Fever Crumb

by Philip Reeve

  Fever thought that she liked the sound of Master Solent, although she knew it was irrational to form an opinion based on such little knowledge of him. Still, she looked hopefully at Dr. Crumb, wondering if he would let her go.

  Dr. Crumb still looked troubled. He said, "Fever is a great help to me here, Dr. Stayling. What shall I do without her?"

  "Oh, I'll ask young Quilman to come up and assist you, Crumb. He's highly rational. And it is only for a short time, three weeks or a month. So pack your bag, Fever Crumb. You will be leaving for Ludgate Hill tomorrow."

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  ***

  3 The Wind Tram

  The main entrance to Godshawk's Head was not through its mouth, as you might expect, for annoyingly Godshawk's sculptor had chosen to represent him with his lips firmly closed. Instead, the Order and their visitors came and went through a door at the top of a flight of steps that led up the Head's left nostril.

  Out of that door and down those steps next morning came Fever Crumb in the pearl-gray London daylight, pushing open the gate in the high fence, which ran all round the Head, and walking out onto the tram stop, which was a timber platform built on piles against Godshawk's upper lip.

  Dr. Crumb came with her. He had carried her cardboard suitcase from their quarters, and he would have liked to carry it farther. He would have liked to go with her all the way to Solent's house and see what sort of place she was to live in and among what kinds of people. Fever would have liked that, too. But

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  neither of them dared suggest it, for fear the other would think them irrational.

  So they stood on the Head's wooden mustache in the gusty, biting wind and wondered what to say. The tram was due, but as yet there was no sign of it. The wire-link fence sang thinly in the breeze.

  "The wind is still from the west," observed Dr. Crumb at last. "You will have a good, brisk run to the Terminus, and from there I believe it is but a short walk to Solent's place."

  Fever agreed. They stood facing each other, the collars of their white coats turned up against the wind. On Fever's head was a wide-brimmed straw hat that Dr. Crumb had unearthed from somewhere, saying she would need it to protect her scalp from the sun. She held it on tightly and watched the thick, gunmetal clouds sweep above the city and thought about sums, angles, anything that would take her mind off what she was feeling.

  She didn't want to go. She wanted to stay in the Head forever. She wanted Dr. Crumb to hold her hand and lead her back inside. She felt afraid of living without him, and angry at him for not standing up to Dr. Stayling and insisting that she stay. But she knew, too, that those feelings, like all feelings, were irrational. They were the frightened instincts of a small animal leaving the nest for the first time. Everyone had instincts, just as everyone had hair; they were another vestige of humanity's primitive past. A good Engineer learned to suppress them.

  The tramlines began to chirrup and then to hum. She glanced

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  to windward, and there was the tram coming down the long sweep of the viaduct that carried it above the roofs of Wary Edge. In another half minute it would be at Godshawk's Head. She turned back to Dr. Crumb, and almost lost control and hugged him, but by then a whole crowd of Engineers were coming out of Godshawk's nostril like a highly educated sneeze, and what would they think of her if they saw her acting on her feelings? They would think that they had been right all those years ago, and that girls were not suited to the ways of reason. So she held tight to the handle of her suitcase with one hand, and kept that farm-girl hat in place with the other, and just nodded to Dr. Crumb, and Dr. Crumb nodded back, and wiped his eyes with his coat cuff and said, "Bother this wind...."

  "Farewell, Fever Crumb!" called the other Engineers. "Good luck! Be reasonable!" And she bowed to them, too, and then the tram was almost alongside the platform and there was nothing to do but turn and run for it while Dr. Crumb, in a voice too small for her or anyone else to hear, said, "Take care, little Fever! Take care...."

  ***

  Fever had often watched wind trams pass the Head, but she had never boarded one before. There was a worrying gap between the platform's edge and the tram's deck, but her legs were long and strong, and she leaped it easily and dumped herself on one of the slatted wooden seats behind the main mast. The tram did not slow, but kept trundling past the tram stop at a steady twelve

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  miles per hour so that the Head fell quickly astern and was soon hidden behind a terrace of thirtieth-century villas.

  Fever set her suitcase down on the deck between her feet and groped in her pocket for the coins that Dr. Crumb had given her. The tram conductor, a squat man with a wooden leg, came stumping aft, and she said, "The Central Terminus," and put the coins in his hand. In return he gave her an oyster shell and an expectant stare, as if he were waiting for a thank-you, but Fever did not see any reason to say "thank you" -- he had not done her a favor, merely his job. After a moment he stopped waiting and went on his way, muttering something to another of the tram crew, who laughed nastily.

  The oyster shell hung on a cord threaded through a hole bored in its edge. Everyone who traveled by London Transport wore one. Fever took off her hat, and looped the cord over her head, and put her hat back on, and sat on her uncomfortable seat and watched the city slide by. The cloud cover was breaking and a stook of sunbeams stood on Ludgate Hill, gilding the wet roofs of the Barbican and the copper-topped towers of the Astrologers' Guild.

  For the first time the bad, breathless feeling which had seized her when she was saying good-bye to Dr. Crumb began to fade, and in its place came something which she thought of as positive anticipation, but which someone who had not been brought up by Engineers would have called excitement.

  More houses went by, their top-floor windows level with the

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  tramline. Then the weed-grown summit of a digger's spoil heap, with goats grazing among the buddleia. They passed other stations where people jumped nimbly aboard carrying children and shopping and cumbersome packages, squeezing into the seats on either side of Fever's. The wind died a little as the tram nosed its way deeper into the built-up heart of the city, passing into the lee of tall buildings. Ahead, flocks of dust-gray pigeons wheeled around the thatched roofs of the Central Terminus, in the shadow of Ludgate Hill. The tram crew furled their flapping sails, took up long poles and quanted the rest of the way, only stopping when they reached the incline outside the Terminus, down which the tram coasted until it fetched up with a jarring thump against the straw buffers.

  " Central Terminus'. Alight 'ere fer Ludgate Hill, Liver Pill Street, an' the Stragglemarket! Change 'ere for stops to 'Bankmentside, St Kylie , 'Ampster's 'Eath, and Effing Forest! "

  And oh, the noise of it! Fever was pummelled by the din and stink and bustle that greeted her as she climbed down from the tram and made her way along the platform, which was spattered with pigeon droppings and clumps of filthy straw fallen from the high, thatched canopy overhead. Stevedores shunted trolleys piled with crates and barrels at Fever, and left it to her to decide whether she would leap aside or be crushed under their wheels. Men shouted to one another as they ran up the masts of lately arrived trams to furl their sails. Doors slammed and handbells

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  rang as other trams pulled out, laden with freight and passengers. She clutched her little cardboard suitcase to her chest and hurried on until she reached the wooden turnstile at the platform's end. There she held up her oyster shell while the eyes of the turnstile keeper flicked over her in a bored, faintly aggressive way before letting her through.

  At once she found herself caught up in a river of Londoners, which was swirling across the concourse and down a broad flight of wooden stairs and out into the street to join a still larger river outside. Drovers were herding sheep toward the meat market, barrow boys and news-sheet vendors were shouting their wares, and dozens of sedan chairs were being carried past, bobbing on that tide of hats and heads like overdecorated
cupboards washed away in a flood.

  Fever fished in her pocket for the directions that Dr. Stayling had given her, while keeping tight hold of the handle of her suitcase with the other. Dr. Crumb had warned her of the sneak thieves and dip-pockets who haunted London's busier streets. She peered at Dr. Stayling's sketch map, but she could not relate the neat lines he had drawn to the complex, busy, jagged streets in which she found herself. She looked about for a street name or a signpost, but there was none. The river of people swept her on. The low sun was lighting the upper parts of the buildings and a window flashed as a maid leaned out to empty a chamber pot. Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine,

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  and stumbled into the path of a religious procession -- celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, " Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!

  Disgusted, Fever veered away. But all around her now were the signs of unreason, temples to Poskitt and Mad Isa and dozens more of London's shabby gods, with the ramshackle copper-domed towers of the astrologers poking up over their roofs. Shops and stalls sold scents and prayer flags and dream catchers and impractical hats and cheap storybooks with lurid covers. Barrow boys swore and squabbled. Women passed by with painted faces, wearing skirts so wide that small wheels had been attached to the hems to stop them from dragging in the street-muck, while little gas balloons held up the points of their flamboyant, lacy collars.

  It was small wonder, Fever thought, that the Order of Engineers had long ago decided to cloister themselves away from such a world, with all its disorder and distractions. Round a corner she went, and down steep, cobbled streets that kept turning into stairways. Down? No, that must be wrong! She looked at the map again. She should be going uphill.

  She was growing confused and panicky, but she was still rational enough to see the truth. She had been alone in the city for barely five minutes, and already she was lost.

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  ***

  4

  Stragglemarket

  Trying to think in the calm and scientific way that Dr. Crumb had taught her, Fever turned her back on the sun and started following a nearby viaduct, hoping that it would lead her back to the Terminus. But the viaduct was not easy to follow. Scruffy buildings leaned against its supports, archaeological digs opened in the middle of streets, and in detouring round them she soon lost sight of the tramline altogether.

  (She did not notice the black sedan chair that cut through the crowds a hundred feet behind her, dogging her path like a large, square shark.)

  She took wrong turn after wrong turn, and ended up on a street with high, abandoned-looking warehouses on either side. In front of the buildings small-time scavengers and archaeologists had set out their wares on trestles under canvas awnings, or spread them on blankets on the cobbled ground. Fever tasted a sudden tang of homesickness as she looked down into a hamper

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  filled with old mobile phone carapaces just like the ones she had so often cleaned and polished for Dr. Crumb. On other stalls she glimpsed intriguing knots of old wiring and circuitry, and once a whole engine, but most of the traders were simply selling junk -- shapeless old clots of crushed plastic and rust whose purpose not even an Engineer could hope to guess.

  "'Allo, ducks!" called a toothless old woman, seeing Fever glance at the rust-stained stones that were spread on her blanket. "Treat yourself to a bargain, dearie!" She snatched at Fever's sleeve and Fever looked round into her mad old face. The woman's eyes widened. Her grin turned into something different. "What are you?" she asked. She started to back away, pointing with one arm at Fever's face while she used the other to elbow a path for herself through the crowd. "Her eyes!" she squealed. "Her eyes! She's one of them!"

  "Please, do stop it," said Fever, but her voice was small, no more than a whisper really, while the old woman's had risen to a wheezy shriek.

  "Scriven! She be Scriven!"

  Heads were turning. People were noticing Fever, and they weren't the sort of people she wanted to be noticed by. Burly barrow boys, rag-robed scavengers, crop-headed London roughs with tattooed necks. With startling speed a ring of gawpers congealed around her, attracted by the scent of coming violence. Someone knocked Fever's hat off, and as she stooped to pick it

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  up she heard them muttering, "Look at her! She's got no hair! No hair! "

  "I am an Engineer," said Fever, straightening up. "I shave my head. Hair is unnecessary, and provides a home to lice and fleas. It is a vestige of our animal past...."

  But none of the people round her looked as though they'd know what "vestige" meant, or believe that mankind was descended from the animals. They weren't listening anyway.

  "She's tall enough, but she ain't got no speckles," said one man, peering into Fever's face. "She ain't no Scriven."

  "But look at them eyes!" another urged. "She's some sort of misshape all right. 'Ow could she be human yet 'ave eyes that don't match?"

  "Of course I am human!" said Fever weakly, but the men were all suspicious now, and that word "misshape" had been enough to rouse a wary hatred from deep in their folk memory. Mutations were rare, and not many had been as long lasting or as dangerous as the Scriven, but most Londoners still believed in stamping out misshapes wherever you found them, just in case.

  Fever looked around, hoping to find someone in the crowd she might appeal to. There was no one. Some were jeering and laughing at her, while others looked ready to murder her. "Your behavior is irrational," she told them, hoping to calm them, but she could not seem to make them understand. They clumped closer, leering, one man reaching out to prod her. Behind their

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  faces, like something in a dream, a black sedan chair slid toward her, swinging side-on. As the crowd sensed it and turned their heads to look, Fever saw her chance and fled. She found a side alley and darted down it, her cardboard suitcase banging its corners against her legs, shouts breaking out behind her, a rotten cabbage bursting against the damp brickwork of the alley wall.

  For a moment there was panic, and wet cobbles, and the slap of her running feet. Then she rounded a corner into another alley and there was the black chair again, blocking the way ahead.

  "Miss Crumb!"

  A man was leaning from the chair's open door, calling out to her as she turned to run back the way she'd come. He opened the chair's door and reached out a hand to Fever.

  "Come on, Miss Crumb," he said. "The Stragglemarket's no place to hang about. Not for a stranger." He smiled, and his smile made her feel safer. "I'm Kit Solent," he said. "Stayling told me you weren't used to being out alone, so I decided to come and meet you at the station. I called, but you must not have heard me. Not your fault, of course. Once you get caught in the crowd, you end up going where it takes you...."

  Another crowd, the angry Stragglemarket mob, was approaching fast along the same alley Fever had just run down. She could hear their voices, harsh as animals'.

  "Come on, hop in," said Kit Solent.

  Fever decided that the rational thing would be to do as he

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  asked. She passed up her case to him and clambered inside, feeling the chair dip beneath her as the bearers adjusted to her weight. Then Kit Solent tugged shut the door and rapped once with his knuckles on the wall behind his head. The chair set off at a brisk walking pace, back up the alley Fever had just run down, herding her pursuers ahead of it. Solent gestured to Fever to keep her head down and leaned from the window, calling out, "She's not come this way."

  Crouching between the two bench seats, Fever's eyes grew used to the shadows of the chair. She saw that two children were sitting beside Solent, a boy of about eight years and a little girl, much younger. They sat close together and watched Fever solemnly, like a pair of owls. The girl was clutching some sort of pretend animal, a blue dog made from fluff and wool.

  "There!" said Kit Solent, helping her up, and grinning at her as she settled herself on the
seat opposite him. The Stragglemarket was behind them; the chair was climbing through quieter streets, up the side of Ludgate Hill. "Miss Crumb, I do believe you are the most exciting employee we've ever had. We have had a sedan-chair chase and a near riot, and it's not yet time for elevenses. You must have a perfect genius for getting into trouble!"

  Fever blushed. "It was no fault of mine," she said, peeking through the tiny window behind his head to make sure they were not being followed. 'Those people were most irrational!"

  "They were scared, Miss Crumb," Kit Solent replied. "Don't you know your history? The Scriven used to run this city, and they

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  were cruel and wicked and not altogether human. Anybody who looks a bit different tends to remind people of them."

  He smiled at Fever. He was older than Dr. Crumb but not nearly as old as Dr. Stayling; a large, handsome man, slightly overweight, with an intelligent face, blue eyes, long, chestnut-colored hair tied back with a silver clasp, scruffy clothes, an ink stain on his shirt cuff. Fever remembered him now; he had visited the Head several times, and she had looked down from the window of Dr. Crumb's chambers and watched Dr. Stayling greeting him when he stepped off the wind tram.