Predator's gold

34

But Anchorage had not drowned. Borne away from Arkangel by strong currents, it floated into thick fog, the ragged raft of ice it perched on grinding sometimes against other drifting floes.

When daylight came again most of the city gathered at the railings on the bow of the upper tier. With the engines turned off there was little work for anyone to do, and little to talk about, for the future looked so bleak and brief that no one cared to mention it. They stood in silence, listening to the slap of waves against the ice and peering through gaps in the shifting fog for glimpses of this strange new sight, the sea.

“Do you think this might be just a big polynya, or a narrow stretch of open water?” asked Freya hopefully, walking out on to the forward observation deck with her Steering Committee. She hadn’t been sure what a margravine should wear for Going to a Watery Grave, so she had put on the old embroidered anorak and sealskin boots she used to wear for trips aboard her mother’s ice-barge, and a matching hat with pom-poms. She regretted it now, because the pom-poms kept bouncing in an inappropriately cheery way, making her feel she had to be optimistic. “Maybe we will drift across it and find good safe ice to run upon again?”

Windolene Pye, pale and tired from tending the wounded, shook her head. “I would guess these waters don’t freeze until the deeps of winter. I think we will drift on until we ground on some desolate shore, or the ice-floe breaks up and we sink. Poor Tom! Poor Hester! Coming all this way back to save us, and all for nothing!”

Mr Scabious put his arm around her, and she leaned gratefully against him. Freya looked away, embarrassed. She wondered if she should tell them that it had been Hester who brought Arkangel down on them in the first place, but it didn’t seem fair somehow, not with the poor girl still sitting vigil at Tom’s deathbed. Anyway, Anchorage needed a good heroine at the moment. Better by far to let the blame for the Huntsmen rest with that fraud Pennyroyal. He was to blame for everything else, after all.

She was still trying to think of something to say when a sleek black back broke the surface, just off the forward edge of the ice-floe.

It came up like a whale through a wash of white waters, venting air in a hissing plume, and everyone thought a whale was what it was until they began to make out patterns of rivets on the metal hull; hatchways and windows and stencilled lettering.

“It’s those parasite devils!” shouted Smew, running past with his wolf-rifle. “Come back for more loot!”

The wallowing machine extended its spider-legs to grip the edges of the ice-floe, hauling itself up out of the water. Sleds were already speeding to meet it, packed with armed men from the engine district. Smew raised his rifle, taking careful aim as the hatch popped open.

Freya reached out and pushed the gun aside. “No, Smew. There’s only one.”

Surely it could not be a threat, this lone vessel surfacing so openly? She peered down at the stiff, skinny figure who came creeping up through the parasite’s hatchway, only to be grabbed and pinioned by some of Scabious’s men. She could hear raised voices, but not what they were saying. With Smew, Scabious and Miss Pye at her side she hurried to the head of the stairs that led down on to the city’s skirts, waiting nervously as the captive was led up to meet her. The closer he came, the more grotesque he looked, his misshapen face coloured purple and yellow and green. She knew the parasite-riders were thieves, but she hadn’t thought they were monsters!

And then he was standing in front of her, and he wasn’t a monster, just a boy of her own age to whom horrible things had been done. Some of his teeth were missing, and a terrible red weal scarred his throat, but his eyes, blinking out at her from a mask of scabs and fading bruises, were black and bright and rather lovely.

She pulled herself together and tried to sound like a margravine. “Welcome to Anchorage, stranger. What brings you here?”

Caul opened and closed his mouth, but couldn’t think of what to say. He was out of his depth. All the way from Grimsby he’d been planning for this moment, but he had spent so much of his life trying not to be seen by Drys that it felt unnatural to be standing here in the open with so many of them. Freya shocked him a little, too. It wasn’t just the boyish haircut; she seemed bigger and taller than he remembered, and her face was rosy; she was not at all the pale, dreamy girl he had grown used to from the screens. Behind her stood Scabious, and Smew, and Windolene Pye and half the city, all glaring at him. He began to wonder if it might not have been easier to die in Grimsby after all.

“Speak, boy!” ordered the dwarf who stood at Freya’s side, jabbing Caul’s belly with his rifle. “Her Radiance asked you a question!”

“He was carrying this, Freya,” said one of Caul’s captors, holding up a battered tin tube. The people crowding behind Freya drew back with nervous little gasps, but Freya recognized the thing as an old-fashioned document container. She took it from the man, unscrewed the lid and pulled out a roll of papers. Looked at Caul again, smiling.

“What are these?”

The breeze, which had been rising unnoticed since the Screw Worm surfaced, tugged at the papers, fluttering their crisp, age-browned edges and threatening to pull them from Freya’s hands. Caul reached out and grabbed them. “Careful! You need those!”

“Why?” asked Freya, staring down. There were red marks on the boy’s wrists where cords had cut into the flesh, and red marks on the papers too; words written old-fashioned in rust-coloured ink, latitudes and longitudes; the thin, wriggling line of a coast. A rubber-stamped notice warned, Not To Be Removed From The Reykjavik Library.

“It’s Snori Ulvaeusson’s map,” said Caul. “Uncle must have stolen it from Reykjavik years ago, and it’s been sitting in his map room ever since. There are notes, too. It tells you how to get to America.”

Freya smiled at his kindness, and shook her head. “But there’s no point. America’s dead.”

In his urgency to make her understand, Caul gripped her hand. “No! I read it all on the way here. Snori wasn’t a fraud. He really found green places. Not great forests like Professor Pennyroyal imagined. No bears. No people. But places where there are grass and trees and…” He’d never seen grass, let alone a tree; his imagination kept letting him down. “I don’t know. There’ll be animals and birds, fish in the water. You might have to go static, but you could live there.”

“But we’ll never be able to reach it,” Freya said. “Even if it’s real, we’ll never get there. We’re adrift.”

“No…” said Mr Scabious, who had been peering over her shoulder at the map. “No, Freya, we can do it! If we can just stabilize this floe we’re sitting on, and rig up some propellers…”

“It isn’t far,” said Miss Pye, reaching over Freya’s other shoulder and resting her finger on the map, where the head of one long winding inlet was labelled Vineland. A spattering of islands showed there, so small that they might have been just ink-blots, except that old Snori Ulvaeusson had marked each one with a childish drawing of a tree. “Perhaps seven hundred miles. Nothing at all, compared with the distance we’ve travelled!”

“But what are we thinking of?” Scabious turned to Caul, and Caul took a few shuffling steps backwards, remembering how he’d driven this poor old man half mad with his ghostly appearances in the engine district. Scabious seemed to be remembering it too, for his gaze turned cold and far away, and for a long moment the only sounds were the faint, nervous stirrings of the crowd and the rustle of the breeze-blown papers in Freya’s hands. “Do you have a name, boy?” he asked.

“Caul, sir,” said Caul.

Scabious stretched out his hand, and smiled. “Well, you look cold, Caul, and hungry. We shouldn’t keep you standing here. We can discuss all this at the palace.”

Freya remembered her manners. “Of course!” she said, as the crowd around her started to break up, everyone talking excitedly about the map. “You must come to the Winter Palace, Mr Caul. I’ll ask Smew to make hot chocolate. Where is Smew? Oh, never mind, I can do it myself…”

And so the margravine led the way along Rasmussen Prospekt with Scabious and Miss Pye close behind, Caul walking nervously between them, and others hurrying to swell the strange procession as word spread that the boy from the sea had brought new hope: the Aakiuqs and the Umiaks and Mr Quaanik, and Smew pushing his way to the front, and Freya waving Snori Ulvaeusson’s map in its old tin holder and laughing and joking with them all. It wasn’t very dignified behaviour, and she knew that her Mama and Papa and her mistress of etiquette and her ladies-in-waiting would not have approved, but she didn’t care: their time was gone; Freya was margravine now.