A clockwork river, p.60
A Clockwork River, page 60
ORSON: Who when these woods were young did engineer
An opening in this monarch of the forest.
Inserting his own self into the trunk,
His arteries then healed its sappy veins;
His skin, its bark; his hair, its leaves; his oils,
Its resins; organs to sense light and wind;
And nerves, that knit an arcane tissue drawn
Upon the heartwood’s living loom of impulse.
LUCREZIA steps forward and presses her cheek to the trunk of the great tree.
LUCREZIA: I seem to sense its woody pulse. ’Tis warm!
ORSON: His sacrifice bequeathed to nature reason;
To man, the forces of the world, which now
Can know what’s wanted of its energies.
It lacks but that you make your wishes known.
LUCREZIA: Ho! Tree! A pair of greaves in which to pass
The scorpion desert without harm, and then
A bottle of their venom.
Angeline, lingering modestly to one side, now stepped forward to breathe her line with a heaving bosom. It is all to the good that Fanny Spurwell was not present to see a woman who was quite thirty play so plausibly the role of a naïve forest-bred maid of seventeen, with a good heart full of misgivings, marked with a tragic destiny.
BELINDA: Its spirit speaks!
Captain Jack, unable to restrain his enthusiasm at Angeline’s virtuoso delivery, delivered a burst of applause. Pronouncing a spooky couplet in a resonant voice, the tree produced first a pair of boots coated in metallic paint, then a bottle that Lucrezia fastened on a cord about her daughter’s neck.
LUCREZIA: ’Tis excellent. Now money – she’ll want money
For bribes to launch her bloody plots – let’s have
The gold!
BELINDA: Its boughs shake grievously. You ask
So much, my mother, for so little good!
TREE SPIRIT: My roots tap on the underworld, a mine
Of death that’s insufficient, yet is thine.
This was Jacky’s greatest achievement. With a great crack as of a sap-filled branch bursting in a cold snap, the whole tree sagged back as its trunk split open in the direction of the audience, disgorging a bucketful of coin. Sam wondered suddenly how Jacky was getting on, with a pang of guilt that he had thought of her so little since they first came to Oxhull.
LUCREZIA: No more? ’Twill do; it will be made to do.
BELINDA: I fear your thirst for vengeance hath laid waste
Unto a larger treasure.
The three actors froze in a tableau about the blasted trunk of the tree. As the footlights were extinguished, the bright windows of Deligris’s cottage, deep in the valley by the bank of the canal, sprang into view; a gust of wind carried from it the unnoticed cry of a woman in childbed, faint as the squeak of the set change. Another gust from a different quarter brought drunken voices and a whiff of smoke. The flickering points of torches and scores of lit cigars pricked out the top of the dam, where the general was to give his speech a few hours hence. Heedless, Sam swam forward through the crowd in his eagerness to observe the following scene, in which Bertha counseled the motherless Andreas to marry the heiress his father had selected for him. Jenny Rapscallion played a livelier and nosier nurse than his fretful and high-strung one, and he regretted to admit that her interpretation carried this ribald scene extremely well.
ANDREAS: Come, Bertha, hold your peace, I love her not,
Though she be not unlovely.
BERTHA: You fail to figure
In full the vastness of her tracts of land.
This was a laugh line, which Jenny encouraged by shaking a part of her matronly carriage. Sam thought the choice was overboard. He wedged himself into the throng at the foot of the stage, in hopes of discovering more failures from a closer vantage, and deduced with a sudden start that he stood immediately behind Captain Jack, who was jostling for a prime place with Ichabod and Rafe.
Jenny played her character with more leg-play than Sam had done, and when she hiked up her skirt and gave a subdued but skillful kick with an unmistakably shapely ankle, it became evident that she was trained to performance by way of the cancan line. The audience erupted in applause, and Rafe whistled enthusiastically. Branson, coated in white powder and turning handsprings, introduced Leon and Belinda – now disguised as a man and disguised further by a red wig in which she looked quite handsome.
Captain Jack, who had seen only the first act and had no idea that a red wig was in the offing, leaned in hard and elbowed Rafe who elbowed back. Although he was breathing down the captain’s neck, Sam considered himself safe as long as Angeline remained upon the stage, infiltrating the household in the character of Billfred Bellimore, a provincial playboy who had come to the capital to establish connections, invest his wealth and sow wild oats. Leon insinuated to Andreas that friendship with a spendthrift rube might be just the thing to repair the family’s flagging fortunes before he made a discreet exit. Bertha traipsed after him with a parting high kick, and Rafe ceded Captain Jack his place.
In banter rife with incestuous double entendre, the young rakes came to an understanding that, though Andreas lacked hard cash, he would gladly “fall to the native hardness of my character”, on the condition that his new friend foot the bill for their adventures in dens of chance and the demimonde, where they would
BELINDA: Enlarge our stakes, and raise ourselves from privates
To general intercourse enlarging others.
Captain Jack, greatly appreciating the military metaphor, whooped loudly. Gradually, the blue wordplay yielded to darker intimations of the tragic crescendo of the plot, in which the younger generation succeeded against their will to the sins of their parents, and everyone ended up lunatic or dead.
Sam knew the play backward and forward, of course, and his main curiosity was to see how his replacement would manage Bertha’s most difficult scene – an emotionally subtle reunion with Lucrezia whose griefs and crimes had driven her into a supernatural sphere beyond human reason. But as the lights went out for the intermission, and the theater thundered with applause, a brigade of drunken artillery officers stationed at the dam thought it appropriate to test the fireworks. A bright shower of flares shot up above the valley, illuminating the troupe in various stages of half-costume, and at just this moment, Captain Jack, happening to look around, fixed his piercing blue eye upon his quarry.
Sam ducked below a pair of conveniently tall convicts and cut right, but the captain had already whipped out his rapier and shouted, “Halt, felon!” The crowd was dense, and the night was dark, but Captain Jack was swift and skilful, and in the end, Sam had not much of a head start when he finally sprinted out into the alpine paths threading through the woods above the dam. After ten minutes of close chase, a bell rang from the amphitheater, and the captain, placing pleasure before business on this exceptional occasion, sprang back to resume his place of worship before the altar of Angeline’s abilities.
Breathing very heavily, Sam found that he had rounded the construction site and was looking down upon the dark, ice-bound expanse of the reservoir. A few boats bobbed in a glittering patch of open water just before the gates, where the ice had been cut through to make underwater mechanisms accessible to maintenance personnel with insulated diving suits and air hoses. Beyond the bright, straight line of the dam, already lit up in preparation for the festivities, the storehouse, the observation tower and the amphitheater loomed up from the high ground, while inglorious felt tents and mud-brick storage huts and fir-timbered square barracks infested the slopes below in chaotic clumps around the officers’ mess. It was all very striking, especially since the whole landscape was shortly to be transformed, but Sam had eyes only for Doctor Deligris’s cottage – nestled in a picturesque fold of earth with its windows all ablaze and silhouetted homunculi bustling about in them like puppets in a shadow play. Sam tried to make out Rosie among them, but at this distance, he was hard put even to notice the front door opening to let out Professor Deligris.
A great number of medals and pompous speeches and raucous cheers and other things were to be given out on the occasion of the opening of the floodgates, not least among them a ceremonial plaque Deligris was to receive from the hands of General Firth himself. For a man about to receive such a signal honor, the professor had a fretful and altogether preoccupied demeanour as he trotted up the hill, occasionally removing his knitted woolen mittens in order to worry his handkerchief. He had left Rosie pacing the length of the kitchen, supported on one side by Kat and on the other by the maid. Her face sweaty and drawn with pain, she had breathlessly wished him luck and even offered her shiny cheek to be kissed, which the poor professor did, gripping her hands and vainly seeking reassurance in the midwife’s curt nod.
It was with false heartiness that he assured Rosie he would be back in a matter of hours, shrugged into his bearskin coat while feeling for the acceptance speech rolled up in its pocket, and tromped out into the snow thinking of the night Rosie had herself been thrust into his arms, a squalling bundle of daughter to take the place of a wife silenced forever. The frigid air was calming, however, and by the time the house had shrunk to the size of a toadstool behind him, he was able to take interest in the whine of celebratory rockets bursting over the dam. Increasing his pace, he took off his fur hat and ran his kerchief across his pate, wishing that he had had the presence of mind to burnish it with Doctor Longwilling’s special polishing cream.
Gold and silver fireworks spattered the black sky, released by overeager munitions experts. In the distance, Deligris could see the bright streaks of waving torches and the silhouettes of officers running to and fro along the top of the dam and clustering around the bulky square of the podium where the general was to make his speech. Then, in the same way one sometimes glances at the clock just as the minute hand slips forward, he happened to look down just as something pale flipped back and forth against the white snow. For some reason, this tiny movement, of no more force than the struggle of a butterfly caught in a smear of tar, caught his attention. He struggled toward it through the snow and darkness, kicking up great sprays of powder that settled on his coat in a fine dust that sparkled as he moved. Soon he could see that the pale flipping was a cuff; even from this distance, he could see that it stood up with starch. Striking a match, Deligris harumphed in disapproval at the sight of General Firth dead-drunk in the snow, his arms flung out like a conductor in the throes of a great symphony, and very lightly dressed, wearing no more than a white, linen shirt and a pair of long underwear.
Without his finery, the general looked no more martial than any other man; if it were not for his unmistakable bulbous red nose and halo of iron-gray hair, he could have passed for any tinker or farmer whom liquor had rendered foolish. Deligris peered over a tide of white hillocks to the officers’ mess. Tendrils of cigar smoke still curled from its seams like a freshly snuffed candle; through its window, he saw a private tilt wearily beneath a tray of glasses. A gentle prod with the tip of his boot raised not so much as a drunken snore. Cursing under his breath, Deligris bent down to heave the general over, but he found the man’s limbs unnaturally stiff and unyielding. The poor professor felt all at once so nauseous and defeated that he was obliged for a moment to sit down in the snow and wring his handkerchief, which the day had already reduced to a loose mesh of pulpy fibers. When he had recovered sufficiently to inspect the corpse, he found its throat wrapped in a quantity of piano wire.
And so it was that Professor Deligris, who hated to be late, was the last of the honorees to arrive at the festivities, running pell-mell across the snow with only one mitten on and his furry coat billowing out behind him like the cloak of a flying squirrel until he encountered a region of deep drifts and slowed to a desperate slog. Waves of applause flooded from the amphitheater, and as Deligris neared the scene, his progress was slowed further by the crowds of merrymakers coming from the play. The red points of a hundred cigars indicated men in braided epaulets crowding onto the stone bridge of the dam and milling about there with champagne glasses in their hands, or swinging their legs off the sides and shooting off rockets.
Three sharp blasts echoed off the canyon walls. Squinting, Deligris could make out a company of trumpeters who had led the parade and were now trapped on the other side.
“Let me through,” he commanded. “Let me through, I say. McDell!” he barked at an army engineer blocking his path. “What the devil are you doing here? Why aren’t you manning the sluice?”
“I was told there wasn’t room, sir. I was told to wait here. There’s no hurry – the general just got here. Had to walk one off, I hear.”
“Preposterous!” Deligris had to shout to be heard. “The general? We have to call the whole thing off.”
And yet a junior officer standing well out of earshot lit a fuse, causing magnificent green fireworks to shoot up from each corner of the bridge. A mob of officers pressed up expectantly against the rough, wooden platform that projected out from the wall of the dam like the prow of a ship. The medals on the breast of a general’s uniform caught the light, although the face of the man who wore it remained in shadow; the bright brass buttons on his sleeves cut the air in a commanding gesture, and four enlisted men on either end of the bridge touched simultaneous torches to four black strings.
Hidden in the shrubbery just upstream of the dam, Sam had a splendid view of the whole proceeding. Amid the lights of the flares and the shouts of glory and exasperation, he strained forward to see the opening of the sluice gates, whose design he had reworked so completely that he felt they were basically his. Instead, he saw pinpoints of light sputtering slowly down the back face of the dam toward the waterline. At the same time, a figure in a general’s uniform rappelled discreetly into a kayak waiting in the maintenance channel.
More bursts of fireworks lit up the sky. Starting out from behind his bush, Sam saw the man in the kayak shrug a tarred suit on over his clothes. Snorting something from a vial into his nose, the man looked up at Sam, and his face relaxed into an unforgettable smirk. It was the waiter from the Grand Hotel – the one who had hit Sam on the head, stolen his locks and thrown him into the Rhumb to die.
“You!” Sam cried, plowing toward the waterline, though of course there was too much noise for anyone to hear him. In his rage, he leaped into one of the johnboats stabled at the edge of the ice and began to flail the oars.
On one of the catwalks that crisscrossed the dam, a pair of grunting officers set their shoulders to the notched metal wheel that controlled the sluice gates. For a moment, it was quiet enough to hear the hiss of burning fuses as thin serpents of fire smoldered down the slope. Geysers of golden sparks shot up along the dam.
“Stop!” cried Deligris.
But the sluice gates were opening now, and the earth already trembled with violence. None of the blueprints, with their tiny, neat lettering and their perfect protractor-drawn arcs, could have prepared Sam for the noise: a subterranean thunder like the hooves of a thousand demon cattle in an underground stampede, and then, as water surged through the penstocks and erupted into the spillway, a high-pitched roar that could knock a man backward.
The man in the kayak saluted Sam with his oar. The ice of the reservoir cracked with a noise like cannon fire and blocks of it drifted into the maintenance channel where Sam was fighting the sudden downstream current. His adversary kept his kayak adeptly in place; the fuses burned close to the waterline.
The fireworks began in earnest now, weeping golden trees and trembling crimson peonies and great flashes of silver dragons breathing emerald fire, and even a blinding incandescent rhinoceros in every color of the rainbow. As bits of charred paper floated down from the sky like black snow, a new explosion came, louder than the others, and now instead of a flash of colored light in the sky, it was the dam itself that began to tremble like a great pudding. Deep in its flanks came another angry boom that, for a moment, dwarfed the roar of the water. Most of the crowd cheered and tossed caps. Then the officers began to scream, as the dam buckled underneath them and the first few lieutenants were pitched off, and then everyone was screaming as they realized what was about to happen.
Were it not for all the noise, Sam might have heard Starklime say, as the sparks ran up the fuses into their detonators, “So, Mr Locke, you are intent on ending up in the Rhumb at last.” As it was, he only saw the man’s lips move through a sociopathic smile, and then everything was blotted out by the tremendous blast of heat and shrapnel as the dam collapsed.
LVI
The Demon.
Picture a place far below the basements, the cellars, the sub-basements, and even the sub-cellars of the Locke mansion; under the deepest of the empty wine vaults, holding only a few antediluvian vintages, long past drinking, and cider bottles with moldering corks, and liqueur casks from which the spirits had evaporated to another phase more spirituous yet; under the mechanical rooms and the catacombs where Locke bones lay grouped by type, with buckets of clavicles and other buckets full of ribs looking like macabre umbrella urns; a place where the foundation of the house fades into the city’s maintenance channels and water conduits and every stray noise in the gloom is suggestive of an ancient race of troglodytes gathering for an assault upon the surface.
There came an ominous scuffle in a shadowy side corridor, some heavy breathing and the slap of huge feet against the stone and, finally, a glimmer of light. Holding out a bright bullseye lantern into the oily, black gloom of the underearth, Doctor Longwilling picked his way down a spiral staircase hewn from the living rock. He emerged into a vast underground cavern and, brandishing the lamp, cast monstrous shadows onto the looming wall. “Poor Briony,” he sighed. “Wearing next to nothing in this weather, and night coming on fast; I do hope she is all right.”
Shay grunted and popped his joints. He was wrenching a gurney down the stairs, with Jacky, unconscious, strapped into it. At last, he got it on its wheels again at the bottom and began to trundle it across the damp, shiny, rough-hewn stone after the doctor, whose pigeon-toed feet as he toddled ahead made rhythmic clicking noises like a novice tap-dancer practising the fundamentals. If rats were scuttling by, they did it discreetly and outside the scope of the lantern. If the water people were prone to haunt the region when they wanted a bit of solitude, they were not doing it now.
