Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories (23 page)

The mountain had its own climate, a climate closer to the one that Mary — the dead woman — had known when she was young. She knew the plants that grew on the mountain, their names and uses. Several times every week she and the girl would set out along the road that snaked around the harbor to the foot of the mountain. The road was paved with shells, and Mary used her ears to keep to it, and she wouldn't take hold of the girl till she could hear no other footfalls near them. Once she was sure that they were unobserved, Mary would reach into the shadow she could still feel even in the shade of the mountain—a kind of black warmth in the air near the girl — and she'd take hold of the girl's plait, and they'd be able to go along a little faster.

They liked best to go plant gathering on mornings when the mountain was girdled with mist—then Mary could smell the herbs they were after, their scents diffused through the damp air. She would send the girl off the path, saying, for example, that she must look for the low plant with furred silver leaves that looked a little like lambs' ears. She would hear the scoria crunching under the girl's boots and the little
snick
of the sharp knife she carried. Then the girl would return and put a plant into her hands. Mary would hold it to her face, and inhale, and remember. And sometimes she might tell some of her story.

She would tell how, in the happiest part of her life, she'd lived in the highlands out of Calvary with her husband's family. She would tell how they'd first met when he'd come down to cut cane. How different he was because his people, the Maeu, had been in the islands since the dawn of time and, in the highlands, still lived in their old ways, cooking their food in the hot springs, growing fruit trees and root vegetables, and building bird traps. Mary's husband had been sent off by his village to earn money cutting cane, to return with timber and roofing iron and pots and pans. "But he also returned with me—a cane cutter. My people—my great-grans—were brought here by blackbirders. My father and brothers were working the plantations for wages, but we hadn't come far up in the world from the days when we were slaves. We were a ragged lot compared to my husband's family. But—you see — on Sundays we all wore white. I caught his eye because he liked me in white." It had been a two-pig wedding, Mary said. Her family had traveled up country in a big cane dray. They brought liquor for the wedding—rough sugarcane rum. The air was colder in the high country, and there were streams and swamps that
steamed.
And sometimes it was windy and the steam came up off the water in sheets, and the wind tore the sheets into rags, which flew off, growing gradually transparent. "It was as if the air were full of wedding veils."

The girl folded the lambs' ears lug into newspaper and put it in her basket. Mary was swiveling her head back and forth, tilted, as if she hoped to find an angle that let her see out under the cataracts covering her irises. "That steam smelled like this mist. That's what reminded me of that time."

"There are hot springs here, too. They warm the sea in spots all around the shore."

"I know. But today the mist has a little burn in it, a little acid, don't you think?"

It was true. The girl's throat felt sore, as if she'd spent the night shouting above a crowd in a smoky room. She could see that the mist above them was darker, not white, but blued by the sky. She led Mary on and they came out of the cloud near the summit. Two thousand feet wasn't high enough for the greenery to peter out, and the top of the mountain was a grassy cone. It had been grazed, but now it was cleared of livestock for the works of the thermal project. The girl looked down into the crater at the men and their equipment and said that she'd love to take a closer look at what they were up to. "Can I leave you here, Mary?"

Mary said, "No." She didn't want to be left alone. It wasn't that she needed company. Nor was she fearful. Only, she knew that if she was left, it wouldn't be the mist nestling up to her, its scent, and her memories of her distant past, it would be the
other
thing — the church, with its disinfected walls and floors and its pews turned seat to seat to make beds. The sealed windows of the church, the airlessness; the wet cloth in her left hand, her right searching,
feeling,
passing back and forth across her daughter's lips, vainly seeking breath.

Mary said, "I'll come with you, and as we go you can tell me what you see."

The engineers had used a skid — a series of towers, a cable, and a steam-driven winch—to carry everything up the mountain: the girders of the derrick, boxes of bolts, drill shafts, cables, tins of grease, the new acorn-head drill bits. Pack mules were used to carry the explosives. What the airship tethered by four lines to the rim of the crater had been used for the girl didn't know.

Gethsemane's newspapers had reported that the airship was a zeppelin awarded in war reparations to Southland. Like the thermal project, the airship belonged to Southland's venturesome South Pacific Company. There had been an account in the newspaper of the ship's botched first attempt at landfall in Calvary. Apparently it hit rough air on its descent and drifted east of Ragged Hat. Its skipper ordered the anchor and landing bag cast out on the boulder bank at the head of the harbor. (The landing bag was a sturdy cylindrical canvas sack, with an anchor fastened to the bottom of it. The weight of the bag helped push the anchor down into flat contact with the terrain.) The zeppelin had come in so fast that the crew didn't see that the boulders in the bank were mostly huge hunks of scoria in beds of pumice. Despite the rope webbing that reinforced its sides, when the bag hit and dragged, it split, spilling its makeshift ballast of canned food and hand tools — which were all gathered up by a group of Maeu who were fishing off the boulder bank. The zeppelin was forced to ascend again to cruising altitude and fly far west of the islands and come into Gethsemane several days later on a kinder wind.

Suspended above the crater, the airship was an astonishing thing, but the girl was young and used to novelties, and didn't feel exactly how extraordinary it was till they reached the place on the path that put it between them and the sun. She saw Mary's face when the zeppelin's shadow fell on it. The blind woman balked and recoiled from the shadow—a shadow of something where nothing should be.

The girl said quickly, "It's the airship. It's like a cloud poured into a pan and baked solid. It's wonderful, but I can't think why they need it."

A voice behind them said, "Because the geologists wanted to take a good look at the topography of the harbor. The water is very clear and there's a lot to see. And the mountain provides only a nineteen-hundred-foot elevation."

It was the chief engineer, Sylvia's Mr. McCahon. He had come up behind them on the path. He went on. "Because the harbor is a cal-dera, and this mountain is what is known as a resurgent dome, and each warrants a close, and a
far,
inspection."

Mary had stiffened, and in contrast, her face had grown slack. She didn't simply mask herself; she slipped away altogether, while still standing there.

"If the harbor is a crater, wouldn't soundings have told your geologists everything they need to know?" The girl looked innocently quizzical.

McCahon was surprised. He seemed to take a closer look at her, and then his eyelids flickered, as if she were too bright to look at. "Possibly," he answered. "And possibly someone in the company simply wanted an airship. Someone unused to having his plausible explanations questioned."

The girl asked whether she might be permitted to go down to the center of the crater. She explained that they were gathering herbs for medicines.

"You're the witch who makes love potions."

"You're not supposed to know that," she said, and smiled. "I make purgatives and toothache powder, too."

"As remedies for love?"

She ignored this. She said that they were after a particular plant. "But I see you're drilling where we used to find it. Might I look to see if there's any left?"

McCahon offered to take them down. But when they got to the place where the track became a scramble, he said, "Here, girlie," and put his hands around her waist to lift her down—then didn't offer any help to Mary. "Surely you don't need your servant to mind you," he said.

"She doesn't mind me; I mind her. Or I supply her with a mind. If I go too far from her, she'll turn into confetti and blow away."

Again McCahon looked at her, assessing, as though he were thinking of buying her. Then he took her hand. "Come on."

The drill wasn't in operation, and as they stepped down the track into the crater, they moved out of the wind and away from every other sound, the noise of the port, the refineries, the ocean. The air in the crater was still and hot. At the bottom the girl spun around to view the interior of the green cone. The rim of the crater framed the sky, and the zeppelin floating in the middle of the blue looked like a keyhole in a perfectly circular lock.

Of the plant she sought she saw that there was a little remaining. She crouched to pick it, and McCahon hunkered down beside her, pulling off a flower and rubbing it between his palms to release the smell. "You say it grows only in the crater?"

She nodded. She didn't open her lips because she suddenly had too much spit in her mouth.

"Is that because it's so sheltered here?"

She swallowed. "No."

She put the plant in her satchel, then pushed the growth aside to bare its roots. She burrowed, then took one of McCahon's hands and pushed his fingers into the loose soil. She watched him thinking. He frowned and delved deeper, forcing her fingers down with his, till the grit was rammed uncomfortably under her fingernails. He said, "The thermal heat is close to the surface." He let her hand go.

"The plant wasn't here till Mary's auntie brought it back from the hot springs in the highlands after Mary's wedding and planted it."

"Who is Mary?"

"My servant."

"The zombie? And how is it that you know her story?"

She didn't answer. She asked him to observe how the foliage was yellowing.

"Meaning?"

"It does that when its roots are too hot."

"And you blame our drilling?"

"No. It was yellowing before you came. It used to be healthy — says Mary."

"Mary says things?"

She didn't respond to that either, and again her silence seemed to make him fall into a temptation to educate her. "The increase in heat is a release of pressure, not a buildup. Our bores will achieve the same thing. We are not poking a stick into a beehive, as some people seem to think. We are tapping a great reserve of energy through this bore and the one over the fumarole on the south slope."

"Are you sure that's how it works?" She sounded dubious.

"There's no reason to suppose a volcano isn't like a boiler," he said.

On their way down the mountain, Mary lifted the heavy satchel from the girl's shoulder and put it over her own. She took hold of the girl's plait. They were going along like that when they caught up with Gethsemane's other mismatched couple: the wiry, black able seaman, and his young fair-haired companion.

"Mam," said the man respectfully to Mary. She realized that it was she he was speaking to when she felt him lift the satchel from her shoulder. "Let me carry this for you," he said. And then he slipped his arm under hers. "The path is wider here, and if you lean on me, it will give your young friend a rest from her duties."

No one but the witch ever spoke to Mary. But this man not only spoke to her; he went on to make friendly conversation. He referred to both the girl and his companion as their "young friends."

The boy and girl, left behind together, were silent at first, then began a desultory exchange of information. He told her that he was a steward on the
John Bartholomew,
which meant he served at the captain's table. "And the captain's pleasure — I spend all the livelong day polishing the white brass.

She told him that she had a little place in an alley off Market Square. "I sell charms," she said. "I'm a witch." She sounded self-conscious — her invention and sense of drama seemed to have deserted her. "Is that so?" said the boy politely.

Mary, overhearing this, found herself smiling. It was as if someone had removed the weights hanging on her jaw.

The man and boy saw them all the way to their crib, then went off about their own business.

The sun had been shining in the courtyard, and the cages gave off a ghostly chicken-shit smell. Mary asked the girl whether she'd discovered what kind of kin they were.

"You mean those two?" The girl was surprised. "Yes. They are kin."

"They can't be," said the girl. "The old man is black." "Your eyes are deceiving you," Mary said. Then she continued, "I don't suppose you learned their names?" "No. I didn't give them mine."

But of course she hadn't—not even Mary knew the girl's name.

The following Sunday, the girl said they should go to the morning service. She wanted to see how Sylvia was getting on with Mr. McCahon. "They'll both be there. Everyone will. It's Founder's Day."

"Do you expect your potion to have worked?" Mary mocked. The girl was falling for her own fictions.

"I expect Sylvia's bared breasts to have produced some result."

They washed at the pump and put on their cleanest clothes. They went out into the street, one following the sight of the cathedral's towers, the other the sound of its bells. On the steps of the cathedral, Mary sensed the people parting around them, and a babble, as of troubled waters. She understood that she'd forgotten her place and all her own promises. She seized the girl's skirt and stopped her in her tracks.

"What?" The girl was in a hurry. Then she said, "How silly of me. Of course you can't go into a church!"

Mary released her.

"Wait for me. Look, here's some shade." The girl hustled Mary into a corner and placed her hand against a stone pillar. Then she was gone.

After a moment, "Mam?" a voice said. A warm, worn hand took hold of hers. "Are you waiting to go in? You can sit up the back with me, if you'd like."