Thunderer (3 page)

T
he sky over the Heath is full of wings and motion now. The crowd screams and cheers. The trees explode with gusts of avian life. Sparrows and pigeons flutter up to join the Bird. Little bright larks flit around the throng’s edge. The great white Bird soars over the Heath toward the Countess’s men.

Holbach pulls himself up onto the dais, and, gasping, says, “It’s…here! What’re you…
doing
? White! Come…on!”

A footman raises a white flag. At the signal, the white-robed men square their shoulders against the dragging ropes and run for the river, heavy boots gouging at the lawn. (
The Parks and Gardens Committee will be furious,
Holbach frets for an absurd instant.) The ropes pull taut and drag the leaning and wobbling balloon with them.

Today’s work is part worship, part science. It demands both ceremony and precision. Holbach counts under his breath, then croaks, “Blue!” A blue flag comes up, and two more rows of white-robed men run after the first, trailing kites, overtaking them.

“Gold!” and down the Heath toward the river, there’s a crack and a hiss and a cloud of stinking smoke. Another flare scores into the sky and bursts. Stars iris out lazily from the explosion. Holbach’s team crafted the fireworks to pattern, for an instant, the loose outlines of a swooping dragon. Against the bright blue midday sky, the shape is indistinct, suggestive, a ghostly afterimage. Another firework, and another, raise a procession of ghost-creatures in the sky: swan, moth, bat, owl; all in faded pastels, in jade, heather, coral. The quartet at the foot of the dais begins to saw away at Barnave’s Opus 131 (
The Eagle’s Morning
). The crowd cheers frantically for all this new activity, whatever it is.

The Bird curves itself in space toward the balloon, leisurely, as if curious about this bright clumsy challenger. Then it rushes suddenly forward, its presence sharpening into a line across the sky. The balloon leaps and the Countess’s men are dragged from their feet and let the ropes slip from burnt and bloody hands. Lucia shrieks. The Bird soars close past the balloon and the feathered cloud following the Bird engulfs it for a second. Half obscured by the flock, the balloon seems to turn itself inside out, and for a moment it becomes a great pair of wings, sixty feet of azure taffeta spread out on the wind. The wings beat once, then the fabric falls slowly to the ground, curling smokily in the air. The basket drops, not slowly. The little menagerie of birds in the basket takes flight, their wings whole again, and joins the god’s flock.

The kite-holders reach the river, where a flotilla of small boats cluster against the jetty’s black timbers. The men tie their kites to prow and stern of the waiting boats, then push them off. The boats row out into the river, the kites tugging lightly into the air, whipping and diving in the excited breeze.

In the middle of the river sits the frigate
Thunderer,
pride of the Countess’s small fleet and veteran of a decade’s campaigning against the pirates out in the far reaches of the Peaceful Sea (and sometimes against the fleets of the Countess’s rival lords, in incidents that it’s safest to forget). It carries thirty-two long guns, and more than one hundred crewmen wait nervously on its decks: not the largest ship in Ararat’s navies, but famed for its speed and grace, and speed and grace are of the essence for Holbach’s experiment. Its figurehead is a robed amazon, lunging from the prow, carved lightning bolts in her hands, freshly repainted. The wood below is rich and dark.

Before dawn, without fanfare, the Countess’s men brought it in from the sea, and up the Urgos into the city, forcing aside the river’s regular traffic of garbage barges and coal barges. The Urgos is broad and deep, but the warship is incongruously huge in it, like some abyssal leviathan heaving onto land.

They’ve taken down its sails. Holbach supervised the work, up on the forecastle, watching a forest of masts and rigging topple noisily around him—the crew shouting and cursing and straining, Holbach wincing to see such a beautiful machine torn apart. Then Holbach’s team brought onboard the second and larger balloon, dragging its deflated jellyfish body up the planks and onto the deck: now where the mainmast should be is a tumbled heap of golden cloth, waiting for air and life to be breathed into it.

Holbach had tried to explain it to a skeptical Arlandes as they stood on the denuded deck: “Of course the balloon won’t lift it, not of its own force; it would have to be, oh, a
hundred
times bigger; but it’s a sign the Bird will recognize.”

Arlandes had arched one eyebrow. He had distractingly beautiful blue eyes. “You think the god will do as you command it, Professor?” Holbach had shrugged plump shoulders and looked away from those eyes and that cold smile and said yes. “Yes. Yes and no. The ship’s a
sign,
like the fireworks and the kites and all the rest. Imagine it—well, imagine it as a great big bright floating cathedral dome, to be filled with the Bird’s blessing. It’ll
work,
Captain.”

Gods, he hopes that’s true. But it’s too late to worry now. The moment’s come; and at once it’s gone, and Holbach watches the Bird pass over the river and glide off north toward Faugère and Hood Hill. The Countess grips his shoulder with an elegant, bony hand, and she
squeezes
. Her nails are very sharp indeed.

Holbach watches. It works so smoothly. A loose, then rapidly tautening, golden sphere swells up from the
Thunderer
’s deck. The balloon’s inflating. Thick ropes (not visible at this distance) will be tightening, tethering the balloon to prow and stern. Sailors like little black ants swarm on its decks.

Then the small pointed several shapes of the kite-boats rise into the air, in a darting, uncertain ascension, halting and lurching. And in their midst, the
Thunderer
rises, too.

Its hull is deep below the surface, deeper than Holbach realized. It pulls slowly from the water, which rises with it in a lingering kiss, then opens and falls back in curtains of rain. It climbs against the backdrop of the buildings on the river’s right bank; higher than the dome of Hoffman’s Academy, than the bell tower of the Temple of the Crawling Stone, higher finally than the rusty cranes over the Brattle Bros. warehouse. It’s so massive, even at this distance, the vector of its motion so improbable, that for a moment it seems to Holbach that the ship is still, and the city and the blue sky are opening back and falling away behind it. He grabs the rail to steady himself.

Holbach starts to count, “One, two, three…” The Bird has gone. The warship remains, impossibly airborne. “…sixty-one…” Still airborne, the impossibility compounding with every moment. The naked hull’s like a swollen black belly, quite grotesquely unsuited to its new element, and yet it hangs there, defiant. “…one hundred and twenty.” The men in the kite-boats toss out ropes to the
Thunderer
’s deck. The frigate’s crew lash their satellites in radial position, forming the fleet into a crown, suspended over the city. In triumph, the
Thunderer
drifts up over the Heath. Its guns fire in salute, again and again, frighteningly loud.

The crowd cheers and screams and stamps, louder even than the guns. Holbach claps, and smiles and smiles and smiles. His experiment is a success. All these mad gestures, all this manipulation of signs and portents, balloons and fireworks and so forth—which Holbach thinks of as a science, and the mob thinks of as worship—has trapped the Bird’s gift in the
Thunderer
’s hull. It need never come down again. No one has ever done anything like this before.

But now politics calls; a different sort of science is necessary if he is to harness this moment to his own fortune. So he bounces around the dais, pumping the hands of every man there, congratulating them, and himself. “Excellent work…Your contributions were invaluable, Minister…. I hope we can count on your support for future ventures, Your Grace….”

As her peacock courtiers puff each other’s plumage, the Countess steps to the front of the dais. Her white face is expressionless. Her footmen scream for silence; then, as the reporters for the
Era
and the
Herald
and the
Intelligencer
cluster at her feet, she offers a cascade of half-threatening reassurances:
This is a gift to the city, to be used only in the interests of all of Ararat, as she sees them
; and
This ship is an act of worship, a living temple to the Bird, there’s nothing impious or sorcerous in this, and it would be irresponsible even to suggest that there is, she hopes there’ll be none of that….

Behind her, Captain Arlandes stares at the crumpled mess in the middle of the West Meadow: an unraveling wicker basket, and a little broken figure in a white dress. For some reason, he’s drawn his saber, and he’s holding it in a weakly shaking hand.

Holbach’s glad-handing rounds bring him in front of Arlandes, and he offers his hand to shake. “Grand work, Captain. Are you looking forward to your new command?” Arlandes doesn’t take Holbach’s hand. He seems frozen. Holbach, too, just stands there, hand out, an awkward smile fading slowly from his face.

I
t seems there has been an incalculable interval of timelessness and weightlessness. Then Jack lands hard on hands and feet, on rough brick. He can’t think what he called upon to cross that abyss. Yet here he is.

One of the watching women on the roof approaches him, her hand outstretched. Maybe she means to help him, but maybe she means to hold him. He spits at her face, snarls and bites the air at her. As she recoils, he’s running for the door, and down the stairs, and down through ranks of rattling looms and out a broken window and
out
into the alleys.

T
he Bird drifts north. Beneath it, the city rises steadily into the slopes of Ar-Mount. The Bird’s flock has dispersed now. The river is a silver-blue ribbon below and to the west. It would take many days to follow the river this far, and you would pass through many dangerous parts of the city. And you might meet other gods on the way and forget where you were going: not all the city’s powers are so gentle as the Bird, and the river in particular is something of which one should be very, very wary.

Here, dense, reeking streets and markets are woven around a maze of colossal stone walls, left here in some ancient age of the city. The Bird circles listlessly and settles on a high crumbling arch at the corner of two walls. It folds its wings and shuffles clawed feet, dislodging chips of stone. It looks very much like a bird now—a bird, not merely the suggestion of a bird. Its flat feathers are the dull shade of the stone; its huge eyes are yellow and blank.

The Bird has spent almost all the potential it brought with it. It has scattered its gift across the city, sometimes compelled by arcane science, sometimes freely. It has made changes to the city’s matter, to its sacred and shifting topography, that the cartographers and city-scientists will notice over the weeks to come: changing the course of the river, very subtly, shaping elegant new curves; raising a daring crest of high towers over the hills. No less important, it has redrawn the territories of the city’s avian life. It is neither pleased nor displeased with its work. Now it’s ready to move on, to open the way from this part of the city to another, to begin again.

It leans slowly forward, stretching and turning its neck. It relaxes, then slowly stiffens, craning out to the facing wall. Then it isn’t a bird anymore, only a steep flying arch of yellow stone. A tiny last mark on the city’s map.

A presence leaves the city. The city’s summer gives way to autumn. A thin, cold rain starts to fall.

T
he never-published
fourth edition of Nicolas Maine’s infamous Atlas would have described Ararat thusly:

ARARAT:
The sacred city, the gods’ great perpetual work, the city of a thousand lords; but you know this. It’s everything you may see from your window, and much that’s beyond your sight, and more that is cruelly buried. Everything written here was written first in its streets, but here it is given meaning and order.

Everything that is true of Ararat somewhere is a lie somewhere else. We shall try to do it justice in the pages before and behind us, but we crave your indulgence for our errors. If it’s truth that angers you, we are not sorry.

…which entry, penned partly by Holbach, partly by the playwright Liancourt, was of course a little joke, for Ararat was the subject of the entire Atlas, and even all its many volumes couldn’t hope to capture it: it was as absurd as trying to contain the Atlas itself within a single one of its entries.

Ararat’s poets and votaries, the boosters of its business and the toadies to its rulers, struck a less ambivalent tone. This was
Ararat,
they hymned: blessed, haunted Ararat! First among cities, heart and also summit of the world; ancient beyond reckoning, but rebuilding itself a million times a day, stone and brick and iron, flesh and dreams, all of it woven, unpicked, and rewoven by the crisscrossing paths of a thousand divinities: a condensation of meaning into city-stuff, gleaming and proud. How very pale and thin the rest of the world seems next to Ararat! Let those who can sing its praises; but at the docks, on Gies Landing, Arjun just sat on his pack in the rain, between two stinking fish stalls and a juggling clown in smearing snakeskin facepaint, and he asked himself what the
fuck,
a crude and dissonant curse he had picked up at sea and disliked, but some dissonance was, he felt, required here, what the
fuck
he was doing.

His mission had propelled him over the sea, and across half the world, but now he thought he had never, throughout his long journey, allowed himself to look directly at that mission, never seen how vague and obscure of implementation it really was. Now he was in the city, and it was time to begin, and he did not know how.
And what if I’m wrong? What if it simply isn’t here?
He had only a little money left and no place to stay.

The people who surged and jostled him and bellowed and tried to sell him things were mostly light-skinned; almost eerily pale, some of them. City-folk did not get enough sun. Others were dark or at least grime-blackened. The golden-brown of Arjun’s skin appeared unique, and he attracted curious and possibly hostile stares, which he met with a polite smile and a sinking heart.

After a little while, the rain drove the clown off. Sheltered under a green awning, Arjun took his pen from his pack and unfolded a sheet of paper. Resting it on the hard back of his copy of Girolamo’s
Techniques,
he started to write:
Fathers, Mothers, I have come to the city, at the end of summer, over the sea, bringing our hopes with me
.

L
ike Ararat, Gad sat in the shadow of mountains. It was far to the south, almost at the other end of the world. Its farms were on stony earth, under dark moss and purple heather. The air in Gad was very clear and cold. Sound carried far there. Perhaps that was why the first settlers had been able to hear the Voice.

The Choristry was the only building of any size in Gad, or for miles around. It stood in the middle of town. It was built like a wheel, topped by a shallow dome. Four spires rose at the compass points. A fifth rose from the dome’s center, higher than the others. Its walls were made of a dark mountain stone, carved and silvered in somber and abstract designs. Ample windows opened its contemplative silence to the mountain light.

The town of Gad sloped out down the hill, under curving roofs of thatch and clay, bowed as if in worship around the Choristry. Its roads were narrow and tangled, the widest of them barely enough for the carts that came in from the farms. There was no other traffic. Gad had only one market, and it had no particular name.

Gad had no neighbors in the mountains. A single road led down onto the warmth and noise of the plains. Winter’s snow made it impassible, but in the summer, Gad did a little trade with the towns of the plains, sending down its small surplus on ox-drawn carts.

Sometimes, a Choirman went down onto the plains with the carts. The dusty, drunken cow towns of the plains could be rough places, but Choirmen traveled unmolested: any idiot who laid hands on a Choirman’s black robes would soon face justice—or what passed for justice in the heat and noise of the world down there. And the towns were eager to house the Choirmen, for their medicine, or their skills with animals, or their patience in resolving disputes; but above all, the plainspeople—whose daily lives were dry, tough, and practical—wanted the Choirmen for their song, and for the intimations the song could bring them of Gad’s sacred Voice.

In dusty bowls out back of the town, or in clearings in the scrabbly woods, the Choirman, or more often woman, would sing until night fell over the plains, then slip away. At dawn, she would wait where she sang the night before, cross-legged on the ground, black robes pooling around her feet, waiting for the town’s children to come to her. She would test them all day, helping the shy children to improvise a clumsy descant upon her plainsong. She listened closely to their voices as nervous parents waited at home. Most often, she would pack up and leave town alone. Only a few children had the gift of song, and those she brought with her.

A
rjun was very young when Mother Abayla tested him and brought him up into Gad. He soon forgot his previous life, except for a few scattered images. He remembered horses; cows; a piano banging away over a warm drone and shimmer of sitars and the drunken beat of hand-drums, in a room full of towering, twirling legs in dusty brown leather and bright lace and silk; the smell of dust and cows and cheap rum. Nothing much else. The Choirmen disdained piano and sitar and drums, but still, when he composed, he imagined that cheap piano and the peasant drums and drone, and the memory gave his music a thumping liveliness entirely unlike the other students’ exercises. Otherwise, he never thought much about what his life might have been like before Gad.

They let him keep his birth-name. They added
Dvanda
to it—a word that referred, in their scheme of thinking, to an augmentation of chords through doubling and repetition, but that they chose for its sound, not its meaning: so that he was
Arjun Dvanda
at the chanting of the roll. It fitted the meter better.

The Choristry’s floors were made of cool grey stone. The Choirmen’s feet brushed it gently. The first thing he learned was to walk quietly, and listen closely.

A
rjun’s voice broke early, and fatally. It was not terrible, only pedestrian and a little flat. Good enough to belt out a sing-along at some peasant feast day down on the plains; better, in fact, than anything one could hear anywhere else in the world; but not good enough for the Choir. The Choir existed to echo the Voice. Only the purest singers were fit for that task. Those boys whose promise went sour were sent back sadly onto the plains.

Arjun was allowed to stay only because of an exceptional gift for composition. That was his earliest real memory: sitting in Mother Abelia’s lacquer-paneled office while she and Mother Jessica and Father Julah explained this to him. They gave him a choice: he could stay, or he could leave the Choristry and go into Gad, where he would be taken in. He was very small on the hard wooden chair. The Mothers and Fathers were not cruel, unless it was perhaps cruel to offer a child that choice, but they were very honest.

Arjun chose to stay. When the Choir practiced at noon, he was permitted to take tiny parts, so long as he stood with stronger singers. When the Choir sang at twilight, in the hall in the central spire, chanting their measured adoration of the Voice, he was permitted to stand in the outer circles, where the less gifted students listened in silence.

Sourly he cultivated other talents.

The Choirmen were masters of many delicate arts. One school within the Choir specialized in clockwork, in workrooms in the south spire. They built precise clocks, and clever toys. A wind-up man walking; a dancer curling into a dying fall, then uncoiling up again; racing horses with tricky hooves that never quite touched the painted grass. There was a big Headman from the plains who had been a friend to Gad, who had sent two sons and a daughter to the Choir, but who had never himself been able to come to the mountains. They made a diorama of Gad for him, with little tin figures on tracks orbiting the Choristry through intricate carved streets. The plains demanded music boxes, too, and they got them, though the Choirmen found their noise tinny and false.

In the Choristry’s gardens and greenhouses, another school cultivated herbs, medicines, and spices. Other Choirmen brewed beers and rum and liquors in the tunnels. Others made musical instruments, most of which they kept for themselves; the plainspeople had little use for the finer instruments. Arjun threw himself into composition. Every student composed music as an occasional exercise—it was a way to come closer to the Voice’s song—but Arjun did it constantly, obsessively. By the time he was fourteen, his desk in the library was stuffed with densely scrawled notebooks. He made the other students perform his compositions. His pieces became increasingly difficult and angular. They had such strong and pure voices. He lacked their grace. It got awkward and painful.

T
hey elevated him from the outer circle of the students into the second circle. He was now, they told him, a closer echo of the Voice; and with time he would become closer and closer until he reverberated with it perfectly. He was allowed small parts in the song, on the less significant days of the calendar. They added
Atyava
to his name, and moved his quarters to the east spire.

I
n Father Julah’s office high in the east spire, Arjun discovered a rare gift for languages.

He had gone there to discuss a problem with a piece he was composing. Fingers steepled, head lowered, black-bearded Julah listened patiently to the precocious child’s problem. When Arjun was done, Julah thought for a while and dug through his shelves.

“Here. Father Nayaren’s
Principles.
It used to be a basic part of the regular syllabus when I was your age. Keep it. I want you to read his second chapter. And—aha!”

Julah held up a book bound in deep red leather, stamped on front and back with a thin snaking dragon in gold foil. He opened it at a random page and held it up to Arjun. Instead of any letters Arjun recognized, it had rows—no, columns—of intricate designs. Like diagrams of one of Father Anias’s clockwork engines; like musical notes, or the tangled roots of herbs.

“It’s Akashic. I do not know the author. The book purports to have been written by the Petal Rain Dragon of the Heavenly Parliament, though I rather expect a human hand had to hold the pen for him. The let-us-say
difficulty
with which he deals is not dissimilar to yours. You can’t read it, of course, but I can, though not as well as I’d like. I’ll read to you. ‘
Gakusei
’—that’s ‘students’—‘listen…’”

Arjun came back the next day, and the next, to listen to Julah read. It went slowly because Arjun wanted to know the Akashic for every word Julah spoke. And when that book was finished, Arjun found other Akashic books. He found dictionaries and grammatologies, and began to teach himself the language.

Over the centuries, the old building had amassed a huge and startlingly diverse library, scattered among the Choirmen’s offices, the vaults, the storerooms and workrooms. Arjun scoured the shelves and dug his way into hidden troves of strange words. He learned with preternatural quickness. It was just another kind of music, and it was easy to learn music, there in the echoes of the Voice. Within a year, he had mastered Akashic, and was teaching himself Tuvar and Mali.