A fluttering murmur arose from the noblewomen. Without glancing over his shoulder, Anton knew that the last of their number had arrived. Every New Year’s Eve, the dowager’s arrival at the ballroom was the culminating event of the preparations, the signal that the festivities were soon to commence. Carefully timed, as though the old woman had some preternatural sense of when all the others had been bolted and strapped into place, ready to admire and obsequiously comment as she assumed her rightful position among them.
The doctor set to work, with no need of greeting or command. One of the senior maids in the dowager’s retinue took the wrap from her shoulders, the sable fur powdered with snow not yet melted in the ballroom’s heat.
Another waited upon the dowager, who had not accompanied her the year before. When Anton closed his tool kit and stood up, keeping close to the paneled wall, he spotted Gisel. That was when his heart sped and his breath caught in his throat. Not at seeing her face—when had that ever made him other but happy?—but at discerning the fear inscribed upon it. She stood behind all the others, her own gaze downcast, arms close against her ribs, red-chafed hands locked upon some bundle glistening white. The pulse at her throat ticked even faster than his, impelled by whatever terror it was that she felt.
“There.” Herr Dr. Pavel stood back from the dowager, his intricate labors done. “The evening is yours, madam. Enjoy it as you wish.”
“Not yet,” said the woman, now surrounded by the same metal struts and linkages as the other guests. “There are still the best adornments to be put on.” She turned and looked past the knot of chambermaids, to the one farthest behind them. “My pearls—”
Gisel scurried up to the dowager, her hands opening to cup the circled strands.
“Don’t dawdle, child. The ball is to commence at any moment.”
The reason for Gisel’s fear was quickly evident to Anton as he watched her struggle to fasten the pearls around the dowager’s neck. The articulated metal bands came up high enough on the woman, as with all the other noble guests, to make the task more than merely difficult—close to impossible, in fact. His own hands tensed into useless fists as he watched the girl attempting to draw the pearls through the narrow space between the dowager’s wrinkled throat and the inside of the ironwork assembled about her.
“What is the matter with you?” The dowager fidgeted in discomfort, a soured grimace evidencing her dislike of another human being so close. “Is such a simple task beyond you?”
The woman’s sniping words didn’t help. Gisel became even more flustered, her face draining white and her hands shaking with anxiety. Beneath her fingertips, one of the gleaming strands caught in the angle of a metal hinge. She tugged at the graduated length, attempting to free it. The silken thread inside snapped—the tiny, precious spheres flew in all directions, bouncing and clattering on the ballroom floor.
“Cretin!” The dowager’s face was a wrinkled mask of fury as her bony hand slapped Gisel. “Idiot! Look what you’ve done.”
“I’m sorry—” Gisel was already down on her hands and knees, trying to gather up all the scattered pearls. Futile—some of them had rolled and vanished into the grooved apertures through which the various machinery from the cellars below protruded, scalding vapors hissing along the jointed armatures. “I didn’t mean—”
“The smallest of them is worth more than you.” The point of the dowager’s heeled boot caught Gisel in the ribs, hard enough to evoke a gasp from her. “Twenty of such as you!”
Anton wouldn’t have thought there was so much strength in gthe old woman. As he watched, another kick brought a spatter of blood from Gisel’s mouth. If it hadn’t been for the cagelike mechanism bolted into place around the dowager’s voluminous silken skirt, her anger might have been enough to take off the offending girl’s head.
“Don’t—” Herr Dr. Pavel laid a restraining hand across Anton’s chest as he had stepped forward from the wall. “I’ll take care of it.”
Tears had diluted pink the blood that Gisel smeared with her palm as she huddled into a ball, knees against her breast. She barely looked up as the doctor interposed himself between her and the dowager. “But an accident,” he soothed. “No harm was intended—”
The dowager’s rage continued without respite. She was even smiling, a slash across her starkly rouged face, as her gloved and jeweled hand struck the doctor. Her eyes glittered in triumph as he fell at her feet.
A blow such as that wouldn’t have been enough to kill the doctor—Anton knew that. Perhaps it was the shame, to be treated as a mere servant in front of all this nobility. It didn’t matter. He pressed his own spine tighter to the paneled wall, gazing with dire presentiment at the unmoving figure crumpled on the ballroom floor.
The manager of the dowager’s estates came down to the cellar, to talk with Anton.
He sat on a little wooden crate that at one time had held canisters of grease for the machinery clanking and wheezing all about them. Up above, he could hear the dancing. The unmanned violins slid their bows across the strings, the sprightly rhythms impelling the aristocratic figures through their motions. Or seeming to—all knew, but pretended not to, that it was actually the various armatures that moved through the openings in the ballroom floor, their pistons and hinges connected to the curved metal bands fastened around the elegant guests.
“You’re aware, aren’t you, that this person’s dead?”
Anton looked over to where the manager, in his black livery, tilted the doctor’s chin with an ink-stained finger. The old man’s face was gray and slack, his eyes already filming over.
“Yes—” He nodded. “I knew that. Even before they brought him down here.”
The distant instruments skirled and stuttered through a Hungarian galop, its rapid notes audible through the mechanical clamor closer at hand. From below, he could hear the roaring of the furnaces, driving every step of cavalry boot and sweep of lace-fringed gown.
“So I can hardly pay you, can I?” The manager pulled his hand back, letting the doctor’s head nod back onto his motionless chest. “Our contract is with him. Or rather, it was. His unfortunate demise would seem to nullify the relationship. Did he have heirs?”
A shake of the head as Anton bit his lower lip. He was not surprised at what the manager, with the accounts book in a pocket of the swallow-tailed coat, told him now—he had expected as much, in his own sinking heart. But to hear it pronounced with gallows finality, that he would not receive his year’s wages, which Herr Dr. Pavel had always settled upon him as the midnight bells had struck—that he would go homeless and hungry, peering through shuttered shop windows for even the illusory hope of some new employment—he felt his hollow stomach clench at the thought of the empty, wintry streets that lay outside the Apollosaal.
“If he had such, you might apply to them.” The manager drew on his gloves. “For what’s owed to you.”
Anton said nothing. He knew no one owed him anything now. That was the way of this world.
He watched the estates manager mount the creaking iron rungs, spiraling back up to the light and music above.
Alone once more with his former master’s corpse, he leaned forward where he sat, arms across his knees, hands working themselves into a brooding knot. His own hunger he scarcely minded. He was used to that. But Gisel had surely lost her place in the dowager’s service. If he were able to pay for even a few more weeks of the attic room’s shelter, he might have taken her there and wrapped his arms about her as they lay on the brown-spotted straw heaped in one narrow corner. He might have kept her safe there as they both waited for the cold year to turn, the snows to melt under spring’s desperately longed-for advance. They had both whispered plans to each other, that he might break from the doctor’s drudging employ, that they both might flee from the city and live on wild apples and snared woodcocks turned on rudely fashioned spits, the two of them crouched around a small fire’s blackened stones….
Even if it had been just for one spring and su
mmer, before the first chill winds inched through the hills—they would at least have had that much. Which would have been enough, or at least enough to tell each other so. But now they wouldn’t. He turned his head, looking over at the doctor’s slumped form. They never would.
Heavy with resolve, Anton stood upright, pushing the wooden box aside with the heel of his foot. For a moment, he looked around himself at the churning machinery, the levers and pistons pumping away at the linkages to the ballroom above. If he tilted his head back, he could see small bright glimpses of the light from the glittering chandeliers, interrupted by the quick, relentless motion of the dancers, swirling in their courses from one end of the grand space to the other.
He watched and listened, then turned toward the valves and gauges spanning the basement’s walls. He reached out and grasped one of the small iron wheels, hesitated a moment—then twisted it as far as he could, until it could open no farther. Each of the valves hissed at him as he did the same to them. When he was done with the last, he stepped back, listening to the machinery shake faster and faster. Clouds of scalding vapor filled the chamber as he turned and made his way to the stone steps leading even farther below.
The stokers turned their silent gaze toward him. The flames beyond the iron doors glinted on the sweat and soot of their naked chests.
“More,” said Anton. He brought his own gaze from each man to the next, one after another. “Higher.” He raised his hand and pointed to the furnaces behind them. “All you can give.”
They looked about at each other, then back to him. First the closest one slowly nodded; then they all did. A time had come that the stokers in their chains had thought would never come to them. They turned away, thrusting the blades of their shovels into the heaps of coal, hurling one load after another into the mounting flames.
Even before Anton retreated onto the steps, he felt the dizzying heat wash over him as though it were the tide of a fiery ocean. He brought a forearm across his eyes, to shield himself from the vision of suns bursting to life inside the furnaces.
He found Gisel at the back of the crowds outside the Apollosaal. The townspeople pressed their faces close to the high-arched windows, gaping through the blood-spattered glass at the whirling scene within.
“Don’t you want to see them?” Gisel pulled her rough woolen shawl tighter about herself. This far away from the columned building, the snowflakes remained unmelted, clinging to her golden hair. “You told me you never liked them, either.”
“I don’t need to,” said Anton. That was true—when he had come up from the basement, he had walked through the grand ballroom. He had stayed close to the wall to avoid the caged figures of the nobility, whirling about in the interminable courses through the glittering space. Impelled by the unleashed machinery protruding from the floor’s gaps, the corseted men and women moved with such velocity that the slightest impact might have sent him sprawling unconscious.
At the sudden noise of the windows shattering, he wrapped Gisel in his arms, turning his back toward the Apollosaal and shielding her from the shards of glass. There were at least a few people in the crowd whose faces were nicked by the bright flying bits, like a gale of razor-edged ice crystals. They didn’t even notice the trickles of red running down their throats as they pushed and scrabbled with the others, climbing inside the ballroom to gaze at the dead marvels there.
Dead or dying—he had seen at least a few, as he had made his way along the side of the ballroom, who might still have been at least partly alive, the last of their strength and breath ebbing away. Slumped in the cages of the whirling machinery, medals dangling from hollow chests, jewels draped over cold breasts, their bodies kept erect only by the confines of the iron bands as they swept in one great circle with the others, from one end of the ballroom to the other, then around again and again. The clattering of the machinery, along with the hissing and groans from the boilers beneath, was all that could be heard in the ballroom. That other music, all allegro and dash, had ceased when the violins’ strings had been sawn through by the ceaseless, back-and-forth fury of the bows.
Anton let go of the living form in his arms. He walked over to the dead one that had crashed through the ballroom window, flung by the mechanism that had disintegrated about the woman, its iron bands snapped at last by the force of the dance. The dowager’s kid-leather boots were sodden red now, the feet bloodied to pulp inside them. After she could no longer dance, the machines had danced for her and the others caught inside them. Now twin pools of red seeped through the trampled snow, which thawed with their thinning heat, then froze again. The empty eyes looked up at him, with nothing but the night’s heavy clouds reflected at their dulling centers.
But only for a moment. He felt Gisel stepping close beside him, then saw one of her rag-wrapped clogs kick the dowager’s face, hard enough to crack bone and snap its lifeless gaze to one side.
“Don’t—” He wrapped his arms around her again, pulling her away as she burst into sobbing tears. “It’s all right. It is, it is…”
Even more terrible things were happening inside the grand ballroom. As he led Gisel away, he could hear vengeful shouts and laughter, the creak of metal wedged asunder, bludgeons of stick and fist upon withered flesh.
In the center of the city’s widest street, he held her close to himself. They both looked far beyond the skeletal trees at either side, toward the ancient Roman walls. The half-naked stokers were lifting the beams onto their blackened shoulders, unbarring the gates tall as clock towers. Massive iron hinges groaned as the gates slowly parted, the stokers gripping and pulling the timbers’ edges toward themselves.
He closed his eyes and pressed his face to the snow that had traced across Gisel’s hair. Soldiers who wore no medals, with worn boots of rough, unpolished leather, and hard-faced commissars with machine pistols rather than swords at their belts, astride horses lean and bony-ribbed from their long trek across the steppes—they would enter unopposed now, gazing around at all that had fallen so easily into their hands.
He held her even tighter, her heart in time with his.
Things would be different now.
Fair Vasyl
by Steven Harper
(BASED ON THE RUSSIAN FAIRY TALE
“VASILISA THE BEAUTIFUL”)
“I’m going up,” Vasyl said.
Petro caught his arm with strong fingers. “Don’t be a fool! The penalty—”
“I know the penalty.” Vasyl shook himself free of his friend’s grip and climbed the stairs in chilly autumn air. A chattering crowd in Kiev’s Khreshchatyk Square hushed in stages as they realized that someone was taking up the challenge. Vasyl’s heart beat faster with every step and his stomach felt tight as sheet metal. At the top of the wooden steps on the wide platform sat Vyktor Ivanovych, the mayor of Kiev, dressed in all his red velvet finery. The heavy gold chain beneath his beard indicated his office, and he occupied an elaborately carved chair. Behind him stood a mechanical man in gold livery. It carried a tray of food and a crystal goblet of wine. Vasyl quavered at the intimidating display, so fine compared to his simple work boots and oil-stained shirt. Even his tinker’s pack and cap had oil stains on them. He quickly snatched off the latter, revealing deep red hair.
Beside the mayor, on a much smaller chair, sat Hanna Vyktorevna, the mayor’s daughter. Her golden hair, azure eyes, and graceful figure made Vasyl think of an autumn sunrise, both beautiful and untouchable. She was nineteen now, time for her to marry. Ivanovych wanted Hanna to marry a prince, but no princes called on the daughter of a mayor.
As time passed, it became more and more embarrassing that Hanna remained single, and Ivanovych decided that if his daughter couldn’t marry a prince, she must at least have a husband who proved himself by fulfilling a task set by the mayor himself, a task sure to be all but impossible. As a result, this was the seventh Sunday the mayor had put his daughter on display, and no one had dared approached the platform.
No one until now.
Ivanovych looked Vasyl up and down. “Who are you?”
“My name—” Vasyl’s voice broke. He coughed and tried again. “My name is Vasyl Mykhailovych, and I wish to marry your daughter.”
The crowd broke into unexpected applause. Vasyl caught a glimpse of Petro standing among them. His lifelong friend’s face was grim. Petro was a Tatar, from the Crimea, which meant he had dark hair and a swarthy complexion. Years of working as a blacksmith had given him a powerful build, and his kind face caught the attention of any number of women, but he had shown no interest in any of them since the death of his wife nine years ago. At the moment his brown eyes were hard with disapproval, and Vasyl almost left the platform right then.
The applause died down and the mayor held out his hand. “Wine,” he said, and his mechanical handed him the crystal goblet with precise movements. “Your occupation, Mykailovych?”
Vasyl shifted the little pack of tools on his back. “I am a simple tinker, sir.”
Hanna glanced at him, then looked away, her face carefully impassive. The mayor pointed a beringed finger and replied, “Does that wish to marry her as well?”
Coming up the stairs was a brass machine. It was a skinny, pointed staff with two long arms that ended in vaguely human hands. The bottom of the staff flared out wide like a bell with wheels on the bottom. To navigate the stairs, it hitched itself upward with its arms, one step at a time, laboring with the effort but refusing to give up. Steam puffed from several seams.
“Broom!” Vasyl said. “You didn’t have to come up here.”
The unclear command caught Broom off guard. He hesitated at the top of the steps and tipped dangerously backward.
“Wait!” Vasyl called. “Come here, Broom.”
Broom scrabbled a moment, regained his balance, and scuttled over to Vasyl, where he waited with folded hands. The crowd laughed.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 2