Page 16 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

He settled. It was always nice to have a little tiff to make sure everyone knew where they should stand. He poured himself some tea, or started to, but then paused. Behind her, all along the huge glass windows, owls had lined up. There were twenty at least, different species and sizes, and they were all looking out to sea, as though they expected somebody.

PART TWO

EIGHT

Yokohama, 18th December 1888

Thaniel jerked out of a nightmare with the absolute certainty that there was someone in the corner of the cabin, watching him. It didn’t go away even once he had been looking around for a while. Unsettled, he went out to the balcony for some air. They were sailing close to the land, much closer than he’d thought. It was misty, but above the mist, unreal because it was so vast, was Mount Fuji. There was a click above him. Some ladies on the next deck up were taking photographs – or rather, the photograph, the one everyone wanted for a postcard.

Fuji wasn’t like other mountains. The slopes were shallow, the tip truncated. It looked like it should have been small, but it was a titan. From less than a third of the way up, it was white. There were other mountains ghosting around it, but in comparison they were miniature. Right around the skirts of the whole range sprawled Aokigahara Forest, bluish in the mist bands.

Near the shore was a great murmuration of birds. Thaniel couldn’t tell what they were, but something had upset them. The swing of their flight wasn’t the peaceful twisting of a playing flock; they were shooting away from something, and the shapes they made were strobing.

Thunder growled from inland. The sky was pewter, and there was a migraine pressure in the air. Up on the mountainside, something flashed blue. He yanked his sleeve over his hand when the rail gave him a shock. Whatever was wrong with his lungs, he’d started to feel the cold badly and he’d slept in a jumper since leaving London. The wool stuck against itself now, staticky.

Above the land, the birds were crying, and there was a salt-coloured haze over everything. But the sky was clear. The mist, most of it, was the noise of the birds. The world looked clearer when he covered his ears.

He wondered about tapping on the connecting door to see if Mori was awake yet. He folded his arms to stop himself. Mori had been cheerful all through the journey, and kept the door between the two cabins open always. A few days ago, when they reached the southernmost tip of Korea, he had brought Six through so they could watch from the balcony as they passed the Russian fleet. Thaniel had never seen real warships before. He’d thought the liner was big, but the Russian ironclads were juggernauts. Friendly juggernauts, though; the men in the rigging waved and the liner passengers waved back, and Six pealed into delighted laughter when the flagship let off its guns in a huge, fantastic salute.

The music in the first-class lounge that night had been Tchaikovsky. Mori taught him to waltz. Thaniel couldn’t always remember where or when to turn, but it didn’t matter; the bones in Mori’s hands were close to the surface, and they flickered before a change in direction, as clear as weathervanes.

Then Nagasaki had materialised on the horizon. It was a strange place, full of ramshackle shipyards and markets that everyone had poured off the liner to explore for a few hours while the crew refuelled. Everyone except Mori, who wouldn’t even go near the gangway. There was something wrong with Nagasaki, he said; it gave him nightmares.

That had been early yesterday, and Mori hadn’t got back his cheer. The connecting door was shut now. It seemed the decent thing to give him some time to himself, to get used to home and everything it meant, instead of following him around like an asthmatic puppy.

There was a green clack as the connecting door unlocked. Mori came through.

‘Speak of the devil,’ Thaniel said, surprised.

‘I know, I’m sorry.’ He must have got up in a hurry. His cuffs were undone and his shirt was open to his collarbones, and it wasn’t clear what he was apologising for. ‘Could you come inside a minute?’ he said. ‘Away from the balcony.’

Thaniel did as he was told. Mori shut the balcony door and stepped back from it, just before the murmuration reached them and birds smacked into the windows, dozens of them. Thaniel jumped. Yells came from the cabin above, and more from the one on the right. The bang of each small body burst black stars across Thaniel’s vision, followed by the tin scritch of cracking glass. The birds were blue and grey, the size of tennis balls. One smashed through a weakened patch of glass and Mori caught it, very softly, between both hands.

It stopped as quickly as it had started. All that was left were floating feathers. Dead birds covered the balcony floor. The living one in Mori’s hands cheeped feebly. When he let it go, it wheeled away, still panicking.

‘She’s on the bridge, she’s all right,’ Mori said, just as Thaniel took a breath to ask about Six.

Some of the birds on the balcony weren’t quite dead yet but jerking brokenly. He opened the door and knelt down to snap the neck of one that was getting frightened and frantic. White-breasted with dark speckles, it was a lovely little thing, something like a finch. He set it down gently. ‘Why did they do that?’

‘Something on the mountain.’ Mori watched Fuji go by.

A few of the other birds twitched, but none of them was alive enough to save.

Six had made friends with Second Lieutenant Hopkins, who was mechanically minded and happy to show her things. At first, Thaniel hadn’t been too pleased with the idea of letting her go off with strange men; not because he thought Mori would let anything bad happen, but because it seemed dangerous to teach her to trust everyone. Mori, though, had pointed out that it was just as dangerous to teach a little girl that one foot wrong would mean a lunatic and a dungeon. It made it sound inevitable, whereas if you were brought up safe in the knowledge that people were supposed to be good, you approached the bad ones with a healthy fury that might just see you out of the dungeon.

None of the windows had broken on the bridge, but some of the officers were peering down through the cracked glass.

‘Mr Hopkins says it’s electrical,’ Six reported when she saw Thaniel and Mori. She was studying the wing of a dead bird, which Hopkins had spread out to show her. ‘The compasses have gone strange. Look.’ She pointed to the navigation panel just beside her.

The needles skittered and stuck in odd places.

‘Hopkins,’ the captain said distractedly. ‘Put that child back where you found it.’ He was leaning close to a telegraph, listening.

Thaniel took her hand and nodded to Hopkins. He started to turn away, meaning to take her downstairs again to find some food, but Mori stayed where he was. He was watching the captain.

‘You’re about to get a shock from the key,’ he said.

‘Since when did we allow passengers on the bridge?’ the captain said. He had one hand over his ear in an effort to listen to the telegraph. ‘If you wouldn’t mind terribly …’ He faded off. ‘Hopkins. The tower on shore is broadcasting. They’re saying to stay five miles off the coast until Yokohama. Turn us away. Engine order full steam— Jesus Christ!’