“Oh. What happens when you finish school then?”
“Well, it depends. Maybe you’d go to work in one of the King’s factories,” Will said. “Or maybe you’d become a mechanic. Or a doctor. Or a farmer. Or a soldier.”
He smiled.
“And then you’d have food? They’d give you rations and feed you?”
The smile fell off of Will’s face.
“Well, maybe,” he said. “So long as it wasn’t a famine.”
They continued walking in silence.
When they reached the second engine, Will knew immediately that it was what he was looking for: a type 4A engine. It was almost exactly as he remembered it from the capital, the six cast iron cylinders, the carburetor, the exhaust, the crankshaft, even the attached gearbox all looked to be intact. The remnants of an aircraft were scattered around the engine, broken and useless, but the engine itself appeared serviceable. It would require significant cleaning and maintenance, but after an inspection Will was sure it would run. With Brandon’s help he lugged it out to the front of the junkyard and put it on his cart then, as promised, gave Brandon all the money he had on his person. Again, Brandon looked at him strangely when he did this but accepted the money without complaint.
Then Will started the long walk back to the village.
Chapter 10
By the beginning of winter, Will had finished the plane. The type 4A engine had indeed required significant cleaning and service, but when restored to working condition it ran merrily without sign of malfunction, stall, knocking, or any other condition that Will could think of. Frankly, Will had been deeply impressed by the hardiness and reliability of the engine - which at the same time was lighter and more powerful than most of the engines he worked on.
“It’s amazing,” he remarked to Martin on one occasion. “They really are producing the most sophisticated engines in the world at the capital factories.”
The airframe of the plane had required some modification to accommodate the engine, which was slightly larger than what Will had planned on, but it worked just fine in the end. He set about carving the propeller, which he did with significant help from Harry. When the propeller was finished, he hooked it up to the engine. The engine roared mightily and the propeller spun at thousands of RPM, blowing loose hay all around Harry’s barn, where Will had done the bench test. Then Will mounted the engine and the propeller, and the aircraft seemed almost done. He only needed to add a few control surfaces before they would be ready to fly.
One day, as he was walking past the canteen on the way to his shop, the familiar sailor who sold things out of the back of his truck called out to him.
“Hey mechanic!” he called. “You need anything? Tools, fuel, spare parts. Army surplus. Cheap. Or hey, I heard you need an engine. I could probably get my hands on one for you.”
“No thanks,” Will said. “I already got one.”
“Really?” the man said, surprised. “I heard you were building an airplane. You need a particular kind of engine for that, don’t you?”
“Well, not that particular. I could have used a newer tractor engine, but I found something better.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“A type 4A engine. I found it down at the dump.”
The soldier started chewing his tobacco pensively.
“Look, mechanic, maybe it’d be better if you bought an engine from me. You don’t want to use some old thing you found at the dump, do you?”
“It runs just fine. Besides, I probably couldn’t afford one of your engines anyway. No sale.”
The man kept chewing his tobacco and looking pensive, but he shrugged and didn’t say anything else.
A few days later, Will was back in Harry’s barn, putting the finishing touches on the plane. Everything was perfect, as far as he was concerned. The engine and the fuel tank were mounted, the propeller ran smoothly, everything had been tested and re-tested and looked to work just fine.
“I think it’s ready to fly,” he told Martin and Harry, who had gathered to watch the culmination of all Will’s efforts.
“How do you steer it?” Martin asked, peering at one of the metal struts.
“Uh, you don’t,” Will said. “I haven’t done much in the way of control surfaces. There’s a rudder in the tail. Well, here’s the controls I got.” He pointed to the cockpit, where he had constructed most of the controls from old tractor parts. “The wheel controls the rudder,” he said, gesturing to the tractor steering wheel he had mounted there. “The pedals are the gas and the clutch, and that’s pretty much it.”
“You know Will, I was reading a book about this and I’m pretty sure that the wheel is supposed to control the ailerons, and you need pedals for the rudder.”
“You read too much, Martin. Besides, I don’t have any ailerons.”
“And you’re sure you’re not gonna die flying this thing?” Martin asked, looking at the barn-built aircraft with a dubious expression.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m gonna fly it at really low altitude, speed, and power. I won’t die. I’m not sure the plane will survive though,” he added, laughing nervously. “Maybe I should have made a biplane to start with.”
“What are you gonna use it for if it works?” Harry grunted.
Will shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about that. We could mount pesticide to the bottom and spray crops with it, I guess.”
“Good enough for me,” Harry said with a shrug.
Will kicked the blocks out from under the wheels and reached into the cockpit to disengage the hand brake. He started to wheel the plane towards the door of the barn. They had smoothed and leveled a section of field - which was unused anyway, due to the drought - for a makeshift runway. However, the door slid open before he reached it. Half a dozen soldiers marched into the barn.
“Are you William Gurnsley?” demanded the lead soldier, a sergeant who William had never seen before.
“Yes,” Will said. “Something I can do for you?”
“We received intelligence that you’re in possession of army property.”
“Army property?”
“A type 4A engine.”
“What?” Will looked incredulously at his plane, then the soldiers. “You threw that out in the junkyard,” he said disbelievingly. “It’s been there for years.”
“We’ll have to take possession of it,” the sergeant said matter-of-factly.
“You can’t-” Will started to protest, but they pushed him aside, sending him sprawling into the dirt and hay. Martin rushed over to help him up while the soldiers surrounded the aircraft. One began to hack away at the wooden airframe with an axe, and the aircraft splintered into pieces. When they reached the engine block, the soldiers - thrusting aside pieces they didn’t need - unceremoniously hauled out the engine. They chopped off the fuel line but loaded the rest of the engine - along with the propeller and much of the nose section - into the back of a waiting truck outside. Then, without another word, they sped off.
Will was in shock.
On his way home that day, he passed the canteen, where the navy soldier was leaning against the back of his truck. The sailor spit out his tobacco and called, “hey mechanic! I hear you’re back in the market for an engine!”
Will stared at him incredulously. “Did you do all this? Just so I’d buy an engine from you?”
The man shrugged.
Though he felt anger boiling inside him, Will couldn’t think of anything to say. He shook his head in raw disbelief and walked back into his house, staring at his now empty garage, where he had painstakingly shaped the wings, the frame, the propeller, and every other part of the plane before lugging them down to Harry’s barn for the final flight.
He sat motionless at his work bench for a few hours, before finally shaking his head.
“I’ll build it all over again.”
Chapter 11
The drought continued into winter. Though the cold was bitter and the awful winds whipped the faces and gnawed at
the legs of everyone who ventured outside, and the skies stubbornly refused to relinquish rain, Will hardly cared anymore. What had happened to his little airplane, which he had worked on and dreamt about for so long - that his father had dreamt about for so long - stayed with him. Memories of the soldiers with the axe continued to spring up in his dreams. It was all he could do to not punch the tobacco-chewing sailor who sold tools, fuel, and spare parts out of the back of his truck every time he saw him. The aircraft itself was in ruins, but much of it could be salvaged. One of the wings was cracked beyond repair but the other was intact, and Martin thought he could remake the airframe from what remained. Perhaps out of a desire to make the aircraft more sturdy, so it could not be destroyed as easily as the old one had been, he began to remake the body out of mostly aluminum rather than wood. The wings were still wooden, as was most of the nose section, but the sunken cavity that surrounded the cockpit and the engine block was metal. He also found himself using Nate’s lathe more and more, though he was still not entirely sure this was because it was useful so much as he simply wanted to have used it for the project. Scrap metal was in short supply and proved hard to get. Will laid hands on it however he could, and on a few occasions began to plan more trips to the junkyard. However, work kept getting in the way, and he remained in the village.
While Will concerned himself with his plane and his mechanic’s work, the village was still moving past and around him, oblivious to or uncaring of his efforts regarding the plane. Word seemed to have gotten out that the plane had been confiscated by the military, and people no longer asked him about it. They went about business as usual. The market stalls seemed to be doing more business than ever before come winter, with increasingly sophisticated goods - fruits and vegetables from different cantons, tinkered radios that even picked up foreign broadcasts, and large stocks of medicine started to appear for sale. Martin, whose surgery still only had rudimentary supplies from the central hospital, could frequently be seen going down to the market to buy drugs for his patients (as could the patients themselves). Will was also quite sure he had caught sight of the strange trader he had met on the train on one or two occasions, and remembered what the man had said about having good access to medicine for sale. Homeless boys continued to appear to pick pockets and steal produce, only to be chased out by the soldiers again, only to return the next day or the day after. Will had begun to suspect that they were a permanent fixture in the town, as much as Ms. Diane had insisted in the past that they were a social ill that would be promptly addressed.
Harry, for his part, continued to dig. Armed with the power auger and the help of a few other farmers (and Martin, when he could spare the time), Harry succeeded in striking water just as the worst of the winter frost began to make the ground impenetrable. It seemed the aquifers Martin had spoken of were real after all. Though much of the village was apathetic to his efforts now that food rations had returned, Ms. Diane reacted with positive enthusiasm to news of a new well and instructed everyone to help build a new mechanical pump with pipes running down into the aquifer. The water that came out of the pump turned out to be too dirty to drink, but it wasn’t salty and Harry seemed satisfied that it could be used for irrigation and, if there was enough of it, they wouldn’t have to face famine in the next year. With his project for the winter complete, Harry appeared in the village more often now, smiling as he chewed his length of straw and tucked his thumbs behind the straps of his overalls.
However, the soldiers seemed increasingly antsy and clannish. While they still came to the canteen in droves as often as they could escape the base and made moonshine in their still, they had started behaving secretively. Many spoke about regimental business in whispers, and more soldiers than usual came to town with their rifles slung over one shoulder or their sidearms holstered, as if they were waiting for an attack. Some wore very grim expressions. For the most part, this confused Will since the front line had been almost completely quiet since summer. The radio broadcasts from the capital had said nothing about any military action, but instead gave people the normal warnings to stay vigilant and remember that the rebels and the Black Force could attack at any moment. Substantive news was confined to weather reports, industrial stories, and King Edward’s visits to various parts of the country.
Something had changed about the train time tables too. Trains with military markings came through the station without stopping more and more frequently, but they headed towards the navy base rather than the army base. Still, everything that Will had come to associate with the possibility of attack - the boom and crash of artillery fire and the distant rat-tat-tat of machine guns, as he had heard on the night that the pamphlets had rained down - was missing.
One afternoon, when the soldiers looked particularly on edge, Will sat down in the canteen. He found himself next to the tall, scrawny soldier whose name he had never learned and asked him about the atmosphere of tension.
“You said you had a friend in the navy, right?” the soldier asked.
“Nate Larson, yeah.”
“Well, as long as you’ve got a friend in the navy I guess it’s okay to tell you-”
“I’ve got some enemies in the navy too,” Will added, thinking of the tobacco-chewing sailor.
“Who doesn’t?” The scrawny soldier took a swig of his beer. “But listen, we’ve been hearing a lot of reports from the navy recently about skirmishes with the Black Force. You know, little battles between the small ships or a few slugs fired between the bigger ones. It wasn’t serious. A few casualties, maybe, nothing official, nothing catastrophic, no ships sunk, but things were heating up out there. Last week we got word from the u-boat command. Your friend isn’t a submariner, right?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter as much then, but u-boat command said that they’d started sending patrols into enemy water - deep into enemy water - on hunting missions.” He lowered his voice. “Today I heard a rumor that one of our subs sank a rebel battleship. They put it on the bottom of the sea. All hands lost. If it’s true, the rebels must be hopping mad. There could be an attack coming at any minute.”
Will frowned. “Isn’t that a breach of the ceasefire?” he asked, his tone sinking as low and confidential as his companion’s had been.”
“I dunno if anyone’s told you but there is no ceasefire anymore,” the soldier replied. “We shoot at each other all the time. We’ve got - must be a hundred artillery pieces lined up in our base and on the mountainside, just pointed east at the rebel positions. And from my post in the base, I can see their guns pointing at us. And sometimes we start shooting at each other. It happens all the time.” He frowned and looked into his glass, swirling the murky liquid. “I hear the ocean out there is like the forest is for us landlubbers. It’s covered in mines and the rebels are just on the other side. I can’t imagine charging across the forest to fight the rebels. I think you’d have to be just as crazy to sail a u-boat into rebel waters. And if they did... well, we may have started a fight.”
“Do you think the navy really sank a rebel battleship?” Will asked.
“We’ll find out soon.”
Will spent the rest of the day in a state of strange nervousness. He didn’t tell anyone what the soldier had told him - not even Martin and Harry - but he kept looking out towards the ocean. Though he couldn’t see the ocean from the village, everything to the west was so calm and peaceful that it hardly seemed possible there could be fighting just over the horizon. The artillery batteries by the forest were also quiet, and Will knew that meant the attack had not yet come. Military aircraft overflew the village several times. Will spotted a new model cutting-edge fighter, a sleek one, bigger than the others but similar in design, with a metal frame and swept wings and a big propeller. It was trailed by a hulking four-engine bomber, two whirling blades on either wing lugging the huge aircraft from one side of the sky to the other.
That night, the news affirmed everything that Will had heard in the canteen. The newscaster,
sounding jubilant, announced a naval victory over the Black Force just off the coast and said a rebel battleship had been sunk by a navy u-boat. The Black Force fleet had been left in confusion, and the navy u-boat - one of the most sophisticated in the world - escaped the area safely. It was a great triumph in the King’s War.
Will spent much of the night awake, wondering if tonight was the night that the attack would come. However, the evening remained tranquil and unbroken with none of the booms of artillery that he knew would herald the start of the fighting.
But there was no fighting the next day, or the day after, and the village continued much as it had before.
Chapter 12
A few days later, Will had gone back to work in Harry’s barn. With the well dug and the gas-powered augur stowed away, Harry had decided to help work on the plane. While Harry didn’t know much about the mechanical workings of aircraft, Will had to admit that work had gone much faster since he’d started helping and maybe the project had been a two-man job all along. As the winter got colder and colder, Will set up a crude electric furnace in the corner of the barn to keep them warm, though he’d insisted on surrounding it with a dirt fire-break to stop it from burning the barn down in case of accident. The furnace also kept going off during the frequent power outages that still plagued the village, despite the Colonel’s promise, years ago, to ensure the town had a steady power supply.
Once again, the plane’s airframe started to take shape. The mesh of metal and wood looked extremely bizarre, but Will didn’t mind how it looked as long as it flew. Will had shaped a new wooden wing back in his shop and hauled it to the barn. He was just fitting it when Harry flung open the barn door.
“Army trucks are coming,” he said.
These words ran through Will like an electric shock. He grabbed two huge sheets that they used to shelter trucks and tractors in the winter and threw them over the aircraft, then raced out of the barn. As Harry had said, two military trucks were trundling along across the field, rocking up and down as they passed every furrow. Will stared at them. They approached, then rolled right by him without a second thought. It took Will a good ten seconds to realize where they were going.
The King's War Page 9
