The Earl of Brass (The Ingenious Mechanical Devices Book 1) (16 page)

“Eilian, are you attached to this union suit?”

“No, why?”

With a snap, the inventor ripped the sleeve from the undergarment and shimmied it over the prosthesis before sealing the mechanisms off with a black, leather glove. “There, that should keep it out. We may need to sacrifice the other sleeve if this one gets too dirty.”

He smiled to himself. “I think I’m willing to make that sacrifice. Would you like to take a walk to the spring with me? I know it’s early, but we having nothing left to do until Joshua returns and Mr. Barrister probably will not try anything for the rest of the day. A dip in the water may help you get accustomed to the heat.”

“I would like that very much, my lord.”

A Knight and his Squire

The noise that awoke Hadley Fenice was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was a sound that traveled through the bedrock itself, climbing up the metal legs of her cot until it rattled her sleeping form. Within seconds, she was completely alert, but the noise had stopped and all that was left was the tinkling of debris raining down on their tent. Her wide eyes met Eilian’s as they leapt out of their beds and began getting dressed. She dove behind her screen, quickly tightened her corset, and threw on her shirt and trousers, letting her vest hang loose. By the time she came out, Eilian was already dressed and struggling to put on his outer prosthesis. As she wordlessly slid up the cotton sleeve, fastened the corset-like binding, and attached the springs to allow his arm to flex, he buttoned her vest and neatly tied her silk cravat with one hand. They cautiously poked their heads out of the tent but saw nothing out of the ordinary except for a new crater several hundred yards away from the first excavation.

“What’s going on?” Eilian called out as they approached Sir Joshua, who stood over the new hole shouting directions to the men.

He whipped around with a start. “Did I wake you? My apologies. After a month, you think I would remember that you are here.”

Henry stared into the pit and watched as the men scooped out what appeared to be the remains of a tree stump. A piece of shattered clay was shoveled into a bucket and dumped into a heap. “You used dynamite to remove a tree?”

“It was a very stubborn stump. Plus, Ibraheem has been dying to blow something up.”

“What about the artifacts?”

“We have not found anything in days. Actually, I was meaning to talk to you two about this. Would you be willing to take a walk and see if you can spot any potential sites? I think we have exhausted this one.”

***

Hadley smiled as they walked through the desert plateaus, watching Eilian from the corner of her eye. London didn’t do him justice. The city overwhelmed him, drowning him in its drab colors and sulfurous grime, but in the desert, even beside the towering rocks, he glowed with an unendingly hopeful light she envied. Glancing over her shoulder to confirm the camp was far behind them, she reached out and squeezed his hand.

A wide smile spread across his face as he brought her hand to his lips. “So, Had, are you enjoying yourself?”

“Yes, but I expected an archaeology dig to be more… eventful.”

“They usually are,” he replied as he scanned the desert floor for the shadows of a foundation or a cracked column but saw only the moon-grey ground as a rock tumbled in the wake of his step. “If we were in Egypt, it would be buzzing with activity, but Sir Joshua has had bad luck this time. What do you make of him and his men?”

“Everyone has been very nice to me,” she explained as she let her voice slip back to its feminine tone, “especially the men. They have been helping me with my Arabic, and in return, I have been doing their portraits. I’m not sure how I feel about Sir Joshua. I do like him, but sometimes I feel as if he is searching for something that doesn’t exist. It’s as if he expects to find El Dorado or Atlantis in the middle of the desert.”

“You have to understand that he has worked with some very successful men. It’s hard to work with Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld, and then go off on your own and not find anything significant. It may seem like an odd choice to come to the Negev,” he motioned toward the vast cliffs and empty plains, “but the Israelites have lived here as well as the Romans, Christians, and Muslims, so there is a good chance of stumbling across something of importance.”

She paused in the shadow of a canyon. The warm breeze lapped against her cheek and tousled her hair. Eilian took a long swig from the canteen and passed it to her, but as she brought it to her lips, something fluttered through the wind. Because of its tan hide, it was difficult to discern against the sand, but as it dipped and swooped, she could make out blurs of blue and red on its underside. As the object came to rest on the sabulous floor, she sprinted out to grab it before the wind came and swept it away again. The piece of parchment slapped against the sole of her boot as she caught the corner. Turning it over in her hand, she revealed a painted scene of knights riding into battle. By the time Eilian reached her side, Hadley was already moving toward another floating piece of parchment that had wedged itself under a rock.

“What is it?” he called as he peered over her shoulder at the two columns of neat calligraphy covering the second page.

“It looks like pages from a medieval book. Where are they coming from?”

Eilian watched as another page glided across the plain. His grey eyes traced back its path until they came to rest on a shadowed depression in the rocks. They ambled over to the mouth of the cave, gathering pages as they went until they found a thick, overturned tome lying only a few yards in. Hadley gaped in wonder as she beheld the cave’s interior. The walls were lined with rock shelves filled to the brim with books of all sizes and ages. As she ran her hand across their spines, the intricately carved leather bindings jutted against his palm like knuckles. The room was perfumed with the intoxicatingly musty smell of old parchment and cracking leather, which Eilian had always tried to emulate in his own library. She studied the titles on the shelves. The books were in different languages and ranged from encyclopedias to religious texts and even to works of fiction including
La Divina Commedia
and
The Canterbury Tales
. In this sacred glimpse of civilization in the wild, the adventurers could barely speak, and with glances and gestures, they exchanged their awe.

A pebble skidded across the floor as a sharp gasp shattered the silence. Eilian and Hadley looked to each other, and realizing that neither of them had spoken, their eyes moved to the back of the cave. Peering at them through the darkness was a willowy, young girl whose face was painted in a deathly pallor, but her enormous periwinkle eyes glowed as she stared at them in alarm. As Hadley opened her mouth, the girl bolted toward the bowels of the cave, her footsteps echoing through the tunnel.

“Wait! Come back, little girl!” she called as motherly as she could muster through rough breaths as she ran after her. From her thin features, she feared the girl had been lost for some time. “Are you lost?”

“Had, wait!” He tried to grab her arm, but she ran faster than he could as he clumsily avoided the rocky outcroppings jutting up around the well-worn path. “We need a torch!”

Finally, the girl’s ragged breathing grew louder as Hadley eyed her again at the end of a long, narrow tunnel. She tried to call for her again, explaining that they just wanted to help, but the child continued to run like a deer in a hunt. The tunnels grew darker and tighter until her elbows trailed along the edges of the wall, but still she followed the little girl. As she rounded a blind corner, her forehead collided with the unforgiving surface of a stalactite. Eilian cautiously rounded the corner, noting how the footfalls fell away, leaving only echoes and disconcerting silence. His eyes instantly fell on Hadley’s fallen form as she lay in a heap under a low-hanging outcropping. Crawling under it, he rolled her onto her back and gently patted her cheek. A swollen wound over her right brow leaked blood, clotting into her hair and across her eyes.

“Hadley,” he called sternly, remembering James yelling only inches from his face when he woke him after his surgery. “Wake up. We need to get back to camp! Hadley!”

The light patter of feet stirred him, and when he looked up, his gaze met six pairs of light eyes staring down at him as much in fear as in concern. Instinctively, he pulled her supine form closer, cradling her bruised head defensively as the group approached.

***

Hadley’s eyes flickered open. Her head pounded rhythmically as she grew accustomed to the soft, bluish glow of the room. With a start, she realized she wasn’t sleeping in her tent but was lying on a cot in a stone-walled room. As she flew up in bed, her head swam, but Eilian’s gentle touch on her shoulder steadied her, keeping her from smacking the back of her head into the wall behind her. She tried to think how she got there, but her thoughts were fuzzy and muddled. Reaching up with a trembling hand, she touched her forehead. It had swollen into a small egg, but the gash she had received when she foolishly ran into the cavern was neatly sewn shut with silk-like thread.

“Where are we?” she muttered, rubbing away a little dried blood that was still left in the corner of her eye.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I think it’s an infirmary.
Where
we are, I have no idea.”

She looked around the room and saw that every wall had been tiled with glimmering mosaics of fields and forests like Renaissance murals, and turning her head up, she observed that even the ceiling had been tiled to resemble a starry sky. Scattered throughout the room were several empty cots with only one at the far end of the chamber occupied by a wizened man beneath a pile of brightly woven blankets with what appeared to be his wife dutifully at his side. Hadley stared down at the colorful linen that lay on her lap. It was adorned with an infinite number of tiny arabesques that were so small she could scarcely see where one began and another ended.

“What happened?”

“You were chasing the child in the cave, and you ran headfirst into a stalactite and passed out. The girl must have realized you were hurt because she called for help, and a group of them appeared. They pantomimed for me to follow them, so they could patch up your head. You have only been knocked out for a few minutes. They left after they stitched your wound, but from what I understood, they will be back shortly to speak to us.”

“Are— are we prisoners?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.

He took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know.”

Eilian’s head whipped around as the flap hanging across the wide doorway parted, and three men, four women, and the child entered the infirmary. All eight people were deathly pale with oversized eyes, which ranged from mint green to lilac, but all had milky white hair bound in intricate knots and loops. While each outfit was made of what appeared to be the same silken material, their decoration ranged from plain to highly ornate patterns. Both men and women wore a similar tight, long-sleeved undershirt and hosier under a draped tunic and bloomer-like trousers. The group drew near Hadley’s bedside and began conversing in a melodic language that neither Hadley nor Eilian could place.

The oldest man of about sixty had a long beard that had been intricately braided and shaved to form tight curls and clutched a hefty manuscript and stylus. Speaking to him was the doctor who treated Hadley earlier. She had kind lilac eyes and a sweet voice even though they couldn’t understand what she was saying. To her right stood a tall figure who Eilian had originally mistaken for a man. Her hair was plaited with multicolored ribbons and was so long that it swept the floor as she sauntered in. Beside the male teacher were two women with dirt under their nails and smeared across their cheeks. On their backs were large baskets, one contained what appeared to be kiwis while the other was laden with finger-length crystals. Off to the side, barely noticeable, was a petite woman who bore a striking resemblance to the little girl. She opened a large ledger, looked at Hadley in the bed, and marked it down. Finally, a portly man wearing an apron seemed to call the group into order, and the scholar approached Eilian. He spoke slowly and clearly, but the melodic, consonant-laden language was like nothing they had ever heard.

“My name is Eilian Sorrell, this is Hadley Fenice. We are from England, and we mean no harm,” he replied when the man finished speaking. He then repeated the entire statement in Arabic and added while pointing to Hadley’s forehead, “Thank you for fixing her head.”

The group stared at him and then back at each other before murmuring back and forth. The scholar beckoned for the little girl, gave her an order, and with a smile, she dashed out of the room. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, an ancient, bald man with a face as wrinkled as a pug shuffled in carrying a book with a deteriorating leather spine and a crystal on a string hanging from its binding. He smiled as he placed the point of the crystal to his temple. Its inner surface lit up with a point of white light as the tiny black veins within seemed to reach toward his skull.

The old man cleared his throat before pointing to Eilian and reciting, “A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man, that fro the tyme that he first bigan to riden out, he loved chivalrie, trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.” He turned to Hadley and continued, “With hym ther was his sone, a yong squier, a lovyere and a lusty bacheler, with lokkes crulle as they were leyd in presse. Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.”

How hard did I hit my head?
she wondered as she rubbed her temples. “Eilian, I think their English only goes as far as Chaucer.”

The man’s crinkled face brightened. “Chaucer, yis.”

“We know English but not
that
English,” Lord Sorrell replied timidly.

The group once again gathered together. The scholar posed a solution, but the imposing woman with the motley braids shook her head insistently, glancing at the adventurers from time to time. After fifteen minutes of heated discussion, the teacher won, and the artist barred her arms across her breast with a derisive sigh. The elderly man who had brought the book pulled a long, scratched crystal from around his neck and handed it to the other man. Eilian’s heart pounded as the man drew closer, clutching the spiked rock. He clenched his eyes shut as the stranger placed it against his temple. As the point touched his flesh, a prickle of electricity arced from the stone and dispersed through his tissues like a bolt of lightning. His body shuddered when the feeling finally dissipated.