Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  Thus it was the last time I entered the shop, standing there with my hand on a sticky sweet sekerpare I had just purchased from her, that the world which had remained in the background, only a vague insinuation of a threat, broke loose.

  The door to the shop opened and three soldiers entered. All were armed and all held their weapons out. At us. They were the new breed of soldiers coming out of the west, with cybernetic interfaces in their helmets and cell receivers under the skin of their heads, in constant contact with each other and their superiors. I recognized the helmets they wore. I doubt anyone else in that shop would have seen one before, but Ryszard and I, we had carried such things as cargo and talked with a few people about such things. At that point, nobody yet understood what was happening. You would think I ought to have, but I had been safe for so long, for years, that it never occurred to me I might finally be snared. The soldiers asked the crowd who owned the van that had arrived in town, and who had taken delivery of its contents. Then I understood.

  Lucyna looked at me that once—straight at me without shyness. This was, I thought, the thing she had seen before, that first time as she stared into the future. To the soldiers she said, “Everyone here is of the village.” They seemed to believe her, but in the end it made little difference. Before the sun had set, two large cargo transports floated down out of the sky and everyone—every single man, woman, and child in that village—was herded into them. Houses stood with open doors, lights on, meals served or cooking. Probably fires would break out in some of the houses before morning, but we would never see them. I rode in the same transporter as Lucyna but half the village separated us, just like now. Ryszard hadn’t escaped either, but he was in the second one. I didn’t see him again until after we’d been released into the camps.

  The enemy had come at last. The mountains, breeding ground for resistance, as Ryszard and I knew too well, were being systematically stripped of inhabitants. The presence of our van had been an excuse. The enemy would have rounded up everyone regardless, pulling the fangs of the resistance by eliminating any hope of a sustained network. “They won’t get all of us,” Ryszard whispered to me our first night in the camp. “There will be pockets of rebels they don’t find—after all, they didn’t find the guns we delivered, did they?” I didn’t know if they had or not, but I wanted to believe him when he said that. The guns had gotten out of the village before the enemy had arrived. But mountains are like walls, and from those heights you cannot defend the cities in the valleys, on the plains. You can only remain in the mountains and hope the occupiers withdraw. Ryszard was no revolutionary. He was a man making money off them, and it was no different in the camps. He knew how to barter with the other prisoners, even with the soldiers, not all of whom were cruel, were villains. Some—the lowly ones who weren’t considered worthy of the more advanced, expensive technology—understood that there was little separating us from them, that we could easily have traded uniforms and circumstances. They operated from fear. Those were the ones Ryszard approached. He had an unerring sense of who could be bought, and I, by association, benefited from his skill. Nevertheless, there was only one thing I wanted, one piece of information I needed to know, and that proved challenging. Ryszard told me, “You must assume she is alive in the women’s camp. But we have to tread carefully in inquiring, because it requires ripples of influence well beyond our control. A lot of trust. That is going to take some time.”

  As it happened, I didn’t have to wait. I saw her in the yard across the razor wire. She and three other prisoners were being led somewhere. They’d all been shorn the same as us, but that didn’t matter, I could not help recognizing the shape of that face I adored, that I had closed my eyes and imagined on so many nights, alone, in an act of furious frenzy that accompanied something I meant to be tender. We are, all of us, animals lusting after grace.

  She was too far away that time. If I’d called out her name she might have heard but I would have been taken away and beaten. For every guard who was decent to us, there were five more who came to torture like wolves to a feeding ground. Ryszard was the one who told me about the stories—the stories of what happened on the women’s side of the wire. Some of it was happening on our side as well. There were guards who preferred men or boys. Most of them found their pleasure on the other side. Since he’d protected me, I asked if there was anything Ryszard could do to protect Lucyna. “Impossible,” he said. “We don’t know where she is there. All you would do is draw attention to her, and the rutting jackals would wonder why, and they would notice her. And fucking’s not a thing you can influence that way. They’ll take your contraband and then go ahead and have their sport. What would you do about it? Not a thing.”

  It was six months then before I saw her close up. Christmas. We had spent the cold and rainy fall and winter building housing for more prisoners, for more guards and administrators. Word of the larger war leaked to us, of course. We heard that a coalition of enemy nations had turned on us, and while others had condemned the annexation of our country, a slaughter that was being called genocide was taking place and nobody was attempting to stop it. We heard that there was resistance in the mountains that had swept down into the cities, but could not hope to do more without outside aid, and the world was holding its breath, as if hoping the slaughter would simply stop, the enemy come to their senses and withdraw. “The world,” Ryszard said to me, “is collectively an organization of cowards who speak in lofty phrases until action is required, and then who withdraw into the shadows, pretending that statements of condemnation should be enough. The cowards never act unless there’s a profit to be made in intervention; then they are more than willing to send others to their deaths while they and their friends grow rich. Look at me, after all. I profited. So did you. Did you care for causes? No, you wished to make enough money for you. It’s the same the world over. Whoever says otherwise, he’s a liar and probably already profiting handsomely.”

  A few months after we’d been brought here, there was an attempted escape. We in our building—one of eight on our side of the wire—knew nothing about it. The escapees had wisely concluded that they should tell no one, and even so they were, most of them, captured. Rumors claimed that three men had succeeded in escaping. If so, their freedom came at a very high price, because the dozen who’d been caught were summarily executed the following day. We were herded out and ordered to watch, but we were segregated so that we could not speak with their comrades, the ones from their building. I happened to look back and saw that the women had been marched up to the wire to see, too. I scanned them for Lucyna but couldn’t find her. The line of women stretched the length of the wire, though, and I couldn’t see most of them. There were screams of protest and despair from some of them as they recognized the naked men who were to be shot. One woman leapt onto the wire, which only sliced her savagely before others dragged her off, but it wasn’t Lucyna.

  Other men from that building were assigned the task of carrying their friends’ corpses out of the compound to the pits. The rest of us were led back to whatever jobs we were supposed to be doing, and life went on as if nothing unusual had occurred. We continued building new prefabricated facilities for our captors. It was a walled palace we were erecting. They were planning to stay a good long time.

  Fall rotted into winter. More of us died from cold and hunger. Some took their own lives. So far as I knew, nobody else attempted to escape.

  For Christmas our captors rewarded us by opening the gates between our side and the women. After half a year of isolation from them, we were allowed to mingle for a few hours. Husbands sought their wives, sons their mothers, daughters their fathers. I looked for Lucyna. I had no illusions. I knew she had a husband, a child. I wouldn’t be the party she sought and more than likely I would be forced to observe the affection I wanted and couldn’t have. Instead, when I found her, she was alone. No husband, no child. She was thin, her eyes darkly ringed. Cautiously, I approached. She didn’t look up from that same dista
nt gaze. Now it looked farther into the future than ever, to the end of her life and beyond.

  Another woman saw me standing there, unable to make myself approach but unable to back away, and she came up. “Do you know her?” she asked me. I told her that I did, that I knew her from the bakery in her village. The woman asked my name and I gave it. She walked up to Lucyna and said that I was here to see her. The fog seemed to clear a bit from her eyes then. She looked my way but there was little recognition. Maybe none at all. It might have been nothing but my hope of recognition. And so I stepped forward and said, “I wished to buy a loaf of bread from you.” Her eyes welled with tears then, and her chin quivered, and she threw her arms around me. I held her. For minutes, hours, it could have been forever. We all stank like rotting meat, even though we had been allowed showers earlier, but not our clothes of course. I reveled in her closeness, my face to her neck, seeking the smell of her underneath that stink. She cried and cried. She muttered names—again and again she said, “Janek.” She never said mine, not knowing it, nor asked it of me. She started to kiss me, kissed my mouth, my face, all the while saying, “Janek, my darling, my love, Janek.” While she clung to me, the other woman said, “He was executed that day—you remember that escape attempt. Did you know him?”

  I said, no, we were housed separately. Different parts of the camp.

  Her baby hadn’t lived through the first month. Likely, her husband didn’t know. He also didn’t know how she had been used by the guards, either. They liked her looks, her breasts swollen with milk. She’d gone mad long ago. She was kissing her husband, not me. I wasn’t even there. Yet I accepted my role, because she was looking steadily in my eyes with all the love, the passion I had only imagined.

  Finally we were ordered back to our separate sides. Lucyna began to wail, and I held her face in my hands and said, “No, no, stop now. We’ll be together again. I’ll come back. Live for me, please, and I’ll live for you. I promise I’ll come back.”

  She did then. She swore, promised. If she had any inkling I was not Janek, she gave not a single outward sign, and I suspect she didn’t know. She had seen a familiar face and it had replaced his in her shattered mind.

  I walked away backwards, watching her as long as I could. Ryszard caught up with me. “So, did you find your woman? Did she remember you?”

  “I found her,” I answered.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “I found out that we’re going to leave here,” he said.

  “What?”

  “After the New Year. Their palatial embassy is almost complete and we’re going to leave. I had to bribe a few guards to get the information.”

  “What about them? The women?”

  “I would think they’ll be going, too. All of us together.”

  All of us together. Such a hopeful phrase.

  It was all of us together two weeks later as we filthy men marched across the yard to the communal shower once more. We saw three bulbous transports settling onto the field outside the wire as we walked. Come to take us away, I recall thinking. They’re going to let us leave after all. Inside again, we stripped down and waited for the water that never came. A moment of panic, terror, the realization that you’re in a sealed room, a vault. And then it was over, so quickly that I don’t know what it was. Electricity, gas, something we had never heard of. There was no smell, no warning. Dead in an instant. All of us together.

  The transports brought new workers, their people this time rather than ours. We had built their massive embassy complex and now the workers had come to inhabit the complex. Like those who had built the pyramids for the Egyptians long ago, we’d finished our task.

  One small cadre of prisoners remained, who would act as servants to their new masters as soon as they had completed just one distasteful act. They carried us naked from the sealed room and tossed us in the dirt. Then earth moving equipment with scoops pushed the piles of us into the pits. The women…the same thing had happened to them. Ryszard vanished in the tumble, crushed far below me. I fell near the top, as did Lucyna. She’s there, canted on her side across from me now, with that one naked foot of hers protruding from between the other bodies, as if she’s Cinderella and I’m about to fit the slipper upon her. Of course it will fit. Her golden skin is dusted with the first sprinkle of lime. Any second now she’s going to turn those beautiful, distant, half-lidded eyes my way, and I’ll hold her gaze as darkness rains upon us, and I’ll calm her, saying “See, my darling, I lived for you.”

  EYES OF CARVEN EMERALD

  Shweta Narayan

  Sunrise glinted bloody on giant tumbles of statue; it edged the palace beyond with blood.

  A limestone arm, severed elbow to thumb, came almost up to Alexandros’ waist. Fingers thick as logs lay scattered behind it. Sunrise glimmered in the statue’s blank, rain-filled eyes and trickled down the pitted stone cheek. So too would Dareios of Persia have fallen, had the coward not fled.

  But the statue had been a symbol of Persia’s might; it could serve Alexandros’ purpose well enough. “Leave it,” he said, turning away. To his general Kleitos’ raised eyebrows he added, “They will see our victory in it.”

  “But…” Kleitos shook his head. “Basileu, it had nothing to do with our victory. We simply outnumbered—”

  “It trembled in fear of our coming, and fell at the taste of defeat.”

  “It did?”

  “They will see it so.” As they saw him, more clearly with every city he took, as unstoppable. With Egypt, with all the length of Persia’s royal road, and now even Persepolis in Alexandros’ power, Dareios knew he fought a losing war, and his knowing made it so.

  Which was as it should be. And yet…

  “As you say.” Kleitos’ voice held little understanding and less curiosity; like most of the men, he fought only for land. Alexandros bit back irritation and wished once more that he had Hephaistion at his side. At his side, on the field, in his bed; but his reasons were the same ones that had sent Hephaistion, not Kleitos, back to Babylon to quell an uprising.

  He said, “Call it a reminder.”

  “And of course they will need that reminder, Basileu,” said a woman’s voice, “because you and your restless army will move on.”

  He spun, hand going to his sword; felt Kleitos brush by. A piece of the statue’s crown shifted. It spread wings and hopped with a whirr of gears onto the nose. Its feathers were tarnished bronze, blurred with age, and it had human hands instead of claws. Not sharp. Little chance they would be poisoned. Keeping an eye on the beak for darts, Alexandros said, “Of course. Persepolis could not hold me, not with half the world yet to see.”

  “And conquer.”

  He lifted a shoulder, not bothering to respond to the obvious. “Do Persian automata generally speak to kings without offering so much as a name?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said the bird. “Those creaking parodies aren’t worth my words.”

  Alexandros’ eyes narrowed with the first glimmerings of interest. What might this mechanism be, if not Persian? Surely not Northern barbarian work; it was too fine, though it wore around its neck a ring of shining gold, as they did. It looked old, but shifted without noise or stiffness. And it spoke Greek like a Persian; badly, but with meaning beneath the words.

  And that last mystery implied a challenge worth taking. Alexandros said, “To whom do you belong? A king who is long dead, it would seem, or else one who neglects you.”

  The bird rustled its feathers. “The last king who tried to own me died of slow poison while his city burned.”

  “A queen, then.”

  A rapid, ratcheting click, and the wings rose. Kleitos stepped in front of Alexandros, arm up. Alexandros put his own hand on the arm and said, “Do you mean me harm, bird?”

  “Not yet, King of Asia.” The wings came slowly down. “But keep trying to weight me down with an owner, and I might. I had heard the Greeks were barely civilized, but I had expected better from a student of Aristoteles.”
r />   “And not from a son of Zeus-Amun?” said Alexandros around a surge of anger. To dismiss one the Oracle had named half-pine as a mere student—

  The bird laughed, a strangely human sound. Womanly. Well, and if she wanted Alexandros rash in anger, he would not be. He nudged Kleitos aside and drifted close enough to inspect her, his hand a deliberate three fingers from his sword. At Kleitos’ wordless protest he said, “She said she meant me no harm, old friend, and telling a lie in Persepolis is suicide.” The sun warmed the back of his neck. If the bird was indeed reckless enough to have lied, it would glare in her eyes.

  She met his gaze without fear, though there was not a weapon to be seen on her. Nor was she a bribe, with so sour a tongue, and she had yet to convey a message or say who sent her. A scout, then, albeit an ill-mannered one. “Now where,” Alexandros said soft-voiced, “do they say Macedon lacks civilization? I have conquered half the world and never heard of such a people.”

  Kleitos’ breath caught at his tone. Alexandros started to smile.

  “Were you to follow the sun,” said the bird, “you might find them. But I would not advise you to try.”

  East. The edge of the known world. And— “East. Where your cur of a king ran, leaving his womenfolk behind.”

  Though in that, Dareios could hardly have been more useful to Alexandros. His mother Sisygambis had met abandonment with cold fury; her nature was not forgiving. She had allied with Alexandros against her traitor son, and the information she now sent him was timely and precise.