The Cloud Hunters

by Alex Shearer

  I waited for somebody else to deny it. But they left me to answer for myself. So I nodded my head a little and said, ‘Sort of.’

  And he said, ‘Cool, man. Cool thing to be.’

  And so it was. I didn’t disagree.

  We said goodbye to the rescued prisoners. They shouted their thanks and waved their farewells as our boat sailed away into the main thermals and as we turned for home – well, my home. The Cloud Hunters already were at home; their boat was their home. So they were always at home, and never at home too; for they had neither land nor country; they were eternal wanderers of the sky, who were born and who lived and who died there. They were creatures of another element. Not like the rest of us, with our boring, steady feet on the solid, unshakeable ground. They were creatures of the air, like sky-fish, except they had no wings. Their boats were their wings, and the sails were their feathers and scales. They were born to soar, to be free.

  We returned by the Main Drift, only diverting from it once to pursue a cloud bank which appeared off to starboard. We headed for it, turned the compressors on and filled the tanks. Then, with a full hold, we set course to my home island.

  ‘How many days?’ I asked Kaneesh.

  ‘Two,’ he said. ‘Three, maybe.’

  Two days. Three at most. And it would all be over.

  My eyes searched the sky for sight of a sky-whale, or maybe a stinger, or a ship full of dangerous Barbaroons. But no. We sailed on safely and quietly. It seemed that we had run out of adventures.

  As we were nearing the last day, Jenine came to me and said, ‘Do you want to swim again?’

  I suppose it was a way of saying goodbye – a last pleasure, a last treat before the holiday was over.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be good.’

  They stopped the boat. We dived over and swam and floated in the air. I was getting good at this, I felt, and wasn’t afraid any more of falling any more, or of the great depths beneath me.

  As we swam, two sky-fins came along, and they seemed to want to play. They nudged us with their rubbery snouts and we grabbed onto the humped fins on their backs as they sped and cavorted through the sky, turning somersaults and cartwheels as we held on tight, laughing and shouting and happy, as if life were a joy that could never end.

  After a while the sky-fins stopped and seemed to want some reward. Carla threw them a handful of dried sky-fish from the boat; they gobbled it all up and swam contentedly on.

  Then we had to move on too.

  ‘Are you coming back to school, for the next term?’ I asked Jenine as my home island came into sight in the distance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It depends on my father. I think he wants to move on. He says this part of the sky is played out and overworked. He’s heard it’s better elsewhere.’

  But I thought to myself that nomads must always believe that – that things are better elsewhere. It gives them reason to be moving on; it justifies and legitimises their restless natures.

  ‘But you’ll stay for a while?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe.’

  37

  unexpected honours

  When we came back on board, there was a reception committee waiting: Kaneesh and Jenine’s mother and father were all standing there, looking solemn and ominous, and I wondered what was up.

  It was Mikhail who kicked things off.

  ‘Christien,’ he said. ‘My young friend. We have been talking between us and have agreed that we have much to thank you for. Without your help, who knows, I and three others might be now dangling from a string on the Isle of Quenant.’

  ‘I think you’d have managed without me,’ I said. (And not from any false modesty. I believed they would have.)

  ‘All the same,’ Mikhail continued. ‘You have our thanks. We are not material people, as you’ll have seen. We don’t have much by way of possessions or by way of wealth. The honours we confer are not expensive gifts. But we have our own ways of showing our gratitude.’

  I did wonder what they might be. But then something told me. I smelt the herbs, bubbling in the small pot on top of the brazier. I saw the ceremonial knife, warming up in the heat, its tip just starting to glow red. I saw the phial in Carla’s hand, like the one the mother of Alain, the young Cloud Hunter, had broken open, and the numbing contents of which she had poured into his drink, just before they had –

  And my heart sank. It sank all the way down to the sun.

  Jenine realised too. She stared at me. Not just into my eyes, but right down into my heart, to my very secret self. And she knew, just as I did, with, I’m sure, the same regret and sadness, what my answer would be to the question about to be asked.

  ‘We would,’ Mikhail continued, ‘like to accord you the greatest honour we can offer to you, my young friend, by way of our thanks. With your permission, if you are happy to accept them, we would like you to receive – the scars.’

  What could I say? What could I do? It wasn’t the fear; it wasn’t the thought of the pain; it wasn’t the permanent disfigurement; it wasn’t any of those things. Hadn’t I thought to myself how much I wanted those scars, on so many occasions? How I would look with them, what a cool, impressive person I would be.

  Jenine kept staring at me. She knew, as well as I did, that if I chose to have those scars, then I chose her too. I would be like them, with them, of them, forever. We could grow together, be together. All that she had held back, she would no longer keep from me. We would belong to each other. All I had to do was say the right words.

  And I couldn’t. I couldn’t say them. I wanted to. I did. So much. So much. But I too had a family, a home, a mother, a father, uncles, aunts. I couldn’t. If I returned home with those scars etched forever into my face –

  I couldn’t do it to them. I just couldn’t. Much as I – so much as I –

  I just couldn’t.

  I don’t really remember what I said. I know that it must have been the right kind of thing because no one was offended. I thanked them all for the huge honour that had been offered to me. I thanked them for their hospitality, for having allowed me to join them. I said, yes, all the right things. And I declined to have those scars put onto my face. I hoped they would understand my reasons, and they seemed to. And we drank some green tea. I was actually getting to like it.

  But Jenine went and stood alone by the deck rail. And she wouldn’t look at me. But then, when we set sail again, I went over to her and said,

  ‘Jenine – you do understand –?’

  She looked at me now.

  ‘I understand, Christien. You can’t be what you’re not. And neither can I. And for that reason –’

  ‘That doesn’t mean we can’t be – be friends.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. But we can never be more than that now, can we? My face is scarred. And yours is not. And that puts a world between us.’

  ‘It doesn’t. It needn’t. That’s not true. We can still –’

  ‘It does, Christien. You chose home. Your people. Your life. Just as I would choose mine. In fact, neither of us even has a choice. You can’t be a Cloud Hunter. And I can’t not be. And that’s how it is.’

  And I think that she was crying. But I couldn’t really tell you. I couldn’t really see so well. For my own eyes were a little blurred. I don’t recollect why.

  ‘You’ll all have to come and visit us,’ I said, as my home island came into sight. ‘Have a meal with us. All of you. With me and my parents. They’ll want to thank you all – for taking me and for bringing me back. And we can tell them everything that happened – well, maybe not all of it, we can miss out the more dangerous bits. But some of it. I mean, things like that don’t happen every day, do they?’

  ‘Don’t they?’ Jenine said to me.

  But maybe for her they did.

  The nearer we got to my island, the less I wanted to go home. I wanted to see my parents again, of course. But it’s still sad when things end – things that you do
n’t want to end. And I wanted this to go on forever: sailing the skies, finding clouds and selling water to all the distant, strange, parched and thirsty islands that make up this wonderful world in which we live.

  People who have not been here would no doubt say that a world like ours was a scientific impossibility, that it defied all the known laws of gravity and atmosphere, and could not possibly exist.

  But do you know something? It was the same in the old world too. It’s the same with every world. They’re all miracles. Given the facts and the chances at the outset, most people would say it’s not possible; such worlds, such people could never come about. Yet here the world is. Here we are, living in it. The chances against us being here are billions to one. But we breathe, we exist. We might not even understand it ourselves yet. We might never understand it. But here we are.

  The closer we got to my home, the less Jenine and I seemed to have to say to each other. It was as if the Cloud Hunters were travelling away from me and in their minds were already taking their leave. I was no longer a friend and a companion. I had become a landlubbing stranger again, one of ‘them’, one of the land-dwellers, with no understanding of their customs or their nomadic lives.

  And then we were tying up at the harbour. The few things I had brought with me were packed in my bag.

  ‘I’ll be back in the morning,’ I said to them. ‘To let you know what time to come to dinner tomorrow. Is that all right?’

  The others looked to Mikhail. He neither nodded nor shook his head, but just said, ‘Of course. And thank you again, my friend, for all you have done.’

  Jenine’s mother said goodbye, and I thanked her for having me on board. Her father shook my hand and grasped my shoulder and said that he was pleased to have met me and he thanked me for my help – though I protested that I had done little enough and had been more of a passenger and a burden than anything else.

  And then Kaneesh said goodbye.

  ‘So you’re leaving us, boy,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you’ll all be coming to visit tomorrow,’ I said. ‘My parents will want to meet you all and to thank you.’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take this.’

  I looked at his hand. One of his daggers was held in it. Its blade gleamed in the light and the jewelled hilt sparkled.

  ‘But I . . . it’s your knife.’

  ‘It’s yours now,’ he said. ‘So use it wisely. Don’t cut too many compression tubes with it, eh? Or too many throats.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You didn’t do badly, boy,’ Kaneesh said. ‘You didn’t do badly at all.’

  From him, high praise indeed.

  He put the hilt of the knife into my hand and clasped my own hand around it, then he turned his back and walked away.

  There was only Jenine to say goodbye to now.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘That’s for you too.’

  She took one of the thin gold bands from around her wrist and she put it around mine.

  And I knew right then that I would never now see her again. I knew that when I came back in the morning, they would be gone.

  ‘Jenine . . .’ I said. ‘I don’t have anything to give you –’

  But she just put a finger up to my lips.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she said.

  And, of course, she was right. So I leaned forward, and I kissed her, and I held her in my arms, held her tightly, and she held me too, and I said all the words I’d wanted to say to her for so long, from since I’d first set eyes on her.

  We must have stood there like that a long time, because I remember hearing someone clearing their throat and I glanced up and saw Kaneesh and Carla and Mikhail, all studiously looking at anything but the two of us, locked in each other’s arms.

  And then I had to go.

  I climbed up the walkway and onto the dockside. Carla passed me my bag. I said goodbye and I thanked them yet again, and then I started to walk. My house wasn’t far, no more than fifteen minutes’ walk away.

  I looked back many times and I waved to them again and again. Then I turned along the cliff path that led to my house and I could no longer see them. All I could see was the mast of the boat and the solar sails.

  In another few minutes, I was home.

  They were happy to see me. And I was glad to see them too.

  ‘But look at you,’ my mother said. ‘Look how tanned you are. How dark you’ve got. And your hair’s grown. And with that dagger in your belt and that bracelet around your arm, you know what you look like . . .’

  I knew just what I looked like.

  ‘He looks like some kind of disreputable Cloud Hunter,’ my father said with a chuckle.

  And it was just the right thing to say to me. He couldn’t have given me a better welcome home.

  I went to see them, early the following morning, to give them their invitation to come and eat with us. But it was too late, they were already gone, as I knew they would be.

  They must have set off first thing, to catch the solar tide. I walked home, my heart heavy, my footsteps dragging. Jenine and her family had gone.

  But I guess I had known that from the very beginning. I had known it all along. Cloud Hunters never stay anywhere for long; they must always be moving. It’s in their nature, in their blood. They are like the very clouds they follow, perpetually drifting and moving with the wind and tide. And if you want to go with them, you have to become one of them – completely, without compromise.

  I think they chase the clouds the way we chase our dreams. The next one is always the best – the one not yet fully formed, the next cloud, the next dream. That is what we all pursue, one way or another.

  When I got home my mother was getting ready to leave for work. She could see from my face that I had missed them, the disappointment was plain to read. She tried to be consoling and sympathetic, but she was a little bit victorious too, vindicated, as if all her warnings had been proved correct – that everything she had always said about Cloud Hunters had been right. They were fickle, strange, undependable, unpredictable, and always moving on.

  ‘See,’ she couldn’t help herself saying, ‘I told you it wouldn’t last. And now they’ve gone. Without so much as a goodbye. I mean, what in the end did you get out of it all? Buffeted and knocked halfway around the Main Drift, your father and me driven mad with worry, and all for what?’

  All for what?

  Well, I could have said many things. I could have told her that there was nothing I would have exchanged those weeks for. It made a memory for me, one to last forever. Yes, I could have said so many things, but she would never really have understood.

  ‘What did you get out of it all, you see?’ she said. ‘All that danger and discomfort and all the rest. What did you get out of it? What did you actually get?’

  She left to go to work.

  ‘What did you get?’

  What did I get?

  What did I get? I got a dagger and a bracelet and unforgettable memories.

  I raised my fingers and I touched my lips.

  ‘And a kiss,’ I whispered. ‘I got a kiss.’

  But I don’t think my mother heard me say that; she had already closed the door.

  You know, I think that there are scars on my face, of a kind. It wasn’t a knife that put them there. It was experience and time. You need special eyes to see them. But they’re there.

  38

  tomorrow

  Somewhere, in this vast and wonderful world of islands and sky, a small boat plies its trade, searching for clouds, hunting them down, condensing them, selling the water. There is a girl on board with jet-black hair and the most beautiful brown skin, and with two deep facial scars running from under her eyes down towards her mouth. You might think that such scars would make her look less pretty than she is, but they don’t. If anything they made her look even more beautiful and mysterious and . . .

  Oh well.

  On the boat sails, on into the sky. There’s a far cloud forming, you can see it,
some fifty kilometres away, cotton wool in a pale blue sky. The boat turns and heads for it. They’ll be with it in a couple of hours. If somebody else doesn’t get there first.

  Yes, on that boat is a girl with deep green eyes. I’ll probably never see her again. But I kissed her once, and she kissed me back. And I held her in my arms. You never forget a thing like that. Never. I think I was a little in love with her, but I couldn’t say for sure. No. That’s not true. I was in love with her. I still am. I always will be. I think she maybe loved me too.

  Her mother is singing as they sail; it’s a sad sort of song, but tender too, almost a kind of lament, a lullaby. It would send the shivers up your spine and bring tears to your dry, indifferent eyes.

  The boat glides on, on the solar wind, until at last it comes to the bank of cloud. It floats on into it, is enveloped by it, and gradually fades from view.

  Finally, it disappears.

  And you wouldn’t even know it was there at all.

  You wouldn’t know that it had ever existed.

  The Cloud Hunters have been swallowed by the clouds.

  One day, when I’m older, I’ll sail the world. I’ll go to all the places there are to go to and see everything there is to see. I’ll sail the known islands and I’ll go on travelling to find new ones. And new ones after that. And the worlds beyond, that no one has even discovered, and I’ll see things that no one has yet seen.

  And there will never be an end to it all, never an end to the journey.

  Never an end to the wide, wide world.

  Not even an end on the day I die.

  Only ever a new beginning.

  And who knows, but that before that, I may even find her again. If someone else hasn’t found her first. Maybe even now, she’s thinking about me, as the clouds gather around her, like halos in the sky. Remembering me, the way I remember her. And always will do. Yes. Always will.

  The inspiration behind

  The Cloud Hunters

  Often, answering the question as to where a story came from is a matter of being wise after the event. At the time you don’t necessarily have any idea, and even in retrospect it isn’t always clear.