Pinion (44 page)

“Hello,” she said shyly. Her fingers brushed his hand, and he was lost.

“You live.” Boaz was unaccountably pleased. The human voices inside his head purred. As for his gut, at least it seemed to be making sense.

“I live.” She closed her eyes a moment.

He was losing her!

No, no, she was resting.

::
the maiden slept ninety nights and nine, and all the days between, on cloth-of-gold and cedar boughs
::

Hold her head up, boy
.

The latter was al-Wazir, plainly as if he were speaking from a point just past Boaz’ ear. The Brass lowered himself to a seated position on the deck and took her head in his lap.

People were shouting, Kitchens speaking urgently, the engines straining with an ugly rattle, the late-night air suddenly cold enough to lay condensation on him, but he held Paolina in the circle of his arms.

::
they bore her bridal-bright with yew poles beneath her sedan
::

She sighed. Her eyes were evening-dark, and full of stars. Or perhaps that was just the oil leaking into his.

“Those men want your attention.” Paolina’s hand closed on his.

Boaz looked up. Kitchens came into focus from somewhere very far away.

“That’s the girl, isn’t she?” the clerk demanded. “The one Sayeed lost in Strasbourg.”

His vision sharpened, the springs and actuators within him coiling as for battle. “This is Miss Paolina Barthes of the Wall. She is under my protection, sir, and no subject of the British Crown.”

::
a champion arose from the crowd, crude and loutish in the cast of his face but with shoulders to make a giant take pause
::

Kitchens laughed, almost a giggle—the man was very close to the edge of terror. “I should think, sir, that you might need to be under her protection. I require your aid, if you could leave her in the care of . . . of . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked around at a deck crowded with bloody, exhausted sailors.

“Call her companion over,” Boaz said. The strange woman did not act as if she were a frustrated captor.

One of the sailors squatted next to him in the temporary absence of Kitchens. “You be taking us in to Cotonou, sir?”

“I am not your command—” The Brass stopped himself and thought for a moment. “What has Mr. Kitchens said?”

“His clerkship told us to wait for you to be done with the foreign chit.”

::
struck them three and seven, then seven and three, until none of the water sellers could walk, or even cry for help
::

Boaz would have leapt from the deck and knocked the man cold, but for the fact that Paolina was still propped against him. He settled for words. “She is no foreigner, sir, for this is her land, and she is absolutely no chit. As you value yourself, address this woman with respect, for she saved us all.”

That
went without dispute, especially for anyone who’d seen Paolina plunge past the rail, then reappear moments later as so many of their attackers had tumbled broken-backed and shattered from the sky. All had noted her handling of the pursuing Chinese.

“Begging your pardon, your Brass-ship.” The man screwed up his courage and tried again. “So is we going on to Cotonou?”

“Most certainly our voyage continues to Cotonou,” Boaz snapped. If the airship could last that long. Damaged as she was, taking her back to the Wall was likely suicidal.

He had to consider Paolina.

::
you shall ring her with fine silks, and the flowers of the lower meadows, and the honey from four farms at each end of the land
::

Now you’re getting it, laddie. Yes
.

The sailor scuttled off to the poop to call out directions to the helm. Others organized the wounded and the dead.
Erinyes
was not large enough to have her own doctor, while the carpenter who served as chiurgeon had been killed in the attack, so the medicine was of the roughest sailor’s sort.

Boaz could have done a better job.

“My dear,” he said, trying the words in his mouth to see how they felt, to see if they landed flat and hard on the deck. “Have you skill in the setting of bones and the closing of wounds?”

She tried to sit up, but failed with a groan. Then the strange woman was close. Her face was strangely ornamented, adorned with white dots and tiny, eye-shaped shells. She spoke oddly flat English, as if she’d learned from a book with no one about to speak with. “I will watch over her. Her head is struck, I believe.”

::
Jezebel! Temptress! Thou shalt not suffer—
::

“As for these men?” Boaz asked, ignoring the roar of the Sixth Seal.

Distaste flickered in her eyes. “Once I have seen to the girl, I shall see to their hurts.”

“Let me go,” Paolina told him. “For now. You must fly the ship with that madman in the ruined suit.”

He stood, stiff and worn, to head for the poop. As Boaz mounted the short ladder, he turned. The foreign woman was just rising from Paolina’s side, already looking at the gaggle of bloody, exhausted men gathering around her.

“We’re hours out of Cotonou,” Kitchens told him. “The crew is half dead, the gasbag is leaking, the engines are done for, and if we were set upon by a flock of sparrows, I do not think we could defend ourselves.” He patted the helm that he now gripped tightly. “
Erinyes
is knackered.”

“As well as everyone aboard her,” Boaz said, feeling the pressure of monkeylike impatience. “What would you of me now?”

::
cut through the bindings which straiten you and make forward to the altar
::

“We must discuss command. I need you to seize this vessel, to save my freedom for larger concerns I am pursuing.”

“Paolina is here now,” Boaz said. “I will not have her arrested in Cotonou, nor anywhere else. Neither will I permit myself to be taken again.”

There must have been an edge to his voice, because Kitchens gave him a troubled look. Even in the night shadows close beneath the gasbag the man was easy to read.

“No one is arresting you, John Brass. If I have my way, you shall be a hero from Cotonou to Cornwall. But they will most certainly arrest me if I arrive in command.” Kitchens sounded horrified. “I am a
civilian
, after all.”

::
him that taketh up no arms in time of war haveth no say in the making of peace
::

“I am an enemy.”

“An enemy officer, commanding
Erinyes
under his parole!”

“Parole? To whom?”

“To
me
!”

Boaz was almost ready to allow the Sixth Seal to take control of his mouth. Let this madman argue with that. “You can return in control of
Erinyes
through my hand, but not your own? Your laws are mad, man. Simply mad.”

Kitchens stood his ground. “You are an officer under arms. Better you lead the ship than I. I can give direction, but not orders.”

“I am no officer,” Boaz protested. “They will not take orders from me, this English crew.”

The clerk leaned in close. “They already are.”

::
carrying the banner furled in bands of goat hide so they would heed his call but not his colors
::

He was right, the Brass realized. So was the Seal, if it came to that. “You will swear this to me,” he demanded of the Englishman. “That when we arrive there, Paolina and I will be free to go upon our way. We will not be taken in and chained by anyone, ever again.”

“I cannot bind another man’s honor,” Kitchens said, “but I can bind my own. I pledge my place in the Special Section of Admiralty and my powers of persuasion to your cause.”

So it goes
, Boaz thought. Any commander serves at the will of his men. As long as he guided
Erinyes
to Cotonou and the British airship station there, Kitchens and this crew would follow him. If he turned away, south toward the Wall or east back toward the African interior, there would be more trouble.

Trouble from the deck, trouble from the winged savages, trouble from the Chinese.

::
our fears rise within us like hunting birds on the wings of dawn, and their cries strike down across the meadows of our hearts
::

The airship labored on through the remains of the night. Muttered consultation with the older sailors revealed that they should hail Cotonou sometime after dawn. Boaz had no idea what sort of presence the British might have there.

“It is a quiet base,” Kitchens told him. “Reinforced since the loss of
Bassett
, to support a more forward fleet element along the Wall. We’ve neglected the West African station because there has been so little opposition
here. In the past two years, Chinese incursions have grown far bolder. The Wall itself now fights us more vigorously as well.”

“You will never prevail against the Wall,” Boaz said quietly. “My own people built an empire for dozens of centuries, and could not control more than our small allotment. Rome could not do it; neither will Britain. The Wall is too great, too powerful, too much the barrier in the mind of the world to be overcome by a million men under arms, with all the airships of Heaven behind them.”

::
the angel came down to him on a chariot of fire, and spake in a voice carved from the thunderbolt
::

Kitchens chose his words with care. “It is not the Wall we fear. It is the Chinese. The Wall is a great, slow storm of stone straddling the two Earths, but it is just a thing. The Chinese seek to carve out the heart of the Empire and make us all bow down like savages.”

Having known a few Chinese, briefly, Boaz considered this. “They would probably say the same of your English navies. You pursue one another about the world, looking to set fire to every ship in the air and every boat on the water. Who could have the right of such a thing?”

Kitchens made a small noise, somewhere between a sob and a laugh, then said, “I do not know, John Brass. I only know which sovereign to whom I am sworn.”

“What of your queen?”

::
she rules from a chariot of blood, riding dark miles over a land of emptiness
::

Kitchens looked about. Boaz had the wheel now, holding a course. No sailors were on the poop, only the two of them. “I must speak of something terrible,” the clerk said. He seemed greatly shamed.

“What is your fear, man?”

“Our Queen is hostage to some dread combination of science and magic. She lies in Blenheim Palace, entombed in a cask of her own fluids, living in the dark while men make a pretense of heeding to her.” Kitchens gulped air, a dry sob now. “She has asked me to . . . to . . .”

It
was
a dread, Boaz realized. Something well buried.

Inside him, al-Wazir stirred. The man’s voice was deeper, softer, as if Paolina had left his head when she appeared, but a part of her had remained behind.

Do not prod him, laddie
.

::
they shall find their own souls within the fires of Baal
::

Which Boaz took to mean that the Seal agreed with al-Wazir.

“I must return to England,” Kitchens announced, in control of himself once more. “Not just to seek aid for the tunneling project, but to return to
Her Imperial Majesty’s side. I allowed my notions of duty to cloud the honorable truth.”

Boaz watched the horizon a while. After an extended silence, he asked the next obvious question. “What will you do there?”

“What she asked me to.”

Near dawn the foreign woman came to Boaz. He was surprised to have spent the night at the wheel without agitation over Paolina. A sense of progress, of the firmness of their reunion, had lent him peace even while she was resting.

::
storms pass on over the sea, but still the flood remains behind
::

“All is well,” the woman said. “She slept long, and now looks into the problem of the engines with some of these . . . men.”

Boaz glanced at the nacelles, but of course they were not out monkey-swinging over the gulf of air beneath
Erinyes
’ keel.

“What about you?” he asked. “You are of the Wall.”

“Of the Southern Earth,” she corrected. “Gashansunu, a member of Westfacing House in the city.”

“I am Boaz, a Brass of Ophir, along the Wall.”

“Boaz, Brass of Ophir, I have followed this girl across the Wall to the waters of the distant east, then to here. In three days she has shown me more of the powers of this world and the other than I have seen in six decades of studying.”

“Paolina has that strange talent of laying open the tightest-shut eye.”

::
she rides a steed out of Eden, bright white as the world’s first sun
::

“I would return soon,” Gashansunu replied. “But my
wa
remains unsettled. I should allow this to heal before I once more stretch myself in the Silent World. Besides, I am curious as to the fate of the girl Paolina.”

“Have you foreseen something?” A hard urgency leapt deep within Boaz.

“Only that.” She pointed forward, just off the port side of the bow.