Scrivener's Moon (5 page)

So he made himself useful to the silky gentleman; helped him count his money and make up his accounts. From the grown-up sons he learned how the barge’s big old engines ran. And when the silky gentleman and all his family met with a terrible accident it was discovered, amazingly, that he had left the
Knuckle Sandwich
and all it held to Borglum.

At this long remove of years it was hard for Borglum to recall the exact details of the accident. “It was a tragic business” was all he’d usually say, if ever anyone asked about it. Sometimes, if they pressed him, he would bare his little yellow teeth and his feldspar eyes would glitter and he’d say, “It involved
knives
. . .”

By coincidence, “It involves knives” was more or less what people had been saying about Borglum’s carnival that night, as word of its arrival spread excitingly through all the flapping canvas streets and cardboard cul-de-sacs of Tent Town. For too long the workers of London had been forced to make their own entertainment, which mostly meant dog-fights and cock-fights and knife-fights. Now the professionals had arrived! Young men stood in the light of the flaming torches and stared up at the gory paintings on the barge’s sides. Children scampered off to tell their parents what was taking shape. Tired workers coming down from shifts on the new city and drunken young noblemen stumbling home from Quercus’s ball were all revived by the sight of Borglum’s blood-red banners licking at the evening sky. From all over Tent Town, groups of people made their wondering way towards the carnival, drawn by its powerful promises of violence and glamour.

Amongst them, unnoticed in his drab off-duty clothes, came apprentice Charley Shallow, as eager as anyone to see what the Carnival had in store. He had been out that evening with a girl called Milly Floater, and had decided that this might be a good way to round the night off. From what he’d heard in Tent Town it was meant to be quite horrifying, and he knew that girls, when horrified, liked a protective arm around them, and that one thing might lead to another.

He was fond of Milly, but as they joined the end of the queue he glanced around to make sure that none of his fellow apprentices was there. Round, good-natured, cheaply dressed Milly was exactly the sort of girl you would expect to see with a boy of Charley Shallow’s sort, and for that reason he did not want to be seen with her. Ronnie Coldharbour and his friends still didn’t like Charley, but they had learned to respect him, and he liked to drop hints to them about all the girls he knew in Tent Town. If they saw that he could do no better for himself than Milly Floater it could dent his reputation badly.

Sure enough, there was Coldharbour with a couple of the others, a few yards further up the queue. Before he could look back and notice Charley, Charley took Milly’s arm and dragged her into the slipstream of a passing Movement officer and his lady; rich folks from Ludgate Hill who thought that queues were not for them. Hurrying behind these nobles, they quickly reached the front of the crowd, where an entrance painted like a fanged mouth opened into the carnival tent. “Roll up, roll up!” the men who guarded it were shouting, while a girl with green eyes sold tickets in a canvas booth. A pretty girl, thought Charley, as he fumbled for his purse, and then saw as he proffered his bronze half-quid that she had no hands for him to put it in, only a sort of mechanized lobster-claw strapped to the stump where each hand should be. She laughed at his confusion and showed him the brass bowl where the coins went, and Milly laughed too. Charley thought,
Stupid tarts
, but he grinned as he took the ticket from her pincers, and turned to go in through the painted mouth.

They entered a dim-lit, awninged space. Blocks of steep-raked benches had been erected round an oiled canvas groundsheet mapped and marbled with alarming stains. The seats were filling fast. As he squeezed in next to Milly, Charley heard the barkers outside changing their message. “That’s all! Come back tomorrow. Another show tomorrow. . .”

A hush fell over the crowd on the benches. Even the rich people stopped talking about themselves in such loud voices and used whispers instead. Charley could hear moths battering their wings against the big lanterns, which swung on chains from the timber props that helped hold up the roof. Milly giggled nervously, squeezing herself against him. He looked across the canvas arena, checking for Coldharbour and the others. He could not see them, but he did notice three latecomers making their way into a space opposite: two white coats and an expensive fur cloak.

“What is it, Charley?” Milly asked, noticing the way he stared at them.

Charley didn’t answer. He was too surprised. What were Wavey and those Crumbs doing at a thing like this? He studied them, confident that they would not notice him among so many other faces – they’d probably forgotten he had ever existed, he thought bitterly. Wavey was talking, smiling, but Doc Crumb looked bewildered, while Fever sat so stiff and straight that you could almost see the disapproval crackling off her. Charley looked at her long white neck, the subtle shape of her under that crisp, buttoned-up coat, and he felt angry again at the girl who sat beside him. If Milly Floater had looked more like Fever Crumb he would not have minded showing her off to Coldharbour or anyone else. . .

Then the music started, so sudden and so deafening that all the thoughts flew out of his head like scared birds rising from a tree. He jumped. Everybody jumped, all along those rows of hard, uncomfortable benches. The music sounded like tin pans and bicycle chains, like bad plumbing and xylophone bones and the murder of elderly dustbins. Into the arena marched a bizarre army with a fur-clad dwarf strutting at its head.

“Welcome!” shouted the dwarf, into the silence that came down when the music stopped. He had the voice of a much bigger man, and a manner that commanded you to watch him. Nimble as a tumbler, he vaulted up on to the armoured hand of a massive Stalker that stood just behind him; a man-shaped hulk that looked ready to leap into the crowd and start ripping heads off, but was restrained by a blindfolded African woman holding tight to a leash fastened around its neck. Charley had seen plenty of these armoured zombies since the Movement seized power, but never one like this: barnacled with studs and spikes, it wore as a headpiece two massive, curving mammoth tusks. Above the glowing green slot which served as its eyes the silver figure of a winged woman jutted from its forehead; the hood ornament from an Ancient motor-carriage.

Who would decorate a Stalker like that? Charley wondered. How could this ramshackle circus even
own
a Stalker? Surely only powerful warlords and their technomancers were able to control those weird old war machines, and even they were starting to run short of them as stocks of mechanical brains wore out. Maybe this was one of those crazy ones you heard about that went rogue and struck out on their own?

It started to dawn on him that being a spectator at the Carnival of Knives might not be altogether
safe
. . .

The dwarfish ringmaster ran up the monster’s armoured trunk like a squirrel up a tree and perched grinning on its head, holding on to those tusks to steady himself as the thing started to lumber around the edge of the arena. “I’m Borglum,” he announced. “A travelling man. My legs are short, but long leagues lie behind me. All over the wild northlands this circus of mine has rolled, and everywhere we go there we find war. Little wars and big, my friends, old wars and new. Those nomad empires are forever a-squabbling, sending forth their landships and their valiant soldier-boys. And people ask, ‘Why? How is it that these wars keep happening?’ Like wars are freaks of nature that fall all unbidden on poor human beans.”

The audience shifted, fidgeting, wondering when Borglum would come to the point. The freaks of nature they wanted to hear about were the grisly crew lined up behind him; a hairy giant and an armoured dwarf, a bone-white snowmad sword-boy, that night-black, blindfolded amazon. The points they were interested in were on the racks of swords and nameless spiky things which his mutant roadies were setting up at each end of the ring like vicious fences.

But Borglum knew the value of a good build-up. “Well, my dearies,” he went on, “I’ve looked hard at war. Looked at it from outside, mind, since I don’t quite make the height requirement for any army I’ve yet met. And I can tell you why war keeps on thriving. It’s because men love it so. They do! Deep in the darklymost ventricles of all their secret hearts, blade, bone and bloodshed is what thrills ’em best. The Ancients understood. The showmen who ran their coliseums and their multiplexes knew how even the peaceablest man does long to see a little carnage now and then. So here it is, O my ladies and my gentlemen of London Town. The Amazing Borglum has prepared you a little taste of War that you can savour from the safety of your seats. . .”

The silence of the crowd had thickened. The awning flapped heavily. Moth-wings pinged and ticked against the lantern-panes.

“Without further ado,” cried Borglum, “we give you: The Carnival of Knives!”

hey’d practised long and hard, those mis-formed fighters Borglum had gathered to his carnival. They never did each other lasting harm, but that was not how it looked as they went at one another with cutlasses and clubs, bare hands and bladed flails. They fought one against one to begin with, and interspersed their duels with other tricks: tumbling through flaming hoops, juggling with knives. Then more fights, in larger groups, each melee choreographed like a brutal dance to the music of dinged armour and clashing blades. They knew just where to place a shallow, harmless cut to draw the most blood, and in the spiny racks of blades and maces at each end of the arena they knew where to find theatrical weapons with foldaway blades that could be used to simulate a mortal blow. The entrails which splattered the canvas floor had been bought that afternoon from a butcher’s shop, and the fallen fighters who were dragged off groaning down paths of what appeared to be their own gore would all make miraculous recoveries before the next night’s show. But the audience didn’t know that. They saw only the blood and the glinting metal; fights with nets, with fists, with flaming torches; knives buried in bellies; clubs slammed against heads, strangling chains pulled taut on straining throats.

Fever, who knew a thing or two about theatre, guessed quickly that the blood was fake, and kept leaning across Wavey to tell her father so. Dr Crumb was appalled by the spectacle, and still more appalled by the people around him, who whooped and cheered at every blow. “Kill him!” they yelled, men and women, rich and poor, as if they were all eager to live up to Borglum’s low opinion of their appetites. “Gouge his eyes out!” they hollered, making trumpets of their hands to help the fighters hear them. “Rip her head off!” “Spill his lights!”

Wavey laughed and clapped and shouted with the rest of them.

Charley Shallow watched her. Milly was agreeably thrilled and clung to him in just the way that he had hoped, but he ignored her, for he had noticed something far more interesting. At the last lull in the action, when the dwarf Borglum came riding round the arena on his tame Stalker, introducing the next pair of fighters, he had spotted Wavey in the crowd, and their eyes had met. She had given the faintest little smile, and just for an instant the showman had lost the thread of what he was saying. It had been only a tiny hesitation, and it was only because he was watching Wavey instead of the show that Charley had noticed it at all. Now he was trying to think what it might mean. What possible connection could there be between the Chief Engineer and this disreputable out-country dwarf?

After a long time, when most of the fighters had fallen, a young albino snowmad was left battling against the Stalker. Everyone was rooting for him. Fever almost joined the chant herself, but remembered just in time that she was an Engineer and immune to the crowd’s gusts of emotion. Still, she could not help but admire the young man. There was real skill in the way he parried the Stalker’s blows with that cleaver-like snowmad sword. But surely, she thought, as she watched him twirl through the lamplight, it was irrational for him to wear his white hair so long?

She was right. The Stalker grabbed him by his flying ponytail and yanked back his head, bearing his throat to one of its rusty blades. The watching Londoners all gasped together. Fever felt herself gasp too, afraid for the boy even though the fight was fake. For an instant she thought that he really was about to die; that maybe Borglum’s carnival must end with real blood before the audience could go home satisfied. She felt disgusted, and underneath the disgust was an undertow of something worse: a dark excitement.

Then Blind Lady Midnight – who had been swiped aside by the Stalker earlier in the fight and flung across the ring with such violence that half the crowd thought she was dead and the rest had forgotten her – recovered suddenly and came to the boy’s rescue. She was immensely tall and strong but earlier, when Borglum introduced her, she had torn off her blindfold to show everyone her spooky white eyes, without iris or pupil. The audience gasped again as she crossed the arena in a series of handsprings and vaulted up to sit astride the Stalker’s huge head.

“Lady Midnight is not really blind,” said Wavey. “Those misshape eyes of hers see heat instead of light.”

“She can perceive the infrared end of the spectrum?” asked Dr Crumb, intrigued despite himself.

“Hush!” laughed his wife. “It is much more dramatic if people think she has no sight at all.”

The Stalker had let go of the snowmad and was flailing its claws at Lady Midnight, but its shoulders were so massive that it couldn’t reach her. While it was trying, she drew a bodkin and drove it through the green eye-slit, which spewed a satisfying cloud of sparks and vapour and went dark. The snowmad boy, meanwhile, picked up his sword, found a chink in the Stalker’s armour and drove it in, letting out more sparks, more smoke, and a spew of ichor. The Stalker groaned like rusty brakes and toppled backwards, Lady Midnight jumping clear as it crashed to the canvas. She reached out to the snowmad boy, who took her hand, and together they made their bow while the boneyard music started up again. The show was over.

“What a horrible spectacle!” complained Dr Crumb.

“But so exciting!” said Wavey. She shifted uncomfortably, and Fever knew that she was in pain. Her pelvis had been broken by the rogue Stalker Shrike years before, and although the injury had healed well, a night of dancing and an hour on Borglum’s hard bleachers was enough to set it hurting again. Of course Wavey would never mention it; she hated anyone to think that she was weak. She kept her smile and said, “It reminded me of the old days, the fights Godshawk staged at Pickled Eel Circus. Except that no one is ever really killed in Borglum’s shows. Well, barely ever. . . Come, we’ll wait until the crowd is gone, and then I shall take you to meet him; you shall meet them all.”

Neither Fever nor Dr Crumb was keen to meet the dwarf showman or his frightening friends, but they knew that it was futile to argue with Wavey, so they waited meekly, yawning from time to time, while the rest of the audience filed out.

On the far side of the arena, among the crowd around the exit, Charley Shallow waited too, and watched. He had this vague idea forming that there was something shady about Wavey and that dwarf, and that if he could learn the secret of it, well, he might use it to his own advantage.

Milly pulled at his hand. “You’ll walk me home, Charley, won’t you? Ooh, I should be scared to walk home all alone, after seeing all that. . .”

Charley barely heard her. “You run along then,” he said. “I’ll catch you later.”

“But Charley!”

“I said ’
op it
,” he said, his voice sliding down to the Bagmanish growl which the other apprentices had all learned to fear. “I got
business
.”

She said something bitter which he did not catch and flounced off. Charley kept his eyes on Wavey and the Crumbs and moved himself sideways, behind the back rows of benches, into a tight and shadowed space where he could watch unseen.

Borglum was watching too, while the last of his audience drained out of the arena, their chatter fading. Then, while the girl with the lobster-claws went round snuffing the lanterns one by one he crossed the stained canvas to the bench where Wavey sat, flanked by the white coats of her family.

“Jasper,” she said, with a smile in her voice. She knelt down, and they embraced, the dwarf’s big head resting for a moment on her shoulder. “Duchess!” he said, and stepped back, still holding Wavey, his eyes darting over her face, as if he were taking stock of all the ways in which she’d changed since last they met. Only then did he spare a glance for Dr Crumb and Fever.

“My husband and daughter,” said Wavey.

Borglum beamed. “Dr Crumb. It’s good to meet you, sir. And little Fever. . . Not so little now! The Duchess used to talk about you often. ’Course, she wasn’t even sure you were alive back then. Now look at you. Grown up, and pretty as your mother.”

He held out his hand.

“You have upset them with your display,” said Wavey.

“Then I’m sorry to hear it,” Borglum said. He did look sorry, too, just for a moment. Then he turned to Wavey again, as if he could not stop looking at her for long.

“So what brings you to London?” she asked slyly.

“How do you know it’s not just business?” asked Borglum. “All these workers Quercus has dragged here, hanging around bored and in need of entertainment. I’m on a humani-bloomin’-tarian mission to bring some excitement to their lives.” He chuckled. “Anyway, ’tis but a fleety visit. We’ll pass a fortnight here, then we’re for the north again. I was planning to come and find you in the morning. I thought you’d be too posh now to come and watch the carny. I got some news from the north I thought would interest you. About the tower up there. But come; come aboard the barge, my dearie-os. I’ll tell it to you all in comfort. . .”

“It is very late,” said Dr Crumb uncertainly. “Perhaps we should go home, and save this news for tomorrow. . .” But it was no use, for the dwarf had reached up to take Wavey’s arm and they were walking together towards the side exit, which hung half-open, revealing the hatchway of the
Knuckle Sandwich
waiting just outside. Fever gave her father an encouraging smile. She was tired too, but she was curious to find out who these strange friends of her mother were, and how she knew them. She was relieved when her father shrugged, and shook his head, and started following Wavey out of the tent.

Charley Shallow watched them go from his hiding place in the shadows between the back row of the seats and the tent wall. It was a good hiding place, but he was too far away from Wavey and the dwarf to catch what they were talking about. “
News for you
. . .” Borglum had said, hadn’t he? “. . .
about the power up there
. . .” Something like that. As they all started to leave he squirmed quietly sideways, hoping to get closer, but his foot came down on a loose plank beneath the seats which croaked like a bullfrog. Borglum, standing at the exit to hold the tent-flap open for his guests, looked round. There was a slinking sound and a flash of quicksilver reflections as he drew his dagger.

“Is someone there?” asked Dr Crumb, who was still jittery after the night’s display of violence.

“Prob’ly just some low-life come sneakin’ round to try an’ steal our fuel or catch a peek at Lady Midnight in her undiewear,” said Borglum. “Quatch! Stick!” he shouted. “Get out here!”

Charley heard the footsteps thudding down the gangplanks as the misshapes came scrambling out of the barge. He didn’t see them, though, since he was busy struggling his way out through the tent’s side by then; wrenching apart the ties that held two panels closed and forcing himself out through the gap he’d made.

Tent Town seemed quiet. He set off running, drawn by the faint sound of fiddle music and a raucous laugh from one of the canvas pubs. But behind him he could hear those ’shapes yelling to one another as they came out through the Carnival’s hungry mouth.

“There he goes!”

“Get him!”

Charley regretted running. If he’d just walked away casually the ’shapes might have taken him for a passer-by. He could have called out to them and said, “I seen the man you want; big fellow; he went that way!” But ideas like that always came to Charley just too late, and so he ran, and the misshapes ran after him. Along an alleyway between two rows of tents he went, leaping guy-lines like a hurdler. The pub he’d been aiming for loomed up ahead, but when he got close he saw it was a Movement place, with a northern name outside the door and northern songs spilling out. He couldn’t be sure how the folks in there would take it if a London boy came asking them to save him from angry ’shapes. They might help, but then again, they might stand back and watch the misshapes murdering him like a free show.

So he swerved around the pub, stumbled over a drunk in the shadows behind it and ran on, flagging now, wondering if any of the empty-looking tents around him would make a hiding place. But when he looked back he could see the misshapes behind him; big hairy Quatch and that snowmad boy, and if he could see them then they could see him and they’d follow him into any tent he chose like ferrets down a rabbit-hole.

On his left now something dark rose, like a sea-cliff rearing up out of a surf of tent-tops. It was the old temple of St Kylie. Till lately it had stood huddled round with houses at the heart of a busy web of streets, but the salvage gangs had taken all the houses now and left it lone and lorn. For the moment, fear of St Kylie had made them spare the temple, and Charley offered up a heartfelt prayer of thanks to her as he scampered round a corner, up the steps and into the shadows of the portico.

He could hear the voices of the misshapes coming closer, but they weren’t in sight yet, so he nipped through into the temple precinct; a space as big as their arena, open to the sky, where a statue of St Kylie towered behind a broad stone altar. He ran behind her, hoping the misshapes might be too superstitious to search there. Above him dozens of broken kites rustled and whispered on strings stretched between the temple’s eaves. The gods and goddesses of London seldom saw eye to eye on anything, but this past year they had all united to forbid their worshippers from making anything that flew, and most of the city’s temples now sported these swags of torn kites, like ugly bunting. On the wall behind the statue something glistened: a red circle with a blue line slashed through its centre. Charley had been seeing that symbol on walls all over London lately, or at least, in all the bits of London where walls still stood. It was the mark of the London Underground, and this particular one was still wet. He reached out quickly and touched it and his fingers came away smeared with fresh paint.