Escapement

by Jay Lake

  They walked, the Mask Poinsard leading, in a frigid, rigid silence that left Childress wondering yet again whether she should hope or despair.

  Mute Swan had no chaplain, so perforce the captain, one William Eckhuysen, led the services. Childress was accustomed to the high church splendor of St. John Horofabricus on Crown Street in New Haven, with its racks of votive candles, stained-glass windows in the stations of the horofix, elaborate vestry and sixty-voice choir. It always seemed to her that God abode at His best in the shadows of splendor.

  Still, here in the raw weather of the deck with the hands shuffling and yawning, Captain Eckhuysen had a certain passion quite capable of invoking the divine spirit. Childress stood close to Poinsard’s elegance and Anneke in her sage-green gown as the crew opened with the Navy hymn. Eckhuysen then read from Paul’s letter to the Rhodians, the passages concerning the writ of Holy Spirit in the brasswork of the sky.

  “ ’For it is given to us as the greatest gift to have proof positive of God’s intention, in looking upward in day or night. Lest you doubt, or seek solace in the machinations of Babylon or Egypt, remember where the Lord Jesus laid down His own life, in the slow and inescapable advancement of a man’s simple copy of His Father’s works.’ ”

  He then looked about the deck, catching the eyes of his officers, passengers, and hands. “The centuries since Our Lord’s horofixion have brought change upon change upon change to our world. We sail the boundless oceans on muscles of steam, where once we feared to row far from shore. We walk the lands under the hottest sun of Northern Earth, where once we did not know what lay south of Africa’s Mediterranean beaches. The avebianco soars over the hearts and minds of men, making free what had before been bound.

  “In this, we are following the words of the Apostle Paul. We pursue the slow and inescapable advancement of man’s efforts to imitate God. We remake Creation in our own image, over and over, taming lands and seas, wresting knowledge from the fabric of the world around us, always laboring in the light of Christ’s gift to us.

  “With this in mind, remember what you—”

  He was interrupted by the helmsman shouting from the bridge, “Wake ho!”

  The words got Captain Eckhuysen’s undivided attention. “Which quarter?” he bellowed.

  “Trailing portside, just west of north, sir!”

  Every man on the ship raced to the port rail, leaving Childress, Anneke, and the Mask Poinsard standing in confusion. “Get to your cabins,” Anneke said, but Childress and Poinsard exchanged glances, both shaking their heads. They followed the sailors to the rail.

  Almost all the ship’s company crowded there, forty officers and men. Fingers stabbed as they pointed out at the choppy water. Childress saw neither ship nor wake, just roughening swells covered with sliding foam. There were no birds in evidence either. She had no idea if that was significant.

  Eckhuysen turned and looked up at his bridge again. “Where’s it now?”

  “Lost it, sir!”

  “Emergency stations,” Eckhuysen shouted. “Women to the lifeboats. Prepare the rockets. Bosun, open the arms locker immediately!”

  With that, the sailors were a whirling riot of motion, racing across the deck, up ladders, down hatches, shouting in half a dozen languages.

  “What is it?” the Mask Poinsard asked Anneke, her voice straining over the din. “I see nothing.”

  “Aft boats.” Anneke’s voice was grim. She grabbed the Mask Poinsard’s arm with one hand, Childress’ arm with the other. “We’ll want to be in the life rings as well.”

  Childress resisted the tug. “If we go into the water, there’s hardly any hope of rescue here, I should think.”

  The look Anneke shot her was tinged with desperation. “As may be, but it is what I can do. If there were more, believe me, I would do it as well.”

  “Underwater,” Childress said, her voice catching. “They have spied an underwater boat.” She cudgeled her memory for the proper term. “Sous-marin. There is a submarine nearby.”

  The Mask Poinsard, unwilling to be budged, hitched herself up slightly. “Her Imperial Majesty’s Royal Navy has no submarines.”

  “No,” Anneke said. “But the Chinaman does. Come now, please, ladies.”

  There was another shout from the pilothouse. All three women looked over the port rail.

  A long dark hull was sliding into view above the wave tops. It had a single tower or deck house. Sailors poured out of hatches, setting up a gun on the forward deck close to Mute Swan.

  Above and behind them, there was a loud pop, followed by a whistling screech, as Captain Eckhuysen set off the first of his signal rockets. Childress assumed this would be futile. Even if they were espied, the nearest help would have to come from beyond the horizon’s distance.

  Men appeared at the rail of Mute Swan bearing rifles and pistols. Half a dozen dropped to brace their weapons, half a dozen more standing behind them to present a tight concentration of fire. The rattle of their weapons was painful to Childress’ ears, the stink of gunpowder unexpectedly sharp.

  The first Chinese shot went wild of the defenders. Instead the wind of it tore at Childress’ sleeve as the rail before her shattered. A teakwood splinter eighteen inches long slashed into Anneke’s gut like a knife. The woman collapsed to the deck, her green silk gown blooming with blood nearly black.

  Childress dropped to her knees next to the stricken woman even as the Mask Poinsard backed away. Anneke stank of blood and bowels and urine. She lifted a hand toward Childress, her fingers twitching as she tried to grab something invisible between them.

  “I wanted,” Anneke said; then the effort was too much.

  The difficult young woman breathed awhile longer as the battle raged. Mute Swan bucked and rolled with the impact of Chinese shells. Sailors cursed, while at one point the foghorns blared so long that Childress thought she might be stricken deaf. Still, she knelt on the deck holding Anneke’s cooling hand and wondering what it was that the woman had wanted.

  To be the best, perhaps. Or even just to be accounted good.

  As Chinese sailors swarmed over the rail, small and swarthy and golden-skinned, in their strange blue uniforms, she folded Anneke’s hands across her waist and kissed her eyes gently, one and two, before raising her face to greet whatever was to come next.

  FOUR

  PAOLINA

  The one who spoke English came to Paolina at sunrise two days later. None of the others who attended her would admit to understanding the language. In the time she’d been under care, Paolina had tried Portuguese, and her fragmented Spanish, and even attempted a tiny bit of Latin, but received no response.

  Now that she was somewhat accustomed to the ways of these people, Paolina recognized the woman as a leading lady of this strange court—her neck was bare. The highest servants wore thin collars of silk, while those of lower rank wore heavier leather bands, or even half helms. Only the great were free to raise their heads unencumbered, it seemed.

  On entering Paolina’s high chamber with the rain-drenched windows, the woman neither bowed nor turned her head away, but simply said, “I am Karindira. Are you dying?”

  “I do not think so.” Paolina was fascinated to be pulled back into the same conversation as if no time had passed.

  “You carry a gleam.” The woman’s unblinking black eyes strayed to the stemwinder in Paolina’s hand.

  “I do.” Paolina had been wondering what she would do in this moment. The mechanism had gotten her past the gates, into this palace, and under the care of these strange, squat people. She was unsure that it would be such an easy key to her departure. Not unless she could make something of the gleam.

  “Show me, now that you live.”

  Paolina sat up higher against the pillows at the head of her too-short bed and opened her hand. The blank dial with the four hands faced up. The woman did not move, simply staring at the thing, so Paolina tugged at the stem until she had it ready to reset the hand measuring the time that beat
at the heart of everything. “See this? Are you certain you want me to adjust it?”

  “No,” Karindira said, finally blinking slowly. “Put it away. I know this for what it is. You carry the gleam. That is enough.”

  Paolina closed her fingers but kept a good grip on her creation.

  “There was another,” the woman said. “Two years ago, when the ground shook, another gleam moved across the Wall. We never saw it.”

  Even across the many gaps between them, Paolina heard a note of desperation in the strange woman’s voice. “Why do you need to see the gleam?”

  “To know.” Karindira glanced away a moment. “We are a city of women. There has not been a man born or raised here in over a thousand years. They left in pursuit of another gleam, once. We were bound over to ourselves to lay nests of girl-children in silent memory of our mothers. We have been looking for a gleam of our own ever since. Perhaps it will bring them back. I fear the unbinding.”

  “As you should,” Paolina muttered. “I hail from a village of men. They are crass and foolish louts who know themselves to be lord of every woman born, with ears only for decoration to offset their open mouths.”

  “No matter.” Karindira’s face settled. “We have made our own way down the centuries. You carry the first gleam to come to our gates since then. The temptation is . . . great. . . .”

  “I carried the gleam away from my own gates.” Paolina clutched the stemwinder ever more tightly. “I go in search of the English wizards who understand the true order of the world.”

  The woman spat on the floor, crudely out of keeping with her otherwise mannerly behavior. “English. Dog-eaters and monkey-suckers who would pull down the heavens for their curiosity.”

  “Yet you speak their tongue. . . .”

  “As some among us must, for trade along the Wall. This is not the language of my nesting clutch.”

  “Nem mina,” said Paolina in Portuguese. Then, in English: “But it has become the language of the order of the world.”

  The woman smiled, a somewhat appalling sight given her stained triangular teeth. “We can curse one another in the tongue of those flatwater barbarians. You will need a week or more to recover properly. I offer you hospitality until then.”

  “I will be along my way as soon as I may,” Paolina said politely.

  “When you are well,” Karindira said, “I will show you a thing.” She sat on the edge of Paolina’s bed. “In the meantime, will you tell me more of men?”

  Nine days later Karindira led Paolina down a dank stair in the heart of her palace. “This is a thing of men I will show you. Choose what it will mean to you. I make no urging.”

  Paolina followed her down a squared-off series of landings around an empty shaft that might have been built for some other purpose, before these wooden steps had been set into place on iron frames. Some of the individual risers were rotten, and the frames creaked beneath her weight, so that her heart raced as she descended. The molder made her eyes and nose run thick.

  She did not look forward to making her way back up again.

  At the bottom of a long series of flights there was a larger room. A great brass altar or tomb was set in the middle of it, like a metal coffin with a crystal top. There were brass ribbons inset into the floor running east and west from the coffin. Columns loomed around them, broken-off stubs protruding in many places.

  “There are weights within the Wall,” Karindira said. “Pieces that turn to keep the balance of the world.” She patted the brass altar. “This is a cart which moves among the weights. It will take you all around the world and back in a day, should you desire.”

  Paolina was amazed that such a thing was possible. That the world was filled with the grand mechanisms of God’s design was self-evident from any examination of the heavens. That a person might set foot within the mechanism was not so clearly the case.

  “How would you control it? How would you know where to stop and exit?”

  “These things are not known to me.” Karindira shrugged, a remarkable ordinary gesture. “I told you I would show you a thing. I cannot account for it. When the men departed, they took the keys which had been given to us, so they might easily return.”

  Paolina was sorely tempted. She was clever, more than clever, but this was something she had no basis to understand. She could imagine being trapped in the car, circling beneath the Wall forever, unable to break free or exit until she starved to cobwebbed bones flashing forever in a forest of whirling brass. Still, the possibility of passing so quickly beneath the skin of the world amazed her.

  “I would if I could,” she told Karindira. “But I cannot see how to control this thing.”

  Karindira seemed sad a moment. “Then fare well on the trail, Paolina-who-seeks-the-English. I will walk you upward and to the gates. After that, your path is your own.”

  Traveling to the east gate, Paolina got her first good view of Karindira’s city. She’d never seen one before, though certainly Dickens had described London well enough.

  This place was no London, but the streets were stone. Buildings seemed arranged on top of one another to loom high enough for three and four rows of windows. All of Praia Nova would have fit in one street. Even the walls were overwhelming, blocking out the world outside while hemming the people and their places in close as any fist.

  It was so large. She realized that there must be a thousand people there, perhaps two thousand. An almost inconceivable number. Paolina could see the virtue of a place as small as Praia Nova.

  She walked some miles from the east gate of Karindira’s city before stopping for the night. Paolina pulled herself into a hollow among the ferns and reeds in a wider bamboo forest that dripped even as the sun glinted in the west. It smelled watery, a rich, spongy stink that spoke of life. Monkeys howled nearby, thrashing in the upper reaches of the great stalks, while great moths larger than her face whirred as they displayed the colors of blood and bone.

  Had she been given to spiritual fears, this might have been a frightening place. Instead she made a warm and comfortable nest in the underbrush and lay down to sleep again, wondering how it might have gone with her had she boarded Karindira’s brass cart. Would she even now be among the English, eating their puddings and drinking their beers and glimpsing the true secrets of the world?

  The image of her grinning skull orbiting endlessly in the tunnels beneath the earth was sufficient to discourage that fantasy. Paolina sighed and snugged lower, hiding from the moths that seemed bent on brushing her in their moonlight dances.

  And so the trail went for weeks on weeks. She began to understand how Clarence Davies had walked for two years. Every day was the same, though the path might be different and the weather might change and the creatures that roared upon the slopes varied in size and frightening array.

  Her confidence grew in her device as the gleam continued to be a passport. Perhaps Clarence’s Dent stemwinder had served the same purpose in its way—she did not know. Creatures avoided her when given the chance.

  She tried again and again to make the gleam do something, anything. Should she be asked again, as Karindira had, Paolina did not intend to be caught out. But she could no more force a flower to grow to fruit, nor a creek to stop running, than she could have halted the progress of the sun in the sky.

  In time she found a country of walls, ornate and winding little knee-high labyrinths that seemed to have been built to the scale of marmots or hedgehogs. There was no evidence of structure, really, just miles of the little walls in an endless maze, which Paolina stepped over.

  There were bones, too, some so massive as to be beyond improbable. A curve of rib that ran nearly a hundred yards had to be a jest of God, left to tempt the gullible. That, at least, was what Paolina told herself, especially when, crossing a flower meadow filled with glossy broad-leafed plants displaying bright purple blooms, she passed a jaw fragment with embedded teeth that stood taller than she did.

  One morning Paolina was camped on the
head of a rock knee that gave her a glimpse of the glinting brass at the top of a Muralha. She watched it twist and sparkle in the coming sunlight, a warm glint in the predawn gloom that shone briefly bright as a second sun just before the daystar finally appeared.

  Onward she walked, losing all consciousness of the time of the journey and immersing herself in the complex nature of a Muralha. She developed a theory that the Wall was the true purpose of Creation, while earth and sun existed merely to make the thing possible. God had made a great vertical canvas on which to draw His experiments in broad brushstrokes and fine. How different was she from Karindira’s people, really? As alike as cats and dogs, perhaps.

  Paolina kept the gleam in her grip. She watched the hands jitter around the face—the heart of the world, the passage of the hours, the measuring of her own blood’s beat. The fourth hand continued to defeat her. What had she meant by it, for it? She couldn’t quite recall now. No matter what she tried, she could not coax its secrets forth. She would need a wizard, some English sorcerer, to show her the true path.

  Then one day she met the brass man.

  He stood where a higher path met her trail, right in the middle of the track. She might have mistaken him for a statue, but the rock beneath his feet was worn by generations of travel. Either he’d walked there, or he’d been set long after the trail was made. There was dust and dirt around him to tell the story of his being there awhile, and a scattering of bones alongside the trail.

  Had he fought or killed, she wondered? Or were those relics of older combats?

  The brass man was slightly over six feet tall. His body was formed of armor—greaves and breastplate and guards, as if he awaited combat with some great and terrible creature. His face was almost the opposite, an eerie beauty oddly marred by its near perfection. His lips were wrought in the ghost of a sneer, though a tiny grate showed where they pursed open. His eyelids were shut.