A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  “Very well,” said Fever meekly. “But you should try to make a full-size machine. I could help you. I know a bit about engines.”

  “No,” said Arlo Thursday.

  “But you must need my help. Why else would you have sent the glider to me?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve lost models before. Crosswinds catch them, up among those crags. Maybe some kid found it. Thanks for returning it. Goodbye.”

  Fever went back along the path to the gate. Halfway there she stopped and looked back and Arlo Thursday was no longer watching her. But just before she reached the gate the lock clacked and it swung open to let her out on to Casas Elevado. It closed again as before when she had stepped through. From behind her she heard the house give a long sigh, and then the squeak and rumble of its wheels as it climbed away from her.

  8

  THE SECRET POOL

  s soon as she had gone Arlo Thursday went back inside his house and operated the levers which opened valves high above, filling the tanks of the counterweight. As the building began its long climb he went through the big front room, squeezing his way past the thing that filled it, and looked out of the window to see if he could see Fever Crumb. He could not.

  How stupid he had been to let her in! He should have kept the house up high and the gate locked. But when Weasel came flying to tell him that there was a visitor he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to talk to someone. Especially when he looked through his telescope and saw her waiting there; not that busybody Flynn or some thug from the local branch of the Oktopous Cartel but a pretty girl. He felt embarrassed now that her prettiness had influenced him. Was he that shallow? And when he’d seen her close to she had just reminded him how much he was in love with someone else.

  Still, she had seemed a sweet girl. And she had seemed honest. She hadn’t shown a flicker of recognition when he mentioned poor Edgar Saraband, and yet… That glider… Was it a message?

  He went out on to the veranda again and picked it up from the table. He had often lost models among the crags, as he had told Fever Crumb. But this was not one of them. This was a model he had made for Edgar Saraband, and sent to Saraband’s workshop in Thelona. How had it found its way back to Mayda, and into the hands of that girl?

  When the house reached the top of its rails he set the brakes and stepped down into the garden, squinting in the sunshine and the brisk, dusty breeze that blew his hair across his face. His angels wheeled about the house. He called Weasel down to him and held out his arm so that the angel could perch on his wrist. “Follow the girl,” he told him. He did not say it with words but with squawks and clicks and quick movements of his head, the language of angels. “Watch all that she does.”

  Weasel took off, and Arlo climbed away from the house, up through the last steep section of garden above the buffers to where the crags began. Small birds flew away chattering through the overgrown clumps of lavender and lemongrass. The sun was hot on his back and the crushed leaves scented the air. He stopped and shaded his eyes and watched Weasel, a white speck dwindling against the hugeness of the city. He hoped the old angel would not get distracted and forget the mission he had been entrusted with.

  The wave which had sluiced young Arlo’s family away spent most of its fury on the Ragged Isles. By the time it came to Mayda it was a lesser thing, and half exhausted. It still did damage, all the same, to the harbour and the shipping there. It would be the best part of a year before the city’s salvagemen had ships and time to go and see if anything remained of Thursday’s Shipyard.

  When they brought Arlo back with them people said that he had left his mind behind him on the island. It was no surprise, after his loss and all those months he’d been out there alone. That must be why he wouldn’t speak and why, when the doctors put him in a comfortable room, he would not sleep in the bed like natural, Goddess-fearing folk but used bedding, chairs and firewood to build himself a nest. He had gone lonely-mad, they said, and could remember nothing of what had happened.

  But Arlo remembered all of it, and he had not been lonely. He had had the angels to comfort and to care for him. They had understood his grief, because they had so many griefs of their own; there was always some hatchling fallen from a ledge or some fine young bird taken by a hawk. They had come to the stranded boy with gentlings and cooings, with blankets of white feathers. They had taken him into their flock. And if he didn’t speak at first on his return to the human world, it was not because he had forgotten how, only that he’d filled his mind with angel-words, which were as likely to be small motions of his head or shuffled dance-steps as sounds. It took him a while to dig down through that new language which he’d learned and unearth his own. And if he seemed shy and afraid it was only because the city was so strange to him, with the noise of all its people and their closeness, and their roofs and walls and window frames and chimney stacks caging out the sky.

  He decided, as he settled back into his human life, that he would like to go and live at his family’s town house, the funicular on Casas Elevado. But he was only twelve, and the lawyers who controlled his affairs said it could not be. They leased the property to strangers, and Arlo went to live instead at Blaizey’s shipyards, and be apprenticed there.

  Augusto Blaizey had been the second-finest shipwright in Mayda before the wave came, and now that he was the first he felt guilty. He had often gone to kneel at the Temple of the Sea and ask the Goddess to wash Mayda clean of his great rivals, Thursday & Sons. Now, shocked at how literally the Mãe Abaixo had interpreted his prayers, he felt himself responsible for young Arlo.

  His shipyards were outside the city in a bay on the Costa Norte, reached by climbing up and down a steep road through the crater wall. That suited Arlo better than the harbourside. He lodged in Blaizey’s attic while the years went by, turning him into an able, likeable young man. He was big, but gentle with it, and always quiet; never a drinker and a racket-rouser and a chaser of girls like the other ’prentices. But if old Blaizey had hoped he’d bring some Thursday sparkle to the yard’s designs, then he was disappointed. The boy’s carpentry was good; he was obedient and hard working, but that was all. He seemed uninterested in boats. His apprentice piece, a small cutter built from fragments of old Thursday vessels salvaged from the breakers’ yards, showed skill but no passion. The only things he made that hinted at Mad Dan Thursday’s flair were the strange folded darts of scrap paper which Blaizey sometimes found beneath his window, or on the workroom floor. Unsettling things they were, like … petals? Leaves? Wings? Like nothing you could put a name to.

  And then there was the matter of the angels. Naturally the beggar-birds came clamouring round the yard when the workers stopped to eat their noonday pasties, and again in the evening when the smell of Senhora Blaizey’s cooking wafted from the kitchen windows. But there was nothing natural about the way the big birds hung around young Thursday, never pestering him for scraps the way they did the other men, just watching him work. They talked to him sometimes with little becks and flutterings and squawks and fannings of their tails, and Arlo seemed to understand them. Sometimes he seemed to reply.

  When Weasel was out of sight Arlo shook his memories aside and scrambled on, up to a small opening in the cliff behind his house. A rusty iron grating covered it, but he had the key, and he opened it and went inside, into cool shadows and the smell of water.

  The builders of his funicular had dug a cistern into the crater wall to collect and store the water which was needed to move the house and counterhouse up and down. It was a large, dark space, with only the glimmer of sunlight from the entrance to show the curved rock roof and the pillars reaching down into the deep pool which filled the heart of it. Rain that fell on the heights above came creeping down through fissures and faults, and although it was several weeks since any had fallen Arlo could still hear water plopping, and see the ripples spreading as drops fell into the pool. There was a smell of
moss and dim, growing things that did not love the light.

  “I’m going to be needing you,” he said. “I think Vishniak is here.”

  The echoes came back at him flatly out of the darkness. He looked across the water, his eyes adjusting to the lack of light. A ledge ran right around the pool, raised a few inches above the level of the water. Something moved on it, right at the far side where the shadows were deepest. Something lifted, rising to its feet. A small light came on, and then another and then more, packed close together like a battery of glowing eyes, lighting reflections in the water. They shifted suddenly, and the faint noise of the thing and the echoes of it sounded across the water as it came padding along the ledge to meet its master. Tick, tick, tick.

  9

  A LEAVE OF ABSENCE

  ayda was waking up as Fever walked thoughtfully back down the Southern Stair. The parasols which shaded the tables of the pavement cafés had opened like daisies in the sunlight, and the bright air was full of the sounds of footsteps, voices, the distant bangs and clangs and clatterings of the shipyards around the harbour.

  One of the voices belonged to Dr Teal. It cut through Fever’s thoughts as she was crossing the Rua Cĩrculo, and she looked round to see the Engineer standing beside the buffers of a big funicular hotel. A portable theodolite stood beside him on its spindly tripod like a gigantic pet insect. He seemed to have been measuring the angle of the hotel’s rails.

  “Miss Crumb!” he called again, snapping shut the notebook in which he had been jotting down his findings. “Out for a morning stroll, I see! How are you liking Mayda?”

  Fever looked away from his smiling face. She wanted to tell him about what she had just witnessed up at Casas Elevado, but for some reason she could not bring herself to break the irrational promise she had made to Arlo Thursday.

  Luckily Dr Teal seemed not to notice her hesitation. “So,” he said cheerfully, turning to wave at the hotel he had been studying. “What do you make of the funiculars now that you have had a chance to see them for yourself? Impressive, aren’t they?”

  “They are rather … frivolous,” said Fever. “And they must waste a great deal of water every time they empty their tanks.” She disapproved of waste and frivolity, and she was surprised that Dr Teal did not.

  “Och, there is no shortage of water in Mayda,” the Engineer replied. “The prevailing westerlies bring plenty of rain. Anyway, most of the ballast which the funiculars dump is not wasted: it finds its way through pipes and leats into the reservoirs of the lower city. But you make a good point, Fever; a very good point. In London, of course, we shall use engines to pump the waste-water from our funicular elevators back up, so that it may be used again and again. Breakfast?”

  “What?” Fever had been only half listening and the sudden change of subject took her by surprise.

  “Shall we have some breakfast? You can tell me your other observations of Mayda; all fascinating, I’m sure…”

  Fever shook her head. She needed to be alone with her thoughts. “I have to get back to the theatre,” she said, and started to turn away before he could protest. “The children will be wondering where I am…”

  Mornings were the time when Fern and Ruan had their lessons. Fever had been shocked when she first took charge of the children to discover that they knew nothing of science and almost nothing of mathematics. At Miss Wernicke’s school in London they had learned poems, read stories, and memorized a rather romantic version of history, but Fever didn’t see how any of that would help to turn them into useful and rational adults. So for an hour each day she did her best to teach them fractions and long division and the rudiments of calculus, and explain the laws of motion and the recently rediscovered theory of evolution.

  They were not the most attentive pupils. Calculus and motion did not hold much attraction for them compared with the things that surrounded them on the Lyceum, where painted canvas could become a castle or a forest, and people could turn themselves into someone else. They had both decided already what their lives would be, and neither of them saw mathematics playing much of a part: Ruan was to be a painter, and Fern would be the finest actress of her generation. But they did not tell Fever that. They knew she would just say that they were being irrational, and make them study harder.

  That morning, though, she had as much trouble concentrating on the lessons as they did. Her thoughts kept drifting up to Casas Elevado. Sometimes she would forget Fern and Ruan altogether and start studying the angels which circled overhead, trying to puzzle out equations that would describe their aimless courses. She was starting to understand the curved shapes of the wings of the models that Arlo had shown her. The air flowing over the upper surface would be travelling further, moving faster than that flowing underneath, which would mean that the pressure above the wing was lower than the pressure below. Would that pressure differential be enough to lift a whole machine into the air? Not on its own, no, of course not, but perhaps if it were combined with the thrust provided by Saraband’s engine…

  The children looked at one another, wondering what was distracting her, but not wanting to ask in case she set them back to work. It was a lovely, sunny morning and they didn’t want to spoil it with sums.

  That afternoon they took a walk along the harbourside to see the ships that were tied up at the quays. Fever said it would be educational, and for once the children agreed. They ran from one berth to the next, calling out excitedly. “This one’s huge!”

  “Oh! This one’s even bigger!” There was a tiger-striped caravel from the Thousand Islands, a cog from the Seamark with its prow carved as a snarling dragon, and a six-masted oil tanker just arrived from the Bight of Benin, bringing fuel for Bargetown’s engines. There was also a long, lean, blood-red war-galley with a wicked-looking ram jutting from its prow and a plaque on its stern-castle announcing that it had been provided for Mayda’s defence by Senhor J. Belkin. It impressed Fern and Ruan greatly to think that they had sat at dinner with a man so rich that he could buy whole warships. But Fever just kept looking past the ships, up towards the heights of the western wall. When Ruan asked her what was wrong she said, “Nothing,” and then pointed out a shabby funicular, just visible among the overgrown bushes at the top of its ragged garden.

  “That is Arlo Thursday’s house.”

  “The mad lunatic Senhora Belkin told us about?”

  “The man with the spider-demon?”

  “He does not have a spider-demon,” said Fever. “And I don’t believe that he is half so mad as superstitious people like Thirza Belkin like to claim. It is possible that his odd behaviour masks a rational, scientific mind; perhaps the only one in Mayda. How lonely he must be, hidden in that peculiar house with his inventions…”

  “That bird is following us,” said Fern, who had not been listening. An angel perched on one leg on a nearby capstan-head. It looked like a filthy feather duster on a pink stick. Fern said, “It was at the Lyceum while we were having lunch, and it has followed us all the way here.”

  “How can you tell it’s the same one, silly?” Ruan asked. “They all look alike.”

  “It is probably just hoping that we have snacks for it,” said Fever, and flapped her arms at the bird. “Shoo! Be gone!”

  The angel spread its white wings lazily and flapped away, but it did not go far, just up on to a tarpaulin-covered deckhouse near the bows of Jago Belkin’s warship, where it watched Fever and the children as they walked on.

  Right out along the harbour mole they went, passing through the shadows of the bridge that spanned the harbour mouth and emerging into the sunlight again and the stiff salt breeze. Far out to westward a scattering of islands bristled up like splinters from the ocean’s rim. “They are called the Ragged Isles,” said Fever educationally, and she let the children take turns to look at them through AP’s telescope, which she had brought along from the Lyceum for the purpose. Not that they were very much to look at. Just stubs of black rock, with the white surf coming and going round thei
r feet and the white angel-spatter shining on their crags and the white of angel-wings speckling the sky all round them. “They look like sad, weepy, lonely sorts of places,” said Fern, and Fever thought again of Arlo Thursday, who had been marooned there when he was no older than Ruan.

  The angel called Weasel perched on a buoy in the middle of the harbour. Others of his flock had perched there before him; they had left their droppings, and a fish-head. He ate it thoughtfully, watching Fever with his strange little blue-bead eyes.

  It was the Lyceum’s last night in Mayda for a while. The next morning the Persimmon Company was due to leave for the fiesta at Meriam. AP was determined to give a good performance, so that word would go on spreading while they were gone and eager audiences would be waiting for them when they returned to Mayda. But whatever it was that had set Fever daydreaming seemed only to get worse when the sun went down and the play started. She kept forgetting lighting cues, and often Ruan would peek into the periscope and see that the scenery he’d worked so hard to paint was lost in shadow. If he had not hissed a reminder at her she would have forgotten to turn on the spotlight for AP’s famous soliloquy in scene four (the one that began, “’Tis but one small step for a man / Yet for Mankind it is a Mighty Leap!”). And she missed the big blackout at the end of Act I completely, so that the curtains had to be closed on a fully lit stage.

  The audience had not noticed, but AP had. “What’s wrong with Fever tonight?” he asked, when Ruan went scrambling up to help with the big scene-change in the interval. “Is she in love or something?”

  “Oh no, AP,” said Ruan. Luckily he was so hot and red from his time below that his blush did not show. He could sense that if Fern or Dymphna or Lillibet ever found out about his feelings for Fever Crumb the teasing would be more than he could bear.

  “Well, she’s certainly daydreaming about something,” grumbled AP. “Remind her about the spotlight in Act II, would you, Ru? I don’t fancy delivering any more speeches in the dark…”