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VIOLINIST’S
TALE
HE WAS BORN IN KASH, LIKE THE REST OF YOU. His cradle was carnelian and brass. His smoke was bilious and soot-riddled, even as an infant, and his eyes dripped orange flame when he cried out for his mother. My grandfather, whose name was Suhail, was dissatisfied by the silent finery of Kash, however, and chafed against the Khaighal, which was the life charted for him by the best astrologers. He wanted to find a princess with a wicked wish for a dark and handsome stranger to whisk her away and sing to her on a balcony surrounded by swans and imps.
So that is just what he did.
My grandmother had a long braid the color of fire, and very green eyes. As all folk know, this coloring indicates a deviant and difficult disposition, and indeed, she spent her nights at her tapered window, wishing for a dark and handsome stranger to come and whisk her away from a boring life of embroidery and afterbirth, and sing to her on a balcony surrounded by swans and imps. She was not entirely sure what she meant by singing, but in her books, suitors always sang to their ladies, and she was determined to hear a song for herself, even if it did seem a little dreary. My grandmother, whose name was Glaucia, laced her dress very tightly and sighed loudly at her window, just as the woodcuts in her books always depicted such ladies.
My grandfather, lately run off from Kash with a silk sash like blue fire, heard her sighing and needed no Khaighal to grant her wish. He obliged her most vigorously, and the swans trumpeted, and the imps snickered, and Glaucia discovered that singing was not so very dreary after all.
As it tends to do, time produced a child, a daughter with green eyes and very polite, soft black hair that never—not even once!—snaked out to strangle a parrot in flight. Suhail did not know what to do. He could not send her to be educated properly in Kash, for they would burn her and drown her in short order, and universities tended to also ask for pedigrees. But she was a mild and sweet girl, to the astonishment and consternation of both her parents, and she found a mild and sweet boy to build her a house, and was happy enough for someone who couldn’t even strangle a parrot properly.
Her only unhappiness was that her marriage could not be consummated. Whenever her husband drew up the covers over them both—oh, how Glaucia rolled her eyes when her daughter recounted that!—and reached for her, the poor girl’s body melted into black smoke, every bit as oily and soot-riddled as her father’s. Her husband fell right into her and found his face pressed into his own pillow. There was no end to the weeping and storming in their little house.
But it seemed not to matter, for she came down with child just like any other woman, and in the usual span produced me, whose hair immediately throttled the nearest turtledove, to the relief and joy of my grandfather, who burst into grateful and incendiary tears at the sight.
My parents settled in Ajanabh and put down a modest basil field. Everything in my childhood smelled of basil, soapy and green. But I did not love basil, nor the few small squares of garlic my father put into the ground. I loved music, and I sang before I spoke. This delighted my grandmother when she visited. She did not mind that my voice sounded much more like a rabbit roasting alive in a crackling hearth than sweet tiralees. But I would not give up, and when my grandfather brought me a fiddle of lava rock with a long, thin blue flame for a bow, I threw my arms around his black and bilious neck and squeezed until he could not breathe. I learned that fiddle like some children learn their figures—it was as simple and easy to me as adding up a column of numbers and presenting the tidy, graceful sum at the bottom of the page. My mother said I played too fast, and my father said that true virtuosos certainly did not dance that way while they played, but I would not stop, or slow.
At last, when the basil fields were still high and bright and green, I reached the limit of my abilities. I could not play faster, or sweeter, I could not move my fingers in more complex patterns. My parents thought I would be satisfied then, to be the best I could, but my grandfather winked at me on his winter visit, and I knew my hands were not yet happy. Once the family had feasted and were snoring in four-part harmony I crept from the farmhouse and into the city proper, which was then as lawless as a ship without a brig. I sought out the cottage of Folio, who was the author, so they said, of every wonder in Ajanabh.
Her door was a menagerie of locks. Every possible type and size, from huge brass bolts to tiny, intricate silver keyholes no wider than a needle, wooden locks with gaping slots and golden locks with birds carved into their faces, iron locks and crystal locks and copper locks and locks so old and worn that only rust was left where the metal might once have been, bronze locks and locks fashioned out of antlers, crude slate locks and locks in the shape of open, staring eyes blown from purest, clearest glass.
I had no key, and there was no spare splinter of door left on which to knock. Being a clever child, I pressed my fingers into ten varied locks, no two of the same stuff, and heard a dozen little bells cascade their chimes through the hunched hut, alone among the campaniles of Ajanabh a short, squat, stairless shack. The door creaked open in just the manner one would expect a mysterious door to creak, and the light within was rust-colored, reeking of oil and copper and burnt air. I stepped gingerly inside; the door behind me swung closed, the locks merrily going about their slotting and turning.
Folio sat at her workbench, an old fig-wood plank with vises set into it and open books lying brazenly a-splay. There were sketches on the walls, and scraps of metal in various states of molten and hard leaning against chairs and baseboards or puddled in molds; loose gears and pendulums and countless clocks, their innards violently exposed, metronomes endlessly ticking away; and many things whose use I could not guess: machines of metal precious and cheap, black with oil or draped in cloth, metallic wings and pens which wrote hurriedly with no hand to guide them, little clockwork lumberjacks who chopped ineffectually at iron stumps, and a spinning wheel whose spindle whirled contentedly all on its own.
Folio had a hunchback and skin the color of fig seeds, and her spectacles—for it is well known that all inventors wear spectacles—wer
e fashioned from clock hands which stuck out every which way from the round glass. Behind them, her dark blue eyes, the color of good dye, were luminous and calm. She was rather old and her white hair, braided in tiny strips, hundreds upon hundreds of them, piled onto each other like bridge ropes. Her lips were thin and almost blue from pressing them whilst deep in thought, and her hands, those famous hands, had eight joints each. Her nails were very short, but her spidery hands were so delicate, plying gently a little copper sphere that spun over a fountain of steam.
“It’s a pretty toy for a dull child, but I’ve been thinking about a mechanical horse,” she said happily, her voice crisp as clockwork. “But you surely do not care much about horses, even if they could be made of silver and weep fire from their eyes.”
I shrugged. “My grandfather weeps fire.”
“Well,” she said archly, looking up from her spinning ball, “it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. My horses would have a weeping switch that you could turn on and off. Young people are so hard to impress these days.”
“I am sure they would be wonderful. They say you make all the wonderful things in the world.”
“That is certainly a lie. Such strange birds folk are—make a few flying machines, purely by commission, and everyone starts telling stories about you. Which is of course what brought you here—come to buy a wonder, I presume.”
I blushed a bit. “Not to buy, I’m afraid. I haven’t any money.”
“To beg a wonder, then. And what sort of miracle am I expected to produce for free from behind my ear?”
“My violin, madam. I wish to play it as no one has played a violin before.”
“Practice,” she humphed.
“I can already play better than a Satyr plays her pipes,” I said hotly. “But you should understand. What does the world need with a mechanical horse when every farmer has his own old gray nag? Who needs a horse made of silver, weeping fire? No one—but you’ll make them anyway, one day or another. I would be to other violinists as your horse will be to a bent-back dapple with flies in her nose!”
She glanced at my fingers. “Very well said, girl. I think perhaps we can do something for you, but we will have to consider it for a while. I did not think of the horse until I watched the ball spin—who knows where I may find your wonder?”
I swallowed hard. “I should rather stay, madam, and help where I can.”
“I do not need an apprentice, nor am I a hospice.”
“Of course not! I didn’t mean to say—”
