Two
All day we had fought, under a topaz sky which slowly clouded over as though obscured by the smoke from our guns and the spreading fires below. The clouds turned dark red with the sunset; beneath our feet the decks were slick with blood. Still we fought, desperate now, though the light was going and our numbers were but a quarter of what they had been; the dead and dying lay thrown about like splinters, our proud ship's paint and goldleaf were blackened and burned, our masts were felled, and our sails - once puffed out bright and decorated as any military chest - now hung like half-burned rags from the mast-stumps, or covered the debris-littered decks where fires burned and dying men moaned. Our officers were dead, our boats were burned or smashed.
Our ship was sinking and burning; the form of its inevitable fate dependent only on whether the rising waters reached the powder magazines before the unchecked fires. The enemy vessel, wallowing across the wreckage-strewn sea, seemed in scarcely better condition than our own; a single holed and flame-sooted sail hung from her remaining, tilted mast. We tried to shoot down that remnant of her rigging, but we had no chain shot left, and no master-gunners left alive. Our powder on deck was almost finished.
The enemy ship turned towards us, closing. We used the last of our shot, then took up cutlass and boarding pistol. We left the wounded to their own devices. Lacking any yards to hang boarding lines from, we made ready to leap aboard the other vessel when she hit. The other ship fell silent too, the last dark clouds from her cannons blowing slowly ahead of her, over the dull red swell of the empty ocean. Our smokes mingled as the ships drew near.
The two, torn, bulbous hulls touched; we leapt across, away from our stricken vessel.
The collision felled our enemy's last makeshift mast, and the two craft separated again; like us they had used no hooks or grapples. We staggered shouting and cursing through the enemy galleon's decks as our old ship drifted away, but we found no men to fight, only the dead and the moaning wounded. We found no powder or shot, only rising waters and spreading fires. We found no ship's boats, only wreckage and charred wood.
Resigned, exhausted, we gathered on the sloping, splintered poop deck. In the smoky, flickering light of the spreading fires we looked out across the slow-increasing gap of littered, bloody ocean to our old ship.
Her masts were flame, her sails were smoke. Her reflection burned on the waters between us, a livid and inverted ghost.
Our adversaries stared back through the smoke at us.
My apartments are high up on this section of the bridge, close to the summit and not far from one angle of the squashed hexagon which the section resembles. It would appear that I deserve this exalted position because I am one of Dr Joyce's star patients. My rooms are wide and tall, and their walls on the seaward side are the glassed-in girders of the bridge itself. I can look out - from perhaps twelve hundred feet or more - in the direction we call down-river. That is, when the view is not obscured by the grey clouds which often submerge the bridge from above.
My rooms were quite bare when I came here from the hospital - I have improved them, adding several useful and decorative pieces of furniture, and a modest but carefully chosen collection of small paintings and little figurines and sculptures. The paintings mostly show details of the bridge itself, or are of the sea. I have several fine paintings of yachts and fishing vessels. The sculptures are, in the main, figures; bridge workers frozen in bronze.
It is morning now, and I am dressing, performing my toilet. I dress slowly, in measured stages. I have an extensive wardrobe; it seems only polite, having been given so many well-made clothes, to give some thought to their effect. They are, after all, a language; they do not so much say things about us, they are what is said. The bridge's menial workers, of course, have uniforms to wear, and don't have to worry about what to put on each morning. My envy for their way of life begins and ends there, though; they accept their lot and their position in society with a meekness I find both surprising and disappointing. I wouldn't settle for being a sewage worker or a coal miner all my life, but these people fit into the structure like happy little rivets, embrace their position with the adhesion and cohesion of coats of paint.
I comb my hair (a pleasantly intense black, and just curly enough to give it body) and select a cravat and matching enamelled pocket watch. I admire my tall and aristocratic reflection for a moment, and check that my cuffs are even, my waistcoat centred, collars straight, and so on.
I am ready for breakfast. The bed needs to be made, and yesterday's clothes require cleaning or putting away, but the hospital very considerately sends people to do that sort of thing. As I go to select a hat, I pause.
The television has switched itself on. It clicks and starts to hiss. At first, as I go through to the sitting room, I think I might be mistaken, that it will be a leaking pipe - water or gas - making the noise, but no, the screen built into the wall is on. It shows the same view as before: the man in the bed, silent and still and in monochrome. I switch the set off. The picture vanishes. I switch it back on; the sick man reappears, and the channel-changing control has no effect. The light is different. There seems to be a window set into the wall on the far side of the bed, beyond the encircling machines. I look carefully for any further clues. The picture is too grainy for me to be able to read any of the writing on the machines; I can't even tell what language is being used. How can the set switch itself on? I turn it off, and hear a droning noise outside.
From the windows of the room, I look out onto a blue, bright day. A formation of aircraft is flying past the bridge, from the direction of the Kingdom. There are three of them, identical, rather cumbersome-looking, single-engine monoplanes, flying one above the other. The lowest aircraft is about level with me, the middle plane is fifty feet above it, the highest plane another fifty feet above that. They fly past, engines droning, course steady, propellers glittering like huge protruding glass discs, and from the tail of each aircraft little dark bursts of smoke issue, seemingly at random. The small black clouds hang in the air, strung out like some strange code. A long trail of smoky signals marks the course of the planes, disappearing into the Cityward distance like some strange airborne fence.
This both puzzles and excites me. I have not seen or heard of any aircraft at all since I've been on the bridge; not even flying boats, which the bridge's engineers and scientists are obviously quite capable of constructing and operating.
These aircraft had no visible undercarriage - they certainly had no floats - and generally they looked quite unable to operate from water; I assume they have retractable wheels and come from an airport on land. I would find that encouraging.
The puffs of black smoke start to drift with the slow wind, heading towards the City. They dissipate as they go, into the wide blue sky. The planes' piston-engine noise gradually fades as well. The thinning black clouds seem to have a vague pattern; they are grouped in three-by-three grids, carefully spaced. I watch the gradually moving cloud-groups, waiting for the merging smoke-puffs to form letters or numbers, or some other recognisable shapes, but after a few minutes, all that is left is an indistinct hanging curtain of dull air being blown slowly Citywards like a gigantic scarf of soiled gauze.
I shake my head.
At the door I remember the malfunctioning television; but when I try to call the repair people the telephone isn't working either; it transmits a series of slow, not-quite-perfectly-regular beeps at me. Time to go. The world - the bridge, anyway - may be going mad, but a man must still have his breakfast.