Diana Pho - Steampunk World

Eru’s omai turned toward the ocean, waiting for Rito’s statue to rise. “Rito!” he called. “Rito, answer me!” The window that had shown her face was now black.

He put the invader Olon back on the ground and strode through the jungle toward the beach. “Rito! Say something! I’m coming!”

But there was no response.

When he reached the beach, he saw from her own giant footprints that following her into the water would be suicide. The statues worked fine on land, but would bog down in the water. Rito was trapped, buried on the bottom of the ocean.

“Rito,” he whispered, and felt hot tears burn his eyes. He put his hand against the black window, but no image appeared. She had gone, alone, to meet the true omai.

Arto stood before the row of statues. One was missing: the one that had fallen in the water that long-ago day, ensuring that their people would survive. Another had returned to its place at the end of the line, but this time faced out toward the sea, watching over its fallen comrade. Boats that passed over the spot could see through the clear water to the great stone shape lying face-up below.

Beside Arto stood Eru. The boy had changed since the invasion: he was quiet now, and seldom smiled. He seemed to harbor some dark secret that weighed on him, maturing him far past his years. When he’d come to Arto and asked to train as the next high priest, Arto had laughed at first. But he had no sons, and it didn’t take long for him to see that the boy was serious. The laughing troublemaker had gone for good, replaced by the grim young man who now stood tall and strong beside him.

“The omai will always protect us,” Arto said. “They watch, and wait, and listen. Once I doubted it, but since the day I saw them walk with my own tired eyes, I now know the truth.”

Eru nodded. His eyes filled with tears again as he followed the gaze of the lone omai that looked out at the water.

As a girl falling asleep to the rhythm of cicadas and mosquitoes, Ging dreamed of fire. Fire caught between panes of brass, fire captured in a bead of glass, fire reflected in temple gold. Her grandmother’s skein of stories inherited over generations, long and slow to unwind, of a queen who rode to war; of the sky blazing as she fell.

Decades later, in Bangkok, Ging wakes up each day to a secret place full of fire.

Ging’s days are canals: the slant of roofs to either bank, the load of fruits and hand-drums on her wheelboat. A song on her lips, a song in her palms. She brings home pomelos and sticky rice, lumyai and coconut milk.

Ging’s evenings and nights are an apprentice, a workshop.

She lives by the Chaopraya where it’s coolest, an expensive home gifted by an expensive patron: halfway rooted in the banks, halfway in the shallows as though amphibian. Sometimes she talks to her apprentice Nok of retiring in Ayutthaya or even further into the countryside, by a forest or on the edge of rice fields. Both recede by the day as Bangkok grows, the seams of its borders and canals loosening as the years pass, restitched and extended to include that much more in its weave.

When they work they strip to the waist the way women still do in the countryside, for all that Bangkok has adopted His Majesty’s taste for foreign modesty: the one that says women must cover up from throat to ankle, not a hint of arm or wrist or collarbone. Strange fashions such as these soak into Bangkok as monsoon water soaks into mud, and the girls working for them are startled when Ging or Nok bares their breasts. Soon that changes, for the heat dissolves that imposed, alien propriety quickly enough.

Most of the girls think what they make are only mannequins, peculiarly large, peculiarly made—but decorations. They weave rattan into torsos and limbs, chisel wood into faces. Some of the finished results go to furnish tailors, theaters, or become the possessions of court ladies with a taste for the odd. Miniatures are equipped with tiny gears and clockwork parts to become the toys of wealthy houses.

The rest go elsewhere.

Nok has an eye for symmetry and flourish; she draws designs on hard Jeen paper. Ging shapes and boils the hands. “Is it magic, mistress?” her apprentice asked once.

“Like dipping green mango into chili salt is magic,” Ging said, smiling. “Like turning yolk and sugar into sweets is magic.”

The process is delicate, the formulae passed down from mistress to pupil: ones Ging keeps close to her, though once she’s mixed and distilled the ingredients she allows Nok to watch. Wax softening in the pot, wax poured into a mold. The result is a smell of melting candles and hands which Ging kneads into tapered, spread fingers that she reinforces with brass wires and dancing talons.

The hands move on their own, for a time, a whisper of mechanism inside them as they scurry along the floorboards. Ging catches them and attaches them, by spikes and adhesives, to the ends of rattan-strand wrists. This is the most important part: not the limbs or torso, not even the clockwork hearts. It is the hands that propel them, give them the wherewithal to hear and obey.

Ging does not grant them voices.

One monsoon-drenched afternoon, a foreigner visits.

Anna Leonowens: a woman of hard glittering eyes, stiff fabrics, teeth like a carnivore's. She moves with a heaviness of being, as though the air itself resists and resents her passage. There is more clothing on her than Ging has ever seen on anyone, man or woman, and she has seen the king from afar at temple ceremonies. Palace girls say that the ma’am does not trust Siam weavers, Siam tailors, Siam anything. It shows: Anna’s dress, made for icier climes, is spotted with sweat. The farang must be sweltering in it.

Her powdered face betrays no discomfort. She gazes at them both, not quite down her nose but in the way one might at a pair of buffalos: with no expectations that either Ging or Nok might address her in human speech.

“Can I help you?” Ging says.

Anna’s brow creases. “You speak English.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She stopped stumbling over Angrit years ago. “We sell puppets. They’re unique art, no two alike. Many British and Francois clients have brought them home.” Where they resell them, she supposes, for the kind of prices that’d buy enormous tracts of fertile land here. Nok resents it and doubles the price for western customers. Ging lets her.

The ma’am turns her gaze to the inanimate puppets: Ging has delighted in these, knowing they don’t have to be compact or dexterous or practical. She has given them the heads of eagles and horses, the tusks of elephants and the claws of tigers. Bestial faces, faceted eyes in amber and blue and green, gilt lips. “I’ve seen some of these in the palace,” Anna says. “Interesting. Your husband’s work? Or father’s?”

“My own, ma’am.”

“Quaint,” Anna says, circling the mannequins. Perhaps her jawline tenses in disapproval, but it is hard to tell—the woman has one of those farang faces that are perpetually sour. “Not very womanly.”

“It keeps a roof over my head.” Ging nods, laughs. “Does any of my work interest you?”

“Another day.”

That year, the streets are full of foreigners. Not Phma, not Yuan. Invaders, all the same.

They meet in the morning at a temple, after Ging has given alms to the monks, filling each black bowl with dried fish and candied tamarinds. Ever since she’s started working for the lady, she has done this more often, for peace of mind if nothing else. She doubts feeding monks is enough to cleanse her virtue.