“I thought it couldn’t really be the Ancestors,” said Carn Morvish. “Not the Ancestors, I thought; not talking to our Cluny. We are soldiers, we Morvish; we don’t have visions. I always feared it might be connected with what I let that Scriven do to her. . .”
“I don’t think the machine in Cluny’s head is working very well,” said Fever. “She is only experiencing a few of his memories. One of them is of the city Godshawk dreamed of building.”
“The city that they are building,” Marten said. “It makes no difference where your vision came from, Cluny-my-sister. You have still seen what London will become. What we must roll south and stop it from becoming.”
“I know,” said Cluny. Her fingers were still tracing and retracing the line of the scar under her hair. “I know that what I saw was true, this changes nothing. But I would very much like to stop seeing it now, do you see? Before it sends me completely mad. Fever, can it be turned off, this mind-machine?”
“I don’t know,” said Fever. “My own machine was stopped by a magneto pistol – or at least quietened. . . But it would be so risky. We know so little about these things. Yours may be different to mine. The magneto pistol might not stop it. Or it might kill you, or harm your brain somehow. And Godshawk put other Stalker-stuff in me, mechanimalculae to help me heal. Do you have them too? Do you heal more quickly than other people? Do you catch colds and things as normal people do?”
“My fair share,” said Cluny. “And I heal the same as anybody else, I think. . .”
“Then we must assume you don’t have the mechanimalculae in you, and without them we don’t know if you would survive the blasting of the machine. . .” Fever walked in small circles, thinking hard. “I wish I knew more. If only Wavey were here. . . But even she did not know much. That’s half the reason she came north, to try and learn more about Stalkers.”
“How?” asked Carn Morvish.
“There is a site somewhere west of here where she thought we might find something.” Fever stopped walking and looked at him. The pyramid had not been in her thoughts for weeks, but now in her mind she saw it clear again; black slanting walls beneath a sky of light. Wavey would not have approved of her sharing the secret with this barbarian lord, but it did not seem to matter now. She said, “Sir, if you would let me go there, I might find out something. If we had some real idea how Stalker brains worked, we might be able to safely stop them working. . .”
“It’s a trick, Carn-Morvish-my-father,” said Marten uneasily. “She just wants you to let her complete the journey she and her mother were on. I expect this site is full of old-tech that Quercus needs for his new city.”
“What site is it?” Carn Morvish asked.
“It is a pyramid,” said Fever. “At least, the part that is still standing. . .”
Cluny looked at her father. “Skrevanastuut.”
“It is shut,” said the Carn. “The Kometsvansen swung that way once. There is a curse upon that pyramid, so I did not go near, but men who did said there was no way in.”
“There is now,” said Fever. “Earthstorms have opened a way in. It would be a long journey, but. . .”
Cluny smiled. “Mammoths move fast, when we need them to. We could be there and back within a fortnight, in time to rendezvous with Raven and the rest of the alliance.”
“It is bad country,” said her father doubtfully. “No roads. And anyway, Nintendo Tharp would not allow it.”
“Tharp need not know, until we’re gone,” said Cluny. “You know what the worst of this has been, Carn-Morvish-my-father? Being locked away; not being allowed to ride, or hunt. So to take mammoths and go into those hills, before this war breaks over me. . . To do something, and not sit here in the house like a woman. . .”
“But you are a woman!” Marten complained.
“She was always a tomboy, this sister of yours,” said Carn Morvish. “But I’d rather have my brave shield-maiden than some fragile little princess.”
“I would be scared to go to Skrevanastuut,” said Marten. “Scared of nightwights, and of the place itself. Skrevanastuut is a place of the dead.”
“I’d be scared too,” said Cluny. “But fear is slavery; to be free we must ignore fear. If you won’t come with me, Marten, then Fever and I will go alone.”
“That would be unwise,” her father warned. “To go alone into that country, with only an enemy for company. . .”
“Fever Crumb is not our enemy,” said Cluny. “Anyway, I want to see this place. If there is something there that could stop these nightmares. . . Carn-Morvish-my-father, you don’t know what it feels like, having this thing in my head.”
“All right,” said Carn Morvish. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t like having a prophet for a daughter either. He didn’t like watching his brave girl turn into a shaky stranger who was afraid to go to sleep, and knowing that it was all his fault. He said, “All right, I’ll think on it. But we must leave Fever alone now. If Tharp finds out what we are planning. . .”
Cluny gasped and put a hand over her eyes, and Fever knew that she had just been granted another glimpse of London. It passed quickly this time, and she looked up and smiled, and said to Fever, “We’ll prepare in secret.”
“I haven’t agreed that you are going yet, Cluny-my-daughter,” said the Carn.
“But you will,” said Cluny, and hugged him. “You always do. Tomorrow night or the next we’ll come for you, Fever. We’ll go to Skrevanastuut together.”
21
THE LONG SHORE AND THE
LONELY HILLS
n silence they crossed the dew-wet grass between the sleeping vehicles of the Kometsvansen. The Morvish fort reared up black behind them on its big clawed wheels. The waning Foxglove Moon had set, but there were so many stars that their light was bright enough to see by; sometimes, as she went after Cluny and Marten, Fever thought that she glimpsed their star-cast shadows on the ground.
They had come for her after midnight; Marten relieving the guard at her door, Cluny waiting hidden below until he reckoned it safe to bring Fever down to her. The fort was asleep; the guards on the hatch they left by were Carn Morvish’s chosen men who would say nothing of what they’d seen. Among the patchy birchwoods west of the Kometsvansen mammoths were waiting, two huge shaggy shapes that steamed in the starlight, like haystacks on a summer’s morning, except that Fever had never met a haystack that breathed, or snorted, or snuffled at her clothes and face with a wet, inquisitive trunk.
“Don’t be afraid,” whispered Cluny. “That smaller one is Marten’s mammoth, Lump. This one is Carpet, who has carried me on ever so many journeys.” She stroked the beast’s long, hairy nose. A small eye glittered, half veiled in hair. “We call her Carpet because she’s a pet, and she looks like a carpet.”
Fever thought any carpet that looked and smelled like that ought to have been burned long ago. She did not approve of carpets: irrational, insanitary objects which were home to mites and moths. She did not trust animals at all, and could never understand why people grew sentimental over dogs and horses and pretended that they could be the friends of humans. She stood beside Cluny and watched while Marten, with various clicking and cooing noises, persuaded the larger mammoth to kneel. She had to admit that the creature seemed well-trained, and that in the chill of the northern night there was much to be said for riding on something so big and so warm. Even so, she felt scared as Cluny helped her up between the bags and bundles on Carpet’s back, and more scared when the mammoth rose ponderously to its feet, a shuddering, uncertain rise that made her grab handfuls of its coarse coat to save herself from tumbling straight off the other side.
Away in the night somewhere another mammoth bellowed. Carpet’s trunk went up swaying like a snake and she let off an answering hoot, a plume of vapour under the stars. Marten, scrambling nimbly up on to his own mount’s neck, said, “Hush, girl, hush!” It must have been strange for the mammoths, Fever thought, being singled out from their herd and led away like this with only pe
ople for company. Cluny slid herself into the coll between Carpet’s shoulders and the tall, domed head, dug in her heels behind the big, flapping ears, and did something which made Carpet turn and start to move, swinging her head from time to time, those long tusks swishing through the bracken. Lump followed. The mammoths now ignored the trumpetings coming from behind them, but they communicated with each other by means of snorts and low, sub-vocal rumblings which Fever felt rather than heard.
She arranged herself on the massive, swaying back, letting go of Carpet’s hair and finding better handholds in the mesh of hempen straps to which the baggage was attached. When she felt safe enough to look back, she saw that the sky above the Kometsvansen was already growing paler, the stars fading. Even in that twilight she could see the path that Lump and Carpet left; the crushed bracken; the big footprints across patches of bog. “They will know where we have gone,” said Fever. She had been hunted before. She did not relish the thought of the Arkhangelsk tracking her with dogs and bowmen.
“Of course they’ll know,” said Marten, glancing across at her from his perch on Lump’s broad neck. “Father will tell them we’ve gone hunting. I’ve been trying to get Cluny to come hunting with me for weeks.”
“Tharp will be furious when he finds I’m gone,” said Cluny.
“And when he hears I’m gone too. . .” murmured Fever.
“We’ll be halfway to Skrevanastuut by then,” Cluny said.
“And what if the empire rolls south before we’re back?” Marten asked.
“Then they’ll have to find someone else to be their Vessel of the Ancestors, won’t they?” Cluny said. “Tharp can do it himself, maybe.” And Fever could hear it in her voice, how glad she was to be leaving her people behind and shrugging off for a while the burden she had been carrying.
They kept moving through the dawn until the trees thinned, and the sun rose behind them and showed them a grey sea and a strand of ochre shingle that curved away from them into the mists of the west. It was the poor shrunk remnant of the North Sea, lapping against a four-hundred-mile-long beach which ran all the way from Heklasrand to Caledon. Dozens of icebergs had washed ashore there like the bones of drowned giants.
“The Longshore,” said Cluny, twisting round on Carpet’s neck to look back at her passenger. “We’ll follow it for a few days, and then beyond it lie the hills, and among the hills is Skrevanastuut.”
It was a strange place. That endless beach, the dunes behind, the stranded icebergs and the tangled stunty woods. Northward over the grey sea a pale light reflected on the clouds, for they were close to the margins of the ice and latitudes where even summer could not thaw the frozen sea. The rare fisher-villages they passed were huddles of low, domed huts with birch-bark boats drawn up on the strand in front. They slept each night around a driftwood fire. It felt timeless. It felt prehistoric. The fact that they were riding mammoths didn’t help.
And yet, somewhere on that shore, Fever began to feel the first stirring of feelings she had not known for a long time. Not happiness, not quite, but a sort of contentment; a springtime feeling, as if she had been buried deep and was now stretching up shy fingers to the sun. Wavey was dead; she had not forgotten that. Wavey was dead, but the world went on without her, and Fever went with it. It felt good to be travelling with the Morvish. She sat in the sunlight and smiled at the silly, pleasant conversations which they tossed between them as they rode. Hail-showers came at them over the ice-strewn sea, and Cluny showed her how to rig the hide awning on Carpet’s back to keep herself and all the baggage dry. The driven hail fell sideways. Tiny white hailstones danced madly in the grass behind the beach.
They passed a stranded whale.
They passed a long-dead ship.
They watched a houseberg sail past a mile offshore; a huge ice-floe motorized and turned into a floating home by northern fisherfolk, who could be seen hauling their nets in on its blue-white skirts. “Floemads,” explained Cluny, as if Fever was a child who knew nothing of the north. “Like in the nursery rhyme: ‘Nomads on the tundra, Snowmads on the ice-wastes, Floemads on the cold sea’s swells. . .’”
“‘. . .Moss-folk in the old towns, Elf-folk in the forest, Nightwights in the dark beneath the fells,’” chanted Marten.
They forded the shallow rivers which seeped out of marshes further south.
They scattered up huge flocks of birds from saltings and lagoons, and one evening Cluny took a short horn bow from Carpet’s panniers and said to Fever, “Come,” and the two of them went creeping away through the alders and the birch-clumps in search of supper.
Fever had come to think herself very superior to the Arkhangelsk, but she could not move as quietly as Cluny did through the tanglewoods. She could not have plucked an arrow, set it to the string, aimed, and loosed it all in one brisk, graceful, unthinking movement, as Cluny did when she had watched the ducks upon the water for a while. She would not have thought to wait, as Cluny waited, until the scared ducks had wheeled and settled and she had a chance to shoot another.
Tramping back to camp behind her friend, carrying the brace of birds, she wondered if that was why she’d been invited on this hunting trip; for Cluny to make clear to Fever that she was not stupid, that she was as far beyond Fever in some things as Fever was beyond her in others. Then, as they hiked through the sliding dunes towards the glow of the fire which Marten had lit on the beach, Cluny stopped and turned and said, “It’s getting worse. The dreams. They breed in me.”
“It was like that once for me,” said Fever. “I know how you feel,” she said, and it was true. I know how you feel. She had never really known how anybody felt about anything before.
“Were you frightened?” asked Cluny.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure there’ll be something at Skrevanastuut that will help?”
“No. But the more we can find out about these Stalker-brains. . .”
“I saw those lamps again,” said Cluny. “Flying away across the water.”
“Those were float lanterns from a party at Nonesuch House, a long time ago,” said Fever. “It was Godshawk’s home. He loved it.”
“I see your mother sometimes,” said Cluny, looking towards the fire, so that two tiny fires lit in her eyes.
Fever looked quickly away. She saw Wavey too, all the time. Whenever she thought of her she saw the Stalker cut her down, so she did not want to think of her at all.
Cluny said, “In my mind she is young and very beautiful. She has a new dress.”
“Wavey always had a new dress,” said Fever, and felt herself smile.
Cluny touched her shoulder. “You know, here in the north we believe that there is no such thing as time. It is an illusion. While we live we must accept it, but when we die our souls will be freed from time and we will be able to see it all as one huge pattern of unchanging moments: the past; the present; the future; all one. Your mother’s life was made of many moments, and her death was only one of them. In the World Without Time, her soul is young again.”
“There is no such thing as a soul,” said Fever, and stepped away, startled by how much she wanted Cluny Morvish to hold her. She was glad it was nearly dark and Cluny could not see her blush. This too was Godshawk’s fault, she thought, squashing the irrational yearning down. It was only because she had first seen Cluny through Godshawk’s eyes. . .
Except she hadn’t, of course. She had seen her first at Hill 60, watching as the Heart of Glass went by, and even then she had felt attracted to her, although she had not admitted it to herself.
“Fever? What is the matter?” asked Cluny.
“Nothing,” said Fever, and as Cluny turned away and walked on she suddenly understood why this feeling was called falling in love. It was as dizzying as dropping down a hole. We must find you a new boyfriend, Wavey had kept telling her, but what if a girlfriend was what Fever needed? She felt as if she had opened the door to a room she had never noticed in a house where she’d lived all her life.
&nbs
p; “What’s happening?” called Marten, from the fireside. “Are we going to eat those ducks, or what?”
They passed a crumbled tower, left over from some forgotten northern war.
They passed a sandbar where hundreds of seals basked, and the scent of the seals scared the mammoths, and the scent of the mammoths scared the seals, and the day filled with trumpeting and honking and roaring and the raucous, easy laughter of the Morvish.
Fever no longer tried to stop herself from admiring the graceful sway of Cluny’s back as she steered Carpet through the dunes. She waited hopefully for glimpses of Cluny’s face when she turned her head to call to Marten or looked over her shoulder to smile at Fever. Her smiles were like little gifts. Was it possible, Fever wondered secretly, that Cluny felt the same things for her as she did for Cluny? She had never been any good at understanding other people’s feelings. She’d had no idea that Arlo was in love with her until he’d told her so. So should she tell Cluny? But tell her what?
One afternoon, trembling with shyness, she managed to mumble, “You are very beautiful.”
Cluny just laughed. “Why, thank you, London girl,” she said. “You’re beautiful too.” She didn’t mean it though; not the way Fever did. For her it was just a thing friends said to one another. Fever could not think of any other way to explain herself. Should she say, I am in love with you? Some mimsy, flimsy form of words borrowed from Master Persimmon’s playscripts? It made her blush to even think of saying things like that. . .
“Marten!” Cluny called to her brother. “Fever thinks I am beautiful. Like a sunset, or a nice tree. We are both beautiful! You should think yourself lucky to be travelling with two such beautiful ladies!”