A Web of Air Page 0,1

noise the others were all making. “Wa-a-ave!”

“What? What’s that, Weasel?”

“Wa-ave come!” Weasel had more words in him than the others of his flock. He was learning not to let his bird-voice stretch them out of shape. Grandfather said he was a throwback, almost as clever as the angels of old. He hopped from foot to foot and fluffed out his feathers and waggled his fingers in alarm, trying to make Arlo understand. “Wa-ave come here! Danger! Big-big!”

“A wave?” said Arlo, and looked again to the west, from where a sudden wind had started blowing.

The horizon heaved and darkened. It swelled into the sky. Arlo listened. He could hear the hammers at the shipyards, and the maids laughing in the house, and a distant sound that lay beneath it all, so vast and low that he wondered if it had always been there. Perhaps this was the noise the world made, turning round on its axis. But how had he never noticed it before?

“Wa-a-a-a-ave!” screamed all the angels, and the sky flexed and shuddered and Arlo understood, and then he was up and running. But how can you hope to outrun the horizon?

After ten paces he looked back and saw it clearly; a blade of grey water sweeping towards him over the face of the sea. It hit the outermost of the islands and there was a brief explosion of spindrift and they were gone and the wave came on, white and broken now, like a range of snow-covered mountains uprooted and running mad.

“Wa-a-a-ave!” he started to shout, just like the angels, as brainless as an angel in his terror. But who could hear him, above the world-filling voice of the sea?

He ran and tripped and fell and rolled and scrambled back through the heather, out on to the crag where the watchtower stood. A hundred feet below him the men in the shipyards were setting down their tools, standing, starting to run. From down there he doubted they could see the wave, but they must be able to hear it…

There was a smack like thunder as it struck the cliffs at the island’s western end. White spray shot high into the sky, and dropped on Arlo as a storm of rain. The weight of it punched him back against the stones of the watchtower wall. It plastered him there; and past him rolled the wave, or part of it, a fat, foam-marbled snake of sea squeezing itself through the straits that separated Thursday Island from its neighbours, lapping at the high crag where he stood.

And when it was gone, the thunder and the spray and the long, shingle-sucking, white, roaring, hissing rush of it, he peeled himself from the tower’s side already knowing what he was going to see. Or, rather, not see. Because his home, his family, the shipyards and the ships which they had held were all gone, swiped aside by the sea’s paw and dragged down into drowning deeps so bottomless that not a spar or a splinter or a scrap of cloth would ever surface, and he was alone on Thursday Island with the angels.

2

IN MAYDA-AT-THE-WORLD’S-END

n the long, lilac twilight of a midsummer’s evening, Ruan Solent ran between the land-barges which were parked up on the fairground behind the busy harbour. In London, where Ruan came from, these barges were called “Summertown”, and he’d looked forward every year to their arrival. Now he was a part of their convoy, a traveller himself, and he knew that their proper name was Bargetown, and that they kept rolling through every season, not just summer, carrying their shops and entertainments all over Europa; even here, to Mayda-at-the-World’s-End.

The fairground where they had parked was a weed-speckled empty lot between tall warehouses, swept clear of buildings by the great wave that had struck the World’s End nearly ten years before, the same wave which broke over Thursday Island and destroyed the shipyards there. But Ruan was only ten, and he had arrived in Mayda just that afternoon. He had never heard of Thursday Island. He had heard people talk about the giant wave (the Ondra del Mãe they called it in these parts) but it was an unreal and storybookish thing to him; just another colourful disaster out of history.

Anyway, Ruan had more immediate disasters to worry about. His land-barge, the travelling theatre called Persimmon’s Electric Lyceum, was supposed to raise its curtain at sundown, and already the sky was freckled with the first pale stars and in the steep streets