A Web of Air

1

THURSDAY’S CHILD

omething was upsetting the angels. Usually at that hour Arlo found dozens of them fluttering along the beach, scuffling their little bony hands through the mounds of drying seaweed to scare up crabs and sand fleas which they caught and crunched in their toothy beaks. Most mornings, when he came in sight, dozens of them would start calling to him, their scratchy voices rising above the boom of the breaking surf: “A-a-arlo! Snacks? Snacksies?”

But that morning the beach was silent and deserted. The tide had gone a long way out, and even the sea was quiet. Despite the heat the sky was grey, and had a strange look; as if the clouds had somehow curdled. Glancing up as he climbed his secret path on to the island’s high, rocky spine, Arlo thought that this was what a fish might see if it looked up from inside the sea at the underbelly of the waves. His grandfather had grumbled that a storm was on the way.

He scrambled up on to the island’s summit, hoping to find cooler air and some angels to talk to. No one had time for him at home that morning. His mother was busy with the new baby, which was grizzling at the heat. Father was down at the shipyards, overseeing the work on Senhor Leonidas’s new copper-bottomed schooner. Grandfather was at work in his study. Arlo didn’t really mind. He preferred it up here, on his own. He’d always been a solitary, thoughtful boy.

Following goat tracks through the gorse and heather, he approached the old, abandoned watchtower, which stood on a crag high above the harbour. From there he could look down into his family’s shipyards. The new schooner lay like a toy in the large pen with other ships, xebecs and barquentines and fine fast sloops, built or half built, in the lesser pens around it. Offshore, the sea was scabbed with islands, but most of them were just barren rocks and angel-rookeries, none as big or pleasant as Thursday Island. Away in the east, dark against the hazy shoreline of the mainland, squatted a conical crater. Smoke hung above it in the hot and strangely windless air, making it look as if it were getting ready to erupt. But it was no volcano. It had been formed in the long-ago by some powerful weapon of the Ancients, and the smoke came from the chimneys of the city that was built on its inner slopes. Mayda-at-the-World’s-End was the finest city in the world, and Arlo’s family were its finest shipwrights, even if they did choose to live outside it, safe and private here upon their island.

He left the tower and climbed a little higher, intent on the tiny white specks which were the sails of fishing boats scattered around Mayda’s harbour mouth, and suddenly, as he reached the stones at the very top of the island, angels were soaring past him, their wide white wings whizzing and soughing as they tore though the air. A few of them recognized him and he heard them call his name: “A-aa-arlo! A-aa-arlo! W-a-a-a-a-ve!” So he waved, and they swung past him and out across the sea and back again, following curious zigzag flight paths as if they were trying to elude a predator. He glanced up, expecting to see a hawk or sea eagle hanging in the sky’s top, but there was nothing, only those curdled clouds.

He watched the angels for a while, trying to understand the way they tipped and twitched their wings to steer themselves. He pulled two leaves from a bush, found a forked twig of heather on the ground, and spent a little while constructing an angel of his own. He climbed on a rock and threw it like a dart, and just for a moment its leaf-wings spread to catch the air and he thought it would fly, but it only fell. He lost interest in it before it even hit the ground, and looked away westwards, sensing something.

Above all the black stacks and wherries where the angels roosted, fretful clouds of them were twisting, turning the sky into a soup of wings. And beyond them, far off across the ocean…

Something had gone wrong with the horizon.

Just then his favourite of the angels, the fledgling he called Weasel, landed beside him like a feather football. Arlo groped in his pocket for the crusts of stale bread he always brought with him, expecting Weasel to ask for snacks. But Weasel just made the same