The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [87]
Orphan, still bemused, followed her.
"What's your name?" he asked the girl.
"Elizabeth," she said. "What's yours?"
"Orphan."
The girl giggled. "Orphan's not a real name."
"What's a real name?" he asked, brushing away a branch. Where were they going? The girl seemed to know her way, but he was completely lost.
"You know," the girl said. "Edward, or Richard, or Henry, or…" She seemed to think about it for a while. "Or James," she said.
Orphan smiled. He remembered, when he was a kid, being interested in old coins. "They're all very royal names," he said.
"Orphan's not a proper name," the girl said. Orphan shrugged. He wasn't going to get into that. He must have had a real name, once. A name his mother had given him. But he had never known her. Orphan might have been a description more than a proper name, but it suited him fine.
"Where are we going?" he said.
"Don't you know anything?" the girl said.
Orphan shrugged again, too tired to argue, and said, "No."
"It's not far now," the girl said.
"Fine," Orphan said.
"If you're a pirate," the girl said, "then where is your cutlass?"
"I don't know how to use one," Orphan said. "I am… well, was… well, a poet, you see. And the pen, you know, is mightier than the sword."
The girl turned to look at him, then snorted a laugh. "That's not true."
"Books," Orphan began, but the girl stopped and looked at him in alarm, no longer smiling. "Books!" she said. She made a sign with her hand, as if warding off evil.
Orphan, not sure why she responded that way, backtracked quickly. "We had no books on the pirate ship," he said. "Anyone caught with a book was made to walk the plank!"
The girl slowly relaxed. Then she grinned. "Did they make you walk the plank?"
"No, of course not," Orphan said. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here, would I?"
"I think you did!" the girl said. "That's why you're here. You swam from the pirate ship and got to the island!"
The girl had strange ideas, Orphan thought. Unfortunately, this one was a little too close to the truth. He remembered Mr. Spoons making that last sailor from the Nautilus walk the plank, and shuddered. He hoped he never saw another pirate ship again for as long as he lived.
Which might not, he reflected, be all that long.
Then, without him noticing, he and the girl went around one final tree (its trunk the thickness of several men) and came out into the open.
Before them lay a crater.
The crater was enormous; it looked as though, at some distant time in the past, a giant fist had come down from the skies and punched into the earth, shattering it into painful splinters. It was a place where the land had bled; once-sandy patches were now areas of strange green glass where nothing grew. The crater lay bare before Orphan. Only its rim, high above it, was alive with plant life, and these, in sharp contrast to the crater itself, were plentiful but grotesque. Flowers as tall as Orphan nodded in the breeze, their colours in too-sharp relief, bloodied reds and oozing greens like the unmixed paint on an artist's palate.
But it was the scene below that captured his attention.
Down in the crater, two large, matt-black airships hung suspended, moored to the ground by long trailing cables. Below them, dome-shaped buildings sprouted everywhere. They reminded Orphan of mushrooms, and suddenly the thought of mushrooms – in butter, with fried onions and a piece of toast – made his stomach growl. When was the last time he had eaten?
The girl – Elizabeth – looked at him sideways and suddenly grinned. Orphan blushed.
It wasn't the buildings, however – nor the hordes of uniformed people who swarmed between them – that had captivated him. What had – what made his heart suddenly beat against his chest as if he were coming down with a cold – was the elaborate structure that towered out of the bottom of the crater. A giant metal tube, a mechanism supported by a complex web work of wires and machines. It was monstrous, a cannon magnified a thousand-fold,