Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti Read online

  He looked away from the human wreckage. He looked up past the empty trapeze to the very top of the rigging. There was a little tear in the ceiling of the tent, and through it there was the night sky, a smattering of stars.

  When he glanced down again, Boss was looking at the woman’s body, lifting her hair to look at the skull, brushing the blood away from her remaining eye, as if cleaning off a toy that had fallen in the mud.

  “Can you help her?”

  He didn’t know why he asked. It wasn’t like he wanted her helped.

  After a long time, Boss said, “I don’t know what will happen.”

  Stenos remembers that it was cold that night; he shivered, holding her.

  This is what he sees when he looks at her that night:

  He sees the empty tunnel of her eye socket. He sees into her; he falls through and through the tunnel until he is swallowed up by the emptiness there, until he sees the night sky.

  Even after the ground has crushed her she is gasping for air, her ribs heaving through the skin as she fights the inevitable, though everyone knows Death is following close on her heels.

  His only thought is, If she dies, I get the wings. I get the wings.

  He feels them already as if they’re growing out of his shoulders; he sees himself leading the procession through the cities, his wings a fan of knives on either side. He imagines the ground falling away as he rises over the awed crowd. The air seems to shimmer, anticipating him.

  All he has to do is wait this out; as soon as the woman is dead, he will inherit the wings.

  He looks down at the woman in his arms and thinks, Tough luck, and flexes his fingers against her arm, against her knee, like a consolation prize.

  But when she stops breathing, his chest goes tight; he adjusts his hold and pulls her towards him without thinking; he puts his mouth on the blood where he hopes her mouth is and pushes a breath into her lungs. It comes back to him, sick-sweet and dry as dust, and for some reason he can’t name he is terrified, too terrified even to lift his mouth from her mouth.

  This is how Boss finds them when she opens the door.

  “Bring her in,” she says, after too long.

  He lays her out on the table, and then Boss is filling the workshop, pressing him out without ever touching him, and when he is outside she locks the door against him.

  Stenos remembers that the night Bird fell was cold. Her body was cool when he held her; he had walked from the trailer with his arms crossed in front of him; when he passed Elena, she was trembling.

  But this is how memories are—always true, never the truth.

  Elena shrank from the blood on his face, and he crossed his arms in front of him to keep them from shaking, and even though he remembers these things, he does not know the truth of the night when he woke Bird.

  This is the truth:

  The night was warm; Bird had gone cold.

  29.

  The government man came back, good as his word, our last night in the city.

  I forced a smile as I handed him his ticket, and when he looked at me I winked and rapped my knuckles once on my right leg, the brass in tune with Panadrome.

  “Welcome, sir,” I said, “to the Mechanical Circus Tresaulti. Jugglers and tumblers and girls in the air, the finest spectacle anywhere!”

  “I’m sure,” he said, and I thought he’d be annoyed, but when he looked down at me his eyes were shining.

  I went cold all over, and didn’t really recover until he had disappeared into the tent and I was sure he couldn’t see me any more.

  One of the nice things about so many governments, I guess, is that people don’t recognize you from the others who have murdered their way to power. His car was nowhere to be seen, and only one bodyguard followed him in.

  I handed out tickets until the last rube was inside, and then I skidded around to the back flap of the tent, close to the trailers, where some of the acts filed in to wait behind the bleachers for their turn.

  The government man took a seat at the edge of one of the benches, with a clear shot to the main entrance of the tent, like any man would if he wasn’t a fool.

  I ran for Boss so fast I slipped in the mud, reached her as a sopping mess.

  She was waiting outside the main entrance of the tent for Panadrome to finish his welcome march. Jonah was holding a wide yellow umbrella over her, to keep off the last of the rain, and when she saw me coming she held out one hand, palm out, to stop me from coming closer.

  “Watch the dress,” she said. “I’m on.”

  “He’s here,” I said. “The government man.”

  Her hand curled into a fist. She dropped her arm to her side, looked at the entrance to the tent. The griffin tattoo peered into the twilight.

  “What do we change?” I asked, my mind racing. “I can get Ayar back from the bleachers, no one’s seen him yet, and if Jonah—”

  “Nothing,” she said. Her gaze was fixed on the tent ahead of her. Jonah’s hand was shaking a little; the yellow umbrella trembled.

  “But he’ll see us,” I said. I felt like I was sinking into the ground, pulled into the mud by my own terror.

  She shook her head, her face set. “Being afraid wastes time,” she said, as if to herself.

  Jonah said, “The jugglers are ready and waiting for your word, Boss.”

  Boss stepped out from under the yellow umbrella and opened the tent flaps with both hands; for a moment she was a dark shape against a flare of lights and noise, and then the flaps fell shut and it was just Jonah and me left in the yard, ankle-deep in the mud and looking at each other like a couple of frightened kids.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Circus Tresaulti!”

  Boss’s greeting filled the tent, rolled out past the canvas, over the both of us and out into the darkness, and for a moment I was brave again; Boss’s voice does that to you.

  Still, after her voice had faded I pulled a stool up to the tent and waited, slowly sinking into the mud, for Boss to come safely back out again.

  30.

  After Alec died, we drove for two days without stopping. Nobody knew where we were going but Boss, who drove the lead truck alone.

  I had meant to go the first leg with the tumblers, and then switch to the other mens’ trailer when we stopped for the night, but we ended up trapped in there for two days together.

  The first night we got drunk, so drunk that Molto and Brio wept into their sleeves about Alec, and the rest of us blinked at the ceiling. The second night we tried to dry out, so that if we ever stopped we’d be good for something besides the guillotine.

  The morning of the third day, our truck stopped. After a moment, Barbaro said, “Well, fuck,” and opened the door as if it didn’t matter to him whether he died or not.

  We were all pulled over; the crewmen who had driven the trucks were already asleep in the bunks above their cabs, and the rest of us staggered out into the morning like a pile of cave rats.

  “We’ll stop here tonight,” Boss said. “He can be buried here as well as anywhere.”

  We were on a grassy flat outside the ruins of a town that had been long abandoned. Good place for a final rest, I supposed, though I didn’t see why we had taken two days to get there instead of any other place.

  (It reminded me of the city where Boss had found him, though this place was grown over with weeds, empty for a hundred years, so it couldn’t have been.)

  “Rest here,” Boss said, and then, “except Ayar and Little George. Let’s get the body out of the workshop and dig a grave before day’s gone.”

  As I passed the women’s trailer I looked at Ying, who was like a wraith after two days locked up with Elena and the rest of the women. She couldn’t even manage a smile when she saw me; she looked across the grassy plain at a little grove of trees and shoved her hands in the pockets of a jacket five sizes too big.

  (It was one of Elena’s things. I would have pegged Elena as the last person to notice someone else was cold, but I guess you n
ever know.)

  The coffin was strapped where we had left it, and we dragged it out to the trees for the protection from the sleet and wind, and Ayar broke ground on the grave.

  “I want it proper deep,” Boss said. “God knows what people do out here when they’re desperate. I don’t want him to be easy to find.”

  Ayar and I looked at one another, wondering what sort of people she was expecting. Finally Ayar said, “Sure thing, Boss.”

  He dug that whole grave himself, of course—he could dig a hundred graves without getting tired. I was there to get him water and bring lamps for a little warmth and to tell him jokes, just to keep him working.

  It still took until nightfall, and when he was finished and had hauled himself out of the grave he said, “I don’t have it in me to cover him tonight.”

  “I’ll tell Boss,” I said.

  Turned out there was no need (Boss knows the lay of the land). When I found her and told her the grave was dug, she picked up a lamp and went out before I could tell her a thing, but as soon as she reached Ayar she said, “We’ll leave it for now. Thank you, Ayar, for your work. In the morning we’ll bury him.”

  It was winter, so the coffin stayed out. Boss acted like it hardly mattered, and stayed in her trailer, lights on and the sounds of sharpening tools, until everyone else had gone to sleep.

  Then she opened the door and looked for me.

  When she saw me, I ran to her (old habit), and she took my arm and knelt so we were eye to eye. I was still a boy, and hated being reminded how small I was, but she only took my shoulders like she was the queen and I was the questing knight, and I felt how it really was—that she had come down to me.

  “Watch him,” she said, her face pinched and blue in the moonlight. “I don’t want him to be alone his last night. Bad enough to have been locked away for so long.”

  It was winter, I wanted to say. I could freeze. He’s dead now, I wanted to say, I don’t know why it matters.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” she said, with the worst attempt at a smile I’d ever seen from her. Then she cleared her throat and went inside, where she wound up the little radio Jonah had found for her in a junk heap a dozen cities back. The crackle of a broadcast cut through the camp; a government station, it sounded like, from the casualty reports.

  I took up a seat on one of the flatbeds, cradled between two rolls of canvas. I could see the coffin from where I was, and at least in the canvas I wouldn’t freeze to death overnight.

  For a while I dozed amid the comfortable smells of wax and oak and old beer.

  At some point I woke. The camp was silent except for the crackle of the radio, and for a while I looked at the far-off lumps that in the daylight had been a city, and now looked like a snoring beast. Funny how things change depending on the light.

  Later, when it was full dark except for the moon, Elena came to the coffin.

  I thought about scaring her off (what does a sour bitch like that care for anything?), but she had given Ying her jacket to ward off the cold. I let her be.

  I watched her for a long time as she stood still beside the wooden box. Her shabby coat hung off her thin shoulders; when the wind blew, the coat flapped against her, showing flashes of white that had rubbed off on the lining from running to the tent in the winter with her coat wrapped over her powdered legs.

  I couldn’t see her face, so I didn’t know if she was crying, or praying, or spitting on the grave.

  No. That last thought wasn’t fair, I knew it even as I thought it. Out of all of them, Elena wouldn’t do that to Alec. Elena was the one who had almost caught him.

  She bent to the coffin; her head was a warm silhouette against the mountain of black earth Ayar had dug up. For a moment her lips moved—prayer, then, after all.

  At last she kissed the rough wood, as if waking him, as if she was the prince in a fairy tale.

  Then she stood and turned back, her feet crunching gently in the frost all the way back to the trailer where the women lived. She didn’t look around her, didn’t see me at all.

  I sat up all the rest of that night, wide awake without knowing why.

  31.

  This is what Elena said to Alec, before she pressed her lips to the coffin to wish him good journey:

  “Coward.”

  32.

  According to Elena, the aerialists are sexless.

  They say it’s because of the bones. You get sewn up again and something isn’t quite right. Some pieces don’t work like they should. The girls end up light and strong, and utterly without the sort of thing a man can enjoy.

  The rubes don’t know, of course. It’s for the crew and the jugglers, who flicker in and out of their lives; even when the worst of them are three sheets to the wind, the aerialists still get the sort of treatment that men give little girls or old women.

  It’s not true, of course—Alto, who’s sleeping with Nayah, and Altissimo, who’s sleeping with Mina, know differently, but they keep their peace; they can guess what Elena would do if they spoke out of turn.

  Elena is fond of the lie. She knows that in times like these a troupe leader must look out for her own, and she does what she can with what she has. You can’t trust anyone to be clever or kind; you can trust them almost to the last to be gullible and afraid.

  (Almost. Elena thinks differently about Bird. That glass eye goes right through you.)

  The first time Elena sees Stenos, she thinks (to her surprise), He’s for me.

  God knows why—she’s always preferred handsome men—but when he says, “It was the circus or prison for me,” she doesn’t tell him to piss off to prison, like she should.

  Instead she looks past him as if he isn’t there.

  “You must be Elena,” he says.

  She tries not to smile. Boss told him, then. Boss will try any dirty trick just to get a rise out of her. Elena knows better than to bite; it’s not worth it. If he doesn’t have the bones, he’ll be gone before she can bother to remember his name.

  Still, she watches him go. On his way to wherever it is outsiders sleep, he passes the strange woman; they look at one another, take a wide step apart like two dogs facing off. Then the strange woman keeps walking into the tent, and after a moment of looking after her, he shrugs it off and turns away, the sharp lines of his face visible for a moment as he disappears into the maze of trucks.

  Elena learns his name.

  She waits for him to get his new bones.

  For fifteen cities she locks the trapeze in place, watches the girls flying back and forth, and keeps one eye on the trailer where Boss molds them into survivors. For fifteen cities she waits, for nothing. Stenos hauls canvas and lumber and dredges beer glasses out of wash barrels for Joe the cook to dry, and is so ordinary it makes her ill.

  “Doesn’t he want anything?” she asks one night as they walk back from the fire, as if it’s funny and it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

  “Food and sleep,” says Nayah, “that’s all he ever asks for.” She knows from Alto; it’s probably true.

  “Too bad that’s all he wants,” says Penna with a wink at Ying, who’s smart enough to get interested in taking off her makeup, burying her face in a towel.

  Elena looks at Penna, who has managed to stay stupid all these years, and says, “No fucking the crew, Penna. What are you, an animal?”

  Penna flushes and skitters into the trailer.

  Elena finds herself walking beside the strange woman as they approach the trailer. (The strange woman has a name, but Elena’s never used it. The woman answers to anything—“Hey,” “You there,” a snap of the fingers. She’s answered to anything for so long that Elena has swung past contempt and is starting to be impressed.)

  The woman says, “He wants the wings.”

  Elena stops walking. “Liar.”

  The woman shrugs, and Elena realizes with a start that she has misjudged the strange woman, thinking she was beaten and locked onto the bars of the trapeze.

&nbs
p; She is docile only because she does not care, because she does not intend to stay where she has been placed.

  She’s after the wings.

  Elena wants to say something, but her throat is dry.

  The woman eventually closes the trailer door. Inside come the sounds of laughter and shushing and the creaking of the girls slipping into their bunks.

  Long after the lights have gone out, Elena is standing outside, trembling.

  When she knocks at Boss’s trailer, Boss opens right away. (Boss doesn’t sleep much.)

  “You wouldn’t,” Elena accuses. “You wouldn’t do that. Not after what happened to him.”

  Boss is quick to catch up. “They’re not Alec’s. They’re mine. I made them. I’ll give them to whoever I want, and if you dare to question me again I’ll pull out your bones for a crown on my head.”

  “Which one will get the wings? Him or her?” The tears are two hot streaks on Elena’s face; she digs her fists into the tops of her legs.

  “I haven’t decided,” Boss says at last. Her voice is kinder now, which is worse, Elena knows. “Something will make up my mind.”

  Elena feels smaller, feeble, as if Boss is pressing against her from across the room; she stumbles out without farewell and staggers back toward the green trailer where a madwoman is waiting.

  Stenos is coming back from the tent (has he been practicing? Is he preparing to be one of them? Oh, God, the wings), and he looks up and sees her.

  He smiles.

  “Lost?” he says, and his eyes are two dark insects.

  She turns into the trailer without a word, sets the latch like she can lock out what she knows is coming next.

  In the dark, she listens to the madwoman breathing and thinks, You fool, you fool, don’t you know?

  33.

  The city where they buried Alec had, for a long time, fared better than most. It wasn’t important enough to be bombed out at the beginning, and then the long line of governments stayed in it as they traveled, rather than rolling over it. It had a series of names that meant as little as any name Boss had given a dancing girl: New Umbra, Zenith, Praxiteles, Johnsonia (only for a year—he was quickly deposed), Haven.