Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

  The landship was called the Heart of Glass. It was an unprepossessing vehicle; an armoured barge painted in dirty white dazzle patterns, rolling on big, clawed wheels. Movement landships were faster than most, but it still could not keep pace with Borglum’s speedy Knuckle Sandwich, which kept running on ahead and pausing to wait impatiently for it to catch up, like a thoroughbred in the company of a carthorse.

  Wavey had helped herself to the captain’s cabin and covered its whitewashed wooden walls with tapestries and fine hangings to make it feel more homely. “After all,” she told Fever, during the first afternoon of the journey, “what is the point in being Chief Engineer if I cannot travel in comfort? I had a hard struggle to get where I am now. When you were a baby I had to flee London like a common criminal, pursued by those mad Skinners, hunted everywhere, till Master Borglum took me in. I lived like an animal, forever frightened, lurking in culverts and reed beds by day, moving on each night, trusting no one. My shoes fell apart, my clothes went to rags, my poor starved ribs looked like a toast rack. Don’t you think I deserve a little luxury now that I am old?”

  Fever, who had been standing at the window to look back at London, turned. Wavey was sprawling lazily on a cushioned bench beside the stove, eating Turkish Delight with a little silver fork. Fever had never heard her speak before about the dreadful things she had endured after the Skinners’ Riots. It made her feel suddenly protective. “You’re not old, Wavey,” she said.

  “Oh, but I am,” said Wavey. She altered her position on the bench and plumped a cushion, inviting Fever to sit down beside her. It was true, she was beginning to look a little gaunt; the skin stretched taut across the fine bones of her face. “We Scriven live far longer than the common human herd,” she said, “and we do not suffer so much from the diseases of old age, but even by Scriven standards I am no longer a young woman. It is starting to show, I fear. These creases around my eyes – crow’s feet, people call them; isn’t that horrible? You are so lucky to be young, Fever. You should make the most of your body, my dear, before it starts to let you down. Speaking of which, have you noticed young Harrison Stickle? I’m sure he fancies you. I think he’s rather handsome, in his curious way. . .”

  Fever wasn’t listening. She was busy wondering why the Scriven aged differently. What was it about their bodies that had made them less susceptible than other people to the trials of time? She wished that her father were there so that she could discuss it with him.

  Turning back to the window, she saw that London had finally sunk behind the hills.

  Sometimes the snow lay year-round on those hills, leading Londoners to believe that they could see the snouts of glaciers when they looked north from their city’s borders. But that year was warm, and the ice and snow were gone, leaving the land dotted with meltwater meres. The convoy rattled past them, swinging eastward through heaths and scrub woods and showers of cold grey rain. It crossed Kingsbath marshes and entered Doggerland, a foggy, fenny place, so flat and so full of still, reflecting waters that there seemed to be nothing there except the sky. That country had all been beneath the North Sea until a few centuries ago, and in the mist that met the convoy it looked as if it still was. Borglum said that it must have been cheerier when it had little fishes swimming about it. Still, there was a good road there; a Movement road that ran north-east as straight as a ruler, low hills rising into cloud on its left-hand side, the old seabed stretching out for ever on the right.

  Towards sundown a long, low ridge appeared ahead, rising like an island from the marshes, with the road leading over it. This was Dryships Hill, and at its foot on the northern side lay Three Dry Ships, a settlement built around the hulks of some freighters abandoned there when the sea drained away. Their timber hulls had been much built-upon, and sheds and shanties sprawled all around them, for this was an important way-station now on the roads that linked London to the Fuel Country. Filthy children came running and shouting behind the Heart of Glass as it pulled in, and for a moment Fever was reminded of other arrivals in other towns, when she had travelled aboard Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum. But those journeys had been in southern lands, nothing like the damp plains of Doggerland, and Ambrose Persimmon would never have brought his theatre to a place as grimy and desperate as Three Dry Ships.

  There were not enough people there to warrant setting up the arena and staging a proper show, but the carnival fighters sparred with one another in the light of the campfire while Borglum’s cook prepared the evening meal, and the people of the place gathered round to watch.

  Fever watched too, for a little while. She had not meant to, for she was alarmed by the carnival people, with their strange looks and costumes and their easy laughter and all the memories they lit in her of her old life in Summertown. At first she stayed in her own small cabin aboard the Heart of Glass and tried to read Wintervale’s History of the Northern Peoples, because she wanted to learn something about the places that she would soon be seeing. But trying to follow the alliances and fallings-out between those ever-shifting nomad empires was like trying to map smoke, and the clang of weaponry from outside was distracting, so at last she put the book aside and stepped out into the chilly night air, which was filled with the smell of the gorse-root fire and the grunts and war cries of the sparring fighters. The huge, hairy one they called Quatch was crossing blades with the Knave of Knives. Fever watched them, trying not to disapprove, and ate stew from a wooden bowl that someone handed her. She looked across the fire at the lad called Stick and remembered what Wavey had said about him, and he did look handsome in the firelight, but he was sitting beside Lucy the lobster-girl and it was it was quite obvious that he was her boy or her sweetheart or whatever the silly expression was, and that made her feel suddenly very lonely.

  Quatch gave a great roar, swinging his cleaver in a blow that should have lopped off his opponent’s head, but the Knave ducked under it, tripped him, somersaulted over him as he fell and ended up astride him with his knife at Quatch’s throat. The onlookers clapped and cheered. They knew it was a friendly bout so there was no need for fakery and butcher’s shop blood. The fighters stood up, bowed, and went to find their own bowls of stew.

  Next came something special: a new act that Borglum was trying out. Lady Midnight swaggered out on to the fighting-ground. She chose a long blade from the weapons rack and stood there swinging it, splashing glints of firelight over Borglum’s face as he warned the audience to keep quiet, so that the blind woman could hear her foe approaching. Then he left her and hurried into the knot of fighters and crewmen waiting by the barges, grinning at Fever as he came. “This’ll be good!” he said. “This is something special! Oh, but it’s grand to have your mother back. . .”

  Fever looked around and saw that her mother was no longer watching the fight. She must have gone back aboard the barge. . . Or aboard Borglum’s barge. For a moment she had a horrible feeling that Wavey was going to emerge in the boiler-plate bikini of which the dwarf had spoken so fondly. But what actually came down the ramp of the Knuckle Sandwich and stepped out into the firelight was something far, far worse. For a moment nobody could work out what it was. When they did, a murmur of surprise ran through the watchers.

  “’Tis a paper dolly. . .”

  “A cut-out man. . .”

  “But how’s it moving then?”

  Flat as an outline chalked around a corpse, blank face flickering with firelight and shadow, the paper boy stood and looked around, turning its flat white head from side to side, until it saw Lady Midnight waiting on the far side of the fire.

  “Oh!” said Fever, and put a hand up to her face. She was well able to control her emotions usually, but the paper boy was so unexpected, and it reminded her with such awful clarity of the time when she and Dr Crumb and poor Dr Isbister had battled things like that in the library at Godshawk’s Head; really battled them, not just in play. For a moment she was afraid that she would faint.

  “It is all right,” said a voice beside her, and there was
Borglum, looking up at her all kindly and concerned. “You’re wondering how we make him move, the mannikin? ’Tis all done with technomancy, my dear. There is a machine aboard the Sandwich which talks somehow to a little wafer of a brain that’s slipped inside the paper of him. Your mother’s operating it now; what he sees, she sees, and she tells him where to move. It’s a marvellous engine.”

  “I did not think there were any such things left,” said Fever, who had burned the last of London’s paper boys herself.

  “We picked it up from an antiquarian in Hamsterdam who didn’t know how to make it work, and in truth we didn’t know neither, but your mother came aboard today, opened it up, tinkered a while inside with wires and such, and our little papery friend sprang straight to life.”

  The paper boy tensed, then started to shuffle forward, mincing along on the edges of his cut-out feet. He moved so silently that Lady Midnight seemed not to have heard him.

  “Behind you!” shouted someone in the crowd, forgetting that they were not supposed to speak.

  Lady Midnight swung round with her sword ready. The paper boy raised one paper hand, and from his fingertips five tiny claws emerged.

  “Poisoned needles!” Borglum shouted importantly. “Envenomed with the ichor of the deadly Zagwan centipede, a vicious reptile from Lady Midnight’s mother country!” He nudged Fever and muttered, “There ain’t no such creature really, so don’t worry; it won’t give our Agnes no more than a scratch. . .”

  Lady Midnight had sensed the thing’s approach, perhaps by the small scritching sounds its feet made in the grass. She swept her sword at it, and it bent backwards with inhuman suppleness so that the blade swished through empty air. Lady Midnight hesitated, looking confused. No doubt she knew what she was facing; no doubt she and Wavey and Borglum had planned out every step. But Fever did not feel that she could watch any more. She turned and walked away from the fire, away from Three Dry Ships, into the quiet and the dusk. She climbed the hill behind the town and stood on its summit looking east across the marshes at dozens of distant points of fire which burned like red stars, far away behind the mist. The Ancients had dug oil wells out there, and the Movement had reopened some of them, and found others in places which must have been too difficult or too expensive for even the Ancients to reach when they lay deep under water.

  Deep under water. . . How strange it was to think that the sea had once covered all this land. At Fever’s feet, in bald patches between the grass, scatterings of tiny white seashells glowed in the twilight. She sat down and picked up a handful and let them trickle through her fingers, and thought about the seas of the south, and Arlo. If only she had gone with him. If only she had stayed with the Lyceum. Ever since Wavey reclaimed her she had felt like a doll or a pet. She had thought this journey to the north would change things, but she was as listless as ever. She wished something would happen to her.

  It was a wish that she would come to regret.

  11

  THE REVOLUTIONISTS

  r Crumb was a punctual man. If you wanted to bump into him it was not difficult. You just had to station yourself between Bishopsgate and the Engineerium when the six a.m. bells were ringing to summon the day shift to the factories and there he would be, hastening along with his case full of plans and papers on his way to start his morning’s work.

  So that was where Charley Shallow stood, in the grey of a drizzling Monday morning, a few days after Fever and Wavey departed for the north. “Good morning, Dr Crumb!” he called, and tried to sound surprised to see him there.

  “Oh . . . Shallow. . .” Dr Crumb blinked at him. He had always had a vague feeling that Charley might have been unhappy at the way he’d been dismissed when Fever returned home, but he was glad to see that the boy seemed friendly enough. Not only that, but he was carrying a large umbrella, and since Dr Crumb had left his at home as usual it was only rational that he agree to Charley’s suggestion that they walk together and share the shelter of it.

  “You are quite sure I am not taking you out of your way?” he insisted, as they started down Ludgate Hill. “I am working aboard the new city this morning. . .”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Dr Crumb,” said Charley. “I’m going there myself. Me and Coldharbour are helping Dr Steepleton with the new boarding ramps in the Gut.”

  Dr Crumb sighed. “It is the Great Under Tier, Charley. I do wish people would call things by their proper designations, instead of all these silly nicknames. Say ‘G.U.T.’ if you must, but not ‘Gut’.”

  “Sorry, Dr Crumb.”

  “That is all right, Charley. I did not mean to snap. . .”

  “I expect you’re under a lot of pressure,” said Charley kindly. “I mean, it must be a worry and all, with Mistress Crumb and young Miss Crumb going off with that circus. . .”

  “They have not ‘gone off with a circus’, Charley; they are undertaking a scientific expedition. There is no rational cause for worry.”

  “Still, you’re lonely without them, I expect?”

  “A rational man need never be lonely, Charley. I have my work and my books and my own thoughts to keep me company.”

  Liar, thought Charley to himself. But all he said was, “That’s so true, ain’t it, Dr Crumb?”

  The rain was passing. Splashes of sunlight lit the roofs of Tent Town. The flanks of the new city were wreathed in rainbows. Afraid that Dr Crumb would decide he no longer needed Charley’s umbrella and hurry on without him, Charley looked for a new peg to hang their conversation on. He was determined not to let the old blogger escape until he had steered it round to the subject that he really wanted to talk about.

  “Rainbows!” he said. “I always wondered what they were. Bridges to fairyland, the girls at the Mott and Hoople used to tell me when I was a nipper, but I know now there must be a more scientific explanation. . .”

  “Oh, there is indeed!” said Dr Crumb, and he was off, describing the way that water droplets split the sun’s rays like a prism, revealing all the colours of the visible spectrum. Charley put a look of deep interest on his face while he screamed with boredom inside. This is the sort of smart-arse lecture Fever must have had to listen to the whole time, growing up with him, he thought. No wonder she turned into such a stuck-up little know-all icicle. . .

  “I expect you miss Miss Crumb?” he said, when the lecture ended. “Miss her as an assistant, I mean. It seems irrational somehow for a man as learned as you to have nobody to do the little chores for you while you turn your mind to more important stuff.”

  “Oh, there is a maid who does the dusting, and so forth,” said Dr Crumb. He had been about to recommend a good book on optics, and was surprised that the discussion of rainbows had ended so abruptly.

  “No, I mean a scientific assistant,” Charley explained. “Someone to draw up plans and keep papers in order and do small bits of research for you and stuff.” He had thought that Dr Crumb would have caught his drift by now, but he hadn’t, so Charley ploughed on. “You know, I wouldn’t mind moving back in with you if you wanted. Just till Mistress Crumb and Miss Crumb get home again, I mean. Not that I don’t like living in the Engineerium, but it’s hardly rational, is it, for my old room at Bishopsgate to be empty and a man of your learning labouring away without anyone to help him?”

  Dr Crumb stopped and blinked at him again. They had come to the foot of Ludgate Hill and the place where their ways divided; Dr Crumb’s road curved away through Tent Town to the stairs which led up into the Engine District, Charley’s ran straight to the new city’s prow, where the huge outer doors of the Gut stood open like enormous jaws. “Well, Charley,” said the Engineer, “that is an interesting idea. Most interesting. I shall certainly consider it. Yes, indeed.”

  Which wasn’t really the answer that Charley Shallow had been hoping for. Still, better than nothing, he thought, as Dr Crumb went scurrying away. He’ll come round. He had a feeling that he understood Gideon Crumb. A clever man, he was, but weak; he needed somebody to tell him what to do, a
nd with Wavey gone, why shouldn’t that somebody be Charley Shallow?

  It was all very well helping the Underground start their revolution, but he wasn’t at all sure they could deliver. While he was waiting he’d much rather live in his cosy little room at No.1 Bishopsgate than in the Engineerium.

  He spent that day in the Gut, doing as little actual work as possible while Ronnie Coldharbour and old Dr Steepleton fussed about with tape measures and theodolites. Once London got moving the Gut would be a garage where land-barges and other vehicles could be housed. When the doors were opened ramps would extend so that they could drive in and out, and Steepleton said it was vital that the ramps and the hydraulic systems which would move them be positioned just so. All very interesting, no doubt, but Charley had his mind on other things. Two rival versions of his future hung in his mind, and each made for pleasant daydreams. In one he was Dr Crumb’s trusted assistant, living in the big guest bedroom at Bishopsgate, eating meals cooked for him by Wavey’s Parisian chef and a great favourite with the maidservants. In the other he was on the barricades, leading the uprising against Quercus, with Gwen Natsworthy fighting at his side. Well, maybe not actually fighting, maybe just waving a banner or something, urging the others on. . .

  He couldn’t decide yet which of these futures he preferred, but either of them would be a step up.

  When his shift ended he strolled round to the south side of Ludgate Hill. There was a digger’s pit there where a flaky archaeologist named Vimto Grebe had been busy since long before Charley was born, excavating the remains of some old temple. He claimed he’d found the legendary St Paul’s Cathedral, and he had written many letters to Quercus about it, inviting him to come and see the heap of filthy old stones and suggesting that the thing should be reconstructed on the new city’s topmost tier as a symbol of London’s continuity. Quercus had ignored them all, and so Master Grebe had become a friend of the Underground, and let them hold meetings sometimes in the big tarpaper sheds that protected his diggings.