The Hod King

by Josiah Bancroft

  Invariably, Bryon found her, and when he did, he’d scold her for shirking her lessons and for sitting on a stool, which a lady absolutely did not do. When Voleta demanded an explanation for why a lady could not sit on a stool, Byron’s answer was hardly satisfying: “According to Lady Graverly’s Table, stools are inherently masculine seats. It is impossible for a lady to sit upon a stool without inferring a certain … flexibility of virtue.”

  “Oh, really? What else can’t a lady sit on?” Voleta asked.

  Byron ticked the forbidden furniture off on his velveteen fingers. “Banisters, swings, saddles, ottomans, and love seats, for obvious reasons.”

  There were a thousand rules for how she must conduct herself in “polite society.” If something wasn’t a rule, then it was a custom. And if it wasn’t a custom, then it was ladylike, an adjective that was as expansive as it was loathsome. Voleta had begun to build a mental list of all the beloved activities that were not considered ladylike, including: climbing trees, carrying fruit in her pockets, eating without a plate, eating without a fork, eating in general, letting a squirrel live in her blouse, hiding in closets, crawling through vents, tying knots in her skirts, spying on people, laughing, slouching, joking, running, and sitting where and when she pleased.

  She knew it was all for a good cause—to reunite Senlin with his wife—and perhaps she could’ve even forgiven Byron the indignity and the tedium if it weren’t for the fact that while she was learning how to manage a hoopskirt on a bench seat, Edith and Iren were off having the time of their lives on the bridge of the ship! They were plotting courses and hunting currents and firing the cannons and swooping so close to the upper ringdoms their draft sucked the caps right off the heads of the port guards. They were testing the hull speed of the greatest airship the world had ever known while she was learning the appropriate honorific for an earl’s second wife and how to curtsy in a manner that did not evoke a bucking horse.

  Edith had expelled her from the bridge the moment the ship had left the Sphinx’s hangar. Edith—Captain Winters—had made it clear that she had been banished because she could not be trusted to obey orders and because the bridge contained more buttons than an accordion. No one, not even the madman, was sure what all the doohickeys did, but they were all convinced that she could not be trusted to leave them alone. Voleta found the assumption insulting, and she had half a mind to run in there and mash some keys just to prove them right.

  It seemed a pity that Adam wasn’t there to explore the ship and her intricate consoles. Voleta had no doubt he would’ve been smitten with the titanic vessel. She wondered if he would’ve stayed had he known about the State of Art. Or had he been so eager to get free of them—of her—that not even a winged marvel could’ve enticed him to stay? She didn’t like to dwell on the question.

  Voleta suspected that her exile from the bridge wasn’t actually to punish her rebelliousness. No, the captain and Iren were trying to keep her as far away from the madman as possible.

  When Voleta learned that the Sphinx had named the Red Hand as the ship’s pilot, she had been baffled. Yes, the Sphinx was always mysterious and often contrary, but she wasn’t an imbecile or a saboteur. So why in the world would she dispatch a recently paralyzed and half-dead murderer to serve under the very woman who had tried to kill him? It made no sense! Voleta had many questions she wished to put to the Sphinx, but she had not been given the opportunity to ask them. In the final days before their departure, the Sphinx had not only refused to see her, but she had also locked her workroom door, sealed the airshafts to the conservatory (and the only climbing tree for miles), and commanded Ferdinand to chase Voleta out of the corridor if he ever saw her. Voleta had tried on a few occasions to charm the locomotive doorman with song and play, but the lumbering engine would only allow himself to be distracted until she tried to open one of the myriad doors in the Sphinx’s home. Then Ferdinand would stomp his elephantine feet, pick her up by her nightgown, and carry her swinging and upside down back to the crew’s apartment. And so, Voleta’s brief friendship with the Tower’s most enigmatic hermit seemed to have come to an unceremonious end.

  Which was fine with Voleta—or so she tried to convince herself.

  Still, for all the captain’s efforts to keep them separated, Voleta had met the Red Hand, at least in passing.

  She had been on her way to join Byron in the dining hall when she nearly bowled into the Red Hand on his way out. She bucked and gave a little shout of surprise, and he pressed himself against the doorway with his hands up. He palmed something that glinted in the light. She got a good look at him then, this man who she’d only seen once from a distance and through a snowstorm. His head looked like a boiled egg. His hair was as spare and coarse as the fur of a kiwi fruit. He had deeply set, almost piggish eyes and a wide mouth. He was no taller than her, yet she could feel the greater gravity of his presence.

  The Red Hand said, “So sorry, my girl! I’m as thoughtless as a comet.”

  Perhaps it was because she’d spent the morning practicing small talk with Byron, but before she could stop herself, she found herself asking: “Did you have a nice lunch?”

  The Red Hand tossed a pair of empty glass vials into the air, caught them, and exclaimed, “Oh, yes! It was delicious! Like sipping sunshine from a volcano.”

  Then Edith appeared behind him, scowling to have caught him talking to Voleta. She said, “Go on, airman. You’ve had your victuals. Leave the lady alone.”

  “Aye aye, Captain!” the Red Hand said. Before he turned away, Voleta could’ve sworn she saw a little wisp of steam rise off of his eyes.

  On the sixth day into their promenade about the Tower, Byron summoned Voleta to the dining room to review the politics of seating charts, the subtleties of utensils, and general napkin etiquette. The room was all mahogany and brass, curlicues and cursive. The high-backed booths were intricately carved with vines that melded with the wild hair of women who seemed to float just beneath the surface of the wood grain. Electric sparks suspended inside voluminous glass bulbs lit the ornate room. It was a cozy enough space that would’ve benefitted from the presence of other diners, or servers, or food.

  Voleta slouched before an empty plate that was fortified on three sides by no fewer than eleven utensils. The formal setting also included five glasses, two saucers, and a pair of folded napkins.

  “Sit up straight,” Byron commanded. His precise pronunciation seemed at odds with his strange, reedy voice. “No, not like that. Like this. Straight, but naturally so. No, like a tulip, not a yardstick. Better. Now, once more.” Byron took a deep breath. “Pick up the fish knife and fish fork.”

  Voleta surveyed her options miserably. “I think humanity peaked at the spoon, don’t you? A spoon can serve as a fork, a knife, a ladle … A good spoon is all you need, really.”

  “And I will tell you again, if you ever eat your fish with a spoon, I will appear out of thin air wherever you are in the world, snatch the spoon from your hand, and rap you on the head with it!” Byron arranged the silky black cravat upon his red vest. “Now, show me the fish knife and fish fork, please.”

  Voleta selected a fork and knife, scraped them together, and started to saw at the empty plate just to make the porcelain squeal.

  Byron’s antlers shivered, and his long ears drooped. “That is the bread knife and the cake fork. Try again.”

  Voleta stamped the utensils upon the tablecloth, making the glasses ring. “This doesn’t make any sense!”

  “You’re absolutely right.” Byron reached across the table and scooted the utensils back to their proper place. “The reason you have to be taught this is that none of it makes any natural sense. None of it is logical. You could sail across every ocean, summit every mountain, survive a thousand seasons, and never discover the proper time to drink out of a saucer. The answer is never. Never drink out of a saucer.”

  “What if I just refuse to eat? What if I just sit on my hands and nod and smile and say nothing at all?
They can’t find any fault if I don’t do anything.”

  “Of course they can! They’ll assume you’re an imbecile or a snob or someone who can’t tell a gravy boat from a teapot. Voleta, you have to understand, customs exist for two reasons: one, to identify insiders; and two, to exclude outsiders. That’s why they’re so tricky and picky and peculiar. Table manners are like … like a long secret handshake, a handshake that goes on for hours and hours until everyone is so full they can’t do their pants up.”

  “That’s revolting.”

  “So it is. But, my irritating ingenue, if you want to get invited to the sort of parties Marya gets invited to, you have to practice the secret handshake.”

  “All right! Fine! What about this? Is this the fish fork?”

  “Good! And what about the fish kn—”

  The hull of the ship rang about them. The light bulbs swung, and the china rattled. Voleta knew at once it was the cannons. By the sound of it, all the guns on the portside had been fired in a single volley.

  Voleta began to scoot out of the bench seat, but Byron reached over and took her wrist before she could get to the end of the booth. “No. No, no. Stay right there. We haven’t finished our lesson.”

  “But there’s a war on!”

  “Don’t be so dramatic! You know they’re just showing off. If it’s anything more than that, then they’ll sound the alarm.” Voleta’s arm went limp in his grip, and she slumped back down. “And this gives us a chance to practice another important skill. You have to learn to keep your composure even when a plate breaks, or a lady chokes on an olive, or a candle falls over, or the curtains catch fire, or—”

  “Why?” Voleta demanded with arms crossed.

  “Because that’s the benefit of etiquette: It tells us what to do when no one knows what to do.”

  The echo of the cannons on the deck below rumbled on. Voleta watched the tilting water in her wineglass. The ship was rising and turning. “This is torture,” she said.

  “Just wait until the napkin drills,” Byron said and, to demonstrate the form, took her napkin, shook it once, and then drew it across his lap.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You may, but I’m still going to point out the fish knife. It’s this one here. You can remember it because the back edge looks a little like a fin.”

  “Why do you think she saved the Red Hand? Why did she bring him back? Why did she put him in here with us?” The questions came as quickly as cards being dealt. Byron’s expression ossified, and his large eyes stood wide. “I mean, do you think she’s trying to kill us? Do you think she’s just trying to get rid of me?”

  Byron sighed deeply, his long muzzle nearly dropping to his vest front. “It’s not always about you.” The stag looked up again and shook his head. “Look, the Sphinx is shrewd, and adaptive, and almost certainly the greatest mind the Tower has ever produced. But she also doesn’t like to admit her mistakes.”

  “And all of us have to pay for it.”

  “Perhaps,” Byron said, his gaze following his hand as it arched upon the table, a tentative gesture, a small plea for patience. “And I have told her more than once that she should admit her errors, fix them if they can be fixed or destroy them if they’re beyond redemption, and move on to the next attempt.”

  “I’m not saying I want to see the Red Hand destroyed, I just don’t understand why the Sphinx had to—”

  “I wasn’t talking about the Red Hand. I was talking about myself.”

  Voleta scowled. “Wait. You asked the Sphinx to destroy you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  The intimacy of the admission made her squirm in her seat. She huffed through a few false starts, not knowing where to look or what to say, then finally blurted, “Honestly, Byron, and I don’t mean this to sound awful … I don’t know where you came from or even what you are.”

  “I’m a muddy miracle, is what I am!” he said with a flash of his former hubris, though it quickly softened. He gave a long, unsteady exhalation. “And also, I am an experiment. You see, the Sphinx learned after years of breeding beasts for specific tasks that animals are unpredictable and limited in what they can reliably do. She could breed bull snails to grease the Basement plumbing easily enough, and parrots to make the beds and serve as town criers. But try as she might, she could not, for example, breed an animal to find and repair the cracks in the face of the Tower. So she built a machine for that and for other jobs, too. For a while, it seemed that any need could be answered with an engine. For a while.

  “But the trouble with autonomous engines is that they’re dumb and easily manipulated. All the Sphinx’s engines are easy to hijack. Every time she would send a new machine into the world, it was only a matter of time before someone captured it and recast it as a war machine or a mule or a steed. You can’t imagine how much it grieved her to see her wall-walkers transformed into crawling cannons. The ringdoms turned all her gifts into obscenities. And then she made me.”

  “But where did you … Where did the stag part of you come from?”

  “I was a pet. I was brought back as a fawn from a hunt in the north plains. I suspect the people who brought me here probably also killed my mother. I was given as a present to a princess in the ringdom of Oyodin, or so I’m told. I don’t remember it at all. Apparently, after a year or two in her care, I fell ill or perhaps I was just neglected. Whichever it was, I was delivered to the Sphinx in a hopeless state. I was dying, all but dead.”

  “I’m so sorry. How awful! If I ever find the princess of Oingodin who mistreated you, the two of us are going to have words. Then we’re going to have fists and feet. And maybe a shovel!” Voleta boxed the air and mimicked the pleas of a frightened princess. But soon, she felt silly and strangely helpless, and the play lost its fun.

  “I don’t know how the Sphinx gave me the ability to think and speak as I do, or how I came to inhabit this body. I suspect it involved her medium, but she has never told the details of my rebirth.”

  Voleta gazed at him with fresher eyes. “I still don’t understand why you’d say you were a mistake. I think you’re actually rather marvelous, I mean other than your personality.”

  “It’s possible, I think, to be so many things at once that you’re practically nothing at all. If you crush a mountain and spread it across a continent, it doesn’t make little mountains; it just vanishes into dust.” Byron drew the napkin from his lap and began absentmindedly folding it into the shape of a boat. “I’m not as tireless or amiable as the animals she’d breed in the past. I’m not as strong and dexterous as her other engines. I haven’t been embraced by the men and women who I’ve met, which makes me useless as any ambassador to the ringdoms. I am not a beast, a machine, or a man. I have no place at all and no purpose but to serve the Sphinx as I can.”

  “So you went to the trouble of learning all of this,” Voleta said, waving a hand over the table setting, “because you hoped they would accept you?”

  Byron finished the napkin boat and set it on the open table before him. “It turns out that knowing my cake fork from my snail fork can’t quite make up for these.” He reached up and flicked the thorny tip of one of his antlers.

  “I don’t think … no, I know the Sphinx would never do anything to hurt you, Byron. She loves you. And I don’t think you’re even in the same category as the Red Hand. He’s something else entirely. I think he is a mistake.”

  “Well,” Byron said, delivering a practiced and almost convincing shrug, “time will tell.”

  Chapter Two

  My grandfather, the royal magistrate, famously said: “Sometimes a prisoner would rather stare at a bare wall than a barred window.”

  Or, put another way, ladies: “Do not taste the cake your figure cannot afford.”

  —Lady Graverly’s Table: Rare Graces and Common Shames

  Voleta spread the shaggy bath mat on the steel floor near the midway point of the gun deck.

  The gun deck had turned out to be a surprisi
ngly good pitch. The floor was unriveted and as smooth as a watch crystal. The alley between cannons was wide enough to accommodate a field of nine or ten lanes, should she ever be able to assemble so many players, and that would still leave room for a verge on either side for the onlookers. Yes, when bath-mat sledding took off as a sport, the dimensions of the State of Art’s gun deck would be cited as the standard.

  Voleta still wore the big-skirted dress Byron had put her in for their evening dance lesson, though she had taken off the hard slippers that nipped her ankles and blistered her heels. For a few hours every afternoon, Byron sequestered himself inside the Communication Room, where he received and dispatched the Sphinx’s winged spies and messengers, and in doing so, gave Voleta a much-needed break from the tyranny of polite society.

  The cool floor felt good on her bare feet. On either side of her, two tiers of cannons pointed at the sealed gun ports. The barrels of the guns had been forged to resemble a variety of animals. They evoked the stretched and stylized bodies of tigers, dogs, elephants, lions, hawks, and wolves, and all of them with round mouths that seemed caught between a pucker and a roar. A mechanical figure stood by the breech of each of the sixty-four guns. The cannoneers looked like toy soldiers, with red jackets and black shakos and expressionless, perfectly round heads, but they were much cleverer than toys. Voleta had once managed to see the gunners in action, reloading the cannons between volleys. They twirled their sponge-rammers like batons and shifted cannonballs as if they weighed nothing at all. The cannons had been cleaned, reloaded, and reset before she could count to seven. Then they fired once more. It felt as if she were trapped inside a thunderclap.

  But presently, the toy soldiers were still, the cannon zoo silent.

  Bath-mat sledding was a dangerous sport. She had already bruised the underside of her chin during one tumble and cut her shin from another. The challenge was to carry as much velocity as possible from the run up to the leap, but not so much speed that she lost her balance and pitched forward onto her face. She used the cannons as a unit for measuring the distance of her sled rides. So far, her record was seven and a half gun bays.