Aquila Read online

  ‘Yeah…’ Tom stepped slowly up to Aquila. ‘Fun.’

  ‘Right,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘Where exactly were they supposed to go?’

  Mr Urquart pointed to the map attached to his master worksheet. ‘Along here. The route marked in green. It was an exercise in map-reading, you see, and they had to –’

  ‘If you sent them that way, they’ve probably gone over here.’ Miss Taylor pointed in the opposite direction. ‘What’s all this?’

  ‘That’s a quarry.’

  ‘Quarry?’

  ‘And some old lead mines.’ Mr Urquart swallowed nervously. ‘And caves. There’s a lot of caves round here. It’s what makes it such an interesting area, geographically…’

  ‘Perfect.’ Grimly, Miss Taylor stood up and turned to face the children. ‘Listen up, everybody. Pay attention, please!’

  All heads turned in her direction, including a party of old-age pensioners on the far side of the picnic area, who guiltily put down their cups of tea and stopped talking.

  ‘You probably all know by now that we’ve got two people missing,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I am going off to find them and bring them back. I just want to make it clear that if anyone else is foolish enough to get lost this afternoon, they will be travelling back to school with their feet tied to the back axle of the coach. Understood? All right, carry on.’

  ‘You don’t think they’ve had an accident, do you?’ asked Mr Urquart.

  Miss Taylor picked up her map. ‘They will have when I get to them,’ she muttered, and strode off, stony-faced, into the trees.

  The flight back to the quarry was not as bad as Tom had expected. They travelled at a few metres above the ground, which was a lot less frightening than being several thousand metres in the air, and he had to concede it was the most extraordinary sensation.

  It was like being a bird, but without all the bother of remembering to flap your wings. Aquila sailed over the ground with less effort than it took to push a telephone button, and in total silence.

  A couple of cows gazed indifferently up at them as they crossed one field, and a flock of sheep ran away from their shadow in the next. They waved at a couple of cyclists when they flew over a road, and laughed as one of them fell off his bike in surprise.

  And when, finally, they swept over the top of the hill behind the quarry they had left so suddenly an hour before, Tom decided that before they went back to the coach, he would like to try a turn at the steering himself. It was such an incredible machine. It was a shame in a way, he added, that they wouldn’t be able to keep it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Geoff leant over the side to pick up Tom’s rucksack from the quarry’s edge. ‘Why shouldn’t we keep it?’

  ‘Well… we can’t, can we?’ It was so obvious that Tom found the reason difficult to put into words. ‘For a start, it’s not ours.’

  ‘Yes, it is. We found it.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean it belongs to us.’

  ‘We know who it belongs to,’ said Geoff. He pointed to the bottom of the quarry. ‘He’s down there and he doesn’t want it any more.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference!’ Tom looked at his friend. ‘Come on, Geoff. Your mum doesn’t let you ride a bike on the main road – you think she’ll let you buzz around town in something like this? You think anyone will?’

  They were hovering directly over the cave. Beneath them, the Roman soldier stared out in front of him, as he had for the last millennium and a half.

  ‘So when we get back, we just hand it over and… never see it again?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘They’ll take it away…’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll never have another chance to fly it…‘

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or find out what any of these other buttons do…‘

  ‘No.’

  ‘No…’

  There was a long pause as an idea slowly grew in Geoff’s mind. A very simple idea.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said.

  Miss Taylor strode up to the Hall with the thunder clouds almost visible above her head. She had spent the last forty minutes fruitlessly walking and calling through the woods and was in the mood to pull the arms off any child who dared so much as talk back to her.

  ‘They’re here.’ Air Urquart came down the path to meet her. ‘Back ten minutes ago.’

  ‘Right.’ Miss Taylor’s eyes narrowed. ‘I want two ritual disembowelling knives and a sharpening stone…’

  ‘I think I ought to warn you, they could both be in shock,’ said Mr Urquart. ‘They’ve been through a very traumatic experience.’

  ‘It’s nothing to the experience they’re going to have when I…‘ Miss Taylor stopped. ‘Why? What happened?’

  ‘They found a body. A dead body.’ Mr Urquart shook his head. ‘I’m just hoping it doesn’t leave them emotionally scarred.’

  Miss Taylor looked up the hill to where the two boys were surrounded by an eager group of classmates. Tom was holding a skull, and Geoff was moving the lower jaw like a ventriloquist’s dummy to make it tell a ‘Knock Knock’ joke.

  She walked briskly towards them, scattering small children on either side like leaves.

  ‘Give me that.’ Miss Taylor held out a hand.

  As Geoff passed the skull across to her, a large spider crawled out of one of the eye sockets and one of the Year Nine’s fainted.

  ‘Pick her up, somebody.’ Miss Taylor sighed and turned to Mr Urquart. ‘Call the police, will you, Graham? And you –’ she turned back to the boys – ‘had better show me where you found this.’

  It was astonishing, Geoff thought, how many people you needed just to decide what to do with a few bones. At the moment, he could count at least fourteen vehicles and more than thirty people, not including himself, Tom or Miss Taylor, gathered at the base of the quarry.

  There were four policemen in two police cars, an ambulance with a nurse and two paramedics, a doctor and his wife, and a Land Rover and two cars containing the five-man team that had come out from the County Archaeology Department. Another Land Rover belonged to the farmer who owned the land, there was a van belonging to a representative of the local Wildlife Protection Society, and a Mini that had somehow contained six large men from the Cave Rescue Services.

  The woman in charge of the archaeological team had short cropped hair, a silver ring in her nose, and was called Doctor Warner. She climbed out of the cave, brushing the worst of the dirt from clothes that had not been particularly clean when she went down.

  ‘Definitely Roman,’ she announced. ‘Probably late third or early fourth century – it’s difficult to tell at this stage – but he’s been there at least fifteen hundred years.’

  ‘Any idea how he died?’ someone asked.

  ‘Not really.’ Doctor Warner shook her head. ‘There are fifteen empty jars of Cypriot wine down there that might have something to do with it. Or he could have been poisoned by someone from the Free Britain Movement.’ She paused. ‘He was sealed in there when the roof of the cave collapsed, but that could have happened at any time.’

  ‘So you don’t know why he was down there?’ asked Geoff.

  ‘No.’ The archaeologist looked thoughtfully back down at the body. ‘He’s a long way from the cave entrance, though. And in full armour. It’s curious…’

  ‘Romans didn’t have machines, did they?’ Tom blushed as everyone turned to look at him. ‘I just wondered how he carried all the wine down there.’

  Miss Taylor watched as Doctor Warner explained to Tom how Roman society was powered by slaves rather than technology, and felt a faint doubt stir in her mind. There was something not quite right in all this. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but something about the way those boys were behaving didn’t fit.

  ‘They’re asking questions, aren’t they?’ said Mr Urquart, standing beside her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That archaeologist. They’re asking her th
ings. They don’t usually do that, do they?’

  Miss Taylor suddenly realized he was right. Tom and Geoff never asked questions. Questions got you noticed, and they had both spent years perfecting the technique of sitting at the back of a class attracting as little attention as possible. Attention might mean you had to do some work.

  ‘It’s like they are… interested,’ Mr Urquart went on. ‘I’ve never seen them like that before.’

  ‘No,’ said Miss Taylor, thoughtfully. ‘Neither have I.’

  As the school coach left the National Trust car park, Tom and Geoff sat together in seats near the back. Tom had the map from his worksheet spread out on his lap, and the two boys gazed intently out of the window as the coach turned out on to the road that would take them back to Stavely.

  Mr Urquart, sitting at the front, caught a glimpse of them in the rear-view mirror and considered, not for the first time, what an odd pair they made. They were such different boys, in the way they looked as much as the way they behaved, and yet he knew that, in school and out, they were virtually inseparable. It was, most people agreed, a curious friendship.

  He would have been even more puzzled if he had known what the boys were doing. Neither of them spoke as the coach set off down the road, but both stared intently out of the window at an isolated barn just visible at the top of the hill on their right.

  It was a very ordinary barn, with open sides, of the sort farmers use to store bales of straw through the winter, but its location had been carefully marked on Tom’s map. If Mr Urquart had seen it, he would have been impressed at the care that had been taken to note its exact position, and the way the boys now double-checked to make certain there had been no mistake.

  Tom and Geoff wanted to be quite sure they could find it again, when they came back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘As I see it,’ Geoff said, pushing open the doors to the school library, ‘we have two real problems. First, we have to get out there so we can fly it back. And second, we have to have somewhere ready to hide it when we do.’

  As he followed his friend over to the desk, Tom privately thought they could have a good many more than two problems, but he said nothing. There seemed to be quite enough difficulties connected with the ones Geoff had mentioned.

  Mr Urquart was on duty at the desk, signing out the books people wanted to borrow and he looked up at the boys in some surprise. He had never seen Tom or Geoff in the library before, and if what Miss Taylor had told him was true, there was some doubt whether either of them could read.

  ‘Have you got any maps?’ asked Geoff.

  ‘Maps…’ Mr Urquart carefully disguised his surprise and stood up. ‘I think we might be able to help. If you’d like to follow me?’ And he led the way over to the reference section.

  When he came back to the desk. Miss Taylor was waiting for him.

  ‘What are those two doing in here?’ She had lowered her voice until it sounded no louder than the rumble of passing lorries, and was staring suspiciously at Tom and Geoff.

  ‘They wanted a map of our route yesterday,’ Mr Urquart explained. ‘I’m not sure, but I think they may be planning to go back.’

  ‘You mean to the cave?’

  ‘Yes. It’s rather encouraging, isn’t it?’ Mr Urquart smiled happily at the boys, who were busily thumbing through the Road Guide to Britain he had given them. ‘It really seems to have caught their imagination.’

  Miss Taylor did not reply. Through narrowed eyes, she continued to stare at the boys.

  ‘I wonder why they go around together all the time,’ said Mr Urquart. ‘I mean, as far as I can see, they’ve got nothing in common at all.’

  ‘Are you doing anything on Saturday?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Mr Urquart blinked.

  ‘Saturday,’ Miss Taylor repeated. ‘Didn’t you say you had to go back out to the Park sometime, to make sure the next field trip wasn’t anywhere near a quarry?’

  ‘Yes. Well, I thought that sometime, I should –’

  ‘If you went out there on Saturday,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘you could take the boys with you, couldn’t you? Keep an eye on them. Maybe find out what’s going on.’

  ‘You think they’re up to something?’ asked Mr Urquart.

  ‘I know they’re up to something,’ said Miss Taylor. ‘I just want to know what it is.’

  She paused for a moment to confiscate a Walkman from a passing sixteen-year-old.

  ‘And you’re quite wrong.’

  Mr Urquart didn’t always find it easy to keep track of conversations with Miss Taylor.

  ‘About them.’ The Deputy Head nodded towards Tom and Geoff. ‘They have one thing in common.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘They both come bottom of the class. Always have done. Ever since primary school.’ Miss Taylor landed a meaty hand on Mr Urquart’s shoulder. ‘Take my word, it can be a very powerful bond.’

  Tom carefully measured the distance with his ruler, but it only confirmed what he already suspected.

  ‘It’s not going to work,’ he said. ‘It’s too far.’

  According to the map, it was nearly fifty miles from Stavely to the barn where they had left Aquila. They would never be able to cycle that far in an afternoon.

  ‘So… we have to think of something else.’ Geoff sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

  ‘There isn’t anything else,’ said Tom. ‘That’s it. We’ve tried everything.’

  He had a point. Cycling had not been the first possibility on their list. The evening before, Geoff had asked his parents if they could drive him out, but the answer had been no. Mr and Mrs Reynolds ran a newsagents that was open twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and they simply didn’t have the time.

  Tom’s mother was in no position to help either. Mrs Baxter suffered from an illness called agoraphobia, which meant she was frightened of open spaces and couldn’t go out of doors.

  Geoff had rung the railway station, but trains do not run in National Parks, and the man at the bus depot had told him that no buses went within five miles of where they wanted to go. Cycling had been the only idea they had left.

  Geoff was still trying to come up with an alternative when he looked up to see Mr Urquart standing at the end of the table.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s of any interest,’ said the teacher, ‘but I’m going back out to the National Park on Saturday, and if either of you wanted to come with me…’ He stopped, a little unnerved at the way the boys seemed to be staring at him.

  ‘It’s not compulsory or anything,’ he added. ‘It was just… you know, if you were interested.’

  ‘I think we might be interested,’ said Geoff. He smiled triumphantly as Mr Urquart walked back to his desk.

  ‘There you are. Problem solved.’

  Tom pointed out that there was still one difficulty.

  ‘He’ll know, won’t he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Urquart. If he takes us out to the site, he’ll expect to take us back.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But if we’ve flown home with Aquila, we won’t be there for him to take back, will we? So he’ll know something’s happened, won’t he?’

  Geoff thought about it. Tom was right.

  Could be a tricky one that…

  Geoff worried about the problem all afternoon. He thought about it through Miss Poulson’s history lesson on the causes of the First World War, and then through Mr Duncan’s double maths. Nothing that either teacher said disturbed his train of thought and finally, on the way home, the answer came to him. It was a clever idea, and if Miss Poulson or Mr Duncan had heard it, they would have found it hard to believe that Geoff was its author.

  ‘Supposing only one of us went with Mr Urquart on Saturday,’ he suggested, as they turned into the street where Tom lived. ‘And the other one stayed here.’

  Tom grunted. He was looking at a stone he had found in the road just outside the school gates. He couldn’t be certain till he
got it home, but he was pretty sure it was a piece of fluorite.

  ‘Then at lunchtime, the one of us out there could say he wants to go for a walk, go up to the barn, get Aquila and fly it back here.’

  If it was fluorite, thought Tom, it was remarkably pure. The crystal was almost colourless.

  ‘Then whoever’s back here gets in it, we both fly out to the site, whoever was out there before gets out, and whoever was back here flies it back. You see? We’ll both be back where we’re supposed to be. And Aquila will be in there.’

  Geoff pointed to the garage at the top of Tom’s drive.

  ‘It’s the perfect place to hide it. Your mum’ll never see it. She never goes out.’

  Tom stared at his friend as the idea slowly penetrated his brain. One of them would go out to the site on Saturday with Mr Urquart. In the course of the day, that person would fly Aquila back to Stavely, pick up the other one, they would both fly back out to the site, and then the one who’d been picked up would fly Aquila back to Stavely…

  ‘No.’ Tom shook his head, firmly. ‘It wouldn’t work.’

  ‘What do you mean it wouldn’t work? Of course it’d work. Why wouldn’t it work? Tell me one thing about it that wouldn’t work.’ Geoff looked closely at Tom. ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’

  Tom said nothing.

  ‘I mean, there’s nothing to be scared of, is there?’

  ‘Nothing to be scared of?’ Tom spoke with a sudden and surprising force. ‘How about flying fifty miles in a machine we’ve only sat in twice that you found in a hole in the ground?’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Geoff was slightly taken aback by the vehemence in Tom’s voice. ‘It’d be worth it, wouldn’t it? To have something like that parked in there…’

  ‘And what if it breaks down?’ Tom’s voice rose another notch. ‘Or we get lost? Or if I bump into something, like a tree, or a small hill? Or a big hill? And we kill ourselves? Would it still be worth it?’

  ‘You won’t bump into anything,’ said Geoff, and then remembered that the only time Tom had taken the controls, on the way up to the barn, he had bumped into a wall. ‘I’ll explain it all to you,’ he added. ‘It’s really easy. You saw! I learnt in two minutes!’