A Web of Air (4 page)

The city of Mayda was bowl-shaped, built on the inside of a gigantic impact crater which rose from shallow water a few miles off the bleak coast of World’s End. Fever had had plenty of opportunity to look at the outside of it as the
Lyceum
and the other barges came down the coast road and crossed the causeway, but once they had passed through the fortified cleft in its eastern wall and entered the city itself she had been too busy preparing for the show to look around, and had only a confused impression of rows and rows of houses stretching up all around her towards the ragged crags that crowned the crater. Now, as she climbed alone through its steep streets, she kept stopping to look back at the fresh views of the city that revealed themselves at each level.

From a few levels up she could see that the harbour which the barges had parked beside filled most of the crater floor. Fishing boats and pleasure yachts clustered thickly in the inner part, while big, ocean-going galleys and caravels were moored in a deep-water basin near the harbour mouth, which was a natural cleft in the crater’s western wall. The buildings that lined the harbourside were old and shabby and crammed close together; warehouses, chandlers’ stores, the pinched homes of the Maydan poor. Higher up the crater walls the buildings were bigger; spaced well apart in their steep gardens. Bridges spanned the goyles and gulleys of the cliffs, and some of these had houses built on them too, with baskets on long dangling ropes let down to haul up groceries and visitors from below. Highest of all, way up where those weathered crags stood dark against the stars and white birds veered on wide-spread wings, Fever could see the turreted mansions of the rich perching on Mayda’s heights.

An interesting city, she decided. And strangely familiar, as if she had seen it in a dream. She wondered if Auric Godshawk had ever called here on his travels.

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.
They 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.