Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  “Has our summoning succeeded? What part of the city are you from? What doors did you open? What message have you brought me? What have we unlocked, spirit? Who or what have we finally finally angered? Speak, ghost!”

  “I’m here for Ivy Low, Mr. Brace-Bel.”

  “What?”

  “Will you release her?”

  “Certainly not! She’s mine.”

  “What on earth are you doing here, Mr. Brace-Bel?”

  “Oh shut up.” Brace-Bel sagged. His wheeling eyes went dim and tired. “You’re only another thief. Or worse, some Know-Nothing or policeman or busybody. Gods damn you as they surely have me. No matter how far I go there are always busybodies. Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “Is this some kind of ritual? It seems familiar, somehow.”

  “Mind your business. Mr. Basso, please!”

  Arjun had not fully noticed, among the dancers—but not dancing, only watching and waiting—a large man in a grey wool suit and flat cap, who now appeared holding a silvered and crystal-handled stick.

  Arjun picked up the whip again, and held it ready.

  “No, Mr. Basso,” Brace-Bel said. “I’ll thrash this dog myself. If you please!”

  Basso threw the stick to Brace-Bel, who caught it neatly. There was a new intensity in his eyes as he advanced on Arjun. He held the stick by its foot, thrusting the shining crystal forward; then, laughing, “This is only a man! I’ll need no trickery tonight!” he reversed his grip and lunged with the silver-shod foot of his weapon.

  Arjun knocked the stick aside with the whip’s long handle, and stepped back. Brace-Bel lunged again.

  Some of the dancers, released from their duties, lit cigarettes as they watched this new show.

  Brace-Bel advanced on surprisingly nimble legs, full of febrile energy. He lunged the cane’s silver foot at Arjun’s face; he swung it sideways at Arjun’s legs. Arjun parried and fell back.

  It was an inelegant and unpredictable combat. Brace-Bel was clearly well trained with his weapon, and for all his fat he was quick and surefooted; but whatever drugs he’d ingested before the ritual were taking their toll on him. He executed skilled maneuvers at a point somewhere well to Arjun’s left. He giggled and nearly tripped. After a flurry of deadly lunges and feints he sighed, stepped back, and began trying to wipe his cane clean with his sweaty hands, having apparently forgotten Arjun’s presence, until a blow to the head with the whip’s handle reminded him that the job was still unfinished, and he charged again. Another effect of the drug was an indifference to pain; or perhaps, to judge from the bruises and welts on his naked body, he’d long since made a friend of pain.

  And Arjun found his own capabilities … erratic. It seemed that at some point in the past, in his forgotten wanderings, he’d learned how to fence—and the whip’s long handle was a passable weapon— but the memories were inaccessible to his thinking mind. So sometimes, by instinct, he’d parry and deftly riposte, striking Brace-Bel’s soft belly and winding him, or rattling the teeth in his globular head, and at those moments it seemed Arjun was rather the better fighter; but the next second he had no idea what he was doing, and could only retreat clumsily. Not knowing his own abilities, he couldn’t plan; he could only defend from moment to moment. He feinted without thinking; then, having thought, he couldn’t remember how to follow the motion through and left himself open. Brace-Bel, scratching his balls thoughtfully, said, “Aha!” and lunged only a moment too late. Later Arjun dropped his weapon, and was only saved by the fact that Brace-Bel’s attention was focused on the glitter of reflected electric light in the crystal on the end of his cane …

  Basso stepped in and punched Arjun smartly in the nose. Sparks exploded in his brain and his nose started to bleed. The dancers sighed or shouted or clapped. Arjun fell back. Basso withdrew discreetly and let Brace-Bel take his place; the naked fat man pressed himself up against Arjun, holding him against the wall with the cane at his throat. Arjun looked around, trapped, panicked, and his eyes met Ivy’s, where she sat on the edge of the bandstand recently vacated by Brace-Bel’s musicians. Her look of cold unsympathetic curiosity—out of that face so much like Ruth’s—chilled him. The fight went out of him.

  Brace-Bel pressed his face up against Arjun’s and glared into his eyes. His breath was rank and greasy.

  “Tell your masters, Know-Nothing, I won’t be trifled with! By the Gods I’ll send you back to them in such a state! Pain is the great teacher, Know-Nothing, and I’ll teach. By the Gods! … wait a moment; don’t I know you?”

  Arjun wheezed: “Not … not a Know- … Noth …”

  Brace-Bel relaxed the cane. “I do know you!”

  “You are … ah … very familiar, Mr. Brace-Bel. But … I have had … trouble with my memory. “

  “Aren’t you that little dark fellow who worked for old Holbach?”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  “One of Olympia’s?”

  “One of Olympia’s what?”

  “One of what do you think?”

  “Please, sir, your cane.”

  “Are you or aren’t you?”

  “You would know better than me, Mr. Brace-Bel. I remember nothing. If you know me, if you know anything of my past, I beg you to …”

  “Ah! Now I see. You went up on the Mountain.”

  “So I understand.”

  “More fool you. You people and your explorations. Was your expedition a success? Did you chart it?”

  “I don’t think so. Please, Mr. Brace-Bel, if you would take one step back …”

  “Your exploration was always outward, you see, and physical; mine was inward and more subtle.”

  “Mr. Brace-Bel, if you can tell me anything …”

  “See?” Brace-Bel—-finally!—stepped away from Arjun, and gestured with his cane at the dancers, who mostly stood in a row against the far wall. There were about fifteen, twenty of them, each more ridiculously dressed than the last—men and women, thin and fat, young and old. Seeing themselves observed by their master they straightened up and hid their cigarettes behind their backs and pulled their masks back on, if they had them. “See?” Brace-Bel repeated, as if the point was too obvious to be worth explaining.

  Brace-Bel Explains Himself-

  Under the Rose-A Man Out of Time-

  A Little Song about the Dawn

  Brace-Bel

  My name is Brace-Bel, and a byword for evil. Here, now, in these last days, my reputation is still young; a poisoned seed yet to grow. My time, like yours, was many centuries ago, and far away, and I am forgotten. Like you I am a man out of time. Once I was before my times; now I am behind them. But if all time in the city is one time—as I believe that it is—and down some strange turn of hidden streets we may wander into years thought lost to us and find the long-dead still living and breathing and fucking into existence generations paradoxically unborn in one place and gone to dust in another—well then there still exist places where mothers warn their children to behave or Brace-Bel will take them; where preachers bellow against Brace-Bellism; where gutter-witches invoke those potent syllables Brace and Bell against their enemies, to make maidens sterile and young men mad. A byword for evil. And why? Brace-Bel; it’s a pretty sound. My father was a nobleman and noted merchant of wines, and well thought of in the councils of princes. My mother—well, in truth she was a serpent, a foulness, a barren womb; had my father’s seed been planted in more hospitable soil it might have grown straight and true, and not into the ugly fat creature you see before you. For science teaches us that it is the father’s seed from which the child grows, and the mother provides only a temporary housing, which may fall short of adequacy, but can not exceed it, so the mother may contribute to the child’s defects, but not to its excellencies; and this is why all men of learning and sensitivity revile their mothers. A serpent! Yet she was publicly reckoned a great woman of the city, and notable for her work with orphans and charity and sponsorship of the arts and other things that make me sick to
think of. No, the black stain on the Brace-Bel name is my work alone, mine alone, and …

  … yes, yes. I’ll be getting to you—Arjun? Odd name. Where was I? I am suddenly very tired. I make use of certain drugs in preparation for the ritual. They give me vigor but confuse my thoughts. Where shall I begin?

  I was only an indifferent student of divinity. I’ll not bore you with the details of the scandal which resulted in my first expulsion, my first return in disgrace to my father’s house, and in the hanging of my tutor and partner in depravity, who was of less noble family … Now, were it sane to punish crimes of love or passion, then punishment would fall in some scientific and regular fashion, and there is no question that I was more deeply at fault than him; that arbitrary scattering of punishments taught me all I ever needed to know of the law.

  It is well known that a man will spend his seed in the moment of hanging. I watched him struggle and jerk on the rope. A public hanging, in Tiber’s Square. Afterward they cast the body into the Gods’ imperious fire. What dry and dark pleasure did it give the priests and the judge to procure that joyless spending? I realized that I had been outdone in depravity. It was not Law. There is no Law. Much sinned against, I am. I promised I would meet the city’s challenge; I would exceed it in depravity.

  When I returned home my father struck me, and I struck him back, and soon I was on my own in the city and …

  No, sir! Damn you, sir, no! I will not clothe myself! My nakedness offends you? Here I bare my soul to you, and you balk at a little flesh?

  Mr. Basso, take my arm please. I need to sit.

  Dancers, away!

  Where is Ivy? Basso, bring Ivy to me. Well, find her then. Am I not the master here?

  Come, sit closer, Arjun. My voice is tired.

  I had a little flat in Foyle’s Ward. There I was attended by guests, so long as my father’s money lasted. I was never physically well favored, even when younger, and that money was much of my charm. Those were happy days, though I had not yet found my purpose. The quality of whores has declined precipitously in this city.

  Godsdamn it, where is Ivy? She calms me when I am sick. The drug tires me and the ritual tires me. Nightly I bang my head against the walls of reality like a moth against a flame; is it any wonder I am tired?

  … happy days. I made the mistake of embarking on an affair of sorts with a young relative of the Countess Ilona. A little too vigorous a hand with the whip left marks on him that were unpresentable in company. And that time he received only a dressing down, while I, the less noble man, spent a season in the Iron Rose …

  Yes, Arjun, it’s a prison! Gods, do you remember nothing} What monstrous defenses the Mountain must have. It puts my garden to shame. I was wise to flee from it.

  The Iron Rose was a prison, then: far to the south, and far lost in time; five great ancient towers broken and slumping, bound together with iron. A maze. A thousand cells, a thousand thousand; the Rose’s million bloody petals exceeded all record keeping. Traitors and poisoners and witches and blasphemers and seditionists— criminals by the reckonings of one or other of the city’s thousand lords and laws—laws so various and perverse and contradictory that there was never a man in all of Ararat who was not a criminal by someone’s reckoning somewhere, and so it was pure chance who did or not end up in the Rose.

  In these last days the whole city is a prison. I have never cared for democracy or leveling.

  During my incarceration I wrote, and my letters were smuggled out. Wonderful slashing letters to my old clucking tutors in the School of Divinity, expounding upon my theories. So blasphemous were those letters that those old men might have been struck blind reading them. What more could they do to me? I was already in the Rose.

  And through those letters I came to the attention of Nicolas Maine and his Atlas-makers.

  No? Nothing, Arjun? No memory? Not a glimmer? Yes, I think I see a glimmer in those pretty dark eyes of yours … I most certainly did see you among them, in the last days. No? Still nothing?

  Maine, then, brought together all the most brilliant minds of the city, among whom I was most certainly to be counted, even in those days when the city was full of wit and brilliance—now, in this stagnant backwater of time, I am entirely without peer—and he set them to the work of mapping the city; of recording not only every last street but every last fact about those streets and the men and Gods who walked them; every last idea in the city; the last great work of knowledge. A blasphemous business, said the priests and censors, because it was not for men to reduce to understanding the perfect complexity of the city—and so my blasphemous path traveled alongside Maine’s, for a time. I contributed the Atlas-entries on the Prison-State, and the Orgasm, and the twin Gods of the Iron Rose, and on Menstruation, and on Suicide, and on Prostitution, and on a great many other topics. I essayed a number of contributions on the Womb and on The Maternal Impulse, which were repeatedly rejected, I’m sorry to say.

  You? You came in the last days, long after Maine was exiled, in the days when he’d briefly come back, only to die … You had inquiries of a theological nature. You wanted to find a God or possibly get rid of one. I think you were one of Olympia Autun’s lovers. Awful arrogant woman. Because she played a few flummery lawyer’s tricks in court to spring me from prison once or twice she considered it her place to lecture me on my proclivities. She took exception to my fondness for the whip. Once she struck me! And you were one of Holbach’s creatures. You were a translator for him, weren’t you?

  Well?

  Akomoffen lindur olmik, agalom dolmik!

  Hah! Don’t look so offended. My Tuvar is weak and I only remember their curses. Well, then, you were his translator; there’s no doubt in my mind.

  You were there for the end.

  Hold me up! Hold me! I do not remember the stairs being so treacherous. Look how they slip and slide beneath my feet.

  Carry me swiftly to my toilet or I cannot be accountable for what will happen to your shoes, sir.

  Oh, Basso, who is this oaf who handles me so roughly?

  Oh yes. Yes. I remember.

  Ahhh.

  Don’t be shy. You may sit on the bathtub, there.

  The end? The end of what? Oh yes. How tiresome. Let me tell you of my theories, instead, my marvelous theories.

  By fucking we are brought into this world and by fucking we shall pass beyond it.

  That’s the essence of it. All else is footnotes.

  Help me downstairs, will you?

  See? My dancers, my girls and boys and men and women, my creatures. In old Ararat I had my pick of the finest dancers and beauties of the city’s most splendid brothels; I had my pick of the wildest freaks of its circuses and sideshows. All those brilliant impoverished artists, eager for my patronage! Here I make do with more ordinary persons. There are no dancers, no freaks, and no artists left in the last days. Yes, yes, wave to them as we pass.

  Ivy alone is not ordinary. You shall not take her from me.

  Each one incarnates symbolically a God of the ancient city. I have only seventeen dancers here, because money is not inexhaustible; but the Gods were infinite in number, as many as the moods of the city, its cobbles and leaves and windows and iron bars. Thus we have frequent changes of costume, and some must do mul-tiplicitous service.

  See this one? I dress her in armor; she stands for the God Addartta, bloody in battle, resplendent in victory; God of the triumphal march and the conqueror’s golden statues and the bringing back of spoils in chariots down cheering stamping streets. But she is also Querl, the mailed fist of the lawman. And she is also Vulmea, God of freebooters and bandits and drunks. The whore beneath those clothes has a gifted tongue but she also has the clap; be warned.

  This one in the jewels is Orillia, spirit of the lights, spirit of the illuminations, of torchlight and gaslight and bright glass and open fires blazing over the dark hills of the city, the bright flash of its arcades—in these grey days it is hard to imagine the city was bright, once, but i
t was. She also does service as Keba, the whore. And so on and so on. This one here who rings with chimes is all the spirits of music the city had, which were many. This one in rags is the Beggar, and also the Typhon, murderous stinking river-spirit, greedy for sacrifices. This young man in his mirror-masks is Lavilokan, God, of course, of the mirrors. This is the Spider. Ivy, wherever she’s gone, stands for the Bird, most beautiful white-winged bird of freedom, on which I meditated long and hard during my time in the Iron Rose. Ivy is my favorite and you shall not have her. This young lady here is …

  Are you listening?

  It began as a perversion. It began as a sick thought, of an imprisoned libertine and lecher, thinking, how might I most terribly outrage against decency? Arrest me, will they, for debauchery? They’ll see what debauchery means!

  I dressed up whores as the Gods and I fucked them.

  You do not appear shocked. Have you forgotten the Gods, too? What a funny blank little man you are.

  It rather discomforts me, not to be shocking. Are you not perhaps a little … ?

  Yes, well, it quickly became clear that this delightful practice was more than a mere perversion—I should not say that, for it has always been my case that a pure and beautiful perversion’s a finer thing than any dull utilitarian purpose. But anyway. In this forbidden union with the divine—in this ecstatic union—I found myself becoming closer and closer to the divinities of the city. Elevated, in the moment of ecstasy, to what lay above the ordinary matter of the city; descending, in submission and degradation, to what lay below it. Piercing the curtain of the real with a thrust. A thrust!

  Pardon me.

  A dance of submission to the divine, and dominance over it. More—of unity with the divine. As your dull old Professor Holbach sought to understand the Gods of the city with his mind and his mathematics and his grey brain—so I mastered them with my prick.

  I confess that the ritual has grown baroque, has grown elaborate, over the years; once it was me and a whore and a bird-mask and perhaps a whip or candle; now the cast’s swollen and the props become … operatic.