by Jay Lake
“And you would do no less to Britain?” she asked quietly. “You, who raid into our North Atlantic and drag ships down to their graves.”
“For you, Mask Poinsard.” His tone was cold. “It was your dealing that brought us here, not mine. The Beiyang Navy gave me orders, but we are not nearly so foolish as to make any habit of savaging British shipping in its home lanes, so very far from a safe port of ours.”
She wanted to back away from that line of thought, quickly. “Still, China pushes everywhere.”
“If we do not, Britain takes everything without let or hindrance.”
They stared at one another awhile. The warmth they’d built between one another slipped too easily away.
She did not want to lose that, did not want to be alone and friendless on this vessel full of men who could kill her at any moment. Childress took a deep shuddering breath. “My apologies, Captain. That is a discussion best left for another time, perhaps never. Still, the Golden Bridge. Do you know what lies beyond the Wall?”
“Of course not. No more than you do.”
“My point exactly. Every traveler’s tale or saint’s myth about the Wall is filled with magic and peril that mounts like waves on the ocean.” She paused, picking her words with care. “Have you considered what your Golden Bridge might unleash?”
“It is the Celestial Emperor’s Golden Bridge.” Leung drummed his fingers on the little table. “And yes, it has occurred to me to wonder exactly that. Any navy officer who has sailed out of the brownwater has seen the sort of monsters which come down off the Wall. Creatures out of legend and beyond. The priests and eunuchs at court do not credit what actually swims the waves and skims the air, though they are willing to count the demons of the underworld as if they were farmers turned out for census.”
Inasmuch as the captain’s careful English ever did give away the landscape of his thoughts, Childress could hear disgust in his voice. “I am a Spiritualist, sir, as any white toucan is, but I am also an empiricist. Only a blind-eyed Rational Humanist would deny the presence of the divine in our lives. Neither do we concern ourselves overmuch with counting the angelic populations of pinheads. Still, do not discount that which abides in the shadowy realms of belief.”
“White toucan?” he asked. “You are the avebianco, are you not?”
Childress recognized her mistake. “A New England regionalism. What they call the white bird in the colonies.”
“I see. I did not mean to turn away from the discussion, but your choice of words engaged my ear, Mask Poinsard.”
She wondered if he’d seen through her deception. There was nothing for it except to carry on. “Call it what you will, we who follow the Feathered Masks do not look to the Wall for salvation. Christ died on the Roman horofix to absolve our sins. Breaching the Wall would release all the unsaved strangeness and magic of the Southern Earth, while also calling down those creatures and races which abide there in the sky. Is the Golden Bridge worth that? Just to steal a march on England?”
Leung seemed glad to return to their sparring. “The executions of your minor prophets are not of concern in the Celestial Kingdom. As it happens, I personally share your concern about the Wall, if only from sheer common sense. There has never been any significant incursion from the Wall into our lands. I would not hope to live to see one arise from our meddling.”
“Who could stop the Golden Bridge? The Emperor?”
“The Emperor’s word is the word of Heaven. If his will was that every man in the Beiyang Navy fall on his sword, we would fall. However, the Emperor is not given to pronouncements on such matters, as a general rule. The Celestial Kingdom is a complex place.”
“Decentralized power,” Childress said. “Your admirals and governors hold their own.”
“Without ever calling it so, yes.” Leung sounded uncomfortable. “We balance the propriety of rank and degree with the reality of distance and the practical application of the mandate of Heaven.”
“Truly, you are not so different from the English.”
The next day Five Lucky Winds made anchorage in a little harbor tucked into an island. A larger landmass loomed in the distance, mountains wreathed in cloud and fog, but here there were craggy hills clothed in towering trees larger than anything Childress had ever seen. Eagles circled above the bay, calling down their dismay at the submarine.
The sailors rowed ashore in two little rafts to dispatch hunting parties and make a camp. Captain Leung had given leave, here where there were no pot shops or women of ease. His men were forced to nature for their pastimes.
“We place a great value on poetry,” he told Childress as they stood on the stony beach near the fire a-building. “The worth of a gentleman is often measured in his words, and the calligraphy by which he sets them to the paper.”
“Words about mist-covered mountains?”
“Well, yes.” He nodded then stepped away to walk the perimeter of the beach camp.
The political officer approached her as soon as Leung had passed beyond earshot. Childress had scarcely been able to avoid him on the submarine. He had his pistol again, and his crooked smile.
“Hello.” He showed her the white bird hand sign again.
She couldn’t see a graceful way to turn away from him. Or even a graceless way, truth be told. He was armed and she had nowhere to go. “Hello.”
“You go Europe.”
“Not now.” She wondered what this meant.
“Ah, you from Europe.”
Another lie. Childress invested all the strength and chill she could find in her voice. “I am the Mask Poinsard.”
He laughed. “I watch. I learn. I know.” With a slight bow, he wandered away.
Childress stared after him, wondering what that could possibly mean. She turned and looked back out at the bay. The submarine lay at anchor, riding high in the water now. The metal tower rose like a little castle floating on the gray waves.
That the Chinese could build such a vessel, sail it beneath the ice, and sink ships in the Atlantic, probably should have been as frightening to her as that Golden Bridge. But war between nations was simply the way of things. Breaching the Wall, calling down its denizens on the wider horizontal world, was unnatural.
Regardless of the presence or absence of the hand of God in this world, any reasonable person should be able to see the folly of that labor.
EIGHT
PAOLINA
When Paolina awoke, Boaz was gone. She felt an immediate flood of regret. She had surely used him ill. It did not matter what he had done before, she had betrayed his trust. He was her friend even if his character was essentially male.
She crawled out of her leafy hole. The cracks and booms of the night had dissipated into the undernoise of the jungle—animals, birds, creaking trees, rustling vines. It all moved with a swaying rhythm that comforted her.
The country around Praia Nova had been drier and sparser, but still she knew to avoid things that had too much color, or spines of any kind. Neither the bejeweled frogs nor the quivering flowers were suitable for her attention.
Boaz had been bright and colorful, in his Brass way.
She pushed that thought aside and walked east, along the boundary where the jungle lapped against the rising rock of the Wall. The African coast loomed close, a muddy river draining from farther along the continent’s interior.
Closer by she saw signs of fighting—trees knocked down, smoldering ash piles, a mucky furrowed pathway where some portion of the sealed army had come and gone.
She could hear a distant thrumming. A coil of gray smoke or steam rose from behind an outthrust in the irregular pillars that formed the base of the Wall here.
The English?
Paolina’s heart raced as she approached their camp.
She clambered over a chunk of boulder fallen from higher up. The rock was growing rougher here, entwined with green tendrils of jungle. Paolina considered heading down the slope toward the army’s track, but she had to assume that w
as under watch by the English.
Coming around the far side of the boulder, she found Boaz. He crouched behind a smaller rock, staring east.
“I thought you had fled,” she said.
“Where would I go?” He nodded without turning to look at her. “A barrier lies yonder, a little one of wood.”
She positioned herself next to Boaz and peered outward. It wasn’t hard to spot—a timbered palisade that extended from the face of the Wall in a bow to meet up with another fold in the stone, protecting a bay hidden from them.
That was where the coil of smoke or dust came from.
There were men along the palisade as well. She could see the heads bobbing as they moved back and forth.
“It’s the camp,” she said.
“Your goal. Ophir’s goal as well.”
“Will you come with me?”
“I cannot.” He shivered again. “Authority yet commands me.”
“What if I knew your word?” she asked.
“Then that would be different.”
“It is not written on your forehead.” Paolina touched the brass above his eyes. “But I think it is written in your soul.”
“I do not posses a soul. I am a machine. A Brass.”
“Remember the part of you which fell dark and silent when I used the gleam to control you? The part that awoke angry and resentful, later? That is your soul.”
“What does it profit me to have a so—?” Something too fast to see spanged off his forehead, knocking him back against the larger boulder.
She turned toward the English camp as the sound of gunfire found her ears. Another bullet plucked at her dress.
Paolina threw herself to the ground, screaming, “Stop, stop!”
Two more shots hit the stone above her. Splinters of rock sprayed to sting her face and hands. Keeping low, Paolina pulled herself next to Boaz.
He lay flat on his back. His feet twitched slightly, drumming against the mossy muck that filled the little space between the two rocks. He was not dead, nor absent from his own thoughts.
She waited a few moments to see if the shooting had stopped. Then she tucked up against the rock and raised her head.
Two more bullets whined past.
Paolina dropped again. “Stop shooting! Friends! Friends!”
There was no answer from the English defenders. The possibility of this happening had never occurred to her. Paolina wondered if she could use the gleam. It had touched Boaz, after all. But she couldn’t stop the English defenders. Like her, they were flesh. Flesh could not survive that treatment. Could she somehow disable their guns?
She pulled the gleam free, keeping her head down. Paolina simply didn’t see how to set the fourth hand to match anything about the English weapons.
Paolina tugged the winding stem to the fourth setting, twirling it while letting her mind range. The other three hands were moving in their assigned courses. The fourth remained where she had stopped it on removing Boaz from the gleam’s thrall.
How to end their shooting and make them take her seriously? Paolina knew she needed a credible threat. Something to make even these rough Englishmen take heed of her.
She looked up at the Wall. What if she pulled rocks down from above? She did not want to kill the camp’s defenders, but she did not want them killing her either.
Whatever she did, Paolina knew that she would have to act quickly. They outnumbered her, as well as having a camp full of reinforcements. She focused on the Wall, setting the gleam against the stone.
That had a time, too, a beat that lay within its construction that was close to the time that beat at the heart of the world. It would be easy for the Wall to come apart—it seemed constructed of fracture lines, as if God had assembled it from pieces when He was making the face of the world.
She closed her eyes, listening for the beat and clicking the stem around until the quiver in her hands matched the quiver in the Wall. Sliding the stem back in, she twitched the gleam.
There was an ominous crack from above. Pebbles cascaded downward, followed by the harder echo of large rocks.
“I’ll bring it down on your heads if you don’t stop and talk to me!”
There was a sudden silence from beyond her sheltering boulder. She hadn’t realized how much noise there had been before. The sounds of the Wall giving way had frightened even those animals too stupid to be scared off by the gunfire.
“Are you listening?” She shifted the gleam in her hand. Another cascade of rocks came sliding down.
“Oo’s that up ’ere, then?” someone called back.
“A friend.” Paolina slowly lifted her head.
A big Englishman in a red coat crouched beside a tree just downslope. He had a rifle in his hand. She saw another fellow lurking in the rocks twenty or thirty yards back. There must be more, by now.
“No shooting,” she said softly. “Talk first.”
“Stop it with the Wall, then, missy.” The big man kept his rifle close but not aimed directly at her.
“Stopped.” She wondered what to say next. “All of you, step out where I can see you.”
He grinned. “Begging your pardon, but why should we be doing that?”
“So I won’t bring down a piece of the Wall upon your heads. You step out, I’ll step out, two of you come for my injured man here. Then we all go talk to the wizards in your camp.”
“Wizards, missy?” Another man she hadn’t spotted stood up from a shadowed hollow. “You’re not from home, are you?”
There were five in all. A couple continued to cast nervous glances up at the Wall. The rest studied her, grinning.
Paolina felt less and less sure of herself. “I need to go to your masters, then, if they are not wizards.” Davies had not told her how big and strange these men were. She’d thought them all sweet-faced cherubs as Bassett’s boy had been.
These were much more like the fidalgos of Praia Nova, oh-so-certain of themselves, no matter their depth of ignorance.
Something scraped behind her. All their eyes shifted, rifles swinging up. “Do not shoot him,” she snapped. “Or I will bring it down. He is with me.”
“ ’E’s one of them brassy boldfaces.”
“Yes. And he’s with me. We bring news of the army you face.”
“Oh,” said the leader in his red coat. “You’re a scout wanting to turn coat.”
They all relaxed a bit at that.
“I just want to come home to England,” she lied.
Red coat laughed. “We ain’t got the Queen stashed away or nothing, but we’ve brought a bit of England to you.”
“That will have to be a beginning, won’t it?” She glanced over her shoulder briefly. “This is Boaz. He is also a friend of England.”
Boaz said nothing, simply making a shaky bow. She would have to fix him if she could.
“Let’s go, then,” red coat said. “You other’n, get on your business. We’ll take her in.”
“First real woman we seen in two months,” one of the others snapped. Protesting?
Something was wrong. She heard it in their voices, saw it in their stance. These men weren’t drunk, but they might as well have been. They were grinning way too much. Now that they knew she was only a woman, they weren’t taking her seriously. Paolina twitched the gleam again, slashing it across the stone in front of her.
A great hunk of Wall rumbled free and fell in a shower of gravel and rock, smashing down on two of the Englishmen. One was killed instantly, crushed in a spray of blood. The other screamed as his groin was pinned beneath a boulder larger than she was.
“You will take me to your camp.” She hated the way her voice broke. “Or I’ll bring the rest of it down.”
“Ho, ho, ho, little chit.” Red coat laid his weapon down and held up his hands palm-out, facing her down. He took a step toward her. “You needs to lay off that shite. You kilt Augie.”
“You were ready to rush me down. I’ll lay it off if you take me in safely. No more of that ‘
real woman’ folderol.”
He stopped. “All right.” Turning, he shouted to the others. “Put down the weapons, boyos, and shift yon rocks off Bells. We’ll need to be carrying him in.”
Boaz stepped around Paolina’s boulder. “I will ward her.” His voice was hollow and loud. “If you wish retribution for the death of your fellow, seek redress from your commanders.”
Shortly they were marching in file through the jungle. Red coat’s two carried the wounded man in the lead. Boaz followed, then Paolina, then red coat himself. They’d left someone’s cloak over Augie’s crushed body.
“I’m call’t Perks.” Red coat was close enough for Paolina to feel the warmth of his body. “A man can’t be too careful out here. I hopes you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” she said pleasantly, gripping the gleam tight and wondering if she could set it to his time. “I shan’t apologize for Augie and Bells. I don’t have much brief for men who threaten me.”
“It weren’t noth—,” he began, then stopped.
“There’s hope for you yet, Perks,” she said grudgingly.
“Me ma’am says the same every time she sees me.”
There was something plaintive in his voice that brought a swell of pity.
She was growing too soft.
Twenty minutes later they filed out into the cleared land before the English stockade. A large red, blue, and white flag twitched over the wooden wall. Gray dust hung in a pall. A chattering thump echoed across the clearing.
Several men on the wall spotted them and quickly rushed to weapon stations. Perks waved his rifle in the air, then stuck his fingers in his mouth to whistle.
The men on the stockade didn’t abandon their watch.
Paolina followed Boaz across the open field of churned mud and tree stumps. There were whitewashed rocks every few yards, amid winding paths worn by the passage of patrols. Otherwise the place could have been taken for a wet, mucky desert.
