Social Class Theme Analysis

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Thaddeus Valentine was Tom’s hero: a former scavenger who had risen to become London’s most famous archaeologist—and also its Head Historian, much to the envy and disgust of people like Pomeroy. Tom kept a picture of him tacked to the dormitory wall above his bunk, and he had read his books, Adventures of a Practical Historian and America Deserta—Across the Dead Continent with Gun, Camera and Airship, until he knew them by heart.

“Ask him!” she screamed. “Ask him what he did to Hester Shaw!”

“The law!” she scoffed. “Valentine is the law in London. Isn’t he the Lord Mayor’s favourite? Isn’t he the Head Historian? No, he’ll kill me unless I kill him first.”

Magnus Crome had been ruler of London for nearly twenty years, but he still didn’t look like a Lord Mayor. The Lord Mayors in Katherine’s history books were chubby, merry, red-faced men, but Crome was as thin as an old crow, and twice as gloomy.

“Yes, I know, and I’m terribly sorry about it, but what can I do?” said Wreyland sadly. “Times are hard, you know.”

“It’s made of junk!” he gasped.

“Junk?” laughed Miss Fang. “Why, the Jenny Haniver is built from bits of the finest airships that ever flew! An envelope of silicon-silk from a Shan Guo clipper, twin Jeunet-Carot aero-engines off a Paris gunship, the reinforced gas-cells of a Spitzbergen war-balloon... It’s amazing what you can find in the scrapyards...”

“I WORK FOR THE LORD MAYOR OF LONDON NOW,” said Shrike. “HE HAS SENT ME TO KILL YOU.”

Tom whimpered again. Hester gave a brittle little laugh. “But ... you won’t do it, will you, Shrike? You wouldn’t kill me?”

“YES,” said Shrike flatly, still staring down at her.

“We don’t stand a chance against Shrike in the air,” she explained. “Hopefully on the ground I can outwit him.”

Above it flapped a black and white flag; a grinning skull and two crossed bones.

“Great Quirke!” gasped Tom. “This is a pirate suburb!”

“What does she mean, K Division?” asked Katherine.

“I want Tunbridge Wheels to turn into a city, a proper big city wiv me as Lord Mayor, sumfink I can ‘and down to me sprogs. And you Tommy, I want you to tell me how a city ought to be, and teach me manners. Ettyket, like. So I can hob nob wiv’ other Lord Mayors and not ‘ave them laugh at me behind my back.”

“Nor will we have to go chasing after scraps like Salthook,” Crome continued. “In another week London will be within range of Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall. For a thousand years the Anti-Traction League has cowered behind it, holding out against the tide of history. MEDUSA will destroy it at a single stroke.”

“No!” Katherine heard herself say. “Oh, no, no, no!” She started to run across the garden, staring towards the lightning-flecked cloud which wreathed the wreckage of the conurbation. From Circle Park and all the observation platforms came the sound of wordless voices, and she thought at first that they were crying out in horror, the way she wanted to—but no; they were cheering, cheering, cheering.

“I may be no better than Valentine,” she went on, “but there is a difference between us. Valentine tried to kill you, and I want to keep you alive. So, will you come with me?”

“I try to be nice,” she said. “Nobody’s ever made me feel they like me before, the way you do. So I try to be kind and smiley, like you want me to be, but then I catch sight of my reflection or I think of him and it all goes wrong and I can only think horrible things and scream at you and try and hurt you. I’m sorry.”

And light burst down from above; the harsh beam of an airship’s searchlight raking across the snow. The aviatrix reeled blindly backwards, and Valentine leaped up, snatching his sword, pulling her hard against him as he drove it home. For a moment the two of them stumbled together like drunken dancers at the end of a party, close enough to Tom’s hiding place for him to see the bright blade push out through the back of Miss Fang’s neck and hear her desperate, choking whisper: “Hester Shaw will find you. She will find you and—”

He said, “You must understand, Kate, I did it for you...”

“So, Apprentice Melliphant, I gather you have something to tell us?”

She had come to think of Bevis Pod as a sweet, clumsy, rather useless person, someone who needed her to look after him, and she suspected that that was how the Historians all thought of him as well. But that afternoon she had begun to understand that he was really much cleverer than her.

“I’ll be dead in twenty minutes, Tom,” she said. “Just get yourself safe away. Forget about me.”

“I’ll circle back...”

“I’ll be dead.”

“I’ll circle back anyway...”

Hester was stumbling backwards, lifting her bound hands to ward off Father’s blow, and Katherine flung herself between them so that suddenly it was she who was in his path, and his sword slid easily through her and she felt the hilt jar hard against her ribs.

He gently moves a stray strand which has blown into her mouth, and holds her close, and waits—and the storm-light breaks over them and they are a knot of fire, a rush of blazing gas, and gone: the shadows of their bones scattering into the brilliant sky.

“But we’re alive, and together, and we’re going to be all right.”