

Kingdom of Clockwork

Billy O'Shea

Black Swan

www.blackswan.dk

Front cover illustration and map: Andrey Dorozhko (andreydrz.blogspot.com)

Cover design and typesetting: Dan Eggers grafisk formgivning (daneggers.dk)

Originally published in Denmark by Black Swan, Copenhagen (www.blackswan.dk)

Copyright © Billy O'Shea 2014

Published by Billy O'Shea at Smashwords

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For Charlotte, without whom

strange that in fog  
we feel the mechanics of things  
Tycho Brahe's whirring mental cogs  
Copernican spheres and trajectories  
softly rending the thick air above me  
planetary charts over Denmark and Sweden

  * Paul Larkin, Christmas Homage to Copenhagen

K ingdom of Clockwork

Being the true account of the invention of the Clockwork Railway, and of the late expedition by His Majesty the King to the North. As set down by my own hand – Karl Nielsen, June 2413.

Chapter one

A buried railway

The sun lies heavily on the streets of the four-gated city, stoking up dust and the thick smell of ox dung. Tanta is pushing the baby carriage, but she takes my hand as we cross the street, weaving between the carts and bicycles. She calls to my brother William to keep up. He crosses after us and a cart-driver shouts at him to watch out. 'Stop dreaming, boy!' Tanta scolds, once he is safely across. She speaks Anglian when she is cross. I like it better when she talks to us in Kantish.

We are on Bridge Street, at the street market. Tanta haggles in rapid Kantish with women in headscarves with Agaholm accents, hands over silver coins, and piles up fruit and vegetables on the baby carriage. A piece of yellow fruit lies abandoned in the gutter. There are ants crawling on it. I pick it up to look at them, but Tanta tells me to throw it away.

We walk by Island Gate. I want to look at the King's Men in the sentry boxes, but Tanta hurries us past. We enter the long curve of the Esplanade, with its fine town houses on one side and the steep grassy slope of the ramparts on the other. The noise of the cartwheels on the cobbles gradually fades as we walk. William follows behind in his dark blue school coat. When I go to school, I'll have a coat like that.

Some girls are playing a clapping game in the road. Skinny Malink fell down the sink, into a cellar black as ink... I look at them curiously as we pass by.

We are at the turn for Foundry Street, but something is happening on the other side of the road. Men are digging into the embankment. William stops to watch. Tanta is about to say something to him, but then the baby starts to cry in his carriage and she has to pick him up. I seize my chance and run over to stand beside William. Grim-faced soldiers are standing guard in their red and white uniforms, and behind them labourers are digging. Some have stripped to the waist and are sweating in the hot sun. I stare at their muscles and tattoos. Tanta comes over to join us, holding the baby and rocking him up and down. One of the diggers shouts up some remark to her, and she replies sharply in street Kantish. Down in the ditch, something is gradually being uncovered. I can see the sheen of metal in the sun. The men stop their work and began to lift and heave at the object. It turns out to be nothing special – just a long metal rail, but it is attached to some structure that I cannot quite make out. It looks like a giant ladder laid out flat in the ground.

'What's that thing, Tanta?' I ask. And she replies with a word I have never heard before.

I would probably have forgotten the incident, but for what happened later that day. At our evening meal, our mother was trying as usual to get William and I to practise our Anglian. She asked us where we had been on our walk with Mrs Clausen, and I told her that we had been down by the ramparts watching some men digging, and that we had seen a railway. (I used the Kantish word, knowing no other.)

My mother looked up sharply as though she had been struck. A glance passed between her and my father. 'You must not use that word, Karl,' she said.

'I don't know what it's called in Anglian. I'm sorry.'

'It doesn't matter. You mustn't talk about things like that at all. Not in Anglian or in Kantish.'

'But Tanta said it was a railway. She said there used to be magic carriages that carried people in them...'

'Karl, listen,' interrupted my father, glancing around to make sure Tanta was out of the room, 'Mrs Clausen did not go to school, and sometimes she says silly things. But you must promise not to talk about that again. We could all get into very serious trouble if you go around repeating things that are not true. Do you understand?'

I nodded, deeply confused, but determined, as always, to try to do what is right. I suppose that has always been my greatest failing.

This, then, is where my story begins – in a row of elderly town houses ranged alongside a canal in the city of Kantarborg. From my bedroom window, I could watch the boats going past on the canal and the oxcarts clattering along the quay. Some were piled high with wheat, with the guards of the King's Men marching alongside. William said it was our father who told the men driving the carts where to take the wheat. That made me feel very proud. In winter, beasts and bicycles sometimes slid about on the icy cobblestones, and people had to be careful not to end up in the canal. Once, up by the bridge, I saw a carriage lying on its side in the water, and Tanta said a lady and two horses had drowned. After that, whenever a horse carriage passed by, I would wonder whether a lady or someone special was inside – maybe even the King. The Old King knew my father by name – my father never failed to mention it at dinner if the King had passed him by at the wheat market and greeted him with a 'Good day, Merchant Nielsen!' (I imagined him doffing a crown.) I thought perhaps one day the King might come and visit us, but he never did.

With time, of course, I eventually realised that we were not quite on such intimate terms with the aristocracy as my father liked to imply, but although there was much muttering about bills in our household, we kept up a respectable enough front. We even had servants, of a sort, in the form of the Clausens, who lived in the cellar. Rolf however was often so slow at coming up from below that my father sometimes grew impatient and answered the door himself, much to my mother's annoyance. Mrs Clausen we called Tanta, the Kantish word for aunt.

On our way to school, my brothers and I sometimes peeked into the yard of the Royal Foundry, where the great anchors and cannons of the fleet were cast. If we were lucky, we could watch open-mouthed as rivers of steaming, red-hot metal were swallowed up by the giant black moulds.

Once, a steamship entered the canal – a source of wonder and excitement for the whole neighbourhood. It was a strange-looking vessel made of as much iron as wood, with almost no sails to speak of, drawing behind it a barge loaded with timber. It slipped in gently under its own power, hissing and belching smoke from its chimney – 'It's not a chimney, it's a funnel,' said William, knowledgeably – and to the delight of myself and my brothers it berthed on our side of the canal, just yards from our front door. In the days that followed many of our school friends came by just to gaze at it, and my brothers and I showed if off as though we were the proud owners. It was not very big, as ships went – perhaps the length of four or five oxcarts from stem to stern – but it was bizarre in appearance, with a long, low superstructure, painted grey, a central black funnel held in place by cables, and a single mast. It was called Amelia, as a brass nameplate proclaimed, and I spent hours trying – and sometimes succeeding – to catch a glimpse of its inner machinery and find out how it worked. Sometimes a crewman would open a hatch to the engine-room, and there would be a flash of hefty metal pistons and cogs, marvellous to behold. But while on occasion my brothers and I could charm the sailors of other vessels to let us go on board their ships, this crew was a surly lot and jealous of their secrets, so that was all the insight I was able to obtain.

On Sundays, we would walk the short distance through the cobbled streets to the Anglian Church of St Christopher the Navigator, with its bizarre and beautiful spiral tower that always fascinated me. Outside the church was a black wooden sign with the letters 'CXM', which William claimed stood for Cult of the Executed Man. Although my parents never expressed any interest in religion that I can recall, it was socially important in that neighbourhood to be seen in church on Sunday mornings. Linguistically, our family purported to be Anglians, though my father could swear quite impressively in Kantish when he didn't think we could hear him. Once, I also heard my mother express herself in some very choice and perfectly fluent Kantish when she lost her temper with a shopkeeper. My brothers and I of course spoke mostly Kantish, which we picked up from Tanta and from all the other children on the street, but our mother forbade us to use it in the house, where only Anglian was permitted to be spoken, except by the servants to each other.

The church service was in High Anglian and thus mostly incomprehensible to myself and my brothers, despite or perhaps because of the fact that everything apparently had to be repeated three times. The baffling ceremony over, we returned home to a Sunday dinner of cooked meat, usually lamb or pork. Meat was a rarity in Kantarborg, even in the best streets, and was generally kept for Sundays, though it was rumoured that the King and some of his courtiers ate meat every day. For the most part we ate porridge, vegetable stews and bread, and so in that respect our diet differed only in terms of presentation from that of the poorest people in town.

The school, where we were taught by forbidding-looking scholars in black capes, was about twenty minutes' walk away, up one side of the canal, across the hump-backed bridge, and down the other. But sometimes in winter the canal would freeze over, and we could climb down a metal ladder and take a short cut across the ice, instead of having to go all the way round. It was a risky business, as none of us could swim, but thrilling.

Of my brothers, it was clear that William, the eldest, would inherit my father's business, while Jonas was good at letters and would likely become a scholar. That left me, and I was a conundrum. A solitary child, I spent hours alone, mostly drawing. I had little interest in games or in spending time with other children, except my brothers. At school I was poor at reading and writing, and indeed showed little aptitude for any subject except mathematics and art, although my talent was mediocre. My caricatures of the teachers were, mercifully, quite unrecognisable. When my future was being discussed at home, the possibility of accountancy was sometimes raised, at which my mother would sigh and look glum. But one day, when I was ten years old, something happened that was to change my life completely.

Our family had two clocks; one in the hallway, which tick-tocked in a respectably restrained manner, and a diabolical contraption in my parents' bedroom which woke my father (and the rest of the household) in the early mornings with a hideous racket. I remember it was made of dark, varnished wood, with brass angels on the top, a glass cover over the clock face that could be opened to allow the clock to be wound, and a lever on the side which once had been capable of damping the sound to a more civilised level, but which had long since ceased to function. It also ticked with a feverish, syncopated intensity that made it quite impossible for me to sleep when, troubled by my frequent nightmares, I crawled into my parents' bed at night. But one day, quite suddenly, it stopped. My father woke late for work and I heard him leave the house in a great huff, complaining loudly about the cost of clock repairs. When my mother came to wake me, I suffered a violent but entirely artificial coughing fit and begged to be allowed to stay home from school. There was to be a written exam that day in Anglian – a subject in which I had never exactly shone – and that was more than enough to affect the state of my health quite dramatically. My mother, trusting soul that she was, felt my forehead and pronounced that I had a fever. She led me downstairs by the hand and installed me beneath a blanket on the chaise longue in the dining-room; ostensibly because it was warmer there, but actually, I suppose, so that Rolf could keep an eye on me during the day and make sure I didn't get up to any mischief. At the dining table, William and Jonas ate their breakfast porridge in silence and regarded me with frosty suspicion. My mother reappeared, carrying the now moribund clock – it was about the size of a football, but heavy – and thunked it down onto the table, telling William to call in at the clockmaker's on his way to school and ask him to drop by later. (It was the custom in those days for clockmakers to call on people's homes to fix their clocks. Even relatively portable timepieces like this one were valuable items, and not something you would want to be seen carrying through the streets.)

Then my brothers left for school, and my mother departed on one of those mysterious errands that she conducted during the day, and which usually kept her out of the house until dinner-time. (William had a theory that she had a lover in town, as was fashionable for ladies of her station, but I suspect the truth was rather more prosaic and – for my mother – infinitely more shameful. Somewhere in the city, my mother worked.)

The day dragged on, boring but blessedly free of examinations. I had a pencil and paper, on which I drew pictures and plans of steamships and machines. Flying steamships with wings. Clockwork oxen to draw them in. Airship cranes to unload them. I was hoping that the clockmaker would come by soon, because I loved to watch him work, and I was curious to see the inner workings of the clock. But the clockmaker did not arrive. (The clockmaker did not arrive, we heard later, because his own ticker had stopped, that very morning – his wife had gone to wake him and discovered him stiff and cold in his bed. As he had often fixed our own clocks in the past, this seemed a troubling coincidence – even a portent – upon which I sometimes heard my father speculating gloomily in the weeks that followed.)

As the hours passed, it occurred to me that the clockmaker might appreciate it if I opened up the clock and had it ready for him. It would save him a little work, I reasoned to myself. He might even give me a smile and say 'Bright boy!' I liked it when people said that. And, more to the point, it would give me a chance to take a good look at the clock's mechanism. Surely it couldn't do any harm just to take a look? I slipped out from under the blanket and over to the table, and examined the catch that held the panel on the back of the clock. It was a simple sliding catch – no need for a screwdriver, though I had my precious screwdriver-penknife ready if it should be needed. The back panel was a kind of round lid on a hinge, and it opened like a door. And inside – what a revelation! A whole galaxy of brass cogs and wheels. I spent a few moments taking it all in. At the top were two brass bells, which must have been what made all the noise in the mornings. I flicked one of them with my finger, and it made quite a loud ping. I glanced anxiously at the door, but Rolf, with the mistress gone from the house, was of course nowhere to be seen. The mechanism was exquisite but ... no, not complex. Not complex at all. There were two spiral springs. You could see how one of them drove the two hands on the clock face, via a series of interlinked cogs, while the sole function of the other seemed to be to operate the hammer that struck the bells. And there was the latch that set the time at which the clock would ring. The spring for the clock mechanism itself was very tightly wound. It looked ... uncomfortable, somehow. And one cog didn't look quite straight. Experimentally, I pushed it back into place with the end of my penknife-screwdriver. Ka-TCHUNG, said the mechanism. I withdrew my hand hastily. But it was clear now what was wrong; the clock had been overwound, and the pressure had pushed a cog out of place, jamming the gear. A simple thing to fix. First of all, I needed to release the pressure from the spring. Since I knew of no other way to do this, I held the cog in place with my screwdriver again and set the ka-tchung sound going for a full half-hour, until the spring looked more comfortable. Then I tightened the screw that held the cog with my screwdriver. The clock ticked away merrily and seemed to be in working order again. I then noticed how the lever to dampen the ringing sound had been bent slightly out of shape. A little pressure from the screwdriver, and ... there we are. But the only way to see if it would work would be to set the alarm going. I had worked out how the tiny extra dial on the clock face set the time at which the alarm would ring. I gingerly moved its hand around to a time ten minutes ahead of the time that the clock showed, and waited.

At that point, unfortunately, Jonas came home from school and found me with the clock open and my hands in the gears. He, of course, was highly indignant and predicted that Father would surely give me a thrashing. But I must admit, I didn't much care. I was lost in fascination with the clock, and not a little pleased with myself. After a few minutes the clock's alarm rang with its usual clamour, and when I pushed gently on the lever, the sound shrank to a bearable level, and then gradually increased in volume as I moved it back again. I had fixed the clock.

Much to Jonas's disappointment, I received no thrashing. In fact, when I demonstrated my simple repair job to my mother and father, I saw a look pass between them which seemed significant, though the import of it was lost on me at the time.

'Well done Karl,' said my father. 'You did a good job there.' It was, I think, the first time my father had ever really praised me. That night I dreamed of keys and cogs and gears.

Chapter two

Did God give us the sea?

At age fifteen, I commenced my horology studies at the University's Technical College on the other side of the harbour. Quite how I managed to gain entrance to an institution of such prestige – the fact that it was the only one of its kind in the city made it no less so – despite my unimpressive school leaving examination remained forever something of a mystery. No doubt my father made use of whatever influence he had at court and pulled a few strings. And it was indeed fortunate that he utilised that influence while he still could, because it was while I was in my second year at college that the Old King died, and whatever influence my father had probably died with him. That day I heard the cannons fire over the city, and the Royal Airship was seen aloft, above the city's towers, carrying the body of the King to his rest in the Old Capital. The king's eldest son, Reginald (or Ragnvald as we knew him in Kantish) had been killed some years earlier in the Northlander wars, and so he was succeeded on the throne by his second son, a boy roughly of an age with myself whose name was Norbert II, but who for the rest of his reign would always be known as the Young King.

But such matters were of little concern to me then. For the next three years, I immersed myself in the mysteries of clockwork. I learned about cylinder, duplex and detached lever escapements. Temperature compensation devices. Control and feedback mechanisms. Calculating machines. Clockwork-steam interfaces. For my Master's project, I designed a set of modular operating systems that could be installed in the most common calculating machines of the time, and which could change the device's units of measurement from the Kantish to the Anglian or Hansan systems. (Nowadays, of course, this can be done without even changing the mechanism.) It was later developed in practice, and my father even made use of my calculator design in his business, which was a source of some pride to him in the final years of his career.

Moreover, my status as a student meant that, wearing my red student's cape, I now had access to the Royal Library, which had a stately reading-room in the centre of town – all polished wood, stone arches, reading niches and balconies – and like all other young students I immediately turned to the forbidden tales of the mythological age of plenty. I still could not easily read Anglian, much less Old Anglian, but the story was easy enough to follow from the pictures alone, some of which were in colour. Houses that could fly. Boxes that produced endless amounts of food. Magic mirrors that could transmit images from one place to another.

And railways. There seemed to be pictures of railways on almost every second page. Some of them were stupendous complexes on a scale that seemed impossible to conceive. Track upon track, locomotive behind locomotive – six, seven and even more in parallel formation. In the background of some of these pictures, the familiar towers and church spires of Kantarborg seemed to suggest that they were intended to depict our own city in ancient times. However, the veracity of the pictures was much debated, in low tones, beneath the arches of the University, with many scholars dismissing them as forgeries, or, at best, images born out of allegory and legend. The Electric Age was after all notorious as an age of lies.

Opinions also differed as to how the pictures had been created. Some contended that the ancients must have had a light-capturing device of some kind, but the consensus was that they were merely painters of extraordinary skill, using techniques that have long since been lost. Of course, the scholars were careful never to allow their speculations to appear in print; all such talk had long since been declared heretical by the Inquisitor Royal, who pointed out that there was no mention of railways, flying machines or any other magical transportation devices in the Bible. This was underlined after the Broadway Riots, when the Old King issued a decree that all talk of such fables was forbidden – a law firmly if somewhat capriciously enforced. The penalty of Expulsion Beyond the Walls was quite intimidating enough to quell all open debate on historical questions.

Nonetheless, if these stories were lies, an alternative explanation would be required for all the strange finds that kept turning up beneath the ground. The solution was elegant: Professor Anders Carstensen, Royal Antiquarian and a scholar of some repute, had declared in the early years of the reign of the Old King that the Rational Layer in human history extended to a depth of no more than two or three yards below ground level, or about the depth of a grave. Beyond that lay the Irrational Layer, where nothing made any sense. It was, he said, analogous to the dreams that proceed from the sleeping mind of man, which, while they are often made up of elements from the rational, waking world, are not subject to its laws of cause and effect. In the same way, the Irrational Layer proceeded from the subconscious of human history and culture, and we could therefore take nothing we found there for granted.

This doctrine chimed well with the popular culture of Kantarborg, since, like most peoples of the North, we had a terror of the dark and the underground, where all kinds of goblins and horrors were reputed to dwell. We are flatlanders by birth and breeding, merchants and sailors by nature, and we leave it to others, braver or – we imagine – less civilised than ourselves, to draw up the riches of the earth. The very thought of a cave or shaft is the stuff of nightmares for a Kantarborgan. Luckily our country was very flat, and the water table close to the surface, so deep excavations were rarely required. But it was one reason why the houses of Kantarborg, with their shallow foundations, tended to lean on each other in familiar fashion like drunks finding their way home. (The houses did have cellars, but superstitious Kantarborgans placed a pair of iron griffins at the entrance to them, to remind the unwary that they were about to enter the underworld.)

In my own studies, Mortensen, the college lecturer in technological history, was circumspect on the subject of the ancient times. He devoted just one lecture per year to the Electric Age, and it was always well attended. For a man of slight form, he had a surprisingly rich and fruity voice, which rang out through the draughty old lecture hall with its stained glass windows. Standing at the wooden podium in the dust-moted sunlight, he began by outlining some of the principal works of the period: Gray's Fantastic Inventions of our Age, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Then he summed up his view, which – by no coincidence – was also the official line. 'So what, then, do the old books tell us, and how are we to understand them? The story, taken as a whole, is clear. Mankind digs down into the Earth, into the Irrational Layer, and discovers a treasure house, which contains a powerful source of energy, consisting of the remains of ancient magic forests. And what do men always do when they break into treasure houses? They gorge themselves.' (At this point he passed around a reproduction of The Beggars' Banquet, a painting of the period.) 'So for a while, Mankind lives like a god. There is food for all. He knows everything, can see everything. His cities cover the Earth. He can fly through the air. He even, we are told, visits the moon.' (A murmur of laughter passed through the hall.) 'But then, within a few generations, almost all the treasure is gone. Men fall to fighting among themselves for the little that remains. They invent terrible war machines, great explosives that can obliterate whole cities and poison the very air. And in the end, of course, the four horsemen ride out, and there is hunger, social collapse, and the Great Cataclysm, followed by the Dark Ages.'

'What are we to make of all this, gentlemen?' (He ignored the few women students present.) 'I put it to you that what we are dealing with here is allegory and fable, a morality tale. There is in fact no evidence that Man has ever been able to glean anything from the Earth other than that which he has earned through his own labour. "In the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread", says the Good Book, and that is how it has been ordained for mankind. There never have been any wondrous automata, any tin men, that could do the work for him, though he has always dreamed of them. Our greatest and most sophisticated technology is and always has been clockwork, a noble tradition of which you are fortunate enough to be the heirs, but such machines, as you know, use only the energy that we put into them. There is nothing whatever magical about them. Likewise, if we make steam engines, we must plant forests to feed them. If we harvest the wind to pump water or to power generators, then we can take only what nature grants us while the wind blows. This is one of the fundamental laws of our world, and if we attempt to flout it, and try to steal from nature energy that is not rightfully ours, then these ancient manuscripts, fictional though they may be, contain a very grave warning for us all of the consequences.'

Afterwards, there was silence in the hall. There were no questions. If any of us had doubts about the merits of Mortensen's argument, it was probably prudent to keep them to ourselves.

My years as a student were generally happy ones, though for my taste I spent too many hours with a pen in my hand and too few with a screwdriver. I learned to drink beer and rum in the scholars' taverns and visited the Pleasure Gardens with the other students, and I also learned a little about the opposite sex, who up until then had been something of a mystery to me. But for some reason girls seemed to show very little interest in machines, and I for my part seemed quite unable to talk about much that interested them, so my love life was somewhat limited. Why all this talking and talking about things of little consequence should be so important was one of the great mysteries I was never quite able to solve.

At the age of eighteen I had as yet no income and was still living at home, cycling to college every day, but my mother was already making arrangements, with what seemed to me to be unseemly haste, for me to get engaged to a suitable girl from the neighbourhood, Johanna Kroeyer, who though unspeakably dull – and who no doubt found me the same – was the only child of a shipbuilder, and stood to inherit a modest fortune. (My father's health was failing, and I think now that my mother must have feared the worst, and saw that time was short if the family was to avoid sinking back into the poverty from which it had probably only recently emerged.) The young lady and I spent some miserable Sunday afternoons alone in our front parlour, attempting to play cards and engage in stilted conversation. I think we were both relieved when my mother finally abandoned the project. (A few weeks later I saw Johanna chatting and laughing with some other girls in the street, a merry little thing. She was only miserable with me.)

I bemoaned my inability to converse with the opposite sex, or even understand them, to a friend of mine, a naval officer cadet called Kaare Johansson, one night as we sat drinking in The Thimble, a favourite student haunt. Johansson was from a noble Northlander family that had fallen out of favour with the king of that country and had thrown its lot in with Kantarborg. His mother was reputed to be from the tribes of the far north, though no trace of that lineage showed in his features. He had already served several terms on a customs frigate in the Sound, and was studying to complete his officer's education. He was more at ease with women than I, but then he had sisters at home, so young women were not entirely alien creatures to him. Quite apart from the fact that he was tall and blond, and an officer, of course.

He laughed heartily when I recounted my disastrous attempts to interest Johanna Kroeyer in my studies.

'Perhaps you should build yourself a clockwork woman, Karl!'

'Yes, that might be the answer. Don't think I haven't considered it!'

'For God's sake don't mention cogs and gears to the female sex. You need to make them laugh.'

'Laugh?' I tried to imagine myself telling some kind of joke to Johanna. Johansson looked at me, and seemed to have the same thought.

'Well, perhaps not. You just need to meet a different kind of girl. Someone with something to say for herself.'

'And where might I find such a creature, pray?'

'Plenty of intelligent women at the college debating society. I go there every Tuesday. Come with me next time!'

Which was how, a few days later, I found myself listening to a young female student by the name of Erika Thorne making an impassioned speech in favour of the motion 'That this house would support greater democracy in the Kingdom of Kantarborg'. She was an attractive woman, striking perhaps rather than conventionally pretty, with her blond hair cut strangely short, almost like a boy's. She spoke in fluid Anglian, and dealt with the catcalls and heckling from the mostly male audience with humour and some grace. With a dull feeling, I began to feel that if this was the calibre of woman who frequented this society, I was once again going to be completely out of my depth.

The motion was defeated. Afterwards, Johansson made an attempt to introduce me to a couple of women students he knew, but they seemed far more interested in talking to him than to me. After a while I drifted away, and went to refill my glass at the drinks table, where I found myself standing beside Erika Thorne.

'I enjoyed your speech,' I said.

'Thank you,' she said. 'You're Karl Nielsen, aren't you?'

I was too surprised to reply.

'I know your little brother,' she said with a smile. 'He pointed you out to me.'

'You know Jonas?'

'We're in the same year. We have some classes in rhetoric together. What are you studying?'

The dreaded question. What could I do, other than tell the truth? So I told her I was a final-year student of horology, and she politely asked what that involved, and I told her, and then there was a silence.

'Clocks are fascinating things, aren't they?' she said at last.

Now was apparently the moment when I should make her laugh, but nothing remotely amusing came to mind. Johansson walked over to us, and Erika excused herself and went to talk to some other people.

'Be careful of her,' murmured Johansson – unnecessarily, I felt, since it seemed unlikely that she would ever speak to me again. 'She's mixed up in some shady things.'

'What kind of things?'

'I'll tell you later. Not here.'

We repaired to The Thimble for the post-mortem and ordered a couple of mugs of beer. My head was full of questions – most of them, I admit, to do with Erika Thorne. But Johansson was dismissive of her.

'She keeps dangerous company. Have you heard of the League for Democracy?'

I had learned the meaning of the Anglian word that very evening.

'She talked about government by the people,' I ventured.

Johansson snorted.

'Government by the people! You don't hear them making speeches in Kantish, do you? Government by them, more like.'

'Who?'

'Why, people like you, Karl – no offence. The merchant classes. They resent the crown and the nobility telling them what to do. And of course they want to get their hands on the Sound Tolls.'

'The what?'

'Good God, what kind of a sheltered life have you led? How do you think Kantarborg prospers? Where does the money come from?'

'Well, from trade and industry, I imagine. The same as any other kingdom.'

Johansson snorted again.

'Kingdom my arse. That's a grand name for an isolated city-state with a couple of fortified outposts. Nearly a quarter of our citizens are in the King's Men, and most of the rest are financed by the public purse, directly or indirectly. We have no agricultural land to speak of, apart from Agaholm. No resources of our own. The fact is that we have but one real source of income in Kantarborg, Karl, and that is piracy.'

'Piracy!'

'Keep your voice down. We don't call it that, of course. We call it taxation. Look – every merchant vessel sailing from west to east or east to west must pass through the Sound to get to their markets. So, since we control the passage, we impose tolls on their ships.'

'Surely that's perfectly legitimate?'

'Why? Did God give us the sea? And we charge them a king's ransom; half or more of the value of their cargo, in cash or in kind. If they can't pay, we impound them, and if they try to slip through at night...'

He paused.

'Then they are the ones we call pirates. They are often unarmed, Karl. But when we catch them, their crews die like rats. I have seen some things that...'

Johansson sighed, and drew out his pipe from his pocket.

'Anyway, that's what this so-called League for Democracy is all about. They don't want all that gold going straight into the King's pocket. They want to get their grubby little paws on it, too.'

'How do you know that? She seemed quite sincere to me.'

'The Thorne woman? Oh yes, no doubt she is. But there are others behind her who have a quite different agenda, believe me. Sharing out the King's power will mean sharing out the King's riches, and they know it.'

'And you? What do you think about it all?'

He smiled.

'I am a loyal officer of the King's Men, Karl. We do not have political opinions.'

Johansson eventually went to talk to a group of his fellow officers, and I was about to leave the tavern when I passed by the young lady herself, sitting at a table with another student. I smiled at her.

'Come and join us, Karl,' she said. 'I need the opinion of a scientist here.'

I was hardly that, but I pulled up a chair anyway and sat down with them. Her companion ordered a mug of beer for me.

'My friend Peter here says that there are vast amounts of energy still locked up in the underground, but the Church won't let us use it.'

'Not the Church,' said Peter, placing my beer on the table. 'They just say what the nobility tells them to. So they forbid us to talk about it.'

'But if the energy is there, why would the nobles want to hush it up? Why not use it?'

'Because then we would all become like gods. We would live like the ancients, with riches and infinite power. And we would no longer be their slaves.'

'I'm not the slave of anyone. Certainly not of the nobles,' said Erika. I noticed now that her short-cropped hair was not fully blond, but had a reddish tinge to it. She had freckles on her cheeks and nose.

'You think you're not, but you are,' said Peter. 'We all are. As long as they can keep the secrets of the ancients hidden from us.'

Erika turned to me.

'Karl, what do you say?'

'Me?'

I drew in a breath. They waited. Perhaps my confusion might be construed as a thoughtful pause.

'Well... I have seen the ancient books, as have you. I think it's possible that the ancients had access to some power source that we know nothing about. Perhaps it did come from below the ground. But no power is ever infinite. My feeling is, if it ever existed, it is all long gone now. And I don't believe in magic.'

'Then you are a materialist,' said Peter.

'Am I?'

'Yes. Someone who believes only in what he can see, hear or touch.'

'Well... only in what can be measured. Yes.'

'Do you believe in love, then?' asked Erika with a smile. 'Can that be measured?'

I didn't know what to say to that.

'What about desire?' she continued, pressing home her advantage.

'These are all... phenomena of the mind.'

'But they exist?' She leaned towards me.

'I suppose so. But they act only within the mind, and upon the mind.'

'And the body.'

'Well, yes. But they do not act in the physical world. Not like magnetism or... light. Gravity. Things like that.'

'And yet, great empires have been won or lost for such things. They have changed the course of history!'

Once again, I didn't know what to say. She smiled and placed her hand over mine.

'I'm teasing you, Karl. In Rhetoric, we are schooled in such debates. What is real and what is not, all that kind of nonsense. But we never really seem to arrive at any conclusion.'

I was spared further humiliation by the arrival of my brother Jonas, who seemed rather surprised to see me in such intellectual company.

'Karl, you're here too? Erika, could I have a word for a moment?'

Erika excused herself and went off into a corner to talk to Jonas. We watched them. The discussion seemed to become rather heated.

'Who is that boorish oaf?' asked Peter.

'My brother.'

'Oh, I'm sorry!'

I smiled and shook my head.

'He's a theology student.'

Peter laughed as though I had made rather a good joke.

'You know what they say: "Know your enemy, but fear your brother"! So what does he think about the ancient times?'

'I don't know. But he's a bit of a conservative, I'm afraid. He'd probably say there are no magic machines in the Bible.'

'I never said they were magic. I think they were very real. But if the Church gets its way, none of us will ever get to see or hear about the Age of Plenty again. They're getting ready to make their move. You'll see. And now I must make my move.'

He got up to leave. I remained at the table to finish my beer. It had been a long evening and I was feeling ready to go home. The crowd in the tavern was thinning out. But to my surprise, Erika returned to the table a few minutes later, her cheeks flushed.

'Your brother seems to think he can control a good many things,' she said. 'Including me.'

I laughed.

'I rather doubt that anyone could do that.'

'Why do you say that, Karl Nielsen? Do I threaten you?' She was still angry.

'No, it's just that I... I never really saw much point in trying to control anyone else. We're not machines, after all. And you're right; there is more to life than material forces. Human ideas and feelings do change things.'

She placed her chin in her hand and looked at me thoughtfully.

'Let's go somewhere else,' she said.

Some hours later, in Erika's college room, I was surprised to discover that women's breasts are not hard and firm, as I had imagined, but softer than silk cushions. Their bodies are rounded in ways which seem rather impractical. And as for the female organ itself, all I can say is, we young men had been greatly misled by the paintings in the Royal Gallery. It was quite the most peculiar thing I had ever seen in my life, and while attractive, it seemed rather unfit for purpose. If I had designed it, it would have looked very different. But enough of that; Erika was a skilled teacher, and I learned more in that one night than in all my years at the university.

Afterwards, she washed herself at the hand-basin, in the candlelight. 'You're beautiful,' I said, as I lay in her single bed, watching her.

'You have seen few women, Karl,' she replied over her shoulder. 'I am reasonably attractive. I am not beautiful.'

'I think you're beautiful.'

'Don't go all starry-eyed on me now, Karl, you're supposed to be a scientist.'

'I'm not a scientist, I'm an engineer. Just a clockmaker, really.'

She came over to the bed and placed her hand on my cheek, cupping her breasts with her other arm.

'Well, I think you're rather pretty, too. And you're very sweet. But I am not going to be your woman. Just so you know.'

'I hadn't really thought that far.'

'Well, don't. These are revolutionary times, Karl. A woman can decide who she wishes to lie with without becoming a man's property. Now, get up and I'll put some cushions on the floor for you. That bed isn't big enough for two of us to sleep in.'

In the morning, she made tea for us. There was nothing to eat except an apple, which we shared. I made some fatuous remark about Adam and Eve. Watching her smile at me across the tiny table, I felt rather puzzled at the feelings she awoke in me just by brushing a lock of hair from her forehead. I don't remember much of what we talked about, but we seemed to have no problem talking. To my amazement, she seemed to be genuinely interested in what I studied. She spoke about the clocks in her parents' house, and how much she had loved one in particular, which produced a squawking bird on the hour.

'It probably used to say 'cuckoo' once upon a time, but the mechanism was very old, so all it could say was 'kaark!', like a crow,' she laughed. 'It always gave visitors a shock. You should have seen the pastor's face.'

It occurred to me, right then, that I could love this woman. Really love her. But right on cue, the town hall clock struck eight, and she had to go. (Overnight guests were not allowed, so I would have to wait for a while and then stroll out as if I'd recently arrived.)

'Would you like to come to dinner tonight?' she asked, as she pulled on her coat.

I tried, unsuccessfully, not to appear too eager.

'Can you meet me in The Thimble at six? I'm not much of a cook, but I can fix us something.'

When she was gone, I glanced a little through her bookshelves. There were quite a few works on philosophy and politics, by writers I did not know. Some League for Democracy leaflets. A folder of her university lecture notes showed doodles of animals and people. She could draw better than me. In among the papers was a draft of her speech on democracy to the college debating society. There were a lot of crossings-out. One deleted passage read:

'The nobility will never surrender their privileges voluntarily. They, quite naturally, follow their interests as a class. We follow ours, and ours is to overthrow our enslavers and institute a just society – by force if necessary.'

This was seditious stuff. No wonder she had decided to tone it down a bit. I felt I was prying, so I replaced everything as I had found it and left – drawing a cynical look from the porters at the entrance on my way out.

That evening I was in The Thimble on the dot of six. But the Town Hall Clock struck the quarter-hour and then the half, and Erika did not appear. I eventually wandered home, puzzled and bitterly disappointed.

I looked for her in the weeks that followed, but I saw no sign of her at the university. I tried mentioning her name casually to people who knew her, but the conversation seemed to dry up very fast. Once or twice I even found myself standing in the street where she lived, staring up at the window of her second-storey room like some moonstruck poet. But she never appeared. Perhaps, I eventually told myself, it was all for the best. A woman like that had other fish to fry, and these radical currents were challenging waters for someone of my temperament.

Some months later I graduated with honours, and exchanged my red student's cape for the black one of a scholar, but my status was still lowly. My first paid job was as Assistant to the Royal Chronologer, which sounds much grander than it really was. For the first few months, I spent much of my time winding the hundreds of clocks in the offices of state. Despite frequenting the palace and the ornate offices of the courtiers, I never saw the King, nor indeed anyone else of importance. Handrasen, the Royal Chronologer, took care of all such matters. He was an odd man, rather stout and squat, darkly dressed, with round spectacles mounted permanently on his nose. He always looked as though he were laughing at me, which perhaps he was. The words 'I have a job for you, Nielsen!' were always accompanied by a sarcastic smile that I learned to dread.

It was an eye-opener for me to visit the royal palace and the offices of the administration, with their wide, polished parquet floors, tall mirrors and chandeliers. But the rooms were cold and draughty in winter, and I was glad that I did not work there all the time. I noticed that all of the clerks tended to wear scarves both indoors and out. At first, I thought that this was some kind of badge of office – only gradually did I realise that it was a necessity.

As I became more trusted, I was given tasks with greater responsibility. One of these was looking after the Town Hall Clock, the familiar chimes of which could be heard all over the city. Mounted at the top of a tall square tower, it had four faces and was one of the finest timepieces in town. Honoured as I was to be working on such a well-known mechanism, I soon discovered why the job had been assigned to a young chronologer fresh out of college. There are three hundred and twenty-three steps in the Town Hall Tower, and I came to know each one of them intimately. But the view from the top was magnificent – I could see the whole city, with all of its grandiose and beautiful buildings, right from the distant spire of our local church near the harbour to the Round Tower in the centre of the city, where the royal airship, Freya, was moored. How lucky I was, I thought to myself, to be born in this city, with all its riches and marvels! Well, I was young.

The Town Hall Clock had an interesting mechanism, as it was one of the few electric clocks in town. That is perhaps to say too much, as it was not driven by electricity as such, but rather by two weights hanging on long chains inside the tower. One of these weights would descend, driving the clock mechanism, while the other was gradually drawn up inside the tower by an electric motor which sparked and sputtered in an alarming manner. The reason for this curious arrangement was that the power supply could not be relied upon. The electricity for the motor derived from the Great Windmill, the largest in Kantarborg, which also fitfully lit the Royal Palace and the offices of state. For as long as the wind blew, the electric motor would continue to draw one of the weights up inside the tower, at a somewhat faster rate than the other one descended; but when there was no wind, the ascending weight was forced to pause, while the other one continued on its way down. In this way, it was possible for the city's most visible clock to run even when no wind was blowing. However, if there had been no wind for several days the system failed, and the weights had to be cranked up inside the tower by hand. And that, let me tell you, was no easy job, even for a young man.

I was therefore rather relieved when I was eventually recalled to court to perform repairs on its myriad of timepieces. The court clockmaker's workshop was a wonderland of exquisite mechanisms, being the very best that our tiny state could afford, and it was a veritable paradise for someone of my inclinations. There were chiming clocks and marine chronometers, scientific clocks, allegorical clocks and musical clocks, and clocks with windmills that turned and processions of bowing courtiers and dancing ladies that emerged on the hour. Then there were the automata: the music boxes, singing birds in cages, mechanical insects and animals, toys, gaming machines and mechanical tableaux, all of which also needed repair and care. Some were semi-electrical, with lights that flashed if you connected them to an acid battery. Many were gifts to the King from faraway lands, and had mechanisms that were equally foreign. At times their function seemed almost beyond comprehension: you began by wondering what this thing did, and when you had worked that out, what on earth was it for? All had their peculiar illnesses and indispositions, and the older varieties had to be persuaded back to health with a delicate touch. I found I had a natural aptitude and understanding for these complex mechanical devices – perhaps not entirely unconnected with the fact that I found human beings so utterly baffling. Indeed, I could probably have lived a long and happy life in that workshop – but eventually, to my everlasting regret, my skills were noticed.

Chapter three

An encounter with the King

'The King wishes to meet you,' said Handrasen gruffly one morning, 'so put on your best bib and tucker this afternoon.'

This was said in such an offhand manner that I thought at first that I had misheard.

'Yes, Nielsen, you! Incredible though that may seem. You did a good job on his oriental dancing girls. He wishes to meet the man who did it. But don't let it go to your head. We are merely mechanics and menials in this court. We do well to remember that.'

What Handrasen called the 'oriental dancing girls' was in fact a clock – though I had not realised this at first, since it displayed the passing of time in an alien system that apparently involved neither hours nor minutes. But once the device had been restored to life, and its governing system adjusted, it could be seen to have a cycle of approximately 24 hours. At regular intervals, a procession of somewhat unclothed female figures would appear and begin to dance in a manner that seemed extraordinary. It was a highly complex and ingenious mechanism, and one which had occupied all my skills for almost a week, gently cleaning and restoring the ancient metal parts to life, and drawing, copying and re-making those that could not be saved.

Handrasen's announcement took me completely by surprise. There was no time to go home and change into my best clothes. All I could do was brush myself down a little and shine my shoes.

An hour later, we set off through the draughty corridors of the royal palace.

'Do exactly as I do,' Handrasen hissed at me, 'and don't open your mouth unless the King asks you a question.'

He knocked on a set of double doors which seemed identical to all the others in the long hallway. They were opened from the inside, and without any preamble we were suddenly in the royal presence.

The King was standing in the middle of the room, which was large, with a parquet floor, and almost unfurnished, but full of spring sunlight. Although I had often seen his portrait before, his appearance seemed quite extraordinary to me. He was smaller than I had expected – smaller than me – and was wearing a yellow silken doublet over a white shirt and hose. His dark hair was long, and was tied back. His shoes looked like women's shoes. His eyes were a startling shade of dark brown that I had never seen before. I almost forgot to bow until I felt the pressure of Handrasen's hand on my back.

'Majesty,' said Handrasen in cultivated Anglian. 'This is my assistant, Nielsen.'

The King walked over to us and extended his hand. I did not know if I was allowed to straighten up, and so took his hand from my bowed position. Handrasen sighed. 'He is a little unaccustomed to our courtly ways.'

'Do stand up, Nielsen!' said the King cheerily. I straightened and looked into his eyes, and suddenly I saw a young man like any other, though one seemingly possessed of an extraordinary energy. Sorry about all this, his eyes seemed to say, but don't worry, I am just like you.

'You're the man who fixed the umbubu,' he said. I had no idea what he was talking about. Handrasen came to my rescue.

'Nielsen found the dancing girls quite an interesting challenge, Majesty.'

'Good! Well done!' said the King. 'It was a gift to one of my forefathers. As so many of these things are. But it's as well to keep them in working order, you never know when some ambassador may call and ask to see it. Did you manage to work out what it is?'

'It appears to be... a clock, your Majesty,' I managed to stutter. 'Of some kind.'

'Yes indeed, that's what it is. But it is also of some religious significance, I am told, though Heaven knows what that might be. Let us hope it brings me luck.'

I could not think of a response, so I stayed silent.

'Would you like to see some of my other toys, Clockmaker?'

I looked at Handrasen, but the question seemed to be addressed to me. 'Yes... Indeed I should be delighted, Majesty,' I said, trying to imitate courtly Anglian. It seemed to be the right answer.

'Excellent,' said the King. 'Can you spare him for a little while, Handrasen?'

Handrasen bowed and withdrew.

'Come with me,' said the King. He led me over to a corner of the room, where there was a rather small door. The King opened it himself – there being no servant standing next to it – and led me down a long and very narrow corridor.

'Nice to have another young person about the place,' he said over his shoulder. 'We do have rather a lot of old fogies of Handrasen's vintage. My father's generation, don't you know?' I didn't know, but it seemed prudent not to comment.

The corridor widened into a grand room, full of fine furniture, but the King marched straight across it and into another narrow corridor. I was having trouble keeping up. Finally we stopped in front of an unimposing door which, inexplicably, had a picture of some kind of striped animal painted on it.

'Now, here are some things that might interest you,' said the King. 'It was my nursery. And my father's before me.'

He opened the door and held it, and – no doubt against all royal etiquette – I walked in ahead of him.

And then I stood still in amazement. I had seen pictures of toy shops in old books which seemed wondrous to me, but this outdid even them. I had never seen such an array of mechanical marvels: on shelves up to the ceiling, hanging from the chandelier, scattered across the floor and on tables. One or two of them I recognised from their visits to the workshop, but most of them were quite unknown to me.

'The less important mechanical devices ended up here. Not the clocks, of course, they would only have got broken. But there's quite a collection of mechanical men and vehicles.'

The mechanical men did not seem to look very much like men, however. They were only a few inches tall, and mostly rather square-shaped and chunky. The King wound one up and set it going on the wooden floor. It made a loud whirring noise and took some ungainly steps forward, wobbling from side to side.

'I think they may have been war machines in ancient times. They would have been much larger in real life, of course. Imagine if you were this tall' – with his hand, he indicated something about the size of a mouse – 'and you saw one of these coming towards you. They would have been quite intimidating.'

In my heart, I doubted that such a mechanism could ever have been other than a toy. In the size that the King suggested, it would have been totally impractical. It would have taken a team of men to wind it, for the sake of a minute's motion at best. But I did not like to dampen the King's enthusiasm.

Next, he showed me a clockwork ship, with a screw at its stern. It was rusty and well-used, but it certainly looked as though it could make some headway in water.

'I have shown it to our engineers,' said the King. 'But they seem to think steam is more practical. I don't know why. It costs a fortune to import the wood and then half a day to fire the thing up. With a vessel like this, we would not be dependent on the wind or weather. We could set out at any time, catch the pirates while they are becalmed.'

I was beginning to have some sympathy with the engineers. The King had ideas and energy, but he was clearly not a practical man.

Then he showed me a flying machine. This was in a truly battered condition, with many dents. It had two parallel wings, which did not flap like a bird's but were held stiff, and a mechanical pilot wearing goggles, not unlike those of our own airship crews. At the front it had a propeller like a small windmill, for propulsion. I had seen something similar on the royal airship. He wound it up and set it loose on the nursery floor, where it ran around in random circles.

'Does it fly, Majesty?'

'Alas no – though when I was a boy I often threw it from the window to see if it would. That's why it's in such a state. I'm not sure the ancients ever quite perfected the art of flying, as we have.'

I thought of the flying machines I had seen in the old books. Such things did seem incredible – but then again, there had also been pictures of airships not unlike the King's, so what was true and what was not? But I took care to instinctively suppress such heretical thoughts in the royal presence, lest they should form themselves into an unthinking remark – even if the King himself, as it seemed, was happy enough to speculate on the past. But then, he was the King.

'With all these marvellous devices, one could almost build an entire mechanical city in miniature,' I came out with, just to say something non-controversial.

My remark produced a most unexpected reaction. The King turned and gripped my elbow.

'Yes, that's just it! You see it, don't you? You do!' His tone was fierce and his eyes were burning.

I wasn't sure what it was I was supposed to see, so I merely nodded.

'That is the whole thing.'

He seemed lost in thought for a moment. A mile away, I heard the familiar chimes of the town hall clock begin to strike the quarter-hour. Incongruously, I found myself wondering whether the weights were up or down today in the tower.

'I have an appointment now,' said the King. 'Can you come back tomorrow evening? About six? I have something I particularly want to show you. But it will require a little preparation.'

He bowed his head slightly to me, which I took to mean that I should take my leave. I thanked him for showing me his collection and opened the nearest door, which left me in a totally unfamiliar part of the palace that looked worryingly like the private apartments. It took me a full hour to find my way back to the workshop – all the while fearing that the King's Men might find me wandering about the corridors and arrest me as an intruder.

Chapter four

A special toy

At dinner that evening, I had hoped to revive my father's spirits with my story of my encounter with the Young King, but he seemed withdrawn and tired, as he had so often been recently. My mother was pleased, but she had never really trusted royalty. 'They don't sow grain or hew wood, so what are they for?' I can remember her saying dismissively when I was a child, as we watched a royal procession pass over the canal bridge. But she wanted to know if there might be a chance of a royal commission for me, and I hinted (though I scarcely could have known it at the time) that that might well be the case.

'Be careful, Karl,' she said. 'You tend to see the best in people. You have not known liars and thieves, and the court is riddled with them.' It was the most personal thing I think she had ever said to me, and it made me fall silent.

Lying in bed that night, I speculated on what it was the King wished to show me. Perhaps, given our conversation, he had decided to set up all his mechanical wonders to create a small city, as we had spoken of. That would indeed demand preparation, but it would be rather trivial – even a little childish. Something told me this King had ambitions that went beyond impressing a mere clockmaker. I fell into a troubled sleep.

Next day at the workshop, a little to my surprise, Handrasen did not ask what had taken place between me and the King, and in fact seemed quite uninterested in the subject. I was employed in repairs now, and occasionally in building new devices for special commissions, under Handrasen's direction. Thankfully, a new horology graduate was now doing the rounds of the offices of state and winding the clocks.

That day, we were working on a mechanical singing bird in a cage, designed by Handrasen for the visit of a foreign dignitary. When wound up, the bird opened and closed its beak, and in the hidden mechanism a pair of levers operated a tiny set of bellows, creating a most realistic birdsong sound. It was not a particularly innovative design, but its small size made it a challenge to work on, and with a week to go before the visit, we were rather pressed for time.

'I think I will need you to work a little late on this tonight, Nielsen,' said Handrasen in his usual offhand manner, as he studied a drawing on the other side of the workbench. 'Shall we say, until eight o'clock?'

'I am afraid I cannot, Mr Handrasen,' I replied. Handrasen glanced sharply up and stared at me above his spectacles. I had never refused him before.

'I have... an appointment.' I did not need to say with whom. There was a silence.

'Oh, so you've wormed your way in there, have you, Nielsen?' he said at last, in a voice heavy with sarcasm. 'Well done, well done little Karl. I'm sure you have a marvellous career ahead of you.'

I did not know how to reply. I began to stutter an apology, but he waved it away.

'No, no, I do you an injustice, Nielsen. You possess neither guile nor ambition. Quite the blue-eyed innocent. But I hope you know what happens to innocence in a royal court.'

As we fell silent again, I was struck by how tired he looked. It occurred to me, for the first time, that Handrasen must once have been a young man in the court of the Old King. What had he seen, what he known in his time? I would have liked to ask him, but the difference in our stations, so often underlined by Handrasen himself, made that quite impossible. What was clear was that Handrasen was a disappointed man.

Handrasen went home as usual at five and left me working on the birdsong mechanism. I was nervous and hungry, and in truth would at that moment much rather have simply gone home to my dinner as usual. But I had been summoned by the King. At a quarter to the hour, I packed up and began the long walk through the corridors, hoping I could remember which door Handrasen had knocked on the previous day. My first guess was wrong, but thankfully my knock brought no response. Eventually I found the right door and knocked again, my heart thumping in my chest. The double doors opened as before, but instead of the King, there was servant waiting, who led me back out into the corridor and down another series of passages and staircases, until at last we arrived at a very humble-looking door indeed, which did not seem as though it could possibly be part of the royal apartments. 'Wait here,' said the servant, and left. So I waited there, outside the door. The minutes dragged by, but nothing happened. I heard the town hall clock chiming the quarter hour, then the half. I began to wonder whether there had been some mistake. I would look foolish, going back to my family and telling them that the King had forgotten about our appointment. Finally, when I had almost given up hope, the door opened and another servant motioned to me to go inside. Immediately behind the door was a narrow stairway leading downwards. I followed the man down past several landings, until I was sure we must be below ground level. At the very bottom was another short passage and then a heavy wooden door, which the servant opened for me. Beyond it was a long, low hall, with stone columns and arches, almost like a church. Tables had been arranged around the walls, and on them a series of miniature rails ran around the room. The ladder-like structure of the tracks was instantly familiar to me. The King and a few courtiers stood at the far end. When the King saw me enter, he marched over towards me. This time, I remembered to bow.

'Nielsen! There you are at last!' he said gruffly, as though I were the one who was late. 'So, what do you think? Do you know what this is?'

'Indeed I do, sire,' I replied. 'I have seen them in ancient books. It is a railway, is it not?'

'A railway – yes indeed, Clockmaker! Though only a model of one. Come and see how it works.'

He took a miniature vehicle and wound it with a key, then placed it on the shiny metal tracks. It set off around the room at a cracking pace that would surely have been impossible in real life, if such things had ever really existed. But I had seen very similar tracks being unearthed, all those years ago... was it really possible?

The King showed me how the device could be made to draw a chain of interlinked carriages, which had pictures of tiny passengers on the windows. They looked like normal people, although they were dressed very strangely. Then he handed the toy engine to me. It lay heavily in the palm of my hand.

'Is it not marvellous?' he asked.

'It is indeed a fantastic contrivance, Majesty,' I said, as I examined it.

But I could already see that it was anything but. It was made of thin metal, printed or painted in some gaudy fashion, and had four metal wheels. The winding key passed through the metal shell straight to the hub of a standard coil spring on a ratchet, which provided the motive power. There were couple of cogs to transmit the power to the wheels, but these were nothing special. I had seen far more complex mechanisms in the workshop. The only point of interest was its reasonably constant speed, which it seemed to achieve by means of a flywheel. At the back were a couple of levers which regulated the speed and the direction of motion. It was, quite simply, a toy.

'But can it be done, Clockmaker? Can it be done?'

'Done, Majesty?'

'Will it work?'

Much too late, it began to dawn on me what the man was asking.

'Majesty, I fear it would be... very difficult.'

'But you are a talented man, Clockmaker! I can tell. I place my trust in you.'

And so began the project that was to change my life forever.

Chapter five

The Battle of the Strait

I was given a workshop and a team of three assistants. 'One of them will certainly be a spy,' said my father. 'He will report everything you say and do. So make sure you profess loyalty to the King at all times.'

Showing disloyalty was the last thing on my mind – I had every intention of trying to live up to the King's expectations. But the man had given me an impossible project. How was I to explain to him that what he was asking was completely impractical, if not entirely mad? You do not argue with a king. Especially one who doubles your salary and gives you your own department.

The running time of the King's toy was perhaps five minutes at best. Five minutes before the thing needed to be wound up again. Even supposing that the power output would be proportionate when scaled up to full size – a most unlikely prospect – five minutes would barely take the machine from one street to the next. And then what? How was such a spring to be wound? By what mechanism? You could hardly ask a team of men to follow behind with a giant key.

I fulminated, I sweated, I drew sketches, I constructed models. But everything I did only made it ever clearer to me that I was destined to fail. Falling out of favour with the King was not an appealing prospect.

I was given a temporary reprieve by a political crisis. War (endemic in these regions) was once again threatening to break out. The Northlanders, tired of our 'taxation' raids on their ships, were reported to be mobilising their forces to strike at the city. Immediately, all of our scientific and engineering efforts were diverted to the development of war machinery. I managed to persuade the King that giant fighting mechanical men might, for the time being, be beyond our capabilities. But there was one area in which I could make a difference, and this was not on the ground, but in the air.

The King was immeasurably proud of his airship, Freya. It was by far the largest vessel of its type in the Northern lands, though it spent rather more of its time moored at the Round Tower in the middle of the city than actually flying. Adjacent to the tower, a large building which had once been a church now housed the Royal Hydrogen Works, where banks of algae bubbled away in glass vessels. The amount of hydrogen they generated was miniscule, but it was enough to keep the airship topped up.

Designed to be able to land on water if necessary, the airship was quite literally a wooden ship with balloons on top. It was equipped with sails, but so as not to be entirely at the mercy of the wind, it also had a propeller, powered by an electric motor, which could be swivelled to point in various directions. This generated very little power, and so could not be used to drive the craft, but it was useful, at least on windless days, when manoeuvring to dock at the Round Tower. The only alternative, on days when the wind blew the airship hopelessly about over the town, was to drop a line and let the craft be dragged to its mooring by oxcart. This less dignified procedure did not appeal to the King.

A more sophisticated navigation method would require more power, but the trouble was that the electric motor which turned the propeller required large and heavy acid batteries. Increasing the power would mean increasing the number of batteries, and hence the weight – in which case the airship would barely be able to drag its belly off the ground. I suggested to the King that a few small clockwork engines, which could be wound up before a flight, might prove a viable alternative. The electric motor and its heavy batteries could then be moved onto the top of the Round Tower and used to wind up the clockwork motors. The King was enthusiastic about the idea, although I tried my best to dampen his expectations, explaining that it would be quite impossible to obtain more than fifteen minutes' running time, at the very most, from such engines. The airship would continue to be dependent on the wind for its motive power.

But the King, as usual, utterly failed to hear my objections, and, hoping of course to create jealousy, declared to his military engineers that I was a genius. Other people at court, sensing his mood, began to keep their distance from me. They knew what the favour of kings usually leads to.

I borrowed the King's toy flying machine, and designed an upscaled version of its propeller and motor, which to my great relief was able to generate a considerable breeze in the workshop. To make it as light as possible the propeller was carved from wood, although the gears and spring were of course metal. The King wanted a single large engine like the old one, but I was able to persuade him that a number of smaller ones would be more efficient. After much experimentation with different sizes and power outputs, we finally settled on an array of four propellers: two on each side, which could be swivelled to point in any direction. In theory, the airship could now even fly backwards, the prospect of which delighted the King. He ordered the conversion to go ahead with all possible speed, before the Northlanders could move to attack. The airship was known to be the King's pride, and so would undoubtedly be a prime target in any conflict.

Whatever faults of character the King of Kantarborg may have had, he was not a man lacking in courage. He was determined to lead his own forces into battle in the manner of the ancient monarchs, and he would do so from the royal airship. Nothing could dissuade him from this course of action – certainly not the advice of his counsellors, whom he for the most part regarded with open contempt.

'You are old men! Old men!' shouted the King, striding up and down in the council chamber. 'You have grown too fond of your beds, and now you wish to die in them. God, send me a man of war!'

He turned to me.

'Clockmaker! Is this ship safe?'

'I believe she is, sire,' I said – though I had no idea whether I spoke the truth.

'There you are!' said the King. 'A clockmaker, a CLOCKMAKER, is prepared to go to war in this vessel! She will pour fire upon the heads of the Northlanders! She will drive them from the seas and the skies, and we will bring victory to Kantarborg.'

There was no more to be said. The airship was ordered to be made ready, and I went home with a troubled heart. Somehow, I seemed to have volunteered to go to war with the King.

'Do you know how the kings of old ensured that their armies' cannons would not misfire?' the King asked me next day, with a smirk. I usually tried to avoid the King when he had been drinking, but on this occasion it appeared he had started early.

'They got the head cannon-maker to sit on top of each new cannon at its very first firing!' He laughed heartily at his own joke. 'An admirable principle for quality control, don't you think, Clockmaker?'

He called me Clockmaker to remind me of my status. Genius or not, I was not to get above myself.

'It was indeed very wise, Majesty,' I replied. Even as I spoke, I realised with a sinking feeling that this was precisely the answer he had been anticipating.

'Yes Clockmaker, it was indeed very wise. I think we should practise the same principle with you. Tomorrow, you are going flying with me!'

The next day dawned bright and fresh, with just a few small white clouds in the sky. Perfect weather for flying, I thought gloomily, as I cycled into the city. Officially, this was to be a test flight; a short patrol, and then back to base. Unofficially, the King was looking for trouble. The Northlanders had airships too, although they were smaller and more manoeuvrable than our mammoth craft. I suspected the King was looking to take them on, and the sooner the better.

'We must show them we control the Sound,' he said to me. 'Our kingdom depends on it. A single sharp shock should be sufficient.'

The armament on Freya was necessarily light, with brass cannons no longer than a man's arm. (However, small as they were, their recoil effects could on occasion be quite dramatic, as I was to discover.) The crew also had a number of muskets, but the ship's most dangerous weapons were its incendiaries. These were essentially modified gunpowder fireworks, not unlike those that were fired in the city every November to celebrate the King's official birthday. They were very light, being mainly made of paper and card, but a lucky shot could land them in the rigging of an enemy vessel, where they could start a catastrophic fire. Another version was designed to explode in the air, scattering sparks in all directions. But whatever weapons we had, we could be sure the enemy had them, too. As a result, aerial combat between two airships was a gladiatorial affair, almost bound to end in the death and destruction of one or the other, or both. So the despondency that I felt on that morning was by no means without ground.

I am not a natural mariner in any element, and merely boarding Freya, which was done by climbing a ladder perched on top of the Round Tower, almost unmanned me in itself. Then, when the ropes were cast off and we lurched into the sky, I wondered if I should ever see my beloved city again. Never had it looked so beautiful to me, with its graceful towers and red-roofed buildings, as it did at that moment.

The ground fell away with frightening speed. Soon I could see every part of the city, from the North Gate with the distant forests beyond, to the fields of Agaholm with their rows of vegetables. The wind took our sails and we began to move eastwards, towards the sea. On the other side of the Sound, the coastline of the Northlands was already in view. How close we lived to our enemy!

I had a little cubby hole at one side of the deck, with a control desk for the new engines, and a telescope. Officially, my job was to calculate our speed and position, and oversee the operations of the new clockwork engines – but since these would probably only be turned on when we were safely on our way back to Kantarborg, I had little to do. In an effort to control my nerves I tried to busy myself with maps and landmarks, although everyone on board knew perfectly well where we were. My hands were trembling and my heart was hammering in my chest. The wind was unexpectedly cold at this altitude, and I found myself shivering and wishing that I had wrapped up better. Far below, I could see the waves silently heaving and writhing like a basket of snakes. A few fishing vessels, looking smaller than the King's toy boats, were making their way out to sea. The King strode about the deck, alternately enthusiastic and irritated about everything he saw. I could now see the enemy shore all too clearly, and I knew that they could see us. Such a provocation could hardly be expected to go unchallenged – and indeed it did not. After a few minutes we saw the flash – flash – flash – of the first enemy cannons opening up, and a moment later the boom of the reports. The King grasped the balustrade and peered over the side, yelling down curses upon the Northlanders. We came about in the breeze, which involved presenting our broadside to them, and as we did so a ball tore through our rigging and smashed into one of the yardarms. It was a lucky hit, as at that distance most of their shots were bound to go wide. But then, far below us, we saw what I had been dreading most – an airship climbing up the skies to meet us. A few seconds later, we spotted another – on the port side this time. A couple of the men began firing their muskets down at them, but the gunnery sergeant ordered them to cease fire and wait for the order. I saw the shadow of a cloud moving across the deck, and I remember wondering that such ordinary natural phenomena could still take place while we were engaged in a struggle to the death.

The enemy airships, being smaller and lighter than ours, quickly drew up to our altitude, and then the shooting began in earnest. I saw a man fall in front of me, and the ship's doctor ran over to him. They were firing at us from both sides. How could they possibly not hit the balloons? When our small cannons fired the ship rocked like some kind of fairground ride, rolling almost onto its side, and I found myself clinging to the balustrade beside me, staring down in terror into the abyss. To my horror, my precious brass telescope rolled off my desk and went hurtling across the ship, where it slammed against the inside of the opposite balustrade with the sound of smashing glass. As we rolled back again, I heard the whoosh of our incendiaries being fired. A moment later, a cheer went up from the crew, and when I dared to look up I saw one of the enemy airships in flames. It took just a few seconds for the whole craft to be engulfed, and then it plummeted down to the sea, tumbling over and over in a long thick tail of black smoke. The crew cheered again, but I saw no cause for jubilation, thinking of the poor wretches on board.

Having hit the enemy, the sensible thing to do is to pull out before they get a chance to hit you back, and while the King may have been hot-headed, he was no fool. He ordered the helmsman to bring her about, and we headed back towards Kantarborg with the second airship in pursuit, determined to exact its revenge. The wind was with us, but it aided the enemy just as much, and the lighter Northlander craft was gradually drawing closer. An incendiary landed on the deck and was quickly extinguished by the crew. Another exploded nearby, scattering sparks across our rigging. The King strode over to me. 'So, Clockmaker!' he boomed. 'Go and work some magic for us!' I had not envisaged having to prime the engines in the middle of a battle, but I could see that it might represent our only chance. The direction of each of the engines was controlled by wires attached to windlasses on the deck. The crew were busy with the sails and the guns, so I gave no orders but grabbed the windlasses myself and went about winding them one at a time, until the lateral engines were all pointing forwards, towards the bow. I had to crawl from one windlass to the next, keeping my head down to try to avoid the enemy fire. Then I ran back to the control desk and pushed the levers to turn each of the engines fully on. The propellers began to spin and a juddering could be felt through the deck. At first it seemed to make no difference, but then, agonisingly slowly, the pursuing airship began to grow smaller and finally fell out of range. The crew gave another cheer, which I felt might be somewhat premature – but then I saw the enemy airship turn back.

I had been optimistic in hoping for fifteen minutes of engine time. Less than ten minutes was what we got, but it was enough. By the time the propellers stopped we were over Kantarborg. The King, ever the showman, commanded a signal to be flashed ahead, ordering every bell in the city to be rung in celebration of our victory. With no clockwork power left we still had to be drawn in by oxcart to our mooring, but it mattered little. The bells of the city were pealing out, and crowds had gathered to welcome us home.

The airship was made fast, and one by one we descended the ladder to the Round Tower. The King was determined to hold a public speech from the base of the tower, and while this was going on I managed to slip away unnoticed, avoiding the crowds, and went to find my bicycle. However, my legs were shaking so much that I could barely walk, let alone cycle, so I pushed it all the way home.

And so ended what later became known as the Battle of the Strait. In the history books you can read about how, thanks to our superior technology, Freya defeated a whole armada of airships while our navy took on a fleet of fifty warships on the waves below. In the Royal Gallery there is a painting made to commemorate the battle, full of ships, flags, cannon fire and smoke, with Freya hanging gloriously in the sky above. I saw no ships at all on the water that day, apart from a few fishing boats, but maybe I didn't notice them. Or perhaps it is just that I know little about statesmanship.

Chapter six

Fame

After my contribution – such as it was – to the Battle of the Strait, it seemed I could do no wrong in the King's eyes. His confidence in me was limitless, and as the threat of hostilities between us and the Northlanders began to recede (if it had ever actually existed), he urged me to return to the clockwork locomotive project.

Quite why the King was so obsessed with this insane scheme I could not fathom, and once again I had the feeling that there was more to all this than he was willing to reveal just yet. But I had little choice. My state income had been doubled again, and I had even been awarded a medal for what the King called my heroic actions under fire. I wondered whether everyone who ever received a medal for their supposed bravery felt like I did: a complete fraud. Interviewed by the Kantarborg Journal, I tried to set the record straight. 'I was terrified. I did only what was necessary under the circumstances.' It was the simple truth, yet I was praised by the paper for my becoming modesty.

There were many changes in my life in the spring of that year. I finally moved out of my parents' house and into a modest town house in the same district, and, like my parents, I engaged a middle-aged couple, the Gotfredsens, to look after the cooking and cleaning. I insisted on answering the door myself, however – which for someone of my social status was tantamount to a revolutionary act, and much disapproved of in the neighbourhood. Even worse, I addressed the Gotfredsens in Kantish, which was after all my native tongue, despite my mother's best efforts to bring her children up as Anglians. I have never been entirely comfortable in the Anglian tongue, and the thought of speaking to my employees in anything other than our common language has always seemed ridiculous to me. But once again, it raised eyebrows whenever colleagues came to tea, and it also seemed to make the Gotfredsens feel a little uncomfortable, as though I were being overly familiar. Eventually we silently developed the compromise that I would address them in Anglian whenever there were visitors, which seemed to keep everyone happy enough.

In April my father died, and the house and his grain business passed to my elder brother, William. William married a young lady of my mother's choosing shortly after our father's death, and now, with a house, a wife, and an income, he seemed well set up in life. But William was his father's son in every respect but one; I knew him to be a gambler, and it was my private but fervent hope, for the sake of my mother if nothing else, that this would not lead to the kind of trouble I had seen in other families with gambling debts. I think William found it hard to maintain his usual brotherly relationship with me, now that I was a man of some fame, but we saw each other at church every Sunday and exchanged greetings cordially enough, if a little awkwardly. Meanwhile our younger brother Jonas had graduated and gained some position at the university, though exactly what that was I could never entirely make out. He seemed a little secretive and unwilling to talk about his private life, which I put down to shyness at the time. He had been living at home, but when William married he clearly felt the time had come for him to make a life of his own, and he moved into an academic hall of residence in the city, after which we rarely saw him.

The newspaper interview had been a mistake. I found myself being asked to attend a great many social events, which I have always detested. I can only take so much standing around in the parlours of merchant families with a glass in my hand, and after a while I instructed Gotfredsen to return all such invitations with a polite apology. Let them think me eccentric if they wished. Outside church after Sunday service, women I had never seen before would eagerly enquire about my mother's welfare and introduce me to their sullen daughters, while the rest of the world, it seemed, looked on in amusement. I soon developed a terror of these portly mamas, and began to flee them as though each were a man o' war bearing down across the horizon.

It is not that I am a cold fish, you understand, but I have never been particularly at ease with human beings. I can never quite seem to understand them, nor they me. Breaking the social rules, as I so often seemed quite inadvertently to do, was always a painful experience, so I avoided human company when I could, and thereby gained what I felt was a rather unfair reputation for snobbishness. Perversely, though, this only seemed to increase my social standing, and I was more sought out than ever before. Even academics and engineers whose work I respected began to consult me for my opinion on all kinds of projects that lay well outside my area of expertise.

It was here that the real danger began to emerge, and to my credit, I think I saw it straight away: the danger that you might believe in it all. That because you were a rising star at court, the bearer of a medal for valour, regarded by the King as a genius, you might actually start to think that it was all true, and that you really were brilliant, brave and talented. After all, everyone said so.

No-one knew better than I that it was all nonsense, and, confronted with this impossible railway project, I was quickly reminded of my very real shortcomings. I was a clockmaker, used to dealing with tiny forces and delicate mechanisms. I was not a civil engineer or a scientist. In desperation, I asked the King for permission to expand my staff and my budget. This was granted, and I added several engineers and blacksmiths to the team, and eventually also a physicist called Hansen, on the recommendation of my brother Jonas.

Hansen was the archetypal man of science: white-haired and balding, with spectacles. He even took to wearing a white coat on occasion. I had seen pictures of scientists in the old books and I had a suspicion that he was deliberately cultivating the image. But there was no denying his genius – not so much for science, as for project politics and fund-raising.

'Tell them it has a military application and they will give you anything you want,' Hansen said to me one morning.

He began to stuff his pipe, preparatory to lighting it – another affectation of his, all part of the image. We were sitting in our temporary workshop, the former stables at the Palace, talking about the need to find an area where we could safely test what might turn out to be highly dangerous devices. We would need several workshops and a source of power. There was a suitable site on Agaholm, an old military foundry which had a windmill and a few dilapidated buildings. But it belonged to the King's Men, who were notorious for hanging onto every inch of their property, however ancient and neglected.

'Then don't try to get it off them,' was Hansen's suggestion, puffing at his noxious herbs. 'Get it labelled a secret military project and they will fence it off, maintain it for us and even guard it. All for nothing.'

'But what on earth could be the military application of a clockwork locomotive?' I asked.

'Well, obviously you don't call it that. You call it... an advanced spring-loaded mechanism. No, device.' Hansen thought for a minute. 'Cannons. What if you could develop a spring so powerful that it could shoot a projectile at the enemy without the need for all that expensive gunpowder? Of course you don't say that to just anyone, you murmur it to a general at dinner, in confidence. Not to be passed on, all very hush-hush you understand, General. He'll be in your pocket forever.'

As I said, Hansen was a talented man.

We moved into the new workshops in April of that year. I remember the cold and the continual draughts in those old wooden huts and brick halls. But I was gradually beginning to feel more confident with a skilled team around me. I had the feeling that if anyone could crack this, we could. And if we couldn't, it probably couldn't be done.

The project had been labelled secret, for both practical and ideological reasons, as it would not do to have the townspeople talking of trains and railways and 'getting delusions', as Hansen put it. Accordingly, everyone who worked on the project was sworn to secrecy. We were each given a royal seal to wear on a chain around our necks, which entitled us to eat and drink in taverns guarded by the King's Men, and we were even allotted a special barber, in case some Northlander spy might infiltrate the barber's trade and avail of the opportunity to slit our throats.

In the design of this vehicle, the first question to be considered was, naturally, the source of motive power. The King's toy had been equipped with what appeared to be a chimney. ('I believe it's called a funnel,' I said to Hansen. 'Let's just call it a chimney, shall we?' he replied tiredly.) This suggested some kind of combustion. Steam power was a possibility, but a quick calculation showed that the amount of wood required, even at an unlikely rate of efficiency, would make this quite impractical. Wood was in very short supply in Kantarborg. There were a couple of forests beyond the city ramparts, but these were military property, and as Hansen pointed out, the Navy would hardly thank us for leaving them without masts or planking. Electricity was also quickly ruled out because of the weight of the batteries. Besides, the King's brief was for a clockwork engine, for whatever reason. That was, after all, why he had engaged a clockmaker in the first place. So clockwork it would have to be.

The King's toy locomotive had been powered by a simple coil spring of the kind familiar to me from countless timepieces. Obviously this would not do in a full-scale version, if we wanted the thing to run for more than a few minutes. A clock with such a spring will run for several days – but a clock has a tiny expenditure of energy and does need to move itself from A to B.

Hansen's proposal was that we should construct an entirely new kind of spring. Any spring is, essentially, a way of storing energy. You put the energy in by distorting the metal in a way it does not like, and you release it by allowing it to return to its 'natural' shape. In theory this can be done many times, until metal fatigue eventually sets in. You can never, of course, get out as much energy as you put in – friction and other natural factors see to that. Hansen felt that around 60% might be feasible.

Essentially, the problem was that we needed to store a very considerable amount of energy – enough, say, to ensure the device would run for an hour or so – and we then needed it to be released slowly, not explosively. It would require a very strong container.

'It's like putting a powerful genie into a bottle,' said Hansen. 'First you have to squeeze him into a very tiny space, where he does not want to go. Then you have to make sure he stays in there and does not smash the bottle into little pieces.'

The energy of the spring (assuming that we could construct such a thing) would have to be released gradually, at a more or less constant rate. Hansen came up with a design for what he said was a volute spring, which was cone-shaped and could be compressed into a very small space. A battery of these, released one at a time, could provide a relatively steady power output. The blacksmiths shook their heads, but took away the drawings and came back a day later with hulking great spirals of heavy steel. These were as tall as a man when extended, but when compressed could in theory become as flat as wagon wheels laid on the ground. To me, as a clockmaker, these gigantic springs appeared vulgar, even menacing. Once again, I felt I was out of my depth.

Now we had to wind up our clockwork. It is one thing to make a spring that can potentially contain a large amount of energy – it is quite another to compress it. Our only source of power was the windmill, which luckily had been designed for grinding corn and was therefore suitably slow and strong in its operations. Our first attempt at compressing a spring, using a ratchet device attached to the windmill axle, resulted in the entire mechanism locking and the windmill sails stopping dead in their tracks. We rearranged the cogs to load the spring more slowly, and this had a better effect. After some experimentation, we were eventually able to load a spring to the maximum of its capacity. Once the spring was fully 'wound up' we could reverse the process to release the energy. We even managed to set the windmill sails spinning backwards on a windless day – something which amused Hansen greatly, although it caused mutterings about witchcraft among the local Agaholm peasants. Our reputation for dabbling in the dark arts was reinforced when, some days later, we overloaded a spring. With a tremendous bang the thing suddenly exploded into fragments, blowing holes in the windmill walls and knocking tiles off the roof. Luckily there were no injuries, but the damage was all too visible, and I saw old women crossing themselves as they passed on the road nearby.

Having worked out how to compress the springs, we now had to contain them. With the largest springs, once they were compressed, not even our strongest metal casings could hold them without bursting apart. We could make the casing as thick as a cannon, of course, but the extra energy required to move such a weight made this solution impractical. Reluctantly, Hansen designed smaller springs. These, however, had the advantage of being able to fit inside steel cylinders, which Hansen called 'pods'. The springs inside them could be compressed individually at the windmill, and the pods could then be rolled out and carefully loaded onto the locomotive. If we ever managed to build one, that is.

With summer turning into autumn, I realised I would soon have to turn my attention to the design of the locomotive itself. I felt it should conform as closely as possible to the appearance of the King's toy, since from what I knew of the King he wanted exactly what he had in mind, and anything else would perplex and perhaps anger him, however practical it might be. So it should have four wheels, like the toy – even though the pictures I had seen of ancient locomotives often had many more. Hansen scoffed, however, at the idea of including a chimney.

'There is no combustion involved, dear Nielsen! What would it do?'

'It would serve a very important function,' I replied. Hansen raised his eyebrows.

'It would make it look as though we know what we are doing.'

He glowered a little, but he could not argue. He knew it was not enough for the thing just to work – it also had to look right to those who were financing it. In any project of this size, practicalities always give way to politics. It was Hansen himself who had taught me that.

The pods were each equipped with a piston which transferred the force of the spring inside into external power, but there remained the considerable problem of turning this power into useable motion. But here, at last, is where I came into my own: if there is one thing a horologer knows about, it is how to convert a large source of relatively uncontrolled power into smaller, controlled movements. So I set about drawing the cogs, escapements and levers, and all the paraphernalia required to turn a certain amount of expansive energy into the motive force required to set some powerful wheels turning at about the speed of an oxcart. For my calculations, I used a device I had been given by the King – a diplomatic gift he had received, but for which he had no use. It was a beautiful polished wood and brass calculating machine of foreign manufacture, ingenious and subtle in its workings. I loved it dearly, and would happily have done far more work with it just for the sheer pleasure of hearing it tick and watching its dials turn.

To a large extent, designing the locomotive engine was simply a matter of scaling up from my previous work. It was all standard horological engineering: I knew the materials, their load ranges, tensile and compressive strengths, expansion coefficients and elasticity. The locomotive as I designed it would have variable speed, it would be able to reverse, and it would be able to stop – hopefully at a precise point. The initial drawings took me a week. When I showed them to Hansen, he was impressed despite himself.

'Remarkable what a horologer can do!'

'We do more than mend clocks, you know.'

Nonetheless, he of course found flaws in the design. In particular, he wanted an easy way to load the pods onto the device.

I studied some illustrations of the King's toy locomotive that had been made for us by a court artist. At the front of the machine, there appeared to be a round hatchway that, in the original, could perhaps be opened. If we placed cylindrical receptacles inside this hatchway, the pods could be loaded in from the front. It would require a radical redesign of the engine mechanism, but it could be done. However, as usual, there was a problem. The force exerted by the pods towards the levers at the back of the locomotive would be matched by an equally strong force towards the front. We could risk blowing the hatch right off and turning our locomotive into a cannon.

We solved this problem by giving the pods a screw canister and screwing them into holes inside the front of the round part of the locomotive body, which for want of a better term we now began to call the 'barrel'.

I could see Hansen was fascinated by the possibilities of constructing a real spring-powered cannon, however. It was around this time that he began to run a parallel project in a nearby shed, which involved using the pods to fire projectiles into targets. The results were promising – though nothing like as powerful as real gunpowder cannons, the spring-powered weapons were much lighter and a great deal cheaper to operate, and were quite accurate over short distances. As an airship weapon for close combat, they would be ideal.

Hansen made a point of showing his cannon project to visiting military officers, who were suitably impressed. When Yule came around, our annual budget was renewed without demur.

Up until now we had been talking in largely theoretical terms, but it was time to get down to hard facts. Just how large was the locomotive going to be? The larger we could build it, the more powerful it would be, but Hansen felt it might be best to start with the smallest practical version until we had honed our skills, and I agreed. We could always build a larger one later.

What, then, was the smallest locomotive we could get away with? This depended to a large extent on the tracks on which it would run. The distance between the rails in the King's toy was about the width of two fingers. If we could find out how large this was meant to be in full size, we would have a measure by which to scale the machine. The obvious way to find this out would be to examine the ancient tracks that were sometimes dug up – but we would have to do this discreetly, since to suggest that any such railway systems had ever really existed in the distant past was heresy, bordering on treason.

At lunch one day, I casually asked one of our engineers, who lived close to Foundry Street, if he knew whether the Royal Foundry had received any excavated iron recently. The man was canny enough to know exactly what I was referring to, and informed me that he had seen a cartload of 'iron bars' being taken down the street two days earlier. If they had not yet been melted down, this might be my chance.

The following Saturday, I visited my brother William and my mother in our old family home – I had recently become uncle to a baby girl, and respects had to be paid – and afterwards I took a stroll past the foundry gates, where my brothers and I had once stood entranced by the sight of flowing, white-hot metal. I decided to act as though I were on official business and walked straight in, nodding to the guard. There was a great deal of clanging and banging going on, but the men must have been occupied elsewhere, as the yard was deserted. A large barn-like building, evidently a storage shed, lay across to one side. I walked over to it, and to my delight immediately saw several lengths of iron rail lying on the ground. Taking my tape measure from my pocket, I made some quick measurements and jotted them down in a notebook. The rails seemed tremendously large, and had a strange profile, which I sketched. But this in itself told me nothing about the width of the tracks. As I looked around for more clues, I saw a foundry foreman watching me curiously. I decided to brazen it out, and pointed at the rails.

'Do you know if these were attached to some kind of wooden beams when they were found?' I asked in peremptory Kantish – affecting that slight Anglian accent the nobility had when they spoke the vernacular.

'Yes sir, they usually are.'

'And do you have any of them here?'

I was wearing my medal, and I saw him eyeing it. I had a feeling he knew who I was. Though hopefully he didn't also know that I had grown up on this street.

'Indeed we do, sir. We burn them in the furnaces.'

He brought me over to a pile of lumber in a corner of the yard. Twenty or thirty of the stumpy wooden beams lay there. Rust marks and holes clearly showed where the rails had once been attached. I measured the distance between them. It was a strange size, not complying with any Kantish or Anglian units that I knew of. Scaled up from the King's toy, this would make the locomotive... huge. Our shed would barely hold such a beast.

'And how were the rails attached to them?'

He showed me some metal brackets.

'The bolts went here, and... here. Smart, eh? They were clever folk, the ancients.'

He gave me a sly look, as though we were complicit in a secret. I ignored it.

'Are they always this width apart?' I asked, pointing at the marks.

'By and large, sir. Sometimes we find them that are narrower, but they are few in number.'

I thanked him and tipped him a quarter sovereign, but I would hardly buy his silence so cheaply. Word was bound to get around that the King's clockmaker had been poking about in the Royal Foundry. But what of it – I was on the King's business, wasn't I? It was hardly my fault that I was forced to employ such methods. But it troubled me, just the same.

Chapter seven

Disgrace

As spring came around again, we began work on the locomotive body. I had given orders that it was to follow, as precisely as possible, the design of the King's toy. The outer body, which we called the canopy, was made of light steel. Its colour was mostly a deep green, and we placed a brass bell on top where there appeared to be the representation of one on the toy. We even reproduced the writing on the side as carefully as we could, although apart from a few numbers it appeared to be meaningless. We also copied a number of protuberances on top of the barrel, including the chimney, if that's what it was, and some strange additional features, the original function of which could not be guessed. At the back was a cab, where the driver would stand. It was left open, as on the toy – if for no other reason, so as to make it easier for the driver to leap off in an emergency.

The question of who was to drive the machine on its first journey, I left up to the team. The engineers were mostly young men, and all keen to take up the challenge. It was decided that the first driver would be chosen by lot on the day.

Meanwhile the construction of the chassis was going well. My mechanism, with a few modifications, had proved durable, and in frictionless tests of the engine in the shed we had for short periods managed to attain theoretical speeds that were unheard of, even for airships. It would be a different matter, of course, once it was pulling a load. In some sense, the apparent ease of motion was also an illusion: it required many days of charging the pods to achieve even an hour or so of engine power. It was clear that this was unlikely ever to prove a practical means of transport. This bothered me, but Hansen was philosophical about it.

'The kings of old, I have heard, built palaces with marvellous, sparkling fountains,' he said. 'The fountains were powered by oxen turning pumping wheels. Dozens of them. They were kept well out of sight, so as not to spoil the illusion. We build for princes, Nielsen, not for the people. For princes, the appearance is all.'

It is not that Hansen was a cynic – he was a scientist. As long as he had an interesting problem to work on, and the funding to do it, he was happy. I, on the other hand, am an engineer. I like things to have a function, to be useful. The idea that this whole project might simply be a conceit, a king's plaything, something to be brought out to entertain foreign guests, was one that I found rather depressing. But who knew what the King had in mind? I was convinced there was more to it than mere amusement – but naturally, I kept my thoughts to myself.

By May, we were ready to marry the body to the chassis. The job was done slowly and carefully, using winches, and it was late at night by the time we finished. Finally, we paused to admire our work, and in the lamplight of the shed the locomotive looked truly magnificent. To the top of its chimney it stood more than twice the height of a man, and it was as long as three oxcarts. Its paintwork shone. Henningsen, one of the engineers, produced a bottle, and we toasted each other and the locomotive, drinking from the canteen teacups. I cycled home very woozily, wobbling somewhat, but with a great sense of accomplishment. We had done it. It was the last time I was to feel such simple joy in the project.

When I arrived on the site the next morning, a little later than usual, I found everyone in a sombre mood. One of the engineers had been carrying a pod to load it into the locomotive when its piston had suddenly discharged, striking him very violently on the shoulder. He had been taken to the infirmary, but seemed likely to lose his arm. None of us was superstitious, or at least we affected not to be, but it seemed an unfortunate portent. We agreed that we would take things, in the Kantish phrase, 'quietly and easily'. There was no rush – better to be careful and slow than to risk any more injuries. The remainder of the compressed pods were carried very cautiously from the windmill by two men at a time and screwed gently into the front of the locomotive.

Once the pods had been screwed in, and the front hatch of the 'barrel' was closed, it was time to start it up. A short stretch of straight track had been laid in front of the shed, conforming to the dimensions I had sketched and measured in the foundry yard. With a great deal of shoving and pulling, we managed to inch the locomotive forward onto the track, where its flanged wheels gripped the rails well. So far so good.

As arranged, the young men drew lots to decide who would drive the engine on its first short trip. The choice fell on Erik Kramer, a small, dark-haired man with a boyish face. There were no cheers on this day, with the accident in everyone's mind, but there was some back-slapping in congratulation. With a grin, Kramer put on a driver's cap that someone had had made for the occasion and climbed up into the cab.

There was a loud squeak as the brakes were released. 'Slowly, man!' I called out. 'Very slowly!' Kramer gradually opened the throttle, and the machine gave a jerk, then began to roll gently forwards out of the shed. There was no restraining the men now in their cheering. None of us had ever seen a self-propelled vehicle on land before. It was indeed a wondrous sight as it slipped out into the spring sunlight, creaking somewhat, but moving quite smoothly. For myself, I was more than a little amazed that my mechanism had worked first time. Perhaps I was a genius after all.

Kramer stopped the vehicle after it had travelled the twenty yards of track, and then, of course, they all wanted to have a go at driving it. By the end of the day we had mastered the reverse function and were shuttling the locomotive back and forth with ease. Luckily, we had had the forethought to prepare a large number of pods, or else the windmill would never have been able to keep up with the demand. As it was, after the first day we had to wait several days more for enough pods to be charged to allow us to begin testing again.

When a month had passed, we felt confident enough to be able to give a demonstration. We chose what we hoped would be a sunny day in late June, and invited the King, the leading courtiers and the highest-ranking military officers to attend. As the project was still ostensibly secret, however, no members of the press would be present – something for which I was later to be profoundly grateful.

The programme, which I had devised myself, was that we would begin with a short speech given by me from a podium beside the track. (I offered to share this honour with Hansen, but he waved it away.) The locomotive would then emerge slowly from its shed while a fanfare was played by court musicians. It would then pause for a moment (and perhaps applause) in front of the guests' stand, before continuing and disappearing into a second shed at the other end of the track, from which it would emerge again moving backwards (Oh wonder!) and finally draw to a gentle stop in front of the stand. I would then conclude with an explanation of its workings, hopefully to general amazement and admiration.

After some discussion, it was decided to lay bales of straw along the trackside, both for reasons of safety and as a matter of discretion, to conceal the actual track from the guests. This was because the track we had laid bore more than a passing resemblance to the excavated ancient iron rails, and we did not want to be under any suspicion of encouraging heretical ideas concerning their historical use.

When the day came, I was excited but also more than a little proud. My erstwhile boss Handrasen, the Chronologer Royal, would also be there. I was looking forward to showing him the fruits of all my efforts. He would surely be impressed.

The guests began arriving by carriage and filling up the pews. The King was last to arrive, as was customary, and took up his seat in the middle of the stand. He gave me a smile and a wave. All was ready.

With trembling hands I mounted the podium and said a few words. I am not a gifted public speaker, so I intended to keep things brief and let the machine speak for itself. I thanked the King for his support of the project, and said that I hoped the results of our almost two years of work would please him. I made mention of Hansen and the rest of the team, and praised their devotion and hard work. Then I said that we would now like to present a truly wonderful contrivance. I stepped down and nodded to Hansen, who signalled to the court trumpeters to begin the fanfare, and to the driver in the shed to start the locomotive.

What happened next was, to put it mildly, unexpected. A loud grinding noise came from inside the shed, followed by a roaring sound. The locomotive shot out at an incredible speed, showering sparks from its wheels on all sides. The courtiers gasped and leapt for cover. As the machine approached the end of the track, its front wheels reared up as though it were trying to take to the air. I saw the driver fall out of the cab. The trumpet fanfare was still blaring away, though in a rather confused and unmusical manner. The huge machine thundered along on its two back wheels and hit the second shed with a crash at a forty-five degree angle, destroying it utterly. Shards of wood flew through the air. Then it smashed out of the remains of the shed, turned over and landed on its back, its wheels spinning. The whole thing had taken no more than a few seconds.

The fanfare trailed off discordantly into silence. Some of the bales of straw had been set alight by the sparks, and smoke drifted across the scene. Through the coughing and shouting, I could hear a strange, high-pitched sound. It was the sound of the King, laughing.

I stepped cautiously through the smoke and approached the stand where the audience had been sitting. Only the King could be seen. He was sitting hunched forward with his hands on his knees, laughing uncontrollably.

'Majesty...' I began to stutter in apology, but he interrupted me.

'Oh, that was marvellous, Nielsen!' he said, through sobs and gasps. 'I haven't seen anything so entertaining in years. You certainly put the fear of God into this lot!' He gestured at the courtiers, who were gradually emerging from behind the seats, where they had taken cover.

'What is the phrase? 'Back to the drawing board', eh?' Still laughing, the King picked up his robes and stepped down from the stand, followed hurriedly by his entourage.

They walked away towards the carriages, some of them limping or clutching their arms. One of the courtiers hissed at me as he passed by:

'You can be very grateful his Majesty came to no harm! Very grateful indeed!'

I saw Handrasen and tried to say a word, but he just walked past, shaking his head.

I looked around. The locomotive was lying on its back in the ruins of the shed, its wheels still spinning. Out on the track, the driver, uninjured but in a state of shock, was being helped to his feet. The rest of the team were standing around in stunned silence. No-one knew what to say. Hansen took charge. He shouted to the men to turn off the locomotive engine and fetch water to put out the fires. Then he turned to me with a short laugh. 'Well, if nothing else, Nielsen, we've proved its potential as a weapon!'

He walked over towards the track, and I watched him kicking straw out of the way and picking up fragments of wood and metal. Ever the scientist, he was interested in what had happened. I was not. I could not move, or even properly take in what had occurred. But one thing seemed clear: my career was now as shattered as the wreckage that lay all around me.

Chapter eight

Fencing

Unlike my reputation, the locomotive had suffered only minor damage. Over the next few days we managed to winch it upright, place it back on the track and haul it back into its shed.

It did not take us long to find out the cause of the debacle. So as to be able to vary the power of the machine, we had allowed for the possibility of firing more than one pod at once. But when the driver had released the first pod, the shock had set off three more in a chain reaction, with the result that the engine had received four times as much power as was intended. To prevent this happening again, I came up with a 'revolver' device, in which the pods rotated inside the barrel around a central axle, and only one could be fired at a time. Hansen found this idea quite ingenious, and praised it, which pleased me.

The redesign took some months, but when it was finished, we had a machine that we believed would be safe under almost any circumstances. But there were to be no more grand presentation ceremonies. We would test, and test, and test again, before announcing the project to be complete.

One Monday morning, when I arrived at the site after the weekend, I found that a tall plank fence had been erected around the part of the site where Hansen had been testing his spring-powered cannons. In addition to Hansen's original shed, a rather large outdoor area had been fenced off. Entry to this area went via a low wooden hut manned by guards. 'Oh, it's just to keep the riff-raff out,' was his explanation when I asked him about it. But there were no riff-raff here – only the King's Men, and our team, all of whom had security clearance, so I found the remark rather puzzling.

For the next few days Hansen was nowhere to be seen, but while we ran the locomotive back and forth, checking it with various kinds of loads, some loud bangs and cracking sounds could be heard from Hansen's enclosure. Towards the end of the week, the sound changed to a kind of PAP-PAP-PAP, like a cluster of fireworks going off. Eventually I decided we could no longer do without the services of our chief scientist, so I decided to pay him a visit. (And yes, I admit it, I was also curious to know what was going on in there.) I walked into the guard hut, where to my surprise I found a desk and a kind of reception area, with a doorway on the other side leading into the enclosure. One of the King's Men, who had been sitting behind the desk, quickly got up and barred my way. I looked at him, dumbfounded.

'Get out of my way, man! I wish to see Dr Hansen.'

'I'm afraid you can't do that at the moment, sir,' he replied.

'I am the head of this project! I demand that you let me see Dr Hansen at once!'

'One moment sir, I'll get the sergeant.'

He disappeared, leaving me alone. From the other side the PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP-PAP sound came once more, very loudly now. I decided that I would be delayed no longer, and walked through into the enclosure.

What I saw there astounded me.

Hansen was standing with a group of military officers. They were gathered around a cannon device – but this one had a rotating barrel. It was similar to the rotating barrel of the locomotive engine, but the tubes were smaller, and carried smaller pods, which seemed to be loaded from the back of the device, rather than from the front. Fifty yards away, at the end of the firing range, was a crude wooden mock-up of an airship, from which several projectiles protruded. It was on fire.

'Mr Nielsen, sir!' the guard shouted from behind me.

Hansen looked up and saw me, and in that moment I saw a look pass across his face that I had never seen there before. It was disgust, mingled with fury. He strode towards me, his eyes flashing.

'Clockmaker Nielsen, you have no business here! I must ask you to leave at once.'

The guard gently laid a hand on my shoulder, and turned me around. I was escorted out.

I felt at first confused, then humiliated, then angry. I was the project director – how dare he treat me this way! A word from me to the King, and I could have him removed from the project altogether. In fact, now that we had a functioning locomotive, why not? He and his absurd military cover story were no longer needed.

But at our afternoon tea break Hansen turned up again, and was his usual affable self.

'I apologise for that little incident,' he murmured. 'It was only a performance.' He used the Kantish word meaning a sideshow or entertainment. He was implying that it was all an act. It had seemed pretty convincing to me.

'It is important to keep the generals happy. And they are very particular about secrecy.'

'You used my revolver design!' I said, sounding in my own ears like a petulant child.

'Yes. Well, it's hardly your design, is it? I mean, the basic idea, yes. But I had to make a lot of modifications to get it to work properly. And of course, that experience feeds back to our work with the vehicle, so we all benefit in the end. It's good teamwork.'

I was not going to be mollified by this patronising attitude.

'Listen to me, Hansen. I am the head of this project and I must insist that all parts of this facility are open to me. Otherwise, how am I to know what is going on? This business with the cannons was only supposed to be a cover story, but now it seems to be taking over!'

'Yes, well, that's the question, isn't it? Which is the cover story, and which is the project?'

'And just what do you mean by that?'

He was silent a moment, and took out his pipe. He glanced around at the other members of the team in the canteen. No-one was paying any attention to our conversation. Then he spoke again, in a quieter tone.

'Look, Karl. You are a gifted horological engineer, a brilliant man. But when it comes to project politics, you are a babe in arms. You have no idea how important it is to keep the military on our side. We are on their land, after all. One word from them and the project could be cancelled, and then we'll all be out of a job. I have to keep them convinced that the project is worth supporting. That there are goodies on the way to them. And if I may say so, I have been doing a very good job.'

I thought of the mock-up airship in the enclosure. Burning.

'That thing... that weapon. What is it?'

'With luck, it is our future. They are very interested. Very interested indeed. We just need to keep stringing them along, and they will keep approving our budget.'

'Have you ever seen men die in a burning airship, Hansen? I have. It is not a sight I wish to see again.'

Hansen pursed his lips in an attitude of extreme patience.

'I am working on weaponry for the defence of the realm. There is nothing strange about that. That is what scientists and engineers have always done. You, on the other hand, are working on a highly controversial device.'

'The locomotive? Don't be ridiculous. How could it be controversial? It cannot do anyone any harm.'

'I would not call it a locomotive, if I were you.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Clockmaker, you have a project. Exactly what it is, and what its purpose is, you cannot know. That is for the King to decide. It would be as well not to speculate on areas that could lead you into trouble.'

'Hansen, it's a locomotive! Just like the ancients had. The King is not afraid to say so, and neither am I. Everyone knows there were once trains and railways...'

'We cannot speak of such things!' said Hansen, more loudly than was necessary. Heads began to turn. 'You know perfectly well it is forbidden!'

There was a silence. Suddenly, it seemed as though everyone in the canteen was staring at me. Flustered, I pushed back my chair and walked out – with the strange feeling that I had reacted exactly as Hansen had expected me to do.

Chapter nine

The secret of the Rose Castle

All that weekend, I could find no peace in my mind. Hansen's actions were peculiar, and his words more peculiar still. I ate my meals in silence, and quite forgot to thank Gotfredsen and his wife for the food, as is the Kantish custom towards servants. But I think they could see I was preoccupied, for they kept well out of my way. I found myself continually staring out of the window, turning Hansen's words over in my mind again and again. Was I being taken for a fool? Had I, perhaps, already entered a trap? Which is the cover story, and which is the project? Perhaps Hansen had entered this project with the sole intention of developing weapons. But there is nothing forbidden about making new weaponry for the King – so if that were the case, why not say so openly? Why hide behind a completely different project? I could not unravel it.

One of the curses of living alone is that you have no-one to confide in. I desperately needed to talk to someone about all this, but I had no friends apart from my colleagues at work, and no wife. (And even if I had, I would have been unable to talk to her about the project. I was under an oath of secrecy, and the penalty for 'breaking the King's seal' – the phrase meant the same as opening royal letters – was quite simply death.)

So my thoughts turned to my family. There was William, but for all his virtues he was not someone you went to with problems. He was a man of little imagination, simply incapable of thinking much beyond his own affairs. That left Jonas, my little brother, with whom I not been particularly close since we were children. But he was the one who had originally recommended Hansen to me, and he worked at the University, which counted almost as a branch of the court. Perhaps he might know something.

I sent a message to Jonas on the Sunday evening, and received the reply straight away – he must have told the boy to wait – that he would be pleased to see me at his home on the afternoon of the following day.

We had arranged to meet at three o'clock, and as usual I was on time. Years of working with timepieces had given me respect for the hour and the minute. I walked through the large doorway of the building and up a grand staircase, knocked on the door and was shown by a servant girl into the receiving room of Jonas's first-floor apartment. It was considerably finer than I had expected – spacious, with expensive polished furniture and bookcases. And a servant! Was this really how academics lived, in our kingdom? The rear windows of the apartment block looked out upon a lush green courtyard, with a fountain playing in the centre. I could not help speculating on how it was powered. An oxmill? Perhaps in a cellar? Was some unfortunate creature toiling its life away in the darkness, forever turning a wheel around and around, never knowing why it was alive or what it was working for? For princes, the appearance is all. As I stood there, I noticed a picture of a young woman in an oval frame on the windowsill. I picked it up. It was a drawing of Erika Thorne.

After some time Jonas entered, wearing his black priestly robe. A little formal, I would have thought, for a visit from his brother – but perhaps he was coming directly from the University. I had not seen him for some months, since the funeral of our mother, who had died earlier that summer. On that occasion we had greeted each other kindly, but had not exchanged any small talk. He had taken to wearing glasses, or rather pince-nez, and had begun to sport a goatee beard that I did not think suited him.

'Terribly sorry,' he said. 'I was at a meeting and we ran a little late.'

'Jonas, you must forgive me, but I've never quite... I've never learned exactly what it is you do at the University.'

'Perhaps it is just that you don't pay very much attention to what people say to you, Karl. But one can't expect a man of your importance and stature to be concerned with the likes of me.'

His words were barbed, but he smiled to take the edge off them.

'I am in the History department. And lately, I've been working on a project for the Royal Library.'

'And what is it that you are doing at the library?'

'Oh, just some boring stuff,' he said dismissively. 'Cataloguing and...'

He indicated with a wave of his hand that it was very dusty work and not worth bothering me with.

He poured me a glass of rum, which I drank more eagerly than usual. Then he poured one for himself and refilled my glass.

'So, what's on your mind?' he asked, settling into an armchair. 'Hansen giving you trouble, I suppose?'

I was surprised at his prescience, but tried not to show it.

'Jonas, I don't know what to think. Things on this project are not working out at all as I had expected. Of course, I can't say too much about it, but...'

He sighed, reached for his collar, and pulled out a chain with the King's seal hanging from it.

'No problem here, old man. Security clearance. Confess away.'

So I told him about the latest developments in the project, and about Hansen's bizarre behaviour and utterances.

'I'm sure Dr Hansen was just trying to warn you,' he said, when I had finished my tale. 'He's an odd fellow but solid enough. He was probably afraid someone might have overheard.'

'But Jonas, everyone on the team knows what we are working on. It's a locomotive, for God's sake!'

'It's a secret project nonetheless. Has Hansen ever actually called it a locomotive?'

I thought back.

'Well, no, not that I can recall. For him it's just a set of technical problems to be overcome. But what difference does that make?'

'Karl, you have to be very careful about this sort of thing. Remember what Father said: someone on your team is bound to be a spy. You can't blame Hansen for covering his back. If anyone caught you talking like that there'd be hell to pay.'

'But I can't for the life of me understand why there has to be all this secrecy about it. It's just a locomotive, for God's sake. In ancient times they had hundreds of them.'

'That is a matter of conjecture. There is no proof.'

'I have seen them in the ancient books!'

'You don't know what you have seen!' he said, with sudden heat. 'Students look at coloured pictures in old books and let their imaginations run away with them. The Church itself has ruled that such things never existed. But perhaps you think you know better than the theologians?'

I was shocked – not so much at his words, but at his manner. This was my little brother. In our childhood he had followed me around like a puppy. I had fashioned catapults for him from the branches of trees in our back garden – and had felt the wrath of our mother for it. And now he was talking like someone with authority. Like someone I did not know.

'Look Karl,' he went on, a little more gently. 'Maybe your device had precursors in ancient history, maybe it didn't. We don't know, and frankly, in the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter very much. But for Kantarborg, it is a matter of prestige. As far as the Kingdom is concerned, no-one has invented anything before us. The idea that there might once have been magical devices that did all the physical work and transported people around, over the ground, through the air, whatever, would only... cause disturbance.'

'The tracks we dig up...'

'The things we dig up, whatever they are, come from the Irrational Layer. Nothing buried more than a few yards below the surface makes any sense. The Earth dreams, even as we do. There are all kinds of nightmares down there – skeletons and monsters. A wise man avoids them. Surely they taught you that at the university?'

'But even the King knows there were railways in the past! He is not afraid to speak of it!'

There was a pause.

'The King is mad,' said Jonas quietly.

The room suddenly felt flowing and unreal, as in a dream. I fought to regain control of myself. When I spoke again my voice was low and furious.

'You warn me not to speak of the ancient past, and yet you dare to say something like that!'

'I do dare, Karl,' said Jonas calmly. 'I dare because you are my brother, and because I know you will not repeat it to anyone. And also because you know what would happen if you tried.'

He was right. There were no witnesses to our conversation. If I were to accuse Jonas of saying such a thing about the King, I would most likely be the one to be arrested, not him.

'His Majesty suffers from occasional bouts of delusions,' he went on. 'That is unfortunate, but it is not the first time it has happened with that family. Why do you think we have the Rose Castle?'

The Rose Castle was a tower keep located in a garden on the city perimeter. The King was known to spend time there, but I had always presumed it was to receive foreign guests or mistresses.

Jonas read my thoughts.

'The Old King was also confined there in his bad periods. Or did you suppose the guards are there to keep people out?' he asked with a smile.

'At the present time we are very concerned about the King's mental wellbeing,' he went on. 'Not only is he unstable in his moods, he is also beginning to expound views which border on heresy. Including this nonsense about the ancient past, talk of which is expressly forbidden by the laws of Kantarborg itself. So right now, the important thing is to prevent this disorder from contaminating the affairs of state. The survival of our state, of our city, the maintenance of law and order here, is more important than the lives of any one of us. Even a king.'

Who was this man? He could not be Jonas.

'You have been given a project by the King, to make one of his toys in full size. Well and good. Finish it, get paid, and say no more about it. Ever. That is my advice to you, as your brother.'

He rang a handbell to call the servant, and asked her to bring my cloak. I took my leave of him in a state of deep confusion and agitation.

Outside in the street, I heard the familiar chimes of the Town Hall Clock. It was four o'clock. The Royal Library closed at half past. I made my way there hurriedly through the cobbled streets, signed the visitors' book at the front desk, and entered the Reading Room. I needed to know whether I was sane or not.

I filled in no cards and made no reservation, but, flouting the rules, I walked straight to the shelves and pulled out a heavy, leather-bound book. I sat down at a desk and turned straight to page 152, one of my favourites, where there had been a representation of our city in ancient times, showing a row of locomotives at a stopping-place. Gone. You could see where the page had been neatly excised, probably with a surgical scalpel. I pulled another book from the shelves, a bound volume of Popular Mechanics, dated 1932. Every reference to trains, flying machines, or indeed self-propelling vehicles of any kind, had been removed. There was very little left. I began pulling down book after book. Every article, every picture that had fascinated and enthralled me as a young student was gone.

A guard appeared beside me and grasped my elbow.

'Mr Clockmaker Nielsen, you have not reserved that desk or those books. I must ask you to stop at once.'

'Goddamn it, man!' I shouted. 'Who has been here? Who has vandalised these books?'

The other scholars looked up at the commotion.

'Let go of me, damn you! I am on the King's business! Someone has been here. Someone has been destroying the books!'

Another guard appeared, and between them, they manhandled me out.

Chapter ten

The railroad to the Unconscious

I suppose I was lucky not to have been arrested. After being ejected from the library I wandered, somewhat dazedly, through the streets, where the stalls were closing down for the day. I came past The Thimble, my old student drinking haunt, where I went down into the cellar and sat in a corner with a beer, watching the young people conversing gaily. The ground no longer felt solid beneath my feet. Everything I knew, or thought I had known, was suddenly unsafe. I could trust no-one, not even my own family.

It seemed I was a pawn in some kind of game, though what that game was, I could not guess. Morbid thoughts enveloped me ... of fleeing the Kingdom, even of suicide. But in the end, I was not one for grand gestures, and I knew it.

When I arrived back at my front door some hours later Gotfredsen was nowhere to be seen, so I let myself in. Lying on the hall table were several letters, one of which bore the royal seal. It contained an invitation to attend the King and describe the progress of my project, on Thursday afternoon at the Rose Castle. A week ago I would have thought nothing of it, but now the choice of venue seemed ominous. At the bottom of the invitation, a no doubt baffled servant had written: 'His Majesty requests that you bring the following items with you: a measuring tape of at least five yards, a drawing pad, and pencils.'

For the next few days I busied myself making drawings of the locomotive and its inner workings, which I felt sure would interest the King. For reasons of discretion I did not draw the track, but that would no doubt be clear to him. Why he wanted me to bring along drawing materials – and a tape measure! – was a mystery, but I was used to receiving odd requests from His Majesty. I kept my distance from Hansen, who was in any case rarely to be seen. I am not a subtle person or one skilled in guile. When I do not trust someone, it is obvious. I did not wish Hansen to read that mistrust in my face or voice. From now on, I was resolved to protect myself.

On the Thursday afternoon I bundled up all the materials and, since the weather was sunny and my portfolio of drawings rather large, I decided to walk, rather than cycle, through the town. The dark, late-summer green was on the trees, and a pleasant breeze was blowing. The chatter of the people on the streets eased my nerves a bit. It took me about an hour to reach the eastern fringe of the city, where the tower of the Rose Castle rises up from the pleasant surroundings of the Royal Rose Gardens. The castle itself, a red-brick building with a green copper roof and some rather quaint towers, is mainly decorative rather than defensive, although it is surrounded by a wide moat. I felt more than my usual nervousness as I crossed the narrow wooden bridge and was challenged by the King's Men. Did you suppose the guards are there to keep people out? They examined my invitation and searched me rather thoroughly, but let me pass. A servant was called to show me to the throne room, which was accessed via several flights of a stone spiral staircase. As I entered, the King was standing in the middle of the room with his back to me. He was wearing a long ermine cloak, which indicated that he must have been engaged in some formal business before I arrived. The room was large – larger even than most of the rooms I had seen at the royal palace proper – and was dominated at one end by a throne on a raised dais. The floor was covered in black and white marble tiles. Heavy velvet curtains flanked the tall windows. The kings of Kantarborg were determined to look the part. Some marvellous and delicate string music was emanating softly from somewhere, though I could see no musicians. The King turned and, seeing me, shouted 'Nielsen!' with a smile of delight. Then, to my surprise and shock, he strode towards me and gave me a warm embrace, as though I were a long-lost brother.

The music stopped, and the King walked over to an aperture in the wall and began to clap and shout into it.

'Bravo, music master! Splendid! You may take a break now.'

'My forefathers had this constructed,' he explained to me. 'The musicians are below, and the music rises up here. Most inventive. But what goes up must come down, you know, so discretion is advisable.'

I could not fathom what he meant by this remark, so I merely nodded.

'Come and see this,' he said brightly.

In the middle of the floor he had set up part of his toy train set, on a large oval-shaped track. He wound up the clockwork locomotive, which had been the cause of so much joy and terror in my life, and set it running merrily around the track, pulling a couple of carriages. How much trouble, I reflected, could come out of a simple toy. The whole situation was completely absurd. I almost laughed.

The King mistook my smile for pleasure.

'Delightful, isn't it? But look here.'

He had built a small tunnel from books on one of the straight stretches of track. The locomotive entered at one end and emerged from the other.

'Trains, you see, can disappear below the ground. From above you would see nothing.'

Could it be that the King really was mad? If there was some significance to this, other than childish play, I could not see it.

I opened my portfolio.

'Majesty, I have brought...'

'Ah, drawings! Good, good. Let us take them into the library.'

The King led me into an adjacent room which was lined with bookshelves. Most of the bound volumes on the shelves looked very old, with titles in Old Anglian and other languages I did not recognise. In the centre of the room was a large octagonal table, upon which the King spread out my drawings and examined them with interest.

'It is indeed a most marvellous device you have created, Nielsen. And these pods! Ingenious, most ingenious.'

I had not mentioned the spring-loaded pods to the King before. Although they were visible in the drawings, I had not labelled them. How could he know what we called them? I was in a wretched, paranoid state, and everything seemed suspicious to me. One of them is bound to be a spy.

'They may have applications in other areas, too, Majesty. In mechanical cranes, for example, and...'

'And weapons. Yes indeed. There are many possibilities in this research. It is most promising. All we need now are a great many more windmills!'

He paused, and in my mind's eye, I fancied I could see the King's vision. There would be windmills set up all along the coast, charging hundreds of pods, to power... what, exactly?

'If your Majesty will forgive me...' I began, tentatively.

'I do not grant forgiveness in advance, dear Nielsen. Tell me what it is, and let us see if forgiveness is warranted.'

'I was wondering... what might be the potential application of the...vehicle?'

'All shall be revealed, Nielsen. But not when I am SURROUNDED by INQUISITIVE EARS!'

His sudden shouts startled me. Jonas had said he was unstable in his moods.

'Let us concentrate, for the moment, on producing a locomotive such as the ancients would have used in their railways,' he went on, quite calmly.

I could restrain myself no longer.

'Sire, I beg your pardon, but... is it truly your Majesty's opinion that such railways existed in ancient times?'

'Of course they did, Nielsen. Every fool knows that. The dogs in the street know that.'

He observed my discomfiture.

'Well, what is the matter?'

'It's just that...' – I struggled to find the correct courtly terms in Anglian – 'The King your father issued a decree...'

'Oh, that! Yes, he did. Actually it was a renewal of a previous decree issued by my grandfather. And by his father before him, I believe. No mentioning of any mythical Golden Age of Plenty. The newer version also bans talk of whatever may lie in the Irrational Layer. But note two things. Firstly, I am the King. And secondly, I am mad. That means I can say what I want.'

'Majesty, I do not understand.'

He placed a hand on my shoulder.

'The mad king is in the Rose Castle, playing with his toys,' he murmured, very softly. 'That is what they all think. But there is method in it, I do assure you!'

He gestured to a chair, and I sat. The King walked over to the bookshelves.

'It has come to my attention that some regrettable acts of destruction of royal property have taken place in the city,' he said, more loudly. 'I believe I know who the perpetrators are, and I aim to see that they are punished for their misdeeds.'

He pulled down a large book from a shelf and brought it over to the table. Motioning to me to be silent, he opened it at the title page. It was Fantastic Inventions of Our Age, a leather-bound copy of one of the ancient books that had been vandalised in the Royal Library. Opening it in the middle, he showed me the pictures of railway locomotives that had been cut from the books in the library. This copy was undamaged. He then closed the book and returned it to the shelf, and pulled down another large volume.

'I love to study the ancient writings. There is much one can learn from old books, Nielsen. About architecture, for example...'

I was surprised to see that the new book appeared to be written in some form of Kantish; almost all the books I had seen in my life up until then had been written in Anglian. It was entitled A History of the Rose Castle, and contained several ancient illustrations. He pointed to one, which appeared to show the plan layout of the castle's basement, showing some kind of passageway that led off it and out of the building.

'I have acquired quite an interest in history,' said the King, 'and also in some of the ancient sciences, such as archaeology.' He whispered the word. I had heard of it only as a black art – something to do with dead bodies – that had long been banned in the Kingdom.

He looked out of the window at the dying sun.

'I would like you to come with me on a small journey tonight,' he murmured, very quietly. 'It will require courage. Are you ready for that?'

'Of course, sire. I would follow you anywhere.' I don't know why I said that – I am not a particularly courageous man, as the reader will have gathered – but at that moment, I felt it to be true. He smiled and clapped me on the back.

'Splendid! We are not going very far. It should take no more than a few hours. You have brought your drawing materials with you? Good. You will need warm clothes. I will find you some.'

It was late August, and the nights were still warm. But the King was the King.

The King invited me to dine with him first. There were just the two of us at one end of the long dining table, and the meal was a simple one of duck, which I suspected was not wild fowl from the forest, but more likely a bird fetched up from the castle moat. Together with potatoes and a few vegetables, it was a meal such as any citizen of the city might have eaten, at least on a Sunday, except that it was accompanied by sparkling wine, which I had never tasted before, being accustomed to beer and rum. We drank from crystal goblets, inlaid in silver with the royal coat of arms. I tried not to stare at them like some oafish peasant.

Over dinner, the King told me about the castle and its history, about the tapestries and the paintings acquired by his ancestors, and about the throne, which according to legend was fashioned from the tusks of unicorns. I had the feeling that this was a well-rehearsed speech, and one that required only smiles and nods from its audience. Nothing controversial was spoken of. He made no mention of being confined in the castle against his will, and I of course did not bring up the subject.

The meal over, we went to the dressing chamber, unaccompanied by servants, where the King took off his cloak and set about finding me some warm clothes. I was given a thick knitted sweater and fur-lined boots, which had belonged to the King's uncle and fitted me well enough. The King put on similar clothing. He then found me a large leather shoulder bag for my drawing materials 'and for certain other items we must carry'.

We then descended several flights down the same stone spiral staircase via which I had first entered, until we arrived at what I presumed must be the castle basement. The King opened a door to a cellar room, which had a low roof supported by stone arches. A small window set high in one wall admitted a little light. Across the floor and on some rough wooden tables were spread many of the King's clockwork toys. There were the mechanical men and vehicles that I had seen before, but also some with which I was unfamiliar, including a carousel such as might be seen on market days in the city squares. The King wound it up and set it going; it revolved with a merry tinkling.

'This is where I come to play,' said the King. 'They think nothing of it. A mad king playing with his toys.'

To my surprise, he bolted the door behind us.

In a corner lay a group of candle lanterns. The King lit one with a match and gave three more to me. I asked if I should light one as well, but he said that one lamp would be sufficient at first.

Against one wall was a large cabinet. The King asked me to help him move it, and, between us, we dragged it to one side. Behind it there was a small hole in the wall, just large enough for a man to crawl through.

'Take a look,' said the King, brushing his hands. I poked my head into the hole and felt a chill breeze on my face. There was a smell of damp earth. When my eyes got used to the gloom I could make out a narrow passageway, with rude stone steps that seemed to descend downwards forever.

'It was constructed by my ancestors,' said the King. 'As an escape route, I suspect. The entrance was lost for centuries behind this wall. I read about it in the book I showed you, and became determined to find it. It took me a week of poking around down here. I believe no-one knows about it except me. Fascinating, isn't it?'

'Sire, does it descend... into the ground?'

'Indeed it does, Nielsen, deep into the Irrational Layer. That is why it requires courage to go down there. Or a little madness. Fortunately, I have both.'

What was the King getting me into now? I felt a chill of fear in my belly, but I was also pleased that the King had taken me into his confidence. I was determined to live up to his trust in me. (It is a fatal flaw in my character, I fear.)

He placed the lamp on the floor and eased himself through the hole, feet first. Then he reached for the lamp and asked me to pass him the other equipment. Finally, I squeezed through myself.

Inside, it was possible to stand almost upright. The King lifted his lantern and led the way down the steps into the depths, while I followed behind, struggling with the lamps and bag in the narrow space. To say that I was nervous would be a gross understatement. I was beside myself with fear, and while I had great affection for the King, that did not mean that I always respected his judgement. I had been taught since childhood that the Irrational Layer was full of terrifying things, and expected at any moment to be confronted with the worst monsters from my nightmares.

The steps finally ceased and the tunnel became a level passage. We walked along it for a good ten minutes, the King striding confidently ahead with his flickering lantern, and I stumbling along behind as best I could. Inevitably the King moved further and further ahead, and then, quite suddenly, he was gone. I was alone in the darkness.

'Your Majesty!' I almost screamed, now in quite unashamed terror. 'I beg you... I must have light!'

'Ah – sorry Nielsen!' came the distant reply. 'Nearly there now.' He placed the lamp on the ground what seemed like some fifty yards further ahead, and I blundered towards it. When I reached the lamp, the King was nowhere to be seen. The tunnel ended blindly.

'It's a little hard to get up... pass the lamp up first.' The voice came from above me. Looking up, I saw the King peering down at me from a hole in the tunnel roof.

'Use your arms and legs against the walls,' said the King. 'Give me your hand.'

With the King's assistance, I crawled up through the narrow aperture and emerged, panting for breath, into what seemed like an underground cavern.

'Listen!' said the King, and clapped his hands. The reverberations went on for a very long time. The place must be vast.

The King held up his lamp, and I gasped. The cavern looked as big as a cathedral. It seemed unearthly, but was clearly the work of man – there were arches and passageways leading off in all directions. On the walls were signs with words, apparently in Old Kantish to judge by the lettering, though I could not decipher them. The floor beneath my feet was smooth and well finished, but coated with much dust. I took a tentative step.

'Be careful how you go,' said the King. 'There are sudden drops – look!'

He held out the lamp and I saw how the floor suddenly dropped away, to a depth of a couple of yards. At the bottom of the gap lay something that I recognised at once: railway tracks.

'Majesty, what is this place?' I asked.

'I believe it is a station.'

He used the Anglian word for stopping-place.

'But it is below the ground!'

'Yes indeed. And that begs the question: Why put such a place here, beneath the ground, deep in the Irrational Layer, where they might encounter ghosts and demons?'

'How could they live in this darkness?'

'There are lamps built into the ceiling. My guess is that they used electricity for lighting. But it would have cost a fortune. And that is what leads me to believe that this was not a place for everyone.'

'Look at the walls, Nielsen.' He scraped away some dust with his fingers.

'White tiles. Look at the craftsmanship. The whole place is covered in them. Each one is perfect. There is also a staircase wider and grander than anything I have in my palaces, with steps hewn from foreign stone. This was a place of unimaginable luxury. It can only have been intended for a king. A king making a sacred journey.'

The King walked over to the edge of the platform and looked down at the tracks.

'The ancients had a famous man of science, a man called Freud. He wrote about the 'royal road to the Unconscious'. I believe that this is it. This is the royal road, or railroad, as it was later known, which penetrates the Irrational Layer. And down there...' – he pointed to where the tracks disappeared into a tunnel – 'is where we will find the Unconscious.'

The thought of making any kind of journey down here was one I did not exactly welcome, not to mention encountering the Unconscious, whatever that was.

'Is this what your Majesty had in mind for the locomotive?' I asked with some trepidation.

'Here? Alas, no. You could not get the locomotive down here without making a very big hole, and that would be a big project, and would involve a lot of people. And of course, it would not be good for them to see all this.'

I could see why. If the populace ever got word of the existence of this place, it would instantly give the lie to the story that the ancients did not possess trains and railways – and, by extension, technology that was vastly superior to our own.

'No,' said the King. 'Here we must unfortunately make the journey on foot.'

And without hesitation, he leapt down onto the line.

'Where are we going now, sire?' I asked, in naked fear.

'Into the tunnel. Don't worry, I have done it before. I can promise you this, Clockmaker – you will see wonderful things!'

I scrambled down onto the line, still carrying the lamps and drawing materials, and began to follow the King, stepping on the slats between the rails – which here seemed to be made of some kind of stone rather than wood.

'They are called sleepers in Old Anglian,' said the King. 'Highly symbolic name. I believe they are meant to represent the sleeping warriors of the King, who will rise up to defend him against intruders.'

From my work on the locomotive, I knew the existence of such 'sleepers' to be a simple engineering necessity to keep the rails in place and spread the load, but this was clearly no time to argue with the King.

As we entered the gaping mouth of the tunnel, the King pointed out some strange writing along the walls. In contrast to the neat lettering I had seen earlier, the inscriptions here were scrawled round about in many different colours, at the height of a man's hand, but apparently at random. They looked occult and ominous.

'I have copied them and tried to decipher them, but they seem to be meaningless. But that is only to be expected. We are in the Irrational Layer now. Nothing here makes sense. I know we have some ridiculous taboos in our society, Nielsen, but make no mistake – the Irrational Layer is very real. We risk our lives, coming here.'

As though to underline the King's words, I heard a distant rushing noise, almost as though a great railway locomotive were approaching along these very tracks. I stopped dead, listening.

'It is only the wind,' said the King, striding onwards into the dark of the tunnel. 'It blows here as above, though how that can be, I cannot say. Perhaps it blows to us from the River Styx itself.'

The King's reference was obscure to me, for which I was grateful. Everything else he had said I had found profoundly disturbing.

We trudged onwards into the solid darkness. Progress was difficult for me as I struggled with my burden, and as usual the King paid no attention to whether or not I was keeping up. Then, once again, the lamplight was extinguished and I was plunged into blackness. I called out for the King, but there was no reply. I continued to walk along the track as best I could, feeling my way along the rail with my boot. Then a little light fell across me and, looking up, I saw to my horror that a vast, silent monster was blocking my path, with shining eyes as big, it seemed to me, as the Round Tower itself, and below that, a vast, black, open maw. I cried out in terror.

'Oh do get a grip, Nielsen!' said the King, his face suddenly appearing in one of the monster's eyes. In that instant, I saw to my intense relief that the 'eyes' were merely two windows through which the lamplight emerged, and that the 'mouth' was just some kind of doorway, though its lower edge was almost level with my head.

'You can't get in that way,' said the King. 'Come round the side.'

I felt for the side of the tunnel and carefully edged my way around the huge contraption. There was another doorway here, and below it, some steps. The King helped me to clamber up. By the dim lamplight, I could see we were standing in a long, low room. What appeared to be some kind of seating was arranged in rows on either side.

'What is this place, Majesty?' I asked.

'Can't you guess? It's a railway carriage, Clockmaker!'

Of course. The embarrassment of realising the obvious was almost worse than the terror had been. But it looked nothing like the carriages in the King's toy.

'There are several of them here. But unfortunately there is no locomotive – now that would have been interesting!'

Interesting was not a word I would associate with anything in this tunnel, but at this stage I was so beside myself with dread that I had almost gone beyond my fear. Everything seemed to be happening in some kind of dream from which I could not awake. And yet there was still more horror to come.

'Now,' said the King. 'I want to show you the real secret. Come this way. You can leave those things here.'

He set off down the aisle between the rows of seats, while I put the materials down on the floor and followed after.

We passed through a narrow aperture from one room into another.

'Careful here,' said the King, and stopped. He held up the lamp.

Something was lying on the floor between the seats. As my eyes got used to the dark, I thought at first that it must be a statue... but no, surely not, it could not be... it was a human skeleton.

'Is it real, sire?' I whispered, when I could get my voice back.

'It is. I believe it is one of my ancestors. And there you have the reason why this place was built underground, Nielsen – it must be a tomb. A royal tomb. This is where the King made his final journey – to the land of the Unconscious, where all our dreams reside.'

The royal skeleton was not alone. Dimly, I could make out other forms: bits of bony arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, all around. The place was a charnel house.

'There are other bodies here, sire?'

'There are. I suspect that the King's servants were sacrificed to accompany him on his journey into the underworld. But you can see from the composition that the central body must be the important one. There are also grave goods. He was sent into the afterlife with the magical things that symbolised his power. There is a book with a glass screen, a sacred hat, a folding shield to protect him, and many other items. This shows that he was a man of very high status. A true warrior king.'

The King stood at the feet of his ancestor, bowed his head, and muttered some words of respect in High Anglian. Then he turned and led me back to the room we had first entered.

'Now,' he said. 'Light the other lamps, and place them around this space. Then draw it all, every last detail. Just this carriage, not the chamber of the dead. Draw the outside, too. Measure it all up. I want you and your men to make me an exact replica. We must have a carriage for our train!'

I spent a couple of hours making the drawings the King requested, as best I could in the poor light and limited space, and then, to my intense relief, we made our way back through the tunnel and along the passageway to the Rose Castle. I placed the new drawings in my portfolio alongside those I had brought for the King to see, and walked home, carrying a pass that the King had written for me, in case I should be challenged by the Watch while walking through the city at such a late hour. But they did not approach me – my legs were trembling so much that I probably just resembled a common drunk.

Chapter eleven

A carriage fit for a king

I spent the next few days in the workshop, converting my rough sketches and measurements of the carriage in the tunnel into something resembling proper engineering drawings, as the season turned gently into autumn outside the window, and the wind blew leaves around the cobbles in the yard.

It irritated me that even after that terrifying adventure underground, the King still had not revealed to me the purpose of the whole project. Clearly the King was not mad – or if he was, then so was I. He certainly made some wild speculations, and some of his ideas were perhaps extreme, but he was no lunatic. So why did he still not trust me enough to tell me the truth? Eventually, a possible explanation occurred to me. The King was not master of his own house. He had some power, but there were clearly other forces at work at court that were trying to discredit him, perhaps in order to depose him, or worse. He could trust no-one – certainly not someone whose own brother might well be involved in these very intrigues.

These morbid reflections, believe it or not, represented my more optimistic thoughts. In my darker moments I wondered whether the King might not indeed be mad, or at least highly eccentric, and merely wanted me to produce a toy in full size, as Jonas had implied. In which case there would be no need for me to know the future fate of the project, because I would quite simply not be involved.

I distracted myself, as usual, through work. There is no better remedy for gloomy thoughts, though I grant you it may sometimes be the equivalent of scrubbing the deck of a sinking ship. There was nothing horological involved in designing a railway carriage, but it was a calming process, and a fairly effective form of therapy.

Many of the details of the original carriage had to be simplified greatly. Although I had been able to see the wheels of the vehicle in the tunnel, the chassis had been quite inaccessible to me, and the coupling between the carriages was immensely complicated and had been difficult to sketch adequately in the dim light. Besides, some of its functions were impossible for me to guess at. I substituted a much simpler hook-and-eye coupling, as in the King's toy, and a basic four-wheeled chassis with the kind of leaf-spring suspension used on some of Kantarborg's finer horse carriages.

Inside, I drew seating in two rows, as in the original, but the King insisted that there should also be sleeping quarters and a galley for making meals. Obviously there would be no room for all of this in a single carriage, so I suggested that two carriages might be called for, and the King agreed. I therefore drew a second carriage with a small galley and sleeping space for eight persons, which would probably be the minimum number of personnel required if the King was planning to go on a journey. (Though just how the King proposed to make a train journey of any length without railway tracks, I could not imagine.)

Now that we were planning several carriages, I was also in doubt about the feasibility of reproducing the flexible gangway that I had observed linking the carriages in the tunnel; if we were to imitate that, it was likely the whole thing would fall apart when the train was negotiating a bend. So, on a whim, I added a simple platform at each end of the carriages which would make it possible to cross between them. Rather than having doors at each side, the carriages could then be entered via a central door on this platform, which to my mind was a much more elegant solution. The carriages in the King's toy train set, though crude, seemed to suggest some similar arrangement.

As to the outward appearance, I had copied down some of the lettering and numbers from the side of the carriage, which the King said might be of ritual significance, but the precise colour of the carriage had been almost impossible for me to make out in the near-darkness. I guessed at a maroon colour, which went well with the dark green that we had used on the locomotive.

The body of each carriage was to be fashioned from wood, and the chassis and wheels from cast iron and steel, respectively.

I consulted with the engineers and made technical corrections, and at the end of the week I submitted the final drawings to the King, who approved them, with one modification: he wanted both carriages to have wood-burning stoves at their centre. He sketched in this detail in rough pencil, adding his initials 'N II' at the bottom. The heating and cooking stoves caused some head-scratching among the engineers – 'Does the King wish to build a mobile sauna?' was one comment – who were worried about the presence of fire in a moving vehicle in proximity to all that wood, but a solution was eventually found by installing metal sheets on the floor around the stoves, and around the narrow stovepipe chimneys in the roof.

From the engineers, the drawings passed to the craftsmen, and within a few weeks we had built two rather fine railway carriages, which we shunted proudly back and forth with our locomotive, though it made our small test line rather crowded. By pure professional instinct, the joiners had added some attractive details, with mouldings and cornices of polished wood, and the upholsterers had created rich red velvet seating. It was, indeed, a vehicle fit for a king.

I cannot have been the only one to speculate on what the purpose of all this was, but by common consent this was a taboo subject, especially after Hansen's outburst in the canteen. Kantarborg, a city you could traverse on foot within a few hours, was simply too small to benefit much from a railway, and the world beyond the walls was far too unstable. Even if we were to lay lines right through the wildwoods to Alsina or the Old Capital, a vast project that would take years to accomplish, it was unlikely that they would last more than a week before being robbed away and melted down. In Kantarborg itself, the only way that I could see a clockwork railway being in any way useful would be in bringing vegetables and meat into the city from Agaholm, but there was already a canal being used for this purpose, so the gains would be marginal.

As you can see, I was still thinking on a small scale, and in terms of our little world within Kantarborg. I should have realised that the King had much bigger ambitions.

At the beginning of November, the King paid us a surprise visit. The sight of the royal coach drawing up outside the gates caused panic among the team, but we need not have worried. The King inspected the carriages inside and out, watched the locomotive shunt them back and forth, and pronounced himself very satisfied with the outcome, to general relief. But his next requests, which he put to the whole team in our canteen, were perplexing. He wished us to build a set of tracks around a mile in length, leading from our test sheds to the Agaholm Canal. There the line should run along the bank, parallel to the canal, for a distance of a hundred yards or so. As usual, there was no explanation. At the end of the impromptu meeting, I saw the King in a corner, talking intensely with Hansen. As I approached they broke off their conversation, and the King turned to me with a smile.

'So, Clockmaker! Can it be done, do you think?'

'In engineering terms, Majesty, I foresee no difficulty. The ground is flat and firm. But the proposed route of the line crosses military land, and I fear we may encounter some opposition there.'

'That's just what I was talking about with Dr Hansen here. I'm sure something can be worked out. We just need to find something the generals can use it for. Hansen is well experienced in that area.'

Hansen smiled modestly and inclined his head.

'I can already imagine certain advantages for our military friends, Majesty,' he said. 'They have a firing range here which requires heavy cannons to be transported from the Royal Foundry by oxcart, which of course is most inconvenient. So if the cannons could instead be transported by barge and railway...'

'Excellent, Hansen! That's such a good idea, I'm sure I must have thought of it first. Tell the generals that the King commands it. They will appreciate that I have their best interests at heart.'

'We will need an open wagon of some kind,' I interjected. 'But that can easily be done.'

'Better make a few, Nielsen,' said the King. 'I have a feeling we will be needing them.'

Chapter twelve

That November and December, we were occupied with building what presumably must have been the first railway line to be seen in Kantarborg for several hundred years. An order was placed with the Royal Foundry for a large number of cast iron 'girders', both straight and curving, in a form which must have seemed familiar, although I deliberately gave them a different length and cross-section profile to those of the ancient rails, for the sake of discretion. The short stretch of track ran in a gentle curve from the locomotive shed to the canal bank, where we built a stone quay to bear the weight. Hansen sold the cannon transportation story to the military, who were enthusiastic, and even agreed to build a heavy-duty crane at the quayside, in readiness for the anticipated deliveries. As we had no means of turning the locomotive alongside the canal, it would have to reverse back up the line once it had received the load. However, with the aid of a track-switching mechanism (ostensibly designed by me – actually copied from memory from an illustration I had once seen), we were able to construct a run-around loop, so that the locomotive could at least pull from the front of the train in both directions. The line now continued past the engine shed and all the way to the firing range itself, with a side-branch to the shed.

After some experimentation, we managed to build some flat-bed trucks of a sufficiently strong construction to carry the heavy loads, and by December we were ready to collect the first cannons from the canal barges. However, to our consternation, the little clockwork locomotive struggled to move them. It could manage the lighter brass cannons, but with the heavy steel weapons the wheels began to slip and the mechanism groaned to an alarming degree. Unperturbed, the military simply laid down a gravel towpath beside the track and used their own canal horses to draw the trucks. As far as they were concerned, that solved the problem. They had little interest in our locomotive anyway, which I suspect they regarded as a rather trivial project.

During this period, we also abandoned the old corn-grinding windmill and began to construct a windmill specifically designed for the job of charging the pods. This extension of the project was also begun at the instigation of the King, who specified that the structure should be a standardised design, capable of being dismantled and re-erected somewhere else. No element in the structure was to be longer than a standard canal barge. Accordingly, we built it in wood with bolted-on steel braces; it was completed by the start of December, and gave us a great improvement in efficiency. We could now charge enough pods in a day to provide eight hours of travel time for the unloaded locomotive.

The Yule holidays came, and as usual, I spent them at our old family home, which now belonged to my brother William and his wife. Their baby girl, who charmed me utterly, was now approaching three years of age, and Ingrid was pregnant again. I could not help noticing a certain tension between them, however, which I put down to the usual marital troubles of a young couple. Unfortunately, though, it was rather more serious than that. One evening, William went out to attend the annual Yule dinner at the merchant's club, leaving Ingrid and I to dine alone together. She was a personable young woman with an agreeable personality, and she made me feel at ease in her presence in a way that other women, on the whole, did not. At least, not since Erika. Whom I preferred not to think about.

After dinner, we drank a couple of glasses of schnapps and talked about life in general. Like the rest of the world she was of the opinion that I ought to find myself a wife, but unlike the rest of the world, she did not press the point. From there we got onto the topic of household finances and bills, when all at once she fell silent, and I saw tears in her eyes. I of course asked her what the matter was, and then, with much sobbing, it all came out. They were in debt, up to the very roof eaves. William had not left his gambling ways behind him when they married, and as a result they were now on the point of losing everything. He had kept the worsening situation secret while my mother lived, but now Ingrid had discovered the truth. The house would probably have to be sold, and she had no idea where they were going to live. I assured her that if the worst came to the worst, they could always come and live with me. My state income was modest, but sufficient to support a household. She thanked me profusely and with much tears. It disturbed me more than I can say to see Ingrid lose her dignity like that, and I privately made up my mind that I would help them in any way I could, if only for her sake. The problem being, of course, that any money I gave them might go the same way if William got his hands on it – and in any case, I could not possibly raise enough to cover the debts. She begged me to say nothing to William, to which I readily agreed.

We saw nothing of Jonas that Yuletide, which was unusual. As a churchman he did not celebrate the solstice, but he usually joined us on St Stephen's Day. After our last encounter I was a little relieved that I would not have to confront him, but I was also puzzled.

'He has troubles of his own,' muttered William in response to my inquiries, as we sat in the drawing-room after the traditional feast. He was clearly reluctant to say more, but I pressed him on it.

'He's been seeing some woman at the university, one of those Democracy League people. Apparently she's been arrested and sent to Sythorn. Jonas is furious. I hope he has the sense to keep his mouth shut, though, or he'll end up there as well.'

'Sythorn! On what charge?'

'Originally, vandalising royal property. Books from the Royal Library. She would have faced no more than a fine, but she denied it and claimed it was all a political set-up. She was turning the whole trial into a platform for democratism, so the Crown brought the further charge of criminal insanity. No trial is needed for that, of course – the word of a court physician is enough. Even then she could probably still have avoided Sythorn, if she had shown a little humility. But it seems she was determined to be a martyr.'

The shock I felt must have shown in my face. I tried to pretend it was out of concern for my brother.

'But Jonas is no radical agitator! Quite the opposite, it seemed to me.'

'Well, the King has displeased many people since he began expressing... shall we say, unorthodox views? He has annoyed some of the more conservative clerics, including our brother. So they and the democratists may be making common cause. Politics makes strange bedfellows, as they say. These are troubled times, Karl. We must all be very careful.'

But my own troubles, as it turned out, were only just beginning. When I cycled up to the project site after the New Year, I was met at the gate by Andreasen, a young engineer, who anxiously asked me if the news were true. In the canteen, a notice had been pinned up. The project was being shut down. The team members were thanked for their contribution, but their services would no longer be required. It was signed by Dr Hansen. Furious, I began to stride over towards Hansen's compound, when a thought struck me.

'Where is the locomotive?' I asked Andreasen.

'The King's Men took it, sir, over the holidays. We thought it was on your orders.'

I walked into the locomotive shed and stared in incredulity. The shed was empty. Not only was the locomotive gone – so were both the carriages and the various trucks we had built – and outside, the new windmill had also been disassembled and removed.

'Could the train be at the quay?'

'No sir. It was all loaded onto barges and...'

'It's all gone? Everything?'

'Everything, sir. I'm sorry.'

I walked over to Hansen's compound. There were no guards. His office was empty, and his papers were gone. The office had been completely stripped. I sank into a chair in utter confusion. What on earth was going on? I would have to speak to the King at once. In front of me, on Hansen's desk, lay an envelope, addressed to me. I opened it. The message was brief:

'Sorry, they offered me better funding. H.'

What the devil was that supposed to mean?

I was sitting there with the letter still in my hand when a group of the King's Men burst into the room, their weapons drawn. I stood up.

'Where is Dr Hansen? What is going on here?' I demanded angrily.

'I'm afraid Dr Hansen has left us, sir,' said a bearded officer. 'And you are under arrest.' He took the letter from Hansen out of my hand and inspected it while the men placed me in shackles.

I was taken outside, where the whole team stood watching in silence as I was led out to an oxcart. My angry demands to be allowed to speak to the King were met with insolent smirks from the guards. Under armed guard I was taken through the city in the open cart, while the townspeople looked on curiously. Some of them recognised me, and laughed and pointed.

The cart eventually turned down a side street and passed under a stone archway into the courtyard of the city lock-up. I was marched inside to a desk, where the duty sergeant, with a sarcastic smile, asked me my name and wrote it down. As if he did not know who I was! My pockets were then emptied and I was placed in a cell, alone. I was not told why I had been arrested or what the charges might be. As the hours passed, my mind was in a state of turmoil. I tried to formulate some logical explanation for what was going on. Was it all being orchestrated by Hansen? But how could he expect to get away with such a thing? I was a close associate of the King – even, I dared to hope, a friend of his. Whatever I was suspected of, surely the King would be able to sort it out. My only hope was to contact him as soon as possible.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the guards came and led me, still in shackles, to a small office with green walls, where an officer dressed in a black uniform with brass buttons was sitting behind a desk. He had a balding head and a short beard, and after a moment, I realised that I recognised him. It was De Martinus, Head of the Watch. Two other men were also sitting in the room, dressed in the same black uniforms.

I stood in front of the desk. De Martinus regarded me in silence with folded arms, then sighed. After a few moments he opened a folder in front of him and began to study it.

'You should have gone with your friend Dr Hansen,' he said. 'Too late now.'

'I don't know what you are talking about.' I tried to give the impression of furious indignation, but inwardly I felt only fear. 'Where is Dr Hansen?'

'Well, we were hoping you could tell us that, Clockmaker Nielsen. It seems Dr Hansen has grown tired of our company. He has left us for the Northlanders.'

The shock was vertiginous. Hansen a traitor? It was not possible. He had worked closely with the military all along. But then...

'And he has taken the locomotive?'

'The clockwork toy?' De Martinus sneered. 'Rather worse than that, I'm afraid, Nielsen. He has taken the plans for your new weapon.'

'What has that to do with me? Hansen and I are not friends. He kept his work secret from me. I knew nothing of this.'

'Well, I'm afraid that's a little difficult for us to believe, Clockmaker. Because just before he left, Dr Hansen did a rather strange thing, didn't he?'

'What strange thing? What are you talking about?'

'Oh, I'm sure you already know, don't you? He paid off your brother's gambling debts. Now why do you think he would do that?'

Chapter thirteen

Sythorn

The bird is back. He taps imperiously at the window. Reaching through the bars, I open the small window pane at the top and drop a few breadcrumbs down to him. He gobbles them up, and flies off. Outside, the snow falls gently on the rooftops and stone walls, and down into unknown depths that I cannot see. Beyond the walls, I can see it falling upon the grey sea.

As cells go, this is not one of the worst. I have a bed, a writing desk and a chair. Hot water pipes keep the room a few degrees above freezing, though I often have to wrap myself in blankets from the bed. One wall of the room is curved. It suggests a tower. They bring me food twice a day: bread and tea for breakfast, vegetable gruel and water for supper.

Yesterday, I found out where I am. A prisoner was sweeping the corridor. On the shaft of the broom were the words 'Sythorn, Alsina'.

So that is where I am. Not in a prison, as I first thought, but a madhouse.

Outside, the whiteness falls. There are different categories of white, it seems to me. There is the white of pain. There is the white when they are asking questions. There is another kind, when I seem to be dissolving into pieces, snowflakes falling through space.

At first, I did not even know who I was. I was somebody, once, but then I was not sure what I was anymore, or if I was anything at all. Lines from songs drifted through my head, children's rhymes. It was not what they wanted to hear, but it was all I had. I gave them what I could.

Skinny Malink fell down the sink, into a cellar black as ink.

They were frustrated. Displeased with me. Then they were gone.

I remember rain. Rain on cobbles. A street beside a canal. Boats tied up. Wind flapping the sail ropes. Someone calls my name.

When I woke up in this room for the first time, I saw a woman in uniform. She asked me if I was hungry. I replied that I was, which surprised me. She left and returned with some tea and bread. I tried to eat, but it was hard to lift my arms.

'Why are there bars on the window?' I asked.

'They're there for your own protection,' she said, briskly. Then she was gone.

Another woman entered, with a syringe in her hand. She had a more senior manner. I asked her the same question.

'It's because you're an important person,' she said with smile that did not look quite right. She gave me an injection in my arm. I fell asleep.

A man was asking me questions, but this time in a different language. I found I could reply, although I did not know what I was saying. That seemed very strange. How many languages could I speak? Could I, perhaps, speak all languages? It was a conundrum. I faded into unconsciousness again.

Then there was whiteness and scalding pain. It felt as though my body were being dismembered. More angry questions. I don't remember what I replied.

It was another day. They wanted me to get up from the bed. A woman lifted my legs and turned my body, while a man supported my shoulders. I was able to stand, just about. They put me in a chair, and left. I wondered whether something was about to happen, but nothing did. I could see the roof of part of the complex outside the window. The shadows of clouds moving swiftly. After a while they returned. They brought me out to a toilet in the corridor, then put me back into bed. They did not lock the door.

Some days later, they brought me a journal – a rather splendid volume with blank pages, in a tooled leather cover. They gave me some pencils and encouraged me to write and draw, and I did – in the days that followed, I wrote down most of the preceding chapters of this account. I had some idea that I might be able to present it in my defence at my trial. (Trial! There is no trial for the insane, I realised eventually.) Every evening the journal was removed, and every morning it was brought back again. I suspected they might be copying it, but for what purpose, I could not imagine.

They want me to tell them everything, but they never tell me what it is they want me to confess to. I wish they would give me a clue. I would happily confess to anything: grand treason, poisoning the wells, corrupting the women of the court. Better, far better, to be a villain than a fool.

Outside, the whiteness falls.

There is no sense to the world, there never was. I was something, now I am nothing. Even when I was a man of repute I was just a piece in someone else's game. But I was so stupid, I did not even know what the game was. And I still don't.

Once a day, I am allowed out for exercise in the courtyard. There are no other prisoners there with me. Two bored orderlies stand by the walls with their arms folded, shivering in the cold. I suspect my grey prisoner's uniform is warmer than their white ones. There is a fountain, long disused, in the centre of the yard – no doubt a relic of former times – and a cobbled pathway around the perimeter. Sometimes I walk around the yard one way, sometimes the other. That is the limit of my choice in life. Occasionally I bring a crust of bread in my pocket to feed the birds, although it is not allowed. We are beside the sea, so there are many gulls here. It is nice to see something that is alive and free. And innocent of all human machinations.

In the courtyard, I can see more of the building in which I am incarcerated. It is a fortress, clearly very old. It is bigger than any building I have ever seen before in my life, yet there seem to be few people here. Or perhaps it is just that I do not see them. There are the marks of other footprints in the snow.

The clock strikes the quarter-hour. My exercise period is over. I walk across the yard towards the orderlies, who open the gate into the building. No-one speaks. They no longer bother to shackle me as we walk down the corridors.

A few days ago, on my way back to my cell, I saw another prisoner being marched the other way by two orderlies. It was a young woman, in a long grey prison dress. As she passed me, she gave me a look of contempt and spat out 'King's lapdog!' It was Erika.

The days pass. I do not know how long they will keep me in this place. It may even be that I will die here. The prospect is not attractive but neither is it entirely unappealing. It hardly matters now.

Why did Hansen pay William's gambling bills? It can only have been to implicate me, to make it look as though we were conspiring together. But why bother? If you are going to defect to the enemy side, why not just do that? Why try to discredit me as well? Hansen was many things, but he was not jealous or vindictive. His assumption of his own natural superiority was too great for that. And he certainly was not a man who would spend a fortune merely to ruin my reputation.

The questions are many, but there are too many unknowns. I do not have the information to solve them. Perhaps, now, I never will.

In a corner of my cell, I have scratched my name on the wall: K. Nielsen. It is a boring name, common in the Kingdom. But it is all I have left. And it shows that I still exist.

The days grew longer, and the snow melted. The interrogations ceased. In a peculiar way, I almost missed them. Then, just when I was getting used to the idea of nothing ever changing again, something odd happened. There was a small, dark-haired woman who sometimes brought me my breakfast. One day she put down the tray, then handed me a tiny, folded note. I opened it. It said:

If you can read this, nod your head.

I looked at her in confusion. She was watching me intensely. I nodded. She took the note out of my hand and stuffed it into her blouse. I opened my mouth to ask her what this was about, but she barked 'No talking!' sharply and looked away. Then she left the cell.

Was this some kind of test? Some new interrogation procedure they had thought up? So many inexplicable things had happened to me that I had almost ceased to speculate. Whatever happened, happened.

Next day a different woman came with breakfast, and she did nothing out of the ordinary.

Several weeks passed. Then the dark-haired woman returned. She handed me another note. It said:

Spring is coming.

Spring had long since come and gone. It occurred to me that she might be as mad as the inmates. Who could tell what working in such a place might do to you? She looked at me expectantly. I nodded, and she took back the note as before. I sighed and decided that we might as well play this silly game. It passed the time, if nothing else.

The next few times I saw her, she did nothing. Perhaps, I thought, the game is over. More weeks passed.

The weather is warm. I am tired of just walking around the courtyard. I ask for permission to take my journal outside with me to draw the birds. They let me do so, sitting on the parapet of the former fountain, even though I also draw the fortress and its towers. Perhaps this place is so secure that they are unafraid that I might be planning an escape. And yes, it does cross my mind that if I could catch one of the birds, I could tie a note to its foot. But to what end? I have no allies in the outside world who could assist me. And you would need an army to escape from here.

On sunny days in the courtyard, I lean back my head and drink in the delicious blue of the sky. Oh please, dear sun, do not let me awaken. Do not let me begin to feel again, because then I will truly know despair.

The summer passed. I had not seen the dark-haired woman for many weeks. Then one morning she reappeared with my breakfast tray, looking somewhat agitated. She had a new note for me. It read:

Tomorrow in the courtyard. Be ready. Nod if you understand.

It did not say what to do if you did not understand. For one terrifying moment I wondered whether this madwoman was proposing an assignation with me. I stared at her dumbly. She grabbed the note back impatiently, scribbled something on it with my pencil, and handed it back. She had written 'N II' in curling letters – the royal insignia. I nodded, though I still did not understand. She took back the note and tucked it into her blouse, and for the first time, she smiled. Then she left. Definitely mad.

Next day, everything seemed to be normal. When the time came for my exercise period, I took my journal and followed the orderlies down the corridors and the stone staircase to the courtyard. Outside, to my relief, there was no sign of the madwoman. I sat on the parapet of the dry fountain as usual, took out my pencils, and began to draw. There was a small flock of birds in one corner of the yard, and I began to sketch them. The shadow of a cloud moved across the courtyard, and suddenly, all the birds took flight at once. I glanced around in annoyance for something else to draw, and found myself looking at two soldiers who had not been there before. How odd. They drew their swords, ran towards the orderlies, and stood in front of them. The end of a rope ladder was slowly sweeping its way across the yard. I stared at it.

'Come on, Nielsen!' shouted a voice from above my head. It sounded almost like the King. I looked up and squinted at a vast, dark object. The royal airship filled the sky, suspended in perfect silence above the courtyard. 'Climb, you fool!' yelled the King, in Kantish this time. His voice echoed against the courtyard walls. I tucked the journal into my prison jacket, grabbed the rope ladder, and began to climb. It swung away from my legs as I struggled with it, and I almost fell off. The soldiers below ran over and held the ladder steady for me while I ascended, then they too began to climb. I was approaching the top when the ladder suddenly gave a jerk and the airship began to rise rapidly through the air. The walls of the fortress fell away below me. I heard the clockwork engines start up and we began to move out over the sea. I could only cling to the rope ladder, utterly terrified. The King leaned over the side of the airship and reached down his hand to me. I grasped it.

Chapter fourteen

The journey begins

I lay panting on the deck of the airship Freya, staring up at the King. He was dressed in his finest military attire, with long leather boots and a sabre at his side. Johansson, my old friend from university, stood smiling alongside him in his blue officer's uniform.

'How are you feeling, Nielsen?' asked the King.

Gasping for breath, I could not answer.

'Get him some food and water,' he said. 'And some proper clothes. We can't have him walking around here in madhouse garb, even if this is a ship of fools.'

Johansson helped me to my feet. Far beneath us, I could hear the cannons of the fortress opening up. It sounded as though they were finding our range.

'Don't worry, Karl,' said Johansson with a smile, as he supported me down the steps into the galley. 'Their gunners won't hit us. We're flying the Royal Standard. It seems to have a strange effect on their aim.'

Half an hour later, the sound of the cannons had faded and finally ceased. I was sitting at a bench in the cramped galley, trying to eat a meal of porridge. It was little better than what I had been given in Sythorn, but no less welcome for that. I was wearing the dark blue uniform of the air mariners that the men had given me to put on. Through the porthole beside me, I could see clouds and the grey sea far below. Seven or eight of the King's warships were trailing us, but they did not seem to be firing. As far as I could make out, we were keeping to the centre of the Sound, heading north-west. From Alsina, such a course would take us beyond the borders of Kantarborg and into hostile territory. The neighbouring lands were all either unknown wildernesses or else in the hands of the enemies of Kantarborg. Even the sea here was claimed by the Northlanders. As rescues go, this one was a little strange. I had many questions for the King.

I did not have to wait long. Johansson reappeared and brought me to the King's cabin, which was located in the aft of the airship. As I entered, the King put down his brass telescope and greeted me warmly, once again with a brotherly embrace. (I was beginning to be nervous of the King's embraces – they usually presaged trouble.) He motioned to me to sit at his desk, and for a moment he simply regarded me with a smile.

'So, here you are at last,' he said. 'Very sorry it took so long to get you out of there. There were... complications.'

'Complications, Majesty?'

'Indeed. It's a long story. I'm afraid you are looking at a king without a kingdom. I have been deposed. Or rather, I have deposed myself, which must surely be a historical first.'

My confusion must have been evident on my face. The King laughed.

'It seems you have been mixed up in something of a conspiracy, Karl. Every court has its plotters. Mine was no exception. Clever and ambitious men, jealous of power. In the name of liberty, they proposed to impose tyranny. On the first of September I was to be declared insane and permanently consigned to the Rose Castle. If I resisted, I would be accused of heresy and put on trial. My views on the ancients are well known, after all. But I knew of their plans in advance and laid a few of my own. This morning I made my escape from the city with Freya and as many loyal men and ships as I could muster. It has forced their hand, but it has not changed the ultimate result. De Martinus is provisional regent. Your brother Jonas is Minister of Justice. I expect they will find a position for William, too. Something harmless.'

I was somehow unsurprised to find that the King knew the names of my brothers. Perhaps now I could obtain some answers to my many questions.

'Why did Hansen pay William's gambling debts, sire?'

'Ah, now that's a bit of a puzzle. Obviously it was intended to discredit you, but the amount involved was a small fortune, and Hansen did not have such funds at his disposal. I rather suspect it must have been your brother Jonas. If you are going to be Minister of Justice, it will not do to have a brother in debtor's prison. It would look bad, and he would probably have had to let the poor soul out, which might well annoy some of the populace.'

He smiled.

'Besides, it was a clever way of getting rid of you. You are, after all, a close associate of the King.'

I felt a warmth in my face, and feared I was blushing.

''A man should know his enemy, but fear his brother' as they say,' said the King. 'Hansen's defection presented them with a marvellous opportunity. So I think your brother Jonas borrowed the money from the plotters as expenses, and they in turn could subtract it from the state purse once the coup was accomplished. Jonas is living in your house now, by the way.'

I looked up with a start.

'Oh yes, you have forfeited all your property. Well, not quite all. We managed to save this.'

From a drawer, he pulled out a small wooden box and handed it to me. I opened it. Inside, on a red velvet pad, was my gold medal.

'When they said you were a traitor, I told them that in that case I wanted the medal back. They could hardly refuse me.'

I didn't know what to say. It seemed that all that remained of my past life was a symbol of what I was not.

'By associating you with Hansen, they made you look guilty of treason,' the King went on. 'But they could not simply kill you. First, they had to find out what you knew. When Hansen left, he took all the plans for his weapon with him, and he destroyed the prototype. So now we are in the position that the Northlanders have the clockwork cannon, while we do not. Which is obviously rather unfortunate.'

The thought of the Northlanders armed with that automatic weapon was chilling. I remembered the airship I had seen fall in flames.

'But they still had you,' he continued. 'They did not know how much you knew about the cannon design. They needed to find out.'

'They gave me a journal,' I said. 'I thought it was an odd kindness to grant me. I should have known.'

'Indeed. You have it with you?'

'I do, Majesty. But I fear they have a copy.'

'Did they torture you?'

'Yes, Majesty. But it is hard to remember. They also used some drugs...'

'Did you reveal the design of the weapon?'

'I could not, sire. Hansen kept it secret from me.'

'Then you were of no use to them. They would no doubt have had you executed shortly. Looks like we got you out of there just in time.'

'So... Kantarborg has no king now?' It was hard to imagine. Apart from the odd muttered anti-royalist sentiment, like my mother's, the monarchy had always seemed to me to be popular in Kantarborg.

'I am still king, Nielsen! But I was supposed to be their puppet head of state, locked up in the Rose Castle. Now, that plan has gone a little awry.'

He leaned towards me with a confidential smile and poked my elbow with his hand, as though to tell me a joke.

'Do you know what they were most afraid of?'

I shook my head.

'Children! A successor. Their greatest fear was that I might marry and acquire legitimate heirs before they could make their move. That would have greatly complicated matters. They planned to solve the problem by having me declared a lunatic. Now, I suspect they will drag in my uncle from the Old Capital and make him king. There is no danger of him ever having an heir, as he has been of the Other Persuasion all his life.'

I looked blank.

'He prefers boys.'

'Oh.'

'Of course, when he dies they will have a problem,' mused the King. 'But I wouldn't put it past old De Martinus to have himself declared king on the basis of some spurious connection with the royal line. There are historical precedents.'

The King was lost in thought for a moment.

'Oh, by the way. Speaking of death, I'm afraid poor old Handrasen was carried off by the spring pox. I hereby appoint you Chronologer Royal. Congratulations.'

He smiled to himself and looked down at the map on his desk. It seemed I should take my leave. But I had one more question that could not wait any longer.

'What happened to the locomotive, Majesty?'

'Can't get rid of it, I'm afraid, Nielsen. Take a look.'

He handed me the brass telescope and pointed to one of the warships on the seas far below. Lashed to the deck I could make out a large object, covered with canvas. It had to be the clockwork locomotive. On the decks of some of the other ships, I could see other bundles which looked like the carriages and trucks we had built, and the disassembled windmill.

'I had to keep them all locked away in my storehouse until winter was over. Now we must hasten north while the weather is good. Where we are going, we do not want to encounter snow.'

'Where are we going, Majesty?'

'We are embarking on a kind of diplomatic mission. It is very risky, unlikely to succeed, and will be extremely dangerous. Are you ready for that?'

'Of course, Majesty!' I replied. 'I am ready for anything.'

'Thought you might be. Not that you have much choice, of course.'

Besides Freya, our little fleet consisted of eight ships of various sizes, carrying a couple of thousand men in all. Johansson, now a lieutenant, was stationed on the frigate Steadfast, which carried Freya's supplies of hydrogen and clockwork pods. I found myself apprenticed once again – this time to Petersen, the navigator of Ariadne, who was brought up to Freya to act as temporary navigator on the airship, and to instruct me in the basics of marine navigation techniques. Freya had never before ventured far enough to make the services of a navigator necessary, although I had pretended to be one during the Battle of the Strait. The warships had their own navigators, of course, but there was general agreement that the relatively stable deck of Freya was a much better place to make calculations, as the navigational instruments had to be suspended vertically and read off, which is a difficult thing to do on the heaving deck of a ship. (Navigating from Freya also meant that it was a great deal easier for the King to exert direct control over the navigational decisions, which suited his autocratic ways.)

The basic principles were familiar enough to me from my time at university, where one of my subjects had been marine chronometer design. To my delight, the King had brought along the brass and wood calculating machine that I had used when designing the locomotive, as well as a fine collection of navigational instruments, which included a sextant and a beautiful disc-shaped astronomical device that I learned was an astrolabe.

To navigate, we took readings of the angles of inclination of the sun or various astronomical bodies, and compared these with the figures shown in astronomical tables, known as ephemerides, which indicated the expected position of these bodies at particular times. It required an accurate timepiece, but Freya was fitted with a good chronometer, originally designed by Handrasen, but adapted by me during my time at the palace.

I have always enjoyed mathematics and found that I had a natural aptitude for the work, which pleased me very much, as I was well aware that mere passengers are unwelcome on board an airship. I was happy to be regarded as one of the crew, and at my own insistence I slept on the gun deck in a bunk like the rest of the men, rather than share an officer's cabin.

At night we navigated by the stars, which meant I had to climb up through the balloon nets to the small crow's-nest at the top of the mainmast. I have no head for heights, but the presence of the grey balloons, shifting quietly around me like so many grazing beasts, was comforting and thankfully masked off the view of the deck far below. Just like a sailing ship, we usually moved with the wind, and as a result, it was generally peaceful in the crow's nest, if bitterly cold. Despite the freezing temperatures, I enjoyed the silence of the night up there, and the solitude. There are, after all, few places you can be alone on board a crowded airship. Sometimes I explored the night sky with my telescope, and observed the lunar mountains, and even the moons of Jupiter – an awe-inspiring sight.

Freya was also equipped with a small workshop, where I could maintain the clockwork engines and instruments. In this workshop, to amuse myself in the hours when I was not on duty, I also practised the traditional sailor's craft and began to carve a small model of Freya, complete with sails and balloons made of cloth, and small tin propellers that revolved when you blew upon them. Brass cannons, turned on the small workshop lathe, poked from the gun ports, and I even managed to fashion tiny copper nameplates for the prow, with the name 'Freya' stamped upon them. It looked rather fine when it was finished, and I was quite proud of my handiwork.

I plotted our course in accordance with the instructions of the King, who wished for the time being to stick to the centre of the channel, well away from the coasts on both sides, and out of cannon range. The length of the voyage he was contemplating only became apparent to me some days later, when he spread out a large map on the table in his cabin. The map was clearly very old, and had borders and kingdoms marked upon it that were unfamiliar to me.

'All this once belonged to Kantarborg, in very ancient times,' he said, sweeping his hand up along the Westland peninsula. 'Then it became a kingdom in its own right. There were towns and settlements right along the coast... all the way up to here.' He indicated a place that looked as though it were perilously close to the North Pole.

'Now, of course, they are all gone. It took vast amounts of energy to survive in such areas, and when the Great Cataclysm came, it all collapsed. We know very little of what goes on in those regions now.'

'The whole peninsula is claimed by the Northlanders, but in reality, their influence extends no further into the Westlands than the mountains, here.' With the side of his hand, he bisected the peninsula lengthwise.

'Then right over to the east, on the other side of the Northlands, we have the Ursan empire, which is exerting pressure on the Northlanders. We hear rumours of threatened invasions. Historically, it has suited us well for the Northlanders to have to be prepared to fight on two fronts, but it does not suit Kantarborg for them to actually lose to the Ursans. If the Northlands fall, we may well be next.'

'Where there is forest in the Westlands' – he indicated the southern end of the peninsula – 'there are indigenous tribes. Further north it is unlikely that any human settlements still survive, apart from some nomadic herders. The winters there are much too harsh, and there is little arable land. But we must be prepared for anything.'

'We are going to sail up the west coast, well away from Northlander patrols. Our destination, ultimately, is what was once the Westland port of Jernhavn – right up here.'

The place the King indicated looked impossibly distant. It seemed unlikely that our little expedition could make such a journey unscathed. We might as well travel to the ends of the Earth – indeed, this looked like it might be just such a place.

'This was where the ancients loaded the treasure from their mines onto ships,' the King added.

'Mines, Majesty?'

The very word was terrifying.

'Indeed so. They broke into the Irrational Layer and stole its riches. And they paid the price. Very strange beings dwell beneath the mountains in those parts, if we can believe the sagas.'

He did not use the word 'troll'. We were none of us superstitious men, but what could be ruled out in this world?

'There are mountains there, sire?' I asked.

The only place I had seen mountains before was on the Moon, through my telescope. I found the prospect of seeing them up close almost as intimidating as the thought of any creatures that might live within them.

'Mountains such as you cannot imagine,' said the King cheerfully. 'You have an adventure ahead of you, Nielsen. Did you know that in summer, the sun never falls below the horizon up there? It stays daylight for weeks. Then in winter, it is night all the time.'

I found that very hard to believe, but I suspended my judgement. I had learned by now that some of the things the King said could turn out to be true, no matter how incredible they might at first sound.

Freya was lighter than the naval vessels and unencumbered by contact with the waves, which meant that we usually tended to move faster than the ships. We solved this problem by keeping a very long line attached to the lead vessel, with the result that we strained ahead of it like a hunting dog on a leash. This was necessary to ensure that we did not get separated from each other – a very real danger when visibility was limited. Early on the morning of the third day of the voyage we ran into thick fog, treacherous for the marine vessels, who dropped their anchors at once. Luckily the sea at this point was still shallow enough for this to be done, but that was also the reason why it was necessary, as there were many sandbanks and rocky outcrops in the area. At our greater height in Freya we were above the fog and lay for the most part bathed in sunlight, but this was of little help to us in navigation, as no landmarks could be seen. The clouds stretched out to the horizon on all sides beneath us, like a magical sea, full of strange formations and suffused in a pink light. I had never seen such a cloudscape from above before, and I found the sight utterly enchanting.

It was decided that we would make use of the pause to replenish the hydrogen in Freya and replace some of the clockwork pods that had been used up in our flight from the fortress. The line was drawn in, and we descended through the clouds to just above the masts of Steadfast, which carried the hydrogen tanks. The hose was connected to the airship, and the crew of the marine vessel turned the gas supply on. Below, I could see the one-legged captain of Steadfast directing his men around the deck.

As bad luck would have it, we were in that highly vulnerable position when three frigates flying the Northlander flag suddenly appeared through the fog. I suspect they were as surprised to see us as we them, but to their credit, I suppose, they did not turn tail and run, but turned broadside on to us and began firing their cannons. Freya was released at once, and we ascended rapidly – the airship would have been an easy target, and in any case the light cannons it carried were of little use against warships. From above the clouds we could see nothing of the battle save occasional flashes of cannon. The King was furious, stamping about the deck and cursing, but there was nothing we could do. After about half an hour the firing ceased, but we had no idea where the ships lay, and it was too dangerous to descend through the cloud without a line. All we could do was wait until the fog cleared, which it finally did late in the afternoon. We could then see through our telescopes that all of our ships were still there, and no more than a few miles distant from us, but it was obvious at once that Unicorn had lost a mast and was listing badly. Her crew had the boats in the water and were transferring what they could from the stricken vessel. She finally sank an hour later, taking two railway trucks and a large quantity of pods with her (though some of the latter floated up to the surface again and could be retrieved).

The final casualty count was just three injuries, and no deaths, but our presence in the area, accompanied by the royal airship, was now known to the Northlanders, and they would most certainly be back in force. All we could do was set sail with all possible speed as soon as the wind rose. The King ordered that we should keep the coastline just below the horizon, to prevent our movements being monitored from the shore – at least until we were beyond the territory claimed by the Northlanders. Once we had rounded the southern end of the peninsula, and had begun our journey northwards, the shore would be empty or populated only by the indigenes, who as far as was known possessed no weapons more sophisticated than bows and arrows.

But there was one more obstacle to be traversed first. The final outpost of the Northlanders was at Christiansby, a military garrison almost at the southern tip of the peninsula. We aimed to slip past it at night, staying low on the horizon. But once again we were beset by bad luck, as the wind died early in the morning, leaving us almost within spyglass range of the settlement. The airship could have flown on for some distance by clockwork power alone, but the ships were stranded where they were until the wind picked up again. The King fulminated about the stupidity of his military engineers, who had refused to install auxiliary clockwork motors on the vessels when he had first suggested the idea years earlier – although, as I knew, the fact that he had done so on the basis of a clockwork toy boat with a running time of three minutes had probably not helped his case.

Nonetheless, it may have been a mistake made by His Majesty himself that led to the ensuing disaster. The King was worried about the possibility of the Northlanders sending out an armoured steamship from Christiansby in the windless conditions, and as dawn approached and the sky grew lighter he ordered that the airship be raised to a higher altitude so that we could keep watch. But as soon as I saw the lights of the town on the horizon, I realised that we had made a mistake and risen too high: if we could see them, then obviously, they could see us. The King realised this at the same instant and barked an order to descend at once, but at that moment, the first rays of the rising sun struck Freya, lighting up its balloons and sails like a Yule decoration.

Had we been lucky, and the lookouts of the Northlanders had been looking in another direction, we might still have got away with it. But within minutes, I heard the King cursing as he studied the horizon, and I knew we were in for trouble. He handed the telescope to me, and I could make out two black dots in the air above the town. Airships.

They were approaching very slowly, but the craft were gradually growing larger in the spyglass, and as there was still no wind so they must have had some sort of powered engines on board, probably battery-operated.

Today there were no clouds to hide us. Freya could have made a getaway under her own power, but that would have left the fleet helpless. The King made the decision to stand and fight; we had defeated Northlander airships before, and we would do so again. The ropes were cast off and Freya was once again free to fly where it would in the sky. We ascended to two thousand feet, and waited. I went to my battle station, on deck at the motor control panel. The King was standing at his command position on the quarterdeck behind me. I had taken a small pistol along, ostensibly to protect against boarders, but actually because I was determined that if Freya were to be mortally damaged I would make an end of my own life rather than fall in flames as I had seen men do before.

As the two enemy craft grew near they separated and flew to either side of us, their black balloons and the blue and yellow Northlander colours now clearly visible. The cannons of our ships opened up below, although the chances of hitting such tiny black objects in the wide sky were minimal. The enemy craft maintained their height and ignored the fleet – their target, clearly, was Freya. Our men held their fire, waiting for the order from the gunnery sergeant.

Then came an ominous pap-pap-pap sound that I recognised at once.

'The cannons!' I shouted up to the King. 'They've got Hansen's cannons!'

In the next second, a veritable typhoon of projectiles tore across the deck, cutting down men and slicing through ropes and equipment. It was instantly clear to me and to everyone else on board that we could not withstand many such volleys. Our men returned fire with our own brass cannons, but the enemy airships had retreated out of range, probably reloading and getting ready to return for a second run. Part of Freya's bow area was already on fire, with the flames threatening to spread to the rigging, and from there to the balloons. The King gave the order to flood the bilges with our water ballast, and from the bilge, water was pumped via hoses to douse the fires. Even in the midst of this life or death struggle, as I watched the men struggling to pump the water by hand, it occurred to me that this was another area where a clockwork engine might be of some use.

The water being hosed onto the bow end of the ship was disturbing our centre of gravity, so that Freya now hung with her nose downwards. I clung to my desk as men and equipment slid down the deck, and slammed the clockwork motors into full reverse, but to little effect. The situation was obviously critical as the enemy airships, scenting blood, came in for the kill.

'Ascend!' shouted the King. 'Let out the ballast!'

The men scrambled to obey his order and open the bilge-cocks, letting water pour out of the hull. Freya gave a jerk and began to rise rapidly through the air. Somewhere behind us I could hear the pap-pap-pap of the enemy guns opening up again.

'Ascend!' shouted the King again. 'Higher!'

The deck shuddered as the enemy fire hit home. The bitter smell of smoke was everywhere. If we threw out all our water ballast, we would have none left to fight the fires. But the King kept ordering us to ascend.

We had regained level flight, but we were at such a height now that the crew were suffering from altitude sickness. There was a whistling noise in my ears as when a cannon is fired nearby, and I felt faint with vertigo. I saw men doubled up and retching.

The ship's engineer shouted to the King that the balloons were at bursting point – looking up, I could see they were bulging through the ropes.

'Higher!' said the King. The men looked at him in dismay and confusion.

'Higher!' he shouted again. 'Let out more ballast!'

Slowly, whether because of the altitude or fear, the men obeyed and yet more water sluiced out from the hull. The enemy craft were below us now, but clearly intended to follow us up.

Freya strained to climb still higher, and I could hear the ropes straining and creaking around the balloons. What looked like a tear had opened up in one and there was a hissing sound as the gas escaped.

Then, all at once, there was a loud report like an explosion. Like everyone else I looked aloft, but our balloons seemed to be holding as yet.

A ragged cheer went up from the bow, and when I looked down to port I saw one of the enemy airships tumbling, its balloon in useless tatters – burst by the altitude. The craft took a long time to drop to the sea. Falling from such a height, into the depths – it was horrible to contemplate. Poor souls.

The other enemy airship made one more attempt to fire upon us, but seeing that we were out of range, and at a height where it could not safely follow with its single balloon, it broke off the attack and turned away.

We had survived the fight, but at a cruel cost. Of the crew of Freya, five were dead, and four times as many badly wounded. The cries of those who had suffered burns were piteous to hear. As we limped back down towards our ships, I wondered once again how men could ever find anything remotely glorious in the practice of warfare. It is an ugly affair, repulsive to look upon.

Reaching the surface, we began transferring the wounded men to the ships. Nothing was said, but I had the feeling that some of the crew felt it was the King's fault that we had suffered this catastrophe. Perhaps the King felt that, too; at any rate, he made great efforts to ensure that the wounded were well cared for. Since we had no adequate medical facilities for some of the injuries, it was decided that the smallest of our vessels, Springer, would return to Alsina with the casualties and surrender to the garrison there. All of them being citizens of Kantarborg, it was unlikely that they would be badly treated. The King then announced that any of the other men who wished to do so could return with the wounded, with no recriminations. A dozen or so men chose to take up the offer – for the sake of their families, they said. This appeared to me to be a very wise move on the part of the King, who thereby defused any mutinous sentiments.

I was also struck once again by the King's cunning in maintaining his almost obsessive secrecy – for now, although some of the men were returning to Kantarborg, they could reveal nothing of the King's plans to the regime there, because, like me, they simply had no idea of what the King intended to do.

Chapter fifteen

The Sky God

The wind returned that night. We watched in silence as Springer turned away and sailed for Alsina, and then we set forth again, sailing with considerable relief beyond the limits of Northlander territory. We were less than a week into our voyage, and we had already lost two vessels and a large amount of equipment. We had six ships left, all in good condition, but Freya was in a sorry state, with extensive damage to her hull and rigging. It was clear that repairs were called for, but there were no friendly ports we could put in to. We had our own carpenters and blacksmiths, but the shoreline here looked wild and unwelcoming, with more rock than soil visible. Nonetheless, we had to seek shelter somewhere soon before a storm or other difficulties should arise. After another day's sailing the King chose a rocky inlet that led into a shallow fjord, where we found a flat beach just wide enough at low tide for Freya to land on. Here she was put down and propped up with hastily felled logs, so that the carpenters could repair the holes in her hull, working quickly before the tide returned.

All around us lay the silent forest. The atmosphere was eerie, and I could not quite dismiss the feeling that we were being watched. The men felt it too, and were anxious to be away, but it was evening by the time the most essential repairs were completed, and the helmsmen said it would be much too dangerous for the ships to try to navigate out of the rock-strewn inlet in the dark. There was nothing for it but to make an early start in the morning, so we posted guards all around and went to our bunks. Most of us on board Freya, I suspect, slept rather uneasily in the silent and motionless airship – with the exception of the King, whose snores could be heard even on the gun deck.

I awoke to a commotion. There was a great deal of shouting and pointing going on, and when I jumped out of my bunk and looked out through the porthole, I saw three men sitting cross-legged on the sand near the ship. The strangers were dressed all over in black leather with metal studs, and wore many items of ornament, some of which I recognised as Kantish trinkets. Their arms were bare and muscular, and were heavily tattooed. Their hair was long and matted, and one of them had plaited his beard. They bore no weapons and sat looking up with what seemed to me like forbearance at a squawking circle of our men, who could not understand how the strangers had slipped so easily past our guards, and were busy blaming each other.

At length, one of the officers went down to try and sort things out. Recognising someone who seemed to have some authority, the strangers stood up, thereby revealing that they were all a good head taller than any of our men, and attempted to reply to the questions. I joined the outer fringe of the group and could hear the conversation, such as it was. The strangers seemed to speak some variety of Kantish, but it was a dialect well removed from my own, so I could make out only fragments of what they said. But there was one word that was instantly recognisable: king, king! They wanted to speak to the King. (But how on earth did they know our king was on board?)

The King was called for and clambered down from Freya in a somewhat unkingly manner with the aid of a ladder. However, I noticed that he was wearing his robes and emblems of office.

Seeing him, the strangers at once prostrated themselves in the sand.

The King looked a little embarrassed at this and indicated that they should stand.

The men stood up. One of them, his eyes fixed downwards and his arms spread apart, said something to the King in their dialect, and to my amazement the King replied in the same tongue. The man then smiled ecstatically and said a great deal very rapidly and loudly, which I suspect even the King was struggling to follow. The King ordered that they be given food, and drew aside to confer with his officers. He beckoned to me to join the group.

'Well, this is a bit of a surprise,' murmured the King. 'They are indigenes. The language they speak is similar to Old Kantish, from the days when this land was ruled by Kantarborg. I was taught it as part of my education, though I speak it only poorly. But the funny thing is, they seem to regard me as some kind of messiah. Apparently their legends tell of a king who will one day appear from the sky and liberate them from the Northlanders. So, the question is, what do we do about this?'

There was a brief silence, then Johansson spoke up.

'Majesty, who knows what trouble we may stir up here? It seems to me that there is only one thing we can do, which is to pack up and get going with all possible speed.'

'Yes, that is certainly... one possibility,' said the King. It was clear he had other ideas in mind, though as usual it was difficult to tell what they might be.

'Sire,' I began tentatively, 'surely you do not intend to let these people believe ...'

'That I am their messiah? Good grief, no. But there might be other possibilities in this situation. They are the enemies of the Northlanders. So are we. It seems to me that we could make some mischief for the Northlanders here that might benefit our cause.'

There was no more to be said, as it was clear the King had reached some kind of decision.

When the strangers had eaten, the King politely asked if he might speak with them. He then sat down with them on the sand, together with myself and a few of the officers.

The King inquired about their villages and their tribes. (I found I could follow most of what was being said when the King was speaking, though rather less of what was said by the indigenes, unless they made an effort to speak slowly.) They replied that they were a few hundred in their tribe, but that other tribes also inhabited the forest. They drew a map in the sand to indicate the various tribal territories. 'Irdai', they said, indicating themselves and their own area on the map. The other tribes – as I heard the names – were Frentai, Chokfrawn, Bantita and Halsanga. They also showed us where the Northlanders were moving into their forests, and, as they indicated by mimed actions, were felling the trees and killing their tribespeople.

The King then asked if he might visit their village. I saw some of our own officers exchange worried glances at this, but the indigenes were delighted and offered to take him there at once. One of them scrambled up and ran off ahead into the forest, no doubt to get the village ready to receive their messiah.

The King stood up and brushed the sand off his clothes.

'A day,' he said to the officers. 'A day at most. Then we will be on our way, I promise you.'

'You will need an escort, Majesty.'

'Of course. But let's not frighten them. Six men will do. Nielsen, you come with us.'

The two indigene men took the lead as we entered the forest, following a route which presumably must have been some kind of path, although none was visible to my eyes. The men were lithe, muscular and swift, and we could only follow rather clumsily behind. Every now and then they would pause and listen – which at least gave us a chance to catch up – and then move on. The ground was rough and rocky, rising and falling continuously in an exhausting manner – quite different from the flat regions around Kantarborg.

It took us about an hour to get to the village, where all the villagers came out jubilantly to greet us, crowding around us and throwing flowers. The King, though no longer dressed in his robes of office, but in more sensible jacket and leggings, was cheered most loudly of all. The women mostly had long blonde hair and wore leather skirts and jackets, though many of them were bare-breasted, which I could see was distracting our guards. As the crowd pressed against us the situation began to get a little out of control, and our men began to push the people back a little roughly. Then one of the younger tribesmen, showing initiative, led a small pony over to us. The King crawled up upon the back of the beast, and with the tribesman leading the pony, he ascended up the forest track to the village.

We entered through a wooden palisade into a compound which contained a number of huts roofed with thatch or corrugated iron. In front of these was a large open space, and at the centre was what seemed to be a large ceremonial throne, made of metal and some kind of coloured fabric, on which an old man sat, clad in black leather like the rest of his tribe, but with a fur stole around his neck of the kind that the fine ladies of Kantarborg might wear. Unlike most of the other men in the tribe, he was clean shaven. The King dismounted from the pony and immediately walked up to the throne and bowed to the headman as respectfully as he would to any foreign potentate. The villagers gasped and cheered. The headman regarded him solemnly, then stood up. The crowd fell silent. His voice, though high-pitched and hoarse, rang out with surprising vigour.

I could make out that he welcomed the King and said that this was a great day, a day which had been foretold in the prophecies, and which had finally come to pass. Now the Northlanders would soon be defeated and banished, and his people would once again live in peace in the forest. The villagers cheered.

All of this naturally made me feel rather uneasy. Our ragged army could not even have defeated the tiny garrison at Christiansby, let alone the concerted might of the Northlander forces. But the King seemed undisturbed by these grandiose pledges. Addressing the headman and his tribe, he replied that he was honoured to be the guest of the Irdai, who were the... something... guardians of power? (The King used some obscure idiom.) He was, he said, undertaking a long journey north, almost to the ends of the Earth, but that he would return, and when he did, he would sweep the Northlanders from their lands.

The villagers cheered again, even more loudly. The headman ordered a feast to be made ready, and we were invited to eat.

'I know you're worried, Nielsen,' said the King to me, as we stood watching the cooking fires being lit outside the banqueting hall. 'Really, you are as transparent as the clear air. You are concerned that I am making promises I cannot keep.'

I could only smile.

'Indeed so, Majesty.'

'Well, that is the way of rulers, isn't it? If a merchant makes a promise he cannot keep, we throw him into prison. But somehow rulers always seem to get away with it. It seems most unfair.'

He read my look again.

'I do not mean to sound cynical. Look at it this way: if we lose, we will never return this way again, and no harm will have been done. They will go on waiting for their messiah for another hundred years, or a thousand. But if we win, then I do assure you, I will most certainly return here, and together, we will drive the Northlanders from these forests.'

If the King somehow regained his throne and if he defeated the Northlanders. It all seemed a most distant and unlikely prospect.

In the hall, we sat upon long benches and dined upon some sort of meat that I had never tasted before, but which I suspect was goat. This was accompanied by a strong alcoholic beverage in wooden cups. The King and the village headman sat together and kept up an animated if somewhat stumbling conversation, assisted by much gesticulation. Towards the end of the meal, the King beckoned to me to join them.

'The chief wishes us to see a holy place. It lies a short distance from here.'

The headman smiled and pointed enthusiastically out of the doorway.

'You and I can go. We can leave the men here to eat their fill.'

'Are you sure, Majesty? Is it safe?'

'Probably safer than staying here and drinking their hooch.'

He had a point.

The three of us set off, with the headman – whose name, improbably, was Chief Ragnar – taking the lead, and showing himself to be surprisingly agile for someone who must have been at least sixty years of age. We walked up the hill between the trees along a well-worn path, which had stone steps set in it here and there at the steepest points. It was a sunny day, if rather cold. Below us in the late afternoon haze we could make out the village, with smoke still ascending from its cooking fires. The path grew steeper and steeper, and eventually both the King and I were scrambling over the rocks on our hands and knees, while Chief Ragnar bounded ahead like a mountain goat. Finally the way began to level off, and we attained the top of a rocky prominence, from where we could see distant mountains and, across the tree-tops to the south-west, the masts of our ships. How obvious and peculiar they looked from here. No wonder we had attracted their attention.

The top of the hill consisted of a long ridge which gradually ascended, and was covered with brown moss. At its highest point I could make out some kind of object silhouetted against the sky which looked as though it must be man-made. Chief Ragnar pointed ahead and smiled his largely toothless smile. As we grew nearer I saw, to my amazement, that it was a long, pipe-shaped object, apparently made of metal. It lay crookedly across the ridge as though it had been slapped down there by a giant hand, and was much larger than I had initially thought. I wondered how on earth it had got up here. Then, with a shock, I realised what it was.

The King recognised it in the same moment that I did, and gave a short laugh.

'My God Nielsen, it's a flying machine! So they did exist!'

We approached the craft with awe. It was much corroded, and its entire tail assembly, if it had ever had one, was gone. Only one of its wings remained, which was roughly triangular in shape. The flaps on this were familiar, as we used some similar contrivances on Freya, but on this machine they looked vastly more complex. The craft lay slightly askew, twisted onto one side. I could see no sign of a propeller, so that must have been long gone, unless it used one of those magical sources of power mentioned in the sagas.

'What do you think this was, then, Nielsen?' asked the King.

'Majesty, I don't know why, but it makes me a think of a sword.'

'A sword, yes indeed! I believe you are right. This was some kind of war machine.'

Here and there the body of the craft had various markings, some of which must once have been in bright colours, although they were now very faded. On the wing, I could make out a round design.

'Majesty, look at this.' The faint imprint of a circle could be seen on the crumbling metal, and, within it, the marks of what looked like several royal crowns.

'The three crowns!' said the King excitedly.

'What are they, sire?'

'The emblems of the three ancient kingdoms of the North. Each claimed the right to rule the others. Many wars were fought between them. Then came the Great Cataclysm, and they were all swept away.'

'I have heard the story. The Three Sons of Thor. But I thought it was a myth.'

'No myth, Nielsen. It really happened. And here is the proof.'

The Chief beckoned to us to follow him down towards what must have been the front of the craft. Here there was room for a single air mariner. There were signs that there might once have been a seat here, but it appeared to have been removed. (Much later, I remembered the Chief's metal throne down in the village.) There were some kind of controls in front, presumably for steering the craft, but their function was difficult to perceive. The Chief stood beside us and performed a brief ritual, spreading out his arms and chanting in a high voice. Then he fumbled in the moss beneath the body of the craft and brought out a small metal box. With great reverence, he opened it to reveal a very ancient book. It had a drawing on the cover of a craft quite similar to the one we were standing beside. The Chief carefully turned its crumbling pages and showed us diagrams of flying machines in profile, apparently ascending and descending. He pointed at one. 'King!' he said. Then he pointed up at the sky. Gradually it dawned on me that this old manual was the tribe's sacred book, from which they had derived their prophecies. This was nothing less than the very temple of the Sky God.

On our way back down the slope, Chief Ragnar brought us to another holy spot: a standing stone almost at the foot of the hill, among the trees. It was somewhat overgrown, although a sprinkling of flowers on the ground around it showed that it had not been forgotten by the tribespeople.

The Chief pointed at some faint carvings on the stone. At the top a cross had been inscribed, not unlike those I had seen in the church back home in Kantarborg, but here lying on its side. Further down, on the left-hand side, was a crude carving of a female form, somewhat rotund, with pendulous breasts.

The Chief pointed at the cross-like object, and said, slowly for my benefit, 'Sky God'.

He then pointed at the image of the woman.

'Let me guess,' said the King. 'Earth Mother?'

The Chief shook his head. 'Forest Woman.'

'So,' said the King, pointing at the figures, 'the Sky God comes down from heaven, and meets the Forest Woman, and they have a child...' He indicated the uppermost of a number of small circles which descended down the front of the stone like a row of buttons. It was as though he already knew the story.

The Chief nodded. 'Irdai.'

'Irdai, yes of course, the founder of your tribe. The first chief. And since then there have been...'

He counted the 'buttons' with a forefinger.

'One, two, three... ten generations to you.'

The Chief nodded again and pointed at himself.

Ten generations. If that were true, the craft would be several hundred years old. That would date it to the time of the Great Cataclysm.

The King appraised the stone with what seemed to me to be a cool professional eye.

'A very neat line of succession. I wonder what they did with all the others?'

The Chief gave a laugh and exchanged a glance with the King, who smiled back.

'Majesty, how did you know? About the story of their tribe?' I muttered to the King as we continued our way back down towards the village.

'I read books, Nielsen.'

'About the Irdai?'

'Good grief, no. Origin myths. Just about every tribe on Earth tells much the same story about the Sky God and the Earth Mother. Or Forest Woman, whatever.'

'Then surely we should all have a common religion, sire!'

'Well yes, except for the slight problem that each tribe thinks it has been singled out by the Sky God for some special mission, and that all the other tribes are therefore inferior.'

'Ah.'

'Indeed, Nielsen. Ah.'

'But do you think there could have been a real Sky God in this case? I mean, a man who came here in that machine?'

'It does not look to me as though anyone could have escaped alive from that wreck, but who knows? It is possible. I suppose we will never know.'

'I'll tell you one thing, though,' said the King after we had walked on for a minute more. 'Our friend there doesn't believe a word of it.'

'What doesn't he believe?'

'He doesn't believe in a deity from the skies, and he most certainly doesn't believe that I am the reincarnation of him. He sees quite clearly that I am a man like him.'

'He said that, Majesty?'

'He doesn't have to. I can see it in the way he looks at me. He and I are of one kind. He is a ruler, and he knows a political opportunity when he sees one. As do I. On his side, his people have been blessed with the reappearance of their messiah, proof positive that they are the anointed ones among all the forest peoples. And for my part... these people may seem uncultivated to you, Clockmaker, but they are tough, and, properly armed, they could be quite a force. They might not be able to defeat the Northlanders in open battle, but they could be a major thorn in their side. And that can only benefit us.'

We walked on in thoughtful silence.

'It still seems an odd coincidence, though,' I said at last.

'What does?'

'That we should fetch up here, in Irdai territory... with the very people who have this particular Sky God myth.'

'Yes, extraordinary, isn't it? It must be fate,' said the King – and winked at me.

But back in the village, the Chief had a surprise for us that dented our scepticism about their origin myths. He brought us to the outskirts of the settlement, to a low stone hut with a wooden roof. It looked too small to be a house, and so I guessed it was some kind of shrine or crypt, which turned out to be correct. The hut had no windows, and its floor was below ground level. The Chief spoke a few words of prayer, then led us down the entrance steps and opened the low wooden door. Inside, we could at first see nothing in the dim light entering from the doorway, but once our eyes had adjusted, we could make out a long stone slab like an altar, with what looked like the body of a man lying on it. On closer examination, we could see that the body was no more than a skeleton, and was clad in a strange, green-coloured cloth suit of some kind, which covered it from neck to ankles. On its feet were black leather boots that appeared to be of expensive quality, while at the other end, beside the skull, lay a strange rounded war helmet. On the chest of the suit was a sewn-on label, with a name neatly printed on it: Himmelson.

'The son of the sky,' the King translated. It was a chilling moment.

I was glad to emerge into the sunlight again. Outside, the Chief and the King began to discuss their immediate plans. Chief Ragnar wanted the King to stay in the area until he could call a gathering of all the forest tribes and tell them the good news, but the King replied that, unfortunately, our mission to the North could not be delayed, and that we would be leaving the next morning. Chief Ragnar said that in that case, he and the villagers would like to attend the departure. The King agreed to this, and they smiled respectfully at each other and shook hands, like two merchants sealing a bargain.

We took our leave of the Chief and walked back over to the banquet hall, where we found four of our guards fast asleep at the table, clearly somewhat the worse for drink. The other two were nowhere to be seen, though I rather suspected that they had disappeared into the arms of some tribal women.

The King eyed the sleeping men with a sardonic expression.

'Some escort they turned out to be. The tribespeople could have slit my throat, if they had been so inclined.'

'Will you have them punished, Majesty?'

'What is the point? They would only desert. I should be grateful that they have followed me this far.'

He sighed.

'I suppose I must punish them somehow, or the men will think that anything goes. A couple of days in the brig will do them no harm.'

We left the men where they lay and began to make our way back to our ships alone, through the gathering dusk.

'Majesty,' I asked as we trudged along the uneven trail beneath the trees. 'What did you mean when you said, 'I wonder what they did with all the others?'

'Well, a king or a chief doesn't usually have just one child, does he? You have to have a male heir, but he might die, so you need at least one more as a spare. I was the spare. But then brothers can be rivals and compete for the throne. It is not unknown for the elder brother to be murdered, or suffer an unfortunate accident. My own brother Reginald was killed in the wars against the Northlanders when I was six. Perhaps someone at court felt he was unsuitable material for a king, and decided he ought to be sent to the front line. I don't know.'

I thought of Jonas. Had we also been rivals? If so, I hadn't noticed it. But there was so much I had not noticed, until it was too late.

'And some monarchs have no children at all, or have only daughters,' the King continued. 'So then you either have to have a queen, which is not always a popular move – although there have been some remarkable queens in the past – or else you drag in some cousin or other. It's never quite as simple and straightforward as the carving on that stone would have us believe.'

'Indeed, it all sounds rather complicated.'

'It's more than complicated; it's absurd. As a system of government, it is primitive, barbaric even. But understand this, Nielsen: it is what the people want. The idea of bloodlines is deeply ingrained within us. It was the same even in ancient times. That is why people keep telling me I am like my father, when I am nothing at all like him, except for the shape of my nose. They might just as well have taken some foundling from the streets and brought him up to be king. But the people want to believe that I have inherited some magic quality from my ancestors that gives me the right to be their ruler. So there is probably little that I or anyone else can do about that.'

We stopped to get our bearings. We had come to the brow of a hill, and our ships' masts could be seen not far away. Inwardly, I must admit, I felt a little disturbed by the King's apparent disregard for the institution of the monarchy.

'Your father was a popular king,' I ventured.

'He was, and a far better king than I. No, don't protest, it is true. My father would not have lost his throne. He was a simple man, content to live within the boundaries set out for him, do as his counsellors advised, uphold the law, fight the wars and impose the censorship. But I am a curious man. I want to know how things work. I want to know about science, and about the past, and to learn everything I possibly can about the world. I want to see if things can be better than they are. And that is what has made me a believer in knowledge, and a heretic, and has cost me my kingdom.'

'Your throne has not been lost to you, Majesty. I am sure the people are loyal.'

'Yes, well, that's one thing De Martinus and his crew have failed to understand. They are not of the bloodline. They can trumpet the public good all they wish, but the people know they are not their rightful rulers. That is my trump card, and when the time comes, I will play it.'

'And do you think you can win, Majesty?' It was a daring question, but I had to ask it.

He paused for a moment.

'I don't know, Nielsen,' he said at last. 'In battle, no. But there are more ways than one to win a war.'

'You have a plan,' I smiled.

'I have the outline of a plan. Not quite the same thing. And it has such a slim chance of success that I am almost ashamed to ask people to follow me on this quest. Because the fact is, not all of us will see our homes again. Perhaps none of us will. But I am their king, and I must lead. We can only be what we are. Don't you agree?'

'Majesty, I can only say that I am glad I am a clockmaker, and not a king.'

The King laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. As he walked ahead of me down the slope, I noticed that his leggings were dirty from the trek through the forest, and there was a tear in his jacket. For someone as careful with his appearance as the King, this was remarkable. We were not much more than a week out of Kantarborg, and already our fine courtly ways were crumbling. And we had a long and difficult campaign ahead of us. It was a troubling thought.

At dawn the next day, the beach was crowded with hundreds of Irdai tribespeople – men, women and children. There were many more than could possibly have lived in the village we had visited, so it seemed the word had spread – the departure of the Sky God was an event no-one wanted to miss. As a parting gift, they had slaughtered a great many pigs and goats, and even some deer, and our cooks were busy packing the meat into salt barrels. If nothing else, we would dine well in the coming days and weeks. Our parting gift to the Irdai was one that I had suggested to the King the evening before – my model of Freya. I was a little sad to see it go, but I knew it would be prized by the tribespeople for years, perhaps decades.

The day itself was grey and rather overcast, and a little rain fell upon us as we erected the temporary podium upon which the King would give his farewell address. Once the helmsmen were satisfied that the tide and wind conditions were favourable for our departure, the King ascended the platform and began his speech, with Chief Ragnar standing alongside him. Though of small stature, the King looked magnificent in his ermine robes, and to my great surprise, he was even wearing a crown – the first time in our acquaintance that I had ever seen him wearing one. I had no idea that such regalia were even kept on board the airship.

Speaking in Old Kantish, the King praised the Chief and his people for their hospitality, and promised to return to the Irdai very soon. ('I hope the wind does not blow too hard from the west,' muttered Johansson behind me, 'or we will be returning to them rather sooner than we had planned.') In the time to come, the King said, the prophecies would be fulfilled and the incursions of the Northlanders into the forests would be brought to an end once and for all. There was no cheering this time – I suspect because the moment was simply too solemn for the tribespeople. After all, although the King had carefully avoided claiming to be so, many of them regarded him as their messiah. Some had tears in their eyes. The King then switched to Anglian and addressed his own men.

'Loyal men of Kantarborg! You see before you a king without a kingdom. A monarch without a throne. But you also see before you a man who is deeply proud today. I am proud, because I stand in your company. You are the bravest warriors in all of these lands, and there is not one man in all of the northern kingdoms who is the measure of any of you. You have followed me on a deeply uncertain and dangerous mission, into hostile territory, from which there is no guarantee that we will return, simply because you are loyal citizens of Kantarborg, and because I, your King, asked you to do so. That is what makes me proud today.

I will not lie to you. The road ahead is full of perils of which we can know nothing now. We will have to endure many privations and struggles, and there will be times when it will seem that all hope is lost. But I also promise you this – this will be the greatest adventure of your lives. You will one day tell your grandchildren of this journey, of how you followed the King to the far north, into danger and into battle, without hesitation or regret, and there will be men in Kantarborg who will cringe in shame that they were not here with you today. We go forth together now, and I promise you on this day that I will fight at your side until the last breath leaves my body, or our great kingdom of Kantarborg is restored to us at last!'

A great cheer went up from the men. It is at times like this, I thought to myself, that a man like the King really shows his mettle. He might doubt himself, but I could never doubt him. He was my king, and I would willingly die for him.

The King then handed the model of Freya to Chief Ragnar, who embraced him warmly, and to the cheers of the whole crowd, the King mounted the ladder and boarded the airship. The rest of us followed, and a few minutes later Freya lifted gently from the beach and turned out to sea, manoeuvring with its clockwork motors. For once we were not bound to Ariadne, so on the King's orders we climbed higher and higher – always the showman, he no doubt had an eye for the look of the thing as we disappeared into the clouds. And indeed, it must have been a magnificent sight.

Chapter sixteen

The expedition encounters a storm, and a monster

Once we were well out to sea we descended again, reconnected with the rest of our fleet and threw down a line to Ariadne. The weather was grey and a little threatening, the wind skittish. I spent the morning discussing our route with the King and Franzen, the helmsman. There were essentially two ways to sail northwards along the coast; we could either keep to the traditional 'North Way', which involved sailing through the sheltered fjords and passages between the mountainous islands, or we could stick to the open sea. We agreed that the nominally safer route between the islands was probably not the best choice for us, with our limited knowledge of local reefs and sandbanks. We had maps, but these were untrustworthy and might well have been based on originals that were centuries old. We simply could not afford to lose any more ships, so there was nothing for it but to take the tougher route of the open water.

I returned to my post to plot our course, and was engaged in doing so when I heard a great commotion from amidships, with men shouting and pointing over the port side. I went over to find out what all the fuss was about, and saw, in the seas below us, the outline of a great whalefish, heading south. I ran to get my telescope, through which I could see that there were in fact two of the creatures: a large one, presumably a female, and a calf of perhaps half its length. The larger beast was of a stupendous size, not much smaller than one of our warships. Some of the men asked if we should not warn the ships below, but the old hands laughed and said that the great fish were harmless. I understood the men's nervousness, however, as it seemed hardly credible that a beast of such a size could possibly be benign. Just the thought of its mouth, which could surely swallow five or six men at a time, was petrifying. For safety's sake we flashed a message to Ariadne, but the beasts swam past our fleet peacefully enough.

That evening, as though not to be outdone, the crew of Vigilant, the trailing vessel in our fleet, were adamant that they had seen an entire flock of mermaids following in the wake of their ship. None of the other ships saw anything unusual, however, and I was inclined to think that the memory of bare-breasted Irdai tribeswomen may have influenced the perceptions of the crew of Vigilant somewhat. But who could say? Once again it was borne in upon us that we were sailing into unknown waters, where finding explanations for the phenomena we saw around us might challenge even the most rational of men. It was not to be the last time.

The weather was worsening and becoming squally. We were being battered by rain from the west, and in the high winds we were glad of our line to Ariadne. But then, suddenly, this lifeline became itself a source of danger. The winds picked up and became stormy, and the entire airship was being blown helplessly about, with the clockwork motors of little assistance in the gale. There was a real danger that the airship might drag Ariadne onto the rocks; but if the ship let go the line, there was no telling where Freya would end up – perhaps wrecked on the impassable mountains to the east. To their great credit the crew of Ariadne kept their nerve and did not cast us off, and after some very frightening hours we managed to find an inlet leading to a fjord where we could take shelter.

I had never imagined that mountains could be so vast, or so steep. Inside the fjord, we were reduced to the size of mere ants by the immense dark slopes, and all our human endeavours seemed equally insignificant. In our own country, I reflected, it was man and the affairs of man that dominated nature; here it was very much the other way around. Nature was in command, and mankind had to respect it, or die.

We anchored there, with Freya crouching low above the ships, and waited rather tensely for the storm to pass. The King was quietly furious, muttering about the need to get to the north before the weather grew any colder. Examining the shoreline with my telescope, I remarked that at least there was no sign of autumn on the trees yet. The King looked at me as though I had made some kind of stupid joke, then in growing incredulity as he realised I was serious.

'Good God, Nielsen, you are not seriously telling me that you did not know that the trees here remain green right through the winter? Where do you think Yule trees come from? I know you are a city boy, but did you learn nothing about the natural world in school?'

I admitted that I had indeed been a poor school student, but I could not recall the subject ever being mentioned. We had learned about the geography of Kantarborg and its neighbours, of course, and a little about the known world in general, but the ordinary flora and fauna of the world about us had never been a teaching priority. (Although I did not wish to say so to the King, I also had the feeling that part of the explanation was fear on the part of the scholars of treading into forbidden areas, such as geology.)

'Remind me of that when I return to the throne, Nielsen. I will make it a priority to see to it that every schoolchild in the realm has an adequate understanding of nature. This will not do.'

I nodded my assent, and gratefully dropped the subject. I had no wish for the King to discover any further gaps in my knowledge, of which there were many, as I was painfully discovering every day.

The heavy rain eventually stopped and the wind dropped, although the sky was still low and threatening, with clouds boiling around the mountaintops. We brought Freya up again as far as the line would allow in order to scan the landscape, and from this height, the remains of a town could be seen at the water's edge on the opposite side of the fjord. Although the King was anxious to be away, his curiosity got the better of him, and he ordered a couple of boats to be put out and sent across the fjord to see if there was anything there that could be of use to us.

While this expedition was gone, the King received a delegation of helmsmen and senior officers, led by War Counsellor Samuelson, who put it to him that it had become far too dangerous now to sail at night. Our mission had almost met with catastrophe that day, and it was only by chance that the storm had struck during the hours of daylight. Had it been dark, we might have been unable to find a fjord in which to shelter, in which case Ariadne or Freya, or perhaps both, would certainly have been lost.

The King listened to their arguments with visible impatience, but he was forced to concede that they had merit. The officers were seasoned and experienced men and did not make such requests lightly. It was agreed that from now on the fleet would sail only in daylight, and that we would seek an anchorage each evening – the coastline fortunately being rich in estuaries and inlets large enough to accommodate all our vessels. But the days were rapidly growing shorter, so this strategy left us with precious little sailing time. We would have to make as much headway as we possibly could while the sun was up.

After some hours the boats returned from across the water, and there was a great commotion. The men had found no signs of human life in the town, but Simonsen, one of the younger cadets, claimed he had seen the body of a dead monster inside one of the buildings. Some of the men laughed, but Simonsen angrily insisted that the thing he had seen was real, and no mere shadow. He was clearly shaken.

The King was interested in this account and decided that he wished to see this monster for himself, so a boat was sent back across the fjord, this time carrying the King and myself, as well as five other men, including Simonsen. The King rowed along with the rest, while I was placed in the stern with the rudder. I was a little resentful of this frank appraisal of my abilities, but it was of course quite sensible: someone had to steer the boat, and, not being a seaman, I was obviously the most suitable.

The waters of the fjord were relatively still now, but black and ominous in appearance. A cold mist hung over the waters, and there was silence all around us, save for the occasional echoing cry of a gull. With all this talk of monsters, it was easy to imagine some horror dwelling in the depths – perhaps like the whalefish we had seen previously – which might emerge with a roar and swallow our little rowing-boat in a single bite... I pushed the thought away. It would not do to lose your nerve when people were depending on you. I had at least acquired that much of a mariner's discipline.

After about twenty minutes we reached the far side of the fjord, where a stone jetty remained, at the edge of an ancient harbour. We climbed out and explored the remains of the town, which presented a desolate appearance. Clearly, no human being had lived here for some very considerable time. Few of the buildings had roofs, and many were mere blackened ruins. Everything that could be plundered had long since been plundered, and everything that could be burned had been burned. There was nothing here for us.

Simonsen led the way to a single-storey, boxlike building towards the edge of the town. He showed us the entrance, but refused to go inside. We passed through the remains of what had probably been a large glass door – there were fragments of glass everywhere – and into the gloom of an official-looking building. It certainly looked as though a monster could have been on the rampage here, as all of the doors and cupboards had been smashed and were lying askew, and there was rubble all over the floor. Books – discarded as useless by whoever had plundered the building – lay scattered all around. The King picked up a few and perused them with interest.

'This one might be useful,' he said, and showed it to me.

It was written in something resembling Old Kantish, and seemed to describe the tribes of the far north. But the pages were crumbling and almost illegible. He picked up another. This one contained a diagram of some kind of platform at sea. From it, a long, needle-like pipe was shown descending to the sea bed, and even deep beneath it. The King studied it with interest.

'It's a rig!'

'What is a rig, sire?'

'Well, etymologically, the word is related to the Kantish word for 'riches' and 'realm'. I believe that this was one of the ways they drew up riches from the Irrational Layer in ancient times. Like a mosquito drawing blood. But in drawing up energy, they also drew up irrationality, and it sent them mad.'

There was a shout from one of the men, and we hurried over to see what he had found. He stood at the doorway to a central hall, and was pointing in at where the body of the monster lay stretched out across the floor. It was quite clearly long dead, as nothing but its skeleton remained, but we still approached it with trepidation, the men's hands poised over their weapons. Apart from the whalefish, this was the largest creature I had ever seen in my life. It lay on the ground in a pose of struggle, and was the length of at least six men. It had gigantic, powerful leg bones and cruel gnarled claws that grasped at the air. Its skull alone was as big as an ox. The jaws were filled with an array of sharp teeth, each up to a foot long. We stood around it, staring in awe.

'I have seen pictures of such creatures in the old books,' said the King quietly. 'They are said to come from the underground. No doubt there was a mine around here somewhere. The miners must have accidentally set this thing loose from the Irrational Layer, and it preyed upon them. But it seems to have met its death in this place. The townspeople must have trapped it here and killed it.'

'Sire,' asked one of the men, 'do such things still dwell in the underground in this country?'

'I cannot tell,' said the King. 'But clearly, anyone who systematically disturbs the Irrational Layer will pay a price. There are many old tales of dragons in caves, guarding the treasures of the Earth.'

We gazed at the creature in silence. Some of the men crossed themselves.

Taking one of the creature's sabre-like teeth with us as evidence of our story, we returned to our vessels in sombre mood. The story of the monster spread rapidly among the ship's crews, and there was a great deal of muttering in corners. For the first time, I saw men wearing lucky talismans for protection. It was not, I felt, a good sign.

The next day, however, dawned bright and sunny, and we gratefully left the gloomy fjord and its horrors behind us and set out once again on our northward journey. I spent the rest of the day updating our navigational charts, which placed the fjord somewhat further to the east than I calculated it to be. (I had heard the theory that the Earth shifts its position over centuries in relation to magnetic north, but this struck me as a scientific impossibility. Human fallibility seemed a rather more likely explanation.) The town we had seen was not marked on the map, so I drew it in. 'Call it Miasma,' said the King. I had no idea what that might mean, but I duly wrote down the name, adding the warning that there were dragons in the vicinity.

Having seen the usefulness of my model of Freya, the King took me off navigational duties for a while and asked me to make some more items that might be suitable as diplomatic gifts. The airship workshop was well stocked with materials, but the tools, as you might imagine, were rather crude and quite unsuitable for horological work. However, Vulcan was equipped with an entire blacksmith's forge for maintaining the fleet's weaponry, and Jensen, its smith, made me up a very serviceable set of small pliers, stamps and hammerheads on my instructions. Using these, while I might not be able to produce a whole timepiece from scratch, I was sure I could work up some reasonably good clockwork devices. I also borrowed a magnifying glass from the map room and set it up on a stand on my bench.

I was engaged in this work when the King called me up to the map room, where he was gazing through the telescope. He handed the instrument to me.

'Look up ahead there to the north-west. Tell me what you see.'

At first I could see nothing in the glare of the sun upon the waves, but then, a strange angular object began to appear on the horizon. I adjusted the lens, and the outline of a platform became clear.

'Majesty, it's a rig!' I said. 'But it's huge!' I could gradually make out what appeared to be a vast collection of cranes, towers and buildings on top of the structure. 'It's as big as a whole town.'

'Just so,' said the King. 'Much larger than I had ever imagined. And if you look to the right and left, there appear to be more of them. There must be at least five. No wonder they drew up every drop of the Earth's blood! We should take a closer look at them, don't you think?'

The idea filled me with dismay.

'Majesty, the men...'

The King looked at me in puzzlement, then grimaced in disgust as he realised the problem.

'Oh, God's teeth! That thing yesterday has put the wind up them. We should never have gone near that cursed town.'

He let out a sigh of exasperation.

'I suppose you're right. If that rig out there penetrated down to the Irrational Layer, it could be crawling with monsters. But surely we could fly a little closer and take a look from above?'

'There might be flying monsters, I suppose, Majesty?'

'But this is a ship of war! These men are supposed to be warriors!'

He threw out his arms.

'It's always the same story with soldiers, isn't it? Show them an army with muskets, swords and cannons, and they will fight to their last drop of blood. But show them something they do not understand, and they become like mewling infants!'

He sighed again.

'Draw them for me, would you, Nielsen? I would at least like to record their appearance.'

I fetched my journal and began to sketch the view through the telescope. The closest of the rigs appeared to have once had a great tower upon it, but this was now crumpled and bent in the middle, hanging perilously out over the sea like some kind of proboscis. Together with the giant legs beneath the platform, the effect was indeed not unlike the 'mosquito' to which the King had previously compared it. The King watched the rigs slip past on the horizon with great frustration, but he gave no order to go any closer, to my secret relief. I do not pretend to have the heart of a king, and I remembered those long, sharp teeth with utter horror.

Chapter seventeen

Danger by fire

The King was still worried about the weather. He spent much time with his spyglass, scanning the shoreline, where snow now covered the mountain peaks. The skies were low and threatening, the winds changeable and occasionally violent. Sometimes flurries of snowflakes whirled around the airship in a mad, twisting dance. I had never before seen snow so early in the season; in Kantarborg snow rarely falls before Yule, and in some winters there is no snow at all.

The men, too, were full of unease. The religious ones were muttering prayers, while the superstitious had amulets around their wrists or necks. There was a feeling of foreboding on board, not helped by the grey, chilly conditions and dark mountains.

I escaped from the gloomy atmosphere by fashioning my toys, as I called them. One of them was a butterfly that could flap its copper wings. Using a recipe I remembered from my student days, I produced an enamelling powder from crushed tinted glass, and coloured the butterfly's wings in Freya's small kiln, which gave a most pleasing effect. It was, I felt, fine enough to serve as a diplomatic gift – at least in the far north, where more sophisticated devices might well be unknown. I showed it to the King, who was delighted with it, and fulsome in his praise. I also made a tiny model of the clockwork locomotive – a model of a machine that itself was based on a toy. Although much smaller than the King's original toy train, it could run in circles on a piece of cardboard with grooves cut into the surface. For variation, I added a cardboard tunnel that ran beneath a small 'mountain'. Watching the little device disappear and emerge again had some kind of calming, hypnotic effect on me, in a childish sort of way.

Despite our resolution to stick to the open sea, we passed between a number of islands when the passage was wide and the waters seemed deep. From Freya we were able to see quite far down into the depths, and so could spot submerged rocks and sandbanks that were invisible to the crews on the ships below. We were therefore much occupied with surveying the way ahead and, when necessary, flashing warnings of course changes to the fleet.

Curiously, the further north we sailed, the more relics of the ancient times became visible. In our own country almost all traces of the Electric Age had vanished many years ago after the wars and the concrete blight, which caused many of the works of that time to crumble into dust. Here, though, we could see the remains of towns and villages all along the coast, but no sign of life. They all appeared to be as ruined and empty as the town where we had seen our monster. One evening, as we approached a river estuary to spend the night, I thought I saw a light, as of a bonfire, in the distant hills, but it was gone before I could draw anyone's attention to it.

Then, early on the morning of the fourth day after the storm, we saw what at first appeared to be a large island dead ahead. It was soon joined by other mountainous ridges, which seemed to form an impenetrable barrier from the west to the east. The King and his officers consulted the maps, and were in agreement: we had reached our goal. The fleet turned to the east and began to follow the wide fjord inwards towards the mainland. That evening, as the sun was dipping low on the western horizon, we arrived at the remains of some kind of industrial town, which they said was Jernhavn. As the goal of such a trying journey, it perhaps left something to be desired; on that day, it seemed it would be hard to imagine a bleaker spot. In the shadow of a vast, brooding, snow-capped mountain lay many quays and ruined buildings, together with the crumbling remains of cranes and other large installations. Dangers also lurked beneath the water surface: Freya had to urgently flash a message to the ships below to warn them to avoid the hulks of what appeared to be the remains of enormous sunken ships in the harbour. From our vantage point, we eventually spotted a quay that looked to be free of such threats, and we directed the ships to moor there. The long stone mole lay a little south of the town itself, with some kind of large industrial complex on one side, and the steep, tree-clad mountainside on the other. Once the ships had safely docked, we descended and tied off a few feet above the water.

The King, sensing that the men were in sore need of some recreation, announced that there would be a feast to celebrate our arrival. We built a large bonfire on the quayside with wood from abandoned buildings, and the cooks unpacked the salt barrels containing the meat the Irdai had given us, and began to roast it on the fire. A simple repast, but with bread and triple rations of rum, it very soon resembled one of the finest meals any of us had ever tasted.

Afterwards, as darkness fell, the men began to play cards. Some of them gambled for the remaining rations of rum, which of course left a few men very drunk and a lot of others very angry. In the inevitable fights that followed, the officers eventually had to intervene and throw some of the combatants in the brig. But things had quietened down, and most of the men had found their bunks, when we on board Freya were suddenly startled awake by someone urgently ringing the alarm bell. 'Fire, fire!' was the distant shout, at which the men leapt from their hammocks and ran for the deck. Above us, we could at once see the extent of the disaster; one of Freya's hydrogen balloons was being consumed in an inferno of flame, and it was clear that the others were about to be lost, too.

The King appeared in his nightgown and shouted to the men to release the balloons.

'Don't untie them – chop the ropes!' he yelled, and began to hack at the nearest ropes with his sword. The men took axes and knives, and did likewise. I grabbed a metal saw from my workshop and joined in. The heat of the flames was immense – we were all sweating, and bits of the rigging were falling down among us in flames. The deck began to pitch forward as the foremost ropes came free, then with a groaning, cracking sound the remaining ropes snapped and the hull of Freya crashed down into the water beneath. The flaming balloons rose up and away, taking my beloved crow's nest with them, and drifted out across the harbour, flapping and turning like some vast fire-breathing dragon, until they gradually descended and fell into the black waters.

'If the entire country didn't already know we were here,' the King remarked, 'they certainly do now.'

The men extinguished the remaining fires on the deck. All in all, it could have been a lot worse. The fire had been kept away from the powder magazine, which if it had exploded would have killed us all, and the airship's stores had all been preserved. There were a few minor injuries among the crew, but nothing serious. The assumption was that some stray sparks from the dying bonfire must have blown across in the breeze and landed in Freya's balloon rigging. So now Freya was a ship like any other, albeit one in need of conventional masts and rigging – and if she was going home again, it would be by sea.

Next morning, however, a much more worrying version of events began to emerge. A young rating said he had been relieving himself at the quayside, looking away from the bonfire and towards the mountainside, when he saw a number of flaming arrows fly overhead and hit the balloons. He was closely questioned in the Map Room, but stuck by his account.

'And they were not incendiaries? You're quite sure?' asked the King.

'No, sire. They made no sound, like an incendiary does. There was a bunch of them – three or four. They came over one after the other.'

'And they came from the quayside?'

'From the east, sir – over there.' He pointed in the direction of the land end of the quay, where an ancient roadway skirted the mountain.

The officers exchanged glances. We had been under attack, and had not even realised it. The boy was thanked and dismissed.

'Tribesmen?' asked the King, as the door closed.

'Quite possibly,' said Johansson. 'But if they knew to use flaming arrows...'

The implications were clear to everyone. These were no mere primitive savages. They knew what airships were, and how to attack them.

Commander Hain of Steadfast had been in the north before. 'If the local tribes turn against us we are in trouble,' he said. 'They are few in number and not well armed, but they know the terrain. They could easily destroy our supplies, pick us off one by one.'

'Then it is imperative we make contact with them,' said the King. 'We must get them on our side. I am sure the Northlanders are as much of a bother to them as they are to the Irdai.'

'Is it possible they thought we were the Northlanders?' I ventured.

'Either way, we must find them and convince them otherwise,' said the King. 'Nielsen, come with me. Let's take a walk and see where those arrows came from.'

There had been some light snow during the night, which brightened up the morning gloom somewhat. We walked down along the quay, at the end of which we saw something that immediately excited the King's interest: railway tracks. We had not seen them the evening before, as they were recessed into the ground, but they were very definitely tracks, and moreover, they looked to be the same gauge as our locomotive. They led off in the direction of the industrial complex further along the harbour.

'And look at this, Nielsen!' said the King, touching the rails, which were free of rust. 'These are not ancient. They have been in use. Not recently, but not very long ago, either.'

'The tribes have a locomotive, Majesty?'

I had trouble envisioning that. It would require workshops and foundries – not things you would expect nomads to have on hand.

'Not the tribes, Nielsen. The Northlanders. They have been here. And my guess is, they are not popular with the locals.'

So the Northlanders were developing railway technology, too. Had they been doing this for some time, or was this another of the fruits of Hansen's treachery? (And, when I had time to think about it, I wondered how much the King had known about all of this in advance. He had hardly brought the locomotive all the way from Kantarborg on a whim.)

We crossed the tracks and the old roadway, and walked towards a ruined building. Behind it, we found what we were looking for: the charred remains of a fire. This was where our attackers had lit their arrows, keeping the flames of their fire out of sight. The mountainside rose up steeply behind the building – it looked an impossible slope, but they must have come down from there.

'They could only have been tribesmen, then,' said the King. 'I can't imagine Northlanders scaling that.'

There was no sign of footprints – only the pawmarks of some kind of large dog in the snow, which at least indicated that there must be human beings around somewhere.

We walked back in the direction of the quay. It was a grey, cold day. The wind whipped in across the harbour, making me shiver in my tunic.

'How will we make contact with them?' I asked.

'I don't know,' said the King frankly. 'It may be that they will make contact with us first, one way or the other. But let us first get established here, and then...'

His voice trailed off. He had spotted a small black rock close to the railway line. He picked it up and handled it, lost in thought.

'What is it, Majesty?' I asked.

'I must talk to Johansson at once,' was all the King would say. We hurried back to the ships.

Later, from the deck of Freya, I saw the King and Johansson in animated conversation on the quayside. The King was holding the rock he had found earlier.

I suppressed the pang of jealousy I always felt when I saw the King confiding in someone else. It was his way – the instinct born of a life spent at court. Never tell anyone the whole truth. Make people compete for your favour. Never let them feel secure.

I walked down the gangplank from the airship and approached them, as though entirely innocent of the idea that anything should be kept secret from me.

'If they have the blackstone, it changes everything,' the King was saying. Johansson nodded gravely. As I approached, Johansson took his leave of the King and walked back towards his own vessel.

'What stone is that, Majesty?' I asked.

The King paused, as though wondering how much to tell me.

'Look,' he said at last. 'I'll show you.'

We walked over to the remains of the previous night's bonfire, still smouldering on the quay. The King threw the stone into the embers, where it soon began to glow red, and then burst into flame.

The significance of this was quite lost upon me, although I had never before seen a stone that could burn. But I was seeing many things on this trip that I had never seen before. I could not imagine what it was about this stone that was making the King look so concerned.

'When we build steam engines, we fire them with wood,' the King explained. 'So do the Northlanders. That is why they are impractical for us – we have very little forest land, so they are much too expensive and difficult for us to use. The Northlanders have more wood, but it still requires a lot of labour. But there is a special stone that can burn much better than wood. The trouble is, it must be mined from layers deep in the Irrational Layer, and then only in certain regions of the world. I had no idea it could be found up here. The ancient books make no mention of it.'

I still could not see the problem.

'But why would that make a difference, Majesty? They may have steam engines, but we have clockwork and wind power.'

'Iron and steam, Nielsen. It's a fatal combination. If the Northlanders have both of those, Kantarborg cannot prevail against them. They could build iron steamships like those of the ancients that could sail in any wind conditions, with powerful cannons that could sink our customs vessels. And that would remove our main source of income. Our kingdom would be absorbed by the Northlanders. It would be inevitable. But iron and steam demand the blackstone. Without that, the possibilities of the technology are very limited.'

'Perhaps they do not have much of the blackstone? Most of it must have been used up in ancient times?'

'It seems that they must have it in abundance, because it looks as though they have been exporting it from here. Why else build a railway line to this godforsaken port?'

He looked out across the fjord.

'Come with me, Nielsen – I need to think.'

We walked down the quays and along the old road towards the town. Here the King found a stone railway bridge, clearly of ancient origin, with which he was fascinated.

'Look at those materials, think of the expenditure of energy!' he marvelled. 'All for a bridge. They were rich beyond belief, and never knew it.'

Indeed the whole area seemed to be criss-crossed with railway lines. It would have required vast amounts of iron to build so many lines, I remarked to the King.

'Iron, they always had around here,' he said. 'There was so much of it that it was even exported in ancient times. And now it seems the Northlanders have started up that trade again. But why? Why not keep what little is left? And what could they get in return? What could possibly be so valuable that you would trade iron and blackstone for it...?'

Suddenly the King stopped, and laughed out loud.

'Nielsen, I am an idiot! Tell me I am an idiot!'

'If you insist, Majesty...,' I stammered. 'You are an idiot.'

'A hanging offence, insulting the monarch!' he laughed, and turned to walk back to the ships.

I hurried to catch up with him.

'Sire, I beg of you, for once tell me the truth!' My voice betrayed my feelings rather more than I had intended.

He stopped, and turned to me with a serious look.

'But I always tell you the truth, Karl. Just... not all of it. Not always. It's for your own protection.'

'Just this once, Majesty. Let me take the chance.'

'Well... it's quite simple. The ancient books were right – there never was any blackstone in this region. The Northlanders are not exporting it – they are bringing it in! And that means they have no blackstone of their own. Which makes the prospects much brighter for Kantarborg – and for our mission!'

He marched off, reinvigorated and full of his customary energy, while I followed behind, struggling as usual to keep up – in more ways than one.

Chapter eighteen

The expedition departs

The next morning we held a council of officers to decide what to do next. I jest, of course. In fact, the King held a council and issued orders to everyone else. A party of scouts was to be sent out to map out the town, and specifically, the local railway lines. A group of engineers would be sent to find some suitable rails that could be brought back and built into the quay alongside the ships. On this track we were to set up the wheeled crane on the quayside, and the windmill was to be erected to charge up the pods. We were to build defensive ramparts and fences at a suitable distance from the ships, and man them permanently with guards. In short, our little corner of the harbour was to be transformed into a military fortress, capable of withstanding anything short of an all-out assault by the Northlanders. Despite our skirmishes in the Sound, we were not actually at war with the Northlanders – at least, not yet – but our presence at their western outlet to the sea was bound to be regarded as provocative.

In fact, all things considered, it was odd that we had as yet seen no sign of the Northlanders. The harbour had clearly been used by them in the recent past, but now there was nothing to indicate that there had been any activity there at all for many months.

The King was of the opinion that the blackstone was being brought in from the islands to the far north, where the old books claimed there had been mines in ancient times. But perhaps the sailings had ceased for the winter. Or perhaps the miners had run into other difficulties. He didn't need to spell out what those difficulties might be.

Once the fortifications had been completed, we would hold a council of war, at which, at last, the King's plans would be revealed. This was what most of the men were looking forward to. I, of course, was the exception.

None of the scouts seemed at all surprised at being asked to trace the course of tracks for machines that, in our official Kantish history, were deemed not to have existed. It was clear that, as the King had once said to me, even the dogs in the street in Kantarborg knew that there once had been railways. What pious nonsense it had been to try to pretend otherwise! When they returned, the scouts reported seeing both ancient iron trucks and modern wooden ones on the tracks, with Northlandish markings – proof positive that the Northlanders had reopened the ancient line. Otherwise, the news was both good and bad. Yes, the tracks at the end of our quay were connected to the other lines. By a slightly circuitous route, we could progress to what appeared to be a main line heading east out of the town towards the mountains, in the direction of the Northlands. The bad news was that immediately upon leaving the town, the line entered a tunnel. The scouts had walked down it for some distance, but, fearful of what they might find down there, they had eventually given up and turned back. Since the line was passing through a highly mountainous district, the probability was that there many such tunnels, perhaps even longer than this one. If we were going to make an expedition with the locomotive, as it seemed we were, it would take men with strong nerves to face that blackness beneath the rocks. No-one wanted to say the world 'troll', but we had all heard the stories.

But the Northlanders had clearly travelled on that line and survived. The empty Northlandish trucks lined up on sidings near the harbour bore traces of having carried both blackstone and iron. In fact, there was so much blackstone lying around that the men began bringing it back in buckets for our cooking stoves, where it burned fiercely and merrily, although the cooks complained that it made a terrible mess when you had to clear it up afterwards.

It took us three days to get everything ready, especially because daylight was limited. The King had been quite right: the sun barely seemed to crawl above the horizon here. We had perhaps six hours of usable light each day now to get things done, and that time was shortening all the while. Finally, however, the windmill, set up at the end of the quay, was spinning steadily in the breeze from the fjord, and a pile of charged-up pods gradually rose up beside it. The engineers laid the temporary tracks along the dock, and the locomotive and its carriages and trucks were winched ashore.

The men began oiling their guns and practising their shooting and swordsmanship in anticipation of the coming battle into which, they felt sure, their king was about to lead them. There was an atmosphere of tense anticipation.

The council of war was called on the fourth day. We were a larger group of officers than usual – as advisor to the King, I had by now assumed de facto officer status – and so could not all fit into the map room on Freya; instead, we filled the galley of Ariadne, sitting where we could, or standing along the walls. The King addressed the officers himself, with Johansson standing beside him. Pinned to the wall behind him was a map of the northern regions, so far as they were known.

The King indicated the probable route of the railway line eastwards across the mountains to the Northlands. It was believed, he said, that this was where the Northlanders were building their northern fastness and industrial centre, far from foreign borders. The size of the enemy forces in this region was unknown, but it was thought they might well number several thousand. A small murmur of unease spread through the room. It was beginning to sound like a suicide mission.

But what the King said next took everybody by surprise.

'You men know me as a soldier, as a man of war. But we must remember why we are here. Our goal is not necessarily to attack the Northlanders. Our goal is to regain the kingdom of Kantarborg. We will therefore fight only if attacked, and then only to defend ourselves – as you did so bravely during the voyage here.'

'The coup by De Martinus and his gang had been anticipated. For some months in advance, our loyal forces had been putting spies into Northlander territory, to prepare the ground, in case this mission should prove necessary. Consequently, I believe we know more about the Northlanders' situation than they themselves suspect. That knowledge is our strongest card, and we will play it only when the time is ripe. I am asking for your trust on this point, and I believe that you will give it to me.'

He paused.

'Our force on the expedition will comprise fifty men.'

There was a gasp of shock in the room. This was not what they had been expecting.

'The rest of you will remain here and maintain this position for the winter. If we are not back by the spring equinox, and you have received no message from us, you are to sail to Kantarborg and surrender. Those are my orders. The men who are to take part in the mission will be informed shortly. We will leave as soon as the locomotive and its train are ready.'

For the journey, the King chose mainly men with specific skills: engineers, navigators, scouts, sharpshooters, and a few officers, including Johansson, who, being from a Northlander family, could speak both Northlandish and a little of the local tribal language. There was also a cook and a doctor, and myself, to look after the locomotive. I was to be engine driver until such time as I could train up a suitable apprentice – but there was no shortage of volunteers for the job. On the King's orders, the windmill was dismantled and packed onto its truck – we would be bringing it with us across the mountains. The King also reminded me to bring along my mechanical 'toys' from Freya. We loaded our pods, tents, provisions, weapons and tools onto the open trucks and went on board. Some of us could sit in the two carriages – the rest sat outside on the trucks. Most of the men had never even seen our clockwork train before, never mind ridden on it, so it was a very exciting occasion for all. I climbed into the cab, the King waved from out of the window of his carriage, and the men lining the track gave us a great cheer as we set off gently down the quay and through the wooden gate that had been erected in the defensive ramparts. However, our grand departure was marred somewhat when we came to an abrupt halt at the end of the quay. The bend that the engineers had laid down to bring us onto the dockside track, and which had been tested only with a truck, turned out to be too tight a radius for the locomotive to traverse. The crane was hurriedly summoned, and the locomotive was hoisted in a somewhat undignified manner and set down again on the tracks leading towards the town. Once the train was connected up again the men gave another cheer, and we set off once more – though, for safety's sake, at barely walking speed, and followed by an armed escort of twenty men on foot to get us safely through the town.

It was an eerie experience to pass through the remnants of what must once have been a thriving city, with roads, warehouses and houses – all now ruined and abandoned, and many of them blackened and burned. There was no sign of life anywhere, but it was impossible to let go of the feeling that we were being watched. The clanking and clattering of our little train echoed against the bare walls, which, here and there, bore traces of ancient writing, apparently in Old Kantish. We halted a couple of times while the engineers cleared the line of debris or switched some points with the aid of mallets. The day was brighter than the previous days had been, and there was a little blue in the sky here and there, but the wind from the fjord was biting. As we turned onto the main line, I saw row upon row of ancient rusting iron trucks in a siding, each of them as big as our little locomotive, which I doubt could have hauled even one such truck for any appreciable distance. I wondered to myself what kind of locomotive could have moved so many. Such machines must have been a wondrous sight to see. But the energy they would have required... it appalled the mind to think of it. The ancients must have lived like kings, with such energy riches. At least, for as long as it lasted.

After twenty minutes or so we arrived at a ruined building on the outskirts of the town which might once have been the local station. Here our armed escort wished us good luck and turned back to the quays. From now on, we were on our own.

I started the locomotive up again, keeping the speed very low, and our train rose up a gentle grassy incline towards the tunnel in the mountainside. I was determined not to show any nervousness in front of the men, but it was difficult not to think of the mouth of some huge beast. Thanks to the King, I had been underground before, but for the rest of our party this was no doubt a completely new and terrifying experience. No-one from Kantarborg ever willingly ventured into the Irrational Layer.

I had stationed a man at the front of the locomotive with a wind-up electric lamp, but it proved unnecessary, as the tunnel was a lot shorter than we had been led to believe by our nervous scouts. The exit was visible right from the start, and although I held my breath for the minute or so it took us to traverse it, we passed through the tunnel without problems – only to see another just ahead. We continued like this for some time, in and out of tunnels, while the track continued to climb steadily up the mountainside. So far, we had encountered no trolls or ogres, or even the arrows of local tribesmen. When we emerged from the tunnels the waters of the fjord could be seen to our left, with the slope becoming ever steeper and more precipitous. Eventually, the line seemed to be just barely clinging to the mountainside. If the tribesmen were to attack us now, we would be helpless. In the light of such a prospect, the tunnels began to appear benign – almost a kind of refuge. There were plenty of trees around, but they were thin and small in stature, probably due to the cold local climate. After a few hours we began to see the end of the fjord, and I wondered what new environment we were about to encounter.

The King opened the door of the carriage behind me and joined me on the locomotive footplate. He began to use his spyglass to scan the way ahead. If he knew where we were going, he gave no sign of it. 'Like sailing a ship,' he mouthed to me with a smile, above the noise of the engine.

The line began to descend a little now, curving down away from the mountainside and into a wide, barren-looking valley between the mountains at the end of the fjord. The King continued to spy ahead, and all at once he shouted, 'Stop! Stop the train!'

Ahead of us was an iron bridge. We climbed down from the locomotive and walked along the tracks to inspect its condition. The bridge appeared to be sound, but there were signs that it had been repaired in the not too distant past. The King pointed at some objects in the river valley far below, and passed the spyglass to me so that I might inspect them. They appeared to be the remains of iron girders and some wooden beams, lying scattered in disarray.

The light was failing as the sun descended behind the mountains, so the King decided to call a halt for the night. The men began pitching their tents and gathering firewood. As dusk fell, I saw, far up in the hills on the other side of the bridge, something glittering. A cooking fire. The tribes were not far away.

For the King and myself, and a few of the officers, there was accommodation on board the two carriages. We had brought a few buckets of the blackstone with us, and the stove in the carriage kept us warm and comfortable. I began to appreciate why the King had insisted on having it installed. After dinner, the King and I played cards and drank rum at the small dining table. We were playing Kings and Queens, a game popular in Kantarborg, but the King was playing badly, his mind elsewhere.

'Luck is not with your Majesty this evening,' I observed, as I won another round.

'Luck...' murmured the King, distractedly. The sound of singing could be heard from the campfire outside. I was glad the poor wretches did not seem to be suffering too much from the cold.

'Nielsen, I need your thoughts,' said the King, as I dealt. 'The bridge, as far as we can see, is safe. But it has been destroyed in the recent past, perhaps several times. What does that tell you?'

'That would depend on whether it was destroyed deliberately or by natural causes, sire.'

'I think we can assume deliberately. We are too far away from the mountain slope for rockfalls, and no storm could have brought down an iron structure like that.'

'Well, then that would suggest conflict, Majesty. The local tribes, I suppose.'

'Exactly. They must have resented the incursions by the Northlanders. But now, when they have the chance to attack, they leave the bridge alone. Why?'

'Perhaps they were defeated by the Northlanders?'

The King shook his head.

'No military force could guard this bridge permanently, in such terrain. And a defeated tribe would be even more inclined to sabotage it.'

'Then perhaps the Northlanders have reached some kind of agreement with the tribes? Bought them off?'

The King played the ace of spades.

'That's what I was thinking,' he said. 'But with what? Gold is no use to them. What would you offer them?'

'Weapons? Alcohol? No – blackstone!'

I played the queen of hearts and collected the King's cards again.

'You're getting better at this game, Nielsen!' said the King with a smile. I was not quite sure which game he was referring to.

'Blackstone must be the answer,' he went on. 'There is some forest here, but blackstone would make life a lot more comfortable for the tribes in the winter. The Northlanders had plenty of it by the looks of things, and if the tribes misbehaved, they could turn off the supply, just like a tap. Now that would be clever.'

We folded up the card table and began to make the bunks ready.

'What all this means is that we cannot pass through this territory without the approval of the tribes,' said the King. 'For all we know, the bridge could be booby-trapped. Or even if it is not, we would stand no chance here if they decided to attack us. Tomorrow, I will send out scouts to contact them. We must offer them something. I don't know what, yet. I will sleep on it.'

That night, in the warmth of the carriage, I dreamed of Erika Thorne. It was a melancholy dream, as despite my best efforts I had never quite managed to forget her. When I awoke I lay for a while in my bunk and wondered about her. Perhaps she had been released now, under the new regime. Or perhaps they, too, considered her a dangerous radical. For some reason, she seemed to consider me her betrayer – but I had spent just one night with her, and had told no-one of it. True, when I was alone in her college room, I had looked at some of her books and notes. Perhaps she had noticed that when she came home. Then, when she was arrested, it would be logical to suspect me. But I could not rid myself of the thought that there was more to all this, somehow.

Outside, it was a changed world. It had snowed again during the night, and the whole valley, which had looked so dreary and desolate the day before, now appeared magical and enchanting. There was not as yet so much snow that it would impede our progress with the train, but it was clear that if much more came, we would have a problem. I began to appreciate why the King had been so intent on getting north before the weather turned cold. Now, perhaps, it was already too late.

Two scouts were sent out, on skis: a young man named Ebsen, who was strong and fit, and Johansson, to act as interpreter. I stood with the King as we watched the two men pick their way slowly and gingerly across the bridge, then strap on their skis and disappear in the direction in which I had seen the cooking fires the previous night.

'Have you decided what you will offer the tribes, Majesty?' I asked.

'I've told the scouts to find out what they want, first. It's a different situation to the Irdai. They may not be interested in being liberated from the Northlanders. They may not care about the railway one way or the other, as long as they are left in peace. But if the Northlanders are interfering with them in some way, we may have a bargaining point. We still do not know why they attacked us in Jernhavn. Did they think we were Northlanders, or were they acting on the Northlanders' behalf? All this has to be cleared up. In the meantime, the scouts are to say that we are on an important diplomatic mission, and that we respectfully request the tribes' permission to cross their land.'

It was an unusually forthcoming piece of information from the King. Perhaps he had taken my plea to heart and decided to take me more into his confidence.

For the next few days, while we waited for the scouts to return, the engineers set about improvising a wooden snow plough for the locomotive. They eventually came up with a device that could clear away a couple of feet of snow without us having to stop. Any more than that, however, and we would have to resort to the shovels. I wondered how much snow normally fell in these regions in the course of a winter. Five feet? Ten? If that much fell, no amount of shovelling would get us through – all we could do would be to wait until spring. But we did not have enough food for that.

For this reason, and to keep the men occupied, the King ordered hunting parties to be organised. There ought to be hare around, and perhaps deer – but the men were under strict orders not to touch any reindeer they saw, as they would almost certainly belong to the local tribes.

There was little danger of that, however, because these men were soldiers and sailors, not hunters, and on their first forays into the woods they made an appalling din which would have frightened off any wildlife. After that it was decided that the hunting parties would be limited to two or three people only.

One of these groups consisted of the King and myself, though I suspect that his primary motivation for volunteering was to get away from the men and be able to think for a bit. We were armed with muskets and bows, although I was a poor shot with both and unlikely, I felt, to be of much help.

At least I was good at keeping quiet. We set out in an easterly direction away from the camp, through snow that was around a foot deep, and silently made our way up the slope through the sparse woodland. The sun had returned and was making the snow sparkle and glow like gold. It was about the noon of the brief day, so we had a couple of hours of daylight left. After walking for half an hour, the King pointed at some tracks in the snow, leading through the trees. 'Deer', he said. I could not see how he could possibly tell that, but hunting, I knew, was the sport of kings, so I trusted in his expertise. We followed the tracks through the woods until we reached a small clearing. The King motioned to me to stop. At the other side of the clearing, a slight rustling could be heard in the bushes.

The King was about to say something, then stopped abruptly. From among the bushes, something resembling a huge grey dog silently emerged and stood watching us. Time froze solid in the air around us. The animal's grey eyes rested unblinkingly on the King – it did not seem to look at me at all. I raised my gun, but the King put his hand on my arm. He stared straight back at the creature, which had a strange look in its eyes. I can only describe it as acknowledging the King, with some kind of mutual respect. It sounds bizarre, but that is what I saw. Then, suddenly, it turned and was gone.

The King, looking somewhat shaken, told me what it was.

'But Majesty,' I protested, 'Surely such creatures are only legendary!'

The King gave me a sardonic look.

'Did that look like a legendary creature to you, Nielsen? Let's see if we can find its mythical tracks, then.'

We walked cautiously over to the other side of the clearing, where the large pawmarks were clearly visible in the snow. And we also found something else: a dead deer, which it must have just killed when we disturbed it. We dragged the deer back to the camp for the evening meal, but the King asked me to tell the men that we had killed the deer ourselves, and to say nothing of the creature we saw, so as not to disturb them further with stories of mythical beasts. I am sure that most of the men, like me, believed that wolves existed only in old tales to frighten children. The King, for his part, was in a very thoughtful mood for the rest of the day and, most unusually for him, said very little to anyone.

Next morning, we saw two men approaching on skis. One was Johansson, but the other was a small, dark-haired tribal man in a strange blue and red costume. Of the other scout, Ebsen, there was no sign. It turned out that he was not coming back – in response to the worried enquiries of the men, Johansson replied that Ebsen had decided to marry a tribal woman and stay where he was. (Overhearing this, the King commented only: 'Good God, is our food that bad?')

Johansson and the tribal man, whose name was Áno, were brought into the carriage, where the King and the other officers were eagerly waiting to hear Johansson's story. He related that he and Ebsen had skied in the direction that I had indicated, and had eventually arrived at a village up in the hills, consisting of a ring of tents with ten or fifteen families. They were given a friendly welcome, but the diplomatic situation turned out to be a little complicated. The tribal headman, who could speak Northlandish, claimed to have no idea who had attacked us in Jernhavn, but suspected the Rani, a tribe from the southern side of the fjord. They themselves were Kuma, and were related to the Rani by a few marriages, which conveyed a complicated series of obligations that Johansson had not entirely been able to understand, but which essentially meant that the Kuma were obliged to offer food, shelter, and occasionally war provisions to the Rani, but were not obliged, and may even have been actively forbidden through some taboo, from actually allying themselves with them in war. As a result, they knew little of the Rani's attitude to us. Or so the headman said, at any rate. We had been right about the blackstone – the Northlanders had offered it to the tribes to induce them to stop destroying the rail line and attacking their 'black pig', which Johansson surmised meant a train. But the Kuma said that they had seen little of the promised blackstone, and that the supply had dried up anyway last winter. The Kuma could not by themselves guarantee our safety in the district, and knew little of the Northlanders' situation, but referred us to the Great Witch, who knew everything and could grant us safe passage.

The King raised his eyebrows.

'The Great Witch? That's what they said?'

'Yes, Majesty. The headman said that all the tribes obey her. If she approves us, we will be safe.'

The King, sat back and folded his arms, looking rather displeased at this turn of events.

'So how do we find this witch?'

'She lives on what they call the Bear Mountain. Áno will show us the way.' (Áno, hearing his name mentioned, smiled shyly and nodded.)

'It is not far from the line, apparently. We can get most of the way there with the train. Then we will have to hike for a few hours.'

The King sighed.

'Well, if that's the way it must be, then I suppose we had better respect their customs. I wouldn't want to see any more flaming arrows coming our way at this point in the mission. But I'm not keen on the idea of negotiating our passage with some local hag. We will need some kind of a gift. Nielsen, your butterfly might come in handy.'

I nodded. Given the amount of work I had put into it, I had hoped it would be presented to a person of importance rather than a tribal wise woman, but I said nothing.

'And what about Ebsen? What happened to him?' asked the King.

'When the headman said that Áno could come with us, a woman stepped forward, and there was some kind of an argument. Something about them being a man short for the reindeer herding in the next few days. Now that the snow is falling, they will have to divide the herds. But I think she had her eye on Ebsen from the start. I saw her watching him while the headman was talking. Anyway, eventually the headman turned to me and said that this woman wanted to see if Ebsen was any good as a herder. And she just took his arm and led him away. I didn't understand what was happening. The headman just looked at me and said 'A fair exchange is no robbery'.'

I laughed. The King looked at me.

'Sorry, your Majesty. My father was a merchant. He used to say that.'

'The next day, Ebsen told me that he had decided to stay there and become a tribesman. That's all the explanation I received. He would say no more.'

'There may be more to these people than meets the eye,' mused the King. 'Tell Áno he is welcome, and give him something to eat. But don't let him out of your sight, even when he is sleeping. We simply cannot risk trusting a stranger up here.'

Chapter nineteen

The Great Witch

More snow fell during the night, and by the time daylight came we had another foot or so to deal with. The engineers had fitted their improvised snowplough to a wooden wagon, which had to be lifted and placed in front of the locomotive. Men with shovels also sat in the wagon, both in order to add weight to the truck, and to be ready to jump out and dig if the drifts became too deep for the snowplough to handle.

We tested the bridge by pushing the snowplough wagon across it, while the King watched impatiently. When no problems were encountered I brought the locomotive across, and then the men pushed the other carriages and wagons across one by one. Finally, we were under way again, with the snowplough hissing at the front, throwing the snow aside like the prow of a ship. It was quite an impressive sight.

At first, all went well. Áno, the King and I stood on the locomotive footplate as we began a long ascent once again into the mountains. Áno watched the hills, and the King watched Áno, not trusting him for a moment. I mimed asking him 'How far?', to which Áno merely smiled and pointed further up the mountainside. The line was beginning to curve around and head north.

The day was overcast, with much snow still falling. The King looked very concerned at this, but the combination of the snowplough and the men with their shovels seemed to be dealing with most of the problems.

Then, after a couple of hours, disaster struck. The track dipped down into a shallow valley basin, and we drove straight into a very deep drift, almost as tall as the locomotive itself. One side of the snowplough snapped off, and the train slammed to a sudden halt, with the sound of things crashing and breaking in the carriages behind.

We had been thrown violently forward, and the men on the snowplough truck had fallen into the snow, but thankfully no-one seemed to be hurt, beyond a few bruises. The King and I climbed up onto the roof of the locomotive to examine the situation. What we saw was a shock. What looked like a wide, still lake of deep white snow stretched all the way to the next mountain rise a couple of miles distant. We said nothing, but it was clear to both of us that this might take a month to dig through.

Áno touched my ankle, and I looked down to where he was standing on the footplate. With his arms, he mimed skiing. I nodded and called for Johansson, and through him Áno told us that the witch's home was a few hours distant by ski. We could make it by nightfall if we started straight away. The King ordered the men to start digging, so that we could at least make some progress in the meantime.

The expedition party consisted of myself, the King, Áno and Johansson. The King told us to bring our weapons in our backpacks, as well as my mechanical butterfly. I had never skied before and made very slow and clumsy progress at first, much to Áno's amusement, but he showed me how to hold the staves correctly and move my feet, and eventually I began to get the hang of it.

We moved off to the left of the track, heading north, away from the valley and along the mountain ridge. There were few trees here to impede us, and we seemed to be making good progress, although the surroundings seemed to me to be as bleak as anything I had observed with my spyglass on the surface of the moon. After a couple of hours, Áno pointed to a couple of dark dots on the horizon and said something. 'The Great Witch,' translated Johansson, unnecessarily. The sun was slipping behind the mountain tops again, and the light on the snow had become a golden yellow colour. As we approached, the dots turned into the outline of a few large, conical tents and some log huts. The snow thinned out, and we took off our skis and walked the rest of the way across the stony soil. A dog barked as we approached, and an old woman emerged from one of the tents and watched us impassively. She wore a similar blue and red costume to that of Áno.

The King bowed, and Johansson began to recite a carefully-prepared speech of greeting to the Great Witch, but before he had said more than a few words the old woman burst into cackling laughter. Áno said something to Johansson, who grimaced in annoyance.

'She's not the one,' he said. 'The witch is inside the tent.'

'Well, let's go and see the real crone, then,' said the King irritably. It was clear to see he was beginning to think this whole thing was a stupid waste of time.

It was dark inside the tent, and it took our eyes a few moments to adjust to the gloom. What we then saw took us completely by surprise. Sitting cross-legged on a mat of reindeer skins in front of us was an intensely beautiful young woman. She was dark-haired like many of the tribal people, but wore a red costume, with a cloak around her shoulders. She stared at us with eyes that were so deep brown they seemed almost black. Johansson seemed to have entirely lost the power of speech. Finally he managed to stutter out a few words, and the woman nodded. It was hard to tell her age, but she was probably of one age with the King and ourselves, possibly a couple of years older. She motioned to us to sit down on the furs.

'Butterfly, Nielsen,' muttered the King to me, and I fumbled for it in my backpack. I handed the toy to the witch, who took it expressionlessly and examined it, then put it aside.

'Tell her why we are here, and that we respectfully request permission to cross the tribal land,' said the King.

Johansson began to translate, but the woman interrupted him in what sounded like a dismissive tone.

'She says she knows why we are here,' said Johansson. 'Everyone in the district knows. Ever since they saw the great dragon in the sky.'

The King grimaced, no doubt remembering Freya's flaming balloons.

The woman began to speak again.

'She says that permission may be obtained to cross the tribal land, but that it is customary to give a gift.'

'We have given her a gift. We gave her the butterfly.'

The woman spoke again, in an angry voice.

'She says she does not want your toys,' Johansson translated. 'Keep them for your royal friends. Such things are of no value up here.'

'But what does she want, then?' asked the King in exasperation.

Johansson asked, and the woman replied. Johansson looked aghast, and spoke to her again.

'What is it? What is she saying?' demanded the King.

'She says... forgive me, Majesty... she says she wants you. For tonight.'

The King looked appalled. 'Me? But... she's never even seen me before,' he said, lamely.

'She says she has seen you before. She has been... watching you. And you have met her,' said Johansson.

'I am quite sure I would have remembered if I had!'

'It's what she says, Majesty.'

'I gave you a deer!' said the woman suddenly, in accented but clear Kantish.

The King's face was a sight to behold. If I did not know him to be a man of courage, I would have said he was scared.

'You... drive a hard bargain, my lady,' he stuttered at last.

It seemed he had little choice. If this woman was as powerful as she was reputed to be, it was her word whether we lived or died up here on the mountain.

The witch began to speak again, in her own language.

'She says she will also give you something else. She will tell you whether or not your mission will succeed,' said Johansson.

'Tomorrow,' said the witch, in Kantish. 'Now we eat.'

She called out in her language. The old woman answered from outside, and after a minute she brought in bowls of stew, which we ate in the tent by the light of an oil lamp. This was accompanied by some kind of alcoholic beverage, a little like beer, but stronger. I found myself gradually being overcome by the urge to sleep.

The old woman indicated to Áno, Johansson and me that we should go with her. The King gave us an almost despairing look as we left the tent. We were shown to one of the small huts, which turned out to contain yelping dogs. We lay down there upon the straw, with furs to cover us, and despite the animals, I was asleep in less than a minute.

I dreamed of Kantarborg. Streets with market booths, rain falling on the canals. Home. The hut was pitch dark when I awoke, and it took me a while to remember where I was. Eventually I crawled out of the straw and pulled aside the cloth that covered the doorway. Outside in the sunlight, to my great surprise, I saw the King, standing stark naked and rubbing himself down with snow. Seeing me, he called out:

'Nielsen! Have you ever been in a sauna?'

'It's been a while, Majesty!'

'Well come and get yourself clean. Bring Johansson.'

He turned and went back into a small dark wooden hut with a metal chimney, from which white smoke was pouring.

I roused Johansson (Áno was gone, having evidently woken before us), and the two of us peeled off our now rather dirty clothes, walked across the yard to the sauna hut, and entered the baking heat. Inside, in the dim light from the stove, we were shocked to see the witch sitting on one of the wooden shelves, quite naked. She was smiling and joking with the King in broken Kantish, and seemed rather less forbidding than she had done the day before. Johansson and I tried to look like people who did this sort of thing every day.

Her name, as it turned out, was Ulrika. It was a name I'd heard before, and it did not sound particularly tribal, which puzzled me a little.

'Johansson!' said the King. 'I want to ask her... how does she live, up here? Does she have reindeer, or what?'

Johansson translated, and the witch replied.

'She says she has no reindeer. She tells people their future. Or what way a venture will turn out. Sometimes she cures people of illnesses. They give her gifts.'

'Your gift was acceptable,' said the witch, in Kantish. 'Most people give a fish!'

And she collapsed into giggles.

'Then I have paid in advance,' smiled the King. 'When will you tell me my fortune?'

'Today. Later,' said the witch, and said something in her own language to Johansson.

'She says she must be clean first. Then she must make preparations. She will call you when the time comes.'

After a while the door opened and the old woman came in, carrying our wet and steaming clothes, which she had apparently washed. She proceeded to lay them on the shelves of the sauna, and mimed turning them over, so that we would know what to do when they were dry on one side. We thanked her with as much dignity as one can muster when naked. She looked upon us kindly enough, but with none of the deference we were accustomed to receiving from peasant women. I suspect that in her eyes we were merely boys.

She also brought us a bottle with something to drink, which we passed around. It tasted good: sweet and sour at once, like the juice of berries.

Sitting there, in the warmth, I began to understand why Ebsen had decided to leave us. Right now, the thought of the train and all our struggles was very far away and unappealing. All I wanted to do was stay here forever.

After a while the witch got up and left the sauna hut to get herself ready for the ritual. We were obviously curious, but Johansson was bolder than I.

'So, Majesty...' he asked with a smirk. 'What was it like? To be with a witch?'

The King looked thoughtful.

'It was very... educational,' he said at last. And that was all we could get out of him on the subject.

His discretion spoke for itself – she had seduced him in more ways than one. But I remembered those grey eyes in the woods; I did not trust this woman. In Kantarborg, under his father the Old King, she might well have been tried for witchcraft.

And then, with the dreadful clarity of the jealous heart, I suddenly saw her plan. It made me gasp inwardly. I would have to speak to the King as soon as possible. But I had to get him alone.

'That deer we hunted the other day,' I said to Johansson, as casually as I could. 'You didn't happen to mention that to Áno, did you?'

'I might have done. I don't remember. Why?'

'I was just wondering how she knew about that.'

'I should imagine the whole district knows about it,' Johansson replied. 'They seem to see everything.'

I could feel the King's eyes upon me, but he said nothing, and neither did I.

Áno reappeared as we were getting dressed again. He rubbed his stomach and smiled, and indicated that we should go with him. He led us to the old woman's hut, where she served us some hot porridge with blueberries in wooden bowls. It was very welcome and nourishing, and we thanked her warmly for it. I could not work out what her relationship was to the witch – servant, grandmother? Through Johansson, Áno said that she was the witch's foster-mother – which left me none the wiser. And they were living out here – alone, with no village, no family, no reindeer? I knew little of the customs of the tribal peoples, but this struck me as very odd. Yet according to Áno, the witch held the respect of the whole area. Perhaps respect was another word for fear. I could not imagine that a wolf would be a particularly beloved animal among herding peoples. Even if what she implied was just superstitious nonsense.

The old woman, whose name we never learned, came back in after our meal to tell us that the witch was ready to receive us. The command seemed impertinent to me, but the King was unperturbed. I suppose he was used to the idea that people had official and unofficial roles, and when you were playing one, you could not be the other. Now we are playing diplomats. So be it.

The King, Johansson and I entered the dark tent with some trepidation. A small fire of birch logs had been lit in the centre of the tent, the smoke rising up through the hole at its apex. The witch was sitting as we had first seen her, looking stern and rather intimidating in her colourful tribal costume, with various implements alongside her whose purpose I could not guess, including a round drum covered in strange symbols and markings. She wore jewellery which was probably of ritual significance, and earrings with a strange runic design, like the figure of a warrior. The change was striking – with that fierce glint in her eyes, she looked nothing like the girl we had seen in the sauna just a few hours earlier. The air was close and smelled of incense.

We sat down on the reindeer skins facing her, with the King in the middle. The witch said something in a formal-sounding voice, and Johansson translated: 'You may ask three questions.'

The King nodded.

'My first question is: Why did the blackstone stop coming?'

That surprised me. I would have thought the King had more important queries to put to her, but perhaps he had some strategic reason for seeking this particular information.

The witch took up the drum and held it horizontally, then dropped two small stones upon it and began to beat the drum with a hammer made of bone, all the while chanting some strange, unearthly melody. The stones began to move across the drum, finally ending up at one side. But the witch went on drumming and chanting for a full five minutes. It began to grow a little tiresome.

At last she stopped and spoke to the King, while Johansson translated.

'She says the islands of the North are haunted by a great bear. The bear has chased away the Northlanders and is eating the blackstone.'

The King looked a little nonplussed by this. I, for my part, felt a growing anger. I had seen tricks like this played by fortune-tellers on market days in Kantarborg: they always give an answer that sounds portentous, but could mean anything. The woman was clearly a charlatan.

'My next question is: Will I regain my throne?'

The whole charade began again, and again we waited a full five minutes for the answer, which, when it came, was equally unsatisfying.

'She says you will regain your throne, but not your kingdom.'

'Is that it? Can't she explain what she means?'

Johansson put the question to the witch, who shook her head. We would have to be satisfied with that. The King sighed.

One more question. The King thought for a minute before putting it.

'Ask her who will rule in Kantarborg after me.'

That was clever; it would force her to say something specific about whether the King would succeed in his endeavours. The chanting and drum-beating began again, to my increasing impatience. Finally the stones stopped moving. The witch put down the drum and spoke.

'She says: A prince of your blood will arise and win the three crowns.'

At that, the King looked satisfied. The witch stood up and wished us good luck on our journey. We were being dismissed. We got up, and the King bowed low.

'I thank you that we may move across your territory,' he said. 'Although with the snow as it is, it doesn't look as though we will be moving very fast.'

Johansson translated, and the witch replied in Kantish, her black eyes fixed gravely upon the King:

'You will receive help soon.'

Another prophecy – a free bonus. We smiled and took our leave of her – the King taking her hands and gazing into her eyes like a puppy. She nodded: go now.

The sun was already low in the sky as we strapped on our skis, although there had only been a few hours of daylight. We would not make it back before nightfall – but with the snow, the darkness was far from absolute, and Áno knew the territory well. The sky clouded over and snow began falling again as we made our way back towards the mountain ridge. I wondered how well the digging operations were faring back at the train.

Áno and Johansson moved ahead, talking together in the tribal language. The King and I followed behind, in the tracks of their skis. The King, as usual, could read me like an open book.

'What is it, Nielsen?' he asked. 'You don't approve of me and the witch woman, I take it?'

'Under the circumstances, Majesty, I don't think you had much choice.'

He gave a short laugh. 'No, I don't believe I did. So, what is bothering you?'

'Majesty, I fear she may have had... other motives.'

'Such as what?'

'Have you considered what may happen if she gets with child?'

'Well, if that did happen, I imagine they would be well able to take care of it here.'

'Would it not be your first-born?'

'As far as I know, yes. But illegitimate, of course.'

'Would that make much of a difference?'

'What are you getting at, Karl? You're not suggesting that some ragged little tribal urchin could make a bid for the throne of Kantarborg?'

We had reached the top of the ridge, and could look down across the valley. I stopped to catch my breath after the climb. Somewhere down there lay our little encampment. There was no sign of it from here.

'Sire, there is something strange about that woman.'

'I assure you, you will get no argument from me there!'

'More than the witchcraft and the fortune-telling. She lives out here on her own, with no family or tribe around her. How do we even know she is tribal?'

'She speaks the language. And the tribes respect her. What else should she be, a Northlander?'

'She could be both. She has a Northlander name. And she speaks some Kantish. Where did she learn that?'

'Well, it used to be spoken around here.'

'But not for centuries, sire! It's not like the Irdai, who still speak the old form. Here it is of no daily use. She must have been taught it.'

We began our slow, zig-zagging descent into the valley. Áno and Johansson had moved some distance ahead, and we could no longer see them in the gloom. We followed their tracks.

'So she has an education. What does that prove?'

'There's something else. She has calluses on the first three fingers of her right hand.'

The King laughed, then looked at me incredulously.

'You're not suggesting that she...?'

'Is a trained archer. Yes.'

The King stopped skiing. We stood in silence, looking out across the ghostly valley. The light of our camp fire could now be glimpsed in the distance.

'But what possible reason could she have...?' he began, then stopped, as the obvious reason occurred to him. 'To make sure I moved through her territory,' he sighed. 'By land, not by air.'

I said nothing.

'So you think she planned it from the start? She shot those arrows?'

'It's a possibility, Majesty.'

'All in order to have my child? A prince of my blood..!'

'I admit it sounds far-fetched, sire.'

'Not in this world, Nielsen. Not when the stakes are so high. God, what a fool I've been!'

'It may not be true...'

The King pushed off again, angrily.

'It is true! I've been duped! Why the devil did you not say this earlier?'

'It only occurred to me this morning, sire. When it was already too late.'

We skied down towards the camp, at a furious pace. There was nothing more to say. The King was angry at himself, and so he was angry at everyone. For all our courtly ways, she had played us like peasants newly arrived in the city. The King was the very one who had said we should not trust a stranger up here, and now the fox had himself been outfoxed. By a wolf woman.

Chapter twenty

A runish sign, and thoughts of home

The next day was grey and overcast, and there was a dampness in the air. In theory, we now had permission to pass through the tribal territories and no longer need fear attack, but it seemed our difficulties were only just beginning. In our absence the men had repaired the snowplough and had cleared about fifty yards of the line by hand, but the going was very slow, especially as, given the width of the track, only about five men could work there at any one time. Worse, the works of the engine were suffering from the cold and damp, and I was spending more and more time coaxing its reluctant mechanisms into life. Food was short, and it was beginning to look as though we would be very lucky even to get through this valley before our rations ran out. The cold weather was also wearing down morale, and the hunting parties had had little success, there being only scattered scrub forest at this altitude, and consequently very little game. To add to our difficulties, the wind was picking up and temperatures were dropping fast. Even if we abandoned our mission now and turned back, it would be very difficult to get back to Jernhavn. In short, things were looking grim.

With daylight in such short supply (no more than about five hours a day now), we had little choice but to continue the digging at night, despite the intense cold. The diggers could keep reasonably warm through their work, but we had to change the guards every half hour to prevent them freezing to death. Our evening meals by now consisted mainly of oats, boiled up with a little meat. Strange lights flitted silently about in the sky, eerie howls and barks could be heard from across the valley, and the men muttered about ghosts and trolls. There was no singing now – after the meal all those who were not digging went straight to bed, although by the brass clock in the carriage I could see it was no more than eight in the evening. But civilised time seemed to belong to another world, to Kantarborg and the court – it meant little here.

Not even the stoves in the carriages could keep the cold out now. Lying in my bunk that night, shivering despite the fact that I was still wearing most of my clothing, I began to feel that I had had enough. Between wolves, witches and monsters, it was as though I had been trapped in a gigantic irrational layer ever since I had first made the acquaintance of the King. I longed for my workshop back at the palace; for clockwork, and tools, and metal, and wood, and things that could be weighed and measured and counted, and did what you expected them to do. My mother had warned me not to get involved with the court, and she had been right. It was all a madhouse. If ever I got back to Kantarborg, I would become a humble clockmaker, and live out my days in obscurity and honest work. And it was amid these gloomy thoughts that, at long last, I feel asleep.

I awoke suddenly in the darkness with the feeling that something was wrong. The King was already up, so I quickly pulled on my jacket and joined him outside beside the locomotive, where he, Áno and Johansson were examining something in the snow.

'We had visitors last night,' said the King.

I looked at the snow, and by the light of the moon I could immediately recognise the signs drawn there, apparently by the point of an arrow or spear, although I could not interpret them.

'Runes, Majesty?'

'Yes. The old alphabet of these parts. I have questioned the guards – they heard nothing, the fools. We could all have been slaughtered in our beds.'

The snow round about had been much disturbed by the footprints of our own men, so it was impossible to tell how many 'visitors' we had had, but the row of five or six strange symbols was clearly intended for us to see. A message, or perhaps a warning?

'What do they mean?'

'I don't know,' said the King. 'We have been discussing that. Look: that is a V, and that is an N, but they don't seem to form a word in any language we know. Áno says it is not tribal, and it doesn't make sense in Kantish or Northlandish.'

'Anglian, perhaps, Majesty?'

'No, it's some other language – or a code. Draw them for me, would you, Nielsen? I would like to find out what it means, if ever we get back to civilisation again.'

I brought out my notebook and began to sketch:

The sky was growing brighter as I concentrated on getting the symbols right. Behind me, I could sense that the sun was about to appear above the mountains. The King, Áno and Johansson were standing a short distance away, talking about the night's incursion. Then, quite suddenly, they fell silent. I looked up and followed their gaze, and saw a dark fringe forming along the mountain ridge – a line of men. The line grew – forty, fifty warriors, with horses and reindeer sleds. Then, all at once, they gave a great cry and began to charge down the slope, waving their weapons above their heads.

The noise had a dramatic effect on our men, who leapt, startled, from their bunks and grabbed their guns and swords.

'Seize him!' shouted the King, pointing to Áno. Johansson and I stood as though paralysed.

'Seize him!' shouted the King again, drawing his sword. Reluctantly, we took hold of Áno, who went on smiling benignly, seeming not to understand what was happening.

'Johansson, tell them! Tell them I will cut his throat if they come any closer!' The King put the blade of his sword to Áno's neck.

Johansson began to shout out the warning in the tribal language, then trailed off as the charging men drew up in a line about twenty yards away. Behind the trucks, our men had raised their muskets. There was a tense silence.

And then it happened.

Like one of those puzzle drawings for children, which can either resemble a beautiful young woman or an old crone, though not both at once, the scene before us was suddenly transformed. The axes and swords they held above their heads did not look quite right. They were too long and... shovel-like. They were shovels. They had come to help us, and we had almost massacred them.

Áno called out a greeting in that strange howl they use, and there was laughter and taunting in response. The King lowered his sword and exhaled in relief.

The tribespeople came smiling towards us. They were not all men, as it turned out. There were a few women among them, too, dressed under their fur jackets in the same kinds of bright blue and red tunics as their menfolk. To our great surprise we also saw the somewhat abashed-looking figure of Ebsen, our runaway scout, his eyes fixed on the ground as he mumbled a request to rejoin the King's Men. The story emerged gradually – the tribal woman he thought he had married turned out to be Áno's wife, who had apparently regarded Ebsen merely as a temporary replacement while we borrowed her husband. Now that Áno was returning to the tribe, she was giving him back to us, with thanks for the loan.

In theory, of course, Ebsen had deserted his post – a serious matter in the military. But the King, having been so recently deceived by a tribal woman himself, was inclined to look leniently upon the matter. Indeed, as Johansson related the story to him, I could see he was having trouble keeping a straight face. The King ordered that Ebsen be demoted to the rank of ordinary rating, and no more was said about it.

The digging method of the men of the Kuma tribe was quite different to ours. Where we would put four or five men at the front of the train to dig the snow away from the track, they would first of all dig down fifty yards away to find the point where the track was heading. They then placed two long lines of men standing on snowshoes and skis between us and that point, and dug down in parallel. Using this method, they had already cleared as much track by the time the sun went down as our own men had managed in all the time since we had entered this valley.

The Kuma were of course much better dressed and equipped than us for the climate. Although we had our winter uniforms and boots, we were all suffering terribly from the cold – even those of us lucky enough to sleep in the carriages. When they were not working, I had seen our men wrapping blankets and even their sleeping bags around them in an attempt to keep in a little warmth. The tribespeople noticed this and, through Johansson, asked whether we would be interested in trading some items for warmer clothing. We of course agreed, and a woman was despatched back to the village with a reindeer sled, and returned with it piled high with reindeer skins, fur jackets and hats.

But the transaction was not without its complications. Neither gold nor silver held any attraction whatsoever for the Kuma, as it was of little use to them. Even the little rum we had left could not tempt them: they had their own alcoholic spirits, they said, which they considered far superior. They wanted only one thing from us, and that was our weapons: our knives, swords and muskets, which they could use for hunting.

On the rather slender grounds that I came from a merchant family, I was appointed to conduct the negotiations. But the Kuma turned out to be tough traders; the exchanges they demanded were, in my view, extortionate. A fine beaten sword for a fur jacket. A musket for a hat. Some of these things were worth a full year's labour back in Kantarborg. But they were adamant – it was take it or leave it.

I went to the King with the bad news. 'It seems we must strip ourselves naked in order to be clothed,' he remarked, with a sigh of exasperation. 'Oh very well, give them what they want. The men must be warm, or we will never get off this damn mountain.'

And so we all received fur jackets and hats, with the Kuma woman returning to the village with the sled for a second load, taking virtually all our weapons with her. When the transformation was complete we hardly resembled military men any more. The King had relaxed the shaving rules when we left Jernhavn, so we were all more or less bearded and bedraggled, and now in our furs we looked less like soldiers and more like the vagabond traders that used to call at the North Gate of Kantarborg selling scrap metal and lumber.

We were a little concerned about how we would feed our visitors, but with their trading honour satisfied, it was the Kuma who fed us, sealing the deal with reindeer meat and some more of that sweet beer that we had sampled in the home of the witch.

That night, around the bonfire, some good cheer was restored to our men. We ate heartily of the food brought by our guests – perhaps too heartily for decorum – and passed around jugs of our remaining rum. The King also donated a couple of bottles of his personal wine to the guests, who received them with great enthusiasm and praise.

I, however, sat alone by the fire, still feeling rather downhearted. The King plumped down on the log beside me.

'You have a face on you like a constipated bulldog,' he said cheerily, in rather vulgar Kantish. Lately he had taken to addressing me more often in Kantish than in courtly Anglian. I couldn't decide whether this was fond familiarity or condescension.

'Not still worried about the witch woman, are you?'

'No indeed sire, my thoughts were rather more... with my own concerns.'

'You're homesick,' he said, with his usual irritating _perspicacity_.

There was clearly no point in pretending otherwise.

'Do you think we will ever return to Kantarborg, Majesty?'

'No,' he replied simply, staring into the fire.

I looked at him, shocked at his candour.

'But then, this whole mission...?'

'Oh, we can go back, if we are blessed with luck and cunning. Don't misunderstand me – no doubt you will one day see the same streets and the same market squares you used to know. What you will not see is the place you knew, the place you loved. That is most likely gone forever.'

He sensed my confusion.

'It's the way I was brought up, Karl. Kings have no homes. The monarchs of old had many castles throughout their lands, as well as vassal states and territories overseas. They had to travel to them all, be at home in all of them. So my tutors taught me that I had to learn to swim, not stand; to handle, not hold. Those who try to cling on to what they know will drown. Boldness is all, for the king who wishes to survive. Or so they said.'

The logs cracked in the fire, and red sparks flew away into the darkness.

'But you have a people, sire, who are loyal to you. Is that not your home, among them?'

'My people?' asked the King, a little bitterly. 'My people are whoever give me their allegiance. The Irdai are as much my people as the citizens of Kantarborg.'

The idea of a king like a mobile piece on a chessboard was one I found rather disturbing.

'Then you could be king of anyone?'

He laughed.

'Did you know there is an island in the far north which is also part of my realm? A world of mountains, ice and snow. They have no forest, little grass, almost no animals. How they survive is beyond me. Yet I am told that the people there are loyal to me – they fly the flag of Kantarborg on my birthday, and sing the national anthem in front of my portrait. Except that it is actually my father's portrait, but never mind. There were plans for me to make a voyage there for an official visit last summer, before the recent events intervened. But they are also my people, Karl, and so that is also my home.'

He picked up a small chip of blackstone from the ground and threw it into the fire, where it glowed and hissed eerily with a blue flame. Devilish stuff.

'But I, my lord – I am not a king. I had a home.'

'But you were once a child, as was I. And like any young boy, I'm sure you commanded armies and ruled over a kingdom. Is this not true?'

I laughed despite myself and nodded, remembering my tin soldiers.

'And now you have lost your kingdom, and so have I. And neither of us will ever find our way back, even if I regain my throne and you your home. Because the truth is, no-one ever really goes back. Exile and loss are the common fate of every human being ever born.'

It seemed a rather bleak outlook on life, though he seemed cheerful enough. But his home-spun philosophy did little to ease my heart's pining. The King might be as much at ease here in the wilderness as he was at court – indeed, sometimes he appeared to be more at home here – but I longed for the simple comforts I had left behind. For warm food and a warm bed. A sun that stayed in the sky instead of hiding behind the mountains. Trees with proper leaves instead of needles, and birdsong thronging among them. The free and easy laughter of men, women and children. I wanted to go home. I told him as much, a little circumspectly, for I did not wish to seem disloyal.

'Then you must find your way home, Karl,' said the King. 'But remember: home may not always be where you expect it to be.'

And with that he stood up and became once more the King. Leaving me to ponder his words.

Next day at sunrise, we recommenced the digging. As the track rose gently up the valley floor the snow cover grew shallower, and by the end of the day, to our great relief, it was no more than a foot or two deep – which our improvised snowplough could easily cope with. We took our leave of the Kuma with regret; they had become our friends and saviours over the past few days. Gathered around the camp fire, the King told them that he owed them a great debt, which he promised that he would one day repay. As a token of this, he gave them a gold sovereign, which of course bore his own likeness stamped on one side. The Kuma accepted this gift with joy; here was a tale they could tell their grandchildren, even if the King from the south never returned to pay his debt. There was a noisy celebration that night, but early next morning, before most of us were out of our bunks, the Kuma loaded their tents and shovels onto their sleds and silently vanished.

Later, I found the King looking at the marks they had left behind in the snow.

'Were they our friends or our enemies, do you think, Karl?'

I was surprised and a little shocked at this, given the warm words he had spoken to them the previous evening.

'They have been of immense assistance to us, Majesty. They may have saved our lives.'

'They also led us to the witch. And they have disarmed us. Very effectively – without firing a shot. If they have cleared our path, it might be in the hope of furthering their own aims in the end.'

'My impression, sire, for what it is worth, is that they are quite innocent of all such deviousness.'

The King nodded. 'That is my impression, too. But the innocent can also be used for purposes which are not their own.'

He sighed. 'No doubt all will become clear in the end.'

I must admit I smiled to myself. It was a source of some little satisfaction to me to find that even a king could sometimes suspect he might merely be a pawn.

We began once more to make our way along the line under our own power, though very cautiously at first. We still had a few unused pods left, but we had long since passed the point at which we could safely bring the engine back to Jernhavn. We had the windmill with us, of course, but setting it up to charge the pods would be a major undertaking. It would cost us several days, and our provisions were running very low. The question was whether we had enough power left to get us to wherever it was we were going.

After a couple of hours we reached the top of the pass, where we halted to get our bearings and take in the view. The line had become somewhat meandering, clinging once again to the mountainside. It had levelled off now, but it had been a tough climb for the engine. It struck me that this railway must have been extraordinarily difficult to build. Even if the old legends were true and the ancients had had vast amounts of energy at their disposal, they would hardly have constructed such a line across a harsh and sparsely populated region without a very good reason for doing so. And now the Northlanders were attempting to re-open it – for which they must have had a very good reason, too.

The snow on the peaks on the far side of the pass lay streaked across the grey rock like the last white hairs on the pate of a bald old man. We stood in silence and contemplated the mountains. I had never seen anything so big or so silent. It was magnificent and terrifying at the same time.

Standing there on the ridge, the King and I were alone. I grasped the opportunity.

'Majesty, if I may ask... where are we really going?'

He pointed towards the horizon.

'Just beyond those mountains. It is not as far as it looks. If the weather had not caught up with us, I believe we could have completed the whole journey in a couple of days.'

'And what is there, sire? Beyond the mountains?'

'It's where the Northlanders get their iron. Real iron, fresh from the ground! Not recycled, like ours. Think what Kantarborg could do if we had access to iron like that. Think what we could build...'

His words trailed off and he stood silently, lost in his own thoughts. I had no idea what visions he was conjuring up, but I if knew anything of the King, my guess was that railways figured in them somewhere.

'Do they have... mines there, Majesty?' I still found it hard to say a word that had been banned from polite conversation back in Kantarborg.

'Mines? Oh, probably. They certainly had in ancient times.'

'But isn't that... risky?'

'You mean they might set monsters loose? Yes, I suppose so. But they are clever, the Northlanders. Perhaps they get someone else to do the mining.'

'Trolls?' This conversation was becoming unnerving.

The King laughed.

'Well, maybe. Let's face it, we are on very foreign ground here. We know nothing of this place, so anything is possible.'

I still had no idea what the King had in mind. Surely he was not planning some kind of a raid? Even if we succeeded in stealing some iron, we could hardly bring much of it back with us.

He read my thoughts.

'The game is at a critical point, Nielsen. I have three cards I can play, and our clockwork machine is one of them. We have technology here that I suspect the Northlanders would dearly like to get hold of.'

'But Dr Hansen has already...'

'Given away our secrets? Ah, but has he, Clockmaker, has he? That is the question. If not, then I think we have a very valuable bargaining chip.'

'But sire, are the Northlanders not our enemies?' I protested.

'We are not at war with them. Not yet. We are in a state of armed tension – something that can often lead to war, but is not war itself. So far, our battles have been merely skirmishes, to show we mean business. It could be the first stage of war. Let them think that. It could also be the first stage of negotiation.'

The King put his arm around my shoulder as we walked back to the train. He spoke quietly and urgently.

'Never negotiate from a position of weakness, Nielsen, that's the trick. We needed a victory, and the Battle of the Strait gave us that. The encounter at Christiansby was more of a draw. So we remain in a strong position.'

'Except that...'

'Except that I am longer in possession of my kingdom. Yes, there is that.'

He turned away to talk to his officers. I should have known better by now – no matter what the King said, he still said nothing.

I need not have worried about the pods; from here on the line was mostly descending, and we required little power. A vast white frozen lake opened up on our left-hand side, while the tracks continued to hug the winding mountainside. I drove the locomotive very carefully, at barely more than walking speed, for fear of losing control over it on the slopes. The snowplough continued to work, casting the snow up around the cab like sea spray.

We began to see more trees around the line, the scraggly birch that we had seen higher up now blending with the pines – I still thought of them as Yule trees – of which we had seen so many on our voyage up the coast. It would be Yule in a month or so. Although I had no children myself, I thought longingly of my niece back in Kantarborg, and of how I had celebrated with William and his wife last year. Everything to do with my former life seemed now to be cast in some magical light, like a golden age. But the King was right about one thing – after all that had happened, I could never return to that cosy life again. That was over for good. It was a sad thought.

Finally the land flattened out, to be replaced by a rolling wilderness – dense clouds of tangled trees in a white, misty landscape that stretched to the horizon. We passed by more ancient stopping-places, and occasionally the King called a halt so that we might examine the worn platforms and the blackened remains of buildings. It was curious that there did not appear to be any house ruins or other signs of human habitation nearby, so what good these stations might have been to the ancients was anyone's guess. Johansson speculated that the climate might have been different in those days, and that it might not have been just an empty wilderness back then. But if there had once been villages or farms here, all trace of them had utterly vanished. There was nothing to be seen now but scrub forest and snow.

During one of these pauses, we caught sight of a man on horseback in the distance, galloping away from us. Our little procession must have been all too obvious in the landscape, so it was reasonable to suppose that the man was a military officer, hurrying away to report our presence to the Northlanders. In our now virtually disarmed state, there was nothing we would have been able to do to hinder our arrest, if that was their intention. But another day and a night passed without further signs of activity.

On the second day after leaving the mountains, the King called a halt in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, and examined the horizon carefully with his spy-glass. He passed the instrument to me, and pointed.

'Are those hills I can see out there, Nielsen?'

Although they were almost the same grey-white colour as the overcast sky, I could just about make out some strange steep mounds along the horizon, looking a bit like children's sandcastles.

'They appear to be so, Majesty. Are they significant?'

'If they are what I think they are, you will never see any other hills like them. Those are the iron mines of the Northlanders. Some of them are man-made – spoil heaps hacked out from beneath the ground over centuries.'

I passed the spy-glass back to the King and tried not to show what I was feeling, which was a strong sense of foreboding. To turn the world upside-down like that, piling up on the surface what ought to lie below... how could it not result in evil?

'And that is our destination, sire?'

'We are going straight into the hornets' nest,' he replied, squinting through the eyepiece. 'I think we can look forward to a little excitement.'

Chapter twenty-one

In the mountain hall

We halted and set up camp for the night within sight of the iron mines, so that we would be able to make maximum use of daylight the next day.

After the evening meal the King addressed the men, standing on one of the open trucks while snowflakes danced lightly in the air around him.

'Tomorrow, we will arrive at what is reputed to be one of the strongholds of the Northlanders in these parts. We have no idea what awaits us there. It may be death or imprisonment. But there is a chance – a slight chance – that this will prove to be the path that leads us back to Kantarborg. If that is the case, your names will be crowned in glory forever in the history of our country. You have already proven yourselves to be heroes ten times over. You have followed me on this long and arduous journey, in spite of cold, privation and terrifying danger. Now I am asking you, not as my subjects, but as my brave comrades and friends, to take one more step with me, into the unknown – for your king, and for Kantarborg!'

A cheer went up from the men, but somehow the oratory did not move me as it used to. Frankly, I did not wish to end my life here, in this barren wilderness far from my homeland. Of weapons, we had just a few daggers left, and a couple of swords, including the King's. We could hardly even protect ourselves, much less pose any kind of a threat to the Northlanders. In my heart of hearts, I no longer really cared for any high purpose or for my name being crowned in glory. I just wanted to go home. But perhaps the King was right, and this was the only way to do it. I just hoped he knew what he was doing. I spent a restless night with little sleep.

Next morning, just before dawn, we set off again – more slowly now, keeping watch on every side. The sky had cleared and the sun was shining, though orange in colour and low in the sky. At this speed, in the snow, the locomotive was almost silent. The only sound was the swishing of the snowplough ahead of us.

The line curved around and began to head straight for the strange hills. We moved more rapidly now along the level ground, through the forest – at one stage scattering a herd of reindeer before us. But still there was no sign of human activity. Secretly, I fervently hoped that we might find the mines empty and abandoned.

We began to pass the remains of more and more ancient buildings to our right and left. The hills grew steeper until they towered up above us. The ruins of some sort of town could be made out up ahead.

We came to a fork in the line; to the left, the line led towards the town – to the right, the strange hills. The points had been set to the right. The King nodded, and we continued down the right-hand path. The line then curved sharply westwards, and we began to skirt the edge of a white, frozen lake. There were more railway tracks here, in parallel with ours, where we saw long rows of ancient metal railway trucks, now rusted and crumbling beneath their shrouds of snow. Then the line turned south, away from the lake and straight towards the looming slopes. The mouth of a tunnel appeared ahead of us. I could see no exit. It could only be the mine entrance.

To my relief, the King signalled to me to stop the locomotive. We climbed down and examined the scene. If this place was so valuable to the Northlanders, it was curious that they had placed no guard. But then again, who would attack them here? We were far distant from both the east and west coasts. This was as isolated a spot as could be imagined.

There were no footprints around the tunnel entrance, which indicated that no-one had gone in or out of the mine since the last snowfall – at least, if this was the only entrance.

'Reminds me of my uncle's rat traps,' said Johansson, voicing my thoughts. Once we were in there, it would be a simple matter to close off the mouth of the tunnel. Leaving us at the mercy of whatever was inside.

The King took a decision.

'Nielsen, Johansson and I will take the locomotive into the tunnel. The rest of you stay here and guard our exit. We will make an exploratory foray into the mine and return here within an hour or two.'

I must talk to him.

'Majesty... may I have a word?' I asked, as we stood watching the men uncoupling the carriages.

'Not nervous are you, Karl? You've done this kind of thing with me before.'

'I am worried that this may be a trap, sire.' And that we will be eaten alive by monsters, I might have added.

The King looked at me.

'If you prefer I can have you replaced. Eriksen can operate the controls. But I am determined to find out what's down there.'

For a moment I considered it.

'No, Majesty. I will come with you. I must. It's just hard to see how this... venture will benefit our cause.'

'Well, we don't know until we find out, do we? Anyway, it's no harm to confront your fears. Into the Unconscious again, eh?'

He walked away. Brave or foolhardy? Is there ever really a difference, I wondered to myself.

The men lifted the snowplough truck off the track and moved it back behind the locomotive with the carriages. The largest of the lamps was wound up and attached to the front of the engine. The King buckled on his sword, while Johansson and I accepted a dagger each from the men. Looking at mine, I was reminded of the teeth of the dead monster we had found. Not a comforting thought.

Johansson climbed up onto the front of the locomotive, while the King and I stood on the footplate. Trying to ignore the feeling of imminent disaster in my mind, I started up the engine and we edged slowly into the darkness.

At first it was very like the tunnels we had encountered in the mountains, and I began to feel a little more reassured as we passed further and further in without encountering anything. But there seemed to be no end to the tunnel – the minutes passed: ten, then twenty, and still the track stretched monotonously ahead in the lamplight. We must have been well inside the heart of the mountain by now. I was just beginning to hope that the King might declare his curiosity satisfied and order me to reverse the engine, when, quite suddenly, the walls and ceiling of our narrow corridor vanished.

I halted the locomotive without waiting for the order. We seemed to be in some kind of vast cavern. Johansson took down the lamp and pointed it upwards and around, but there was nothing to be seen. The lamplight could not even reach the ceiling. The King clapped his hands once, and the echoes went on for a full minute. Then, when the reverberations had died away, I thought I heard what sounded like some kind of regular breathing, far off: uh-hurh, uh-hurh. In the distance, a blue light could be seen, advancing slowly towards us. There was a hissing sound that gradually grew louder. There are many old tales of dragons in caves, guarding the treasures of the Earth.

The King climbed down from the cab and drew his sword. Johansson pointed the lamp into the darkness, but still nothing was visible. My hand went to the shaft of my knife, but I was paralysed with fear.

The King stepped forward and called out a challenge.

'Come forth and show yourself, whatever you are!'

There was a sound from the right-hand side.

'Johansson – over there!' called the King.

Johansson swung the lamp around, and out of the darkness stepped a small, dark, man-like creature. Its chest was bare and its legs were covered in fur, and it was holding a pickaxe. It looked at us with black, intense eyes.

Now there were rustling sounds from all around us. Johansson swung the lamp around to reveal more of the creatures... dozens of them, advancing on us from all sides. They paused in a circle around the locomotive, then shuffled gradually closer and closer. I felt a bony hand pluck my knife from its sheath. Then a sack was pulled over my head, and I saw no more.

I must have fainted, because the next thing I knew I was lying on my back, firmly tied with ropes. There was a high-pitched jabbering sound all around me – some language that I had never heard before. There seemed to be some kind of argument going on. Then I was being dragged along, feet first, on what felt like a sled, with the jabbering and squeaking still going on all around. I caught sight of lamps on the tunnel walls, and realised that they must have removed the sack from my head.

The sled bumped upwards through a shaft of some kind for ten minutes or so, and suddenly I was blinded by daylight, and we were out in the open again. I felt the cold wind on my face and heard the sound of barking dogs. The face of one of the creatures came close to mine. He had few teeth and lank hair, and I closed my eyes instinctively. His breath smelled foul. I was lifted up and placed on another sled, to which dogs had been harnessed like oxen. I caught sight of two other bundles, also bound and trussed like joints of meat, on other sleds – presumably the King and Johansson. Then we set off at great speed through the snow, the dogs pulling and yelping up ahead. At first I could see tree-tops flashing past overhead, then after a while they vanished and the wide blue sky appeared. I managed to turn my head a little and could see that we were out on some kind of frozen lake or river. It was still daylight, though late in the afternoon. On the far shore, growing closer, was a vast complex of white walls and translucent towers, glittering in the sunlight.

After a few minutes we reached the shore and bumped up onto the bank, passed beneath an archway carved out of snow, and entered some kind of courtyard. The drivers halted the sleds and the dogs began to bark excitedly.

Then we were lifted up again and carried inside to a cell, the walls and ceiling of which seemed to be made of blocks of ice. Some faint daylight entered through a small aperture in the wall. Our ropes were cut with a knife, and we were left lying there alone.

We stood up, a little shakily, rubbing our arms and sides where the ropes had chafed. The King looked at Johansson.

'You know where we are?'

'Yes, Majesty."

'Do you think we will see her today?'

'I would think so. From what I could overhear, it seems they are making every effort to... expedite things as quickly as possible.'

I had no idea what they were talking about.

'What is this place?' I asked. I could not prevent my voice trembling.

'It seems to be the winter palace of the queen of the Northlanders,' said the King. 'Known as the Mirror Palace. It is made of ice and snow. I had heard stories about it, but I wasn't sure that I believed them until now.'

I touched the translucent wall.

'Is it really all made of ice?'

'So they say. From blocks cut from the river. There was such an ice palace here in ancient times. Now the Northlanders are reviving the tradition. Every winter they build it, and every summer it melts again.'

'But why do they do it?'

'Who knows? Religion. Tradition. Or to impress. Mankind does many strange things. Especially rulers, if they can get away with it.'

'What were those... creatures? Were they trolls?'

'Trolls?' the King looked surprised. 'Why they were men like you and I, Nielsen! Though somewhat shorter than us on the average, perhaps.'

'But their legs... the fur...'

'Fur britches. They're mine workers. Foreigners. I told you the Northlanders probably got someone else to do their mining for them.'

'I have heard that there are some foreign peoples who have no fear of the underground,' said Johansson.

'And I have heard that there are people who are willing to undertake terrible risks for very little recompense,' retorted the King sardonically.

'I thought they were going to eat us alive,' I said.

The King laughed.

'I doubt that they would have eaten us, Karl, but they could easily have killed us. They did not. They disarmed us and brought us here. On the whole, I would say we have been well treated so far.'

I thought huffily to myself that the King had an odd idea of what it meant to be well treated.

We were not left alone for long. Within an hour, two guards – Northlanders, to my relief – opened the wooden door and brought us out. They did not shackle us, I noticed. We could perhaps have escaped – but where would we go?

The walls were covered in intricate ice carvings and tracery, and as we walked, I caught sight of long snowy corridors to our right and left, full of strange and beautiful sculptures, all carved from ice: mermaids, dragons, warriors. It was marvellous, but it was also madness. What kind of monarch would command such an edifice to be built?

We entered a large central hall, lined with icy columns. Above us hung what looked like chandeliers. At one end of the hall was a podium, upon which a woman clad all in white sat on furs on an ornate throne of green-blue ice. She was perhaps fifty years of age, though her hair was long and blonde, and plaited like a girl's. On her head she wore, not a crown, but a tall white hat of some kind, lined with fur. She looked at us with what I can only describe as an expression of distaste.

The King bowed and addressed her in courtly Northlandish.

'Your Majesty, Queen of Northland, ruler of the Goths, the Wends and the Westlanders, greetings. I am the King of Kantarborg...'

'I know who you are, Pirate King!' interrupted the Queen, in a voice heavy with contempt. 'You are the man who killed my husband's son.'

As diplomatic missions go, there have perhaps been more auspicious beginnings.

Chapter twenty-two

The negotiations

If the King was taken aback by the Northlander Queen's statement, he did not show it.

'I have heard rumours of that, Majesty,' he said. 'But I claim fair battle, and no murder. We were above the waters of Kantarborg, and the airship flew no royal standard.'

I realised he must be talking of the Battle of the Strait. I saw again the burning Northlander craft, tumbling over and over, down to the grey distant waves. So there had been a king's son on board.

'You know well why no royal standard was flown,' said the Queen. 'Nonetheless, Erik was the son of the King, and heir to the throne.'

'Should we not rather say your rival, Majesty? The son of a chambermaid has no proper claim. You and I both know that.'

The Queen regarded him as though he were something unpleasant a dog had brought in.

'We heard you had been deposed and had fled westwards,' she said at last. 'We supposed you would seek asylum in Anglia.'

'That would be no great feat, Majesty. From what I hear, that entire country is an asylum.'

The Queen showed no sign of being amused by such witticisms.

'What do you want, Pirate King?' she asked wearily.

'I want to put things right. I want to restore harmony between our two kingdoms. I want peace.'

This from the man who had so recently berated his courtiers for being insufficiently bellicose. Did this come from the heart, or was it just politics again? I watched with interest.

The Queen seemed unimpressed.

'You want peace now, when you have no kingdom. Kantarborg has been committing piracy against our vessels for generations, and recently you have yourself attacked and killed our people without provocation. Can you give me any reason why I should not have you executed right now?'

'Madam, I am your humble servant. I am in your power. If you decide to have me executed, that is your privilege. But it may be that your Majesty may be able to make better use of me than that.'

'At this moment, no great usefulness suggests itself.'

'As I said, I am in your power.'

The Queen motioned impatiently to the guards, and we were led back to our cell. I could not understand why the King had not tried to make a better case. What had this whole mission been for, I asked him in some exasperation, if we were just going to throw ourselves at the mercy of the Northlanders?

'Queen Gudrun is no fool, Nielsen,' he said. 'She knows we have more to offer. This is a political opportunity for her. But you do not tell a queen what to do – especially when you are her prisoner. The initiative must come from her. Now, we wait.'

Our guards brought us a little food, and then an officer appeared with a list of the names of the men who had been captured outside the mine. He went through every name on the list and asked the King to confirm that each one was one of his men.

'Thorough people, the Northlanders,' commented the King afterwards. 'I suspect their queen will be, too.'

'I thought their ruler was King Magnus,' I said.

'He was carried off in the spring pox, while you were in Sythorn. The Queen has daughters but no sons, so had Erik lived, he would have stood to take the throne after his father.'

'But you said he was illegitimate?'

'I exaggerated a little when I said he was the son of a chambermaid. His mother was a lady-in-waiting of the Queen: a noblewoman. In such cases, illegitimacy is no real barrier.'

'If Erik had become king,' he went on, 'Gudrun would most likely have been cast out. But she is not the kind of woman to graciously surrender her throne to the son of her husband's mistress. If we had not killed him, it is quite likely he would have met with an accident. Dynastic struggles can be quite nasty in this country. Her husband Magnus himself seized the throne by force from his brother Haakon some years back.'

'Didn't Haakon marry a tribal woman?' I vaguely remembered hearing some rumours about that when I was a student.

'Yes, it was a major scandal in the kingdom. They say she seduced him with sorcery. And if we are to believe the stories, he was persuaded by her to experiment with it, too. Tribal magic, the sort of thing we saw up in the mountains. But all those accusations might be just politics. In any case, Magnus had his brother condemned for heresy and witchcraft, and Haakon was deposed.'

'What happened to him?'

'He fled the kingdom. It is said that he is dead.'

'Know your enemy, but fear your brother?'

'Indeed so. I suppose I am fortunate that I no longer have one. Not that it has turned out any better for me.'

'Does Gudrun have the support of the people?' I asked.

The King looked at me as though he thought that a slightly odd question.

'Who knows? It is the support of the nobles that counts. No doubt she has her faction, and Erik had his. And there are probably those who still support Haakon. She is Queen With Opposition, as the historians say. That, at any rate, is what we are counting on.'

Johansson had a pack of cards in his pocket, and we played a desultory game by the dim light of a small wind-up lamp, crouching upon reindeer pelts on the snow floor. Johansson won. Eventually the guards brought us thick fur sleeping bags, and, somewhat to my surprise, I was warmer inside mine than I had been for weeks, and quickly fell asleep.

I woke in the darkness to hear Johansson and the King whispering together.

'How do you think he will react when he finds out?' Johansson was asking.

'I don't know,' said the King. 'He is a good man, but rather naïve. He doesn't understand how these things are done.'

'You are sailing somewhat close to the wind, Majesty,' replied Johansson after a pause.

'Have I ever done anything else?' asked the King.

It was an odd snippet of conversation, and left me feeling somewhat disturbed.

When dawn came we were given a little gruel to eat, then ushered back into the royal presence.

The queen began by turning her gaze on me. 'I know who Lieutenant Johansson is,' she said, 'but who are you?'

I looked at the King. I could understand the Queen's carefully enunciated Northlandish quite well, but I could not reply to her in that tongue.

'Mr Nielsen is my counsellor,' said the King. Well, he could hardly say I was his clockmaker.

'Nielsen? Then this must be yours,' said the Queen, holding up the leather satchel that contained my journal. She opened it and took out my drawing of the runes we had seen carved in the snow.

'What is this?'

'It was something we saw up in the mountains, your Majesty,' said the King. 'We were unable to decipher its meaning.'

'Runes are forbidden in this kingdom. They are signs of witchcraft. Have you been consorting with witches?'

The King opened his mouth to speak, but the Queen interrupted.

'Think very carefully before you reply, Pirate King!'

'Madam, as I have been told, runes are merely an ancient system of writing in these lands. We assumed the writer meant to convey some message to us, but we could not work out what it was. I asked Nielsen to draw them for me.'

'Runes are not merely a system of writing, and whoever told you that was a fool,' the Queen replied. 'But I do not think this message was intended for you. I think it was for me. And I know who wrote it. You were merely the errand-boy.'

'In that case, Majesty, you have the advantage on us. We are entirely in the dark about it.'

'I don't think you are. You came across the mountains. You passed through her territory. A party as small as yours could not have done that without her consent. Is there more to this story? Answer me!'

'Madam, we were told by the mountain tribes that we would need the permission of some local... wise woman. We visited her and obtained a safe passage. Next morning we found this in the snow. That is all we know. '

The Queen contemplated us balefully for what felt like a long time.

'It is very difficult for me to believe this story, gentlemen. I have to ask myself whether it is really possible that you could be that stupid. That you truly do not know who she is?'

Her words echoed in the icy hall.

I glanced at the King. For the first time, he was looking seriously concerned. The conversation was spinning out of control. He made no answer.

'We are done for today,' said the Queen. 'I invite you to consider carefully what you will say at our next meeting. If you are found to be in league with a witch against the sovereign ruler of this kingdom, then the penalty of the law is clear. You will be burned, all of you.'

Back in our cell, the King looked pale. This development had been completely unexpected.

'I don't understand – how can a mere witch be such a threat to her? We have fortune-tellers and soothsayers on every market square in Kantarborg. Is Ulrika leading some kind of insurrection?'

Johansson shook his head.

'If she is, our spies have not heard of her.'

'Then why the devil is she so important? There's something we don't know. What are we missing here?'

'I know who she is,' I said.

They looked at me.

'She's King Haakon's daughter.'

There was an appalled silence.

'You knew this?' asked the King.

'No. It has only just occurred to me. But if so, she is half Northlander and half tribal. She is the daughter of the deposed king and a tribal witch. That means she can command the loyalties of the northern tribes in a way that Gudrun never could. It would make her a formidable rival.'

'That would explain their loyalty to her,' said the King. 'She's not just a witch, she's a princess! And of course that also means...'

'Yes.' I did not need to spell it out.

The King swore, forcefully.

'Haakon and Magnus came from a southern family, as did Erik's mother,' said Johansson thoughtfully, 'but Gudrun is from the east. She is of a noble family, but she is only queen by marriage – a royal consort, not the daughter of a king. Whereas Ulrika...'

The King took that in for a moment.

'For all we know, the provinces may be in a ferment of revolt. That might be one reason for moving their court here, to the winter palace.'

'Even if the southern provinces are not in open rebellion over Haakon, he will certainly have his supporters there,' Johansson continued. 'Now that Magnus is dead, they will eye their chance. Look: say Ulrika has the loyalty of the northern tribes and Haakon's faction in the south, while we have the support of the Irdai and the other southern tribes. Together...'

'We could topple Gudrun,' said the King, finishing the thought. 'Or at least, Gudrun might easily be persuaded to think that a possibility.'

'Sire, we must try to turn this to our advantage somehow,' said Johansson.

'But how? Anything we say now will be met with the deepest suspicion. All part of a plot to put Haakon back on the throne, if he lives. Or Ulrika. Or, heaven help us all, a son of mine!'

'Surely if the Queen thought that was our aim, we would be dead already?'

'If I might venture a suggestion ..?' I said. They turned to me.

'It seems to me that Gudrun is warning us. She is giving us time to get our story in order. If we have divined the political situation correctly, she may be in a desperate predicament. As you said, our arrival here is an opportunity for her. She badly needs to make use of us, but we are of no use to her dead. So the last thing she wants us to do is to tell her the truth. If we do, she will have to burn us.'

'By heaven, we'll make a courtier of you yet, Nielsen,' said the King with a smile. 'So, what's your suggestion?'

'We deny everything. If Ulrika does produce a child, she cannot prove it is yours. The only witnesses to what happened were the three of us and Áno. Our story is that in order to get permission to cross her territory, we gave her... the clockwork butterfly. That is all.'

'Gudrun will never believe that,' objected Johansson.

'No, she won't. But if I am right, it won't matter.'

There was a silence.

'It looks like our best chance,' sighed the King at last. 'Let us hope it is enough to prevent us ending as kindling.'

Later that day, to my great relief, we were transferred from our snow cell at the palace to some quite ordinary-looking wooden huts in a fenced compound near the mine, where we were reunited with the rest of our men. All were unharmed, except Ebsen, who, perhaps trying to redeem himself, had lunged at the arresting Northlanders with a kitchen knife, and had been shot through the arm for his trouble.

My journal was returned to me, and the King was also given back his personal items, including, to my great surprise, his sword. Clearly, the Northlanders did not expect us to try to escape.

The compound was large, and we were not the only prisoners housed there. We saw ragged men from all over the Northlands, sentenced to work at the mines for various crimes, or for sedition. It was all above-ground work, however: sorting, sieving, smelting and grinding. Even the Northlanders were not so cruel as to send their own people underground. That task was reserved for foreigners from distant lands, who, as Johansson said, may not have shared our terror of the subterranean depths – or perhaps, as the King implied, were merely desperate for work.

The King ordered that Johansson and anyone else with a working knowledge of the Northlander tongue should mingle with the other prisoners and seek out gossip – anything they could learn about the state of affairs in the kingdom might be useful to us. What we heard back, allowing for exaggeration, tended to confirm our impression that Gudrun was in a vulnerable position. The Ursan Empire to the east was putting pressure on the Northlanders, demanding concessions. Haakon was rumoured to be still alive, and to be leading a revolt in the western provinces. Erik had somehow survived the airship crash and had joined him. (The latter story we were obviously inclined to dismiss.) Most of the smelting work had ceased at the mine since the previous season, due to a lack of blackstone. No-one knew for certain why the supply had dried up, but there were stories of monsters infesting the blackstone mines on the islands of the far north. ('Bears, most likely,' said the King. As though that made a difference!) Strangely, there was no mention of Ulrika in any of the rumours, although her tribe's territory lay just a couple of days' journey away. But these prisoners were mostly men from the east and south of the country; apart from the mines, there were no other Northlander settlements this far north.

Returning from one such sounding, as darkness fell, I saw once again the strange lights in the sky: almost like clouds, but luminous, and swirling and boiling above us. It seemed likely to be a portent or a sign, but whether for good or evil, who could say?

The night air was icy, and I hurried to get back to the relative warmth of the hut. As I approached, I saw through the window the King and Johansson, in the lamplight, in animated conversation with a white-haired, bespectacled man. As I entered, he turned towards me.

'Nielsen, there you are! I am sorry about the subterfuge,' said Dr Hansen.
Chapter twenty-three

The King plays three cards

I am not a violent man – I have not struck anyone since I was a boy, scrapping in the schoolyard – but at that moment, I could happily have throttled Hansen with my bare hands. Here was the traitor who had sold our secrets to the Northlanders, whose actions had consigned me to prison and torture – and the King and Johansson were standing there chatting to him as though they were all the best of friends!

'What subterfuge?' I managed to stammer out.

'I'm afraid Hansen was our man all along,' said the King. 'We needed to establish lines of communication with the Northlanders. We knew the coup was coming, so we had to plan ahead. We had to offer them something.'

'The cannons?'

'We had to establish trust. The cannons were useful in that respect.'

'Majesty, men have died – our men – because of those cannons.' My voice was shaking with fury.

'Yes, that was... unfortunate,' replied the King. 'I did my best not to engage the Northlanders, but they caught us off Christiansby. It was not meant to happen.'

Unfortunate. The cries of the wounded had remained with me ever since.

'This man's treachery sent me to prison!'

'I was acting on the command of my king, so where is the treachery?' Hansen retorted angrily.

What about the treachery to me? I thought.

'Anyway,' he went on, 'you were not meant to end up in prison. I did not pay your brother's gambling debts. I don't know who did.'

'It was me, actually,' said the King quietly.

I stared at him.

'I'm sorry Karl, really. We had to make it look real. We had to distance you from me. It was just politics. I didn't think they'd send you to Sythorn, though. I miscalculated there.'

'So it was all to protect you?'

'Not me, Karl! The realm. The survival of the Kingdom is more important than any of us – even a king.'

'Funny you should say that.'

'But I got you out again, didn't I?'

'Because you needed an engineer for the locomotive!'

The King made no reply.

'And Erika Thorne? What part did she play in all this?'

The King looked puzzled.

'The Democracy League woman? She defaced royal property.'

'If it was her!'

The King threw me an exasperated look: Here we are deciding the fate of a kingdom, and you are blathering about library books. But Johansson knew what I was talking about.

'Know your enemy, but fear your brother,' he said quietly. 'You can't say you weren't warned. He couldn't have her, so neither would you.'

I looked at him. I found I could say nothing. I turned and left the hut.

Later that night, sitting on my bunk with a wind-up lamp, I wrote a single sentence in my journal:

Politics and friendship do not mix.

I stared at it. There was no point in feeling sorry for myself – I had put myself in this position. But something, now, had fundamentally and irrevocably changed.

At Johansson's suggestion, the King sent Queen Gudrun a message saying that he wished to make a Witnessed Statement in front of her entire court. The thinking was that such a declaration would demonstrate the King's sincerity, and establish, once and for all, that he was not involved in any plot to depose her. Exactly what he intended to say, however, was something the King kept to himself.

Yule was approaching and the days were shortening rapidly. Now we had barely an hour of daylight left each day, so the gathering in the Great Hall of the ice palace was set for sunrise – eleven in the morning. Hansen accompanied the King and Johansson, and I went with them sullenly, feeling rather superfluous among this triumvirate of men who, it seemed, had orchestrated this entire masquerade from the start. I might have flattered myself that I was in the inner circle, but I had never been included in the conspiracy. How could I have been? I was the son of a merchant. I did not think like an aristocrat. I did understand how these things were done. I did not understand politics. And God willing, I thought, I never will.

The King bore his full regalia and sword, and we walked grandly up the nave of the packed hall, the Northlander courtiers staring curiously at us as we passed. Just like a wedding, I thought sourly. But which of us is the bride?

On the throne, Queen Gudrun was also in her full regalia. In her silver crown and long white robes, she did not look like a monarch whose position was in any way threatened. But that, no doubt, was precisely the intention.

'Your Majesty, Queen of the Northlanders,' began the King. 'I have come here today in the sight of your court to declare to you my fealty and my honest intentions. The aim and hope of my mission here is to bring peace and prosperity to our two nations.'

'Go on, King Norbert,' said the Queen drily. 'You have our undivided attention.'

'I have three gifts to lay before you.' Three cards to play, I thought.

'The first concerns the blackstone. We monarchs of the new generation are dreaming big dreams. We wish our kingdoms to grow powerful and prosperous – perhaps even to rival the ancient kingdoms of the past. This is not only desirable, it is a necessity. Our rival nations are already beginning to rediscover the secrets of ancient times, and we must not be left behind. The northern peoples can no longer afford to be afraid of the dark. We must learn to mine the knowledge of the ancients, whatever it brings.'

'But there is a problem. The great machines of the past drank deep of the blood of the earth. Now, most of those resources are gone. Your steam engines crave blackstone, yet there is none to be found in these lands. All that you have is what little remains in the islands of the far north, where, as I understand it, you have lately been much troubled by bears.'

The Queen grimaced.

'One bear in particular,' she said.

I felt a chill at the thought of the Great Bear that the Witch spoke of – but the King was quicker with his wits than I, and drew a quite different conclusion.

'Indeed so, Majesty. One bear in particular. The Ursans have driven you out of the islands.'

The affronted look on the Queen's face told us he had guessed correctly. So that was why the blackstone had stopped coming.

'They have had their eyes on those resources for centuries, and now they see their chance. They have taken your blackstone, and they want your iron. Even if you trade with them, it would be a most unequal relationship. They are expanding fast. If you look east, you will end as their vassal kingdom. You know this.'

'Thank you for telling us what we know,' said the Queen acerbically. 'And what do you propose we should do about this?'

'Look south, Majesty. Our new clockwork technology can bring you freedom from the blackstone, freedom from dependence on the Ursans. Your Majesty knows the old riddle: I have no birth but yet I grow. I have no voice but yet I moan. I have no wings but yet I fly. I have no death but yet I die. What am I?'

'The wind,' said the Queen impatiently. 'Our engineers have examined your locomotive and your windmill. They are ingenious contrivances, but there is nothing there that we cannot copy. And of course we have Dr Hansen's cannons. This gift is indeed most useful, but it seems it has already been given. You said you had others?'

'My second gift is my blood.'

A murmur went through the hall.

'Your kingdom is presently troubled by the problem of succession, and in that connection, I understand there have been rumours that the King of Kantarborg might have had the intention of taking part in some conspiracy against Your Majesty and Your Majesty's line. Nothing has been further from my mind. I hereby declare before this court that I recognise Your Majesty and Your Majesty's heirs as the rightful rulers of this kingdom, and as proof absolute of my support for your line, I wish, in the sight of your court and before these witnesses, to propose myself in marriage to one of your daughters.'

'Did you have anyone particular in mind?' asked the Queen. 'Or would any of them do?'

The King waited patiently until the laughter subsided.

'Madam, you and I are both rulers. You know that we are not proposing a love match. This will be a royal alliance, the marriage of two kingdoms. You may call me a pirate king, but you know that I am of the bloodline. There is royal Northlander blood in my veins as well as that of Kantarborg. I am a worthy suitor for any Northlander princess.'

'And then I suppose you would like our army to give you back your kingdom as a dowry? That would be most convenient, wouldn't it?'

'No, Majesty. I am proposing the unity of our kingdoms. You will remain the queen of the Northlands until your death. I will rule in Kantarborg with your daughter, who will bear the title of Princess of the Westlands. The first-born of our union will be the first monarch in many centuries to hold the three crowns.'

(I noticed the King did not say 'son'. Was he embracing modern ideas, or just being careful not to offend the Queen?)

'The three crowns? Ancient history!' said the Queen dismissively. 'Much blood was spilled over them centuries ago, but now that neither you nor the Westlands pose any threat, it is an empty title to hold. The prosperity and welfare of my own kingdom is what matters to me.'

'Of course, Majesty. And that brings me to my third gift: all the gold of Kantarborg!'

For a moment I thought the King literally meant the coffers of the royal treasury, which I knew had been much depleted by the wars of recent years. But I thought I saw a flicker of interest in the Queen's eyes.

'As your Majesty knows, Kantarborg has grown wealthy on taxation and tolls.'

There was a growl from the courtiers. 'Piracy!' shouted someone. The King ignored it.

'The tolls we impose on vessels passing through the Sound have brought a great deal of prosperity to our land, but they have also been the source of much contention and resentment between Kantarborg and the Northlands. If we were to become one kingdom, that wealth would be shared between us. Moreover, merchants of the Northlands would of course be exempt from the tolls. You would be able to export and import your goods at half the price you currently pay. And that, I surmise, would make a very great difference to your economy.'

There was silence in the hall. I felt the King had scored a definite hit.

'In conclusion, your Majesty, I will merely say that if you see fit to accept this offer, your name will be blessed by generations of Northlanders. You will be called Good Queen Gudrun, the monarch who brought peace and prosperity to our northern kingdoms.'

The Queen looked amused at the blatant flattery. But then she did something which, to me at least, was completely unexpected. She stood up, and her voice rang out clearly and coldly.

'I, Gudrun, Queen of Northland, ruler of the Goths, the Wends and the Westlanders, do hereby in the sight of my court accept the offer of the King of Kantarborg. May God bless this compact between our kingdoms.'

There was a gasp in the hall, then a loud cheer. The power balance had suddenly shifted, and like courtiers everywhere, they hastened to be on the winning side. The King, smiling, approached the throne and bowed, and the two rulers shook hands.

'That was extraordinary!' I said to Johansson, as we filed out of the hall. 'She didn't even withdraw to consider.'

Johansson smiled. 'What, and give her courtiers a chance to play politics? Monarchs never act spontaneously, Karl. She knew what was in the wind from the moment we proposed a Witnessed Statement. So she presented her court with a fait accompli. They can like it or lump it – her future and her line are secure now. If she is not assassinated within the next twenty-four hours, I think we can say we have accomplished our mission.'

The brief midday sun flickered low on the horizon, then winked out. We were in darkness.

Chapter twenty-four

A beginning

The following weeks and months, through Yule and the time of continuous night, were spent in further negotiations and war plans, in which I played little part. Hansen had taken my place in the King's inner circle, and despite the King's occasional friendly words to me, it was obvious I was being sidelined. It mattered little.

The workers at the iron mine were busy producing Hansen cannons, which were being laid out in long lines in the stockyards. Trains drawn by our locomotive and by the Northlanders' steam device took them to the naval base at Nordhamn, on the east coast.

As spring drew on, and the sun gradually returned, our combined forces were ordered to gather at the southernmost tip of the Northland peninsula to make ready for the invasion of Kantarborg. The King was determined to marry his Northlander princess, Ingeborg, in the church of St Marilyn in the city – the traditional venue for royal weddings. The outcome of the invasion itself was, of course, thought to be a foregone conclusion. Kantarborg was not expected to put up much resistance against its own king, especially with such overwhelming military might behind him.

In May, once the sea ice was gone, our group accompanied a trainload of cannons to Nordhamn, and from there we sailed south on the Northlander frigate Hammershield. One day during the voyage I made my intentions known to the King, as we stood on deck, watching the tree-lined shore slip past to starboard.

He did not take my resignation well.

'But Karl, you are my moral compass, my lodestone!' he protested. 'How can I rule in Kantarborg without you?'

That was humbug, of course, but there was something else behind it. His deep brown eyes showed real distress.

'Is there nothing I can give you? I could make you a courtier, a minister...'

I smiled.

'The one thing I would ask of you, Majesty, is something you can give to no man.'

'And what is that?'

'Your friendship.'

To that he made no reply, but looked stricken.

A few days later we docked at Sandviken, a small Northlander town on the shores of the Sound. In the far distance, across the water, I could just make out the towers and spires of Kantarborg – my erstwhile home.

The King had given me some gold sovereigns, which he counselled me to exchange for Northlander coins, which would shortly be the common currency of our two kingdoms. It was not a fortune, but it would be enough to keep me for a few months. While the ship was being unloaded at the quay, I slipped away.

I took lodgings at the first boarding-house I saw, and inquired where I might be able to get something to eat. The mistress of the house exchanged a sovereign for me and gave me directions to the baker's on the market square.

It was a pretty little town, sleepy in the spring sunlight, with the promise of a warm day in the air. The streets, empty at this hour, were cobbled, and the houses old and half-timbered, mostly in one or two storeys, some with balconies leaning crookedly out over the streets. Hollyhocks twined gently around drainpipes. A child's ball lay in the gutter. This was a place that had not known war for a very long time.

On the square was a clock tower. The clock had two faces, both of which seemed to have stopped, though at two different times. There was a brass plate on one side, with an inscription in some language I did not recognise.

A bell rang as I opened the door to the baker's shop, and a pretty girl came out of the back room. She gave me the things I pointed at, smiling a little at my attempts at Northlandish pronunciation. I asked her about the clock.

'Oh, that's the two-faced liar!' she said. 'It hasn't run for a hundred years. It was built by a foreign clockmaker, and when he died no-one could fix it.'

'There is an inscription beneath it...?'

'Loft godt van al en drinckt den wijn, en laet de werelt de werelt sijn,' she quoted, to my surprise.

'Praise the God of all and drink the wine, and let the world be the world.'

And then she gave me a broad and open smile, which I found rather disconcerting. As I stepped out of the door again, it struck me that despite everything that had happened, I was still a young man. And this town had no clockmaker.

I walked down to the pebbled beach and sat down to consume my breakfast. Freya, now repaired and refitted, was floating above the bay, and beneath her a fleet of warships lay at anchor, ready for the coming battle. Alongside the Northlander vessels, I could make out Ariadne and Steadfast, and several more of our ships. On board one of them, no doubt, was the clockwork locomotive. Perhaps one day there would be such engines in every town. Perhaps railway lines would run all the way up the Northland coast to the iron mines. Perhaps there would even be street railways in the towns and cities, with clockwork carriages trundling through the streets, carrying people to their daily work.

I stood up, and from my pocket, I drew out the medal that the King had given me for bravery. I looked at it for a moment, then threw it as hard as I could, and watched it fly in a long arc and drop silently into the grey waves.

I smiled to myself. My life was just beginning.

#####

##### Acknowledgements  
My grateful thanks are due to my friends and translator colleagues for reading the first draft of this book and providing helpful comments, especially Jo Ann Cahn, Margaret Schroeder, Marga Blankestijn, Katja Benevol Gabrijelčič, Sharon Grevet, Tony Crawford and Yves Lanthier; to the writers Brendan Sweeney, Paul Larkin and Autumn Barlow for encouragement; to Andrey Dorozhko for the cover picture and map; to Dan Eggers for cover design and typesetting; and to my children Christopher, Catriona and Ciara, for their patience with the old fella.

_Kingdom of Clockwork_ is also available as an audio book. For details, see: www.blackswan.dk

Facebook page for Kingdom of Clockwork:

 https://www.facebook.com/KingdomOfClockwork?focus_composer=true&ref_type=bookmark

About the author

Originally from Ireland, Billy O'Shea he has so far failed ate being a grape-picker, a dishwasher, a dock worker, a TV sound technician, a diamond sorter, a pirate radio DJ, a bar musician, a translator, a 3D illustrator, a writer and a broadcaster.

He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Copenhagen.

He has lived in Scandinavia for the past thirty years.

