Planesrunner (Everness Book One) (20 page)

“Come on you bassards, no fair no fair…I can whup any one of youse, but two? Make a proper fight of it, ye bassarding Bromleys.”

“Who are they?” Everett asked.

“Albarn Bromley and Keir Bromley,” Sen said. “Seth's bijou brothers. Younger and thicker. Not Kyle. He's the kid of the family. It's his fight, but Kyle Gorgeous Bromley'll never risk his eek in that ring.”

The two Bromleys came to a nonverbal agreement and charged Mchynlyth. He ducked under their combined assault easily and came up dancing like a butterfly on the other side of the ring. The crowd cheered. Everett had fought this kind of fight hundreds of times. It had been on the Xbox, against Ryun, in the warmth of Ryun's room, not on the cobbles of Hackney Great Port with the frost settling out of the air, but the principle was the same. It was the classic of speed versus power. Everett's analysis favoured speed. It was how the great Ali had won all his classic fights, back in the ‘70s, when boxing was cool. Keep moving, that butterfly beat, tire them out, take their best shot and survive and then come back. One two, out. But the Bromleys were a lot bigger than Mchynlyth, and he was looking almost as tired as they. And there were two of them.

“How did Mchynlyth get himself into this?”

“Oh, he'll have started it. He gets a meese fighting head on him when there's drink taken. Or when there isn't drink taken, now I come to think of it. He'll have seen them all down the Knights and told them Annie'd sooner marry a ground-pounder than Kyle Gorgeous Bromley.”

“Captain Anastasia's engaged?”

“Ma Bromley thinks she is,” Sen said. “It's all sorted, according to her. Kyle Bromley marries Anastasia Sixsmyth, thus bringing
Everness
—which as everyone knows is the sweetest ship in all Hackney Great Port—into the family fleet. Rejoice rejoice! Only problem is—”

“No one's told Captain Anastasia.”

“Correct, Everett Singh. Well, they have told her. Proper proposition and everything. I heard Annie's reply. I ‘spect Ma Bromley heard Annie's reply all the way over at Pylon 22. Those Bromleys, they reckon they're right Hackney aristocracy, and no one can say no to them. It's an insult. Noblesse oblige and all that. Insult Kyle, you insults ‘em all.”

Sen's knuckles went white on the rail as Mchynlyth walked into a sly rabbit punch to the ribs. He went down on one knee, wincing, winded. The Bromleys grinned at each other and closed. Then Sharkey forced his way out of the press of spectators. He crossed the ring in three steps and with a well-timed kick tripped up Albarn Bromley and sent him crashing to the ground. The big man roared and rolled and found himself looking up at Sharkey's face along the barrel of a shotgun.

“'The bows of the mighty are broken, and they that stumbled are girded with strength,'” Sharkey said. “First Samuel chapter two, verse four. Let's fight nice.” He held Albarn Bromley under the gun as Mchynlyth picked himself up, straightened his neck, popped his knee joints, flexed his shoulders, and dropped into fighting pose. Again the crowd roared. Keir Bromley came at him. Mchynlyth blocked a hook, spun away, and planted a Thai-boxing kick firm in Keir Bromley's ribs. Bromley reeled.

“Kill him, Mac, kill him!” Sen yelled. Mchynlyth pressed his advantage, driving Keir Bromley backwards as the big man blocked and dodged. The crowd moved with them, moving blow by blow, ooh by aah up Mare Street. Sen beat her fist on the rail. Everett found her naked bloodlust alien and hateful. Hackney Great Port was hard, and applied its own rules quickly and harshly; the Airish way of life was more immediate and passionate than anything Everett knew in his contained, concerned, middle-class London, but girls shouldn't call for blood. They shouldn't enjoy physical violence. Everett wondered again about Sen's background. When he had asked her she had dodged the question, but he had seen the look in her eyes at Seth Bromley's parting jibe. If she could have clawed his lungs out, she would.

“We're missing it!” The fight had moved under the shadow of the airships and out of the line-of-sight from the crane. Sen grabbed Everett's hand and dragged him off the gantry. “Come on!”

“What's with the ‘come on's?” Everett muttered. “Everyone's always telling me to come on.” He came on anyway. Sen found a fine vantage point on a gallery that encircled the second floor of the Acheson and Muir Bonded warehouse. Everett felt the rusting metal creak beneath him. The fight moved up the street, a mauling, rolling scrum of bodies. Both Mchynlyth and Keir Bromley were bruised, shambling, shiny with blood. The ring of spectators urged them on, though the combatants could hardly stand, let alone land a blow on each other. Everett felt sick. There was nothing noble in this, there was no honour, just two people ruining each other. The intention to harm, the rage, was the only thing that kept them upright. They stumbled out from under the shelter of
Leonora Christine's
hull into the clear night air. They reeled; they staggered. The ring flowed and moved and re-formed around them. This was horrific.

“Stop it!” Everett yelled. “Stop it!” He was a scientist. He didn't believe in magic. But even as his shout flew over the heads of the crowd a jet of water blasted out of nowhere and knocked Keir Bromley and Mchynlyth from their feet. Down they went skidding and spinning under the torrent. Then the jet turned on the spectators, sending them falling and reeling, scattering them like a hose washing dead bugs from a car. Keir Bromley tried to get to his feet, but the water blast turned on him and pinned him to the cobbles. The fight had carried under
Everness's
shadow. There on the cargo hoist, ten metres above the big brawl, was Captain Anastasia with a control unit in her hand, directing a ballast vent onto the mob. She moved a joystick; the jet of high-pressure water sent the spectators scurrying.

“Go on, get out of here,” Captain Anastasia cried, sending stragglers scurrying with blasts from her water cannon. “What would your wives and girlfriends and partners think? Shame on you all. Go on, go home.” She shut down the vent. Water dripped from the valve on
Everness's
hull. Captain Anastasia said, “Mr. Bromley, tell your mother that my answer remains the same. You shall not have me and you shall not have
Everness
. Good day, sir. Mr. Mchynlyth, I neither need nor appreciate your gallantry. You have sullied the honour of this great ship. And Mr. Sharkey, don't think I didn't see your part in it. Report to the cargo deck. You have two minutes to make yourself spick and airship-shape. And you too, Sen and Mr. Singh. I'll be docking wages. Ballast water's not free, you know.”

The cargo hatch touched ground. Sharkey slid his shotguns into the tail of his coat. He had somehow avoided the water. Even his hat had regained its proper shape, and he had found a new feather from somewhere. Keir Bromley dragged away, dripping. Mchynlyth wrapped his arms around his saturated body. The heat of the fight had gone out of him; a cold clear night was settling over Hackney Great Port. He was shivering uncontrollably, but he was grinning. Last of all Sen and Everett joined the group on the metal platform. Sen nudged Mchynlyth, a soft shoulder-charge. He winked back. Captain Anastasia pressed the hatch control. Winches whined; cables tautened. As the hoist drew them up into the vast belly of the airship, Captain Anastasia ordered, “Mr. Singh, private supper in my latty, at your convenience.” Her words were stern, but Everett got the impression she was smiling.

T
he captain and her daughter were putting up Christmas decorations. Everett watched them through the open galley door as he whipped up seasonal hot chocolate, stirred with a cinnamon stick. There were wonders upon wonders tucked into the corners and crannies of the galley's cupboards. Sen was up ladders with lights and paper garlands; Captain Anastasia handed the decorations up and directed where to put them. They talked. They talked like no one was overhearing them. They talked about Christmas and who had got what for whom and the extra presents they had got themselves. They talked about the cargo that was being loaded and whether they might take time off after Berlin, which was its destination, and have some fun because Berlin was a great city; they talked about how the ship was feeling a bit rough, troubled by the weather; they talked about the news of Hackney Great Port and the stories from Dona Miriam and the other gossips. They talked not like captain and pilot, or even mother and daughter; they talked like two girls together. Everett had to constantly remind himself that Captain Anastasia was younger than he thought, maybe not even out of her twenties. The cinnamon stick stopped in midstir. Everett was overcome by a sudden wave of loneliness so crushing that he had to grasp the edge of the counter with both hands to keep himself up. His eyes filled. This was their home; this was their family. He had a latty, but not a life here. His family was in a room on the twenty-second floor of the Tyrone Tower, and two kilometres up the road in another universe. Broken into pieces. He had to break it to be able to put it back together, but they could not understand that. Tejendra was physically unable to understand; all he knew about the worlds was what Charlotte Villiers allowed him to know. His mum only understood that the two men in her life had vanished in less than a week. And he had to make his move soon, before
Everness
lifted for Berlin. Christmas was the time. Guards were dropped, vigilance relaxed, holiday moods prevailed. He had worked it out. There was a task for everyone aboard
Everness
with their different talents and abilities, and even for the ship itself. Before any of that he would have to make that appointment to see Captain Anastasia in her ready room, without Sen listening at the bulkhead, and say,
I need your help
. He would have to explain exactly what he intended to do, and how only
Everness
and its crew could help him. And he knew what she would say:
You're asking me to risk my ship, my crew, my daughter?
And he could only say,
I am
. And put like that, not even Everett would say yes to himself. The clock was ticking. Mchynlyth, confined to ship until lift-time along with Sharkey as punishment after the Bromley fight, had spent the day before buying in lift gas from the Gas Office, the government monopoly that controlled the helium supply. He would have to ask soon. He dreaded it. It ate at him. Everett resumed stirring the hot chocolate. He almost dropped the cinnamon stick at the sudden call of his name.

“Mr. Singh!”

Captain Anastasia beckoned him. He brought the steaming mugs. Dunsfold Air Traffic weather station reported a high-pressure cell anchored over southeast England with clear skies, low winds, and plummeting temperatures. Everett had cleared frost on his latty porthole when he woke muffled deep in his hammock that morning. Sharkey and Mchynlyth were in five layers but still shivered at their labours. Sharkey was supervising a squad of dockers, shipping containers onto the loading bay and operating
Everness's
internal gantry crane to distribute them evenly around the ship's centre of gravity. Mchynlyth was under the deckplates, down in the power distribution system, with voltage meters and bypass cables and much of his individual style of language that always sounded as if he was swearing. The cold had even worked its way forward to the crew quarters. Sen was in thick grey woollen tights, a too-big pullover, sleeves stretched down to her knuckles, and a scarf. The only warm place was the steamy galley. Captain Anastasia took a sip of scalding, cinnamon-infused chocolate. She closed her eyes in bliss.

“Mr. Singh, that is damn fine chocolate. What's the little suspicion of heat?”

“Chilli,” Everett said. “A pinch. I once had it in this coffee place in Seattle.”

“Mission for you, Mr. Singh. Christmas is coming and we must have bona manjarry. Does your Punjabi granny have any recipes for turkey? Away down to Ridley Road Market and see what you can rustle up. Get plenty of vegetables. Sen would eat nothing but meat and carbo if I gave her the chance.”

“I would not,” Sen protested. “I like veg. Sort of.”

“Fresh, green, and seasonal, Mr. Singh.” Captain Anastasia counted a wad of pounds from her wallet, which was a marvellous magician's box of a thing, folding this way, that way, turn it over and it opened a third way, revealing new layers and levels and flaps and pockets, more and more the farther in you went. Infundibular. “If it comes to more than that, my credit is good with all the retailers in Hackney, but I'd prefer you kept to the budget. Do you know what the first law of the Airish is?”

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be?” Everett said.

“No, Mr. Singh, though that is a wise saying. Much more prosaic than that. Cash is king.”

Leeks, long and straight and dusty blue-green. Italian kale, its leaves so dark a green they looked almost black. Potatoes—waxy ones, which were better as part of a dish with other vegetables, rather than floury ones for roasting. Already he was developing a cooking plan. Onions—cooking was inconceivable without them. He picked over a dozen types of onion, from ones as flat as a turban to tiny pickling onions the size of his thumb. Everett settled for two pounds of small, dark-skinned Polish onions that he could smell through the paper bag.

“These are bigger for the same price,” Sen said, holding up a pale-skinned Spanish onion the size of her fist.

“Too big. They're all water. No flavour. Big isn't always best.”

“It is with me.”

Garlic. Lots of it. Root ginger. Everything was available at Ridley Road Market. Every day, every hour there was something new to discover about this Hackney. Ridley Road Market—go past the boarded-up Knights of the Air pub, go through the tangle of pipes and valves and gas-cylinders where the Gas Office stored its helium—was one of the bigger discoveries. Not because it was a market, but because it was a market in both the universes that Everett knew. In his home London it had been a street and a half of mostly Caribbean stalls and lock-ups opposite Dalston Station. In this London it was a bazaar of ethnicities and skin colours tucked into the arches and culverts and narrow alleys of a complex railway exchange. Laneways led to tunnels to vaults and church-sized halls built inside red-brick railway viaducts. Food and clothing and books and dodgy electrical goods, ironmongery and kitchen ware and suspiciously cheap tools. Crockery and household goods. Toys hung like a mass execution from the fronts of stalls; bolts of cloth stacked high, the lower ones flattened by the weight of those above them. Women drinking tea at stalls beneath high brickwork domes. The trains that passed regularly overhead shook the market to its core, shook the cups and tea sets on the china stalls, shook drips of rainwater that formed at the tips of the stalactites leached from the arches' cement joints, dripping down on the heads of the shoppers. Here Hackney Great Port and greater London met and mingled and haggled. City fashion mixed with the most piratical Airish dress; standard English, in a dozen accents, with palari. Everett went from stall to stall, asking, sniffing, holding in his hand, checking for blemishes, haggling, passing on.

“Hows can you tell the difference? It's all just spuds and onions,” Sen complained. She was restless and bored.

“Well, it's all just lip gloss and makeup, but that doesn't stop you taking the lid off every single one.”

“That's different. That's shopping.”

“So what's this?”

“This is buying.” Sen thought for a moment. “Do all the omis in your world know how to cook?”

“I think the question is the other way round; do none of the omis in your world know how to cook? My dad taught me.”

“Your dad.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Just. Well. You people are weird.”

“It's a basic life skill. Are you going to starve to death in the middle of a market like this because you don't know what to do with basic ingredients?”

“Not me,” Sen said. “I has grace and charm. That's what everyone says. Tell me about your dad, Everett Singh. We's supposed to be rescuing him and all I know is he's a scientist and bad guys want him and he supports some fruity-sounding team called Tottenham Hotspur. Oh, and he taught you how to cook.”

“My dad's called Tejendra.”

“See? You didn't even tell me that.”

“You haven't told me your dad's name,” Everett said. Or anything else about him or any of your family, or if they are alive or dead.

“Uh uh. This is your dad we're talking about.” Sen didn't miss a beat as they walked on, stall by stall, into the depths of this Earth's Ridley Road Market. “You see, if I'm supposed to be helping you rescue him, I's entitled to know a bit about what I's rescuing.”

“It's a Punjabi name.
Singh
means lion. It's a really common name in the Punjab.
Punjab
means ‘five rivers': it's up in northwest India; in my world it's split between India and Pakistan. A lot of people died when they split Pakistan from India. Millions. It was a bad time; the worst time. I don't know what India's like in your world. My dad's family comes from a village right at the centre of the five rivers. Right in the middle. They all moved to Ludhiana before my dad was born—he was born in India, but he moved before he was five so he doesn't really have the accent—well, you can hear a bit of it when he gets excited about stuff. He had three brothers and two sisters, and they grew up over an Asian supermarket in Walthamstow. So that was eight of the immediate family, then a couple of unmarried aunts and an uncle who'd just got married, all in this one house. You see, the Punjabis are like the Airish of India. They're always shouting and rowing and making up and celebrating and fighting. They all live with the volume up at eleven. Now, if you met my dad you wouldn't know right away he's Punjabi, because he's not big and noisy and he thinks about things, but you should see him at White Hart Lane at the North London Derby. And when he talks about physics, when he talks about those things that no one else understands but mean so much to him, you can see it in him like fire.

“How could I make you understand my dad's side of the family? Okay: I'll show you how my bebe and my other uncles and aunts would celebrate Christmas—which they all do even though they're not Christians, because Punjabis like nothing better than a good party. You wouldn't be sitting down to dry old turkey. No no, that's not proper manjarry for a feast. It'd be something for a real celebration, like royalty was coming. Always entertain as if you entertained princes, my bebe Ajeet says.” Everett looked around the meat and poultry stalls; the turkeys plump and round as buttocks, the geese with their heads tucked under their long bony wings, the rounds of spiced beef filling the air with the scent of cinnamon, the clove-studded hams. His eyes lit on the pheasants hanging by the neck, male and female in pairs, from the game stall.

“How long have your pheasants been hanging?”

“In this weather, about nine days,” said the stall holder, a square-built man, cheerful with salt-and-pepper hair cut into a stiff brush. Everett lifted a cock pheasant and sniffed it. “We get them from Lord Abercrombie's estate,” the stallholder added.

“How much for four?”

The stallholder named a price. Everett haggled him down, parted with some of Captain Anastasia's banknotes and left with two paper bags with long, beautiful tail feathers sticking out of them.

“My bebe, she'd be thinking now, what's the most luxurious, wintery thing I can do with pheasants, what's royal and extravagant, and I'd be thinking, like murgh makhani, but with pheasant: pheasant makhani, with maybe a bit of edible gold leaf over the top; and she'd be thinking that's kind of goldy red and I'd need something green with that to show it up but I already have my leeks and my kale; and you'd need rice, a pillau that's so rich it has jewels in it, and bread because there's no Punjabi meal without bread; and then she'd be thinking, oh, let's eat sweet and talk sweet, so she'd be looking for things like sesame seeds and cardamoms and rosewater and clarified butter…”

As he talked, Everett moved through the market, filling the bags ingredient by ingredient, haggle by haggle, moving out from the subterranean stores into the alleys that opened on to Dalston Lane. Here were the clothing and fabric stalls, the hats and bandanas and scarves for winter, the bolts and bales of print cottons and chiffons and worsteds and taffetas.

“There's one last detail,” Everett said, looking up and down the lines of stalls, their owners muffled up in coats and scarves and hats and fingerless gloves, huddling over mugs of tea. “You can't serve a meal for a prince on a table for a beggar, so I'd need to dress the table. But I'd know that everything on an airship has to justify its weight, so I'd be looking for something that's beautiful but light as a feather. Like
that
.”