Chapter 5
Engineering Arises
The mornings were golden for good reason now. Pom began to wonder why they never chased the tail of night, and instead slept through it until they were nearly sweating under their bedsheets baked in the climbing sun. After all their heavy yawning and walking to the crumbling tower, the melancholy of missed sleep left without a trace, and watching the ever-warming fledgling days was a tranquil pleasure. It wasn't so for Woogums, or so she saw in the occasional shakes of his head as he watched only the ground before his travelling hooves.
Under either of their weights, the balloon refused to fly, even under Pom's, who's weight was more delicate than a ram's. The heat of the air trapped in the paper did lift regardless, and if its cargo were only a hair less heavy than it was strong, it would fly. One morning, as they lay in the wet grass and the balloon's fuel roared into the throat of the balloon, Woogums did silent geometry upon the woolen head of his little sister. Her wool was kempt, yet it grew day by day. Rather than shearing it into a common style, she simply shaped it roundly and high so it poised upon her head like a proud white mountain. Whether it remained there as an obtuse project of her's or a blatant lack of self awareness, the other sheep of the valley wondered if all her mother's children would always be so odd. Woogums knew of these concerns, (though seemed to forget that he himself was one of those children) and wondered if he could both free his sister from their carefully kept criticisms, and shave off just enough weight to allow for her passage into the air.
An old mirror was dug up from a closet of theirs, one a younger Pom put away long ago to banish the things she'd see in dark doorways behind her. She'd hauled the blasted thing herself in the late day, so intent to not lose an ounce of her wool that pillowed her head against unexpected ramming. A border of its frame was affixed directly to the balloon, and its opposite edge was allowed to lean far away from its basket, tied with a rope, so the mirror sheen gazed downward into the grass below. They needn't a pilot now, and instead could watch the thing's reflection in a spyglass as it floated far past the town's border alone, proofing the siblings from the technicality of the town's laws of lambs in the sky. Every setback while installing the thing made Woogums stamp his hooves in conclusion that such a thing would never work. Yet he solved issue after issue, and when it finally hung fast he spent the later night in silence, drawing up other such solutions on parchment, wondering why he didn't think of it first.
But how the balloon did run in the cold morning breeze was frightening. How the clouds hiked across the sky so fast, stopping at nothing, came into her grasp while watching the balloon. It charged into the air of the meadow, away from the sun, and away from the bend of the river and they couldn't begin to beg or scold it to heel. It would not only need be pulled, but by something innocently lifeless that could pass the borders faultlessly as well.
On the arch of the bridge across the river where the bustling East of town connected to the rolling West, they ate a lunch of fruit over its waters, watching the lillypads spin away forever. Pom gave her familiar and quiet huff she does when she'd finished eating, and as though he was waiting for it specifically, immediately kicked an apple of her's off the edge and into the water. After Pom watched it plop into its watery grave, she tried to subject him to her affronted gaze, but he didn't wait for it, and ran to the opposite edge of the bridge, watching it plow like a sweet fist past the plates of green and floating just as gracefully. A whole big bucket of them, he decided, would hold the balloon to the watery track, right down the same way they let the pedals of the flowers ride that Pom still wished to make right. The Apple Anchor, Woogums committed to parchment, and could hardly sleep that night, racking his brain for his inspirations, hoping he truly did think of it first.
Summer neared and the morning's icy teeth melted away one by one, the ones they desperately needed to launch. Woogums found himself deathly correct on his earlier damnation of Pom's mirror trick. In flight above the green hills, far from town and anchored there soundly with a barrel of McIntosh, the clay frame of Pom's old vanity seemed to bob relentlessly with the motion of the balloon's flight, and unusably sensitive to the slightest breeze. Polishing the lens over and over against her fleecy thigh, and even against Woogum's more abrasive one, she could see no clear picture of what the balloon loomed over. The rush of color in the mirror's face showed a rock, a tree, what she thought was herself if she could follow its thrashings in the wind for long enough. No autonomous touch could map the surface of the meadow, the rickety thing yearned for operation. Someone must go up.
Ruff, who had scampered after Pom insistently, even without her bell, sat at her side as she rubbed her eyes, flogged by the wobbling in the sky. As her brother reined the balloon back to the ground, the young pup whimpered up to her as she draped a gentle hoof over his small back.
"Fetch the shears, Ruff. I'm ready," she said with a teary eye, from her telescopic struggle or the lament of her soon lost wool, Woogums could not tell. Ruff began to sniff around, as if he'd find them stuck blade-down in the soil nearby.
"No... No wait, we won't need them," Woogums said, "Ruff can heel, stay and fetch by now. I mean, look at him go! Here boy!"
The dog was pulled from his fruitless task. The young ram unfastened the convolution of rope securing the mirror, which flopped face-first and painlessly into the cushion of grass beneath it. When it fell, Pom saw Ruff in the balloon's basket, draping his paws over the side. Woogums put the edge of the mirror frame to his face, which he bit into obediently.
"Woogums, please no. What if he runs? he can see every squirrel in the Meadow from up there!" Pom insisted.
"He won't run. I've seen this pup, he's stays with the best of them. A whole squirrel army couldn't budge him. We'll take it a bit at a time, he won't go all the way up. I'm not even sure he's light enough yet."
Slow as it was, the balloon and its new pilot rose. Unpinning only a slight bit of rope from under his hoof at a time, Woogum's wonder multiplied as the vessel finally fulfilled its purpose. Even when the basket stopped abruptly against the straining rope, Ruff's head and body bobbed even less, and the mirror hung in his little jaws far stiller than it ever had. When the balloon began to turn in the breeze, Ruff would turn in opposite to face them again, insistent on watching his owners as he performed his idle task. Pom peered at him as he drifted further and further, and felt herself slacken when she saw his still joyous face in the spyglass, and just below it, a living painting of the meadows in his mouth.
"Enough! I want that pup on the ground, now!" A voice came crashing down as if the balloon, the pup, and the whole world had fallen. They both recognized the herdsman at once, the same one who occupied the Prime Minister nearly a week before, and even recognized the three hounds trailing him in service.
"Ye first bother the Minister, wanting to lead us all out of town, for what!? Now you're flyin' pups! Get 'im down!"
In all her life, Pom hadn't seen face as red and eyes both searing and pleading at once. She couldn't move, not to the rope or from her spot before the furious herdsman at all. Instead she stared at Woogums and regretted every morning while he yanked and stepped on the rope in panic, trying to apologize between untaken breaths.
It's approach was deathly knowing what fury she'd seen of him was only to multiply upon its landing. It descended and was on the ground burning still before she could ever ready herself. Ruff hopped from the cockpit, dropped the mirror, and came bounding to lick Pom's face from her stupor of fear and regret. Woogums wouldn't look at her, only at the herdsman, who leered at him in a way no one ever had; as a ram who made his life's yet greatest mistake, and not Pom's young lamb of a brother.
When the both lay in awake in beds across from one another, it was as if the herdsman's anger had dropped not like a hammer, but a feather that sliced slow through Pom's mind, and had cut clean through by nightfall. For the rest of the day she only recalled him yelling to bring down the vessel, and all he said to them, mostly to her brother, on their stupidity and selfishness had only ran through her mind now, but it ran endlessly in circles.
Watching the light of the moon the same way one does a boiling pot so it didn't spill into morning, Pom didn't want to live in a day where the whole village had known of their obsessions. The grounds of the town and the hills of the Meadow sufficed for all. Why wasn't it for her and her brother? What about them both was so wrong? Maybe she really did want to leave, and they saw it deep in her, when she couldn't even see it in herself. That was wrong, she thought, and the townsfolk were right when they fixed something in them that could have cost them Ruff.
A hearing would be called the next day to decide the fate of the balloon, and quite likely them as well. The strange thing, hung like a guilty skin before the town, would likely be dismantled and sold far from their home so the parts couldn't be reconstructed again. The herdsman left it in the darkness of the tower, but not before snuffing her candle. Her little golden promise to the Wicklighter blinked into the air in an instant. Her track of time had drowned in the night hours ago, but she still rose from her bed, stumbled to her tired hooves, and walked the dark hall to the window to tell him in person. Maybe in all the decades of candles he snuffed, the one he gave her had slipped his mind.
It was nearly dawn already, she found from the light that shined the glass of the window. All the candles were out, a Wicklighter's work for the night was done. As she turned to her room, the blade of reflection on the window jumped, perhaps at her. She thought the sun sparked across the polished frame, but instead a single candle had remained, lit and waiting, with the pane of glass swinging in the breeze and the hook of the lock ineffectually picking at the air.
The illusion of the day was made clear once she climbed out her window with the new candle, since Woogums found peace with all his waking torments for now. The only place she'd ever known was an alien plane in the night. She had only gold burning before her eyes and ringing around her neck guiding her down the path they whittled in the grass all week, and she stayed dead center in the spinning triangle guard of her three pups. Not even the phantoms of the night could reach her, she thought. But she walked not without fear, for the other sheep could, and may leave her another long night awake with more words to burn through her dream-starved mind.
On the hook she hung the balloon, as she saw Woogums do, and with all her dogs she hoisted the thing awake. By the time she lit the kindling, Ruff had already found himself to the basket, whinging for the mirror. The cart was left from when they first delivered the craft, and it was loaded with the Apple Anchor.
Over the silhouettes of the southern hills she waited for the first blinding arch of the sun to announce the day. Pom wondered if anyone, if not the Wicklighter, would wake early enough to find her. For some reason she wanted them to, as if to save her from some mistake she was making. But that coin flipped over every time, and reminded her that this task was one a sheep never faces, which is a task alone. What had their votes ever done but stifle her? What will they ever do but leave her lifeless? The hills finally revealed the beams of the sun begotten, and she pushed the whole cart into the river.
The anchor jerked the balloon to heel as hounds do to lead their old ewes where their old eyes no longer can. Down the meandering waters it went with its tethered eye above, carving a triangular trail harshly across its surface that lapped against the banks far behind it. Ruff watched Pom from above without fear or determination, but that mindlessly loving gaze all well-fed dogs do. She thought to wave and sing praises to him across the sunny mist, but fearing any restlessness, she took out the spyglass, and waited to see her not-so-distant land of freedom and flowers aplenty.
With such a long rope, the balloon and its dog tip-toed across the peaks of the hills that concealed the watery track and anchor. Their week's passion had gone further than they ever could, and gleamed its rewards back to her in the silvery reflection under its pilot. In it she saw green and more green of the hillsides. No different than she'd seen all her life, but like the dark side of the moon there could be anything in it, including everything she had already send hurtling through the water mill for hours. For a moment, she saw something break the green into white, then green again. Something further, teal this time, but it came to a point, like something sharp as fresh stone. The orb of Pom's sight bobbed with the beat of her heart, and with one last look into the mirror, she saw two opals dancing in a fire's light, set into something's face. It was somewhat pink like the morning's arc in the sky which was, in the singular moment Pom dropped the spyglass into the water, pierced through its belly by a flaring ivory tusk, and slowly Ruff's balloon lost altitude and was lost behind the river's forbidden bend.