The Angel's Cut

 

I'd like to thank this book's early readers, Kirsten McDougall, Bill Manhire, Natasha Fairweather and Naomi Leon. Thanks also to Bernadette Hall and the Stout Research Centre for the loan of rooms when my own room was besieged by building noise. Many thanks to my editor Linda Funnell, and—as always—my first reader, Fergus Barrowman.

 

T
he Zeppelin hung concealed in cloud, a layer of thick stratus with a base three thousand feet above the sea. The airship's navigator—the angel Xas—was in the control cabin, studying a map in the greenish light from the gauges, when his captain came to stand beside him. They looked out together on the ghostly country of cloud.

‘Hans,' said Captain Hintersee, ‘would you say that this cloud extends all the way to Dover?'

The navigator Hans Ritt was famous in the fleet, for he never lost his way. Pilots navigated using compasses, and by making dead-reckonings from roadmaps they carried. They dropped down and looked for landmarks. But Ritt seemed to know all of Europe from the air; to have it in his head. Even without a compass and in the thickest fog he always knew where north lay.

That night, over the Channel, Xas turned his eyes from the window and the gauzy white topography below to tell his
captain that yes, he did think the cloud cover extended from coast to coast. Then he dropped his chin and waited. The Zeppelin captain frowned at him. ‘Perhaps you should—' he began, then caught himself and modified his suggestion so that it was an order. ‘Hans, I want you to take the cloud car down and take a look about.'

Xas stood straight, clicked his heels, then smiled happily, which spoiled the effect of military propriety. ‘Thank you, captain,' he said, and left Hintersee's side.

He reported to the belly of the airship, where he found the cloud car ready, its attendants around it, and at the controls of the winch and its thick coiled cable.

The car was a basket made of hardwood struts covered in canvas, a streamlined cradle with a bulbous front end where an observer would sit, hunched behind a low windscreen. It was equipped with a telephone the observer used to communicate with the control cabin.

The basket was positioned above a gap in the longitudinal girders of the airship's frame. It hovered, swinging slightly. Cloud fumed through the gap.

Xas wriggled and jumped and tugged his way into a thick, fleece-lined canvas suit. He put on a helmet and gloves. Two crew members held the basket steady as he clambered through the cables that kept it level. He positioned his goggles, hunkered down, and gave the crew the thumbs up. The winch spun, the cable unwound, and the cloud car took him out of the light inside the airship, and into the wet white air.

Cloud came between him and the airship. The diffuse
patch of brightness that was the gap in its belly dimmed, then disappeared. The hum of its engines grew muffled.

Xas removed his goggles, helmet and gloves and stuffed them between his knees. He was always careful to put the protective gear on again before he returned to the ship. The gear was, like his name, a disguise he wore for the benefit of others.

He raised his hands and opened his mouth and let the air caress him. As the basket cut its way through the lower layer of cloud, its cables acquired thin white streamers of vapour. Xas ran his fingers back and forth through these dragons' whiskers, which broke and eddied like smoke rings.

The cloud car passed through the thinning vapour, and Xas looked down.

The sea was dark, but textured, its waves backlit by the faint radiance of a rainfall several miles away. Xas could see where the rain softened the air. He could see too that there were several interruptions in the sea's surface. Black strokes. Three ships, showing no light. He waited till his eyes made a further adjustment and he could spot each ship's wake, and therefore the direction they were headed.

He picked up the telephone, and put it to his ear. There was a loud click, then the electric hum of the open line. He asked Hintersee to have the men in the belly of the airship lower him a further ten feet. He said that the cloud was thicker than they'd thought. He reported that he was only just out of it. Really he hoped to relish more of the clear sky under the cloud.

The basket shivered as the winch started up again far overhead. The soft bright underside of the cloud receded, and the wind grew a little less wet. He savoured it. In a moment he would turn to his duty, but for now he swung through the dark in his own true home, the fully three-dimensional terrain of the sky.

He took a moment, then put the phone back to his ear and began to talk to his captain, to relay the bearings of the target ships.

Suddenly, a coil of vapour spun down past the cloud car. Dark spirals of turbulence appeared in the underside of the cloud some twenty feet above. Xas knew at once what was causing it. Clear air from above the layer of cloud was being forced down through it, making black vortices in the vapour, vortices formed by the tips of great wings describing high-velocity parabolas, and mixing fog and air.

Xas dropped the phone. The soft ceiling above him ruptured. A huge dark shape pierced the cloud and opened a gap through to starlight. Wings made a rushing thump in the air. Xas felt the concussions of displaced air shuddering around him.

The archangel braked his plunge, then banked against unbroken cloud, coming around in a tight loop that would bring him back to where Xas hung in the fragile cradle of the cloud car. Xas saw that the attenuated avian hands on the wrist joints of the archangel's six wings were splayed, reaching. He saw light flash on the pale palms of the archangel's two human hands. And, as the huge winged body closed on him, he saw that one of those many, avid hands was
missing some fingers. It was by this mutilated hand that Xas recognised Lucifer—who had cut off his wings.

He threw himself out of the cloud car.

Looking back through his feet as he fell, Xas saw the archangel connect with the cloud car, catch hold of it, and hang swinging, hands gripping the basket, two top wings flared back and flapping furiously. He heard the cable shriek and groan. And he heard his name, for the first time in over fifty years. Lucifer shouted, ‘Xas!' and Xas closed his body into a ball. He knew he could fall faster than Lucifer could fly down. The archangel had too much surface area to race any falling, wingless creature a few thousand feet to the sea.

Xas plunged straight down, and hit the surface of the sea so hard that he rebounded once before sinking into it. He let out all the air in his lungs and stopped breathing.

It was cold and dark under the water. Far away the ships' propellers whined like bees caught behind a curtain. Xas hung below the surface and looked up through murky transparency at that surface in reverse—the gleam of light on the backs of the waves. After a moment he saw the ragged star of Lucifer's form pass above him. The sea turned momentarily smooth in the downblast of the archangel's wings. Then Lucifer banked and drove upward, disappearing in a flicker of darkness into the night sky.

X
as was the last act of the day. The sun had come out, a seven p.m. sun that sat balanced on the top of the grandstand. All afternoon the crowd had been a flowerbed of faces, hair, hats, exclamatory hands, but now, with the sun behind them, they had become a dark, tense fur of persons, a mass of exhausted nerves, and unslaked lust for catastrophe. They'd enjoyed the show, applauded the aerial acrobats—six girls who never left their perch on a biplane's top wing, but clambered over one another to make shapely filigrees of limbs against the sky. They'd laughed through clenched teeth at clowns skating back and forth along the wobbling wings of a slow, low cruising plane. They'd held their breath when the parachutists performed their bullet drops. Of the day's thrills all that was left now was the grand finale, the plane-to-plane transfer.

Xas tucked his plait into his flight suit. The huge, adenoidal voice of the Tannoy began to tell the spectators
what he planned to do. He gave a wave, keeping his arms close to his sides so that no one would divine the full effect of the trick until it unfurled before them.

There were no other planes in the air. The skylarks had returned to the field and were threading the evening with song.

Xas climbed into the biplane, taking the forward seat, and gave his pilot a thumbs up. A mechanic span the propeller, hauled away the chocks, then ran around to a wingtip and turned the plane onto the airstrip. The pilot gunned the engine and they took off, banked and climbed. They levelled out and waited for the second plane to join them. Once it was in the air they settled at their different altitudes, Xas's pilot climbing to eighteen hundred feet, the other to only five hundred. The planes levelled off, then turned again to make a run past the grandstand.

Xas climbed out of the cockpit. A big drop of oil blew back from the open cowling of the engine and splattered on one lens of his goggles. He wiped at the splash with his glove, but couldn't shift, only smeared, it. He pulled his goggles off and dropped them onto his seat. He had his back to the wind and it pushed his thick bound hair into a kind of hood around his face. It was as if he'd smeared lamp black under his eyes. There was no glare. He could see everything—could even make out the expression of anxiety and disapproval on his pilot's face. Xas smiled at the man and, in a moment of mischief, unbuckled the parachute strapped to his chest and dropped it too into his empty seat. The pilot shook his head. Xas took hold of the top wing and hauled himself up onto it.
He swapped his handholds and turned around into the ram air. He felt his eyes and facial muscles stiffen in response to the pressure of the wind. Ram air made everyone grimace—everyone but him. His face lost all its pliability and settled, sculptural, angelic, as hard as a bird's beak.

Xas stood up and spread his arms. The wind caught the webs of silk and baleen between the sleeves and sides of his soaring suit. The plane leapt away from him and for a moment he floated, a dark star against a pale blue afternoon sky. Then he rolled into a somersault—followed by an apparently uncontrolled series of writhing falls. He flung his arms out again and stopped tumbling, only to swing back and forth like a leaf falling from a tree, rocking as it dropped.

This was what the crowd saw. Xas could hear them sighing and crying out. He realised that he shouldn't have abandoned his parachute so surreptitiously, but with a flourish. Then they'd be silent, and their silence would be like the skin he felt forming as he curled up once more. He closed his body, and the air closed around him.

All aerial acrobats and parachutists wore helmets so as not to be deafened by the eardrum-sucking speed of the passing wind. But Xas hung wrapped in the sound of that wind, and of the world below—all discrete and distinguishable. He was balanced on the bubble of air that people feel form under them in a freefall. For a moment he felt an invisible hand holding him up, and promising to hold him, promising that the space below him would be divided infinitely, that there was no bottom to it, because all halves
have
halves, as Zeno said.

This ecstasy lasted only seconds. Xas let the seconds go by and then he spread his arms and legs and looked down. He searched for the second plane—his target. It was below him, as it should be, and behind, as it should be. But it was too near. It was going to overshoot their rendezvous.

Xas dipped into a shallow dive, speeding ahead, gaining ten feet of forward distance while losing a hundred in height. The second plane slid by, the transparency of its propeller only twenty feet below. Xas felt a flutter on his feet and knees. It was the slipstream, an invisible churning serpent of displaced air. He knew the slipstream would pull him down before it pushed him back behind the plane, so he tilted his hips and dropped his suit's canvas fantail into the turbulence.

The slipstream flipped him. As he went over he wrenched his head around and his eyes found the nearest carbane—one of the wires between the biplane's wings. He snatched—making contact with one fingertip only. He closed that finger into a hook and was jerked forward as he simultaneously stopped falling and matched speeds with the plane. The change of direction was so sudden that he went into another somersault and crashed into the wing. The spectators howled. The plane yawed and wobbled. Xas clung on, lay still as the pilot brought the plane level. The green, shadow-filled grass was streaming by directly beneath them, and he understood that the second plane had dropped dangerously low to catch him. There was the blur of green, then the fawn dust of the rolled dirt air strip. Xas crawled back along the wing. He lowered himself into his seat in the same moment the wheels touched the ground.

The pilot taxied the plane in close to the grandstand. The crowd poured toward them. Xas clambered down and stood waiting to be congratulated on his feat. Then he saw that his first pilot was nearer than the nearest of his admirers, was coming at him, swearing, and swinging his abandoned parachute. Then he was engulfed, muffled in bodies, one pummelling him with the soft package of the chute, the others thrusting pens and flyers at him—the flyer advertising the air circus which figured him at the centre of its images, in his soaring suit and long, black braid, as ‘
The Daring, the Devil
May Care INDIAN
.'

Later that evening Xas was sitting in a bar with the pilots, acrobats, parachutists, when a woman arrived at their table with eight glasses of Dubonnet crammed in her skinny hands. She was a light-skinned Coloured woman with high cheekbones and marcel-waved hair. She fixed her eyes on Xas and mustered words. She asked, in ungrammatical French, whether he was really an Indian?

‘He's German,' someone said, ‘but since the War no one is letting Germans fly in Europe.'

Someone else pulled out a chair for her. She said her name was Millie Cotton, and that she was an American. She was in France because she was learning to fly. ‘Flying schools back home won't even take Coloured
men
. I'm at the Ecole d'Aviation des Frères Caudon. It's near here.'

Seven of the glasses had been claimed. The circus people were waiting for Millie to take the eighth. She didn't notice. She only stared at Xas as though hoping to somehow absorb
him. ‘How do you do it?' she said. ‘How do you find the other plane?'

Xas's first pilot touched her arm and said, slowly, reverently, in French, ‘He's a pioneer. He plans to make his mark.' Then he raised a hand and slapped it down on the tabletop so that all the empty glasses jumped and toppled.

Millie looked alarmed.

Xas explained. ‘To make your mark is to fall to your death, splashing some farmer's field. He's saying I take big risks to make my mark, to finally lose my game with gravity.'

The pilot put his hand on Xas's. ‘Tell her this,' he said. ‘Tell her that most days the spectators can see the effort and care it takes to make a transfer from plane to plane. But today you were having too much fun.'

Xas said to Millie, in English, ‘He says I was having too much fun. On other days the crowd can see the care and effort.'

Millie laughed.

He said, ‘Would you like me to take you up and teach you to jump? All pilots should know how to use a parachute.'

‘Yes! Would you?'

‘Can you come after the show tomorrow morning?'

Millie nodded. And then she looked around the group and reverted to her halting French to tell them that, in the States, there had been law changes that had pretty much put an end to the airshows. The pilots had to fly too high, and the audiences couldn't really see the stunts any more.

Everyone made sounds of disgust. Then Xas said, to Millie, and to anyone who might give him an answer, ‘Do you think that will happen here?'