by Alex Shearer
‘What is it?’ I asked Jenine. ‘I can’t see anything. What is it? Where –?’
Wordlessly, she handed me the binoculars. The black speck in the western sky became clear and visible. It was a boat. A boat just like ours.
‘It’s another Cloud Hunter. Isn’t it?’
She took the glasses back and put them to her own eyes.
‘Of a kind,’ she said.
‘Where’s it headed?’ I asked, rather unnecessarily.
‘Where do you think?’ she snapped.
Then I realised that it wasn’t just a hunt any longer. It was something else as well. It was a race too. A race to be first to the clouds. We were two packs of hunters after the one quarry. And sharing didn’t enter into it.
16
cut-throat competition
We watched the other ship as it approached. It was of similar construction to our own, but its water storage tanks were patched and welded, as if recently damaged by a meteor storm. Its hull was pitted and full of dents.
We were almost equidistant from the clouds. The other boat was running flat out, as we were, with its solar panels fully open and its wind sails billowing. It was plainly desperate to get there first.
‘Can’t we go faster?’ Carla asked.
Kaneesh shook his head.
‘No. But we have more of the sails.’
He meant we had the wind more directly behind us, which the other boat did not. It was tacking: that is, its sails were catching the wind from an oblique angle, so its speed was less, though perhaps it didn’t have quite so far to go.
‘Recognise it?’ Carla asked him. ‘Know them?’
Kaneesh shook his head again. His hands gripped the wheel.
Jenine took the glasses and looked through them, adjusting them to get better focus. Then she lowered them and her face seemed dismayed.
‘They’re not true Cloud Hunters. They’re Barbaroons,’ she said.
‘Are you sure?’
Her mother took the binoculars and looked for herself. She turned to Kaneesh and nodded.
‘She’s right.’
Kaneesh swore again. His hand went to the knife in his belt, as if to reassure himself that should it be needed, it was there.
‘Barbar-what?’ I asked Jenine.
‘It’s what we call them. It’s a general term – a type. It means criminals, pirates, cut-throats. Uncivilised people. No traditions. No culture. People like that.’
‘The competition?’ I said.
‘You could put it that way.’
‘So?’
‘There’s no agreement with them. They’re not real Cloud Hunters, not like us. Just opportunists. They’ll steal anything.’
‘Meaning?’
‘It means they’ll try to take the clouds, no matter what. First there, or last there, they’ll still try to take them.’
‘What do we do?’ I naively asked.
‘We don’t let them, of course.’
‘But how do we stop them?’
The three of them looked at me, but none of them answered. If there was any kind of a reply, it came from Kaneesh, who took his knife out, checked the sharpness of the blade with his thumb, and then put it back into his belt.
Cloud Hunters are usually known to each other, and they’re mostly of similar ethnic origins. But not all. Anyone who wants to can get a boat, rig it out and take to the skies to hunt for clouds. Which literally would make them a Cloud Hunter. But in practice things are not so straightforward.
For one thing, there is the question of acceptance. If other Cloud Hunters don’t regard you as having a legitimate right to hunt, nor feel that you possess the correct credentials of custom and tradition, then although they will make no attempt to stop you, they will make no effort to assist you either, should you land in trouble. You’re not a fellow hunter in their eyes; you’re a poacher, a thief.
And, more importantly, they won’t play by the rules. They will take the clouds from under your nose, and there won’t be a thing you can do about it.
Not that there are explicit rules, just unwritten, tacitly agreed forms of conduct which have evolved over the years, in order to minimise conflict.
First: the clouds belong to everyone. When abundant, there can be no quarrel. When there is enough for everybody, then every hunter is entitled to their share.
But when the clouds are meagre and are barely enough to fill one ship’s tanks, then the first boat to reach them and to start up the compressors has title to them. Any other ships must withdraw. That had always been the convention and most of the time it was peacefully observed.
But not everybody plays by the rules. Water is water after all. It’s worth money. Water pirates were a constant hazard. And now we had some, right in front of us. And the brutal truth is that might is right. There is no real law in the open sky. There are international regulations, certainly, but rarely any authority to uphold them. The laws of the land don’t really apply where there is no land for them to apply to. The only people there to look after us were ourselves.
Carla went to the cabin. When she returned, she too had her knife at her waist.
I began to wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed at home. And Kaneesh obviously thought the same.
‘We should never have brought him,’ he mumbled to Carla, thinking himself out of earshot. But I heard.
‘He’s her friend,’ Carla said. ‘She’s alone too much. He’s someone of her age.’
Kaneesh turned his head and spat over the side of the boat.
‘Friendship with land-dwellers! Education!’ he sneered. ‘What good is it? What is she going to learn that she can’t learn here? Table manners?’
‘Things you’ll never know,’ Carla said.
‘And never need to,’ Kaneesh snapped back.
‘No, because this is all you’ll ever do,’ Carla snapped in turn.
‘And what will she do?’ Kaneesh said, angry and defiant. ‘Where will she ever fit in now with those scars on her face? It’s too late. She’s branded and you know it. An exile, everywhere she goes. An outcast, like the rest of us.’
‘Her father wanted it, not me,’ Carla said. ‘We quarrelled over it. I told him she was far too young – that it was a bad tradition that had outlived its time. It should stop. We should end it.’
‘What’s done is done. It’s too late now and can’t be changed,’ Kaneesh said. ‘She’s a Cloud Hunter and always will be. She’s as marked as you and me. Where can she go? What island will have her? Everywhere she goes the scars tell the story. She’s a Cloud Hunter. They all want water and they look down on those who gather it. They think we’re barbarians, but they can’t live without us.’
‘Prejudice is there to be overcome,’ Carla said, her face set like stone now.
‘Ha!’ Kaneesh didn’t seem too impressed by that. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘No one will ever overlook the scars on her face, any more than they will overlook the tattoos on my arms or the colour of my skin.’
‘It’s the same colour as mine,’ Carla said.
‘Exactly.’
‘There are a thousand islands with a thousand colours. There’s room for everyone.’
‘Not for us. We’re hunters. Hunters have no homes. Just the journey and the sky. It’s in her blood, as it’s in yours and mine.’
Carla didn’t answer immediately, then she said quietly, almost as if speaking to herself, ‘If, in the future, she met and married a land-dweller – maybe her children –’
I’m a land-dweller, I thought. I’m still young and single. I wonder if . . .
Kaneesh shrugged.
‘Maybe . . .’ He turned his head around to look at the other boat. ‘But who would have her?’
Jenine didn’t hear them. She was at the other end of the boat, but I heard every word. I had never much thought of it that way before, that the scars the Cloud Hunters bore on their faces were more than mere ceremony or decoration; they excluded them too, in numerous ways, from any other life.
It was self-perpetuating, almost as if there would be no Cloud Hunters if there was no exclusion, no lack of alternative or lack of acceptance elsewhere.
No, you couldn’t see someone with scars like that sitting happily and contentedly in some office job, or behind a bank counter. Just the look of them would frighten the customers off. As for the idea of putting Kaneesh in a suit and a tie, you may as well have put a sky-shark in one, for all the naturalness there would be to it. The sky-shark would have been more convincing, and probably more comfortable.
No, even if Kaneesh had given up cloud chasing and become an upstanding member of the Civil Service, he’d still have gone around frightening people with his appearance. One look at that scarred face and you’d have paid your income tax immediately, without even querying the amount.
Jenine turned around. I watched her. Maybe she had heard after all, or perhaps they were telling her nothing that she didn’t already know. She looked momentarily sad and she reached up and touched the scars that ran down her face. I tried to imagine her without them; she would have been like anyone then, just another girl – or would she?
Maybe even without them she would still have been different. I knew that I could have picked her out from any crowd, whether her face was scarred or not. There was just, well – something about her. Something unusual, something free. Those green eyes were like jewels.
Perhaps one came with the other: the scars bought the freedom, but the freedom branded you as different, an outcast, destined to travel, to wander, and for ever, in a way, to be excluded and alone. It seems in life that for every plus there is a minus, and that even freedom itself doesn’t come free. For that too, there’s a price to pay.
‘Jenine . . .’
I felt I had to say something – something consoling, reassuring.
‘What?’
‘The scars . . . I think they make you look – distinguished.’ (That was wrong. Inadequate. That wasn’t what I’d really meant to say.)
‘They make me look like a freak, Christien. And that’s what I am, isn’t it? An ugly, defaced freak. Isn’t that what everyone thinks?’
‘No. No. They don’t. No.’
‘They do. I’ve heard them.’
‘Not me. I don’t think that. You look beautiful.’
She stood looking at me, through her green, piercing eyes.
‘Christien,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
She went and sat alone at the prow. I let her be. What could I say? How could she believe she was ugly? She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
I joined her after a moment. I glimpsed a flash of sail. The rival boat was running fast, wind sails full out, spinnaker billowing, solar panels yawning wide.
‘Tell me about these Barbaroons,’ I said. ‘Who are they? Where did the word come from?’
It wasn’t an expression I knew, but even the most unfamiliar words may have all-too familiar meanings.
Jenine laughed.
‘It’s a cross,’ she said, ‘between two words. It’s a combination, of barbarians and poltroons.’
‘What’s a poltroon?’
‘I thought you were supposed to be educated.’
‘Nobody knows everything. Only the ignorant think that.’
‘A poltroon is a trivial person. It’s an idiot. A buffoon. Well, Barbaroons are untrustworthy, unpredictable, and usually violent.’
In other words they were criminals, pirates and kidnappers, just as I had thought.
‘And what do the Barbaroons call Cloud Hunters?’ I asked her.
She either didn’t know or preferred not to tell me.
‘Why don’t you ask them?’ she said. ‘We’ll be close enough soon.’
We were gaining on them – we were maybe two hundred metres ahead, if that. We sailed into the first outlying wisps of cloud. I reached up, trying to touch one. Not that you can. What are clouds, anyway – just water ghosts.
‘Hold the wheel.’
Kaneesh left the helm and went to the compressor. We entered the thick of the cloud. He fired up the pump and it spluttered into life.
‘There. It’s done.’
We were first there to the cloud bank. We had staked our claim. The question was, would they respect it? Would the crew of the other boat turn around now and leave us to collect our water in peace?
The answer to that question came immediately.
And the answer we got was no.
17
drastic remedies
They were quite invisible now, fog bound. The other boat was lost in the cloud. But we could hear the sound of an engine firing, and then the drone of another compressor.
‘Hey, you there!’ Kaneesh shouted into the mist. ‘Turn it off!’
But they did not hear, or chose not to listen, for the drone went on.
I reached out into the cloud again. My hand vanished, and then it came back to me. It must have been as you read in the books about the old world, when someone had their first experience of snow. It was half miraculous and half ridiculous. It made you want to laugh.
Jenine saw me and smiled at my pleasure in what was, to her, such a commonplace, everyday thing.
The other boat remained hidden from us – unseen, but faintly audible, behind the pulsing of our own compressors. They were stealing our clouds – our water. Was Kaneesh going to let them get away with it? He didn’t seem the easily forgiving type. Yet neither he nor Carla moved to stop them.
Then Kaneesh did a strange thing. He shut our compressor off. But why? Whatever was he doing? Was he was actually giving up, letting them take it all, handing them the prize? But then I understood that he wanted to track the cloud-hidden boat by following the sound of its engines.
‘Over there.’
Carla nodded and steered the boat to starboard. The drone of the other boat’s compressor and the sound of its pump grew louder. The cloud became denser; it was so dark and grey around us now that I could barely see the deck. Jenine wavered in and out of sight. One moment she was there, the next she was gone, like an apparition.
I shivered. I felt cold and my clothes were damp. The outer world had gone. All there was now was fog: dense, silent, concealing, muffling the sound of everything like a heavy curtain. Even the throb of the other boat’s compressor seemed to come from behind a screen of glass. Then suddenly a dark shape loomed into sight and as quickly vanished.
‘There!’
Carla turned the wheel in pursuit of the vanishing shadow.
‘Hey, you!’ Kaneesh called again.
Nothing. No response. Perhaps they thought that if they ignored us we might go away.
But Kaneesh wasn’t the going-away type.
He gestured to Carla to bring the boat around again. As she did, he climbed up onto the deck rail, holding on with one hand to the rigging. The shadow of the other boat reappeared. I could make out the silhouette of three figures on board; they seemed like phantoms.
‘Keep her steady!’
Kaneesh took his knife from his belt. He steadied himself on the rail, balanced himself on the balls of his feet, let go of the rigging, then he leapt. He was gone into the cloud and vanished from sight. The fog closed around us again.
Carla held the ship steady. Jenine ran to the side, to that point on the deck from which Kaneesh had jumped. I went to join her. We listened, our hearts the only sounds we could hear, just them and the faint drone of the other boat’s compressor, and then –
Voices. Raised in anger. The sound of an argument. I could clearly hear Kaneesh. He was asking the men in the other boat what they thought they were doing – didn’t they know the customs and the laws? Then there were other protesting voices, denying his claims, disputing his assertion that we had prior entitlement, that our speed and first arrival had given us precedence.
The quarrel became angrier. There were shouts and threats and the sound of fighting.
Silence again. The boat’s compressor had stopped. There was a cry of anguish a
nd dismay. Then once again silence, as the thick cloud swirled around us, leaving me damp and shivering, both with cold and with apprehension.
Kaneesh? What had happened to him? What had he done?
Our boat suddenly shuddered as it collided with the other ship, the bows of which momentarily appeared from the fog. The two boats slid around each other, and as they did, I saw a figure balanced on the other ship’s prow. The shape leapt towards us and landed softly on the deck. Immediately, Carla wrenched the wheel around to flick the bows outwards, and the other boat was gone again, drifting away, its compressor silent.
Kaneesh was back, his skin gleaming with moisture, his face grinning. He took his knife, wiped it on his bandana, and put it back into his belt. Carla looked at him questioningly. In response he raised his index finger to his throat and drew it across his Adam’s apple in a slicing motion and he smiled. Carla smiled back, as if to congratulate him on a good job well done. Kaneesh walked across the deck and restarted the compressor. That was the only noise there was now. There was no competition. It had been put out of business.
I felt sick. Not sky-sick this time, just plain, ordinary, deep-down sick. I went to the rail and leaned over, longing to see blue sky again and to feel the sun.
They were the barbarians. Them. Kaneesh. Kaneesh had killed the man on the other boat. He had slit his throat, over ownership of a handful of clouds which, in reality, could belong to nobody. Kaneesh had killed him and Carla had approved. Maybe Kaneesh had even slaughtered the whole crew, all three of them, not just the captain. He looked capable of it, without a doubt.
I glanced over to where Jenine was standing on the deck, watching the vapour billow into the mouth of the compressor as it sucked the clouds into its lungs, like a smoker inhaling. She also seemed quite unperturbed, as if this were an everyday occurrence. And maybe it was.
I looked at Kaneesh again. He had taken his knife out and was etching a scar into his forearm, the way a gunman might notch a mark on the barrel or the butt of his gun: one mark for every kill.
I turned away. I wished I was home. I wished I had never come. I had known that the skies were lawless, but I hadn’t expected this. I wished I could be sick, I tried to retch, but nothing came. I turned away from them all and leaned my head against the coolness of the rail. My hair was damp from the vapour of the cloud. I loathed the lot of them, Jenine included. How could Kaneesh have done that? To kill a man for a tank of water? And for the others to condone it? Maybe my mother had been right after all. Maybe they were savages at heart.