By Fire Above_A Signal Airship Novel

by Robyn Bennis

  “Slow going at this time of year,” Bernat said to Josette, on the eighth day of travel. Mistral had just passed the same bend in the Secana River, and Bernat had just waved to the very same rice farmer for the third time in twenty-four hours. “Will we be very late getting in?”

  Josette looked insulted. “As long as we don’t get another storm tomorrow, we’ll arrive in the afternoon, with time to spare.”

  The winds conspired to prove her wrong, but not by much, and they arrived above Kuchin just after dark, which was all the better. Dazzling, sun-bright quicklime lamps illuminated the great glass dome of the National Museum and the decorative cherry trees in the gardens surrounding it—though their lovely blossoms were out of season—and gaslights along the Ager Beatus cast that broad avenue in a softer but still-beautiful light. Couples strolled down the riverfront as if in broad daylight, with ripples in the water twinkling behind them. And that splendor was only the crowning jewel of Kuchin’s network of gas street lamps, which formed a great constellation of stars below, rivaling those above.

  Josette stepped to the rail next to him, resting her hands on it. She stood there so long that he had to ask, “Let me guess: you’re calculating how much luftgas we could purchase for the cost of running those lights?”

  She swallowed and shook her head. “No,” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the steamjack and airscrews. “Only looking at them. It is a goddamn waste—you’re right about that—but it’s also quite beautiful.”

  He began to laugh, until she silenced him with a glare. “My apologies,” he said. “But this is so unexpected. I’m proud of you.”

  “I am capable of appreciating beauty,” she said harshly, “when leisure permits.”

  He struck a pose and ran his fingers through his hair. “And yet you can’t seem to appreciate the beauty that’s right in front of you.” He undid a button on his jacket. “Won’t you come to my berth, when leisure permits, so that we may appreciate my beauty together?”

  He was only trying to make her blush, of course, but by the light of the quicklime it was clear he hadn’t succeeded. She stood watching the ground for a while, before finally asking, “Are you clipped on quite securely, Bernie?”

  He glanced at the clip connecting his harness to the overhead jack line. “Well, yes, why do you—” That was all he managed say before she gave him a quick shove that sent him tumbling over the rail. He fell a short but harrowing couple of feet before the jack line caught him short and hung him by the shoulders, a hundred feet over the ground.

  He looked up to see Josette leaning over the railing. She shot him a rare smile and said, “It would be selfish of me to not share your beauty with the entire city.”

  “That was not funny!” he called, but the deck crew disagreed. They howled with delight, and Josette did nothing to stop them. The ship was just descending over the Ager Beatus, where crowds who had gathered to watch the airship now pointed up at him. Bernat waved, and they replied with cheers and applause.

  Once everyone had had their fun, he pulled himself up to the railing and Josette helped him the rest of the way. By the time he had his clothes smoothed out, the ship was all but landed. It only remained for the mooring mast to winch them in snugly, and the ground crews to walk them into the shed.

  “I suppose your family has a house in town?” Josette asked.

  “We usually stay at the palace when we’re here.”

  “I’m surprised the king allows that.”

  “Oh, he quite encourages it,” Bernat said. “All the better for keeping us in order, but don’t tell anyone I said that.” He craned his neck, to see if the ship was secure.

  Josette gestured over the side, with a flick of her head. “Off you go. I know there’s debauchery out there with your name on it. Just be back by dawn.”

  Bernat grinned back and did his best imitation of standing at attention. He unclipped his harness and hopped over the side, calling out for the benefit of ballasting, “A hundred and fifty pounds of prime lady-killer, going ashore!”

  He skipped and trotted his way along the length of the ship, rounded the tailfin, and then came to a dead stop. He recognized, just outside the shed, the most insipid man he’d ever met. He tried to duck back, but it was too late. He’d already been made. Even as he groaned inwardly, he put on a smile and walked over to the twit, saying, “Hello, Roland.”

  The muttonhead smiled back and said, “Hello, little brother.” Instead of taking Bernat’s outstretched hand, Roland put his arms around him and wrapped him up in a tight embrace.

  “Oh good, hugging,” Bernat said, his voice a study in polite resignation. When Roland finally let him go, he added, “I don’t suppose Mother is about?”

  Roland shook his head. “No. When she found out you were coming, she left town in a rush, cursing your name and the day you were born.”

  “I’m sure she was talking about someone else.”

  Beaming a false smile at him, Roland said, “Yes, I’m sure she was referring to an entirely different ‘scheming, goony-eyed, sap-headed mollycoddle.’”

  Bernat smiled fondly. “I miss her.”

  “Who the hell is this?” The question came from behind him.

  Bernat heaved a great sigh and turned to face Josette, who was standing with her bag over her shoulder. “Josette,” he said. “I’d like you to meet my brother, Roland. Roland, this is Josette. Captain Dupre to the likes of you.”

  Roland’s face brightened to rival the limelight of the Ager Beatus. “Never!” he cried, looking to Josette. “The stories say you’re ten feet tall.”

  “As usual,” she said, “the stories are just about half right.” She shifted her baggage to the opposite shoulder and stuck out her hand. Roland clearly meant to kiss it, but she recoiled and he quickly substituted a handshake.

  “Half right! Ha!” Though he had been foiled in kissing her hand, Roland couldn’t stop shaking it. “And she’s a wit, too,” he said to Bernat. “The papers don’t mention that.”

  “Wit?” Bernat asked, frowning. “Oh, don’t be such a fawning yokel, Roland. I’ve wiped superior wit out of the crack of my—” In light of the nasty looks they shot him, he stopped short to consider his next word. He finally settled on, “Intellect.”

  Roland was still shaking hands with an increasingly flabbergasted Josette, and the look in his eyes told the rest of the story. If only most of her eyebrows hadn’t grown back already, perhaps there might have been a chance he’d be put off by her. In all her life she had surely faced no greater danger than Roland’s interest. The man was boredom brought to life, and that was among the least of his faults.

  Roland finally let go of her and offered to carry her baggage, and she—the damn fool—accepted. Roland flung the flight bag over his shoulder, assuming the most insidiously casual pose. As they turned to walk off together, Roland flashed a grin at Josette and asked, “I wonder, may I show you the waterfront sometime?”

  She was just working up to rejection. Bernat could see it in her face. But then she spotted Bernat emphatically shaking his head, and she grinned. Grinned twice in two seconds, actually, in what might have been a personal best for her: one grin for Bernat and another for Roland.

  And, no doubt just to spite Bernat, she said to his brother, “I’d like that. When leisure permits.”

  *   *   *

  “I KNOW YOU didn’t sleep with him.”

  As Mistral cruised at rooftop level over the city, Josette ignored him and kept her mind on her duty, for what little it was worth aboard an airship turned into flying scenery.

  “No,” he said, in reply to unspoken words. “No. I don’t believe you.”

  She said nothing. Indeed, she hadn’t said a single word about Roland all morning—not since they’d returned to the ship an hour before dawn, and she’d said goodnight to him right below Bernat’s sleeping berth.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Bernat said. “But I can see right through you. Nothing happ
ened between you two. Nothing at all.”

  She glanced at him and shifted the smirk to the other side of her mouth.

  “You expect me to believe that? How credulous do I look?”

  She only shrugged.

  “It defies all reason. You may each be desperate in your own manner, but that would hardly result in anything happening between you.”

  “Up three degrees,” she ordered, though she wished she could remain mute and go on teasing him with the full force of her silence. “And bring her around when we’re over the river.”

  “Do you know why I’m sure?” Bernat asked.

  She looked at him with polite and amiable attention.

  “I’m sure, because you would never do that to me.”

  As much as she wanted to keep the game alive, that was just too much. “And why not?” she asked, stepping to the rail and lowering her voice. “You slept with my mother, after all.”

  “That was different!” Only then did he remember himself and add hastily, “I mean, no I didn’t.”

  She only shook her head at him. “I knew it.”

  “So what? You bedded my brother as retribution?”

  “No, of course not. He showed me the waterfront, then we strolled through the Low District to the Sumida Temple.”

  Bernat eyeballed her. “That’s the one with the great big paper lantern under the gate?”

  She eyeballed him right back. “Yes.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking away with a dour face. “It’s tradition for lovers to kiss under it, you know.”

  “That tricky son of a bitch,” Josette muttered, neither cross nor surprised. “Well, we didn’t kiss, if you’re wondering. We talked and saw the sights. That’s all.”

  Bernat was not consoled. “Yes, of course. That’s where it always begins.”

  “That’s where it’ll end, too. And not because I have too much respect for you, if that’s what you think. Tell me, why do you dislike him so?”

  “You might as well ask the farmer why he hates the vermin that ravage his harvest,” Bernat said, waving a hand about with irritation. “My brother—if indeed he is even legitimate, on which subject I have my doubts—will one day become the Marquis of Copia Lugon. Why? Not because he is wise, which he is not. Not because he has dignity, which he does not. Not because he can politick or even hold up an interesting conversation, which he most certainly cannot. No, he will be marquis because of an accident of birth. As a commoner, you couldn’t possibly understand how frustrating that is.”

  “Surely, I can’t even begin to understand,” Josette said, looking straight ahead.

  Mistral steamed along the river for a while, running up and down until the crowds of morning watchers thinned. Josette then took the ship over the Tellurian Quarter, where students at the university rushed from their classes to gawk skyward. From there, she turned across the Secana to buzz the greater of the Kuchin’s two pagodas, and proceeded through a wide sweep across the city.

  At eleven in the morning, crowds swelled again on both banks of the river, many of them with picnic lunches. Mistral entertained them with a few circuits over each bank, then resumed her meandering loops about the city.

  At three in the afternoon, the mild westerly headwind suddenly increased and turned quite chilly. The more experienced crewmen looked at the western horizon. The sky there was blue, and contained nothing more fearsome than a few fluffy, white clouds, but Josette didn’t trust its benign appearance. She looked up at the aneroid barometer, whose mercury was falling steadily.

  “Sergeant,” she called up the companionway, “let’s rig the signal lamp and call for a weather report.”

  The call, flashed to the semaphore station atop City Hall, was promptly returned with a report of clear skies from every station in the hundred-odd miles between Kuchin and the coast.

  “I still don’t like it,” she said, and several of the airmen on deck nodded their assent. “Steersmen, bring her to west northwest, a quarter west. Steamjack to half power.”

  Mistral steered straight down the Secana River, but between the force of the headwind and her much-reduced airspeed, Mistral was being overtaken by steam barges on the river below, and by some of the faster donkeys on the road beside it. One donkey cart ahead of them matched the ship’s ground speed almost exactly, and the driver kept looking back over his shoulder at the airship, as if he suspected it of pursuing him.

  By five o’clock, Josette’s weather instinct was confirmed. The western horizon boiled with darkening clouds as they came within sight of the air base. Before they could even rig the signal lamp, however, a message was flashed to them, asking why they were off station.

  Josette, manning the signal lamp herself, dearly wanted to signal them back with a request to look out a goddamn window. Instead, she sent, Mistral request landing due to worsening weather.

  The answering message was: Clear weather expected. City officials have complained your absence. Mistral return to station.

  Now she really wanted to send her preferred signal, but by a heroic exertion of self-control, she refrained. She only acknowledged the message, stowed the signal lamp, and ordered Mistral about.

  “If I die because some goddamn paper-pusher can’t be bothered to glance at the fucking horizon,” she said, “I will wait patiently for his arrival at the gates of hell, and then he’ll be in for it.”

  Bernat looked up from the rail. “Do you suppose they allow that in hell?” he asked. “I would expect them to have a stricter policy as regards loitering.”

  Corporal Luc Lupien replied before Josette could. “No need to worry about that,” he said. “Give the captain a week in hell, and she’ll be running the place.”

  With the wind at her tail, Mistral sprinted back to Kuchin, making her station in under a quarter of an hour. She turned into the wind and went to one-third power, just enough to hold her practically motionless, three hundred feet above the river. From there, Josette watched the storm brewing.

  Every quarter of an hour, she requested a weather report. Most of them came back identical, down to the exact wind speed at each weather station, which gave away the game: the semaphore network was backed up, and the weather reports were coming in hours behind schedule. The staff at base either hadn’t noticed, didn’t understand the implications, or never looked at weather reports unless they were marked urgent.

  She flashed a message to the signal base via the city hall semaphore tower, explaining the situation and requesting new orders. She didn’t wait for the message to make it through the clogged network, but immediately ordered, “Steamjack to maximum safe power. Let’s bring her home ahead of the storm. Perhaps orders to that effect will make it to us by the time we arrive.”

  As Mistral struggled upwind, the first line of clouds blew in over the city, peppering them with stinging rain and obscuring further developments in the weather. Josette lowered her goggles to keep the needle-drops out of her eyes. The headwind had lessened somewhat with the coming of the rain, but what it lost in raw speed, it made up for in turbulence. To maintain course and trim, the steersmen had to swing their wheels first one way and then the other to adjust for the changing winds. Worse, the wind didn’t shift all at once, across the entire length of the ship. Josette had to grab an overhead girder as a sudden lateral gust hit the tail while the nose was still in a headwind, yanking the ship through forty degrees on the compass before the gust blew its way forward and the ship stabilized onto a steady but sideways course.

  She looked back to her steersmen, who remained calm and controlled. To her right, however, Bernat held so fast to his safety line that he was practically dangling from it, his feet barely touching the deck. As the gust blew itself out and the headwind returned, he swung inward due to the tilt of the deck, until his feet were nearly touching Josette’s knee. He looked desperately at her, as if hoping for rescue.

  “Steady, Bernie. Steady.” She thought about sending him up into the keel, but judged it better to leave him wher
e she could keep an eye on him. The ship stabilized and Bernat swung back to his customary place on the deck. “Let’s get a double frapping on those bref guns,” she said to the deck crew.

  As the crew lashed the guns, Mistral clawed her way downriver. No donkeys passed her this time, but only because they’d all been driven to shelter by the rain. The thunder had started by the time they came within sight of the signal base—or rather, within sight of the beacon lamp shining through the haze. This time, permission to land came without fuss or delay, and the landing circle below was marked off by flares. The ship drove down toward it, and the ground crews became visible through the mist of rain.

  They disappeared again as Mistral was flung nose-high by a sudden updraft. “Emergency power!” Josette ordered, despite the risk of fire. “Elevators down full!” For if the nose was rising, it meant the tail was pivoting toward the ground. If the rudder hit and was damaged, they’d be lost in the storm.

  At the top of the companionway, Jutes was thrown to the deck by the sudden heave. But he kept his eyes pointed aft, and as the ship leveled off, he called, “Tail’s clear!”

  “How close?” Josette asked.

  Jutes relayed the question, then relayed the answer. “Private Davies reports that he shared a moment of meaningful eye contact with a ‘very alarmed ground squirrel, or possibly a marmot.’”

  “God be with it,” Josette said. “Steamjack to half power. Let’s try that again.”

  By the time Mistral came around again, fat drops of heavier rain were pattering at the top of the envelope, hitting so hard it was audible even on the hurricane deck. As it soaked into the envelope, the rain weighed the ship down, so that the elevator man had to put an extra half turn on the wheel just to keep her in trim.

  “Half a point to starboard,” Josette ordered, making her best guess as to where the mooring mast lay, for the yardsmen’s flares, patented and warranted to work in all weather, were sputtering out under the downpour.