The Wrinkled Crown

by Anne Nesbet

  “See?” she said. “The whole world is in here: measurement and magic, both at once.”

  And she shook the stiffness out of her fingers and played that for them as a song, simple and sweet.

  24

  UNWRINKLED!

  The hush after the last note seemed itself to be part of the music. A pause as the world peered around a corner and glimpsed something wonderful there.

  And then that silence turned into noise, enormous noise—tumultuous cheers and hullabaloo!

  Linny could feel the regent’s eyes digging angry holes into her shoulder blades. He said, once the noise had abated a bit, with his frigid voice, “I see. You will regret this, sooner or later. But on with our program now.”

  He pointed. In front of the tin can on the stick, there was now a table with a lever machine, connected to many wires heading off to the right; a long wick, leading off to the left; and a flickering candle.

  “Two sides to every world,” he said. Those were ceremonial words, apparently. He said them with such a flat voice, almost as if he didn’t believe what he was saying. But Linny knew the flatness hid anger.

  He put the candle into Linny’s hand and pointed at the wick, and a moment later fire was racing quietly down the long fuse and along the balustrade of the bridge, where the wick string was cleverly held up by a series of little metal rings.

  The sun melted at the horizon line, became a molten puddle of gold, and was gone, leaving a sky as brilliantly rose and gold as the belly of a wrinkled trout.

  As the sun vanished, the Angleside half of the fair sparkled into light, all at once. Small globes of glass were strung like drops of dew on a spider’s web, a web of beaded glass that ran around the booths of that fair and on high poles along its paths, and when Linny pressed the lever the regent pointed to, a miniature star began to shine in each one of those little glassy spheres. In places, whole clusters of lights drew pictures in the air, of towers and trees and flying machines, and some of the strands of the lights were colored green and blue and red and purple and yellow—like strings of jewels, only brighter than jewels ever could be.

  And just as Linny was smiling at the bright, jewel-like Angleside lights, the long fuse she had lit with the candle reached its endpoint, and there was a screaming cacophony of lights and thunder as fireworks blossomed over the wrinkled side of the fair. The fireworks exploded in every possible fiery shape and pattern, and the last of the rockets released a great flock of tiny paper lanterns that flickered as they drifted down from the heights—flickered and then floated, hovering and bobbing, just above the heads of the fairgoers on the Bend side of the river.

  Linny saw children—not just children, no, grown men and women—jumping up into the air to try to catch one of those pretty peach-colored flames in paper, but the lanterns bobbed gently out of reach each time. They were wrinkled lanterns, and did not care to be caught by human hands too soon, but each time they swam a little ways out of reach, they made a pretty little sound, like a ringing bell.

  Some of the fireworks settled on the head of that statue of the Girl with the Lourka, over there in the square the gray men had been marking off with their spikes, and a fountain of sparks danced into the air now from her head, like a feathery crown made of fire. Worlds of light on both sides of the river! Linny’s eyes soaked up the beauty of it, of all of it, the electric brightness of the Plain side, and the wilder lights dancing over there on the wrinkled side of things.

  There were oohs and aahs from the crowds on either end of the bridge, not to mention the people now crossing the bridge itself (the barricades must have been trampled right down). And Linny could not have said which display she liked better, the one on the Plain side made possible by machines and glass, or the wrinkled mystery of the other fairground’s bobbing, chiming lanterns.

  The regent tapped her on the arm.

  He had switched off his tin can again.

  “I will ask you one more time. Will you be sensible and responsible, and put this crown into my care?”

  “But I don’t think I can,” said Linny. It was that business of doing the right thing.

  “The choice is on your head, then,” he said, and he switched the machine back on that made voices so large.

  “One more remark, if I may—”

  “Hey,” said the magician, in mild protest, from Linny’s other side.

  “One more remark, I say, before we go about joyfully stuffing food into our happy, happy mouths—”

  His voice boomed out over everywhere, an inexorable tide of sound. Linny shrank back an inch from that oversize sound, but there was nowhere soundless to shrink into. She could sense the whole crowd shrinking with her, as if they were all, all the thousands of them, children who had been caught red-handed, who had smiled when they had not been given permission to smile.

  “We must keep clear minds even as we rejoice. A successful claimant has come down from the wrinkled hills—that is very good news. But it should not blind us to facts. Only a child or a fool would argue that the halves that make up our world are the same in worth or value. Why, even here, at the bridge that crosses our river, we cannot help but see the past on one side and the future on the other.”

  The cheers had died off, and the crowds shifted nervously from foot to foot, waiting to see what this man who had been regent so long, whose eyes and hands still radiated power, would say.

  “The future lies with those who have the power to reshape the world. To help us all keep that in mind, we have set up one last display on the Bend side of the fair—there!”

  He pointed at that odd, small rectangle filled with wrinkled things—with floating books and growing miniature trees and singing flowers and toys that could walk or dance or laugh on their own, thanks to their wrinkled natures—that crowded patch of wrinkled ground, with, at its heart, the statue of the Girl with the Lourka still streaming sparks from its hair.

  “A representative assortment, as you can see, of the most wrinkled things we could find. And we have marked out that rectangle by means of a set of grid stakes linked to the waterworks, just by way of experiment and example. The wrinkled hills have stayed backward so long, because hillsickness hobbled us and kept civilization limited to the Plain. But I tell you now, we are on the brink of a new age, when wrinkled places will no longer make anyone sick. We have found an antidote to hillsickness, and the antidote will allow us to cure the deeper disease. And now our newly found claimant will do us the honor of pressing this other lever here, so that the lesson may be made clearer. The power behind the cure. A new beginning for us all.”

  It was something glittering in his voice, something eager in his eye, that made Linny shake her head.

  “No,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, but you will,” said the regent, glittering more sharply. “The lesson is about why it is important to keep one’s bargains. It is about who is really in charge, in this world. So I’m afraid it does have to be you who pushes this lever.”

  And before Linny could move away, he took her hand and forced it right down on that lever—she shouted out, but that did no good, and the magician had shouted, too, and was lunging toward them. She felt a surge of energy pass through the various wires, enough so that her hair stood straight up on the top of her head, and over there on the wrinkled side of the river, the rectangular patch of ground where that little plaster statue was went dark. Its lanterns and fires and glowing things just plain winked out, all at once.

  Something bad had happened there. But what? Linny pushed the regent to one side, dodged the shouting magician (who himself was being tackled by a bunch of Surveyors in gray), jumped off the old stage in the center of that bridge, and began running, as fast as she could, down toward the Bend side of the river.

  The crowds let her through. Most of those faces were simply puzzled (everyone asking his neighbor, “What just happened?”). But many were upset and beginning to grow angry.

  The feeling that bit into Linny
now was grief. A gap had just been torn into Linny’s soul. Something had been lost.

  And then, oh, miracle, Elias was there beside her. Elias! She was so relieved to see him, but so horrified by the dark patch of ground where the statue had been that the relief vanished into the air, almost as soon as it appeared.

  “Why?” he was saying. “Why? Why? Why?”

  “What was that?” Linny asked him. She didn’t stop running, though.

  “Their grid,” he said. He tried to say more, but Linny was dragging him off the bridge now and through the fair. Everyone around seemed to be shouting and surging in one direction or another, but the crowds fell back to let Linny pass, because she was the Girl with the Lourka, and she still wore the crown.

  There she was then, facing the ruined patch of the fair, the breath in her painful and making her pant. The little statue was still there; the plaster girl’s eyes looked dully down at Linny. But sparks no longer sprayed forth from its head, and lanterns no longer hovered in the air, not in this part of the fair, and the flowers in their pots had wilted, and much of the color had vanished from everything there. It had been a display of everything wrinkled, and now it was a rectangular patch of ordinary ground, covered with broken things and junk.

  How had they done this awful thing? They had put real power into their grid, and they had found a way to mark off a part of Bend, filled with everything wonderful—and then they had unwrinkled it.

  “The dirty griddlers! The buzzards! The rats! The foul, foul pigs!”

  That was Elias, cursing and crying at Linny’s elbow.

  “And they made your hand push that button thing that did this! We’ll show them. Oh, I’ll show them if I can—”

  He turned and shouldered his way through the crowd, heading back to the bridge, where the magician was fighting with a sea of men in gray. Linny looked at all the broken things in this rectangular place, and then she remembered (her brain was moving slowly, it seemed, as if it had lost some essential part of its own wiring) what Elias was carrying under his jacket.

  Those awful canisters, full of destruction, that the madji had asked Elias deliver to someone. What was it about this miserable city? The Plain side unwrinkling things; the magicians making disorder bombs to undo the very bones of the world . . .

  “Elias, wait!” she shouted, and then took off after him.

  “Is it war?” said a man’s voice, not far away. “Is it war, Lourka Girl?”

  “Stop him for me,” she said, pushing the crowds away with her hands as she followed Elias back to the bridge. “Stop him. Please stop him. He mustn’t help them do anything terrible.”

  “War! War!” said voices from the crowds—and the ordinary people in gray, the ones who moments before had been laughing and smiling at the displays on the Bend side of the river, like everyone else, were now taking alarm at what the voices around them were beginning to say. The gray people were trying to get back to the bridge, too, back to their side of the river. But it was slow, moving through those crowds, even though people still gave way before her, before Linny. But some small part of her brain could hear voices crying out, not so far away, and fists thumping and perhaps even vases or bones being crushed.

  Bad things were beginning to happen. The crowd was still mostly just murmuring, but soon there would be nothing anywhere but bad things.

  She ran as fast as she could, pushing her way through the people around her, and soon she had her hand on Elias’s back again, and he was swinging around, fists flying, not knowing who it was.

  Linny ducked.

  “Elias, please don’t,” she said to him. “Come away with me, so we can talk.”

  “There isn’t time to talk. I have to get the weapons where they need to go. You know it’s only fair. We can’t let them get away with that.”

  No, they couldn’t just get away with that, with unwrinkling a part of the world.

  They were at the edge of the bridge, pushed up against the stone railing. The crowds were milling and struggling around them, and some large percentage of that crowd was probably watching them.

  Linny tried to hang on to Elias, tried to whisper into his ear.

  “Please stop. Please think. Those bombs the magician makes—they’re bad, too. Maybe even worse than what just happened, than unwrinkling things. The magician’s bombs destroy whatever’s there, they ruin space—they make places wrong. Elias! They don’t fix anything.”

  “I think a place without any wrinkle to it is already as good as destroyed,” said Elias. “Can’t you feel that? Why can’t you feel that? On the Angleside, it feels horrible all the time. And they want to do that to every part of the wrinkled country. That’s what they’re planning. It’s too late to talk about fixing things. Let go of me, Linny!”

  He was scrabbling at the railing now, trying to climb up it; he was so eager to get out of her grasp.

  And Linny was hanging on to him tooth and nail, with all fingers and both hands.

  “Stop it!” she was saying. “Stop it! You idiot! You’ll make things worse. You’ll get hurt!”

  She remembered what even those tiny pea-sized disorder bomblets had done to people in the market, when the magician had thrown them. And Elias had huge sticks of that stuff tucked into his vest. She had seen that.

  “Let go of me,” said Elias. “You don’t understand anything. You never understood anything. All you cared about was yourself.”

  In both fairgrounds, people were shouting at each other. Things were falling apart. And the people around them were shouting, too.

  “Let go,” said Elias, and Linny held on as tight as she could.

  She could be stubborn. She truly could. Maybe he was right, and that was selfish. But she would not let him go. He was perched on the railing now—he had swung his legs over somehow, and Linny hung on to him as tight as she could, not letting go. If she hung on long enough, he would rethink his craziness. That was her hope.

  It was at that moment that a screech of laughter came dancing along the railing itself: red hair and bright clothing, dancing on the railing as if it were a line painted on the floor, not a thin band of stone high above a river in which it would be all too easy to drown.

  “Need help, laddie?” that voice shrieked. “Why won’t you let him loose, Lourka Girl? Haven’t you maybe done enough, pushing their wicked buttons for them?”

  It was the magician’s old ma, her brilliant red puffball of a head glowing slightly in the dusk. She was wearing a ragged parody of Linny’s own dress, rough stripes in many colors running down the skirt, all old and worn and fraying.

  “Go away,” Linny said, and to Elias she said, “Don’t do their work, Elias. The magician just destroys things and makes money on it. That’s as bad as the gray people. What if something happens to you? What do I tell Sayra then?”

  He opened his mouth and started to say something. But what that something was, Linny didn’t find out, because the shrieking fireball that was the magician’s old ma kept coming in her wild dance along the railing and flung herself on them, while the magician himself shouted out and wrestled with Surveyors up higher on the bridge. Oof! Pain shot up Linny’s poor arms, and the old woman with the dandelion’s worth of bright red hair was shouting even louder.

  “With me!” she shouted, and in one awful leap, she wrenched Elias out of Linny’s hands and right over the edge of that bridge.

  No no no no! Linny scrambled back to her feet, grabbed at the bridge’s railing.

  There was a great splashing in the water, down below, and that splashing commotion was being pulled down the river, away from the bridge, as fast as the water could flow.

  Linny couldn’t see exactly what was happening. Those were Elias’s arms thrashing around, weren’t they? Was that crazy old woman trying to drown him?

  No no no no!

  Elias was gone.

  25

  DISASTER

  “What’s going on down there?” the regent was saying, somewhere behind her back. Ev
en he had been fighting, apparently, or wearing himself out by ordering others to fight; his voice was ragged and harsh. “Why don’t those guards take control?”

  Linny was leaning over the railing, her knuckles white. She could see splashes that must actually be people drifting over to the right side of the river—but they were already headed around the bend. The river water Elias was maybe drowning in ran into the gray wall of the waterworks there, not so far away now, not far enough. What happened to the water then? And to the waterlogged bodies it was carrying when it splashed up against the waterworks wall? What would happen to them?

  When the river turned the bend, it became impossible for Linny to see what exactly was going on with Elias in the water.

  Please don’t drown!

  “That was someone you knew who fell in the river?” said the regent, now so close to her she could see the welt on his cheek where someone must have punched him. There were gray Surveyors behind him now, and others, slightly farther away, still trying to subdue the magician.

  “You!” said Linny, furious. “You unwrinkled that part of the fair!”

  “The only way to make barbarians behave is to show them what kind of force they’re up against. That’s a message they can understand. The rest is all nonsense.”

  Linny whirled around, finally angry enough to look away from the river.

  “And you used my hand to push that horrible lever! You had no right!”

  “That’s enough—” said the regent.

  And at that moment, there was a horrible noiseless shock, an explosion that shook through every mind in that place on some peculiar frequency ordinary ears couldn’t hear much of, though it shook Linny’s bones: an awful, enormous whooooompf, coming from behind her back, from far away, down the river, and sucking all the air out of the world for a moment.

  A silent thunderclap. And then people started screaming. One thought drowned out everything else in Linny’s head as she spun back around and grabbed the bridge’s railing with both her hands.