by D Des Anges
“Ah, my Qingting,” said Ærndís, waving to the fly-by-water with a blunt kind of joy.
“Why,” Hajar asked, taking advantage of the apparent affability of the one-armed woman, “are we here? We meant to circumnavigate the vent. El Alacrán had plans. We had a destination in mind. Or he had one.”
“We can return you to your destination,” Ærndís said, beckoning over the fly-by-night, “we travel north, along the volcanic ridge. Refuelling. You head north. But you may not wish to return to the ground again.”
The tone of her voice was so ominous that it seemed almost threatening, and Hajar steeled herself for the possibility that they were once again prisoners in reality and guests in name.
She did not ask, haughty and cold, And why would we not wish that?
But she thought it as Ærndís clapped Qingting at the foreleg and the two exchanged cries of greeting: one distorted, childlike, and eerie, the other the normal, a little deep voice of a strange-accented Albionwoman.
“Ghent!” called Ærndís to the gaggle of men surrounding Ferdinand, “Ghent, should we not tell them?”
Tell us what? Hajar thought in some alarm, trying to catch Ferdinand’s eye and failing. She would have sought El Alacrán’s also had she known quite how to meet a scorpion’s eye with meaning.
This ‘should we not tell them?’ sounded most threatening. It came then to her that this was perhaps the most cunning of prisons, for not even in a sailing-ship might one be so marooned as in the air. On a ship one might, if one could swim, stand a chance of finding another ship or some wreckage: in the skies the only escape was to fall to one’s death.
“O yes,” said a man with a crop of fine red hair shorn woeful short who must have been Ghent. All the men she could see with bare heads seemed short-shorn, and all clean-shaven, which was quite against the fashion of Albion and at least in part against the fashion of the Franks. “O yes. Here, you, newcomers. C’mere.”
They were nudged gentle into a circle: Hajar, Ferdinand, and Benjon, for it was clear that no one was foolhardy enough to nudge El Alacrán, whether gentle or harsh.
“The ground,” Ghent said, in a grave and portentous fashion, “will swallow you.”
“Really,” Ferdinand said, flat-voiced. Hajar dared not steal a look at him.
“It hungers. The land feeds. It has taken villages. Cities. We have records,” Ghent broke off to cough like the ignition of a poor-calibrated engine, “from our city’s founding. This is why – we took – to the skies.”
“Interesting,” said Benjon’s occupied form.
“This is why,” Ghent said, in a low voice, “you were taken. We do not wish you to die thus. You need it seems no re-education in bearing kindness to our arthropod brothers and sisters, and Ferdinand here says among you are two engineers and a doctor – skills we have always use for. So.”
“Oh did he?” Hajar asked, exasperated.
Ferdinand looked rather sheepish.
“Please, remain,” said Ærndís, echoed in eerie child-machine register by Qingting, “do not go down to the ground and risk your deaths.”
Oh, Hajar thought, relaxing, they’re just lunatics.
It made a kind of sense. Why else would people choose to live in the sky?
“And should we not wish to remain in the sky?” El Alacrán asked. His hoarse, rasping, echoing voice seemed almost normal after the eerie alien mechanical-baby voice of the distortion tubes.
“Then we shall return you to your destination, or as close to it as we can come without deviance,” said Ghent, who seemed to have appointed himself spokesman for the time being.
“Our destination is the volcanic river at the northernmost tip of this range,” El Alacrán said immediately, “Take us, and our gratitude will be unreserved.”
“Wait, no,” Hajar said, holding up her hand. “They have a flying-ship—”
“We have five,” Ghent corrected, “in flotilla. This is a city, Mizdaughter, not a village.”
For some reason the remainder of the sky-people seemed to find this amusing, and laughed like drunks at a fallen comrade.
“—There is no reason why we should not return ourselves to Albion and save your escort of us to your General,” she finished, over the laughter.
“There is every reason,” Ferdinand objected, lending the room the feeling of some meeting of lore-practice. “We do not yet have the, the cure for which we have travelled all this way. For Benjon.”
He frowned at her, and Hajar felt a moment’s shame. Benjon was her friend and here was Ferdinand, who had every reason to his mind to hate the man, defending his survival.
“Yes, what of my … cure …” agreed the occupied body of Benjon, and Hajar ached to remove her boot and throw it at him; but then she would be missing a boot. And it would only be Benjon, in the end, that she hurt.
“If you still seek the cure for your parasitised friend,” El Alacrán said, “it would be the better if you return with me, to our original course, and I will take you to my General. Either we will come upon a cure on the way, or the accumulation of greater wisdom will work to provide one.”
“You’re very keen on us going back with you,” Hajar said, pointing at the scorpion an accusing finger. “I think. I think I smell a rat. Here. You. What is your meaning in this, why not let us return with these people?”
“Hajar –” Ferdinand muttered.
“You fed us that nonsense about trust and betrayal, scorpion, and I do not think you believe it. You tell me now what you mean—” Hajar snapped.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ferdinand said, while all about them the men and women of the sky watched with the dull curiosity of merchants exposed by accident to a family dispute, “we must return and resolve this … illness … in Benjon.”
“He doesn’t want that,” Hajar said, staring at the scorpion. “Why? You’d have given us over as prisoners to your bloody General and left us to die there instead.”
“You were to be returned to your own nation,” the scorpion insisted, stubborn in what was surely his lie, “in the company of a prisoner already held; your ‘rescue’ was to be his achievement, and his salvation on return to Albion—”
“And how was that supposed to work?” Ferdinand asked, seeming interested at last.
El Alacrán, who had raised his claws as if facing attack, lowered them slowly and made a sound like a moan. “It is still possible that you will ‘escape’ with his help.”
“You mean to betray your own General?” asked one of the sky-men, his odd accent rendering Albiontongue close to the Prussian dialect.
“Only if he holds John Lancaster,” said El Alacrán, curt and quite disinterested in the compunctions of their captors; Hajar noted this.
“This man must be important, then, eh? Important enough to betray your loyalties, then, eh?” replied the sky-man. His clean-shaven cheek was so dark he might almost have passed as a Moor.
“Why do you think that is?” El Alacrán asked. He seemed to address himself to Ferdinand, though Hajar could not tell why.
She knew on one morning she had awoken to find Ferdinand and El Alacrán appearing to engage in a staring contest, but had thought there was no story to it beyond the hostility that Ferdinand bore everyone as they trudged through the forests, alone.
“E’en so,” Ferdinand mumbled, seeming abashed. “You might have told us.”
“Which’ll it be?” cried Ghent without gravity or apparent ill-humour at the argument, or even much acknowledging its content. He stared about his guests with keen pale eyes. “The volcanic river or the border with the dominions of Albion –”
“Not Albion-of-the-Britons?” Hajar asked, disappointed.
“They watch the skies,” said Ærndís, with another unwelcome consoling pat on Hajar’s shoulder. “It is not safe there.”
“It is no matter, do not make up your minds yet,” Ghent said with a great gesture of his arms. “We travel north along the volcanic ridge. When we reach your river, Scor
pion, we will ask for your decision – if then you truly wish to return to the land.”
“They are mad,” Ferdinand muttered, edging through the circle to stand beside her.
Ærndís leaned away to converse with her fly-by-water friend.
“Quite mad. We have only to decide, Hajar – risk our use as El Alacrán’s bargaining pieces, or…” he glanced at Benjon’s occupied form, standing alone, “…lose hope of returning your friend.”
“Come, eat and rest,” called Ærndís, beckoning to them with her stump to follow her. The motion seemed as though she knew not of the arm’s absence. “No more dispute, then, eh?”
* * *
Ærndís answered Hajar’s questions all, but none to her satisfaction and often with the vaguest deflection: for ‘what propulsion have you for this city, that it may travel where it please?’ she gave Hajar only ‘engines’, and for ‘how came you to this city?’ she gave only ‘I was born here’, and for ‘how is such great lift achieved?’ she gave only ‘the effluent of volcano’.
In short, Hajar found conversation of the properties of the city most frustrating, and though it accompanied at long last the opportunity for ablutions, these, too, were not the mannered bathing and perfuming with which she had been raised.
Instead she was offered fine sand scented with some pungent oil which smelled almost as animal as her own some-weeks-unwashed stink, and told to scour.
“It pulls away dirt, and grease, and that which has died but not departed from your hide,” Ærndís explained, and Hajar, clad only in borrowed shift, scarfless and unshod, was too eager to be clothed again to dispute this rationale.
It was somewhere between the realms of pain and invigoration, and by the end Hajar glowed with the friction.
On the matter of her own life Ærndís was endlessly curious:
“Do you have schools? Do they teach? Is there teaching? On the ground?”
“There are … there are Universities,” Hajar said, confused and becoming again annoyed at her own confusion. “For the further study of the world and the future –”
“But for children?”
“What? No!” Hajar blanched at the mere idea of letting some wretched sticky-fingered urchin into her laboratory. “Why would we let them into the University?”
“To teach them, of course,” said Ærndís, as if this were obvious to the point of pain. “How else are they to learn?”
“Oh,” said Hajar. “Tutors. Some cannot afford them and go without, some tutors teach on the greens in the summer, a penny a student, but their books are out of date and they teach wrongly and –”
“That is utter madness,” Ærndís declared. “How does anyone learn?”
Yes and you think the ground eats people, Hajar thought, as she gave an apologetic shrug. So I will afford your judgement very little bloody value.
“And,” said Ærndís, for whom this was at once clear the most important question, “how do you fly?”
On firmer ground – the irony of which thought was not lost upon her – Hajar began to explain ornithopters.
“Madness,” Ærndís interjected, every now and then. “Mad. Mad. You are all mad. You live on the ground and leave it in mobile explosions. I say you are all mad.”
She gave Hajar yet another unwanted slap on the shoulder.
“Good for you that we found you, eh?”
The arrangement of the Hall for domestic purposes seemed however quite similar to that of the University buildings, with even the rooms for sleeping students and immovable elder staff. When this was pointed out to her, however, Ærndís did not understand.
She seemed to sleep alone, though there was room in her allotted hutch for two, and elements, here and there of a man’s presence now-forgotten. Ærndís at last showed Hajar to a strange, elongated pouch hanging from the ceiling of Ærndís’s quarters and said it was where she should sleep.
“What is this?” Hajar asked, for it looked too much alike the white sac in which Ferdinand’s horse had perished for her comfort.
“It is a haemmeck,” Ærndís said, extending her own for Hajar’s better inspection. “A bag for sleeping in.”
“It looks like a bag for holding the dead in,” Hajar muttered, thinking of Benjon’s occasional flat-topped cart journeys. He could so often be seen dragging behind him the unclaimed and unidentified of the halls of the dead for his own use.
“When we die,” Ærndís said, climbing into her own, her haemmeck, without impediment from her missing hand, “they are.”
This did not give Hajar great comfort. It also took many trials and finally the use of the edge of a table as a mounting-block to ascend her own sleeping-place, but she was so tired from the exertions and strangeness of the day and the now-unaccustomed full belly that she fell almost straight away into a deep sleep.
* * *
Hajar’s questions were better-answered in the morning not by Ærndís, who was called upon to give lessons to the children of the city, but by Hajar’s own eyes.
Qingting escorted them through the city, or as much of it as they could view without leaving the first hall they had entered.
“How do you – the humans – pass between the halls?” Ferdinand asked, grey-faced as he peered from the window. Beyond it lay the hulks of three more halls: shrouded in cloud and harnessed with ropes, looming from the mist like mountains. “On those rope bridges?”
He sounded as if nothing could delight him less.
“The old and the infirm, the young, those who are bound to walk,” the eerie child-machine voice of the fly-by-water’s distortion pipes replied. “Most fly.”
“On ornithopters?” Hajar asked in alarm. The thought of such volatile engines in such proximity to the sky-obscuring vastness of volcanic smoke contained above made her blood run cold.
“Maybe theirs are less … explosive,” Ferdinand suggested.
“Ornitho-what?” asked Qingting, who it seemed had not been appraised of Hajar’s conversations from the night before. “They glide.”
“What?” El Alacrán muttered. He did not appear to be interested.
“Unusual dark for the morning,” Benjon’s voice remarked.
He had thus far listened as attentive as any guest, but made no contribution, and Hajar had been consumed with suspicion as to what the parasite learned from all this. Now, Benjon’s long, bony fingers extended to indicate the skies through the faceted windows, which were indeed growing dark.
A trailing rope whipped the windowpanes.
“A storm!” Qingting exclaimed, and without further word the fly-by-water abandoned them, dashing on nimble feet toward the room in which the hatch was located.
“How … do we think … they weather storms, up here?” Ferdinand asked.
“You were the ones who wanted to come up onto this death trap,” El Alacrán’s hoarse, echoing voice rasped. The great scorpion sounded more now as though air did not enter fully the organs of respiration, and as though this pained him.
Hajar had the sudden thought that she was not aware if arthropods bore such organs. If Benjon had ever been moved to dissect one, he had kept his findings to himself. And the smallspiders and the like were fiddlesome and pernickety, which would like as not put him off.
El Alacrán dug his feet into the wooden floorboards like knife tips. “Now we all find out.”
Chapter 19
Men are not designed to live in total darkness, and they are not made to live in blackness without cease or company most of all. For time John Lancaster had no way to measure, he lay still in the darkness, listening to the distant whispers of his captors.
He was left food, which he smelled, and found with his fingers. It was quite palatable, if cold.
He was left water, which he spilled across himself a few times until he had the measure of how to bring the vessel to his lips before he tilted it.
John slept, and woke, and slept, and woke. He might have slept an hour, or a week. His body grew accustomed to the furs on the
unyielding rocks, and his ears grew accustomed to the echoes of the occasional movements of each of his changing guards, but his eyes did not acclimatise for there was not one weak ember of light to give them use.
Though he tried not to, he found his thoughts wandered at first to the hospice.
It was the perfect twin of that era: inescapable blackness, sameness, and the loss of time. Then there were the guards, the knowledge of being talked about, but never to. But most of all, there was the loss of time.
In the bowels of the frozen earth, laid alongside the warm stones on his bed of unseen furs, John was left unmolested and unaddressed.
No one came to force-feed him sickening brew; no one beat the demons of madness from him with birches, or laid stones across his chest to flush him of malignance. No one filled the room with smoke until he grew drowsy, the better to flush out insanity. No one here held him in iced water or suspended him by the ankles in ‘repose’. No one pushed his face to the floor; no one with-held from him food until the malignance that was supposed to have taken him could be tempted out with hunger.
This was no hospice.
But he was alone, without light and without human voices, and it felt so very much akin to the time spent locked within a tiled room.
It had been such a long time, his unshod feet later dampened with his own piss, and no one to come for his futile calls. Though he was then still young, it was graven in his memory now as indelible as if carved in his bones.
John lay in the darkness, for he could not walk without fear of falling, and he succumbed to the night terrors in this one endless and unbroken night.
He had no knowledge of how long he lay with great horrors that swirled in his mind and seemed to burst from his person. At times he was plagued with the belief that he was himself an arthropod in Folded disguise who had only forgotten himself, and soon his skin would flake away and his true form unfurl. He laughed his way out of this madness with the thought of how bad he was at mere paper origami.
At other times his mind supplied the cries of tormented arthropods from the Wireless, and placed them in the mouths of his colleagues upon the rig.
