The Cloud Hunters Read online

  I didn’t ask her for more details of that day. Nor did she give any. Yet now that I knew the outline of what had happened, I could imagine the rest clearly enough.

  We sat on the deck; the breeze was in her hair; her green eyes were dark and thoughtful. After a while she looked at me again.

  ‘So now we have to go back,’ she said. ‘There’s just a short time left.’

  ‘Until?’

  ‘Quenant’s Day. When they’ll hang him. If we don’t free him first.’

  I wondered what I had got myself into.

  ‘And if you can’t? Or if you fail?’

  ‘Then, if that isn’t possible, then we find the man responsible for having him arrested.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We kill him,’ she said simply. ‘What else? If we can’t have my father back, then we’ll have revenge.’

  ‘But you can’t do that,’ I said. ‘You can’t kill him.’

  She looked at me, baffled.

  ‘Why not? It’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘No, it’s wrong,’ I said. ‘You know . . . an eye for an eye . . .’

  She still looked perplexed.

  ‘What do you mean? An eye for an eye?’

  ‘An eye for an eye and soon the whole world is blind.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You shouldn’t take revenge.’

  ‘So I should let you blind me but do nothing about it? Is that what you mean? Lie down, roll over? We should turn the other cheek, should we? To be struck in the face again? And again? How many blows and insults is someone supposed to take before they fight back, Christien? What if it was your father?’

  ‘All right, then what if you do rescue your father? You’re not still going to kill the man then?’

  ‘Maybe not. We’ll have to see. The chance may not come our way.’

  ‘You should seek redress in the law.’

  ‘But it was the law. Their law. Quenant law. Weren’t you listening? It was the law of their island. Anyone can make up laws or give the name of laws to injustices. So now this is our law. We’re tired of your law, Christien. We exhausted it. The law’s no good. The only real law is what you can do for yourself. The police aren’t going to risk their necks to rescue my father. They’ll leave him to rot. Are you telling me that if someone captured or killed your father you wouldn’t avenge him?’

  ‘I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do anything. But your father isn’t dead yet. I’m just saying –’

  ‘What? That you’d write a strongly worded letter of complaint, would you?’ she said with cutting sarcasm. ‘Is that what you’d do? Is that how they handle things in your nice, polite world? “Dear Sir,” do they say, “I wish to express my strongest objections to your hanging dogs and killing the people who try to save them. Please don’t let it happen again. Yours sincerely . . .” Is that how you put things right?’

  I kept silent. It wouldn’t have mattered what I said now, because anything I did say was just going to make things worse. If her short fuse got any shorter there’d be a major explosion.

  Finally I thought of something neutral and non-­inflammatory to say, a question which wouldn’t make her angry.

  ‘So who,’ I asked, ‘is Kaneesh?’

  ‘My uncle,’ she said. ‘My father’s brother. He’s going to help us to rescue him – or to do whatever else is necessary,’ she added. Her voice trailed away.

  ‘And me?’ I said.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes. Me. What am I going to do? Why am I here, Jenine?’

  ‘You wanted to come. You asked to be here,’ she answered, with disingenuous simplicity. ‘You wanted to know what it meant to be a Cloud Hunter, and now you’re finding out.’

  ‘Jenine . . . why did you agree to my coming along?’

  ‘All right. We’re hoping that you might help us too. Help with the rescue . . . and anything else that might need to be done.’

  ‘But I might not want to do that, to help with your rescue or your revenge. I might not want anything to do with it.’

  ‘We just need you to stay and look after the ship. That’s all. You don’t have to go on land.’

  ‘Don’t you think,’ I said, ‘that you should have asked me and told me all this beforehand? And have explained to me in advance what I was letting myself in for? Instead of leaving it until it’s too late for me to get off your boat? What if I want to turn around and go back home?’

  ‘OK, Christien,’ she said. ‘If you’re afraid –’

  ‘I’m not afraid, I just –’ But then I corrected myself. Why lie about it? ‘OK, Jenine, I am afraid. What’s wrong with that? Aren’t you? Why should I pretend I’m not afraid when I am? Fear’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m human and it’s a human emotion. We can’t help it. So yes, I am scared and that’s the truth. And at least I’m not too proud or stupid to admit it. Aren’t you afraid?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But what can I do? He’s my father. Of course I’m scared. But we can help each other to be brave, can’t we?’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘Look, Christien,’ she said, ‘we’re not going to make you do anything you don’t want to. If you don’t want to come all the way to Quenant with us, that’s fine. We’ll let you off at the next populated island. You can call your father from there and he can come and get you. Or you can catch a sky-bus home. I just thought you wanted an adventure, that was all.’

  ‘Yes, I did. But –’

  ‘Always a but, eh?’

  ‘But I wasn’t expecting . . . to . . . kill anyone . . . or get killed myself.’

  ‘With luck, it won’t be either. And if there is any killing to be done, we’ll do it. You can just watch. Or, rather, look the other way. How’s that?’

  The long, black tresses of her hair blew back from her face in the breeze. She moved away to the other side of the boat, leaving me there staring out at the wisps of clouds and wondering what I had got myself into.

  I thought of something I had read in a book once. It said that there are two tragedies in life: the first is not getting what you want; the second is when you do get it. I’d always wondered what that meant. But I was beginning to understand it now.

  She called across the deck to me.

  ‘Well then, Christien?’ she said. ‘Do you want to be dropped off at the next island? Or do you want to make the rest of the journey with us? I’d like you to stay. But you don’t have to. It’s our quarrel. Not yours. We’d understand. I wouldn’t think any the less of you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay. I’ll stay.’

  I answered her without even thinking. And then I did think. Long and hard. I thought to myself that I must be mad. But it felt like a pleasurable madness. And I wasn’t going to change my mind.

  I stayed because she said she wanted me to. For that, and for no other reason.

  26

  dive

  The strange thing was, after an hour or two, how little it bothered me: that prospect of what lay ahead. After all, everybody lives under some precariously dangling sword or other; they just don’t realise it most of the time.

  Accident, illness, death, disaster: such threats hang over us every second of the day. Yet mostly we behave as if they didn’t exist or we cultivate enough indifference to them to carry on regardless.

  It was a long way to the Forbidden Isles, I told myself. We hadn’t got there yet and might never arrive. We still had to pass by the Islands of Night. Perhaps we wouldn’t survive even that leg of the journey.

  So why worry about being hanged by the intolerant Quenant, when we might get eaten by sky-sharks first? Why worry about one particular unpleasantness, when there were so many others that could precede it? No. If you were going to worry about all the bad things that could happen, you’d never enjoy any of the good ones that sometimes did.

  I wondered who would be sad about me, if I did die. My parents, of course; a few school friends; Jenine, maybe, if she were still alive hers
elf. I’d maybe get a nice headstone in the memorial gardens. We don’t bury anyone here; there are no graveyards. Everyone and everything just turns to ashes in the end. The sun gives life and it’s to the sun that we return. The sun is heat, light and existence, and also death and darkness, cemetery and oblivion. It is where we bury our dead. Clean fire. No rot. No decay. Just the long journey down, to where the air ends, to that great, inextinguishable, all-consuming furnace. First the remembrance ceremony, then we set sail, with the body wrapped in a winding sheet, and we lower it over the side, and let it fall.

  So no graves, just headstones in the gardens of remembrance; only our memories, and memories of memories. And as long as there is one person left alive to remember, we all live on. At least that’s what we believe.

  Near our house is a Field of Remembrance, on the headland overlooking the void. Some names here are of the first pioneers – the ones who came from an overcrowded, polluted, war-ridden, dying Earth – their names and their dates and their unfamiliar birthplaces, along with quotations from old poems.

  While I was lazing on deck thinking about this, Kaneesh came over and stood looking down at me. As usual he had his knife in his belt and he was rattling his dice in his hand. He seemed friendly for a change, chatty even – for him.

  ‘Hey, boy . . .’

  I squinted up at him. He grinned at me.

  ‘So you want to be a Cloud Hunter?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘One day.’

  Behind him I saw Carla get to her feet.

  ‘Well,’ Kaneesh said. ‘If you want to be a Cloud Hunter, then you should look like a Cloud Hunter. And to look like a Cloud Hunter . . .’

  He took his knife from his belt and he pointed with the tip of it to the deep scars on his face running down from eye to mouth.

  ‘Kaneesh . . .’

  Carla was level with him, ready if necessary to try to take the knife. But he just laughed at her – or, more probably, at me.

  ‘Only offering,’ he said. ‘Only offering to do the boy a small favour.’

  And he returned to the wheelhouse to check our bearings and to alter course a little. Then he began to whistle, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, as if he hadn’t just offered to do some minor surgical alterations to my face with his sharp, and probably very unhygienic, knife.

  He hadn’t mentioned an anaesthetic either.

  I think he just had a weird sense of humour.

  Another stint of steady sailing took us closer to that darkness which we had first glimpsed some kilometres before.

  ‘How long till we’re there?’ Jenine asked her mother.

  ‘Three, four hours,’ she said.

  ‘Is there time to swim?’

  Carla motioned to Kaneesh to close the solar panels and slow the ship.

  ‘A short one,’ she said.

  Jenine walked over to me and kicked the sole of my shoe.

  ‘Hey, lazy,’ she said. ‘You coming for a sky-swim?’

  I got to my feet.

  ‘Sure.’

  But when I took one look over the side of the boat, I was petrified. It was a very, very long way down.

  I hadn’t done a lot of swimming in the open air, not without a safety net under me. The public swimming area off the rocks at home was one thing. But that was the shallows compared to this. This was deep, wide air, an ocean of sky. Lose your buoyancy here and you’d never recover. You’d only stop falling when you were a cinder.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked.

  She had climbed up to the top of the rail and was poised, about to dive.

  ‘If you are,’ I said.

  Without another word, she sprang like a fired arrow, arcing gracefully into the air, and then falling down into the abyss.

  Then she suddenly levelled, and she was floating on her back, looking up at me, laughing.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you coming in? The air’s lovely. I felt so cooped up on deck. It’s lovely to stretch. Or have you changed your mind?’

  Kaneesh and Carla were watching. I couldn’t embarrass myself any more than I already had.

  ‘Come on then, if you’re coming. We don’t have long.’

  I decided not to risk a dive. I tentatively lowered myself over the side, clinging onto the rope ladder.

  ‘Just let go of it. Let go and swim. It’s the same as water. Just let go.’

  I let go.

  I thought I was going to die. Or throw up. But I didn’t do either. I floated like a cloud.

  We didn’t swim for long. The air density makes it just possible not to sink. But the feeling is always there, in the pit of your stomach, that the bubble of what you are doing is about to burst, and then you’ll zoom around, like a punctured balloon, before falling limply to your death.

  Air-swimming is like tightrope-walking. What keeps you up there is a certain degree of skill, a certain amount of faith, and a large (and probably misplaced) quantity of self-confidence. You must never face the reality that your skill, faith and confidence are probably all delusions. Do that and you’re finished.

  After ten minutes we returned to the boat. Kaneesh uncovered the solar panels. We took up speed again and sailed on towards the Islands of Night. Beyond them I could see tall, spreading plumes of smoke and fire. I asked Jenine what they were.

  ‘The Fire Islands,’ she said. ‘They’ve burned and smouldered for years.’

  ‘Why don’t they burn out?’ I said.

  ‘They will, one day, I suppose.’

  But for now they went on burning, glowing orange and red amid the black and grey smoke. They looked like demons’ eyes.

  Night.

  Too often here, it doesn’t exist. So it is somehow exciting to find it. And between the Islands of Night there is real blackness and deep, impenetrable shadow: permanent nightfall.

  These islands stretch for over a thousand kilometres. One island hovers above the other, and the darkness is sandwiched between them, like the filling in a cake.

  Our route lay not lengthways, but in traversing their widths at the narrowest crossing point. So our journey through darkness was nearer to three hundred than a thousand kilometres. But it was still a long, dangerous way.

  We were fifteen or twenty minutes away from entering that black tunnel when Kaneesh, leaving Carla to steer, disappeared down into one of the cabins.

  Jenine and I sat at the prow, watching the approaching dusk. We appeared to be sailing into the open maws of some great monster, whose jaws were made from two huge chunks of land. The darkness gaped at us; it even seemed to grin invitingly, in a macabre and baleful way.

  Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

  Kaneesh came back up from below carrying waterproofs. He threw one set in my direction and handed another to Jenine.

  ‘Put it on,’ he said. ‘You’ll be cold.’

  He was right. As we approached the dark, the temperature dropped. The chill of cold, and the chill of apprehension, entered into you simultaneously, one seeming to trigger off, and to feed on, the other.

  Soon we were levelling with the two great islands: one above us, one beneath. Each cast a giant shadow upon the other, creating that tunnel of night. The islands were reputedly unstable too, like dormant volcanoes, and due, at some point, to collapse, one upon the other; it might be tomorrow; it might not be for another million years. The fact that the jaws could close upon you at any moment merely added, of course, to your travelling enjoyment.

  We entered the darkness. I looked back. The light behind us was quickly fading. I felt a moment of blindness and panic. But gradually my eyes became accustomed to the dark and I saw that it was not quite as absolute as it had first appeared.

  Kaneesh turned on the ship’s navigation lights, along with a powerful spotlight, mounted on the bows. There was ample power in the solar batteries, more than enough to take us through the darkness and back out into the light.

  First the chill and the dark. Then, when you had adjusted to that, the n
ext thing you noticed was the silence. We sailed on into it. It flowed all around us, above and beneath, running like the silent water of a silent stream.

  After fifteen minutes it was nearly as dark behind us as it was ahead. There was just the pale glow of the light we had left, of the lost, open sky, glowing as a faint candle in a room full of night, a pinhole in a box.

  The silence was heavy and contagious; the lack of sound made you almost afraid to break it. It seemed as if we were in church, a vast cathedral, where mute, invisible monks were at their solemn devotions, worshipping unseen gods of darkness and tranquillity, and where it would have been blasphemy to speak.

  Kaneesh broke the silence. Yet even he kept his voice low, and his tone, if not reverential, was at least respectful of this eerie, alien place.

  ‘Over there . . .’

  We looked up. A pale, flaccid creature of bloated appearance, half the size of our ship, wafted out of the darkness and floated effortlessly, weightlessly past us, barely flicking its fins.

  ‘What a disgusting . . .’

  It peered at us through tiny, purblind eyes, as if eyes were not things it really needed here in the darkness that was its element; for it had a dozen other, more useful senses, that helped it to get around and to survive.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Sky-slug,’ Jenine said. ‘We’ll see plenty more of them.’

  As she spoke, the creature’s mouth fell slackly open to reveal plates of baleen, like a whale’s. It was a filter feeder. It scooped up tiny creatures as it went along, insects and sky-minnows and anything that didn’t need chewing. It swallowed them whole. Its mouth looked big enough to swallow any one of us too, and I was glad when it had gone by. I didn’t want to be eaten by some big tea strainer.

  The creatures that evolved to live in darkness must be among the ugliest in creation. Arguably, when no one can see you, it doesn’t matter what you look like. Though that still wouldn’t explain why ugliness ever took precedence over beauty, even in the dark. All because no one can see you, that’s no reason to look ghastly. It’s not as if it costs more money to be nicer looking, and it surely can’t be more of an effort.