Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti
Page 23
“Why?” I asked without thinking, but when she looked at me I saw that glimpse of the graven image that had frightened me when I first had the tattoo; she looked shaken and cracked, and I didn’t know what she had done in that city to be so drained of her power.
“Is anyone gone?” I asked, already dreading.
“Barbaro,” she said, and I stopped walking and looked back at the truck. (I thought I had seen him, but there were only seven brothers; I had seen what I wanted to see, because I couldn’t yet imagine that Barbaro had died.)
But mourning would come later, and as Jonah and Minette leapt off the truck to unload the others, I called, “Bring the worst to the workshop.”
When Ying was helped down from the truck (her leg looked wrenched, but she was here and that was all I needed), my heart smacked twice against my ribs.
As I motioned the truck to drive Ayar to the workshop, I did a quick count, frowned. There were fewer, too few—Moonlight and Sola were gone, and more of the crew then I could even look for.
I saw a silhouette far off on the edge of the wall, and even in the thin light I recognized Elena’s profile. She must have come over the roofs, making sure there were no last-ditch fighters hiding in the alleys. Nayah and Mina came after her, flickering at the top of the wall like shadows, appearing moments later at the end of the ropes, feet hardly touching the ground.
“And Stenos?”
Boss’s mouth went even tighter. “Bird is missing.”
My skin went clammy. I thought, No, she’s all right, because if she was dead I’d know.
But Boss was too far ahead of me, her shoulders sloped for the first time I could remember, and they only lifted when she opened the flap of her half-made tent and Panadrome stood waiting for her. He spoke, and she spoke, and they stood together for a long time before the flap dropped closed behind them, and the work began.
I tried to hold on to the idea that Bird was alive like it was something I’d have to prove, but I was choked with so much loss and relief and emptiness that I could hardly notice a little more. The ache increased as I worked on Ayar and on Brio and Ying, and long before Stenos came out of the city (his eyes haunted and his hands empty), I had accepted that Bird was gone.
Stenos was the last of us, and we took all our dead with us when we drove away from the walls; this city was no place for a performer.
When we stopped for the night to bury the dead, we lit fires and gathered to keep warm, because even though we were still too close to the city we were a free circus now, and who did we fear?
(Boss didn’t join us. She closed the door of her trailer every night for a long time.
Later, she and I would talk about what sort of government springs up in the void. She never got over the death of the government man. He had been cruel, but it was another hundred years before anyone else made half the progress he made.
“This world is so fractured and so slow,” she said. “It’s why we can go so long without growing old.”
As if to prove it, the griffin on my shoulder never healed; the edges stayed singed and raw, and it ached until I learned to ignore it.)
That night Stenos was apart from the fires, as always, but he seemed so stricken that I left my seat beside Ying and followed him into the dark.
He was sitting on the trailer steps. I saw what must have driven him out; in the lamplight, the table was stained the purple-red of old blood.
I wanted to say, She might be all right, but I didn’t believe it, and I didn’t want to insult him with the lie. He had suffered enough without false hope.
Instead I said, “Why don’t you come to the fire.”
“So you’re still the little ringmaster,” he said, glancing up at me.
I grinned. “Not if I can help it,” I said.
He asked, “What will I do now?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that he was without a partner, that there was no place for him without an act.
“We’ll find something,” I said. “Now come on to the fire. You need to eat something, at least.”
All that night he sat at the fire as if he’d been ordered not to leave. No one spoke to him; Elena didn’t even look his way, as if she was afraid to catch his eye.
She needn’t have worried. His whole attention was on the sky, as if he was just waiting for the first notes of the wings.
79.
Panadrome greeted Boss, under the flap of the medic’s tent, with, “I was afraid we’d lost a good alto.”
(He can’t say what he wants to say. There are no words invented yet.)
She says, “I killed the man who could have brought the opera back.”
There is a new ache, suddenly, that Panadrome didn’t know he had room left for. It’s easy not to want what is impossible, but to know that Boss had seen the possibility almost drives him into the city walls, just to see what she had seen.
He wants to put his arms around her, but they’re as cold as the air, and no comfort to her.
Instead, he says, “Who’s first wounded?” and turns to the workman’s table.
(His hands are still a musician’s hands, and when it comes to sewing up wounds, he’s deft with a needle.)
80.
Elena refused, point blank, to be the other half.
“He has no place here without Bird,” Boss said.
Elena folded her arms and said, “I stood on your doorstep and begged you to destroy the wings. You didn’t, and this is what comes of it. Figure it out yourself, or give him to the Grimaldis.”
(They would never take him, Elena knew. Not after what had happened to Barbaro.)
“One of the others might partner him, then,” Boss said. “He needs something to keep him from going mad.”
For one long, nauseated moment, Elena thought about Bird going mad in her hands on the trapeze, about Bird with one eye gone (horrible, horrible), Bird whose madness had never been a worry. How could Boss trust so much in one of them and not in the other?
“Make him some wings,” she said.
Boss frowned and stepped forward, her bulk seeming to fill the air around them, and her voice was at its most commanding when she said, “You’ll partner him.”
“What am I,” Elena said, “an animal?”
(She had loved him, and it was over.)
Fatima was the one who offered, at last.
“He never dropped her,” she said, not looking Elena in the eye. “One could do worse, I think.”
“The more fool you,” Elena said, but she didn’t fight it.
(She was afraid what Boss would do if it went on like this; she imagined Boss turning to one of the dancing girls, passing her hand over Sunyat’s eyes, making whatever she couldn’t find.)
Fatima suits Stenos.
She’s as tall as he is, lithe and strong, and when they walk together into the ring they look like one of the peeling marquees for a romance. Their routine is choreographed; when he throws her into the air she flutters back down like a ribbon, confident and light.
Elena thinks Panadrome must be disappointed; now he has to play the same song every night.
It takes some getting used to that when Stenos gathers Fatima into his arms, she looks like an acrobat at rest and not like an animal in a cage.
Stenos never utters a word about Bird, after that first night. Whenever George mentions her in passing, Stenos looks up as if George has spat on the ground, turns away again.
No one else in the circus mentions Bird, because they don’t think of her. (She can’t have lived long, wounded and so far away from home, and she could not be mourned as much as Barbaro; there were no seven mourning brothers waiting for her coffin to be set into the ground.)
Elena doesn’t mention Bird because she fears that to say her name will pull that little string that ties her to the wings. It lies silent, and that’s all Elena requires. If that means Bird is dead, then that’s what it means; Elena is finished with being compelled.
(Sometimes when it rains, or in the
winter, Elena feels a lonely pang along her ribs. She ignores it; you get all sorts of pains in this line of work. There’s nothing else to be done.)
Now the tumblers go after Ayar. Stenos and Fatima take the ring after the tumblers have gone, and on their heels Elena and the others drop from the ceiling onto the trapeze, as soon as the applause has faded.
Now when Stenos leaves the ring, people applaud.
Elena thinks he must be happy.
(It isn’t true.)
81.
This is how you silence a pair of wings:
You find a barren plain on a windy day, and you sink to the ground as low as you can, and you bathe in the dust.
The first time is like resting your hand over guitar strings; you feel the vibration deeper than before, but the sound is softer, humming instead of singing.
The second time you bathe in the dust, it’s like setting down a guitar when you’ve finished playing; there’s the hint of motion, the echo of the song, but if you didn’t know what to listen for, you’d never know.
The third time, they are downy as a sparrow’s, and make as little noise, so no one can hear you passing overhead.
Then you can spread the wings as wide as you like, catch the wind without singing a note, go so high that the ground has no more hold on you.
Then you are the bird, and the bird, and the bird.
82.
This is what George sees, years later, when he comes into the city carrying his rolled-up poster and his bucket of glue:
The old poster is still there, though it’s gone yellow with age and the once-rich green has been gnawed away by rain and sun. (“Been a while since we hit that city,” Boss had said when they stopped, and George can only imagine what that means.)
No one has pasted over it or torn it away or scorched the wall; the whole city seems on the verge of being civilized, down to the concrete streets that make it easy for him to walk through it in his brass casts. (No power or amount of his working on them can make them more comfortable.)
Inside the sickly-pale cameo of The Winged Man, someone has drawn with grease pencil over one of Alec’s eyes; now he wears a quarter of a skullcap, and has a wide bright eye that never closes.
George looks at the poster for a long time; then he turns around and peers up into the sky.
It’s a cloudy day, the sky as flat as a sheet of lead, but if he closes his eyes, he imagines he can hear music.
Ying meets him at the edge of camp and takes the bucket out of his hands, and they walk together around the empty, flattened ground where the crew is already setting up the tent.
Ayar and Jonah are helping, driving the stakes so far into the ground that the sound of the hammer is swallowed up by the earth.
(George can never shake the feeling, now, that they move like soldiers. The circus hasn’t been itself since the day in the capitol city. It’s clear now that it’s a shelter for fighters from a war they can’t ever escape.
It’s as if a sharp light has been turned on over the circus that can never go out, and now all their shadows are different.)
Outside her trailer, Boss is talking with Panadrome, sketching plans in the air with her expansive hands—a map, maybe, or a tent with a new shape. Maybe someone has been to audition while he was plastering the poster to the public board. (He doesn’t worry. Boss will tell him later; these days she’s more his partner than his master. She doesn’t tell him why, and he doesn’t ask. If her powers are diminished for being shared, he doesn’t want to know.)
The acrobats are practicing on the grass, and the aerialists in a nearby tree, except for Elena, who stands at the bottom and barks out the orders.
Stenos and Fatima have finished training; they walk back across the camp to the aerialists’ trailer. At the door Stenos nods and keeps going, to the edge of camp and beyond it, out of sight. George can’t see if Stenos looks at the sky or not.
Ying says, “He looked. He always looks.”
George grins at her. “I have to put these inside,” he says, taking back the bucket and holding up the broom. “I’ll meet you at the wagon, I’m starved out.”
The inside of the supply wagon has a window that faces the little trailer, and George looks through the grime and wonders what to do.
(It was right to tell the truth, he knew; but he was learning how to play the truth against the circus. What good would it do Stenos to know she was alive if it would only drive him back onto the road, and then what would happen to him, alone and empty, looking for a bird who might not ever pass this way again?)
When he comes out, Ying is waiting at the food wagon, talking with Ayar. She says something and jerks her head at the tent, and Ayar throws back his head and laughs.
George glances at the sky, and for a moment he watches a little silhouette too far off to see, unless you know what you’re looking for.
Then he joins Ying and Ayar for the meal, on his way to meet with Boss and make plans for the road ahead.
There are things about the circus he is beginning to understand.
THE END
About the Author
Genevieve Valentine’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, Subterranean, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, Running with the Pack, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Weird Tales, and Fantasy Magazine; she co-wrote the pop-culture book Geek Wisdom, coming from Quirk Books in summer 2011. Mechanique is her first novel.
Genevieve lives in New York, where she has discovered a rather counter-intuitive wariness of the theatre district. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog at: genevievevalentine.com.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the contributions of many people whose dedication has delighted and amazed me throughout this process. I would like to thank everyone who has been interested in the book, at any stage; nothing pleases a writer like the idea that someone else might actually want to read it.
I’d like to thank Kathy Sedia, who encouraged me to begin. I’d like to thank my agent Jennifer Jackson for her sage advice along the way, Paula Guran for her insightful editing, and Sean Wallace for putting his faith in both the process and the product.
I’d like to thank Kiri Moth, who as able to conjure so much with her artwork.
I’d like to thank John Joseph Adams for believing in the book, and for all his advice and support.
I’d like to thank (and apologize to) all the friends who have been remarkably patient with me long before I started in with specific annoyances related to this book, particularly Eileen Lavelle and Veronica Schanoes.
Special thanks are due to Anna Psitos, Stephanie Lai, and Elizabeth Story, who are the most enthusiastic and dedicated readers and friends in or out of the business, and to whom enough gratitude can never be rendered.
And last of all I’d like to thank my family, who first took me to the circus.
Table of Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
About the Author
Acknowledgments