Escapement (38 page)

Someone called indistinctly from within. The petty officer threw open the door and stepped back. The sour, angry expression was still strong upon his face.

She hadn’t been sure what to expect from Admiral Shang’s office. Certainly
Five Lucky Winds
had not contained a trace of opulence. The submarine was a machine, designed for a machine’s purpose, the bodies of men only furthering those ends. Ashore, amid wealth and power, people
tended to serve their own purposes, no matter what oaths they’d sworn, no matter what commission they bore.

Except for its size, this office was ordinary. A polished wooden floor that could have been found in half the buildings in New Haven. Square double-hung windows facing the cranes and wharves of Tainan harbor, the noise and bustle and heat echoing in through their raised lower panes. A large desk, carved and ornamented in a style unfamiliar to her, but still unmistakably the lair of a bureaucrat. It might have fit nicely in the dean’s office back at Yale.

There were certainly differences in style—instead of portraits of ships or famous dead men, the walls were hung with long, narrow paintings mounted on silk, weighted at the top and bottom to keep them straight. The room smelled of oils she didn’t recognize, and incense she’d never encountered before her time aboard
Five Lucky Winds.
The side tables had tea and wine services of curious design.

The only strangeness was the absence of chairs on which guests might find refuge. Admiral Shang apparently believed in holding his meetings standing up. Certainly he was standing now.

She was inexperienced at assessing Asian quality, the countenances and habits of dress of Asian quality, but Shang was a strange man even to her foreign eye. He was taller than any Chinese she’d met thus far.

Tall was only the beginning of it. Shang had hair like brittle straw, which he wore long, and a face as pale as snow. His features were unmistakably Asiatic, but he seemed albino, like the pink-eyed white rabbits one of the children in her neighborhood back in New Haven had raised and sold for the cook pot.

Though she was less equipped to assess Shang’s attire, the white brocade robe he wore seemed out of place. There had been very few people on the docks dressed in white. This had all the formality of a bishop’s rochet to go with its unusual color. The pale fabric only called out the paste color of his skin.

Of course,
she thought,
how would he turn away from it?
Shang had embraced what marked him out, rather than attempting a pointless concealment.

There was also a sharp gleam in those narrowed eyes. He seemed as suspicious as the petty officer. A quick rattle of Chinese, in which she caught a few familiar words—“vessel,” “voyage,” “Atlantic”?—provoked a long response from Leung. The captain did not seek to placate the admiral, but neither was he overtly confrontational. Rather, their conversation volleyed back and forth for several minutes. Shang’s eyes never leaving Childress.

When the give-and-take ceased, Shang bowed low. “Ma sue ka Shi Da Sz, welcome.”

She puzzled over that a moment before catching her own name in the strange syllables. “
Hsieh hsieh,
Admiral,” she replied, thanking him in Chinese.

Leung took a formal pose, back stiff and chest thrown out. “The admiral bids you greetings here in Tainan. He offers you the hospitality of the Beiyang Navy.”

She knew how to decode the hidden warfare behind such politesse. Even across languages, the dance was clear enough. His carefully chosen words signaled that she was being kept here in the naval base. And he decidedly had not mentioned the hospitality of the city or the Celestial Empire as a whole.

“I thank the admiral,” Childress said as graciously as she could, speaking slowly in case he understood any of it. “His hospitality is a welcome grace note to the courtesy shown me aboard
Five Lucky Winds
.”

Meaning: I prefer the protection of the captain.

Shang smiled when Leung rattled that off in translation. He responded at some length, with a series of questions and answers.

Eventually Leung cleared his throat. “I am to explain something in my own words, though I still speak for the admiral. Do you understand the intent?”

Childress was fascinated. “Yes.”

“It would be normal practice of the Imperial Court at a time such as this to exchange invitations to exquisite services of tea and rice wine. The two parties would pass veiled insults and subtle threats in an attempt to test one another’s resources. Each would to compose poems upon the virtues of the season and matters of the heart, until someone tired of the game. Such contests can go on for weeks, even months and years, as the player who yields first loses much advantage. His face is taken away, and he is known for a buffoon and a peasant among his fellows. Even his concubines will laugh behind their fans.”

“I have no fan, sir,” Childress said.

“Indeed. You are not Chinese, you are of no known nobility, you are perhaps not even human according to the strictures of the Celestial Empire. Admiral Shang, who understands much about the judgments of the color of skin and eye, proposes that we consider the elaborate courtesies to have been rendered. He is even so gracious as to yield the point to you.”

Childress swallowed a laugh. “Since such yielding is, after all, wasted on an old woman from the English lands.”

“Do not underestimate the power of old women in China,” Leung told her, an intense expression on this face. “And as that may be, do you accept Admiral Shang’s proposal of courtesies dispensed with?”

“Of course.” Childress bowed to the admiral. “And convey to him my admiration for his subtle observation of the forms of civilized discourse.”

Some expression flickered on Leung’s face that might have been the ghost of laughter. Then he spoke again.

When the admiral answered, Leung froze. The admiral then spoke directly to Childress, in thickly accented but clear English. “Where is the Ma sue ka Pu Yin Sar?”

Time passed with a slowness that Paolina found excruciating. She toyed with crazed plans once more, bringing down the other airships or somehow reaching out to the city of Marseilles with the power of her gleam. Revenge seemed pointless, even in the privacy of her imagination. All men followed their courses surely as the earth did. To expect Captain Sayeed to relent in his decision to confine her aboard ship was no more sensible than to expect night to fail in coming after day.

Despite her wounded pride and overwhelming boredom, night did follow day, and day came again. By six bells of the second dogwatch, as the curious Naval method of timekeeping had been explained to her, the crew was aboard. Paolina watched from atop a rope locker while the first mate mustered the divisions for a head count.

The captain seemed surprised to have all his men back. She could understand that. They’d just come off a cruise down the Atlantic to the Wall and back, with no company but one another and hostile Chinese airships. The wine and . . . other amusements . . . in port must be irresistible. She’d heard enough English grumbling about the unreliable, incompetent French to understand why the British tars would come back aboard, but the Continental Europeans among the crew were another matter.

They cast off into the chilling air of an October dusk. As
Notus
gained altitude, all Paolina could see were clouds and more clouds, parting to show the brass orbital threads of Luna and Earth and distant Venus.

The lights of Marseilles fell away behind the ship. First the pulsing glow of the central city, as if a furnace powered the metropolis, then the glimmering knots of neighborhoods and outlying villages until there was
only the dark countryside below with the occasional light of a shepherd’s camp.

There were more people in Marseilles than Paolina had ever thought to exist in the world. Logically the world was capable of containing billions, so long as they had enough to eat and places to sleep. But she’d assumed that cities would be larger versions of Praia Nova, much as Karindira’s stone town had been. Even Ophir, for all the proud history proclaimed by Boaz, had still been comprehensible to her.

The teeming sprawl of Marseilles was another matter entirely. Even from the air she’d
smelled
more human beings than she’d ever have known the existence of. She tried to calculate the mileage of all the streets in the city, but gave up when she realized that a thousand miles of pavement would not encompass half of what she could see.

Europeans bred like rabbits in a meadow. The only reason they had not overwhelmed
a Muralha
was sheer distance. Someday this flood of people would lap at the foot of the Wall, then begin to climb. Praia Nova, Ophir, and every village, tribe, and hypogeal monster between the Atlantic surf and the brass track in the frigid air high above would be at risk.

That thought depressed her, immensely.

They sailed almost due north that night, which seemed odd, given Paolina’s limited understanding of European geography. She would have expected a more easterly curse. She continued in her strange version of solitary confinement. If she moved about the deck, men sidled away from her. The only exception was if she approached the poop where the officers stood. Invariably some large airman would block her way, looking overboard or aft, anywhere but at her.

She wound up in the bow, watching clouds lit by starshine. Paolina did not need to speak to Captain Sayeed, or Bucknell, or anyone else aboard this accursed ship. They were all men, with the same universal delusions of ownership and importance.

As the night wore on, she found herself wishing she had reached some accommodation with life in Praia Nova. At least there she’d understood what the
fidalgos
were about. These Englishmen of sail and sky seemed more alien than the enkidus or the Brass.

Eventually light stole into the eastern sky. The bright traceries of the outer planets vanished first, taking the slighter lamps of the stars with them. Somewhere during that slowly fading display Paolina realized the strange clouds she’d been watching to the east were in fact mountains. Their white shoulders thrust into the airship’s wide sky.

East of north would have taken
Notus
right into those peaks deep in the night. While she had no doubt that Captain Sayeed would fly his ship over
a Muralha
if he felt compelled to do that, she also acknowledged him as a very prudent man.

In some matters, at least.

Sunlight had not made the climb over the eastern mountains, but dawn’s brightening lent depth and color to the last of night’s shadow play. There were towns below, not large enough to have had electricks against the darkness, where roof tiles glistened with morning dewfall.

It was also cold up here; colder than she’d been before on this voyage. Or really, colder than she’d ever been in her life. Paolina realized she was shivering. Her teeth clicked, and her body seemed oddly numb.

She’d avoided the sailors just as they’d avoided her, but this was too much. She crept to the forecastle and slipped through the hatch to her little cabin. Though she’d slept on deck through most of their African travels, Europe was too cold and damp. Belowdecks there were blankets, and no wind.

She finally fell asleep.

“We’s over Strasbourg,” Bucknell said, waking her as he leaned through the door without actually setting foot within. He looked sullen, and had a dreadful black eye.

Paolina didn’t ask. She didn’t want to ask. That would presume she cared for Bucknell and his fate. He was just another Englishman.

“Am I to come on deck?”

“Wouldn’t rightly know, ma’am, seein’ as
I’m
a stunted lackbrain.” He spat on the deck. “Captain might see it amiss if you did not, though.”

“Thank you,” she said, almost reflexively. Then, on impulse: “Bucknell, I apologize. My difficulties are not your doing, and it was unfair of me to strike at you as if they were.”

One hand strayed gingerly to his eye. “ ‘T’ were Gunny Rosskamp what struck at me, ma’am. You only did give me the sharp side of your tongue.”

“Well, I am sorry for that as well.”

Maybe sleep had dulled her edge, or the notion of arriving at a destination so far from the Wall. Whatever Sayeed’s machinations, the Schwilgué Clock was here. It counted the unwinding of the heart of destiny, if half of what he’d said about the magnificent thing was true.

She was bound for where she’d set out to be—in the company of wizards, in the presence of great and powerful things beyond what she might ever have found upon the Wall.

Paolina gathered her handful of belongings and stepped into the companionway. Bucknell slouched ahead, leading her back to the main deck as if she’d never found her way there on her own before.

Notus
was passing low over a city of spires and thick-walled buildings with red roofs. A cathedral with a single tower dominated a central square, while a complex of large buildings huddled a few blocks away along tree-lined streets. A smaller river met a larger here, and the city was surrounded by the richest, greenest hills she had seen since the jungles at the foot of
a Muralha.
There was a certain twisty charm clear even from the air. The brawling ruckus that had afflicted Marseilles seemed to have passed Strasbourg by. This pretty little city seemed made for the dreams of artists.