The Clock of the Time Dragon

Frex was more concerned for Melena than she knew. He stopped at the first fisherman’s hut he saw and spoke with the man at the half-door. Could a woman or two spend the day and if needed the night with Melena? It would be a kindness. Frex nodded with a wince of gratitude, acknowledging without words that Melena was not a great favorite in these parts.

Then, before continuing around the end of Illswater and over to Rush Margins, he stopped at a fallen tree and drew two letters from his sash.

The writer was a distant cousin of Frex’s, also a minister. Weeks earlier the cousin had spent time and valuable ink on a description of what was being called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Frex prepared himself for the day’s holy campaign by rereading about the idol clock.

    I write in haste, Brother Frexspar, to catch my impressions before they fade.
    The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and stands as high as a giraffe. It is nothing more than a tottering, freestanding theatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves and proscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, an invention of green painted leather, silvery claws, ruby jeweled eyes. Its skin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, and iron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled by clockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrow leathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches out sulfurous balls of flaming orange stink.
    Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches, are puppets, marionettes, figurines. Creatures of folk tale. Caricatures of peasants and royalty alike. Animals and fairies and saints—our unionist saints, Brother Frexspar, stolen out from underneath us! I get enraged. The figures move on sprockets. They wheel in and out of doorways. They bend at the waist, they dance and dawdle and dally with each other.

Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, this propaganda tool for wickedness that challenged the power of unionism and of the Unnamed God? The clock’s handlers were a dwarf and some narrow-waisted minions who seemed to have only enough brain capacity among them to pass a hat. Who else was benefiting besides the dwarf and his beauty boys?

The cousin’s second letter had warned that the clock was making its way next to Rush Margins. It had told a more specific story.

    The entertainment began with a thrum of strings and a rattle of bones. The crowd pushed close, oohing. Within the lighted window of a stage, we saw a marriage bed, with a puppet wife and husband. The husband was asleep and the wife sighed. She made a motion with her carved hands to suggest that her husband was disappointingly small. The audience shrieked with laughter. The puppet wife went to sleep herself. When she was snoring, the puppet husband sneaked out of bed.
    At this point, up above, the Dragon turned on its base, and pointed its talons into the crowd, indicating—without a doubt—a humble well digger named Grine, who has been a faithful if inattentive husband. Then the dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hither gesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maiden daughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Grine, Letta, and the blushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores.
    The Dragon rested again but draped a wing over another archway, which lit up to reveal the puppet husband, wandering out in the night. Along came a puppet widow, with sprigged hair and high color, dragging along a protesting, flinty-toothed daughter. The widow kissed the puppet husband, and pulled off his leather trousers. He was equipped with two full sets of male goods, one in the front and another hanging off the base of his spine. The widow positioned her daughter on the abbreviated prong in the front, and herself took advantage of the more menacing arrangement in the rear. The three puppets bucked and rocked, emitting squeals of glee. When the puppet widow and her daughter were through, they dismounted and kissed the adulterous puppet husband. Then they kneed him, simultaneously, fore and aft. He swung on springs and hinges, trying to hold all his wounded parts.
    The audience roared. Grine, the actual well digger, sweated drops as big as grapes. Letta pretended to guffaw, but her daughter had already disappeared from shame. Before the evening was out, Grine was set upon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesque anomaly. Letta was shunned. Her daughter seems to have vanished entirely. We suspect the worst.
    At least Grine wasn’t killed. Yet who can say how our souls have been stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostages to their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at such indignity, don’t you agree?

Sometimes it seemed to Frex that every itinerant witch and toothless gibbering seer in Oz who could perform even the most transparent of spells had seized on the outback district of Wend Hardings to scratch out a trade. He knew that folks from Rush Margins were humble. Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the drought dragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding. Frex was aware that the Clock of the Time Dragon combined the appeals of ingenuity and magic—and he would have to call on his deepest reserves of religious conviction to overcome it. If his congregation should prove vulnerable to the so-called pleasure faith, succumbing to spectacle and violence—well, what next?

He would prevail. He was their minister. He had pulled their teeth and buried their babies and blessed their kitchen pots for years now. He had abased himself in their names. He had wandered with an unkempt beard and a begging bowl from hamlet to hamlet, leaving poor Melena alone in the minister’s lodge for weeks at a time. He had sacrificed for them. They couldn’t be swayed by this Time Dragon creature. They owed him.

He moved on, shoulders squared, jaw set, stomach in a sour uproar. The sky was brown with flying sand and grit. The wind rushed high over the hills with the sound of a tremulous wail, as if pushing through some fissure of rock, on a ridge beyond any Frex could see.