Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures

by Sean Wallace

  When I returned, I felt like the open air had scoured me clean of unhappiness. I sang under my breath as I walked Melekush back to our yurt and tied her up outside, and I opened the door like blowing air through a dili-tuidik.

  “Dursun,” Yazjemal said, and I slid back into my small self.

  “Yes?”

  She sat almost alone on the carpets, only little Annaguel sleeping at her side, and had one of Gariagdy’s jackets spread across her lap, its frayed hem mid-repair with blue and white threads trailing from it like hairs.

  “There is tea, recently brewed, if you would like some,” she said, offering her usual smile, warm as a bowl given in reconciliation.

  “Thank you.” I poured some for myself and topped up hers, and sat opposite her with no coat in my lap, no purpose except participating in this inevitable conversation.

  “Your parents are concerned,” she began. I drank more tea. “It’s time for them to choose you a husband, and everything you say and don’t say indicates your lack of interest in this.”

  Yazjemal bit her lip, and her next words sounded like they came from her, not borrowed from my parents. “Do you remember when I first arrived here? How quiet I was, how I barely slept from trying to please your mother and Gariagdy and all of you, how I must have looked close to tears at every critical glance or word. I know I felt it. I was so worried that I wouldn’t please your family. Now three years have passed and I talk freely with your mother, I talk to you, I . . . I’m happy! For so many brides, this is their story: they are afraid when they first put their right foot inside their husband’s family’s yurt; before long it’s their home and they love it, as if it had always been so. I’ve heard your parents discussing this, Dursun – they won’t marry you to some brute, some awful creature who’ll hurt you, with a mother like a tyrant.” She paused, expecting me to talk – and I wanted to, but words and thoughts caught in my throat like small fish bones. “I just want you to understand that it’s not as frightening as you might think.”

  I stared at my tea.

  Quietly, she said, “Talk to me, Dursun. What’s wrong?”

  That transformation, from timid bride to smiling Yazjemal, my gelneje, who listened to my thoughts no matter how foolish, sat in my memory alongside specific events: how quickly her stomach grew round, how healthy Annaguel was from her first day of life. Not a son, but they would come. And I knew that Yazjemal enjoyed sex with Gariagdy.

  One night, trying to imagine the act in complete detail, I’d suddenly seen myself with Cheper. How could I explain this?

  Wives didn’t need to enjoy it, I knew, but I wanted to. I felt sick at the thought of a husband who wanted my body and pleased himself with it whenever he chose. Even if I confided in this to Yazjemal, I knew, I knew, she would smile and tell me that it is something to grow accustomed to, it is enjoyable.

  As for my thoughts of Cheper . . . I closed those off, a precious box deep inside my body. Its edges struck at me. It hurt.

  “Dursun,” Yazjemal said again, wool-soft.

  “I’m . . . I don’t think I’m ready.”

  She didn’t list the things I would like, eventually, about marriage. She put aside her sewing and hugged me, and kissed my cheek – which was wet, I realized, and then I really started crying. The noise woke Annaguel. Still, Yazjemal held me.

  “I don’t think anyone’s ready,” she murmured. “Come. Let’s talk about something else. Did you know that Garhera joined some of her older friends in trying to get beads from the Hadjis?”

  “No!” The thought of my little sister, only three years old, demanding beads made me giggle despite my tears, and by the end of Yazjemal’s story I was holding my sides, sore with laughter and feeling better.

  * * *

  I needed to spend more time on my trousseau: trousers and tunics and socks and several jackets to take to my future husband’s yurt. If my parents intended to decide soon, it required a lot of work to be completed in time for my wedding. The front-left of my second jacket, for instance, was barely embroidered, and its cuffs lay bare. I’d hardly knitted any socks.

  Yet, on a morning where the horizon spread bright and clear after a night-time dust storm, I told my mother I would visit a friend for several hours. I wanted to see Cheper, but she was finishing her trousseau; anyway, I didn’t want to talk about her future husband or her jackets or my own thoughts about men, when all I wanted was to spend my life with her. I went to Houran and Aynabat’s yurt, curious, though I thought I probably shouldn’t be, about Aynabat’s metal animals.

  The traders and Hadjis had passed the storm in various people’s yurts, and as I walked along the edge of the village – that place where the open plains gusted in one ear and the sounds and smells of the village hung by the other, and only my right earring rattled – I saw them returning to the open air.

  Houran and Aynabat’s small door was fastened open against the side of the yurt and several Hadjis emerged as I approached. Each nodded politely to me, and I returned the gesture, feeling strange in my colourful clothes and shining jewellery next to these holy men in plain, worn robes. Houran stood by the door, thanking them all for honouring him with their presence and welcoming them back whenever they wished. This must be a routine, I thought, if he had travelled with them for long, and they all smiled and laughed and passed compliments to one another like old friends.

  When they had all left, returning to their donkeys and camels, I stepped up to the door and asked if I might visit Aynabat.

  “Yes, of course! Stay as long as you like.”

  Business took him elsewhere; I stooped to enter the yurt, and inside found Aynabat sitting on the carpet we had sold them, working on one of her contraptions.

  “Can it fly?” I blurted out, like a child forgetting to be polite.

  “Unfortunately not. The metal is far too heavy and clumsy, still. This is my first attempt.” She set down her tool. “Please, sit. Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Some spare space remained at the edge of the carpet; I sat, took the offered tea, and asked how these creatures of metal worked.

  “They are powered by steam.”

  “Steam?” I looked at my tea, which brushed steam against my chin like faint fingers.

  “Yes,” she said, laughing. “Steam. Carefully controlled, it’s capable of moving certain parts within these animals, over and over, setting the limbs in motion. There is a miniature fire in here, and a miniature pot of water that can be replenished if I open this small hole, and the steam created by boiling the water powers this eagle, and the horse I showed you last time, and the other animals. And other things – far to the west, there are things called trains that use steam to power a machine far vaster than these, capable of carrying hundreds of people. Steam power is a wondrous invention.”

  “European,” I said.

  “Yes.” She added, in a far more cautious tone, “But they hardly need to be the only ones who can use it.”

  So she did intend to create more than animals. Perhaps. I felt . . . not afraid, barely even worried. I couldn’t imagine Aynabat working with European powers. Why would she devote so much time to her little animals?

  Instead, I wondered why people needed things like trains, when horses ran like the wind. I looked at the metal eagle again, and imagined it large enough to hold the entire village, shining silver and gold, with the turquoise she was halfway through adding to its wings. Where would it take us?

  Far away from a husband, I thought, and flushed at the idea, and looked at her. “In the place where these steam-powered things are made, what do the women do? Are they like you, making things?” Although, as I said that, I recalled her words the last time we spoke – she would remain indoors in Khiva, like any other wife, except that she worked with metal instead of wool.

  Here, I thought. Here she does that. But where she came from . . .

  It was her turn to flush. “Well,” she said unsteadily, “I obviously wouldn’t know
first-hand, but from what I’ve heard . . .” She paused, collecting words, and more than ever I wanted to ask how a European woman came to be here. But some secrets were probably not for me. “The women there are much like the women here: they look after their husbands and raise children, and any work of their own is just a part of the household’s income. It is not often possible for a woman to live well without a husband.”

  I stroked the carpet that I had helped to make. Anywhere I went, a man would marry me and put children in my womb.

  “What’s wrong?” Aynabat asked softly. “Do you want me to show you some more of my creations?”

  “That won’t help,” I murmured, then felt rude for refusing her kind offer.

  Before I could replace my response, she asked, “What would?”

  The truth fell out like grain from an overturned bag. “Not having to marry a man, even a kind one.”

  “I remember that feeling.” She spoke strangely, as if she wanted to say something else.

  “Does it go away? Do you love your husband? Are you happy when . . . you know, at night?”

  “Well . . .” She took a deep breath. “Dursun, this is one of my greatest secrets.”

  “I can keep secrets! All my brothers and my sister and my gelneje have asked me to keep secrets, and I haven’t told a single one – and I’ve told no one about your steam things!”

  “I’ve . . .” She swallowed and started again. “I’ve never liked men in that way. I’ve never imagined myself sleeping with them. I’ve . . . only women make me feel that way.”

  Whatever she saw on my face, it made her turn away and concentrate on her eagle. She was fighting back hurt, I realized. I took my own deep breath and said, “Me, too,” and her head snapped up like a bowstring going taut. “I don’t know what to do.”

  She pulled me across the carpet and hugged me tighter than even Yazjemal or my mother did.

  “I’m so glad I’ve met another woman like me,” she said. “At home, long ago, there was one, and another I met when my first husband was alive, but we’re so rare, or we’re so reluctant to talk about it.”

  Did Cheper have the same secret? The idea of asking her filled me with dread. “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “I can count on my fingers the number of people I’ve told.”

  For a long time we said nothing else. It felt so strange and wonderful to know that other women shared my thoughts, my desires, my fears.

  Yet she had married, like any other woman, and she had not told me whether she liked Houran’s touch. “Is it all right,” I said into her hair, “being married?”

  “If you find the right man.” She sighed and drew back. “I was fortunate. My husband is kind; he respects my explanation that I do not want sex. We are hoping to quickly have several children and then we will stop sleeping together. But I was able to make this agreement with him before we married.”

  I shuddered. “I don’t think I can sleep with a man, even on my own terms.”

  “There are ways to make it pleasurable for you, even though it’s a man.”

  “It’s not that.”

  Several weeks earlier, Yazjemal had taken me aside to give me the same advice: if you touch certain places, if you show your husband how to touch those places, it produces a highly pleasurable heat between your legs. Alone, I liked that heat. Imagining it with a man made me feel cold all over.

  “I know.” Aynabat stroked my hands. “I don’t know what to say. It’s difficult to be us. Sometimes I wish there was a place we could go, where we weren’t expected to behave in certain ways.”

  “I wouldn’t really want to leave here. This is my home. I love it.” Except for this.

  My unhappiness crept back into the yurt like a malignant spirit, but no amulet could ward it off.

  “Can I watch you work on the eagle?” Its foreign origins meant far less to me, now.

  “Of course,” Aynabat said, with a sad smile that said so much more: I wish I could help you, I wish you were happier. Because what I saw so perfectly matched my thoughts, like the left and right sides of a jacket, I looked away, and let the movement of her hands over the eagle distract me.

  When I returned home, I found the yurt door shut and some dirty pots stacked up outside. I got to work washing them. Just as I finished setting them out to dry on the tagta, where the sunlight fell with late-morning brightness, the door opened and three women stepped out. They all saw me and gave me long, scrutinizing looks as they walked away. I smiled politely. When they were gone, I walked inside the yurt with legs as awkward as the wings of Aynabat’s eagle.

  “Those were relatives of Biashim, a young man who has apparently seen you once or twice,” my mother said, with nearly empty tea bowls in her hands. “His oldest brother’s wife is one of my cousins. She brought some dried fruits. Biashim has said that he would like to marry you.”

  “Oh.”

  “They say he’s a good-natured man, skilled with horses, and he has never once lost a sheep to the wolves. He would provide well for you. I will talk to your father about this, but I think he could be a good husband for you, if you preferred him to Tagan.” More softly she asked, “What do you think?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “I know you like the open plains. They sing, don’t they? Like no voice a woman or man could produce.” She breathed deep, as if hearing the wind, as if it tangled her hair and gusted her scarf like a horse’s tail and set her earrings a-jangle, like some kind of small, women’s instrument. She missed it, I knew. “With him, you will live there, and no village will soften it.”

  Would he want a yurt full of sons, one for each of his horses? Although he had looked at me like a friend, he remained a man.

  “I would like to live on the plains,” I managed to say.

  “I wasn’t ready, either,” my mother said, “and it was very difficult, and I wasn’t happy.”

  “And now you are,” I murmured.

  “Very, although it makes me sad to see that you’re not.”

  If every new bride with a good husband became happy, like my mother and Yazjemal and Aynabat, perhaps I would, too. Perhaps Tagan or Biashim would make me smile.

  “Shall I make some fresh tea?” I said. “And then we can sit together. I suppose I have to finish my trousseau very soon.” I tried to smile, even though I couldn’t fit myself into the pattern of happily married women, and felt like a glass bead in a pile of turquoise.

  “Perhaps the stories you heard were just that,” my father said to Gariagdy just outside the yurt door. “Stories. As true as anything a traveller tells after enough time away from his home. The woman looks foreign; perhaps that’s all it took for fabulous metal machines to sprout from the men’s mouths.”

  I heard them as I finished laying out dinner, and strained not to miss a word over the sound of my mother and Yazjemal discussing the patterns Yazjemal’s distant sister liked to shape on large pieces of round, flat bread.

  “But,” Gariagdy said, “the nomads apparently heard about it from the Hadjis, and I doubt they would lie.”

  “Hadjis remain men, occasionally given to a fanciful tale or exaggeration.” But I heard doubt in my father’s voice.

  “Then what of the Hadji who slept in their yurt only last night, weathering out the storm, who claims to have seen a metal creature tucked away in their possessions?”

  I almost dropped the bowl of steaming rice. How could Aynabat have been so careless to let someone see that?

  “Did he think that it could be some fancy item of jewellery, perhaps, from the wife’s land?” my father asked.

  “He didn’t know. He didn’t look in any of their boxes, though he was very curious; it reminded him of Houran talking about steam-powered inventions and other kinds of devices.”

  “Hmm.”

  When my father stepped inside moments later, he wore a frown like an approaching dust cloud. I considered saying something – Aynabat means us no harm, please, leave her alone, let her be
my friend, I need her – but every possible defence dried in my throat. I placed out bowls for tea and retreated to the side of the yurt where my mother sat with Yazjemal and the small girls.

  After dinner, my mother joined my father for another conversation that I simultaneously wanted to ignore and hear every word of.

  “Biashim seems to be a good man,” my father said thoughtfully, “but Tagan’s family is very wealthy, their lifestyle more stable, more secure, than that of a nomadic horse breeder. Biashim could lose all his stock in a raid, and lose Dursun, to men who will treat her cruelly.”

  “Raids can affect all people,” my mother murmured. “A nomad is fiercer in a fight; he knows better how to defend his family.”

  “Do you want Dursun to marry a fierce man?”

  I stared into my tea as if it could produce a perfect husband, one who never wanted a child.

  “We know Tagan better,” my father said. “We know that he’s going to treat Dursun well. I think Biashim could be a very good husband, certainly in terms of temperament, but he’s so young. He could change.”

  And, I thought, his family’s bride-price would not be as high. No one voiced that consideration, but I knew my parents would be thinking it.

  When my mother privately asked me for my preference, I said only, “Choose who you think is best. I trust you.” No man would be perfect. What else mattered?

  A day later I slipped away, unable to bear the sight of my trousseau. I wandered through the village, lost as a mote of dust.

  I saw Aynabat’s yurt and remembered my fear for her.

  “How are you?” she asked, welcoming me inside with a smile and an offer of tea.

  “You and Houran mustn’t talk to people about your metal things.”

  My directness made Aynabat look suddenly awake. “Why do you say so?”

  “It’s European. We don’t want Europeans here.” I stopped my tongue. What a stupid way to phrase it, when I wanted so much for her to stay. But it was true. “We don’t want European things or European influence. We don’t need it.”