Fever Crumb Part 1

Fever Crumb.

The Hungry City Chronicles.

Philip Reeve.

PART ONE.

Chapter 1.

THE GIRL FROM G.o.dSHAWK'S HEAD.

That morning they were making paper boys. Fever had gone down at dawn to the pressing room to collect fourteen of the big, furled sheets of paper, six feet square, which Dr. Isbister made by pulping and pressing foolish old books that his library did not need. Then she had carried them carefully back up the winding wooden stairways of the Head to the chambers that she shared with Dr. Crumb. There they had set to work.

Fever was just the right size now to lie on each sheet while Dr. Crumb drew an outline all round her with his pencil. When that was done, she fetched two pairs of paper shears, and they carefully cut out the silhouettes. Soon fourteen of her blank, white selves lay stacked on the workbench. Fever stood at Dr. Crumb's side, watching but not speaking while he spread out one of the cutouts and laid a thin, wire skeleton on top of it. He took care over the hands, with their complicated little mechanisms, and the dim white metal discs, like flimsy coins, which were the paper boy's eyes and brain. These were old-world mechanisms, and if they were damaged they could never be replaced, for no one knew the secrets of their making any more; they had been recycled from one generation of paper boys to the next ever since the Scriven first brought them down out of the unknown north.

When all the mechanisms were correctly positioned, Fever helped Dr. Crumb to coat the paper figure with paste. Then they took a second cutout and stuck it precisely over the first, so that the two cutouts formed a Fever-shaped paper sandwich with the metal parts hidden inside. Together, they carried it to the bath that stood in a corner of the room and laid it in the solution. At first the paper boy just floated on the surface, like a dead leaf on a pond, but Fever took rubber-tipped tongs and gently pressed it down until the solution flowed over it and it sank. While Dr. Crumb set to work on the next paper boy, Fever got her fingers under the edge of the bath and tilted it gently up and down, up and down, so that the solution shifted but did not spill, and the paper boy slid to and fro under the surface, his head and feet banging alternately against the ends of the bath.

Fever thought that it would be more rational to call the device a paper girl, since it had been drawn around her, but Dr. Crumb said that it was not alive and had no gender.

"So why are they called paper boys?"

"A good point, Fever. The name is foolish, and was clearly not invented by a man of reason."

When all seven paper boys had been made and soaked, they lifted them out of the bath one by one and held them up so that the excess solution could drain off. Then, carrying the dripping figures on a rack between them, they left the workroom and went up the stairs and out onto the roof.

"This is a great waste of time," said Dr. Crumb, as they pegged the paper boys out like laundry for the brisk west wind to dry. "Why the New Council does not just ask their Master of Devices to make paper boys for them, I fail to understand. Master Wormtimber was once a member of our Order, and surely he cannot have forgotten everything he learned from us...."

"Perhaps the New Council knows you make them best, Dr. Crumb," said Fever loyally. "And maybe they want paper boys they can be sure of, if there is really to be a war."

"There is not going to be a war," said Dr. Crumb.

"But Dr. Isbister told me that a nomad horde is approaching from the north --"

"As our Order's librarian, it is one of Dr. Isbister's duties to read the city newspapers, and I'm afraid they fill his mind with rumors and scaremongery. This is not the first time one of the nomad empires has moved south. They will not dare to attack London. Though if they did, I doubt that a few paper boys could do much to stop them."

The drying paper boys flapped and crockled, a line of white dancers strung between two ventilator cowls. Specks of rust and dust blew against them and stuck to the still-wet paper, so Fever and Dr. Crumb went to and fro patiently picking them off. After a while, as the boys began to dry, Dr. Crumb went back below, leaving Fever to keep an eye on them. She walked to the roof's edge and lay down, enjoying the warmth of the sun. It was July, the height of London's brief summer. Bees droned past her, and the cries of hawkers came up faintly from the deep streets, where she could see people and carts and sedan chairs moving. Jackdaws called and squabbled around the strange, old, blue metal towers in Clerkenwell; wind trams under their clouds of sunlit sail went rattling along their spindly viaducts. And somewhere beneath her, more as a vibration in her breastbone than an actual sound, Fever could hear the voices of old Dr. Collihole and his a.s.sistants as they labored in his attic works.p.a.ce, a.s.sembling the vast paper balloon in which he planned one day soon to begin the reconquest of the skies.

Fever was the youngest member of the Order of Engineers, and the only female. Engineers did not have wives or children. But one evening fourteen years before, Dr. Crumb had been called out to a dig on the Brick Marsh by an archaeologist named Chigley Unthank who wanted an opinion on some Ancient artifacts which he'd unearthed, and on his way back he had heard crying coming from an old weed-grown pit close to the road. There, among the bramble bushes, he had found a baby in a basket with an old blanket laid over her and a label tied around her wrist, upon which someone had written just four words: Her name is Fever.

He had told Fever the story often when she was little. (Dr. Crumb did not believe in telling lies, not even white lies, not even to little girls. He had not wanted her to grow up thinking she was his?) She knew how he had stood there in the twilight staring down at the baby in the basket and how finally, not knowing what else to do, he had carried her back with him to G.o.dshawk's Head.

In earlier years he might have taken her to the civic orphanage, but that was the summer of the Skinners' Riots, and the orphanage had been wrecked and looted, along with much of the rest of the city. In London's rougher boroughs, like Limehouse and St Kylie, the skins of murdered Scriven still flapped like speckled flags from poles that the Skinners had set up at street corners. The collection of merchants and lawyers who called themselves the New Council had not yet completely restored order.

Dr. Crumb made up a little bed for the foundling in a spare drawer of his plan-chest and fed her watered-down milk through a laboratory pipette. Looking into her eyes, he noticed that they were different colors; the left dark brown, the right soft lichen gray. Was that why she had been abandoned? Had her mother been afraid that her neighbors would take that small oddity for a sign that the child was a Scriven or some other sort of misshape, and kill her? There was a small wound on the back of her head, a thin cut not quite healed. Dr. Crumb, who had seen for himself the savagery of the Skinners, imagined some crazed Londoner slashing at her with a knife....

The other Engineers, gathering round him to peer at the tiny refugee, had all agreed with him; the child must not go back to live among those savage, superst.i.tious Londoners. She would stay with the Order, in G.o.dshawk's Head, and Dr. Crumb would act as her guardian. Girls had never been admitted to the Order before, since it was well known that female minds were not capable of rational thought. But if little Fever were to be brought up in the ways of the Order from infancy, was there not a chance that she might make a useful Engineer?

So here she lay, fourteen summers later, in the sunshine on the Head's roof. She had grown into an odd-looking girl, and her clothes made her look odder still. Only someone who had spent fourteen years being told that appearances don't matter would dress in clothes like those. Big digger's boots, skinny black trousers, an old gray shirt, a white canvas coat with metal b.u.t.tons. Then there was her hair, or rather, her lack of hair. The Order was keen to hurry humankind into the future, and they believed that hair was unnecessary. Fever shaved her head every other morning, and had done so for so long that she didn't remember what color her hair would be if she were to let it grow. And below the bald dome of her head she had a curious face, with a short, sudden nose and a wide mouth, thick fair eyebrows, and, oddest of all, those large eyes that didn't match. Yet somehow it all worked. It was one of those rare faces which bypa.s.sed pretty and went straight to beautiful.

Of course, that would never have occurred to Fever. She attached no importance to her looks. But she was beautiful, all the same, as she lay there watching the city and waiting for the paper boys to dry and idly tracing the raised line of that old scar that she could feel but never see -- a slender, silvery thread which curved along the base of her skull.

Chapter 2 An Offer of Employment.

G.o.dshawk's Head was not a building; it really was a head. Auric G.o.dshawk, the last of London's Scriven overlords, had planned to commemorate his rule with an immense statue of himself, but he had gotten no further than this metal head, seven stories high, which stood near Ox-fart Circus on a patch of waste ground surrounded by the huge, abandoned smelting and rolling sheds where it had been constructed.

The Scriven had arrived in London two hundred years before. Driven out of their northern homelands by some power shift among the nomad empires, they swept south in search of a city to conquer, and London, rich in trade and archaeology, had drawn them like magpies. After smashing London's army at the Battle of Barnet, they dragged their mobile fortress onto the summit of Ludgate Hill, tore off its wheels, and converted it into the Barbican, the stronghold from which Scriven kings would rule over the city for the next two centuries.

They were brilliant, cruel, and party mad, and they were not exactly human beings. In the black time after the Downsizing all sorts of mutations had come whirling down the helter-skelter of the human DNA spiral, and the Scriven claimed to be a new species entirely. h.o.m.o superior they liked to call themselves, or sometimes h.o.m.o futuris , the idea being that they had come into the world to replace dull old h.o.m.o sapiens. They were strange in a lot of ways you couldn't easily put your finger on, and in one way that you could: Their pale skin was blotched and dappled with markings, like leopards' spots. Some Scriven's spots were freckle-colored, others were dark as spilled ink. The Scriven prized dark markings most. They believed that they had each been written on by a G.o.d called the Scrivener, who had inscribed the future history of the world upon their skins. Scriven scholars spent whole lifetimes making drawings of other Scriven in the nude, and trying to decipher the Scrivener's sacred ideograms.

But like most mutant strains, the Scriven hadn't thrived for long. The genetic peculiarities of which they were so proud turned out to be their downfall. All of London's previous conquerors had intermarried with native Londoners and had children who were Londoners themselves, but although some Scriven took human wives and lovers, no children ever came of those unions. Even Scriven marriages were often barren. By the time G.o.dshawk began work on his giant statue there were only a few hundred Scriven left, lording it over a city of sixty thousand. The taxes needed to pay for it, and the slave labor used in its building, helped spark the Skinners' Riots, in which G.o.dshawk and all the other Scriven had been slaughtered.

The rioters had swirled all through London, burning and smashing anything connected with the Scriven, but they'd not been able to do much damage to that t.i.tanic head. When the smoke cleared it was still standing, its stern face dented and daubed with angry slogans.

There had been a housing shortage after the riots -- the burning down of buildings, it turned out, had been a bad idea in a city made mostly of timber and thatch -- and the unpopular Order of Engineers (who had taken no part in the uprising, and many of whose members had worked for Scriven masters) were thrown out of their big Guildhouse on Ludgate Hill to make room for displaced families. It seemed logical that, rather than waiting for a new Guildhouse to be built while their valuable collections sat moldering in makeshift huts, they should just move into G.o.dshawk's Head. It was hollow, mostly weather-tight, and very big. The builders had left scaffolding inside that formed the basis of floors and walls and stairways. The Engineers glazed G.o.dshawk's eyes, and poked dozens of smaller windows in his cheeks and forehead. They gave him a tar-paper roof like a bad hat. The Head was only intended to be a temporary accommodation, but it became permanent. After all, as the Engineers liked to joke in their dry, unfunny way, it was most appropriate that they should live in a head. Hadn't they always said that they were the brains of the city?

That night, when the paper boys had been taken down and packed in boxes, and sent up to the Barbican, and Fever was washing up after the evening meal in the tiny kitchen which adjoined Dr. Crumb's work s.p.a.ce, there came a tapping on the door. She put down the dish she had been wiping and reached for a towel to dry her hands, but Dr. Crumb had already left his workbench and gone to see who their visitor was. Fever could not see the door from where she stood in the kitchen, but she heard it open, and heard the voice of Dr. Stayling.

Fever wondered what could have brought the Chief Engineer to their quarters at such a late hour. She was almost tempted to eavesdrop on what he and Dr. Crumb were talking about, but she reminded herself to be reasonable. There is no profit in wondering why Dr. Stayling has come here, she thought. It may he nothing to do with you, "Fever Crumb, and if it is, you shall find out about it in good time. So she made herself go on with her ch.o.r.es, carefully wiping and drying each plate, dish, and utensil, and putting them back in their places on the kitchen shelves. A place for everything, and everything in that place was one of the rules that Dr. Crumb had taught her when she was very little.

She was just emptying the dirty water out of the kitchen window when Dr. Crumb called to her. "Fever. Dr. Stayling would like to speak with you."

So it did have something to do with her! She put the bowl upside down on the sill to drain, then shut the window. She ran a hand over her head, glad that she had shaved that morning. Then she went through into the workroom.

Dr. Stayling was a tall, broad-shouldered old man. He shaved his head, like all the Order, but he didn't bother to clip the hairs in his nostrils, which were long and steely gray and quivered when he breathed. Fever, facing him, reminded herself that it would be childish to find that distracting.

"Fever," said Dr. Crumb, looking worried, "Dr. Stayling has a proposal for you."

"It is not my proposal, you understand," said Dr. Stayling, with that North Country accent of his which grew stronger when he was excited. "Kit Solent, a minor archaeologist, has asked me to supply an Engineer to live at his house on Ludgate Hill and help him to study artifacts from a new site he has discovered. He has requested you, Fever."

Fever, like a good Engineer, showed no emotion, but beneath her white coat her heart began to beat very quickly.

"Fever is very young to be sent out on such a placement," said Dr. Crumb.

"Nevertheless, Crumb, you're always telling us how rational and capable she is. And it is perfectly usual for young Engineers to be sent out into the world. Only then do we find out if they are truly men of reason, or if they will fall prey to the world's temptations. You did it yourself, Crumb."

"Yes," said Dr. Crumb, looking suddenly fl.u.s.tered. "Yes, I did, and it was a ... a troubling period. Difficult ..."

Dr. Stayling went and stood at the window, gazing out across the great, smoky, unreasonable city. He said, "I always had high hopes for young Solent. As a young man he struck me as having a very rational mind. Made some interesting discoveries. Remember that old underground railway station down by the Marsh Gate? That was one of his finds. Remarkable state of preservation. Then he went and married some digger's daughter, and that was the end of his usefulness. They busied themselves mooning about and having babies for a few years, and then the girl died, and ever since he's just looked after the children while living off his savings, which I should imagine are getting pretty low by now. I'm pleased to hear that he's digging again. It is rational for the Order to encourage him in any way we can."

Fever thought that she liked the sound of Master Solent, although she knew it was irrational to form an opinion based on such little knowledge of him. Still, she looked hopefully at Dr. Crumb, wondering if he would let her go.

Dr. Crumb still looked troubled. He said, "Fever is a great help to me here, Dr. Stayling. What shall I do without her?"

"Oh, I'll ask young Quilman to come up and a.s.sist you, Crumb. He's highly rational. And it is only for a short time, three weeks or a month. So pack your bag, Fever Crumb. You will be leaving for Ludgate Hill tomorrow."

Chapter 3 The Wind Tram.

The main entrance to G.o.dshawk's Head was not through its mouth, as you might expect, for annoyingly G.o.dshawk's sculptor had chosen to represent him with his lips firmly closed. Instead, the Order and their visitors came and went through a door at the top of a flight of steps that led up the Head's left nostril.

Out of that door and down those steps next morning came Fever Crumb in the pearl-gray London daylight, pushing open the gate in the high fence, which ran all round the Head, and walking out onto the tram stop, which was a timber platform built on piles against G.o.dshawk's upper lip.

Dr. Crumb came with her. He had carried her cardboard suitcase from their quarters, and he would have liked to carry it farther. He would have liked to go with her all the way to Solent's house and see what sort of place she was to live in and among what kinds of people. Fever would have liked that, too. But neither of them dared suggest it, for fear the other would think them irrational.

So they stood on the Head's wooden mustache in the gusty, biting wind and wondered what to say. The tram was due, but as yet there was no sign of it. The wire-link fence sang thinly in the breeze.

"The wind is still from the west," observed Dr. Crumb at last. "You will have a good, brisk run to the Terminus, and from there I believe it is but a short walk to Solent's place."

Fever agreed. They stood facing each other, the collars of their white coats turned up against the wind. On Fever's head was a wide-brimmed straw hat that Dr. Crumb had unearthed from somewhere, saying she would need it to protect her scalp from the sun. She held it on tightly and watched the thick, gunmetal clouds sweep above the city and thought about sums, angles, anything that would take her mind off what she was feeling.

She didn't want to go. She wanted to stay in the Head forever. She wanted Dr. Crumb to hold her hand and lead her back inside. She felt afraid of living without him, and angry at him for not standing up to Dr. Stayling and insisting that she stay. But she knew, too, that those feelings, like all feelings, were irrational. They were the frightened instincts of a small animal leaving the nest for the first time. Everyone had instincts, just as everyone had hair; they were another vestige of humanity's primitive past. A good Engineer learned to suppress them.

The tramlines began to chirrup and then to hum. She glanced to windward, and there was the tram coming down the long sweep of the viaduct that carried it above the roofs of Wary Edge. In another half minute it would be at G.o.dshawk's Head. She turned back to Dr. Crumb, and almost lost control and hugged him, but by then a whole crowd of Engineers were coming out of G.o.dshawk's nostril like a highly educated sneeze, and what would they think of her if they saw her acting on her feelings? They would think that they had been right all those years ago, and that girls were not suited to the ways of reason. So she held tight to the handle of her suitcase with one hand, and kept that farm-girl hat in place with the other, and just nodded to Dr. Crumb, and Dr. Crumb nodded back, and wiped his eyes with his coat cuff and said, "Bother this wind...."

"Farewell, Fever Crumb!" called the other Engineers. "Good luck! Be reasonable!" And she bowed to them, too, and then the tram was almost alongside the platform and there was nothing to do but turn and run for it while Dr. Crumb, in a voice too small for her or anyone else to hear, said, "Take care, little Fever! Take care...."

Fever had often watched wind trams pa.s.s the Head, but she had never boarded one before. There was a worrying gap between the platform's edge and the tram's deck, but her legs were long and strong, and she leaped it easily and dumped herself on one of the slatted wooden seats behind the main mast. The tram did not slow, but kept trundling past the tram stop at a steady twelve miles per hour so that the Head fell quickly astern and was soon hidden behind a terrace of thirtieth-century villas.

Fever set her suitcase down on the deck between her feet and groped in her pocket for the coins that Dr. Crumb had given her. The tram conductor, a squat man with a wooden leg, came stumping aft, and she said, "The Central Terminus," and put the coins in his hand. In return he gave her an oyster sh.e.l.l and an expectant stare, as if he were waiting for a thank-you, but Fever did not see any reason to say "thank you" -- he had not done her a favor, merely his job. After a moment he stopped waiting and went on his way, muttering something to another of the tram crew, who laughed nastily.

The oyster sh.e.l.l hung on a cord threaded through a hole bored in its edge. Everyone who traveled by London Transport wore one. Fever took off her hat, and looped the cord over her head, and put her hat back on, and sat on her uncomfortable seat and watched the city slide by. The cloud cover was breaking and a stook of sunbeams stood on Ludgate Hill, gilding the wet roofs of the Barbican and the copper-topped towers of the Astrologers' Guild.

For the first time the bad, breathless feeling which had seized her when she was saying good-bye to Dr. Crumb began to fade, and in its place came something which she thought of as positive antic.i.p.ation, but which someone who had not been brought up by Engineers would have called excitement.

More houses went by, their top-floor windows level with the tramline. Then the weed-grown summit of a digger's spoil heap, with goats grazing among the buddleia. They pa.s.sed other stations where people jumped nimbly aboard carrying children and shopping and c.u.mbersome packages, squeezing into the seats on either side of Fever's. The wind died a little as the tram nosed its way deeper into the built-up heart of the city, pa.s.sing into the lee of tall buildings. Ahead, flocks of dust-gray pigeons wheeled around the thatched roofs of the Central Terminus, in the shadow of Ludgate Hill. The tram crew furled their flapping sails, took up long poles and quanted the rest of the way, only stopping when they reached the incline outside the Terminus, down which the tram coasted until it fetched up with a jarring thump against the straw buffers.

" Central Terminus'. Alight 'ere fer Ludgate Hill, Liver Pill Street, an' the Stragglemarket! Change 'ere for stops to 'Bankmentside, St Kylie , 'Ampster's 'Eath, and Effing Forest! "

And oh, the noise of it! Fever was pummelled by the din and stink and bustle that greeted her as she climbed down from the tram and made her way along the platform, which was spattered with pigeon droppings and clumps of filthy straw fallen from the high, thatched canopy overhead. Stevedores shunted trolleys piled with crates and barrels at Fever, and left it to her to decide whether she would leap aside or be crushed under their wheels. Men shouted to one another as they ran up the masts of lately arrived trams to furl their sails. Doors slammed and handbells rang as other trams pulled out, laden with freight and pa.s.sengers. She clutched her little cardboard suitcase to her chest and hurried on until she reached the wooden turnstile at the platform's end. There she held up her oyster sh.e.l.l while the eyes of the turnstile keeper flicked over her in a bored, faintly aggressive way before letting her through.

At once she found herself caught up in a river of Londoners, which was swirling across the concourse and down a broad flight of wooden stairs and out into the street to join a still larger river outside. Drovers were herding sheep toward the meat market, barrow boys and news-sheet vendors were shouting their wares, and dozens of sedan chairs were being carried past, bobbing on that tide of hats and heads like overdecorated cupboards washed away in a flood.

Fever fished in her pocket for the directions that Dr. Stayling had given her, while keeping tight hold of the handle of her suitcase with the other. Dr. Crumb had warned her of the sneak thieves and dip-pockets who haunted London's busier streets. She peered at Dr. Stayling's sketch map, but she could not relate the neat lines he had drawn to the complex, busy, jagged streets in which she found herself. She looked about for a street name or a signpost, but there was none. The river of people swept her on. The low sun was lighting the upper parts of the buildings and a window flashed as a maid leaned out to empty a chamber pot. Fever jumped aside just in time to dodge the shower of urine, and stumbled into the path of a religious procession -- celebrants in robes and pointed hats whirling and clapping and chanting the name of some old-world prophet, " Hari, Hari! Hari Potter!

Disgusted, Fever veered away. But all around her now were the signs of unreason, temples to Poskitt and Mad Isa and dozens more of London's shabby G.o.ds, with the ramshackle copper-domed towers of the astrologers poking up over their roofs. Shops and stalls sold scents and prayer flags and dream catchers and impractical hats and cheap storybooks with lurid covers. Barrow boys swore and squabbled. Women pa.s.sed by with painted faces, wearing skirts so wide that small wheels had been attached to the hems to stop them from dragging in the street-muck, while little gas balloons held up the points of their flamboyant, lacy collars.

It was small wonder, Fever thought, that the Order of Engineers had long ago decided to cloister themselves away from such a world, with all its disorder and distractions. Round a corner she went, and down steep, cobbled streets that kept turning into stairways. Down? No, that must be wrong! She looked at the map again. She should be going uphill.

She was growing confused and panicky, but she was still rational enough to see the truth. She had been alone in the city for barely five minutes, and already she was lost.

Chapter 4.

Stragglemarket Trying to think in the calm and scientific way that Dr. Crumb had taught her, Fever turned her back on the sun and started following a nearby viaduct, hoping that it would lead her back to the Terminus. But the viaduct was not easy to follow. Scruffy buildings leaned against its supports, archaeological digs opened in the middle of streets, and in detouring round them she soon lost sight of the tramline altogether.

(She did not notice the black sedan chair that cut through the crowds a hundred feet behind her, d.o.g.g.i.ng her path like a large, square shark.) She took wrong turn after wrong turn, and ended up on a street with high, abandoned-looking warehouses on either side. In front of the buildings small-time scavengers and archaeologists had set out their wares on trestles under canvas awnings, or spread them on blankets on the cobbled ground. Fever tasted a sudden tang of homesickness as she looked down into a hamper filled with old mobile phone carapaces just like the ones she had so often cleaned and polished for Dr. Crumb. On other stalls she glimpsed intriguing knots of old wiring and circuitry, and once a whole engine, but most of the traders were simply selling junk -- shapeless old clots of crushed plastic and rust whose purpose not even an Engineer could hope to guess.

"'Allo, ducks!" called a toothless old woman, seeing Fever glance at the rust-stained stones that were spread on her blanket. "Treat yourself to a bargain, dearie!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed at Fever's sleeve and Fever looked round into her mad old face. The woman's eyes widened. Her grin turned into something different. "What are you?" she asked. She started to back away, pointing with one arm at Fever's face while she used the other to elbow a path for herself through the crowd. "Her eyes!" she squealed. "Her eyes! She's one of them!"

"Please, do stop it," said Fever, but her voice was small, no more than a whisper really, while the old woman's had risen to a wheezy shriek.

"Scriven! She be Scriven!"