When We Have Wings

by Claire Corbett

  This singing is the truest Flight I ever heard.

  Now I’d stumbled out onto an outcrop of cloud, and stood up to my calves in cloud-stuff like a cherub in a painting, unable to see anything but plum mist on three sides and one starry wall of sky falling to black water—and there in front of me, his back to me, his white wings spread wide, stood Eros.

  My vision of Peri flashed across my mind. My dream had been trying to tell me something. I knew where I’d seen that god’s walk before. The god was a goddess, her movement too sinuous for a man. The tall girl looked like Peri. But could it really be her? Her hair had been sheared off and dyed and her feathers were the wrong colour but that was nothing; many fliers at SkyNation were more elaborately altered than that.

  ‘Peri!’ I yelled.

  The figure turned and gasped. Then she spun away and launched herself like a great white bird into the dark.

  I crept as close to the edge of the cloud-that-was-not-cloud as I dared, trying to make out where she’d flown, but she’d disappeared. What was she doing here?

  Then terror laid its grip on my head and neck and heart. I shivered in the high cold night air. Where was baby Hugo? For, if he was gone, what wouldn’t Peri do? What desperation and rage and hate was now driving her?

  The bridge glided to the right far below me and I realised I was drifting. In one heartstopping instant I saw that my outcrop of cloud was dissolving, its edges breaking up, streaming away into the air. There was no link now to the walkway I’d used to climb up. So this was how I would die. I laughed out loud. Who could have foreseen that though I’d come to SkyNation focused on Thomas, I’d ended up hot on the case instead, still chasing that damn fool girl Peri? I’d made a stupid mistake and would pay with my life.

  I am as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm carrieth away.

  Well, Marmaduke Thomas St John ‘Pat’ Pattle, old chap, looks like this is it, eh? I patted my jacket pockets. Might as well go down with my aviator glasses on. As I felt inside my pocket my hand closed around something else—my SkyNation pass. Christ, you’re a flaming clot, the ghost of Marmaduke said to me. Nearly bought the farm for no good reason other than LMF. That’s lack of moral fibre to you, old son.

  I used the pass to navigate me to the only walkway still connected to my cloud, which had been hidden from me on the other side of the cloud tower. This walkway led me back down to the net I’d seen earlier from the castle. Now it was packed full of performers and partygoers and the music of Songs from the Blue was much louder here.

  As I steadied myself on the net, jostled by jugglers and clowns and musicians, I rang Halley. ‘Halley, I’ve seen Peri. She’s here and I’m worried she’s going to do something crazy. I’ve got to find her or at least warn someone.’

  ‘Sorry?’ replied Halley, her voice breaking up. ‘Can’t hear you, Zeke. Where are you? Can you hear me?’

  ‘Halley, listen. Oh, Christ, I’ve just realised Peri’s actually armed. That crossbow isn’t just part of her costume, I’m afraid.’ Deep tremors from the music shook my body.

  Halley’s voice crackled and dropped out in the static burst from some god-knew-what pulse of solar radiation or shuddering from a distant tsunami.

  ‘Who do I speak to about this?’ I was almost screaming into my slick. A richly robed man with flowing hair and beard and soft hat sitting on his head like the cap of a large black mushroom bumped into me, then turned back to stare at me as if I were deranged. A pin on his velvet robe proclaimed him to be Leonardo da Vinci.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ Halley said, her voice dropping in and out as the Songs from the Blue reverberated through SkyNation. She said something else I couldn’t hear, then added, ‘Peter’s giving his speech soon for the launch of Cloud City. I’m going there now.’

  ‘What’s Peter’s costume?’ I bellowed.

  ‘What?’

  A group of musicians harmonising with Songs from the Blue on didgeridoos, keyboards and kotos glared at me as I shouted.

  ‘Daedalus!’ yelled Halley. Her voice broke up again and I caught through the crackle and hiss the words ‘was an architect too’.

  I shook my slick and tried one last time. ‘Warn Peter and find some security, Halley. I’ll do my best to hunt down Peri or find someone to tell. I’ll meet you later at your table, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I thought I heard Halley say as her voice was submerged under the avalanche of blurring, buzzing sound, but I didn’t think she’d understood anything of what I’d said. And I had no fucking idea what Chesshyre dressed as Daedalus would actually look like. Draped in some sort of classical robe? He already had the wings.

  I rang Chesshyre but only got a message. Of course he wouldn’t be answering any calls now, not when he was about to give the biggest speech of his life.

  I looked around wildly but couldn’t see any security nor any sign of Eros from where I was forcing myself through the crowd. Angry glances and curses were thrown my way as I pushed towards the edge of the net nearest the castle, reasoning that if I could get back up to the top where Halley’s table was, I’d have a better view and more chance of seeing either Eros or a security patrol. The greater bulk of all these fliers, thronging like a massed choir of angels, was really hindering me; it was so hard to squeeze by all those wings and every time I snagged a feather I thought I’d get a punch in the face.

  Rising ahead of me, about a hundred metres away, gleamed the walkway leading to the castle, but at my current rate of progress I might as well be a kilometre away. Songs from the Blue swelled till I could barely hear myself think: it was as if the sounds had become the molecules of my own body and were vibrating me to their chords; as if I’d been seized by sound and was moving over the face of the earth as a great storm; as if I were part of the earthquake shaking the sea bed; as if I’d been thinned to vapour and flung wide to drift on the atmosphere, part of the planet-sized drama of the weather. How could anyone ever think the weather was boring? To fliers it was fascinating, a matter of life and death.

  Two fliers in fluoro jackets, who could have been security but were more likely paramedics, stood at the very edge of the net, looking down. I thought about trying to reach them but decided it was a waste of time.

  Finally, near the edge of the net, the densest press of the crowd thinned a little and I escaped up the walkway. The walkway was lined with fliers too, turning their heads towards Cloud City, which, formerly in shadow, was now being lit in a rising tide of light pouring up from its base.

  Breathing hard, I forced myself halfway up the catwalk and paused, looking back for a moment. Spotlights converged on the broad prow of Cloud City just as the tide of light reached it and my Zefiryn-enhanced vision could see Chesshyre standing right at the tip of the prow. A mass of people shifted and glittered in the light behind Chesshyre; I could pick out Halley, just behind and to the side of Chesshyre. David Brilliant stood further back, talking to a polished, important-looking woman I vaguely recognised. Just you wait, buddy. Your turn’s coming.

  Truly, I was running out of time. Chesshyre stared out over the crowd towards the castle, readying himself for his speech. As I’d foreseen, he’d draped himself in a white classical robe, which fell over one shoulder, and in his left hand he carried a chisel. Two wide purple bands crossed over his chest and disappeared over his shoulders. I supposed the bands represented the means by which Daedalus had affixed wings to himself and his son.

  Halley, I wanted to scream, get away from Chesshyre!

  I tried to call Halley but there was that sparkling, burring sound that indicated about a hundred other people were also trying to contact her. Not surprising at the climax of this triumphant occasion for Kohn Chesshyre Li.

  Furiously, my heart pounding as if it was going to come up into my throat, I thrust myself up the stairway and onto the castle.

  As I scrambled u
p the stairs, Songs from the Blue faded. Chesshyre started to speak. My back was to him and I expected his words to be blown away in the breeze that had sprung up, but every word was clear, as if he were standing next to me.

  ‘Every year since its inception,’ Chesshyre said, ‘SkyNation has been a marker of our progress. Every year we party, we celebrate, but we also catch our breath and see how far we’ve come, how far Flight has advanced.’ Chesshyre was interrupted briefly by applause. He resumed. ‘Every year we push ourselves to redefine what life can mean when we have wings.’

  Now I was half running up the stairs, searching the faces of all the fliers I passed and hearing Chesshyre still speaking behind me but only tuning into his words now and then. As long as he was speaking I knew no-one had attacked him yet.

  ‘Flight,’ Chesshyre said as I elbowed my way through the cloister, ‘is not just flying. We all know this.’

  Christ, he was starting to sound a bit like David Brilliant.

  I burst out onto the terrace at the top of the tower and made my way towards the edge, towards Halley’s still-reserved table. The terrace was busy but not too crowded; many of the VIPs who had reserved tables here were now on the prow of Cloud City with Chesshyre.

  ‘Flight gives us a vision by which we can live the whole of our lives,’ intoned Chesshyre. His voice had taken on an incantatory quality; he was becoming entranced by his own rhetoric. ‘We yearn for a life freed from constraint, in which we’ve slipped the surly bonds of earth.’

  I searched the crowd systematically, dividing the fliers on the net into quadrants and going over it clockwise. An owl-masked goddess among dragons at eight o’clock. Fairies surrounded by gargoyles and vampires at twelve o’clock.

  Something moved. The merest flash of white at the corner of my eye made me glance upwards. Of course. Eros was poised high above the crowd, on a wire of the lighting rigging. A good place to hide in plain sight. Even fliers rarely look up, unless gauging the sky for Flight. No-one would notice her there, balancing, intent, her head cocked to one side, listening to Chesshyre.

  What did she have to gain by coming here? She had unfinished business with Chesshyre but what could it be here and now, in front of all the fliers in the City?

  In prosperity the destroyer shall come upon him.

  ‘Peri! No!’ I shouted up at her. For a non-flier there was no way up to where she was standing.

  My vision of the cloudy, dark-winged goddess above the City came back to me. Winged balancer of life, daughter of Justice. I’d thought that Cam and Henryk and I were her instruments. But here she was. Nemesis. All in white.

  I searched for Halley in the crowd behind Chesshyre but couldn’t see her as he said, ‘In this vision, fliers live, work, play, grow, in the air, a truly aerial existence. Flier children are born and fly before they walk, their feet hardly ever touching the ground.’

  I looked up again.

  At Chesshyre’s last words Peri stiffened. I held my breath. Was this the future for Thomas, for his children, if he were fortunate enough to have any?

  ‘I speak of vision,’ Chesshyre continued. ‘Visions of what Flight can mean. And that is why I stand before you now, costumed as the first great dreamer of Flight that we can put a name to: Daedalus. Daedalus the inventor. Daedalus the engineer. Daedalus the architect. It is no accident,’ Chesshyre’s voice rose in conviction and strength, ‘that the designer and builder of the great Labyrinth confining the monstrous hybrid Minotaur, symbol of our beastliness, our viciousness, our eternally and fatally conflicted natures, is also the inventor of wings, of the very dream of Flight itself which has been kept alive for thousands of years and which we now embody.’ A wave of applause drowned him out. Chesshyre raised his hand.

  ‘Since the myth of Daedalus, Flight has been a metaphor. Daedalus has stood for the artist, the scientist, the engineer, for all Promethean and Faustian seekers after knowledge, for all those who push the boundaries. But I claim Daedalus for Flight. We have done with Flight as a symbol! We are mastering it in reality!’ Chesshyre roared the last two sentences and was met by a cheer and an answering roar from the assembled fliers.

  Chesshyre bowed his head and an expression of pain and weariness crossed his face. Would he dare to name the price Daedalus paid for his inventiveness? He did not. Instead, he raised his head and flung his arms and his wings wide.

  ‘And so we come to Cloud City!’ he cried. ‘The first building, the first creation of its type on earth to take Flight and the life that it means seriously.’

  I shook my head. I’d fallen into a trance of my own, standing there gawping at Chesshyre and listening to his words.

  ‘Peri! Hey! Peri!’ I called. But the wind from the sea blew away my words, though not Chesshyre’s cleverly amplified speech. Obviously I was not totally inaudible, as some of the other fliers on the terrace shot me nasty looks.

  As I prowled the terrace, making my last-ditch attempt to find a single sensible or official-looking flier I could try to warn, Chesshyre began to outline the latest advances and how they were incorporated into Cloud City. He talked about how inspired he was by this new conception, how this was not a building, not even a ‘machine for living’, but the foundation for a new way of life, the beginning of a true city. Was he talking about secession? Surely the laws of the land still applied a hundred metres in the air? But there was the planning minister, the polished, powerful-looking woman I’d seen earlier and only just recognised, beaming at him. I thought of the documents I’d sent to Sunil. I had only a few pieces of the whole picture but it was clear fliers had all the influence they needed in this City.

  Now Chesshyre was saying how proud he was because Cloud City was ready and this SkyNation would celebrate its launch. The Songs from the Blue swelled again and Cloud City, ablaze with light, emanated a low powerful hum of its own.

  High above us, Peri was motionless, her being concentrated on Chesshyre. She looked as if she’d been placed there by SkyNation organisers; a beautiful ornament, the marble image of the god. She reminded me of Frisk, his stillness when he hunted, his body frozen, ready to spring in a split-second.

  Then two things happened simultaneously. The top third of Cloud City, the part Chesshyre had said would rotate, lifted away from the rest of the tower at the point where the base of the prow joined the structure. The top of Cloud City was rising into the air above the City. It was flying. Or at least floating slowly, with all those fliers still standing on its prow, lights coursing over its surface and fireworks bursting into the air and gasps and cheers coming from the crowd. Now was the most dangerous moment. I threw my head back to stare up at Peri.

  She’d twined herself round the lighting strut.

  She raised her crossbow. Aimed it.

  ‘Peri!’ I yelled.

  I would have missed what happened next except that I’d automatic- ally glanced back to Chesshyre. All at once, with shocking swiftness, red had flowered on his white robe and he’d staggered sideways off the prow and was falling, falling away with the speed of a meteor as Cloud City continued to rise. Two fliers on the prow reacted instantly and dived after him. There were a few shrieks of horror but most fliers were too busy oohing and ahhing at Cloud City dropping its fantastic flowers of light over the CBD to notice.

  I looked back at Peri. She lowered her bow and as she turned, someone else, an unusually large flier below on the net, was now taking off, heading for her. I knew those red wings.

  Bellowing, ‘Peri, over here!’ I ran right to the edge of the terrace. A few other fliers turned to stare at me. ‘Watch out, Peri,’ I yelled.

  The Raptor reached Peri as she was halfway to me. Peri twisted and dropped like a stone into the gulf of air just before the castle structure but the huge Raptor clutched at her as she plunged and grasped her wing. They tumbled and fought in mid-air like two giant eagles and then they were falli
ng towards the terrace where I stood, appalled. Without thinking, I grabbed at the Raptor as he swept past me.

  The Raptor faltered, Peri still fighting in his grasp. All I could think was that if I added my weight to Peri’s, the Raptor would not be able to manage, he would have to let Peri go.

  We were a welter of feathers and clawing hands. I caught the Raptor’s wing and my weight brought him staggering onto the terrace, Peri writhing to free herself from his grip. The other fliers on the terrace were screaming as they backed away. I seized a chair and smashed it into the Raptor’s side. It fell with a crash as he swayed and grunted. Then I grabbed the Raptor from behind, clambering onto his broad back, thinking there was no way he’d take off with my weight on him, but I didn’t slow him down enough and to my horror he reeled towards the edge of the terrace, still hanging onto Peri, and lurched into the air again.

  Jesus Christ on a bike, I’d really done it now! I was so fucking dead my funeral was just a goddamn formality.

  Now we were plunging, the Raptor and Peri and I, down towards the City, as all the fliers and structures of SkyNation streaked past us in a blur.

  I hung on for dear life. The Raptor was a giant, the biggest flier I had ever seen. I’d fastened on him like a barnacle, instinctively, and now the idiocy, the sheer certifiable lunacy of climbing onto the back of a flier, was coming home to me.

  We were plummeting.

  Suddenly—I nearly lost my grip—the Raptor and I shot higher; Peri had twisted herself free and the loss of weight had sent us rebounding. Freed of this weight, the Raptor now powered both of us higher above the City, still pursuing his quarry. How could I describe my feelings? A shrieking vortex of terror and fury but also awe at the beauty of the blue City below us, and around us the spangled shroud of sky.

  I clamped onto the Raptor’s wings, grim as death, and managed to inch myself a little further up his back. A bit further, and a bit further. Now I was riding him and my weight and position—arms round his massive shoulders, legs straddling his waist—were seriously hampering his flying. He was wallowing, ungainly as a landing albatross, keening with fury like a wild creature. I gripped him so hard my hands began to go numb.