Cloudland (4 page)

Lucy looked one last time at the Life Garden and started climbing again.

The next room they came to was full of glittering light. A long, plain, narrow room, it had on its far wall two windows open to the sky. After the eeriness of the Life Garden, Lucy was relieved to see the free air. She paused by the door. The windows showed yellow masses of cloud, rising one upon another to a blue horizon.

‘Can you see Earth?' Daniel shoved past her and ran into the room.

At once, the walls seemed to break into pieces, filling the room with white beating light. Panic exploded in Lucy's head. It was the noise: blundering thuds and wails. She had a confused impression the cloud they were standing on had given way. The next instant, she saw the room was full of birds: wide-winged, snake-necked creatures, all swooping on Daniel. They had piled onto his head and shoulders; they were clapping their wings against his face, their wings rising and falling like colourless flames. He staggered under the weight of them.

‘Wait!' Lucy flung herself into the room. The birds rose around her, shaking out light. She couldn't tell where Daniel was, or the door. She flailed her arms. Their wings buffeted her chest. It was like fighting a stormy sea.

A whistling cry cut through the room. At once, the air stilled, and the room formed itself around Lucy again. She heard an echo of those beating wings in the blood thudding through her head. She was standing next to Daniel in a small, clear space. He was trembling, clutching his scratched hands to his chest. Around the two of them, covering the floor, the white birds waited, heads tilted, each of them watching Lucy and Daniel out of one pale, cold-looking eye.

‘Slowly.' Facing the room, Lucy and Daniel inched back. Behind them, the birds cleared a narrow path. In front of them, the birds closed over the place where they had been.

They stepped back through the door and huddled behind Wist and Jovius, breathing fast. Lucy's hands started shaking, and her knees went wobbly with relief.

‘It is bad luck to wake the snow geese,' said Wist.

‘Why?'

Jovius puckered his lips and shook his head, setting all his chins shaking. ‘They have such a distance to go. If they set off now . . .'

‘Wait here to see if they sleep again,' said Wist.

‘It's hardly our fault,' said Daniel. ‘They should have warned us. Stupid birds.'

‘You're covered in feathers.' Lucy picked one off his jumper.

‘Well, you've got some in your hair.'

In the room, the birds shifted restlessly. One of them started up, clapping its wings, and ran over the other geese in long, awkward strides. A bird cried out – the sound tore at Lucy's chest – and swooped out the window. One after another, the birds followed. All the noise and unrest in the room unravelled into sky, until the room was bare and full of light again.

‘Bad omen.' Wist pushed past Lucy and continued climbing, his face a mask. Jovius threw Lucy one pleading look and followed him.

‘It's not our fault,' said Daniel again to the empty room.

Lucy thought of those birds beating across the sky, throwing their cry into its silence. Suddenly, she imagined the air around her ringing out one continuous note above the pitch of hearing. The skin on her arms tightened, thinking of those birds beating through emptiness, seeing Earth spread out beneath them like a map. She remembered their eyes, as cold and unfeeling as all they saw.

‘They fly from Siberia, don't they?'

Daniel shrugged. ‘How should I know?'

After that, they climbed for a long time without
speaking. The panic drained out of Lucy and left her weary. Her bones felt heavy. She climbed, one step after another, without thinking.

At last, Wist led them into a room the shape of an elevator.

‘Where are you taking us?' demanded Lucy.

Instead of answering, he shuffled her forwards to face the wall and pushed Daniel after her. Daniel stood rubbing his shoulder where Wist's hand had touched him. Glancing back, Lucy saw Wist scrabbling in the floor with his long toes. All at once, the floor reached up to grab them.

The world cut out. Lucy's eyes were full of staring whiteness with no shape, no distance, nothing. Only when her chest slammed into her throat, she understood she was falling. Her whole body was a scream, jagged and fierce.

Lucy landed with a thump on soft cloud. It took her a full minute to realise she was breathing. Nothing hurt. The falling had stopped. Slowly the whiteness faded, and its blurred forms shrank into definite shapes. They had landed in a small, bright room.

‘What is this?' Lucy demanded. ‘Where are you taking us?'

‘Safe now,' said Wist. He reached out his hand to help her up. She shook her head and dragged herself to her feet. ‘The Citadel,' he declared. ‘Safe heart of the Cloud Palace.'

‘We'll eat here,' added Jovius, and Daniel stood up.

Wist ran his hand across the wall. It quivered and pulled apart. Lucy was so used to seeing only emptiness and hearing only silence, she thought at first she was looking into a blizzard. Everything tossed and whirled. Then, as her eyes cleared, she realised she was looking into a vast cavern, crowded with Cloudians.

‘The Citadel,' sighed Jovius. ‘All the Cloudians have taken refuge here.'

Daniel edged closer to Lucy. They stared in silence. Lucy could sense Daniel's solid presence at her side. Apart from that, everything seemed to spin slowly around her. The whole ceiling shone with pearly light. Under its vast stillness, hundreds – even thousands – of Cloudians talked and worked.

It's a world
, she thought, and amazement sent small electric shocks up her spine. Following Wist and Jovius through the deserted palace, she had thought she was passing through the ruins of some civilisation lost to time, but this was real and close.

‘They're
knitting
,' said Daniel.

Lucy saw Cloudians tucked into armchairs, clustered along one side of the room. All as fat as Jovius, they sat knitting and chatting with their elbows out.

‘My lot,' said Jovius happily.

Over every armchair there floated a misshapen white balloon, which the knitters held by a thread.

‘But those things are alive,' Lucy whispered. They were floating creatures with long, patient faces. Whenever they moved, they unravelled, and the knitters' needles flashed. The cloud coats grew at every knitter's feet while, overhead, the cloud sheep shrank.

On the other side of the Citadel, a ring of gaunt-faced Cloudians sat cross-legged on clouds suspended, like shag-pile magic carpets, a foot above the floor. They had their eyes closed and their ears stretched out, listening to a Cloudian in the centre of their circle chant with the sound of an out-of-tune radio.

‘Look!' Lucy whispered, pointing upwards. The air was busy with Cloudians tearing around the Citadel on scraps of cloud, batting a cloud ball back and forth.

‘They can fly!' said Daniel.

‘I think it's those cloud boards.'

‘What do they want with us?' breathed Daniel.

Wist pinched Lucy's shoulder and pushed her into the Citadel. His voice rang out: ‘The Protector! The Protector is here!'

The silence was sudden and so complete Lucy thought the Citadel itself was breathing in. The knitters pushed their coats aside, the listeners leapt from their carpets. Even the floating sheep turned their patient eyes on Lucy. Then all the Cloudians rushed towards her. Such flickering whiteness: it was like being attacked by snow. Clammy hands flung Lucy up and spun her over until everything whirled.

At last, a high note sounded and there was silence again. Lucy found herself standing on a long table with Daniel beside her and the Cloudians massed at her feet: a crowd of colourless faces. She stumbled against Daniel and was grateful for the touch of human flesh in so much floating light.

‘Protector? Why do they call you their Protector?' Daniel's voice sounded loud in the silence but the Cloudians had their eyes fixed on the wall behind Lucy, where statues, carved out of polished cloud, stood rank upon rank. As Lucy turned her head, she saw a statue's hand pull away from the wall. She assumed at first it was a trick of shadows but she heard Daniel cough out air and knew he had seen it too.

The statue was a Cloudian, tall and gaunt like Wist, with a hooked nose and a mouth like a paper cut. Though it was still a statue, staring dully at air, it was opening its mouth and yawning – so slowly Lucy could hear the cloud it was made of creak.

Tearing its arms from the wall, the statue rubbed its eyes, which lit up, smooth and hard. It loosened and shook free its hair. At last, without making a sound, it took one long step from the wall to the table.

The Cloudians sighed and bowed their heads. Still, nobody spoke. The statue worked its head around and fixed its eyes on Lucy. Without moving its lips, it said: ‘Welcome, Protector.'

Lucy realised the statue must have heard Wist name her. Her skin shrank under the idea of all those other statues, listening. ‘There's been a mistake.' She meant to speak boldly but her words came out ragged. ‘I'm not your Protector. January sent me but –'

The statue had turned away. Raising its hands with splayed fingers, it cried: ‘The Heir found her. January raised her. Our Protector is here!' The air broke open with the Cloudians' shouts: ‘Protector! Protector! Protector! Protector!' Above them, the statue gestured for silence: ‘Eat, and then plan.' Jerking itself around, it stalked to the far end of the table.

Across the Citadel, the Cloudians shoved forward to find a seat. Daniel jabbed Lucy's ribs. ‘What does it mean: Protector? Why does it call you that?'

‘I don't know.' Lucy could feel blood pulsing through a vein in her forehead, the start of a nagging headache. ‘I told them it was a mistake –'

The statue paused and forced its head all the way around until it was staring directly back at them. ‘Sit by me.'

The Cloudians at the table stretched out clammy hands to brush Lucy's and Daniel's ankles as they passed. At the end of the table there were three chairs, each backed with curlicues formed like rams' horns. Propped in the middle chair, the statue beckoned Lucy and Daniel to sit on either side. Lucy and Daniel paused for a moment, face to face, but it was impossible to speak while the statue sat watching them with its blank eyes.

The statue beat on the table with a stiff-fingered hand, making a hollow sound. At once, the far wall shrugged into an arch and a line of Cloudians scurried into the Citadel.
Stratus
, Lucy realised: the lowest, drabbest kind of cloud. They were so hunched their noses scraped the floor. Only their long feet kept them from somersaulting over their faces. On their backs, they carried platters piled with food. Without
looking up, they formed a line behind the seated Cloudians. With a dip of one shoulder, they swung their platters onto the table, then shuffled back and waited.

They had set out an extraordinary banquet. There was nothing but cake: mounds of it, covered with soft meringue. The seated Cloudians clapped their hands together and started feasting, tearing off handfuls and stuffing them into their gaping mouths. Whenever they raised a hand, one of the hunched Cloudians behind them shuffled forwards, set a flask on the table and shuffled back.

What kind of place was this? Lucy looked down the long table. Near her, the gaunt Cloudians, the Cirrus, sat eating in silence, chewing slowly and staring at the high dome. At the far end, the fat Cumulus chattered and waved their hands in the air, sending gobs of meringue flying. Behind them all, the hunched servants waited, never speaking. The feasting Cloudians looked greedier and more alive with those patient Stratus at their back.

Lucy thought back to the cloud hall: a column for every hundred years the Cloudians had lived in the clouds. There had been at least a thousand columns. She glanced at Daniel. Already, he had eaten half a cake. He was grabbing another handful, darting
suspicious looks up the table. Meringue smeared his cheek and shirt. Lucy saw that he had hidden some food in his pocket.

The cake was cold on Lucy's teeth but it tasted sweet. As she chewed, she felt colours swirling through her. Her nagging thirst vanished. The colours were tastes – pale yellow and green and orange, all the colours of an early-morning sky. She remembered eating January's cloud biscuits and then drifting up into perfect calm. Now, again, she was suddenly radiant, with a feeling she could float from her chair into the high air.

The statue hadn't eaten. It sat staring straight ahead. Lucy tapped its hand, resting on the table, and said, ‘There's been a mistake.' The statue didn't stir. Lucy twisted in her chair to look up at its face. Its eyes shone like streetlights on wet pavement. Lucy tapped its hand, harder, but its eyes didn't flicker. It was a statue again.

Its stillness frightened Lucy. She looked at the hunched servants. Did they come to Earth, she wondered, and become what people imagined ghosts to be: pale, silent, see-through creatures? Was she a ghost up here? Was Daniel? She studied his face. He looked real enough: his face tight with worry, his skin mottled with cold. She had always felt queasy
thinking of everything packed into her skin; her teeth poking up through her gums, her veins piped through her flesh like creeks under an asphalt city. Now she clutched her arms, squeezing them until she could feel her bones.

The statue started to hum, a low sound that made Lucy's skin sting as though she had stepped into ice-cold water. The Cloudians stopped eating and turned to watch. In a slow voice, almost chanting, the statue said:

‘The first story is of ice. Ice on Earth and ice in Cloud: A cold thought, the Kazia made winter without end, cold years past counting. Only a creeping life, scant life, for the survivors. Their hunger forced them far in search of food. So it went on, cold long past counting, until at last a Protector came up from ice Earth –'