Diana Pho - Steampunk World

She bore a basket of pastries from Veronica for the Contanto residence, and told the story of her overnight stay in the de Fonseca home in distracted bursts. Her cousins wanted to know about Veronica’s dress, her manners, and the inside of her house. It took Caterina reprimanding them to let her attend to her sewing in peace, turning Veronica’s words over and over again in her mind.

It is about the will of the Lord, Margarita. You do not see the victors or the cause of the battle because only the Eternal King can determine our fates.

If she wished to complete the ritual to make her dream better, she would have to tell it two more times. She pricked her finger as her hands stumbled, struck with fear at the thought. Not even Caterina had asked about the nightmare’s content . If she could not tell her aunt, who else could she tell? It was another three nights before the answer came to her, in the smiling face of her newly returned uncle. She would tell Abram Contanto, and trust that he would have the wisdom to give her proper counsel.

Perhaps counsel strong enough to end the dream. Margarita waited through the affectionate greetings of her cousins and aunt for Abram, and the hours of stories, two meals, and the return of her cousins to their beds before she would brave his study to talk to him. Margarita knocked softly on his study door, entering only after her bid her to do so.

He removed his glasses, restoring the ordinary appearance of his eyes, as he leaned back in his chair. “How is my little Rita?”

She dragged one of the small stools in the room to sit beside him at his desk, taking a deep breath. “I…I have been having a bad dream, since you left.”

Abram raised his eyebrows. “A? Only one dream?”

“Every night, Uncle. And it repeats. It is always the same.” He watched her unhappy visage, nodding in silent encouragement. “I dream of a battle. There are mercenaries, and foreign armies. They lay siege against a city, and everywhere trembles under the weight of the siege engines and the fighting. The air is full of smoke. The sky is blue.”

“Have you been reading histories while I have been gone?” At her expression of surprise, he chuckled. “I know you come to the study sometimes when I am not here, to read. It is not love stories, so I let it be.”

She shook her head. “No, Uncle. Not histories or love stories. There is…” she raised her hands, trying to summon the machine of her nightmares. “…a machine. A terrible machine, like none I have seen. With walls of copper and iron, and it moves on many wheels and hums with fire and gears.”

Abram’s expression grew somber. He placed a hand on her own. “And this machine?”

“It rolls over the men on the battlefield. It is tall, and casts a long shadow. It’s…the face of it opens, and many culverins fire from within it. And I wake screaming. Convinced I am in front of it, and about to die.”

They sat in silence as Abram withdrew his hand, thinking. After a time, he nodded to himself. “Perhaps it is about the power of a people. A community.” He kept his gaze locked on her face, looking into her eyes. “One people, united, can do great and fearsome things, Rita. They can protect things others would steal from them.” Abram gently placed his hand upon her shoulder. “Is that all you wished to speak of?”

After a moment, she exhaled, looking down into her lap. “I know it. I do not know how, but I know the machine.”

“You believe you have seen it before?”

Margarita struggled to breath, to think, forcing herself to lift her head. “Uncle, I think I may have made it. But I know not how such a thing could be.”

“You have studied the books of science and mathematics in my study, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You ask me about the wonders I have seen in the world, and the news of new science?”

“Yes, Uncle, but what does th—“

Abram held up a finger. “Rita. You have not had the same life your father had, you have not been an artist distracted by science before. But you have his talent for drawing, for thinking. For wanting to know. Tomorrow, I will send a servant to fetch you art supplies. You will draw this machine. Perhaps that will cure your dream, and convince your soul that it is but a fancy, not a thing to be achieved in form.”

Abram was good to his word. Their servant came and went before the Sabbath, and the package sat in her room under the miniscule excuse for a desk beneath her small window. There was plenty of moonlight, and the house was asleep. She knew that even though they did not cleave to things as strongly as others might, that to take ink to paper on the Sabbath would cause even Caterina to frown.

This is why she was as quiet as she could when she opened the package. She weighed a long piece of vellum down, and began to draw. Not the battle or the bloodshed. But the machine. Abram had not misspoken; she did know mathematics and science, far more than many women did. But she could not make sense of how such a machine could work. Yet still, she drew. It was massive, long, a fearsome expanse of metal. Details came to her that she had never fully recalled after the nightmare and those too she rendered on paper.

She had little knowledge of metalwork, and only slightly more about the use of gears, and soon Margarita’s head swam with questions, questions she committed to another piece of paper. She crawled into bed hours after the house had fallen asleep, and by morning she clawed her way out of her bed linens, gasping, sweat soaked, and thankful to be alive. She had dreamt of the culverins again, somehow visible when they had not been before.

To draw it was not the cure.

Abram had begun taking time every night to grill her about the device, and her slowly changing nightmare. Each night she would pray, before lying down in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. No more did she feel an unequal opponent to the nightmare. It still scared her, terrified her deeply, but with Abram’s support she went to bed each night to fight with it. Jacob had survived wrestling an Angel. She could survive battle with a brutal dream, challenge it to give her details. But two weeks after his return, a gilt-touched envelope arrived from the de Fonseca house. Isaac was home, and Veronica wished to invite them to dine at their home in honor of her brother’s safe return. Abram only laughed when Margarita muttered a complaint, head bent over a book they had begun to study, on the construction of ancient siege engines.

“Why do you not wish to go, Rita?”

She sighed forcefully, before gesturing to the book. “This is important. Why is dinner with the de Fonseca’s more important than this?”

“Because they are our people, and we must celebrate our survival whenever and wherever we can.” He squeezed her shoulder, and shook his head as she went to question him. “No, Rita. We shall end early tonight. Go rest, for tomorrow is a different kind of labor.”

The dinner included not only the de Fonseca siblings, Margarita and her aunt and uncle, but a few men she did not know as well. She and Caterina were introduced to Justefino Rosso and Mordechai Bellini. Margarita spoke little over the dinner, concentrating on the strange currents in the air around them. Caterina knew neither man, but the blithe way her aunt spoke to them was an illusion, a distraction to keep them from noticing her shaking hands and the tight set of her shoulders, something Margarita expected no one outside their household to know. Abram kept looking at Isaac de Fonseca as if he could speak to the man only with his eyes, which held something close to anger or contempt. Veronica plied her wits against both her aunt and Justefino, and as the dinner dragged on, Margarita was increasingly certain he was not Venetian—perhaps not even Italian.