Cloud Castles (33 page)

‘Can’t ask them to come along on this,’ she sighed. ‘We’ll need all the capacity we have for combatants. Mall, would you haul up the ladder? Jyp, if you’d take the wheel – it’s much like a ship’s, but there are other controls, I’ll show you. Steve? We’re ready to go. If you wouldn’t mind signalling them to cast off …’

I leaned through the doorway and waved down to the crewmen, who scurried to unlatch the moorings; it seemed almost sacrilegious having them hooked around that beautiful Gothic tracery. They swung free, I returned the crewmen’s salutes – and looked down.

It was worse than my first look down from a swaying mast; it was worse than the first real rock face on the Eiger, with the glacier plunging away into nothingness and birds flying beneath my feet. The
Dove
swayed gently, her strange engines idling with little puffs of steam, just off the face of the tower. The lines of its sides struck down into the depths like arrows, carrying my mesmerized stare with them to the cobbles of the square and the tiny figures who clustered there. With
the motion of the airship the red-tiled roof-tops surged beneath me like waves of blood, swelling and sinking in a peculiarly sickening slow motion. A strong hand caught my shoulder and pulled me back, just in time. ‘To spill one’s jetsam from the maintop’s poor enough, be the wind i’ the wrong quarter,’ remarked Mall, sliding the door shut. ‘But from this height and onto innocent heads ’twould be counted ill-bred, I think. And no way to sail off to war.’

I sat back on the gondola’s polished wooden floor, closing my eyes for a moment. Behind us the engines altered suddenly from soft chugging to a pulsing thunder as Alison leaned on the throttle, though they were still far quieter than anything that powerful and steam-driven had a right to be. A flurry of startled pigeons fluttered past the window. The swaying stilled, and the
Dove
was no longer a helpless balloon-like bulk but a powerful nosing arrow, thrusting for the greyness above, the uncertainty of the Spiral, where the high peaks of stone and the ridges of shifting vapour became one, mountain-throne and mist-crest merged, each tracing the other’s contours, each joined by common paths, the most and the least solid meeting at the far horizons of the Spiral. Where they joined, where wide roads opened between the ocean and the air and archipelagos stretched out into the clouds, the mighty shadows of all times, all places stretched; and men who spied their way could pass between. Jyp, grasping the controls with his usual uncanny ability, gunned the throttle to a deep drone, tilted the nose and brought us circling upward till all trace of the ground fell away like debris in our wake, and overhead the clouds drew back, out flung arms of a receding land, reaching out to the islands of the sunset sky. I stood at the gondola’s forward window, and Alison joined me there. ‘Over the sunset,’ she whispered, and I wondered what had moved her to express it like that, so close to the helmsman’s call I’d heard first on another such desperate chase.

‘Over the airs of the Earth!’ I answered. And something of the old exultation did break out in me then, for all the gloomy cloud that overhung us and the danger of what was to come.

Jyp caught it, and his old grin broke through. Mall’s smile flashed like the sun through an overcast, and she slapped the sheath at her thigh. ‘Over the airs of the Earth! We’re under way!
We’re coming!
’

‘Whither away?’ demanded Jyp, spinning the
wheel experimentally. ‘Where first, Alison?’

‘North-west ten degrees,’ she said, quite quietly. ‘Then north a degree, and I’ll guide you in. The
Urwald
, the heartland forests of Europe. The late summer, fifteen years after Christ.’

We came floating out of the clouds into darkness, a darkness more absolute than you could find almost anywhere in our light-polluted modern world. Alison had the wheel now, guiding us out of the shadows of the Spiral to the Core locations she knew. ‘In Rome Tiberius is still emperor,’ she said, steering us over hilly country whose skylines were a solid fringe of forest, broken only by a winding seam of dull silver. ‘Probably off in Capri just now. But down there somewhere his nephew Germanicus is leading a great campaign to drive the barbarians back from the Danube frontier …’

It didn’t look as if anything could be stirring down below, let alone two sizeable armies, so dense were the trees under their faint carpet of chill mists. But Jyp, with his night eyes, suddenly pointed ahead, to where a tiny ember of red pulsed among the blackness. As we came closer we saw it was the wreck of a largish fort or township, walls reduced to stumps now but still crackling with fitful bursts of flame. We glided in under low power, almost brushing the pine tops, with our airscrews barely turning, and drifted like a cloud over the wreck below. Alison passed Jyp the helm, shot back the gondola door and swung down onto the unreeling ladder, waving. Under the forest shadow dull gleams of metal stirred, and a head crest of high red plumes. A tall centurion in scarlet cloak moved out, peering suspiciously, with a dozen or so men behind him. Then he flashed a hand in quick salute. ‘What’s this? Reinforcements?’

‘Recall!’ said Alison, thumping down onto the bushy slope. Within minutes, while she was still explaining, the centurion was chivvying the men up the ladder and through the gondola into the body of the machine. He sprang after them, loricated breastplate clanking and caligae squeaking, his hard face pale around the cheekbones, and tossed me a chest-thumping salute. ‘
Caio
’
Marco
’
Fevronio
’,
centurio
’!’ he announced, and then, with hardly an accent, ‘You’re Fisher? The Lady Alison, she tells me we follow you. Okay, here we are. But we need more than my handful if we go lay siege to the
Brocken, eh?’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘More than one airship load!’

‘Not siege,’ I told him. ‘Blitzkrieg. Alison, where next?’

‘Westward,’ she said. ‘Western France, south-west of Paris on the Loire, summer of 732. Look for a battle and you’re there.’

Even in the dark we couldn’t have missed it, even over our motors; the sounds drifted up to us, clanging, screaming, the snap of bows and the shrill neighing of horses. Here and there dark silhouettes capered against the light of burning buildings, widely separated; peasant farmsteads, I guessed. Alison was scanning the darkness, peering at the shoals of banners as they swept past the fires, following some kind of signals I couldn’t even sense. ‘Our man’s with the armies of Charles Martel, the Hammer, turning back the Moors,’ she said absently. ‘This was as far into Europe as they got.’

I frowned. ‘Hang on a moment. Around that time the Moors weren’t so bad, were they? They were the civilized ones, they built the Alhambra and all those other great buildings in Spain. More civilized than a load of Frankish head bangers, anyhow.’

‘It’s not what they were,’ she said. It’s what they could become. And don’t assume that cultured equals humane – the Moorish nobles treated their own people like dirt. It helped bring them down during the reconquest – there!’

I couldn’t make out one group from another, but we went drifting down like a stray cloud over a group of startled Moors, who let out one unison wail and bolted. The group of horsemen harrying them also bolted, except for a small knot who held their ground, calmed their plunging horses, and came trotting over, evidently well aware of what we were. Alison spoke to them hastily, and we held our breath every time an arrow sang past. Somebody blew a complicated horn signal, and within moments we had five or six chunky blond men with braids and moustaches clambering up into the gondola, their short mail shirts and studded belts clinking as they climbed. ‘That’s all they could spare,’ Alison reported. ‘And they’re leaving their horses, Charles is short of them for the pursuit.’

I looked back at the long rear gondola, which had a ramp for loading horses up into the body of the airship. ‘We could use some horsemen. We may need to get somewhere fast, through rough country.’

‘It’ll have to be later. They’re too precious in these early periods, they’d be missed. We won’t get them at the next stop either. That’s eastward, Jyp. To the shadows
of Byzantium, and beyond. Out into its northern territories, the steppes by the Dnieper, spring of the year 1091.’

The centurion Marco nodded. ‘The Emperor Alexio’ Comneno’, where he defeats the Pecheneg horde. We go for Hastein, eh?’

Alison nodded. ‘If he’s still all right.’

There was no way we could approach that great circle of campfires and colourful tents across the rolling land. We came down swift but light, like a driven cloud, and Alison and Marco went to fetch their man while I stamped and fidgeted. The man who finally came clattering up the ladder was unexpected; I’d never seen anyone less Greek, a red-blond giant with a drooping handlebar moustache and embroidered fur-trimmed jacket over his scale-mail shirt, an immense axe over his shoulder. He saluted me the same way as the centurion, his English American-accented. ‘Hi. Hastein Hallgrimsson, Icelander. Deputy
Spatharokandidates
of the Varangian Guard. And, of course, Knight Commander of the Sangraal, at your orders. Even if it does mean that hell-hole. We could only spare ten, but there’s one Knight and four squires, five probationers serving as cataphracts.’

‘They’ll do!’ said Alison, herding a motley group up into the body of the ship. Some were blonds like Hastein, the five cataphracts short and dark and Greek-looking, with lighter mail and bows; all of them were slathered with drying blood, apparently not their own. A couple of them spared a curious glance for this non-Knight who was leading them, but they seemed as sombrely calm as their leaders.

‘Hey, I don’t suppose anyone’s got a cigarette?’ demanded Hastein.

‘Got some cigars someplace,’ said Jyp.

‘Not in an airship, as you very well know,’ snorted Alison. ‘You’ll have to excuse him, Steve, he’s from nineteen forty-eight, apparently they smoked all day and night then.’

‘The Graal helped me break the compulsion,’ sighed Hastein. ‘But after ten years back here drinking watered Greek wine you kind of revert. Besides, what
harm’d just one do? The hydrogen doesn’t get down here into the gondola.’

‘No!’ said Alison firmly. ‘Take us out of here, Jyp, before he blows us all up.’

Jyp gunned the throttle gently and spun the wheel; Alison worked the control surfaces. ‘You’re heading north-north-west now, Jyp. To France again, the north-west coast in spring fourteen fifteen – the siege of Calais, under Henry the Fifth.’

Again the darkness, the smoke and flame and screams – and this time the thud and crash of cannon, wafting bitter powder smoke up to us as we glided over the glittering calm of the Channel. ‘And what’s this got to do with civilization?’ I demanded.

‘Unite England and France, that’s what Henry tries to do,’ answered the centurion sombrely. ‘And Bourgogne – that’s Burgundy. A good enough man by the ways of his time; better than the French Dauphin. But he dies young, his lords squabble, and then there is this Giovanna d’Arco, who puts the worthless Dauphin on the throne of France. Pfft!’

I stared down at the mayhem below. Even as I watched, a sheet of flame leaped from the city walls at one point, leaving a smoking gap in the parapet. What good could come from all that, however long-term? But perhaps things like that would have happened anyway; better there was some point to them.

Through noise and fire and a sleeting, miserable drizzle a few bedraggled figures stumbled towards the sea coast where we’d landed, all the Knights here could spare; soon there’d be Agincourt to fight. We lifted away and slipped back into the shadows cast by this land and era, long and bloody shadows; and at their extremity they mingled with others, and Jyp’s skilled hand slipped us between them, and out once more. Into the leaping flames of medieval Germany, to pluck bright-clad
landsknecht
mercenaries from lordly squabbles, Alison and I dashing into the midst of tramping ranks to find them, between wagons laden with pikes and loot. Into the blood-soaked mud of pastures by the Danube on a stifling August afternoon in 1526, as the vast Turkish armies rolled over the last diminished forces of Hungary, and thought them no more than an advance-guard. There, as thunder crashed and the skies opened, and the young king was swept to his death in the swollen river, we came on a little knot of riders, one of many making a last defiant stand. But when they heard our mission, they turned and came with us; and perhaps we did as much to
delay the Turks, when they saw the
Dove
rising like a portent through the flickering lightnings. Into the sullen embers of Russia in 1609, shattered by years of famine and civil war after the death of Czar Boris, to pluck Polish cavalry from the invading army of King Sigismund – fierce, gallant men carrying curved sabres like those with which their descendants would launch one last charge against German tanks. From there to the same land a century later, as Peter the Great broke the Swedish Empire at Poltava, and King Charles fled to exile and death. In all these places smoke rose, blood fell; men lived, died, rose or were ruined, and the destinies of a continent were pulled and distorted, this way, that way, by forces no man caught up in them could ever have understood. Were we any better?

It grew harder now, as armies became more organized, to spirit away men who had often risen high in their commands and counsels; but we cruised unseen through the blizzards south of Moscow, to pull out some of the Russian irregulars who were harrying the retreating French, serf and nobleman fighting alongside one another to break the first great crack in Napoleon’s dream of dominion. We settled among the smoke and flame at Leipzig, on a warm October afternoon in 1813, to hail a platoon of Scottish infantry as they drove some remnants of French
cuirassiers
off the field. We rescued Bavarian lancers as they broke before the Prussian guns in the last days of the Austro-Prussian war, and Bismarck forged the future in blood and iron. We came down amid eddying clouds of gas to bring in French cavalry at Ypres salient, five or six of them clattering on board, men and horses alike draped in stinking impregnated coats and hoods. I watched them sombrely as they tore them off and hurled the hateful things away, and wondered at their calm demeanour. If they died with us, they would simply be thought to have vanished into the appalling rolls of death and disappearance in that shell-shattered morass. But if they survived, they might return.