Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  THE STEMWINDER was heavy in the pocket of her homespun smock. She knew it was there the way she knew her heartbeat was there. Wound, it ticked. Ticking, it reflected the world.

  Time beats at the heart of everything, she thought.

  It was one of those ideas that pricked a spark in her mind, a little flare that staked a claim of importance.

  God had made the universe of clockwork. The world ticked and turned. Two years ago, it had stuttered. The great waves and quakes came from deep within, she knew. Midnight had slipped by a few seconds. No one else understood, and there was no point in explaining, but she’d known.

  Then the world had been fixed. Whatever time beat at the heart of the earth had been restored. Paolina wished she knew how. A question that ran through all the books (except the Bible, of course) was whether God acted directly in the world, or simply let His handiwork sort itself out.

  Something had been sorted out.

  And still time beat at the heart of everything. The stemwinder was a model of the universe, no larger than the palm of her hand, no thicker than two of her fingers, and it ticked away the moments and hours just as all of Creation did.

  Paolina put it close to her ear, listening with the words of Dickens and Verne and the Old Testament prophets close in her mind. Ezekiel 24:6 suggested itself to her in the gentle ticking deep within. Woe to the bloody city, to the brasswork in which there is verdigris, and whose verdigris has not gone out of it! Take out of it piece after piece, without making a choice.

  That was clear enough. God was telling her to take the watch apart.

  PAOLINA’S MOST difficult problem was finding a clean, clear workspace. Whatever gears and trains lay within the stemwinder were tiny reflections of the brass in the heavens. She’d need a room sealed from the winds, relatively free of dust and dirt, where the complex work could remain undisturbed in her absence.

  The inner room of the great hall, among the books and bottles, would have been ideal. But even Paolina couldn’t quite imagine how to get the fidalgos to come around to that. They would beat her for a stupid chit and set her to scraping moss off the water stairs if she had the temerity to even ask.

  She wandered the village, looking at the houses and storerooms that comprised most of Praia Nova. The ones that were not inhabited were tumbledown. Paolina didn’t want to contemplate the patience required to clean up an abandoned hut.

  On the Oporto shelf, the second ledge above town, where more of the thin wheat fields ran, she realized she was looking at her answer—the mushroom sheds. They were sealed with lacquered canvas, and they were quiet. It would be a month or more before another set of trays was picked. All she needed was a bit of light.

  Best of all, the women of the town ran the sheds. Senhora Armandires was the dame of the mushrooms. Paolina had built a much improved chimney in the woman’s house last year, once Senhor Armandires had finally moved out for good and the senhora could make her own choices. The lady would make no objection.

  Light was still an issue, but it would take little enough to see the watch. Candle stubs were her friends.

  Paolina went off to find Clarence. He could help her drag a table out of one of the abandoned houses and up to the Oporto shelf. And a cloth to cover it.

  She would find a way. This was the solving of problems. She was good at that.

  DURING THE course of the following days, Paolina opened the back of the stemwinder to observe the delicate movements of the mechanisms within. What she saw nearly turned her away from her project. She lacked the tools to grasp such miniscule things. She might be able to make those, in time, with scraps from the Alcides’ smithy. She would need a lens, as well, scarcely possible here in Praia Nova. In any case, this was a task for the slow and patient. She stuck with picks and pries made out of hardwood splinters.

  Clarence was something of a help, ghosting about and answering her occasional question. He spent time foraging, too, farther from Praia Nova than most of the locals would go. Of course, he’d walked the Wall for two years—the boy had survived far stranger things than the glittering, scaled cats that occasionally prowled the ledges here, or the bright, frigid rocks that sometimes bounded down from higher up.

  He came running in the evening of her fourth day in the mushroom shed. Panting, sweating, as the whites of his eyes gleamed in the light of her little candle stub. “The fidalgos are looking for you!” he shouted in Portuguese.

  “Someone is always looking for me.” A tiny stab of fear stole into her heart.

  Davies switched to English. “You have been summoned. Senhora Armandires argues with Fra Bellico down in the village.”

  Paolina sighed and put down the teakwood picks. She carefully covered the stemwinder with a square of pale silk, part of the bounty harvested from the body of a Chinaman brought up in the nets the year before the big waves. “What does the good father want of me?” She dusted off her hands.

  Clarence looked down at his feet a moment. “The fidalgos are angry.”

  The answer was obvious now, but her rising irritation made her unkind. “About what are they angry, Englishman?”

  Walking behind her through the canvas flap that was the door, he mumbled some answer she couldn’t hear.

  “Pardon?” Nasty now.

  “That you were given the watch.”

  “That I was given the watch.” Her singsong tones mocked him. What had she ever thought worthy of this idiot boy? “The heavens opened up and spat a watch into my hands, which by the grace of God should have been given to the men of Praia Nova, is that it?”

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered, but she already raced down the paths toward the shouting.

  THE FIDALGOS were drunk and angry. The first thing Paolina realized was that they were into the wildflower wine. The bagaceira was gone, and Fra Bellico had not found any more of the wild grapes and plums from which to press his pomace and make more. No wonder they were upset, forced to drink a woman’s swill.

  The five were drawn up to their table again, facing her: Alvaro, Pietro, Bellico, Penoyer, and Mendes, who chewed his moustache and looked thoughtful. The rest merely seemed possessed by the same tired anger that had gripped the men in the village since the fishing fleet had been lost.

  They badly missed the seafood trade with the enkidus and the down-trail tribes.

  “You!” roared Bellico. “Thieving girl! We should sell you up a Muralha.”

  “I have stolen nothing,” said Paolina. “I give you everything and more. What is it you want now?”

  “What is our due,” Mendes said quietly, casting a sidelong glare at the others. “What the boy mistakenly set in your hand.”

  “What he gave me?” She let her voice seethe with contempt, though in truth these men scared her. Not for who they were, but for what they could do. The fidalgos in council, which they were now, were judges and swords of the law in Praia Nova. Never mind that no one owned such a blade.

  This was as large a matter as they’d ever broached her over.

  “The watch,” said Penoyer. He was flush, even in the candlelight, with a graceless air of shame.

  “You want me to give you my watch?” As with Clarence, she would make them say it.

  “Yes!” It was Bellico again. “The village could do much with that wealth of metal. Trade it, keep it for a treasure. Not let it be greased by the clumsy hands of a youthful Carapau de Corrida with more ambition than sense!”

  “Fra,” said Paolina slowly and deliberately. “If you call me that name again, I shall make sure your still produces nothing but vinegar, and your pilinha will burn every morning for the rest of your days.”

  “She’s a witch,” muttered Alvaro. “Always was, little chit.”

  “Enough,” said Mendes. He was not the bull among them—that was Fra Bellico—but he was the only fidalgo with enough sense that Paolina could consider having respect for him. “It does not matter. What matters is you took an object of great value, easily considered salvage and thus the pro
perty of all, and have hidden it away. That should have been the decision of the village.”

  “You mean your decision.” Paolina just couldn’t stop herself from speaking. The men didn’t merely believe they were entitled—they were entitled. This transcended reason.

  “Our decision is the decision of village.” Mendes leaned forward, the room around him now quiet, the guttering candle filling his eyes with shadowed darkness. “Your decision is not.”

  And there it was. The truth of the matter. She might as well argue with a Muralha as argue with generations of tradition.

  “No,” Paolina told him. “You cannot have it until I am done.”

  “You will not obey the decision of the fidalgos in council?” Mendes asked. Slowly, carefully.

  She was on an edge here. But she simply couldn’t give in. If she did it now, she was lost. “No.” It was amazing how easy that word was to repeat.

  Mendes glanced at Bellico in particular. The father took a deep, shuddering breath, then nodded. “Very well. At fifteen, you are old enough to heed the will of the village or pay the consequences. I only regret we did not take you in hand earlier.”

  They were getting up from the table, chairs scraping, feet shuffling as the large drunken men encircled her.

  Paolina felt a stab of fear. She shrieked when they grabbed her, already clamping her knees together, but the fidalgos dragged her to the back room, shoved her in with the books and bottles, and shut the one door in all of Praia Nova that actually had a key.

  It took her a while to cry, and longer to begin screaming, but the door remained thick, wooden and locked no matter how she pounded and pleaded. In time, they doused their candle and left. She didn’t know whether the wine had run out or they had tired of the noise of her fear.

  Al-Wazir

  Threadgill Angus al-Wazir, formerly Ropes Division chief petty officer aboard HIMS Bassett, ship lost in service along the Wall, scratched at the starched collar. The civvie shirt cut into his neck like a dock monkey’s shiv. “This is worse than a lashing,” he muttered, though no one could hear him save the two lobsterbacks standing guard in front of the great double doors outside which he waited.

  Royal Marines, in uniforms that could have been paraded in his grandfather’s time. Insufficient to fend off a howling mob, and yet too much for the mere keeping of a door, no matter how many admirals and MPs sat on the other side of it.

  Some days he almost missed starving on that dhow off the Mauritanian coast under the blazing Atlantic sun. That was an honest fate for a good sailor. Nothing like death by sweat and knife-edged crease.

  Civvies, at that. Not even a uniform. He hadn’t worn civvies since he’d left short pants. Even on leave, it was a tar’s canvas trousers and some old blues.

  The room was as bad as the clothing. The lobsterbacks might as well have been furniture, bayonets silvered and polished to shaving-mirror brightness. The walls were done in some strange lumber, in them little panels like pictures in frames except it was all the same wood. A chandelier with far too much cut glass glowed with ill-wired electricks. A big painting of the clockwork two-decker Vincent Leonard, that had foundered under Nelson and put an end to those old spring engines. Back to sail, it had been, until they’d worked out the steam. Another big painting of the admiral himself, victorious at Trafalgar with the head of Villeneuve dangling from one hand. The old Froggie’s eyes were as surprised as death ever made a man.

  Al-Wazir saluted the Frenchman. It had been near the last gasp of their power.

  Below the level of the paintings the room grew peculiar—delicate settees covered with paisleys he wouldn’t bury a dog in, tiny end tables bearing tinier silver dishes of mints the size of biscuit weevils. Rugs on the floor from somewhere far to the east, with the look of knotting by little fingers. He’d seen enough posh in dockside knocking shops to have an idea. All that bawdy house stuff was just so much tinfoil and chintz imitation of this room, where the Queen herself could have eaten off the parquet flooring had she taken a mind to do so.

  Being a chief petty officer, however discharged at the moment, al-Wazir had to admire the obsessive attention to cleanliness. He doubted even the most white-gloved psychotic could have found fault on an inspection here, unless one of the marines had soiled his linens. Knowing that lot, their bladders were at firm attention.

  He scratched at his collar again, grinning with evil intent at the unmoving sentries. He was out of uniform, he’d by God scratch. Al-Wazir studied them intently. Yes, the one on the left had a bead of sweat on the tip of his nose. He didn’t quite have the kidney to give a good ribbing, not when yon doors could open at any moment and his undivided attention be required by Admiralty, but for now he could enjoy another man’s discomfort with a genteel incivility.

  Al-Wazir waited in an antechamber somewhere within the second floor of the Ripley Building, where Admiralty was housed. He was aware of the irony of finding himself in this elevated estate only after being discharged from the Royal Navy by an examining board at Bristol. The summons to London had been a surprise, to say the least. Al-Wazir had been on a train to Scotland with the last of the Queen’s shillings in his pocket. A whey-faced lieutenant with a squad of Royal Marines in sensible woolens and hard hands had pulled him off at Pemberton. It was not arrest this time, as had happened when their dhow had finally creaked into Bristol harbor to the jeers of the dockside idlers. Rather, he was taken aboard a sealed first-class car, alone except for his escorts.

  That had been all right with him. Al-Wazir hadn’t really been looking forward to seeing his ma anyway. Besides which, he possessed no notion of what to do next out of uniform. Al-Wazir had figured on dying in the air one day, but when Bassett had gone down under the combination of monstrous attack and inclement weather, the Lord God Almighty hadn’t seen fit to take him with the ship.

  So now he was here, scrubbed and shaved and pressed and folded into a black suit and a little seat in a room where Prime Minister Lloyd George had passed him by an hour before.

  Quality, his ma always said he was destined to hit quality. She’d just meant it in a different way.

  AL-WAZIR STARTLED awake when the doors creaked open. A quiet little man in a suit much like al-Wazir’s own nodded to him.

  The Royal Marines remained a pair of silent logheads. This was no better than being called before the captain on account of some ropes idler going stupid while he wasn’t looking. Admiralty, and even the Prime Minister, were nothing more than bigger captains.

  So he followed the quiet man into a very large room, where older, heavier men with long muttonchops and red faces sat around a table the size of a longboat, nodding at a bloody huge chart of some islands. It wasn’t anywhere al-Wazir had ever been; that was for certain. He adopted the blank look-at-nothing practiced by sailors in the presence of officers since the first reed boats had sculled along the Euphrates.

  His escort faded into a number of similar men making notes and riffling through red folders along the dark edges of the room. There were no windows here, just as in the outer room, though a pair of frosted skylights admitted some gray from above. Otherwise the room was lit by electricks in sconces around the walls, giving forth a slightly scorched smell. Where there might have been more paintings of naval history, there were now charts or maps. Al-Wazir would be damned if he was going to stare.

  Busy. The room was busy. In some indefinable way, it reminded him of a gun deck just before battle. Men were sweating and the air was thick with tension. Simply because no guns were in evidence did not mean there was no enemy at hand.

  “Chief al-Wazir.” He was being addressed by a broad-faced man with humor in his eyes, dressed as all of them were here in black. The Prime Minister, in fact—Lloyd George himself.

  “Sir, yes sir.”

  “The man with the interesting name. You would seem to be as Scottish as the next oat-eater from Lanarkshire, I must say.” The Welsh in Lloyd George’s voice was almost absent, though the humor carried throug
h. “You may think of me as the Member from Caernarfon Boroughs, if that helps. As for the rest of the gentlemen here, they are simply persons committed to the interests of the Crown. Their names and titles should not matter to you.”

  “Sir, no sir.” Though he did wonder why a room full of senior men in the heart of the Admiralty complex should be so empty of uniforms. Including his own.

  “Tell me, Chief …” Lloyd George’s eyes sparkled. “Have you ever heard of the city of Chersonesus Aurea?”

  Of all the questions Her Imperial Majesty’s Prime Minister might have asked him, that was not one al-Wazir would have imagined in his wildest dreams. “No idea, sir.”

  “To be expected, I suppose.” The PM sounded disappointed. “Neither had any of the rest of us. I daresay you know the Wall, and the Bight of Benin?”

  Al-Wazir felt a smile cracking. “Thumping huge bit of rock, sir, far to the south. Been on her a bit, then sailed myself home out of the Bight by way of Dahomey and Mauritania.”

  “So we have been informed.” He walked around al-Wazir, an inspection in all but name. “I shan’t apologize for your discharge hearing in Bristol, Chief. Regulations are regulations.” Lloyd George reappeared in al-Wazir’s line of sight. “But would you be interested in going back to the Wall on Her Imperial Majesty’s service?”

  “At my rank and grade, sir?” The question slipped out.

  “If that is what is required. Or as a civilian—No … I think not.” Lloyd George nodded at one of the quiet men on the edge of the room. “I expect you’ll be a chief petty officer once more by Monday next, if not sooner.”

  “Sir, yes sir.” Al-Wazir could feel his sweat pooling now. He felt much like the marine he’d silently mocked in the antechamber.

  “Kitchens,” said the PM in a carrying voice. “The other map, please.”

  One of the quiet little men used a long pole topped by a metal hook to roll up the island chart. A moment later he replaced it with a chart of the Bight of Benin, the bulk of the Wall a dark line brooding at its southern extent.