Escapement

by Jay Lake

  The ship’s crew and a portion of Ottweill’s men would remain with him. They would work under the supercargoes to get the ship unloaded as quickly as possible, and the supplies secured once landed. He’d have to lay the rails, too, and get the three little locomotives currently welded to the foredeck laboring to haul those supplies up to the work site.

  The fate of Gordon’s expedition hung heavy on al-Wazir’s mind, but those circumstances had been different. Today they were tackling the Wall on English terms, not following the Wall’s own dangerous ways. The ghosties and bright machines that lurked up high could keep right on lurking up there, so long as it wasn’t them that had come down to make war on the expedition here.

  He put that thought out of his head and went to talk to the first mate about what could be done to clear a way to the pier.

  Hornsby and his men had vanished into the jungle, heading toward the Wall. None of the promised runners reappeared.

  Ottweill was fit to raise hell and all the dead who lay within. “Splashing about in that miserable river you must stop,” he screamed at al-Wazir. Ottweill, the chief, Prince’s first mate, and the lead supercargo were meeting in the ward room. It was the fourth day they lay at anchor in the estuary.

  Al-Wazir still had blood under his fingernails from Grassi’s death by crocodile that afternoon. He was in no mood to hear it. “If you have a better plan, Professor, please share it with us.” He slapped the tabletop. “Otherwise I’ll drag you down into the river to cut rotten, stinking, fire-hardened wood with the rest of us. Perhaps you’d like to count the leeches? Or carry a rifle and stand chest-deep in the water on crocodile watch.”

  “You will regret this conduct,” Ottweill said stiffly.

  “I have no doubt. But only if I first succeed in keeping all of us alive.” Al-Wazir knew he should not be bickering with the man who was effectively his captain, not here before their real purpose had even begun to bear fruit. “I regret my conduct, sir,” he said heavily, lying himself blue. “I cannot shift the wreck any faster. We already work from first light to total darkness in heat that would boil a chicken. Men are dying in the water.”

  “Work harder,” Ottweill muttered.

  “Of course.”

  And so it went, for days on end.

  On the seventh day, Captain Hornsby sent back a detachment with a message. The short column of wounded was led by one of Hornsby’s lieutenants, a foppish boy from Kent whose name al-Wazir could never get right.

  The young officer was smiling, though he seemed to have bandages in place of one ear, and had walked in with a crutch. “Chief al-Wazir. May I present Captain Hornsby’s compliments?”

  “Indeed.” Al-Wazir was conscious that he stank of Mitémélé bottom mud. It was much like being painted with shit. On the other hand, the lieutenant stank of jungle and gunpowder and old blood.

  Sometimes he missed the Royal Navy. “How goes it on the Wall?”

  The lieutenant swayed slightly. “The earlier expedition was attacked in force.” There was something fixed about his smile. “Almost a hundred dead before they could repel the hostiles. We arrived in time to break a second attack.”

  “Who is the enemy?” That question might be meaningless on the Wall, but still he had to ask.

  “Brass men, sir. Walking statues with spears that throw fire. They have mixed native troops, of all colors and sizes.”

  “We are victorious?” he prompted.

  “Yes. With no damage to the steam borers or essential equipment.”

  Al-Wazir wondered what constituted nonessential equipment, so far from England and resupply. He was spared the need to ask that question by the arrival of Ottweill from the ship. The chief nodded to the lieutenant, who saluted and turned to tell his tale again while his men stood down to smoke dog-eared butts and stretch out on the planks of the trestle pier.

  Back to the river, he thought. The sky was so much cleaner.

  Once they’d cleared Parsifal’s wreck, Wallachian Prince could stand to and be unloaded. That was another sort of work, which fortunately did not require al-Wazir’s full attention. He occupied himself with several long, thorough showers and a seventeen-hour slumber in his rack. The cramped cabin was larger than any space he’d ever had to call his own in the Navy, though others grumbled at length about the Spartan accommodations.

  There was no question that the ship’s crew would be pleased to see the last of Ottweill and his merry band of Wall-drillers.

  After that, he watched from the rail as a mountain of gear, supplies, equipment, machinery, rails, and raw material was disgorged from the holds of Wallachian Prince. The railroad men had a line laid almost immediately, up and away from the trestle pier before branching into several sidings. They ran one of their locomotives shifting tonnage away from dockside to facilitate continued unloading. Ottweill and his quartermasters worked on the landward side to direct the unloading of that haulage, with an eye toward more efficient reloading and transport to the cutting face later.

  It was a masterpiece of coordinated effort. All the slacking layabouts and troublemakers who’d so occupied al-Wazir’s time on the long voyage south seemed to have unfolded into as hardworking and clever a bunch of seaman’s sons as he’d care to see.

  He finally went ashore with the last of the load, eighteen days after landfall in Acalayong. The battle had broken off completely up at the Wall. Hornsby’s runners were getting through. The railroad seemed to creep southward whenever he wasn’t looking, opening new sidings and cargo dumps, but also developing the mainline that would be required to shift all the goods up to the base encampment.

  English industry had asserted itself in the teeth of even the Wall. Al-Wazir began to think that perhaps the Prime Minister’s scheme was not so mad as all that.

  The cutting face was impressive. The initial teams had surveyed to Ottweill’s specifications, following what few maps existed. They’d claimed a great squared-off bay that led some small distance into the Wall. There was no great profit in cutting off a few score yards of the tunnel. Rather, the value was in the sheltered space where the steam borers had been set, the rails laid to drive them up from the river having been pulled up after for reuse inside the tunnel.

  A stout wooden stockade had been constructed that bowed outward from the mouth of the stone bay. There was a gate house, already being rebuilt in stone, and a palisaded wall, which showed signs of recent heavy fighting. Small breech-loading cannon had been mounted on three towers. As an air sailor, al-Wazir was not one of nature’s infantrymen, but he appreciated what he saw.

  A trail of wreckage, felled trees, and roughly plowed land led east, marking the direction of the most recent attack by the Wall-dwellers.

  The one question no one had answered was the reason for the attack. Not that anyone on the Wall had ever needed a reason, in his experience. Crazed savages and wicked saints, one and all.

  Deep within the bay the tracks for the steam borers ran right up to the face. Standard-gauge rails were tucked between them. The machines had been fired every day, their boilers running on wood here rather than coal, but in Ottweill’s absence they had not been brought up to meet the Wall. Al-Wazir knew the original plan had called for prospecting for coal, but that was impractical in the face of continued hostilities. Wood they had in plenty, enough to send the borers through the Wall a dozen times over. It would suffice.

  Now that the attacks had been beaten back, they were set to begin operations. Ottweill, al-Wazir, and Hornsby had met with the officers of Wallachian Prince to compose a letter urgently requesting both more civilian workers and soldiers in face of their initial losses. None of them would admit to believing the expedition was in serious peril.

  Studying the camp, he looked up from the steam borers to the rising expanse of God’s Creation. Al-Wazir had been wrong about at least one thing—sunlight did fall at the foot of the Wall, at least a few hours a day. In that respect, the weather was like home—gloomy and damp, with a bit of brightness
in between. Of course, it was 110 degrees here. Not so homelike, that.

  But sometimes the Wall sent down a refreshing breeze to break the heat’s grip awhile. And when he looked down across the swaying tops of the glossy trees to the brown water of the Mitémélé, he could see the beauty of Africa lying at right angles to the soaring cathedral that was the Wall. Heat to the north, cool shadow above, and those great black steam borers ready to cut in.

  Somehow they seemed in scale here. The machine back in the Kentish quarry had been sullen, evil even, in its affect. These seemed so small next to the Wall they were meant to breach that al-Wazir had difficulty seeing them as instruments of destruction.

  Ottweill climbed the ladder atop one of his beloved borers. The doctor still favored his tailored suits, which seemed inhumanly hot to al-Wazir, but even Ottweill had given up his necktie.

  “Tomorrow against the face we will set the number one borer,” he told al-Wazir, patting the iron flank.

  “To start cutting?”

  “Not yet. Testing we will be. Run the drill up to speed and back down, a final check on the integrity of the rock face we will perform. The rails, too. Everything but the cut. That, for the next day.”

  “I will be here, on the stockade, watching for hostiles,” al-Wazir promised him.

  “I had hoped in the cab of number one you might join me. The first part to drive.”

  Al-Wazir thought about the tiny doorway leading into the armored cab. To ride that coffin into the depths of the earth seemed too far from sailing the sky. “No, I do not believe so. But I am honored, sir.”

  “Fair enough,” said Ottweill. “The limits of his courage every man must know.”

  It was almost good to see the doctor back in his usual form.

  CHILDRESS

  She avoided the political officer as much as she could. Staying in her cabin was the simplest solution; nonetheless, Childress was forced at least twice a day to seek a meal in the wardroom. Sometimes the little man was about; sometimes he was not. Well, they are almost all little men, she thought. At four feet and eleven inches, Childress was not a woman of any size, but in this company she felt almost tall.

  Crammed into the wardroom, where at most four could be seated, a blue-coated steward would bring her meal. It was always a tiny bowl of tea, a tiny bowl of soup, a tiny bowl of rice, and a tiny bowl of something fried and flavored that varied from day to day. All four were always hot, though Five Lucky Winds otherwise seemed eternally damp and chilled, cold water beading on her bulkheads and hatches.

  The men of the submarine would pass by the door in ones and twos to steal glances when they thought she couldn’t see them. Decades of watching over divinity students—as mean-spirited and self-entitled a bunch of miscreants as one could ever hope to meet—had honed her skills of peripheral observation. She knew perfectly well when they slowed their step, and picked it up again.

  At least that gave her a chance to listen to their soft chatter.

  The peeking only stopped when Captain Leung came to sit with her, or if the political officer were in the passageway outside.

  “Are you finding circumstances to your satisfaction, Mask?” he asked, the second day asea.

  Childress was now dressed in an old blue uniform. It was extremely undignified, but less so than wearing the bloodied dress in which she’d been captured. The steward had bowed and bobbed and explained something at great length to her in Chinese before taking it away. She hoped the garment would be cleaned and repaired, or failing that, burned, but she had no real way of knowing.

  “I should like to have some decent clothing,” she said briskly, “as befits my station. And though this native food is charming in its strange little way, a reasonable meal that an Englishwoman might recognize.” That was as much like the Mask Poinsard as she could stand to be.

  Leung stared at her evenly a bit longer than she might have liked. The political officer hovered at the doorway again. “I am afraid we can accommodate almost none of your wishes,” the captain said. He set a stack of books on the table. “Here is a manual for electricks which is written in English. My esteemed engineer would like to have it back at the end of the voyage, as considers it a valued if incomprehensible souvenir. Here is also a Roman devotional, and two postcards from Singapore. That is all the English material aboard my ship.”

  “I am sure it will keep me sufficiently entertained,” Childress said. “May I take these to my cabin?”

  “Of course.” Leung paused, searching for words, perhaps. “And if you would care to converse, it will always benefit my English to have practice at it.”

  “Your English is already better than that spoken by most subjects of the Crown,” she told him politely. Polite, but true.

  Over the next few days they established a habit of him coming to visit her at one of her two meals. Sometimes it was little more than a nod, if he had urgent business elsewhere; sometimes it was a conversation.

  “The Feathered Masks have their followers in the Celestial Empire,” he told her one morning.

  “Of course.” Childress was distracted by the damnable little eating sticks. They were more than difficult for picking up rice, but she didn’t fancy asking for a fork. “The avebianco is everywhere.” She thought of the political officer, with his hand sign and his hello. She hadn’t yet told Leung about that. She wasn’t sure she would.

  “Your philosophy appeals to a certain kind of traditionalist.”

  “I did not think the Chinese held to the supremacy of God the father.”

  “Not that sort of traditionalist.” He laughed softly. “To put it in simple terms, the emperor is the Son of Heaven. Heaven’s structure can be divined from careful study of the brasswork in the skies. So the nature of Creation guides the emperor, just as the emperor guides his people.”

  “How do you see Creation?” She was quite curious—God’s handiwork was incontrovertible, after all, even if His current state of engagement was subject to theological and practical disputation.

  “The world was made,” Leung said. “But where you Europeans seem to find one great, overriding presence in a position of responsibility, the Universal Cause, so to speak, we see a balance in the courts of Heaven. So this one made the moon, while that one set the lamps of the stars to wheel in their courses, and this other arranged the faces of day and night so as to favor men.”

  “Not so different, really.” Childress pushed a few shreds of pork around. “You have just named the varying aspects of God. As if each of His hands were a different thing.”

  “I believe we have a very long way to go before we can properly misunderstand each other,” Leung said.

  The captain left her with the political officer and his pistol, Childress chasing the last of her brown-fried onions with the useless little sticks.

  And so it went for a week. She read and reread about electrickal valves and switches. She studied lives of saints Euphronius, Lupus, Padraig, and Xanthippe, wondering time and again why Fr. Algys B. Huang, SJ, had felt the need to discuss those four saints in particular in his little book. She examined the Singapore postcards until she could recite their respective texts about the wicked imperialist dog Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and the great prince Parameswara.

  Sometimes the ship would change speed or course. Occasionally it would change angle, heading lower or higher in Oceanus’ grip. Those moments brought Childress unwelcome fears of attack by British surface raiders or aerial bombardment.

  Surely Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy even now sought to avenge the insult to Mute Swan. Childress had no illusions about her own value. The Mask Poinsard had been a woman of rank, perhaps even a duchess, and thus likely to be sought after on disappearing.

  Between reading, sleeping, and brief bouts of terror, Childress ate rice, sipped tea, tipped her soup bowl, and practiced capturing slim bits of food with her little eating sticks. And, of course, spoke to Captain Leung.

  “Do your people admit the existence of angels?”


  “Angels?” He frowned. “In the sense of messengers of Heaven, certainly.”

  “No.” She was thinking of that poor, lost boy Hethor, who’d gone to wind the mainspring of the world. “The leaders of the hosts of God. They carry swords, to punish or reward.”

  “There is scant reward to be given with a sword,” said Leung. “But no, while Heaven and Northern Earth and Hell are filled with ghosts and demons and mandarins of all orders, there are no angels in the European sense.”

  “Biblical, actually.” Childress wasn’t sure what a European angel would be. “The Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite explains in detail. Ophanim, Thrones, Cherubim . . . more than most will bother to recall these days. But not precisely European.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “What I mean to say is that there are orders among the angels, which are described in European theology. Some of them move among men.”

  “Again, I think we are far from a reasonable misunderstanding of one another.” Leung’s smile wrinkled his face. “Though surely the Celestial Realms are populated by as many orders of rank as populate the everyday world. The Celestial Kingdom is certainly arrayed much the same.”

  “Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius,” said Childress. As above, so below. “Here is my point: Do you recall two summers past, when there were great quakes around the Northern Earth? Waves coursed across the shores of the world, and there was destruction upon the Wall.”

  “Yes. Our astronomers declared that the time that runs beneath the world was in slippage. Our priests said there was a war in Heaven. Whichever was correct, hostilities did come to an end.”