Boaz would need to write out what he could before reaching Ophir, so the knowledge would not be lost completely.
Faint fingers of smoke marked the locations of both lost airships. Boaz wondered if Chin Ping had survived, or any of those strange, violent little men. The lion-and-the-unicorn had finally gone to open war with the Imperial dragon.
Boaz wondered how he should feel about that. These flatwater kingdoms were their own affair. Any denizen of the Wall understood this as a first principle. YHWH’s purposes, inscrutable as they were within the effulgent cloak of the divine, were different in the rising lands than down below. The Creator had provided His children on the Wall with endless variety, while peopling the rest of the world with a greedy, squabbling monkey sameness.
Though he had known a few fine folk, Boaz was weary of human beings and their discontents.
Setting that thought aside, the Brass looked over the die still clutched in his hands. If this truly was the Sixth Seal, it could change all. The kings and prophets of old had spoken with YHWH as one might seek out a wise man in the market. The Lord was not so inscrutable to them.
Such wisdom as He had left behind in Creation for His thinking children to accumulate had worn thin. The fires on the horizon were proof of that. Likewise conspiracies and treachery among the Brass of Ophir. The world was indeed running down, as free will replaced thoughtful obedience to the divine plan like a widening stain in water.
Carefully, he opened a compartment in his belly. Boaz wrapped the Sixth Seal in a bundle of leaves he’d harvested as he walked, then snugged it within. Closing his belly again, he felt the thing within like a cancer, an unaccustomed weight that would bend his body out of alignment. As it already bent his thoughts.
That stray voice again.
“My thoughts are my own,” Boaz told the horizon. He settled into the torpid rest that was his approximation of sleep and waited for nightfall.
By daybreak Boaz was much higher up along the Wall. He’d reached a familiar country of stunted trees and low, flowing aprons of scree. He examined the small miracles that were the flowers flickering in the breeze. They grew in tenuous clumps among the heaped rocks that flowed in still, silent rivers down the face of the Wall, brave colors like tiny standards in the green armies of some forgotten war.
Each of them has been made by YHWH, he thought. Every blossom, every petal, every stem represented another page in the book of Creation.
He sat down to stare a while at a blossom. The outer part of the petals was an almost delirious blue. It shaded to a pale subtle color toward the center before becoming a white cup around the delicate structures that lay at the flower’s middle. Those were curling up, their season passing, the flower’s beauty flowing back to the mind of YHWH.
Boaz sat up in the fading light of dusk. He had been kneeling in the rock field since that morning, staring at flowers and overflowing with the thoughts of the Creator as He set every bit and piece of the world into place.
This was literally incomprehensible. No one could encompass the infinite possibility inherent in a single plant, let alone all the complex majesty of the earth and sky.
Why are you thinking on this? His inner voice again. He recognized it now. The oil-spot chrism on his forehead burned slightly.
The voice arose from his memories of Paolina and al-Wazir. From his sense of what it might mean to be human. From his sense of his own recent ensoulment.
This was the voice of self-doubt, of monkey unreason, the voice of mistake and creative inspiration.
Logic only comes in the light of illogic. Otherwise the universe exists without purpose. Does a rock know logic? Does the sun?
A different thought: YHWH would not have it so. He reached, trembling, for the portal in his belly where the Sixth Seal was hidden. It was changing him, bringing him closer to YHWH, so close that the infinite attention of a Creator God could overtake Boaz in a clump of flowers and trap him as thoroughly as the erasures of Authority in Ophir had trapped Boaz at the Armory of Westmost Repose.
He shuddered and clawed at his belly, but could not seem to open the access port. For the first time in his centuries of life, Boaz’ own fingers, his own body, refused to obey his conscious intent.
“Paolina,” he cried out. “Please, help me.” Dear one.
Boaz sat trembling a while, then finally rose to climb away from the marvelous, tempting flowers under the cover of darkness.
Just as there was war between empires to the east of him, inside Boaz’ head there was war between the empires of reason and faith—hardwired, blindered faith that left no room for doubt, because there was a speaking tube in his center that admitted the words of YHWH.
“I had not meant to come this way,” he gasped, and continued walking upward, westward, away from Paolina and everything he’d come to care about.
Once he was on the Ophir road, even this decayed, rubbled end of it, Boaz made much better time. This was the highway of his people, which he had passed along recently enough in the company of al-Wazir.
Like much of the Wall, this area was deserted. Evidence of prior settlement abounded—a staircase cut into a rock shoulder that connected nothing to nothing; a tributary road leading away from the main highway to an empty meadow; blocks of worked stone in a little cascade of rubble alongside his path.
Staving off the competing voices in his head, Boaz wondered anew what had befallen the life and cultures of the Wall. Ophir was a shadow of its former greatness. An empire once stretching along the Wall from the shores of the Indian Ocean all across the waist of Africa and well into the Atlantic was now little more than an aggressive city. Their days of building great highways and trading around the entire Wall through the car system were a thousand years in the past.
Why? Had YHWH planned for His Creation to grow, and prosper, then tumble back into chaos?
The world was almost six thousand years old. That was incontrovertible fact, the moment of Creation well established by both the inerrant recordkeeping of the Bible and verified by the astronomer-horologists in David’s court who had worked out the epicycles and rhythms of the heavens in order to count backward to the original setting that YHWH had established before He put His worlds into motion. Denying the literal truth of Creation was as demonstrably erroneous as denying gravity. Water ran downhill, no matter what one’s private faith might argue otherwise.
That the world had been running down for at least a thousand years was likewise incontrovertible. The flatwater kingdoms had prospered in their strange monkey ways, but nothing Boaz knew of along the Wall had maintained its former greatness.
Boaz wondered if the world had reached its peak. What if the coming of the last prophet, Yeshua bin-Joseph, had been the zenith of Creation? The world had existed for four thousand years before His birth. Perhaps the long, slow decline of the civilizations of the Wall was nothing more than Creation returning to the unsprung chaos from which the Lord had first assembled it.
Boaz regretted that he’d pulled that idea from the stream of his thoughts. Yet it held the eerie fascination of the inevitable. Such inexorable symmetry, if it in fact existed, could not be denied.
He quickened his pace. If this insight was true, if the world was in fact already entering its senescence, then the future was inevitable. That, of course, had been implied since the moment of the first words of Creation. But at the least, the Brass of Ophir could make ready for the end, spread the word and employ their collective immortality to watch and wait.
You are a fool, said the human voice within his head. You make much of nothing, and would take away the only thing that makes us free in the face of the overwhelming might of God’s will.
“Choice?” he asked aloud, his voice sending a startled hyrax scuttling from a rock.
Hope, replied Paolina and al-Wazir in unison.
GASHANSUNU
The sun that night appeared to spiral twice before it touched the horizon, much as a bird might do on approaching the nest with a pred
ator in sight. The earth’s lifeline flared with the setting, but night came as swiftly as ever it did in this place.
Gashansunu stood in ibex pose atop the First Ring of the city, looking across the jetty. Her dalliance with Baassiia had been more than pleasant—the man really did understand the secret pathways of a woman’s need—but his breast-talk afterward had been of his own fears for the city, and the wrath of the Bone People.
She did not believe so much in the wrath of the Bone People. They had their own relationship with the world, seeing it as a fixed point in the universe about which both space and time revolved. She had heard they claimed every moment was the same to them, but clearly that was not so. Why else would they bother to travel to the city, to elsewhere in the Southern Earth as they were known to do with their powerful, silent airships?
Evening settled over the Great Sunset Water. She consulted with her wa on the meaning of the sun’s strange passing, but even the Silent World had no special wisdom this day.
SOMETIMES LIGHT IS MERELY LIGHT, she was told.
Yet the world moved strangely. Not so much as it had done two years earlier, when the combined might of all the houses in the city had been required to hold off the boiling walls of water thrown up by the shakings of the world. Even the greatest of old mages dwelling amid the Poison Ring at the center of the city, their bodies wrapped in beaten silver with jewels excrescing from their skin, had been disturbed by that.
The pale stranger had come then, who had inflamed the Bone People with his daring theft, and fled as more of the wave-storms arrived. She wondered anew what he had done, whether he had been cause or solution to the violence that had racked the land and sea then.
Now the world moved strangely, but on a different path. Not so much the vulgar shaking of the body of things, but ripples spreading in the earthsoul. The Silent World.
Discontent was afoot. Some part was aimed at her city.
Gashansunu took the implicit advice of her wa and ignored the strangeness at the setting of the sun. Everything in the world was a sign. That was the First Lesson. But not every sign was a signifier. That was the Last Lesson, which she hoped to understand someday before she walked out of her body for good to join her wa in the Silent World.
She set out looking for first a bath—to take the crackling, slightly rotten scent of sex off of her body—then food. Tonight Gashansunu thought she could fancy some fish. If she ate it with the right sauces, the dreams that followed might open some of the ways.
Something was happening. Soon enough she would know what. Once she knew what, she would know whom. Once she knew whom, she would know how. Once she knew how, well, if some change was needed, such a thing could be wrought.
If only Baassiia had not been so useless. As a man, he was brilliantly good. As a circle caller, well, he was only a man.
KITCHENS
The next morning, the crew of HIMS Notus marched in ragged file across the green of the landing field, then assembled at parade before the base of the tower. Guards surrounded them, rifles at the ready. A few minutes later Sergeant Penstock climbed the stairs, followed by a compact, sallow man sporting a bloody eye and a pronounced limp.
“Harrow, Chief Petty Officer, reporting, sir,” the man muttered.
Kitchens studied the newcomer. He appeared miserable, and not just from whatever recent violence had taken him. “Are the commissioned officers with you, Mr. Harrow?”
“They’s all sitting in barracks. Says they won’t set foot out the door without Captain Sayeed.”
Penstock nodded. “Sort of a work stoppage, you might say.”
“Well, I don’t suppose it’s my problem until they arrive on the deck,” Kitchens replied. A bald-faced lie, of course. Notus would be the most unhappy ship in the history of the Royal Navy. What had Admiralty been thinking to treat these men so?
Well, he knew the answer to that. Government and Admiralty both were mortally afraid of whatever magic the girl had brought aboard the airship; she had used it first to destroy a pursuing Chinese vessel, then later to bomb Strasbourg. That the men might be somehow enslaved to the girl, or simply contaminated with whatever spirit had moved her, was a real fear.
Kitchens looked the petty officer up and down. “Are your men ready to sail, once their officers come aboard?”
Harrow made a show of examining the deck, the gasbag sagging overhead, the general state of affairs on the airship. “Sir, it will take at least a day to get her ready to move, assuming we don’t find nothing that’s unairworthy enough to require a maintenance takedown. Where would we be sailing to?”
“Back to the West African station, Chief, to set right what was done wrong.”
“Ain’t us that brought the bitch aboard, sir,” Harrow said bitterly. “Begging your grace for my speaking too freely, but I ain’t got a lot of patience left. Ain’t us what took down the Shirley Cheese. Ain’t us what decided to haul her into Strasbourg.”
“A ship’s crew is as one man,” Kitchens replied softly. He didn’t believe that himself, thought that collective guilt was arrant nonsense, but with such a power loose in the world as these men had touched, no one was taking chances.
Harrow met his eye. “You ever wear a uniform, sir?”
Kitchens touched the dark lapel of his suit coat. “Only this one, Chief. But it exacts its own price.”
“Maybe that coat does. But you’ll never understand us.” He drew himself up and offered a formal salute. “Permission to bring my men aboard, sir? I’d like to have them begin preparing the ship for the air.”
“Permission granted,” Kitchens replied.
Penstock gave Harrow a long, suspicious look, then headed back over the plank to make his way down the tower stairs. Kitchens waited in silence as the clomp of feet began echoing upward.
Once aboard, the crew set about preparing HIMS Notus for sailing. Kitchens made no attempt to address the men. Public speaking was something his training had neglected.
Faced with his gaggle of men, Harrow had come to life. Gone was the somber, depressed affect with which he had addressed Kitchens. Instead the chief practically attacked his crew—berating them, shouting down their work, handing out discipline like sweetmeats on Easter morning. Harrow was everywhere on the deck, harassing the divisional petty officers, liberally putting his boot into the common seamen, and in general making a very noisy nuisance of himself.
“Mr. Harrow,” Kitchens said as the chief rushed past a few minutes later with a curse flying. “A word with you, please.”
Harrow ceased his pursuit of an errant tool and the hapless sailor who carried it to step close to Kitchens. His voice was very soft, pitched too low for overhearing. “Sir?”
“How dangerous is this crew right now? To themselves and others?”
“We’s ten minutes from a mutiny,” Harrow said bluntly, still keeping his voice low and soft. “First wrong word comes out, first man who falls upon you, it will all be over. I could not be less surprised should it happen. Whoever in Admiralty gave you to this ship did you no favors, sir, for you’ve got your hand in the hornet’s nest, pure and plain to see.”
Despite himself, Kitchens felt a tinge of exasperation. “I am not their enemy, Mr. Harrow.” In memory, the Queen bobbed in her bloody tank, face fish-white and drowning-fat. Who was the foe now? The Chinese had not done that to England.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but you is the enemy. Any man in a civvie suit who comes from Admiralty will be that to them, for the rest of their lives.” He paused, obviously considering his next words. “Sir, should Captain Sayeed or any number of his officers take an idea to do so, Notus won’t never be coming back to England’s shores. Some mutinies start at the top. You might want to go back down them tower stairs and find another place to berth.”
“Thank you, Mr. Harrow, but I expect that I shall persevere.”
The chief grunted, then strode off without waiting to be dismissed.
Kitchens realized the man had a very good point.
Without order and discipline, it wasn’t that the sailors might simply run riot, as Kitchens had already foreseen. The entire ship could break loose, a mutiny from foredeck to officers’ cabins.
A mutiny that would have only a single victim in hand the day it took place. He did not want to imagine the crew’s reaction to the death warrants that lay within his case.
The captain and his officers came aboard the next day without significant ceremony. Sayeed was a dark man, precise in his carriage and bearing. The captain appeared unscathed by his recent incarceration. The seven officers with him had not fared so well, sharing as they did an assortment of split lips, blood-filled eyes, and bandaged hands.
Kitchens hoped one of the latter was not the ship’s chiurgeon.
Crew stared at their officers. Officers stared at their crew. No one spoke, no bosun’s pipes shrilling, no welcome or orders. Just silence punctuated by the cries of wheeling gulls.
A seaman thumped his mop against the deck once, twice, three times. Another stamped his foot to pick up the rhythm. Within moments the entire crew was pounding out . . . what? A welcome? A salute? The opening act of Harrow’s predicted mutiny?
Sayeed rubbed his hands together, gave Kitchens a long, slow look that smoldered like a match-lit fuse, then began speaking. The crew fell silent.
“. . . have order on this ship.” The captain’s voice was quiet, almost quavering. “We fly the Queen’s flag; we will behave like the Queen’s men.” He drew a deep, shuddering breath.
Kitchens had the impression that Sayeed intended to shout, but what followed was no louder.
“Return to your posts. Prepare to cast off within the hour.”
Notus’ master turned away from the sudden scurry and made his way toward the poop, trailed by the limping, battered officers. Harrow caught up to them, a look of vast relief just leaving the petty officer’s face.
Kitchens braced for what would come next.