Escapement (36 page)

“From the first you set a course north across Africa instead of following your patrol route. All that talk of Strasbourg and the Schwilgué Clock was
a mummer’s play, to make me feel I’d won something from you. And I learn as well you perhaps did not mean for me to stop our pursuers. Your fear and worry that night make so much more sense to me if I realize you had a lost a friend instead of an enemy. You used that Chinese captain to make an excuse for turning north, and you have meant to carry me to Strasbourg since we left the Wall. Why lie to me?”

“Ah.” Sayeed reached down for her bowl with the obsessive tidiness of a sailor. He turned it in his fingers awhile. “I . . . I was not sure of you at first. If I had been wrong, we would have made for England from Marseilles, and none the wiser. As for Captain Yang and his
Shi Hsi-Chi,
the story is more complex than you think, but at heart, you have something of the right of it.”

“So you lied to see what I would do.” She climbed to her feet. “I killed a ship and dozens of men because I thought I was protecting us.”

“It is a risk we all take,” he snapped.

“Not at my hands, we do not.” She snatched the gleam from her dress. “I did not mean to make a . . . a . . .
gun
! A thing to kill to protect, or be killed protecting.
You
made me a killer, with your lies. And what would you have told me if I had not asked after Strasbourg, sir? If your pretty lures about the Schwilgué Clock had fallen unheeded?”

His voice was cold. “I would have taken you there, if I judged you aright, and let the Silent Order determine what is best for you.”

Paolina swallowed the next words that leapt to her tongue. Fighting with the captain would serve her no good at all. Instead she took another path. “I am not a weapon either, sir. I do not want you, or the Silent Order, or anyone determining what is best for me. If I wished to be chattel, I could have stayed in Praia Nova. The
fidalgos
there certainly knew what was best for me. All you had to do was ask them.”

“Let me explain something, then.” Sayeed, too, sounded as if he were struggling for control. “You are a woman, my dear. In the lands of the Empire, this means that your father, husband, or brother has the final say over your acts. In the absence of family and spouse, responsible men must stand in their place. This is both law and custom. You can argue against it all you want, but if it was freedom of action you desired, perhaps you should have stayed upon the Wall.”

“I belong to no man,” she blazed.

“All women belong to some man!” he shouted. “It is the natural order of things.” With that, Sayeed stormed away.

Paolina sat awhile by the rope locker, sulking and plotting puerile vengeance. She could stop
Notus
’ engines, but to what purpose? She could even stop Sayeed’s heart, she reckoned, though even in her anger the
thought made her ill. He was no worse a man than any other here, tepid endorsement though that was.

She wished she could reach out and give him an awful case of the flux, though. Or cause
him
to bleed and weep four days out of the moon’s cycle.

Men were the prime error in God’s Creation; that was obvious. If He’d made woman first, He could have stopped there and the world would have been so much better run.

She stayed onboard at Marseilles.
Notus
approached the mooring mast at dawn, a process Paolina watched with fascination. The port had twelve masts near a bustling waterfront crowded with vessels great and small. Many of them set out for the day’s fishing even as the airship circled over their heads, setting herself into the wind at the right altitude.

The masts rose from a low hill just to the east of the docks. Their bases were surrounded by a cleared expanse of land which from the air still clearly showed the grid of streets and the outlines of old structures. She wondered if there had been a hydrogen fire, or if the Royal Navy had simply demolished the neighborhood against the threat of one.

The city stretched away in all directions—the waterfront itself, a district of buildings large as anything in Karindira’s city or Ophir, miles of smaller establishments.

There were more people here than she’d ever seen in the world. Even Ophir, great and strange as it had been, was not so vast or sprawling. The huge masts where
Notus
came to dock were little more than interruptions in the rolling expanse of people crowded together like swallows in a cliff.

She could
smell
the city from the deck. They were about 150 feet above the hill where the masts were anchored, and perhaps a quarter mile from the edge of the airship reservation. This close, coal and cook fires and food and muck and the swelling scent of a city full of people mingled to a compounded odor the likes of which Paolina had never before experienced. Or even imagined.

The crew warped the airship into place with the aid of men upon the mast.
Notus
came to rest amid four of her fellows, the other seven masts being empty. Though Paolina could see differences in design among the airships, they were all clearly of a type—similar to one another in ways the Chinese she’d destroyed had not been. All flew England’s colors as well. No free city here, to be sure.

No one, not Bucknell nor Sayeed nor anyone between them in the ship’s company, offered her a chance to go down. She watched as the sailors were told off on their leave rotations to much groaning and shouting and
gibing. The ones on discipline, forced to hold back from a city of fine wine and compliant women, bore their punishment with ill grace that the officers ignored and their fellow sailors hooted at.

She was one of those, trapped aboard with the ruffians and the deck watch, and whoever it was that would be aiding the purser in renewing the stores or the engineer in taking on fuel.

The thought of how they might have feted a
man
who’d single-handedly brought down an enemy airship was painful to contemplate. So she spent a while instead deciphering the lay of the streets, how carts and people flowed among the buildings, where commerce must come from and go to. It was a fascinating pursuit—such a great city was a marvel of design and ingenuity, though from the look of it, nearly all accidental. Even that hobby paled after a few hours, and so she went back to her hot little cabin and tried to sleep, wondering how it was that a woman was shrill and thoughtless when she exercised the same power that won accolades for a man.

He stalked through the camp. He didn’t know where Boaz was—they’d been separated in the fight. Right now no one was visible, but he realized that there were not enough bodies, either. Many of them were alive, somewhere. He would have noticed the winged savages carrying the workmen away in dozens and scores. The burning steam ram shrieked, some relief valve overwhelmed.

The tunnel.
They had to be inside the tunnel. Picking up more firearms as he went, al-Wazir walked toward the cliff face.

Sure enough, there was a barricade at the mouth. A number of winged corpses were scattered outside, with more human remains. There was no one visible at the barricade, but he couldn’t see into the shadows. A hundred barrels might be pointed at him now.

“Come on out of there, ye simple-minded liver eaters!” he shouted. “Them boojums be gone, and we’ve a hell of a lot of work tae do now.”

“How is it you’re still alive?” The voice sounded like Mercks, the railroad man al-Wazir had met back in Kent. “You been calling them down on us?”

The accusation was so extraordinary that it dumbfounded him. “Are you completely daft, man? I was out here fighting them off. I’m alive because I didn’t turn my back and run. That’s when they stoop on a man and snatch him up. You fewking rabbits is quivering in your hole now, but you’ll have to come out to piss sometime!”

Suddenly tired as he’d ever been, al-Wazir sat on a feathered corpse and began checking the magazines of his armload of weapons. Where he found
only a few rounds, he transferred them to other magazines. The two that were mostly full, he set aside.

He looked up when Ottweill approached, trailed by several of his toughs. Mercks’ men, to be sure.

“The mission you are failing.” Angry, Ottweill’s accent was thick. He pointed at the smoldering steam borer. “This cannot be.”

“What will ye be having of me, Doctor? I cannot sweep the skies clear. If your men will not drill themselves well enough to recall their orders when battle arrives, there is no fight to be had when the enemy comes.”

“That is your concern.”

Orders or no, al-Wazir had had enough of the doctor and his tunnel. This occasional, wearing combat would not do. It was like fighting the tide, and he couldn’t trust the men at his back. “Then perhaps you should hide in your hole like snakes in a riverbank whilst I go and find proper help. There were never enough men here to fight a war, and a war is what we have. Ophir will strike and strike again. They’ve made allies of the killers that brought down my ship two years past. I’m man enough to walk under the open sky. You diggers can cower and weep.”

“He’ll just go and bring more of ’em,” said Mercks, hovering at Ottweill’s shoulder. “It’s how he killed that
Beagle
or
Bassett
or whatever wooden bird he flew.”

“Sassenach bastard,” al-Wazir said quietly. “If I thought it would do any good, I’d knock out your teeth and feed them to you through your arse so your shit came out chewed tight and you had to suck on your dinner for the rest of your days. But the doctor here is going to need every man jack of you to die for him while I go for help. I shan’t deprive him of one more English corpse to decorate his parlor.” He stood. “Herr Doctor Professor Ottweill, I’d say it’s been good to know ye, but lying’s a mortal sin. I shall follow me orders and do what I may to summon aid.”

“Go, coward,” Ottweill said.

Al-Wazir resisted the urge to shoot the doctor where he stood. Instead he gathered his cartridges and his salvaged carbine and walked back through the smoldering, ruined camp. He would look for Boaz, send the Brass man on his way, then pass the gates and find his own path back down to the dock at Acalayong. The Mitémélé met the Bight of Benin there. He’d come home from the Bight before, by God.

He could do it again.

The river was brown, muddy and lazy as ever. The dock remained unmolested, somewhat to his amazement. Fuzzy wuzzy canoes were
drawn up on the far bank in the brown ruck that spread between Acalayong and the water. Al-Wazir walked out along the dock and stared down at the crocodiles lazing among
Parsifal
’s broken ribs.

He wished he’d found Boaz. There had been no sign of the Brass man, neither as metal shards nor walking on two feet. Al-Wazir preferred to think of Boaz wending back even now to his people in their city somewhere up on the Wall.

As for himself, he would need to build a raft. He didn’t think he could handle one of the fuzzy wuzzy canoes effectively, and there were no larger boats here. A raft would mean a long, slow sail up the coast until he found an honest ship to carry him home.

Is this my fate?
al-Wazir wondered. His da had made a way back from the Wall, those long years ago. Now here he was, possibly the only man in English history to have to find that long way home
twice.

It was good he did not have a son. The poor lad would be doomed to thrice covering the distance between here and forever.

There was nothing for it but to build a raft, so he did. As he worked, his mind kept straying back to the metal man. Gone now, as everyone was.

Three days later, al-Wazir was testing his little vessel fully loaded in the waters of the Mitémélé when he heard a familiar sound.
Airship.
He scanned the sky with a shading hand to spot the source of the propellers’ whine.

What he saw gave him long pause.

Two Chinese airships, their configuration of gasbag and hull unmistakable, cruised in a slow search pattern.

They were flying dogleg turns about two miles apart. The airships weren’t working the Wall, which possibly meant they weren’t looking for Ottweill’s tunnel.

They’d find it soon enough, though, by spotting the dust plume from the excavation. Either that or the dock itself, which would be clearly visible from the air, and just as clearly not a fuzzy wuzzy undertaking.

He set his little sail, laid his paddle into the slow current, and began to steer away from them. No point in inviting attention by remaining near the wreck of
Parsifal
or the dock itself.

The river deposited him into the waiting arms of the sea, where it pooled dark and lazy at the intersection of Africa and the lowest, tumbled foot of the Wall. Al-Wazir let the shore wind push him out past the desultory surf line before he began paddling. The raft handled no better than a floating door might have, but his time was plentiful. He would sail
west and north until a ship coming south picked him up, or he paddled all the way back to England.

Al-Wazir watched for an inlet by the failing light of day. Even better, he hoped to spot an island with dryland growth standing permanently above the tide. The moon’s track glowed in the sky, lit with the golden fire of sunset, but the sea was already purpling, and he could see a first few stars of evening. The wind was shifting, too, as it always did with nightfall in the tropics.