Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

by Genevieve Valentine

  The Tresaulti people don’t know the names, for this city or for any other. Boss discourages it. “Our circuit is wide enough,” she says. “We might not come back to a city in your lifetime.”

  The crew scoff.

  The ones with copper bones get very quiet.

  They buried Alec outside the city where Boss had first found him, the city he left behind as soon as he heard Boss’s voice.

  Boss would never have come back, would have left it alone until the world cracked to ash, except that he died, and she didn’t know where else to bury him. Some unmarked grave along the road was not for him. For him mausoleums were made; for him they carved angels from stone.

  (She had tried to carve what she could for him, always. She would not shirk now just because he was dead.)

  The city had fallen in, but it was still itself. Thankfully the ones with the bones knew better than to say, and the others were too tired from two days’ drive to look around them and recognize anything.

  Boss worried when Little George looked at the city and frowned, rubbing the back of his neck, tilting his head at the skyline like a listening dog.

  “Come along,” she said, and like a listening dog, he came. “Rest here,” she said to everyone, and then, “except Ayar and Little George.”

  Ayar would dig the grave; George would have something to do besides wonder.

  She cannot bring herself to change George. She means to; he wants to be a tumbler so badly she can hear him dreaming. Someday she will. He’s still young. He can get a little older before she fixes him.

  (He isn’t broken. She does not know what to do.)

  But when she thinks about changing him—when she catches his shoulder to turn him the right way to a task, and he goes away laughing and batting her hand off him—her hand goes cold.

  Before Alec fell, she would have already done it. Before Alec fell, she thought this was the kindest thing you could do for anyone.

  It is. It is the kindest thing.

  But she sends George to the gravedigging, away from the shadows of the city, so he does not have time to think about where they are, and how long it’s been since they were there last.

  Once, she looks back at the center of the camp to see Elena watching her, her eyes flat and merciless in the milky winter light.

  Boss looks at her until Elena drops her gaze.

  “Ying,” Elena snaps, “you may be able to freeze to death, but the rest of us are useful enough to be missed. Get some wood, or throw yourself on the fire to give us something to burn.”

  It doesn’t carry the venom it used to (now Ying has the bones, and she’s in as much danger of cracking and freezing as any of the rest of them), but it’s comforting for some people to hear cradle stories told again, Boss thinks.

  (Ying was too young, Boss thinks, stops.)

  As Ayar digs, Boss watches the ruins.

  She’s not much impressed by cities, these days. The ancient cities lasted a thousand years. Alec’s fell in a hundred, with only some bombs to blame. He’d be ashamed of it, too, she thinks, if he had lived. He understood weakness, but he liked things that were sturdy or strong. He liked Ayar, and cities, and Elena, and the wind.

  Boss can see that the tall buildings had fallen first; their iron girders had groaned and bent and sent their towers crashing onto the low roofs, bringing the whole city to the ground.

  That’s what happens, she thinks, if no one cares for the bones of a thing.

  34.

  Most government men are not an accident.

  Every so often, there’s a soldier in the ranks who happens to be standing after all the rest have fallen; there’s a rich young man maneuvered into place by those who have plans for him; there’s a bureaucrat who happens to keep out of the pit of vipers long enough to grow befuddled and white-haired and become a minister of something without really trying. But most true government men are hungry for it; most government men make plans; most government men are born, not made.

  When a particular young boy goes to the circus, and forgets to clap at the tumblers or the strongman because he is wondering if they could be of any use to him, he is a government man.

  (While he watches them, he thinks of an agile militia; a way to prepare convicts before he puts them to labor; a body for himself. Government men are never too young to worry about dying before their work is finished.)

  Later, his mother will ask him why he didn’t enjoy himself. He will lie that he did. She will believe him; he is an excellent liar.

  Later, after battle, he will lie awake inside the rubble of a bombed-out building, staring at the sky and waiting for rescue, and think how he could leap over the walls if only he had a skeleton of springs.

  Later, he forgets the circus. The war swallows everything at regular intervals, and makes the world start again from nothing; even a clever young man has to pay attention if he’s going to scrabble out of the wreckage and keep his head through the next government.

  (There are ways to do this. He finds them all.)

  Later, he will rise. He will grind peace out of the ashes of little battles, and make alliances with the ones he cannot defeat.

  He resurrects factories whenever he can spare the men to guard them. He fences off land for the prisoners to farm. He collects books and singed half-books in his capital city; he thinks that someday there would be merit in a school. He steals enough gasoline to travel, and wherever he goes he brushes off the ruins to make use of them however he can. He listens, and plans, and works in increments to make a world in his image.

  People let him build it. It’s tyranny, they know, but it’s no more than they would do, if they could.

  He comes back to the circus.

  He watches without seeing; he makes plans. The circus goes on around him, without him. If you asked him what their faces looked like, he wouldn’t know.

  (The little boy at the circus didn’t notice Panadrome’s music, the pinkish lanterns, the spangled costumes. Government men aren’t carried away with any spectacle but their own.)

  A man and a woman step into the ring. She has one eye; he lifts her into the air with one hand. She grips his wrists and fights him, touching her head to the backs of her knees, wrapping her legs around him like a disease.

  Once, she fixes her eyes on the government man. The glass one is unnerving; the real one burns.

  He does not remember this. This thing was not here before.

  Without knowing why, he sits back in his seat as if the tent is plunged into darkness and he cannot remember the way out; as if someone has held a mirror up to him.

  (Those with great hunger are born, not made.)

  35.

  The night the strange woman crashes, Elena finally utters a name that fits—“Poor bird,” she says, and they get gooseflesh, knowing they’ve heard Bird’s real name for the first time.

  Ying goes first, shouting (Ying always did worry), and the others slide down one by one. None of them look at Elena, except Fatima, who goes down just before Elena and who glances at her every few feet down the rigging, as if she’s waiting for the strike and the drop.

  Elena goes to a flatbed to stretch, alone; the last thing she needs is a pile of stupid questions on top of everything.

  She’s walking back across the camp when Stenos comes out of Boss’s workshop.

  His shirt is black with blood, his face smeared and clotted red like he’s been at a carcass.

  Something inside Elena turns over, dark and consuming; he has the bones, she thinks. He’s one of us, finally.

  Desire hits her so suddenly that she recoils, presses away as he passes, in case he can see it on her.

  But he’s not looking at her—his eyes are empty and glassed over (she feels sick and wild), and he walks past her without stopping. The blood runs off his arms like stage paint.

  She knows whose blood it is. She knows what has happened to her copper bones and the fragile skin.

  Why this moment should horrify her, she doesn’t kn
ow. It’s not as if this is the first night she’s had to live through after someone has fallen to the ground.

  At last, she thinks that winter, when she sees Stenos coming for her. On its heels comes the thought, He’s not one of us, but it’s a truth that gets swallowed in her hunger.

  They have no time—they’ll be missed—and he drags his kisses against her open mouth so hard she can feel his teeth.

  After all this time lifting Bird, he’s stronger than he looks.

  (“How could you do that to her?” he breathes into her neck, pressing her against the wall. “How could you do it?”

  She makes fists in his hair, wonders if she’s doomed to be surrounded by fools.)

  Afterwards, he steps back from her, watches with dark eyes as she smoothes her skirt down, pulls back her hair.

  “You have powder on your leg,” she says.

  He brushes his pants with his palms until the white is gone.

  When he says, “Don’t tell anyone,” she makes herself wait a moment before she shrugs and says, “Of course,” as if she’s doing him a favor, as if it’s his privacy she wants to protect.

  (What is she, an animal?)

  36.

  I thought the government man would come out at the end with Boss in hand, barking his orders to have us all taken away. Jonah thought so, too, so much that he and the crew were quietly packing the trucks, and after every act the dancing girls and the jugglers were shuttled off to their trailers, to prepare for flight. By then the rain was pounding down, and I calculated who was safe by how many yellow umbrellas had floated from the back of the tent to the yard and back.

  Ayar put up a fight the moment Jonah told him, standing at the back door of the tent.

  “What, so we should run like dogs?” He grabbed an umbrella from the waiting crewman and marched across the muddy yard under a little pool of yellow. “Don’t be stupid. We do as Boss says.”

  Jonah matched him step for step, despite Ayar being more than a head taller. “Ayar, we have to think about ourselves.”

  “Ourselves without Boss?” Ayar snapped. “Easier said than done, Jonah.”

  Jonah flinched, and Ayar tried again. “She said there’s nothing to fear. We’ll look like fools if we run.”

  “Just because someone says there’s nothing to fear doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run,” said Jonah.

  That stopped Ayar in his tracks, and for a second the two of them stood in the middle of the yard under the yellow toadstool of the umbrella, with the rain coming down around them like it was going to wash them away.

  “I hope you’re right,” Ayar said, and went into the trailer, where I knew he would change into his regular clothes and come out to save anyone he could.

  Jonah looked calmer after that, though even from where I was sitting Ayar’s words had sounded mournful, as if he was convinced that they would be dead without Boss. Seemed foolish to me; who would challenge Ayar and live?

  I thought about Ayar’s clockwork spine. Would Boss have made him imperfect, so he would have to come to her for repairs? Did little breakdowns happen no matter what she meant to do?

  (I was closer than before, by accident; only because I was waking up. I was no closer to understanding anything about what Boss had done. You can never know someone else’s reasons. You barely know your own.)

  When Bird and Stenos went into the tent, a single umbrella hovering over them (he carried her), I couldn’t take it any more. I left my post and slid my way around the camp to the trailer where the aerialists lived.

  I knocked on the door. “Ying? Is Ying in there?”

  Fatima opened the door and stepped aside. I thought it was to invite me in, but then I saw Elena and knew Fatima had moved just so Elena could get a look at me.

  “What’s happened?” she asked.

  It was the least rude she had ever been to me, so I must have managed to look important despite myself.

  I had wanted to talk only to Ying (tell her to forget the troupe and get in the cook truck with Joe and drive out already, keep going, hide and wait until there was a new government that didn’t know her), but looking at Elena I said, “The government man is here. Boss is putting on the full show. He’s seen everything.”

  Penna gasped. Nayah and Ying stood up, like there was something to be done.

  Elena said, “Sit down and be quiet.”

  They obeyed.

  Elena crossed the trailer in five long steps, and a moment later she and I were outside on the rickety stair that hovered just above the ground, half-covered by the roof. I wobbled and was sure I would fall any moment. She stood with one foot on top of the other, arms folded, looking out over the camp like she didn’t even notice the narrowness of the ledge we were standing on.

  “What did Boss say?”

  “That there was nothing to fear.”

  Her lips were a thin line, and, suddenly brave, I took a guess and asked her, “Is this the first government man who’s done this to us?”

  She looked at me, surprised, like I was an infant who had suddenly mastered human speech.

  “No,” she said.

  “What happened, before?”

  Elena pressed her crossed arms into her chest until the metal groaned.

  “I have to get ready,” she said. “Some people don’t have the luxury of running around banging on doors and worrying people for nothing.”

  “So something happened,” I said, but she was gone and the door was closed behind her. Inside, she was snapping at the others to either powder their legs properly or join the dancing girls, who didn’t care if you looked sloppy.

  I met the government man on my way back from the aerialists’ trailer.

  He and his bodyguard (who held a black umbrella over the gentleman’s head) were coming out the front entrance. I was surprised—we were only half-finished—but too relieved to see him leaving to wonder at it.

  “Did you enjoy the show, sir?” I called. “You’re going too soon! You haven’t even seen the Grimaldi brothers yet, and the aerialists—”

  “Does your master always look for lunatics?” the government man asked, too sharply. His steps were careful over the mud, but he was in a hurry to be gone.

  I realized suddenly that he meant Bird. He had seen Stenos and Bird; their act had run him right out.

  Bold and stupid with glee, I said quite seriously, “That’s what happens to some, sir. No predicting how the madness will come upon you.”

  He shot me a look Elena would have been proud of, and then he was gone, down the crest of the hill where (I saw as I followed) the black car was waiting for him.

  I ran, slipping, to the back of the tent, where Stenos was walking out toward the camp, Bird tangled against him.

  “He’s gone,” I said, my relief as overwhelming as my panic had been. I embraced them, my arms circling Bird and just reaching Stenos. Bird accepted it like a statue accepts it; after a moment, Stenos patted my shoulder.

  I pulled back and explained what had happened. I stopped short of telling them Bird’s madness had driven him away. (I wasn’t a fool; if she didn’t kill me for saying it, he would.)

  Bird said, finally, “How soon do you think he’ll be back?”

  I blinked. “He’s gone,” I said, as if to a child.

  The pair of them looked at me so pitying that I took a step back, excused myself, and went to the main entrance, where I could thank the rubes as they left, where I couldn’t see Bird if I tried.

  37.

  You’re quick to leave the tent when the aerialists have finished.

  What is there to keep you? After the last applause, the magic is already over, the tent shrinking around you until you can see the bare bulbs again, the worn-through canvas, the bits of mirror glinting like sharp glass eyes. You leave your beer glass under the bench (or smuggle it out under your coat), and you gather the people you came with, and you wander out through the mostly-empty yard on your way home.

  Now the boy in his brass legs seems sad
, waving goodbye as if he’d like to follow you. Sometimes there are a couple of dancing girls, swaying halfheartedly to imaginary music. But most likely you are alone in the dark, and your shadows walk ahead of you like they’re anxious to be gone, until you’re far away from the circus.

  It unnerves you, and you don’t know why.

  By the time you get home you are tired, and on your way you have passed the shabby walls around your city and the sharp-smelling lemongrass growing through the cracks, and just ahead your house is locked up tight waiting for you—things that remind you of the real world, things that annoy and welcome and shake away the creeping unease of some dark circus yard.

  By the time the door is shut behind you, you are thinking again of how joyful the tumblers seemed, how fast the jugglers tossed the torches back and forth. You talk about the aerialists—some of them, under the makeup, seemed even pretty. You joke at dinner, tossing rolls back and forth over the table.

  Everyone will laugh and pass the rolls high in the air and clap along, until someone starts whistling the sharp-note tune from the circus act.

  Then someone (you) will say, “Stop it, I’m hungry, pass me one,” and the trick will suddenly settle down, and the meal will take up again. The joke never lasts after someone reminds you of the music.

  It’s one thing to see a mechanical man, but the Panadrome ruins the meal for everyone if you think about him long enough.

  38.

  Panadrome was an accident.

  Boss had been an opera singer.

  There was already a war, of course; there was always war. But a good war was like a good spice, and flavored everything. That season the ticket sales of the opera had soared, as the government men named it one of the things the barbarian enemy did not respect. Their people had not thought to respect it either, before, but it’s amazing what a government man can do.

  The opera managers made the season a dark, lush one, the sort of thing to stir the deep pride of a nation at war; they lined up Three Soldiers of the Green, The Sorcerer, Queen Tresaulta, Haynan and Bello.