Larklight

by Philip Reeve

  With an immense effort I managed to shout, ‘Help!’ I did not expect any help to come, there in that unmapped corner of the Moon, but it seemed the only thing to do, and I felt my loathsome companion recoiling slightly from the noise I made. ‘Help!’ I shouted again.

  To my astonishment, I heard an answering cry. A moment later something struck the jar from outside. A star of hairline cracks appeared, then widened beneath the impact of a second blow. I heard voices without, shouting, ‘Over here!’ and, ‘There’s someone walled up in this one!’ English voices! Hurrah, I thought, and shouted out, ‘Help!’ again, loud as ever I could, by way of an encouragement to my rescuers.

  One whole side of the jar suddenly fell away, and as the light spilled in on us I had my first look at the creature whose breakfast I was to have been. It would have given Mr Poe himself bad dreams. A hairy maggot half as high as me, it reared up on the hindmost of its hundred legs and opened a complicated mouth full of huge teeth to hiss at me. I didn’t see any eyes, though I suppose it didn’t need any, living as it did in the dark inside a jar. Anyway, I had only a split second to study it; then there came an immense thunderclap from somewhere close to my right ear and the top of the jar vanished in a spray of flying fragments, taking most of the caterpillar with it.

  There were enough knives and revolving pistols stuck through his belt to make him look very desperate indeed.

  There was a smell which I supposed must be gun powder, and quite a lot of smoke. A hand gripped my shoulder and rolled me over. A face looked down at me.

  I don’t know what I was expecting. One of those Great White Hunters, perhaps, who are forever setting off into the wilds of Africa or Mars in search of big game, with only a few native guides and their trusty elephant gun for company. Well, my rescuer had an elephant gun all right, but otherwise he looked not one bit like the hunters I’d read of in books. He was not much more than a boy himself, for one thing; just about Myrtle’s age. He wore high boots and a very ancient wideawake hat, and his face, which was the only part of him not covered by his tarpaulin spacesuitings, was the brown of well-stewed tea. There were enough knives and revolving pistols stuck through his belt to make him look very desperate indeed, but I was relieved to see another human being at all, so I said, as clearly as I could through my numb lips, ‘Thank you. I am Arthur Mumby. How do you do?’

  The brown boy put a finger to his mouth, hushing me. Then other figures came barging from behind him, snatching me and heaving me upright, and I might have tried to run had I been able, for these newcomers were not human at all. Fingers and tentacles rummaged in my pockets, and something like a man-sized blue lizard held a flask against my lips. Scalding liquid trickled down my throat, and I choked and panicked and spewed and fell back gasping.

  ‘Quiet,’ said the boy with the elephant gun.

  ‘It tastes foul!’ I spluttered.

  ‘It’s rum,’ he replied.

  ‘Yes, it is rather.’

  ‘Jamaican rum. It will counteract the moth’s venom.’

  Sure enough, I quickly found that I could move again, although my arms and legs felt stiff and strange, and I had awful pins and needles. I started to whisper my thanks, and then had a terrible thought. ‘Myrtle!’ I gasped.

  ‘What?’ asked the boy, and his inhuman friends all looked at one another and shrugged and sighed and murmured.

  ‘My sister!’ I went on eagerly. ‘I think that creature caught her too!’

  The boy looked grim, and I could well see why. Where we were standing, half a hundred jars lay heaped about in the shade of a rocky ridge, and although some had shattered most had no more than a small hole where infant moths must have hatched out, and looked quite intact. One of them, I knew, must still be whole, and contain poor Myrtle. But which?

  I’m afraid I started to blub. It seemed so unfair to have one’s father eaten by a spider and one’s sister devoured by a caterpillar on the same day (though I suppose flies must put up with that sort of thing all the time and you do not hear them moaning about it). I thought how sad it was to be all alone, and felt terribly sorry that the last time I had spoken to Myrtle was to tell her off for being impolite to fungi.

  ‘Stop piping your eye,’ the boy said softly. ‘That moth might still be about.’ But instead of keeping quiet himself he turned to the strangest of his companions – two things that looked like walking sea anemones, with not so much as an arm or a head or a face between them, only spreading crowns of writhesome, delicate tentacles. ‘There’s another Earth child trapped somewhere here, boys,’ he said. ‘Can you sniff out her thoughts?’

  The reefs of jars shifted and chinked as the weird pair set about their work, scrambling around on their soft, pad-like feet, touching and feeling the jars with the tips of their tentacles. At last they settled on one that seemed more interesting than the others, and began to trill and coo, their tentacles flickering with light. The boy and his goblin companions pulled out hatchets and set to work, quickly staving in the side of the jar.

  Inside lay Myrtle, quite whole and unharmed, still clutching the handles of her carpet-bag. Although she had been taken first she must have been sealed in her jar after me, for she was still unconscious, and all that lay at her feet was a quivering, soft-shelled egg. Our rescuer squashed it with his boot, and his friends carried Myrtle to a flat, sandy space between the mounds of jars and tipped their foul-tasting liquor into her. She woke up coughing and protesting, then started to scream when she saw the ring of weird, inhuman faces leering down at her. ‘Art! Who are these dreadful people?’

  ‘I’m Jack,’ said the boy rather coldly, as if he didn’t much like having his friends called dreadful. ‘These are my crew; good shipmates, all. And you’d be wise to keep your voice down, missy, for that moth may still be about.’

  ‘What moth?’ asked Myrtle, quite mystified.

  ‘The Potter Moth,’ said Jack. ‘It haunts these parts. Makes its nest on those spires of rock and swoops down on passing travellers to make a breakfast of for its larvae. A maggot would be mumbling on your bones by now, if me and my men hadn’t fetched you out.’

  ‘They are hardly men,’ Myrtle pointed out pedantically.

  The boy called Jack ignored her. ‘The moth takes snails and mushroom-folk mostly, but it don’t mind rich little Earth boys and girls when it can get ’em. Bright things draw it. I expect it saw the flashing of that pretty necklace of yours from its eyrie.’

  ‘So that’s what the mushroom-gentleman was trying to tell us!’ I cried.

  ‘Course it was,’ said Jack. ‘And it’s a pity you didn’t listen to him. Luckily, he knew our ship was moored near here, and he came and told us that two ignorant Earth children were wandering into the moth’s hunting-runs. Now, hide your trinket away, so that we can start back in peace.’ And he reached out and tried to stuff Myrtle’s locket down inside the collar of her dress.

  ‘How dare you touch me!’ Myrtle squealed, flapping him away. The chain that held the locket broke, and it fell slowly to the ground. Myrtle stumbled backwards and sat down heavily, raising a small cloud of dust and shell fragments that might have buried the locket for ever, if yours truly had not had the presence of mind to scoop it up and pocket it. (Myrtle’s brown serge dress had no pockets whatever, so I felt it my place to look after the locket until we could have the chain repaired.)

  ‘I am a subject of Her Britannic Majesty,’ announced Myrtle, who had grown very red. ‘And that locket was given me by my dear, departed mama! Oh, this is intolerable! I insist that you take me and my little brother to the Governor at once!’

  This outburst did not have quite the reaction Myrtle must have hoped for. Our new friends all chuckled and nudged each other, very amused I suppose by how easily we had let ourselves be turned into caterpillar food. ‘They’re pretty green,’ I heard one of them say, but he was grey, with four arms, so who was he to talk?

  Jack scowled at her, as if he wasn’t used to people taking such a tone with him, nor sure
quite how he should react. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’ he said at last. ‘What brings you to the Moon?’

  ‘Please, sir,’ I said, being keen to make a good impression on our saviours before my sister could say something else to anger them, ‘we are from Larklight, sir. It is a house; a sort of floating house, up there. It was attacked by monstrous spiders, and our poor father eaten up.’

  This stopped the laughter of the goblin crew, at least. Jack looked at me. ‘Then you are orphans?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  That seemed to change his opinion of us. He looked at us with a sort of grudging pity. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Our ship’s a few miles back. We’d best take you aboard her.’

  ‘What ship?’ asked Myrtle angrily, as he went stalking off between the heaps of jars, his gun across his shoulder. ‘He is only a boy, Art. How can he have a ship?’

  One of the boy’s followers reached down to help her up, but Myrtle recoiled, because the creature was a type of gigantic land-crab and instead of a hand he was proffering her a hand-sized, blue-black pincer. He peeked at her from inside his shell and said earnestly, ‘You’ll be all right, missy. No harm comes to them as sails the aether sea with Captain Jack Havock.’

  ‘Oh, get away from me, you horrid insect!’ my sister wailed.

  The blue lizard thing came close to her from the other side, and she sprang up to escape it and found herself going after the boy almost by accident, with the crabbish fellow and all the rest of the crew clustering around her, glancing at the sky behind us from time to time and keeping their cutlasses and blunderbusses ready. I ran along behind, calling out as loudly as I dared, ‘He’s not Jack Havock! He simply cannot be!’

  Chapter Six

  We Board The Aether-ship Sophronia, Where I Make a Remarkable Discovery Concerning the Chemical Wedding.

  The real Jack Havock was no boy of fifteen; of that I felt perfectly certain. Nobody knew very much about who he was, or where he had sprung from, but on one thing everyone was clear; he was no mere boy. How could he be? He was the Terror of the Aetheric Main, a daring pirate chief who had been raiding ships of the Royal Interplanetary Company for the past three years, and slipping away afterwards with the holds of his brig stuffed full of booty. When Dr Ptarmigan’s expedition to Saturn was lost without trace, it was Jack Havock they blamed. The pictures I’d seen all showed him as a brawny buccaneer with lighted tapers blazing in his beard and a cutlass gripped between his teeth, boarding helpless merchant ships with a pistol in either hand and his gang of monstrous Callistans and armoured Ionians yowling behind him. I wondered how this slight, brown boy with his ragtag following of lizards and crustacea dared steal Jack Havock’s name. What if the real Jack Havock found out, and came to claim it back?

  I caught up with Myrtle and took her hand. She looked at me with wide, shocked eyes. ‘We must escape from these villains, Art!’ she whispered.

  ‘Just because they look a little odd,’ I said, ‘it does not make them villains. They saved us from the Potter Moth, after all. They may help us to reach the authorities.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ sighed Myrtle. She called out, ‘Boy! When we reach your ship, I shall insist that you take us straight to the Governor’s residence in Port George. We must inform his Excellency about the spiders which invaded our home, so that he can arrange for a gunboat and a few squads of redcoats to go and deal with them.’

  Jack looked back at her, but he did not stop walking. ‘I’m not planning to go nowhere near Port George, missy.’

  ‘Oh, but sir,’ I said, running to catch him up, ‘it may be most terribly important! These spiders were like nothing I have ever heard of before! Even our father was surprised by them, and he has been studying the strange creatures of the Heavens for ever so many years! I believe they must have come from beyond the borders of known space; from Saturn or even Uranus –’

  ‘Art!’ warned Myrtle, interrupting me. ‘Polite people refer to that lonely planet by its original name, Georgium Sidus. It provides less opportunity for cheap jokes.’

  ‘Myrtle,’ I cried, ‘how can you worry about such trifles at a time like this? Father has been ate! The whole Empire may be under threat from these spider things!’

  ‘All the more reason to keep up our guard against coarseness and crudity,’ said Myrtle.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry about your father,’ said Jack, still walking, ‘but I don’t give a d—n about your Empire.’

  ‘Oh!’ squeaked Myrtle, and I could not tell if it were the boy’s lack of patriotism which shocked her most or his shameless use of the d-word.

  ‘You think it makes any odds to me and my crew?’ he went on. ‘Don’t matter to us whether we live under the rule of Queen Victoria or a bunch of creepy-crawlies who have crept out of Ur—… Out of Georgium Sidus. We’ll still be outcasts, won’t we, boys? Still have to live by our wits, and hide out in the black where the writ of no law runs …’

  His followers nodded and muttered their agreement. In desperation, Myrtle tried to appeal to our new friend’s mercenary instincts.

  ‘Please take us to the Governor’s residence! I shall recommend that he offers you a small reward for your assistance …’

  Jack stopped walking when she said that. He turned, raised his gun, and pointed it at Myrtle’s head.

  ‘Oh, very well, you blackguard!’ she squealed, ducking. ‘A large reward!’

  The gun went off, and the echoes rumbled like rolling thunder among the silent lunar mountains. It had not really been pointing at Myrtle, of course, but at the great moth which had been gliding down on silent wings out of the sky behind her. Bits of the monster – its legs and feelers and the silvery dust from its wings – rained down about us as the gun smoke cleared.

  ‘Told you to keep your voice down, missy,’ called Jack. The recoil of his gun had carried him fifty feet away, and he stood waiting for us there beneath a spinney of mushroom-trees.

  ‘Good shooting, Cap’n!’ his goblins chorused, dancing little jigs of victory on the moth’s remains, and getting slime all up their trousers. ‘There’s one moth as won’t be snatching up poor little mushroom-people ever more! Fine shooting, Captain Jack!’

  I started to wonder, as we set off again, whether he might be the real Jack Havock after all. His crew certainly looked wild and rough enough. As we walked on, I took the opportunity to study them, and listen to their talk, and started to learn their names. There was a stocky Ionian with a chest like a barrel and four thick-fingered arms, whom the others addressed respectfully as ‘Mr Munkulus’, and whom I took to be the first mate. There were those two walking sea anenomes, almost identical, with crowns of gently waving arms where their heads should have been, who did not talk, but cooed and trilled like birds; they were Squidley and Yarg, the Tentacle Twins. Then there was a hobgoblin named Grindle, whose speech seemed to consist entirely of dreadful sounding curses. I saw my sister blush each time he opened his mouth, and the big crab-like thing, whose name was Nipper, kept turning round to him and saying, ‘Language, Mr Grindle! Don’t forget there are ladies present!’

  I couldn’t understand what he meant by ‘ladies’ at first, until I looked again at the blue, spiny-headed lizard thing. There was something rather graceful and girlish about the way it moved, and I began to suspect that it was a female – though of what species I could not imagine, for there were no blue, talking lizards in any encyclopaedia I’d ever read. After we had gone a mile or so the lizard confirmed my suspicions by delicately extending a blue hand to my sister and saying, ‘I’m Ssilissa, misss; it’ll be nice to have another girl aboard.’

  Myrtle started back, looking deeply shocked. I’m not sure what upset her more – Ssilissa’s sharp teeth and flickering, pointed, jet black tongue, or the fact that she was wearing trousers.

  In this strange company we walked another mile, and found ourselves passing through the fringes of a lunar forest of widely-spaced mushroom-trees, some of which towered to several hundred feet in the Moo
n’s low gravity. We turned along a narrow, rocky defile, overhung by the spreading mushroom-tops, and there ahead of us sat an aether-ship, perched on the floor of a canyon, and quite invisible until we were almost upon her. She was only about a quarter of the size of the freighter which delivered our groceries at Larklight, and the metal bands which sheathed her timber hull were streaked with rust and speckled with space barnacles and clumps of hanging weed. She looked at least a hundred years old, and at her rear, above the bulbous exhaust-trumpets of her wedding chamber, the mullioned windows of a fine old stern gallery glinted with the light of distant Earth. There was gilded carving underneath the windows; birds and angels and a peeling, painted scroll that bore her name:

  ‘What a filthy old ship!’ exclaimed Myrtle as soon as she saw it. ‘Surely you don’t expect us to go aboard it? It cannot be safe!’

  ‘She’ll fly,’ said Jack, turning to glower at her, and his friends glowered too, for no aethernaut likes to hear his ship disparaged, however humble she may be. Jack took a heavy key from his pocket and fitted it into the lock on the ship’s big, arched hatchway. ‘I’m sorry she don’t meet your high standards, Miss Mumby. Maybe you’d prefer to walk after all?’

  ‘I did not say that,’ replied Myrtle, looking prim, and then primmer still as Jack heaved the hatch open and the fuggy, musty, shipboard smell of the Sophronia’s innards spilled over us.