Escapement (35 page)

“That is one way to see Creation,” Paolina said cautiously.

“Indeed. There are others, Spiritualists, who look for God’s hand in every shadow. Arrant wish fulfillment, children seeking the safety of an omnipotent father.” He snorted. “I have never seen a fingerprint of God’s on this world. However Creation was effected, He has found other business to occupy Himself since.”

“Indeed.” She wondered what point he was reaching toward.

“The Schwilgué Clock . . . in Strasbourg. It was made by men seeking to measure and divide the world all the more closely. Looking for the tracks of the Clockmakers, those who might be God’s proxies.” He glanced at her, his eyes troubled. “We . . . we believe their presence far more likely than the reassertion of the Divine principle.”

“Why are you so nervous?”

“No, not nervous. Though this might be seen by some as blasphemy, it is more fair to say that we pursue a difficult topic.” Sayeed was speaking to the distant surface now, refusing once more to face her. “I told you, I follow a different prophet, one who walked the Northern Earth centuries after your celebrated horofixion. A man of my people. The Empire has a rule of tolerance. There is no requirement for me to bow to the Church of England. Our own belief stands outside the Spiritualist canon which is so popular in London, though it aligns well enough with the Rational Humanist creed. Musselmen do not concern themselves so much with the
history of Creation as with the perfection of self within the laws of the Prophet.”

Paolina found this very strange. She didn’t realize there had been other prophets after the Brass Christ. “Is Strasbourg a Musselman city?”

Sayeed laughed. “No, far from it. And they would be most surprised there to even hear you ask the question. But Strasbourg is a Rational Humanist city. Universität Straßburg remains an important center of our thought. So the Schwilgué Clock is there in Strasbourg Cathedral.”

Paolina couldn’t help but laugh. “The Rational Humanists built their masterwork in a
cathedral
?”

“It has not been so long since Rational Humanism and its antecedents
were
blasphemy,” Sayeed said stiffly. “Once we had to work within the churches. Some of us still do. We do not deny God. We simply see Him at a more distant remove than most would credit.”

“Indeed. Living on the Wall, I never met God personally, but He was closer there than perhaps He is in the flatwater kingdoms.”

“Fair enough.” Sayeed fell silent. Below them, a line of animals crossed a sand-colored plain amid far-spaced trees. The animals were big, moving by the thousands to send a plume of red-gold dust to hang in the air at nearly their own altitude. “With your talent and skills, there are men in Strasbourg who would well care to meet you. Modern heirs to Newton, the keepers of the great clock there.”

Paolina’s heart raced. He spoke of the wizards she’d sought since before leaving Praia Nova! “Them I would meet. Strasbourg is in the British Empire, if not in England. That is indeed my goal.”

Sayeed spoke slowly. “I can lay a course more northerly, and cross the French territories rather than the western coast of Andalusia and the Bay of Biscay. Strasbourg is in Alsatia. The Royal Navy has towers there.”

She tried to remain calm. “And you would take me?”

“If you wish to go. The Rational Humanists meet there in conclave under the banner of the Silent Order of the Second Winding.” His voice became intense, thick with passion. “They will welcome you, with my testimony, and you will be treated with all the respect you have never been properly accorded before.”

“Please,” Paolina whispered. “Take me there, and show me what I need to know.”

“I have already set the course,” Sayeed admitted. “I wanted to ensure that you are with me in this.”

She wondered what might have transpired had she not been with him. That question was not worth pursuing, Paolina quickly realized.

Not if she was going to see the Schwilgué Clock and those who had mastery of it.

In the days that followed, they crossed a seemingly endless country of sand. Sometimes it was long dunes that stretched across the land as far as the eye could see; other times the stuff spilled over cliffs and dry riverbeds and bluffs of red and gray stone. The trees were gone, as were the animal migrations, the little villages, the braided silver streams.

A terrible country,
she thought, and wondered why God had seen fit to include it in His Creation.

Sayeed met with her from time to time, but he avoided the strange passion of their discussion of Strasbourg and the Silent Order. Instead they spoke quietly of the airship’s operations, the note of the engines, how the heat affected the gasbag. All the details of the
Notus
’ operation seemed overwhelming, yet Sayeed held them in his memory and at the tip of his tongue. He understood his ship the way most people understood their own hands. Maybe better.

Sayeed, al-Wazir, Hornsby—she wished there’d been men like that back in Praia Nova, instead of the petty, venal
fidalgos
with their imaginary empires of manhood and privilege. Men who might have been worthy of their women, and of her.

Of course, there had been that mad Dr. Ottweill, as well, and a camp full of scheming, aggressive laborers and soldiers.

She could admire the good in a few men without foolishly ignoring what made all the rest little better than animals.

These Rational Humanists in Strasbourg promised a much more civilized breed of man. Like Sayeed himself. Paolina was profoundly grateful that she had been able to find this path.

She looked forward to reasonable discourse with reasonable people who could see beyond the walls the world set on the minds of men and women alike.

To Paolina’s surprise, the desert sea ended in a real sea. This ocean was the color of glass—nothing like the sullen gray heave of the Atlantic north of Praia Nova. Instead it seemed almost a jewel, some decoration set down by God to make beautiful a corner of His Creation.

“It’s the Mediterranean, what is,” Bucknell explained, gulping and bobbing. “She’s the ocean at the middle of the world.”

“Thank you,” said Paolina, who knew perfectly well what the Mediterranean Sea was. She just didn’t realize
this
was it. There were no charts available to her aboard
Notus,
while her knowledge of the geography of Northern Earth was necessarily limited by her lack of access to maps and globes.

She understood what those were, and what they were for; she’d just never seen one.

There were times when the shame of being a primitive swept over her. She didn’t want to speak with Bucknell or anyone else. Rather, she just wanted to grab on to the rail and stare down at that eye-blue sea, pretending she knew everything needful to find her way and place in the world.

“John Chinaman don’t sail into the Mediterranean,” Bucknell offered. “Hard to pass Suez without the Royal Navy knowing all of it.”

“So it’s safe?” She stared down at two boats, small things though still big enough to be dragging nets behind like wings beneath the waves.

Where there was water, there were fishermen. The sea was infinite in her bounty. Paolina knew that from Praia Nova. Perhaps they had not felt the great waves here, on this water bounded by desert where the Wall storms did not rule. She wished them the joy of their catch and fair sailing.

“Safe as houses, ma’am.” He mused on that a moment, biting his lip where the big raw scar pulsed livid. “If you likes your houses wide as a horizon and filled with sharks, I guess.”

Paolina tacked the conversation. The lad was never much good at moving in a straight line for long anyway. “Have you been to Strasbourg, Bucknell?”

“No, no ma’am.
Notus,
she patrols the African coast mostly. Not so much with John Chinaman over the Sahara or the Continent.”

“I can see why the Chinese would not patrol the desert,” she said dryly. “And I suppose there’s no friendly ports of call for them in Europe.”

“We has them free cities, ma’am. Even the Queen can’t set her flag everywhere she likes.”

“Free city?” Paolina didn’t mind this kind of ignorance so much—she was merely uninformed, not completely lacking in sense.

Bucknell began to wiggle. She’d observed this was what he did when lip biting did not improve his answers. She hoped the borders of her own knowledge were not so apparent in conversation.

“Where anyone can make a landfall without a permission, I guess,” he finally managed. “But things still cost money in them places. Not so free there either. Like wine, and wom—” He stopped himself and blushed a
crimson to match the St. George’s cross in the British flag. “I means not so much as free for the taking, if you follow the scut of my jibe.”

Paolina swallowed a giggle. “I think so. What are some free cities?”

“Oh, Alexandria, Sevastopol, Beirut, Aden, Cotonou. Places on the edge, ma’am. They would never in life make London or Rome or Marseilles a free city.”

She’d caught the drift now. “And so the Chinese come and set their anchors for trade in places where the two empires rub together.”

He was waxing enthusiastic now. “Aye. They rubs hardest in the east, I always hear tell on the deck. All the American lands keeps John Chinaman and Mother Vicky apart, but Africa and India and them mountain kingdoms where they worships the fat buddy, there’s the rub. So we trades in Alexandria, but we fights in Goa. I been drinking with Chinee I knows would be a killing me a week later. Like them what chases us, that Captain Sayeed tricked down?” He stared at her, smiling, as Paolina’s heart collapsed. “That was probably one of them cabbage mouth ships they fly. We met them in Cotonou on the way down to the Wall where we found you. Some heathen name of a ship I can’t rightly say, sounded like
Shirley Cheese.
But Captain Chinaman and Captain Sayeed stood each other a fine dinner in some fuzzy wuzzy palace, while we ’uns and them ’uns drank that palm tree wine that makes your eyes hurt down on the beach and et roast lizards the size of wolfhounds.”

Paolina’s sick feeling intensified. Those had not been faceless killers, but men known to Sayeed.
Had he intended to destroy the pursuing airship,
she wondered,
or was it all a feint?

She was also disturbed to realize that Sayeed had set a course north upon leaving
a Muralha,
outside his patrol orders. She thought she’d been clever, in the matter of Strasbourg, when in fact she’d been asking for something he’d long decided.

Men. Were they all filthy and stupid, lying to her because she was a girl?

“You going to be all right, ma’am?” Bucknell’s voice filled with concern.

“Get away.” Her tongue felt thick, and she would be damned if she was going to cry here on the open deck in front of the boy and anyone who happened along.

“Yes, ma’am.” He bobbed, bowing and stepping away and trying simultaneously to both goggle at her and not look at all. “Should I get Dr. Florin, ma’am? Is it your monthlies?”

Paolina felt a crisp rush of rage overwhelm her confusion. “Get away from me, you stunted lackbrain!”

He got. She went back to watching the water, deeply ashamed of her
temper and herself, but not knowing how to repair the damage without looking even more foolish.

Paolina did not see Bucknell for the rest of the day, but Sayeed eventually found her, shortly after she’d messed with the deck division, eating a bowl of beans and a niggardly little chunk of brown bread. She sat on the windward side of a rope locker, watching the horizon’s blue deepen toward dusk and smelling the crisp salt air rising from beneath their keel.

“We make port in Marseilles late tonight,” he said as he stood over her. “To take on fuel and stores, and grant the men some time.”

“Am I going ashore?”

“You are free to do so, though it should be under escort.” As she opened her mouth to protest, he raised a hand, palm up. “You are your own woman, but you lack papers. You will find papers can be important, within the boundaries of the Empire. In the company of a ship’s officer, you will not be questioned. Alone, I cannot promise your safety or continued freedom.”

“I see.” She tried to banish the petulance from her voice, but without success. “It is not a free city.”

“Nothing is free.”

“No.” Paolina wondered what manipulation might be under way now.

“Including,” Sayeed added, “the services of the boy Bucknell. I set him to serve as your steward because he has a gentle heart, and would protect you from both rumor and the unwise acts of rough and lonely men. Which this vessel is full of, I assure you, just as every ship that has ever sailed since Adam’s day. You have sent him away, with a cruelty I would not have expected of you. Do you now prefer to manage the crew on your own, or shall I set another man to your aid? And might he in turn expect the sharp side of your tongue? I’ve a few older crewmen with wives at home who can turn a hard word like nothing you’ve imagined, missy.”

She was silent a few moments, regret warring with anger. Paolina had never gotten anything yet in this life by yielding to men, so she was not wont to commence doing so now. “Words are strange, Captain,” she finally said. “One can lie without ever uttering an untruth. One can deceive while providing even a heart’s desire. If I was cruel to Bucknell, I regret it. He had said some things which provoked my fear.” She set down her bowl with the last few cooling, gelid beans still clinging to the bottom and clasped her arms around her knees while staring up at Sayeed.