by Philip Reeve
“Mrs Natsworthy,” said Theo, “it’s not just Dr Zero who’s in danger. It’s lots of people. The truce depends on her. Who knows what General Naga might do if he doesn’t get her back? He loves her.”
“He’s a fool, then,” muttered Hester. “People shouldn’t love each other. It only leads to trouble.” She looked at Theo. “I don’t care about your truce. I don’t care about General Naga or this wife of his.”
She jumped down on the sand and started walking away from the ship, gathering dry acacia branches to make a fire. Although she kept her back to Shrike and Theo she knew that they were both watching her. She felt shivery, and cold despite the heat, as if she had a fever coming on, but she knew it wasn’t fever.
At first, when she found herself alone with Shrike, she had been terrified. She had remembered his ghoulish plans for her, and imagined that he was going to kill her at once. But when she learned that he couldn’t or wouldn’t kill, she had decided that Shrike was the person she belonged with. Had it not been Shrike who rescued her, all those years ago, after her own father tried to murder her? Shrike had looked after her when she was a child, long before she met Tom; now her life with Tom was over, and she was with Shrike again. There was a rightness about it.
Anyway, she was glad of someone to talk to. During these months in the desert she had told him things that she had never told anyone before. She told him about her first meeting with Tom, and how she had fallen in love with him; about the Jenny Haniver, and Wren. And she told him how she had betrayed Anchorage, and murdered Piotr Masgard, about how she had driven her own daughter away.
Shrike did not judge her the way a human being would have done; he just listened patiently. Hester felt that when she had told him everything, then she would be able to forget her previous life; she would become as blank as the sand and the red rock hills, and her memories would not be able to hurt her any more.
And now this boy had dropped into her life like a shower upon the desert, making all sorts of things stir under the parched surface. Hope, for instance. Little dreams. She tried not to let them grow, but couldn’t stop them. Theo was still in touch with Wren and Tom, and one day he might tell them of his meeting with Hester in the sand-sea. She liked the idea that he might have something good to say about her. She imagined her husband and daughter, in some far-off harbour, hearing that she had done something good again, just once, to balance all the bad things.
She turned and started lugging her bundle of branches towards the ship. “All right, old Stalker,” she said when she drew near. “All right. All right then. Let’s sell this old tub and find ourselves an airship.”
13
TIME TO DEPART
AMV Jenny Haniver
Murnau Air Harbour
21st May
Dear Theo,
I thought I should write to you, because I am starting on a journey, and it may be dangerous, and I shouldn’t want to die and disappear and leave you thinking that I just hadn’t got in touch because I couldn’t be bothered. A wealthy Murnau gentleman, Wolf Kobold, has hired us to do a little exploring, and we have been in Murnau Harbour for the past week, loading provisions and making plans. Mr Kobold has left now, gone north to a suburb he runs called Harrowbarrow (he’s important enough that he can just commandeer Abwehrtruppe airships to give him lifts, which makes you wonder why he needs us, but I think he likes to do things for himself really, and not make use of all the privileges his position brings). Tomorrow we shall fly out to join him on Harrowbarrow, and our journey will begin. So I am going to leave this letter at the Air Exchange and hope that they will pass it on to the captain of a westbound ship who will pass it on to someone else, and before the year’s out it might, with luck, find its way to Zagwa, and to you.
This is all rather complicated to explain, but I shall try. It seems that some survivors may be living still among the ruins of London. This is news to me, because I didn’t even know that London had any ruins – I thought it had been completely burned up. But apparently there are quite a lot of bits left, scattered about in the Out-Country west of the Green Storm fortress at Batmunkh Gompa. Wolf Kobold went there once, and wants to go back and find out more, and Dad is keen to take him, not just because of all the money he is paying us, but for old times’ sake. And I want to go, too. It sounds exciting; just the sort of adventure I used to imagine when I was stuck in Anchorage. I’ve seen old pictures of London, and heard Dad’s stories of it, but imagine actually being there, and walking in the ruins of those streets Dad walked along when he was little! I’m a Londoner’s daughter, which makes me a Londoner too, in a way; at least, it’s part of me, and I want to see it nearly as badly as Dad.
Sorry: no time to write more. Dad is over at the air-chandler’s, settling our account, and I promised him I would prep the Jeunet Carots for take-off before he gets back. Hopefully by the time this reaches you I will be safe in friendly skies again. If not, look for me in London.
Wren hesitated, then wrote carefully at the bottom of the page:
With love,
From Wren
She blotted the letter and started to read through it, then realized that if she did she would lose her nerve and crumple it up, the way she did almost all her letters to Theo. She folded it quickly, and slipped it into an envelope.
A few days earlier, while she was studying the price-list in the window of a photographer’s shop at the Murnau Air Exchange, Prof Pennyroyal’s journalist friend Sampford Spiney had appeared and offered to photograph her for free. She had sat in the sunshine near the harbour mouth while his colleague Miss Kropotkin took half a dozen portraits, and Spiney chatted pleasantly and listened with interest to Wren’s account of her adventures in Brighton. She had done her best not to expose any of Pennyroyal’s fibs, though several times Spiney had picked her up on something that contradicted one of the Professor’s accounts. “He does tend to exaggerate a little,” she admitted at last, and the reporter seemed quite satisfied.
The finished photographs had arrived at the Jenny’s berth that morning. Wren thought they made her look grown-up and serious, and they didn’t show her spots too badly, so she slipped one into the envelope along with her letter before she sealed it. She liked the idea that Theo would have it to remember her by if they never met again.
Letter in hand, she set off through the busy harbour, making for the Air Exchange. She had not gone far when she met her father, coming back from the chandlery where he had been settling the Jenny’s account. She guessed the bill had been fairly enormous, for not only had the little ship been repainted and refuelled and overhauled but Dad had bought a new compass and altimeter and filled her holds and lockers with tinned food and bottled water, and laid in stocks of rope and envelope-fabric, spare valves and hoses and engine-parts, enormous rolls of camouflage netting, and everything he could think of which might be needed on a voyage into hostile territory. Still, it was affordable enough when you remembered what Wolf Kobold was paying them, and Dad didn’t look too shocked.
Wren waved to him, then remembered the letter and tried to hide it behind her.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Just a letter,” said Wren. “I was going to ask one of the balloon-taxi men to—”
Tom took the letter and looked at the address. “Wren!” he cried. “Great Quirke! You can’t send this! If the Murnau authorities find out you’re writing to somebody in Zagwa they’ll think you’re a spy, and we’ll both end up in a prison on the Neiderrang!”
“But Murnau’s not at war with Zagwa! The Zagwans are neutral!”
“They’re still Anti-Tractionists.” Tom put one arm around her shoulders and started to lead her back to the Jenny. “I’m sorry, Wren.”
Just then, from a neighbouring pan, they heard a loud, familiar voice. “Of course, I used to fly my own ships. Got quite expert at it, riding the Boreal hurricanoes and so forth. But I can’t be bothered on these little inter-city hops. I remember a time in Nuevo Maya when…”
“Airhaven!” cried Wren. “Then you could take this letter for me, couldn’t you? Just leave it at the harbouroffice and ask them to put it aboard a ship bound for Africa…”
Pennyroyal glanced at the envelope as she pressed it into his hands, along with a silver coin to pay for postage. “Zagwa?” he hissed. “Good lord…”
“I know the Murnauers would not approve, but you aren’t afraid of them, are you?” urged Wren.
“Of course not!” said Pennyroyal at once, with a glance at his companion to make sure she understood how brave and helpful he was being. He tucked Wren’s letter into the innermost pocket of his coat and winked slyly at her. “Never fear, Wren! I shall make sure young Ngoni gets your billet-doux if I have to take it to him in person!” He looked at Tom. “I noticed at the Air Exchange that you are scheduled to leave Murnau tonight.”
Tom nodded. He knew that Pennyroyal wanted to know where the Jenny Haniver was bound, but he wasn’t planning to tell him.
“I heard a rumour that you were working for young Kobold?”
“We talked,” said Tom, casually.
Pennyroyal nodded, beaming. “Excellent, excellent,” he said. “Well, we mustn’t keep Mr Lard waiting, must we, dear?” He made his bow and wished Tom and Wren bon voyage, but as his lady-friend strolled gracefully towards the waiting ship he turned and called, “Don’t miss the June edition of The Speculum, Tom! Available in all good newsagents, and the lead article is to be Spiney’s piece on me!”
Tom waved, wondering where he would be come June. The Speculum was published in several languages and sold aboard all sorts of different cities, but he didn’t think he would be able to buy a copy among the ruins of London.
14
GENERAL NAGA
Twenty miles away, at the westernmost edge of the Green Storm’s territory, General Jiang Xiang Naga stood on a fire-step in a forward trench and studied the lights of Murnau through the brass eyepieces of a periscope. An aide twiddled the knobs on the periscope tripod and the instrument turned slowly, showing Naga the neighbouring lights of smaller cities and countless suburbs, another Traktionstadt further down the line.
“New cities are arriving almost daily from the west,” said one of the officers standing in the trench. “Intelligence says that even Manchester, one of the last great urbivores, is moving towards the Murnau cluster. Excellency, they are preparing an attack.”
“Nonsense, Colonel Yu,” snorted Naga, turning from the periscope. “They are trade towns, taking advantage of the truce to come and do business with those fighting cities.”
“Yes, to sell them fresh weapons and supplies!” insisted Yu. “This truce is providing the barbarians with a breathing-space; a chance to rearm…”
“It is giving us the same chance,” said his neighbour, General Xao, a short woman with a creased yellow face like an old purse. She smiled. She had lost three sons to the Green Storm’s war, and it was a long time since anyone had seen her smile. “More than a month now, and nobody killed anywhere on the line,” she said. “Even if the townies break truce tomorrow, it will have been worth it. Listen.”
Naga listened. He could hear the low voices of soldiers in the neighbouring trenches, the whisper of the breeze in his wolf-skin cloak, and faintly, far off, the song of a bird. Was it a nightingale? He wished he knew. He would have liked to tell his wife, when she came home from Africa, “We heard a nightingale singing, right out there on the front line!” But he had been too busy all his life with war to study such things as birds. If the peace held, he thought suddenly, he would learn all about them; birds, and trees, and flowers. He would walk with Oenone in green meadows, and they would point out the birds and blossoms to one another, and he would be able to tell her what each was called…
“There!” he said, and his mechanical armour broke the stillness with a hiss and a clank as it swung him down off the fire-step. He clapped Colonel Yu on the shoulder with a steel hand like a Stalker’s gauntlet. “There! That’s what we have been fighting for, Yu Wei Shan. We didn’t go to war because we want to smash cities, but because we want to be able to hear the birds sing again. And if fifteen years of war won’t do it, maybe we will have to try talking to the barbarians instead.” He waved his arm, indicating the wastelands that lay beyond the wire; the immense shell-craters and concrete citytraps, the wrecked suburbs foundering in weeds, the million bones. “We were supposed to be making the world green again,” he said, “and all we have been doing is turning it into mud.”
It was something his wife had told him once. It had sounded better when Oenone said it. Later, in the airship, on his way to the sector headquarters at Forward Command, he found himself longing for her. If she were here he would find it easier to keep to this difficult road she’d set him on. Half his people thought that he was mad for trying to make peace with the cities, and he sometimes wondered if they weren’t right. But what choice did he have?
The Green Storm was in a bad way. Naga had had no idea how bad until he seized power. Under the Stalker Fang the Storm had always made sure that soldiers like him were never short of food or equipment. But in their own lands everything was falling apart; the people who used to run things in the old League days had all been arrested when the Storm took over, and the young fanatics who had taken their places didn’t know how to do their jobs. In the liberated zones which Naga and his comrades had fought so hard to clear of mobile cities, no one seemed to know what crops to plant, or how to arrange the plumbing and transport systems in the ramshackle new static settlements. No one knew where the money was to come from to pay for anything. Stopping the war would help; the old administrators whom Naga was releasing from the prison-colonies of Taklamakan might know what to do, but the task was huge. Too huge, Naga sometimes felt, for an ignorant soldier like him…
Still, he knew that if he could talk to Oenone she would soon soothe all his doubts away. The white sky slid past his window. He dozed, and he could almost smell her, and feel the warmth of her small body. Where was she? he wondered. He wished that he had not let her volunteer for that mission to Zagwa. But she had wanted to go, and he could think of no one more likely to bring the Zagwans over to his side than little Zero, with her unwarlike ways and that quaint old god of hers.
Forward Command was a disabled Traction City, squatting on a low hill north of the Rustwater behind defensive walls built from its own cast-off tracks. It had been part of the Storm’s front line during the battles of the previous year. Now that the Traktionstadts had been driven back beyond the marshes, it was turning into a full-scale settlement; clusters of civilian houses were sprouting on the slopes below the city, and in the fields around them some kind of root crop seemed to be failing miserably. Wind turbines dotted the steppe, flailing their long arms like idiot giants.
A gaggle of officers waited on the docking pan, fussing around a dark-skinned servant-girl whom Naga vaguely recognized. He could tell from twenty yards away that they had bad news.
“Excellency, word has come from Africa…”
“This is your wife’s servant, Excellency, the mute girl, Rohini…”
“She arrived on foot at the Tibesti static, out of the desert, all alone.”
“Your wife, Excellency – her ship was jumped by townie warships a day out from Zagwa. The Zagwans must have betrayed her, Excellency. Lady Naga is dead.”
Later, in one of the citadel’s council-rooms, she told him everything; how three townie airships had ambushed
the Nzimu, how her crew had fought to defend his wife, and how they had been overwhelmed. She wrote it all laboriously out on papers which an aide read aloud.
When she was a little girl, Cynthia Twite had dreamed of being an actress. Her parents had both been actors; arty, Anti-Tractionist types from the Traction City of Edinburgh who had fled their home for what they imagined would be an idyllic life in a static in Shan Guo. They had always encouraged their daughter to dress up and perform, fondly believing that she might be a star one day. And how right they had been!
Good, tolerant people that they were, they had been taken aback by the sudden rise of the Green Storm. “Not all city people are barbarians,” they kept telling Cynthia, rather plaintively, as ferocious Green Storm slogans crackled out of the loudspeakers which the new regime had erected all around their settlement. But Cynthia thought it all very exciting; she enjoyed the flags and uniforms, and the war-like songs she got to sing at school, and she loved the Stalker Fang, so strong and shiny. She soon grew tired of hearing her mum and dad moaning, and reported them to the Storm as Tractionist elements.
After they were taken away she went to live in a government-run orphanage at Tienjing. From there she was recruited into the intelligence wing, and then into the Stalker Fang’s private spy network. That was when Cynthia discovered that she had inherited her parents’ love of theatre. Putting on disguises, adopting other names and voices and mannerisms, these were the things she most enjoyed, and she knew that she did them very well. Her only regret was that she could never claim the applause which she deserved. But it was tribute enough to watch the tears trickle down Naga’s face while he listened to all the dreadful things the townies had done to his wife.
Naga had probably never wept in public before. His aides and officers looked quite appalled. Even General Dzhu, who had hatched the plan to kill Lady Naga and helped Cynthia to infiltrate her household, looked uneasy when he heard his old friend sniffling and saw the tears drip off his chin. In the end, he cut short Cynthia’s performance. He had arranged Lady Naga’s death because he wanted to shock Naga out of his silly notions of peace with the cities, not to destroy him.