Arabella of Mars(74)

He took it with barely a nod to Arabella, being busy calling out commands to his men. Topmen bustled up and down the masts, unfurling and sheeting home t’gallants and royals, then mere minutes later furling them up again in response to the Horn’s ever-shifting winds.

Amidst this maelstrom of wind and wood and voices one familiar voice stood out from the rest: Faunt, the captain of the waist, calling, “Heave away, ye b____ds! Heave away smartly!” Arabella peered over the forward rail to the deck below, wondering what task her former messmates were engaged in.

What they were doing was opening the great cabinet, fixed to the deck, into which the balloon envelopes had been packed shortly after their departure from London. Immediately the wind caught at the alabaster Venusian silk, tugging billows and folds of it into the air, but the men grabbed the first envelope before it could be whipped away and began hauling it into a large untidy circle. From this perspective, the net of sturdy cables that would hold the envelope once it was inflated gave the impression of a gigantic spider’s web.

“Open the flues!” called Faunt, a command that was repeated down the forward ladder. A moment later came a great bellowing roar, louder even than the rush of the wind through the rigging, and the circle of the envelope bellied out into a great flapping disc, then an inverted bowl, then a loose wobbly sphere that nearly filled Diana’s waist.

A midshipman, black from top to toe with charcoal-dust, appeared and saluted the captain. The smell of burning charcoal on him was so strong that even the Horn’s whipping winds could not carry it away. “Boatswain’s compliments, sir,” he gasped. “Charcoal stores holding steady. We’re clear for descent.” The men below on charcoal duty must be shoveling like fiends.

“Excellent,” the captain replied with a curt nod, then returned his attention to the sails.

Soon the envelope was nearly full, straining against the net that held it down, and the men gradually paid off the lines that held it to the deck until it rose to dominate the sky abaft the mainmast. Though the roaring and swelling continued, the men immediately returned to the envelope cabinet to repeat the performance.

As she watched her old messmates struggle with the envelope’s luffing fabric while topmen scrambled hither and yon and other men shoveled charcoal, Arabella felt herself nothing more than a pretty bauble, a decoration strapped safely to the deck at the captain’s side. Though her life as an airman had been hard, exhausting, and often tedious, the sense of accomplishment she had felt when a sail she had helped to raise billowed out in the sun against the bright blue sky, or when a gun whose load she had carried spoke out with a voice like a vengeful god, or even when she’d cried out “Who shall have this?” and passed a greasy bit of beef to another waister had been greater than any pleasure she’d had on land.

Far below, Mars’s broad dome had spread until he now appeared more landscape than ball, visible above the rail in every direction, curving off to a shimmering blue horizon. The familiar yellow-ochre of the sands below, now close enough that hills, valleys, and canals could plainly be seen, caused Arabella’s heart to ache with homesickness—and with concern for her brother and the family plantation, now threatened by rebellion as well as Simon’s depredations.

Trepidation over what she would find when they landed warred in her heart with impatience to finish her journey, leaving her breast feeling as buffeted by emotion as Diana was by the gusts of wind that even now tossed her about beneath her swelling envelopes.

*

Though Mars’s Horn shook the ship and required many adjustments to the sails and envelopes, the captain and crew’s experience brought Diana safely to the aerial node that Aadim had located, and soon the ship was floating serenely along beneath her three great balloons, drifting in the gentle breezes of the lower planetary atmosphere toward Woodthrush Woods.

Arabella unbuckled herself and peered over the rail, looking past the men who were even now hauling in the sails and sheets from the lower masts. Soon the masts themselves would be unshipped, returning Diana to her original configuration for landing. All of this was, she knew, ordinary standard procedure, but the situation they would encounter upon landfall was entirely extraordinary and nonstandard.

A hazy bright spot on the ground seemed to pace the ship as she sailed along. “What is that, Captain?” Arabella asked, pointing.

“The light of the sun,” he replied, pointing in exactly the opposite direction, “reflected back to us from innumerable grains of sand.”

More and more details appeared as they drifted toward the ground: towering rock formations, orderly ranks of sand dunes marching to the horizon, rilles of soft and rounded stone. Arabella’s heart thrilled when they came upon a canal—the great Khef Shulash, it must be, it was so broad—which ran as straight as an arrow from one horizon to another. Tiny specks of boats floated upon its shining waters.

And if that was the Khef Shulash … She shaded her eyes and peered ahead, to where the canal vanished in the haze of the horizon. Fort Augusta lay in that direction.

From here, she thought, she should be able to see, if not the great sandstone walls of the fort itself, at least some sign of the town that surrounded it. Even if the port was closed and devoid of ships, the forest of masts that made up the shipyard should be clearly visible from this height. “May I borrow your telescope, sir?” she inquired of the captain.

She raised the instrument to her eye, focused … and gasped.