Philip Reeve: A Darkling Plain

Tom watched for a while from an observation platform, then rode an elevator back to base tier and strolled through the busy market behind the air harbor, remembering his first visit to this city, with Hester and Anna Fang, twenty years before. He had bought Hester a red scarf at one of these stalls, to save her having to keep hiding her scarred face with her hand…

But he did not want to think about Hester. When he started thinking about her, he always ended up remembering the way they had parted, and what she had done made him so angry that his heart would pound and twist inside him. He could not afford to think of Hester anymore.

He began to walk toward the harbor, rehearsing in his mind the things he would tell Wren about his visit to the doctor. (“Nothing to worry about. Not even worth operating…”) Passing Pondicherry’s Old Tech Auction Rooms, he stopped to let a crowd of traders spill out and thought he recognized one of them, a woman of about his own age, rather pretty. It looked as if she had been successful at the auction, for she was carrying a big, heavy package. She didn’t see Tom, and he walked on trying to remember her name and where he had met her. Katie, wasn’t it? No, Clytie, that was it. Clytie Potts.

He stopped, and turned, and stared. It couldn’t have been Clytie. Clytie had been a Historian, a year above him in the Guild when London was destroyed. She had been killed by MEDUSA along with all the rest of his city. She just couldn’t be walking about in Peripatetiapolis. His memories were playing games with him.

But it had looked so like her!

He took a few steps back the way he had come. The woman was going quickly up a stairway to the level where the airships berthed. “Clytie!” Tom shouted, and her face turned toward him. It was her, he was suddenly certain of it, and he laughed aloud with happiness and surprise and called again, “Clytie! It’s me! Tom Natsworthy!”

A group of traders barged past him, blocking his view of her. When he could see again, she was gone. He started hurrying toward the stairs, ignoring the little warning pains in his chest. He tried to imagine how Clytie had survived MEDUSA. Had she been outside the city when it was destroyed? He had heard of other Londoners who had escaped the blast, but they had all been members of the Merchants’ Guild, far off on foreign cities when it happened. At Rogues’ Roost Hester had encountered that horrible Engineer Popjoy, but he had been in the Deep Gut when MEDUSA went off…

He pushed his way up the crowded stair and saw Clytie hurrying away from him between the long-stay docking pans. He could hardly blame her, after the way he’d yelled at her. He must have been too far away for her to recognize him, and she’d mistaken him for some kind of loony, or a rival trader angry that she’d outbid him in the auction rooms. He trotted after her, eager to explain himself, and saw her run quickly up another stairway onto Pan Seven, where a small, streamlined airship was berthed. He paused at the foot of the stairs just long enough to read the details chalked on the board there and learn that the ship was the Archaeopteryx, registered in Airhaven and commanded by Cruwys Morchard. Then, careful not to run, or shout, or do anything else that might alarm a lady air trader, he climbed after her. Of course, with her Guild training, Clytie Potts would have had no trouble finding a place aboard an Old Tech trader. No doubt this Captain Morchard had taken her on as an expert buyer, and that was why she had been at the auction house.

He paused to catch his breath at the top of the stairs, his heart hammering fiercely. The Archaeopteryx towered over him in the twilight. She was camouflaged, her gondola and the undersides of her envelope and engine pods sky blue, the upper parts done in a dazzle pattern of greens and browns and grays. At the foot of her gangplank two crewmen were waiting in a pool of pale electric light. They looked rough and shabby, like Out-Country scavengers. As Clytie approached them, Tom heard one man call out, “You get ’em all right, then?”

“I did,” replied Clytie, nodding to the package she was carrying. The other man came forward to help her with it, then saw Tom coming up behind her. Clytie must have noticed his expression changing, and turned to see why.

“Clytie?” said Tom. “It’s me, Tom Natsworthy. Apprentice Third Class, from the Guild of Historians. From London. I know you probably don’t recognize me. It’s been … what? … nearly twenty years! And you must have thought I was dead…”

At first he felt sure that she had recognized him, and that she was happy to see him, but then her look changed; she took a step backward, away from him, and glanced toward the men by the gangplank. One of them—a tall, gaunt man with a shaven head—put a hand to his sword, and Tom heard him say, “This fellow bothering you, Miss Morchard?”

“It’s all right, Lurpak,” said Clytie, motioning for him to stay where he was. She came a little closer to Tom and said pleasantly, “I’m sorry, sir. I fear you have mistaken me for some other lady. I am Cruwys Morchard, mistress of this ship. I don’t know anyone from London.”

“But you …,” Tom started to say. He studied her face, embarrassed and confused. He was sure she was Clytie Potts. She had put on a little weight, just as he had himself, and her hair, which had been dark, was dusted with silver now, as if cobwebs had settled on it, but her face was the same … except that the space between her eyebrows, where Clytie Potts had rather proudly worn the tattooed blue eye of the Guild of Historians, was blank.

Tom began to doubt himself. It had been twenty years, after all. Perhaps he was wrong. He said, “I’m sorry, but you look so like her…”

“Don’t mention it,” she said with a charming smile. “I have one of those faces. I am always being mistaken for somebody.”

“You look so like her,” said Tom again, half hopefully, as if she might suddenly change her mind and remember that she was Clytie Potts, after all.

She bowed to him and turned away. Her men eyed Tom as they helped her up the gangplank with her package. There was nothing more to say, so he said “Sorry” again and turned away himself, blushing hotly as he made his way off the pan. He started across the harbor toward his own ship’s berth, and had not gone more than twenty paces when he heard the Archaeopteryx ’s engines rumbling to life behind him. He watched her rise into the evening sky, gathering speed quickly as she cleared the city’s airspace and flew away toward the east.

Which was curious, because Tom was certain that the signboard beside her pan had said she would be in Peripatetiapolis for two more days…

“I am sure it was her!” Tom said, over supper that night at the Jolly Dirigible. “She was older, of course, and the Guild-mark wasn’t on her brow, which threw me a little, but tattoos can be removed, can’t they?”

Wren said, “Don’t get agitated, Dad…”

“I’m not agitated, only intrigued! If it is Clytie, how come she is still alive? And why did she not admit who she was?”

He did not sleep much that night, and Wren lay awake too, in her little cabin up inside the Jenny’s envelope, listening to him pad along the passageway from the stern cabin and clatter as quietly as he could in the galley, making himself one of those three-in-the-morning cups of tea.

At first she was worried about him. She hadn’t quite believed his version of what the heart doctor had said, and she felt quite certain that he should not be staying awake all night and fretting about mystery aviatrices. But gradually she started to wonder if his encounter with the woman might not have been a good thing after all. Talking about her at supper, he had seemed more alive than Wren had seen him for months; the listlessness that had settled over him when Mum left had vanished, and he had been his old self again, full of questions and theories. Wren couldn’t tell if it was the mystery that appealed to him, or the thought of a connection with his lost home city, or if he simply had the hots for Clytie Potts, but whichever it was, might it not do him good to have something other than Mum to think about?