A Web of Air (25 page)

“Machine?”

“His boat, ship, whatever it is that he is building. We must get aboard that galley and see where Fat Jago is going to—”

“Oh, no, no, no, no!” said Jonathan Hazell. “Fat Jago’s men will see us – I mean, they will see
you—
”

“But how else can we find out where they are bound, and get there first, and ensure … ensure Fever’s safety?”

“Believe me, Dr Teal, I am as concerned about Miss Crumb as you, but to try and stow away aboard the
Desolation Row
would be madness.” He blinked a few times, looking from Teal to the distant harbourside, where tuns of water were being rolled into the galley’s holds. “Madness,” he said again, and then, “I have a little boat of my own… It will take a big ship like the
Desolation Row
several hours to make ready and get out of the harbour. In my boat we could leave at once.”

“For where? Nowhere? Or Meriam?”

“Meriam,” said Jonathan Hazell firmly. “It is most likely that Miss Crumb has gone where her friends are. And once we are out of the harbour the wind will be with us running down the coast.”

Once they were out of the harbour; but that proved more easily said than done, for there was no wind at all inside the crater that evening, and Jonathan Hazell had to row his boat the whole length of the outer basin, while Dr Teal sat in the bow and fumed.

“Come
on,
Hazell,” he snapped, as they drew level with the long red blade that was the
Desolation Row.
Lanterns had been lit on her high stern-castle, and her crew were busy removing tarpaulins from a boxy structure near her bows, which turned out to be a revolving gun turret.

“Look,” said Teal, “they’ll soon be ready for the off. Still, it’s good to see that your friend Fat Jago is as wary of the Sea Goddess as every other fool in Mayda. No engines on that ship of his; just oars. She can’t be very fast.”

“Oh, she’ll be fast,” panted Jonathan Hazell. “Fat Jago employs a great many oarsmen. And she’ll not be prey to the winds, as we are. We must just hope she will give us another hour or so; a sporting start…”

But their luck was out. Just as they passed the lighthouse at the harbour mouth and felt the first stirrings of the wind, they heard the faint, steady pounding of a drum coming up the harbour behind them.

The
Desolation Row
swept out of Mayda in the twilight under bare masts with her oars dipping and rising like the pistons of some implacable machine. Teal and Hazell watched her come, her sleek red hull like a bloodied knife, with dim lights burning in her gun-slits and that big lantern bright on her stern. Her lookouts mistook Hazell’s boat for a fisherman, maybe, or maybe they were so intent on their business that they never noticed it bobbing there at all.
Boom, boom, doom,
went the drum inside her, and the white water wavered like a ghost against her ram, and the little boat pitched on her wake as she went past it and swung her prow towards the last band of golden light that lay along the western sea.

“West!” hissed Dr Teal. “They’re headed west! Hazell, you idiot, you were wrong! They’re making for the Ragged Isles!”

“But there’s nothing there!” insisted Jonathan Hazell.

“Well Fat Jago seems pretty sure that there is! You don’t set sail in a monster like that on the mere off-chance of finding something.”

“What shall we do, Dr Teal?”

The Engineer looked grim, and one hand reached inside his coat. There was something in there that he kept feeling for, as if its bulk and weight reassured him. Since he was an Engineer, Jonathan Hazell suspected it must be something more practical than a lucky rabbit’s foot or
The Meditations of St Kylie.
He patted it now, glared at Hazell and said, “Follow them, of course!”

Jonathan Hazell raised the sail. It might have been russet if there had been any light to see it by, but in the deepening twilight it was just a rhomboid of deeper darkness against the sky. It flapped for a moment until Jonathan Hazell scrambled aft and pulled in the mainsheet, whereon it filled with wind, causing the boat to heel and rush forward and making Dr Teal say angrily, “I thought you knew how to sail this thing?”

Jonathan Hazell ignored him. The tug of the mainsheet in his hand was comforting, and so was the cheerful gurgling of water under the boat’s foot, the slap of the small waves as she cut through them. “She’s a good boat,” he said. “A fast boat.”

But she was not so fast as the
Desolation Row,
whose stern lantern was already dwindling in the west, racing towards those far-off islands which pricked the black horizon like fishes’ teeth.

hey had worked all afternoon, pausing now and then to eat ship’s biscuits and slices of cheese, but never stopping for a meal. They had forgotten to feel hungry, or tired. Sometimes one or other of them would take a break and walk away from the tower, and once Arlo went to the beach to swim, but their heads were full of their work all the time, and they soon came back to the machine. They felt that they were close to something. To stop before they reached it was impossible.

By sundown Fever’s new engine was complete. With the Aranha’s torus at its heart it was as light and delicate as everything else about the
Goshawk.
As the sky above the tower grew dark and filled with stars and the angels went ghosting homeward to their roosts Arlo lit a lantern and Fever helped him fix the engine into position on the machine’s back. Carefully they made it fast, boring holes through the struts and bolting the engine to them, tightening the nuts as far as they would go. Instead of the medieval armour that Edgar Saraband’s engine had worn, Arlo had made a tortoiseshell basket of balsa struts and they pasted paper over it and varnished it and fixed that over the mechanisms. The torus gave off so little heat that Fever didn’t think it needed any vents to cool it, but Arlo made some anyway, just to be safe. They looked like the gills of a dogfish.

And then, when the newborn sickle moon hung high over the islands, they switched it on. It buzzed restlessly, and the propeller quivered, and when Fever gave it one helping turn the big wooden blades dissolved suddenly into a circular blur of motion, and they felt
Goshawk
trembling, straining at its tethers like a live thing, a huge, newborn bird that longed for the freedom of the sky.

When they turned it off the night seemed quieter than before, the air more still. The breeze had died. Fever said, “I hope the wind comes back tomorrow. We cannot launch without a headwind.”

“It will come,” said Arlo, watching her, laughing privately at that busy brain of hers, the way it never rested.

“Five miles per hour would be ideal, but I suppose we can manage with less.”

He said, “You never unfasten your hair.”

“What?” Fever put a hand to the hard bun at the back of her head. “What does that have to do with anything?” She wondered if he was thinking of using her hair as some sort of pennant so that he could gauge the speed and direction of the wind. Surely his own was long enough?

“Even when you go to sleep,” said Arlo. “Sometimes a bit comes loose, but you always tie it straight back.”

“Hair is irrational,” said Fever. “It is a vestige of our animal past. I had to grow mine when I left the Head just to stop people staring, but that does not mean that—”

He came around the
Goshawk
’s tail and stood close to her. He reached out and she felt his fingers busy at the nape of her neck, unravelling the careful knot she’d tied. She knew that she ought to protest, but when she tried to speak no words came out, just a little sigh, a little gasp. And then the knot was undone and around her face in wisps and strands her dry, sun-bleached hair came tickling down. He combed his fingers through it, arranging it for her, his hands brushing against her throat and her ears and the angles of her jaw.

“I do not approve…” she started to say, but she could not remember what it was that she did not approve of. She touched his face, tracing all the beautiful patterns of his freckles, thinking,
This is not rational. I am forgetting myself.
But might it not be pleasant to forget herself for a little while? Might it not be pleasant to give in to these fierce and hungry feelings? The smells of Arlo’s body flowered in her mind as sprays of nameless colour. She supposed that she was falling in love. That was what Dymphna or Lillibet would call it. And although she knew it must just be a matter of chemicals and instincts, it still felt wonderful and frightening and strange. She leaned towards Arlo until their faces touched.
I am supposed to kiss him now,
she thought, thinking of all the love scenes she had watched through her periscope from her lair under the
Lyceum
stage.
I wonder how kissing works?

White wings flared above her in the moonlight and an angel came down and landed heavily on her head.

“Weasel!” it squawked, pushing its fish-stinky beak down between their startled faces as they sprang apart. “Arlo! Weasel!”

Fever batted it away and it fluttered wildly and settled on the Goshawk’s port wing, still screaming out a mess of squawks and words. She wondered if it was angry at her for touching Arlo. Then she saw the look on his face.

“What?
What
has happened to Weasel?
How?”

“Thir-z-aa,” croaked the angel. Fever thought it was the same female she had tried to talk to about the scratches in the birdcastle. It hadn’t many words or much understanding of how to put them together, but it kept trying until Arlo understood.

“She
drowned
him? Thirza?”

A cold feeling came over Fever. “What was Weasel doing anywhere near Thirza?”

“Thir-z-aa!” said the angel, doing a little agitated dance along the parapet. “Friend. Snacks.”

“Does Weasel talk to Thirza often?” Fever asked.

“Often! Yesterday!”

Arlo shook his head. “Yesterday might mean last month or last year. Weasel wouldn’t betray me…”

“Weasel wouldn’t
know
he was betraying you,” said Fever. “Not if she was nice to him and gave him lots of snacks.”

“Thirza wouldn’t…” he started to say.

And then more angels were around them, their voices clanging like rusty bells around the old tower. “A-ar-lo! Floatyboat! Big, big! Floatyboat come!”

Arlo and Fever turned from each other, looking out across the sea. Beyond the reefs and shoals which screened the island, a ship rode the starlit swell. Long and low and black, with lights showing here and there. Fever stared at it, trying to understand what it meant. She could not believe that it was anything good.

“Floatyboat!” cried the angels.

“It’s Belkin!” said Arlo, with a catch in his voice as if he were going to cry. “That’s his galley, the
Desolation Row.
It was built at Blaizey’s, the year I started there… But it’ll never get through the reefs…”

“Not even if Weasel told Thirza about the waymarks?” asked Fever.

Arlo looked at her. “No. She’s too big. She’d rip her keel out on the rocks…”

“Little floatyboat!” screeched the angels, taking up a new cry. “Big floatyboat-come-little-floatyboat-come.”

Arlo looked confused, but Fever, with her keen Scriven eyes, soon saw what they meant. A smaller shape was detaching itself from the black outline of Fat Jago’s galley. A skiff, already starting to thread its way through the reefs. Faint sounds came to her across the water: the dull wooden clunk of a banged oar, a distant curse.

She took Arlo’s hand, and felt him trembling.

“Weasel told Thirza about us,” he said. “And Thirza told Belkin everything!”

“Arlo,” said Fever. “It is irrational to cry over spilled milk. Can that boat get through the reefs?”

“The big ship certainly couldn’t, not by night. But maybe a skiff…”

He made an angry gesture, scaring the angel away into the dark. He looked very frightened. Fever had the feeling that came to her sometimes when she was with Ruan and Fern; a need to protect him against the hard truths of the world. She decided to take charge.

“We’ll launch the
Goshawk.
Fly to Mayda now.”

“I’m not leaving you behind,” he said.

“Perhaps she’d carry us both, with the new engine.”

“Never. The balance would be all wrong. Anyway, there’s no wind, she’ll never lift in this calm.”

He was right. The night was still, the air as quiet as the air in a big room, the voices of Fat Jago’s men and the creak of their oars carrying clearly across the water.

“They can’t come up here unless we let them,” Fever said. “There’s only one way in, up that ladder.”

“They’ll have guns.”

“But they won’t want to use them. The
Goshawk
’s no use to them if it’s full of holes, and nor are you. We can hold them off.”

“What with?”

“Where’s your pistol?”

“It’s not loaded. It never was.”