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There was a rummaging, clanking sound from behind a large stone furnace, and what spit a girl whose blood is a quarter fire can claim dried in my mouth. An extraordinary thing emerged from behind the furnace: a woman all of silver and bronze, whose body was a mass of gears and bolts and plates, with no flesh at all on her, only metal, endless metal, and her eyes were two rolling balls of gold. She had no hair, silver or otherwise, but an oblong head all spiked with joints and gears. Her hands ended in long, many-knuckled fingers, just like Folio’s. The inventor turned to the creature and smiled fondly.
“Hour, darling, you know you’re not supposed to come out when company is present.”
The silvery woman turned and began to burrow behind the furnace again, pulling a dropcloth over her head and piling scrap on her shoulders. Folio laughed.
“We can still see you, Hour.”
“All right, Mother,” came a muffled, curiously flat voice. A bronze hand flashed out and dragged a large wing of tin plates over itself.
“No, darling, come out; you’ve spoiled your hiding already.” There was a great clatter as she emerged again and the scrap fell to the flag-stone floor. She stood there, hanging her head. Gears whirred softly.
“I am sorry I came out. But she has bad hands,” said the bronze woman, and her unmuffled voice was peculiar, something between a clock chime and a whetstone spinning.
Folio turned her eyes, but none of the rest of her, and looked at my hands. “Not everyone can be so blessed as we,” she demurred.
“She has bad hands,” the woman repeated. “Fix her hands. Violins and bows go together, not violins and hands.”
“Interesting!”
“Madam Folio!” I cried in alarm. “What is that thing?”
“She is not a thing, thank you very much! She is to a person what my horse will be to a nag, what you would be to a violinist. Kindly show a little respect—and don’t you go telling anyone either, or there’ll be no end to the outlandish strangers who will come fingering my locks for miracles.”
“How can you have made such a thing, that talks and walks?”
“You believe with all your smoky little heart that I can make you a virtuoso, but you wonder at this smallest of things? I made her; she is my daughter. There is nothing simpler in the world than that…”
THE TALE OF THE
ROOSTER-MAKER’S
DAUGHTER
WHERE I GREW UP, THE SEA SOMETIMES FREEZES.
Just the edges, mind you, like a puddle freezes, from the edge-side in. The waves would go so cold that their foam came tinkling down in a shower of ice, and the beaches were hard and clear as glass. When I was a girl, I would collect the foam shards like shells, but no matter how quickly I hurried back to my house with its wide porch, I would come to the door clutching a pail of water and nothing more.
My father had a very fine house. The whole dwelling was full of white curlicues and delicate fluting, breaking over the face of the house like frozen foam. But the walls were thick and solid, as they had to be, for it was cold in Muireann, as often cold as Ajanabh is hot.
When I was not trying to ferry ice from the sea to my bedroom, I was fiddling, as my mother called it. My father did not think there was very much odd about a child fiddling, as he was a fiddler himself, by trade, and fiddling had bought our curlicued house. He worked with four other men and women in Muireann at a peculiar export which, not being fish, was not much noticed among the other products of the great seaside city. Between the five of them, they produced the most extraordinary clockwork roosters that crowed out the morning with golden beaks. This was their summer crop. In the winter they trolled the oyster beds and carved the tropical birds of their dreams from the pearls. My father made the eyes, which flicked open and shut—not by any mechanism, you understand, simply by eyelids that rolled back and forth as you turned the little golden bird in your hands. His was a simpler trade than mine—but that is the way of parents and children.
My mother was a poet, who wrote long, dreamy stanzas about broken masts and hungry seas. Once she spent a year recording every shade of gray that the palette of the Muireann sky produced. She cried out her poems at the harborfront, and young girls threw pennies at her feet. She threw up her hands like pennies when I fiddled, but once, just once, she held her hands in the freezing well water for hours and hours, and then, running to the sea and back again, brought me in her blue and shaking fingers one perfect shard of foam.
My father let me have a few of the finished roosters, and I took them apart in my room when I ought to have been sleeping, until my floor was full of broken birds—but I put them back together again, too, learning how the crowing sound was made by a tiny bellow in the breast, and piecing the poor fellows together in ways my father would have found horrifying, making great, huge cockerels with four or five beaks crowing in harmony. I read endless books with onionskin pages concerning the great fiddlers of old: the Kappa and the Lizard-Breeders, who made such things as I could never dream to touch, who wrote out the whole universe in scales on an iguana’s back. Where had they gone, that no one could now see much on an iguana but ill temper? Where had they gone that the world was now so slow and dark, when turtles once grew trees of light in their skulls? I pondered this for hours, alone as I was content to be.
Eventually I exhausted the practical lessons of roosters. My parents wanted to introduce me to society, and served lavish teas with silver plates and watercress and costly oranges so that the white-wig
ged, whalebone-necklaced girls of Muireann would come and think highly of me, and introduce me in turn to their brothers. More than a few of them I induced to remove their wigs so I could count the hairs sewn into the cloth. Beyond that, I had no interest in them, as they were neither made of gold nor able to crow out the morning hours, nor did their eyelids roll back and forth if you tilted their heads.
Then, of course, there were my hands. It is true that my mother had an extra joint on her smallest finger, but that seemed no good reason to have a daughter with fingers like the legs of grass-spiders. They were very good for fiddling, hopeless at pouring tea, and excellent for making rich young women scream. The glove-makers shuddered in horror and turned me away. I did not care—who can feel a bird’s toothed guts with gloved hands?
Finally one of the rooster women died—the one who made the red tails—and I humbly submitted my petition to take her place. I had my own little house then, with a few small curlicues which my father assured me would reproduce in time, and from my uppermost windows I could see the crumbling sea. And tails are easy enough. I had generous portions of my days left over when those golden feathers were lined up on the shelves like red candles. And so I set aside a rooster in my sitting room, and set about fiddling with it. I am sure a Kappa would have found my wonders tawdry and plain. But I am here and they are not, and I have done the best I can.
First, I taught it to crow not only the morning but every hour of the day. This took quite some time, for I first had to teach it what an hour was. Once it reliably marked the time, I taught it to crow a great many melodies, like a little music box, and to sing a different tune for each hour. Intricate minuets for morning; slow, sighing sonatas in the afternoon; and rolling nocturnes, naturally, for the evening. Then, because I was lonely and even my father did not often visit, I taught it to sing words as it had sung tunes, and this took a very long time indeed, for there is a great difference between a note and a word.
After many lessons with which I will not bore you, the rooster marked the hours with little, nervous words: only the number of the hour at first, but then “hello” and “mother” and “ice.” I found it pleasant to be with, but I also found that in my thirtieth year I was quite tired of roosters, and quite lonely for people. Muireann is a glowering and recalcitrant place where folk do not much like to speak to one another outside tea and watercress and oranges, where the rules of conversation are fixed and true as the heavens, so that no one need tax themselves over-much. Thus I began the process of reshaping the rooster’s outside as I had done its inside.
I had not nearly enough gold to build her in style—for I had decided to make a hen of my rooster, and to call her Hour, for the first things she ever knew. There was enough, only, for the eyes, my father’s famous eyelids, but no more. But I had a great many rooster pieces, and broken clocks, and broken armor, and fishhooks, and such. I took away her little three-toed legs first, and fitted her with bronze bolts and calves and plate. She was like a siren then, a bird’s body sewn to a woman’s legs. I gave her a new torso of silver and bronze from the armor shards, and then arms, and then the throat—a new voice, lower than the chirping birdsong—and a face, my beloved girl’s face that I know so well, now. Finally I gave her hands like mine, and why should I not? A child takes after her parents. For a while I used one of the old white wigs for her hair, but this only made her look ridiculous. Every day I wound her like a pocket watch, and set her going: click, click, click.
