Navigator

by Stephen Baxter

Abdul said, ‘One of Colon’s sea stories is that when he voyaged to Iceland, he was told of corpses, washed up on a western shore of Ireland, strange men with yellow skin and dark hair, in a boat that was a hollowed-out log. Colon never saw these corpses. Yet he believed they must have come from China, washed across the ocean by a current.’

  ‘So,’ Geoffrey said, ’Abdul suggested repeating the trick.’

  ‘I arranged for a corpse to be dumped on the shore near Palos. As it happens,’ Abdul said grimly, ‘the south of Spain has not been short of corpses these last few years. I ensured the man, a Christian, had drowned. I dyed his skin yellow-brown with tea, and added some tattoos for good measure. And I cut him around his eyes, for everybody knows that the Chinese have odd narrow eyes with folds of skin across the corners. Such a corpse at Palos was bound to come to Colon’s attention, and so it did. Now he parades around the court with diagrams of the wretched man, and even dried bits of flayed skin to show off my fake tattoos.’

  Geoffrey laughed. ‘Gruesome but ingenious.’

  ‘But will it be enough?’ Harry said gloomily. ‘All we have to turn Colon’s head is a bit of scholarship and a dubious corpse, against Grace Bigod’s engines ...’

  ‘It will have to be enough,’ Geoffrey said.

  Abdul said with a trace of bitterness, ‘Of course Grace and Ferron do not admit to their clients how much Bacon’s work was helped by the studies performed for my ancestress Subh by Moorish scholars and artisans. After all, Sihtric took his designs to al-Andalus because he knew the best scholarship in Europe was available there. When Joan of the Outremer took possession of the Codex, she plundered what had been achieved there as well, though all Subh’s Moorish workers had fled from the approach of the Christians. It is part of a wider story, as Christendom plunders al-Andalus of learning as well as gold—’

  ‘And thereby rediscovers its own lost past,’ Geoffrey said gently. ‘Can that be such a bad thing, Abdul?’

  ‘Yes, if Moorish scholarship is now to be turned against the Moors!’

  Geoffrey pulled his lip. ‘Well, we must have patience. We will watch Grace Bigod’s display of fire, and see what we can learn. Now. Who can spare a penny for more of this filthy beer?’

  XVII

  The December day dawned bright and clear. Even in mid-morning the sun was still low over the abandoned village, so that the hummocks and green-clad shells of the ruined houses cast long shadows over the dewy ground.

  And James, looking down on this scene from his ridge, could already hear the crump of explosions, the cries of men, and the clanking, hissing noises of monstrous engines. He grinned with anticipation. Let Bartolomeo Colon be unmoved by this!

  As for himself, since before dawn James had been atop this rough limestone ridge, making ready. He was wearing leather trousers and a close-fitting quilted coat that he belted tight around his body. He knew from earlier trials that the wind and grit would get in his eyes, and so he wore a special cap with a long peak and panels protruding before his cheeks. He tied its strap under his chin before donning his gloves.

  Now four novices approached, each bearing an iron egg. These were slim ovals, each the size of a sleeping pigeon, with sprawling tails. The novices trod warily, nervous, trying not to tremble. They hung the eggs from James’s belt, and he tested the leather tabs he had to pull to release them.

  Next his engine had to be assembled around his body.

  First came the ‘muscle’, as he thought of it. This was a box of canes several feet tall. It had complicated ‘shoulder’ mechanisms, and at its heart was a powerful crossbow as thick as his arm, already wound back. It had quickly been learned that a man’s muscles were too feeble to beat the great wings; but the crossbow would suffice. This frame was lowered onto his shoulders and strapped to his torso by a cradle of leather bands.

  James’s shoulder units had to be tested. These were elaborate arrangements of rods, shafts, gears, pulleys and ropes at either side of the muscle frame that would translate the crossbow’s unwinding into complex movements, up and down, twisting. The shoulders, carefully oiled, worked flawlessly. The novices added a vertical ‘tail’ of wood and feathers fixed on a strut to the back of the central frame.

  And now came the wings, each borne on the backs of more sweating novices. They climbed stepladders to either side of James, and pushed the wings’ joints into their attachments in the shoulder units and strapped them into place with more leather belts. The wings, spread, were like tents made of young fir, fustian, starched taffeta and feathers, and the morning light shadowed their internal skeletons.

  The supervising friar ordered one last test of the mechanism. With utmost caution the wings, still supported by the novices, were lifted and lowered, twisting as they did so, and the feathers spread and closed, each pasted by hand to its own tiny cog wheel. The flight of birds had been carefully studied by Bacon and his followers for two hundred years. It was clear that the air was a fluid through which birds swam, as fish and seals swam through water. This elaborate machinery had been designed, after generations of paper designs, model-making and trial and error, to copy exactly that flapping, swimming motion.

  But at this moment the theory, the mechanics, didn’t matter at all to James, compared to the sheer beauty of the engine above him. He was thrilled that he had used his master’s seniority to become the soul of this fantastic creation.

  The supervising friar, a blunt practical man with wild grey hair around his tonsure, now faced James. ‘Ready?’

  James grinned and nodded.

  The friar yanked at a rope. The crossbow was unlatched, and flexed, and immediately its elastic energy was poured through gears and pulleys into the shoulders. The wings flapped and twisted, James’s harness tugged at his chest, and he was dragged up into the air.

  The ground fell away, and the novices’ upturned faces were like coins on a table. They were clapping and cheering. The landscape opened up beneath him, and he saw the shape of the limestone ridge from which he had launched, and the plain before it, and the ruined village where engines crawled and gunpowder flashed.

  His heart raced with excitement, and a bit of fear, and he felt his loins tense up. He had admitted to nobody, not even his confessor, the extraordinary erotic thrill this hurling into the air gave him. If he could never have a woman, at least he had this. And as the air washed around him the face of Grace Bigod swam into his mind, elegant, cold, sneering.

  Already the crossbow was running down, but it had lifted James high enough for his purpose. He had to work quickly. He pulled strings to latch the crossbow, and others to lock the wings, outstretched with the feathers closed and banked. Then, with a grunting effort, he leaned forward, and the leather cradle into which he was strapped pivoted, so that he was suspended beneath the wings, belly down.

  He glided forward, wings rigid as a coasting seagull’s. He was falling, of course, falling like a dead leaf. But he should reach the battlefield, and that was enough for him to do his job.

  He looked down at the ruined village. More hapless novices were defending a ‘fortress’, crudely constructed of heaped-up stone from the village. They were equipped with weapons of a conventional sort, crossbows, longbows, arquebuses and cannon, and had even had some rudimentary training in using them.

  But huge machines crawled relentlessly towards the village, spitting fire. James made out the gun carriage nicknamed the ‘organ-pipes’. Between two massive wheels was suspended an axle with a triangular cross-section. On each of the axle’s three faces had been fixed a dozen cannon, in a row like the pipes of a church organ. These fired together, lit simultaneously by spring-loaded flints. Then, dragged by unhappy mules, the engine trundled forward until the axle turned and another bank of cannon was brought into play.

  Other engines displayed different solutions to the challenge of multiplying fire. Here was a great wheel set horizontally, mounted with cannon spread radially like the petals of a daisy, which turned and spat fire when each gun was brought
to the right position.

  And now, shaking itself to life with a series of crashing explosions, here came the most spectacular machine of all. It was the testudo, named by the brothers after the famous formation of the Roman legions. It was a great shell of steel, immensely heavy, tough enough to withstand a direct hit from any of the defenders’ petty weapons. Cannon fired from ports in all the forward angles, and as it advanced it shook and shuddered, smoke billowing from its ports from the internal detonations that drove it forward. It was unstoppable, inhuman. The testudo simply crushed a crumbling stone wall beneath its great hidden wheels, and the defenders, their shot and bolts and arrows simply bouncing off the mighty shell, fled, probably terrified out of their wits by the noise alone.

  From James’s elevated vantage he could smell nothing of the battle; he could hear little save the distant crump of explosions and the shouting of men like birds’ cries, sounds drowned by the hiss of the wind in his wings, and his own rapid breathing. It was like watching a battle played out with toys, he thought - distant and abstract enough to quash his own conscience, and to allow him to savour the exhilaration of his extraordinary flight over these engines of carnage.

  Now it was time for James himself to deliver the finishing blow. He tugged on guide ropes so that his wooden bird swooped to a line that led straight to the mock fortress. He glanced to his left to the observers’ canvas pavilion, to see if Bartolomeo Colon and the rest were watching him. He saw Grace in a bright purple gown. He grinned, and the wind was cold on his teeth, and his heart beat even faster.

  He banked over the fortress. As his huge shadow crossed the village some of the defenders ran, their superstitious fear overwhelming them, though they knew it was James. Now he pulled at the leather tags at his belt, one, two, three, four. The metal eggs were released and fell straight down, their bird-like shapes cutting through the air, the fins at their backs stabilising their fall.

  All four landed in the heart of the fortress, splashing fire as they hit. The noise of the explosions hit him, and a sudden updraught of hot air pushed him higher. He whooped with an unreasonable joy. James was a man of peace, but he was young enough to relish the sheer exhilaration of such a complicated and dangerous game.

  And as the fires bloomed he thought of Grace, Grace pushed down before him, Grace begging for his forgiveness - begging him to stop.

  He looked over at the pavilion. Grace and the others were standing and pointing - not towards James and the fortress, but east. James craned his neck to see that way.

  Something was wrong.

  XVIII

  ‘The testudo,’ Ferron said weakly, ‘is astounding. Devilish!’

  ‘Not the devil,’ Grace said smoothly. ‘It is all the work of man, his imagination divinely inspired.’

  ‘But how is it possible for such a weight even to drag itself over the earth? There must be a herd of horses in there.’ He cupped his ears in gloved hands. ‘And the noise—’

  ‘Not horses. Bacon’s black powder.’ And, sitting beside Ferron in the wooden viewing stand, she tried to explain how the gunpowder had been harnessed into an engine. ‘There are a series of pistons. When the gunpowder charge explodes above each piston, air is forced out of a chamber of iron, and the piston is dragged up, as a man inhaling may draw a feather into his mouth. That motion is translated into a turning of the great wheels, by a complicated mechanism James could no doubt describe for you. And so the steel beast travels forward, powered by a beating heart, each pulse a detonation that could kill ten men...’

  While Bartolomeo Colon stared, fascinated, it seemed to be too much for Ferron. He held his hands over his ears, flinching from each new explosion. ‘Devilish,’ he repeated. ‘Devilish.’

  She tried to distract him with the manufactory’s new sort of arquebus; one of them was set up on display before them. ‘Then consider this, brother. The old sort of hand gun, as Isabel is deploying against the Moors even now, is slow to reload, and unreliable to fire, for you must apply a flame to the powder that propels the shot. Now we have a new sort of gun - based, again, on the designs in the Codex - which is fired not by flame but by a spark.’ She showed him how, when a trigger was pulled, a hammer slammed a bit of flint against a steel plate; the resulting sparks were funnelled into a chamber to ignite the gunpowder.

  Ferron was distracted by the glistening mechanism as she operated it. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I see.’

  ‘It is still difficult to reload - we will work on that - but the reliability is so much improved, the weapon is so much safer, that it will be as if we have double the number of soldiers in the field. And furthermore—’

  ‘What,’ Ferron said, pointing, ‘is that?’

  It was a woman - young, scrawny, dirty. Grace had no idea who she was. She was running. She fled towards the battlefield. Grace could not have imagined a more unexpected sight.

  And now monks followed her, grimy, blinking in the light. They too ran towards the noise and smoke of the field, not pursuing the girl, just running. But one of them called over his shoulder to the spectators in the viewing stand. ‘The manufactory! Get away, my lady - the manufactory!’

  ‘Dear God,’ Ferron said.

  Grace was bewildered, unable to understand what was happening. ‘I think—’

  The explosion was a roar, all around her. She was thrown forward onto the ground, helpless as a doll.

  From the air, James saw fire erupt from the ground, a line of searing fountains. Monks and novices squirmed out of hatches like moles emerging from their holes, and ran off. James understood immediately. The fire was breaking out of the ground through the air vents of the underground manufactory. The explosions must have come from within the compound. It was the store of gunpowder, it could only be that. Some accidental spark had ignited it - or perhaps, he thought suddenly, it had been deliberate.

  James had to concentrate on his own flight. His mechanical bird was dipping towards the ground. He had only a few heartbeats left in which he could control his descent. He scanned the ground anxiously, looking for a clear space to land.

  But a fresh set of explosions broke out over the location of the main manufactory, distracting him, and James saw bones hurled into the sky. The gunpowder must have broken open a plague pit. It was an extraordinary, unnatural sight to see those bones go flying up into the air and then fall back, a grotesque parody of the Day of Judgement.

  XIX

  Harry, with Abdul and Geoffrey, had been watching the display from a distance, with appalled fascination. The wooden bird in the sky especially was an awful, unnatural sight.

  But when the fires began to erupt from the ground they all knew something had gone badly wrong. Abandoning all attempts to conceal themselves, they ran towards the party coming from the viewing pavilion.

  They met the others not far from the entrance to the manufactory. The explosions had stopped now, but smoke still poured from the ground. No more monks clambered out of the hatches, and Harry wondered how many had died that day.

  Diego Ferron was unmistakable, a tall, pale cleric. He was holding a woman by her hair, a wretched, skinny girl in a grubby white gown. Beside Ferron and his captive was Grace Bigod. She was a hard woman of nearly fifty, her face smeared with soot and twisted in fury. It was the first time Harry had met this remote cousin.

  Ferron seemed surprised to see Abdul with two strangers, but his rage overwhelmed him. In accented Latin he cried, ‘Ruined! Destroyed! Centuries of work lost!’

  ‘Not lost,’ said Grace, her voice trembling, ‘Just delayed. We have lost our engines, but those in the field survive, and we have the designs—’

  ‘Lost because of this Christian witch!’ He twisted the girl’s hair and threw her to the ground.

  She lifted her head. She looked straight at Harry. Her hair fell away from a bruised face.

  ‘Agnes!’ He could not have been more shocked if his sister had been raised from the dead. ‘But you are in your cell in York.’

  ‘Evidentl
y not,’ she said. Her voice was a scratch, and she coughed, her lungs full of smoke.