Free Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve

problem."
    Kit Solent started to say something, then changed his mind and sat in silence, smiling to himself, watching Fever strain for another glimpse of home. He liked her, her primness and her bravery. It was a shame, he thought, that those dry old-tech botherers at the Head had never let her have a proper childhood.
    He did not think to look behind him, through the small window in the rear wall of the chair, if he had, he might have seen another taxi-chair following not far behind.
    ***
    Ruan couldn't believe that Fever had never been to Summertown. "What, never?" he kept asking her, as if there were a chance that she had been but had forgotten -- as if anyone could forget Summertown. To Ruan there was simply nothing in the world that mattered more than the land barges. Each May time, as the snows of winter melted, he would start to listen for the grumble of their engines on the Great South Road. He would lie in his bed in the quiet of early morning and strain his ears to catch that first distant whisper. Sometimes, when a convoy had been sighted, Daddy would take him down to 'Bankmentside and they would stand together and watch the great pachydermous vehicles passing, big as houses, big as castles, their tracks ingrained with the mud of Europe and their upperworks dusted by the sands of far-off Asia. There were big lumbering cargo hoys like herds of sauropods, but Ruan's favorites were the gaudy, speedy tinker barges and traveling fairs. Half the size of the sluggish hoys and twice as fast, they were painted in a million lurid shades, decked out with flags and chrome and mirrors, and hung each night with strings of saffron lanterns. Dizzy op-art spirals whirled on their wheel hubs, and their exhaust stacks were striped like gypsies' stockings. And along their sides, in cutout letters as high as house fronts, they wore their names: Ma Gumbo's Travelin ' Raree Show ; The Dark Lantern; The Paradise Circus; A Dream of Fair Women.
    He did his best to explain all this to Fever while the chair joggled them through the rookeries of Lemon Heel. He wasn't sure that she understood. She was a strange person, and he couldn't help wondering if she was a bit stupid, even though Daddy had told him she was clever. But she was very pretty -- he thought she was the prettiest person he had ever seen -- so he didn't want to think that she was stupid. Perhaps she was just shy, and that was why she didn't seem interested when he told her about the barge with the big dragon's head at the front, or the magician who made rabbits and ribbons appear out of his hat.
    They crossed the Westerway and the chair slowed as it joined the flocks of chairs and people on foot all making for Summer-town. Even Fever began to look interested as the breeze blew fairground noises in through the open windows – chingling music and bellowing, foghorn voices. She remembered Dr. Crumb telling her how some of the land barges traveled all the way to Vishnoostan and Kerala. Even Zagwa, the crazy Christian empire which had conquered most of Africa and southern Europe and banned all technology there, still permitted land barges to visit the free trade zones along its borders....
    By the time they stepped out of the chair onto litter-strewn grass between the big barrel-shaped wheels and clay-clagged tracks of the barges, Fever was as wide-eyed as the children. Kit Solent paid the bearers and took Fern's hand, while Ruan ran ahead, shouting back to draw Fever's attention to his favorite barges.
    There was a boy who strode about on stilts, and a man who was juggling with shining knives. ("You must not try that at home, Fern," Fever warned the little girl, remembering her role as the rational member of their party.) There was a man who was busy sawing a woman in half. ("Or that ," she added. "I expect it is all done with mirrors.") A barker on the deck of a barge shouted at them through a big tin trumpet, inviting them to climb the boarding plank and see for themselves the