“Abram—“
Her Uncle seized Isaac by his shoulders. “If she is taken from here, she can complete it. If she can complete it, we can be saved.”
“Uncle—“
“Abram—“
Abram looked at them both, his expression somber, hollow. “I know you are confused, Rita. And I wish I could explain this to its fullest extent, but you must be sent away from the ghetto. For your safety. For all of our safety. And if Isaac can take you to the Empire, you may solve the riddle of your great machine. And it is safer there, far safer, than life here. Life under the Muslims is far more tolerable, and questions will not be asked there as they were here. But Isaac must be the one to take you.”
Margarita wasn’t sure if the sound that came from her lips was laughter or tears. “I must make the machine? Why? And why Isaac? Shall he disguise me like Sarah was, and he shall tell the Sultan I am his sister?”
“He shall say you are his wife.” Abram spoke the words in low, even tones. “And you shall be married to him before you leave Italy. He shall take his bride to the Empire to see his homeland, and enjoy a land unlike her native Venice. There, you will build the machine, or Venice shall fall beneath the French, and only the Eternal King knows if the Jews shall survive. Isaac is to take you because he is not a foreigner there; despite the faith we all share in this room.”
Isaac reached for her hand, but let his drop when she shrank away, eyes filled with tears. “And if I refuse?”
Abram shrugged. “Then I will try and reason with you.”
“And if I continue to refuse?”
“Then you will stay. And when the French come to Venice, the children of Israel will die in the streets. As we often do, when invaders come to a place that houses us with disdain and hate.”
Margarita could feel her composure failing, the tremble through her lips and chin warning of tears to come. She slipped out the door before they could speak to her again, running for the front door and then out it, barely pausing to seize her cloak. She kept her head bowed as she ran for the bridge between the ghettos, Old and New, one hand pressed against her mouth to muffle her weeping. She felt hot and cold, lightheaded and unable to think. Fear and betrayal and anger lashed around inside her, angry snakes that choked and bit within. She cried on the bridge, cried till her face was swollen and she felt as if she would vomit into the canal water. She gripped the bridge, waiting for reprisal, for Abram to drag her back. To force her into a plan she barely understood.
Isaac was the one to come for her, not with anger but sympathy, and a scrap of cloth that she ran across her face, drying the ends of tear tracks. Her voice was hoarse and miserable. “So I am to be your wife, and go forth to a strange land? To build something I don’t understand for a war that isn’t even here yet?”
She looked up at him, both of them pressed against the railing of the bridge. Isaac was older than her, surely in his thirties. Wouldn’t Abram listen to him? All he had to do was say he couldn’t take her, couldn’t marry her. He didn’t touch her, but he stood closely, body radiating warmth.
“Perhaps the dream is about a triumph of yours, Margarita. Of winning against impossible odds.”
“Winning a war for Venice?” She laughed, the sound cold and broken.
“Winning a war for yourself. I…I am no prophet. And I think you know that both my household and your own, we know things few do, or would expect us to.” He placed his hand on the railing, close to hers, yet still not touching. “What he is asking, we must both agree to do. I will not touch you, put a hand upon you, or force you to do anything as my wife. I will not let him make you do this, if you do not wish to. If you doubt his intentions, his methods, I will continue in my life as you do in yours. But if you believe the counsel of your Uncle, that this is a task only you can accomplish, there are many engineers in the Empire. Forges and foundries would not be hard to find. And there is a man, in another part of the Empire, who seeks to build an engine to drive machines—one made of steam.”
Steam and smoke. Her gasp was slight, but her thoughts were already tumbling. Depending on the placement and size, perhaps a dual—
Perhaps it could be done. And if it could be done, if it was even possible, perhaps this would cure her dream.
Margarita shook her head, glancing down at their hands. “You will help protect me?”
“With all I have to offer to that service.” Isaac was serious, sincere, and did not smile when she looked back up. Their hands stayed as they were, next to each other.
If it was possible that she could do what had been asked of her, children like Lorenza and Fiora might not have to die.
“When could we leave?”
The Leviathan of Trincomalee
Lucy A. Snyder
Thilini Rothschild saw the green fireball streaking across the sky above the coconut palms before her father did. “Look, Papa!”
“Why, that’s an extraordinary meteor! I’ve never seen one of such color.” He peered out at the night sky through his workshop window. “Good thing that will crash far out in the Indian Ocean and not in a city!”
Thilini gazed at the fireball’s sparkling emerald tail, entranced and yet feeling a bit crestfallen. “I hoped it was falling star so I could wish upon it.”
“Why, I’m sure a fine meteor such as that is just as wish-worthy!”
So she closed her eyes and thought, I wish for an adventure!
* * *
Three years later, Thilini had forgotten all about the meteor. She woke before the first crows of her mother’s junglefowl, wound on her favorite green sari, and slipped out to the kitchen to gather some cold chickpea fritters and jackfruit in a basket. Her father would still be at his workshop by the harbor; no doubt he’d been working on his wireless telegraph machine all night. He’d probably forgotten to eat.
Excitement jittered in her stomach. Today was the day the Southwind would return, her hold creaking with goods. If the special gears and glass panels her father had commissioned from his partners in Switzerland arrived with it, that meant they might finally be able to assemble the submarine prototype she and her father had been working on for the past year. Thilini couldn’t wait to see the ocean from beneath the waves.
She hefted the reed basket over one shoulder, slipped into the sandals her mother made her leave by the front door, and ran down the wagon-rutted road to the harbor shops. To her surprise, a stout, balding man was standing in the shop, arms crossed. Her father frowned up at him from his workbench, his eyes shadowed in the flickering candlelight. Biting her lip, she pushed open the front door, quietly so the bells wouldn’t jingle.
“You’re wasting your talents here,” the stranger lectured in German. “You need to go back to Europe. Or at least come to our estate in Kandy.”
Her father pulled off his wire-framed round glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. His long curly brown hair had come loose from its queue. He looked exhausted. “I’m fine, Martin. The clean air here suits me more than the noise and stink of Frankfurt or London.”
He looked past Martin and his eyes focused on Thilini.
“Ah, you brought breakfast?” he asked her in Tamil.
“Yes, Papa. Who is this?”
“Your uncle Martin,” he continued, still speaking in her native language. “Pay him and his unpleasantness no mind.”
“Yes, Papa.”
“‘Attān’?” Martin said, repeating her endearment, staring at Thilini. Recognition seemed to dawn; he grimaced in disgust. He stared back down at her father, eyebrows raised. “Are you this little pickaninny’s sire?”
Her father turned red as a berry, his fists clenching in his lap. “I’ll not have you speak about my daughter in such a debased fashion.”
“Debased?” Martin exclaimed. “It is you who have debased our family! Rothschilds dance in the courts of every ruler in Europe, and yet here you are, tinkering in the sand, breeding like a mongrel with the first brown bitch who wiggles her tail at you.”
>
It was Thilini’s turn to feel the blood rise in her face. She could bear insults to herself with all the quiet grace her parents had taught her, but she would not stand by while this stranger spoke so badly of her mother. But her father responded before she could open her mouth.
“I have lived upon five continents.” Her father’s voice shook with rage. “And Thilini’s mother is the finest woman I have ever met. None of the simpering court ladies you and your brothers deemed so suitable as matches have half the beauty, intelligence, or courage of my dear Anula.”
“Indeed,” Thilini replied in her best German. “If my mother is such a poor match for my father, I should be a useless idiot, should I not? So, test me. Ask me any question you like, in any language you like.”
Martin was clearly surprised she knew German at all. “Who’s the tsar of Russia?”
“Alexander the Third.”
“And the President of the United States?”
“Grover Cleveland. Please, do ask me something difficult, dear Uncle.”
Martin frowned. “What’s the square root of eighty-one?” he asked in French.
“Nine,” she replied in English.
“What are the components of black powder?” he asked in German.
“Sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter,” she replied in French. “I can make you some if you like. The recipe is easier than my mother’s fish soup.”
“Why doesn’t your father’s wireless telegraphy machine work?”
She smiled at him. “And now you’re fishing for trade secrets, Uncle.”
Her uncle stared at her. “How old are you?”
“I shall be thirteen in two months.”
* * *
After Martin left, her father fussed at her a bit for speaking so boldly to her uncle, but clearly he was proud of her. They ate the breakfast she brought, and then he sent her down to the docks with their portable telegraph prototype. It was based on some of the correspondences he’d had with the American inventor Brooks. The device almost worked, but the power supplies they’d tried were insufficient for the components.
“I’m sure the new electrochemical cells will do the trick. It’s just a matter of fine-tuning the equipment,” he said as he loaded the sixty-pound rig onto her little palmwood wagon.
“Can we make it smaller?” she asked doubtfully.
He laughed. “Reliability first. Miniaturization second.”
Thilini hauled the wagon down to the docks and took up a vantage point where she could keep watch for the tall sails of the Southwind. Occasionally, part of a telegraph would come through; she’d transcribe the message and jot down the time in her notebook. The first time they’d gotten anything at all to transmit and be received through thin air, they’d both been overjoyed. But getting an entire message to go through over distances more than ten feet or so had proved a confoundingly difficult challenge.
Science, she mused, involved an awful lot of waiting and doing-over.
Her reverie was broken by the shouts of men. She stood. The Southwind had sailed into view … but she was too low in the sea, and listing so far to one side she looked in danger of capsizing. Had the ship broken its hull on a coral reef?
“She’s taking on water fast!” the stevedore shouted. “Every man with a boat, get out there! We need to get that cargo off!”
* * *
Two hours later, Thilini stood with her father as two deeply tanned dockworkers pulled the precious Swiss crates from the deck of a patamar that had been pressed into rescue duty. The crates were so waterlogged that she would not have been surprised to hear fish flopping inside them. The glass would be fine, provided it had not been mishandled, but she cringed at the corrosion the seawater would wreak on the delicate gears if they were not carefully rinsed, dried, and re-oiled.
“Please, get these back to my shop as quickly as you can,” her father told the men of the hired wagon.
“Yes, Herr Rothschild.” They quickly set to loading up the crates.
The stevedore approached them, shaking his head. He was a small, wiry man who looked Tamil but he wore a Catholic rosary over his loose cotton shirt and had a slight Portuguese accent. “A third of the cargo lost, and five sailors sent to the Almighty. The ship can’t be repaired in the water, so we need to find some way to haul ‘er in to dry-dock before she sinks. And I ain’t convinced she won’t just sink.”
“Was it a reef?” Thilini asked.
“If only!” the stevedore replied. “We could dodge a reef, but this … well, come see. Perhaps your papa can make heads or tails of this deviltry.”
Further down, another boat had come in bearing a broken plank from the hull. Not broken, she realized. Something had bitten it in half! Imbedded in the stout English timber was a shark’s tooth of far greater size than any she’d imagined. The biggest one she’d seen until then was about the size of a gold sovereign coin.
“Mein gott,” her father breathed. He laid his hand beside the protruding tooth; it was larger than his palm and outstretched fingers. “What leviathan could grow such a fang? Some type of cachalot whale?”
“Carcharodon carcharias,” came a voice behind them.
Thilini turned. Trincomalee’s resident naturalist, the retired physician Edward Kelart, was gazing at the tooth with grave concern. He leaned heavily against his silver-filigreed cane, which he’d needed to use ever since a hard voyage to England had nearly killed him two decades before.
“That tooth’s far too large to come from a great white shark,” her father countered.
“Indeed,” Dr. Kelart said. “But the tooth shape is distinct, and unmistakable. If it is not some ancient great white grown to immense size, it is a close cousin.”
* * *
The imported glass was in fine shape, and Thilini and her father were able to clean all the gears they needed for their submersible prototype. In just a few months, they had his latest invention ready to test in the waters. The gleaming fifteen-foot submarine was skinned in copper and steel, courtesy of the fine craftsmanship of the local metal smiths. The sub was sleek as a dolphin, with round fore and aft windows and triangular fins for stability. Her father’s patented, self-contained steam engine powered the screw-shaped propellers at the rear of the sub and electric headlights.
“This is just a miniature version of what I propose to build later,” her father remarked to the stevedore, who helped them guide the sub down the wooden ramp into the water. “We must test every aspect of the craft, of course.”
“You’re letting the girl pilot this thing?” Astonishment was plain on the stevedore’s face.
Thilini ignored him and focused on buttoning up her black rubber suit. The feel of the tight material against her legs was strange; she was used to airy saris and sarongs, but skirts would drag her down in the water if she needed to abandon ship. She hoped the coolness of the sea would help counteract the heat from the steam engine. Otherwise, she’d be stewed like a whiting in a parchment bag before her three hours of air were depleted.
“She knows every rivet and gear of this craft, and she is a far better swimmer than I,” her father said. “Further, we had to build the sub at such a limited scale that I can scarcely fit in it myself!”
The men helped her squeeze through the top hatch of the sub.
“Don’t go out of the shallows at first, and if the craft is sound, don’t take her farther than Pigeon Island,” her father admonished.
“I won’t,” she promised.
They sealed the hatch above her, and moments later the sub lurched as the men pushed it into the water. Thilini said a quick prayer and pulled the lever to start the steam engine. The whole craft shook as the fire ignited in the belly of the sub and the boiler began to steam. She busied herself checking pressure and temperature gauges, then went around the inside of the craft, checking all the brass and copper pipe fittings and wall panels for leaks.
After a half-hour, she was certain the engine was operating as expected and the craft was wa
tertight. She settled in the leather-padded pilot’s chair and cautiously steered the craft toward Pigeon Island.
The undersea coral reefs were breathtakingly beautiful; Thilini had seen plenty of brightly-colored fish pulled up by fishermen, but she had never imagined the coral itself would be such a gorgeous wonderland. She felt as though she had been transported to an entirely different world, and that she was not traveling through water but soaring above a dazzling forest on a planet lit by a foreign star.
A pod of curious porpoises swam along next to her craft. Their squeals and clicks echoed through the cabin. The sea mammals seemed to smile at her through the windows, and she could not help but smile back at them as they somersaulted and cavorted.
One porpoise paused and let out a squeal. She and her sisters swam together and huddled with their snouts pointed at each other for a moment; Thilini had the impression they were urgently discussing something. Then they broke away from the sub, swimming fast toward the shallows, all traces of playfulness gone.
What had alarmed them? She peered out through the front window into the deeper water beyond the island. And there swam a lone whale. Not a great blue whale, but a younger toothy orca she guessed was not much longer than the five yards of her submarine. No doubt he was what frightened off her cetacean friends.
I should like to see a whale up close, she thought. She’d seen plenty of dead whales brought to the harbor, but that wasn’t nearly the same as seeing one in its natural world. The engine is fine; a quick look won’t hurt anything.
She pushed the craft forward, gently, to prevent frightening the creature. It was certainly big enough to ram the submarine if it deemed her a threat. The orca turned and gazed at her curiously when she was about a hundred yards away. She stopped the craft, holding her breath, hoping the creature was not territorial.
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