Escapement

by Jay Lake

  Here, she was little more than a tool for pumps and levers, an otherwise inconvenient girl. There, well . . . how could an empire ruled by a woman not be able to see what she might do?

  So long as she could show them.

  Paolina bent to her parts—long, narrow levers with serrated catches, beveled wheels, little worm gears, springs and pins. It seemed as if she could build a hundred stemwinders. But she’d had a vision in the dark, and it hadn’t vanished completely with her return to the light.

  The first problem was a plate or frame on which to build the train of her genius. Her hand slipped back into Clarence’s raiding bag, to see what might serve at that size and weight. It would have to be a bit bigger than the Dent stemwinder, as her tools were not sufficiently fine, but it would still be something a girl could carry in her hand.

  The following morning, Senhora Armandires had bustled in tense silence before leaving Paolina alone with her thoughts. After eating the senhora’s thin gruel, she returned to the mushroom shed, where she found her mother and Clarence Davies waiting together.

  Clarence smiled. He seemed to stand a bit taller, be a bit happier. Perhaps he’d found a place here, she thought, some purpose or sense of home. Miserable as Praia Nova was, after two years of walking, ordinary people who spoke some English might have seemed to him a gift from God.

  Her mother, on the other hand, was bent lower than ever. The years of her father’s absence weighed on Senhora Barthes. Still, somehow Paolina had missed the arrival of old age in the droop of her mother’s eyes, the wrinkles upon her face marking the scars of time.

  “Madre,” Paolina began, then stopped herself. It had been Senhora Armandires who’d come to her in the dark, not Senhora Barthes. She nodded at Clarence with a hint a smile. “Senhor Davies.”

  “Daughter.” Her mother’s voice was thin and strained as her face. “I am glad to see you well.”

  Clarence returned her smile.

  Paolina wondered what this was about. Surely the freshwater pump, though she’d resolved to make the men ask her. “I am not so well as I might have been otherwise.”

  “Please.” Her mother raised a trembling hand. The woman needed a cane, Paolina realized. Badly so. “Do not speak of what has gone past. You must earn your trust, daughter. There is little water left.”

  “Let them carry buckets,” she said bitterly. “As they would have done in any lifetime except mine.” Her anger at being shut away flooded back. “What am I to the fidalgos?”

  “What are you to the girls who must lift those buckets?” Clarence asked quietly.

  It was strange, a man even thinking about the work that women did. As if Clarence had never been told of the natural order of men and women. “I am a girl with a project.” She nodded at the mushroom shed behind them. A girl with different aims, beyond this place.

  The world was so little here. A Muralha towered above them like the walls of Heaven, the Atlantic spread before them as a moat around God’s castle, and yet all the people of Praia Nova could do was live within their tired places, generation after generation.

  “I will come fix the pump in three days’ time,” she said. “Until then, I shall work here in the mushroom shed. In the meantime, I suggest people carry buckets. Everyone.”

  “They will not like it,” her mother whispered. “Please, don’t be foolish. They will put you back—”

  “No,” snapped Paolina. “They will not. Not if they expect me to ever again turn a finger to any need in this village.” She pushed between them and bent to pass through the canvas flap that served as the low door to the mushroom shed.

  The secret to being a man was simple, she realized. It was nothing more than to act as if the world belonged to you, and everyone owed you duty.

  Within, the stemwinder awaited her, taking shape on its frame. It seemed to sparkle in the darkness even before she lit the latest of her candle stubs.

  The night of the third day she took her stemwinder with her when she left the mushroom shed. Clarence’s stolen scraps were returned to the roughspun carry sack, which she tucked behind one of the beds. She wanted nothing more than her own model of the world and the decent boots she wore.

  Outside in the early fall of night, the stemwinder glowed slightly. She’d made a round frame from enkidu metal, and cut a glass face from an old lantern lens. The shell was half again as big as the Dent watch, overfilling her hands. The face was blank, for she already knew the time, but there were four hands. One to measure the time that beat at the heart of everything, one to measure the beating of her own heart, one to measure turning of the earth, and one to measure whatever she set it to. Paolina had built a stem, too, in imitation of the English watch. Hers could be set in four different positions, one to adjust each hand, as well as pulled out to rewind the mainspring coiled within.

  When she held it, the enkidu-metal back and cut-glass face were slightly warm, almost velvety—like shaven skin. It seemed to move slightly at her touch, as if she held a compact, contented child.

  The new stemwinder, her stemwinder, was beautiful. She had enough pride to hope it would prove her credibility to the wizards of England.

  “Time to fix the pump,” she announced to the gathering darkness.

  Praia Nova was quiet. Candles flickered in the great hall. There was the glow of firelight from some homes. The Atlantic brought a wind that smelled of storm. She could see lightning far out to sea, though there were stars immediately to the north.

  The pump she’d built was in a little shelter near the top of the water stairs. It was meant to be operated by someone leaning against a post and walking in place. Though no one in the village had ever before heard of a foot pump, it had been perfectly obvious to Paolina that the legs were far more powerful than the arms, and thus much better suited to the work of raising water.

  They raised the body off the ground, did they not?

  The piping—bamboo sealed with tree gum and rags—let out into a trough. She’d proposed an arrangement of tanks, to store more water over longer periods, but a lack of both interest and materials had led the fidalgos to ignore the idea.

  Paolina settled into the post and worked the pedals.

  They rotated in place, their hammered iron scissor frames still articulating, but no water emerged. Within a couple of steps, the resistance increased. Negative pressure was developing in the line.

  There was nothing wrong with the pump. The problem was down below, at Westerly Creek.

  With the earthquake drying up the springs here at the village, all the water Praia Nova had left was in the creek. If something happened to that source, the village was dead. You could hardly drink the Atlantic Ocean.

  She headed down the water stairs, looking carefully at the bound-together pipe.

  The creek met the path at the 212th step. A ledge led away there, too narrow to be of use for a foundation or even permanent storage, but wide enough for a person to walk carefully. The cliffs below Praia Nova were a series of staggered shelves and odd-sized ledges like this one—almost like a wall of decaying bricks, if each brick were the size of a ship.

  She was just above the little shale beach and the jetty where the fishing boats tied up. There were two partially built hulls careened over, but no one possessed any real understanding of boat building. The fleet lost in the great waves had been accumulated as runaways, salvage, and wrecks came in, each vessel built from pieces of the previous generation.

  The men of Praia Nova were re-creating a misunderstood memory of bastardized boats. Without the proper tools or braces. At the least, it would take a frame to fully support the developing hull, but they’d been unwilling to commit the wood to such an apparently wasteful use.

  There was a raft there, too, built from wood stripped from the boat project and covered with reed mats.

  She wondered which storm would carry this all away, and leave the men even more angry and purposeless.

  The water source was only half a dozen paces from the steps.
There was a trough here as well, built long ago to trap enough water for people to fetch it away, as they had done once more of late. She wasn’t sure exactly when the pump had stopped working, but the upper trough had been dry.

  There was plenty of water—the creek had not stopped. She inspected the assembly that anchored the piping and provided the water intake. She’d crafted a screen of woven bamboo to keep the moss and small rocks out of the pipe, backed by roughspun to filter sand.

  It was dark with crud and muck.

  Paolina removed the screen and scraped it clear with her fingers. She’d told the fidalgos and the women both to have a girl come down every three days with a brush and clean the pipe end. It looked as if no one had done that work in weeks.

  The sheer foolishness made her angry. Why couldn’t they see these simplest things for themselves?

  She replaced the filter and turned to walk back up the stairs and test the pump. Paolina jumped, startled, to find Clarence standing in her path.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

  She’d already decided as much but had not yet put it quite so baldly. The words stuck a moment, stinging her. “Yes,” she finally said. “I want to go to England.”

  “It’s not so bad here, this place. The Wall is . . .”

  “Difficult?” She nudged him ahead of her, so they could both climb the water stairs.

  “Dangerous.” They climbed in the moonlight as distant thunder rumbled. “Lengthy. You don’t know.”

  “I don’t,” she admitted. “But staying here is wrong for me. I am just a girl, and will never be more.”

  “No one else I’ve known could have built this pump.”

  She laughed. “You are English, from a nation of wizards that rule the world. Even if some of you are crazed.”

  “I’m not one,” he complained.

  “I might become one.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “I have to try, to find out.”

  At the top, they tested the pump. The pressure on the pedals felt right. With a few dozen step-strokes, the water ran. She stepped off and let Clarence set his feet on the pedals. Even in the moonlight, the spring water ran black. It could have been lamp oil. Or bagaceira. This dark fluid that spat from the bamboo pipe as the pedals squeaked certainly was the lifeblood of Praia Nova.

  “It’s time to go,” she told him.

  He reached behind the shelter and handed her a small canvas bag. “Senhora Armandires said you’d want this.” His smile was crooked in the moonlight that faded before the coming storm. “A spare dress for traveling, and a little bread, and a steel knife.”

  It was a wealth, in Praia Nova, especially coming from a woman. “Will you go with me?” She hadn’t meant to ask, but his smile sent a pang through her chest.

  “N-n-no.” Now he was sweating, enough to make her laugh. “The senhora is very kind to me. She’s—” He stopped, embarrassed.

  Another man, then, topping a woman, though the senhora could have been this boy’s mother and more. Paolina didn’t know whether to be disappointed or relieved. “Well. Thank you.” She waved the bag at him. “For this, and for the metal and tools you brought while I was locked in the great hall.”

  “It was senhora’s doing,” he admitted. “She thought you might know what could be done, if you had the right things in your hand.”

  “East, then,” Paolina told him. “To find Bassett, or Africa, whichever I come to first.”

  “ ’Ware the spiders.” He shuddered as a wet wind gusted, bring the smell of rainwater and lightning. “And the brass men who will bother to talk to you can be trusted. Their word is good, if they give it.”

  “Spiders. Brass men.” The breeze continued to rise, damp and oddly chill. She wanted to be gone before the storm moved in and folded Praia Nova in a blanket of rain and wind and shuttered windows. There were cracks and caves enough anywhere on the ancient, eroded face of a Muralha.

  “Farewell,” he told her.

  Their hands met, squeezed a moment. What did she care for him? Senhora Armandires had taken the English boy into her bed. He was sweet, and her figure was full for a woman of age. It was no business of Paolina’s—she still hadn’t begun her monthlies, what use had she for a man?

  She turned and walked away from Clarence, following the path east, out of Praia Nova, into the wilderness of the Wall. The storm would close a curtain behind her that no one in the town of her birth would ever bother to draw open again.

  Paolina only wished she’d been able to bid her father good-bye.

  The stemwinder was heavy in the pocket of her dress. She slipped a hand in to stroke it. This was hers, her measure of the world. Before she was done, she would measure all of Creation, she swore. No man would ever again hold a hand over her head.

  AL - WAZIR

  He spent the next several days in Admiralty being led through meeting after meeting by Mr. Kitchens. It was a great and troublesome bore, reminding the chief why he’d never had the slightest interest in officering. Much better to work the decks, where the orders of the day were the work of the day and someone else worried about the politics of empire and the Law of the Sea.

  Still, Kitchens and his fellow quiet men treated al-Wazir like something of a toff. A toff in a velvet prison, pointedly discouraged from stepping out to find a smoke or a tot of the good, rough rum he knew he’d find not many streets away. The place always smelled of oil soap and crisp linen and something sour they used to keep down the ants and perhaps cut the smell of piss in the heads. Bad plumbing was the English way, after all.

  And so he was seated in a small room, being lectured about the submural tribes on the Gaboon coast by an old fellow of the Royal Society who’d probably never seen a fuzzy wuzzy in his life. Then he was taken to another small room, where three gentlemen from Greenwich talked at length about air masses and wind currents along the Wall. This was a subject with which al-Wazir was intimately familiar, having been Ropes Division Chief on Bassett as she’d sailed those airways. Much like the anthrophagist—that’s what al-Wazir thought the old fellow had claimed for his title—these climaxologists or whatever they were had no real notion of the worldly facts of their subject.

  Walking down yet another carpeted hallway past a painting of storm-tossed ships, he turned to Kitchens and tugged the quiet man to a stop. “It’s like blind men talking about the sunset,” al-Wazir said, “these old fellows with their papers from the Queen talking about the Wall.”

  Something almost a smile quirked Kitchens’ face. “Of course it is. But these are the experts we have. You will note that the Member from Caernarfon Boroughs has not troubled to send them to the waist of the world. There is a reason you have the doing of this task, sir.”

  “Then why am I frittering my days here?” grumbled al-Wazir.

  Kitchens’ voice was patient. “Because these are the experts we have. And when Questions are raised in Parliament, or the paper-voice wizards who attend Her Imperial Majesty make their reasonable inquiries, this is what they will desire to hear.”

  Al-Wazir laughed. “What? That you didn’t place the security of the empire in the hands of a drunken sailor of uncertain parentage and a questionable service history?”

  “We are quite certain of your parentage, sir,” Kitchens replied, brushing al-Wazir’s arm free and resuming his pace.

  Al-Wazir laughed even harder. “I do believe you’ve essayed a jest.” He followed Kitchens to the next little room. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  The morning of the third day, Kitchens attended al-Wazir as he ate kippers and eggs in the little refectory amid the attic rooms where he had been lodged.

  “You don’t take your mess with me,” al-Wazir told him. “I’ve not even seen you swill water yet.” He speared a kipper. “Fish, then?”

  “No, thank you.” Kitchens opened a red folder and made a note.

  Al-Wazir ate the offering himself, watching the quiet man carefully. He wanted something, but more to the point he want
ed the chief to speak first. That much was obvious. Al-Wazir obliged. “Am I to make the next sailing to the Wall?”

  “If not, there will be more.”

  That wasn’t his purpose, then. Damn, but this was no different from talking to an officer. He went with his own mind this time, instead of trying to second-guess Kitchens’. “When do I get sprung from this place and find out about that Dr. Oddball? Everything here is just frippery for the papers. You said it yourself. This is like any new command—I need to see to the men and the gear. I already know more about the Equatorial Wall and its airs than any of your lot, saving your presence.”

  “Including my presence, I’m afraid.” Kitchens seemed relieved. Something in his stance shifted. So, al-Wazir had asked the right question. “Then as you have asked, I shall transfer you to the Engineering section for their briefings.”

  “This is another of them formalities for the Parliamentary Questions, ain’t it?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir. Have your bags ready in half an hour. We can place you on the next train to Maidstone, as you have requested.”

  “Indeed,” said al-Wazir. He tucked into the last of his kippers. There didn’t seem much point in rushing. Kitchens wouldn’t leave without him. His entire kit consisted of a canvas satchel not much larger than a ditty bag. That was mostly secondhand gear given him in Bristol by other sailors to offset his complete destitution debarking from the dhow from Dahomey.

  Twenty-five minutes later al-Wazir stepped out of Admiralty into a cool September morning, then boarded a waiting carriage. Somewhat to his surprise, Kitchens climbed in after him to tug the door shut on the first honest sunlight the chief had seen in days.

  They boarded a train at Bricklayers’ Arms, though to al-Wazir all the stations of London could have been one vast brick-and-glass hall. He’d always been a ropes-and-sails man, first on the water, then in the air. The gasbag division and the engine gang had their own ways, dark and dingy to al-Wazir’s thinking.