The Language of Bees

by Laurie R. King

  “London, Glasgow, and the north of Scotland. But if you're going to ask me to question the ticket-sellers, there's little point, without a pho—”

  I stood up fast, then grabbed at the table to keep from sprawling on my face. While the room spun around me, I said through gritted teeth, “Take me to that hotel.”

  “Mum, I dinna think—”

  “Do you have a motor?” I demanded.

  “Yes, but—”

  “I have photographs,” I told him, and began to hunt them out of my pocket when my eye was caught by a figure trotting across the tarmac towards us. I left my hand where it was; Javitz opened the door and stuck his head inside. Rain dripped from his hat.

  “Miss Russell? We're set to go, as soon as she's fuelled up.”

  I stood motionless, caught by indecision: I deeply mistrusted leaving a vital interrogation to others, even if the other was one of Mycroft's… The tableau might have lasted forever—one dripping, one with her hand in her pocket, one waiting in apprehension—had the waitress not decided this was a good time to present me with my meal.

  The aroma of meat and roast potatoes reached me where the motion did not. I pulled my hand from my pocket, then looked at the plate, and at her.

  “I don't think I'm going to have time to eat that. But if your cook could make me half a dozen bacon butties or fried-egg sandwiches to take with me, there'll be a gold guinea if it's here in four minutes. Mr Javitz, do you plan to stop again short of Thurso?”

  “Inverness.”

  “I'll be with you as soon as the food is ready.” The two left, in opposite directions. I turned to Mycroft's tweed-suited agent. “Mr…?”

  “MacDougall,” he provided.

  “Yes. Did you question the waiter about… anything?”

  “Just if those men had been here.”

  “Not about their behaviour, their temper?”

  “Mr Holmes didna' ask for that.”

  “Well, I am asking. I need you to go back to the hotel with these photographs, and confirm that this was the older man, this the younger, and this the child—he has a fuller beard now, and she's a bit older. I also need you to ask about the behaviour of the men—were they amiable or angry, did one of them seem drunk or drugged? Did they seem to be working in harness, or was one of them in charge and the other fearful, or resentful, or … You see what I'm asking?”

  “Ah do.”

  “Can you then find a way to get me that information at either Inverness or Thurso?”

  “Ah've a colleague in Inverness, although Ah dunno if Ah'll have the information by the time you reach there.”

  “We shall probably be forced to spend the night at Inverness,” I told him. “Have your colleague there ask for us at the air field. And lacking Inverness, send a wire to the telegraph office in Thurso.”

  A large, warm parcel was thrust into my arms by the breathless waitress, and I duly dug out the cost of the luncheon, laying one of the gold guineas on top. She wandered off, transfixed by the gleam in her palm. I thanked MacDougall and trotted back to the aeroplane, to share out the meal with Javitz and eye the repair on the undercarriage. It looked like a splint held in place with baling wire and sticking plasters; I opened my mouth, closed it, and climbed into my seat. We made it down the field and into the air without it breaking, so that was good.

  The fur coat and rugs around my shoulders were almost adequate. The knowledge that the child was alive warmed my thoughts, but made little inroad on my icy toes.

  The Stars (1): The man was but a child when he heard

  the message of the stars, seeing the precision of the link

  between their paths and those of human beings.

  Testimony, IV:7

  A HUNDRED TWENTY MILES FROM EDINBURGH TO Inverness, and we fought the wind and rain every inch of the way. We followed the railway lines, which added miles but gave us sure guidance. As the clouds dropped ever lower, we did as well, until I feared we might meet an engine head-on. Javitz hunched over the controls, the juddering of the stick knocking through his body like a blow. Every so often, I saw him peer forward at the instruments, and I could tell when he braced his knees around the control stick to reach out and tap at the instruments.

  The wind howled, the rain beat us sideways, the 'plane groaned and cracked, and even the wind clawing at the cover could not take away the stink of fear in my boxed-in space.

  On a good day, we might have covered the distance in ninety minutes, but between the head-wind and being continually blown off course, it was twice that by the time we saw signs of a city below. The number of times Javitz leant forward to rap at the gauges did not make my stomach any easier around the stony eggs and sloshing coffee.

  We came down ominously close to dusk, slowing, dropping, teetering on the gusts. Javitz chose what appeared to be a mowed hayfield, although as we descended I noticed a faded red length of cloth nailed to a high post at the far end, tugged back and forth, tautly horizontal to the ground. He slowed us further, rising into a half-stand so he could see past the nose. No aerodrome here: If his undercarriage repairs failed, we would be grounded.

  Then again, if the repairs failed on landing, further transportation might be the least of our worries.

  Clearly, the danger was foremost on the pilot's mind, as well. Javitz fought the machine for control, our low tanks and the 405 square feet of wing threatening to upend us before we touched down. When he did tap the wheels to the ground—gently, cautiously—the wind perversely refused to let us go, lifting and playing us on the razor's edge of flipping over all the way down the field.

  We came to a halt, wings still quivering, ten feet from the hedgerow at the field's end.

  Javitz peeled one hand off the control stick and cut the fuel.

  Silence pounded at our eardrums. In a calm voice that sounded very far away, Javitz said, “I'm going to go get drunk now, if you don't mind. I'll meet you back here at dawn.”

  “What—” I strangled on the word, cleared my throat and tried again. “What about the machine?”

  “I'll make arrangements.”

  The arrangements came from the nearby house to meet us, in the form of a grizzled farmer and his strapping young son, the latter of whom was clearly the enthusiast. The lad stared from the aeroplane to the pilot in open admiration, while his disapproving father moved to tie our eager machine down to earth. I half-fell down the ladder, accepted the valise that Javitz thrust into my arms, and watched him march away down the field with the young man trailing behind, pelting him with unanswered questions.

  After a minute, I realized an older man was standing at my side, and had asked me something. “Terribly sorry,” I said. “I could rather use a Ladies', if you might direct me?”

  I felt his hand on my elbow, propelling me in the direction of the building he'd come out of. He led me through a kitchen, showed me a door, and went away. I put down the valise, closed the door, and knelt to vomit into the tidy enamel lavatory.

  When the spasm had passed, I stayed where I was for a time, shuddering with a combination of cold and reaction, emitting a noise that was part groan and part cry. Not unlike the noise the wind had made all afternoon around my head.

  All right, I said after a minute. Enough. I got to my feet, washed my hands, splashed water on my face, and even went into my valise for a comb to restore my hair to order. When I came out, I felt approximately halfway to human.

  Which was just as well: The man standing in the farmer's kitchen was so out of place, he could only be Mycroft's Inverness contact, colleague to Mr MacDougall.

  “Mungo Clarty, at your service,” he declared. His name and speech patterns were Scots, although the accent originated two hundred miles to the south. He marched across the room with his hand extended, pumping my arm as if trying to draw water. “I've been instructed to make you welcome and get whatever you might want. And if you're fretting over your pilot, I've sent a friend to look after him, in case he decides to get a bit the worse for wear. I
've telephoned to a dear friend of mine, runs a lovely boarding-house in the town with more hot water than you could ask for, beds fit for a queen and a cellar second to none. Does that sound like what you'll be needing?”

  Had he remained where he was, I might have draped myself around him in gratitude and wept on his shoulder, but he had let go of my hand and picked up my valise, and was already taking our leave from the farmer, leading me from the warm kitchen to his waiting motor, talking over his shoulder all the time.

  “You haven't had any information from MacDougall?” I asked when he paused for breath. His motorcar was not as warm as the farmer's kitchen, but it was blessedly out of the wind, and the travelling rug he tucked over my knees was thick.

  “He said to tell you the waiter had gone to see his mother, whatever that means, but that he's going after him.”

  I took a breath, and pushed away temptation. “Good man. I need to visit all the hotels and restaurants in town.”

  “All the—that'll take most of the night!”

  “What, in a town this size?”

  “Inverness is the door to the north,” he said, sounding reproachful. “Anyone going to northern Scotland passes through here.”

  “Superb,” I muttered. “Perhaps we should begin with any ticket agencies that may be open.”

  It was, as Clarty had warned me, many hours before I took to that bed fit for a queen. Even when I did, so cold through that I gasped with relief at the hot-water bottle against my feet, the physical warmth had no chance against the turmoil of my thoughts.

  We had found no trace of them. I had looked at my last pair of the photographs Holmes had left me, loath to let go of them, but in the end decided that, from here on, the places I would be asking were so remote, any three strangers would attract notice: descriptions would suffice. I left the photographs with Clarty, so he could repeat the circuit of ticket agents and hotels during the daylight hours.

  Friday morning, at dawn, I returned to the air field to do it all again.

  If Inverness was a tenth the size of Edinburgh, Thurso would have a tenth the population of Inverness, too small a setting for Mycroft to have any sort of an agent: From here on, I was on my own. I had asked for a car to pick me up well before dawn, not wanting to rob Clarty of his already short sleep, and I could hear its engine chuckling on the street outside when I walked down the stairs of the boarding-house, so ill-slept I felt hung over.

  The owner was there, looking fresh as a terrier, and greeted me a good morning.

  “I don't suppose you had any messages during the night, for me?” I asked her.

  But she had not had a message to assure me that Holmes had resolved the issue on his own. Nothing to transform my Valkyrie ride through hell into a placid, unadventurous, puffing, ground-based train-ride back to the warm, dry, August-kissed South Downs. I would even process the honey from the other hives, I pledged, were it to absolve me from climbing back into that aeroplane.

  But, no message, telegraphic, telephonic, or even telepathic.

  I followed the obscenely cheerful driver out onto the rain-shined street, and he drove me to the hay-field.

  Javitz was there before me, his young admirer lingering at a distance. My pilot looked no better than I felt. Still, his hands were steady as he poured me a cup from a thermal flask filled with scalding coffee.

  He walked away and finished his check of our various levels by torch-light. I cradled the coffee to its dregs, and dropped the cup back onto the flask. When he came back, I handed it to him, and glanced up at the glass-wrapped passenger chamber with loathing.

  Instead of offering me a hand, as he had before, he leant back against the wing and lit a cigarette. “It's ninety miles, more or less, to Thurso,” he began. “That weather report you saw me with, back in London, warned me that the wind was building, and it's out of the north-east. That's why we came across the mountains from Edinburgh instead of following the coast-line.

  “But from here on, we don't have a choice. Even if we keep inland, we'll get the wind. The weather's going to be bad,” he said bluntly. “It's expected to blow itself out by tomorrow, but today's going to be rough. And when we leave Thurso, it'll be worse.” He studied me in the half-light. “This could kill us.”

  Since I had come to work with Holmes, I had spent rather more time than most women my age in contemplating my imminent death. Gun, knife, bomb—I had faced all those and survived. Death by fire would be terrible, and drowning awful, but relatively quick. Falling from a great height, however, with no control, no hope, no avoiding the knowledge of a terrible meeting with the earth: That would be forever.

  I swallowed: It would be easier, if I only knew. If I were certain that we were on the right track, that my presence in Orkney was the only hope for Damian and his Estelle, I would not hesitate to risk my life, or that of this brave man who had blindly done all I asked, and more. If I were sure …

  I met his eyes. “I can't lie to you. There is a good chance that we are chasing a wild goose. We may get to Orkney and find our quarry has never been there, never had any intention of going there. And before you ask, yes, I knew it before we left London. My partner and his brother both disagree with me, and are hunting elsewhere.

  “Two things I am certain about: One, that I could be right. And two, we only have today. Right or wrong, tomorrow will be too late for two lives, one of those a child. If I could fly this machine myself, I would. If your professional judgment decides that it is insane to go into the air today, I'll see what I can do by train.”

  Javitz tossed away his cigarette end and said merely, “Okay. Let's see how things look in Thurso. Lad,” he called. “Help us get the machine turned around.”

  When the 'plane was facing the other way, he handed me up, then scrambled past me into his own seat. Our eager helper took up his position at the front, and when Javitz gave him a shout, he yanked the prop with all his young strength and passion. Instantly, the roar of the engine assaulted our ears. The boy whipped away the chocks, and we bumped down the deserted field before the sun cleared the horizon. The head-lamps of an arriving motor-car sought us out, but we were already throwing ourselves at the clouds.

  The furs and rugs were cold and damp; they never did actually warm up.

  They say that a woman in labour enters a state in which time is suspended and the sensations she is undergoing become dream-like. Men attacked by ferocious beasts claim to enter a similar other-worldly state of grace, when their horror and pain become distant, and oddly unreal. I know, having flown that day from Inverness to Thurso, that a person can only hold so much sheer terror before the mind folds itself away.

  We were shaken by giant hands every one of those 150 miles, tossed about and batted up and down. Sometimes we flew above unyielding ground; other times we were suspended above cold, white-licked sea; once we flattened ourselves against a young mountain that loomed abruptly out of the clouds. That time, Javitz emitted a string of distracted curses, and I curled over with my hands wrapped around my head, whimpering and waiting for a ripping impact and nothingness.

  The engine roared on.

  I retreated into myself and wrapped the world around my head like the travelling rugs. We bounced and rattled and I felt nothing—not until the unending noise suddenly halted and the 'plane ceased its inexorable press against my spine. We both came bolt upright, flooded with panic for three interminable seconds of silence before the engine caught again and the propellers resumed. The shoulders before me were bent over the controls so tightly I thought the stick was in danger of shearing off; my throat felt peculiar, until I found I was keening with the wind.

  We followed railroad tracks along the coast, up a river, and through mountains to another river. The ground below settled somewhat, although the wind relented not a whit, and I eyed the green fields and the river with love, knowing that they would be marginally softer than the mountains and warmer than the sea.

  Finally, a gap in the clouds permitted us a glimpse of
open water with a small town at its edge.

  Then the clouds obscured it; at the same moment, the engine spluttered into silence for a terrifying count of four, then caught again.

  It did it once more when the town was directly to our right. This time the silence held long enough that the machine grew heavy and tilted, eager to embrace gravity. Javitz cursed; I made a little squeak of a noise; with a sputtering sound, the propeller found purpose again.

  If Thurso was too small for an agent of Mycroft Holmes, it was also too small for an air field. However, it did have an apparently smooth and not entirely under-water pasture free of boulders, cattle, and rock walls—Javitz seemed to know it, or else he spotted it and was too desperate to survey the ground for other options. The house beside it had sheets hanging out to dry; as we aimed our descent at the field, I noted numbly that, in the space of a few seconds, the laundry flipped around to cover roughly 200 of a circle's 360 degrees.

  We splashed down, skidded and slewed around, and came to rest facing the way we had come. Javitz shut down the motor and we sat, incapable of either speech or movement, until we became aware of shouting. I raised the cover, and a red-faced farmer pulled himself up. “Wha' the bliudy ‘ell're yeh playing at, yeh blooten’ idjit?” the man shouted. “Ye think p'raps we enjoy scrapin' you lot off'n our walls? May waif thought he'd be comin’ threw the sittin’ room winda—c'mere and A'll kick yer— Captain Javitz? Is that you?” His hard Scots suddenly lost a great degree of its regionality.

  “Hello there, Magnuson. Sorry to give your wife a fright, it wasn't half what we gave ourselves.”

  “Jaysus be damned, Javitz, I'd not have thought it even of you. Oh, miss, pardon me, I didn't see you.”

  “Quite all right,” I said. One might have thought I would be growing accustomed to life in a state of fear and trembling, but my voice wasn't altogether steady. Nor were my legs, when I made to stand.

  Javitz and I staggered into open air. The rain had stopped, but the sea-scented wind beat at us and made the aeroplane twitch like a fractious horse. The farmer, Magnuson, eyed it as if it were about to take to the air on its own—not, in fact, an impossibility.