A Darkling Plain

  16 Fishcake on the Roof of the world

  ***

  remember little Fishcake and his Stalker? Not many people do. The death of Brittlestar and the theft of the Spider Baby had been a surprise to Brighton, but the other Lost Boys had instantly started to squabble among themselves for possession of Brittlestar's slaves and houses, and by the time the bullets and the Battle Frisbees stopped flying, nobody remembered the odd events that had sparked all the trouble.

  A few days later a raft town cruising in the crater maze east of the Middle Sea reported losing fuel from its storage tanks, and the captain of a submersible diving for blast glass on the crater floors claimed to have seen a strange craft swim by above him, silhouetted against the sunlit surface. But the captain was a drunkard, and the few people who believed his story just shook their heads and muttered that the Lost Boys must be up to their old tricks again.

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  From crater to flooded crater the Spider Baby crept north and east. It crossed a spur of the Great Hunting Ground, swimming along flooded track marks and scuttling nervously over the ridges between them, while the ground shook beneath the weight of prowling cities. It crept through the Rustwater Marshes and found its way at last into the Sea of Khazak. The sea had been a battlefield not long before, and there were sunken suburbs and drowned airships lying all over its silty floor. Fishcake burgled their rusting fuel tanks and surfaced in a cleft on the rocky shore of the Black Island to recharge the limpet's batteries. Then he submerged again and pressed on eastward.

  The Spider Baby had passed beyond the edge of Lost Boy charts weeks earlier, but Fishcake's Stalker seemed to have a map of this country in her mind. Beyond the sea a broad river curved down out of the eastern hills. Fishcake did as she told him, following the river east, past Green Storm airbases and under bridges rumbling with convoys of half-tracks and armored trains. Pontoons had been stretched across the river in case townie raiders tried to sneak inland in boats, but the Spider Baby slid under them, passing like a ghost through the lands of the Storm.

  "Why don't you make yourself known?" asked Fishcake, looking through the periscope at settled statics, farmland, the green lightning-bolt banners flapping confidently from forts and temples. "These are your people, aren't they? When they see that you're alive--"

  "They betrayed me," his Stalker hissed. "The Once-Born have failed me. They follow Naga now. I shall make the world green again without them."

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  "But you'll have me, won't you?" said Fishcake nervously. "I can help you, can't I?"

  His Stalker did not answer him. But later, while he was resting, he woke to find her sitting at his side. She was Anna again, and she touched his hair with her cold hand and whispered, "You are a good boy, Fishcake. I am so glad of you. I should have had a son of my own. I should have liked to watch a child grow, and play. I never see you play, Fishcake. Would you like to play a game?"

  Fishcake felt himself turn hot with shame. "I don't know any games," he murmured. "They didn't--at the Burglarium-- I mean, I don't know how to."

  "Poor Fishcake," the Stalker whispered. "And poor Anna."

  Fishcake huddled himself on her lap, wrapping his arms around her battered metal body and laying his head against her hard chest, listening to the tick and shush of the weird machines inside her. "Mummy," he said quietly, just to find out what shape the word made in his mouth. He did not remember calling anybody that before. "Mummy." He was crying, and the Stalker comforted him, stroking his head with her clumsy hands and whispering an old Chinese lullaby that Anna Fang had heard in her own childhood, on the bird roads, long ago.

  And Fishcake slept, and did not wake until she turned into the Stalker Fang again and stood up, dumping him onto the floor.

  Mile by mile, up rivers, through marshes, clumping on its eight steel feet through empty valleys, the Spider Baby edged its way eastward. One night, when Fishcake went out onto

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  the hull to breathe fresh air, the moonlit mountains of Shan Guo stretched along the horizon ahead of him like a white smile.

  The river shallowed, choked with rocks and boulders that spring floods had washed from the overhanging hillsides. The Spider Baby moved only by night, stalking up white rushing rapids in the starlight, hiding at dawn in the dense forests of pine and rhododendron that cloaked the riverbanks. The Stalker Fang grew impatient during these delays; she bared her claws and listened enviously to the convoys of Green Storm airships that passed overhead from time to time. But when she was Anna, she liked the forests. She held Fishcake's hand and led him down the quiet, resin-scented aisles between the trees, or turned girlish and silly and threw pine-cones at him. "We're playing!" she whispered excitedly, as he chased after her laughing, throwing pinecones of his own. "Fishcake, this is what playing feels like!"

  Fishcake lived for the times when she was Anna. He hated the Stalker Fang, and Anna did too. "She scares me," she told him once. "The other one. So cold and fierce. When she comes, I can't even hear myself think...."

  But the Stalker Fang was scared of Anna, too. Each time she regained control, her first question was always, "How long was I malfunctioning? What did the Error do? What did it say?" That was her name for the Anna part of her: the Error.

  "This unit is damaged," she declared. "I need repair."

  "I don't know how," whined Fishcake. "I don't know anything about Stalker brains." If he had, he would have shut down the Fang part of her and made her be Anna all the time. Then they could take the Spider Baby away into the

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  empty mountains somewhere and live there and be happy together, the Lost Boy who wanted a mother and the dead woman who wanted a child. But he knew it was hopeless. If the Fang part of her found out that Fishcake had tried to help the Error, she would kill him.

  So he went east and north with her, following her whispery directions, while the river grew steeper and narrower, until one night the Spider Baby surfaced in the plunge pool beneath a tall white waterfall and Fishcake realized that it could carry them no farther. At first he felt relieved. But the Stalker Fang was not disheartened for a moment. "We shall leave the limpet here and walk," she whispered.

  "Walk to where?" asked Fishcake.

  "To talk to ODIN."

  "How far is it?"

  "It is two hundred and ninety-four miles away."

  "I can't walk that far!" protested Fishcake.

  "Then stay here," his Stalker said. She left the limpet and started to feel her way up the steep, spray-wet ladder of rocks beside the cataract. Fishcake quickly filled a burgling bag with provisions, ready to go after her. When he scrambled out onto the hull, he found her waiting for him. She was still the Stalker Fang. She had decided that he might be useful to her after all.

  "There is a hermitage on Zhan Shan," she whispered. "We shall break the journey there."

  Zhan Shan was a volcano so huge and high that Fishcake had been piloting the Spider Baby across its lower slopes for days without even noticing. The whole world seemed to form the

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  roots of Zhan Shan, and its head was lost above the clouds. The narrow tracks that wound up and up across the lava fields were lined with shrines. Raggedy silk prayer flags clapped and fluttered and tore away in wisps of silk and cotton, carrying prayers to the realms of the Sky Gods.

  "This is a holy mountain," said Fishcake's Stalker, turning into Anna again and picking him up, because the path was steep and the air thin and he was close to exhaustion. He wondered why she had come back now. Had it been the sound of those flags flapping that had woken her?

  "No one knows how it came to be," she whispered. "Perhaps it was the Gods who put it here, perhaps the Ancients. Something ripped the land open, and the hot blood of the earth welled out and made Zhan Shan and all the young mountains north of here. Ash and smoke blocked out the sun. The winter lasted for decades. But look how beautiful this land is now!"

  "You can't see it."

  "I remember it. I loved thes
e mountains, when I was alive. It is good to be home."

  After a day and a night, Fishcake saw a light ahead, twinkling at him through the twilight and the silent-falling snow. They passed a field where a few hairy cattle stood with blankets of snow on their backs. Beyond it lay a tiny house with a steep roof and eaves that curled up at the corners like burning paper. It was built from the black volcanic stone of the mountainside, but there were shutters and a pillared porch made of carved wood painted red and gold and blue, which gave it a cheerful look. A dog trotted out to greet the travelers, then slunk off whimpering when it sniffed the Stalker.

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  "What is this place?" Anna whispered.

  "Don't you know?" asked Fishcake. "You brought us here."

  "I have never been here before. I just followed the road the other me set us on."

  Fishcake looked critically at the little house. "She said there was a hermitage. She said we'd break our journey there. Is this it?"

  His Stalker did not know.

  The door had two gold eyes to ward off evil. Fishcake thumped with his small fist on the planks between them. He heard a movement behind the door, then silence. He knocked again. Above, on the sheer buttresses of the mountain, the evening mist made ghosts.

  The door opened. A person in a red robe of some thick, crude-woven fabric. A woman, Fishcake decided. She had a brown face, hollow and large eyed, and her hair had been shaved down to a shadow on her bony skull. "We need food, please, Missis, and water," Fishcake began, but the woman was not even looking at him. She stared over his head at the Stalker. Her mouth moved, but no words came out, only little whimpering sounds. She put her left hand to her face, and then her right, and Fishcake saw that the right hand was not really a hand at all, just a shiny metal hook.

  "Anna?" the woman said. She took a step backward into the darkness of her little house. "No! You are not her!" she said. "I tried and tried, but you are not--"

  "Sathya!" whispered the Stalker, and lurched past Fishcake to wrap her steel arms around the frightened woman. Fishcake shouted out, because he thought for a moment that she had turned back into the Stalker Fang again and was

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  murdering the stranger. When he saw that she was just embracing her, he felt relieved, and then jealous.

  "Sathya!" his Stalker whispered, tracing the lines of the woman's face with her metal fingertips. "I haven't seen you since--oh, that night at Batmunkh Gompa, the snow, and the fire, and Valentine.... Oh Sathya, how old you've grown! And your poor hand! What happened to your hand?"

  Sathya looked at her, and looked at Fishcake, and fainted with a little sigh, collapsing on the flagstone floor.

  "She was my friend, my student," the Stalker whispered, crouching over her. Her blind bronze face looked around at Fishcake. "What is she doing here? What has become of her?"

  Fishcake shook his head uneasily. How was he supposed to know anything about this hermit lady? His Stalker was the one who knew her. He said, "We ought to nick some food and get going before she wakes up."

  "No! We must help her! I want to talk to her!"

  "But what if the other half of you comes again? She won't want to talk, will she? She'll just kill--"

  "Then you must watch for her," his Stalker whispered. "You must warn Sathya when you think the other one is about to come. But perhaps she will not come at all." She stroked Sathya's face. "Such memories, Fishcake--all sorts of new memories! They make me stronger, I can feel it. Now help me; where is her bed?"

  That was easy; the hermitage had only one room, and the bed was in the far corner; a big bed, heaped with furs and blankets, with a fire of cattle dung burning in a space beneath it. Anna laid Sathya down and gently drew a coverlet over her. Sathya stirred.

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  "Anna, is it really you?" she asked. "I think so," the Stalker whispered.

  Sathya started to sob. "Anna, it is all my fault! I should have let you rest peaceful, but I couldn't bear it! I made a deal with Popjoy."

  "Who is Popjoy?"

  "An Engineer. He Resurrected you. He promised me that you'd be yourself again, but you didn't remember me, you didn't remember anything, you said you weren't Anna...."

  "Sssssh," the Stalker whispered, holding Sathya's hand, pressing it against her cold bronze lips. "You brought me back, Sathya. Your love brought me back."

  "Oh, oh," moaned Sathya, and hid her face in the blankets, while Fishcake watched and waited for Anna to turn into the Stalker Fang. But she did not change, and slowly he started to hope that this meeting with her old friend had given her the strength to keep the Stalker Fang at bay for good.

  He slept on the floor that night, pillowed on rugs, warmed by the dung burning in the potbellied stove. The voices of Sathya and the Stalker washed over him and around him, speaking of places he had never been to and people he had never met, dropping now and then into languages he didn't know.

  He woke hours later, to morning sunlight and the steady sound of a pump. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he went outside into the bright morning mist. His Stalker was sitting on the porch, her back to the sun-warmed wall, her blind mask turned inquisitively toward the sounds that Sathya was

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  making as she worked the handle of the pump at the far corner of the house. It looked like hard work for someone with only one hand, so Fishcake went to help. When they had filled Sathya's big leather bucket, they took a handle each and started carrying it to the house. "You're wondering what this is for, I suppose?" said Sathya. "Well, it's a bath, for you."

  Fishcake yelped, protested, and almost dropped the bucket. He didn't think he'd ever had a bath before, and he didn't see why he should break the habit of a lifetime now. But Sathya and his Stalker would not listen to any excuses; working together they stripped off his grimy clothes and dumped him into Sathya's zinc bathtub, and soaped and scrubbed him, and washed his lousy hair.

  That was the happiest day of Fishcake's childhood, and he would remember it always. The sun rose high and burned away the mist, and all around Sathya's lonely house the snowfields shone clean and dazzling, each summit exhaling a breath of wind-blown snow into the diamond sky. Sathya washed Fishcake's clothes, and gave him some of her own to wear while they were drying: worn canvas trousers and a woolen shirt. He chopped wood for her, tugging big logs out of a pile that had been brought up to the hermitage as a gift by the people living in the deep valleys below, and splitting them with an axe. His Stalker helped him carry the split logs into the lean-to behind the house, and then Sathya led him down to the drystone enclosure where the cattle were. They frightened Fishcake at first, because they were so big and so alive, but Sathya showed him how gentle they were. He thought they were funny, the way their hairy black ears twitched like mittened hands to bat flies away, and their pink

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  tongues curled around the mouthfuls of hay he held out to them. He watched while Sathya milked the cow, and then carried the pail back to the house for her, careful not to spill a drop of the foamy, steaming milk.

  Meanwhile, Anna had unsheathed one of her claws and was using it to carve an off cut of wood she had found in the lean-to. When she had finished, she pressed the thing she had made into Fishcake's hands. It was a little wooden horse, trotting with its head up and its tail flying out behind it like a flag.

  "What is it for?" asked Fishcake, turning it over, surprised.

  "For you," whispered his Stalker. "It's a toy. For playing with. My father used to carve toys for me when I was a little girl."

  Fishcake looked at the horse in his hands. If he had been a normal child, he would have had lots of toys; he would have spent whole afternoons lying on the carpet inventing worlds of his own with toy animals and cities. If he had been a normal child, he might already think himself too old to play with little wooden horses. But he was a Lost Boy, and he had never owned a toy before. And he started to cry, because the horse was so beautiful, and he loved it so much.

  Later he and Sathya walked down
to the river: a white rush of a river that spilled under a rickety rope-and-bamboo bridge and went shouting and splashing away toward the wooded valleys. They threw stones into the rapids, while Sathya's dog barked and bounded up and down the bank. Fishcake found the pole from an old prayer flag washed down in last spring's thaw from some shrine high on Zhan

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  Shan, and threw that in too, and they watched the river carry it away. The sun was going down. The valleys filled with shadow, and the mountains glowed amber and rose.

  "You should stay here, Fishcake," said Sathya, over the roar of the water.

  "I can't," Fishcake replied, not wanting to even think about it. "The Stalker ..."

  "She can stay too." She looked away from him, far away, beyond the mountains, into her own troubled past. "After I lost my hand and the Stalker took charge at Rogues' Roost and the Green Storm seized power, I went a little bit mad, I think. I kept trying to tell people that she wasn't really Anna, but they wouldn't listen. The Storm wanted to execute me, but there were a few officers--Naga was one of them--who took pity on me, and they arranged for me to come and live here instead. The Stalker Fang must have signed the order, I suppose; that must be how she knew to find me here. I expect the others have all but forgotten me by now. I'm not allowed to leave, but the people in the valley settlements look after me; they bring me wood and honey and tea, and in return I go up onto Zhan Shan and tend the high shrines, and pray for them to the Sky Gods and the Mountain Gods."

  "Don't you get lonely?" Fishcake asked.

  "Of course I do. It's a better life than I deserve, after the things I did when I was young. But if you wanted to stay for a while, there would be room for you. Just until you are ready to move on, or old enough to move down into the villages and make a life for yourself there.... Fishcake, you're only a child."