Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  A horn began to play, off-key, and the company sang “God Save the Queen.” Hethor thought it an odd choice for a funeral hymn. As the last flat notes trailed off, Smallwood said in his usual command voice, “We will bury our dead over honest water when next we find it, that those winged savages shall not pick among the bones of honest Englishmen. Ship’s muster is dismissed.”

  The crew scuttled to their stations, those off-watch back to their hammocks and hidey-holes. Hethor stood before the canvas lumps that had so recently been men. Though none were his particular friends, de Troyes had been kind and thoughtful to Hethor when no such consideration had been warranted.

  The ship’s Bible still lay there, one page folded over, the other with a penciled highlight glittering in the late-afternoon sun.

  Curious, Hethor picked it up.

  It was open to the Book of Job, Chapter 41. He read the underlined verses aloud softly. It was as close as he could come to saying a benediction to the dead and a prayer for the missing.

  “‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?’”

  “Seaman Hethor.” It was the second mate, Lieutenant Wollers. “Captain Smallwood will see you at the second bell of the evening watch.” He looked Hethor up and down. “Come clean and fresh as you can make yourself, boy.”

  Hethor nodded. He handed the Bible to Wollers with an abortive pass at the sign of the horofix. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  If Captain Smallwood had been angry in defeat, Wollers was simply defeated. The officer walked away slope-shouldered and tired.

  Hethor moved among the watchful marines to the water butt, the better to clean his hair and ears.

  EXCEPT FOR his trips to and from Lieutenant Malgus’ cabin during his stint as the navigator’s assistant, Hethor had spent no time among the ship’s officers. In the quiet of the evening, he made his way aft, down the narrow companionway, past Malgus’ cabin and several others before presenting himself to a marine who stood guard outside Smallwood’s hatch. The entrance to the captain’s cabin was an ornate thing, carved with classical motifs of nereids and sirens. So far as Hethor knew, it was the only such hatch on the ship.

  “Seaman Jacques reporting to Captain Smallwood as ordered.”

  The marine was an older man with a ruddy face lined as a plowed field. He frowned, then reached over to knock without taking his eyes off Hethor.

  The hatch cracked immediately. Wollers peered out. “Seaman Hethor. You are timely.” He tugged it all the way open, ushering Hethor into the cabin beyond.

  It was the stern cabin. Three narrow windows glinted in the flickering light of electrick lanterns. The ports showed muted colors of stained glass, which would likely be glorious when the ship sailed away from the sun. Other than the carven door and the colored windows, the captain’s accommodations were austere—two sea chests, a bed folded up to become a writing desk, two chairs and a bench and a chart table.

  The only luxury was the sheer size of the cabin. In no other respect did the place resemble the carpeted expanse of silver ornaments that deck rumor attributed to Smallwood. Hethor had never thought the captain a man of excess. He was glad to see himself proven correct.

  “Thank you for coming.” Smallwood was seated, Dr. Firkin standing behind him. The captain waved Hethor to the bench. A signal breach of naval etiquette. “We must speak with you on matters of grave concern to the ship.”

  Had the viceroy somehow sent a message? Hethor thought in panic. Was he to be turned out, or clapped in irons? Surely not, if they had asked him to come astern, cleaned and dressed. Would Smallwood take him farther from Gabriel’s charge?

  “I am ready to serve, sir.” Hethor tried to press the nerves out of his voice.

  “The loss of both Lieutenant Malgus and Midshipman de Troyes is a terrible blow to Bassett,” Smallwood said. “Especially with Dalworthy dead as well. We are shorthanded now for watch-standing, with no one to fill in for our navigators. It is my understanding that Lieutenant Malgus trained you in the instruments of his craft before dismissing you back to Chief Lombardo’s service.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hethor paused, uncertain. “I have some talent and experience with fine mechanisms.”

  “So you can take readings, and establish position?”

  “He had not time to teach me to plot charts, sir, but I can set the clocks and take our latitude, calculate present speed, and such tasks.”

  Wollers, in the other chair, exchanged glances with Smallwood, who nodded and cleared his throat before continuing. “But you could take the measurements, and consult with Lieutenant Wollers with regard to the charts?”

  This was not how he had wished to be restored to his work. Though Hethor felt a rush of excitement, it was nearly balanced by a parallel rush of shame. Excitement won through though—he would be free of the petty tyrannies of the deck, working again with the instruments and the mathematical precision that he had loved under Master Bodean and again under Lieutenant Malgus.

  “Sir … I would be pleased to aid the ship as you command.” The captain had to be desperate, to be asking him with such politeness.

  “It is for England, son,” said Smallwood, forcing a smile. “We have a crude map with rough directions, left by General Gordon’s expedition. It was recovered from the site of the massacre. Bassett is to bear east another ninety or so knots, and look for a certain bay in a cliff, about six thousand feet above the level of the sea. That is rather above our normal cruising altitude. It is my understanding that this bay may be hard to locate by eye, due to a tricky lay of the land. Sadly, our charts of the Wall are necessarily incomplete.

  “You, Seaman Jacques, must guide us there, with Lieutenant Wollers’ leadership. The entire ship’s company, and the noble memory of our dead, shall depend upon your skill.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Hethor, his elation melting to misery. He wanted freedom, not responsibility. Captain Smallwood might as well have kept him in chains as set him to this task.

  But it wasn’t just Smallwood, it was al-Wazir and Dairy and Lombardo and the Welshman and all the men of the decks and ropes and gasbag who needed him. Perhaps most of all, Lieutenant Malgus, in spite of his strange behaviors and secretive ways, needed Hethor’s help.

  Wollers showed him out and walked him to Malgus’ cabin. “It would not be seemly for a common seaman to bunk here,” the second mate said, “but as this is also the chart room, you may use this as your workplace. Keep your hammock on the deck and mess with your division and watch. You will need to take the midnight hour each evening. Do not fall prey to sleep when you return here with the box clock.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  The officer departed, and Hethor dropped to a seat on the low stool at Malgus’ chart table that he had originally mistaken for a desk. He looked about the tiny cabin. No windows, just two cupboards for the instruments, a sea chest, and a narrow bunk that looked far less desirable than his own hammock. And the chart table. There were sheets upon sheets of charts stored in the drawers that made up its pedestal.

  Nothing here spoke of the life of Simeon Malgus, lieutenant, RN. Hethor studied the chest. There was a fresh wax blob over the latch. It was marked with the captain’s signet, or possibly the purser’s seal. Despite Smallwood’s words of rescue, the officers had written Malgus off for dead, then.

  Hethor tugged open the chart drawers. The maps lay within. They were densely packed, printed on a fine paper almost as thin as onionskin, the better to stuff them in so that there would be a sufficiency for Bassett’s long voyage.

  “I seek the Wall,” Hethor told the empty room and, perhaps, Malgus’ ghost looking on.

  He fli
pped through charts of England’s water and sky lanes, penciled notes of trans-Atlantic navigation, down the drawers to New England and the Virginia Country and Georgia, down again to the Caribbean.

  Malgus had been particular in his organization.

  Hethor looked through another pair of drawers. These charts were more like sketches, not the printed and tinted sheets from the higher tiers. The papers were covered with rough coastlines and altitudinal cross-sections, notes on bays and harbors and plateaus along the Wall’s Atlantic coast, right to where it met Guinea.

  Carefully turning those fine sheets, he found a different chart, of Earth’s track around the sun. It was edged with notes on the cycles and epicycles of the balancing system. Someone—Malgus?—had sketched in the hand of God, a key held within His fingers.

  Hethor’s heart fluttered.

  The Key Perilous.

  On the back was an elevation of a temple, in the Eastern style like something the Middle Kingdom would have built—he had been told that Jerusalem and Constantinople were full of them, from the days of the Horde before Spanish steel and English leadership had driven the Chinese and their pony warriors back almost all the way to the Indus. The temple seemed to stand against a cliff face, if Hethor could trust the artist. In lettering that was definitely Malgus’ hand, the caption on the sketch read, “Return, reconsider, rebuild. No heart.”

  He put the papers away as seven bells of the evening rang. Time for the box clock, and the long climb to the navigator’s rest.

  For a moment, Hethor’s heart skipped again at the thought of the winged savages coming by night, swooping silent over the spine of the airship like sharp-shinned hawks over a stubbled field, to carry him off as handy as any squeaking mouse. He shook the image away. There was a job at hand, and a need, as well as a chance to make more of himself than any he had had since being expelled from New Haven.

  THE NEXT morning he sat with Wollers and reviewed the charts that Malgus had left behind, as well as the crude sketch recovered from the ground.

  “The bay is here on the drawing,” Wollers said, “with a warning, ‘Not easily spied.’ I do not see anything like it on Malgus’ chart.”

  “We are somewhere in this area.” Hethor stabbed his finger east of the great knee where the battle had taken place, marked on the chart as Sepulchrum Caii. Grave of Caius. “If the distances are correct, unless we meet a storm we shall be within a few knots of the bay tomorrow shortly after dawn. I do fear we shall have to climb quite a bit higher to reach it. I recommend we slow during this coming night so as not to overshoot our mark.”

  “Agreed.” Wollers turned the chart as if he could find wisdom in another lay of the land. “I will pass that order. During this day, see if you can establish the possible location of this high bay. There may be some pattern in the knees and columns of the Wall here that lend themselves to such concealment.”

  They all lend themselves to such concealment, thought Hethor as Wollers left the cabin. Nonetheless, except for his noontime measurements, he sat and sketched possible configurations of the land, trying to imagine the complex topography of the Wall in terms of the ways that clockwork fit together. There were always many solutions to a problem of horological design, but usually only one that truly made sense, made art of the mechanical soul of the thing.

  He thought the Wall might yield to the same logic.

  Working as he did, Hethor also had time to listen: to his breathing, feet pounding the deck overhead, and more distantly within the hull, occasional groans and shudders from the gasbag, the wind playing in the rigging.

  And, as always, the rattle of the Earth’s turning, the springs deep within the planet’s shell powering the days and seasons of the life of man. Here in the air, so close to the Equatorial Wall, whatever the reason, Hethor could not hear the dissonance he had detected previously. The world’s windings sounded normal once more.

  WOLLERS AWOKE Hethor just after dawn. “Come, now, to the poop.”

  Hethor rolled out of his hammock, dragged his fingers through his hair, and trotted after Wollers across the main deck and up the ladder to the poop deck. He’d never been there before.

  Midshipman Fine seemed to have the deck watch. He glared at Hethor with undifferentiated malice. Captain Smallwood stood near the tillermen, staring off the starboard side at the face of the Wall. It was forested here, insofar as Hethor could tell in the orange glare of the morning sun—narrow, tall trees of a light green and passing strange canopy. Nothing like the stout forests of New England, nor even the tropical hardwood riot of Georgetown. This forest swayed in the wind, as though the trees were no more than giant reeds.

  “What do you see, sailor?” Smallwood handed Hethor the spyglass.

  Almost shaking with pride, Hethor put the glass to his eye. He knew something of optics from his work with Master Bodean, and had made use of a glass in his duties as navigator, but this was the first time he had been called upon to render intelligence from the view. And by the captain at that. Hethor hoped not to disgrace himself. After a few moments of confusion, he found the shaking forest and scanned it.

  “What is our altitude, please, sir?”

  “Just over six thousand feet,” said Smallwood.

  The correct part of the Wall then, for all that it loomed ever higher over their heads like the edge of God’s Creation. Hethor wondered why his breathing did not labor, as he had been told it would at higher altitudes.

  He studied the shadows creeping away from the dawn. “According to what I understand of our charts,” he said, “there is a knee in this rock face. It would seem that this forest hides that cliff, folding it away in a blanket of green. If we make ten degrees east of south, dead slow, and watch our marks, I believe a narrow valley will open up. Cool, dark, and hidden.”

  “Good.” Smallwood took the spyglass from Hethor and snapped it shut. “Remain here with Lieutenant Wollers, and send a runner soonest you are certain. I must go forward and prepare for a shore party.”

  Hethor stood as the airship slowly eased toward the blanket of forest, marveling at how the green seemed to part as they approached the edge of the knee. Once he knew to look for it, he could see in perspective that the more distant forest past the gap boasted a smaller appearance. The narrow, shake-shouldered trees made that hard to find and focus his attention on.

  “Bamboo,” said Wollers suddenly. “A Chinese tree, like elms for the devils.”

  They entered a valley not as narrow as it had seemed, sort of a tall fjord cut from the stone-bordered sky. The tillermen slowly eased Bassett around a great bend to reveal a giant harbor of the air. Its contours were approximately the shape sketched in General Gordon’s map. A city stood there, rising high into the morning sun and plunging to the shadowed depths of the harbor. It was all of wood and wicker, vertical towers and ladders and bridges and cunning battlements balanced on ropes and poles. There was a scent of morning mist, and damp wood, but he smelled no cookfires, no brawny reek of bodies, no oiled scent of commerce.

  The city was quiet as a churchyard.

  “It rises for miles.” Hethor stared upward, wondering where the folk who had built the place had gone.

  “A vertical, wooden London,” agreed Wollers.

  “I wonder if we are at the proper altitude,” Hethor said. “Gordon’s column could have passed through this great maze anywhere. It would be like looking for a single man in downtown New Haven.”

  Together, he and Wollers scanned the vertical face, looking for some sign or clue indicating the passing of a British force.

  “There.” Hethor pointed at a spot a few hundred feet above their present altitude. “Those dark streaks against that pale palisade. Someone has lit cooking fires here, and recently. We should send a runner to the captain.” Librarian Childress could have done no better a job of observation, he thought with a swell of quiet pride.

  Wollers moved to pass the word, while Hethor watched his mark. The ship rose carefully, as pained and cautious in
her movements as any arthritic matron.

  The architecture was impressive. Entire forests had died to make this city. Hethor realized this was a place where a race such as the winged savages could dwell in comfort. His awe quickly collapsed to fear. A thousand savages could tumble upon Bassett and worry them all to their deaths in the shadows far below.

  A signal gun went off, the sharp report startling flocks of birds and bats. They rose in thick clouds from the forest that grew throughout the city.

  Hethor bit his tongue to hold in his shout of fear as fluttering wings in their millions met the sky all around Bassett, like dogs that would run before hunters of the air.

  FIVE

  THE MARINES already assembled in the waist of the ship ran to the rail. Their carbines crackled as they shot wildly into the mass of birds and bats that darkened the air around Bassett like smoke from a burning city.

  “Belay that firing immediately,” shouted Captain Smallwood as he returned to the poop deck.

  Officers and petty officers about the ship took up the order. The marines quickly stood down. Their lieutenant ran up and down the ranks berating his men. The clouds of winged creatures surrounding Bassett dissipated, seeking higher ground and more peaceful roosts.

  Wollers barked a series of steering orders to the tillermen and the ropes division, lest the airship drift into the walls of the city that now surrounded them. Hethor glanced backward, over the stern rail, to see blue sky beyond, ocean sparkling below. The Guinea Coast was a dark and distant line looming on the horizon.

  Honest terrestrial soil, so comfortingly horizontal, had traded places with the ever-vertical Wall, which itself had once been the foreboding shadow in the distance.