Celestial Matters (3 page)

The deck careened to port then starboard then port again as the ocean’s currents, free from the power of Middler science, yoked themselves again to the natural flow of the tides. Amid the chaos I kept running until I reached the steam engine.

Twin jets of steam spurted out from the nozzles on either side of the huge bronze sphere that held the boiling water. The streams of hot vapor tried to spin the sphere; the belt of leather that tied the brazen ball to the paddle wheel wanted to be turned by that spinning; the paddle wheel wanted to receive that turning and so turn itself in the ocean and make the ship go. But the paddle wheel was chained by the corpse of the kite and could not accept this gift of movement. This rejection was passed on to the leather loop, which could not move across its pulleys and so passed its stasis back to the engine, which was locked into place by this chain of refusals.

But the steam kept coming out of the pipes, stubbornly trying to imitate the Prime Mover and set all things in motion. Cracks appeared in the ball, rivets popped out, and a dozen little hisses joined the great blasts of boiled water.

I ducked below the sphere, wrapped the hem of my robe around my hand, and yanked open the door in the side of the fire box that boiled the water. Gouts of no-longer-contained fire rushed up into the sky. I rolled to the aft railing just fast enough to avoid being scorched.

The steam from the orb turned into heavy mist as the flame that had kept it boiling rose upward, forming an ascending pillar of fire, a flare that could be seen for miles. The blaze continued to rise until, pushed upon by the air, the atoms of fire dispersed, joining their fellows in the glow of daylight.

I collapsed onto the deck, my seared throat choking on the sodden air. I coughed phlegm into my drenched robes, then lay still, sweating like a Marathon runner. The cloud of steam gradually condensed into dribbles of water. The paddle wheel, freed from the chains of impetus, rolled gently backward, pushed by the Mediterranean tides, and the broken battle kite and its broken pilot fell gracefully into the wine dark sea.

A cheer rose from the crew; I struggled to my feet to acknowledge the accolade, but it wasn’t me they were lauding. From the east a two-hundred-foot-long steel ship, bristling from prow to stern with evac cannons and armored soldiers, bore down on us. I sank back in exhaustion and thanked Ares and Athena for our salvation. The navy had arrived.

With Spartan efficiency, the battleship
Lysander
heaved alongside the damaged merchantman, pulled the formerly panicked, now cheering sailors from the water, and laid a gangplank between the two vessels. During these unhurried maneuvers, I propped myself against the empty fire box, stanched the blood dripping from my cheek with my robe, and watched. The
Lysander
’s presence and bearing restored my sense of safety. She was a long, sleek ship, covered from stem to stern with a canopy of steel to protect her from aerial bombardment. Her steel hull had been painted a utilitarian iron gray. The only adornment on the entire ship was the figurehead on her prow, ’Era, patron goddess of Sparta, arms crossed in front of her, eyes scanning the horizon for anyone who would dare offend against her people.

I bowed my head to the image of heaven’s queen, then turned to gaze with personal pride at the onyx pyramid that covered the sternmost twenty feet of the ship. My ’Eliophile engine, my only claim to glory until Sunthief. It had been twenty years since I discovered how to attract and catch the atoms of fire that danced in the sunlight and use them to power ships. Since then every oceangoing vessel built in the navy’s shipyards had been fitted with one of my engines. They had become so common that few people even remembered that I had invented them, such are the vagaries of the goddess Fame.

A cough interrupted my reverie. A lightly bearded young Aethiopean wearing the black-fringed tunic and professionally concerned expression of a naval doctor was standing over me with an open satchel of instruments.

“I am not seriously injured, Doctor. Attend to the sailors,” I said, knowing exactly what his response would be.

“Let me be the judge of that,” the young man said with solemnity that belied his years. Doctors always said the same thing in the same tone of voice and they always had the same casual disregard for orders; the Oath of ’Ippokrates is much stronger than the discipline of armies.

“No great injuries,” he said after looking down my throat, rubbing a light metal probe over my cheek, and feeling my limbs for fractures. “Just some scratches and a parched throat.”

He pulled a brown glass bottle with the Egyptian hieroglyph for blood incised on it and a clean goose quill out of his leather bag, filled the quill with red liquid from the bottle, and jabbed it into my arm. “Just an injection of Sanguine Humour to speed the healing process,” he said, as if I hadn’t known that. “Apart from that all you need is some rest,” as if I hadn’t been resting when he came along.

The doctor turned to go and snapped off a quick salute to a young woman in armor just crossing the gangplank from the
Lysander
to the merchantman. I almost ignored her; after all, many of the battleship’s crew had come over to secure the smaller ship. But she was not wearing a naval uniform. She was caparisoned in the thick steel breastplate, hoplite sword, and two-foot-long bronze evac thrower of an army officer. But what particularly caught my eye was the horsehair-crested helmet and the iron brassard only worn by graduates of the Spartan military college. What was she doing on a naval vessel?

She stepped onto the Phoenician ship and strode briskly toward me. As she neared, I began to make out the person under the steel. Her skin had the terra-cotta coloring that identifies the native of North Atlantea and her long, braided black hair, sharp features, and wiry, athletic build told me she was from the Xeroki city-states. But her eyes were a color I had never seen, golden like ’Elios, but with a glint that I thought at the time was coldness, as if the gates of her soul were two wards of frozen fire.

“Commander Aias?” she asked in a voice that perfectly melded Xeroki syllabling with ’Ellenic enunciation.

I nodded, unable to look away from her cold-gold eyes.

“You must come with me,” she said like a judge passing sentence.

“What?”

She opened a thin leather pouch strapped to her belt and handed me a sheet of papyrus. It bore a few lines of mechanical block printing, two signatures, and the seal of the Delian League: two circles interlocked, the left one containing Athena’s owl, the right one ’Era’s peacock.

The message read:

The scholar Aias of Athens, scientific commander of the celestial ship
Chandra’s Tear,
is ordered to accept Captain Yellow Hare of Sparta as his bodyguard and obey any commands she deems necessary for the protection of his life.

By order of

Kroisos, Archon of Athens

Miltiades, Archon of Sparta

I read the letter thrice, hoping to make some sense of it. The idea of a Spartan captain assigned the lowly task of bodyguard was ludicrous; if the Archons had ever set my father such a menial job he’d have boiled into a rage, but this Yellow Hare seemed to accept it like a stoic. And why after three years did I suddenly need a bodyguard? Had the Archons somehow known about the battle kite? No, impossible!

“What does this mean?” I asked her. “What’s happened?”

“My orders had no explanation. I was called, I came.”

“Do you know how that battle kite reached here?”

“No.”

“Do you know why it attacked this merchantman?”

“It must have been sent to kill you,” she said. “Now come with me to the
Lysander
so I can prevent the next attempt.”

“To kill me?” I said. “Of all the military targets in the Mediterranean why would the Middlers send a battle kite to kill me?”

“I do not know,” she said. “But I was told that attempts would be made on your life. Commander Aias, I must insist that you come with me.”

I found myself momentarily unable to move; my mind, honed by long years of Akademe training, needed to understand what was happening before I acted. And to leave the fragile Tyrian merchantman for the safety of the battleship would be to give in to ignorance. But I couldn’t defy the orders of the Archons or the Spartan confidence in Captain Yellow Hare’s voice; I gathered my traveling bag and followed her onto the
Lysander.
All the while my heart was churning up possible explanations for this impossible attack.

My soft leather sandals slapped harshly against the steel deck of the warship, but my new bodyguard’s bronze leggings made no noise at all, as if the clash of metal against metal was a sacrilege she was too holy to commit.

Leather-armored seamen stopped their work, leaving guns unloaded and decks unswabbed to salute her as we walked down the steel-canopied foredeck toward the battleship’s prow. But though they saluted, the sailors gave Captain Yellow Hare a wide berth, as if unsure how to treat the high-ranked landlubber.

We passed by an open hatch in which I saw a ladder that led down to the crew’s quarters. Below there would be baths and a place to rid myself of my itchy, salt-stained robes. “I would like to change my clothes,” I said.

Captain Yellow Hare shook her head. “The spaces below are too confined. An assassin might be hiding there.”

“On a Spartan warship? That’s impossible.”

“No more impossible than a battle kite reaching the heartlands of the League.”

“But—”

She chopped the air between us with her right arm, cutting off my argument. “Your safety is more important than your convenience. You will be able to bathe when we reach Athens.”

We marched to the bow, stopping just a few feet in back of the ’Era figurehead. My bodyguard looked out from under the steel canopy and swept her gaze across the sea and the sky. I followed her eyes, wondering what she was looking for; then for just a moment the military lessons my father beat into me came forth and I saw as she did.

There were half a dozen ships within sight; four were merchant ships plying the many trade paths of the Mediterranean, one was a passenger steamer carrying civilians from city to city, and the last was a naval messenger boat, just twenty feet long, only one gun, but fast enough to sail rings around the
Lysander.
Above us there were half a dozen specks that were most likely celestial ships or moon sleds flying high over the few clouds strewn about the sky. But suppose they weren’t. Suppose one of those ships was carrying a Middler assassin. Suppose one of the dots circling overhead was another battle kite. If the first impossible attack had come, how many more could follow it?

“You are right, Captain,” I said. “My apologies. I have served too long in positions of safety. I will defer to your judgment.”

She nodded curtly, then shifted her attention to the ship’s armament, scrutinizing the evac cannons set in drum-shaped swivel mounts every five feet along the port and starboard rails. They looked like twin rows of phalloi at a Dionysiac festival. One by one the tops of the long cannons described circles in the air as the gunners greased and tested the aiming gears. My bodyguard nodded curt approval and returned her unreadable gaze to me.

I began to wonder if this assignment was some sort of punishment for her. The idea gave me a perverse sense of relief since it reduced the likelihood that I was in real danger. But two facts glared down this comforting hypothesis: First, Spartan officers who made mistakes were either forgiven or executed depending on the seriousness of the crime.

Second, and more compelling: that battle kite had attacked a ship carrying merchants, wool, and purple dye. The only thing on it of any great value to the Delian League was an important scientist. But I was by no means the most important target in the heart of the League. Unless the Middle Kingdom had found out about Sunthief.

My thoughts were interrupted by the boatswain shouting, “Brace for speed!”

I reflexively grabbed and held on to the support rail that ran the length of the deck and braced my feet against the corrugated flooring.

He shouted, “Deploy impellers!” and a line of golden wedges sprouted on the prow’s fluted waterline. A fiery gleam washed under the canopy, limning ’Era’s statue with a divine light. The aura of Zeus’s bride flowed backward, suffusing Yellow Hare’s armor with a fiery brightness. She stood so still and looked so majestic in the light that I thought, forgive the impiety, that there were two statues of goddesses in front of me.

My eyes grew accustomed to the glow and the moment of inspiration passed. I took a deep sniff of the rarified water that wafted like a bracing mist from the impellers. The fire-impregnated metal thinned the ocean, so the ship could sail swiftly without being slowed by the sluggishly heavy waters.

As the ship sped toward Athens on a carpet of unresisting ocean, I gripped the railing hard to brace myself against the back-push. But Captain Yellow Hare’s only precaution against the sudden speed was to lean slightly forward and tense her legs. And that little action stopped her from sliding across the deck or tumbling over the side. Immobile as the earth, she let the cosmos shift around her, heaving Spartan defiance in the face of physics.

The ocean spray leaped into the sky in front of us, rushing onto the deck. It stung my face a little, but my cuts had mostly healed and I relished the sharp touch of speeding droplets. I closed my eyes and inhaled the tangy melange of salt and rarified air; then I cleared my head with a deep breath and started to sort through the strange things that had happened since I left Tyre.

Two facts appeared instantly in my thoughts: Ramonojon and Kleon. Had they also been assigned bodyguards? They were in my estimation more valuable to the League than I was. Kleon was universally regarded as the ablest celestial navigator ever to graduate from the school on Crete. And Ramonojon, despite not being an Akademe graduate, was the most skilled dynamicist from India to Atlantea. If the Middle Kingdom wanted to set the Delian League’s celestial ship design work back five years, they only had to kill him.