Escapement (6 page)

Within she found metal.
Tools.
And shapes. Not the stemwinder, not anything she recognized. But metal.

He’d been raiding then, along
a Muralha,
maybe up to the ruined cities of the enkidus.

“Patience, prayer, and watchmaking,” she told the darkness.

She could have loved the boy in that moment, for all that he was the inadvertent architect of much of her troubles. Instead Paolina worked to sort what she had, laying it out on the floor before her knees.

God had created the world in darkness, had He not, before lighting the lamp of the sun? This was a much smaller thing.

Besides, her fevered dreams had given her so much more than she’d had before falling into restless sleep.

Tools, tools and metal. With those, any intelligent woman could remake the world. She could do no less.

A week and more Paolina was in the darkness. Her sense of time was not so perfected, but every day or so one of the older women came to her. It could hardly be a secret they were caring for her, but the men continued to pretend. She knew they had to let her out soon enough—something would go wrong with a well, or a winch would jam too hard, and they’d need her help.

She explored the logic of her tools and the inexorable movement of time. Every click of every second of every day was fodder for her. She’d measured the skies years before, understood perfectly well the dance of sun and moon and planets. It was time now to visualize how God had assembled these things in His work.

All she had to do was copy, not invent.

So in the darkness she cut and scraped and filed. Tiny pieces seemed to hold firm in her fingers, though she knew with the right clamps and stands she could have cut them almost dust-small. The shavings she carefully swept by hand, separate piles for each consistency of metal, in case she needed them for even tinier springs. Likewise the slivers, which could provide a roller for a movement almost too small to see. She could not build those here in the dark, with these tools, but she could anticipate the need and how it would work.

There was frustration, too, as some parts fumbled away from her hand, and others couldn’t be made to fit with sufficient smoothness. Wherever and whatever Clarence Davies had traded or stolen for her, he had been a genius unknowing. She kept finding just one more bit of metal, one more fragment to serve as a bearing, one more tip to cut.

It was like being at prayer, save with metal in her hands instead of some scrap of Scripture.

When Senhora Armandires came to let her out, Paolina was ready. She’d repacked Clarence’s bag with her bits of tool and machine. Working in the darkness had provided magnificent focus for her imagination, with no diversion of purpose.

Now she needed to be terribly sick awhile, and sleep in honest light. Then she could reopen the bag and see what she had wrought.

Outside, it was as if nothing had changed. Pretense, all pretense, as was much of life in Praia Nova. Walking slowly on Senhora Armandires’ arm, Paolina saw the men ignore her, the boys stare at her, and women keep their faces turned away.

“Am I supposed to have learned some lesson?” she asked hoarsely.

“Hush, girl. You need rest in decent shelter. Talking about what happened will only make it worse.”

In that moment Paolina knew she was not going to stay in Praia Nova. No matter that she had no airship to carry her away. If the fool boy Clarence could find his path across
a Muralha,
so could she. It was only a matter of determination.

Though not being killed along the way might matter as well, she had to admit.

She spent two days sleeping, waking periodically only to relieve herself and sip a little fish broth.

“They’ve been casting nets,” Senhora Armandires explained at one point.

“From a boat?” Paolina’s voice squeaked badly.

“A raft.”

“Fools,” she muttered, then slipped back into sleep, dreaming of the Atlantic swells that crashed against the base of
a Muralha.

Waking finally on the third day, Paolina felt almost normal. Her strength seemed to have returned, and her eyes didn’t hurt anymore. The senhora sat on the foot of her little cot in the tiny house. “We must speak.”

“I listen.”

Senhora Armandires picked at her mantilla a little while. Satisfied finally that there were no hidden flaws there, she looked up again at Paolina. In that moment the girl realized how old the senhora was. Not in years,
perhaps, but in cares. Her face was seamed with lines. One eye was clouded fog pale. Her hands shook slightly.

A Muralha
killed people, quickly or slowly, but still it made martyrs of them all. That Praia Nova was a settlement of refugees and rebels and wreck survivors might give them all a sliver of noble pride, but they were not meant to be here. None of them.

It wasn’t just she who should leave.

“The
fidalgos
will not say this. . . .” The senhora paused, looking again into Paolina’s eyes for something. “It is so difficult to be a man.”

Paolina began to laugh in choking gasps.

“No, no. Attend me. They have so much to live up to, before God and their fathers and one another.” Senhora Armandires sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “They will bleed before they show weakness. And apologizing to a woman is weakness. So we must read their words in their acts. The
fidalgos
have forgiven you, and repented of their haste. Do not distress their dignity by raising questions. In public or in private. Please.”

“What has broken?”

The senhora’s head bowed. She let her breath out in a long, slow sigh, like a lie escaping. “The pump will not work. We are running out of water. Every ounce must now be carried up from below, or foraged from the beck along the enkidus’ borders.”

“I suppose it is just as well that I did not starve in the dark as they intended.”

“Their pride . . . you must always remember and respect their pride.”

Never,
thought Paolina, but she kept the word within. “I shall fix the pump. Then I shall expect to be left alone.”

Senhora Armandires’ eyes flashed. “You are still a girl—”

Paolina let some of her anger leak out. “
I
am the only one who can fix the pump. I believe that makes me an honorary man.”

The senhora stood, brushed off her mantilla, and made a slight bow. “I am sorry,” she said as she retreated from her own house.

Paolina wondered if that was the only honest thing the senhora had said to her today. Though in truth, if Armandires was lying, it was more to herself than to Paolina.

She drew Clarence’s bag out. She wasn’t quite ready to open it yet. The lumpy, scratchy homespun carried promise, more than anything else she’d known in her life.

Paolina
remembered
seeing how everything worked. If she opened the bag and found she’d been grinding junk to dust in the dark, she would simply throw herself into the sea.

So she hugged it awhile, and rocked, and listened to the sea pound below, and wondered how many men and boys would drown fishing from the raft before they let her help them figure out how to build the boats. Finally she realized that she didn’t care anymore.

The next day Paolina was back in the mushroom shed. She had decided to wait until one of the men asked her to fix the pump.
She
had water, after all, in three gourds left her by Senhora Armandires.

It was quiet and dark, but so different from the closet in the great hall. She was here by choice—a vast improvement. No one barred the door. The darkness was different, too, filled with the gentle texture and reek of the mushrooms. The night soil of the village was spread here, used and reused to build a stinking bed on which the little brown buttons grew. Periodically the mushroom beds were turned out into the fields for fertilizer.

In other words, the mushroom shed was like the spring at the heart of the stemwinder, storing energy meted out over time in the form of food for future consumption.

She liked the idea. It gave her a certain sense of sympathetic resonance. She wondered if God had some divine equivalent of a mushroom shed in which He had labored at crafting the clockwork of Creation.

The pieces she’d cut in her blind fever were more difficult to assess. They bore only a passing resemblance to Clarence Davies’ English stemwinder, insofar as she’d been able to study it before being hauled away. Paolina figured the watch was unlikely to come back to her now, not while it was still hung on the point of the
fidalgos’
pride.

No matter,
she told herself. Her memory would suffice. She set herself to recreating her vision of how the energies of Creation were gathered and stored.

It was not simple. Much like the skies themselves, her course was charted in complex paths and traceries of brasswork. There was a mainspring, but she seemed to have made several other, smaller springs, as well as a profusion of minute gears. They were more crudely cut than the sparkling elements of the original stemwinder, but they were true.

She did not need what the English needed. As Clarence had explained, that was agreement with clocks at an observatory just outside distant London. She required only a model of the world. The heavens themselves gave the time to anyone who knew how to read the signs. It was the rest of the order of Creation with which she was concerned.

Paolina did not want to go to
Bassett,
let alone all the way to England, with empty hands. Those great sorcerers would scarcely hear her suit if she did not bring a journeyman’s work with her to prove her worth.

She imagined standing before the Queen and her court of the wise and the magical, showing her own stemwinder, demonstrating to all how she could follow in the footsteps of Dent, Watchmaker to the Queen.

Here, she was little more than a tool for pumps and levers, an otherwise inconvenient girl. There, well . . . how could an empire ruled by a woman not be able to see what she might do?

So long as she could show them.

Paolina bent to her parts—long, narrow levers with serrated catches, beveled wheels, little worm gears, springs and pins. It seemed as if she could build a hundred stemwinders. But she’d had a vision in the dark, and it hadn’t vanished completely with her return to the light.

The first problem was a plate or frame on which to build the train of her genius. Her hand slipped back into Clarence’s raiding bag, to see what might serve at that size and weight. It would have to be a bit bigger than the Dent stemwinder, as her tools were not sufficiently fine, but it would still be something a girl could carry in her hand.

The following morning, Senhora Armandires had bustled in tense silence before leaving Paolina alone with her thoughts. After eating the senhora’s thin gruel, she returned to the mushroom shed, where she found her mother and Clarence Davies waiting together.

Clarence smiled. He seemed to stand a bit taller, be a bit happier.
Perhaps he’d found a place here,
she thought, some purpose or sense of home. Miserable as Praia Nova was, after two years of walking, ordinary people who spoke some English might have seemed to him a gift from God.

Her mother, on the other hand, was bent lower than ever. The years of her father’s absence weighed on Senhora Barthes. Still, somehow Paolina had missed the arrival of old age in the droop of her mother’s eyes, the wrinkles upon her face marking the scars of time.

“Madre,” Paolina began, then stopped herself. It had been Senhora Armandires who’d come to her in the dark, not Senhora Barthes. She nodded at Clarence with a hint a smile. “Senhor Davies.”

“Daughter.” Her mother’s voice was thin and strained as her face. “I am glad to see you well.”

Clarence returned her smile.

Paolina wondered what this was about. Surely the freshwater pump,
though she’d resolved to make the men ask her. “I am not so well as I might have been otherwise.”

“Please.” Her mother raised a trembling hand. The woman needed a cane, Paolina realized. Badly so. “Do not speak of what has gone past. You must earn your trust, daughter. There is little water left.”

“Let them carry buckets,” she said bitterly. “As they would have done in any lifetime except mine.” Her anger at being shut away flooded back. “What am I to the
fidalgos
?”

“What are you to the girls who must lift those buckets?” Clarence asked quietly.

It was strange, a man even thinking about the work that women did. As if Clarence had never been told of the natural order of men and women. “I am a girl with a project.” She nodded at the mushroom shed behind them.
A girl with different aims, beyond this place.

The world was so
little
here.
A Muralha
towered above them like the walls of Heaven, the Atlantic spread before them as a moat around God’s castle, and yet all the people of Praia Nova could do was live within their tired places, generation after generation.

“I will come fix the pump in three days’ time,” she said. “Until then, I shall work here in the mushroom shed. In the meantime, I suggest people carry buckets.
Everyone.
”