Pinion by Jay Lake
“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 th
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.
He looked a while, until he realized that a darker thread hung in the lightening sky of the last of night. Smoke, rising from a great fire on the ground.
Cotonou had been burned.
“The ship will not make the journey all the way back to England,” Boaz said, almost to himself.
“She may not have to.”
The battle lanterns of four more Chinese airships lit, one by one, bonfires to announce the coming of the enemy.
“Go and fetch Paolina now,” Boaz said urgently. “Kitchens with her, if he can be wakened.”
The ship’s engines seemed louder, more strident, as if Erinyes knew that battle came to her one last time.
::dig the trenches before you fight, that the carriers of spears shall have a place to lay their bodies down::
You are in for it now, boy.
CHILDRESS
British tars working the decks of their idled ships stared at Five Lucky Winds with frank curiosity. A small crowd of mixed Egyptians and foreigners gathered along the base of the pier, where it met a public street. Clearly the submarine was the day’s wonder.
The war, wherever else it raged, did not seem to have come to Port Said yet.
The morning grew so hot that even the seabirds retreated to crouch spread-winged along the verges of the pier, or simply huddled miserably in the glare. The city continued its bustle of noise and smell and squalor and plain, old-fashioned busyness.
All eyes were pointed at them. As were the Maxim turrets aboard Inerrancy. She wondered how those men felt, trapped in their little metal cages, aiming death at her unmoving crew.
At least Leung had caused the awning to be raised.
Bork arrived a few hours later, in the pounding noonday sun. He was piped aboard by an English bosun, from a flatboat filled with sailors in crisp, white uniforms with large sidearms.
Not quite a raiding party, but much more than a courtesy call.
She did not see al-Wazir among them.
The lieutenant commander appeared intensely pleased. Four of his sailors came with him, pistols depending prominently from their belts. “Mask Childress,” he intoned with the righteous satisfaction of a beadle confronting a parishioner napping through the homily.
Something orange—no, saffron—flashed in the corner of her eye. Bork’s flatboat issued a loud crack and began listing. Two of the sailors fell into the harbor, the other two struggling to clamber onto the sloping deck of the submarine.
Leung’s crew began to laugh. Bork turned to his men, then lost his balance and fell.
That was a bizarre piece of slapstick, robbing the British officer of his dignity. Childress contained a smile as two of Bork’s escorts helped him to his feet. The others fished their fellows out of the water, with assistance from the amused Chinese.
“Madam, if you somehow believe this moment to be accounted a victory,” the lieutenant commander shouted, “then you shall indeed be sadly mistaken!” He spun to leave, then realized his error.
“A dramatic exit works much better, sir, when one has a usable egress,” Childress said softly to his shaking back.
The crowd along the docks howled with laughter. The tars on the moored ships enjoyed their mirth as well, though they fell stiffly silent as Bork’s gaze swept them.
“You will be hard pressed to explain to a promotion board how you allowed a woman and a pack of grinning Chinese to watch you swim to shore,” she told him.
Bork growled, “You will kindly lend me a boat, madam.”
“Of course.” Childress turned to Captain Leung. “The launch for our guest, Mr. Leung. Also a crew to row it, lest our property be misplaced.”
The monk would go ashore, she realized, much as the woman had come aboard—cloaked from observing eyes until she was ready to be seen. The Chinese would know better than to question such a one, should they glimpse a flash of her robe or a whiff of her smoke, while the British would never notice her.
Go, Childress thought. Turn their commander’s heart and fetch al-Wazir from his cell.
The launch was winched up from beneath the deck grating and set into the water. “You will fare with my best blessings,” Childress called out.
She hoped the monk’s trick, whatever it was, would turn the business soon. They could hardly sit idle in this harbor, waiting for Wang and his fellows to come to some devilment, or worse, the war to catch them all.
Five Lucky Winds would fall victim to Chinese grenadoes just as readily, and likely with far mo
The lieutenant commander and his party were rowed away in resentful order, taking their observers with them in the horribly overcrowded launch. The submarine was at last alone with her surviving crew. Except for al-Wazir, wherever he was.
As to whereabouts, why was Wang here? His purposes could not possibly be friendly to hers, yet Childress had not seen ill in the man’s eyes in Panjim. At any rate, he would not approach the submarine while she was moored so close to the British. Not Wang, who didn’t have nearly that kind of heat in his blood.
What an odd thing to think of a man.
KITCHENS
A man shouted in his ear. He’d dreamt of tumbledown shanties and a railroad that stretched around the world like barbed wire wrapping the skull of a martyr with rough rust and cold steel rain.
“Wha—”
The razor was in his hands, and a sailor stumbled backward with an expression of shocked panic.
A crisis was afoot, to be sure. Kitchens had not even gone below, just tucked himself behind an equipment locker on the foredeck. He knew nothing of Erinyes or the arrangements of her people.
Surely this was not an attack, for no guns fired, either in the hands of crew or from the turrets along the ship’s waist.
He stood, rubbed his eyes and revised his opinion. Four Chinese airships loomed forward with glowing battle lanterns spread wide. A rising column of smoke testified to the state of the airship towers at Cotonou. A trap had been sprung.
The last sunrise he’d ever see blossomed in the east.
The girl! She could stop airships. She’d frightened Captain Sayeed silly with her strange powers before demonstrating them again right here on this deck.
Kitchens scrambled to the poop. The Brass man stood there, gripping the wheel as if it were his very existence. Martins, the surviving petty officer, was there along with two of the older sailors. Where the devil was that worthless midshipman? Longfellow? Longglory? This vessel was cursed by God, that much was certain.
“We will not live out the day,” Kitchens announced flatly on reaching the helm. “Unless, friend Boaz, that girl you so delight in can work some magic against all our enemies at once.”