Escapement (49 page)

Al-Wazir grasped it as well, and threw his back into the next tug. Something popped with a shower of rust, but again the column just shook.

The great double doors banged open as a squad of the brass-armored soldiers poured in. Some of them were armed with swords as well as spears.

“I reckon our moment is nigh,” al-Wazir said.

“We shall see,” muttered Boaz. They gave the column another concerted pull, al-Wazir grabbing it high up to put his weight into the effort. His ribs stabbed within his chest. There was another popping noise and one of the pipes began shuddering. The king splashed in his tank, while the soldiers were nearly upon them.

He didn’t even have the spear in his hands, just a grip on this stupid iron column.

“Fewk that!” screamed al-Wazir, and jumped upward to grab at the shuddering pipe as Boaz yanked once more on the support.

All gave way with a slow, groaning grace. A stream of water shot out of the rupturing pipe, under much more pressure than al-Wazir had
expected. Metal shrieked anew. Column and pipe both bent as Boaz tugged. The monster thrashed. The soldiers surrounded them with blades and spears at the ready just when al-Wazir fell to the ground, clinging to the pipe, which now spat water like shot from a cannon. The stream drove back some of the soldiers, while others danced around it, seeking footing.

“They fight to lose!” al-Wazir hissed at Boaz.

The Brass man ignored him and the soldiers both, instead charging toward the Inhlanzi King’s tank with the seven-foot stub of the iron column. The other pipe had broken now as well. Dark, stinking water erupted from it.

Al-Wazir tugged at his pipe end in an effort to aim the water. It was the only weapon he had. The captain of the squad seemed determined to close on him, but the others were hanging back or milling as if to pursue Boaz. The chief dropped the pipe and launched himself, fists swinging directly at the officer.

He counted on the others continuing their strange, slow mutiny.

The Scotsman and the soldier hit the floor together to slide on wet stone, just as there was an enormous crack loud as if someone had broken open the sky. They both looked up to see a craze spreading across the glass face above them.

Boaz danced back with the column and made another run, leaping to drive it into the smashed glass.

This time the tank ruptured. It spewed a waterfall of filth that completely obscured the Brass man. The soldiers scrambled away as the tide surged toward them, while their captain and al-Wazir both scrabbled to follow.

The Inhlanzi King was coming out of his water bed.

Whatever he is, ’tis more than some fewking great African fish,
al-Wazir thought.
Eel, perhaps. Or just monster.

The king poured forth, scaly and long, uncoiling to show a mouth taller than al-Wazir, filled with needle teeth the size of a man’s arm. The upper body hit the stones with a jarring wet noise. He thrashed even as more of his body rode the sluicing water out of his tank.

Boaz rose from the filthy flood and stabbed one baleful eye with the stub of the iron column. At that all the soldiers roared as one and charged their king. Al-Wazir found himself sitting alone in several inches of rank water as his erstwhile enemies set blade to flesh, tearing into the scales and muscle of those long, thrashing flanks.

There was a great deal of killing to be done. The soldiers did it with a great deal of screaming, hacking, and cutting and sometimes dying, even as more and more of their fellows ran in shouting to join in the feast of
blades. The water drained away, thickening with gelid silver-blue blood as it vanished.

They weathered two storms between the islands and Singapore. As usual,
Five Lucky Winds
submerged and rode out the worst of the violence beneath the waves. The hull still rocked and the water still boomed, but there was nothing like the violence of a boat upon the water driven by wind and rain. Childress sat in her cabin in those long, noisy hours and refined her arguments against the Golden Bridge. If they made their way to Chersonesus Aurea, which still seemed like a substantial assumption to her, logic would be her greatest and only weapon.

Leung brought them to the surface several hours outside of Singapore. He found Childress in her cabin. “Would you accompany me to the tower?”

She set aside a chart she’d been studying simply for the sake of knowing something about the landforms. “Of course.”

Childress followed Leung up the ladder to the deck hatch. They climbed onward up damp rungs to the little cupola at the top of the tower. He helped her into the light.

It was hot. The air seemed practically liquid, and the sun pressed on Childress like a fist.

Ignoring that, she looked around. A low tropical coast, thick with verdant green and a startling array of colors. The water was a muddy yellow brown, smelling of salt and flood. She turned to look the other way.

The Wall loomed.

It consumed her vision. What had been a glowering line on the horizon at the Qun Dao Islands was an immense presence extending so far into the heavens, she had to lay her head all the way back on her shoulders to see it. The Wall was covered with countries—forests and mountains and tumbling rivers, all written sideways, with their own storms and clouds moving among them like the layers in a pastry. High up, where the sun caught a bright rim, frost perhaps, she thought she saw the gleam of brass.

“Oh, goodness.”

“Your Wall,” he told her. “It stands over Singapore like a rebuke from Heaven.”

“
My
Wall?” She laughed. “God’s Wall. Or Heaven’s, if you prefer. Whatever would the rebuke be?”

He smiled. “Something against overreaching, I should think.”

“Indeed.” She stared at its mottled vastness awhile. “May I stay here?”

“Of course.”

_______

Singapore was a busier port even than Tainan. The scene was busy enough to distract her from the mind-numbing Wall as
Five Lucky Winds
entered the harbor.

The Wall still loomed close, fog-shrouded below and gleaming above with the emerald of bright growth, but the logic of the maps she’d been studying was clear enough. Any trade that passed between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea flowed here. The British had been here as well, the easternmost extent of empire before the Chinese had driven them out not so long ago.

They moved up a narrow inlet packed with ships and boats and rafts and people. The passage was wide enough for a vessel larger than the submarine, but Childress thought that a person could probably walk across the water from deck to deck virtually everywhere else along the waterway.

Buildings crowded alongside the port, some obviously British, others with a more Asian feel. None were as large as the new iron-skeletoned towers that had been rising in Boston and New York City. Rather, these were broad, solid trading houses, banks, bourses, exchanges, and warehouses.

This city bought and sold, sold and bought. Childress imagined it mattered little to the inhabitants what flag flew above the customs houses.

Even ashore amid the surging chatter of crowds, there was an orderliness that had not prevailed in Tainan or Sendai. This was a city that kept itself a certain way, not surrendering to the riot that sailors brought with them.

It was also hot, soaking her with sweat even through the homespun blues she had adopted on this voyage. Who knew her here, after all? She would likely be arrested if she strolled the streets of New Haven in trousers and jacket such as these, but the crew had taken her for their own now. No one ashore here had firm opinions about the attire and comportment of a good Christian woman from New England.

Childress laughed softly and smiled up at the Wall, which hung over everything here like the palm of God’s hand. The sun beat down on her head, the air was thick enough to slice with a butterknife, and the water around her smelled like an old bilge. She was close to whatever this journey would bring to her.

“Chersonesus Aurea, I am here,” she said, addressing her words to the imposing presence that was the Wall.

So much for the Mask Poinsard and her Great Relic,
Childress thought.
I will do more for those who planned to let my throat be slit than they ever would have accomplished for themselves.

The surge of pride both thrilled her and shamed her. Childress accepted the two impulses as one, and watched to see where the pilot officer standing nearby would dock the ship.

“Now that you’ve received Admiral Shang’s approval,” Leung told her, “you are permitted to debark on your parole. You will return to the ship as if you were a ship’s officer under orders.”

“I should expect no less.” In truth, Childress was surprised, but she saw no point in elaborating.

He coughed, then smiled. “That means, should you elect to go ashore, you may leave the dock and move about on your own. This is perhaps the only port in the Celestial Empire where that would be a useful freedom to you. Singapore was in English hands until only a generation ago. It is still a common language here.”

“Is that why you speak English so well?”

“Thank you.” His head bobbed in a bow. “My parents are Singapore Chinese. It was a language at our dinner table. I pursued my education in English. There are engineering and scientific journals from your kingdom which have much to teach us, when the Celestial Empire can deign to admit those publications.”

She patted the metal of the tower. “Your engineering seems quite adept to me.”

“Again, my thanks.” He stared down at the wharf, where a detail of sailors from
Five Lucky Winds
was already being sent out. “Our peoples pursue different questions, though. We find different answers.”

“Much as with God.”

“Indeed.”

She walked along a narrow street crowded with faces of a dozen shades and colors. If there had been English here recently, there would still be churches. Possibly Church of England, possibly Romish or Lutheran, but churches. Childress didn’t actually know whether the Chinese empire practiced tolerance as a formal policy. From what Leung said, China seemed to lack the obsession with a single path to righteousness that gripped so many in the European world. Tolerance or no, the churches within the British Empire fought one another like aging tomcats. Each was jealous of the faithful of the others.

Many folds in the way
was a phrase that had stuck in her memory.

The shore was no cooler than the ship had been. Worse, because the
breeze out on the open water was blocked by the buildings of the city. All that pace of life was mixed together in a swirling maelstrom of scent.

She walked past narrow shops hung with blind-eyed ducks and haunches of stringy pink meat she preferred not to contemplate too carefully. Others sold mountains of red paper in many forms—envelopes, posters, folded into strange shapes, mounted as lanterns. Still more featured clothing, tools, jars that swam with pickled animals and tinctures of strange plants. There were more and more beyond, teahouses and little cook fires crammed into doorways.

For all its orderliness, Singapore was as jumbled and crowded as Tainan. Here there was the chatter of a dozen languages besides Chinese, and the dress of many clans and nations.

She wandered awhile, preferring not to ask directions. As there were many older women here, Childress did not feel conspicuous for her age or gender. She was the only European she saw. People did not stare, though. They just kept pressing past, on their own errands. Many rode in little two-wheeled carts pulled by running men dressed in almost nothing.

Her patience was rewarded when she came to a small mission building. It was a church, complete with a cross atop the roof, though the signboard was in Chinese.

Childress slipped through the open door and stood for a few minutes at the back. It looked Papist to her—there was a table full of candles in the vestibule, and large paintings of the Virgin Mary and a thorn-crowned Christ. Both seemed more Asian than the pale faces of traditional European religious art.

She smiled at that.

The pews were mostly empty, with a few people at prayer. A short man in a black cassock moved back and forth at the altar. There was no evidence of a pending service, nor of much else in progress. She slipped into a pew and knelt on the padded bench to pray awhile.

God did not speak to her, but then He never did. Still, praying in a church had always seemed to her to be more to the point than private prayer. He was certainly infinite in His attentions, by definition, but Childress could never escape the notion that God was very busy. Like the dean of an endlessly large college, perhaps—an image that always made her smile. She supposed it was sacrilegious if not outright blasphemous.

It pleased Childress to imagine the Brass Christ laughing at the thought.

When she stood from her contemplations, she saw the priest waiting for her in the aisle. His skin was the color of polished oak but his nose
could have come from the Mediterranean. Some race unknown to her, though she’d seen dozens of his fellows in the streets outside.