Tower of Mud and Straw

by Yaroslav Barsukov

  He studied them both.

  “Oakville is home.”

  And that was all he told them.

  Later, in another room in his quarters, he rolled across the sweaty sheets, the fat angel staring at him from the ceiling.

  A hand touched his shoulder. “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he said, eyes on the painting.

  “It was nice.”

  “This time it was different. You’re different, Lena.”

  “Different how?”

  “Gentler—no, wait, that’s not it. Happier, I guess.”

  She rose on her elbow, making no effort to cover her chest.

  “I am happy. I want to run out naked into the courtyard and laugh, laugh, laugh.”

  “Better not do that, though.”

  “I won’t.” She chuckled and traced his cheek with her fingertips. “I’ll be fine now.”

  He turned to her. “I don’t understand you. That book, from the settlement—it’s just a legend. You can’t seriously believe in the Mimic Tower.”

  How could he tell her? How could he tell her he was about to undo everything, to smash that happiness into pieces?

  She paused, contemplating something. “Imagine living at the foot of a great volcano. You live there in a village, a town, a city—doesn’t matter. It’s all the world you know. And then, one day, you learn the volcano will erupt in five years. And all will be gone, the houses, the people, the trees, the brook where you used to swim as a kid.”

  “I would probably move somewhere else.”

  “You can’t, that’s the problem. The ash would cover the skies until the earth itself would grow cold.”

  “Then I would eat, drink, and make love as much as I can before the end comes.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t. I’ve been living with that kind of knowledge for years, Shea. It breaks you. Makes you cry like a baby at sunset.”

  “But that’s the point,” he said. “It’s not knowledge, Lena. It’s some text and a couple of drawings. You don’t even know if the copy you showed me stayed true to the original book.”

  “Do you remember what I’ve told you about my mother?”

  “You said she was a famous landscape painter.”

  “She had a period, right after my father had died, when she couldn’t paint—so she took on menial jobs to get us by. One of those jobs was restoration. She restored everything, from paintings to old books.”

  “So it was her.” Shea studied her face, her black hair cascading unto the pillow. “She introduced you to that legend, didn’t she?”

  “The Mimic Tower is real, Shea. We’ve avoided an apocalypse by a hairsbreadth.”

  Something bitter rose in him and splashed in acid against the windpipe. “You’re a child. A beautiful, proud, misguided child.”

  He immediately regretted his words, the clumsy attempt at hurting her. You’re trying to hurt yourself, he thought, you prick, for what you’re planning to do.

  He opened his mouth to apologize—but she simply smiled at him, something maternal passing through her eyes.

  “Have you ever entertained a thought,” she said, “that the universe may be more complex than we’re ready to admit?”

  He remembered. There had been a day in his childhood, a last day of spring—he’d been seven, and his biology teacher strode into the classroom brandishing two daguerreotypes.

  Here, kids, is an octopus—and what do you see now? Holding up a picture of an aquarium (and in it, something with more limbs than a living being was entitled to), switching the images with the practiced movement of a circus magician.

  I see only rocks.

  Look closely. This stone to the left, it’s him. Mimicking his environment. Live matter is capable of wondrous things, kids.

  Can rocks mimic life, too?

  No. No, of course not.

  But behind the classroom’s window, the sunlight had filtered through the branches of an apple tree, a lattice which reminded Shea of the veins on the back of his grandmother’s palms, and an idea had occurred to him then—vague and half-formed as it was in a seven year-old’s head—which echoed what Lena had said just now: that maybe life carried more facets than even the scholars knew.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Lena sat on the bed. “Everything’s fine now. It’ll be a while before anyone would attempt another construction on this scale.”

  How can I tell her? Do I have the right anymore to this intimacy?

  He remembered thinking he was a cart on a track, with no option but to press forward—during his speech at the council chamber, when he’d told the duke to get rid of the Drakiri devices. Now he was retracing his own steps, following the pas in a golden dance.

  “I want to leave Owenbeg,” Lena said. “I want to travel the world, now that I have it. You could join me.”

  “Join you?”

  “Yes. Why stay? You’ve said yourself the queen will blame the tower on you. Why wait for that? Let’s run away together.”

  She studied him, eyes glowing, and the ballroom in his mind shook.

  “It’ll be wonderful, you’ll see. We’ll travel with a caravan to someplace near the ocean, live in a house at the beach, listen to gulls in the evening. Let’s do it, Shea. Let’s do it right now, let’s run away tomorrow.”

  For a moment, the dance moves no longer made sense. He imagined breathing in the smell of her skin, looking at the stars through the strands of her hair. He saw her, in a light linen dress, ankle-deep in water. Sat with her, feet dangling, at the edge of a caravan’s wagon, pine trees full of sunlight passing them by.

  Then he glanced at the angel again, at the olive branch extended toward the hunter. Paintings are a lie. They’re frozen in time, but nothing can stand still, and all things are moving, drawn to some faraway goal.

  “I need to leave for a week,” he said. “Let’s talk again when I’m back.”

  3

  He heard his sister before he saw her—or rather, he heard a crowd’s rumble coming from the direction of Sun Plaza. He’d expected her in the morning, but something must’ve intervened. It was getting late. Squeezed between the roof tiles, the evening was a baked crust, the same gold and terracotta reflecting, Shea knew, off the grapes at home, at the vineyard.

  He turned away from the street and dove back into the workshop’s twilight. At this hour, the hall reminded him of a belly of some great ship, shadows accentuating all the wheels suspended under the ceiling and all the ropes stretched between them.

  “Danny!”

  The only man still working raised his head from a sand-yellow cabinet.

  “She’s coming. It’s time.”

  Danny was a bit slow. Well-meaning, hard-working, but slow. A few seconds dragged by before he nodded, wiped his hands on his apron, and followed Shea outside.

  The rumble: two streets away now, judging by the acoustics. One.

  When a wooden cart rolled into the square and in front of the workshop, it pulled behind it a dozen onlookers: a flock of baby ducks in their mother’s wake. Lena sat atop a pile of something big, dark, egg-shaped.

  Beaming, she waved at Shea. “Look at this, brother!”

  For a moment, for him, she became the girl with whom he used to play hide-and-seek at the vineyard, and he realized he was already smiling back. He took her hand and helped her to the ground.

  “You’re alone, sis?”

  “So. Why?” She dusted her trousers.

  “Show’s over, guys,” he said, picking out with his eyes the tallest person in the crowd, a woman in a linen coif. Then, to Lena, “I thought we’ve agreed you’d bring a Drakiri to help us.”

  “Are you afraid of a couple of flowers?”

  “Flowers?”

  People began to disperse—but slowly, like sleepwalkers.

  “Tulips.” Lena patted one of the dark things lying on the cart. “They are tulips, don’t you find?”

  “I’m not sure. Eggs, at most.”

  “Wait until they bloom
.”

  “So you know how to operate them?”

  “Of course,” she said. “And anything I don’t know, we can figure out together.”

  He paused, studying her, studying the devices. “Okay. Let’s unload them, then. Danny, would you…”

  “No need to.” Lena turned and touched a valve on the tulip’s surface.

  With her other hand, she nudged a lever. Both motions appeared natural, light, as though she were weaving or playing a harp.

  The dark egg hummed and rose into the air like a giant bumblebee, prompting a collective sigh from the people who still lingered in the square.

  “And then you do… this.” She reached around and slapped the hovering thing on the side, sending it gliding toward Shea. “Catch it, brother. Catch it, Danny! Catch it!”

  Lena’s laughter followed them as they ran—clumsily, in Danny’s case—after the Drakiri device, headed for a back alley.

  4

  “It’ll come,” Shea said. “Two more hills, and we’ll see it.”

  The place where the river meets the land, where the hillside scoops the sun’s honey and the toy white boats ride the ripples.

  He didn’t know whom he was telling this—certainly not that calm silence which sat across the table from him.

  Aidan fished a piece of meat from his plate, eyes on the airship’s window. The black gloves stayed on even when he ate.

  The dining lounge hosted one more passenger, an old lady with large, veiny hands. Although she held on to a fork, she didn’t appear to be eating: each time Shea glanced at her, it was the same posture, same lowered head, as if she’d started the motion but didn’t have the strength to finish it.

  “Something seems to be bothering you,” Aidan said. “May I ask what?”

  His earlier words echoed in Shea’s mind—‘we must get rid of Patrick, I’m afraid’—as if Aidan had applied a knife to the sentence the way he’d been ready to apply it to Patrick’s throat.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because we share a common goal, and I’ve no desire to see it compromised. And because I still know nothing about this workshop of yours.”

  Sunlit hills flowed below, trees at that distance turning into gilded fur.

  “Musk Valley is my home,” Shea said.

  “Fine, don’t talk.” Aidan folded his napkin. “You seem intent on rejecting my help.”

  “What do you want me to say? Listen, when I convinced the duke to destroy the Drakiri devices, I believed in what I was saying. The stuff’s dangerous. Heaven knows how many were maimed at the tower, perhaps even died—were there any deaths? Do you know?”

  “I don’t. Not that I care much, mind you.”

  The old lady twitched the way people twitch in their sleep. The fork clanked against her plate, and she finally started eating.

  “What the hell am I even doing,” Shea said, “bringing more devices to Owenbeg?”

  “A chance at the crown means nothing to you, does it? Then consider this: if the tower doesn’t get finished within the next two years, Duma will attempt an incursion.”

  Shea couldn’t contain a hiss. “Come on, are you one of those idiots who believe Duma has the densest population of megalomaniacs in the world?”

  “I don’t believe anything.” Aidan skewed his mouth, from the looks of it probing his teeth in search of a wayward piece of food. “I know. Duma is my motherland, I spent the first thirteen years of my life there; I know how they think, their opinion of other countries, of you.”

  “Well, it’s not like we have a lot to do, so why don’t you convince me that they’re the furnace of the world’s evil?”

  “I’ll tell you a story, Shea.” Aidan slouched in his chair a bit, but one of the black gloves squeezed into a fist, crumpling the napkin. “It was my father who’d decided, single-handedly, that we needed to leave the country. He decided it when the crown prince, only fifteen then, only three years older than me, assumed command of the royal cavalry battalion.

  “People went crazy. You know how it happens: everybody ecstatic, everybody talking of a new emerging leader. Father, he saw the writing on the wall. One morning at the end of summer I woke up and saw him through the window, in the sun, exchanging papers with a man I didn’t recognize.

  “They shook hands, and the man left. Father turned and walked, too. I couldn’t see him past the window’s edge, but I knew the front door would bang in a few seconds, and that moment was for me—I realize it sounds trite, but still—it was a loss of innocence. My sisters, Maria and Isabel…” He paused. “Maria and Isabel slept in another room. I remember a toy, a bear, perched on the table in mine.

  “The door banged and he walked in, or rather, darted through the anteroom. I heard him say something to Mother in a loud voice—normally, he was all quiet in the mornings, afraid of disturbing our sleep.

  “When I tiptoed over the ice-cold floor, into the living room, Mother was collecting things, some silly stuff—pictures from the walls, porcelain cats from the shelves. Father told her to stop, pack the clothes, and wake us up.

  “The carriage already waited outside. Our cook flapped her apron at her face, and the stable-hand, Michael, ran after us, waving his hands. Michael had first put me on a horse and taught me to ride.”

  Aidan slid away his plate. “Past the city gates, I remember, Father relaxed. He even smiled at me. Isabel asked for her doll. That was when the bomb exploded.”

  He traced with his fingers a pattern on the table.

  “Something hit me on the head, and I flew out through the carriage’s door like a sack. I sat on the pavement, bawling, snot all over my face. My hearing was gone. And you know what the worst thing is? I don’t even remember the corpses. I remember a wheel rolling past me, people running toward us, but not the corpses.

  “Mother and Father survived—Isabel and Maria didn’t. It was Michael who’d planted the bomb, of course. They’d found out Father wanted to leave the country, and they bribed our stable hand to blow us up.”

  “I’m sorry, Aidan,” Shea said.

  “You don’t have to be. It was twenty-five years ago; I healed. Which brings me to another point…” He pinched the rim of his glove. “You’re afraid that people at the tower will never learn to work with the Drakiri devices? Well, you can live with these things for your entire life.”

  In one motion, he pulled the glove off. The old lady at the neighboring table gasped, and her fork rang like a little bell.

  Aidan’s arm ended at the wrist; what came after branched off in metal and purple veins, glowed in sparks, roughly following the contours of a human hand—but only roughly. Knotted ‘fingers’ rolled in the air as though strumming a chord.

  Carefully, Aidan put the glove back on and smiled at the old lady who sat there with huge, frozen eyes.

  Shea exhaled. “Gosh. I never knew.”

  “Now you do. The bomb maimed me, and I had this thing fitted instead by a wandering Drakiri craftsman when I was twenty-one.”

  “You said you found out it was Michael who’d planted the bomb. What did you do to him?”

  Aidan didn’t say anything, but his smile sharpened while the eyes went to ice.

  Isabel, Maria. Lena. Shea exhaled, struck by an analogy. I could’ve been Aidan. If it were a person that had taken Lena from me, I quite possibly would’ve been him.

  And then they passed the next hill, and, sure enough, there were the ripples on water, and the white sails, and the valley’s saddle onto which a palette knife had scrawled the contours of a city.

  Somehow, the magic of it appeared dull; all he could think about was a boy looking at dead bodies, an image that held, in itself, a similar picture from his own past, like a Dumian stacking doll.

  5

  Upon entering the workshop, Shea ducked in a nick of time to avoid getting smashed against the wall by a gliding wardrobe.

  “Sorry, brother!”

  He scanned the room but couldn’t understand where Lena’s voic
e was coming from.

  On the far side of the hall, Danny and another worker caught the wardrobe and stabilized it in the air. It hung there, spinning lazily, surreal in the purple light that oozed from the ‘tulip’ fastened to its back. Danny stared at it, mouth open. Other pieces of furniture floated across the workshop, too—a mahogany dining table, a padded sofa for four, an oak-and-leather chair: a scene from someone’s dream.

  “Grand, isn’t it?” Lena descended to the floor, sitting with legs crossed atop a Drakiri device.

  “This is dangerous, sis. You could fall.”

  “Why don’t you give it a ride yourself?” She smiled, rose, and tapped the inky surface. “Come on.”

  “No thank you.”

  The moment the tulip had touched down, the purple light inside began to die.

  “Look.” She waved around the hall. “No more hauling things. No more accidents when something falls on someone. We can have twice as much space, we can get rid of all the workbenches—people will work on the furniture while it’s suspended in the air. Hey, they can even work outside if they wish.”

  “Why didn’t you wait for me, sis? I thought we wanted to try those things out together.”

  “I thought so, too.” She thumped her fist playfully on his arm. “But today, you seemed more interested in that new maid—what’s her name? Muriel? Did you take her out to the vineyards?”

  Shea felt red rising to his cheeks. “No. Listen, I had a talk with that Drakiri, you know, the one who works in the town hall.”

  “Mmm?”

  “He told me those things—tulips, eggs, whatever you call them—they’re dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that I asked him to come here and take a look at them, and he wouldn’t even consider it.”

  “Brother.”

  “He said they’re volatile and difficult to operate.”

  “There’s a valve, and there’s a lever. You saw how I operated them—did it seem difficult to you?”

  “I saw you working with them, sis, yes. What about the others here?”

  “I can turn the tulips on and off. Once they’re in the air, you don’t need to do anything else, just push them here and there. I can take care of everything.”