Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (21 page)

"It's easy," George said.

Lewis blinked. "What?"

"Oh come on," George said, leaning back in his chair and snagging the coffee pot off the stove to pour himself another cup. "Don't tell me you can't see it."

"No," Lewis said.

George grinned, getting up and tearing a piece of butcher paper off the roll on the counter. He fished a pen out of his pocket. "I'll show you." He drew a wide curving sweep across the page. "That's the border between France and Germany. Imagine this looks like a real map."

"Ok," Lewis said.

"Here’s the line." He filled in heavy ink. "Now with classical tactics, what do you do?"

Lewis shrugged. "Go around it."

"Yep." He filled in the line again, pointing at the paper. "Now on the south end of the line you're in the Alps. Can't go around it that way because you can't get through. So you extend the line north, right? You counter each flanking movement. That's what happened in the Race to the Sea in 1914, when the Great War started. Until you get to the English Channel. Then you can't go around that way either."

"So," Lewis said slowly, "If you've got both ends of the line anchored in a natural defense you can't move, then you're in the clear, right?"

George leaned forward over the paper. "Ok, warfare alternates between defensive and offensive superiority. That's what's happened throughout history. Somebody comes up with a really good weapon, like the chariot, and it's the best thing in the world for a few centuries. Until somebody else comes up with ditches and obstacles that screw them up. Then for a while it's all about building mud brick forts. Then somebody comes up with horse archers, and your forts are screwed because they'll just shoot over the walls. So you build bigger walls and put archers on top. But then somebody invents catapults and knocks the walls down. That's how it goes. Fast forward to the Middle Ages. It's all about the castle. Until cannon. It's all about the infantry square with pikemen. Until muskets. It's all about muskets — until Napoleonic cavalry." He tilted his hands back and forth like a scale. "Offense, defense. Offense, defense. The technology changes, and the balance tilts."

"Ok," Lewis said. "I see that. We went into the Great War thinking that it was going to be like the Civil War, but the defensive technology was too good. Machine guns change the equation. You can't charge through fire. And so you get trench warfare and you're stuck."

"Actually the technology was already changing at the time of the Civil War," George said. His blue eyes were very bright. "Stonewall Jackson was the last gasp of Jominian cavalry tactics in the Valley Campaign. Ten years later, in the Franco-Prussian War, when the sons of Marshals tried to fight it that way they got their butts kicked. You can't beat the artillery. And then barbed wire and the machine gun sewed it up."

"So," Lewis said, looking at the line on the paper. "The Maginot Line is the ultimate trench system. Both ends are anchored in natural defenses that you can't get through, mountains and sea, and you can't get through the middle. What's the deal?"

George tapped it with the pen. "The world isn't a piece of paper. It's in three dimensions."

Looking down on the trenches from above, out over the wing at a blasted no man's land, at the muddy line of despoiled river, at the haze on the far horizon of lands behind the lines….

"Oh boy," Lewis said.

Turning like a bird on the wind, the puffs of smoke from the barrage far below, the only thing that could touch you a silhouette against high, thin clouds, the swift shape of another biplane….

"How tall a wall do you have to build to stop an airplane?" George asked softly. "How big a gun do you need to hit a plane at eight or ten thousand feet?"

"It can't be done," Lewis said. "Not with the current technology. We're not talking about Wright planes that fly at a few hundred feet. There's not an artillery piece in the world that could hit a modern aircraft."

"Or that's fast enough to," George said. "Is there a gun in the world fast enough to hit you in a powered dive? Is there a gun that could touch
you
?"

"No," Lewis said. He could see it absolutely clearly, stooping like a kestrel in a fighter plane that moved like wind itself, four hundred miles an hour in a dive. Maybe more. "Those new Messerschmitts are clocking at better than three hundred miles an hour flat out."

"379," George said. "I'd put money on well over four in a dive."

Lewis nodded. The possibilities were dizzying. "With a plane like that, nobody could hit me."

George smiled. "There's not a gun in the world that could. And this?" He gestured to the drawing of the Maginot Line. "It's not even an obstacle."

A line on the ground, harmless as a line on the map. It made his fingers itch for the controls of the plane he imagined, for the rush of wind and the ballet of death.

"Go over the top," Lewis said. "And then you just clean up behind. Cut off the fortification and let them starve." He could see. He could see so clearly.

"It's the flying wedge," George said. "That's as classic as you get. Only instead of sweeping around a flank with cavalry, you're sweeping over the top with close tactical air support. The third dimension."

Lewis was still looking at the paper, but he didn’t really see it. No, he could feel what the maneuver would look like, the shape of the squadron behind him, the point of a lance of steel and fire driving everything in front of it. Over the top and into the heart, a dive out of the sun, lethal and bright. Not the one-on-one air combat of the Great War, but a thunder to eclipse any cavalry that ever lived, planes stacked in tight three dimensional formations, a pack of hounds baying after their quarry in concert….

"It's easy," he said.

George sat back in his chair, his face oddly solemn. "I told you it was."

"I can do that," Lewis said. He could see how. He could feel exactly how, surely as if the plane's controls were in his hands.

"You can," George said. "And you probably will."

Lewis nodded slowly. "You think there will be another war?"

George's eyes met his straightforwardly. "I think if there weren't I wouldn't be here."

B
y the time they’d returned from the dig, Willi was feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself for his behavior that morning. He managed to say as much to Jerry at the dig, but there was no privacy, and too much other work to do for Jerry to do more than shrug. There was no chance to speak before dinner, either, and certainly not during, and Willi excused himself from the usual gathering on the lanai, pleading a busy day. He opened the bedroom windows and turned on the fan, stripping to his shorts, grateful for the night breeze that stirred the palms. Faintly, he could hear voices as the boys settled onto the porch, and then at last the door opened.

Jerry shut the door behind him, leaning heavily on his cane for a moment, then came to sit on the edge of the bed. That was another problem with the crowded house, Willi thought. The rooms were small, and there was hardly enough furniture in this one for them to stay physically separated. Jerry lifted his leg onto the mattress with a sigh, and Willi slanted a glance at him.

“I should not have been so rude.”

“It’s not me you owe an apology.”

“I intend to apologize to Mrs. Patton too. But I was rude. I’m sorry.”

“You’re the one who told me the story of the
Wind Raker
,” Jerry said. “What the hell? It fits with what Mrs. Patton said —“

“It’s just a story,” Willi said. “They are both just stories.”

“Stories that fit together,” Jerry said.

“There are thousands of tales of strangers from over the sea,” Willi said. “In South America as well as Polynesia. In Australia, too, I believe. It’s sheer coincidence.”

“You can’t seriously mean to discount the possibility of legends leading to truth.”

They were both keeping their voices down, Willi realized, a sure sign that this was serious. “You classicists are fixated on Schliemann and Troy. Yes, in that case the legends were accurate, but in how many others have they proved totally misleading?”

Jerry hauled himself further up onto the bed, bracing himself against the headboard. “And yet from what you told me, the
Wind Raker
story has documentary evidence.”

Trust Jerry to remember that. Willi scowled. “A fragmentary record of a ship sent on a peculiar mission. Why would Hawaii be the navel of the world? There is nothing in legend to suggest that. The island names are all references to harborage, as one would expect — this is the Fair Haven of the Gathering Place here.”

“And yet,” Jerry said. “Dr. Buck tells me that the word cognate to
hawai’i
in a number of other Polynesian languages generally means underworld or ancestral home. He said that for the Maori, it’s both — which is hardly a contradiction.”

“No, as myth-logic it would not be,” Willi said, deadly polite.

“The underworld, the ancestral homeland, the navel of the world. Surely you can see that connection.”

He could, too, and it was damnably attractive, a chain of inference that could lead anywhere or nowhere. He shook his head. “It’s a coincidence. Nothing more.”

“Oh?” Jerry’s expression was militant. “We know for a fact that this was
Wind Raker’s
mission: find the navel of the world. And we know she sailed east when the rest of the fleet sailed west. Why is it outrageous to speculate that, as she sailed further into Polynesia, she heard tales of an ancestral homeland — called ‘Hawai’i,’ or something like it — and bent the search that way?”

Willi hesitated, caught for a moment in the same vision. Yes, it could have happened that way, the Ming admirals were noted for their willingness to hire native guides, follow local sailing routes. He could believe that Admiral Chou could have heard such a story, could have followed it across the Pacific to the place where the world was made… And he had learned in China where such speculation could lead. If he had not woven that tale while the sparks whirled up from their fire to meet the canopy of stars— He swallowed that guilt, and shook his head. “There’s no proof. None.”

“Just one or two suggestive oddities,” Jerry retorted. “Ming porcelain where it shouldn’t be, and a stone that by your own admission says ‘the navel of the world.’”

“I have not said so,” Willi snapped. “It might, that’s all. Or it might be scratches.”

“Scratches that look like actual Chinese characters,” Jerry said. “In fill dirt from when the village was in its heyday.”

Of course he’d noticed that, too. Willi scowled. “So? Everything else is ordinary Hawaiian material, another hundred fishhooks for the Bishop Museum. I am not willing to put my career on the line by aligning myself with a bunch of lunatics —“

“What are you talking about?”

Willi licked his lips. “Saying that the Chinese discovered Hawaii is a lunatic statement.”

“No.” Jerry shook his head. “What do you have against those people — and who are they, anyway? The people who backed this dig?”

Willi’s breath caught. Part of him wanted to tell — not because he was afraid, but because Jerry needed to know what he was up against, what the stakes really were. But there were so many layers, and so many lies… “I told you, I don’t know who put up the money.”

“But you do know why they wanted you.” Jerry fixed him with a narrow stare.

And that question was even more dangerous than the first one, and Willi made himself shrug. “I am one of the leading experts, and I was available. Nothing more than that. As to why I don’t want to be part of this question — you are aware of the National Socialists’ racial theories, I’m sure?”

He made it a question, so that Jerry had to nod. “They’re hard to miss.”

“There is a — specialist branch within the party that has taken up the theory that the ancient Aryans conquered most of the Far East, including both China and Japan, by the year 2000 BC. The expedition to Lop Nur was expected to find proof that von Le Coq’s red-haired mummies were a descendant population, the last survivors of that conquest. Which —“ Willi managed a shrug. “I suppose it’s possible, but I can think of many more likely origins for a more-or-less Caucasian population on China’s western borders. But, in any case, there was a great deal of pressure to interpret everything we found according to that theory.”

Jerry nodded again. He had to understand academic politics, Willi thought, but he found himself talking on, spelling it out in detail.

“I am caught between a rock and a hard place. If I acquiesce, once the Nazis are out of power my reputation is ruined. If I say what I really think, I will most certainly lose my place at the Neues Museum, and quite frankly I can’t afford it. So. I am cautious, I quibble and question and never actually express an opinion — and that is one reason I was glad to take this job, since it meant another eight months before I go home again — and now here it is again.”

Jerry reached for his cigarettes, offered one, and Willi took it, cupping his hand around Jerry’s as he offered a light as well. “I do see the problem,” Jerry said, and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“Just so.” Willi leaned back against the headboard himself, savoring the smoke. “And it is a pretty story, Jerry, I do see how it fits. But — there is no real evidence. And I don’t think we’re going to find any. Not here.”

Jerry’s mouth curled into a crooked smile. “Surely the Aryan theorists can’t like the idea that their supermen were commanded by a eunuch.”

Willi snorted. “They’ll argue that it had only a spiritual meaning or some such nonsense. When it was very real…” He shook his head. “I do not want to give them ammunition.”

“I agree,” Jerry said. “And yet — we have these finds.”

“Which I will report, yes.”

“But you’re going to minimize them.”

“I think I must.” Willi met his eyes frankly. “It’s too easy to make too much out of them.”

There was a long silence, and then Jerry nodded slowly. “It’s your dig. You understand the material far better than I do.”

Willi took another long pull on his cigarette, a shiver of relief running through him. Oh, he had known he could trust Jerry, even as he feared he’d have to tell him at least some of what was going on, and it was good to have it over with. If only this was enough.