Courne Supremacy

Even before being delivered from the womb, Alicia dreamt of flight. She soared over the tops of snow-capped mountains, across the vast oceans of the world, and circled the towering thunderheads that marched ceaselessly across the earth, blown by the ever-moving wind. She perched with her brethren atop castle towers, chimneys, and the roofs of common cottages. When the weather grew cold she would take flight for the south. She loved her wings and the freedom it gave her.

When Alicia was old enough to be aware of herself, she found that her pretty wings had been replaced with stubby jointed, featherless, bony arms. At the end of them were five digits and when she flapped her arms she could not fly. When Alicia’s mother began to home-school her, Alicia asked her: “Can we fly like the birds? I want to soar up in the sky!”

Her mother smiled politely and said: “Humans cannot fly.”

Undeterred, Alicia’s games often had her trying to go higher and higher off the ground. There was a swing her father had put up for her on a thick branch of an oak tree. Alicia would swing herself as high as she could go and jump with her arms out. To her dismay (and her parents) her flights never lasted very long and caused her a great deal of pain and eventually her father dismantled the swing for fear of further injuries.

Alicia’s other love was to draw on parchment with wax sticks. As a toddler she drew birds that she saw perching upon the clothesline outside, but her renditions were mostly shapeless blobs. She also drew jumbles of squares and lines that neither of her parents could make heads or tails of, but loved all the same. As she grew older, the squares and lines became cottages, city walls, and castle towers as seen from high above. Her birds became more than shapeless blobs. They had gorgeous beaks and feathers. She went from drawing them from the clothesline to depicting them as she recalled them in her memories: her brethren would be flanking her and she could, from the corner of her bird-eye’s view, see one of her own cruising next to her with his wings spread.

At ten, Alicia knew everything there could be to know about birds. She was gentle enough that wild birds would perch on her finger and they would not peck or bite at her. She had friends amongst the bluejays, nightingales, ravens, and any other bird that would fly down to greet her. Often times she was surrounded by them and watched them fly circles above her as she laid in a grassy hill by her home. Between her daily chores, she ran along the fields, her arms outstretched, and she pretended to be high above the ground with them. When the leaves fell off the trees, the birds all bid her farewell. Sadly, she waited for her friends to return in the spring.

Unable to go outside most of the winter, Alicia spent her time studying, doing household chores, and daydreaming about flying. Her father allowed her access to his small library of books in his trunk. There she found one about the history of the world. As she paged through it, she came across some very familiar places. She easily recognized the drawings of the castle towers at Aeterall, because she had sat upon them a lifetime ago. That city, according to the book was south of their village and it was the capital of their great country, Maedrellaedan. In fact, Alicia found her old drawings, and compared them to those of the book. Her renditions were lacking in details, but the buildings and shapes were exactly the same. She compared other drawings with those of the book, and found that she knew most of the places of the known world.

And, through her drawings, she knew of the places of the unknown world as well. On a sheet of parchment she had inked the shapes of buildings that sat atop clouds and towered high into the blue sky. Sometimes the city drifted over oceans and sometimes over land. The buildings had circular wooden window frames, the houses had arched roofs, and many bridges crisscrossed between the clouds. People packed the streets and wore colorful clothing and greeted one another with smiles and grace. If she had more colors she would have painted the city in shades of gold and red like the rising and setting of the sun. It was a favorite place for birds because there was much to see and do and the city was always moving through the sky.

She told her mother these reoccurring dreams, and asked, “Do you think a city flying in the sky can exist?”

Her mother smiled politely. “No, I don’t believe that such a city exists.”

When Alicia was fifteen, she had learned much about the world through books. She had even gone to see Aeterall with her own eyes. The city, according to her father, was a dangerous place to go, filled with thieves and crooks and too much hustling-and-bustling, but Alicia begged him to go. Begrudgingly, he prepared a horse for her. As they traveled, they came to the gleaming city of Aeterall and she stood upon a hill and basked in its glory. She could see the white towers of the King’s castle just as she remembered them.

Together she and her father entered the city’s outer wall. He was off to take care of some much needed business. Alicia was never to be apart from him, but she managed to tear her father away from his list of duties to see the city. At the University she saw all her hopes and dreams come true. From a high tower overlooking a field, a man jumped from a window holding in his hands a bar attached to a large triangular cloth sheet strapped over a frame of wooden rods. He soared through the air, making a circle, and then crashed into the ground. His friends whooped and cheered as they closed in on him. The man stood up, he was alright.

“What was that?” cried Alicia.

A man next to her said reproachfully, “A waste of the King’s money. These so called scientists do this all day. A load of rubbish, I say.”

From that day henceforth Alicia was determined to study there if it would allow her to fly again. To her dismay her parents could find no way to finance it. The amount of gold that would be needed was more than they could make and everything they produced went to keeping the family alive.

At nineteen, she parted ways with her parents. If they could not provide her the means to go, then she would have to find her own way. Tearfully, her mother and father hugged her one final time before she rode off on her horse for the city of Aeterall. Her plan was to find a benefactor that would allow her to study at the prestigious university. For more than an entire year, she could find no one to sponsor her, and learned that the university had stringent requirements before they would accept her – she would have to pass a battery of tests before they would admit her onto their hallowed grounds. The library in the city gave her access to more books then she could imagine, and at night she consumed book after book on varied subjects from art history to the sciences, and during the day, she worked in the tavern below waiting tables and tending to the kitchen.

In the spring of her twenty-first year, several very fortunate things happened: Alicia passed the entrance exams and Professor Elana Bellafore agreed to sponsor her studies into mechanical sciences. The third came as a technological marvel. The school was the first to invent a piston engine that relied on a new form of power: steam.

Alicia spent the next four years of her life devouring everything she could get her hands on concerning science, engineering, and mathematics. She studied biology to understand how birds, bats, insects all flew. By Professor Bellafore’s urges the school skipped her beyond basic physical sciences so that by her second year she was learning how the steam powered engine worked. Even after she graduated from all of her classes, Professor Bellafore kept her on as a researcher. One evening, while helping to clean out several old labs, she came across the triangular piece of cloth attached to wooden rods that she had seen as a child. The cloth was moth-eaten and the rods moldy. The inventors of the contraption called it an “air sail” and it laid in the corner forgotten for all these years.

At age twenty-six, Alicia fashioned her own air sail in between her work on the steam powered engine. Alicia perched on a plank sticking out of an attic window overlooking the courtyard of the university below. Her friends waved to her. Without fear, she held tight to the bar of her glider and jumped off the plank. By luck, a gust of wind carried her sail upwards. She stiffened her body into a straight line and her artificial wings carried her over the fence of the university and over the streets of the city. She was high above all of the people and the buildings. This was the feeling she had been missing for her entire life, but she lacked the words to describe it. When she touched down, she was greeted with stares and wonderment from all those around her.

Flight after flight, she became better at controlling her air sail. She felt the movement of the air around her and guided her sail to pick up up-drafts and send herself into turns and dives. She kept notes on her flights and built new sails each time. She traveled higher and further, but she could never go as high as the birds, and she could not go as far as it would take her to find that city drifting in the sky.

Through her study of birds, and her own gliders, she came to understand the principles of flight intimately. She left her study of steam engines and pursued and built the first of its kind a solid wing made out of the lightest wood material she could find. She tested it in miniature uncertain if she should jump out the fourth story attic window with a piece of wood strapped onto her back – it just didn’t seem very prudent. The miniature winged things flew, but not without its flaws. She learned that a vertical wing placed on the tail of the wing’s body could help it stay steady. The more she added to allow the wing to move stably, the more she realized that it was no longer something she could strap to her back. She devised a seat sitting low within the wing, similar to the row boats she saw university students racing on a sunny afternoon. Even with her careful plans for the vehicle, there would be no way that she could push the beast fast enough to make it soar into the air, but the steam engine could. Within a decade’s time she built the first of its kind, an airplane.

At thirty-seven years of age, Alicia tested her mechanical bird. The plane failed to lift off for the first test, and the second, and the ones after that, but each time she was undeterred by failure. She refined the structure of the wings, lightened it further and tried again. A year later the machine she had so lovingly built took off into the sky.

In the next five years to follow, she helped the university refine plans for the mechanical bird so that they could find a means to reproduce her work. Alicia flew home to see her parents, and found only her father waiting for her. She had not been home for so long, that she hardly remembered it, but in the backyard was the swing she had used when she was six years old. She found the grassy hills that she used to lay upon when she was ten years old. She located the old books that had taught her that her dreams were transcendent when she was fifteen years old, and she had found her mother buried in the earth and talked to her about all the things she wished she could show her.

In her room she found the drawing of the city drifting in the sky that she had drawn so long ago. She loaded up her mechanical bird and went to her father.

“You always did want to be amongst the clouds,” he told her tearfully. “Go as far as you can go.”

She threw her arms around him one final time, seated herself into the plane she had built to do the very thing her body was incapable of, and took off into the heavens. As the sun set below the horizon, she could see birds flanking either side of her just as she remembered from a lifetime ago and they sailed majestically by her side. For nights and days she had traveled over the land and her friends landed and took off with her. She passed over the snow-capped mountains to the south and knew that she had gone beyond Maedrellaedan. As she refueled and traveled further, the land where her home lied disappeared behind her and a blue ocean sprawled once again before her. She circled thunderheads and marveled at their great strength. On the dawn of the seventh day, the red and gold of the rising sun shimmered against the clouds, and sitting on them she could see circular windows, arched roofs, and crisscrossing bridges.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 4th, 2007 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Short Stories, Tales from a Mechanical Bird. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.