The Forever Engine (24 page)

THIRTY-TWO

October 11, 1888, Brezna, Serbia

After ten minutes of loud and animated discourse in broken German with a couple of the locals, the boss-man of Brezna showed up, still fastening his belt around the long peasant smock he wore over baggy trousers. He was younger than I’d expected, late thirties or early forties, and tall but not particularly muscular. It was hard to read his expression. His eyes were deep set, masked in shadows, a shock of unruly black hair fell across his forehead, and a luxurious flowing black moustache covered most of his mouth.

“You are English?” he demanded in excellent German.

“We’re with the English expedition. I’m American, and the woman is French. She has a wound which needs attending.”

“Yes, bring her along to my house. Your man, too. He is English?”

“No, Bavarian. We brought two of your guards with us.”

He barked an order in Serbian and two villagers leapt forward to cut the two prisoners free. Two more offered to carry Gabrielle, who was starting to stir in my arms, but I shook my head.

“Let us hurry,” the chief said and led the way. “You have come about the English scientist, Dr. Thomson?”

“He’s Scottish, actually.”

The chief laughed.

“Yes, he told me. This is a curious expedition the English mount, to send an American, a German, and a French woman in to rescue their Scottish scientist. But I believe it. The English seem always willing to spill the blood of friends and subject nations, provided it is for a noble cause and makes England richer.”

“Everywhere I go,” I said, “people love the English.”

He laughed again and held open the front door of a two-story stone house. I carried Gabrielle into the brightly lit front room, and the chief hurried past me. The house smelled deeply of garlic and cooked cabbage and stewed tomatoes.

“Bring her this way, into the kitchen. Put her on the stove.”

On the stove?

The stove took up half the kitchen and was more like a large brick oven built against a massive stone chimney. There were doors and nooks in the front and on the sides, but the top was bare glazed brick.

“Go on,” the chief encouraged me. “In the winter my wife and I sleep here.”

I put Gabrielle gently on the warm stove top as a woman came down the stairs at the back of the kitchen, tying her hair up in a kerchief. She was in her thirties, stout of build, average height or a bit shorter, but with strong features, a clear complexion, and dark, piercing eyes. She hurried to Gabrielle’s leg and began peeling back the blood-soaked bandage, frowning and shaking her head. She barked an order to her husband, the chief, and he answered with stubborn dignity but then started to leave.

“I return with water. You stay here.”

Gabrielle was fully awake now, although still pale, and she propped herself up on one elbow. She and the woman conversed in Serbian a bit, and the woman turned to me and scolded me. I couldn’t understand the specifics, but the general tenor was clear enough. Serbian sounded like a pretty good language for scolding people.

“Her name is Mirjana Radojica. Her husband is Jovo Radojica, the
voivoda
. She says you are a fool.”

“No argument from me.”

Mirjana pointed to the wound and asked a question, and when Gabriele answered I caught the word
azhdaja:
dragons.
Mirjana frowned, nodded solemnly, and patted Gabrielle comfortingly on her unwounded leg.

“Ask if she has needle and linen thread so I can stitch up your leg,” I said.

Gabrielle translated, which set off another series of dismissive remarks aimed in my direction.

“She says men cannot even sew buttons on shirts. She will stitch my leg, and do it so there is only a small scar when it heals, instead of it looking like the seam in a quilt. Those were her words,” Gabrielle explained.

“Got it.”

Presently the chief—Jovo Radojica—returned with a bucket of water and moved quickly around the kitchen gathering bowls and pans at Mirjana’s direction, pouring water in them, fetching clean rags and jars of ointments. I backed away to get out of the traffic pattern and saw Melzer watching through the door to the front room. I gave him an encouraging smile, and he shrugged in reply. I had to admit that, whatever else happened, it was hard to think of ourselves in much danger. This was all just too . . . domestic.

“The woman fainted,” Jovo Radojica said to me from across the room. “We should loosen her clothes.”

Without looking up, his wife hit him hard in the upper arm with the back of her hand.

“You don’t speak German!” he protested, rubbing his shoulder.

“Know enough,” she answered in an accent thicker than his. She unbuttoned Gabrielle’s jacket, and she breathed more easily.

“You know what Mirjana means in Serbian?” Jovo asked me. “It means
obstinate
. Her father gave her this name, and he cursed all of us when he did.”

Mirjana Radojica shooed us all out into the front room and drew heavy drapes across the door to the kitchen. Jovo sat in the only padded armchair in the room and gestured to other chairs around the fireplace for us. He began packing a long white pipe with tobacco, and Melzer pulled his own pipe out as well.

“So,” Jovo began once his pipe was going, lit from coals in the fireplace, “you have come for the Scottish scientist Thomson. The Old Man of the Mountain wants him as well. Why should I risk that one’s wrath by giving the Scotsman to you?”

“I don’t think you’re afraid of the Old Man. If you were, what was that fight with his zeppelin all about this morning?”

“You heard about that? It was nothing. Rumors! These stories grow in the retelling.” He puffed on his pipe and frowned into the fireplace. The flames painted his face orange and yellow.

“I did not hear about it: I watched it from a ledge less than a mile from here.”

His eyes moved to me and then crinkled in a smile. He shrugged.

“Very well. I get along with some of my neighbors better than others. That is always the way, is it not? I have the crew of his airship, those who survived the crash, twelve men in all. Also his strange gun, although the barrel is bent and will require a master gunsmith to set it right. I thought to ransom the crew, but the Old Man sent word he
might
spare my life if I turned over them and Professor Thomson unharmed, and paid to repair the ship. Can you imagine the arrogance? Then he sent his other ship here to intimidate me. Well . . . things got a little out of hand yesterday. So now I suppose I will have to send his crew back just to settle things down.

“I would dislike giving Professor Thomson to the Old Man, even though it would help make peace. I have grown fond of the Scotsman. He is the only one I can talk to of the wider world. I went to school in Vienna, you know, two years at
Die Akademie der Bildenden Künste.
I wished to paint. Now, mostly I sketch—gun positions, poorly guarded gates, that sort of thing.”

“Life’s funny that way,” I said, and he nodded in agreement.

He turned to face me directly.

“So,” he said.

I pulled the five gold sovereigns from my pocket and handed them to him. They seemed to glow in the firelight.

“We will pay more,” I said. “This is just to demonstrate we can.”

“An impressive demonstration,” he said. “Now we haggle back and forth to reach a price. The people in these hills love it, because there is so little else to do. It is a form of entertainment, you see? But I have no love for it, and not enough patience.

“So this is what I do instead. You tell me your price, and I will tell you yes or no. No bargaining. If the answer is no, you leave and the Scotsman stays with me.”

“No second chances, huh?”

“No.”

He put his pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire, I guess to let me think it over. I didn’t need to.

“One hundred gold sovereigns. The five you have here and ninety-five more.”

He continued to study the fire, chewing on his pipe, as if thinking over the offer, but I knew from the way his eyebrows went up at the figure the answer was yes. Maybe he was thinking about whether there was a way to ask for more, but that would have broken the rules of his own game. Finally he turned to me and smiled.

“I will send for the Scotsman.”

I sent Melzer with the news for Gordon, but also to tell him we wouldn’t be leaving until morning. Thomson had banged his leg up and would need a litter, and Gabrielle would as well, just to be on the safe side. Rigging litters and trying to carry two people down the mountainside in the darkness was just asking for trouble. Besides, Jovo Radojica,
voivoda
of Brezna, was feeling hospitable.

His hospitality did not extend to a dozen or so heavily armed men, however, so the team would have to camp in the woods. It was just as well—I didn’t want Radojica giving our Bosnians, or Sergeant Durson, too close an inspection.

I rose when Thomson came to the door, and for a moment neither one of us spoke. His brief time in captivity seemed to have aged him. He walked with a wooden staff and favored one leg, and his face bore several abrasions and bruises, probably from the crash. He’d still been in his nightshirt when Tesla’s men grabbed him back in Munich. Now he wore homespun peasant clothing, and if his hair had been longer he could have passed for a gray-bearded village elder. He put his hand on my shoulder, and his face crinkled in relief and grief.

“Ach, look at yah!” he said, his voice thick with emotion, “your eyes black and nose crooked, and I’m that glad to see you. I saw them beating you, Jack, once you went down. I though’ you were dead. I did, it’s God’s truth.”

“I’m hard to kill.”

We shook hands.

“Come on and sit down, you old fart.”

I helped him to a chair by the fireplace, and from the other room I heard Gabrielle.

“Is that Professor Thomson’s voice?”

Within moments she joined us, supported under one arm by the formidable Mirjana Radojica, who frowned in clear disapproval of her patient being up and about. It was starting to look like a convention for the walking wounded.

“My word, is that
Mademoiselle
Courbiere?” Thomson asked. “I hardly recognized you.”

Gabrielle ran fingers through her straggling hair and smiled weakly.

“I recognized you at once, Professor. But we are so different from when we met at the house in Munich. Was that really only one week ago?”

I took her arm and helped her to a chair as Mirjana dragged a wicker hamper over from beside the wall and then gently raised Gabrielle’s injured leg and rested it on the hamper. Through the slit side of her riding habit’s skirt I saw a fresh bandage on her thigh.

I pulled a chair next to Gabrielle’s and sat, and for the next twenty minutes we caught up. I told the bare bones outline of our adventures, leaving out the rendezvous with Durson’s Turks and Cevik Bey’s promised intervention once we gave the signal. No matter how Jovo Radojica felt about Tesla, he probably wouldn’t be crazy about a Turkish-led battalion of Bosnian riflemen marching through his neighborhood. Thomson told of the flight through the mountains and the crash at night, and Jovo freely admitted to setting the lure for the airship, although he was surprised it had actually worked.

Marjana brought steaming cups of sweet coffee just when a villager knocked on the door. It opened to reveal the returning Sergeant Melzer with Gordon in tow. More introductions followed, along with another reunion between Thomson and Gordon, more reserved than ours had been.

“We need to talk,” I said once everyone settled in. I glanced at Jovo, hoping he would give us some privacy. He shrugged.

“What is it you want?” he asked us, looking around the circle of faces. “What is it you expect to accomplish here? I think more than simply rescue my new good friend Professor Thomson.

“I have a problem of my own. He is called the Old Man of the Mountain. He loves Serbia, he says, but he does not love me, and he does not love our king, this I know. He will bring ruin on our nation if he continues with his madness—this I believe.

“I think you intend to do something about him. Tell me if I am wrong.”

He looked around at each of us. No one said anything.

“I thought as much. I will not help you in this. Too many of my countrymen are likely to die. Even though my country may need this thing done, I will not bloody my hands with it. But this much I
will
do: my wife and I will go to bed.”

He rose, shook Thomson’s hand, bowed to the rest of us, and then he and Mirjana went back through the kitchen and up the creaking wooden steps to the second floor.

Thomson looked at each of us.

“Well, then,” he said, “I suppose the first order of business is command. Nominally I am supposed to be in charge, but I have some misgivings on that score. Captain Gordon, you have crafted a new plan and brought the expedition here, surmounting what sound like extraordinary obstacles. It would be foolish and irresponsible of me to supersede you at this point, particularly as I am physically unfit to actually accompany our move on Kokin Brod. I know that officially the responsibility is mine, but I surrender command to you on the grounds of medical infirmity. Do you accept?”

Surprise and embarrassment flickered across Gordon’s face.

“I do, Dr. Thomson. And I—I very much appreciate your confidence.”

“Not at all. Now, tell me what we know about Tesla’s plans.”

“Well—”

I heard shouts from outside, the sound of running feet. The door burst open and Sergeant Melzer came in, face red with excitement and alarm. Through the open door the sound of angry voices was louder, but I also heard the crackle of distant rifle fire.

“
Herr Hauptmann
, the natives say we have betrayed the truce! There is firing from the direction of our camp!”

THIRTY-THREE

October 11, 1888, Brezna, Serbia

Gordon and I sprang to our feet. I heard two people pounding down the back stairs. Jovo and Mirjana appeared at the doorway in nightclothes, Jovo’s face dark with anger.

“By God, if you have betrayed us . . .”

“Do you see a gun anywhere pointed at you?” I demanded. “You have all our leaders under one roof, deep in the heart of your town, with one gun between us, and it’s not drawn and pointing at the
voivoda
. If this is a betrayal, it must be the most stupid one in history.”

He glanced at each of our faces and saw nothing but surprise and alarm. His frown remained in place, but he nodded. He spoke a word to Mirjana, who turned and hurried back upstairs, and then, still in his nightshirt, he stalked between us and out the door.

“Come along,” he said curtly.

I turned to Thomson and Gabrielle.

“You two stay here. I’ll be back. I won’t leave you.”

“Yes, go,” Thomson said. Gabrielle simply nodded.

Jovo, Gordon, Melzer, and I ran to the edge of town through a growing crowd of angry and frightened villagers. The sound of firing grew louder and more distinct as we got to the small gate.

The wild-eyed sentry babbled out a sentence in Serbian, and Jovo put his hand on his shoulder to calm him. The
voivoda
replied, the sentry looked around in confusion, then relaxed and nodded. Jovo patted him on the back and turned to us.

“He says the English are attacking us,” he explained in German. “I tell him I don’t think so, but if they are, the English must be terrible shots since none of the bullets come this way. Tell your captain someone is attacking his camp.”

I started to translate, but Gordon nodded impatiently and cut me off.

“Right. The camp is under attack. We have to get back there and sort it out.”

“You go. I won’t leave Thomson and Gabrielle.”

“Don’t be a bloody fool! They’re safe here, and I need you to translate,” he said.

“You’ll do okay without me. I’m staying.”

He hesitated for a moment, torn between duty and the desire to throttle me. Then he unbuckled his pistol belt and handed it to me.

“You may need this.”

“What will you fight with?” I asked, but I took it gratefully.

“A mixed platoon of Royal Marines and Bavarian rifles, I should imagine. I shall be back shortly.”

Gordon and Melzer ran off into the darkness toward the distant flashes of small arms fire twinkling through the branches of the woods to the southeast. I wondered what General Buller would think if he could see Gordon now, running into the pitch-black night, toward a fight with unknown enemies, unarmed.

“Is he brave or foolish?” Jovo asked, as if he had read my thoughts.

“He’s English,” I answered, and Jovo nodded.

The breeze, blowing softly from the northwest, picked up for a moment and carried a soft, faint droning sound which momentarily was louder than the distant crackle of rifles. Jovo heard it as well, and we looked at each other. Bees?

“A zeppelin’s engine,” Jovo said.

“Get your men armed. The land attack is a diversion!”

I ran toward his house, to Thomson and Gabrielle. Jovo shouted a warning in Serbian behind me. Somewhere a bell rang the alarm. I rounded the street corner before Jovo’s house and saw broad black shapes glide over the rooftops ahead of me, making soft whispering sounds. A batlike creature, its wings fully a dozen feet across, settled into the shadows of the courtyard ahead. Its wings drooped to the ground and fluttered awkwardly, and without thinking I had Gordon’s revolver out.

Crack, crack, crack.

Three shots and the thing staggered back and then collapsed. I waited a moment for more movement and then trotted toward it.

The thing rested on the ground, an indistinct lump outlined faintly in the pale starlight and the yellow glow of the
voivoda’
s nearby open front door. I prodded the thing with my foot. It groaned. It was not a creature at all, simply a black-clad man in a sort of silk-winged paraglider harness.

He started to move again. I shot him once in the head and ran toward Thomson, Gabrielle, and Mirjana, all crowding in the open door.

“Back inside!” I barked.

They hurried back in, and I followed them and closed the door to a slit.

“Douse that light. Tesla must be either very anxious to have you, Professor, or very angry at Jovo, or both.”

I buckled on Gordon’s pistol belt, dug four cartridges out of the leather ammo pouch, and replaced the spent rounds. As I clicked the revolver closed, Jovo ran up the street. I held the door open for him.

There was fear in his face. He and Mirjana exchanged hurried words in Serbian, and she disappeared into the kitchen.

“You have seen them?” Jovo asked. “They come like shadows, mostly in the north side of town, I think, while we were south.”

The distinctive, metallic rattle of a Gatling gun reached us from outside.

“Ah! Now the damned airship joins the attack,” he added.

“It will pin your men down in the south half of the village, suppress their fire, while the air assault consolidates in the north,” I said. “Once they are organized, they will push south and clear the village house by house. They’ll get here fairly soon.”

Jovo looked around the room, fighting against the rising tide of panic. Everything was happening too fast for him. I turned to Thomson.

“I hate to say this, since we just found you, but we’ve got to leave you behind. Your leg . . .”

“Yes,” he answered, and put his hand on my arm as if to hurry me toward the door. “I’d never keep up, and I doubt he means me any harm. You have to go now.”

“My leg is injured as well,” Gabrielle said. “Perhaps I—”

“You I can carry. We’re going down the ridge into the valley. Jovo, we need a back way out, a window—”

Jovo’s face cleared, and he nodded decisively.

“Yes, follow me.”

He led us into the kitchen, where Mirjana finished tying together the two ends of a rolled wool blanket. She thrust it at me.

“Take,” she ordered in German.

“
Danke.
” I slipped it over my head and left arm. “What about you?” I asked Jovo.

“All we can do is give up or die, and dying is stupid, so we’ll give up. The Old Man does not butcher Serbs, although he may take his anger out on me. We will see. When the soldiers come, I will say the Scotsman is Mirjana’s crazy uncle Sasha from Zagreb, who only speaks German. Perhaps we will have some luck there if the released airship crewmen do not see him.”

“And when they ask where Thomson is?”

“The five gold coins will explain his absence, unless Captain Gordon’s party is taken as well. Now go!”

Mirjana opened shutters on a window on the back wall.

“It is about three meters down, then twenty meters to the edge of the slope.”

I lowered myself out feet first but stopped to shake Jovo’s hand.

“Thank you. I don’t think I’ll be able to repay you.”

“Singe the Old Man’s whiskers and that’s payment enough.”

I lowered myself until I hung from my hands and then dropped the two feet to the ground. Out here the rattling chatter of the zeppelin’s Gatling gun was louder, along with shouts and screams and the sound of scattered small arms fire in the town. Above me Jovo and Mirjana helped Gabrielle out and lowered her by her hands. I reached up and held her by her waist.

“Got her. Take the weight on your good leg, Gabi.”

I eased her to the ground.

“This is foolish. I cannot keep up. You must leave me.”

“No chance.”

Above me the bright square of the window darkened, filled with Thomson’s head and upper body. From behind him I heard loud rapid knocking on the house’s front door.

“Laddie, you’ve got to stop Tesla. He has enough liftwood to have built an engine of enormous power. If the earth’s orbital velocity slows even slightly, we move closer to the sun. Temperatures will rise, and it will take very little to produce disastrous results. It—”

“Yeah, melting icecaps, rising oceans, killer storms, mass extinctions—got it. Now close the window,
Uncle Sasha
. I’ll take it from here. And watch out for yourself.”

“God be with you.”

The shutters closed, and the world turned black.

Stop Tesla.
Did I even want to do that? I supposed I did, but I also needed Tesla for . . . everything else. Putting those two things together was going to be a really good trick, and I could hardly wait to find out how I was going to pull it all off.

For that matter, Tesla was a smart guy and so far as I knew not suicidal. Wouldn’t he have figured out all this end-of-the-world stuff? That was something to ask him, when the time came, but first we just needed to get away. When I faced Tesla, it wouldn’t be as a prisoner. Not if I could help it.

We had to get to the edge of the slope, then start down, but my night vision was shot. I put my arm under Gabrielle’s shoulders to support her, and we started slowly toward the valley.

“Leave me,” Gabrielle said, her voice almost pleading. “I will be all right. You have a better chance by yourself. I do not believe Tesla will harm me.”

“Based on what, his record of restraint?”

“He does not harm women.”

Huh.
Was that true? I thought about it for a couple seconds while we walked.

“He kills people he sees as obstacles, Gabi. In your world most women aren’t empowered enough to constitute an obstacle. You are, so no more argument. Pay attention to the trail.”

I had enough night vision by then to see faint gray highlights on the ground beneath us against the deeper black of the open sky ahead, where the ground fell away. There was no abrupt drop-off, simply a gradual descent which grew more pronounced at a certain point, and continued to grow steeper with every step until we had to struggle to keep our footing.

We stopped, and despite Gabrielle’s protests I picked her up in a fireman’s carry, settled her weight so she was balanced, and began backing down the slope using my free left hand as a support against the ground. The hillside was rocky, with woody scrub and vines. It tangled my feet but also gave me good handholds when my feet slipped. I lost my footing several times and slid a foot or two down the slope, I skinned my knees up and felt a couple thorns and splinters in the palm of my left hand.

My gloves were in the pocket of my overcoat, back at Jovo’s house. Gabrielle’s overcoat and the jacket for her riding habit were back there, too. Being out here in worsening weather without adequate clothing worried me. Hunger and thirst don’t kill many people in the wilderness—exposure does. Fortunately Mirjana had had the presence of mind to grab a blanket for us. I liked Mirjana, even though the feeling didn’t seem to be mutual. I liked Jovo, too. I hoped Tesla wasn’t going to be too hard on them, but sticking around wouldn’t have made it any easier.

My feet slipped again in loose shale, and I slid three meters down the slope before I got a good handhold. I stopped for a moment, panting for breath and smarting. The knees were gone from my pants by now, and I could feel my legs bleeding. The fireman’s carry is a good way to handle weight if you are upright, but leaning forward like this put a lot more stress on my neck and left arm, and my lower back ached from trying to compensate.

“Okay, we need to change position.”

“You should rest a few minutes.”

“Can’t. Look up there.”

She looked up and caught the tail end of a flare rising over the village. Somebody had fired a Very pistol up in the air.

“What does it mean?” she asked, and even as she said it the stutter of the Gatling gun died away.

“Tesla’s men have firm control of the upper village. That must have been their signal for the zep to cease fire, so they can move south and clear the other half. We need to get some distance between us and the town. Then we can rest.”

I had her put both arms around my shoulders and ride piggy-back as we resumed our descent. That let me use both hands, which was an improvement. After another fifteen minutes all sound of fighting died away, although the drone of the zeppelin’s engines remained, growing louder and softer as it circled the town. I wondered if Gordon and the others had fought their way clear. I wondered if Jovo’s ruse had kept Thomson safe. Mostly I wondered how much longer I could keep this up.

Another ten minutes gave me my answer. My legs and arms trembled uncontrollably, and when I lost my footing again, I slid on bare rock and scraped my knees so badly it brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t get back up. It was as if my legs no longer received the electrical signals from my brain. I lay there panting for a while, Gabrielle still on my back.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I slapped the ground beside us with my right hand.

“Camp here.”

We rested for a while. Gabrielle started to shiver. With nothing on above her waist but a silk blouse, it was no wonder. I unrolled the blanket to wrap it around her shoulders, and my appreciation for Mirjana grew. She had not simply rolled up a blanket for us. In it she had included a small bag of dried meat, one of dried fruit and nuts, a thin loaf of hard bread, a jar of ointment for Gabrielle’s wound, clean linen bandages, and a dozen wood matches tightly wrapped in a small square of rubberized canvas.

“What?” I said, examining our treasure. “No Serbian-English phrase book?”

“I think this was very thoughtful of Mirjana,” Gabrielle said in her defense.

“Me, too, Gabi. I was joking.”

“Ah,” she said, as if she understood.

We ate a little bit, and Gabrielle rubbed some of the ointment on my bloody knees. She wanted to bandage them as well, but I wouldn’t let her use all the linen for that. I tore a small square for each leg, just a patch, and pressed them over the ointment. Then I used my pocket knife to cut about a four-inch strip off one end of the blanket, cut that in half, and used each half to wrap around my knees to hold the linen patch in place, and for padding.

I checked her leg as well, but there was no sign of bleeding on the bandages, so the stitches were holding.