Before the song had ended, he heard a scrabbling sound outside his window and when he opened the sash, he was confronted with the face of the smallest of the mechanical hounds from the cavern. He fell back, making room to do battle with the beast, but it only stepped delicately into the room and looked up at him with its flickering electric eyes.
After a moment of stilted silence the dog spoke: “What would you have me do, Master?”
Thunderstruck, the soldier sat down on the hard chair beside the door. “Who would have thought…?” he muttered.
“What would you have me do, Master?” the mechanical beast repeated.
“Can you dig a well?”
“I cannot, Master. But I can fetch the digging machine to you.”
“Can you, indeed, little dog?”
The gleaming metal dog nodded its heavy head.
“Then fetch the machine and take it to the field beside the last building on the southeast side of the main road of this town. Bring it in darkness or someone may try to stop you, and we’ll drill a new well so deep the town will never run dry again.”
The mechanical dog nodded again. Then it bounded out of the open window and was gone from sight in a moment more.
Once darkness fell and the last lights of the town were extinguished, the soldier went out for a walk and strolled to the eastern edge of the town, where he sat on the edge of a dry horse trough, lit a cigar, and waited to see if the dog would turn up. Moonlight silvered the ground, and the earth sighed the day’s gathered heat into the air, swirling up eddies of fine grit that looked like fairy dust enchanting the cloudless prairie night.
In a while, the soldier could see something coming down the moonlit road from the woods. It marched along on six slim legs and in front of it ran the metal dog. The soldier stood up to meet the dog and its strange companion, which proved to be the walking augur machine he had seen in the cavern so many weeks ago. He pointed to what looked to be a good spot for the well, but the dog sniffed at the ground awhile and led the machine to a different location.
“Well, all right, then,” the soldier said. “Let the drilling begin.”
The machine began to drill into the ground, the dirt and rock spewing out and piling up around the edges of the hole as the bit dug in with a deep grumbling noise.
The soldier stood by and watched the machine. The augur dug steadily for hours with only a few adjustments by the soldier while the town slept on. After a while the sun started peeping over the eastern woodland, and the soldier could hear people stirring and beginning their morning chores.
He turned to regard the stalwart mechanical beast standing beside the tireless augur. “Best hie yourself home now, dog. I’ll look after the drill, but I think it better if no one gets a glimpse of you.”
The dog made a smart turn around and loped away, vanishing into the trees as the sun broke over their tops. The bright orb had barely sent its fingers down to touch the gleaming drill when a geyser of water erupted from the hole it was digging, knocking the walking augur into the air and tumbling it end over end to the very edge of town.
The sound of the machine falling attracted attention, and in a minute a few men and women had gathered to stare at the spring that had appeared overnight in Morton’s field at the edge of town. It wasn’t long before a crowd had encircled the muddy ground and begun talking about the miracle and praising God for it. The soldier edged to the back of the crowd, but not fast enough to elude the eyes of two people who came running along the street to see the source of the ruckus: Sarah and a beanpole of a man wearing a very fine suit and an expression of fury.
The widow hailed him and the man came along. “What happened?” Sarah asked.
“A spring seems to have erupted from the ground while we slept,” the soldier replied.
The tall man scoffed. “It just…appeared here overnight?”
The soldier shrugged. “By the grace of God.”
But the man had already turned his sharp gaze to scour the landscape, and he spotted the broken augur lying like a crippled spider at the edge of the woods. Ignoring the wondering crowd, he ran to the machine and looked it over. When he returned, his expression was thunderous, but he said nothing, merely brushing past the soldier with a glare and ignoring the calls of “Mr. Halprin, Mr. Halprin!” that followed after him. A small number of men detached themselves from the gawking crowd and scurried after him.
Sarah let out an amused snort at the sight. “There they go, kissing Halprin’s backside, but I think they won’t let this be taken away. Even the city council needs water.” Then she turned to regard the soldier with a clear eye. “I suspect you have some idea how this ‘miracle’ came to be.”
“It’s hardly my place to guess at the motives of the Almighty.”
“I was thinking of someone closer to home,” she said, reaching out to take his nearest hand and turn it over to see the light smears of dirt and machine oil that smirched his palm and fingers.
The soldier cast his gaze down and pulled his hand back.
But Sarah was disinclined to let him get away so easily. “Why don’t you come home with me and fetch some buckets? Be a pity to let that water go to waste when there’s so much to clean and cook, and bathe….”
The soldier nodded and followed her, meek as a lamb, but with a smile on his face.
It took two days to build and cap a proper wellhead and most of another to mount the large, gleaming pump donated by Mr. Halprin, but the folks of Stone Crossing went to the job with a will. It took two more days before the city council had declared that there was enough water and pressure to consider Mr. Halprin’s suggestion of a proper civic plumbing project that would pipe water to every building on the main road by the end of the year. Sarah and the soldier both applauded the announcement, but Halprin himself, though hailed publicly as a great man—and privately as a miserly bastard—wore a sour countenance throughout the proceedings, turning a suspicious eye on the soldier and his landlady. But nothing came of his bitter looks, and the town reveled in its wonderful new water supply. The miraculous walking augur was repaired and a second well was drilled west of town to irrigate the fields so that they flushed again with greenery even in the heat, the railroad workers continued their din of industry, and everyone smelled a stretch more pleasant.
Things went on as they had before the drought, except that the soldier smiled once in a while and was seen on occasion strolling with the widow Sarah along the edges of the woods on Sunday evenings. The summer burned out the last of its fury, and the town was left adrift on the golden autumn sea of scythed fields.
As the trees dropped their leaves, red as garnets, on the ground now touched by the silver fingers of frost, the railroad moved west and the folks of Stone Crossing laid up stores for the winter. The soldier began thinking he should do something more than smoke, gamble, drink, and read books in Sarah’s parlor, but what he might do eluded him, for he had known no other trade but war. Should he stay or move on? He grew more fond of the widow with every day that passed and he liked the town well enough, but he did not know what place there was for such a man as he. He pondered on it in the night and was, therefore, the first to see the dreadful ruddy glow that illuminated the western sky when all should have been blanketed in darkness.
The soldier threw open his window and leaned out to see what caused the light. A thread of smoke came on the wind and the whisper of a distant fire, crawling on its ravenous way across the stubbled fields toward the town. For a moment he was seized with a terror of this mindless, devouring thing and he thought to flee, but he knew he could not outrun such a conflagration even if it were not a coward’s act. Then he thought of the metal dog and plucked the music box from his dresser.
He turned the ill-fitting key in the mechanism, but the tune did not ring out after the first wind. He turned it a further revolution and now the cylinder rotated, starting up with a harsh chime of chords, one and then a second chord, before the queer little song began to play.
>
He slipped down the stairs and ran outside in his nightclothes to meet the dog. He gazed toward the woods and saw it coming, bounding across the ground in great leaps, but as it drew near, he realized it was not the knee-high beast that had come to his first call, but the larger dog that had guarded the second room and its machines of destruction. He stiffened his spine and waited, for he could no more run from this beast than from the fire advancing on the other horizon.
The massive hound stopped before him, its sides of copper and brass reflecting red in the distant firelight. “What would you have me do, Master?” the dog asked, its voice rumbling like a rockfall.
“Do you see the fire that comes toward this town?” the soldier asked.
The mechanical beast nodded its brass-bound head, red light flickering across the rivets as large as the soldier’s thumb that picked out the lines of the creature’s face.
“Take the pumping engine from the cave and place it on the crawling wagon, then bring it to me by the western well. Quickly!”
The massive machine-hound turned around and bounded off again without a word.
The soldier began running toward the fire. Soon he was joined by a handful of his neighbors who grabbed up buckets and rushed along with him, though by their frightened words, he knew they held little hope of stopping a prairie fire with nothing but pails and strong backs. As they ran on, the fire gobbled up the western fields and lit the iron rails of the train tracks with orange light that made them glow like ingots fresh from Hephaestus’s forge.
As the soldier and his neighbors neared the edge of town, a wind from the east passed violently by them, blowing back the flames for a moment. The townsfolk turned their heads aside to keep the dust from their eyes, but the soldier did not and saw that the wind came in the path of the metal mastiff that towed the crawling wagon in its wake. The dog dashed on to the well at the edge of the blazing fields, and the soldier followed it.
At the well, the soldier clamped the engine’s hose to the pump and began to fill the tank as rapidly as he could. The townsfolk were slower, but coming toward the well also.
“Quick, dog,” the soldier said, “bring fuel for the crawling wagon!”
Once again the dog ran away and returned in minutes bearing cans of fuel in its massive mouth.
“Good dog!” the soldier cried, and took the fuel. “Now run around the far edge of the fire and dig for all you’re worth—bury the flames if you can. We’ll water them away here and meet in the middle.”
The tireless hound bounded off, disappearing in the smoke that billowed from the burning fields.
The soldier’s neighbors stared and rubbed their eyes, but there was no time to wonder if they had truly seen a giant metal hound and they turned their frantic hands to filling the pumping tank and firing up the motor of the crawling wagon. In minutes, the engine began to creep forward. One of the men from the town climbed up into the wagon to steer it while the rest ran beside it, supporting the hoses and turning them on the flames as the soldier ordered them, low to the ground where the fire ate its fill of the harvest stubble.
Water hissed and steam rose and as the night wore on, more and more people of the town appeared to relieve the men who held the hoses and guided the crawling wagon back and forth along the fire line, pushing the flames back and back, down and down. Through the fire some swore they glimpsed a giant beast scurrying back and forth and throwing up clods of dirt as large as pigs that smothered the fire where they could not break through.
By dawn the fire had been extinguished and the empty fields lay blackened and wet, the warped metal of the railroad curling through the wasteland like petrified snakes, and the tracks of the crawling wagon laid over the ashen mud for a mile. But Stone Crossing stood untouched. Shrouded in the steam and lingering smoke at the middle of the burned field stood the wagon, nose to nose with a tarnished metal beast.
The soldier, steam-scalded, burned, and dirty, sat on the front of the wagon and patted the monster on the snout, its glowing eyes dim, but burning still. “You’ve done well, old dog. Can you return home now on your own?”
The brass beast nodded its massive head and trotted away, its stride covering the miles with ease.
The soldier slid down from the wagon and staggered toward the town, exhaustion weighing his every step as he wove his way across the field. He emerged from the steam and lingering smoke like an apparition and fell to his knees. Near to fainting, he took the little key from his pocket, but before he could do more, Sarah rushed to his side and helped him back to his feet.
“You marvelous fool,” she said, hugging him much closer to her side than necessary. “Don’t say this was the hand of the Almighty at work.”
The soldier slipped the key back into his pocket unseen. “Your preacher says the Lord moves in mysterious ways….”
“I doubt the Lord plunked down a pumping engine in the middle of our fields,” Sarah said, “but I won’t refuse the gifts he has given us. I know a good man when I find one.”
She walked with him until they were enveloped in a crowd of their neighbors. The relieved and ragged folks of Stone Crossing carried the soldier home, right past the scowling face of Mr. Halprin as he stood at the outer edge of the town, alone and white with fury.
At the boardinghouse, the widow put the soldier to bed and it wasn’t particularly remarked upon by anyone that she took it upon herself to bathe his burns and care for him. It was also no further business of theirs that when she kissed his cheek he kissed her back or how those kisses lingered and slid into something more. Some would not even have been entirely surprised if, like the morning sun, they had peeped in the window a day or so later and seen the widow Sarah snuggled against the soldier in his narrow bed and clothed in nothing more than the sheets.
The soldier, however, was taken quite by surprise at these developments, for he had thought the joy and peace he found in her arms had vanished from his heart forever. When she murmured sweet words and stroked her hand across his chest, her fingers lingering and then stopping on the strange scar that lay in the arch of his rib cage like a keystone, his elation crashed to the ground and he stiffened, holding his breath.
“What is this?” Sarah asked. “Does it pain you?”
“It pains me no more, except that it may send you from me.”
She would have inquired further, but a rumpus had begun downstairs and she took herself out of the bed, cursing and putting on her dress in haste. Barely had she closed the buttons when the bedroom door burst in to admit Mr. Halprin and her other tenants in his wake.
The men of the boardinghouse stopped on the threshold, their eyes wide with surprise, but Halprin bulled forward until Sarah blocked his path.
“Step aside, woman,” Halprin demanded.
“I don’t think I shall,” she replied. “You have no right to assault my guests in my house, Mr. Halprin, and I will ask you to leave at once.”
“I’ll have my say before you throw me out of this house where you consort like a whore.”
Sarah slapped him with such force that it turned his head full stop to the side. Then she spoke in clipped tones. “These gentlemen will escort you to the door now.”
Halprin glared over her shoulder at the soldier and jabbed a warning finger his direction. “You stole my dogs and you’ve ruined everything! I don’t know how you managed it all, but if you are still here come morning, you’ll live only long enough to wish you hadn’t come here.”
The soldier gave him a glance as cold as midnight and said, “I mean to stay, sir. Make no mistake: I like this little town and I’ll like it just as much without you in it.”
“Are you threatening me, you miserable scrap of a man?”
“No more than you are me. But you’d do well to recall what befell Morton.”
Halprin straightened like a tree bough snapping back from being bent down, and his nose went up in the air as if the soldier’s words put a stench up his nostrils. “You will regret your trespassing an
d your meddling before I’m through,” he declared. Then he turned and glared at Sarah and her boarders. “As will you all!”
And he stalked away, brushing past Sarah as if her touch were acid. The rest of the boarders fell in around Halprin and conveyed him out the door and down the stairs with chill courtesy. For the first time in the history of Stone Crossing, they barred the door behind him.
Sarah turned back and looked down at the soldier, who had propped himself up in bed and was reaching for the key he always carried in his pocket.
“Do you truly mean to stay?”
“I do, if you’ll have me.”
Sarah looked down at him, puzzled. “Have you? Haven’t we just—?”
“I meant that I should like to marry you, if you will have me once you know the truth of…this,” the soldier added, touching the keystone scar on his chest.
Sarah offered him a bemused smile. “Of course I’ll marry you, fool! How can you imagine that I would run away now? I know these scars are from the war. I know what you have been through, that you have fought—”
“And died,” the soldier said.
Sarah was taken aback, but she sat on the edge of the bed as he patted it for her. Then the soldier told her his tale: how his horse had stepped upon a torpedo and been killed beneath him by the explosion and the sharp metal scrap that cut through the poor creature; how the flying barbs tore into his own face and body, one piercing his heart; how he lay dying, watching his fellows charge ahead on the disarmed ground vouchsafed to them by his noble horse; and how he had awakened again in a makeshift hospital with a clockwork heart ticking away in his chest—the “gift” of a half-mad surgeon driven to save whomever he could by whatever means, no matter how unnatural.
Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables Page 9