Chapter 11 - The Anchor Shawl
It is an unremarkable and usually-insignificant piece of trivia that; the atmosphere of Starharbor is localized within each district, and lawfully enacted by those districts’ councils of prevailing elements. In the stone and metal forests of stilt houses and skyscrapers, ‘sunlight’ had been swept off the streets, and the people spread embraced a newer, livelier champion, ‘flamelight’. In the muddy, moldy, destitute sprawls of middle and lower class, the chief representatives - Cold, Gloom, and Poverty - passed legislation for a deluge of chilled jelly, running from sunrise of one day to sunrise of the next; a clear case of self-perpetuating nepotism.
The industrial burg of Bleachgate sat on the opposite side of the atmospheric-political spectrum from the slums and sprawls. Not in terms of bleakness. Indeed, Gloom - that same representative from the housing sector - was said to have his fingers - in one form or another - in every local council’s pie. No, it was in the ‘precipitation’ provisions that Bleachgate differed from the rest of Starharbor. Bleachgate had none.
Ages past, the founding fathers of the Bleachgate industrial center brought forth a charter for their desired surroundings. Among these visionaries were some recognizable names: Lord Smokestacks, Sir Cole Forge, the brothers Brick and Mortar, Grinding Hiss Bang’Clang-Sparks the IV, and his sister-by-marriage, Brimstone Tobacco Sulfur’Diesel-Sparks V. Together, these scions of industry set forth clear standards for their city quarter. Of these standards, the most-sweeping was; ‘No Moisture’. Rainfall, sweat, and even the ubiquitous jelly had been proofed-against by the district border. Humidity itself ran before the billowing chimneys, roaring fires, and sooty, sawdusty streets of Bleachgate. The visionaries established lesser-characteristics at this same juncture: ‘no breezes’, ‘choking air’, ‘demoniacal heat.
These laws remained in effect generations later, with expected consequences. Bleachgate factory-employees stood in contrast with the rest of the city’s working-class. They worked and withered like wizened old men, under conditions of perpetual heat, without the option of sweating. They left Bleachgate at the end of their shift with a well-baked tinge, and a thin powder of soot. Everything which entered or exited Bleachgate turned instantly-parched. The attentive reader might guess Mr. Grey’s hands spent some eons in the factories of Bleachgate, and the attentive reader would be correct. And since rain and cool breezes were forbidden, The Wind had nothing to do with the burg. She never visited.
Absent Wind or rain, storms were - generally - unfashionable. The storm pursuing Mr. Grey on his way home would never pass through Bleachgate’s borders.
Another class of storm, however, began forming at that moment, not far ahead of Mr. Grey. It needed neither Wind nor rain to devastate.
Upon the industrial district of Bleachgate, it set its many eyes.
Mr. Grey trod at a steady clip into the downtown Starharbor slums. Far above, the Wind’s clouds wept fat globs of jelly rain, which plopped heavily down upon him.
Mr. Grey took no notice of the jiggly hummocks accumulating on his shoulders and dripping down his forehead.
Mr. Grey’s thoughts circled his personal failings, brought to light during his beach walk with Honeydew. Mr. Grey’s senses rejected the cold rain. Instead, he ran and reran over every statement he might have made with greater eloquence, every question to which he could’ve given a cleverer answer.
He wished he’d spoken plainer. He wished he’d said, “Honeydew, Neon Silveste is a prevaricator. He’s absorbed in himself. He’s not worth your time.” But the words had seemed so challenging. With all his distracted rewording and rethinking, the cloudy storm evaded Mr. Grey’s heed.
Meanwhile, and not so very far away, another storm gave its birthing rumble.
It began in the different grades of ‘preyed-upon’ slumping along Starharbor’s dingy streets. It began in their bitterest moods. The citizens of starbor hurried back and forth under the same frigid, jiggly tears of the jelly clouds as Mr. Grey. Some found brief respite under the sparse overhangs of rundown, graffiti-clad hovels. Most did not.
These mixed classes - stoop dwellers, government pencil pushers, wheelhouse junkies - felt the cold rain more keenly than Mr. Grey. Not just as an added shiver in their limbs, or another slime on their clothes, but as yet another affront on their characters. As if things were not terrible enough! What with wanton poverty, and pervasive dirt, and the rising cost of beans for eating. These factors combined to sculpt dark, coughing, hollow-eyed cadavers from the bodies of men, women, and children. Such a brood could only spawn from an artificial, endless, crippling want of food. The vibrancy in their eyes, and the strength in their limbs, melted away with every rumble in their stomachs.
And now, on top of all these customary indignations, Starharbor had heaped another blight; its pervasive, perpetual rain. With its wheelhouses, and its fortune auctions, and its mist of laws and regulations, and its consuming hunger, Starharbor drained its citizens of their vigor - and now, after it was finished, spat on them.
Nothing novel was there in these humiliations. Poverty and jelly poured down every day over Starharbor. Like old plow horses with bum knees and languorous gaits, Starharbor’s citizens were long broken-in to their toils; by wheel, or want, or auctioned mis-fortune.
The novel element which introduced this new storm came from a certain set of people, with a different set of ideals. This class wasn’t oblivious to the jelly storm as Mr. Grey was, but neither were they resigned to it like their legions of crushed cousins. Biting, burning hunger lurked in the stomachs of these men and women too. But, it lurked in a cowering way, galled to the back of their minds by a greater monster.
Hatred. Hatred of the fortune auctions, of the king, of the Odormoats. Hatred scorched every hollow in the bodies of these people. Hatred made Hunger, Gloom, and Pity seem like little embers beside its all-consuming conflagration. Hatred fueled these peoples’ actions and efforts. This class wielded Hateful fire against the perpetual cold and dark. This class - these revolutionaries - stoked Hatred’s embers, and set their cousins aflame.
Of course, these revolutionary echoes began epochs ago. These echoes began the tavern hootenanny. These echoes came from the loudest grumblers on the subject of ‘rigged fortune auctions’. These echoes had long harped over the rising tram costs, or the impossibility of obtaining visas, or the clear-cut difference between the city’s face of flamelit stilt houses, and its hungry body of slums.
Little by little, day after day, the revolutionaries had passed pieces of straw, and coal, and other kindling among their neighbors. They filling their fellow citizens with something other than resignation; tiny, bright sparks. Now as the rain poured - and the people on the streets soaked beneath it, and wrapped their dirty robes tight around their withered bodies, and looked all around them with bright, angry eyes - the instigators pumped the bellows.
Mr. Grey stepped through the outskirts of broken Starharbor homes. He took no notice of the deeper shadows. He remained introspective. His grey eyes and ears and nose picked up all manner of sights, sounds, and smells, to which he paid no attention.
One scene came right past the periphery of his senses, as he strolled obliviously through a quarter of town rampant with graffiti and ruin. A short way down a nearby alley, two men traded hurried whispers. They traded loudly, however, so that the whispers might have been the stage variety, and the two men, actors. If Mr. Grey had heeded his eyes, he might have turned them fully to the men. Mr. Grey would’ve seen one of the two pass a strange assortment of things to the other man: a bag of ice, a box of pufferfrogs, a Rube Goldberg machine for dropping the ice into the pufferfrogs, and a pocket ticker. If Mr. Grey had heeded his ears, he might have wondered at the loud, whispered words the two dark figures shared.
“This is all you will need, Jacques. Are you ready?”
“I am, Jacques. Is it still Canalatin Bagging Co. that is the target?”
“That is so, Jacques. Now make a hasteful pace, so that you are in position before the rest arrive.”
“Indeed I shall, Jacques. Touch then.”
But Mr. Grey’s eyes did not see as the one man handed the strange objects to other, or how they clasped hands, or that the man with the objects ran off with his face concealed in a hooded, tweed robe. Nor did he hear their whispered dialogue. Only his words and Honeydew’s resounded in his mind - repeated, and gone over, and re-responded to.
Mr. Grey let his stride carry him. He beat a slow, splishing rhythm on the wet cobblestones. His feet took him closer to home, but closer also to the brewing mass of the second storm.
Once more, Mr. Grey’s sensory organs strained intensely to warn him all was not right.
His ears said, “Take note, Grey Master, of the profound clamor in every tavern and inn we pass. Each one bubbles with cries, from seething waves of hateful men. Each crash of sound rings with a call for violence. Heed me, please, Grey Master.”
His eyes said, “Buddy, the ears are onto something. Look at all those furrowed brows. And check out the boney shoulders gathering at the doors. I dunno man, I think we’d better find some other way home…”
His nose said, “Something smells… fishy.” Mr. Grey’s nose wasn’t especially witty. There was, nevertheless, a submarine taint in the air. The people summoned a grimy, sweaty miasma as they crowded and stamped beneath the heavy rain.
Mr. Grey took no heed of these signs. An irate man ran past him with his shoulders in fighting stance. Mr. Grey only swerved aside, unconsciously.
Mr. Grey’s footsteps kept the even rhythm. Splash, splash, splash went the grey shoes like a metronome on the wet street, amid the buzz of falling rain and the crash of shattered windows. His head drooped in concentration, and forced his eyes to gaze upon whatever spot of ground happened to lie a few paces ahead.
The grey orbs gave up. They threw up their hands in resignation as Mr. Grey walked blindly on. The nose, having never been much help to begin with, brought in the rain’s damp smell, then called it a day.
Only the ears kept trying to warn Mr. Grey. They pointed out the shattering glass. They told Mr. Grey to attend the heavy wooden crack of a highwheel being overturned. They begged him to listen at his back, where shouting persons coagulated into one choral multitude. They pointed out the bouncers’ bugles. Or rather, they pointed out the disturbing lack of that brassy noise, for the bugles were always sounding from one city corner or another. Not today, however. Today the bugles blared no notes. As though even the king’s own bouncers closed their highwheel doors and windows in fear of the new storm.
But the words of ears, nose, and eyes, were as nothing against the anguish of introspection.
Mr. Grey almost reached his cell in the workers’ prison. While all those sensory organs might desert him, Mr. Grey’s splish-splash footsteps beat a tireless tune on the cobbles. No matter what Mr. Grey’s thoughts were, his feet moved automatically. Only a block more, and that ingrained pathing would have carried him to safety.
Too late did Mr. Grey finally hear the call of his ears, telling him of many other footsteps fast joining his own. Too late did the grey eyes widen to the surroundings. Mr. Grey suddenly looked up, looked around, and saw a wave of enraged faces charging through the rain.
The crowd consumed Mr. Grey. Not as a victim; Mr. Grey wasn’t mugged. But his particular brand of grey complimented the mottling represented in that cold and wet and angry crowd. So they took him in.
That is the short — well, more so, the long - of how Mr. Grey joined a mob.
Mr. Grey addressed the largest and most-in-charge looking person nearby; a wet, glowering coal miner with an ostentatious scar over the bridge of his nose. “It seems you have everything under control. I doubt you lot need me. I’ll just duck out, if it’s all the same.” Trying to get through to the man over the drizzle of the rain and the whooping crowd, Mr. Grey unfortunately used the exact same speaking voice as always.
Mr. Grey attempted to back out of the mob. But the imposed comradeship of the citizens behind him pushed him forward. Many maneuvers did Mr. Grey attempt to affect an escape. Each was met by a forceful, irate, friendly jostling. The stranger sea had him caught in its waves. Mr. Grey expended most of his locomotive efforts in simply maintaining his formal posture. Every nearby hand seemed shove-happy; every foot, trippy. Like a man hurrying to bail water on a sinking ship, Mr. Grey continually found himself shunted sideways or stumbling over feet. Often, only the packed bodies of his fellow mobsters prevented a fall.
Meanwhile, the animal hullabaloo of the cheering and shouting crowd gradually took on a structure. The mob instigators - brothers and sisters of the two whispering Jacques from the alley - parceled out mantras to the loudest of the protesters. There came a sly cry of “Lower Bids, Grander Fortunes!” from one quarter, which was taken up by a vocal chorus. But that mantra petered back into generic yelling. Then “No more transit banning; make cheap enchanting!” sounded off and spread in waves through the mob. But that one too rippled out at the edges.
The instigators had come prepared. Eventually, “Take a Risk: Make Bigger Beans!” found lasting popularity. Even this phrase morphed under the diminished attention span of an angry crowd. They pared it down to, “Risk Bigger Beans!” This war cry found rhythm with the people. They lurched their shoulders in time to the cry, and chanted it in cultish fashion, and stamped the cobblestones to its tune.
The close press of strangers and their gunpowder mood had forced Mr. Grey’s mind from its hermit like seclusion. He saw now the things he’d missed earlier. Every wheelhouse and finders’ office door put on its most presentable ‘closed’ sign, while the managers and owners hid behind shuttered windows and bolted doors. The streetside enchanters, lurking wolf gangs, and bouncer highwheels were all gone. They’d fled before the dangerous new storm.
Mr. Grey began to see, also, the mob’s purpose. He saw how the people screamed against the clouds and cold drizzly jelly that massed on their readied shoulders. He saw how they marched, unrelentingly, in one specific direction.
Towards Bleachgate rolled the new storm. Towards Bleachgate, and its hot, dry border.
Mr. Grey now took careful note of those special persons who had so brilliantly stoked this fire. He picked out the ones introducing the slogans. He saw how the clouds in the crowd-storm followed at the beck of a small set, who marched with determined and directed steps. At one point, while the sweep of spindly forms crested over a stone arch bridge (beneath which, a dragon tram furrowed unconsciously through the jelly canal), Mr. Grey saw one such instigator in the distance. It was the man with the strange collection of objects: the bag of ice, the box of pufferfrogs, the Rube Goldberg machine for dropping the ice into the pufferfrogs, and the pocket ticker. This cloaked man rushed ahead of the masses with a secret purpose. Mr. Grey half-remembered the man from the periphery of his vision. He watched the man, clad in his hooded tweed robe, disappear into a canalside tunnel.
Mr. Grey’s senses told him all this, but at too late an epoch for him to change his course. Mr. Grey was carried on, making occasional inside-voice requests to be let go, and doing his best to stay upright. He tried slipping between neighbors, tried falling back. The sea of strangers, however, had him firmly in its sallow-handed clutches.
On the attempt which became his last, two old, wet, wrinkly crones attached themselves to his flanks. They exhorted him to, “Lead the charge, young man!” They hooked their elbows on his own. Mr. Grey felt common courtesy demanded he accompany them for at least a little time. Mr. Grey let the ladies lead him on.
Guided by the slogans and the front runners, the mob crossed another, wider bridge of curving stone. As the front waves touched the pavement on the other side, a sudden cloud of hissing steam mushroomed overhead. All the moisture - all that jelly rain - clinging to the masses evaporated instantly as they pressed through the Bleachgate border. Like a sopping towel fed through the roller lips of a laundry mangle, the mob left the slums wet, cold, and jelly-spattered, and entered Bleachgate wrinkled and dry. The hungry people took on a duller brand of grime, swapping mud for coal dust.
The only exception to the mob’s dry, dull, cadaverous aspect lay in their eyes. Like gemstones twinkling in a dark wall of rock, thousands of shining eyes glared from behind lined and sooty faces.
As did one set of alarmed grey ones.
“No more, my suffering peers, shall we brook the heavy-shouldered domineering of the king and his bouncers!”
A cheer, like the braying of hunting hounds, met this remark.
“No more, these polluted fortunes. No promised tomorrows of vague brightness, in exchange for complaintless chafing, amid bleak pulp and valueless treasure.”
Another barking chorus.
“Are you happy? When you return - from eon after eon after eon of mind-chiseling, soul-scouring shifts of swinging hammers, or twisting lids on jars, or scraping jelly from the lacquered boots of the high-and-mighty lords - are you content?”
The question, though flagrantly rhetorical, received a definitely negative answer from the irate crowd.
Mr. Grey floated on the mob sea, which flooded the courtyard of a bean factory. The bitter multitude of souls which comprised the angry mob had captured this metaphorical beachfront. They’d broken through a chain and barbed-iron fence, and passed beneath a metal sign which read ‘Canalatin Bagging Co.’ in calligraphy letters.
One man - sooty with gelatin powder and wearing a stylized robe of muzzle flashes - had clambered up the supports of the tallest iron sawhorse in the yard. The mount was an adult male of the sawhorse species, probably 7 or 8 eons, with a rusty coat, and a top beam stretched above the heads of the crowd.
Now, Mr. Grey watched and listened as the man resumed his heated diatribe of the people sea from his seat on that noble steed’s beam.
“The king calls the auctions equal? He says the fortunes are fair? Lies! Lies! Lies!”
Mr. Grey’s eyes, and all the shining eyes in the sea, followed the man’s arm as it thumped against the rusty beam of his mount to punctuate his last three exclamations. The sawhorse bucked and reared, enhancing the effect.
Unbeknownst to Mr. Grey, and to the onlooking, and even to the speechmaker, his arm swung its three-beat rhythm in perfect time with another arm, swinging in a similar motion, just beneath the crowded court.
In a dank cellar of the fact… Actually, that’s wrong. We are in Bleachgate, after all. Let’s start over.
In a parched cellar of the factory - lurking beneath the courtyard thronging with uninvited guests - a usual crowd of crates, bags, and beady eyed, desiccated rats, fretted and worried about an unexpected visitor.
The cellar generally ran hot, and dry, and dark. Nothing often disturbed the fuzzy dust carpet and cobweb curtains. The mean, sooty bricks in the walls glowered in menacing unity on the rare intruders. Unless some annoying busybody came to drop off another box of raw goods, or gather a bean bag for delivery to Starharbor’s taverns and eateries, the cellar clung to a static state of abandonment.
But today, while it remained hot and dry (under penalty of law), the cellar was not dark. A single candle brought harsh light into the eyes of the rats, who shied to the corners in sleepy annoyance. The dust carpet and the cobwebs were blown back. One group of the sooty bricks no longer stood upon each other’s shoulders in formation, but lay on the floor in a scatter.
A gaping hole had been blown through the cellar wall. Through it, a hooded man in a chicanery-spotted robe carried the too-bright candle at the end of an aloft-held arm. In the other arm, he balanced a small bundle of objects: the bag of ice, the box of pufferfrogs, the standard issue Rube Goldberg machine, and the pocket ticker.
The man listened for a moment. He made sure of his unbroken stealth. Then he set to work. He began with the three swings of his arm, hammering a Goldberg cog into place, in sync with the courtyard man thumping his fist on the sawhorse. One overly complicated module after another, pulley by pulley and marble by marble, the man assembled his Rube Goldberg machine. The rats and bags and boxes watched with worry.
Meanwhile in the courtyard, Mr. Grey took a measured head swivel of his surroundings. He found no escape avenue. The mob, grinning madly, had stuffed themselves into the courtyard; like cubicles in a hedge. Some went so far as to clamber above the heads of their companions, seeking a better view of the sawhorse knight. They climbed and sat on a viny network of dark iron pipes connected to huge stoves and furnaces in the brick factory walls. The stove-beasts made a mechanical lowing noise, and took synchronized breaths with every up and down motion of their pufferfish bellows.
Finding himself in the definite middle of a stranger-faced crown, Mr. Grey relied heavily upon his pocket ticker for comfort. He un-pocketed it, flicked it open, checked the hands, put it away, drew it again, wound it (for the dozenth time since the mob took him), and once more returned it to his pocket. Mr. Grey’s elbows remained firmly locked with the two hunched crones at his sides, but his hands were free. Mr. Grey took out his earmuffs, and planted them over his ears. The linen, grey headwarmers did nothing to block out the noises of the crowd, the stoves, or the mounted tirader. They did, however, distance him further from unwanted conversation. They also looked ridiculous, in the dry heat.
Having broken the record for ‘Maximum Isolation Achieved Standing in the Middle of a Mob’, and gathered small comfort, Mr. Grey planned his escape.
He lacked the force of character required to shove through the unasked-for comrades blocking the sharp iron gate. A paralytic fear of discourtesy extinguished the thought in its babyhood. Besides that, Mr. Grey’s body model hadn’t shipped with any special muscular attributes. His shoulders came from a standard mold. Most individual members of the mob looked fragile; thin layers of street dirt, covering thin wrappings of sere robes, covering thin layers of parchment skin. As a unit, however, they melded into a hard, solid shape; just as all the individual legal pages came together to form the great parchmentwork mines. There simply was no path to the gate.
In the same way of the cubicle hedge or the parchmentwork mines which it resembled, however, the crowd had shifting channels. Like the cubicle hedge, gaps appeared sometimes when the people jostled to catch the mounted man’s speech. Like the parchmentwork mines, occasional opening yawned before Mr. Grey, offering an easy route to the tall factory walls.
The walls were made of dark clay bricks. The bricks were all from one family, which Mr. Grey inferred by the mother-factory wording stamped upon each; ‘Bluntgem Brickery’s Most A-Dorable baby brick!’. His grey eyes followed the sibling blocks and furnace vines up the wall. The one exception to the wall’s uniform pattern was an overseer’s glass box at the pinnacle. The overseer who stood within looked upon the speechmaking knight and his peasants’ revolt with fretful eyes and wringing hands.
Mr. Grey’s looked away from the wall. His hands had little hope of scaling the bricks, with only a thin layer of connective mortar between each block in the brood.
Finally, Mr. Grey looked at the crowd. He sought a kindred spirit, a fellow unwilling mob member wanting to leave. Most people kept their bright eyes glued on the speaker. They only broke their furrow-browed, open-jawed expressions of anger for verbal outcries of the same emotion, whenever the speaker’s words required a monosyllabic response.
A select few engaged themselves in other ways. One man picked bent and picked about the courtyard’s dust and stones. He held up a bug, calcified by the heat and left unnoticed, and added it to his treasure sack. Another woman showed even higher enthusiasm for the speaker. Instead of clapping or answering his questions, she whistled like a dragon tram each time he dealt one his strong, verbal blows to the king. She made this whistle by sticking seven fingers in her mouth - most of which were her own - and blowing hard. Neither the bug man nor the whistle lady seemed to Mr. Grey like good candidates for an alliance.
Mr. Grey’s eyes accidentally met those of the crone on his right. He gave her the same nod he used for passing coworkers in the Justice Center halls; tight-mouthed, courteous, dismissive. He tried breaking from her notice by rearranging the pencil pushing tools in his pockets. All this, with his elbow still linked to hers.
But the mistake was made. As Mr. Grey reached for his pocket, that rightmost lady leaned back into his frame of view, and waved at him with her free, wrinkled arm. She said, “Excuse me, young man. You don’t busy yourself with the cause.” Mr. Grey pulled back his earmuffs, pretended he hadn’t heard. She said, “Young man, you should consider yourself a fortunate tock in a history-making moment.”
His engaged elbows prevented Mr. Grey from giving a noncommittal shrug. Instead he nodded, while avoiding her eyes. She held him in a stern, towering glare. “I do consider myself so, ma’am,” he said. “But I’m not sure… It’s not, so much, my business. You understand?”
“Oh honey, Noooo,” said the squatter, plumper crone on his left, in a soft voice of admonition. “This is everybody’s business. As my husband always used to say, ‘Politics is everybody’s business.’” The left crone looked up at him with a softer face. Her plump cheeks held a disappointed, pitying smile.
“Precisely,” picked up the right crone. “When I was your age, I’d already participated in a dozen protests. With much more enthusiasm than you’re showing.”
Mr. Grey was about to explain that he, “Wasn’t, precisely, specialized in the protesting line of work,” Just then, however, the background noise of the speaker paused for a crowd cheer. Mr. Grey cheered with them. Evidently his monotonous, one-tone cheering didn’t meet the high standards of the right crone’s younger days, or the left crone’s husband. Both looked at him disapprovingly. The tall and lined right one looked down with glowering sternness; the plump left one, up with pity.
When the cheer withered and the rant resumed, the old ladies gave their names to Mr. Grey. He gave them his. The right one, speaking down to the left, said, “Well, my dear. If this ripe lad doesn’t plan on recruiting himself…”
The left one nodded sagely, and said, “We could always…”
The two unhooked their elbows from Mr. Grey’s. For a flash, he thought they meant to release him, and to help him escape. A silly thought. It lasted only a tock. The two grandmothers instantly recaptured him. They adjusted Mr. Grey’s shoulder and elbow joints to force the arms out straight. He held his fingers stiffly, in a chopping position, not sure what the grandmothers intended. The old ladies brought out a long skein of yarn, and began draping it lengthwise in alternating lines across his grey limbs.
The left one explained. “Now honey, since you won’t find anything else to do, you can hold the warps. My late husband did it all the time when he was around. We’ll feed the yarn and handle the weft.”
“Pay close attention,” snapped the right grandmother. “Move your arms precisely. Hold them still when we say. Otherwise, the weave won’t come together. It’s a complicated mechanical operation. You can’t stand and stare through it.”
The right one spoke with a snootish tone. The left’s eyes gleamed with self-satisfied, false sympathy. The attitudes said that the old ladies expected - and perhaps wanted - Mr. Grey to fail.
But these elders had misjudged Mr. Grey. Difficulty? With a mundane task involving mechanical rhythm?
As if…
Mr. Grey played the part of the loom to perfection.
The two old women, while they might have hoped to belittle their enlisted helper, were not less pleased to find a quality loom. Mr. Grey, while he might have hoped for some escape from the sweltering courtyard and the ladies, found the task kept his hands busy. The result was that all three were satisfied with the arrangement. They wove together at an industrious pace, in the middle of the work yard riot.
The women gabbed over Mr. Grey’s head. The growl of the coals in the factory furnaces rolled beneath their chatter. The man on the sawhorse sent his own words soaring above, punctuated by wild and forceful gestures with his hands. The words flying over their heads just then were, “And why is it? That murky promises of ‘great wealth’ or undefinable ‘happiness’ always come with the clause of ‘greater effort’ in our ‘fair fortunes’?”
The question and angry sarcasm produced some scattered cries.
The speaker went on, “They ask us to pour our sweat and our breath into another swing of the pick. Worse still! They threaten us if we fail. The fortunes foretell misery on our heads if we don’t meet their vague condition. I laugh when I read these weaker fortunes, comrades. What additional misery could they possibly heap upon our troubled brows?”
The speaker laughed bitterly, cueing the crowd to do the same. The two ladies and Mr. Grey paused. The applause ended. The speaker ranted on. The three resumed their weaving.
The plump lady on the left tried pouring her own sweat into the labor, as she threaded the yarn up and down across Mr. Grey’s arm-warp. This being Bleachgate, however, each fresh droplet vanished the moment it bubbled on her skin, in a raspy puff of vapor. She wiped a dirty sleeve needlessly across her brow, and said, “Mine could have been better. I don’t deny it. That brave sweetheart on his noble steed has found the matter’s meat.”
“Your what?” asked the tall right one.
“My fortune, of course. It predicted I was due for an age without colds. But only if I ‘started eating right’.”
“And?”
“Anndddd? Explain to me how exactly I’m supposed to eat ‘right’? I can’t afford that. The same beans are sold now as at the last auction. I’m sure I’ll catch something today. I’m positively sure of it! My husband always said, ‘If you’re in a crowd, you’ll probably catch something.’”
The tall right one sniffled… dryly. “You don’t expect to avoid every Starharbor plague, do you?”
“And why not?”
“With this incumbent king? Laughable. These ages you have a flu, or a wart, or a bad case of fleas sold to you from every corner shop. The moment you march out the door you’re exposed to his majesty’s parasites. Do you know how often I used to get sick? Back when our king’s father’s father was in charge?”
“If my husband were here he’d know…”
“Almost never. That’s how often I got sick when I was a girl. But that’s not how it is these days.”
“‘Almost never,’ IS exactly what he would have said!”
Mr. Grey had heard the dwarfish left lady reference her husband in the past tense several times now. It made him anxious. The two ladies seemed to have forgotten Mr. Grey wasn’t really a loom, or at least, not the inorganic kind. He surprised them both when he spoke to the left lady. “You’re an expert in your own affairs, miss. But, if your husband isn’t existing now, is it proper - not to say ‘legal’ - to reference him?”
“Not existing!” The portly grandmother jumped and nearly missed a pick in the weave. “I never said my husband wasn’t existing.”
“I’m sorry if I’m mistaken. You did call him your ‘late husband’…”
“He’s late for the rally, Honey. Only late for the rally!”
Mr. Grey paused. “You’ve also been saying your husband ‘would have’ said or done this…”
“Her husband is mute, young man,” answered the right one. “He rented out his throat to a frog. A little extra income, and no wonder they need it. In this day and age.”
“Ah,” said Mr. Grey. The simple explanation defeated him utterly.
“You should look a little further before leaping to conclusions,” murmured the left one.
“Sorry, miss.”
Another break by the mounted man obliged the assembly to clap. The three paused in their weaving to applaud with the rest of the crowd. Mr. Grey found it awkward with his arms tangled in the skein.
“What was yours young man?” the right one asked.
“Mine?” Mr. Grey glanced up at her snappish face.
“Your fortune. You must have liked it, Mister ‘I’m-not-the-involved-sort’.”
“I have great changes coming, if I ‘leave my comfort zone’. It’s vague. I do agree with that general complaint.”
They both nodded sagely. Mr. Grey alternated his gaze mechanically between the two, until the right one said, “It is vague. Believe me, I had to buy and fulfill my share of that kind when I was a girl. In fact I had a dozen fortunes just like yours. I distinctly remember finishing each and every one.”
“Then you’ve been outside your comfort zone a time or two.”
“She has,” said the left one, interrupting her friend. She chortled softly. “So have my husband and me. More than once. If he was here, he’d be the first to tell you the number of times we got more than a little uncomfortable with each other. He’d tell all about when we weren’t quite sure things would-”
“Work,” said the not-so-mute husband. He didn’t address this to his wife; he wasn’t in the courtyard. He spoke to himself, in a murmur, alone in the cellar, as he made the finishing touches on the Rube-Goldberg/frog-box/ice/pocket-ticker contraption. “Please… just work.”
The old husband rubbed a grimy hand across his face, which looked dark beneath the hood and behind his whiskers. He stood, took one deep breath, and twisted a knob on the pocket ticker. He made sure the hands had started tocking. Then, in a flurry, he kicked up dust and rustled the cobweb curtains of the dry cellar. The husband vanished through the broken brickwork hole. The candle, which he left behind, diffused greasy light over the counting contraption.
The dusty boxes and sacks of beans huddled close for comfort. The pufferfrogs in the box looked at the bucket of ice dangling above them with shivering eyestalks. The withered rats followed the hands of the pocket ticker with nervous eyes, as the long metal rectangles juddered around the ivory face. The room resumed its breathless silence, but with one, tense, repeated note. “Tick… tick… tick…”
""Tick, tick, tick!” screamed the man on the sawhorse back in the courtyard. His steed reared, and whinnied with the sound of bending metal. “How many times, brothers and sisters, shall we listen to the calls for efficiency in labor. How long must we struggle for ragged breath at the same pace? How many moments can we-”
The man soldiered forth in his point. The crowd, however, no longer responded with applauding, stamping, shouting thunder. They met the latest call to arms with glossy, distant expressions. The speechmaker was beginning to drag on.
Mr. Grey - listening to the two ladies all the while - had found comradery in their shared weaving. He finished a string of edgewise thoughts. “-and that’s basically the wide and narrow of my problem.” Mr. Grey swung his arms at the perfect time to catch a draping thread.
“Well,” began the tall right woman, “my opinion is that there’s no problem at all.”
“You think the choice is clear?”
“Of course! Obviously you need to embark on your work mission. Straight through the Odormoat with you! When I was your age I went on half a dozen tours in the king’s service.”
“It wouldn’t be ‘official’ service. Technically it’s a vacation.”
“Young man, when you’re told to take a vacation, it’s always expected you’ll use that time to serve your king.”
“There are some clients I plan to track. A few people who may need prompting…”
“It wasn’t a matter of a few people during my service ages. Our jobs involved many people, young man. You take your work trip, and be grateful for the perk you’ve been gifted. That’s what I say.” The towering right grandmother ended aggressively threading a new pick across Mr. Grey’s arms.
Before Mr. Grey could answer, the left grandmother merrily yanked Mr. Grey’s arms down to her level. She said, “Oh dear, I’m sure my husband would disagree.”
“You don’t think the trip’s right then?” asked Mr. Grey. He rolled his head to look down at her.
“Honey, you seem to want out of that comfortable area of yours. I’ve a presentiment this Honeydew girl will see you do just that.” She chortled, as at some inward joke.
“She said she wanted excitement.”
“Which I got in spades serving our grace,” interrupted the lady from above and to the right.
The left lady grabbed and held Mr. Grey’s attention before he could turn it. “My husband would be the first to tell you that’s what this Honeydew gal wouldn’t want! My husband and I got on so well because he was always right at my side. He never went running off on any wild romps.”
Mr. Grey said, “But when we walked at the beach, even though I made an extra-long mental list, she didn’t seem interested in any of my questions.”
“She thinks you’re selfish. You’ve gone on and on about your ideas, your vacation. Why should she invest her time if you won’t?”
“Hmmm. In that case, I’d be better off staying here. Maybe I need an even longer list…”
“If it were my husband talking, He’d say something like that. Only, more eloquently. And another thing,” she added with a sharp tug on her thread, “is this; don’t beat about the bush. If it were my fortune, and my husband, the timeframe wouldn’t matter. Every tock’s precious. My husband would be the first to tell you, ‘Time’s running out.’”
The dwellers in the dim and dusty cellar thought similarly at that moment.
One of the withered rats inched toward the pocket ticker. The boxes and bags could only watch, motionless and tense. The frogs were terrified. They shook in their box. Only the rodents had resolved to intervene. The whiskered lot had drawn straws. Now the lucky losers watched as the unlucky winner - the short straw clutched between his buck teeth - scaled the device.
The intrepid rat reached the top of the frog box. He looked down at the forest of quavering eyestalks. The pufferfrog stalks flicked back and forth between the rat, the bucket of dangling ice, and the spinning ticker. The rat skirted along a domino track of the Rube Goldberg machine, careful not to disturb the ice bucket, careful not to set off any zany component.
Through a mix of luck and skill, the rat made it to the Goldberg structure’s peak. It reached the top of a marble ramp. The timer tocked before its beady eyes. The hands spun heedlessly, almost too fast, as though eager to release the miniature marble train and begin the show.
The rat looked back at his beady eyed comrades. The other rats peeked from the dark gaps left by the dry boxes and bean bags. The whole dusty crowd vibrated with anxiety. Some of the rats pulled at their whiskers, while a few offered toothy, encouraging nods.
The chosen rat took a deep, raspy breath, and swatted the button on the pocket ticker with a claw.
It did not have the desired effect.
Instead of stopping, the spinning ebony hand on the ticker face leapt forward a large fraction. The hand rushed around, faster than ever. Like a runner at the final turn, it spun towards its final, vertical position.
The chosen rat turned back to the crowd. They wore a group expression of unmasked, awestruck horror. It looked down at the pufferfrogs. They looked back pleadingly; as though it were in the rat’s power to grant mercy.
The chosen rat shrugged apologetically. It leapt from the device, hit the stone floor with a mushroom of dust, and scurried through the brick wall-hole into which the plump grandmother’s husband had earlier fled.
The other rats exploded in a mad scramble. As one, they scurried after their comrade. The crates groaned accusations after them, calling the rats cowards and traitors. Their dry wood creaked as the stacked boxes braced together. The pufferfrogs swiveled their eyestalks wildly between the ice bucket and the pocket ticker. “Is this the end?” asked one of the resigned, warty creatures.
“Yes,” thought Mr. Grey, back in the courtyard. “This is the end.”
A tweed-robed man jostled through the dense crowd. He lacked Mr. Grey’s reservations against pushing and shoving, and used both maneuvers to reach the shouting man on the sawhorse. Mr. Grey had seen this newcomer before. This was the same tweed robe that disappeared earlier into the canal tunnel, back when Mr. Grey crossed the Bleachgate bridge in the mob’s clutch.
That same mob had turned malleable as their interest in the speaker waned. The tweed-robed man parted them easily. He moved up to the sawhorse.
“Well young man?” asked the woman on the right. She pulled hard on a thread to get Mr. Grey’s attention.
Mr. Grey looked up at her. “Pardon?”
She scoffed. “When I was your age, we paid attention to the wisdom our elders gave.”
“Terribly sorry. I think it’s time for us to-”
“What my dear friend asked,” picked up the left lady, “was if you’d decided about that fortune?”
“Leaving or staying is a big decision. I’ll need some time.”
“Honey, you’ve got to take a chance. Otherwise, you’ll never talk with this Honeydew girl again. That’s something along the lines of what my hus-”
“It sounds to me like you ship out soon,” interrupted the right lady. “No time to dawdle.”
Each old lady tugged at the yarn weave, pulling Mr. Grey’s attention between the two. He said, “Let me ask this. Did it work out for you? In the end?” He addressed this question to both, by alternating back and forth between the two grandmothers.
The tall old crone scoffed. She looked at him grimly. “Do I look as if service failed me?”
The squat old crone chortled. She waved a hand at her brow in a vain attempt at cooling it, and smiled sadly. “If my husband were here, he’d tell you exactly how well it went for us.”
Mr. Grey’s head rotated back and forth between the two old women. One was sad. One was grim. Both wore, over their sere cotton bonnets and fraying patchworks hems, the ubiquitous bleak grist of Starharbor.
Mr. Grey watched the man in the stiff tweed robe shunt his way past a last wave of poverty stricken rioters. The man climbed the side of the rusted sawhorse, which whinnied in a grating metal noise at the additional weight. The speaker blew continuously on the dying coals of his speech, while also leaning his ear to catch the hooded man in the tweed robe’s report.
Mr. Grey’s eyes caught this exchange, even if his ears could not. This time, he attended the eyes’ testimony when they said something dangerous was afoot.
The industrious old pair had resumed their weaving without waiting for an answer from Mr. Grey. He turned to the squat woman with a sudden plan. “You know, your husband might be waiting outside,” he suggested. Then he turned to the other. “Besides that, your, um, leader’s message seems to have been made. It looks like people are ready to… well, to go out and… lead themselves from this point.” He twitched an arm instinctively to his pocket and its ticker. He stopped himself short, keeping the weave together.
“There’s something in that,” conceded one.
“Yes. It’s time we leave,” said the other.
The two began carefully unlocking the yarn shackles binding Mr. Grey.
Meanwhile, man-in-tweed-hooded-robe descended from the sawhorse’s stirrup. He began pushing his way out of the factory court. Man-on-sawhorse smiled in a satisfied and triumphant way. Abruptly shifting his tone, he said, “But - brothers and sisters - words can only inspire. Too many ring of falsehood, no matter how true.”
There were several stifled yawns; one man tapped a foot on the cobblestones and glanced at the massive workhouse ticker.
“The time has come to take the next step forward! Let this glorious start follow you in every moment after; in your homes, in your jobs, in the streets-”
The man continued, despite evincing a desire to wrap up. But he got his intention across. The people stretched their backs and knuckles with destructive popping sounds, and swiveled their heads with sharp vertebral cracks. The mob shuffled toward the gate. The ones sitting on the stove pipe vines leapt to the cobblestones. The speaker dismounted from the sawhorse. He gave it a look of pity, and tried leading it by its bungee-cable reins. The animal remained loyal to its factory owners, however, and wouldn’t budge.
As an ebbing tide, the crowd hustled and bustled to the toothy gate. A general gurgle of disparate conversation picked up; like sink water let loose through the pipes. No longer did they roar with the anger and fury of a rising storm. Now, Mr. Grey heard idle, everyday gossip, and the patter of softer footfalls on cobblestone.
The two ladies enjoyed a degree of freedom in the receding mob. Its participants retained enough of their individual humanity to make room for their elders. Mr. Grey carried the tight weave they’d made together under one arm; a boat-anchor shawl. He marched forward in the wake of the chattering biddies. In this way, Mr. Grey reached the gate at the front. He slipped out of the factory yard. He looked across Bleachgate’s dusty streets. He saw no approaching bouncer highwheels, and no other mobs to hinder his step.
As they stepped beneath the pointed fangs of the workhouse fence, Mr. Grey brought out his pocket ticker to check the time. Another pedestrian, passing in front at that same moment, caused Mr. Grey to trip. His pocket ticker flew from his hand. Its glass face charged at the unforgiving paving stones.
Mr. Grey bent and caught the ticker with a mechanical arm swing, a moment before it smashed.
But, in the tensed cellar below, no one stopped the alarm ring of the pocket ticker attached to the Rube Goldberg machine.
The timer hand struck the vertical with all the force of a dropping gavel. In a whoosh, the gate holding the marbles flew open. In a whoosh, they raced down the course. There rose a cacophony of springing, and a bedlam of clicking, and a mess of bright flashes, as the standard issue machine went through its unstoppable, cascading sequence.
The crates, the bags, and the terrified pufferfrogs watched as the final trigger - a metal locking pin - exploded off of the device. It hit the dusty floor with a chime. The heavy bucket of ice swung once in a lazy arc. Then it poured chunky, frozen water onto the stalky frogs.
The frog box shook. The frogs, which had been quivering from fear, now trembled violently at the touch of the ice. The unforgiving, hard, cold water sucked every degree of heat from the warm-blooded amphibians. The ice didn’t melt, moisture being forbidden in Bleachgate. Instead, sublimated directly into a cloud of hissing steam, sputtering off the poor pufferfrogs.
Every frog in the box immediately caught a very bad cold.
The critical reaction began with a single sniffle, from a single frog. The bags and boxes braced themselves. More sniffles joined. The frogs said - in nasally voices - how glad they were to share these final moments with each other. The frogs inhaled and puffed up to twice their size. Then three-times their size. The box’s dry boards bowed outward from the growing volume.
As one voice, the frogs prepared to sneeze…
“Ahhhhhhhhh,” with one breath inward.
“Aaaahhhhhhhhhh,” with a second.
A still cellar.
Dry dust on the floor. Dry cobwebs in the rafters. Dry boxes and bags in the corners. Dry bricks in the walls.
A long moment of endlessly stretching silence.
“CROOOOAAAKKKK!”
Mr. Grey heard a peal like thunder. There echoed behind him a cracking… croaking… boom. He stood from picking up his ticker and spun.
Mr. Grey watched the factory courtyard bubble. The pavement ballooned up beneath the people still inside. He heard and smelled a final, hissing, marshy air. Then the sublimated gas exploded from the dry vault. Bricks and sawhorses and people went flying. The whole courtyard ensemble took to the skies. The speechmaker soared over the factory gate, shock shining on his face. His rusty sawhorse followed him out with a shrieking-metal whinny.
Mr. Grey stumbled. His knees and hands scraped the dry street. Debris dropped like ashes around him: pieces of courtyard rubble, bean-clusters buzzing like bugs against the street, petrified pufferfrog eyestalks.
Mr. Grey stood back up. He still held the anchor shawl product of his weaving. Of the two old grandmothers who’d helped him make it, he saw no sign.
In the distance, the first notes of approaching bouncer bugles blared forth.
Mr. Grey started forward; in a way that was not at all stiff or mechanical. Ears ringing, heart hammering, he willingly joined the confusion of fleeing citizens.