Philip Reeve: A Darkling Plain

Dad is all right too. Those Kom Ombo doctors gave him some green pills to take, which help his pains a bit, and he hasn’t had any attacks since that awful night on Cloud 9. But he seems awfully old, somehow, and awfully sad. It’s Mum, of course. He really loved her, despite what she was like. To be without her, not even knowing if she’s alive or dead, upsets him terribly, tho’ he tries to be brave.

I thought that once he was well enough, he would want to take me straight home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but he hasn’t suggested it. So we have been traveling the bird roads ever since, seeing a little of the world and doing a little trading—antiques and Old Tech mostly, but harmless stuff, not like that awful Tin Book! We’ve done quite well—well enough to get the ship afresh coat of paint and have her engines overhauled. We’ve changed her name back to Jenny Haniver, which is what she was called before Prof Pennyroyal stole her from Mum and Dad all those years ago. We wondered at first if it would be dangerous, but I don’t think anyone remembers anymore that that was the name of the Stalker Fang’s old ship, and if they do, they don’t much care.

Have you heard about the truce? (I always thought General Naga was a good sort. When we were captured by the Storm at Cloud 9, his soldiers were very inclined to prod me with their guns, and Naga stopped them doing it. It’s nice to know that the new leader of the Storm takes a firm stand on prodding.) Anyway, everyone is very excited about the truce and hoping the war is over, and I hope so too.

I am getting quite used to life as an air trader. You would think me ever so much changed if you could see me. I’ve had my hair cut in the latest style, sort of lopsided, so that it comes down below my chin on one side but only to ear level on the other. I don’t want to sound vain, but it looks extremely sophisticated, even if it does make me feel sometimes as if I’m standing on a slope. Also I have new boots, tall ones, and a leather coat—not one of those long ones that Daddy and the other old-style aviators wear, but a tunic, with a red silk lining and pointy bits at the bottom called tappets or lappets or something. And at this moment I am sitting in a cafe behind the air harbor here in Peripatetiapolis, feeling every inch the aviatrix, and just enjoying being aboard a city. I could never really imagine what real cities were like, growing up in sleepy old Anchorage as I did, but now that I spend half my time aboard them, I find I love them—all the people, and the bustle, and the way the engines make the pavements throb as if the whole of Peripatetiapolis is a great, living animal. I am waiting for Dad, who has gone up to the higher tiers to see if the Peripatetiapolitan doctors can find some better pills than the ones the Kom Ombo lot prescribed. (He didn’t want to go, of course, but I talked him into it in the end!) And sitting here, I got thinking about you, the way I do quite often, and I thought…

It wouldn’t do, Wren decided. She scrumpled the page and lobbed it into a nearby bin. She was getting to be quite a good shot. This must be the twentieth letter she’d written to Theo, and so far she’d not mailed any of them. She had sent a card at Christmas, because although Theo wasn’t very religious, he lived in a Christian city and probably celebrated all their strange old festivals, but all she had written was “ Happy Xmas” and a few lines of news about herself and Dad.

The trouble was, Theo had probably forgotten her by now. And even if he did remember her, he was hardly likely to be interested in her clothes, or her haircut, or the rest of it. And that bit about how much she liked city life would probably shock him, for he was an Anti-Tractionist through and through and could be rather prim…

But she could not forget him. How brave he had been on Cloud 9. And that good-bye kiss, on the Kom Ombo air quay, amid all those oily ropes and heaped-up sky train couplings and shouting stevedores and roaring engines. Wren had never kissed anyone before. She hadn’t known quite how you went about it; she wasn’t sure where her nose was meant to go; when their teeth banged together, she was afraid that she was doing it all wrong. Theo had laughed, and said it was a funny business, this kissing, and she said she thought she might get the hang of it with a little more practice, but by then the captain of his airship was hollering, “All aboard that’s coming aboard!” and starting to disengage his docking clamps, and there had been no time…

And that had been six months ago. Theo had written once—a letter that reached Wren in January at a shabby air caravanserai in the Tannhäusers—to tell her that he had made it home safely and been welcomed by his family “like the prodigal son” (whatever that meant). But Wren had never managed to compose a reply.

“Bother!” she said, and ordered another coffee.

Tom Natsworthy, Wren’s father, had faced death many times, and been in all sorts of frightening situations, but he had never felt any fear quite so cold as this.

He was lying, quite naked, on a chilly metal table in the consulting room of a heart specialist on Peripatetiapolis’s second tier. Above him a machine with a long and many-jointed hydraulic neck twisted its metal head from side to side, examining him with a quizzical air. Tom was pretty sure that those green, glowing lenses at its business end were taken from a Stalker. He supposed that Stalker parts were easy to come by these days, and that he should be glad that all the years of war had at least spawned a few good things: new medical techniques, and diagnostic machines like this. But when the blunt steel head dipped close to his torso, and he heard the machinery grating and whirring inside those shining eyes, all he could think of was the old Stalker Grike, who had chased him and Hester across the Out-Country in the year London died.

When it was all over, and Dr. Chernowyth switched off his machine and came out of his little lead-walled booth, he could tell Tom nothing that Tom had not already guessed. There was a weakness in his heart. It had been caused by the bullet that Pennyroyal had shot him with, all those years ago in Anchorage. It was growing worse, and one day it would kill him. He had a year or two left, maybe five, no more.

The doctor pursed his lips and shook his head and told him to take things easy, but Tom just laughed. How could you take things easy in the air trade? The only way he could take things easy would be if he went home to Anchorage-in-Vineland, but after what he had learned about Hester, he could never go back. He had nothing to be ashamed of— he had not betrayed the ice city to Arkangel’s Huntsmen, or murdered anyone among its snowy streets—but he felt ashamed for his wife’s sake, and foolish for having lived so long with her, never suspecting the lies she had told him.

Anyway, Wren would never forgive him if he took her home now. She had the same longing for adventure that Tom himself had had at her age. She was enjoying life on the bird roads, and she had the makings of a fine aviatrix. He would stay with her, flying and trading, teaching her the ways of the sky and doing his best to keep her out of trouble, and when Lady Death came to take him to the Sunless Country, he would leave Wren the Jenny Haniver and she would be able to choose whichever life she wanted for herself: the peace of Vineland or the freedom of the skies. The news from the east sounded hopeful. If this truce held, there would soon be all sorts of opportunities for trade.

When he left Dr. Chernowyth’s office, Tom felt better at once. Out here, beneath the evening sky, it seemed impossible that he was going to die. The city rocked gently as it rumbled northward up the rocky western shoreline of the Great Hunting Ground. Out upon the silver, sunset-shining sea a fishing town was keeping pace with it beneath a cloud of gulls.