by D Des Anges
“GET ON GET ON,” the fly-by-water shouted.
Its nightmare voice contrived to sound shocking akin to a very jolly mother who had once lived opposite Hajar and Hana in another town. Hajar shook herself at the unnatural connection.
“GET ON, LOOK, HE’S DOING IT, YOU DO IT –” the fly-by-water bellowed, flitting around the ladder through the terrible dark smoke.
“We have to get him back,” Ferdinand sighed, as if he would much rather not. He seized Hajar by the waist and lifted her to the ladder with a grunt of effort. “O you are heavier than you look, woman—”
“Bugger you,” Hajar snapped. She found her footing only with difficulty and planted a brief satisfying foot against his chest.
The rope ladder swung and swayed and had no solid grounding to it at all, leaving her to cling and swing and climb only with caution. It was quite the opposite of her fantastical descent from the Wall’s zenith.
Behind her she felt the ladder grow firm, and as she looked back she saw Ferdinand holding it into place, waiting patient as a monolith for her to climb far enough that he might join her ascent.
She looked up, and saw Benjon scaling the lines as a sailor might, disappearing into the cloud with haste, and she put one hand in front of the other.
It was after all not she who feared height, she thought, waiting to feel Ferdinand’s nervous weight on the ropes as she ascended.
“STOP BEING SILLY,” the alien child-machine voice cried, and the fly-by-water shot past her. “YOU ARE A STUPID ARACHNID, LOWER YOUR TAIL, STOP THAT—”
Hajar concentrated on not missing her footing, and within a moment she had risen six awkward cautious feet from the end of the rope ladder. Ferdinand’s weight swung onto it, which sent the whole long tail of rope rocking in such a wide swing that Hajar was sure that the rope ladder must reach to the moon to allow such movement.
“I’m heavy?” she shouted at him.
“O bugger you,” Ferdinand retorted as the ladder’s end swept over the fissure and both squeezed their eyes shut in horror.
The swing halted in a sudden jerk.
Hajar pried open a watering eye and saw, indistinct and blurred by smoke and tears, that the fly-by-water had grasped the rope further up. The creature pulled it back toward where El Alacrán waited with his claws and tail raised.
“SILLY ARACHNID,” the fly-by-water shouted again, “JUST GET ON THE LADDER AND WE WILL PULL YOU UP, YOU DON’T HAVE TO CLIMB – WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR LEG – GET ON THE LADDER, YOU FOOL, WE’LL GET YOU UP THERE—”
“Climb,” Ferdinand said, swatting at her feet.
“Are you all right?”
“I will vomit into your boots,” Ferdinand said, and when she looked down his eyes were still shut. “Please climb, al-Fihri.”
“I will kick you in the face,” Hajar said, soft as to an infant, and she took the thin wooden rungs with care.
Each seemed of ancient construct, reinforced with a plate of slim metal below, and worn smooth by the action of many a hand and foot upon them, like ships’ ladders must be on those still-rigged.
She climbed. The rungs must be hollow, Hajar thought, bearing the rope within them that wound about the side supports between rungs, in a two-stranded twist. She climbed.
“If you kick me in the face,” Ferdinand said, his voice shaking, “I will bite you in the leg, you see if I don’t.”
“Stupid bugger,” Hajar said as encouraging as she could. For Ferdinand had proven before as much an Albionman in his heart as he was Iberian-Moor in his hide, and Albion-of-the-Britons’ affections were ever communicated in foul talk.
The affected mannerly bluntness was the province of stranger and acquaintance: to a good friend – as she had once spoke to Benjon – the warmest of greeting was the foulest in nature. Hajar had no thought that she would call herself a ‘close friend’ of Ferdinand, but after their time in the forest and flight from the spiders, he seemed more of an intimate than an acquaintance.
“If you bite me I’ll fall on your head and we’ll both die.”
“Suppose I had better not sick on your boots,” Ferdinand agreed, a little less shaken.
“Suppose you better had,” Hajar said, climbing. “Is he on the ladder yet?”
“I am not going to look,” Ferdinand said with fervent conviction. “Doesn’t feel like it, does it?”
“COME ON, SILLY ARACHNID, YOU CAN’T DANCE AROUND A VOLCANO ALL DAY, BE A GOOD SNAPPY-CLAWS THING AND GET ON THE LADDER,” roared the high and strange voice of the fly-by-water or as Hajar suspected the fly-by-water’s speaking apparatus. Whatever it might be, it made the fly-by-water sound very strange.
“That sounds like a no,” Ferdinand said, his voice coming from direct below her feet. “What if he will not? Do we just climb this ladder forever until we sit on a cloud?”
“Let’s just get Benjon back,” Hajar suggested, placing one hand in front of another, one foot in front of another. She tried as she climbed not to think about how far they had risen above the ground, and if it was higher than the Wall had been, and what likelihood there was, should she fall, that she would land in the fissure and burn – or land on the rocks, and break her bones.
“GET—” cried the fly-by-water, and there was a great jerk on the rope ladder so violent that Hajar and Ferdinand near lost their footing. There followed too a cry from far up the lines, which might have been Benjon’s occupied body or might have been anyone. “THERE, WAS THAT SO HARD? ALL YOUR FEET, YOU MAD THING, ALL OF THEM – WHAT DID HAPPEN TO YOUR LEG? IT SEEMS UNFORTUNATE TO BE SO LOP-SIDED – ALL OF THEM, COME ALONG—”
“Climb,” Ferdinand whispered, hoarse, from below her.
Hajar ventured to look down at him and found he had locked his arms about the supports of the ladder, and doubtless also his legs. His face was screwed up into a lined and creased ball and his colour was near as grey as the patches in his hair, but he seemed quite determined.
“Climb, al-Fihri, or there will be sick in your boots and we shall doom ourselves both,” Ferdinand hissed.
“Stupid bugger,” Hajar said, beginning to climb again. The blast of the fissure sent warmth up her back, but on the side that climbed she grew colder and colder the higher she climbed
“Horrible woman,” Ferdinand sighed, climbing behind her. “Rotten mare.”
“Ugly boar,” she assured him, as the rope ladder grew exceeding taut with the weight of scorpion on its far end. “Cow shit.”
“Crow-voiced wench,” Ferdinand rumbled, patting her briefly on the back of one heel. “Mean-spirited cat. Keep climbing, keep climbing.”
“HOLD ON,” screeched the fly-by-water, and it shot past them, heading up into the clouds above like an arrow from a bow. “HOLD ON THEEEEERE HOLD OOOOOON.”
A moment later there was a sudden jerk from above.
Ferdinand cried out, and Hajar seized blindly at the rungs of the ladder. The jerk came again, and as the ladder began to rise into the unknown, she wrapped her limbs about the rope as firm as she could.
She pressed her face into the foul and stained wool of her coat, her headscarf – in some disrepair itself – fluttering in the terrible wind, and murmured, “I don’t like this at all.”
“You don’t like it,” Ferdinand muttered, below, his voice very pale-sounding. “Hah. You don’t like it.”
* * *
When at last Hajar came to firmer grounding, she was hauled up from the ladder by her armpits, then waist, then thighs by hands that were hands and not the barbed and bristled protrusions of arachnid legs. She had by then been so married to the rope ladder for so long that her sense of what was real seemed to have slipped away, and she felt she should be forgiven for believing that she found herself in a dream.
She found herself lying on her back on smooth planks very like the deck of a sailing-ship.
There were men and women about but they were occupied in helping Ferdinand from the ladder and onto the decking, and paid no attention to her. Benjon’s occupied for
m stood gazing upward, and so, getting to her feet she joined him in peering further into the sky. Hajar felt very filthy and unkempt and not at all presentable, but the feeling did not last long.
The shock of what she saw almost swayed her to seize at his arm, but even before Benjon’s hateful infection she had not been in the habit of clutching at him: he hated to be touched.
In the sky above the decking, many feet above her head, hung a great hall. It was the shape of a sailing-ship’s hull, but far greater than any sailing-ship or even steam ship she had ever seen dock in Albion-of-the-Britons’ ports.
At first she thought it was topped by a bank of cloud. They were very high and even now mist clawed cold and damp at her clothed legs, but it seemed that what blotted the sky from her view was in fact an endless vast skin. It was stitched and patched, studded with strange metal warts, girded about with some kind of cables, and trailed a multitude of ropes like stalks of fur along its underside.
It seemed to fill the whole sky above her head, but by craning her neck she could see the bow, the prow of the thing, and by squinting very hard she saw it must be some vast iteration of the little smoke-skins the fly-by-water had filled.
As if in answer to her thoughts, Benjon’s voice said, “Look.”
He pointed up to the metal warts encircling the monstrous skin, and there were something to the order of ten fly-by-waters flitting about with smoke-skins in tow. Each brought their bulging smoke-spheres to the warts.
As Hajar watched, by some strange operation the little smoke-skins shrank and withered, without spilling any of the black smoke which they had taken in below.
Air-lock valves, she thought, too tired to be excited but too intrigued to let it escape her.
The planking rocked beneath her, and she turned to see Ferdinand had taken to his feet and was helping the men and women to haul El Alacrán aboard. The arachnid did not seem to take well to the manhandling or the height, but he had stopped flicking his tail as he had been at the fly-by-water, and with a great heave of both rope ladder and hand-holds on his limbs they pulled him up.
She hurried with some guilt to assist those who had raised her up in the settling of the arthropod upon the boards, but he seemed to have righted himself already. She was left only to look uncertainly at Ferdinand.
He had not, it seemed, vomited at all. He did not however look overjoyed at finding himself on a platform floating in the sky.
“Now what?” Ferdinand asked.
It seemed that now there was a further journey to make, for it was plain they could not remain on the dangling platform, while the wind blew and the cold crept into them once more. Ferdinand looked as if he wished very much that he could either clutch at her or get back down onto his hands and knees and squat like a dog.
But they were not to wait long on this exposed and fenceless platform. As soon as El Alacrán had been shown to be wholly balanced aboard, one of the group of men and women made some violent gesture like the ornithopter pilots’ exaggerated. They were all of a muchness, and with their faces covered and brown leather clothing they were impossible to tell apart.
Almost right away there was another terrible, unbalancing jerk and the whole platform began to rise in an unsteady and unsettling manner.
Hajar made out the ropes at each corner and the gantries by which the pulleys were affixed to the hall above. She saw the rope ends disappearing inward, but not who pulled upon them. The platform gave another lurch, and as she saw Ferdinand’s face take on once more a grey hue, she said, “We should sit, until this is risen.”
She was afraid for a moment that when they had ascended to the Hall they would be required to swarm the rat-lines like sailors in order to enter through the windows, but the fear was as groundless as their platform.
As they drew near to the Hall a hatch opened in the floor of that suspended building, full large enough for El Alacrán to pass through without squeezing, and the men and women of the platform positioned themselves below it.
And so it was that they stepped out into the belly of a huge ship with very little exertion after all.
Hajar looked to the windows she had seen from below. Very like the stern windows of sailing-ships, they used only small diamonds of glass held together with a kind of gum, but through many of these tiny windows brought together in rectangles brought about sizeable windows.
Through the window, she saw cloud, and the flitting of the huge fly-by-waters, and – almost rubbing her eyes in disbelief – the bulk of another Hall. It was suspended some yards away in the sky from another bulging behemoth smoke-skin. There hung a forest of ropes between the one Hall and the next, and even a rope-bridge, further back.
“Welcome,” said one of the women, clapping Hajar on the back without warning, hauling her from her examination of the skies as she had hauled Hajar from the ladder. “Welcome. Ærndís, here. Who have we fished from the ground, then?”
She spoke, Hajar noted, in a most peculiar accent, but she spoke what was mostly Albiontongue, and her name was Albion in derivation.
The woman was older than Hajar: not much, though it seemed hard to tell. She bore about her face deep grooves from the rim of the strange mask that lay now around her neck. She was short-cropped in hair, fair of skin (though so weathered that it was less evident) and broad of smile.
Her left arm below the elbow was absent.
“Travellers from Albion-of-the-Britons,” Hajar said, wishing the woman would not clap her on the shoulder so. It must be a normal greeting here, for she saw a man clap Ferdinand on the shoulder (to similar clear discomfort to him), but it made her uneasy.
“Ah, my people backalong were from down there, one of the islands,” said Ærndís with a curt nod of recognition but no seeming love for the place. “So, traveller from Albion-of-the-Britons, you have a name we should call you, eh?”
“Hajar al-Fihri Auda Bedu Ird,” said Hajar, making a point of inclining her head as she had learned from her mother.
It was childish to be so stiff, but she felt dirty and unsettled. Within this chamber she saw El Alacrán’s legs tensed as Ferdinand’s shoulders, and knew she was not the only one who knew not what would become of them. It was some comfort to know that she was not alone in her fears.
“That’s all your name? Bit of a mouthful,” said the ‘Ærndís’ woman.
“O, that is not all of my name,” Hajar said, feeling spiteful.
“Will ‘Hajar’ do? We keep names short,” said Ærndís, gesturing with her stump to the mask about her neck, “especially outside.”
Hajar blanched at this natural, unconscious motion of stump.
The cryptic remark was not explained. Hajar examined the mask as best she could, without seeming to stare.
It was a black leather construction slotted with vents, and between what seemed to be two layers of leather she could just glimpse an extraordinarily fine mesh of thin wires, of the sort used in some of her experiments. They were favoured for letting through only the very finest of air, and blocking smuts and cinders from the engines. She had hoped to include them in a design for a new, better form of braking system.
Hajar glanced at Ferdinand, who seemed to have struck up a conversation, and at the occupied body of Benjon, which was engaged in something which must have been one. About the room other men and women appeared, peering curiously at them, all burdened with the cunning masks about their necks. Not all the masks were black, and some were of slightly different construction: a few bore great glass circles like spectacle lenses, and seemed designed to cover the whole head.
“What?” Hajar said eventually, recalling she had been asked a question, then, “Yes.”
“And you climbed that wall why?” Ærndís asked, and though her words were blunt it seemed she believed herself to be well-mannered in the asking. “We found you a long way from the human parts of this world.”
“It is a complex matter,” Hajar said, not seeing until after she spoke that it was Ferdinand’s phrase she used.
“Ah, you are hungry, no doubt,” Ærndís said, nodding, her hand on Hajar’s shoulder still. “Still, questions are understandable, then, yes? You must see that. You come with companionable arthropod. We thought we were the only ones.”
“The only ones what?” Hajar asked, confused, and with half an eye on where El Alacrán debated with several curt-handed gesticulating men out of her ears’ reach.
“Live with arthropoda,” said Ærndís. “All we remember, everyone down there in the danger keeps ghetto. Them on their side. You on your side. No mixing.” She looked pensive: Hajar grappled with the compulsion to make sure Benjon’s occupied form was not causing affray. “Your arachnid friend, the claw-snapper, he has no pipes. How does he speak?”
Hajar shrugged. “He said it involved parasites and was complicated. At the moment, everything involves parasites and is complicated.” She heard the weariness in her own voice, and wondered if she would ever cease feeling so stretched thin as she did now. “What pipes?”
“Distortion tubes,” said Ærndís, with abrupt good cheer.
“What are they? What is their construction?” Hajar tried not to sigh. “I do not understand.”
“We collaborate. They are orgone; humans design, dragonflies, moths, they work the orgone. With difficulty. It takes spit.” She sounded thoughtful. “I hear tell the spiders use silk in theirs, and that is stronger. Flexible. But there is enmity between our flying friends and the eight-legs. They once ate our arthropoda, like hawks eat pigeons.”
That made a sort of sense, Hajar thought, watching Ferdinand clap one of the flying-men on the shoulder in return to some remark or other.
He seemed back in his element now: the ill-temper that had dogged him across the forests melted as it had amid the sailors. Ferdinand was a man who thrived on company as Hajar did not, and Benjon never had.
Outside the window nearest her, something large and fast flew past, and a moment later a huge fly-by-water crept through the open hole in the floor. Its wings were stilled at last and – now that she knew to look for it – a complex structure of short, coiled black tubes was held by a leather-looking harness about its body.
