A Web of Air (23 page)

“No, the villa is huge; the wife is charming. And the fact that Belkin has been asking after Miss Crumb tells that he does not know where she is, do you see?”

“It tells us that he
did
not know. But if he has stopped asking, perhaps he has found her. And if he doesn’t have her, where is she? We’re no further on than we were when you first stuck your oar in.”

“Ah!” said Jonathan Hazell. “That brings me to the second strand of my investigation. I have learned something about Arlo Thursday’s house. Local fishermen, who know all the ins and outs of Mayda’s shores, tell me that there is a hidden cove on the south-western side of the island. When Daniel Thursday lived in that funicular, he used to keep a boat there. I believe there must be a path leading through the crater wall from Thursday’s garden down to this cove. That must be the way that Thursday escaped after he gunned down those two Oktopoid gentlemen. Doubtless he took Miss Crumb with him. They have escaped by sea. If only we knew where they were making for…”

“What about the Ragged Isles?” asked Dr Teal. “Didn’t Thursday’s family have shipyards there? Could he be holed up there?”

“Oh no,” said the merchant. “Those shipyards were swept away by the great wave. The Ragged Isles are dead, bare places now. Cursed, the locals say. It’s far more likely that Miss Crumb and the boy would seek shelter in Meriam or Nowhere. We should send at once to those cities and see if there have been any sightings of them!”

Dr Teal said, “This is excellent work, Hazell. I could not have done better myself. Tell me, in your delvings, did you hear any mention of a man named Lothar Vishniak?”

Jonathan Hazell looked blank. “I can’t say I did. Who is he?”

The Engineer shook his head. “No one. Just a name that I heard mentioned once. I merely wondered… But if you have not heard anything of him, perhaps we may reassure ourselves that he is not in Mayda.”

rlo had always planned to call his new machine the
Thirza.
Through all the months of planning and hard work it had never once occurred to him that it should not be dedicated to her. It was as beautiful, as delicate, as precious as his Thirza, and he liked to imagine how she would look when the news reached her; not only had a miraculous device alighted on the lawns behind the Quadrado Del Mar, it was named after her. Fat Jago Belkin might have given her pearls and diamonds and fine dresses and a house the size of a small town, but Arlo would make her a present of all tomorrow’s skies.

But when he woke on the morning of the first flight he knew that was not the right name after all. The picture of Thirza Blaizey that he had carried in his mind all these years had begun to fade, like a painting hung on a sunny wall. She was still there, but she seemed less real. Maybe she had never been real. How many actual words had he ever exchanged with her? A few hundred? Maybe not that many.

He rolled over in his bunk and looked across the big, bare room to where Fever Crumb lay sleeping. She always went to sleep flat on her back, which she claimed was healthier, and as far as he knew she always woke up in the same position, still with her hair tied back in that tight bun, which must be as hard as a pebble under the nape of her neck. Arlo grinned. When they had first come to the island he had sometimes thought how much he would rather have had Thirza Belkin there with him instead of this bony, stubborn, cold-natured Londoner, but now that the machine was finished he could see that Thirza would never have been able to help him as Fever had. He could not imagine debating lift-to-weight ratios and angles of attack with Thirza, nor could he see Thirza planing a propeller blade for six hours straight, or wearing without complaint the same grubby clothes day after day, and washing only in the sea. Slightly surprised at himself, he decided that Thirza did not deserve to have her name on his machine.

He rose quietly, and went up on to the roof, and by the time Fever awoke and joined him there he had already painted the new name he had chosen on the machine’s nose. She frowned when she read it.

“It is irrational to give a name to a machine,” was all she said.

Eastward, behind Mayda, the sun was coming up, but in the west the sky was still dusky, the ocean almost colourless. A cool breeze from the west, salt-smelling, hummed through the
Goshawk
’s rigging. Together, using mallets and hammers and their bare hands, they demolished the parapet on the tower’s windward side. Then Arlo pulled on his goggles and tied back his long hair and clambered into the harness that was slung beneath the trembling paper wings. His hands grasped the levers which operated the wing-flaps and rudder.

“Wish me luck,” he said, as Fever went round to the back to start the engine.

“Good luck,” she said obediently, although she did not believe in luck, only in engineering and the laws of physics. She reached up and gripped the edges of the propeller they had made, and found that her hands were shaking, which annoyed her. Surely Arlo was the one who should be afraid, but she did not see him trembling; he just lay there in the harness as if he were a part of the machine, as if he were a new fledged angel spreading its wings on some shelf of the sea cliffs…

She swung the propeller as hard as she could. The clumsy engine came to life at last with a hard, throaty roar that shivered all the struts and cables. She reached up and gripped the edges of the propeller they had made and swung it as hard as she could and it whirled into a blurred disc, scattering shadows over the wings and the tower roof. Then she put both hands on the bar which Arlo had mounted below the tail and used all her weight to shove the machine forward, into the wind.

It went off the edge of the roof, seemed to hesitate for a moment, dipped its wings and plummeted. “No!” she screamed, the scream lost in the angry shout of the engine, which echoed from the cliffs and the tower wall as the
Goshawk
plunged downward. She ran to the roof’s edge with that dreadful feeling of watching something fall and being helpless to save it. But the machine saved itself. Before it hit the rocks its nose lifted; the engine roared and whinnied as it scrambled up the sky and Fever was kneeling on the roof watching it fly away above the beaches, wiping the silly tears from her face and feeling glad that there was no one there to see her.

Alone in the sky, Arlo eased on the rudder lever and felt the
Goshawk
respond, veering to the right. He drew back on the wing controls and tried to make her climb.
I’m flying,
he thought, wondering how he could nail this moment into his memory. He wanted to keep all of it, everything, every last shadow in each ripple of sand on the low-tide beach below him. The noise of the engine battered at him, its echoes reflecting off the cliff faces. The curious angels whirled all round him, circling the machine, an honour guard welcoming him into the realms of the air. He saw Weasel among them, crossing and recrossing the machine’s path; heard his cry above the engine roar: “A-a-a-ar-lo!”

But he was too heavy. He could feel it each time he tried to go higher. A sluggishness. The grumpy tug of gravity. That big engine mounted above him was upsetting the delicate balance of the wings and spoiling all his careful mathematics. It was a struggle to keep the
Goshawk
’s nose up. Engine fumes blew in his face, smearing his goggles, stinking of castor oil.

He had planned to circle the island and land on the long flat strand beside the quay, but he was barely halfway round and already he had dropped almost to sea level. Rocks rushed by just beneath him, exposed by the low tide, spine-breaking rocks with skirts of bladderwrack and black barnacled backs as friendly as cheese-graters. He saw sand ahead; a long stretch of wet sand under wet black cliffs, and he steered for it as best he could, already feeling a little sad that the sky did not want him after all.

The harness punched him in the breastbone, knocked all the air out of his lungs. Flung divots of sand stung his face, clogged his mouth as he gasped for breath. The machine bounced and took flight again, rushing along a few feet above its own shadow. A ripped-off wheel bounded along beside it for a way, drawing a line across the beach. He saw a rainbow hanging in the fan of spray that it threw up behind it from the wet sand. Then there was another thump, sand between his teeth, salt water, his hip banging painfully against a strut, the crunch of snapped wood, paper tearing, a line of rocks sliding towards him sideways…

It took her an unbelievably long time to reach the place where he had fallen. She scrambled over breakwaters and barriers of wet rock; clattered across deep drifts of pebbles, pulled off her shoes and pelted barefoot along the shining sand. The flying machine stood on its nose, surrounded by inquisitive angels. Spilled fuel slid in rainbow-coloured ribbons down the little streams and runnels of the beach towards the sea. Arlo was still dangling in the harness, caught there, upside down. He was laughing, and as she struggled to unstrap him she thought he must be delirious. Perhaps too much blood had run to his head in all the time he’d hung there waiting. But she helped him down and set him upright and slapped his face a couple of times and he went on laughing. He was just happy.

“I flew, Fever! I
flew!”

Fever stepped away, because he showed a definite inclination to hug her, the way the
Lyceum
actors sometimes did after a good performance. She did not want to be hugged by Arlo Thursday. She did not know where it would end.

His laughter slowly wore itself out. He pulled his goggles off and wiped his eyes. There was a small cut beneath one of them.

“You were right about the engine,” he said. “We shall need a lighter one.”

Fever shook her head. “That isn’t possible.”

“You could make one,” he said. He had flown; he felt all things were possible. “I bet you could make one even better than Edgar’s…”

“Out of what?” Fever complained. “I haven’t the materials or the tools. I have no idea how to make an engine that would be light enough. And even if I did, what would it run on? Half our ethanol has spilled away. You will just have to make the
Goshawk
bigger. If it had a broader wingspan perhaps it would be able to lift the engine…”

“No…” Arlo sat down on the sand, sobered. The angels swooped to and fro above him, dropping echoes of his spent laughter like bombs,
Ha ha! Hoo hoo hoo!
He traced shapes in the sand for a moment; wings; letters. “No; we haven’t the time; we haven’t the wood; we haven’t the paste or the paper. We must have another engine.”

“But I have already explained…”

“You don’t need to build one.” He looked up at her, shading his eyes with one hand, smiling so happily that she wondered if he were still delirious. “We already have one. Right here, on the island.”

Fever thought for a moment. “The Aranha?”

“Why not? Your grandfather’s gift to mine. There’s some engine inside it that doesn’t seem to need fuel.”

“All engines need fuel.”

“Then maybe it has a limitless supply. If we can get it out and use it to drive the
Goshawk
’s propeller we’ll have solved the weight problem.”

“But we need the Aranha! What if Belkin finds us? Or Vishniak?”

“What if they don’t?” asked Arlo. “They haven’t yet. Why should they now?” He stood up, brushing sand from his clothes, shaking it from his hair. He had been in the sky, and he was not going to let his enemies stop him from returning. “Fever, we’ve almost done it! Powered, controlled flight! We can’t let fear of Belkin and Vishniak stop us now!”

They spent the rest of the morning dismantling the
Goshawk
and moving the pieces up above the tideline before the sea returned. In the afternoon they carried it all back, piece by piece, to the tower, reassembling it on the roof while the Aranha hopped on its endless, eerie sentry duty among the overgrown quays below them.

At about the age when most children were learning nursery rhymes and how to count to ten, Fever had been taught the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Dr Crumb said that everyone should know them; they were the key to understanding so much about the universe. The name made them sound complicated, but they were really quite simple. The first law said that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change its form. The second, that entropy increases in a closed system; which, Dr Crumb explained, meant that hot things, if left to their own devices, cooled down; that heat only moved from hotter places to colder ones, and that machines could never be completely efficient.

So where did that leave the Stalkers? Reanimated corpses, armoured and mechanized, powered by technology from who-knew-when, they burned no fuel as far as Fever had ever been able to see, and they had been known to keep going for centuries. So either they must be making their own energy somehow (which broke the first law), or they were charged up when they were made and the charge kept them running for ever (which broke the second).