Hic Sunt Dragones.

—The Lenox Globe (Sixteenth Century)

Our relationship with dragons is a strange one.

The dragon is a myth that has grown and molded itself to whatever contradictions the current age requires. It’s a world-carrier or a treasure-hoarder, celestial or flawed. Fra Mauro, on his fifteenth century map of the world, dismissed the kind of superstition that believed in fictional beasts. Elsewhere on the map, a small island is neatly labeled, “Isola de Dragoni.”

But though there are exceptions in every age, dragons of the classical mold can be found as one of three kinds; though, as most myths do, these dragons may overlap one another, and a few generations may turn a benevolent wish-granter into an obstacle that must be slain.

***

1. His Heart is as Firm as a Stone: Dragons as Force

In [Leviathan’s] neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy before him… His heart is as firm as a stone…The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold.

—Job 41: 22-26

This great universe, situated on one of Lord Anantadeva’s thousands of hoods, appears just like a white mustard seed. It is infinitesimal compared to the hood of Lord Ananta.

—Srimad Bhagavatam, Canto 5, Chapter 25

The earth is a tangle of dragons.

The dragon is a myth given veracity by the fossil record that offers dinosaur remains as proof positive of the monsters who had possessed the world, once. The dragon is a monster that carries any burden we give it—terror, wish-granter, lesson.

The first incarnation of the dragon is as a force beyond ken, a force so great that it conquers nature, or becomes it. This dragon is pervasive, appearing in dozens of cultures as a serpent with wings or with talons, with feathers or with a mouth large enough to swallow a hundred men. (They are often to be prayed to; while they can grant wishes, they’re quick to anger, and the sword laid against them cannot hold.)

For the people of the Santa Clara Pueblo, Avanyu is the dragon who brings water. His brothers, in spirit if not in geography, are the Japanese Ryu, the Vietnamese Long, and the Hebrew Leviathon. Mayan Kukulkan is the messenger of the sun.

Indian myth, perhaps, trusts its dragons most; Ananta-Shesha, the zenith of serpents, is he upon whom the earth rests. As he uncoils and stretches, time moves forward and the universe flourishes; when he curls back into himself, the universe will cease, and only he will be left; his name marks him as the eternal: “that which remains.”

***

2. The Imprint of Her Foot Serpentous: The Monstrous Woman

Tiâmat opened her mouth to its greatest extent… Her heart was gripped, she opened wide her mouth. Marduk grasped the spear, he split up her belly…He pierced [her] heart … He brought her to naught, he destroyed her life … He cast down her carcase, he took up his stand upon it.

—Enuma Elish, 4.97-4.104

I was a woman, let me have once more
A woman’s shape, and charming as before.
I love a youth of Corinth—O the bliss!
Give me my woman’s form, and place me where he is.

—John Keats, “Lamia”

“Go thou hence, false serpent!”…
Then she began to give a sore sigh, and therewith flew out the window, transfigured like a serpent great and long in fifteen foot of length; And mark it well that on the base-stone of the window appeareth to this day the imprint of her foot serpentous.

—Jean D’Arras, “Melusine” (from Old English), 1393

Of all the terrifying forms a dragon takes, it seems that to be a woman is, despite all the possibilities, the worst of all.

Though tales of the monstrous woman appear thousands of miles apart, the fate of the woman (often discovered by her beloved to have been a serpent in disguise) varies little. In both the Greek myth of Lamia and the French folktale of Melusine, a dragon takes human form for love of a man. Her beloved spies on her and discovers her secret; he decries her, and each heroine takes her true form and returns to the world of beasts. (Some, like Melusine, are faithful, and haunt but one bloodline; the Lamias all take victims as they stray.)

Monstrous women can come even from within a friendly nest. In Japan, where dragons are often wish-granters and givers of advice, the legend of Kiyohime follows a widow who transforms into a fearsome dragon, tears the monastery to pieces, and immolates the monk who spurned her love. The story ends with a warning about “the strength of the evil in the female heart.”

And sometimes, the monstrous woman needs no human form at all; instead, conquest of the female dragon is necessary to end a reign of terror. Marduk, who climbs on the corpse of the chaos-dragon Tiamat in the Babylonian creation story and uses her body parts to build and furnish the earth, is the first of the great dragon slayers, but not the last; in Portugal, St. George’s dragon was a female, too.

***

3. A Countenance of Terror: Dragon as Rite of Passage

But George, astride his horse, against this beast rode he,
And commended himself to Jesus Christ and blessed him with his hand.
Against the dragon with strengthened heart quickly he did ride,
And the spear against the beast was set and hit him full and right,
And to the earth George bore him down, all a hardy knight.

—”St. George and the Dragon,” c. 1400

A countenance of terror I bore up before all folk, after that I brooded over the heritage of my brother, and on every side did I spout out poison, so that none durst come anigh me, and of no weapon was I adread, nor ever had I so many men before me, as that I deemed myself not stronger than all; for all men were sore afraid of me.

—Volsunga Saga, “Of the Slaying of the Worm Fafnir”

His rage passes description–the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.

—J. R. R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

The ultimate dragon, of course, is the one that balances the godly with the mortal, the dragon that is fearsome enough to wreak havoc, and fallible enough to be slain.

This third dragon is what proves a hero’s worth.

This is the modern dragon: the beast slain by Sigurd—Fafnir, who shriveled to a reptile as he hoarded treasure—can trace his line directly to Smaug of the Lonely Mountain. This is the dragon St. George slew with a single strike, like Beowulf, Gawain, and a hundred heroes after.

Interestingly, these dragons are already more humanized than their elemental ancestors; the same shifts in cultural perception that make them fallible to heroes make them vulnerable to other human weaknesses. These dragons are petty enough for greed, and are the treasure-hoarders.

This dragon is an obstacle who serves each master to his needs. (This is the dragon that, if the quest requires, can be tamed.) Perseus slew the serpent to win a royal lineage and defy the gods; St. George used his dragon to honor his god, and converted thirty thousand pagans with a dragon’s head.

***

The Once and Future Dragon

Cimorene felt very frightened. The smallest of the dragons was easily three times as tall as she was, and they gave an overwhelming impression of shining green scales and sharp silver teeth…

“Well?” said the three-horned dragon just in front of her. “Just what are you asking us to do for you?”

—Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons

The dragon, a legendary beast more chameleonic than most, embodies the world and the time of those who would honor it, or slay it. The modern dragon is aware of its parentage, but as humanity’s struggles have changed from merely surviving in the world to conquering it, so has the dragon become a steed (as are the dragons of Pern), a helpmeet (The Dragon and the George’s Smrgol), an irascible employer of brave young women (as Cimorene soon discovers).

In a world where humanity has broken nature, the next dragons might complete the cycle of regard, becoming symbols of a natural balance fatally disrupted, a way of life that’s vanished. Or worldly conflict might make use of dragons as both obstacle and savior, and they will fortify their scaly armor and become beasts of war.

But at heart, the dragon may be truer to itself than we think; in both creation and fatality, the old, unslayable dragons would wake, and see themselves, and be pleased.

Before you get in over your head, consider these warnings against the biggest downsides of making eyes at the celestial sphere.

***

Unrequited Love

Unrequited love is uncomfortable for everyone involved, and disrupts the world’s careful balance of woeful mix tapes. When half of this equation is a deity, there’s no way it’s going to end well.

If you’re the piner, making the first move is strongly discouraged. Bodhisattva Quan Yin preferred death to marriage (and, given that she soothes the sorrows of all humanity, she’s probably too busy to date, anyway). Greek hunting-goddess Artemis alone could fill a quarry with the bodies of those who put the moves on her and failed. Actaeon was turned into a deer and torn apart by his own hounds just for laying eyes on her. When twin giants Otos and Ephialtes swore to kidnap her from Olympus and forcibly wed her, she changed into a deer and darted between them to trick them into killing one another with spears. (Sub-lesson: Don’t be a jerk.)

If you’re the pinee, and there’s an amorous deity with his eyes on you, the outlook is even worse. (Universal rule of godly power: If it exists in nature, a mortal can be turned into it.) Your best options are to appeal to the deity’s spouse ASAP, and run for your life as soon as the spousal bickering begins, or to look as much like a tree as possible and hope they lose interest (A for effort, Daphne), but even then, with gods, there’s really no knowing.

***

Awkward Family Dinners

So, let’s say you and the god of your choice are lucky enough to have a mutual attraction. Congratulations! Sadly, you’re still in the weeds; eventually, she is going to bring you home to meet the family. And you’re doomed.

Pantheons the world over are heavy subscribers to the Keep It in the Family Newsletter. Even worse, these family ties are extremely flexible; what you think is your sweetheart’s mother Bastet might end up being his sister and, occasionally, his wife. And if you’re dallying with Vishnu, you might be able to fill a dining room with nothing but his own incarnations.

However, pretty much anything would be better than a reunion in Asgard. Norse god Loki has an entire saga devoted to the time he crashed a dinner party and starting a flyting (a Ye Olde Insult Battle), reminding people of the loved ones he killed until finally they tied him to a rock with the entrails of his own son. Sometimes there just aren’t enough hostess presents in the world, you know?

And there’s not even a reassurance that they can keep it in their intermythology pants: Egyptian and Syrian gods were often caught canoodling where both cults were prevalent, and the popular Isis made serious headway into Greece and Rome right through the age of Christianity. You’ll never be able to shake all those gods-in-law.

***

Two-Timers

Of all the things deities are known for, fidelity is at the very bottom of the list, just below “excess ear hair.” If you’re dating one, be prepared for a lifetime of heartbreak. And while Zeus may be the most notorious of all gods ever in terms of stepping out on his wife—half the natural world exists because he couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to shapeshift his exes before Hera showed up, leading to one unlucky mistress staying a cow for years—there are several others hot on his heels.

Loki, when not starting enormous fights in Asgard, fathered several children with mortals out of wedlock, and even birthed one—the eight-legged horse Sleipnir—while in the form of a mare, an indiscretion which disgusts his enemy Heimdallr … who’s the son of nine mothers, which is an infidelity issue we can’t even fathom. (The family tree problem is no joke.)

The Celtic goddess Cliodna took numerous lovers, many of whom met unhappy ends, and for spite of whom, in some legends, she was banished to the sea. Meanwhile, her Greek cousin Aphrodite, goddess of love, made cheating on her husband an art form. To be fair, her husband was the plainest of the gods, and was chosen for her by Zeus to make the other gods stop fighting over the right to marry her. Zeus, of all the gods, should have known better than to think marriage stops outside romantic entanglements.

Even if you take sex out of the equation, you might end up with an absentee deity who wanders around for years with twelve guys who can’t stop writing home about how much they love him: Jesus, you’re an awful boyfriend.

And a faithful spouse could still make for some awkward moments—such as with the fertility god Min, whose defining feature in art is his erect penis, and in whose honor Egyptian youths had pole-climbing contests in a display of virility that they hoped would flood the Nile. (There’s a photo album to show the kids.)

***

Break-up Drama

Here’s the rub: Even if it’s requited, and even if you manage to get past the family squabbles, and even if you forgive all the stepping out, your relationship is probably doomed.

Every once in a while, you luck out and pull an Ariadne, who was discovered by the lovestruck Dionysus moments after being abandoned by her previous mostly-mortal lover. (Upgrade!) But that’s far from the rule, and if there’s one thing the gods really savor, it’s their break-ups.

Often it’s a flat-out smiting. Sumerian goddess Inanna actually married the mortal Dumuzi, but when she returned from a period of captivity in the underworld, Dumuzi wasn’t in mourning for her. Inanna divorced him posthaste and condemned him to take her place in the underworld.

Sometimes there’s a more roundabout end to a godly relationship. Mesoamerican goddess Mayahuel had a flirtation with Quetzalcoatl that ended when demons chased her down and tore her into hundreds of pieces. Quetzalcoatl’s apology: Burying the pieces in the soil, where the first agave plants sprouted. How … sweet. (But since agave could be distilled, Mayahuel eventually became the goddess of drunkenness, so you can always toss one back in her honor.)

And even when your love is for real, the pantheon tends to conspire against you; Titan Eos accidentally cursed her mortal lover Tithonos with immortality sans youthfulness clause, which caused him to shrivel until he became a grasshopper. (Sorry, babe—my bad.)

***

Really, the more one looks across cultures, the more the stats on god-dating build up as overwhelmingly negative. The best thing you could do for self-preservation is to avoid extreme good looks, extreme boasting, or extreme heroism, and never even cast a glance at the skies. But if, after all this evidence to the contrary, you’d like to date a deity, go right ahead: You might be just foolish enough to make a good myth.

Then again, even if the wishes go right, things can get pretty odd.

The history of supernatural requests is a storied one, but some wishes are stranger than others. These bizarre boons are off the beaten track—or, in some cases, flat-out head-scratchers. (Don’t worry; we’ll work out the moral of the story; no self-respecting fairy tale leaves the house without one!)

***

1. Horticulture Begins at Home

In the German tale “The Carnation,” a queen gives birth to a son with the power of wishing. A palace cook steals the kid and frames the Queen for criminal negligence. While she lingers in a tower prison with only angels to feed her, the cook makes the kid his ward, and the kid grows up making his fake dad’s every wish come true, like a palace (sure) and a young girl as a companion (huh).

As the years pass, the cook gets paranoid that the kid will someday wish to see his true parents and spoil the game. Like any dad would, he tries to get the young woman to murder her “brother”; instead, she does the old Snow White kill-a-hind fake-out. The young man, remarkably slow on the uptake until that moment, begins to suspect foul play, so he turns the cook into a dog (sure) and the frightened young woman into a carnation (huh) and heads back home. He goes to work for his real father the King until he’s summoned for his good work (sure). There he turns the dog and the carnation into humans, and after the cook is murdered, the King sanctions the marriage of the erstwhile brother and sister. He also frees the Queen, who doesn’t want any part of this reunion; she invokes God and dies (huh).

It’s the Platonic ideal of the wish story—someone with unlimited wishes and the uncanny ability to deploy them without unpleasant side effects. And yet, even though nothing spins out of control for the wisher, the wishes get weirder as he executes his revenge plan (which largely hinges on the cook/dog somehow not thinking he’s in trouble until the last second—only in a fairy tale). As usual, no bones are made about the multiple kidnappings, imprisonments, and unwilling sororal shapeshifts, since it’s a Grimm Brothers tale, and they always enjoyed a little intrafamily terrorism.

Weird Wish: Turning someone into a flower against their will so you can cart them home to Daddy.

Moral of the story: Don’t stick your neck out for your jerk brother or he’ll just turn you into a carnation every time he’s pissed at you, and then marry you.

***

2. All Creatures Great and Small

Another Grimm picking with an odd and roundabout wishing system is the tale of The White Snake (rock horns!). A kitchen servant in the King’s hall steals a piece of white snake from the King’s secretive nightly supper. Turns out the flesh of the snake gives the young man the ability to speak to animals. He harnesses this neato gift to locate a missing jewel of the Queen’s in a goose’s throat, and then uses his reward money to travel the countryside, helping a series of animals—fish, ants, and ravens—who are all in dire straits, and who all promise to return the favor.

Since this is a fairy tale, they all do! (Fairy tale creatures rarely pretend to be out of town when you call in a favor.) Our young hero falls head over heels for a princess, and when he’s tasked with fetching a magic ring at the bottom of a lake, those fish come in handy. The princess, not satisfied, casts a sack of grain into a field and orders him to gather it, which is where the ants repay their debt. Finally, the princess tasks him with picking the apple of life, and the ravens deliver. Having run out of ways to tell him she’s not interested, the princess marries him and he lives happily ever after (no word on how the princess resigned herself to it all).

Aside from the fact that he might have been pretty unpleasant if the princess was constantly setting him impossible tasks to put off marrying the guy, here’s another young gent making the best of his powers, even though this time the wishes are made independent of the power itself; I guess we can take comfort knowing that he performs some good deeds before cashing in on his wishes, which is more than we can say for Boutonniere Jack up top.

Weird Wish: The wishes themselves are pretty standard, if you can look past the fact that nobody whatsoever wanted this guy to marry the princess; the baffling bit is that for a genre that delights in punishing people, this seems like an implicit endorsement of palace embezzlement.

Moral of the story: If you don’t feed your waiters a shift meal, they’ll just take it off the back end.

***

3. Don’t Go Changing Just to Please Me

The 17th-century Italian fairy tale “Peruonto” follows the travails of a very well-meaning young man who’s roundly chastised for being the stupidest man in all creation by a bunch of villagers who probably have not had a lot of experience with politicians. On his way to get wood for the fire, he sees three men sleeping under a burning sun, and builds a shelter for them. When they wake, they thank him for his kindness and reveal that, since they’re the sons of a fairy, they bestow the power of wishing on him.

Peruonto’s first wish is to ride his firewood home (sure), which brings him to the attention of princess Vastolla, who laughs at his antics. She tells her father she’ll marry only the man who rode the wood (oh, fairy tales, you and your symbolism). Once her dad is done threatening to kill her, he throws a feast at the palace, and Peruonto appears! Then the King seals them both into a wine barrel and throws them into a river (huh).

They’re done for, until Vastolla finds out Peruonto can wish for things, at which point she suggests that maybe he might want to wish them safely on a ship or something. That works, and so the princess has him wish them into a palace, and then has him wish himself handsome and personable (awkward). They live happily ever after, with a brief appearance by a penitent father whom everyone forgives for the Wine Barrel Incident.

This is another story in which kindness is rewarded with wishes, though none of our other heroes has had to suffer the indignity of being asked to wish himself more socially-acceptable. It’s also worth noting that even though we have yet to see a single woman being gifted with wishes herself, Vastolla worked that ability like rent was due.

Weird Wish: “Wish yourself to be less terrible” is pretty much the harshest wish we’ve ever heard.

Moral of the story: All the wishes in the world won’t make you any smarter (unless you wish yourself smarter, in which case, best to do that before your wife brings it up).

***

The power of wishes in fairy tales is a potent one, beyond the obvious plot-enhancing opportunities (and the universal satisfaction of turning an annoying family member into a dog). It’s worth noting the subtext of all these wish-centric stories; the protagonists are usually from a humble beginning, and the clout of their wishes allows them to escape their social status, triumph over their enemies, or internalize the qualities of royalty. In that case, a wish is never just a wish, which makes the origins of these stories a little clearer, even though the execution sometimes veers into the realm of sororal horticulture.

The Circus Tresaulti spent the winter on the road, Ayar the strong man knocking the stakes into the ground when it was frozen over.

They bartered for liquor to keep warm, and when spring came they pushed the trucks through the mud to save oil, and everything went on as before, and nothing broke.

But that was the winter they found the house.

***

The mansion stands more than two miles from the city walls, far enough that the looters have given up, and it’s been left to rot so long that the city’s children wouldn’t understand it’s a house.

The windows go first, from enemy fire and bad frosts. Then the moss and ivy move in, and the birds, and the rain. At last, the brick begins to crumble.

By the time the Circus comes, it will be a ruin.

But by the time the Circus comes, the storm has been raging for days, and the house rises up from the road, and Boss thinks, We must rest here, there’s no way to go on.

“Stop,” says Boss, and the Circus stops.

***

The Circus waits in leaking trailers while Boss takes her lieutenants through the house.

Then, her lieutenants are Elena from the trapeze, and Panadrome the music man, who presses his accordion bellows tight to his side to keep it from sharp edges, and Alec, their final act, who folds his gleaming wings tight against his back so he can fit through the hole in the wall.

Inside, the ceiling is waterlogged and sagging, but when Alec opens his wings even the nails sing for him.

Alec laughs, and the birds in the rafters scatter as if he’s called them down.

(Alec will be dead in a year; these are the last birds he sees.)

***

They split up to cover ground; the house was grand, before it went to seed.

What Boss sees: five rooms with floors that haven’t rotted through; a ballroom with a chandelier still hanging; three bathrooms with copper pipes intact behind the stone. (She can see metal right through walls, by now.)

What Boss does not see: Alec in a dining room with only a sideboard left, silhouetted against wallpaper that was green once. He faces a painting of a banquet, but his head is lowered. His wings are folded; he is still.

Elena stands behind him. Her forehead rests on his bare back, in the cradle between the wings. Her eyes are closed; her skin becomes pinker, as if she’s waking from a long sleep.

(His wings are tall. They swallow her.)

***

Panadrome is beside the piano when Boss finds him.

One of the legs has collapsed, dropping the higher registers to the ground, and a few keys sank with the impact, but otherwise it’s pristine.

He holds a blanket in his skeleton fingers, and the piano is free of dust; long ago someone, in their terror, still risked a kindness to a beautiful thing.

“We’ll stay here,” Boss says.

He doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He thinks the Circus might fall apart if it stops.

After too long he says, “As you like.”

“You think it’s not safe?”

Alec comes in, and Elena a few moments later.

“If you want us to live in an obstacle course,” Elena says, “you’ve found the right place.”

Boss says, “They can use the mess to shore up the holes, then. Call them.”

Elena scowls and goes.

Alec smiles at Boss, holds out a hand. “Did you see the dining hall? There’s a painting of a banquet, in case you forget what room you’re in.”

A moment later Panadrome is alone, one hand on the piano, pulling in breath he doesn’t need.

***

Boss has a knack for skeletons.

Panadrome has never asked to have his silver hands covered over (though more than once Boss brought back someone’s hands, still bleeding, and asked, “You need a pair of gloves?”).

He is proud of the slender phalanges, the slightly curved metatarsals, the wrist joints always dark with oil. It is a testament to her art, and he would never dream of covering it.

But it is not a hand.

(A painting of a banquet may be beautiful, but you’re no less hungry.)

***

They gave him oranges to carry, palm down. It strained very particular muscles so you could hold your hands aloft for the length of a concert.

(You cannot rest your weight in your fingertips when you play; your fingers are puppets, and the palms of your hands are the framework that holds them aloft.)

Now, he can play the accordion just as well as he ever could, though he thinks it’s not as though anyone plays the accordion so much as cajoles a song from it.

But in the crumbling house, he stands beside the piano without moving to the bench.

(Panadrome’s hands are pipes and gears. He does not have the spread between fingers that you need—the spread you could achieve if you practiced hard enough, if you held enough oranges, if you were born with the necessary reach. He could cover thirteen notes, in his prime.)

He has not seen a piano in a long time; winters are hard, and their wood burns as well as any other.

He is the last piano player in the world, the very last, and in the crumbling house he stands beside the instrument and trembles.

***

The Circus makes a home.

They drag stones to patch up the holes, and bolster the ceilings where they can, and come to blows over who gets the driest rooms, and Ayar the strong man reaches through the brick walls like they’re made of cheese and pulls away long strands of copper. He takes it all; Boss wants it for the things she builds, and there’s no knowing the next time they’ll have a store like this.

“You look like a snake charmer,” says Little George, when Ayar brings them to the workshop trailer for safekeeping.

(Not a drop of rain has gotten into the workshop. The workshop is sealed tight as the grave.)

***

Elena fights to keep the aerialists in their trailer and out of the house (“Just what I need, one of them breaking and me having to start from scratch.”), but Boss allows no mutinies.

So Elena turns her battle to getting them the driest room, and they all crowd their pallets in, laughing, alongside Ayar and Jonah, whose clockwork lungs are susceptible to damp.

Elena lasts two hours before she moves her things to the third story.

The next day Boss says, “The floors up there are rotted through. You’ll fall and snap your head off.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Elena says.

***

Panadrome comes back to the piano room, often, and pulls the blanket away like a magician mid-trick.

He thought he was used to knowing that there would be no music that did not come from him, from the brass barrel of his body and the spindly silver lengths of his arms, from the bellows on one side and the keys on the other that make him useless for work.

He thought it would please him, to have power like that. (You think a lot of strange things, before the truth sinks in.)

***

If he tried, he might be able to play the final duet from Heynan and Bello. If he tried.

The melodies are layered, but the range is not large; it’s an opera expressiva, and those rely on depth over breadth.

It’s a pleasure to conduct. It lacks the classic majesty of Queen Tresaulta, but Heynan and Bello has its own appeal for the musician: Every theme (the bold brother Bello, the clever sister Heynan, the court families, the castle) can be played over any of the others.

During the siege, when all the themes are played at once, the wall of sound is transporting, and even from his harbor on the conductor’s podium there is a sense that the music could break free and swallow them.

The finale is softer. Only Heynan and Bello are onstage, and their separate notes move quietly forward into the end. When they’re about to be discovered, they clasp hands and pitch themselves over the edge of the tower into the sea, to keep their love from becoming known.

After they fall, the love theme plays. It has appeared only once before, in the moment of their first kiss, two bars of music between their own songs like a dream they only remember after it’s too late.

He found himself bent almost double at the end of every performance, as if he could pull every bow over the strings himself.

But he has never understood it.

The music is beautiful enough that he should be able to understand (he’s a musician, that’s his work), but it’s the reverse; their themes are so sad that every time he conducts it, he thinks that this time they will face whoever enters, and triumph, and walk out free.

(If you can make something so beautiful, why would you ever stop?)

***

This is what he thinks about every time Boss is going to bring someone into the circus.

She takes his hand, pulls him aside (she never hesitates to touch him, the only one of them who does).

Then she asks, “What did you think of that?” and behind her eyes the performer is already taking shape.

“I vote yes,” he says, because if you can make something beautiful, why would you ever stop?

(Her hands are always warm; he doesn’t know how he knows.)

***

“No fires,” Boss says, the first night.

The house is far from the city, but she knows by now that the kind of city that grows from a prison is the kind that doesn’t like neighbors moving in.

She and Alec make their bed in a room with no windows, just in case. His wings catch any light they can find.

“It’s charming,” he says the first night, as they listen to what might be birds fighting over their heads. “Reminds me of camping.”

(It’s a joke. He was born after the war started; that kind of leisure doesn’t exist anymore. But she tells him what the world was like, and he pretends, because it pleases her.)

“Go to sleep,” she says, smiling, and he settles onto his stomach, his wings along his back.

They each face away from the other, pretending to sleep, for a long time.

He is listening to the little bird-sounds above them that he knows are Elena.

Boss is listening as hard as she can, right through the walls, for the sound of the city coming for them.

***

For a while, everything is quiet.

The crew sleeps, recovering from the winter. The aerialists sleep, recovering from Elena.

The floors start to fall in, and the Grimaldi Brothers practice by balancing on each other in the weakest points, and leaping away when the boards give in. (Little George stands in the doorways, judges how impressive the tumbling is, and declares winners.)

Ayar and Jonah find a few books under a pile of rubble, read them until the paper starts to flake.

Elena strings up a trapeze in the attic.

“The birds won’t be happy,” says Alec, at dinner.

(Elena still comes down to dinner with the rest; Boss gave the order.)

Elena seems not to hear, and it’s Little George who says under his breath, “She’s probably eating them,” and gets a box on his ears from Boss.

Panadrome watches from his corner for a while before he disappears.

(He’s long ago given up the pretense of food. He tried for a while, to be part of the family, but some things aren’t worth pretending over.)

***

The house is enormous, but they seem to fill it more as days pass, until it’s a trick to find a room that won’t eventually be hosting the Grimaldis as they play.

There are two exceptions.

The music room they leave alone. Boss gave the order.

The attic is Elena’s, and that’s all it takes to keep them out. Not worth the trouble; she holds a grudge.

No one gives that one a second thought. No one even glances at the attic stairs, growing from a servants’ staircase at the end of some hallway they gutted of pipes.

(No one sees the second set of footprints marking passage, flanked with little sharp cuts in the dust where his feathers have been.)

***

The city sees them.

When the militia comes, Boss meets them with Little George beside her, and two of the crew in their work clothes, and one of the crew dressed up in bangles and veils. The others arrange themselves inside the house to hide their numbers and look as sweet as possible.

Alec, Panadrome, Ayar, and Jonah crowd into the windowless room where Boss and Alec sleep. Elena stands guard at the door, in case the city people make it that far. (She was a good soldier, in her day.)

Little George comes up to relieve them.

“She said we were happy to put on a week of free shows,” he says, still panting from the sprint upstairs. “They didn’t want any of it. They said we have until nightfall to leave town, or they’re going to burn us out.”

“What did Boss say?” Panadrome frowns.

“She said, Yes of course, no harm meant, we didn’t realize it was city property, thank you for the warning, we’ll start packing right now, and then they left.”

Alec is smiling. “And what does Boss really say?”

Little George grins so hard his ears move up his head.

“She says if they’re going to be rude, so can we. We’re heading to the woods to harvest what we can.”

Jonah and Ayar and Alec walk out smiling.

Panadrome doesn’t move. He stands where he is, and reminds himself over and over that the piano is just another beautiful thing.

They’ve all said goodbye to beautiful things; it’s the nature of the business.

Still, he stands where he is a long time.

(What Panadrome does not see: Elena standing in the attic, looking at Alec’s footprints in the dust, reminding herself it’s the nature of the business.)

***

Jonah comes back with an armful of potatoes.

“There are more,” he says, “it’s just that the ground cover is so thick, and I can’t reach.”

(His lungs are housed in a gold beetle-dome; he has to be careful.)

Boss organizes a hunting party, and under cover of dusk they slink into the trees to shore up enough food to keep the crew from dropping dead around them.

Panadrome takes the time to look over the house, now that people’s boots have left a trail where the floor is sound. He’d never been beyond the ground floor before; he’s not an adventurer, by nature.

He’s on the second story when the music starts, and he thinks his mind is playing tricks on him.

But there are too many mistakes his imagination would never make, and he creeps downstairs wishing there were a weapon left for him to wield.

Instead he creeps to the doorway, glances inside.

Elena is kneeling, playing a song they use in children’s primers, pausing every few chords to frown and adjust her fingering.

Her hands are strong enough (a lifetime on trapeze), but her fingers are stiff. She had a poor teacher. The piano’s out of tune, which doesn’t help.

But still he rests his temple on the wall, and listens to the first notes in ages that haven’t come from him.

Then she pauses mid-phrase, and he realizes after too long that she’s standing. It’s not absence of mind—she’s given up. The notes are hanging, dissonant.

“You have to finish,” he says, moving into sight.

If she’s startled, it doesn’t show. “I don’t remember.”

“I’ll teach you,” he says.

He must sound too desperate, too eager, because she levels a look at him he’s rarely seen. Cruel, yes, and angry, yes, and terrified, but not this.

“Play it yourself,” she says.

He raises and drops his hands a few inches (it passes as a shrug), says, “I can’t.”

She watches his fingers, glances out the window.

(He can see her thinking, You still could, if you had any courage, but she’s known him long enough to try not to be cruel.)

“Please, just to the end,” he says. “Only ten measures.”

(Before Boss gets back, he thinks. He would never let her see him this way; he would never seem so ungrateful.)

“We’ll have to leave,” she says. “You can’t keep this.”

He doesn’t answer. (He’s asked for so little, in all this time. There must be a way.)

When he doesn’t meet her eye, she says, “This house was a mistake. Don’t let this ruin you, too.”

He doesn’t understand her. He nods to her—manners, always—and goes.

In the kitchen he breathes so deeply that the brass strains against the bolts.

***

This is what he can’t admit: His body forgets.

The music he remembers; he remembers things he said and did. But he has forgotten the taste of wine, and the pinch of the baton between his fingers, and the itch at his throat from his tie. Thinking back is like watching film, knowing it happened but sensing nothing.

He learned accordion after; for the Circus, he can play.

But the rest was so long ago, he might kneel in front of the piano and not have one note left in him.

(The first thing he sensed was the warmth of the sun rising, and when he opened his eyes Boss was in front of him, standing watch.)

The music comes back after a very long time. It’s halting, and off-key, and she needs an orange under her palm—her fingers will wear out, this way.

But you don’t examine a gift (manners, always), so he stays where he is, closes his eyes, listens until the song is over.

***

What Panadrome does not see:

The others coming back from the forest in the deep night, with enough plants to survive on. Alec leads the way, wings loose, carrying a blanket filled to bursting.

When he sees Elena in the doorway, he smiles like a crowd is watching.

But then he reaches her.

Then his face softens, and his wings tremble, and she reaches out over his shoulder to touch them.

For a moment they stand in the hall as if on the edge of the castle tower.

Then she pulls back her hand. (Boss is coming, and they don’t dare be seen, and by morning they’ll be on the road and have to leave this behind; it’s the nature of the business.)

She walks alone up to the attic, and Alec stands and waits for Boss and the others bringing in the harvest.

What Panadrome does not see: notes moving quietly forward, into the end.

***

What no one sees:

Alec emerging from the forest as the clouds thin across the moon, and light flickers off his wings like a signal beacon across the hills to the city.

***

Little George is on the deep-night watch; he’s the one who comes running inside.

“They’re coming!” he shouts.

The house riots.

The crew knock each other awake and scramble. The Grimaldi Brothers drop through the hole in their floor.

It takes less than five minutes for the Circus to run, when it has to. They’ve made an art of vanishing when the takings go cold.

Panadrome has nothing to gather, but still he cannot leave.

He’s standing beside the piano when Elena finds him.

“We can’t leave it,” he says. “Not for them.”

“Burn it yourself, then,” says Elena.

She’s holding a match; her voice is the kindest it’s ever been.

“What?” he says. “No.”

“Better you than them,” she says. “A funeral or a butchering.”

He looks at her. His face has turned to stone.

“It might be the last one,” he says. His mouth is dry, somehow. “The very last.”

She looks him in the eye. She says, “I know.”

She rests it in the plate of his palm, vanishes.

He closes his eyes, feeling the piano behind him as though it’s moving closer, swallowing him.

Then he opens them, and Boss fills his vision.

(Every time he looks at her is a little like that first time; waking, and knowing he is bound.)

“We can take it with us,” he says. “Please. Ayar can carry it.”

“No time to be careful,” she says. “No spare fuel to carry it.”

Panadrome feels his body is falling to pieces.

“But look at it!”

There are tears in her eyes.

“They’re coming,” Boss says. “We have to go.”

But she doesn’t move.

Even Elena has turned in the doorway to watch, Elena who has never waited.

He looks at the piano as if he could lay hands on it and bring it to life.

Far away come the familiar sounds of a mob.

In another lifetime, someone might come to this house to take refuge from the winter. They might find the piano, and kneel, and play.

But someone is coming now, axe in hand and looking for kindling, and they might not even take the blanket off before they start their work.

Boss hasn’t moved. He realizes this is the illusion of choice; Boss has given her order.

(He doesn’t look at Elena. She gave him the match; there is no question what she would do at the castle precipice, on the verge of being found out.)

When he strikes the match against his palm, his silver fingers do not tremble; he does not feel the fire.

***

The whole house has caught by the time the last truck is on the road.

Panadrome looks out the grimy window as the fire snakes the ivy, races across the rafters.

He imagines he can see the piano through a gaping window, long past the point he knows it’s gone.

(He ran as soon as he dropped the match inside, and the fire caught. Some things he can, barely, stand; the sound of piano wires snapping is not one.)

Boss sits beside him without speaking.

In their view, the house turns into a hearth, into a lit match, into nothing.

They pass the thin, pale lamp of some other city, far away, but Boss doesn’t give the signal, and so no one turns. The trucks rattle over the rocky ground.

It’s almost a metronome, he thinks as if from some other life; phantom oranges rest in the upturned nests of his palms as he presses his fingers to the keys as long as he can before they fall.

Finally they escape the very last of the city light, and there’s nothing left but the sky, silent and cold and spotted with stars.

(Panadrome hasn’t missed the stars; he’s not an adventurer, by nature.)

“Stop,” says Boss, and the Circus stops.

I watched a silver swan, which had a living grace about his movements and a living intelligence in his eyes—watched him swimming about as comfortably and as unconcernedly as if he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweler’s shop…

In recent years, automatons have seen a surge in popularity, from steampunk contraptions to mecha. But this interest is hardly new: For centuries, humanity has turned its eye towards the application of ingenuity, physics, and aesthetics into largely-useless but awesome-looking recreations of the natural world. From swans to soldiers, owls to poets, the world is a sucker for mechanical wonders (or, sometimes, a half-decent hoax). Here’s a brief spotlight on some of history’s most marvelous automata.

***

Automata of the Classical World

These mechanical marvels didn’t begin as an overwhelming aesthetic statement. One of the earliest known Chinese machines was the South Pointing Chariot, a mechanism whose clay passenger served as a compass, in use by several centuries BC.

Many of ancient Greece’s automata were also taken as teaching tools or novelties rather than wonders (such as a water-operated toy in which Heracles strikes a dragon with a club). However, these early machines would be the basis for robots to come. Hero of Alexandria was a prolific inventor of practical mechanisms, and many of the technologies he developed would find their way into the silver swans of later generations.

In the mid-eighth century, The Caliph of Baghdad displayed wind-powered androids atop the gates of the palace. A century later (after commissioning a report on Hero of Alexandria’s techniques), the palace also boasted a golden tree on which mechanical birds flapped their wings. More sophisticated still was Abu Al-Jazari’s Peacock Fountain; when the tail was pulled, water poured into a basin, and the rising water levered a servant statue to offer soap and a towel. Though it used a flush mechanism, the piece was more beautiful than useful—a trend that would continue as technology caught up with imagination.

It’s no surprise that Leonardo Da Vinci, in between inventing the helicopter and taking ten minute naps, took his turn designing some beautiful machines. He developed a humanoid automaton around 1495; there’s no evidence the mechanism (designed to be housed in a suit of armor) was ever built, though when it was reconstructed in the twentieth century, it worked. Perhaps lesser known are his mechanical lions. One he built in 1515 to welcome Francois I to Lyon; it walked forward to greet the king, and when stroked, revealed a fleur-de-lis in its chest. He premiered another in 1517 (showoff), which could also wag its tail and shake its head.

As improvements in technology allowed for more mechanical complexity, there was increasing interest worldwide in making the mechanical an aesthetic achievement, rather than a simply functional one. By the eighteenth century, several inventors had made an art of artifice.

***

The Eighteenth Century: The Gilded Age

Across several cultures, the eighteenth century gave rise to the desire to imbue automatons with the illusion of inner life. One of the best examples of this aesthetic is Japan’s karakuri ningyō. Emergent in the seventeenth century, these small-scale androids were commonplace by the eighteenth. Zashiki karakuri, the most common, were household luxuries; emphasizing lifelike grace, zashiki karakuri were designed to perform a single task, such as walking a cup of tea across the table to a guest. The idea of evocative mech didn’t stop there; puppet-based dashi karakuri shows and clockwork-enhanced butai karakuri theatre troupes were all the rage.

In Europe, a different aesthetic reigned supreme. Merlin’s Silver Swan, built in the mid-eighteenth century, was a prime example of the European automata of its age: crafted in detail from precious metal, with intricate mechanics that allowed it to perform a particular simulacrum of nature. Notably, it served no practical function; it did not pretend to be anything other than proof of its maker’s ingenuity.

As it happens, the swan’s first owner was James Cox, himself a master of the art. He’s responsible for the Peacock Clock, a gift to Catherine the Great. The enormous clock featured a life-size peacock perched in a miniature oak tree, surrounded by birds and animals crafted in precious metal. When the clock struck, an owl inside a silver cage turned his head as bells on the cage spun and chimed; a rooster lifted his head and crowed, and the peacock lifted and spread the individual feathers of his tail.

The movements of the James Cox Peacock Clock (say it three times fast) were more delicate and naturalistic than the swan that preceded it by only a few years. When this attention to detail and mechanical capacity was applied for other purposes, the results could be impressive.

One of the most startling finds of this type is Henri Maillardet’s Draughtsman. This eighteenth-century invention was discovered in the twentieth and reassembled in an attempt to puzzle out its creator. When put into motion, the human figure put pen to paper, but instead of merely mimicking the motions, the Draughtsman’s mechanical memory produced four drawings and three poems. One of these poems was signed “Written by the Automaton of Maillardet,” which neatly wrapped up that little whodunit. That particular serendipity notwithstanding, this android’s remarkable achievements showed a heretofore unseen level of complexity.

With articulated peacocks and automated draughtsmen coming down the pike, it seemed the next great step for man would be a machine that went beyond mimicry. The world wanted a machine that truly mimicked nature—or, even better, thought for itself.

***

The Hoaxes: Too Good to be True

Two of the most famous automata of the eighteenth century claimed to have accomplished the goal of being more real than real. The Digesting Duck seemed to have equaled Nature in its ability to process and digest food, and the Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing installation that purported to be, at last, the automaton that could reason.

They both sounded too good to be true.

They were.

Le Canard Digérateur, built by Jacques de Vaucanson, was a duck of excruciating detail, with over 400 wing feathers. Vaucanson claimed the duck was as faithful internally. And indeed, the duck was able to eat grain; the explanation given was that within the duck (a complicated mechanism into which perforated sides allowed but a glimpse) the grain was metabolized; shortly after eating, the duck defecated. When first displayed, it caused a sensation. It was only later that a disenchanted public learned the truth: The duck had two separate compartments, one at the base of the throat to catch the grain, and one into which the unimaginably devoted Vaucanson had pre-packed feces.

Less visceral, but no less ingenious, was the Turk. First displayed in the late eighteenth century, the Turk was a life-size male torso atop a large cabinet. The cabinet doors could be opened, revealing mechanisms within, and the machine demonstrated skill with chess, winning several games against human opponents, including Napoleon. Its fame quickly grew—along with speculation that it might be a hoax (the downside of following a pooping duck into the public eye). The skeptics were right, though it took several decades to crack. It was admirably complex: A player sat inside the cabinet on a rolling platform out of sight of any opening doors, and played by monitoring the game via magnetized strings under each piece, and operating the puppet’s arms to manipulate the board.

The Turk would be the last of the great mech hoaxes; the Industrial Revolution in Europe would turn benchmarks of technological progress from the fanciful to the useful (covering a spectrum that included manufacturing equipment and the Lovelace/Babbage Analytical Engine), and personal mechanical whimsies in nineteenth-century European homes would decrease in scope to music boxes and children’s toys that, while they pleased, would cease to startle.

***

The Nineteenth Century: Crossing Borders with Clockwork

The automatons of the nineteenth century were no longer more astonishing than the machines of industry. Their value lay in their meaning, not in their making, and would be used for different purposes—like diplomacy.

One of the most remarkable automatons of the nineteenth century was Alamet. In 1889, a Japanese diplomatic contingent visited Istanbul; as part of the subsequent information and gift exchange, Sultan Abdulhamid Han commissioned a clock that would both demonstrate technical prowess and serve as a cultural insight.

The result was Alamet (“miracle” or “medal”), a clock encased in a life-size gold and silver replica of a whirling dervish; once an hour, he spun and opened his arms, and a built-in phonograph played a recording of azān (the call to prayer).

This automaton, one of the first designed as an expressly cross-culture product, was as much a marker of its time as the silver swan. In the nineteenth century the world was shrinking, as exploration both academic and colonialist brought cultures into close contact. The circumstances that led to Alamet’s design were a prime example of the pressures of globalization: the ability to condense one’s own culture for experience by others, both in an educational capacity and a bid to seem formidable to outsiders. Though largely forgotten in later narratives, Alamet stands as a fascinating snapshot of a world that was rapidly changing.

***

The Twentieth Century and Beyond: What Now?

The twentieth century saw technological leaps so quick and so vast that machines no longer developed over centuries, but decades. The automata of the twentieth century tended to be designed along one of two cultural touchstones: aesthetic nostalgia, or the increasing drive (in an echo of the eighteenth century) for man to replicate true consciousness.

The former took shape with Japan’s Gakutensoku, a robot constructed in the 1920s that was technically complex, but whose significance lay in the design of his face (which could change expressions) and the symbolic nature of the lamp he carried; when the lamp was turned on, Gakutensoku began to write poetry with the pen he held in his other hand.

The drive toward artificial consciousness would occupy much of the robotics field of the twentieth century, but an early marker was the 1938 Deco-tastic robot Elektro—a humanoid robot whose photoelectric eyes could distinguish red light from green, and who could walk via voice command. (He was also a champion smoker.)

The field of robotics continues to make great leaps in the development of mechanics that mimic nature—from the robot-dog toy craze to the artificial heart to Honda’s most recent androids, the future of automatons is bright.

Fittingly, Elektro made his public debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a temple of technology at which automata of Elektro’s kind were more than welcome. Seventy years earlier, after all, the same feeling of wonder had been conjured when Mark Twain visited the World’s Fair in Paris, and had marveled at another example, itself already a century old, of mankind’s attempt to reconstruct the world, one silver bird at a time.

***

Further Reading:

• Robot Evolution: the Development of Anthrobotics, by Mark E. Rosheim
• Da Vinci’s lion prowls again after 500 years (Reuters)
• Maillardet’s Automaton (The Franklin Institute)
• Abdulhamid Han and Robot Technology (Netpano.com)
• Karakuri.info

All I saw was the gate that led to the Night Market.

We pulled barrels off the cart (salt, cinnamon, chilis, cardamom, and mazeflower safe in the center away from wandering hands), and when the moon rose and the women came it was as if we’d always been waiting.

They moved in pairs, holding back their veils, closing their eyes as the smell of mazeflower struck them.

“Goes well in baking,” Mark told a woman, “which you know all about, with those fine things in your basket.”

The whole night went well (Mark could sell spice to a stone), until I got peppered by a loose lid and staggered back, choking.

From behind me a woman asked, “Where are you going?”

“Who’s asking?” I snapped, and looked up into the ugliest face I’ve ever seen; teeth like old cheese, small black eyes, a thin mouth swallowed up by jowls.

“A passenger,” she said. “Where are you going?”

“South,” I said vaguely (never liked people knowing my business), then brushed pepper off my shirt and yelled, “Mark, so help me, I’ll sell your hide to the fur traders!”

The woman was still standing there, smiling, her hands folded in front of her politely.

“Did you need some salt?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Well, I wish you good journey,” I said, and then for some reason I’ll never know I asked, “Where do you travel?”

“South,” she said, and I realized exactly where she thought she was headed.

I’ve never known when to seal the barrel and shake on the deal. It’s how I ended up with a blue wagon and a partner like Mark in the first place.

“Not on any transport of mine,” I said.

“It’s for my husband,” she said. “A shoemaker in Okalide. I’ll join him there.”

I didn’t wonder why he’d left her behind. A face like that was bad for business.

Mark came around and stood behind me.

“I can’t take an unescorted woman,” I said. I didn’t care, but someone on the road would. This was a church state. “Find someone else to take you.”

As I turned to go she opened her hand and unfurled a necklace of sapphires as long as a man’s arm, flaming as they caught the dawn. Mark gasped.

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I reached without thinking, and had to pull back my hand when I remembered myself. I knew the trouble a woman would bring on that road full of pilgrims and devout traders.

“I don’t accept bribes,” I said. Mark kicked my foot.

“It isn’t a bribe,” she said. “It’s a dowry.”

Mark stopped kicking.

“You want me to—” I paused.

She held out her hand draped in glittering blue, her eyes steady. “Sandal-brides are common enough on this road.”

“Not this common,” Mark muttered, and I surprised us both when I cut him off with, “Pack the wagon.”

Still muttering, he went, and then it was just the woman and me.

“Sandal-briding is dangerous,” I said. “Women go missing that way if the men get greedy.”

She smiled. “A greedy man wouldn’t have pulled back his hand.”

I found myself smiling, too, and by the time she said, “My husband has another when I am safely delivered,” somehow I had already decided to agree.

We went the back way; I didn’t want her to see Mark’s face until it was too late to object.

The ceremony was easier than border-crossing. I gave her a pair of sandals I’d bought on the way, and she showed the priest the necklace she was giving me in lieu of bed rights. I swore to release her at the end of the journey. He wrote my name down next to hers, marked us “Okalide,” and it was over.

Outside I said, “You could go pack your things.”

“I don’t have any things,” she said, and stopped to buy a blanket.

Mark was still packing when we got back, but he must have known what I was going to do, because he had made space in the back of the wagon for someone to sit.

I drove the oxen, which were fonder of me than of Mark (good salesmanship never fools oxen). Mark kept watch in the back of the wagon, when he was awake.

All morning I expected him to climb through and demand a seat away from the woman (my wife), but when we stopped in the scrub at midday and I let the oxen loose to find what they could in the stringy undergrowth, I saw him helping her down.

“We’ll rest half an hour,” I said.

Mark nodded and disappeared back into the wagon.

“Just kick him out of the way when we set off,” I said, unhooking my canteen.

She laughed and took a seat under the branches of the twisted pim. It was scant shade, but the flats were like this all the way to Okalide. There was a reason her husband made a living there; this ground wore out your shoes.

She shaded her eyes with one hand and peered out at the horizon, though there was nothing inspiring about it. It was three months of low scrub and low hopes.

“Expect more of the same,” I said, taking a drink from my canteen and trying to sound like a grizzled traveler and not like someone who used to live above an alehouse and still hated desert nights.

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I’ve never been outside the walls before. I’m excited for anything.”

I was probably more grizzled than I thought, though, since the idea of being closed in by city walls made my skin crawl.

“Well, if you like scrub, we’ll have plenty.”

“How do the animals take it?”

I looked over at the two bony oxen, who had found enough roots for a meal and were chewing contentedly. “They’re tough beasts, though they look dead.”

“Tough beasts do surprise you that way,” she said.

She went back into the wagon, and only then I realized she had gone all day without so much as a drink of water, and I had offered her none.

“We’ll arrange a bed for you in the wagon,” I said the first night as she and Mark were trying a fire.

“Oh, no,” she said, “I love the sky.”

I wondered if she expected me to sleep at her side. I didn’t know what sandal-husbands usually did. “The wagon is really much better. More privacy.”

“Too late,” she said, “I already know what Mark says in his sleep.”

She handed him the flint, and Mark blushed and bowed his head to the sparks.

After the fire was going, Mark helped me pull rations out of the barrel.

“I hope she doesn’t eat much,” he said, staring at the salted beef and stale bread.

“What do you say in your sleep?”

Mark shook his head, and I hated that they should have been together in the back of the wagon with their secrets while I was sweating in the sun all day.

“Don’t lose your manners,” I said into the barrel.

Mark raised an eyebrow, sliced the meat into three pieces with his pocketknife. “Well, what’s her name, then, so I don’t have to keep calling her Goodwife?”

“You should call her Goodwife.”

“Don’t you know her name?”

She hadn’t said it and I’d never asked, but the priest had written it down. “Sara.”

Mark looked at me like I was one of the oxen, and took the skillet out to her.

“Tell me about your city,” she said to me.

“It was like your city. Like any city.”

“I don’t know my city,” she said. “Start there.”

And I must have made a face again, because she explained, “They have the market at night so we don’t see the city well enough to run away.”

I thought about the women picking their way home before it was light, about her thin purse, her refusal to go home and pack. The food turned to dust in my mouth.

“What do you want to know?” I asked, but I knew the answer before she said, “Everything.”

I told her about the alehouse; she asked how ale was made and listened as if she’d married a brewer. She wanted to know how many people could read. I told her about my schooling in the townhouse owned by a noble who lived in the country, and then I realized how it sounded to live in the country when the country looked like this, so I explained lakes and green trees and the soft wet snow that fell in winter.

I described the trader who sold me his wagon, his beasts, and Mark’s indenture in exchange for the alehouse. I expected her to tell me it was a poor trade, but she listened to this story the same as to the others.

When I got to the terms of the sale, Mark said, “This was worth an alehouse in a season city?”

I had no answer, gave him none.

After I ran out of my life, I told her the Tale of the Pearl, which seemed to make her sad, so I told the Tale of the Blind Flower-seller to smooth things over.

Then my throat hurt, and I said, “We should sleep.”

“You know, I grew up, too,” Mark said as he sulked back to the wagon.

She laughed; her voice was dry, and I handed her the canteen.

She laid her blanket on the hard ground and pulled half of it over her. I felt guilty for not having bought a pallet, a felted shawl even, in all the time I’d been sleeping on the ground. The wagon was as it had been delivered to me, as though I was just keeping it for the man who might want it back.

“We’ll buy you a pallet,” I said.

“No need,” she said, like someone who’s used to the worst bed. “Do you know the stars?”

“No.”

She was quiet after that. When enough time had gone by, I made a bed a little behind her; it was cold that far from the fire, and it felt too familiar to be so close, but I wanted to be something between her and the night.

I wasn’t fond of other traders on the road (or ever), but a few evenings later I saw a fire and knocked on the side of the wagon to let them know we were stopping.

I brought a rasher of bacon to trade for a torch to light our fire. They were glass traders from Demarest, and after the pleasantries I found myself saying, “Let me bring my wife over; she has a little pepper to season it.”

Mark and the sandal-bride (Sara, I thought) were pulling bread out of the barrel when I hauled myself into the cramped quarters.

“Bring some pepper,” I told her.

I wasn’t sure how to go on, but she guessed and smiled, and reached for the right barrel.

Mark said, “That’s five coin worth—”

“Come on,” I said, and she carried the ladle like it was mazeflower and not some common thing.

They were surprised to see her, and I remembered she was ugly.

She didn’t notice, or didn’t react, and they made room for us, and when there had been quiet for a moment she said, “Where have you come from?”

They looked to me like she had spoken out of turn.

I thought about the city walls and the night market closing around her again in Okalide.

I said, “Do you know about the stars?”

A week later we found someone who knew the stars, and he went through each constellation, jabbing his finger at the sky.

We found a botanist after that, wasted out in the scrub, who described flowers I’d never seen.

A silk trader liked her. He opened up his caravan of wagons and had his servants bring the best. We held up our lanterns and looked at the embroidered fountains that spit silver spangles along the blue silk.

Pilgrim women never spoke; the men only spoke to me. We stopped trying. Pilgrims could season their own food.

Once when I stopped the wagon for the night I found her sleeping with her cheek pressed against a barrel of cinnamon, like she could hear how it smelled.

I rarely said anything at strange camps; what was there to say when you were always the ignorant one?

But I listened, and I saw how people changed as they spoke of things they loved, and with every story I felt the world opening before us as if my oxen walked on the sea.

A metalworker and his wife sharpened our knives for some chilies, and the sandal-bride’s eyes gleamed in the dark as he explained how to power the wheel, how to shape a blade.

“Where did you learn it?”

“At my father’s feet,” the man said, and tears sprang into his eyes, but even as he cried he told her about the illness that had carried off his parents. He wanted a home by the sea, where the salt air dulled enough knives to feed a metalworker for the rest of his life, and where the fish was fresh.

That night she cried softly, mourning the parents of some man she’d never see again.

I counted the stars: the great ox, the three cubs, the parted lovers, the willow tree.

The wagon got lighter as we went.

Mark winced every time I opened a barrel, and though I kept the ladles skimpy, I couldn’t blame him. We would never make it to a port city before we ran out.

I closed my hand around the sapphires in my pocket as I drove. The day was coming when I’d have to break the clasp and sell them off.

Twice we stopped in tent cities and set up in their open squares, and Mark and Sara and I handed out envelopes of mazeflower and filled people’s burlap bags with what was left of the cumin and salt.

By then the nights were cold in earnest. Mark made beds amidst the barrels, little fortresses to keep out the wind. Sara and I kept separate blankets, but I slept between her and the wagon flap. I would listen to the wind hissing past the canvas and think: This much, at least, I can do for her.

One night it was birders, and I scraped the last of a barrel of cinnamon to make enough for an offering.

“I don’t know what you’re hoping for,” Mark said, “but you’re ruining yourself this way.”

I didn’t answer; there was nothing to argue.

When we reached camp I said, “This is my wife Sara,” and took her arm to present her, and she looked at me for a long moment before she smiled at them.

She told my stories, always. People were kinder if they thought she wasn’t from Miruna.

We met the girl with the shriveled leg who made cages, the boy who made paints that turned a thrush into a sweet-anna. Above us the little beasts hopped back and forth in the bentwood cages, and of everyone we met on that long journey, that family was the happiest.

That night she sat and looked out past our circle of light to their camp, where the birds were calling.

Silhouetted by the fire she looked like a camel, a beast who had always been wise, and I watched her until the birds went silent.

The last long stretch to Okalide was four nights of nothing, not even scrub for shelter, and in the pilgrim town we bought up vinegar-wine (only thing that won’t go brackish) and decided to travel at night and rest in the heat of the day.

Mark drank whenever wine was offered, and he took it as badly as ever, so he was still asleep when the sun set and it was time to go.

Sara and I sat in the shade of the wagon and watched the night crawl over the dust.

“Will I ever hear your story?” I asked, and she looked at me as if she knew why I was asking.

She did know. She knew, and Mark knew, and I was the only one who was just waking up to why.

Her thin mouth pressed tighter as if she was afraid of the words getting out. “I have no story,” she said. “I was born hidden, and grew hidden, and I married hidden, and now I go to Okalide.”

“And your husband? Is he kind?”

“I hope,” she said after a long time. There was a breeze moving in ahead of the moon. “But if not, I’ll be unhappy in Okalide, which is better than being unhappy in Miruna.”

I wanted to say, stay here and risk unhappiness with me, but “here” was a wagon and a raggedy trail around the desert cities. You met the same sort of people wherever you went, and one day she would regret asking someone his story and learning what he really was.

She was only my sandal-bride, and by the time the leather wore out she would be happy or unhappy with some other man, and I would still have a wagon and a wide circle of road.

I said, “You’ll find a way to be happy,” because that was the only thing I really knew about her, and we sat in the shadow of the wagon until the breeze turned cold.

She sat beside me, wrapped in her thin blanket, all that night as I drove toward Okalide.

After we were stationed in the morning market, Sara my sandal-bride stepped out from the wagon without even her blanket and said, “I’m ready.”

Mark came out behind her; when he was on the ground he held out his hand and they shook like it was a business deal.

“My wishes for a good life,” he started, but abruptly he turned his back and crawled into the wagon as if he had forgotten something important.

I almost took her elbow, but when I held out my hand she looked at me. Under her gaze I dropped my arm, held it against my side.

She looked around until she saw some landmark her husband must have given her.

“This way,” she said, and I followed her out of the market.

Okalide was under church rule, too, but here I saw women in daylight, at least, buying bread and reading the notices posted in the open squares.

The crowd that had been a nuisance before was overwhelming now. I wanted to know about the old man carving spoons on his doorstep, about the three young girls running along the edges of the fountain in the square.

Here no one noticed Sara (my wife). Her face was one of a thousand faces, not some apparition with a ladle of pepper in her hands, but somehow walking beside her I felt like the Empress’ Guard.

At a corner she looked at the words etched into the clay walls, then turned to me.

“Which one reads South?” she asked quietly, and my heart broke.

I pointed, and after she looked at the word to memorize it we turned down the shady street.

His was the sixteenth door, and when he answered her knock he said, “Sara,” as if she didn’t know her own name, but she just smiled and embraced him.

I looked back at the main road, where a shaft of sun crawled across the dust.

He introduced himself, but as he did he wrapped his arm around her waist and I didn’t catch his name.

“How was your journey?” he asked, and, tripping over himself, “—and of course you’ll come in and have some cold water and some fruit.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“He has an apprentice,” Sara explained, “and they have work.”

He nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said, and then he turned to her and smiled. “And how was the journey?”

I held my breath and waited for the first story she would tell him, the first words that would make it one big story sewn with little ones as a wedding gift to him.

She smiled and said, “A lot of brackish wine.”

He laughed so hard he had to drop his head, and for a moment she and I looked at each other.

I saw the bars of her cage bending around her, saw why she had wanted those stories; she’d needed something that was hers, to hoard against a life with some dull boy to whom she had given her word.

When he had recovered from his laughter he saw I was still there, and blinked. “You need your bride-price, of course, so sorry for forgetting,” he said, and a moment later there was a little ruby bracelet in my palm.

I was still looking at Sara. I had forgotten I would be paid.

The priest at the bastion wrote “safely delivered,” and wrote down all our names, and it was over.

She said, “Come visit as soon as you can.”

“We’ll be back again,” I said, which was the only lie I ever told her.

When I got back to the market the wagon was still packed and Mark was waiting in the driver’s seat.

“What did he look like?”

“Let’s go,” I said, took the reins.

We were five miles outside the city when I said, “What do you want to do after your indenture?”

“Trade!” he blurted, choked on a mouthful of dust.

I got his story; he had a woman in Suth he’d promised to come back for, and he’d heard about the botanist from Sara and wanted to find new spices. “From the East, maybe,” he said, “if they can be had by ship.”

I gave him the ruby bracelet. “Payment for the spice I used on the journey. Your indenture is over.”

The oxen would warm to him; he knew how to drive the wagon.

I moved through and questioned anyone who would answer. I wanted to know everything about the world. With the first sapphire, I bought a book to write in.

Some old man married a woman with six red-haired sisters. The youngest got black hair, and set about cursing them all, poorly, and he and I laughed into our beers until we cried.

Three brothers pulled aside a riverbed to keep their village from flooding, and they bought wine and sang songs in three parts, and I marked the words as fast as I could.

When the first book was full I bought another, for the botanist and the birders and all the stars I knew.

I listened to everyone, wrote down everything.

You have to write down everything. The world is wide, and you never know what stories someone is waiting to hear; maybe someday, someone will have bought a pair of boots from the shoemaker and his ugly wife, down a dusty street in Okalide.