The Cloud Hunters

by Alex Shearer

  Behind us they came, chasing fast. The rowers had taken to the galley oars and pawed the air with those wide, flat, fan-shaped paddles. They rowed in frantic unison, with all the energy and speed they could muster.

  But they couldn’t outrun us. We left them trailing. They fired a last harpoon, but it fell short. Soon we could barely hear their cursing, and then I realised that I couldn’t even smell them any more. Their boat was a dark, receding shape, a shadow among shadows. And so we left them to their angry disappointment and to their eternal darkness, to their brutal and violent, and probably short, lives. We left them to wait for the next unwary travellers, foolhardy enough to take a shortcut between the Islands of Night.

  Kaneesh turned the compressor off. He inspected the gauges.

  ‘Well?’ Carla said.

  ‘Empty,’ he said. ‘We need to find more clouds.’

  But even the loss of our water seemed a small price to pay for our sight and for our lives. You only have the one life, but there is always another cloud. Well, eventually there is, if you can wait for it. And sometimes that’s all you can do.

  Of course, I could afford to be philosophical; it hadn’t been my cargo and my livelihood. It wasn’t my loss. It was theirs. It was no particular concern of mine. At least not until I got thirsty.

  But it had been my life. And I was quite attached to it, and glad to have held on to it – at least for a while longer. Though for how much longer remained to be seen.

  29

  whaler

  Soon after we emerged from that long, dark corridor between the Islands of Night, we saw some vague shapes in the middle distance, moving in our direction.

  We squinted at them through eyes not yet fully reaccustomed to the light. But what we saw wasn’t the bank of clouds we’d hoped for. It was something else. It was a whaler.

  Jenine made it out first.

  ‘It’s a factory vessel. See the shape of the bows?’

  It was a massive sky-ship, powered by two immense wind sails and myriad sun cells, which sparkled like dew. It looked more like a battleship than a trader, for on its foredeck were mounted two colossal harpoon guns, solidly bolted down.

  But the surprise wasn’t the boat itself – it was what was tethered to the hull. Flanking its port and starboard sides were two dead whales, each with red, vivid wounds where they had been impaled by harpoons. The whaler had killed two sky-whales so far. And now it was after a third. Another was running ahead of it, as yet oblivious to its pursuer.

  ‘Butchers!’ It was Kaneesh who spoke, quite softly and quietly too, almost without malice. Just stating an indisputable fact.

  We watched with grim fascination as the whaler closed in on its quarry. The creature floated onwards, slow and gentle, innocent and oblivious, occasionally altering course with a flick of its tail – which was bigger than our boat. Its undersides were dark, its top half pale, almost pure white.

  ‘Why do they do it? There’s surely no need . . .’

  The Cloud Hunters seemed to have some affinity with the creature, and a reserve of pity and sympathy for it too. Maybe whales and Cloud Hunters had something in common: born free but prone to persecution. The free are often envied, even hated, for their freedom. Some people would hunt a sky-whale or kill a sky-shark for no other reason than to say that they had done it, that they had faced one in some big game hunt, as if this were something courageous, when the things didn’t have a chance. If sky-whales came equipped with their own guns and harpoons, nobody would bother them then. They wouldn’t dare.

  ‘Why do they do it?’ I asked again. ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Oil, meat, fat, fuel. There are plenty of substitutes. But it’s a tradition with them. The whaling islands never got civilised,’ Kaneesh said.

  Which I also thought was pretty good, coming from him.

  ‘No. They just got rich and fat. They came from the dark ages and they stayed there,’ Carla said.

  And yet . . .

  I remembered something. The perfume that Carla wore. My mother had told me that it was musk, extracted from the glands of a whale. But perhaps she had been wrong. Maybe I’d ask Jenine about it. Another time, though. Not now.

  The whaling ship ignored us. We were a minnow compared to it. It sailed on in sombre majesty, steadily following the third sky-whale, which was still heedless of its pursuit

  There was movement on the forecastle of the whaler. Two men went forward and took the covers off the harpoon guns; those guns looked like small missile launchers. The sailors loaded harpoons into the barrels and checked the linkage ropes, so that even if they missed, or if the whale managed to pull free, the harpoons would not be lost, but could be reeled back in for another shot.

  ‘What can we do?’ I asked Jenine. ‘How can we stop them?’

  ‘We can’t,’ she said. Then she seemed to think of something. ‘Or maybe –’ She disappeared to the wheelhouse.

  She was gone no more than a minute. The marksmen on the sky-whaler were behind their guns taking aim, waiting for the command to fire.

  ‘What’s that you have?’ I asked as Jenine returned.

  She held a canister, the size of a small fire extinguisher. It had a red nozzle coming out of it in the shape of a horn. She had yellow foam earplugs in her ears.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked again. She hadn’t heard me.

  ‘Put your fingers in your ears,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want to deafen you!’

  I saw that Kaneesh and Carla had already done so. So, without further question, I did the same. Well, it may have muffled things, but it didn’t blot them out.

  First I heard the amplified command come from the sky-whaler’s PA.

  ‘Get ready, take aim . . .’

  Next thing, my eardrums almost erupted.

  The canister Jenine held was a compressed air siren. She set it off and it screamed out a high-decibel shriek of distress. Not content with doing it once, she did it again. And again.

  At the first burst of noise the sky-whale slowed and looked curiously around. At the second, it panicked. The third time, it simply put its head down, expelled all the air in its lungs to lose buoyancy, and dived.

  To be more accurate, it plummeted. Within seconds it was a fish-sized figure far below us. Then we saw it level off and resume its placid grazing.

  A torrent of amplified abuse came at us from the sky-whaler. But, as Jenine said, what could they do? She hadn’t done anything criminal. Just tested out our emergency siren. And fortunately, it was in good working order.

  All the same, to be on the safe side, Kaneesh uncovered the solar panels and in seconds we were streaking away from the whaler and were soon out of range of its harpoons – just in case they had any ideas.

  ‘They already had two sky-whales,’ Jenine said. ‘That was bad enough. How many can someone eat?’

  She went to put the canister back in the wheelhouse.

  Her mother had taken the helm and Kaneesh was at his usual place on deck, staring out at the blank, blue sky, with that inscrutable, impenetrable expression on his face. You could have hung a sign on him, saying, Do Not Disturb. He was at his favourite pastime: looking for clouds. And he never once seemed to get bored with it.

  It took us a full day to find fresh clouds and compress them into water. By then we were half a day’s journey off course. Kaneesh had ‘smelled’ water after a few hours, but it had taken time to find it, and for the ‘smell’ to turn into substance.

  Whether he really had ‘smelled’ water, or whether he had just taken a guess and got lucky, I didn’t know. I certainly wasn’t going to ask him or cast doubt on his abilities.

  The cloud bank we found was dense and cold. As soon as we entered it, Jenine and I turned on the compressors and slowly the tanks refilled. There was nothing to do then except to wait. I joined Jenine at the stern of the ship.

  ‘So what do we do?’ I said.

  ‘What do we do when?’


  ‘Well, now?’ I said. ‘Once the tanks are full.’

  ‘We go and sell the water,’ she said. ‘To the Dissenters.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then we go to the Forbidden Isles and find my father. And free him.’

  ‘And how exactly do we do that?’ I said. ‘Rescue your father? Have you considered that might not be so easy?’

  ‘We don’t expect it to be easy. We don’t expect anything to be easy.’

  She walked off to check on the tank pressure. I followed her.

  ‘Jenine, you’re not facing up to it. I mean, how, precisely, do we dock on the Forbidden Isle of Quenant,’ I persisted. ‘Without being seen? And go on land without being noticed? Then walk around, complete strangers and foreigners, and no one remarking on it? Then track down your father, simply let him out of jail, and get away without anybody doing anything about it? Do you even know where he’s held?’

  She gave me one of her cold, indifferent stares, as if to tell me again that I was an outsider and always would be and was only there under sufferance.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You won’t have to do anything dangerous. We’re not expecting that. Just wait in the boat and make sure no one boards it, and have it ready for our escape when we return.’

  ‘And how do I do that? On an island full of religious crackpots? Who have nooses dangling from every crack and crevice? And whose means of dealing with people they don’t like is to hang them?’

  ‘You only have to dock to let us onto the land. Then you can hover offshore.’

  ‘What if they see me?’

  ‘What if they do?’

  ‘Won’t they come after me?’

  ‘Why should they? You won’t have done anything. If they do bother you, you can drift off into international air space. You have to set foot on their land before they’ll actually do anything.’

  ‘Won’t they chase after us when you come back with your father?’ (I really meant ‘if you ever come back’, but didn’t feel it would help to say so.)

  ‘They might do, yes. They probably will.’

  ‘So what then?’

  ‘We outrun them.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  ‘We fight them.’

  ‘And if we lose? We get hanged, I suppose.’

  Jenine smiled. Her scars always helped to make her smiles sardonic.

  ‘You know, Christien,’ she said. ‘You’re always looking for what might go wrong. You worry too much.’

  ‘Best to be prepared,’ I said.

  ‘Oh – boy scout!’ she said.

  ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst, take what comes,’ I said, quoting one of my father’s dictums. ‘Seems like a pretty sensible way of looking at things to me.’

  ‘OK. So we’ll take what comes, then.’ She tapped the water gauge. ‘Tanks are full,’ she said. ‘We can turn the compressors off.’

  She was right. They were full to the brim. Water was spilling out of the overflow valves. The ship felt heavier again, more stable, full of ballast.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘We can sail now. The Isles of Dissent it is. Or do you want dropping off?’

  ‘No. The Isles of Dissent it is, I guess,’ I said. ‘After all, you only live once.’

  ‘You’re right about that,’ she said.

  So we agreed on something.

  Kaneesh and Carla were already busy with the solar panels.

  ‘And I’ll tell you what else,’ Jenine said. ‘I’m starving. Once we’re underway, I’m going to cook some dinner.’

  Kaneesh powered up the reserve engines to take us out of the cloud.

  ‘What are you thinking of cooking?’ I called to Jenine.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said. ‘I’ll give you two guesses.’

  And right enough, it was what I thought.

  30

  witness

  I had heard plenty about the weird ways of the inhabitants of the Isles of Dissent. And like most people who have heard plenty and seen nothing for themselves, I was no doubt filled with much groundless prejudice.

  Dissenters had a reputation for doing as little as they could and for taking as long as possible to do it. They were, in short, generally believed to be a bunch of long-haired, layabout anarchists who only believed in having a good time. They disliked all authority and took it as a truism that the majority is always wrong and the minority is always discriminated against.

  But as we neared the Isles of Dissent, instead of the expected chaos and dilapidation, I saw only rows of tidy and well-looked-after houses and there was every sign of activity. Nets were neatly stacked and folded on the dockside. Sky-trawlers were being painted and their decks scrubbed clean. It looked like any other island: busy, orderly and alive with activity.

  It occurred to me then that really there is very little difference in the way that people live, at least compared to the vast gulfs of difference between what people believe in. But what did all these differences of belief amount to in the end? A few habits and rituals? A few dietary restrictions? And if that was really all it was, why did people bother to fight about it? Yet they did. Constantly and unremittingly. People will kill each other over nothing more than a difference of opinion – and feel every justification for doing it. It seems the hardest thing in the world is to put up with beliefs, views and opinions that don’t coincide with your own.

  ‘Ahoy! Cloud Hunters!’

  The sky ahead was empty. Then I turned around, surprised to see another boat, gaining up on us.

  Sky-boats can move as silently as the dust when on solar power alone. Even a shoal of sky-fish makes more disturbance. This ship had crept up on us, unheard and unseen. Had it been manned by a pack of Barbaroons, we’d already have had our throats cut.

  Fortunately the ship carried friendlier faces. And one look at those faces told me all I needed to know: they were Cloud Hunters too: tall and dark, muscular and slender. There were tattoos on their bodies, and the usual assortment of amulets and bracelets around their necks, wrists and arms.

  ‘Kaneesh!’

  The man who greeted him looked nearly as disreputable as he did: white teeth, knife, tattoos, scars, and notches carved into the boat mast.

  ‘Eldar! How goes it?’

  There were five people on board: a man, a woman, a baby, a young girl, and an older boy, about my age. I didn’t like the look of him much, and I don’t think he liked the look of me. I didn’t altogether care for the way he was smiling at Jenine. Not that she seemed particularly interested. But having no real grounds for jealousy never stopped anyone. If anything, the flimsier the grounds, the greener the monster.

  There was something different about him. I soon realised what. Unlike Jenine and the adults, his face was unmarked. But it wasn’t to stay that way much longer. And that, we discovered, was the reason the boat had been speeding to catch us.

  Cloud Hunters don’t ordinarily waste time socialising when they have work to do. It’s a different matter during the slack season or when idling in port. Then they might take things easy, and get together to swap stories and news.

  But sometimes, even when work is at its busiest, custom and ritual demand attention. Work or no work, tradition must take brief precedence.

  The fenders of the other boat clattered against ours as it pulled over. The boats were secured, then there was a brief discussion over who should join whom; it being the more coveted role to play the host rather than the guest.

  However, when Eldar announced that he had pulled alongside because there was to be a ‘Witnessing’ (and I give it a capital letter because that was how he spoke of it – in capital letters and portentous tones) then Carla and Kaneesh agreed that we should go on board their vessel, which we did.

  The newcomers greeted me with a polite but cool reserve. Jenine explained who I was and how they had let me come along on this voyage. Eldar and his wife brewed up green tea and poured it into small bowls which they offered round. I tasted it, but it was disgu
sting, and I looked for an opportunity to pour it over the side.

  They all made conversation for a while, discussing the weather, trade, the price of water and where the best clouds were to be found these days. They talked of people they knew, of births and marriages, illnesses and deaths. But there was no mention of the Forbidden Islanders, nor Jenine’s father’s imprisonment, nor talk of revenge killings. That was private, family business.

  Finally they got around to the matter in hand.

  ‘So your son is growing up now?’ Kaneesh said.

  ‘Of age from three days ago,’ Eldar told him. ‘You’re the first hunters we’ve seen, able to witness – if you will.’

  ‘Of course,’ Kaneesh nodded. ‘Our honour.’

  I didn’t yet know what was going on, but it didn’t take much to surmise. And my assumptions soon grew to certainties when I saw the increasingly apprehensive look on the face of Eldar’s son. He looked like someone about to have a tooth extracted and who was trying to give the impression that he was quite indifferent to the prospect. Only he was not entirely succeeding.

  The son’s name was Alain. Jenine was talking to him. They stood together by the wheel. She appeared to be explaining something to him and her hand indicated her face. Her fingers traced out her scars.

  His mother took a bowl of the green tea over to him. I noticed that before she did so, she broke open a phial containing a clear, colourless liquid, which she poured into the cup – some kind of anaesthetic or painkiller, I presumed, to numb his nerve endings for a while.

  There was a little more conversation, but it seemed to be for a calculated duration, as if to give the drug time to take effect. Then the talking was over. Eldar went to the centre of the boat and announced, somewhat theatrically:

  ‘Friends: the Witnessing . . .’

  He paused, as if for dramatic effect, like an actor on a stage.

  ‘They’ll think it’s a great honour for you to see this,’ Jenine whispered to me. But I wasn’t altogether sure that ‘honour’ was the word I would have chosen.

  ‘Alain . . .’

  Eldar beckoned to his son, who joined his father at the mast.