Escapement

by Jay Lake

  It was of no matter to the white birds and their allies. Only a fool could look at the brasswork in the sky and deny God’s handiwork. Only an idiot could look at the brasswork in the sky and declare God immaterial. Childress and her sliver of the quiet wisdom of librarians had been content to nudge where nudging was called for, teach where teaching would be heard, and report that which was noteworthy.

  This business came back to Hethor and his feather, she knew. That had been a time when the world shook, great waves striking coasts all over Northern Earth. That New England had been spared was nothing short of a miracle, but English and Colonial lives had been lost aplenty elsewhere. The boy had gone seeking William of Ghent and passed out of her view. She’d heard sufficient echo of his later effort to know he’d achieved something.

  Success, evidently, as the world seemed to be yet turning, and the horomancers had settled down once more to casting lots and predicting the fevers of children. William of Ghent had left Boston on a mysterious errand, not yet returned to the courts of Empire even now.

  She tried not to wonder if her own note to the man in Boston who ran his specials had made things worse for poor Hethor. Phelps was part of the avebianco, too, in his way.

  As she reflected, her boots echoed down the wooden planks, past bales of cargo netting, cotton and canvas, as well as larger, bulkier containers—hogsheads and tuns and barrels. There was a profusion of practice around her that signaled a vocabulary of action and word. Every craft carried its own cant, librarians and libertines alike.

  Men looked at her, too. Wondering. Childress knew that nothing of her appearance telegraphed any sense of belonging here. She was far too old to be a dockside hussy, or even a madam. Her attire, high-necked black in close semblance of widow’s weeds for all she’d never married, was far too plain to be a captain’s wife or widow-owner. In the rising dark of the evening, the torchlight and great storm lanterns would deepen the lines on her face to those of a children’s witch.

  It was no surprise at all when the avebianco found her. The woman who’d visited her at the library looked out from under a sailor’s flat hat, just as Master Boyett of the University of Connecticut libraries stepped around a stack of wide, shallow chests.

  “Good evening, Librarian Childress,” Boyett said quietly.

  She was aware that at least four of the sailors nearby were not moving about at their tasks, but rather focused on her.

  Childress let her voice go frosty. Boyett had always been a bit of a sucking grind. “Something of a walk from Storrs, isn’t it, Brian? Out for your evening constitutional?”

  Boyett moved his hands slightly, the v-and-x signal of the white birds. “I’m here as witness. . . .”

  She took satisfaction that he couldn’t quite bring himself to call her by her Christian name. She still had the advantage of him. Her only advantage now, and not one she could see a way to playing. “Witness what? I have been called, I come. Most of us spend our lives watching and waiting without ever serving at all.”

  The sailor-woman’s hand closed on her arm. “Time to go, Librarian.” Had Childress not seen this woman in a dress some hours earlier, she would not have questioned that a man stood beside her now.

  “Nonsense,” Childress answered. “The tide’s running for several hours yet. Your sense of the dramatic is overtaking your judgment.”

  The grip grew tighter. “You will not be baffling me as you have him.”

  “Then I go. I came, did I not?”

  Boyett shuddered. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” she asked, but he did not answer.

  Then the woman led her up a gangplank of a fast packet named Mute Swan, which shuddered as its engines chuffed somewhere deep within the metal hull. Childress looked back when she reached the top. Boyett stared up after her.

  “What did you tell him?” she asked her captor.

  “The truth,” the woman said. “As for you, you go below now.”

  Childress looked up at the brass curving in the evening sky, wondering if that poor, lost Hethor had found any reward to go with his success.

  TWO

  PAOLINA

  Paolina realized that the fidalgos were not simply going to let her out. She’d been offered neither food nor water since being pushed into this closet. Sipping at the dregs of wildflower wine and bagaceira to stop her thirst was hardly sensible. But they had not returned, nor had they sent one of the women to care for her.

  All of this? Over a watch? They were very angry, or very frightened. With these fools, the two were almost the same.

  She spent much of her time visualizing the stemwinder, imagining what parts might be needed to ensure its successful continued operation. There would be a way to store energy, of course. A coiled spring was the only reasonable solution for that, given the shape and size of the device. That spring would slowly unwind, driving a series of gears designed to capture its motion and transmit that to the hands. The gearing would be required to adapt to the differing tension of the spring as it uncoiled, so that the rate of motion of the hands did not change.

  There would be more, much more, but those were the basics.

  And so Creation worked, the planet spinning like the hands of a watch, meshing with the ring of its orbit as it transited through the sky. Everything danced around everything else, advancing in a mechanical sarabande that told the story of God’s craftsmanship more eloquently than words in any book could talk of the brass snake that had clacked through Eden or the horofixion of Christ.

  It was all there. She’d been unfolding the secrets of Earth in the mushroom shed before they’d taken her away. Only the English truly understood God, those wizards of Bassett and the Dent watchworks back in the motherland. Clarence Davies might well be an idiot, but he was an idiot sprung from a race of wizards.

  Could she build a stemwinder herself, she wondered? Her own model of the universe? Surely not with teak splinters and brittle iron.

  Paolina Barthes sat in the damp, breathing darkness and imagined her way toward the doors of knowledge. The world could be solved, and she would solve it. There simply was no other way.

  Sometime later she lay slumped and stinking, her mouth dry as rotting canvas. Paolina became aware that a glaring bar of light had fallen across one hand.

  “Girl,” said someone quietly. The voice still scratched at her ears like tiny claws. “What have they done to you?”

  Senhora Armandires, Paolina thought. She let her head loll sideways though the glare hurt her eyes. “Hel . . .”

  “No.” The woman knelt. “Don’t speak.” She bent close to touch Paolina’s neck. “They are fools and worse, but they are our men. Right now they are also being kept busy.” Senhora Armandires propped Paolina’s head up and pressed a damp rag to her mouth. “Here, close your jaw.”

  “Out,” Paolina tried to say around the rag. The word was little more than a grunt.

  “When I can.” The senhora shoved a sack next to her. The rough fiber scraped on Paolina’s thigh as coral might, rough enough to draw blood. “Three waterskins and some bread from your mother. Soak it before you eat. Also, that English boy sent some things.” Another bag, with the first. “He is frantic for you. It would be sweet if he were not so unsuitable.”

  She let the rag drop from her mouth. “Get me out,” she whispered.

  “We will. The fidalgos must think it their idea.”

  “They w-w-want to kill me.”

  “We all live in this world. They do not mean to kill, only to frighten you into sensibility.”

  Exhausted, she had no more to say. Senhora Armandires slipped a sliver of mango between Paolina’s lips—where had the woman gotten that?—smoothed her hair, and kissed her forehead. “Patience and prayer,” she said. “Someone will return with more water, but guard what you have.”

  She nodded, terrified of the darkness that was about to return. When Senhora Armandires shut the door, what remained behind was a familiar, close silence. Not the fear Paolina
had dreaded, not at all.

  Groping, she found Clarence’s bag. It clicked. What had he sent her?

  Within she found metal. Tools. And shapes. Not the stemwinder, not anything she recognized. But metal.

  He’d been raiding then, along a Muralha, maybe up to the ruined cities of the enkidus.

  “Patience, prayer, and watchmaking,” she told the darkness.

  She could have loved the boy in that moment, for all that he was the inadvertent architect of much of her troubles. Instead Paolina worked to sort what she had, laying it out on the floor before her knees.

  God had created the world in darkness, had He not, before lighting the lamp of the sun? This was a much smaller thing.

  Besides, her fevered dreams had given her so much more than she’d had before falling into restless sleep.

  Tools, tools and metal. With those, any intelligent woman could remake the world. She could do no less.

  A week and more Paolina was in the darkness. Her sense of time was not so perfected, but every day or so one of the older women came to her. It could hardly be a secret they were caring for her, but the men continued to pretend. She knew they had to let her out soon enough—something would go wrong with a well, or a winch would jam too hard, and they’d need her help.

  She explored the logic of her tools and the inexorable movement of time. Every click of every second of every day was fodder for her. She’d measured the skies years before, understood perfectly well the dance of sun and moon and planets. It was time now to visualize how God had assembled these things in His work.

  All she had to do was copy, not invent.

  So in the darkness she cut and scraped and filed. Tiny pieces seemed to hold firm in her fingers, though she knew with the right clamps and stands she could have cut them almost dust-small. The shavings she carefully swept by hand, separate piles for each consistency of metal, in case she needed them for even tinier springs. Likewise the slivers, which could provide a roller for a movement almost too small to see. She could not build those here in the dark, with these tools, but she could anticipate the need and how it would work.

  There was frustration, too, as some parts fumbled away from her hand, and others couldn’t be made to fit with sufficient smoothness. Wherever and whatever Clarence Davies had traded or stolen for her, he had been a genius unknowing. She kept finding just one more bit of metal, one more fragment to serve as a bearing, one more tip to cut.

  It was like being at prayer, save with metal in her hands instead of some scrap of Scripture.

  When Senhora Armandires came to let her out, Paolina was ready. She’d repacked Clarence’s bag with her bits of tool and machine. Working in the darkness had provided magnificent focus for her imagination, with no diversion of purpose.

  Now she needed to be terribly sick awhile, and sleep in honest light. Then she could reopen the bag and see what she had wrought.

  Outside, it was as if nothing had changed. Pretense, all pretense, as was much of life in Praia Nova. Walking slowly on Senhora Armandires’ arm, Paolina saw the men ignore her, the boys stare at her, and women keep their faces turned away.

  “Am I supposed to have learned some lesson?” she asked hoarsely.

  “Hush, girl. You need rest in decent shelter. Talking about what happened will only make it worse.”

  In that moment Paolina knew she was not going to stay in Praia Nova. No matter that she had no airship to carry her away. If the fool boy Clarence could find his path across a Muralha, so could she. It was only a matter of determination.

  Though not being killed along the way might matter as well, she had to admit.

  She spent two days sleeping, waking periodically only to relieve herself and sip a little fish broth.

  “They’ve been casting nets,” Senhora Armandires explained at one point.

  “From a boat?” Paolina’s voice squeaked badly.

  “A raft.”

  “Fools,” she muttered, then slipped back into sleep, dreaming of the Atlantic swells that crashed against the base of a Muralha.

  Waking finally on the third day, Paolina felt almost normal. Her strength seemed to have returned, and her eyes didn’t hurt anymore. The senhora sat on the foot of her little cot in the tiny house. “We must speak.”

  “I listen.”

  Senhora Armandires picked at her mantilla a little while. Satisfied finally that there were no hidden flaws there, she looked up again at Paolina. In that moment the girl realized how old the senhora was. Not in years, perhaps, but in cares. Her face was seamed with lines. One eye was clouded fog pale. Her hands shook slightly.

  A Muralha killed people, quickly or slowly, but still it made martyrs of them all. That Praia Nova was a settlement of refugees and rebels and wreck survivors might give them all a sliver of noble pride, but they were not meant to be here. None of them.

  It wasn’t just she who should leave.

  “The fidalgos will not say this. . . .” The senhora paused, looking again into Paolina’s eyes for something. “It is so difficult to be a man.”

  Paolina began to laugh in choking gasps.

  “No, no. Attend me. They have so much to live up to, before God and their fathers and one another.” Senhora Armandires sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “They will bleed before they show weakness. And apologizing to a woman is weakness. So we must read their words in their acts. The fidalgos have forgiven you, and repented of their haste. Do not distress their dignity by raising questions. In public or in private. Please.”

  “What has broken?”

  The senhora’s head bowed. She let her breath out in a long, slow sigh, like a lie escaping. “The pump will not work. We are running out of water. Every ounce must now be carried up from below, or foraged from the beck along the enkidus’ borders.”

  “I suppose it is just as well that I did not starve in the dark as they intended.”

  “Their pride . . . you must always remember and respect their pride.”

  Never, thought Paolina, but she kept the word within. “I shall fix the pump. Then I shall expect to be left alone.”

  Senhora Armandires’ eyes flashed. “You are still a girl—”

  Paolina let some of her anger leak out. “I am the only one who can fix the pump. I believe that makes me an honorary man.”

  The senhora stood, brushed off her mantilla, and made a slight bow. “I am sorry,” she said as she retreated from her own house.

  Paolina wondered if that was the only honest thing the senhora had said to her today. Though in truth, if Armandires was lying, it was more to herself than to Paolina.

  She drew Clarence’s bag out. She wasn’t quite ready to open it yet. The lumpy, scratchy homespun carried promise, more than anything else she’d known in her life.

  Paolina remembered seeing how everything worked. If she opened the bag and found she’d been grinding junk to dust in the dark, she would simply throw herself into the sea.

  So she hugged it awhile, and rocked, and listened to the sea pound below, and wondered how many men and boys would drown fishing from the raft before they let her help them figure out how to build the boats. Finally she realized that she didn’t care anymore.

  The next day Paolina was back in the mushroom shed. She had decided to wait until one of the men asked her to fix the pump. She had water, after all, in three gourds left her by Senhora Armandires.

  It was quiet and dark, but so different from the closet in the great hall. She was here by choice—a vast improvement. No one barred the door. The darkness was different, too, filled with the gentle texture and reek of the mushrooms. The night soil of the village was spread here, used and reused to build a stinking bed on which the little brown buttons grew. Periodically the mushroom beds were turned out into the fields for fertilizer.

  In other words, the mushroom shed was like the spring at the heart of the stemwinder, storing energy meted out over time in the form of food for future consumption.

  She liked the
idea. It gave her a certain sense of sympathetic resonance. She wondered if God had some divine equivalent of a mushroom shed in which He had labored at crafting the clockwork of Creation.

  The pieces she’d cut in her blind fever were more difficult to assess. They bore only a passing resemblance to Clarence Davies’ English stemwinder, insofar as she’d been able to study it before being hauled away. Paolina figured the watch was unlikely to come back to her now, not while it was still hung on the point of the fidalgos’ pride.

  No matter, she told herself. Her memory would suffice. She set herself to recreating her vision of how the energies of Creation were gathered and stored.

  It was not simple. Much like the skies themselves, her course was charted in complex paths and traceries of brasswork. There was a mainspring, but she seemed to have made several other, smaller springs, as well as a profusion of minute gears. They were more crudely cut than the sparkling elements of the original stemwinder, but they were true.

  She did not need what the English needed. As Clarence had explained, that was agreement with clocks at an observatory just outside distant London. She required only a model of the world. The heavens themselves gave the time to anyone who knew how to read the signs. It was the rest of the order of Creation with which she was concerned.

  Paolina did not want to go to Bassett, let alone all the way to England, with empty hands. Those great sorcerers would scarcely hear her suit if she did not bring a journeyman’s work with her to prove her worth.

  She imagined standing before the Queen and her court of the wise and the magical, showing her own stemwinder, demonstrating to all how she could follow in the footsteps of Dent, Watchmaker to the Queen.