Steampunk! Part 11

The boy and man weren't locals. They'd arrived in the Shackle Islands on the John Bartholomew. Ships that came into the port of Gethsemane would usually unload quickly, then pick up a cargo of sugar. But the John Bartholomew stayed. She was three days in the dock, unloading a cargo of equipment for the South Pacific Company's thermal project. Drills and gantries, steel cable and steel beams were piled up on the wharf, then carried off along the road to Mount Magdalene. The ship then anch.o.r.ed out in the channel, where its crew weren't at any easy leisure. They idled and fumed within sight of the port, and only the captain came and went freely. And then the boy and the man began to appear - inexplicably exempt from the rule against sh.o.r.e leave.

The boy was only a steward on the ship, but the John Bartholomew's captain seemed to favor him, and the talk in the port was that he was some shipowner's son getting a maritime education. This, because of the captain's odd partiality and the fact he had a servant - for it was a.s.sumed that the able seaman who accompanied him everywhere was his servant. The man was in late middle age, grizzled, wiry, and as weathered as any aging sailor, but there were those who said that this was only a disguise, and that he was in fact an old family retainer. He seemed too tender of the boy - tender with a familial tenderness. He was black, and the boy white, so, given the tenderness, it followed that he couldn't be simply a shipmate.

That winter everybody was busy, and the busybodies were busier than ever. Rumor rose like steam from a town that seemed to be coming to the boil. The cane had been cut, and the refineries were lit up all night. In the wind that came off the sea, the town smelled of caramel. The wind blew across the bay named Broken Crown, over the port and refineries, and right into town, where it mingled with the smells of the Sat.u.r.day market and the gardens, its caramel giving body to the fruit and floral scents.

Gethsemane was a city of gardens. Its topsoil was made of eons of decayed vegetation mixed into many feet of ash, making a fertile, friable soil that parted lovingly for the hoe. The locals had always talked about their soil as if it were some kind of demiG.o.d - the way people in high-lat.i.tude ports talk about the weather. The locals discussed soil, but the engineers who arrived on the John Bartholomew were interested only in ash - where it lay, and to what depth. To the townspeople, "ash" was potash for porcelain, or wood ash for gunpowder - utilitarian stuff - and though they worshipped their soil, they never thought about what it was made of, or the ground beneath it. Gethsemane's earthly powers, the mayor and sheriff, the owners and managers of refineries, the plantation owners with summer houses on the lower slopes of the town, all were welcoming to the engineers because they wanted to grow Gethsemane - as the town's soil grew melons. Yet, at their parties, the talk wasn't about money but progress, the fecundity of the future. They all agreed that Gethsemane was paradise on earth. Its early settlers had discovered a salubrious climate and a most welcoming native people keen to share their bounty of bush pigs and fat native birds and fruiting trees and hot springs - the earth's own ovens. The settlers dug hot-water wells for their baths and laundries. The very earth, even barren, had utility in the form of heat. Puffed up with civic pride, the city welcomed the engineers and geologists who came to learn how to tap that earth for power, how to sink bores and find steam forceful enough to drive turbines and generate electricity, so that the refineries could run day and night, and the city could sparkle, a clean, bright, South Pacific jewel.

There was another hot property of the town's wishful gossip. The thermal project's chief engineer, McCahon, proved to be a bold and ferociously forward-looking man - a real novelty in the islands, whose planter families were old and established powers. McCahon was someone on whom the island's future prosperity might depend. Someone new. He was invited everywhere, scrutinized and admired, and after scarcely a fortnight it was rumored that he'd developed a fancy for the mayor's daughter, Sylvia. Then, to pour fuel on the fire of rumor, that young woman was seen, in man's attire, and a hat pulled low, ducking in at the gate to the witch's crib.

The witch, a pretty girl aged somewhere between sixteen and twenty, had set herself up nearly a year before, selling balms and love charms, and - it was rumored - abortifacients, and sleeping drafts, and potions that produced dreams vividly reminiscent of those the moneyed people of Gethsemane would share whenever they visited Southland, the nation of which the Shackle Islands were a protectorate. No one knew the witch's name, and she had a servant - a white-eyed mute - said to be a dead woman.

In the fine residences along the inner harbor, practical-minded people tried to point out errors in the logic of these rumors. Why would the mayor's daughter be looking for a love charm if she'd already caught McCahon's eye? And - in more hushed tones - how could she be looking for an abortifacient when she'd only known McCahon for a couple of weeks? And - on the subject of the little witch - how could her servant be a zombie and also have been seen coming down the mountain path leaning on the arm of the old able seaman?

A local doctor talking to a certain group of lacy matrons over iced tea said that he thought the girl's potions were probably only opium and datura and psilocybin mushrooms. She was either a skilled herbalist or a daring experimenter. The doctor said all this to dispel the nonsense of gossip. But having sown the seeds of his own temptation, he visited the witch's crib himself several nights later. He told himself that he only wanted to procure for a.n.a.lysis some of her home-brewed remedies, but he came away impressed in spite of himself by the girl's terrible, cold gravity, and by the figure who stood unmoving in a corner the whole time he was there - tall, skeletal, and as inanimate as a broken grandfather clock.

You ask how we know what the doctor thought. Well - he survived. He had an operation to perform in the other big settlement in the archipelago.

The circular harbors of Calvary and Gethsemane were the "shackles" of the Shackle Islands. The towns were linked by a 150-mile "chain" of low islands, planted in sugarcane, and by a road that ran through cane fields and salt marshes.

One hundred and fifty miles. In Calvary, there was time enough for an evacuation.

The doctor lived to tell his tale. And so did Alice Lewes. Alice had sailed to Southland, sent away by her father when he discovered that she'd been out at night with her wild friend, Sylvia. It was Alice and Sylvia - Sylvia in man's attire - who were seen slipping through the gate to the witch's crib. Alice had promised to keep her friend's secret and did so even though her father threatened to send her away to school. She kept her mouth shut and was packed off. She was in transit when she heard what had happened, and she understood that there was no one left who cared what she and Sylvia had done.

It was Alice who first approached the witch. She did it to tease her friend. They were in the market and spotted the haughty girl, with a basket on her arm, taking her time over each display, to the discomfort of the stallholders - a girl who went about untouched in the crowd, shadowed by her starved, still-faced servant. "Perhaps the little witch can make you a love potion, Syl," Alice said to her friend, and darted away from Sylvia's desperate batting hand. Alice didn't know that although Sylvia liked to talk about Mr. McCahon, she hadn't liked to hope.

Alice followed the witch from the market. She waited till there were fewer people about, and she could approach the witch while keeping the girl between herself and that frightening, black, white-eyed creature. "Excuse me," Alice said. "I have a friend who requires a love potion. Can you do that?"

And the witch told Alice where she lived and when they could come.

The courtyard of the witch's crib had a wicket gate, and its walls were lined with empty poultry cages made of silvered gum-tree wood. Their grid was so tight that there was very little light. If the gate hadn't creaked and given the two people in the house some warning, Alice and Sylvia might have heard the witch say to the dead woman, "Will this do? A tisane strong enough to be offensive to the palate but not to turn the stomach. That's what you said." And they might have heard the dead woman answer, "I said, 'One that tastes bad but won't make the young lady sick.'" And then heard the witch, fondly chiding, "Mary!"

The gate creaked. Alice clutched Sylvia's arm. Sylvia, now resolute, shook off her friend and hurried to the door. It opened onto a long room that seemed to squeeze itself down to nothing at its end, where the ceiling dropped and there was a step down into a scullery. The only window was there, at the very back, its gla.s.s coated with black mold. For a moment all that the friends could see was the witch's white ap.r.o.n and her pale face. Then they glimpsed the figure standing in the room's darkest corner, thin, and sinewy, and as motionless as a monument.

The witch sprang forward and pushed Alice and her friend right back out into the courtyard. She said, "I don't want your hopes contaminating this potion before it is finished." She slammed the door in their faces. They waited in the close, hot s.p.a.ce, Alice with her skirts gathered in her gloved hands. They heard the witch whispering - spells, they supposed. A moment later she let them in again.

The kettle had been swiveled back over the coals and was steaming. There was a bowl on the hearth, beside it a small bottle, a funnel, and a rag stopper.

Alice kept her friend between herself and the white-eyed figure in the corner. She gripped the back of Sylvia's jacket.

"How does the potion work?" Sylvia asked the witch. "What must I do?"

"You must drink one-third of the potion the night before you see this man. On the morning of the day that you see him, you must comb all but a few drops of it into your hair. The remainder you must dab here." The witch stepped close and insinuated her hand into Sylvia's shirt to touch her cleavage. "Over your heart," the witch said. "Then you cannot cover yourself - you must let the sun shine on your hair and b.r.e.a.s.t.s."

Alice giggled.

"But what if he - Mr. McCahon - can't keep his appointment with my father or comes late, when the sun is down? He's up the mountain every day, where they're drilling."

"I know where he is," said the witch. "If he fails to appear before sundown, come again and I'll repeat the charm. I won't charge you for that. We can't control all circ.u.mstances."

"But will it work?"

"It will if your heart is pure."

Sylvia's face fell. Even Alice could see the obvious. .h.i.tch.

"Oh," said the witch, "you mistake me. I don't mean maidenly. Your hopes can be wholly carnal - but you must not be simply playing."

Sylvia nodded, solemn.

Alice, made bold by the witch's forthright and doctorly manner, ventured to ask, "Is it true what they say, that your servant is"- she dropped her voice -"a zombie?"

"My slave," the witch said, her tone gloating. "While your potion cools shall I tell you her story?"

Sylvia and Alice looked around as if they had been invited to sit. But there was nothing to sit on, not even a stool. There was the low hearth and, in a corner, a single pallet bed covered in grubby blankets.

The witch went to the fire and stood with her back to it, its light striking only one blue eye. "My craft came to me," she said. "And this is how." She pointed at her slave. "This woman and my nurse were rivals for the love of a certain man. This woman procured a curse that, she was told, would strike my nurse ugly. The curse was cast, and the following Sunday, the curser was infuriated to see my nurse holding my hand as we came into church - and looking as lovely as ever." The witch raised a finger, and an a.s.sortment of bra.s.s and silver bangles slipped, chiming from her wrist to elbow. "But, a week later, my nurse discovered a tiny blue mark on her cheekbone. She washed her face, but soap wouldn't move it. She tried pinching color into that spot and felt, between her fingers, a little hard ball, like a dry pea. Week by week that pea grew, into a cherry, into a plum, into a bluish horn of flesh. She took it to a doctor, and the doctor told her it had grown into the bones of her face. And he told her that there wasn't any hope for her. My family kept her on, and she still saw to my needs, but kept her face covered. After a time the horn stopped growing and began to sink and spread, and my nurse complained of always having a terrible smell in her nose. Then she lost the sight in her left eye. After that she stayed in bed. The horn blossomed. Once, when she was sleeping, I crept into her room and uncovered it and saw a cavity, like a crater, black at its edges and hot and b.l.o.o.d.y at its center. At the end the poor woman couldn't even speak or swallow. But before she lost her voice, she taught me a powerful curse, a curse her family had kept but the knowledge of which she had always shunned, because she was a good woman. It was a curse to take a soul. Not a life; a soul.

"The night my nurse died, I used that curse on her rival. This woman"- the witch pointed at her silent slave -"this woman came to my nurse's funeral. She followed the coffin to the churchyard and stood at the graveside, smirking. But when the mourners had moved away and the s.e.xton was filling in the grave, this woman was still there, standing, swaying. Her head was back, and she was staring up into the sun. She wouldn't stir. They had to lead her away indoors, and by that time, her eyeb.a.l.l.s had blistered.

"I did that," the witch said. "I made her mindless and soulless and now she follows me.

"You were watching me in the market before you screwed up enough courage to make your appointment. You must have seen how she always follows after me with her hand held out. It isn't that I'm guiding her, but that I'm all she can see. And what she sees is my shadow. And my shadow appears to her as a black door. She wants to go through that door. For she knows she can only escape her servitude in death. And she knows that if I die first, the door vanishes, and she is left in a desert of whiteness, the whiteness that is all she can see."

The witch finished her story and turned to the hearth to pick up the bowl and blow on it. As she came closer to the fire, her shadow moved and thickened and fell across the face of her silent slave, who raised her arm and reached - like someone putting out a hand to a door handle.

The visitors gasped and clutched each other.

The girl turned back to them and smiled at their fear. She took a funnel and decanted the potion from the bowl into the bottle, then stuffed the bottle with the rag stopper. She held it out - a reddish liquid behind grubby gla.s.s. Her hand was stained with plant juices. "For your Mr. McCahon."

Sylvia closed the bottle into her fist and slipped her fist into her pants pocket, making a little boyish bulge.

"Remember," said the witch, "you must have a heart unsullied by hesitation. I may have followed my nurse around Ragged Hat -"

Ah, Alice thought, so she comes from Calvary!

"- learning about herbs, but I wasn't a witch till I cast that curse. It worked because I asked justly. Magic makes judgments. Remember that."

Gethsemane's harbor was roughly circular, seven miles across, and half a mile wide at its entrance. The flat land and gentle slopes of the town were all opposite the harbor mouth. The rest of the harbor was a crown of forested cliffs. If the harbor was a clockface with its entrance at twelve, and the town at six, then at four there was Mount Magdalene, taller than all the surrounding ramparts, two thousand feet high, and the reason why everyone but layabouts and prisoners in the thick-walled city jail got to see the sunrise. The sunrise was always late, for Gethsemane lay in the shadow of the mountain till eight in the morning in winter.

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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 un.o.bserved, 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 sh.o.r.e."

"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 gra.s.sy 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, pa.s.sing 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 st.u.r.dy 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 alt.i.tude 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 caldera, 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, a.s.sessing, 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.

"Ma'am," 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 bra.s.s."

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-s.h.i.t smell. Mary asked the girl whether she'd discovered what kind of kin they were.

"You mean those two?" The girl was surprised.