Clockwork Canada

by Dominik Parisien

  She smelled Wazhindoon’s wigwam before she caught the glimpse of the white birch trail glowing in the moonlight. The midewikwe was burning something to smudge, something protective that reminded Suzette of runs gone bad; vigils for fallen runners. She entered the hut to find it dimly lit; just bright enough for the wide eyes of Dibaabishk and Wazhindoon to shine orange embers in her direction.

  “You were right,” Dibaabishk said by way of greeting. He stood, ill at ease, as Wazhindoon sat placidly nearby with a familiar disk of fire-coloured metal in her hands. A second clochemar.

  “I was right,” Wazhindoon put in. “You should never have made this thing.”

  “You were both right,” Dibaabishk admitted, his habitual defensiveness absent. “I should never have made La Clochemar. And this—” He gestured at Wazhindoon. “We must destroy this.”

  “You made it? For the pale woman?” Suzette guessed, her heart sinking.

  “La Comtesse Martine de Champchevrier, yes, I did. I had no choice!” he stressed. “She was there, always, and her master’s swords. I tried to beg that my work was secret, to work alone, but I needed – that is, the pieces needed to be bonded. You were right,” he sighed. “It’s – a complicated process. But I needed access to the lives the clochemar was supposed to track. They had prisons. I was never alone there. Guards, swords, and always, her eyes and ears somewhere in the shadows.” Dibaabishk stopped pacing and faced the wall. “Her ‘bandits’ – well. Corsicans, mostly. Mussulmen. Jews. If it is banditry to want to defend your villages and herds, your family and neighbours… No, you were right, Soo. I met men who hunt other men for sport, and now – now I have helped them.”

  “She doesn’t have this clochemar yet, my friend,” Wazhindoon said. “Break it on the anvil.”

  “She would never allow it. It is only because I told her some nonsense about requiring a midewikwe’s blessing for the thing to work that she does not have it already. Even so, I am not sure she believes me. No, Soofoo, you must take it to Loowe, in secret—”

  Suzette had begun to nod her assent when her keen ears heard the footsteps of someone outside the wigwam. She held up a hand for the others to fall silent and recognized the same bold gait she’d heard on her way here. Her heart fluttered when she realized her mistake. I have been followed, she tried to warn her friends with a look.

  “Mr. Nebahahquahum,” the pale woman said, striding into the hut calm as June in her dark blue wools the colour of night. It took Suzette three heartbeats to realize she was speaking to Dibaabishk. “You will not destroy anything. I have your money, and you have my map. I’m disappointed to find you are as sentimental as my masters feared.” She appraised Wazhindoon, Suzette, and the room with a quick glance that displayed a well-seasoned talent for evaluating threats. Nothing in her body language indicated whether she took any of them for a credible one.

  “I’m sorry, Madame, but I have changed my mind. I thank you and your masters for your hospitality, but I must decline to close on our arrangement. The clochemar will stay with me.” Dibaabishk stood stiff as ice, like a creature about to bolt.

  “No, it will not,” the woman called Champchevrier replied. “One way or another, it will come with me. The simplest way is for you to honour our agreement.”

  Her contemptuous demeanour flared Suzette’s anger, but Dibaabishk’s eyes grew wide with fear. Wazhindoon climbed slowly to her feet and moved to her friend’s side. “We will fight for the clochemar, strange woman,” she said. “We do not fear your masters here. You’ve overextended your reach.”

  “Have I?” Champchevrier sighed, looking bored. Her hand dove into the folds of her skirts kingfisher-quick, drawing out her gleaming, silver prize: a pistol no bigger than a clochemar. Suzette gasped.

  “You cannot fire that here,” she blurted. “It will draw Mandimanidoo. You’ll be killed. Put it away this instant!”

  “We will, won’t we?” the woman smiled, teeth yellow by the firelight. “Perhaps this whole village as well. That would be a shame. The map, if you please.”

  Dibaabishk reached out and took Wazhindoon’s hand, the one holding the clochemar, in his own. He stared hard at Suzette. “No,” he said, refusing to lose her gaze. “I will not allow you to conduct your conquests with my art.”

  “Idiot,” Champchevrier said, shrugging. “You are nothing to me.” She squeezed the trigger.

  Smoke and sound filled the room in a fiery burst. Dibaabishk recoiled, hit, but remained standing. A moment later, a second shot caused him to crumple around the wet slick blossoming in his belly. He clutched Wazhindoon’s hand, and the clochemar, to the wound. He held it there as he fell to his knees, unyielding as stone, even as Wazhindoon lowered him to the ground.

  Champchevrier strode towards them and pointed her gun at Wazhindoon. “I will take the map now,” she told her.

  A terrible, familiar cry rang out through the night, drawing all their attention. Pamolai.

  Suzette seized her moment. In the half-heartbeat Champchevrier looked away towards the smoke-hole Suzette threw herself at the other woman, laying her weight into her body as her hands took hold of the little gun. She pushed the muzzle back towards her face with her wrist in an iron grip until she felt one of Champchevrier’s fingers pop. The woman’s grip loosened for only one moment. Suzette wrested the weapon from her hands, sprang to her feet, and backed across the room with lightning speed, raising the gun in rage.

  “Soofoo,” Dibaabishk groaned. “No. Just run.”

  Suzette ran. She threw aside the door hangings and ran blindly into the night, eyes straining against the starry treetops for any shadow or shape that might be a waking monster.

  There, blocking the thin sliver of the waxing moon, was the dread tower of feathers growing taller as their bearer stood straight. Pamolai, the Mountain’s Anger, with her crown of feathers and horns, and her hatred for the people of the lakes.

  Pamolai raised her equine muzzle to the stars and shrieked, as many as ten miles away. Far enough to ignore on a calm day, but right now bound directly for the gunfire she hated so much, and the town of Weashcog.

  Suzette ran towards Pamolai barely armed and unprepared. She was not painted, but wore nonetheless the warm leathers of autumn that would protect her from the branches and boulders she could not see. She had no rifle, but neither had a thousand years of Anishinaabeg runners before the French had arrived and she had, at least, the little pistol. She had no partner, but she had the determination that comes with knowing nothing else will save your friends and neighbours if you do not. She could not read La Clochemar in the dark, but she found she had no desire to.

  She knew this terrain well enough to know Pamolai must have been slumbering under the cliffs by Crooked Trout Lake, north and west of where she was. The area was spotted with hundreds of little lakes and swampy ponds, each as black and sudden as the last, but these broke up the forest and the sky, letting in enough starlight to guide her. She raced from shore to shore, never losing sight of her quarry. As Pamolai closed the space between them twice as quickly as Suzette could, she wet her lips and forced herself to breathe, for she would need every muscle of her lungs very soon.

  Suzette ran until she was less than a mile from Pamolai. She stuttered to a stop on a flat rock next to a lake too small for a name, pointed the tiny gun at the sky, and fired.

  The bird-crested beast slowed its stride as if taking notice, but did not turn. Suzette cocked the gun and fired again. How many bullets could such a little thing have? Surely, not many more.

  Pamolai stopped and looked in her direction, eyes little lakes in their own right. Suzette stared back. Pamolai started towards her.

  Suzette waited. Her training told her to run, now, while she still had a lead, but she could not risk losing Pamolai. For all she knew, the gun was barren already. She was lucky enough to have gained the monster’s interest – now she needed to keep it.

  Two hundred heartbeats was all it took for the creature to come so close, Suzette
could feel the gusts of Pamolai’s feathered arms pumping, the heat of her angry breath. She was too close to outrun, not with her stride of fifty feet and taste for human blood. The run had to end here.

  Pamolai had nearly reached the clearing when Suzette leapt into the lake. The monster’s great, taloned feet crushed the stones of the shoreline to sand as Suzette kicked water as hard as she could, flailing clumsily for the deep, impossibly cold heart. Pamolai’s long, moose’s face opened to reveal a forest of bladed teeth when she howled in anger, reaching out with a great feathered arm to pluck Suzette from the lake.

  Suzette dove. She curled into a ball and let herself sink, letting the icy water weigh her down. She dropped into a niiyawaa state so deep that her held breath slipped from her lungs and her consciousness slipped under the folds of her mind. Unbreathing, unmoving, unthinking, she was still sinking when she forgot the world completely.

  * * *

  Suzette woke up.

  They had pulled her body, still and frozen, from the lake just a shade before dawn, almost a whole night since Pamolai had grown frustrated dredging the murky water and moved on, prey forgotten. Makoonse, her partner, and the others of her party had wept thinking her as dead as her body itself believed.

  But the keen attention of Wazhindoon found her heartbeat, each thump an eternity from the next. Though there was little they could do about the blackening joints of her fingers and toes, little by little they coaxed her self out of its hiding place and returned her to the world. Nobody was more amazed than she when her eyes fluttered open, when her mind was unchanged.

  “But, Dibaabishk?” she finally found the courage to ask. Wazhindoon’s smile turned sad. Suzette looked away.

  “It was for nothing, then. Champchevrier has the clochemar and I could not save Dibaabishk. Ooh,” she moaned. “That you had left me at the bottom of the lake!”

  “Hush, Soo, hush,” Wazhindoon cooed. “It is not for nothing Dibaabishk spilt his life’s blood,” she murmured. “That clochemar won’t work. Not for her purposes. It was forged anew in our friend’s blood. It has his spirit now,” she chuckled. “And where he has gone, even Manidoo-dibaigisisswaii cannot track him.” Wazhindoon squeezed her shoulder as Suzette began to grieve.

  Suzette did not run again. For some time, people of science arrived from Europe with coy questions on their tongues about pocket maps and blood-spirited metals, but, in her new capacity as interpreter to these folk, she had become a wall. La Clochemar had never existed.

  And in the wilderness, a rough morning’s travel north-west of Weashcog, was a lake they named Fooniiyawaa – Foolish Stillness. It was said to be a particularly good home to mosquitoes in summer, though legends persisted about a woman who once lay half-dead in its belly. Both were causes to give the place a wide berth, keeping well the other secret sleeping undisturbed at the lake’s bottom: La Clochemar.

  EAST WIND IN CARRALL STREET

  HOLLY SCHOFIELD

  Wong Shin pulled down on a lever, scraping his elbow against the metal framework within the clockwork lion. The lion obediently approached Margie where she stood in his family courtyard. Over and over, he made the lion step forward, then retreat, keeping a light hand on the crucial levers. When Margie shot a guilty look over her shoulder at the brothel behind her, Shin copied her glance, awkwardly peering upwards through the screening above the lion’s broad nose. Margie’s aunt was not at the second-storey window. He let out his breath. Fully four years older, he felt responsible that they not be seen together. Practice time was short so he gave all his attention back to the controls, completing the sequence of dance steps, as focused as if he were performing a traditional Chinese lion dance in front of his father’s business associates rather than for the amusement of a ten-year-old White girl.

  From his cramped spot behind the lion’s eyes, he twisted a bamboo rod, snapping the lion’s mouth open and closed, imagining the traditional drum beats. As cables tightened, a pulley triggered another line attached to the puffy silk balls mounted on the lion’s papier-mâché face. He let the silk decorations waggle a bit then he pressed a ceramic spring-loaded button next to his knees, sending the clockwork lion’s gears ratcheting noisily. As he pumped his legs in the iron stirrups, the lion’s front feet followed suit, dancing a complex jig. Dust billowed up between the gaps in the stirrups, making him cough.

  He pranced again toward Margie, his knees reaching up around his ears. “Go away, Mah-jee, go away!” he called out, laughing.

  Margie giggled and twirled out of his way. “You mean run away! Or flee!” she called back, eager to improve his English, as always.

  He chased her across the unkempt courtyard, picturing the layers of colourful cotton swaying behind him. This morning’s improvements meant the lion’s iron framework was now the length of a large horse – fully a dozen chek long. There was nothing like the clockwork lion in the city of Victoria’s Chinatown, nor in British Columbia, nor perhaps in all of the Dominion of Canada – despite it being a complete sham.

  Tomorrow, across Carrall Street at Teck Woo’s new bakery, the drummers would play: at first, slow beats, then becoming gradually faster and faster. The crowds would yell encouragement and, as the excitement grew and the lion danced, Shin would snatch the all-important red envelope of money through the massive lion jaws. And no one would know that it wasn’t a true clockwork lion.

  Shadows crept up the brick wall of his father’s grocery store as the afternoon wore on. A dial on the lion’s interior panel indicated that the clockwork’s energy coil was almost spent. Shin’s arms and legs began to ache from the repeated motions in the confined space.

  As he sashayed one more time across the yard toward Margie, making the ears wiggle and the beard shimmy, she looked past him toward the store and her eyes grew wide with fear. He stopped, in confusion, just as his father’s voice rang out.

  “Shin-Shin, neh jow mat yeh, wah?” Shin-Shin, what are you doing?

  Shin laboriously turned the lion fully around to face his father, hoping the cotton-clad framework would shield Margie’s escape. She would need time to climb the fence and his father blocked the only front exit that led between brick buildings out to Carrall Street.

  “Doy em jee, Baba.” I’m sorry, Father.

  “Why are you practicing out here? The neighbours must not see!” His father’s village-accented Cantonese harshened in displeasure.

  “Sorry, Baba, the workshop floor is not big enough anymore for the full routine.” Shin let the lion’s knees sag, relieved that Baba hadn’t caught sight of Margie; his father was simply worried that the clockwork lion would be seen by the neighbours. No one in Chinatown, aside from Shin and his father, knew that the boy steered the lion from within. In the two years since the lion had been completed, Shin’s father had convinced the Chinatown businessmen’s association that the lion was truly clockwork-run. The scale and complexity of such clockwork had been attempted without success since the start of the Qing Dynasty and his father had quickly grown famous. If the businessmen knew that this lion was controlled by a boy pulling levers, they would not pay the ten-dollar fee for an opening good-fortune ceremony; instead they would hire Lee Chan and his brawny son to provide the two-dollar, man-powered version.

  “Since you are already out here, practice the lettuce-retrieval ceremony. Grab that maple leaf up there.” Shin’s father pointed at the woodshed roof, cluttered with twigs and debris. “Balance your front legs on the old chicken coop.”

  “Yes, Baba.” Shin steered the lion to the dilapidated wooden structure that hugged the woodshed. They hadn’t had chickens since Mama had died during childbirth seven years ago. Now, thistles filled the coop, spilling out the top and sides through wire mesh. Shin pressed a lever to raise the lion’s left foot onto the top corner of the rickety structure, praying to the earth god Dabo Gong that the chicken coop could withstand both the lion’s and his weight. He knew he’d grown taller since Baba had designed the lion head when he was twelve – he was n
ow up to Margie’s shoulder – and he must have put on a few catties of weight too. He almost blurted out that this stunt would be more difficult than placing the lion’s front legs on two pre-positioned barrels as he would tomorrow, but he bit the words back. Baba would know all that and have factored the risk, like men did. If it was fated to collapse, it would. Shin clamped his mouth shut, even as the huge lion foot made the top board creak. If he didn’t attempt difficult things, Baba would never call him Ah Shin and treat him like the adult he was.

  He eased his weight forward, the energy coil unwinding with a squeal. An indicator on the left panel said he had about ten fan of energy left – just enough to make the lion grab the large green leaf and drop down to kneel in front of Baba.

  The chicken coop creaked again. Thistles rustled. Shin looked down between his leg stirrups. A wisp of blonde hair was caught among the thistles. More rustling and blue eyes peered up at him.

  “Hurry up!” Baba’s voice came from behind, near the grocery’s rear door. His father must have stepped back, most likely expecting Shin to fail and fall. He hadn’t seen Margie.

  In the chicken coop, Margie’s eyes filled with tears. The lion weighed as much as three men. If the chicken coop couldn’t support its weight, it would surely crush her just as being born had crushed his little sister. The baby that was to be Shin’s little sister had only lived a few days, not long enough to name.

  Should he tell Baba that Margie was in the coop and save her life? She could run home. He glanced upward at the building behind. A woman with a mound of hair on her head stood at the brothel window, scanning the alleyway. His father would thrash him with a bamboo stick if he knew about Shin’s friendship with Margie, but that was nothing compared to the beating Margie’s aunt would give her for associating with filthy heathens such as himself.