“But his daughter has had twenty hours in the air over fifteen flights.”
“His daughter also weighs ninety pounds, and the warden has strange ideas about long-range flight. The difference between you and her is about fifty pounds of fuel, and the warden values that difference.”
“I can play twelve dances on the keovtar and perform those same dances, I play clock-chess, I speak five languages, I know this book of chivalry down to the very last clause—and I can fly. I could qualify as a squire, I could even pass as a warden.”
“So all you need is a family fortune five times the size of ours and you could buy the articles of an unattached squire. Serjon, as a flyer you can do test flights. Who could hope for more?”
“Well me, for a start.”
“So what happens to the family name in the meantime? You’re my only son.”
“I’m your stepson. Warden Jannian is my father.”
“You must carry on as guildmaster after me.”
“And I will. I’m an articled engineer—”
“But you don’t want to be a guildmaster! I look up with pride when I hear the note of one of my engines overhead. You look up and wish you were flying.”
“Papasair, I am doing everything that a good son of an engineer guildmaster ought to. The other warden-heirs and flyers are out drinking with bawdy girls in the taverns or gambling their wages away. I am here, and I am reading a book on chivalric practice. What more could you ask for?”
“But why not a book on mixture boost-charging—”
“Gah, that’s enough!” shouted Serjon, struggling stiffly to his feet. “Even though you want me to drown in grease, and though the warden probably wants Bronlar Jemarial for his next squire, I am going to fly!”
“Where are you going?”
“Outside, for some fresh air. If I can’t fly in it, at least I can breathe it! Oh, and you have thirteen gravy spots on your shirtfront.”
Outside, in the weakening light of evening, Serjon glanced around to be sure that his father was not following him, then stopped beside Jannian’s triwing. It was a graceless but very functional gunwing. The apprentice from the airframe guild who was standing guard waved idly to him, and Serjon waved back. Farther across the wingfield he could see Bronlar standing beside the sailwing of Jannian’s squire. She too waved, and Serjon responded with a courtly bow. The bow was in fact the correct formal greeting for a guildmaster’s daughter, but Bronlar turned away at once, fuming.
The issue of female flyers was a topical one in Yarron. Many guild families had no sons, and daughters often carried on the work of airframe maintenance and fueling, including the test flights of some wings. The armorers’ and engineers’ guilds had been less tolerant, preferring adoption, son-in-law heirs, or even “guested” fathers to supply male children. Bronlar had been brought to the capital by Warden Jannian. He had an idea that women might be introduced to the ranks of the flight guild, first as flyers and later as squires, and he had the support of several other wardens with talented female flyers among their own guild families. The issue had raised considerable debate among the Yarronese wardens, although Bronlar’s flight to Condelor and the subsequent outrage of the Bartolican adjunct, herald, and wardens had won her a lot of support.
She stood leaning against a pennant pole beside the sailwing, gazing wistfully over toward the old throne room and wondering what was being said about her fate at that very moment. The sky still glowed with sunset, and Mirrorsun was not yet visible on the opposite horizon.
“So you’re what all the fuss is about.”
Bronlar turned, and not far away Serjon looked up from the book that he was trying to memorize by lamplight. Several youths of her own age or older formed a half circle around her. By their flight jackets and town hats she could see that they were of the families of wardens and squires, and many were quite probably future wardens themselves.
“Are you speaking to me?” she demanded sharply, so sharply that nobody spoke for a moment.
“Being a flyer is not your place,” a very thin but handsome youth of about her age said nervously.
“That decision is not yours to make, Sair Alion,” Bronlar replied, stepping so that the thick pole remained between her and the group.
“Flyers have to do more than fly gunwings and sailwings, we must fight on the ground as well as the air,” declared a shorter but more heavily built youth who now stepped forward and reached for her.
Bronlar made to walk straight into his outstretched arm, taking him by surprise. She snaked an arm around his, stepping behind him and bending him over double. He gave a cry of surprise and pain. Her knee was in the way as he tried to take a step to balance himself, and he rolled over it and fell heavily, crashing into the pole. As he lay there, stunned, the others got over their surprise and began to circle and close in. Some had drawn the calf-canes from their boots.
Bronlar was armed with a cross-truncheon bound in leather, and had been taught to use it. Enduring a cane stroke across the arm, she lunged, striking Alion in the midriff, then did a blind swing behind herself, catching another youth over the ear. For a moment there was a break in the fighting, but the group was still confident although surprised.
Serjon stepped over Alion to stand beside Bronlar, holding up his book on chivalry.
“Does it take thirteen of you to defeat a girl?” he said. “Is Yarronese chivalry in such a state? If you flyers and wardens of the future need odds like this to go into battle, then your pennants will very soon be painted on the canvas of some foreign warden’s gunwing. Besides, thirteen is a very bad number, did you know that?”
“Stay out of this, guildsman,” warned Alion, who was fighting to get his breath back. “If she wants to fly she needs to know what happens after forced landings.”
“Even flyers are sworn to uphold the basics of chivalry,” Serjon insisted, “and I do have the license of a flyer.”
“You have only daylight solo, even Bronlar has night ascents and landings appended to her license,” called someone behind Serjon.
“Bronlar is from the family of a guildmaster of my warden. As a flyer it is my chivalric duty to protect her against—”
“What?” exclaimed Bronlar, suddenly realizing what Serjon was doing. “I’m a flyer in my own right, and with my own license! I need no protection.”
Serjon held up his book and brandished it at them.
“It says here on page forty-seven that flyers must serve their warden in the protection of women and children, especially in matters of honor, safety, and virtue.”
“That book is ninety years old!” shouted Bronlar, slapping the volume out of his hands and into the dust. “I’m a flyer and a woman, and what’s more I’m a more senior flyer than you!”
“Your status is defined in the wardens’ constitution,” Serjon pointed out, bristling at the truth that he hated.
“I fight my own battles!” Bronlar retorted indignantly.
“I duel with no girl!” declared the stocky youth, who had lost the thread of the argument long ago.
“By the rules of heraldry you must accept a challenge or be posted on the pennant pole below the Line of Shame,” Bronlar insisted.
“Challenge can only be given to a peer,” he replied.
“Page forty-seven you say?” asked a youth who had picked up Serjon’s book.
“You are a woman under threat and I am under a clear obligation to defend you, whether your rank exceeds mine or not,” Serjon cut in.
“He’s right,” said the youth with the book.
“Well I reject your defense!” cried Bronlar, slapping Serjon’s face, “and I challenge—”
Serjon did not see the explosion that erupted within the old throne room of the Airlord’s distant palace, but he whirled at the flash of light on Bronlar’s face, then staggered back at the massive blast. The roof and walls collapsed in a cauldron of smoke, dust, flames, and sparks; then all was eerily quiet for a moment except for the echoes of the deto
nation. Whistles, trumpets, and bells began to come to life, and everyone rushed toward the glowing but horrifyingly flat remains of the old throne room.
By the time Serjon arrived there were still small fires dancing amid the rubble from crushed lamps. The weight of the stones and beams was beyond the strength of those who had dashed across, and it was an hour before the first heavy crane was in place and lifting the stone blocks away to reveal the crushed, burned, and suffocated corpses of the Yarronese wardens and their servants. Thousands of volunteers held torches or formed human chains to carry away the smaller pieces of stone. Nurses and medics came from all over the city, and infirmary tents were pitched in the palace gardens. The Airlord’s body was found just after midnight, and by the morning three hundred and twenty bodies had been removed. Nine servants and clerks were pulled out of the ruins alive, and five wardens lived to see the sunrise. Not one of them was expected to be able to take a gunwing into the air again, so terrible were their injuries.
Fieldmajor Gravat was sworn in as regent, and he ordered a dozen courier sailwings into the air at first light. They carried details of the disaster and orders for all surviving wardens to wind up their business within a fortnight and come to Forian. Yarron was placed under martial law until the fifteen survivors of the Yarronese peerage were gathered together to proclaim the Airlord’s only son to be Virtrian XII of Yarron. One of Gravat’s first acts as regent was to declare all business posted for the wardens’ meeting to be passed as a gesture of respect to the dead nobles. This included Jannian’s motion that women be admitted to the guild of squires.
The Yarronese Inspector General quickly determined that explosives had been placed in the walls and roof of the old throne room with such skill that the building would not be blown apart, but would collapse on those inside, maximizing the number of deaths. The Airlord’s own inspectors had gone over the old throne room that very morning, but even under torture it could not be established that they had been paid to overlook explosives already secreted there. Some scraps of sacking with a Dorak haulier’s guild crest were discovered amid the ruins, but this did nothing but provoke outrage from the Dorak envoy when he was summoned and confronted with it.
The days that followed were filled with funerals, flypasts, and mass wakes. Succession disputes erupted right across Yarron as its aristocracy struggled to cope with a disaster that was on the scale of a major duel war in terms of casualties to their ranks. Jannian’s body was strapped into the flyer’s seat of a gunwing trainer and his son Ricmear flew it back to Middle Junction for burial, with the three sailwings of his house flying a guard of honor.
12 July 3960: East Bartolica
Life on the black tram was exceedingly boring for Rollins, his stoker, and the two gunners throughout June, but in early July that began to change. The gunners practiced shooting at target kites towed by unmarked sailwings, and the crew practiced covering the tram with camouflage netting every time it was at rest. Rollins began to wonder if the outlaws were Yarronese, and if their wardens were backing them! Were that the case, Bartolican carbineers and their trams might be strafed from the sky by sailwings—or even gunwings! The idea of warden outlaws was almost a contradiction in terms, but Rollins always tried to keep an open mind. The tram’s reaction gun was fired at the target kites both when the tram was moving and when it was at rest in sidings.
On the 12th of July the black tram was at a siding at Bancroft, on the mountain tramway to the border with Yarron. They had been there all day, cleaning and servicing the tram and exercising the prisoners from the top deck. A store of wood blocks, dried food, and water had been left a hundred yards into the forest near the siding, and the prisoners were made to carry everything to the tram in the afternoon. When the last of sunset had faded from the sky a sailwing droned overhead, then dropped a flare with a parachute. A dozen of the prisoners were sent out with two of the officers, and they presently returned carrying two heavy boxes in slings. They were walking very carefully, under the watchful direction of the merchant officers.
The boxes were unpacked in the darkness by officers wearing odd goggles. Rollins could see little from where he knelt on the roof, boring holes with an auger under instruction from another merchant officer. There was a thing like a pedalframe without wheels, a large plain box, and reels like those used for aircraft bracing wire. The prisoners were moved out of the upper level, the contents of the boxes were carried in, and the officers set to work inside, hammering something into place. Outside the tram Rollins and the stoker stood chopping the boxes and packing into firewood.
In the morning Rollins saw that four poles on hinges had been erected on the roof of the tram. Bracing wire was strung from the poles, and there was an irregular peeping sound coming from the upper level.
“I hear whirrin’,” said the stoker.
“Sounds like a spinning wheel turned by pedals,” suggested Rollins.
“Why not fire up the steam engine and use that to spin, ah, whatever they want spun?” asked the stoker.
“Perchance they want their machine spun discreetly, in hiding, with no smoke to betray the tram’s position.”
The stoker raised a finger into the air and gave a great beaming smile of revelation.
“Hey there, now that’s clever,” he cried. “You smell what’s on the air? Like a thunderstorm. I’ll bet they’re buildin’ and storin’ thunderbolts in there. New weapon, that’s what all the fuss is about. Aye, we’re in the thunderbolt carbineers, Sair Rollins! Ain’t ye proud?”
Rollins winced at the level of the man’s voice. In the distance a merchant officer who was keeping watch turned around, but he could not have heard what they were discussing. Rollins gave a small wave, as if he were scratching his ear.
“Hey now, my brother’s on a cart cannon crew. You know, the new big ones with a four-inch bore? Now you got to be there to see the look on his face when I tells him that I’m on a thunderbolt crew.”
The officer was drifting closer, not obviously listening but close enough to hear the drift of what the stoker was saying. Rollins tried to steer the conversation to speculating on when they might move again, and slowly the stoker calmed down and lowered his voice. The officer locked eyes with Rollins for a moment, and Rollins nodded twice. The officer returned to scanning the valley below them with field glasses.
Rollins slept for most of the day, and in the late afternoon he was woken in his sleeping roll by Kalward. The merchant officer asked about what the stoker had been saying about thunderbolts earlier in the day. Rollins related the conversation with passable accuracy. Kalward listened. in impassive silence.
“My impression is that you want discretion for the black trams,” Rollins concluded. “Stoker Harrical has little sense of discretion.”
Kalward stood in silence, leaning against a pine tree and looking across to the black tram as the prisoners were being given their evening breakfast. He looked down at Rollins, and in his eyes Rollins could see something very cold and hard.
“We do want discretion, Sair Rollins, and we want it as badly as this.”
Kalward pushed away from the tree and strode over to where the prisoners were eating. The stoker was tending a cooking fire, feeding it blocks of dry, hard wood that gave off little smoke.
“Sair Harrical?” said Kalward, raising his reaction pistol.
As the stoker turned with his mouth open to reply, the officer emptied half of the spring clip into his face. Later that night Kalward came to stand beside the driver’s cage as Rollins drove the tram along the winding mountain tramway and one of the other officers stoked the furnace. He gazed into the darkened mountains ahead for a long time. Rollins said nothing.
“Well?” asked Kalward, without turning away from the view.
“Yes, Sair Kalward?” asked Rollins.
“Are you going to ask what this tram is really used for?”
“No, Sair Kalward.”
“You’re bright and you work hard. Don’t you want promotion?”<
br />
“No, Sair Kalward.”
“That’s because you have a past, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Sair Kalward.”
Kalward laughed. “Good lad, you have a future with the Merchant Tramway Service.”
12 July 3960: The Yarronese border
Laurelene Hannan had chosen a particularly bad morning to begin her journey through Yarron, although she would not realize it for some weeks. When her steam tram reached Kemmerer she disembarked and walked through the town to the place on the eastern outskirts where an iron rail was sunk across the road. A sign read WELCOME TO THE DOMINION OF YARRON in Yarronese, Bartolican, and Old Anglian, and two Yarronese guards flanked the road. Beyond this was a small customs house; then the road wound among rocks and conifers.
A guard walked over to where Laurelene stood with a wreath of flowers, reading her son’s report as if it were a requiem prayer.
“Can I help you, Semme?” he asked in Bartolican.
She looked up slowly, as if she did not expect him to be there.
“Ah, yes, thank you. A man, an acquaintance of mine, died here some weeks ago. I wanted to lay this wreath at the place.”
The guard shook his head, but his expression was one of sympathy.
“I could take the wreath for you, Semme, but you cannot cross without papers. The border between our dominions is tense, especially after the terrible bombing in Forian.”
“But I do have papers,” said Laurelene, suddenly gathering her thoughts together. “I am to cross into Yarron by steam tram this very hour.”
The guard examined her papers, then took her over to the customs house and signed her in for an excursion crossing.
“I was on duty that very evening,” he said as he walked down the road with Laurelene. “The Bartolican carbineers shot at Sair Glasken from the border, then swept us aside and crossed into Yarron in pursuit of him. Ah, this is the very spot.”
The Miocene Arrow Page 12