Escapement

by Jay Lake

  “We has them free cities, ma’am. Even the Queen can’t set her flag everywhere she likes.”

  “Free city?” Paolina didn’t mind this kind of ignorance so much—she was merely uninformed, not completely lacking in sense.

  Bucknell began to wiggle. She’d observed this was what he did when lip biting did not improve his answers. She hoped the borders of her own knowledge were not so apparent in conversation.

  “Where anyone can make a landfall without a permission, I guess,” he finally managed. “But things still cost money in them places. Not so free there either. Like wine, and wom—” He stopped himself and blushed a crimson to match the St. George’s cross in the British flag. “I means not so much as free for the taking, if you follow the scut of my jibe.”

  Paolina swallowed a giggle. “I think so. What are some free cities?”

  “Oh, Alexandria, Sevastopol, Beirut, Aden, Cotonou. Places on the edge, ma’am. They would never in life make London or Rome or Marseilles a free city.”

  She’d caught the drift now. “And so the Chinese come and set their anchors for trade in places where the two empires rub together.”

  He was waxing enthusiastic now. “Aye. They rubs hardest in the east, I always hear tell on the deck. All the American lands keeps John Chinaman and Mother Vicky apart, but Africa and India and them mountain kingdoms where they worships the fat buddy, there’s the rub. So we trades in Alexandria, but we fights in Goa. I been drinking with Chinee I knows would be a killing me a week later. Like them what chases us, that Captain Sayeed tricked down?” He stared at her, smiling, as Paolina’s heart collapsed. “That was probably one of them cabbage mouth ships they fly. We met them in Cotonou on the way down to the Wall where we found you. Some heathen name of a ship I can’t rightly say, sounded like Shirley Cheese. But Captain Chinaman and Captain Sayeed stood each other a fine dinner in some fuzzy wuzzy palace, while we ’uns and them ’uns drank that palm tree wine that makes your eyes hurt down on the beach and et roast lizards the size of wolfhounds.”

  Paolina’s sick feeling intensified. Those had not been faceless killers, but men known to Sayeed. Had he intended to destroy the pursuing airship, she wondered, or was it all a feint?

  She was also disturbed to realize that Sayeed had set a course north upon leaving a Muralha, outside his patrol orders. She thought she’d been clever, in the matter of Strasbourg, when in fact she’d been asking for something he’d long decided.

  Men. Were they all filthy and stupid, lying to her because she was a girl?

  “You going to be all right, ma’am?” Bucknell’s voice filled with concern.

  “Get away.” Her tongue felt thick, and she would be damned if she was going to cry here on the open deck in front of the boy and anyone who happened along.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He bobbed, bowing and stepping away and trying simultaneously to both goggle at her and not look at all. “Should I get Dr. Florin, ma’am? Is it your monthlies?”

  Paolina felt a crisp rush of rage overwhelm her confusion. “Get away from me, you stunted lackbrain!”

  He got. She went back to watching the water, deeply ashamed of her temper and herself, but not knowing how to repair the damage without looking even more foolish.

  Paolina did not see Bucknell for the rest of the day, but Sayeed eventually found her, shortly after she’d messed with the deck division, eating a bowl of beans and a niggardly little chunk of brown bread. She sat on the windward side of a rope locker, watching the horizon’s blue deepen toward dusk and smelling the crisp salt air rising from beneath their keel.

  “We make port in Marseilles late tonight,” he said as he stood over her. “To take on fuel and stores, and grant the men some time.”

  “Am I going ashore?”

  “You are free to do so, though it should be under escort.” As she opened her mouth to protest, he raised a hand, palm up. “You are your own woman, but you lack papers. You will find papers can be important, within the boundaries of the Empire. In the company of a ship’s officer, you will not be questioned. Alone, I cannot promise your safety or continued freedom.”

  “I see.” She tried to banish the petulance from her voice, but without success. “It is not a free city.”

  “Nothing is free.”

  “No.” Paolina wondered what manipulation might be under way now.

  “Including,” Sayeed added, “the services of the boy Bucknell. I set him to serve as your steward because he has a gentle heart, and would protect you from both rumor and the unwise acts of rough and lonely men. Which this vessel is full of, I assure you, just as every ship that has ever sailed since Adam’s day. You have sent him away, with a cruelty I would not have expected of you. Do you now prefer to manage the crew on your own, or shall I set another man to your aid? And might he in turn expect the sharp side of your tongue? I’ve a few older crewmen with wives at home who can turn a hard word like nothing you’ve imagined, missy.”

  She was silent a few moments, regret warring with anger. Paolina had never gotten anything yet in this life by yielding to men, so she was not wont to commence doing so now. “Words are strange, Captain,” she finally said. “One can lie without ever uttering an untruth. One can deceive while providing even a heart’s desire. If I was cruel to Bucknell, I regret it. He had said some things which provoked my fear.” She set down her bowl with the last few cooling, gelid beans still clinging to the bottom and clasped her arms around her knees while staring up at Sayeed.

  “From the first you set a course north across Africa instead of following your patrol route. All that talk of Strasbourg and the Schwilgué Clock was a mummer’s play, to make me feel I’d won something from you. And I learn as well you perhaps did not mean for me to stop our pursuers. Your fear and worry that night make so much more sense to me if I realize you had a lost a friend instead of an enemy. You used that Chinese captain to make an excuse for turning north, and you have meant to carry me to Strasbourg since we left the Wall. Why lie to me?”

  “Ah.” Sayeed reached down for her bowl with the obsessive tidiness of a sailor. He turned it in his fingers awhile. “I . . . I was not sure of you at first. If I had been wrong, we would have made for England from Marseilles, and none the wiser. As for Captain Yang and his Shi Hsi-Chi, the story is more complex than you think, but at heart, you have something of the right of it.”

  “So you lied to see what I would do.” She climbed to her feet. “I killed a ship and dozens of men because I thought I was protecting us.”

  “It is a risk we all take,” he snapped.

  “Not at my hands, we do not.” She snatched the gleam from her dress. “I did not mean to make a . . . a . . . gun! A thing to kill to protect, or be killed protecting. You made me a killer, with your lies. And what would you have told me if I had not asked after Strasbourg, sir? If your pretty lures about the Schwilgué Clock had fallen unheeded?”

  His voice was cold. “I would have taken you there, if I judged you aright, and let the Silent Order determine what is best for you.”

  Paolina swallowed the next words that leapt to her tongue. Fighting with the captain would serve her no good at all. Instead she took another path. “I am not a weapon either, sir. I do not want you, or the Silent Order, or anyone determining what is best for me. If I wished to be chattel, I could have stayed in Praia Nova. The fidalgos there certainly knew what was best for me. All you had to do was ask them.”

  “Let me explain something, then.” Sayeed, too, sounded as if he were struggling for control. “You are a woman, my dear. In the lands of the Empire, this means that your father, husband, or brother has the final say over your acts. In the absence of family and spouse, responsible men must stand in their place. This is both law and custom. You can argue against it all you want, but if it was freedom of action you desired, perhaps you should have stayed upon the Wall.”

  “I belong to no man,” she blazed.

  “All women belong to some man!” he shouted. “It is the na
tural order of things.” With that, Sayeed stormed away.

  Paolina sat awhile by the rope locker, sulking and plotting puerile vengeance. She could stop Notus’ engines, but to what purpose? She could even stop Sayeed’s heart, she reckoned, though even in her anger the thought made her ill. He was no worse a man than any other here, tepid endorsement though that was.

  She wished she could reach out and give him an awful case of the flux, though. Or cause him to bleed and weep four days out of the moon’s cycle.

  Men were the prime error in God’s Creation; that was obvious. If He’d made woman first, He could have stopped there and the world would have been so much better run.

  She stayed onboard at Marseilles. Notus approached the mooring mast at dawn, a process Paolina watched with fascination. The port had twelve masts near a bustling waterfront crowded with vessels great and small. Many of them set out for the day’s fishing even as the airship circled over their heads, setting herself into the wind at the right altitude.

  The masts rose from a low hill just to the east of the docks. Their bases were surrounded by a cleared expanse of land which from the air still clearly showed the grid of streets and the outlines of old structures. She wondered if there had been a hydrogen fire, or if the Royal Navy had simply demolished the neighborhood against the threat of one.

  The city stretched away in all directions—the waterfront itself, a district of buildings large as anything in Karindira’s city or Ophir, miles of smaller establishments.

  There were more people here than she’d ever seen in the world. Even Ophir, great and strange as it had been, was not so vast or sprawling. The huge masts where Notus came to dock were little more than interruptions in the rolling expanse of people crowded together like swallows in a cliff.

  She could smell the city from the deck. They were about 150 feet above the hill where the masts were anchored, and perhaps a quarter mile from the edge of the airship reservation. This close, coal and cook fires and food and muck and the swelling scent of a city full of people mingled to a compounded odor the likes of which Paolina had never before experienced. Or even imagined.

  The crew warped the airship into place with the aid of men upon the mast. Notus came to rest amid four of her fellows, the other seven masts being empty. Though Paolina could see differences in design among the airships, they were all clearly of a type—similar to one another in ways the Chinese she’d destroyed had not been. All flew England’s colors as well. No free city here, to be sure.

  No one, not Bucknell nor Sayeed nor anyone between them in the ship’s company, offered her a chance to go down. She watched as the sailors were told off on their leave rotations to much groaning and shouting and gibing. The ones on discipline, forced to hold back from a city of fine wine and compliant women, bore their punishment with ill grace that the officers ignored and their fellow sailors hooted at.

  She was one of those, trapped aboard with the ruffians and the deck watch, and whoever it was that would be aiding the purser in renewing the stores or the engineer in taking on fuel.

  The thought of how they might have feted a man who’d single-handedly brought down an enemy airship was painful to contemplate. So she spent a while instead deciphering the lay of the streets, how carts and people flowed among the buildings, where commerce must come from and go to. It was a fascinating pursuit—such a great city was a marvel of design and ingenuity, though from the look of it, nearly all accidental. Even that hobby paled after a few hours, and so she went back to her hot little cabin and tried to sleep, wondering how it was that a woman was shrill and thoughtless when she exercised the same power that won accolades for a man.

  AL - WAZIR

  He stalked through the camp. He didn’t know where Boaz was—they’d been separated in the fight. Right now no one was visible, but he realized that there were not enough bodies, either. Many of them were alive, somewhere. He would have noticed the winged savages carrying the workmen away in dozens and scores. The burning steam ram shrieked, some relief valve overwhelmed.

  The tunnel. They had to be inside the tunnel. Picking up more firearms as he went, al-Wazir walked toward the cliff face.

  Sure enough, there was a barricade at the mouth. A number of winged corpses were scattered outside, with more human remains. There was no one visible at the barricade, but he couldn’t see into the shadows. A hundred barrels might be pointed at him now.

  “Come on out of there, ye simple-minded liver eaters!” he shouted. “Them boojums be gone, and we’ve a hell of a lot of work tae do now.”

  “How is it you’re still alive?” The voice sounded like Mercks, the railroad man al-Wazir had met back in Kent. “You been calling them down on us?”

  The accusation was so extraordinary that it dumbfounded him. “Are you completely daft, man? I was out here fighting them off. I’m alive because I didn’t turn my back and run. That’s when they stoop on a man and snatch him up. You fewking rabbits is quivering in your hole now, but you’ll have to come out to piss sometime!”

  Suddenly tired as he’d ever been, al-Wazir sat on a feathered corpse and began checking the magazines of his armload of weapons. Where he found only a few rounds, he transferred them to other magazines. The two that were mostly full, he set aside.

  He looked up when Ottweill approached, trailed by several of his toughs. Mercks’ men, to be sure.

  “The mission you are failing.” Angry, Ottweill’s accent was thick. He pointed at the smoldering steam borer. “This cannot be.”

  “What will ye be having of me, Doctor? I cannot sweep the skies clear. If your men will not drill themselves well enough to recall their orders when battle arrives, there is no fight to be had when the enemy comes.”

  “That is your concern.”

  Orders or no, al-Wazir had had enough of the doctor and his tunnel. This occasional, wearing combat would not do. It was like fighting the tide, and he couldn’t trust the men at his back. “Then perhaps you should hide in your hole like snakes in a riverbank whilst I go and find proper help. There were never enough men here to fight a war, and a war is what we have. Ophir will strike and strike again. They’ve made allies of the killers that brought down my ship two years past. I’m man enough to walk under the open sky. You diggers can cower and weep.”

  “He’ll just go and bring more of ’em,” said Mercks, hovering at Ottweill’s shoulder. “It’s how he killed that Beagle or Bassett or whatever wooden bird he flew.”

  “Sassenach bastard,” al-Wazir said quietly. “If I thought it would do any good, I’d knock out your teeth and feed them to you through your arse so your shit came out chewed tight and you had to suck on your dinner for the rest of your days. But the doctor here is going to need every man jack of you to die for him while I go for help. I shan’t deprive him of one more English corpse to decorate his parlor.” He stood. “Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill, I’d say it’s been good to know ye, but lying’s a mortal sin. I shall follow me orders and do what I may to summon aid.”

  “Go, coward,” Ottweill said.

  Al-Wazir resisted the urge to shoot the doctor where he stood. Instead he gathered his cartridges and his salvaged carbine and walked back through the smoldering, ruined camp. He would look for Boaz, send the Brass man on his way, then pass the gates and find his own path back down to the dock at Acalayong. The Mitémélé met the Bight of Benin there. He’d come home from the Bight before, by God.

  He could do it again.

  The river was brown, muddy and lazy as ever. The dock remained unmolested, somewhat to his amazement. Fuzzy wuzzy canoes were drawn up on the far bank in the brown ruck that spread between Acalayong and the water. Al-Wazir walked out along the dock and stared down at the crocodiles lazing among Parsifal’s broken ribs.

  He wished he’d found Boaz. There had been no sign of the Brass man, neither as metal shards nor walking on two feet. Al-Wazir preferred to think of Boaz wending back even now to his people in their city somewhere up on the Wall.


  As for himself, he would need to build a raft. He didn’t think he could handle one of the fuzzy wuzzy canoes effectively, and there were no larger boats here. A raft would mean a long, slow sail up the coast until he found an honest ship to carry him home.

  Is this my fate? al-Wazir wondered. His da had made a way back from the Wall, those long years ago. Now here he was, possibly the only man in English history to have to find that long way home twice.

  It was good he did not have a son. The poor lad would be doomed to thrice covering the distance between here and forever.

  There was nothing for it but to build a raft, so he did. As he worked, his mind kept straying back to the metal man. Gone now, as everyone was.

  Three days later, al-Wazir was testing his little vessel fully loaded in the waters of the Mitémélé when he heard a familiar sound. Airship. He scanned the sky with a shading hand to spot the source of the propellers’ whine.

  What he saw gave him long pause.

  Two Chinese airships, their configuration of gasbag and hull unmistakable, cruised in a slow search pattern.

  They were flying dogleg turns about two miles apart. The airships weren’t working the Wall, which possibly meant they weren’t looking for Ottweill’s tunnel.

  They’d find it soon enough, though, by spotting the dust plume from the excavation. Either that or the dock itself, which would be clearly visible from the air, and just as clearly not a fuzzy wuzzy undertaking.

  He set his little sail, laid his paddle into the slow current, and began to steer away from them. No point in inviting attention by remaining near the wreck of Parsifal or the dock itself.

  The river deposited him into the waiting arms of the sea, where it pooled dark and lazy at the intersection of Africa and the lowest, tumbled foot of the Wall. Al-Wazir let the shore wind push him out past the desultory surf line before he began paddling. The raft handled no better than a floating door might have, but his time was plentiful. He would sail west and north until a ship coming south picked him up, or he paddled all the way back to England.