Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (2 page)

“What are you dreaming about?” The doctor’s voice broke into his warming reveries. “Come over here and help me open up these stopcocks.”

He did as he was ordered, letting all the girl’s smiles flutter away, like ashes up a chimney flue. Straining at the stubborn valves, he let one other hope step inside his heart. That none of their work here, readying for the gala ball, would require going down into the subbasements below these, where the great roaring furnaces and boilers resided. He hated having to go down there, hated seeing the stokers chained between the fiery iron doors and heaps of coal, the shimmering heat revealing the stripes across their naked backs. Their eyes would turn toward him as they crouched over their black shovels. Their eyes would tell him,
As you are, once were we. Steal but the slightest crust or bauble, and join us here….

Their extinguished voices would follow him as he fled up the spiral of clanging metal stairs, the errand accomplished that
Herr Dr.
Pavel had sent him on. He could hear them now, whispering far beneath his sodden clogs, as he gritted his teeth and strained to turn the most ancient of the spoked wheels another quarter turn.

“That’s good.” The doctor stepped back, wiping his hands across his vest. “Anton, my coat, if you please.”

He fetched the swallow-tailed garment, lifting it from the hook by the stone arch of the cellar door. The horsehair-padded shoulders itched his own palms as he helped the doctor slide into its heavy woolen arms.

“There.” An old man’s vanity—he tugged at the lapels, gazing
fondly at his reflection in one of the floor’s puddles. “When everyday gentlemen dressed as elegant as this, the empire was feared by Cossack and Hun alike.”

“If you say so.” Anton had no memory of such things. The doctor might have been imagining such faded glories, for all he knew.

“We’ll discuss it another time.” The sad state of his assistant’s learning was a topic frequently evoked, if never acted upon. “Let’s fire ’er up, lad. A job well done’s the best payment.”

Anton watched as the doctor pushed one lever after another. Constellations of gears engaged about them, all enveloped in sweating vapor. Ratchet and piston moved through their limited courses, the clatter of brass and iron loud as church bells on a tone-deaf Easter morning.

“Splendid!” The doctor bent his head back, gazing up enraptured at the chamber’s damp ceiling. “Do you hear it? Do you?”

Anton knew what those sounds were, barely audible through the commotion of the machinery driving them. He’d heard them before, every year’s end, from when he’d first apprenticed to the dancing engineer’s trade. To now, this last calendar page, so much dragglier and tattered than the ones from all the years before.

He pulled his own thin coat away from one of the jointed arms thrusting up through the ceiling’s apertures, careful not to be snagged by its pumplike motions. All through the basement, more such churned away, up and down and at various angles, pivoting upon the hinges that he and the doctor had so carefully greased. Like a mechanical forest, brought to clanking animation by the white gouts billowing from every quivering pipe….

There they go,
thought Anton as he looked up at where the doctor gazed. He could see them, without ascending the stairs to the grand ballroom. The empty metal frameworks, like iron scarecrows, would be bowing to one another, then embracing. The smaller with the larger, just as if already filled by the evening’s elegant guests. Already, the mechanical violins were scraping their bows across the rosined strings.

Closing his eyes, he watched from inside his head as each skeletal apparatus—jointed struts and trusses, cages shaped into men and women—took another by a creaking hand. Then swirled across the acres of polished floor, just as though it were the music that impelled them, rather than clockwork and steam.

S
he breathed into her cupped hands, warming the strands of pearls she held.

There might come a day when she was old enough, with years of servile experience ingrained through every memory, that she would be entrusted to help dress their dowager employer. For now, Gisel watched as the senior maids, some of them older than the bent and wrinkled figure upon whom they waited, busied themselves with the intricate laces and stays.

“Ah! You’re too cruel to me.” Vanity and girlish affectations tinged the dowager’s simpered, murmured words. “You’ll break something one of these days—I know you will.” She brought her hawk-etched, deep-seamed visage over the lace at her shoulder and smiled the yellow of old parchment at her attendants. “But not tonight. Be so sweet as to spare me just one more night of pleasure.”

The maids said nothing, but obliged with nods and their own little smiles. Gisel had heard the old woman say the same thing the year before and the year before that. She had still been working in the scullery three winters ago, scrubbing the stone floors with a wet rag, but the oldest of the chambermaids had told her that the dowager had spoken the same words every New Year’s Eve, for decades now. None of them were quite sure that the dowager could say anything else, at least not while getting dressed for the ball.

Gisel watched as the others stepped back, the gown assembled into place at last, as though a seamstress had wrapped lengths of ancient silk around a bone dummy. The dowager admired herself in a triptych of full-length mirrors, as though the gray film at the center of her eyes somehow filtered out the overlapping scales of
time, letting through only the image of the lithe girl she still believed herself to be.

Now the pearls were as warm as Gisel’s blood. They could have been a kitten sheltered between one palm and the other, if only they had breathed and had a fluttering pulse inside soft fur. She stepped forward with them, holding them up as though they were some sort of offering.

“No—not now.” The dowager surprised them all by something different. Something she had never said before. She waved a wrinkled, impatient hand at Gisel. “They caught last time. In the framework.” Her scarlet nails clawed at the tendons that ridged her neck harplike. “How they tormented me! The whole beautiful night, dancing and dancing, and the whole time I felt as though I were being garroted. I could have burst into tears from the pain, if I’d let myself.”

Gisel dared to speak, though she received a warning glance from the oldest chambermaid. “You don’t want to wear them?”

“Silly girl—of course I do. They were my mother’s, and her mother took communion from the hand of a pope with them around her throat. How could I not wear them on a festive occasion such as this? I wear them
every
New Year’s ball.”

“I’m sorry….”

“Don’t fret about it, dear.” The dowager smiled even wider and scarier as she let one of the other maids settle a wrap about her shoulders. “Let us go to the Apollosaal—you and I, and the others. Won’t that be fun? And you can put the pearls upon me there. So you can make certain they don’t pinch and bind. I believe that’s the smartest thing to do, don’t you? I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

The notion terrified Gisel. Her heart pounded at the base of her own throat as she felt all the other maids turning their silent, premonitory gaze upon her. What would she do without the oldest and kindest of them, to tell her what to do?

“But…I don’t know….”

“No one will mind, I’m sure. Once the music starts, I’m sure there will be some little corner where you can crouch and hide.
Perhaps in the back, from where the waiters bring the champagne and the marzipan cakes. No one will even see you.” The dowager’s eyes were like ivory knifepoints set in crepe paper as she went on smiling.

She knows I’m scared,
thought Gisel, holding the bundled pearls closer to herself.
That’s why she wants me to go with her
. If only she hadn’t let the dowager see that in her, she might have had a chance. To escape.

But now there wasn’t any. She nodded dumbly and followed the other woman, out of the dressing room and toward the curving sweep of stairs that led down to the carriage outside the door, and all the wintry city streets beyond.

A
s the guests assembled, he saw her. Anton’s heart raced—it always did, as though some internal furnace of his emotions had been stoked higher.

Assembled, it seemed to him, almost literally. This was the part of his apprenticeship to the doctor that he disliked the most. Some tasks were worse than others. He thanked God, the one cloaked in the tattered remnants of his faith, that this one came about only once a year. And at the end of it, so that even in the bleakest December there would likely be no further discouragements.

With his own tool kit slung by a leather strap from his shoulder, he hastened through the grand ballroom. Only the lesser nobility were entrusted to him. And of those, only the men—he knelt before baronets and princelings, the younger sons of dynasties and households so ancient that their pedigrees might have been traced in whatever pages would have followed the Book of Revelation. As
Herr Dr.
Pavel had pointed out more than once to him,
youth
was as relative a term as
wealth
, in this case meaning only slightly less gray and enfeebled. With wrench and calibrated screwdrivers, he encased spindly legs, cavalry boots buffed lustrous by their lackeys, into the jointed, cagelike frames. Standing up, he fastened curved metal bands about the noblemen’s waists
and chests, taking care not to disarray their ranks of medals, gleaming as miniature suns with the profiles of dead emperors at their centers. Last came the tapered armatures locked into place at their wrists and elbows, linked by clever pistons to the similar mechanisms at their shoulders. With a few of the more dissipated, he had to hold their arms above their heads himself while with his other hand he completed the necessary fastenings. As a lady’s maid might corset an obese matron, he would then raise a knee to the small of their backs, in order to engage all the torso elements to the mechanical iron spines that extended from their hips to the napes of their stiffly collared necks.

But he had to admit the results were impressive, when he finally stood back from each one, his tools dangling in each hand. They stood at attention, chests thrust out inside the metal cages, shoulders pulled back by bows of iron behind them, each as proudly straight as though their decorations had been won on actual battlefields.

With practice accumulated over decades, the doctor was able to work so much faster, encasing not only the more elderly noblemen, but all their wives and daughters and courtesans as well. The doctor had told Anton that the women were easier, as their bodies were more pliant, more accustomed to the rigors of fashion, more submissive to the attentions of men. He wasn’t sure about that—they all terrified him, the old ones with the bodices like the prows of bejeweled warships, the comparatively younger with their sharp glances aimed over fluttering fans as though they were infantry rifles. He would have believed that the women were more ready than the men to pick up their grandfathers’ sabers and run through any foes worthy of such an encounter.

“Such attentions are a delight,
Herr Doktor
.” The grand duchess of some inconsequential principality simpered through her fan. “If only my late husband’s touch had been so skilled.”

“You flatter me, madam.” Wielding a brace of screwdrivers, the doctor completed adjusting the thin steel bands spanning the woman’s capacious bosom. “I am no more than a simple craftsman.”

Anton finished encasing those to whom he had been assigned. The gaudy colors of their parade uniforms seeped through the hinged ligatures and mechanisms, as might the plumage of exotic birds in tightly bound aviaries. They preened before each other, the skeletal limbs of their full-length cages creaking in place, as he knelt at the side of the ballroom, wiping the tools with an oily rag before putting them away.

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.