Predator's Gold (33 page)

In his urgency to make her understand, Caul gripped her hand. “No! I read it all on the way here. Snøri wasn’t a fraud. He really found green places. Not great forests like Professor Pennyroyal imagined. No bears. No people. But places where there are grass and trees and…” He’d never seen grass, let alone a tree; his imagination kept letting him down. “I don’t know. There’ll be animals and birds, fish in the water.

You might have to go static, but you could live there.”

“But we’ll never be able to reach it,” Freya said. “Even if it’s real, we’l never get there. We’re adrift.”

“No…” said Mr Scabious, who had been peering over her shoulder at the map. “No, Freya, we can do it! If we can just stabilize this floe we’re sitting on, and rig up some propellers…”

“It isn’t far,” said Miss Pye, reaching over Freya’s other shoulder and resting her finger on the map, where the head of one long winding inlet was labelled Vineland.

A spattering of islands showed there, so small that they might have been just ink-blots, except that old Snøri Ulvaeusson had marked each one with a childish drawing of a tree. “Perhaps seven hundred miles. Nothing at all, compared with the distance we’ve travelled!”

“But what are we thinking of?” Scabious turned to Caul, and Caul took a few shuffling steps backwards, remembering how he’d driven this poor old man half mad with his ghostly appearances in the engine district. Scabious seemed to be remembering it too, for his gaze turned cold and far away, and for a long moment the only sounds were the faint, nervous stirrings of the crowd and the rustle of the breeze-blown papers in Freya’s hands. “Do you have a name, boy?” he asked.

“Caul, sir,” said Caul.

Scabious stretched out his hand, and smiled. “Well, you look cold, Caul, and hungry.

We shouldn’t keep you standing here. We can discuss all this at the palace.” Freya remembered her manners. “Of course!” she said, as the crowd around her started to break up, everyone talking excitedly about the map. “You must come to the Winter Palace, Mr Caul. I’l ask Smew to make hot chocolate. Where is Smew?

Oh, never mind, I can do it myself…”

And so the margravine led the way along Rasmussen Prospekt with Scabious and Miss Pye close behind, Caul walking nervously between them, and others hurrying to swell the strange procession as word spread that the boy from the sea had brought new hope: the Aakiuqs and the Umiaks and Mr Quaanik, and Smew pushing his way to the front, and Freya waving Snøri Ulvaeusson’s map in its old tin holder and laughing and joking with them all. It wasn’t very dignified behaviour, and she knew that her Mama and Papa and her mistress of etiquette and her ladies-in-waiting would not have approved, but she didn’t care: their time was gone; Freya was margravine now.

35

AN ARK OF ICE

What a hammering and banging filled Anchorage in the days that followed! What a glow of work-lamps in the long nights, and what showers of sparks as Scabious supervised the cut ing of makeshift propeller-blades out of spare deckplates, the building of outriggers from the old cat-cowlings! What a stutter and grumble of engines being tested, cam-shafts and drive-belts repositioned! Caul used the Screw Worm to bore through the ice floe, and the new propellers were lowered carefully down into the water beneath the city, while Scabious experimented with a jury-rigged rudder. None of it worked very well, but it all worked well enough. A week after Caul’s arrival the engines started up in earnest and Freya felt her city stir purposefully beneath her and begin to push itself slowly, slowly through the sea, water chuckling along the edges of its ark of ice.

And slowly the days grew longer, and the icebergs fewer, and there was warmth in the shafts of sunlight that pierced the fog, for Anchorage was steaming into latitudes where it was still only late autumn.

Hester took no part in the parties and planning-meetings and sing-songs that occupied the rest of the city in those last weeks of the journey. She didn’t even attend the wedding of Søren Scabious and Windolene Pye. She spent most of her time in the Winter Palace with Tom, and later, when she looked back on those days, it was not the landmarks she remembered – the dead islands and thick jams of drift-ice that Anchorage had to nudge its way past, the lifeless mountains of America hunched on the horizon – but the smaller milestones of Tom’s recovery.

There had been the day when Miss Pye summoned all her courage and all the knowledge she had been able to find in her medical books and cut Tom open, reaching in with long tweezers among the wet, dark pulsings of his body until -

well, Hester had fainted at that point, but when she came to, Miss Pye handed her the pistol-ball, a little dented snub of blue-grey metal that looked as if it could never have harmed anyone.

Then there had been the day when he first opened his eyes and spoke; feverish, meaningless stuff about London and Pennyroyal and Freya, but better than nothing, and she held his hand and kissed his forehead and eased him back into twitchy, murmurous sleep.

Now that Tom was no longer expected to die, Freya often came to visit him, and Hester even let her take a turn at sitting with him sometimes, for she was feeling unwell herself by then, as though the motion of the floating city disagreed with her.

Things were awkward between the two girls at first, but after a few visits Hester steeled herself and asked, “Are you going to tell them?”

“Tell who what?”

“Tell everyone that it was me who sold you to Arkangel?” Freya had been wondering about that herself, and she thought for a while before she answered. “What if I did?”

Hester looked down at the floor, smoothing the pile of the thick carpet with her scuffly old boots. “If you did, I couldn’t stay. I’d go off somewhere, and you’d have Tom.”

Freya smiled. She would always be fond of Tom, but her crush on him had faded somewhere on the Greenland ice. “I am the Margravine of Anchorage,” she said.

“When I marry, it will be for good political reasons, to someone from the lower city, perhaps, or…” (She hesitated, blushing a little at the thought of Caul, so sweet and awkward). “Anyway,” she went on quickly, “I want you to stay. Anchorage needs someone like you aboard.”

Hester nodded. She could imagine her father, in some chamber of High London long ago, having just such a conversation as this with Magnus Crome. “So when there’s trouble, like if Uncle and his Lost Boys find your little settlement, or air-pirates attack, or a traitor like Pennyroyal needs quietly killing, you’ll turn to me to do your dirty work?”

“Well, you do seem rather good at it,” said Freya.

“And what if I don’t choose to?”

“Then I’l tell everyone about Arkangel,” Freya said. “But otherwise, it’ll be our secret.”

“That’s blackmail,” said Hester.

“Ooh, is it? Gosh!” Freya looked rather pleased, as if she felt she was finally getting the hang of running a city.

Hester watched her carefully for a moment, then smiled her crooked smile.

And at last, very close to journey’s end, there came a night when she was woken from her half-dreams in the chair beside Tom’s bed by a small, familiar voice that said just, “Het?”

She shook herself and leaned over him, touching his brow, smiling into his pale, worried face. “Tom, you’re better!”

“I thought I was going to die,” he said.

“You almost did.”

“And the Huntsmen?”

“All gone. And Arkangel stuck in trap-ice somewhere behind us. We’re heading south, right into the heart of old America. Well, it might be old Canada, technically; nobody’s sure where the border used to run.”

Tom frowned. “Then Professor Pennyroyal wasn’t lying? The Dead Continent is really green again?”

Hester scratched her head. “I don’t know about that. This old map’s turned up – it’s complicated. At first I didn’t see why we should believe Snøri Ulvaeusson any more than Pennyroyal, but there are definitely patches of green here. Sometimes when the fog lifts you can see twisty little trees and things clinging on for dear life to the sides of the mountains. I suppose that’s what gave rise to all those airman’s tales. But it’s nothing like Pennyroyal promised. It’s no Hunting Ground. Just an island or two.

Anchorage will have to become a static settlement.” Tom looked frightened, and Hester squeezed his hand and cursed herself for scaring him; she’d forgotten how much townies like him feared life on the bare earth. “I was born on an island, remember? It was nice. We’ll have a good life here.” Tom nodded and smiled, gazing at her. She looked good; rather pale, and still nobody’s idea of beautiful, but very striking, in new black clothes she told him she’d taken from a shop in the Boreal Arcade to replace her prison-slops. She had washed her hair, and tied it back with a silvery thing, and for the first time that he remembered she did not try to hide her face while he watched her. He reached up and stroked her cheek. “And are you all right? You look a bit white.” Hester laughed. “You’re the only person who ever notices how I look. I mean, apart from the obvious. I’ve just been feeling a bit queasy.” (Better not to tell him yet about what Windolene had found when Hester went to her complaining of sea-sickness.

The shock might make him ill again).

Tom touched her mouth. “I know it feels awful, those men you had to kill. I still feel guilty about killing Shrike, and Pewsey and Gench. But it wasn’t your fault. You had to do it.”

“Yes,” she whispered, and smiled at how un-alike they were, because when she thought of the deaths of Masgard and his Huntsmen she felt no guilt at all, just a sort of satisfaction, and a glad amazement that she had got away with it. She lay down on the bed beside him and she held him, thinking of all the things that had happened since they first came to Anchorage. “I’m Valentine’s daughter,” she said softly, when she was sure he was asleep, and it seemed a good thing to be, as she lay there with Tom in her arms, and Tom’s child inside her.

Freya woke to find a sliver of grey daylight showing between the curtains. Voices were calling out, down in the street outside her palace. “Land ho! Land ho!” It was hardly news, since Anchorage had been close to land for days now, nosing cautiously down a long, narrow inlet towards the place which Snøri Ulvaeusson had called Vineland. But the shouting went on. Freya climbed out of bed and pulled on her dressing gown, opened the curtain, opened the long window, stepped out into the cold on the balcony. Dawn was breaking, clear as ice. On either side of the city black mountains squatted over their reflections, striped with snow, and among the crags and scree slopes small starveling pines showed like the first growth of hair on a shaven head. And there…

She gripped the balcony rail with both hands, glad of the bite of the frosty metal which proved she was not dreaming. Ahead, the outline of an island was hardening out of the mist which hung above the still water. She saw pine trees on the heights, and birches still holding up handfuls of last summer’s leaves like pale gold coins.

She saw steeps green with heather and rusty with dead bracken. She saw a lacework of snow on dark stands of rowan, blackthorn, oak; and beyond, across a shining strait, another island and another. And she laughed aloud and felt her city tremble beneath her for the last time as it yawed and slowed, bearing her safely into the secret anchorages of the west.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone at Scholastic, and particularly Kirsten Skidmore and Holly Skeet for their help and advice during the writing of this book.

Philip Reeve

Dartmoor, 2003

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