Steampunk World

by Sarah Hans (ed)

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  As a girl falling asleep to the rhythm of cicadas and mosquitoes, Ging dreamed of fire. Fire caught between panes of brass, fire captured in a bead of glass, fire reflected in temple gold. Her grandmother’s skein of stories inherited over generations, long and slow to unwind, of a queen who rode to war; of the sky blazing as she fell.

  Decades later, in Bangkok, Ging wakes up each day to a secret place full of fire.

  * * *

  Ging’s days are canals: the slant of roofs to either bank, the load of fruits and hand-drums on her wheelboat. A song on her lips, a song in her palms. She brings home pomelos and sticky rice, lumyai and coconut milk.

  Ging’s evenings and nights are an apprentice, a workshop.

  She lives by the Chaopraya where it’s coolest, an expensive home gifted by an expensive patron: halfway rooted in the banks, halfway in the shallows as though amphibian. Sometimes she talks to her apprentice Nok of retiring in Ayutthaya or even further into the countryside, by a forest or on the edge of rice fields. Both recede by the day as Bangkok grows, the seams of its borders and canals loosening as the years pass, restitched and extended to include that much more in its weave.

  When they work they strip to the waist the way women still do in the countryside, for all that Bangkok has adopted His Majesty’s taste for foreign modesty: the one that says women must cover up from throat to ankle, not a hint of arm or wrist or collarbone. Strange fashions such as these soak into Bangkok as monsoon water soaks into mud, and the girls working for them are startled when Ging or Nok bares their breasts. Soon that changes, for the heat dissolves that imposed, alien propriety quickly enough.

  Most of the girls think what they make are only mannequins, peculiarly large, peculiarly made—but decorations. They weave rattan into torsos and limbs, chisel wood into faces. Some of the finished results go to furnish tailors, theaters, or become the possessions of court ladies with a taste for the odd. Miniatures are equipped with tiny gears and clockwork parts to become the toys of wealthy houses.

  The rest go elsewhere.

  Nok has an eye for symmetry and flourish; she draws designs on hard Jeen paper. Ging shapes and boils the hands. “Is it magic, mistress?” her apprentice asked once.

  “Like dipping green mango into chili salt is magic,” Ging said, smiling. “Like turning yolk and sugar into sweets is magic.”

  The process is delicate, the formulae passed down from mistress to pupil: ones Ging keeps close to her, though once she’s mixed and distilled the ingredients she allows Nok to watch. Wax softening in the pot, wax poured into a mold. The result is a smell of melting candles and hands which Ging kneads into tapered, spread fingers that she reinforces with brass wires and dancing talons.

  The hands move on their own, for a time, a whisper of mechanism inside them as they scurry along the floorboards. Ging catches them and attaches them, by spikes and adhesives, to the ends of rattan-strand wrists. This is the most important part: not the limbs or torso, not even the clockwork hearts. It is the hands that propel them, give them the wherewithal to hear and obey.

  Ging does not grant them voices.

  * * *

  One monsoon-drenched afternoon, a foreigner visits.

  Anna Leonowens: a woman of hard glittering eyes, stiff fabrics, teeth like a carnivore's. She moves with a heaviness of being, as though the air itself resists and resents her passage. There is more clothing on her than Ging has ever seen on anyone, man or woman, and she has seen the king from afar at temple ceremonies. Palace girls say that the ma’am does not trust Siam weavers, Siam tailors, Siam anything. It shows: Anna’s dress, made for icier climes, is spotted with sweat. The farang must be sweltering in it.

  Her powdered face betrays no discomfort. She gazes at them both, not quite down her nose but in the way one might at a pair of buffalos: with no expectations that either Ging or Nok might address her in human speech.

  “Can I help you?” Ging says.

  Anna’s brow creases. “You speak English.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She stopped stumbling over Angrit years ago. “We sell puppets. They’re unique art, no two alike. Many British and Francois clients have brought them home.” Where they resell them, she supposes, for the kind of prices that’d buy enormous tracts of fertile land here. Nok resents it and doubles the price for western customers. Ging lets her.

  The ma’am turns her gaze to the inanimate puppets: Ging has delighted in these, knowing they don’t have to be compact or dexterous or practical. She has given them the heads of eagles and horses, the tusks of elephants and the claws of tigers. Bestial faces, faceted eyes in amber and blue and green, gilt lips. “I’ve seen some of these in the palace,” Anna says. “Interesting. Your husband’s work? Or father’s?”

  “My own, ma’am.”

  “Quaint,” Anna says, circling the mannequins. Perhaps her jawline tenses in disapproval, but it is hard to tell—the woman has one of those farang faces that are perpetually sour. “Not very womanly.”

  “It keeps a roof over my head.” Ging nods, laughs. “Does any of my work interest you?”

  “Another day.”

  That year, the streets are full of foreigners. Not Phma, not Yuan. Invaders, all the same.

  * * *

  They meet in the morning at a temple, after Ging has given alms to the monks, filling each black bowl with dried fish and candied tamarinds. Ever since she’s started working for the lady, she has done this more often, for peace of mind if nothing else. She doubts feeding monks is enough to cleanse her virtue.

  Khunying Aunrampha dresses like a commoner, all surface: there’s no smell of smoke or cooking in her clothes, no stains of ink in the creases of her palms, and her fingers are smoother than those of a child grown with the knowledge of harvest in calves and knuckles. Despite this she never looks, quite, soft. Her gaze sees, calculates, and appraises. Her farmer’s hat keeps her features in shadow.

  They watch the passage of ducks and a geriatric crocodile that’s become the local fright-tale to unruly children.

  “The ma’am paid you a visit.”

  Ging doesn’t ask Aunrampha how she came by that information. “Briefly. She wasn’t overly inquisitive.”

  “The first farang queen of Siam.” Aunrampha yawns. “From the looks of it, that’s what she aspires to. But you know how monkish His Majesty is, and she’s neither young nor beautiful. Or pleasant. Or witty.”

  “I thought she was an instructor in the women’s quarters?”

  “Her education is not exceptional for a woman of her station, and she puts on finer airs than she warrants—somewhere up the line there’s a grandmother she doesn’t want named and commoners for parents. She’ll have you believe she’s descended from great commanders. A spy, of course.”

  “But His Majesty,” Ging tries.

  “Is not infallible. The ma’am is far-traveled and he has faith in her competence to teach us geography, arithmetic, proper Angrit…” Aunrampha cocks her smile the way archers cock arrows. “In her favor, she doesn’t try to convert us like Doctor Bradley did, though really he was a sweet enough man as long as you nodded at the right parts. I still don’t know who Yesu was, but then he never learned to recite Sudsakorn or write proper poetry.”

  Ging sights the crocodile’s head amidst a camouflage of driftwood. “Should she come again, what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. When will your next batch be ready?”

  “Two weeks.” She scrunches folds of her pha-nung in one fist. “I thought what I’ve already delivered was sufficient.”

  “I’ll call them sufficient when they outnumber western soldiers. I’ll call them enough when they cover the earth from here to the borders of Malaya, and make a wall to guard Bangkok land and shore.” Aunrampha exhales, her mouth softening. “It sits uneasily with you, I know. You’re not a soldier, you haven’t bound yourself to any oath or any cause. If there were other ways I would take them. I want none of this burden on y
our peace, your heart, your life.”

  “It is not that.” But it is precisely that—a selfish horror at what she makes, the thought of the use they could be put to.

  It does not help that Aunrampha’s touch pricks her with a frisson of desire; it does not help that Aunrampha’s lips are soft against her own, that the brief kiss recalls everything else they’ve done together and will do. It does not stop Ging from thinking She does this to yoke me to her cause, but is that cause not hers as well, whether or not she is sworn to protecting Siam? Is it not the duty of all who drink and thrive off this soil?

  Aunrampha lets go of her, eyes wide and mouth parted. “Perhaps when this is done,” she says softly, “we can share a house, by a forest where old things live, and grow gray together. Away from Bangkok, away from secrets.”

  Ging does not say, For too long you’ve promised this, and neither of us is a girl anymore.

  * * *

  The first time Ging saw a doll kill it was an accident.

  Ging inherited trade secrets from the mor-phi who taught her to give a doggish sentience to automata. She failed to inherit an eye for weapons or a mind for battlefields from her mother. The dolls were just ornaments, a canvas for her imagination. Lucrative and, when she allowed herself to admire her own work, beautiful. A gift of trade secrets and an alchemical discipline to pass onto Nok.

  She no longer remembers the soldier’s face or nationality. She recalls only that they were on her wheelboat, its mechanical paddles churning river water to white froth, Nok regaling her with stories of raising fighting cockerels.

  One of Ging’s new automata stood at the prow, holding a gas lamp. She’d chosen a lesser canal cupped between tattered, leaning houses that creaked among themselves like gossiping grandmothers. The doll was her pride, but she didn’t yet want to parade it down the floating markets before it could perform to perfection.

  A sound like fifty storms’ worth of thunder. Jeen firecrackers, Ging reasoned back then, before a farang man stumbled into their boat. A moment where it rocked so far Ging could feel the weight of green waters pulling her down, could smell the silt and feel the weeds curling around her ankles. When it steadied the man had taken hold of Nok, a knife to the girl’s eye. He barked something foreign, angry.

  Ging did not have time to process—to understand—before the doll opened the man’s throat. An arterial spray. Nok’s lips moving but Ging could hear nothing save the roar between her ears.

  On the banks: a compact woman incongruously dressed in loosely knotted pha-khaoma, a dirty shirt, bare feet coated in mud. In her hand she clasped a long pistol, its handle lacquered black.

  Ging recognized her at once.

  “Jeen make,” the woman said, tucking the pistol into the folds of the pha-khaoma and retying the fabric. “Dear in price, but it pays for itself. I’m sorry for the noise. Nang Ging?”

  “You’re Khunying Aunrampha.” Her hearing returned in patches. “Mother’s successor.”

  The lady inclined her head. “I’ve that honor and hope to live up to a fraction of her accomplishments.” She gave wai.

  Ging nearly leaped backward into the water, would have prostrated if Aunrampha did not stop her.

  “You are the daughter of a legend,” the lady said, “and my elder, if by a few years. Doubtless if she’d stayed in Bangkok and reared you in the women’s quarters, you would have taken up this office.”

  She could not say that she had disappointed her mother; that her mother—though never saying in so many words—did not judge her fit for that position. “I don’t think so.”

  Aunrampha’s gaze was fastened to the doll, which stood tranquil in disregard of the blood dotting its front. Ging had made that one with a giant’s face, fierce red eyes and upturned tusks. She would always wonder afterward if that was an omen, if some premonition had guided her hands.

  The lady did not try to touch the doll. But she looked at it and saw what Ging never had. “Did you,” she said, “make this?”

  * * *

  Ging’s mother raised her with an understanding of the world, and it is this: that nations are built and move on war, that weapons are the true language of diplomacy, and that their enemies are not the Phma or the Yuan.

  Spymaster. Advisor. Tactician. All three. Mother did not hold an official title, being only a senior servant in the women’s quarters—the highest rank a merchant’s daughter of no particular lineage could aspire to. Yet she commanded respect: Ging had been born in Bangkok, stayed there until she was eight, and she’d seen the regard afforded Mother. A touch of fear.

  Away from Bangkok, in the wet remoteness of Ranong, Ging gained three things: a fondness for the southern dialect, an unseemly accent, and a longing for the sleekly muscled southern girls that took her years to untangle and understand—years while those girls turned to boys equally fleet, ones who could dive and fish and wrestle with sharks, if their boasts could be believed. Her mother must have known, but did not care overmuch. It was more imperative that Ging could replace her.

  Ging never knew how Mother reached the decision that she could not. But one day Mother summoned an old, old woman and told her a name: Khunying Aunrampha Panthapiyot. Ging overheard that, the name, but did not forget it even as she tasted a relief so great it nearly imploded her lungs.

  When she turned twenty and mastered all the formulae her mistress had to teach, her mother told her, “Go to Bangkok” and she did. Equipped with a fund to establish herself, back then in a more humble house doubling as a shop, just making dolls. She took in Nok, a temple orphan.

  Aunrampha found her way into Ging’s workshop, her life, her bed. She was a patron, and then she was more. The skin of a lady, Ging marveled as she stroked over and over that long, soft body during their first times. Behind shut doors Aunrampha’s mouth is not aristocratic, in language or in other uses.

  Ging thinks of this now as she lies awake next to Aunrampha, their limbs crisscrossing, a weight of hand on her thigh, a heft of arm across her belly. Aunrampha has had a nielloware glass installed overhead; Ging first objected to it—bad luck—but soon found herself watching, rapt, the tremors and tensing of her own body. Reflected, each act becomes that much more indelible.

  A finger draws circles in the bend of her knee. She hates to admit it, but Aunrampha stirs her more sharply than any other ever has. Perhaps it is that months can pass by before they’ve the opportunity to be together this way. The thrill of infrequency, the rarity of Aunrampha’s touch.

  “Have you not slept?” Aunrampha pecks her earlobe.

  “You’ll take the dolls today.” A dozen, primed to obey.

  “I thought we kept those talks out of the bedchamber.” Aunrumpha pushes upright. “Nang Malee… your honored mother taught you, didn’t she, of what happened to Malaya, to Phma, to Yuan? His Majesty—and his revered father before him—strived hard to keep us out of western reach. But negotiation will work only so long.”

  “Have you ever put them to the test?” Ging is not sure what makes her ask; she doesn’t want to know. Nevertheless the question is out and she’s not willing to recall it.

  Aunrampha’s brow creases. “Do you want to see? Meet me in Sampeng tomorrow, noon, at Taogae Jak’s gold shop.”

  * * *

  In Sampeng, Ging feels foreign. There are women here wearing gipao patterned with cranes and chrysanthemums, who have jade bangles around their wrists rather than silver or brass. Men in vests and tunics, their long hair in queues. It’s not that Ging has never crossed the river, but, though many of her clients are Jeen traders, it’s strange to be among their midst, to hear more Taechew and Jeenglang than Thai.

  Taogae Jak’s gold shop is attached to a teahouse, brisk with midday traffic: steamer baskets arriving at and departing from tables with blinding speed, laden with dumplings, chicken feet, seaweed balls. The smell of soy and plum sauces thick in the air. More teacups than Ging has ever seen in one place. And farang patrons: a few merchants, perhaps some dignitaries. But m
ostly they are soldiers.

  Aunrampha has a table to herself. She is in gipao, high collars and gleaming silk embroidered in serpents. Her face is powdered, her eyes kohled and limned gold. She would have been unrecognizable if Ging did not know her face so well, was so familiar with the arrangement of Aunrampha’s brow and jaw.

  Between mouthfuls of pork buns, Aunrampha points out a short, bald farang. “He tried to assassinate Phra Ongchao Phannarai. Farangset. Goes by Mathieu Dubois. It’s much like a Somchai or Somying—a name so common it’s almost certainly an alias.”

  “There are people named Somchai and Somying,” Ging points out, to be contrary. “Who could wish ill on Phra Ongchao Phannarai?” From what Ging knows, the princess is one of the most inoffensive in the women’s quarters.

  “His Majesty has lost two wives. To lose another would… disturb his peace.” Aunrampha nods, lowers her voice. “The farang rents a house at the end of Yuparat. I’ve sent the automata ahead.”

  “Does he know who you are?”

  “He suspects. Let’s take a walk.” Aunrampha calls for a server in Taechew.

  They spend half an hour meandering Sampeng, Aunrampha pointing out favorite eateries, shops, vendors. She shares palace gossip and her suspicion that Phra Ongchao Phannarai may have a fondness for her handmaids that goes beyond propriety. “It’s such a shame,” Aunrampha laments. “Were I serving her directly I could have snared myself a princess.”

  Ging pinches her arm. “Don’t go seducing the wives of kings. Isn’t she older?”

  “Five years, but there’s a certain charm to older women…” Aunrampha grins; Ging is four years her senior. “Who would know? Handmaids bathe princesses in the night, attire them in the morning. That is the way of things.”

  Against her determination to remain somber Ging bites down on a chuckle. “I do not suffice?”