Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  “The steersman did not.”

  “No. There are four dead, including him. The other three were lost saving you.”

  That pained Hethor’s heart in a way that the deaths of various of Bassett’s people had not. He was, in a sense, captain to this crew. Their lives were his to save or spend. No matter the cost of the spending.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “It was where their way led them. They walked along the water road a while in company with the Messenger. None protested his passing.”

  That seemed a strange way to think of it, as far as Hethor was concerned. Who would have time to protest being eaten by a crocodile?

  “I was not paying attention,” he began, but Arellya’s free hand touched his lips.

  “You pursued your spirit-magic into the Message, Messenger. Do not fault this old half-salt river if its small gods fought back. Even the crocodile only follows his nature. You must follow yours.”

  “Where is the plate now?”

  “In your hands, silly little monkey.” She leaned over and kissed him, lightly brushing his lips. “Take some fresh water, eat a bit of fruit, and rest. It will still be here when you are better.”

  LATE THAT afternoon he took up the tablet again. There was slime crusted on it, and blood, but he didn’t try to clean the filth off. His heart was sore, his faith in the spirit-magic, whatever it was, bruised by his failure with the crocodile.

  “God … world, then God, then God … world,” Hethor said.

  Heart, heartsore, the heart of things. With a whirr, another word came to him.

  “Heart. The heart of God is the heart of the world.” Hethor looked up and shouted, “I understand!”

  There was a rippling cheer from the correct people, but nobody asked him what it was that he understood. Instead they busied themselves lashing their flotilla together again. No one had the slightest desire to put ashore in the salt-raddled forest, dark and dank as it was. Better to risk crocodiles in the night than to crouch in those horrid, stinking shadows.

  He took up the tablet again, willing the words to come to him. There had been life and death in these tablets already, all three of them now. He knew he would not get a fourth.

  “The heart of God is the heart of the world.” His fingers traced the first two lines. The third and fourth were harder, but the last two almost came to him. “ … God … the world. As … God, so … the world. God in the world. God of the world. God begat the world.”

  Hethor closed his eyes, let the metal under his fingers reveal the fine and finer structures that whirled within its form. The form carried the ghost, so to speak, of what the words and letters had meant to their author—be that Gabriel, God, or some other divine agency. Clockmakers, even, he supposed.

  “As God lives,” Hethor said, “so lives the world.”

  It was like a bell tolling in his head. He eagerly looked at the middle lines, that would join them together.

  “The heart of God is the heart of the world.

  “As man lives, so lives God.

  “As God lives, so lives the world.”

  That was it. The divine message that he had been pursuing since the first golden tablet had come to him in the vertical city.

  That was it?

  He’d chased across half the world to hear something almost scandalously heretical, and nonsensical to boot. Comparing man to God, as if they were complementary terms in a syllogism, was just wrong.

  Or was he focused on Pryce Bodean’s God, the God of his childhood churches, rather than Arellya’s god, who breathed with the continental green lungs of African jungles?

  “Arellya,” Hethor said quietly.

  She stepped over a tightly lashed pair of canoes to sit with him. “How goes it?”

  He read her the message on the tablets.

  She smiled. “I worried that you might never understand the words, Messenger. You make me proud.”

  Though Hethor wished for it, she did not kiss him that time.

  NINE

  MORNING BROUGHT panic of another kind. They awoke just after dawn to find themselves still drifting among the brooding salt jungles. A distant roaring or booming could be heard. If it was a beast, it was huge. To make such a noise would require a mouth large enough to swallow one of the river’s killer crocodiles.

  The flotilla scrambled to cut free its member vessels, the better to pull apart and fight or flee as needed. The correct people did very little talking under this threat, far different from their usual chattering joy in almost every aspect of life.

  “What comes?” Hethor asked. His heart raced, and though he hated the brand of coward, he could taste coppery fear in his dry mouth.

  Arellya shrugged, a gesture she had copied from him. “We do not know. The birds are not fleeing, and nothing in the jungle screams, so perhaps it is not so dangerous.”

  Or perhaps it has driven everything else off, Hethor thought, but he did not want to say that.

  The monster approached them in a rush of water, a wake or wall perhaps a yard high. The booming noise was the sound of the water racing upriver, echoing off the trees on each bank to be magnified. The correct people shouted and whistled, some few casting their spears, but Hethor began to laugh.

  “It is a tidal bore,” he said, using the English words for the thing, “a rush of water from the Great Salt River.”

  “The river itself attacks us?” Arellya shrieked.

  “No,” Hethor said as the water hit the boats and rafts, scattering them further and turning more than a few over. Correct people tumbled in the air, splashed yelling into the water, clung to each other and their boats.

  It was gone within a minute, even the noises. Those who had tumbled in were helped out, and boats were righted. No one seemed to be missing or badly hurt, though some belongings were lost.

  “If that is a peaceful bore,” said Arellya, imitating Hethor’s English word, “I fear to ever see an angry one.”

  “That is like a rain within the river,” Hethor said, trying for a better explanation. “It is of the river’s nature, but only near the Great Salt River.”

  This information was passed around among the boats to much nodding and chin-scratching. They shortly reformed the flotilla to collectively pole and paddle their way downriver again. Even the air reeked of salt, and what Hethor thought was the medicinal smell of seaweed. Everyone agreed they were close to their goal.

  “The Great Salt River,” Arellya told him. “That will be a sight to delight the soul.”

  “Surf.” Hethor once more of necessity used the English word. “Ripples in the Great Salt River, very big ones that fold over on themselves. They are beautiful.”

  As the day went by, the water road grew wider and wider, until they lost sight of the northern bank. The flow shifted from brown to a murky olive color, but it still seemed more river than sea to Hethor. They had not crossed into what he thought to be ocean, so he held his counsel even as various of the correct people dipped their hands in the water to taste, debating saltiness. Would the Great Salt River be pure white, like actual salt? Would it be brown, or green, or some color known only to God?

  Sometime after noon, the question answered itself. Streams of white foam, or perhaps little bubbles, appeared in the water. Up ahead the water looked choppy, surging rather than flowing.

  “That,” said Hethor, “is the Great Salt River.”

  Eager to be on the sea itself, the correct people paddled furiously, crossing rough water and a great bar to struggle among the waves. They screamed with delight as they were tossed, then dropped.

  “South,” called Hethor. “Turn south. Do not go out to sea.”

  Arellya joined him in calling to the excited correct people, but not all heeded the direction. At least three canoes and two rafts paddled enthusiastically out onto open water, far past range of voice.

  Hethor despaired of ever seeing them again.

  “It is their road, their way,” Arellya shouted over the
splashing of the waves.

  They struggled south behind the line of breaking waves. Hethor scanned the shore. As best as he knew, Malgus had come to earth somewhere along this coast, but finding the man by simply casting about would be like searching all of Connecticut for a missing house cat.

  Hethor scanned the jungled shore. Here, just as along the river, the trees came right to the water, omitting the usual courtesy of dunes and salt marshes, or decent rocky headlands—the sorts of geography Hethor was accustomed to along Long Island Sound. The jungle didn’t even rise to the horizon. In his entire journey from Arellya’s village, Hethor had been journeying across a great, low plain.

  He finally spotted something out of place—a spire or spar that rose high. It glinted in the afternoon sun. Hethor stared, then waved for Arellya and some of the other correct people to look where he pointed.

  “It is stone,” Arellya said. “With a great fire atop.”

  A lighthouse, thought Hethor. Which implied a port of substance. “A large village awaits us,” he called out. “A village of boats, and stones, and rock roads such as you have never seen.”

  On a great adventure, clearly ready for anything now that they had seen the sea, his correct people cheered.

  They worked their way southward for another two hours, the lighthouse growing more visible, other towers rising beyond it. At the same time, the chop whipped up on the sea. It was clear to Hethor that a storm was working in from farther offshore. Though they had not yet reached their goal, he finally decided that the flotilla must move ashore.

  “Land,” Hethor shouted through cupped hands. “We must make our way to land.”

  The rising wind stole his words, though he stood in the dangerously rocking canoe. He milled his arms, trying to attract attention, Arellya yelling with him.

  Some of the flotilla saw Hethor’s signals, some did not, or perhaps chose to ignore him in their eagerness to reach the lighthouse. These people had never seen the sea, did not understand storms or open water, he realized. He wished mightily they had landed at the mouth of the river and walked south. Certainly the correct people would have known how to conduct that march, and they could have safely admired the sea from the shore.

  As it was, Hethor and Arellya and their paddlers beached themselves unaccompanied. They glimpsed other canoes and rafts fighting the swells farther south, trying to come ashore in the wind and rain that had come up with the dusk. The oncoming storm in turn drove the surf harder.

  Ten of them gathered in the slight shelter of a stand of palms. “We have to help the others,” Hethor shouted.

  “None can move in this weather,” someone shouted back.

  “Shelter,” said Arellya.

  He could not persuade them to do anything more.

  Hethor felt a terrible guilt as the correct people wove a covering into the root balls of some enormous cypress-like trees just inland from the palms. Some of his flotilla was surely lost at sea, and more would drown. Arellya seemed less concerned, mostly sharing in his anxiety rather than the reasons behind it, while the erstwhile paddlers worked with almost their usual cheer.

  Later, as they huddled under shelter with no light, and only a little cold food in their bellies, Hethor curled up between Arellya and one of the other correct people. The rest gathered around them in turn. “Why is death so easy for you?” he asked, whispering fiercely to her.

  She half turned, so he could smell her sweet breath, and whispered back. “Death is never easy for the one whose path it is.”

  “But your people, you are not afraid. You almost rejoice in it.”

  “They came because they would; they died because they were doing what they chose to do.”

  He could see her teeth gleaming even in the dark of their shelter, punctuating her smile.

  “They are gone now, too many of them. This hurts my heart,” Hethor said.

  “Mine, too. But what do you think death is?”

  “At death we … we go to God.” Hethor wasn’t sure he actually believed that the Christ would return someday to restore everyone from their graves to a gleaming clockwork Heaven, though he had certainly heard enough sermons on the subject. The Winding of the Souls, many people called it. The enrapture was an article of fervent faith among some sects of Christians. It always felt like arrant wish fulfillment to Hethor.

  What God wanted was for people to live well—that was clear to Hethor both from the Bible and from common sense. The rest of what people chose to believe was churchiness of various degrees.

  “When correct people die, we become part of the world,” whispered Arellya softly. “When we die in a beautiful place, we share that beauty. When we die in strangeness, we become strange. When we die in hunger, we are part of all hunger. So there is joy in dying where and how you choose.”

  How different was that from the teachings he had heard all his life?

  That night Hethor dreamed that the Earth was a giant raft sailing a brass sea. Smallwood commanded everyone, giving rambling funeral sermons as people fell off the edges in never-ending waves.

  HE AWOKE before dawn to quiet and an absence of dripping water. Extracting himself from the great, hairy pile of correct people, Hethor took his golden tablet and slipped from the shelter to pick his way to the shore.

  There was actually a little bit of muddy beach beyond the brambled palms, which he stepped out onto. Looking south, he could see the lighthouse gleaming like a star fallen to Earth. The glow was pale and steady, which implied electricks rather than the more old-fashioned kerosene lamps some New England lighthouses still used. Hethor was surprised that there should be electricks in the Southern Earth.

  Arellya joined him, slipping her arm around his waist. “We will look for our males as we walk south today,” she said. “We will rejoice in who we find alive, sing the deaths of those we find beyond help, and honor the memories of those we never encounter at all. This is our way. Can you follow our way, at least on this day, Messenger?”

  Hethor loved the feeling of warmth where she touched him, the gentle pressure and silk-fine texture of her hair. He was afraid to speak, afraid to spoil the moment, but she deserved an answer. “Yes,” he said. “I can follow your way.”

  Together they watched color steal into the sky as waves rushed at their feet and mists rose from the jungle bearing the stench of life. Her touch lingered long upon his wrist.

  AS THE day wore on they made a slow pace of walking. Scouting ahead of Hethor and Arellya the correct people quickly found wreckage, but it was their own canoe, shattered in the night by the storm.

  After a time they found a raft, mostly intact, but no sign of any more correct people. Arellya stood knee-deep in the ocean and sang for a while, free-form poetry about the Great Salt River and souls riding the waves. Moving on, they found a dead correct person, crabs gnawing at his body. Arellya and the others refused to bury him. Instead they sang another version of her earlier song, all of them together this time.

  Farther along they found another canoe with six correct people dancing around it.

  So the day went—the living, the dead, and the missing. By dusk they were perhaps three or four miles from the lighthouse, which seemed to be the northern end of the city. They had found twelve canoes and rafts from the flotilla out of the more than thirty that had originally departed on the water road. Some were missing their crews.

  Hethor counted Arellya and fifty-three young males of the correct people with him at sundown.

  “When we are again home,” said one of the males, “I will make a story of the Great Salt River.”

  Arellya chittered her laughter. “We will all make that story. Like good shelter, the stories will weave together.”

  Hethor sat silent into the evening. He was sad despite his promise to Arellya. He turned the golden tablet over and over in his hands while the correct people began to try out different versions of their story. They ate grubs and shoots foraged raw from the swamp and whistled and clicked far into the night.


  “As God lives, so lives the world,” Hethor said to himself quietly. He had no stomach for the uncooked grubs, but sidled off munching on some shoots to watch the starlit surf and think further on his golden tablet. What did it mean, then, that the Mainspring was running down?

  Were the earthquakes the nightmares of God?

  Or His palsies?

  THE NEXT day after breaking their way through more jungle and mud, they had to swim two miles of swamp, clinging to driftwood, to reach the sandy beach at the base of the lighthouse. By some miracle all the correct people made it, though Hethor expected crocodiles to leap out at any moment.

  The lighthouse itself was of a cyclopean architecture Hethor had never seen outside of fanciful paintings, though it did resemble William of Ghent’s jungle fortress. The building appeared to have been raised in solid rock, towering perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the sand around its base, and hexagonal in cross-section. The base in turn simply plunged into the sand like the blade of a sheathed dagger, rather than revealing anything that might be considered a foundation. At the top each of the six faces branched out in a prong to support whatever mechanism generated the light. The whole structure was seamless, a deep uniform brown. There were no doors or windows that Hethor could locate.

  “Is this how the huts of your village are made?” Arellya asked him. Unlike Hethor, she did not seem particularly awed by the lighthouse.

  “Not at all,” said Hethor. “In fact, this challenges even my imagination.”

  She smiled sweetly. “I find that unlikely.”

  There must be a great race abiding here, Hethor thought, to make such things. It was like reading Plato discussing Atlantis.

  Past the lighthouse, the beach ran along another mile or so before reaching a breakwater and a city wall. Both structures were built of the same smooth, featureless brown stone in a scale far outsized to the needs of ordinary men, let alone the little correct people.

  Though the wall was vertical, shielding the bases of the towers behind it from view, the breakwater had angled sides. After some confusion a mission was dispatched to cut vines and sticks for a ladder. Once that work was done, Hethor and his band climbed the breakwater for their first real view of the city.