A Web of Air (9 page)

The closeness of the gun reminded her queasily of the time in London when the Skinner had cornered her and Kit Solent had been forced to shoot him. It was difficult for her to look away from the weapon. But she controlled herself, and looked, and saw her captor.

He was a young man, barefoot, and dressed shabbily in clothes which had once been white. His face was mostly hidden by his hair, which was dark, tousled and much too long. Fever could just see one greenish eye.

“Who are you?” they both said at the same instant.

“I’ve got the gun,” said the stranger, after a second more. “That means you have to go first.”

“I’m Fever Crumb,” said Fever.

“And who has sent you here, Fever Crumb? Was it Flynn? Or the Oktopous Cartel? Or those clowns from the Quadrado Del Mar?”

Fever, not knowing what any of those names meant and wanting only for the pistol to be pointed somewhere else, said, “I came here yesterday on a land-barge.
Persimmon’s Ambulatory Lyceum.
I am looking for Arlo Thursday.”

“Well that’s a new twist! A
theatre?”

The green eye watched her unblinkingly for a long moment. Then the stranger lowered his pistol and took a step backwards, shoving his hair away from his face with his free hand. His face was pleasant, and made more pleasant to Fever’s eyes by the freckles that were scattered over it. Dark against his sallow skin, they reminded her powerfully of the markings of her mother’s people; for a shivery instant she thought that he too was Scriven.

“You’ve found me,” he said. “I’m Thursday.”

He was younger than Fever had expected. Twenty? Twenty-two? No older. He tilted his head quickly on one side and studied Fever. (It was a movement she would have called bird-like if that had not suggested fragility and hollow bones and a lightness not in keeping with his height and his broad shoulders.) “You don’t
look
like an actress,” he said.

“I operate the lights and stage effects,” said Fever.

Arlo Thursday smiled. “It’s a long time since I saw a play. Perhaps you have brought me a free ticket? Is
that
why you climbed all the way up here, Fever Crumb?”

Fever sensed sarcasm in the question, but she wasn’t good at sarcasm and had no idea how she should respond. “I am not here on theatre business,” she said. She opened her bag and pulled out the glider she had found on the cliff. “I’ve brought this back.”

Arlo Thursday’s eyes went down to the model, then back up to Fever’s face. There were shadows and questions in them, and something that looked a little like fear. He didn’t sound at all sarcastic when he said, “How did you come by that?”

“On the cliff path, the night before last,” said Fever patiently. She knew it must have been Thursday himself who sent the model glider to her. She assumed that this was some sort of test. “It flew past me. Landed in the bushes.”

Arlo Thursday watched her. There was something odd and secretive about him; his quick movements and the way he hid behind his hair. Suddenly he snatched the model from her and set it down on the table. “This was an early version. It does not fly well.”

“Well enough,” said Fever. “It made me want to find out more.”

“Ah,” said Arlo Thursday, and looked up for a moment at the other miniature gliders swaying on their strings. He put down the gun, then reached up and unhooked the largest of the models, a boxy thing with four wings. “Weasel!” he called. His voice echoed against the cliffs, and before the echo faded there was a fluttering of wings and an angel landed on the veranda, tilting its head, its blue eye glinting greedily. “Snacksies?” it croaked.

Arlo Thursday did not answer, unless that odd little quirk of his head was an answer. He was moving some part of the model which he held in his hands, winding and winding a carved shape like a double-ended spoon which was set in the centre of it. After a few seconds he walked to the edge of the veranda, held the machine above his head and threw it as far and as hard as he could.

“No!” gasped Fever, afraid that the beautiful thing would be snatched by the rising wind and dashed to pieces against the rocks of the garden. But instead of falling the model rushed busily upwards, its paper wings dazzling white in the sunlight, the spoon-thing chirring as it whirled.
A paddle-wheel; a propeller
… When it was almost out of sight, way up in the sky above the crater, it lost momentum and began to spiral downwind, but the angel called Weasel kicked into the sky with one big beat of his scruffy wings, soared easily after it and snatched it in his beak. Another wingbeat carried him back to the veranda, where Arlo took the model from him and laid it down carefully on the table. Arlo sat down on one of the wicker chairs, or rather he perched on it, pulling his knees up to his chin and wrapping his bare toes around the edge of the seat.

“It’s just a model. But if it were built full size, with an engine – a lightweight engine – then a person could ride on it. He could fly.”

He looked at her, daring her to disagree. She said, “Dr Collihole thought that it was impossible. He’s an Engineer I know, in London. He says that if we are ever to fly then we must concentrate on making balloons. I went up in the balloon he built.”

“Gas or hot air?” asked Arlo, as if balloons were commonplace things.

“Hot air. There was a brazier on board.”

“How far did you fly?”

Fever wasn’t sure. She had been terrified and exhausted and she had slept through most of that historic flight. “It must have travelled twenty miles.”

Arlo Thursday bobbed his head like a pigeon. “Balloons are no use. Clumsy. Easy to get up, but hard to steer, and impossible to bring down where you want them. They make you a slave to the wind. Heavier-than-air is the answer.
Aëroplanes,
like the Ancients used.”

Fever nodded eagerly to show that she too knew something about the Ancients. “Dr Collihole studied one. Well, the remains of one. It wasn’t much more than a stain in the earth, but you could see how big it had been, and the shape, like a giant bird. But he could never understand how they got the wings to flap.”

“They don’t need to.” Arlo Thursday peeked at her through his overgrown hair. She had the feeling that he didn’t really want to talk to her but couldn’t stop himself. He said, “When I was a boy I used to watch the angels and long to fly like they did. Look at them…” He pointed out into the sky where dozens of the grubby creatures wheeled, keeping watch for dropped snacks in the streets below. “They hardly move their wings at all. You saw Weasel just now. He flapped once to lift himself, again to change direction, but most of it was just gliding. That’s the way I made my first models. The angels were happy enough to let me draw and measure them. They aren’t quite as bird-brained as most people think. I learned everything from them.”

Fever picked up the model aircraft. She turned it in her hands, running her fingers over the leading edges of the wings, feeling the roundness there, the way they tapered. There was something about that shape that must help the machine rise, and keep it in the air.

“What about the engine? Could you make one light enough for the machine to carry?”

Arlo Thursday shrugged. “I know nothing about engines. I’m Maydan; we don’t have them here, except for a couple of weeks each year when you travelling folk bring your barges over. But I had a friend in Thelona, a man called Edgar Saraband; he wrote to me about flying machines. I made some models for him; some designs. He was clever with engines. He thought he could build one small enough to fly with…”

“Did he succeed?”

“Yes. From what I’ve heard, his machine flew. But then…”

He paused. Fever waited for more, but no more came. She dimly remembered that name, Saraband. Remembered AP flapping his newspaper at her somewhere in the rust-country, sometime early in the summer, saying, “Here, Fever; this will interest you; ’tis most scientific…” There had been a story about a rich Thelonan who had built a “flying machine”, only it had not so much flown as fallen. She’d paid no attention at the time. Newspapers were full of stories like that.

“Are you planning to make a full-scale machine?” she asked.

Thursday’s face changed. It was as if blinds had been lowered behind his eyes. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Too dangerous.”

“Edgar Saraband didn’t think so.”

“Edgar Saraband is dead.” He stood up, reaching for the pistol. He didn’t point it at Fever, just let it hang there by his side while he said, “You’re leaving now.”

“But there are so many things I want to ask you!”

“Well you can’t. I’m tired. Or busy. Or something.”

He followed Fever back around the veranda. Angels, who had gathered along the eaves, burst into the sky with clattering wingbeats. Arlo Thursday said, “I want you to promise me something, Fever Crumb. You’ll not speak of me to anyone.”

“Very well,” said Fever meekly. “But you should try to make a full-size machine. I could help you. I know a bit about engines.”

“No,” said Arlo Thursday.

“But you must need my help. Why else would you have sent the glider to me?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve lost models before. Crosswinds catch them, up among those crags. Maybe some kid found it. Thanks for returning it. Goodbye.”

Fever went back along the path to the gate. Halfway there she stopped and looked back and Arlo Thursday was no longer watching her. But just before she reached the gate the lock clacked and it swung open to let her out on to Casas Elevado. It closed again as before when she had stepped through. From behind her she heard the house give a long sigh, and then the squeak and rumble of its wheels as it climbed away from her.

s soon as she had gone Arlo Thursday went back inside his house and operated the levers which opened valves high above, filling the tanks of the counterweight. As the building began its long climb he went through the big front room, squeezing his way past the thing that filled it, and looked out of the window to see if he could see Fever Crumb. He could not.

How stupid he had been to let her in! He should have kept the house up high and the gate locked. But when Weasel came flying to tell him that there was a visitor he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation to talk to someone. Especially when he looked through his telescope and saw her waiting there; not that busybody Flynn or some thug from the local branch of the Oktopous Cartel but a pretty girl. He felt embarrassed now that her prettiness had influenced him. Was he that shallow? And when he’d seen her close to she had just reminded him how much he was in love with someone else.

Still, she had seemed a sweet girl. And she had seemed honest. She hadn’t shown a flicker of recognition when he mentioned poor Edgar Saraband, and yet… That glider… Was it a message?

He went out on to the veranda again and picked it up from the table. He had often lost models among the crags, as he had told Fever Crumb. But this was not one of them. This was a model he had made for Edgar Saraband, and sent to Saraband’s workshop in Thelona. How had it found its way back to Mayda, and into the hands of that girl?

When the house reached the top of its rails he set the brakes and stepped down into the garden, squinting in the sunshine and the brisk, dusty breeze that blew his hair across his face. His angels wheeled about the house. He called Weasel down to him and held out his arm so that the angel could perch on his wrist. “Follow the girl,” he told him. He did not say it with words but with squawks and clicks and quick movements of his head, the language of angels. “Watch all that she does.”

Weasel took off, and Arlo climbed away from the house, up through the last steep section of garden above the buffers to where the crags began. Small birds flew away chattering through the overgrown clumps of lavender and lemongrass. The sun was hot on his back and the crushed leaves scented the air. He stopped and shaded his eyes and watched Weasel, a white speck dwindling against the hugeness of the city. He hoped the old angel would not get distracted and forget the mission he had been entrusted with.

The wave which had sluiced young Arlo’s family away spent most of its fury on the Ragged Isles. By the time it came to Mayda it was a lesser thing, and half exhausted. It still did damage, all the same, to the harbour and the shipping there. It would be the best part of a year before the city’s salvagemen had ships and time to go and see if anything remained of Thursday’s Shipyard.

When they brought Arlo back with them people said that he had left his mind behind him on the island. It was no surprise, after his loss and all those months he’d been out there alone. That must be why he wouldn’t speak and why, when the doctors put him in a comfortable room, he would not sleep in the bed like natural, Goddess-fearing folk but used bedding, chairs and firewood to build himself a nest. He had gone lonely-mad, they said, and could remember nothing of what had happened.