Escapement (53 page)

Though the welcoming party did not break composure, she could see a stir.

These men were very well trained,
she thought. Perhaps some of them had the fortune to have dealings with the Imperial Court. Or misfortune, judging from the way Leung sometimes spoke of his rulers.

Instead of launching into a speech as she’d expected, Leung produced a sealed envelope from his tunic. The back was coated with a large glob of green wax. It featured several red stamps, their square imprints filled with some design she couldn’t make out. The captain handed it to the man closest to him, a pudgy young fellow so pale as to barely seem Asian but for the cast of his eyes.

The man tore open the envelope, studied the paper within, then turned and bowed to a much older man, speaking quietly and at some length. The old man nodded before stepping forward to face Childress.

“You are the Englishwoman,”
he said in Mandarin Chinese—the dialect she’d been learning.

Childress knew her accent was terrible, but she could give a creditable answer. “Yes, Honored One.”

“Eh.” He turned and walked away. All his fellow mandarins followed save the pale man who’d received Leung’s missive—he remained, a tall parrot in his cheongsam of yellow over green.

“Cataloger Wang informs me that he does not speak English,” Leung said after a moment. “He has instructed me to inform you that his fine ears will not hear the coarse accents of a ghost-face from beyond the horizon.”

Childress smiled sweetly at Wang, leaned forward, and said very quietly, “Boo.”

Wang’s eyes flickered.

“I believe we understand each other.” She folded her hands in the sign of the
avebianco.
As if called by her, a whirring flight of pale birds skimmed out of the trees to pass just over their heads. They skimmed
Five Lucky Winds
’ tower and circled out across the little bay.

Behind her, Leung chuckled.

Wang said something fast. Childress caught the word for “Englishman.”

“Dwei le,”
she murmured.
Indeed.

That seemed to settle the issue. Wang whirled and led them down the dock. Leung saluted his ship, then turned to follow the cataloger. Childress trailed behind them both, wondering precisely what was taking place in this strange, glorious place.

Wang and Leung did not head for the wooden buildings as she had expected. Instead they followed a trail that led out of the clearing and up into the ruined city. Pillars lay broken on the ground, overgrown with clinging vines and flowers the color of a dog’s tongue. Sweeping wide flights of stairs rose into stands of glossy-leaved bushes that rustled with movement running contrary to the direction of the wind. Monkeys—she hoped they were monkeys—howled and boomed in the foliage above their heads.

Some of the pillars had gold banding. Chersonesus Aurea had been quite literally lost, if no one had looted the precious metals in all the years since the place had fallen. She wondered what catastrophe had swept here. Not fire, surely. The pillars and standing walls did not appear to have been blackened, nor shattered by heat. Plague, or some disaster of political economy that cut off the trade routes and flow of goods. This place had never been supported by self-sufficient agriculture.

The trail crested a rise beyond which some of the trees had been felled to grant a view of the valley. The rest of the city was visible before her. At the shallow bottom, the buildings stood in a dark lake surrounded by waist-high grass. Buildings stood in widening concentric circles from that point, rising with the line of the hills. The structures were taken over by trees where they were increasingly distant from the water’s edge.

It is a map of a civilization,
she thought,
rising from the muck and climbing to
the heights, only to finally be overcome by the forces of nature.
Shattered and broken, the forms of the city were still visible. Statues glinted with gold and jewels where they had fallen in the crossroads.

The strangest thing was that this place appeared to have been built by Greeks, here so very far from the city-states of the Peloponnesus. She knew there had been colonies distant from the great centers of that ancient world in Sicily and Rhodes and even the Exuin Sea. But here, in an island chain tucked between the Malay Peninsula and the Equatorial Wall?

God’s world was filled with strange magics indeed.

Cataloger Wang stopped in front of a marble palace. Much of its facade was intact. He drew himself up and seemed ready to make a declamation. Instead he glared at Childress, stared at Leung, shook his head, and led them inside.

Within was a library.

Those words were inadequate to the task of describing what she saw.

A library was a repository for knowledge. A biblotheque. Some of that knowledge was in the form of books, other portions in the minds of the librarians themselves, still more as indices, catalogs, maps, files, displays.

This place was more than a repository. It was the mother of knowledge, the omphalos of human thought. She could have fallen to her knees and prayed, except for what that would likely mean to Wang. She did not need the cataloger’s affection, but she did require his respect.

Childress reminded herself that the Mask Poinsard would not have been impressed by mere books.

The center of the palace was a vast dome with vaulted ribs bearing its weight. Below the dome was a pit with slanting walls that descended into the ground. This was lined with shelves and scrolleries arrayed in shallow spirals.

This place must have been built by men who understood the
ars memoriae.
The architecture was perfect for that.

Those days were long gone. Now stinking water stood about twenty-five feet below the rim of the pit. Ramps and furnishings went on into the depths. What remained above the water was crammed with documents, books, bindings, scrolls, plaques—words on all kinds of paper, leather, and wood, thousands on thousands of individual volumes.

Below the water . . . She shied away from the thought, but it was undeniable. Below the water, past the depth of visibility, rotted the corpses of many thousands more volumes. Flecks of paper floated on the surface of the hideous pond like so many water lilies.

She wondered how deep the hole went, why someone would be moved to build such an impractical library, how many books had drowned like hostage children chained to the watergates of some medieval port.

It even
smelled
like books—an almost overwhelming itchy scent of leather and paper wafting over the rotten-pond stink.

Dozens of Wang’s fellows worked among the volumes. Some moved slowly up and down the spiral ramps. Others were seated on stools studying the bindings and shelf tags and scroll ends.

Wang the Cataloger, indeed,
she thought with a smile. This was a life work for a hundred librarians. An entire guild could spend decades here. It was far too easy to mourn what had been lost. Salvaging what remained might assuage those wounds.

Leung asked Wang something. There was another short, fast exchange.

“I am to tell you,” Leung said, “that women are not permitted among the books. You will please stay above the rails here, and not move about the premises unescorted.”

“Am I soiled?” she asked pleasantly. “Unclean? Or do they fear my wicked English wizardry?”

“These are the rules here. I cannot say.”

“Ask Cataloger Wang how long those rules have stood. Were women forbidden before I passed through his doorway? Or is it the case that he has created this rule now, then endowed it with the appearance of authority by claiming some canon of conduct?”

The captain visibly swallowed a grin. There was another exchange in Chinese, which ended with Leung nodding. “He says you are a bothersome woman and are to stay behind the rail.”

“I may be a bothersome woman, but I am also the Mask Childress. Cataloger Wang is free to attempt a restriction of my movements, should he wish.” She didn’t feel nearly so brave or powerful as that statement, but she didn’t know what else to do. If she bowed to Wang’s foolish hatreds, she would not readily recover any authority here.

The Mask Poinsard would have skinned this foolish little popinjay. That was not her way, but it was a good thought to strengthen her resolve.

“I believe he takes your point,” said Leung.

She did stay behind the rail that ran about the top of the pit. The area had perhaps served as a reading room once, though there was now scant evidence one way or the other. The Chinese had set up a number of wooden tables with stools spread between them. Material brought up from below was stacked across these like drifts from a paper store. More of
Wang’s fellows carefully examined the finds. They made notes on small sheaves of paper each carried in his arms.

They were all men; that was certainly true. There was indeed no place for women here.

She moved quietly, looking at what was spread here.

None of the material visible to her was in Chinese. She saw Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Roman lettering, and several scripts she did not recognize. A cold, tense excitement stole across her heart. This had once been a repository of books from across the ancient world. Anything might be here, from the lost classics of Homer to the greatest alchemical treatises of the Middle Ages.

Childress had never been one to blindly believe in ancient wisdom. The world demonstrably grew better educated and more clever with time. But so much had been lost along the way, buried in the grave of years. Here was a chance to exhume some of that missing knowledge.

All of it in Chinese hands, all of it somehow in service of the Golden Bridge.

She finally stopped next to an old man studying a scroll. The script was vertical squiggles that meant nothing to her. Nothing she had ever seen, that much was certain. There were several illuminated ornaments on the section he held open, seemingly random abstractions that might be stars or flowers or bonfires.

“Ni hao ma?”
Are you well?
—a polite greeting among strangers.

He looked at her and smiled, gap-toothed, the lines around his eyes drawing tight as any net. “Wo hen hao. Ni ma?”
I am well. And you?

“Wo hen hao, hseih hseih.”
I am also well, thank you.

He said something she didn’t quite follow. When Childress looked at him blankly, he tried again.

She realized he was asking her a question in her language. “Your words are English?”

“Ah, yes. I am English.” The accent was thick.

A nod this time. The gapped smile grew wider. He tapped his finger above the scroll, not quite touching it. “Taelsaem. Magic from Africa.”

Now that she had the trick of his accent, she could follow him. “Yes.”

His hands slipped into the sign of the
avebianco.
“You the Mask we promised?”

“Yes.” She made the lie true by telling it over and over. “I am the Mask you were promised.”

She found an abandoned hut. The roof leaked with the rain that drove Mogadishu into the evening, and goats had apparently used it last before her, but much of Paolina’s childhood had been spent among leaking roofs and goats. Neither water nor the caprine stench held much concern for her now. Paolina made a place for herself amid rotten straw. Wrapped in her stolen robe, she slept far more soundly than she might have thought possible.

Waking before dawn, she stepped back outside. This city slept at night, without the electricks of a Marseilles or even an Alexandria. There was no harbor light, nor even torches in the streets. It could have been Praia Nova writ just a bit larger.

Perhaps, she realized, the world was not the bigger and better place she’d hoped. Just little villages of men piled one upon the other in ever-larger arrays. That Mogadishu was a small place didn’t bode well for her chances to find aid. Seeking out the Chinese in an effort to balance England’s mighty and barbaric reach would be pointless. She would just be a different kind of prisoner. It was the Wall for her.

She followed a dirt trail until she found a railroad track. The line led south and west toward the Wall. It connected Mogadishu and Kismaayo, then. She wondered what might be traded up from a nothing town so close to the Wall. Precious metals from the African interior, perhaps.

Paolina began following the line. She walked on the wooden sleepers to keep the worst of the muck out of her shoes, and avoid the slippery, wet clinkers.

She’d been picking her steps for less than ten minutes when something huge wailed in the darkness ahead. The noise startled her for a
heart-hammering moment, until Paolina realized that it must be the train heading north on a night run from Kismaayo.

Scrambling down the bank, she huddled beneath a dripping thorn tree and waited for it to go by.

The locomotive moved slowly past her at little more than a walking speed. Paolina wondered if it had traveled at that pace all night for fear of animals on the track or washouts in the right of way. It looked smaller than the locomotives she’d glimpsed in al-Wazir’s camp at the Wall, back where she’d first found the English.