Mothstorm Read online

  But they did not. Some of the Snilth about the castle – loyal soldiers of the Mothmaker, I imagine – flourished their bagpipe-guns and went running to meet the new arrivals, and a battle broke out, Snilth versus Snilth, with dozens on each side falling unconscious into the shrubbery, and green explosions hurling armoured figures high above the hedges.

  But the newcomers from the ships were so many and the defenders of the castle so demoralised by the passing of the Mothmaker, which I am sure they could sense, that the battle did not last long. And as it ended, a strange noise arose, like a great rustling wind rushing from the ships towards the castle.

  ‘They are cheering!’ said Jack.

  ‘Oh, look!’ exclaimed Charity.

  And up the drive, with a bodyguard of armoured Snilth about her, came Ssilissa. And it was wonderful to see the way in which even those Snilth who had been fighting against her supporters a moment before seemed to recognise her natural breeding and knelt on the grass as she went by, acknowledging her right to rule them!

  A moment later she was in the castle, and I helped Jack unbar the doors and rushed out into the hallway to greet her.

  ‘Myrtle! Jack!’ she shouted, seeing us, and broke into a most unqueenly run and hugged first him and then myself. I sensed that she had much to learn about genteel behaviour and resolved then and there that I should be her teacher.

  Another Snilth now presented herself to Jack. ‘Why, Miss Thsssss,’ he said, and she apologised for the precipitate way she had fled the Sophronia in the midst of the battle, leaving him without an alchemist. ‘But when I realised that Ssilissa was a hatchling of Queen Zssthss, I knew that I mussst take her sswiftly home, for many Sssnilth have long awaited her. There was no time to explain. You would not have believed me anyway.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Jack. ‘No harm was done, and I admire the sly way you got off the Sophronia.’ And he looked with what I thought was rather too much admiration at Miss Thsssss’s pretty blue face, so I took his arm and led him back into the hall, leaving Art and Charity to listen to the tale of how Ssilissa found herself in Mothstorm and how the rebel Snilth hid and protected her and raised an army about her while the Mothmaker was besieging Earth.

  Back into the great hall went Jack and I, and soon we were joined by all the rest. The rebels had a Snilthish lady doctor with them, whose mothskin case contained an antidote to the bagpipe poison. Soon our fallen friends and family were waking, with many sleepy groans and so many mutterings of ‘Where am I?’ and ‘What happened?’ that I grew quite weary of explaining how we had triumphed. And meanwhile, Jack scaled nimbly up the Christmas Tree and unfastened Her Majesty from its top, then lowered her down into the helpful blue hands of many Snilth; and there upon the hearthrug the Queen of Great Britain met the young Queen of the Snilth and congratulated her very prettily on her accession.

  The sun went down and twilight deepened around the castle. The water serpents sported in the loch, and on the mountains all around us the highlanders lit their victory bonfires.

  ‘It is not quite the Christmas I had planned,’ said Mother, as we Mumbys and our friends took a stroll in the frosty garden before supper. ‘But it is a good end to the year, I think.’

  ‘An end to it?’ asked Art, hobbling along at our side, leaning upon a crutch Prince Albert had kindly whittled for him out of the wreckage of the minstrels’ gallery.

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Mother. ‘I consulted a copy of Crevice in the castle library, and today, on this portion of the Earth, is the thirty-first of December. Tomorrow will be New Year’s Day.’

  ‘1852!’ said Charity Cruet.

  ‘1851 certainly held its share of surprises,’ said Father. ‘I wonder what this new year may bring?’

  ‘School,’ said Art, sounding doubtful.

  ‘A cure for the Tree Sickness, I hope,’ said Jack, who had spoken of his family’s predicament to Her Majesty when she graciously thanked us for our part in her deliverance and asked us what we might like as reward.

  ‘A new ship,’ I said. (For that was the reward I asked for: a small but sturdy barque or aether-brigantine to replace the Sophronia. And a well-stocked wedding chamber aboard her, and a good alembic, and a comfortable cabin for a lady alchemist.)

  ‘Father’s wits restored to him,’ said Charity, whose father had been brought to Earth aboard Ssilissa’s ship most confused and quite unable to recall anything that had happened since he went out for a walk upon the cliffs one night in Cornwall, more than a year before.

  ‘No more surprises,’ said Father fervently.

  ‘And you, Mother?’ asked Art. ‘What do you hope for from 1852?’

  Our mother looked sorrowful and did not answer him at first. Then she said, ‘I am not sure that I should hope for anything. My dears, I made a promise. I vowed that I would cease to be when my old body perished. Perhaps I was right to break that vow in order to defeat the Mothmaker, but now that she has ceased to be, perhaps it is time that I too followed her into oblivion.’

  ‘But you can’t!’ said Father. ‘I mean, the stuff that destroyed her is all used up, isn’t it?’

  ‘There are other ways that I could cease to be,’ said Mother. ‘If I opened a pathway for myself into the heart of the Sun. Or if I left this Solar Realm entirely and flew out across space to seek oblivion in the depths of a dark star … ’

  ‘But you must not do any of those things!’ I expostulated. ‘They both sound quite horrid!’

  ‘I am sure they would be, Myrtle,’ Mother replied, ‘but have I really the right to linger on in mortal form? Am I not as bad in my own way as the Mothmaker? I have interfered again and again with life upon these planets of the Sun. Your empire is my doing, and people have fought and perished because of me. Perhaps it is time for me to go.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ we all three cried. ‘You can’t! You mustn’t! We need you!’

  Mother turned to Father, taking his hands in hers. ‘But don’t you think people will say it is odd, Edward, that you went into Mothstorm with one wife and now have another who looks quite different?’

  ‘Not at all!’ said Father staunchly. ‘Why, Emily, you are looking more like your old self every moment; and who will really notice? Only our closest friends, and they will understand that you are the same woman.’

  ‘And you, my dears,’ she went on, looking now at Art and me. ‘You coped so well when I was a prisoner of the white spiders all those years and you thought me dead. You would get on well enough, I think, were I to leave.’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t!’ Art declared.

  Mother shook her head. ‘Oh, what am I to do? My heart tells me that I should stay with you, but my head tells me that it is my duty to cease to be. What am I to do?’

  And we stood beside her in the heather and waited for her to decide.

  Another Epilogue

  In Which Many a Loose End Is Neatly Tied Up.

  What sort of epilogue was that? I ask you! Even Myrtle must understand that our story cannot be left hanging like that, with everyone wondering what happened next.

  Well, Mother decided, and I am jolly pleased to say that she decided to listen to her wise old heart and not her head. She is with us still and will be, we hope, for ever. And if people sometimes look askance at her and remark, ‘How you’ve altered, Mrs Mumby’, well, what does that matter? We know.

  As for the rest of ‘what happened next’, I’m afraid it would make for dull reading. There were many months of tidying up and setting straight, and I had little part to play in any of it, for I was by then a pupil at Vermiform’s Academy for the Sons of Space-Faring Gentlefolk, which turned out to be a top-hole place after all – perhaps I shall tell you about it one day.

  Anyway, while I was puzzling over my Latin verbs and trying out for the Low-Gravity Cricket XI, all manner of changes were afoot in space. Sir Richard Burton, who had been appointed Britain’s Ambassador to the Snilth, arranged with Sir Waverley Rain to have the Mothmaker’s silver sun towed out to
the far reaches of the Solar System, where it now hangs in orbit about Hades, one of the lonely, lifeless worlds beyond Georgium Sidus. Apparently, all that world needed to make it pleasant and habitable was a little sunlight, and the Mothmaker’s pocket-size sun suits it admirably. The Snilth have changed its name from ‘Hades’ to the far more cheery ‘Snil’, and under the wise rule of Queen Ssilissa they have settled there and are building a pleasant city for themselves. Not only that, but they are trading with their neighbours, the gentle mer-people of Georgium Sidus, with whom they have become firm friends.

  In fact, they are becoming so polite and civilised that nowadays, when children behave well in company, people say, ‘What a little angel; he has the manners of a Snilth!’

  As for those hordes of mighty moths, the greater part of them went blundering aimlessly into space until, just like earthly moths drawn to a candle flame, they flew into the furnaces of the Sun. Indeed, for the first several months of the new year the sunlight was noticeably dimmed and had a greenish hue, due to all the moth ash that hung about it. But a few flocks survived and went with the Snilth to their new world, where they are farmed and bred much as they once were within the Mothstorm.

  And someone else who has gone with the Snilth is our old friend Captain Moonfield. Sent out with Sir Richard’s mission, he renewed his acquaintance with Miss Thsssss; they are to be married next June and we are all invited!

  But now let me bring you to the present. It is the Easter hol, and I am spending it on the planet Venus, whither we travelled in Jack’s new pride and joy, a lovely little aether-ship called Teasel. She is not the Sophronia, but she is in every other way as trim and swift a ship as you could hope for, and Myrtle, pottering about in the wedding chamber, managed to carry us here from Larklight jolly smoothly.38

  The Teasel rests behind me now, upon the long sward of blue Venusian grass which stretches down the hill above New Scunthorpe. Her crew and Myrtle, Mother, Father, Charity and I are gathered on the little headland where Jack once told me his life’s story, on an evening which seems very long ago. We are quite familiar with this headland now, for we have spent much of our time here in the few days since we arrived. It was dark then (the Venusian night is very long) and we all held lanterns while Jack went among the three trees which stand in that little dell and injected into each a little of the serum that he was sent by the RXI upon the express orders of Queen Victoria.39

  We have come back often since then, wondering if the trees are really changing or whether it is just a trick of the light as the sun slowly rises. But today the change is plain enough. Their upper branches have fallen away, their leaves lie in rustling drifts in the dell and they are people: a man, a woman and a child, standing like sleepers there.

  ‘Oh!’ cries Myrtle upon seeing them. ‘They are all in the nude!’

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ I ask.

  ‘Their clothes must have torn away when they first turned into trees,’ said Mother.

  ‘Quite,’ says Myrtle, hiding her eyes, but peeking through the gaps between her fingers. ‘Even so … ’

  I am afraid that when Jack’s ma and pa awake, the first thing that they will hear is Myrtle scolding them for being improperly dressed.

  We all hang back and let Jack be the first to go to them. As his footsteps rustle through those fallen leaves, the former trees stir. They raise their heads and open their eyes and look about – a tall, good-looking young Scotsman, his pretty black wife and a little boy, no more than six, who was once Jack’s older brother.

  They have been trees for twelve whole years, so it is no wonder that they seem confused or that they look startled and even alarmed to find this handsome young aethernaut stood before them, bedecked with cutlasses and firearms.

  It is Mrs Havock who is first to guess the truth. ‘Jack?’ she whispers. And she hugs him, and then he turns to hug the others as the rest of us look politely away or pretend suddenly to be very interested in the ground or the sky, and Mr Grindle wipes a tear from his eye and quietly blows his nose.

  And now Jack is leading them towards us. I see their faces properly and they are all so like Jack in different ways, despite their leafy hair, that it is as if we finally have the key to him and he makes sense at last.

  ‘Ma, Pa, Sid,’ he says gently, ‘I am your own Jack and these are my friends.’

  We mumble, ‘Pleased to meet you’, etc., and I pull off my hat, but we do not quite know what to do or what to say, confronted by these revenants from 1839.

  And then, to everybody’s surprise, Myrtle steps forward and takes off her cloak and places it around Mrs Havock’s shoulders. And that is the cue for Father to offer his coat to Dr Havock and for Mr Munkulus to wrap his pea-jacket round young Sid.

  ‘We are delighted to make your acquaintance,’ says Myrtle kindly. ‘Jack has told us so much about you! And we have such a lot to tell you. But first, I think, we all need some jam scones and Devonshire cream, and a nice cup of tea.’

  Art Mumby Aboard the Teasel Venus 1852

  Mr Reeve and Mr Wyatt release a flock of Leaping Sphagnums into the Bonehill Rocks Vivarium.

  TWO GENTLEMEN OF DEVONSHIRE

  Mr Reeve is the author of the Mortal Engines quartet and the Carnegie Medal-winning Here Lies Arthur, as well as the illustrator of many children’s books and co-writer of a musical, The Ministry of Biscuits.

  Mr Wyatt is one of the leading illustrators of his generation, and his work has graced the books of Professor Tolkein, Mr Pratchett, Mrs MacCaughrean and many others.

  Anxious to avoid the indolence or excesses that most successful creative persons fall victim to, Mr Reeve and Mr Wyatt have plunged their vast fortunes into the Babylon Endeavour, designed to promote a taste for knowledge and an acquaintance with the works of Nature. Several hectares of Mr Reeve’s estate upon Dartmoor have been sealed within a great glass canopy (visitors can be assured the edifice will not suddenly up sticks and lay waste to the nearest city!40), in which flora and fauna from the Deepest Reaches of the Aether have been installed to provide a remarkable and informative attraction for the discerning gentleperson.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Authors’ uncouth demeanour and flimsy grasp of our fine language should have barred them for ever from good society were it not for the sterling education which they have received at the celebrated BLOOMSBURY finishing school. Their most particular thanks are due to Miss Szirtes (Eng.), Mrs Brathwaite (Art) and the strict but fair headmistress, Miss Elena Fountain (B.Sc. Physiol.).

  The Pudding Worm was first Captured and Described with the help of pupils at St Aidan’s C of E High School, Harrogate.

  Footnotes

  1 Patchy? I hear you ask. Surely not! Trevithick’s make the finest generators that money may buy and have been providing top-quality gravity aboard aether-ships and orbital establishments since 1809. Well, this is true. Unfortunately, ever since her adventures aboard that old Yankee warship Liberty in September, Myrtle had been gripped by a silly notion of becoming an alchemist, and Mother had decided to humour her. They had set up a laboratory in one of the spare rooms in the spinward wing, and there, in smoked-glass goggles and a leather apron, Myrtle was learning how to perform the chemical wedding, that complicated alchemical reaction which can drive a ship through space far faster than the speed of tardy old light. Naturally, since Myrtle is a girl, and not an especially bright one, these experiments had resulted in a number of horrible smells, a deal of smoke and a couple of rather spectacular explosions. One of the latter had affected our gravity generator, and it has never been quite the same since.

  2 What Jack Havock sees in my sister is one of the Mysteries of Known Space. She is an absolute horror and looks like a loony fish.

  3 In seasons when no Christmas puddings are available, the Pudding Worm contents itself by eating up puddings of other sorts – plum duff, spotted dog, jam roly-poly; no pud is safe from this voracious pest. Not only that, but it will snack on cakes and preserves too, if the o
pportunity arises.

  4 It was a mashie niblick, very useful for driving out of the rough and fending off monsters.

  5 Or pincers, tentacles, etc.

  6 Of course I can, you impudent young pup! (See right.)—D.W.

  7 Nipper wrote this bit: don’t blame me. If you are a red-blooded British boy you will be squirming with embarrassment by now and may wish to skip to the bottom of page forty-nine at once: I’m sure you’ll pick the story up.

  8 Oddly enough, one of Mr Wyatt’s celebrated cover illustrations for the Boy’s Own Journal (reprinted on page 294 of Larklight) shows the Sun with nine planets, the ninth being a tiny world which he has labelled ‘Pluto’. The explanation seems to be that our great illustrator had been at the BEER again and added this ninth world by mistake. But strangely, our astronomers have since detected that a large asteroid or small planet does indeed orbit out in the endless darkness north of Hades. Could it be that in the haze induced by twelve pints of Rugglestone’s Best, Mr Wyatt entered into a mystic communion with the forces of the Universe, which enabled him to envision this world, as yet unknown? Perhaps. But whether it be there or no, ‘Pluto’ is a poor sort of name for a planet and will never catch on.

  9 You can probably see where my train of thought was bound, dear reader; after all, I reasoned, this was not the first time I had had a parent or parents snaffled by forces of unearthly evil. I was wondering whether I might not manage something in the Daring Rescue line.

  10 No, dear reader, I have not simply PINCHED it. Myrtle, being most beastly envious of my success as an Author, worked it up for publication herself, meaning it to rival my own account of these adventures. Since no one outside our own family bought a copy, however, she has grudgingly allowed me to reprint the good bits here—A.M.