Printhammer

I took a deep breath, and blew it out in a frustrated sigh that I hoped would take with it some of the smoke that clogged me up inside. I could feel it everywhere, sticking inside me like tar, making my eyes itch, making my chest ache, but as anyone around me could tell you, there was no actual smoke to be had: it was all a fabrication of my mind, an excuse, they said, not to make any real effort.

But it was real enough to me: no fool, I knew there was no smoke or tar or gunk clogging me up, and that I wasn’t going to actually breathe it out and suddenly, miraculously be well. After all, they had words for this condition now, words that weren’t known when I was young, like anxiety, depression, spectrum. I was unknowing, or unwilling to name, which applied best to me, and certainly not about to avail myself of one of the manic researchers at some university hospital to have my personal discord plucked at, but I knew there was some merit to the malaise.

Some writers perhaps have the advantage of full formed stories and well-knit plots leaping undistracted from their creative unconscious, but for me, it comes with tics and involuntary, stuttering fragments interrupting each other as they pour out, unbidden, into the most distracting parts of my forethoughts. The bits and pieces my mind makes for me form strange sensory symphonies: these come with flavours, colours, scents and sensations, and there’s a particular sort of cathartic salve I make by wringing them out for a reader.

When I am tired, or stressed, or frustrated, it wanders through my mind like a tune, half heard through the din of a market, or like the cracklestatic of a wandering radio dial. When this maddening affliction sits lodged, stuck, burning like a coal in my chest, I feel it smoking up inside me, like now, and there’s nothing to do but wait out the burn and ease the swelling with drink.

I suspect, perhaps, that I am not alone in this remedy.

Despite my best interests, and the knowledge that the exercise wouldn’t avail me, I hunched over the machine that sat on my writing desk, staring at the bald-faced page tucked into its top, my ears ringing for its silence. For perhaps the fiftieth time, I set my fingers on the keys, and waited for the pressure of my muse to bear down on one and swing the first blow to chip away at the parchment. For an instant, I felt the twitch, and then like a startled bird, I snatched my hands away, as if the promise of relief had burned them.

I slumped in my seat, once again defeated and exhausted, and felt my brow knit in the looming shadow of a pending migraine. I heard a flurry of tuneless, wordless singing fast approaching my closed door like a gay seasonal squall. I flinched as the door flew open wide.

My mother swept through the room in a bustle. She’d always supported the arts, and had been something of a poet herself in her youth, but the cacophony of childrearing and the love of m y father had soothed something inside her, and the scrabbling poet had wandered off into me. She tsk’d at me as she straightened, and I knew that she’d made the excuse to barge in to my study because she’d seen me in this state before. A cress sandwich with boiled egg made its appearance on the plate she tucked onto the corner of my coffee table, one of my favourite snacks when the writing mood took. Just now, it looked flat and stale and disappointing: about how I felt.

“It’s always so drab in here,” she opined, falsely. Surprised by the incongruity of her words, I actually turned around to take in the atmosphere of the room, so reminiscent of my father’s tastes, and let myself appreciate the inherent charisma it held, that it might, perhaps, stir my inspiration. All in all, the room was warm, inviting, and imbued with comfort and charm that reminded me of my childhood : it was me who was drab in here .

Mother turned from the window, looking at the machine on my desk disdainfully. Her father had used quill and ink to write, and to scribe maps, design buildings, and make windmills. He would define plants he found as he wandered the nearby bluffs in great detail , filling a number of the natural history books on the shelves around me with science and memories. Mother had no love of the mechanical clatter of the Printhammer when it was at work: it reminded her of the textile mills, she said, and the poor folks who had to work the machines there. When, at times, I would rattle away on it for hours into the night, she’d retreat fully from the house, escaping to the garden cottage in a bid for peace.

“I do wish you would get up from that silly thing and go outside.” She announced, gesturing at my writing companion with the same sort of superstitious dismissal one might reserve for an ill-omened cat. “That new young lady I mentioned, the one whose family bought the Marlon farm? She was out in the lane earlier, and she looked to be headed for the market: perhaps you’ll meet her there while you’re collecting my list.”

When I looked plaintively at her, she pulled a hand-scrawled note from the pocket of her dress and handed it to me, not tolerating my dire mood. I sighed again, and the coal in my breast throbbed, sooting up the room. It would be unkind to argue, when she clearly cared more than I did for my well-being. With a feckless jab at the keys, I hammered out a single word, carelessly wasting the paper.

FINE.

She rolled her eyes.

“Davan, don’t you get that way with me.” Her finger wagged in my face, less encouraging than a moment before. “I would put up with this from your father from time to time, bless his socks, but if I’d known his sullen moods would be part of your inheritence, I’d have traded up for a grain farmer or something. Just because you’re in a fit, does not mean you can be a brat to your mum. Now go get me my things.”

I stood up from the desk with a bland look of apology. “I’m sorry mum. You know how it is for me though. I’m just unwell. I can’t think straight and this bloody cough—“

She stopped me, eyes closed, hand on my chest. She’d heard it before and she did not, I knew, subscribe to my excuses. I broke off the litany, and she let me go. “Boy, you spend your whole life thinking that everything is so important, that every itch you have needs scratching, and that there’s only one way you can get any satisfaction. Just this once, pretend that’s not true, and imagine with that great big mind that I might be important too, and go get my sewing from the market.” She opened her eyes, and smiled to smooth the edge off the rebuke: “And while you’re there, have a look at the girls, would you? Or the boys, or the puppies for all it matters to me if it will get you out of your mood.”

Despite myself, I laughed, and it caught in my throat, sending me into a fit of coughs. Mum waited patiently for it to pass, though she offered me no comfort for it, and picked a walking stick out of the rack behind the door, using it to poke me on my way. I finally pulled it from her hand as I tucked my arm into a jacket sleeve, and it wasn’t long before I was tapping it along the stones of the lane outside the house as I picked my way to market.

Not far down, near Taggart’s corner post, I came across a rumpled pile of clothing, wool dyed a deep butterscotch yellow and threaded through with brown streaks. It looked handsome and well-tailored, so it was a surprise to see it in the dirt. Moreover, to see its owner perched over the ditch nearby, her white under-tunic and breeches shining in the dull light as she jammed what looked like a large branch into the duct under Taggart’s gate.

The way she was covered would not have been scandalous, save for the fact that her overcoat had been shed and piled up nearby, which somehow made me feel like a peeping tom, spying from afar. Before I could shake it off and decide how to react, however, she noticed me, and turned to look over her shoulder, beckoning me closer. She almost lost her balance, catching herself before falling in with a desperately clutched handful of rushes . Instinctively I hopped forward to try and catch her, despite being much too far to do so. By the time I reached her side, she practically had her head into the duct up to the shoulder.

“Can’t quite reach,” she winced out in a way that echoed hollow underneath. “See if you can… nick it out from the other side, hey ?” I could see her hair dangling perilously close to the water, the colour of the curls lighter by a magnitude than the dark closer to her scalp. Freckles on her neck distracted me enough for her to pull her head back out of the ditch, glance meaningfully across to the other side of it, and have me dart over to do as I was bid. I briefly wondered before I clambered onto my knees if I were meant to take my trousers off, and settled for just the jacket.

I peeked into the darkness under the gate, into the corrugated metal tube Taggart had lain under to make sure it didn’t sink into the ditch, and saw the shadow of her in the light at the other side. Her stick was poking at something that glinted in the dimness, and with my arm braced on the bank, fingers dug into the sod, I reached my walking stick into the shadow to hook the thing out.

It was a bottle, dirty as anything I’d seen. It was in rough shape for something that wasn’t fundamentally broken, the cork worn to a nub, the glass a spiderweb of scratches and gouges that gave it a frosted look wherever the black mud hadn’t ingrained itself. Something inside rattled gently, but before I could give it much thought, the woman had moved across from the other side of the ditch, and plonked down beside me on the bank. She leaned against me, warm in the late season air, and smelling of lavender.

Her face was ruddy from her effort, but she smiled with such excitement that, for a third time, I had to shake my attention loose. The coal throbbed in my chest, catching my breath, and taking it away. “Well?” she asked, a hint of foreign lilt in her voice as charming as everything about her. “How d’you want to do this?”

I opened my mouth to answer, and gaped like a frog. I may even have croaked like one, but for all I knew, and she laughed unselfconsciously, leaning back to lay on the rich grass. After a moment, she bounced back up, snatched the wet bottle from my stunned fingers, and shook it around while I blushed at her , speechless.

“There’s somethin’ in here, an’ I want it, but you helped me fetch it, so I suppose it’s partly yours by right.” She turned it over in her hands, running pale fingers with uncoloured but well-kept nails, over the unreadable bumps of whatever had been impressed on it by the maker, trying fruitlessly to clear a look inside. “I don’t want t’break it though, so I suppose we’d best go find something to open it with hey?”

In the time it took me to help her back in to her dress, I learned that her name was Arlene, and that Taggart’s wife had a nosy way about her when two young folk crawl up out of the ditch at the end of her walk in a state half dressed. We scurried off laughing toward town, laughing all along and stopping for our breath when we were out of sight, she still clutching the bottle like a prize.

We talked as we toured the market, pointedly ignoring the quest to find someone to uncork our catch, and I learned that she lived a half hour’s walk up the lane from me, on the old Marlon farm as Mother had surmised. Arlene’s family had come here from the provinces, near where the Empress commissioned her whaling fleet, and the great warships that patrolled the coasts for the Heather Raids. I did not find out how she managed to spot the bottle in the murky ditch under Taggart’s gate, but I couldn’t, admittedly, decide how to ask.

Somehow I remembered to pick up the articles of Mother’s shopping, making a bit of a game of it to pick the furthest shops apart to stretch my time as far as it would go. As we wandered in circles, Arlene started asking me what I thought of our treasure. “Do you think,” she pondered aloud, looking into the inscrutable glass, “it’s a map? Maybe pirate treasure, or a guide to the old Heather posts from before the wash. We could take a boat out and dive for crates of silver and jade.” I cast her a rueful, but doubting glance, and she ignored me totally.

Her eyes were lit like seawater in summer as she turned the glass around and around in delight. “Or maybe it’s a love letter from a baroness to her country sweetheart. It’s not a cheap bottle, I’d say it was probably an old brandy from the vineyards before the last war, so there would have been all sorts of nobility carting it around these ways here and there, settling in for the fighting.”

The more she spoke, the more I delighted: the way she unravelled the dull, muck-covered bottle from being some bit of old rubbish found in the ditch into being the fixation of one story or another, from a love note to the last will of a banished cardinal and any other whim enraptured me to the quickness of her mind. She knew her history well enough to find its romance, knew the ways of Society here as though she’d had to study it, which was quite possible for one foreign born coming to a place where the not-quite aristocracy of the upper-born middle class had eked out existence away from both the industrialization of the cities and the poverty at the frontiers. I learned that her father had been a military man, sailing with Her Majesty’s Own as one of the Bone Privateers, which had afforded him the commission to buy a house here, sheltered from the dangers of the Heather Coast he knew so well.

I also realized somewhere while we were sitting over tea in the square that Arlene possessed an imagination unrivaled in anyone I had ever met, and the absolute lack of the structured social decorum common to the area that allowed her to share it with me unfettered. She told stories with such a plain ease that I was hard pressed to think that they were anything but a recounting of actual events, certainly they MUST have happened—they ALL must have happened—for them to spring so readily to mind. I was enthralled, hanging on every word.

This bottle in her hands had belonged to pirates and savages, goblins and fae: it had traveled from either of the moons, at least once, carrying messages of warning for the return of the Iron Fleet. It was as simple as a love letter, as extravagant as an endless flask of mead, and even carried an unbreakable promise which we’d know when we opened it and could not dare to disobey. I watched it with growing respect as her otter-like fingers pinched and turned and rapped and scraped against it, and its legend became more and more and more because she willed it so. In my chest, the coal beat so hot and hard and unsteadily, that it surprised me to realize that it was just my heart than it did to hear about the bottle’s myriad supposed owners .

When the bill came, the boy brought us a bottle opener with the check. He set it down on the table between Arlene and me, and smiled, skittering off with the pile of milled coins we’d made for our tea. We stared at it, jointly, neither of us reaching, as though it were some sort of strange, daunting weapon.

Arlene frowned, and I made my choice. I picked up the corkscrew, which folded in the middle to disappear within a decorative sheathe, and put it aside, out of sight. “What if,” I asked carefully, catching her eyes, “It’s a lost work of the great composer Vacily Endona, that she cast into the sea in a fit of rage over how the Baron Raummeld treated her after the Fifth Gala?”

Immediately, the light flowed back into her face like a breaking of the clouds, and the corkscrew was forgotten. She leaned over the table, sweeping the bottle up in an excited dash, holding it practically under my nose. “Oh, d’ye think so? I wouldn’t put it past her, the primadonna. But, ooh, what if it’s a bit of that wild whalebone scrimshaw they have in the far coast, those ones they been hexing folks with? Might be some dark magus bottled it up to spread their influence further aways, hey?”

And so went the afternoon. And the next, and the weekend following. We took a trip into the mountains to draw pictures of the things we imagined there, under rocks, in the badger dens, and high up above the clouds in a hiking journal much like granddads had been.

Miraculously, the smoke slowly cleared, but the coals never went away: We didn’t talk once for three weeks for all she was mad at me, sulking and in my smoke, but it wasn’t long before she had me back out of it. I learned, through hardship, that Arlene had her own demons, and that while I was quiet and dark in my moods, hers were furious and even violent, and that drink did little to quell her as it did for me, making it only worse. Her father’s death, when word of it came, had put Arlene into such a dark place that I would not have recognized her for the spirit who had helped guide me out of my own bleak mind. This was when I learned to tell her stories, not simply writing out her imagination, but developing my own muse to lure her back from the horrid edges of depression and rage and despair.

I can only hope I am as much of a boon to her as she to me: not a year went by when she didn’t humble me, exalt me, praise me, chide me, and impress me with the ever-flowing realness of her, until it finally spilled over out of us, uncontained, and took the form of our exuberant, freckled twins. These were born of our celebration at finding a publisher in the capitol who was interested in distributing our work, with my beloved wife as the titular author; something otherwise unheard of in our time.

Our shared work, telling of worlds linked by magic doors, and street shops which came and went with interesting stories as needs be, captured the interest of a generation, inspiring something of a renaissance in the cities as people catered to the romance of the Unseen Roads. There were others, of course, but the most popular tale was the Black Bottle series, whose array of short stories, poetry, and prose always featured the old corked treasure we’d once dredged out of the muck, either boldly centered, or hidden in plain sight as coy little references.

It was said there wasn’t anyone in the Empire who hadn’t read the Black Bottle series. Thus, when the summons came, we weren’t sure what to make of it. The page who arrived at the dooryard seemed pleasant and genial, straightened when he saw Arlene and I, and announced that in three days, an escort would arrive to show us to the Imperial capital for an audience. It was not framed as a request, and we were instructed, in no uncertain terms, that we must bring the old bottle.

Arriving at the Imperial palace, our children in tow, we were shown through a long tour of rooms, halls, courtyards, and at one point I think we even crossed the throne room in both directions, else there are two gilded thrones. Impressive guardsmen strode in silent, efficient lockstep, spears held ramrod straight as the elder court official who had received us at the gate, helping my wife down from the carriage, told us nuanced facts of tapestries, histories, and meanings of things around the grounds. A helpful part of my mind catalogued details, but Arlene fretted obviously. When we were finally sequestered to a sitting room, she began to pace while our host served tea.

“What if we’ve angered someone?” she thought aloud. Stopping by one of the slatted walls which overlooked the small garden in which our children had been let out to play, smiling nervously as they waved. She ran fingers through the ringlets of her hair, which bounced attractively as I wrung my hands around the strange hat, which we’d bought to cover my own thinning hair for the occasion. She has been clutching the old bottle, but as if recognizing its delicacy, set it down shakily, jostling the tray. “What if it’s cursed? What if it’s HERS and we’ve stolen it? Oh, Davan what if?”

Delicate old hands, gnarled but unshaking, set the tea pot on the tray, and gathered up the Black Bottle. Arlene gawked at our guide for the audacity of it, and I tensed, watching. Neither of us had realized before she spread her careful touch over the faded boss of the ancient brand, and the simple silver signet worn on her ring finger declared the Empress herself to have hosted our tour, and poured our tea. Arlene made a sound I could not describe, and I began to clamber down to a knee, before she stopped me with a gesture.

“What if,” she began, in a voice that was old, certainly, but clear, if wistful: her eyes never left the bottle, and she smiled as she shook it to hear the faint rattle within.

“it’s an Imperial Commission?”

And that was how, with our third tucked up under an arm and the others hidden behind their mother’s skirts, we came to find ourselves sitting before the bed of the aged Empress herself, taking turns carefully whispering stories to her as she smiled and drifted and dreamed, about, among other things, the nature of the dirty old brandy bottle we’d been asked to bring to the palace, in order to share its magic with Her Majesty, in order to restore her youth.

And many were they who said that it worked.