A Web of Air (30 page)

Wavey watched her with those Scriven eyes of hers, those grey and golden eyes which seemed both more and less than human. “You
are
a clever girl, Fever,” she said.

Fever went rushing on. “I’ll go and talk to the Maydan’s high priestess myself as soon as we dock. I think I know how to make her listen. But you have to promise me that Arlo will not be harmed.” She knew what Arlo would have said if he had been able to hear her; that he would not want to live if he could not fly. But she did not care. All she cared about was that he be spared.

Wavey looked away from her towards the rail. Jonathan Hazell must have succeeded in tethering his boat alongside, for his nervous face had just appeared over the
Supercollider
’s gunwale. The rest of him followed, hauled aboard by helpful sailors, and after a moment Arlo came after him. Wavey watched the young man; watched the sea-wind tousling his dark hair, the uncertain, winning smile that spread on his face when he saw Fever waiting there.

“Oh, he
is
rather lovely,” she admitted, and looked round smiling at her daughter. “Very well. As long as he gives up his work, I shall tell Dr Teal that he is not to come to any harm.”

y the time the
Supercollider
had docked in Mayda’s outer basin the sun was already past its zenith and the cool blue shadow of the western wall lay across the Quadrado Del Mar. The great driftwood temple of the Sea Goddess looked like a wreck on the floor of the ocean, with blue-robed priests darting in and out of its ever-open doors like inquisitive fish.

Quite a crowd followed Fever as she walked towards it: her mother and father, a squad of marines from the
Supercollider
and a whole shoal of Maydans, shopkeepers and gentry, dockers and children and harbourside riff-raff, who had been drawn to the quay to watch the strange new ship come in and were eager now to see what happened when its passengers met Orca Mo.

The priestess had been warned of their coming. Indeed, she had watched the fall of the
Goshawk
and the arrival of the
Supercollider
that morning from the temple’s precincts, through a vast old telescope cased in mother-of-pearl. She had objected at first when the steam-ram asked permission to dock, reminding the council that the Goddess abhorred motorized ships. But when its captain sent word that he would like to make a large donation to the temple funds, she prayed for a while and came to understand that the Goddess would not mind making an exception for the
Supercollider,
just this once.

She was waiting for its passengers at the top of the temple steps, dressed in all her regalia, with the tentacles of her squid-hat waving on the breeze.

Fever, striding towards her across the cobbled square, felt a quick, nervous fluttering in her stomach. “Stage-fright”, the actors on the
Lyceum
called it. She stopped at the foot of the temple steps, looking up at Orca Mo.

“Why have you come here?” asked the priestess sternly.

“I have come—” said Fever, but her voice was just a hoarse little whisper so she had to start again. “I have come to ask for forgiveness.”

She wasn’t an actress, and she’d always hated lies. But she thought of Arlo, and the look that Arlo had given her as they parted at the foot of the
Supercollider
’s gangway, of disappointment and betrayal and despair, and she said, “I’ve come to ask the Sea Goddess to forgive me,” and it sounded sincere.

Orca Mo smiled at her. Not a smile of triumph; quite a kindly smile. “Then come in, child,” she said, holding out one hand to Fever, and the other to stop all Fever’s friends and followers who would otherwise have come with her up the steps.

Shafts of dim blue daylight lanced through skylights into the temple’s dim interior, slanting down between barnacled wooden columns. All sounds seemed muffled. The distant voices of chanting priests were as vague and echoey as whale song. A water-organ was playing softly somewhere. If you could let yourself forget how dotty it all was, thought Fever, it would be quite beautiful.

Orca Mo sat Fever down on a driftwood pew close to the altar and settled beside her. She studied the wound on Fever’s face, the purpling bruises. “You are already forgiven, child,” she said. “The Goddess has already forgiven you. I saw it all. You flew with the birds, and fell into the sea, and our Mother Below chose not to let you drown.”

Fever wondered how she knew all that. She couldn’t possibly have been able to see through her telescope who the
Goshawk
’s pilot had been. But probably part of the job of being a priestess was making people believe you knew everything, so she did not ask how the woman came by her knowledge.

“When you were under the waves,” said Orca Mo softly, “did the Goddess come to you? Did you see Her? She has been known to appear to those who fall into Her realm. Even to unbelievers.”

Fever looked down for a moment at her hands, folded in her lap, then up again at the priestess.
Don’t do this,
Arlo had shouted at her, when he learned what Fever was planning.
You mustn’t!

“Yes,” she said. “I saw her.”

She could feel herself blushing, her ears warming up like twin electric elements. She felt sure that Orca Mo would know she was just making this up. But when she looked into the woman’s eyes she saw only a wistful yearning. Orca Mo longed to believe, and that made her easy to lie to, even for a novice liar like Fever.

“What did She look like?” urged the priestess. “How could you be sure it was Her?”

Fever glanced up at the altar, where the statue of the goddess smiled down insipidly from its aquarium. It was the same age-old, sacred statue that she had watched being carried on its litter across the lock-gates at the Festival of the Summer Tides. Now it was back beneath the water, surrounded by bright shoals of darting fish, and on the white sand at its feet were the
Mãe Abaixo’s
three sacred symbols: the bubbling clamshell, the treasure chest and the skull.

“She looked just like her statue,” said Fever. “Those blue and white clothes. The circle of gold above her head, exactly like that. But her eyes were green and her hair was dark and she had freckles.”

“Freckles?”

“Freckles.”

“And did She speak to you? Did She ask you to carry any message to us out of the Great Deep?”

“Yes,” said Fever.

You mustn’t!
Arlo had screamed at her. She had gone to see him in the
Supercollider
’s medical bay, where Wavey’s surgeon was tending to his wounded arm, but when she told him what she planned to do he had driven her away.
If people start believing flight is wrong we’ll be barred from the sky for centuries!
he had shouted.
Flight is possible! We’ve done it! The
Goshawk
flew! You can’t murder the truth!

But Fever thought she would rather murder the truth than let the Suppression Office murder Arlo.

“What did She say to you, child?” pleaded Orca Mo.

Fever bowed her head. “She said that it was she who had made my flying machine fall, and that she was letting me live so that I could come to you with her message.”

“And what is Her message?”

“That people are not meant to fly. That is one of the reasons why she smote the Ancients with, um, smite-y things. Because of all their flying machines, dirtying the sky… Only the Goddess may make flying things.”

She broke off short, sure that she’d gone too far. Surely no one could believe this bilge? But Orca Mo’s eyes shone, filling like tide-pools, spilling salt water down her cheeks. “Oh yes!” she said, taking Fever’s hands in hers. “Oh yes! It makes such
sense!”

“Does it?”

“Of course! The sky is Her realm too, you see. Science has taught us that the air is mostly made of water, so what is the sky but another sort of sea?”

“Well, that’s not
quite
…”

“And does not even the moon herself obey the pull of the Sea’s tides?”

“No, it’s the other way round,” Fever started to explain.

Orca Mo did not notice. “Pray with me, child,” she said, pulling Fever off the pew, shoving her down on to the sea-worn planking of the temple floor, kneeling there beside her. “We must give thanks to our Mother Below for this new revelation. And then we shall go forth into the city, and make sure that all of Mayda knows Her will.”

But all Fever could think of was the last look that Arlo had given her, that empty look of shock and loathing. He’d been betrayed by Weasel, and betrayed by Thirza Blaizey, and now he had been betrayed by Fever Crumb.

wo days later the
Lyceum
rolled back into Mayda, still garlanded with flowers from the fiesta at Meriam. The flowers were fading now, but Ruan and Fern had fresh bright memories of their adventure which they were eager to tell Fever about. The dolphins in the harbour! The great walls of Meriam, high as high! The fountains they had played in by the light of the festival fires! The kindness with which the caliph had received them! The way Ruan had worked all the lights and stage-effects himself, without ever once burning the poor old barge to flinders, which Fergus Bucket had said he was sure to do!

But they had no chance to tell Fever any of it, because she had news of her own. That strange warship anchored in the outer basin had come from London just to find her. These people were her parents; this lady, tall and kind and beautiful, was her mother, this shy, quiet gentleman her father. And what would that mean? What would happen now?

When she told them, Fern started to sniffle, and Ruan couldn’t even look at her; he had to go away and walk along the harbourside by himself. There was no one he could talk to about what he felt. How can you explain that you have a broken heart when you are only ten?

But the show must go on; if he had learned anything in his two years with the Persimmons, it was that. So he went back to the
Lyceum,
back down into the crawl space under the stage that had become his now. He was determined to let Fever see how well he could work her lights.

That evening, back on the waste ground behind the harbour, the tale of
Niall Strong-Arm
unfolded once more in the summer twilight, and this time Fever watched it from the audience, seated in the front row between her mother and father. She was worried at first that they might not approve of this make-believe world she had spent the past two years in, but Wavey laughed at all the jokes and applauded at the end of every scene, while Dr Crumb, who had never seen a play before, seemed quite fascinated.

Fever was fascinated too. She had never really understood before the strange alchemy that AP and his company could work. Now, although she knew the script by heart, she found herself moved by the improbable story; by the love of Selene for her astro-knight; by AP’s voice, which served up slabs of poetry as rich and dark as fruit cake; by Laura Persimmon’s autumn beauty; Lillibet’s ballet; Max and Dymphna’s clowning; by the excitement of the fights and battles, and most of all by the skilful way Ruan worked the lighting and effects, and by little Fern. AP had padded out the handmaiden’s role with extra lines, and Fever realized that Fern must have been watching and learning during all her time aboard the
Lyceum,
for she could steal a scene as slyly as Cosmo Lightely and ride a joke as well as Dymphna.

And she knew that that would make it both harder and easier for her when the play ended and she had to go to AP and tell him what she had already told the children: that she would not be travelling onward with the
Lyceum.
Wavey and Dr Crumb had already decided what would happen to her, and Fever had not had the strength to argue. She would be leaving with them on the morning tide, going back north aboard the
Supercollider.
And Fern and Ruan would not be going with her. It would not be fair, she thought, to take them from this summer country back to the snows and sloughs and smokes of London. They would miss her for a little while, she thought. But she had never really been a parent to them, or even a proper guardian; she had just been the person who delivered them to their new home, the
Lyceum,
and there aboard the
Lyceum
she must leave them, among all these good people whom they loved, and who loved them better than Fever had ever managed to.