Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

by Genevieve Valentine

  Boss was an alto; she sang the nurses, the witches, the kitchen cook. Her closest claim to greatness that season was as the handmaiden of Queen Tresaulta.

  Annika Sorenson, the Queen, sang the final aria on the wide staircase of the palace set, descending slowly as her emotions built, until it would be time for her handmaiden to rush forward from behind the great pillar and press a knife into her lady’s hands, so that the queen might stab herself and thwart the captors who had sought to use her.

  Their Queen Tresaulta was a powerful production; it had been advertised as the performance of Annika Sorenson’s career, and Boss was beyond disputing it, as much as they all disliked Annika.

  Annika was the sort of visiting soprano who demanded that air conditioning be turned off backstage to preserve her throat, as if she’d never been a chorus member shoving herself into a costume in a muggy basement room. (She never had been; a voice like hers spent no time in the chorus.)

  The conductor, a stout gentleman just beginning to age, took to drinking after rehearsals. A few weeks before the opening, Boss had come across him in the prop room before rehearsal, sneaking drinks out of a bottle. When he saw her, he gave her a half-defiant, half-sheepish smile.

  “My family’s vineyard. Early spring, red. Only two years old.” He sighed. “I should have stayed there. I don’t have the heart for making music no one appreciates until a war breaks out.”

  She took the bottle and drank.

  “It’s not a good year,” he apologized.

  “Tell me about it,” she said, and he laughed.

  That night, Annika Sorenson was spectacular.

  She exceeded even the audition that had gotten her the contract, exceeded the performance tape the opera managers had passed to various governments as part of the invitation to the Summit. That night she sang as if only the notes held her together. By the last aria, the audience was entranced down to the last man, warding off gooseflesh, leaning forward so as not to miss a note.

  Her voice echoed off the chandeliers, rolled through the domed ceiling and out the doors. When she fell quiet (after “for this stone hall I lived,” as wavering Tresaulta recovers the bravery to kill herself and spare her kingdom from disgrace), the entire hall was silent, rapt.

  It was so quiet that the whirring whistle of the bomb was audible for a moment before it reached them.

  There was just enough time for Annika to glance up and fix Boss an annoyed look, as if Boss had timed some fireworks on the roof to ruin Annika’s evening.

  Then it struck.

  There are some things Boss knows.

  Boss knows that great events have a spirit of their own. Government men speak of it when they hold rallies in beautiful places lined with their soldiers, but they do not think it is true. Greatness seldom reveals itself to government men.

  Boss knows the reason some cities fall after the Circus Tresaulti has passed through is because the life of a city flickers and trembles when they are near. Then Tresaulti departs, and the life of the city tries to follow and cannot; even the buildings stumble and fall, become lost. When a city has no greatness, its will is gone; then a city is nothing but a maze of shells that are only stone and steel and—soon enough—dust.

  She does not know why it is that some cities have a greatness that allows them to stand, and others crumble less than a hundred years after the circus has passed there. (She tries to save those cities when she can by putting Tresaulti out of reach, as if the spirit of the city might not be offended if it can’t see them. “Might not be a good crowd,” she says. “We’ll camp farther out.”

  No one suspects another reason; by then, each of them has been driven away from things often enough.)

  Boss woke inside a cylinder.

  She didn’t know what had happened (the bomb—she ached when she remembered) or where she was (trapped inside the pillar). She struck out. The pillar crumbled and peeled under her hands, and she choked on the fine, sour powder as she dragged herself out of her prison as if she was hatching from an egg.

  There was no room for her to stand; the stairs had blown apart and the ceiling had caved in. The building was nothing now but a maze of painted wood and marble, deep purple velvet and chips of glass from the chandelier, groaning and swaying and doomed for the ground.

  She called out, absently, for Annika. (It was just the shock talking; she had already seen the fragmented stairs.) The air was so close that with every breath, a layer of powder coated her lungs.

  Panic struck and she shouted for anyone, shoving past metal pipes and chairs and the limp arms of the dead.

  (More than the bodies, though, more than the air that was already running thin, Boss trembled because the aria had gone unfinished; because the great moment had died.)

  She slid carefully through the wreckage, looking for a place with some light or air, some place that indicated there was a way out. She tried to hum, for company, but gave it up—it took up the air.

  She found the conductor on her crawl out from the stage, hoping for a pocket of air in the orchestra pit amid the splinters of instruments. He had been separated neatly from his head and hands by a falling beam; his right hand still clutched the baton.

  Absently, Boss tied them into her skirt, kept climbing.

  It took her three days to crawl out onto the top of the wreckage.

  By the time she emerged, she was dragging pounds of detritus with her; springs she’d picked up without meaning to, gears that fell into her outstretched hands, twists of wire that peeled away from the wreckage as she climbed. She had tied a string of ten piano keys to her belt; she had pulled them free of the balcony wall.

  The dome at the apex of the Opera House had been blasted sideways and embedded into what was left of the ceiling. She climbed inside the brass-lined curve and lay back, sucking in ragged breaths. When her panic had faded enough for her to move, she unknotted her skirts and arranged her collection at her feet in a little honor guard of metal bits and body parts. The conductor’s head rested near her left hand, gazing out mournfully at their city, where war had come.

  From where she was curled against the cool metal, she could see burning roofs dotting the sky. Occasionally the sharp report of gunfire would float up from the streets, but it was rare. The fight here was over. Now it was just a matter of the new government grinding the old one to death underfoot, and beginning again with the next city in line. The men who would burn through the city would never even look up and think, What a beautiful building that was, with the brass dome and the music; they would never look up and think, What a pity.

  “For this stone hall I lived,” she sang softly. Her lungs, stretching with the notes, felt like hers again after so many days of struggle. She finished the aria, an octave and a half below Annika’s rendition, so quietly that only the walls of the dome caught the sound. They rolled the notes back to her, tinny but true.

  She rested the conductor’s head in her lap and smoothed its hair. “It was beautiful music,” she said. “My compliments.”

  She watched the sky go from black to grey; slowly the fires burned themselves out, and the gunfire settled, and finally it was that long hour between night and dawn, and she was alone in the world.

  She built Panadrome before she ever climbed down from the roof of the opera house.

  There was no sign that she had gained some new power. There was just the worm’s knowledge that if you push long enough, the corpse will give way. She knew only that if you pull up the brass sheeting with the twisted bar you carry, it will curl into a barrel in your hands and you can fasten it tight; that if you find a home for every gear and coil, for every piano key, you can build a home.

  (She did not know, yet, how to do any of it the right way—Panadrome’s first set of hands would wither and have to be replaced with ones she fashioned out of silver—but if she had not tried from exhaustion and loneliness and terror, she might never have tried.)

  She strapped him to her back for the descent from the heap of ru
bble that was once the opera house. It took longer than it should have—she stopped, now and then, to pick up wires and joints and the flat backs of the opera chairs, which were useful once the char was scraped off.

  When she was on the ground, she put together what remained. She took refuge in the pockets of the outer walls that had been blasted out, and no one with a gun ever looked around enough to see her, working quietly in the grave of the opera house.

  At last, she passed her hands over what she had made, and the Panadrome rattled to life. He blinked and flexed his fingers. Tentatively, he touched the piano keys that lay along his right side like ribs. She watched horror and joy and resignation and despair fly over his face.

  After a long quiet, he said, “Madam, the piano is not in tune.”

  “I can fix that,” she said, and set to work.

  (The dead give way before the worm.)

  39.

  These are the songs that Panadrome plays:

  For the jugglers he plays a march in four-four time, so fast he can hardly keep up with the notes. He changes the song whenever the jugglers change; it gives him a chance to compose something new, and the jugglers will hardly notice.

  For the dancing girls, it’s a song in a minor key, rolling and swaying. The melody snakes slowly through the tent and, on the right night, can make everyone there think the dancing girls are better than they are.

  The strongman gets “The King Enters the Hall,” from Haynan and Bello. The music suits Ayar, and Panadrome likes the song itself. He’s been playing it so long he should hate it, but how can he? This is the music he was born to play, and it’s easier to have music sound the way you want it to if you play all the instruments.

  For Bird and Stenos, Panadrome plays what he likes; watching them meet and part is a comfort that reminds him of singers falling silent before the knife is handed to them in the final act. Every so often he wishes he could play Tresaulta’s theme, but every time he starts, the song bends into something else, and he lets the new notes happen, follows the melody where it leads him.

  Some parts of the past cannot be reclaimed, he knows. Better not to raise ghosts.

  The tumblers get no song at all, merely a play-along of sounds and scales, where he slides out this note or that one to emphasize how far they’re jumping, how fast they flip backwards, to heighten the tension as they crouch and wait.

  The aerialists perform to an intricate waltz, a majestic one-two-three one-two-three, timed to the length of the pendulum swing. (“Don’t play us the halfpenny oompah those other horrors get,” Elena said.)

  He plays it the same every night, without thinking. He never has to adjust the tempo of this song; Elena’s girls are better trained than most musicians. They do not falter; Elena’s girls do not fall.

  When Alec had his wings and swooped from the ceiling at the end of the circus, Panadrome fell silent. Alec’s wings sang as he flew, each feather a note, and the chord always carried over the gasps and the cheers of the crowd. Every night was a triumph.

  Panadrome was forgotten, and when he looked across the tent at Boss, her face upturned to see her lover spiraling down over the adoring audience closer and closer to reaching her, no one thought to look at Panadrome, to see why he was watching his maker.

  Maybe it’s just that she had been on the road with him for a long time, so long that only the two of them knew, so long that she had gone from treating him like a conductor to treating him like a brother to treating him like one of her own limbs. He looked at her in those invisible moments because he was used to looking at her; because out of them all, she was the only thing that really lasted. That was his reason; that was all.

  Better not to raise ghosts.

  40.

  After Little George has dropped the news about the government man and clanged away, casting resentful glances over his shoulder, the camp seems quieter, as if the worst is already over. The sound of Panadrome playing for the tumblers is muffled by the canvas and applause.

  In the distance, Stenos can hear little bell-sounds of the cooking cart being packed away. Mistake; they’ll just have to unpack it all again, if they stay.

  Stenos carries Bird to one of the trucks, where they can sit alone. She prefers to be away from the others when she can. He has never stopped hating her, but still, better to be alone with her than with the rest of them.

  (By now he knows her well enough that hating her is the same as knowing how tall she is; it’s a true thing about her; it just exists. He lives around it.)

  They sit side by side at the edge of a truck bed, their backs pressed up against the wooden crates where the light bulbs are packed. She’s overworked herself; he can see three angry marks on her tunic where the blood has seeped through the scars on her ribs, the black stains on the fabric like bullet holes.

  (When he holds on to her he can feel the raised skin where she had been sewn back together, a mountain range sliding under his thumbs.)

  One of the crew men passes them and spares Stenos a disapproving look. Stenos ignores it. He used to be one of them, but as soon as Boss saddled him with Bird the crew began to turn their shoulders to him, as if he has the bones by association.

  (Boss hasn’t said anything about the bones, as if she’s waiting for him to prove himself. He hopes she’s not going to be too much longer in offering; he hopes she’s only waiting until he’s earned the wings. No point in suffering more than once.)

  The rain has plastered down the dirt, and while she looks at the tent he watches the moon, a white sliver out of his reach.

  “What do you think the government man will do with us, when he has us?”

  He looks at her. “Soldiers, I suppose,” he says, once the terror of her question has faded.

  She nods. “Anyone without the bones will be lucky, then,” she says. Her feet are hooked on the rigging under the truck, and her legs make two pale crescents against the dark.

  He thinks about the last city he hid in, before the circus came, and says, “Or we’ll all be shot.”

  “Same thing,” she says, drops her eyes to him. “None of us have any heart left for war.”

  Us, she says; the ones with the bones.

  “If you have any heart left at all,” he says.

  She smiles like he made a joke; then her mouth becomes a thin line.

  He feels like she’s always on the verge of telling him something important, but she chokes on it whenever they’re alone. Nothing she’s said so far worries him at all; nobody in the circus gives a damn about the war, that’s something Stenos knows for sure, so he doesn’t know what she’s getting at.

  “We’ll see what the government men say when I have the wings,” he says.

  Her face is suddenly serious, the glass eye gleaming. “Don’t get the bones before the government man comes back for us.”

  She’s only saying it because she wants the wings. He can’t trust a word of it, he knows.

  Still, when she looks at him he can see hunger and fear and hopelessness, but not cunning. He closes his eyes a moment.

  “I need a smoke,” he says.

  “Talk to the dancing girls. Moonlight sells them cheap. She’s fair.”

  “You just want me to die from the smoke,” he says.

  She glances at him; then she stands and goes. He follows a step or two behind her.

  It’s strange, always, to watch her walking. Her spine is perfectly straight, her head tilted like her namesake, keeping the tent in the peripheral vision of her good eye. There is a small mark near the small of her back, too, where she’s torn the skin and bled.

  (He thinks about holding her in his arms that first night, how he had cradled her and felt the cool ridges pressing against his hands. He had thought she was frail; he hadn’t realized right away how bad it was, that it was metal against his palm.)

  She’s light enough that she leaves no footprint in the trampled-down grass.

  At the door to the women’s wagon she pauses with her hand on the latch, and
says without looking at him, “Shall I tell Elena you’re waiting?”

  It’s the first time she’s said Elena’s name to him. He doesn’t know how she knew. There’s no way Elena told her. (What else does Bird see when no one knows?)

  “No,” he manages, listens to the click of the closing door before he leans back against the wagon.

  He can still hear her as she steps through the noisy wagon full of girls, the splash of water he knows only her hands make.

  It terrifies him to know her.

  He sees no way out of this, until one of them has the wings. Stenos knows he’s the better choice—he would make a better picture walking at the front of the parade then poor Bird with her one eye. He would know how to make the crowd love him. (He misses applause.)

  Looking at Bird, though, he worries; he wonders if she would hesitate to dig the wings out of his shoulders as he slept.

  Inside the wagon she has slid into her bed, has turned her face to the wall.

  She cuts through him just by breathing.

  41.

  These are the things Jonah fears:

  He fears the government man, who leaves early without explanation. “Bird frightened him off,” Little George says, laughing too much, but Jonah has had some experience with government men. He knows they are hard to frighten, because they do so little fighting of their own; Jonah knows the circus will never be safe from him.

  He fears the rain. The others come to terms with it; their bones are under the skin, and the rain is a terror that fades. But Jonah’s workings are exposed, and it would take so little for him to rust from the inside out. He doesn’t know what Boss would do if it happened; maybe she would save him, or maybe she would hold him in between life and death, if she wanted something from Ayar.

  (He fears Boss.)

  He fears the cold. It makes their bones brittle, and just because they can be repaired doesn’t mean it’s painless to go under Boss’s knife. Jonah knows that more than anyone; she scooped him hollow while he was dead, and when he woke up he was locked for life in a suit that didn’t fit and cracked when the winter wind blew.