Diana Pho - Steampunk World

Despite her discomfort in sensing she was missing something, she did her best to speak when spoken to, and say little else. When they each came to say goodnight to the de Fonsecas, Isaac looked as if he wanted to say something, but held it back. He gave Margarita a brief smile instead.

“Thank you, for the company you gave my sister while I was absent. It means much to me, that she finds friends in Venice.” Margarita’s brow furrowed, she summoned a sincere, but bewildered thank you of her own, claimed within moments by her aunt and uncle for the return home. The shadows were not yet long, but they made haste regardless. The smallest glance back over her shoulder revealed the figure of Veronica at one of the front windows, but soon both house and womanly shadow were concealed by the turn of the street. She tried to put the strange evening out of her mind, but Abram sending her to bed once they returned home, and the odd dinner, preyed upon her mind.

She paced her small room for some time after dressing for bed, trying to discern the meaning of the many things left unsaid at the dinner, and the few that had been given voice. Her nightmare was splintered and disorganized, without insight and left only with a ringing in her ears. She went straight to her needlework after dressing for the day, shrugging off Caterina’s concerns with a shake of her head.

“Work will clear my head, Aunt. Please let me work.”

She bent her head back down before Caterina could protest, listening with only half her attention to the household rising from its nightly rest. Mouthing the words with her head bowed over her sewing, she thanked the Eternal King for returning the souls of their household to them, and for allowing them to rise refreshed to greet another day. She prayed infrequently, following Caterina’s example in that regard, but the dream was still not cured, and perhaps prayer would help where other things had failed.

With that thought, she paid no more heed to her surroundings, jarred from her productive haze by the sound of distant shouting. Her cousins were themselves loudly talking with their mother, and the vibration of the nearby argument was a brief tremor in the air between their breaths. She left her needle gently hooked on her project, and excused herself with little ceremony. Her shoes were soft on the floor, following the few simple turns and stairs toward the now considerably quieter study of her Uncle. She hesitated at the door, straining her ears to listen, unsure of the words, only Abram’s tone—both angry and pleading.

Margarita raised her hand, knocking twice about the door with her knuckles. Instead of sending her away, her Uncle opened the door, yanking her in and shutting it behind her. Across her Uncle’s desk sat Isaac de Fonseca. He looked under-slept, skin swept with ashen pallor beneath his dark color. He looked upon her like he had never seen her before, as if she were not an orphan ward, but something strange and unknowable.

Margarita drew her shoulders in, unconscious of her need to become smaller. “Uncle?”

Abram pointed at Isaac, the gesture accusatory, his tone a venomous hiss. “He does not understand my concerns about the country, Rita. Tell him. Tell him of the dream.”

She pressed a hand against her middle, opening her mouth to plead, but Abram’s look in her direction stopped her. Whatever was going on, his anger, rare to appear, would not vanish unless quenched. Unless she yet again repeated her dream. Margarita leaned against the door, forcing herself not to sag inward. She focused her eyes not on the fury of her Uncle’s form, but on Isaac’s face. His eyes were also full of anger, but concern came with it.

Concern for her?

“I have a dream. I…it has come for weeks. Every night. Even in your home, when I was unable to leave the night of the flood.” Her breaths felt uneven beneath her clothes, as if her hammering heart would tear forth from her chest and stain corset and chemise alike beneath her burgundy gown.

“There is a battle. Pitched and brutal, Italians against French.” She felt her eyes water with unshed tears, unsure of why it felt so difficult this time, the third time, in the telling. “There is a machine. It casts a shadow upon the battle. And it grinds, with wheels and gears. It is a towering thing of copper and iron, and I know not how it is propelled. But it moves forward, and crushes men beneath it.” Isaac rose from his chair at her words, his look to Abram both betrayal and confusion.

“It does not stop. It keeps on going forward, and a—a hole opens up in its front. Inside there is steam, and warmth, and culverins. Perhaps a dozen. Firing as one.”

Silence. Her heart felt as if it would stop, before Isaac finally spoke. “Perhaps it was a dream of conquest over a great challenge.” He looked at her, as if desperate for this interpretation to be agreed upon, and save them both from further words. Abram’s tone was harsh in answer.

“You know what she dreams of, yet you still insist on looking away.” Margarita looked between both men, light headed from speaking, the unceasing pounding in her chest.

“Abram—“

Her Uncle seized Isaac by his shoulders. “If she is taken from here, she can complete it. If she can complete it, we can be saved.”

“Uncle—“

“Abram—“

Abram looked at them both, his expression somber, hollow. “I know you are confused, Rita. And I wish I could explain this to its fullest extent, but you must be sent away from the ghetto. For your safety. For all of our safety. And if Isaac can take you to the Empire, you may solve the riddle of your great machine. And it is safer there, far safer, than life here. Life under the Muslims is far more tolerable, and questions will not be asked there as they were here. But Isaac must be the one to take you.”

Margarita wasn’t sure if the sound that came from her lips was laughter or tears. “I must make the machine? Why? And why Isaac? Shall he disguise me like Sarah was, and he shall tell the Sultan I am his sister?”

“He shall say you are his wife.” Abram spoke the words in low, even tones. “And you shall be married to him before you leave Italy. He shall take his bride to the Empire to see his homeland, and enjoy a land unlike her native Venice. There, you will build the machine, or Venice shall fall beneath the French, and only the Eternal King knows if the Jews shall survive. Isaac is to take you because he is not a foreigner there; despite the faith we all share in this room.”

Isaac reached for her hand, but let his drop when she shrank away, eyes filled with tears. “And if I refuse?”

Abram shrugged. “Then I will try and reason with you.”

“And if I continue to refuse?”

“Then you will stay. And when the French come to Venice, the children of Israel will die in the streets. As we often do, when invaders come to a place that houses us with disdain and hate.”

Margarita could feel her composure failing, the tremble through her lips and chin warning of tears to come. She slipped out the door before they could speak to her again, running for the front door and then out it, barely pausing to seize her cloak. She kept her head bowed as she ran for the bridge between the ghettos, Old and New, one hand pressed against her mouth to muffle her weeping. She felt hot and cold, lightheaded and unable to think. Fear and betrayal and anger lashed around inside her, angry snakes that choked and bit within. She cried on the bridge, cried till her face was swollen and she felt as if she would vomit into the canal water. She gripped the bridge, waiting for reprisal, for Abram to drag her back. To force her into a plan she barely understood.

Isaac was the one to come for her, not with anger but sympathy, and a scrap of cloth that she ran across her face, drying the ends of tear tracks. Her voice was hoarse and miserable. “So I am to be your wife, and go forth to a strange land? To build something I don’t understand for a war that isn’t even here yet ?”