A Web of Air (8 page)

“Not mad,” said his wife. “It’s just… He lived alone out there on Thursday Island for a whole winter before they found him.”

“Imagine that!” said Senhor Barçelo. “Months and months alone on that bleak rock with only the angels and the ghosts for company. Poor thing! It is little wonder that when he was finally rescued and brought back to the city he was …
odd,
to say the least. A recluse. He became an apprentice to Senhora Belkin’s father, old Augusto Blaizey, but as soon as he reached manhood he gave up shipbuilding and went to live all alone in the Thursday’s old funicular on Casas Elevado. He makes little birds.”

“Birds?” asked Laura Persimmon, thinking she had misheard him.

“Paper birds.” Senhor Barçelo spread his hands out about twelve inches apart to show how big the things had been. “It was as if, when the Goddess took his family, Arlo turned his back on the sea and started dreaming of the sky instead. The white angels are forever flapping around that house of his. And these toy birds he makes used to be forever soaring over the city, though I haven’t seen one for a while now. People used to say that he was planning to make one big enough that he could fly away on it.”

“Nonsense,” said Fat Jago. “Ridiculous.”

“Well, the Ancients had flying machines…” said Fever.

“Fairy tales!” protested Fat Jago. “Like your play; Niall Strong-Arm flying to the moon. A pretty story, but it never really happened. Surely a scientific young woman like yourself pays no heed to those old legends?”

His wife agreed. “Only the
Mãe Abaixo
can make flying things, Senhorita Crumb,” she said earnestly, fingering her brooch. “It is not for us mortals. You must have heard the old saying:
If the Goddess had meant us to fly, she would have given us wings.
It is small wonder that ill-luck pursued Arlo Thursday…”

“Why would your sea goddess care what goes on in the air?” asked Fever.

“She is not just the Goddess of the Sea,” said Senhor Barçelo helpfully. “Her symbol is the winged fish that swims both in the sea and the sky. Her
home
is the sea, and She has lived there since all things were water, but the whole world is Hers. It is She who raised up the dry lands and lit the stars and made birds and beasts and people.”

“But—” Fever started to say.

“Fascinating story!” said AP hurriedly. He didn’t want Fever to offend these friendly Maydans with her outrageous ideas, the same way she had Orca Mo. “It would make a good play.
The Shipwright’s Curse!
A pact with the Devil … murders … secrets … a storm scene … I would play Daniel Thursday as a tragic hero, of course, with Mistress P as his long-suffering wife, trying to turn him back from the path of evil which he has chosen… Dymph, Fern and Lillibet could all be mermaids…”

“What about me, AP?” called Cosmo Lightely from the far end of the table.

“Why Cosmo,” said Mistress Persimmon, raising her glass to him, “you would play the Devil, of course.”

“And I’ll be the demon spider!” shouted Max Froy.
“Tick, tick tick!”

Everyone laughed, and the talk veered back to plays. Fern tugged at Fever’s coat-cuff and said, “Fever, is there
really
a demon?” and Fever told her firmly that there were no such things, except in stories and in the imaginations of stupid people. But she was barely listening. Her eyes had been drawn upwards to the lamplit windows of the funiculars on the southern heights. She kept remembering the words the angel had croaked at her that first night on the cliffs,
Thursday, Thursday try-to-fly
and the glider that had come to her on the night wind. It had been a signal, a sign; she felt certain of that. Fat Jago wasn’t the only Maydan who had heard that an Engineer lived aboard the
Lyceum.
Clearly Arlo Thursday had heard it too, and he had followed her, and sent the glider to her to see if she could understand it. He wanted her to go to him. Perhaps he needed her help.

hat night in her dreams, Fever
flew.
The shock of it half woke her and she rolled over in her hammock, blaming the rich Maydan food. She almost never dreamed; she did not
approve
of dreaming. But then sleep took her again and she was back in the sky.

She was not flying in a balloon, like the clumsy thing that had lifted her clear from Godshawk’s Head the day it burned. She flew like a bird; like an angel; arms stretched wide, fingers spread like flight-feathers, soaring around the castles and cliffs of cloud that formed the base of a colossal thunderhead. Below her the sea burned with sunlight, gold and blue. She was so high that she could clearly see the blue arc of the horizon, and she thought to herself,
There, that
proves
that the Earth is a sphere, that will show those superstitious people who claim it’s flat.
But somehow she could not hold on to the thought; it was swept away from her by the wild, singing joy of flight as the wind tore past her and lifted her spiralling up and up and up again.

She woke with a jolt and lay there tingling, feeling the vivid sensations of the dream slowly fade. A rim of grey light showed around the porthole shutter, but it was not yet day. When she took out the wax earplugs which she wore at night she could hear Max Froy snoring in the neighbouring cabin and beyond that nothing; only the silence of the theatre and the silence of the other barges around it and around them the wider silence of the sleeping city.

Quiet as a ghost she swung down out of the hammock, pulled off her nightshirt and washed quickly in cold water from the pail she kept in the corner of the cabin. Then she dressed and put the model glider into a canvas shoulder bag and went with it out of her cabin and out of the barge into the clear, cool, empty morning.

The sky above Mayda was blue by then, but it would be some time yet before the sun rose high enough to peek above the crater rim. Sunk in lilac shadows and utterly still, the city looked like a picture painted by someone who was good at buildings but didn’t do people. Not even the gulls, not even the angels were awake yet.

She walked between the barges down to the harbourside with only the sounds of her footsteps for company. Dew had formed on the yards and rigging of the ships moored there. A thin cat appeared and ran soundlessly ahead of her as she went on along the quays, stepping over mooring cables and coils of tarred rope, writhing her way past old iron bollards and rusty winches.

She found herself at the foot of the Southern Stair and started up it. The climb was long and steep and the city was waking by the time she came to the street called Casas Elevado. It curved around the southern side of the crater several hundred feet above the harbour. On its right-hand side there was just a metal handrail and a dizzy view of the rooftops and chimneys of the houses below, from which smoke and smells of fresh-baked bread were beginning to rise. On the left, long stripes of garden stretched almost vertically up the crater wall. Up the length of each garden ran two pairs of metal rails, a house at the top of one, a blank-walled counterweight at the foot of the other. One of the counterweights had just started to move, rumbling slowly up the cliff while its house descended.

Fever watched for a few seconds until she understood how they worked. Beneath their broad verandas, where an ordinary house might have a cellar, the funiculars had water tanks. When the occupants wished to descend, the tank was filled with water pumped from reservoirs up among the crags. Then the funicular’s own weight would pull it down the rails, dragging its counterweight up past it until the two had swapped places. When the house needed to go back up it emptied its tanks while the tanks of the counterweight were filled, and the process was repeated. Some of the counterweights were little more than boxes on wheels, but most had been decorated to match their houses, and some were houses in their own right.

Fever was not sure how she was going to find the Thursday house, and there was nobody in that empty, early-morning street whom she could ask. But it turned out that she did not need to, for halfway along the street she passed a high wall, and then an ornate arched gateway, its portico carved with scenes of ships and dolphins and the word
Thursday
in curly lettering.

Fever pushed hopefully at the heavy gate, but it was locked. She put her face against the rusty railings and looked through into the garden. A turreted counterweight, like an ornate tomb, rested against its buffers in a grove of tall, dark trees. Following the rails up through the ragged foliage, Fever saw the house itself, a spiky, pointy-roofed construction, perched at the top of its tracks.

“Go away!” croaked a harsh voice from somewhere above her.

She stepped back from the gate and looked up. An angel was perched on the top of the gateway. It flapped its wings and opened its beak to display a pointy grey tongue. “Go away! No visitors.”

“I just want to talk to Senhor Thursday,” said Fever.

The angel put its too-big head on one side and studied her. Then, with a rattle of wings, it was gone. She looked through the gate again and saw it glide away between the trees and go soaring up the sunlit garden to vanish among the ramshackle spires of the house. It was the first angel she had met that had not asked her for snacks, and she wondered for a moment if it could be Arlo Thursday’s gatekeeper, carrying a description of her to its master. But that was fanciful; the angels surely hadn’t enough intelligence to be employed as servants.

She was just turning away when a noise from the garden made her stop and look back. The counterweight was shifting. Creaks and clanks came from beneath it, then soft tearing sounds as it broke free of the weeds which had grown thickly around its wheels and chassis. Cables glinted and twanged taut between each pair of rails as the counterweight started to climb and the house started to descend. A wide, low house with broad verandas, dusty windows, that complicated roof of spires and turrets, all built from wood gone grey with age and weather.

It reached the bottom, clunking heavily into its resting place against the bottom set of buffers. For a moment there was silence. Then another sharp, mechanical noise and the gate swung squeakily open. Wary, Fever stepped through into the garden. The gate swung shut behind her, and she heard bolts grating as they slid back into their holes, shutting her in. She tried to ignore her feelings of unease and concentrate instead on how that had been done. Not with water-power, surely. There was old-tech at work here, and she looked at the waiting house with fresh respect.

No one came out to greet her. The door stayed shut, and no face showed behind the dusty windows. Feeling nervous, yet telling herself not to be so irrational, Fever went along the mossy path between the trees and stepped on to the veranda that ran all round the house. It did not rock or give beneath her weight, as she had half expected. It felt as firm as any ordinary house. Beneath the veranda she could hear water gurgling and slopping into a drain as the ballast which had carried it down the cliffside emptied away.

She knocked at the big front door. No one answered. Yet Fever had the feeling that she was being watched, and not just by the angels which perched on the roof.

“Senhor Thursday?” she called.

The wind stirred the trees. Angel claws scritch-scratched across the shingles.

Fever was starting to grow impatient. Why would Arlo Thursday have brought his house down to street level and let her into his garden if he did not mean to talk with her? She walked round the house, following the sagging veranda. Across every window, pale, sun-faded blinds were drawn. At the back the veranda was broader and covered by a wooden canopy, in the shade of which a white-painted wicker table and two matching chairs had been set out. From the canopy hung baskets of dry earth and dead flowers, and between them, twirling in the faint breeze, winged white shapes.

Fever reached up and touched one, stilling it. The size of a small gull, it had been made with great care from paper and thin ribs of balsa wood. Its wings were bat-like and there were four in all, two large ones mounted one above the other, two small ones front and rear. Between them, lying flat, a child’s doll had been mounted, its crude wooden hands outstretched as if to grip tiny control levers.

Something hard and cold jabbed against the flesh beneath Fever’s right ear. She heard the creak and clack of a pistol being cocked, and a voice that said, “Turn around.”

She turned, not even breathing, just stretching her hands out slowly on either side of her to show that she was not armed. The pistol’s muzzle wavered an inch from her face. A large-bore pistol, long in the barrel, with an old-fashioned wheel-lock mechanism in which a slow-match was clamped. The match dribbled a thin braid of blue smoke into the air. If the pistol’s owner chose to pull the firing lever the lit end of the match would be pressed into the tray of gunpowder in front of it, sparking an explosion which would drive a slug of lead through Fever’s face.