Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  She flew a ghost ship now. The crew had pooled what they had gained and kept over the years to purchase a retrofitted washbasin of an airship from the shipyard outside town, which they’d (somewhat amusingly, she thought) renamed the Swan. They would break the bottle on her bow within the week, and then she would take wing.

  Her own airship, or what was left of it, rested in the yards, lonely as a boat in drydock, while she and her son paced the warren of its rooms like restive ghosts themselves.

  In what her quest had not ransacked from the captain’s quarters of the airship, the Lady Explorer’s son sat her down on a rotten chaise and took her hands, more to pin her in place when he stared her down than out of any outward tenderness.

  Reflected in her dulling eyes he saw a figure trapped as if down a well and glaring out at the world it could not reach. With a mild shock he realized that it was himself.

  He forced his gaze back to her. “Look at you,” he sneered. “Have your damnable dials stopped yet? You’ve one foot in the grave already, and what do you have to show for it? Has it never crossed your mind that none of your precious mountebanks can tell your fate any better than I can? Look here, at the scuffing on my boot. There—that looks like a swarm of bees, and there’s the river you jump into, trying to escape them. These pebbles stuck in the mud on the sole signify the rocks you forgot you had in your pockets, and sadly you drowned.” He paused, trying to collect himself. “You look me in the eye and tell me that this—” he gestured at the room, once fine, now as though ravened at and left for dead—and at her, once strong-armed and sharp-eyed, now rotting like a windfall full of wasps—and at himself. “That any of this was worth it.”

  She eyed him very closely. “Do you honestly think that this—that any of this—has ever been about me?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she shook her hands free of him and left.

  In her absence, he took a deep breath, counted to ten, let it out slowly, and when this failed to have any noticeable effect on his level of serenity, he took four long strides across the room, and swept a shelf full of framed daguerreotype and conch shells and hurricane lamps to the floor. For a moment the crash appeared to satisfy him. He turned halfway. Then spun on his heel and punched the wall.

  From the wall came a whirring and a series of reproachful clicks, and then a panel in the wainscoting slid free, releasing a bloom of mildew and two folded sheets of paper. Both were yellowed with age and buttery soft with re-reading.

  The softer and older-looking of the two he recognized. The words were centered on the page in a clump, outlined by a long-armed globular shape, which, in turn, was flanked by smaller outriding shapes. A few squiggles off to either side of the central mass suggested waves.

  Mama,

  Because you always have your Nose in your Book of Maps, I will hide this Letter there, disguised as a Map. If you are reading this, I have tricked you, and I am sorry, so please do not be angry.

  I met some Boys and Girls on the Beach yesterday, when you told me to go play while the Grown-Ups sold some Things at the Docks. I tried to play with them, but they laughed at me and kicked Sand on my Trouser-Legs. They said that real Boys and Girls live in Houses and have Pet Cats and Sunday-Shoes and Governesses. They did not believe that I could live in the Sky and still be a real Boy. One bigger Boy said that I must be a Gull-Boy or a Crow-Boy and my Mother a Bird. I struck him in the Nose. It bled. A lot.

  Still I think I should like to live in a House. I do not know what Sunday-Shoes or Governesses are, but I did like to play with Jacob’s Cat, before we had to put her in the Stew.

  P.S. I am also sorry that I spilled your Ink, but I needed a Shape to draw my Coastline from. I told you that little Cora did it. That was a Lie. Please do not be angry about that too.

  The other was unfamiliar.

  My darling Child,

  Oh! I cannot call you so anymore, can I, for you are a grown Man now and I an old Woman, and much like a Madwoman in an Attic, I fear, as far as our Fellows are concerned. I do not doubt your Sentiments toward me are similar. Well do I deserve them!

  To my Shame, I have not been wholly frank with you. I cannot undo my Errors now, but I can, perhaps, patch up some few of the Holes that they have rent between us.

  When we stole the Airship, I was but a Girl—a working Girl of twenty, with Engine Grease in her Hair and all over Bruises, Cuts, and Scars from her own Labor. A Girl just strong enough to stay aboard the Ship, give birth to you, and there fight to remain; but a Girl just silly enough that when we stopped outside a Town to make Repairs, and a travelling Circus joined our little Camp, and those of the Crew with a Spiritist leaning asked the Circus Fortune-Teller to tell theirs, I went along.

  What the Fortune-Teller told me was that our Airship would be crippled by a Broadside with a ’Ship-of-the-Line and drift through Equatorial Waters, deadlocked as a Clipper on a windless Sea, and that I would perish of Starvation, along with most of the Crew—and my only Son.

  It was in that Moment that I became the Person you have always known me as. After a Life of Hardship, which until then I had accepted, I resolved that I would fight—an unseen Enemy, and a formidable one, and perhaps one who cannot be defeated, it is true—but I could not leave you to that awful Fate—or to any of the others, prescribed to me over the Years.

  Because, as perhaps by now you will have guessed, each Death that I was told was mine—but it was not mine alone. I have seen you shot, drowned, stabbed in an Alley, run down in the Street, fallen off a Widow’s Walk, shipwrecked, hit by Lightning, and perished of Consumption in a Garret—and it haunted me. But what haunts me more is this: would those Deaths have been mine alone if I had not sought to keep you close? Will my attempts to rescue you lead you to your Doom instead?

  Though I fear I shall never have the Courage to say it to your Face, it is my one remaining Wish that you get out, get free of this, and live your Life as best you can—and perhaps, one Day, find it in your Heart to forgive one foolish old Woman, who sought to protect you by keeping you—by keeping both of us—encaged.

  And now I am off to deliver this Letter before I change my Mind. Lest I give the Crew reason to think that a Woman who has learned to repair a Combustion Engine in Freefall or shoot a Tiger between the Eyes at ninety Paces is afraid of her own Son!

  P.S. It turns out I am not as brave as I had hoped. It is three Months since I wrote this Letter. I will show it to you this Evening, upon your Return from treasure-hunting with the Crew, and then likely flee to my Room like a Child from a strange Noise on the Stair.

  The Lady Explorer’s son stared at the letter for some time—at the shakiness of the penmanship, the smudges from re-reading, and the date at the top, some six years gone. Then he folded both letters back up together, put them back in place, and went to pack his things.

  “The spirits sense resistance in your soul,” the medium said to the Lady Explorer, as the table rose and sank and the chandelier flared and dulled and the curtains snapped against the panes in a gale-force wind localized specifically to themselves. After giving the Lady Explorer ample opportunity to admire these phenomena, the medium took up the mirror in which she’d read the Lady Explorer’s death and swaddled it in black silk. “You’re like a ship fleeing a storm with no sails, no bearings, and no port to pursue. I have dealt with spirits that did not know or accept that they were dead. You seem not to know how to be, or accept being, alive.”

  That evening, the Lady Explorer stood on her balcony, watching as the airship lurched, unmanned and blinded, up through the city’s widow’s-weeds of coalsmoke toward its maid’s May-wreath of sun. Once it dwindled to a crow, a flake, a mote, she took herself back inside her newly rented rooms, threading her way between heaps of pelts and boards of butterflies and oddly fleshy potted flowers that would not survive the snow.

  At her desk she sat, dipped her pen, and in rusty penmanship with a quavering hand began to write:

  The Worlds within us and without us are the same. I
n one as in the other, we delude ourselves that there are new Lands to discover, virgin Territories awaiting Conquerors and Claimants, while in Truth there are only Lands to which we ourselves have not been. Some Trepidation is natural, then, on the final Approach to an unfamiliar Landmass, looming with presumed Malevolence on a glittering Horizon…

  Perhaps the airship would find itself a new batch of disheartened, wanderlustish souls to keep it company. Perhaps it would return for her, or for her son. Perhaps it would be grappled down by scavengers, flayed for parts, before it reached the sea. Or perhaps it would fly on, uncrewed and uncommanded, flaunting for the ghost-ship-hunters and the tall-tale-tellers and what children did not flee its shadow when it spread its wings against the sun—until the years dissolved it as they dissolved her, and it fell in clinker from its perch of air.

  Her head grew heavy, and her pen stopped. As she dropped down into sleep she found herself smiling as she replayed in her mind how she’d returned to the airship from the medium’s that afternoon to find that her son was gone, the thread she always kept tucked in the edge of the false panel in the wainscoting was on the floor, and on her pillow was a sheet of paper.

  It was one of the recruitment broadsides the Swan’s crew had been passing around town, featuring a woodblocked airship folding her wings against her hull to stoop upon some hapless prey or other on a placid sea.

  When she turned it over, penciled on the back she found the note.

  I have seen Sunday-Shoes and Governesses, and I prefer the Sky.

  FOLD

  Tanith Lee

  Jintha wrote letters from a tower. They were letters of love.

  The tower itself was quite high, probably of thirty storeys, but Jintha had long forgotten. He himself resided on the fifteenth floor. He had forgotten this too.

  Beyond his apartment there were always various sounds in the tower, which had made him fantasize that he lived in a sort of golden clock, inside the mechanism of it. All who lived there, accordingly, would have their own particular functions, Jintha’s being, (obviously) to write love letters. This kept the clock accurate, made it work. Sometimes the clock struck. That was the silvery clash of the elevator doors. While the smooth ascending or descending purr of the murmurous elevator was like the movement of an intermittent pendulum. Birds often alighted on the broad sills of windows, or the elegant gargoyles which adorned the building. The clicking of their claws or whirr of their wings provided the clock’s ticking—now loud, now soft, now stilled—and now restarted.

  The gargoyle outside Jintha’s main window, which was that of his living-room, was in the form of a long-necked verdigris lion’s head, its maned forehead decorated by the horns of a gazelle. During or after heavy rain, water would fountain down from all the gargoyles. Especially at sunset this was very beautiful, the streams like strands of a disparate waterfall, luminous against the pale pink sky and slim darkening shapes of the city, which ended against the holy wall of an ice-blue sea.

  There was another interesting feature of the main window. It was an optional feature; not every tenant of the tower had one. It possessed a binocular lens. Jintha had merely to press his hand or forehead against a certain area of the crystalline, self-cleansing window-pane to activate it, and so see straight down into the street below, at a magnification resembling only a few feet of separation from the subject. A quantity of the building’s other binoculars, which Jintha’s rooms did not have, directed sight all the way out to the esplanade that ran parallel with the ocean’s brink. But Jintha had never required such a viewer. He remained intransigently enamoured of the glamorous sidewalk fifteen storeys—had he remembered—beneath his window.

  It was such a lovely street. A wide road perfectly maintained by occasional noiseless machines, and along which rode the attractive city transports, was flanked by two pedestrian pavements, the nearer of which was laid with slabs like translucent marble. Several stores, spangled with alluring goods, opened on both sides of this thoroughfare. But oh—the people. They passed up and down, an endless pageant both day and night. For once the sun had set, the slender city lighted itself with yellow stars, and the most delicate street lamps, rounded lanterns on ornate iron posts, lit the concourse.

  Although not a part of the clockwork of the tower, these passing people he saw seemed, to Jintha, another vital mechanism. They were the clockwork of life itself. And so he would perceive and stare deeply into the individuality of each. And one by one, always, he would find among them those with whom he fell in love.

  Despite their transience, Jintha’s love affairs with the passers-by below, were intense and, to him, entirely meaningful. They sustained him. They lit his days and nights like sun and lamps and stars.

  And therefore, quite naturally, he wrote these persons love letters.

  For example.

  There had been a young man Jintha had seen every day for one whole month, who always walked across the vista at about 7 a.m., just after the dawn had painted in the street. The young man had hair like black silk, which fell below his shoulders. His skin and eyes were tawny. He was always smartly dressed, as if for some important clerical office, in one of three suits. One was pale grey, one dark grey, and one a mild grey-blue. His shirts however were always different. In the whole month Jintha believed he had never seen any single shirt repeated. Sometimes the young man wore silver hoops in his ears and sometimes copper hoops. He had beautiful strong hands that made Jintha think he might be also a musician. And on the twenty-ninth day of the month Jintha was rewarded by beholding, in the young man’s grasp, a violin case. Jintha had already named him “Musician.” After seeing the violin case Jintha wrote him a letter.

  “Dear Musician,” (it began)

  “You fill my days with palpable if unheard music. Seeing you pass, for me the day begins to bloom, the sun opens fully her eye. She lights you to a splendour. What music you must make upon that violin you carry so caringly, like a kind father with a beloved child. If I listen very hard it seems to me I hear this music at last. How marvellously well you play. May your magnificence only increase, and your life blossom and bear fruit. I shall never cease to be happy for those glimpses I have had of you…”

  * * *

  But Jintha knew that seldom did anyone continually pass below the tower. And after eight further days had gone, the young man with the violin no longer went by. No doubt he had found another route, or another workplace, or had bought himself a personal transport, or become suddenly noted for his musical skills and so hurtled up the mountain of fame.

  Sequentially then, Jintha took his completed love letter, which ended in this way: “I remain, dear sir, your obedient servant,” and folded it carefully into the shape of a bird with two outstretched wings. Then, undoing the upper pane of the living-room window, he cast it free into the evening air. Down, down it floated, smooth as a white-winged gull. He always turned away at the last, not to see where it might fall, if any picked it up, what became of it.

  A sad nostalgia lingered for Jintha for a little while. But soon enough a beautiful young woman began to come and go along the sidewalk. Her hair was the colour of fresh lemons, and she always wore a pair of dark trousers or a long dark skirt, and over these, tunics of twenty or more colours, belted in by a sash of violet or green, mauve or scarlet. Jintha named her “Rainbow.”

  “Dear Rainbow,” (he wrote)

  “‘You are like a garden of flowers, changeably unchanging. Yesterday you carried oranges in a bag, but later, returning in the dusk, grapes and aubergines. I imagine for you meadows of poppies and heliotropes, descending to a vast forest where peacocks spread their fans. Yet always within sound of a sea…”

  * * *

  Rainbow went by twice each day, passing from right to left, and left to right on the way back, for five days. Then Jintha did not see her at all for nine more. Then she returned, but only once, and from that single journey (right to left) at 11 a.m., she did not come back either way.

  Jintha waited a furth
er nine days, then concluded his letter, “I remain, dear madam, your obedient servant.” He folded the paper into a bird and let it fly.

  But after another space of sad nostalgia, Jintha beheld a wonderful old woman with long white hair and a crooked back, like a carving from purest ivory. He named her “Empress” and wrote to her three love letters in all, one for each of the nights he saw her haltingly go by. (She was not, of course, the only one to whom he wrote three times.)

  * * *

  We do not know much of Jintha’s adult background. We know very little of his beginnings. And that which we do know, we have gained, (mostly) through a kind of hearsay.

  Apparently he was born a sighted child to blind parents. He had been, it is generally thought, an accidental baby, conceived without intention when the couple were old. Even so, they loved him. Later, too, inevitably, they found him useful.

  Jintha, it seems, rather than resent this, derived great pleasure from assisting them and successfully doing for them what they could not. More than fundamental tasks, he loved to describe for them the images and people he saw all about him, themselves included. Naturally (one assumes), they may have found his narratives puzzling, for both had been sightless from birth.

  One day they were to go to visit sighted relatives in a distant city. Jintha was then somewhere between eleven and nineteen years of age; the collected data cannot be made more precise. Having escorted his parents into the safety of the air transport, from which they were to be met, Jintha returned home, for at that time they had, with Jintha’s sighted help, run either a flourishing café or library, depending on who thinks he has learned the facts and tells the tale.

  Unfortunately the air vehicle carrying his parents on their journey malfunctioned, a very rare event in recent times, and crashed with total loss of life.

  The bereaved child or young man that Jintha then was kept up the family business for several further years. But it is said, and given other evidence seems likely, that during this era he wrote a letter to his parents every month, detailing certain happenings, wishing them well and to be enjoying themselves, and reminding them of how he loved them, and of their great personal beauty. It is thought he compared them to engravings, or exquisite slender old trees clad in the platinum foliage of their hair.