Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

by Genevieve Valentine

  Ying has reached the roof, Ying has managed a gun on top of everything, and she takes aim at the capitol doors. Boss can’t see, but there must be something there that terrifies her; Ying lines up the shot and holds and holds and holds.

  Just shoot, Boss thinks, why are you hesitating, and even as she thinks it Boss knows it must be the government man (that’s a shot you can’t miss, strike the heart or lose your chance).

  Then Barbaro stands. (Barbaro falls.)

  Boss strains against the bars, once, but he’s too far to catch, and Boss sucks the cold air into her lungs, trying for some trace of him she knows will never reach her.

  She hears the music of Alec’s wings in the distance, growing closer, and thinks, So this is it, trapped here while they fight, the cold freezing my reason. She thinks, Let Alec come, I’ll take the madness, I can’t go lower.

  Then Bird flies across the moon; her feathers catch the moonlight, flickering in and out of Boss’s vision like the last lights before the wilderness.

  Bird is the one carrying the music with her; Bird is folding her spread wings for the dive into the tower. Boss is horrified, relieved to tears; her heart aches that George has done so much so soon with what she gave him.

  The soldiers below her on the roof are firing up into the darkness (the stray bullets ring off the bells, and Boss covers her head), and then she hears a the chord shift to a minor key as Bird angles the wings and dives, feathers out like knives.

  Boss hears a short series of screams, then a moment where not even gunfire rings out over the sound of the wings, and then she hears the thunder of boots as the living soldiers panic and flee.

  (Alec would never have used them for this, Boss thinks even as she knows she shouldn’t look a rescue in the mouth. She must forget they were Alec’s; the wings he wore were of a different kind.)

  Bird appears, so close that Boss startles; Bird wrenches off the rusting cage door, lifts Boss into her arms. Boss wraps her arms around Bird’s shoulders, out of the way of the sharp wings. (Bird will not take care, so Boss must be careful on her own behalf.) There is the fleeting spark that Boss gets when she touches one of her make, and just before she can form the thought with it, she’s in the sky and the stars are getting closer.

  “Where do I carry you?” Bird asks.

  “Barbaro,” Boss gasps, and Bird dives.

  Boss is wrenching out of Bird’s arms before they’ve even landed, she’s running as fast as she can without thinking of the bullets (Bird draws fire from above her); she drops to her knees in front of Barbaro and holds out her hands to trap whatever’s left.

  But it’s too late; there’s nothing left of him but meat and smoke. He struck out to save his brother and has suffered for it. There is nothing now but a body like any other body that sleeps in the ground.

  Bird has swooped lower; Bird is watching for signs of life that will never come.

  Boss stands up, says, “Take me to the capitol doors.”

  She must fight where she can fight, and there’s a man she wants to see.

  75.

  Ayar is lost in the battle-sounds, the pang of bullets striking his ribs and the crunch of bone under his feet, snatching Brio back from the soldiers who have dragged him to the ground to slide him into the building.

  (There is too much gunfire around him for him to hear a single voice, a single shot; he will not know until the battle is over that Barbaro has died.)

  Ayar doesn’t notice the music until one of the soldiers on the stairs lifts his gun upwards and then freezes, staring, until Bird dives into the fray.

  The soldier goes down under her wings, and that’s when Ayar really sees her.

  He can’t forgive her (can’t forgive Stenos), but he sees Boss in her arms and thinks, that’s one good deed she’s done us.

  The soldiers are, for a moment, struck dumb, and the only sound is the fading chord of the wings.

  Then the chaos begins, and someone from inside shouts, and the soldiers at the top of the stairs fumble to reload.

  (It was the government man shouting, “Kill the one with wings,” because even then he had not given up hope—they had loyal fighters, but he had numbers on his side, and he knew that her soldiers could bleed as much as his—but Ayar did not hear. Ayar only knew they were in danger, and feared for them all.

  Ayar did not hear the Minister’s voice shaking, or he would have taken heart.)

  “Get her out,” Ayar calls, moving between Boss and the soldiers. If she gets shot, it’s all over.

  But Boss has a hand on his chest, in the center of his woven ribs, and it stops him as if her arm was made of iron. She says, “I’m here for the Minister,” in the voice he has come to recognize (for that voice, all things give way).

  He steps back, lets her walk past him and into the dark of the capitol.

  There’s a shot.

  Ayar, panicked, thinks it’s Boss who’s been struck. It’s Bird (she cries out, and Ayar thinks it sounds like a falcon), but it must be a glancing blow, because she fans her wings to take off; a soldier grabs for her wing and draws back a bloody stump, screaming.

  “Give him here,” Bird cries to Ayar, her arms out.

  Ayar shifts Brio off his shoulders and hurls him as gently as he can, watches as he flies ten feet above the soldiers’ heads; Bird catches him by the waist, sails out of sight.

  Free of his burden, Ayar swings his elbow out to test his new reach; it connects, and he hears a neck snapping. The others are trying to edge away enough to lift their guns, but he pushes back against the tide, keeps them too close for them to get an angle, and for ones farther to get a clear shot.

  In the little space he’s made, Boss walks forward, up the stairs, her dress fisted in two hands, her face trained on the government man, who is standing behind a clump of soldiers and looking as if he’s deciding how to flay her if the soldiers manage to catch her.

  (The soldiers should have caught her already, Ayar thinks, but they fall back as she walks; this is a fight they cannot win.)

  Ayar shoves his way through them to block their shots at her; no soldiers will get through to her if he can help it. He fights them as they dare come, grabbing at guns, punching ribs out of whoever’s close enough.

  Bird swoops back, scoring the edge of the crowd, picking up a straggler and carrying him a hundred feet up before she drops him into the fray again.

  The soldiers surge forward on Ayar, half-angered and half-panicked.

  (Some of the soldiers in the back, safe from the wings and from Ayar’s arms, are hesitating; they are waiting to see how the river flows before they wade into it. They may be fighters, but they’re not fools.)

  Ayar does not see this; he only sees that Barbaro has given up shooting, that Ying’s shots are far between, and come only to save Ayar from harm. When their bullets run out Ayar will be here alone with the crowd of soldiers, and Boss will be trapped inside, beyond Bird’s reach, and they will all die together, which he thinks is better than it could have been.

  Better to die here than in a cell; better to die fighting, no matter what comes.

  Inside, Boss has been surrounded; she does not struggle against the soldiers who hold her, and when the government man pulls out his knife she does not look surprised. (She must know what she’s doing, Ayar thinks, but below that is fear, and fear is his master; he has done hasty things before, when fear takes him.)

  Ayar turns and moves for her without thinking; he doesn’t understand the sting of the bullet that strikes his leg as soon as his back is turned, until he moves to step on it and the leg gives.

  He crashes to the ground, and the soldiers descend.

  His heart is thudding against his ribs, his ears are stopped up from panic, and he is so intent on keeping back the crowd that he doesn’t hear the pounding at the gates as Big Tom and Big George use their arms as a battering ram; he does not hear the tiny pings as the strings of lights hit their marks and shatter.

  He does not realize, until he s
ees Jonah and the dancing girls running into battle with copper pipes as lances, that the circus has come at last.

  76.

  This is how the circus enters the city:

  Big George and Big Tom are lashed to the tent truck, their long arms lying along the top of the cab and out in front as a battering ram. That truck takes the main road straight into the gates, which groan and cry out with every blow as the truck backs up and drives forward, four metal fists crashing against the wood.

  The other trucks have fanned out, and the Grimaldis and the aerialists screech to a stop at points outside the city walls. The tumblers run out and stand in pairs with their hands in a porter’s hold, and the aerialists step onto the locked wrists and are flung clear over the wall, their bodies tucked for speed. They unfurl at the top of the soldiers’ walk, landing lightly on their feet on and charging in a single motion at the soldiers keeping watch, who stagger back from the onslaught of impossible motion and fall too fast even to scream a warning.

  When there are no more aerialists the tumblers launch one another, and Elena and Fatima catch their outstretched arms, swing them safely onto the stone. Alto and Stenos come last, jumping one at a time straight from the ground.

  One by one they jump from wall onto the roofs of the city—Penna and Elena aim for the trees, which form a lacy fence along the main road, nearly to the open square.

  Fatima stays alone on the wall, securing the ropes when the crew tosses them over. (This is how the crew must climb until the gates are open; this is how they will all escape if the gates are blocked.)

  When Fatima has attached them, she crouches in the shadow of the wall; she will wait for them here.

  (“I don’t care who fights,” Elena said, “so long as you pretend to be useful, for once,” and when she turned and said, “Fatima, you can still tie a knot, I hope?” Fatima took her first breath in a long time.)

  The gates at last give way, and the soldiers there have lined up ready to fire.

  But Boss’s trailer is close behind, and as soon as the tent truck has driven through the soldiers and scattered them, three soldiers find themselves on the wrong end of javelins.

  (Panadrome is the only one of them who was never a soldier. He is surprised by his aim, and thinks no further; as the truck drives past the dead, he forces himself not to pity them. If he is sorry to have to see battle after so long without, it’s not his nature to say.)

  As soon as the road is clear, Jonah and the jugglers and the dancing girls grab whatever weapon is at hand and pile out of their trailers. As the smaller trucks roll into the city they run alongside and grab the rails; they enter the city hanging one-armed off the sides of the trucks, their eyes scanning the dark streets, hammers and planks and lengths of light bulbs coiled like rope clenched battle-ready in their hands.

  This is what they see as they close in on the capitol:

  (The ones on the roofs see it first, and Stenos stops short when the battle comes into sight. Behind him, Nayah and Alto and Altissimo land heavily with the shock of it.)

  There is no open square; it is a sea of soldiers, a carpet of men, and for a sickening moment they see only that Bird is drawing their fire and she can hardly get close enough to do harm; they see only that Ayar is sinking under their outstretched arms.

  Stenos watches Bird dodge the soldiers’ shots and says quietly, “We’re too late.”

  Then Nayah says, “No, look,” and starts again leaping from edge to edge; then Alto and Altissimo see Ying with her rifle, and Barbaro and Brio lying farther off, and they’re running off across the roofs.

  Stenos sees only that Bird is bleeding. He scales down the wall to the ground, scoops up a rifle, runs.

  Elena is sailing between the trees (easier than running), picking up power and speed, and she sees the battle only in impressions between swings; the surge of uniforms, Stenos’s face as he disappears into the fight, a flash of wings as Bird sees him and pulls her sharp feathers back.

  (Elena sees the red stains spreading from between Bird’s ribs, and before she can help it she thinks, At least this one won’t live long enough to go mad.)

  The truck reaches the top of the hill, but before it can turn onto the road to the capitol Jonah sees Ayar sinking under the soldiers. He jumps down and runs, and Sunyat and Minette are close on his heels, the copper pipes gripped in both hands. The truck follows, and the others take up a whooping cry as the battle comes into view.

  This is what Ayar sees when his rescuers come, and even though Stenos is the one who clears the way when the soldiers cover him, Jonah is the one who reaches Ayar in time to offer his arm up and stand at his back.

  The circus joins the fight in earnest; as the acrobats drop from the roofs, there are bursts of gunfire from the street below, and someone screams, then another. Then the jugglers and the crew are coming. Some of them carry makeshift flails; one of them has found a welding torch.

  Then it’s nothing but the sound of flesh giving way and the glint of rifle barrels, the battle without quarter from two sides who can’t risk mercy.

  77.

  Elena watches from the tree above the square until she sees where she’s needed.

  She is close to the city roofs; she hears the shouts of Alto and Altissimo when they cannot wake Barbaro, and long before they give up trying, Elena guesses what has happened. (Boss has to be close to take hold of you, the moment you go. She remembers that.)

  Then she drops from the tree and leaps through the battle, snapping one neck every time she lands, until she’s taking the capitol steps. They crumble underneath her; she was never a soldier, not like the rest, but she knows how to kill as well as anyone.

  The mass of soldiers are beginning at last to fall back, before an army which must seem immortal, an army designed to terrify, and the last few yards of her way are clear, except for the bodies.

  She and Stenos reach the doorway at the top of the stairs at the same time, ready to face the government man and the soldiers holding Boss.

  But the soldiers inside have vanished, and only Boss is left, standing with her hand outstretched over the government man’s fallen body. Boss looks ill, as if she’s eaten something rotten, and Elena wonders what happens when Boss takes a life she doesn’t plan to give back.

  Stenos gets closer, points his rifle at the body as if there’s a chance the man is still alive, and looks at Boss for orders.

  Elena hangs back. She still remembers the moment before she died the second time, Boss holding out her hand this way and Elena not believing what Boss meant to do until the world went black.

  Stenos looks impressed by Boss’s skill; he half-grins up at her as he says, “Did you wait to kill him until he saw we were coming?”

  But Elena knows better. Elena recognizes Boss’s expression just before she speaks; it’s regret.

  (Boss regrets things so rarely that it takes Elena longer than it should. Elena was never a soldier, not like the rest.)

  “I should have killed him before you came,” she says, as if to herself. “I was waiting for the soldiers to give way and run, so he would know he was without help. But it was too long; it was too late.”

  For a moment Stenos doesn’t understand what she means. Elena waits for him to realize; when he does, his face gets set and grim. He looks down at the body; the gun trembles in his hands, and he doesn’t speak again.

  (Elena knew, as soon as Boss spoke, what the matter was.

  In the moment before Boss killed him, the government man had seen Boss’s army come to her rescue. Before he died, he had a glimpse of the circus performers descending on his soldiers and fighting as viciously as he’d always dreamed they could.

  Just before he died, he had seen that he was right.)

  Around them the battle rages, but in the marble vestibule where the three of them are standing, it is as safe and dark and quiet as a tomb.

  78.

  The two hours I spent under guard in the workshop trailer were the longest I remember. With
the griffin on my arm I was too valuable to lose, but it was agony to be trapped without a thing to do. I could only listen to the bustle of the camp as they prepared for the casualties; covering trailer tables in canvas, setting out wrenches and nails and bandages for the living, and needle and thread for the shrouds.

  At last Fatima climbed down from the walls and came through the woods to the workshop, and quietly we laid out what copper pipe was left, and marked with grease pencil the lengths of a finger bone, an ulna, a femur.

  After a long silence I asked, “Could you see Ying from the wall?”

  “I couldn’t see any fighting,” she said, and something about the way she said it (relieved, maybe) kept me from asking any more.

  (Once I pulled down a copper bowl and frowned. “What’s this for?”

  “A pelvis,” she said, and placed my hand on her hip so I could feel where the rim would curve out and around her, and I thought, I must be a different person than I used to be, for her to be at ease.)

  We worked until we heard the first shouts from the camp.

  They were driving out of the city in the truck—too slowly to be in retreat. They were dangling from the sides if they were well, stacked up in the open bed if they were injured, and Boss standing in the center of them all like the captain of a ship that’s coming home at last.

  As soon as she was on the ground again I ran towards her without thinking and embraced her for the first time in my life; for a moment she was pressing me back, her cheek against my hair, and then she was stepping away and walking for the workshop trailer. I fell into step beside her (I was home again).

  “How many are injured?” I asked. I saw Fatima running with supplies from the workshop to one of the trucks with an empty bed, so both Boss and I could work at once.

  “Most of them,” she said. Her face was drawn. “Two are on the edge; I don’t know if I can save them. It will have to be you.”