Hethor rubbed his cheeks. The tears of rage, shame, frustration, whatever, all seemed burned out of him. “You could say so.”
“Reckon I can share my lunch out with yer, if you’ve a mind.”
“I have nothing to offer.” Too quick, Hethor thought.
Another while, another flick. “Tell me a story. One I h’ain’t heard before. Nothing about cows or farms or Her Imperial Majesty’s tax collectors.”
Hethor thought back to his Classical literature classes, cleared his throat, and launched into a loose interpretation of Book Nine of Homer’s Iliad.
HOMER, SOPHOCLES, and the Aeneid of Virgil got them to Hartford that evening, with a lunch of cold fried chicken and some good brown bread. The old man twitched the wagon into a marshalling yard behind a wholesale victualler’s where a dozen more old men waited. Shouting lads unloaded some wagons, while others lined up by the stables, their teams unhitched and led off for the night.
“You’re a right good talker, young Hethor,” said the farmer, whose name had finally been revealed as Thomas Mudge. “Practically a preacher. The boys over there, they’ve got a little feed laid on tonight in the meadow behind the yard here. You can join us and talk for your supper. I wouldn’t mind if you’d tell some of them Greekie tales again.”
“Thank you, sir, but I must get on.”
“Get on where? In the dark? You’ll fall into a ditch. And I know you h’ain’t got no coin for hot food nor a warm bed. I’ll show you around to the boys; might be some feller or another’s got an empty wagon heading toward Storrs or Westford on the morning, be glad of the company. If’n he gets to knowing you tonight. Meanwhile, you can help those young lads with my turnips.”
An evening of alarming corn liquor and warm roast turkey went a long way toward restoring Hethor’s bruised faith in human nature. He listened to tall tales about foreign lands and the heathen magics of the Southern Earth. He told some of his own from history and the Classics, and fell under the spell of drink and firelight and the evening breeze.
Late in the night, when it was his turn to talk again, Hethor stood up with a stoneware jug in his hand. The moon was so close to new as to be little more than a nail paring in the sky, and even the stars seemed to have retreated to their rest. Four or five of the old men were snoring under blankets, for though they had a little cabin to sleep in, the night was pleasant and the fire was warm. The rest still listened, bleary-eyed.
“Had me a visit,” Hethor said. His lips stumbled over the words. “Angel came down from Heaven.”
“How ol’ wash she?” laughed one of the men, but another elbowed him in the ribs.
“No woman angel, I reckon. Taller than any of us, with feathers white as a swan’s. Eyes like a stone. Told me to go … go … find a key. A dangerous key. So I’m off, now, to see the viceroy. Give him the word.”
“I’ve got a word or two for the visheroy myshelf,” said the heckler, laughing again.
“This a fireside tale, boy?” asked Mudge, who was still awake. “Or one of them old classy stories?”
“Real thing, sir, I swear it.” Hethor swallowed a burp. “I swear by the brass heavens.” He added on impulse: “And the albino toucan.”
Mudge was a beat too slow in responding, giving Hethor a sharp glance. “Boy knows how to move turnips,” he told the rest of the men, as though that were the highest of praise. “And how to tell a story besides. Voice like an angel.” He smiled sidelong at Hethor. “I’ll stand good for him. Who’s going east and north tomorrow?”
“Pierre Le Roy ish,” said the heckler.
“Le Roy’ll take our boy, then,” Mudge announced. “And find him help on to Boston.”
“To Boston!” They all drank.
“To Boston!” said Hethor, waving his stoneware jug before he collapsed in a widening circle that seemed to grow as big as the Northern Earth.
THE NEXT morning consisted mostly of a series of bleary-eyed grunts exchanged between Hethor and Le Roy. Even Le Roy’s mules seemed to be recovering from the corn liquor. Hethor’s head felt like it had spent too much time inside Master Bodean’s grandfather clock, being beaten by the sweep of the huge pendulum. His mouth had definitely hosted a small battalion of chickens, while his gut was sour as a June apple.
Le Roy’s wagon lurched along the turnpike, Le Roy snoring at the reins. Hethor felt inclined to do the same. He couldn’t find a way to sit that let him sleep, though, and the waking world intruded. Every sound was a magnified version of its normal self. Bees buzzing in pasturage, cattle grumbling over water and hay along the pike, every squeak and rattle of the bed of Le Roy’s wagon—it was a symphony written by an idiot.
Hethor rubbed his eyes clear and stared south. That way, beyond hills and miles, lay Long Island Sound and the great Atlantic Ocean. Mathematics and common sense alike told him he could never see the Equatorial Wall from here in Connecticut. Though it was a hundred miles high, the Wall wasn’t visible past about seventeen degrees of latitude—along Jamaica’s south coast for example.
Yet Hethor could swear that in the rising morning light he saw brass glittering low in the southern sky to match Earth’s brass tracks arching upward through the heavens.
He stared, rubbing his eyes again and looking over the low, close horizon. He listened past the idiot symphony, trying to hear the clicking of the world.
“It’s one of them mirror-ages,” said Le Roy suddenly. “Preacher man explained it to me oncet. The air, it gets like to a mirror, and shows you that what’s far away. Like how the fields look like they got water on ’em on a hot summer day.”
“No magic then,” said Hethor, vaguely disappointed. He traced the horofix across his chest anyway.
They rattled on in silence. Hethor thought about Gabriel and God, the Tetragrammaton. God in His infinite wisdom had made the world so, hung Earth in the sky on the tracks of her orbit around the lamp of the sun, then left it alone, for man to find his way. After man’s fall into sin and error, God had sent His son to be the Brass Christ, redeeming man by showing the way to correct thought and deed.
Hethor knew there were heresies, folk who claimed that Christ had come to wind the Mainspring of the world again, and even that He was neither the first nor the last. Others said the world was built by greater men, just as men built fences and sheds for their livestock. As a clockmaker’s apprentice, he was in a sense party to those heresies, for the very keeping of time was seen by the most strictly religious as a challenge to the brasswork of the heavens. Measuring God’s work was held by some to be a questioning of the divine.
Still and all, life in New Haven had always seemed safely removed from the legendary realities of biblical tradition.
Until Gabriel had come to Hethor’s room to lay a duty on him.
So what did he believe? In God?
Certainly.
Proof of the divine was incontrovertible, found in every aspect of Creation. It was hard even for heretics to argue with a sky full of brass, of a design so evidently driven by keen intelligence and vast power.
As for piety, well … Pryce Bodean was pious, and probably someday to be a leader of the church. Hethor had full example of what Pryce’s Christian compassion had bought.
He sighed, closed his eyes, and listened to the sounds of the world. God, or Gabriel, would find him soon enough if either of them wanted him. Le Roy’s mules fussed their way into Hethor’s uneasy daylight dreams.
LUNCH WAS cold turkey. Hethor ate slowly. Hunger warred with a general malaise. Le Roy offered him corn liquor as well, which he refused with an uneasy lurch of the stomach. The old farmer munched and drank his way through their rest stop in a copse of alders as placidly as either of his mules, while Hethor tried not to think at all.
The afternoon passed quickly enough. The wagon jarred Hethor out of his hangover in slow steps. Le Roy had nothing to say, which suited Hethor just fine, until they rolled into Storrs in the evening starlight. White clapboard buildings gleamed among towering elms th
at bordered streets as well cobbled as any New Haven boulevard. Storrs was a city that carried itself with pride.
Le Roy clucked the mules to a halt just outside the town center, laid down the reins, and shifted in his seat to face Hethor. “You sure you’re set on a-seein’ the viceroy in Boston, boy?”
“Yes, sir.” Was Le Roy about to run him off?
“They’s a certain cut of man welcome at court in Boston. You got the city about you, boy, but still and all you ain’t their kind.”
He hadn’t been their kind in New Haven, either. Faubus had known no better, but Pryce … well, Pryce was a different matter.
Le Roy cleared his throat. “They’s folks there who judge a man by his shoes afore they ever look to see if he’s got truth in his eyes. Old Mudge, he saw truth in your eyes, boy, but in Boston they ain’t going to get past the mud on your boots.”
“I am who I am,” said Hethor. The archangel Gabriel had granted him a mission, perhaps the most important mission in Northern Earth. He had to keep moving. “I’ve only got my story to tell.”
Le Roy’s voice was suddenly thick, driven by passion, or perhaps anger. “Mudge bade me tell you this, for the sake of the white bird and them what set you on this road: If you give up on the viceroy, there’s a man drinks at Anthony’s on Pier Four in Boston when he’s in port. Goes by name of Malgus. Might tell your story to him, boy. He might even listen. And now, off with you.”
Hethor hopped down from the wagon’s bench seat. “I thought you were to send me on to Boston,” he said uncertainly.
“And if you wait here, I shall.” The old farmer was just a silhouette now, looming above Hethor as the sweat-stinking mules chuffed in the darkness. “Someone will be along presently to take you further. Won’t do to show you around the livery where I’m headed right now. Farewell, boy.”
As Le Roy drove away, Hethor realized he’d never given the old man his name, nor as far as he knew had Mudge done so. It felt strange to hide who he was from someone who had shown him kindness. Hethor’s life had never been about fear before.
Had it become so now?
He was not sorry that the archangel Gabriel had chosen him, but this was a hard road. In a few short days his world had already come to ruin. He sat on the edge of a boardwalk and tried to remember his father. Only the sad, defeated face of Franklin Bodean would come to mind, as his master had looked when turning Hethor out.
LE ROY’S “presently” turned into the better part of two hours. Hethor’s sense of time was always with him, always accurate. Several times he considered simply walking away, following the road east and north, but the long, slow prospect made his feet ache even more. Hethor chose to continue waiting. His journey so far had been difficult, but not nearly so bad as it might have been. The hand of Librarian Childress had reached far, perhaps.
He sent a silent prayer of thanks to God, Gabriel, and the secret company of librarians.
The old moon was nearly gone, and gave little enough light. Eventually a wagon—an odd, oblong thing shiny even in the dark of the evening—came for him. As it stopped, smelling of sawdust and polishing oils, Hethor realized his next conveyance was a hearse straight from the manufactory.
“Come on, then,” said a boy, voice piping high. “If you’re old Le Roy’s friend in need of a ride, here’s your coach-and-four.”
It was more of a coach-and-two, but Hethor smiled at the joke. “Never been on one of these,” he said apologetically, pulling himself up the iron step to the driver’s bench. It smelled of leather, but crinkled when he sat.
“I should hope you haven’t,” said the boy. “Most people make this journey only once. Mind the newsprint, now. Protects the seat. She’s newly built, and I’m to deliver her to Foxboro over Massachusetts way two days hence.”
That was when Hethor realized that the boy was a young woman. Not from her voice, nor her clothes, which were lumpy and boyish enough as far he could tell in the dark, but something in her smell and the way she sat with the reins in hand, knees too close together and leaning forward not quite the right way.
A girl. There weren’t any girls in Hethor’s life, not at Master Bodean’s, not at New Haven Latin. And here he was alone in the dark … . What was he supposed to do? Hethor could feel his face flushing hot and red, and was profoundly glad of the shadows.
“I … I …” He was lost for words.
“Don’t worry. Don’t scratch up the lacquer or the brightwork and you’ll be fine. Le Roy slipped me a pound note for your vittles on the way, so you’ll eat in style. English pound at that, not one of our American pounds.”
Le Roy slipped her a pound note? Hidden eyes were watching him. Librarian Childress had given him an unexpected gift, with the password of the albino toucan. It had called forth great favor by the fire in Hartford. Who were these people, farmers and librarians and—apparently—a coach girl?
“I’m Darby, by the way.”
Her voice was nice. Once he knew it wasn’t a boy’s voice, it didn’t sound sissy any more. She was a girl … the kind of person a boy could spoon with if he was very lucky. She might even be …
That vague, pleasant line of thought broke off as his common sense awoke. Darby, a girl, was driving! Hethor wanted to grab the reins from her, save the two of them from hurtling into the nearest ditch as always happened when some man was foolish enough to let a woman take to the road. But part of him remembered the cool competence of Librarian Childress.
Who seemed to be watching over him even now, in the form of Darby’s English pound note.
Perhaps he was as wrong about women as Pryce and Faubus had been about him. Except that women were flighty, hysterical, unreliable—they had their monthlies. Every boy was warned of that, in whispered rumor if not in the classroom. It was simple biology, not an artifice of society like the snobbery that had condemned Hethor in the eyes of Pryce.
The same snobbery that would likely condemn him in the presence of the viceroy as well, Hethor thought with glum persistence.
“Would you like me to drive?” he finally said, his voice somewhere between a squeak and a gasp. His face was still hot.
“Are you a drover? I only do this a few times a month.”
Hethor wanted to say, “No, but I’m a man,” but he couldn’t quite find the courage. “I … I thought you might like some help is all.”
“Why? If you’re half as potted as old Le Roy, you’re in no condition to drive a settee, let alone a wagon.”
He gave up. The night was crisp and cool, and after a while Hethor found himself talking about spring loading and escapements, and how the wheel train drove the measurement of time so precisely that one could not discover the errors without special instruments and training. It was something safe and neutral that Darby seemed to find interesting. He was even able to forget she was a girl, mostly, and not think about what there might be under her shapeless pea coat.
She stopped for the night, offering him the hearse’s box to sleep in, but the prospect of lying where the dead would soon travel unnerved Hethor. “I’ll sleep up here on the bench, thank you.”
“Suit yourself.” Darby shrugged, now visible in the starlight, still looking boyish. She grinned, her teeth gleaming, and climbed off the driver’s seat and headed for the box.
Hethor sat a while. His pants were suddenly tight and uncomfortable, and he was embarrassed and hot all at once. He wondered what he should have said or done differently. When sleep found him, he was chased by vague dreams of looming women with fire in their eyes.
THE NEXT day was another round of quiet chatter, with stops for stew and bread. Darby was content not to push the horses, a mismatched team of an old gray and a young, frisky roan. They talked about spring plantings and the virtues of cobbled streets as compared to brick, and why ships carry more than one clock aboard, and who the viceroy was likely to appoint as the next governor of Connecticut. Every time the sway of the hearse brought their forearms brushing together, Hethor felt his face flu
sh again. He worked very hard on forgetting that this was the first time in his life he’d been alone with a girl … well, a young woman.
In the late morning, insects droned in the trees as the day shaped up hot. Hethor stared at the damselflies darting below the railings of a little bridge as the hearse crossed. Darby’s conversation had lapsed a while. Hethor kept stealing glances at her profile—gray eyes, snub nose, wisps of brown hair under her cap.
She drove well. Much better than he would have, though that was hard to admit. She knew her way along the roads. She was pleasant, funny—might have made as good a friend as a boy could have.
That was when Hethor finally blurted out what had been bothering him all along. “But … but … you’re a girl!”
It came out sounding like an accusation of heresy.
Darby twitched the reins, slowing the horses to a halt, then turned to look at him. Her eyes were narrow under her flat cap. “Not that my nature’s any business of yours, but what of it?”
He felt like an idiot—clearly, she was driving, with no trouble at all. One of Master Bodean’s sons could have explained it much better, with all the rigor and might of Yale logic, and probably the majesty of the law on his side as well. But for Hethor, the problem was so obvious, so self-evident, he wasn’t even sure how to put it into words. Everyone knew that women couldn’t be trusted with such responsibilities. Nor could men be trusted with a woman running free among them. “It … women … you’re alone. You’re not supposed to be driving the roads.”
“I’m not alone,” she said reasonably. “I’m with you. I’ll ride Daisy back and lead Dapple, probably make it in one long day. Besides, most people think I’m a boy, and don’t look twice at me. So why do you care?”