“Yes. I should speak to Captain Mayfair again, if you please.” With a nod to Culver, she followed Dennis into the brisk evening air.
Captain Mayfair stood beside a campfire with a group of soldiers. “Mrs. Klein. What did you think?”
She took a deep breath. “This man Culver’s work reminds me of the high craftsmanship I saw as a girl in Germany. Extraordinary.”
“Yes. He’s a peculiar Negro.”
“That said, Captain, my carousel brings joy to my horses and riders, especially children. Working on warhorses like this … it’s not right for me.”
“I was afraid you might be reluctant.” Captain Mayfair nodded to a soldier beside him. The man folded down a burlap bag between his feet. There, wadded in wrinkles of coarse cloth, stood Bucephalus.
Ilsa couldn’t hold back a gasp, her hand flying to her mouth. Lieutenant Dennis shuffled his feet in clear discomfort.
The captain kept his focus on her. “This horse is special to you. People talk of him. I understood why once I entered your home.”
Ilsa shivered in rage. These soldiers took her as they took so many horses, supplies, even homes. If she fled north, she couldn’t expect any better. The Yanks would be constructing their own horses soon enough. They’d be no kinder in their pillaging of property or people.
But maybe the Yanks wouldn’t stoop this low.
“How dare you, Captain?” she whispered.
Captain Mayfair glanced at the fire behind him. “It’s my understanding that nothing binds as well as an original body. You must be very close to catch a soul, correct?”
She barely managed a nod. For Bucephalus’s soul, I would brave the fire. A strong soul like his can be transferred several times. I could make him a new body.
“We need horses, Mrs. Klein. We’ll house you well. My men will not harass you.”
She ached to bolt, to make for the road, to fly from this place. She looked at Bucephalus and shuddered. “If I am to—to help, then I must say straight out that I won’t abide with any horse being killed without need.”
Captain Mayfair motioned, and Bucephalus was gently wrapped up again. “Horses are dear to us. We have no desire—no capacity—to replace them completely. And it’s not as though we lack in dying horses.” Sadness curved his mustache.
“Yet you threaten to burn mine.”
“Is he a horse anymore?” The captain sounded curious rather than facetious. “How long has this Bucephalus been bound by wood?”
“Twenty years.”
“As long as you’ve been in America, then.” The man had done his research. “Lieutenant Dennis will show you your quarters and your workshop.”
“You want me to start now? Tonight?”
“Yes. The Union’s building pontoons to cross the river. Soon there’ll be plenty of horses in need of new bodies.”
* * *
Smoke veiled the furrows as if attempting to hide the mangled blue and gray bodies in the mud. The air of the place—of so many distended souls—weighed on Ilsa like a hundred winter coats.
Lieutenant Dennis helped her down from a buckboard wagon loaded with rattling wooden equine hearts. “Ma’am, I’m sorry. This is no place for a lady.”
“It’s not a place for anyone,” she whispered.
Never before had she sensed the presence of human souls, much as she had tried. God, had she tried. She couldn’t see them, but there were so many here that her head felt as afloat as a hot air balloon.
“There’s a horse over here!” called a soldier.
She stumbled over roots and rocks and things her gaze slid across but could not comprehend, and then she came to the horse.
The air shimmied as the stallion struggled against death. He stubbornly stood on all four legs even as his ribs—and more—were bared to the air.
“There, there,” Ilsa crooned, focusing on him. “Good boy.”
His eyes were glazed over with pain, but she saw beyond that. He was a horse as described in the Book of Job, all flaring nostrils and eagerness at the herald of a trumpet.
Like men, some horses were born fools.
“Fine lines,” murmured Dennis. “Some Thoroughbred to him.”
Ilsa brought her face so close that vapors of soul caressed her like steam. “Do you want this?” she whispered. She exhaled an image of what awaited the horse: a new body, built strong; how the hooves would clatter; how he might miss the taste of oats, but he would still know the joy of a gallop.
Even in agony, his ears perked up. His soul gushed outward, eager to move on.
“His body’s pain needs to end,” she said.
A soldier aimed a gun barrel between the stallion’s eyes. At Ilsa’s nod, the gun fired. Even expecting the noise, she flinched. The horse collapsed. She grabbed hold of the soul as it drifted out from his eyes. The effervescent strands were strong, testing her as if straining against a bit.
“I need cherrywood.” A strong wood, bold as the horse. A soldier dashed off for the wagon. “Shh, shh, easy there,” she whispered. She plaited the soul with her deft fingers, forming a loop to confine its essence.
She pressed the soul into the wooden heart as she took it in her hands, patting the ventricles the way a person molds clay, and after a few minutes, she nodded. The soldier took the heart away.
“I wish I could see and feel what you do, ma’am,” said Dennis, voice softened in awe.
“No, you don’t, lieutenant.”
Ilsa rubbed her torso, reminding herself that there was no pain, no blood. Impressions from the dying horse glistened across her mind’s eye. Green fields, contentment. The good man who smelled of leather and damp wool, how they rode into battle together—excitement—hoofbeats—wind—galloping, galloping—and then a lightened load. Many others had sat on his back since. Where was the good man?
She shivered out of the reverie. At least she had granted this horse’s soul some extra time on earth, doing something he would love. For the first time, this enterprise felt worthwhile.
Though given her druthers, she would still grab Bucephalus and run.
“There’s another horse over here, sir! Ma’am!”
The dying mare lay on her side. Her ribs heaved like bellows, breaths wheezing through bloodied nostrils. Wisps of her soul clouded the air and Ilsa’s consciousness. A child’s laugh. A hand at her mane, a kiss at her muzzle. The girl’s wails as the horse was ridden away. The mare kept turning to look toward home, toward the girl. Reins jerked her head straight.
Home. Where the girl waited along the split-rail fence.
“What sort of wood?” Dennis’s voice shattered the image.
“No.” Ilsa gasped. “Not a warhorse. She should never have been here. She needs … I need …”
Children. Soft hands. Bouncy, light bodies within the sway of her back.
“Mrs. Klein, I’m sorry. We can’t fill a heart we can’t use.”
“I just need one!”
“Will there be only one like this here?”
This soul wasn’t as strong as Bucephalus. It couldn’t transfer more than once. Nor could she hold more than one soul at a time as she journeyed across the battlefield, but she wanted to, she needed to. This mare belonged in the carousel. Ilsa couldn’t bring forth the same girl, but there’d be others. She clawed for the dissipating strands of the horse’s soul. The bellows of breaths softened, the horse’s gaze distant.
The last vapors vanished against a sunbeam.
Gone. Not human, not saved by baptism. Lost, like the soul of the unchristened stillborn babe, born in an outhouse behind a Berlin carousel shop.
Ilsa would grab all the souls if she could. She would be the leaden weight to anchor them to earth.
“Ma’am?” Lieutenant Dennis whispered. “I’m sorry to put you through this, but—”
“I came to America to start my life again. I’m in the same place, but this is no longer America.” Her voice rasped like that of an old woman. She was an old woman.
She
stumbled onward, eyes blinded by tears, guided only by the tendrils of another agonized equine soul.
* * *
Confederate commanders encased her in a gray ring. They murmured excitedly, buzzing like machinery.
Culver waited by the first empty auquine, the prototype. “Pay them men no heed.”
“If this fails—”
“Ain’t gonna fail, missus. You know what you doing. You know these horses.”
She thought of Bucephalus, the horse she knew best of all, then looked to the heaping basket of wooden hearts beside her. The harvest of the battlefield. Days had passed, and her agony had turned to numbness.
Do the job. Give these souls a home. Let some good come of this.
She touched a knob of smoothed walnut, then delved deeper to find cherry. The heart pulsed in her hand, quickening. In her mind, she retraced the metal body before her, showed it to the soul the way she would once have extended a palm of oats.
As she knelt before the auquine’s chest, the murmurs behind her ceased. The horse’s chest compartment opened on hinges to show the vascular chamber. Stroking the heart, she murmured wordless assurances as she set the wood within its new cradle.
Death is rife with pain. So is rebirth.
Ilsa stabbed sharpened wood connectors into the heart. At each strike, the soul shivered as it spilled through the puncture wounds to explore gutta-percha veins. The auquine rumbled as the engine started.
She sealed the body shut. A hoof tentatively stomped on the dirt. At the auquine’s head, Culver made shushing noises, stroking along the silver muzzle. Ears pivoted on their roller joints, head lifting as if to sniff. The commanders broke out in applause.
“There, there. You mighty fine. You doing good, girl.”
Culver wasn’t whispering to the horse.
Ilsa moved on to the next auquine in the long row.
* * *
“You’ll look after Culver for me, won’t you, ma’am?” Dennis asked. Dawn had yet to pierce the oil slick of the sky, yet the camp bustled.
“Lieutenant, he’s as old as I am. I think he can look after himself.” Ilsa softened the words with a faint smile, her eyes on the auquines. Her horses, their silver and copper hides dull by firelight.
The Provisional Cavalry had practiced in the valley for weeks to acclimate the horses’ souls to their new, stronger bodies. Now their orders had come in.
“Well, I-I suppose so.” Dennis stooped in a way that reminded her of Culver, an invisible yoke heavy on his shoulders.
“Lieutenant Dennis. Mrs. Klein.” Captain Mayfair granted Ilsa a tip of his hat. “It’s time to mount up.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dennis, snapping out of his salute. He cast Ilsa a nod and joined the rest of the horsemen.
“I have been meaning to speak to you, Mrs. Klein,” Captain Mayfair said, “on the matter of that horse of yours.”
Bucephalus. The name pained her. “What of him, Captain?”
“He has a strong soul, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Could he be transferred to an auquine?”
She looked at the men—boys, really—and their metal horses. All of them giddy in anticipation of what was to come. These horses would truly die if their wooden hearts were pierced or their veins too badly mangled. Their souls escaping into nothingness. Ilsa couldn’t follow the cavalry and save them.
“You’d put Bucephalus in front of cannons?” she asked. “Why not just drop him in the campfire, then? It’s faster.”
It was selfish of her, she knew, to value his soul more than the rest, but Bucephalus had been her constant companion for decades. She had twined his soul and kept it warm beside her own heartbeat. She spent weeks carving his new body in butternut. They traveled the seaboard with her carousel until the war started. She talked to him; he listened.
“A great deal depends on this unit and its success, Mrs. Klein. These auquines could turn the course of the war. They could end it.” The captain was silent for a long minute. “I met my wife when I was at West Point. At the start of the war, she went back to New York to be with her parents on the farm. I would very much like to see her again.”
“My horse will not change that.”
“Smaller pebbles have changed the world, but that’s not my point. My inquiry is not about Bucephalus now, but for when the war is done. I own property in the Low Country down near Charleston. There’d be a place for him there. I would like to see him in action as he really is.”
“Captain,” said a soldier. He passed over an auquine’s reins.
Captain Mayfair swung himself into the saddle. “It’s something to keep in mind while we’re away, Mrs. Klein. Farewell.” He rode to join his men.
“Bucephalus is my horse,” she whispered to the dust. “Not yours. You stole him.”
Ilsa retreated to her room and listened to the soft thuds of hoofbeats as they faded away. The walls boxed her in like a stall, the ropes that bound her invisible yet strong.
* * *
The knife was a familiar weight in Ilsa’s hand. She inhaled the heady scent of wood so fresh it almost cleared her senses, her memories. A gas lamp cast the workshop in an orange glow.
Beyond the thin walls, men cheered. The first mission of the Provisional Cavalry had been a grand success. Their two-day pursuit of the Yanks had resulted in a decisive victory and the acquisition of a Union quartermaster’s wagon loaded with honest-to-God coffee beans.
“We couldn’t have achieved this victory without you,” Captain Mayfair had said. As if she needed the reminder.
She also did not need anyone to do the mathematics for her. Five horses gone. She did not count the men.
Ilsa didn’t look up when the door opened. As had become their ritual over the past month, Culver sat down on the lopped-off stump across from her. She was so used to working and talking aloud to Bucephalus that it felt peculiar to share her space with someone who replied. Peculiar in a pleasant way.
Culver opened a toolbox and began busywork with wires and bolts and fingernail-size scraps of metal. The soldiers in the foundry knew their jobs well by now, and he wasn’t required there anymore. He mostly acted as manservant for Lieutenant Dennis.
A fiddle whined outside, and voices arose in chorus:
“Jeff Davis is our President,
Lincoln is a Fool!
Jeff Davis rides a white—horse—auquine!”
The song broke off at the overlapped words. The men cheered again.
“They better be glad Cap’n said they sleep late tomorrow,” said Culver. “Gonna be a long train ride down to Alabama in three days.”
Alabama. Deeper south, deeper into this whole mess, and this time Ilsa was to come along. More horses would die. Dozens heaped together in a day, their memories blurred like hummingbird wings.
“How do you stand it?” She clenched the handle. “Knowing that if you headed north a ways, you could be free. That every time you build a horse, you’re building something that keeps you a slave.”
“I been free.”
“What?”
“I been free. When I’s a young man, I ran north, to New York. What a place, what a place.” Culver shook his head, still marveling. “Got me a ’prenticeship and a girl and a baby girl-child. And then blackbirders came, trussed me up, and hauled me back to Georgia.”
“My God,” she whispered. “I lived in New York back then—twenty years ago, was it?” Culver nodded. “I heard about those men, that they even dragged free-born Negroes south and into slavery. Your family—what happened?”
“Don’t know. But I had my family down in Georgia, too. Lord be praised for that. Got to see my boy grow up.” The curve of his smiling cheeks reminded her of Lieutenant Dennis, how he looked at the auquines.
My boy never grew up. He never even breathed. She was ashamed of herself for envying Culver in such a way when he had lost so much more.
“To be free and captured again …”
“Didn’t lose all
my freedom.” He tightened a bolt.
“How is that?”
“When you carvin’ those carousel horses, what’s it do for your soul?” An oddly blunt thing for Culver to ask.
Ilsa stroked the half-carved heart in her hands. “Years ago, I had a small boy ride the carousel time and again. He told me he’d truly been riding a mustang to California. He said the horse knew right where to go. That’s how I feel when I carve, when I see the carousel horses in their new bodies. That I’m going the right way. Escaping without escaping.”
“Mustangs. I heard ’bout them, out west. Crazy place, all dirt far’s the eye can see.”
“We should go there.” She set the knife on her lap. “The two of us. Forget this fools’ war.”
“Aw, Missus Klein. I’m too old to go off somewhere new. Maybe you can, your skin. Anyone take one look at me, they know where I come from, know right where I go. Blackbirders did.”
“I knew a horse like you once.” She resumed carving in furious strokes. “He had known freedom. He had known love. He was a bit Arab, a bit Thoroughbred, a bit of everything. He could race—Lord, could he race. His mind, it was faster than any whip. But then he was hurt and sold, and spent his last year pulling a glueman’s wagon down the cobbles in New York City. He pulled it like a royal chariot, awful as its load was, piled with dead of his own kind.”
“This that horse of yours? The one Cap’n has?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
The two of them worked in silence as her mind untangled frustration and fear and the need to do something for Culver, for Bucephalus, for herself. She thought of her carousel horses and mustangs.
“I’m going to ask the captain for a last trip to my shop for supplies.” Ilsa smiled at Culver. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever been on a flying-horse carousel?”
* * *
“I’ll need a few minutes to start up the steam engine.” Ilsa scurried about the old barn, connecting the engine and walking the long length of the cord, checking for rust or rat’s nests.
“Can I be of help, ma’am?” asked Dennis, their guard for the foray into town. He had seemed especially weary in recent days. She didn’t think he was too happy about the cavalry moving south. Maybe it brought the war too close to home.
Clockwork Phoenix 5 Page 30
