The Cloud Hunters Read online

  Another day and your tongue is swollen in your mouth. You can barely swallow, hardly speak. But what’s there to say, anyway? And still the clouds don’t come.

  You look at the tracker, despairing now, accusing. ‘You told us to stay here. Had we kept sailing we’d be safe now and the holds would be brimming with water. But no. We’re still waiting, and the barrels are dry. And still the clouds don’t come.’

  The tracker says nothing. He lies in the shade, immobile, inscrutable. Does he really know what he’s doing? Or is he also starting to doubt?

  Time tries to pass, but it can hardly move; it crawls like a snail on a hot afternoon. A sky-angel swims by, followed by a sky-clown, their markings vivid and surreal, making them seem like the strangest, most miraculous creatures in the universe. Or perhaps you’ve begun to hallucinate from lack of water.

  You move your eyes to watch them, as you lie under the canopy, dry, parched and shrivelled in the everlasting blue. The sky-angels dive to the lower levels. A shoal of ugly-fish takes their place, drab and dreary and boggle-eyed, with faces like bags of stones.

  Still the clouds don’t come.

  And then –

  The tracker stirs. He moves a finger; he opens his eyes wider. He smiles and slowly uncoils his legs. You watch him. Why is he moving? There’s nothing to move or smile for. But he reaches up and pulls himself to his feet. Yet why does he waste energy in standing? Lie down, man. Don’t be a fool.

  But then you smell it: cool and moist; you taste it in your mouth; you feel the air grow damp. Drops of condensation wet your lips. Your blackened tongue peeks out, like a starving rat from a hole in the skirting; it tastes water.

  Finally you see it. Real? Or a mirage? Your own thirst, maybe, manufacturing illusions?

  But no, the cloud is there. It begins to form around you, in wisps and slivers. Soon, it’s a thin mist, and then it grows denser and darker. You feel cooler, then cold. Before you know it you can barely see your own hand in front of your eyes.

  You shout to the tracker – (oh ye of little faith!) – laughing, drinking in the moisture, wallowing in the damp, clammy cold.

  ‘You were right! It’s here now! It’s here!’

  So now to work. You call to the rest of the crew. The cloud is so thick you can only make out the others as dull shapes on deck. You feel your way to the familiar controls; you start up the engines and turn on the condensers. The suction pump starts and draws the moisture down into the tanks. It’s as if the whole boat were thirsty, gasping for water to save its life. And it gulps and swallows the vapour down with an insatiable, unquenchable appetite.

  It takes hours to fill the tanks. You go below to get some waterproofs on or you’ll start to shiver. Then back on deck. The hair on your head is as wet as if you’d taken a shower. Visibility is no more than a few metres. The blue of the sky is a memory; the heat of the sun has gone. But the condenser goes on humming, until at last the tanks are full and water is spilling from the overflow and the deck is sopping.

  Time to go. You turn the wheel and set a course for home. The tracker sits at the prow, a smile on his face, a well-earned flask of water in his hand and a plate of fried sky-shrimp beside him. He looks at you as if to say, ‘You see, I told you so. But you wouldn’t believe me, would you? You lost faith. You had your doubts.’

  You pretend otherwise, that you never wavered and you believed in him all along, and you always will. But you know that’s a lie. There will always be that element of doubt inside you, and, probably, inside him too. Nothing’s ever that certain. Even the best of the hunters gets it wrong sometimes. Nobody is infallible; no one always gets it right.

  I’m one hundred per cent sure about that.

  5

  invitation

  ‘I’m inviting someone back for dinner,’ I announced one day when I got home from school.

  My mother feigned delight. She was always telling me that I ought to be more sociable. But now that it had actually come to it, the inconvenience possibly outweighed the pleasure.

  ‘Oh, that’s – that’s wonderful,’ she said, with just enough hesitation to imply that it might not be. ‘Not on a school day, I hope. What with all the homework –’

  ‘Friday,’ I said.

  You couldn’t argue with Friday. There was the whole weekend ahead of it. You couldn’t be expected to do homework on a Friday.

  ‘I suppose that will be all right. Who is it? A boy in your year?’

  ‘A girl,’ I said.

  She looked at me.

  ‘A girl?’

  ‘Yes. But don’t panic,’ I told her. ‘Not a girlfriend. Just a friend, who happens to be a girl. Or a girl, who happens to be a friend. However you want to see it.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And I ought to warn you that she’s got scars.’

  ‘Scars?’

  ‘Running from here to here.’

  ‘Oh, how awful.’

  ‘No, they’re not. They look pretty good.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’

  ‘No. Nothing like that. In fact, they look so good I was thinking I wouldn’t mind some myself.’

  ‘Now you listen to me, Christien! Don’t you even dare –’

  ‘I was only saying, Mother. I’d never do it,’ I admitted. ‘It would be too painful anyway. She said they have to drink something first which makes your face go numb, then they get a very sharp knife and they –’

  My mother was looking green.

  ‘I think I’ve heard quite enough. And this is the girl who’s coming here? For supper?’

  ‘If that’s all right.’

  (Well, I assumed she was coming for supper. I hadn’t actually asked her yet. She might have been intending to go off with her mother in the boat, but I suspected not. The week had been damp and muggy, with clouds everywhere. There was no need for them to go out at the weekend. The boat must have had full tanks.)

  ‘Well, I don’t know . . .’

  She couldn’t say no, though. Had she said no, it would have gone against everything she and my father had always told me – about tolerance and integration and not being prejudiced against minorities and all the rest. So a reserved, ‘Yes, I suppose so’ was the only answer she could give. And that was exactly what I got.

  ‘But I don’t know what your father’s going to say.’

  I couldn’t see him saying anything. All I could imagine was him staring at Jenine’s mother if she came to the door to collect her daughter after supper, his jaw slowly dropping at the sight of this tall woman with her black hair and green eyes and her scarred face.

  He’d probably run a mile.

  I thought.

  Only it turned out I was wrong.

  My mother told him about the invitation later that evening.

  ‘A girl with scars, apparently,’ she said.

  My father looked up at me from his newspaper, vaguely amused.

  ‘Cloud Hunters?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Er – well – yes – I guess so,’ I admitted.

  He nodded too.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Ask her round.’

  But then I suppose you can’t spend your working life around at the Inter-Island Sky Trading Company, supervising the loading and unloading of barges and boats, seeing ships come in from every isle in the system, and not occasionally come across a Cloud Hunter.

  Maybe, I thought, I had underestimated him. Maybe my father dealt with people like Kaneesh and Carla on a daily basis, haggling with them over prices and arguing over the quantity of water in a tank or the quality of rice in a hold. The fact that he had not physically travelled so much did not mean that his mind was narrow. He had maybe met more people from more islands than those who had travelled a lifetime. He was fluent in at least five languages, including Common Dialect, and could get by in a handful more.

  ‘Bring her round,’ he said. ‘Let’s see her.’

  So I said I would.

  But, of course, before I could
do that, I had to persuade her to come.

  I decided that what it all came down to in the end was being respectable, or at least being seen to be. The appearance of respectability was what my mother cared about. Possibly more than its actuality.

  For there was Jenine’s mother, with two deep scars on her face and a mass of black ringlets cascading down over her shoulders. And there was her tracker, Kaneesh, who looked as if he would murder you for nothing if you crossed him on a bad day, and murder you for the fun of it on a good one.

  And then there was Jenine herself, who not only had facial scars like her mother, but hennaed hands with intricate designs upon them. And though they were doubtlessly three of the kindest and most considerate people, they certainly didn’t look it.

  They looked like – well, what did they look like? You could have said they looked like killers or renegades or refugees from the law. How were my respectable parents ever going to let me go cloud hunting with a crew who looked like that? Had they looked like vicars or singers in a choir, it might all have been easier.

  But appearances, of course, can be deceptive. Once you get to know people a little, your prejudices and misgivings about them tend to drop away. You soon discover that you have more similarities than differences. The fact that they smell of musk oil and carry a sharp knife in a sheath on their belt or are covered in scars and tattoos seems eventually not to matter. I was sure my mother would come to see it that way.

  Or so I hoped.

  It took me a long time to understand something, though – it took half a long voyage that I had yet to undertake. But the fact is that people never see themselves as you see them. They might hate things in themselves that you admire, or value what you perceive as faults. Jenine’s scars, for example. In most people’s eyes she was strikingly beautiful, and the scars made her even more so. But inside her, things were more complicated. She didn’t feel that way about herself and her scars were things she hated. Impossible as it seemed to me, she believed she was ugly.

  6

  refusal

  ‘No thanks.’

  I hadn’t anticipated her refusal. I had probably expected her to be delighted, flattered, even.

  Here I was, after all, a boy with the hospitality of a fairly big house to offer. We weren’t rich, but we were well off. We had a home on the coast with a view of the void, which almost took your breath away every time you looked at it.

  If you walked a few steps from our house, you were at the shore. And there, ahead, were views of the other islands, and beneath you was the vast, empty nothingness. It was staggering. It made your head spin and gave you vertigo every time you approached it. But I wasn’t afraid of falling, as I could air-swim fairly well; I’d swum at least three or four hundred metres out.

  If you think I mean flying by that, well, I don’t. It’s a different motion, more akin to swimming in water than anything a bird would do. The atmosphere here is thick and heavy, and if you learn the technique properly, you can swim and even float upon the air. If the air of the old earth could buoy up a great eagle, well, here the air can buoy up a person, as long as she knows how to use the currents and the updrafts.

  But panic, or lose your nerve, and you’ll fall. And the further you fall, the more momentum you acquire, and the harder it is to stop. Until it becomes quite impossible. So you plummet all the way to the fire; though you probably lose consciousness long before you get there – if that’s any kind of consolation.

  I’d been air-swimming since I was small. There was a wide safety net at the beach near our house, looped from stanchions, which stretched out from the coast. If you lost buoyancy there, it didn’t matter. You wouldn’t fall far, the net would catch you. Most people learn to air-swim from an early age. Then you’re safe and the sky can’t harm you; it’s just the element around you; it’s where you live.

  Fathers and mothers take their children to the beaches when they are still only a few months old, to let them have their first taste of swimming in the open air. At that age you’re too young to be afraid. But if you leave it until later, when you are old enough to know fear, such a mortal terror can come over you at the sight of that infinite drop that you’ll cling to the land and never leave it.

  Some islanders have never learned to air-swim and never will. They won’t go anywhere near the coast if they can avoid it. And if they ever have to travel, they strap on two or three buoyancy packs, and rope themselves to the deck rails with safety lines. For it’s a long way to the bottom, and there’s no coming back up. It’s even a kind of drowning. You drown in the fire of the sun.

  ‘No?’ I was not just disappointed but perplexed. ‘Not come for supper? But why not?’

  ‘I might just not want to,’ Jenine said.

  Well, I supposed that was fair enough, but it still didn’t seem like a good enough reason. It didn’t even seem like a credible one.

  ‘You can choose what you want to eat,’ I said, trying to make the offer more alluring.

  ‘Thanks all the same, but I don’t think so.’

  Then I understood. Or thought I did. It was her appearance that did it: her clothes, her dark hair and sunburnt skin; the long nails on her fingers, filed and sharpened so that they were almost like talons; and then there were the two facial scars. She looked impregnable, invulnerable. But maybe she wasn’t like that inside.

  Maybe the most ferocious of appearances actually contain the most sensitive of natures; looks can be deterrents, they are the hard shells around the soft insides.

  She was shy, reserved, wary of being out of her element. That had to be it.

  And, in the circumstances, why wouldn’t she be? We were possibly as strange and as exotic and alien to her as she and her mother and Kaneesh were to us.

  She lived on a boat and usually slept on the deck, and had probably done so most of her life. She had seen her own father tossed overboard in the midst of a gigantic solar storm, so the rumour had it. She had seen him flail and flutter like a leaf in the air, and had watched as he had fallen. Or so I had heard.

  Maybe she had also seen the sky-sharks dive and go after him, their fins twitching, their bulbous eyes gleaming, their mouths perpetually ajar, as if they had too many teeth ever to close them properly. Sky-sharks have fins as wide as wings. They never fall, only at the end when they die. They can swim as near to the sun as they can tolerate and they always make it back up.

  Despite their fearsomeness, sky-sharks are long and graceful, both menacing and beautiful at the same time. Sometimes they fly so close to land you can see their beady black eyes looking down at you. Should they come too low, people run indoors, or hurry to pick up stones and get their slingshots. But usually it isn’t necessary. Sky-sharks don’t like people and they don’t like land. They’re afraid of getting stranded and not being able to take off again.

  I’d have liked to have asked Jenine about what had happened to her father. But how do you ask someone a thing like that? You can hardly say, ‘Excuse me, but is it true that your father was swept overboard in a storm and got eaten alive by sky-sharks?’

  It wouldn’t be what you’d call tactful.

  So I just tried to persuade her.

  ‘Why not? Why not come?’

  ‘I don’t like houses, Christien,’ she said. ‘Sorry. But they make me feel cooped up and hemmed in. Even the classroom’s claustrophobic.’

  ‘But our house is spacious. It’s bigger than your boat.’

  ‘Does it have a deck, then?’

  ‘It’s got a balcony. We can eat outside, if you like.’

  ‘I do know how to use a knife and fork!’

  ‘I didn’t mean –’

  ‘And I don’t like people staring at me.’

  ‘No one’s going to stare at you.’

  ‘You stare at me. All the time.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. That’s –’

  ‘What?’

  Well, I could hardly tell her it was because I couldn’t take my eyes off her. So I
just denied it.

  ‘My parents are far too polite to stare at anyone,’ I said.

  ‘They’ll still think things.’

  ‘Yes, like how nice it is to meet you.’

  She rolled her eyes. I knew it was cheesy. But say nice things to people and they’ll always work – sometimes the cheesier the better.

  ‘We can sky-swim too,’ I said, to tempt her. ‘There’s a beach near my house. With a net. It’s quite safe. There’s a water pool too. It’s not always usable. We can’t always afford the water. But there’s water in it now. It’s not full, but it’s deep enough. I mean, it’s not a big pool but –’

  The thought of the water pool did it.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll come. I haven’t swum in water since – oh – for so long I can hardly remember.’

  ‘Do you have a costume?’ I said.

  ‘I’m hardly going to swim without one, am I?’ she said.

  But I didn’t know. You never know about Cloud Hunters. They aren’t really like the rest of us. They’re a different breed. The rules don’t seem to apply to them somehow. Cloud Hunters can do what they like.

  7

  sky-seal islands

  Maybe you’re wondering how we all travel here, and how we get about between the islands. Well, almost everyone travels by sky-boat, and, in truth, nobody travels fast. It’s a leisurely kind of pace. Sky-boats of one sort or another are really the only way to get around. Maybe it’s only a trip to the next island, maybe it’s a journey of five, ten or fifteen thousand kilometres. But that’s how we go.