Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (13 page)

“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 and 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.

At first the soldier had been confounded, then amazed, happy, frightened, sorrowful, guilty…so many emotions crowding into him that he could not think. Until his commanding officer ordered his return to the battlefront and he discovered that now he could not feel, and feeling nothing, he did not care. When the letter came about the death by typhus of his wife and child, the army was glad to send him away at last—a broken toy soldier, a mistake they wished they’d never made.

Sarah stroked his cheek. “You are no mistake, my love.”

“Am I your love, truly? A man who must wind up his heart like a watch?”

“I don’t care
how
your heart beats, only that it does. I loved you when it was a mystery, and I love you still, now that it’s not.”

“Then hand me that key, beloved, for I have much to do before Mr. Halprin springs his traps.”

“Do you believe he means the things he said?” Sarah asked, passing him the small brass key from the dresser.

“Oh, yes. He means to kill me,” the soldier replied, fitting the key to the odd scar on his chest, “and he’ll no doubt take half the town with him, for he’s clearly quite insane.”

“You mustn’t let him hurt you,” Sarah said, her face going pale, though who could tell whether it was from fear for him or the sight of the little brass key sinking into his flesh…?

The soldier did not look up as he wound his clockwork heart. “I don’t intend to. Nor let him harm this town any further. I’ve stopped him before and I’ll stop him again. I’ll regret it mightily, but if I must put him in his grave to do it, I will.”

He drew the key away at last and raised his head to look at Sarah. Her mouth was set firm, but there was a softness in her eyes that was neither pity nor tears. “I am sorry to present you such a terrible betrothal present,” said the soldier. “You can still refuse….”

“No, in fact, I cannot.” She smiled gently and kissed his cheek.

The soldier and Sarah sat together for quite a while, talking of their own future and of Halprin’s threat. Sarah informed the soldier of Halprin’s past in greater detail—which was sufficient to turn even that battle-hardened man pale.

“Halprin is a very monster,” Sarah concluded. “I don’t doubt for a moment that he set that fire himself, though why he should burn his own properties I can’t guess.”

“As you said once, there will be no lack of buyers once the railroad is through.”

“But the fire ruined the new-laid tracks,” Sarah objected.

“Only those that run beyond the town. The station and warehouses at the edge of Stone Crossing remain untouched.”

“And those warehouses belong to Mr. Halprin,” Sarah added. “No doubt filled with his horrible devices ready to be shipped back to the war in the East.”

The soldier looked startled and Sarah asked him what was wrong.

“I am suddenly reminded of something that was missing….”

“What? Has someone robbed your room?”

“No, my love, but there may be a worse problem. Pass me the music box from the dresser, please.”

“Why?” she asked, even as she handed him the box.

“I fear Mr. Halprin’s threats may be all too real and we may need a great deal of help to counter his plans, but I must ask a question of a dog first.”

He put the key to the music box and turned it once, twice, thrice. The chimes rang out in three dreadful chords and the tune began to play. Its strange, discordant notes were still shivering on the air when they heard the sound of metal feet clattering against the roof outside the window. Sarah helped the soldier to the window and threw up the sash.

The smallest of the mechanical dogs stepped inside, its copper and brass no longer so bright as when the soldier had first seen it, but its eyes glowed as if lit by hellfire. Beyond it the head of the largest hound peeped over the roof ledge, gilded a dull silver by the cloud-shrouded moon.

“What would you have us do, Master?” the dog asked as before.

“Are both your brothers outside?” the soldier asked.

The dog nodded.

“Then I will go down to meet them.”

The sun was long gone by this time, the late-autumn night clouded and the wind speaking of snow soon to come. The soldier dressed warmly and went down to the porch to speak with the mechanical dogs. If any of his neighbors peered out of their windows, he made no remark upon it.

The first dog scrambled down from the roof and joined the other two, making a row by ascending size: the first normal-sized, the second huge, and the third a giant whose head overtopped the doorway to such a degree that the soldier commanded it to lie down and thus ease his neck from craning upward to see the beast.

“Now, tell me, has your former master returned to the caverns lately?” the soldier asked.

The first dog shook its head, and the soldier marked it as by far the cleverest and most nimble of the three.

“And has anything more been taken away since I first called upon you?”

All three dogs shook their heads, and the porch shuddered as the largest dog knocked one of the pillars with its snout. This one, the soldier thought, was the juggernaut of the company—ponderous, but as near unstoppable as a comet hurtling through space.

The soldier pointed at the first dog and named it. “Scout—for that is what you are—can you record information?”