A Web of Air Page 0,2

of the city the lamps were being lit. So Ruan was rushing, weaving, burrowing his way through the crowd of sightseers and shoppers that swirled between the barges. Behind him he could hear his friends Max and Fergus bellowing through their brass trumpets to attract an audience. “Take your places at the Lyceum! Take your places for Niall Strong-Arm or The Conquest of the Moon!” Some of the people Ruan was pushing past looked interested, and started to make their way towards his barge, but Ruan just ran even faster away from it. He knew that without him and his fleet feet and bony elbows, the show could not begin.

“’Scuse me!” he hollered, as he jabbed and ducked his way past a fat, silky merchant. “Scoozi! Scoozey-mwa!” he shouted, bulldozing onwards. (He was a much-travelled boy, and knew a little of all the languages of Europa.) He was as thin as a pipe-cleaner sculpture and as brown as a hazelnut, with a dandelion-clock of sun-blond hair and a sudden white grin that helped people forgive him when he bumped into them. Maydan fisherfolk in their temple-going best looked down and made way for him. Pretty ladies smiled sweet smiles as they stepped aside to let him pass. “’Scuse me!” he kept on shouting. “Scoozey-mwa!”

All afternoon the barges had been crawling into Mayda, edging their way out along the zigzag causeway which tethered the crater to the mainland, squeezing through a cleft in its wall into the city. The Lyceum had been one of the first to arrive, and while her crew were busy setting out the stage and seating, other barges had parked up all around her; not just the familiar ones which had been travelling with Bargetown all season but a second convoy too, come down from Nowhere and the Caps Del Norte to set up shop here at the World’s End.

Ruan recognized one of the newcomers; an old blue travelling market called the Rolling Stone. It was such a recent arrival that its engines were still cooling and sea-spray from the causeway crossing dripped like rain off its wheel arches and its underparts, but its merchants had already set out their wares, and a queue of eager shoppers was edging up its gangplank. Ruan scurried up past them to the turnstiles at the top, where one of the men on duty tried to stop him squirming underneath, but the other said, “Oh, let him through, Allan, it’s only that Solent boy from Persimmon’s theatre…”

He waved a thank you, running out on to the market-deck. It was crammed with stalls and little cluttered shops, already busy with shoppers under its fluttering awnings. A woman blocked Ruan’s way, holding up a bolt of cloth against herself and asking her bored husband his opinion. “You ought to go and see the play, master,” Ruan told him, swerving past. “It starts in a couple o’ minutes.” And right on his cue his words were answered by a distant farting of brass bugles from the far end of Bargetown, announcing that the Lyceum was preparing to raise its curtains.

Ruan knew that by now the audience would have gathered in front of the apron-shaped stage which extended from the theatre’s stern. The first night in a new town always meant a big crowd. The seats would be full, and people would be sitting on the ground too, or standing at the back, or watching from the windows of nearby buildings. Max and Fergus would be going round with their cash-satchels, selling last-minute tickets. The closed curtains would look calm and classy, and give no hint of the panic boiling behind them, where Ambrose Persimmon would be trying out his big stage voice, “Me, me, me, me, me-me-mee!” while Alisoun Froy helped him into his first-act costume. Fern, Ruan’s small sister, would be sneezing in the fog of face powder that filled the ladies’ dressing room as she hared this way and that among the racks of hanging gowns on frantic errands for frantic actresses. Mistress Persimmon would have lost her tiara as usual and Lillibet would be sobbing that she had put on weight and couldn’t fasten the hooks and eyes on the back of her bodice … and all that effort, all that fuss and worry would be for nothing if Ruan didn’t make it back within the next two minutes!

At the untidy sternward end of the market-deck was a stall called Squinter’s Old-Tech Improbabilities. Its owner, Mort Squinter, was haggling about something