Kingdom of Clockwork

By Billy O'Shea

When the oil and gas ran out, civilisation collapsed. Now, centuries later, mankind is once again beginning to discover the secrets of the past ... starting with clockwork.

In a future Denmark, the King’s clockmaker becomes enmeshed in a web of court intrigue and undertakes a fateful journey to the Far North, where he encounters many strange phenomena that challenge his rational nature.

Kingdom of Clockwork is a science fiction/steampunk novel by Billy O’Shea. The story takes place in a quasi-medieval society that arises in Scandinavia after the new Dark Ages. Lacking fossil fuels and knowledge of past technology, the new kingdoms of the northern lands can only draw upon the power of the wind, which they store using clockwork. But the King of Kantarborg has a plan to mine other secrets of the past, and weaves a young court clockmaker into his dangerous schemes.

Kingdom of Clockwork has been described as “alternate history, historical fantasy and steampunk”. It is a quirky, intriguing, slightly whimsical tale of reason, magic and human cunning. The story combines real Scandinavian history and locations with flights of fancy, both literal and metaphorical.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Billy O'Shea
• Release date: Nov 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311517296

Billy O'Shea

Billy O'Shea is a writer, translator and musician. Originally from Ireland, he was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Copenhagen. He has lived in Scandinavia for the past thirty years.

Book preview

Kingdom of Clockwork

Billy O’Shea

Black Swan

www.blackswan.dk

Front cover illustration and map: Andrey Dorozhko (andreydrz.blogspot.com)

Cover design: Damonza.com

Originally published in Denmark by Black Swan, Copenhagen (www.blackswan.dk)

Copyright © Billy O’Shea 2014

The right of Billy O’Shea to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

For Charlotte, without whom

strange that in fog

we feel the mechanics of things

Tycho Brahe’s whirring mental cogs

Copernican spheres and trajectories

softly rending the thick air above me

planetary charts over Denmark and Sweden

Paul Larkin,Christmas Homage to Copenhagen

K

ingdom of Clockwork

Being the true account of the invention of the Clockwork Railway, and of the late expedition by His Majesty the King to the North. As set down by my own hand – Karl Nielsen, June 2413.

Chapter one

A buried railway

The sun lies heavily on the streets of the four-gated city, stoking up dust and the thick smell of ox dung. Tanta is pushing the baby carriage, but she takes my hand as we cross the street, weaving between the carts and bicycles. She calls to my brother William to keep up. He crosses after us and a cart-driver shouts at him to watch out. ‘Stop dreaming, boy!’ Tanta scolds, once he is safely across. She speaks Anglian when she is cross. I like it better when she talks to us in Kantish.

We are on Bridge Street, at the street market. Tanta haggles in rapid Kantish with women in headscarves with Agaholm accents, hands over silver coins, and piles up fruit and vegetables on the baby carriage. A piece of yellow fruit lies abandoned in the gutter. There are ants crawling on it. I pick it up to look at them, but Tanta tells me to throw it away.

We walk by Island Gate. I want to look at the King’s Men in the sentry boxes, but Tanta hurries us past. We enter the long curve of the Esplanade, with its fine town houses on one side and the steep grassy slope of the ramparts on the other. The noise of the cartwheels on the cobbles gradually fades as we walk. William follows behind in his dark blue school coat. When I go to school, I’ll have a coat like that.

Some girls are playing a clapping game in the road. Skinny Malink fell down the sink, into a cellar black as ink… I look at them curiously as we pass by.

We are at the turn for Foundry Street, but something is happening on the other side of the road. Men are digging into the embankment. William stops to watch. Tanta is about to say something to him, but then the baby starts to cry in his carriage and she has to pick him up. I seize my chance and run over to stand beside William. Grim-faced soldiers are standing guard in their red and white uniforms, and behind them labourers are digging. Some have stripped to the waist and are sweating in the hot sun. I stare at their muscles and tattoos. Tanta comes over to join us, holding the baby and rocking him up and down. One of the diggers shouts up some remark to her, and she replies sharply in street Kantish. Down in the ditch, something is gradually being uncovered. I can see the sheen of metal in the sun. The men stop their work and began to lift and heave at the object. It turns out to be nothing special – just a long metal rail, but it is attached to some structure that I cannot quite make out. It looks like a giant ladder laid out flat in the ground.

‘What’s that thing, Tanta?’ I ask. And she replies with a word I have never heard before.

I would probably have forgotten the incident, but for what happened later that day. At our evening meal, our mother was trying as usual to get William and I to practise our Anglian. She asked us where we had been on our walk with Mrs Clausen, and I told her that we had been down by the ramparts watching some men digging, and that we had seen a railway. (I used the Kantish word, knowing no other.)

My mother looked up sharply as though she had been struck. A glance passed between her and my father. ‘You must not use that word, Karl,’ she said.

‘I don’t know what it’s called in Anglian. I’m sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter. You mustn’t talk about things like that at all. Not in Anglian or in Kantish.’

‘But Tanta said it was a railway. She said there used to be magic carriages that carried people in them…’

‘Karl, listen,’ interrupted my father, glancing around to make sure Tanta was out of the room, ‘Mrs Clausen did not go to school, and sometimes she says silly things. But you must promise not to talk about that again. We could all get into very serious trouble if you go around repeating things that are not true. Do you understand?’

I nodded, deeply confused, but determined, as always, to try to do what is right. I suppose that has always been my greatest failing.

This, then, is where my story begins – in a row of elderly town houses ranged alongside a canal in the city of Kantarborg. From my bedroom window, I could watch the boats going past on the canal and the oxcarts clattering along the quay. Some were piled high with wheat, with the guards of the King’s Men marching alongside. William said it was our father who told the men driving the carts where to take the wheat. That made me feel very proud. In winter, beasts and bicycles sometimes slid about on the icy cobblestones, and people had to be careful not to end up in the canal. Once, up by the bridge, I saw a carriage lying on its side in the water, and Tanta said a lady and two horses had drowned. After that, whenever a horse carriage passed by, I would wonder whether a lady or someone special was inside – maybe even the King. The Old King knew my father by name – my father never failed to mention it at dinner if the King had passed him by at the wheat market and greeted him with a ‘Good day, Merchant Nielsen!’ (I imagined him doffing a crown.) I thought perhaps one day the King might come and visit us, but he never did.

With time, of course, I eventually realised that we were not quite on such intimate terms with the aristocracy as my father liked to imply, but although there was much muttering about bills in our household, we kept up a respectable enough front. We even had servants, of a sort, in the form of the Clausens, who lived in the cellar. Rolf however was often so slow at coming up from below that my father sometimes grew impatient and answered the door himself, much to my mother’s annoyance. Mrs Clausen we called Tanta, the Kantish word for aunt.

On our way to school, my brothers and I sometimes peeked into the yard of the Royal Foundry, where the great anchors and cannons of the fleet were cast. If we were lucky, we could watch open-mouthed as rivers of steaming, red-hot metal were swallowed up by the giant black moulds.

Once, a steamship entered the canal – a source of wonder and excitement for the whole neighbourhood. It was a strange-looking vessel made of as much iron as wood, with almost no sails to speak of, drawing behind it a barge loaded with timber. It slipped in gently under its own power, hissing and belching smoke from its chimney – ‘It’s not a chimney, it’s a funnel,’ said William, knowledgeably – and to the delight of myself and my brothers it berthed on our side of the canal, just yards from our front door. In the days that followed many of our school friends came by just to gaze at it, and my brothers and I showed if off as though we were the proud owners. It was not very big, as ships went – perhaps the length of four or five oxcarts from stem to stern – but it was bizarre in appearance, with a long, low superstructure, painted grey, a central black funnel held in place by cables, and a single mast. It was called Amelia, as a brass nameplate proclaimed, and I spent hours trying – and sometimes succeeding – to catch a glimpse of its inner machinery and find out how it worked. Sometimes a crewman would open a hatch to the engine-room, and there would be a flash of hefty metal pistons and cogs, marvellous to behold. But while on occasion my brothers and I could charm the sailors of other vessels to let us go on board their ships, this crew was a surly lot and jealous of their secrets, so that was all the insight I was able to obtain.

On Sundays, we would walk the short distance through the cobbled streets to the Anglian Church of St Christopher the Navigator, with its bizarre and beautiful spiral tower that always fascinated me. Outside the church was a black wooden sign with the letters ‘CXM’, which William claimed stood for Cult of the Executed Man. Although my parents never expressed any interest in religion that I can recall, it was socially important in that neighbourhood to be seen in church on Sunday mornings. Linguistically, our family purported to be Anglians, though my father could swear quite impressively in Kantish when he didn’t think we could hear him. Once, I also heard my mother express herself in some very choice and perfectly fluent Kantish when she lost her temper with a shopkeeper. My brothers and I of course spoke mostly Kantish, which we picked up from Tanta and from all the other children on the street, but our mother forbade us to use it in the house, where only Anglian was permitted to be spoken, except by the servants to each other.

The church service was in High Anglian and thus mostly incomprehensible to myself and my brothers, despite or perhaps because of the fact that everything apparently had to be repeated three times. The baffling ceremony over, we returned home to a Sunday dinner of cooked meat, usually lamb or pork. Meat was a rarity in Kantarborg, even in the best streets, and was generally kept for Sundays, though it was rumoured that the King and some of his courtiers ate meat every day. For the most part we ate porridge, vegetable stews and bread, and so in that respect our diet differed only in terms of presentation from that of the poorest people in town.

The school, where we were taught by forbidding-looking scholars in black capes, was about twenty minutes’ walk away, up one side of the canal, across the hump-backed bridge, and down the other. But sometimes in winter the canal would freeze over, and we could climb down a metal ladder and take a short cut across the ice, instead of having to go all the way round. It was a risky business, as none of us could swim, but thrilling.

Of my brothers, it was clear that William, the eldest, would inherit my father’s business, while Jonas was good at letters and would likely become a scholar. That left me, and I was a conundrum. A solitary child, I spent hours alone, mostly drawing. I had little interest in games or in spending time with other children, except my brothers. At school I was poor at reading and writing, and indeed showed little aptitude for any subject except mathematics and art, although my talent was mediocre. My caricatures of the teachers were, mercifully, quite unrecognisable. When my future was being discussed at home, the possibility of accountancy was sometimes raised, at which my mother would sigh and look glum. But one day, when I was ten years old, something happened that was to change my life completely.

Our family had two clocks; one in the hallway, which tick-tocked in a respectably restrained manner, and a diabolical contraption in my parents’ bedroom which woke my father (and the rest of the household) in the early mornings with a hideous racket. I remember it was made of dark, varnished wood, with brass angels on the top, a glass cover over the clock face that could be opened to allow the clock to be wound, and a lever on the side which once had been capable of damping the sound to a more civilised level, but which had long since ceased to function. It also ticked with a feverish, syncopated intensity that made it quite impossible for me to sleep when, troubled by my frequent nightmares, I crawled into my parents’ bed at night. But one day, quite suddenly, it stopped. My father woke late for work and I heard him leave the house in a great huff, complaining loudly about the cost of clock repairs. When my mother came to wake me, I suffered a violent but entirely artificial coughing fit and begged to be allowed to stay home from school. There was to be a written exam that day in Anglian – a subject in which I had never exactly shone – and that was more than enough to affect the state of my health quite dramatically. My mother, trusting soul that she was, felt my forehead and pronounced that I had a fever. She led me downstairs by the hand and installed me beneath a blanket on the chaise longue in the dining-room; ostensibly because it was warmer there, but actually, I suppose, so that Rolf could keep an eye on me during the day and make sure I didn’t get up to any mischief. At the dining table, William and Jonas ate their breakfast porridge in silence and regarded me with frosty suspicion. My mother reappeared, carrying the now moribund clock – it was about the size of a football, but heavy – and thunked it down onto the table, telling William to call in at the clockmaker’s on his way to school and ask him to drop by later. (It was the custom in those days for clockmakers to call on people’s homes to fix their clocks. Even relatively portable timepieces like this one were valuable items, and not something you would want to be seen carrying through the streets.)

Then my brothers left for school, and my mother departed on one of those mysterious errands that she conducted during the day, and which usually kept her out of the house until dinner-time. (William had a theory that she had a lover in town, as was fashionable for ladies of her station, but I suspect the truth was rather more prosaic and – for my mother – infinitely more shameful. Somewhere in the city, my mother worked.)

The day dragged on, boring but blessedly free of examinations. I had a pencil and paper, on which I drew pictures and plans of steamships and machines. Flying steamships with wings. Clockwork oxen to draw them in. Airship cranes to unload them. I was hoping that the clockmaker would come by soon, because I loved to watch him work, and I was curious to see the inner workings of the clock. But the clockmaker did not arrive. (The clockmaker did not arrive, we heard later, because his own ticker had stopped, that very morning – his wife had gone to wake him and discovered him stiff and cold in his bed. As he had often fixed our own clocks in the past, this seemed a troubling coincidence – even a portent – upon which I sometimes heard my father speculating gloomily in the weeks that followed.)

As the hours passed, it occurred to me that the clockmaker might appreciate it if I opened up the clock and had it ready for him. It would save him a little work, I reasoned to myself. He might even give me a smile and say ‘Bright boy!’ I liked it when people said that. And, more to the point, it would give me a chance to take a good look at the clock’s mechanism. Surely it couldn’t do any harm just to take a look? I slipped out from under the blanket and over to the table, and examined the catch that held the panel on the back of the clock. It was a simple sliding catch – no need for a screwdriver, though I had my precious screwdriver-penknife ready if it should be needed. The back panel was a kind of round lid on a hinge, and it opened like a door. And inside – what a revelation! A whole galaxy of brass cogs and wheels. I spent a few moments taking it all in. At the top were two brass bells, which must have been what made all the noise in the mornings. I flicked one of them with my finger, and it made quite a loud ping. I glanced anxiously at the door, but Rolf, with the mistress gone from the house, was of course nowhere to be seen. The mechanism was exquisite but ... no, not complex. Not complex at all. There were two spiral springs. You could see how one of them drove the two hands on the clock face, via a series of interlinked cogs, while the sole function of the other seemed to be to operate the hammer that struck the bells. And there was the latch that set the time at which the clock would ring. The spring for the clock mechanism itself was very tightly wound. It looked ... uncomfortable, somehow. And one cog didn’t look quite straight. Experimentally, I pushed it back into place with the end of my penknife-screwdriver. Ka-TCHUNG, said the mechanism. I withdrew my hand hastily. But it was clear now what was wrong; the clock had been overwound, and the pressure had pushed a cog out of place, jamming the gear. A simple thing to fix. First of all, I needed to release the pressure from the spring. Since I knew of no other way to do this, I held the cog in place with my screwdriver again and set the ka-tchung sound going for a full half-hour, until the spring looked more comfortable. Then I tightened the screw that held the cog with my screwdriver. The clock ticked away merrily and seemed to be in working order again. I then noticed how the lever to dampen the ringing sound had been bent slightly out of shape. A little pressure from the screwdriver, and ... there we are. But the only way to see if it would work would be to set the alarm going. I had worked out how the tiny extra dial on the clock face set the time at which the alarm would ring. I gingerly moved its hand around to a time ten minutes ahead of the time that the clock showed, and waited.

At that point, unfortunately, Jonas came home from school and found me with the clock open and my hands in the gears. He, of course, was highly indignant and predicted that Father would surely give me a thrashing. But I must admit, I didn’t much care. I was lost in fascination with the clock, and not a little pleased with myself. After a few minutes the clock’s alarm rang with its usual clamour, and when I pushed gently on the lever, the sound shrank to a bearable level, and then gradually increased in volume as I moved it back again. I had fixed the clock.

Much to Jonas’s disappointment, I received no thrashing. In fact, when I demonstrated my simple repair job to my mother and father, I saw a look pass between them which seemed significant, though the import of it was lost on me at the time.

‘Well done Karl,’ said my father. ‘You did a good job there.’ It was, I think, the first time my father had ever really praised me. That night I dreamed of keys and cogs and gears.

Chapter two

Did God give us the sea?

At age fifteen, I commenced my horology studies at the University’s Technical College on the other side of the harbour. Quite how I managed to gain entrance to an institution of such prestige – the fact that it was the only one of its kind in the city made it no less so – despite my unimpressive school leaving examination remained forever something of a mystery. No doubt my father made use of whatever influence he had at court and pulled a few strings. And it was indeed fortunate that he utilised that influence while he still could, because it was while I was in my second year at college that the Old King died, and whatever influence my father had probably died with him. That day I heard the cannons fire over the city, and the Royal Airship was seen aloft, above the city’s towers, carrying the body of the King to his rest in the Old Capital. The king’s eldest son, Reginald (or Ragnvald as we knew him in Kantish) had been killed some years earlier in the Northlander wars, and so he was succeeded on the throne by his second son, a boy roughly of an age with myself whose name was Norbert II, but who for the rest of his reign would always be known as the Young King.

But such matters were of little concern to me then. For the next three years, I immersed myself