The Emperor of all Things

by Paul Witcover

  ‘By whom?’ asked Quare.

  ‘Why, the wizard himself – or so I convinced myself. It seemed that wherever I set foot, he had preceded me and left behind traces of his presence designed less to throw me off the track than to entice me farther along it. There was something flattering about it. I felt as if I were being tested like some knight of old, that I must prove myself worthy before I should be permitted to find the grail which I sought.’

  ‘That being the watch, I assume.’

  ‘I did not know it at the time. But patience, Mr Quare – you shall hear all. Indeed, you shall be the first to hear it. Not even Magnus knew the whole story. He would not have believed it. I did not fully believe it myself for many years, although it happened to me. I thought much of it a dream. And perhaps it was. But dreams, too, can be real. Never doubt it, sir.’

  PART TWO

  8

  Wachter’s Folly

  I REACHED MÄRCHEN with the last echoes of the hour still haunting the air. Snow was falling, as it had done on and off during my ascent of Mount Coglians. I was exhausted, hungry, chilled to the bone. My rucksack seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. Even my hat was heavy. Yet I was in high spirits. I had been back in Europe for some months, having sailed from Africa to Italy, then made my way up the peninsula and across the Italian Alps into Austria. Winter was drawing nigh, and I was glad to be away from the oppressive heat of the climes in which I had spent much of the last year. I was travelling incognito, in the guise of a journeyman, following the clues – or riddles, rather – left by that nameless horologist whose footsteps I had dogged halfway round the world. Wherever I went, I found evidence that he had preceded me. Among the timepieces brought to me for examination and repair in each new town or city, I would find one or two that bore the unmistakable signs of his touch – strange, capricious-seeming alterations whose only purpose, as far as I could tell, was the introduction of random inaccuracies.

  By random I mean simply that they were not regular, as, for example, the loss of a certain number of minutes in a day, but rather unpredictable from day to day and even moment to moment. A clock might run fast and then slow, then speed up again, for instance, all within the space of an hour. Needless to say, the mechanisms responsible for such variation were impressive, and quite often beyond my understanding – I sent drawings back to Magnus, and he incorporated many of them into subsequent inventions of his own. Always there would be a clue concealed somewhere in the timepiece itself, or in its altered functioning, that, once divined, led me to my next destination. And this was true, by the way, regardless of the type of timepiece. Not just mechanical clocks driven by springs or weights but clepsydrae and other water clocks, hemicycles, hourglasses, even gnomons. Nothing, it seemed, was beneath the interest, or beyond the expertise, of my quarry.

  I did not expect to end my quest in Märchen. Indeed, I was not even aware of the town’s existence until, travelling on foot across the lower slopes of Mount Coglians, I happened to hear, from out of the cloud-steeped heights above me, the tolling of bells that struck an hour at odds with what my pocket watch assured me was the correct time. I paused to examine my map but could find no trace of a town anywhere near by, save for the place I had spent the previous night. Of course, I could have been hearing the echo of a clock from elsewhere: the peaks and valleys of the mountains had a way of playing tricks with sound. Still, I decided to investigate. Over the next five hours, as I picked my way up the side of the mountain, following trails that seemed better suited to sheep than men, the clock struck thrice only. And not once did the tolling of the bells – one tone overlying the next, echo building upon echo to extend across the frozen surface of the air, then dispersing by an equivalent subtraction until no trace remained – coincide with the true hour.

  Märchen turned out to be a small village; it almost had to be, perched so high, in the shadow of an immense glacier. All the way up the mountain, amidst snow flurries, I had watched the sun progress towards that distant upthrust dagger of ice until, at last, it seemed to impale itself there. Now, in the waning light, skirls of snow and ice crystals unfurled from the glacier’s jagged edge like blood from a wound in the sky. I topped a ridge, and as quickly as that, with a suddenness that took my breath away, I found myself on the outskirts of the village. Even at the time, it seemed strange to me that there had been no warning, no sign that I was drawing near to a place of habitation. No rubbish such as one might expect to find at the edge of a settlement, no pastured animals , no stray dogs, not even wagon tracks. I looked back the way I had come, but all was lost in mist and snow; I might have been in a different world altogether from that in which I had started.

  The few people I saw on the streets were bundled against the weather and hurrying to be out of it; they did not stop to talk, shooting me curious but not unfriendly glances. I nodded as I passed by, taking note of their simple but well-made clothing. The houses and other buildings of the town shared these qualities. There was nothing ostentatious about them; everything I saw bespoke the quiet confidence of long-standing prosperity, as if the bloody tides of war that had surged back and forth across the lands below had never risen high enough to splash Märchen’s well-kept streets.

  Street lamps glittered through the snow, which had increased, whipped by a biting wind that made me clutch my cloak to my throat. Upon reaching what I took to be the central square, I saw a lone, dark-cloaked figure kindling the lamps around its periphery from a sputtering flambeau. The man was scarcely more than four feet tall and required a stepladder to perform his task; he carried this implement with him, slung over one shoulder, which gave him a hunchbacked appearance as he trudged from post to post with an uneven gait, the flickering torch held before him, his dark cloak flapping behind. For an instant, I thought I was seeing Magnus, and that, by some incomprehensible circumstance, my friend and former master had preceded me here.

  At the centre of the square stood the clock tower, a square, monolithic structure about fifteen feet to a side that rose to a height of perhaps thirty feet. Such monumental clocks are usually part of a town hall or prominent church, but this one stood alone in the middle of the square – where I would have expected to find a statue or fountain – as though proclaiming its independence from all secular and religious authority. The façades of the surrounding buildings, as far as I could make out, were clockless.

  I approached, the chill forgotten. I think I knew already – and not just from the evidence of my eyes, but on an instinctive level, by the pricking of my thumbs, as it were – that I was in the presence of a horological masterpiece, and, moreover, an eccentric one. This impression was bolstered by the tower’s appearance, which, though it revealed nothing of the mechanism within, nevertheless confirmed my sense of an idiosyncratic personality at work, for it more than made up for any lack of ostentation in the other structures I had seen so far. I did not doubt for an instant that I had found another example of the wizard’s work – the purest example yet, for this was no mere addition to something made by a lesser craftsman, as was the case with the other timepieces I had encountered in my travels: this masterpiece could only have come from the hands of the wizard himself, or so I imagined.

  The ragged pulse of lamplight and shadow through the curtain of falling snow imparted a semblance of activity to the figures that covered the tower’s exterior. I couldn’t tell at first if they were castings or carvings, nor if they were painted; they seemed to sprout from every inch of the façade and came in a variety of sizes: the smallest no larger than my finger, the largest as big as life, or bigger. Men, women and children were represented, but also gargoyles that mixed human and bestial aspects, winged devils and cloven-footed demons, as well as angels, and skeletal figures, too, wielding scythes or hourglasses that seemed no less dangerous. Twining through and about them all was the coiling body of an immense serpent … or perhaps a dragon, though it lacked wings as far as I could see. Never had I beheld the sufferings of the damned depicted so persuasively
, for such, it appeared, was the artist’s subject. The crowd of tormentors and tormented blurred before my eyes into a single undifferentiated mass, as if those inflicting pain and those seeking to escape it suffered alike the agony of exile from God’s presence even as they remained subject to His will, fixed in place for ever by a judgement that permitted neither escape nor appeal.

  As I gazed at the tableau, a feeling of horror stirred in my breast, and I shivered beneath my cloak. Despite my admiration for the artistry, or what I could discern of it, I found myself hesitant to undertake a closer examination. Indeed, I felt an impulse to step back, as if I were in the presence of something dangerous or vile, and though I stood my ground, I did not draw any nearer.

  The decorated portion of the tower rose to a height of fifteen feet or so, where an opening gaped, wide and dark as the mouth of a cave: daylight would no doubt reveal a recessed stage there, across which, at the stroke of some predetermined hour, figures emerging from within would progress along inlaid tracks in jerky pantomimes of living movement. I had seen such parades of dolls and automatons hundreds of times in my training and my travels, and knew them inside and out, but I felt certain that whatever display emerged from this particular tower would be like nothing I had witnessed before.

  Above the proscenium, the pale clock face floated in mid-air like some smaller sister of the moon seduced down from the heavens. I tried to make out the time, but I couldn’t see the hands clearly, much less the numbers to which they pointed. Rising out of the mix of snow and shadow, in which feathery black flakes seemed to be falling alongside the white, was the apex of the tower: a campanile open on all four sides. Clustered within, dimly visible, were the pear-shaped silhouettes of five bells. The two largest hung motionless, but the three smaller ones were swinging slowly back and forth, each following a rhythm of its own. Though there was no sound of striking clapper, faint pings and clicks reached my ears through the keening of the wind – a forlorn music.

  ‘ Tempus Imperator Rerum ,’ rasped a voice from behind me in German-accented Latin.

  I jumped, startled; lost in reverie, I had not heard the man’s approach. Turning, I saw the lamplighter looking up at me with a sly expression, as if pleased to have surprised me. This close, there was no mistaking him for Magnus: he was younger, for one thing, with a full and vigorous reddish-brown beard (in which snowflakes winked and melted), a bulbous red nose and glittering blue eyes beneath a battered brown tricorn. Unlike Magnus, he was a true dwarf, his head disproportionately large for the rest of his body, as were his hands. Yet he might almost have been a dwarf of legend.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

  In one gloved hand, the man held the knotted end of a hempen rope by which the ladder was slung over his shoulder; in the other, like a club, he carried the flambeau, now extinguished. ‘ Tempus Imperator Rerum ,’ he repeated. And then, in an English that bore the same accent as his Latin: ‘Time, Emperor of All Things. Is that not the motto of your guild?’

  ‘What guild would that be?’ I asked in turn.

  He laughed aloud, flashing teeth as white and large as those of a horse, or so it seemed to me. The combination of physical exhaustion and mental stimulation made everything dreamlike and unreal. ‘Come now, lad,’ he chided, although he did not appear any older than I. ‘Do you think I don’t know a member of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers when I see one? Why try to hide it?’

  ‘I’m not hiding anything,’ I replied. ‘I’m merely curious as to how you came to that conclusion, as I carry no badge or mark of identity.’

  ‘Do you not?’ he asked, still grinning. ‘Who else but a clockman would be standing here in the middle of a snowstorm, oblivious as a pilgrim in a cathedral? And you are English, as I deduced from your manner of dress, and as your speech confirmed. Finally, you recognized the Latin motto. Thus, you are an English clockman. Thus, you are a member of the Worshipful Company. Quod erat demonstrandum .’

  ‘You are here,’ I pointed out. ‘You speak English and are acquainted with the motto. Does that make you a member of the guild?’

  The man gestured with the charred flambeau. ‘I have to be here, don’t I? No matter the weather, the lamps must be lit. But now my work is done, and I’m for the hearth and home. You’d best come along, before you freeze to death.’

  I confess I was taken aback at the invitation. ‘That’s very generous of you,’ I said, ‘but if you could just direct me to a good inn …’

  Again he laughed, expelling gouts of steam from the thicket of his beard. ‘Why, where did you think we were going? To my hearth and home? The missus would have my head on a platter!’ Chuckling, he started off across the square, moving with the lurching gait I had noticed earlier, as if the ladder slung over his shoulder was a lot heavier than it looked.

  ‘What’s your name, clockman?’ the man inquired once I had caught him up.

  I gave him my alias. ‘I am Michael Gray.’

  ‘Adolpheus.’

  I wondered whether this was a first or a last name. No clarification was forthcoming.

  ‘Come to fix our clock, have you, Master Gray?’

  ‘I’m no master,’ I told him. ‘Just a journeyman. But yes, I’d like to try.’ That seemed the safest way to answer the question.

  ‘Climbed all this way, did you? Afoot, with no horse to bear you?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’re fortunate. Each spring we find the frozen bodies of those who stray off the track in some snowstorm or other.’

  ‘I didn’t realize it was so dangerous.’

  Adolpheus grunted but said no more. He led me through a maze of steep and narrow lanes, all of them deserted, past closed-up shops and dwellings whose curtained windows glowed warmly through the falling snow, which had increased in intensity, along with the wind. If it didn’t qualify as a snowstorm yet, it would soon do so.

  At last, following my guide around a corner, I found myself facing a two-storey dwelling whose windows were ablaze with light. The inn – or so I judged it to be from the clapboard sign that hung above the door, which depicted a dog lying curled before a fire and was flapping vigorously back and forth as though determined to break loose and fly away, a creature tethered against its will – seemed to promise more than mere hospitality, as if every species of earthly delight were to be found within.

  ‘The Hearth and Home,’ Adolpheus said, bustling forward. He unslung his ladder and leaned it against one wall, where snow was already piling up, then laid the dead torch across the top rung. Motioning for me to precede him, he flung the door open.

  A wave of warmth and conversation rolled out. Smells of wood smoke, tobacco, cooking meat, mulling wine and cider, and spilled ale mingled with the steamy odours of wet garments drying in the heat of a roaring fire. I paused on the threshold, dizzy, dark spots and bright sparks dancing before my eyes. A hush descended, not hostile, but not welcoming, either. A dog barked once, sharply.

  In my travels, I had of necessity become a connoisseur of silences. Being able to judge them correctly can mean the difference between life and death to a stranger entering a place whose customs and language may be other than his own. This silence was made up of curiosity and suspicion in equal measure. I guessed that more than one of the hushed conversations had concerned my identity and purpose – news of a visitor spreads fast in small towns, along with the wildest of rumours. In such cases, it is imperative to make the proper first impression. People are ever eager to believe the worst.

  I removed my hat, but before I could say a word, Adolpheus pushed me forward and entered behind me, slamming the door against the wind. ‘Bless all here,’ he said in German, vigorously brushing the snow from his beard.