by D Des Anges
“Shut up, Ben,” with a sour feeling bubbling in her stomach, for it would not be Benjon who heard.
“Perhaps a basket and pulley—”
“Will you not be practical, Ferdinand,” Hajar muttered, for what felt like the thousandth time that night. “How are we to get the pulley up there?”
The Wall, it seemed, was as effective an insurmountable obstacle as its constructors, both human and arthropod alike, had intended for it to be. Here in populated Frankish territory it drew to several storeys in height and dwarfed all the houses anywhere about. Perhaps if they travelled to the terrible mountains where habitations were few, on the far side of the Black Sea, they might find their way over a lower barrier, but they had no means nor time.
“We can’t just ask,” Ferdinand retorted, tipping his spoon this way and that through the pungent broth, “They’ll be onto us in a minute: ‘Hallo, we are Albion-Moors come to hire an ornithopter in this town right by the Wall, no we have no intention of breaking into the Gated Continent, we just want a chance to look at the tops of trees while it snows’.”
Whether or not the venting of his spleen was aimed at her, Hajar appreciated it little. “Shut up, can’t you?”
For a while, they each toyed with their meals, frustrated into silence, while the sot who stank of sheep muttered to himself. It seemed there that their pursuit was to be stymied at the turn wherein there would have been no changing of minds, but Hajar was not in the habit of surrender when her mother was not present to force her hand.
She turned to the shepherd, abandoning her stew gratefully.
He was far in his cups but she asked regardless in thick and clumsy Frankish if he hailed from anywhere very nearby, and what had brought him to this boarding house.
His reply came in time, such great time that Hajar was afraid he must not have understood her, or was loath to speak with a Moor. His reply came also in Frankish that bore the strong and unmistakable accent of the mad Prussian nation, which rendered it similar to an Albionman speaking Frankish with a sore throat and a drunk tongue. This effect was furthered by his quite clear drunkenness.
He came, he said, from a city in the Prussian territories which Hajar found impossible to recognise, where he traded in prized livestock. This was a point of which he was very proud, and repeated several times.
He came, he claimed, to ‘the arse of nowhere’ in search of a stud from which to breed. The literal translation would have been a little more like ‘the spot between the testicles and the arsehole’, but Albiontongue was not so very anatomically specific in its metaphors as the Prussian dialect of Frankish.
He was meant to meet with a trader who claimed to have access to ‘the finest ram that a man could set to his ewes’. Instead of this happy union with a Frankish sheep farmer, he had been robbed by ‘bastards’ and left in the woods outside the next town over. The sheep trader was understandably full of opinions relating to the moral qualities of the Pure Franks and their fucking towns.
Hajar expressed her sympathies and said that it was the same all over, that terrible bandits roamed the countryside in Albion-of-the-Britons, and neglected to mention that the bandits in question had a common tendency to end up in windowless rooms or suspended over crossroads in cages. Albion-of-the-Britons was given to the employ of sterner law-keepers than the Franks.
Then, the Prussian stock-trader said, evidently pleased to have a fresh audience for his complaint, he had achieved the loan of fresh monies at the cost of his – a word Hajar couldn’t understand – and was now to await the arrival of the bloody ram-trader. The wretch, it seemed, had to be contacted all over again.
In the meantime, the Prussian said, he would be stuck in this ‘miserable turd of a town’ and drinking himself blind to kill the inevitable boredom.
Hajar was impressed that a man whose principle interest was to stare at ewes was so stricken by the provinciality of the Wall-side town, but this, too, she kept to herself. She asked, instead, was there any pastime he had found outside of the boarding-house, or had he ventured elsewhere to relieve the monotony of the few rooms. Ferdinand might be frustrated or puzzled by the sloth of this conversation, but she had learnt from the cradle that to nudge a man’s mind was a slow process.
Yes, he said.
There was, he said, some bloody show-off in the town who had a flying device, and had offered for a sum of money the Prussian considered to be outrageous the chance of observing the town from above.
The ‘self-satisfied bastard’ – the Prussian had no apparent regard for the wyflock of anyone’s parents – had told him it was a popular pastime of cartographers, and that in this manner he supplemented well his usual living. The Prussian – he reported, with some pride – had told him that he was an ugly parasite, and had returned to the boarding-house in order to drink himself insensible.
“We should like to see the town from above,” Hajar said, taking care to sound idle rather than excited. “What is this man’s name? Where might he be found?”
Once the Prussian had shared this with Hajar, she engaged him still, asking about his wife, his prospects, the character of the city from which he hailed, and his impressions of the Franks. All of his impressions of the Franks, it seemed, were profane, often employing the kind of language that would give a sailor pause.
She kept at him until he excused himself to vomit, having reached the limits even of his Prussian stomach for the local drink. When he had staggered outside under the disapproving eye of the boarding-house’s wife, she returned triumphant to Ferdinand and Benjon.
“There is a man in the town who has an ornithopter,” Hajar said, “and it will cost us dearly. But he is there, and he is without scruple as to whom he hires it to. They are light enough to carry, between us three, and will serve to carry us over the Wall, I think. What do you say?”
The occupied form of Benjon was immediately in agreement. He offered to go at once and hire the machine.
“You can’t speak Frankish,” Hajar pointed out, thinking of Benjon’s furious struggles with the tongue and eventual abandonment. He knew enough Old Romish to decipher their medical texts, he had said, and that would suffice now that he had Hajar to intercede in the Moorish texts too.
“Hugo Waldren could,” said the thing inside Benjon. It repeated the phrase in quite fluent Frankish, which sounded bizarre and unsettling in Benjon’s mouth.
“You shut up,” Ferdinand growled.
“In the morning,” Hajar said, pointing to the darkness that besieged the windows. “In the morning we will all go, and one of us must purchase a travelling-cloak and poles.”
Ferdinand and Benjon regarded her all dumbness, and Hajar set a great sigh into her unwanted soup. “We are travelling, after this night, through a land without people. There will not be a boarding-house every twenty miles with beds and fires.”
“And I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with the hardships of that,” Ferdinand muttered, his sarcasm lacking bite.
But they quarrelled no further, and when he suggested that the next day he might take Benjon to hire the ornithopter, to have the use of his new-found Frankish tongue and to thus ensure that the Frank with the machine believed himself to be hiring it to an Albionman and not only a Moor, Hajar conceded. She said she would attend to their other needs.
“I can’t fly an ornithopter,” said Ferdinand, as they ascended the very narrow and dark staircase to the single room they had settled upon. “And neither –” he said quickly, with a sharp look ahead to where Benjon’s sticklike figure was dim-lit by the sole gas light, “– could Hugo.”
“It is no matter,” Hajar said, “I can, I will show you as much as you need to know for such a short rise.”
Ferdinand seemed doubtful, for the machine was notorious for complexity, but he was at least not quarrelsome.
“My mother designs them,” Hajar said, unsmiling, as she lay full-dressed on the first bed she had encountered for days, “And you are a quick study. We should worry more a
bout what lies on the other side of that Wall, now.”
* * *
The great irony of the ornithopter which those like Hana had worked without tire to correct was that though the construction of the machine itself was needs must light as feathers and strong as iron, the means of propulsion and of raising were needs must incalculably heavy. Therefore the nature of ornithopter engineering was best viewed as a perpetual battle between battery and lift.
“I thought you said these were light,” Ferdinand pointed out. They heaved together at the mass of canvas and wood, wires, leather, membranes, and useless little wheels, through the uphill climb to the base of the Wall.
Benjon, whose twig-like body would have been of little use in the transport of the machine, was left to haul their bags and poles, travelling-cloak and food, like a very thin mule.
“The machine is light,” Hajar grunted, “the means of conveyance is intended to protect the pilot from the engine of generation and the foulness that drives it. Don’t –” she filled her lungs with difficulty, and nearly tripped on a tree root, “—make me explain the means. It would take a week, and all the breath I have is for carrying.”
They lifted the ornithopter delicately through the dense conifer forest, wherein the winter light hardly penetrated, but neither did the inclement weather.
Ferdinand, however, did not take her advice. He said, “I’ve never known a woman to be the one to lug a weight like this through the landscape—”
“You’ve never known many women,” Hajar said tartly, but she smiled as she said it.
“O, that is not true,” Ferdinand said with a laugh. “I have known a hundred thousand women, al-Fihri, they are all in the employ of Albion Broadcasting and -- oof -- not one of them would lift her foot if there were a labourer to lift it for her.”
“I would put my twenty on Mabeline Pilbrook carrying nothing more than her own head,” Hajar acknowledged, in spite of her resolution to save her breath for the climb.
“I would not take your bet,” Ferdinand said, a short laugh again, “I know her well. Most like she would forget whatever she was to carry, than she would refuse it. And that includes –” he gasped at the precariousness of his position, for he had almost unbalanced himself on a spot of pine needles that seemed less firm than the rest of the ground on which they trudged, “—her head.”
The Wall, when they came at last to it, was all that Hajar had imagined.
It rose above the trees, the nearest of which grew thirty feet from its base. The ground beside the stones, and back to the treeline, was scorched and plantless, free of even shoots, dotted with greenish-yellow grit. Hajar supposed they must raze the soil about the wall to keep any vine or tree that might aid the foolish climber, but her mind rebelled at the scale of undertaking it must require to keep every length of the great edifice so sterile.
They laid down the ornithopter, and devoted some significant time to stretching, bending, and unseating their aches. Hajar noted again the grey in Ferdinand’s beard, and judged him to be either drawing close to four decades, or else to have suffered a great many trials.
“Hurry up,” Benjon’s voice complained, “We are hungry.”
The calibration and wiring of an ornithopter – especially as old a variation as this – coupled with the danger of the engine of conveyance either igniting the machine, the pilot, or itself (in a great fireball which would no doubt set the surrounding forest alight, damp air or not), was as delicate and troublesome an operation as Hajar had encountered in the laboratory at the School of Non-Occult sciences.
It to be undertaken without the comfort of knowledgeable persons nearby, or the understanding that, should she accidentally cause the destruction of her own work through some alchemical misgiving there would be fresh equipment and material to work with. Hana had impressed upon her that this was a common occurrence in the creation and use of the ornithopter, for the reactions required to electrify their engines were brought about only by the most vicious and deadly of substances.
Hajar was therefore not overburdened with confidence.
“May I—” Ferdinand began, leaning in to adjust a wire. Hajar very nearly screamed, worn ragged by the proximity of the engine of conveyance and the terrible fate it contained.
But his huge, rough hands were as careful as hers, and it took all four hands to coax the coil to the degree of tension at which it should sit.
“How many cartographers has that greedy Frank killed with this thing?” Ferdinand added, appalled. “Sure they would have been electrified by their seating before it ever lifted from the ground.”
“As long as we avoid that fate,” said the thing that dwelt in Benjon, stooping over the exposed guts of the machine with great interest. “Why does—”
“No, you shut up,” Ferdinand said, pushing him away with one hand to the narrow and birdlike chest of the occupied doctor. “You’re of no use and you’re getting no answers. Out of it. Now.”
“Who goes first?” Hajar said, half to herself. “If I go, and it misfires, there will be no one to fix it. If he goes, and it fails, the purpose of this mad flight is annulled. And if you take the bloody engine and it ignites –”
“We will have lost nothing,” Ferdinand said, lifting her away from the seat with his two hands upon her arms, “or nothing that does not wish itself lost. Hup. Out of my way, woman, and stop scowling. You know it’s the truth. Show me how this thing works.”
Seething in near-regal indignation at being so manhandled and with a firm resolution to explain exactly why no one was ever to lift her or move her else she would spit in his eye, Hajar bit down on her tongue until she knew she would no longer give vent to her ire. Instead she began her most simple instruction in the piloting of an ornithopter.
Benjon in his right mind would have termed it ‘the idiot instruction’, as he deemed his base introductions to the anatomy of a man. Hajar let the memory of his perennial frustration with new students keep her from cursing at Ferdinand for every mistake he made.
They were few enough: he was after all an engineer of sorts too, and made connection as well as any other, once given the facts. Hajar was careful to keep from him, for now, that while she knew the instruction of ornithopter flight, she had no more practice of it than he.
It would only unsettle his nerves, and it would do no good to his understanding.
When at last she was sure she could do no more to guide him, Hajar stood back and shooed Benjon’s parasitised body back from the machine. She scooped away all that they had brought with them for the journey ahead, and gave Ferdinand the wordless gesture of ‘go ahead’ that she had seen ornithopter pilots use.
Hajar then had to shout, “GO AHEAD”, between cupped hands regardless, for Ferdinand did not know it.
There was a terrible gurgling as of the digestion of a huge beast, and a series of smells so foul that they made the stench of decay in Benjon’s Durham house and the stink of Magda’s failed experiments seem homely and sweet.
Ferdinand shouted, “Is it supposed to do that?” and, “Never mind, I think it’s working,” and, “Fuck, that bit’s burning—”
But the ornithopter membranes and framework circles began to move, slow as melting snow, then faster, and faster, and faster. At last their frantic dance was as crazed and swift as the wing beats of the humble-bee upon which their motion and design were based.
Ferdinand, only part-visible amid the whirling and whirring parts, tugged and pushed at the tools of steerage which Hajar had pointed out to him. With a great cloud of errant pine needles and scattering green-yellow grit, the ornithopter rose a few inches from the scorched earth, and rose, and rose again.
“If it explodes,” said the thing that had taken Benjon’s form for its own, “how are we going to get over the Wall?”
“If you don’t shut up,” said Hajar, her arms crossed as with a critical eye she watched the ornithopter rise in heart-stopping jerks, “I will shut you up.”
“You will only damage
your friend’s body,” said the occupier with some smugness.
“Gagging his mouth won’t damage him,” Hajar said.
The ornithopter drifted up to the top of the wall, some feet higher than the tops of the nearest trees, and settled very precariously on the stone span that they must cross.
“If I had the means to dig you from his head with a spoon I would do it without hesitation,” she added, as Ferdinand climbed shakily from the now-quiet ornithopter and waved down to them.
He was too high up for her to see his face, but the stiffness with which he moved suggested he was very much frightened to be so high up on such a narrow ledge, and had not enjoyed his flight at all. Hajar did not judge his fear unreasonable.
“You would only kill your friend should you attempt such a thing,” said Benjon’s voice with unnatural cheer. “Your only choice is to find my arthropod vessel for me.”
“I know,” Hajar said, as Ferdinand began, with uneven motion, to affix and adjust the ropes which would bring the ornithopter down to her once more, “because if there were any other choice I would have taken it.”
The ornithopter descended with much more speed than it had ascended. Indeed it was only the outstretched arms of Hajar and Benjon slowing its descent at the final leg that prevented it from crashing into the base of the Wall and therefore igniting.
“SORRY,” Ferdinand shouted down.
Hajar affixed their supplies to the rope on which he had let down the ornithopter, and called, “PULL IT UP,” back to him, giving a tug on the line for emphasis.
While Ferdinand was so engaged, Hajar turned to the occupied Benjon with her most fierce stare, and said, “You will have to ride the rope up. Be grateful Benjon is so ascetic in his eating.”
“Suits us,” said the thing that used Benjon’s mouth, “We don’t want to explode.”
Hajar said something so extremely rude that were her colleagues present Odo at least would have fainted, and were her mother present she would have slapped her face without hesitation. Benjon’s possessed form only showed its teeth in a smile, and Hajar turned her attentions to the ornithopter.