‘Go faster, so that the waves will always be behind me.’
‘Yes.’
‘We need to find Wahir before he breaks his neck. I’ll take the carpet and have a look. Will you stay here with Alessandra?’
‘I’d rather not, master.’ Said looked away.
‘She’s unconscious. She can’t try and seduce you.’ Benzamir punched him on the arm. ‘It’s all right to like her. She is very pretty.’
Said folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. ‘She’s an infidel woman.’
‘And plenty of those never found their way into a harem, did they?’ Benzamir started for the carpet, still basking in the sun.
‘She could still ruin everything for you.’
‘Not if we run fast enough.’ Benzamir dug out the skullcap and slipped it on. The carpet rose into the air, turned lazily and met him halfway. He stepped on and sat cross-legged, just like he’d seen in the picture books. He ought to have a turban; instead, he wound his headscarf around his face until only a slit remained for his eyes.
The front of the carpet dipped as if bowing, then steadily accelerated until Benzamir’s kaftan was snapping and cracking behind him. Loose sand billowed up in his wake, two perfect spirals that arced upwards and fell back with balletic grace.
He turned, hard and tight. To his left, the desert. To his right, the sky. Straight ahead, the horizon running in a line up to down. Then he came back, gaining height, rising up the rocks like an eagle in an updraught.
Wahir was on top of the plateau, poking around inside a ruin, a black arched back with ribbing extending down into the dust.
‘Master, what is this? It looks like some great beast.’
‘It’s difficult to tell.’ Benzamir uncrossed his legs and found the ground. He patted one of the ribs, still upright but carved and worn by sand and time. He walked underneath it, and along the spine, picking his way over the half-buried debris until he was outside again. Diggers had been here before them. Only the ribs remained. ‘It’s an aeroplane,’ he said.
‘A what?’
‘A flying machine. These struts are some sort of composite, carbon tubes and resin. It used to have a skin, and wings, though they seem to have fallen off. There were seats, rows of them, all the way down. People travelled from city to city in them.’
‘Is it a User machine?’ Wahir got down on his hands and knees and scraped away some dirt near Benzamir’s feet. ‘Will there be anything working still?’
Benzamir got down beside Wahir, though he didn’t attempt to dig. ‘Listen. Seeing things like this, and your reaction to them. It worries me.’
‘Why, master?’ Wahir sifted dust and wind-worn grit through his fingers.
‘Because it doesn’t inspire you. You don’t look on this and wonder how you could make it for yourself. You just wonder at the power and foolishness of the Users, see what there is to scavenge and walk away, shaking your head.’ He saw Wahir’s reaction and quickly added: ‘It’s not just you. It’s everyone. Anything the Users left behind is impossible for you to recreate. So no one tries. Someone should be trying.’
‘Master, I know your ways are different to ours—’
‘It’s like Selah. He finds it easier to get his steel from the diggers, and in a generation there’ll be not a single man who remembers how to make it for himself. It’ll be lost. Not for ever, but lost all the same.’
Wahir stopped scooping and sieving. ‘What’s wrong, master?’
Benzamir unwrapped his headscarf and let the end dangle in the dirt. He gave a sad little smile. ‘You see, Wahir, this is what temptation is like. You know the story of Eden, the apple, what it represents? The traitors: they fell. They gave in, for all the best motives, for all the wrong reasons. Me? I can feel it too. The push, the voice telling me that it’s right to eat.’
‘When you talk like this, I don’t understand. Is it because I’m too young?’
‘No. It’s because I’m always trying to hide the truth from you.’ Benzamir sighed and slapped the carbon fibre support with his hand. It shivered for a moment. ‘I’m trying to save you from this, from all the works of the Users. And suddenly I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do any more.’
He got up abruptly, and the flying carpet glided over towards them.
‘I trust you,’ said Wahir, ‘whatever it is you have to decide.’
‘Thank you,’ said Benzamir, kicking up dust with his sandals. ‘I hope I won’t let you down.’
‘Master, where are we going now?’
‘Something that Said and me were talking about – how the faster we go, the less chance there is of getting caught. So: the Kenyan emperor wants his User book back. I’m rather interested in having a look at it myself. Let’s go and find it before he does.’
CHAPTER 20
THE FIRST THAT Va and Elenya saw of An Rinn was a boy up a tree. The boy disappeared down behind the leeside of the hill and was lost to sight.
‘We can expect a welcome, if not news.’ Va strode out with renewed vigour, leaving Elenya in his wake.
‘This Kenyan – this rumour of a Kenyan – has led us halfway across the world, and six months later we’re in Aeire, the arse-end of nowhere. But it’s all the same to you, isn’t it?’
Va declined to reply.
She shouted: ‘You’re a bigger gossipmonger than the whores at court!’
‘We’re closer now than we’ve ever been,’ he called back.
A stone skittered past him, kicked by Elenya. It fell into the roadside ditch. He stopped and waited for her, his black habit flapping and snapping in the wind as she adjusted her small pack.
He, of course, had nothing. Poverty was one of his vows.
‘God has led us here,’ he said when she had caught up.
‘You’ve led us here, and don’t pretend otherwise.’
When they crested the hill, they could see the rough huts and natural harbour that made up An Rinn. The wind blew in their faces, and they caught hints of wood smoke and cured fish, seaweed and soil. On the flank of the hill towards the headland was a stone church – a single nave with a tower, as was the style in these lands.
‘Look,’ said Va. ‘There, at the end of those houses.’
Four sails processed round above the turfed roofs.
Va picked up the hem of his habit and started to run down the dirt track. The machine slowly revealed itself between walls and trees and the folds in the ground until it was laid bare before him. He stood at the foot of one of its huge supporting beams and looked up at it, amazed and appalled in equal measure.
Under the machine was a woman with a sack of grain, feeding it a handful at a time into the ever-turning millstone. She had her back to him, until the boy they had seen climb down from the tree slipped out from behind a building and gestured to her.
She frowned at him, said something in her barbarian language that sounded like a scold, but the boy just waved more frantically. Eventually, with a long-suffering shrug of her shoulders, she glanced behind her.
She stopped. She put the sack down. She stood and wiped floury hands on her dress.
Va finally noticed that he was being stared at, but all he could think about was the soft swoosh of the sails and the low clatter of the wheel as it turned over his head.
‘What manner of abomination is this?’ he muttered. ‘This has to be the Kenyan’s doing.’ He shook himself violently to break the spell, and the woman jumped back with a shriek.
She shouted at him; tried to shoo him away as if he was a chicken.
‘Who built this?’ he raved. ‘How can you bear to have it here?’
Neither could understand the other. Va was demanding answers, the woman was barking questions, and soon they were surrounded by the villagers, who had no idea what to make of any of it.
‘Out of the way, get out of the way, will you? Nice going, your holiness.’ Elenya pushed into the circle. She looked up at the windmill and patted one of the uprights. ‘This is new.’