The White City

5

There was nothing they could do to speed up the boat-building. Down worked away, quietly, secretly. Mary saw Dalip creep back to the site and watch for a long time, just to try and catch something being added. He left, frustrated, and yet the next morning when she’d gone for a look, it was half ready.

It had a hull, and the first signs of a deck. From being buried deep in the sand, it was starting to float up through the dunes in which it was being born. When it was◦– what? Finished? Ripe?◦– it would pop to the surface like a rubber duck in the bath. They’d just have to drag it to the water’s edge and push it out to sea.

Crows had been a stoker, below decks on a steamship, shovelling coal into the belly of a red-hot furnace. He’d said he had experience: believing that included little sailing boats was an assumption too far. Dalip was the only one with any relevant knowledge at all, and he didn’t know how a Down-grown ship was going to differ from a modern fibreglass dinghy. He’d confessed that he might end up killing them all.

And that was without the risk of having Crows in the same boat.

It was going to have to carry six of them, for as long as it took to cross the bay. The White City, if it was more than an artefact of Down’s collective imagination, may not be there after all. But at least they wouldn’t have to have walk all the way, and if Dalip’s idea of using the portals as a time machine was actually possible, it wouldn’t matter too much how long they spent looking for it.

She patted the boat and went back down to the beach, where Dalip and Mama were sifting through the maps again, this time looking for any mention of this mythical city made of white stone. She crouched between them and watched for a while.

‘Any luck?’ she asked.

‘It’s difficult to tell. There’s this one.’ He passed her a dog-eared scrap little bigger than a Post-it note. ‘It doesn’t seem to have a portal on it, but whatever this is was still important enough to draw.’

‘There’s no writing on it.’ She looked at the front, with its faded fine lines, then at the back, which had a completely different pattern on it. ‘And they used both sides.’

‘There are old books in the British Library where people have written an entirely different text sideways across an existing one. Paper’s going to be really rare, so yes, every last scrap gets used. Lots of these have two, three, even four maps on them.’ Dalip rubbed his eyes and screwed up his face. ‘I’m going blind staring at these things.’

‘Do you think the White City exists?’ she asked.

Mama stretched out her sore legs and wriggled her toes against the sand. Her blisters were already starting to heal. ‘Crows hasn’t outright denied it,’ she said. ‘If this is a map of it, then I guess it might.’

‘It has to,’ said Dalip.

‘And why is that?’ asked Mary.

‘Because we want it to.’

‘I thought,’ she said, ‘it was supposed to be the one place that didn’t rely on Down’s magic. So wishing it real isn’t going to make it happen.’

‘I’ve been thinking about that. Do you know what the blind spot is?’ Dalip half-turned towards her in a shuffle.

‘I… maybe.’ Mary didn’t. She knew what a blind spot was, but not the blind spot.

‘It’s the bit at the back of your eye where the optic nerve collects all the signals together and sends them to the brain. It’s the only area where there aren’t any light-collecting cells. Normally, you never notice, but there’s this trick you can do with a dot and a cross drawn on a piece of paper. Stare at the dot and move the paper closer or further away, and at a certain point, the cross will simply disappear.’

‘So…?’

‘If you want to hide from Down, you want somewhere that doesn’t have villages, castles, portals, or anything worth fighting over. Down’s blind spot. The White City.’

‘You’re just making shit up now, aren’t you?’ Mary peered deep into the map fragment for a hidden meaning.

‘It’s all I’ve got. Sorry.’

Mama looked down at her feet. ‘Crows was running to somewhere, girl. He might not know where, or even if, but he was moving with purpose. And that man, he does nothing without intending to profit from it. May as well call where he was heading the White City and have done with it.’

‘You see, that makes much more sense.’

Mary handed the map back to Dalip and stood up. Out to sea, a serpent’s head rose above the swell and turned their way. She waved before she realised what she was doing, and Mama rolled her eyes.

‘He’ll do you no good, girl,’ she said. ‘He’ll take everything, and leave you with nothing.’

Dropping her hand by her side and feeling both foolish and angry, Mary had a ready response on the tip of her tongue. Then she glanced at Dalip, who was almost cringing in anticipation.

‘You know what, Mama? Kind of worked that out for myself. The idea of having Bell’s seconds is just a little bit… you know, sad.’ She swished her skirts and turned away, still feeling the tingling in her fingers and the tip of her nose that she always experienced just before she was going to blow.

But it was better this way. More grown-up. She didn’t have to bite every single time, even though Mama’s advice was unasked for and, for fuck’s sake, all she’d done was wave. She clenched her fists and kept on walking, down the beach and towards the strand line. Tomorrow morning, they’d be heaving the boat down to the shore◦– all this bickering would be done with because they’d be on the move.

‘Wait,’ called Dalip, trotting up behind her, his feet sinking into the soft dry sand and causing him to have an awkward, almost stumbling gait.

‘You got something to say too?’

‘Me? No. What I know about relationships could be written on a stamp.’

She laughed despite her mood.

‘What is it, then?’

‘I wanted to,’ and he stopped, his lips twisting and no words coming out. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Fuck, Dalip. Sometimes you need to just say it.’

‘Okay.’ He took a deep breath. ‘If it comes to it, save the maps, not us.’

‘What?’

‘At least that way, one of us might survive. If you can’t carry the box, because it’s the wrong shape and too heavy, how many maps do you think you can hold in your claws?’ He waited for an answer, but she was too stunned to say yes or no. ‘We might get five minutes from shore, when I do something stupid and turn the boat over. If those maps get wet, they’re ruined for ever. So even if it’s just an accident, and we can get right way up again, we’ve lost the point of the journey. So you have to get as many maps as possible to safety, whatever happens to us.’

‘You want me to watch you drown?’

‘No. But who are you going to save? Me? Mama? Luiza or Elena? And while you’re doing that, you’re not saving the maps.’ He looked surprised at his own words. ‘We’ve all talked about it, and we’re agreed.’

‘Without asking me.’

‘Or letting Crows know.’ He held up his hand to forestall argument. ‘We have to consider that he’ll try and take the maps, just like we have to consider storms, shipwreck and me screwing up.’

‘Okay. Okay.’ She felt even considering the matter was a defeat. They might have decided she would be the last woman standing, but she didn’t have to go along with that when the time came. She could say yes with her mouth, and no with her heart. It wasn’t like she didn’t lie every five minutes back in London. ‘I’ll try. Carrying you was hard, but at least you were the right shape. Prey-shaped. What if we ditch the box, maybe rig up some sort of sling I can grab?’

‘It’s not that we won’t try and save ourselves. None of us want to die, and who knows? Crows might do the saving for us, flip the boat back over and dump each of us on board. It still means that you have to go for the maps first, because while you have them, we’re worth saving.’

That was a good reason, and she felt happier. ‘I said okay.’ Crows wasn’t going to renege on his deal, the deal they forced out of him, with promises of destitution and mutilation being his only alternatives. Was he?

She watched Crows play in the breaking waves, threading his sinuous black-scaled body through the walls of water as they rose and rushed inland. She knew what a gold-plated bastard he was, and yet… She chewed at her lip. Sooner or later, he was going to betray them. They all knew it, even◦– especially◦– him. All the kindnesses, the advice, the food: none of that would matter. Not to him, not to her.

At that moment, there was one person she really wanted to talk to, and that was Bell.

‘I thought that conversation was going to be much more awkward,’ said Dalip, and she tuned back in. Apparently he’d been saying some other stuff, but if it had been important, she’d missed it and she wasn’t going to ask him what it had been.

‘You’re fine,’ she said absently. The wind carried the smallest grains of sand across the beach, blurring it. She felt it tug at her skirt, and wished it was pulling at her feathers. She watched Crows for a few moments more, then deliberately turned her back on him.

‘We need more firewood,’ said Dalip, ‘and we used most of the nearby stuff last night.’

‘What happens when we run out?’ she said, more thinking aloud than an actual question. ‘We’ve got nothing.’

‘It’s not that bad. We’ve got enough to be getting on with.’

‘That’s not it, though, is it? We’re living like, I don’t know, cavemen or something. No wonder everyone ends up in a castle.’

‘Those brass instruments of Bell’s mean that there’s somewhere here that makes them. It’s another reason to believe that the White City is real place. Those things have to come from somewhere.’

‘But what if they don’t? What if there are paper trees and metal bushes and cotton mines, or stuff pops up out of the ground like the castles do? What if the White City doesn’t exist and we’re all just Down’s bitches?’

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ he said. ‘Our one advantage is you. You can fly up and search a huge area quickly.’

‘I could do that now!’

‘You’d be gone for days, and we’d be alone with Crows.’ He sighed. ‘We wouldn’t stand a chance.’

Her enthusiasm deflated like a slashed tyre.

‘Don’t think I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Dalip. ‘You’re the only thing keeping us and the maps together.’

He knew it too, then, that Crows would ultimately turn on them. And, like her, he lacked the balls to get rid of him first.

‘The boat’ll be ready to go in the morning,’ she said, for the want of anything better. ‘How far do you think those islands are? When I’m flying, they look like I’d be gone for hours.’

Dalip shielded his eyes from the sky-glare and stared at the distant smudges of land. ‘It’s impossible to say. I can’t make out any features, except there’s a mountain on one of them. Could be five miles, ten miles. Twenty miles.’

‘Further than that.’

‘It is what it is. If Down is… flatter. Bigger.’ He shook his head. ‘Every time I look up, I get a little bit more of an idea of just how vast this place is. Nowhere on Earth is this empty. Nowhere. It’s easy to forget.’

She gave him a sceptical look, and he shrugged.

‘Okay, not that easy. But it’s possible. This looks like places I know, places I’ve been to.’

‘Lucky you.’ She thought again about Greece, about the video advert she’d seen just before the fire, about the blue water and white sand and the tanned, toned girl in a bikini. Maybe one day.

‘And then, of course, a sea serpent comes into view and ruins the illusion.’ He spread his arms wide as Crows’ sleek, serpentine head emerged from the depths. ‘I’m on a beach in a different universe, I’m dressed like a Guantanamo convict and my best friend can turn into a falcon.’

‘It could be worse,’ she said.

‘It was worse.’ Then, in an effort to brighten the mood, Dalip said, ‘We still need to find more firewood, or we’ll be cold and hungry tonight.’

‘Where’s Luiza?’ She didn’t need to ask where Elena was, because either by choice or habit, they were almost always together.

‘I think they went inland.’

‘To…’

‘Look for food, I suppose.’

She glanced over to where Mama sat, next to the map box.

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Most of the morning. I think Luiza, at least, wanted some time away from Crows.’ He turned to face the line of dunes backing the beach. ‘Do you want to check up on them without looking like you’re doing it?’

‘Better than picking up driftwood and hauling it halfway across Down.’ She was still self-conscious enough about changing in front of him to want to find somewhere private. She’d done it before, but not while he was in any state to notice that there was a moment◦– blink and he’d miss it brief◦– when what she was wearing disappeared but the physical transformation had yet to begin.

Crows always changed underwater, so she hadn’t known, and quite why she cared she couldn’t say: except that Dalip would be embarrassed, and she didn’t want that. Well, perhaps a little. But not enough to cause more problems between them.

‘I’ll go,’ she flicked her hand in the direction of the dunes, ‘and take a look.’

She picked up her skirts and set off, climbing up one soft-faced dune and down the other side, sand falling into her footprints behind her. She was alone. Her toes transformed into talons and her skin ripped and flowed. With one, two, three lazy wing-beats she was aloft, heading away from the sea and rising over the crowns of the scrubby, salt-stunted trees towards the forest proper.

Her pin-sharp eyesight started to scan for the giveaway flash of orange through the shroud of green. She wheeled and soared, tracking a line parallel to the coast, then further and further inland. After a while with no sighting at all, she flew down until she was almost skimming the uppermost twigs, the wake of her passing stirring the leaves and causing them to whisper.

And then◦– did she hear that? It sounded like a cry, cut off, brief and uncertain. Maybe her ears weren’t as good as her eyes. She’d have to find a clearing, and check on foot. She circled again, finding a place nearby where a fallen trunk was rotting into exuberant life and a ring of saplings fought towards the light for dominance. It wasn’t ideal, and the springy trees whipped her as she landed, but she was back on the ground, rubbing her sore, bare arms and gazing into the shadowed undergrowth of the forest.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. ‘Luiza! Elena!’

There was no response. Not even bird calls.

Which struck her as odd, as there was always noise◦– tweets and trills and caws◦– along with the flashes of colour that marked the startled warning behaviour of the birds as they trooped by underneath. It was more than that, though. It was almost perfectly quiet.

She shivered. This wasn’t normal behaviour for Down. Down was generously alive: something was always on the move.

She dropped her arms, then raised them again, bringing the forest floor with her: twigs, leaves, fragments of bark and browned petals. Little beetle things wriggled their legs frantically as they were suddenly denied the ground.

There, almost behind her, just beyond the edge of the clearing: a grey-green smudge the same colour as the dappled shadow. She clenched her fists and threw the hovering debris in one thick stream at her target. The outline of a man appeared, raising his arm against the spray of dirt and turning away so most of it struck his back and shoulders.

The deluge petered out, and the last few sticks rattled back to the ground. Her effort had left her momentarily breathless, and she didn’t have the energy straight away for another attack. In the calm, the camouflaged figure straightened up and grew more visible.

As did his wolves, which materialised out of nothing and after a moment’s straining on their iron-linked chains, were free to bound towards her across the clearing. Their shaggy heads were low, their powerful legs pumped, speed not magic blurring their oncoming shapes.

‘Fuck,’ said Mary.