Louis absorbed that for a moment. London was nearly white now. He could make out a sliver of the Thames, burning like the surface of the sun.
“I will be blind again?”
As you said, you have been blind since the attack on the barge. But you have put on the best of faces. You have behaved nobly. You are the king.
“I am the king,” Louis assured himself. He let his face relax into a smile.
London grew suddenly dark. I adjust the light so you can see, so it will not be intolerably bright, the angel explained. Louis opened his mouth to ask what that meant, when suddenly even the darkened city was once again bathed in light. A huge ball of fire had appeared beyond London, filling half the sky. Fatio had missed! But before that dismay could even register, London was gone. For less than a second there was a confused impression of flame and wind—and then the mirror went silvery.
Farewell, my king, he heard, and then everything went dark. He heard Fatio shriek, and instantly there were hands upon him everywhere.
“His wounds!” Someone screamed, “Oh God, the blood!”
He no longer cared. He felt heavy, as if he were sinking into the earth.
“Thank you,” he told the angel, though he knew it was gone. And yet, he could see in the mirror of his mind, he could remember things. He was again ten years old, holding little Phillipe under his arm, telling him it would all be well.
“Will it?” Phillipe asked.
“Of course. Because God loves us. And you will be well because I love you. Because you are my brother, and I am king.”
He remembered how sadly Phillipe had looked at him then as he said, voice quavering, “I love you, too, Louis. That's why I'm sorry you have to be the king.”
He understood Phillipe, and so he smiled as sleep claimed him. It had been so long since he could rest.
One quarter hour later, the sky began raining burning stones. The more jaded of the court applauded again, for the shower of stars was more beautiful than the first had been. When the nine windows of the Great Hall shattered and swept through them as a wind of glass, they ceased applauding.
Adrienne did not witness the flame in the sky. She lay on a mattress stuffed with leaves, twisting in a fever, as Crecy and an old peasant woman tried to quench the fire burning inside her.
“I never dreamed …” Stirling groaned. The black column had become a mushroom, still climbing, filling more and more of the sky.
The air suddenly slapped Ben in the face. The paddle wheeler creaked in complaint as shards of heaven fell from above.
“Look!” Vasilisa shouted, waving her arm wildly at the sea. Near the horizon, Ben could make out a plume of steam rising. Its size was impossible to estimate. The sailors, howling, pointed out two more.
“Do you comprehend what you have done, you fool?” Newton asked Stirling.
Stirling jerked his head about. “I … how could I …” He hadn't found his words when the noise came. It sounded like a thousand cannon firing fifty miles away, a groaning, rumbling noise. To Ben it was a million people screaming.
“You and your French allies have obliterated a good deal more than London. Did you never calculate the precise consequences of your actions?”
“Of course I did! I just didn't understand! Numbers like that have no sense to them!”
“If they were too vast for you to grasp, didn't you reckon that the effects might be so, too?”
But Stirling had no time to answer, for the Russian in the crow's nest began yelling.
Ben realized then that he was still gripping Vasilisa's hand. “What?” he asked.
She pointed south. “The wave,” she said simply.
It looked like no wave Ben had ever seen. It was really more a fantastic swell, a bulge in the water four yards high, sweeping toward them with abnormal speed. The line of it stretched off to the limits of vision on each side. West, toward England, it seemed larger, and there Ben could see foam churning at its crest.
Vasilisa let go of his hand and began to run across the deck, shouting something in Russian.
The ship, broadside to the immense swell, lifted up and tilted. The deck flew from beneath Ben's feet, and for a long moment he hung suspended in the new, nightmare world of black clouds, shooting stars, and impossible waves. Then the deck found him again, dealt him a welcoming blow that left him with a twisted ankle and the taste of blood in his mouth and nostrils.
The deck was nearly perpendicular. Ben skipped down it like a stone across a pond, hit the rail, flew again, and the sea sucked him in. He shouted and fought; the wave seemed to go on to the ends of the Earth. Ben was a good swimmer, better than anyone he knew in Boston. He had felt the pull of the Charles River and on one occasion had wrestled a bit with an undertow in the sea. He had never felt anything remotely like this, this Neptune's fist that had hold of him. His only fortune was that he was on the trailing side of it, that it was gradually outdistancing him.
After the first panicked moment or so, the pressure eased, and he began to think he might live. Swimming on his back, he made out the vague hulk of the ship framed by its lights: He thought it was still on its side, perhaps a hundred yards away.
He began to shout. There was still a current, a powerful one, but its speed had diminished so that it was no worse than being in the channel of a swift river. However, a black night was also rapidly falling, as clouds of growing size and density whipped by overhead with unreal speed, suffocating what remained of day. South was a wall of jet, lit only by sparks of hellfire, the hoofprints of dancing devils in God's stolen sky. An occasional sound like a cannon being fired boomed across the waters.
It began to rain, huge hot drops of salty, gritty rain, and then he lost even the lights of the ship. He ceased his efforts to stroke toward it then, for he quickly lost his sense of direction. Instead he concentrated on keeping afloat. That was far from easy; the rain came so thickly it seemed a solid sheet, leaving little more air to breathe above the sea than below it. Hail or perhaps rocks were mixed in it, and they tore mercilessly at him.
In less than half an hour, despite his best efforts, his limbs and lungs began to fail him. The sea, remorseless, swept him along.
24.
The Night-Dark Day
Ben felt the first sting of water in his lungs and found a feeble strength he was unaware he possessed. His arms and legs thrashed at the sea mindlessly, hatefully. Shouting at the top of his lungs, he swallowed a mouthful of water with every cry.
But the black water did not even pay him the honor of mockery. He was mere flotsam. His rage began to dwindle, and with it his hopes of living.
Jewels suddenly sparkled in the air, were gone, shone again to his right.
Jewels? It had rained fire and stone and salt water, and now burning jewels?
Then his weary brain understood, and he began shouting again, waving one of his arms wildly.
“Damn lucky you are, Ben,” Robert shouted above the rain as Ben collapsed onto the floor of the dinghy. “We might have been twenty feet from you and not known you were there if not for your screaming.”
“I saw the lantern light,” Ben explained. “But you must have been close.”
“We set out for you when we still had a little dayglow. But that was some time ago.”
Sir Isaac sat silently, water pouring from each corner of his hat, his mind clearly focused elsewhere. Ben hoped he hadn't gone mad again. Aside from the three of them, there was no one else in the boat.
“Vasilisa?” he asked.
“I don't know, lad. I think the ship went down. I'm sorry.”
“Maybe in the morning—”
“In the morning we shan't be here,” Sir Isaac said calmly.
“Sir?”
Newton only smiled, but Robert poked his finger at a large copper globe that shared the lifeboat with them. It was perhaps two feet in diameter. Six cables were fastened to a large eyehook at one of its poles. The other ends of the cables were attached to various parts of the di
nghy.
“Are we ready then?” Newton asked. Robert shrugged. Ben didn't have the strength to ask any more questions.
Newton reached over and did something to the sphere. “Mind the cables,” he said.
Ben was hardly listening. The sphere had begun to shine faintly red, and more importantly, it had begun to rise. It floated straight up until all of the cables were taut. And it continued up! The cables hummed in the high wind as they took on the boat's weight, and then suddenly they were rocking airborne.
That swinging sensation was Ben's only clue that they were flying. Otherwise, the boat was still a small island of light in a stygian sea: Raindrops were still the only vista, and though the occasional flare of lightning opened the sky a bit wider, it still seemed closed.
“Are we still rising?” Ben asked after a time.
“Yes,” Newton replied. “I'd like to be above the clouds, above the rain.”
“Above the rain?” Ben weighed these words for madness but kept his judgments in abeyance. He was, after all, flying in a boat. He wondered what a cloud would smell like.
Finally the rain stopped, and the wind did take on a peculiar smell: sharp, chemical, burned. Mixed currents of hot and cold air touched them. They were enclosed by an eerie silence, the only sounds their own breathing, the whisper of winds in the cables, and an occasional distant rumble of thunder.
“Oh, God,” Robert said, “look!”
Below them, Ben saw lightning brightening the heart of one cloud, and then another. The endless mass beneath them seemed like some vast organism, its internal organs luminescing now and then, shining through its convoluted skin. The clouds were hundreds of feet below.
Tremulously, Ben turned his gaze upward. “If we have risen above the clouds,” he asked, “shouldn't we see stars?”
But there were no stars, only the arcane radiance of the sphere that bore them. Ben felt a tickle of horror when he understood that the luminescence was patterned. The once-solid globe now seemed translucent, an egg held up to a candle, its yolk bright, an eye straining to peer through a cataract.
Ben slept briefly and restlessly in the damp bottom of the boat, his mind racing despite his weariness. He had just dozed for a second time when he saw new light.
“The moon but not stars,” Robert murmured beside him. “How very odd.”
The rising orb was ruddy and huge, spreading its light liberally upon the clouds below. In the dim luminescence, Ben could still see no end to them, a vast desert of mist.
“That's a bright moon,” Robert remarked, his voice unsteady. Sir Isaac, nearby, snored a noncommittal reply.
Ben stared in momentary incomprehension. “No craters,” he said. “No man in the moon. Robert, that isn't the moon. That's the sun.”
“The sun? But the sky is still so dark. It's so pale!”
At noon, it was brighter than the full moon, but one could still stare at it for a few moments without looking away. The sky was amber, shaded to a vile brown at the horizon. Newton, now awake, sighed.
“We have made the world different,” he said. “We can only hope God will forgive us.”
“I don't understand,” Robert admitted tightly. “I'm no philosopher, I … Couldn't this be the end? Armageddon?”
Newton kept looking thoughtfully at the sun. “My researches into history suggest that the last days are not upon us yet,” he answered. “But it could be. In a few days we shall know. Mr. Nairne, you are in good company, for I don't understand these things we see much better than you do—nor, I suspect, does Mr. Franklin. But I will tell you this. If this is not the time foretold in the Revelation of John, it is a time of testing nevertheless. It is a time to use the minds God gave us, to decipher the phenomena around us. Most especially, we must stop this from ever happening again.”
“Again?”
“If one madman can call a comet from the sky, so can another. I mean to make certain that it cannot be done again. Mr. Franklin, I am sore in need of an amanuensis, a laboratory aide, a collaborator. In short, sir, I need an apprentice. May I interest you in the position?”
Newton's offer held only a vague hope of accomplishing too little too late, but it held the only hope that Ben saw left anywhere in the world.
“Yes,” he finally replied, not from eagerness or innocence, but from the beginnings of something wiser. “Yes, sir, I am interested.”
Adrienne woke to the tattoo of rain on a tile roof and tried to reconstruct from scant, disordered memories where she was.
Her last clear recollection was of fleeing through the woods with Crecy, of a throbbing pain in her wrist.
She raised her right hand and for a crazy second nearly laughed, because it looked so odd to have an arm ending in a wrist. She touched the clean bandage gingerly and was rewarded with pain.
She remembered fevered dreams of a filthy cottage, but now she lay in a large, comfortable bed in a small room. Outside a cracked window, the rain poured in a solid sheet. A faint sulphury odor wafted in from the open window, infusing the damp, metallic scent of rain.
She tried to rise and quickly discovered that she was too weak for that yet, and worse, she had a sudden, vicious bout of nausea. Fortunately, the chamber pot was on the side of the bed.
The noise of her being sick brought motion outside, and the door creaked open. Crecy entered, clad in a loose brown manteau somewhat short for her height.
“So!” Crecy said, kneeling nearby with a damp rag. “You're awake. How do you feel?”
“Veronique, where am I? How many days have passed?”
Crecy touched Adrienne's forehead lightly. “You have been very ill,” she said. “I thought you would die. You may have noticed your hand.”
“Yes.”
“It's been more than a week since we fled Versailles. You remember that?”
“Very well. And Nicolas …”
“Good. Then I don't have to explain.” She hesitated a moment and then added, “I am sorry, you know.”
“It was my fault. If I hadn't hesitated—”
“Then you would merely have lost your hand sooner,” Crecy finished. “Enough of that. We have other worries, and I will need you attentive to them, not frozen considering the past.”
“Other worries?”
“I'll get to that. When we fled the carriage, you didn't get far. I found a woodcutter and his wife; she had some knowledge of herbs and poultices. Your hand had to be removed.”
“The pursuit?”
Crecy smiled grimly. “The next day, Newton's cannon fired, and the pursuit seems to have quite forgotten us.”
“Truly?”
“Adrienne, the western sky lit up like midday, and then stones began to fall. Some of them were aflame, and the woods caught fire. A few hours after that, the sun was blotted out.”
“Blotted out?”
“By black clouds. It's been raining the most part of every day since, and the rain smells foul. I took you from the woodcutter's place to higher ground, for the lowlands are all flooding. I killed a gentleman and his driver, stole his carriage, and brought us here.”
“Where? Whose house is this?”
“Madame Alaran, one of the Korai. She received us, but we cannot stay here long. Her servants and tenants all think that the world has ended, and her fields are drowning.” She smiled sardonically. “Some of this is to our advantage. Many roads are washed out between here and Versailles. It will make our flight easier.”
Adrienne remembered her own calculation of the impact of the comet.
“I never saw all this,” she muttered.
“No matter,” Crecy said softly, “I did. It isn't the end of the world, I assure you. But it will be a very dark time, and you and I must leave France as soon as possible, while you are still well able to travel.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you are with child, my dear,” Crecy replied.
She stood in the ruins of Versailles and knew that she dreamed or that somehow Crecy
had given her the second sight, for she understood that she also remained in bed. Most of the great mansion still stood, but its windows were shattered, and the pounding of rain filled the empty halls like the sound of God's tears.
Through the downpour, she walked to the Grotto of Thetis, and there, with a mixture of pity and triumph, she regarded Louis' face on Apollo, the eyes now altered somehow so that the stone registered not a dread, sovereign gaze, but the sad eyes of a little child betrayed.
Her own face looked different, too. Older, and with something in the curve of the lips—something disturbing but not immediately recognizable.
Pain throbbed in her wrist, and it seemed now that she remembered why she was here. Approaching her statue, she gazed more closely, her eyes microscopes looking deeper and deeper until she spied the atoms that made it, the mathematical prisons that gave them form. She smiled and then laughed at the beauty of it.
Still smiling, she reached with her good hand and broke the stone wrist of Thetis, pressed the hard marble hand to her own stump. And then she wrote an equation the like of which had never been written before. She wrote it not with pen and ink but with atoms, the way God writes.
And then, dream or vision, it faded. She forgot much on waking, and forgot more each moment thereafter. But when she woke, she had two hands again.
Epilogue
The Angel of Kings
Peter Alexeevich, emperor of all the Russias, Livonia, Karelia, and Sweden, paced through the rooms of his modest Summer Palace like a caged tiger. At forty-eight, his tall frame trembled with the pent-up energies of a younger man, a man used to action and presently denied it.
How could he act when he knew nothing? Oh, he had a few reports, but most aetherschreibers seemed to have stopped working. He knew, at least, that the spectacular sights in the western and southern heavens of two nights ago, the subsequent darkening of the sun, and now the unseasonable storms rolling in from the west were small things compared to the cataclysms in the rest of Europe. Of two score ambassadors, merchants, and spies in the Netherlands, only one had so far contacted him, a short, panicked note that raved of fire from the heavens and the waves flowing over the dikes. Amsterdam, that most incomparable of cities, had been reclaimed by the sea. In France, the Sun King was dead, and all was chaos. There was no word from London. It was as if every agent in England had vanished.
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