Chapter 9
Breakfast at Moon’s
The taxi set down on a platform outside an entry port in Murnau’s armor, where there were a lot of guards and questions. The guards were polite enough, but reluctant to let dubious-looking characters like Tom and Wren up to Tier Two even when Orla Twombley promised that she would vouch for them, and showed the guards the ornamental sword she’d been presented with for shooting down three of the Green Storm’s destroyers at the Battle of the Bay of Bengal. At last, exasperated, she said, “They are old, old friends of Professor Nimrod Pennyroyal!” and that was enough; the guards stopped being merely polite and became quite friendly; one of them put through a telephone call to his commander, and a minute later Tom, Wren, and Ms. Twombley were aboard an upbound elevator.
In these days of peace Murnau had taken to opening the shutters in its armor during the daylight hours, to let the sunlight in. Even so, Tier Two felt gloomy. Many and many a time on their way from the elevator station, Tom and Wren passed empty places where whole streets had been collapsed by rockets and flying bombs. The buildings that still stood had Xs of tape across their windowpanes, giving them the look of drunks in comic strips. On every square inch of wall there were posters and stenciled slogans, and you did not have to speak New German to understand that they were urging the young men of Murnau to volunteer for the Abwehrtruppe, Murnau’s military. Most of the young men Wren could see had taken their advice and were dressed in smart midnight-blue uniforms. The few who weren’t, those who were missing an arm or a leg, or half their face, or who were being pushed along in wheelchairs, all wore medals to show that they had done their bit against the Storm. A lot of the young women were uniformed too, but not so magnificently as the men. Orla Twombley said, “Murnau women are not allowed to fight, poor dears. They play their part by working in the factories and the engine district while their menfolk crew the guns.”
They crossed a square called Walter Moers Platz, heading for the tall, narrow cafe named Moon’s. A shutter had been opened in the city’s armored cowling a few streets away, letting in the bright spring sunshine, but it came too late for the trees and grasses in the little park at the center of the square, which were all dead and brown and withered after years in the shade. Through the bare branches Wren caught glimpses of silent fountains and a rusting bandstand. She thought this the saddest city she had ever been to.
But when she followed Orla Twombley through the front door of Moon’s, it was as if she had stepped out of Murnau and into another city altogether. The café’s scuffed and mismatched furniture looked faintly arty, and the walls were covered with paintings and drawings and photographs of people having fun. It reminded Wren of Brighton, and the resemblance was deliberate. There was a generation of young people aboard Murnau who had lived all their lives with war and duty. They had heard about the sort of freedom people enjoyed on other cities and were determined to taste it for themselves. And so they came to Moon’s: the artists and the authors and the poets and the young men on leave from the Abwehrtruppe who dreamed of being artists and authors and poets, and they did their very best to be Romantic and Bohemian.
They weren’t very good at it, of course. There was something too stiff about the careless poses they struck in Moon’s tatty old leather armchairs. Their casual, baggy clothes were too well pressed, and their too-long hair was always neatly combed. The few real artists among them, like the painter Skoda Geist, they found rather scary. So when Nimrod Pennyroyal had arrived on Murnau, they had welcomed him eagerly. Here was a man who had made his fortune by having highly Romantic adventures and writing books about them, and who had once been mayor of Brighton, that most artistic of cities. Yet unlike Geist he never laughed at them, or mocked their poems and paintings; quite the contrary, he was always ready to praise their little efforts, and happy to let them buy him drinks and meals.
He was in the middle of an enormous breakfast when Tom and Wren walked in on him. Quite literally in the middle of it, for the couch he sat on, in an upstairs room, was surrounded on all sides by small tables laden with rolls and cooked meats, fruit, croissants, algae waffles, fried eggs and mushrooms, toast, kedgeree, omelettes, jam, and cheese. A silver coffeepot sent curlicues of steam up into the play of sunbeams from the taped-over windows, and all around, packed onto other couches or sitting rather daringly on the floor, artistic young Murnauers listened as he described the book he was at work on.
“… I have just reached the bit where I faced that dreadful Stalker Fang,” he explained, through a mouthful of moss loaf. “Rather a painful episode to put on paper, for I don’t mind admitting that I was scared. I quaked! I quivered! I never planned to fight her, you understand—I do not mean to set myself up as some sort of hero. No, I came on her by accident while I hurried through the gardens in search of a way to escape from the Storm…”
His audience nodded eagerly. Some of them had served in Murnau’s skirt forts and faced Stalkers themselves, and most recalled the dreadful battles of the year ’14, when Green Storm airships had landed squads of the Resurrected on Murnau’s upper tiers. They all wanted to hear how this valiant old gentleman had managed to overcome the most terrible Stalker of them all.
But Pennyroyal, for once, seemed lost for words. His mouth hung open, he set down his fork, and one by one his listeners turned to see the newcomers standing in the doorway.
“Two old friends to see you, Professor!” said Orla Twombley, finding herself a place to sit among the Murnauers.
“Tom!” said Pennyroyal, standing. “And Wren! My dear child!”
He came to greet them with his arms outstretched. Their sudden appearance had surprised him, but he was genuinely happy to see them both. He had always felt guilty about shooting Tom, but by saving Wren from the Lost Boys, helping her fly The Arctic Roll to Kom Ombo, and then magnanimously allowing them to keep the little airship, he hoped that he had made up for that unfortunate incident at Anchorage. Now that Tom’s horrible wife had vanished, Pennyroyal felt glad to count the Natsworthys among his friends.
“My dears!” He beamed, hugging them each in turn. “How happy I am to see you! I was just telling my friends here about our adventures on Cloud 9, which are to be the subject of my forthcoming book. A respectable Murnau publishing house, Werederobe and Spoor, has paid a whopping advance for a modest account of my part in the downfall of the Stalker Fang and the rise of General Naga, that peace-loving gentleman. You will both feature in the tale, of course! After all, Wren, was it not you, my loyal former slave girl, who flew The Arctic Roll up to Cloud 9 to rescue me when all hope seemed gone?”
“Was it?” asked Wren. “That’s not how I remember it…”
“She is modesty itself!” cried Pennyroyal, glancing over his shoulder at his young friends, and to Wren herself, rather more urgently, he muttered, “I had to alter the facts a little, just here and there, to add some color, you know.”
Wren looked at her father, and they both shrugged. She thought how tiring it must be to be Pennyroyal, and build a past for yourself out of so many interlocking lies. He must have to spend such a lot of time tinkering with his stories to make sure they fitted, and surely he must live in fear of the day when the whole shaky edifice collapsed?
But perhaps Pennyroyal felt that the rewards made it all worthwhile. He certainly looked as if he were prospering. He wore an outfit of his own invention that managed to make him look important and military without actually being a uniform: a short, sky-blue dolman-sleeve tunic over a red waistcoat (both covered in frogging and pointless silver buttons), a lilac sash, purple breeches with gold embroidery and a six-inch crimson stripe, and bucket-topped boots with gold tassels. Compared to the Pennyroyal she had known in Brighton, Wren thought he looked quite tasteful and restrained.