Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  He flicked through further and saw this journal was full of notes for the same tale and so he set it aside. The next book was more illuminating: there was a list of names (“U-Ta,” “Gol-O-Rad-O,” “Ay-O-Wah,” “Kan-Zaz”) under a heading “Are These Clan Names? Or Their Actual Names?”: descriptions of habits; hand-drawn maps and, lastly, the secret of how Anselm’s father had managed to get so close to the dragons of America to observe all of this. Anselm looked at the last paragraph on that page more thoughtfully than he had ever looked at his school books:

  “I shall mark these entrances with glimmerfoil seeds this year and hope that they will be covered next year by this weed. I shall then know where to find them again. Glimmerfoil is a hardy plant and self-protective. Nothing in the desert eats it and even Americans know to avoid its stings.”

  Tucked into that last book Anselm found two travel passes, both of them undated.

  “Lunacy,” he muttered to himself, putting the books back in the box.

  His father had always said great men were touched by a little madness, though.

  * * *

  The months passed and the secrets of alchemy continued to elude him.

  He did not speak again with Renfred, but he saw him often in the corridors between classes. Night after night the dragons of America began to fly, unbidden, in Anselm’s dreams and, day after day, he would look up as he moved from one lecture to the next and see the eerily calm eyes of Renfred Rolandsson surveying him from somewhere, a slight smile on the boy’s narrow face. Occasionally the other boy would incline his head in acknowledgement he had been caught out, constantly keeping fresh in Anselm’s mind the offer that was on the table.

  At year’s end Anselm’s grades hadn’t improved from the year before. In the spring assessment tests he actually managed to drop a grade in his practical exam. Master Hunfrith called him to his office to discuss ways Anselm could better organize his study time:

  “For you’re surely in need of something radical now,” the old alchemist muttered. “If you don’t wish to remain an eternal student, that is.”

  A radical solution?

  Everything he needed to concoct such a thing was there, in the meagre legacy of his father’s estate, he began to think: maps, notes, travel permits. As an added fillip, Anselm thought, he wouldn’t mind seeing the look on Renfred’s face when Anselm, the great failure, presented him with a priceless dragon egg.

  The week before the dragons came he decided he would do it. He would go and steal an egg. All he needed now was some superficial reason he could give to Dowsabel to explain why he needed to borrow her car for a night and day.

  In the end, he spun out a story of a study session at the home of one his tutors in north Arrowstorm—an all-night session with a meal and tents in the garden. Remarkably Dowsabel bought this tale from him wholesale and agreed that their mother could give her a lift to work the next day. It was established by all that Anselm was in sore need of the extra tutelage and, since it was free, it was worth doing. He felt a certain shame for this lie as the day ended, but that shame was not what kept him awake nor was it what coloured his dreams.

  The dragons of America filled the sky in squadrons, flying into the fiery east without hesitation, just as surely as missiles fired from a distant kingdom. He watched them for hours, remembering Tamasine’s lips against his; her determination to kiss him; the hot thrill he’d felt at being wanted for something. He imagined the kind of wife she’d make—dutiful and useful—and he watched the dragons, plotting, planning: telling himself the tale of what he would do and how.

  IV

  The American soldiers asked where he was going. He told them he was driving to Sea-Halls, the province to the north, where the Museum of Shipwrights was: he had an exam on the history of his people soon. The pass tacked into his sister’s car window verified that he came from a family known to be co-operative and he’d taken great care to bring nothing outwardly suspicious with him. He had a packed lunch and some water: a little first-aid kit; a torch and a flare. Anyone driving through the desert would take at least that much, as the soldiers would have known. He had no camera to record anything, only a pen. He grew a little shaky when one of the Americans lifted up his father’s journals from the back seat but the sentry must have simply thought these were the boy’s own notebooks. He weighed them in his hand but did not open them.

  “I’m staying the night there with family friends,” Anselm blurted out.

  The American put the journals back on the seat and nodded to his colleague. The barrier went up and Anselm was curtly waved through. On the wrists of the Americans gold watches gleamed in the afternoon sun. Their uniforms were greener than the desert had ever been. Bulletproof vests, grenades clipped on bandoliers, binoculars resting on bulging stomachs, all khaki: the Americans were pinker than the TV made them seem on the nightly news. Anselm gave them a small wave and drove out into the heat and the dust, heading north, parallel to the black horizon, stopping an hour later to wait and see if he had been followed. Nothing came along the road. He turned the car east, onto the flat desert, wending southwards.

  * * *

  Einar’s notes recorded that certain ravines, where the dragons had burrowed fissures for egg storage, had smaller entrances on the far side of the gullies where they mated. In his books Einar guessed that this had been the result of some process that the newborns went through—possibly as they hatched, though he wasn’t sure—that wracked the ground, splitting the dry earth at the back of the fissures. He further speculated that those caverns were the ones where the newborns had not survived, for the dragons seemed to avoid them.

  Anselm’s father had been able to burrow through these narrow openings and wriggle his way up to watch the dragons from within the unused chambers. There were several maps that noted where to turn off the road, what shape the land was, and where it was sensible to leave the car and continue on foot to get to these places.

  Einar had written that early evening was the best time to approach the mating grounds. The path he’d followed was out of the sightline of the dragons on the ground, but there was no cover from any in flight: twilight was a time of day when they were not inclined to eat, he’d written—though the looping track he’d marked out to their mating grounds kept one away from the direction the dragons went when they hunted in the mountains, anyway. He marked the entrances to the tunnels he felt for certain were no longer used with the glimmerfoil, his later diaries noting that this had been a success: the tough weed had grown plentifully, obscuring the holes that led to the tunnels through the rock.

  At sunset Anselm stopped the car where the map suggested, in a narrow valley about two miles from the first ridge of the hot ravines. Stepping out of the car he realized for the first time just how hot it actually was without the temperamental air-conditioning in Dowsabel’s car on full. He was used to the heat of the city, but this was different. He was beaded with perspiration in a few moments. Shouldering his pack, he kept one of his water canteens at hand as he stomped across country towards the breeding grounds.

  The sun was gone by the time he spied the first of the glimmerfoil clumps on the sloping land ahead. Behind it, barely visible, was a split in the earth, no bigger than a beach ball in diameter. He carefully pushed the tangled glimmerfoil bush down with his boot and leant into the hole.

  It turned out the torch he’d brought had a weak battery, but its paltry light was just about bright enough for him to see how the hole became a tunnel within a few feet. He wriggled in and pulled himself forward, pushing his pack ahead. After a few feet he emerged into a space big enough to stand up in. The dim sky was visible not so far ahead, along the steep slope upwards, so he turned out the torch and felt his way along, his fingers running over seams of the desiccated rock. As he went along he felt the earth shaking lightly beneath his fingertips, while dusty downfalls of sand speckled his arm and head. He heard roars and saw the hole before him flare with flame.

  When he came closer to
the lip of the cave he went down on his belly and crawled slowly forward. The grotto of hard rock opened out quite high up over the deep ravine: looking out and down he saw a small grouping of American dragons.

  The ravine was horseshoe-shaped. Its rough sides surrounded a bowl of the desert, marked only by the occasional boulder. There were five dragons in sight. With a sudden and thumping realization of the danger he was in, Anselm watched as a huge female emerged from another cave and slid down the rock into the bowl, sending shale out before her in a tiny avalanche. Two newborns, each walking with a floppy gait, leapt out of her way, barking weirdly, their wings shaking: another female shepherded them aside. A smaller dragon slumbered on ground close to the cave Anselm hid in. Another newborn, he guessed.

  The solitary male, lounging on his back, rolled over to watch the sliding female as she steadied herself. With phenomenal speed he flipped up onto his four feet, shooting her a questioning look. She purred. The male took to the air, sending a swirl of dust and sand around the ravine. Little rocks skittered towards Anselm and he ducked back down, squinting his eyes tightly. The stirred air carried with it that smell of magic and the far-off: pretzels and bagels and endless prairies. Liberty. Doughnuts and apple pie. Democracy and skyscrapers. Steak. Grilled cheese.

  As the evening darkened he simply watched them, giving no thought to what he had come to do, as fascinated as his father must have been. He just wanted to watch these creatures. Even the blundering newborns were a source of delight but, truly, it was the huge adults that hypnotised him. They seemed to flow with every movement in Anselm’s eyes. He was his father’s son in those hours; his face streaked with dirt, more deeply transformed by the joy that sat there after so long absent. Fire billowed out in the air below. Anselm felt the heat of it on his face. Soon the male returned, his jaws clamped around a mountain lion. He flung it at the feet of the female he had been eyeing up and she ate so haughtily Anselm almost laughed aloud, seeing the male’s chagrin. But when she was done she consented to be mounted and Anselm watched, intrigued, as her tail lifted and the male writhed around her on his side, batting the air with one wing, in cautious approach. When he had penetrated her, his eyes closed and little flames and smoke puffed up from his nostrils. The female let out a sweet sound as the male thrust deeper and deeper and her wings went up and down languidly as they both dragged over the ground. The newborns skipped around them until their mother batted them away with a scowl. The male let out a huge roar and flipped up, detached from the female. He strutted around her and then took to the air again. Anselm craned up to watch him rise into the night, marking his presence through the black air by the spurts of fire he sent across the sky.

  The ground shuddered close to Anselm. He looked sharply to the right and saw the slumbering dragon he had taken for a newborn was, in fact, an adult, after all: a female, smaller than normal, now approaching the tunnel he was in. One of her back legs dragged and Anselm saw a single working eye. The other was milk-white. The two newborns barked up at her, sounding amused. She mewed in protest at their mother, but that dragon had wandered over to the now-reclining female who had just mated. Anselm slipped back into the darkness of the tunnel. A moment later the silhouette of the lame dragon blocked the front entrance.

  She stayed there the whole night, making terrible noises. Anselm decided to simply wait it out. At dawn, perhaps, he would be able to sneak past her and into the ravine. His father had written that the dragons slept so deeply, well into the day, that one could walk near enough to them to almost touch. Anselm had decided that was when he would make his attempt at snatching up an egg.

  He settled against the hard wall of the cave and drank some water.

  * * *

  Something smooth and heavy hit him gently in the face and he woke up, momentarily confused and annoyed. Alarmed, he saw that dawn had come and gone. A white, mid-morning sky was framed by the entrance to the cave. The lame dragon must have moved off at some point whilst Anselm slept. He heard and felt movement outside. The dragons of America were awake. He had missed his chance.

  But then he looked at the thing that had woken him and saw it was, in fact, a small egg. He gave a little laugh of delight at the improbability of this good fortune before reaching out to pick it up.

  He realized instantly that something was wrong with it as his eyes cleared of sleep’s fuzziness. The egg was cold, and a simple white colour. His father had written that dragon eggs were warm to the touch and either a white colour striped over with red striations or a shade of deep blue, speckled with little stars: either kind were at least two foot long.

  This egg sat in Anselm’s palm easily, no bigger than a grapefruit, but certainly heavier. He guessed it was some kind of stillbirth: its mother had not looked or sounded strong. Would Renfred still want it? Whatever the condition its in-sides were in it would still give Renfred enough shell to last him through years of studying, even practicing, proper alchemy.

  Anselm thought about it. It would simply be suicide to go outside into the bowl now. And surely Renfred Rolandsson had not been expecting an egg that would come to term? Now Anselm had such things in mind he apprehended that Renfred must have been planning to terminate a birth from any egg Anselm brought him, somehow. Well, this saved him that bother, too.

  Anselm put the egg in his pack and clambered around to the small gap that led out of the cave, glancing back just once: part of him wanted to look at the dragons for one, final time. Another part urged him away: he had done what he was bound to do.

  Mission accomplished.

  * * *

  When he came out, pushing the glimmerfoil bush aside again with caution, the air on his face, though warm, felt fresh and invigorating. A kind of appreciation for his own daring began to bloom in him as he stood and stretched. He had seen what few men, even American men, had seen: the mating of American dragons. Furthermore, he had taken what no one in his own land had ever had from the creatures.

  He clapped his hands together and looked about him. To the right, not far-off, was another clump of glimmerfoil. There was something dark tangled up in it. Piqued, Anselm walked over. It was a shoe. It was his father’s shoe. The left, from a pair of brogues. The one that had been missing on the day Einar had been found in the middle of the north road, his old car pulled over onto the sand. It had been mating season then, too. The American soldiers who brought Einar’s mangled corpse back to Arrowstorm had told Anselm’s mother that they thought her husband had got out of the car and been hit by another vehicle on the road. Maybe he was flagging it down for aid, they’d suggested, though there was nothing mechanically wrong with his car as far as they could tell. She could collect it from their compound whenever she liked, they said. The battered body, too.

  Anselm lifted the shoe out of the glimmerfoil cautiously. There was a brown stain on the inner heel. Dried blood, maybe. He looked past the briary weeds and saw that the entrance to the tunnel behind them had collapsed. Further up the ridge four cracked indentations buckled the rocks.

  It was easy to imagine an American dragon landing there, its feet thumping into the earth at great speed, causing the cave below to fall in. He discovered it was also dreadfully easy to imagine his father crawling, crushed, out through the packed hole; just as terribly easy to imagine his father stumbling or dragging himself across the desert and back to his car, desperate to get back to Arrowstorm and help. Had he even wanted to pull over that day? Or had he done so in some delirium of pain and stepped out of the car in a panic and then simply fallen down dead, his wounds later taken as collision wounds? It was impossible to say, but Anselm was suddenly certain that was what had happened, nevertheless. He felt sick and sad and hot and cold all at once. This was something that could belong to him only, and forever. Dowsabel could not be told. His mother should never know; not even that such things were a possibility. He put the shoe back in the weeds, as though it were its own kind of marker.

  Testament that a man had been there.

  * * *


  For some reason he knew he would be breezed back through the checkpoint when he got back to Arrowstorm. This confidence was new to him, and strange, but he trusted it unthinkingly and he was right to do so: as he stopped at the city gate the American soldier who’d beckoned him past the barrier yesterday merely peered in and nodded before turning to his comrade and shouting:

  “It’s the kid from yesterday. The student.”

  The barrier went up and Anselm went in.

  He felt like the homecoming king.

  V

  The dead dragon came to him that night. No bigger than a dog, she wound about the struts that held the canvas over his rooftop bed, wraithlike and smoky and free from the shell where she’d died.

  “Are you my mommy?”

  Her voice was the cutesy, too-sweet voice of a child star.

  “What?” Anselm sat up. The dead dragon put her front claws on his stomach and looked up at him with entreating eyes.

  “Are you my mommy?” she repeated.

  “No,” he said. He looked into the little space beneath the platform his bed was on. He’d put his wicker laundry basket there with the egg hidden inside. Reaching over and lifting the lid he saw the egg was still there. “What’s going on?” he muttered.

  “What is going on?” the dead dragon asked him. She nuzzled up against his chest.

  “Is this a dream?”

  “Is this a dream?”

  He gently pushed at the smoky creature and she swirled, becoming indistinct. He stood up as she coalesced back into her supple shape again.

  “She is bonded to you,” said a husky voice behind him. He spun around and saw that the dragon he had taken for a newborn in the desert, the lame female, was perched on the low, brick wall of the rooftop.

  A little bit of piss spurted out of Anselm. She was here to punish him for his theft, he thought: What else could it be?