by Charlie Nash
He closes the door. “Are you followed?”
She shakes her head. “At least, I think not. Artemis’s dogs are swift and silent.”
He cocks his head. “Artemis’s dogs—?”
“I am afraid, Physician.”
“Of whom?”
“Of the others. Of the fire bird. Of the end times.”
In his line of work, he has seen many with illnesses of the mind, and these words are like theirs. Words erupted above white stretched shirts, beneath brows greasy with imagined fears. Perhaps he has imagined the whole, crazed story, too. But she has not the cast of those types. His fingers settle on the cog, still in his pocket. He draws it out and shows her.
“I didn’t imagine you, did I? You are real?”
Her nod is sharp. “And once flesh, like you.”
“Then who did this to you?”
The question paints terror in her features. “I must go.”
And she flies from the shop before he can stop her. His questions tumble over themselves. If she was once flesh, then someone has transformed her. Someone knows what he wants to know; the juncture of man and machine, the Darwinian cheat, the key of immortality.
So when another knock comes, he leaps up, hoping she has returned, only to find Terrance on the stoop.
“It’s Greek,” he confirms, shaking evening drizzle from his flat cap. “But not modern. Not even biblical. Ancient. Someone has played a joke on you, John. A student, perhaps. Unless you’ve been playing in the digs.”
“What does it say?”
“It says, Made by the hands of Hephaestus.” Then Terrance glances around the shop with its jars of potions and powders. His face darkens, his thoughts as clear as if he had spoken: all this is a testament, man’s attempt to thwart the will of God with medicine and science. To dismiss prayer and acceptance. Terrance is soon gone, the rekindled accord fizzling in his wake.
But John has what he wants. Hephaestus. He knows that name, learnt on the hard benches of his schooling. A god of the ancient pantheon. He pulls a dusty text from his shelf and sits heavily on the chaise. Hephaestus, a smith god. And now some great inventor has taken the name. John reads, his blood thundering. God also of metal and fires and craftsmen. Created the weapons of the gods. Married to Aphrodite, later Aglaea. He reads on, of automatons built to work the forges. Of the winged sandals of Hermes, of Achilles’ armor.
This is mythology. Made-up gods and made-up faith, like the arguments that split he and Terrance apart. He slams the book with a shudder of dust, his thoughts balanced on a thin edge. Then he decides.
She is no myth. He has repaired her, heard her words. Smelled her skin. So this Hephaestus … he too must be real.
When she comes again, he knows it was not by choice. Her arm has seized, and it changes her fluid walk into a stare-drawing shuffle. She doesn’t have to ask. He sits her on the chaise and gathers what tools he has. She stares at the high corner of the room, tears brimming.
“I am an apothecary,” he says gently, before he begins. “I know not what I am doing. Should you not find someone who knows this work? Return to Greece, perhaps?”
“There is no one who knows this work, not anymore,” she says.
“Hephaestus?” he tries. But even as the word leaves him, he senses the tension tugging through her skin. This name has meant something awful to her.
“He is dead.” Her voice is flat and final.
A pressure forms behind his breastbone. A master craftsman, gone. Someone with the name of a god, with god-like craft. “That’s a shame,” he says.
Her face hardens. “It is a sign. Gods do not die.”
He tries to take a breath and finds himself paralyzed. It is as though he is speaking with Terrance again, things taken seriously that are not real.
“The firebird is building its bower,” she goes on. “If I die, the Age will end.”
Here are words again that speak to him of madness. And he would think her mad, if he didn’t know she was a machine. If this situation were not mad enough already. If he had not decided to attach himself to her.
He tries escape through reason. “But how can you know this? Even if the world was to end—”
“The Age, not the world,” she corrects him. She pauses, then, “When I was young, long ago, I saw things to come. I saw that I would die. Now the others want to force me to look again.”
“The others?”
“Zeus, Artemis … and Aphrodite.” She says the last name with poison of long regret. He feels the burrs of her emotion catch on him, draw chills along his skin and cut inside his stomach. He tries to tell himself she must be from a family beloved of old stories, whose children were named for imaginary beings long past. But some thin tendril of thought within him knows this is not truth. A dozen times he tries to retreat into the paradigm of the world before he knew her, and he finds he no longer fits through the door. He is in a bleak open plain of thought. A brisk wind pushes against his doubt and his reason.
“What is your name?” he asks, tremulous.
“I am Aglaea.”
He reaches a hand towards her, to make her real, but she cowers back. “You should not touch my skin, or you may see the future, too.”
The last shreds of disbelief tear away.
There is almost nothing written of her. He pours through his meager texts while she watches the flames crackling in the grate. The air is still scented with the delicate oil, the winter frost lurking in the room’s distant edges.
“You are one of the Graces,” he says, lowering the last volume. “Your name means ‘splendor’.”
The air shifts as she settles behind his shoulder. A curious thrill steals across his skin.
“What else does it say?”
“Not much. You were married to Hephaestus—”
“Never.” Her voice is a knife through the very idea.
He clears his throat. “I am sorry, the sources conflict. Others say Aphrodite, though it was not a good match … she teased his deformities.” Aglaea sighs. He goes on, “And you were her attendant?”
A bitter laugh. “Your books are so simple, Physician. This was not how it was.”
He twists from his seat on the floor, looks up into her face. She is splendor to him, both the lilt of her voice, the cast of her features, and the machine within. If this book is not truth, then he wants it from her. Wants to understand how to help her. “Then how was it?”
She hesitates, her gaze falling on her hands. “I can show you, Physician. But what you see will be long past. You risk your mind remaining in the ether.”
The term settles within him like a swallowed stone. “Lord Kelvin believes in the ether. It has led to quintessence, on which the ill-studied physician relies. It is not real.”
She raises her hands. “It is the river from the past to the future, the place of all memory. It is real enough.”
Her hands fall on his shoulders.
His ears pop; he is falling. The ground rushes to meet him, expanding as a great white hall lined with fire pits and benches. He slaps his hands over his ears: hammers pound, hot metal hisses in buckets, furnaces roar, and all echoes amongst the marble.
Then, he hears her voice in his ear. “This is the work hall.” The noise dims.
He stumbles amongst the benches. On some are swords of fine construction. On others, shields, javelins, breastplates and greaves. Behind each bench and forge toils an automaton, dull with soot but tireless, performing the same moves again and again. He reels on, afraid of something ahead without knowing why. He reaches the end where three forges stand apart. Here are parts he recognizes. Silver ribcages, in different stages of design. Fine braided tube. Pumps, such as he has seen in Aglaea’s chest. He stops.
“Keep moving,” she hisses.
Then he sees ahead. Two figures stand by a screen in the hall’s side, far from the noise of the forges. A lady, and a man. No, not a man.
John absorbs the detail. The twist of this figure’s leg, the p
ower in his hands and shoulders. He hears a voice in his head, as if the ether has spoken: Hephaestus. A god. Beside this god, he recognizes Aglaea, in a floating robe, melancholy drooping her shoulders like a shawl. Hephaestus grips her arm and draws her towards the screen. Anger surges within John, but the hands on his shoulders keep him still. “It is a memory, only,” she says, though her voice is choked.
John drifts around, to where he can see their faces. Hephaestus’ smile is a slash across his face, grim and satisfied. Aglaea is the mask of misery. They stare through a screen as fine as muslin, but as rigid as glass. With shock John registers the scene. Another man. No, a god. Full-armored, ravishing a woman in a twist of scarlet sheets. Aphrodite.
Hephaestus forces Aglaea forward. “Look,” he murmurs. “Magnificence.”
Aglaea averts her eyes, but Hephaestus is locked. “Beauty like that, I can give you,” he says, running a finger down Aglaea’s cheek as the debauchery plays out. “Tonight. Forever. It will work this time. And you will be mine, then. And you will tell me what you have seen.”
And despite the obscenity, despite the shame of this, he sees the lift at the corners of her eyes. Hope. Just before she glances to the hall’s end, where two memorials lie side by side. Fear.
As if the ether has catalyzed thought, John understands: Aglaea loved Hephaestus, enough to allow him to transform her body. Even when he had killed her sisters perfecting his technique. Even when he taunts her with hope.
John’s hands curl and compress, emotion feeding a furnace inside his head. Then he is stumbling, the hall turning over. A rush of cold and darkness. Pressure on his cheeks, then on his legs, the crackling heat of the fire on his face. His world returns.
“Physician?” Aglaea’s voice, ribboned with concern.
He holds himself still as the nausea rolls through his guts and thoughts, as if an invisible hand is hauling both into his mouth. He thinks of curative ginger and peppermint, but this is more than sickness. The link between his mind and body feels tight and frayed, ready to snap. Her hands brush his coatsleeves, soothing. It is the ether, let it go. He is not sure whether she is speaking, or if the voice is still in his head. He fights against the phantom organ thief, feeling his mind towed towards insubstance. Let it go!
He gives in, prepares himself to empty his stomach, but instead the sensation slips away. His body is real again. Stiff and bruised, he turns to her worried gaze.
“You mustn’t hold onto the ether,” she warns him.
But he is remembering what he has seen in those brief minutes of memory, glimpsing the depths of her torment. His own self diminishes. He doesn’t need to ask why she allowed Hephaestus to change her. But he wants to know what happens now; his part in it. How he protects her. “What did he want you to show him?”
She retracts, but not as far as before, long fingers unfolding, mechanically smooth, against her chin. “What will come to pass.”
He scrambles to his knees, and takes her hands in his. “And what is that?”
She bites her lip, tiny white teeth.
He implores her, even as he feels the ether pull at him again through her skin. “Please?”
It comes in a rush. “His death. And mine—”
From outside comes the splash of a cartwheel sunk in a puddle. Her eyes snap to the window, widening like a doe caught in the open. Crawling dread claws his skin as he follows her gaze. In his silent stockings, he creeps away from the fire, towards the pitch-black window. Nothing seems amiss; all the smells are familiar, the sounds of a usual night. But something, something…
With trembling fingers, he tears the black sheet from the window. He catches twin lights of slit-centered eyes, the twin bloom of hot breath against the glass, the white flash of a fang. Then, nothing. He stands, stilling his thundering heart, knowing in his ancient brain, the parts Darwin’s processes have never touched, that she has been hunted and tracked here.
Artemis’s dogs are swift and silent.
Eventually, he replaces the pitch and returns to the chaise. He looks on her, in her flowing robes, every inch a woman. Every part a machine. Every inch within his heart.
“You should stay here,” he says.
He cannot avoid his duties. While Aglaea remains in his loft room, he runs the shop in a haze of diminished importance. A week passes this way, and never again does he see the phantom hunting beast, nor sense its presence. Yet every day when he closes, he takes his ancient hunting stick and sweeps around the cobbled streets, returning only when chilled in breath and skin, and he can watch over Aglaea sleeping on his chaise.
Then, there are the repairs. Every day, something in her workings breaks or seizes, and he fixes her as best he can. He asks her why the parts are failing, so obviously well made. A bloom has crept across all the metal within her now. Why is that? She will not speak of it. And so, as each time seems to risk her very existence, a disquiet grows within that he must remedy before he can sleep.
His circles grow wider. Once, he imagines he sees a woman in robes at the mouth of a lane, her hair caught like a marbled statue, a quiver over her shoulder, a stag by her feet. When he blinks, she is nothing but a crone with an overladen basket, a scowl on her face for his stare and her lamp-lit shadow suggesting a deer. He curses himself, but he can’t help it. He mis-sees the robed woman again, and again. Sometimes alone, and sometimes with another: a woman tangled with roses who disappears into sparrows or swans.
He does not tell Aglaea. Finally, after ten days, his widening circle reaches a certain street and he stops. The church spires rise into the darkening night, set afore the full moon. He creeps to the gate and sets his hands about the bars. Buttery light leaks from the chapel windows, a dozen helpful candles. He catches movement to his side. A glance shows him another robe-clad woman, a snake twisted on her arm this time, an owl with glowing eyes atop her head. The clean scent of lemons fills his nose. He shakes himself, looks again. A gaslight post draped with an abandoned harness piece is all he sees.
Is he losing his sanity?
He finds himself back at the Society’s gates, looking for the logic he remembers in the yellow window squares. Instead, he rushes the gate to the adjoining churchyard and crawls into a back-row pew. He is a stranger amongst the faithful, but his real world is stranger still. He drops his head on his hands, in what must look like prayer.
Hours later, a hand touches his shoulder, and Terrance sinks alongside. His robes color the air with incense, drawing John’s memory of Aglaea’s scented oil.
“My friend,” begins Terrance, as if their paths have gently re-met.
“I cast myself upon you,” begins John, holding back the tide of words that want to rush off his tongue. “Will you hear the ravings of a mad man?”
Terrance takes his elbow. A glow of confidence settles within John. He glances to the alcoves, where the mysterious robed women wait in his peripheral vision, statues and flowers when he examines them directly. He sighs. And he tells Terrance everything, from the beginning of Aglaea to the end of these visions. Terrance listens patiently, perhaps the only man in the world who could hear this talk of gods and machines without assuming madness. Such delusions are his usual staple.
When John leaves later, it is with absolution. But as he treks towards the store, that lingering lemon scent burrows into his mind. He looks on Aglaea, uneasily slumbering on the chaise, he knows she is in pain constantly, now, as if all the things of which she will not speak are breaking her down. Vulnerable to what lives in her memories, in the future, in the night. And he can’t help feel he has betrayed her confidence.
That he has been the one to truly place her in danger.
Three days later, something serious breaks within her. He hears the gasp from above floors, the thud as she impacts the floor. It is just before he closes for lunch, and the shop is silent, but for a delivery man who is complaining of thefts as he waits for his coins. He pays the man and rushes upstairs in a sweat of fear. He is quite unprepared. Not for the fac
t she is sprawled on the threadbare floor rug, her skin losing its rose like an autumn petal … no. It is the sickness in his breast that tells him how she has crept upon him, night by night as he has tended her. How her words and her suffering have bent his affection, until she means more to him than any object or patient he could see. Whether she is flesh or machine, it makes no difference. He loves her, now.
But he is losing her.
This time, she cannot tell him what has failed. He knows her mind is still flesh, and it has sunk under unconscious fog. He lifts the panel of her chest. All within is smirched in gray patina. He searches for leaking oil, for breakage in this anatomy of silent steel. Silent.
Her pump heart.
A chilly hand strokes his throat. The pump is not moving. Frantic, he puts his ear close, trying to hear around his own thundering pulse. Has something inside it caught and jammed?
He hears no clicks. And something else is wrong. The soft scented oil is too faint, her workings cool. The ribs tick and sigh, like a kettle retreating from boil.
He curses, and pushes back the lower panel, where the blue-fire boiler stares back, its pilot spot empty and cold.
The fire has gone out.
By now, he knows enough of her workings to understand this is not a fuel problem. Deep in her pelvis is a complex system of wonder that makes the blue fire from the things she eats. If he can relight the pilot, perhaps…
He strikes a match, but the old wick crumbles at the fire’s touch. He throws the still-lit shaft aside, searching the room. An old sooted lamp rests atop the mantle. He splits his nails tearing the wick from its belly with his bare hands. The process seems to take an age: a knife to cut the length, threading the wick into her gold-hammered case, and touching the flame. And even when the light takes, he stands over her, his fist in his mouth, his heart hammering his senses. The boiler is hissing back to pressure, now, the pump in her chest turning again…but surely it has been too long? That cold stroking hand turns savage, twisting his own fleshy heart. What if she never wakes?