Aeon Nine

by Aeon Authors

  “Good God,” said Michael.

  Mary Poppins said nothing at all; she merely stared off in the direction of the next hill. After waiting expectantly, Michael gave up and followed her gaze. Two little bands had clustered, shouting at each other and making hideous faces. Some of them were painted blue.

  “Picts?” demanded Michael.

  Mary Poppins nodded. “One of their first real conflicts, I think.”

  “That’s a real conflict? There’s maybe twenty men on a side. A dozen, more like.”

  “I didn’t realize a dozen men were unworthy of your consideration, Michael Banks.”

  He flushed. “They’re not, but—what are they doing?”

  They were banging their spear butts on the ground and yelling at each other. When the yelling reached a fever pitch, one of them chucked his spear at another. He missed. The man who had been nearly hit ran forward and stabbed with his spear. His opponent fell to his knees, blood leaking around the spear-point in his chest.

  “Christ.”

  “Not yet,” said Mary Poppins absently. “War, you see, Michael? It’s always hell.”

  “Poor bugger. Reminds me of a Canadian I saw bayoneted. No help for that, either.”

  Mary Poppins sighed and tapped the watch stem. The hands flew around the face, and the hill spun around them. The armies were bigger this time, dressed in tunics and kilts and bearing bows and arrows. They had formed ranks, of sorts.

  “Oh, more of them?” said Michael. “Haven’t learnt any better than we, have they?”

  Mary Poppins compressed her lips. “I am showing you how men have survived war.”

  “And keep waging it anyway.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Bravo, Poppins,” said Michael. “I’ll always know to have you cheer me up when I’m blue. Take a man home from the trenches and show him the horrors of war through the centuries. That’ll bring a smile to his lips. Better than a music hall, that!”

  “For goodness’ sake!” snapped Mary Poppins. “You used to be able to learn a lesson.”

  “You used to be able to give one. For God’s sake, Poppins, even Jane telling me to pull myself together was more effective than that, and she’s been saying it since I was seven.”

  “All right, we won’t do the other wars,” she said. “I had intended an edifying journey through history, but since you are determined to take no thought from it—”

  “I don’t find it cheering to think of blokes soaked in blood for centuries and millennia, thanks.”

  Mary Poppins glared at him and shoved the watch into her pocket. She tapped her umbrella smartly against the hillside, and it spun again, resolving only slowly. Michael had to close his eyes to keep the spoonful of Scotch down. When the turning sensation stopped, he opened his eyes.

  This time the people below them were unarmed. There was a string of them stretching out as far as Michael could see, old men, small children, and many, many women. They wore modern clothing, tattered and dirty from the road. They pushed small carts and wheelbarrows full of their belongings.

  “This is why you fought,” said Mary Poppins.

  Michael nodded. “Belgians. I know.”

  “Their plight is—”

  “Heartbreaking, yes,” he said wearily. “Miserable.”

  “But seeing why you fight—”

  “I saw miserable Belgians, I promise. We were told over and again.”

  “Oh,” said Mary Poppins in a small voice.

  “What next, Poppins?”

  “You know best,” she said, still in a small voice, “as always….” She trailed off, staring at the Belgians.

  “After the first attack,” said Michael meditatively, “I just laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. I kept thinking perhaps it was the right day and I’d get filled with Laughing Gas and float off. But it never happened.”

  “And a good thing, too, without a ceiling to stop you. You’d have been a sitting duck for passing aeroplanes, I should think, and your own side wouldn’t have known to keep from shooting you.”

  Michael shook his head. “Got an answer for everything, don’t you, M.P.?”

  She tossed her head. “Naturally.”

  “What’re you going to answer if they shoot John’s aeroplane down?”

  Mary Poppins went still. “If they…shoot John’s aeroplane down?” she enunciated.

  Michael looked at her. “I told you he was up in an aeroplane. I told you that. You knew.”

  “I was—I beg your pardon, Michael, we have had a few things to think of in this discussion.”

  “John is in the R.A.F.,” said Michael, as though he was speaking to a very small child. “He enlisted as early as they would let him, and he flies an aeroplane on a regular basis, and he may die at any moment. War is like that. Through the ages,” he added nastily. “You’ve seen that much.”

  “John is just a baby,” said Mary Poppins. “He was talking to starlings still last week.”

  “Aer-o-plane, Poppins.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “He’s up right now.”

  Michael nodded grimly. “Might well be.”

  “He is. We’ve got to stop it.”

  “That’s the stuff, Poppins. Pull something out of your magic bag and save him.”

  “Thank you, I will.”

  He stared. “You really do mean it. Oh, I see—that umbrella. But what about me? I’m too big to trail along after you.”

  “You do not presume to think that I would go without a spare umbrella,” said Mary Poppins.

  “Oh, that’s the old spirit, Poppins,” said Michael nastily. She gave him a steady look until he flushed and grabbed the umbrella from her hand. It had not been there a moment before—he felt sure of it—but that had ceased to matter. He threw his leg over the umbrella, and it bucked to life like the flying candy cane had so many years ago.

  “Follow me, and no dawdling,” said Mary Poppins. She angled her umbrella upwards and sailed into the air, seated neatly sidesaddle on it. Michael imitated her and flew too high, then bounced too low. The umbrella twitched sideways underneath him, and it took all the strength in his hands to hold it on a steady course for the first minute. After that, it seemed to settle down. They soared through the grey, soggy air above Belgium, faster than Michael was strictly comfortable flying. He clutched the umbrella a little tighter. He had to work to hang on in the wind, and he was afraid he’d slip around sideways at any second, or the umbrella would pop open and send him tumbling heels over head through the air. He could barely keep his eyes open against the wind—no wonder aeroplane pilots wore goggles—but if he closed his eyes, he was afraid he would crash.

  “Poppins!” shouted Michael. “Do you know which way the front is?”

  “Of course!” Mary Poppins shouted back, and Michael could almost hear her sniff over the whistling in his ears. They flew high enough that the individual Belgians in the refugee line were barely distinct. Soon Michael could see trenches, webbing dark below him.

  They heard the intermittent rattling burst of guns, and Michael smelled something sharp, distant below them. In the failing evening light, he could see a yellow fog creeping over the trenches. He clutched the umbrella even tighter, wishing he had his gas mask with him.

  “Poppins, the gas!”

  “Too high!” she snapped back briefly. But she was staring down at the trenches with a curious expression. They were too high for her to smell the disease, the spoiled food, the rum, the blood, the human wastes that Michael knew were below. The squads of medics, moving forward in their masks, could only save the fortunate, and even Mary Poppins could not take care of all the rest. But when he saw her face, he lost the urge to tell her; he realized she had seen for herself.

  “How will we find John?” he yelled instead.

  Mary Poppins pulled herself together and cast him a withering glare, and soon he could see why: through the gloomy air, he could see dogfighters lighting the sky before them. “Which one is his?”
The khaki biplane wings of the Sopwith Pups all looked similar to him, and he knew they would have concentric circles of blue, white, and red on the wings regardless of who was flying them. Even discounting the German Fokkers with their black and white crosses, that left about half the biplanes in the dogfight. Surely they couldn’t save all the pilots, he thought, and immediately felt guilty for thinking it.

  Mary Poppins ignored him. She flew forward even faster, and Michael’s umbrella followed her without his instruction. All he could do was cling to it and keep his head down. He flattened his body against it as much as he could. Tears streamed down his face from the contradictory winds of the aeroplanes. They whipped past the last of the British formation, close enough that Michael could have touched a khaki wing. They flew past the next aeroplane. The pilot looked out to his side and saw them. Mary Poppins nodded politely. The pilot shouted something and swerved away from them, pulling himself back on course only just before he would have hit one of his fellows.

  “What will we do?” shouted Michael. “Which is John?” But the noise of the engines and the guns had joined the whistling of the wind, much closer to hand, and Mary Poppins didn’t hear him. Michael could see nothing to do but follow her, and the umbrella, though it dipped a few times as if in suggestion, seemed content to do the same. He squinted down and could see no gas haze, but he took no comfort in that.

  Mary Poppins leaned to the left, and her broom shot off that way. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael did the same: there was a British aeroplane that had just been shot in the tail. He could see the pilot leaning back, limp, though goggles and helmet obscured his head. He couldn’t tell if it was John.

  For a moment it didn’t matter.

  They hovered the umbrellas next to the plane as it fell, tugging and pulling at the straps until they got the young pilot free. “Go up!” yelled Mary Poppins. Taking the weight of the boy, Michael used his knees to direct his umbrella upwards, barely dodging a German plane. The sound of the guns had not sounded so loud even when he had been shot. He flinched, twisting and trying to put himself between the German plane and the pilot who might be his brother. The umbrella bucked and turned, unhappy with the steering or—Michael realized—shot in the handle.

  Mary Poppins swerved around the falling plane and its German pursuant and managed to join Michael before he dropped the pilot. When she pulled him a little further away, Michael clutched the bucking umbrella, trying to steer it steady. The pilot’s face was obscured by helmet and goggles, but Michael knew his brother’s voice in the brief moan he heard before the pilot fainted.

  They sank to the ground, bearing John’s limp body between them. Michael snatched off John’s goggles, and Mary Poppins undid the buckles and, more gently, pulled his leather flight helmet off. He was breathing a little quickly, but Mary Poppins’s face betrayed her relief as she examined John.

  “It’s him,” said Michael, gulping down great gasps of air.

  “Of course it is. Grazed in the shoulder,” she said. “Barely a scratch. The medics will patch him up.”

  Michael drank in the sight of his younger brother’s face—unconscious, certainly, and worse than Poppins had said. The “scratch” had shattered his clavicle. But he was not fatally wounded. They had seen medics not too far away. John would be all right. He felt like dancing the Highland Fling his father had so often indulged in when he was little. But then he looked over his shoulder to where the aeroplanes and the parachutes were falling.

  “Other people’s brothers,” he said softly. “Other mothers’ sons. Other nurses’ charges.”

  And before the medics could reach them, Mary Poppins said, very quietly, “Home.” And Michael found himself standing before the hearth fire, holding a limp umbrella with a bullet in its handle.

  He heard a noise he had never heard before. He looked over to find the Mary Poppins was crying. It was not the ladylike sniff he had heard so many times, but a full-throated wail. He looked around almost hopefully—surely someone else must be making the noise and not Mary Poppins—but there was no one, and the tears coursed down her face.

  “There, there, Poppins,” he said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “There, there.”

  “Age after age after age,” she said, and repeated it until Michael got her to sit down in one of the chairs. Then she gave a great snuffle and looked up at him, China-blue eyes brimming. “I have spent all my days raising other people’s children, and believe me, Michael Banks, I have had a great many days. And all of them—Greek godlets and fairy tale princes and little Edwardian lads, it’s all the same. You just get them out of the nursery and the first thing they want to do is smash each other to bits, inside and out.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary Poppins,” said Michael, alarmed. “It’s not that we want to, we just know it’s the right—you saw the Belgians—”

  “And then, after they’ve flung away all the nice manners you’ve taught them and all the magic you showed them on the sly, then they blame you for the smashing. Why I do it, I couldn’t tell you, for I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t—”

  “Except that I keep hoping it’ll get better, and it keeps getting worse!” she wailed.

  “Your handkerchief, Mary Poppins,” said Michael. “Oh, damn.” He knelt beside her and rummaged in the carpet bag. He handed Mary Poppins her red bandana handkerchief. “What about your relatives? Can’t they do anything? Uncle Albert or Nellie Rubina or any of them?”

  Mary Poppins blew her nose into the bandana with a resounding honk. “Uncle Albert can’t do much except on his birthday, and even then—it’s hard to get soldiers to really laugh, Michael.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “And the others, like Nellie Rubina and Mrs. Corry—they all have their own jobs. It’s hard enough for Nellie and Uncle Dodger to get the seasons changed over without trying to stop war or the like.” She sighed heavily. “It’s just what we can throw together, the others in their spare time and—me. And I can’t even so much as cheer up one of my old charges.” Her tears flowed afresh.

  Michael cleared his throat. “Buck up, Poppins. It’ll be all right.”

  “It won’t! It won’t!” she sobbed. “John will go back up in that wretched aeroplane, or another like it.”

  “He was shot down. Maybe he’ll get discharged.”

  “Then someone else will!”

  Michael looked away, at the same time ashamed and relieved to be so glad that his brother, at least, was safe. “Poppins, you did what you could. When John really needed you, you were there. You were there and no one else could have been. When I was wounded, the medics could patch me up, but there was no one else who could do what you did for John.”

  She sniffed and peered at him uncertainly.

  “That’s all we can do, is the best we can. And—and the things no one else can, the things that are ours alone, do you see?”

  “I suppose,” she sniffled.

  “It’ll be all right, Poppins, really it will,” said Michael. “Wars never last forever. There’s always an armistice.”

  “There always has been,” said Mary Poppins. Michael couldn’t tell whether she meant to be hopeful or dubious, but he patted her shoulder.

  “That’s the spirit, Poppins. It always comes to an end. And until it does, we all do what we can, right?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I do suppose.” She straightened up her shoulders and adjusted the angle of her hat.

  “That’s a very becoming hat, Mary Poppins,” said Michael quietly.

  She gave her nose a final blow and tucked her handkerchief into her pocket. “We only buy the very best,” she said.

  “I know it.”

  She nodded briskly. “Well, I can see that I’ve stayed my welcome, and my work is done.”

  Michael smiled and did not contradict her about who had done what work. “Take care of yourself, Mary Poppins.”

  “Wear your galoshes when you go out,” she snapped, “sp
eak nicely when you’re spoken to, try to be a credit to your upbringing, and—oh, Michael, be good to your sisters.”

  “I will,” he whispered. He blinked tears out of his eyes. When he could see clearly again, she was gone.

  Michael groped for the arm of the chair and maneuvered himself into it. He stared into the fire in an entirely different mood than he had been doing, and when the door banged shut and his sisters’ voices sounded in the hall, he ran down to meet them as fast as his bad leg would take him. He gave each a squeeze.

  “Hullo, Michael,” said Barbara, blinking at him in surprise.

  Annabel pecked his cheek. “You’re awfully perky tonight.”

  “I think I’ve turned a corner,” he said, reaching for Jane to hug last. He held her at arm’s length just to look at her. He had not notice how thin his sister’s face had gotten, nor how dark the circles under her eyes were. He had not noticed the way her shoulders slumped. He had not noticed anything at all.

  “Barbie, won’t you get Mrs. Brill to make Jane some of those biscuits she scrapes together on rations? She’s dead tired.”

  “Why, Michael!” said Jane.

  “Scoot along, girls, I’ve something to tell Jane.”

  Annabel made a face at him, and Barbara sniffed haughtily, but they went into the kitchen as they had been told.

  “Jane,” he said, “Mary Poppins was here.”

  Jane’s thin face lit. “Oh, Michael, really? And how do you feel?”

  “Better,” said Michael. “A bit, at least. Like I could do something again. But Jane—Barbie and Annabel will have to hear it when the news comes, but I couldn’t explain it before. And everything is all right, Poppins fixed it, but—”

  “On with it, Michael,” she said.

  “John’s aeroplane was shot down.”

  Jane went white and then rather grey. “But it’s all right?”

  “Poppins and I flew on brollies and got him behind our lines and to a medic. He was hit in the shoulder, not even as bad off as I was. He’ll be all right.”