Amelia lay in bed, in the upstairs office of the warehouse, because it hurt too much to move. She’d partitioned the office into two rooms through the addition of some walls, one each for herself and Iris, while Marta and their father had done much the same with the lower office. Amelia’s room was little more than a place to sleep, because she’d been working so hard, she never bothered to decorate, though it included a proper bed with a mattress and the battered trunk she kept personal items in. To one side, a fire burned in a wood stove, which kept the room warm.
The curtains were drawn and the room was fairly dark, even though it was day, but she couldn’t sleep; her mind was too busy with possibilities for flying machines and the issue of how to cushion the wheels, for the sake of softer landings.
At the same time, part of her mind was slowly working out the details of an alternative: an air ship. Hot air balloons were not unheard of on her world, though they were generally frowned upon, but Amelia was debating a risky alternative to hot air. One of her mother’s old books on alchemy described a lighter than air gas that could be produced through the reaction of iron and acid, which it called ‘metal phlogiston’, but The Book of Newts called it ‘hydrogen’. It was the smallest of the elements and also the lightest. With a large enough volume of the stuff, it could lift even a heavy mass into the air, but there was a significant catch: hydrogen could be quite explosive in the presence of air, needing only a spark.
There was a knock at the door.
Amelia gingerly propped herself up, laying her back against her pillows, before calling out, “Come in!”
Marta and Mrs. Maccle stepped into the dim room.
“How are you feeling, dear?” Mrs. Maccle asked with an expression of deep concern and worry on her face, “I heard about your crash. Everyone in town saw you fly.”
Marta opened the curtains, letting in enough light for everyone to see, while Mrs. Maccle sat on the end of Amelia’s bed.
“I’m just bruised. Nothing broken.”
“That’s good to hear, dear.” Mrs. Maccle commented, though oddly, she didn’t look relieved.
Finally sensing the depth of Mrs. Maccle’s concern was greater than expected, Amelia asked, “What’s wrong?”
Her friend sighed, “I’m afraid the people of Macclesfield are a fairly backward lot, very attached to ancient traditions. Traditions I don’t agree with and would never tolerate under normal circumstances, but…”
“But what?”
“There’s been an accusation of witchcraft. It’s coming from a very vocal minority, but some of our more quiet citizens are starting to join them. They want you and your sisters investigated. In fact, they’re demanding it, dear.”
Amelia groaned and a tear rolled down her cheek. She was tired of running from that, tired of being feared for no reason, other than ancient prejudice.
“I know, dear.” Mrs. Maccle shook her head, “I’ve been subtly guiding the people of this city away from such backward ideas, but it would seem I moved a little too fast. I was trying to make a safe place for our ancient bloodline, but I guess my neighbors aren’t as enlightened as I’d hoped.”
Marta reacted with shock before Amelia had the chance, “You’re a witch?”
“Indeed, dear.” Mrs. Maccle muttered and snapped the fingers of her right hand, producing a brief, candle-like burst of flame from her thumb, before she explained, “I can just about manage to light a lantern, but that’s the extent of my magic. I’ve had better success with alchemy, but anyone can do that.
“I knew you were a witch, just as soon as I looked at you,” she met the gaze of Amelia as she spoke, “because you walk and talk with a confidence men in power don’t like to see in women.” She winked, “That isn’t a sure-fire sign of a witch, but combined with your insatiable desire for knowledge and your many experiments, I knew you could never be an ordinary woman.”
“What’s going to happen?” Amelia asked.
“For now? You rest and heal, while I do everything I can to quietly put out the fires and delay things, dear. More officially, my husband will be coming along for a preliminary investigation in about a week’s time, a task he has no desire to perform. He’ll ask some questions and pretend to care about the results, but will find you innocent, despite the fact he knows what you are.”
Amelia sighed, “That won’t be the end of it.”
“But it will certainly buy you time enough to heal and pack to leave. My husband will buy back the warehouse, if you like.” Mrs. Maccle offered as she looked out the window at the steam-powered custom machinery Amelia had built with her own hands, “He’ll even buy the equipment that’s too big for you to carry.” Tears rolled down her cheeks as she looked down, “I’m sorry, dear. I’d hoped my foolish neighbors were past this kind of prejudice, but I clearly have far more work to do. However, I should be able to use this incident to shame them into further change, once you’re gone. It may be that the next witch seeking a home with us will find refuge.”
“Thank you for all you’ve done for us.” Marta bowed her head to their kind benefactor.
“Is there nowhere we might be accepted?” Amelia quietly sobbed, “I’m tired of running from this!”
Mrs. Maccle took Amelia’s hand and stroked her knuckles with a thumb, “There may be such a place. I don’t know the precise way there, but I’ve heard of a place far to the south, beyond the Burning Slopes.”
“Sounds ominous.” Marta pointed out.
“It will be a long and perilous journey, dear,” Mrs. Maccle agreed, “but the merchants that visit Macclesfield tell rumors of a place where witches are openly accepted. They don’t trade with that nation, because they fear them, but if you can pass the mountains, the locals may know the way.”
Amelia asked, “How far is it?”
“Depends on which way you go. It’s a matter of months if you go through the Burning Slopes, but I wouldn’t recommend that. On the other hand, going around the mountains could take upwards of a year, possibly more. Either way, the country is named Dugaria, if you want to seek it out, dear.”
“Thank you.” Amelia bowed her head.
Mrs. Maccle let go of Amelia’s hand and sighed with frustration, “I just wish I could do more for you.”
Getting an idea, Amelia smiled a little, “Perhaps you can.”
“Oh?”
“If you and your husband were to delay things as long as possible, how much time do you think you could buy us?”
“Well, I might be able to make the men of this town second-guess themselves for a time, through some pressure from their wives, while my husband could hypothetically draw out the investigation for a week or two, once he’s actually begun. I could get you three weeks, for certain, maybe a month, dear.”
“That might be enough,” Amelia grinned, then grimaced as she slowly rose to her feet, “but I’ll also need some supplies, which I’ll happily pay for.”
“Like what, dear?”
“Iron filings, sulfuric acid, lots of cotton fabric and most important of all, rubber.” Amelia turned to Marta, “Father can help by gathering or buying wood for construction materials. I want lightweight, strong wood. Oh, and we’ll need rations for the journey, of course.”
Marta nodded and ran off, while Mrs. Maccle commented, “None of that list should be problematic, dear. If you like, I’ll quietly make arrangements on your behalf, to keep you out of the limelight.”
“Thank you.” Amelia headed for the door, wincing as she walked, “I should have a materials list in a few hours time.”
Mrs. Maccle lent Amelia a shoulder for support, helping her down the stairs to the workshop, where she sat at the desk she used for drawing plans and got to work with a set of rulers and a pencil. She winced with nearly every movement, but the work was too important to delay.
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“Burn!” The leader of the protesters called out, with great fervor!
The crowd’s refrain was quick and even more emotional, “The witch!”
The angry mob outside the front of the workshop quickly got into a rhythm of shouting that was highly disturbing to Marta, who lay on the roof to minimize the chance she might be seen. Despite the fact it was cold enough to make their breath visible and they were obviously freezing cold, the men of the mob were hateful enough to protest Amelia’s presence. Marta couldn’t help but wonder if hate kept a person warm.
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They held up signs made from crude, heavy paper nailed to bits of wood, with various disturbing slogans written on them, mostly with charcoal, including ‘WITCHES BURN!’, ‘FLY AWAY WITCH!’, ‘GET ON YER BROOMSTICK!’ and ‘NO AHMEELEEYUH’, an amusing misspelling of Amelia. Some of the signs didn’t use words, but made decent use of visual metaphors to get their point across, such as a pointed, black hat with a red X through it and a surprisingly good drawing of Amelia’s face, which had a red circle with a line through it painted over the top.
So far, they were focused on Amelia and hadn’t said anything about Marta and Iris, but it was only a matter of time before they painted the entire family with the same brush.
Marta carefully withdrew herself from the edge and crawled back over to the roof hatch she’d emerged from.
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Amelia, Iris, Father and Mrs. Maccle tried to ignore the angry, rhythmic shouting as they hammered away at a wooden structure, for important touches. All of them wore heavy coats, because the only part of the warehouse that was warm was the offices, which had wood stoves to heat them.
The vehicle they worked on was little more than a wide, flat platform of wood with a building in the center, surrounded by a walkway with a wood railing that featured a series of dangling canvas bags full of rocks. The building was constructed of rather heavy support beams, with wooden walls between. The roof of it appeared to be a folded bag of rubberized cloth. The front and back end had ramps and large, open spaces. The front held the tractor and Amelia’s portable workshop, which were strapped to the platform via steel rings and ropes. The rear area held the horseless carriage and Father’s wagon, which had been turned into a fairly comfortable little house, despite the fact they’d been welcomed to Macclesfield. Amelia had been planning to convert it to a horseless carriage for months, but she’d never found the time.
The whole thing was mounted on four extremely large wheels, about five feet tall, the spokes of which were basically small tree trunks, while the rims had been hastily built from sections of hollowed out tree treated with a resin-like glue and reinforced with steel plates. The main platform was just above the shafts for the wheels, at a little over two and a half feet up. Amelia didn’t like the wheels, because they were so crude, but there hadn’t been time to cast them in steel.
Mounted to the front wall of the main building was a steam engine linked via belts to a pair of propellors. The engine was also linked, via a belt and small opening, to the area beneath the platform. Were one to look beneath, one could see the belt attached to the drive shaft for the back wheels.
Between Amelia’s portable workshop and tractor stood a nautical-style wheel for controlling a ship’s rudder mounted to something akin to a desk with a horseshoe-like structure. The desk’s surface was an area for mounting other controls for the large vehicle, including a throttle handle on the right and a brake handle for the wheels, both of which had been marked as such with charcoal. Beneath the desk was a variety of machinery that was clearly intended to be hidden, but it lacked side panels. There were also a few levers for more mysterious, as yet unlabeled purposes.
“It’s getting ugly out there!” Marta called out as she headed back down the stairs for the upstairs office, which also led to the roof hatch, “They want to burn Amelia!”
“Ooh! That’s bad, dear.” Mrs. Maccle shook her head.
Marta climbed the front platform and joined the others.
“We’ll be ready to go in two minutes,” Amelia pointed out, though she kept working, “and I can finish the rest on the way. Mrs. Maccle, thanks again for everything. Could you please put away the ramps, then open the back door?”
The older woman handed her hammer and the handful of nails she’d been working with to Marta and used a couple of small winches to lift the ramps, which slid under the platform, aside from the last bit of each, which folded upward on hinges, to become part of the railing. Next, Mrs. Maccle leaped off the side. It wasn’t easy for her to move the heavy doors on her own, taking close to a minute to open each. Fortunately, the mob hadn’t yet blocked the back way.
Amelia finished what she was doing and handed her tools to Marta, before heading for the helm. She pushed the throttle forward until the huge vehicle crept forward by inches. She hadn’t designed it to be fast and it would never go faster than a walking pace, but it didn’t need to.
They rolled out of the workshop and into the light. It was noon, but still bitterly cold.
“Iris, tie us off!” Amelia shouted as she reduced power to the engine and set the brake, “Father and Marta, make sure the bag doesn’t snag while I inflate it! If it tears, we’ll have to leave this behind, because we won’t have time to fix it!”
Iris leaped over the side and tied the vehicle down to some prepared, heavy stakes that had been hammered into the soil of the large yard behind the warehouse, while Father ran to the back and Marta moved to the area beside the helm. Amelia stepped through an open door to the interior of the vehicle. Within a minute, the bag-like roof began inflating.
“Good luck!” Mrs. Maccle called out and ran off.
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Mrs. Maccle joined her husband in the main road of the city, where he looked on the gathered mob. He had a huge mustache that reminded one of a walrus, though he was otherwise clean shaven. He wore a heavy, woolen hat the covered his ears.
Standing beside him was the sheriff, a young man that wore a gleaming, silvery badge pinned to his coat, but otherwise didn’t have a uniform on, because wearing metal armor in such bitter cold could be hazardous to one’s health. From his belt hung a short length of rope and a sword. He was flanked by a group of eight deputies that also lacked uniforms, but could back up their authority by being exceptionally large and muscled.
“The fools.” The mayor grumbled.
His wife agreed, “I know. They’re inflating the bag now, so they’re going to need that distraction, dear.”
The mayor nodded toward the sheriff, who stepped toward the crowd, using his most authoritative voice to shout, “Do you fools have a permit for this public gathering?”
“Who do you think you are, the sheriff?” The leader of the crowd shouted, before turning to look, only to notice the gleaming, silver badge, adopting a look of shocked embarrassment.
The mob’s leader was Mr. Cliffoak, a small, middle-aged lawyer with brown hair, that generally held unpleasant opinions and was rather vocal about them. Unfortunately, he was also wealthy, charismatic and well-spoken, facts that usually allowed him to get the young and impressionable on his side, who were among the current group he’d talked into joining the mob. In contrast to his followers, Cliffoak wore an expensive coat, high-quality boots and glasses.
The sheriff grinned like a fat, happy cat that had just finished a canary, “Well, as a matter of fact, I think I am!”
“Well, I don’t care! The law says we burn witches, so why aren’t you doing your job, Mr. Sheriff?”
The mayor stepped up to answer that one, shouting, “Because I found zero evidence that Amelia is a witch! I thoroughly questioned her and the only thing I found evidence of was science! She’s a scientist and engineer, not a witch!”
“But she flew! We all seen her!” One of the crowd shouted, a small man with a twisted nose, “Ye don’t fly unless you’s a witch or a wizard or something!”
The mayor produced a sheet of paper he’d folded into a paper airplane, carefully opened the wings and threw it over the heads of the crowd. It sailed in a circle for a time, before passing between a pair of them, where it hit the mixture of slush and snow, quickly turning soggy.
“Properly folded paper can fly!” He shouted, then demanded, “Does that make me a witch? Does that make every child that’s folded and thrown a paper bird a witch?”
There were murmurs of discontent among the crowd and some of those on the outskirts walked away.
“No.” Cliffoak admitted.
In the background, but unseen by the mob, because they were too distracted, the lifting bag of Amelia’s airship rose above the roof of the warehouse, an elongated tube with some fins at the back, though from the perspective of those in front of the warehouse, it looked small and round, much like a hot-air balloon, because the tail faced them.
The mayor explained, “Well, all Amelia used was the same idea, just bigger and far better! It wasn’t magic and that’s why I cleared her of all charges!”
The sheriff tried again, “Now, have you got a permit for this gathering or shall my deputies arrest the lot of you?”
Having heard their cue, his men fanned out to either side of him, moving to put themselves all around the mob, which was getting quite small. Still more of the crowd peeled away from the edges, because it was clear which way the wind was blowing and they were soon gone, later claiming they’d been far away, with no idea the incident had even happened.
In the background, a rope ladder was thrown over the lifting bag, to drape down either side, and a slight figure, possibly Amelia, climbed halfway to the top, near the back end. She fiddled for a time with some cables attached to the control fin.
“That paper trick doesn’t prove a thing!” Cliffoak cried out, “Why don’t you show us everything! You’re hiding something, aren’t you?”
Roughly half the remaining crowd took the opportunity to walk away.
The distant figure dropped down the ladder and climbed up the other side, to do some work on the opposite fin.
The sheriff loudly threatened for all to hear, “Show me that permit, or you all go to jail!”
Cliffoak stepped over to the sheriff with an angry expression and poked him in the chest as he growled, “This is a conspiracy to help the witch, isn’t it?”
Meanwhile, the last of the protesters started backing away, only to bump into some extremely large deputies, who laid hold of their shoulders.
The sheriff looked down at the offending digit and grinned with satisfaction as he asked the mayor, “Did you see that?”
Before the finger could be fully withdrawn, the sheriff grabbed it and twisted until the man screamed!
The mayor nodded, “I do believe he intended violence.”
“You’re under arrest for assaulting an officer of the watch, disturbing the peace and incitement to riot, as well as conspiracy to murder an innocent woman, a circumvention of justice.” The sheriff grabbed his prisoner’s other hand and hauled them both behind their back, to tie Cliffoak’s hands with the short rope from his belt, while his deputies did the same with the mob.
Meanwhile, Amelia appeared to finish her work and climbed down, while the lifting bag fully inflated, becoming almost rigid.
Mrs. Maccle watched as it rose through the air.
“Such a shame.” She commented.
Her husband stepped away from the spectacle of the mob being arrested and joined his wife in staring at the rising airship, “Can you imagine what me might have learned from her? Can you imagine how prosperous the city might have become with such a genius among us?”
“I can, dear.” The woman sighed, “I really can. I wanted her to be a part of my plans to modernize this city.”
The engine of the airship came to life with a heavy drone from the propellors and it slowly turned to the left, to head south.
“Any idea where they’re going?” Mr. Maccle asked.
“Dugaria, dear. They want to live somewhere they can be themselves.”
“Where did they get that dang fool idea from?”
Mrs. Maccle was confused and spoke timidly, for once, “Witches are accepted in Dugaria, aren’t they? I know that much.”
“Only because the government uses them as living weapons!”
Mrs. Maccle slapped her forehead and groaned, “If I’d known that, I would never have suggested it!”
“I could send a man on a fast horse…” Her husband trailed off.
“But he’d never catch their attention, dear.” Mrs. Maccle sighed, “They’re already over the forest, traveling as the crow flies.”
Mr. Maccle shook his head with sadness, “May the Gods have mercy on their souls.”