A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  But although she tried to order her thoughts and observe it rationally, she couldn’t. She was too shocked and exhausted by her misfortunes. She slept or fainted several times between the cliff’s top and the beach and to her shame Arlo had to pick her up and carry her. He didn’t seem to mind. “Light as a bird, you are,” he said.

  And then they were on the shore, in a tight little steep-walled secret cove where a boat rode at anchor. It was about thirty feet long, without the beak or stern-castle that boats from Mayda usually wore. Fever saw polished wood shining faintly as he carried her aboard. She heard the tick and creak of the Aranha as it withdrew itself into the bushes and the shadows on the shore.

  Arlo had brought her down the cockpit steps and left her in this cabin, where she had eased herself out of her wet clothes and into this bunk with its clean, crisp covers and woolly, comforting blankets. She had snuggled down and gone to sleep as easily as Fern…

  She sat herself up and looked out of the porthole, but there was nothing to see but sea. The water foamed white along the boat’s side, and she realized that it was not at anchor any more.

  So she stirred herself, despite wanting to go back to sleep. She swung her legs over the bed’s edge and pushed herself upright. The swaying of the deck took a little getting used to, but it was not so different from riding the Lyceum over rough ground. She dressed and went to the door and opened it and climbed up the narrow ladder she found outside it, emerging into sunlight and the crying of angels.

  The big birds hung all about her, riding the sea wind above the boat and on either side of it. Shadows of them slid over the taut sail, a parallelogram of white canvas which reared high above Fever’s head. Away from land and people the angels seemed less absurd; their wide wings were made for these empty spaces, and instead of begging for scraps they were finding their own food, stooping every so often to pluck a shining fish from the wave-tops. Fever watched them for a while, wondering if one of them was Weasel and how she could thank him for saving her.

  “Fever!”

  Arlo Thursday was sitting at the tiller at the stern of the boat. There was a blanket wrapped around him, and she had the impression that he had not slept. Behind him, far astern, Fever saw the unmistakable outline of Mayda silhouetted against the morning sun. She turned, and there behind a cloud of birds were the Ragged Isles, jutting from their skirts of surf a few miles ahead.

  “This is one of my grandfather’s ships,” said Arlo, pushing the tiller over, the boat heeling. “In fact she’s about seven of them; a bit from one hulk and a bit from another; I rescued them from the wrecker’s yards and cobbled them back together. She’s called the Jenny Haniver. In the Museum at Mayda there are some things which the old sea priests claimed were mermaids. They’re bogus, of course, stitched together from halves of monkeys and fish. They’re called Jenny Hanivers, and since my Jenny Haniver was stitched together from pieces too, it seemed a likely name.”

  Fever looked about. Brass rails, oak planking, that towering sail. “Where is the Aranha?” she said.

  “It will make its own way to the place we’re going.”

  “It can swim?”

  “I suppose.”

  In Fever’s memory the Aranha paced down the cliff path, spines agleam, its back-to-front knees glinting as it minced along. “It is a machine,” she said.

  “A very old machine. A gift to my grandfather from a grateful client.”

  Fever could guess who the grateful client had been. She had seen things a bit like the Aranha before, in pictures and in the memories which she had inherited from Auric Godshawk. When the Scriven ruled London machines like that had been unleashed in Pickled Eel Circus to slaughter their enemies. If her grandfather had kept a few for the Scrivens’ army the London mobs would never have been able to overthrow him, but no, he had chosen to squander them all in bloody games with human gladiators, or give them to his friends…

  “It has a Stalker’s brain inside,” said Arlo.

  “It must have more than that,” said Fever, thinking back to the Resurrectory aboard Quercus’s traction fortress, where she had watched Fern and Ruan’s father reborn. “It must have been a person once.”

  “Not quite.”

  Fever glanced at him. “An angel?”

  Arlo nodded. “It is the world’s one and only Stalker-angel. Armed with a swift-firing gun. It saved my grandfather and my father many times when their enemies hired the Shadow Men or the Lords of Pain to murder them.”

  And in return, thought Fever, his grandfather had built Godshawk a ship: the Black Poppy, a fast, strong ship that took him north to frozen islands on the fringes of the great whiteness, searching for more knowledge of the Stalkers. How he would have loved this voyage, she thought; the sunlight and the motion of the cutter and the blue, salt smell of the sea. It was almost as if he were still there, just beneath the surface of her conscious mind.

  The Jenny Haniver ran on into the west with her escort of angels all about her and the sunlit water foaming down her flanks, and soon she began to pass among the Ragged Isles.

  Twenty miles to the west of Mayda there had once been a second crater, even bigger, and perhaps created by the same Ancient weapon. But perhaps because it lay in deeper water, or was made from different rocks, the wall of this western crater had crumbled to form a loose ring of spiky islands and treacherous shoals. Seeing them from Mayda, Fever had taken them to be barren, and certainly they looked sheer-sided and inaccessible. But as the Jenny Haniver sailed between them Fever saw that there were mats of grass on the tops of some, pine trees and dwarf oak jutting at angles from the cliffs, and on one of the largest, a scatter of ruins.

  Arlo moved the tiller and the cutter swung her nose towards it, passing through narrow straits between high jagged rocks. Other rocks, almost submerged, broke the sea’s surface like black teeth. It felt dangerous, but Arlo seemed sure of himself. Fever started to suspect that the angels who flew ahead of the Jenny Haniver were not just weaving random paths but were guiding Arlo through those choppy channels; they kept looping back, swooping over the cutter’s helm with raking cries, which the young inventor seemed to understand and respond to, adjusting his course between those slabs and knives of rock.

  He saw her watching and laughed. “They are really quite intelligent, if you know how to speak to them.”

  Some of the looming rocks had been splashed with angel-guano in patterns that Fever realized were not as random as they seemed. They lined up with one another to form waymarks, blazing a safe trail through the maze for anyone who knew how to read them.

  “There is a good, clear, deep water channel further north, beyond those stacks,” said Arlo. “Fishing boats from Mayda pass there sometimes. But Thursday Island itself is bad luck; nobody comes near it now.”

  Young trees clustered among the tall, rocky crags on the island’s summit. Lower down Fever could see the ruins which she had glimpsed earlier. Roofless sheds, dead warehouses, the broken stub of a lighthouse on a harbour wall. She remembered the story that Thirza Belkin had told, of the wave that had destroyed the Thursdays and their shipyard. It had come from the west, the shock wave from some almighty earth-storm in lost America, rolling clear across the Atlantic before breaking over Thursday Island. It had smashed down buildings, and sunk the ships whose dead masts could still be seen jutting sadly from the water in the harbour. Close in against the shore there were concrete basins, like the pens of a fish farm, where yachts and schooners must once have been dry-docked. The sea had filled them, and all that was left were crumbled, weedy walls that barely showed above the waves.

  Here, among these ruins, young Arlo had lived for months after all his family were drowned, with no one to care for him but the angels. She would have thought it must hold horrible memories for him, but when she glanced at him she saw that he looked happier than he had ever looked in Mayda. This was a homecoming for him. But not for her. This place made her uneasy.

  Smiling, Arlo steered the Jenny Haniver i
nto one of the abandoned pens, a shady cave-like space between two roofless warehouses so overgrown with weeds and small trees that they looked more like cliffs than buildings. A shiver ran through the cutter as her fenders grazed against the rotting concrete, the sail came rattling down, and for a moment Fever thought that they had run aground, but no, it was all deliberate, and there was Arlo springing forward to make fast to a rusty bollard on the pen wall.

  “Welcome, Fever Crumb,” he said, turning, and held out a hand to help Fever ashore. Sand had drifted thickly between the dead buildings. When Fever looked down at it she saw that it was partly composed of thousands upon thousands of tiny white shells. She imagined the great wave scooping them up off the sea floor as it rolled eastwards, depositing them here like payment for the lives and ships it washed away.

  Arlo pointed inland, up a cobbled hill. “The shipyard buildings are all in ruins, but the old watchtower was here before them, and it’s still sound, I think…”

  A metal ladder, orange and scaly with rust, stitched its way up the cliff face behind the abandoned harbour. Three-quarters of the way up a platform was bolted to the rock, like a landing. From there another ladder rose to the cliff top, where a squat tower perched, dark and unwelcoming, high above the beach. It was very old; a watchtower and artillery emplacement left over from some earlier era.

  “Are we going to stay there?” asked Fever.

  “Why not? It’s good shelter. We’re castaways; we can’t be choosy.”

  Fever’s unease settled on that word “castaways”. Sometimes in the plays at the Electric Lyceum people found themselves cast away on desert islands, and if there were two of them, and they were male and female, they might bicker for a scene or two, but they always ended up by falling in love. She hoped that Arlo Thursday would not get that sort of idea.

  The sea nearby stirred into ripples, hummocked, and split to disgorge the spiny steel carapace of the Aranha. It stalked out of the water up a flight of weedy steps and stood there dripping, trailing pennants of kelp and bladderwrack, ticking patiently to itself. It looked like a living gun. Had it swum here? Or had it walked, scuttling like a weird crab across all the miles of sandy seabed between this place and Mayda?

  She stood there in the sun and stared at it, torn between disgust at its strangeness and envy of her grandfather for knowing how to build such things.

  “Don’t be afraid of it,” said Arlo, misunderstanding the look she was giving it. “It’ll keep us safe. If Vishniak or Fat Jago finds us it’ll see them coming, and kill them. Come on now. Let’s unload.”

  18

  THE WATCHTOWER

  hey set up camp in the tower. It had one big room with lime-washed walls and arrow-slit windows and a doorway with no door that opened on to a narrow platform outside where the ladder came up through a hatchless trapdoor. There was a fireplace and some broad shelves that might have been bunks set into the walls, and some old tables and chairs covered with dust and angel-droppings. Another ladder went up through another trapdoor on to the broad, flat roof. Guns or scorpions had been mounted up there once, commanding the northern approaches to the island, but they were long gone, leaving only a few rusty metal mountings set in the stonework. There was a low parapet, crumbling in places, sprouting weeds with pink and yellow flowers that nodded and whispered thinly in the breeze.

  “This is where we’ll build the machine,” announced Arlo, peering over the edge.

  “In the open?” asked Fever.

  “Of course. If we put her together inside we’ll only have to take her apart again to get her up here. This is where we’ll be launching her from. It’s not as high as the cliffs that Edgar Saraband launched from at Thelona, but it’s high enough, I think.”

  “You think?” Fever was starting to hate her own scepticism. She knew that risks must sometimes be taken if progress is to be made. But when she went to stand with him at the parapet and looked down to the jagged rocks at the cliff’s foot, she could not imagine flying, only falling.

  “What if there’s more rain?” she said. “What if a storm blows in?”

  “The weather will hold,” Arlo said. “We only need a few days.”

  Fever hoped that he was right. “What can I do?”

  “The engine,” he said. “I know nothing about engines.”

  “Of course.” She remembered what Dr Teal had told her about Edgar Saraband’s accident. “I’ll strip it down and rebuild it; check every part…”

  Arlo looked sideways at her, squinting in the sunlight. “Fever, I thought I wanted to be alone out here. But I’m glad you’re here too.”

  “I don’t approve of mating rituals,” said Fever sternly.

  “What?”

  “Romance. Kissing. Holding hands and … that sort of thing. Just because we are on an island does not mean that… The Earth has a perfectly adequate population nowadays, so there is no need for people of reason to give in to the primitive urge to mate and reproduce. I just thought I would let you know.”

  Arlo Thursday stood and looked at her and she didn’t know if she had offended him or disappointed him or what. Her ears felt as if they were about to catch fire.

  “You needn’t worry,” he said, after a moment. “There’s someone else, you see. I’m in love with someone else.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “She’s called Thirza Blaizey,” said Arlo. “At least, she used to be. She’s Thirza Belkin, now…” He shrugged, looked away across the ruins for a moment and then, as if the conversation had never taken place, said, “We must start getting the machine ashore. I’ll need your help with the bigger pieces.”

  How had it begun, that friendship between Arlo and the Blaizeys’ eldest daughter? Even Arlo wasn’t really sure. She had always been there at the Blaizey place on Costa Norte, hanging about the yards and “and Blaizey’s…” slipways, or helping her mother in the house. He had scarcely noticed her at first. But slowly something about her had started to call to him, and make him think it might be time to shake off his solitary, birdish moods. It was the tallness and the grace of her, and that calm face that never let you know what she was thinking. She reminded him of the women in the paintings which the sea had stolen along with his grandfather’s gallery. A maiden in a story, waiting at a castle window for the man who’d rescue her.

  Thirza had no time for the jokes and boldness of Blaizey’s other ’prentices, but she seemed to be amused by Arlo’s conversations with the angels. Shyly, he taught her the special call that he used to draw his favourites down from the flocks that flew over the shipyards. He showed her how to hold out her arm so that Weasel could perch on her wrist, and explained the meanings of all his movements. He was delighted by how quickly she learned, and how well she spoke the angel language. Her long neck and slender hands were better suited to their dances than any part of Arlo was. Her white fingers were as delicate as angel feathers.

  It was not long before Augusto Blaizey started to find notes in his daughter’s room, scribbled on those dart-like, wing-like things that Arlo made. They seemed to have flown from the boy’s window into hers. That made him uneasy. So did the bird-shapes that Arlo had taken to making and launching from the cliff sides on his afternoons off. Stringless kites and paper angels which an unfortunate wind might carry right over the crater-crown and down into the city, leading to awkward questions at the Shipwrights’ Guild. (“That Thursday boy of yours still away with the angels, is he, Blaizey? Don’t he know the Mãe alone makes flying things?”)

  It would not do, the old shipwright decided. He would have to break this link of tenderness that he saw growing between Thirza and the lad. It pained him, for they were a pretty pair, and he held his daughter very dear and wanted nothing but her happiness. But, as he told her, these youthful loves meant nothing; they were only fevers of the heart and the hotness of them cooled to clinkers after a few years of marriage and a kid or two. Most people never knew that sort of love at all, and took no harm from the lack of it. Far better for Th
irza she accept the offer he’d had for her from Jago Belkin, a merchant who wasn’t exactly young or exactly handsome but had grown rich from his contacts with traders in Matapan and other ports around the Middle Sea. “Love fades,” he told her, “but money, if it’s tended right, increases and increases, and with enough of it you can buy happiness, no matter what the poets say. What do poets know about money?”

  Thirza bit her lip and thought hard, and a few months later she put on a blue silk gown and stood at the altar in the Temple of the Sea with half of Mayda watching while Fat Jago Belkin cast the ceremonial fishing-net over her and the High Priestess pronounced them Man and Wife.

  Soon after that Arlo Thursday left Blaizey’s and went back to live alone at Casas Elevado, being old enough by then to decide his own affairs. The city forgot him, except on the days when his strange, silent air-machines went sliding their shadows over the streets and rooftops. Then people would look up and shake their heads and remind each other of the rise and fall of the Thursdays.

  It surprised Fever to find how much more capable she was than Arlo. She’d seen the things he’d built and the way he’d steered the Jenny Haniver and she had assumed he’d bring the same easy skill to everything, but no; it turned out that boats and aëroplanes were the limit of his practicality. She watched in astonishment as he tugged the pieces of his flying machine out of the Jenny Haniver’s holds and cabins and started to carry them one by one up the ladder that led into the tower. It was she who had to show him how to rig up a simple hoist, taking ropes and tackle from the cutter and rigging them over the handrail at the ladder’s top.