She felt like a fool when they finally reached the bottom of the ravine and she could hear the river roaring less than twenty feet away. She sat down on the rocky, sandy ground amidst the scrub and tried to catch her breath and stop her heart from banging almost painfully against her ribcage.
“Sasha, are you all right?” Quinn asked with concern, refusing to let her hand go.
“Yes,” she answered after a few moments. She climbed slowly to her feet and weaved against the rock wall. “I’ll be fine now.”
“It’s not very far,” John assured her. He led them on, and they walked single file through the canyon, not because it wasn’t wide enough—the canyon itself, including the river, must have been a mile wide—but because the whole valley was honeycombed with eroded stone stalagmites that resembled giant broken teeth and the loops and arches of stone they had observed from the plateau. It made travel difficult and gave the valley a cave-like feel, even though there was no ceiling. The river washed down in a white froth to the right of them. Unlike the plateau above, the river fed the valley. As a result, it was as verdant as an oasis, full of tall marsh grasses, rambling, thorny bushes and the occasional stunted conifer abuzz with insects and small, busy animals clinging to its upper bows. The valley was too rocky for tall trees, so there was no real protection from the birds, no trees to climb or to hide beneath. A series of caves pocked the wall of the canyon to their left, each sinking away into utter blackness. John warned them to watch their step and to be sure not to get snagged on anything. “All you have to do is bleed a few drops and you’ll draw a whole host of animals to you.”
“I have no intention of bleeding if I can help it,” Sasha stated, checking herself all over for scratches. Her palms were rubbed raw by the rope, but otherwise, she was fine.
“And try to avoid making any unnecessary noises. The birds up there”—he pointed in the direction of the cliff wall where the giant hanging nests resided—“have incredibly acute hearing. If they think an animal down here is in distress, they’ll pounce on it, day or night.”
Twenty minutes later, John led them up a short series of levels to his cave, his “home away from home,” as he called it. Having spent over a month here, he’d furnished the spacious cavern with rudimentary furnishings he’d been able to construct from logs, stones and other debris he’d found in the valley. He’d constructed a crude writing easel for himself and a hammock to sleep in, and had developed a fairly complex pulley system of weights and balances in order to move a giant boulder up and down to act as a “door” for his cave, a way of deterring the larger animals from getting in at night. By filling a basket with stones, he was able to tense the rope attached to an overhead pullet and then to a homemade metal hook affixed to the boulder, thus raising it. When he removed the stones, he was able to lower the boulder into place. Sasha admired the ingenuity that had gone into the system. She could also appreciate the idea of all of them getting a full night’s rest for a change.
John showed her his notes, diary, and blueprints for the Machine, spread throughout the cave, and even stuck in clefts in the walls. After that, he showed them the underground pool at the back of the cave, which delighted Quinn. Because the comfort and security of a cave, and the ingenuity of its owner, meant very little if there was no source of water. It was a small pool, no larger than the duck pond behind her father’s house, but John said a series of underground tunnels fed into the pool, producing a continuous supply of fresh water. The water tasted good after their long hike.
“And now, the Machine…such as it is,” he announced, leading her out of the cave, down the crude “steps” to the floor of the valley and through some dense vegetation. Sasha followed, with Quinn close behind. Quinn had said very little since their hike had begun, but Sasha knew he was on full alert, looking for signs of danger.
John’s choice in camp had not come about by whim or accident. Just past the weeds was a large circle of complex rock formations pushing up out of the ground like a series of giant teeth. At the center was a stone dais. On the altar-like dais was a very complicated-looking tuning fork consisting of fourteen metal spires of varying height set on a homemade wheel-like device. The wheel spun lazily in the soft wind, the whole thing looking rough but effective.
Quinn took in the sight of the stone formations surrounding them, then the tuning fork. “It’s very pretty, but what is it?”
Sasha came forward then. “It’s a Tuning Machine.”
“It doesn’t look like one. At least, not like the one you created at home.”
“It’s the same principle, though.” She walked in a circle around the dais, marveling at it. “How long did it take you to make this?” she asked John.
“A month,” he said almost sheepishly. “The Moja traded me much of the crude metals for it, after I showed them better ways of hunting and did other tasks for them. I refined the metals, which was the hardest part. It was difficult and time-consuming.”
“I’m sure.”
He moved closer to the tuning fork and spun it on its wheel. When he turned it quickly enough, it produced a high, clear vibration that Sasha felt somewhere deep in her bones.
“And you use wind to drive it.”
“Correct. Though tonight there’s no wind.” John looked skyward. “However, the Moja shaman has said that the Great Wind is on its way and will appear in about a week’s time. I’m hoping that means the rainy season—which is, apparently, a yearly occurrence. It’ll storm and rain for seven days straight, then there won’t be any more rain—or wind—for another year.” He turned to look at her. “Unfortunately, I’m having a devil of a time harnessing enough wind to maintain the fork’s vibration, even though this rock formation”—he indicated the stand of stones—“catches more wind than any other in the valley. I know because I’ve tested all of them.”
Sasha’s mind had already leapt forward, trying to devise a way to catch enough wind to keep the fork singing. If she could do that, she might be able to open the gate. Of course, assuming she was able to do any of that, she was still faced with the dubious and almost overwhelming task of tuning the fork’s vibration so she had the right gate, not just any gate. After all, they could find themselves on a dead volcanic world, or a planet without oxygen. The possibilities were grim and frightening.
“So, Sasha,” John said with a game smile, “what do you think?”
Sasha spun the tuning fork on its wheel, listening to its tinny song. “I have no idea.”
CHAPTER 9
Well, that wasn’t exactly true, but close.
She had ideas, but nothing practical, nothing she could apply to John’s natural Tuning Machine. Sasha spent the next four days in John’s cave, sitting at his writing easel, looking over his blueprints and becoming increasingly frustrated. She needed to construct something that would not only maintain wind but also fine-tune it. It didn’t seem possible. Every idea she came up with was based on the design of the original Tuning Machine, and that was based on a complex system of electricity. She had nowhere near the resources she’d had when she first created the devise, and certainly no way to harness electricity. She didn’t even have any metal scraps to work with—John had used them all just to create a functioning tuning fork. She had wood and cloth to work with, stones and bones, weapons and survival odds and ends, nothing useful.
She worked from sunup to sundown, with only two hours of troubled sleep every twelve hours. On the fifth day, she rose from her fitful rest, uncertain if it was day or night, washed the sleep from her eyes with a bucket of water, and crawled to John’s writing easel to look over her notes from the day before. She picked up the crude kohl pencil and started to make notations when the tip cracked. She stood up, exited the cave, and walked down to the Tuning Machine. There she collapsed at the foot of the dais and started to cry helplessly, uncaring if anything heard her, despite it being daylight hours.
Five minutes later, Quinn appeared at her side and went to one knee beside her. He carried his
javelin in one hand and an old, half-broken umbrella of John’s in the other. The open umbrella, they’d discovered, confused the birds if one had to be out and about during the day. He said, his voice soft and measured in her ear, “Try not to make too much noise. The birds are circling.”
She put her hands over her mouth to stifle her cries. The pterosaurs wouldn’t attack unless they thought something on the ground was wounded. She didn’t want to make any more wounded noises. Quinn pulled her against him and she buried her face in his shirt and cried for a while, muffling the noises against him. He set the javelin down, held the umbrella up as a shield, and cupped the back of her head and held her, saying nothing.
That was something else she loved about Quinn. He never offered false comfort. He didn’t do stupid things like tell her it was going to be all right when she knew it wasn’t. He let her cry and sob and anything else she needed to do. And then, when she was done, then he reasoned with her.
When her sobs had subsided into hiccups he said, “Sasha, is it really that bad?”
“I don’t know what to do, Quinn. I really don’t.”
“You’ll think of something.”
“I have nine days at most.” The days were becoming increasingly darker and the heavy scent of electricity was on the air. She knew the Moja shaman was correct. “Nine days until the storm season is over. Then we’re trapped here at least another year.”
He petted her braids and seemed to consider that. “Then we’re here another year. And during that time, you work on different ideas. Next year, you try again.”
“If we live long enough.”
“We’ll make it,” he assured her, and she knew he was making no empty promise. “I’ll see to it personally that we make it until next year.”
“I just don’t have the skills or resources to do this, Quinn. I’m only an amateur inventor.”
“You’re a very smart girl,” he said, resting his chin on the top of her head and embracing her protectively in his arms. It was so odd that she felt safer in Quinn’s arms on a planet full of prehistoric predators than she ever felt on her own world, alone.
“I don’t feel smart.”
He was silent a long moment. “May I suggest something?”
“Please. By all means.”
“I believe you may be overcomplicating your designs. You are thinking like a girl from our world. You need to think like a girl from this world.”
She eased back in his arms and looked up at him. For a moment all the tension went out of her shoulders and she smiled. “Lord Sirius Quinn, do you know you’re a very beautiful man?”
Quinn laughed then, a real laugh. She had never seen him laugh like that before; it was as rare as his smiles. “No one has ever said that about me before. I usually get the opposite end of that.”
“All right, then. You’re an evil, ugly old git.”
“There you go.”
Over his shoulder, she could see the birds circling like a collection of kites, riding the updrafts off the valley. They flapped their stiff wings and cawed to each other, their voices bouncing off the stone of the valley and reverberating on the still air.
“Kites,” she said. And then: “Sails. They don’t fly like modern birds, Quinn.”
Quinn nodded, then frowned and shook his head in confusion.
“They use sails.”
“Yes?”
She looked at him, intently. “Did you have a candle windmill when you were a boy?”
“A candle windmill?”
“It’s a toy, like a little house. You light the candles and the smoke blows the paddles round and round…” She stopped as a rush of adrenaline gripped her, making her entire body hum. She sprang up, breaking Quinn’s hold. How could she have forgotten about the candle windmill? It was one of her first toys, and she’d spent days playing with it, figuring out how it worked. “I need to get back to the cave,” she said, perhaps too loudly because one of the birds circled closer, eyeing the two of them. “It’s very, very important!”
She started running for the cave with Quinn attached to one arm, toting an umbrella turned very much inside out in their haste.
CHAPTER 10
It took them five days to build the windmill. Sasha worked the calculations while Quinn and John did most of the manual labor. The storm season was well on its way by then, and all three of them were getting very used to being wet and wind-buffeted on a daily basis. The rain was cold and drenching, at times discouraging, but the upside of the situation was that the pterosaurs disliked the rain even more than they did, choosing to roost in their nests or cower in crevices and caves further up the plateau, so the three of them had less to worry about.
The rains fell and the winds blew. That, too, may have been a factor in the birds’ withdrawal. Powerful, almost continuous wind, ripped through the valley, generating odd, melodious songs from the weird rock formations and sending anything not nailed down skittering into oblivion.
On the fifth day, Quinn and John finished installing the last of the sails in the gigantic carousel that Sasha had designed. The sales were homemade, yet functional, composed primarily of branches fastened together with catgut and pieces of fabric stretched overtop the skeletons. Each of the six sails was over five feet tall and designed to run on a circular rail that Sasha had constructed of young green saplings. She had made everything using the natural resources at hand, as Quinn had suggested. Almost from the moment they fastened the last sail and let the whole device go, the wind began driving the sails in a steady circular pattern about the dais. Immediately, the tuning forks changed their song, depending on how the wind was being interrupted by the sales. Sasha had also designed a stopper, a stick she used to slow the carousel in certain places by grinding it against the rails, thus adjusting the tune to exactly the speed and velocity she wanted. After the sails started picking up speed, she experimented by racing around the carousel and slowing the sails in certain places. She only needed one vibration to open a gate, a perfectly pitched vibration.
Nothing happened the first day, but the second day she was experimenting with it she hit the right vibration and an explosion of light poured out over the top of the tuning forks like some Martial death ray in Mr. Wells’s new book. The light caught a passing pterosaur unawares and it vanished in spackles of light, sent to some far-off mystery world, never to be seen again—at least by eyes in this world.
Her two boys whooped in victory and danced in the rain, momentarily forgetting their ongoing feud, stomping their boots in the mud.
Sasha ran over and hugged them both tight.
“Where do you think it went?” John asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Sasha answered, breathlessly excited and dancing with them like they were all mad together. They were going home. They were really going home!
It seemed too much to ask for. And in a way, she feared it was.
CHAPTER 11
On the sixth day of the storm season, they packed their meager belongings and tried to prepare themselves. John was unhappy about leaving so many of his homemade devices behind, but carrying everything with them into the gate would have proved impractical. It was bad enough he was taking his huge satchel of notes along with him, something Quinn was worried would slow him down, should they find themselves in a precarious position.
Sasha let Quinn pack their things while she worked on fine-tuning the Tuning Machine. Her boys were so eager to return home, they seemed obvious to the one remaining issue: she had to find the right gate to take them to London, otherwise they might wind up in whatever unfriendly place that pterosaur had gone. And there were other considerations. After she opened a gate, she found that it would stay open so long as the sails were not interrupted. During that time, she needed to sit crouched on the dais and play her fingers over the tuning forks while the images above her changed rapidly from primeval forests to advanced civilizations, from creatures to men to things she had no name for. It took many hours before she hit what she felt was th
e jackpot: an image of a busy London street, probably somewhere in Whitechapel. She watched with rapt attention as coaches raced through the wet streets and newspaper boys and vendors stood on the street corners, hawking their wares. She promised herself that the moment she was home she was going to ride up and down the cobblestoned streets and greet everyone she met.
She wondered how her father was fairing. He must be sick to death with worry for her, she thought. She had been gone almost three months. Then she thought of Toby, who had chosen to remain among the Moja and learn their ways, lead them. Inspired, she dug out the one remaining piece of chalk that John had managed to save and jumped to the ground. She crouched low to write instructions for using the Tuning Machine in English on the stone. The Tuning Machine looked very unusual, so chances were good the native people would leave it untouched, thinking it was some holy shrine. And should Toby’s wandering tribe ever come by this way, he’d see the instructions and find he had an opportunity to return home, if he chose to.
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