Pinion (5 page)

“Then I shall design one for us. I know your men can sew.”

Al-Wazir grunted. “You’re both cracked.”

Leung began to plot a course. Al-Wazir stared moodily at the extent of the Wall rising to their south. Childress watched a school of silver fish skimming the wavetops like so many coins and wondered how they would be received in Goa.

Their entrance to the port in no wise resembled
Five Lucky Winds
’ home-coming to Tainan. The harbor was different here, merely a great, shallow river mouth. The bar was about two miles wide, offering little shelter from westerly storms. The old Portuguese town perched several miles up the river, not even affording the luxury of an airship tower. That suited Childress’ purposes well enough, since it meant no nosy British captains lounging at the rail to remark upon the arrival of a submarine in their waters.

Even if there had been, she and Leung had little choice. The submarine’s battery problems continued to elude resolution. This meant she could not long remain submerged below snorkel depth. Airships were very good at killing submarines, Childress had been given to understand—one reason the Royal Navy had never troubled itself with the difficult, dangerous vessels.
Five Lucky Winds
’ only safety from attack lay in deep waters, moving quietly far enough below the surface to evade watchful eyes.

As they drew closer, she realized why they saw no towers at Goa Velha. There was barely a town. Just a collection of massive churches atop a hill sloping up from the estuary, surrounded by fields and huts. A half-rotted dock jutted out into the riparian waters, two fishing boats tied alongside.

The greenery of the shore struck her as strange, too. Neither the tropical riot of Chersonesus Aurea, nor the more mea sured greens of a New En gland spring, this place was dusky, dusty and dark. The grasses by the roadside were burned a deeper shade than she might have expected. The wind brought unfamiliar scents as well, more resembling Tainan than New Haven.

Leung shouted orders down the speaking tube, slowly conning the submarine in to her mooring.

This was the most dangerous part of their plan. An excitable En glish officer with artillery to hand could end all their hopes between one breath and the next. For that reason alone, the sleepy isolation of Goa Velha was a welcome sight to Childress.

Even a small town should have food for sale. The river here promised an abundance of water, though she might prefer not to drink the murky stuff.

She would be the Mask Childress here, speaking to what ever bishop or local farmer came to the docks to treat with them.

Their flag snapped overhead, false as it could be. After further argument Childress had sketched out a narrowing quadrangle, the shape of a pennant with the tip cut off. The field was white, hopefully signifying a lack of warlike intent to the En glish coupled with the Chinese color of mourning. The device on the banner was a simplified gear, square-toothed and hollow, a solid circle set within.

The Earth, Northern and Southern halves united in heraldry as they were not in life. “We sail all oceans,” Childress had urged. “Pursuing peace in the world. Let us put the world on our flagstaff and they all may wonder at our coming.”

“They’ll be wondering at our submarine,” al-Wazir had growled.

However the locals chose to read the submarine’s banner, they neither fled screaming nor mounted a welcoming party. A handful of fishermen tended the gear aboard their boats, incuriously eyeing the arriving vessel. Farmers working the fields along the shore did not even look up.

Sailors sprang ashore and made the submarine fast to piers of dubious substance. Even Childress could see this would not be a place to tarry. “I doubt we will find fuel here,” she said, “nor machined parts. Food, yes.”

“Information as well,” replied Leung, biting his lip. “Beginning with the knowledge that the Beiyang Navy’s charts are inaccurate. Clearly the British have moved what ever port was once here to some other locale.”

“And you’re complaining now, are ye?” Al-Wazir eyed the skies, looking for airships on the rise. “Better we trot through this little costume play like good kiddies than stride onto Her Imperial Majesty’s battlefields not even knowing our lines.”

After a few minutes, Childress took herself down to the deck.

“Nothing is here,” Bai, one of the ratings, said to her in Chinese.

Childress smiled. “This is En gland’s doorstep,”she replied.

She was still dressed in her ship’s castoffs. Touched by sun, with her hair pulled into a queue by Lao Mu, she could almost pass for one of the crew within the shapeless blue top and straight-legged trousers.

Bai laid down a plank for her to step ashore. Another agreement: She would go first if there was no obvious course of action, mumble in Chinese
at need and listen to what was said in En glish. If Portuguese was the language here, so much the worse that they did not have Paolina. Childress’ face would fool no one, of course, but they counted on the thin hope that the clothes would make her the man she wasn’t.

Childress was not above a bit of brazening if it came to that. Something else the woman she had been would barely have understood, but long months of violence and deprivation had changed much within her.

She reached the end of the dock and set foot in India. Nothing in partic u lar happened except that a mule brayed. Childress looked up the hill to see a corpulent man riding down the road. His skin was sun-reddened, and he was dressed in black vestments.

A priest, though whether Portuguese Catholic or good Church of En gland she could not say. Childress briefly examined her standing with God and decided that nothing had changed of late. The last time she’d knelt to prayer had been inside that Catholic church in Singapore, under the watchful eye of a priest who himself had hailed from somewhere here in India. Where that young man had been handsome in a sort of nut-brown way, even from a distance, this fellow on the mule gave the impression of being resolutely uncomfortable.

For a moment, she was almost overwhelmed with the temptation to beg for mercy, to ask to be released from her durance vile aboard an enemy vessel on the high seas. Childress laughed at herself, her voice pealing silver-bright into the warming air of this Asian morning.

She tossed the thought aside and strode forward to meet the priest, trusting the others to trust her with the task. If she could not speak with a divine after all her years in the Day Missions Library at Yale, then her presence aboard
Five Lucky Winds
was little more than a waste.

The rakish yacht
Fortunate Conjunction
had not been constructed along traditional lines. The glossy white paint and teakwood decking appeared so very En glish. The Kô, for all his Confucian propriety, was a man of forward leanings. Very unusual, in the Imperial Court. Wang had come aboard her by the night, along with the water barrels.

Being packed out of the library that had been his entire work this past six years took only a few hours. Once the Kô’s mind was fixed on something, everyone on the island hewed to the letter of his intent. One of the se nior Mandarins had even come down from the ruined palace to scowl disapprovingly. The readers at their research had barely noticed, but Wang’s little covey of archivists and papermakers and bookbinders and clerks had been set to panicked fluttering.

His belongings were down to a small silk roll—much had been discarded, or held against a return that Wang had already come to realize was highly unlikely. His work had been transferred to the offices of Yoo Wing-Chou, his first deputy, and he had secreted the little round statue of some ancient goddess in an inner pocket before lowlier servants came to sweep his chambers clean.

The Kô was erasing Cataloger Wang from the Golden Bridge, as thorough a purge as man could ask for who did not now sleep a head shorter than when he had awoken.

“You’ve gone and spilled the vinegar, haven’t you?” said a man, interrupting the drift of Wang’s thoughts.

He was surprised to find a monk next to him at the prow of the ship. The sailors had not threatened the cataloger’s life, but neither had they made him welcome. The prow seemed safest, for it had been deserted since they’d cast off with careful soundings of the island’s twisted little harbor. Wang had been small, fat and slow as a boy. He knew the trouble that could find an unpop u lar personage in what someone else had decided was the wrong place.

“I do not know,” Wang admitted with uncharacteristic frankness. Another lesson of his youth, as well as of his ser vice of the Dragon Throne: Say as little as possible, for in time someone, somewhere will surely call you to account for your words.

The monk smiled as he rooted about in a leather pouch slung across his saffron robes. “Ah!” he finally announced, and pulled forth a small jade pipe.

A smaller pouch followed. The monk tamped down his smoking mix with a grubby finger, then lit it with a struck match.
Very En glish
, Wang thought. A long, slow pull on the bowl fired the embers enough to touch the monk’s face with orange light.

That was when Wang realized he had been speaking to a woman. Her cheekbones had shown in the flaring light so he could see past the robes, the shorn head, the wind-chapped face.

“You . . . ,” he said, then stopped.

“I am a monk, yes.” She took another long pull from her pipe. It did not smell of opium, but rather of a sickly sweet herb.

Hemp, of course
.

“You are a monk,” he said, then closed his mouth. What business of this was his? He was already lost, rushed away from his place in the order of things on the irritated word of a man who could order Wang’s death out of sheer, indolent boredom. Surely the Kô knew who was aboard his own ship.

“Unanswered questions are the way the world teaches us our limitations.”

“Rude monks are the way the world teaches us humility,” Wang countered.

She laughed at that, her voice snatched away by the wind off the ocean.
Fortunate Conjunction
slid swiftly through the night-dark waters among the islands of the Kepulauan Riau.

They were in for a long sail to Phu Ket, he was sure, even at this yacht’s speed.

The monk offered Wang her pipe. He shook his head. Neither spirits nor smoke had ever served him well. He trea sured the sharpness of his mind, such as it might be, far too much to blunt his intellect with temptation.

Without reason, he was nothing.

“Are you a friend of the Kô?” she asked after a while.

“Have you
met
him?” Wang blurted, then covered his mouth in horror.

“Even the dragon at the gates of Hell has friends. It might have been better to ask if you know the Kô as a man.”

“No,” said Wang, his voice slowing. He had already betrayed himself several times over to this monk, should she have the ear of power. “I only know him as a dragon at the gates.”

She grunted, finished her bowl, and tapped the ashes back into her pouch. Pale fish skimmed away from their bow, fleeing among the sheltering waves. Not so many weeks ago a great storm had risen here. A fleet had been murdered—an incident that might well yet end their mining of the ancient knowledge of Chersonesus Aurea to rebuild the Golden Bridge of the ancients.

“Have courage, little man,” the monk said. She brushed fingertips against Wang’s cheek. “You are being called, not sent. That is the difference between an ox-cart to Heaven and a chariot to Hell.”

There seemed to be as much upward as downward on
a Murado
. Ascending the northern face of the Wall had not been nearly so difficult. It seemed the wildness of the Southern Earth was matched by the wildness of
a Murado
’s southern face.

“Follow,” the angel had said before flying off into the mists. Follow
what
? Paolina began to wish she’d remained in the ruined temple atop the Wall, up against the towering brass of the gear ring. The building had been fascinating and strange, the grounds not yet utterly wild. She and Ming could have stayed a long time, living off the neglected orchards, the rabbits, the old gardens overflowing with feral vegetables in the cool damp.

It would have been for naught, she realized. The whole point in her crossing the Wall was to escape the entanglements of Northern Earth. Too many had died by her hand. She’d made the hardest choices, then found them snatched away.

Try as she might, Paolina could not bring herself once more to the point of being willing to submit to unreason. Simply erasing the knowledge and skill to make another stemwinder was not enough to stop the men of that world from seeking to strip bare her mind, body and soul.

They knew no limits, no more than any man did.

Some were different. Al-Wazir. Perhaps that Chinese captain, Ming’s commander who’d sent him away with her.

Boaz
, a voice whispered unbidden somewhere deep inside her head.

“He is not a man,” she shouted. The words were a lie before ever they left her mouth—if anything was true of her lost Brass, he was definitely a man. Not in the matters of shaving and
pilinhas
. Rather, the shape of him.

Paolina could not set Boaz aside.

The MacGregor did not follow Kitchens into the abattoir. The clerk stepped alone into a room so underlit as to be almost black. Great, shadowed shapes loomed, while the thumping and the stench were much stronger.