by Philip Reeve
So the militias trained each morning at the edge of town, target-shooting with their new Bugharin rifles. Wavey took Fever to watch them one chilly morning. They sat in her sedan chair at the edge of Hamster’s Heath and watched the lines of men marching and wheeling on the snowy commons as if it were all a display which Wavey had laid on for her daughter’s entertainment. After the things she must have seen, Fever wondered how her mother could be so light-hearted about the prospect of another war. But when she mentioned it Wavey just laughed and said, “Your grandfather used to say that there is no end to war among the nomad empires. He always said, ‘The best you can hope for is a gap between one war and the next.’”
Wavey was trying to befriend her daughter. She had been in exile when Fever was growing up, and although it had not exactly been her fault, she still felt guilty that she had missed her child’s childhood. She meant to make up for it now, but she had no idea how to be a mother, so she tried to treat Fever like the best friend she wished she had had when she was Fever’s age (instead of all the catty, treacherous Scriven princesses who had been her actual friends). She confided in Fever about her new-found happiness with Dr Crumb. “I know he seems boring, but after the life I’ve led a little boredom is quite a change. And have you noticed how, when we snuggle, he is just the right height for me to rest my chin upon his head? I think there is a lot to be said for a husband who can be used as a chin-rest.”
Fever just winced with embarrassment.
Wavey gave her presents; whole trunks of dresses ordered from her own dressmaker and from dressmakers in Paris and Hamsterdam too, so that Fever would cut a dash at the Winter Festival parties. Even Wavey had to admit that she was herself a little old to wear some of the latest fashions, but it pleased her to imagine Fever dressed in them; she knew just the colours that would bring out her daughter’s striking looks.
But Fever would not go to parties, and she never opened her overstuffed wardrobes. Instead, each morning, she dressed in a grey shirt, black trousers, twenty-eyelet boots and a plain white Engineer’s coat. She agreed to an appointment with Wavey’s expensive hairdresser, but only let him trim her hair, then tied it back again in that hard, unflattering bun.
So Wavey tried to interest her in the mysteries of her own past; the curious operation which Godshawk had performed on her when she was just a sickly baby. The technomancers whom Quercus had recruited from the north had brought an Electric Microscope with them. In its chamber at the Engineerium, while burly apprentices worked the treadmill which powered it, mother and daughter sat side by side and peered at a drop of Fever’s blood, magnified many hundreds of times. For the first time Fever glimpsed the tiny machines which twitched and fidgeted there.
“Mechanimalculae,” murmured Wavey, entranced, leaning forward for a closer look. “I guessed as much. Stalkers have them, but I didn’t think Godshawk had ever found a way to keep them working in a living person. . . No wonder that gash on your face healed so beautifully when we were coming home from Mayda. All these busy little things inside you, mending damage, protecting you from germs. I don’t suppose you’ve had so much as a cold in your whole life, have you?”
“I don’t remember,” said Fever, remembering times when everyone aboard the Lyceum had been sneezing and coughing and only she had escaped the infection. At Godshawk’s Head, too, in the flu season, she’d sometimes had to nurse Dr Crumb and the other Engineers, and never caught their illnesses herself.
On the screen the mechanimalculae frisked and jiggled, each no bigger than a corpuscle. “How are they powered?” she asked.
“Molecular Clockwork,” said Wavey airily, as if she knew what that meant. “It doesn’t matter, Fever. Don’t trouble over details.”
But the things were in her daughter’s blood, not hers. Fever could not help but be troubled.
Down amid the gloom and snow the old year ended and a new one began. The weather did not get better, but it stopped getting worse. In springtime when the roads were open again the convoys bringing fuel and timber from the north brought good news too, from Quercus’s old comrade Rufus Raven, who commanded the army there. The war was won: the Great Carn of Arkhangelsk had made peace, and his forces had withdrawn into their old hunting grounds further north. The clap of victory fireworks was added to the din of the construction work, and portraits of Raven appeared in shop windows and on huge banners which hung from the girders of the half-finished city, honouring his triumph.
By early summer Wavey had a triumph of her own to celebrate. She had persuaded Fever to attend Quercus’s victory ball, which was to be held aboard the new city, in the echoing, metal cavern called the Great Under Tier. Realizing that it would be futile to suggest a gown, she dressed her daughter in a new white coat, longer and better tailored than her others, with mother-of-pearl buttons. In the light of paper lanterns suspended from the vaulting roof all the fashionable people of London danced and chattered, bright as birds. Musicians played on one of the bridges that spanned the enormous space, while drinks and dainties were served in the landship hangars, which opened off it on each side. Wavey took time out from the waltzes and hip-hops to point out eligible men among the crowds. “That dashing young officer is Bjorn Somersby, Fever. I do believe that he admires you! And look, there is good Captain Andringa, one of Quercus’s most promising young men. . .”
Fever looked at the couples on the dancefloor, the way they held each other. She did not like being touched. The only person she wanted to hold her like that was Arlo Thursday, and she would never see him again.
Wavey seemed to sense what she was thinking. Afterwards, when they were heading home up Cripplegate in their big, Stalker-drawn rickshaw, she said, “Fever, we really must find you a new boyfriend. I was never short of boyfriends at your age. Can it be that you are still moping about that boy in Mayda? That wretched Thursday boy?”
Fever just rubbed a gloved finger over the steamed-up window. She thought of Arlo’s little ship, alone on the face of the ocean, sailing into the west. She had lied to save him from Wavey’s agent Dr Teal, who would have killed him to suppress the secret of his flying machine. She had lied, and Arlo had thought that she’d betrayed him. He had sailed away alone. She had stood on the end of the harbour wall, calling and calling his name, but he had not heard her, or had not cared.
“He is not the only boy in the world,” insisted Wavey.
“I expect you miss the children, Fever?” said her father, hoping to change the subject.
Fever kept rubbing the window, making a square hole in the condensation. “Fern and Ruan are much better off without me,” she said. “I had a letter a few weeks ago. The Lyceum is travelling among the Italian city-states. Fern is becoming quite an experienced actress. Ruan talks of becoming apprenticed to a painter. And I had a parcel from Mayda containing something that I believe was once a piece of cake; wedding cake, from the wedding of Dymphna Persimmon and Jonathan Hazell. . .”
“But what about Arlo Thursday?” Wavey pestered. “Is there any news of him? You still think about him. I can tell you do. Look, you’ve gone bright red!”
Fever looked away angrily. (People who are prone to blushing do not need anyone to tell them when they do it.) She wondered if Wavey knew that she scanned the travellers’ tales in London’s newspapers each week in the hope that there might be word of a boy arriving on the shores of Nuevo Maya; a boy who talked to birds and knew the ancient mysteries of flight. She said, “It is unlikely that he survived on that wide ocean, in such a small boat, and with one arm injured before he even set out. . .”
“Poor Fever,” Wavey said, laying her hand on Fever’s cheek. “It passes, you know. There will be other boys. But it’s no help, is it, my telling you that? Oh look!” she added, suddenly leaning across her to see out through the clear patch she had rubbed on the window. “Borglum is here!”
The chair was crossing a region of waste ground where buildings had lately stood and which tents had not yet had time to colonize. A travelling
show had set up there, a spiky black barge with a big tent pitched beside it and torches burning at the entrance. For a moment Fever wondered if it might be old friends of hers from Summertown, but no; this was a raggedy northern show; the sort of show which opened when respectable people were heading home to bed. Along the side of the barge, in big red letters made to look as if they had been painted recently in blood, it wore the name The Amazing Borglum’s Carnival of Knives!
Wavey rapped on the wall of the chair to make the bearers stop. “Oh, my dears, we must see the Carnival of Knives!”
“A Carnival of Knives?” said Dr Crumb. It was already past his bedtime, and he yawned as he spoke. “Wavey, it sounds somewhat irrational. . .”
“Nonsense,” said his wife. “It is the very thing to cheer poor Fever up!”
There were a lot of showmen in the world who styled themselves Amazing, but in Jasper Borglum’s case it was the simple truth. He even felt amazed at himself, as he stood on the roof of his land-barge watching his audience gather. He had not visited London since the Movement took it, and he felt hopeful about the place. It reminded him of huge nomad encampments that he had known up in the Birkenmark. And here he was, with his circus ready like a net to gather in the shoals of shiny little coins that swam in this canvas sea.
He was about the same age as Dr Crumb, and in some ways he was rather like him, for he was intelligent, cautious and neat, although when necessary he could show a certain reckless daring. Like Dr Crumb he cropped his hair down to a fuzz, but it was a blond fuzz in Borglum’s case, and he left one long lock at the front to dangle down over his forehead and half hide one of his eyes, which were as bright as chips of feldspar. For clothing he favoured the furs and ’broidery waistcoats of a nomad nobleman, and he wore a jewelled dagger in his belt that was just for show and a plain one in his boot that was not. When he drew himself up to his full height he stood just a half-inch under three feet tall.
Quite early in his life the Amazing Borglum had understood that he was an oddity, and that people were going to try to exploit him. Travelling shows stopped most summers at the village where he grew up, and there were whole barges packed with freaks and misshapes for the paying public to google at. Once the silky gent who ran a barge called the Knuckle Sandwich tried to persuade Borglum’s ma and da to sell him their little dwarfish boy for twelve gold coins. They wouldn’t sell, for they loved their son, even if there was a little less of him than they might have hoped. But they wouldn’t be around for ever, would they? And even while they were, what was to stop some big neighbour from picking Borglum up and selling him to the shows without their permission? It was a burden to a young man to be worth a dozen of gold.
So the following summer, when the Knuckle Sandwich reappeared, Borglum went and made his own deal with the silky gentleman. He gave the money to his ma and da, wished them a loving farewell, and set off upon his travels. If people wanted to exploit him it seemed to him that he’d best beat them to it and exploit himself.
He missed his parents, but otherwise life on a travelling show suited him well. It was better than village life, with all those towering lads who’d scoffed and bullied and the girls who would never even notice him. Aboard the Knuckle Sandwich he made friends who’d been born with the same lopsided luck as himself; the Stone Faced Man and the Bearded Lady, pretty Liv the Human Lemur with her covering of pale gold fur, who taught him to juggle and walk stilts, savage Quatch who made rich ladies faint when he roared at them and rattled the bars of his cage, but who wasn’t really savage at all, and who, on quiet nights between stops, would entertain the company with lovely songs and play to them upon a balalaika. Pretty soon young Borglum found that the only thing he didn’t like about this new life was the way that all the work of performing and roaring and being gaped and googled at was done by him and his friends, while all the money went to the silky gentleman and his wife and grown-up sons, who styled themselves the proprietors of the troupe. Borglum’s friends often grumbled about it, and he felt sure that they were right, but it was not in Borglum’s nature to be a grumbler.
So he made himself useful to the silky gentleman; helped him count his money and make up his accounts. From the grown-up sons he learned how the barge’s big old engines ran. And when the silky gentleman and all his family met with a terrible accident it was discovered, amazingly, that he had left the Knuckle Sandwich and all it held to Borglum.
At this long remove of years it was hard for Borglum to recall the exact details of the accident. “It was a tragic business” was all he’d usually say, if ever anyone asked about it. Sometimes, if they pressed him, he would bare his little yellow teeth and his feldspar eyes would glitter and he’d say, “It involved knives. . .”
By coincidence, “It involves knives” was more or less what people had been saying about Borglum’s carnival that night, as word of its arrival spread excitingly through all the flapping canvas streets and cardboard cul-de-sacs of Tent Town. For too long the workers of London had been forced to make their own entertainment, which mostly meant dog-fights and cock-fights and knife-fights. Now the professionals had arrived! Young men stood in the light of the flaming torches and stared up at the gory paintings on the barge’s sides. Children scampered off to tell their parents what was taking shape. Tired workers coming down from shifts on the new city and drunken young noblemen stumbling home from Quercus’s ball were all revived by the sight of Borglum’s blood-red banners licking at the evening sky. From all over Tent Town, groups of people made their wondering way towards the carnival, drawn by its powerful promises of violence and glamour.
Amongst them, unnoticed in his drab off-duty clothes, came apprentice Charley Shallow, as eager as anyone to see what the Carnival had in store. He had been out that evening with a girl called Milly Floater, and had decided that this might be a good way to round the night off. From what he’d heard in Tent Town it was meant to be quite horrifying, and he knew that girls, when horrified, liked a protective arm around them, and that one thing might lead to another.
He was fond of Milly, but as they joined the end of the queue he glanced around to make sure that none of his fellow apprentices was there. Round, good-natured, cheaply dressed Milly was exactly the sort of girl you would expect to see with a boy of Charley Shallow’s sort, and for that reason he did not want to be seen with her. Ronnie Coldharbour and his friends still didn’t like Charley, but they had learned to respect him, and he liked to drop hints to them about all the girls he knew in Tent Town. If they saw that he could do no better for himself than Milly Floater it could dent his reputation badly.
Sure enough, there was Coldharbour with a couple of the others, a few yards further up the queue. Before he could look back and notice Charley, Charley took Milly’s arm and dragged her into the slipstream of a passing Movement officer and his lady; rich folks from Ludgate Hill who thought that queues were not for them. Hurrying behind these nobles, they quickly reached the front of the crowd, where an entrance painted like a fanged mouth opened into the carnival tent. “Roll up, roll up!” the men who guarded it were shouting, while a girl with green eyes sold tickets in a canvas booth. A pretty girl, thought Charley, as he fumbled for his purse, and then saw as he proffered his bronze half-quid that she had no hands for him to put it in, only a sort of mechanized lobster-claw strapped to the stump where each hand should be. She laughed at his confusion and showed him the brass bowl where the coins went, and Milly laughed too. Charley thought, Stupid tarts, but he grinned as he took the ticket from her pincers, and turned to go in through the painted mouth.
They entered a dim-lit, awninged space. Blocks of steep-raked benches had been erected round an oiled canvas groundsheet mapped and marbled with alarming stains. The seats were filling fast. As he squeezed in next to Milly, Charley heard the barkers outside changing their message. “That’s all! Come back tomorrow. Another show tomorrow. . .”
A hush fell over the crowd on the benches. Even the rich people stopped talking about the
mselves in such loud voices and used whispers instead. Charley could hear moths battering their wings against the big lanterns, which swung on chains from the timber props that helped hold up the roof. Milly giggled nervously, squeezing herself against him. He looked across the canvas arena, checking for Coldharbour and the others. He could not see them, but he did notice three latecomers making their way into a space opposite: two white coats and an expensive fur cloak.
“What is it, Charley?” Milly asked, noticing the way he stared at them.
Charley didn’t answer. He was too surprised. What were Wavey and those Crumbs doing at a thing like this? He studied them, confident that they would not notice him among so many other faces – they’d probably forgotten he had ever existed, he thought bitterly. Wavey was talking, smiling, but Doc Crumb looked bewildered, while Fever sat so stiff and straight that you could almost see the disapproval crackling off her. Charley looked at her long white neck, the subtle shape of her under that crisp, buttoned-up coat, and he felt angry again at the girl who sat beside him. If Milly Floater had looked more like Fever Crumb he would not have minded showing her off to Coldharbour or anyone else. . .
Then the music started, so sudden and so deafening that all the thoughts flew out of his head like scared birds rising from a tree. He jumped. Everybody jumped, all along those rows of hard, uncomfortable benches. The music sounded like tin pans and bicycle chains, like bad plumbing and xylophone bones and the murder of elderly dustbins. Into the arena marched a bizarre army with a fur-clad dwarf strutting at its head.
“Welcome!” shouted the dwarf, into the silence that came down when the music stopped. He had the voice of a much bigger man, and a manner that commanded you to watch him. Nimble as a tumbler, he vaulted up on to the armoured hand of a massive Stalker that stood just behind him; a man-shaped hulk that looked ready to leap into the crowd and start ripping heads off, but was restrained by a blindfolded African woman holding tight to a leash fastened around its neck. Charley had seen plenty of these armoured zombies since the Movement seized power, but never one like this: barnacled with studs and spikes, it wore as a headpiece two massive, curving mammoth tusks. Above the glowing green slot which served as its eyes the silver figure of a winged woman jutted from its forehead; the hood ornament from an Ancient motor-carriage.
