Thunderer (2 page)

Mr. Tar starts up and shouts, “What’s this? Stop that boy!” Hutton, trying to curry favor with Tar, grabs Jack’s arm. The older boy could hold Jack easily if he really tried, but he has no idea how desperate Jack is, so he stupidly turns his back and looks smiling for approval at the Master. He stumbles away a second later holding his bitten and bloodied ear. Jack swerves around a chimney and drops onto the slate slope of the lower roof. He stops for a second. When another boy comes up to the edge, Jack levers up a tile and throws it at his head. With a bark of triumph, he spins his rough cloth cap after it.

He scans the sky anxiously. Nothing there, no speck in any direction. “Oh no. Come on. Come on. Come
on
.”

When it comes, it comes tremendously and all at once. Pigeons, rooks, gannets, and gulls burst over the roof and scatter the sky. Unbelievably, men and women wheel among them. In the center, the object of all attention, is the Bird.

Jack shakes out the bundle of laundry and draws out a bedsheet. It used to be as grey and mottled as every other sheet in Barbotin, but Jack has stolen some silk-dyes and bleached it white. He understands that to be an important gesture. Into the sheet are stitched stolen rags and filaments of silk. He shucks off his jacket, quickly, roughly. Beneath it, his shirt is also bleached white, and ornamented with long, brightly colored threads of stolen silk. He whips the sheet around his shoulders. He looks as comical and pathetic as a flightless bird.

Mr. Tar has climbed down onto the slope now. Jack salutes him, and runs to the edge. He slips on the steep slope for a second as a tile gives way under his feet, then rights himself. Jack’s foot connects with the guttering under the eaves, and he kicks himself off into the air and throws his arms out.

It works, Praise Be, it works, but not well. His magic is crude and makeshift: he had to do the best he could with the materials to hand. He imagined flying like a bird, like
the
Bird. Instead, it’s as if, for a second, he’s free of gravity and with each step he can kick off again higher, so beautifully poised is he; but in the next second gravity returns like a blow across his back and he loses his balance. He falls hard and scrapes his knees. He looks back in sudden despair. But Praise Be! He’s on the next roof, separated from Barbotin House by a wide chasm. Behind him, Mr. Tar is on all fours at the edge of the House’s roof. Tar is clutching the guttering with one hand to steady himself, and with the other holding Jack’s talismanic silk-shot bedsheet, torn from his back.

Jack’s standing on the bare roof of another warehouse. There is a door in a square brick extrusion in the corner of the roof, but it’s locked. There’s no other way down. Tar yells and blows a whistle. There are answering yells from within the House. They’ll find their way into this new building soon.

Jack runs to the edge and looks over the abyss to the next roof. There’s another door there, this one open,
propped
open, with a brick. A group of women stands on the roof waving after the departing Bird and its flock. One of the young ones turns and sees Jack run. She gives a quick little clap of excitement.

He can’t get to her. It’s a whole street away and three stories down. His makeshift wings are gone. The Bird’s presence is dwindling in the distance, drifting up over the escarpment that divides Shutlow from Mass How, and everything is very heavy again. The ritual is broken. There is no power left to call on.

The Fire with it anyway.
He runs to the edge, closes his eyes, and reaches out, snatching at the last threads of potentiality drifting in the air, and leaps, praying.

H
ow very gratifying it is, madam, to know It’s coming. To be proved right. I’ve never seen anything quite so lovely as those flares. I’d be lying if I said I’d been entirely confident.”

The Countess Ilona raises an eyebrow; it’s a thin black line in a sharp face that’s painted china-white, above a gilt gem-studded collar. The thick paint
almost
makes her ageless. No one would dare tell her it doesn’t.

“You appeared confident. I should hope you
were
confident, Professor. I put a great deal of trust in you.”

Holbach smiles blandly and curses himself. “A figure of speech, madam. A little joke. My predictions were very sound. I would not have had you, um, expose yourself in this manner had I not been perfectly confident…”

“
Expose
myself? Is my position that vulnerable, Professor?”

Holbach offers a mutter of conciliation,
didn’t mean to say aha of course no um no oh I’m sure no,
and a submissive half-stoop; and, begging her pardon, he excuses himself to oversee the final preparations. A velvet-frogged footman steadies his arm as he steps off the dais and onto the grass. Holbach rewards the servant with a smile of thanks, full of confidence and, he’s sure, quite without condescension. He heads off over the Heath, inspecting the line of men stretched out before him.

Smooth, plump, and genial; scholar, augur, and courtier; a man of affairs, of dignified age: Holbach knows better than that by now how to talk to the city’s potentates. The excitement is getting to him, placing, he thinks, let’s say, sharp burrs in the, ah, velvet of his blandishments. No, a terrible metaphor, awful: he can do better. Let’s say…

Holbach stops before a man in the middle of the line sweating from the exertion of holding his rope. Holbach straightens the golden silk of the man’s robe where it has bunched over his shoulder, smoothing it so the silver trim falls straight. The man starts and shifts, but doesn’t let go of his rope. The Countess’s man knows what’s good for him.

“No, no: nothing wrong. Don’t concern yourself. The Countess appreciates your efforts, of course. Good man.”

The Countess’s dais stands at the edge of the West Meadow of Laud Heath, against the bosky shade of the Widow’s Bower. Before it, the grass rolls out east and slopes down gently to the river’s bank. Two lines of golden-robed men stand in front of the dais. Each man holds in both hands a rope. Between them they tether a huge balloon. The gas-filled sphere, patched with azure and argent, strains against their arms’ strength.

They raised it an hour ago, the dashing Captain Arlandes, pride of the Countess’s forces, leading the men in their battle against gravity in fine style: Arlandes on the back of a black charger, uniformed in sapphire-blue parade-jacket, gold-trimmed, gold-medaled, one hand—one dueling-scarred hand—on the pommel of his golden saber, barking orders to the men, who fear the Countess, but love Arlandes.

The honor of being the first person to ride in the balloon went to Arlandes’ young bride, Lucia—Arlandes himself and Holbach being indispensable on the ground, and the Countess not being so inclined.

She sits now delicately on the wicker floor of the basket, dressed in a froth of white lace. In the basket with her are an eagle, a parrot, a rooster, and a duck, all with clipped wings. The birds are carefully chosen, an integral part of the ritual. Lucia’s just a passenger, an ornament; she is, as Holbach put it, a part that does nothing in the machine, which was not very considerate of her feelings, but not intended maliciously. “Perhaps, Professor,” she’d offered, “I might exercise a calming influence on the poor animals,” and he had of course agreed eagerly, but somewhat insincerely. In earlier controlled experiments, the birds had been quite frantic and in no way safe to touch or pet, and he thought Lucia’s charms unlikely to change that. She herself was bright-eyed and rapt with excitement, at the honor, at the adventure, at the change they were about to work in the city. “Hush now, precious,” she’d soothed at the duck as Arlandes helped her into the basket. “The Professor is
very
wise. You’ll be free soon.” She’d blushed a little to be seen talking to the birds, but Arlandes kissed her hand and Holbach beamed at her in what he calculated was a fatherly but not inappropriate manner. Then the balloon lifted and she was gone from sight.

F
lanking the golden-robed men, two columns of riflemen keep the mob at bay. The city has been expectant all morning, whispering rumors of the Bird’s return. When word went out that the Countess Ilona was carrying out some mysterious project on the Heath, a scattering of curiosity-seekers came to watch. And when the wonderful air-filled globe ascended, the crowd exploded.

It seems like the whole city is here now, mobbing the Heath and choking all the narrow streets around it. The city hasn’t seen a balloon flight in living memory. Carriages are left empty in the street, and children climb on their roofs for a better view. Workmen’s rough cloth rubs against velvet. Bottles are passed around. A thousand boots ruck the lawns’ green into black mud. And, of course, agents of the Gerent, the Chairman Cimenti, and all Ilona’s countless other rivals drift among the crowd, watching suspiciously.

Holbach paces the line. He’s dressed formally for the occasion, in a tailed gold-buttoned coat of thick red velvet, and a weighty ringletted wig, sweating slightly under his clothes, what with the summer sun and the tension and the crowd’s heavy heat. He knows what the crowd’s thinking: that this is something different from the city’s usual run of spectacles, from all the gods and ghosts and monsters that thrum across its lines of power. This is a
machine
.
Hands
built this and raised it with deliberate, cunning purpose. The power of flight, under human mastery. What other powers—the crowd must be thinking—could these people arrogate to themselves? The balloon is the more beautiful for being a little blasphemous.

And, Holbach thinks, he was only telling the truth: the Countess
has
exposed herself. If today’s venture succeeds, the people will adore them, will praise their triumph to the skies; but if nothing comes of it, after all this spectacle, they’ll forget how wonderful the balloon is; they’ll just remember the failure. She’ll never outlive the humiliation.

Holbach has exposed himself, too, no less than her. He is a scientist; he has a reputation. And he has risked it in print, something he does not do lightly.

Nineteen years ago he published his
Critique,
his first monograph on the Bird, the one that made his name. And earlier this year, in a dense, technical paper that was nevertheless widely read—a point of pride for Holbach, who would like to be a man of the people—he set out to predict the Bird’s next return. He did it by reference to the complex massing of the city’s signs—a chaotic, organic weaving of almost infinite threads of potential. A fashion for silks; a new verse inserting itself in an old children’s rhyme,
the bird is on the steeple/high above the people;
a rage amongst new-minted aristocrats for heraldic designs featuring birds; the roaring success of the Eagle and Kingfisher in Toulmin Street; a day on which all the grubbing, deformed pigeons of Kanker Market were replaced by doves. Certain graffiti around the city, and many other, less obvious signs. Dreams of flight, of course, not least his own.

It is by such signs as these that the symbiosis between our city and its gods is revealed,
he’d written, in one of his entries for the Atlas;
so the gods shape the city, and the city shapes the gods, and our lives are hammered out between the two
.

The research was difficult. It has been decades since the Bird last appeared, and the divided and disordered city has never been good at keeping its records. And, of course, Ararat
teems
with divinities; it would be easy to attribute a sign to the Bird that was really a harbinger of, say, the Key, also a power of freedom, or Monan, also a power of sharp winds and the open sky. But despite the uncertainties, Holbach dared to commit himself to a date for the Bird’s return.
Today
. His rivals are circling, hoping for him to be proved wrong.

And, privately, Holbach had approached the Countess Ilona with his plan. Today’s work is dreadfully expensive, and he needed powerful patronage to make his dream come to life.

If his predictions had been wrong, after all this, she would not let him live. But he knows that he’s not wrong. He felt the Bird’s return even before the first flare went up. It’s somewhere out there now. The city feels like a great wheel about to turn. With the right lever, some of that power can be put to useful work. Changes can be made. The maps can be redrawn.

He has passed beyond the lines of robed men. Someone has left a copy of some broadsheet on an iron bench. Tilting his head a little, he sees that it’s the
Sentinel
. He tries to read the headline. These things are often portents; the city speaks through them. A drift of wind ruffles the paper’s pages. Then a redoubled wind lifts it and it opens its broad pages and hurls itself at Holbach’s face. He can read
Bird
and
Today
and
Coming
and
?
before it wraps itself inkily around his head, and he flails it away.
It’s here,
he thinks. He should be on the dais, of course. Puffing and red-faced, he sets out back to his place.

T
he Bird’s coming up from the southwest. It circles the dun tower of the Mass How Parliament, turns sharply, a knife twist, as if with malice, and veers north and up Cere House Hill. The turn’s too sharp for many of its human flock to keep pace. They find themselves alone in the sky for a horrific moment too long. Without the Bird to fill them and lift them, their ersatz wings are just a stupid joke, and they are prey for gravity again.

Indifferent, the Bird slows again and gently climbs the Hill, every inch of which is scabbed with a great crust of buildings grown together. Where the structures have not simply been built into each other over the years, the builders have covered what used to be open squares and streets with great swathes of grey waxcloth, pinned tightly between domes and peaks: an ancient depth of cobweb. Tall curling spires rise from it. Ugly blackbirds lurch from their roosts in the spires, and they join the flock. The waxcloth shrouds of the Cere House whip in the wind and open the gloom below to shafts of light.