Hethor glanced down to see a dozen pairs of hairy hands on his legs and feet, lifting and pushing him in.
“My thanks,” he told the correct people as they strained to loft him to his goal.
Inside, the gasbag stank of gutta-percha, canvas, and mold. The grumbling whisper was louder, almost a whickering noise. The gasbag was laid out quite differently from Bassett’s. Lightweight beams crossed the width of the ship, tying the vertical struts together, with more beams rising, like a very large, open-weave basket. Where Bassett had great huge cells filling portions of her bag, this airship had many small cells shaped like oversized bolsters set on end.
A more intelligent design, Hethor realized. This layout would economize on hydrogen and reduce the risk of fatality or sudden loss of altitude were one of the cells to rupture.
Picking his way along the narrow ribs and staves in nearly total darkness, Hethor followed his ears. He came to an odd shape as the source of the sounds. Careful exploration by touching revealed it to be a long cylinder wrapped in more of the gasbag’s fabric, the concentration point for a maze of flexible pipes he had not noticed in the darkness.
An engine of sorts, Hethor realized, though what it was and how it ran was not readily apparent to him. There was certainly another one balancing it on the starboard side, and perhaps more fore and aft.
He only wished he understood the principles of its operation and function.
“Enough,” he told himself aloud, the soft-walled darkness swallowing his voice in an absolute absence of echoes. “Back to the deck.”
The faint gleam from the open access way guided his return to sunlight without particular mishap.
ARELLYA WAS on the deck, having appeared from wherever she had hidden herself away the evening before. Hethor didn’t know why she was avoiding him. At the sight of her he realized how much he had missed her in their night apart.
In New Haven, he thought, she would have been caged as a monkey. How was it that he had now come to see her as a woman?
No matter. Somehow, she did stir feelings in him that had been the subject of schoolboy gossip and a few blushing accidents—Darby the drover with the hearse came to mind. But this was nothing he had before experienced to any full or logical conclusion. Or, perhaps, been permitted to experience.
“Greetings,” he stammered in the tongue of the correct people. Stammering was a human speech problem that they seemed to find tremendously amusing.
“We are in a wondrous place,” she said. “None of my people ever thought to fly. It would be a gift to die here.”
“Of course,” he said. Sometimes it was very hard to see the world she lived in, even though they stood right next to one another. Hethor cleared his throat. At the moment it was more important for her to see his world. “I need to understand what guides this boat of the air, or we may be thinking of the ground all too soon. Would you walk with me?”
She went with him, though today she did not loop her arm in his.
There was a little shack or locker between the waist of the ship and the stern. It was one of the few deck structures. Hethor had passed it on his walk forward without much consideration. Now that he realized in broad daylight how sparsely furnished the deck truly was, he was far more curious to see the locker’s contents for himself.
About four feet high, with a base three feet square and an angled top, the locker seemed to be an affair of folding panels or shutters. Hethor was at a loss as to how to open them. Obviously, if one knew the secret, they would flex in some well-crafted fashion. He had the clear image of a square-petaled wooden flower in mind.
The mechanism, however, was not apparent.
Hethor tapped and pushed at the shutters, or panels, or whatever they were, for a while. Nothing came free. His frustration began to mount even as the correct people chattered quietly amongst themselves. Hethor wondered where the axes were aboard this vessel.
As he grunted and chuffed in his frustration, Arellya finally tugged Hethor’s elbow. “Salwoo is a monkey-puzzler. Permit him to try this little hut of the boat.”
Hethor stepped away with a wordless nod. One of the correct people males scrambled over to the shuttered affair, began running his hands over it, barely touching the surface but never quite losing contact either. He circled as Hethor and the others watched, one or both hands always on the wood. After perhaps ten minutes of this, a time that was almost as frustrating to Hethor as his own lack of success, Salwoo pressed on two shutters at once, one on each side. He then jumped back as a clever series of springs and hinges flipped and folded the panels into a small box below a shelf. It looked like nothing so much as a podium or lectern.
Hethor was impressed. He bowed to Salwoo. “My thanks.”
The correct people all laughed at this, then with much chattering and waving of hands urged Hethor to the newly revealed station.
There was a dome or hemisphere set there, brass, with the shapes of land and sea etched on to it. A demiglobe. A bright gleam winked near the base of the dome—their current position?
Impressive as the folding box was, it was basically a cabinetmaker’s trick. The brasswork map was something else entirely. Hethor could not conceive of how it had been crafted or made to work.
Still, the airship had come from a city of sorcerers and witches.
A stick stood up from the lectern, perhaps a foot high. Several levers were set along the shaft. He tugged lightly on the stick.
The airship shuddered.
Hethor let go quickly, and the airship resumed its stable flight.
So this is where the mysterious engines are controlled from. Presumably along with altitude, trim, and rudder. It even had its own map of the Southern Earth. He turned to Arellya. “I must work with this a while, which may cause the boat to spin or rock. Please, there is no cause for alarm among the correct people.”
“Shall we stay away from the edges, then?”
A very practical question. He should have thought of it. “Yes, that would be well. Perhaps some below the floor, if there is any ease to be taken there. The rest may shelter in the middle up here.”
She herded her fighters into two groups, and dispatched them to their places of relative safety. Hethor noted that Salwoo stayed above, to watch the experiments with pointed interest and a certain pride of ownership.
Fair enough, he thought. His own efforts would take longer, though.
HE KNEW little enough about the principles of flight. Even so, this airship was built to be operated by any man fresh off the docks. Over the course of several hours of cautious experimentation, Hethor found that not only could he direct the airship, but it followed a course once he had set it.
The vessel was a marvel of engineering. He could not imagine any British or New England engineer even conceiving of this sort of self-operated machine, let alone dedicating such a great resource of intellectual and mechanical design to the use of casual passersby.
Gabriel’s hand was once again visible to Hethor.
Though still lacking the skill to land the airship, he could certainly direct it. Hethor set it on a southward course and stepped to the stern rail. He wasn’t prepared to leave the command lectern completely abandoned, though perforce he must trust the unknown engineers who had made this thing.
Africa lay below, to his right. White foam met dark beaches lined with more jungle. The land rose slowly under the carpet of complex green, lacy geometries of treetop and vine lending texture still alien to Hethor’s eyes. A line of stony hills erupted in the distance, their heights creating an eastern horizon.
To his left, the ocean. He supposed it was the South Atlantic, though the only name he had heard for it in the Southern Earth was the correct people’s Great Salt River. The unknown birds still circled in the distance, though they seemed closer, bigger. He studied them a while.
Winged savages.
The rangy angel-bodied creatures had both threatened and saved him, their rude aspects a weird echo of Gabriel’s beauty an
d power. The Jade Abbott had implied they were a lesser Creation. Did the winged savages serve God? Or some other master, such as William of Ghent?
Hethor felt a pang of guilt, then, at his precipitous action in shoving the sorcerer into the whirling brass bowels of the Earth. He’d had no other choice, he told himself, not as prisoner in a strange land. The traitor had to be dealt with. Hethor had seized his chance.
“I must carry on my quest,” he told the distant fliers. “Southward I go and southward I shall discover myself.”
He turned back to the deck to find the correct people all along the rail, staring down at the ocean and shouting to one another at the sighting of a particularly interesting wave, or the passing shadow of a cloud. Arellya had lost herself among the war band, so Hethor went forward, to where he had slept. There he sat with the golden tablet in his hands.
“The heart of God is the heart of the world.
“As man lives, so lives God.
“As God lives, so lives the world.”
He now understood what the words said, but what did they mean? How would this message from Heaven help him find the Key Perilous?
The airship passed then into the shadow of the cloud, light leaching from the deck and darkening the tablet. “Perilous” was right, Hethor thought. That part of it he understood. It was the key itself he did not understand.
He looked at the scar on his hand. The mark had reemerged after all the other insults done to his body, still in the shape of a key. Was the Key Perilous somehow within him, the way the heart of God was within the world?
Hethor became very afraid that if he failed in his mission, failed to wind the Mainspring of the world, the heart of God would stop when the world ran down. Which could not be possible, of course. God encompassed the universe. He was not subject to it.
It all made Hethor’s head ache, so he set the tablet aside, rubbed the scar for a moment, and went to look for food and water.
He would have much time to consider the mystery before they went so far south that urgent action would once more be required on his part.
ALL DAY Arellya kept her distance from Hethor without ever quite managing to disappear from sight. If he went aft, she idled amidships. If he went forward, she stayed at a rail somewhere nearby. The few times he had headed straight toward her, Arellya walked briskly away.
He looked down on the folding waves. The wind whistling around the gasbag merged with the distant rush of the surf below, but inside both noises, Hethor could hear the clattering of the tiny gears-within-gears. He was hearing the sounds of Creation more and more often now, not just under distress or fear. It was becoming an ordinary background to his everyday life.
Hethor could not decide if that was a frightening thought or a comforting one.
He pushed away from the rail to look for the water that Salwoo and his fellows had reportedly found belowdecks. As he walked toward the companionway, something made Hethor stop.
It was a change of wind, perhaps. Or a shift in the water below.
He cocked his head, listening carefully. How far away was the sound?
Then Hethor realized that he was hearing a shift in the gears-within-gears noise of the universe. There was a clatter, like a slipping clock, out of time and out of rhythm. He ran back to the rail and stared down at the surf.
It was hard to see if anything was different. The surf rolled; the trees along the shore swayed in the breeze. The world looked as it had a few minutes before.
The noise grew louder to become an intrusive rumble. The surf receded quickly, as if the tide were running out at terribly high speed. The trees swayed against the wind now.
He ran to the other rail and looked west farther out to sea. Even from a thousand feet up in the air, the approaching swell was clearly visible. This wave had robbed the shore of its water.
His heart plunged, tight and cold. It was a terrible sight, driving fear through Hethor’s entire body. But fear would change nothing. “Look!” Hethor shouted to the correct people, pointing.
“A monster,” one said. “A spirit,” said another. “The Great Salt River is angry.” They chattered, excited again rather than sharing Hethor’s sinking spirits.
He crossed the deck again to watch the wave strike shore. Strike it did, the swell curling over as it approached to form a giant wall of surf. Hethor guessed it was close to a hundred feet in height, a wet cliff advancing on the jungle.
Birds shrieked into the sky ahead of the roaring water, streams of irregular color streaming away from the treetops. He had seen this before. Some of them were already too late, Hethor realized. He wanted to reach out, pluck them from their jeweled flight to doom, and set them safe much higher in the air.
The wave swallowed the shore, collapsing across the leading edge of the jungle. A riot of water ran through the jungle, almost as high as the treetops—white foam, blue sea already staining brown with mud and soil, the boles of enormous trees tossed upward like kindling in a gutter.
The noise was horrendous. Hethor could hear it all—the heartwood groaning as the trees snapped, the cut-off screeches as animals of ground and treetop drowned, the fluttering slap of birds caught in the flood. Water roared, advancing inland in an increasing front of chaos, pushing roiling debris ahead of it.
Oddly, the wave stank of mud, and rot, sea stench and jungle reek all mixed together. Why had he ever thought the sea smelled fresh?
“The Great Salt River punishes the land,” said Arellya, next to him again.
“The world hurts.” It was as close as he could come to explaining what was wrong. The gears clattered and ground somewhere at the edge of hearing.
They watched the water flow back out of the jungle, carrying thousands of trees with it. Great furry corpses followed along. Three more waves came in, smaller than the first but each terrible in its own right. By the time it was over several hours later, the coast looked as though all of God’s artillery battalions had taken practice. There was only a tangled mass of broken greenery, standing rocks, and slumped, steaming mud.
Hethor went below, stumbling until he found his way to a cabin. None of the correct people were within, so he lay on the bunk and stared at the planking of the ceiling, wondering why God’s design encompassed so much blight to the world.
“What causes it?” Arellya asked from the hatch. “You said the world hurts. What hurts the world?”
“William of Ghent,” said Hethor with a flash of remembered anger. “A man of my people.”
But that was not true, he thought.
“Who is this William to hate the world so much as to hurt it?”
“I spoke hastily.” Hethor tried to frame his words, picking through Arellya’s language. It was so much less precise than English, at least for matters of theology and things mechanical. “When God made the world, He made it with a … a … flaw.”
“Everything has a flaw. Only God can be perfect.”
Hethor hadn’t thought of that. To his experience, the perfection of a thing reflected on the worthiness of its creator. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. The world must be, well, turned, from time to time.”
He could not find a word for winding a clock in the speech of the correct people.
“Turned?” She laughed her soft chittering laugh and sat on the edge of his bunk. The almost-touching warmth of her body was an electrick spark to him. “Like a yam on the fire coals? Surely the world turns itself.”
“No, no.” He laughed, too, now, washing away some of his grief and fear. “There is a heart inside the world, like the heart inside a man. It beats in rhythm with the world.”
“That seems like a sensible way to arrange things,” she said.
“Well, yes. But the world is a made thing. The heart must be turned once every few lifetimes, so that it will continue to beat. My people call that turning winding.”
“So this heart of the world must be winding?”
He thought of the words on the golden tablet, recited them to her.
> “The heart of God is the heart of the world.
“As man lives, so lives God.
“As God lives, so lives the world.”
“The heart of the world is our heart, and God’s,” Arellya said, sounding satisfied. Then she took his hand in hers. “How is your heart, Messenger?”
His heart raced, actually, his hand prickling at her touch. “My heart is well, Arellya,” he said softly.
“Is it full already?”
“Full?”
She pulled herself close and kissed him on the lips. The fur of her face tickled his moustache and rough beard. He had not shaved since his time with William of Ghent, and did not realize how far his facial hair had grown till it rubbed together with hers.
A few months ago, he could no more have grown a beard than grown wings. Of course, since then he had flown from the Wall, too.
He found her lips on his again, and set himself to kissing her in return. It was not a subject of which he had knowledge or experience, but she seemed willing to let him practice. Her lips were firm, fringed with hair, and the tip of her tongue darted into his mouth like a little snake.
It was a thrill he’d never felt, the electrick feeling coursing through his entire body. He opened up his arms and she settled onto his lap, so much the smaller that she fit. His personal parts stirred, stiffening, which caused him to blush hotly. Hethor tried to shift his hips and pull the embarrassment away from the weight of her little buttocks.
She broke away from the kiss and took his cheeks in her hand.
“I am sorry,” he gasped, mortified.
Arellya wiggled her bottom. “Don’t you run away from me,” she said with a grin, then came to his kiss again. Her hands explored his hair, his neck, loosed the upper buttons of his ragged linen shirt.
He rubbed at her hairy back, enjoying the silky smooth feel, like petting a giant cat, until she broke away from the kiss again. Fumbling, she opened the rest of his buttons.