by Sean Wallace
“Of course you wouldn’t. You are the mistress here, the maker of worlds. I shall tell you. It is fascinating, at first – like being in another country. You observe, for it is strange to not be at the centre of your own story, strange to see a landscape, a city, an ocean, bending its familiarity towards someone not yourself. But then – then, Hessa …”
Nahla’s voice was an ocean, Hessa decided, dimly. It was worse than the sea – it was the vastness that drowned ships and hid monsters beneath its sparkling calm. She wished she could stop staring at Nahla’s mouth.
“Then, you understand that the landscapes, the cities, the oceans, these things are you. They are built out of you, and it is you who is bending, you who is changing for the eyes of these strangers. It is your hands in their wings, your neck in their ruins, your hair in which they laugh and make love—”
Her voice broke there, and Hessa had a tiny instant’s relief as Nahla turned away from her, eyes screwed shut. Only an instant, though, before Nahla laughed in a way that was sand in her own eyes, hot and stinging and sharp.
“And then you see them! You see them in waking, these people who bathed in you and climbed atop you, you recognize their faces and think you have gone mad, because those were only dreams, surely, and you are more than that! But you aren’t, because the way they look at you, Hessa, their heads tilted in fond curiosity, as if they’ve found a pet they would like to keep – you are nothing but the grist for their fantasy mills, and even if they do not understand that, you do. And you wonder, why, why is this happening? Why now, what have I done?”
She gripped Hessa’s chin and forced it upward, pushing her against one of her worktables, scattering a rainfall of rough-cut gems to the stone floor and slamming agony into her hip. Hessa did not resist anything but the urge to scream.
“And then” – stroking her cheek in a mockery of tenderness – “you see a face in your dreams that you first knew outside them. A small, tired-looking thing you saw in a coffee house, who looked at you as if you were the only thing in the world worth looking at – but who now is taking off your clothes, is filling your mouth with berries and poems and won’t let you speak, and Hessa, it is so much worse.”
“I didn’t know!” It was a sob, finally, stabbing at her as she forced it out. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry – I didn’t know, Nahla, that isn’t how it works—”
“You made me into your doll.” Another shove sent Hessa crumpling to the floor, pieces of quartz marking her skin with bruises and cuts. “Better I be an ancient city or the means to flight than your toy, Hessa! Do you know the worst of it?” Nahla knelt down next to her, and Hessa knew that it would not matter to her that she was crying now, but she offered her tears up as penance all the same.
“The worst of it,” she whispered, now, forefinger tracing one of Hessa’s braids, “is that, in the dream, I wanted you. And I could not tell if it was because I found you beautiful, or because that is what you wanted me to do.”
They stayed like that for some time, Hessa breathing through slow, ragged sobs while Nahla touched her head. She could not bring herself to ask, do you still want me now?
“How could you not know?” Nahla murmured as she touched her, as if she could read the answer in Hessa’s hair. “How could you not know what you were doing to me?”
“I don’t control anything but the stone, I swear to you, Nahla, I promise,” she could hear herself babbling, her words slick with tears, blurry and indistinct as her vision. “When I grind the dream into the quartz, it is like pressing a shape into wet clay, like sculpture, like carpentry – the quartz, the wax, the dopstick, the grinding plate, the copper and amber, these are my materials, Nahla! These and my mind. I don’t know how this happened, it is impossible—”
“That I should be in your mind?”
“That I, or anyone else, should be in yours. You aren’t a material, you were only an image – it was never you, it couldn’t have been, it was only—”
“Your longing,” Nahla said, flatly, and Hessa tried to ignore the crush of her body’s weight. “Your wanting of me.”
“Yes.” Silence between them, then a long-drawn breath. “You believe me?”
A longer silence, while Nahla’s fingers sank into the braids tight against Hessa’s scalp, scratching it while clutching at a plaited line. “Yes.”
“Do you forgive me?”
Slowly, Nahla released her, withdrew her hand, and said nothing. Hessa sighed, and hugged her knees to her chest. Another moment passed; finally, thinking she might as well ask, since she was certain never to see Nahla again, she said, “Why do you wear your hair like that?”
“That,” said Nahla, coldly, “is none of your business.”
Hessa looked at the ground, feeling a numbness settle into her chest, and focused on swallowing her throat-thorns, quieting her breathing. Let her go, then. Let her go, and find a way to forget this – although a panic rose in her that after a lifetime of being taught how to remember, she had forgotten how to forget.
“Unless,” Nahla continued, thoughtful, “you intend to make it your business.”
Hessa looked up, startled. While she stared at her in confusion, Nahla seemed to make up her mind.
“Yes.” She smirked, and there was something cruel in the bright twist of it. “I would be your apprentice! You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To make my hair like yours?”
“No!” Hessa was horrified. “I don’t – I mean – no, I wouldn’t like that at all.” Nahla raised an eyebrow as Hessa babbled, “I’ve never had an apprentice. I was one only four years ago. It would not – it would not be seemly.”
“Hessa.” Nahla stood, now, and Hessa rose with her, knees shaky and sore. “I want to know how this happened. I want to learn” – she narrowed her eyes, and Hessa recoiled from what she saw there, but forgot it the instant Nahla smiled – “how to do it to you. Perhaps then, when I can teach you what it felt like, when I can silence you and bind you in all the ways I find delicious without asking your leave – perhaps then, I can forgive you.”
They looked at each other for what seemed an age. Then, slowly, drawing a long, deep breath, Hessa reached for a large piece of rough quartz and put it in Nahla’s hand, gently closing her fingers over it.
“Every stone,” she said, quietly, looking into Nahla’s wine-dark eyes, “knows how to sing. Can you hear it?”
As she watched, Nahla frowned, and raised the quartz to her ear.
Clockmaker’s Requiem
Barth Anderson
Krina nudged her clock, and it crept up her long neck, closer to her ear, tiny claws tickling. “Left. Left again,” it whispered. “Forward.”
Behind Krina walked the confidante, a spider-limbed girl with lip rings to seal her mouth. She kept close to Krina, whose inventions always found the right way, no matter how the ziggurat changed, and the skirts of their cloaks stirred swirls of the maroon dust that seemed to gasp from the mortar and paving stones.
“The salon is located up there this afternoon,” the clock whispered to Krina. “Up the Ascent.”
Today the Avenue of Ascent was a vast flight of stairs beneath a sky of ceiling windows, and a regiment of urbanishment troops inclined upon the steps in a cove of sunlight, their stiff shirtcollars sprung open like traps. Up and down the great flight, fruit sellers stacked their wares for climbers to buy, making the Avenue of Ascent a cascade of color. Blood-red loaves. Foreign lemons. Ripe adorno pears. Pomelos.
Krina stopped and stared at the big orbs of yellow-green pomelos, considering. Instinctively, she touched the small, spiny back of her other clock, a lookout wrapped about her right thumb and the sibling to the one lit upon her neck. The lookout whispered the futures into her ear, when she raised her hand to her shoulder:
“People will all see the same time together, the apprentice will say to you, Krina. A tool, that apprentice will call the thing he’s created. Stop him. Don’t let him.”
The confidante watched Krina staring at the
stack of spongy pomelos, light fingertips resting on her lips as if the tight line of locking rings might not be enough to prevent her from cautioning her mistress from buying one.
The fruit-monger caressed the round brow of a pomelo, flicking dust from its green rind. “Fancying a sweet-tart, duchess?” he said from behind his bandana, which was wet and dusty at the mouth. To him, it was simply fruit. He had no idea what the pomelo meant in Krina’s caste or he might not have said, “Only half a crona.”
Shadows from a dove flock zigzagged up the Ascent, the moment passed, and Krina shook her head. Then she lifted the hem of her cloak and walked up the steps.
The apprentice will be safe, yes? said the confidante in handslang.
“We clockmakers are the engines of the ziggurat,” said Krina, turning and climbing the stairs. “I’d save everyone if I did it now with his clocks unmade. Besides, why do you care?”
The confidante took Krina’s left hand and pressed handsigns against Krina’s palm in a series of pats, the equivalent of whispering to a handslanger. Assassinating based on whispers from lookouts? Tragic.
“You needn’t scold.” Krina snatched her hand back. “I didn’t buy any.”
Krina led the way, lookout hissing and slithering along her shoulder, and in their deep pockets, the confidante’s hands said, You are an ungrateful, rebellious confidante.
With heavy, hand-hewn beams of brandy-colored wood overhead, buttery lantern light pooled on the floor, and the room smelled of wood fire, yam griddlecakes and the scent of spilled wine turning to vinegar. The apprentice’s workshop was a lovely corner of the salon, near what had once been Krina’s own shop. The large coterie in attendance for the young man’s debut drifted from the tables of clocks to the tables holding bottles of wine and back. There was an eagerness to become a throng. Krina accepted a drink from her confidante and they walked to the tables where his clocks were displayed.
“I told you. There they are. The beginning of the end,” whispered the lookout with a nip at her ear, as Krina looked down the row of dally maple clocks.
The apprentice was a square-faced and sincere-looking youth in old work boots who immediately stopped talking to his colleague and faced Krina when he saw her from the corner of his eye. Nearby, in the wide-open space of his workshop, drunker guests were flailing hilariously through an impromptu reel.
Krina, with the care of a gardener removing aphids from a favorite rose bush, brushed a fine file of the ubiquitous red dust from a nautilus curve in the clock’s scrollwork. The clock lifted one paw to her gratefully, and she smiled down into its face, which, oddly, was merely a round disc with hashmarks and numbers as if to represent actual features that would be added later. “What kind of clock are you?” she said, lifting it. The clock’s feet kicked and its tail lashed as she turned it upside down. “Are you finished?”
The apprentice glanced at her wine-stained teeth. “It’s just a protoytpe. But you’ve never seen a clock like this.” He sounded chary, as if he expected a reprimand or contradiction.
The blank, featureless face shined at Krina like a little moon, and she thought of the ominous warning her lookout had whispered to her regarding this clock. “No, never. Tell me about it.”
Many high-heels clopped on the tiles, and a wine-soaked nonet struck up a song that was either a reel or a staggering waltz. “It’s not like the clocks you made, Krina,” he said over a burst of laughter from the dancers. “You can tell time by this clock.”
The room was warm with so many bodies, which she hoped would hide the rise of angry color to her cheeks. “Rather presumptuous. Me telling the clock time?”
“It’s meant for people to use. I have to figure out a way to make many of them, for many, many people.” The apprentice stammered when he saw her wince at his words, but soldiered on with his explanation. “Think of it as a tool.”
The lookout on her shoulder murmured and growled.
“A tool?” It looked wrong to her, the apprentice’s faceless clock, like a fish walking upright in grass and sun. “A tool to do what?”
“To …” he hesitated, as if searching for words that wouldn’t offend her, “to measure time as a people, to bring people together. So people will all see the same time. Right now everyone makes clocks to create whatever time they want. But this – it’s – it tells a time that everyone can agree on.”
“That’s the idea,” said a passing livery officer with a firm, manly nod to the apprentice. “Quantify it. Time shouldn’t be subjective. We should have one time. I’ve always thought that.” With two glasses of wine held high, he meant to keep walking but stopped. “How does that clock work?”
“We know when and where we are with this clock. Always. But I’m still combing out snarls,” he said, shaking his head at the clock. “It needs little hands. Maybe chimes to tell us a common time.”
“Now your clock is telling us time?” Katrina chided. “I thought we were telling it time.”
“Well, I’ll look forward to seeing your clock when it’s finished, and so will my company,” the livery officer said. “This mad place needs all the help we can get.”
From the cowl of Krina’s cloak, the little lookout hissed, “See? What did I tell you?”
“We don’t need it,” Krina said to the officer’s back, as he took his wine away. “Farmers have roosters, and bread bakers know the rhythm of a rise in their stiff wrist bones. No one wants these clocks of yours, because everyone here prizes the license to do as we will. This? This is not our way.”
“Not yet,” the apprentice said, grinning from Krina to her confidante.
Putting her hands in her pockets, sipping wine through a straw, the confidante lowered her gaze, as if the apprentice’s grin were a gift she couldn’t accept here.
Ah, there it is, Krina thought, watching the young man.
His clock shifted its feet, jostling the other clocks on the table, who hissed and spat at the eyeless thing. Why would anyone, she wondered, tolerate being told that one’s time was the same as everyone else’s – no worse, no different, no more painful, no more beautiful, fortuitous, or grand? In a place where time has reshaped the very architecture, what effect would such a clock have? One of the other clocks took a swipe at the blind clock, which recoiled, unable to defend itself. “We have a responsibility to keep time, yes, but we must keep it well. Vibrant and strong. It’s just cruel,” she said, “creating something with a face and no eyes.”
She lifted her gaze from the crippled clock to see if her words had reached him, and the apprentice nodded slowly to her, perhaps already building another clock in his mind. “Send me your next,” she said, “as soon as you’ve built it.”
“Oh, I plan to,” the apprentice said, and for the first time, there was a note of challenge, even threat in his voice.
Krina donned her cloak, and, as she pulled up her hood, she whispered to her confidante, “Go back and buy three pomelos from the fruit-monger, please.”
The confidante shut her eyes as tightly as her mouth and, when Krina turned her back, handslanged, Oh, I plan to.
Dusk threw shadows across the chamber but Krina didn’t light any lamps or candles. She liked the violet calm of early evening, so she stood in the center of her black brocade rug and felt the darkness deepen while her brother’s friends fell into an ode for strings and percussion. She didn’t want the wags here tonight, but she could retreat to her apartments if they grew tiresome.
“What’s wrong, Krina?” her brother, Lemet, asked after bobbing his head to the music for some time. “You’re being particularly ominous tonight.”
Cellos and drums rolled and tolled. “I’m afraid of what that new apprentice at the salon will do with his clock,” Krina said.
Lemet was a clockmaker, too, had the same broad, strong hands as Krina. He patted his knees in time to the drums and said, “What do you mean? What’s to fear?”
“His clocks will kill our clocks, the ziggurat,” Krina said.
“
You’re paranoid.”
“My lookout told me,” she said. “I’m very serious. My confidante is stacking three pomelos in the apprentice’s doorway, as we speak.”
Lemet turned down the corners of his mouth as if to say that was a judicious move on his sister’s part.
“Oh?” A cellist smirked in appreciation, fingers fretting near his pierced ear. “Is someone about to come down with offcough? The blackspot. Do you use a poisonist, Krina?”
“We pay our dues and use the Method, like everyone in this room,” her brother said in calm reprimand, not appreciating the insinuation that Krina was hiring mercenaries. To Krina, he said sotto voce, “Why the Method? You have clocks that could undo the apprentice, right? Use them. Eclipse him.”
“Too many people actually want his damn clock. You should have seen the crowd around his salon table.”
Lemet showed his sister that he was annoyed with her seriousness by turning his attention back to the musicians.
“It’s like the ziggurat has a death wish,” she said to his profile.
“Such fascism,” said a violinist. “Who would want a clock that unifies time?”
Keeping the measure with just a tad more emphasis until the violinist looked at him, the drummer said, “Oh, yes, who would want a unified time?”
Now the musicians were annoying him, which seemed to annoy Lemet further. “Music, yes. But not all of life. That’s so beyond boring, and it’s beneath us – it’s below our – it’s—”
“Yes, there are no words,” said Krina, appreciating her brother’s stammer. She stood and looked down at a wide esplanade near the lagoon below. Drifts of maroon dust were splayed across the cobblestone concourse, and young boys in great cloaks and kerchiefs over their faces were attempting to sweep the fine powder into pails. Futile work. The very mortar of the ziggurat gasped silt into the air. “This dust.”
A bassoon moaned across the cellos and bass drum.
In birdskin slippers, Krina’s feet slid across the floor into her own apartments, away from her brother and his revelers. They would go all night, and she wasn’t in the mood to join them. As she shut the door on the boom of a throaty cello, the first clock she had ever built, with intricate, interlocking pinewood scales leaned kindly against her ankle. Seizing the clock by its fat, solid coils, she looked into its eyes of agate.