Pinion (15 page)

Well, he knew the answer to that. Government and Admiralty both were mortally afraid of whatever magic the girl had brought aboard the airship; she had used it first to destroy a pursuing Chinese vessel, then later to bomb Strasbourg. That the men might be somehow enslaved to the girl, or simply contaminated with whatever spirit had moved her, was a real fear.

Kitchens looked the petty officer up and down. “Are your men ready to sail, once their officers come aboard?”

Harrow made a show of examining the deck, the gasbag sagging overhead, the general state of affairs on the airship. “Sir, it will take at least a day to get her ready to move, assuming we don’t find nothing that’s
unairworthy enough to require a maintenance takedown. Where would we be sailing to?”

“Back to the West African station, Chief, to set right what was done wrong.”

“Ain’t us that brought the bitch aboard, sir,” Harrow said bitterly. “Begging your grace for my speaking too freely, but I ain’t got a lot of patience left. Ain’t us what took down the
Shirley Cheese
. Ain’t us what decided to haul her into Strasbourg.”

“A ship’s crew is as one man,” Kitchens replied softly. He didn’t believe that himself, thought that collective guilt was arrant nonsense, but with such a power loose in the world as these men had touched, no one was taking chances.

Harrow met his eye. “You ever wear a uniform, sir?”

Kitchens touched the dark lapel of his suit coat. “Only this one, Chief. But it exacts its own price.”

“Maybe that coat does. But you’ll never understand us.” He drew himself up and offered a formal salute. “Permission to bring my men aboard, sir? I’d like to have them begin preparing the ship for the air.”

“Permission granted,” Kitchens replied.

Penstock gave Harrow a long, suspicious look, then headed back over the plank to make his way down the tower stairs. Kitchens waited in silence as the clomp of feet began echoing upward.

Once aboard, the crew set about preparing HIMS
Notus
for sailing. Kitchens made no attempt to address the men. Public speaking was something his training had neglected.

Faced with his gaggle of men, Harrow had come to life. Gone was the somber, depressed affect with which he had addressed Kitchens. Instead the chief practically attacked his crew—berating them, shouting down their work, handing out discipline like sweetmeats on Easter morning. Harrow was everywhere on the deck, harassing the divisional petty officers, liberally putting his boot into the common seamen, and in general making a very noisy nuisance of himself.

“Mr. Harrow,” Kitchens said as the chief rushed past a few minutes later with a curse flying. “A word with you, please.”

Harrow ceased his pursuit of an errant tool and the hapless sailor who carried it to step close to Kitchens. His voice was very soft, pitched too low for overhearing. “Sir?”

“How dangerous is this crew right now? To themselves and others?”

“We’s ten minutes from a mutiny,” Harrow said bluntly, still keeping
his voice low and soft. “First wrong word comes out, first man who falls upon you, it will all be over. I could not be less surprised should it happen. Whoever in Admiralty gave you to this ship did you no favors, sir, for you’ve got your hand in the hornet’s nest, pure and plain to see.”

Despite himself, Kitchens felt a tinge of exasperation. “I am not their enemy, Mr. Harrow.” In memory, the Queen bobbed in her bloody tank, face fish-white and drowning-fat. Who was the foe now? The Chinese had not done that to England.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but you
is
the enemy. Any man in a civvie suit who comes from Admiralty will be that to them, for the rest of their lives.” He paused, obviously considering his next words. “Sir, should Captain Sayeed or any number of his officers take an idea to do so,
Notus
won’t never be coming back to England’s shores. Some mutinies start at the top. You might want to go back down them tower stairs and find another place to berth.”

“Thank you, Mr. Harrow, but I expect that I shall persevere.”

The chief grunted, then strode off without waiting to be dismissed.

Kitchens realized the man had a very good point. Without order and discipline, it wasn’t that the sailors might simply run riot, as Kitchens had already foreseen. The entire ship could break loose, a mutiny from foredeck to officers’ cabins.

A mutiny that would have only a single victim in hand the day it took place. He did not want to imagine the crew’s reaction to the death warrants that lay within his case.

The captain and his officers came aboard the next day without significant ceremony. Sayeed was a dark man, precise in his carriage and bearing. The captain appeared unscathed by his recent incarceration. The seven officers with him had not fared so well, sharing as they did an assortment of split lips, blood-filled eyes, and bandaged hands.

Kitchens hoped one of the latter was not the ship’s chiurgeon.

Crew stared at their officers. Officers stared at their crew. No one spoke, no bosun’s pipes shrilling, no welcome or orders. Just silence punctuated by the cries of wheeling gulls.

A seaman thumped his mop against the deck once, twice, three times. Another stamped his foot to pick up the rhythm. Within moments the entire crew was pounding out . . . what? A welcome? A salute? The opening act of Harrow’s predicted mutiny?

Sayeed rubbed his hands together, gave Kitchens a long, slow look that smoldered like a match-lit fuse, then began speaking. The crew fell silent.

“. . . have order on this ship.” The captain’s voice was quiet, almost quavering. “We fly the Queen’s flag; we will behave like the Queen’s men.” He drew a deep, shuddering breath.

Kitchens had the impression that Sayeed intended to shout, but what followed was no louder.

“Return to your posts. Prepare to cast off within the hour.”

Notus
’ master turned away from the sudden scurry and made his way toward the poop, trailed by the limping, battered officers. Harrow caught up to them, a look of vast relief just leaving the petty officer’s face.

Kitchens braced for what would come next.

They stumbled, shaking. Dust whirled in an angry, stinging cloud. Paolina blinked away the grit as Ming cursed softly.

He did not scream
, she thought with a guilty sense of relief.

Around them, the world had changed utterly. She’d meant to leave the termite palace, but she hadn’t known her destination. They could have gone anywhere. Here it was green.

Green
.

The rotting, brilliant, blazing viridian of a true tropical jungle. The lungs at the waist of the world. Broad-leafed and dripping and very, very silent.

This reminded her of the land outside of Ottweill’s camp. A horrible thought struck Paolina:
Had she taken them north of the Wall?

A quick glance upward told her nothing. They were in a cleared space. Great, ramified boles rose high over them to meet in an intertwined canopy that glowed ethereally with the light of the hidden sun. She had no view of
a Murado
or the angle of the daystar by which to judge her apparent latitude.

Ropy vines larger than her thigh connected the trees in all directions. Those vines were wrapped in yet more growth: teeming orchids with their bright, bobbing flowers; sprays of bromeliad; mats of chartreuse moss; little curling opportunistic plants filling the spaces between all.

In the airy green cathedral a profusion of butterflies moved, as though the flowers themselves had detached from their seats and gone hunting for mates. Flashes of color, some larger than her hand, flitted in aimless circles driven by the dim priorities of insect intelligence.

Paolina lowered her gaze to Ming. He was brushing dust from his road-worn blues and frowning. Behind him a spiderweb strung between two of the great trunks held a slender beauty with an hourglass body and trembling legs that could have spanned Paolina’s face. She took half a step back from that sight, and turned again.

The cleared space had no path leading out. An old deadfall, a void in
the rising riot of life that claimed this place. Broad-leafed plants the color of the deepest shadows nodded as if in sleep, shedding huge drops of water with each cycle of movement to make tiny rainfall onto the deep furze that had already claimed the feet of the two travelers.

Then the noise came back. Whatever shock their arrival had introduced to this place was dying away. If there had been an earthquake as a result of her using the stemwinder, it was not here. Something high up hooted once, twice, then crashed away in great leaping arcs completely unseen. Her ears painted the motion as clearly as her eyes would have. A chittering arose, blending into a cycling hum that opened up a whole vista of other noises: animal, insect, bird, wind, water.

And the smell. Rank rot of water standing in old tree trunks, the cloying sweetness of the flowers, the peculiar musk of monkeys high in the canopy, the strange edge that any close mass of green-growing things had, like the ozone prickle before the coming of the storm. The scents were a tapestry of their own, weaving a story just as compelling as the sights and sounds of the place, and just as overwhelming even if she closed her eyes and covered her ears.

“This is horrible,” Ming finally said.

“Do you really think so?” she asked softly.

“Yes.” He turned in place, making the same assessment she had just conducted, except that his eye as always would be scanning for threats, for opportunities, for dangers that might claim them unawares.

“Ah,” said Ming, and stepped toward one of the banyans encircling them. He reached into the shadows of the braided mass of the trunk and pulled out a feather.

It was a yard long, pale as an albino’s skin.

“The angel,” Paolina blurted, her heart flooding with relief. She was not so used to following blindly. “It has left us a sign.”

“Or a very big bird.” Ming handed her the feather.

She took the pinion by the quill at the base and turned it over in her hand. Big as this was, it seemed like a sword to her, though it weighed a tiny fraction of what a weapon would. The spine was hollow, just as a bird’s feather. The vanes gleamed with little rainbows as tiny irregularities in the barbs caught at the light and plucked beauty unlikely from it.

She realized the feather was blood-warm. “We go that way,” she told Ming, pointing at the banyan from which he had retrieved the feather. “We are close.”

He looked at the dense growth beyond and shrugged. “I have no . . . ,” he said, using a word she didn’t know. At her puzzled look, Ming added, “I do not have a knife large enough.”

If the feather had in truth been a sword, they could have cut a path with it. Without a machete, they would have to push through as if they lived here, rather than coming as invaders.

That seemed humble enough, somehow. The jungle would be pitiless, as was its nature, but approaching in humility was better than being cloaked in false pride.

Humility. Boaz would have been humble
.

She pushed thoughts of the Brass out of her mind and followed Ming into the depths of the forest.

They soon located a trail. Narrow as the path was, she was relieved to stand upright without being wrapped by clinging fingers of green and brown. “A game trail?” she asked.

Ming glanced at her, apparently unsure of her meaning.

“Did animals make this?” Paolina clarified in Chinese. “I think not.”

He grunted. “Persons. Or big animals.”

She held the feather at arm’s length, using it like a pointer. Left, then right. Right, then left. After three tries, Paolina decided that the right caused the feather to tremble more. Judging by the angle of the sun, that was mostly a westward path.

“There,” she said. “We will go west.”

Before long they came to a rise, a shallow crest of stone emerging from the sea of muck and soil and life that covered the world’s hardnesses in this place.

They crested the ridge to find a monkey standing on the path. The creature was almost the height of Paolina’s shoulder, and straight-backed. It also wore a grubby loincloth and carried a spear.

Not a monkey, then. Not exactly. Also not threatening. Just blocking their way and staring at them.

Ming shot her a swift glance. Paolina nodded and whispered, “I will do this.” She stepped around the Chinese to stand before the monkey. There she spread her arms as if welcoming, to show no weapon but the trembling feather still clutched tight. She smiled, careful not to bare her teeth.

“Friends,” she said softly in Portuguese, the language of her birth. “Travelers.” She repeated herself in Chinese and English, showing the angel’s feather as if it were a token. All three tongues seemed stupidly unlikely in this place.

The monkey-person’s liquid brown eyes stared back at her. “Welcome,” it said in perfectly good English. “We have been expecting you.”

He did not ask for a tour of the room-of-the-world, and the Mongolian did not offer. Wang would have loved to see how they arranged their information. Knowing a thing held small purpose, if the fact of that knowledge was not itself a known thing. Otherwise people continually reinvented that which had been previously perfected, repeating old errors and ramifying them. This was the whole point of indexing.