Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  “You will also see to it that this message is delivered to the Archons,” I said, handing the scroll to Solon.

  “Yes, Commander,” the soldier replied. The three of them stepped onto the moon sled and secured themselves amid their comrades turned prisoners.

  I turned to the rest of the crew. “Only Phan and I are needed to pilot this ship. Any of you who wishes may go as well.”

  Yellow Hare said nothing. Her stolid gaze told me what I already knew, that she would stay with me until the day of my death and even beyond if the gods permit.

  Ramonojon shook his head with a slight smile. “The Delian League would not welcome me back,” he said.

  “Aeson?” I said.

  “Are your ordering me to go?” he asked.

  I hesitated. I knew Aeson would not leave without such a command, and I was tempted to give the order. The testimony of my writing would be greatly enhanced by Aeson’s presence, and if he went, he would certainly survive what was to come. But to force him to depart, to give up the last vestige of his command for the sake of his life, was to make him betray the spirit of his city. His Spartan soul could not emerge intact after obeying such an order.

  “No, Aeson,” I said. “I am not ordering you.”

  We set the men adrift, knowing that the gleaming silver dot of the moon sled would attract the attention of our pursuers. With their departure, our crew had dwindled to a mere five from the two hundred who once occupied Chandra’s Tear.

  When the sled had dwindled to the size of a coin far aft of us, I said to the four people remaining under my command, “Now we will run the barricade of the moon.”

  I steered Rebuke of the Phoenix into the Xi line connecting ’Ermes and Selene. Phan activated the Xi strengtheners and we began to fall toward the scarred body of the silver moon. In the music of the spheres, the goddess sang a dirge into my soul, calling me down to her with a sad lament of youth lost to the ravages of time and man.

  Selene called and my ship answered, crossing the one score thousand miles in an hour’s time. I could imagine the reaction on the moon as the patrol ships spotted our approach and the impossibly fast pace we were setting.

  As we entered the Xi shoals around Selene, I saw more than twenty celestial ships and over a hundred moon sleds waiting to meet us. If we slowed and greeted them they would have known that all was well. But after I had given one swift tug on the port rein, causing Rebuke of the Phoenix to dart deftly around the right edge of their well-ordered battle lines, they had no choice but to adjudge us enemies.

  The cannonades of the four nearest ships spat steel into the air; a hail of tetras blanketed the sky before us. I pulled the down rein and Rebuke dove toward the surface of the moon, ducking under that wall of flying steel shards.

  Ground cannons fired up at us, slamming into our underbelly. Another wall of ships flew up from the caverns of the moon, their forward cannons firing a new fusillade into our underside. I yanked on the reins of our fiery horse, pulling us left and right, trying to dodge as many of the tetras as possible.

  The hum of the Xi strengtheners grew louder as Phan fought to hold the ship together against the onslaught.

  Then the flagship of the lunar fleet, the battleship Bow of Artemis, flew out from the moon’s equator; huge and terrible, shaped like an angry eagle with a two-mile wingspan, her forward edge was lined with cannons from one wing tip to the other. She tried to fly above us, but I pulled the up rein and the Phoenix rose above the eagle.

  Denied the perfect bow shot, she still fired, and half a thousand tetras struck the underside of my ship.

  The harmonic of Selene shuddered up my spine as the ship’s keel cracked under the force of the barrage. There was a rumbling noise from below, a sound I’d heard before but could not identify.

  Then we were through the barricade of Selenean ships, past the moon herself, through the inmost crystal sphere, and flying down from the lowest reaches of heaven toward the earth.

  We outdistanced our pursuers easily and took up orbit halfway between the earth and the moon. I left my cabin and joined the crew at the base of the hill.

  “The ship has been badly damaged,” Yellow Hare said.

  “Show me where.”

  She led me and the rest of the crew down the tunnel to the storage cavern. The once-solid floor of moon rock had been punched through by the repeated artillery barrages, so that through the many holes in the floor the earth could be seen. Most of the large boxes had been splintered by ricocheting tetras and their contents had fallen out of the ship.

  “There is no way to repair this much damage,” Ramonojon said. “This ship will not be able to fly much longer.”

  “We have a more serious problem,” Yellow Hare said. “Our supplies are gone.”

  I called Phan over from his survey of the cracks in the hull. “How well are we supplied with survival pills?”

  “We have taken the last of them,” he said. “They will wear off within two days.”

  “The omens are clear,” I said. “Our journey must end soon.”

  ρ

  “Where are we to go?” Phan said.

  “A mountain on one of the borders where the armies of both the Delian League and the Middle Kingdom can find us,” I said.

  “You want to be found?” Aeson said.

  “Yes,” I said, “but not immediately. We must have a few hours on the ground before we are located.”

  Ramonojon took a deep breath and spoke. “There is a place in Tibet we might land—”

  “Tibet?” Phan said in disbelief. “The country is swarming with the Son of Heaven’s armies.”

  “And the armies of the League are permanently camped on Tibet’s borders,” Yellow Hare said.

  Ramonojon nodded and a thin smile broke out on his lips. “And the Tibetans have a myriad of places to hide from both armies. The mountains of Tibet have many hidden communities of Buddhists; one of them is the place where I was taught.”

  Aeson cocked an eyebrow at Ramonojon. “Whatever Aias’s plan is, it involves both armies finding us. Do you want your teachers killed?”

  “They would give up much more than their lives to stop Sunthief,” Ramonojon said.

  “But they do not have to,” Yellow Hare said. “There are mountains in South Atlantea where we could hide for a few hours.”

  “Do you know them well?” Ramonojon said. “Can you spot a good hiding place from the air?”

  “No,” she said. “We would have to search.”

  “I know how to reach my teachers’ refuge,” Ramonojon said.

  “Ramonojon’s idea is the best,” I said. “The Buddhists are the only other people on Earth being hunted by both empires. They may be able to give us the aid we need.”

  “What aid is that?” Aeson said.

  Athena opened my mouth and spoke through me. “A mountain peak, a mountain cave, pens, ink, and paper,” she said. “Those are the last things you will require.”

  “My teachers can provide those,” Ramonojon said.

  “Then there you will go,” Wisdom declared.

  Yellow Hare and Aeson bowed at the divine voice. Ramonojon covered his face, and Phan stared quizzically into my eyes, then slowly bowed.

  From that moment until this, Athena has not left me. She has dwelled in my heart and filled my mind with her wisdom, so that even though we had descended into the heavy air of the earth, my mind remained clear and my purpose never wavered.

  The goddess returned my voice to me as she settled herself into the two caverns of science that had grown within my heart.

  “We will go to Tibet,” I said.

  With the underside of the ship badly damaged from the cannonades of the moon, I did not dare let anyone strap down below. We bundled together in the control cabins. Yellow Hare and Ramonojon came into my cabin. Aeson went with Phan to his.

  I steered us into the huge Xi flow that joined Selene and Earth, and we fell toward the night-shrouded Pacific Ocean. Rebuke of the Phoenix
screamed as we plummeted, the now horribly familiar howl of moonstone cracking. There was an angry snap and a large piece of our port side broke off. The gaming fields went spinning off into a silent orbit, carrying half our left wing with them. No more funerals would be held on our ship, and the games of our dead would have to be played on Earth.

  The balance of the ship shifted sharply to starboard, and the straps securing me started to loosen. My head slammed into the aft wall, dazing me; Yellow Hare loosened her own straps, freeing her arms but keeping herself securely tied to the floor by her legs. She leaned over and grabbed my shoulders to keep me steady.

  The ship continued to dive down toward the moonlit waters of the vast ocean. Out the forward window, I saw dark spots against the waters, islands only a few miles below us. I tried to pull on the starboard wire to drag us out of the Xi flow, but it strained against me; Yellow Hare reached over and took hold of the pull rope, adding the strength of her arms to mine. Phan turned off the strengtheners just as Yellow Hare and I, together, managed to drag the starboard control wire in enough to turn the sun fragment and pull the ship in a wide swoop away from the water.

  We took up a swift orbit only two miles above the earth. Groups of islands flashed below us as we flew westward toward the Middle Kingdom and Tibet. In the night sky above us I saw flecks of silver growing larger, celestial ships descending to catch us.

  The ship passed from darkness into twilight over the islands of Nippon. Battle kites rose up in their hundreds from that rugged land to meet and challenge us. The air above the mountain air bases of Nippon became thick with strengthened Xi currents, but the currents that buoyed up the silk-skinned bamboo bats and dragons flying toward my ship only gave added speed to Rebuke of the Phoenix.

  Silver dust and boulders of moon rock spilled from Rebuke as she cracked again from the strain of dodging two flotillas.

  Phan turned on the Xi strengtheners and I released the reins. Given its head, our horse of fire plowed through the assembled squadrons of aircraft, scattering the Middle Kingdom’s wood-and-cloth dragons upward into the sky, where they met the diving moonstone battleships of the Delian League. Evac cannons spat and Xi lances roared as battle was joined between our two pursuers. My people and Phan’s turned and met again across the chasm of their sciences and death erupted from that void. Where he and I exchanged words they exchanged fire.

  “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.