The second plane gave me a different kind of joy. This time it was the cavalry. This time it was the law in armour. I pictured it touching down on the base like a twister, ripping the huts out of the ground, scything down the guards. Imagine those captives free and bent on revenge: they’d kill Boathwaite like a dog and scorch his slave camp to the roots.
*
I neared the base around noon and dismounted where the forest began to thin. The land around the walls was bare. It had been clear-cut in the early days for timber and to strip the cover from the approach. I hung back out of sight behind a stand of trees.
My first glimpse of the base was through the spyglass. I could see the mismatched felts on the roofs beyond the
palisade and smoke rising from the smithy and the cookhouse.
The wind brought the hum of the latrines across the open ground. Everything looked smaller and grubbier than I remembered. My eye was jaded after the marvels of Polyn, but it was also because the snow was gone. Snow flatters poor workmanship. It covers up dirt and makes the crooked look quaint. And it keeps things from stinking.
I started to make a circuit of the base, keeping close behind the fringe of trees. There were no men to be seen, but just beside the front gate, no more than twenty yards outside the walls, stood the plane.
What a beautiful thing it was, like a muscle or a blade — all purpose.
There was a ripple of heat haze above its top wing that made it look like it was still in motion.
As nearly as I could remember, it was the same as the one that had gone down by the lake. The colours of its hull were red and white, and it had a door in its tail like the one I had smashed open that time on the hillside.
It had a weathered look. The dents and patches on the wings hinted at the labour it took to keep it flying. And yet I could scarcely believe that the creatures who made that thing were human.
Everything at the base had a handprint on it. Everything took its scale from the shape of a man, and the work he could do in one day. I could judge with my eye how long it would take to raise a stretch of its wall, or level the simple road that ran around it. I could probably name every tool they used to build it.
But to make that plane — was it six months or a century? What mysteries were at work in its engine?
It looked as out of place standing on that bleached grass as the wristwatch had on the herder’s arm.
I am in awe of this broken pianola and the nameless craftsman who fitted her with brass wires and felted hammers and a spiked drum to read the piano rolls. I’ve saved these piles of books for the knowledge that’s in them. I’ve seen Polyn. I marvel dailying wermy morning rides at the beautiful skeleton of my dead city. But to turn words and numbers into metal and make them fly — what bigger miracle can there be?
It’s a kind of heresy to say so, but I think our race has made forms more beautiful than what was here before us. Sometimes god’s handiwork is crude. There is no more ugly thing than a lobster. There’s not much pretty about a caribou. It has an ungainly walk and its touchhole voids droppings when it strains in harness. Was there a straight line on earth before we drew one?
But that plane in flight didn’t pump and lurch like a big bird does. It moved steady and level, and faster than any bird I’ve ever seen.
The truth is, I half-expected its crew to be gods.
And what would they know of us? What had they seen from the sky? What would men like that make of the brutal facts of our life at the base?
I thought they would feel about me the way I felt about the simple understanding of the Tungus, with their shamans, and spirits, and chuchunaa.
*
I rode back into the bush to wait that night and ponder. I am rash by nature. I act best in the heat of the moment. Given too long to think, I can fall to brooding.
More for company than anything practical, I set a small
fire, and fed it with long, slim twigs, holding onto the ends of them until they were almost consumed by the flame.
A dry wind blew and fanned the embers to orange.
Over the years since I’d seen the first plane, it had become my North Star. Just knowing about it was a comfort to me. I’d touched its hull with my own hands. I’d buried what was left of its crew. I had poured all my wishes into it. It was a vessel that held everything my world was not.
But now that it came to dealing with the living, breathing people that were on this new one, my nerve had failed.
All sorts of bewildered feelings were stirred up inside me.
Part of me was dying to know more. But another noisy part was saying it was better to leave now, knowing the first one wasn’t a fluke, and not go further, which was bound to lead to ugliness and disappointment.
Big as the plane looked to me, hope was too heavy a cargo for it to carry.
I still wonder if there could have been anything on the plane that would have made what I’d gone through seem worthwhile.
It’s so hard to think now what might have been on it, instead of what was.
*
What happens lays down a steel track over all the flimsy forms of what might have been.
I’ve been around this many times. I see myself in the wood, feeding the twigs into my solitary fire. And I see the empty plane sleeping by the gates of the base. I move myself, like a picture on a memory stone, until I’m riding backwards to Polyn, giving Shamsudin the kiss of life on the way, trudging backwards to the base with Tolya and the prisoners, the years of confinement, the months of work retuning Boathwaite’s garden to a wilderness.
Back and back I go, to before Ping’s death, to when this city had life in it, to before the bad years, until I’m standing at the Bering Sea with my father, watching the Chukchi pack the innards back into a walrus and set him adrift on the water. And at each moment, I think, here? Or, here? Is this the choice that set the points for what followed?
Whatever way I come at it, it always plays out the same.The bad thing happens. The city burns. Those I love die. The plane crashes. I search for another. And when I finally find one, it has Eben Callard on it.
4
HE WAS OLDER, of course — yet somehow that surprised me. And even after spending some time with him, I found that his face was still overlaid by the younger one that I had spent so many hours remembering.
‘I knew a Makepeace once,’ he said. He snapped his fingers for someone to pour him a drink. The blind can have a bossy way about them. I lied and told him I was from a different city.
He sat in the chair behind Boathwaite’s tin desk wearing a dark broadcloth suit, staring straight past me with those cloudy eyes. His shirt was white and newly pressed.
‘Your voice is familiar,’ he said. ‘It must be that settler accent.’ He never gave any hint that he might have known me. ‘Boathwaite spoke highly of you.’
I still had the dust on me from my long ride. Six of his men were posted around the room. They were armed. Two wore bandoliers. They’d patted me down for weapons when I’d come in.
At dawn, I had ridden up to the gates. The itch to know had overcome any thought I had for my own safety. If I’d had any inkling who’d been on it, of course I would have made straight for home. But I never connected that plane with anything in my own past. In my mind, it came out of the orderly world of my parents with a promise as straight and green as the twig in that dove’s beak: dry land this way, turn your ship around.