Phillip Reeve: Mortal Engines

But long after dark, as they huddled in a hollow of the mud to escape the chill night wind, she suddenly started telling him her story.

“I was born on the bare earth,” she said, “but it wasn’t like this. I lived on Oak Island, in the far west. It used to be a part of the Hunting Ground once, but the earthquakes drowned all the land around and made an island of it, too far off-shore for any hungry city to attack, and too rocky for the amphibious towns to get at. It was lovely; green hills and great outcrops of stone and the streams running through tangly oak woods, all grey with lichen—the trees shaggy with it, like old dogs.”

Tom shuddered. Every Londoner knew that only savages lived on the bare earth. “I prefer a nice firm deckplate under me,” he said, but Hester didn’t seem to hear him; the words kept spilling out of her twisted mouth as if she had no choice in the matter.

“There was a town there called Dunroamin’. It was mobile once, but the people got sick of running all the time from bigger towns, so they floated it across to Oak Island and took its wheels and engines off and dug it into a hillside. It’s been sitting there a hundred years or more, and you’d never know it used to move at all.”

“But that’s awful!” Tom gasped. “It’s downright Anti-Tractionist!”

“My mum and dad lived down the road a way,” she went on, talking straight over him. “They had a house on the edge of the moor, where the sea comes in. Dad was a farmer, and Mum was a historian like you—only a lot cleverer than you, of course. She flew off each summer in her airship, digging for Old-Tech, but in the autumn she’d come home. I used to go up to her study in the attic on winter’s nights and eat cheese on toast and she’d tell me about her adventures.

“And then one night, seven years ago, I woke up late and there were voices up in the attic arguing. So I went up the ladder and looked, and Valentine was there. I knew him, because he was Mum’s friend and used to drop in on us when he was passing. Only he wasn’t being very friendly that night. ‘Give me the machine, Pandora,’ he kept saying. ‘Give me MEDUSA.’ He didn’t see me watching him. I was at the top of the ladder, looking into the attic, too scared to go up and too scared to go back. Valentine had his back to me and Mum was stood facing him, holding this machine, and she said, ‘Damn you, Thaddeus, I found it, it’s mine! ’

“And then Valentine drew his sword and he … and he…”

She paused for breath. She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backwards to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother’s star-charts like the map of a new constellation.

“And then he turned round and saw me watching, and he came at me and I dived back so his sword only cut my face, and I fell back down the ladder. He must have thought he’d killed me. I heard him go to Mum’s desk and start rustling through the papers there, and I got up and ran. Dad was lying on the kitchen floor; he was dead too. Even the dogs were dead.

“I ran out of the house and saw Valentine’s great black ship moored at the end of the garden with his men waiting. They came after me, but I escaped. I ran down to the boathouse and shoved off in Dad’s skiff. I think I meant to go round to Dunroamin’ and get help—I was only little, and I thought a doctor could help Mum and Dad. But I was so weak with the pain and all the blood… I untied the boat somehow, and the current swept it out, and the next thing I knew I was waking up on the shores of the Hunting Ground.

“I lived in the Out-Country after that. At first I didn’t remember much. It was as if when he cut my head open some of my memories spilled out, and the rest got muddled about. But slowly I started remembering, and one day I remembered Valentine and what he’d done. That’s when I decided to come and find him. Kill him the same way he killed my mum and dad.”

“What was this machine?” asked Tom, in the long silence. “This MEDUSA thing?”

Hester shrugged. (It was too dark to see her by this time, but he heard her shrug, the hunch of her shoulders inside her filthy coat.) “Something my mum found. Old-Tech. It didn’t look important. Like a metal football, all bashed and dented. But that’s what he killed her for.”

“Seven years ago,” whispered Tom. “That’s when Mr Valentine got made head of the Guild. They said he’d found something in the Out-Country and Crome was so pleased that he promoted him, straight over the heads of Chudleigh Pomeroy and all the rest. But I never heard what it was he’d found. And I never heard of a MEDUSA before.”

Hester said nothing at all. After a few minutes she began to snore.

Tom sat awake for a long time, turning her story over and over in his mind. He thought of the daydreams that had kept him going through long, tedious days in the Museum. He had dreamed of being trapped in the Out-Country with a beautiful girl, on the trail of some murderous criminal, but he had never imagined it would be so wet and cold, or that his legs would ache so, or that the murderer would be London’s greatest hero. And as for the beautiful girl…

He looked at the blunt wreck of Hester Shaw’s face in the faint moonlight, scowling even in her sleep. He understood her better now. She hated Valentine, but she hated herself even more, for being so ugly, and for being still alive when her parents were dead. He remembered how he had felt when the Big Tilt happened, and he came home and found his house flattened and Mum and Dad gone. He had thought that it was all his fault somehow. He had felt full of guilt, because he had not been there to die with them.

“I must help her,” he thought. “I won’t let her kill Mr Valentine, but I’ll find a way to get the truth out. If it is the truth. Maybe tomorrow London will have slowed down a bit and Hester’s leg will be better. We’ll be back in the city by sundown, and somebody will listen to us…”

But next morning they woke to find that the city was even further ahead, and Hester’s leg was worse. She moaned with pain at almost every step now; her face was the colour of old snow and fresh blood was soaking through her bandages and running down into her boot. Tom cursed himself for throwing those rags of shirt away, and for making Hester lose her pack, and her first-aid kit…

In the middle of the morning, through shifting veils of rain, they saw something ahead of them. A pile of slag and clinker lay spilled across the track-marks, where London had vented it the day before. Drawn up beside it was a strange little town, and as they got closer Hester and Tom could see that people were scrambling up and down the spoil-heap, sifting out collops of melted metal and fragments of unburnt fuel.

The sight gave them hope and they pressed forward faster. By early afternoon they were walking under the shadow of the townlet’s huge wheels, and Tom was staring up in amazement at its single tier. It was smaller than a lot of the houses in London, and it appeared to have been built out of wood by somebody whose idea of good carpentry was to bang a couple of nails in and hope for the best. Behind the shed-like town hall rose the huge, crooked chimneys of an experimental engine array.

“Welcome!” shouted a tall, white-bearded man, picking his way down the clinker-heap, grubby brown robes flapping. “Welcome to Speedwell. I am Orme Wreyland, Mayor. Do you speak Anglish?”

Hester hung back suspiciously, but Tom thought the old man looked friendly enough. He stepped forward and said, “Please, sir, we need some food, and a doctor to look at my friend’s leg…”

“I’m not your friend,” hissed Hester Shaw. “And there’s nothing wrong with my leg.” But she was white and trembling and her face shone with sweat.