A Web of Air (19 page)

“This is where we’ll build the machine,” announced Arlo, peering over the edge.

“In the open?” asked Fever.

“Of course. If we put her together inside we’ll only have to take her apart again to get her up here. This is where we’ll be launching her from. It’s not as high as the cliffs that Edgar Saraband launched from at Thelona, but it’s high enough, I think.”

“You
think?”
Fever was starting to hate her own scepticism. She knew that risks must sometimes be taken if progress is to be made. But when she went to stand with him at the parapet and looked down to the jagged rocks at the cliff’s foot, she could not imagine flying, only falling.

“What if there’s more rain?” she said. “What if a storm blows in?”

“The weather will hold,” Arlo said. “We only need a few days.”

Fever hoped that he was right. “What can I do?”

“The engine,” he said. “I know nothing about engines.”

“Of course.” She remembered what Dr Teal had told her about Edgar Saraband’s accident. “I’ll strip it down and rebuild it; check every part…”

Arlo looked sideways at her, squinting in the sunlight. “Fever, I thought I wanted to be alone out here. But I’m glad you’re here too.”

“I don’t approve of mating rituals,” said Fever sternly.

“What?”

“Romance. Kissing. Holding hands and … that sort of thing. Just because we are on an island does not mean that… The Earth has a perfectly adequate population nowadays, so there is no need for people of reason to give in to the primitive urge to mate and reproduce. I just thought I would let you know.”

Arlo Thursday stood and looked at her and she didn’t know if she had offended him or disappointed him or what. Her ears felt as if they were about to catch fire.

“You needn’t worry,” he said, after a moment. “There’s someone else, you see. I’m in love with someone else.”

“Oh. Good.”

“She’s called Thirza Blaizey,” said Arlo. “At least, she used to be. She’s Thirza Belkin, now…” He shrugged, looked away across the ruins for a moment and then, as if the conversation had never taken place, said, “We must start getting the machine ashore. I’ll need your help with the bigger pieces.”

How had it begun, that friendship between Arlo and the Blaizeys’ eldest daughter? Even Arlo wasn’t really sure. She had always been there at the Blaizey place on Costa Norte, hanging about the yards and “and Blaizey’s…” slipways, or helping her mother in the house. He had scarcely noticed her at first. But slowly something about her had started to call to him, and make him think it might be time to shake off his solitary, birdish moods. It was the tallness and the grace of her, and that calm face that never let you know what she was thinking. She reminded him of the women in the paintings which the sea had stolen along with his grandfather’s gallery. A maiden in a story, waiting at a castle window for the man who’d rescue her.

Thirza had no time for the jokes and boldness of Blaizey’s other ’prentices, but she seemed to be amused by Arlo’s conversations with the angels. Shyly, he taught her the special call that he used to draw his favourites down from the flocks that flew over the shipyards. He showed her how to hold out her arm so that Weasel could perch on her wrist, and explained the meanings of all his movements. He was delighted by how quickly she learned, and how well she spoke the angel language. Her long neck and slender hands were better suited to their dances than any part of Arlo was. Her white fingers were as delicate as angel feathers.

It was not long before Augusto Blaizey started to find notes in his daughter’s room, scribbled on those dart-like, wing-like things that Arlo made. They seemed to have flown from the boy’s window into hers. That made him uneasy. So did the bird-shapes that Arlo had taken to making and launching from the cliff sides on his afternoons off. Stringless kites and paper angels which an unfortunate wind might carry right over the crater-crown and down into the city, leading to awkward questions at the Shipwrights’ Guild. (“That Thursday boy of yours still away with the angels, is he, Blaizey? Don’t he know the
Mãe
alone makes flying things?”)

It would not do, the old shipwright decided. He would have to break this link of tenderness that he saw growing between Thirza and the lad. It pained him, for they were a pretty pair, and he held his daughter very dear and wanted nothing but her happiness. But, as he told her, these youthful loves meant nothing; they were only fevers of the heart and the hotness of them cooled to clinkers after a few years of marriage and a kid or two. Most people never knew that sort of love at all, and took no harm from the lack of it. Far better for Thirza she accept the offer he’d had for her from Jago Belkin, a merchant who wasn’t exactly young or exactly handsome but had grown rich from his contacts with traders in Matapan and other ports around the Middle Sea. “Love fades,” he told her, “but money, if it’s tended right, increases and increases, and with enough of it you
can
buy happiness, no matter what the poets say. What do poets know about money?”

Thirza bit her lip and thought hard, and a few months later she put on a blue silk gown and stood at the altar in the Temple of the Sea with half of Mayda watching while Fat Jago Belkin cast the ceremonial fishing-net over her and the High Priestess pronounced them Man and Wife.

Soon after that Arlo Thursday left Blaizey’s and went back to live alone at Casas Elevado, being old enough by then to decide his own affairs. The city forgot him, except on the days when his strange, silent air-machines went sliding their shadows over the streets and rooftops. Then people would look up and shake their heads and remind each other of the rise and fall of the Thursdays.

It surprised Fever to find how much more capable she was than Arlo. She’d seen the things he’d built and the way he’d steered the
Jenny Haniver
and she had assumed he’d bring the same easy skill to everything, but no; it turned out that boats and aëroplanes were the limit of his practicality. She watched in astonishment as he tugged the pieces of his flying machine out of the
Jenny Haniver
’s holds and cabins and started to carry them one by one up the ladder that led into the tower. It was she who had to show him how to rig up a simple hoist, taking ropes and tackle from the cutter and rigging them over the handrail at the ladder’s top.

She spent the rest of the morning making bundles of the spars and spare timber and tying them securely to the rope’s end so that he could haul them up, untie them, and carry them inside the tower. Then there were big bales of paper to be lifted up, and bags of tools, and the unfinished propeller, and the clanking portions of Edgar Saraband’s aëro-engine. Finally, there was a bag of provisions. When Fever looked inside it she saw that it held only a wheel of cheese, some ship’s biscuits, a bag of sugared almonds and a flask of Thelonan wine.

“No flour?” she asked, not quite believing that he expected them to live here on just that. “No butter? Fruit? Water?”

“There’s water on the island,” Arlo said. “I’ll fetch my fishing tackle from the
Jenny
to catch our meals. And I think there are berries on the western side; there used to be. Anyway, we’ll be not be staying here long. We’ll finish the machine, and when it’s ready I shall fly it back to Mayda. It will soar over the city, and land on the lawns behind the Quadrado Del Mar.”

“Orca Mo will not like that,” said Fever.

“Not many Maydans think like Orca Mo nowadays,” said Arlo. “My people cling to their superstitions, but they’re not stupid. Once they see that flight is possible, and understand what it will mean for trade and profit, they will soon take to the idea, just as they have taken to land-barges. I’ll ask for investors, and set up a company. Vishniak and Jago Belkin will not dare to try anything once I am in the public eye. I’ll build a whole fleet of flyers, bigger and better models, able to carry passengers and cargoes…”

He held out one arm and startled Fever by letting out a piercing cry. With a flap of wings an angel settled on his wrist.
Weasel,
guessed Fever, and wondered how long she would have to spend among these birds before she learned to tell them apart as Arlo did. She couldn’t even sort males from females yet.

Arlo was talking to the bird, in clucks and gestures and in words as well. “The house… Yes…”

“House,” said the bird, and took flight. Fever shaded her eyes with one hand to watch him as he soared away over the sea towards the far-off, misty cone of Mayda. The angels made flying look so
easy.
You could see why Arlo, growing up among them, might start to think that he could do it too.

“Weasel will be our eyes in Mayda,” said Arlo. “I’ve asked him to tell us what’s happening at the house. If Fat Jago has found those dead thugs of his yet. Whether he’s looking for us.”

Fever didn’t answer. She kept watching the angel until he was out of sight. She remembered Fat Jago in the rain last night saying,
“I’ll find him.”
She remembered Thirza telling her,
“There is nothing that happens in Mayda that Jago doesn’t find out about.”
And it was not just Belkin and the Oktopous Cartel they had to fear, but the faceless threat of Lothar Vishniak as well. Could they really expect one scruffy seabird to outwit both of them?

p went Weasel, high, high, spreading his wings so that the kind, warm air above the beaches lifted him. Pitying as he went the poor left-behinds below him, Arlo and Arlo’s new young female, with only their feather-naked arms, no wings to loft and carry them, poor nestlings!

Carried on the gyres of the air he reached Mayda-sky with barely a wingbeat. From his height the city looked like a nest, and the harbour a blue egg laid in it. He half folded his wings and let earth-tug take him down, spreading them again as all the chimney pots lunged upwards at him. He swooped through the city’s invisible awning of scents, and the smoke smells and snack smells and garbage smells reminded him that he was hungry; but he knew he mustn’t stop. He was wiser than the rest of his people; he was not to be distracted by snacks and smells. Arlo wanted to know things, and Arlo was his friend.

So he went to the house; to Arlo’s house, which sat in the morning sunlight empty and dead-looking at the bottom of its garden. A sharp scent of carrion drew his eyes down to the two dead men in the garden, crawling with flies in the morning heat. Others of his people were there, hopping about in the grass beside the rails. They were picking up things in their beaks and their fingers; things that flashed and glittered in the sun. Fights broke out now and then, with fierce squawkings and wide-spread wings, as a new angel arrived and tried to take one of the glittery things for himself, but there were plenty to go around. Little shiny brass tubes they were, open at one end, empty inside, with a smell of fires and smoke about them. Good for decorating a nest, thought Weasel, landing, turning one of the tubes in his wing-fingers. He had to remind himself again that he was not like these others whose small heads were full of nothing but snacks and nestings. He was not here for nestings; he was here to be Arlo’s eyes.

He flew to the house. The door was open. More of his flock were inside, squabbling over scraps in the kitchen.

Suddenly, from the trees at the garden’s foot, a voice shouted, “Thursday? Fever?”

Angels exploded out of the house and rose from the garden like litter in a whirlwind. Their alarm calls jangled in Weasel’s narrow head. His instincts dragged him into the sky, but instead of fleeing with the rest he circled there and landed on the house roof, watching as the stranger climbed towards him up the steps.

“Fever?” shouted the man again, thinking that if she was hiding somewhere she might not have heard him over the screeching of those stupid birds. “It’s me! It’s Dr Teal!”

There was still no answer. Dr Teal snuffed the air suspiciously, catching the same sickly scent that Weasel had noticed a few moments earlier. He stooped and picked something up from the grass. A shell-casing from some sort of old-tech gun. Going to the rails, he looked down into the trench between them and saw what lay there. For a moment he was afraid that it might be what was left of Fever, but then the coverlet of blowflies lifted for a moment and he saw that the thing had been a man; bearded and brawny, with an octopus tattoo on his arm. Another just like him sprawled among the lavender bushes further down. The angels had already eaten their eyes.

“The Oktopous Cartel has been here, Dr Teal,” Dr Teal said aloud, covering his nose with his handkerchief and looking at those tattoos. “The Oktopous, and someone else who does not like them and is rather more heavily armed…” It was not strictly rational to talk to oneself, but it was a habit that he had. He reached inside his coat and took out the pistol he had been issued with before he left London, holding it ready as he moved on up the steps. The back door of Thursday’s house was open. Dr Teal went inside and moved cautiously through the empty rooms, stooping sometimes to examine a pattern of footprints in the dust and shavings on the floor.