Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
“Good, Nazhuret. We have a very strong beginning.”
Memories only remain connected, so that they make a tale that moves from third hour to fourth hour to noon, in situations so utterly new that our minds cannot otherwise catalog them. Once we have begun to feel comfortable—to understand or to give up understanding all things around us—we group memories in clumps of like experiences. (I am told, however, that it is not the same for idiots, who remember each incident of their unsuccessful lives as sequential, unique, and inexplicable. Though I have been called a simpleton all my life, I am glad my memories have not been so drearily particular as this.) My recollection of my first whole day with Powl switches from the first mode of memory to the second at about the time just described. Sometime later in the afternoon he took a set of keys and led me through various doors into the odd-shaped rooms that made up the rest of the volume of this round building within a square one.
There was a spare but perfectly comfortable bedroom that boasted a
fireplace not set into the wall but pounded out of what seemed to be pieces of old body armor (both
of horse and man) and served by a flimsy exhaust pipe, and a storage room where grain was kept very
tidily in glass and ceramic with rubber gaskets and where wooden crates rose almost to the low
ceiling, along with a far more interesting collection of sabers, rapiers, disassembled pistols,
lance cannons, caltrops, and other instruments to eviscerate, maim, and otherwise discourage
one’s friends. The room at the third corner smelled of fuller’s earth; it had certain of
the flags lifted, and a great displacement of the earth beneath them was scattered over the
remaining floor. Atop the hole in the flags was a thigh-high iron box with a matching hole in its
top. The entirety was described to me (reluctantly, it seemed) as a “work in
progress.”
The fourth comer was a fairly up-to-date kitchen, complete with an oven of iron similar to but heavier than the affair in the bedroom. It did not appear to be used.
Why Powl had left me the night before on a hard bench when there were battens and blankets so near at hand puzzled me for a while—he certainly had not used them himself, and it didn’t seem he feared my personal cattle would infect his property, for now he gave me the ring of black keys with no hesitation. I can only suppose he had wanted to give me every opportunity for walking out, if my instincts had run in that direction.
That afternoon he gave me the second of my regular defeats at arms, this time simply saber to saber, but it did not appear that the exercise had his full attention, and before evening he left me again, with food to cook and wood to cut and a very serious charge: I was to discover the central purpose of the building in which I now lived, and I was to be able to operate it competently by daybreak.
He left me paper and pen for figuring, if I should need it, and beer for solace. Everything but candles for light he left me, and when I pointed out the omission he walked out the door, laughing, saying that the building operated best without candles.
My king, I know it seems ridiculous to a man of your breadth of experience that I did not know in what sort of place I was, but remember the single-purposedness of my up-bringing, and remember also that it was twenty-one years ago, and many things that are ordinary now were marvelous then, or even unknown.
First, because it had been so much in my thoughts, I approached the “rack” in the corner. It possessed a great oak wheel on an axle of iron, and protruding from the rim of the wheel was a handle also of oak and iron, parallel in line to the axle itself. I had difficulty turning this wheel, both because of the resistance of the machinery and because the wheel stood so tall that at the handle’s highest point I could scarcely reach it and could put almost no force into the rotation. Below the mechanism I placed a box from the storage room, and by stepping on and off once for each revolution I worked the thing with a will.
It seemed it did nothing but creak and cause the building to creak. I stopped my efforts and regarded the contrivance again. To the best of my knowledge, nothing had changed. Since I could not lubricate the wooden wheels, I lubricated myself instead, and sat upon the steps of the central platform with a mug of warmish, still beer.
The buttons were moving on their strings and the sun shone its last light through the fault in the ceiling. Beer is not conducive to mental exercise but rest is, and when I rose again I went to the kitchen stove, took from its belly a damp piece of charcoal, and smeared lines over all the meeting places of the gears within the machine, or at least all that could be reached. I worked the thing again until it was growling all around me, and then I observed what progress I had made.
None of the lines met anymore. Some had moved only slightly, and some bore traces of having run their circle through more than once. The bigger gears seemed, in general, to have moved least.
This ought to have been most significant, but my brain refused to lead me any farther. Gears existed to speed movement, to slow it down, or to change the direction of it. These gears were of many sizes and moved up and down, sideways, and in both diagonals, but seemed to be connected to nothing except each other. And the building, of course. It had grown dark during my last flurry of pumping, and I had suddenly in my mind an even darker vision of myself slowly pushing this square shell of bricks and mortar over the crest of the hill it sat upon, until it would overbalance itself and crash into the trees below. It seemed the sort of joke an inexplicable man like Powl would find humorous. In sudden panic I ran out through the hall and out the heavy door, to find the sun was still in the sky, and the path exactly where I’d left it that afternoon.
I was inspired to leave, to return to Sordaling School with a story of sudden illness, amnesia, attack from townies. Now that I think back, sir, I doubt there was a day in my peculiar education that I was not overcome at least momentarily by an impulse to drop the effort and run. Except for three days, which I shall describe after this is done.
I went back in and poured another beer. It was very dark inside now, and only the swinging brass buttons of the ceiling caught sunlight through the clerestory windows. I glanced out through the crack in the roof and beheld the first stars, and only then did it become obvious to me that the pole, the slot, the entire roof of the building had moved—that the squat dome, the crowded clerestories, and the clumsy key frieze were no chance ornaments of a builder without artistic taste but instead the inevitable concomitants of a roof designed to spin like a top.
A very slow, cumbersome top.
Questions are never really answered, but only replaced by larger questions. Why on earth would a man want to move the roof of his house in a circle? That under certain circumstances he might want to move the house itself over the ground I could accept. That he might want to replace the roof to the left or the right according to rain or wind direction also was comprehensible, though practically speaking it was enough that it merely cover the floor well. This pierced, flawed, and ponderously mobile dome seemed beyond reason.
Yet one thing had led to five or six others in my researches, and I was inclined toward faith in the reasonableness of this ugly brick building. I left off beer and conjecture and mounted the platform.
The great tube ended in a smaller, polished tube, which in its turn was completed by a round lip of brass like the neck of a bottle. It occurred to me that perhaps Powl’s intent was to capture dew or rain, but when I inserted my finger into the hole I thought I felt it blocked by something hard. It was a tiny opening anyway, and hard to feel with the fingers. The tube itself rang hollow to knuckles; it made a shivery, almost sweet sound.
On the Zaquashlon southern coast, at Morbin Harbor, there stands a cannon as long as this very tube, and like it, the cannon is made of brass. It can carry a ball of iron for three miles out to sea, and its purpose is to terrify the pirates of Felonk, who harry the shores. Though the Felonkan are a round people, however, their ships are light and wasplike and balanced on wasp-legged pontoons, and never has this fearsome weapon managed to hit a ship clean on or even to swamp one, though I am told men have been washed off the decks and drowned. If ever it did hit a ship, I’m sure the destruction would be total.
On its way to emplacement on the harbor cliffs, the Morbin Harbor cannon was paraded through Vestinglon and afterward Sordaling, pulled by thirty chestnut brewery horses. We of the school were brought to examine it, and I remember that the barrel of the cannon was very heavy, so that it made little ring when beaten by the fists.
There was a chair on the platform, placed not under the tube but to one side. Its brocade seat was well and particularly worn, as by the posterior of a single man applied many times. I sat on that chair (feeling a slight sense of sacrilege) but found no virtue in the act, nor was there anything to be seen or heard there. Of course, the chair was not attached to the tube but to the platform by its own weight. If the tube moved (as it must) with the roof…
I sought a stick or a pencil and could find nothing but the piece of charcoal I had sharpened against the gears of the roof-engine. I inserted this into the lip of the tube and found it was actually blocked by something hard. In an effort to discover whether the blockage was complete, I managed to break the charcoal in the declivity and fill it, whether-or-no. I peered into the brass ring stuffed with gray dirt and was no wiser. Most heavy guns, the Morbin Harbor cannon among them, are barrel-loaders, and this thing had no obvious juncture between the large bore section and the end section. But it was possible that strength inherent in the unbroken nature of this instrument was worth the extra trouble inherent in a long muzzle-loader. Perhaps such a cannon might be easier to drill to specifications. More accurate.
Though a ladder would be very necessary… Powl’s parting words, that this place operated better without candles, now seemed heavily significant. The man certainly didn’t want to give me any opportunity to shoot off the huge gun at random, or to blow up the emplacement. I began to consider breaking open the crates in the storage rooms in search of black powder or gun cotton.
Destroying things seemed beyond the scope of my assignment here, and though I was more and more alarmed each minute and less at one with the purposes of a man who kept a dog with such terrible teeth, still I could not be sure. I determined to go slowly and be certain.
Next I discovered something that excited me strongly, and that was that the single attaching strut of the tube to the platform was no mere support but a complex levered pipe that would raise and lower the tube along the slot in the roof. To prove true sane intent in the construction of this mad machine, nothing more was necessary than to find that there was an awning of canvas that followed the tube down, covering the fault in the roof entirely, so that if the thing were laid flat against the bottom of the dome, the roof was impervious to rain and dew, if not to wind.
It seemed likely that the blockage in the end of the tube was a fuse, broken off below level, as so often happens with fuses. The endpiece did seem to be threaded, but I did not manage to get it entirely off to check my suppositions, and I feared to break such an intricate piece of machinery—whether good or evil as I feared, it was obviously quite expensive.
There remained one more test for what was becoming a fond theory: If the building was a huge, immovable cannon, it must be aimed at something.
In the last light of the sun and the first light of the moon I went
out again to examine the hill’s horizon. It was trees and blackness, except in one direction:
the direction of the road whence I had come. I returned to the “rack,” worked
prodigiously, and looked again.
The next morning I was awake when Powl arrived, for I had not slept. He clearly did not expect the accusation written in my eyes. He dropped a large pack, under which he had been sweating.
“So you know?” he asked me, dry and ironic.
“It is fearful,” I replied. “It is fearful and traitorous and I wish I had not seen it pointed straight for my city and home.”
“That’s where I thought you had pointed it,” he answered. “It is what I would expect from a lad your age—to look straight at the lights of the city. There are higher targets, believe me.”
I was very angry. “Higher? There is Vestinglon itself, and the
palace, I suppose. But to have a cannon this size pointed at the second city of Velonya and its
military capital is enough. I had hoped”—and here I was stuck between anger and a
strange embarrassment—“I had hoped that you had only found this place, had overcome the
traitorous element and—”
Powl’s jaw dropped and his eyebrows rose commensurately. “As a matter of fact, I had no hand in this construction. It was Adlar Diskomb himself who had it built, and who hanged himself from this very ceiling, though whether he was a traitor to do so is more than I can say. But for the rest of your accusation, Nazhuret, son of—of Sordaling School, I am totally bemused.
“A cannon? Do you think you are living in a gun bunker of some kind?” He climbed the platform in two steps and dragged the chair over to the end of the tube. He looked closely into the brass lip and cried out like a bird.
“Deity! What have you done, boy? Idiot! Hooligan! You’ve
broken the eyepiece, and how I am ever going to remove it, let alone grind a
replacement…” I was about to tell him I was glad if I had, but his attitude was so much
that of outraged innocence that I was losing faith in my own inductions, and I merely stood
stubborn. If this were not a brass gun aimed at Sordaling, I could not guess what it was. Then the
charcoal fell out from where I had wedged it and Powl gave a great groan of relief. He put his eye
to and made the sort of face one makes when looking hard. He twisted the adjustment.