Escapement (21 page)

Deep within the bay the tracks for the steam borers ran right up to the face. Standard-gauge rails were tucked between them. The machines had been fired every day, their boilers running on wood here rather than coal, but in Ottweill’s absence they had not been brought up to meet the Wall. Al-Wazir knew the original plan had called for prospecting for coal, but that was impractical in the face of continued hostilities. Wood they had in plenty, enough to send the borers through the Wall a dozen times over. It would suffice.

Now that the attacks had been beaten back, they were set to begin operations. Ottweill, al-Wazir, and Hornsby had met with the officers of
Wallachian Prince
to compose a letter urgently requesting both more civilian workers and soldiers in face of their initial losses. None of them would admit to believing the expedition was in serious peril.

Studying the camp, he looked up from the steam borers to the rising expanse of God’s Creation. Al-Wazir had been wrong about at least one thing—sunlight did fall at the foot of the Wall, at least a few hours a day. In that respect, the weather was like home—gloomy and damp, with a bit of brightness in between. Of course, it was 110 degrees here. Not so homelike, that.

But sometimes the Wall sent down a refreshing breeze to break the heat’s grip awhile. And when he looked down across the swaying tops of the glossy trees to the brown water of the Mitémélé, he could see the beauty of Africa lying at right angles to the soaring cathedral that was the Wall. Heat to the north, cool shadow above, and those great black steam borers ready to cut in.

Somehow they seemed in scale here. The machine back in the Kentish quarry had been sullen, evil even, in its affect. These seemed so small next to the Wall they were meant to breach that al-Wazir had difficulty seeing them as instruments of destruction.

Ottweill climbed the ladder atop one of his beloved borers. The doctor still favored his tailored suits, which seemed inhumanly hot to al-Wazir, but even Ottweill had given up his necktie.

“Tomorrow against the face we will set the number one borer,” he told al-Wazir, patting the iron flank.

“To start cutting?”

“Not yet. Testing we will be. Run the drill up to speed and back down, a final check on the integrity of the rock face we will perform. The rails, too. Everything but the cut. That, for the next day.”

“I will be here, on the stockade, watching for hostiles,” al-Wazir promised him.

“I had hoped in the cab of number one you might join me. The first part to drive.”

Al-Wazir thought about the tiny doorway leading into the armored cab. To ride that coffin into the depths of the earth seemed too far from sailing the sky. “No, I do not believe so. But I am honored, sir.”

“Fair enough,” said Ottweill. “The limits of his courage every man must know.”

It was almost good to see the doctor back in his usual form.

She avoided the political officer as much as she could. Staying in her cabin was the simplest solution; nonetheless, Childress was forced at least twice a day to seek a meal in the wardroom. Sometimes the little man was about; sometimes he was not.
Well, they are almost all little men,
she thought. At four feet and eleven inches, Childress was not a woman of any size, but in this company she felt almost tall.

Crammed into the wardroom, where at most four could be seated, a blue-coated steward would bring her meal. It was always a tiny bowl of tea, a tiny bowl of soup, a tiny bowl of rice, and a tiny bowl of something fried and flavored that varied from day to day. All four were always hot, though
Five Lucky Winds
otherwise seemed eternally damp and chilled, cold water beading on her bulkheads and hatches.

The men of the submarine would pass by the door in ones and twos to steal glances when they thought she couldn’t see them. Decades of watching over divinity students—as mean-spirited and self-entitled a bunch of miscreants as one could ever hope to meet—had honed her skills of peripheral observation. She knew perfectly well when they slowed their step, and picked it up again.

At least that gave her a chance to listen to their soft chatter.

The peeking only stopped when Captain Leung came to sit with her, or if the political officer were in the passageway outside.

“Are you finding circumstances to your satisfaction, Mask?” he asked, the second day asea.

Childress was now dressed in an old blue uniform. It was extremely undignified, but less so than wearing the bloodied dress in which she’d been captured. The steward had bowed and bobbed and explained something at great length to her in Chinese before taking it away. She hoped the garment would be cleaned and repaired, or failing that, burned, but she had no real way of knowing.

“I should like to have some decent clothing,” she said briskly, “as befits my station. And though this native food is charming in its strange little way, a reasonable meal that an Englishwoman might recognize.” That was as much like the Mask Poinsard as she could stand to be.

Leung stared at her evenly a bit longer than she might have liked. The political officer hovered at the doorway again. “I am afraid we can accommodate almost none of your wishes,” the captain said. He set a stack of books on the table. “Here is a manual for electricks which is written in English. My esteemed engineer would like to have it back at the end of the voyage, as considers it a valued if incomprehensible souvenir. Here is also
a Roman devotional, and two postcards from Singapore. That is all the English material aboard my ship.”

“I am sure it will keep me sufficiently entertained,” Childress said. “May I take these to my cabin?”

“Of course.” Leung paused, searching for words, perhaps. “And if you would care to converse, it will always benefit my English to have practice at it.”

“Your English is already better than that spoken by most subjects of the Crown,” she told him politely. Polite, but true.

Over the next few days they established a habit of him coming to visit her at one of her two meals. Sometimes it was little more than a nod, if he had urgent business elsewhere; sometimes it was a conversation.

“The Feathered Masks have their followers in the Celestial Empire,” he told her one morning.

“Of course.” Childress was distracted by the damnable little eating sticks. They were more than difficult for picking up rice, but she didn’t fancy asking for a fork. “The
avebianco
is everywhere.” She thought of the political officer, with his hand sign and his hello. She hadn’t yet told Leung about that. She wasn’t sure she would.

“Your philosophy appeals to a certain kind of traditionalist.”

“I did not think the Chinese held to the supremacy of God the father.”

“Not
that
sort of traditionalist.” He laughed softly. “To put it in simple terms, the emperor is the Son of Heaven. Heaven’s structure can be divined from careful study of the brasswork in the skies. So the nature of Creation guides the emperor, just as the emperor guides his people.”

“How do you see Creation?” She was quite curious—God’s handiwork was incontrovertible, after all, even if His current state of engagement was subject to theological and practical disputation.

“The world was made,” Leung said. “But where you Europeans seem to find one great, overriding presence in a position of responsibility, the Universal Cause, so to speak, we see a balance in the courts of Heaven. So this one made the moon, while that one set the lamps of the stars to wheel in their courses, and this other arranged the faces of day and night so as to favor men.”

“Not so different, really.” Childress pushed a few shreds of pork around. “You have just named the varying aspects of God. As if each of His hands were a different thing.”

“I believe we have a very long way to go before we can properly misunderstand each other,” Leung said.

The captain left her with the political officer and his pistol, Childress chasing the last of her brown-fried onions with the useless little sticks.

And so it went for a week. She read and reread about electrickal valves and switches. She studied lives of saints Euphronius, Lupus, Padraig, and Xanthippe, wondering time and again why Fr. Algys B. Huang, SJ, had felt the need to discuss those four saints in particular in his little book. She examined the Singapore postcards until she could recite their respective texts about the wicked imperialist dog Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and the great prince Parameswara.

Sometimes the ship would change speed or course. Occasionally it would change angle, heading lower or higher in Oceanus’ grip. Those moments brought Childress unwelcome fears of attack by British surface raiders or aerial bombardment.

Surely Her Imperial Majesty’s Navy even now sought to avenge the insult to
Mute Swan.
Childress had no illusions about her own value. The Mask Poinsard had been a woman of rank, perhaps even a duchess, and thus likely to be sought after on disappearing.

Between reading, sleeping, and brief bouts of terror, Childress ate rice, sipped tea, tipped her soup bowl, and practiced capturing slim bits of food with her little eating sticks. And, of course, spoke to Captain Leung.

“Do your people admit the existence of angels?”

“Angels?” He frowned. “In the sense of messengers of Heaven, certainly.”

“No.” She was thinking of that poor, lost boy Hethor, who’d gone to wind the mainspring of the world. “The leaders of the hosts of God. They carry swords, to punish or reward.”

“There is scant reward to be given with a sword,” said Leung. “But no, while Heaven and Northern Earth and Hell are filled with ghosts and demons and mandarins of all orders, there are no angels in the European sense.”

“Biblical, actually.” Childress wasn’t sure what a European angel would be. “The Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite explains in detail. Ophanim, Thrones, Cherubim . . . more than most will bother to recall these days. But not precisely European.” She paused to gather her thoughts. “What I mean to say is that there are orders among the angels, which are described in European theology. Some of them move among men.”

“Again, I think we are far from a reasonable misunderstanding of one another.” Leung’s smile wrinkled his face. “Though surely the Celestial Realms are populated by as many orders of rank as populate the everyday world. The Celestial Kingdom is certainly arrayed much the same.”

“Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius,”
said Childress.
As above, so below.
“Here is my point: Do you recall two summers past, when there were great quakes around the Northern Earth? Waves coursed across the shores of the world, and there was destruction upon the Wall.”

“Yes. Our astronomers declared that the time that runs beneath the world was in slippage. Our priests said there was a war in Heaven. Whichever was correct, hostilities did come to an end.”

“They came to an end because an angel found a boy named Hethor in New England, and set him to repairing the mainspring of the world.”

He chuckled. “I think that explanation would be difficult to tender in the gardens of Soochow.”

The next day Leung warned Childress that
Five Lucky Winds
was going beneath the ice. “We may have difficulty with our air. All persons not about urgent business are enjoined to remain in their bunk, breathing quietly.”

“What will happen to your boilers?” she asked.

“Their fires are already banked. We run on electricks until we can find a hole to surface. There we will refresh our breathing air and restart the boilers to charge the batteries.”

“And so like seals we breathe out the air we have, hoping for a hole in the ice?”

“You have divined the very essence of the Iron Bamboo.”

She could swear the captain’s voice had a wry tone, though somehow that seemed un-Chinese. “It would appear to be a time for prayer.”

“If that is your path. I must warn you that there may be considerable noise, some of it quite odd. The cold and the currents stress the ship unusually.”

“I will remain as calm as is given to me to be,” Childress said. “And pray for us to find air and light among the ice.”

Leung nodded. “You may wish additional blankets.”

“Not if they must come from those used by the men.”

“Very well.” He took his leave of her.

Over the next few days the ship ran deeper, while the noise of the propellers grumbled ever slower. She might have expected them to make quicker time beneath the ice, the faster to reach the other side of the Arctic, but perhaps it was too dangerous to move quickly in these waters.
Five Lucky Winds
ran more quietly, too, the electricks not transmitting the same vibrations through the hull that the boilers did.

So they ran silent and they ran deep. The water on the walls grew colder and her breath began to fog. Childress reduced herself to one meal a day. Those were simpler as well, cold rice that grew increasingly tough with each passing day, and stringy pickled meats. The soup vanished and the tea had become tepid.

She did not see the political officer anywhere.

The rest of the time she lay in her bunk. She prayed, though God’s deliverance seemed more remote than ever beneath the frozen seawater. It seemed more likely that the divine lurked in sunlight and color and the touch of the breeze, not in chilled metal and deep booming noises that might have come from the mouths of continents.