Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  He was reduced to sucking on roots and shoots of small, inoffensive-seeming water plants.

  “I will not … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … .”

  Each evening Hethor stopped before sundown. He would find a tree to sleep in away from whatever crashed heavily through the jungle at night and check it for snakes. Once settled he chewed on whatever shoots he’d found that day, then stared at the scratched writing on the golden tablet until the light stole his sight away from him.

  Malgus would be at the coast, somewhere with or near the Southern wise men the Jade Abbot had spoken of. The hierophants of this part of the world would dwell in cities, which meant ports. It made little sense to come inland. Here was trackless jungle, and no settlement at all save William’s fortress. Hethor wished that he had asked more questions when the Jade Abbot mentioned the Relics of Christ coming over the Equatorial Wall.

  Why?

  Who brought them?

  He did not care for Malgus in the first place, really, for all that the man had rescued him in Boston. Malgus had betrayed Hethor as well, in a sense, with the misleading trick of parachutes coming down from the Wall. Still Hethor did not think Malgus evil, as William of Ghent was. William had condemned Hethor to death, and sought to overturn the order of the world. Malgus simply worked at cross-purposes to Hethor’s mission from Gabriel.

  Where had the man landed in his great fall from the Wall?

  “I will not … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … .”

  On the fifth day out from the fortress Hethor came to a wide river that blocked his way west. He could not begin to judge its depth, for it was muddy and apparently in flood. It seemed narrower upstream, to the south. Hethor picked his away along the bank in that direction, looking for a log or some other way to cross the flow. The flood had a ticking chuckle to it, different from any water he had ever heard.

  Heard.

  Hethor shouted, dropped his golden tablet into a stand of ferns, and reached up to gently stroke his ears. Insects flew from the left, and he dislodged a leaf from his right.

  “Is it me? Can I hear?”

  His words were still lost to him, but Hethor could definitely hear the river, though as a ticking, the way he’d always heard the turning of the Earth.

  He fell to his knees, kissed his tablet, then looked up at another small noise to see a great, tawny cat staring at him from perhaps thirty feet distant.

  Hethor walked away slowly, backing from the cat’s gaze, but it sauntered after him. He turned to run. Over his shoulder he caught a flash of movement as the cat sped up. Hethor spun back around, brandished his tablet, and shouted, “In the name of God, leave me!”

  The cat pulled up sharply, eyes blazing in a bright reflection of the sheet of gold. It opened its mouth to another sound of clicking before walking back into the blue-green shadows of the jungle.

  “I will not … lose these words … ,” Hethor said, his voice at the verge of audibility now. They had saved his life, over and over again.

  “I WILL NOT … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … . I will not … lose these words … .”

  Ten days into the jungle, Hethor still followed the river south. He was too weak now to attempt a crossing, so weak he crawled most of the day, dragging his tablet with him. He’d tried to eat other things, eggs and insects, but that just made him sick. There had been more earthquakes, more animals, and once something dark and large that howled its way across the sky, but his memory grew fainter and more chaotic. He had seen a white bird, a parrot perhaps, several times, but could no longer recall why that might be important to him.

  He longed for cold chicken and corn liquor, a simple ride in a hearse over country roads, Royal Navy hardtack and rum. He longed for anything but this hot, moldering jungle with its smells of water and rotten flowers and the little clicking noises that always hovered just inside his hearing.

  One hand, then another, Hethor thought. One foot, then another. It was good that his boots were so stout, as the ground was tearing into his palms and knees as he crawled, making of them a painful mess.

  With a loud clattering, a small hairy foot planted itself between his hands. The shin was almost pressed into Hethor’s nose. He looked up, squinting, to green-tinged shadows of a familiar shape.

  “I will not … lose these words … ,” Hethor said. His voice sounded almost normal.

  The owner of the hairy foot bent down, a spear preceding him, and jabbered in a clicking, whistling sort of language. This was one of the small hairy men, Hethor realized, that had forced him off of the southern ledge of the Equatorial Wall to fall after Simeon Malgus.

  Straining, his every movement a palsy, Hethor fished within his coat for the golden tablet. Where was it?

  “Have I lost … these words … ?” he asked, but then it poked him, hurting his hand.

  Hethor drew the tablet out and brandished it unconvincingly at the hairy-footed spear carrier.

  More clicks and whistles, quite a few of them, accompanied by considerable running back and forth. A conference, then, of the little apes, as they circled around Hethor. Under their clicking and whistling, the clattering of gears, as if the entire world were nothing but automata within automata, every creature in God’s Creation a thing of brass gears and rings.

  Five or six of the little hairy men picked Hethor up and laid him on their spears stretched crosswise beneath him. Once he was balanced they began to run through the jungle, chanting to the rhythm of their steps. Hethor floated above them in the green-lit shadows like a small, almost-fallen angel making that final trip to ground.

  THE NEXT few days were a fevered blur of color and pain, always tinted green, though flashes of every hue in God’s palette seemed to pass before Hethor’s eyes. Once he awoke to find himself covered in long black tongues, as though his body were vomiting forth what lay within, only to realize they were leeches sucking him dry. He screamed himself back to sleep.

  Later, there was a moment of concern from a hairy face, brilliant yellow eyes so close to his their lashes might have touched, a furtive hand upon his forehead. He smelled flowers then, and heard more of the whistling click-speech. Beneath that speech and woven through it there was the clattering of gears and spheres that had dogged his hearing ever since it had first begun to return to him in the jungle.

  He awoke one morning in a terrible thirst. His head was clear, but he felt very weak. Hethor was barely able to move his arms. The leeches were gone, but his hands were bound in large leaves, greasy and stretched beneath their coverings. He was inside a simple hut, barely more than a lean-to, walled by vines and fronds woven together in a semblance of privacy. Or perhaps just for shade. It was daytime outside, but the light in his shelter was a uniform aquarian green.

  “Water.” Hethor rejoiced to hear his own voice, though it was cracked and dry as an old cobblestone. “Please, someone. Water.”

  One of the little hairy men stepped inside. No, thought Hethor, a hairy woman. He wasn’t sure how he could tell, for she was thin as any stripling lad, with no bosom to speak of, only a cloth waistband to hide her sex.

  Not that he would have looked.

  She had those brilliant yellow eyes, like liquid shards of sunlight, set in a small face almost indistinguishable from that of a monkey. She carried with her an enormous gourd. Its skin had been carved in complex geometries that could have been animals, or a junglescape, or just an abstraction of the mysteries of life. The smell of flowers followed her into Hethor’s little hut. A familiar scent, one from his fevered dreams.

  The hairy woman sat on the edge of the cot where Hethor lay. He tried to prop himself up to greet her, but the effort racked him with coughing, creating lingering pain in his ribs and the muscles of his stomach.

  She touched his forehead, patting him with her fingers in such a long and rhythmic way that he wondered if thi
s were speech among her race. She dipped her hand in the gourd to wipe water over his forehead and cheeks before lifting the gourd to his lips and steadying it at the exactly correct angle to avoid pouring water onto his face.

  Hethor drank deeply. This water was warm and sweet, almost nectar, though his thirst was so great he would have prized damp mud. The hairy woman watched him carefully, keeping the gourd tilted sufficiently to allow him to drink his fill.

  “Thank you,” Hethor finally said, pulling his face away from the gourd. He tried to wipe his lips but encountered the waxy slickness of the leaves wrapping his hands.

  She smiled, a flash of sharp teeth around long, biting canines, then wiped his mouth for him with the back of her free hand. Small as she was, Hethor realized the hairy woman was strong. She must be, in order to manage the gourd one-handed.

  “Thank you,” he said again.

  She clicked-whistled at him, the sound still underlain by that faint clattering of gears. Was she an automaton? Was he hallucinating? Or was his hearing so damaged that every sound carried that undertone?

  “Right.” Clumsy, he took her free wrist between his leaf-wrapped hands. “I am Hethor. Heth-or.”

  She chattered, something very much like laughter, then rose from his side and set the gourd on the floor. With a last flashing glance of those sun-yellow eyes, the hairy woman left his hut.

  Exhausted, Hethor let sleep reclaim him.

  THE NEXT time he awoke, it was to the smell of a stew or soup not unlike what William of Ghent had served him. Had that really been the last time he had eaten? No wonder he was so weak. His face itched, too. Hethor crossed his eyes, trying to see if he’d grown a real beard.

  “Hello,” he tried to call, though his voice again betrayed him. Daylight still reigned, flooding his hut with that lambent green.

  There was a racket just outside, followed by more chattering laughter. The hairy woman returned bearing a shallow wooden bowl of the stew and a rough-carved spoon. She squatted beside his cot, back on her haunches, and slowly fed him, one little spoonful at a time. Though he could smell meat in the stock, and it made his mouth water, the hairy woman gave Hethor only vegetables and broth. She kept smiling. Her eyes were bright.

  He could not recall ever having such attention paid to him. Sick in Master Bodean’s shop, Hethor had simply been packed off to his attic room with bread and water to sweat it out, the better not to pass his illnesses to Bodean and his sons. He did not remember much of life with his mother. Hethor presumed she must have fed him as an infant.

  Now there was a hand casually laid upon his arm, or tilting his chin, eyes close to his, a ready smile. Somehow it didn’t matter to Hethor that she was small and hairy as any jungle ape, another race of man entire—no woman had ever focused her full attention on him, except Librarian Childress for a few brief hours.

  This woman, he thought, is someone of whom the librarian would approve.

  Hethor realized he must still be feverish, to react so to the presence and touch of someone who was little more than an ape. His logical mind, back at New Haven Latin, warred with his emotional mind for a while, as stew kept spooning into his mouth, until his body, warmed and comforted, forced him to stop eating through sheer satiety.

  After the meal, as she was wiping his mouth, Hethor asked a question that had been lurking at the edges of his thoughts for a while.

  “Where is my golden tablet?” he croaked.

  She whistled and stared intently at him.

  Hethor mimed a rectangle with his leaf-wrapped hands. “My tablet,” he said, as though reinforcing the words would somehow help her understand.

  The hairy woman chirped. She then reached beneath him, hands burrowing in the rustling bedding of the cot, before producing the tablet. She stared at it for a moment, turning it in her hands, with an expression somewhere between lust and awe inasmuch as Hethor could read her nonhuman features, then handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said. Then: “I can’t call you ‘hairy woman.’ I am Hethor.” Tablet clutched in his elbow, he tapped his chest. “Heth-or.”

  She chittered her laugh again, then said in a passable imitation of his voice, “Heh-for.”

  “And you?” he asked, pointing toward her.

  She clicked and whistled, then again in more or less his voice, said, “Arellya.”

  Hethor felt a smile stretch his cheeks. “Arellya. A beautiful name.”

  Taking the bowl, she left.

  He studied the golden tablet for a while. It seemed to be more sensible, somehow. Somewhere in the depths of his deafness perhaps he had overheard the language of God, and now the words of the tablet echoed just outside his hearing.

  Which, Hethor realized, given the way everything around him now clicked and whirred, might even have a grain of truth to it.

  He tried to form his mouth around the strange words, the clusters of letters that might or might not be the Tetragrammaton. What did it mean? Why did God, or Gabriel, or some agent of Heaven, keep sending him this message, over and over? The tablet had been a lifesaver for him. But its purpose had to be more than that. It had to hold a greater meaning.

  Though no answers came to him, Hethor felt at peace with the mystery of the words for the first time since they had come to him. He let the tablet rest on his chest, staring out at the leaves and vines surrounding him, wondering where he was, where he should go, what would be next in his quest.

  “I must take control,” Hethor said aloud, “not be subject to the whims of the viceroy or Malgus or William of Ghent.” Gabriel had charged him with finding the Key Perilous, not one of his enemies. Nor even his allies.

  Hethor flexed the palm of his hand, thinking of the key-shaped scar the silver feather had left behind, but the leafy wrappings hid any view he might have. He suspected all the abuse he had recently taken had obviated the scar with new damage.

  Arellya looked through the curtain, smiled at him, and pulled down the line of leaves and vines.

  He sat a bit above a clearing in the jungle. The mighty river muttered nearby but out of sight. His bed, his little hut, were surrounded by the diminutive hairy men. They stood in circling ranks, male and female, young and old, parent and child, each with a little bundle of goods and weapons at their feet.

  As Hethor watched in growing horror, with a chorus of clicks and whistles, they all bowed to him. Every last one, even Arellya.

  “No,” he said. “Not this. Get up, by God. You will not bow to me!”

  “Heth-or,” they all intoned, like monks chanting. “Heth-or.”

  He struggled to his feet, swaying. He threw his hands out in an unsteady attempt at balance. “Get up! This is wrong. I’m not here to be your leader. I’m not … I’m …”

  Words failed him. The hairy men continued to chant his name, their heads pressed to the leaf-strewn floor of the clearing, as the brilliant tropical sun blazed down upon them all.

  EIGHT

  HETHOR TRIED for the rest of that day to get the hairy men to stop bowing and treating him like a god-king. He yelled until they chanted his name in time to his rants. He grabbed one or another by the shoulders and pulled them to their feet, where they would gaze in ecstasy upon his face, boneless as eels, until he dropped them again.

  That night, even with the leaf-and-vine curtains of his hut pulled to, Hethor was forced to listen to his name being chanted like a prayer.

  The next day, more of the same frustrations.

  “Hey,” Hethor shouted, “I’m just a man.”

  “Heth-or, Heth-or.”

  With “ma-an, ma-an” as counterpoint.

  He ran around the clearing, or at least hobbled at a brisk pace. They followed him. That was when Hethor realized his hairy man contingent was growing. More of the tiny folk continued emerging from the jungle.

  He tried to pick a fight, shoving and shouting.

  They just grinned, chanting his name.

  Hethor finally threw a tantrum. He yelled and screamed and leapt
about on his still-sore feet until his ankles felt ready to snap. He fetched the golden tablet from his cot and hurled it to the ground.

  “Stop!” Hethor shouted. “Someone please just please talk to me!”

  He sat at the foot of his cot, back to the crowded clearing, and stifled the hot, tired tears that threatened to burst forth. Somehow this was even worse than the fighting, the cold, the fear. Being bowed to made him feel dirty. He was no slaveholder or raider or workhouse tyrant.

  Arellya came and squatted next to him. Her fine-boned hand rested gently on his shoulder. “Hethor,” she said, in a quiet, normal voice.

  His breath shuddered. “What?”

  She clicked and whistled, then tugged at him, trying to make him turn around.

  Hethor grudgingly looked.

  The clearing was still full of Arellya’s folk. Many watched him, but they were no longer in their worshipful array. Some built fires, while others wove shelters of jungle leaves. A group of young males, spears at the ready, stood guard over the golden tablet where Hethor had thrown it in his temper.

  He looked at Arellya again. “Thank you.”

  She smiled her too-toothy smile, took Hethor by the hand, and led him out of the hut to a fire circle. There he ate a pale yellow stew of grubs and fruit. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Arellya and her folk, Hethor’s sense of disgust at being worshipped transmuted to a sort of golden-hearted kinship.

  “We are all men, in God’s image, are we not?” he asked the circle.

  Clicks and whistles all around answered him, so Hethor had some more of the pale stew.

  WALKING BACK to his hut in the miserable, stinking heat of the late afternoon, Hethor stopped before the young men guarding the tablet. They immediately opened their circle of spears to let him step forward. When Hethor bent to pick up the tablet, he heard his name whispered. When he stood again and looked around, a number of the hairy men were forming their worshipful ranks again.