The Emerald Storm

by William Dietrich

  “Not to mention fatal.”

  “Which means it’s best to be careful,” added Cayley unnecessarily.

  “Why doesn’t one of you carry it?”

  “Because you’ve the incentive to rescue your wife, while George here will be busy with his flying machine,” said Frotté. “There’s no room for me, so I’ll organize the horses. Thanks to your emerald, fate has provided us with the hero of Acre and Tripoli for a most truly dangerous part.” He hoped flattery would give me spine.

  “It was my emerald. Now that damned French policeman has it.”

  “Once you know all of L’Ouverture’s secrets, imagine what you can bargain for!”

  With those words in my ear, I scuttled across the castle roof. There was a flat parapet following the walls, towers poking up here and there. The center of the castle was a series of barrel-arched stone vaults over the cells. I’d been briefed on the location of L’Ouverture, and faint light emanated from a hole in the center of his vault. Across the hole were iron bars, and down it, I hoped, were the people I was to break from prison.

  “Astiza!” I hissed.

  “Here, Ethan.”

  “Thank goodness. He hasn’t molested you, has he?”

  “He’s so old and sick he can barely stand. Please hurry!”

  “Was it hard to have them let you in?”

  “The French are bored,” she said impatiently. “They found the idea of seducing him for secrets quite amusing. They’re probably listening for sounds of love.”

  I pulled out the canister. “Is L’Ouverture ready?”

  “Not really. He thinks us quite mad.”

  “Well, he hasn’t lost his judgment, then.”

  “The guards are suspicious. Stop talking and act.”

  “Moan to buy us time.” Women are good at noises.

  The bars formed a cross, meaning I had to break the rods in four places to get my wife and the black general out of their hole. I held the cylinder, used my gloved hands to loosen a screw cap the English had devised, and readied the spout over one of the bars. “Stand back while I release this,” I warned.

  A lever freed a cork the final way and something—I suppose it was liquefied carbon dioxide—gushed out, flashing into white snow as promised. I dunked what Frotté had called “dried ice” on the point where an iron rod jutted from the masonry. Snow and steam swirled upward. Then I took my chisel and hammer and struck a blow where I’d frozen the iron. The bar snapped with a ring, surprising me with its glasslike fragility. Maybe this would truly work.

  It’s clever being a savant, but noisy, too. I glanced about. No sentry yet.

  I repeated the operation on the next bar, and the next.

  A prison guard, alerted by the noise, pounded on the cell door below. “Mademoiselle?”

  “Please, we are busy!” Astiza protested, feigning breathlessness.

  “On the fourth blow, the grill will fall inward. Try to catch it,” I reminded. I froze the final bar and got ready to swing, but what I hadn’t counted on was that the fourth rod snapped all on its own from the weight of the grill, and dropped before I could even tap it.

  It bonged like a bell on the floor below and I winced.

  “What is going on?” the guard demanded.

  “Games,” Astiza called, as if impatient at his interruption. “Do you know nothing of love?”

  I poked my head down into L’Ouverture’s prison. It was a rather generous thirty by twelve feet, with a fireplace on one wall, a door at one end, and a narrow bed with rude blankets. A coal-dark face looked up from the bed in amazement, the bright white of his eyes the most arresting feature in the gloom. L’Ouverture looked thin, ill, and rather homely, with graying hair, thick lips, sunken cheeks, and thin limbs. This was a notorious womanizer? The fatalism of his gaze was disconcerting. He looked up at my head, framed in the skylight, as if I were some kind of angel, but not of mercy. Rather, the angel of long-wished-for death.

  More guards pounded on the cell door. “Mademoiselle? Is he abusing you?”

  “How can I finish my interview with all this knocking, you idiots,” my wife snapped. “Go away and give us privacy! We’re playing a game.”

  I dropped a rope into the cell. “Astiza, use the bed to block the door. Toussaint, tie this under your arms.”

  “Ethan, he’s too sick to move.”

  “Then you move him.”

  “No man goes before a lady,” the black general said, his voice deep but raw. He coughed, horribly. Damnation, he was feeble! He stood as if arthritic, grabbed his bed, and manfully dragged it to the wooden cell door to barricade it. “Your wife—whom I have not touched, monsieur—goes first.”

  L’Ouverture was the first gentleman I’d encountered in some time.

  And no time to argue! She expertly tied a noose (we’d practiced), slipped it under her arms, and I leaned back against the bricks of the barrel roof and heaved her up. Being much lighter than a man, in seconds she was up and beside me, giving me a quick kiss and glancing about as warily as a sparrow. Her eyes were bright, her smile crooked. She was enjoying this, I realized.

  No wonder we’d married.

  “I’m glad I didn’t have to hear you talk your way in.”

  “You simply let men imagine more than they will ever get.”

  Women practice that, keeping us constantly befuddled. Now some of those frustrated men were again banging on the door, shouting questions. L’Ouverture limped over to stand beneath the hole. “I am already dying,” he called up. “You are rescuing a corpse.”

  “Not before you help freedom with your secrets. For liberty!” I dropped the rope again. With agonizing slowness he stepped into the noose and lifted it to his chest. I yanked to make it tight. The peephole in the cell door opened. Angry cries now, recriminations from an officer, and the squeal of keys. The French guards were unlocking the barricaded door.

  Astiza seized the rope, too. “Pull!”

  We hoisted. L’Ouverture spun like a top, ascending to heaven, limp with a curious resignation. Did he somehow foresee his end? Then there was a crash, the door butted in, the bed smashed into splinters, and then a volley of gunshots flashed in the gloom. The Haitian hero’s body jerked as it was riddled. Astiza and I looked at each other, horrified.

  We dropped the rope in surprise. There was a thud as L’Ouverture’s body hit the floor. Had my hopes of rescuing my son died with him? The smoky room filled with soldiers, some of them glancing up at the hole in the roof. The two of us leaned back so as not to be seen. Their muskets were, for the moment, empty.

  “Where’s his mistress?” one asked.

  “On the roof somehow. She has an accomplice. Raise the alarm!” A bell began to clang. “Upstairs, you morons!”

  “Time to flee.” I grabbed my wife and we sprinted back for the wall where we’d climbed. Cayley had made it up to the parapet there as planned, and had unfolded and assembled his invention behind its crenellation. The glider looked to me a kind of wooden bed frame from which canvas wings jutted, like flaps on the skeleton of a goose. No sturdier than a stack of jackstraws.

  He greeted our arrival with relief. “Thank goodness we can go.” He glanced past. “Where’s the general?”

  “Shot trying to escape.” I couldn’t keep the despair from my voice.

  “Then all this was for nothing?”

  “Not entirely,” Astiza murmured.

  I didn’t have time to ask her what she meant, because the door opened to the tower room I’d climbed past. My would-be female companion, her hourglass charms on display in a linen shift, stood backlit by revealing candlelight. “Monsieur, what is that bell? Is it time for our rendezvous?”

  “No! I told you to wait.”

  “Ethan?” My wife’s tone was understandably suspicious.

  “I had to tell her something to keep her from crying out.”

  “Tell her what? That you were going to cheat on your wife?”

  “Wife?” the girl asked, realizing a
nother woman was beside me.

  “It’s not what it seems,” I said to both of them.

  And now the damsel did scream, screeching for Papa like a fury. Damnation, women are difficult.

  Another door from another tower banged open, and more soldiers appeared, their primed muskets tipped with glinting bayonets.

  “Time to fly!” Cayley cried. He picked up Astiza, heaved her onto the flimsy frame without apology, and tugged at me. “Lift on the other wing!” We hoisted and climbed up the low crenellated wall at the brink of the castle.

  The guards were raising their guns. “They’re after the colonel’s daughter!” one cried.

  I held the glider with one arm, pulled a pistol, and fired, my fist bucking, to throw off their aim. One of them actually went down. I threw the empty gun, making them instinctively duck, and then pulled and fired my other pistol.

  “Now, now!” Cayley cried.

  There was a volley of muskets, bullets tearing toward us.

  Or rather, tearing toward where we’d been.

  We’d launched into the abyss.

  Chapter 12

  We hurtled into a black void. There was the sickening sensation of falling, stomach left behind, and then a gust of wind swooped us sideways. Cayley shouted something unintelligible, I clung to the frame, and Astiza was squashed and half smothered between us. Our “goose” felt pregnant with our weight. More shots, the hiss of musket balls, and then we began to glide just above the tips of a downward-sloping comb of mountain pine, jutting like stakes to impale us. I could smell the forest in the wind.

  “It works!” Cayley cried.

  I waited for his invention to make my son an orphan.

  I hate modern times.

  Our machine was nothing like the angel wings of an Icarus. Its spine was a pole twenty feet long with a cruciform tail of little wings, like two kites melded at right angles to each other. This appendage, the inventor explained, was to give us balance and direction. The two main canvas wings were more reminiscent of a bat than a bird, thin canvas fabric stretched over a wooden framework like dried skin. Thin cables led from tail and wings to a rectangular framework suspended below the pole. The Englishman had lit a small lamp that hung from the central strut. It would allow our allies (and the French, I thought gloomily) to follow our progress.

  Or find our bodies.

  The swooping glide was like a sled run; I’d never traveled so fast. Cayley had one cable in his teeth and another in a hand. “Pull your line to the left!” he commanded.

  I did so, and the machine leaned, almost spilling us out. Astiza shrieked, sensibly.

  Or was that me?

  “Not that much!”

  I slacked off, groaning. But then he shouted, “Enough!” and we flattened and steadied. We were still descending, but on a long, gentler trajectory. Patches of snow went by beneath us like blurred clouds. The experiment actually worked.

  We heard the rip of a cannonball cutting through the air, sounding like tearing fabric, and then the boom of its cannon echoing from the fort. I was impressed they’d gotten even one shot off. We were flying what seemed like fifty times faster than any horse, Fort de Joux’s mountain far behind, and a rent in the clouds lit up a palette of grays that showed fields, woodlots, and the lines of road.

  Ahead was a lighter gray, the blob of a pond.

  No, a lake. It was rapidly growing as we neared it. By Creation, that was more than enough to die in. I tensed all over again.

  “George, the ice will be like pavement if it’s thick, and we’ll drown if it’s thin.”

  “I’m going to aim for the water near shore. The ice will bend like a cushion. Frotté will follow, with dry clothing.” His voice was tight, his concentration enormous. The wings of the glider rocked as we flew, gusts bucking us up and then dropping us down. Wind sang in our rigging. I heard gasps and hugged Astiza. Or was that me doing the snuffling?

  “It will be like a bird crashing into a window.”

  “Thin glass, in April.” English scientists are unrelentingly optimistic. “However the landing, we’ve made history, my friends.”

  I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure they’ll put a stone up.”

  Now we were skimming over ice, the lake growing ever larger and more menacing. A tracery of snow had been blown into patterns, some of it puffed up as we raced just above. Instinctively, we all cried out and braced. Then before I could take breath we slammed onto the surface of the lake, breaking through crust as fragile as frosting and plowing into freezing water. The glider disintegrated into kindling. Canvas wings caught ice floes and floated off. Meanwhile, we heavy humans plunged into black depths. I clutched Astiza, determined to die with her in my arms. The cold was paralyzing.

  All was dark. We kicked, looking for the surface. Our heavy winter clothes were like weights, and she pushed away from me to sensibly shed hers.

  Then my feet touched something.

  A rocky bottom!

  I staggered upright, surging through shards of ice and snow to freezing air, throwing off water like a frenzied dog. I could stand, and haul up my wife, and so I did so. “Astiza! Are you all right?”

  “Alive.” Her eyes mirrored my own shock. “It’s so cold it hurts!”

  I held her close. “It’s shallow,” I gasped. “You can walk.”

  We half waded, half swam, up the pebbled shore.

  “Where’s George?”

  “I think I can salvage it!” he cried from behind us. He was still chest-deep, hauling in pieces of his shattered flying machine.

  “Leave it, Cayley! Maybe they’ll think we drowned!”

  Even an eccentric can discern logic at times. He nodded reluctantly and let the pieces of his prize float away, struggling toward shore himself. The three of us staggered out of the bitter water and up onto a frosty, snow-glazed meadow. The clouds had closed up again, and there were no lights to be seen. We were soaked, the wind was numbing, and we’d survived glider flight only to die of exposure.

  “Of all the bollocks-backward schemes I’ve been involved in, this was the worst,” I wheezed, using the anger to warm myself.

  “Actually, I’m amazed it worked at all,” Cayley confessed. “Too bad it will have to remain a secret, given the necessities of espionage. I think my aerial machine could also benefit from improvement.”

  “The object of our rescue shot dead, your invention ruined, the three of us on the brink of freezing, and no closer to dealing with Leon Martel for my son than before,” I recited, just to make clearer the actual situation. “Astiza, why didn’t L’Ouverture climb faster?”

  “He was already dying,” she said. “Chilled to his marrow and thin as a stalk. You could see death in his eyes. Betrayal and imprisonment had broken his spirit. He didn’t look at me as if I were a rescuer, Ethan. He looked at me as a messenger of doom.”

  “And now our modern Spartacus has been crucified for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing. For science,” Cayley said.

  “Yes. How fast can we freeze in place?”

  The inventor ignored my skepticism and staggered up a snowy slope. We heard hoofbeats on frozen ground. Cayley waved. “It’s Frotté! He’s coming with horses and clothes!”

  So we might live after all, if the spy brought brandy to light our core. My heart was racing like a hummingbird’s wings, trying to keep warm, and I was furious at risking the life of my wife to rescue a man already almost a corpse. “All for nothing,” I growled.

  “But it wasn’t for nothing, Ethan,” she whispered while she shuddered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d time to explain the emerald and the treasure to L’Ouverture, and I could see he understood what I was talking about. His eyes gleamed with hope. Just before you lifted me, he gave a clue.”

  I saw the spray of snow from the rescuers who would spirit us toward Switzerland. The French, I guessed, were mustering their own cavalry to pursue. “What clue?” I chattered, shaking with cold.

&nb
sp; Astiza looked as miserable as I’d ever seen her, but her eyes were bright. “To look for the emeralds in the diamond.”

  Chapter 13

  The heat of the Caribbean in June, the beginning of the sultry hurricane season, was like a heavy shroud of sweaty muslin. As the British frigate Hecate ghosted into English Harbor on the island of Antigua, sails limp, pitch on deck seams bubbling, tarred rigging hot as a throbbing vein, my wife and I studied what officers called the Graveyard of the Englishman. The sugar isles were colorful hell, they said, a muggy mystery of thick green scrub, iridescent turquoise water, truculent black slaves, and poisonous vapors. A soldier or sailor assigned there was far more likely to die of disease than from a French or Spanish bullet. Europeans went to the sugar isles for one reason and one reason only: to get rich. Then they rushed home before fevers took them, vermin bit, their own Negro maids poisoned them, or a rebel Maroon—an escaped slave—slit their throats.

  “The rain comes down like an overturned bucket,” Captain Nathaniel Butler warned us, turning the serene harbor into an enclosing net of menace. “The air is alive with insects, and the ground with ants. The groundwater is bad, so you must doctor it with spirits, but in order to drink enough the planters are intoxicated from breakfast to bedtime, and drunkards all. Every English item costs three times what it does in London, and a tropical tempest can knock down a decade’s hard labor. Yet just one of these islands produces more wealth than all of Canada. An ambitious man can carve a plantation out of jungle and double his money every year. Sugar, Gage, is white gold. And men die for gold.”

  “I daresay this is a good hurricane hole,” I ventured. English Harbor was surrounded by steep, verdant hills, and the serpentine bay wound back into the island like a rabbit’s burrow. A hundred black cannon poked out from various batteries to deter attack. This was the most closely defended graveyard I’d ever seen. “Perhaps a dip in the sea would make it bearable.”