by Lavie Tidhar
The men fell one by one, noiselessly.
They lay on their backs, their mouths masticating without sound, their eyes staring unseeing at the sky, their limbs twitching occasionally. The bees were silent in the veteran’s thigh.
The Stranger was about to rise when someone beat him to it. He saw a shadow detach itself from a hiding place on the opposite hill and begin to journey down.
It was a woman, wearing two low-slung pistols on her hips, a wide-brimmed hat which shaded her face, and a large, curved, nasty-looking knife on her thigh, which she unhooked smoothly and held as she descended.
She crossed the stream with long, easy strides. On the other side of the bank her head turned, for just a moment, and in the light he saw her face. She wore a black patch over one eye and her other was a deep, calm blue.
She approached the men who were unmoving on the ground.
The Stranger watched the woman rummage unhurriedly through their stuff, upending their bags until she found the brace of clown scalps and this she held for a moment as though considering its worth before she put it back on the ground.
Next she went to the nearest of the lying men and knelt beside him with the knife in her hand.
She cut the man’s throat with one quick, clean motion.
The Stranger watched. The man spasmed on the ground, and his legs kicked as though by their own accord, and then he went still. The woman had cut through his carotid artery, with a skill the Stranger could almost admire.
There was not much blood.
The woman next went to the veteran with the bees, who beat against the walls in their glass prison, but the woman ignored them. She killed the man with the same easy motion. When he died, the materiel in his thigh did not change but the bees with a soft sigh sank to the floor of their cage and expired.
The third man was different.
Perhaps he had imbibed less than the others, or perhaps what horrors he saw of that other world, with its traffic-choked streets and its electric lights, the call of sirens, with its accountants, banks and accruements, the ring of phones, the smell of grease and diesel, had pushed him back to the Escapement.
As the one-eyed woman brought her knife to his throat, the man’s hand flew up and grasped her wrist, taking her by surprise. With a scream, the man, small and wiry, leaped at the one-eyed woman, pushing her off balance. As she fell the man reached for his gun and the woman desperately tried to reach for hers.
A shot rang out.
The sound filled the air before it was snatched away at the edges of the maze, and there it echoed queerly, carried from one path to another. For a moment the two adversaries seemed frozen, as though not sure which of them had been shot. Then the man, slowly, toppled to the ground, half his head missing from the rifle shot.
The woman stood up. Her hands and her face were covered in gore from the killings, but she did not seem to mind. She let go of the knife and her hands rested on the butts of her pistols, but she did not draw.
She watched for where the shot had come from.
The Stranger came out from behind his rock. He was holding the rifle. He was not quite aiming it at the woman, but he wasn’t not aiming it, either.
The woman watched him. Her single eye was very blue. She did not yet draw her own guns, but the Stranger assumed she could draw them very quickly if she wanted to.
He took a few steps down to the camp. He saw that some of the dead man’s brain had sprayed the wall of the old mill house. The woman watched him calmly. She did not take her gaze off him as he approached.
“They’re mine,” she said.
The Stranger approached. He nodded. He pointed the rifle low, and shot the nearest of the two still-living men. He then went and stood over the other of the two veterans, the one with half a clock embedded in his abdomen.
“Bounty?”
“They’re mine,” the woman repeated.
The Stranger pulled the trigger and shot the man who was fused with materiel. It was a head shot, like the other.
Now all five men were dead, and he was left alone with the woman.
“Why a knife?” he said.
She shrugged. “Why waste a bullet.”
“How did you get through the maze?”
Her gaze was icy. “I’ve been here before.”
“They killed eleven clowns, three days’ ride from here.”
“They killed many more than that,” she said. “You just shot two of the Thurston Brothers.”
“They were brothers?”
“Only the gimp leg and the first guy you shot. But that’s what they all called themselves, as a gang.”
“It isn’t much of a name.”
“They’re worth two hundred ducats each,” the woman said. “Paid by the Central Bank of Jericho.”
“For killing clowns?” the Stranger said, surprised, for the hunting and murder of clowns was often encouraged by the rough settlers of the Escapement.
“For bank robbery,” she said.
“Ah.”
The Stranger looked at the corpses. “Two hundred ducats each? That’s a lot,” he said. “They don’t look worth shit to me.”
“They’re mine,” she said, again, patiently, as though explaining a complex problem to a child. “I’ve been following their trail for a while, you know. Since outside of Marxtown, where they hijacked a shipment of substance bound for the rail terminal there. I lost them in a symbol storm somewhere in the Doinklands, and by the time I got out they’d gained a lead on me. . . . I finally tracked them here, but by then they’d gone off on a scalping raid. I breached the maze . . . and waited. The only thing I wasn’t counting on was you.”
The Stranger nodded.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I wasn’t after them for the money.”
“Prospector?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m Temperanza,” she said. She said it a little expectantly, as though he should know the name.
“You’re a bounty hunter?”
“Aha. Do you mind . . . ?”
He shrugged. Temperanza removed her hands from the butts of the pistols and picked her knife up again. The Stranger watched her. She worked efficiently, with quiet confidence, until she had taken the scalps of all five men, or what was left of their scalps.
“I really would have preferred if you hadn’t shot them,” she said.
“Are you complaining?”
“I didn’t need your help, stranger. Don’t flatter yourself.” She sawed off ears where the scalps were too damaged to collect.
The Stranger picked up the bottle of Sticks. Only a tiny bit of dirty-white residue remained at the bottom of the bottle. He tossed it at the mill house wall, where it shattered.
Something moved behind the walls of the mill.
“What was that?”
The Stranger held his rifle, and Temperanza had drawn a gun before he’d even noticed.
That sound behind the walls came again, louder.
The Stranger and Temperanza exchanged glances, wordlessly, and then they moved in tandem, circling the mill.
The Stranger saw that an old wagon was hidden behind the walls of the mill. A faded yet garishly painted sign on the side of the wagon said Professor Federico, the Magnificent.
A door was set into the side of the mill and the dirt had been recently swept, and someone had put a Welcome mat on the ground. A few balloons and bits of broken mirrors, and strings of flags and paper streamers hung from the door.
“Streamers?” Temperanza said.
The Stranger said nothing and he stepped over the threshold with the rifle in his hand.
“You there!” a voice said. “You killed my men and they were ever so helpful. That wasn’t very nice of you, you know.”
An elderly man in a white lab coat and white whiskers and
moustache materialised out of the harsh bright lights. “They brought me clowns,” he said; and somehow the words brought a chill to the Stranger’s heart.
The old man carried no weapons. He rubbed his hands together as though cold.
“Well, never mind, never mind,” he said. “They drank too much and cussed awfully, you know.”
“What the fuck?” Temperanza said.
The Stranger held on to his rifle.
But the old man seemed not to register their weapons in the least and, after a moment, he brightened up. “Well, come on in, come on in!” he said. “I get so few visitors out there. It’s partly why I chose this place, of course. Just on the edge of the Doinklands and away from people and their judgement. I am so busy, so busy you see. It’s quite fascinating.”
“What’s fascinating?” Temperanza said.
“Clowns!” the old man said. “Oh, I am so sorry, I did not even introduce myself. I am Professor Federico, the M—”
“Magnificent?”
The old professor beamed. “You have heard of me?” he said.
“Lucky guess,” Temperanza said.
“Can I offer you anything? Water? I make my own, from recycled urine.”
“. . . No, thank you.”
“What is it you do here, exactly, Professor?” Temperanza said.
She had not taken her finger off the trigger.
“Come, come, see for yourselves!”
The man vanished deeper inside. The Stranger paused. It smelled bad in there. It smelled of chlorine and ammonia, and they in turned merely overlaid a deeper smell, of piss and blood and fear. . . . It smelled like a hospital in there, he thought.
He looked to Temperanza. She just shrugged.
They followed the old man deeper within.
They came to a makeshift room where a large steel table sat in the centre. Bright lights rigged to some sort of primitive generator chased away all shadows. The Stranger saw pieces of materiel lying about, the strange ethereal debris left after some storms: a fur-covered saucer, cup and spoon; a half-melted clock; a miniature tree growing earrings.
His eyes were drawn away from the horror on the steel table.
He saw the specimens collected behind glass: the giant femur bone of a boss clown. The grinning skull of an elderly Hobo. An entire petit Pierrot floating in murky formaldehyde.
Temperanza stared aghast. The Stranger wanted to throw up but didn’t.
He looked at the table.
A dead clown lay on the smooth metal surface. He had been stripped naked and dissected with some care. Skin flapped open, a ribcage exposed.
“What . . . have you done?” the Stranger said.
“Oh, this? My research, man! My life’s work. I will title it, On the Nature of Clowns. You see,” Professor Federico said earnestly, “we must try to understand clowns! Are they alone a species native to the Escapement? What is the taxonomy of clowns? What is the role of the Big Boss Clown in the social hierarchy of their society? Why is it that they so rarely speak? How come they slip on banana skins so often? And why aren’t they funny?”
“Nobody likes clowns,” Temperanza said. “The Bank has a standard bounty on them. But this . . . You are insane.”
“Why aren’t they funny!” the professor said, ignoring her. “I cut, and cut, trying to find the answer. This one’s a Whiteface. Note the large red nose, the elongated feet bones. The genus, of course, is Homo farceur. The large feet may suggest an evolutionary need to run from predators. I have so much work to do, still. So much work. You see,” he said, peering keenly into the Stranger’s face as though sensing in him somehow a fellow aficionado, “we know they’re clowns, but what kind of clowns?”
Which was when Temperanza shot him.
In the back of the old mill the Stranger found a cage with iron bars, and behind the bars he found a shudder of clowns.
The prisoners stared at him as he opened the door of their cage.
They emerged one by one out of that tiny enclosed space, too many of them than seemed possible. They tripped and slipped and collided and fell. They never spoke.
The last, an elderly Hobo, carried a small red flower on his breast. He motioned for the Stranger to smell it.
The Stranger leaned over, and the flower squirted him with water in the face.
The Stranger laughed.
The Stranger and Temperanza rode away together. They torched the mill on their way out. They made sure it burned, that it burned well, so that the horrors inside would never be found. There were some questions one should never ask, the Stranger felt. Some people wanted an answer to everything, every detail of the world explained, every corner mapped and named. The Stranger had been travelling for a long time, searching for the Flower of Heartbeat, and he was destined to travel for a long time more. He knew that some mysteries just were.
And that one should never be unkind to clowns.
TWO:
TINKERERS
The man walked on. At a corner store he bought a fifth of bourbon. He drank it furtively, his walk aimless, through streets and neighbourhoods teeming with unsaid words. The very nature of the light was furtive, he thought.
He passed a baker shop with a beggar in rags sitting under the awnings. All he could see were bright brittle eyes under a hood, the face swaddled in shadow.
A woman accosted him. She wore fingerless black gloves. Her breath smelled of sweet liquor, coconut and rum. She gripped him by the shoulders. She only had one eye. She leaned close to him and whispered in his ear, urgently, telling him not all was lost, telling him about a place beyond the Mountains of Darkness, and of a flower that grew only there. She let him go and he walked on, deep into the night, until he heard footsteps, running, and someone shouting his name. His keys dangled in his hand. He let them help him through the door and he sat on the couch and waited for them to leave, politely, but frozen, until he heard the door shut close. Then he lay down on the sofa, with his head on the boy’s stuffed toy clown, and it was only then, finally, that he started to cry.
A painter’s brush smeared strokes of yellow paint over the horizon, and the sky gradually turned a light blue. The clouds in the sky resembled clowns’ balloons, and the Stranger, on his horse, looked up over the Escapement. The landscape stretched away from him in all directions, with not a town or a hamlet in sight. They were two days’ ride away from the broken maze and clown country, and at least another day, he calculated, from a small outpost town called Kellysburg. Clumps of scorpion weed and five-needle prickly leaf lit up the parched earth with vivid blue and yellow colours.
“What is it that you are looking for, Stranger?” Temperanza said.
She drew on her cigarillo, and blew out two perfect rings. The rings floated in the air until they linked with each other, and slowly dissolved in the breeze.
“A flower,” the Stranger said.
Temperanza gestured at the land around them. “There are plenty of flowers here,” she said.
“It is called the Ur-shanabi, and it lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness.”
At this Temperanza’s face grew troubled and she smoked for a few moments without comment. Thick drops of ash blew away on the breeze. Then she said, “I am not familiar with that flower, nor with that particular geographic region.”
“But you have heard of it?”
She shrugged. “Stories. Stories are all we have, really, in this world or the other.”
“What sort of stories?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t ask me.”
“I must,” he said. “I need to know. I have been searching for an awfully long time.”
“Time means nothing, here.”
“Please,” the Stranger said. He knew that she was not quite what she seemed. Temperanza’s frown deepened. She blew out three smoke rings in quick succession. The r
ings interlocked above the brook and seemed suspended there.
She said, “Long ago, I was on a wagon travelling in the north. It snowed, and the sun went down faster than we expected. The horses were scared, you could smell their fear, and their breath turned to fog in the air. Our breaths, too. A storm was coming over the mountains, an ordinary one at first but then we began to catch flashes, pilcrows and octothorpes and trefoil knots . . . The horses whinnied and ran faster, the wagon jostling from side to side. It was then that we began to hear the sound of giant footsteps, of vast and ancient stone pounding the frozen earth.”
“The Titanomachy.”
“It was only a skirmish, I think now. We never saw the Colossi, only heard them. One of the horses turned into a crow and flew away. My companion’s ear melted like wax. It dripped on the seat. As for my eye—” She touched the eyepatch, gently. “Well.”
After a moment she continued.
“We came to a stop. Another of the horses had gone so mad with fear that I had to shoot it, out of mercy. We waited out the storm, infinities bursting around us. Then it was all over, and the storm had passed and the battle, it seemed, simply moved away. We’d survived. When the sun rose up we saw that the road was littered with materiel, a giant, melted trumpet, a dead lizard with a tiny tree trunk for a tail, bowler hats, a sunflower with a baby’s face. We left the wagon, unhooked the horses and rode on. Shortly after we came to what remained of a farmhouse. There was a well outside, and the skeleton of a donkey beside it. We sought shelter inside the house, from the elements. It was there that we discovered the soldier.
“He wasn’t, by then, much of one. One of his legs had been blown clean off, and the remaining one had turned into a string instrument of some sort, long and delicate, with silver inlays, but it had no strings. The man was drunk on Sticks. He went in and out of lucidity. I think he knew he did not have long for this world, or the next.
“He spoke of many things. It was hard to understand him, and harder enough to care. We grew resentful of his constant babbling. We wished him to die but still he held on. He was a camp follower of sorts. He followed the Titanomachy where it went. And yes. He spoke of one place, with huge figures standing motionless in the sand, and dark mountains, so dark it was as though they sucked the light and made it vanish. But they were far in the distance, I think. These mountains. He was not very clear. Colossi, and some sort of guards at the mouth of a tunnel at the end of the world. I don’t know of any flower.” She jerked her cigarillo into the brook. It hissed when it touched the water.
