The House of Storms Read online

  On the current schedule, the Proserpine would be fully refurbished and loaded and ready to embark on the high tide by early September. Against the Trade Winds, admittedly, and aether was a problematical load, but there was no reason to imagine she’d encounter difficulties as long as she was out in the Boreal Ocean before the hurricane season, and kept shy of the trade lanes and Enforcer ships. With luck and a good breeze, she’d be outside the Bristol Channel and quietly waiting for a pilot before October set in.

  ‘Our agents have negotiated with the Emperor a price of five million pounds in gold for the entire load,’ Grandmaster Cheney said. Outside, the drilling had stopped. Even the fans seemed to have slowed their endless nodding. ‘On current market values, and allowing for the cost of the Proserpine’s refitting, we estimate the cargoes residual value here to be something in the region of thirty million. Of course, there are technical problems. I gather that every spell on the ship needs to be rephrased and set in perfect pitch or the presence of that much aether will corrupt it. But I firmly believe she could be brought to our shores before winter. Of course, she’d need the right sort of conditions for her arrival that’ll keep the Excise Men blind. Here, Weatherman Ayres, is where you come in. We need your best weather—or rather, your worst—for the unloading.’

  ‘There would be no problem.’

  ‘But I understand that Invercombe now has residents?’

  ‘There’s a lad and his mother—she’s Greatgrandmistress of the Guild of Telegraphers, very much an easterner, and certainly not the sort we’d want looking over our shoulders. But she’s away now far more than she’s here, and the lad’s a decent sort, and he’ll be gone off by then to his big academy.’

  ‘Forgive me for saying this, Weatherman, but this is more than just summoning some wafts of mist to unload a few barrels of porter. We are discussing, all of us gentlemen, a far more difficult and expensive project than any of our previous endeavours. The entire estuary must be cloaked in fog. And then the Proserpine will need to be unloaded as quickly as safety permits—then sunk, I suppose, in deep water, and with a spell cast over her to keep her out of mind until it ceases to matter to the likes of us seated around this table.’

  Weatherman Ayres smiled. Thinking of Cissy, he licked the sweat from his moustache.

  XV

  MARION AND DENISE WERE WALKING the shore. A breeze was coming in from Luttrell, but not enough to extinguish their mirrored shapes, and the tide was warm as tea.

  ‘I can’t believe I’ll be in Bristol this autumn,’ Denise said.

  ‘You almost sound sad.’

  Denise smiled back at her sister. She was wearing a sun-hat—Invercombe’s greatgrandmistress had made a considerable impression on her and she was striving to keep her complexion fashionably pale—but she looked more than ever like herself, her hair gleaming copper-red, her fine features dark with joined freckles, her eyes shining. ‘No. I’m not sad…’

  They walked on, happy in each other’s company in a way they rarely had been when they were younger. Happiness for Marion was like good health had been for Ralph; in fact, the only surprising thing about happiness was how unsurprising it felt, and she wondered what particular shade of life the Marion Price of before this glorious summer had existed in. It had been a kind, she decided, of waiting. She chuckled and gave the water a kick so that it splashed across her bare legs.

  ‘Tell me again, Marion, that thing you were saying about how creatures were made.’

  ‘It’s all very simple—’

  Denise laughed. ‘You said that before.’

  ‘It is. The way creatures die, the number of offspring they produce, is governed by how good they are at surviving. How strong they are. How well fed. How fertile.’

  ‘That’s common sense.’

  ‘Denise, it’s all common sense. We’re all different. You and I—look at us—even though we’re sisters. It’s the same with every living thing. That starfish is different to that one over there. So, if one creature has traits which make it particularly good at surviving, chances are it’ll have more offspring. And they’ll live longer as well and have more offspring of their own. Given enough time and enough variation, any characteristic can change and develop. Taller, smaller. Longer or lighter bones. Better ways of walking or swimming …’

  ‘That’s it? It doesn’t sound like much.’

  That was part of the idea’s glory. ‘There’s clear evidence—there’s a species of moth which is much darker in cities. It doesn’t get seen and eaten by the birds so easily.’

  ‘Sounds a bit harsh to me, as well, Marion. All this stuff about creatures having babies and dying as if that’s all life is. You’ll be telling me that this is something different from the word of the Bible next.’

  Marion swung her toes deeper through the limpid tide, glimpsing wormcasts and razorshells, the darting shapes of her own toes. Things developed. They evolved. That was the true beauty of creation: there was no need for the Elder’s interfering hand. Still, she sensed in her sister’s blank resistance the looming of a far bigger hurdle than she and Ralph had ever discussed. Not that anyone would ever care what Denise thought, but then there was Doctor Foot and the Reverend-Highermaster Brown, and all the unreasoning and set-in-its-ways rest of the world. And Denise was right. Ralph’s theory was harsh. Adapt or die. Adapt, in fact, and die anyway. I’m walking, the thought suddenly came from somewhere, in this place I know so well, and the tide will soon be over my knees, but I have no idea where I’m going …

  Ralph’s bedroom back at Invercombe was a changed place. Books sprawled in teetering heaps. And every shelf, every space, every spare bit of floor, had gathered a collection of some kind of object which he and Marion had found. Dead insects, both natural and aethered. Chippings of rock. Scraps of plant. Skulls. Broken-spined drifts of worn-out notebooks. Everywhere, above all, there were shells. Goose barnacles withered on their dead tethers. Keyhole limpets and ormer shells. The windows remained open throughout most of the day and night, and their ledges too were heaped with drying tresses of horn wrack and sea belt, and what there was left of the floor was glittery with sand, and the room smelled of the shore. But the place seemed complete this way, as if Invercombe’s picture rails had always been waiting to be decorated with the spongy yellow egg cases of the common whelk. Learning for Ralph was different. Everything—everything—made sense in this new way they were looking at the world. It was as if they were reshaping it, making into something clearer and better.

  ‘One tip, though, sis,’ Denise said. ‘If you and Ralph really are planning to sell this idea to the world, it’ll need a good, catchy name. All the best things have one. Think of aether…’ A slight pause. ‘Or Pilton’s Universal Tooth Whitening.’

  Marion laughed. ‘You’re right.’ She fished in her pocket and drew a tube out.

  ‘Thanks. You didn’t steal this from Invercombe, did you?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. Why would that bother you?’

  ‘It wouldn’t. But it would bother you.’

  ‘Ralph gave it to me.’

  ‘Well. There’s a surprise.’

  ‘Shall I take it back?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  The water was cooler now. Soon, she would have to get back to Invercombe. She and Ralph had measurements to take for Weatherman Ayres; a duty which would only come to a lesser maid—a shoregirl, even—on a summer day such as this, when the ships hung upside down in the Bristol Channel and Durnock Head, but for the wyrelit beacon of its Temple of Winds, had been swallowed entire by the blue of the sky.

  ‘I’m happy you’re happy with Ralph, sis,’ Denise said eventually. ‘But, well… The fact is, I don’t want you to end up in Alfies, and Mam’s too embarrassed to say anything, so it’s about time someone took the effort to explain—’

  ‘Alfies? Denise, what on earth are you on about?’

  Denise took her sister’s hand. ‘Come on. We’ll sit by the dunes.’

  Marion acquiesced.
She’d already guessed what Denise wanted to say. Since that first perfect Midsummer night together beside the seapool, it had become a source of some difficulty and no little frustration between her and Ralph, and she knew enough to understand premature withdrawal was hardly a reliable contraceptive.

  They sat in the tussocky grass, and Denise produced a small cork-stoppered jar. It was as dark as Pilton’s Universal Tooth Whitening was white, and lightning-flecked if you shook it. She explained the spell Marion should chant at the first sign of her bleeding, and the different one she should always whisper to the full moon. Little things really, but Marion found it amazing to hear of the way her sister’s words mingled the seasons of her own body with cold grey spheres of rock turning in space, and the flow of the tides.

  XVI

  IT WAS A HOT, HEAVY AFTERNOON when Alice left the house of Enforcer Scutt, but Bristol, even greyed, still had an edge of lightness, almost of unreality, in its coloured tiles and extraordinary over-leaning shapes of the houses, which seemed to have bulged and risen like cake dough. She glanced up, briefly smiling, at the arched window of the enforcer’s bedroom in case he should have arisen from his sprawled snorings. But that was hardly likely, and in Cornelius Scutt she was convinced she’d found someone who lay at the fulcrum of the west’s mendacity.

  Past these gingerbread houses, and a sweetshop on the corner, she turned towards the plainer reek of the docks, which were even messier and more ancient than London’s. Churches and almshouses mingled amid confusing fingers of water so filled with ships that they seemed like dry land. Bigger magics were practised with this heavy industry, and the air resounded, amid all the other sounds of engines coughing and barrels rolling and chutes spewing and pallets being dropped, with the oddly accented cries of western spells. Here was a spiked trap for kingrats which, her endless curiosity driving her to explore the dark as well as the light places, gutters and piss-smelling alleys, she almost stepped on to. Here were festering, whispering clumps of cuckoo-nettle. There was no way of telling that this place was in recession, although Alice knew that it was. She gazed over the jangled rooftops at the smokestacks and silos of the big sugar importers: BOLTS, KIRTLINGS; their names shimmered huge upon sooty walls. Big players, certainly, but everything here was stuffed rigid with pomp and restrictive practice, and set ready to fall at the slightest push.

  Cargoes of this and cargoes of that. Swarthy men and peculiar accents. Wafts of alien spells and smells from strange vessels. Negro crewmen and dockhands, physically fine specimens with no evidence of obvious maltreatment or the lash. Freemen or bondsmen—it was impossible to tell, although their presence here seemed subtly wrong to Alice in much the same way as Cissy’s did at Invercombe. An easterner at heart, she still thought that black skin equalled slavery. What would happen to Bristol’s economy, Alice wondered idly, if that prop were kicked away? Smiling, she reached the Bristol Exchange. They were almost used to her now, and after she’d dealt with all the usual bowing and scraping, and had drunk a cool glass of dilute limeade to get rid of Enforcer Scutt’s aftertaste, she settled herself inside a telephone booth with little fuss, and firm instructions that she should on no account be disturbed.

  As always, there was so much to be done. There were contracts and investments in the west to be redirected, alliances to be forged or broken, and the first commercial processings of bittersweet to be supervised. More than for herself or for her guild or for Tom, it was for Ralph that Alice now felt as if she was doing all these things. Not quite, perhaps, the Ralph who picked over rocks at Invercombe with that shoregirl and was fuller than ever with science and some new theory of his, but the man he would soon become. He’d be knowledgeable and powerful and handsome. He’d be loved and feared. Almost, in fact, herself made male.

  With her routine calls finally finished, she decided to stay in the booth a while longer and practise her recently refined skills. Doing so, calling up the spell, she was drawn, as ever, towards Invercombe. Even before Weatherman Ayres brought the late afternoon rain, the garden’s colours had a gloss, a glow, a density, and the buzzbugs already shone like huge glow-worms beneath the deep-cast shadows of the trees. Their minds, as Alice brushed against them, were thoughtless—scarcely minds at all—but the sense of being here, the fragmented hues, was impossibly strong. The conflagration of scent, shape and colour of a particular flower was something they yearned for as nothing else in their sharded, spinning worlds and Alice, in all her human complexity, basked in the absolute moment of entering a pyrepoppy as a timeless sharing of mutual need. Then she wafted on across the parterre gardens and up through the pinetum towards the beacon of sunlight which was the Temple of Winds. Beyond that, where the land fell away in the cliffs which guarded Invercombe’s northeast side, a small boat was moving by twitches of its oars.

  Ralph, bare to the waist and below the knees, felt cool escapes of sweat from his back and armpits as they entered Clarence Cove. Marion had dragged off her blouse once they were out of sight of the shore, and was wearing scarcely more. He knew, loved, how her skin changed shade, but now only subtly, in the places her vest and hitched skirt kept hidden. They’d dutifully taken swimming costumes with them, but by now they were used to swimming brown and naked as seals.

  They dragged back the oars and stilled the boat. Ralph looked up at the portion of the house which peered from the top of the cliffs, which was just one coral cluster of chimneys and the balcony of his mother’s empty room—for she was in Bristol today—although it was hard to shake off the sense of their being watched. The sea sucked and boomed. The entire cliff face beneath Invercombe was honeycombed with caverns, although he and Marion had been warned by Cissy never to attempt to go below the level of the generators in the house. Real caves were slippery and dangerous, and as likely to be vertical as horizontal. Ralph peered over the boat’s side as the last of the ripples settled. The sea here really was astonishingly deep. Clear as well—the sense was almost vertiginous. Sunlight blazed through the water and was slowly lost.

  ‘This’ll do …’ Marion unpeeled her cotton top. Then, balancing so well that their boat scarcely bobbed, she stepped from her skirt and knickers. She was so beautiful, yet a shadow fell briefly over Ralph. The thing about summers, he thought, is :hat the deeper you get into them, the less there is left.

  ‘What about over there?’ One of the caves in the cliffs looked more than wide enough for them to row their boat inside. There even looked to be a sort of natural jetty where they might manage to clamber out.

  But Marion shook her head. For a moment, he thought, and as far as it was possible, her as she was, to seem that way, she almost looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m too hot to row any further. Let’s just dive in from here, shall we?’

  With a kiss, she was gone, and Ralph was momentarily alone and looking down as she swam away from him towards the cool deep. Struggling, rocking the boat wildly, he followed. Once, in the distant time of not-so-long-ago, he’d never have believed that anyone could dive at all, but he’d left the old Ralph far behind, and only Marion, feet flashing and kicking through the swarming dark, lay ahead of him.

  They rose, gasping, towards the sun, then dived down again. Deeper, this time. Their ears sung with lost guildsmen’s spells and dimness pushed at their eyes. Beneath was a moonlit place with a darkly white sea floor and flickers of fish, inkstains of weed. Then Ralph saw the bones of something lost and huge. Not some sea monster, but the remains of a ship. Slowly, rising to the air and kicking down, they gained their bearings. Marion found a green pendant amid the sprawled wreckage. Ralph, an encrusted marine implement which still whispered, when he touched it, of stars and sand. A boiler, its furnace lit with a cold inner fire. Fronds of weed, a temple of pale flames and rising banners, wafted about them.

  Ralph felt, as his airborne lungs tugged at him with increasing urgency, a near-religious awe. Then Marion swam above him, and the light shone over her limbs and her hair wavered across her face amid the
dancing weeds, and she gave him a siren wave. The scene was almost ridiculously beautiful, and he felt clumsy and lost as he hauled himself once again to the surface and clung to the side of the boat. Marion’s head popped over the other side. He was still gaining the necessary energy to climb back over the gunwale, but she was scarcely breathing hard.

  ‘I wonder,’ he gasped, ‘how it got wrecked there?’

  ‘Probably wasn’t…’ She flipped back her hair. ‘Sometimes pays to sink boats when you’ve finished with them.’

  ‘Why would anyone … ?’

  But she was already climbing into the boat. As they lay eating the oranges they had picked earlier from the citrus grove—which had grown incredibly warm, as well as stickily sweet—they talked about all the new information they would need to catalogue back at Invercombe—species and phylums, every gathered bit of their shore—to create an unanswerable case.

  ‘You know …’ Marion launched the emptied white hull of an orange from the side of the boat. ‘All those things that went on a century ago when the Age changed. Haven’t people been saying that it should change again soon? Yet nothing’s happened, has it?’

  Ralph’s gaze travelled with the sunlight along her thigh. He thought of her hands bunched in anger. Or waving flags. ‘I can see you on the barricades.’ He really could. Ma-ri-on. He could even hear the chant.