Newton's Cannon (45 page)

“Passing deep,” Vasilisa answered.

“That is well, I suppose,” Sir Isaac murmured.

Ben noticed Vasilisa's puzzled frown, but though he didn't understand the great magus' statement, he had very little curiosity left.

“How big did you say this rock was?” Robert asked. In many ways, he seemed most subdued of all.

“A mile or so in diameter,” Sir Isaac replied. “Maybe more, maybe less.”

“I should think we shan't see a thing,” said Robert.

“No, I think we
shall
.”

Stirling was on deck, hands and feet in chains, staring south with a grim intensity.

“Will you enjoy it, Stirling?” Ben asked brusquely. “Will it give you joy?”

“Not joy,” Stirling answered, “but satisfaction. Peace, perhaps.”

“Your sickness is deeper than mine ever was,” Sir Isaac said, his voice almost inaudible, “and yet I am as much to blame. If I had not let myself slip away, I could have stopped this.”

“How?”

“I'm not certain. But God would not allow the creation of such a thing and not provide for its destruction as well.”

Something high above caught Ben's attention.

“There,” Vasilisa shouted.

Far above the southern horizon was a kernel of brilliant light, brighter than any star Ben had ever seen. It moved slowly toward the horizon, passing behind a cloud.

The cloud fluoresced, and quickly the light in the south flared. The comet itself appeared again, pipe-shaped. In a moment, it became so bright that it could not be looked at.

Stirling was the only one to speak. His face was nearly argent in the unholy, bluish light.

“Oh, God!” he said.

Ben's hands trembled violently at the rail. When Vasilisa's hand found his, he gripped it without thinking.

The new sun set.

It rose again, fifty times as large, a dome of purest white, and all the south was white. Everyone around him was screaming as
the scene rippled, and then suddenly the light was replaced by a black tower, rising without end, reaching for the darkening heavens.

Louis XIV sat in the Hall of Mirrors, surrounded by his court. He wore the diamond- and emerald-crusted coat he had planned to be married in. The rest of his court was as splendid.

His armchair rested on a dais, and his children sat or stood around him. In addition to them was Fatio de Duillier, his face grave and troubled.

“When will it begin?” he asked de Duillier, switching his gaze from the London-facing windows of the Hall of Mirrors to the smaller glass that rested before him.

“Very soon, Majesty, though I warn you, we may see little or nothing at this distance. You should keep your eye firmly on your mirror.”

Louis quelched the frown that threatened. This was the moment, the moment when France would at last understand, when his court would love him again.

A general gasp went up from the courtiers, then scattered applause.

“What is it?”

“The sky, Sire,” Fatio replied. “Do you see? I was wrong, it
is
visible.”

Louis stared through the vast windows of the hall at the darkened sky. “I see nothing,” he snapped. But his court clearly did, for their astonished sounds continued to wax.

You cannot see it because I cannot
, the angel told him.
Or, I should say, I see it but not in terms you would comprehend. I can only translate images that both of us have. You have no image for this.

“Show me anyway,” Louis snapped petulantly.

If you wish. But you should watch in the mirror instead. But at Your Majesty's insistence …

Suddenly the sky changed. It became something more like a taste or a sensation than sight, and yet he could perceive a monstrous thing, a hole in the sky, a phantom's eye.

“Stop! Stop!” he managed. The sky became again a flat pane across the heavens.

“Sire?” Fatio and several others said at once.

“Nothing!” he snapped, and then forced himself to relax. Act the king.
Be
the king. This must be his greatest performance, his finest moment.

His breathing smoothed out, and then he noticed something new in his magic glass.

London had begun to glow, the sunset shadows of its cathedrals washed away by light.

Loud cheers and thunderous applause went up all around him.

“What? What?” Louis asked.

“The comet passed beyond the horizon, Majesty, but it was quite spectacular in the end. It lit up the entire sky like summer lightning.”

I really can't see
, Louis thought.
I am blind.

I have helped you as I could
, the angel told him.
I have helped you act the king, this one last time.

“Last?” Louis whispered, suddenly afraid.

When the comet strikes London, I shall have to depart from you for a time.

“Why?”

When you throw a pebble in a pond, it sends out ripples. The ripples the comet will send out affect angels of my sort so as to make us ill. I shall be forced to leave you. I only remain now so that you can see your triumph. I have grown attached to you, great king, and it amuses me to please you.

Louis absorbed that for a moment. London was nearly white now. He could make out a sliver of the Thames, burning like the surface of the sun.

“I will be blind again?”

As you said, you have been blind since the attack on the barge. But you have put on the best of faces. You have behaved nobly. You are the king.

“I am the king,” Louis assured himself. He let his face relax into a smile.

London grew suddenly dark.
I adjust the light so you can see, so it will not be intolerably bright
, the angel explained. Louis
opened his mouth to ask what that meant, when suddenly even the darkened city was once again bathed in light. A huge ball of fire had appeared beyond London, filling half the sky. Fatio had missed! But before that dismay could even register, London was gone. For less than a second there was a confused impression of flame and wind—and then the mirror went silvery.

Farewell, my king
, he heard, and then
everything
went dark. He heard Fatio shriek, and instantly there were hands upon him everywhere.

“His wounds!” Someone screamed, “Oh God, the blood!”

He no longer cared. He felt heavy, as if he were sinking into the earth.

“Thank you,” he told the angel, though he knew it was gone. And yet, he could see in the mirror of his mind, he could remember things. He was again ten years old, holding little Phillipe under his arm, telling him it would all be well.

“Will it?” Phillipe asked.

“Of course. Because God loves us. And you will be well because
I
love
you
. Because you are my brother, and I am king.”

He remembered how sadly Phillipe had looked at him then as he said, voice quavering, “I love you, too, Louis. That's why I'm sorry you have to be the king.”

He understood Phillipe, and so he smiled as sleep claimed him. It had been so long since he could rest.

One quarter hour later, the sky began raining burning stones. The more jaded of the court applauded again, for the shower of stars was more beautiful than the first had been. When the nine windows of the Great Hall shattered and swept through them as a wind of glass, they ceased applauding.

Adrienne did not witness the flame in the sky. She lay on a mattress stuffed with leaves, twisting in a fever, as Crecy and an old peasant woman tried to quench the fire burning inside her.

“I never dreamed …” Stirling groaned. The black column had become a mushroom, still climbing, filling more and more of the sky.

The air suddenly slapped Ben in the face. The paddle wheeler creaked in complaint as shards of heaven fell from above.

“Look!” Vasilisa shouted, waving her arm wildly at the sea. Near the horizon, Ben could make out a plume of steam rising. Its size was impossible to estimate. The sailors, howling, pointed out two more.

“Do you comprehend what you have done, you fool?” Newton asked Stirling.

Stirling jerked his head about. “I … how could I …” He hadn't found his words when the noise came. It sounded like a thousand cannon firing fifty miles away, a groaning, rumbling noise. To Ben it was a million people screaming.

“You and your French allies have obliterated a good deal more than London. Did you never calculate the precise consequences of your actions?”

“Of course I did! I just didn't understand! Numbers like that have no sense to them!”

“If they were too vast for you to grasp, didn't you reckon that the effects might be so, too?”

But Stirling had no time to answer, for the Russian in the crow's nest began yelling.

Ben realized then that he was still gripping Vasilisa's hand. “What?” he asked.

She pointed south. “The wave,” she said simply.

It looked like no wave Ben had ever seen. It was really more a fantastic swell, a bulge in the water four yards high, sweeping toward them with abnormal speed. The line of it stretched off to the limits of vision on each side. West, toward England, it seemed larger, and there Ben could see foam churning at its crest.

Vasilisa let go of his hand and began to run across the deck, shouting something in Russian.

The ship, broadside to the immense swell, lifted up and tilted. The deck flew from beneath Ben's feet, and for a long moment he hung suspended in the new, nightmare world of black clouds, shooting stars, and impossible waves. Then the deck found him again, dealt him a welcoming blow that left him with a twisted ankle and the taste of blood in his mouth and nostrils.

The deck was nearly perpendicular. Ben skipped down it like
a stone across a pond, hit the rail, flew again, and the sea sucked him in. He shouted and fought; the wave seemed to go on to the ends of the Earth. Ben was a good swimmer, better than anyone he knew in Boston. He had felt the pull of the Charles River and on one occasion had wrestled a bit with an undertow in the sea. He had never felt anything remotely like this, this Neptune's fist that had hold of him. His only fortune was that he was on the trailing side of it, that it was gradually outdistancing him.

After the first panicked moment or so, the pressure eased, and he began to think he might live. Swimming on his back, he made out the vague hulk of the ship framed by its lights: He thought it was still on its side, perhaps a hundred yards away.

He began to shout. There was still a current, a powerful one, but its speed had diminished so that it was no worse than being in the channel of a swift river. However, a black night was also rapidly falling, as clouds of growing size and density whipped by overhead with unreal speed, suffocating what remained of day. South was a wall of jet, lit only by sparks of hellfire, the hoofprints of dancing devils in God's stolen sky. An occasional sound like a cannon being fired boomed across the waters.

It began to rain, huge hot drops of salty, gritty rain, and then he lost even the lights of the ship. He ceased his efforts to stroke toward it then, for he quickly lost his sense of direction. Instead he concentrated on keeping afloat. That was far from easy; the rain came so thickly it seemed a solid sheet, leaving little more air to breathe above the sea than below it. Hail or perhaps rocks were mixed in it, and they tore mercilessly at him.

In less than half an hour, despite his best efforts, his limbs and lungs began to fail him. The sea, remorseless, swept him along.

Ben felt the first sting of water in his lungs and found a feeble strength he was unaware he possessed. His arms and legs thrashed at the sea mindlessly, hatefully. Shouting at the top of his lungs, he swallowed a mouthful of water with every cry.

But the black water did not even pay him the honor of mockery. He was mere flotsam. His rage began to dwindle, and with it his hopes of living.

Jewels suddenly sparkled in the air, were gone, shone again to his right.

Jewels? It had rained fire and stone and salt water, and now burning jewels?

Then his weary brain understood, and he began shouting again, waving one of his arms wildly.

“Damn lucky you are, Ben,” Robert shouted above the rain as Ben collapsed onto the floor of the dinghy. “We might have been twenty feet from you and not known you were there if not for your screaming.”

“I saw the lantern light,” Ben explained. “But you must have been close.”

“We set out for you when we still had a little dayglow. But that was some time ago.”

Sir Isaac sat silently, water pouring from each corner of his hat, his mind clearly focused elsewhere. Ben hoped he hadn't gone mad again. Aside from the three of them, there was no one else in the boat.

“Vasilisa?” he asked.

“I don't know, lad. I think the ship went down. I'm sorry.”

“Maybe in the morning—”

“In the morning we shan't be here,” Sir Isaac said calmly.

“Sir?”

Newton only smiled, but Robert poked his finger at a large copper globe that shared the lifeboat with them. It was perhaps two feet in diameter. Six cables were fastened to a large eyehook at one of its poles. The other ends of the cables were attached to various parts of the dinghy.

“Are we ready then?” Newton asked. Robert shrugged. Ben didn't have the strength to ask any more questions.

Newton reached over and did something to the sphere. “Mind the cables,” he said.

Ben was hardly listening. The sphere had begun to shine faintly red, and more importantly, it had begun to rise. It floated straight up until all of the cables were taut. And it
continued up
! The cables hummed in the high wind as they took on the boat's weight, and then suddenly they were rocking airborne.

That swinging sensation was Ben's only clue that they were flying. Otherwise, the boat was still a small island of light in a stygian sea: Raindrops were still the only vista, and though the occasional flare of lightning opened the sky a bit wider, it still seemed closed.

“Are we still rising?” Ben asked after a time.

“Yes,” Newton replied. “I'd like to be above the clouds, above the rain.”