Neddeth's Bed

Editor's Note

2009-05-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

To those readers who have enjoyed Neddeth's Bed:

I have not forgotten Neddeth, who started me on a journey which I'm not yet seeing the end of. Inspired by her and her world, I went off-line (and onto NaNoWriMo) to write another novel which takes place in this same place, if not this time. I'm working on getting that novel critiqued and edited, and will be submitting it to publishers soon. Wish me luck!

In the meantime, now that I have finished the other novel I have decided NOT to go on with Neddeth's adventures in blog format, because I'd like to take what I've written here, hone it and make sense of it and complete it, and then submit THAT to publishers. So I'm not abandoning Neddeth, but quietly trying to groom her a little for a new life in paper pages.

I'll keep you up to date on how it goes and what I'm doing with her. In the meantime, this is the place where you have been able to read the first draft version (at least part of it). Maybe someday other people will read the paper version, and wonder what the first draft actually looked like. And they'll be able to go see!

My thanks to readers, be they one person or five hundred.

-- Heather McDougal

Fear

2008-05-23T06:17:00.000-07:00

My father is sick, again. Once again, it is the figs. I fear for him.

Hieram is still here. I do not know who to talk to. He is not who I -

Oh -

Hieram, Again

2008-05-20T04:56:00.000-07:00

Hieram is here again. My life feels as if one of the Four Lords of the Deep Dark had taken hold of it and steered it toward misery. There is no place the cretin cannot find me, save the Labyrinth! One years' growth has brought him neither wisdom nor selflessness. He has set his desires on conquering me - and there is no Ennis now to help me foil him.

Today I was helping Asta wash out the great, round, copper dye-tubs in which we dye our wool, for it is the season to pick arpe, the flower-buds of the canper plant, and they must be brewed immediately into dye or the lovely blue color is lost. The dye-tubs must be immaculately clean or the dye will be ruined. I was in the courtyard with my old green leggings and short tunic, bent and scrubbing, when he came - as he is certain to do when I am unable to defend myself. Asta watched in disapproval while he laughingly tried to grasp my legs. I moved away around the tub, unable to scrub as I avoided him, yet knowing that the harvesters would be bringing the buds in at any moment. The cobbles were running with dirty water and I flicked my dripping metal-fleece at him irritably to make him go away, but he only laughed and moved closer, his lavish tunic stippled with dark water-spots. I could see his crooked teeth as he smiled.

Luckily, my mother happened to look out her window at that moment.

"Hieram!" she called sharply, "For shame! Neddeth will be Curator someday - she is not a silly chambermaid for you to ravish. You overstep your place, and it will not do to anger the Gods."

Hieram stood back, bowing sarcastically to my mother. "As you wish, Madam," he replied, pretending gallantry. But as she nodded curtly and went back to her writing, he lifted an eyebrow at me. "Until later, my love," he said, and grinned when I reddened. Then he turned and went back toward the Palace, stepping carefully through the water with his stupid, heavy gait, like an overstuffed rooster. My love, indeed!

Asta shook her head when he had gone. "That young man is a horror, just like his uncle," she said, "Don't let yourself be alone with him for a moment."

She had an odd look on her face, and I wondered at it. Hieram is a bother and rather stupid, but I can't think of him as dangerous. Still, I would not choose to be alone with him in any case. He makes me uncomfortable and angry, and -

Oh - someone is aking I m ..

News From a Quiet Time

2008-05-15T03:22:00.000-07:00

Eleanor has a companion.

The last three times I have come to her in my dreams, she has been speaking with someone - a man, I think, though I cannot see what his relation is to her - and I have had to be content to sit within her mind, and listen. The conversations were rich and varied, and I learned many things about this strange world you live in. Your arts are strange to me: there are no Mechanisms, no Gear Tourniers. I wonder how a civilization can be filled with machines, and no-one reaches for the art in them? I shudder at the number of machines I have seen which are created solely to do the work which should rightfully be done by people. How different our worlds are!

The man she speaks to is awkward; there is no Body-knowledge in him. He does not use his hands much. I wonder at that: how can someone so far-reaching in his speaking be so silent with the Gods? Perhaps the Gods themselves are silent, here.

In my world, things are moving slowly. I made, with less effort than I would have thought, a small set of leaping Clowns for the Spring Festival, which is supposed to be about joy and life. Our traditional Clown Engine was to be there, as usual, spinning and falling over and making great silly rollie-pollies and hand-stands to delight the audience; but I decided to make it an entourage. I carefully crafted the gears, enamelling them with many colors so they would match the Clown Engine, and housing them in elegant cut-brass carapaces. It was great fun working to make them wobbly and silly, instead of the other way round, and the leaping mechanism is quite cunning. I am proud of that.

So when the Clown Engine came out, surrounded by six leaping, tumbling children, a great roar went up from the crowd. Even I, who had seen it a hundred times before the Festival, was laughing at their antics. It buoyed my heart, and I determined to write to Ennis to tell him about it. I have heard no word from him since he went off to the University in Wurzen, though my father tells me he is well, and I have been thinking of how to write him in sisterly affection without seeming too stupid.

In two days' time, Hieram comes again, to stay for a fortnight or more. I heard this from Asta, who is close to the Greenswoman at the Palace - the person in charge of vegetables and fruits for the King's tables. This Greenswoman despises Hieram because he comes through the pantry and squeezes the fruit, looking for the best ones. Sometimes, she says, he takes bites to sample them, and then puts them back with the bites hidden. Once he did this to a bowl of fruit destined for the King's study, and the Greenswoman only found out at the last second. When Hieram is around, she locks the Pantry, but he is stealthy. It is like a war between them. What a childish mind he has! I don't look forward to his visit.

There was a great uproar last week at the College of Art and Metallurgical Philosophy, in the Western part of the city. They had a fire - not a large fire, and quickly put out, but it burned through

My Mother and Her Mathematical Books

2008-04-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

Things are difficult. My mother has been arguing with a small round man, by the name of Eggfeld, who publishes her books. And as always after these rows, she stays in her room sulking. This happens every time she has a book ready to publish: she gives the finished work to this man Eggfeld, he tells her which parts need to be changed, and she sulks for a week or more.

And we all bear the brunt of her misery.

Eventually, she relents, realizing that Eggfeld is not as stupid as she hoped, and begins to make small changes, eventually becoming obsessed. She locks herself in her room all day until we worry she will starve. After a week or more, she emerges with glowing face and gives the changed text to Eggfeld, who goes away for a day or so and then comes back all smiles, with a bottle of wine for her. She makes a special meal and we all celebrate; Eggfeld merrily tells us stories of his travels in the East, his dealings with writers, and all types of gossip. We all go happily to bed with our heads buzzing, relieved to be done with the whole thing.

For awhile my mother is a changed woman, smiling and helpful and everywhere about the house and town (perhaps too much) for about a month. We all hold our breaths, and try to remain patient with her meddling, as we have come to depend on our freedoms and her inattention, and when she begins to get a look about her eyes - I cannot describe this look, except to say it is not the look of someone listening to what you say - we try not to fidget, while my mother becomes increasingly irritable. One day she goes up to her room, leaving the bread to burn or the laundry to cook dry, and does not come down until dinnertime. At which we all sigh, close our eyes, and thank our Gods, for things are normal once again.

My father laughs and says her Creating is hampered by her leaping and twisting mind, which climbs ideas like ladders and will not be still enough to settle properly into her hands and her movements. We can not all naturally be easy in our bodies, my father says, and he is grateful my mother puts her (very capable) hands to the world at all.

So here we are in the sulking phase, trooping dolefully around and wishing she would make up with Mr. Eggfeld. We miss her beautiful cakes and soups and the wonderful way she doctors the animals. My father, too, misses speaking to her of his work, for she is very perceptive, and can offer him great insight sometimes.

All this, and the Spring Festival preparations have begun. I try to fill my mind with thoughts of my new work, my mother's mood infects me and I move through the days curled around a strange ache. Ennis must be far along the way to Wurzen by now, I think. Later, I think: now he has arrived at the university. I imagine him making new friends, listening to his masters' explanations, watching the some of the best Gear Tourniers in the Greater Lands at work.

I want to be there, with him, learning what he is learning, talking to him about what we are seeing and hearing. I feel left behind, too young, useless. Father says -

Eleanor Changing

2008-03-18T05:50:00.000-07:00

Eleanor grows much better. The last visit I saw that she was seeing more clearly, and her fingers were eager to spell my words. I am pleased that she has passed through her ordeal and is here again with me.

She seems to be packing. I do not know if she is going away, or moving from one house to another. All the many things that lay around her household are cleared away, and there are no less than three boxes packed neatly in the corner by the bed. Perhaps she is simply ridding herself of the useless things which have collected around her. Where do you go, my Eleanor, my Hands, my only and best company?

The streets outside seem softer, somehow, though the snow still comes down tonight. I wonder

Learning My Work

2008-03-07T02:52:00.000-08:00

We are preparing for the Spring Festival, and the King appears to be unruffled by my father's requests, so we all move a bit easier. I am of the feeling that the King holds my father's word to be be truer than the Duke's. However, the Duke has far more power and influence among the Blood than my father, so the King does not protect my father as much as he could.

Which my father understands. He is not only a great Gear Tournier, but a high authority on spiritual and educational matters, bound to uphold not only the Creating of machines, but motion and beauty and the importance of the human body. To move is to live. Economy of motion, the use of our hands, and Creating things are what we live by; therefore, my father stands as the King's closest advisor and the keeper of our History. His sphere of influence is within the universities, with teachers and Gear Tourniers from all around the country. They work to keep these traditions and tenets alive, and keep the citizens educated in these things and in everything else. He works very hard at it.

And because his position is in benefit to the general populace, he is... well, popular. It is this, I think, which the Duke despises or envies in him. The world loves the Curator, or at the least they love my father - to hear stories of the Curator before him, a man to whom he came through his natural ability rather than heredity, he sounds a cold and prickly man, though my father loved him. I suppose, then, that the Curator is as influential as his abilities with people, though he always deserves immense respect.

I have set to work with a will, learning as best I can from my father. Bereft, I see with new eyes. If I am to be Curator in his stead, I must use all the knowledge I have soaked up as a Palace brat, all the many hours of my father explaining things as I grew. I realize now he has been training me, all my life, without my knowledge: working it into the edges of things, into my lessons, into our discussions around the kitchen table.

I always knew I was likely to be the next Curator, as my sister was never of a mind for it. Yet somehow I resisted it, did not like the idea of doing it, simply because it was hoped-for. I felt somehow that everyone was telling me who I must be, what direction I must follow. But since Ennis has left me I see beyond myself: there are greater distances inside me. I see that my father, who was not the son of the previous Curator but one who came to the task naturally, is a different person than the Curator before him.

So may I be a different person, a different Curator than my father. I hope, when the time comes, that I will be as good at the work as he.

This Feast-day I hope to

Immobilized

2008-02-03T01:17:00.000-08:00

I stood in that room for an hour or more, afraid to move, to disturb the beauty of that moment; if I moved, perhaps the air would change, the the ray of sunshine leave me. I looked around at the tools lined up so carefully, the worn wood of the workbench, the boxes of machine-parts laid so carefully on the shelves, laid there by his hands. I saw them all with new eyes, with clean eyes. In every place there, I saw his hands, his fingers, working. Cutting the gears with the same care, that surety, which I myself had just felt as he took my arms.

The moment hung there, fresh and shining, the fulfilment of so much longing, so much watching. My skin still marked with his touch, I stood, afraid to move, not wanting life to begin again and sweep it away, push the minutes forward again. Push me away from this.

It seemed to me that I would never be able to breathe again, to sleep, to eat; instead I would be all on end, waiting. Standing on the edge, holding myself still for this moment to come again.

And yet, the moment was an accident, a strange fluke. My skin might be marked by his hands, but he remained unmarked, he was the same Ennis he had always been, the laughing young man, the angry man, the unseen, unwanted journeyman Gear Tournier; he didn’t know me the way I now knew him. How was I to see him out there, being his untouched self, knowing he did not see it or feel it, that one true, shining moment? I could have wept, if I were not filled with such impossible joy.

It was as if I had suddenly seen something in myself that had always been there, unknown and unseen by me; as if I had discovered my own true nature. I could not go back; I could not go forward; I could only stand and look at all the places his hand had touched. Everything in that room had been placed by those hands, with care and precision. Those hands, those long fingers and strong wrists: the same hands which had left the traces of truth on my skin.

I didn’t want to go, be woken from my dream. I went to the wall and touched the shelves, the drawers, the places he had touched, and it seemed to me the wood breathed to me of his reverence, his care. I stood still again, on the verge of weeping or laughing, my hand out, feeling I would die happily right then.

And gradually, as I moved again and went around the room, the feeling faded: the things became merely things again, arranged carefully. Looking at them made me happy, because he had made them that way; but that was all. It was gone, and I was left only with the sense of truth, the certainty: there would be no one for me, ever, but Ennis. It was there in my body, in the way he laid down his tools, in the last traces of sunlight from that moment. I was doomed, and joyful in it.

I walked back through the passages of the Labyrinth, absently trailing my hand along the smooth stone of the wall, climbing stairs as if I were floating, opening the door into the courtyard, stepping out into the late light as if emerging from a wonderous dream. The facade of the Museum seemed so ordinary, so full of details that I had never looked at before. I saw every stone underfoot with new eyes, and when I went into the kitchen my mother seemed to me different, beautiful, strange. I knew, looking at her, that she had been here, in this strange afterglow, and survived it.

And this revived me.

Goodbye

2008-01-02T17:22:00.000-08:00

While my father was at the Palace, I was back at our compound behind the Museum, pretending that life was going on as it always did. My mother was uncharacteristically edgy, peering vacantly out her window instead of working, coming downstairs to fidget with the kettle.

I think my father going to visit the King over one of his own transgressions made her nervous: we lived a life of small transgressions, my father flexing the power he had as Curator in ways that would benefit the art; but we were always careful not to point this out to anyone at the Palace. This was a new thing, this discussion with the King. It might be the end of a comfortable existence.

After a time, I got tired of making the motions of work and crept away to the Labyrinth, going through the small door and down the many stairs, choosing my turnings without thought, with only the determination to get away from the world above.

The high sunlight trickled into those passages as a soft glow, only now touching the sills of the occasional small light-wells which came down from ground level. The walls of the many interlocking passages swept along, the sandy stone cool to my touch, as I counted out the turns to the workspaces. Along the sides, small chambers opened out which stored old Devices; old tools leaned against dusty corners, the remains of ancient Gear Tourniers and their methods.

As I came into the room with the Steam Beast, the light followed me, the sun poking into the gloom, touching the mirrors that ran along the far wall and illuminating it. I stopped, curious: it had already begun its change. Several parts and small mechanisms lay around its feet, and one of the tiny Devices that seemed to live in its room came up to explore my foot, which made me smile. I had no fear of the Steam Beast any longer - nothing which made such delicate pets need frighten me.

As I stood in my workroom looking around, I heard a step along the corridor, and a bright head of hair moved past the doorway to the next room. My chest collapsed on itself, my heart seeming to labor under a press, and I stepped over the little Device to follow.

I heard a sound in Ennis’ workroom and tiptoed toward it, almost unable to breathe. Who had found their way down the confusing flights of stairs to this part of the Labyrinth? I was terrified, and confused, and curious, and a little outraged, so I rounded the corner quickly to confront whoever it was.

And came face to face with Ennis, putting tools in a bag.

I must have looked stunned, for he laughed, glancing over as he reached for another of his precious tools. He looked more relaxed than I have seen him in a long time.

I am forced to admit, I could think of nothing to say. He went on laying tools gently in their places in his bag, and then tied it up and turned toward me, smiling. I had not seen him smile like that since he was burned, all those many months - nay, more than a year - ago. It brought him back to me, all in a rush. I saw him as he had been, as he was, as he would be: the boy who made me laugh, the angry youth who would not speak to me, the person who helped me.

“I have been saved,” he said to me, nearly serious. “Your father was my salvation. He took himself to the King and brokered for my freedom. I am to be allowed to pursue this Gear Tournier life, but I must do it properly, and am being sent to a college in Wurzen to learn my trade. By the time I get back, the Duke will have forgotten about me, and I will have a legitimate degree to allow me to work.”

I tried to smile at him, but I could feel the edges of it wavering. “In Wurzen? For five years? But - but there are colleges here in the Capital! Must you be gone so long?”

I was so intent on my distress that I did not see him looking at me kindly, nor notice that he walked over and put his bag down; but the next thing I knew, his hands were clasped warmly on my arms.

“It won’t be so long,” he said gently, “I have already learned so much, la? Maybe a year, or a little longer.” He looked down at me, and I could see the small traces of his scarring along one cheek and down the edge of his mouth. “I will miss you, and your wild ways.”

I stood confused, while a long finger of sunlight found its way into the little room, touching the boxes on the shelves behind him, catching the top of his head in a flicker of gold. Wild ways? Me? But when I looked up, he was leaning down to kiss my cheek, like a sweet older brother. His hands were there on my arms, and then not. He picked up his bag and smiled again. “I will come and see you, when my time is up,” he said, and touched my hand. “You watch over your Da for me.”

And with that he was gone, and I was left there with the little shaft of sunlight, struck by my own ignorance, and his.

Meanwhile

2008-01-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

While Eleanor was sick I had plenty of time to think of the many things which had happened to me. I feel a thousand years older than the girl who worked so hard to make the Beetles for the Midsummer Festival.

My father was gone for the better part of the day at the constabulary, trying to convince them to let Ennis go. At the end of the day, he came home to find us sitting around the kitchen table drinking cups of late cha with Ennis' mother and father, who sat stiffly at the table and stood up quickly as my father walked in.

He shook his head tiredly. "They will not hear reason," he said. "There is someone of consequence who has insisted on this, and they cannot go against it, though they are very polite."

"Did you see Ennis?" asked his mother Elsa, a short, lined, impatient woman with a mad sort of humor who had had Ennis later than most.

My father sat down, while my mother brought him a cup of cha.

"I did," he said. "He was doing well enough. They are very kind to him there, treating him with great respect. They told me they had never seen a Festival Device like his."

Ennis' father Mokul, a tall man from the far Eastern mountains, looked as if he did not know whether to look proud or stern. "Yes, well," he said, his face going redder, "I don't know where he got the makings for that. It were, indeed, a wonderous effort. But I'd just as soon that he stayed in the stables, if he's gon' to go and get himself in gaol."

My father cleared his throat. "Well, hmm, I'd meant to talk to you about that. I gave him the tools and the makings for that Device. I saw in him the makings of a great Gear Tournier, and I suppose I became carried away. I apologize for that," he said.

Ennis' father and mother both stared at him with their mouths open, and I saw my father blush, for the first time in my life.

"He did so seem to need it..." he faltered. "In any case, I felt it was my duty to try to get this cleared up."

Mokul stood up, looming over my father, a slow flush spreading across his face, and I was somewhat amused to see a fleeting look of anxiety cross my father's face. But the big man simply seized his hand and pumped it up and down. "Always looking out for him, you was," he said, smiling, his sharp nose wrinkling with glee. "I do have much to thank you for."

My father, looking bewildered now, smiled back. "Well, let us see if I can winkle him out of jail first, shall we?" he said kindly, returning the man's clasp.

"I have no fear for that, sir, no I don't," said the stableman, and with a bow he took his wife and left.

We were all left looking at one another doubtfully.

The next day, my father went to the Palace. Once again, he was gone for most of the day, and we waited fretfully, for it is rare for my father to ask for an audience with the King, though we live so near and my father works so closely with him on the Festivals. This time (I had from him later) he waited a long while, an unusual circumstance. He spent most of it sitting in a small lounge outside the King's personal study while the King met with someone inside.

My father said he heard raised voices inside the room, speaking back and forth for awhile; and then the door opened, the guards stood smartly to attention, and out came his old enemy the Duke of Aneth. He looked at my father with dislike and swept out, leaving a strong smell of fennel behind him.

Eleanor's Illness

2007-12-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

So many months since Eleanor has been able to write! All this time I have visited her, and she has not been near her Machine, and cannot tell more about me. In my visits I have seen - oh, horrible things. A huge machine with a gaping mouth through which incurious people fed her, despite her fear and trembling. Terrible places, full of boxy machines that controlled her heartbeat or put their transparent, pointed snouts into her bloodstream, doing I know not what. For much of it she was in pain, and sometime early on I came to her just as she was lying on a hard cot, staring at a harsh light overhead with the silhouettes of people looking down all around. Just after that, she spiralled down into the dark and I lost her.

I have been frightened for her, watching this.

When she finally came home she was so sick that she vomited and lost her hair. Once I came when she sat, trembling, by the window, and watched your strange machines crawling by below - so like my Beetles! - too tired to do anything else. I saw her phantom in the glass of the window, pale and shadowed and too thin.

Then, for awhile when I came, she would be outside in the darkness, walking through the autumn evening: walking and walking, a warm hat pulled over her naked head. Her hair began to grow back, and she grew stronger, but still she did not go near her writing Machine.

Tonight, for the first time, I find her here, staring at the Machine. Outside, there are colored lights everywhere - some kind of Midwinter Festival? - and it is snowing. The hard streets of this place drizzle with light and movement, and there is a feeling in the air

Waiting

2007-08-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

All that day, I wandered the house and yards, until my mother leaned out her window and told me irritably that she could not write with me mooning about so. I moved on to the Museum, trailing my hands over the cases and peering in at the familiar old Machines, but found no comfort there.

At noontime, I was not hungry, and pushed my food around until my mother said, "Tsk" and sent me outside again. Then she leaned out her window again and told me to go put away my Beetles in the Labyrinth.

Glad of the orders - for staying busy was better than the endless hanging minutes - I went downstairs with the first Beetle in my hand. The evening of the Midsummer Festival, when all the feasting had done, my father had taken me aside and pressed the key to the many sections of the Labyrinth into my hand, saying that with the Beetles I had become a true Curator-to-be. He was proud of me, he told me smilingly, and looked forward to teaching me all the arts of Curatorship. I held the large key in my hand, warm from his pocket, and thanked him with all my heart, for I could not imagine a better thing than to be like my father at that moment.

Now, however, the key was cold, hanging in its place on my belt. My innards felt much the same way, as if they had been hanging somewhere cold all day; and the dark stairwell of the Labyrinth did not warm me. Cautiously, I walked to the bottom and opened the first door. All was silent; dim corridors stretched away in three angling directions as if waiting for my presence.

I have always wandered the Labyrinth, at first with my father and then later alone, and yet have still not reached all its parts. The near parts are familiar to me, never before causing fear or hesitation, only curiosity; yet today, with the coldness in my belly, the corridors seemed too aware of me. I moved into the first one with a sense of dread.

My father, when he presented me with the key, had brought me down here ceremonially, both of us yawning from the feasting and the lateness of the hour. He had twinkled his eyes at me, gesturing for me to open the first door myself, with my own key. I thought that was the whole of the thing, but in silent glee he had taken me further in.

"I remember when I made my first festival Creations," he said. "My father brought me here afterwards. It was one of the most exciting moments of my life. I am pleased to do the same with you." He linked his arm with mine, patting my hand as we walked along between the clean, dry stones. The Labyrinth, being under the Museum and the Palace itself, is never cold or damp, only cool and quiet. The perfect place to work and to keep Machines safe. It is much more than that, of course; but the near parts we use daily, with no thought of those other uses.

We walked toward my father's work-room, a place I had always loved: large and spacious, with many shelves around the walls full of odd and interesting things. That night, however, we walked on from there, past Ennis's small work-room, which was designed to look like an annex of my father's, in case we were found out. On the far side of this space was another large space, unused and unkempt for many years. Tonight, however, it was transformed. The wide floor was swept and polished and the walls whitewashed. The single tiny window, looking up through a thickness of stone to the ground, above, was clean and bright. Tools hung along one wall above a workbench, and shelves hung on two other walls in the same manner as my father's space. The ceiling was high and clean. It waited for me to come and Create.

"Oh, Da!" I cried, and hugged him awkwardly. I was nearly as tall as my mother now, and did not know how to fit my grown body to his so well.

He kissed me and chuckled. "I hope you come down here often," he said. "I am very proud of you."

I swore to him with tears in my eyes that I knew of no better place than this one he had made for me.

But this day - only one day later, though my joy seemed years away now - it seemed to me that something waited there, in the corridors. I did not want to be there, and brought my Beetles down hurriedly, dumping them on a high shelf in my silent and empty work-room. I had left the last one on the bench and was coming swiftly past Ennis' work-room, when I stopped. I wanted to see where he had worked.

Ah, I feel the sun comi

Backstep

2007-08-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

All the things which have been happening since the Festival are now crowding in my head to be told.

To start with, Ennis was sent to gaol.

It is impossible to express the outrage that I felt when he was sent for, very nicely indeed, by the constables. My mother came in looking unusually flustered and told my father that Ennis was being marched away. I ran outside before she had spoken four words, and just saw them turning the corner farther down the street, the constable gesturing politely for Ennis to go first. I must have looked quite stupid, standing with my mouth open as I did, my breath coming in disbelieving little gasps.

Whirling around to get my father, I nearly collided with him. He was standing behind me with an identical expression on his face. We looked at each other in horror: had we not given him the space to work, he would not have been sent off like this.

Seeing my emotion, he composed himself and spoke gently to me. "I cannot believe that our King is so cruel as to imprison a young man for Creating such a wonderous a thing. It may be that he merely wishes to speak with him. Have faith, my little Ned; have faith," he said to me, holding me by the arms and giving me a gentle shake. Then he held me in his arms and stroked my hair, a thing he did less nowadays than before. "Nevertheless, I will go and see what I can discover."

When I clamored to come with him, he shook his head, smiling sadly. "You will be more hinderance than help with me in the Palace," he declared. "Better to stay here and wait."

So, with beating heart and tears in my eyes, I stood by as my father came out in his best clothes and his most ceremonial Curator's girdle, his Curator's staff in hand, and kissed me goodbye before walking briskly off the same way the constables had done.

When I went

The Annual Miracle

2007-08-06T13:59:00.000-07:00

Now that my telling of the Midsummers' Festival is done, I can write of what has been happening since.

Oh! But before that, I must tell you about the Steam Beast's appearance at the Festival. I had not been in the Labyrinth for many weeks before then, and so had not seen its last changes. Father had told me that I would be surprised, and so I was: for the Steam Beast did not make its appearance until the sun had set that evening. The entry of the Steam Beast into the Festival is not done by men, but by the Beast itself, which has a telling of the hours and seasons within it; and so its arrival is heralded each year as a miracle. My father's job is only to unlock the door of the Labyrinth and leave it open, so that the Steam Beast can come out when it is ready.

We were all feasting, and the musicians (and music-machines) tuning up for the dancing, when a great and melodious sound was heard from the direction of the Museum, and everyone went quiet and turned to look. The sound came again, a long questioning cry, like a song or a fanfare. There was muttering in the crowd, but quiet descended as we waited, for all of us expect miracles on Midsummers' Eve. It is the time for miracles.

As we watched, a lick of flame showed between the buildings. There was the sound of some large Thing treading toward us, and around the corner came a thing so large and yet so delicate, so brilliant and frightening, that there were gasps from the crowd. It was the Steam Beast.

It approached us, a thing of silver and fire. Puffs of smoke and steam wreathed the many long, dancing pipes that stood from its body. Each pipe had what looked like a brazier at the end, from which billowed occasional tongues of flame. It looked like a Dragon with many necks, each one spouting flame and singing as its necks wove intricate patterns which made the flames leave images on our eyeballs from their trailing fire. The song changed from deep, vibrating into our bones, to trilling, depending upon the different tongue of flame that pushed the sound from its throat. It was magnificent, and people stood back as it passed around the square, nodding a blessing on people as it passed. The song went on, with stirring, lilting notes; we stood unmoving, listening and watching, until it had gone on, moving down the North Street and disappearing. Its song went on, skirling in the distance with flashes of brightness, then was silent.

We all sighed for awhile, before the dancing commenced again. The arrival of the Steam Beast every year is like a visitation from the Gods, and we all take it as a yearly miracle when it comes. For who knows what makes it wake every year, and re-make itself? The mechanics of the ancient Brilliants will always be a mystery; only the Gods know when the Steam Beast will cease to make the journey.

Ennis was praised mightily, clapped on the back and given drinks all round. My father, beaming all over his face, embraced me for my Beetles, as he called them, and shook Ennis' hand with nearly enough joy. I was afire with pleasure that he had finally Created.

Especially because my father and I had worked so long on our secret together, before I was swept off in the Creation of my Beetles. Our secret, which we set like bait in the trap: a workshop, set partway inside the Labyrinth, which we led Ennis to by a series of breadcrumbs. He took the bait, and built what is considered one of the finest Machines for a hundred years - all in the place my father and I made for him! To say I was proud, of him and my father and myself, is only part of the joy of that day.

Since then, however, there has been uproar among those of the Blood, for a simple stable-boy should not be able to Create such a thing. It is so stupid!!! I cannot ee m as - o dear -

Midsummers' Festival, Day of the Feast

2007-07-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

I see Eleanor's hands shaking tonight. I cannot see why, but she seems ill. I will finish this, and let her rest.

...At midday the parade began, the royal caravan coming from the castle to the North, along the Wide Road and into town. People shouted and called, and the Machines arrived from the Museum road, rolling or stalking or creeping, waving downy tendrils and colored flags, their interiors alight with fire and gleaming metal, beads of color jumping and leaping, and every manner of lovely movement. Soon the King's caravan was surrounded by a gleaming, dancing battalion of beautiful machines. It was wonderful to see.

I stood on the roof of the Museum stables, looking over the back wall, where the Wide Street went by. My machines stood around me, waiting to be released, while I watched for the right moment. It came, finally, after all the machines had been brought forth, and the oohing and aahing had gone down a little. I knew that at any moment the great cheer might go up which signalled the start of the Festival, so that was when I set the little ones going.

Over the side they went, a gleaming blue wave of beetle-like carapaces. Quickly I climbed down the ladder and ran into the street, in time to catch the gasp of amazement as the crowd caught sight of the effect. It did look wondrous: the twelve little machines ran along the wall in a curling dance, their color shifting on cue from deep blue to green to red and yellow. They moved, spiralling, across the wall and down along the street, climbing other walls in ones and threes, spreading color around the street.

The King, speaking with my father, saw me and called me over.

"You did this?" he asked, his white beard fine and crisp against the crimson of his suit.

I bowed. "With many people helping me, I did, Sire," I said, hardly more than a whisper. The King had never spoken to me before - had never even noticed me before.

He craned his head to look at the swirling motes on the buildings around. "Then you will make a fine Curator, perhaps even a Master Machinist," he said. His sharp blue eyes held me for a moment, then moved away. I knew I was dismissed, and walked away hardly able to breathe. I wanted to jump and scream.

I walked that way for awhile, following the caravan, but seeing very little around me. Then we came to the square.

In the middle of the square, standing on a plinth, stood a glass woman, glowingly white, as if made of mist. Within her misty limbs darker things moved, as she raised her arms to the sun. The parade, tumbling into the square in a hurdy-gurdy tangle of color and shouting, stilled, all the sounds dying away save the snapping of the flags in the quiet breeze.

The woman stood, her arms to the sun, and opened her mouth and sang, with a voice like a water bird, like warm honey. It was echoing and sweet and made the hairs stand on my arms. I do not know what she sang, but as the liquid notes dropped down, the people sighed. It was wonderful.

And when she was done, out from the crowd stepped Ennis, and bowed low before the King.

Midsummers' Festival, 5

2007-07-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

I must finish this, things are changing quickly here.

Suffice to say that Ennis did help me.

Oh, by the Gods, I must speak more elaborately than that. I see that.

I told him of my failure, and he sat with me and spoke of it for awhile. After a time, I am not certain how long, I began to feel hope, for he showed me that the thing missing in my formulae was the pressing of the folded areas of the feet into the inequalities in the walls. The ideas flew between us, and we found ourselves standing at the table, trying different things, as the torches burned lower and the stars wheeled round above, his hands working next to mine.

Finally we discovered what seemed to be a way. By altering the feet so as to incorporate a plunger-style mechanism which pushed a viscous liquid into the folds of the foot-coverings I had fashioned, the feet actually did cling to things. By working well past the double bells, we had finished one of the machines and started the mechanism up.

IT WORKED!!! With only two days to go, Ennis and I had solved the riddle of walking on walls. The thing skittered across the ground and up a stone wall, crossing around the courtyard with ease, the colors on its back changing faster as it crept. It was only as it tried to creep up onto the ceiling of the portico that disaster struck: the thing lost its footing and fell, breaking its carapace on the floor below. It seems that the hairs in the Gycko's feet serve some function, after all.

He said goodnight, kindly and as near his old self as I have seen, and I went to bed, my head whirling with ideas and with his nearness, which had a strange effect on me.

The next two days were a flurry, trying to fix the broken machine and tan enough stomach-leather for all the feet on all the machines - as well as fashioning the feet themselves. I was up til all hours both nights running, though Ennis came only once, to help me stitch feet the last night. He was silent then, and did not sit near to me, his face turned away; but he seemed only thoughtful, not angry. I wondered, then, for the first time, if he had his own machine for the Festival. I remembered the fallen bits of machine-metal on that day so many weeks ago, and wanted to ask him of them; he seemed so thoughtful, however, that I could not bring myself to interrupt his ruminations.

The day of the Festival dawned bright and warm. The flags were all up, all around the town, and many hundreds of strange people came and went from the inns and the camping-places by the river. Brightly-colored carts made their way into the square, setting up around the edges with much hustle and bustle. A whole city within the city, of carts and stands and cloth-covered booths, had bloomed in the night.

I stood on a

Midsummers' Festival, 4

2007-07-16T10:38:00.000-07:00

Ah, my Eleanor, my Hands, how I have itched to finish this story of the Festival! Things are happening now that I would tell you of.

So: let me speak quickly.

My father's idea about the cow's stomach did indeed seem valuable. I looked at one through the Vial, and found that he was right about its deep structures. I experimented feverishly with the tanner's caustic, and found that the stomach must be half-dried for the caustic to work; fully-dried and it lost its pliability. Then it was a matter of how to apply the caustic, as it seemed to shrink with the direction of the brush-strokes. But these details are of little interest.

Ennis came and watched me work, but went away without saying anything. I longed, now my eyes were opened to the clarity and learning of his mind, to speak with him of all the things I wondered about; but his face, though gentler, was still closed to me, and I dared not. So I worked on with little sleep, and at length, but four days before the festival, I had something that I deemed might work. It lacked the infinitesimal hairs of the Gycko's feet, so I could only hope that this would not hinder it.

After some experimentation, I was able to attach some of the material to one of the machine's feet, but the experiment was a complete failure! I was devastated, unable even to come down to dinner. My father came upstairs to comfort me in my room, but could not; all he could do was love me and insist that I not give up. I still had more than three days.

So I sat, the dutiful daughter, in the courtyard and stared at nothing in the evening light. Nothing came into my head, no further plans or ideas. It grew dark, and the women lit the lamps, and still I sat. Most people went to bed; my father came and looked at me and went away again, leaving me alone. I sat and let the tears trickle down my cheeks, until a rough, long-fingered hand touched my arm, making me start.

It was Ennis, his tea-colored hair falling over his eyes, looking down at me with surprising tenderness, which of course made me cry all the harder. I threw my sleeve over my face and bawled, and he put his strong hand on my back, of which I know not what I felt.

At the end, I was reduced to hiccups and trying to recover my dignity, which was likely ruined anyway. I looked up to find him sitting next to me, looking at the mess of my labors. We sat in silence for awhile.

Oh, I can feel -

Midsummers' Festival, 3

2007-07-09T08:48:00.000-07:00

Ah, me, all the interruptions. This telling takes so long to tell, while the rest of my life slips away untold...luckily these weeks are dull ones, for me. This year the summer is hot, and we stay inside during the heat of the day, coming out like forest animals in the early hours and the late ones. So there is plenty of time to think, and dream, but not much happens; it is a drowsy time, with long, full days of harvesting, eating the harvest, fixing buildings, cleaning, and so on. There is always much to be done, when the days are long; it is a time of creation and repair.

In any case, my trip to the tanners was quite enlightening. Ennis showed me how the drum-makers paint their hides with caustic to shrink them. The drum-makers kindly showed us how, if the hide is not stretched, the caustic will make it ruck up as it shrinks, into folds very like the ones on the Gycko's feet. Examining the crumples in the hide, I asked Ennis if he thought it would do.

"Probably not," he said, in that stiff way he has. "Look at it under the Lense Vial first, and see. It may only be a start."

A start! When there were only five days left until the festival? My anxiety knew no bounds.

But I thanked the drum-makers and walked back with a silent Ennis, who bid goodbye as soon as he could. Then I unlocked the case with my father's Lense Vial in it and set to work.

Ennis was right. The folds were of the right type, but the surface of the hide was much too pitted and full of pores to be of use. What good did it do? I threw away the bit of hide in despair, and went to help my father in the Museum.

My father was busy directing the white-washing of the Museum rooms, showing the men what to do, directing ladders and getting out cloths to cover the machines with. I helped to spread the cloths, fetching water for the white-washing and trying to note to how my father conducted his business. He took time to explain things to me, as he always does, since I will be the Curator when he is passed; but eventually he looked at me, and took me by the shoulders into another room.

"My dear," he said, "You have been looking strained recently. Is it your machines for the Festival? I do worry you have looked large in that department. When I was your age, I simply created a sort of cart with a fan that opened and closed. It's not necessary, you know, to create the universe again."

I smiled at him, for I love my father. He is a kind and generous man, as well as being brilliant with machines. I am not supposed to ask the Curator for help in my first Festival presentation, but I am allowed to ask my father for advice.

"Perhaps you might suggest something for me then, Father, as I am struggling so to re-create Nature's wonders! I am working with smoothed hide, but even that is too rough for what I need. I need a skin of some sort that is absolutely smooth, even under your own Lense Vial."

He looked at me strangely, but I could see his thoughts at work, behind his dark brows. "What is it that you are trying to accomplish?"

I explained to him about the pleats, and his eyebrows went up. "That is indeed ambitious for a first project. Are you certain you wouldn't prefer to simplify it?"

"I will, Father, if that is what is required. But I wish to try." I tried to keep the stubbornness off my face, but he still saw it and laughed.

"Let me think about this. I do not know of a hide that is so smooth as to be able to fit against the imperfections of glass! What you need is something already pleated, something complex and soft..." here a faraway look came into his eyes, as always happens when he is imagining the workings of things. Then his brow cleared, and he said to me, "What of the inside of stomachs? Have you looked to see? They are much like the surface of tongues, with flower upon flower, down too small to see. You could even, if you wished, use the tanner's caustic to shrink it further. Try these things, and see if they will help you."

Did I not say my father is brilliant?

Midsummers' Festival, 2

2007-07-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

So many things to describe! It is difficult, during my limited time with Eleanor-of-the-Hands, to put down all that happens. I try, and then just at an important moment I find myself receding, falling away from her and her small screen, and I know the last part of what I say is lost.

I believe I was writing of Ennis' willingness to help me, of how I called out to him to ask his help.

When I told him what it was I needed to discover, and of the discoveries I had made about the Gycko's feet, he scratched his head, frowning. I watched him, thinking how his frown was so much less fierce these days.

"The problem is," I told him, "I understand how the Gycko's feet look, but not what they mean. I don't see how they allow the creature to stick to the walls. It is not simple suction, for my father says they can run across coarse surfaces as well as smooth."

Ennis was silent for awhile, while I tried hard not to fidget. "I believe it is an effect I heard spoken of once," he said finally, "discovered by a man from the Low Country. He said that all things are attracted to each other, but that various other forces intervene, so that we do not always see the effect of this force."

I stared at Ennis, astonished, for he had never said such a thing to me. Our conversation had always been joking and friendly, or sad and brief; never one of deep philosophy, or the arts and sciences. Listening to him speak, I saw suddenly that I had been thinking solely about what he was able to do, not how he thought. I felt, as he said these few sentences, that my sense of myself was shaken, for if I could be so little understanding what was in Ennis' mind, then what else had I got wrong in my world?

But Ennis was unaware of my shock, and went on. "The reason that you and I are not able to walk up walls is mostly because the surface of the wall is rough, and therefore little of our foot or hand can really touch it. Instead, the points and lumps that are in even the smoothest surface - even glass - offer us only minor contact. It seems to me that these Gyckos, with those pleats upon pleats on the soles of their feet, must be able to settle the surface of their feet so well into the roughness of the surface that they can use the Lowlander's force - the attraction of their feet to the wall - to keep them aloft."

At this point he stopped, as if suddenly aware of how much he had spoken, and how much I gaped at him. I watched his face shut up like a shutter, and the grim line came back to his mouth, which had before been curving beautifully.

Finding my own mouth open, I closed it. "Many thanks," I stuttered, completely undone. "I - I do not know that I would have thought of that."

In the face of my consternation, he relented a bit. "You would not know," he said, "unless you had read every book in your father's library."

And with that, he turned on his heel and walked away. I watched him go, and wondered that I had never seen this man, so young and so harsh, in the light of his mind before. I felt I had opened a door through which a wind had come, and blown away all I knew.

It was a late hour of the day, so I went back to my mother to help with the evening meal as if my eyes, indeed all my senses, were flayed. The whole world seemed to come rushing in at me with a new sharpness, a painful awareness. I saw that my mother's eyesight was worsening; I saw the worry lines in my father's face; I saw how the scrubbed table in our dining-place was much larger than we needed; and I wondered how many other things that spoke of secrets, of unknowable changes or unspoken realities, there were in my life. It seemed that I was surrounded by doors that opened to places I had never imagined. Every person I knew had a head full of unknown knowledge, unspoken longings, unwritten histories. It made me want to weep.

In the night, as I lay awake in my bed, I wondered at his remark about my father's library. Had he read all the books therein? It was all of two hundred books, full of knowledge I had never thought to learn. Had he? If so, it must be one of the best-kept secrets in the kingdom. And once again, I felt that wind whistle through the newly-opened doors of my mind.

But by the next morning I was somewhat righted, as if I had learned to walk in this new and unexplored world, and I went through my chores and learning-sessions with my eyes open and the Gycko's foot in the back of my mind. There were but a few days left until the Festival, and I was worried. I even began plans for what I would do if I could not make the color-machines walk up the walls, though it made me feel terrible.

I did not see Ennis that day or the next, for he had tasks of his own to accomplish for the Midsummers' Festival. I struggled with the problem of the gycko's feet all alone, never questioning that it was the answer to my need. On the third morning, Ennis was waiting for me in the courtyard, standing like a prisoner next to my work-table, staring apparently at nothing.

I approached cautiously, wondering at the set of his shoulders, and the look he had of wishing to be elsewhere.

"Come with me, " he said brusquely, so I followed him. We walked out of the Museum compound and past the stables, down the river-path toward the foundries and the dyers' house. He did not stop here, but continued onward toward the tannery, where he turned into the gate.

Several apprentices looked up in surprise, bending quickly back to work at Ennis' glance. Bewildered, I followed him toward the side-yard where the drum-makers work.

"There," he said, and pointed. "That's what you need, I reckon."

I couldn't see what he was speaking of at first, but then as li jfos ns

The Midsummers' Festival

2007-06-25T22:41:00.000-07:00

Where to begin? So many things have been happening!!!

I am glad, for Eleanor is in fine form tonight. The sun is setting outside her window, and her hands feel nimble and ready to tell my story. Thank you, Eleanor, my Hands, my friend.

I will start where I left off.

As I went to the Labyrinth to find my father, the day after my last dream of this place, I saw Ennis coming up the stairs from the rooms below. I stood back in the shadows of the colonnade and watched him emerge. He was dusting something off his trousers and he looked - not happy, but - less grim than he has since the fire. His sleeves were rolled away up his arms and I could hardly see the scars there; and as he rolled his sleeves down a small thing fell out and rolled away. He did not appear to notice, so when he had gone I went quickly over and picked it up.

At first I could hardly see what it was. Then I saw: a tiny spring, no larger than my little fingernail in all, worked in the finest brass. I was staring at it in wonder, trying to fathom how it came to be rolled in his sleeve, when I heard a small sound, like a footfall. It was Ennis, come back for the thing, I suppose. I could feel my face go very red as I held it out to him, and he stared at me a moment without expression before taking it, putting his finger to his lips as if to silence me, and then turning away. I simply stood there among the stone columns and watched him go, wishing that I could fall through the floor.

When I came to the top of the stairs I bent to see what he had been brushing away, and what I found was many small crumbs of brass, tiny shavings. such as those the blade of a gear-turnier's tool makes, carving the teeth into small brass gears.

I think Ennis is Creating again!!!!

The next day, I was out in the courtyard as usual after lunch and my noontime chores, trying to understand how to adjust the balance of my machines. I had taken the covering off one the feet and was examining it, trying to see why the tiny hooks had not grasped at the crucial moment, when my mother called me into the kitchen. There was a package for me, she said.

On the table was a strange package, a small wooden box tied all round with string, and an envelope hanging off it. I tore the envelope open and found it was from Master Ravenor! The note said, "Please examine these feet. Perhaps it will help you to find your way with your own Creation."

Inside the box, when I nervously opened it, was a jar with what looked like a small lizard floating suspended inside. The thing looked terrible, pale and strange; but the flesh was as soft-looking and pliable as in life. I looked at its feet, and saw only wide, squashed-looking toes with pleated bottoms, and wondered what he wanted me to see. I could not fathom it; but then my father came into the kitchen, looking for something, and exclaimed over the jar and the package, reading the note and giving me the rather odd look he has been turning my way recently. He told me it is a gycko, a creature that can walk up walls and across ceilings. He was greatly astonished that Master Ravenor should send me one of his prized jars, and went away upstairs muttering.

Armed with this information I went to my father's study and found his Lense Vial, and removing the thing from its bath trained the armature on its feet. Much to my astonishment, I found the feet looked much the same, no matter how closely I looked: the pleats were pleated into smaller pleats, moving crosswise; and these pleats were in turn pleated crosswise again, and so on for as deep as the Vial could look. It looked, at the smallest levels, as though there might be tiny, miniscule hairs, though I could hardly see them through the glass.

That night I couldn't sleep, thinking of ways to make feet like that for my machine. I lay for hours, trying fruitlessly to imagine it. Finally, exhausted, I fell into dreams of Master Ravenor sitting on the bed, pleating my linens, trying to show me something that I could not see.

The next morning, I moved stupidly through my chores, dropping hot water on the cobbles of the front court, which led my mother to scold me for the noise from the high window of her work-space. Giving up, I went and had a cup of tea in the side portico, drawing and drawing different ways to make Gycko feet but getting nowhere. I spied Ennis coming along the outer wall - just his head bobbing past as it does with tall people - and nearly turned away, my scalp tingling with embarrassment.

But I thought, suddenly: what if I should approach him directly? Speak to him of the help I needed? Since that day I saw him coming up the stairs, I had been shy of him, but not so feared of his fierceness. Watching him go by, it was such a joy to think of him making machines again, I forgot my own feelings and called out to him.

His head, above the wall, swiveled to see me, then came on around the corner, the rest of him appearing by degrees and approaching me cautiously. When I told him I needed help, I saw his eyebrows go up.

"Help from me? I will certainly offer any aid I am able," he said formally. I had to suppress a feeling of irritation. I explained what I was trying to do, and showed him one of my machines, which made him nod against his will.

"I've been watching you work with these," he said much less formally, with an unexpected candor that took me aback.

I told him about the Gycko and he sked ould tak ook at ar

A Conversation

2007-06-18T22:21:00.000-07:00

Thank the stars, Master Ravenor is gone! I do not think I could have stood his scrutiny any longer.

Two days ago he came on me working on my colour-making machines. They are nearly ready; I have put together twelve of them, and am only having difficulty with the attachment for the feet, which will allow them to go up walls without falling over backwards. I cannot make them climb any higher than my shoulder before they peel away from the wall. Something about their balance, I think, and a difference between their front feet and their back.

I was pulling a foot apart when he came and stood over me, I know not for how long, for he stood quietly, watching me work. After a bit I reached for a tool and saw his shadow, which sent me starting up, knocking my stool over behind me. I do not know why I was taken this way, though the suddenness of my awareness startled me.

He apologized, and turned away to walk in the portico along the Eastern wall, but I stood for awhile after he rounded the corner, my heart pounding.

Later, I saw him speaking with my father in the great room at the back of the Museum we call the Whisper Chamber, for it is used for nothing that I know of, and the sound inside is very strange. You can hear a person across the room from you, but not the person standing beside you. There is not a stick of furniture in this room; not a hanging nor a candle. At night it is spooky, with odd sounds coming out of the darkness. My mother says it was designed so that people could speak to the spirit world, but my father scoffs at that.

They stood slightly to one side of the center of the room, in the safest spot, for no-one can hear you when you stand there, unless you stand directly beside the person you are speaking to. Master Ravenor was gesturing, touching my father's arm and speaking urgently, and my father looked puzzled and surprised. I stood behind a pillar for the best part of a half-hour, trying to construct what they were saying from the gestures, and finally had to conceal myself as they walked past me and outside. I still don't know what they were speaking of, though I have seen my father looking at me with an odd expression on his face once or twice since.

Now Master Ravenor has packed his many trunks, full of the specimens he took of the bones and rocks and stones around the town. They have been loaded on the waggon, and we have all stood politely out in the forecourt and waved goodbye. At last, I can relax.

Master Ravenor

2007-06-11T22:02:00.000-07:00

My father's old teacher, Master Ravenor, is visiting this sevenday. He is a strange old man, given to flights of speech, but he always has something interesting to say. I find him fascinating, and a little frightening. He looks at me as if he wanted to take me apart and examine all the pieces, and I am conscious of his gaze; it makes me uncomfortable. I do not look at him much, but stay in the background and listen.

My mother tells me this is because he is a Natural Philosopher, always interested in the why of things. She says he finds it interesting how like my father I am, yet in a female body. She assures me he has no prurient interest, but is simply like that. I suppose she should know, she has known him for two and twenty years and more, but being scrutinized by a man, even in the best of intentions, still makes me feel odd.

My sister told me, before she left, that he has a whole room full of glass jars in his home, each full of some natural monstrosity: two-headed babes, and giant worms from the belly of a woman who starved to death, though she ate and ate; a severed arm and a strange monster from the deeps of the sea. And more; though my sister did not know what else.

This seems so unnatural to me that I am doubly disturbed when he stares at me: I do not want to be one of his displays!!!

I saw him speaking quietly to Ennis outside the stables three days ago, and did not see Ennis again until today, when he was very thoughtful. He hardly noticed me standing so obviously at my machines, and did not help me. I wonder what Master Ravenor said to him?

My project is moving apace. I asked young Asker, the jeweler's apprentice, about the coloring of metals, and he was very helpful. He hadn't learned all the techniques yet but he introduced me to Ailen, one of the journeywomen, and she is a fountain of knowledge! She sat with me for two days, trying to see a way to what I was attempting to do, and finally we uncovered a very neat solution. I was very pleased. However, now I am working on the machines' mode of travel, and in this I could use Ennis' help. It is too bad he is so distracted. If I could only

Working and Playing

2007-06-04T13:39:00.001-07:00

This has been a really difficult week.

I am learning so much about what it means to be a Machine Artist, but every time I think I understand, I find I cannot make anything work. I am thrashing about in my own ignorance.

Ennis has silently come and helped me twice now, with no sign of satisfaction on his scarred face. I always thank him politely, and he always puts down the tools and stalks away, as if I have offended him. I wish I could help him! And I wish I didn't feel so that I am the cause of his misery.

I know that it was the fire and the pain of his flesh that hurt him, along with the loss of his lovely creations, but still, the way he behaves toward me - it's as if he wants to do something to me, I can't think what. He appears as if he is unwilling, and helps me as if I am an ignorant fool, and then goes off as if he can't wait to get away. Why doesn't he just stay away, if that's how he feels!!!!!

My sister came back again with her new daughter. Everyone is fawning over the baby, which looks a bit like a side of beef, and my sister hardly has time to talk to me. No matter: I am always outside, in wind and in sun, trying to get my blessed machinery working. I told my father that I didn't think I had the right mind for this work, but he just smiled and patted my shoulder and said not to worry, I was ages ahead of where he had been at my age. I don't believe it at all!

This Thor's day we went to the Meadows for a picnic, my only break in the misery of my learning. My mother packed an enormous lunch into the back of the waggon and we all walked or rode the five miles to the great stone tables cut there from the living rock. We spread out cloths and dishes and sat, feasting, for hours in the gentle sunlight under the vines which cross from tree to tree, a natural arbor. Ennis sat across and a little down from me and did not look at me once, though he did speak with my father some. I could not help staring at him. It seems to me that his scars are fading, becoming less thick and red: or am I becoming used to him? I could not stop looking at his rolled up sleeves, and the marks on his forearms. They did not seem bad to me at all. Why is he so unhappy?

Creating

2007-05-14T13:51:00.000-07:00

I have begun working on my Machine project, and it is far more interesting than I bargained for. I had a sort of idea of a machine that would change color, and climb about on buildings. It seems to me that most of the machines stay close to the place they are designed to work - in the street for a parade, or around the feasting-tables, or in the throne-room of the King - but it seems to me they should be all around, like flags flying. Think how it would look, with these colorful machines clinging to the buildings, changing colors! The whole village, the whole palace could look as if it had put on feast-clothes!

The tricky part, for now, is understanding how to create a carapace with a changing color. It's a new idea, putting a carapace on the machine. It goes against tradition, and may be greeted with horror. I'm not certain what the reception will be like. I think perhaps the Hands - my fine writing friend Eleanor - are to blame for this idea of mine, for I had never conceived of machines with clothes on before I came to your world.

In any case, not only am I imagining a sort of shell, or flag, or banner on the back of this Machine-creature, but I want it to be able to change colors. Do I make it change at a signal from me? Or change according to something around it? Or is it simply a decision the Machine makes, a random thing? And how do I effect the change?

So I have been sketching and reading about this.

Yesterday morning, as I was deep in the midst of temperature and color-changes in metals, I felt a presence behind me. It was Ennis. He was looking at what I was reading, and I caught, for the first time in months, a look of interest on his face. But immediately afterward his expression closed up like a fan and he turned away, the angry set back in his shoulders.

Since then, he has walked through the courtyard where I work far more often than usual, but I have not caught him looking. Still, I think my plan is making progress.

The King has returned from a trip to Alyr.. 7 ..Â SORRY I'M ..xb

In the Labyrinth

2007-05-07T13:18:00.000-07:00

I am so happy to see Eleanor, my excellent Hands. I have been thinking of you, and wondering.

For the past three days I have been in the Labyrinth with my father, working on our secret. Each day, on the way to where we are working, I stop at the Steam Beast's lair and marvel at how it changes. I cannot see how it is done. My father has the only keys to the Labyrinth, and I have been with him all the time recently.

He claims the Steam Beast does it itself. I know the Great Machines are capable of many things, but I cannot see how a machine could recreate itself. My father, who has faith that I seem to lack, says that the Great Machines have their own minds, built long ago by the great craftsmen, and that they sit in their places, dreaming of what they will be next. They live, he told me, for their yearly unveiling. To me, this seems a form of sorcery, but my father says it is not, only a very great skill that has mostly been lost.

He is already drawing up plans and setting out his workshop for the next great festival, the Midsummer's Feast, planning a new version of his Fireflower Machines. This new secret, the project we are working on, will only take up his time for a little longer, and then he wants to spend his free time in the workshop. The Curator always gets a good place in the Festival Machines, but they are not always as skillful as my father.

So: now I have to think of a Machine-project I want to work on. It will be my first, as I am only just through my Passing Ceremony, and I will need help with it. Plenty of drawing out plans in public places, I think, and some judicious, obvious cursing - and perhaps a little poor work with the cogs and gears ought to do it; a certain someone is bound to try and help me. I'm excited to see what happens.

But more of that later. Let us see if I'm successful before I disclose any further.

Hieram has, thankfully, gone back to his family's manor, three days' ride to the West. I hope they will keep him busy enough to stop him interfering. I was heartily glad to see him go! Any longer, and I feared someone would offer me to him in marriage, he was so persistent. And yet I cannot see him wanting a Curator for a wife.

But then, I think it is not perhaps a wife he wants. I wish I knew more about men!

Help from Ennis

2007-04-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

I have had an idea.

Yesterday, when I was cleaning another of those blasted machines from the museum, I had to take part of it apart to get into it properly. When I went to put it back together, I was horrified to find that there were several parts left over. I'm usually good with machines, but this one was quite complex, and I'd clearly misunderstood some part of it.

While I was gazing at the pieces, and peering into the machine to try to understand where, among the cogs and springs, they should be put back, Ennis came by, leading some horses to be put on the King's carriage. I could feel him looking at me but I was suddenly struck by an idea: I ignored him, instead taking a tool and starting to undo the fastenings, cursing under my breath (but loud enough so he could hear I was upset).

To my disappointment, he went on, leading the horses around the corner and out of sight. So I went on as well, taking the thing apart as far as I had before, and then putting the pieces back carefully, piece by piece, trying to see where the extra pieces fit in.

Suddenly a hand reached in and stopped me from working anymore. It was Ennis! He silently took the tool out of my hand and gently pushed me aside, and then swiftly - and so deftly! - put the pieces all back into their places. I watched carefully, and it made perfect sense. I felt a little foolish then, as I thanked him and he looked over my shoulder, but also I was gleeful inside. He may not have been friendly, but at least I had made him curious.

Then, with a nod, he was gone. I stood there for ages, wondering about it, before I rolled the machine on its platform back up the ramp and into the museum.

I think, perhaps, I might have the beginnings of a plan.

The Passing-Ceremony

2007-04-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Hieram has started his advances again. I do not know what to do. I dare not offend him, for fear of his family, but this is unbearable.

It was all right until my birth-celebration, which was a large one this year as I turned fifteen. For girls in our part of the world, fifteen is a special age, when we have our passing-ceremony as well as the birth-celebration. Each girl has a great party to celebrate her stepping into the world of adults. For one day, she is the center of the world, and everything is done to make her happy. Aunts and cousins come, and there is feasting, and she is the guest of honor.

Preparations began three days early. My mother and Asta, the helping-woman and occasional cook, had conferences in the kitchen, and local children kept running in and out. It is the custom for children to be given sweets in honor of Kalil, the goddess of growth and learning, on a girl's feast-day, but all children, since the beginning of time, it seems, begin trying when the preparations begin. I watched them and remembered doing the same when my sister had her passing-ceremony. I remembered Asta giving me apples to quiet me - and sure enough, there they came with apples, juice all over their hands. They saw me and giggled, and I felt myself turning red.

I was and am unused to such attention. Usually my lot in life is to wander through the courtyards and echoing rooms of the museum as if I am some part of the architecture. In the village, and even in Lethiam, the larger market-town where we go once a month, I feel unimportant, unseen. True, there are a number of people who say hello, but only in passing. No special attention is paid to me. For those few days, though, people turned to me with broad smiles, saying, "There she goes!" and "She is growing, is she not? What a fine young woman she makes!" and so on. I was like to die with shame.

Which was unexpected, because I've been so looking forward to this moment!!! All my life, I've dreamed of being fifteen - being able to go where I like and just, well, be a grown person. I've dreamt of the celebration: what I will wear, how I will do my hair, how many cakes I will get to eat, how all the young men will look at me, and so on. Yet once the time arrived, it felt all wrong. All my childhood I imagined when this moment came I would be a different person. More popular or more easygoing, more adult. A person who enjoyed the attention. But I'm not: I'm still me, used to being left alone, and easy with my freedom to slip through the world without being noticed.

Worst of all was Hieram's attention.

It started on the day when my mother was meeting with the Asta. I was outside cleaning one of the Machines from the Museum, which Axel had helped me move out into the North courtyard on a cart. My hair was tied back, I had smudges on my cheeks, and my sleeves were rolled up. The machine had a million tiny crevices which all desperately needed wiping out, and I was wet and cursing when Hieram walked into the courtyard.

I didn't notice him for a moment, but after a particularly ferocious curse, I heard him say "tch, tch" behind me. I turned around fast, and there was his smiling, smug face and his immaculate clothing. He waved a finger at me as if to say "naughty, naughty" and then went on smiling as I went back to work.

He wouldn't leave!!!!! I grew more and more annoyed, what with that terrible machine and the feeling of his eyes boring into my back as I scrubbed. Finally, I lost my temper and turned on him.
"If you want to admire my work, you can come back when I'm done," I told him. "I've no mind to work my fingers off with you standing there sniggering."

He looked surprised, as if he didn't expect me to have a temper, and then sloped off to some other part of the Museum.

The next day I went to the village to see about

The Hands Named

2007-04-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

A view from the Museum Tower

My benefactor has a name! I saw it on the screen when I came to her this eve. There was a letter, with the words "sincerely, Eleanor" at the bottom, and my host was just writing it when I first looked through her eyes.

Eleanor. I like that name. I can feel her smile as she writes this.

I am always surprised, coming to her, how little she looks about. Her gaze is so focused, so narrow. It is as if she has lost interest in looking at the world, or has grown so used to the familiar sights that they are merely a code to her, a sort of summary; as if instead of looking at the cat her mind supplies the word "cat" and puts it in his place. I cannot imagine living in such a small world! I love waking up in the morning and seeing how the light plays on the tree outside my window on any particular day. The world is always different!!!!

Perhaps this is why adults so often lack understanding, because they cannot see that each moment is a different moment; each time you see something it is new. Looking out at the world through Eleanor's eyes I notice she skims over so many things that I would stop to look at. I do not think this is merely because I find her world strange, and want to look at it. It is as if her world is a patchwork - or perhaps a map - of known, dull things, and she has ceased to look at anything carefully, unless it changes or something new appears. It makes me shudder. My father says ignorance is the lowest form of misery, and I see now what he means.

Still, Eleanor, please don't be offended. I know you are ..with.. * ...too far

Mourning for Ennis' Losses

2007-04-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight the Hands are tired; they shake and have difficulty writing. Still, I have so much to talk about, I hope they will bear with me.

I saw Ennis, finally. He was mostly silent and nearly sulky in his mood. I had gone with my father, who was there to offer to give him a small room on the edge of the Labyrinth to work on his machines, but Ennis declined, claiming his hands were too scarred to work on fine machines anymore. Father persisted in extending the invitation, saying that if Ennis felt ready, the space would be there in any case. When Ennis would not come see where it was, my father explained to him where it was, while Ennis hung his head and looked away. I do not think he will make machines again, and I do not think he understands the risk my father runs of offending someone by his offer, for many people would frown on a stableboy being given space in the Labyrinth to tinker.

Yesterday Ennis was to return to the stables to begin working again, but when I went to say hello, he went on working and would not come out. He seems angry all the time now, and I worry that he is unhappy with me for seeing him in pain, with his skin peeling. He walks with a limp now, and the skin on his arms and hands is so tight it makes it hard for him to use a shovel or a pitchfork, but he does it anyway, with his mouth in a grim line; it must be quite painful. The beauty that was once his is dulled, and he turns his head so that people will not look upon the scars on the side of his face.

I went home and cried in my room, after that visit. Everything that once made Ennis so special is gone now, and I am afraid it will never come back. He no longer smiles, or pursues his secret art; the Ennis that made dry jokes which passed over people without so much as ruffling their hair is lost or gone. His grace and fiery strength, all lost. I fear that he will grow old this way, like Lukas Orn, who is twisted and grim, though he is respected by all.

My father says it is a terrible shame, and a crime, that he may not even offer a place for talent to grow without fear of censure. He shakes his head, and claims Ennis to have the potential to be the greatest gear-turnier since Alloway, who invented the Pneumatic Salamander two hundred years ago.

Hieram returned from his hunting trip three days ago, but I have not seen much of him, thank the Gods. I was afraid of a return to the cat-and-mouse game we had been going around and around in before he left, but he has largely left me to myself, for which I am immensely grateful. Things at home have been lonely; my sister is back with her family until the lying-in, my father distracted with a commission by the King for an Exhibit in the Palace, and I have much to do, while carrying this grief in my heart. My mother, as always, lives in her own world, abstracted; when she is not tending to the management of the household, she is upstairs in her study poring over mathematical equations which she says may help explain the universe, though I cannot see how.

I must stop. The Hands, that unseen woman, is taking longer and longer to write. I wonder if she is ill? I have thought about her visit to the horrible place last sevenday, and wondered if it was some kind of examination place. Yet she sees no-one; no-one visits her here other than the cat, which I have now seen twice. It comes in by the window-sill.

I would like to find a better name for my benefactor than the Hands.

And away...

Hell

2007-03-27T08:37:00.000-07:00

Last time I saw the Hands they were unable to write for me, for they were not near the writing-machine. Instead, I saw a nightmare world of flying, crawling machines. Your world is so ugly! And your machines are everywhere, neither beautiful nor pleasing, nor built for the Spirit. Instead they are overrunning you, everywhere telling you what to do, where to go, when to do it. At one place I saw a great black and white beetle-machine chasing a man, who ran away in fright, while the machine told him in a loud voice to stop. When he would not stop, it made the most horrible noise and started flashing at us all, as if to tell us how angry it was, while it went off after him around the corner. I shudder to think what happened to the poor man when it caught him.

So many people! And such large buildings, boiling with life, like a maze of beehives, people-bees zooming in and out as fast as they can go. I did not see the sun at all, though I could see its glow behind the great brick beehives.

The Hands went into such a building, riding in a small machine-room to a place colored like the inside of a pig’s stomach. We waited for a long time in that dull room, with a lot of other people who seemed downcast. After a time, a woman in ill-fitting white garments came and took us to a small green room, where the Hands changed into a horrid garment all open down the back, designed, I think, to humiliate him or her. I can think of no other reason.

The room held several frightening-looking machines, all clothed in metal or horn, with staring silver glassy bits, which stood threateningly around the small, high bed. They were not made to add comfort to the Spirit, only I think to add to one’s sense of inferiority and fear, as was the precarious-looking little bed.

Then another woman came into the room, and shook hands with the Hands. She was all business, and asked questions like a rattle of beads. I really heard the Hands’ voice for the first time then, as I had been too overcome earlier to hear anything. It was light and melodious and not much old, as I had assumed. And the Hands are a woman.

The other woman made the Hands lay back, and began doing things to her private areas. I was horrified, and stared through the Hands’ eyes up at the terrible light coming from the ceiling, wishing I could wake then and escape the torture. I found I wanted to know what the Hands were thinking, but her mind was inaccessible, as always. However, her body was not rigid, as I would have been, so perhaps I was misunderstanding the situation.

After the woman left, writing something on a small tablet in her hand, the Hands got dressed again and left that terrible place, riding the little room back to the outside. I was pleased to see the sky again, though it was only a small slice.

I am used to large buildings. Our Palace I have been in and out of more times than I can count; and the Museum where I am to be Curator someday is vast and complex. But the buildings in your world were not built to be grand, or beautiful; only to hold many, many people. They are like the underground homes of rabbits, or as I said, beehives: small passageways and rooms, layered in tightly, with no sense of space. They would make me ill, I think.

I found myself missing home after a very short time, for this world is loud and ugly. The people walk angrily, or like they have lost hope. The machines flash and bark and roar in every part of your life - in your homes, in the stores, on the streets: there is no rest. It is a wonder you have not all gone insane.

I wanted to -

Oh here it co es

The Steam Beast Uncovered

2007-03-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

I spent the day in the Labyrinth with Father, learning to strip the Steam Beast today. We do this every year, strip it down to its skeleton, so that it can grow into its new guise for the next year. No one knows how this is accomplished, though many people suspect the Curator of creating each guise; but my father swears it happens by itself. He says he will show me this year how the Steam Beast begins to grow, adding gears and wheels and clockwork springs in no known order. By the night of the Festival, it is ready, but it is not clear what the true nature of the Beast will be until it is wound up and sent off into the streets.

To tell the truth, the thing frightens me, particularly in its skeletal state, although working with my father this day dismantling all those delicate workings did help me with my fear. It lurks there in the Labyrinth as if it were alive, which I suppose it must be if it grows there throughout the year.

We set the Beast’s parts on the shelves in its room, ready to hand should the Beast want them. Father says every year there are a few more of them, and he has no idea where they come from. I wondered to myself, if one were to keep an eye on the Steam Beast, what one might see, but Father seemed to know what I was thinking, and chided me for not allowing myself to enjoy the magic of the thing. He says that sometimes it is better not to know.

I have tried, with the Hands’ help, to draw the thing as it stood when we were done with it, though I fear I have made a poor job of it. It is one thing to keep a flow of words moving to the Hands, whose skill with the machine in front of them is high; but to make them draw, when they are clearly unused to it, is another matter.

Ennis has moved in with his sister, who is better able to take care of him. I have not seen him for some days, for whenever I go to her house, she tells me he is sleeping or bathing and to come back some other time, and I do not know if this is a polite way of telling me to leave him be, or if I simply have poor luck in my choice of visits.

Still, if he does not tell me himself that he wants me to leave him alone, then I shall keep tryng. I cannot forget that glimpse of him working, in that dim workshop with all the lovely things. Someday I hope to help him get back his workshop. I cannot bear for him to feel that all is lost, and he must go on being a stablehand forever, and never make machines again.

Tomorrow, my sister Hemila will go back to her husband, as she has not had the growing-sickness for some time now. Her belly grows larger by the minute, and we have all been madly sewing so that she will not go unclothed when her dress grows too tight. Father has made her a new trunk to take all her new clothes home in, and she sings while she packs it. She has a sweet voice, like her nature. I will miss her, though I can see she is rejoicing to return to her own house and husband.

Hieram has been out these last few days on a hunting trip, and the place has been blessedly quiet. I asked my father today how much longer Hieram must stay, and he told me at least another month. Another MONTH!!!!! When I asked him why, he quieted me and told me not to be ungenerous. It seems Hieram’s father is in trouble with another lord to the South, and Hieram has been sent here for safekeeping until the trouble can be resolved. I believe, from the way my father said it, that Hieram may be the source of the trouble. What a silly person he is!

Before he left on his hunting, he found me out in the laundry-house, cleaning out the

Anger

2007-03-05T16:40:00.000-08:00

Today was my sister’s birth-day. For the occasion, her husband Enoch came to stay from his parents’ house. Father brought out his gift to her, a pair of beautiful blue-spode horses, well-matched and gleaming. “You will have to get a carriage yourselves,” he told them in that dry way he has. “I have not the means; but this is a good beginning, la?”

Hemila was delighted with the pair, but Enoch fell in love with them straightaway, and swore he would have a carriage for them within the month. My father patted his arm and told him not to be hasty, they had a baby on the way and he could not afford to be buying every little thing that came into his head.

Ennis is healing, finally. The infected cuts are clean now, thanks to Amira’s remedy, and she says there won’t be too much scarring. Thank the Gods that the infection was not in his face or his arms! It would be terrible if he could not see or use his hands ever after, with the skills he has.

I hear people talking about him in whispers, about the burnt machinery that was found in the barn after the fire. It is not well looked-on here to hide an ability with machines; but at the same time, I find these whispers terribly hypocritical, since most gear-turniers are not of Ennis’ station. If these same people had known that Ennis was making machines, they might have spoken ill of him for aiming above his place - so how was he to choose the right path?

I sit by his bedside and tell him stories to pass the time, for he must lie on his stomach and not move, or the crusts on his back might break and become infected again. He still does not speak, but I can tell he is listening. The awkwardness I felt with him the last few months is fading, at least on my part. I can’t tell how he feels about me visiting, for he is unfailingly polite. He lies with his head turned away from me and it is only the most subtle clues which tell me when he is feeling impatient, or tired, or ready for more stories.

At times there are these waves of something coming off of him, like heat off the rooftops on a sunny day, and it is only yesterday that I discovered it was anger. He is very, very angry about something, but does not speak of it, and I only hope he will not hurt his healing with angry thoughts.

But I wonder about it. Is he angry at the loss of his machines? Or angry at his injuries? Or is there something else to be angry at?

This sevenday

Infection

2007-02-26T16:39:00.000-08:00

Ennis’s back became infected. He tossed and raved and it was all we could do to keep him held down so he did not do something terrible to his injuries. Amira, the medic, told me not to pick the maggots out of the worst parts, for they help to clean the wound, though they look horrid. Instead, she packed the rest of the burns with a foul-smelling compound made, I think she said, from minerals found by the bogs to the North, mixed with a few herbs for relief. He screamed when we applied this, before the herbs numbed his pain, and I held his arm with my teeth clenched. It was not until the herbs had stopped the pain and he was sleeping that I found that my face and the front of my dress were wet. I must have been weeping unnoticed.

Amira took me aside afterward and complimented me on my fortitude. She charged me with the care of the infected parts, giving me a solution with which they must be bathed every four hours; and the maggots were not to be disturbed in their work.

Sure enough, today the wounds are looking cleaner. Most of the maggots had crawled away and cuccooned themselves in small, brown pellety things, which I brushed away, and the blood was coming clean and bright. I applied some of the salve Amira had left, and Ennis groaned. He opened his eyes and looked at me, and his gaze was clear.

He said, “Here she is, my heart is easy,” and closed his eyes, and did not open them again.

Burns

2007-02-19T16:38:00.000-08:00

These Hands are shaky tonight, and ill-looking. pale and chapped with saggy tips, as if their person was not drinking enough water. When they were beginning to type for me, I saw a cat’s tail curled near the screen. I did not know the Hands had some company; it makes me feel better for them. Oh Hands, who are you? How may I help you?

I will not write long tonight: the Hands are not moving well.

Suffice to say, there has been a terrible fire. Ennis’ wine-barn and all in it have been burned to the ground, and Ennis badly burned with trying to save his things. His secret is found out. He is in grave condition, with burns on his arms and face and back, and I sat out the Festival of Elementals next to his bed, though my sister came to take me home. I refused her. I will be fifteen in a few weeks, I can stay if I please, and help his father care for him. I think his father may be grateful for the assistance...but oh! Ennis’s poor skin...

Father came to tell me the Steam-Beast wept this year.

The Festival of Elementals

2007-02-12T16:37:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is the Festival of Elementals! I am terribly excited. Every year, with the coming of winter, we celebrate the Elements: Fire, Water, Air, Flesh, and Metal. Every gear-turnier will be out with their best inventions, inviting everyone to notice how well-tuned their creations are to the Great Arts.

My father, who has some knowledge of Machines, will bring out the great Steam-Beast from the Museum, as he does every year; and as with every year, the Beast will show us some new delight. My father swears that he does not tinker with the Beast between-times, but no one believes him. He says the Gods bring the Beast forth each year in a new guise, and we all humor him, because it is such glorious fun - and a little awe-making, too.

I escaped Hieram for an afternoon and walked out to the wine-barn where Ennis has his workshop, but he wasn’t there. The door was locked, but I could see through the corner of the window that he has some large Thing bundled away in there, and I have high hopes that he will show everyone his wonderous skill - even winning the prize for best Machine!!!

Though how he has found time to work on it, I don’t know. I have seen him, in the town and around the Palace, working extra hours to get the younger horses used to the Machines before the festival. They have a Thrummer and a Banger, which makes a loud report, out in the field, and are spending a lot of time walking the horses back and forth in front of these and other Machines, to get them used to noises and flashes of light. It is not an easy job. The poor horses are terribly nervous and liable to jump and flinch, and lose their heads. Many grooms have been injured at this time of year. I will pray for Ennis.

My sister Hemila is here for a visit. She is pregnant with her first child and is staying with our mother, as is custom, while she goes through the first bit of nausea and weakness. When she is stronger she will go back to her husband, but for the moment we are enjoying having her here, as her unease seems only to strike for part of the day. The rest of the time she spends helping our mother and making jokes about my future as a Curator, and generally being her cheerful self. She has us all wrapped around her little finger, and none of us mind. I envy her this easiness she has.

I love Hemila, and she is fun to have around, but she does not take to studying like my father and I do. She does not understand why the Museum is so important. When I

Stupid, stupid

2007-02-05T02:25:00.000-08:00

I am getting better at feeling when I will wake and leave the Hands. Last week I could feel it - a swimming sort of feeling, as if I was rising through water - so I did not try to finish my thought. Perhaps I will be able to avoid broken sentences in the future.

Hieram is a menace. He follows me about, lurking in doorways, trying to catch me unawares. He thinks, because he is a young man of the Blood and I am not, that he can force his will upon me; yet he does not quite have the courage to do so, because I am the Curator’s daughter, someday to be Curator myself. This puts me in a category of which he is not entirely certain, so he alternately watches me threateningly and tries to woo me, in the knowledge that any young woman not of the Blood is bound to be lacking in morals - or perhaps simply stupid.

After the shoeing, therefore, when I went looking for Ennis, all I found was Hieram. He followed me, despite my entreaties and my testy remarks. When I found Ennis, Hieram was in midstream, telling me how my eyes were like two pools, etc.

Ennis of course only raised his eyebrow at me, and I rolled my eyes back at him, but it was embarrassing anyhow, and I left, with Hieram in tow. I was nearly able to talk to him, and Hieram has spoilt it. Hieram will never get lucky with me. Why can’t he see it? Stupid, stupid.

Ennis and Hieram

2007-01-29T16:23:00.000-08:00

For the sake of the Lady! Last week was terribly brief, la? My sister came and woke me to tell me our father is much better, and I was very annoyed with her!!! Why she felt she needed to wake me I can’t say. She could equally have waited until morning, though I was grateful for the news.

My father is sitting up again, though his skin is still faintly green, as if he were having a hard time with his stomach. But he talks to us, and even jokes a little, and that is very heartening. I sit by his knee and count off the records to him so that he can keep track of what has been happening since he fell ill. We have three new stone heads, found in a field near Eeling, and a sword that belonged to the Red King, back in the lost days, which someone gave us when their father died. We are lucky that the people take the Museum so seriously; for many of them, the Museum has religious significance, and by giving things of value to our displays, they can win favor with the Gods. My father works not only with the things in the Museum but with the people, as an advisor. People treat him with respect, as he has his own kind of access to sacred ears.

Ennis came today to shoe the horses. It was a cold day - winter is touching the air these last few days - and he was bundled in a thick jacket, with the shoeing apron over his legs, and once again I did not recognize him at first. I went to watch the shoeing, as it has interested me since I was small, and after a time of measuring and trimming, Ennis straightened his back and shot me a sidewise smile which pierced me to the core. I was suddenly certain that he knew I knew his secret.

I went on watching, wondering what I would say to him. Should I apologize for following him that day? Or should I make light of it? I stood there, uncertain, until the Duke’s son Hieram, who I didn’t get to tell you about last week, strode into the courtyard and made a coarse joke about poor Ennis, bent over under the horse.

I was drawing my breath to protest - Hieram never fails to raise my hackles - when Ennis answered him quietly, perfectly placid. I was amazed by his indifference, until I grasped the joke in what he said, and snorted.

Hieram stopped suddenly - as if he had been shot - for he saw the joke only a beat after I, and turned around, all threat. But Ennis went on placidly working, looking like a dull groom about his work, while Hieram watched him narrowly. I suppose he was soothed by Ennis’ apparent humility, for after a moment he relaxed and went away inside.

“Gone to strengthen his Blood, la?” Ennis said to the horse’s hoof, and I snorted again, and was rewarded by that quick smile, which warmed me through. The smile told me we were conspirators, so when my mother called me to lunch, I went away with a light step, knowing he was seeing me all the way in.

Too fast

2007-01-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

I do hate how the Hands take themselves away while I am still shaping a sentence. Last sevenday, I was still considering what to say about my father’s illness and my place as nurse - when I was whisked away, back to my own bed. I must find some way to make the Hands stay until I am done with what I must say.
Who are you, out there? For whom do I write these things? I wish I could see you, oh owner of these aging Hands. Who else reads these things I write? I wish that I could know.

And yet, if I did know, would I be able to speak so freely about what is so close, so private, to my heart?

Hieram, the Duke of Aneth’s stupid son, has

Unfairness and Discomfort

2007-01-15T16:20:00.000-08:00

My father has taken ill. Although he is back in the King’s graces, I feel certain that there is someone else determined to do him harm. He became ill after eating a number of fruits that were sent here in a gift-basket for him; he cannot resist figs, and there were a number in the basket.

I had eaten some of the apples and one of the pears, and nothing came of it; but he was ill so suddenly after eating them that I suspect the sender knows he is fond of figs, and tried to poison him.

It is all so petty! Why would someone want to hurt him, except for silly political intrigues, or because he behaved in a way that was not perfectly correct? I am tired of the Lords of the House - they demand nothing short of slobbering flattery from those who are not of the Blood. Think of the sleep my father lost and how he was nearly ruined, simply by defending the King’s possessions from a greedy lord!

I have not seen Ennis all this week. My discovery of his secret has made me both grateful for his absence, so I may take time to know how I feel, and somewhat impatient for his return, for on examining my feelings, I find I wish very much to talk to him about his talent. I will find a way!

In the meantime, I must nurse my father, so

Ennis' Secret

2007-01-08T16:20:00.000-08:00

I'm afraid I don't know what I said last time. I have nothing to look at to confirm what I wrote.

...Oh, yes - I was talking about Ennis' secret, la?

I followed him, and I didn't know what to do. He seemed so impossible to reach, so much possibility for embarrassment!

I was torturing myself with all the horrid possibilities when he turned into a small. old, unused lane. Curious, I followed. It seemed so strange that my childhood friend could be hiding something; I didn't believe it. Still, I drew back behind a tree when he came to an old wine-making barn, decrepit and filthy, and looked around. I feel sure he did not see me, and when I dared to look he was nowhere in sight.

I felt a shiver creep down my back, but I crept out and looked all around the place. It looked just as falling-down as before, but I saw a footprint on the doorsill, and I knew he'd gone inside. So I peeped in at the windows.

They were all so dirty I couldn't see through them - except one, which had a small corner clear. Carefully, I peered through.

At first, I couldn't see anything, but I saw something moving off to the left. I thought it must be Ennis, walking back and forth. Then things became clearer, and I saw that he had removed some kind of covering which was letting light in through the ceiling. Before him was a large old table, covered with something lumpy. I looked and looked, trying to see what it was - and then he pulled at it and I saw it was a cloth covering something else.

When he paced by, pulling the cloth back, I almost lost my breath. On the table were several machines, some of the most beautiful I had ever seen. Different metals had been used, and they gleamed black and silver, coppery and yellowy-gold. Wooden knobs stuck out like a backbone from one, and some lovely and transparent things, like billowfish spines, rose from another. I could see the inner workings, and more innards scattered over the table. He was creating these machines, in secret.

Why he hid them, I can't say. I have not seen him since. I watched for awhile, but looking at someone's back while they file and drill and screw things together is dull, and after a time I gave up.

I have spent four days now thinking about this. I felt odd about Ennis before, confused and unhappy, and to this now is added some other strange emotion. I can't understand what it is. It is like excitement, or glee, or fierce happiness, but I am scared to death to come face to face with him, for I fear it would show in my face. I fear he will see it there and know I have been spying on him. I am so proud of him! How can I tell him so without letting him see I followed him?

The King has forgiven my fa

Hope

2006-12-23T01:42:00.000-08:00

I've been sleeping better and better.

There has been no word of the Duke's doings, and the King has been perfectly civil to my father, so we are hoping nothing will come of the Duke's displeasure.

Yesterday, I discovered Ennis's secret. He doesn't know I know yet, and I'm not sure how to approach him about it.

I saw him ahead of me on the road, and followed him awhile. I was of two minds, as always with him: to catch him up or to leave him alone, not burden him with my approach, unless I had something to speak to him about. I would do anything to avoid the horrors of the last time we saw each other. No true ill, just terrible embarrassment on my part. But more about that later.

I walked awhile, watching him, trying to think of something to say to him. I searched my mind for any subject on which to converse, any reason to approach him. Perhaps I could

Machines

2006-12-11T02:23:00.000-08:00

The Hands came so strongly and quickly tonight, it was almost a shock. I sat in the Hands' window, looking outside for awhile. The world outside is grey and sheets with rain. The buildings in this place are sharp and ugly. When I see them I know I am in no dream, for I could not imagine such things.

So with that question, where am I? Some other world I can enter through the door of sleep? Perhaps the Afterworld? How can I know? The thought makes me shiver, and I can see goose pimples rise on the Hands' arms. I must not let go, for I have so much to say, so many questions.

Hands, who are you? Can you answer me?

--I waited here for twenty minutes, and the Hands did not answer, did not even move from the typing machine. I will keep trying, each time I come.

The machines here are not like the machines at home. Yes, we have machines, though we do not move around in the strange, sleek waggons that the people here seem to use. Our machines are not work-machines, as yours seem to be. We do not use them to replace our bodies, for that would be blasphemous. Our Gods made our bodies as they are so that they can do the work at hand, and to give the work away is to shun the gifts we are given.

Our machines look different, and are for different purpose.

For example, we do not cover our machines in sleek metal clothing. The workings of machines are part of their marvelousness, and should be there for all to see. My father, who tends many machines in the Museum, says that the best machines show inspiration in their workings, and inspiration is of the spirit. Therefore by looking at the workings of the machines, people may be lifted in spirit, may be closer to inspiration, and thence to the Gods.

I understand what he is saying but I do not see the inspiration. It does not move me.

Still, I think the machines are beautiful. Their movements are carefully designed to please, the sounds they make and the way they work together are like a dance, like a symphony. I love to watch them.

Once, during the Night of Dance, Ennis and Amela and I ran through the middle of a wandering group of Hush Motors. Their gently-waving fingers brushed against our faces. We laughed and ran in circles, and the Hush motors shushed at us, tickling. I knew the adults would -

Oh. Here it co

Sleepless

2006-12-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry it's been so long!

I haven't been to visit the Hands for more than a moon, and the last time was only a quick peek before I was drawn back again. There was no time to write.

I have been sleeping badly.

My father is in trouble with the Duke of Aneth, which makes him in trouble with the King. When the Duke is angry with you you must walk very carefully! I know my father is not sleeping well either, for late at night when I am turning and turning in my bed I can hear him through the floor, pacing and pacing.

It's a stupid reason, too. The Duke took a fancy to a sword in the museum and would take it away. My father said he couldn't take it, it belonged to the King's grandfather, and a King's sword is too important for a Duke to use.

He made a mistake. The Duke was stung; he doesn't like being made to feel small, and my father, who is usually so diplomatic, didn't speak carefully enough. I think he was tired, and angry that the Duke thought he could take such a thing, as if it belonged to him. My father feels that the Duke is too free with the King's things, with the King himself even, but he would never normally say such a thing. The King is so easygoing, it is easy for people to forget themselves with him, but everyone knows the Duke takes advantage of this kindness of the King's.

So now the Duke is poisoning the King's ear with false tales about my father. The king, sweet man that he is, can hardly believe it, and shakes his head in disbelief, or so I hear. But the Duke will win, in the end. And that is what takes my father's sleep: how long?

The terrible thing, the thing I can't tell anyone, is that I'm not sleepless because of my father's trouble. I have troubles of my own.

The other day I saw Ennis again. He was working with his father, unloading hay from the waggon, and he had his shirt off. When I saw it I didn't know what to do, because that feeling I had before that he was someone I didn't know came back, but I was also embarrassed, because I wanted to say hello. I stood there, feeling stupid and watching him work, and the longer I stood there the worse it got. Finally, I thought I would sneak away before he saw me, but of course as soon as I moved, he looked up.

He smiled at me and waved, and suddenly I could see the old Ennis inside that big person, and it felt wonderful to have him back!!! I smiled back, I think, but then the sun shone on his skin and the moment was over. I felt embarrassed again, and I ran off. I could feel him looking after me as I went, but there was nothing I could do.

Ever since then I've been anxious all the time. It's so strange. I look everywhere for him, terrified I might see him; but when I don't see him I'm somewhat disappointed. It's horribly confusing. I can hardly sleep, thinking how foolish I must have looked and wondering what to do next time.

So, trying to get away from that thinking, for it is useless as well as hopeless, I have been raiding the library for books, and reading long into the night. If I get tired enough, I will sleep. If not, well, then I turn and turn.

In the meantime, I can hear my father down below: tramp, tramp, tramp. My mother says we look like a couple of ghosts. She can't stand how tired we look. I don't blame her. If I had anot

Loneliness

2006-11-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

I'm back.

It's hard for me to finish these letters carefully. When I wake up it pulls me away from the hands and I can't control them anymore. It seems to happen piece by piece, so the writing gets a little spotty at the end. I'm sorry if it gets confusing!

Today I was out sweeping the courtyard when Ennis came by. Ennis is a boy I used to play with when we were smaller. He is very intelligent and quick, and about three years older than me. He used to look out for me when all of us children had adventures - which is another way of saying getting into trouble.

About five years ago he had to go work with his father in the stables. Before I began working with my father, I used to go visit him there, though now I don't see him much at all. He would let me help feed and curry the horses, and sometimes we would talk if he had a moment. I always liked talking to him. He is very soft-spoken and full of life. He makes very funny jokes, but you have to listen carefully for them. It is easy to think him too serious, which he is not.

Today, when I saw him, I was shocked at how tall he had become. It was terrible; he came into the courtyard and I almost didn't recognize him until he said, "Hello, Neddeth," and then when I did I was overcome. All the old easiness was gone, and we stood awkwardly, he and I, talking about stupid things. Finally, he said he had to go back to work, and when he left I almost wept.

I do not have many friends, especially now I am spending so much time on Museum business. Ennis was a good one, and now I've lost him. It is especially hard as he was one of the few children who thought I was a happy person. It is easy, if someone is quiet and does not smile much, to think that person is too serious or even sour. My sister, who is much older than me and married now, is always telling me to smile. She says that if you smile at people they will do anything for you, but I feel uncomfortable pretending like that. Especially getting other people to do things for you.

I keep thinking about seeing him. It was so confusing!!!! I knew who he was, and remembered all our conversations, but I could not make the person standing beside me feel like the person who had said all those things, done all those things. The thought of that tall person carrying me across a creek now makes me blush.

I think sometimes my Hands - I mean the person who writes this for me - must feel much as I do, alone much of the time and sometimes lonely. Busy, though. I can see from the edges of the Hands' vision that their owner makes things. What kind of things, I don't know, but there is a table with things on it that is clearly a Making-table. I wonder if he or she longs for contact with others?

I can feel the beginnings of wakefulness. Goodb

Dreaming and Waking

2006-10-26T16:13:00.000-07:00

It's a bit weird, writing this.

I know I'm dreaming. It's one of these dreams where you know you're dreaming and you do it anyway, la? I can see where I am, and the people going by outside the window of this...room, and everything. I even know how to work this machine. I see my hands (which look too old to me) working away, and the letters are pouring across the screen. AND IT'S MY WORDS!!!!! What I'm wanting to say is said, written. By me, I think. But where do these old hands come from?

I can't see everything. The room is kind of shadowy and the light coming in the window is a funny color. I think it might be nighttime, though it is very bright. I turn my head and see a bed, not made, behind me. It's a funny kind of bed, like for one person, la? It makes me a little sad to look at it. The person who my hands belong to seems lonely.

I don't know how long I'll be here so I'll write as fast as I can.

Where do I start?

I've been having these dreams for a long time. Several moons, at least. Every time I had one I found myself staring at these hands - sometimes on the machine, sometimes holding a cup or a spoon. Usually very short dreams, just a moment or two. But I didn't know I was dreaming, until last night.

Last night, here I was again, looking at the hands on the machine. They were typing, a letter, I think, and there was a strange sound outside. A hooting noise came close and then passed by, and there was something about that noise that startled me. As if I woke up from dreaming and knew that I was dreaming. I've had these dreams before, haven't you? Suddenly you know you're in a dream and you can push things around a bit, make things happen. Or at least stop being frightened. So I told the hands what I wanted to say. They hesitated, and I tried again, and then they did something to the screen. It got brighter, and the letter went away, and suddenly they were typing my words!!!!! I could not bear the feeling, and I woke.

All that day, I did my work in a trance, thinking and thinking about what had happened. Why had I been so frightened? It was only a dream, only a pair of hands doing my work for me. Yet it had been so strange to make something happen so truly. I can't explain it. Always before, when I've had one of those dreams - my mother calls them halsa dreams, you know, the kind you can control - it has been funny, or odd, or simply crazy. But this time it felt so real. So, even though I still felt frightened, I determined in myself that I would stay there this night, and not be driven away by my own fear.

And so, here I am. Usually these kinds of dreams don't last long. Which is why I have to push these hands to write quickly.

I live in the top floor of the museum, in the Palace grounds. My father is the Curator, and I...well, I am what is known as a palace brat. Though really, I'm too old for that now. I used to run around with the other children, but since my twelfth birthday, for nearly two years now, I have been working with my father to learn the trade. It is a slow business, curating, and a different person would hate it. But I am like my father, and I like it. He is kind to me and does not make me spend the whole day inside, but sends me on errands or lets me go study light and shadow with my paints, so it isn't too bad.

On feast-days I -

I feel my mother calling! I will writ ag in lat