The Cannon and the
Voice of the Generations
by Jamie McNabb
COPYRIGHT © 2011 by Jamie McNabb
Published by Soapbox Rising Press
Cover illustration copyright © William Attard Mccarthy/Dreamstime.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, events, or locations is purely coincidental.
The Cannon and the Voice of the Generations
Bonus Short Story: The Magic Box of Goodies
A Preview of The Man who Taught Iron to Fly
The Cannon and the
Voice of the Generations
Naerian, Magus to Gilbert the Bloody, had never intended to hurt anyone, let alone disembowel himself in front of dozens people, including his patron, the aforementioned Gilbert.
The callous among them observed that Naerian had picked a good day for it: a bright, sunny Thursday afternoon in high summer. A pleasant breeze had blown in from the Pacific Ocean, and the gulls had gathered. They had watched the proceedings eagerly, almost as though they had had some sense of what was about to happen.
The pious among the gathered people claimed that Naerian's innovation had angered the Gods and the Generations, especially the Generations, and that they had punished him for his invention and for his hubris.
But no hubris on Naerian's part had been involved. One thing had led to another, and the chain had led to disaster, as such chains so often do.
For months afterwards the curious wondered what Naerian had done wrong, what technical mistakes he had made with his contraption. Could it possibly be true that his only mistake had been standing next to it at the fatal moment?
The wise, especially Gilbert the Bloody, the Iredale chieftain, wondered who else might have tried to do what Naerian had tried to do and whether or not they might have accomplished it. He wondered how he might learn of their failure or of their success. The hard way, he feared. In battle. He also wondered how another of his magi might succeed where Naerian had failed. They would, he was certain, apply less enthusiasm, for a start. To succeed, one first had to remain alive, at least until the end of the project.
Teasing out the answers to these questions was likely to reveal itself to be a matter of life and death, not only for Gilbert and his clan, but also for those who might use such an abomination to attack him.
As far as Gilbert the Bloody was concerned, the Gods and the Generations, the magi, and the priestesses and the priests had the right of it: unlicensed and unwarranted innovations cursed the living and angered the dead. The Gods didn't approve of them. The Great Winter and the Second Creation had proved that fundamental theology beyond any rational doubt.
At the same time, however, as far as Gilbert the Bloody was also concerned, wars were there to be won, not to be lost over erudite quibbles about tactics or weaponry.
#
Several months before his grisly and untimely death, Naerian had set out to improve upon the design and construction of the approved signaling rocket. He built larger and larger versions of the device until he had constructed a behemoth that stood as tall as he did. To launch it, he rigged up a length of iron pipe three times longer than his creation.
When Naerian lit it off, it roared correctly out of the pipe. It spewed flame and smoke. It streaked across the field he had chosen to serve as his proving ground, arced high over the neighboring field, and came down in a small woodlot, setting it ablaze.
The guards sounded the alarm in good time, but in the end, they had to settle for containing the fire until it burned itself out.
Begrimed and joyous, Naerian announced that for his next launch, he intended to attach an explosive charge to the nose of the rocket and aim it at a target.
"What sort of a target?" Gilbert the Bloody asked.
The chieftain's sons, Edmund and Wolfram, both in their late teens, watched and listened from the window seat in their father's study.
"A derelict galley would do nicely, m'lord," Naerian said. "You have two rotting in the bay."
"Why a galley?"
"Because, m'lord, the river and the sea roads are like broad causeways that lead to your very walls. They are your soft underbelly."
"How will a rocket that explodes help?" Wolfram asked. He was the younger of the boys, skilled beyond his years in the arts of war, but not in the ways of courtesy.
"Because, m'lord, if it works, your father will possess a weapon so powerful no one would dare to attack him."
As a magus, Naerian ought to have known better, and as a chieftain, Gilbert did. The prospect of something new excited Edmund, but Wolfram thought his brother's excitement ill placed.
Within hours, Royden, the clan's presiding engineer and himself a magus, got wind of Naerian's plans. Without wasting a moment, he went to Gilbert to put a stop to them.
Naerian protested: "Signaling rockets have explosive charges! All I intend to do is build a large signaling rocket."
"You're building an explosive weapon."
"Anything can be a weapon."
"Not if it explodes," Royden said. "If it explodes with the intent of causing damage, trauma, or death, it's an explosive weapon. Explosive weapons are forbidden. Therefore, your exploding rocket is forbidden."
"Signaling rockets explode!"
"Of course, they explode," Royden said, doing his obvious best not to explode himself, "but the discharges convey information or communicate commands. They do not cause damage, trauma, or death. Signals signal; weapons kill."
"I thought 'damage, trauma, or death' were the whole point."
"Not when it comes to gunpowder they aren't. Gunpowder may be used for signaling, for cauterizing wounds, for celebratory displays, and for religious and other ceremonial purposes. It may not be used to power weapons."
It crossed Naerian's mind that an army faced with one of his rockets would rather ceremoniously find religion on the spot, but he chose not to throw that idea at Royden. Arguing another line, Naerian asked, "What about a signaling rocket that goes astray and explodes causing 'damage, trauma, or death' to the enemy?"
The question did not appear to disturb Royden in the least. With a dismissive shrug, he said, "Accidents happen."
"Yes, and I want to make those accidents happen on purpose. The device I'm building is inherent in our existing technology and materials. It emerges from them."
"Not without a license, it doesn't."
"The ancients had rockets that exploded," Naerian said. In his exasperation he had allowed his voice to grow loud, strident—on accident, of course.
"Yes, they did," Royden said. "They also had steam engines, self propelled wagons, stainless steel, mechanical birds, machines that talked, and ways to use the very forces that fire the sun." He paused. A smile broadened across his face. "And look what having all of those hideous and wondrous things did for them. If it hadn't been for the Great Winter and the Second Creation, they would have exterminated themselves, and you and I would have never been born."
Naerian swore at the engineer and stomped away.
Edmund, Gilbert's elder son and heir, sadly watched him leave. A weapon that would render the Iredales immune from attack would be worth a few technological and religious risks, wouldn't it? Who could predict how many lives such a device might save? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? After all, no one was talking about building steam engines and the rest, none of the great sins. Naerian's proposal called for only this one new weapon. It offered a chance to preserve lives, not take them.
The Gods and the Generations couldn't possibly disapprove of saving lives, could they?
No, they could not.
Wondering how best to help his father's magus, Edmund ran to catch up to him.
Naerian replied, "Thank you, but I have to take care of this myself. In any case, you can't be seen to be involved."
"Why not?"
"Politics."
Naerian appealed to the Engineers' Guild. Naerian lost.
Naerian appealed to the Academy of the Magi. Naerian lost again.
He licked his wounds for a few weeks, pretended not to sulk for a further few weeks, and brooded for still more weeks. Then he snapped himself out of his gloom and set about haunting the dustier sections of the manor archives.
There, in a room opened to magi and to no one else, he found a folio of drawings. They weren't sketches, but actual plans: the plans of cannons. Some were so sophisticated as to be unintelligible, but others, with a gargantuan effort, were within his reach. After all, he had studied with the best magi available, had taken top marks, and had written his senior thesis on weaponry. It wasn't as though he hadn't prepared.
He emerged from the archive with a plan of his own.
"I will teach iron to fly," he whispered.
#
Naerian had a keg of powder left over from building his rockets, and he had the length of iron pipe. The rest of what he needed was readily available. It wasn't as though he didn't have everything he needed to get underway ... except for a license.
Well, to hell with bothering about a license.
He already knew where trying that would get him: absolutely nowhere.
He recruited a three-man crew and set to work.
First, he cut the pipe down to a length of two meters. He closed off one end, and using strips of oak glued into place, he reinforced the tube along its length which he now called a barrel. The whole of it ended up being three and a half times as thick as the inside diameter of the original pipe.
Next, he wrapped the outside with iron bands, like barrel hoops, at 30-centimeter intervals. He placed two at the open end which he now called the muzzle and three at the closed end—which he now called the breech. Then, he drilled a vent, a hole through which he could ignite the propellant charge with a fuse, in exactly the same way that rockets were ignited. He built a suitable carriage upon which to transport his creation, and, finally, with the additional help of several strong laborers and an assortment of blocks and ropes, he mounted his cannon on its carriage.
Almost as an afterthought, Naerian fashioned the tools he needed to load and fire his hellish contraption: a ladle to place the powder in the barrel, a rammer to ram both it and the projectile into place, a linstock with which to ignite the fuse, and a sponge to clean out the barrel and extinguish any burning residue between firings.
Naerian swore his workers to secrecy, and told no one about what he was up to, about what he imagined was possible, and about what he hoped and dreamed of accomplishing. He was determined to make no premature announcements this time. He'd learned his lesson with his improved rocket.
Royden, the Iredale's presiding engineer, learned of the project "from a source," and protested to Gilbert. Gilbert disliked the delusion of a weapon so terrible it would end the threat of war. The ancients had traveled down that fool's road many, many times, and each time, they had done so to their great cost. However, Gilbert also abhorred spies and spying. He abhorred carrying tales even more, and most of all, he was terrified of facing an enemy in possession of an overwhelming military advantage. True to his sacred calling, that of chieftain, in any choice between his own spiritual purity and the welfare of his clan, his clan won. The Gods and he Generations were free to damn him for it as they chose. And so, he sided with Naerian.
These were, however, his private thoughts.
In public, he took a different tack.
He maintained that if there were any real danger of any serious harm being done, then he could always bring Naerian to heel. The magi, Gilbert explained to Royden and his ilk, were an odd bunch and tended to become cranky and surly if they weren't allowed to scratch their brains from time to time. "Don't worry about a new instance of uncontrolled innovation. He'll frighten himself into a fresh pair of pants the first time he sets it off."
#
The first time came on a bright, clear afternoon with a strong breeze off the ocean.
Naerian hauled his cannon down to the dunes behind the south jetty.
With Edmund's help, over the previous two weeks, Naerian had made several iron balls to be used as shot. They were slightly smaller than the pipe's inside diameter, which he now called the bore, and were quite heavy. Assuming they hit anything, they were bound to cause damage, trauma, or death. Deliberately. Not by accident. Unless the shot had gone wild.
Nevertheless, on Gilbert's express orders, Royden confined himself to observing that were Naerian to use his cannon for hunting, the only dishes he would be able to make from his kill would be stew, hash, and sausage.
"You forgot soup and pudding," Naerian said, and they shared a friendly laugh.
Now, with the wind skipping across the sand like a troop of dancers, Naerian ladled the first charge of powder into the cannon, and rammed it home. He followed it with a wad and ball, rammed them home, and worked the fuse down through the vent and into the charge.
"What if the fuse goes out?" Edmund asked.
"Then the charge won't go off," Naerian answered. "It's time for you to mount up, m'lord."
Grave with the portent of the moment, Edmund grasped a tall pole with a yellow flag and swung up onto his horse.
Naerian tied a second, longer piece of fuse to the first, and lit the match, a length of ordinary rope that had been soaked in pitch. The match smoldered and sent up a trail of smoke. Thanks to the pitch, it smelled almost like incense.
Wolfram, Gilbert, Koisha—who was Gilbert's wife and the boys' mother Royden, most of the court, and the curious of the manor had gathered to watch. Those immediately around the cannon cleared the area. They crouched behind dunes, bushes, and one or another of the recently erected wooden shelters. Edmund rode out—downrange, as Naerian termed it—a reasonable distance. The yellow flag whipped in the wind as though kicked by one of the dancers' feet.
Naerian stayed out in the open, alone with his cannon. He walked around it, checked its carriage, and patted its breech for luck. He touched the match to the fuse. The fuse caught. It sputtered and smoked, and Naerian ran to the nearest wooden shelter. He crouched behind it.
The long fuse burned up to the short one, and the shot one burned down into the vent.
Before anyone had time to worry about whether or not the cannon would actually go off, it fired. The sound of the blast hit them like the sound of a mast snapping in a storm a sickening, deafening CRACK! Smoke and flame spat out the muzzle, and simultaneously the cannon, carriage, and all jumped backwards as though they'd been kicked by a very determined, very angry horse.
Dozens and dozens of meters downrange, first one and then a second, third, and fourth patch of sand flew up into the air. The ball had struck and bounced, and struck and bounced until it had come to its final resting place.
With their ears still ringing, the onlookers sent up a hesitant cheer, and Naerian acknowledged them with a wave.
The noise died away, and Edmund spurred his horse forward. Using the flag, he marked the spot where the ball had first landed. Then he wheeled his horse around and rode back to Naerian.
For several minutes no one in the party spoke above a murmur, while unbidden, a party of men at arms ran out to examine with some care each of the places where the ball had struck. Naerian made notes and examined the cannon. Satisfied that it was whole, he followed them downrange. On foot, Edmund, Wolfram, a dozen or so other boys, and no small number of girls trailed behind the magus.
They clustered around the first gouge in the sand, chattering and gesturing at the cannon and pointing farther out along the line of flight the ball had taken. They located the next gouge and repeated the process.
After they located each of the ragged depressions and had searched in vain for the ball itself, they trudged back to the gun, laughing too loudly and making too many bad jokes.
No formation of men at arms, no vessel's hull, and no curtain wall could stand against Naerian's weapon. Its use would amount to murder, not war.
One of the women offered Naerian a glass of beer and he drank it off in silence. The odors of the burning match and the powder smoke lingered in the air.
"Never mind about the ball," Naerian said, as though reaching a decision. "We can find it later."
While those around Wolfram passed through the various stages of delight, realization, and horror, Gilbert's younger son noticed that an inexplicable sadness had overtaken his father. It was as though the chieftain had gazed into the future, or into the distant past, and had witnessed the death of someone or something he held very dear.