by Philip Reeve
“I’m all right,” he told her, and it was true, the pain was passing, though he felt sick and giddy. “It’s happened before… It’s nothing.”
He tried to stand, but Wren’s friend Theo came and picked him up, lifting him with barely an effort. He must have lost consciousness again as Theo carried him back across the gardens, because he thought that Hester was with him, but when he looked round she wasn’t, and they were already at the Jenny’s open hatchway, Pennyroyal peering out at them from the flight-deck windows. It was confusing, especially with the whole garden tilting and swaying like this, and the only thing he could be sure of was Wren, who was holding his hand very tightly and trying to smile at him, though she was crying at the same time. “Wren,” he said, “we can’t go; we have to find your mother…”
Wren shook her head, and helped Theo heave him aboard. “We’re going to get you away from this awful place before it’s too late,” she said.
The hatch closed, and as Theo went forward to the flight deck to help Pennyroyal start the engines Wren knelt over her father, holding him the way that he had held her when she was a very little girl, when she was sick, or frightened. “There, there,” he used to whisper to her, and so she whispered, “There, there,” and stroked his hair, and kissed him, until he was calm again. And she tried not to think about Mum, and the things that Mum had done, and said, and the trembling light that had shone from the blade of Mum’s knife. She tried to remember that she did not have a mother any more.
How she had aged!
Shrike had thought he understood the once-born and the things time did to them, but it was still a shock to see his poor child’s lined and weather-beaten face, her beautiful red hair turning coarse and grey. He reached towards her, sheathing his claws, and she reacted in the way most once-born did when the chase was done and there was no escaping him; that wordless keening, and the sudden hot stink as her bowels emptied. It hurt him that she was afraid of him. He pulled her close as gently as he could and said, “I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH.”
And Hester, crushed against his dented armour, could only shudder, and weep, and listen to the saddest sound she’d ever heard; the dwindling roar of twin Jeunet-Carots as the Jenny Haniver took off without her.
And Cloud 9 touched down at last, first the dangling cable car ploughing into the sand like a drag anchor, then the edge of the deckplate catching on a reef of rocks. Catwalks torn from the underside went striding end-over-end across the dunes; smashed flying machines and uprooted trees spilled down into the desert. A hawser snapped; a sagging gasbag broke free and fell upward, soaring through smoke and dust. Whole sections of the Pavilion burst, shedding antiques and objets d’art like shrapnel. Stairways crumpled; sundecks buckled; swimming-pools imploded. Cloud 9 bounced, slicing the top off a gigantic dune. Candy-coloured domes bowled off across the desert, pursued by greedy townlets. The wreckage crashed down again, belching fire, trailing cables and collapsing gasbags; crashed and skidded and spun and slewed and shuddered to a stop.
There was a time of silence, broken only by the mineral sigh of a billion grains of up-flung sand sifting gently down. And in that silence, before the scavenger towns came roaring in to gobble up the wreckage, the Stalker Shrike stood up, and lifted Hester in his arms, and walked away with her into the desert, and the dark.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The lines from The Four Quartets from Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
The story is continued in
For Sarah (as always),
For Kirsty and Holly (of course)
And for
Sam, Tom and Edward
(eventually)
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confus’d alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
PART ONE
1
SUPER-GNATS OVER ZAGWA
Theo had been climbing since dawn; first on the steep roads and paths and sheep-tracks behind the city, then across slopes of shifting scree, and up at last on to the bare mountainside, keeping where he could to corries and crevices where the blue shadows pooled. The sun was high overhead by the time he reached the summit. He paused there a while to drink water and catch his breath. Around him the mountains quivered behind veils of heat-haze rising from the warm rocks.
Carefully, carefully, Theo edged his way on to a narrow spur that jutted out from the mountain-top. On either side of him sheer cliffs dropped for thousands of feet to a tumble of spiky rocks; trees; white rivers. A stone, dislodged, fell silently, end over end, for ever. Ahead, Theo could see nothing but the naked sky. He stood upright, took a deep breath, sprinted the last few yards to the edge of the rock, and jumped.
Over and over he went, down and down, dazed by the flicker of mountain and sky, mountain and sky. The echoes of his first cry bounded away into silence and he could hear nothing but his quick-beating heart and the rush of the air past his ears. Tumbling on the wind, he emerged from the crag’s shadow into sunlight, and glimpsed below him – far below – his home, the static city of Zagwa. From up here the copper domes and painted houses looked like toys; airships coming and going from the harbour were wind-blown petals, the river winding through its gorge a silver thread.
Theo watched it all fondly till it was hidden from him by a shoulder of the mountains. There had been a time when he had thought that he would never return to Zagwa. In the Green Storm training camp they had taught him that his love for home and family was a luxury; something that he must forget if he were to play his part in the war for a world made green again. Later, as a captive slave on the raft-city of Brighton, he had dreamed of home, but he had thought that his family would not want him back; they were old fashioned Anti-Tractionists, and he imagined that by running away to join the Storm he had made himself an outcast for ever. Yet here he was, back among his own African hills; it was his time in the north that seemed to him now like a dream.
And it was all Wren’s doing, he thought as he fell. Wren; that odd, brave, funny girl whom he had met in Brighton, his fellow slave. “Go home to your mother and father,” she had told him, after they escaped together. “They still love you, and they’ll welcome you, I’m sure.” And she had been right.
A startled bird shot past on Theo’s left, reminding him that he was in mid-air above a lot of unfriendly-looking rocks, and descending fast. He opened the great kite that was strapped to his back and let out a whoop of triumph as the wings jerked him upwards and his dizzy plunge turned to a graceful, soaring flight. The roar of the wind rushing past him died away, replaced by gentler sounds; the whisper of the broad panels of silicon-silk, the creak of rigging and bamboo struts.
When he was younger Theo had often brought his kite up here, testing his courage on the winds and thermals. Lots of young Zagwans did it. Since his return from the north, six months ago, he had sometimes looked enviously at their bright wings hanging against the mountains, but he had never dared to join them. His time away had changed him too much; he felt older than the other boys his age, yet shy of them, ashamed of the things he had been; a Tumbler-bomb pilot, and a prisoner, and a slave. But this morning the other cloudriders were all at the citadel to see the foreigners. Theo, knowing that he would have the sky to himself, had woken up longing to fly again.
He slid down the wind like a hawk, watching his shadow swim across the sunlit buttresses of the mountain. Real hawks, hanging beneath him in the glassy air, veered away with sharp mews of surprise and indignation as he soared past, a lean black boy beneath a sky-blue wing invading their element.
T
heo looped-the-loop and wished that Wren could see him. But Wren was far away, travelling the Bird Roads in her father’s airship. After they escaped from Cloud 9, the mayor of Brighton’s airborne palace, and reached the Traction City of Kom Ombo, she had helped Theo find a berth aboard a south-bound freighter. On the quay, while the airship was making ready to depart, they had said goodbye, and he had kissed her. And although Theo had kissed other girls, some much prettier than Wren, Wren’s kiss had stayed with him; his mind kept going back to it at unexpected moments like this. When he kissed her all the laughter and the wry irony had gone out of her and she had become shivery and serious and so quiet, as if she were listening hard for something he could not hear. For a moment he had wanted to tell her that he loved her, and ask her to come with him, or offer to stay – but Wren had been so worried about her dad, who had suffered some sort of seizure, and so angry at her mum, who had abandoned them and fallen with Cloud 9 into the desert, that he would have felt he was taking advantage of her. His last memory of her was of looking back as his ship pulled away into the sky and seeing her waving, growing smaller and smaller until she was gone.
Six months ago! Already half a year… It was definitely time he stopped thinking about her.
So for a little while he thought of nothing, just swooped and banked on the playful air, swinging westward with a mountain between him and Zagwa; a green mountain where rags and flags of mist streamed from the canopy of the cloud-forest.
Half a year. The world had changed a lot in that time. Sudden, shuddering changes like the shifting of tectonic plates, as tensions that had been building all through the long years of the Green Storm’s war were suddenly released. For a start, the Stalker Fang was gone. There was a new leader in the Jade Pagoda now, General Naga, who had a reputation as a hard man. His first act as leader had been to reverse the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft’s advance on the Rustwater Marshes, and smash the Slavic cities which had been nibbling for years at the Storm’s northern borders. But then, to the astonishment of the world, he had called off his air-fleets, and made a truce with the Traction Cities. There were rumours from the Green Storm’s lands about political prisoners being released and harsh laws repealed; even talk that Naga planned to disband the Storm and re-establish the old Anti-Traction League. Now he had sent a delegation to hold talks with the Queen and Council of Zagwa – a delegation led by his own wife, Lady Naga.
It was this which had driven Theo to rise at dawn and bring his old kite up into the high places above the city. The talks were beginning today, and his father and mother and sisters had all gone to the citadel to see if they could catch a glimpse of the foreigners. They were excited, and full of hope. Zagwa had withdrawn from the Anti-Traction League when the Green Storm took power, appalled by their doctrine of total war and their armies of reanimated corpses. But now (so Theo’s father had heard), General Naga was proposing a formal peace with the barbarian cities, and there were even hints that he was prepared to dismantle the Storm’s Stalkers. If he did, Zagwa and the other African statics might be able to join again in the defence of the world’s green places. Theo’s father was keen for his wife and children to be at the citadel for this historic moment, and anyway, he wanted to have a look at Lady Naga, whom he had heard was very young and beautiful.
But Theo had seen all he ever wished to of the Green Storm, and he did not trust anything Naga or his envoys said. So, while the rest of Zagwa crowded into the citadel gardens, he swooped and soared on the golden air, and thought of Wren.
And then, below him, he saw movement where nothing should be moving; nothing except birds, and these were too big to be birds. They were rising out of the white mist above the cloud-forest, two tiny airships, envelopes painted in wasp-stripes of yellow and black. Their small gondolas and streamlined engine pods were instantly familiar to Theo, who had been made to memorize the silhouettes of enemy ships during his Green Storm training. These were Cosgrove Super-Gnats, which the cities of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft used as fighter-bombers.
But what were they doing here? Theo had never heard of the Traktionstadts sending ships into Africa, let alone as far south as Zagwa.
And then he thought, They are here because of the talks. Those rockets which he could see shining like knives in the racks under their gondolas would soon be lancing down into the citadel, where Naga’s wife was; where the Queen was. Where Theo’s family were.
He was going to have to stop them.
It was strange, how calm he felt about it. A few moments ago he had been quite at peace, enjoying the sunlight and the clear air, and now he was probably about to die, and yet it all seemed quite natural; another part of the morning, like the wind and the sunlight. He tipped his kite and dropped towards the second of the Super-Gnats. The aviators had not seen him yet. The Gnats were two-man ships, and he doubted they were keeping much of a watch. The kite took him closer and closer, until he could see the paint flaking from the ship’s engine pod cowlings. The big steering fins were emblazoned with the symbol of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft; a wheeled and armoured fist. Theo found himself almost admiring the daring of these aviators, who had flown so deep into Anti-Tractionist territory in their unmistakeable ships.
He kicked the kite backwards and stalled in mid-air, the way he had learned to do when he was younger, riding the thermals above Liemba Lake with his schoolfriends. This time, though, he came down not into water but on to the hard, curved top of the airship’s envelope. The noise of his landing seemed horribly loud, but he told himself the men down in the gondola would have heard nothing over the bellowing of their big engines. He freed himself from the straps of his kite, and tried to tuck it beneath the ratlines which stretched across the surface of the envelope, but the wind caught it and he had to let go to stop himself being pulled away with it. He clung to the ratlines and watched helplessly as it went tumbling astern.
Theo had lost his only means of escape, but before he could worry about it a hatch popped open beside him, and a leather-helmeted head poked out and stared at him through tinted flying-goggles. So someone had heard him after all. He threw himself forward, and he and the aviator tumbled together through the hatch and down a short companionway, landing heavily on a metal walkway between two of the airship’s gas-cells. Theo scrambled up, but the aviator lay unmoving, stunned. She was a woman; Thai or Laotian by the look of her. Theo had never heard of easterners fighting for the Traktionstadts. Yet here she was, in one of their ships and one of their uniforms, flying towards Zagwa with full racks of rockets.
It was a mystery, but Theo hadn’t time to ponder it. He gagged the aviatrix with her own scarf, then took her knife from her belt and cut a length of rope from the netting around the gas-cells, which he used to bind her hands to the walkway handrail. She woke while he was tying the last knots and started to struggle, glaring out angrily at him through her cracked goggles.
He left her writhing there and hurried along the catwalk to another ladder, climbing down between the shadows of the gas-cells. Engine noise boomed around him, quickly drowning out the muffled curses from above. As he dropped into the gondola the light from the windows dazzled him. He blinked, and saw the pilot standing at the controls, his back to Theo.
“What was it?” the man asked, in Airsperanto. (Airsperanto? It was the common language of the sky, but Theo had thought the Traktionstadts used German…)
“A bird?” asked the man, doing something to his controls, and turned. He was another easterner. Theo pushed him against a bulkhead and showed him the knife.
Outside, the city was coming into view beyond a spur of the mountains. The crew of the leading Super-Gnat, with no idea of what was happening aboard her sistership, angled her vanes and started to swing towards the Citadel.
Forcing the pilot down into his seat, Theo groped for the controls of the radio set. It was identical to the radio he’d had in the cabin of his Tumbler-bomb during his time with the Storm. He shouted into the microphone, “Zagwa! Zagwa! You’re under a
ttack! Two airships! I’m in the one behind!” he added hastily, as puffballs of anti-aircraft fire began to burst in the sky all around him, and shrapnel rattled against the armoured gondola and crazed the window-glass.
The pilot chose that moment to try and fight, lurching out of his chair and butting Theo bullishly in the ribs. Theo dropped the microphone, and the pilot grabbed his knife-hand. They struggled for control of the knife, until suddenly there was blood everywhere, and Theo looked and saw that it was his own. The pilot stabbed him again, and he shouted out in anger and fear and pain, trying to twist the blade away. Staring at his opponent’s furious, clenched face, he did not even notice the leading airship vanish in a sheet of saffron flame. The shock wave came as a surprise, shattering all the windows of the gondola at once, and then the debris was slamming and jarring against the envelope. A torn-off propeller blade sheared through the gondola like a scythe. The pilot went whirling out through the immense gash where the side wall had been, leaving Theo with an after-image of his wide, disbelieving eyes.
Theo stumbled to the radio set and snatched up the dangling microphone. He didn’t know if it still worked, but he shouted into it anyway, until exhaustion and terror and loss of blood overcame him. The last thing he heard, as he slipped down on to the deck, were voices telling him that help was on its way. Twin plumes of smoke were rising from the citadel. Above them, blue as damselflies, the airships of the Zagwan Flying Corps were climbing into the golden sky.
2
MATTERS OF THE HEART
From: Wren Natsworthy
AMV Jenny Haniver
Peripatetiapolis
24th April, 1026 TE