The Tales of Two Seers

by R. Cooper

  “I may still come here?” Kazimir pressed at last, but the pain in his chest did not lessen when Jacob nodded.

  FOR THE NEXT few weeks, Kazimir only caught glimpses of Jacob. Jacob, worn thin and paler from never leaving the workshop. Not resting. Forever tinkering with whatever lurked behind the curtain.

  The mood around the King was tense with anticipation. Kazimir spent his afternoons curled up on Jacob’s unused cot, listening to the whirr of gears and hating them. But walking into the workshop to cold ash instead of fires, and to silence, was far worse.

  The curtain was gone, along with whatever had stood behind it.

  Kazimir raced back up the mountain only to find his fears confirmed—the likeness was done and would be unveiled at sunset.

  Kazimir bathed and perfumed his hair and let servants pin it into place. He put on fine, clean wool, and stacked bracelets on his arms to show off the King’s generosity. Then he entered the throne room to stand as far as from the King as he could for this display.

  The King sat on his throne, his eyes on nothing else but the figure of precisely Kazimir’s height in the center of the room, draped in white cloth.

  Kazimir could not hold still and clasped his hands to disguise their shaking. He did not believe Jacob would fail. He must not believe it. But the thought of his likeness, of knowing exactly what everyone thought of Kazimir, dancer and prisoner, made him sick.

  The sun began to set. The King got to his feet as if ready to unveil the monstrosity, and Jacob walked out of the crowd.

  Kazimir couldn’t breathe. Jacob was stumbling, legs jerky, lips purple. He was drunk, and he did not, or would not, look at Kazimir. He reached the automaton and, without a word, yanked on the cloth to bring it down.

  The crowd gasped. Kazimir shut his eyes, though he could still see the figure in the dark behind his eyelids.

  It was him. Exactly him. Down to the length of his fingers and the gold and pearl clasps in his hair. But perfect, radiant, with curls of shining thread and lips painted to look as soft as petals. The skin was bronzed to appear warm to the touch. Perhaps it was. Kazimir had not looked to see how the thing ran, if the ticking gears made it hot.

  Jacob had dressed it in a loose, undyed chiton, left the long legs and arms bare and glistening with oil. Jacob had looked on, rapt, had watched Kazimir dance and seen his beauty, had wanted him. Kazimir had seen Jacob shape his clay and wished for Jacob’s hands on his thighs, had thought Jacob had shared his wish. The figure was sharp as well as beautiful, but its beauty was almost irresistible, almost perfect.

  That was how Jacob saw Kazimir. He could not love Kazimir as he claimed if this was how he viewed him.

  But Kazimir had seen the little dancers in clay Jacob had made. Kazimir smiling. Kazimir pulling at his hair in idleness or frustration. Kazimir’s face soft, as though whatever he thought of in Jacob’s presence had made him more sweet than bitter.

  He looked to Jacob, who faced the King instead of his creation.

  The King was staring.

  The crowd gasped again.

  Kazimir looked, too, and startled to find his likeness had opened its eyes. The King, everyone, was frozen as the likeness took its first step, its movements so light it barely made a whisper on the stone.

  Then it began to dance.

  Kazimir turned away, first to the King, who swayed forward, entranced by graceful, lifeless, arms, and then to Jacob, who still would not look at him.

  “He is beautiful, inventor,” the King announced, trailing a few steps behind the dancer as it spun.

  “It is beautiful,” Jacob said, in a funny, hollow voice that carried through the room. “Not nearly as exquisite as the real thing, and it cannot speak, but I made it with a fully functioning body, and that is all you need, isn’t it?”

  “Jacob!” Kazimir reached out although he was too far away to stop him.

  “What did you say?” The King turned from the dancer to Jacob, who moved his shoulders in a shrug.

  “It is beautiful and you can bed it. Wasn’t that its purpose?” Jacob asked, mockery in his tone for everyone to hear.

  The sting in Kazimir’s eyes might have been shame at last. It might also have been anger. But no one was looking at him. At least for one night, Kazimir was invisible beside his inhuman likeness, which continued to dance, mimicking the movements Jacob had watched dozens of times.

  “All you have to do is wind it up. It will never complain, never defy you, never not want you—because it can’t want anything.” Jacob was relentless, hammering the King with his fury and disdain while the court watched and listened to every word that they had all thought but never dared to say. “It can dance all day and lie still all night. You can even—”

  The King reached Jacob and shoved him to the floor.

  “No—” Kazimir stepped forward, only to be knocked back by the twirling dancer.

  “He’s no longer necessary,” the King shouted. It took Kazimir too long to hear the words and realize they were meant for Jacob. The King’s gaze had already returned to the dancer and the skin bared with every step.

  Jacob watched from the floor, unmoving. “Just a little oil,” he said, crude and mean, and laughed when the soldiers hauled him to his feet.

  “Jacob, you are drunk.” Kazimir could not raise his head, could barely even speak. “You promised me.”

  “What did he promise you?” demanded the King, focused on Kazimir again but only for that single moment, and then the willing dancer was close enough for him to touch. The dancer stopped, whirring and trembling in the King’s arms, bringing an aroused flush to the King’s face. Jacob laughed again, and the King flinched.

  The King would not like that to be seen, and Kazimir opened his mouth although he could not think of what to say to calm him. Nonetheless, the movement briefly drew the King’s attention.

  “Remove him.”

  Soldiers took Kazimir’s arms, and the shock of being touched by someone else held Kazimir still for too long. They had dragged him out of the throne room when he heard the rest of the King’s pronouncement.

  “Throw the inventor from the cliff, so that there can be no other dancer but mine.”

  The pain in Kazimir’s chest left him heaving for breath. He was strong, but the soldiers were stronger, and he was in his rooms, alone, shaking, as their other orders were carried out.

  KAZIMIR LEFT in the middle of the night. His eyes were dry. It might have been panic, or maybe the poison of what had happened was slow to act and kept him frozen. But the strange emptiness allowed him to pack his jewelry and his finely woven clothing so he would have items to sell to fund his journey. Then he fled, while he was still forgotten and others would be too fearful to speak to him.

  No one looked for him, at least, not at first, and by the time the King might have tired of a clockwork body, Kazimir was on his way across the sea. He chose to go north and east, for no other reason than he needed a direction. He had no home to go to anymore, no family. He had no one.

  But he was free.

  The thought shook him from a fitful sleep during his first night on a foreign shore, and he buried his head and wept for fools. The second night, exhausted from walking, he wept for the dead. The third night, looking up at the stars, he wept because he had felt the pain in his heart too late to know what it was.

  After that, his tears came with no obvious cause and ended much the same. People were mostly kind to him, perhaps because he was beautiful, or perhaps because he had eyes rimmed red and had torn his clothes for mourning.

  He overheard talk of a cruel king so besotted by a doll that his own guards had slain him in his sleep, and differing rumors of a king so weakened by lust, his kingdom had been conquered by another in revenge for past insults. Other tales said a palace atop a mountain had plunged into the sea after a mighty earthquake, leaving nothing behind but foam atop the waves.

  They were merely stories, and Kazimir would not let go of his grief to spare a single thoug
ht for a dead tyrant. His nights were spent alone, without dreams, and his days were spent in relearning how to live, and to be useful once again. He had forgotten how to be free.

  He had no skills except dance, and he would not share that with anyone else, so he tried learning other trades as he wandered, and eventually settled at a village not far from a shrine. Visitors to the shrine kept the village lively enough, but not busy. Kazimir purchased a small tract of land full of olive trees, though he had to pay a few local children to teach him how to care for them.

  His hands got rough. He cut his hair, setting aside a few locks to offer for Jacob, along with honey and wine, since there would have been no funeral. Kazimir lived quietly among his trees, a free man. And, again, because he was beautiful and he mourned, people came to him for romantic advice. As though he was Aphrodite’s favorite, he thought more than once, and decided that Jacob would be pleased.

  IT WAS A YEAR, just over a year, since Kazimir had crossed the sea, when a local boy dashing past his house stopped to inform him that there was a new smith in town. The last one, elderly, with no sons or skilled enough apprentices, had put out word not long ago, although few wanted to work in a village with more need for nails and cart wheels than weaponry or complex mechanisms.

  Kazimir did not pay the news much attention until the child added that the man had made a marvelous toy cat, that meowed a hollow meow, and wove in and out of ankles.

  It was not Jacob, Kazimir told himself, as he nonetheless walked to the village on shaky legs. Some of the gods might have brought Jacob to Kazimir to free him from the King, some were powerful enough to lead the King to his own destruction, but none of them favored Kazimir enough to defy death. It was not Jacob.

  But Kazimir’s feet carried him through the village, to the house with the forge, where fires were lit like beacons. Kazimir headed toward them with his mouth dry and a humming stillness in his mind.

  Then he stopped, far enough from the house that he could have run away without being seen if the man stoking the fires hadn’t turned.

  Kazimir started to move again, quickly, unconcerned if the child had trailed after him, if anyone else was around. He saw the beard and the messy hair and the warm eyes, already widening at the sight of him, and strode forward.

  “You are free, then?” Jacob asked, smiling at Kazimir with dawning joy. “And here in this village? I did not expect to see you again, dove, but the sight of you brings me peace. I’d hoped, you see. I lingered, hidden, around the palace for a while to be sure. I had to know you escaped, and then I—”

  Kazimir took Jacob’s face in his hands and kissed him.

  Jacob reeled back but Kazimir followed him. Jacob’s hands came up to hold his, then didn’t pry them away. His lips parted, sweetly and softly, but Kazimir could not be gentle. Jacob’s hair was between his fingers to be tugged and pulled. Jacob’s chest moved with life. His body was strong. Kazimir could not let him go or get close enough.

  “Ah,” Jacob whispered breathlessly when Kazimir finally inched back to study his perfect face. “Do you… love me, golden one?”

  “You’re alive,” Kazimir informed him before kissing him again. He tried to make it gentler, but Jacob’s hands moved to his hair, dragging through the short length, and Kazimir had to give him a year’s worth of kisses in one, and all his loss, as well as his gratitude and love and the ache that kept him awake each night. “I love you and you’re alive,” Kazimir managed before taking another kiss from Jacob’s stunned, slack mouth. “Tell me how. Who must I pray to? Who must I thank?”

  Jacob pulled Kazimir’s hands away at last, but held them in his and gazed at them before kissing them despite their roughness. “You were worried for me,” Jacob began hoarsely. “It forced me to change my plan. No one there knew me well, save you. I had the materials, if not much time. So, I made a clockwork version of me to say my words and hopefully offend the King, to keep him from noticing you as you slipped away. Which you did.” Jacob looked up again, putting heat in Kazimir’s cheeks. “Clunky, hastily made mechanisms disguised as drunkenness. A conveniently heavy body to throw off a cliff, should that occur, which it did, while I waited in the town below the mountain to hear of the night’s events.” He frowned. “I would not have done even that, but you insisted… you insisted I try to save myself, and I couldn’t deny you. But I didn’t understand why you would care so…. Now, I see. You love me and you are free. You love me. And here I am in front of you. Your devotion was rewarded.”

  Kazimir kissed him again, thanking the god of fire and smithing, worshipping the gods of love as they were meant to be worshipped. It was not fruit or wine or white lambs on an altar that pleased them, pleased her. It was this. “You will not leave me again.”

  “Not if you don’t wish it, dove,” Jacob answered, dazed.

  Kazimir was dazed as well. “I do not,” he told Jacob fiercely. In place of the pain in his chest, he had the gift of butterflies, and messy curls to twine around his fingers. Just once, death might be defied.

  He marveled at his gift, his inventor and prophet and beloved, and offered his devotion again with more kisses. Perhaps he was what Jacob had always claimed he was. Or perhaps that had always been Jacob.

  Kazimir pulled him closer, and sighed to feel Jacob’s hands on him at last.

  He had never before known it, but this was bliss.

  The End

  If you’ve read Dancing Lessons, that last story might seem familiar to you. Dancing Lessons is decidedly not in the Beings universe (though Raf is not wrong to think Chico would make a delightful lilac fairy). Dancing Lessons is a contemporary story, without magic, set very much in the real world (albeit slightly rosier and kinder than ours can often seem), about learning to take chances and love again. It is only vaguely about dancing. But it does feature talk of a ballet entitled The Clockwork Dancer, based on a short story of unknown origin, and which has a plot close to the one in Aphrodite’s Favorite.

  The reason for that is that The Clockwork Dancer existed even before Dancing Lessons. It was an alternate universe version of Kazimir and Jacob’s story that I made up to amuse a friend. It had several endings, all of them eventually happy, and one even had Rennet as the one who finds the lost inventor/Jacob and brings him to Kazimir. When I needed a ballet for Raf to use to woo Chico, there it was, already thought up and easily turned into something suitably tragic.

  Well, that’s the logical explanation. A way more fun explanation is that there is a universe somewhere where it is a ballet based on a fairy tale with a happy ending, and that there also is a universe where the dancer and inventor are happily growing old together, and that there is also the universe where Jacob glimpsed all of that, and liked it. (In that universe, Jacob and Kazimir also happily grow old together. Because I said so.)

  The Being(s) in Love Series

  Magical creatures known as beings emerged from hiding amid the destruction of the First World War. Since then they’ve lived on the margins of the human world as misunderstood objects of fear and desire. Some are beautiful, others fearsome and powerful. Yet for all their magic and strength, they are as vulnerable as anyone when it comes to matters of the heart.

  Some Kind of Magic

  A Boy and His Dragon

  A Beginner’s Guide to Wooing Your Mate

  Little Wolf

  The Firebird and Other Stories

  A Dandelion for Tulip

  Treasure for Treasure

  His Mossy Boy

  Sweet Clematis

  The Tales of Two Seers

  Other works by R. Cooper

  Taji from Beyond the Rings

  Izzy and the Right Answer

  The Familiar Spirits Series

  About R. Cooper

  R. Cooper lives among the coastal redwoods of Northern California in a tiny house with two greedy black cats and one possible ghost. You can generally find her with either a cup of coffee or a cup of tea next to her that she has forgotten about and has long since
gone cold.

  www.riscooper.com