A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  Arlo turned, waved, remembered that he had no clothes on and hurried awkwardly to where they lay heaped on some nearby rocks. He ran doubled-over and trying to hide various portions of himself, but Fever could not see what the fuss was about. Did he imagine that she had never studied human anatomy?

  He hopped about pulling his trousers on, shrugged on his shirt and came running up the beach to her, waving two silvery shining things like trophies. “Breakfast! You wondered what we were to eat? I caught these in the old pens…” He stood there holding the fishes out for her to see, grinning foolishly, a little flushed. “Welcome to Casa Thursday, my old family home.”

  “There is no house here,” said Fever, and then looked down and saw that the mounds around her, overgrown with wild flowers and grass, marked out the roots of walls, the floor plan of a vanished building.

  “This is the villa my grandfather built,” said Arlo, as if he were still proud of it. “Look, here was the atrium, with the entrance-hall leading out that way towards the shipyards. That was the dining room, with the bedrooms beyond. This place where we are standing was Grandfather’s study.”

  “It was extensive,” said Fever. “He must have been a very wealthy man.”

  “The best shipwright in Mayda. Best in the world, probably.”

  “Thanks to his friend Senhor Açora.”

  “Yes…” Arlo bounded off across the old walls like a proud householder giving his guest a guided tour. “Grandfather kept his pictures here. He was a great one for paintings. They’re some of the things I remember best from when I was little…”

  “I saw one in your house in Mayda,” said Fever. “Of your grandfather and Açora and the Black Poppy.”

  “Yes,” said Arlo again, looking slightly mystified at the way each thing she said turned back to the mysterious Açora.

  “I recognized him,” Fever said.

  “Who? Grandfather?”

  “No, Açora. And the ship too, actually. He travelled all the way to Anchorage aboard the Black Poppy. His real name was Auric Godshawk. He was my grandfather.”

  Arlo turned and came back towards her, a fish hanging stupidly from either hand. “Really? You know, you have a look of him about you. Like his picture…”

  “He was Scriven.”

  “One of those northland mutants? Homo superior?”

  “Well that’s what they called themselves. They weren’t really very superior.”

  Arlo was watching her and she couldn’t guess what he was thinking. She hoped it would not unsettle him to be sharing his island with someone not-quite-human.

  He grinned suddenly. “Açora means ‘goshawk’ in one of the old tongues of Mayda. Do you see? It’s almost ‘Godshawk’.” He laughed. “Fever, this is wonderful! It’s fate! A sign from the gods! Your grandfather helped mine build his ships, and now you’re here to help me build my aëroplane…”

  “There is no such thing as fate,” said Fever sternly. “And there are certainly no such things as gods.” But as she followed him back towards the tower she felt pleased that she had told him about her grandfather. She thought that Auric Godshawk would have been glad that she was here, on Daniel Thursday’s island, helping Daniel Thursday’s grandson to change the world.

  For the first few days she kept expecting trouble. The memory of how Fat Jago Belkin’s men had wrenched and tethered her was like a stubborn stain; however hard she tried she could not shift it. But slowly, in the sunlight and seeming safety of the island, it began to fade a little. The mysterious Lothar Vishniak did not appear, and when Weasel visited the island he had nothing much to tell them about Fat Jago. Belkin was busy “doing business” he kept telling them.

  But even Weasel did not come often. “He’s found some female in the city,” Arlo guessed, watching him flap back towards the heights of Mayda.

  Fever stopped sneaking glances from the windows quite so often. When she did she saw only the empty beaches, the Jenny Haniver moored under the trees at the abandoned quay, and sometimes the Aranha pacing the foreshore like a thoughtful crab, still keeping guard over the Thursdays’ island and its secrets.

  On the tower’s roof the flying machine was taking shape again. Arlo seemed so absent-minded sometimes that Fever wondered how he could possibly make sense of the mass of disassembled struts and sections they had dragged up from the cutter. But soon the machine was looking much as it had when she first saw it, except that in the open air it seemed both smaller and more alive. She watched Arlo work at it, using a spokeshave or a rasp to skim off as much as he could from the struts and wing-bones, smoothing and shaping them until they were as light and delicate as they could be without losing the strength they would need.

  Sometimes they worked together at the propeller, smoothing the rough thing he’d shaped, working oil into it with a brush before sanding again. Fine sawdust covered them, sticking to the sweat on their sunburnt faces, making them sneeze. One hot afternoon Arlo pulled off his shirt and Fever saw that his shoulders and chest were as covered with freckles as his face. He stirred deep, unexpected memories in her; of Scriven girls her grandfather had loved; their cowrie-shell shoulders and dappled throats. Was that why her grandfather had chosen Daniel Thursday to be his shipwright? Not because of his boatbuilding skills, but simply on account of all his lovely freckles?

  Arlo looked up, saw her watching him, and smiled vaguely at her. Then he went back to his work, the starcharts of his speckled skin slowly fading under fresh layers of sweat and sawdust.

  In the evenings the surf boomed along the island’s beaches, but in the pens and basins of the old Thursday shipyard the sheltered water grew still as glass, reflecting the peach-coloured sky. A dead tree had washed up on the beach. Arlo chopped it into logs while Fever gathered dry brushwood from the cliff tops and made a fire in the tower’s hearth. The fish which they caught in the pens and tide-pools they spread open like silver books and roasted on a rack that she made from an old window grille. Their oil sizzled, dripping into the hot ash below, and the smell of them was the colour of old terracotta flowerpots. When they had eaten, Fever might leaf through Arlo’s scruffy notes and drawings while he explained to her the secrets he had learned from the angels. Or they would talk about the next day’s work, and then of the other inventions they might make, other wonders from the Ancient World still waiting to be rediscovered. Then Fever would curl up on one of the stony bunks under a blanket brought up from the cutter and fall asleep, dreaming of flight, and of the machine that waited on the roof above her, tethered to the mountings of the old artillery-emplacement, its wings trembling in the night wind.

  Days went by: days of hard work and sunlight. Soon the frame of the machine was complete. Together, she and Arlo pasted strip upon strip of paper over it, building up the wing-surface, sculpting the careful, asymmetric camber which would give the machine extra lift. As the paste dried they painted the paper with a solution, dizzyingly smelly, to strengthen and waterproof it. They attached the control cables which would lift the flaps at the wings’ tips and trailing edges to steer the machine up and down, and turn the swallow-tail rudder to make it go left or right. Arlo was determined to launch from the tower’s top, although Fever was sure that if he could get up enough speed he would be able to take off from a flat stretch of ground, like one of the island’s beaches. But Arlo said he was not going to take the machine apart and carry it all down again, and she had to give in. It was his machine, after all. She suspected his real reason for wanting to launch from the tower was rooted in his memories of watching the angels fly, hurling themselves into the wind from their precarious roosts on the sea cliffs.

  Fever was happy. Happier now, she thought, than she’d been since she was a little girl, helping Dr Crumb with his experiments in Godshawk’s Head. She sometimes missed the children and the rest of the Lyceum’s company, but she knew they would be having a good time in Meriam, and mostly it was a relief not to have to listen to their endless chatter, and waste time thinking about ways to ligh
t the foolish plays. Here on the island there was always the feeling, giddy and intoxicating, that she was helping to build the future.

  The only crack in her happiness was the engine which Arlo expected her to attach to his machine. To someone brought up among Engineers it was a crude-looking thing, an inelegant metal box full of pistons and gears, powered by the constant explosion of liquid ethanol, lubricated with castor oil. She carefully dismantled and reassembled it, and she could see no reason why it should not work, but it still seemed to her to be much too heavy, although she could see no way that she could make it lighter. Worse still, Arlo had brought with him only one small barrel of fuel. There was not enough to waste any running the engine for long before they mounted it on the frame of the machine. Its first proper test would come when Arlo took to the air…

  21

  LOST MAPS OF THE SKY

  ometimes Fever still needed to be alone, and sometimes, too, she sensed that Arlo did not want her company. Then she would go off by herself along the narrow tracks which wound between the pines and dwarf oaks, into secret hollows among the rocks on the island’s high spine.

  It was on one of those lonely expeditions that she found the birdcastle.

  At the island’s western end stood the remains of a second tower. Five hundred years before, Mayda had been a target for all sorts of sea-rovers and sea-raiders: corsairs from the Islamist caliphates of old north Africa; roving pirates from Oak Island and strong-walled Dun Laoghaire. The Maydans had had a use for lots of watchtowers. This one was roofless now and tumbledown and a tangled mass of branches and debris had somehow become wedged in its top. The first few times she saw it, Fever imagined that Arlo’s wave had washed right over it and left it clogged with driftwood. But this evening, when she had climbed up higher than before on to the summit of one of the rock formations, and was looking down at the tower, she started to see that there was a sort of structure to the jutting baulks and branches, and that in places they had been woven together like a wicker basket, or an enormous bird’s nest.

  She scrambled down off her rock and found a way to the tower through the juniper bushes and low-growing clumps of heather. There was a doorway at the base of it, nothing left of the door but rusted hinges and a scattering of nails among the nettles which grew on the threshold. She crept inside and looked up. The westering sun slid long needles of orange light through chinks in the walls, lighting up a metal staircase which spiralled through the sagging ceiling. She went up warily, feeling the treads shift as they took her weight. She could hear nothing but the wind-blown bushes outside rhubarbing like actors in a crowd scene and, far below, the lazy pulsing of the surf.

  The top floor was thick with fish bones and ancient guano. The raggedy mass of old branches overhead formed a roof; a driftwood dome, tied together with rotting rags and ancient straggles of oily rope, with fisherman’s floats and old bottles stitched into it here and there. It was clumsy, rank-smelling, crude, probably unsafe, yet in its way it was as impressive as any building she had ever seen, and she stood there for a long time just staring up at it; the architecture of angels.

  A scuffling, a fluttering, and one of the creatures landed beside her. “Snacksies?” it asked. Fever was coming to know a few of the angels by sight now. She had often noticed this young female hanging around Arlo’s tower, waiting for scraps.

  “Sorry,” she said, spreading her hands out so the angel could see they were empty. “No snacks. I just came to look at this place.”

  “Old,” said the angel, hopping away from her, picking up a fish skull with the fingers of one wing. “How old?” asked Fever. “Yesterday.”

  Older than that, thought Fever. Years and years old. But to the angels everything that was not happening now had happened yesterday.

  She asked, “Why don’t you live here today?”

  The angel made no reply. It probably hadn’t understood the question. Weasel seemed to be the only one with a vocabulary of more than a few words. Fever left it examining the fish bones and walked across the room to where a gap in the driftwood gave her a view of the western sea. Angels were wheeling whitely around a tall stack offshore. She could make out their nests, crammed together on rock ledges high above the surf, the cliffs beneath them drizzled with long white beards of guano like frozen waterfalls. She wanted to ask the angel what had made them stop building their birdcastles and go back to roosting on cliffs, but there was no point, and she already knew the answer. They had forgotten how, just as people had forgotten how to fly.

  The sun was sinking quickly. Orange rays tracked through the tower like the beams of spotlights, revealing flurries of scratches on the ancient lime plaster of the walls. There, too, Fever could see order. There was nothing she could read, but there was a rhythm and a reason to the marks which the angels of long ago had made. There were long lines of parallel scorings which might have been tallies of numbers, and in one place a collection of rough shapes which looked oddly familiar, until she recognized them as the outlines of Mayda and the Ragged Isles, just as they had looked on the maps in Master Persimmon’s atlas.

  “You made charts!” she said, crouching down to bring her face closer to the old drawing. It was very detailed; she could see the causeway zigzagging from Mayda to the mainland, and the double curve of the harbour wall. Stylized bird-forms marked some of the outer islands, perhaps to show which ones were home to angels. She looked to her left along the wall’s curve, and there she saw another coastline, with bites and headlands scratched carefully into the paint and things that might have been fish in the sea. The fish-symbols must mark the best fishing-grounds, she thought, places way to the west of Mayda, out of reach to human fishermen but well within the range of the angels, gliding on their wide wings. But what was that other shore, so far to westward?

  “Is this America?” she asked, turning to the bird behind her.

  “Merica,” said the angel.

  “Did your ancestors, the old angels, did they sometimes fly all the way to America?”

  “Merica,” said the angel, with its head on one side. It had never heard the word before. It was just mimicking the sound. Then it caught some other sound, the clatter of a kicked stone down below, and took flight, filling the room for a moment with its panicky wingbeats before bursting out through a gap in the driftwood lattice overhead. A white feather came zigzagging down through the sunbeams, and settled in Arlo Thursday’s hair as he walked up the stairs.

  “Fever… I came to tell you that supper’s almost ready. Oh, I see you’ve found the angels’ atlas.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “That’s what my grandfather called it. He used to bring me up here when I was little. He reckoned that it showed their fishing grounds, their roosts, even the currents of the upper air. You see those swirling scratches? ‘The bird roads’, he called those. Maybe we’ll ride them too, one day.”

  “And this coastline…?” said Fever, touching the wriggly scar of it.

  “You can’t be sure it is a coastline, you know. Birds drew these maps, and they may not have shared our concepts of east and west, distance and direction. Just because they drew Mayda here and then that shore over there doesn’t mean anything. That could be a map of somewhere further down the coast, or in northern Africa, or some made-up country, some birdy heaven.”

  “Or it could be America,” said Fever.

  “Well, yes. That’s what Grandfather believed. Angels have been known to travel for thousands of miles. He thought that they could easily have reached the Dead Continent.”

  “But if the angels reached it, it can’t be dead,” said Fever. “Other birds must go there. They’d take seeds with them, plants would grow. Insects and spiders would blow there on the wind. And there are fish in the seas, look…” She pointed to the fish-shapes which angels had carved in the nooks and inlets of that unknown shore.

  Arlo laughed. “Perhaps we’ll fly there ourselves one day, when the machine is ready, and find out. What do you think?”r />
  Fever thought that she was being made fun of. It had happened often enough in the past, and she was starting to recognize the signs. She smiled to show that she did not mind, then got up and followed him back down the stairs of the tower, still contemplating lost America. “Perhaps it’s just a taboo that stops people going there and exploring for themselves,” she said, squinting into the red sunlight, wishing she could see over the curve of the earth. “All those old stories about America being destroyed by the gods; a wasteland; a continent of death. We’ve all grown up on those stories so we half believe them, even the rational ones among us.”

  “Old myths are very powerful,” agreed Arlo. “Look at the Zagwans, burning people like you and me alive because they think technology offends their god. Or my own people. We were still sacrificing children to appease the Sea Goddess until a few hundred years ago. And as for you Londoners? Isn’t this obsession with making London move just another crazy cult? And it’s spreading as fast as any religion; I gather that half the towns of the near north are thinking about adding wheels and engines…”

  “It won’t catch on,” said Fever firmly. “Not when people hear about your flying machine.”

  “Ah yes… The machine…” He looked at her and there was an odd light in his eyes; a banked-down excitement so boyish that he looked for an instant no older than Ruan. “Fever, she’s ready. There’s no reason to delay any longer. If the wind stays in the west and not too strong I mean to test her…”

  “When?”

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  They went home together along a path which Fever had always avoided before. It was more direct than the winding heather-mazes she usually walked up on the island’s crown, but it skirted close to the cliff’s edge, and the views of the white waves breaking all that way below made her stomach feel strange, however often she told herself she was being irrational and there was really no danger of falling. She walked carefully, keeping her eyes fixed on Arlo’s back and the lights the sunset lit in his hair. She feared for him, and she dared not say so in case that made him fearful too. She knew that the machine should fly; she had checked and checked his figures. But the cliffs were so high, and his body so fragile.