Larklight

by Philip Reeve

  ‘Where are we?’ she gasped.

  ‘On Sir Isaac’s Golden Roads,’ said Jack, floating past her with a triumphant look. ‘Ssilissa has worked her magic in the great alembic and pushed us almost to the speed of light. No mortal eye can track us now, nor any ship follow us.’

  I swam through the littered air to take my sister by the hand. ‘It’s all right, Myrtle,’ I promised. ‘There was a small misunderstanding with some gentlemen of the Royal Navy, but all is well now; we are safe and en route to Mount Ghastly again.’

  ‘I’m afraid you ain’t,’ said Jack, turning suddenly sombre. ‘I can’t risk another set-to with that frigate. The fact is we’re wanted men. Why, just last week we boarded and robbed two fat vessels coming home from Mars, all full of rich nabobs and their ladies travelling back to Earth for this famous Exhibition affair. I had thought if we laid low among the mountains of the Moon a while the hue and cry would die away, but it seems the bluecoats are still a-hunting us. We shall have to hide ourselves further afield, at a place I know far out of harm’s way in the darksome deeps of space.’

  ‘But what about us?’ wailed Myrtle, starting to sniffle.

  Jack Havock gave the gravity-free equivalent of a shrug. ‘We’ll touch at a port again in a week or so,’ he said. ‘Till then, you’d better make the most of our spacefaring life, miss. You and your brother are going to be pirates for a while.’

  Chapter Eight

  In Which Myrtle and I Enjoy Breakfast with Our New Shipmates.

  When I woke next morning, in a swaying hammock strung up between the beams of one of the Sophronia’s little narrow side-cabins, it took me a few moments to recall where I was, and what had happened to me. Then, like a douche of cold water, all my terrible memories of the day before came crashing down on me: the white spiders, Father’s capture, the Potter Moth and the battle with the Indefatigable.

  I pulled aside the thick felt curtain which hung across the porthole near my hammock, and golden light filled up my little cabin. I had seen it often from a distance, that glow of alchemy which surrounds our aether-ships as they speed across the Heavens.5 To be wrapped up inside that mystic, protecting veil of light myself was wonderful, and suddenly, despite all the dreadful things that had befallen me, I could not quite suppress a feeling of excitement.

  I rolled out of my hammock, drifted to the cubby hole where I had stowed my clothes, and dressed. Enticing smells were seeping between the planks of my cabin door, and when I ventured out into the main part of the ship I saw the crew gathered around a table, tucking into a breakfast of fried red whizzer and potato cakes.

  I hung back at first, afraid to join them, for they looked more fearsome and outlandish than I’d recalled, but then Ssilissa saw me and bobbed her long, delicate head in my direction, and Nipper turned and drew me down to the table with a friendly claw.

  ‘Where are we?’ I enquired, as I watched Grindle (who was ship’s cook) fill a pewter dish with food for me and clap a lid quickly over it to stop anything floating away.

  ‘Running fair and true down the Golden Roads,’ replied Nipper.

  ‘Out in the darklymost deeps of space we be, far south of Earth,’ chuckled Grindle.

  ‘Don’t tell him all our business,’ said Jack Havock, who lounged in mid-air at the far end of the table, picking his teeth and looking thoughtful.

  ‘But he’s one of us, now, Jack!’ Nipper protested.

  ‘Is he?’ Jack flung his toothpick aside and it floated up into the drift of clutter which hung bobbing beneath the ribbed roof. ‘I don’t think so. Does he know what it’s like to be an object of curiosity, and a fugitive from the law? He’s only a kid, so we must feed him and keep him safe, but don’t get to thinking he’s one of us. He’d sell us out in an instant, if ever he could.’

  ‘Oh, but I wouldn’t, I swear …’ I declared, and I was about to pledge my allegiance to the Sophronia and its crew, but Myrtle spoiled things, as usual. She emerged from her own cabin with her hair all tangled and straggling up on end in the no-gravity.

  ‘Why is there no water for me to wash in?’ she demanded angrily. ‘And, Art, I forbid you to eat anything that creature cooks; his hands are quite black with grime. Indeed, this entire vessel is in a most disagreeable state of filth.’

  I blushed with shame; some of the crew-beings laughed, others looked shocked. Jack Havock simply glared at my sister. Then he reached out and snatched one of the pewter globes which served the crew as drinking cups. He unscrewed the two halves, and flicked out a wobbling sphere of water. ‘You want water, miss? Here, have some.’

  I suspect that Jack and his friends must sometimes have indulged in water fights to while away the boredom of the spacial deeps, for his aim was perfect. Like a great, uncertain balloon the water globe went rolling through the air, and struck my sister full in her angry face, where it burst into a million smaller globes which swam off in every direction. ‘Oh!’ cried Myrtle, and some other things too, but her words were all drowned out by the coarse, delighted laughter of the crew.

  Jack Havock didn’t laugh. ‘I’m sorry you find our home so dirty,’ he said coldly. ‘Fact is, we are kept too busy running from your navy to ever take much trouble cleaning her. We don’t carry passengers as a rule, neither. Them as ship out aboard Sophronia have to work their passage. I didn’t think you and your brother looked much good for working, miss, but now you have set a notion in my head. While you sail with us, you’ll be our cleaners. You’ll scrub and polish and tidy up after us, and see if you cannot get our vessel into a state that does please you.’

  He pushed himself away from the table and went soaring up towards a high platform. Grindle and Munkulus tumbled about in mid-air, bellowing with laughter, while my poor sister stood wet and furious in the open doorway of her cabin. Tears squeezed out of her eyes and bobbed up to join the spreading halo of water that hung above her.

  I wondered if I should go to her aid, for I did feel a little sorry for her, but I was angry too. I had felt that the pirates were beginning to accept me, and now, thanks to her outburst, I was to be nothing but a skivvy aboard their ship. So I turned my attention to my breakfast (it is no easy matter eating red whizzer and potato cakes in zero BSG, but years of experience at Larklight had made me pretty good at it) and in the end it was Ssilissa who went quietly over to take Myrtle’s hand and lead her to the table.

  ‘There, missss,’ said the blue girl, quite kindly, pushing breakfast and a globe of tea towards her. ‘We have not always time to wasssh aboard Ssophronia, but eat, and I shall find you ssoap and water when you’re done.’

  Myrtle scowled at the dish before her and said, ‘I cannot accept food that has been stolen from poor, murdered people.’

  ‘What people?’ asked Nipper innocently, and Grindle cried out, ‘A murder? Where?’

  Myrtle tilted her chin haughtily at them all. ‘Can you deny that your vittles were all stolen from those ships your captain boasts of having boarded and robbed so recently?’

  ‘I caught them fish myself,’ cried Grindle angrily, ‘up on the star deck with my rod and line.’

  ‘The potatoes were stolen though,’ admitted Nipper, looking sheepish.6

  ‘But we have not murdered anyone!’ said Ssilissa, her frill of head-fronds bristling with shock at the very suggestion. ‘We may be piratess, misss, but we are not murderersss! Why, we only ever aim our cannon at their wingss and exhaust-trumpetss, and when we board them we carry unloaded gunsss.’

  ‘We flourish our swords about a great deal, to be sure,’ Nipper admitted.

  ‘And ssometimessss we have to thump some eager aethernaut on the head to stop him harming ussss …’

  ‘But we would none of us wish to kill anyone.’

  ‘But all the stories in the public press …’ Myrtle began.

  How the pirates laughed at that! ‘They are just sstories, misss,’ said Ssilissa. ‘The newsspapermen exaggerate, and perhaps the crews of the shipsss we rob exaggerate too …’


  ‘Wouldn’t look good for ’em to go home to their owners and say they’d been boarded and stripped bare by a young ’un and a bunch of harmless creatures like ourselves,’ chuckled Grindle, and tears of mirth popped from his eyes and orbited his head like a cloud of sequins.

  ‘I’ve seen it said Jack’s ten foot tall, with a great black bushy beard!’ giggled Nipper.

  ‘Then what about the Saturn Expedition?’ cried my sister. ‘The aether-ship Aeneas lost along with a hundred men, and everyone knows it was Jack Havock and his crew who were to blame!’

  ‘Everyone knowss wrong then, misss,’ Ssilissa said.

  ‘Uncharted aether lies between Jupiter and Saturn,’ said Nipper, lowering his eye-stalks in respect for the lost expedition. ‘Anything could have befallen the Aeneas out there, and it was nobody’s fault but Dr Ptarmigan’s, for being so rash as to go there.’

  ‘Why would we want to attack a scientifical expedition, anyhow?’ demanded Grindle. ‘They don’t carry nothing but instruments, and brainy coves in wigs and frock-coats. Those Company ships from Mars though; they was stuffed with gold and silver …’

  ‘Crystal!’ said Nipper happily.

  ‘Lovely sssilk gowns,’ sighed Ssilissa.

  ‘And all we had to do to get them was fire a few shots across their bows and run aboard whooping and hulooing and waving our empty guns,’ said Grindle. ‘It was Jack Havock’s reputation that did the rest. Those rich Earthlets were falling over themselves to surrender to us and give us their worldy goods. Why, if Jack had let us take all they offered they wouldn’t have had air or food enough left to get themselves to London.’

  ‘We ain’t murderers though, miss,’ said Nipper, seeing my sister flinch as Grindle cackled toothily at his memories of past robberies. ‘We’re most of us just poor orphans, who were imprisoned till Jack freed us and found a way for us to make a living out here.’

  Myrtle looked suspiciously at him. She had not spoken directly to Nipper yet, for I fear she thought it was beneath her dignity to talk to a crustacean, but his words intrigued her enough that she asked, ‘Pray, what were you imprisoned for, Mr Nipper?

  It was Ssilissa who answered her. ‘For being different, misss. You are mossst of you kind enough, you earthly people, but there are some among you who cannot sssee an unusual creature like Nipper or Squidley or Yarg or myself without feeling a need to prod and poke and quiz and otherwise examine us. With the exsseption of Grindle and Mr Munkulus, we all grew up in a place where we were ssstudied and tormented, and might have died, had it not been for our dear friend Jack.’

  ‘The Royal Xenological Institute,’ said Nipper, and for once there was no kindness in his voice, just loathing and a trace of fear.

  I stared at Myrtle, hoping to catch her eye and remind her that it would not be a good idea to let on to these assorted monsters that our own poor father had been a corresponding member of the Institute. But Myrtle was looking up at the helm, where Jack Havock was studiedly ignoring her.

  ‘Mr Havock seems to have a fondness for orphans,’ she remarked, and blushed red, causing her to clash horribly with Ssilissa, who had come out in purple blotches.

  ‘He is an orphan himself,’ confided Nipper. ‘His parents were part of the colony on Venus. And you know what happened there, miss.’

  ‘Then they are not exactly dead,’ I said. ‘I mean, not technically …’ But Myrtle booted me hard under the table. I think she was afraid that I would hurt Jack Havock’s feelings, which seemed pretty ripe, considering it was she who had been calling him a murderer and so forth not five minutes earlier!

  ‘Venus,’ she said quietly. ‘Oh, how dreadful! And how glad I am that fate never took me anywhere near that accursed orb.’

  ‘Oh, but fate’s taking you there now, miss!’ said Nipper cheerfully.

  ‘At leasst, the Ssophronia is,’ Ssilissa said.

  ‘What’s an orb?’ asked Grindle.

  Jack Havock rejoined us, drifting down light as any feather to hover at my side. For all his show of ignoring us he had clearly heard every word we spoke, for he said, ‘Nothing to fear. It is a good hiding place, that’s all. After all, who would go to Venus now?’

  Chapter Nine

  In Which We Make Landfall on the Morning Star.

  You will know all about Venus, of course. Everyone knows what befell the colonies there in ’39 when the Changeling Trees came into flower.

  I thought that Myrtle would faint again when Jack told her we were going there, but she didn’t. She just went very quiet and ate her breakfast, and afterwards set to work cleaning the ship. I believe that what she had learned about Jack had made her change her opinion of him. Before that she had thought him irredeemably wicked, but now she had decided that he was simply a poor sinner who had suffered, and had gone astray, and that by setting the right example she might persuade him to give up his life of crime and piracy.

  In the days that we spent travelling to Venus she must have scrubbed and buffed and polished every inch of the Sophronia’s great main cabin, and she made me help, I’m sorry to say. It did not look bad when we had finished, and I think the pirates were impressed – or maybe they were just amazed at us; it is hard to tell when you are dealing with crabs and sea squirts and hobgoblins. The hardest part was gathering up all the crumbs and scraps and half-eaten crusts which floated about. Chasing after them with her dustpan and brush, Myrtle declared, ‘What you really need, Mr Havock, is a good-sized herd of hoverhogs.’

  ‘Hoverhogs? Not on my ship,’ replied Jack Havock sullenly. I believe he knew that she was trying to improve him, and rued the day he had appointed her ship’s cleaner.

  They had what I believe learned coves call a ‘Clash of Personalities’, my sister and the pirate chief. Often I caught her staring at him when his back was turned, as if considering other ways to save his soul, and when her back was turned Jack Havock stared at her, probably thinking how much simpler his life would be if he just opened a hatch and kicked her overboard.

  In the breaks between her bouts of tidying, Myrtle would retire into the small cabin that we shared, and there scribble furiously in her diary, doubtless noting down all sorts of details which she hoped might one day be used in evidence against Jack and his crew when they were brought to justice. Meanwhile, I busied myself repairing the chain of her locket, which you will remember she had contrived to break when we were upon the Moon. I did it pretty well too, but when I offered Myrtle the locket back she said, ‘Please keep it safe upon your person for a little longer, Art. I fear that if Jack Havock sees it he will be tempted to rob me.’

  I returned the locket to my jacket pocket, though privately I felt certain that Jack and his friends would not have tried to steal it. They were too busy dividing up the mounds of loot which they had stolen from those Martian ships they’d raided. I do not know quite who it was who started the rumour that crime does not pay, but I can assure you they were wrong. It pays very well, and my shipmates’ ill-gotten gains included chests of gold and silver, diamond necklaces, crates of fine-quality Martian crystalware, as well as all manner of pocket watches and cufflinks and other trinkets. As for the silk gowns which Ssilissa had stolen, I suspect they made even Myrtle think that piracy on the high aether would not be such a bad way to make a living.

  All told, there was so much going on that I almost forgot we were bound for the most notorious world in the Empire. But eventually the dread day came when the engines slowed, the golden glow of our swift progress through the aether faded from the windows and the cold green light of the Morning Star spilled in upon us.

  Nowadays our former colonies on Venus are all fallen into ruin and decay, and the planet is deserted but for a few mining camps down near the southern pole. So at least we did not need to fear being observed as the Sophronia carried us down into that steam bath of an atmosphere and settled upon a stretch of blue grass between the foresty uplands and the edge of the sea. But I feared other things. I glanced nervously towards the forests, whic
h seemed to be exhaling mist. The blue-green foliage of the Changeling Trees stirred softly in currents which had nothing to do with the wind.

  Nipper slapped me on the back with a friendly pincer. ‘Nothing to fear, young Art. Once every fifty years; that’s when the Changelings flower. Jack says they won’t be in bloom again until 1889, by which time we’ll all be old and rich and far away from here.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, trying to sound brave. But what if he were wrong? What if some of the trees were blossoming at that very moment, and their invisible pollen was hanging all about us in the steamy air?

  No such gloomy thought seemed to trouble my shipmates. Myrtle is always too busy reading about dresses and things to take an interest in the articles in the Boy’s Own Journal and other important journals, so perhaps she did not know the details of what had happened to the Venus colonies. (Or maybe she was too proud to let Jack Havock see they worried her. She was certainly giving him a very funny look as we disembarked.) As for the rest, I believe they would all have followed Jack into the gates of Hell if he had asked them to.