Straggletaggle

By J. M. McDermott

The clockwork kingdom of Saxonia engineered itself into a machine of the law, refashioning even its citizens’ bodies into cogs and pistons. Before the chirurgeons and engineers splice his brain inside the crown, Prince Hollownot escapes into the kingdom’s flogistan soul, where he sees all possible futures. In one, Princess Sapsorrow can break the law with contradiction and shatter the kingdom. But saving the world from the machine comes at a high price: Her love, her family, and her physical body will all be destroyed. The neighboring kingdom of Bavaria has seen nothing come past the great clockwork wall of Saxonia for centuries until a Straggletaggle appears with an odd physiognomy — maybe human, maybe not — and an incredible tale of escape from Saxonia. She claims ignorance of the nearby fatal airship crash and the exquisite prosthetic foot in the wreckage. When a phonograph wrapped in the shell of a man arrives demanding Princess Sapsorrow’s return, Bavaria's disgraced prince and scientist princess, with their intrepid bodyguard, embark on a perilous mission with the Straggletaggle as their guide, to stop a war that, should it start, can only end with Saxonia turning the people of Bavaria into components of its horrific machine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bad Ducky Industries
• Release date: Dec 13, 2014
• ISBN: 9780692234716

J. M. McDermott

I am a robot fueled by coffee and fantasy novels.

Book preview

Straggletaggle

J.M. McDermott

©2015 by J.M. McDermott

No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, graphic,

electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval

systems without written permission of the author.

Cover Art by AnnGee

Interior Art public domain material from Wikimedia Commons

Cover and Interior Design by Elfelm Publishing llc

Published in the U.S.A.

All Rights Reserved.

First Edition ISBN: 978-0-692-23471-6

To Angela

Table of Contents

1: High Upon the Royal Clocktower at the Heart of Saxonia, Prince Hollownot is Trapped Alone Inside the Machine

2: At the University of Wittgenstein, a famous medical school in the neighboring kingdom of Bavaria, Prince Alexander prepares to leave for home one week before final exams, for he has been quietly expelled

3: Princess Sapsorrow, Severely Injured During the Crash, Escapes Like a Wild Beast Into the Countryside

4: In the Bavarian Palace, a Princess Seeks Out Her Father to Stop the Amorous Advances of a Gentleman Far Too Old For Her, in Her Opinion, Though Her Father Disagrees

5: The Princess Sapsorrow Enters the Veterans Hospital Where She is To Be Studied by a Leading Scientist

6: Captain Jameson Ties Up One Lingering Loose End from the Prince’s Failed Attempt at Passing the Medical Boards.

7: The Prince of Bavaria Hides From His Honor at the Veteran’s Hospital, Where He Takes Charge of the Creature

8: Viewing the Saxonian Ambassador, Princess Catherine Discerns Tactical Intelligence, Which Generals Do Not Wish To Hear

9: The Prince Visits the Straggletaggle in the Hospital, and Continues to Refuse Captain Jameson’s Good Advice

10: Prince Hollownot Atop of the Clocktower Observes All Events From His Place in the Light

11: An Interrogation of the Prisoner Leads to a Revelation That Shakes Captain Jameson to His Very Core

12: Prince Alexander Visits His Father Before the Prior Events, As He Has Important Information, Then Makes a Selfish Decision That Changes Everything

13: At Last, the Willamette takes flight, And Another Ship Unexpectedly Flies, As Circumstances Demand It

14: In the Air, Driven by the Powerful Influence of Prince Hollownot, the Airships of Bavaria Travel With Great Speed to Encounter the Saxonian Wall, and the Oliphaunts Behind It

15: Across the Wall, in Saxonia, the Airship is Captured and Captain Jameson and the Professor Harrison Must Quickly Devise an Escape From the Hooks of the Oliphaunts

16: The Airship Willamette Lands Hard, and Not Everyone Manages to Escape the Wreckage Before the Airship is Pulled Away

17: Princess Catherine Remains Behind in Bavaria, Left Reeling From the Disappearance of the Prince While War Is Imminent

18: The Prince and the Straggletaggle Journey Alone Away from Danger Into More Danger

19: Struggling to Secure Basic Necessities in Saxonia, Princess Sapsorrow Reveals the Depth of Her Knowledge of this Blighted Land

20: With No Sign of the Student Stevens Who Was Taken by Chirurgeons, Captain Jameson and Professor Harrison Remain Together Treated with Neither Animosity nor Great Concern As Long as They Move West, Or Not At All

21: Hollownot, Locked in Light at the Top of the Clocktower, Considers What Must Be Done to Save the World

22: With the Head of the Clockmakers Guild, Professor Harrison and Captain Jameson Discover Their Strategy

23: From Within the Light, Prince Hollownot Aids the Safe Landing of all Airships

24: The Princess and the Prince Encounter Death In a Chirurgeon’s Dining Hall

25: The Airship Descends Where the Oliphaunt Can Reach It Without a Harpoon, and the Identity of the Pilot Is Revealed

26: Prince Hollownot Observes Prince Alexander and Princess Sapsorrow on their Progress Towards the Clocktower Beyond the Ancient Mines and the Clockmakers’ City

27: Princess Sapsorrow and Prince Alexander Ascend Into the Throne Room to Face Her Father and Attempt to Save the World

28: Princess Sapsorrow and Prince Alexander Confront Her Father, the King, on the Throne of Saxonia, to Prevent the War

Epilogue: Hollownot Journeys West to See a Mountain and a Forest With His Own Eyes, Stopping to Aid Those He Finds Along the Way

1: High Upon the Royal Clocktower at the Heart of Saxonia, Prince Hollownot is Trapped Alone Inside the Machine

Hollownot

Light.

Light.

Light.

Light, I can barely stand it. I can’t stop it. If I look away a moment, I might die upon this tower, where the light pours over me and fills me up. I must gaze into the light; let it run through my eyes, into my skull, into me, into me, light, merge with it until I am no more and then go beyond that until I find myself again on the other side of my eyes on the other side of the light below where there is no light and the absence of light is also a kind of light.

I came here to run away. I think it was a long time ago, but might not have been very long at all. I thought I would climb up above the gear platforms, beyond the cranks and spindling wires of the tower, up past the pendulums, where the high air is cold and howls and howls enough to sing through the whole kingdom, a banshee in my ears. I thought I would climb because I was angry and I could think of nowhere else to go where I’d be alone but up. I had to escape somehow. I couldn’t stand to be among the world as it was.

My mother was dead. For this, the kingdom had to pause in mourning. If not for this, I’d never make it this high at all. All the gears and pneumatic tubes and springs held still to mourn the queen. Time stopped, for this clock, and for all of us who obeyed it. Light, itself, seemed to pause, hanging in the air and moving to mourn her death, though I did not understand why that happened until I climbed so high to reach the light.

I climbed.

I saw light.

I climbed.

I thought the light would be a kind of heat.

My mother was going to remain alive as long as I never saw her body. That was what I believed. I was a child, still. I was a child every day of my life until I reached the light. I would not look upon the cold, white root of my mother’s death. I kept the black robes of mourning, though they tried to catch in the gears and chains I climbed like ladders.

It was cold. It was so cold that I could see my breath, even though it was late summer, and hot below. I was higher than I had ever been. Up, where I climbed, the cold was everywhere. My hands steamed upon the gears and chains and tried to slip a little on the humid, damp metals. My bones ached with the cold. I shivered.

Light.

I saw it above, where all the lenses of the clockfaces converged. Did we, below, even realize what this machine was built to do? The clocktower did not tell time. Not really. That was only making use of the crystalline façade. The crystals in the clockface prismatically sliver raw flogistan from the air itself, and it accumulates in a perfect bubble without heat or quicksilver before it flows into the machinery. I saw the light. I thought it should be warm if it were a flogistan bubble. These were almost always hot enough to melt clothing. Almost always, I say, because the closer I came to this bubble of light, the colder I became. There is fire of heat warming up from absolute zero and there is fire of cold, as matter pulls away from the point of ice or melt. To minute flecks of matter or flogistan particles, there is a flame in distance from the static point of nature. This is why the ancestor clockmakers built this high up, like this, where it would capture all the

Light.

Light.

Light.

I am not warm, not cold.

The funeral ended below before I found the light. The gears began again, and the pendulous weights that were once my ladders became my grinding prison. There is no return down unless the machine stops again. I was cold. The light was supposed to be warm. I kept climbing up, stopping to blow on my hands and rub them together. My feet were numb, and my nose and ears. I pushed my hands against my long, black wig to press some warmth down upon my ears. The light was my only hope. I climbed into the bubble, expecting heat.

No heat. No cold.

Light.

Light.

I have never left, I think, for many years, or maybe not many years, or maybe a hundred years, or maybe only a few years, or maybe no time at all. I eat light, drink it, breathe it. It fills me up. It binds my body whole, flows over me, through me. Color has bled from me, and I see myself and I am bright white. My black hair is white. My black robe is white. All my muscles, follicles, organs and biologies are all burned into a white.

I live, yet. I live on light.

There is a lens in front of me at the point of separation that masquerades as a glowing clockface. It is a huge lens that shimmers and becomes an essence of a soul. Not quite a soul – more protoplasmic than a soul, like the wee beasties at the bottom of the microscope lens – but the essence of one, truly. I can feel that much life in it, where I stand. Stand on the threshold of the soul of all light, see the possibility of a living machine – a truly conscious machine – even if nothing like intelligence could take root inside of the strictly-defined gears and channels, and it is not permitted to be more than just the idea of a soul. That is what I did. I stood on the threshold of machine soul.

Light. More than light. All light touches all light. One fracture of light is all photons of light. I see. I see centuries. I see the shape of centuries. They pour into me like

light.

Light.

Light.

Light.

Light.

This bubble is every bubble, every photon and mirror molecule. I see my mother born. I see her mother born, and all mothers born: I see the sun being born, in a deep night sky. I see it burn out. I see everything in between, and everything that is possible in between.

I have seen too much. I should not see my own mother’s face a thousand times across the centuries, as women are born, live, and die, who all carry her face, her voice, her beating heart.

Mother.

Light.

I see the teeming masses with an individual grace that belies my distance from them all. Every gesture and tick in the face of light, every tragedy and triumph. Every rotten bone in their desiccated skulls.

I was Hollownot, once, a prince who would be king of Saxonia, and merge brutally when the crown of the machine would inhabit and consume my own head.

No, this was never to be. Once I fled the palace, my future possibilities upon a throne were lost, and good riddance.

In every future I see, I have no place among the thrones of time.

In most futures I see, I remain here, held up in the light, until my soul bleeds into it completely and it into me and I am no more than it.

Or, the machine stops. I climb down the tower, no prince at all, and walk into the hills beyond the Great Clockwork Wall at the western edge of the machine.

I shall stop the kingdom forever, I think. I have seen too many futures. I shall stop the machine.

I see it now.

Light.

My people serve the flogistan bubble, but it does not serve us. We call it a law. We call it a kingdom. It is alive, though it cannot move much from the gears and wires. There is nothing for it to do but fulfill the systems to which it has no control.

I weep for you, mindmute Light Light Light, living thing, fungal Light pulling up the essence of the world – her minerals and biologic life – to fuel a Light impulse misunderstood as a life, alive, but alone and unthinking, unfeeling. It is conscious the way a fungus is conscious. It is a wee beastie below the microscope glass writ large upon the world, empty and huge and hungry.

Search, then, through all possible futures.

We serve a machine that does not see us, a flogistan core that does not warm itself in the glow of a fire. It has no eyes, no ears, no tongue, just teeth and teeth grinding gears through all the minerals and coal formations of the underground, from my father’s throne upon the mainspring and out to the wall and beyond when the diggers find no more to build and burn. More than this, the light pours over all of us, carrying the source of the mindmute consciousness of being that is the light itself embodied in this clocktower cold fire bubble. All light is all light, all dark is all dark. That Light lives means nothing to the geographic space upon a map. Beyond the wall, they are also part of this machine, where the light touches them. The nations of the world are gears moving to a force of hidden light that burns them all slowly, in time, unto the toothgears of the machine that knows only that it must continue to devour, until it is no more. It is a thoughtless thing, with too much time and no love, no breeding.

Just

Light.

All possible futures, we become the stomach lining of the machine, and so it must be stopped; lest we become single cells dividing in the noise of the gears, like a slow infection until the machinery grinds us all down to glass prisms of

Light.

Light.

The machine cannot be permitted to live.

My ancestors began this cathedral of gears to prevent war, and let people live in peace. But this is worse than war, to become mere machine parts made of flesh.

***

Oh, my sister, Sapsorrow, so sad because it was she running in the roads to find the edge of the rules. Mother saved her, but the Oliphaunt’s foot crushed her flat, and Sapsorrow’s foot with it. The chirurgeons and clockwork engineers outdid themselves upon my sister’s prosthetic.

Look upon my sister’s foot. It is a beautiful foot, all bejeweled and intricately modeled with spindling pneumatics and elegant gyroscopes beneath the glistening, golden shell, to be a foot but more than what she lost. Still, see her weeping there, staring at her foot as if it was an Oliphaunt’s.

The behemoth could not even see where it stepped, and crushed her foot into nothing as if the girl were not a thing at all, just a crumpled rag to crush in the street. Then, there was her new foot, built to grow up with her, become part of her – welded directly to the bones with all the excruciating hours of work upon it while she was aetherized, half-awake and half-asleep, staring full in the face the chirurgeons and their creations splayed upon the tables of the room that made her father’s fate seem gentle.

Returning home, her mother’s ring is all that’s left of the woman.

The Ring.

There’s a ring in the throne room, placed upon a cushion, upon a pedestal, under glass.

The hours turn. An hour. One. Maybe a hundred.

Ring.

Yes, there is a ringing. The bells boom like gravity breaking through the light. Clocktower bells. Huge bells.

Ring.

Ring.

There is a reason the machinery fell still upon her death, my mother. Mother, your skull smiles up at me from deep in the bowels of the catacombs of the old mines, where the spindly buttresses and poles hold up the engineer’s city at the level of the ground. In the undercity that spreads below the sun, and all the machines turning there, where men have been turned into machines, limb-from-limb. There is oil and there is blood. There is blood oil mixed from both together that pumps through tubes. There are faces straining in agony when the aether comes from the chirurgeons’ tubes, and the faces fall silent and still as skulls, knowing what is to happen to their lives, and terrified even as they must embrace the dark, the knives, the change.

Ring.

Another bell has rung, another hour gone, I think, or it could have been a moment between bells. I cannot see the face of the clock from here, except through light and light takes me everywhere, shows me every time, as I think and will.

Ring, my mother wore a ring all the days of her life as queen. It was the ring of the first queen of Saxonia. It was handed down from queen to queen. She who wears the ring must become the queen.

She put it on to marry my father, and placed her finger into the throne to twist the spring there. The ring of the queen is the spring of the king, which is just below the throne - the coiling serpent coiling and coiling that must be cranked, re-cranked, re-cranked a single turn at a time, a single twist for a tiny press against the coil-resprungening.

Without the ring, there can be no turn of the device, no coiling coil, no kingdom, and no king. Without the king, there can be no law to prop up this thing that eats the ground beneath our feet, our feet, and all the world. It is all built, for us, to serve a king.

Anarchy, then?

No. Just a different thing. Build no towers like this. Build no idols in the place of God for the deep ground below. Build no Gods like this. Build no Gods. Build nothing greater than

Light.

Light.

Light. The ring is the center of the world, not the throne, not this place behind the glass where light separates into flogistan. The ring winds the throne, binds the king upon it, coils the spring that drives the core and a mile below the tower and a mile above the tower light and unlight separate into their two domains.

When my mother placed her hand upon my father’s, placed upon her finger the ring that coiled and snapped into her skin, she also pushed her ring finger into a keyhole upon the side of the king’s throne and turned.

Ring.

The machine still needs us. It will always need us.

It needs the ring to turn the spring. It needs machinists making Oliphaunts of the running men, to make pipes out of pistons and pistons out of people, watch the coal fall into smelters and pull the steel out of the coke bins on the back of the centipedal diggers that once were men.

We are busy workers, like the minute things that hide inside the photons inside my body. We are busy little machine parts. Enslaved and call it virtue. We hold the ring up, and the throne below the gruesome crown that cuts into a man’s mind itself, declare these two the highest places and all must strive and strive to serve these slaves of laws as old as the machine. We are born bound to serve an entity as indifferent to us as it is to a tree or a cog or a star, for the entity is unalive, thoughtless even as it has consciousness at the cusp of a soul. It is of the world, but not among the world. It is not our master, nor is it the Godhead of law we long to serve.

Light. It is only

Light.

It has accumulated here, expressing in the limitless air. It is only

Light.

Light.

It must be released. It must be unmade, and return to the rippling conscious-less tides of sky.

It must die.

But what can I do from this tower?

There is a path I see. I can see.

I can see everything that has been and has not become. I cannot see what cannot be changed. I think. I think that’s right.

Ring. Another hour lost to

Light.

There is my sister Ashjoy. If I do not descend, my eldest sister takes the husband who takes the throne. She will never lift a hand to stop this glorious future she was bred to adore.

I have two other sisters. There is Willowweep, a babe when I ascended, sitting in a chair – her face as still as a machine. No hope for the world, in her. No hope inside her heart, I assume, for she is so still, smiling like it breaks her heart.

Sapsorrow, Sapsorrow, my most beautiful sister, where are you hiding? You aren’t supposed to leave the palace. Where did you go? That’s good. Rebelliousness is good. It means you might break your fated place in these machine halls.

You’re not in your room. You’re not in the hallway. You’re not in the palace at all.

There you are, upon a foreign dirigible that’s bound to the village of the Clockmakers Guild, a vessel hovering above the houses that stand on stilts and buttresses above the ancient mines.

Sapsorrow.

She’s older, now. She’s much older. I must have been here for years, light and light and light all through me, holding me up. Hold me up a little longer and do not burn me through.

My sister, Sapsorrow, is lounging on a divan. Her mechanical foot has grown with her, as it was built to do. It is beautiful, bejeweled, and graceful as a dancer’s dress. Her shoes are off. She has her feet up on a divan in the carriage of an airship. There is a man, here. He is handsome, older, with a streak of white in his hair. He looks at her like he is gazing upon a still pool of water that reflects his desperation. He has a pipe in his hand as if it were a stone he could skim across water. He rises to his feet. He bends over her. She is waiting for him to… Don’t look.

Light.

I know too much because I see too much. I should never have seen this. I should never have known what happens next.

My sisters live, still, down below.

I see them. I see them born, growing, falling into the arms of husbands and lovers and birthing sons and daughters.

I see too much in the

Light.

There are other kingdoms than this. Across the wall to the east there is no salvation for us. The Caliphate keeps their concubines in jeweled prisons, fawning luxuries upon them under armed guards. Their people are like all the people of the world: farmers, husbands, wives, builders and betrayers, broken and believing beyond the

Light.

They cannot help us to the east. They arm themselves against us. They train their cannons and musketeers to tear down the Wall, for all the good it would do them against a single Oliphaunt. They have their laws. They say law came from God.

No, this does not please me. I would have no law to rule above a beating heart. If they didn’t have us, the musketeers and cannons would turn to the world, carry their rule of law out upon it. No

Light.

No

Law.

To the west, it is a little better. Bavarian kings and queens reign a thousand years in peace and their people live and argue with each other, and there is another way to live, where Gods rule the next life, not this one. The machine touches them at the edge of the Great Clockwork Wall, but there is another way to live, without the touch of

Light.

Light.

I see what it will do. The machine will slowly build momentum up from this soil until the meat of our flesh is all that remains and cannot be burned in the coal fires. The machinery will move. Pneumatic tentacles will dig into new soil, grind down the armies of the world and devour. Not intelligent enough to farm or rotate crops, this mindmute consciousness will merely consume, grow, consume, grow. There is war, but it is short. There is death and the loss of cities and countrysides and peace.

Bones in the earth melting away in dust all musty and sandy in their decay beneath the machinery — I have found all the bones of my ancestors, all the sand that was the bones of my ancestors, all the sand that could become the world if I abandon my post at the tower, stop eating drinking seeing the light and light and light, escape into the hills. I have seen the machinery, every wire and coil and gear. Where the light touches, the flogistan touches, and all of it is my meat and drink. Gaze into the centuries, then, and gaze back from them, and see the shape of everything.

Light.

My sister could save this world from the symbioses with the machine, if she escapes with the ring.

Ring.

Light.

Ring.

The roll and groan of hours, ring them down to all the world, but this machinery does not know what I am, or what I must do to it. It is alive the way a fungus is alive, conscious like a small worm. It can sense things, touch them a little, but it has no spark of soul or guile. It is.

They speak, her lover and her, where I cannot. He wants to go home. He did not expect the city to take his ship as it has, to forbid his escape. He has a daughter in Anglia, he says. He had a wife, but she is already passed on. This is a lie, but it is no matter if he lies about it, now. He tells her stories of fields of green grass, flowers blooming in the spring and late summer, and fruit ripening on the vine.

What is a flower? she says.

He smiles, wistfully. He reaches around his laboratory for a horticultural manual. He had been an explorer and naturalist. He drew accurate pictures of such things. He shows her all the beautiful flowers he had drawn, in all their colors. He tells her it is the way of things beyond the wall, where there is no law greater than nature, and she doesn’t even know whence originated the food that came upon the treads of the nannies in the dining room.

She walks well on her foot, through the hallways to her bedroom, leading him there. Her foot was well-made, bedecked with jewels and gems and precious stones. It whirrs a little while she walks with the flywheels and