Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  He saw only one dragon—the others in the flock were far to the east already—but that one was worth waking for. Its wings ravished the darkness, sending a gust down that made him blink. The fragrance of magic wafted down, too, and he clapped his hands impulsively.

  From neighbouring rooftops he heard the restless awe of local children and the laughter of their woken parents; the sighs of young women and the speculative chatter of men. A first camera flashed somewhere and then, as though it had been a signal, there came a paparazzo’s worth of lightning tracing the route the dragons were flying over Arrowstorm. Down on Anselm’s street he saw dusty white vans being driven east, doggedly following the flock as well as the ragged city roads and checkpoints allowed: their drivers would be stopped at the city wall by American soldiers, though.

  Anselm Einarsson stilled his applause, shoving his hands into his armpits, and watched the huge form as it flew on, over the squat and square houses of the suburb. Its shadow fell through the air onto the white buildings and swept along dusty avenues lit by sodium streetlights, a drop of ink on the lit canvas of the city. Delight as sweet as soda from the fridge fizzed through him.

  Then he remembered what he had to do next.

  He went and sat back down on his bedroll. Car horns bleated across the city. Someone south of Linden Avenue was setting off fireworks. From downstairs Anselm could hear his sister, Dowsabel Einarsdottir, complaining volubly to their mother about the racket. They both had work in the morning and he had an early meeting with his tutor at the academy to attend: concerns had been raised that he was about to fail his course again. He was already repeating a year.

  Even with that on his mind he had to sit for a long time looking east, through the TV antennas that shot up like corn on the rooftops, and beyond the city’s eastern watchtowers, before he could stretch back out on the thin bedroll, cover himself with his sheet and sleep again.

  When he did the dragons of America flew in his dreams.

  For a month the dragons will fly over the city of Arrowstorm, heading for the hottest hells of the desert to mate. Great columns of black will rise on the horizon daily. At night that edge of the world will glow like the sides of a furnace door. The breeding grounds the dragons fly to are places of packed sand, as dry as stale biscuit, where ravines form crucibles of the sun. The Americans annexed this territory as soon as the dragons began using them over a century ago, the desert now forbidden land for the people of Arrowstorm.

  Dragons mate quickly, lay their eggs within a day of copulation, and wait but a week while those eggs, buried in caves clawed into the rock-face, throb and mature. It’s said in the oldest textbooks that the newborns learn quickly what they are, that they are tested in the desert fastnesses by their elders; that their nursery is a place where the sky governs the visible world from a searing archway and the far mountains punch out of the earth like fists.

  Did he really have to go out there and steal an egg?

  II

  There had been only one boy in the library when Anselm walked in. Sat behind the set of books—Essentiale Skilles, A Guide to Alchemical Workshops, and The Apprentice Book—that the first-year students at the Vindaga Academy of Alchemy had already been instructed to absorb thoroughly if they wished to secure a place as second-year students, the other boy was obviously intent on forging ahead with due diligence.

  Anselm had tried to plough through the same pile himself in much the same fashion. Failure, however, had taught him that he was a plodder; that it was better for him to separate one book from the pack and slowly devour it as best he could. Outside a September sky, pink with the end of the day, filled the windows. It had been a Friday afternoon, close to the beginning of the school year. On the other side of those windows Anselm’s fellow students had been spilling out onto the quad, heading to the buses. As he’d glanced out he’d seen both his peers from last year and his new classmates in the year below, and envied them their ease.

  The other boy looked up, his glance sliding off Anselm in a second, his thoughts maybe on some fiendish calculation or theorem, and Anselm recognised him: Renfred Rolandsson—he had heard the boy’s name in the welcoming assembly for new students at the beginning of the week, dimly noting that Renfred had been assigned a place in the class for gifted and talented first-years.

  Once upon a time Renfred and Anselm had been neighbours. Their fathers had done their National Service in Arrowstorm’s civic militia together, those duties earning them basic city housing vouchers. But whereas Anselm’s dad had been glad to accept his discharge at the end of his mandatory service, Renfred’s father had pursued a career with the militia. As he ascended the ranks Roland’s status allowed for better housing and he moved the family to a fine house in the north of the city as soon as he could. Anselm’s earliest memories were of summery days playing with Renfred’s older sister Tamasine Rolandsdottir in the family gardens: happier times in a happier world.

  As he looked over at Renfred Rolandsson he recalled that the boy had once caught him and Tamasine sharing an exploratory kiss at the bottom of one of the gardens. Renfred had worn the same look then, as he observed his sister withdrawing her small mouth and wet lips from Anselm’s surprised face; a look that combined the contemplation of something alien and off-putting with the close-up and clinical interest of an enraptured entomologist.

  Was that about the last time Anselm had seen Renfred or Tamasine? Anselm rather thought it was. Around that time they’d moved away. Anselm dimly remembered his mother telling him recently that Renfred’s father Roland, incapacitated during a raid on an insurgent safe house, lingered near death’s door in the hospital where she worked. But when she spoke sorrowfully of Roland as a great hero and champion of the modernising city her words had somehow blurred, becoming empty speech balloons that bumped into the painful thought of his own poor father’s demise: found dead on the north road outside of Arrowstorm, the victim of an apparent traffic collision five years ago, when Anselm was thirteen.

  Anselm sidled over to the reading table and put down his copy of The Life of Sacheverell, spreading out his exercise book in front of him. He had an essay on the innovations of the legendary philtrist due in after the weekend for Master Hunfrith. Five minutes passed as he sat and stared at a single page, trying to corral the words into absorbable sense. He looked over at Renfred. A year younger and already a set above him, Anselm imagined Renfred Rolandsson probably knew Master Sacheverell’s biography backwards. Maybe he could crib some quick notes and be done for the day. But when he opened his mouth to inquire if Renfred could aid him all that came out was a croak:

  “Renfred…”

  Renfred did not stir.

  Anselm began again: “Renfred…I wonder…”

  Renfred turned the page of the book he was so intent upon, his lips pursing.

  Anselm Einarsson felt his cheeks burning. So, he was to be ignored—was that it? Wasn’t good enough to be acknowledged, let alone assisted, now everyone knew he was repeating a year? A prick of slender anger pierced the back of his throat. He said:

  “Your, ah…Your sister must be a very beautiful young woman by now.”

  Ha! Anselm thought. Let him hear that!

  Renfred put down his pen and looked up. Behind the clear lenses of his thin, gold-rimmed glasses his eyes were stony. “Anselm Einarsson,” he said, in toneless recognition. His eyes flicked to the windows, narrowing as they encountered light, before levelling again on his former neighbour. “Tamasine takes many prizes at the girls’ academy. She makes the family proud. A bright future lies ahead of her. What could you offer such a girl? I have heard you are a mediocre student of alchemy at best.” As he spoke in this staccato fashion he spread his hands judiciously, eyeing his pile of books and Anselm’s sole tome. “Already I am ahead of you. I mean no offence.” Renfred’s eyes flatly pronounced a different sentence, however, and Anselm flushed yet more. He gathered his things and stood, too stifled by mortification to even croak out a response. He was halfway ac
ross the library when Renfred spoke up again:

  “Einarsson. Wait.”

  Anselm turned. Renfred had set aside his pen and now leant back in his chair, his hands behind his head. With his shirt unbuttoned at the neck and his school tie pulled aside he looked every inch the officious head-alchemist he would probably one day become in one of the nation’s few remaining foundries or factories. His hair was the same white-gold as Anselm remembered Tamasine’s was, but short and neat where hers had been beguilingly wild. Renfred nodded in the direction of the chair Anselm had just vacated: “Come, sit again.”

  Puzzled at this change of tack, Anselm ambled back over, aware now that his anger and humiliation had dappled him with sweat.

  “I was a little harsh just then,” Renfred admitted. “I apologise. One should not use old friends so.” He nodded at the work before him. “But you truly know how demanding our studies are.”

  Anselm nodded. What he knew truly was that alchemy was an impenetrable mystery to him. It hadn’t even been Anselm’s choice to study the science of stones and sands: his mother had decided it was his best career option for him the year his father had been found dead and she’d steered him on this course ever since, averring that alchemy was the future. He doubted Renfred struggled much with the subject: he had been studious even as a little boy.

  Renfred sat forward, pushing aside his work, and leant over the desk towards Anselm. “I will be a great alchemist one day,” he whispered confidently, confirming Anselm’s thoughts, “restoring the name of our city to the minds of the Americans for all the right reasons. You wait and see.”

  Anselm nodded. He didn’t doubt Renfred Rolandsson would try.

  “Of course,” Renfred went on, glancing around to assure himself they were still alone, “the best alchemy is done in America. You know why?”

  “The eggs,” Anselm muttered. “The Americans have access to the eggs of the dragons. The shells are said to be great transmitters when they’re rendered into powder. Master Hunfrith said as much last year.”

  “That’s right,” Renfred nodded, his eyes gleaming. “Father told me that Einar was a dragon-watcher, of sorts,” he said.

  Anselm felt himself blushing again: Einar, his fool of a father. He’d hoped the story that had plagued his first year at the academy had faded from people’s memories, the same way he himself seemed to have blended into the walls of the academy over time, but apparently not: he wondered who else amongst his new classmates had heard the same, if Renfred himself might have been spreading the word amongst the first-years this week.

  Yes, his father had been obsessed with the American dragons. Many in Arrowstorm were. It was the only city in the nation they flew across on their way to mate: the best biologists and zoologists from the capital all came here to take the brief opportunity summer allowed for them to see such creatures passing overhead. None of them were as enchanted by the dragons as his father had been, though—a mere electrician and voluntary neighbourhood fireman, who’d actually snuck into the forbidden desert to spy on them when they came, according to some of the more florid gossip Anselm had had thrown at him last year.

  “I bet he’d have agreed with me,” Renfred whispered. “It isn’t fair that the Americans alone have access to such things. Why, the eggs are even made here, on our land! Does that not make them our property, not theirs? We are supposed to be kin with the Americans. Their ancestors sailed west and found a new land, making alliance with the dragons. Ours trekked south and made a home here. Surely even basic goodwill and brother-hood means they should at least share their wealth a little?”

  Anselm had never heard his father express such sentiments, so close to those of the anti-American zealots in the city, but he nodded now, a little hesitantly, and this seemed to encourage Renfred.

  “You must have learnt a lot about them from him,” Renfred said, his eyes wistful but somehow cold all at once. An odd and fervent air hung about him, as though he’d finally chanced upon something that had caught and held his interest at last.

  “A little,” Anselm admitted. He didn’t wish to tell Renfred that he had thought his father an errant dreamer. Nor that the rumours were true: his father had, indeed, gone out of the city to illegally observe the dragons.

  “This is what I’ll do,” Renfred said, sitting up again, “to make amends for my harsh words just now. I will help you. In one year’s time, if alchemy is still not crystal clear to you, I will help you. With my father in a coma, I am head of household —much as you are head of yours. The prestige of association with my family would open many doors for you in Arrowstorm.”

  Anselm swallowed. “Why?” he asked. He cleared his throat. “Why will you wait one year?”

  Renfred looked back at him as though the answer should have been obvious. “So you will have time to bring me an egg next summer, of course,” he said. “I want one for my work.” He picked up his book again. “It’s a simple equation. You want my sister. I remember. You always did. Well, I want an egg. One egg equals one sister. If you and she were to form a union you wouldn’t need to bother with all this,” he tapped a finger on the rest of his books. “Bring me an egg and I will bless such a match.”

  And, with that, Renfred opened his book and returned to his work.

  III

  After his father’s funeral Anselm had found some things in a box in the study. His mother had given him the key to this room—his father’s former haven—admitting that, whilst Anselm was now ostensibly the head of the household, his territory was, in fact, circumscribed by the walls of that room, much as Einar’s had been.

  “Whatever is in there is yours,” she’d said, “but that’s it. Your sister and I are both busy women. We’ve no time for a boy’s interference and what little money there is belongs to us all equally.”

  Anselm had accepted this. It was fair. Dowsabel and his mother both knew how to make a penny stretch like it was copper wire. His allowance, on the other hand, tumbled out of his grasp like water. And men had had disastrous impact on both his mother’s life and Dowsabel’s, he knew: his sister had been affianced four times and each union had broken up because Dowsabel had discovered fault with her suitors. His poor mother had suffered life with his daydreaming father.

  “Living with a man like me is in itself a sellable skill,” even that fellow had concurred.

  The discovery that had excited Anselm most had been his father’s secret stash of American magazines. He’d had no idea his father collected such gossip-sheets and scandal-rags. There were at least twenty of them, each packed with pictures of teenage witches as rouged and coiffed as strumpets; vampyr-slayers with defiant, beseeching glares; barbarian warrior-women on horseback and blousy princesses stumbling out of limousines. Anselm was on the cusp of thirteen that year and the sight of all that tight denim and enthralling beauty had been as giddy-making as a goblet of wine. He hadn’t wanted to flick through Einar’s collection of faded and oft-thumbed copies of Supernatural Geographic once he saw the American magazines tucked beneath. Full of the petulant nonchalance most teenagers in the city felt for the yearly appearance of the creatures in Arrowstorm’s skies, he’d been much more taken with America’s legends and lays.

  He went back to this box of magazines and journals after his talk with Renfred, taking out the supernaturalist periodicals and putting them to one side on the study’s desk. Beneath them were his father’s journals, the log-books of his trips into the desert. Such trips were long restricted: hence the checkpoints and the watchtowers; the international negotiations every winter (where the rights of the desert cities and the demands of the Americans were in a constant state of flux, subject to internecine brokering); the simmering resentments in the city. His father had rejoiced when Dowsabel found work at the American Embassy, though. Not many men of Arrowstorm would have been so pleased, but Dowsabel’s job meant she had access to inter-province travel passes that their father could display in his car when he went out of Arrowstorm to look at the dragons.


  Anselm took out the topmost journal (he had never looked in any of them before) and opened it, half-wondering if he might find some simple plan inside that outlined how one could casually walk into a dragon’s lair and come away with an egg. He had no intention of doing as Renfred had suggested. Going into the desert and risking the wrath of either the dragons or the Americans was sheer lunacy. Still, he was curious. Had his father known how to do such a thing? If he had known he would surely have recorded it in one of these books.

  But instead of any kind of factual account Anselm first found only a story Einar had been attempting to write:

  “The first dragon to reach America was called Mayflower, or Flor de Mayo in her native tongue. It had taken her a week to cross the Atlantic, a hopscotch journey that had seen her land in Orkney, in Iceland, once on an iceberg and twice in Greenland. It was a desperate journey, one that would never have been undertaken if her riders had not been subject to dire privations and persecutions in their native land, England. The year was 1620 and those riders were the wizards who had opened a gateway between our world and the world of the great reptiles…”

  Anselm knew enough history and geography to know that this was pure fiction. A list of imaginary places and made-up words. Was this the kind of thing that had drifted down to his father as he watched the dragons year after year? Was this the source of his fascination with them? Anselm had not known Einar’s imagination could be quite so deft: no wonder his heart had been ensnared out there in the hot-lands, if this was an example of the dreams that came to him when he was under the spell of the American dragons.