by Anna Butler
“Ja. Only one aeroship plies for hire. The aeroport manager told me a dozen of my countrymen appeared in his office on the ninth. Altenfeld was in command, seeking to charter the aeroship, but the pilot already had a contract and would not break it. Altenfeld failed to find an aeroship here. He went on south, towards the Cataracts.”
I glanced at Banger Bill over Reitz’s shoulder. Banger nodded.
What excellent news to balance the headache Nell had given me. “Good. He wouldn’t find anything between here and Khartoum, where the aero facility is even smaller. He would have to keep to the river, and that’s slow. Backtracking downriver to Cairo to pick up an aeroship would have been quicker.” I reached for Ned’s tin trunk, which Theo and I had kept in the pilot’s cabin with us, being suspicious-minded individuals and not wanting it out of our sight. Between us, Theo and I shook out the map of Nubia and spread it out over my knees. I traced the course of the Nile with my finger.
“You show a lack of surprise over the number of men Altenfeld has with him. And you are not surprised that he was in command.”
I glanced up from the maps and looked Reitz in the eye. “No. I’m not. On either count.”
“Ah.” Reitz’s grimace suggested he was once more waiting for me to enlighten him. When I returned my attention to the map, he coughed and went on, “He probably left their steam launch here. I visited the Philae excavations a couple of years ago. Passage through the First Cataract by steamer is impossible—the water is too fast and shallow. We hired horses to get upriver to Philae. It is only a few miles by the riverside trails.”
“No chance of a private launch at Philae?” I had never been that far south.
“Nein. But there is a public steamer from there to Wadi Halfa, where Altenfeld might hire a launch. This will have delayed him. It takes several days to reach Khartoum by river. Five or six.”
Theo relaxed. “That’s all to the good.”
“It still puts Altenfeld about ten days ahead of us.” And closer to Ned, although I didn’t voice that disquieting thought. I looked at my watch. “It’s just on three. It will take almost five hours to reach Khartoum. I’m not keen on the idea of landing at an aerostrip as small as this one after dark. Nor am I at all keen on pottering around Khartoum at night trying to find a decent hotel. It’s not that long since Kitchener took back the Sudan. It’s still unsettled, and we English aren’t popular there.”
Reitz’s smile was shark-sharp. “Your Imperial ambitions sour the world’s affections.”
I shrugged. They soured mine, too. “We stay here tonight, then, and set off at dawn.”
“Here on the aeroship?” Nell smoothed away her little frown when she caught my glance. Her tone brightened. “It isn’t very comfortable for all of us, but I’m sure we’ll make do.”
I turned in my seat to stare through to the passenger lounge. “There aren’t enough beds. Besides, I’m selfish enough to want a more comfortable sleep before another day’s flying. So, no. We’ll go to the hotel for the night.”
Nell looked relieved. So did everyone else. The chairs all converted to narrow couches, but they were hard and unforgiving. They were sufficient, at a pinch, but the hotel promised far pleasanter night’s rest.
“We’ll take the opportunity to stockpile supplies,” I added. “We’re heading into the sort of territory where we can’t pop to the village shop if we need a loaf of bread. We’ll have to take a fair amount with us.”
The plan was agreed. We held a brief conference over the Marconi with the Gallowglass, during which both Theo and I forbore to mention Nell’s presence. One anxious father in London was enough. We didn’t mention our exact destination, either. Not until we were sure. Then we left the Brunel under guard, and the four of us—Reitz, Theo, Nell, and me along with half our guards—trooped into Aswan to the Cataract Hotel to secure whatever rooms we could find before embarking on an extensive shopping trip.
Nell stuck to me for a while, averting her gaze from Theo with a sniff whenever he glanced her way and commenting on how her ladylike delicacy was taxed by passing donkeys… camels… the heat… the flies… “What on earth is that indelicate unladylike smell, Rafe?” Theo’s ears burned scarlet. She returned him to favour when he had the gumption to make a handsome apology for what he termed his maladroit, high-handed behaviour. He’d have been safer from her if he’d stayed cast into the outer darkness, wailing and gnashing his teeth. Some men have no sense of self-preservation.
Refreshed by this little tiff, they threw themselves into the shopping trip. While Theo and Nell viewed it as a treat of the highest order, Reitz proved invaluable. He was a skilled haggler, and more than one Aegyptian trader met his match that day as he bartered down their prices from the eye-watering extortion they expected Europeans to pay because we didn’t know any better. He took my shopping list—everything from foodstuffs to a basic first aid kit to aether-powered photon globe lanterns and other camping gear, including tents and an aether stove—and attacked it with impressive efficiency.
He secured us several sacks of rice at a price that was merely exorbitant rather than something equivalent to the cost of the South African war, persuading the vendor to throw in several huge canisters of water for free. He’d already bought every chicken in the shop. From the amount of squawking coming from the back premises, the shopkeeper’s assistant was dispatching the fowl and stacking them into the portable ionic-exchange icebox I’d brought from the Brunel.
“I am proving my worth, I believe, Lancaster,” he said, as the shopkeeper bowed us out of his depleted store and went off to dance a merry jig over his day’s profits.
“By the minute.”
Reitz laughed that hearty laugh of his. “I am glad to be of use.”
I had a quiet word with Theo while Reitz and Nell exclaimed over the chickens. Bless the boy, but he came up trumps. He linked one arm through Nell’s and the other through Reitz’s and marched them off to a nearby café to celebrate, taking most of the guards with him but leaving me with Tatlock and Banger Bill. Reitz glanced at me over his shoulder, but allowed himself to be carried off. The look I got from Nell was just as sharp, intelligent, and questioning.
“What now?” Tatlock asked.
“Al Meridab Street, and the place you mentioned where we can stock up enough extra phlogiston cartridges to start a war.”
The murmur of enthusiastic agreement came from Banger Bill, but by the time we’d acquired five cases of phlogiston cartridges as large as steamer trunks, and several new pistols, wide-bore muskets, and harquebuses to fire them, Tatlock’s smile could have split his face in half.
House guards did like their toys.
I was less enthusiastic. But then, I suspected a war was exactly what we were heading into. In the circumstances, I bowed to the wisdom of the Chinese general, Sun Tzu: the art of war required us to be ready to receive the enemy.
We’d be ready.
My rest had been uneasy again, as it had been every night since we’d realised Ned was missing. I’d spent the night lying sleepless, failing to summon up imaginary sheep to count, interspersed every five minutes with pummelling my pillows into different shapes. I’d tried to get more comfortable on my side and forget the longing for Ned that knotted my gut, only to fling myself on my back to glare at the ceiling until my eyes stung.
I’d been reduced to fishing Herodotus out of my meagre luggage pack, and opening the embellished leather slip covers. But, once again, the wily old Greek historian failed me as a distraction, and after reading the same chapter twice and having no more idea of what it was about than if it were written in Esquimaux, I’d put the book aside and returned to thumping my pillows. I’d ended up in a chair next to the window overlooking the Nile, listening to the murmuring water eat at the long Corniche Aswan now forming its bank, punctuated by the faint bump of wood on stone as the feluccas tapped against their moorings. Dawn couldn’t come quickly enough.
“When we women have the vote and rule the world,
adventures will start at a far more civilised hour of the morning.” Nell’s savage displeasure at being rousted out before the sun fully rose was belied by her neat and trim appearance. In fact, she was her usual exquisite and elegant self, which ought to be illegal that early in the day.
Adventures do always seem to start before dawn. It’s the tradition. I regretted it every bit as much as Nell could, though she probably had the advantage on me of having slept through the night.
I inhaled my breakfast coffee—an invigorating brew, both thicker and stronger than I served in my coffeehouse back home. “You stowed away and insisted on coming along. You can’t complain we aren’t running this venture according to your delicate ladylike requirements.”
Nell glowered above the rim of her cup. We traded glares. For once, she looked away first. I took another sip of coffee.
Within a few hours, we’d be in the Highlands. That was all that mattered.
We took off as the sun lightened the dawn sky and stopped off in Khartoum for an early luncheon more than four hours later.
“Must we?” Theo said as the Brunel came to a halt in an aeroport smaller than Aswan’s and with less in the way of amenities. “I’d rather we crack on and find Ned.”
I eased my back and rolled my shoulders. “If you want to fly so I can rest, please do.”
He grimaced at me.
“I thought so. In which case, I need to eat and stretch my legs.” I pulled the charts from their holder beside me and checked the coordinates I’d scrawled onto the parchment about the Thoth plateau. “About another four to four and a half hours, I think. It’s about the same distance again. We’ll be flying over some terrible country, where the Blue Nile takes an enormous curve south from its source before heading north again. All ravines and gorges.”
“And plateaus shaped like birds.” Nell had curled up in one of the big chairs in the lounge and dozed for at least half the journey, the House guards tiptoeing around in an effort not to wake her. She’d woken in a cheerful and energetic mood, content to share the pilot’s cockpit with Theo and me.
“Just the one, I hope.” I glanced at Reitz as he joined us. “We’ll be here for an hour or so. I want to take off by twelve thirty at the very latest, to ensure we arrive well before dark.”
“Can we find somewhere to eat?” Reitz looked doubtful.
“We’ll ask at the main building.”
He nodded and offered Nell his right arm. We left the Brunel under guard and went out into the hot Sudanese sunshine.
Khartoum was much warmer than Cairo, a thousand miles to the north. Nell made a disgusted sort of noise, and excusing herself to Reitz, she released her hold on his arm to take off her shady hat and pull the hairpins from her hair, letting it snake down her back in a long plait. With the hat jammed back on her head and in her simple cotton blouse and piqué skirt, she was the pattern-card schoolgirl on an outing.
“My hair’s too heavy to keep up. It makes my head ache.” She cast a mischievous glance in my direction. “Another disadvantage of being a woman, Herr Reitz. Rafe and my father would have a fit if I cut it all off.”
I couldn’t summon up enough interest to counter that. She bit at her lip and turned away.
The bored official manning the aeroport pointed us to the street outside the main gate and recommended one of the cafés clustering around a tiny square of thin yellow grass at its northern edge. I escorted Nell while Reitz and Theo, again with Banger Bill as an honesty check, made inquiries about aeroship hire.
We ordered for everyone: falafel, stuffed chicken, Mullah Ahmar stew to be scooped up with thick pancake bread, all washed down with hibiscus juice. The proprietor sent one of his people over to the Brunel with a complete meal for the guards waiting there, and brought some falafel for Nell and me to nibble upon until Reitz and Theo rejoined us.
When they arrived, Reitz took the seat next to me. He drew his pipe from his pocket and filled it, then added a pinch of the dried Chinese herbs. “Altenfeld had to wait for three days because, as in Aswan, there is not a lot available for hire, but he succeeded at last. His party flew south a week ago. We are gaining on them.”
Excellent news. But still, an entire week ahead of us. Anything could have happened in a week.
Before I could ask, he said, “They hired a Telford Menai.” When Nell offered her plate to share, Reitz managed a polite bow. “Thank you, Fräulein.” He raised his pipe. “I hope you will permit?”
Nell was grace personified. “Of course. Please do smoke. I know it helps your knee. I’ll have a cigarillo myself, later.”
Which meant she’d be pilfering one of mine.
“A Menai? I didn’t know any were still around. That’s a stroke of luck. I learned to fly in one, and they were obsolete even back then. It’s ancient, and as slow as—” I remembered Nell’s presence, and tempered the military’s profane opinion of the old training aeroship. Old Tom Telford was nicknamed the Colossus of Roads for good reason, and it had a lot to do with where his engineering abilities served him best—and that was not in aerocraft design. “Let’s just say a geriatric snail with a lead shell would leave it standing. I’d be surprised if Altenfeld gets much more than seventy miles an hour out of it, and that’s with a strong tailwind. He’d have been faster flapping his arms.”
Theo, being a gloomy sort of cove sometimes, cheered us with a “Still, he’s days ahead of us.”
Yes, indeed he was. I considered thanking Theo for that piece of encouraging commentary. Instead I shoved my plate of falafel into the centre of the table and waved at it in invitation to the others to tuck in. Theo had killed my appetite.
By the end of the day we’d be at the Thoth plateau, all this dreadful suspense and anxiety would be over, and we’d find Ned.
The alternative was unthinkable.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The last stage.
Reitz joined me in the cockpit, since Theo opted to sit with Nell in the passenger cabin behind us so they could flirt without being under my eye. “You have a precise destination in mind.”
“Yes.” I folded the map and stuck it into the pocket on the side of my chair. It was handy, if I needed to recalculate our navigational headings. I gestured to the Marconi. “Can you tell the authorities I’m ready to take off?”
“Of course.” Reitz did so, quick and economic in word and gesture.
I flicked the switches that fired the Edison batteries in the hold into life. The electrical lightning they generated sizzled along the wires to the bank of Leyden capacitors, then onward to ignite the engines, set the turbines spinning, and kindle the aether where it mixed with the phlogiston fed through the regulatory valves. In moments, power was thrumming in the steering yoke under my hands, the Brunel straining like an excited hound on a tight leash just after she’s found a scent. Releasing her was a matter of inching open the phlogiston valves to increase the flow, freeing the engines to send power and thrust through her. She reached up into the sky between one breath and the next, surging upwards as the huge paddles turned, one on each flank, pushing against the air as if oars pushing against water. I brought her around over Khartoum in an immense circle, gaining height as we went, then turned her towards Abyssinia, crossing over the deep V of the two Niles joining, their shores clustered with Khartoum’s sprawling suburbs. Canting to the left, she hurtled along the Blue Nile, the hound let free to run in the sun. She raced her own shadow as she sped south, giving a fleeting darker blue to the rolling waters of the great river beneath her.
“I wonder what Thoth saw when he went south,” I said. “Do you think he flew as an ibis or loped along the ground as a baboon?”
Reitz blinked. His mouth curved up. “I think perhaps you should have eaten more at luncheon, to absorb your drink—”
“Hibiscus juice, remember?”
“Then you are delirious. Thoth is a myth. He did not exist.”
No. Of course he didn’t.
We settled into silence. Reitz divided hi
s gaze between the Sudan outside and me. I brought the Brunel up to her cruising height and followed the river as it meandered to the southeast. We’d abandon the Nile at Abu Harras to follow one of the largest tributaries, the Shimfa, for a while, taking the most direct route to Abyssina’s Lake T’ana, the source of the Blue Nile. In another couple of hours we’d leave the deserts of the Southern Sudan for the uplands of Abyssinia, every moment taking us closer to Ned.
I was aware of Reitz’s gaze, calm and measuring, and when I turned to look at him, he nodded and said, tone still quiet and somewhat reflective, “I told you yesterday of my father.”
“You did. He died in battle, you said.”
“Ja. At Wörth. He was a pilot, like you. Though I do not believe his aeroship was as sophisticated as this one.”
Wörth had been something like thirty-two years ago. The year I was born. “They didn’t have phlogiston-enhanced engines then. I flew a bird from that era in a large aerodisplay over Buckingham Palace, the day of the late queen’s Diamond Jubilee in ’97. Primitive compared to today’s machines. It didn’t have electrical batteries, as I recall—it was built years before Edison invented them. One of the technicians cranked it into life.”
“Cranked?”
“A crank’s a metal spar with a handle, stuck into the firing point of the engine.” I mimed turning the handle. “After much swearing and praying, it created enough of a spark to ignite the aether, though I’m still not sure how the fuel was kept alight without a constant electrical current flashing in the gases. That fighter was as slow as treacle flowing over plate glass on a winter’s day. I have great respect for your father if he flew one of those into a fight.”
He nodded. “Danke. I respect him, too.”
Damn the man. He persisted in making me like him.
By the time the sun was westering and our shadow stretched out long attenuated fingers to the mystic east, the Roof of Africa unfolded its secrets beneath us.
