Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

THE TAILOR OF TIME by Deborah Biancotti

The Tailor of Time sat at his sewing machine, stitching night to day.

He joined the clear cloth of dawn to a full bright afternoon like a circus top. Then he smoothed on a panel of smoky rouge for dusk and finished it off with a thick purple evening. Brushing his hand over the result, he felt a thin echo of satisfaction.

The Tailor worked with a minimum of noise or fuss. He suffered only the occasional grunt or shrug (to indicate ‘this is done’ or ‘bring me cloth’), aimed at the tyros who also worked in his rooms. The tyros were pale, bald children that could pass as the Tailor’s own. They looked like a ramshackle circus, dressed in scraps of cloth that tied at waist or shoulder. They worked at the Tailor’s demand, darning or mending or gathering what needed to be darned, or mended, or gathered.

The Tailor ignored them. He existed in a meditative cocoon, his voice so unused it had all but healed over. His mouth sagged like a pocket, his eyes drooped like the shoulders of an old suit and his whole body slumped like a smock on a hanger.

Only his hands remained steady, darting leanly under the light of his sewing machine and out again before they could be caught by the quick, sharp tooth of the needle. In and out, swift as the very machine itself. In and out.

With the day laid out in cloth before him, the Tailor added a hem, threaded a drawstring through both ends and slung it like a cloak over a bare globe to his right.

Thus dressed, the globe was spun onto tracks like train tracks, where it butted against other globes and sloshed with the weight of water in its guts.

The water served to hold it steady.

Dismissed, the globe and its partners creaked and shuddered, working their way along the tracks circumventing the room. They passed the industrious tyros, the bare stone walls and heavy curtains of the room. They passed towards the arched window in one thick-cut wall, and would have passed out, but here they snagged and pushed back, bubbling against each other.

Coming through the window was a man. He shoved his way into the chain of gowned globes and climbed into the Tailor’s room.

The tyros saw him first. In a sudden frenzy of panic they fell into a silence even deeper than their usual quietude. One ran towards the Tailor and stopped, confused, unsure how to encroach on her master’s concentration. One ran towards the man, the stranger, and halted just as cautiously as her cousin.

The Tailor was unaware of the alterations in the room, sewing night to day, day to night. Until he received a bobbing tap to his elbow from his most recent globe (scuttling back along the tracks), and jumped hard in his seat.

His finger snagged in the great machine, and the Tailor cried out to see the cruel incisor pierce all the way through. Blood beaded into the sworls of his fingertip and spilled on the cloak of time he was making.

“Oh!”

The first clear sound he’d made in a hundred years.

“Ouch!”

The second.

He stepped off the foot-pedal at once and rescued his stricken finger, pulling his bloody hand free. He drew the injured appendage to his lips to taste the unexpected saltiness of his mistake.

On the cloth with the bloodstain, war broke out for a day. It commenced seemingly from nothing and returned there just as quickly. History would refer to it as the War of Hours.

The Tailor, however, was not concerned with this. He looked up to find the cause of the commotion and caught at once the eye of the intruder. The man had completed his expedition through the window and now stood surrounded by tyros up to his waist.

The tyros divided their gazes between the stranger and the Tailor, chewing the blood out of his injury.

The stranger said, “You the Tailor of Time?”

The Tailor, mouth still entertaining his finger, nodded.

“You make the cloak of time that clothes the world, you determine night and day, the colours, the length of hours, the pattern of seasons and years?”

The Tailor nodded and shrugged so that his ear travelled painfully close to his shoulder. He hoped to signify both regret and well-intentioned acceptance.

“Then my name is John Avery, and I have a favour to beg.”

The Tailor cleared his throat, but the first sounds to come out were not words. He had to try twice more before he managed to say, “Beg it. John Avery.”

Avery drew breath. “Tailor,” he said. “You are largely forgotten where I’m from, and many places besides.”

Not forgotten enough, it seemed. Though the Tailor was engaged in the act of polite conversation, it did not escape his attention that Avery had breached walls which had not seen a visitor in hundreds of years.

Avery was not privy to the Tailor’s befuddlement. He dragged an empty stool to the Tailor’s side, and rested his elbow on the table where the machine sat glowering and grinning.

Up close Avery was older than his spryness belied. Much older than an adventure like this warranted, climbing walls and windows and rooms, vaulting or swimming, surely, the moat which still must hug the base of this fortress. He had a light beard that deepened to faded brown at his ears. His hair was thick but receding, lending him a horned look. And he had long, wiry eyebrows over narrow brown eyes. He looked kind, but sure, and careful.

“I paid witches and bribed fools,” he said. “I followed dreams and rumours from elders and madmen, seers and scientists. It took three years.”

“And,” said the Tailor, voice still thick and unpractised, “what do you want?”

“Time.”

Of course.

“I want you to slow down time for a day. No, an afternoon. A set of hours, even. Just some small, very small, amount of time.”

The Tailor let out a bark that might’ve been a cough, might’ve been, instead, some descendent of laughter.

Avery continued, “You expected me to ask that.”

The Tailor nodded.

“You want to know why I ask?”

A grunt, meaning ‘naturally.’

Here it came, all sorts of tales of great deeds and discoveries to be made if only time would permit. Of acts of humanity planned and mistakes to be rectified. Of love to be given or taken, of fears that must be faced, of favours to be returned. Particularly to the Tailor, if only he would grant this one wish.

He tried not to roll his eyes as he faced this newest petitioner.

“I intend to waste it,” said Avery.

“W—?”

This was new.

The Tailor spread his hands and gestured Avery forward, indicating with the tilt of his ear that he should repeat the request.

“Waste,” said Avery, leaning in and enunciating carefully. “I want some time to waste.”

“Because…?”

“Because that’s exactly what youth is meant to do.”

The Tailor paused, even more confused than before. John Avery, he was convinced, was not young. But was he mad?

“I would waste every precious second. I would engage in all the childish pursuits my old-man frame would allow. I would run after dragonflies and kick at puddles in the mud and roll in grass and thread plastic spoke rattles onto my pushbike, I would—”

“Spoke rattles—?”

“Because this girl,” said Avery, reaching into a pocket, “deserves that, don’t you think?”

“Your…?”

“Daughter, yes.”

The Tailor drew breath.

He was trying to clear the constriction that threatened to overwhelm his throat and stomach, and ease the tension that dragged his shoulders backwards like broken wings.

Avery held a photograph of a girl (of—what?—seven, eight years?) Sunlight limned her fair head and lay on the top curl of her grin. She was squinting, standing by a pushbike with one hand gripped to the handlebar, one hand curling the seat.

“This is Bella. Some days she can breathe,” said Avery. “Some days she can even ride her bike. Some days she gasps and coughs up the fluid that is drowning her from the inside out.”

He let this sink in.

“Unlikely I could repay you, Tailor, understand.”

Not even a favour traded.

What was the Tailor to make of this?

He dropped his hands to his lap and sat, looking lopsidedly at his visitor. Then he gazed around at the drapes, the thick stone walls and finally, to the childish tyros who had returned, by degrees, to their work.

He looked at the chain of globes emptying from the room, the spill of blood on the cloth still caught in the machine, the floor and then, his own lap (filled with threads and scraps of cloth.) He shook his head slowly like he was waking from a dream.

How had he…?

How did any of this…?

How could…?

“One problem,” said the Tailor, voice heavy, “I don’t know how.”

“You…? Oh.” It was Avery’s turn to pause. “Is there someone who does?”

The Tailor gestured broadly. “No. Only…” He paused.

“Yes?”

“Perhaps the Engineer.”

“Okay?”

“She built everything.”

“An engineer?”

“The Engineer.”

“You’ve met her?”

“No,” he grunted at the impossibility of that idea. “Well, once. Saw her, more like. But she was… I called out to her, but perhaps she didn’t hear. She was busy.”

The Tailor couldn’t find any other excuses for the way the Engineer had looked at him. Blankly, like he was a swatch of fabric and she was thinking what to do with him.

“Okay.” Avery looked like a man trying not to give up. “And she made this strange place?”

“Some suggest she built all of everything that there is.”

“Oh? Okay. And what does she do now?”

The Tailor shrugged. “Maintenance?”

Avery nodded, thumbing his beard thoughtfully. “Can she be found?”

The Tailor was uncertain. And even then, he explained, it was unlikely she could be prevailed upon. The Engineer was cold and unyielding, like the stone that made up this place.

Avery leaned back, clenching his hands over his stomach almost in prayer. He stared at the stone ceiling. “Unlikely…” he repeated.

They say time heals all wounds, but it wasn’t as true as this: time, most often, runs out.

Avery was thinking that then, as he leaned his chin into both hands beside the Tailor’s grand, grinning machine. He stayed there, bowed, for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was muffled by his fingers. “Then how…?”

The Tailor had never granted a request. Had, in fact, attempted to make sure he was in no position to hear them.

But now, stalled in his work, he couldn’t not consider John Avery and that cheerful girl with the sunlit grin who looked directly from the photograph like she might leap from its shallow page.

“Bring her here?” said the Tailor.

But here there were no dragonflies, no spoke rattles, no mud. And could such a small girl travel the whispers and rumours it had taken Avery just to reach here?

No. The only way to do it was to stall the globe. And not just any globe. What they needed was to stall the globe that was in use, the one determining time at that very moment.

The Tailor reached out a hand to Avery, but hesitated, uncertain, and said instead, “I will help you, John Avery. Somehow.”

For Bella, with the smile like daylight.

Avery stood to leave, the plan agreed. On a good day, when Bella could breathe without help, he would send word.

“You’ll know,” said Avery, cutting off the Tailor’s next question. “And Tailor—”

“Welcome,” nodded the Tailor. “You’re welcome.”

He left the way he’d arrived.

The Tailor returned to his sewing as best he could. His focus was gone and he was aware of the dull throb of his injured finger, and how the injury made him cautious now, lest he wreck some other part of him in the maul of the machine.

Almost at once the machine hit a snag and ran rough temporarily, and he was forced to reach for the pouch of tools in his pocket, to poke and prod it open and check its gears and screws, discover a loose one and right it, then return to his work. This he did as required while he waited.

Also while he waited, he drew in several of the tyros at a time, their bald heads shining in the light of the machine, and he lead them through what to do and how to clothe the globes.

Just in case there was ever another Tailor needed.

The word from Avery, when it arrived, was a whisper carried on whispers. It breached the room, starting with the tyro nearest the window and working its way around to where the Tailor sat ready.

“This is the best way to tell you that today is a good day for spoke rattles and dragonflies, dear Tailor,” whispered the nearest tyro.

“Time,” replied the Tailor, “has come.”

He rose from his machine and watched as his training took effect. The tyros shuffled into position, two of them dragging the swathes of cloth up to the machine; another two feeding it through.

Unsentimentally he left them to it, straightening his spine with effort and pausing a moment to savour the release of standing upright. He crossed to the tracks where the globes travelled and climbed, unsteadily at first, but with increasing assurance. He pushed out a gap in the line and pulled himself along, nose bumping the sheathed globe in front while the ones behind caught at his toes. He crawled, hands gripping hard to the track, knees pressing painfully.

The window caught him on each shoulder and threatened to dislodge him. He had to back up and remove his cloak and thick shirt, then clamber forward again naked to the waist, skin trembling from the effort, elbows alternatively locking then shaking.

When he breached the other room he took a moment to get his bearings. There was a passage, the track snaking across to exit another window just as small as the first, light glowing messily from the other side. He approached and squeezed through, scraping his upper arms, awkwardly pinning his wrist under him and wrenching it enough that it ached.

After the second window was daylight and a sheer drop over which the tracks meandered in confused circuits.

What a crazed, hellish design he’d found. What singularly unfriendly efforts had been spent constructing this track and the struts that suffered its support. And then affixing the lot to a cliff at angles and heights that sent the senses spinning.

But of course this was exactly the point, he realised. The maker of the machines did not want for interference. The Engineer built monsters so others would think twice about abuse or ownership. She made them unfriendly with all the purpose and intent possible.

He thought again of those blank eyes and the unsmiling fixture of her mouth, and none of it surprised him after that.

He took a shuddering breath and then another. He kept his chin high so he wouldn’t be tempted to look down.

The globes here had stalled. To move forward, he would have to climb over the top of them. He clasped each one in turn, pulling it into the shadow of his belly and then pushing it back between his thighs to where it washed against its followers. The soft thud and glub of the waterlogged spheres behind calmed him.

Still, he cursed his newfound friend more than once and then cursed the crazed mind of the Engineer who’d built this thing. But he couldn’t go back on his word. If he failed, the memory would nag and fill him up and leave no room for anything else. He had, as he saw it, no choice.

He gripped hard, chin between shoulders, forcing himself to breathe, to squeeze his eyes shut against the inertia that dragged at him. He focused on stilling the tremble in his arms and isolating the ache in his knees, willing both into ignorance.

Only then did he find the focus to look ahead for his quarry, the globe that determined the current day. And there it was—that had to be it—a globe that stood alone on a plinth, lit from above and below, held steady and rotating methodically.

The lights made it look as though it floated. It rotated slowly, already shifting from a pleasant pink dusk to a throaty, overcast day. He didn’t remember sewing that one. It hadn’t seemed special in his machine, nor had the cloth inspired him as he ran it through his hands. And yet, here it was. The day John Avery had deemed a good day.

He crawled forward, slow but sure, traversing the track in-between. He passed another globe and another, closing in on his prey shining with the bliss of its being.

One final globe and at last he was there. Now all he had to do was stall it. He needed to wedge something into the mechanism to hold it steady. This way he would give John Avery those hours he’d asked for.

The Tailor stood upright on the tracks with the gaping void on either side of his feet. His ankle shook and nearly gave way, and he had to wave his arms out straight on either side of his body to keep himself right.

He stabilised, and let out a slow breath that was too passionate for a sigh.

The globe, by now, was rotating closer and closer to night. Soon it would slip its mooring and sail off along the track to where the other used-up days sat, their coats faded from the harshness of the spotlights. Soon, soon the day would be done, and the Tailor’s promised unaddressed. And he had come so far, climbed so far, was even now perched precariously above the sheer drop that emptied out to nothing but a grey horizon.

In his pockets were all manner of implements and needles and miniature tools to mend the machine. His pockets, however, were all in the coat he’d left on the floor of his room.

He took a moment to curse.

Then he leaned over the globe and found the tiny mechanical catch that kept it isolated, and he wedged his thumb against it—that lean, learned thumb that had been used to pinch and hold and size the demands of thousands of years of sewing.

Almost too late he realised that wasn’t the right spot. A latch opened outside his hand and he had to swiftly move to keep it from closing. There was a grinding noise as the globe attempted to dislodge, and the whole world quivered and seemed as though it would topple.

But it held, the clicking latch pressed back on the Tailor’s sinewy thumb. It held and the bank of globes behind him waited dutifully, and the globes in front continued to bounce along, oblivious.

For one full rotation he waited. Then he waited another and another, averting his face from the dull glare of the spotlights (dimmed but not extinguished, signifying night.) He held himself in place with one strong hand gripping the appendage that kept the lights and plinth together.

The cloth grew faded.

Slowly at first, then like a day where the sun refuses to rise or set, the cloth faded as if smog covered the world. He should let go. Soon he should let go. One more moment, one more…

Brown patches of burn appeared gently, the soft cloth falling to ash. By then his thumb was so stiff with the weight of the latch that he couldn’t even be sure he was holding it anymore. And finally with a click, the globe rolled off.

For a moment, no globe took the plinth.

The tailor had to haul himself bodily over the spot, convinced he would fall, his knees so stiff and shoulders so weak he couldn’t feel when he was touching the track and when he wasn’t. He moved out of the way, willing the next globe into place.

Sure enough, the next globe rolled onto the plinth, latches and catches working perfectly to hold it steady.

The Tailor was too spent to even breathe a sigh of relief. He made to lower himself to the track, reaching out a shaking hand and bending to an awkward squat. He offered a silent acknowledgment for John Avery and his daughter, hoping it had been enough. Surely it had been enough.

He was so wrapped in his thoughts that at first he didn’t realise his hand had missed the track. His own hand, on which he relied every day, and now it fell beyond safety with an almost pre-ordained determinism. It dropped in something akin to slow-motion and pulled the rest of him with it.

His inside elbow scraped the track, following his hand. His chin snagged, but it wasn’t enough to hold him.

And then he was falling.

Head first, body unfolding behind, swooping with an uncanny grace. Plummeting through grey.

He fell and—

He fell and—

He fell.

Nothing caught or saved him. He plunged into the gap afforded by the precipice. He dropped towards a grey void that could’ve been anything but ultimately turned out to be stone and earth.

He fell and hit the hard ground.

He died.

The impact shook free the Tailor’s soul, which blossomed and ballooned above his crumpled form and then spread thin like a bubble exploding.

When it rose past the windows of the place that used to shelter him, only one witness was there to see it. Not the tyros, still busy at their work in the Tailor’s room, bald heads bobbing almost in time to the needle on the great machine.

It was the Engineer who leaned from the window, round-eyed with bemusement, reaching with short, stocky fingers for the suds of the Tailor’s soul. She rubbed with finger and thumb at the smooth stickiness it left on her skin. She frowned and gazed and wondered what other force could call her tailor-man away, and to where. What higher force could there be, she thought, than an engineer?

As he drifted from her reach and travelled, uncertain at first, then with increasing urgency into the grey-blank sky, she merely stood, paying heed to the last of her lost man.

The Engineer seemed—seemed, only—more human than her fellow occupants in this strange place. Were it not for the blank, calculating eyes and the permanent downturn of her mouth, she might be mistaken for a child of—what?—seven or eight. But she moved with the steely calculation of an intellect that had observed thousands of years.

One more Tailor, she calculated, had just been lost. The best one yet. One more disappearance, one more example of the only remaining mystery in a world she once believed herself to have built. It frustrated her. But frustration, like all emotions, was barely more than an intellectual effect. What benefits others received from emotions, she had never determined.

The remnants of the Tailor were all but gone, a bare shimmer in the distant air. The Engineer dismissed the sight, turning from the window. She slid to a seated position with her back against the stone wall, and pulled out a strip of plain cloth and a white tailor’s pencil. She looked thoughtfully to one corner of the ceiling.

Then, balancing the cloth on her knee, she wrote:

‘The Tailor hopes…’

In bulky, childish script.

She licked the tip of the pencil and chewed her lip and thought. She drummed her thumbs on the bones of her knee. Then she continued,

‘…hopes there were dragon flies and mud and spoke rattles for your bike and more—’

And more.

Then she crumpled the note in her fist, since cloth and pen marks cannot travel through whispers and rumours. John Avery and the unmet girl, Bella—if they were to be reached at all—must be sought in the traditional way, through muted words and the spaces in-between the words.

The Engineer leaned back to feel the smoothness of the wall behind her and to wonder idly, idly, what places she might visit. That is, if she could travel whispers and rumours, beg favours and elicit curses, roll across silence, across water-coloured skies. She wondered what more there was and more there could be.