Godin knelt by the shore and started picking up what pieces of wreckage he could identify. One wooden spoon landed by his side.
“We’re going to die here,” said Mutis.
Godin shook his head. “No, thank you.”
“It’s true. If the Danish are patrolling this area, any ship that could rescue us will be sunk too.”
“You don’t know that.”
Mutis sat next to him and looked at the sea. “We may get used to the taste of raw crabs. But scurvy will catch up with us eventually.”
Godin threw the spoon at him. “You’re not helping!” Mutis blocked the blow covering his head with the satchel, and Godin gasped. “On second thought, maybe you are.”
Mutis lowered the satchel slowly. “What am I doing now?”
“Give me the satchel.” Mutis obeyed, and Godin started taking sheets of paper out. “The drawings are wet. We need to lay them out to dry.”
“What for? We have no way of taking them to Spain.”
“You’re wrong,” said Godin, suddenly very excited. “We have this.” He showed him one of the pages, blurry but still readable. “And we have that,” and he pointed at all the broken wood around them. “We even have a sail that we can repurpose.”
Seeing his partner’s intention, Mutis stood up. “That’s an absurd idea. We don’t have the tools.”
“We’ll make them. We have everything we need right here. Take these papers to higher ground, where the tide won’t reach them. We are getting out of here, and we are going home.”
Mutis took the sheets of paper and started walking uphill, hoping that the instructions would still make sense, that they would be able to reconstruct the descriptions in the right order, and that they would have enough wood to replicate the majestic bird machine designed by Father Bartolomeu, kept aloft by a fire that provided hot air and a series of cloth balloons positioned to keep it stable.
That was the secret the queen had sent them to dig up from boxes of forgotten notes, which held all her hopes for winning future wars, and which they were going to have to make work if they wanted to survive.
It was the design of a ship that could fly.
Night, August 19 (Gregorian), 1756
Above the Atlantic Ocean
“We could still go higher,” insisted Godin.
“Our firewood has to last the whole journey,” Mutis reminded him. “They’re the same stars anyway; you aren’t going to see them any better.”
With his arms over the handrail and his eyes still aimed at the sky, Godin replied, “I don’t care. I want to go further up, as high as God will let us.”
After the first days of travel, Mutis had learned to temper his fear of heights. From time to time they lowered the flying machine to catch fish, but he was still concerned about the risk of scurvy. “Can we see Saturn tonight?”
“Yes, it’s over there. If I had my telescope with me, I might be able to discover another moon around it.”
“What would you name it?”
“I don’t know. It’d have to be something dramatic, something memorable. For all we know, there could be a myriad of other planets out there that we cannot see because we haven’t flown high enough.”
Mutis thought for a moment. “If any moons are discovered because of a machine like this, the first one should be called Daedalus.”
“It’s a cautious choice,” nodded Godin. “You didn’t pick the name of the son who fell.”
“There will be falls, with enough time. We may think we found the way to outsmart the Danish, but someone will find the way to outsmart us.”
Oblivious to the warning, Godin let his mind fly in the direction of his gaze. “Do you know what kills me about studying the heavens?”
“What?”
“Learning that there are so many places up there and knowing that I’ll never visit them.”
“We’re already making history right here. We’re the first people to fly.”
“Yes, but now that I’ve reached the sky, I want to see what’s beyond it.”
“That didn’t end well for the people of Babel.”
“No, this is different. I can feel it. Right now, there could be an entire Danish fleet beneath us, and if we had any cannon balls to drop on them, they’d have no way of firing back at us. This changes the balance of war forever.”
Mutis kept his eyes pointed up so he wouldn’t see how far they were from the water. “Do you want to watch the sky or do you want to kill Danes?”
“After the queen gives us a welcoming worthy of heroes, she can go and kill as many Danes as she likes. I’m happy up here.”
Mutis forced himself to stare at the ocean and, resisting the immediate bout of vertigo, imagined a different constellation, a row of submarines ready for battle, unaware of the enemy that now rose beyond the reach of their cannons. “Maybe it’s the medic in me, but I can’t find the thought of war joyous.”
“Then don’t think about it.”
“How? War is coming either way. It will devour the world.”
Godin regarded Mutis and saw that his companion was truly disturbed. “It’s not that it doesn’t bother me. I hate carnage as much as you do. But you don’t want to bow to the king of Denmark, do you? Our queen must have this weapon.”
Mutis couldn’t stand to look down anymore. He leveled his eyes with the clouds and breathed. “What will you do when the war erupts?”
“I already serve the queen by training her sailors. You will serve her by healing them.”
“Is that all we are?”
“It’s what we’ll have the chance to be. War doesn’t make people great; it makes them small, so small they can vanish and it doesn’t matter.”
Mutis didn’t know whether it was because the air had grown thin at that height, but he was finding it harder to keep breathing. “In every book of history I’ve read, the wars are the longest chapters.”
“Yes, but the least interesting. Reading about war won’t tell you anything worthwhile about humans. War is what happens when humanity fails, and it always looks the same, with or without wondrous weapons. I’d rather look forward to the time that comes after. That’s when humans show you who they are.”
Part 6: Spread
Open that door, and show us how our world is just like the others.
It has been proved that nonexistent things cannot be affirmed.
Afternoon, April 2 (Gregorian), 1917
Mahisūru
A commotion was sweeping the faculty offices. Professor Hiriyanna noticed the concerned murmurs exchanged in corridors, the painfully slow wave that signaled the existence of news to be told and the reluctance to voice it out loud. At each of his classes for that day, he inquired of his students what event of note had occurred, but no one could say. By the time the sun was highest in the sky, his mind had tired of running through the scenarios that over the decades of living in a world war he’d come to consider the likeliest. Above all he feared that the Danish might have made an advance beyond their half of India, a horrific thought for the villages caught in the offensive, but only a small chapter in the long story of the Danish war with Iberia. He berated himself for obsessing over that topic, but he had to admit that for the length of his life there had been no other topic. The war had become all the news there was.
Instead of going directly home at the end of his classes, he decided to stop by his boss’s office and try to get an answer there. Dominican friars had a way of being better informed about the outside world than anyone.