“I’ve taken up with Napoleon in a way,” I confessed. “As an American I’m not really sure which side I’m supposed to be on.”
“Expediency, Ethan, expediency. Yes, I’ve heard of your work on negotiations over Louisiana. You’re clever as a fox, but then so is Frotte here, who somehow draws payments from half a dozen governments at once. You’re both rascals but useful rascals, and now your interests are aligned with mine. Is that not so, Astiza?”
“Only because the French have kidnapped my young son,” she said. Women have a formidable single-mindedness when it comes to children.
“And the English are going to help you get him back.” Smith beamed.
She was skeptical, but I was of the mind we needed whatever help we could get. “See here, Sir Sidney, I agree that ours is an alliance of convenience,” I said. “I was simply trying to sell a jewel when a renegade secret policeman stole it, kidnapped my son, Horus, and demanded secrets I don’t have. We’ve no idea where Martel is, or what to tell him if we find him. Nor am I entirely clear what he really wants.”
“He wants to conquer England. Have some tea, please, and I’ll tell you more of what I know.”
We sat around a side table as the service was set, oil paintings of stern-looking dead Englishmen looking down on us as if in judgment from a secular Sistine Chapel. Life for the upper class is constantly trying to live up to the standards of ancestors who never seemed to have had a good time. Out the windows, the Thames through the wavy glass was a parade of watery commerce, sails slipping by like bird wings.
“First of all, Leon Martel is a scoundrel,” Smith began. “He was an underworld boss of some sort-the rumor is he turned country girls to prostitution and orphan boys to pickpockets-when he decided to join Bonaparte’s new secret police rather than risk being caught by them. His allegiance is to himself, and he reportedly had hopes he could succeed Fouche someday as police minister, either through promotion or betrayal. Instead, he’s now found himself out of the police and suspect to his fellow criminals as turncoat and informer, so he’s extorting people like you and shopkeepers like the jeweler Nitot. He’s made a close study of torture and uses it on people who cross him. He’s also a coward; he was drafted into the early French Revolutionary armies and deserted.”
“A man who makes anyone else look good,” I summarized, glancing at my wife. Those of us with flaws are encouraged by such comparisons.
“As the two of you know as well as anyone,” Smith went on, “England is a nation with a powerful navy. By the end of this year we’ll have seventy-five ships of the line and hundreds of frigates, while France has but forty-seven battleships. We hear nineteen are being built, and we must always fear alliance between Bonaparte and Spain. Still, our confidence in our navy is high.”
Indeed. The English seemed to win almost every sea fight they picked.
“However, we have a relatively weak army. We believe our soldiers are the finest in the world, but they are relatively few and spread over a large empire. If Bonaparte can get a hundred and fifty thousand men across the Channel, which our spies tell us he intends, London will fall. There will be an eternal reign of terror.”
I was of a mind that London cuisine could benefit from a French invasion, and that a glass of wine in late afternoon was preferable to a pot of tea, but I kept such subversion to myself. The English would die like lions to defend boiled mutton and dark beer.
“That means the English Channel is key,” Smith went on. “If Napoleon can control it, even for a fortnight, he could land an army and conquer our kingdom. He might achieve passage with a decisive naval victory, but we believe that unlikely. He might lure our ships away, but I hope Nelson is too clever for that. Then there’s the chance of strange new machines of war-yes, I’ve heard of Fulton and his plunging boat, or submarine-but it takes time to perfect new inventions. Or Bonaparte could take to the air.”
“Ethan and I have been in a balloon,” Astiza said.
“You never quite got all the way in the balloon,” I amended. I still had nightmares of her fall.
“I remember,” Smith said. His ship had rescued me when I crashed in the Mediterranean. “But balloons can be shot down, and are slow and victim to the vagaries of the wind. Cayley’s glider only descends. What if such a craft could go up as well as down, and travel exactly where you pointed it? What if men could fly like hawks, wheeling and plunging and sending down bombs from heaven?”
“A ghastly idea,” I said. “Unfair, to boot. Thank God no one’s close to doing it. I tried Cayley’s contraption, and I can assure you, Sir Sidney, if you can get Napoleon into something like that, your war is all but won. He’ll plunge like a shotgunned sparrow.” And yet Mexico’s Aztecs had apparently made a golden replica of just such a device, putting me in this predicament. There’s something to be said for conservatism, where nothing ever changes.
“George Cayley is just at the beginning of his experiments,” Smith said mildly. “There is, however, an earlier civilization rumored to have mastered the art of flight, or at least to have produced models that look like flying machines. The speculation is that they not only enjoyed a controlled descent, but an ascent as well.”
“You mean the Aztecs. But how? What could make that web of sticks go upward?”
“We’ve no idea. A steam engine, perhaps? You yourself, Gage, are reputed to be somewhat of an electrician, a master of lightning. Perhaps that mysterious force can somehow drive an aerial craft. Mechanicians like Fulton and Watt are coming up with all kinds of peculiar ideas. In any event, the ancients were clever and might have had far better understanding of flight than we do. If the French could learn from an earlier civilization, they might swoop ahead of us and descend on our fleet like vultures.”
“Earlier civilization?”
“So the stories go. The recent notion that those in the future might know more than those in the past, or that the present age is the equal or better than our origins, is very new. For most of history, people believed the ancients knew more than us. The Aztec empire, Mr. Gage, believed it learned the arts of civilization from its gods, and is rumored to have immortalized the designs of their god’s flying machines in the gold and jewels of lost treasures. If the treasure of Montezuma could be found, and provides a model for flight, such a discovery might turn the tide of the war. The Channel could be leaped. That is what Leon Martel has heard, and that is what he’s after in the hoard.”
“But from Indians?”
“You understand better than anyone that the world has lost secrets in deep places. The pyramids? Mythic Norse artifacts on the American frontier? Greek superweapons?”
I had to give him the point. Our planet is a lot stranger than most people are willing to admit. I’d found a number of clever oddities in my time and had nearly died trying to harness them. Clever races or supermen seemed to be mucking about long before our own culture got started, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they flew, as well.
“We know the Caribbean is littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure ships,” Smith continued, breaking into my thoughts. “In the century after 1550, as many as six hundred such vessels sank, each bearing an average of four to eight million pesos. It says something of the wealth of Mexico and Peru that even with such losses, enough survived that Spain became the richest kingdom in Christendom. Does Montezuma’s treasure exist? Was it lost, recovered, and finally rehidden? Who knows? But even if Martel’s theory is improbable, the barest possibility makes it imperative he is stopped. Empires are at stake. A true flying machine could tip the balance of power in an instant. Imagine a regiment of French cavalry mounted on the equivalent of flying carpets, swooping down the Thames like Valkyries.”
As I’ve said, Smith was barking mad, not to mention having the habit of mixing metaphors. “You enlisted me because you seriously fear Valkyries?”