Celestial Matters (44 page)

“No longer!” I shouted. “Fight no longer.” But the two fleets could not yet hear my words and the thunder of their weapons drowned out the thunder of my voice.

And then we were through the cloud of pursuing dragons.
Rebuke
had been injured; the ship was bleeding a stream of silver moondust to spin and glisten in the sky behind us, leaving a trail for celestial ships and dragon kites to follow.

Rebuke of the Phoenix
flew past the islands and over the twilight ocean east of the Middle Kingdom. We sped on, following the curve of the earth, until out the forward window, there on the horizon, lay the Kingdom’s capital, ’AngXou. Its glittering jade towers sparkled in the sunlight reflected from the lake on its western edge and the ocean on its east.

O, ye gods, I beg that you know how much I was tempted to dive my ship down toward that city, to fulfill the simplest of the duties I had been given. It would have been easy to abandon the commands of the gods for the orders of men to rain down celestial fire and destroy a million lives for the glory of the Delian League. One tug on the downward rein at the right moment and I would have guaranteed my own immortality.

But I held back my hand. Though every battle kite in the capital rose up on silken wings to batter my ship with breaths of fire and twisting currents of Xi, though
Rebuke of the Phoenix
was shaking and cracking as if it would shatter in a moment, and though every lesson my father had ever battered into my heart about duty cried against me, still, with Athena’s help and Prometheus’s vision, I held my hand.

We flew over the cities, the towns, the farmlands of the Middle Kingdom, no doubt striking terror into the hearts of the people of that land. But we continued on, bleeding silver into the air, until we reached and passed the Kingdom’s western border and entered the maze of pinnacles that rise above the clouds, stabbing upward from the mountains of Tibet.

I steered toward those peaks, hoping to reach our goal before
Rebuke of the Phoenix
died, never to rise again.

“Descend, Aias,” Ramonojon said. He pointed toward a tall peak that pierced the low-lying clouds, the snow on its cap melding its frozen white with the floating white of the clouds. “That is the mountain we must reach.”

I pulled the down rein, and we dropped among the peaks. Snow that had been frozen since the world began melted from the unnatural nearness of the sun fragment.

Like a hunted bird, we dodged and wove between the mountains. Our wing spars cracked against the mountainsides, but we kept flying. A trail of silver marked our path, glittering in the sunlight. With each turn we took to dodge between one mountain and another,
Rebuke of the Phoenix
broke a little more and screamed its suffering in the voice of ravaged Selene.

But, at last, we managed to reach our goal: a cold, peaceful mountain high in the ’Imalaias, desolate and empty, with no sign that anyone had ever lived there.

As we neared the peak, I pulled hard on the starboard guide wire, pulling the sun fragment sharply toward the apex of terraced stone. As I had planned, the net snagged on the jutting pinnacle of the mountain, and the sun fragment, flying in a spiral, wound the net into a tight knot around the jutting spire of stone and snow.

By this means I moored
Rebuke of the Phoenix
to the roof of the world. Then I pulled on all four reins, drawing out the small impellers that lined the net. A column of rarefied air appeared, pointing up from the mountaintop toward the sky. The sun fragment bobbed inside that column, trying to fly upward but held down by the net and the mountain. The fireball became a gleaming beacon that would mark our position clearly for those who hunted us.

The Selenean body of my ship floated a few hundred yards from the peak, orbiting lazily around its mooring.

Yellow Hare, Ramonojon, and I unstrapped and joined Aeson and Phan. We boarded one of the remaining moon sleds, and I piloted it down the side of the mountain until we passed through the water-thick clouds, down into the lower reaches of the mountain.

There on a spar of rock looking up into the sky stood perhaps ten or twelve men, clad from head to toe in heavy furs.

“There,” Ramonojon shouted above the blustering Tibetan winds. “Land where they are.”

I brought the moon sled in for a soft landing on a snowdrift near the rocky outcropping. Aeson and Yellow Hare secured the sled to a nearby boulder with mooring ropes while the rest of us stepped down onto the solid, unmoving ground of Earth. The cold of winter bit through my sandals into my feet, and I watched in momentary fascination as my breath condensed into a cloud of steam.

The fur-garbed men walked over as we disembarked. They threw back their hoods to reveal a variety of Middler and Tibetan faces, all craggy, all weather-beaten, and all remarkably calm about our presence.

From the center of the group stepped a short, thin Tibetan man with a serene face and gentle brown eyes. There was something lying across his shoulders; it was not a spirit, but it could have been had he wanted it to be. He smiled at me, and I felt the smile pass through my eyes and touch Athena in my heart.

Ramonojon stepped up to him and bowed, grasping the old man’s hands warmly.

“Master,” my friend said. “We seek assistance.”

The Tibetan touched Ramonojon’s shoulder and my friend straightened up. “Come with us, Ramonojon. We are leaving this place for a safer one.”

“Master,” Ramonojon said, “I cannot. The weapon I contributed to making is tethered to this mountain. I have not yet stopped the warriors from using it.”

“Ramonojon,” I said, “go with your teachers. I promise you that Sunthief will not be used as a weapon.”

Everyone turned to look at me.

“Aias,” Ramonojon said, “how can you promise that?”

“Because History and Wisdom have told me how it can be done.” I took Ramonojon’s arm. “Please go,” I said. “You have a place of refuge. People who can harbor you. Please go to safety, my friend.”

Ramonojon stood still for a while, his eyes shifting back and forth between myself and his master. At last he turned to face the old Tibetan and said, “Master, I must stay with them. I have not gained enough detachment to leave my friend to a fate that should be mine.”

The old man shook his head sadly, but said nothing to try and dissuade Ramonojon.

“We need a cave,” I said.

“Follow that trail,” the Buddhist teacher said, pointing toward a rough-hewn track that ambled down the side of the mountain.

“Yellow Hare, Aeson, Ramonojon,” I said. “Find the cave. Phan, you and I must return to
Rebuke of the Phoenix.
We have work to do.”

My comrades followed the trail down the mountainside while the Buddhists followed a different path that led them into a deep ravine on the north side of the mountain, where they disappeared from our sight.

Phan and I took the moon sled back to the ragged body of my ship. The sun fragment had melted the permafrost from the peak of the mountain, laying bare the sheets of stone that had not seen daylight since the world was made. The air was filled with heavy trails of steam, thick with mind-dulling water, but Athena kept my thoughts clear and focused on the plan she had inspired in me.

I landed the moon sled near the bow of the ship, beside the laboratory hillocks, and tied it to one of the cave entrances.

“Get your equipment from Mihradarius’s lab,” I told Phan. “And meet me by the port Xi strengthener.”

“Yes, Aias,” Phan said.

When we met again, the two of us set to work changing the configurations of the Xi strengtheners by painting a thick line of cinnabar from each of the spiked blocks to the base of the trolley, then another one from Phan’s cabin down the ship’s axis, over my cabin, and onto the trolley. We finished our task by nailing a dozen silver spikes into the left and right sides of the trolley itself.

I did not tell Phan what we were doing or why we were doing it; but I knew in my own heart that I did not need to do so. I do not know what god guided him or whether he had truly found the Tao in his heart and was simply doing what needed to be done.

But whatever divinities inspired us, Phan and I worked together swiftly and efficiently as if we had been comrades-in-arms from childhood.

When the last stroke of paint was laid down and the last silver nail hammered, we went to our control rooms but did not strap down. With slow, cautious rein work, I uncoiled the fragment from the mountain peak, freeing
Rebuke of the Phoenix
for its final flight.

The ship twisted to port, and the last vestige of our wings shattered against a mountain. I pulled the up rein and let the fragment pull us above the highest peaks of the ’Imalaias.

Then Phan activated the port and starboard Xi strengtheners at the same time. There was no hum in my cabin because the line we had just drawn connecting the cabins and the trolley dampened the Xi flow in the body of the ship. The port and starboard sides of the vessel came alive with the flow of nature, but the central axis of
Rebuke
was as lifeless as the spine of a corpse.

I pulled back on all five reins. The central cord hauled in the sun fragment, loosening the coils of the net. The other four reins rarefied the air in four small columns, pulling the loosened strands of celestial matter away from one another, undoing the knots Mihradarius had tied. The sun net came apart like a cascade of hair released from a ribbon.

The sun fragment, freed from its net, would have leaped up into the sky, but the Xi strengtheners had created flows that pointed left and right, not upward. Pulled by the opposite natural motions, that perfect sphere of sun fire deformed into an ellipsoid, its long axis stretched across the sky, and in that oblate ball, fire pull against fire, straining to follow two different dictates of nature.

We waited for five tense minutes, watching the fragment strain while the strands of green and brown and silver celestial matter that had comprised the net separated into two bundles of heavenly streamers, flapping upward in the breeze.

The fragment sang its torment, wailing the harmonic of the sun through the mountains of Tibet. Then that song became a cry of freedom as the glowing red ellipsoid tore itself in twain. Two balls of fire shot away from each other, one flying left along that Xi flow, the other flying to the right.

Each of the celestial flames flew into one of the strands of uncoiled net, and when heavenly fire touched heavenly rope, I let the reins go. The strands twisted, but not back into the unified net Mihradarius had designed. Now there were two sun nets, each holding half the fragment.

For a short time, my chariot had not one horse, but two. With reins and Xi strengtheners Phan and I turned those twin steeds around and set them to pull
Rebuke of the Phoenix
down toward the mountains.

Phoenix
cracked under the strain of that turn. The harmonic of the moon reverberated back and forth through the body of the ship, growing stronger with each echo. It jarred my bones and shook my teeth, but I held on to the reins, steering the ship back to the mountain that had tethered it before. The scream of Selene filled my ears, threatening to blot out all other thoughts, but there, there was the pinnacle. I tugged the port and starboard reins and the twin fragments twisted to left and right, coifing themselves in opposite spirals around the peak and yanking at the ship from opposite directions.

Only when they were solidly moored did I release the reins. Then I ran from my cabin over the straining ground, dodging streams of moon sand and bombards of silver rocks. Phan and I met at the moon sled. I cut the mooring rope with a knife; the two of us dove onto the disk of moon rock, and we flew away from the bucking ship.

Behind us the ship screamed one last time and broke in half along the line of deadness we had drawn down her meridian. There was a blinding hail of silver moondust which splattered the moon sled and dug deep into our robes and skin.

But we had succeeded. All that remained of
Rebuke of the Phoenix
were two huge slabs of moon rock welded to the two halves of the trolley, which in turn hung on to the two sun nets which were wrapped around the mountain. The whole makeshift arrangement chained the sun fragments, like twin Prometheuses, to the rock.

“Well done,” I said to Phan, brushing the silver dust off my body and watching it float away in a lazy spiral.

“Well done, indeed,” he replied, clearing the gleaming moon sand from his glowing face.

I piloted the moon sled down the trail until I found the Buddhists’ cave, a large cavern shielded from view by icy ledges. Inside there were two dozen small circular huts made of stitched white furs thrown over skeletons of lashed-together bamboo. On the back wall had been painted a picture of a serene-faced Indian man holding the world in his open palm and looking down at us with a comforting gaze. The image was roughly drawn and little color had been used, but still it compelled the soul as strongly as Athena’s statue in the Parthenon.

“Shakyamuni Buddha,” Ramonojon said.

Yellow Hare looked away from the image, but I bowed briefly to our host.

Near the entrance was a vegetable garden planted with rows of cabbages, turnips, and some kind of bean unfamiliar to me. There was also an underground stream that flowed from a break in the cave walls; the water sparkled clear and cold against the rock floor.

Yellow Hare and Aeson were sharpening their swords beside the river. Ramonojon was sitting in the door of one of the huts.

“What now, Aias?” Aeson said.

“Now we will bring our pursuers here and the will of Zeus will be done,” I said, and my voice echoed through the cave.

I pointed to Aeson and Ramonojon. “I want you two to take the moon sled and deliver messages to the fleets pursuing us.”

“The League or the Middle Kingdom?”

“Both,” I said.

“What are we to say?” Aeson asked.

“Tell them that if they will send to me delegations of a dozen men, comprised of both soldiers and scientists, then they can each have one of the fragments. If they refuse, tell them I will sink the celestial fires into the earth, where they will burn through Gaea’s body, orbiting inside the body of the world forever.”