Elizabeth Bear: Bone and Jewel Creatures

Or cage, rather: five feet tall, but no more than three feet by four feet in its footprint, just exactly filling the floor of the little red wagon. And inside the cage, huddled in blankets, a stiff wide collar about its throat of the sort one used to prevent an injured animal from tearing at its wounds, lay a naked child.

“I don’t want that,” Bijou said. “Who did you buy it from?”

He released his breath slowly, through his nose. “If you can save it, I thought it will be an extra pair of hands. Or hand, anyway.”

Bijou stared at him, mutely. He took her arm, though, and led her around the side of the cage, where she could see the injured limb it clutched to its chest. Bijou, with her eye for skeletal structures, could see that the hand had been deformed to begin with, twisted back on itself even worse than her own. It looked as if the child’s fingernails had gone untrimmed for a long while and had grown into the flesh of the palm.

The jewel-translucence of fat gleaming maggots ornamented its suppurating wound. “Those are keeping it alive. Or the poison in the wound should have killed it.”

“Nature’s surgeons,” Brazen said.

Bijou snorted. “What’s your name, child?”

It huddled deeper in the blankets, eyes shut tight, and made no more speech than an Artifice.

“It doesn’t talk,” Brazen said. “It is a feral child. If you cannot save it, I thought you could use the bones.”

There was no saving the hand.

Brazen returned to the great spider-legged steam- carriage he had left crouched in the street on creaking pistons, leaving Bijou alone with the child. While Hawti barred the door, Lazybones dangled Bijou’s smock from its enormous hook-hands so Bijou could shrug it on over her robes. She retied her leather apron and obtained Ambrosias’ assistance to unbutton thirty-two buttons. Sleeves rolled up, she scrubbed her arms and hands. Bijou was still spry enough to manage this, and she could rely on the strength of her Artifices to restrain the patient.

That the child did not speak came as a relief. Bijou engaged in a certain amount of daily conversation with her Artifices, but they did not answer except in actions. Human voices grated. The child looked about six or seven years of age—though malnutrition could make them seem younger. If it were feral, it had grown beyond the age where it could have learned to speak.

Which meant that Bijou stood no chance of explaining that what she was about to do was for its own good. She would have to minister to it as she would an animal, while defending herself from attack.

Perhaps she should consider ether, but ether was dangerous, and she only knew how to use it to suffocate. She had all the skills necessary to perform the amputation, however, and Ambrosias’ deft pinchers would serve to clamp pulsing arteries until Bijou could stitch or cauterize them. She would do it fast.

Beside the slate-topped bench she meant to use as a makeshift surgery, Bijou arranged her tools—the delicate scalpels and the sharp, sharp knives. Ambrosias and some of the others fashioned leather straps with heavy buckles and fastened one to each leg of the table. There was a belt for the child’s waist and another for its neck.

They filled the brazier and set it to heat, and so was all laid in readiness.

Hawti, Ambrosias, and Lucy—an Artifice that had started off as the skeleton of a gorilla whose dissected corpse Bijou had purchased from the Zoo of Messaline—approached the feral child’s cage. Hawti and Lucy lifted the cage—“Gently, gently!”—down from the wagon and set it on the stone floor of the loft. Within, the child huddled on its blanket, the uninjured hand pressed to the underside of its awkward fanlike collar as if it would have liked to put the fist against its mouth. It made no sound at all, like a tiny woodland kit huddled in shelter, waiting for the danger to pass.

“Shh, shh,” Bijou said, soothingly. She hunkered as much as her inflexible spine would allow and peered between the bars. “I’m going to have to hurt you, Poppet. But it will be better after, and what I break I’ll mend.”

Lucy, bone-and-brazen armature clattering, came forward to block the cage door as Hawti reached to slide the bolts. Catherine spread enormous wings, settling to the roof of the cage with all its jewels casting sparks of amplified light around the room. The child heaved itself to feet and one hand, cramped into the far corner of the cage, plate-matted hair hanging about its face in foul vines. Still, it made no sound, but it dragged the infected hand close up to its breastbone and hunkered, showing bared teeth, wrinkled nose, and slitted eyes.

“Bring it out,” Bijou said, and limped away from the cage with her cane rattling on the floor.

Lucy pulled its arms in tight together at the elbows and reached into the cage with giant, gentle hands. Bijou knew the delicacy of Lucy’s touch. There was no other among her Artifices that Bijou would trust with fragile porcelain or glass, or the egg-tender skulls of new-hatched songbirds. But Lucy—with bones as thick as a human wrist, and the ropes of baroque peach-colored South Sea pearls dripping from humerus and ulna—could perform all but the finest work.

And now, hopefully, it could catch the child without injuring it.

The cage wasn’t deep; the child batted at Lucy’s hands, swung its blanket and flailed, but it couldn’t keep the Artifice from delicately encircling its scrawny biceps. Once the gorilla’s hands were closed, the brazen clockworks inside the chest of the skeleton tick-ticked, and the powerful arms began to bend, drawing the child inexorably from the cage.

Still, it made no sound, but it snapped and twisted in Lucy’s grasp as if it were seizing. The lithe body jerked this way and that, thrashing horribly, bruising itself on the cage door. Its working hand lashed out and fastened around an upright, but Lucy continued to move it gently away from the cage and the arm stretched taut, knuckles whitening, elbow extended beyond a straight line as the arm bent back from the shoulder.

“Wait,” Bijou said. Lucy paused, angling its great-browed head so the lamplight caught a shimmer across cobalt-glass-and-gold eyes. “Ambrosias.”

The centipede needed no instructions. It rattled up the bar, levered its leg-ribs under the child’s fingers, humped its spine, and pried. Bijou’s face scrunched in sympathy as the little thing winced with effort, but its tiny fist was no match.

It kicked out, bare feet drumming against the chest plate that covered some of Lucy’s finer machinery, at least one kick hard enough to leave a smear of blood on the rubies and sapphires of her design. “I should wash you first,” Bijou said to the child. “But surgery will be enough fear for one day.”

Between them, Lucy and Hawti brought the child to the bench, liberated it from the fan collar, and strapped it down. The slate table-top was too hard under the child’s skull. Bijou sent Catherine for a blanket. While hand-span crab-Artifices clattered across the floor in swarms, Bijou made a little pillow and a brace to hold its head immobile. All this work would come to nothing if it dashed out its own brains in panic and pain.

Bijou moved to her tools. “Better if you don’t look,” she said, and selected a single-edged knife, razor-sharp, as long as the length of her hand.

Despite the maggots, the putrefaction had spread. Crimson strands threading pale flesh showed the advance of septicemia, and the limb felt hot and hard halfway up the forearm. “The elbow, then,” Bijou said, with a sense of relief.