The Gods and their Machines (9 page)

‘The sky will still be there when you get to the airfield, Cham,’ she said to him. ‘If you’re tired of being cooped up in the car, you could always go for a walk up the canal. I don’t think we’ll be moving for a while.’

‘I could walk all the way and be there before you at this rate.’

‘Why don’t I come with you, then, and we’ll do just that. Your father can catch up. Kellen?’

Kellen nodded and waved at them to go ahead. He turned on the radio and found his favourite jazz station. There weren’t many cars around with radios, and he jumped at the chance to use it whenever he could. He turned it up, so that the soldiers in the trucks around them could listen with envy. A lively, big-band number followed Chamus and his mother down the road.

There were a lot of medical services trucks – with the big red cross in a white circle marked over their olive drab paintwork – more than a normal army column would have warranted, but there were also half-tracks, armoured troop carriers and jeeps too. There must have been two hundred vehicles on that section of the road.

‘It’s as if they’re getting ready for a disaster,’ Nita muttered. ‘I wonder if they’ve heard about some huge terrorist threat.’

‘I don’t know,’ Chamus thought aloud, remembering the mysterious conversation between his grandfather and the two men. ‘I think they’re heading out to the Fringelands. Couldn’t they just be looking for the terrorists?’

‘Bartokhrin’s not about to let all this in,’ his mother shook her head. ‘They’ve reacted badly enough to our bombers’
strikes. If this is seen coming down the ramp, there’ll be uproar. No, it’s got to be for some kind of emergency, I think. But don’t ask me what.’

‘Hey, mister!’ Chamus called up to one of the soldiers in the back of a covered lorry. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Just setting up base at the aerodrome, lad,’ the man shouted back. ‘Providing support for the medics, that’s all we know. They don’t tell us much, and we can tell even less.’

‘Let’s walk faster, Mum,’ Chamus said, ‘the more of these lads that show up, the less room I’m going to have to take off.’

It took half an hour to reach the airfield and when they did, they found vehicles filing in through the security gate, one by one. Chamus and Nita showed their passes, shared a few words with the policeman on guard, whom they knew well, and walked through, making their way to the group of hangars owned by Aranson Air. Thomex was already there, with some of his design engineers. The aircraft that Kellen was to fly sat just inside the open door of the biggest hangar. Outside the smallest, Chamus’s plane was being given the once-over by a mechanic.

‘Where is he, then?’ Thomex asked Nita.

‘Lost amongst some trucks, a couple of miles behind us,’ she answered. ‘What’s going on, Thomex? Do you know?’

‘Bloody army,’ he scowled, as if that was all the
explanation
she needed.

She regarded the sleek scout plane that sat with its canopy open, awaiting its pilot. The air force was poised to buy the design if the test went well, which would mean big things for their small company.

‘It’s an insidious-looking thing,’ she said, nodding at it.
‘What’s the weather report like?’

‘Excellent,’ Thomex spun his wheelchair around to look down the airstrip. ‘Wind is five knots at the most. Visibility is near perfect and we’re expecting clear skies all afternoon.’

He turned to Chamus: ‘Your bird’s ready if you want to take her up, Cham.’

‘I’ll wait for Dad. I want to see him take off,’ Chamus shrugged.

Thomex nodded and swivelled to look at the gate, where the military vehicles were still rolling in.

‘Bloody army,’ he grunted again.

Nita saw two of the engineers testing the controls on the prototype and went over to interrogate them. Chamus knew how seriously she took his father’s test flights and that the two unfortunate men were in for a grilling.

It was peaceful out there in that huge, open airfield. There were no aircraft engines to be heard and a sound he first took to be the wind across his ears now became clearer and he recognised the whispering voices once more.

‘Damn the quiet,’ his grandfather murmured to himself, ‘always got to make yourselves heard in the quiet, haven’t you?’

Chamus stared down at him.

‘You hear them too?’ he blurted out, before he could stop himself.

His grandfather gave him a piercing glare.

‘What do you hear, lad?’ he asked, as if he already knew the answer.

‘I’m not sure,’ Chamus said hesitantly. ‘It’s like a
whispering
; it’s very soft. I thought maybe my eardrums had been
damaged. It’s like listening to lots of different voices all
talking
at once, but none loud enough to hear on its own.’

Thomex smiled bitterly and looked away.

‘There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, Cham. I thought the same when it first started happening to me. But it’s got louder over the years and now I know it’s not some buzzing in my ears from too many hours behind the engines. I’m not sure what it is, but I think more people hear that sound than want to admit … and I think it
means
something, but I can’t work out what. When did you start hearing it, then?’

‘After the … the sireniser at the hangar. When my hearing came back.’

His grandfather nodded.

‘Mine started after I got shot down. And I didn’t damage my ears, I can tell you. I think it has something to do with trauma. It’s a curse too, stops you from concentrating, stops you thinking straight. Gets you all tense, too. I can’t stand the quiet now. I need noise all the time, and I always have to be doing something, or I get all wound up inside.’

Chamus knelt by his grandfather’s wheelchair.

‘That’s it, that’s exactly it,’ he agreed excitedly. ‘What do you think it is, Grandad? You must have some idea.’

‘I don’t know, Cham, but it drives me mad. It’s like bein’ haunted by your own personal ghosts.’

His voice was so harsh when he said it that Chamus stood up again. He looked to where his mother was questioning the two engineers, who were glancing around for some reason to seek shelter.

‘I think I will go now, Grandad, if that’s okay,’ he told the old man, ‘I could use a bit of noise.’

His grandfather was in a world of his own. Chamus walked towards his mother and the two men. He waved to her as he drew close and when she turned to him, the men hurried around to the far side of the aeroplane. He told her he was going up and went inside to get his things. When he came out, carrying his kit and wearing his parachute, Nita was
talking
to the mechanic who had checked his biplane over.

‘… and you’ve greased all the rocker-box housings?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I always do, you know that.’

‘And checked the oil?’

‘Ma’am …’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ she held up her hands. ‘You know what I’m like when he’s flying, Josek.’

‘That I do, ma’am,’ the mechanic smiled across at the two engineers by the scout plane. She could have been talking about her son doing a solo in the primitive biplane or her husband doing a test flight in a state-of-the-art, but
experimental
monoplane. It didn’t matter. Nita Aranson did not like either of them taking chances unless she was sure she had done everything she could to make sure they came back down safely.

‘Mum, leave him alone,’ Chamus sighed. ‘He’s only been fixing the things for fifteen years.’

She regarded her son carefully.

‘Where’s your map?’ she asked.

‘I won’t need one,’ he protested. ‘I’ll keep over the main roads once I’m out of the airspace.’

‘Young man, you are not flying out of Victovia without a map of the ground you’re flying over. Get yourself a map, please.’

‘Dad won’t have a map.’

‘Dad will be happy to get off the ground today. Besides, he’s been flying over Bartokhrin all his life. What would he say if he were here now?’

‘“Listen to your mother”,’ Chamus chanted dutifully,
painfully
aware that the mechanic and the two design engineers were grinning at him.

‘Now, inside with you and get whatever maps you need. Where’s your scarf? It’ll be cold up there.’

‘Aw, Mum, will you leave off!’

‘Your scarf, young man. And let me see that parachute …’

He hung his head in embarrassment as his mother checked the straps on his ’chute. Then he went in and grabbed some maps and a scarf and jogged to the plane before she could think of anything else. Climbing into the single-seat cockpit, he strapped himself in and checked the magnetos switch was off. He pressed the small plunger to spray fuel into the carburettor and waved to his mother, who stood by the propeller.

‘Be careful up there,’ she said. ‘Magnetos off?’

‘Magnetos off,’ he called.

She pulled the propeller through a couple of times and then stood back. He switched the magnetos on.

‘Magnetos on,’ he called.

With one practised motion she flicked the propeller down and the engine caught with a bellow, the spinning blades blowing her sandy-coloured hair back, and blue smoke
billowing
from the exhaust. She walked clear and he let the engine warm up for a few minutes. He pulled on his leather flying helmet. His mother wore the same expression that she
always wore when she watched him fly, pride mixed with a concern that she tried to hide from him because she knew it bothered him. The canary-yellow biplane had been a gift from his family, a single-seated version of the plane his grandfather had once landed in a pig farm. It was pretty bare by modern standards. The radio was the only concession to modern technology. There was an oil gauge and a fuel gauge and little else in the way of instruments. It had no
artificial
horizon, no altimeter and was made mainly from doped canvas, wood and aluminium, and the engine was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Chamus loved it dearly. It was an animal compared to the tame trainers they flew at school. That was why his grandfather and father insisted he started with it. It never let you forget the basics.

He tabbed the transmit button with his left thumb, requesting clearance. When the tower radioed that he could take his position, he waved to his mother, eased the throttle forward and taxied, rocking and shuddering down to the end of the runway. The windsock halfway along the strip hung limply and the sky was absolutely clear. The
controller’s
voice crackled over his headset, clearing him to take off, and he pushed the throttle open. The engine roared its delight and the plane leapt forward. He felt it go light as it got up to speed, the tailwheel lifted from the ground, he pulled back on the stick and … there was that wonderful, sudden, floating sensation as the wheels left the runway and he was airborne. He peeled away, and the plane that moved like a garden shed on the ground rode the wind with a lazy grace.

Chamus grinned and gunned the engine skywards. 

Thirteen

O
nce the excitement had faded and he was left alone with his thoughts, Benyan began to be afraid. He was in the back of a covered truck with six other men; none of whom said anything to him. They passed around cigarettes and played cards and made crude jokes, but he was left to himself at the front, against the wall of the cab.

The voices of the martyrs had died down and were not as clear now, over the growl of the lorry’s engine. Without their control, he felt isolated, his stomach tightened
uncomfortably
and his imagination began to plague him with doubts about what he was supposed to do. Kill Altimans. The very idea of it had seemed so normal when he was training with his friends, charging up hills and practising with their
weapons
. But now he was on his way to Victovia, a place he had never been, to kill two men and a boy whom he had never met. Altimans. The race who had conquered the skies, who had weapons that could lay a country to waste, and armies that could move like the wind to invade and destroy. And he would be going right into the heart of their empire. The six
men would see him to the outskirts of the city, the wall of the plateau, and then he would be handed over to others who would guide him to the home of the Aranson men.

The enormity of it made him tremble. They would kill him; the soldiers and police would find him long before he found his targets and they would kill him. Or perhaps even torture him. He had heard stories from men who had been captured before. Few had ever escaped to tell, but of those who had, some had been tortured in ways they could not have even dreamed, with electricity and chemicals, by doctors who knew how to keep you alive and conscious for a long, long time. Benyan clasped his hands together to stop them shaking and put his head down to pray. The voices became clearer and filled his head. He had only to complete his mission, they promised, and paradise would be his. Their strength filled his body again and he found himself chanting in time with them.

But the knot in his stomach would not go away.

The truck bounced and rumbled along the gravel road for several hours, and then as the sun was reaching up towards noon, they came to a halt. He was beckoned out of the back by the driver, and the six men jumped down with him. They were in a town; he did not recognise it, but they were
outside
a train station. The clear sky of that morning had become overcast, and a light mist was settling over the street. He was not taken out onto the platform. Instead, he was ushered into a warehouse, where a large wooden crate was lying with its top open.

‘The train will take you to the foot of the plateau,’ the driver told him, ‘but the security there is very tight on the
way. The trains are searched by soldiers along the route, and all passengers must pass a checkpoint at the end. They have brought in a new system of identification for work papers and we have not yet managed to forge it successfully. You are to be taken in with a shipment of birds. The crate has a false bottom and there will be boxes of birds placed in over you. It is safe and it will work, but you must be silent and still for several hours.’

Benyan looked in horror at the crate. It was four feet cubed, but the section covered by the false bottom was only two feet deep. He would be barely able to move.

‘For Shanna and the cause,’ the man said, looking pointedly at him.

‘For Shanna and the cause,’ he repeated, glaring back.

He climbed over the side into the box and curled up on the floor. The man also gave him a water bottle. Then he gently pushed Benyan down and two others lowered in the false floor. Benyan heard the haunting voices grow louder in his head as the darkness closed down on him. There was some light from the ventilation holes around the sides of the box, but it did not help. He was suddenly terrified. He heard and felt the baskets of live birds being placed in on top of him, and to ease his mind, he pictured all the species he remembered from his home village. There were canaries, doves and budgies, as well as swallows and the herons on the lakes. The shifting and scratching of the birds above him was such that he knew they must be crushed in even more than he was, and that some of them would not survive the trip. His mind came back to the prison he had found himself in. The baskets were pressed down and the pressure in the
box changed as the lid was put in place.

The hammering came as a shock, the beats of the hammers jolting through the wood around him and sealing him in as securely as if it had been a coffin. The space was just barely deeper than his shoulders were wide and he would not now be able to straighten his legs or neck until somebody opened the box. He resisted the temptation to push up against the boards above him, knowing that it would only increase the terrible feeling of being trapped. He focused on the faces he had memorised: the two men, one old and crippled, one tall and strong, and the boy who was not much younger than Benyan himself. He wondered what it would feel like to die and he fantasised about paradise, and seeing his parents there. Closing his eyes, he slowed his breathing and prayed to Shanna. The voices swirled in his head, chanting and interfering with his concentration and his prayer, demanding his attention. As if they were separate from her … were they not with her? He felt his hands clench into fists and an overpowering impatience to face his
enemies
came over him. It would be days still before he got his chance. The voices hissed venomous curses, restless and frustrated.

At the bottom of the loop, the wind cut across the biplane’s wings with an airy shriek, Chamus’s body going suddenly heavy as he pulled back on the control stick and then levelled the bird out. He pressed down on the rudder bar with his right foot, pulled the stick back and the plane went into a spin. He let it get to the point where he was almost
losing it, before spiralling into a dive and pulling up just above the mound of cumulous clouds that appeared under the plane’s nose. He frowned. Where had that come from? The day had been completely clear, with nothing more than the odd strand of cloud in the air around him. He had not been paying much attention to the weather, absorbed in hours of playing in the sky, with loops, spins, slow rolls, hammerheads – all the things he couldn’t do at school
without
an instructor sitting in the cockpit with him. Doing a
difficult
manoeuvre was twice as hard with someone next to you making notes on a clipboard.

But now there was this cloud. He angled the aeroplane around and looked towards the city. He couldn’t see it. Everything north-west of him was covered with a thick carpet of cloud, including Victovia. He instinctively looked at his fuel gauge. He had been burning up fuel at a massive rate with all his aerobatics, and now he was running low. He closed the throttle down, adjusted the trim and flew lazily in the
direction
of the city. Taking out a map, he checked his position. There were few major roads in Bartokhrin that stood out from the air, but he could see a lake and a mountain ridge that appeared on the map. He was miles from the city, but there was a landing strip marked that he might be able to reach, out to his east. He would make for that. Keying the transmit button, he radioed the tower at his home airfield.

‘Machel Tower, this is AR71,’ he spoke into his mike, ‘requesting weather check, over.’

‘AR71, Machel Tower, we have complete cloud cover. Heavy fog expected to stay with us until dusk. You have an alternative strip, over?’

‘Roger that, Machel Tower,’ Chamus replied, ‘going to try for Najakis Airfield. I’d appreciate it if you could let my folks know, over.’

‘They were asking for you earlier, Chamus,’ the
controller’s
voice came back. ‘I’ll let them know you’re alright.’

Chamus turned eastwards and started looking for the small airfield. The band of clouds was creeping with him, and the fog was starting to form along the ground. It was unnerving, seeing the mist just come into being like that. He pushed the throttle forward, in a hurry to close the distance between himself and the airstrip. It should have been visible by now, but everything down there looked the same. He checked his map and heading again. Fog slipped slowly under him and he banked the biplane to keep the grey blur out from beneath his wheels.

He was getting worried now. He might not make the
airstrip
, or it could already be under the fog. Chamus had never made a forced
landing
on his own, although he had been with his father on two. Landing in a field was not like landing on a nice flat airstrip; you had to know what to look for. A ditch, a grass bank, even a large animal burrow could flip the aircraft over. He tried to remember what his father had taught him about reading terrain, but he wasn’t confident enough of what he saw. Everywhere he looked, the ground seemed to have too many obstacles. He checked his fuel again. He would have to make a decision soon. He could always jump with his parachute, but he could not bear the thought of losing the plane. Gripping the stick, he searched desperately for a place to land. And the longer he hesitated, the more the fog crept across the land.

Chamus watched the needle settle at the bottom of the red on the fuel gauge. He had minutes left. If he wasn’t going to land, he should jump immediately, while he could still see a clear piece of ground. That clear piece of ground was getting smaller all the time. He kept flying, hoping for another opportunity. But with a growing sense of dread, he realised he had done what a pilot should never do. He had frozen and lost his chance. Looking back to where the last patch of open space had been, he scowled bitterly. The blanket of fog was now broken only by mountain peaks to his south and east. There was nowhere to go. Even a parachute jump into fog was likely to be fatal.

The engine gave a troubled cough and his heart nearly stopped. This was it. He undid his seatbelt. Better to fall with a parachute than plummet with a plane. He was about to climb out of the cockpit when he saw the space. It was small, but it was there, and one pass over it told him he could get the plane down. He couldn’t tell whether he would stop it in time, but beggars could not be choosers. He swung round to bring the plane into the wind and pushed the stick forward.

Rumbler’s ears pricked up and he whinnied. Riadni listened hard to the few sounds she could hear in the mist,
wondering
what the horse’s keener hearing had picked up. She had slowed down, careful not to lose her way as the fog settled, and now they were moving at a snail’s pace, the girl relying on her horse to watch its footing in the murky haze. There came a noise like a large hornet, growing steadily louder. An
aeroplane, but different from the ones she had heard before, rougher and more ragged. She drew Rumbler to a stop to judge its direction as best she could. It was going to pass overhead.

The angry noise bellowed towards them and coughed as it crossed their path. She instinctively soothed Rumbler with some soft words and a pat on the neck, but the old horse was too well trained to rear at the racket created by the machine. Then the hornet coughed again and the racket
clattered
to a stop, and Riadni knew that the aircraft had not landed and that they did not fly without their engines.