THE CLOCK was moving rather slowly; the lads who pushed and pulled it were struggling across the terrain. It felt as if they were hauling the wagon over a series of railway ties without the benefit of steel runner rails, since the ground was fretted with half-submerged roots of oakhair trees.
The dwarf and his new recruit walked ahead, picking out the best route. They would need to stop before long, as the sky was paling.
“We shall want to take special care, Lady Lucky,” said Mr. Boss. “Usually we like to sidestep troublesome neighborhoods, but our advice this time is to thread our way among contentious populations of nasty, armed men. Reach a safe haven just between them—a tall stone house where custom requires we be granted sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary comes at a cost, however hidden,” she replied.
“Oh, our private Missy Prissy condescends to comment!” The dwarf skipped in place. His mockery was affectionate, but it knew no restraints. “Do tell, darling.”
“I mean nothing by it. Just—just that no rescue comes free.”
“You’re sulky, you’re surly, because we impressed you into service after we saved you from that dolorous tower. That’s the thanks we get. My feelings are hurt.”
She shrugged. Perhaps she did mean that. Some weeks ago, in her life before now, her aging employer had locked her in the top floor of a stone turret. She’d been retained as a nurse, but he wanted more than medical care, and she had refused to yield to his advances. (Well, she couldn’t even if she’d wanted.)
He had gloated at her from below, by turns cajoling and threatening, until one morning, when a grape had become lodged in his windpipe. She couldn’t throw herself out the high window to revive him; the drop was too steep. She couldn’t beat the door down (she had tried that). She watched him stagger to his knees and clutch his throat, and look up at her. He couldn’t speak. She had all she could do not to sing down to him, “Did you take your tablets before your meal?” When he fell, his body made a shadow and then a stain on the terrace.
She feared starvation, but scarcely a day later the dwarf and his crew came along with their awesome Clock. The Dragon had stretched its armored swanlike neck nearly as high as her windowsill, and she had been able to escape, exchanging one affectionate fiend for another. But at least the dwarf and his toothsome boys had sworn against sex with a woman, so they were a better company to keep for the time being.
Mr. Boss deduced that his reticent recruit was in a perplexed mood. He asked, “What were you doing in the service of that Grandpa Ogre, anyway?”
She looked hither and yon. Though the boys were far enough ahead not to hear, she didn’t want to talk about most of it. She said, “My invalid master professed that in exchange for chores I could perform, I could barter for my freedom. I had three years to go when he became cross with me and locked me in that tower. It was too high to escape from, unless one wanted to jump to one’s death. Once in my childhood I had thought I could fly—but I had no wings of my own. It took your dragon with its own wings to reach its neck up so I could crawl on top of it, and scramble to safety. Did the dragon tell you I would be there, or was it just my luck?”
“Please! I don’t dabble in contingency theory. Too rich for my numbish skull.”
“How long am I beholden to you for your kindness?”
“Ah, that I can’t say. The Clock spells out its designs of fate only as far as it wants me to know them.”
They were silent. More companionable than usual. The dwarf in his way was as indentured as she was in hers. She had seen him set up the Clock only once, to put on an exhibition for a petty brigand who’d come across them on a stretch of paved road and threatened them with a pistol. She’d watched the sergeant-at-hand ratchet the gears until the whole tall instrument was quivering with tension. They all stood back as the Clock invented a little entertainment. She didn’t yet know if the Clock was merely distracting, a tiktok cleverness, or enchanted.
A puppet arrived under the arch of a little proscenium up top. He looked uncannily like the brigand, right down to the gusseted Lincoln-green tunic and the pistol. The puppet looked this way and that, as if to make sure he was alone. Then he sat down and clasped the pistol, barrel upright, between his legs and began to stroke the shaft of it.
No children’s puppet play, this. She’d closed her eyes.
“That’s filthy,” murmured the bandit, somewhat approvingly.
She heard the puppet rocking back and forth. Though there was no sound, she could tell by the quickening of the rhythm that the big pop was near. “Stop,” she’d tried to say, but her voice had fled: She knew no one was listening to her.
“Whoa,” said the bandit, “you’ve got some nerve—”
She had peered between lashes, she admitted it: The mouth of the pistol had fountained a surge of foamy blood all over the trousers of the puppet, who fell back, sated and, it seemed, dead.
Worried that the Clock was not just illustrative of morals but perhaps a hand of fate, she’d whirled to see the brigand. He was slack jawed at the performance (though that was the only part of him slack), and he hadn’t yet noticed that the boys had liberated him of his considerable wallet and his pistol both.
They kept the cash and the bullets and returned the pistol before releasing him. They had nothing to fear: He tore off crashing through the underbrush like a fox from hounds.
The blood was good, no? asked the dwarf. Juice of blood oranges and pomegranates thickened with cream of tartar. The Clock is talented but needs some fuel from time to time.
She hadn’t asked how it came to be that the Clock was supplied with a puppet resembling a chance highway robber. Such a turn put paid to the notion of chance at all. Still, in some ways that was consoling: She could stay where she was, clandestine and still, and freely believe that this must be her fate. The need to decide further was removed from her, which made something of a rest.
“I won’t keep you longer than I’m directed to,” said the dwarf now, as they headed toward the sanctuary he had divined might take them in.
“You did me a service by rescuing me. I’m not looking to leave you. I have no plans but to keep out of sight. I merely worry at the thought of armies massing around us.”
“Armies are only hunters in formation. Upright teams of precision hunters.”
“Once I hunted for information, but one of my informants was killed. I have retired from hunting, Mr. Boss. I am no fan of the spoils of the game.”
He reached out to pat her wrist but she tucked her hands in her shawl. Such reticence she showed! Hoping to further this unexpected moment of confidences, the dwarf asked her, “How would you feel about a Lion hunt?”