Celestial Matters Read Online Free

seared throat choking on the sodden air. I coughed phlegm into my drenched robes, then lay still, sweating like a Marathon runner. The cloud of steam gradually condensed into dribbles of water. The paddle wheel, freed from the chains of impetus, rolled gently backward, pushed by the Mediterranean tides, and the broken battle kite and its broken pilot fell gracefully into the wine dark sea.
    A cheer rose from the crew; I struggled to my feet to acknowledge the accolade, but it wasn’t me they were lauding. From the east a two-hundred-foot-long steel ship, bristling from prow to stern with evac cannons and armored soldiers, bore down on us. I sank back in exhaustion and thanked Ares and Athena for our salvation. The navy had arrived.
    With Spartan efficiency, the battleship Lysander heaved alongside the damaged merchantman, pulled the formerly panicked, now cheering sailors from the water, and laid a gangplank between the two vessels. During these unhurried maneuvers, I propped myself against the empty fire box, stanched the blood dripping from my cheek with my robe, and watched. The Lysander ’s presence and bearing restored my sense of safety. She was a long, sleek ship, covered from stem to stern with a canopy of steel to protect her from aerial bombardment. Her steel hull had been painted a utilitarian iron gray. The only adornment on the entire ship was the figurehead on her prow, ’Era, patron goddess of Sparta, arms crossed in front of her, eyes scanning the horizon for anyone who would dare offend against her people.
    I bowed my head to the image of heaven’s queen, then turned to gaze with personal pride at the onyx pyramid that covered the sternmost twenty feet of the ship. My ’Eliophile engine, my only claim to glory until Sunthief. It had been twenty years since I discovered how to attract and catch the atoms of fire that danced in the sunlight and use them to power ships. Since then every oceangoing vessel built in the navy’s shipyards had been fitted with one of my engines. They had become so common that few people even remembered that I had invented them, such are the vagaries of the goddess Fame.
    A cough interrupted my reverie. A lightly bearded young Aethiopean wearing the black-fringed tunic and professionally concerned expression of a naval doctor was standing over me with an open satchel of instruments.
    “I am not seriously injured, Doctor. Attend to the sailors,” I said, knowing exactly what his response would be.
    “Let me be the judge of that,” the young man said with solemnity that belied his years. Doctors always said the same thing in the same tone of voice and they always had the same casual disregard for orders; the Oath of ’Ippokrates is much stronger than the discipline of armies.
    “No great injuries,” he said after looking down my throat, rubbing a light metal probe over my cheek, and feeling my limbs for fractures. “Just some scratches and a parched throat.”
    He pulled a brown glass bottle with the Egyptian hieroglyph for blood incised on it and a clean goose quill out of his leather bag, filled the quill with red liquid from the bottle, and jabbed it into my arm. “Just an injection of Sanguine Humour to speed the healing process,” he said, as if I hadn’t known that. “Apart from that all you need is some rest,” as if I hadn’t been resting when he came along.
    The doctor turned to go and snapped off a quick salute to a young woman in armor just crossing the gangplank from the Lysander to the merchantman. I almost ignored her; after all, many of the battleship’s crew had come over to secure the smaller ship. But she was not wearing a naval uniform. She was caparisoned in the thick steel breastplate, hoplite sword, and two-foot-long bronze evac thrower of an army officer. But what particularly caught my eye was the horsehair-crested helmet and the iron brassard only worn by graduates of the Spartan military college. What was she doing on a naval vessel?
    She