A Web of Air

by Philip Reeve

  Once they were out of the harbour; but that proved more easily said than done, for there was no wind at all inside the crater that evening, and Jonathan Hazell had to row his boat the whole length of the outer basin, while Dr Teal sat in the bow and fumed.

  “Come on, Hazell,” he snapped, as they drew level with the long red blade that was the Desolation Row. Lanterns had been lit on her high stern-castle, and her crew were busy removing tarpaulins from a boxy structure near her bows, which turned out to be a revolving gun turret.

  “Look,” said Teal, “they’ll soon be ready for the off. Still, it’s good to see that your friend Fat Jago is as wary of the Sea Goddess as every other fool in Mayda. No engines on that ship of his; just oars. She can’t be very fast.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fast,” panted Jonathan Hazell. “Fat Jago employs a great many oarsmen. And she’ll not be prey to the winds, as we are. We must just hope she will give us another hour or so; a sporting start…”

  But their luck was out. Just as they passed the lighthouse at the harbour mouth and felt the first stirrings of the wind, they heard the faint, steady pounding of a drum coming up the harbour behind them.

  The Desolation Row swept out of Mayda in the twilight under bare masts with her oars dipping and rising like the pistons of some implacable machine. Teal and Hazell watched her come, her sleek red hull like a bloodied knife, with dim lights burning in her gun-slits and that big lantern bright on her stern. Her lookouts mistook Hazell’s boat for a fisherman, maybe, or maybe they were so intent on their business that they never noticed it bobbing there at all. Boom, boom, doom, went the drum inside her, and the white water wavered like a ghost against her ram, and the little boat pitched on her wake as she went past it and swung her prow towards the last band of golden light that lay along the western sea.

  “West!” hissed Dr Teal. “They’re headed west! Hazell, you idiot, you were wrong! They’re making for the Ragged Isles!”

  “But there’s nothing there!” insisted Jonathan Hazell.

  “Well Fat Jago seems pretty sure that there is! You don’t set sail in a monster like that on the mere off-chance of finding something.”

  “What shall we do, Dr Teal?”

  The Engineer looked grim, and one hand reached inside his coat. There was something in there that he kept feeling for, as if its bulk and weight reassured him. Since he was an Engineer, Jonathan Hazell suspected it must be something more practical than a lucky rabbit’s foot or The Meditations of St Kylie. He patted it now, glared at Hazell and said, “Follow them, of course!”

  Jonathan Hazell raised the sail. It might have been russet if there had been any light to see it by, but in the deepening twilight it was just a rhomboid of deeper darkness against the sky. It flapped for a moment until Jonathan Hazell scrambled aft and pulled in the mainsheet, whereon it filled with wind, causing the boat to heel and rush forward and making Dr Teal say angrily, “I thought you knew how to sail this thing?”

  Jonathan Hazell ignored him. The tug of the mainsheet in his hand was comforting, and so was the cheerful gurgling of water under the boat’s foot, the slap of the small waves as she cut through them. “She’s a good boat,” he said. “A fast boat.”

  But she was not so fast as the Desolation Row, whose stern lantern was already dwindling in the west, racing towards those far-off islands which pricked the black horizon like fishes’ teeth.

  25

  THE LANDING PARTY

  hey had worked all afternoon, pausing now and then to eat ship’s biscuits and slices of cheese, but never stopping for a meal. They had forgotten to feel hungry, or tired. Sometimes one or other of them would take a break and walk away from the tower, and once Arlo went to the beach to swim, but their heads were full of their work all the time, and they soon came back to the machine. They felt that they were close to something. To stop before they reached it was impossible.

  By sundown Fever’s new engine was complete. With the Aranha’s torus at its heart it was as light and delicate as everything else about the Goshawk. As the sky above the tower grew dark and filled with stars and the angels went ghosting homeward to their roosts Arlo lit a lantern and Fever helped him fix the engine into position on the machine’s back. Carefully they made it fast, boring holes through the struts and bolting the engine to them, tightening the nuts as far as they would go. Instead of the medieval armour that Edgar Saraband’s engine had worn, Arlo had made a tortoiseshell basket of balsa struts and they pasted paper over it and varnished it and fixed that over the mechanisms. The torus gave off so little heat that Fever didn’t think it needed any vents to cool it, but Arlo made some anyway, just to be safe. They looked like the gills of a dogfish.

  And then, when the newborn sickle moon hung high over the islands, they switched it on. It buzzed restlessly, and the propeller quivered, and when Fever gave it one helping turn the big wooden blades dissolved suddenly into a circular blur of motion, and they felt Goshawk trembling, straining at its tethers like a live thing, a huge, newborn bird that longed for the freedom of the sky.

  When they turned it off the night seemed quieter than before, the air more still. The breeze had died. Fever said, “I hope the wind comes back tomorrow. We cannot launch without a headwind.”

  “It will come,” said Arlo, watching her, laughing privately at that busy brain of hers, the way it never rested.

  “Five miles per hour would be ideal, but I suppose we can manage with less.”

  He said, “You never unfasten your hair.”

  “What?” Fever put a hand to the hard bun at the back of her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” She wondered if he was thinking of using her hair as some sort of pennant so that he could gauge the speed and direction of the wind. Surely his own was long enough?

  “Even when you go to sleep,” said Arlo. “Sometimes a bit comes loose, but you always tie it straight back.”

  “Hair is irrational,” said Fever. “It is a vestige of our animal past. I had to grow mine when I left the Head just to stop people staring, but that does not mean that—”

  He came around the Goshawk’s tail and stood close to her. He reached out and she felt his fingers busy at the nape of her neck, unravelling the careful knot she’d tied. She knew that she ought to protest, but when she tried to speak no words came out, just a little sigh, a little gasp. And then the knot was undone and around her face in wisps and strands her dry, sun-bleached hair came tickling down. He combed his fingers through it, arranging it for her, his hands brushing against her throat and her ears and the angles of her jaw.

  “I do not approve…” she started to say, but she could not remember what it was that she did not approve of. She touched his face, tracing all the beautiful patterns of his freckles, thinking, This is not rational. I am forgetting myself. But might it not be pleasant to forget herself for a little while? Might it not be pleasant to give in to these fierce and hungry feelings? The smells of Arlo’s body flowered in her mind as sprays of nameless colour. She supposed that she was falling in love. That was what Dymphna or Lillibet would call it. And although she knew it must just be a matter of chemicals and instincts, it still felt wonderful and frightening and strange. She leaned towards Arlo until their faces touched. I am supposed to kiss him now, she thought, thinking of all the love scenes she had watched through her periscope from her lair under the Lyceum stage. I wonder how kissing works?

  White wings flared above her in the moonlight and an angel came down and landed heavily on her head.

  “Weasel!” it squawked, pushing its fish-stinky beak down between their startled faces as they sprang apart. “Arlo! Weasel!”

  Fever batted it away and it fluttered wildly and settled on the Goshawk’s port wing, still screaming out a mess of squawks and words. She wondered if it was angry at her for touching Arlo. Then she saw the look on his face.

  “What? What has happened to Weasel? How?”

  “Thir-z-aa,” croaked the angel. Fever thought it was the
same female she had tried to talk to about the scratches in the birdcastle. It hadn’t many words or much understanding of how to put them together, but it kept trying until Arlo understood.

  “She drowned him? Thirza?”

  A cold feeling came over Fever. “What was Weasel doing anywhere near Thirza?”

  “Thir-z-aa!” said the angel, doing a little agitated dance along the parapet. “Friend. Snacks.”

  “Does Weasel talk to Thirza often?” Fever asked.

  “Often! Yesterday!”

  Arlo shook his head. “Yesterday might mean last month or last year. Weasel wouldn’t betray me…”

  “Weasel wouldn’t know he was betraying you,” said Fever. “Not if she was nice to him and gave him lots of snacks.”

  “Thirza wouldn’t…” he started to say.

  And then more angels were around them, their voices clanging like rusty bells around the old tower. “A-ar-lo! Floatyboat! Big, big! Floatyboat come!”

  Arlo and Fever turned from each other, looking out across the sea. Beyond the reefs and shoals which screened the island, a ship rode the starlit swell. Long and low and black, with lights showing here and there. Fever stared at it, trying to understand what it meant. She could not believe that it was anything good.

  “Floatyboat!” cried the angels.

  “It’s Belkin!” said Arlo, with a catch in his voice as if he were going to cry. “That’s his galley, the Desolation Row. It was built at Blaizey’s, the year I started there… But it’ll never get through the reefs…”

  “Not even if Weasel told Thirza about the waymarks?” asked Fever.

  Arlo looked at her. “No. She’s too big. She’d rip her keel out on the rocks…”

  “Little floatyboat!” screeched the angels, taking up a new cry. “Big floatyboat-come-little-floatyboat-come.”

  Arlo looked confused, but Fever, with her keen Scriven eyes, soon saw what they meant. A smaller shape was detaching itself from the black outline of Fat Jago’s galley. A skiff, already starting to thread its way through the reefs. Faint sounds came to her across the water: the dull wooden clunk of a banged oar, a distant curse.

  She took Arlo’s hand, and felt him trembling.

  “Weasel told Thirza about us,” he said. “And Thirza told Belkin everything!”

  “Arlo,” said Fever. “It is irrational to cry over spilled milk. Can that boat get through the reefs?”

  “The big ship certainly couldn’t, not by night. But maybe a skiff…”

  He made an angry gesture, scaring the angel away into the dark. He looked very frightened. Fever had the feeling that came to her sometimes when she was with Ruan and Fern; a need to protect him against the hard truths of the world. She decided to take charge.

  “We’ll launch the Goshawk. Fly to Mayda now.”

  “I’m not leaving you behind,” he said.

  “Perhaps she’d carry us both, with the new engine.”

  “Never. The balance would be all wrong. Anyway, there’s no wind, she’ll never lift in this calm.”

  He was right. The night was still, the air as quiet as the air in a big room, the voices of Fat Jago’s men and the creak of their oars carrying clearly across the water.

  “They can’t come up here unless we let them,” Fever said. “There’s only one way in, up that ladder.”

  “They’ll have guns.”

  “But they won’t want to use them. The Goshawk’s no use to them if it’s full of holes, and nor are you. We can hold them off.”

  “What with?”

  “Where’s your pistol?”

  “It’s not loaded. It never was.”

  Fever snatched the lantern and ran to the hatch and down the stairs, looking desperately around their cluttered quarters. The belt of bullets which Arlo had taken from the Aranha’s gun shone faintly, abandoned under a table. If only we hadn’t dismantled it, Fever thought. The Aranha could have kept a whole fleet from landing. But regret would not bring it back, any more than it would bring back Weasel or undo his treachery. She snatched up the bullet-belt and studied the brass cartridges. On the base of each was a raised disc which she guessed must be some sort of percussion cap. A mechanism inside the Aranha’s gun would have struck that, causing the charge inside the cartridge to explode and force the bullet down the gun barrel. Ingenious, but useless, since the gun itself was several fathoms down in the old dock…

  “What about the angels?” she asked, glancing round as Arlo came down the stairs. “Would they help us?”

  He shook his head. “They’d be too scared. It’s not their fight anyway. They probably wouldn’t even understand… They don’t understand much that we do. That’s why Weasel thought it was all right to tell Thirza about us, I expect. I was wrong to be angry at him. Angels don’t think like us. They don’t understand…”

  Fever went to him and kissed him. There seemed a strong chance that she might die soon, and she did not want to die without kissing him. She need not have worried about not knowing how; it turned out that her mouth had known all along. He tasted of the colour that you see when you lift your face to the summer sun and close your eyes.

  “Fever…” he said, when she stopped.

  It was very interesting, this falling in love. She understood now why people wrote so many plays and songs about it. But it was hard to concentrate properly knowing that those men were coming, and that one of them was the man who had tried to squash her with a house. She made herself step away from Arlo and went to the fireplace, stirring up the embers there with the poker, throwing on fresh wood. She said, “Boil up some water, quick.”

  “Why?”

  “And gather together some logs … stones from the wall … anything heavy.”

  “You’re going to throw stones at them?”

  “We’re going to drop stones on them. We’re a hundred feet higher than them. That’s a hundred feet of acceleration. Stored gravitational energy waiting to be unleashed.”

  She checked the big vice attached to the old table that served them as a workbench. Fetched a hammer and a six-inch nail. When she looked from the eastern window she could no longer see the skiff, but she knew that was not a good thing; that meant it was close in now, hidden from her among the rocks and shadows of rocks just offshore. Maybe it was already off-loading its landing party along the overgrown quay.

  Meanwhile, Arlo had set a big pot of water to heat over the fire, and was making a pile of the biggest logs on the platform outside, at the top of the access ladder. Fever prised one of the bullets free of the belt and clamped it tightly in the jaws of the vice, then dragged the table round until the bullet pointed at the doorway. She laid the hammer and the nail ready beside it, then fetched the heaviest things she could carry: bits of the old engine cowling, a big wrench, a loose stone from the wall.

  She went outside to add them to Arlo’s pile at the top of the ladder, and was about to go back in and look for something else when she heard voices echoing among the crumbled walls below, and the hollow clonk as a boat banged against the stone jetty.

  “They are at the quay!” said Arlo.

  The men were making no attempt at stealth. Some of them carried flaming torches, and they talked to each other in loud voices as they came up the slope from the quays. Only five or six of them, so Fever guessed that they were not expecting much resistance. She felt a fluttering sensation in her stomach. She needed the toilet, but there wasn’t time now. Two of the men had detached themselves from the rest and came right to the ladder’s foot. One held a torch up. The other stood in the pool of light it cast so that Arlo and Fever could see his face.

  It was Fat Jago.

  He shaded his eyes against the torchlight, peering up. “Thursday? Your little feathered friend told me where to find you. Will you let me up? We need to talk.”

  Arlo looked at Fever, and she could see that he was relieved by the fat man’s reasonable tone. It would be easy to believe in that tone; to let Belkin climb up and talk to them. But Fever re
membered too well her last chat with him. It was irrational to trust him. They could not let the Goshawk fall into the hands of a man like that.

  Before Arlo could reply she picked up a big stone and dropped it over the edge of the platform. It clanged off the handrail at the edge of the landing halfway down and Fat Jago skipped clumsily backwards as it shattered on the ground just in front of him.

  “Thursday! Be reasonable!” he pleaded. “Even you must see that you can’t do this alone! The Oktopous Cartel will give you all you need: space, equipment, workers… They want to help you.”

  “They’ll have to come up and get me first!” shouted Arlo, and he snatched a log and sent it hurtling down. Belkin strode to the foot of the ladder, motioning angrily for the rest of his men. They came very fast, with the torchlight splashing their running shadows on the cobbles and the weeds. Bald heads, bare arms, studded leather jerkins, wide belts with knives stuffed through them. They came barefoot, like sailors, making almost no sound.

  Belkin called to them as they started swarming up the ladder, “Take them alive! I want the machine undamaged.”

  Fever hefted one of the weightier bits of Edgar Saraband’s engine, took aim, and let it go. It struck sparks from the ladder as it dropped. A man looked up at the flash and she saw his eyes go wide in the instant before it crunched into his face. He fell soundlessly from the ladder, knocking down one of his mates, but the rest came on. She dropped another piece, and then she and Arlo started heaving logs and engine parts over the edge. The attackers were ready for them now and leant sideways off the ladder to avoid the missiles. A few glanced off shoulders and leather-armoured backs on their way to the ground, but the men came on, and were soon on the landing.

  By then the pot of water on the fire was burbling happily to itself. Together, not speaking, Fever and Arlo ran to fetch it. In the short time that it took them to carry it to the ladder top one of the attackers had managed to get almost up to the entry platform. They upended the pot over him and he screamed and put his hands to his scalded face and went backwards off the ladder and down, hitting the ground with a sound like a stomped snail.