by Jay Lake
Occasionally he even saw whales.
It was as much magic as he had ever hoped to find in the world. The sounds were strange here, too, the clattering of the Earth replaced with the creak of ropes, the snapping of the gasbag’s canvas envelope, and the distant clang of pumps. At night it was like being in Master Bodean’s house during a strong storm, when the beams creaked and the roof groaned. Except these were the noises of calm. And the winds were different at altitude, playing a game both harsh and simple. The world that Bassett inhabited high above the Earth smelled pure as Creation.
Mindful of the mirage that he and Le Roy had seen from a Connecticut road, Hethor often found himself staring south. He hoped for a glimpse of the Equatorial Wall and the gleaming brass that defined its upper margin. Somehow, that seemed the best direction for him to be headed in pursuit of Gabriel’s mission.
Life on the airship had a well-defined rhythm that was not unpleasing to Hethor. They steamed during the day unless the winds were quite favorable for Bassett’s limited sail. They banked the boilers at night unless the winds were quite unfavorable. Much of the ship’s hull was taken up with tanking for the boilers, which burned a high grade of oil.
Shrouds and lines ran up and around the gasbag and out to the great steering paddles. Folding in the paddles was a matter of daily drill. For Hethor this mostly consisted of standing around holding onto a line while people ran past him yelling. More experienced sailors scrambled up and down the nets on the gasbag as well. No one suggested that Hethor do such a thing.
Between drills he cleaned the deck and stowed rope and other goods into deck lockers. Even the seat of ease, sky air chill upon his hindquarters, was strangely refreshing. Three meals a day, a ration of rum, a morning shave—though still barely required—and a sleeping hammock strung in the night air were the only other things in his life. At night, if he crept close to the rail, the Earth’s tracks gleamed in the sky. They were closer than ever, rising from the eastern and western horizons like brilliant horns.
Except for the promised lashing Hethor could almost be happy. He lived in a bubble of quiet unremarked by the other sailors other than Lombardo’s harassment. He steered far clear of officers. It was if he sailed the sky alone. He was no closer to the Key Perilous, but he was out of the candlemen’s pit and in the open air.
Somehow, some way, he would find his path back to Gabriel’s mission.
One afternoon Hethor was stowing a set of brassbound blocks and tackles normally used when the ship wanted to show her best colors coming into port. The steering paddle crews had used them for a drill.
His clockmaker’s eyes didn’t like the way the brass had been polished down—there were streaks of fingerprints along the edges—so Hethor took the tail of his Naval-issue cotton shirt and began working the brass to a smoother perfection. He fogged it with his breath, then polished vigorously, wishing he had some of the right oils.
After a while Deck Chief Lombardo squatted next to Hethor on his heels. “Only damned thing I’ve yet seen you do on this ship that looked like you cared or understood it, sailor.” The man’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle.
“I’ve worked with brass a lot, Chief,” Hethor said quietly. He buffed the edge of a pulley head. Then, holding it with his fingertips, he stowed it in the locker.
“What sort of brass?” Lombardo asked. “Weapons, musical instruments, fittings?”
“Precision machines,” Hethor said shortly. “Clocks.”
Lombardo grunted, then walked away. It was the first time he had done so without hitting Hethor.
Hethor took that to be something of a victory.
A CHANGE in the creaking of the spars and shrouds told Hethor that new developments were at hand. The ship was changing its behavior. Even the smell of the wind was different. He stowed the last of the brasswork and sidled over to the rail.
A scattering of islands lay in the gray sea, the little spots of land shaped like crescents and sickles, all thin and long with many curves and bays. None seemed to have much altitude. Bassett beat downward, her great propellers straining—Hethor was given to understand that fuel for the engines was more readily replaced than any venting of the precious hydrogen. Below them he could see dozens, perhaps hundreds, of whitewashed buildings scattered among the trees. Some of the trees appeared to be pines. Others were strange, great stalks with bushy heads.
Four familiar wooden towers rose out of the waters of one of the harbors. Airship masts.
“Bermuda,” said a sailor leaning on the rail nearby. “’Twouldn’t do to jump ship here. Whole place is nothing but Royal Navy. Nice enough, mind you.”
Bermuda. Hethor had heard of it, traced the tiny dots on maps of the Atlantic in the library at New Haven Latin, just like he’d traced the dots of Hispaniola and Cuba and Jamaica and half a hundred other islands of the Northern Earth.
He’d always thought islands were a sort of magic, life erupting from the hard, salt ocean, a fringe of existence on the watery desert. A challenge to the ruling powers of sea and sky.
That in turn made Hethor glance at the southern horizon. They were still too far north to see the Equatorial Wall, but the very idea of it seemed to hang heavy over the line of the ocean. Even at this latitude, the horns of the Earth’s track had shifted, flattening out a bit.
“You’ll see it afore we hail Georgetown, boy,” the sailor said, following Hethor’s gaze. “You can jump there if you’ve a mind to, but there’s nothing that far south but howler monkeys and headhunters and creatures come down off the Wall. Like enough to the far side of the world, I figure.” He broke into a toothless cackle. “It’ll be a while before we see a good English port with good English food and bad English women.”
Bosun’s pipes began to whistle a new pattern Hethor hadn’t heard in his few days aboard. They were approaching the mooring mast. Most of the deck idlers had jobs. Hethor scuttled back to his post by the fo’c’sle rope locker. He was all alone up there. The engines chuffed, propellers whining, as Bassett dropped her steering paddles and set wide stuns’ls to bring her into position on the mast.
The ship yawed in the wind, gasbag booming overhead. Hethor watched a man atop the mooring mast fire a harpoon upward. It cleared the bow and skittered across the foredeck, a large, narrow-armed, blunt-tipped spike that slid backward just as quickly to catch on the reinforced forward railing.
A group of deck idlers rushed up, secured the spike, and lashed its line to a capstan. They sent a thicker rope down along the first rope, and locked the line into a massive winch. Working in concert with men on the mast, the idlers carefully warped Bassett into her mooring. A rope ladder was thrown across from deck to mast. The men on the mast secured it, saluted, then began the long climb down, two hundred feet or so to the water below where they had a little boat tied to the base of the mast.
Hethor stepped over to the rail and looked down. Purple and blue blotches stained the glass-green water. Coral? he wondered. Slim shapes slid along the pale bottom. Surely those were sharks.
The bosun piped a new call. A swirling mass of sailors gathered amidships on the upper deck. Two hands set up a little awning as Hethor scrambled to find Lombardo and the deck division and fall in with them.
In moments the crew was silent, ranked in neat arrays. Three men in neat blue officers’ uniforms came out to stand beneath the awning. Hethor had never seen them before, though he presumed from all the gold braid that the one in the middle had to be Captain Smallwood.
“Attention, attention,” the man with the least amount of braiding called. Hethor thought he might be a senior petty officer, but he had yet to master the nuances of rank other than the fact that everyone on the ship was above him. “General muster of the ship’s company is called to order, Her Imperial Majesty’s Ship of the Air Bassett, Josiah Smallwood commanding. Whereas we are safe in a friendly port, shore leave is granted in watch rotation. Your chiefs and officers will tell you off. She lifts air at four bells of the forenoon wat
ch, day after tomorrow.” He paused, looking around. “Discipline parade is now called. Seaman Jacques, step forward.”
Oh, thought Hethor. He had almost managed to forget about his lashing.
Lombardo stepped forward with him. The chief took Hethor’s wrists in hand from behind and propelled Hethor to a post set beside the awning. A rope was quickly looped and his hands pulled up and forward, over his head, straining Hethor’s shoulders.
“Oh, God,” whispered Hethor, “spare me from this pain.” He was terrified, sweating his fear, legs trembling. He had seen people lashed back in New Haven—thieves, harlots, wayward apprentices. The sheer magnitude of their suffering had been overwhelming, flesh torn to ribbons, blood streaming down bare backs, wretched screams of pain and terror while the crowd threw fruit and stones and sometimes tossed pans of saltwater.
His shoulders tensed more, threatening to pop loose, as someone tore his shirt free.
“For the crime of striking an officer, Seaman Jacques shall stand for twice twelve lashes,” said the petty officer in a bored voice. “It is presumed that he will draw moral profit from this lesson. Division Chief Lombardo, you may administer the punishment.”
There was a moment of creaking silence. A deceptively cool breeze played across Hethor’s bare back. The first slap of the lash came with a snap of leather and a near-blinding surge of pain like a brand searing his flesh. “One,” roared the assembled sailors as Hethor fought not to scream.
“Two.” He bit his tongue. Blood filled his mouth.
“Three.” Hethor’s back felt like it was blistering in a fire.
“Four.” He screamed and would have collapsed if his wrists were not tied above his head.
“Five.”
And onward, until the world was a blinding glare of pain and the blood spotting the deck around his feet became a muddy red kaleidoscope in the blur of his vision. At the count of twenty-four, Hethor had nothing left to him but a sharp smell of coppery blood and the salt sea below. A veil of pain had drawn over his thoughts.
“Here you go, sailor,” Lombardo said, tugging Hethor’s hands free of the post. Others bound something new to his wrists. Was he to be imprisoned now?
Hethor tried to fight, to push against this new torment, but Lombardo grabbed his head and hissed in his ear, “Hold still, you stupid git; they’re helping you.”
“And ye’d best hang on t’it,” said the Scot who had led Hethor’s press-gang.
Hethor blinked his eyes open as a gaggle of grinning sailors picked him up and charged across the deck shouting and singing.
“Oh, oh, oh, hell!” Hethor screamed as they pitched him over the rail, two hundred feet above the Bermuda lagoon, which stretched louche and shallow beneath Bassett’s mooring.
His hands jerked upward to add a new level of pain to Hethor’s abused shoulders, counterpoint to the ruined horror of the skin of his back. Hethor looked up to see a rounded cap of silk billowing above him. It seemed to be slowing his fall.
For a few astonished seconds he hung in the air as if he were some baby spider on its spring migration, grown great and large. Silk or no silk, the water rushed up to meet him with a slap like the flat of God’s hand. Hethor’s knees drove up to his chin, slamming his head backward and loosing a new round of blood in his mouth as the seawater of the lagoon washed his lacerated back in yet another wave of agony.
He swallowed his scream in time to avoid gulping down the ocean, and fought the ropes and silk to find the surface.
Then sailors were falling out of the sky to hit the water around him. They whooped and screamed as strong hands held Hethor up and tore his harness away. Someone pressed an oil-soaked cloth against his back even under the water. People called his name in the accents of a dozen different nations. The mob swam him toward shore, perhaps a quarter mile away, chattering of rum and prostitutes and gambling.
On the beach, shivering, half dead from the pain and the fall, Hethor stood wrapped in a dry blanket. A square of silk was stretched beneath it to cover the wounds of his back. The mast crew had met the sailors there with supplies and advice.
“New chum,” said one of the Bermuda mast men to Hethor. He was as dark as the West Indian back in Boston had been. “Most bastards don’t make the jump with a cat-scratched back. You’re a hard case, mon.”
“That wasn’t punishment?” Hethor gasped.
“Well, the cat were.” The mast man smiled. “I seen your back before Shinbone put the silk on it. You took your thrashing bloody fewking good, whatever it was you did to earn it. But the jump, mon, that’s what makes you a sky sailor.”
Bassett’s crew and the mast men swept Hethor off in their midst, still carrying him toward a haze of rum and hemp, and even a prostitute someone else paid for, though all she did for Hethor was dab ointment on his back and sew up the wider wounds. She bathed them in yet more rum, which seemed to be what passed for water in Bermuda.
HETHOR AWOKE facedown in a hammock. His mouth was thick and foul as it had been after drinking corn liquor with those Connecticut turnip farmers. His back had achieved a sort of ethereal state of pain, the skin and muscles seeking to float away from his body on some mission of their own.
The swaying of the hammock convinced Hethor that the ship was under way. He turned his head sideways expecting to see the horizon, but found only wood and an oddly angled view of a small desk. A man sat writing at it.
“I …” Hethor croaked.
“Awake, are you?” the man said without turning around. He had the soft voice of someone from the Virginia countries, far to the south of New England.
“Yes.” Hethor could barely get his voice working.
The man turned around. He was dark-haired, balding at the top, with sharp brown eyes and a rounded face that said nothing of his profession. Met on the street, Hethor might have thought the man a greengrocer or ostler. Even his clothes gave no clue. Instead of a uniform, the dark-haired man wore a blue linen shirt and duck trousers.
“Most of the new chum go through their trials one at a time. You managed to encompass a flogging, an initiation, and a shore leave in one heroic attempt.”
Hethor had difficulty remembering the past day or so. On consideration that might be something of a blessing. “Uh,” he managed to say.
“Malgus, Simeon Malgus.” Malgus rose and pushed his chair back. “Navigator on our HIMS Bassett, and lieutenant in Her Imperial Majesty’s navy. And you are Hethor Jacques, mysterious seaman recruit late of New England.”
“Yes.” Malgus, thought Hethor. He’d heard the name before. Of course. His message to Anthony’s had gotten through. God bless Sergeant Ellis. And, Hethor had to admit, a bit of his own quick thinking.
“Chief Lombardo tells me you know something of clocks.”
Hethor tried to sit up. He found he was too weak. “Yes. Apprentice, sir.” His voice was returning.
“Clockmaker’s apprentice.” Malgus stood over Hethor’s hammock with a gleam in his eye somewhere between pity and humor. “The holiest of arts, clockmaking. Imitating the Tetragrammaton in His wisdom. Arranging the hours of a man’s life as He chose to arrange the universe.”
“’S just time, sir.” Master Bodean would have said that, though Hethor never quite believed it.
“Just time. You could say that. Everything is just time—the Earth’s spinning on her track in the sky, the motions of the moon and planets, even the slow unwinding of our own bodies. Did you sleep through the earthquake?”
Earthquake. A cold stab of fear shivered Hethor’s heart. He had felt flaws in the motion of the world, but those were too easily forgotten sailing the skies. “What earthquake?”
Malgus smiled, almost malicious. “Just as we cast off from Bermuda. One of the mooring masts collapsed, and there were fires in Hamilton port town. Captain Smallwood ordered us to press on instead of returning to render aid. Urgent business west and south.”
“Earthquake.” Hethor closed his eyes, listening, to see if he could hear th
e clatter of the world. The ship creaked, and his own breath and Malgus’ both masked some of the sounds; but even here high in the air the movements of the world still echoed at the bottom of all the other noises, a fractional step removed from true silence.
And it sounded wrong.
“You hear it,” Malgus said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “You hear the changes.”
Frightened, Hethor opened his eyes. The old farmer Le Roy had told him to seek out Malgus with his story. He’d finally found the man out after some missteps, and Malgus had in turn effected his rescue from the pit of the candlemen. But after his experiences in the viceroy’s court Hethor was in no wise eager to share his thoughts further. Something about Malgus, his manner or his intensity, moved Hethor to guard his tongue, albino toucan or not. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Malgus’ eyes narrowed. “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t, sailor. I can’t make you something you’re not. But I don’t want all your training to go to waste. Captain Smallwood has graciously permitted me to take you on in my service in order to properly maintain the instruments of navigation. You do that without embarrassing me, and I’ll teach you how to use them.”
Lombardo had been right. It did matter to Hethor what he did, that he had work he understood and cared for. And navigation was essentially the art of observing God’s clockwork in the heavens. This … offer … from Malgus was another step toward fulfilling Gabriel’s mission. “Thank you, sir.”
“Now go back to sleep,” said Malgus. “You won’t be good for anything for a day or two yet. Not with that horrid back. The loblolly boy will be in later to see to your dressings. I daresay whoever sewed you up in Hamilton town knew his business well enough.”