by Lavie Tidhar
“No. I lie. He said he wished to smell one, and he used a name. The one, I think, you used. It seemed important to him, as though, if only he could smell it, all would be well. Then he died.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t a meaningful or noble death, you understand. He passed from here. Whether he lives still in that other place or not I do not know. We didn’t bury him. The next morning, as soon as the snow had stopped, we continued on our way. Now I avoid the cold, and when a storm comes, I take shelter.”
She was silent then. The Stranger mulled over her words.
“Thank you,” he said at last.
They rode on, in companionable silence, accompanied only by the horses’ farts and occasional whinnies, with the horses chomping at the wildflowers or bits of grass whenever they could find them, and the Stranger gnawing, from time to time, on a chunk of dried beef. The Escapement here was flat for miles, the sky serene, and there was no sign of the war.
As the miles passed by, the Stranger rocked in his saddle, lulled by the unchanging landscape.
He was brought sharply awake, however, at the sound of a pistol shot.
The sound was somewhat muffled, and yet it carried across the open air of this part of the Escapement. When the Stranger scanned the horizon he saw, snaking across the plains, what seemed to him the remnants of a white road and, coming in from the west, a plume of slowly rolling dust, which might have been a wagon.
The Stranger made to head that way.
“No,” Temperanza said.
“No?”
She shook her head, simply. “No.”
“But I want to see—”
“Do you know the old saying?” Temperanza said. “Shadow battles stone. The lizard scuttles—”
“From the glare of the sun, yes,” the Stranger said. “What of it?”
Temperanza shaded her eyes and looked out, to that distant plume of dust that was slowly approaching along the white road.
“Beware of shadows, Stranger,” she said. “I’ll see you in Kellysburg, I guess.”
Then she rode away, and took her share of the outlaws’ horses with her; and the Stranger marvelled, for he knew then what she was; and one did not often see a member of the Major Arcana ride out into the world.
The Stranger, whose curiosity had led him down all kinds of twists and turns in the maze of the Escapement and his quest, did not heed her advice but rode on, and he directed his horse at the road, at a point ahead of where the wagon would eventually arrive.
The other horses followed him obediently enough.
They crossed the distance, passing through isolated patches of flowering cactuses and fever trees, stopping only for the horses to drink at a shallow pool of muddy groundwater. All this while the small plume of dust continued to roll sedately enough along the white road, and as it came closer the Stranger could see that it was indeed a wagon, and it was pulled by two dirty, piebald donkeys.
When the Stranger at last came to the road he stopped, and the horses milled nearby. Such roads could be found, from time to time, in the farther reaches of the Escapement, and who, if anyone, had built them, or for what purpose, the Stranger didn’t know. They led from nowhere to nowhere, seldom in a straight line but rather in a crazy curlicue of a twisting and looping arabesque, like secret inscribed messages in the landscape. In the Thickening, that part of the Escapement that had been partly subdued, or perhaps suborned, by the relative thickness of population, there were no ghost roads, and the settlers had constructed new railway lines. And yet even those would often find themselves subject to the external forces of vastation and revel, and loop upon themselves or terminate, abruptly, in a place where no terminal was.
The Stranger waited, his hands resting on the butts of his revolvers, and watched the road. The solitary wagon traversed along its path, never straying, and as it came closer the Stranger could see that it was a small, wooden wagon, once brightly painted, but the paint had faded and flaked, the wooden wheels creaked, and it was only when it pulled to a halt, at the sight of him, that he saw the legend along the side of the wagon, which read Tinkerers.
Two small figures sat up front in the wagon driver’s seat. They were both bundled in rags, as though to defend themselves, vigorously, against a cold snap, which could, they seemed to silently suggest, strike at any moment. One was male and the other was female, though it was hard to tell them apart. They were both watching the Stranger and neither said anything, nor did they appear to hold a weapon, and the Stranger did not draw his own guns.
The male tinkerer at last pulled out a long-stemmed pipe and stuck the bit between his teeth. He next reached for a small cloth bag, from which he extracted tobacco, which he proceeded to stuff into the bowl. Having done that he struck a match, and a fragrant, cherry-flavoured smoke rose into the air and turned it blue.
“How goes it, stranger?” he called. His voice was surprisingly youthful and high, and not unpleasant. “I am, uh, going to assume you are not a highwayman or a horse thief”—his tone suggested that he was far from convinced on that score but for lack of a better choice, was willing to give the Stranger the benefit of the doubt—“and anyway, as you can see, we are but, uh, poor tinkerers, with nothing worth stealing.” He made a desultory gesture at their wagon.
“I heard gunshot,” the Stranger said. “Some distance back.”
“Nothing to do with, uh, us, I’m sure,” the tinkerer said.
“I can’t think where else it could have come from.”
The tinkerer shrugged. The woman beside him cupped her hands and whispered into his ear. He nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said. “We ran into some problems a while back. That’s right. A wild, uh, snake. My, uh, sister had to shoot the creature. A shame, really. We value all life.”
The woman measured out a span with her hands.
“A big one,” the tinkerer added, unnecessarily.
“A snake.”
“It is, uh, so.”
“What happened to it?”
The woman whispered again. The man said, “We left it behind. I was, uh, asleep at the time. I sleep heavily, you see.”
It was none of the Stranger’s business, and he did not press the point just then.
“Why do you travel on the road?” he asked instead, with curiosity. “Would it not be quicker to follow a straight route to your destination?”
“Ah,” the tinkerer said. “You would, uh, think so, wouldn’t you. But the straight route is seldom the quickest, on the Escapement. And there is an old saying, uh, it is the journey that matters, stranger, not the destination.”
The Stranger nodded politely. The man puffed on his pipe. In the wagon behind them, something banged sharply, and for a moment the wagon rocked from side to side. The woman ducked under the canvas and disappeared, and the Stranger heard a sharp crack, followed by silence. The woman re-emerged and took her seat. She smiled at the Stranger and her teeth were white and even.
“Rats,” she said.
“I’m, uh, Fledermaus,” the man said. “This is Titania.”
“Howdy, stranger,” Titania said. “And which way are you travelling, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Kellysburg,” the Stranger said. “I have horses to sell.”
“You won’t get much for them there,” she said.
The Stranger shrugged. “I’ll take what I get.”
“Won’t we all,” she said, and laughed, a surprisingly coarse sound. “As it happens, we’re on our way there ourselves. Not by choice, you understand, but it’s the nearest habitation for miles, and bad trade is better than none, in my opinion.”
“You’re, uh, welcome to travel with us,” Fledermaus said. “The road doesn’t go to the town but it passes nearby, or, uh, more correctly it fades as it nears the outpost. Or so it was the last time we’ve come this way.”
The Stranger considered
the two of them. At last he nodded, and the woman, Titania, took the reins and cracked them, and the two piebald donkeys began to pull the wagon without complaining, slow and sedate, as though they had all the time in the world. Fledermaus continued to draw on his pipe, and Titania hummed the same few bars of some wordless tune the Stranger didn’t recognise. He spurred his own horse, walking alongside them, and the other horses followed behind—though he noticed they gave the wagon itself a wide berth, and walked some distance from it by the side of the road, on which they seemed reluctant to step at all.
Overhead, the sky’s hues deepened by degree, from azure to ultramarine; as the sun traversed the sky, the travellers cast sfumato shadows, which lengthened as they trailed their originators like furtive ghosts. The road itself changed with the light, growing in turns ivory and snow, ghost-white and smoky, until the Stranger found it easier to not look directly at the road at all, but ahead.
“You came from out west?” he said.
“That we did,” Titania said.
“I saw signs of a battle there, six, seven days back, on the horizon.”
“That is, uh, true,” Fledermaus said. “Yes. Yes. We think. We were still some distance away and when we saw the coming storm we sought shelter.”
“We reached the place a day and a night later,” Titania said. “After the battle had moved on. But we are not scavengers, stranger. We didn’t dally there.”
“You found nothing of value?”
He saw them exchange a glance, though what it meant, if anything, he didn’t know.
“What is of value to some is of no value to, uh, others,” Fledermaus said.
“We do not trade in substance or materiel,” his sister said.
The sun had dipped low in the sky when they caught sight of a dwelling in the distance. As they came closer, they saw it was an abandoned chapel. The weathered stone was dirty with dust, and the broken windows gaped open like empty eye sockets. Over the steeple, only, there remained a stylized balloon painted a vivid red, and it swallowed the reflected light of the sun. The travellers, by unspoken consent, halted there, near the old church.
“A strange place for a mission,” the Stranger said.
When people had first come to the Escapement, one could still see the Wild Harlequinade pass by on the prairies, and even Harlequin itself was sometimes seen. Some of these new arrivals fell under the spell of clowns, long before ever the first strongman and the first bearded lady married and brought into being the great circus houses of Boreal and Mercator.
And they believed.
There were still preachers, here and there, though you had to wish you’d never meet one; and here and there upon the body of the Escapement there were still the missions, built in years past, when people still found magic in a pratfall of clowns.
The tinkerers did not offer a reply to the Stranger’s comment. The woman, Titania, disappeared again under the canvas, and could be heard moving around inside the wagon. The man, Fledermaus, climbed down from the bench and stretched, though it was hard to make him out under his layers of clothing. He looked like a short, fat mushroom.
“It will do, stranger,” he said. “It will do.”
That night, the travellers built a small fire and sat beside it. The horses grazed in a patch of grass nearby. Earlier, Titania had disappeared into the Escapement, and when she returned there was a bloodied hare in her hands. The Stranger had heard no gunshots. The woman skinned the creature and her brother set a pot to boil over the fire, the two of them working in wordless unison. From within the wagon they fetched two shrivelled onions and several lumpy potatoes, dirt-encrusted and hard. They added the vegetables to the pot and Titania flavoured the soup with salt, and dried herbs the nature of which the Stranger didn’t know. The smell of the soup as it cooked made the Stranger’s stomach grumble. It had been weeks since he’d had a hot meal. Fledermaus relit his pipe and sat there content, puffing out clouds of smoke that more often than not resembled balloon animals. His sister sat warming her hands by the fire, and she hummed the same few bars of that song the Stranger didn’t know. Her mostly tuneless humming had a soporific effect on him, so that he found his thoughts kept wandering, trailing off and returning, and every now and then he’d startle himself awake, and stare around him as though he were seeing the place and his companions for the very first time.
No sound came from within the wagon now. If there were rats indeed there, or something else entire, it was silent now, but the horses still did not approach the wagon or come close to it. The swishing of their tails merged with the crackling of the wood in the fire and with the whisper of the soup in the pot and with Titania’s humming. The smell of the cooking meat overwhelmed the Stranger’s senses.
“It is kind of you,” he said, “to share your food.”
“You look like you could use it,” Fledermaus said, and chortled. “If you don’t, uh, mind me saying so, there’s less meat on your bones than even on that, uh, hare in the pot.”
They ate out of wooden bowls, the meat tender and the potatoes soft and full of flavour. The liquid was subtly spiced, and it filled the Stranger’s body with warmth. When they had finished eating, the brother and sister both lapsed into silence, staring at the flickering flames. The Stranger found that his own limbs felt loose and heavy, and that a certain light-headedness threatened to overpower him. He excused himself, and rose with some effort from the warmth of the fire.
Standing, he found it hard to balance. All felt peaceful and serene, and in the night sky the star constellations shone brightly, moving and changing with a slow majesty. The Stranger felt dwarfed by the night sky, in which the stars crowded the vast blackness from horizon to distant horizon, and in their light he felt small, and insignificant, and so he sought refuge at last inside the old chapel.
It was warm and dry there. The air hung undisturbed. Deflated whoopee cushions sat forlorn on the empty pews. The Stranger walked down the aisle. Under the open windows, shards of multicoloured glass collected on the floor. The Stranger halted at the altar. It had sustained some damage in an earlier time, the wood chipped and bent and the stylised balloon icon violently broken. He walked round the dais and discovered there, hidden in the chancel, a window of stained glass that somehow remained unbroken, perhaps, he saw, because it didn’t look out over anything. The Stranger swayed gently on his feet as he studied the artwork, muted now as no light coursed through it. It was boarded up on the other side, and though the glass was dark the colours had remained vibrant.
The picture portrayed the Harlequin, a creature perhaps male, perhaps female, with a sensual, almost cruel mouth. It wore a chequered costume made of triangular patches of varying colours, and on its head it wore a three-pointed hat. In its hand it held a bright red balloon.
The Stranger studied the painting, and the creature bound within the bits of coloured glass, or perhaps defined by them, seemed to him to sway and move, as though capering or dancing. The world around the Stranger grew fuzzy, then opaque. There was a saccharine taste in his mouth. The Stranger swallowed but his lips and tongue were dry. He touched the glass, from which the Harlequin had disappeared, and wiped it, and it was like wiping fog off a glass. Beyond, he now saw, was that other place. It was like looking through a clear glass window, onto a modest living room in an apartment, somewhere in the city. There were a couple of paintings on the walls, in rather lurid colours, like the magnified covers of pulp paperbacks, and a shelf full of books crammed onto it untidily, and a potted plant, wilted, in one corner, and a couch and a coffee table and a television.
There was an ashtray and a bottle on the coffee table, and an unlit and half-melted candle. There was some old picture showing on the television, the images flickering rapidly. On the sofa, a man was lying down. He looked like he’d been crying.
The Stranger violently wiped the glass, and the image, mercifully, faded. He breathed deep and filled his
lungs with air and staggered out of the silent church and into the night, where the constellations chased each other across the sky in a sort of fluid dance. The Stranger saw that the fire had burned down to embers, and they glowed faintly in the night. The two tinkerers were ensconced on the ground. Covered in their multiple garments, he could not even make out their faces.
Something moved inside the wagon.
The Stranger froze. The sound came again, as though something heavy moved inside and hit the floor. It made metal pots and pans clang within. The two tinkerers hadn’t moved from their place by the fire. The Stranger drew his revolver. He edged towards the rear of the wagon.
The broken moon hung in the sky. The Stranger hesitated, his finger on the trigger of his gun. The heavy thump from inside the wagon came again, and the wagon rattled on its wheels. Something fell off the wall and hit the floor with a bang. The Stranger reached for the thick cloth curtain that blocked the inside of the wagon. He parted the curtain and for a long time he stared.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
The curtain snapped shut. The woman, Titania, stood in the moonlight, a nasty little sawed-off shotgun in her hands. She was without her heavy coverings, in nothing much more than a slip, and in the moonlight he saw that she was both younger and older than he’d thought, for she had a young woman’s body but an old woman’s hands. Her voice, however, and the simple fact of her finger on the trigger of the sawed-off, said she meant business.
“I heard a noise,” the Stranger said.