“Elena,” I call in the dark.
“It’s time,” she responds, her melodic voice full of anticipation. The lock to her trunk is already broken, and I hear the lid creak open.
Bracing my elbows against the back wall of my trunk, I push. The metal hinges groan, iron bands buckling. Weakened by my earlier efforts, the lid bulges and finally bursts open in a spray of splinters. I kick through the remaining wood and step onto the swaying deck on wobbling, poorly repaired legs.
The rocking of the ship seems to amplify and I pitch forward.
But Elena is waiting, her bright and broken face smiling up at me with permanently pursed lips. Lost among the towering walls of crates and trunks, she firmly presses small hands against my torso, pushing, keeping me from falling.
I put a palm against a nearby crate and steady myself.
“I am sorry,” I say. “I did not realize…my legs…”
“It’s all right, Peter. Like everything on God’s earth, we are falling apart.”
She turns so I can better see the fractures that zigzag across her cheek.
Flexing my fists and stamping my feet, I regain my balance. In the dim light of the hold, I can see the skin of my hands is still torn and the clockwork of my joints only hastily repaired. Something clicks inside my torso as I take a few experimental steps. The plains riders left me with grievous injuries. After the cramped voyage, Elena’s repairs are barely holding my body together.
I kneel and trace a finger over the jagged cracks fanning over her face. The girl is right. We are all falling apart. Even the most beautiful of us.
“Unlike everything else living on God’s earth, we can be restored,” I say.
“Cloaks,” she says. “We must disguise ourselves. There’s not much time.”
Luckily, we have come to port near dusk. Above us, the seamen are shouting to other ships, negotiating to take on a pilot who can guide us to the wharves. Maneuvering through traffic has them distracted for now. But porters will be coming down to offload the cargo soon.
Elena and I empty our trunks of the few valuables we have left, disguising ourselves once again beneath riding cloaks stained with mud and grass and other, darker substances. Soon, we are both buried under layers of clothing, our faces turned to shadow under peaked hoods.
“Ready?” I ask Elena, my arm against the door.
She puts a hand on my arm, looks up into my eyes. The shuffle of footsteps is loud above us. Rough thumping, shouts and laughter, sinister harbingers of a world we’ve never seen.
“Does it matter?” she asks.
We emerge from belowdecks together—a father and daughter, arm in arm. Pushing out onto the deck, we mix in among the crowd of off-smelling human passengers as they gather their luggage and prepare to make landfall. A few hundred yards away, the wooden dock is crowded with porters and workers, all shouting and shoving.
Our ship nestles roughly against the rotten wood beams of the dock, creaking and grinding on a bed of waves that smells like a sewer. And now I can see London, rising behind the wharves, a multitude of silhouetted buildings, spewing streams of lamp and chimney smoke, her damp streets swallowed in a foggy dusk.
“Landfall,” shouts a porter, ringing a bell from his elbow. “This way to disembark.”
One hand on Elena’s shoulder, I usher her through the throng to the front. We shove past the bewildered porter and rattle down the gangplank before anyone can stop us. The surprised murmurs at the sight of us quickly fade as my boot heels hit the wooden pier and Elena and I trot away into the crowd. Unburdened by luggage, we are free to abandon the filth-caked shoreline of the river.
“Quickly now,” I say to Elena.
“Yes, Father,” she responds, sarcastic, yet with a smile in her voice.
In moments, we are lost among people.
Night is falling and the evening lanterns are burning in London. After the long darkness of the voyage, the humming excitement and sheer stimulus of the great city dazzles—lights and sounds and stupendous hordes of people. There are more human beings here than I have ever seen at once, or even seriously considered might be alive. Saint Petersburg was home to tens of thousands, but this place…this accumulation of humanity is on another scale, perhaps the hundreds of thousands—or more.
Along the uneven cobblestoned streets near the docks, a parade of human beings passes by—walking, running, sometimes dancing—so similar in their form and yet drastically different in the contrasts of speech, demeanor, and dress.
The streets are clumped with hay and mud and horse droppings. Laborers and maids and urchins move by, many already dosed with gin, legs wobbling. Wealthy men in powdered wigs pass, ensconced in ornate carriages pulled by snorting horses.
Looking to the sky, I see that this hoard of human animals, wretched and noble, have thrown up such a confusion of noise and light and language that it has pushed away the sight of the stars. The occupants of London are living under a dome of their own humanity—immune to the howl of the wolf or the bite of the cold in a way I have never seen men do. Without fear of God or nature, these souls are choosing between good and evil in a kind of muddy Eden of their own making, safe within their own sturdy walls.
This is the strange state of man which they call civilization. And perhaps most strange, I think, is that by all accounts it is the natural state of humanity.
Elena looks up at me, lamplight glinting from her porcelain face, eyes shining.
“Peter,” she says. “It’s wonderful.”
With the stench of the Thames at our backs, we walk beyond the docks, making our way through groups of sailors and lurking pickpockets, past the nefarious gambling houses and brothels that ring the wharves, waiting to catch sailors like the fishnets they use out on the blue wastes.
As the drunken shouting and the calls of whores fade into the distance, Elena and I shuffle down a side lane, trying to move with confidence as we search for lodging. The meandering road is humped in the middle, a central gutter trickling with black waste. It is too narrow and steep for carts or horses here, so we are briefly safe from the flashing wheels and cudgels of the carriage drivers.
I feel a tug on my cloak. Elena has stopped walking. Her pale face is tilted back, eyes wide. I pivot on my heel to see what she sees.
We have emerged from a warren of filthy streets to the flank of a magnificent church, wrought in unblemished brown stone. Its towers are under construction, surrounded by scaffolding and raw building materials. And among the leaded windows and carved ridges are grand lines of script, scrawled fifty feet high upon its walls, glowing and writhing like flame.
“What is it?” asks Elena, awe in her voice.
On the cathedral’s flank, the drawing of a huge red eye glares at us without seeing. The evil light flutters, beating itself against wet stone. People straggle past us along the wall, directly below the symbol, oblivious to the pulsing waves of illumination.