The Cloud Hunters Read online

  ‘If you don’t like it,’ Kaneesh told the dealer, ‘then leave. We’ll sell it to someone else. I can find a private buyer, just like that!’

  He snapped his fingers under the dealer’s nose. The man didn’t even blink. He was used to hard bargaining, thrived on it. It was his meat and drink.

  ‘Kaneesh!’

  Carla appealed for his patience. Kaneesh walked away and left them to it. Protracted negotiations took place. The water was tasted again. Maybe, the dealer conceded, it didn’t seem quite so bad this time. Yes, maybe it was drinkable. Not any kind of vintage, of course, but decent enough.

  And so it went on until they agreed on a price. They shook hands and the dealer left. He soon returned, with some of his men and a large, wheeled container. They connected it up to the ship’s tanks and drained them out. Then he paid and Kaneesh counted the money – twice – before letting him leave.

  It was time for me to go too. I thanked them for taking me with them – the way I’d always been told to do.

  ‘You’re welcome, Christien,’ Carla said.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess,’ I said to Jenine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I hope you enjoyed yourself.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That’s our hospitality returned then.’

  ‘Don’t feel you shouldn’t invite me again, though,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Christien.’

  I nodded to Kaneesh. He nodded back, just about. Or maybe he didn’t. Perhaps it was the motion of the boat which made it look that way. Then I waved one final time and turned for home, my bedroll over one shoulder, my bag over the other.

  I walked on by all the familiar sights, past the landmarks and the people I knew. Soon I saw my house and, beyond it, the fine view of the open sky and the distant islands. My mother was tending her small herb garden. In her hand was a can of water, spray dribbling from the spout. You had to be well off to afford a garden and a pool, even one only half full of water. My father was sitting reading the newspapers, a drink in his hand. He looked up and saw me and he waved, then he called to my mother.

  I felt that I didn’t belong to them or to this place quite as much as I had. I had gone where they had never been, already seen sights they had never witnessed. I suppose that’s how it happens: little by little you grow up; little by little, you detach yourself from the old familiar things. Then one day you realise that you have let them go completely, and they no longer have a hold on you either. Not as they once did. You are like two hands, still reaching out for each other, but your fingers no longer quite touch. You have let each other slip; you have to let go.

  ‘Did you have a nice time, dear?’ my mother asked. ‘Nice weekend? With your . . .’ She hesitated, wondering what to call them, and finally settled on, ‘. . . friends?’

  I told her that it had been all very nice, very interesting and highly educational. I stressed the educational aspects. My father was listening and seemed both doubtful and amused.

  ‘And you did all your homework?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good.’

  I wanted to tell them right then and there that I had made a great decision; that I now knew what I wanted to do with my life, what I wanted to be. I knew how I intended to spend my adult years and days, until my time had all run out.

  I want to be a Cloud Hunter, when I grow up and leave home . . .

  But it sounded too childish, even to me. It was the when I grow up part that did it.

  I want to be a Cloud Hunter . . . one day . . . soon . . .

  So I didn’t say anything, not then. I decided not to tell them for a while. For I could picture my mother’s face clouding over with dismay and disappointment, and my father, wry and indulgent, saying, ‘Oh, give the lad his head for a while. He’ll soon grow out of it.’ As if he knew all the ways of the world, and that my dreams were just a passing phase on the road to some greater maturity.

  No, I’d keep my goal to myself, and slowly work towards it. And one day I would go. I’d sail out into the vast blue sky in search of the great grey and white clouds. And this time – this time – I’d go and I’d never come back.

  The long end-of-term holiday was six weeks ahead. But the time which preceded it seemed longer than any holiday ever could. There I was, and there were my grand designs, and we had been intercepted by eternity. The great obstacle of time had come between us. Time is a barrier nobody can transcend; it is a wall nobody can climb over. And if anyone has invented a way to make it go faster, I’ve yet to see it.

  I wanted to go again, with Jenine, with her mother, Carla, and the heathen-looking Kaneesh, with his dice and knives and his tallies of what he’d killed, carved in five-barred notches all up his arms and around the boat. Not just for a few days this time, but on some long, splendid voyage, all the way to the other side of the Main Drift, to the Isles of Dissent, the Forbidden Isles, and far beyond.

  The problem was, would they want me? Or, failing to want me, would they be willing to put up with me and take me along? And if they were, or could be persuaded to, what about my parents? We usually went for two weeks’ vacation on a luxury sky-cruiser. It was so much of a habit that it had all but turned into an obligation.

  I could imagine my mother’s face, a picture of perplexity and hurt, when I announced that I didn’t want to go this year, that I would prefer to spend the time with disreputable Cloud Hunters, sleeping on a bedroll on deck and prising fat sky-lice off the hull with a sharp boat hook.

  I dropped hints, small ones at first. I muttered about ‘growing up now’ and ‘doing something different this year, maybe with some friends perhaps’, and of ‘going away on my own’.

  My father, as ever, peered over the top of his newspaper at me, with benevolent scepticism, as though the fact of my trying to establish some independence was a source of endless amusement to him. Or maybe it was the battle between myself and my mother which kept him entertained. I think he regarded himself as some sort of a referee, the kind who occasionally gets embroiled in the fight and trodden on by the contestants.

  Every hint I dropped my mother resolutely refused to pick up. Whenever I expressed the opinion that it would be nice to do something on my own, she countered with how pleasant it was for ‘the family to be together’. And my father went on trying to remain aloof from these domestic disturbances. He watched the battles like an observer up on the hills.

  I suspected that, if anything, he was on my side, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t come down on it, for he didn’t want my mother to feel that he was ganging up with me against her. As a result, he would never commit himself. Whenever she appealed for his support and said, ‘Don’t you think?’, he would yes-and-no and hum-and-ha about it all, until she got so exasperated she would give up on him and start back on me again.

  But if there was one thing I shared with my mother, it was determination and stubbornness. If the Cloud Hunters would have me, then I was going to go with them again. Even if I had to slip away in the night, leaving a note on the kitchen table saying, ‘See you when I get back,’ and with no immediate forwarding address or contact telephone number.

  If they would have me, of course, that was. If.

  I couldn’t truthfully say that Jenine was conspicuously friendlier after that weekend away than she had been before it. At least not in front of other people. But maybe she was a little warmer if we were ever together on our own.

  Sometimes I would look at myself in the mirror and try to imagine my face with the deep, long scars running from my cheekbones down to my jaws, and envisage my arms banded with tattoos, circling like dark bracelets around them.

  I could picture my mother’s horror if I ever came home looking like that. I could hear her – Oh no! Christien! What have you done to yourself! Followed by the crash of scattering furniture as she passed out. I’d have to be a Cloud Hunter then. There wouldn’t be anything else for it. No other career would be open.

  Some people bel
ieve that your destiny is written in your face, or in the lines of your hands. Well, if that was true for anyone, it was true for the Cloud Hunters. Their scars wrote their futures for them, every page, line and word of the book.

  I had only once seen someone with those facial scars doing anything other than hunting clouds. She was a clerk in one of my father’s offices. How, or why, she had given up the hunt, I didn’t know. But there she sat, in a corner of the office, filling in requisitions and compiling cargo lists, looking like a sky-fish which no longer had the air to swim in, trapped and cooped and unhappy: a wild but imprisoned thing.

  She left one day, quite suddenly. She married a settler and they went off to scrape a living on a small, barren island they had bought together. There are thousands of such islands, cheap to get but hard to live on. Still, at least there was nobody there to stare at her scars. Sometimes the only way to be fully accepted is to be with people just like you, or to be alone – another hermit on another rock.

  The scars on the Cloud Hunters’ faces just draw your eye to them, despite your best endeavours to be polite and not to stare. It’s rude to stare, of course, yet you can’t help but look sometimes and wonder at the difference between you and them. Maybe there isn’t one, not inside, but the outside makes you think so. The scars come between you. You can’t pretend that you don’t see them, or that they aren’t there.

  Usually, I suppose, everyone has somewhere, some land to call their own. But there are always a few people who have nowhere, the dispossessed, and the Cloud Hunters were among them. They had their boats, but as far as dry, solid land went, there was nowhere in the world they called home. They only thing that was really theirs was the sky. And what is the sky? Just empty air. And who can possess that? Nobody owns the sky. Quite the opposite. If anything, the sky owns us all. We are just its citizens. But the sky is the kingdom.

  20

  free lunch

  One day, about three weeks before term was due to end, it rained sky-fish.

  A huge shoal was passing, accompanied by the usual attendant predators and opportunists: sky-sharks and sky-fins and all the rest. The fish dropped out of the sky all day long, dead or dying from fatigue.

  You just needed to hold your hand out and one would fall into it. Or you could leave an empty cooking pot outside and it would be full by the time you returned home. Some of the fish even fell down through skylights, or smashed solar panels, or they landed in water butts, and drowned.

  These sky-fish ‘invasions’ happened occasionally. The fish weren’t always edible either; they might be diseased, or had been swimming non-stop for days on end and were exhausted and scrawny.

  All the dead and fallen fish had to be gathered up and disposed of before they started to rot. I went out into the garden after school to help pick them up. They were clammy and cold. Their eyes stared glassily and their wings were folded.

  If you opened the wings up, they were like elongated fins, translucent and iridescently shimmering. It was a shame that the sky-fish had died, but we had to get rid of them, or the smell of decomposition would have been awful. Nothing smells good when it’s a few days dead.

  Once, when I was out in our garden, I thought the sky was bleeding. I was kicking a ball around when I felt a spot of moisture drop onto the back of my hand. I glanced up, but the sky was clear, with not a cloud anywhere.

  I looked at the drop again and saw that it was red. Further drops were falling all around me. I shielded my eyes and looked directly upwards. High, far above me, two sky-sharks were visible in silhouette, fighting to the death. They fought for hours, two great entangling and threshing shadows. They were still fighting when I went in to go to bed.

  In the morning the body of one of them lay in the garden. My mother rang the council and they came and took it away.

  There are tales of children being snatched from the streets, lifted from bicycles or taken from their prams, by hungry sky-sharks. But it always happened to the family of a friend of a friend and no one I ever knew. They’re just stories to scare you with.

  Throughout the following weeks, I waged a campaign on two fronts, and continued to drop large and conspicuous hints in places where people could not help but trip over them.

  I kept asking Jenine what her intentions were for the long vacation, though I knew perfectly well already that she, her mother and Kaneesh were committed to taking water to the Isles of Dissent.

  I observed that an extra pair of hands would be sure to come in handy on a long trip like that, and that I knew of a good, available pair, which might be willing to work for nothing.

  Jenine never said much by way of direct encouragement, just smiled, as if she knew perfectly well what I was up to, which she doubtlessly did. But I hoped she might pass the information on to her mother.

  At home, meanwhile, I diligently kept up the other half of the campaign. I regularly mentioned wanting to ‘do something different this year’. I complained that the annual family holiday was all well and good but that there wasn’t much to do for ‘someone of my age’ on a cruise ship filled with ‘little kids and old fogies’.

  I rubbed away like sandpaper. My mother seemed immune to persuasion, but my father was more sympathetic, saying, ‘Well, if he’s not going to enjoy it . . .’ and, ‘If he’d rather be with people his own age . . .’

  Then one day I was able to come back and announce that I had been ‘invited away for a couple of weeks in the holiday’. Which was quite untrue, of course. I hadn’t been invited anywhere, but I’d screwed up my courage and had finally asked to go along.

  Jenine and her mother had agreed to my going and had basically conceded that they might be prepared to put up with me for a while. Whether Kaneesh felt the same was doubtful. But there was only one of him. Which was just as well.

  In the end my parents agreed that I could go. Our ultimate destination, the Isles of Dissent, did not worry my father so much as which route the Cloud Hunters proposed taking to get there. He spoke to Jenine’s mother and she assured him that we would be avoiding anything hazardous and would be giving trouble a very wide berth.

  At least that was the intention. But the nature of intentions is such that even the best of them can make paving stones for the road to hell; and to other equally hot and unpleasant places.

  I was pleased, but apprehensive. So often, when you get what you want, you immediately begin to think, Do I, did I, really want it? Being tenacious has its value. But you can end up fighting on a point of principle, only to discover, if and when you win, that it wasn’t just the principle that motivated you, it was the pleasure of the fight as well.

  But I was pleased to think that I could only be going because Jenine wanted my company. If she had told her mother that she didn’t want me there, then that would have been the end of it. Or that was what I imagined. And why not? For what sort of a sad, useless life is it if you can’t even dream? For dreams don’t cost anything and they don’t usually hurt anyone, except, perhaps, the people who dream them.

  As I waited impatiently for the weeks, and then the final days, to pass to the end of term, the boat went to and from the harbour the same as ever.

  Sometimes Carla and Kaneesh came back with the tanks empty, but usually the water dealer could be seen making his way to their ship shortly after it had docked. He always walked with the air of a man who could take it or leave it. Yet he never dawdled either, in case someone else got there first. A good dealer must feign indifference, but do so at reasonable speed.

  Every few months we would see the huge water fleets of the United Isles pass by. This great archipelago has a land mass of millions of square kilometres, and is enormously wealthy and powerful. Not that we are part of it. Our island is independent, and named Sovereign Isle. Not because we have any royalty. Just because of the shape of the island, which is like a huge, flat coin, with hills and rocks on it; and, when seen from a distance, it resembles the profile of someone’s head.

  The United Isles never bough
t from Cloud Hunters. Their water fleets ranged for vast distances, comprising massive sky-ships: long, flat vessels with enormous storage capacity. They flew the flag of the United Isles and had their hulls painted in their national colours. The water they collected was for their sole use. They rarely sold it on.

  The fleets would lumber along like great juggernauts, so immense they even dwarfed the pods of sky-whales which passed alongside them, swooping under their bows, or even nudging against them, sending shudders through the vessels, as the whales endeavoured to scratch their itchy backs on the bulwarks to rid themselves of their fleas.

  Once in a while, a caravan of nomadic traders would pass overhead. They travelled together in long convoys of numerous sky-boats, propelled by wind and sun, or towed along by harnessed and muzzled sky-sharks.

  The great caravans could take days to pass, or they might decide to stop and to hover offshore, so that people could go out in their own boats to see what the merchants had to sell, and to haggle with them over terms and prices. Sometimes the nomads organised races and would send their half-tamed sky-fins streaking across the sky, with riders on their backs. My father claimed that the races were fixed and he would never bet on them. But plenty of other people were ready to gamble and some won a fortune. Or, more likely, lost one.

  But finally – finally – the school term was over. The holiday was upon us, and the long trip to the distant and intriguing Isles of Dissent was to begin.

  21

  departure

  We left in the morning. The earliness of the hour and coolness of the air seemed to rob my departure of much of its occasion.

  My parents had risen early to be there to say goodbye and we sat bleary-eyed and half awake at the breakfast table. It hardly felt like an apt moment for affectionate farewells; it seemed more like a time for going back to bed and pulling the covers up over your ears.