Ghosts of Engines Past (24 page)

Back in my office I checked the dates: Stephen had died ten weeks ago, and the recovery of the wreckage had begun the next day. The investigators would have had plenty of time to discover the micrometeorite pitting on the rock samples in the cannister, then go on to compare them with the chemical composition of such rocks as I had brought home from the moon. Taylor entered, and I handed her the files that I had been working on.

“The case is pretty well wrapped up,” she said, sitting on the edge of my desk. “Look, I'm sorry that we couldn't go all out on this one, but you know how it is. Why put a huge amount of effort into discovering something that may be more trouble than it's worth?”

“That could be said of any invention, Adele. You and your budget conscious superiors seem to have forgotten the benefits.”

“No we haven't. We just weighed everything up, then decided to do what seemed best. I know it's disappointing, but that's the way it has to be.”

I assumed a bland expression of sadness and resignation, and my intelligence work training helped me resist the temptation to laugh.

“So when do we go home?” I asked as I began to clear my files off the desk.

“Tomorrow night. I thought you might like to drive out for a bit of real sight-seeing in the morning, though.”

“Sure, why not? We're not likely to be sent back here again. You know, I like it here. It's like Florida used to be when I was a kid. I might migrate here at the end of my contract.”

Somewhere off the coast of ancient Egypt a Greek trading ship had seen the balloon drift out of the sky. The crew had recovered it, then set a course for home. The Pharaoh might have lost interest in the airship for now, but some day soon the Greeks would be able to fly over his kingdom with impunity, spying on his armies and shaming him in front of his own people. He would be forced to pay attention when that happened.

My first reaction had been to tell Taylor everything, to show her the evidence of the army search at the dump, then tell her all the other scraps of evidence. The Australians had called off the search abruptly, and secrecy had been maintained: they must have found the model of Stephen's drive. The US government would be forced to open negotiations for sharing the secret... or would they still try to have it suppressed? Would the Australian government trade export concessions for a key to the universe?

Money is spent in direct proportion to the severity of the fright, we learned that when the Soviets orbited Sputnik 1, then Gargarin. Less than a decade later Americans were walking on the moon. I began to hope that the Australians would do something truly spectacular with Stephen's drive, perhaps even a Mars landing, something that would loosen up so much research money in the US that the first starships might be built in my own lifetime.

That night I had dinner with Richards. He went very pale when I told him the name of a certain disused quarry. I also told him that I intended to migrate, and to become an Australian citizen.

“Migrate?” he said, uncomfortable and puzzled. “What's your game?”

“I'm an experienced astronaut. How many of those do you have in this country? I've got a feeling I'm sure to get a job.”

He thought for a moment, then gave a little nod.

“They're fools about this sort of thing in Britain, too,” he said with the trace of a smile. “Call in on me when you get back from the States, then we'll talk.”

Driving back to the hotel, I stopped on a dark stretch of road and stared up into the starry sky for a long time. My heart pounded with excitement at the thought that I would soon return there, to become another twinkle in the blackness myself. It was not easy to like Stephen Cole, but one had to salute the genius and bravery of someone who dared to go on that great and dangerous adventure alone.

The moon was rising, huge with illusion by being so close to the eastern horizon, somehow closer.

“Much closer than when I flew there,” I whispered in tribute to Stephen.

It is 1303, and medieval aviation is about to get some serious funding in the name of love.

Until the Saturn series of rockets were developed, it was rockets developed for the armed forces that put mice in space, launched satellites, cosmonauts and astronauts in orbit, and sent probes to the moon, Mars and Venus. Medieval aviators were dreamers and visionaries, but they do not seem to have applied for military funding—not in Europe, anyway. The Japanese were dropping ninjas over castle walls from kites and the Chinese were bombing cities using kites. Some very, very brave European and Islamic aviators managed to fly, and a few even lived to talk about it. A siege engine also features prominently in this story. I have a little one, and using it I once managed to break a champagne glass with an olive at twenty paces. I also managed to do what Baron Raimond does—using a model, of course. If the real dreamers of the Middle Ages had dreamed the right dream, they could have done this.

Baron Raimond arrived at the Tower of Wings with his army on the morning of the last day of June in 1303. The summer solstice was not long past, and the weather was clear, warm and windless. The village near the tower was subdued and occupied so very quickly that there were no casualties on either side, but a runner reached the tower long before Raimond's men had any chance of mounting a surprise attack. Lady Angela herself stood listening as the exhausted peasant gasped out his warning for a second time.

“English, strong force, dozens, dozens, dozens,” he panted as he lay against a stack of barrels. “English, under Raimond.”

Lady Angela wore a fur-trimmed mantle over a kirtle and girdle, with an open veil over her parted, plaited and rolled black hair. There could not have been a greater contrast than with the armoured fighting men milling around her, yet she was their leader.

“I ordered the drawbridge raised and all archers to the walls as soon as he came through the gate,” reported the seneschal. “From the bailey wall, you can see them. The tower is surrounded. I estimate three thousand English, and they are already clearing ground for a camp about three hundred yards to the south.”

They climbed the steps to the bailey wall, and looked out over the fields to where the English were at work clearing bushes and erecting tents.

“The sun will be behind them for much of the day,” commented Lady Angela, “and they are well outside the effective range of our archers.”

“Indeed, my lady, the baron is a brave and clever warrior.”

“And he can read and write. He read all of my books as we nursed him back to health here two summers ago.”

“Now see how he repays your kindness.”

“I expected nothing else. It is the way of the world.”

The seneschal never ceased to be amazed by Lady Angela's grasp of matters that other women paid no heed. She spoke eleven languages, had ruled the Tower of Wings and its estates since she was nineteen, and had led her people through two sieges. She had also written four books, on mathematics, medicinal plants, the principles of levers, and the way that birds fly. At the top of the Tower of Wings she had a pigeon coop, and she spent many hours sitting at the windows watching her birds soar and circle about the tower, and sketching them on slate and parchment. Sometimes, however, the birds that circled the tower were devices of red silk and slivers of wicker. There had been mutterings of witchcraft by peasants, churchmen and nobles alike.

“The baron read your book on wings and flight as he lay regaining his strength,” the seneschal pointed out. “He must have denounced you to the English king as a witch, using your work as an excuse to mount this attack.”

“If not he, then someone else,” replied Lady Angela.

Baron Raimond and his master engineer Wat paced a stretch of hard, flat ground some two hundred yards from the curtain wall of the Tower of Wings. Two of his knights stood watch as they walked, but no arrows were fired from the fortress.

“A good surface for your great machine, lordship, and an ideal distance from the walls,” declared Wat. “Just beyond the range of their archers, yet within the useful limit of a trebuchet.”

Raimond gazed at the tower, his arms folded and his expression grim. There was a moat encircling the curtain wall, and at the very centre was a single, slender, elegant tower that was said to be the tallest in Scotland, England or Wales. In the summer of 1301 he had spent two months there after being found wounded and fevered in the nearby forest. Lady Angela had been twenty eight years of age then. She had treated him with oils and philters of her own devising, some brewed from herbs and plants collected in the fields nearby, and others brought from as far distant as the Holy Land, Africa, and even legendary Cathay. They had cooled his fever, drawn the angry scarlet blush from his wounds, and restored his strength.

“What say you, lordship, is she indeed a witch?” asked Wat.

“The bishops say as much,” replied the baron. “She builds fearful machines and studies forbidden arts.”

“The machine we're about to build is fearful,” replied Wat, nervously rubbing his neck. “In an afternoon it can bring down walls that took a dozen years to build.”

“It will do the work of a Christian monarch who has the blessing of the church, but it will do magic.”

“Magic, m'lord?”

“It will bring down walls without breaching them.”

Wat opened his mouth to reply, his mind wrestling with the convolutions of Raimond's words. He closed his mouth again, frowning with concentration, and finally scratched his head. Raimond laughed.

“It is a way with words and facts called logic, but you do not have all the facts. The Moors learned it from the writings of the ancient Greeks, and I learned it from Alren.”

“The Moor friend of yours? He'll bring you no good, lordship.”

“He just might bring me the Tower of Wings, that I may give it over to my king. Alren is within the tower now.”

“Spying on Lady Angela, lordship?”

“One might say that. Order the peasants to clear this ground and begin felling timber in the forest.”

At the top of the Tower of Wings Lady Angela stood beside her pigeon coop, her wheat-filled hand smothered in hungry, flapping, jostling birds. Nearby, her Moorish guest leaned on the southern battlements and gazed across at a second encampment that was being built by the English invaders. Guards had been posted to patrol the perimeter, tents were up, latrine pits were being dug, and carpenters were building hoardings to guard against the best of Lady Angela's archers. The thud of axes echoed faintly to them, followed by the sound of trees falling.

“The English are felling oak trees,” said Alren.

“I have been counting the number of axe blows for each tree,” replied Lady Angela. “They are very big trees. Not the sort that one cuts for firewood.”

“Ah, well observed excellent lady. What are we to conclude from this?”

“They are building a siege engine. Baron Raimond is an expert on siege engines, and he means to take this tower.”

“Ah, admirable. The conventional wisdom would be to have your men issue forth and destroy the device when it is near completion.”

“I have five knights, nine dozen archers, twice as many men at arms, and five hundred peasants with pikes. My estimate is that the baron has three thousand veterans and as many peasants and artisans again to support them. We cannot do anything against odds like that. We must let the walls fight for us.”

“The walls are but frail allies, excellent lady. A well fashioned trebuchet could have them breached within a day.”

“I could design a trebuchet that would fling stones back at theirs,” said Lady Angela listlessly. “We have stores of timber within the walls.”

“Then you shall do so?”

“No. Nearly all our carpenters were living in the village while the bridge across the river was being rebuilt. Thus we have two carpenters in here, and Baron Raimond has perhaps sixty. His engine will be ready to fling stones within a week or so. I could not hope to have one finished within a month.”

“Sad but true, my excellent lady. What will happen when the walls come down?”

“King Edward wants this tower taken, Baron Raimond wants the king's favour, and many in the church want me burned as a witch. When the first stone ball smashes into the curtain wall, my seneschal will surrender the tower and beg clemency from Baron Raimond for all of you.”

“Us, most excellent lady? But what of yourself?”

“I shall join my birds.”

Baron Raimond walked the length of the ground that his peasants were clearing, placing marker stakes at measured intervals. Wat walked beside him, watching and assessing. The rectangular oak base of the great trebuchet was already complete, and the carpenters were attaching four wheels, each half the height of a man.

“As these markers are placed, lordship, you will miss the outer wall of the tower by twenty yards,” Wat pointed out.

“Good, and we shall use that cart as a target,” said the baron, pointing to an abandoned ox cart near the moat.

He folded his arms behind his back and stared at the Tower of Wings.

“'Twould be a pity to damage such a beautiful tower,” said Wat following his gaze.

“Yet the tower must be taken.”

“It's said you once courted Lady Angela,” ventured Wat. “Did you not journey to France and win a tournament in her name?”

“I won three tournaments in her name.”

“Oh bravely done, lordship!”

“She did not even reply to my letters,” sighed Raimond, shaking his head.

“But most ladies are greatly impressed by deeds of arms, lordship.”

“Not Lady Angela. Her neglect, her coldness rendered me ill and angry.”

“Perchance she neglects all men thus.”

“No, this lady is impressed only by scholarship. When traveling through Oxford in 1292 she met an elderly friar, a great scholar named Roger Bacon. He moved her far more than the bravest, most chivalrous knight could have. He filled her head with dreams what he called 'engines for flying', and also with disrespect for authority in general and the church in particular. Alas, I can read and write, but I am no scholar. I cannot even compete with an old friar who is a decade dead. Thus here I am with a siege engine, determined to secure her attention by other means.”