Celestial Matters Read online

  To drive home this point my aunt Philida insisted I attend my niece’s wedding the next day. She had me on prominent display, holding one of the two-foot-tall red candles in front of Ishtar’s altar. Looking down on me from a gallery near the waist of the huge gilded statue of the goddess of love were two dozen young women my aunt had assembled to look me over. By keeping my mind on the solemnity of the occasion, I think I managed to look distant and bewildered enough to disinterest them. Whether that is the case or not, I passed through the ceremony without becoming affianced.

  At the wedding feast I indulged like a sybarite in the wonders of Phoenician cooking, supping on lamb with dates and figs, chickens potted with Atlantean tubers, wine aged in cedar casks, and fragrant honey-nut cakes. When my mouth was not full, I fended off the moneymaking schemes of my merchant cousins. To them science was neither a pure pursuit of knowledge, nor a vital factor in the prosecution of the war between the Delian League and the Middle Kingdom. No, to them science was a source of new devices they could sell. I enjoyed immensely ducking their attempts to inveigle me into complex deals that revolved around my inventing something for them, their selling it, and all of us making a fortune.

  I stayed with my mother’s family for one more day before taking ship to Athens, where I was to give one last lecture, meet Kleon and Ramonojon, and be picked up at the city’s sky dock by Chandra’s Tear.

  At the marina in Tyre I looked over the Spartan high-speed priority transport ship that had been assigned to take me to Athens. The sleek steel craft, its long fire-gold impellers bristling like spines off its bow, would reach the city of knowledge in half an hour’s time. But I did not want my vacation to end that quickly; I wanted to savor the past month’s pleasures for a little longer before immersing myself in the rigor of the Athenian Akademe. So I told the captain I would find other transportation. A few piers away I came across a Phoenician merchantman that was bound for Athens but would take a leisurely twelve hours to reach that queen of all cities. My identification scroll marked with the seal of the Archons and a few obols from my purse bought me passage.

  And that is how I came to be lounging on the open deck of an unarmed antique steamship rather than under the steel aegis of a cannonaded naval vessel when the Middler battle kite swooped out of the peaceful afternoon sky and tried to kill me.

  At first the attacking aircraft was just a spot against the brazen disk of the sun; I thought it was a celestial ship, hundreds of miles above the earth, but as it drove down on us it grew larger much too quickly for something that distant. It darted away from the sun and I made out its silhouette against a lone cloud. A coiled serpentine form twenty feet long with broad translucent wings half the length of its body. I knew then what it was, a silk dragon with a human pilot and enough Taoist armament to easily sink this ship.

  The dragon looped above the cloud, then furled its wings and plunged straight down toward the merchantman. On the tips of the aircraft’s wings its twin silver Xi lances vibrated, roiling the ocean with waves of invisible fury. My fragile merchant vessel pitched back and forth, toppling me onto the foredeck. The rough grain of the oak flooring scraped my face. At the same moment a surge of water came over the side; it drenched my robes, stung my eyes, and diluted the flow of blood from my scratched cheeks.

  I pressed my salty robe against my face to stop the bleeding, wincing at the sting of brine. My lungs coughed out a spume of seawater. Again the silver lances shimmered; the realm of Poseidon heeded their silent command and waves rose up fifty feet from the formerly calm seas and slammed into our hull. The ship turned on its side, narrowly avoiding capsizing. Amid the angry rocking, I clawed my way across the boat, hoping to reach the navigation tower amidships before we were swamped.

  Hand over hand I crawled across the slippery deck, spewing water and maledictions from my throat. First I spat oaths of condemnation against the shoddy old ship, against its antique engine, so slow that the ship did not even have restraining straps. Then I laid my curses where they belonged, against myself for taking civilian transport. But even as I scrambled and swore, my mind focused on the impossibility of the situation: I was on the Mediterranean Sea, not the front lines in Atlantea. How, in Athena’s name, had an enemy aircraft reached the center of the Delian League, and where was the Spartan navy when you needed it?

  The dragon’s shadow rippled in multicolored grace as it soared upward and coiled into a loop, a serpent biting its own tail. It held that posture for a moment, then unfurled and swooped down over the steamer’s paddle wheel. It passed directly over me, blotting out the sun with its shimmering body. I could see the pilot, a small man in a black silk gi, pulling guide wires, turning the Xi lances to bear on our starboard side. I sucked in air and offered silent prayers for my life to Poseidon and Amphitrite, sure that the next blast would sink us.

  My ears had been numbed by the hum of the Xi lances, so I didn’t hear the shot that saved us, but, O gods, I saw it. On the horizon a thin corridor of air pointing from sea to sky shimmered into sharp clarity. A trickle of hope entered my heart at the sight; that line of rarified air meant that just beyond my field of vision an evac cannon was prepared to fire. My hopes were realized; a steel tetrahedron the size of a man’s head flew skyward up that line of thin air. My practiced eyes followed the brightly outlined projectile, and I knew the gunner had done his job well. The twenty-degree incline of trajectory would carry the tetrahedron to a spot directly over our heads at the exact second when the projectile ran out of impetus.

  The equations that governed the movement for an object of that shape and material swam through my mind, offering reassurance of our salvation, but they were drowned out by memories of my boyhood self standing up in classrooms and reciting the simplified forms of Aristotle’s laws of motion.

  A terrestrial object under forced motion travels in a straight line, slowing until it stops.

  The tetrahedron ceased its forward flight five hundred feet directly above the dragon. In the clear air I could see the gleam of sunlight reflecting off the pyramid’s four faces and six knife-sharp edges.

  A terrestrial object under natural motion moves in a straight line forever …

  The tetrahedron plummeted down into the kite, tearing silk and bamboo, flesh and bone like a scythe through papyrus reeds.

  unless stopped by some force.

  The projectile, spattered with blood and festooned with strips of torn silk, struck the steamship’s deck, gouging grooves into the thick wooden planks. Jagged splinters flew out from the impact, but the tetrahedron did not break through the thick slats of oak. The tetra teetered on one of its vertices for a moment, then fell over and sat still as if it had been eternally fixed into the ship like the pyramids into the sands of Giza.

  The shattered corpse of the dragon lost control of the winds that were carrying it and crashed into our paddle wheel, wedging shards of silk and splinters of bamboo between the turning planks. The wheel stopped spinning, raising a wail of protest from the steam engine as it labored fruitlessly to give impetus to the ship.

  That clamor cleared the numbness from my ears and filled my heart with fear. I ran aft, slipping several times on the tilting, sodden deck. Sailors ran past me. Cries of “Abandon ship!” resounded from the navigation tower. Some of the men dived overboard, desperate to get away before the archaic engine exploded.

  The Xi lances, still protruding like claws from the broken wings of the dragon, shattered under the strain of the angry wheel. Silver shards rained down on the deck, biting into the loin-clothed sailors. I threw my arm across my face and a dozen needles stabbed into my forearm instead of putting out my eyes.

  The deck careened to port then starboard then port again as the ocean’s currents, free from the power of Middler science, yoked themselves again to the natural flow of the tides. Amid the chaos I kept running until I reached the steam engine.

  Twin jets of steam spurted out from the nozzles on either side of the huge bronze sphere that held the boil
ing water. The streams of hot vapor tried to spin the sphere; the belt of leather that tied the brazen ball to the paddle wheel wanted to be turned by that spinning; the paddle wheel wanted to receive that turning and so turn itself in the ocean and make the ship go. But the paddle wheel was chained by the corpse of the kite and could not accept this gift of movement. This rejection was passed on to the leather loop, which could not move across its pulleys and so passed its stasis back to the engine, which was locked into place by this chain of refusals.

  But the steam kept coming out of the pipes, stubbornly trying to imitate the Prime Mover and set all things in motion. Cracks appeared in the ball, rivets popped out, and a dozen little hisses joined the great blasts of boiled water.

  I ducked below the sphere, wrapped the hem of my robe around my hand, and yanked open the door in the side of the fire box that boiled the water. Gouts of no-longer-contained fire rushed up into the sky. I rolled to the aft railing just fast enough to avoid being scorched.

  The steam from the orb turned into heavy mist as the flame that had kept it boiling rose upward, forming an ascending pillar of fire, a flare that could be seen for miles. The blaze continued to rise until, pushed upon by the air, the atoms of fire dispersed, joining their fellows in the glow of daylight.

  I collapsed onto the deck, my seared throat choking on the sodden air. I coughed phlegm into my drenched robes, then lay still, sweating like a Marathon runner. The cloud of steam gradually condensed into dribbles of water. The paddle wheel, freed from the chains of impetus, rolled gently backward, pushed by the Mediterranean tides, and the broken battle kite and its broken pilot fell gracefully into the wine dark sea.

  A cheer rose from the crew; I struggled to my feet to acknowledge the accolade, but it wasn’t me they were lauding. From the east a two-hundred-foot-long steel ship, bristling from prow to stern with evac cannons and armored soldiers, bore down on us. I sank back in exhaustion and thanked Ares and Athena for our salvation. The navy had arrived.

  With Spartan efficiency, the battleship Lysander heaved alongside the damaged merchantman, pulled the formerly panicked, now cheering sailors from the water, and laid a gangplank between the two vessels. During these unhurried maneuvers, I propped myself against the empty fire box, stanched the blood dripping from my cheek with my robe, and watched. The Lysander’s presence and bearing restored my sense of safety. She was a long, sleek ship, covered from stem to stern with a canopy of steel to protect her from aerial bombardment. Her steel hull had been painted a utilitarian iron gray. The only adornment on the entire ship was the figurehead on her prow, ’Era, patron goddess of Sparta, arms crossed in front of her, eyes scanning the horizon for anyone who would dare offend against her people.

  I bowed my head to the image of heaven’s queen, then turned to gaze with personal pride at the onyx pyramid that covered the sternmost twenty feet of the ship. My ’Eliophile engine, my only claim to glory until Sunthief. It had been twenty years since I discovered how to attract and catch the atoms of fire that danced in the sunlight and use them to power ships. Since then every oceangoing vessel built in the navy’s shipyards had been fitted with one of my engines. They had become so common that few people even remembered that I had invented them, such are the vagaries of the goddess Fame.

  A cough interrupted my reverie. A lightly bearded young Aethiopean wearing the black-fringed tunic and professionally concerned expression of a naval doctor was standing over me with an open satchel of instruments.

  “I am not seriously injured, Doctor. Attend to the sailors,” I said, knowing exactly what his response would be.

  “Let me be the judge of that,” the young man said with solemnity that belied his years. Doctors always said the same thing in the same tone of voice and they always had the same casual disregard for orders; the Oath of ’Ippokrates is much stronger than the discipline of armies.

  “No great injuries,” he said after looking down my throat, rubbing a light metal probe over my cheek, and feeling my limbs for fractures. “Just some scratches and a parched throat.”

  He pulled a brown glass bottle with the Egyptian hieroglyph for blood incised on it and a clean goose quill out of his leather bag, filled the quill with red liquid from the bottle, and jabbed it into my arm. “Just an injection of Sanguine Humour to speed the healing process,” he said, as if I hadn’t known that. “Apart from that all you need is some rest,” as if I hadn’t been resting when he came along.

  The doctor turned to go and snapped off a quick salute to a young woman in armor just crossing the gangplank from the Lysander to the merchantman. I almost ignored her; after all, many of the battleship’s crew had come over to secure the smaller ship. But she was not wearing a naval uniform. She was caparisoned in the thick steel breastplate, hoplite sword, and two-foot-long bronze evac thrower of an army officer. But what particularly caught my eye was the horsehair-crested helmet and the iron brassard only worn by graduates of the Spartan military college. What was she doing on a naval vessel?

  She stepped onto the Phoenician ship and strode briskly toward me. As she neared, I began to make out the person under the steel. Her skin had the terra-cotta coloring that identifies the native of North Atlantea and her long, braided black hair, sharp features, and wiry, athletic build told me she was from the Xeroki city-states. But her eyes were a color I had never seen, golden like ’Elios, but with a glint that I thought at the time was coldness, as if the gates of her soul were two wards of frozen fire.

  “Commander Aias?” she asked in a voice that perfectly melded Xeroki syllabling with ’Ellenic enunciation.

  I nodded, unable to look away from her cold-gold eyes.

  “You must come with me,” she said like a judge passing sentence.

  “What?”

  She opened a thin leather pouch strapped to her belt and handed me a sheet of papyrus. It bore a few lines of mechanical block printing, two signatures, and the seal of the Delian League: two circles interlocked, the left one containing Athena’s owl, the right one ’Era’s peacock.

  The message read:

  The scholar Aias of Athens, scientific commander of the celestial ship Chandra’s Tear, is ordered to accept Captain Yellow Hare of Sparta as his bodyguard and obey any commands she deems necessary for the protection of his life.

  By order of

  Kroisos, Archon of Athens

  Miltiades, Archon of Sparta

  I read the letter thrice, hoping to make some sense of it. The idea of a Spartan captain assigned the lowly task of bodyguard was ludicrous; if the Archons had ever set my father such a menial job he’d have boiled into a rage, but this Yellow Hare seemed to accept it like a stoic. And why after three years did I suddenly need a bodyguard? Had the Archons somehow known about the battle kite? No, impossible!

  “What does this mean?” I asked her. “What’s happened?”

  “My orders had no explanation. I was called, I came.”

  “Do you know how that battle kite reached here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why it attacked this merchantman?”

  “It must have been sent to kill you,” she said. “Now come with me to the Lysander so I can prevent the next attempt.”

  “To kill me?” I said. “Of all the military targets in the Mediterranean why would the Middlers send a battle kite to kill me?”

  “I do not know,” she said. “But I was told that attempts would be made on your life. Commander Aias, I must insist that you come with me.”

  I found myself momentarily unable to move; my mind, honed by long years of Akademe training, needed to understand what was happening before I acted. And to leave the fragile Tyrian merchantman for the safety of the battleship would be to give in to ignorance. But I couldn’t defy the orders of the Archons or the Spartan confidence in Captain Yellow Hare’s voice; I gathered my traveling bag and followed her onto the Lysander. All the while my heart was churning up possible explanations for this impossible attack.

  M
y soft leather sandals slapped harshly against the steel deck of the warship, but my new bodyguard’s bronze leggings made no noise at all, as if the clash of metal against metal was a sacrilege she was too holy to commit.

  Leather-armored seamen stopped their work, leaving guns unloaded and decks unswabbed to salute her as we walked down the steel-canopied foredeck toward the battleship’s prow. But though they saluted, the sailors gave Captain Yellow Hare a wide berth, as if unsure how to treat the high-ranked landlubber.

  We passed by an open hatch in which I saw a ladder that led down to the crew’s quarters. Below there would be baths and a place to rid myself of my itchy, salt-stained robes. “I would like to change my clothes,” I said.

  Captain Yellow Hare shook her head. “The spaces below are too confined. An assassin might be hiding there.”

  “On a Spartan warship? That’s impossible.”

  “No more impossible than a battle kite reaching the heartlands of the League.”

  “But—”

  She chopped the air between us with her right arm, cutting off my argument. “Your safety is more important than your convenience. You will be able to bathe when we reach Athens.”

  We marched to the bow, stopping just a few feet in back of the ’Era figurehead. My bodyguard looked out from under the steel canopy and swept her gaze across the sea and the sky. I followed her eyes, wondering what she was looking for; then for just a moment the military lessons my father beat into me came forth and I saw as she did.

  There were half a dozen ships within sight; four were merchant ships plying the many trade paths of the Mediterranean, one was a passenger steamer carrying civilians from city to city, and the last was a naval messenger boat, just twenty feet long, only one gun, but fast enough to sail rings around the Lysander. Above us there were half a dozen specks that were most likely celestial ships or moon sleds flying high over the few clouds strewn about the sky. But suppose they weren’t. Suppose one of those ships was carrying a Middler assassin. Suppose one of the dots circling overhead was another battle kite. If the first impossible attack had come, how many more could follow it?