Escapement (37 page)

Al-Wazir had no desire to be on the open water in the dark. Not in this wee unstable rig.

Water exploded next to him. Al-Wazir bit off a curse and looked upward to see one of the Chinese airships several hundred feet above. Sparks flared where grenadoes tumbled down from on high.

He grabbed at the carbine. It was lashed to the mast, wrapped in broad leaves from a fleshy plant growing back along the river. He’d covered the firearm in the fat from a potto he’d killed, in hopes of some protection from the salt air. Several moments passed while he picked at the greasy knots, even as the raft began to buck on the surf it was now passing through with the landward turn of the wind.

The carbine came free at the same time that one of the grenadoes struck the deck. Al-Wazir got the impression of something red and hissing; then a tremendous crash both deafened and wetted him. He tried pulling the trigger. All there was to shoot at were bubbles, and his mouth was filled with salt, and the water boomed like the footsteps of his angry father come home after a long night of drinking.

Daylight brought more than dark dreams of cold hell. Or perhaps the end of dreaming had brought daylight. He was still cold, though, except where he burned like fire.

Something touched him. Al-Wazir tried to push it off, but his arm tingled and dragged. He realized the touch was cold and strong as he was rolled over on his side.

The rush of nausea came as a great surprise. Seawater, bile, blood flooded his nose, his mouth, even up into his head. He seemed in greater danger from drowning of this effluent than he had in the arms of the ocean itself.

Hands pounded his back so hard that a rib cracked with a shooting flare
of pain. Al-Wazir burped out a quantity of sand and mud, and another rush of bloody, stinging water, then closed his eyes and gasped awhile.

“I’ve fresh water upon your being ready for it,” said a familiar voice.

Ants,
thought al-Wazir,
there are ants upon my body.
He tried to speak, but managed only a wretched croak.

The hands pulled him onto his back and into a pool of stinking, warm fluid, and dribbled something on his face. Fresh, sweet water. Al-Wazir began to sneeze, his nose, so offended by the sand and bile, now fighting back. He could not drink. The sneezing made the injured rib flare and flare again.

Ribs. He was hurt more than there.

Finally he opened his eyes and sobbed.

Boaz—it had to be Boaz, no other Brass would have come to his aid—handed him a rag soaked in water.

Al-Wazir closed his lips around it. He didn’t even suck, just let the water drip into his raw, wounded mouth, and from there down his scoured throat.

There was sun in the sky, but it was dappled by green palms wound with vines. He was on land, then. His eyes met Boaz’ blank gaze. Al-Wazir wanted to ask, but words weren’t in it right then.

Boaz nodded. “You were floating amid the tide, bearing a piece of vine tight clutched in your hands. Had you been asea facedown, you most assuredly would have been long dead.”

“Hmm,” al-Wazir managed.

“There has been a strange vessel off our shore. In communication with the hostile airships hovering in the heavens above. It surfaces from beneath the waves, then slips once again from sight.”

“Ch . . . Chi . . .” He couldn’t manage more.

“Sleep. I shall locate some fruit, with ripe, sweet flesh for you.”

Al-Wazir meant to protest that, but his body would not cooperate.

“They scan the shoreline.” Boaz wiped down one of the Brass lightning spears with a leaf as he spoke. “We shall essay a departure this night. This position is too exposed.”

Voice seemed to have returned to al-Wazir, in thin, hoarse measure. He was largely intact as well, with no important limbs or parts missing, though he would swear every portion of his body was bruised, scraped, or sprained. “Chinese,” he said. “In the Bight.”

“Verily. I would take you back to the Wall, if you could but permit such an expedition.”

“England.” Too many words at once were difficult.

Boaz checked something at the spear’s head. “Not this route, not upon this day. Might you be able to reach England from the Indian coast of Africa?”

“The . . . Wall . . .” Al-Wazir racked his memory. He’d never served on an Indian Ocean station. There much of the simmering conflict between England and China was played out. The Atlantic had always been his haunt. But he knew there was a base at Mogadishu to watch for Chinese attempts along the Wall.

Though the Royal Navy had certainly not lived up to its purposes if two Chinese airships were now cruising the Bight of Benin. Not to mention whatever had been in the water.

Pleased that clarity of thought seemed to have returned, he tried once more for clarity of speech. “Mogadishu. Just north of where the Wall meets the Indian Ocean.”

“I can convey you there far more readily and safely than I might be able to escort you north across Africa, let alone travel upon the waters.”

“Then let us go.” Al-Wazir could not remember having felt so flat and helpless in all his life.

Boaz gathered the chief in his arms as if the big Scotsman were nothing more than a load of firewood. The Brass man turned his footsteps into the green depths of the jungle, away from the edge of sea and sky where death wandered above.

Five Lucky Winds
steamed into Tainan harbor with sailors ranked along the deck, flags flying from her tower, and staffs mounted at her bow and stern. A red silk dragon snapped in the stiff breeze above a blue ensign. Childress knew the names of none of the sigils, but their intent was clear enough.

We are home,
the flags proclaimed.
Victorious and mighty, the sea having bent her back once more to our lash.

The coast here was flat with hills rising in the land beyond. The harbor was a lagoon, entered through a channel between sand banks. The Beiyang Navy had claimed much of the waterfront.

Sendai had been nothing more than dockside shacks compared with the bustling brawl of Tainan. This could have been Boston, Childress realized. Even to the airship masts, though she would not have recognized the ships themselves that floated there.

More impressive were a series of very large buildings seemingly
designed to house grounded airships. The vessels never touched down, so far as she knew—these must be construction facilities.

She could see two other submarines in port, along with a variety of larger, heavier iron ships. Great turreted guns protruded from their decks. The long barrels of the weapons were oddly graceful.

Flags flew everywhere on those ships, and on the shore. People teemed along the docks—not a welcoming party, but simply a thickness of populace she might not have been able to envision without seeing it herself.

Captain Leung swept his hand wide to indicate the extent of the waterfront. “This is the home port of the Beiyang Navy. We were removed from Weihai a decade ago, but have made ourselves stronger in this place.”

She was shocked. “Your Emperor expelled his own navy?”

“China has many navies,” Leung said. “The Beiyang Navy is the most modern and the proudest. We turn our face to the blue waters of the outside world instead of the brown waters of home.

“Home is more . . . prestigious.” They’d discussed this before. She simply hadn’t quite realized how literally he’d meant what he’d said about the way affairs were organized in China. The idea of a sovereign nation mounting competing forces to struggle against one another for funds and patronage seemed strange to her, until she considered the regimental system that still formed the backbone of the English army.

But that was men and flags, not these expensive, terrible ships.

Leung spoke up again. “Some battles are still fought by little wooden ships slipping among the islands of the Andaman Sea and such quiet places. That world is largely gone from us, driven away by English aggression and the march of progress. An impudent man might remark that the Imperial Court takes little note of England and even less note of progress. I, however, shall refrain from such untoward observations.”

“Indeed,” muttered Childress, hiding a smile.

Then
Five Lucky Winds
followed signal flags into her berth, with much shouting and whistling and casting of lines.

There was an odor the likes of which she had never before encountered—bodies and horses and oiled metal and smoke and the salty scent of Chinese cooking, mingled in a scent so strong, it might as well have walked around on two feet, slapping people. Though the docks teemed with people, the wharf at their berth was clear of most traffic. A squad of men in blue uniform stood there, backed by a small mob of people of all ages and genders dressed in loose black clothes.

“Our escort,” Leung said, “and the stewards and servants of our sailors.”

“Your sailors have stewards?” Somehow she hadn’t expected that.

“Yes. Even the least of the men among the Iron Bamboo fleet is great here in Tainan. With nothing to spend their wage on, it is banked. Some may be drawn down to a servant or two to keep their houses and care for their wives and children.”

“I cannot imagine a British tar with a manservant at home.”

“Then I sorrow for your tars, madam.” He bowed. “Please wait here in the tower. I must attend certain formalities.”

Leung slipped down the ladder and onto the deck to dismiss the greater part of his crew. An unlucky few remained behind to secure the ship. Looking past the soldiers and servants, Childress could see mechanics and quartermasters waiting beyond a bamboo barrier to approach
Five Lucky Winds
and begin their work as well.

It was a homecoming for everyone but her.

And Choi,
said an honest, painful voice inside her head.
Choi, and Anneke, Captain Eckhuysen, the Mask Poinsard, and all the others who’d died aboard
Mute Swan.

Her anger had faded with time and familiarity, but its thin ghost still haunted her.

Leung came for her not long after, as the mechanics and quartermasters flooded past. “I am claiming you as my honored guest,” he told her quietly. “The petty officer commanding the detail wishes to bind you, but I have convinced him otherwise by virtue of both my rank and my sheer force of character.”

He glowered as he spoke, causing Childress to wonder what else had been said. “The petty officer can scarcely be threatened by one old Englishwoman.”

“It is not the woman he would put in chains, Mask Childress. It is all of England, present here only in your slight form.”

She smiled, then followed him down the ladderway, out across the deck and up the gangplank to the wharf. There the petty officer glowered his distaste for perfidious Albion but held back an obvious impulse to hard words and harsher orders. That was clear to Childress even across the gaps of language and culture.

Instead he formed his men up before and behind her. They marched Childress out the gate and along the waterfront toward a building with red lacquered pillars fronting a far more utilitarian three stories of windowed stone.

As she’d learned of much of China, the building was a mix of tradition and practicality. The center held to the oldest ways, the edges tried the
newest, and the churn between them maintained the Celestial Empire.

She wondered how it was in England, and whether she would ever get to see the differences for herself.

They approached their destination quickly enough. The petty officer seemed ready to march his detail right through the great bronze doors, but Leung halted him with a set of rough-barked orders. With obvious bad grace, the petty officer detached himself from his men and led them inside.

It could have been any lobby in the British empire. The decor differed only in the pattern in the rug and the nature of the paintings on the wall. Electrick fans depending from the high ceilings whicked round and round against the tropical heat. Clerks worked behind little cages like bank tellers. A man at a desk was setting appointments. A number of people, both in and out of uniform, sat on benches like so many tired passengers waiting for a train that might never come.

The three of them marched to a creaking elevator, then rode the wrought-iron cage in silence to the top floor. The petty officer threw open the door and shouted them out. Childress wondered how he’d thought to bring his squad up this little conveyance, which had barely fit the three of them. Perhaps that would only have been a show for the lesser folk in the lobby.

“The Admiral’s English is poor,” Leung whispered to Childress.

She resisted the urge to shrug. “My Chinese is even more so. We shall find our way.”

The petty officer stopped them in front of a set of doors painted red, studded with brass knobs. Some device or sigil had been removed from the center of each upper panel to leave only a blank disk slightly elevated from the wood around it. Childress could see the ghost of an outline, but had no luck in making it out any better.

Their escort knocked twice, sharp, smart raps. He then favored Childress with a narrowed glare intended to melt her.