Escapement (2 page)

Paolina stepped around to the boy. “Come with me,” she told him, in his language.

He stood and followed her out, without a backward glance. Nothing lost there, she realized. Outside she turned to him. “I am sorry.” She paused to frame her next words.

“Não faz mal,”
he replied, surprising her.
It doesn’t matter.

Despite herself, Paolina giggled. “You understood everything they said?”

“Most of it.” English again.

“My mother has bread.” It was the kindest thing she knew to do for the boy. She took his hand and tugged him along the path that was King Street, back to the houses of Praia Nova and their quiet, hungry women.

To save the expense of the candle, they ate on the back step of the hut. Paolina’s mother washed and swept the stone daily. She’d been sitting quietly, staring out at the moonlit Atlantic when Paolina came for the bread, and did not stir.

So it had been in the years since Paolina’s father’s boat came back without him. Marc Penoyer had been captain. He and his two brothers had sworn a tale so alike it had to be concocted—even at six, Paolina had known no two people perfectly agreed on anything. People didn’t
see
what was in front of them. They saw only what was dear to their hearts.

After that, her mother worked her days and dreamt away the nights. Sometimes she spoke, sometimes she didn’t, but Paolina always had at least one dress. She’d never gone an entire day without eating something.

It was the bargain of childhood, she’d supposed. As her cleverness had begun to count for something extra, Paolina had made sure there was always a little flour from the sorry mill above town, always a little dried meat from the line-caught fish the idled boatmen brought in.

The boy asked no questions about her mother, merely gnawing the crust with a gusto that betrayed how long it had been since he’d eaten decently. She’d spared him only two chunks torn from the loaf, and a handful of dried sardinella, but Paolina knew that offering food made her civilized.

He’d seen
London,
a voice within her cried. London. Even Dr. Minor had not been there.

In that moment, she hated
a Muralha,
Praia Nova, and everything else about her life. She stared up at the brass in the sky, wondering how to break it and set free the earth, and herself.

“Thank you,” the boy said.

“Hmm?” She swallowed the harder words which lay too close to her tongue.

“Thank you. They were going to throw me out of the village, weren’t they?”

“Of course.” Despite her anger, Paolina laughed. “You might say or do something dangerous. News of the world helps no one, serving only to make us doubt our traditions. Besides, we are starving.”

“So am I.”

She looked over at him. The boy wore a leather wrap, something that had been tailored in a sense, but as if sewn by cats who had only seen paintings of real clothing. He had a grubby, torn shirt beneath that, and a pair of canvas trousers that must have once been white. Bare feet, which made her wince.

“Sure you did not walk here along the Wall?” she asked him.

“I fell from a ship.”

She resisted the urge to glance toward the ocean far below, but there must have been something in her face. He raised one hand in defense. “An airship. I fell from one of Her Imperial Majesty’s airships.”

Despite herself, Paolina was impressed. “You look well enough for a man who fell to earth.”

“I had a parachute.”

She didn’t know the word, but she was not going to ask him to explain. It obviously referred to a device for retarding the rate of fall. Cloth or ribbons could do that, though with his weight, it would need a wide spread to provide sufficient surface area for braking. In the back of her mind, she began to work out the formula for the relationship between the size of the cloth and the weight of the load.

“I am Paolina Barthes,” she said. “This paradise on Northern Earth is Praia Nova.”

He stood and bowed awkwardly. “Clarence Davies, late the loblolly boy aboard Her Imperial Majesty’s airship
Bassett
.” After a moment he added, “Very late, for it has been two years since I fell overboard and began my walk along the Wall.”

Now she was very impressed. “You survived two years on your own?”

He nodded, still looking both hungry and hunted. It could not have
been easy—Praia Nova barely clung to life, and that was with several hundred people who at least theoretically could coordinate defenses and share what they had.

“You must know how to live out there, then,” she said.

“Knew how to live aboard
Bassett.
” His head drooped lower. “Stay out of Captain Smallwood’s way, listen to whatever the doctor mumbles when he ain’t drinking, watch out for the clever dicks like Malgus and that boy of his.”

“You’re not a—clever?” She was disappointed. He was
English.
They were the genius sorcerers who ran the world. Dr. Minor had taught her that, before he’d fled into the wilderness.

She’d learned so much from the old Englishman.

“Just a boy, me,” Clarence said. “The officers and the chiefs, they know their business. Al-Wazir, he was a magician, could make a man do anything. Need to, I guess, to work the ropes.”

The power of compulsion. That explained a great deal about the British Empire.

The boy went on. “Smallwood, too. The gas division. They walk in poison, you know.”

“This
Bassett
was a magnificent ship?”

For the first time, Clarence Davies smiled. “The greatest. Soaring through the clouds on a summer day, looking down on them whales and sharks and fuzzy wuzzies . . .” His head dropped again. “I want to go back to England, though. But ’tis too far to walk.”

“You flew through the air to come here, and now you cannot find your way home.” Something in Paolina’s heart melted, that she had not known was frozen. “They’ll grumble for a month, the
fidalgos,
and never come to a decision. So I decide now. I invite you in my mother’s name. We will find a boy’s family for you to stay with, and I will make sure there is a bit more food.”

“I . . . I . . . have nothing to give.”

“Nothing is required. Help where you can, lend your muscles, speak to me in English.” She smiled, trying to coax another flash of bright teeth out of this Clarence. “There are few enough safe places on
a Muralha
. Stay here a while.”

“Thank you.” He came to some visible decision, a flash of relief and recognition in his face, then dug deep into an inner pocket of his leather wrap. Clarence shoved a little bag at her. “Here. I don’t need this. Ain’t wound it in months. Smart, clever girl like you maybe could use it.”

The thing was heavy, a hunk of metal or glass. She pulled it out and corrected herself. A hunk of metal
and
glass. Round face, with hours on it
like a sundial and a heavy metal rim containing more weight. The face was topped by three metal arrows. There were tinier faces within, with their own calibrations, and a little cutaway showing something behind the face.

She peered close and saw Heaven.

Gears.

It was God’s gearing, the mechanisms of the earth and sky captured in the palm of her hand. Light flooded her head for a moment, the dawn of a new awareness. Paolina’s stomach knotted in something between fear and fascination. She’d had no idea that a person could fashion a model of the world to carry with him.

“It counts the hours,” she whispered, her voice and hands trembling in awe.

“Yes.” He touched a little cap extending from one end. “See? It’s a stemwinder. A Dent marine chronometer that needs no key.”

Her fingers lay on the knurls of the cap. At his nod, Paolina very gently twisted it.

The tiny model of the world within clicked, just as the heavens did at midnight.

This was Creation in the palm of her hand. The English were truly magicians.

Much to her surprise, Paolina began to cry.

Praia Nova had seven books. They were kept in the great hall, in an inner closet with the precious bottles used to contain
bagaceira
when Fra Bellico found the necessaries to distill more, or the wildflower wine the women made when Fra Bellico lacked materials, time, or ambition.

There was half an English Bible, the Old Testament through the middle of Ezekiel. It was water damaged. The New Testament, with its stories of the Romans and their horofixion of Christ, existed in Praia Nova only as a scrawled leather scroll reconstructed from the memories of the various shipwrecked sailors who’d brought their indifferent faiths to the village over the generations. It did not matter what she thought of the prophets or the inept copy work of recent times—the Bible needed no more explanation than a look to the sky.

The other books were a different matter entirely. Her favorite was
Fiéis e Verdadeiros Segredos,
a Portuguese translation of a book that claimed to have originally been published in French, written by a Comte de Saint-Germain. It was a magnificent volume, bound in a slick, smooth leather that she was fairly certain was human skin. The title was stamped into the binding with traces of gold leaf and faded red pigment. There were
lurid woodcuts within, lavishly illustrating scenes of debauchery from the ancient days. She’d spent time studying those, but had not yet divined the meaning of most. In any case, Paolina found it difficult to credit what Saint-Germain said of himself and the world. The man, whoever he had truly been, was an extraordinary storyteller at the least. She hoped to meet a Jew one day so that she could pursue some of the questions raised in
Segredos.

There was also
Archidoxes Magica,
by Paracelsus. It was bound in boards, and quite damaged by damp and age. Furthermore, no one could aid her with the Latin. She had no second text to compare it with in order to puzzle out the language. As a result Paolina had struggled mightily with the book. In
Segredos,
Saint-Germain claimed to have known Paracelsus as an alchemist and physic, but that only told her one thing—fraud or genius, he had seen into the heart of the world.

That inspired her.

Three of the other books were popular texts, two in English, one in Spanish:
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens,
Mathias Sandorf
by Jules Verne, and
Cartas Marruecas
by José Cadalso. There was also one volume in an alphabet that looked maddeningly familiar while making no sense at all. Paolina was surprised the last hadn’t been burned for fire starter. She’d read through the English works many times, and puzzled through Cadalso twice.

She’d learned how strange the world was, beyond
a Muralha
and the goat-dung paths of Praia Nova. That, and how badly she wished she lived in a part of the Northern Earth where there were printing presses and libraries and bookshops.

Even Dr. Minor’s visit to Praia Nova, while immensely improving her English and her knowledge of the world, had only deepened her dissatisfaction.

Now, though, now she had a treasure beyond price. She had a pocket watch. A stemwinding marine chronometer, to be specific.

Neither the Bible nor Saint-Germain had anything to say directly about watches, though both certainly discussed clockwork—albeit somewhat metaphorically in the Bible. Paracelsus was no help at all, and neither was Cadalso. Verne and Dickens, however, seemed fully in command of a world where pocket watches were ordinary.

In the days that followed, she reread both works carefully. The purpose of the watch would have been clear enough even if Davies had not explained it. Paolina was far more interested in the design and construction. She’d never so much as seen a clock. There were obvious inferences to be
made about the mechanism from looking at God’s design for the universe. He had written His plan in the sky, after all.

What Paolina wanted was a clear set of instructions.

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.