Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

  “You can’t carry him all the way to London,” Fever warned. Carnival fighter or not, the big woman was already straining beneath Andringa’s weight, but she just gritted her teeth and went on down the hill, and as Fever went after her the smoke around them flared golden, for the afternoon sun had dipped below the edge of the pall that hung above the battlefield, and its light glittered on the bogs and culverts of the southward plains.

  They pressed on, while men ran past them, throwing away packs and rifles as they went, fleeing before the northerners’ advance. From behind came the hoarse trumpeting of mammoths, the clang of Suomi war-bells, the ramshackle clatter of the northern landships heaving themselves to the hill’s crest, shunting aside the ships which had stood so long against them. Lady Midnight panted, stumbling; Andringa groaned and bled; Fever wondered uselessly if there was some way they could share his weight. The light grew, and the smoke thinned, and the mist of evening hung above the drainage ditches and the brown, autumnal fields, and there, beyond the fields, above the mist. . .

  What was that thing? What was it?

  Other fugitives nearby had seen it too; Fever could tell by the way their heads went back, and the wonder that woke in their weary faces as they looked up and up. And she realized that the thunderous low growl she had been hearing for some minutes now was not the noise of the battle behind her but was coming from that monstrous shape as it tore its way out of the fog-banks in the south.

  It was the sound of engines.

  London had arrived.

  31

  BATTLE’S END

  ondon had arrived. Through a night and a day it had clawed its way northward, while the people huddled on its deck plates and the Engineers who controlled it slowly grew used to the idea that their city moved. Its speed on that first journey averaged just under ten miles per hour. It shed its tracks with maddening regularity, and several times an engine failed, but the city just halted to make repairs and then rolled on its way again, grinding the New North Road to grit beneath it. Behind the fog and the drifting smoke of battle, nobody at Three Dry Ships had noticed its approach. Through all the thunder of the guns, no one had heard it. The Future, Quercus would say later, is something that sneaks up on us while we are busy doing other things.

  Fever let her eyes rove over it, finding familiar structures beneath the ugly new fortifications. There was the stairway they called Cat’s Creep, rising up the central axis through the unfinished tiers. There was the platform where she’d stood with Dr Crumb on the day she first went aboard. . .

  “What is it?” asked Lady Midnight, gazing at it with her white eyes. “It’s hot. . .”

  “It’s come a long way,” said Fever. “It’s London.”

  “See?” said the carnival woman, reaching up to pat Captain Andringa. “I told you we’d get you there.”

  Behind them, northern forts and battlewagons coming over the crest of Dryships Hill slowed in confusion as their crews made out the thing that waited for them. Fever imagined them frantically checking their charts, trying to identify this misplaced mountain. People aren’t used to this, she thought. Even she, she discovered, had never really believed that London could move: her head had grasped it, but her heart had not. Yet here it was, and although she understood the principles by which its wheels turned and its engines worked, she was as astonished by it as everyone else. None of us is used to geography that moves. . .

  But they would have to get used to it, because here it was, a hundred miles from its birthplace and moving still, rolling carefully and cautiously towards her. Its bows broke free of the drifting mist. The serrated doors of the Great Under Tier looked so like the snout of a hungry dragon that she remembered Cluny and thought, This is Cluny’s vision. This is Godshawk’s dream, made real.

  The northern landships on the hilltop began to fire. Fever ducked instinctively, but the shots were pitched high over her head, tearing splinters from the palisades that ringed each of London’s tiers. At once, big guns aboard the city started to reply: ship’s guns, whose shells fell thick among the clustered vehicles on the ridge. Some were mounted so high on the skeletal girders of the upper tiers that they could shoot right over the hill at the nomad forts and castles behind it. And all the time the city kept on rolling. It showed no sign of slowing in the marshes; its huge tracks sank down through the mire and mud to grip bedrock beneath. At its stern, exhaust stacks hawked up thunderheads of smoke. Uprooted trees were wedged between the teeth of its tracks. The ground throbbed like a drum-skin. The horizon trembled. It was still a mile or two off, but it was moving quickly, and Fever noticed that the men around her were moving too, running back to Dryships Hill as if they thought they would be safe there.

  Fever started to go with them, edging backwards, unable to drag her eyes away from London. It was hard to fight the instinct that told her to get away from something so big and powerful. No wonder Cluny had been terrified when it rolled into her dreams. Cluny had more imagination than Fever; she had understood better the heft of the new city; its predator strength. It was all that she could do to stop herself from turning and running.

  Lady Midnight called out, “Don’t you think we ought to try to get aboard?”

  “They won’t let us,” said Fever, looking at the little ant-like figures on the city’s skirts. “They’ll think we’re northerners, they’ll shoot us down.”

  “I’ve been called a lot of things, but never a northerner,” said Lady Midnight scornfully. “Besides, we’ve Captain A. You’ll vouch for us won’t you, Captain A?”

  Captain A said nothing, but she set off anyway. Fever followed, and noticed that others were going in the same direction; soldiers from London, forgotten by their enemies, were hurrying across the city’s path towards the outer tracks, where iron stairways reached down almost to the ground. One of them was waving something – a tattered banner, torn from its pole – and from a sandbagged gun-nest at the top of those stairs men waved back, and readied a long metal ladder to let them climb aboard.

  Fever started to run. The wet ground shuddered under her as London neared; the water in the puddles danced. Lady Midnight staggered, cursing. The city was slowing, probably wanting to make sure it had knocked out all the northern forts before it crawled into the range of their cannons. As it slowed, men came down the stairs and fitted their ladder into brackets that stuck from the bottom step and slid it down until its lowest rung was inches from the ground. The foremost of the fleeing soldiers grabbed it and started to climb.

  “Wait! Wait for us!” gasped Fever, running, though reason told her that she could not be heard above the racket of London’s wheels and engines.

  Half the soldiers were aboard now; the man with the banner waved it triumphantly as he reached the top of the stairs.

  Fever fell, sprawling on her face in a soft and slimy patch of bog. By the time she had crawled out and wiped the mud from her eyes the last of the soldiers was climbing the ladder.

  “Wait!” she shouted, running, lungs straining, throat burning. “Wait!”

  The men on the city helped the last climber aboard and prepared to raise their ladder.

  “Wait!”

  One saw her and pointed. The others noticed her. They left the ladder there. The city was moving not much faster than a brisk walking pace, and as Fever and Lady Midnight scrambled across the band of disturbed earth near to the outermost track, the dangling ladder came to meet her, its bottom rungs whisking through the long grass, like a ladder to heaven in a fairy tale. A man came down it, seized hold of Andringa and started to heave him up; Lady Midnight followed, pushing from below. Fever was the last aboard; she grabbed the ladder, climbed a few rungs, and could go no further. In the end they hauled it up with her clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a piece of wreckage. They helped her off at the top, but doubtfully. She lay beside Lady Midnight and heard them say, “These two ain’t ours. They look like misshapes. Old Crumb won’t have put their sort on his list.”

  Andringa
was sprawled nearby, looking about as dead as anyone Fever had ever seen, but he heard too, and opened his eyes. “Sergeant,” he said, “this lady is under my protection, and the other is Fever Crumb. She is Dr Crumb’s own daughter, come home from the wilds, and she will certainly, certainly be on his list. . .”

  Thank St Kylie, Charley thought, as London finally began to slow. All night and all day the place had been quaking like a jelly. He had lost count of the number of bruises he had from banging into walls, or having things bang into him. Wherever he went in the Engine District, staggering like a drunk across its tilting pavements, things had been falling from shelves, or cascading out of cupboards which swung open suddenly as the city lurched. People had been warned to stow stuff safely, but things had been forgotten in the rush, and nobody had quite imagined how rough London’s first ride would be. A ship on a stormy sea would feel like this, he thought, and sailors learn to cope, don’t they? But he had never been on a ship, or seen the sea. He had spent the whole night concentrating on just not being sick, and when the battle started and the huge, reverberating booms of the guns came quivering through the fabric of the city, he found himself wishing bitterly that the Underground had won and stopped the thing from ever being built.

  Feeling sullen and sleep-deprived, he edged along the crowded pavements behind his master. Dr Crumb seemed to think that sleep and comfort were like hair; affectations which good Engineers should do without. All night he had been busy, and now that the city was almost at its destination he had chosen not to rest but to come down and check all the buttresses and bracings on Base Tier, in case the recoil from those huge guns up above was putting too much stress on them. All well and good, thought Charley, glaring at his back, but why does he have to drag me with him? He choked on the hot and stinking air, kicking his way through huddles of miserable people who had come aboard in a hurry before the city moved and had not yet been assigned quarters of their own.

  They had checked three of the big iron braces without finding any sign of cracks or warping, and Dr Crumb was just preparing to check a fourth when a man came shouting, “Oi! Dr Crumb!” It was one of Quercus’s coppertops, the badge on his shako glinting in the Base Tier gloom.

  “What is it, constable?” asked Dr Crumb. “Is there an emergency? Nothing structural, I hope?”

  “No, no, sir, no,” the policeman said. “It is only . . . we have your daughter aboard, sir.”

  Charley grabbed a handrail to steady himself, and hoped the coppertop would think it was just the lurching of the pavement which made him sway and blanch. Fever Crumb? Here? Alive and here?

  “My daughter is dead,” said Dr Crumb.

  “I can’t help that, sir,” said the man. “She came aboard with a foreign misshape woman and Captain Andringa. He swore she’s Miss Fever Crumb. But he’s been took to the infirmary now, and we can’t let her go topside unless we’re quite sure of it.”

  Charley was sure of it. It would be just like his luck. Is she completely indestructible? he wondered bitterly. So it had all been for nothing; Fever was back despite his best efforts. Dr Crumb would not want Charley any more.

  He followed Dr Crumb and the coppertop along the walkways which bridged the Great Under Tier and down a stair into one of the side-crofts. A ragtag crowd of battered soldiery had gathered there, barely recognizable as the same brave fellows who had left London to defend the northern approaches. The smoke from London’s engines still lingered under the high iron roof, but through vents and grilles the evening light came in. Under one such vent, where the air was freshest, a young woman waited.

  “Well, sir,” asked the coppertop, in a confidential way. “Is that her?”

  “It. . . It looks a little like her,” Dr Crumb admitted.

  “It’s her,” said Charley. He was shocked at Fever’s appearance too. Would hardly have known her, if it weren’t for those mismatched eyes of hers, which widened slightly as they lit on Dr Crumb. Her prim white coat was gone, replaced by northern clothes so dirty that they looked as if she’d taken them off a dead she-tramp in a muddy ditch. Her greasy hair trailed almost to her shoulders. Her face was altered too; gaunt, bruised, empty-looking. In the hollow of her throat hung a nomad amulet; wires and circuitry and little bones.

  Motioning to the policeman to remain where he was, Dr Crumb went over to her. Charley, assuming the gesture had not applied to him, went too. Her mouth twitched. She was trying to smile, but after the long trauma of capture and chase and battle she could not quite remember how. Charley didn’t know that, though. He just thought, Still the same frosty little bitch, then.

  Dr Crumb stopped and stood swaying a few feet from the girl. If he felt anything at all he did not let it show.

  He said, “I was told you were killed, Fever.”

  “That was not true.”

  “Clearly. But your mother. . .?”

  “Wavey is dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “She was very brave. She fought and fought but in the end there was a Stalker and it . . . and she. . .”

  “Quite,” said Dr Crumb.

  Fever was weeping before she could stop herself. She reached for him but he stepped back in alarm and she was left there with her arms outstretched, tears dripping from her chin.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She wiped at her face with the cuffs of her tunic. She tried to laugh, forgetting that Dr Crumb was just as unsettled by laughter as by tears. “I have been too long among the nomads,” she said.

  “Yes,” agreed Dr Crumb, and his eyes went to the talisman around her neck.

  Charley Shallow, looking on, felt the first stirrings of hope for himself. This wasn’t going the way he’d expected; nor the way Fever had expected, neither. It was like Crumb had armoured himself so thickly against all feeling when he’d thought she was dead that he couldn’t feel anything now she was alive again.

  “Father,” said Fever, in a small, experimental way. She had never called him that before. Watching his reaction, she realized that she never would again.

  “You should rest, Fever,” said Dr Crumb. “You are emotional. It is to be expected, perhaps. Rest will help you to overcome your weakness.”

  She nodded meekly.

  “You will excuse me. There is much to do.” He turned to leave, hesitated, turned back. “Please remove that trinket. That thing around your neck. It looks most irrational.”

  Fever put her fingers to the charm. “It is only jewellery. A friend . . . my friend . . . Cluny Morvish gave it to me. It was her present to me. . . It is all I have left of her.”

  Dr Crumb frowned still harder. “Cluny Morvish? You surprise me, Fever. Is she not the witch, the priestess who led this mad crusade?”

  Fever hung her head, knowing she could not explain.

  “Charley,” said Dr Crumb, “take Fever to the Engineerium. Find her some quarters and some clean clothes. Soap and water, too; she is in a most insanitary state. Whatever she needs. . .” He glanced at Fever again, but would not meet her eyes. “You will excuse me, Fever. There is so much to be done. . .”

  Walking away, he looked as rough as he had on the day he heard she’d died. Charley watched him go. In his head, little green plans were shoving their noses up into the light like February snowdrops. He turned to Fever, smiled his brightest smile. “Dr Crumb is terrible busy, Miss Crumb,” he said, shouting over the steady booming of the city’s guns, reaching out to steady her as the deck lurched. “Come on; let’s get you to the Engineerium.”

  The long guns of London had hammered the heart-fortress, smashing its upperworks, silencing its cannon before they could land a shot upon the city. Most of the landships and the smaller forts were already destroyed, ground under London’s tracks as it drove its huge weight through the crest of Dryships Hill. The rest were in flight, scudding northward like clouds before a gale.

  Cluny did not know how, but she was still alive, still in the armoured howdah of her war-mammoth, which had carried her back from the hill with the rest o
f the Arkhangelsk forces when the city appeared. From the lee of the shattered heart-fortress, through the smoke of its burning, she looked up at her city of dreams. She was not so scared of it now that it was real. All around her people were screaming, running, hiding their eyes, falling face down on the shaking ground as if a god had appeared in front of them. Her mammoth’s rider had hidden his face in its russet topknot. But she was calm, as if her nightmares had all been preparing her for this. The new London did not look nearly so grand or shiny as it had inside her head. In the effort of dragging it out of Godshawk’s imaginings and into real life it had lost some essential beauty. What were all those bits of timber doing, nailed up all round it like the fences of some savage pound? It kept its jaws tight shut, and the guns flashed and thundered on its shoulders.

  Behind her in the howdah Tharp was gibbering, “All is lost! We must fly!”

  “No,” Cluny heard herself say. Her voice was high and clear amid the din. The rider looked back at her from the mammoth’s neck, his face grey with terror, eyes wide behind his goggles. Only the Stalker she’d been given as a bodyguard seemed as calm as she was, watching her impassively from his station at the rear of the howdah. “No,” she said again, and she raised her voice as loud as she could in the hope that the men on other mammoths and the battered landships round about her might listen. “We can fight this thing. It’s only a machine. If we ride in between its tracks and get beneath it and aim our guns up at its under-workings we can break it and stop it, and when it is stopped we can climb aboard it. When we meet them hand-to-hand upon its decks the warriors of London will be no match for the warriors of Arkhangelsk. . .”