A Web of Air Page 3

  She climbed on, walking quickly, glad when the noise from the barges and the harbourside taverns faded behind her. On the quiet, mid-level streets the night was still, the air scented pleasantly with the soft perfume of fruit trees. Garlands of blossom decked the statues of the Sea Goddess which stood at every corner and street crossing, watching Fever pass with seashell eyes. Through an archway she caught a glimpse of the midnight sea, and turned towards it along a narrow footpath which led her through the crater wall and out into moonlight and the soft black shadows of pine trees on the island’s outer slopes. Fallen needles underfoot; a silvery smell of resin. The path wound upwards to an outcropping of stone and another weathered statue of the Goddess. Fever stopped there, looking out at the sea and the zigzag dark line of the causeway linking Mayda to the mainland. She thought again of the way the Lyceum had crept along that causeway earlier that day, and of all the other journeys she had made aboard it, from town to town, settlement to tiny settlement, across the vastness of Europa.

  She had never meant to come so far. When she first boarded the travelling theatre she had not intended to stay. She had planned to get off at Chunnel, and find her way home from there. She had only joined up with the Persimmon Company to buy herself a little time to think.

  She had done her thinking during the two days that it took the Lyceum to trundle south along the packed chalk surface of the Great South Road. Sometimes when it broke down she busied herself helping the company’s technomancer make repairs – his name was Fergus Bucket, and he resented her until he saw how good she was with the old engines. But mostly she sat in the sunlight on the open upper deck and watched the weald and the wild chalk hills edge by, and tried to come to terms with everything that had happened. She had recently learned that she was half Scriven and that her grandfather had been the tyrant Auric Godshawk, whose disturbing memories, implanted in Fever’s brain, had only lately been erased by a blast from an electromagnetic gun. Fading fragments of them still lingered, as ungraspable as the memories of a dream. Sometimes, superimposed upon the passing heath, she would catch glimpses of landscapes Godshawk had known; the icehills of the north and the far-off countries he’d sailed to in his youth aboard his schooner, the Black Poppy.

  And if that were not enough for her to deal with, she had two children to look after. Fern and Ruan were newly orphaned. She was afraid that they might not be safe if she returned them to London, and also that they might encounter their dead father there, for he had been reanimated as a Stalker warrior in the army of London’s new ruler, Quercus. They were still silent and stunned with the shock of losing him, and she did not think they could cope with the idea that his body was still up and about.

  Chunnel was a trading port, built at the easternmost end of the Anglish Channel, where the shallowing waters finally petered out into marshes and saltings. It was a linear city, laid out on the remains of a gigantic tunnel which had once linked the kingdom of Uk to the Frankish shore, back in Ancient days before the North Sea drained away. There were tech-shops everywhere, ships and land-barges from all over Europa, and a babble of excited gossip about the fall of London. News had reached Chunnel far more quickly than the lumbering Lyceum, and Fever soon learned that the takeover had been peaceful, and that the new rulers had announced a strange plan for the city, which was to be rebuilt as a gigantic, tracked vehicle. The merchants of Chunnel were already loading land-barges with all the scrap metal and old-tech they could find, eager to go and sell it to Quercus before he came to his senses, and Fever could have scrounged passage home aboard any one of them.

  But when the moment came she found that she did not want to go. She did not want to go home to Dr Crumb, who had pretended through all the years of her growing-up that he was just her guardian and not her father. She did not want to go home to Wavey Godshawk, the mother she had only just met, a beautiful, arrogant, Scriven technomancer who regarded the laws of physics as vague guidelines and normal human beings as her natural inferiors. She did not want to go home to a city that was about to be torn down and rebuilt on wheels. She knew that scheme was not really Quercus’s idea; that it had been devised by Auric Godshawk, and passed on to Quercus by her mother, and that like all things connected with the Scriven it was touched with madness. She did not want to go home to see her sober, rational friends the Engineers getting caught up in the excitement.

  And again, there were the children to think of. She had had no idea how to care for them, but Ambrose and Laura Persimmon knew, and so did their daughter Dymphna (who had red hair and a face like an entertaining horse and played crones, maidservants and comic parts) and Dymphna’s friend Lillibet (who was plump and pretty and played the younger romantic heroines). It seemed unfair to wrench Fern and Ruan away from these irrational but kindly women when they were just beginning to trust them.

  But what use would I be aboard the Lyceum? she asked herself, while she watched the company prepare their stage that day in Chunnel. She could help with the engines, but she could not act, or paint backcloths, or sew, or do any of the other things which she saw the actors doing.

  But that evening, when the play began, she realized what she could do to help the company. The play itself meant nothing to her (a lot of irrational nonsense, she thought it, all about love and jealousy and magic and other things which didn’t matter, or didn’t exist, or both). It was performed the same way that such shows had been performed ever since mankind first started to recover from the Downsizing; by the dingy light of a few dangling lanterns and a line of oil-lamps mounted along the front of the stage. There were some crude reflectors, made from those chrome-plated dishes known as “Hobb’s Caps” which were dug up by the hundred from Ancient sites, but they did little good. It wasn’t just a fire risk, it was a strain on the eyes, and Fever, who had once helped Dr Stayling electrify Godshawk’s Head, knew that she could make a huge improvement.

  The next morning she wrote a letter to Dr Crumb, explaining that she had been offered a position aboard the Lyceum. AP, as everyone called Ambrose Persimmon, was delighted by her idea of electric lighting, which he said would help the Lyceum to stand out from all its rivals. Even Dymphna and Lillibet grew quite enthusiastic once they realized that they were not going to be electrocuted in their beds. Fergus Bucket gave the plan his grudging blessing, and that afternoon Fever went with him and a purse of AP’s money to Chunnel’s tech-exchange, where they started buying the wires and bulbs and switches she would need.

  While she was there she gave her letter to the master of a London-bound barge. She had regretted it as soon as the barge had gone, and she had missed Dr Crumb badly for a few days afterwards, and often since. But she knew she had done the right thing. She wanted to make her own life and her own discoveries, far from the never-ending madness of London.

  There was a rustle and a flutter and something came down through the pine branches and landed on the cliff path just behind her. She thought at first that it was just her coat-tails she had glimpsed, flapping, from the corner of her eye. Then it fluttered again and let out a sound and she turned, realizing that it was a large bird and that it had just spoken to her.

  “Snacks?” it said. “Please snacks?”

  Fever stared at it. It stood there in the moonlight, a pale and dirty bird the size of a big gull. Its head was too big. Its wings hung like a ragged cloak; a long tail trailed in the dust. “Please lady nice snack?” it rasped.

  Fever had met talking birds before – she knew a Bargetown parrot which could swear in twenty-six different languages – but she had never heard before of seabirds being taught to mimic human speech. There was something uncanny about the way this one looked at her, its eyes shining with the reflections of the sinking moon.

  “Snacks?”

  A dim memory came to her; perhaps something she had read in one of the old books at Godshawk’s Head, or perhaps a memory of a memory she had inherited from Godshawk himself. Anyway, she knew what these white birds were called. “Angels”. Larus sapiens. The
y were a species of mutated gull left over from the time of the Downsizing. It was said that they had evolved a sort of intelligence – Pixar of Thelona, writing two hundred years before Fever’s birth, had claimed they had a language of their own with more than two hundred words. But the spark was fading in them, and now they had only enough wit left to hang around human settlements, eating scraps and singing crude songs in exchange for food or liquor.

  “Snacks?” said the one on the path, hopping closer, hopeful.

  “Go away!” said Fever firmly. She waved her arms at it. “I don’t have any snacks.” But now there were more of them, ghosting down through the shadows beneath the pines all round her on outspread wings, calling out, “Snacks? Drinkey? Pleaseyplease?” and making other sounds, snatterings and rasps and chatters that sounded like words too, but words in a language she had never heard. She heard their droppings fall, spattering on the needled earth between the trees. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty of them, hopping towards her across the rooty ground, absurd and unsettling, like wind-up toys. One landed on the trunk of a tree beside her and went scrambling down it, and she saw that there were small, white, bony fingers on the leading edges of its wings. She felt them pluck at her coat as she turned and started to push back through the flock towards the archway in the crater wall.

  “Let me go!” she said, becoming a little alarmed. The angels disgusted her, but she also felt a queasy sense of pity for them. She too was a remnant of a mutant race that had flourished briefly and declined; another of evolution’s pitiless little jokes. She wondered if these beggar-birds were capable of understanding what their ancestors had been, and what they had lost.

  “I have nothing for you,” she shouted, starting briskly back along the path the way she had come. The angels followed; she heard them complaining at her, wheedling; the breath of the breeze through their feathers as they spread their big wings and glided after her. A good thing they were not predators, she thought uneasily.

  Something white and wide-winged came down out of the dark above her and almost hit her head, making her yelp and duck as it whisked past. It made a papery sound as it cut the air. “Go away!” she shouted, frightened now. But it was not an angel. Intrigued, she watched it glide down into the bushes by the path, then blundered through long grass and nettles to the place where it had come to rest. It was roughly bird-shaped, but no bird; it was made out of paper and glue and slender wooden struts. Smaller than it had seemed; its wingspan no more than the width of her two hands. The thin body weighted at the front with a bronze coin, the tail split like a swift’s. A small kite, she thought at first, but it had no string. It was a glider.

  She turned, scanning the heights of the crater above her. Lights showed in a few buildings way up there, and the moon lit up pale stone revetments at the edges of farming terraces. She could see no sign of anyone who might have launched the glider. Angels blew like blossom across the darkened slopes. She called out to them as she made her way back to the path. “What is this? Where did this come from?”

  The angels had already lost interest in her. One, scuffling among the bushes near the path, glanced at the thing she held and said, “Thursday.”

  “Thursday? What does that mean? What about Thursday?”

  “Thursday. Thursday. Try-to-fly.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  Far down the slope where the crater-side steepened into cliffs one of the other angels had found some carrion or the remains of a picnic. The rest clustered round it in a squabbling cloud, begging for scraps. The one Fever had been talking to lost interest in her and took flight, beating its big wings once as it went past her and sailing down to claim its share of the feast.

  Fever looked uphill again. Held up the glider in case its owner was up there looking for it. “Hello?”

  No answer. Only the distant bickering of the angels, the soft snore of the sea.

  She looked down at the thing in her hands. It was no toy. Even by moonlight she could see how well it had been made. And that place there between the wings; was not that where a pilot would lie, if the whole thing were made twenty times bigger? Big enough to carry a human being aloft?

  In her girlhood she had often heard old Dr Collihole, her fellow Engineer, describe his dreams of flight. She had even flown herself, in the balloon that he had built from scrap paper and filled with hot air on the roof of Godshawk’s Head. She had listened to him recount the legends about heavier-than-air flying machines built by the Ancients, and dismiss them, sadly, as mere fairy tales, because all his experiments had led him to believe that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. But it seemed to her that someone in Mayda did not agree. Someone in this city was designing a flying machine, or at least a glider. And now a model of it had flown into the hands of one of the few people in this quarter of Europa who could understand what it was…

  Which seemed to Fever to be such an unlikely coincidence that she did not think it could be a coincidence at all. But whoever had launched the glider, from those dark terraces above her, did not seem to want to show themselves, and it was late, and the moon was dipping behind the shoulder of the crater, and so, clutching the white glider to her chest, she went walking thoughtfully back into the city.

  The angels had lost interest in her. But from the shadowed terraces above, someone watched her go.

  4

  AN ENGINEER CALLS

  ook,” said Fern. “That house is moving!”

  It was morning, and the light of the rising sun was just starting to slant into Mayda. The company did not usually rise at such an hour, but AP had decided that the backdrops and props looked weather-worn and needed to be repaired before the Lyceum opened its curtains again that evening. So one by one the bleary-eyed actors and actresses were rising from their beds and making their way up the companion ladders to the open upper deck, where Fever, Fern and Ruan were eating breakfast and trying to ignore the breeze which flapped their napkins about and speckled their clothes with croissant-crumbs. Cloud shadows scudded across the harbour and the bright house fronts on the western side of the city.

  “Look, Fever! A moving house!”

  “That is an optical illusion, Fern,” said Fever patiently. She was feeling thick-headed after her late night on the cliffs, and did not have time for Fern’s make-believe. “It is the shadows which are moving, not the houses…”

  But then she turned to look where Fern was pointing and saw that the little girl was right. High up on the crater’s western wall, where the ground was so steep that even the Maydans had not tried to terrace it, a large house was descending gracefully through a long, vertical garden. As it went down, so the building next to it went up, windows flashing in the sunlight. Further along the cliff another pair of houses did the same, and as Fever looked quickly across the city she saw that dozens of structures were in motion.

  “See?” said Fern, with great satisfaction. She couldn’t recall ever proving Fever wrong before.

  “The locals call them funiculars,” announced AP, coming up on to the sun-deck in his dressing gown, a mug of coffee in his hand. “I remember them from when Mistress Persimmon and I last came to Mayda, more years ago than I care to say. Mansions, restaurants, whole hotels on the smarter levels move up and down the cliffs.”

  “But to what purpose?” Fever asked.

  “Oh, just for the fun of it, in the case of the restaurants and hotels.” AP slurped his coffee and watched the buildings rise and fall without much interest. “As for the rich men’s mansions, well, their masters like to rise each evening into sunlight and clear air, then descend again at dawn into the city’s heart where they do their business.”

  Fever shook her head. Mobile theatres, mobile mansions, mobile fortresses… Why were the people of her era not content to live in places which just stood still? Was it the same urge that drove the nomad empires on their ceaseless travels, and had made her grandfather dream of fitting wheels to London? Was it a leftover from the Downsizing, when plagues and earth-storms
had kept the ragged remnants of Mankind forever on the move? Maybe, deep down, people just didn’t feel safe if their home was anchored to the earth. It was deeply irrational.

  And yet the Maydan funiculars were fascinating. She sat and watched as more and more started to move, whole neighbourhoods sliding up and down the crater walls like the shuttles of some enormous, pointless loom. She wondered what it would be like to ride in a funicular, and thought again of the glider which she had brought back from her midnight walk. She had imagined that Mayda would be a backward place, but so far it seemed full of wonders…

  “Fever,” said Ruan, nudging her. “There’s someone calling for you.”

  Fever looked at him, and realized that the annoying noise which had been intruding on her thoughts for the last half-minute was a human voice, and that it was shouting, “Miss Crumb!”

  AP went to look over the handrail at the edge of the deck. Fever joined him. Below, on the cobbled harbourside, she saw a man in travel-stained blue robes and a broad-brimmed hat looking up at her. “Miss Crumb?” he called when she appeared. “Miss Fever Crumb? Of London?”

  “That man was at Master Squinter’s stall aboard the Stone last night!” said Ruan.

  “’Ere, Fever,” said Lillibet, coming to join the growing crowd at the handrail, “that chap was ’ere last night after the show, asking after you. Dead good-looking he is. I told him he should call again today.”

  “Oh, you didn’t?” said Fever. Lillibet and Dymphna were always trying to find her a boyfriend, and never believed her when she told them that she simply didn’t want one. She frowned down at the stranger, wondering how she could get rid of him. But just then he pulled off his hat. He was good-looking, which of course meant nothing to Fever, but his head was as bald as a sea-stone, and that did. She had grown up surrounded by men who looked like that. She had looked like that herself until she came to live aboard the Lyceum and let her hair grow.