A Darkling Plain (10 page)

Wren looked at her father, and they both shrugged. She thought how tiring it must be to be Pennyroyal, and build a past for yourself out of so many interlocking lies. He must have to spend such a lot of time tinkering with his stories to make sure they fitted, and surely he must live in fear of the day when the whole shaky edifice collapsed?

But perhaps Pennyroyal felt that the rewards made it all worthwhile. He certainly looked as if he were prospering. He wore an outfit of his own invention that managed to make him look important and military without actually being a uniform: a short, sky-blue dolman-sleeve tunic over a red waistcoat (both covered in frogging and pointless silver buttons), a lilac sash, purple breeches with gold embroidery and a six-inch crimson stripe, and bucket-topped boots with gold tassels. Compared to the Pennyroyal she had known in Brighton, Wren thought he looked quite tasteful and restrained.

He made room for Wren and Tom on his own couch, and invited them to help themselves to some of his breakfast while he introduced his friends. Wren was not used to meeting so many new people so quickly. She managed to grasp that the bespectacled man in civilian robes was Sampford Spiney, Murnau correspondent of a journal called
The Speculum,
who was writing a profile of Pennyroyal, and the quiet, bespectacled young woman clutching an enormous camera was his photographer, Miss Kropotkin. The rest of the introductions passed in a blur of ranks and names. The only person whom Wren was really interested in--a tall, lean young man who stood on his own by the stove--Pennyroyal seemed not to know, which was a pity. He wasn't as handsome

as some of the other young officers, and his old blue greatcoat was shabby and travel stained, but there was something magnetic about him that kept pulling her eyes back to his wry, watchful face.

Pennyroyal poured coffee for his guests, and there was some polite chat about the truce, the weather, and the handsome advance that Pennyroyal had been paid by his new publishers. Then he asked Tom, "How is the good old
Arctic Roll?
And what has caused you to bring her here?"

"She is the
Jenny Haniver
again now," said Tom, "and we have come looking for someone. A lady."

"Indeed?" Pennyroyal narrowed his eyes thoughtfully; he considered himself a bit of an expert on the fairer sex. "Anyone I might know?"

"I think so," said Tom. "Her name is Cruwys Morchard."

"Cruwys!" cried Pennyroyal. "Yes, by Poskitt, I know her well. Great Gods, but it must be twenty years since I first ran into her." (The journalist Spiney scribbled in his notebook with a stub of pencil.) "She called on me at Cloud 9 a couple of times," Pennyroyal went on. "Still flying that
Archaeopteryx
of hers, and still as big a mystery as ever...."

"Why a mystery, sir?" asked one of the Murnauers.

"Why, because nobody knows where she comes from," said Pennyroyal. "Shall I tell you what I know of her? It is an extraordinary tale...."

"Oh, please do, Professor," cried Wren. "And tell us just the truth, with no alteration of the facts or added color...."

"Oh, yes, please!" cried half of Pennyroyal's audience, and
"Bitte!"
agreed the rest, when their Anglish-speaking friends had translated for them.

"Very well," said Pennyroyal, but Wren's request had made him nervous. "Perhaps I should say it is a
fairly
extraordinary tale. I believe I have heard stranger in my time. But Cruwys Morchard stays in my mind anyway, because of her extraordinary personal charms, and because of the way I met her."

"It was in Helsinki, some nineteen years ago," said Pennyroyal. "The city was hunting for semistats out near the Altai Shan. I was down in the Gut, paying a call on a very charming young salvage supervisor named Nutella Eisberg, when Ms. Morchard came aboard with a couple of companions-- rough-looking coves, but touchingly devoted to her. Walked right in off the tundra, they did--the city's jaws being open at the time so that the maintenance crews could clean its teeth--and asked the foreman of the Gut for sanctuary.

"It caused a bit of a stir, I can assure you! This was the year after London was destroyed. There had already been a few atrocities by Green Storm fanatics, and the cities of the eastern Hunting Ground were getting edgy. I think the Helsinki folk would have kicked Ms. Morchard and her friends straight back into the Out-Country, for fear they might be saboteurs or spies, but luckily I happened to be passing at the time, and I said I'd vouch for her. Her beauty touched me, d'you see? And her youth, of course, for at that time she was not much older than Wren is today."

Everyone turned to stare at Wren, who blushed.

"I took Ms. Morchard to the city's upper tier with me," Pennyroyal continued, "and I even offered to let her come and stay in my own suite at the Uusimaa Hotel, if we could

find suitable accommodations for her hairy friends. But she said, 'I have no need of charity, sir. I have a great deal of money, and I have come to this city to buy an airship. If you wish to help me, perhaps you might introduce me to an honest secondhand airship dealer.' Well I took her straight to old man Unthank. And do you know, she
did
have money! Wrapped up in a secret belt and concealed about that charming person were dozens of gold coins, and each of her companions was similarly burdened. I got a look at the stuff while she was bargaining with Unthank, and I recognized it at once; London gold, each piece stamped with the portrait of Quirke, the god of that unlucky city]

"You may imagine my astonishment! London was gone. Had I not seen with my own eyes the baleful flash of its explosion? 'How did you come by all these Quirkes, my dear?' I asked, and Ms. Morchard, after a moment's confusion, confessed that she was an archaeologist, and that she had been hunting for salvage among the ruins of London!"

A ripple of excitement spread among Pennyroyal's listeners. People whispered eagerly to one another in New German (a handsome language; the words had corners). Tom leaned forward eagerly in his chair. A young lady in a frock decorated with hundreds of blue eyes said, "But Herr Professor, London's wreck is haunted!"

"Indeed," replied Pennyroyal. "In the months that followed London's destruction, a dozen different scavenger suburbs went hastening east to devour its twisted and blackened remains. None of them ever returned."

"Because the air fleets of the old Anti-Traction League caught them as they neared the debris field and bombed

them to bits," said a clear, faintly mocking voice. The young man whom Wren had noticed earlier had come to the edge of the circle of Pennyroyal's friends and was standing there with his hands in his coat pockets, listening intently. His eyes twinkled. His long mouth widened sideways in something that was almost a sneer.

"So we are told, sir," Pennyroyal agreed, glaring at him. "So we are told. But have we not all heard eerier rumors?"

The Murnauers nodded and muttered. It seemed they all had.

"Cruwys Morchard was a rational, scientific sort, like our friend here," Pennyroyal went on. "She paid no heed to talk of ghosts. But she had seen things inside London that had turned her hair gray! No sooner had her party landed among the ruins than a fork of mysterious lightning came crackling out of the debris and destroyed their airship! More lightning followed, leaping upward from the dead metal and striking all around the explorers, as if it were drawn to the warmth of the blazing ship--or perhaps to the warm bodies of Ms. Morchard and her comrades! One of her party was burned to ashes. The others panicked and fled, but the ruins seemed to shift and twist about them, so that they could not find their way out of the debris fields. A dozen of them died during the week it took them to struggle back to the Out-Country. And it was not just the lightning that killed them. There were ...
other things.
Things that made even the valiant Ms. Morchard grow pale as she spoke of them. Things that drove men mad, so that they flung themselves from high places in the wreckage rather than face them."

"What sort of things?" asked the young lady with the eyes on her dress, all agog.

"Ghosts!" whispered Pennyroyal. "I know, Fräulein Hinblick, you will tell me there is no such thing; you will say that nobody returns from the Sunless Country. But Ms. Morchard swore to me that she had met with phantoms in the ruined streets of London. And since Ms. Morchard is the only person who has ever walked those streets and lived to tell the tale, I think we should take her word for it."

There was a silence in the room. It seemed to have grown rather cold. Fräulein Hinblick snuggled closer to her companions, and a young man with medal ribbons and a wooden hand said softly, "It is a haunted place. When I flew with the Abwehrtruppe, I saw it from a distance. Ghostly lights flash and glimmer there at night. Even the Green Storm fear it. Over the rest of the old eastern Hunting Ground they have put settlements and forests and farms and windmill fields, but for a hundred miles around the wreck of London there is nothing."

Tom leaned forward in his seat. It was time for him to try out the theory that he had been working on over the past few days. He was shaking slightly. He said, "I think Ms. Morchard may have been deceiving you a little. You see, I believe that she comes from London. I knew her when she was Clytie Potts, a member of the Guild of Historians. Somehow she survived MEDUSA. Perhaps she made up her tale of ghosts and lightning to keep people from going to London? To scare off scavengers who might try to loot the wreck? Could it be that other Londoners survived the explosion, and that she uses the

Archaeopteryx
to fly in and out of the ruins, ferrying supplies to them?"

The young Murnauers were far too polite to say that they didn't believe him, but Wren could see by their faces that they did not. Only the shabby young man watched him with interest.

"Medical supplies and livestock," Tom said hopefully. "That's what the clerk at Airhaven told us she carries...."

Pennyroyal shook his head. "A nice idea, Tom, but a bit unlikely, wouldn't you say? Even if anyone had survived that terrible disaster, why would they still be living in the ruins, all those hundreds of miles behind the Green Storm's lines?"

Wren felt embarrassed for her father. She wished he had tried out his crazy-sounding idea on her before he let everybody else hear it. Poor Dad! He really missed his old city, even after all these years; that was why he had let his imagination run away with him.

The breakfast party was beginning to break up, the room filling with a low buzz of conversation as Tom spoke eagerly to Pennyroyal, and Fräulein Hinblick explained what had just been said to some of her friends who spoke no Anglish. A few of them looked doubtfully at Tom, and there was some laughter. Wren turned to search for Orla Twombley and instead found the shabby stranger standing close behind her.

"Your father's imagination is almost as vivid as Professor Pennyroyal's," he said.

"Daddy is a Londoner himself," Wren told him. "It's only natural that he should be interested in what has become of London."

The man seemed satisfied. He was better-looking than

Wren had thought at first, and younger, too; just a boy really, eighteen or nineteen, with clear, pale skin and a faint stubble showing on his chin and upper lip. But his ice-blue eyes seemed to belong in a much older face. They stared past Wren at her father as he said, "I should like to talk to him. But not here." He thought for a moment, then reached inside his coat and took out a square, thick, creamy card, which he gave to Wren. Curly writing was embossed on it, an address on the Oberrang, Murnau's upper tier. "My father is giving a party tomorrow afternoon. You should both come. There we may speak in private."

He studied her face for a moment. Wren looked down at the invitation, and when she looked up again, the young man had turned away; she saw the skirts of his coat swirl as he reached the stairs and started down; his hair glinted gold in the lamplight. Then he was gone.

Wren turned to her father, but Tom was talking to the journalist Spiney, trying not to give too much of the truth away as Spiney quizzed him about how he knew Professor Pennyroyal. Wren went over to Orla Twombley instead. "Who was that man?" she asked. "The one who interrupted the Professor's story?"

"Him?" The aviatrix looked around quickly and, seeing that the young man had left, said, "His name is Wolf Kobold. Son of Kriegsmarschall von Kobold, the old soldier they made mayor of Murnau when this war began. Look, there they are together in that print above the fireplace.... Wolf's a brave fighter. Handsome too, don't you think?"

Wren did, but she was too shy to admit it. She tried not to blush as the aviatrix steered her across the still-crowded

room to show her the picture. There stood the kriegsmarschall, a stern, stiff gentleman whose enormous white mustaches made him look as if a wandering albatross had chosen his upper lip as a perch. Beside him was the young man to whom Wren had just spoken, looking younger still-- the picture must have been five or six years old, for it showed Wolf as a rather angelic schoolboy. Wren wondered what had happened to him in the years since to make him so grim.

"He'll be kriegsmarschall himself when the old man finally retires or dies," Orla Twombley was saying. "Until then he has been acting as mayor of one of Murnau's harvester suburbs. He drops into Moon's sometimes, when he visits Murnau on family business, but he's a solitary type. I've never talked with him."

Wren showed her the invitation she'd been given, and Orla whistled softly. "Wren, my dear, you
are
going up in the world! I declare, you've barely been aboard this city an hour, and already you've been invited to the kriegsmarschall's garden party."

***

oh, what's this ? Here on the high seas of the desert, where the rippling horizons seem more liquid than land, something solid has appeared. It is just a speck at first; a dark triangle shimmering above the silver mirages that lie across the dunes, but it grows clearer and harder by the moment; a blade, a shark's fin, a black sail bellying in the desert wind. Listen; you can hear the sand singing under racing tires. Look; you can see the sun's reflection like diamonds in a line of portholes.