Stargazer

by Patrick Carman

  “Flying?” I said. “You mean this thing is meant to go out there?” I looked out through the vast opening to the blue sky with puffy white clouds.

  “Of course it is,” said Marco. “What else would he do with it?”

  I glared at him. Why did he have to be such a know-it-all?

  “I had hoped for a long time to speak with the sea-birds and build something different, something more like them. But I could never break through. Land animals—things like cats and giant lizards—are, for reasons I can’t figure out, easier to converse with.” He looked at the long bank of fish tanks. “I can’t get a word out of them, either.”

  Marco was running his hand along the box. It was twenty or more feet in diameter, but it was only about five feet high. He ran his hands along the worn rail of the box and lifted himself inside.

  “Lots of room in here,” he said. “What’s that?”

  I gave Yipes a little boost, and he was perched up on the ledge in an instant, gazing inside. Matilda and I grabbed the rail and pulled ourselves up, leaning over the edge of the box and looking in. We saw that it was complicated and vast inside. There were rows of benches along two sides, and beneath the benches hung rows of hammocks in the darkened recesses. There were levers and pulleys, boxes and shelves—and it all had the familiar Sir Alistair Wakefield craziness about it, as if it might just fall apart at the very moment of liftoff. In the center, there was a round tube of glass surrounded at its base by a square box. The glass tube ran twice as high as the box and pointed straight up into the balloon.

  “Don’t touch that,” said Sir Alistair, seeing that Marco was reaching out for it. “It’s hot.”

  Sir Alistair explained that he’d tried a great many ways of generating heated air, all of which had failed to provide the result he was looking for.

  “I could get it filled and moving, but then the hot air would run out and the balloon would sink to one side. It wasn’t until very recently that I discovered a way. And it was hidden under my nose all along.”

  “The moss,” said Matilda. Right when she said it, I thought the same thing. Phylo had figured it out.

  Sir Alistair was momentarily crestfallen to find that his discovery was already known, but he quickly rebounded and went on.

  “Why, yes, the moss! I’d known that it did strange things when combined with saltwater, but for some reason it never occurred to me to put that idea to use when it came to the balloon. It was he who told me.”

  Sir Alistair looked down at Grump, and the hulking beast spoke for the first time in quite a while in his sleepy-sounding voice.

  “He can be tiresome when he fails for a long time without a breakthrough.”

  Sir Alistair knelt down and tapped Grump’s back softly with a look of understanding.

  “As I said, he’s a good listener. I imagine he heard me rant and rave for years about this balloon before helping me come to my senses.”

  “So the balloon is full of hot air right now?” I asked.

  “It has been for the past few weeks. It’s only sitting there because I’ve got it tied down.”

  There were great vines tied to pins embedded in the floor of the chamber on four sides. Sir Alistair slid a door along the side of the box beneath the balloon and stepped inside, guiding us all in with him. He opened the lid to a box and poked inside with a long, sharp stick. When the stick emerged, it held a chunk of moss.

  “The bottom of the tube is filled with about a foot of saltwater from the Lonely Sea. And when I drop this in …”

  Sir Alistair raised his arm and held the moss over the opening of the tube, scraping it off the stick. It fell with a plop and a loud hissing sound. The tube filled with white fog that became thicker and thicker.

  “Then all you have to do is turn the crank,” said Sir Alistair.

  “Let me!” said Yipes. He grabbed hold of two handles that poked out of the floor of the box we stood in. The handles were high enough off the base of the box that Yipes had some trouble getting a hold on them. But he was able to get them going, pulling on one and then the other, until a soft, whirling sound could be heard from beneath the tube.

  “You see there,” said Sir Alistair, pointing to the tube. “The heat that comes off the moss is immense when it hits the saltwater—it doesn’t take much when it’s mixed with the air already in the balloon.”

  The misty white inside the tube rushed up, expanding the balloon, and we could all feel the big box trying to lift off the ground. If not for the vines that held it, we would have crashed into the ceiling.

  “That’s magnificent!” said Yipes. “Let’s fly it right now!”

  Sir Alistair had to gently pull Yipes away from the handles for fear of pushing too much heat into the balloon and breaking the vines.

  “That little bit of moss will continue to smolder for hours. And it will flame up, like a bright coal on a fire, whenever we add air from underneath. But we can’t fly it yet.”

  “Why not?” asked Yipes, genuinely disappointed.

  “Because it’s never been flown. No one has ever seen it—including Abaddon—and we don’t want him seeing what we’re up to. We’ll have to wait until after nightfall.”

  Sir Alistair produced a set of maps and charts from an alcove and laid them out on the wide ledge of the box. There were wooden pins on the edge and he pulled them out, moved the pile of charts into position, and sent the wooden pins through holes in the paper. I could see how this might be done when the balloon was flying in order to keep the papers from flying away.

  “Roland helped a great deal with these,” said Sir Alistair.

  “They do look familiar,” said Yipes. He had hopped right up on the ledge of the box and was leaning over, looking at one of the maps.

  “Traveling by air is very like much the same as traveling by sea,” said Sir Alistair. “I’ve been using the same methods to chart a course, and weather patterns are equally tantamount. The wings and the rudders can be used to force the balloon one way or another for a time, but on long journeys, the balloon will be forced to go where the wind will carry it. See here, where this list of arrows and days are?”

  We all nodded.

  “There are times during the yearly cycle when the prevailing winds will carry you one way or another. These winds cycle through every few months in this series of oval patterns, and they are highly predictable.”

  I had wondered silently what the point of all this was from the moment Sir Alistair began speaking of the balloon and what it would do. Why fly at all—what would be the point? Looking at one of the maps, and seeing The Land of Elyon plainly in the distance from the Five Stone Pillars, I finally put two and two together.

  “This is a way home, a way back to The Land of Elyon.” But then, just as quickly as I’d said it, I wondered aloud how many people the flying craft would hold.

  “About a dozen adults or twice as many children,” said Sir Alistair. We all looked at him like we couldn’t believe it, and he responded by telling us the balloon was huge—with 600,000 cubic feet of capacity. Then he started going into a lot of scientific facts about things like grams of heated and cooled air. We all glazed over, completely lost, and he simply said, “Trust me. It will hold a lot of weight.”

  We were all more than happy to agree.

  “And the time comes nearer than you might have imagined. We are right now at precisely the right moment to be flying away from the Five Stone Pillars in the direction of The Land of Elyon. A trip could be made anytime in the next few weeks and the wind will hold.”

  The thought of it was mesmerizing. Drifting over the Lonely Sea on a giant flying machine, arriving to the astonishment of my parents and everyone else in Lathbury. It would be amazing!

  “I want to fly it,” I said.

  Again Sir Alistair spoke as much with his piercing eyes as he did his papery voice.

  “Then fly it you shall.”

  A tingle of excitement ran through me.

  “Where’s Marco?�
�� asked Matilda. He had disappeared while we were immersed in the charts.

  “Right here,” he said, popping out from behind the other side of the box and startling all of us. “Just looking at the way this thing is held together. Very ingenious.”

  “Stop snooping around,” I said, and even I thought it sounded a little bit too mistrustful.

  “Hey—I’m just trying to understand this contraption. It’s not the sort of thing a person sees every day.”

  “How about I put you to work on something more pressing at the moment?” said Sir Alistair. He looked at Yipes. “In fact, you could both work together, up top. I need moss. Lots of moss, and it’s not the simplest thing for an old man like me to get hold of.”

  “As long as he promises not to push me down the hill,” said Yipes. “He’s got a reputation for mischief.”

  Marco grimaced and shook his head. “I’ll admit I don’t much like having you and Alexa around. I don’t like the idea of being forced to leave this place. But I’m not trying to get rid of you.”

  Yipes glanced at me. We knew each other’s secret looks as though they were a language all their own. Neither of us was convinced. As far as we were concerned, Marco was guilty until proven innocent and had to be watched carefully. The thought of Yipes and Marco working together made me nervous.

  “And you, Alexa,” continued Sir Alistair. “You’re going to have to go back and tell everyone what we’re doing. If you leave now, you can return before nightfall and we’ll do a test flight. Matilda will help me prepare the balloon in your absence.”

  “I’m not sure …” said Matilda. I could see that Matilda didn’t like the idea of sending me off on my own. But she was soon convinced that we all needed to do our part, and only one of us could be spared to travel back to the third pillar.

  I knew something she didn’t. I knew that the people would listen if Jonezy told them the truth about me. Some may not want to go along—and the truth was we couldn’t fit them all at once even if the balloon worked—but at least they would listen.

  “Time is running short,” said Sir Alistair. “We better hurry.”

  Matilda put her arm around me and pulled me close. “Be careful going across,” she whispered.

  I paused and looked about the room at all the strange and wonderful inventions of Sir Alistair Wakefield.

  “This place is worth saving. We have to find a way.”

  CHAPTER 17

  EXPOSING AN HEIR TO THE THRONE

  I stood at the edge of the fourth pillar holding the rope. Marco was still at the top, picking moss and placing it into a big wooden bucket, but Yipes had come with me.

  “I’ll move the rope back down right after you’re safely across.”

  “Thank you, Yipes. Thank you for everything. I couldn’t do any of this without you.”

  “Soon we’ll be flying,” he said. “Really flying! Maybe even toward home. Just get back here as fast as you can and make good use of your time. They’ll listen to you. You can be very persuasive when you want to be.”

  I beamed and threw my slider around the rope leading to the third pillar. The far end of the rope was lower now, since we’d moved it up on our end as we’d climbed the long, broken bridge at the side of the fourth pillar. It would be a fast ride.

  I jumped into the air on my slider, glancing past my shoulder at Yipes, who clapped and hollered for me.

  “I’ll be back before dark!” I cried.

  When I reached the other side, I began what turned out to be a maddeningly long effort to find Jonezy. I searched the third pillar only to find that he’d gone to the second, but when I arrived at the second, I found that he’d gone to the first to oversee a harvest of one sort or another. Ranger caught sight of me and wouldn’t leave my side. We took the rowboat across the lake together, searched the veranda, and made our way to the pond. When I finally found Jonezy near the windmills, Ranger pranced around with a stick in his mouth hoping one of us would throw it.

  “I think I’ve thrown that stick a hundred times already today,” I guessed.

  “If only I had his get-up-and-go,” said Jonezy.

  “I think you’ve got plenty of energy,” I said. “You’ve been walking two paces ahead of me all day. Thank goodness I finally found you. We need to talk.”

  Jonezy threw the stick into the middle of the pond.

  “It takes him longer to swim than to run. This way he won’t bother us so often.”

  And so it was that I stood by the windmills on the second pillar and told Jonezy everything as he tossed a stick for Ranger over and over again. I told him all about the fourth pillar, Sir Alistair Wakefield, his flying machine, and what he theorized about Abaddon’s intent.

  “I don’t know if this place is going to survive,” I said, saddened by the thought of losing such a magnificent place. “At least not in the same way that everyone has come to know it.”

  “If that monster succeeds in knocking down the fourth pillar and it hits the third, it will be a catastrophe. We can’t lose that pillar, Alexa.”

  “I’m afraid it could be much worse than that,” I said, wanting to make sure Jonezy understood how dire our situation really was. “By tomorrow, Abaddon may have shredded through enough of the fourth pillar to topple it. And what if it takes out not only the third, but the second and the first pillars as well?”

  “Do you think that could really happen?” asked Jonezy, concern rising in his voice.

  “Sir Alistair thinks there’s a very real chance, especially if the third pillar is hit. It’s thicker, so it might not snap in two, but who knows?”

  Jonezy took stock of the situation and tossed the stick for the wet dog before him, watching Ranger bolt into the pond.

  “It will be safest—and easiest—to meet everyone at the lake,” he said after a moment. “I can have everyone at the shoreline in an hour.”

  He paused and took in a deep breath. Letting it out, his chest sank and his head dropped.

  “This is going to be hard,” he said. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  “No,” I said, not entirely ready to stand before hundreds of people and tell them their way of life might be coming to an end. “But I’ve got no choice. When they find out who I am, hopefully they’ll listen.”

  Jonezy began to walk toward the lake and Ranger followed, shaking his wet coat from head to tail.

  “Oh, Jonezy—one thing more,” I said. “We’re going to do a test flight after dark so Abaddon can’t watch what we’re doing. It will only make him work faster if he thinks we have an escape plan. If he could be distracted—so we’re sure he won’t discover what we’re up to—it would help. How’s it going with Phylo?”

  “He’s gathering rocks by the hundreds and the best shooters he can find. I think we can provide a nice diversion for you tonight. It should be quite a show.”

  “That’s just what I wanted to hear,” I said.

  One of the nice things about a society living in a small space is that you can gather everyone together quickly. The Five Stone Pillars was just such a place, where people of all ages could be scattered between just three places—the first, second, and third pillars. Within an hour’s time, the whole world could be at your doorstep, waiting for you to open your mouth.

  “Are you sure you’re ready to do this?” whispered Jonezy. “I can do the talking if you’d rather. We don’t have to tell them about …”

  I touched Jonezy on his forearm, furry with gray hair, and I glanced up into the sky. Soon the sun would be on the horizon and I’d be expected back at the fourth pillar. “I’m ready,” I said.

  Jonezy turned to the crowd that stood along the shore of the lake. There were, in my estimation, an equal share of children, adults, and those moving into later adulthood, all of whom would have known Roland and Thomas at the House on the Hill so many years before.

  “Let’s all gather in close, if we could,” said Jonezy. Everyone stirred and the two toddlers in the group were picked up and h
eld by two mothers I hadn’t met. The three girls that had befriended me only the night before—had it been that recently?—stood near and waved to me. I waved back and smiled. Scanning the audience I saw Phylo as well, acting rather kingly among a group of boys his own age. He’d obviously brought them into his planned attack on the sea monster.

  “As you all know, Alexa arrived here with a companion only a few days ago. You’ve welcomed them into our way of life and tried to make them feel at home, and for that I know she’s thankful.”

  I nodded, feeling a genuine sense of gratitude.

  “You also know that she brought things with her we have had a hard time understanding—a strange creature that doesn’t seem to like us very much, some bad news about Roland Warvold and the Warwick Beacon, questions about the future of the Five Stone Pillars. I’ve met with her privately to find out what I could, and now she would like to address you all herself.”

  Jonezy stood aside, and I was at once terrified to speak and certain of what needed to be said. It wouldn’t be easy, but I knew it would have to start with me opening my mouth.

  I began, “I wish I had more time to meet all of you and explore every corner of the Five Stone Pillars, but my arrival comes at a perilous moment. Unfortunately, time is not something we can take for granted.”

  There was whispering then, and I felt some concern that they didn’t believe me.

  “I didn’t intend to come here as a messenger with bad news, or to bring terrible things to pass. What happened to Roland and the Warwick Beacon was so unexpected—and what came along with us—even Roland didn’t know a monster was tracking our every move.”

  “I’ve seen the monster!” cried Phylo. By now everyone had seen it, but Phylo was particularly excited.

  “And Phylo has devised an ingenious way of fighting it,” I added. Phylo beamed with pride.

  “I’ve helped defeat this monster before—in a different form—but I don’t see how it can be defeated again. I’m afraid no amount of fighting we do will push this beast back into the Lonely Sea forever. It comes to do something worse than destroy the Five Stone Pillars. It comes to rule this place.”