Empire of Unreason (19 page)

They reached a low rise, and Adrienne stumbled in the snow. Crecy
could bear it no more. “The hell with your orders,” she snapped
and turned.

Adrienne opened her mouth to shout at her friend, but in the same
moment a horse came hurtling by her, and another. Muskets
roared and at least two
kraftpistoles.
She stared up and recognized
Hercule and his light horse, pouring over the hill, twenty of them.

The night opened to fire.

Five of the riders took them up, and moments later they passed
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through the perimeter Hercule had hastily erected around the
airships. A few people still scurried around, but for the most part
they were ready to fly, soldiers and passengers peering over the rail
back toward the city. Exhausted, Adrienne allowed herself to be
lifted onto the flagship and made her way to the bridge.

She could not see Hercule and his horsemen in the dark. The
shooting seemed to have stopped. But from the city, a swarm of
light moved toward them: it looked like a whole regiment. They
were downstream, where the river was still frozen.

“It went smoothly here, it seems,” Crecy said. “Hercule secured the
ships.”

“But where is he? They should be back, by now.”

“He will return, never fear. We should lift anchor.”

Adrienne paused an instant. “We wait,” she said, “for Hercule.”

She sent her djinni out, searching, but no longer trusting them
when they found nothing.

“How exciting!” a woman’s voice said. It was Elizavet, clad in a
splendid velvet riding dress and long marten cape.

“Men are dying,” Adrienne said, shortly.

“But I’ve never seen a real battle, only read about them.”

Adrienne looked at the younger woman, then reached over to grip
her hand. “This is not a real battle,” she said, holding the tsarevna’s
gaze. “Pray you never see one.”

Cheers erupted below. In the space beneath the ships, twelve
horsemen pranced, hats raised. One of them was Hercule.

“There!” Crecy said. “I told you! Now!”

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Adrienne nodded wearily and gave the order, even as Hercule and
his men piled into the large baskets, leaving the horses behind.

Already, bullets were humming by from the approaching force. A
couple of stragglers arrived, leapt into a second basket, and the
flotilla was finally drifting aloft.

As they rose, up and up toward the familiar stars, the sounds of
gunfire faded. Saint Petersburg became a mirror, reflecting the
heavens, a puddle of light, a faint glow in the distance, nothing.

Adrienne raised her face to the wind, which grew colder by the
instant. With her own mortal eyes, she looked out into the ocean of
night, toward Siberia, China, North America— distances somehow
less imaginable than those between the stars. She closed her eyes
and saw only a face, a single face, and felt something—a slight tug of
unnamed affinity, as if a hair-thin wire were tied to her heart, as if
someone far across the world were pulling on it.

He was out there, across those plains and rivers, beneath these
stars.

Her son was there.

Perhaps the whole frame of Nature may be nothing but various

Contextures of some certaine aethereall Spirits or vapours

condens d as it were by praecipitation… Thus perhaps all things

be originated from aether.

—Sir Isaac Newton,
Hypothesis of Light
1675

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At a certain time, the Earth opened in the West, where its mouth

is. The earth opened and the Cussitaws came out of its mouth and

settled near by. But the earth became angry and ate up their

children; therefore, they moved further West.

—Chekilli, Emperor of the Coweta, 1735

1.

Fort Moore

The sky gathered its strength, the dark furnaces of the clouds
burning fitfully violet and crimson. The wind they drove before
them was thick and wet, perfumed with bruised leaves and burnt
air.

Below Franklin, cornstalks bent like rows of gaunt penitents, and
the giant trees of the primeval forest beyond the fields grappled
with the sky.

Lightning streamed in the distance.

“We reached this fortification none too soon, it seems,” Voltaire
remarked. He stood next to Franklin on the narrow wooden
battlements of Fort Moore. In Europe, the structure would hardly
be considered redoubt—a wooden stockade a hundred or so feet on
a side, a motley collection of log buildings within. To Franklin—

who had seen the place only on a map until now—it suddenly
seemed an insubstantial place from which to plan the liberation of
the Commonwealth.

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But here they were. Besides the fort itself, the scattered cornfields,
and a few houses of Indian construction, they might have been
surrounded by a forest from the beginning of the world, before
man and woman were cast from paradise.

“Believe it or not,” Franklin told the philosopher, “the storm will
not last long. If we had been caught in it, it would have been
terrible but brief.”

“It’s hard to credit. It looks like the end of the world arriving.”

“Hardly. We’ve seen a better representation of that, you and I.”

A look of pain crossed Voltaire’s face. “Too true. Still, some virtue
of this weather seems grander even than that, perhaps being
natural…” Voltaire hesitated, then cleared his throat. “I wonder if I
could impose upon you, Benjamin, to explain what our situation
is?”

Franklin gave a laugh, trying to keep any bitterness out of it.

“Well,” he began, “it’s like this. The Junto started as a philosophical
club, and that only. Our membership grew, year by year. Very
quickly, the topics we discussed took on a practical air—a very
American thing, as you shall find. And our greatest, most practical
concern was what to do when the European powers took note of us
again. We thought on it long and hard.”

“A secret government, with Benjamin Franklin as its leader?”

“We work behind the scenes, yes, but I am not the hierarch, as
such. We are arranged more republicanly than that, but once we
had decided on a course of action we were very selective about
those we let in on things. It was clear that the colonies, as such,
would not unify politically. Oh, we have the Continental Assembly,
but it would never function without the secret movements of the
Junto. And you see, come crisis, how the ‘legitimate’ governors find
themselves all split.”

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“Aye, but this is not the foe you expected, a long-lost king of
England.”

“No, we
did
consider it. That’s why the Junto stands together now,
when the Assembly does not. We are more than Whiggish, we are
democratic. What else can we be? Voltaire, the Junto is made up of
peoples from every nation and religious persuasion. In it there are
Negroes and Indians and even Frenchmen and Italians and
Spaniards from Louisiana and Florida. Some are landed, but for
the most part the colonies are now a land without a gentry or
hereditary aristocracy. The Junto aims to keep it that way. That is
why we will conspire even against an English king. Especially when
that king is the puppet of a foreign tyrant.”

For once, to Franklin’s surprise, Voltaire’s cynicism failed to
surface. “It’s a noble dream, Ben,” he said, his voice actually
wistful. “It gives me hope.”

“Thank you. It’s good to hear that we aren’t simply mad. Or that if
we are, it’s a madness with a contagious quality. But I fear for us.”

“And so this flight to the wilderness—it is part of some o’er arching
plan?”

“It was one option. We knew we could never build and maintain a
standing army like those the tsar commands, and though we have
worked to develop new weapons, it was never there that we could
divert our greatest resources, not with people starving and so many
other troubles to be mediated. And so instead we made this design—

it’s a loose one, I’ll grant you. We spent our time first assuring that
for each militia in each colony there was a secret one in
communication with us via aetherschreiber. Until now, our main
task has been to keep the warlock adepts of the malakim from our
shores, and we have done passing well with that. The other was to
form mutual protections and aggression pacts. If there was time,
and it looked the right thing to do, we might have fought for
Charles Town. But it wasn’t the right thing to do: their men were
already in the town, the harbor was filled with ships, and there was
treachery on the part of the Tories. So here is our other option—

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rather than wasting our strength on battles we cannot win, we
conserve it for those we can, and negotiate ourselves time to see the
difference. In this case, we put the forest at our backs and fight
from it.”

“Fight from it how?”

“As we may, I suppose—I’m no general or even man-at-arms. We
have other men for that sort of thing. Some will strike as Indians—

here, there, and gone again. Others, like myself, will invent ways to
deal with diabolic weapons.”

“I don’t mean to offend you, but the numbers I have seen—”

“As I said, it’s not just South Carolina. We have members and
militia in every colony. In fact, from latest reports, the ports of
Virginia have been successfully defended from the invader, at least
for the time being. North Carolina has fallen to the suboceanic
navy, but our friends there were swift to move into backcountry—

and occupy forts such as these, built for just this purpose. And so
on. And there are units of brave men who stayed behind to harry
the enemy as he marches after us—there have been casualties in
this war already, I hear. However many troops James has at his
disposal, they will have to spread themselves thin to search us out,
and our attacks and retreats are always designed to draw him away,
into the wilderness.”

“Still, if they consolidate the cities, they may be hard to push out.

And to actually win this, that is what you must one day do.”

Franklin cocked his head. “When did you start taking an interest in
these military matters, Voltaire?”

The Frenchman uttered a dark laugh. “Ask a fish what interest it
has in water. This last decade has seen to my education. But it takes
no Marlborough or Vauban to see this—they have their backs to the
sea and all of the soldiers and artillery of Russia behind them.”

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Franklin shrugged. “That’s all true, too. But we shall make do.”

Voltaire stared at him, openly skeptical. “Do you have allies?”

“Well, that is what we shall see now. In theory, yes—we long ago
made a mutual defense pact with Florida and Louisiana. The word
has gone out via aetherschreiber—I now await representatives or
letters from them. We can only hope that they honor our treaty. It
worries me that I have not yet had word back from either.”

“What of the Indians?”

Franklin threw up his hands. “The Cherokee in the mountains will
support us—they have long been our friends. The Cowetas have
been as standoffish as the French in replying to the invocation of
our treaty. The Apalachee have sent representatives but do not say
how they will go. Another worry is the margravate of Azilia. They
broke from the other colonies even before the fall of the comet, and
have strange politics.“

“Overseas?”

“The Venetians are our friends, but our word is that they are
hemmed into the Mediterranean by the Turk, who has made a pact
with Russia to keep them neutral in this endeavor. Charles XII we
count our friend, too, and I have sent message to him, but heard
nothing.”

“The Lion of the North? Has he regained his native Sweden, then?”

“No, Charles remains in Venice, but he commands brave troops—

veteran Swedes and Janissaries.” Rain began spattering around
them. “Best we seek shelter, now. These storms care little what
becomes of such as us, my dear Voltaire.”

“What storm does?”

“Mr. Franklin!” someone called from below. He looked down to see
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a tough-looking, sandy-haired fellow of perhaps forty dressed in
deerskin leggings, a battered justaucorps, and checked shirt. He
had a musket thrown over one shoulder and a tomahawk stuck in
his belt.

“Mr. McPherson!” Franklin returned. “How is it with you?” He
hurried down the rampart. When they reached the fellow, Franklin
offered his hand and had it firmly shaken.