by Philip Reeve
“Not that one.” Raven looked grim. He was tired of talking about the rights and wrongs of killing the Snow Leopard. It was not as if talk could bring her back to life. “Not that Scriven witch. She’d have found some way to stab us in the back if we’d let her live. As it was, she killed five of my men. Anyway, I thought you Arkhangelsk didn’t mind a bit of killing. I hope you don’t, for there’ll be a fair few more must die before we reach London.”
Cluny looked at him. “What of the girl?”
“Shot by one of my crossbowmen as she tried to escape. She went over the crag there. We’ve not yet found the body.”
“It is a bad start,” said Cluny. “When the Ancestors sent me the dream they did not mean us to start killing women and innocent girls.”
“Well, like it or not, it’s done,” said Raven. “And sooner or later Quercus will learn of it. I’ll send word it was an accident; reckon he might swallow that for a while. But sooner or later the truth’ll reach him, and by the time it does we’d best be ready to move.”
“I shall ride back to my people and tell them to make ready,” Cluny promised. “I had hoped to go south and see this London for myself, but. . .”
“No time for that,” said Raven.
“No, indeed.”
Wavey’s pyre was ready. The priest stepped forward and thrust his torch into the faggots at the base with no more ceremony than a gardener burning rubbish on a bonfire. The flames rushed up crackling, and men who had been standing nearby stepped backwards, shielding their faces from the fierce heat.
“The last of the Scriven,” said Rufus Raven. “The world’s well rid of them, don’t you think?”
Cluny Morvish watched for a moment longer, then turned without a word and went away.
Strange lass, Raven thought. Six months before, when he had first had word of a prophet among the Arkhangelsk, he had thought she would be just another mad messiah of the sort the northlands seemed to breed. But when the fighting stopped and the young woman came across the silent battlefields to tell him her terrible vision of London, well, it had shaken him. Cluny Morvish was no crazy priest but a proper north-country warrior girl, a hunting girl; a shield-maiden from a good fighting clan. Her dream seemed to confirm all Raven’s private fears about the new city. It had been so compelling that it had made him start to think the unthinkable: an alliance with the Arkhangelsk, against Quercus.
The wind changed, blowing pyre-smoke and the stench of Wavey’s burning hair into his face. He turned, covering his nose, and stomped back aboard his castle.
Cluny Morvish had not travelled to Hill 60 in a fortress or a land-barge but on mammoth-back, as befitted a prophet. Just Cluny herself and her younger half-brother Marten, a half-dozen Morvish warriors and the old technomancer Tharp, who was there to interpret Cluny’s vision and make sure she did not engage in any hunting or fighting or flirting, which would not have been fitting for the Vessel of the Ancestors.
“They could not find the girl they shot,” Cluny told them, as they set about striking the tents and loading the mammoths.
“Maybe they did not really shoot her, then,” said one of her warriors.
“They have no skill at tracking, these Movement men,” said Tharp. He leant on his staff and spat into the grass. “It’s because they travel only aboard these engines and great carts and wanigans. They have no reindeer, no mammoth. They’re losing their sense of the earth beneath them. A child of Arkhangelsk could track better.”
“If you want me to, Cluny-my-sister,” said Marten, “I’ll soon pick up this girl’s trail.”
“I want you to,” said Cluny, calling to her mammoth to make it kneel for her, and climbing easily up to sit astride its neck.
“Why?” the technomancer asked suspiciously. He did not like to hear her giving orders. That was his job. It galled him that Cluny had a better connection to the Ancestors than he did, and he did not like the way the men had started looking to her for their orders before they looked to him. “Why should we want to find this southron girl?” he demanded.
“Because if she is alive, she will need healing, and if she is dead, she will need burial,” said Cluny Morvish.
Only eight mammoths and nine people, but it still took hours to get them on the road, by the time the beasts were loaded and the tents were struck. They left Hill 60 in the height of the morning with the last thin smoke of Wavey’s pyre going up into the sky behind them. Soon they were among the old war zones to the north-east, where the earth was full of the bones of men and Stalkers and many of the trees were blackened by the discharges of strange old weapons. Marten ran ahead on foot. He was twelve winters old, tireless, and a good tracker. The trail that Raven’s men had missed was as clear as a story to him, written in pressed grasses and broken twigs, in drops of blood like red dew on leaves of hart’s tongue fern. He found the girl lying close to their path, and called the others.
“She’s funny-looking,” he said. “Like an elf, or a nightwight.”
“Her mother was Scriven,” said Cluny.
“That’s just as bad.”
The girl was more than halfway dead, and all the Morvishmen agreed it would be kindest to finish her. Especially when she started telling them that she was Auric Godshawk. “We should kill her and bury her and be on our way,” said Marten. But Cluny insisted that they take her with them.
“Why?” Tharp asked sharply. “Did you have another dream? Do the Ancestors think she is important?”
“Yes,” said Cluny, because she knew he would not argue with the Ancestors.
“Godshawk was the name of the old Scriven king in London,” said one of the warriors, an older man named Munt. “He was lord there in the lean years, when me and your father the Carn were sell-swords in the south.”
“Godshawk was her mother’s name too,” said Cluny. “Auric Godshawk must be one of her Ancestors. Perhaps he is speaking to us through her from the World Without Time.”
The men looked even more warily at Fever after that, but they rigged a travois and hitched it to one of the mammoths and dragged her with them, north and east and north again by marsh tracks and the ancient mammoth-ways. By night she stayed in the technomancer’s tent while Tharp worked the medicine-magic on her and Cluny helped to nurse her. To the surprise of them all she began to get better. By the time they reached the Kometsvansen her wounds looked months old and her fever was fading, but she still clung unwaveringly to the belief that she was Auric Godshawk.
Tharp said that she was mad. He said that seeing her mother killed and being half-killed herself had broken her mind. He suggested slyly that, having Scriven blood, she would make a powerful sacrifice when the time came to bless the fortresses before they rolled to war. But Cluny had the men carry the girl aboard her father’s traction fort. The technomancer grumbled, of course. “I have worked the medicine-magic on her again and again, and yet she is not cured. I am the wisest technomancer of Arkhangelsk, and if I cannot cure her, no one can!”
“Let her cure herself, then,” Cluny said, and she sent him away. She had found that she liked caring for Fever Crumb. It helped her to forget her own fears, having someone even worse off to look after. She made the servants bring a bright tin mirror and hang it carefully on the wall near the sick girl’s bed, angled so that she’d be sure to see it when she woke.
In the middle of that night, in the middle of another dream of London, she was woken by a terrible cry. It was coming from the sick girl’s chamber.
“No! I am Auric Godshawk! I am Godshawk!”
When Fever woke next morning, she was herself again. She lay under the heaped furs, trying not to think about what had happened and how she had come there. Godshawk had had his own adventures in the north. When she blacked out at the foot of Hill 60 his memories must have flooded her unconscious mind and driven her onwards like a sleepwalker until the Arkhangelsk found her. She remembered it, some of it, but it didn’t seem to mean anything. All she could think of was Wavey’s awful death, and the
things about Wavey that she would now never know, and the things that Wavey would never be able to tell her.
And I just ran, thought Fever. I just ran and left her.
It had been the rational thing to do. She knew that. But that did not make it feel right.
Someone heard her weeping. Someone came and touched her face and looked down at her, and she recognized the girl she’d seen on mammoth-back at Raven’s camp. She’d not realized then how tall she was; how big-boned, beautiful and strong. A daughter of the frost giants, Borglum would have billed her, if she’d joined his Carnival of Knives. My mammoth-girl, the ghost of Godshawk whispered wistfully, somewhere in the deeps of Fever’s mind.
The mammoth-girl knelt beside the bed and said gently, “Auric?”
“My name is Fever Crumb,” said Fever.
“Good.”
“Auric was someone who I. . . He’s gone now.”
“Pity,” said the girl, accepting this quite easily, with a smile. “He seemed interesting.”
Fever blushed, remembering how enticing Godshawk had found those smiles. Kiss me, she’d said, when she thought she was him. You’d not deny a last kiss to a dying man. And the girl had said, “You’re not a dying man. . .” Fever blushed at the memory of it. Of course, now that she was herself again she was repelled by the girl’s musky odour and old-tech trinkets and that wild cloud of rust-coloured hair. But her smile was kind, and her lilting northern voice was lovely; she didn’t just roll her Rs, she bowled them, pausing mid-word to take a little run-up: in-terrrrresting. Some lingering Godshawkish instinct still made Fever want to kiss her.
She sat up, holding the covers round her and telling herself sternly to be rational. She realized now that she was in one of the cabins of a traction fortress; she could feel the faint vibration of its engines. There were rugs on the deck, hangings on the walls. Bits of rusty old-tech dangled as charms or ornaments from the thick oaken beams of the ceiling. There was that mirror where she’d met herself last night. Some of her things lay on a table near the bed: her penknife, her slide rule and her torch. She remembered faintly her arrival here. Before that; the awful journey on that juddering travois; looking up at the branches as she passed through belts of forest. Before that. . .
“My mother is dead,” she said.
The mammoth-girl nodded, and reached out, and moved a strand of hair from Fever’s forehead. Usually Fever hated it when people touched her, but at that moment and with that girl she did not mind. “My mother died when I was small,” the girl said. “I don’t remember how it felt. But my brother fell at Hill 60 and that felt horrible, and it still does. I’m sorry for you.”
“What is this place?” Fever asked.
“You’re in the traction fort of the Morvish,” said the girl. (The t-rrraction forrrt of the Mo-rrrvish. . . It was like music.) “I’m Cluny.”
“Raven spoke of you. You’re a prophet. . .”
“I’m not,” said Cluny. She frowned; a shadow came into her hazel eyes. “I don’t think I am. . . The Ancestors sent me a dream, and now we have made peace with the Movement and we are making ready to roll on London.”
“With Raven’s help,” said Fever.
Cluny Morvish nodded. “We have not told him that you are here. Nor will we. The Arkhangelsk do not kill women and girls.”
“I must get to London!” said Fever. “I have to tell Dr Crumb. . .” She started to get out of bed, and was halfway before she remembered how weak she was.
“You are not well enough to travel,” said Cluny Morvish, easing her back. “Even if you were, it would not be allowed. You must wait. Soon we will all be in London. We will crush the new city under our tracks, destroy its warriors, and make prisoners of its women.” It sounded quite a gentle business, spoken in that thrilling voice: c-rrrush, dest-rrroy, make p-rrriss-onairrss. . .
“Am I a prrris . . . a prisoner?” Fever asked.
“No,” said Cluny Morvish. “You are my guest.”
“A guest who cannot leave.”
Cluny smiled mischievously. “A prisoner-y kind of guest.”
Fever needed to tell Dr Crumb about what had happened to Wavey. She hated to think of him going about his work in London not knowing what had befallen his wife and daughter. But what we can’t change, we must accept. That was what Dr Crumb had always taught her. She was at the mercy of this Cluny Morvish, and at least Cluny Morvish seemed more merciful than Raven’s crossbowmen. She tied a little charm around Fever’s neck: a bird’s skull and some blue glass beads wired to an old shard of circuit-board. “I had Tharp make this for you. It will protect you from bad spirits while you heal.”
“There are no such things as. . .” Fever started to say, but she knew Cluny was only being kind.
“I never really trusted our technomancer,” Cluny said confidingly. She looked shy for a moment, despite her savage looks. “I thought it was mostly just conjuring tricks, his medicine-magic. When I saw your wounds I thought you would die. We all did. But you lived. So Tharp must be all right at it, mustn’t he?”
Fever said nothing. She knew it was not that mad old man’s potions and witch-doctoring that had healed her. The secret machines with which her grandfather had injected her when she was just a baby had been at work inside her again, remaking damaged tissue and battling infection. It was Godshawk who had saved her life.
For a while after that, all her days were the same. She slept a lot. Servants brought meals for her, and helped her wash herself. Her own clothes had all been ruined, and she was given Arkhangelsk clothes instead: a brown linen dress, a stiff felt tunic embroidered with copper wire, soft deerskin slippers. Her reflection in the mirror looked shockingly thin. Shadows sat in the hollows under her cheekbones. The angry scars on her chest and back ached, seeping thin yellow tears. Each time she shut her eyes she saw Wavey hacked in half again. Each time she slept she dreamed of Arlo Thursday in his little cutter, lost on the hungry, grey-and-silver sea.
Sometimes Cluny Morvish came to see her, and those were the best times. She liked it when Cluny settled herself on the end of the bed and talked about her family, or her animals, or the boy she’d been a bit in love with, who had grown afraid of her now and gone off with Carn Kubin’s daughter. “Do you have a boy, back in London?” she asked, and Fever found herself telling her all about Arlo, whom she had never spoken of to anyone before.
This was how most people behaved, she thought; most girls, at least; talking; sharing feelings and small secrets with their friends. She had never really had a friend before; she’d never seen the point, till Cluny. She knew that if they had met a year before she would have loathed her, for she could tell what a spoiled, swaggering young noblewoman Cluny must have been. She couldn’t read, she believed in all sorts of garbled magic, and seemed to think the best thing you could do in life was to ride the shaggy horses of the Arkhangelsk at absurd speeds over rough country, hunting innocent deer or foxes. But that had all been stripped from her by these dreams, which she claimed came from her ancestors. They wrecked her sleep and left her nervous and shaky, and the mad old technomancer whose word was law here had forbidden her to hunt. Now she was like a little girl again, almost as lost as Fever, trying to relearn her life just when it should all have been clear to her. And she was beautiful, too – at least, Godshawk would have thought her beautiful.
“I wish I could send some message to Dr Crumb,” Fever said again, when she had finished talking about Arlo. “It is so sad to think of him in London, still waiting for Wavey and me to come home.”
“It is a war,” said Cluny. “Sad things happen.” But the next day when she came to Fever’s chamber she brought her father with her; a plump, bald, white-bearded man who seemed too shy and softly spoken to be a barbarian warlord. He welcomed Fever to his house and asked her if there was anything she needed, and Cluny told him that Fever had to send word to her father in London.
“Ah, now, ah, now,” said Carn Morvish, tugging at his whiskers. “Now that is difficult, M
iss Crumb. We are massing our forces to make war on London. We cannot have you warning the Londoners of our plans.”
“They’ll find out about your plans anyway,” said Fever. “How secret can you keep an army of mobile castles? All I want to do is tell my father that I am still alive. And that my mother . . . isn’t.”
“That would do no harm, would it, Carn-Morvish-my-father?” asked Cluny.
The Carn was a kind man, and felt sorry for Fever’s father. If Cluny had been lost somewhere he would have wanted word of her. He said, “I shall send a scribe to write down your words, Miss Crumb. Several of our people can read, so don’t try to put in any clever codes or secret messages. A few trusted merchants still go south from Arkhangelsk to London. One of them will carry your letter.”
16
A RATIONAL MAN
h, Dr Crumb. I’m sorry to call you from your work, but I have some bad news. You’d best sit down. But no, you’re a rational man, aren’t you; not much troubled by life’s little reversals. . .”
“Which reversals, Lord Mayor?”
They were in Quercus’s private chambers at the heart of the new city. A big clock ticking, paintings of the Movement’s glorious past on the walls, and on a central table a model of its glorious future: the new London. The Lord Mayor wore bedroom slippers and a silken dressing gown. Dr Crumb was in his third-best lab-coat, hot and weary after another night’s work in the engine district. More than a month had passed since Wavey and Fever went away. The first full test of the city’s engines was planned for the following day, and there was still much to be done. He could not imagine why Quercus had summoned him from his work. Bad news? He assumed that there must be some new hitch in the supply chain: perhaps the copper that he needed had been delayed again.
But Quercus said, “A messenger has arrived from one of Raven’s garrisons in the Fuel Country. It is about Wavey and that girl of yours. It seems there has been an incident. Savages attacked their landship. It was destroyed with all hands.”