The Cloud Hunters Read online

  I wasn’t sure if even Kaneesh could understand her. But it didn’t really matter. Her gestures, tone and body language told you all that you needed to know: she was angry and you’d cross her at your peril.

  She stood nearly as tall as Kaneesh and wasn’t intimidated by him. But then neither was he by her. He would just listen impassively, letting the torrent of angry words wash over him until her rage had burnt out. Then he would dismiss it all with a gesture, and walk away to a corner of the boat, where he would take his dice out and start to roll them over the deck, as if they would tell him where the next batch of clouds could be found.

  But at other times, they would be sitting together laughing, or lazing under the canopy, sharing a bottle of some kind of wine, which they had traded for a few litres of their water.

  In the evenings it was usually Kaneesh who cooked the main meal. You could smell the herbs mingling with the simmering rice. They weren’t vegetarians, but didn’t eat meat. They ate sky-fish though, which Kaneesh had caught. There wasn’t much choice when out in the far, empty sky. It was eat sky-fish or eat nothing.

  Sky-fish were plentiful out in the Main Drift, but were shy about coming in too near to land. You could always tempt them with a titbit or a morsel on the end of a line though, and then you could catch them in an instant and they would be flailing in the net. I must admit that we ate them too. I hated to see them killed. But they did taste good.

  Our main staple is rice. Rice needs a lot of water to grow, and every grain we eat is imported. It is grown on the few islands in the system to have an abundance of water. They form a vast archipelago, over ten thousand kilometres from here. They are often covered in cloud and have huge natural, underground wells. They are called, unsurprisingly, the Rice Islands. Unimaginative maybe, but accurate and apt.

  After the Cloud Hunters had eaten their evening meal, Jenine would do her homework and her mother would read or laze or work on the boat, or sometimes she would sing. You could hear her voice carry on the soft, warm air. The songs were always sad somehow, like laments for long ago, for things lost, for people loved and remembered, for everyone and everything which would not come again.

  The sound of Carla’s singing always made my father smile. He would hear her when he was working late, as her voice echoed and drifted around the harbour.

  ‘Typical Cloud Hunter,’ he used to say. ‘Only happy when they’re miserable.’

  But he used to get a faraway look in his eye too, as if he were trying to recapture a moment that had gone, and he always left the office window open so that he could hear every word of the song.

  Sometimes, though not often, it would rain on our island. The Cloud Hunters were in temporary trouble when it did, for nobody would buy their water. Why should they, when they could get it for free? The rain might go on for a week and they wouldn’t earn a penny. But then it would stop, and that might be it for months on end, and people would again have to rely on the usual sources: the few natural springs, the water-making machinery, and the Cloud Hunters.

  A Cloud Hunter in the rain.

  It came to be an expression in our house. My father coined it.

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You look like a Cloud Hunter in the rain.’

  It meant that you looked incurably miserable. And a bit wet.

  13

  quayside

  ‘Don’t forget to bring a sleeping bag and a bedroll,’ Jenine reminded me, the morning of our departure. And that was about all the advice I got.

  I had just time to get home to change my clothes and to pick up my things. I scribbled a goodbye-see-you-soon note for my parents and hurried down to the port.

  The Cloud Hunters’ boat was tied up at the quayside, with all eternity beneath it. I walked along the short gangplank between the deck and the harbour wall. There were no safety rails. When I looked down I saw the vast emptiness below me and then far, far below, a pattern of distant islands. They seemed as small as the specks that sometimes float in your eyes. Under that was the glare of the sun.

  What if I fell? I wondered. If I panicked, lost buoyancy, and couldn’t swim my way back up? What if I slipped right now? If I missed my footing?

  I looked up to find Kaneesh watching me: a malign smile on his face, as if enjoying my discomfort.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. Rather feebly too, I realised. But it was too late to say anything different. I wondered if I ought to spit or something. Or curse a little. Maybe that would impress him. ‘I’m – er – Christien,’ I explained. ‘Jenine said that I could –’

  He nodded and indicated that I was to come on board. He didn’t offer to help me with anything. His hospitality stopped at a nod.

  I went on board and put my bedroll down; he immediately moved it somewhere else. But I think he would have moved my things no matter where I had put them.

  Jenine was in one of the cabins. She and her mother appeared after a few, for me, uncomfortable moments in Kaneesh’s company. He was stowing supplies for the journey and making a last-minute check of the equipment. I felt that the best way to help him would be to stay out of his way. He probably thought the same.

  ‘Hi, Jenine.’

  ‘Christien – so you came?’

  ‘You thought I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Maybe not –’

  Jenine seemed pleased enough to see me. I said hello to her mother. Her wrists were heavy with bracelets. She asked if I had everything and I said I did. So she suggested that Jenine show me around while they got ready to cast off.

  The boat was quite plain and basic. The bulk of it consisted of storage tanks for the water. The compressor to condense the cloud vapour sat up on the deck; it was compact and reasonably quiet when in use. There was a galley below deck, a couple of cabins, a toilet, a sink, and not much more.

  Two kinds of energy powered the boat: wind and solar. The buoyancy of the boat could be adjusted to compensate for its laden or unladen weight, depending on whether the water tanks were full or empty. This control was achieved by varying the power output of the solar panels, or by reeling in, or letting out, the wind sails. Uncovering the solar panels gave the boat more power and lift; closing them reduced that.

  The wind sails were there as a bonus, to give extra speed when the breeze was blowing in the right direction, or to use when there was no sun for the solar panels to function.

  Yet the boat could travel without wind sails too, even in cloud, just as long as there was power in the back-up storage batteries. The solar panels constantly replenished these. Fully charged, this battery reserve contained enough power for a good five-hundred-kilometre journey, maybe more.

  After looking around below, we went back up on deck to cast off and to see the island recede behind us. Kaneesh opened the covers from the solar panels and inched the boat out into the sky. Soon, we were over a kilometre away, and when I leaned over the side rail to look down, I could see faraway islands, at all different levels, and beneath them that haze of eternity.

  ‘Dizzy?’ Jenine asked.

  I denied it.

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Some people get dizzy – the first time. Or they feel a little sky-sick.’

  I denied that, too, though the motion of the boat was indeed making me queasy. But I wasn’t going to admit it if I didn’t have to. I noticed Kaneesh look across at me, as if willing me to be sick, if only for the entertainment value.

  ‘If you do need to throw up,’ Jenine advised me, ‘try to do it over the side.’

  Where else would I have done it? I thought. Where else was there to do it? What did she think I was going to do? Use my shoes?

  Her mother went down to fill a flask of water. She returned and offered it to me. I drank some, though I wasn’t really thirsty. I thought it might help me feel less nauseous, but it didn’t, it made me worse. The motion sickness only went about two hours later, after we’d had something to eat. I was lucky it didn’t last all day. Some people have to endure it for a whole voyage.

>   Soon the island was a long way behind us, as we headed straight out into the open sky. Kaneesh seemed to know where he was going, though there wasn’t yet a cloud to be seen anywhere. The air was empty.

  The further we sailed from land, the more creatures we saw. Sky-fish constantly passed us, both above and below the boat, or they briefly flew alongside to keep us company. One blindly flew at high speed into our open sail and ricocheted off like a tennis ball.

  ‘Come on, let’s feed them.’

  Jenine showed me how to feed the smaller, slower sky-fish, with a little food on the palm of your hand. The sky-minnows would fly right to you and nibble it up. But if you tried to grab them, they’d be gone in an instant. Kaneesh could catch them though. He could pluck them right out of the air. Then he’d hold them a moment, laughing at their wide-eyed helplessness and futile struggles, before flinging them back into space.

  Sometimes, at home, I’d buy fresh sky-angel fish from the market just to give them their liberty, to throw them up into the air and to see them go scudding away as fast as they could. There was something rewarding about setting captive things free.

  While Kaneesh was busy fishing, I decided, just out of interest, to count his tattoos. I got to twenty and gave up.

  14

  spare some change

  As we sailed on we passed a sky-trawler. It was rolling out a huge purse net, over two kilometres long. It let the net drift in the sky, then slowly tightened the ends, drawing the sides of the purse together, trapping all the sky-fish that had become ensnared.

  The trawler hauled the catch along in its wake, towing a great rainbow of sky-fish, of all shapes and sizes, some of them edible, some of them not. There were sky-clowns and sky-angels and even some small sky-sharks entangled in the net, a medley of squirming, panicking, bewildered life. The fishermen didn’t bother to haul the catch on board, they just headed for whichever island was home, or for the nearest market, where they could sell their catch.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Jenine said, as she watched them go. ‘And cruel. Half of them are inedible and die for nothing. They just get thrown away.’

  Yet she ate sky-fish herself. But maybe that was different. The Cloud Hunters only caught what they needed, with no wastage and minimal cruelty. Kaneesh killed them in an instant, with one slash of his knife or with a blow from a small stunning implement he gleefully called ‘the priest’. Then the head of the fish would be overboard, its innards gutted, and its body filleted and in the pan.

  I think you’ll eat anything when you’re hungry enough, unless your principles are stronger than hunger; and not many people’s are when it comes to it.

  Carla and Kaneesh left Jenine and me to ourselves. They were too busy conferring over which direction to take, where best to head to find clouds.

  Kaneesh stood at the prow, staring into the distance; Carla held the helm to steer the boat. But it was easy enough to lock on course. It could practically sail itself.

  Later, Kaneesh went below to start cooking. He reappeared after a while and spoke to Carla, who went down to take over from him. He locked the steering onto automatic pilot, then squatted down on the sun-baked deck, and took out his dice.

  I edged over to see what he was doing. He glanced up and gave me a look of annoyance, but he didn’t tell me to go away. He cupped the dice in his hands. There were five dice altogether, each with six sides, and each side bearing not a number but a symbol: some kind of indecipherable hieroglyph.

  He shook the dice together, let them fall, studied them, left three of them where they were, picked up the remaining two, shook them, threw them down again. He left one of them where it was, picked up the other, shook it in his hand, threw it down. He studied them again. Then he scooped them all up and repeated the entire performance.

  Next, he went over to the helm. He adjusted the course by a few degrees and opened up the solar panels, so as to increase our altitude.

  Well, if that was how he navigated and located clouds, then I thought it was nothing but meaningless superstition. I didn’t see how throwing a few dice around could tell you anything. But he seemed to believe in it, and he was the tracker. It was his responsibility to find the clouds, and he was to blame if we didn’t see any.

  Yet there had to be some wasted journeys. I knew there were. You could see it in the Cloud Hunters’ faces, when the boats limped back into port, as dry and empty as when they had left. Nobody succeeds all of the time. It was like my father said: the person who never failed never tried anything. At least not anything difficult.

  I plucked up the nerve to speak to Kaneesh.

  ‘Does throwing the dice find the clouds?’ I asked.

  ‘It helps,’ he said tersely.

  ‘How?’

  ‘That’s our business,’ he said. And walked off.

  He was a man of few words, was Kaneesh. And not all of them were pleasant ones. No, he wasn’t much on conversation.

  Once we had changed course, I saw a small island appear ahead of us. And as we neared it I realised that it was populated: by a community of one.

  ‘Jenine,’ I said. ‘Look. A castaway. Or a shipwreck survivor. Hadn’t we better stop and pick him up?’

  She smiled and shook her head.

  ‘Hermit,’ she said. ‘And a mad one. We pass him all the time. He doesn’t want to be rescued. He wants to be where he is. He likes to be lonely. But he’s not above cadging a few supplies.’

  Sure enough, as we got nearer to the tiny island, its sole occupant began to act in an eccentric and alarming manner. He rushed to the very edge of the rock and stood there, as if about to lurch off into space.

  He couldn’t have shaved for years, nor washed for months. You could smell him from a long way off. He and his island stank of rancid sky-fish; and strewn on the shore were dried fish bones and shrivelled sky-weed. Strips of coloured cloth were braided into his matted hair. His few possessions lay on the rocks around him. There wasn’t much, just a bed, a few cooking pots, some hooks and lines, a water barrel, and that was about it.

  ‘Alms, brothers!’ he called. ‘Alms for a saintly man. Or buy a Big Issue – a few years out of date, but none the worse for that.’

  Kaneesh grinned when the old man called to him. (If he was old. I assumed he was. Perhaps I was mistaken. It was hard to tell. Maybe he was just hairy.)

  ‘You?’ Kaneesh shouted back to him. ‘Saintly? You might be more saintly if you washed. It’s next to godliness, people tell me.’

  ‘Water, brother,’ the hermit answered him. ‘A few drops, for pity’s sake, to moisten these cracked lips and this shrivelled tongue.’

  ‘And why should anyone pity you?’ Kaneesh asked him – though I noticed that he had already moved the wheel and was guiding the boat in. ‘Did anyone ask you to maroon yourself on this godforsaken clump of rock in the middle of nowhere? Or wasn’t it your own choice?’

  ‘Godforsaken, you say?’ the hermit answered. ‘Anything but. God’s here if he’s anywhere, brother, answering his servant’s devotions. He’s right here on this rock, in all his grace and glory. Water, brother, and I’ll say a prayer for you. I’ll say one for you all. I have a direct line to things spiritual.’

  ‘Don’t delude yourself,’ Kaneesh said. ‘You don’t even have the right number. If I want to say prayers, I can say my own. And to better gods than yours.’

  ‘My prayers can find clouds for you.’

  ‘My wits and dice can find them faster.’

  The hermit watched as the boat neared. He could see that Kaneesh intended to stop for a moment, despite his abuse.

  ‘Water, brother, and I’ll tell you where the clouds are,’ he kept on. ‘You’re Cloud Hunters, of course. What else would you be? An honourable profession for a hardy race. I can give you help.’

  ‘The day I need your help,’ Kaneesh told him, ‘is the day I’ll give this up for ever.’

  ‘Water, brother, if you’ve any to spare. I’m parched as a desert, dry as a stone. I’ve nothing lef
t but a cupful.’

  ‘Then why did you ever come here, to die of thirst?’

  ‘The Lord will provide.’

  ‘You won’t need us then.’

  ‘You are the instrument of the Lord’s provision, brother.’

  ‘Is that a fact? And what’s the Lord up to while we’re doing his work for him? Is he having a snooze?’ Kaneesh was a heathen all right, and proud of it.

  Jenine’s mother heard the commotion and came on deck. When she saw who it was she smiled.

  ‘Ah, beautiful lady –’ the hermit began.

  ‘Give him some water,’ Carla said to Kaneesh. ‘How much can we spare?’

  ‘Each drop given is a cloud found, bounteous lady,’ the hermit said. ‘It’s good fortune to give alms to a hungry man.’

  ‘I thought you said you were thirsty,’ Kaneesh reminded him.

  ‘That too.’

  Kaneesh stopped the ship, right next to the island. The hermit hurried over to us, carrying his empty water barrel. Kaneesh took it from him, filled it up, and returned it. The hermit almost bent double under its weight. Staggering, he placed it down on the rocks.

  ‘Thank you, friends. A million blessings. I’ll pray for you now, for clouds and good speed.’

  ‘So which direction, hermit? Where do we sail?’

  The hermit stared at Kaneesh, as if he had only just seen him. He sniffed the air and stared all around, then he raised a gnarled and bony finger and pointed to the far distance.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That way. Even now the clouds are forming. They gather like believers who assemble to hear the prophet.’

  Kaneesh nodded, as if he had been looking not so much for direction as for confirmation of the course he had already decided upon.

  ‘Here,’ Kaneesh said. ‘Make a change from sky-fish.’

  He threw the old hermit a small sack of rice and a bag of cakes.

  ‘Gratitude to you, brother. Gratitude and prayers.’

  ‘Maybe you could risk a little wash,’ Kaneesh told him.

  ‘The Lord will provide,’ the hermit said again. (Though quite what that had to do with washing, I had no idea. Maybe the hermit was waiting for the Lord to provide him with some soap.) ‘Blessings upon you, sir,’ he said, as the boat moved away. ‘And on you, too, kind lady, and on these two young people. Blessings on you all and come visit again.’