MILITARY CAELIGERS
That colour was a happy accident, for the purposes of a military caeliger. Seen from below, everything about these craft was pale, from the gondolas in which the crew rode to the undersides of the balloons, and every piece of structure that could be made light with bleach or paint. Being a natural historian, I needed no explanation as to why. Anyone standing on the ground would have a difficult time picking out the caeliger against the backdrop of the sky. The upper part of the balloon, of course, was painted with a camouflaging pattern, so that should another caeliger happen to overfly it (or the vessel come to ground in a low-lying area), an observer might not distinguish it from the terrain below.
The crew was minimal, so as to ensure we could bring everything we needed. Our baggage formed a tremendous mountain, easily as large as the equipment for all my other expeditions put together (save Vystrana, where Lord Hilford had brought along a great many things for his own comfort that were not, strictly speaking, necessary). We had our scientific equipment, of course, including tools for the excavation of any specimens from the ice, and the means of preserving same. We had cold-weather clothing, which takes up far more room than it ought, along with tents, ropes, alpenstocks, snowshoes, and other tools of mountain travel—including a gift from our mountaineering friends Mr. and Mrs. Winstow that we would be very glad of in the coming days.
But the greatest bulk of it was food, for we could not be certain of buying or even hunting what we needed. Colonel Dorson, the commander of that base, had done what he could to gather up Tser-zhag coin, but it was not much; and we did not wish to draw attention to ourselves by paying in foreign currency. Besides, Thu warned us, the locals did not have much to sell. They scraped a marginal existence in a marginal land, and money would do them no good if they could not travel down to places where they might spend it and still return home in good time. As for hunting, although bears were not unknown in the region, the main large animals were the wild cousins of the yaks herded by the villagers. But these had been pushed out of their grazing meadows by those domesticated kin, leaving them few in number. And certainly no one would thank us if we shot their livestock.
We hoped it would be enough to sustain us. We had to plan our expedition carefully, for there are two seasons in which it is difficult to do much in Tser-nga: the winter, which was behind us, and the period of the monsoon, which lay ahead. In the lowlands that means rain, but at the elevation of Thu’s valley, it would be snow instead. Foul weather during the sea crossing and our adventures making our way up the Mahajanya had put us behind schedule; we had hoped to depart for Tser-nga by the first of Nebulis, but it was already nearly Gelis. The monsoon would begin in a month, possibly sooner. But even if we did not make it back down to the lowlands before the snows came, we ought to have enough.
Unfortunately for our plans, everything seemed to go awry. Dorson had underestimated the weight of our gear, and after we had loaded the caeligers we found the distribution was entirely unsuitable, so it was all to do over again. Then the weather turned against us, with a hot and dusty wind that threatened to clog the caeligers’ engines if we attempted to fly in it. The soldiers took precautions to guard the machines against the infiltrating grit, but when at last we set out for Tser-nga, we discovered the hard way that those precautions were insufficient.
I can only thank heaven that we discovered it before we were even so much as a hundred feet off the ground. Had the engine of our caeliger failed later than that, we would have been in dire straits, with no choice but to land in Vidwathi or Tser-zhag territory and attempt to repair it ourselves. Even with that good fortune, we had more than a few heart-pounding moments as our pilot guided the craft to earth once more. And as easy as our landing ultimately was, Tom staggered out of the gondola with his face white as parchment and collapsed to earth, shaking.
I knelt beside him. “Tom. If it is this hard for you—”
His jaw tensed and his fingers dug into the dirt. “I am not turning back, Isabella. I will be fine.”
To that I made no response. We both knew it was a lie.
Finally Tom shook his head. “I’d hoped to avoid this, but—well. Is there any task for which I might be needed during flight?”
“I don’t imagine so. If the pilots need aid, the rest of us can provide it.” If the hands of four others were insufficient, I doubted a fifth would make any difference.
“Then I’ll just dose myself with laudanum.” Tom climbed to his feet, brushing his hands and knees clean. “Better to be useless in flight than to not be there at all.”
Two days later he suited word to deed, after we had repaired the engine and loaded the caeligers one last time, in yet another distribution of weight—one which left rather more of our gear aboard a single craft than I would have liked. Andrew helped Tom into the gondola, then came back out to bid me farewell.
“Are you certain I cannot come with you?” he asked. His tone was both anxious and wistful, as if he feared for my safety, and also regretted missing the grand adventure he imagined lay ahead.
I forbore to remind him that he was even less of a mountaineer than I, or that we had no cold-weather clothing in his size, or any of the other practical objections. Instead I said, “You would be absent without leave, and I’m given to understand the army frowns upon such things. Besides, in a few months we may need you to ransom us back from the Tser-zhag government.”
It made him laugh, as I had hoped it would. “You’re depending on me to rescue you from a diplomatic situation? Good God, you’re doomed.”
That was not what my nerves needed to hear. Despite everything, though, I held to my course. The next morning Suhail looked at me and asked, “Any second thoughts?”
“None I care to listen to,” I said. Having given him one final kiss, I straightened my shoulders and marched across the camp to the waiting caeliger.
*
Although I had been in the air before, there was a part of me that wanted to curl up on the floor of the gondola with Tom, for I had never been on a flight like this one.