by Ellen Datlow
Gluing and fitting shell pieces together is the tedious work of Purgatory. The opera gloves got hot beneath the bright lamp and the microscope/goggles gave me a headache. It took me three days to glue the lip puzzle. On the last day, Dumpty’s incessant chaotic mumbling entered the realm of clarity, and I could make out what he was saying. “You’ll be richly rewarded for your efforts, my dear,” was what I heard. I wasn’t sure if he could hear me, but I spoke to him and slowly explained my plan to get him together again. For a long time, he recited what sounded like a prayer in a language unknown to me. I reconstructed the nose and found those pieces of shell that reattached it to the mouth.
Days later, after I’d successfully solved the jigsaw puzzle of the face, eyes, nose, mouth, all connected by the appropriate shell, I took the goggles off and blinked. My eyesight had been strained, and the aroma of the paste had me reeling in the heat. By then I’d stripped down to a sheer sarong the color of sunflowers. My next move was to work naked, which was my inclination, but Dumpty’s half-alive leering and shoddy comments put me off.
“Lady Syres,” said the freshly glued mask of Dumpty.
I swooned back into the chair, exhausted.
“I suppose I don’t have to tell you that the king murdered me.”
“I’ve heard,” I said.
“Why’d you rescue me? I’d no idea you were so fond of the old egg.”
“I’m not. The king requested that you be reassembled. The job was given to Montcrief and he shoved it off on me.”
“Montcrief, tedious as dripping water. The king wants me back together after killing me? What a simpleton.”
“I think it’s that he wants to know who of his councilors my sister is having an affair with.”
You can imagine the chuckling that followed. I wanted to strike with a sledgehammer that which took me days to assemble. When Dumpty finally calmed down, he said, “I’ll tell you, but not until I’m back together.”
“I’m working as fast as I can. I thought maybe you could tell me where certain pieces go and save me the guesswork.”
“I’ll do better than that,” he said. “Lift me up and take me to where I can see all of the pieces.”
I dragged myself out of the chair. The paste had already dried, one of my favorite aspects of its properties. I lifted him by a ridge of brow that ran just above his eyes, and a fragment of chin below the lips. Three steps and we stood amid the tables with the pieces of shell spread out upon them. When he finally saw what his shell had been reduced to, a grievous cry leaped from him and he slowly began to turn like a globe in my hands. An instant later, it became clear that the mask was floating in the air of its own volition and every second spinning more rapidly. Astonished, I backed away and watched it hover.
Pieces of shell from the two tables lifted into the air and then shot at the spinning Dumpty as if attracted by a magical magnetism. As he rotated, his shell of a body reformed itself a few pieces at a time. There was this otherworldly light, sky blue, glowing from within the forming shell. The entire thing was too overwhelming for me. I fell into the chair and shaded my eyes against the glare.
A string of chuckling wound round and round and finally, when every crumb of shell had found its proper niche and was affixed by enchantment instead of paste, he leaped to the floor and strode toward me. I didn’t want him near but was too tired to run. He stood leering and announced, “You shall be richly rewarded, my dear.”
I felt sick to my stomach and tried not to look at him.
“I’ve no idea who your sister is having an affair with, but all I need do is imagine someone. I just wanted to get the old man’s goat.”
I held my hands out in front of me to ward him off, but he didn’t lunge as I feared he might. His newly set shell began to undulate with waves beneath the surface. Then I heard the cracks forming, sounding like ice on a spring river, loud snaps and pops. The disgusting thing farted loud and long accompanied by a swiftly dying chuckle that turned into the cry of someone falling from a high place. In a flash, Dumpty’s eyes imploded, his lips crumbled, his arms snapped, and when they did, I had to wonder for a second when and from where he’d acquired arms … and legs?
He turned completely inside out. There was a bang and puff of smoke, and when I’d managed to clear the air, I saw what remained. In Dumpty’s place there stood a large bird made of the clearest crystal. It captured the lights of the workshop and glimmered like an enormous diamond. There’s no way to explain my confusion and dread, leaping from the impossible to the sublime, breaking every natural law. In the end the bird was so beautiful, so gentle in its bearing, I saw it as a gift. Weighing Dumpty against the crystal bird, the shell head lost every time. The sound the creature made was a soft, throbbing music, the purr of an angel.
The bird moved around the workshop, pecking here and there, catching a moth in mid-air with a lightning move of its head. The tips of its talons tapped-tapped light as rain upon the stone floor. “Dumpty, are you there? In the bird?” I called. But the tone and tune remained the same. It flapped its wings in a shower of sparkling light and leaped up from the floor to perch on the windowsill. When it tapped the glass, I knew it wanted out.
Believe me, I understood the problems I would face if I opened the window and let the thing fly off, but I couldn’t stop myself. It flew into the dusk’s pink clouds, shimmering with the last rays of reflected sunlight. Watching it flap away gave me a deep feeling of relief and a deeper feeling of regret. When the king found out I’d released Dumpty’s incarnation into the world, it would cost my head. It didn’t matter. Denying the impulse to free the precious creature was to defile the universe, and that rankled my soul.
For the next two days, I watched the skies around my estate, and spotted the bird many times. Every morning I’d see it fly out of the King’s forest to the East, very often with other birds following it. It wasn’t always easy to spot from the ground. You had to catch it in the sunlight. To assist, though, there was also the distinctive chuckling call somewhere between the snicker of a laughing thrush and a seagull’s guffaw. As I tried to go about my business and work on other projects, I had a sense it was watching me, flying over the realm and watching us all. I pointed it out to Brazzo one day and he said, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
His words were prophetic. The following day, Montcrief arrived with the king’s men in order to inspect the progress on Dumpty. He found me naked in the workshop sanding the rust off an old broadsword I’d found by the riverbank in the summer. I called for Brazzo to bring my robe, but Montie and the king’s men were already scandalized by my body. I laughed at them till they all finally turned away.
I received the robe from my man and put it on and dismissed him. In the pocket were my cigarettes and matches. I lit one and told Montcrief what had happened. When I was done, he stood with his mouth gaping. A few moments later the anger turned his face red. “What do you mean, you let it go?” he screamed.
“I let it go,” I said. “It wasn’t Dumpty anymore. It was something beautiful.” My revelation appeared to make him nauseous and, for a brief time, speechless. “Well,” he finally said, “we’ve got to arrest her. Take her, gentlemen.” They came for me from all sides, and Montie stood back, his arms folded and a look of resignation on his face. I picked up the rusty weapon and started swinging. Blood spurted and bone cracked as I waylaid the first five of the forty. “Brazzo!” I yelled, and a moment later, he was at the door to the workshop.
He fired his blunderbuss. The explosion, the smoke, and the grapeshot in their legs and asses distracted them. His massive form weighed into the depths of the remaining thirty-five and his ham fists cracked jaws and bequeathed concussions. In the end, though, we were simply outnumbered. As three of them twisted my arms behind my back so hard I dropped the sword, and two others grabbed my ankles, I watched fifteen men swarm over Brazzo like the ocean swallowing a mountain. Every one of the fifteen paid a dear price, but my man slowly sank beneath a b
rutal beating from cudgels and clubs. Between the two of us we’d killed maybe ten of them. My last sight of Brazzo was of him lying in a fetal position on the floor, shuddering, his prodigious head cracked open like a ripe melon. Blood was pooling around him.
As for my fate, I fought the whole way to the palace’s tower prison, and at least managed to kick Montie in the balls twice. They carried me like a sofa up the winding stone steps and threw me into the cell. The bars clanged shut and a large key turned in the lock. I scrabbled to my feet, still brimming with fight. Montie ordered the king’s men away, save for one, who now sported a beauty of a black eye, compliments of Brazzo’s fist. “Get Lady Syres something to wear.”
“What?” said the fellow, glaring my way.
“Something decent. Where her ass isn’t hanging out,” yelled the captain of the king’s men, and the fellow fled.
Montie lit a cigarette and handed it through the bars to me. I took it.
After lighting one for himself, he paced back and forth for a few moments. “Don’t worry, I’ll not let his highness execute you.”
“Don’t do me favors, you nipple prick.”
“Here’s what I’m going to tell your brother-in-law: Before Dumpty escaped, he revealed to you the name of your sister’s lover. I will choose one of the councilors to be the culprit. I’m thinking of giving up Arnold Nershlir. He seems more an organic obstruction than a person. No doubt his advice to the crown is pale and weak like him.”
“You’re sick, Montie. I’ll tell the king the truth. You can’t accuse Nershlir of something he’s innocent of.”
“It’s no problem at all,” said Montie. “Whether it’s true or not, once that worm is burned at the stake or made to sit on a spike till his weight pushes it up his ass and out his mouth, the king will be completely satisfied. Your sister can help me with your appeal and you’ll go free.”
“I don’t want your help,” I told him.
“I have plans for you,” he said. “When all this is over, I thought perhaps we might come to an … understanding, so to speak.”
He left the tower before I could answer. “You’ll come to an understanding with my spike heels in your eyes,” I screamed after him. Immediately I set about trying to pick the lock with the wooden matches in the pocket of my robe. It was easier putting Dumpty together. All a failure, I slumped into the corner of the cold stone cell and worked to clear my thinking.
Days dragged on into weeks as everything, even the mechanisms of justice, moved at a glacial pace. I exercised on a daily basis, ate the slop they gave me even though it was toad shit. Every now and then Montie would show up and slip a cold roast leg of chicken or a block of cheese and loaf of bread through the bars to me. I accepted his gifts in order to remain in fighting condition, so that I might drive a dagger into his heart at a future opportunity.
Besides my exercises and meditation, my only way to pass time was peering out the small barred window at the back of my cell. I probably had the best view in the kingdom, high above the palace complex. I could see down into the marketplace, out over the king’s forest, and even beyond to a sliver of sparkling blue that was the inland ocean. Nearly every day, from my perch, I spotted the crystal bird moving from tree to tree in the forest. Seeing its brilliance always made me feel momentarily free, and although I was trapped in stone, I felt a wind at my face and the exhilaration of flight.
At night, I occasionally noticed a slow lumbering form moving past the torches by the gates of the market. It stood, patiently looking up to my prison. I knew it was death, waiting to claim me. An antidote to those midnight terrors was for me, come morning, to look off at the sparkling water of the inland sea, and remember the strange girl, Alice, who told me one lazy afternoon as we lay abed, she with the Carpenter and me the Walrus, of another world just the opposite side of the looking glass.
One day, Montcrief came to visit and told me that he’d successfully implicated Councilor Nershlir in an affair with the queen. “Oh, Cinder, you should have seen the king. He was livid. When your sister played along to implicate the drip in order to keep concealed the secret identity of her real lover, who, by the way, turns out to have been me, his highness moved up the date of the fellow’s execution to next week. Nershlir has been abandoned by his wife and family. He spends his days in irons wracked with lamentations. A sight to behold. As far as I know now, you, Cinder, are to be released after his death.”
“Did I tell you you could address me by my first name? Liberties like that, and I’ll make you suffer first instead of just killing you outright when I get the chance.”
Montcrief laughed low and slow, the opposite of Dumpty but equally as annoying. He pulled something shiny from his pocket and held it up to me. “The king’s gamekeeper keeps finding these little gems in the swift nests,” he said. It was a crystal egg quite a bit larger than a swift egg. “I think your magical bird has been busy. I shouldn’t have doubted you. I saw the creature the other day flying over the down. A stunning sight.”
And then, before I knew it, the day of Nershlir’s execution was upon us. The marketplace below me was set up to accommodate the official function. Stalls had been disassembled and a dais with thrones for the king and queen was set up. I watched like an eagle as the prisoner was brought out and each of his limbs was chained to a horse facing one of the four points of the compass. I could barely hear the charges being read. My sister, as devious as a fox, asked forgiveness from his highness, and it was granted, seeing as no one could be sexually jealous of Nershlir. Her affair was to be excused as a brief mental illness from what Montie had told me. The crowd hummed in anticipation of the execution, murmuring approval when necessary and cheering like mad to placate the crown.
I thought about poor Nershlir, so alone, falsely accused, not really knowing what had become of his life. Then Montie gave the command, and the horses ran away, separating the poor councilor from himself and himself. I thought his scream would split the stones around me. At the first splash of blood and sign of dangling tendon, I looked away. The crowd cheered, not because they had any lust for Nershlir’s death, but in order to convince the King of Hearts that his justice was righteous.
The noise died down, and there was no sound but the hoofbeats of the horses as they returned to the king’s men, dragging pieces of Nershlir through the dirt. It was then that a strange din arose from the direction of the king’s forest, just beyond the marketplace. There was a rustling of leaves, a swaying of branches as if the forest was full with an enormous flock of blackbirds gathering for a murmuration. It was nothing of the sort, though.
I spotted them as the peripheral members of the marketplace crowd did. They climbed down the trunks of trees, climbed, I assume, from their nests. Miniature Dumpties the size of a fist, descended in waves. The first to see them froze, too stunned to cry out. But then their fear cut through the paralysis and they ran toward the middle of the marketplace. The tiny Dumpties surrounded the citizens of the realm, hemming them in and overwhelming them with magical numbers.
The king’s men, all but one, drew their weapons and charged the charging weirdness. Cudgels and clubs made an omelet in the marketplace and still more of the biting, grasping egg/men came in their short pants, red bow ties, and white gloves, to devour and suffocate all. The collective riot of their mirth made it seem as if the very universe was chuckling.
The king was eaten a diminutive bite at a time, allowing for maximum agony, and my poor sister, the Queen, was hastily trampled as the diners rushed her husband. The sole king’s man who did not charge into the fray and meet his end was, of course, Montcrief. I saw him run for the door of the palace tower. He was coming to me, fleeing for his life, and bringing the wave of death with him. All was lost.
Until a cannon ball blew a hole the size of three people in the side of my cell. The dust and smoke cleared quickly with the wind rushing in while outside, hovering next to the tower, a product of my own “magic,” the flying carriage was flapping its wings und
er the power of Brazzo’s pedaling. “All aboard, my lady,” he said. There was a wicked scar across the hemisphere of his head, and it was impossible to miss his broken nose and missing right earlobe.
“Brazzo, I thought you were dead,” I yelled above the wind of the wings. I had tears in my eyes.
“Kill Brazzo? Never! I thought you saw me, late at night by the market gate.”
As I moved to the edge of the wall in order to leap out into the back of the flying carriage, I heard something behind me. I turned and saw Montcrief using his key on the lock to my cell. Only yards behind him was just the very tip of the wave of Dumpties flooding into the room. With all my training for a moment just like this, I was ready. I made the jump without incident, landing in the back of the flying carriage. “Fly, Brazzo,” I yelled, and he pedaled harder and harder, working to get the craft away from the tower. In the meantime Montie sprang from my cell in a poor leap and merely managed to grab on to the carriage’s running board. Dumpties rode his pants legs and coattails, and two lines of them trailed back to the tower where more were climbing out over those and heading for us.
“Help me, Cinder,” he screamed. The fear in his eyes was as clear and black-hearted as the soul of Humpty Dumpty.
For his frantic beseechment, I gave him a big left foot to the face. His grip loosened, Brazzo swung the carriage up and away, and Montcrief, captain of the king’s men, plummeted to earth and upon impact was buried in a flood of Humpty Dumpties. I must say, the sight of it was richly rewarding.
“To the inland sea, Brazzo,” I called over the wind. “I need a vacation from kings and their men and the nightmares they hatch.”