by Sean Wallace
Nothing untoward happened until Act Four. Beatrice and I were perched on the edge of our seats, expecting something awful to befall the production. When it finally came, we only stared for the longest time.
Serafina’s Desdemona was in her chamber, preparing to be married, yet also preparing to die. She said her prayers and lay down to sleep, and that’s when her chamber door opened. Golden light cut a sharp path cross the darkened stage, to brighten the bed where Serafina rested. A sword’s long shadow preceded that of Otello himself. Have you said your prayers tonight, Otello wanted to know – but it was not Otello who sang these words. It was a voice familiar to me, the voice of Trinchero who was not acting, but had made a terrible mistake. He had come to slaughter Serafina, surely believing she had carried his Beatrice away at long last. In a way, she had, but in rescue only.
Beside me, Beatrice gasped in recognition.
“He cannot—”
Upon the stage, Serafina screamed.
It is quite a moment in the opera – Otello coming to kill Desdemona because he believes she has betrayed him – and from here the story would unravel in spectacular fashion until too many lay wrongly dead. But Desdemona was not to scream, because Otello used not his sword, but his hands to wring the breath from her body. The scream that came from Serafina was quite real – she would not have expected Trinchero, either – and nearly Beatrice’s undoing.
Beatrice came out of her chair. In the sliver of light from the opened door, we could see Trinchero lunge for Serafina. He wrapped his arms around her and when the stage lights abruptly came up, they were gone.
Alves certainly wouldn’t wait for the theater to empty; Beatrice wasn’t inclined to wait, either. We fled downstairs and pushed against the exiting tide of patrons, heading for the empty stage, but before we got there, Alves found us. I suppose we were not so difficult to recognize in the end, a tall lady and a dwarf, moving against the exodus. Alves’s face burned bright with anger, but also a kind of sorrow I hadn’t expected.
“Trinchero has taken her,” Alves spat.
“And you?” I snarled back. “This is no better than invading his theater to claim Beatrice.” The idea that Serafina had taken Beatrice before Alves could amused me, but there was something else at play here. Something I did not yet understand. Why did Trinchero want Serafina? Simply because Alves wanted Beatrice? There was something else.
“Trinchero’s house,” I whispered. “We must go.”
Neither argued with me. I expected them to, but we made for the airship that Alves kept in the island’s shipyard. It was no surprise to me that his ship was flown by metallic men, just like those that had boarded the Rocha. Alves had attacked the ship in an effort to prevent Trinchero from bringing Beatrice back – this seemed clear to me, and other theories began to clarify themselves the more I watched Beatrice and Alves on the flight to Trinchero’s house.
Alves endeavored to speak with Beatrice. Beatrice shrank back at every attempt. She continued to place me between them, whether blatantly or covertly. Beatrice rarely strayed from my side because when she was near me, Alves did not approach. He plainly wanted a private moment with her, a moment she refused to give him.
“He would not hurt her,” Beatrice whispered to us. “He would not.”
As kind as Trinchero had shown himself to be, I doubted this. He had risked many things in order to bring Beatrice back – why wouldn’t he harm Serafina to make his point? To win the chess match with Alves?
Alves did not believe Beatrice’s whisper, either; his face looked much like my own must have. There was doubt in his eyes and he chewed his bottom lip in increasing worry. When at last his metal men announced that we were close, there was a brief flicker of relief, but then—
“Raptors!”
The forest was alive with the creatures; they looked like a wide and running river, the way they ran between the fenced-in trees, parting like water around stones, branches. Some gleamed with bronze and copper, but others were wholly flesh – like those I had seen caged in Trinchero’s lab. My breath caught in my throat at the sight of them. At my side, Beatrice whimpered.
“Tell me about the raptors,” I said to Beatrice as Alves ordered his men to follow where the raptors led. We bypassed Trinchero’s treehouse, even more sprawling when seen from above, and moved across the treetops, deeper into the forest.
“I was so young,” she whispered. She shook her head, the lines of her make-up having begun to run and melt under her tears.
There was a still a woman within that clockwork frame, a woman who now feared for another, that she not be changed as Beatrice had been. It was an accident, Beatrice said, a thing she should not have survived. It should never have happened – these dinosaurs no longer existed, she was imagining what she saw. But they did exist, and she had been curious – who could blame her for that? – and she had reached a hand out to touch the nose of one. Was it metal? Was it flesh? It was something of both, and it smelled her. A moment later, its teeth closed about her hand.
The bite was laden with radiation, poison spilling from the core that powered the beast, and it transformed Beatrice. While she did not turn into a raptor, parts of her were consumed by the metal, metal which seemed intelligent. It wormed its way deep inside her, and by the time she came to Trinchero, she was near the end of the first life she would know. Trinchero had fallen in love with her – I could picture the slant of his smiling mouth and mustachio all too well – and had promised to cure her. But there seemed no cure. He could repair the thin threads that kept her alive, but could not extract the metal from her. Bit by bit, he turned her into the thing that had changed her so many years before; now, she could not live without the cogs, she could not live without keeping her heart wound tight.
Trinchero, she said, had discovered a raptor in the valley where she had been bitten. A valley of stone and fossil, a place where no such thing should have lived, yet still did. He brought it home to study and when he found another, he bred one more. He had found the mechanical raptor on yet another venture, and tied them to Alves by chance – the man had arrogantly used pterodactyls in one of his operas. One dinosaur led to others, and to a lab where Alves worked to make more.
“He will surely turn her the way I was turned,” Beatrice whispered as the airship continued to trace the path of the raptors through the forest.
“He will not,” I said.
The raptors led us to another house in the woods, a house with an airship landing high above the tree canopy. One ship was already docked, but there was room for one more and Alves had his men secure the ship there. Far below us, the raptors rushed into a clearing of tall grasses where they appeared to be hunting rodents.
I grasped Alves’s jacket sleeve before he made to leave the airship. “Men who fight each other with dinosaurs? Men who care nothing for the women in their path? Your beast did this to her and you would have left her to die?”
Alves ripped his arm free and sneered at me. He might have been attractive, had he not been such an arrogant ass.
“Beatrice’s transformation was unfortunate – it should never have happened. She is an abomination and I will not see Serafina so changed. So . . . ruined.”
It was a belief many in the world shared, I knew. My own J. J. had lived in fear that his mechanical heart would be discovered. Yet, there were those in the world who pursued the technology still – Trinchero among them. Beatrice lived because of his efforts, might have been otherwise lost. Thinking of the way Beatrice and Serafina looked at each other, I couldn’t begrudge him his work. Love went beyond the heart of a person; I knew this to be true.
Alves exited the ship and Beatrice and I stood there a long while, listening to his steps move down the scaffolding. When I turned to go, Beatrice did not join me. I paused in the ship’s hatch and looked at her, extending a hand.
“Come. If he means to change Serafina, would you leave her salvation in Alves’s hands?” Alves would surely put a bullet in Serafina’s head
rather than see her turned into what Beatrice had become.
Beatrice’s hand trembled in my own. We climbed down the stairs of the landing platform, still in our opera finery, sunset slanting through the trees. Below us, I could hear the chitter of raptors going about their unspeakable raptor business. In such writhing numbers, they were more than a little terrifying, and a shiver crept across my shoulders. They were so strange, so unknown, so hungry. Eventually, from the building the stairs led into, I heard Serafina’s desperate pleas and Trinchero’s replies. He sang the line to her in Italian, much as in the opera itself. Have you said your prayers tonight?
“This will not accomplish anything!” Alves shouted and there came the sound of two men violently colliding.
I ran down the stairs to gaze in wonder at this laboratory Trinchero had rigged. It was just as splendid as the one in his house, precise, neat, but for the bound and pleading form of Serafina in a glass cell. One wall of this cell could be opened, opened to the yard where the raptors hunted and fed. It didn’t take much to imagine that wall opening and raptors flooding inside.
The rest of the laboratory was a collection of works in progress, chiefly dinosaurs, be they fashioned of flesh or metal. Each had its own cage, most sleeping, but some anxious to free themselves and join the other raptors in the yard. They clawed at the vented glass panes that kept them sealed away.
As to Trinchero and Alves, they were locked in a fierce battle some distance away from Serafina, each trying to wrest the other into a position of submission. Neither was having it; each was strong and angry, and I bolted toward Serafina’s cage, looking for a way to free her. Beatrice joined me, but we could see no way to unlock the cage, save for the wall that opened onto the raptor-filled yard.
A glass door from the lab opened onto a closed observation deck. A doorway from that deck led to walkways that were enclosed with open-weave metal fencing that would allow one to move safely through the raptors. Another level of walkways sprawled above, too, causing me to think of taller dinosaurs – did Trinchero have others?
We could reach Serafina with these walks, but Alves had noticed the same. He struggled to make his way to the glass door, Trinchero refusing to give ground. Alves lunged forward while Trinchero grasped him by the jacket lapels and planted his feet. Still, Alves’s momentum carried them into the glass door that led to the patio. It shattered as if it had exploded, the men rolling onto the patio in a barely contained ball of fury. Fists flew and so too feet, as each tried to do permanent damage to the other.
Beatrice and I took advantage of their brawl. We stepped through the doorway and picked our way across the glass-strewn patio, toward the enclosed walkways that would lead us to Serafina. But a curious thing happened – the raptors seemed drawn to Beatrice and she to them. I turned to find that she had paused, that she crouched beside the fencing and cooed at a cluster of raptors who had come closer to smell her. She chittered and they chittered and though I was fascinated, I was also terrified.
“Beatrice!” I hissed.
She did not move. I, however, did, as more raptors closed in on the other side of the fence. They wanted to get closer to Beatrice and were upset when they could not. Fights broke out among the creatures, all lashing tails and hooking claws and I thought I might go mad from the slithering sound of it, from the shrieks and hisses. Into this confusion, a body dropped.
Beatrice and I leaped back with screams; the raptors closed around and over the body they had been given – Alves, good Lord it was Alves! – and began to devour him. I glanced up, at Trinchero who stood on an upper walkway, beaten and bleeding, but looking triumphant as his creations swallowed his nemesis bite by bite.
“You are mad,” I spat at him.
He screamed words at me, words I had no translation for, but here, I needed none. In the way of all good opera, he felt betrayed; he loved his milagro bee and believed himself betrayed and used and oh, he was as mistaken at Otello had ever been. Trinchero made my heart ache with it, the anger and sorrow that poured from him. He closed his hands into the ripped fencing and gave it a shake. I wanted to plead for him to come down, to have a drink and talk some sense, but saw that he was far beyond these things.
“Vittorio.” Not even his name drew his gaze to me.
I threaded my way closer to Serafina and that’s when I saw the break in the fencing. It had been haphazardly repaired at some point, with lengths of what looked like barbed wire. And the raptors – oh, they were clever. They could smell Beatrice and were likely well acquainted with the fencing and how it enclosed them. They were picking their way through the wire even now, lizard-like bodies slithering one against the other as they pushed inward. I would never reach Serafina’s door – not now.
“Muriel.” Trinchero’s voice held a new edge to it; I did not glance up at him, for fear that looking away from the raptors would draw them to me even quicker.
I did not move. I could not see how to reach Serafina – she watched us from the other side of the door, helpless to free herself, and I stared back for what seemed forever, until I felt Beatrice’s cool hand against my cheek. She glided past me without a word, as if in slow motion, toward the raptors who meant to breach the fence. I will never forget the look on her face; it was resolution and relief both. When I realized what she meant to do, I cried out. Trinchero did too.
Beatrice crawled through those slithering bodies as if she were one of them. The raptors let her pass; they turned away from the fence, following where she led. She led them away from the fence, away from Serafina and deeper into the grass where she sprawled and let them crawl upon her. For a moment, I saw a raptor-like fierceness in her face, and then she struck.
Her metallic hands cut through the raptors and drew blood until it flowed down her arms, onto the grasses. With the scent of her fresh in their noses, still frenzied from their taste of Alves, they fell upon her – and she did not move, she did not cry.
I turned for Serafina’s door, horror stricken as I tried to work the door to get her out. Serafina was shrieking at me when I finally did. She leapt for the rip in the fence, but I clung to her, dragging her down so that she could not join Beatrice. From above, Trinchero’s own sobs were like knives down my arms, in my heart, across my throat.
And what did Trinchero at last do? He leapt from the walkway and perished the way of Otello – dead at his Desdemona’s side. The raptors, metal and flesh alike, did not hesitate or show mercy. They knew none. They were upon him as they had been Beatrice – so hungry, sinking teeth and claw into whatever they could. Trinchero scrabbled his way toward Beatrice and in his last moments held her in his arms as the raptors covered them over.
Serafina and I sat for a long while, waiting. I am not certain what we expected – maybe that this had not in fact happened, that Trinchero and Beatrice and Alves would rise to thunderous applause from a rapt audience, but this was no stage. In the days that followed, it did not grow easier. The authorities were dismayed by Trinchero’s lab – he was in possession of clockwork and mechanicals that the world did not approve of, and Beatrice was clear and present proof he had used them to . . . Animate the dead? Had he? Not to mention the dinosaurs he had both built and cloned.
With them dead, and Alves too, the authorities spoke with me and Serafina at length, but we were largely unhelpful when it came to sorting matters. Trinchero, they decided, had done terrible things in the name of love – and who hadn’t? Foolish, impetuous theater-loving Italians! they cried. Trinchero was dead, what more could he suffer? They left him to his peace and to me and Serafina—
Serafina cries when she thinks I cannot hear her; she mourns Beatrice by slathering her toast with honey that recalls the bee’s eyes. She mourns Beatrice best on stage, donning the costumes and becoming everything she ever wanted to be, being the woman Beatrice could not. The crowds love Serafina for it – she is showered with flowers and brings them home by the armful. The halls of Trinchero’s treehouse smell of rose, lily and sometimes marigold.<
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I spend my mornings in the jacaranda-drenched bedroom, wondering if I will stay here, or if I will soon travel again. Someone needs to mind the raptors, the pterodactyls. I think I have even heard a brachiosaurus somewhere in the woods. I walk the balconies that weave through the trees and think I hear J. J.’s knowing laughter. How I always wanted a family.
Selin That Has Grown in the Desert
Alex Dally MacFarlane
My mother once said that I was livelier than any wind that flew across the plains, that no horse could catch me and no wolf could withstand the volume of my song. “Selin that has grown in the desert,” I sang as I sat with my trousseau’s second jacket in my lap and sewed it full of thread as white as clouds. “A well-watered plain.” I felt very far from the girl my mother had described. “My most precious friend, Dursun.” Would Cheper sing of me? If I married my cousin Tagan, I would be able to see Cheper whenever I wanted; both of our husbands would be in the village. “Gone to a foreign place.” But it didn’t matter how close or far I needed to journey to reach my husband’s yurt.
I concentrated hard on the thread and the needle, and I blinked rapidly. Not a single tear fell on my jacket.
Nomads from the south set up their yurts alongside ours, doubling the size of our little village, and told us about the approaching caravan two days away. We had goods to trade: a carpet and a carpet bag, two felt hangings, jewellery. I heard my father and Gariagdy discussing how much wheat and rice they should aim to get.
I heard my father ask, “And what of the men among the nomads? Are there any that we know?”
“Some.” Names fell from my brother’s mouth like sharp silver discs. Each one hurt me, though I put another round of dough in the tamdyr to bake as if unaffected by their nearby conversation. “Good men,” he added, “although I still think Tagan is the best choice for her. We know him well and she won’t have to move far away.”