“He leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than nature,
That shapes man better.”
— Coriolanus, IV.6.
A feast was laid in the commodore’s cabin on the airship Camilla, upon a long table lit by gas and flickering alchemical flames. Some had cautioned the commodore against having so much fire abroad a wooden ship, but he was determined to meet face-to-face with what he feared.
Noise above: the ring of metal, and an impact that rattled the ceiling. The diners – admirals and politicians all – half-rose in their chairs. Commodore Aufidius was first on his feet.
“The sentries would have given the alarm, sir,” his first lieutenant said. Aufidius turned a glare on him, and he added, “I will go check, if you—”
Before he could finish, the commodore was striding across the cabin, taking up his swordbelt from the chest and wrenching open the hatch. A dark shape blocked out the fading twilight above, drawing back as Aufidius climbed the steps.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, emerging onto the quarterdeck, and then stopped short as he saw the three sentry automata strewn before him, the gears in their appendages spinning uselessly. One emitted a few sparks and went still.
Aufidius peered at the intruder on his quarterdeck: he stood in the shadow of the mainmast, a bulky figure framed against the fog-shrouded lights of Antium below. “What have you done to my sentries?”
“They got in my way.” The voice was deep, familiar in a way Aufidius felt in his bones, but could not define.
“Who are you, sir?”
He took a step forward into the light, stiff and halting as a man injured or—“Why, don’t you know me, Aufidius?”
Or not a man at all, though from a distance he might pass for one. He was dressed in cheap shirt and trousers like a dock-worker, sleeves rolled up to his elbows despite the evening chill. Each sinew stood out prominently, the bronze skin faintly gleaming with reflected light. His golden eyes rotated as they focused, taking in the eyepatch across Aufidius’s face.
“Caius Martius,” the commodore said, as though it were a name rather than a functional designation. From martial, the word for war. It lay like a burning brand on his tongue. “First soldier of the Eastern Confederacy. Called the Scourge of Corioles. What in hellfire’s name brings you here?”
“To die at your hand,” Martius answered, slow and word by word. He had not been made for fluent speech. “If so you would take your revenge. Or else, to do your country service. If you would have me.”
A thrill flamed through Aufidius, sharp as the stroke that had taken his eye. “Sir,” he began, and then, forgetting himself: “You marvellous creature! I have dreamed of nothing else.”
#
The admirals were hesitant but pleased when Aufidius brought the Scourge of Corioles back into the cabin with him, holding him in friendship by the sharp joint of his elbow. They were more pleased yet when Martius told them how he wished to strike back against his former nation, and would give them all the intelligence they needed to reach the heart of the Confederacy, behind its defences of mountain and deceptive cloud.
The food was carried away, for Martius would not eat it, and maps were spread out over the table, the conference lasting long into the night.
“You will share the command with me, of course,” Aufidius said, not giving the admiralty time to object, and Martius nodded gravely.
At last, the grandees descended satisfied to their homes in Antium, and the two of them were left alone. Aufidius fetched the brandy-bottle from the sideboard and poured out a glass, offering it automatically.
“You forget,” Martius rasped out, almost seeming to smile. Aufidius shrugged, and drank it himself. It was warm in the lamplit room; he unclasped his uniform coat and draped it over a chair. He could not remember ever feeling so glad, not even when the Camilla was first given him to command.
“They exiled me, the damned rogues,” Martius said after a moment, staring down at his hands on the table, springs tight across his knuckles. “They made me to serve them, and then they said I did it too well, and they exiled me, like a rusty sword dropped on the scrap-heap. Some called for me to be broken down…decommissioned in the public square.”
Aufidius exhaled, almost a gasp. “How could that be?” When he had seen him last, Martius had been wreathed in hellfire on the bridges of Corioles, single-handedly burning a swathe through the city – as his sword had burned across Aufidius’s face, cauterizing the wound it made. Martius had passed through the alchemical fire as though through fog, shining and untouched. He looked…older now, if that were possible, but still immeasurably strong.
“I am not invulnerable,” Martius answered, marking his thoughts. “Strike the right place and the whole mechanism goes: a clockwork toy you give your children. No government would dare make something they could not destroy, at their puny pleasure.”
“And your creatrix?” Of course he knew of the famous Volumnia. Unnatural, for a woman to yield such power. The Confederates were barbarians, for all their advances – they had no concept of the proper bounds between the home and public life. And yet it paid to know one’s enemies – that was a lesson Aufidius had learned well. “Did she not speak for you?”
“She did,” Martius allowed. “But she is one among the Council of Fifteen. The bastards outnumbered her. They have always feared me.”
“They were right to do so,” Aufidius said, a note of admiration in his voice. “And now you will have your vengeance. Together, we’ll burn the Confederacy to the ground.”
Martius did not answer, eyes unblinking on the dawn beyond the cabin windows. The two of them sat like friends and watched the sun rise, while the commodore turned the empty glass over in his hands and thought of the future. He could see it stretching out before him now, bright as a river of flame.
#
They cast off for the East soon after – Camilla the flagship, with the heavy-weight She-Wolf and darting Amazon behind her, their bellies all packed full of men and machines. The Volscian-made sentries and soldiers could not compete with Confederate designs, but they had surprise on their side, and intelligence, and the Confederacy’s own best weapon.
Aufidius was always happiest in flight, the wind in his face, the engines below more felt than heard, the steady hum of propellers behind. He stood on the deck of the Camilla, and did not startle to feel Martius coming up behind him.
“Why,” asked his voice, deep and artificial as the ship’s engines, “do you wear that embroidered bauble across your face?”
Aufidius touched the patch at his left eye. The Antium Ladies’ Institute had given it to him, as a token of esteem for his heroism at Corioles. “Most people do not care to see the wound.”
“No,” Martius said, “why do you wear that? Why not this?” And in his hand, he held up the eyepiece he must have found in Aufidius’s cabin.
This, did not come from the Ladies’ Institute. It was a bronze thing, carefully wrought with tiny levers and gears, fitting over the side of his face. It would replace his missing eye, he had been told, though in truth it did far more than that when he wore it. He could focus on a signpost a mile distant, or see a man’s shape by its warmth in the darkness, or glimpse the tiny movements of an automaton’s workings.
“I prefer not to,” Aufidius said shortly. “It feels…foreign.”
“How will it not, if you do not wear it? You mean to use it in battle, do you not?”
He shifted on his feet. “I should be a fool else.”
“Do you fear to be like me?” Martius asked, rumbling and quiet in his ear. “You needn’t worry. You could never be like me.”
For that, Aufidius had no answer. “Train with me,” Martius told him, less a suggestion than a command. “Train with me, and wear the device.”
#
They sparred belowdecks, for it would not do for the men to see one of their commanders bested. A balcony protruded near the bottom of the ship, screened from above by the curve of its great belly. The wind was stronger here, the green patchwork of land clearly visible through the grill at their feet.
“A dangerous spot,” said Martius – approvingly, Aufidius thought. Since he revealed himself, he had foregone all clothing but a pair of cut-off trousers and a swordbelt, and had no uniform to remove. Aufidius shivered as the wind tugged at his own lawn shirt, but knew he would be warm soon enough. The eyepiece pressed on his temple; he slid it down, and saw in colours no living eye knew.
Without warning, he drew his sword and turned into an attack.
He had the satisfaction of seeing Martius draw back, making time to unsheathe his own weapon. It was no civilized duelling rapier but a broad blade, heavy and near-ruined by fire, but still wickedly sharp at the tip. Aufidius had bitter knowledge of that.
Steel met steel, the sound nearly drowned out by the ship’s engines and the buffeting air. They circled one another, testing with a few strokes and parries, trying their footing on the shaky metal floor.
Aufidius lunged, sliding his rapier along the other’s sword, forcing him back against the low railing. Martius stayed there a moment, and then slowly his arm began to lift, increment by increment, pushing away the blade. Only the eyepiece told Aufidius when his sinews were poised for the final thrust, and he stepped back in time, raising his sword to defend himself.
“Good,” Martius rasped. He came on, swinging faster than the human eye could follow, attack after attack. Aufidius parried each one, but he was breathing hard, sweat sticking the shirt to his skin.
So often, Aufidius had dreamed of this – though his dreams were of meetings in the field, surrounded by the dead and dying. He had imagined every way an encounter between them might go, and he had imagined winning, waking up panting with it in the night.
His throat burned and still he returned the blows, from one end of the platform to the other. His opponent did not flag, did not tire, did not make an error. His strokes were the same, every time, deadly with mechanical precision.
Grinning fiercely in exhaustion, Aufidius made a final reckless lunge, his blade under the other’s guard. It skimmed against Martius’s chest but did no damage, and he could not bring it up into another thrust.
Almost lazily, Martius hooked the rapier into the hilt of his sword and tugged it aside, wrenching it from Aufidius’s raw fingers. He glanced down at the blades, and then tossed them on the floor with a sound of disgust, moving forward once more.
It was not over, then. Aufidius stood his ground, humiliated and roused, as those vastly strong hands closed over his arms. They grappled, swaying in the wind with nothing but sky around them.
For a moment, he thought he’d found Martius’s weakness – an indent at his shoulder where the plates met, to hook his fingers in and pull; a booted foot pressed behind his knee. They tumbled to the grill as it rattled beneath them, rolling, but it was Martius who got him pinned, knees on either side of his hips, even as Aufidius’s hands closed about his throat.
“Do you yield?” Martius demanded.
“Yield?” he repeated, breathless, laughing at the ludicrousness of it. He tightened his fingers: the metal flesh was softer than he had expected, smooth and warm with power. Alive, though one could never mistake it for human skin.
Martius shook his head within the other’s grip. “You cannot kill me that way. Yield, Aufidius.”
“Never.” He struggled until Martius leaned down on him, chest to his heaving chest, blocking out the light and wind. There was no heartbeat, but he could feel something within, thrumming as the engines of the Camilla, the steady, relentless counterpart to his own hammering heart.
“Yield,” the soldier said, low in his ear.
A red haze settled over Aufidius. He changed his grip to pull Martius down still closer, though he would not say the word.
#
On they flew, the Volscian fields below replaced in time by jagged mountains. It was night when the ships passed over the smoking ruins of Corioles, and neither commander looked down to see it.
Once within Confederate territory, they travelled more slowly. Martius stood at the stern with his charts, guiding the helmsman between the peaks too high for the fleet to fly over. She-Wolf and Amazon followed behind, ready to echo every turn the Camilla made.
“To think, sir,” said Lucian, the first lieutenant, as he stood with Aufidius on the quarterdeck, “within a week we may be upon the Confederates’ capital, which none of us has ever seen.”
“Yes,” Aufidius answered briefly, frowning into the pale, hazy sunlight. Thick banks of cloud covered the horizon, broken and complex as towers.
“And all thanks to our new ally. Our new commander, I should say, since you have shared the honour with him.”
“Shared. Yes.”
Lucian watched him shrewdly. “He takes a great deal of authority upon himself, sir, it is true.”
“He is…less careful of my person than I might wish.” Aufidius tugged the sleeve of his uniform jacket lower over his wrist, where a dark bruise was forming: he had heard the whispers among the crew, and did not want to give them fuel. The line dividing pain from pleasure was a fine one between them, and more and more, Martius crossed it. Either he did not know his own strength, or knew it too well. “But that is his nature.”
“Will we build such men one day, do you think?”
Aufidius shook his head. “There can be no other such men.”
#
They sacked their first Confederate outpost the next day. Unassisted, Aufidius might have thought it just another patch of cloud, wreathing the top of a crag. Martius showed them how to approach at night, the lights of the fortress guiding them through the cloud cover. The Volscian ships left the crag burning as a beacon.
“They’ll be panicking now, the councillors,” Martius said later, leaving Aufidius breathing hard against the wall, his skin marked with fingerprints and ashes. The heat of battle had reminded him of Corioles, when he had met Martius among the flames. “Let them panic.”
With each day, with each fortress attacked and each harrying patrol repulsed, the chief city of the Confederacy grew closer. “We’ll come at them from above,” Martius said, at a meeting in the commodore’s cabin. “Our ships over their Capitol. It will mean some dangerous flying, but their artillery won’t be turned that way in time. A few licks of hellfire on their precious town, and they’ll surrender.” He barely glanced at Aufidius for confirmation.
The winds were high, the evening of the final attack, the sunset an angry red behind them. Aufidius held tight to the railing, hands clenching to pilot the Camilla himself, as he had done in his youth. It was hard flying, but his own position was harder.
“Hellfire,” he whispered, as the city emerged like a stormcloud before them, “it truly is an island in the sky, as the stories say.”
“It’s anchored to the mountains,” Martius said, coming up behind him and resting a hand lightly at his waist. “Built on a platform. A cunning design.”
“And the clouds?”
“Steam, from the furnaces in the underbelly. Powering the patricians’ hypocausts and their little toys. If I had been built to serve them with drinks instead of their enemies’ heads, they would have never exiled me.” The bitterness in his voice left a tang, like metal.
“They did wrongly. We will show them that.”
“Yes.” He paused. “Come below? There is a map of the city.”
For a moment, even yet, Aufidius wavered. “I am needed on deck,” he replied. “We’re about to begin our ascent.”
The Camilla tacked up into the wind, her engines straining, rigging snapping with each gust. The vast She-Wolf had come up alongside them, decks bristling with men and automata; Amazon, more easily blown off course, laboured in their wake.
Cannon-fire broke the night, blooms of sunrise amid the darkness; a bolt of lightning arched in the clouds above. For an instant the ship was bathed in uncanny light, in which Martius looked like a statue of stone instead of bronze.
Aufidius loved this kind of flying, wild and reckless, pushing his ship to the limits of its power. He barely heard Martius calling for him.
“Your eyepiece,” he shouted sternly. “You have forgotten it again!”
Cursing, Aufidius slid the thing down over his head, and almost gasped. It was as though the clouds, which had been so dark and impenetrable, suddenly parted before his gaze, and he could see all the lights of the Capitol shining below. It was as beautiful as the engravings showed it, laid out in an orderly grid of brick and marble, with three-lined avenues and buildings of domes and columns. Martius stood at the railing in front of him, gazing down, poised as though his body were one large spring.
Lightning flashed again. The sudden radiance lit the bronze of Martius’s back, and there—
A flaw. Just below his left shoulder-blade, a tiny join only enhanced vision could perceive: the vulnerability that would have allowed his makers to destroy him. Aufidius had searched for it, on all the nights of their journey, but his human eye could never have noticed such a small thing, his questing fingers could not have felt it.
The fleet broke out of the cloud-cover and stopped, with beautiful precision, the three ships hovering in formation above the bright dome of the Capitol, their engines stirring the tree-tops.
“Shall we fire?” Aufidius called, hating himself for the question. Every Volscian man and automaton stood ready with cannon and hellfire, to destroy the streets below as their own towns had been destroyed.
“They’ll surrender,” Martius said confidently. “They are too craven. I will deliver this city whole into your hands.”
Aufidius was about to protest, when he saw the white flag of parley rising tremulously over the Capitol. “What are their terms?” he demanded of the signal-lieutenant.
“They wish to treat with you,” the lieutenant translated. “With Caius Martius, Scourge of Corioles. If you will land, the Council of Fifteen would discuss—”
Martius interrupted, slamming his fist down so hard the console rattled. “Tell them we are not fools or children, to discuss terms with the likes of them. Ready the hellfire.”
“It is ready,” said Aufidius.
But more signals were coming. “They say they will send three of the Council up, to meet with you in person.”
“No,” Martius said. “No councillors.”
“They will send Councillor Volumnia, alone.”
Martius turned to Aufidius, and there was something almost desperate in that look, so far as his face might show emotion. “Might we not hear their terms? One woman would be no threat to us.”
“They are stalling for time, man!” Aufidius burst out. “Can’t you see that? They are waiting for their artillery to be in position, and fobbing us off with promises meanwhile. We must fire.”
“I would hear what she has to say,” Martius told him. “Lower the gangway.”
#
The councillor was a slight, prim figure in shirtwaist and narrow skirt, her grey hair knotted at the nape of her neck, arriving flanked by two sentry automata. “Martius,” she said, as soon as she had stepped foot on the Camilla, “what are you doing?”
He stood before her, stony and implacable; he had put on full uniform while they waited, new epaulettes gleaming at the shoulders. Aufidius could not guess what effect her arrival had on him. It was hard to imagine this small woman having built such a creature, but the steel in her voice held a familiar note.
“I will have revenge, madam,” Martius told her, “for the way I was treated.”
“How you were treated? It was your own stiff-necked pride caused that, when you refused to yield to the Council! You had been given honours, title—”
“Title!” Martius exclaimed scornfully. “The Scourge of Corioles. Do you know what a scourge is, Councillor? It is a whip – a tool for beating those you scorn or fear to touch. I will be your scourge no longer.”
“You’d be the Volscians’, then?”
“I went to them freely,” he said. “And they give me the respect I was due. I am a commodore, an equal to Tullus Aufidius. In your army I was never more than a soldier, obeying an old general who cowers to face me now.”
“Ah, yes.” She took a step toward him, her voice gentler, almost tender. Aufidius had often wondered why, in constructing the perfect weapon, she had made him so very near to a man in form. It made him queasy to think of. “Well, you have made your point. But must the city burn?”
“It must all burn,” said Martius firmly. There was no talk now of terms, of surrender. If it had been any other of the Council, Aufidius might have raised the question himself.
“I created you,” Volumnia said. “I am the closest thing you have to a mother. Would you see me destroyed?”
For an instant, he seemed to waver. Then he shook his head. “You may have assembled these parts, Councillor. But I am the author of myself.”
Volumnia did not seem deterred. “I am continuing my research, you know. There may be more like you – children, for you to mentor and train.”
“More playthings for your army, to be used and discarded at will! No, I will never let that happen.”
“Would you see me beg?” Graceful despite her years, she fell to her knees. “Spare us, Martius.”
“I…” He took a halting step forward, then another. As Aufidius watched, he raised one hand and rested a metal palm against her wrinkled cheek. “I cannot.”
“Then you leave me no choice.” Her eyes, gazing up at him, were blue and grieving. They gazed at each other, and then she lifted her arm and touched a spot on his breast, where a man’s heart might have been. “Go, Martius. Leave, now, and never threatened to harm us again.”
Ponderously, he turned. There was a new blankness in his face, though Aufidius could not have said how he could tell the difference. “We go,” Martius told him. “Command your ships.”
“Go!” Aufidius cried. “When we are on the brink of victory? When all the Confederacy lies helpless at our feet?”
His voice did not alter. “You have had victories enough. We go, now.”
“I’d do as he says,” Volumnia said dryly. She had regained her feet, leaning on the edge of the console. “For our artillery is aimed at you now, and without his help, it will burn all your ships to cinders.”
#
Aufidius fumed as they left the Confederate city behind, standing at the bow with his lieutenant. “What am I to tell the Admiralty?” he demanded of the clouds. “That we came to their doorstep and wavered? That Caius Martius suffered a malfunction, just as we were on the brink of conquest?”
“In another man, you might have called it mercy,” Lucian said quietly.
“He’s not a man,” Aufidius spat. “It was a fail-safe the witch built, that was all. When you make a weapon, you do not want it to be turned against you.”
“And yet, he remains with us. He may still be of use in our wars.”
“He is too dangerous to be of use. Who knows what other secret commands lie hidden inside him? We cannot take his word. He has no word to give.”
“Then what will you do?” his lieutenant asked.
“What I must,” said Aufidius, hearing the heavy tread upon the deck. Martius had removed his uniform jacket once more, to show the sculpted bronze armour beneath.
“Aufidius,” he began, almost pleading, “you understand why I spared them, do you not? If it was your own mother—”
“Oh, I was moved withal,” Aufidius said, with stinging sourness. “And yet – I pawned my honour for your truth. Deferred to you in all things, shared the command with you, served you with my person. I shall be made to answer for it in Antium.”
“I will entreat for you,” Martius said, “in any court you name. Give me pen and paper, and I will write to your Admiralty with a full account of what has passed here. I swear, I will absolve you of the blame.”
“And I’m to be absolved,” Aufidius said slowly, “on the word of a traitor?”
“Traitor!” A crowd had gathered, soldiers curious and disappointed of spoil. The cry went through them like a thunder-clap. “Will I be branded so again?”
“Have you another word, for one who abandons his duty at the sticking point? Who gives up an assured victory, to see an old woman kneel?” The words gathered strength as he spoke them, like sparks catching fire. “But then perhaps we were wrong, to expect any true service from a machine above its station.”
“Machine, you call me?” He looked less human than ever, staring at Aufidius with his golden eyes turning madly, but he sounded nearly hurt. “You, of all people, should know—”
“I’ll hear no more of this,” Aufidius said sharply, feeling release like a lanced wound. “Arrest him, men. He slaughtered our children at Corioles.”
“I’ll not be taken like a dog!”
“Will you fight? I’ll apprehend you myself.” He drew the small, thin dagger from his sleeve and approached, reaching for Martius’s left shoulder. His eyepiece told him where to strike – the spot was a light, a candle flame, pulsating and fragile. The bodkin fit it as a key inside a lock, sliding deep and deeper, wrenching the delicate mechanism from its place.
Martius fell—a wall collapsing, with none of the rough grace that had sustained his body in motion. The Volscian soldiers edged back at the sound, gazing wide-eyed at the Scourge of Corioles lying stretched out upon the deck before them.
And yet he was not like a sentry whose engine had failed, winking out between one moment and the next. He lifted his head with an effort, and breathed Aufidius’s name.
Aufidius knelt, his fingers empty of the dagger. He had no justification to make, but only inclined his head, listening. He felt more kindly toward Martius now, suddenly, than he ever had while at the other’s disposal; the compassion was a foreign thing, blooming in poisoned soil.
“There must have been a world,” Martius whispered to him, “where you and I could have been brothers.”
“That world is elsewhere,” answered Aufidius. After a moment he stood, for there was no need to close the unblinking golden eyes. The last of the sunset had faded, and they flew on toward darkness. “Now I have done it,” he said aloud, “I am sorry for it.”
“He was nothing human,” offered his lieutenant. “You’ve said so yourself, sir.”
Aufidius shook his head. “Perhaps he was too much so. His sin was pride, which we would keep all to ourselves.” His sin was loyalty.
“What’s to be done with the body? The engineers at Antium—”
“Bury it,” he said shortly. “Over the lakes, as is our custom when a pyre can’t be built. I will not give him to the vultures, to make other—” He stopped, wrenched the eyepiece from his head and let it fall atop the still bronze breast, costly as an offering. “To make monsters from.”
END
