A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  “Miss Crumb?” the stranger called. By his accent she guessed he came originally from one of the Scottish city states; a refugee, perhaps, from ice-drowned Edinburgh or Aberdeen.

  “May I speak with you?” he asked. “I am Dr Avery Teal, of London. I arrived just yesterday, aboard the Rolling Stone. I’m on official business. I was delighted to learn that I am not the only Engineer in Mayda.”

  An Engineer? Here? He’s lying, thought Fever. She had grown up amongst the Order of Engineers in Godshawk’s Head and she was certain that she had never seen Dr Teal before. Then she recalled that Godshawk’s Head had burned, and that two years had passed since she fled London.

  “Wait here,” she said to Fern and Ruan, and she hurried down the barge’s winding companionways and out through the stage-left hatch.

  The stranger stood waiting for her. He did not try to shake her hand (an irrational, insanitary greeting) but made a small and Engineerish bow. “You don’t know me, Miss Crumb,” he said. “I am a recent member. Quercus needs all the Engineers and men of science he can get to help him transform London. And what true scientist or Engineer could resist the chance to help set a whole city moving?”

  I did, for one, thought Fever, and then wondered if that was what Dr Teal had meant; that because she’d turned her back on London she could not be a true Engineer. She blushed, and felt suddenly ashamed of her hair and the odd cut of her coat. But Dr Teal was smiling kindly at her, and she saw that he was not rationally dressed himself. No doubt he had travelled far, and had learned, like Fever, that an Engineer’s standards sometimes had to be adjusted, out here in the world.

  “I watched the play last night,” he said. “Enjoyed it hugely.”

  “It is a foolish story,” said Fever. “The moon is 240,000 miles away; it’s most unlikely that the Ancients could have flown there. And if they did, I’m sure they did not find the goddess Selene waiting for them.”

  “Nevertheless, it makes a good play, and your lighting was ingenious. The smoke and flames when that chariot took flight…!”

  Fever thanked him, and glanced up at the curious faces of her friends, which were ranged along the handrail above her, waiting to see whether she would hit it off with her gentleman caller. For a moment she thought of asking him aboard, but she felt suddenly wary. How would Fern and Ruan react to this reminder of London and all that they had lost? And what would Dr Teal make of the chaos and clutter backstage, of the shrine to Rada, dusty with the ash of incense-sticks?

  The Engineer seemed to sense her unease. “Perhaps you would like to walk down to the harbour with me?” he suggested. “There is a place nearby which serves fine African coffee. Or boiled water, if you prefer.”

  It was unsettling for Fever to meet a fellow Londoner, having turned her back on London so decisively. On the other hand, it was not often that she had a chance of talking with someone truly rational. She waved up to her friends and called, “I’ll be half an hour…”

  “Take all morning if you like,” urged AP. “But make sure you are back in time to run through the lighting arrangements for tonight. I am making some changes to Act 2, Scene III. And my soliloquy just before the first-act curtain could use a little more illumination…”

  Dr Teal was already turning away, putting his hat back on to shield his shaven scalp from the sun. Fever did not take the arm he proffered, but walked beside him away from the Lyceum. Each time she glanced up at him she found him watching her with a look of faint amusement, so after a little way she stopped glancing up and kept her eyes on the cobbles instead. Crumpled programmes from last night’s production blew about underfoot, and beneath a nearby barge a pair of angels was squabbling over a dropped pie.

  “Are you to be long in Mayda?” he asked.

  “Only two more nights; then we are to travel south to Meriam, where there is some sort of festival. We shall return to Mayda for a longer stay after that.”

  “Ah, Meriam!” said Dr Teal. “Yes, they celebrate the Summer Tides in great style down there. More of a carnival than a festival…”

  Carnival or festival, it didn’t seem to Fever like the sort of thing two Engineers should be discussing, so she said, “I hope that all is well in London?”

  “Oh aye,” agreed Dr Teal. “At least, it’s some months since I left, but everything was proceeding according to plan when I last looked. You’d scarce recognize the place, Miss Crumb. Everything south of Ludgate Hill has been cleared to make way for the new forges, the rolling sheds, the furnaces. Night and day the new factories roar and rumble, belching out their smoke. While I was waiting to take ship at Brighton harbour I could see the glow of London lighting up the sky from fifty miles away! And all the roads in that part of the world are crammed with land-hoys carting materials Londonward, and the sleepy south-coast ports like Brighton and Chunnel have come alive again with cargo ships. Quercus has had to construct steam-powered warships to keep the convoys safe from pirates. It will be some years yet before the city moves, but already he has transformed the world.”

  Fever said nothing. She did not like thinking about London’s transformation.

  “Your father is well,” Teal went on. “He is busy, as we all are. Doing good work. He speaks of you often. I wish I had known that I was going to run into you; I would have offered to carry a letter…”

  “And what of the other Engineers?”

  “All well. We are a Guild now, not just an Order; you can imagine how that pleases them.”

  “And my mother?” asked Fever.

  “Wavey? Oh, she’s well enough.” There was something odd about the way he said it, and she saw something knowing in his expression that she did not quite like, but didn’t understand. Confused, she looked away again. They were passing a barge called the Travelling Museatorium, decorated with gaudy paintings of freaks and monsters. She thought how tawdry Bargetown must look to Dr Teal, and how foolish he must think her, squandering her skills aboard a theatre. All the excuses she made to herself, her vision of herself as a scientific missionary spreading the light of reason among the fairground crowds, seemed foolish and threadbare now. She was no better really than an out-country technomancer, and she was sure that Dr Teal must despise her.

  “I expect you are wondering what brings me to Mayda-at-the-World’s-End?” he asked.

  She hadn’t been, but he told her anyway, while they walked together along the harbourside. “I am on a mission for the Guild. The new London will be a city much like this. Convex rather than concave, but a vertical city; a city of tiers. Quercus wants me to see how the Maydans manage it. In particular, he is intrigued by their moving houses. In the new London the different levels will be linked by elevators, and the Guild believes we may have much to learn from these funiculars. I must make some drawings. I’ll be sending regular reports back to London. If you have any message for Dr Crumb or Wavey Godshawk just let me have it. I’m staying with London’s representative here, a merchant called Hazell.”

  “Thank you,” said Fever. “Perhaps you could let them know that I am well.”

  “Only that? No word of when you might be coming home?”

  Fever shook her head.

  They reached the café that Dr Teal had spoken of and sat down at a table under a fluttering umbrella. He ordered coffee for himself. Fever said truthfully that she had only just finished breakfast. “I slept late…”

  “You must have been late to bed. The play, and then the party afterwards…”

  “I did not attend the party. I went for a walk on the cliffs and…”

  “You needed some time alone, I’m sure. It must be difficult to think, cooped up in a clattering barge with that bunch of actors?”

  “It is, sometimes,” agreed Fever, and felt as if she were betraying her friends. She had been about to tell Dr Teal of the white glider that had come to her on the night wind. But his coffee arrived, and watching him thank the waitress and add cream and sugar to his cup (all most un-Engineer-like things to do) she changed her mind.
He would think even less of her if she started babbling about moonlit walks and flying machines.

  Instead she said, “Are there men of reason in Mayda? Scientists who might have some knowledge to share with the Order … I mean, the Guild?”

  Dr Teal laughed softly. “Hardly. You know how it is in these southern cities. They worship some nature goddess who forbids them from using technology. The Downsizing casts a long shadow. Even now, all these millennia afterwards, superstitious people still reckon that the Ancients must have been punished for all the machines they built, and that anyone who tries to copy them will be punished too. When Maydans come across some scrap of old-tech they do not try to learn from it, like rational men. They hand it to the priests at the Temple of the Sea and it is flung into a sacred tide-pool to rust.”

  “But what about the funiculars? How are they driven?”

  “Och, simple weight-and-counterweight, water-powered, and built to a design which hasn’t changed in centuries. No, Miss Crumb, you’ll find no scientific minds in Mayda.” He sipped his coffee, arched an eyebrow. “Not unless you count Thursday.”

  “Thursday?” said Fever. That was the word the angel had croaked at her in the moonlight on the cliff path. It had not occurred to her that it might be someone’s name.

  “Arlo Thursday,” said Dr Teal. “He’s the grandson of Daniel Thursday, who was once the greatest shipbuilder in Mayda. Arlo’s the last of his line. Quite batty by all accounts.”

  “Have you spoken to him?” asked Fever.

  “I couldn’t even if I wanted to,” Dr Teal said carelessly. “He’s a complete recluse. Lives all alone in his family’s old funicular up at Casas Elevado on the western wall. Sees no one, speaks to no one, just tinkers with his crazy contraptions.” He chuckled. “They say that he’s trying to fly…”

  5

  THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION

  small brown boy went running out along the arm of one of the ramshackle wooden cranes which lined the harbour side and stepped off the end into empty air. Ruan paused in his work and shielded his eyes against the sun to watch as the boy went falling over and over until he vanished in a bright burst of spray between the moored boats. He surfaced quickly, sleek as a seal, laughing, waving at his friends on the dock. Already another boy was scaling the crane to take his turn…

  Ruan watched for just a moment more, feeling a little wistful. He would have liked to be like those boys, carefree and fearless, playing games in the sunlight that was now tilting into Mayda crater. But he had work to do. Usually the afternoons were the time when the company performed comic sketches, or AP recited poetry, to bring a little extra money in and advertise the evening’s performance. But during these few days in Mayda there were to be no such matinees; instead, the Lyceum’s crew were busy sprucing up their sets and costumes, which always began to look a bit tattered at this end of the season.

  So Ruan and Fergus were busy with paint and brushes, freshening up the shabby backcloths from Niall Strong-Arm, which had been spread out on the ground beside the barge. Up on stage, some of the actors were rehearsing an extra scene that AP had written, while Max slapped a fresh coat of silver paint on Apollo’s chariot. Ruan could see Fern watching from the wings. People on their way to visit the other barges kept stopping to watch too, but Fergus always waved them away, saying gruffly, “Come back later. Just a rehearsal. Come back at sundown. The show starts then.”

  But not all the passers-by were watching the stage. Ruan kept finding that people were watching him. It made him feel proud and self-conscious and a little awkward, the way they pointed at his work and whispered to one another. They were admiring the way he’d used brisk dabs of white and black to give depth to the coat of arms he’d sketched in on the wall of the moon goddess’s palace. “Move on, move on,” growled Fergus. “The boy can’t work with you lot standing ’twixt him and the sun. Come back tonight and you can see it finished.” But the onlookers weren’t really in Ruan’s light, and he quite liked them watching. He was starting to suspect that Fergus was just envious. Nobody stopped to point at the cloths Fergus was working on; the clouds and mountains he had done looked gaudy and unreal, and Ruan knew that he could have done them better, even though he was only ten.

  He finished the coat of arms and started work on the stones of the wall. A line of white along the upper edge of each and down one side, a line of grey-black along the bottom and up the other. A few cracks, black for the shadow, white for the lit edge. He added some moon-ivy growing up the wall, green leaves with black shadows, a white highlight on each. He didn’t know if there was really ivy on the moon, but it felt right to him, and when he paused and stood back he saw that the dull old wall had come alive; it looked as if each of those painted stones and leaves was real. It would be better, he thought, if Fergus had let him use blue or purple instead of black, but Fergus hadn’t liked that idea. Black was cheaper, and using other colours smacked of arty-fartiness. “You always use black for shadows, boy,” Fergus had said. “No one’ll notice anyway, not from out in the audience. They’ll be watching the actors, not your pretty painting.”

  Ruan started work on the garden. It had hedges trimmed into the shapes of fish and griffins, and two stone nymphs. He amused himself by giving Fever’s face to each of them. He was just finishing when a shadow fell across the canvas and AP was standing over him.

  “Ruan, is Fever back yet?”

  Ruan shook his head.

  AP sighed. “Well, I’m sure she and Dr Teal have much to talk about – but I need to talk to her myself before curtain-up.”

  Ruan could not think of anything to say. He didn’t like the way that Fever had gone off so eagerly with that London man. As if some baldy Engineer meant more to her than Fern and him and all her friends. He wondered what they had been talking about all this time. Maybe Dr Teal would persuade her to start shaving her hair off again. That thought sparked others, more worrying: maybe he would want her to go back to London with him. Maybe he’d want to marry her, which would be a disaster, as Ruan had always imagined he would marry her himself as soon as he was old enough. He felt small and powerless and intensely jealous. But he could not explain that to AP.

  AP peered at the backcloth and smiled. “Well, this is splendid, Ruan. Keep up the good work. And when Fever comes back, please tell her that I need to…”

  “Fools! Blind fools! Spoiled children!” someone bellowed, and Master Persimmon stopped, astonished to find his own voice drowned out by one even more thunderous. The actors on the stage stopped too, all looking to see what the disturbance was.

  An odd procession was winding its way between the parked barges, dressed in costumes as fanciful as anything that Alisoun Froy had ever run up. Flowing taffeta robes, stiff tabards, gold-embroidered copes, weird caps and headscarves, and all of it blue, or green, or blue-green. There were perhaps twenty people there, men, women and children, some banging drums and jingling rusty bells. They were led by a large elderly woman, and it was she who was doing the shouting, directing her words at all the barges and all the visitors who were milling around them. A few of the barge-folk shouted back at her, but she ignored them. When she saw the Persimmon Company watching her she wheeled and strode closer, pointing a sapphire-bejewelled forefinger at the Lyceum.

  “Sinners against the Sea! How dare you bring your trinkets and technologies to Mayda to bewitch the young and ensnare the foolish? Do you not know that this is the island of Our Mother Below? Do you not fear the wrath of She who once raised up the oceans to sweep away the cities of the Ancients and cleanse the world of their corruption? Then you shall be made to fear Her! The waves of Her Holy Sea will swallow down all your workings, and Her children the fish will devour you! Her sacred waters will wash away your sin-black carbon footprints…”

  She was just about to make a footprint of her own, in the fresh paint on the edge of the cloth that Ruan had been working on, but Master Persimmon had recovered himself and he stepped into her path, holding up a hand to halt her.
They confronted one another; the actor-manager in his dowdy rehearsal clothes, the priestess in her extraordinary vestments. She was a big woman, and the wide-shouldered blue robes hung right to the ground with her fierce, red face poking out of the top so that she looked as if she were tucked up in a bed which someone had tipped on end. On her head she wore a turquoise mitre shaped like the body of a squid, with the long tentacles draped down over her shoulders. Each sucker was a gold ring, and inside each was a little sunshiny silver mirror. All the other metal about her – the necklaces and pendants, the flying-fish brooch on her gown, the settings of her sapphire rings – was rusted old iron, corroded and blessed by the sea.

  “I am Ambrose Persimmon, and I am at your service, ma’am,” said AP, bowing low.

  “I am Orca Mo,” said the woman, “and I am not at yours. I serve only the Goddess.”

  “Well, you and your goddess are very welcome here,” replied Master Persimmon, with that charming smile which had melted the hearts of so many matinee audiences. “My company and I have travelled widely, and we have nothing but respect for the gods and goddesses of all lands. Yours is the Sea Goddess, I presume?”

  “There is no other!” roared Orca Mo. “All other so-called gods and goddesses are false; there is only the Sea, and the Goddess beneath it: the Mãe Abaixo; our Mother Below. All life came from Her, and the lands of the earth are dry only by Her grace. How dare you profane them with your machines? Your barges and your engines and your filthy elec-trickery?”

  Technoclasts! thought Ruan. Machine-breakers! Fever had told him about people like this; religious fanatics who believed that all machinery was evil and that the Downsizing had been the gods’ way of punishing the Ancients for polluting the world with their technology. He set down his paintbrush and waited to see how AP would deal with them.

  “My dear lady,” said AP, “we are but simple actors. Our engines and machines are only there to aid us as we bring pleasure to the masses. Perhaps if you were to come and see our play for yourself you might feel more kindly disposed towards us. May I present you and your friends with some free tickets for tonight’s performance?”