Clockwork Fairy Tales - A Collection Of Steampunk Fables

by Stephen L. Antczak

  I and many others despaired that they would make of Zellandyne a warrior-princess or some such thing, a modern-day Maid of Orleans.

  More practically, King Grimm caused that all boys between the ages of six and thirty be banned from the palace, with an exception only for the Royal Guard, who were under military discipline anyway. Even they were eventually replaced by automata. This certainly inflected the makeup of the court, and considerably advanced the cause of women’s rights in the Kingdom of Talos, as of necessity many jobs formerly held by young men were now occupied by young women of ambition and perspicacity.

  So Princess Zellandyne grew, while those of us close to the king and queen watched their years-long, hopeless quest to find a way out of the curse of the thirteenth witch.

  Father Brassbound prayed so much we feared for a time he would retreat to some anchorite’s pole in the wilderness. Eventually he buffed his face and polished his eyes and rejoined us, but he always seemed haunted by guilt at his inability to successfully petition God to lift the curse.

  Dr. Scholes consulted ancient manuscripts and corresponded with learned experts from Cambridge to Peiping, but his studies availed little. He, too, seemed ever dogged by guilt at his failure to resolve the problem through the sciences. Both of them, in fact, had the airs of one being punished for some transgression.

  Sometimes, I swear, the queen appeared guiltiest of all, and retreated to her laboratories in the castle basements as if in search of a solution amid the alembics and lightnings of that place.

  For my own part, it fell to me to deal with the endless stream of cranks and dreamers and confidence tricksters who came to the palace with evermore elaborate plans for lifting or evading the curse. Many of them were genuine but misguided, too foolish or caught up in their own fancies to perceive that they had failed before they had begun. By way of solutions, various theories contemplated the love of old men; sheer, simple murder; even the forbidden love of women for one another. In this, perhaps the priest and the doctor were wiser than most. And, of course, some of the visitors were just here to wheedle funds or patronage for their pet projects, devices, even sometimes great juggernauts of machines as if Princess Zellandyne were lumber to be milled within gaping metallic guts, amid chains and belts and shrieking steam valves.

  If one or another of these managed to get past me and find their way before King Grimm, well, he would try anything in his royal and fatherly desperation. Not even the queen could talk her husband out of his reed-thin hopes, perhaps because her own eyes always seemed haunted and thus she lacked conviction. Better all around that I stop the parade of foolishness before it marched past the throne.

  Still, a few slipped through. We all spent an entire season eating lavender honey and dancing bee dances before that one fellow was run off. Likewise the year that colored smokes were to be deployed to draw out demons and deflect the curse. Mostly we stained miles of curtains and carpets and put the palace laundry to its worst test in many a season.

  The child Zellandyne, growing up amidst all this suppressed panic and premature mourning, still somehow managed to be a bright, high-spirited little thing who loved nothing more than morning rides through the misty grounds of the royal estate at her father’s side, or playing games with the maids in the courtyard, or reading about castles and quests and knights of old. She showed the most aptitude at mechanics and artifice, though, and was soon laboring at apprenticeships in the workshops and foundries attached to the Royal Palace.

  “Let her sweat over a fire,” I counseled the king and queen more than once. “Whosoever her heart catches on will be the end of her for the reign of years. Perhaps she will fall in love with the flow of molten brass and spend her time wreaking steam instead of chasing hearts.”

  “She is a girl,” Queen Perrault had said sadly at one of these closeted conferences. “It is her fate to find a love, and be betrayed by it.”

  “At least it is not death that awaits her,” I offered cautiously.

  “Just the sleep of years.” King Grimm was morose, growing into his name as the ever-changing days of Zellandyne’s childhood unfolded. “Is that better?”

  “There will still be a future, in time.” It was small wisdom, of little worth, but all I had to offer. After all, how do you stop a girl from falling in love?

  Prince Puissant of Bourgoigne

  When I was small, I had but to pick up a stick and I was feted as the greatest swordsman since Roland. Every scrawl and scribble of mine foretold a new Leonardo. Such words ring hollow after a while, when you come to recognize the fundamental untruths wrapped within their pretty shells.

  Mother, of course, stood at the heart of it, as she stands at the heart of everything.

  My own words, the ones I will never say, are that Mother terrifies me. She certainly terrifies everyone else in the court, in the palace, in Nouveau Kronstadt, in the kingdom. That her affections seem reserved for me is only natural, and it only adds to my terror.

  Since I was small they have trained me to fight like a nobleman. Ahorse with lance, afoot with sword, learning to lead formations of pikemen and archers and hard-bitten old legionaries who march in the style of Rome. Likewise to command cannon, steam leviathans, even the new rockets that have come only recently out of the devil’s workshops of the Iron District here in Nouveau Kronstadt.

  I will be a man, and I will stand before the world, I am told. Father informs me of this, in his kingly style. I hear it from my tutors, from my arms masters, even at times from the stable boys and serving wenches.

  How can I be the greatest warrior in the modern world by the mere virtue and flattery of my birth, and at the same time stand at the front of the armies of Bourgoigne to do my father’s will?

  It will happen because Mother says it will happen. Her word is the law of the land, whatever our traditions might say. Father married power, after all.

  Mother, so the whispered tales go, is an ogress, or least has the blood of fae running in her veins. Whisper those tales too widely and you’ll find yourself eating your own tongue sautéed with butter and rue. I watched Mother force my old tutor, Magister Biyal, to that bitter fate, before turning him out with a traitor’s brand on his forehead to beg mute in the streets of our city.

  That, at my own age of eight, was when I first knew the rumors about Mother to be true. I have no idea if she literally has ogre blood in her veins, though she is a large enough woman to put fright into one of those Teutonic Valkyries, but she certainly has an ogre’s soul in her hard heart.

  Yet she is my mother, and she loves me.

  So when I turned sixteen I announced that I would quest. First to the Holy Land to worship in the shrines where our Lord was originally venerated. Then to hypocaustal Rome and her younger cousin Venice, where the workshops that birthed the brass world still clang and burble and echo with devilish imaginings amid the foundations of lost empire. Then, I’d told the court at my celebratory feast, I would circle among the countries of Europe seeking deeds of valor and righteousness in the manner of the knights of old.

  What could they do but cheer me?

  Mother had been furious, of course, her eyes smoldering, but she would hardly tear down her beloved son before court and king. Even she had to answer to Father, when he bestirred himself to venture a preference in some matter besides governance of the kingdom and the vintage to be drunk at dinner.

  So I fit myself into the tales she had caused me to be raised upon and rode away from the palace and from Nouveau Kronstadt as free a man as I would ever likely be.

  Someday I will have to return and take up my father’s crown, whether I wish it or not.

  I have worshipped at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I have fought against the armies of the Musselman, myself personally bringing down one of the great, jointed walkers out of the fabled workshops of Samarkand through a combination of dumb luck and a well-aimed petard. Decidedly not a nobleman’s weapon, but the lessons of my father’s court had far fewer applications on t
he field of battle than my arms masters had believed, or at least been willing to confide to me. With that in mind, I spent several seasons apprenticed to a twisted little woman in Murano, a mistress of clockwork and chemical fires who was building weapons no sane man would use.

  And now I am once again ahorse—my third mount these past seven years of wandering, this one a Berber mare of cunning mind and fine footwork—wandering the fields and forests of Mediterranean Gaul and Iberia, wondering if I should finally turn my face toward home.

  NARRATIVE INTERLUDE THE THIRD:

  TRUE LOVE LEAVES NO TRACES

  The prince, riding on his horse Lightning as a road-dusted and exhausted knight-errant, approached the Royal Palace of Talos by the westward road. These past years the palace had become one of the most famous residences in Europe, thanks to the fantastic stories about the daughter of the house. It was, indeed, a curious sight to see.

  Smoke belched from three high, brick stacks that rose behind the tiled roofs. Even at a distance, he could hear the clang and shudder of foundry hammers. Machines not so much in the shape of men stalked and slouched along the palace’s outer walls, or stood atop towers and roof ridges like so many sculptures left behind in the retreat of some mad metalworker.

  Puissant smiled behind his rough Maghrebi scarf. So some aspect of the stories was true, if they’d banished their guards in favor of obedient automata. Or perhaps these were even brass men, whose kind he had met so many of on the island of Murano during his long ago days in Venice.

  A king and queen afraid of comely young men being too close to their daughter. Mother probably took delight at the cosmic joke played upon these people.

  Prince Puissant was in truth on the way home to see his parents, after years of wandering. Somehow his mother’s ambitions had become less overwhelming and less important to him with the passing of years. The papers said Father was ill, and not expected to see another winter. He’d never really meant to leave them forever, just to live outside the shadow of Mother’s will awhile.

  Well, he’d certainly done that.

  But this business of the curse on Talos, that had always interested him. It seemed one last, fitting piece of errancy to pursue on his way home.

  He wondered what life was like inside the palace.

  Taking a knee before King Grimm and Queen Perrault, the prince had already seen plenty of evidence inside the throne room of what had passed over the years. Soot gathered in odd corners even here, a sign that the standards of the house had been relaxed over time. The guards were, as he thought, all brass. Most of them possessed the slack-jawed stillness of automata, but the sergeants were keen-eyed, their gaze gleaming with the intelligence of well-wrought punchtapes. There was even a brass priest attending the king and queen as they received him.

  “Your Highnesses,” Puissant said, raising his face to meet their tired gazes. “It is both my duty and my pleasure to present my compliments to you.”

  “You are a traveler, yes?” The queen’s voice was as weary as her gaze.

  The years have not been so kind to her, the prince thought. She had been mourning her daughter since the girl’s birth. How hard that must be for a parent, to raise a child thinking only that you would have to watch her die. Or at least sleep away a generation, if the tales of the curse were true. “Yes,” he replied aloud. “I have these past years been to the Holy Land, and all across the south of Europe and the north of Africa.”

  “And you know of our troubles?” King Grimm’s voice was reedy and weary, nothing like the glorious rumble that must have once emerged from that great chest.

  “Only what anyone on the street might know. There are half a hundred tales, but the truth seems likely simple enough, if all the more sad for that.”

  The queen leaned forward. “Do you bring some wisdom that might break this spell?” Old woe flashed in her eyes.

  “Only common sense and a good sword hand, I am afraid.” The prince’s fingers strayed momentarily to his hilt.

  “You are welcome to the hospitality of our house,” King Grimm said. “There is only one condition on your visit. You may observe our daughter as opportunity permits, but you may not speak to her.”

  “This would seem to be like solving a puzzle without touching the pieces,” the prince replied, “but I understand your fears, and will heed your condition without reservation.”

  “Then be welcome,” Queen Perrault bade him.

  The prince abided awhile in the Royal Palace of Talos. He swiftly came to like the king and queen, and could see beneath their twinned mantles of worry and fear that they were not so far beyond their young and energetic years. If the curse could be lifted, the royal couple would be rescued from a generation of sorrow.

  Taking his cues about discretion and what was permissible from Otho, the elderly Lord Chamberlain, Prince Puissant observed Princess Zellandyne from a distance. She was almost wanton in her exuberance of movement and action, he noted, as if she’d been raised a boy. She was handsome enough, if not precisely beautiful. The muscled arms and thick legs engendered by long hours in the forges and workshops of the Royal Palace kept her from the classic beauty associated with her breeding and station.

  Still, she moved with a flashing vivacity to which he could not help being drawn.

  “What projects does she pursue in her workshops?” he asked Otho one day as the two of them looked down upon the metal yard where the princess was sorting through pipe stock in pursuit of some unknowable aim. The prince and the lord chamberlain stood together in the Weather Tower of the palace, hidden from Zellandyne’s view by the shadowed embrasures.

  “These past several years, automata,” the old man replied. “She built a leopard in the memory of her old pet ocelot, that stalks the gardens to this day terrifying the servants. Then an improved model of palace guard. Lately the librarians inform me she has been much at study of the books on punchtapes and clockwork intelligences. I know she spends long hours with Father Brassbound.” He added a bit sourly, “The old priest can refuse her nothing, not even inspection of the contents of his head.”

  The prince reflected on how many meanings that phrase could contain, but said nothing to goad the lord chamberlain’s obviously wounded heart.

  Still, what would one in her position truly be thinking to make oneself a man?

  A few days later, he caught the old priest in the upper gallery above the Great Hall. “Father,” called out Puissant, “a moment of your time, please.”

  “Of course, my son.” Father Brassbound sat on a carved bench and met the prince’s gaze. “I apologize if I have been dilatory in making you welcome here in Talos.”

  “No, no, not at all. I am made most welcome. But I wish to ask you something rather personal, if I may so boldly presume.” The prince drew a breath. “This is in pursuit of the problem of the princess.”

  “Anything, my son.”

  “To cut to the core of my question, in your experience, how long might a brass man such as yourself expect to live? Are you bound by the fleshly three score and ten?” He knew what he’d been taught amid the forges of Murano and Rome, but he wanted to hear this one’s answer.

  “No….” Father Brassbound stared a moment at his feet as if they were newly arrived at the end of his legs. “Barring accident or murder, of course, we live the life of our component pieces. Which, unlike those of my fleshly brethren, can for the most part be replaced. Some of the earliest brass men from the workshops of Samarkand and Constantinople are still said to survive, four centuries after their creation. The art of crafting the punchtapes and the intelligences ever improves, of course. While those cannot be changed without changing the man within the mind, the bodies go on.”

  “I have met a few of those old brass along the shores of the Golden Horn,” the prince said, musing a moment on memory. “So if the princess were to lay true love’s first kiss upon a brass man, she might sleep for centuries while he walked the Earth.”

  Father Brassbound closed h
is eyes and sighed. “Do not suggest such a thing to the king and queen, I beg you. Besides, it is not done. Flesh and brass do not mix that way.”

  Puissant laughed softly. “Not even in the manner of their birth? We both know better, sir priest. And if you believe that people do not mix according to their passions, then you are more naive a prelate than I would give credit for. Do not confuse your wishes for the way world might be with the complex realities of the heart and body.”

  “Wishes are all we have left to us here in Talos.”

  Late one evening, the prince slipped through the shadows and into Zellandyne’s workshops. True to his word, he had not approached her, and had in fact gone to some efforts to prevent her from even getting a good look at him. Not that it was so difficult to do—the princess kept mostly to her labors, and associated more with her maids and assistants than anyone else in the palace. In point of fact, he’d dined nightly with the king and queen, and had yet to be sent from the table because the princess had never come to claim her place.

  He walked softly among the hanging chains and great racks of the workshops. Banked fires glowered through shuttered grates, while burbling and glooping noises testified to chemical and thermal activities with the tanks that loomed along the outer walls of the workshop. He touched nothing, but observed everything with his trained eye.

  In the third of the stone barns, he found what he was looking for. This was where she’d done the fine work of building her automata. Shelves were lined with springs and torsion bars, gyroscopes and bins of close-cut gears, the leathers and gutta-percha that would go to make a skin or covering.

  On a great slab of a table in the middle of the workshop lay the mostly complete body of a brass man. He was visible in one of the few pools of lamplight shining in the shuttered night shift. The chest was open and the face was missing, leaving a complex tangle of clockwork and pressure hoses and spark relays. Puissant walked slowly around it, still looking without touching.

  “He is beautiful, is he not?” The voice rang out from the shadows, strong, confident. Female.