The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “Bloke waved me down and asked me to give you this,” he said.

  Javitz took the page in the hand that held the cup; whatever he read made the look on his face go grim again.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  He stuffed it into a pocket, and said, “Weather conditions. We'll have some wind, nothing to worry about.”

  “I think—”

  He turned on his heel and fixed me with an evil gaze. “I don't fly dual controls. You want to drive the thing? Go right ahead, it's your machine. If you want me to take you north, you're gonna have to let me do the worrying.”

  Twice in a year I had climbed into an aeroplane under the control of someone in whom I had less than complete confidence. I must learn how to drive one myself, and soon.

  I nodded, and let Lofte show me how to climb up the ladder. He followed me to demonstrate the special hinged cover that transformed the passenger seat into an enclosed box. I eyed the glass on all sides, wondering how hard a landing would be required to turn the windows into flying daggers.

  I had brought my heaviest fur-lined coat, which I now wrapped around me. Javitz shook Lofte's hand and leapt into the pilot's open compartment in front while Lofte walked forward and waited for the signal to work the prop. Javitz fiddled with the controls in front of him, pulled on his goggles, then stuck up his thumb; Lofte vanished, the propeller kicked a few times before the engine caught, sputtered, then thundered into life. The fragile construction around me jerked and drifted forward. Lofte reappeared off the port side and waved at me with an air of confidence neither of us altogether believed. The sound of the big engine built, the seat pressed itself into my back, and with no ceremony at all we leapt once, twice, and the ground dropped away.

  The compartment was freezing until the sun came up, then I sat in my mile-high conservatory and roasted. I tore the end off of my handkerchief and pushed little screws of the cotton into my ears against the unremitting bellow of the engine and the scream of wind. My bones rattled, my teeth threatened to crack unless I kept my jaws clamped shut, and the ground was a long, long way down. Tiny doll-houses grew among picturesque fields; miniature trains rode pencil-drawing tracks and emitted diminutive puffs of smoke: England was translated into an Ordnance Survey portrait, as real as a coloured moving-picture projected beneath our feet.

  It was—if one didn't stop to consider the consequences—really quite thrilling.

  We flew on through the morning. From time to time, Javitz craned to look over his shoulder at me, and once shouted a question. I shrugged; he laughed, and turned again so I could continue my study of the back of his coat, scarf, and leather cap.

  Two and a half hours later, the engine sound changed and the ground began to grow nearer—slowly, which was a comfort. We had skirted several towns on the way up, and now I could make out the distinctive outline of York with its Minster off to the northeast. There was an air field here—field being the operative term—that Javitz seemed to know, because he made for it and took us down on the hard-packed grass. He shut off the engine, and I pulled the twists of cotton from my ears. They rang anyway. I let Javitz hand me down from my perch; on terra firma, I could feel my bones sway as if I'd been on a long sea voyage. I said, “It's hard to believe we left London at dawn and we're already in York.”

  “You needn't shout, Miss Russell.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “My ears are ringing.”

  “But it's true, this is the next revolution in travel.”

  Emergency speed was one thing, but I did not imagine the world was full of people eager to be cramped into place, shaken about, deafened, frozen, boiled, and frightened silly for the sake of a few hours saved. “I don't believe I'll invest in Imperial Airways quite yet, thank you.”

  “You're losing an opportunity,” he said, and went off to poke gingerly inside the hot engine. A short time later, a laconic individual motored up with tins of petrol in the back of his Model T, and Javitz topped up the tank. He came back before my legs had altogether regained their normal sensation.

  “Ready?” he asked. “Next stop, Edinburgh—we should be there in no time at all.”

  In fact, however, five hours later Javitz and I were barely twenty miles away, in a pasture heavy with cow droppings, working on the engine while two young cow-herds watched us from their perch atop a barred gate.

  Half a mile away, train after train steamed imperturbably northwards.

  We had come down briskly. One minute we were flying merrily northwards, the next, moving air was the loudest thing around us, and through the glass, I could hear Javitz cursing under his breath. Fortunately, it would seem that rebellious engines were commonplace to him, because after an alarmingly long time spent fiddling with the controls and slapping instruments, he stood up in his seat to peer around, found a likely field, and aimed us in that direction.

  After one hour, he'd found a number of problems that it was not. I now had as much grease on me as Javitz did, since his scarred hand could not manage the more demanding manipulations of the tools. Under his direction, I pulled one piece after another out of the engine, waited as he debated its qualities, and saw him lay it to one side before turning to the extrication of the next one. After an hour and a half, one of the cow-herds had taken pity on us and fetched up a pot of tea.

  After two hours, I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and said, “Mr Javitz, if we continue with the process of elimination, we'll soon reach the rudder.”

  “It's hard to think with you wittering at me.”

  I looked at the sturdy spanner in my hand, dropped it, and walked away.

  Two fields over, a pair of huge mares were pulling a combine harvester, inexorably up and down. Had they been cart horses, I might have stolen one and pointed its nose towards the nearest train station, but between the entangling harness and their placid gait, it would be faster to walk.

  Another train flew past, an express by the looks of it. Perhaps I could climb up the telegraph pole and fashion an impromptu Morse generator, asking Mycroft to work his magic over the trains. No doubt I could find tools in the repair kit. Or I could be more straightforward and just build a fire over the tracks, commandeering the thing by gunpoint when it stopped.

  Walking back to our makeshift aerodrome, I saw Javitz in conversation with the two boys. They trotted away, chattering avidly. When I got back to the 'plane, I saw that he had restored a fair number of the parts to their places.

  “Have you fixed it?”

  “The problem's with the petrol. I was hoping to find garbage in the carburettor, or in the fuel line, but it's in the petrol itself. The filter's a mess.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Sure, just drain the petrol and replace it.”

  We surveyed the countryside, which had a singular lack of petrol stations.

  “You've sent the boys for petrol?”

  “I've sent them for clean, empty containers. If I drain it through a chamois, it'll be fine.”

  “How many containers are we talking about?”

  “Lots,” he said.

  The tank, it turned out, contained seventy gallons of petrol when full, which it had been when we left the York field. When the two boys returned, an hour later, they were loaded down with a mad variety of vessels, from chipped tea-pot to tin bath. My job was to check each container, rinsing it if necessary in petrol, before handing it to Javitz. He would then position his chamois rag under the stream of petrol dribbling from the tank, and let the bowl, or coffee-pot, or tin bath fill up.

  We ran out of containers before the machine ran out of petrol, so the four of us wrestled the machine forward, clear of the tin bath, for Javitz to open the plug, draining the remainder on the ground. I kept an eye on the growing puddle, to make sure our assistants didn't go near it with a lit cigarette, but he finished without mishap, cleared the lines, scrubbed the filter, and put everything back in place.

  The petrol took a long time to replace, and even with the care we took, it spl
ashed around and had us reeking and light-headed. At last, when the sun was well down in the afternoon sky, Javitz tossed down the coffee-pot he had been using to transfer the liquid, and we were ready.

  He spent some time warning the boys about the danger of the fumes and traces that remained on their utensils, and more time explaining to the larger boy, in painful detail, how to work the prop and exactly what the consequences would be if the boy did it wrong.

  He climbed back, I dropped my cover down, and we crossed our fingers. When he shouted his command, the lad yanked hard on the propeller. The engine sputtered and died, and Javitz shouted for him to do it again. On the fourth try, the engine cleared its throat and came to life.

  When the boys were well clear of the wings, Javitz aimed our nose down the mild slope we had landed on, and opened the throttle.

  Hard.

  The engine noise built as 230 horses stirred themselves to life. We rattled and rumbled over the field, bouncing and nearly flipping over. My teeth felt loose in my jaw, and each bounce left us only slightly closer to air-bound.

  There was a rock wall at the far end of the field, and we were coming at it fast.

  Too fast. It looked as high as a building and was certainly solid enough to smash us to pieces. I caught only glimpses past my pilot's shoulders, but I was in no doubt that the rocks were there, greedy for our fragility, vanishing with each bounce, only to reappear closer and higher than before. Three times this happened, and I closed my eyes and drew down my head, because when we descended again, we should be on top of it.

  But we did not descend. The wings clawed at air, and the wheels kissed the stones in passing, then before us was only the violet expanse of the heavens.

  Exultation lasted perhaps thirty seconds, before it penetrated my mind that the lighter portion of sky was to our right. I rapped on the glass, then unlatched it and wrestled it up a crack to shout, “Mr Javitz, why are we going south?”

  There was no response; between the noise and the partition, communication threatened to be a one-way event. I drew breath and shouted more loudly: “We're going south!”

  I thought he had still not heard me—either that, or was refusing to acknowledge it. Then I saw that he was bent over something held near his lap. After a minute, he held up a note-pad on which he had printed:

  BE NIGHT IN EDINBURGH.

  I protested, loudly, cursing that my revolver was in the storage locker, but before I could excavate through my layers of clothing for the knife, I realised he was right: I had to trust his decisions. If we could get safely to Edinburgh, we would be going there.

  We made it back to the air field near York well before dark. Fortunately for the laconic individual who had sold us the petrol earlier, Javitz did not find him, and when he laboriously filtered the new petrol through his cloth, not a trace of foreign matter showed up. We spent the night in a nearby farmhouse that let rooms, and before it was truly light, the farmer motored us back to the air field and swung the prop for us. In minutes, the clamour drew us forward and into the sky.

  I had, I need hardly mention, given up any real expectation that this northward journey would be anything but a wild-goose chase. I was by now quite certain that Holmes would be closing in on Bergen, and he and Mycroft's men would be baying on the trail of Brothers and his captives.

  For me, onward motion was merely a thing to cling to until someone told me to stop.

  Place (2): All these are considerations in choosing the site

  for a Work: Central and apart, it must draw from the ages

  yet be ageless, between the worlds yet of the world,

  recognised as holy yet wholly secular.

  A man may search his whole life, for such a place.

  Testimony, IV:6

  WE COVERED THE TWO HUNDRED MILES TO Edinburgh in no time at all, the machine demurely slipping northwards as if in all the days since it had rolled out of the shop, it had never so much as hesitated.

  This time, the problem lay not in the engine, but outside: As we flew north, the clouds tumbled down to meet us.

  Fifty miles south of Edinburgh, the wind began—and not just wind, but rain. One moment we were grumbling along in the nice firm air, and the next the bottom dropped out of the world. It seemed eerily quiet as I rose out of my seat, stomach clenched and my skin shuddering into ice—until the machine slammed into air again and I was suddenly heavy as the propellers bit in and pulled us forward once more. It had happened so quickly, Javitz had not even shifted his hands on the controls. He glanced over his shoulder and laughed, more in relief than amusement. We climbed, I breathed, deliberately, and unclenched my rigid fingers from the seat. Two minutes later it happened again, only this time when the hole ended and we were buoyed and beginning to climb, a sudden gust from the side nearly slapped us over. Javitz fought the controls, raised our nose, and held on.

  Then drops began sporadically to spatter my glass cage. Most of it blew past Javitz, but his hand came up several times, wiping his face.

  It made for a long fifty miles, tumbling and tossing in the clouds. We came out of the mid-day murk alarmingly close to the ground, and Javitz corrected our course to point us at the aerodrome. A gust hit us just short of the ground and we hit the grass with a terrifying crack from below.

  The American gingerly slowed the machine, and I waited for him to turn us about and head back to the hangers we had flashed past. Instead, he throttled down the motor, then stood to look back at the buildings: It seemed that we were to walk back to the aerodrome. I popped up the cover and started to rise, but he stopped me.

  “Stay right there. We need your weight.”

  “Sorry?”

  “If you get out,” he explained impatiently, “we'll shuttlecock. Flip over.”

  “I see.” I sat firmly in my seat, thinking heavy thoughts, until I heard voices from outside.

  Two large men clung to the wings, the wind bullying us back and forth, while we came about and made our way back to the aerodrome. Only then was I permitted to climb down. I felt like going down on quivering knees to kiss the earth.

  One of the men directed me to a café adjoining the air field, where I went in a wobbly scurry while the rain spat down and Javitz tied down the machine and contemplated the wounded undercarriage.

  In the shelter of a room with a baking coal stove, I peered through the window and amended my thought: It appeared we would be making arrangements for repairs as well. Javitz and a man in a waterproof were squatting on either side of the right wheel, peering at where the struts connected with the body.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, then turned and looked at the waitress. “Would it be possible to have something hot to eat? It looks as though I shall be here for a while.”

  She was a maternal sort, and ticked her tongue at my state. “We'll get you something nice and warming,” she said, beginning with drink both hot and stout. I allowed her to slip a hefty and illicit dollop of whisky into the cup of tea before me, and downed the tepid atrocity in one draught. It hit me like a swung punching bag, but when the top of my head had settled back into place, I found that the impulse to pull out my revolver and begin shooting had subsided as well.

  I placed the cup gently back into its saucer, took a couple of breaths, and decided that the day was not altogether lost. The men would fix the strut, the wind would die down, we would be in Orkney by nightfall.

  And when we found that, in fact, Brothers had opted for Norway?

  I would not think about that at the moment.

  I reached for the tea-pot, and my eyes were filled with tweed: a man, beside the table; a small, round man in need of a shave, wearing a freckled brown suit and rather rumpled shirt.

  “Miss Russell?” His accent was as Scots as his suit.

  “Yes?”

  “M' name's MacDougall. Ah've a message for yeh.”

  “From?”

  “Mr Mycroft Holmes.”

  “Sit. Please. Tea?” For some reason, my tongue seemed limite
d to one-word sentences. But he sat, and the arrival of a second cup saved me the difficult decision of how to carry out my offer, so that was good. I watched him slip in and out of clear focus, and summoned my thoughts.

  “He sent me a wire, askin' me t'watch for an aeroplane. Wi' the weather as it is, I'd gone home, but the man here rang me.”

  “Mycroft. Yes. Good.”

  “Er, are you altogether well, mum?”

  My gaze slid towards the window, where the machine that had tried so hard to kill us sat, wet and complacent as men addressed themselves to its undercarriage. “It was a dilli—a difficult flight.”

  The man's gaze followed mine. “Ah can imagine. Ah know three men who've bein kilt flyin'—ye'll never get me up in one a'them infernal machines.”

  “Thank you,” I said coolly.

  His eyes came back to mine. “Sorry. I'm sure they're ever so much safer now, and your pilot's sure ta—”

  “You were saying,” I interrupted. “About Mycroft.”

  “Yes. Well, Ah was the one took his orders Tuesday, to be looking for one and possibly two men and a bairn—and sorry to say we've seen nothing of them, although it was nobbut an hour after receivin' the first wire that Ah had men at Waverley, Princes Street, and Haymarket—for the trains, yeh know—and at Leith for the steamers.”

  So it is Bergen after all, I thought, that mad-man with his knife at the throat of—

  “But while they were watching, Ah myself made the roonds of the restaurants in the toon. And Ah found they may have been here on Monday.”

  “No! Really?” I said, frankly astonished. “But you're not certain?”

  “Not without a photograph. But two English men took luncheon at the hotel near Waverley Station on Monday, and the younger was tall and had a beard. And they had a bairn with them.”

  “The child is with them?”

  “So the waiter said.”

  I felt like weeping with relief. “Waverley Station—where do trains from there go?”