Aquila

by Andrew Norriss

  Beside him, Tom was busily filling in the details of the day’s events in the exercise book he had taken from his desk.

  ‘It explains why there was nothing written down at the site, doesn’t it?’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always wondered why the centurion didn’t have anything written down. like a book of instructions, to remind him what all the lights did.’ Tom pointed to his exercise book. ‘I mean, I’ve written everything down, but he didn’t have to, did he? All he had to do was ask.’

  Geoff looked at Tom’s book. ‘You’ve written everything down in there?’

  ‘Yes.’ Tom looked up. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Geoff. ‘Only I don’t think you should leave it in your desk. We don’t want anyone else to find it, do we?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  The start of Miss Taylor’s meeting was delayed for some minutes by the late arrival of Mr Hodge who had been at the hospital having his head X-rayed, but at a quarter past four it finally got under way.

  ‘I’d like to thank you all for giving up your time at such short notice.’ The Deputy Headmistress looked round at the dozen or so members of staff seated in her office. ‘As you’ve possibly heard, I’m concerned about the activities of two boys – Tom Baxter and Geoff Reynolds – who were found this morning, in the library, trying to teach themselves Latin.’

  A murmur of shock and concern ran round those of the staff who had not yet heard about this.

  ‘In the last four days,’ Miss Taylor continued, ‘these same boys have approached Derek Bampford to ask about advanced power technologies. They asked Amy Poulson about the early navigation techniques used in the Flying Corps, and Peter Duncan found them on Monday trying to solve a maths problem in their free time… for fun.’

  ‘They were at it again this morning,’ Mr Duncan chipped in. ‘Came to me at the end of the lesson. Wanting to work out something about a tap, a watering can and how big was the bath it filled in two hours.’

  ‘Thank you, Peter.’ It was the first Miss Taylor had heard about that one. ‘Now, that is exactly why we’re here. I want to know what’s going on, and the first thing we need to do is pool any information we have on their behaviour.’ She looked around the room. ‘Has anyone else noticed these boys doing anything odd in the last week or so?’

  Eight people put their hands up.

  At the controls of Aquila, Geoff banked to the right, and began a gentle descent that would carry them down towards Tom’s garden. Both boys were filled with that deep satisfaction that comes from knowing that a difficult day has turned out rather better than either of them had dared to expect.

  As Geoff said, once Tom had learnt to speak Latin, they would be able to ask Aquila so many things. They would be able to find out what the buttons did without the risks involved in just pushing them to see what happened. And when they knew what they did, they might even find out what some of them were for.

  ‘Like that one,’ said Tom, pointing to the button which had produced the blue light that had kidnapped Mrs Murphy’s shopping trolley. ‘I mean, what’s it actually supposed to do?’

  They were coming in over Mrs Murphy’s garden as he said it and unfortunately Geoff chose exactly that moment to swing Aquila round towards Tom’s garage.

  The unexpected movement shifted Tom forward in his seat, and his finger made a momentary contact with the button at which he had been pointing. The contact lasted for only a fraction of a second before Tom snatched his hand away, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.

  Aquila was now on full power, and the blue cord of light that appeared beneath it, instead of lazily snaking its way out, flashed to the ground like a bolt of lightning.

  ‘What was that?’ Tom asked, as Geoff took his hands off the controls to stare at the ground beneath them.

  ‘I think’, said Geoff, ‘that was Mrs Murphy.’

  Mrs Murphy, in her garden, had been bending down to pick up one of her cats, when the bolt of blue light had engulfed her.

  Neither she nor the cat had moved since.

  Geoff landed Aquila by the burnt-out shed at the bottom of the old lady’s garden, and the boys climbed out.

  ‘Mrs Murphy?’ Tom ran towards her. ‘Mrs Murphy, are you all right?’

  But Mrs Murphy did not reply. She still had not moved and, as Tom got closer, he realized she was not breathing.

  Both she and the cat appeared to be completely frozen. Even her clothes and the cat’s fur had a solid, unwavering look as if they’d been soaked in starch, and when Geoff stretched out a hand and tapped the old woman on the arm, it made a metallic ringing sound.

  He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.

  It was one of those times when it was difficult to know what to say.

  ‘I’ve killed them, haven’t I?’ said Tom.

  ‘Well…’ Geoff looked closely at Mrs Murphy’s face. ‘I know she’s not moving…’

  ‘She’s not breathing either.’

  ‘No,’ Geoff conceded, ‘but if she was dead, wouldn’t she have fallen down or something? I mean, she looks perfectly all right. Just… not moving.’

  Tom’s shoulders sagged. ‘We’d better go and tell the police or someone.’ He turned back to Aquila. ‘My mother is not going to like this, you know. She is not going to like this at all…’

  ‘Hang on.’ Geoff caught his friend’s arm. ‘There is one thing we could try first…’

  *

  Miss Taylor had been taking notes. Most of the things people were saying, she had already known, but some details were new, and had surprised even her.

  Mr Urquart had given a list of the eight books the boys had taken out of the library in the last week, which included titles such as A History of Rome and Great Palaces of Europe. Mr Rivers, head of the Science department, reported that they had also taken two books from his subject library – on lasers.

  Mrs Ross, the English teacher, described how, after a lesson, the two boys said they had been reading H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man and had quizzed her at some length on how invisibility might actually work. And the oddest revelation in some ways had come from Mr Weigart, in charge of Design Technology, who said that, the day before, he had found the two boys in his craft room trying to make a sextant.

  Mr Duncan, when someone had explained to him what a sextant was, voiced the bemused astonishment of everyone there.

  ‘What are they doing? What on earth is going on?’

  ‘I think I may have the answer to that.’ Miss Taylor stood up and started passing round a set of photocopies, neatly stapled together. ‘If you’d all like to have a look at this? It’s a copy of something we found in Tom’s desk at lunchtime.’

  Mr Bampford looked at the top page of his photocopy.

  ‘Does anyone know what the Latin bit means?’

  ‘It means “Any man can fly”,’ Mr Hodge spoke slowly and carefully, ‘ “if he rides on the back of an eagle.” ’ He looked across at the Deputy Headmistress. ‘I’m surprised to find a child today knowing something like that.’

  ‘You wait till you see the rest of it,’ said Miss Taylor.

  Doctor Warner was sitting in her tent when the phone rang. Deep in thought, the archaeologist was contemplating the object that had been dug up that morning from the earth directly beneath the body of the Roman centurion. It was, she knew, quite impossible. But impossible or not, it continued to sit where she had placed it, on the table in front of her.

  It was a 100 per cent authentic. Red Indian tomahawk.

  The noise of the phone slowly penetrated her brain, and she picked it up.

  ‘Yes, of course I remember you, Tom,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’ She paused. ‘You want the Latin for what?’

  ‘Whatever you did to that woman, please could you undo it now,’ repeated Tom.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Is that too difficult?’

  ‘No. It’s not diffi
cult,’ said Doctor Warner. ‘I’m just wondering why anyone would want to say it.’

  ‘We’re sort of talking to someone,’ Tom explained. ‘like on the Internet. But they only speak Latin. Please,’ he added. ‘You’re the only person we can think of to ask.’

  Doctor Warner stared at the ceiling of the tent for a few seconds. ‘Quidquid illi mulieri fecisti, id facias infectum,’ she said eventually. ‘Was there anything else?’

  ‘Could you hang on a bit?’

  In the background she could hear Tom repeating the sentence she had given him, and a moment later he was back on the line.

  ‘It says “Quaefemina?” What would that mean?’

  ‘It means whoever you’ve got there wants to know which woman you’re talking about,’ said Doctor Warner. ‘Are you boys in some sort of trouble?’

  ‘No, no. No trouble. How can we say “The woman in die garden”?’

  ‘I think before I do anything else,’ said Doctor Warner, ‘I really would like to know what’s going on.’

  ‘Could we explain some other time?’ asked Tom. ‘Only it’s a bit urgent.’

  ‘Who are you talking to? And why are they talking in Latin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘They just are.’

  ‘But they must know another language. Why don’t you ask them to use it?’

  ‘We can’t,’ said Tom. ‘You see…’ He broke off. ‘How exactly would we do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How could we tell it to speak English, for instance,’ said Tom. ‘In Latin.’

  Doctor Warner sighed. ‘Try “Utere Brittanka lingua.” ’

  ‘Utere Brittanica lingua,’ Tom repeated, and Doctor Warner heard a sharp intake of breath, a whoop of triumph, and somewhere in the background there was Geoff’s voice shouting, ‘Fantastic! Oh, wow! That is unbelievable!’

  ‘Tom? Tom, are you there? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better, Doctor Warner.’ Tom’s voice had a quietly triumphant ring. ‘And thank you. Thank you very much indeed.’

  The phone went dead. On reflection, Doctor Warner decided it had been one of the oddest conversations she had ever had, and she wondered briefly if she should tell someone about it.

  Instead, she put down the phone and picked up the tomahawk from the table. As she ran it through her fingers, all thoughts of anything else drifted out of her mind.

  In her hands, she knew, she held the first conclusive proof that, about a thousand years before Columbus, the Romans had discovered America.

  All was quiet in the Deputy Headmistress’s office, as the staff studied the photocopied pages Miss Taylor had given them, reading in an absorbed silence.

  Mrs Ross was the first to speak. ‘You’re sure this is all genuine?’ she asked. ‘Tom Baxter wrote this himself?’

  ‘Every word,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I’ve seen the original.’

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ said Air Duncan.

  ‘I agree. It’s quite unbelievable. But it’s there.’ Miss Taylor leant forward over her desk. ‘Individually, I know, none of the things we’ve talked about mean anything very much, but taken together and particularly in the light of this –’ she gestured to the copy of Tom’s exercise book – ‘I think there is only one conclusion we can come to.’

  Around her, there was a slow, but distinct nodding of heads.

  ‘The question is… what are we going to do about it?’

  Sitting in Aquila, Tom and Geoff stared at the words hanging in the air in front of them.

  ‘WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?’

  ‘I think’, said Geoff, ‘we’d like for you to always use English from now on.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘No more Latin,’ said Tom.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And the first thing we want to know –’ Geoff pointed to Mrs Murphy – ‘is what you did to her?’

  ‘WHO?’

  ‘Mrs Murphy.’ Tom pointed more carefully to where Mrs Murphy stood, frozen in the act of picking up her cat. ‘The woman over there.’

  ‘SUBJECT HELD IN TEMPORAL STASIS.’

  ‘Temporal stasis…’ Tom read it aloud. ‘What’s that?’

  Words filled the air in front of him. There was something in the first sentence about a six-dimensional matrix created by molecular displacement and fractal transpositioning, but none of it was remotely comprehensible.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what it is,’ said Geoff. ‘We just want it undone.’ He turned to Aquila. ‘Whatever you did to Mrs Murphy this morning –’

  ‘And the cat,’ said Tom.

  ‘Right… and the cat. Whatever it was, we want you to undo it now.’

  ‘Please,’ said Tom.

  ‘OK.’

  A whiplash of moving light appeared from beneath Aquila, though this time it was a mauvish purple instead of blue. Quicker than the eye could follow, it reached out to engulf both Mrs Murphy and the cat…

  and blinked out.

  The cat gave a brief yowl, jumped down and ran into the house. Mrs Murphy stood up looking rather puzzled, and swayed dangerously backwards. Tom jumped out of Aquila and ran over to catch her before she fell. Geoff brought up a garden chair so she could sit down.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Tom.

  ‘I think so.’ Airs Murphy sounded rather out of breath. ‘I don’t know what happened, but… I was trying to pick up Percy, and… Oh, dear!’ She held her head.

  ‘Let’s go indoors and get you a glass of water,’ suggested Tom.

  ‘Thank you.’ Mrs Murphy smiled at him. ‘How lucky I am you boys came round.’ Hanging on to Tom’s arm, she tottered into the house. ‘I’m having a lot of trouble with these pills the doctor’s given me. You know, I’ve a good mind to go back to being depressed. It seemed a lot less bother.’

  The excitement of the day’s discoveries made it difficult for Geoff to sleep that night.

  Aquila was parked just outside his bedroom window, and at midnight, still wide awake, he gave up trying to sleep, got out of bed, and climbed outside to sit at the controls.

  He did not want to go anywhere. He was content simply to sit there, six metres in the air, with the night sky around him, his face gently illuminated by the lights from the dash.

  They could no longer leave Aquila in Tom’s garage. Tom had got home that day to find Mrs Baxter busily clearing things out to make room for the car she said she intended to buy. Apparently her treatment was progressing far faster than anyone had expected.

  Geoff had suggested that he keep Aquila outside his bedroom. It would be well off the ground so no one would walk into it, and in the morning, all he would have to do was step out of the window…

  While he was sitting there, he would have liked to ask Aquila some of the questions he had about how old it was, why exactly it had been made, and what it could do, but without Tom to read the answers there was little point.

  And then he realized that there was one question he had that did not require reading for an answer, and he pressed the small green light, third in from the left.

  ‘WHAT CAN I DO FOR YOU?’

  ‘I want to know how far you can go, without having to fill up with water again,’ said Geoff. ‘In miles.’

  The number that stretched out in front of him began with a three, but consisted mostly of noughts. Row upon row, line upon line of them, metre upon metre.

  Geoff smiled in satisfaction. It seemed you could go a very long way in Aquila.

  At midnight, the lights in Miss Taylor’s office were still burning as well. She had a spent a large part of the evening making phone calls to various authorities, explaining the situation, and how she thought it should be handled. Then there had been the paperwork to complete – the forms to fill in, the instructions for her staff, the timetable for action.

  It was important to act quickly and decisively, she thought, before the boys knew what was happening and had time to react.

  Carefully, she checked through her notes one last
time.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘I wonder why she wants to see us?’ asked Tom. ‘We haven’t done anything wrong, have we?’ He remembered the telegraph poles, the eleven fires and freezing Mrs Murphy, and added, ‘Well, nothing she knows about.’

  Geoff only grunted. He was less concerned with what the Deputy Headmistress might want than with what they should do about Aquila. Losing Tom’s garage as a hiding place had turned out to be more serious than either of the boys had realized. Leaving Aquila outside his bedroom window last night had seemed a simple enough solution, but this morning Geoff had realized he would not be able to keep it there on any permanent basis.

  It had rained that morning, and Mr Reynolds, who always took the dog out for a quick walk before opening the shop, had noticed something so peculiar as he came back, that he called Mrs Reynolds and Geoff out of the house to have a look.

  ‘See that?’ He pointed to a section of the paving that ran round the side of the house. ‘It’s all dry. Everywhere else is getting wet, but this bit stays dry.’ He squinted up at the sky by Geoff’s bedroom window. ‘It’s like there’s something up there, stopping the rain coming down.’

  Geoff had seized the first opportunity he could to move Aquila to the bottom of the garden, but he had found there were risks to leaving it there, as well. He had left it by a tree a few metres in the air so that the dog wouldn’t bump into it, but when it was time to set off for school, he found falling leaves had settled on the invisible hull in a way that looked decidedly odd. If anyone had cared to look down the garden, they could not have helped but notice.

  Aquila was safe at school, for the moment at least. They had been able to leave it in its usual place by the fire escape because the ground beneath was already wet, but as Geoff pointed out, what they really needed was a new hiding place. Preferably somewhere indoors, out of sight, where nobody else ever went. He was beginning to understand why the Roman centurion had kept Aquila in a cave.

  ‘I think we should go looking at lunchtime,’ he said as they walked down the corridor to Miss Taylor’s office. ‘You know, float around town a bit. See if we can find anywhere.’ He straightened his tie and knocked at the door. ‘After all, the last thing we want is to lose it now.’