Thunderer

by Felix Gilman

The Fire with it anyway. He runs to the edge, closes his eyes, and reaches out, snatching at the last threads of potentiality drifting in the air, and leaps, praying.

  H ow very gratifying it is, madam, to know It’s coming. To be proved right. I’ve never seen anything quite so lovely as those flares. I’d be lying if I said I’d been entirely confident.”

  The Countess Ilona raises an eyebrow; it’s a thin black line in a sharp face that’s painted china-white, above a gilt gem-studded collar. The thick paint almost makes her ageless. No one would dare tell her it doesn’t.

  “You appeared confident. I should hope you were confident, Professor. I put a great deal of trust in you.”

  Holbach smiles blandly and curses himself. “A figure of speech, madam. A little joke. My predictions were very sound. I would not have had you, um, expose yourself in this manner had I not been perfectly confident…”

  “Expose myself? Is my position that vulnerable, Professor?”

  Holbach offers a mutter of conciliation, didn’t mean to say aha of course no um no oh I’m sure no, and a submissive half-stoop; and, begging her pardon, he excuses himself to oversee the final preparations. A velvet-frogged footman steadies his arm as he steps off the dais and onto the grass. Holbach rewards the servant with a smile of thanks, full of confidence and, he’s sure, quite without condescension. He heads off over the Heath, inspecting the line of men stretched out before him.

  Smooth, plump, and genial; scholar, augur, and courtier; a man of affairs, of dignified age: Holbach knows better than that by now how to talk to the city’s potentates. The excitement is getting to him, placing, he thinks, let’s say, sharp burrs in the, ah, velvet of his blandishments. No, a terrible metaphor, awful: he can do better. Let’s say…

  Holbach stops before a man in the middle of the line sweating from the exertion of holding his rope. Holbach straightens the golden silk of the man’s robe where it has bunched over his shoulder, smoothing it so the silver trim falls straight. The man starts and shifts, but doesn’t let go of his rope. The Countess’s man knows what’s good for him.

  “No, no: nothing wrong. Don’t concern yourself. The Countess appreciates your efforts, of course. Good man.”

  The Countess’s dais stands at the edge of the West Meadow of Laud Heath, against the bosky shade of the Widow’s Bower. Before it, the grass rolls out east and slopes down gently to the river’s bank. Two lines of golden-robed men stand in front of the dais. Each man holds in both hands a rope. Between them they tether a huge balloon. The gas-filled sphere, patched with azure and argent, strains against their arms’ strength.

  They raised it an hour ago, the dashing Captain Arlandes, pride of the Countess’s forces, leading the men in their battle against gravity in fine style: Arlandes on the back of a black charger, uniformed in sapphire-blue parade-jacket, gold-trimmed, gold-medaled, one hand—one dueling-scarred hand—on the pommel of his golden saber, barking orders to the men, who fear the Countess, but love Arlandes.

  The honor of being the first person to ride in the balloon went to Arlandes’ young bride, Lucia—Arlandes himself and Holbach being indispensable on the ground, and the Countess not being so inclined.

  She sits now delicately on the wicker floor of the basket, dressed in a froth of white lace. In the basket with her are an eagle, a parrot, a rooster, and a duck, all with clipped wings. The birds are carefully chosen, an integral part of the ritual. Lucia’s just a passenger, an ornament; she is, as Holbach put it, a part that does nothing in the machine, which was not very considerate of her feelings, but not intended maliciously. “Perhaps, Professor,” she’d offered, “I might exercise a calming influence on the poor animals,” and he had of course agreed eagerly, but somewhat insincerely. In earlier controlled experiments, the birds had been quite frantic and in no way safe to touch or pet, and he thought Lucia’s charms unlikely to change that. She herself was bright-eyed and rapt with excitement, at the honor, at the adventure, at the change they were about to work in the city. “Hush now, precious,” she’d soothed at the duck as Arlandes helped her into the basket. “The Professor is very wise. You’ll be free soon.” She’d blushed a little to be seen talking to the birds, but Arlandes kissed her hand and Holbach beamed at her in what he calculated was a fatherly but not inappropriate manner. Then the balloon lifted and she was gone from sight.

  F lanking the golden-robed men, two columns of riflemen keep the mob at bay. The city has been expectant all morning, whispering rumors of the Bird’s return. When word went out that the Countess Ilona was carrying out some mysterious project on the Heath, a scattering of curiosity-seekers came to watch. And when the wonderful air-filled globe ascended, the crowd exploded.

  It seems like the whole city is here now, mobbing the Heath and choking all the narrow streets around it. The city hasn’t seen a balloon flight in living memory. Carriages are left empty in the street, and children climb on their roofs for a better view. Workmen’s rough cloth rubs against velvet. Bottles are passed around. A thousand boots ruck the lawns’ green into black mud. And, of course, agents of the Gerent, the Chairman Cimenti, and all Ilona’s countless other rivals drift among the crowd, watching suspiciously.

  Holbach paces the line. He’s dressed formally for the occasion, in a tailed gold-buttoned coat of thick red velvet, and a weighty ringletted wig, sweating slightly under his clothes, what with the summer sun and the tension and the crowd’s heavy heat. He knows what the crowd’s thinking: that this is something different from the city’s usual run of spectacles, from all the gods and ghosts and monsters that thrum across its lines of power. This is a machine. Hands built this and raised it with deliberate, cunning purpose. The power of flight, under human mastery. What other powers—the crowd must be thinking—could these people arrogate to themselves? The balloon is the more beautiful for being a little blasphemous.

  And, Holbach thinks, he was only telling the truth: the Countess has exposed herself. If today’s venture succeeds, the people will adore them, will praise their triumph to the skies; but if nothing comes of it, after all this spectacle, they’ll forget how wonderful the balloon is; they’ll just remember the failure. She’ll never outlive the humiliation.

  Holbach has exposed himself, too, no less than her. He is a scientist; he has a reputation. And he has risked it in print, something he does not do lightly.

  Nineteen years ago he published his Critique, his first monograph on the Bird, the one that made his name. And earlier this year, in a dense, technical paper that was nevertheless widely read—a point of pride for Holbach, who would like to be a man of the people—he set out to predict the Bird’s next return. He did it by reference to the complex massing of the city’s signs—a chaotic, organic weaving of almost infinite threads of potential. A fashion for silks; a new verse inserting itself in an old children’s rhyme, the bird is on the steeple/high above the people; a rage amongst new-minted aristocrats for heraldic designs featuring birds; the roaring success of the Eagle and Kingfisher in Toulmin Street; a day on which all the grubbing, deformed pigeons of Kanker Market were replaced by doves. Certain graffiti around the city, and many other, less obvious signs. Dreams of flight, of course, not least his own.

  It is by such signs as these that the symbiosis between our city and its gods is revealed, he’d written, in one of his entries for the Atlas; so the gods shape the city, and the city shapes the gods, and our lives are hammered out between the two.

  The research was difficult. It has been decades since the Bird last appeared, and the divided and disordered city has never been good at keeping its records. And, of course, Ararat teems with divinities; it would be easy to attribute a sign to the Bird that was really a harbinger of, say, the Key, also a power of freedom, or Monan, also a power of sharp winds and the open sky. But despite the uncertainties, Holbach dared to commit himself to a date for the Bird’s return. Today. His rivals are circling, hoping for him to be proved wrong.

  And, privately, Holbach had approached t
he Countess Ilona with his plan. Today’s work is dreadfully expensive, and he needed powerful patronage to make his dream come to life.

  If his predictions had been wrong, after all this, she would not let him live. But he knows that he’s not wrong. He felt the Bird’s return even before the first flare went up. It’s somewhere out there now. The city feels like a great wheel about to turn. With the right lever, some of that power can be put to useful work. Changes can be made. The maps can be redrawn.

  He has passed beyond the lines of robed men. Someone has left a copy of some broadsheet on an iron bench. Tilting his head a little, he sees that it’s the Sentinel. He tries to read the headline. These things are often portents; the city speaks through them. A drift of wind ruffles the paper’s pages. Then a redoubled wind lifts it and it opens its broad pages and hurls itself at Holbach’s face. He can read Bird and Today and Coming and ? before it wraps itself inkily around his head, and he flails it away. It’s here, he thinks. He should be on the dais, of course. Puffing and red-faced, he sets out back to his place.

  T he Bird’s coming up from the southwest. It circles the dun tower of the Mass How Parliament, turns sharply, a knife twist, as if with malice, and veers north and up Cere House Hill. The turn’s too sharp for many of its human flock to keep pace. They find themselves alone in the sky for a horrific moment too long. Without the Bird to fill them and lift them, their ersatz wings are just a stupid joke, and they are prey for gravity again.

  Indifferent, the Bird slows again and gently climbs the Hill, every inch of which is scabbed with a great crust of buildings grown together. Where the structures have not simply been built into each other over the years, the builders have covered what used to be open squares and streets with great swathes of grey waxcloth, pinned tightly between domes and peaks: an ancient depth of cobweb. Tall curling spires rise from it. Ugly blackbirds lurch from their roosts in the spires, and they join the flock. The waxcloth shrouds of the Cere House whip in the wind and open the gloom below to shafts of light.

  T he sky over the Heath is full of wings and motion now. The crowd screams and cheers. The trees explode with gusts of avian life. Sparrows and pigeons flutter up to join the Bird. Little bright larks flit around the throng’s edge. The great white Bird soars over the Heath toward the Countess’s men.

  Holbach pulls himself up onto the dais, and, gasping, says, “It’s…here! What’re you…doing? White! Come…on!”

  A footman raises a white flag. At the signal, the white-robed men square their shoulders against the dragging ropes and run for the river, heavy boots gouging at the lawn. (The Parks and Gardens Committee will be furious, Holbach frets for an absurd instant.) The ropes pull taut and drag the leaning and wobbling balloon with them.

  Today’s work is part worship, part science. It demands both ceremony and precision. Holbach counts under his breath, then croaks, “Blue!” A blue flag comes up, and two more rows of white-robed men run after the first, trailing kites, overtaking them.

  “Gold!” and down the Heath toward the river, there’s a crack and a hiss and a cloud of stinking smoke. Another flare scores into the sky and bursts. Stars iris out lazily from the explosion. Holbach’s team crafted the fireworks to pattern, for an instant, the loose outlines of a swooping dragon. Against the bright blue midday sky, the shape is indistinct, suggestive, a ghostly afterimage. Another firework, and another, raise a procession of ghost-creatures in the sky: swan, moth, bat, owl; all in faded pastels, in jade, heather, coral. The quartet at the foot of the dais begins to saw away at Barnave’s Opus 131 (The Eagle’s Morning). The crowd cheers frantically for all this new activity, whatever it is.

  The Bird curves itself in space toward the balloon, leisurely, as if curious about this bright clumsy challenger. Then it rushes suddenly forward, its presence sharpening into a line across the sky. The balloon leaps and the Countess’s men are dragged from their feet and let the ropes slip from burnt and bloody hands. Lucia shrieks. The Bird soars close past the balloon and the feathered cloud following the Bird engulfs it for a second. Half obscured by the flock, the balloon seems to turn itself inside out, and for a moment it becomes a great pair of wings, sixty feet of azure taffeta spread out on the wind. The wings beat once, then the fabric falls slowly to the ground, curling smokily in the air. The basket drops, not slowly. The little menagerie of birds in the basket takes flight, their wings whole again, and joins the god’s flock.

  The kite-holders reach the river, where a flotilla of small boats cluster against the jetty’s black timbers. The men tie their kites to prow and stern of the waiting boats, then push them off. The boats row out into the river, the kites tugging lightly into the air, whipping and diving in the excited breeze.

  In the middle of the river sits the frigate Thunderer, pride of the Countess’s small fleet and veteran of a decade’s campaigning against the pirates out in the far reaches of the Peaceful Sea (and sometimes against the fleets of the Countess’s rival lords, in incidents that it’s safest to forget). It carries thirty-two long guns, and more than one hundred crewmen wait nervously on its decks: not the largest ship in Ararat’s navies, but famed for its speed and grace, and speed and grace are of the essence for Holbach’s experiment. Its figurehead is a robed amazon, lunging from the prow, carved lightning bolts in her hands, freshly repainted. The wood below is rich and dark.

  Before dawn, without fanfare, the Countess’s men brought it in from the sea, and up the Urgos into the city, forcing aside the river’s regular traffic of garbage barges and coal barges. The Urgos is broad and deep, but the warship is incongruously huge in it, like some abyssal leviathan heaving onto land.

  They’ve taken down its sails. Holbach supervised the work, up on the forecastle, watching a forest of masts and rigging topple noisily around him—the crew shouting and cursing and straining, Holbach wincing to see such a beautiful machine torn apart. Then Holbach’s team brought onboard the second and larger balloon, dragging its deflated jellyfish body up the planks and onto the deck: now where the mainmast should be is a tumbled heap of golden cloth, waiting for air and life to be breathed into it.

  Holbach had tried to explain it to a skeptical Arlandes as they stood on the denuded deck: “Of course the balloon won’t lift it, not of its own force; it would have to be, oh, a hundred times bigger; but it’s a sign the Bird will recognize.”

  Arlandes had arched one eyebrow. He had distractingly beautiful blue eyes. “You think the god will do as you command it, Professor?” Holbach had shrugged plump shoulders and looked away from those eyes and that cold smile and said yes. “Yes. Yes and no. The ship’s a sign, like the fireworks and the kites and all the rest. Imagine it—well, imagine it as a great big bright floating cathedral dome, to be filled with the Bird’s blessing. It’ll work, Captain.”

  Gods, he hopes that’s true. But it’s too late to worry now. The moment’s come; and at once it’s gone, and Holbach watches the Bird pass over the river and glide off north toward Faugère and Hood Hill. The Countess grips his shoulder with an elegant, bony hand, and she squeezes. Her nails are very sharp indeed.

  Holbach watches. It works so smoothly. A loose, then rapidly tautening, golden sphere swells up from the Thunderer’s deck. The balloon’s inflating. Thick ropes (not visible at this distance) will be tightening, tethering the balloon to prow and stern. Sailors like little black ants swarm on its decks.

  Then the small pointed several shapes of the kite-boats rise into the air, in a darting, uncertain ascension, halting and lurching. And in their midst, the Thunderer rises, too.

  Its hull is deep below the surface, deeper than Holbach realized. It pulls slowly from the water, which rises with it in a lingering kiss, then opens and falls back in curtains of rain. It climbs against the backdrop of the buildings on the river’s right bank; higher than the dome of Hoffman’s Academy, than the bell tower of the Temple of the Crawling Stone, higher finally than the rusty cranes over the Brattle Bros. warehouse. It’s so massive, even at
this distance, the vector of its motion so improbable, that for a moment it seems to Holbach that the ship is still, and the city and the blue sky are opening back and falling away behind it. He grabs the rail to steady himself.

  Holbach starts to count, “One, two, three…” The Bird has gone. The warship remains, impossibly airborne. “…sixty-one…” Still airborne, the impossibility compounding with every moment. The naked hull’s like a swollen black belly, quite grotesquely unsuited to its new element, and yet it hangs there, defiant. “…one hundred and twenty.” The men in the kite-boats toss out ropes to the Thunderer’s deck. The frigate’s crew lash their satellites in radial position, forming the fleet into a crown, suspended over the city. In triumph, the Thunderer drifts up over the Heath. Its guns fire in salute, again and again, frighteningly loud.

  The crowd cheers and screams and stamps, louder even than the guns. Holbach claps, and smiles and smiles and smiles. His experiment is a success. All these mad gestures, all this manipulation of signs and portents, balloons and fireworks and so forth—which Holbach thinks of as a science, and the mob thinks of as worship—has trapped the Bird’s gift in the Thunderer’s hull. It need never come down again. No one has ever done anything like this before.

  But now politics calls; a different sort of science is necessary if he is to harness this moment to his own fortune. So he bounces around the dais, pumping the hands of every man there, congratulating them, and himself. “Excellent work…Your contributions were invaluable, Minister…. I hope we can count on your support for future ventures, Your Grace….”

  As her peacock courtiers puff each other’s plumage, the Countess steps to the front of the dais. Her white face is expressionless. Her footmen scream for silence; then, as the reporters for the Era and the Herald and the Intelligencer cluster at her feet, she offers a cascade of half-threatening reassurances: This is a gift to the city, to be used only in the interests of all of Ararat, as she sees them; and This ship is an act of worship, a living temple to the Bird, there’s nothing impious or sorcerous in this, and it would be irresponsible even to suggest that there is, she hopes there’ll be none of that….