Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  Ah, thought Hethor. The tablet. It is not me they worship; it is God’s word.

  He marveled that even jungle savages of such primitive ancestry could recognize the hand of God in their lives, when a sophisticated divinity student like Pryce Bodean had denied the same.

  “Who’s the ape now?” Hethor whispered with a chuckle. Then he set the tablet back down and motioned for the larger group of hairy men to rise and disperse. He left the spearmen to their guard.

  Loath as he was to leave the tablet behind again, it was easier than withstanding the awed regard of the massed hairy men. Besides, they clearly intended to guard it from all comers. They would protect the precious artifact for his future use. Probably better than he could himself.

  Inside his hut, Hethor was at least shaded. Otherwise he was more uncomfortable than he had been at any time since being brought to the village. If insects, heat, and smells were what bothered him most now, that probably indicated that he was recovered for the most part from his fatigue and injuries.

  Arellya approached, whistling for him from just outside. Behind her, life in the camp went on as usual. She had an old male with her, doddering and pale-furred, with a loose mouth that suggested a complete lack of teeth.

  “Hello, Arellya.” Hethor was glad to see her.

  Arellya flashed her toothy grin. “Hethor.” She took the old hairy man by the hand, held their joined fingers up toward Hethor in greeting, and inclined her head. “Kalker.”

  “Hello, Kalker.”

  Kalker said something so unlike the usual whistles and clicks of hairy man speech that Hethor didn’t catch it all.

  “Excuse me?” Hethor said, cupping his ear to mime.

  Kalker repeated himself. “Salve.”

  Salve? That’s Latin, Hethor thought, though the hairy man’s terrible accent would earn him a caning under Headmaster Brownlee. “Ah … ,” Hethor said. “Quod velles?” What do you want?

  It was rude, abrupt, and in the infinitive besides, but Hethor was too surprised to work out conversational sentences in a language he had only been taught to read.

  Kalker grinned, his lack of teeth becoming painfully obvious. “Loquamur,” the old hairy man said. Let us talk.

  They continued in broken Latin, missing one another’s intentions almost as often as they understood. But at least it was common ground, rather than the frustrating impenetrability of trying to speak with Arellya.

  “You are Hethor,” Kalker said.

  “Yes. Me Hethor.”

  “You are angel?”

  “No! Man! Me man.”

  “God’s messenger.”

  “Not an angel.”

  “Messenger. One who talks. Bring divine word.”

  Hethor had to admit this old hairy man living deep in the jungle on the far side of the Equatorial Wall from Rome or New Haven Latin spoke the language better than he did.

  “No,” Hethor said. “No divine word.”

  Kalker said something he didn’t understand.

  “What?”

  The old hairy man tried again. “ … gold …”

  “The table,” Hethor said, incorrectly. What was the world for ‘tablet’?

  Kalker nodded. “God’s word on gold; you bring gold here. You bring God’s word!”

  And how did they know it was God’s word? “Are you a Christian?” asked Hethor.

  Kalker let out a long, chittering laugh, then turned to explain something, at length, to Arellya. Eventually she laughed, too. They both stared at Hethor, bright yellow eyes gleaming like a brace of twinned suns.

  “Christ not for us,” Kalker finally said. “Christ for … men. Only for … men.”

  “Christ died for all men,” Hethor insisted.

  “We are not men,” said Kalker. “We are …”

  “What?”

  Kalker chattered to himself for a moment. Then: “We are the correct people, not men.”

  “I am a man,” Hethor said. “Tell them to stop bowing down before me.”

  “They do not bow before a man,” Kalker answered. “They bow before the messenger of the words of God.”

  IN THE evening, Hethor’s sense that he heard clattering gears inside even the smallest things was stronger than ever. Tiny and hairy, resembling children costumed as so many apes, the correct people danced before a great fire. They threw fruits and meat and even their spears and breechclouts into it. Some fell to the ground, coupling, so that he was forced to avert his eyes. Drums pounded a wandering rhythm that filled the night like a heartbeat. The stars above seemed to waver with the tempo. Even the bright thread of the moon’s track swayed, the sky itself seeming to quake. Clicking and whistling they sang, the music counterpoint to the rhythms of the dance.

  The food on the fire crackled and hissed and raised a smell not unlike a feast fit for angels. The correct people raised a sweat of their own, the scent almost sweet and more than a little challenging to Hethor’s nose. Beetles the size of Hethor’s hand and larger flew out of the jungle into the flames, exploding like little fireworks as they burned, while enormous moths with crying faces upon their wings circled above. Ghost-pale birds rustled and croaked in the surrounding trees.

  He sat in front of his hut where Arellya had so often lately squatted to watch him. There he listened to the clattering. Even the wind seemed a thing of metal artifice, the crackling flames mechanical in their hunger for the fuel on the fire. Every one of the correct people moved with the clicking of an automaton, yet another counterpoint to their click-whistle language and their shuffling steps. Hethor felt as though he was witness to a great conference of metal men, a sort of coven of fleshly machines met to worship in a jungle lair.

  Just as he had lain in his narrow bed in Master Bodean’s attic to listen to the clattering turn of the world, so Hethor now turned his ears to the sounds that tugged at them. He was close enough still to his recent deafness to feel a warm and profound gratitude for the return of his hearing, even if it was strained through this metal sieve.

  All Creation was artifice, was it not? Anyone with eyes could see that, bearing witness to Earth’s orbital track, the gears atop the Equatorial Wall, the mechanical motions of the moon and the stars, even the lamp of the sun. Why wouldn’t men, and correct people, as well as animals, beetles, trees, fire, and wind be artifice?

  Hethor could not decide if this was heady philosophy or maudlin foolery. Instead he closed his eyes and listened, really listened, to the underlying music of the world. The pounding beat of the correct people’s festival-rite only served to make that underlying music clearer. It seemed as though it provided a texture richer and thicker than any silence against which the world could make itself heard to him.

  The beetles buzzed like tiny spring-wound toys. The fire’s crackle was the disjointed fall of a box of small brass parts, tinkling forever. The correct people moved and spoke and sang with a precision fit for any ship’s clock or astronomer’s timepiece. Even the smells seemed composed of smaller and smaller mechanisms, each one’s parts themselves assembled from tinier parts, as if all of Creation held a myriad more Creations nestled inside itself.

  As each man was a Creation of his own, a mind unique in God’s world.

  The words began to come to him.

  “No …”

  “ … yes …”

  “ … three orange and …”

  “ …feet …”

  “ … he loved her once …”

  “ …I am whole! …”

  “ …have a care …”

  “ …joy …”

  “ … we walked for seven days before we found water …”

  “ … he is one of the grub-men, but God has still seen …”

  “ … golden plate, words upon it …”

  They were talking about him. Hethor was hearing the correct people speak, building their words back up from the clicks and whirrs of God’s tiny gears within them.

  “ … Arellya says …”

  Arellya says what? The
memory of her touch, her eyes locked with his, was a sudden surge in Hethor’s gut.

  “Kalker knows better. But he won’t tell.”

  “Look at that one! Green as any crocodile, and I’ll wager it’s …”

  “ … no good. Never any good when God …”

  “Hot! Hot! Hot!”

  She touched his arm, and Hethor opened his eyes to see Arellya, whom he already knew was there, offering him something baked in a banana leaf, smiling with all her teeth. He took the food. Amid the buzzing of the beetles and the deep, roasting smell of the festival-rite fire, Hethor greeted her in the language of the correct people.

  “Hello, Arellya, and my thanks.”

  She wasn’t the least surprised. “Why did it take you so long to find our words?”

  MORNING BROUGHT a red-stained sun, a clearing full of gently snoring correct people, and the heavy, breath-choking smell of ashes. Hethor awoke sprawled on the ground just outside his hut, mere feet from his cot. His body ached due to the roots and rocks on which he had slept. He itched from the attentions of various night-dwelling insects. He wished he had William of Ghent’s razor to set upon his face.

  He didn’t mind.

  At this moment, Hethor was satisfied. He felt as happy as he could ever remember feeling in his life. Arellya slept nearby, curled up like a cat. The correct people woman was not someone he could court, or even love, but there was a species of affection between them previously unknown to him, all the more so as it had developed in the absence of words. They had talked for hours of small things—the beauty of the beetles, the colors of the jungle, the height of the Wall, how well this one danced and that one drummed. All that sort of idle chatter that had always eluded Hethor, tying his tongue, in the days of his youth back in New Haven.

  Last night, somehow, he had found a way of listening to the world that finally allowed things to make sense once more. Not only was he happy, but he felt centered, like he belonged. Not since Gabriel came to him had Hethor known that kind of peace.

  The thought of the archangel made his right hand itch. Hethor looked. The little key-shaped scar was prominent once more, standing out from the more recent wounds and insults that limned his palm in angry red and callused white.

  “It is not my place to be happy, is it?” Hethor asked his hand, speaking to the uncaring scar. The Key Perilous awaited.

  Arellya awoke at the sound of his voice, as did some of the other correct people. She smiled at Hethor. “Good morning, Messenger.”

  Last night she had told him her people thought “Hethor” was his word for “Messenger.” She had insisted it was his name, even if Hethor himself did not know that.

  “Arellya,” Hethor said, somewhere between politeness and affection. The clicks and whistles coming from his own mouth still sounded and felt strange, but in his head the correct people’s language was already as natural to him as his own Queen’s English.

  Her name, of course, sounded very different in her own language than it had in his mouth when she first taught him to say it. Sort of a rising whistle, with a silent pause at the top, and a liquid ell sound that was also a click.

  Hethor liked that version better than his Anglicized “Ar-el-yuh.”

  “When will you take to the water road?” she asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “The river.” Arellya’s voice was patience itself. “When will you take to the water road?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Hethor said.

  “You already know the perils of walking in our jungle. The water road is the only path that can carry you as far as you need to travel.”

  Hethor sighed, smiling. “I don’t know if I want to leave. Your jungle is hot, the air heavy and dense, but this is a kindly place to those who know how to live in it. I would guest as long as you allow me to.”

  “Messenger, God did not send you and your wonderful gold plate to us.” Arellya managed to sound exasperated, even through her clicks and whistles and the underlying clatter of gears. “He intended something else. The correct people are like the ants beneath the jungle floor—we are a part of our place, and neither we nor our place would survive without one another. God does not send us messages except in the fall of rain and the heat of the sun. Your message, it is for something grand, for someone in a distant city of stone and colored wood.”

  “I …” Hethor knew perfectly well that Gabriel had not sent him on a quest to find a jungle home south of the Equatorial Wall. Even if he was tempted to be faithless to the charge that had been laid upon him, the resurgent scar pulsing on his hand was reminder enough of what was at stake. “You are correct, Arellya.”

  “Of course,” she said with a small smile.

  “I must go on.”

  Kalker settled next to them, groaning his age. “May you both dance in the shadows of the sun.”

  “Good morning,” said Hethor. Arellya nodded.

  “So you have found your spirit-magic,” Kalker said to Hethor.

  “No …”

  “Yesterday, we were so many whistling savages. Today we are the correct people, with a different standing in your eyes. Did you come to wisdom on your own in the dark of the night?”

  “Magic is … ungodly.”

  “Magic is.” With that, Kalker was content to sit and gaze at Hethor, neither worshipful nor confrontational.

  “I need to take up the golden plate,” Hethor said, nodding at the group of guards sleeping in a circle, sitting each with their backs to the thing, spears on their laps. Even in the height of the previous night’s frenzy, there had always been a watch. “I must carry it toward the sea and find a man named Malgus. Then together we will seek other men of greater wisdom to direct me.”

  “Wisdom is,” said Arellya.

  This time, Kalker nodded.

  “Can you put me on the water road?” asked Hethor.

  At his own question, he shuddered. Already the day was growing hot. Mosquitoes and blackflies whined; larger things rustled in the trees. The thought of the river was more threat than comfort, dangers in the water, falls and floods and huge crocodiles lurking in the muddy depths.

  “The young males have been working,” said Arellya. “In the woods, they have been making barkboats and rafts, carving paddles and steering oars.”

  “There is only one of me,” Hethor said mildly.

  “Many will come.”

  “I will not take them.”

  Kalker frowned. “You cannot refuse.”

  “Who speaks for the correct people?” Hethor asked.

  “I do,” said Kalker, “those times when it is not sufficient for each correct person to speak for themselves.”

  “You are the headman?” Somehow, this was not surprising.

  “No, but I speak.”

  “The correct people have no headman,” said Arellya. “Each is their own.”

  “Well, Speaker,” Hethor said to Kalker, “tell your young males that they are brave and full of fire, and my respect for their dedication knows no limits. But this is my journey, and I must undertake it alone. So far my travels have not been lucky for those around me. I do not expect improvement.”

  Arellya touched his arm, her grip firmer, more possessive, than it had been. “You cannot stop them. If you take to the water road, they will follow. If you stumble into the jungle, they will follow. It is not you, Messenger. The word of God passes by not once in a dozen generations, perhaps not a dozen of dozens. Let them follow the word. If the word leads them to the limits of their life, that is their choice.”

  “So it is to be a river progress?” asked Hethor. “With the correct people in the flow?”

  “By the will and want of everyone who comes.” Kalker reached out, touched Hethor’s knee where he sat. “Most of all, your will.”

  AS THE days passed, the correct people assembled a flotilla of canoes and rafts. They tied each little craft to the knobby knees of trees that grew out of the water like amphibious sentinels. Vines hung heavy there, an
d monkeys with green-tinged fur prowled close by to watch the correct people launch their fleet. Logs in the water moved against the current, crocodiles, a great gold-brown eye rolling open from time to time, but they did not approach the impromptu port.

  Standing on a mound of clay to watch the effort, Hethor found that the river smelled much different from the jungle village nearby. More of mud and less of growth, with an unhealthy reek as if great monsters rotted in the watercourse’s dank bed. The flow still had the coffee-colored, flooded look Hethor remembered from his first encounter weeks ago.

  He discovered that though his sense of the passage of time moment to moment was as strong as ever, his sense of the days had vanished somewhere on the Equatorial Wall. It had not yet returned to him. Hethor shrugged—he was moving as fast as he could, at least while maintaining life and limb intact. The world would fare as it did until he could unwrap Gabriel’s mystery.

  Not for the first time, he wished the archangel had gone straight to the queen and all her armies. On the other hand, all her armies would not have been enough to pass over the Wall.

  All of life was a puzzle, Hethor thought, his own no more or less than anyone else’s.

  The other thing he had lost, besides his sense of the passage of days, was that feeling of happiness with which he had awoken after the festival-rite. The Key Perilous was back in his thoughts, itching in the scar on his hand.

  “I am ready,” Hethor said to Arellya suddenly. “Tell the young males to take up their spears and supplies and join me on the water road.”

  Though she was only chest-high to him, Arellya reached up and hugged Hethor, placing her arms around his neck as she hitched herself higher to kiss his lips. The closeness of her face made his new mustache prickle and fold, while the pressure of her lips was something entirely new to him.

  He stood, the taste of sweetgrass and clay in his mouth, and marveled at what he didn’t understand while shouts and calls echoed around him. The correct people moved to their watercraft.