Clash of the Sky Galleons

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  As Maris looked down at it, she suddenly realized how thirsty she was. Her mouth was dry and gritty, her throat hurt and she could still taste the faint but disgusting halitoad-breath tang on her tongue. She’d do anything to wash it away.

  ‘No,’ said Quint firmly, as if reading her mind. ‘We can’t risk it. The water might look clear, but it could contain rust-blight or spore-worms …’

  ‘Spore-worms?’ Maris shook her head and turned away. ‘No, on second thoughts, I don’t want to know,’ she said weakly.

  Quint laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘I know it’s hard,’ he said gently, ‘but we have to go on. If we find an ironwood pine and climb it, then we’ll be able to gather some rainwater at the top, where it’ll be pure …’

  ‘If we find an ironwood,’ said Maris miserably, drying her eyes. ‘But what if we don’t?’

  ‘We must,’ said Quint firmly, helping her to her feet. ‘One thing’s for certain, we can’t stay here much longer …’

  He pointed ahead at the dappled sunlit clearing. Strange Deepwoods creatures were emerging, drawn to the light - and the promise of an easy meal.

  Small translucent cray-spinners, with diaphanous wings and eyes at the end of long swaying stalks, were twisting in the dappled light. Large dust-flies and tentacled wind-whelks hovered over the rich churned-up earth, hunting fat wood-grubs and curling thousandfoots. Weezits - long-armed and sharp-fanged -darted from the trees, hunting the cray-spinners and wind-whelks in turn. And behind them, rustling through the trees, came larger predators with their sights set on the weezits …

  There were armour-plated hoglets, sharp-tusked and quick; and gladehawks with hooked beaks and massive talons. While Quint and Maris watched from the shadows, they swooped from above and snapped from below, as they took their place in the food-chain.

  Quint turned and set off in the opposite direction as a troop of whooping silver-backed quarms swung through the trees and launched themselves at the hoglets.

  Maris clasped her hands over her ears as the air filled with ferocious shrieks and frenzied snarls, and hurried after him. Over and under the fallen trees the pair of them scrambled, and back into the depths of the forest. They darted between thickets and scrabbled through tangled undergrowth; they picked their way over stepping stones in broad, shallow streams which Maris yearned to drink from, but that Quint forbade with a frown and a shake of the head. Soon they were hot and panting, with sweat beading their foreheads and trickling down their backs - and still there wasn’t an ironwood pine to be found.

  Far, far above their heads, the sun was sinking lower in the sky and the light that managed to break through the forest canopy was casting ever-longer shadows …

  ‘It’ll be night soon,’ said Quint, stopping and wiping his face with his sleeve. ‘We’ll have to climb the first big tree we come to, whatever it is, and wait till morning.’

  Maris sighed and let her head drop. ‘I’m so tired, Quint,’ she murmured. ‘And hungry, and thirsty …’ But Quint wasn’t listening. He was staring into the gloom at the gnarled roots and trunks of the trees around them, as if assessing how difficult each one might be to climb, and how long it would take them.

  Maris looked away. How sick she was of this terrible place, with its beautiful glades and hideous creatures. How she longed to be back on the Galerider, sitting down to a bowl of woodonion broth and a tumbler of sweet rainwater from the aft-deck water butts …

  She paused. There, just within reach, was a large red woodsap, nestling in the leaves of the forest floor. It was smooth, ripe, without a blemish - and sitting there just waiting to be picked up. Maris’s mouth began to water uncontrollably. She knew just how deliciously succulent it would taste.

  She looked up. Quint was a few strides away, staring up at the tumbling, curled root-stack of a tall sallowdrop tree.

  She knew she shouldn’t … But what harm could it do? A large, red, juicy woodsap which had just dropped from a branch far above … If she didn’t pick it up, then it was sure to be snatched and devoured by some Deepwoods creature at any minute …

  With a trembling hand, Maris stretched out towards the woodsap. Her clammy fingers closed around the ripe fruit…

  Quint turned and shouted. ‘Maris! No!’

  She tried to lift the woodsap, only to discover that it was strangely heavy. She tugged at it greedily, Quint’s desperate voice roaring in her ears.

  ‘No! No! No …’

  Suddenly, the forest floor erupted from beneath Maris’s feet as a massive scaly creature rose up on thin spindly legs. At the same moment, Maris realized that the sweet, succulent woodsap clenched in her hand was in fact attached to a thick, knotted tentacle rooted in the creature’s broad, mud-coloured forehead. As she dangled from it, five enormous eyes opened and focused on the tempting morsel which had taken the bait. The creature opened its cavernous mouth and, with a whiplash jerk of the tentacle, tossed its victim high into the air.

  Maris cried out with terror as she fell back towards the gaping maw. Then, just as she was about to be swallowed whole, a huge black ironwood pinecone shot through the air and embedded itself in the creature’s gaping gullet with a fleshy spplaffi!

  The creature’s jaws snapped shut. Maris landed with a heavy thud on its forehead and skidded off. The five eyes bulged and the tentacle with its woodsap-lure shot up straight in the air as the creature began to gurgle and choke on the heavy pinecone now lodged in its throat.

  On the forest floor, gasping and winded, Maris looked up to see the hideous monster stumble forward on its long, spindly legs, a long broad fin of a tail swishing wildly behind it. Then, with a long, despairing gurgle, it slumped to the ground with a flat-sounding splat and lay motionless. The decoy woodsap on the end of the tentacle fell lifelessly at Maris’s feet.

  She turned away from it in disgust, bile rising in her throat, only to see Quint, hands on his hips, beaming down at her delightedly.

  ‘Wh … wh … what was that?’ she gasped.

  ‘A landfish,’ smiled Quint, helping her to her feet. ‘An angler by the look of it - but no match for a well-aimed ironwood pinecone …’

  ‘Pinecone?’ said Maris in a dazed voice.

  ‘First thing that came to hand!’ said Quint, with a delighted laugh. ‘Look over there. There are hundreds of them beneath that…’

  ‘Ironwood pine!’ she screamed with joy, gazing up at the most magnificent tree she had ever seen. ‘It was right here all the time!’

  She hugged Quint excitedly and the two of them did a little jumping jig for a few moments. The light had faded now to a grey dusk, which was darkening by the second. Quint and Maris stopped and craned their necks back.

  The base of the ironwood pine’s trunk was ten times wider than the grandest tower in Sanctaphrax; a hundred times wider than the Galerider’s mighty mast; a thousand individuals it would take, each one clasping the hand of the next, to encircle it. And tall! The tree soared up into the sky, dwarfing all the others about it, before spearing the lofty canopy and standing proud above the rest.

  Maris turned to Quint, her face suffused with happiness. ‘I’ll bet there isn’t a taller ironwood pine in all of the Deepwoods,’ she said.

  ‘You could well be right,’ said Quint, standing with his hands on his hips looking up at the tree. ‘There’s just one problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said Maris, suddenly serious.

  Quint smiled at her. ‘The long, long climb ahead!’

  • CHAPTER ELEVEN •

  THE BEACON

  They started straight away. The huge ironwood pine, _L in contrast to the blackwood, was surprisingly easy to climb. The bark of the tree was rough and scaly, and provided convenient foot- and hand-holds.

  ‘It’s as easy as climbing a staircase!’ said Maris in wonder, as they made their way up the trunk, soon leaving the darkening forest floor far behind.

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Quint, ‘but be careful of the resin.’

  He pointed to cracks i
n the slab-like bark, from which a thick amber substance oozed in great globules.

  Maris peered at one of the glistening drops of resin seeping from a deep fissure to her right. The great shimmering globule was almost as big as she was, but that wasn’t what made her gasp. No, what took her breath away was the sight of a rotsucker - its thin snout outstretched, its bat-like wings frozen in mid-flap, and its glowing eyes dim and unseeing - entombed within the resin.

  As she followed Quint up the huge trunk towards the first of the branches high above, Maris saw countless other Deepwoods creatures which had got trapped in the treacherous resin, from tiny woodants and termites, to plump quarms and bony weezits, all frozen in mid-step, flap or hop, and strangely beautiful in their amber prisons.

  ‘It reminds me of the collections in the Palace of Shadows,’ said Maris, pausing to marvel at a razorflit caught in the act of swallowing a giant woodmoth. ‘Yet nothing in my father’s palace was half as exquisite …’

  ‘Or as deadly’ added Quint. ‘We’ll be safe when we get up to the branches.’

  He took Maris’s arm and guided her away from a large column of resin, just as a glistening drop - as big as a fist - fell from the end, like wax dripping from a candle. It disappeared into the shadows below with a sticky sounding plopff!

  Now that the sun had dropped low in the sky, down below them, the forest floor was in darkness. Only by climbing higher, up towards the light that still brightened the sky, could they prolong the day.

  ‘I’m so thirsty, Quint,’ Maris rasped as she followed him up the rough bark ‘steps’ of the trunk.

  ‘I know,’ said Quint softly. ‘But just hold out a little longer if you can.’

  Maris looked up at the first of the arched branches high above, spanning the air like the vaulted ceiling of a mighty palace hall, and shook her head miserably. ‘I’ll try’ she whispered.

  Although the ironwood had seemed easier to climb at first than the gnarled and slippery blackwood, the pine tree was far, far larger. This made the distance from its base to the first of its huge branches a daunting climb and, since the slab-like bark was becoming more and more fragile the higher they went, increasingly dangerous.

  In fact, all the trees of the great Deepwoods forest were different from one another. With the passing years, the bloodoak - a flesh-eater - grew broader rather than taller, its mandibled jaws stretching to take in ever-larger prey. The lullabee, knobbly and irregular, with branches sprouting every which way, grew in a robust yet haphazard manner; while the branches of the blackwood would divide and sub-divide, becoming more and more dense with every season. Then there was the redoak, a graceful tree with diamond-shaped leaves that would turn bright crimson at the end of every frost. Growing continuously, the redoak’s branches sprouted from the central trunk, one after the other, almost like a spiral staircase.

  And then, of course, there was the ironwood pine itself. In contrast to most of the other trees, it had distinct growth spurts. For several years the trunk would grow tall and straight. Then, triggered by an upsurge of sap, branches would appear in a ring around the circumference of the trunk. Once these had become established, with massive, dark-green pinecones nestling between the dark-green needles, the trunk would grow again. As it did so, extra branches would grow, so that the lower rings could have anything up to a hundred branches radiating out from the trunk. This number diminished the taller the tree became, until at the top, there was a ring of merely three or four small branches.

  ‘I reckon that’s a good fifty years we’ve just climbed,’ Quint announced as they finally reached the first ring of branches, each one the size of a blackwood tree.

  ‘You mean, strides?’ said Maris.

  Quint shook his head. ‘Years,’ he said, ‘judging by the height of the trunk. You know, the ironwood grows a new branch every twenty years or so. There must be a hundred branches in this first ring alone - not counting all the branches in the rings above. I’m telling you, Maris, this tree must be ancient…’

  Maris looked up at the rings of branches above her head.

  ‘Older than my grandfather,’ she mused. ‘My greatgrandfather, my great-great-grandfather …’

  ‘Maris, this tree is so big, it’s probably older than the great floating city of Sanctaphrax itself.’

  Maris’s eyes widened. ‘Older … than …’ Her voice faded away to nothing as she sat down on the huge branch and, for a moment, forgot just how thirsty she was.

  ‘Come on,’ said Quint. ‘We need to go on a bit further.’

  Dragging herself wearily to her feet, Maris followed close behind Quint as he continued up the tree. They passed circles of branches, followed by long stretches of trunk, followed by more circles of branches, as they forged their way further and further up the tree. It was so immense that it was home to countless creatures that never left it - insects, grubs, birds and beasts, for whom the great ironwood pine was their entire world.

  There were colonies of wood-wasps living in huge papery lantern-like constructions that swayed beneath the branches; there were, flightless urchin-birds with spiky dark-green feathers and needle-thin orange beaks that hid themselves away among the brushes of pine-needles, and scaly creatures with long twisting tentacles that probed the air from crevices in the bark. And eyes … Lots and lots of eyes. Wide discs of green, narrow yellow slits and blood-red dots - all glinting in the half-light as she hurried past.

  They had climbed just beyond the top of the forest canopy when Quint turned to her at last. ‘We’ll camp here for the night,’ he told her, unclipping his parawings.

  With a sigh of relief, Maris unclipped her own and watched as Quint secured the parawing tent to one of the myriad smaller branches that sprouted from the massive one on which they stood. Then, without saying a word, he pulled his knife from his belt, reached up and cut through the stalks of half a dozen of the small, pale-green pinecones that hung in clusters from the branch overhead. He handed them to Maris.

  ‘Break them open,’ he instructed her. ‘Then peel the individual kernels. They’re what we’re after.’ He climbed to his feet. ‘But whatever you do, don’t eat them!’

  While Maris got to work, Quint set off along the main branch. After a few minutes, the branch forked, and forked again, each new branch bristling with great brushes of fragrant pine-needles. Quint clambered out over one of these springy mattress-like brushes, until he reached the very tip. He could go no further. All round him was the forest canopy, golden and gleaming in the evening sunlight.

  Quint sniffed the air and his nostrils filled with a delicious, tangy smell - a cross between limeleaves and woodhoney A broad smile spread across his face.

  ‘Better than I could have hoped for,’ he murmured as he reached out and parted the pine-needles at his feet to reveal a clutch of yellow, ball-shaped mushrooms clinging to the underside.

  Taking care not to slip, Quint lowered himself so that he was seated astride the branch. He slipped his hands inside his greatcoat, unbuckled his tooled breast-plate and pulled it free. Then, having wedged it upside down between his knees, he reached out and took one of the balls of fungus in both hands. With one short, sharp jerk, he twisted it to the left. There was a soft crack and a lingering squellp - and the fungus came free. He laid it down gently inside the hollow of the breast-plate, before returning his attention to the rest of the cluster.

  Squellp! Squellp! Squellp!

  A little while later Quint returned and placed a heavily laden breast-plate in front of Maris.

  ‘What are they?’ she asked, not sure whether to be delighted or horrified.

  Quint smiled as he unfastened the small metal cup from the side of his belt. Then he selected the largest of the mushrooms and, holding it over the cup, gently squeezed. As he did so a clear liquid streamed down into the cup and the air filled with a juicy perfume. When the cup was filled almost to the brim, Quint handed it to Maris.

  Try that,’ he said.

  Maris raised the cup tenta
tively to her lips. Then, wincing slightly, she took the smallest of sips. Her face lit up with an expression of absolute joy. Throwing back her head, Maris drained the cup in one go.

  That is delicious! What is it?’ she asked, as she stuck her hand out for a second cupful.

  Quint selected a second fungus, and squeezed it dry. ‘It has many names. Kobold’s tears. The gift of Riverrise. Cloudtree juice …’ he said, as he forced the last drips out of the spongy fungus and passed the cup back to Maris. ‘But what we sky pirates call it is sky nectar.’

  She drained it quickly, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘Sky nectar,’ she said. ‘I’ve never tasted anything better!’

  ‘It’s pure rainwater trapped in the fibres of the fungus,’ Quint explained. ‘The spores give it that sweet taste. Of course, the fungus also grows lower down, but it’s dangerous to try it there. Anything could get mixed up with the rain. No, it’s only up here, above the canopy where the rain first lands, that it’s safe to drink.’

  He looked down at the pile of ironwood pine-kernels she’d peeled. ‘Excellent work,’ he said.

  Maris beamed.

  Quint leaned forward, picked up one of the golden, heart-shaped kernels, inspected it - then popped it in his mouth. ‘Mmm!’ he sighed. ‘Like tilder sausages flavoured with orange-grass and nibblick …’

  ‘What?’ Maris exclaimed. ‘But you told me not to eat them…’

  ‘Did I?’ said Quint innocently. He took a handful of the pine-kernels, and ate them, one after the other. A smile spread across his face. ‘Absolutely delicious.’

  ‘You … You …’ Maris cried out.

  Quint laughed. ‘You’d better tuck in, before I eat the lot,’ he said.