"Then I hope you will forgive this," said the Minister, and drew from his valise a brass-cased oil-compass. "Do you recognize it?"
Arabella regarded it coolly. "Of course, It is my own."
He proffered it, and she took it.
"Would you state it an accurate instrument?" the Minister asked, rubbing again at his hot pate.
Arabella turned the compass in her white-gloved hands. Many years had passed since they'd seized it from her, for refusing to disclose how she'd fixed the lines of longitude. The brass was well polished, the oil within yet liquid, the compass rose and azimuths segregated and clear. She looked up. "It seems well. At the least you have taken fair care of it."
"Then it will confirm that east is this way?" said the Minister, pointing to a wall resplendent with bizarre animal heads, the trophies of her hunts.
"Of course, man. Any compass denotes the cardinals."
"Then may I suggest a test? Pray stand and cup your eyes about the instrument, then proceed directly East from there."
Arabella frowned. She had not parleyed the natives of Abindia into trade-bondage to play the fool now. "I shall do no such thing."
"Apologies, Lady, but I do not think you will believe it any other way. Humor me please, and I shall cover my eyes with this scarf." He pulled from his valise a black silk stole.
"You came prepared, I see," Arabella observed.
"I come in supplication, at the request of the Prime Minister himself."
"An idiot of a man," muttered Arabella, as he wound the stole around his eyes. When it was done, she spoke again. "Will you now have me pin on your tail? I do not think your head shall mount very well to my wall."
He chuckled uncomfortably. "Only the bearing, Lady, I beg it."
"Very well." She stood, brushed her flowing leathern dresses to the side, and cupped her eyes about the compass. In careful strides, lest she come unseen upon the trestle table, she headed east.
Yet she did not stub her shin on the table, nor did she arrive at the antler-prongs of a taxidermied ibex, as she expected. Rather she came to rest by the portrait of old Galilee, whereupon she lifted her head and surveyed the room behind her.
"Have you yet done?" asked the Minister.
She studied the compass again, but there could be no doubt. She had followed east, and arrived north. She looked to the Minister, who was removing his blindfold. "Do all the Empire's compass malfunction so?"
"Lady they do, and hundreds of ships lost."
Arabella set the compass down and moved to one of the map-chests lining the sitting-room walls. From within she withdrew a vellum cartograph, which she unfurled across the low table. It depicted a topographical array of the world, with countries marked on longitudinal lines like entries in a ledger. She snatched up a scrap of paper and wrote out terse calculations, ignoring the Minister at her side, until at last she sat back in stunned silence.
"My lady, what is it?"
She ignored him, went instead to the sitting room's door, where a valet stood in attendance. She handed him the scrap of paper and gave a terse command, "By telegraph, at once." He bowed, strode away.
The Minister watched this transpire befuddled. "Might I be let in on this secret, Lady? Will you explain yourself?"
Arabella cut him a steely smile, then slapped her musket-cane down upon the cartograph, at a point in the midst of the Arrantic Ocean. "I will explain it, sir, to a gathering of Ministers in Parliament itself. For the giant East is dead, and the others more are sure to follow."
* * *
In the Commons chamber of Parliament, Arabella stood at the whip's green leather gavel and surveyed the Ministers in attendance. To her either side lay long empty bench rows five deep, stocked with only those few who had always supported her, and those who were lackeys, sent by their masters in the Cabinet.
Of the Cabinet members, only the Minister for Trade was in attendance, surrounded by fifteen or so other gentlemen clad in tweed and clearly there as a buffer between her and any real influence.
So be it.
"Here," she began, tapping here cane to the far left of a vellum transcript of the globe, strung up at her side. "Once the abode of East, foremost of the directional poles, cardinal of the rising sun, where our immediate problems lie."
Men leaned in to study the chart cautiously. The Minister for Trade coughed politely. "The abode? Lady Arabella, you speak as though this cardinal point were a living beast."
Arabella smiled drily. "Not a living beast anymore, Minister, though once he was; a living titan, stranded on a lonely Pacifac island, perhaps some lost descendant of Atlas who upheld the world. Now he is surely dead, and the loss of the direction east is the symptom, for he was its living embodiment."
Some in the audience gave nervous laughs, which faded as Arabella turned her steely eye upon them.
"Surely you jest, Lady?" the Minister for trade asked. "East is a notion, no more."
"Do I appear to be in jest, sir? It was East who taught me the lines of longitude."
The Minister for Trade rose to his feet, paling fast. "This titan taught you the lines?"
"Do not faint before me," warned Arabella, "that would be unmanly. As it is, I fear we have precious little time. You know I have never explained my sources. For that I was cast from Parliament, and my compass were taken." She looked about the chamber. "Perhaps some of you voted for my dissolution yourselves? Yes, I daresay more than perhaps."
"That was a formality, Madam."
Arabella's expression sharpened. "Do not puff yourself up sir. I know the manners of government, and I know well how you all rode my patents to the counting house. But that is no matter now. I learned the lines of longitude at the cardinal East's ear, and now I tell you he is dead."
The Minister paled further. "At his ear, Lady?"
"At his ear," Arabella repeated coldly, "for that was the only way he could hear me. He also spoke of a titanic cardinal war, long-transpired, during which each cardinal took his place in the primacy, fixing the poles by which our compasses are now oriented, with North at their head. It ended millennia ago, though now it may be started again, with the killing of East as the first salvo. Do you understand me, sir? The titan East has been murdered, and we must act before the other cardinals follow, and all sense of direction is lost."
The Minister wrung his pocket square between his sweat-soaked palms, looked to his fellows at either side, spoke in a small voice. "We have yet to accept any of these cardinals exist, Lady."
Arabella slapped the gavel-mat with her tamping rod. "East is gone, man! How many more must die before you accept what I say and take action? Can you imagine our Empire holding with not only East dead, but also West? We should never see Armorica again! Imagine North and South perished also, we would be lucky to even reach Gaul. Our island Empire would shrivel like a bud cut from the vine, and that cannot be allowed to happen."
A cautious squeak came from the Minister's lips.
Arabella looked around the room, fixing her sharp gaze on each of the Minister's fellows in turn. "Sirs, you will take what I have told you here, and you will tell your masters that I sail for the corpse of East within a week. If they wish to keep the Empire afloat, they will ready the fleet to join me."
The Minister's face blanched whiter still. "The fleet? But to where, Lady, and what purpose?"
Arabella turned on him with steel in her eyes. "To the east, man, upon the trail of murder."
* * *
They laughed in the Cabinet, as the Minister for Trade reported the news. Swathed in blue taback fumes, the Minister of Geomancy lampooned the notion of titanic cardinals.
"We're as like to see winged potatoes and dragon-headed pigs as cardinals of the compass!" he charged, bushy moustaches quivering. "No such creatures exist. The woman will find nothing but empty ocean and kelp. Trade, good fellow, do you truly think a storybook giant exists in the Pacifac midst?"
Upon the Minister for Trade's efforts to explain the Lady Arabel
la's position again, he was met with derisory mumbles directed at 'the woman', as they'd all taken to calling her.
At last the Prime Minister, a tall and handsome man not given to heeding the hysterical wiles of women, who forbore from calling Arabella 'the woman' though did not chasten those who did, rose to give account.
"Gentlemen, regardless of what we believe, we must act. We are losing ships every day, and it seems the Lady Arabella offers the wisest path we have. Tell me though Trade, how does she intend to travel east, when traveling east is the very problem to begin with?"
The Minister for Trade rubbed his head with his kerchief.
"She envisions an ingenious system of trigonometric reckoning, sir, similar to dead-reckoning by sight. Thereby the cardinal East's pull might be virtualized from three other ships, each constantly bearing towards the other three cardinals."
The Prime Minister tapped on the oak table. "Virtualized, is it?"
The Minister for Geomancy shouted out a protest, calling the woman's science utterly suspect. The Minister for War joined in, claiming the whole thing claptrap and butt-scuttle.
"Yet we are losing ships," the Prime Minister went on, and they silenced into rumination as the Prime Minister considered.
"A skeleton fleet," he said at last. "Stocked well with our greatest mathematicians, medicians, and philosophers, that they might better study whatever we find in the Pacifac. Sirs, I ask you to gather them apace, and board them at once, for we leave by week's end."
"We?" asked the Minister of Geomancy. "Surely you are not serious."
"As a dead titan," said the Prime Minister. "Ready yourselves to sail, sirs, we shall embark on this together."
The Cabinet erupted into dispute and cat-calls. Through the midst, the Prime Minister nodded to the Minister for Trade. The Minister for Trade nodded back, then left to carry the news to Arabella.
* * *
He found her upon the deck of the Huntswoman, her cutter, in the center of foggy Londinium Bay, testing the signaling systems they would use for the trigonometric reckoning. She held up a hand as he was hauled aboard ship, completing some final calibration on an instrument very like a sextant mounted by the port bow.
"It is centered upon the North-bearing ship," Arabella explained, pointing along the line of the instrument and into the mist. The Minister for Trade could just make out the brown of a distant hull. A thick anchor chain hung down from the sextant's stanchion-point, running out into the water.
"Not an anchor," Arabella said, "a chain so we don't lose them." She spun about, pointing towards similar sextants at starboard and poop. "Three ships, travelling in tandem with us. From them we shall calculate East, and avoid the problem of my living room."
Trade peered into the mist, but could barely see beyond the poop deck railing. "Could this be used for other ships, could they be adapted to travel in this way?"
"They could, but not if another cardinal falls. What said the Cabinet?"
The Minister for Trade leaned against the railing. "They do not believe you, the Minister of Geomancy in particular. But they will come, because they are lost."
Arabella snorted. "And I the shepherd, though they took all my iron. I'll make them eat it, when I see them."
* * *
The journey east began two days later, the Huntswoman leading with Arabella and the Minister for Trade at the stern, looking back on the encircling skeleton fleet and the great black-iron bulk of the warship Regent, which bore the Cabinet.
The Huntswoman's steam-funnels churned grey smoke, and the murky waters of Londinium bay frothed under its great iron paddles. Chopping away from the city that birthed it, it led the fleet of the greatest Empire on Earth out to sea.
Two months passed, and the skeleton fleet crawled the breadth of the known world. Like one giant school of fish they rounded the horn of Hispania and steamed through the Graek sea, laying in at merchant ports along the olive-laden coast from Amalfi to Timbuktoo, at each of which Arabella regaled the Minister for Trade with tales of the fabulous beasts she had hunted there.
Passing through the straits of Hormuz, circled at all sides by white-torqued Gyptians atop camel-back ridges with flintlock rifles at their shoulders, she ordered the fleet, all 86 vessels of it, to hang red and gold flags from their pennant masts.
"A promise from the Caliphate," was all she said, at the Minister's insistence.
Further they traveled, and the Ministers on the Regent grew fearful as they approached the edge of the charted world, venturing into the first stretches of wide-open ocean that funneled them between the Abindian archipelago and the paneled canal-ways of the Undonese.
Daily the Minister of Trade made the tug-voyage from the Huntswoman along the tether ropes to the black Regent, whereupon the Cabinet fumed.
"She will not see you," he reported to them every day, and every day they hashed the same arguments over again; that she was a callow ingénue infatuated with her own legend, a trumped up washer-woman indulged as though the Empress of Sud-Armorica, and in the increasingly acerbic words of the Minister for Geomancy, a dire calculating bitch.
He listened to this, and mollified where he could, and mopped the tropical sweat from his pate with a succession of increasingly yellowed pocket squares.
"Perhaps, but essential," he countered at every moment they gave him to speak. "Without her we would be blind now as five-year-olds."
They huffed and puffed on their taback in clouds of blue vitriol, while valets held Terkish umbrellas over their pasty white faces against the harsh Capricorn sun. Yet despite their grumblings, they made no sallies forth to replace Arabella at their head, and so the fleet crept into Eastern climes.
Soon they passed by the sealed-off sea of Nippon with its encircling wall of ships, the sprawling sea-rafts of the Pygmay peoples, and at last breasted the wide waves and rolling whitecaps of the Pacifac.
And then they were there.
* * *
Arabella and the Minister stood side by side at the Huntswoman's railing as the island of the cardinal East rose out of the ocean.
To the Minister it seemed a thing cut from the whole-cloth of myth, and he stared at it aghast, a vast steep-shouldered throne of rock, battered with odd hammer-blow divots at the crown, with the slumping corpse of a titanic grey man seated upon it. The top of his head was half-shrouded in cloud.
"Dead," said Arabella, her hands gripping the Huntswoman's rail tightly, with sadness in her eyes. "I had hoped it might not be so."
The Huntswoman sped closer, with the fleet at its back.
Arabella pointed to the line of East's throne, which was pocked with jagged divots. "What do you make of those marks in the back of his throne?" she asked the Minister. "I am certain they were not there before."
He barely heard her question. Before him was a giant, big enough to crush the Cabinet and all the Houses of Parliament with one blow, and divots were of no interest to him. Soon after he took a tug back to the Regent, where slack-mouthed he stood with the other Ministers and puffed on taback furiously.
"A giant man," declared the Prime Minister, "on a rock."
There was little else to be said. He said it for them all.
As they drew near, the center of the fleet sharply shifted away from Arabella, who after all had merely been their guide, to the Regent, where the Prime Minister and Cabinet summoned in the mathematicians, medicians and philosophers they had brought along for that purpose.
By dusk the fleet had pulled in to landfall at the base of East's throne. Parties of experts were sent out to reconnoiter the foothills around East's immense feet, to clamber his cragged shins and explore the folds of his rock-like dress. In the furore as these events transpired, no-one noticed as the Huntswoman began to circumnavigate the island.
Throughout that night the Ministers heard witness from their experts and carried out exhaustive counsel sessions as information about the giant East poured in.
The mathematicians estimated his height at over
a mile, the girth of his mouth at 1000 feet, the volumetric substances he would have to consume every day simply to survive at an overwhelming 30 tons. At these findings the board hemmed and hawed, while taback-smoke plumed in the air and important notes were made.
The surgical medicians prepared precise charts laying out inferences to East's endocrine system, his vast musculature, the pan of his brain, and how the slumping nature of his posture likely bespoke a major stroke as the cause of death.
"Then not a murder?" asked the Minister for Trade.
At this all eyes turned starkly to him. The Prime Minister stood to give answer, then yielded the floor to the Minister for Geomancy who was clearly champing at his mustaches.
"Have we not heard enough of that mad witch's carping, dear Minister for Trade? What conceivable power could kill a giant as vast as this?"
"I do not know, yet he is a giant," answered the slender Minister, "as the Lady Arabella said, which before you declared equally inconceivable. Is it not folly to disregard her expertise now? Who here believed in the cardinal East until she showed him to us?"
The Minister for Geomancy laughed. "Belief is a tricky thing, dear Minister. A little makes us holy, a lot makes us fools. You should learn the difference."
"We cannot simply ignore her."
Geomancy waved the bald Minister away. "She has plainly glamored you, sir. Your council is suspect."
The Minister for Trade argued, but was laughed down by the Cabinet as Geomancy mimed casting a spell over him. The agenda moved forwards.
Next came the philosophers, who bore witness that no creature under heaven's arch had the ability to murder a creature so vast. Their opinion was noted down in the annals of Empire. Much hemming and hawing was produced and noted, and gradually, what had begun as an urgent race to investigate a murder and save the axes of the world became a post-mortem summit on how best to adjudicate the Empire in the absence of the cardinal East.
Discussions turned to the behemoth task of sending the fleet back the way it had come, the supplies to be commissioned, and also the best method to claim the giant East for the Empire, perhaps by planting a flag in the top of his skull.
Death of East Page 13
