by Sean Wallace
“Who is her friend? The little one who smiles in her sleep? And they’ll try to pry the casket apart with their machines to get at us, to learn our secrets. But diamond is the hardest stone. It won’t be scratched. So tired – they’ll be so tired then – they’ll lay their heads upon our casket, like this.”
Kanarien curled up beside Wunderlich. She rested her cheek upon her cold, torn breast.
“And they’ll hear, from inside, a beautiful song. Like a tiny, shining bird, singing a most triumphant lullaby. Our love. Our battle. Our great escape. And, at last . . . They’ll understand us.”
Green-eyed Monsters in the Valley of Sky, An Opera
E. Catherine Tobler
The airship Rocha steamed south and west, across skies that seemed to have never known a cloud, but for the puffs of vapor that trailed from the ship. These soon evaporated, leaving the skies the clearest blue you could imagine. You might mistake the blue for water reflecting the sky and try to dip a toe into it if the ship’s captain allowed such folly. He would not. The windows were propped open, to allow the warm Zonda wind into the cabins, but this was the extent of the captain’s recklessness. His ship was buttoned up, precise, and lovely but for the coffin secured at the front of the passenger cabin.
The coffin resembled a piece of art if one could ignore the perfectly embalmed woman within its glass confines. I could not. She was the color of beeswax, the honeyed glow deepening to umber beneath her chin where her high lace collar was wrapped. Imagine her asleep, the airship attendant had suggested to me, but I, all too familiar with ferrying dead bodies to their resting places, knew she was well and truly dead. She should have occupied the cargo hold, so passengers could remain blissfully unaware as to her presence, but no, she was here, as if she had paid a fare.
Perhaps she had, and I turned this idea over in my mind as I studied the gilded roses and miniature raptors that decorated the coffin edges. Crystal droplets rested on each golden rose petal; every rose thorn was a sliver of emerald. The raptors each possessed jeweled eyes; rubies, sapphires, and even diamonds had been employed to make the tiny beasts shine. The sunlight that spilled into the passenger cabin fragmented through the gems, flooding the space with a shower of iridescent polka dots.
My attention refused to find pleasure in this swirl of colors. I stared at the preserved body without blinking. My seatmate was less concerned with the coffin or its occupant; while I felt certain the coffin and lady were his own, at the moment he was absorbed in the journals spread before him. I looked from the dead lady back to this man and his journals.
Vittorio Trinchero was in possession of a mustachio so beautiful it slowly made me forget the coffin and its occupant if only for a moment. Where the mustachio should have bisected his face neatly in two, giving him the impression of being a man divided, it did not. Its broad and gleaming ebon prow curled in such a way as to draw the eye ever upward, from the slant of his plush mouth, to the flawless planes of his cheekbones.
His ink-stained finger pressed upon the journal page before him as if to say, “See here.” Trinchero did not speak English, but Italian; his native language poured from his mouth, nearly as intoxicating as any drink I had ever sampled – and in my travels I had sampled many. Trinchero showed me again his journal, willing me to understand.
The sketches beneath his finger were of a grand theater, with which he was utterly enamored. I could not blame him; it looked as though it had been drawn from a dream, balconies rising in countless levels from the floor, curving in a gentle horseshoe shape away from the gilded stage and up into a ceiling of fabric clouds. Where the ceiling rose higher in domes, elaborate frescoes adorned every surface, animals and seraphim holding pendulous chandeliers from sharp beaks and elegant fingers.
“Valle del Cielo?” I asked, and he nodded. I did not speak much beyond English, but this I had learned from my travel guides.
“Si,” he said and I smiled.
It was the very thing I traveled to see. The Valley of Sky was one of the marvels J. J. and I planned to see together, and though he had passed from this world to another, the promise to travel the globe remained. The Valley of Sky was home to two dozen theaters, this floating island city the brainchild of one Ramira Clarisa. The streets of her Buenos Aires grew clogged, she said, but the glorious skies were wide open and hungry for the arts. Thus, her dream of singing opera amid the clouds was born.
“I like this best.”
My finger came to rest beside his own, at the curl of curtain he had added to the main stage. This curtain was not fully drawn, but furled back on one end. The fabric was edged with fronds and ferns, and if I looked quickly enough, it seemed squat, dwarfish bodies lurked within these forest depths. Bodies like my own.
My few words unleashed a torrent of Italian from him, which I could only silently admire. My attention, however, came back to the lady and her coffin, both of which now sat askew in their moorings. I sat straighter in my seat, but it didn’t help; I was also askew, my bottom sliding across the leather seat, my hip slanting into Trinchero’s. He looked at me with raised eyebrows I didn’t require a translation for. The entire cabin was out of kilter and growing more so by the minute.
Traveling the world required one to adopt a new set of standards; I had been all manner of places at the behest of J. J., and had seen people and events I could have never dreamed up. Each had contributed to the woman I currently was: she who was not astounded when there arose a great commotion in the control cabin, and she who did not shriek or otherwise panic when Trinchero grabbed his journal first and me second, and rolled us onto the floor. We slid beneath our seats as a green and gaseous vapor blossomed into the passenger cabin. The sound of a thousand screaming whistles followed. I clapped my hands over my ears.
I needed no translation for the curse that burst beneath Trinchero’s mustachio. He kept his sturdy arm around me as the thunder of metallic feet filled the cabin. Through the haze of vapor, I could see them: mechanical legs and feet, tromping down the aisle as the army invaded the airship. Their torsos looked like repurposed footlockers, their heads wrapped under helmets and goggles that might have allowed them to see cleanly through the thickening gas.
Was I seeing double? Triple? My head began to throb with a dull pain. Other passengers were in full panic; screams and protests reached my ears, but so too did the shriek of metal against metal as the coffin and its embalmed lady began to slide across the cabin. Trinchero tensed at my side, but did not move away; there was nowhere he might go, not with the cabin yet filling with gas and soldiers both.
The Rocha plunged downward, a fish loosed from its hook, shrieking as she went. My stomach seemed to go with it. Every mechanical soldier in the aisle was thrown off balance and this gave me the hope that not even they knew what was happening. This was also a curse – if they didn’t know, then who commanded them? Who had taken the ship?
Trinchero pressed his journal into my chest and I closed my hands around it. He made to move – toward what end, I cannot say – but the ship took another plunge before he got anywhere. The rumbling engines cut out with a final sputter and Rocha was in free fall. The gentle wind that had accompanied us ever since we arrived in South American skies flooded the cabin in a rush, pushing the green vapor away, but causing my eyes to tear even so.
Trinchero’s fingers scrabbled against the seat cushions above us, ripping the linen to reveal the bundled parachutes stored there should this very thing occur. Perhaps the planners had not counted on invading armies of mechanical men (surely they had not, clockwork being considered a thing Most Foul), but should an airship lose altitude—
We made a race of it, to see who could harness themselves more quickly, though Trinchero would easily best me in this contest with his longer arms and larger hands. In the end, he helped me secure my harness and gave it a firm tug to be certain all would hold fast.
From the main cabin, there came a brilliant explosion, which sent the Rocha plunging toward the blur of grou
nd with ever more speed. I staggered against Trinchero as we stood from the floor; he shoved his journal into his belted trousers, and eyed the coffin that now rested against the far wall. He moved for it as another explosion ripped through the Rocha, opening her backside to the brilliant blue sky.
“Trinchero! No!”
There was no possible way he could save the coffin or its lady; I reached for him just as the ship suffered a third fiery insult. Trinchero and I and every seat and every mechanical man and passenger on the ship were blown out the back of the ship. We and our trail of debris exploded through the sky as the Rocha screamed ever downward. My fingers were painfully ripped from Trinchero’s harness and I spiraled up into the blue, blind to everything but that color.
Trees rose in strange silence around me. I watched the leaves and branches sway in a silent wind, birds circling without sound higher above. I yawned in an effort to pop my ears, but there was nothing. I feared my hearing gone, watching a long-tailed monkey scamper soundlessly from one tree branch to another. Another crouched atop a metallic head that had been separated from its body; I wondered at the troops I had seen on the Rocha, but saw no more than this dismembered head.
As I lay dazed amid other broken branches, some poking me in the worst possible places, sound slowly returned. For a long while, everything sounded muffled, distant, but there came a close chitter at my shoulder, and I shied away from the monkey that meant to pluck at my braid.
Birdsong made itself known next and the rustle of leaves under the warm wind. I reached unthinkingly for the branch poking into my ribs and came upright with a screech at the pain. I gasped for a breath and tears streamed down my cheeks. I blinked the tears away, but could not believe what lay some distance away from me in the broken canopy.
The coffin, its four legs shorn off, rested atop the broken branches. The crash and its resultant debris reminded me of tornadoes, the way one house might be swept away while its neighbor was undisturbed. Tornadoes might also pick up an item and set it down unharmed miles away, just as the coffin had been set. J. J. and I had seen such things in our time, but never quite like this. The coffin’s roses and raptors were undisturbed, the glass panels unbroken. The beeswax lady inside slept on. I expected her to sit up, press a hand against the glass, and demand to be let out, but even when a bird perched upon the lid, she did not stir. She didn’t seem to have moved at all.
I sat there sobbing in pain until I heard Trinchero screaming. Signora! Signora! Over and over, sometimes he sounded closer and sometimes much farther away. I tried to draw a breath so as to call to him, but my lungs burned with a fire so intense it stole my voice. I came to my feet with some effort; my legs were not broken, only battered with bruises already, and every movement was pain.
“Trinchero,” I said, and my ribs screamed a protest. Still, I unbuckled my parachute.
I found him some short distance away, tangled in his own parachute; the work to free him was slow, my hands shaking from the effort. He was as bruised and battered as I, a frond from a tree having taken up residence in his jacket collar. I reached up, but could not claim it; his hand enfolded mine and he rocked his lips across my scraped knuckles. His mustachio was no less spectacular up close. Midway through the task of unknotting him, I sat back, trying to breathe without pain. This proved impossible.
“Signora,” he said.
“Muriel, please,” I said.
“Mu-ree-el,” he said.
Once freed, Trinchero gestured in the direction I had come. Through the tangled trees, the coffin threw up a bright riot of light from its glass and gems. I nodded and followed him when he made to head that direction. Monkeys skittered through the trees above us and when we came back to the coffin, one was trying to pry blotches of gem-thrown lights from the fallen leaves. The monkeys fled as Trinchero dropped to his knees.
A sob escaped him. He crawled toward the coffin, touching it as if to be certain he was not dreaming. He pressed his head against the glass lid and murmured words I could not understand, and I turned away, to give him some privacy.
I could not help but think of J. J. then, and of what he would make of my present circumstances. Murrie, he would say, isn’t it a beautiful landscape? Look at the way the jagged mountains slice across the sky, and see there? See how those trees are home to magenta birds – the very color of Mrs Butler’s favorite petticoat? Gracious, she did show it to everyone . . .
Trinchero set to searching the debris around us; he pulled long branches out and set them alongside the coffin. I could not quite fathom what he meant by it all until he began to tear long strips of leaves, knotting these into what could be used as rope. He began to lash the branches together, making a frame around the coffin, and then supports beneath it.
He could not possibly mean to take her, but of course he did and I could not fault him for it. I would not have left J. J. in such a place, dead or no. Slowly, I worked beside him to bind the branches into a sledge with which we could drag the coffin. But where would we go? The mountains rising around us seemed impossible. Our destination had been Buenos Aires, but I had no good idea where we were.
Trinchero was acquainted with the land, however; he did not waver when we slowly set out, pulling the lady and her coffin behind us. I was nearly useless in this effort, my legs simply too short to do a bit of good. Trinchero helped me sit on the sledge while he pulled alone, all through the warm afternoon.
I slept and only roused when Trinchero lifted me from the sledge. It was dark, no sign of sunset or sunrise. The universe spilled above us in a way I had never seen before, a wide river that reached farther than I could ever hope to. J. J. had bid me to explore this world, but in that moment, I wanted to go beyond this world. I wanted to understand what lay at the bottom of that starry river.
A house rose in shadow among trees and the spangled sky; I made no fuss as Trinchero carried me inside. I felt half asleep as it was and when he placed me upon a soft bed, had no trouble sliding fully back into oblivion.
Trinchero lived in the trees, a house of patinated iron and local hardwoods that spanned countless thick-trunked trees seemingly grown for that very purpose. The trunks spiraled up through rooms yet never at random; the house bent around their natural shapes, no tree having been modified, the house rather appearing as if it had been grown to accommodate them. Stairs spiraled up and down, arched doorways leading to further rooms; some stairs followed the lines of the trees, toward ceilings of glass panels that allowed the sunlight entry. This light reached through the forest’s own canopy, shadows and light in constant motion as the Zonda blew.
Shelves laden with books lined interior hallways, these hallways secreting away nooks with cushioned seats and reaching for ends that expanded outward into new sunlit rooms. Rooms on the outside edge of the house possessed glass doors that led to a wide balcony which ringed the entire level I found myself on; the trees here were within easy reach, even at my slight height. The birdsong that had woken me continued at full volume, flowing much like the house’s own staircases, up and down in the same instant, to surround one with a constant cacophony. The bedroom I had been given was sheltered by jacaranda trees, which suffused the entire room with a violet glow as if underwater.
I sipped the strong black coffee left at my bedside and from the balcony watched the forest come to life. Monkeys made themselves known with chitters, their small feet skipping them from roof to branch before they vanished entirely into the forest. One monkey came close enough to smell my coffee; its scent made him skitter away, along the balcony rail, and I followed, until the monkey bounded into the trees. Here, the balcony continued around the outside of the house, yet also branched inward along a new path.
An arched walkway cut through the house, tiled mosaics glittering from floor to apex in the dim light of the passage. There might have been images within the tiles, but my attention was instead fixed upon what I could see at the walkway’s end: curlicues of wrought iron. The passage gave way to a wide expanse of fores
t inside the ring the house made within the trees. Another balcony circled this space, weaving to avoid trees and allow them their natural space. The wrought iron proved to be a massive aviary, enclosing the whole of the trees.
I walked to the aviary’s edge and looked, because surely it would not be kept empty. Still, what I eventually saw made me step back. Made me stare.
Trinchero stood on the opposite side of the aviary, drawing silver-sided fish from a dark blue bucket. At first, I could not fathom the task, not until he tossed the fish into the air. The wire aviary canopy was open enough to allow the fish to pass through. When I thought the fish would plummet to the ground, it was instead snatched up in strong jaws, a massive bird swooping past Trinchero. But the bird was not a bird and I had only seen images of what it might actually be. But how could it be?
“Signora.”
With a crook of his fishy fingers, Trinchero gestured for me to come closer, then bent to pluck another fish from his bucket. I made a slow circle toward him, but watched as another bird propelled itself through the aviary. Its grey skin was leathery, stretched so thin over its wings the sunlight nearly went through them. Its sharp face and bright eyes looked intelligent, eyes tracking the fish as Trinchero lobbed it through the canopy. It snatched the offering and swallowed it whole, pinpointing me with its violet eyes as it glided past me.
Such monsters were not entirely unknown to me. At Trinchero’s side, I spoke even as I knew he would not understand my English.
“There were monsters upon the ice,” I said, unable to look away from the trio that swooped within the aviary’s limits. “They walked upright, they did not fly, but those crests . . .” I touched my own forehead and traced a line backward into my hair, as if I possessed such an ornament, too. I had taken J. J. to his rest and there the creatures had been, from another age, living as they would. “They are surely related. Those faces . . .”