by Jay Lake
“Of course.” Al-Wazir sounded surprised. “Roman cities, and African cities with sorcerers from beyond the Wall. Even cities full of bloody monkeys. It’s just there ain’t no cities of jewels, if you take my meaning. For how could such a thing be possible? Where would you mine a diamond big enough to make a house from?”
In the face of the Wall, all things seemed possible. “If cities of monkeys, why not diamonds the size of houses?”
“Apes,” muttered Dairy. “They’s apes. They hates to be called monkeys. One of them served on the old Firepot, afore she lived down to her name over Corunna and kilt all them Spaniards in that great huge exploding.”
“Ain’t never been no fewkin’ apes on any ship of Her Imperial Majesty’s navy,” al-Wazir said with a grin, “excepting you bloody deck apes. Though I daresay I’d rather have half a dozen rain-forest silverbacks than you lot. I expect they’d work harder and give less sass.”
“Have you been to the Wall before?” asked Hethor.
“No, but my da went oncet.” Al-Wazir sighed. “He was a wet sailor, for the old Guinea and Atlantic Company’s slaving fleet. On Goodness and Mercy it was, one them scut-lined three-deck haulers with a square bottom and that widowmaker keel they built out of Clyde in the midcentury. Sister ship she was to Shirley and Day Follower.
“This was their spring run in, I think, the year of sixty-seven. First mate took a fancy to see what they could find on the Wall, something new that would sell well in Kingston, or even London. Da spoke up just for the chance to go. Captain was a damned sorry-eyed drunk, to hear Da tell it, and waved them off with a smile and a belch. They took a little sloop-rigged boat and sailed south across the Bight of Benin until they struck shoreline at the foot of the Wall.
“Now Da could make this story last for three days. I’m a-going to tell it short, since we’ve all got work and more to do.” Al-Wazir raised his eyebrows at Dairy and Hethor and a few other seamen who had drifted up to listen. “I’ll just strike for the sum of the thing.
“’Twas a short beach of hard shingle and no driftwood or wrack to speak of, with a steep cliff above it. There was a foot-worn switchback trail. They climbed and found a sort of ledge, with some farming among the trees. From there they followed a road higher and higher. Up above a rank of clouds, so it seemed they were climbing to Heaven, they found a city of brass and teak, streets paved with marble slabs laid down like them old Roman towns back home.
“Weren’t nobody in the city, it seemed, but soon enough ghosts began to follow ’em—pale things that vanished like smoke when Da and the others tried to get a good look. First mate got worried, decided there weren’t nae slaves nor gold, but when they turned around, they was met with a terrible battle by white apes, taller than men, carrying fewkin’ spears and bows.
“One thing and another, Da escaped, but he could nae find the road down. He and two of his mates spent weeks on that ledge. They was running from those damned apes and stealing food from the little farms in the forest clearings until they could get down to shore. Never did find the bloody sloop-rig. They came to build a raft. On the way back they lost one man to a water snake bigger around than a draft horse, and finally sailed themselves into Conakry port a year older.
“Da’s hair went white as them apes, and though he took ship twice again, the Guinea and Atlantic finally gave him a pension on promise he wouldn’t tell his tale in ports nae more. Da came home and moved us all to Lanark, thirty miles from the sight of water, and he drank only with shepherds and oat farmers until the day he died.”
“That’s a lie,” shouted Dairy, “’coz I met your Da in Bristol port five year back, he was on the docks sellin’ oysters to the quality trade.”
“Ain’t no lie!” Al-Wazir threw a blow that sent Dairy reeling. “Ya fewkin’ scut-faced poxwhore. If I said it, ’twere true. That’s why I’m ropes chief and you’re nae but a sloppy hand with a fat bleedin’ mouth!”
Hethor slipped off to some more paint scraping, but later he sought Dairy out. “Why’d you say that?” he asked, both of them hunkered down in the orlop, where al-Wazir had set Dairy to hunting rats.
“He ain’t never tole the same story twicet,” Dairy whined. They were crowded close in stinking shadow. Dairy’s rat-killer gleamed by the lantern light. “Cain’t call him on it ’coz he’s bigger and practically an off’ cer besides.”
Hethor certainly knew what came of challenging officers. He had the scars to prove it. “So you met his da?”
“White-haired man sellin’ oysters and mutterin’ that there was apes in the rigging of the ships. Cain’t say more than that, ’cept he hugged al-Wazir like a son when we rowed in from the Bristol masts. The Wall, it takes things from a man, and don’t never give them back.” Dairy glanced up at the low wooden deck just above their heads. “God almighty did us no favor there, when He covered it with magical critters.”
AS THEY grew closer, a chill wind blew down from the Equatorial Wall with a frightening consistency. The air pushed out into the Atlantic chop that fringed the base, beating the water to a dangerous froth. It was clear to Hethor that Captain Smallwood was looking for something, because Bassett beat back and forth across that wind for days, sometimes straining her engines, sometimes almost drifting.
Great, forested knees of rock, bigger than mountains back home, stood out from the base of the Wall in some places. In others, there were shattered slopes that a sailor who originally hailed from some goat-ridden peak in the Basque Territories called “scree.” These scree fields were forty miles wide and thousands of feet high, covered with little rivers of sliding rock. Hethor thought they looked like Hell itself.
On the sixth day, Bassett crossed over a port town with cyclopean stone wharves, and tiny houses of wood and leaves built atop great, step-carved blocks. The airship was perhaps a thousand feet above the water then. Hethor watched tiny figures swarm out, surrounded by speckles that he finally realized was a shower of stones being thrown upward.
On the eighth day, the airship rose to the three-thousand-foot level and approached another of the protruding knees of the Wall. This one had a ledge atop it, more like a plain the size of a county back in Hethor’s native New England. There was plentiful evidence of prior farming there, fence lines and irrigation ditches, but the fields looked to have been abandoned for quite some time.
Bassett made her way over those fields, tacking back and forth across the ever-present wind. Almost all the officers and division chiefs lined the rails, looking down for something. No one passed the word to the hands, but the sailors peered over, too, when they could find space to stand far enough from a watchful, commanding eye.
After several hours, de Troyes shouted out, “I’ve got it.” There was a general swarm to the starboard, sufficient to disturb Bassett’s equilibrium. Hethor joined the mob, stepping up a ratline and clinging to the steering boom even as the officers shouted half the men back to the port side so as not to unbalance the deck.
Below them, on the east bank of a large stream, was a stone arrow pointing west, over the stream and parallel to the line of the Wall. The rocks were whitewashed for greater visibility. Another set was arranged in a crude pattern that Hethor finally deciphered as a lion and a unicorn.
English hands had made that sign.
Bassett beat her way downward as she had in Conakry. Only this time half a dozen men from the ropes division, including both al-Wazir and Dairy, leapt overboard on their silk parachutes. They dragged with them a fine silk line that spooled from a great drum bolted to the starboard rail amidships for that purpose. Another ropes division hand minded the drum, throwing the brake as soon as the party landed in some decent order, so the line would not run out.
They passed down larger lines until the shore party could belay the central anchor to a stout tropical hardwood and help guide Bassett to within a hundred feet of the ground. There was no question of actually landing the ship. Her Majesty’s airships rarely touched the Earth. Hethor and some of the o
ther deck idlers manned a bosun’s chair lashed to the port rail opposite the rope winch, which one by one sent down Captain Smallwood, Lieutenant Malgus, Midshipman de Troyes, and the first mate, Commander Dalworthy, to investigate, along with three marines. Everyone who went ashore was armed—pistols for the officers, carbines for the marines.
Once the officers and marines were safely landed, the men of the ropes division came back aboard. Dairy was sent up first. His ankles were wrapped in a cut length of manila line.
“Near broke me feet off on t’landing,” he told Hethor with a lopsided grin, his face flushed, before the loblolly boy and two idlers carried him off to Dr. Firkin.
Standing by at the bosun’s chair, Hethor peered over the rail to watch as the officers inspected the arrow and the crude sign of the Empire. Malgus took some readings with an instrument. Smallwood and two others paced away from the arrow to look westward, perhaps searching for some sign visible only from the ground.
Someone shouted faintly, and a bell rang. Hethor had never heard that bell before, but the sailors began to mutter, “Sky watch.” Sky watch was the little nest at the bow of the gasbag. Hethor understood it to be like the navigator’s rest, save that a hand from the gunnery division always stood watch there.
Then he heard a little popping noise.
Hethor looked around, trying to find the source.
The sailor next to him, a tall Welshman, said, “Swivel gun on the sky watch. We’re under attack.”
There was a great shouting belowdecks as the ports were knocked open and the guns cranked out on their carriages. Hethor could still see no enemy—was it a Chinese airship, descending from above? No one on the deck seemed to know either, but the officers on the ground beneath were now running about in alarm as the marines aimed their carbines skyward.
The slack rope jerked, signal to raise the bosun’s chair. Hethor peered over the side as he and the Welshman began to crank the little winch. Captain Smallwood was rising up to take immediate command of his ship against whatever trouble was a wing.
The attackers came falling past Bassett. They were angels armed with swords and bows. Gabriel’s sacred band, Hethor thought with a bloom of panic, come looking for him.
But the angels did not spread their great wings and swoop up to Bassett’s decks to carry him away. Rather, silent as stones they dropped to the ground amid the crack of carbine fire from the marines down there as more shots came from the ship. Someone in the gunnery division depressed a two-inch gun in one of the belt turrets, trying to get an angle, but succeeded only in rocking the ship and splintering distant trees.
Still madly yanking on the handle of the winch, Hethor released the breath he hadn’t known he was holding back. These were not angels, not of Gabriel’s order in his pale, glowing glory. These were tall, thin men, leathery as pemmican, with skin the color of fresh-baked bread, and huge, ragged tattoos around their eyes, across their cheeks, encircling their nipples and crotches. The tattoos were red and black in a random pattern like wounds both fresh and pustulant spread across their bodies. Their wings were motley, as if sewn from the plumage of a dozen different drab birds.
They were no angels. They were winged savages.
Only their weapons were fresh, clean, crisp, catching a marine on the ground through the eye here, there smashing Midshipman de Troyes with a great bronze sword. Hethor saw the young officer’s head bouncing away from his staggering body like a cricket ball on a pitch.
In a moment of grief-stricken pity, he lagged on the winch, but the Welshman kicked Hethor hard.
Together they helped Captain Smallwood over the rail. Smallwood was a man possessed, shouting as he came, face as red as the savages’ tattoos.
“Stand by to repel boarders, break out the polearms. Marines on the rail, every last red jack of you. Where’s the second mate, damn me? I want the grenadoes ready now! Mister Fine, I need you.”
He sprinted away toward the poop deck, trailing commands, as Hethor and the Welshman let the winch trail out again. Hethor chanced to look down once more to see three of the winged savages bent over a marine, rending his corpse by hand. Another chased Dalworthy to his death. Two more lopped the arms off the last surviving marine, forcing the lobsterback to dance in a staggering circle.
Where was Malgus? he wondered, arms once more slowing on the winch.
Next to Hethor, the Welshman let his own pace lag as well. There was no one alive down below but the savages now. The remainder of the ship’s marines were firing from the deck with angry abandon. Some of the ropes division tossed grenades over the side, shouting out the names of the dead.
Amid the fall of powder, shot, and curses, Hethor wept as he aided the Welshman in winding back the chair. Below them, the savages spread their wings and flew upward in the afternoon sun. The attackers briefly seemed to be angels again in the golden glare as the ship’s two-inch guns barked across the open air.
Bassett had killed none of her assailants, taken no lives in vengeance, though Captain Smallwood stood at the stern rail and lit off his brace of antique chasers, then emptied the chamber of his far more modern Colt revolver.
In the end, they merely disturbed the crystalline air of the Wall. A few bloody feathers remained behind, but the winged savages had all departed, apparently carrying Malgus with them. Bassett had only her dead.
HE SAT against the lee rail with the Welshman and two Danish brothers from the ropes division, Swine and Wine. Surely their mother had called them something else. When Hethor chanced once in a while to overhear them chattering together in the singsong tongue of their youth, they seemed to trade names with similar sound but more dignity. The four of them shared a butt of watered grog and a handful of boiled eggs.
“Cap’n’ll be angry enough to light a fuse on his temper,” said the Welshman in a morose tone. “’Em as carried off our navigator and could’a murthered all of us in our bunks.”
“Too close,” said Swine.
“Ya.” Wine, speaking. “The Wall is more than we should work.”
Hethor had a different purpose than simply surviving till Bassett made home port. “It was those winged savages. Why there’s such things in God’s world I don’t understand.” Was he being disloyal to Gabriel, too? Surely the creatures that had attacked them were mockeries.
The Welshman shook his head, nodding toward the cliffs. “Sendings. From beyond the Wall. Them sorcerers got fire in their eyeballs and the magic of the Devil in their fingers.”
“Walking dead,” said Swine.
Wine: “Ya. Like saints but different, ya.”
Hethor wanted to protest that it was not so, that the world worked on a more rational basis—the Creator would not have built so mechanical a sky, then set uncanny ghosts to bedevil them all. But the evidence of his own experience had put the lie to that idea already. “The Southern Earth cannot be so different from our own, can it?”
“Oh, my boy …” The Welshman actually smiled. “Fleets of golden ships sailing oceans of spice.”
“Gold doesn’t float,” Hethor said.
Swine and Wine chuckled until the Welshman gave them both a dirty look.
“’Tis the magic, you fewking whelp.” A boiled egg crushed in his hand. “Beyond the Wall there’s great men like graven images waking from their dusty sleeps to cast glamers upon us all. Be glad you’re of the north, where Her Imperial Majesty watches over good honest sailors everywhere.”
SMALLWOOD STOOD beneath his awning once more. Marines lined the rails with carbines in their hands. Hethor had not seen such a show of force since joining Bassett’s crew. The captain was angry, though this was cold anger like the edge of a sword, in contrast to his hot rage in the moment of the attack.
No man among the ship’s company had whispered against Captain Smallwood for coming aboard during the fighting. It was understood that his first duty was to HIMS Bassett, to the ship and her company and her mission. The Articles of War, naval tradition, English law, and the custom of sailor
s all required him to do so. That the captain had fled the field of honor, leaving five dead and one missing in his wake, was a tragedy worthy of a Greek hero. In staying where he was, he would have betrayed his command. In leaving the fight upon the ground, he betrayed his brother officers.
Anger mixed with pity throughout the ship’s people.
Now there were five corpses sewn into stained canvas, doubled thick because so many of their parts and pieces were loose. Captain Smallwood stared down at them as he slapped his thigh with the ship’s Bible.
“Our Brass Christ,” he said suddenly, in a sharp, low voice much unlike his usual firm tones. “Our Lord, He suffered on the Roman horofix. The gears ground closer to His hands and feet. The spike sprang forward by moments toward His heart.
“Yet even in His hurt, our Lord prevailed, taking the sin of the world into him. In time, his tormentors were struck down. Rome …” Smallwood seemed to lose his thought for a moment, then collected himself. “Rome burned.”
The captain stared around at the ship’s company, the continued slapping of the Bible slowing in tempo to a dirge. The air had turned foetid, the ever-present wind suddenly silent as any distant family members at a funeral. The thick scent of blood and rank death curdled the air of the deck. Hethor’s neck tingled as Smallwood’s gaze swept past him, lit on Lombardo—they were arranged by divisions—then back a moment to Hethor. The captain’s eyes burned hotter than the day, a bright fever in their brown depths.
Vengeance, Hethor hoped, rather than the fires of madness.
Smallwood continued to slap the Bible. Then, as if noticing for the first time that he held it, he looked down at the book before opening his hand and letting the leather-bound volume tumble to the deck. It fell open, pages fluttering for a moment before it settled as limp as the wind.
“Rome burned, men,” Smallwood continued, “for her sins. Lieutenant Malgus awaits rescue, having been carried off by these vicious savages. Five of our ship’s company lie dead on an altar of pagan treachery. As we have been ordered to do, we will find General Gordon. With his men and our own stout crew, these savages will pay for their insult to our lives, our honor, and our gracious queen.”