The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [163]
The furs and rugs were cold and damp; they never did actually warm up.
They say that a woman in labour enters a state in which time is suspended and the sensations she is undergoing become dream-like. Men attacked by ferocious beasts claim to enter a similar other-worldly state of grace, when their horror and pain become distant, and oddly unreal. I know, having flown that day from Inverness to Thurso, that a person can only hold so much sheer terror before the mind folds itself away.
We were shaken by giant hands every one of those 150 miles, tossed about and batted up and down. Sometimes we flew above unyielding ground; other times we were suspended above cold, white-licked sea; once we flattened ourselves against a young mountain that loomed abruptly out of the clouds. That time, Javitz emitted a string of distracted curses, and I curled over with my hands wrapped around my head, whimpering and waiting for a ripping impact and nothingness.
The engine roared on.
I retreated into myself and wrapped the world around my head like the travelling rugs. We bounced and rattled and I felt nothing—not until the unending noise suddenly halted and the 'plane ceased its inexorable press against my spine. We both came bolt upright, flooded with panic for three interminable seconds of silence before the engine caught again and the propellers resumed. The shoulders before me were bent over the controls so tightly I thought the stick was in danger of shearing off; my throat felt peculiar, until I found I was keening with the wind.
We followed railroad tracks along the coast, up a river, and through mountains to another river. The ground below settled somewhat, although the wind relented not a whit, and I eyed the green fields and the river with love, knowing that they would be marginally softer than the mountains and warmer than the sea.
Finally, a gap in the clouds permitted us a glimpse of open water with a small town at its edge.
Then the clouds obscured it; at the same moment, the engine spluttered into silence for a terrifying count of four, then caught again.
It did it once more when the town was directly to our right. This time the silence held long enough that the machine grew heavy and tilted, eager to embrace gravity. Javitz cursed; I made a little squeak of a noise; with a sputtering sound, the propeller found purpose again.
If Thurso was too small for an agent of Mycroft Holmes, it was also too small for an air field. However, it did have an apparently smooth and not entirely under-water pasture free of boulders, cattle, and rock walls—Javitz seemed to know it, or else he spotted it and was too desperate to survey the ground for other options. The house beside it had sheets hanging out to dry; as we aimed our descent at the field, I noted numbly that, in the space of a few seconds, the laundry flipped around to cover roughly 200 of a circle's 360 degrees.
We splashed down, skidded and slewed around, and came to rest facing the way we had come. Javitz shut down the motor and we sat, incapable of either speech or movement, until we became aware of shouting. I raised the cover, and a red-faced farmer pulled himself up. “Wha' the bliudy ‘ell're yeh playing at, yeh blooten’ idjit?” the man shouted. “Ye think p'raps we enjoy scrapin' you lot off'n our walls? May waif thought he'd be comin’ threw the sittin’ room winda—c'mere and A'll kick yer— Captain Javitz? Is that you?” His hard Scots suddenly lost a great degree of its regionality.
“Hello there, Magnuson. Sorry to give your wife a fright, it wasn't half what we gave ourselves.”
“Jaysus be damned, Javitz, I'd not have thought it even of you. Oh, miss, pardon me, I didn't see you.”
“Quite all right,” I said. One might have thought I would be growing accustomed to life in a state of fear and trembling, but my voice wasn't altogether steady. Nor were my