Escapement

by Jay Lake

  The Wall loomed.

  It consumed her vision. What had been a glowering line on the horizon at the Qun Dao Islands was an immense presence extending so far into the heavens, she had to lay her head all the way back on her shoulders to see it. The Wall was covered with countries—forests and mountains and tumbling rivers, all written sideways, with their own storms and clouds moving among them like the layers in a pastry. High up, where the sun caught a bright rim, frost perhaps, she thought she saw the gleam of brass.

  “Oh, goodness.”

  “Your Wall,” he told her. “It stands over Singapore like a rebuke from Heaven.”

  “My Wall?” She laughed. “God’s Wall. Or Heaven’s, if you prefer. Whatever would the rebuke be?”

  He smiled. “Something against overreaching, I should think.”

  “Indeed.” She stared at its mottled vastness awhile. “May I stay here?”

  “Of course.”

  _______

  Singapore was a busier port even than Tainan. The scene was busy enough to distract her from the mind-numbing Wall as Five Lucky Winds entered the harbor.

  The Wall still loomed close, fog-shrouded below and gleaming above with the emerald of bright growth, but the logic of the maps she’d been studying was clear enough. Any trade that passed between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea flowed here. The British had been here as well, the easternmost extent of empire before the Chinese had driven them out not so long ago.

  They moved up a narrow inlet packed with ships and boats and rafts and people. The passage was wide enough for a vessel larger than the submarine, but Childress thought that a person could probably walk across the water from deck to deck virtually everywhere else along the waterway.

  Buildings crowded alongside the port, some obviously British, others with a more Asian feel. None were as large as the new iron-skeletoned towers that had been rising in Boston and New York City. Rather, these were broad, solid trading houses, banks, bourses, exchanges, and warehouses.

  This city bought and sold, sold and bought. Childress imagined it mattered little to the inhabitants what flag flew above the customs houses.

  Even ashore amid the surging chatter of crowds, there was an orderliness that had not prevailed in Tainan or Sendai. This was a city that kept itself a certain way, not surrendering to the riot that sailors brought with them.

  It was also hot, soaking her with sweat even through the homespun blues she had adopted on this voyage. Who knew her here, after all? She would likely be arrested if she strolled the streets of New Haven in trousers and jacket such as these, but the crew had taken her for their own now. No one ashore here had firm opinions about the attire and comportment of a good Christian woman from New England.

  Childress laughed softly and smiled up at the Wall, which hung over everything here like the palm of God’s hand. The sun beat down on her head, the air was thick enough to slice with a butterknife, and the water around her smelled like an old bilge. She was close to whatever this journey would bring to her.

  “Chersonesus Aurea, I am here,” she said, addressing her words to the imposing presence that was the Wall.

  So much for the Mask Poinsard and her Great Relic, Childress thought. I will do more for those who planned to let my throat be slit than they ever would have accomplished for themselves.

  The surge of pride both thrilled her and shamed her. Childress accepted the two impulses as one, and watched to see where the pilot officer standing nearby would dock the ship.

  “Now that you’ve received Admiral Shang’s approval,” Leung told her, “you are permitted to debark on your parole. You will return to the ship as if you were a ship’s officer under orders.”

  “I should expect no less.” In truth, Childress was surprised, but she saw no point in elaborating.

  He coughed, then smiled. “That means, should you elect to go ashore, you may leave the dock and move about on your own. This is perhaps the only port in the Celestial Empire where that would be a useful freedom to you. Singapore was in English hands until only a generation ago. It is still a common language here.”

  “Is that why you speak English so well?”

  “Thank you.” His head bobbed in a bow. “My parents are Singapore Chinese. It was a language at our dinner table. I pursued my education in English. There are engineering and scientific journals from your kingdom which have much to teach us, when the Celestial Empire can deign to admit those publications.”

  She patted the metal of the tower. “Your engineering seems quite adept to me.”

  “Again, my thanks.” He stared down at the wharf, where a detail of sailors from Five Lucky Winds was already being sent out. “Our peoples pursue different questions, though. We find different answers.”

  “Much as with God.”

  “Indeed.”

  She walked along a narrow street crowded with faces of a dozen shades and colors. If there had been English here recently, there would still be churches. Possibly Church of England, possibly Romish or Lutheran, but churches. Childress didn’t actually know whether the Chinese empire practiced tolerance as a formal policy. From what Leung said, China seemed to lack the obsession with a single path to righteousness that gripped so many in the European world. Tolerance or no, the churches within the British Empire fought one another like aging tomcats. Each was jealous of the faithful of the others.

  Many folds in the way was a phrase that had stuck in her memory.

  The shore was no cooler than the ship had been. Worse, because the breeze out on the open water was blocked by the buildings of the city. All that pace of life was mixed together in a swirling maelstrom of scent.

  She walked past narrow shops hung with blind-eyed ducks and haunches of stringy pink meat she preferred not to contemplate too carefully. Others sold mountains of red paper in many forms—envelopes, posters, folded into strange shapes, mounted as lanterns. Still more featured clothing, tools, jars that swam with pickled animals and tinctures of strange plants. There were more and more beyond, teahouses and little cook fires crammed into doorways.

  For all its orderliness, Singapore was as jumbled and crowded as Tainan. Here there was the chatter of a dozen languages besides Chinese, and the dress of many clans and nations.

  She wandered awhile, preferring not to ask directions. As there were many older women here, Childress did not feel conspicuous for her age or gender. She was the only European she saw. People did not stare, though. They just kept pressing past, on their own errands. Many rode in little two-wheeled carts pulled by running men dressed in almost nothing.

  Her patience was rewarded when she came to a small mission building. It was a church, complete with a cross atop the roof, though the signboard was in Chinese.

  Childress slipped through the open door and stood for a few minutes at the back. It looked Papist to her—there was a table full of candles in the vestibule, and large paintings of the Virgin Mary and a thorn-crowned Christ. Both seemed more Asian than the pale faces of traditional European religious art.

  She smiled at that.

  The pews were mostly empty, with a few people at prayer. A short man in a black cassock moved back and forth at the altar. There was no evidence of a pending service, nor of much else in progress. She slipped into a pew and knelt on the padded bench to pray awhile.

  God did not speak to her, but then He never did. Still, praying in a church had always seemed to her to be more to the point than private prayer. He was certainly infinite in His attentions, by definition, but Childress could never escape the notion that God was very busy. Like the dean of an endlessly large college, perhaps—an image that always made her smile. She supposed it was sacrilegious if not outright blasphemous.

  It pleased Childress to imagine the Brass Christ laughing at the thought.

  When she stood from her contemplations, she saw the priest waiting for her in the aisle. His skin was the color of polished oak but his nose could have come from the Mediterranean. Some race unkno
wn to her, though she’d seen dozens of his fellows in the streets outside.

  “Father,” Childress said politely.

  “Madam,” he said. She noted his English seemed to have no accent.

  The priest continued: “Are you of the Roman rite?”

  “No, no.” She dropped her chin. “I am a communicant of the Church of England. But I have not had the opportunity to pray in the house of God for some months.”

  She could hear the smile in his voice, though the priest’s face remained serious enough. “Everyone arrives in Singapore via a long sea voyage. And there are sadly few chaplains aboard the ships which call here in these days of Chinese hegemony.” He bowed his head, a chin bob that matched hers. “Welcome, and return to this house of God as it suits you. All Christians are brothers here.”

  “Thank you, Father.” Childress regretted that she had no offering to leave.

  “Go with God, my child.”

  This, from a man less than half her age. “And you.”

  Outside, another dark-skinned man clothed only in a soiled length of cloth wrapped about his privates waved her toward a waiting cart—one of those runners she’d seen earlier, drawing passengers about Singapore.

  “No, no,” she began. Someone stepped close behind her, grabbed her arm tightly, and whispered, “Get in the rickshaw.”

  Her heart felt cold and heavy. There was no one nearby from Five Lucky Winds. The priest would remember her, and surely some of the passersby could say they’d seen the European woman.

  She stepped into the seat. The runner grabbed the handles as the other man slid in beside her. He was brown, too, and nondescript—middle-aged, wearing the same silk clothes cut Chinese-style as half the people on the street. But not Chinese himself. Some other Asian race, one among the thousands on thousands of people in this city. Only his eyes betrayed more. They were bright, gleaming like knives, and showed her no mercy.

  He made the sign of the avebianco. “You are the Mask come among us, yes?”

  The house of her lies had just caught fire, Childress realized. She could not deny herself now.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am the Mask Childress.” That could hardly be kept a secret. “I am unaccustomed to being abducted on the street.”

  The knife-sharp eyes flashed, somewhere between anger and amusement. “I could not come to your ship, no.”

  “I suppose not.” Poinsard, be Poinsard, she told herself. Childress tried to borrow some of that woman’s brittle fearsomeness. Let him approach you with whatever his petition is. The Mask Poinsard would definitely have seen it as such, she knew.

  They rolled through the streets. Their driver trotted and sang in some language that didn’t seem to include the concept of key in its musical tradition. Childress watched the buildings go by, waiting for whatever would come next.

  She was not disappointed.

  He made the bird sign again. He was nervous. Good, let him be. This man had taken a woman alone for a ride in a strange city—he could share her fear.

  “Malaya Chinthé,” he finally said, almost muttering the words.

  “Indeed.” She had no idea what he was talking about, but Childress would not give him the satisfaction of asking. In this moment her power lay most in silence and the presumption of authority.

  “The red folder, yes?”

  This time Childress just stared him down with her best speaking-to-idiots expression.

  He sighed and looked away a moment. They were passing a grove of tall trees with long, dangling branches, something like a willow crossbred with a watersnake. When he turned back, the knives were in his eyes once more.

  “We hear new word. Fire is higher now.”

  “I have been at sea,” she told him.

  “Yes. Silent Order is in a state of panic. Ships come and go from Phu Ket, airships also. Even wireless is not quiet.”

  “Have we moved against them in my absence?”

  “No, no. There is a weapon afoot. A shaman attacked them in their European heart.”

  She digested that a moment. “Who?”

  “I not know. Your people not say. Only to watch for something called the Gleam, yes. Also that the Silent Order are looking for a European girl. Great many reward offered, even.”

  Interesting, Childress thought. Very interesting. “Girl, not a woman? Young?”

  His smile cracked into being a moment. “Not the Mask, no.”

  “And you?” She asked the same way the dean might have.

  “Red folder, red folder. All same. But today I must find you, tell you about girl.” He leaned closer. “Like Golden Bridge, on two legs. London worries.”

  “That project is its own problem.” She looked at him carefully. “Is the girl coming here?”

  “Why? How? European problem, white man make, white man fix.”

  “Fair enough.” She realized the rickshaw was approaching the docks. Five Lucky Winds was somewhere near, though in the jumble of vessels it was difficult to discern.

  “You go. I go. Never see, yes?” He smiled again, this time without the slightest shred of humor. “Watch for girl. She come this way, I think we all hear the fires.”

  The rickshaw creaked to a halt as someone behind yelled. She slipped over the side. When she looked back, he was already gone, out the other side and into the crowd. Only the grubby, nearly nude driver remained. He grinned at Childress briefly before running again, keeping his rickshaw just ahead of a straining oxcart.

  She looked up and down the docks as traffic flowed around her. Three sailors from Five Lucky Winds were approaching as well—Ming, who was something like a petty officer, along with Little Chen and Gray Chen. The Chens each carried a pair of roasted ducks.

  Childress hailed them, surprising the sailors considerably. She felt better heading back to the ship in their company. Any further untoward surprises would be witnessed, at the least.

  The news given by the man from the Malaya Chinthé had been interesting, but she had no way of knowing who he really was. Another Chinese political officer, an agent of the Silent Order, or someone else entirely. She glanced up at the Wall. Did people there come down and mix on the streets here, sending their agents and spies?

  She didn’t miss New Haven, but life certainly was simpler there.

  Childress found herself grinning as she reboarded the submarine.

  SIXTEEN

  PAOLINA

  The voyage south of the Suez Canal was pleasant by Paolina’s recent standards. Spending her days staring at glass-green water, and taking mess with the few passengers still aboard, was a simple pleasure.

  The mess steward was kind to her. The rest of the crew continued to avoid her. She was still on the run, and the British certainly had ample Naval forces here along the Horn of Africa that they could search Star of Gambia if they so wished. Still, being out of the Mediterranean and away from the long shadow cast by Europe and that sad continent’s British masters did much to ease her mind.

  The ship passed south through the Red Sea. Amid those shallow, gleaming waters, thick with salt and touched with sand, Paolina got a glimpse of the Wall. Nearing her goal was heartening. She stood at the rail and stared at the thickening horizon even as the African shoreline slipped by. She fancied she could see the gleam of the gearing, and even some sense of texture from the countries and kingdoms in their vertical array.

  Star of Gambia called at Port Sudan, where Paolina once more remained aboard. She walked along the rail and looked out at hills brown as toast, covered with modest whitewashed buildings. Paolina saw a city much like Praia Nova might have become if it had ever found a chance to grow beyond a refugee settlement at the edge of the world.

  There were two airship masts here, but no Royal Navy vessels were in port. She saw soldiers marching along the dock, but they did not appear to be a serious effort at, well, anything.

  Men like the fidalgos doubtless dwelt in those pale little buildings. There they waited for boiled grapes or stewed lamb or whatever
they ate in a place like this, raising their sons to expect the attentions of women, and their daughters to bow in fear to God and the hard hands of their fathers and husbands. As in Alexandria, Paolina once more felt tempted to cast off her name and go among the people of the city. She would tell those women what they could be, show them that there was a world outside the walls of the houses of their men.

  It was a pleasant and pointless fantasy. Even if she were foolish enough to try, she would not last. The only question was whether the British would find her before the locals killed her.

  Living as these women did, as women did anywhere in Northern Earth, had passed beyond her tolerance. The wild lands and strange creatures and mechanical men of a Muralha were far more to her taste than a life mandated by tradition.

  That was when Paolina realized she would not be returning to Praia Nova. Ophir, possibly, to find Boaz, if no other plan presented itself along the way, but she had no need to take up the chains of her childhood once more.

  Just after dawn they passed a narrow strait that the mess steward informed her was the Bab el Mandeb Sound. There was a large island to the portside, and a group of smaller islands to the starboard. Two British warships rode at anchor to watch over the traffic sailing from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. Paolina returned to her cabin once she saw them.

  When they called at Djibouti to discharge cargo, she saw little that was different from Port Sudan. More sand and fewer hills, and a landscape painted ocher and gold instead of brown and tan. The wind came up while they were in port, and the one airship at mast cast off and lifted away even while the sky tinged from pale blue to pale tan to a deepening brown.

  The wind began worrying at the ship’s superstructure, a low moaning whistle combined with the hiss of dust like someone running sandpaper across the paint. Paolina had never seen such weather—they had nothing like it in Praia Nova. A storm of dust. It was already seeping in around the hatch coaming and settling in corners of her cabin.