Aquila

by Andrew Norriss

  ‘Geoff?’ Tom wondered what his friend was waiting for. ‘I think we should go home. I think we should go home now.’

  ‘We can’t.’ A bead of perspiration trickled down Geoff’s face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We can’t.’ His thumb was pressing the up button as hard as he could. ‘This is it. Full speed.’ He stood up briefly, and then sat down again. ‘And we’re not invisible either.’

  As Tom slowly absorbed this information, both boys could hear the voices drawing closer. Several people were scrambling up the other side of the slope and in a few seconds’ time, the men looking for Airs Murphy’s shopping trolley would come over the hill. They would see the boys and Aquila. They would ask questions. They would want to know…

  It was finished. The whole adventure was over, and they both knew there was nothing they could do about it. Geoff’s hands fell from the controls and they waited.

  It was all they could do.

  As if to express how they felt, it suddenly started to rain.

  Miss Taylor’s conversation had not been as productive as she had hoped. According to Mrs Reynolds, her son had no new interests, hobbies or friends, and was behaving in exactly the way he had always done. He did go out a bit more these days, she admitted, but she had no idea where he went.

  ‘I’m sorry he’s causing you all this bother,’ Mr Reynolds said as Miss Taylor finally stood up to leave. ‘But I’ll have a word with him. Make sure he keeps out of the library, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Please don’t.’ Miss Taylor sometimes wondered if Geoff’s father had fully grasped what children going to school was really about. ‘In fact, I’d rather you didn’t mention that I’d been here at all, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Anything you say,’ said Mr Reynolds, cheerfully.

  As he led Miss Taylor back out to her car, he suddenly remembered something.

  ‘There is one thing he’s got interested in.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just this last week, too.’ Mr Reynolds couldn’t imagine why he had not thought of it before. ‘UFOs. He’s got interested in flying saucers. He likes me to check in the morning. See if there’s anything about them in the papers.’ Mr Reynolds smiled happily. ‘There. I knew there was something.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Miss Taylor.

  It wasn’t the sort of information she had expected, but she filed it carefully away in her mind as she put the car into gear and drove off. It might only be a small piece of the jigsaw, but experience had taught her that was always how you arrived at the final picture.

  One piece at a time.

  It was Tom who noticed it first.

  It was raining quite hard – one of those sudden heavy showers that can soak you to the skin before you even have time to open the umbrella – but neither of them was getting wet.

  Nor was Aquila. As Tom looked, he could see the raindrops splashing down towards the hull, but somehow without ever seeming to connect. Aquila’s surface remained perfectly dry, as if the rain was being absorbed before it could land.

  A man’s face appeared over the brow of the hill. It was an elderly figure with a walking stick, which he pointed down the slope.

  ‘There it is!’ He started walking towards the shopping trolley on its side on the grass.

  Another man – a park attendant – scrabbled up the slope to join him.

  ‘I’ll get it. You wait here.’ He had his coat pulled over his head to keep off the rain and he climbed down towards the trolley as two more men appeared, half carrying, half dragging a rather bedraggled Mrs Murphy.

  ‘This your trolley, missus?’ asked the park attendant, as he pulled it upright. Mrs Murphy nodded.

  ‘Why aren’t they looking at us?’ said Geoff. ‘Why haven’t they said anything?’

  ‘I don’t think they can see us.’ Tom was still looking at the water not landing on Aquila. He had suddenly remembered what Mr Bampford had said about an advanced technology being able to extract energy from almost anything.

  He pointed to the purple lights at the centre of the dash. Only two of them were flashing now and, as he watched, one of those blinked into stillness.

  ‘Water.’ Tom could hardly believe it, even as he said it. ‘It runs on water.’

  That evening in the garage, Tom filled Aquila from a garden hose. It was a strange sight. The water cascaded on to Aquila’s hull and… disappeared. For almost two hours he ran the tap at full flow, and for almost two hours the water vanished somewhere into Aquila, before suddenly splashing off the surface and on to the floor, and Tom hurriedly went to turn off the tap.

  As the water was running, Tom tried to calculate how much of it Aquila was taking on. He knew the hose could fill a two-gallon watering can in about half a minute, so in two hours Aquila must have absorbed… quite a lot. He thought it might be worth working out exactly how much, as it seemed to be more than there was physically room for it to hold. Which would be interesting.

  Geoff left Tom to look after the water. Sitting in Aquila, he pressed the third button from the left on the top, and watched as the hologram of words appeared in the air in front of him.

  ‘SERVUS STO.’

  Laboriously he set about copying the words, one letter at a time, on to a piece of paper. He had a strong desire to find out what they meant.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Mr Urquart looked at the bit of paper and then at Geoff.

  ‘Where did you find this?’

  ‘We saw it written down somewhere.’

  ‘And you want to know what it means?’

  ‘I tried looking the words up,’ Tom put in, helpfully, ‘but they weren’t in the dictionary.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Mr Urquart stared at the bit of paper again. ‘It’s in Latin.’

  ‘Latin?’

  Geoff tried to sound as if this were of only casual interest.

  ‘Which wasn’t my best subject,’ Mr Urquart continued, ‘though I did scrape a GCSE.’ He handed the paper back to Geoff. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘Well… we want to find out what it means.’

  ‘That is what it means.’ The bell rang for the start of lessons, and Mr Urquart sat down at his desk. ‘Roughly speaking. A literal translation would be “I stand ready to serve”. Now, unless there’s anything else?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  Geoff and Tom walked to their seats at the back of the class. It was better than either of them had dared hoped. If a machine asks how it can help you, then it is probably expecting you to ask for some sort of help. And there were plenty of ways the boys could think of that Aquila might be able to do that.

  Unfortunately, it had asked them in Latin, presumably a consequence of the fact that it had belonged to a Roman, so conversation was not going to be easy.

  ‘Try the library at lunchtime, shall we?’ Geoff murmured as they sat down.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Tom.

  They found seven books on Latin in the library. They were ink-stained and shabby, and dated from the days when learning Latin at school had been as commonplace as doing Maths or English. There were three dictionaries, two grammars, a copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and a paperback called Latin Made Simple, written for people who were trying to teach themselves.

  Tom started with the dictionaries.

  Geoff’s idea was that they should make up a simple question in Latin to ask Aquila. It didn’t matter what the question was, he said, all they needed was something they could try out. If Aquila answered the question, even if it was an answer the boys could not understand, they would at least know they were on the right track.

  But it was turning out to be a more difficult task than they thought. Geoff had suggested translating something short like ‘What does this light do?’ or ‘How high can you go?’, but even such simple sentences were not easy to translate. The dictionary, for instance, did not have anything for the word ‘does’, but had a choice of nine different words for ‘can’. Looking at the grammar book
s was no help at all. They were filled with pages of details about irregular deponent verbs of the fourth conjugation that meant nothing to the boys at all.

  ‘Typical, isn’t it,’ muttered Geoff.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The one subject that might actually be useful, and schools don’t teach it any more.’

  Tom was flipping through the pages of Latin Made Simple.

  ‘If it doesn’t matter what we ask, I suppose we could try one of these.’ He pointed to one of the exercises set at the end of a chapter. It was a series of sentences to be turned into Latin, and one or two of them were questions.

  ‘I know they’re in English here,’ said Tom, ‘but it’s got the answers at the back of the book.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’ asked Geoff.

  ‘Are they in the garden with the boys?’ Tom read.

  It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you were burning to know, Geoff thought, but it might serve their purpose.

  The news was greeted in the staffroom with understandable disbelief.

  ‘They’re what?’ asked Miss Taylor.

  ‘They’re teaching themselves Latin.’ Miss Poulson couldn’t help smiling as she said it. ‘Graham Urquart found them in the library.’

  ‘Reynolds and Baxter? Learning Latin?’ Miss Taylor stared at her across the coffee table. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I know it’s odd.’ Miss Poulson had just come from the library. ‘But that’s what they were doing.’

  ‘It’s not odd. It’s unbelievable.’ Miss Taylor frowned. ‘What did Graham say exactly?’

  ‘Just that he found them at one of the tables surrounded by dictionaries, notepads and paper, beavering away…’

  ‘Oh, this is ridiculous!’ Miss Taylor snorted. ‘Those two boys are doing something, and I demand to know what it is!’

  Geoff pressed the button.

  ‘SERVUS STO’ appeared in the air, just as before, and Tom read out the first of the questions he had highlighted in the book.

  ‘Suntne in horto cum pueris?’

  The reply was instantaneous, and was a single word.

  ‘NESCIO.’

  ‘It talks.’ A beatific smile spread across Geoff’s face. ‘It talks!’

  ‘Unfortunately, it only talks Latin.’ Tom started carefully copying the word on to a piece of paper. ‘I wonder what it means.’

  ‘We can find out what it means.’ Geoff leant back in Aquila with a smile of satisfaction. ‘What matters is, it talks. Go on, ask it one of the others.’

  Tom read the next question from the book.

  ‘Cur magistri puellas oppugnabant?’

  It meant ‘Why were the masters attacking the girls?’ and again, Aquila’s reply was instantaneous.

  ‘QUAE PUELLAE’

  ‘Oh, this is great!’ Geoff smiled happily. ‘This is fantastic. Give us another one, go on!’

  When he had finished copying the reply, Tom asked the next question, and the result this time was a lot more than a couple of words. Whole pages of writing suddenly filled the air in front of them, arranged in a curved space around them that was over two metres long and about a metre high.

  ‘Wow!’ Geoff breathed. ‘What did you ask that time?’

  ‘Which country do you come from?’ said Tom. He knew he would never be able to copy down all the reply, but he made a start on the first sentence.

  ‘Neat. Really neat.’ Geoff nodded happily. His only worry was how long it might take Tom to translate all these replies. In the library, when they had asked Mr Urquart how long it took people to learn Latin, he had said eight or nine years was not uncommon.

  Geoff did not want to wait that long.

  What they needed was some expert help.

  ‘Are you sure they weren’t winding you up?’

  ‘Quite sure.’ In the library, Mr Urquart was showing Miss Taylor the table where the boys had been working. ‘In fact I only found what they were doing by accident. They were trying to keep it a secret.’

  ‘A secret?’

  ‘They had a couple of football annuals propped up to hide what they were doing. If I hadn’t come behind them to put some books away, I’d never have known.’

  Miss Taylor shook her head. She still found the whole thing very difficult to believe. ‘I’m calling a meeting for four o’clock this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I want anyone who teaches those boys or has even talked to them in the last fortnight to be there. We have to get to the bottom of this. Is that all right with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And we’ll need all the information we can get. I wonder when the last time was that anyone searched their desks.’

  ‘Searched their…?’ Mr Urquart looked rather startled. ‘Wouldn’t that be an invasion of privacy?’

  Miss Taylor gave him a pitying glance. ‘You’d better come with me to the classroom and show me where they sit.’ She led the way out of the library. ‘You’ve really no idea what this Latin business was about?’

  ‘None at all.’ Mr Urquart followed the Deputy Headmistress down the corridor to the form room. ‘It just seemed they wanted to learn. Tom even asked if I could give him lessons, but I told him I wouldn’t be much use. I said they’d need someone like Mr Hodge.’

  Mr Hodge had come to Stavely Boys’ Grammar School thirty-five years before, to teach Latin and Greek. As the years passed, the demand for these subjects had declined, the grammar school had become a comprehensive, and Mr Hodge had had to adapt his teaching abilities to other areas.

  At the moment, he taught something called Home Skills, which involved helping young people learn the things they would need to know when they had houses and families of their own. It was not a job that suited him. Mr Hodge had no family and his house was notoriously unhygienic.

  He was due to retire in a year, and the Board of Governors prayed that no student would actually die in one of his ‘Safety in the Home’ lessons before then. It looked like being a close run thing.

  When Tom and Geoff found him, he was setting out some ironing boards and irons, ready to teach 5D the finer points of ironing a shirt. He had snagged his fingers twice and had a nasty burn on his forearm which he was running under the cold tap.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked when he saw the boys. He had a nervous, hunted look, and regarded most children with some suspicion.

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ said Geoff, ‘we wondered if you could tell us what this means.’ He passed over the paper on which Tom had written the replies that Aquila had made.

  Mr Hodge looked at the paper.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I thought you used to teach Latin,’ said Tom.

  ‘I did.’ Mr Hodge took his arm from under the cold tap and put on his glasses. ‘That’s what nescio means. First person singular of the verb not to know. The next one is “what girls?”, and this last paragraph… is really rather interesting.’ He looked up at the boys. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘It’s a sort of puzzle,’ said Geoff.

  ‘Is it? It’s not a text I’ve come across before, but it seems clear enough.’ A curious change had come over Mr Hodge’s face as he studied the words. The hunted look had disappeared, and his eyes glinted with enthusiasm. ‘It says…“This life-raft was made by the people of Deneb in the fourth decade of the reign of the Emperor D’BengPar, as part of one of the many flying warships built to defend his property from the treacherous and deceitful Yrrillian.” ’ He paused. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘Where’s Deneb?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Mr Hodge shook his head. ‘The only Deneb I’ve heard of is a star. Somewhere in the constellation of Cygnus. Would that fit your puzzle at all?’

  ‘Yes.’ Geoff nodded slowly. ‘It might fit rather well.’

  ‘It’s beautifully phrased.’ Mr Hodge read the Latin to himself once more, relishing the words as they rolled off his tongue, but before he could finish, the water in the sink overflowed on to the po
wer cable leading to one of the irons. There was a loud bang as the fuse blew, and Mr Hodge stepped back in alarm. He tripped over the end of an ironing board, banged his head on the corner of a table, and fell to the floor.

  Tom and Geoff waited with him till the ambulance arrived. It seemed the least they could do in return for his help, though they were both anxious to write down the translation he had given them before they forgot it.

  As soon as she saw it, Miss Taylor knew that she had found what she was looking for.

  The exercise book had been lying quite openly in Tom’s desk. On the cover, was written ‘Aquila’ in large capital letters, and underneath it was a drawing of an eagle, carrying a banner in its mouth with the words ‘Licet volare, si in tergo aquilae volat.’

  She flipped through the pages in which Tom had carefully recorded everything that had happened since the day Geoff had fallen into the cave. As well as the writing, there were maps, newspaper cuttings, and drawings of the dashboard of Aquila, with careful descriptions of what some of the lights did.

  As Miss Taylor turned the pages, everything slotted into place. However unlikely, she knew there was only one explanation that could possibly fit all the facts.

  She passed the book to Mr Urquart, who riffled through it, and gave a low whistle.

  ‘We need a photocopy,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘And then we have to get this book back in his desk before afternoon lessons. I don’t want them to suspect anything. Not yet.’

  They finally had the answer they’d been looking for, Geoff realized. At the front of the class, Miss Poulson was talking about the Treaty of Versailles, but Geoff, in a world of his own, was not even pretending to listen.

  Aquila could talk. They could ask it what each of the various buttons did. They could find out when it had been made, and who for. They could ask it what the matter was if anything went wrong. It could tell them what it could do, how it worked, who the Yrrillians were…

  The answers, of course, would be in Latin, and they would not be able to ask Mr Hodge for translations on any regular basis, not without arousing suspicion, but Tom would get the hang of it eventually. Geoff had great faith in his friend. He was a lot smarter than most people realized.