As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  Chapter 20

  For what came to a full week, near enough, the character of Hajar’s life aboard the flying city was that of a ship’s rat in a deluge: she clung to whatever was stable, closed her eyes, and knew that whatever came next would not be her doing.

  For that near-full week, Hajar ate little, for there was no food to be had, and drank little, for there was no water to be had, and slept little, for it was the labour of impossibility to snatch rest from the jaws of a hurricane.

  Ropes rapped window panes with such frequency that they became the pattern of her heartbeat. As each tiny diamond-shaped window smashed, they were boarded over, and still the wind and rain raged on.

  Hajar thought little, in this week. She was too filled with the simple, animal determination not to die to give herself over to speculations. What thought she did recall was that she was not sure they had made the best decision in leaving the chance of dissection at the hand of spiders and changing it for the chance of dissection at the claws of the wind, but she had none with which to share it.

  Ferdinand affixed himself to a beam nearby, and covered his face with his arms, and was insensible. He did not allow himself this until he had assisted in lashing down those who required lashing, for he seemed bent on help, even where it was not his place. Benjon’s occupied form seemed agitated and angered, but aside from the natural sympathy she bore the face she still recognised, Hajar had no time for his distress.

  El Alacrán braced himself against the wall of the Hall and held to the wood his human companions. He clung to the wall with his feet, his claws, and even the wicked-barbed tip of his tail plunged in the planks.

  For that near-week, Hajar saw what she saw of the Hall from between a cage of chitinous limbs, and was too weak to be alarmed by her gratitude.

  The violent rocking of the Hall and the fear of falling became so constant that when at last the wind released them from its clutches, Hajar was unsure of how to react. Their small statue-garden of travelling companions remained frozen to the Hall’s splintered and dented wall, amid the broken barrels and shattered bowls. There they stayed until a passing sky-man, his arms weighed with ropes, called to them:

  “She’s gone, it’s good, you can come off then, eh. Come off.”

  El Alacrán was not swift in pulling himself from the wall: it seemed he had clutched so grim to the wood that his tail and two feet had embedded themselves between planks and were well-stuck.

  At first Hajar and Benjon – Ferdinand being some feet away – attempted to push El Alacrán free, but he shouted at them and swore terrible oaths. At last Ferdinand came with his folded knife to whittle away a little of the imprisoning wood.

  With a mighty thump El Alacrán came free of the Hall wall, and Hajar was at liberty to move. Her first move was to fall to her knees as her muscles failed to give response in time, and her second to push Ferdinand away as he tried to lift her.

  “We’re still alive, at least,” Ferdinand said, standing back.

  Hajar had no answer for this.

  She rose with care, and tried to stretch herself back into a shape more suited for walking and standing than crouching against a wooden wall.

  “Lend your hands, then, eh,” shouted the same sky-man as before, struggling with his ropes. “Repair needed. All of you, lend your hands, then.”

  They were set to work. Benjon’s occupied form was of little use, Hajar thought at first, but it seemed many of the sky-men and women – and many of the children – had been bled by the breaking of windows or of spars. One man had crushed a foot between ‘the engines’ improper-secured, which it seemed Benjon must remove.

  She would have watched to be sure that this parasite could do Benjon’s work as he did it, but the sky-men and women had her replacing diamonds of glass into white putty paste for the whole afternoon and she saw neither his work nor that to which her other companions were set.

  Her first day since coming aboard which had not been filled with the howling of wind and the whipping of ropes came to an end. The sky-men and women gathered for their meal alongside some dozen-or-more fly-by-waters and four fly-by-nights whose great furred antennae made Hajar uneasy, and she at last had the measure of her predicament.

  “The other Halls are adrift,” said Ærndís, who seemed to have taken it upon herself to be Hajar’s guide in this airborne world whether she liked or not. She seemed however more exasperated than distraught at this. “When we have bearings the search party goes out, then.”

  “This is common?” Ferdinand asked, for no one about the circle showed any hint of despair.

  “Not this strong, no, then, but we divide –” Ghent said, demonstrating with his hands, his mean meal propped between his feet, “– when the wind comes with storms, so.”

  “They seek us, we seek them, we find each other in a month or two, then, eh,” said one of the other sky-men, his mouth full and his manner relaxed.

  “But we have no bearing,” Ærndís observed. “This time. There is no familiar landmark.”

  “Well what is there?” Hajar asked.

  “Ocean.” This was claimed by what was either Qingting or another of the fly-by-waters. Hajar had no notion of how the humans might go about telling them apart, for they all appeared similar and their eerie child-machine voices. Those were powered in part, she saw, by delicate and restless motion of wings close to the tubes’ aperture. “But there is land on the southern horizon, and we strike for it in search of provision.”

  “A clear breach—” grumbled one of the other sky-men.

  “A necessity,” snapped another. “In emergency. We are low.”

  “But you have no idea where we are?” Hajar pressed, uncomfortable with the thought of the vast unknown ocean separated from her only by a thin floor and a long fall. Somehow it was very much more distressing than the reality of a ship.

  “Winds that carry us faster than we could ever propel ourselves, for more than a sixday,” scoffed one of the sky-women, “we might be over the edge of the world, were it not round, eh. No, we don’t know where we are, then.”

  “Shall we descend to the land,” Ærndís said, and for a moment Hajar thought the remark addressed to her. “I will go, then, and so shall these guests.”

  Hajar glanced to Ferdinand, who gave her naught but a shrug: it seemed he had been told nothing of this, either.

  “They can,” cried the same fly-by-water as spoke before. Hajar was sure then, from the fondness with which Ærndís had spoke of her ‘dragonfly’ friend the night before the storm, that this must then be Qingting. “They know land, they have already risked it. You should not, it is too dangerous –”

  “Qingting,” Ærndís sighed, and Hajar knew then that this was some old argument given new legs by circumstance.

  About the circle some stood and began to remove their plates and bowls, others fell into conversations of their own, but Qingting beyond the circle and Ærndís within it kept up their dispute:

  “I lost my arm, not my brain, and not my courage. You fuss.”

  “With reason,” Qingting replied, and even through the bizarre mechanics of her communication Hajar heard or imagined a huffiness and petulance. “You cannot launch yourself from the ground, you cannot cling to the ladder, should the hungry earth open up and swallow you we would have no means to retrieve –”

  They are all mad, Hajar reminded herself, looking to see if Ferdinand or El Alacrán perceived this conversation. Ferdinand joked with some sky-men, but he seemed in his set uneasy, his shoulders tense; El Alacrán had fallen to conversation with the fly-by-waters.

  She observed one remove with its delicate forelegs the leathery face-part that brought tubes to its jaws, and heard even over the hubbub of conversation the click and hiss of true arthropod speech.

  “You will escort us, then, eh?” Ærndís claimed, flicking some crumb at her friend. “And you can seize me up like a big hero and carry me off, eh. Do not claim you don’t intend to lead the party.”

 
“If I’m allowed–”

  “You’d bite Lingqing’s wings off for the chance to explore new land,” Ærndís laughed. “Don’t lie, eh.”

  * * *

  “We have better bearing,” Ghent told them, in the morning.

  He had studied the stars, Hajar assumed, or some instrument of navigation with which she was not familiar.

  “We lie over the waters south of their—” here Ghent gestured at El Alacrán, and Hajar did not know if he meant ‘scorpion’ or simply ‘arthropods’, “—hot forests. Beyond the ends of arthropod lands, and far beyond man’s. That horizon that draws upon us is without map or legend.”

  “Then why send strangers down to see it?” asked one of the sky-men, his voice filled with scorn. “They’re no more fit for it than any other, it’s not their land.”

  Hajar thought this the most sensible opinion yet uttered aboard the airborne hall, but she did not applaud it while the remainder sat grim in silence.

  “Would you rather your boots touched earth?” asked the sky-woman beside him, with greater scorn. “Or suppose we let those that walked it before walk it again, eh?”

  Hajar received the distinct undercurrent in this that at least if they were ‘consumed by the earth’, the sky-city would have lost nothing.

  The skies were clear, and the sun hotter than Hajar had never known it in Albion-of-the-Britons.

  She was obliged to strip to all but a belted shift and headscarf, though she would not abandon her boots any more than she would abandon a companion. Over the day, Hajar began to see from those windows she worked to repair the oncoming land. At first a mere smudge on the oncoming horizon, it began to resolve itself with somewhat less than train-speed.

  It was broad, though whether continent or island was uncertain: if island it was an island to the scale of Albion-of-the-Britons or larger, not the kind one might walk across in a day.

  It was forested, and some mile or so inland from the coast came clear by midday a strange variation in trees. The most were tall and doubtless ancient, their leaves mid-green and presence established. Within a circle of a mile or two wide, maybe more, whose geometric perfection caught Hajar’s eye as the equal to any of her most careful diagrams, the trees seemed short, pale, and surely far younger. It was as if some devastating fire had swept through only this exact circle some time before.

  But fire was hardly to be contained and directed with such neatness, Hajar thought, the various Boards of Durham had complaint enough about this. She pressed the last pane into the last window in her allotted run, and brushed aside with her foot the boards which she had removed. There must be some other reason for it.

  She harried after the insoluble problem as she piled up the boards for removal to other parts of the Hall.

  It could not be a blight, for blight like fire spread without respect for fence or wall, travelling through soil or water or sky. Hajar speculated farmers, perhaps, clearing but why then had the forest been allowed to regrow?

  Hajar took her first armful of boards to those working to seal the smaller breaches in roof and wall, and was intercepted on her path by Ferdinand.

  “Come see this,” he said, taking her arm and her load from her grasp without asking, “I can see houses.”

  Hajar forgot her task and her annoyance, and followed him across.

  He came about through the door opposite her windows, and led her on through the rooms that followed, one after another, from the one side of the Hall to the other. He strode, seeming now unconcerned by their altitude, his pace steady, and she strove to emulate in his wake.

  On the far side of the Hall the windows had been more thoroughly destroyed, and Hajar was surprised to find how warm the air here had grown. They stood at the rear of the Hall, near to the great paddles and ropes that determined the smoke-skin’s course through the sky. While the main of the Hall hung over the pocked forest with its inexplicable circle, these glassless windows looked out over the coast.

  “There,” said Ferdinand, pointing to the shore. He hung back from the window, Hajar saw: he had not conquered his dislike of the altitude that much. “Remark it, it looks like the slums of Edinburgh.”

  Hajar thrust her head from the window as much to shame him as to see and to feel a breeze upon her too-hot face. There, below, the shoreline boasted a most mean and ill-made scattering of shanty houses of cloth and wood: they were too fragile, too light to be of stone manufacture. The buildings were heaped together in piles as if discarded by some greater civilisation.

  There was truth in what Ferdinand said, they resembled nothing so much as those homes the poorest and most destitute of Albionmen constructed for themselves about the edges of cities: York, Durham, Edinburgh. Here, though, there seemed no city for this parasite to attach.

  Yet beneath the mean shanty-town and its despondent, sagging walls lay not sand nor untamed filth but rather a great stone pavement. In the better-served parts of Durham, men walked upon the same cut-flags outside as lay inside the university buildings, though most had been pulled up for use within homes and public buildings. Aside from the squares where had they need of them?

  But here, here the great stone pavement ran from the shore it hugged into the forest. Leaning so far out of the window that her feet hardly touched the boards below, now that she saw it Hajar could trace its passage beneath the ancient trees. Though they overhung it, it seemed they could burst through it.

  “Peculiar,” Hajar muttered, angling herself to see more of the land that came beneath them.

  “HAJAR,” Ferdinand choked, and as she lost her balance his huge hands shot forth to seize her waist and haul her from the window. “I brought you to show you houses, not invite you to suicide, mother of weevils, you are as mad as them!”

  “I only lost my footing.”

  “Would you not refrain from death, please, Gooddaughter al-Fihri,” Ferdinand chided, in a voice she had heard fathers chide their sons in the street after a terrible scare. “I have seen enough of it.” He composed himself slowly, and released her without haste. “And I should not like to have to one day find and tell your mother.”

  For of course, she had told him of her. What else was there to speak of, travelling through the forests?

  “And have you no mother to tell?” Hajar snorted, brushing down her shift, though she was sure he was too old to have a mother still able to understand the telling of it.

  “Do you remember the Haakonshire plagues?” he asked. “Ten years ago. Took the Prefect and his wife, and two of their small infants along with most of the livestock and half the farms in range? Do you remember that Edinburgh had to build walls of flame to keep it from the city?”

  “Filth in the water,” Hajar said, “yes, I remember.” She had been living farther south, then, her mother preferring the shortened distance to travel back and forth from the Frankish territories. The contamination and burning and the almost entire inaccurate prediction of both Jeppesen and lesser Divinators had been broadcast, however.

  As each week had passed without cure or resolution the voices of Albion Broadcasting had been thrown from their calm.

  “Yes, you remember,” Ferdinand echoed. “So there is no one left to tell, now that Hugo is gone.”

  Making sure of her footing this time, Hajar turned back to the window and pointed to the great paved road that ran from the shore into the trees. “Something is awry down there.”

  “There is always something awry,” Ferdinand said, still lost, Hajar thought, in the past. “That is the way of the world.”

  “I wonder what happened,” said Hajar, more to herself than to he, who dwelt in memory. “Some great catastrophe.”

  * * *

  By mid-afternoon they came to halt. Hajar had not yet been able to attain satisfactory explanation for how this was achieved ‘gainst the caprice of the breeze, and indeed anyone she asked had seemed near offended that she might wish to know.

  She was summoned to the hatch-room.

  She was not called
upon alone but rather with Benjon’s occupied body, Ferdinand, and El Alacrán. The first was bloodied to the elbow, for it seemed that he had been engaged again in the removal of or repair of some human bodies even as she and Ferdinand had laboured to repair the hall, and the last was flecked with white paint, so that he seemed mottled with light that did not move when he did.

  They were then, the strangers, joined by Ærndís, and Qingting. There were others about, both human and arthropod, but three men and one fly-by-water busied themselves about a contraption of stretched cloth and bound wooden slats. It was plain the make-up of her party was this.

  “Water,” said a sky-man who, in defiance of the smooth faces of his fellows, had grown a most prodigious set of moustaches. “Fill skins and tie to the ropes, eh, we’ll just pull it like balloons. Same with any fruit. No seedlings on this journey, no wood, we must check first, eh? So. No animals til we know them good for stewing. Welcome to stew them down there –” he laughed, and Ærndís laughed with him.

  Hajar could see nothing funny in this.

  “And get some bearing, some history, from those houses, then, find us a direction. What are the trade winds, if they know, eh?” the whiskered man concluded.

  Hajar said, “They’ll like not speak any tongue we speak, if this is uncharted land.”

  The whiskered sky-man waved away the protest with an idle flap of his hand. “Sign, scrawl, scratch the sand. We make dumbshow with newcomers, everyone learns soon enough.”

  “What if they want to trade for information?” Ferdinand asked.

  The sky-man seemed angered by this suggestion, and threw his arms up.

  “Oh, sell them the promise of eggs tomorrow or beads that see the future, then, eh? Some lie. We have nothing.” He tugged at his moustaches. “We give nothing. Get the best from them. So.”

  “How noble,” Ferdinand muttered, when the whiskered sky-man had turned from them to address the party with their sailing mechanism. “Give nothing? They’re living in shacks.”

  “If there’s anyone down there at all,” Hajar added. “We saw houses, not men.”