by Philip Reeve
They were needed, for on the rubble-paved roads which ran between the camps huge wagons and motorized drays were moving, and at one point the barge passed a line of laden mammoths, which distracted even Fever from staring at the new city for a moment. She had often heard of Mammuthus novii; the mighty Hairyphants of northern legend. Ancient texts spoke of mammoths as extinct, but there were whole herds of them in the north-country, so either the Ancients had been wrong, or they had found some way to make the creatures un-extinct again, or the mammoths of modern times were a mutation; a tribe of normal elephants in whom some old genetic switch had been tripped by the traumas of the Downsizing, causing them to grow once more those coats of shaggy auburn wool.
“Traders from the nomad lands, come south with tech or copper,” her mother said, as Fever watched the animals go by. “London is like a newborn star; it draws in matter from all around. . .”
The barge went lumbering on up Ludgate Hill until it reached the summit, where the old mothballed fortress called the Barbican had once stood. A ramshackle, temporary-looking building made from wood and plastic sheeting sprawled in its place, thrusting out odd wings and annexes in all directions.
“What has happened to the Barbican?” asked Fever.
“Gone,” said her mother cheerfully. “It forms part of the new city’s Base Tier now.”
“So is that big shed the Lord Mayor’s palace?”
“Oh no. Quercus lives aboard the new London. That big shed is the new Engineerium.”
“And is that where you and Dr Crumb live?”
“Good gods, no! Really, Fever, there would hardly be any point in my being Chief Engineer if I had to live in a shed, would there? I have requisitioned quarters for us nearby. . .”
The land-barge turned left on to the street called Bishopsgate and stopped there outside a tall, thin mansion which had once belonged to one of London’s richest merchants. A Stalker on duty outside its red front door came smartly to attention as the barge ran out its gangplank and the Chief Engineer and her family disembarked. Servants came out with umbrellas to usher them inside and fetch their trunks and baggage from the barge. Fever found herself in a hexagonal hallway paved with Ancient eye-pods. Carpeted stairs ascended into the rain-coloured light from high windows.
“Welcome, Fever!” said her mother. “Welcome to your new home!”
*
Unlike London, Fever had hardly changed at all. She was a little tanned by the southern sun, but that was already fading. She had grown her honey-coloured hair, but it was pulled back into a bun as hard as a fist at the nape of her neck, so it did nothing to soften that bony, alien beauty. Her eyes, one brown and one grey, had seen foreign lands; her mouth had been kissed; her heart had been broken; but none of those things showed. Apart from the hair, the girl who stared out at her from the antique mirror in her new room was the same girl who had left London two years before. She was back where she had started, and not at all sure that she had the energy to start again.
Outside her window, despite the rain and fading light, the salvage gangs kept working. She studied the gaps between the buildings, half hoping to snatch another glimpse of the mammoths she had seen on the road, but they must be long gone by now; on their way home to their chilly northern hills. She watched a row of townhouses in Clerkenwell collapse into smudges of dust. From the new city came the sound of hammers, and from the door of her bedroom a sudden knocking. Too dazed to say, “Come in,” she turned as the door was booted open. A boy in the white coat of an apprentice Engineer entered, carrying a pile of towels.
“Sorry,” he said, seeing her there. “I thought you was downstairs, I never meant. . .”
His voice trailed away. He stared at her over the towels, and she remembered him staring at her once before, in a fogbound garden, a gun between them and him holding it. She did not know his name. He was the Skinner’s boy. The last time they met, he had killed her.
“Go away!” she said loudly. She was not afraid of him exactly, but she was startled by how much he startled her. The boy took a step back, still holding the towels. There were footsteps on the stairs and Dr Crumb appeared in the doorway behind him, nervous as a bird.
“Oh, Fever, I should have warned you. This is Charley Shallow, my apprentice. I know, I, erm, well, that you two have met. . .”
“I was just bringing her some towels, like you asked,” said Charley, turning to Dr Crumb as if he’d been accused of something.
“Yes, Charley, quite. Thank you. I thought Fever was still downstairs with her mother. I’ll take those. . .”
Fever felt her ears turn red. She had been irrational. A glance at Charley Shallow should have told her that he had changed almost as much as London since she last saw him. He looked less like a boy, more like a young man. His hair was cropped as short as Dr Crumb’s. He had probably been trained in the ways of calmness and rational thought by the Guild of Engineers. “I was taken by surprise. . .” she said, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal.
“My fault,” Dr Crumb said, manoeuvring Charley awkwardly out of the room. “I should have said something, I am sure I meant to, but. . .”
But how did you tell someone that the lad you’d taken on as your apprentice was the same one who had chased her through the Brick Marsh and shot her with a magnetic pistol? He bustled Charley down to the next landing and said again, “My fault, Charley, mine entirely. Even so, it might be best if we found you some duties in the Engineerium. Fever has had a troubling time, and I don’t wish to upset her. . .”
“You mean I have to move out?” asked Charley, looking as if he had just been slapped.
For a horrid moment Dr Crumb thought that the boy was going to burst into tears. He was an Engineer. He was not used to dealing with emotions. It had not occurred to him that Fever might be unhappy if she knew that Charley was living in the same house. It did not occur to him now that Charley might feel hard done by at being thrown out and made to go and share a draughty dormitory in the Engineerium with a half-dozen other apprentices. “Yes,” he decided. “That would be best, I think. Gather your stuff, Charley; Fever can take over your duties here as soon as she has settled in.”
And so, on the day that Fever came to her new home, Charley Shallow was cast out of it. Carrying his small trunk of belongings, he set off through the lashing grey rain, while the Stalker that guarded Wavey Godshawk’s door watched him go with its unthinking, lamp-like eyes.
2
ENGINEERIUM
rom apprentice Skinner to apprentice Engineer was a strange leap to make, but Charley had managed it. It had been kind of Dr Crumb, he realized, to take him on as his apprentice, back in the first days of Quercus’s lord mayorship, when it would have been just as easy to abandon him, or have him hanged for trying to do away with Fever. So he had worked hard at his lessons (he had not been able to read or write before that summer) and done everything that Dr Crumb told him. Nobody had ever bothered trying to educate him before, but he was a bright lad and he quickly made up the lost time, learning all the things an apprentice Engineer was meant to know.
He’d never got the hang of Wavey Godshawk, though. She was a Scriven and he was a Skinner’s boy, so it had never been likely that they’d hit it off, but at least in those first few months after the nomad takeover he had not seen much of her. Injured by a rogue Stalker, she had stayed aboard Quercus’s traction fortress, where Dr Crumb visited her, sometimes shamefacedly clutching a handful of flowers. When she finally emerged and announced that she was going to marry Dr Crumb, Charley felt sure that he was doomed. She must know that Charley had been an apprentice Skinner, and she would not have forgotten the way the Skinners of old had butchered her people. The very best that Charley could hope for was that she would forbid Dr Crumb to keep him on. It was more likely that he’d just vanish, like other enemies of the new regime, and be found in the Brick Marsh months later with a pistol ball rattling around inside his skull like a ball bearing in a puzzle.
But
Wavey Godshawk seemed untroubled by his presence. Sometimes she was kind to him in a distant way, sometimes she just ordered him about. When she and Dr Crumb first moved into the house on Bishopsgate she still could not walk, but lay all day upon a sofa, calling for Charley to bring her books or cake or glasses of wine. At first Charley thought that it must give her pleasure to have such power over a former Skinner, and because of her beauty and her flashes of kindness he felt almost inclined to forgive her for her Scriven-ness and arrogance. But soon he came to understand that he was just so unimpressive that he meant nothing to her at all. And that, of course, was unforgivable.
So he hated her, and she fascinated him. He had never met anybody who was so certain of herself. It was there in the way she spoke, the way she moved, the haughty tilt of her chin. She never doubted for an instant that she was the most beautiful woman in London and that it was her absolute right to impose her wishes on all those around her, and because she believed it, Charley found himself believing it too.
Trudging away from her house through the swaying curtains of the rain, he realized that he was going to miss her. Why had Fever had to come home? That spindly, odd-eyed girl had ruined everything for him. He clenched his fists, ashamed and angry, remembering how she’d once saved his life, and how he’d tried to put an end to hers.
There was a sign pinned up next to the doors of the new Engineerium that read No Gods Allowed; some apprentice’s notion of a joke. Someone else had defaced the wall with a big circle of red paint, a blue stripe slashed across its centre. Charley ignored both, knocked, and showed the note that Dr Crumb had given him to the bored apprentice on duty in the lobby. Rain rattled on the plastic roof. The building had been put up by Engineers, so it was weathertight and sturdy, but it had not been built to last; it was just a stopgap, to house the Guild till they could move into smart new quarters on the base tier of the new city. It had a dank, shabby, temporary feel, like a fairground tent left up too long. The dormitory, which was not much bigger than the room Charley had had all to himself in Wavey’s house, contained seven iron beds and a smell of armpits. He started unpacking his stuff, telling himself that an Engineer did not care about physical comfort. The rusty bed-springs gave a dispirited squoink as he threw himself down on them to think. All the beds at Wavey’s place had been perfect; imported from a master-bedmaker in Hamsterdam. Everything there had been expensive, even the hinges on the doors and the catches on the cabinets; they hadn’t been made of gold or anything, you could just tell they were pricey because they worked so perfectly.
He was still thinking about that when his new dormmates came in. They gathered round his bed and stood staring down at him as if he was something nasty which they were viewing through a microscope.
“What’s that?” asked one.
“That’s Crumb’s apprentice, the old Skinner’s boy. Didn’t you hear? Crumb’s thrown him out.”
“What for? Did he try to skin Wavey?”
“No, you nit. Crumb’s girl’s come home. She’ll be his apprentice now.”
“What’s she like? Pretty?”
“Pretty ugly. Half Scriven.”
“Well, Crumb’s cast-off can’t stay here. He’s just a commoner! He’ll lower the tone.”
The Guild of Engineers had altered more than just its name since Charley joined it. Back when it was merely the Order of Engineers it had been a bit of a joke; a gaggle of monkish baldies living in an old head. The men who became Engineers in those days had been the poor-but-brainy ones, like Gideon Crumb. Now, with the new London rising and making ready to move, the wealthy families on Ludgate Hill were starting to realize that in future they would be living aboard a huge machine, and that the people who would grow rich and powerful there would be the ones who knew how to run it. Boys who would once have gone into their fathers’ businesses and become merchants or priests were now being apprenticed to the Guild instead. They did not much like finding a commoner in their quarters.
“We should turf him out,” said the oldest of them, a tall boy of about Charley’s age whose name was Ronnie Coldharbour. “He reeks like an old wet dog. I bet he’s lousy, too. I say we make him sleep in the corridor.”
Charley kept his eyes shut, pretending that he wasn’t listening. He had a nasty idea that this was what his future was going to be like. After all, this was what his past had mostly been like. Growing up in Ted Swiney’s pub on Ditch Street he had spent his days being ignored, jeered at and occasionally hit. He had barely understood that life could hold anything different until Bagman Creech came and took him away. Bagman had been good to him. Bagman would not have cast him off just because some long-lost daughter came home and didn’t like him.
Remembering the old Skinner, he felt his eyes fill with tears. He knew he must not cry; not in front of these preening, sniggering boys. Bagman would have told him not to. Bagman would have said, “You may be low-born, Charley boy, but you’re worth ten of these cloots.” Bagman had been low-born himself, but he’d walked tall in the eyes of all London. Nobody would have dared to jeer at Bagman and say that he smelled (even though he did).
Charley opened his eyelids just a crack, not enough to let the tears out, but enough to show him the faces of his enemies. Ronnie Coldharbour reached down and prodded him. In a moment, the name-calling would turn to blows.
What would Bagman have done? he wondered. How would he have turned this round?
Coldharbour jabbed him again, harder. “Hey, Skinner’s boy. I’m talking to you.”
Charley came off the bed like a lit firecracker. Before the ring of boys could do more than gasp he was on his feet, and the iron jug from the washstand was in his hand. He brought it down hard on Coldharbour’s long nose, once, twice, three times, then he flung it at the nearest of the other boys in case they were thinking of coming to Coldharbour’s rescue. Coldharbour whinnied, both hands to his face, blood between his fingers. Charley wrenched him round, and reached inside his own coat. In an inner pocket, next to his Engineer’s slide rule, he kept his one souvenir of his time as Bagman’s ’prentice.
It was a Skinner’s knife. The long, curved, mammoth-ivory handle made it look like a gigantic penknife. Along one side in crude brown letters Bagman had carved This Ain’t Genocide! Along the other, completing the old Skinner war cry, were the words This is Rock ’n’ Roll! The letters felt rough under Charley’s fingers as he flipped the knife open. All the light in the room seemed to gather in that blade.
“You’re right, Coldharbour,” he said, and his voice slid from the careful, high-London accent he’d learned from Dr Crumb back into the guttural mockney growl of Ditch Street. “I am a Skinner’s boy. That makes me better than you an’ all yer mates, no matter ’ow smart you fink you are, nor ’ow much money yer dad made selling scents and old-tech to the Dapplejacks. So there’s not gonna be no more o’ your lip. Understand?”
He pressed the blade against Coldharbour’s throat until Coldharbour screamed in a high, girlish voice that he did. Then Charley gave him one hard kick for luck and casually put the knife away. The other boys watched him from the corners of the room. The door opened and an old Engineer called Griffin Whyre peered in to ask what all the noise was.
“Coldharbour tripped, Dr Whyre,” said Charley. He looked at the others to see if any of them wanted to disagree. If they told Whyre what had happened he knew he would be out of the Guild by nightfall, back to begging for scraps in the ruins of Ditch Street. But none of the boys said anything. Two came to help Coldharbour to his feet and lead him off to the infirmary. The rest just watched Charley. He thought how proud Bagman Creech would have been of him, of the way he’d grown up. He didn’t reckon those others would give him any more trouble now. They could all see what kind of person Charley Shallow was.
3
THE FUTURE SIGHTS OF LONDON
avey had talked all the way from Mayda about how much she was looking forward to giving Fever a guided tour of the new city, but now that she was home she was far too busy
seeing friends and attending parties, so it was Dr Crumb who first showed Fever around the strange thing that London was becoming.
She had seen it before. At least, she had glimpsed what it was meant to be. Auric Godshawk’s vision of a mobile city was one of the memories that had seeped into her mind from the machine he’d implanted in her brain when she was little. In his imagination it had been a towering, gleaming thing; a proud tower of buildings on a wheeled base. In reality, the new city was much, much broader than it was high, and its upper levels were still mostly girders and emptiness, like a diagram drawn on the sky. Beneath the skirts of the Base Tier Fever could see the big, tracked wheels, rank upon rank of them, with gangs of men creeping over them like ants. Could wheels that big possibly turn? she wondered. Could there be power enough in the world to drive them? Would even tracks that broad spread the new city’s weight enough to stop it sinking axle-deep into the earth as soon as it rolled off the plinth of compressed rubble where it was being built?
Dr Crumb seemed untroubled by such questions as he led Fever up one of the temporary wooden stairways into the city’s Base Tier. They emerged in the Engine District, which looked at first a little like an ordinary district in an ordinary city, except that those weren’t buildings which rose on each side of the streets but the housings for gigantic Godshawk engines, and that was not a lowering, pigeon-haunted sky that stretched above them but the steel and timber underbelly of the tier above.
The scale was dizzying, but Fever tried not to let it impress her as she followed her father along planked pavements, past ducts and furnaces, through forests of pistons and fog-banks of drifting smoke. However wonderful it was that such things had been built, it counted for nothing if they were not rational.
