A long silence hung dark between them. Finally Alice said in a low voice, “I don’t have it all worked out. Perhaps I can persuade them to give you their cure in exchange for all this silver. Or perhaps I can prevail upon their sense of. . fairness. I severely weakened the British Empire, which let China come into greater power, so perhaps the emperor will feel an obligation and grant my request to cure a single clockworker. Or perhaps I will simply scratch a few dozen people on my way to the emperor’s palace and spread the cure no matter what.”
“That’s a lot of ifs, Alice.”
“That’s true.” Her face grew serious. “The problem is, we’re facing a definite when. By that I mean when the clockwork plague gets worse. That is worth facing any number of ifs.” She paused. “I don’t want more innocent people to die when I can save them. But I can’t let you die, either, darling. I’m torn between a lion and a tiger, and I don’t know entirely what to do.”
Gavin put his arm around her shoulders. Strangely, the revelation that she was anything but certain made him feel better. She wasn’t quite willing to trade millions of lives for his, but she was willing to fight for him. The box was open, and he didn’t feel the need to read the date on the paper. The leaden lump evaporated. “Maybe I could cure myself.”
She looked at him. “Could you? Honestly?”
“Probably not.” He sighed. “I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know much about biology. The plague tells me about energy, and sound, and physics, and the mechanics of flight. Sometimes I think it’s all related somehow, at the base level, but not in any way that would help me.”
They stood in melancholy silence for a long moment. Then Alice said, “Do you know what I miss? I miss Kemp.”
“Kemp?”
“Right about now, when I’m feeling unhappy-when we’re feeling unhappy-he would bustle in with a tea tray and demand that we have something to eat or that I put on a pair of slippers. And the way he found a way through the Gonta house in Kiev-masterful! We wouldn’t have gotten this far without him.”
“He was good, wasn’t he?”
“I know he was only an automaton, but. .”
“Yeah. I know.”
Gavin peered forward into the darkness, though the only light was the soft blue glow of the Lady’s envelope. The only way to navigate was by star and compass, and peering ahead was his way of not looking at Alice. His thoughts drifted away from Kemp and back to China again. He was frightened for Alice, and his fear for her chewed at his bones. Gavin had never visited China and knew little about the place, but he did know people, and anyone who offered such a large reward for someone usually had something fairly unfriendly in mind for him-her. He was afraid that if he looked at Alice, he would turn the ship around and fly west toward safety, hang the reward, and hang Yeh. Maybe that would be the best idea anyway.
Alice’s arm slid around his waist. She was still wearing the voluminous Turkmen dress, and the cloth whispered against his white leathers. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said quietly. “And we’re doing the right thing.”
“How do you know?” A lump formed in Gavin’s throat, and the words came out sounding harsher than he intended.
“Because I can’t imagine a world without you in it,” she said. “Because I don’t want to live in such a world, and because I’m quite comfortable risking my life to extend yours.”
“What if we get to China and they kill you?” His arm was still around her shoulders, and he pulled her closer while he stared fiercely ahead. “I can’t live knowing I caused your death. I can’t let anything happen to you.”
“It’s my decision, darling.” Alice leaned into him, and he held tightly to her. The eyes on her spider gauntlet glowed red between them. The clockwork plague was always there.
After a moment, she said, “Play for me?”
Gavin couldn’t have refused her request any more than rain could refuse to fall. Alice took the helm while he retrieved his fiddle from his cabin and tuned it.
“Something quick,” she said. “If you play something slow, I’ll melt. I just know it.”
With a small smile, Gavin took out his fiddle, tuned up, and played the first song that came to mind. His voice rang off the ropes and bounced off the envelope:
Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys
Bedlam boys are bonny
For they all go bare and they live by the air
And they want no drink nor money.
“Tom o’ Bedlam” was the unofficial anthem of all airmen. The endless verses and a tune made for pounding out on a wooden deck teamed with the idea that airmen were handsome, a little bit crazy, and never wanted for drink or money. It created immense appeal, so much so that the ritual for a cabin boy becoming a true airman at age eighteen involved his climbing in his underwear from the lowest deck below to the highest point of the envelope above-going bare and living by the air. Pirates had attacked Gavin’s ship the Juniper and beaten Gavin when he was only a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, and he had missed this ritual. Instead of airman’s wings, he got nightmares and an inability to awaken in the morning without a jolt of fear.
He shook his head and kept singing, the fiddle his accompaniment.
The moon’s my constant mistress,
And the lonely owl my marrow;
The flaming drake and the night crow make
Me music to my sorrow.
And still I sing bonny boys. .
Alice was tapping her hands on the helm to the song, and even though Gavin had played the song a thousand times, he became nervous about making a mistake. He always felt this way when he played for an audience, no matter how sympathetic. It always seemed as if the listeners were waiting for him to make an error, ready to laugh or pounce.
“This is an A, this is an E. Go back and forth between the two. No! Hold the bow right. You can do this.”
For a flicker of a moment Gavin was in a different place. A tall, tall man was standing over him, a man with pale hair and broad shoulders and strong hands. Gavin’s fingers felt tiny on the strings; the bow grew larger. “Keep trying. One day, you’ll play better than your old man, but only if you do better.”
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I am summoned to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end-
Methinks it is no journey.
And still I sing bonny boys. .
The memories were little more than shades, but he could almost touch them. For years Gavin had thought he had no memories of his father, but after he had been infected with the clockwork plague, some of them had come back. His father had left long ago, leaving a hole in Gavin’s life. He wanted to know what his father was like, who he had been.
Why he had left.
A deep ache made his ribs hurt. He knew he must have done something terrible to drive his father away. Ma never spoke of him. Gavin didn’t even know his name. It was ridiculous to miss someone he had never really known, and yet he did. The music was a gift left behind by a faceless angel, a man dead and gone.
I now repent that ever
Poor Tom was so disdained
My wits are lost since him I crossed
Which makes me thus go chained
And still I sing bonny boys. .