A Web of Air (2 page)

He scrambled up on to the island’s summit, hoping to find cooler air and some angels to talk to. No one had time for him at home that morning. His mother was busy with the new baby, which was grizzling at the heat. Father was down at the shipyards, overseeing the work on Senhor Leonidas’s new copper-bottomed schooner. Grandfather was at work in his study. Arlo didn’t really mind. He preferred it up here, on his own. He’d always been a solitary, thoughtful boy.

Following goat tracks through the gorse and heather, he approached the old, abandoned watchtower, which stood on a crag high above the harbour. From there he could look down into his family’s shipyards. The new schooner lay like a toy in the large pen with other ships, xebecs and barquentines and fine fast sloops, built or half built, in the lesser pens around it. Offshore, the sea was scabbed with islands, but most of them were just barren rocks and angel-rookeries, none as big or pleasant as Thursday Island. Away in the east, dark against the hazy shoreline of the mainland, squatted a conical crater. Smoke hung above it in the hot and strangely windless air, making it look as if it were getting ready to erupt. But it was no volcano. It had been formed in the long-ago by some powerful weapon of the Ancients, and the smoke came from the chimneys of the city that was built on its inner slopes. Mayda-at-the-World’s-End was the finest city in the world, and Arlo’s family were its finest shipwrights, even if they did choose to live outside it, safe and private here upon their island.

He left the tower and climbed a little higher, intent on the tiny white specks which were the sails of fishing boats scattered around Mayda’s harbour mouth, and suddenly, as he reached the stones at the very top of the island, angels were soaring past him, their wide white wings whizzing and soughing as they tore though the air. A few of them recognized him and he heard them call his name: “A-aa-arlo! A-aa-arlo! W-a-a-a-a-ve!” So he waved, and they swung past him and out across the sea and back again, following curious zigzag flight paths as if they were trying to elude a predator. He glanced up, expecting to see a hawk or sea eagle hanging in the sky’s top, but there was nothing, only those curdled clouds.

He watched the angels for a while, trying to understand the way they tipped and twitched their wings to steer themselves. He pulled two leaves from a bush, found a forked twig of heather on the ground, and spent a little while constructing an angel of his own. He climbed on a rock and threw it like a dart, and just for a moment its leaf-wings spread to catch the air and he thought it would fly, but it only fell. He lost interest in it before it even hit the ground, and looked away westwards, sensing something.

Above all the black stacks and wherries where the angels roosted, fretful clouds of them were twisting, turning the sky into a soup of wings. And beyond them, far off across the ocean…

Something had gone wrong with the horizon.

Just then his favourite of the angels, the fledgling he called Weasel, landed beside him like a feather football. Arlo groped in his pocket for the crusts of stale bread he always brought with him, expecting Weasel to ask for snacks. But Weasel just made the same noise the others were all making. “Wa-a-ave!”

“What? What’s that, Weasel?”

“Wa-ave come!” Weasel had more words in him than the others of his flock. He was learning not to let his bird-voice stretch them out of shape. Grandfather said he was a throwback, almost as clever as the angels of old. He hopped from foot to foot and fluffed out his feathers and waggled his fingers in alarm, trying to make Arlo understand. “Wa-ave come here! Danger! Big-big!”

“A
wave
?” said Arlo, and looked again to the west, from where a sudden wind had started blowing.

The horizon heaved and darkened. It swelled into the sky. Arlo listened. He could hear the hammers at the shipyards, and the maids laughing in the house, and a distant sound that lay beneath it all, so vast and low that he wondered if it had always been there. Perhaps this was the noise the world made, turning round on its axis. But how had he never noticed it before?

“Wa-a-a-a-ave!” screamed all the angels, and the sky flexed and shuddered and Arlo understood, and then he was up and running. But how can you hope to outrun the horizon?

After ten paces he looked back and saw it clearly; a blade of grey water sweeping towards him over the face of the sea. It hit the outermost of the islands and there was a brief explosion of spindrift and they were gone and the wave came on, white and broken now, like a range of snow-covered mountains uprooted and running mad.

“Wa-a-a-ave!” he started to shout, just like the angels, as brainless as an angel in his terror. But who could hear him, above the world-filling voice of the sea?

He ran and tripped and fell and rolled and scrambled back through the heather, out on to the crag where the watchtower stood. A hundred feet below him the men in the shipyards were setting down their tools, standing, starting to run. From down there he doubted they could see the wave, but they must be able to hear it…

There was a smack like thunder as it struck the cliffs at the island’s western end. White spray shot high into the sky, and dropped on Arlo as a storm of rain. The weight of it punched him back against the stones of the watchtower wall. It plastered him there; and past him rolled the wave, or part of it, a fat, foam-marbled snake of sea squeezing itself through the straits that separated Thursday Island from its neighbours, lapping at the high crag where he stood.

And when it was gone, the thunder and the spray and the long, shingle-sucking, white, roaring, hissing rush of it, he peeled himself from the tower’s side already knowing what he was going to see. Or, rather, not see. Because his home, his family, the shipyards and the ships which they had held were all gone, swiped aside by the sea’s paw and dragged down into drowning deeps so bottomless that not a spar or a splinter or a scrap of cloth would ever surface, and he was alone on Thursday Island with the angels.

n the long, lilac twilight of a midsummer’s evening, Ruan Solent ran between the land-barges which were parked up on the fairground behind the busy harbour. In London, where Ruan came from, these barges were called “Summertown”, and he’d looked forward every year to their arrival. Now he was a part of their convoy, a traveller himself, and he knew that their proper name was Bargetown, and that they kept rolling through every season, not just summer, carrying their shops and entertainments all over Europa; even here, to Mayda-at-the-World’s-End.

The fairground where they had parked was a weed-speckled empty lot between tall warehouses, swept clear of buildings by the great wave that had struck the World’s End nearly ten years before, the same wave which broke over Thursday Island and destroyed the shipyards there. But Ruan was only ten, and he had arrived in Mayda just that afternoon. He had never heard of Thursday Island. He had heard people talk about the giant wave (the
Ondra del Mãe
they called it in these parts) but it was an unreal and storybookish thing to him; just another colourful disaster out of history.

Anyway, Ruan had more immediate disasters to worry about. His land-barge, the travelling theatre called
Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum,
was supposed to raise its curtain at sundown, and already the sky was freckled with the first pale stars and in the steep streets of the city the lamps were being lit. So Ruan was rushing, weaving, burrowing his way through the crowd of sightseers and shoppers that swirled between the barges. Behind him he could hear his friends Max and Fergus bellowing through their brass trumpets to attract an audience. “Take your places at the
Lyceum!
Take your places for
Niall Strong-Arm
or
The Conquest of the Moon!”
Some of the people Ruan was pushing past looked interested, and started to make their way towards his barge, but Ruan just ran even faster away from it. He knew that without him and his fleet feet and bony elbows, the show could not begin.

“’Scuse me!” he hollered, as he jabbed and ducked his way past a fat, silky merchant. “Scoozi! Scoozey-mwa!” he shouted, bulldozing onwards. (He was a much-travelled boy, and knew a little of all the languages of Europa.) He was as thin as a pipe-cleaner sculpture and as brown as a hazelnut, with a dandelion-clock of sun-blond hair and a sudden white grin that helped people forgive him when he bumped into them. Maydan fisherfolk in their temple-going best looked down and made way for him. Pretty ladies smiled sweet smiles as they stepped aside to let him pass. “’Scuse me!” he kept on shouting. “Scoozey-mwa!”

All afternoon the barges had been crawling into Mayda, edging their way out along the zigzag causeway which tethered the crater to the mainland, squeezing through a cleft in its wall into the city. The
Lyceum
had been one of the first to arrive, and while her crew were busy setting out the stage and seating, other barges had parked up all around her; not just the familiar ones which had been travelling with Bargetown all season but a second convoy too, come down from Nowhere and the Caps Del Norte to set up shop here at the World’s End.

Ruan recognized one of the newcomers; an old blue travelling market called the
Rolling Stone.
It was such a recent arrival that its engines were still cooling and sea-spray from the causeway crossing dripped like rain off its wheel arches and its underparts, but its merchants had already set out their wares, and a queue of eager shoppers was edging up its gangplank. Ruan scurried up past them to the turnstiles at the top, where one of the men on duty tried to stop him squirming underneath, but the other said, “Oh, let him through, Allan, it’s only that Solent boy from Persimmon’s theatre…”

He waved a thank you, running out on to the market-deck. It was crammed with stalls and little cluttered shops, already busy with shoppers under its fluttering awnings. A woman blocked Ruan’s way, holding up a bolt of cloth against herself and asking her bored husband his opinion. “You ought to go and see the play, master,” Ruan told him, swerving past. “It starts in a couple o’ minutes.” And right on his cue his words were answered by a distant farting of brass bugles from the far end of Bargetown, announcing that the
Lyceum
was preparing to raise its curtains.

Ruan knew that by now the audience would have gathered in front of the apron-shaped stage which extended from the theatre’s stern. The first night in a new town always meant a big crowd. The seats would be full, and people would be sitting on the ground too, or standing at the back, or watching from the windows of nearby buildings. Max and Fergus would be going round with their cash-satchels, selling last-minute tickets. The closed curtains would look calm and classy, and give no hint of the panic boiling behind them, where Ambrose Persimmon would be trying out his big stage voice, “Me, me, me, me, me-me-mee!” while Alisoun Froy helped him into his first-act costume. Fern, Ruan’s small sister, would be sneezing in the fog of face powder that filled the ladies’ dressing room as she hared this way and that among the racks of hanging gowns on frantic errands for frantic actresses. Mistress Persimmon would have lost her tiara as usual and Lillibet would be sobbing that she had put on weight and couldn’t fasten the hooks and eyes on the back of her bodice … and all that effort, all that fuss and worry would be for nothing if Ruan didn’t make it back within the next two minutes!

At the untidy sternward end of the market-deck was a stall called
Squinter’s Old-Tech Improbabilities.
Its owner, Mort Squinter, was haggling about something with a large man in a broad-brimmed hat and travel-stained blue cloak. Ruan waited a bit, bouncing from foot to foot with impatience, then interrupted. “If you please, Master Squinter, we need some copper wire.”

“Ain’t you got none of your own?” asked Squinter, squinting down at him.

“We
did
have, Master Squinter, but AP used it to make his costume more magnificent and he forgot to tell us and now there’s none left and a fuse has blown and we must do the show in darkness unless you can help us. Mistress Persimmon said you’d be sure to help…”

(Mistress Persimmon had said nothing of the sort, but everyone on the
Lyceum
knew that Mort Squinter was in love with their leading actress; kept her portrait under his pillow and kissed it each night before he went to sleep. Ruan guessed that his request might go down better if it seemed to come from her.)

“Well,” said the love-struck Squinter, blushing as he rummaged through the stacks of tiny wooden drawers behind his counter. “It’s not cheap, your actual copper, not nowadays when so much is shipping north to London. But of course if it’s for Laura Persimmon…” He looked to his other customer, hoping the man wouldn’t lose interest and wander off to try some other stall while he was busy with Ruan. “Beg pardon for the interruption, sir. This boy’s from Persimmon’s
Lyceum,
at the far end o’ the line. We travelled with ’em all last season. They have a wench from London who arranges their ’lectric lamps and stage-effects and such, and there’s never a performance goes by without this lad of hers comes scavenging for some piece of ’tech or other. It’s not as if Laura Persimmon ain’t radiant enough without old-fangled lights shining on her.”