17
The English Channel, 1797
Kite had been a signal lieutenant on HMS Defiance on the day they saw the Kingdom. He’d been twenty-five and awake for about six months, because unlike their own captain, Admiral Howe on the flagship did not believe that signalling was only a pointless fad of the Admiralty.
Whenever he did manage to sit down and talk to somebody, he ended up speaking a weird mix of English, Spanish, and naval signal code numbers, so noticeably that the other lieutenants had started drawing out flags on napkins if they had to pass him a note. If he was ever going to hallucinate, Month Six was the time. He was already sure the dragonfly in their cabin was imaginary. No one else ever seemed to see it.
That was what he thought was happening, to begin with: that he was seeing things. It was not such an extraordinary prospect as it would have been on land. Even well-rested people in their right minds saw things in dense fog at sea; Kite had, on several occasions. Towering leviathan things which, of course, were never really there.
They had sailed in inches all day, powered only by the current. The fog was so dense off the Dorset coast that with his hand in front of his face, Kite couldn’t make out the anchor design on his sleeve button. The duty watch were taking ten minute turns to ring the great fog bell by the foremast. Five second bursts of ringing, once a minute, every minute. It sounded lonely, and cold.
The noise that blasted through the fog then was so loud it hurt. It wasn’t like anything he had heard before. It thrummed in the deck and down his bones, and the men on the quarterdeck smacked their hands over their ears. When it stopped, no one moved. The silence was fearful.
There was a light in the middle distance. It hovered sixty feet above the water, hazy in the fog but brilliant, far too bright to be a lamp. He had a panicky thought about falling stars, but he’d seen those before, and they didn’t float. A tiny cabin boy rushed away from the rail and hid behind him. The only sound was the sea and a low unplaceable hum. Kite looked around twice, to make sure everyone else was seeing it too. They were. The whole deck crew had frozen.
‘I wasn’t even christened properly,’ someone whispered.
‘Quietly,’ Kite said, just loud enough to carry across the deck but not beyond, ‘send the children below.’ He nudged the little boy towards the hatchway. It seemed like the right thing to do, even though God knew a few inches of wood didn’t seem like much to put between the children and whatever was behind that awful light.
He stayed there to mark where the hatch was for the children – it was impossible to see otherwise – and then to murmur down to the anxious men who had come to the base of the ladder below. He didn’t know what to tell them, except to keep the boys down there. He couldn’t say there might be an archangel a few degrees to port.
Fear not, said he, for mighty dread had seized their troubled minds; and well it bloody might. Everyone was staring at the light through the fog, and Kite didn’t think he was alone in hoping for a voice, however chilling, to explain itself.
There was no voice.
Christ, you sat there complacent in church while some bore droned on about Eden, or Michael and the sword, and never once did it sound like a thing had happened to real people. It flashed in front of him now as clearly as if he had been there to see it, how Eve and Adam must have felt that day, when a celestial, star-bridging thing hammered down from the sky and smashed into the earth just by them, a soldier armed and furious. And God, how negligent it was, for priests to have gone around for a thousand years commissioning artists to paint insipid white-robed fairy-babies with harps when what they should have been warning people about was … this.
They came to a clearer space in the fog, which gave them a longer view. The light was moving away from them. Under it were littler lights, in the familiar triangle shape that came from hanging lamps on a boom and topmast.
A ship.
Kite could just make out an iron tower and a funnel. It breathed dark smoke. When he let his eyes come back to things in the foreground, he realised that sailors had clustered close, not knowing what to do. He glanced up at the quarterdeck, where Captain Heecham didn’t look interested in giving any orders.
‘All right,’ he said, trying not to show firstly how relieved he was that this wasn’t the start of the apocalypse, and secondly how embarrassed he was to have lived for years imagining he wasn’t that religious, only to find childhood Catholicism bursting back to life right at the most unhelpful moment. ‘Back to work. Embarrassing to capsize because we all want to stare.’
There were some muted laughs. He pushed a few shoulders, very gently, because the sailors were slight men, pressed or from long lines of underfed families. He was freshly shocked every few days by how fragile they all were. On the sea, the smoking ship glided on, effortless, on no wind.
The ship overtook them slowly about two hundred yards to port, just in view. There was nobody on the deck, and no sign that anyone on it had noticed the Defiance. No reply to their signal flag.
In the deep quiet of the fog, it was possible to hear the flicker-click of moving water over a deeper mechanical snarl. The ship had waterwheels. They were what kept it going, he thought, but the whole thing was so unlikely he had lost confidence in any ability to guess what it might be doing. It had masts, rigging, and sails, but they were furled. When the rocks came sharper and more frequently, the Defiance lagged, unable to keep up.
Five knots on no wind, in fog. The sailors were whispering about devices from Hell. Someone thought it must be some advance made by the French. Or both.
‘Sir?’ the first one said, looking for an umpire.
He shook his head, feeling odd, because an hour ago he would have said that he had a nodding acquaintance with most marine-related things in the world, but the ship was an automated beast unrelated to anything he knew.
Somewhere out in the fog, a cannon fired. It sounded flat: no flintlock. French.
All along the rail, men straightened up fast. Beyond the mechanical ship, still invisible except for the patch of fog its smoke was turning black, there was a French warship, and it had just fired a warning shot. Kite whisper-hissed for the gunners to get below in case they had to engage. Up and down the deck, he heard the other lieutenants doing the same.
A bright light flickered at them from the mechanical ship, about level with the mast. Flash flash flash, off, flash flash flash. They had to be signals. Kite had never seen a light code before and he couldn’t even start to guess what it said. It was the same three, in sets, again and again. As he watched, a woman in green rushed to the stern with a man, and waved at them before she pushed the man overboard. The man hit the water at a painful angle, but he did surface, gasping.
Just people: normal frightened people. Not archangels or devils. A worried stir went along the rail. The water was freezing. No one could last in it for more than a few minutes.
‘Get that man out of the buggering water!’ Captain Heecham shouted from the quarterdeck. He was hunched forward on the taffrail, staring like everyone else. He looked like a slouching bison.
Sailors ran for lifelines.
‘Where’s he gone?’
‘I can see him,’ Kite said quickly. He followed the man in the water and held his arm out straight to guide the sailors. The man could swim, at least.
A round of gunshots went off this time, a whole broadside, from somewhere beyond the mechanical ship. Kite still couldn’t see anything, but he could hear the French ship now – someone was yelling orders. More black smoke poured into the fog.