Read Online Dead Water by Simon Ings - Free Book Online

glittered greenly in the dusk like week-old fish. Mason’s swarthy, flattened looks make him every inch a Nemo, too. Prince Dakkar, son of the Rajah of Bundelkund, who plundered sunken galleons for gold and preyed on British ships to fuck the hated Empire up...
    The boys will spin this story out for as long as they can, they’re learning fast, they’re getting good at this, but narrative logic demands that what goes up must come down. The shattered airship will crash again – and finally, this time. The ship must crash...
    But the winds do not stop in their courses and the oceans do not cease to turn, and the bag, a ruined, wheezing lung, flies higher, higher, hits a slipstream, bends, deforms, stretches and shreds, its luggage spilled, its Nemo hurled without complaint to earth, roll-up sparking in his claywhite fist. World-wrapping winds whip shreds of fabric bag round and round the earth and drop them, years later, on a barren hill.

I T A L I A
    The boys slither over dry, smashed rock, dizzy with adventure. They have no idea where they are, or when, but they are beginning to grasp that geography matters less to them than it matters to the living. They make their own journeys with the stories they tell. They fashion – somehow, they don’t yet know how – their own escapes. They survived a barren and virtually unpeopled Arctic: they’ll make a story of this place too. Stories are their breath. Their food. Their blood. And they’re getting stronger.
    On the hill opposite, perched in a shadowy defile, a wounded officer of the Sultan’s Desert Regiment blinks, sun-dazzled, as letters spill and blur across the shattered wastes, into the defile and up, unseen, towards his heart and brain.
    The boys bed in, tense, waiting for the crash, the screaming plummet, the blow from the monstrous white bear. (For all they know, it’s their presence brought such ill-luck on their former host.) But nothing bad happens: just a stumbling descent on one good leg to the town and the shore and the motorboat. David Brooks rides in the prow, watching a pod of dolphins. He wonders why he feels so nauseous, who never had a day’s seasickness in his life. The boys, winding boisterously around his guts, fight for the view afforded by his eyes.
    The aeroplane ride to the southern city of Salalah is exhilarating, though the Skyvan’s interior is cramped and smelly and not nearly as comfortable as the airship. Riding in the Land Rover with David Brooks and Edward Turnhill brings them back to territory with which they are almost familiar: dust, rock, broken concrete, jerry-rigged phone and power lines. It’s when they get to the palace that things begin to fall apart. This David man’s no hero, it turns out. He’s come to steal a kingdom. No hero hides behind a gun, a uniform. No. The boys will none of him. They’d sooner tease the old man’s parrots.
    When they look up from their play, David has gone. Turnhill and the Sultan have gone. The palace is deserted.
    The palace doors are open. One by one the Sultan’s birds flump their way towards the great outdoors. Funnelled to an unlikely height by the strange, reverse vertigo of once-captive birds, the parrots spiral over their palatial home, up and up, until they hit a cold layer, whipping counter to the sea fog’s flow. Airs of different temperatures and densities do not mix. They rub against each other and waves form along the join. An inverse wave, like a great tongue, scoops the birds up into the cold layer and the wind flings them, bright as rockets fired from Nemo’s ship, out over the ocean.
    Around noon the next day a lump of something, a rough parallelepiped, yellow as a cheap housebrick, drops out of the Indian Ocean’s blue empyrean and lands on the roof of a forty-foot-long shipping container. The container is one of eight lashed to the hatch covers of a small Chinese-built cargo ship called
Malacca Queen
. Bricked in ice, deepfrozen, Sultan Said’s second-favourite parrot