by Alex Shearer
Of course, it’s only light and feathery stuff that drifts in. Anything substantial, it starts to sink in the atmosphere, picking up speed as it goes, and then it’s that big, dry splash and a moment’s flickering as it burns up in the sun.
‘I don’t mean where did you get the piece of wood from. I mean, where did you get the idea to turn it into a gun and go bang-banging around the place?’
Well, I didn’t know. The idea just sort of came to me. I didn’t make any effort to think it up.
‘I don’t know, Peggy. It was kind of … inspiration.’
At which she gave me one of her one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old hard-pickled looks.
‘Inspiration? Not what I’d be calling it. More the sort of thing a hooligan might do.’
‘What’s a hooligan, Peggy?’
‘Someone who likes a fight and causing trouble. You’ll be able to look it up in the big dictionary when we go to City Island.’
‘Won’t it be in the little dictionary?’ I said.
‘It will,’ Peggy agreed. ‘But small dictionaries just give small definitions. Besides, my dictionary’s ninety years old if it’s a turning. And words can change their meanings.’
Which surprised me somewhat.
‘Words can change their meanings?’
‘Sometimes, Martin.’
‘How?’
‘They just do.’
‘But isn’t that kind of like … changing your name? Like, a Martin is a Martin. How could “Martin” change its meaning? That would make me someone else.’
‘It’s called common usage. You take a word like wicked. Once, wicked meant bad and evil. Then it came to mean pretty good and excellent stuff. But as far as I know, a hooligan is still a hooligan. But, as I’m ninety years out of touch, maybe a hooligan is someone saintly by now. But anyway, put the gun down, Martin, and don’t stick it in my face.’
‘I was only playing …’
‘Yeah. I know. What’s bothering me is why.’
‘I don’t know. I was just pretending.’
‘I just don’t know what put the idea into your head. You don’t see Gemma bang-banging at things.’
‘She’s not so perfect.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying. Perfection doesn’t come into it. It’s the ways we’re imperfect is the trouble. Some imperfections are more tolerable than others.’
I’d seen Gemma pulling the fins off sky-fish when we were smaller. I don’t say she did it out of evil, more out of curiosity, and I’d never seen her do it since. But no one’s perfect is all I’m getting at and there are other ways to be a hooligan than to go bang-banging with a pretend gun. It’s just that sisters are more hooligans on the quiet and the sly. Girls do nasty things too, seems to me, but they’re more likely to get away with it, as they try and look angelic afterwards so nobody would suspect.
‘I think I got the idea from old Ben Harley,’ I said. ‘He’s got a gun.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ Peggy said. ‘He has, hasn’t he? He’s got that old harpooner. And if he goes on drinking that private stash of his the way he does, he’s going to end up shooting himself in the foot.’
‘Would that hurt?’ I asked, wondering if we might hear Ben Harley yelling when he finally got round to shooting himself in the foot, even though his island was quite some distance away.
‘What do you think, Martin?’
‘It would hurt.’
‘It would hurt like hell. He’ll end up walking round on a wooden leg, if he’s not careful. Though no doubt it would match his wooden brain.’
‘Thought we weren’t supposed to use words like hell, Peggy.’
‘No, kiddo. You’re not to use words like hell. I get to use them whenever I like.’
‘Why’s that, Peggy? Isn’t that like don’t do as I do but do as I –?’
‘No it isn’t. It’s not do as I say at all. I don’t want you saying as I say, or you’ll end up a foul-mouthed hick from the way-backs, and when you get to City Island they’ll think you’re a little savage – which, going by that gun there, they may have some grounds for supposing.’
‘So why’s it all right for you to say words like hell, Peg, and not me?’
‘Because I’m one hundred and twenty years old and I’ve paid my dues and you’re not and you haven’t.’
‘So when I’m a hundred and twenty years old and I’ve paid my dues can I say words like hell then?’
‘You seem to be saying them now, far as I can hear.’
‘I mean, can I go saying them on a regular basis?’
‘Martin, if you ever get to be my age, you can swear like a trooper all day long. You have my permission.’
‘Will you give me a note saying I can do that?’
‘The hell I will.’
‘You’re saying it again, Peggy.’
‘I’ve got provocation.’
‘What?’
‘You. You and that damn toy gun.’
‘You’ve gone and said damn now, Peggy.’
‘The hell I have.’
‘No, you did. I heard you say it.’
‘Martin, find something else to play with, can’t you? I don’t like guns.’
‘But you’ve got a harpooner too. Hidden away. I’ve seen it.’
‘Really? Well, two things about that. One, what are you doing rummaging about in my hidden-aways?’
‘I came upon it by accident.’
‘The hell you did. Two, that harpooner is for emergencies only, big emergencies. I don’t like guns, Martin. Not even pretend ones. You play at war and soldiers and shooting things, next thing you know you’re all grown up and you are a soldier and you are shooting things. Only, after you’ve pulled the trigger, what you pointed the gun at doesn’t get up.’
‘Oh, I was only passing the time, Peg.’
‘I know. I know you’re a good person at heart, Martin. It’s just sometimes playing at something is conditioning, preparation, you might say, for the real thing.’
‘Well, I’ll throw it away then.’
‘No, you don’t have to do that. I’m not forbidding it. You play with it as much as you like.’
‘I don’t really want to any more.’
‘Well, you want to come and help me go rock-combing?’
‘Yes, OK. Think we’ll find anything today?’
‘You never know.’
So I just left the piece of wood by the coast there and we went rock-combing – which is searching the rocks for whatever the wind and solar tide might have brought in. Most of it’s rubbish, but you occasionally find useful stuff.
Anyhow, what put me in mind of all this, after we left the island of Ignorance and continued on our way with our repaired and working solar engines back intact, was what appeared in the sky a day or two later. It happened on my watch, too, which is why I so exactly remember all the details and such.
It’s mostly boring being on watch. Boring but – according to Peggy – necessary. The Toll Troll had proved that. (You know, I think I maybe use that expression a lot, or even too much. According to Peggy. Most of what I know is according to Peggy. I think maybe she ought to write her memoirs and put down all her choice phrases and sayings and call it According to Peggy.
But I don’t know if anyone would publish it as it would be full of hells and damns, and a whole lot worse, and the righteous (whom Peggy doesn’t have much time for) would say it was disgusting and try to have it banned, which would probably tickle her pink no end, and maybe even tickle her yellow too. Because, why does it have to be pink that you’re tickled? I don’t know. I don’t see why you can’t be a whole rainbow tickled – even tickled infrared and ultraviolet, come to that.
Occasionally, in among the tedium, being on watch has its interesting moments too. Because you never know what might come along: a sky-whaler chasing a sky-whale, sky-jellies, an algae bloom, a full-on midge swarm – and they have to be seen to be believed.
They travel through the sky like tornadoes. If
you can’t avoid a midge bloom, they’ll cause you misery untold. They get into everything: your eyes, lungs, throat, down in your clothes, into the galley, the food, every crevice of the ship. Even Ben Harley’s private stash won’t repel a whole swarm of midges. It’s said that if you get enough of them, they can strip a sky-shark to the bone. One minute it’s a sky-shark, the next it’s just a skeleton flying through the air. Don’t know if I believe that, but it’s what Ben Harley says.
So it was my watch and I had the scope to my eye and I was looking. I looked here, I looked there. I didn’t see anything except blue sky and a few tiny clouds and some black spots that had to be islands in the far, far away. That or dirt on the lens.
I took a rest. Peggy and Gemma were sprawled on the deck, both with their eyeshades on and both asleep and snoring. I mean, when I’d been asleep they’d say to me, ‘Martin, you were snoring again.’ Or, ‘Martin, you were talking in your sleep.’ Or, ‘Martin, would you like to know what you were doing when you were dozing back then?’
And they’d make out that when it came to them they were all ladylike and dainty sleepers. But the truth was, they were driving them home like saw-fish. But whenever I told them that they both snored something terrible, they wouldn’t believe me, and made out it was sour grapes and I was making it all up. So that’s girls for you as far as I could tell – big snorers but pretending otherwise. Not that Peggy’s a girl, but she was once.
When I tackled her on the subject of girls and snoring, she said it would be different when we got to City Island and I would meet girls there I would feel differently about. She said sisters were one thing but other girls were another. So I was reserving my judgement on that score and was waiting to see what these other girls might be like, and as far as I was concerned, they were innocent until proven guilty. But if they were going to tell me they never snored, I wouldn’t believe them. As I’d already had experience.
Well, I took a drink of water and I put the telescope back to my eye. There were a few sky-fish around and some small sky-jellies, but they were the harmless ones that weren’t going to bother you. I raised the scope a little and looked above us. There, in the distance, I could make something out. It was still small, but it was moving, and it was coming our way. I kept the scope trained on it and tightened the focus a little. Then I prodded Gemma with my foot and I shook Peggy by the arm.
‘Something coming,’ I said. ‘Something funny-looking.’
And it was funny-looking too. It was weird. The shape of it was wrong. It couldn’t be a sky-fish. I knew what they looked like. I knew every kind and variety that lived up at our level, and even the names of some of the leathery ones from down below that we had hauled up sometimes on great long lines.
Gemma stretched and stood up and Peggy did the same, but she took a little longer and she creaked more.
‘Let me see, Martin –’ Peggy said.
I handed her the scope.
‘It looks a bit like a sky-fin, but if it is, there’s something else with it …’
Peggy held the scope to her eye and then passed the scope to Gemma.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s a rider.’
Gemma handed the scope back to me.
‘It’s a what?’ I said.
I looked again. I’d never seen anything like this. She was right – there was a rider on the back of the sky-fin. The sky-fin was saddled and bridled and somehow broken in and tamed, and the rider was using it as private transport, and the mount was speeding him through the sky.
‘I knew they were friendly but I thought they were wild. I didn’t know you could tame them.’
‘If you’re got the patience – and the determination – and don’t mind getting a few bites and tail slaps along the way,’ Peggy said. ‘Or you can whisper them, if you have the gift.’
‘Whisper them?’
‘Persuade them and cajole them – with sweet nothings in their ears. You don’t need whips and spurs when you’ve got sweet nothings and you know how to say them. Just brings them round and calms them down. But you have to have the knack. Cloud Hunters do it.’
‘That a Cloud Hunter?’
‘If it is, it’s a lost and lonely one. They don’t usually travel alone.’
The sky-fin and its rider were heading across our path at fifty degrees. But then abruptly the rider seemed to see us, for he jerked at the bridle and turned the sky-fin around, and he began to head in our direction.
‘Looks like he wants some company,’ Peggy said. She took the telescope back. ‘I wonder …’ She put the lens to her eye, seemed to stiffen, then, ‘Gemma,’ she said. ‘Go down to the cabin, get my knife and bring it to me.’
Gemma didn’t question her and nor did I, and I made out like I wasn’t worried neither, but I was. What had Peggy seen about the rider that she wanted her knife for?
‘Can’t we just change course?’ Gemma said. She was back with the knife and the sheath it came in. Peggy hooked it to her belt.
‘Wouldn’t be any good,’ Peggy said. ‘A sky-fin, even with extra weight on its back, is going to outrun you easy. Let’s just see what he wants. Might all be fine. Why look for trouble?’
She put the telescope down. As Gemma didn’t pick it up again, I did. I could see them both clearly now, the sky-fin and the rider. He didn’t look much older than Gemma to me, but he looked kind of strange, kind of blank, like there wasn’t much going on in his mind – or if there was, he was determined to keep it all to himself.
He wore a bandana around his head to keep his long hair in place and out of his eyes, and both were streaming behind him as the sky-fin rode the thermals and kept on coming, its fins beating so fast they were blurs in the heat haze. I could see already that he had scars on his face – deep, ritual, Cloud Hunters’ scars, running from just under his eyes to the corners of his mouth. His torso was bare and he wore camouflage fatigues on his legs. But criss-crossing his bare chest were bandoliers, make out of sky-shark leather, and they held at least a score of short arrows, made from sharpened bone; and slung around his back was a bow, a crossbow.
As he approached, he let go of the reins and dug his knees and ankles into the side of the sky-fin, to keep it on course. Then he reached behind him, brought the crossbow around and loaded it with an arrow. He put a second arrow in a groove on the bow, so that when he fired the first, he could reload almost instantly.
By now I didn’t need the telescope any more. I could hear the beating of the sky-fin and the sound of it coming and of the displaced air. Then we could hear its breath and its panting lungs, as it headed straight for us. The rider dug in with his knees and the sky-fin swooped under the hull and reappeared on the port side of our boat. It came to a stop almost immediately, and then there it was, the sky-fin and the rider, hovering just above the deck.
The rider looked at us and now that we could see him close to I realised that he was wasn’t a whole lot older than Gemma at all – in fact he wasn’t all that much older than me.
He levelled the crossbow and pointed it in Peggy’s direction.
‘Who’s the skipper?’
‘You’re looking at her, young fella.’
But he disregarded the young fella stuff.
‘You’re in territorial sky.’
‘The hell we are,’ Peggy said, at the hells yet again. ‘We’re in open sky.’
‘You’re in sky belonging to the Liberation Enlightenment Army.’
‘We’re damn well not. You look at this chart –’
She reached for the maps, but the rider moved the crossbow so that it pointed straight at her.
‘It doesn’t matter what the charts say. They’re old. This is territorial sky belonging to the Liberation Enlightenment Army and you’ve no business being here.’
‘We’ve every business –’
‘I’m the one talking, old woman –’
Peggy gave him a look but didn’t say anything, though it was plain she didn’t think much of his m
anners.
‘Turn the boat around, and go where I say.’
‘The hell I will.’
He levelled the crossbow.
‘You want me to use this? You think I won’t?’
Peggy looked at him, and so did I. I looked right into his eyes. I thought he would use the crossbow. I thought he probably already had.
‘OK,’ Peggy said. ‘But it’s all a big misunderstanding. Where to?’
‘There. Straight ahead. I’ll be riding right behind you. I’ll give you more directions. Any change of course and –’
To make his point he fired off the arrow in the crossbow; it thwacked into the mast and reverberated, like a violin playing, then it stopped. He’d already reloaded.
‘All right?’
‘We can hear you,’ Peggy said. ‘Only where are we heading and what are we going there for?’
‘We’re going to join the rest of the troops,’ the boy said – and he was a boy really, even to call him a young man would be stretching it. ‘And find out who you’re spying for.’
‘Spying?’
‘You’ve got a scope.’
‘Every boat’s got a scope. Who’d leave land without one?’
‘Then maybe you’re colluding with the enemy.’
‘What enemy? We don’t know anything about your wars and squabbles, kid. We don’t know who you’re fighting nor why you’re fighting them. We’re just on our way to City Isl—’
‘Don’t call me kid,’ the kid said. ‘You hear me?’
‘OK,’ Peggy said. ‘Take it easy – I’m turning her around.’
She took the wheel and turned the boat around steadily.
‘OK. Angle up ten degrees and set the auto for thirty degrees to starboard,’ he instructed.
‘Anything you say.’
‘OK. Put the solars on full. Leave the sails as they are.’
‘You’re the boss.’
‘Just do it.’
He jerked the crossbow again, in a kind of general, all-encompassing warning. Or maybe it was more of a threat.
‘And no talking.’
So we sailed on in silence, on the course he had given, and he rode behind us on the sky-fin, a few metres back, keeping the crossbow primed and ready, and pointed at Peggy’s neck.