Predator's gold

10

All Anchorage’s doctors were dead. The best nurse who could be found for Professor Pennyroyal was Windolene Pye of the Steering Committee, who had once done a first-aid course. Sitting by his bed in a luxurious guest room high in the Winter Palace, she held his wrist between her thin fingers, checking his pulse against her pocket watch.

“I believe he has simply fainted,” she announced. “Perhaps it was exhaustion, or delayed shock after his terrible adventures, poor gentleman.”

“How come we haven’t keeled over then?” Hester wanted to know. “We went through terrible adventures too, and you don’t see us swooning all over the place like maiden aunts.”

Miss Pye, who was a maiden aunt herself, gave Hester a hard stare. “I think you should leave the professor in peace. He requires silence and round-the-clock care. Shoo, now, all of you…”

Hester, Tom and Smew retreated into the corridor, and Windolene Pye closed the door firmly behind them. Tom said, “I expect he was just overcome. He spent years trying to get somebody to fund a second expedition to America, and to find out so suddenly that the margravine’s taking her whole city there…”

Hester laughed. “It’s impossible! She’s mad!”

“Miss Shaw!” gasped Smew. “How can you say such things? The margravine is our ruler, and the Ice Gods’ representative on earth. It was her ancestor, Dolly Rasmussen, who led the survivors of the first Anchorage out of America to safety. It’s only natural that it should fall to a Rasmussen to lead us home again.”

“I don’t know why you’re defending her,” Hester grumbled. “She treats you like something she found clinging to the sole of her shoe. And I hope you know you aren’t fooling anybody with all these costume changes. We can tell there’s only one of you.”

“I am not trying to fool anybody,” Smew replied, with immense dignity. “The margravine must be attended by certain servants and officials: chauffeurs, chefs, chamberlains, footmen, et cetera. Unfortunately, they are all dead. So I have had to step into the breach. I do my bit to keep the old traditions going.”

“And what were you before? A chauffeur or a chamberlain?”

“I was the margravine’s dwarf.”

“What did she need a dwarf for?”

“The margravine’s household has always had a dwarf. To amuse the margravine.”

“How?”

Smew shrugged. “By being short, I suppose.”

“Is that amusing?”

“It’s tradition, Miss Shaw. We have been glad of our traditions in Anchorage, since the plague came. Here are your rooms.”

He flung open the doors of two rooms a little further along the corridor from Pennyroyal’s. Each had long windows, a big bed, fat heating ducts. Each was about the size of the Jenny Haniver ’s entire gondola.

“They look lovely,” said Tom gratefully. “But we just need the one.”

“Out of the question,” said Smew, bustling into the first room to adjust the controls on the ducts. “It would be unheard of for unmarried young persons of the opposite gender to share a room in the Winter Palace. All manner of canoodling might occur. Quite out of the question.” A rattling inside one of the ducts distracted him for an instant, then he turned to Hester and Tom with a sly wink. “However, there’s a connecting door between these rooms, and if someone wished to slip through, why, nobody would ever know…”

But somebody knew almost everything that happened in Anchorage. Peering at their screens in the blue dark, the watchers saw a grainy, fish-eye view of Tom and Hester following the dwarf into the second room.

“She’s so ugly!”

“She doesn’t look too happy.”

“Who would, with a face like that?”

“No, it’s not that. She’s jealous. Didn’t you see the way Freya looked at her boyfriend?”

“I’m bored with this lot. Let’s hop.”

The picture changed, jumping to other views: the Aakiuqs in their living room, Scabious in his lonely house, the steady, patient work of the engine district and the agricultural quarter…

“Shouldn’t we send word to the Aakiuqs?” asked Tom, as Smew made his adjustments to the ducts in the second room and prepared to leave. “They might be expecting us back.”

“It’s already been done, sir,” said Smew. “You are guests of the House of Rasmussen now.”

“Mr Scabious won’t be too happy about that,” said Hester. “He didn’t seem to like us one bit.”

“Mr Scabious is a pessimistic man,” said Smew. “It is not his fault. He is a widower, and his only son Axel died in the plague. He has not borne the loss well. But he has no power to stop the margravine offering you her hospitality. You are both very welcome here in the Winter Palace. Just ring for a servant — oh, all right, me — if you need anything. Dinner will be at seven, but if you would please come down a little earlier, the margravine wishes to show you her Wunderkammer.”

Her what? thought Hester, but she was sick of looking stupid and ignorant in front of Tom, so she kept quiet. When Smew had gone they opened the connecting door and sat on Tom’s bed, bouncing up and down to test the springs.

“America!” said Tom. “Just think of it! She’s very brave, this Freya Rasmussen. Hardly any cities venture west of Greenland, and none have ever tried to reach the Dead Continent.”

“No, because it’s dead, ” said Hester sourly. “I don’t think I’d risk a whole city on one of Pennyroyal’s books.”

“Professor Pennyroyal knows what he’s talking about,” said Tom loyally. “Anyway, he’s not the only one to report green places in America.”

“All those old airman’s legends, you mean?”

“Well, yes. And Snori Ulvaeusson’s map.”

“The one you told me about? The one that conveniently vanished before anybody could check it out?”

“Are you saying the professor’s lying?” asked Tom.

Hester shook her head. She wasn’t sure what she was saying; only that she found it hard to accept Pennyroyal’s tale of virgin forests and noble savages. But who was she to doubt him? Pennyroyal was a famous explorer who’d written books, and Hester had never even read a book. Tom and Freya believed in him, and they knew much more about these things than her. It was just that she couldn’t equate the timid little man who had quivered and whined each time a rocket came near the Jenny Haniver with the brave explorer who fought off bears and befriended savage Americans.

“I’ll go and see Aakiuq tomorrow,” she said. “See if he can speed up work on the Jenny. ”

Tom nodded, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I like it here,” he said. “This city, I mean. It’s sad, but it’s lovely. It reminds me of the nicer bits of London. And it doesn’t go about eating other towns, like London did.”

Hester imagined a gap opening between the two of them, like a crack in ice, very thin at the moment, but likely to widen. She said, “It’s just another Traction City, Tom. Traders or Predators, they’re all the same. Very nice up top, but down below it’ll be slaves and dirt and suffering and corruption. The sooner we leave, the better for both of us.”

Smew returned for them at six, and led them down by long, spiralling staircases to a receiving room where Freya Rasmussen was waiting.

The margravine seemed to have made an attempt to do something interesting with her hair, but given up halfway through. She blinked at her guests through her overgrown fringe and said, “I’m afraid Professor Pennyroyal is still indisposed, but I’m sure he’ll be all right. The Gods of the Ice would hardly have sent him here if they were just going to let him die, would they? It wouldn’t be fair. But you’ll be interested in my Wunderkammer, Tom, a London Historian like you.”

“All right, what’s a Wunderkammer?” asked Hester, tired of being ignored by this spoilt teenager.

“It’s my private museum,” said Freya. “My Cabinet of Wonders.” She sneezed, and waited a moment for a handmaiden to come and wipe her nose, then remembered they were all dead and wiped it on her cuff. “I love history, Tom. All those old things people dig up. Just ordinary things that were once used by ordinary people, but made special by time.” Tom nodded eagerly, and she laughed, sensing that she’d met a kindred spirit. “When I was little, I didn’t want to be margravine at all. I wanted to be a historian like you and Professor Pennyroyal. So I started my own museum. Come and see.”

Smew led the way, and the margravine kept up her flow of bright chatter as they passed through more corridors, across a vast ballroom where chandeliers lay mothballed under dust-sheets, out into a glass-walled cloister. Lights shone in the dark outside, illuminating whirling snow, an iced-up fountain. Hester stuck her hands into her pockets and made them into fists, stalking along behind Tom. So she’s not just pretty, she thought, she’s read all the same books as he has, and she knows all about history, and she still expects the gods to play fair. She’s like Tom’s mirror image. How am I supposed to compete with that?

The journey ended in a circular lobby, at a door guarded by two Stalkers. As he recognized their angular shapes Tom flinched backwards and almost cried out in terror, for one of those ancient, armoured fighting machines had once chased him and Hester halfway across the Hunting Ground. Then Smew lit an argon globe and he saw that these Stalkers were only relics; rusted metal exoskeletons hacked out of the ice and stood here at the entrance to Freya Rasmussen’s Wunderkammer by way of decoration. He glanced at Hester to see if she shared his fear, but she was looking away, and before he could attract her attention Smew had unlocked the door and the margravine was leading them all through it into her museum.

Tom followed her into the dust and dimness with a strange sensation of coming home. True, the single big room looked more like a junk shop than the careful displays he had been used to back in London, but it was a cave of treasures all the same. The Ice Wastes had seen the rise and fall of at least two civilizations since the Sixty Minute War and Freya owned important relics of each. There was also a model of Anchorage as it might have looked back in its static days, a shelf of vases from the Blue Metal Culture, and some photographs of Ice Circles, a mysterious phenomenon encountered sometimes on the High Ice.

Wandering like a sleepwalker among the exhibits, Tom didn’t notice how reluctant Hester was to follow. “Look!” he called, glancing back delightedly over his shoulder. “Hester! Look!”

Hester looked, and saw things she hadn’t the education to understand, and her own grisly face reflected in the glass fronts of display cases. She saw Tom drifting away from her, exclaiming over some beaten-up old stone statue, and he looked so right that she thought her heart was going to break.

One of Freya’s favourite treasures hung in a case near the back of the room. It was an almost perfect sheet of the thin, silvery metal that turned up in American Empire landfill-sites all over the world, and which the Ancients had called “Tinfoil”. She stood beside Tom and gazed in at it, enjoying the sight of their faces reflected side-by-side in its ripply surface. “They had so much stuff, those Ancients.”

“It’s amazing,” agreed Tom, whispering, because the thing in the case was so old and precious that it felt sacred; fingered by the Goddess of History. “To think that there were ever people so rich that they could throw away things like this! Even the poorest of them lived like Lord Mayors.”

They moved on to the next display: a collection of those strange metal rings so often found in Ancient rubbish tips, some still with a teardrop-shaped pendant attached bearing the word PULL.

“Professor Pennyroyal doesn’t accept that these things were thrown away,” said Freya. “He says that the sites which modern archaeologists call rubbish tips were really religious centres, where the Ancients sacrificed precious objects to their Consumer Gods. Haven’t you read his book about it? It’s called Rubbish? Rubbish! I’ll lend you a copy…”

“Thank you,” said Tom.

“Thank you, Your Radiance, ” Freya corrected, but she smiled so sweetly it was hard to feel offended.

“Of course,” she went on, running her fingers through the dust on a vitrine, “what this place really needs is a curator. There used to be one, but he died in the plague, or left; I forget which. Now everything’s getting dusty, and stuff’s been stolen; some nice old jewellery, and a couple of machines — though I can’t imagine who would want them, or how they got in here. But it will be important to remember the past, once we reach America.” She looked at him again, smiling. “You could stay, Tom. I’d like to think I had a proper London Historian running my little museum. You could expand it, open it to the public. We’ll call it the Rasmussen Institute…”

Tom breathed the museum air more deeply, inhaling the fusty scents of dust and floor-polish and moth-eaten stuffed animals. When he was an Apprentice Historian he had longed to escape and have adventures, but now that his whole life was an adventure the idea of working in a museum again seemed strangely tempting. Then he looked past Freya and saw Hester watching him, a thin, lonely figure half-hidden in the shadows near the door, one hand holding her old red scarf across her face. For the first time he felt annoyed by her. If only she were prettier, and more sociable!

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Hester wouldn’t want to stay here. She’s happiest in the sky.”

Freya glared at the other girl. She wasn’t used to having people turn her down when she offered them positions. She had been starting to like this handsome young historian. She had even been starting to wonder if the Ice Gods had sent him to her to make up for the fact that there were no suitable boys left aboard Anchorage. But why, oh why, had they decided to send Hester Shaw along with him? The girl wasn’t just ugly, she was downright horrible, and she stood between Freya and this nice young man like a demon guarding an enchanted prince.

“Oh well,” she said, as if his refusal had not disappointed her at all. “I gather it will take Aakiuq a few weeks to repair your ship. So you will have plenty of time to think it over.” And plenty of time, she added silently, to dump that horrid girlfriend.