“Wife?” the girl asked, realizing another woman was beside me.
“It’s not what it seems,” I said to both of them.
And now the damsel did scream, screeching for Papa like a fury. Damnation, women are difficult.
Another door from another tower banged open, and more soldiers appeared, their primed muskets tipped with glinting bayonets.
“Time to fly!” Cayley cried. He picked up Astiza, heaved her onto the flimsy frame without apology, and tugged at me. “Lift on the other wing!” We hoisted and climbed up the low crenellated wall at the brink of the castle.
The guards were raising their guns. “They’re after the colonel’s daughter!” one cried.
I held the glider with one arm, pulled a pistol, and fired, my fist bucking, to throw off their aim. One of them actually went down. I threw the empty gun, making them instinctively duck, and then pulled and fired my other pistol.
“Now, now!” Cayley cried.
There was a volley of muskets, bullets tearing toward us.
Or rather, tearing toward where we’d been.
We’d launched into the abyss.
Chapter 12
We hurtled into a black void. There was the sickening sensation of falling, stomach left behind, and then a gust of wind swooped us sideways. Cayley shouted something unintelligible, I clung to the frame, and Astiza was squashed and half smothered between us. Our “goose” felt pregnant with our weight. More shots, the hiss of musket balls, and then we began to glide just above the tips of a downward-sloping comb of mountain pine, jutting like stakes to impale us. I could smell the forest in the wind.
“It works!” Cayley cried.
I waited for his invention to make my son an orphan.
I hate modern times.
Our machine was nothing like the angel wings of an Icarus. Its spine was a pole twenty feet long with a cruciform tail of little wings, like two kites melded at right angles to each other. This appendage, the inventor explained, was to give us balance and direction. The two main canvas wings were more reminiscent of a bat than a bird, thin canvas fabric stretched over a wooden framework like dried skin. Thin cables led from tail and wings to a rectangular framework suspended below the pole. The Englishman had lit a small lamp that hung from the central strut. It would allow our allies (and the French, I thought gloomily) to follow our progress.
Or find our bodies.
The swooping glide was like a sled run; I’d never traveled so fast. Cayley had one cable in his teeth and another in a hand. “Pull your line to the left!” he commanded.
I did so, and the machine leaned, almost spilling us out. Astiza shrieked, sensibly.
Or was that me?
“Not that much!”
I slacked off, groaning. But then he shouted, “Enough!” and we flattened and steadied. We were still descending, but on a long, gentler trajectory. Patches of snow went by beneath us like blurred clouds. The experiment actually worked.
We heard the rip of a cannonball cutting through the air, sounding like tearing fabric, and then the boom of its cannon echoing from the fort. I was impressed they’d gotten even one shot off. We were flying what seemed like fifty times faster than any horse, Fort de Joux’s mountain far behind, and a rent in the clouds lit up a palette of grays that showed fields, woodlots, and the lines of road.
Ahead was a lighter gray, the blob of a pond.
No, a lake. It was rapidly growing as we neared it. By Creation, that was more than enough to die in. I tensed all over again.
“George, the ice will be like pavement if it’s thick, and we’ll drown if it’s thin.”
“I’m going to aim for the water near shore. The ice will bend like a cushion. Frotte will follow, with dry clothing.” His voice was tight, his concentration enormous. The wings of the glider rocked as we flew, gusts bucking us up and then dropping us down. Wind sang in our rigging. I heard gasps and hugged Astiza. Or was that me doing the snuffling?
“It will be like a bird crashing into a window.”
“Thin glass, in April.” English scientists are unrelentingly optimistic. “However the landing, we’ve made history, my friends.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure they’ll put a stone up.”
Now we were skimming over ice, the lake growing ever larger and more menacing. A tracery of snow had been blown into patterns, some of it puffed up as we raced just above. Instinctively, we all cried out and braced. Then before I could take breath we slammed onto the surface of the lake, breaking through crust as fragile as frosting and plowing into freezing water. The glider disintegrated into kindling. Canvas wings caught ice floes and floated off. Meanwhile, we heavy humans plunged into black depths. I clutched Astiza, determined to die with her in my arms. The cold was paralyzing.
All was dark. We kicked, looking for the surface. Our heavy winter clothes were like weights, and she pushed away from me to sensibly shed hers.
Then my feet touched something.
A rocky bottom!
I staggered upright, surging through shards of ice and snow to freezing air, throwing off water like a frenzied dog. I could stand, and haul up my wife, and so I did so. “Astiza! Are you all right?”
“Alive.” Her eyes mirrored my own shock. “It’s so cold it hurts!”
I held her close. “It’s shallow,” I gasped. “You can walk.”
We half waded, half swam, up the pebbled shore.
“Where’s George?”
“I think I can salvage it!” he cried from behind us. He was still chest-deep, hauling in pieces of his shattered flying machine.
“Leave it, Cayley! Maybe they’ll think we drowned!”
Even an eccentric can discern logic at times. He nodded reluctantly and let the pieces of his prize float away, struggling toward shore himself. The three of us staggered out of the bitter water and up onto a frosty, snow- glazed meadow. The clouds had closed up again, and there were no lights to be seen. We were soaked, the wind was numbing, and we’d survived glider flight only to die of exposure.
“Of all the bollocks-backward schemes I’ve been involved in, this was the worst,” I wheezed, using the anger to warm myself.
“Actually, I’m amazed it worked at all,” Cayley confessed. “Too bad it will have to remain a secret, given the necessities of espionage. I think my aerial machine could also benefit from improvement.”
“The object of our rescue shot dead, your invention ruined, the three of us on the brink of freezing, and no closer to dealing with Leon Martel for my son than before,” I recited, just to make clearer the actual situation. “Astiza, why didn’t L’Ouverture climb faster?”
“He was already dying,” she said. “Chilled to his marrow and thin as a stalk. You could see death in his eyes. Betrayal and imprisonment had broken his spirit. He didn’t look at me as if I were a rescuer, Ethan. He looked at me as a messenger of doom.”
“And now our modern Spartacus has been crucified for nothing.”
“Not for nothing. For science,” Cayley said.
“Yes. How fast can we freeze in place?”
The inventor ignored my skepticism and staggered up a snowy slope. We heard hoofbeats on frozen ground. Cayley waved. “It’s Frotte! He’s coming with horses and clothes!”
So we might live after all, if the spy brought brandy to light our core. My heart was racing like a
