The Cabinet of Wonders
Page 2
Some of the pets ran in circles on the floor of the cage or climbed up the bars. When Petra opened the cage, five fist-sized scarab beetles, three puppies with tin scales instead of fur, a finch, a raven, two lizards that would have to be purchased together or not at all, several mice, and the big-eyed monkey burst across the room like a comet. When they saw her reach for a jug of brassica oil and a large saucer on the table, they rushed back to cluster around her ankles.
“Such behavior!” Astrophil sniffed, as if he had taken a leisurely stroll to have his breakfast.
The pets dipped their beaks in, lapped up, or sucked down the oil. Petra nudged the monkey aside to make room at the saucer’s edge for a beetle, which was ramming into the monkey’s bottom. When they had drunk their fill of breakfast, they moved about the room more calmly, except for the three puppies, who started to wrestle among themselves. They were the very youngest of the tin pets. They had been completed only six months ago, just before her father left for Prague. They were his latest experiment. Unlike the other pets, the puppies were designed to grow.
It was very boring for the animals to be locked up in a cage at night. They were filled with energy. Years ago, when her father had begun crafting the tin pets, he let them have the run of the house at all hours of the day and night. And what happened? A total disaster. Jars of pickled vegetables were smashed on the kitchen floor, vinegar spilling everywhere. A squirrel got into the linen cabinet and tore several sheets into rags for a nest. A bird cracked a precious mirror by tapping its beak repeatedly at its own reflection. If Dita and her family had lived with them at the time, you can be sure she would have quickly put an end to the pets’ freedom. But there was only seven-year-old Petra, who howled with laughter at the toys. Her father barely noticed anything. It wasn’t until one poor rabbit went missing, and they discovered her trapped and starving inside the gears of one of the models for farm machinery, that her father decided to keep the pets locked in a cage at night. They could play only in the shop, and only during the day when someone could keep an eye on them.
Astrophil was the exception to the rule. But then, he was the exception to almost every rule. He was well behaved from birth. He took his good manners as a point of pride. He learned Czech quickly, speaking in whole sentences when he was just days old. He was the only pet her father made who learned how to read. Astrophil actively sought out books on everything from poetry to how to make Turkish delight. Petra often teased him that he was filled with useless information. But while he learned many things Petra never would, he never managed to learn how to sleep. Most pets, when they were about two years old, would begin to doze for a few minutes at a time. A year later, they might be able to sleep through the night. But Astrophil, who was six years old, showed no sign of doing more than blinking once in a while.
Petra tidied the shop to make it presentable for business, dusting her father’s handiwork: horse bits and plows, intricately engraved silverware, a collection of music boxes, compasses, astrolabes, and clocks that began chiming ten o’clock. It was already late to open the shop. Dita’s husband, Josef, would have left hours ago to work in the brassica fields. Soon Petra would unlock the front door facing the street. She hoped that she might sell a few things. Above all, she hoped her friend Tomik would stop by.
Although it was incredible that she would have heard a shuffling of feet over the noise in the workshop, Petra did. She turned around to see David, Dita’s son. He was a few years younger than Petra. “Stella!” he called.
The tin raven flew across the room in a shiny blur and settled on the boy’s shoulder, gently poking her beak into his curly hair.
“Upstart crow,” Astrophil muttered.
“I am a raven!” Stella cawed back, insulted.
It was clear that the raven had no intention of being sold to an Okno villager or a traveling merchant charmed by her glossy feathers. The raven liked her life at the Sign of the Compass just fine, and had grown fond of David, who was stroking her head.
“Mother wanted me to see if you had finally woken up,” the boy mimicked Dita’s exasperated voice. “She wanted to know if you were taking care of your one duty in this house.”
“Well, I obviously am.”
“Well, you obviously can’t greet customers in your nightgown.”
Petra started to say something rude, but David began singing loudly, looking everywhere around the shop except at her. “Oh, she’s a lovely lass in her nightdress! But her hair’s a mess, I must confess!”
The raven cawed.
“Oh, she’s a—”
“David, be quiet!”
“—lovely lass—”
“Stop!”
He did, for he realized that she was no longer looking at him, but out the window. She had a worried expression on her face. “What is it?” he asked. He saw a cart driven by two men in tattered clothes.
“I’m not sure.” As she pushed the door open, Astrophil climbed into her hair and clenched his legs around a snarled lock of it, looking like a flower-shaped hairpin with eight petals. The animals eagerly rushed for the open door, but David darted across the room to stop them. He hustled them back into the cage.
The two men stepped down from the cart, one of them laughing. The other man glanced at Petra, looked up at the sky, and stretched in the sunlight. They turned away from her and walked toward the back of the cart, heaving at some load in the flatbed.
At first Petra could not believe that the long, angular form the two men carried was her father. But then his head flopped back in the fat man’s arms and she saw his long gray-black hair, his wide mouth, and the rust-colored bandage crossing his face.
She looked over her shoulder at David, who was waiting in the shop, gazing out the door, his eyes wide in horror.
“Dita,” Petra whispered. She had lost her voice.
But David easily found his. “Mother!” He spun around and ran into the dark depths of the house. “Mother!”
2
The Making of the Clock
THE TWO MEN carried Mikal Kronos into his shop.
Petra shut the door behind them. She felt mechanical, like one of her father’s inventions. She couldn’t look away from the cloth covering his face. It was stiff with old blood. Petra knew the bandage needed to be changed, but didn’t know if she could do it.
A thousand questions tried to claw their way out of Petra’s mouth, but only one escaped: “What happened?” Petra was astonished to hear her own voice. It was small and frightened.
“Your da had an accident,” the heavyset man replied.
Dita briskly entered from the hallway. Her back was straight, her hair wrapped in a dark blue scarf, and she was wiping her hands on her starched apron. David followed her, carrying Stella on his shoulder. Dita caught the tall man staring with curiosity at the bird. He glanced away, embarrassed.
“’Lo, missus,” his companion said. “My name’s Martin. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. Your husband’s had a hard journey. Would you show us where we could set him down for a bit of rest?”
“He is my uncle.” Dita frowned. “Come this way. His bedroom is here,” she said, and showed them to a small room on the ground floor with a square window and a narrow bed.
After the two men had laid their burden onto the bed, Dita took her uncle’s hand and bit her lip as she looked at his bandages. “David, get some water.”
David ran out of the room. But Stella launched herself from the departing boy’s shoulder and flew back, settling on a bedpost. The raven craned her neck to watch as Dita gently peeled away the gauze covering her uncle’s face. “How did this happen?” Dita demanded.
The two strangers exchanged a look.
Petra hung back. Her hand was braced on the door frame. Dita’s back blocked Petra’s view of her father. Petra waited for someone to speak. When no one did, she answered her cousin’s question. “They said it was an accident.”
“Really.” Dita’s voice was flat. She pinned the men with a fierce glare. “An accident? You will have an accident, too, if you don’t get out of this house right now.”
Martin smiled and spread his hands. “Now, you can’t blame us for—”
The bird shrieked and sprang from the bedpost, diving at the men with sharp claws and a sharper beak. Startled, they ran from the house, tripping, cursing, and covering their faces with their hands as Stella darted at them like a flying dagger.
When Dita spoke to Petra her voice was both rough and kind. “I want you to leave the room as well.”
Petra hesitated. Then she slipped into the hallway. She ran upstairs to her room. Through the window, she could still hear the bird’s furious screaming.
After that, no one questioned that Stella belonged to the family.
DITA HAD MOVED into the house with her husband and son years ago, after a long drought that had made the brassica fields dry, crisp, and useless. There was no harvest that year, and the one the year before that had been poor. Farmers across Bohemia grew desperate. The prince’s court in Prague felt the pinch of higher prices for reserves of oil used for cooking, lighting lamps in fashionable homes, and making weapons, which relied on the intense heat of fires made with brassica oil. The young prince’s response was to raise taxes.
Outraged, the countryside began to plot against the prince. But then key members of the rebellion mysteriously disappeared from their homes. The plot came to nothing. Some men lost their lives that year. Others, like Josef, lost their livelihood.
Josef and Dita came to the house at the Sign of the Compass with not much more than their son, David. Their farm, their home, and almost everything in it had been sold. Though Petra knew why they had come to live with them, she also knew that her father hoped Dita would become a second mother to Petra. Petra resented this. First of all, she had never even known what it was like to have a mother, since hers had died while giving birth to her. Petra felt that there was no need to replace what she didn’t feel was missing.
And she loved living alone with her father. He taught her lots more than she had ever learned from the wig-wearing village schoolmaster. He sometimes followed her advice, like when he began working on metal tools that were invisible. Petra always enjoyed watching him work. He didn’t use his hands to build anything, but stared at objects with concentration, making gears and drills and nails dance across the room in a shining pattern. He explained to Petra that using his hands was slow and cumbersome. His fingers would block his view of the very thing he was working on. When he said this, Petra suggested that other people would like to see the holes they were drilling. Might not invisible tools be useful? Petra’s idea was good in theory but not in practice. Try hitting a nail with an invisible hammer and you will understand why. But at least her father took the idea seriously and produced a few tools that he stored somewhere in the shop. Petra could never find them, though. This wasn’t very surprising, since the tools were (after all) invisible.
The very best part of living alone with her father was that Petra was free. She was free to wear what she wanted, sleep when she wanted, eat what she wanted, and say what she wanted. It might have crossed her father’s mind that he had no idea how to raise a young girl, but if it did he was quickly distracted by a few days locked in his workshop with a loaf of stale bread and the beginnings of a fresh idea. He was happy and Petra was happy. But when Dita’s family lost their farm and he invited his niece to come live with them, he began looking at his daughter in a thoughtful way. He had had the same expression on his face when the tin rabbit was lost, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was responsible for something he couldn’t take care of all the time.
And so began a struggle between Petra and her cousin. Petra waged a war of resistance. Dita fought back with persistence. Still, over the years, Petra had come to value many things about her cousin. One of them was the woman’s honesty. Dita did what she said she would. And she always said what she thought. Dita was not one to mince words or use them lightly.
So when Dita knocked on Petra’s door an hour after the strangers had left, and entered without waiting to be invited, Petra held her tongue, though at any other time she would have shouted about her right to privacy. Nervous dread sang in her stomach.
Dita sat in a chair near Petra’s bed and sighed. “The prince stole your father’s eyes. He had them removed and preserved.”
When Petra first saw the bandaged face, she knew that the gauze hid something terrible. But—her father, blind? He would never be able to work again. “That’s impossible. Why would the prince do that? Father is making a magnificent clock for him. Father can’t finish it if he can’t see.”
“He has already finished it, well ahead of schedule. He wanted to return home as soon as possible. He says that on the evening when he put the last gear in place, he was surprised by several soldiers and a surgeon, who was a magician of some sort. Then the prince arrived and thanked him for creating such a beautiful masterpiece. The prince said that no man could, or ever would, build anything like it again. And then” —Dita’s mouth twisted —“he ordered the surgeon to take your father’s eyes.”
“But why? Why would the prince want them?”
“I don’t know. Petra, you can speak with your father about what has happened.” Petra leaped from the bed. Her cousin held up a hand. “But only for a little while. He is very tired and his wounds are sore. He needs to sleep.”
After Dita left the room, Petra changed out of her nightgown. Wearing it all this awful morning had made everything seem surreal, as if she were still asleep and dreaming. She wanted to wake up.
“Such behavior!” Astrophil sniffed, as if he had taken a leisurely stroll to have his breakfast.
The pets dipped their beaks in, lapped up, or sucked down the oil. Petra nudged the monkey aside to make room at the saucer’s edge for a beetle, which was ramming into the monkey’s bottom. When they had drunk their fill of breakfast, they moved about the room more calmly, except for the three puppies, who started to wrestle among themselves. They were the very youngest of the tin pets. They had been completed only six months ago, just before her father left for Prague. They were his latest experiment. Unlike the other pets, the puppies were designed to grow.
It was very boring for the animals to be locked up in a cage at night. They were filled with energy. Years ago, when her father had begun crafting the tin pets, he let them have the run of the house at all hours of the day and night. And what happened? A total disaster. Jars of pickled vegetables were smashed on the kitchen floor, vinegar spilling everywhere. A squirrel got into the linen cabinet and tore several sheets into rags for a nest. A bird cracked a precious mirror by tapping its beak repeatedly at its own reflection. If Dita and her family had lived with them at the time, you can be sure she would have quickly put an end to the pets’ freedom. But there was only seven-year-old Petra, who howled with laughter at the toys. Her father barely noticed anything. It wasn’t until one poor rabbit went missing, and they discovered her trapped and starving inside the gears of one of the models for farm machinery, that her father decided to keep the pets locked in a cage at night. They could play only in the shop, and only during the day when someone could keep an eye on them.
Astrophil was the exception to the rule. But then, he was the exception to almost every rule. He was well behaved from birth. He took his good manners as a point of pride. He learned Czech quickly, speaking in whole sentences when he was just days old. He was the only pet her father made who learned how to read. Astrophil actively sought out books on everything from poetry to how to make Turkish delight. Petra often teased him that he was filled with useless information. But while he learned many things Petra never would, he never managed to learn how to sleep. Most pets, when they were about two years old, would begin to doze for a few minutes at a time. A year later, they might be able to sleep through the night. But Astrophil, who was six years old, showed no sign of doing more than blinking once in a while.
Petra tidied the shop to make it presentable for business, dusting her father’s handiwork: horse bits and plows, intricately engraved silverware, a collection of music boxes, compasses, astrolabes, and clocks that began chiming ten o’clock. It was already late to open the shop. Dita’s husband, Josef, would have left hours ago to work in the brassica fields. Soon Petra would unlock the front door facing the street. She hoped that she might sell a few things. Above all, she hoped her friend Tomik would stop by.
Although it was incredible that she would have heard a shuffling of feet over the noise in the workshop, Petra did. She turned around to see David, Dita’s son. He was a few years younger than Petra. “Stella!” he called.
The tin raven flew across the room in a shiny blur and settled on the boy’s shoulder, gently poking her beak into his curly hair.
“Upstart crow,” Astrophil muttered.
“I am a raven!” Stella cawed back, insulted.
It was clear that the raven had no intention of being sold to an Okno villager or a traveling merchant charmed by her glossy feathers. The raven liked her life at the Sign of the Compass just fine, and had grown fond of David, who was stroking her head.
“Mother wanted me to see if you had finally woken up,” the boy mimicked Dita’s exasperated voice. “She wanted to know if you were taking care of your one duty in this house.”
“Well, I obviously am.”
“Well, you obviously can’t greet customers in your nightgown.”
Petra started to say something rude, but David began singing loudly, looking everywhere around the shop except at her. “Oh, she’s a lovely lass in her nightdress! But her hair’s a mess, I must confess!”
The raven cawed.
“Oh, she’s a—”
“David, be quiet!”
“—lovely lass—”
“Stop!”
He did, for he realized that she was no longer looking at him, but out the window. She had a worried expression on her face. “What is it?” he asked. He saw a cart driven by two men in tattered clothes.
“I’m not sure.” As she pushed the door open, Astrophil climbed into her hair and clenched his legs around a snarled lock of it, looking like a flower-shaped hairpin with eight petals. The animals eagerly rushed for the open door, but David darted across the room to stop them. He hustled them back into the cage.
The two men stepped down from the cart, one of them laughing. The other man glanced at Petra, looked up at the sky, and stretched in the sunlight. They turned away from her and walked toward the back of the cart, heaving at some load in the flatbed.
At first Petra could not believe that the long, angular form the two men carried was her father. But then his head flopped back in the fat man’s arms and she saw his long gray-black hair, his wide mouth, and the rust-colored bandage crossing his face.
She looked over her shoulder at David, who was waiting in the shop, gazing out the door, his eyes wide in horror.
“Dita,” Petra whispered. She had lost her voice.
But David easily found his. “Mother!” He spun around and ran into the dark depths of the house. “Mother!”
2
The Making of the Clock
THE TWO MEN carried Mikal Kronos into his shop.
Petra shut the door behind them. She felt mechanical, like one of her father’s inventions. She couldn’t look away from the cloth covering his face. It was stiff with old blood. Petra knew the bandage needed to be changed, but didn’t know if she could do it.
A thousand questions tried to claw their way out of Petra’s mouth, but only one escaped: “What happened?” Petra was astonished to hear her own voice. It was small and frightened.
“Your da had an accident,” the heavyset man replied.
Dita briskly entered from the hallway. Her back was straight, her hair wrapped in a dark blue scarf, and she was wiping her hands on her starched apron. David followed her, carrying Stella on his shoulder. Dita caught the tall man staring with curiosity at the bird. He glanced away, embarrassed.
“’Lo, missus,” his companion said. “My name’s Martin. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings. Your husband’s had a hard journey. Would you show us where we could set him down for a bit of rest?”
“He is my uncle.” Dita frowned. “Come this way. His bedroom is here,” she said, and showed them to a small room on the ground floor with a square window and a narrow bed.
After the two men had laid their burden onto the bed, Dita took her uncle’s hand and bit her lip as she looked at his bandages. “David, get some water.”
David ran out of the room. But Stella launched herself from the departing boy’s shoulder and flew back, settling on a bedpost. The raven craned her neck to watch as Dita gently peeled away the gauze covering her uncle’s face. “How did this happen?” Dita demanded.
The two strangers exchanged a look.
Petra hung back. Her hand was braced on the door frame. Dita’s back blocked Petra’s view of her father. Petra waited for someone to speak. When no one did, she answered her cousin’s question. “They said it was an accident.”
“Really.” Dita’s voice was flat. She pinned the men with a fierce glare. “An accident? You will have an accident, too, if you don’t get out of this house right now.”
Martin smiled and spread his hands. “Now, you can’t blame us for—”
The bird shrieked and sprang from the bedpost, diving at the men with sharp claws and a sharper beak. Startled, they ran from the house, tripping, cursing, and covering their faces with their hands as Stella darted at them like a flying dagger.
When Dita spoke to Petra her voice was both rough and kind. “I want you to leave the room as well.”
Petra hesitated. Then she slipped into the hallway. She ran upstairs to her room. Through the window, she could still hear the bird’s furious screaming.
After that, no one questioned that Stella belonged to the family.
DITA HAD MOVED into the house with her husband and son years ago, after a long drought that had made the brassica fields dry, crisp, and useless. There was no harvest that year, and the one the year before that had been poor. Farmers across Bohemia grew desperate. The prince’s court in Prague felt the pinch of higher prices for reserves of oil used for cooking, lighting lamps in fashionable homes, and making weapons, which relied on the intense heat of fires made with brassica oil. The young prince’s response was to raise taxes.
Outraged, the countryside began to plot against the prince. But then key members of the rebellion mysteriously disappeared from their homes. The plot came to nothing. Some men lost their lives that year. Others, like Josef, lost their livelihood.
Josef and Dita came to the house at the Sign of the Compass with not much more than their son, David. Their farm, their home, and almost everything in it had been sold. Though Petra knew why they had come to live with them, she also knew that her father hoped Dita would become a second mother to Petra. Petra resented this. First of all, she had never even known what it was like to have a mother, since hers had died while giving birth to her. Petra felt that there was no need to replace what she didn’t feel was missing.
And she loved living alone with her father. He taught her lots more than she had ever learned from the wig-wearing village schoolmaster. He sometimes followed her advice, like when he began working on metal tools that were invisible. Petra always enjoyed watching him work. He didn’t use his hands to build anything, but stared at objects with concentration, making gears and drills and nails dance across the room in a shining pattern. He explained to Petra that using his hands was slow and cumbersome. His fingers would block his view of the very thing he was working on. When he said this, Petra suggested that other people would like to see the holes they were drilling. Might not invisible tools be useful? Petra’s idea was good in theory but not in practice. Try hitting a nail with an invisible hammer and you will understand why. But at least her father took the idea seriously and produced a few tools that he stored somewhere in the shop. Petra could never find them, though. This wasn’t very surprising, since the tools were (after all) invisible.
The very best part of living alone with her father was that Petra was free. She was free to wear what she wanted, sleep when she wanted, eat what she wanted, and say what she wanted. It might have crossed her father’s mind that he had no idea how to raise a young girl, but if it did he was quickly distracted by a few days locked in his workshop with a loaf of stale bread and the beginnings of a fresh idea. He was happy and Petra was happy. But when Dita’s family lost their farm and he invited his niece to come live with them, he began looking at his daughter in a thoughtful way. He had had the same expression on his face when the tin rabbit was lost, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was responsible for something he couldn’t take care of all the time.
And so began a struggle between Petra and her cousin. Petra waged a war of resistance. Dita fought back with persistence. Still, over the years, Petra had come to value many things about her cousin. One of them was the woman’s honesty. Dita did what she said she would. And she always said what she thought. Dita was not one to mince words or use them lightly.
So when Dita knocked on Petra’s door an hour after the strangers had left, and entered without waiting to be invited, Petra held her tongue, though at any other time she would have shouted about her right to privacy. Nervous dread sang in her stomach.
Dita sat in a chair near Petra’s bed and sighed. “The prince stole your father’s eyes. He had them removed and preserved.”
When Petra first saw the bandaged face, she knew that the gauze hid something terrible. But—her father, blind? He would never be able to work again. “That’s impossible. Why would the prince do that? Father is making a magnificent clock for him. Father can’t finish it if he can’t see.”
“He has already finished it, well ahead of schedule. He wanted to return home as soon as possible. He says that on the evening when he put the last gear in place, he was surprised by several soldiers and a surgeon, who was a magician of some sort. Then the prince arrived and thanked him for creating such a beautiful masterpiece. The prince said that no man could, or ever would, build anything like it again. And then” —Dita’s mouth twisted —“he ordered the surgeon to take your father’s eyes.”
“But why? Why would the prince want them?”
“I don’t know. Petra, you can speak with your father about what has happened.” Petra leaped from the bed. Her cousin held up a hand. “But only for a little while. He is very tired and his wounds are sore. He needs to sleep.”
After Dita left the room, Petra changed out of her nightgown. Wearing it all this awful morning had made everything seem surreal, as if she were still asleep and dreaming. She wanted to wake up.
