The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Read online

  PRAISE FOR DANIEL A. RABUZZI’S

  The Choir Boats: Volume 1 of Longing for Yount

  “The Choir Boats is Gulliver’s Travels crossed with The Golden Compass and a dollop of Pride and Prejudice . . . An instant classic of fantasy . . .”

  —John Ottinger,

  Grasping for the Wind blog

  “(A)n auspicious debut . . . a muscular, Napoleonic-era fantasy that, like Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, will appeal to both adult and young adult readers.”

  —Paul Witcover,

  Realms of Fantasy

  “(A) fantastic and deeply entertaining debut novel . . . Part steampunk adventure, part classic fantasy, The Choir Boats might be earmarked for young adults, but anyone to whom this sounds like a rich ride will be surprised and delighted.”

  —Lincoln Cho,

  January Magazine

  “With full flanks ahead, The Choir Boats charts a magical course of verve and wit through a richly detailed nineteenth-century world, spinning off little arabesques of wonderment with every turn of the page.”

  —Matt Kressel,

  host of KGB reading series,

  founder of Senses Five Press

  “The Choir Boats is the most underrated young adult title of 2009, although it’s by no means limited to young readers. It’s a gorgeous and light-hearted story, chock-full of clever words, characters, surprises, and one truly spectacular twist at the end. If you’re seeking an engrossing and entirely unique world to sweep you off your feet, look no further.”

  —The Ranting Dragon blog

  DANIEL A. RABUZZI

  THE INDIGO PHEASANT

  Volume Two of Longing for Yount

  Illustrated by Deborah A. Mills

  ChiZine Publications

  Copyright

  The Indigo Pheasant © 2012 by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  Interior illustrations and front cover woodcarving © 2012 by Deborah A. Mills

  Woodcarving photograph © 2012 by Shira Weinberger

  Cover artwork © 2012 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design © 2012 by Samantha Beiko

  Interior design and Hippocampus graphic © 2012 by Danny Evarts

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN: 978-1-92746-917-0

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Samantha Beiko

  Copyedited and proofread by Kate Moore

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  Dedicated to my wife, best friend, and creative partner: the artist Deborah A. Mills. She knows Yount in the crook of the osprey’s wing, in the grain of the wood, in the flower-glow of twilight.

  Continuing the story started in The Choir Boats (Volume I of Longing for Yount), by Daniel A. Rabuzzi (Toronto: Chizine Publications, 2009). For notes to the text and more information about Maggie, the McDoons and Yount, see: www.danielarabuzzi.com.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Many Plans, or,

  The Most Superbly Ludicrous Project Ever Devised

  Interlude: Disjecta Membra

  Chapter 2: Many Meetings, or,

  A Long, Exact, and Serious Comedy

  Interlude: Videnda

  Chapter 3: Many Perils, or,

  The Profoundest Dangers of Air and Time

  Interlude: Qualia

  Chapter 4: More Perils, or,

  A Thousand Strokes of Mean Invention

  Interlude: Fontes

  Chapter 5: A Delayed Beginning, or,

  Brisk Entanglements of Wisdom and Folly

  Interlude: Indicia

  Chapter 6: An Awakening, or,

  The Publication of a Marred Peace

  Interlude: Cartulae

  Chapter 7: Battles Big and Small, or,

  Malicious Affections Roused

  Interlude: Vestigia

  Chapter 8: A Great Singing, or,

  The Fluid Signature of Joy

  Interlude: Farrigine

  Epilogue

  Index of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  Also Available from ChiZine Publications

  Prologue

  “Thou, who didst put to flight

  Primeval Silence, when the morning stars,

  Exulting, shouted o’er the rising ball;

  O Thou, whose word from solid darkness struck

  That spark, the sun; strike wisdom from my soul . . .”

  —Edward Young,

  The Complaint: or, Night Thoughts On Life, Death & Immortality,

  First Night, lines 35-39 (published 1742)

  “The fowl digs out the blade that kills it.”

  —Traditional Igbo proverb

  “The mother that bare them saith unto them, Go your way, ye children; for I am a widow and forsaken. / I brought you up with gladness; but with sorrow and heaviness have I lost you for ye have sinned . . .”

  —4 Ezra 2, 2-3

  “Blood,” said Maggie. “I can see no other way, Mama—it needs blood. Blood to make it work properly.”

  Maggie emptied the afternoon ashes in the bin at the bottom of the garden behind the Sedgewicks’s house on Archer Street by Pineapple Court. She listened to the bells tolling the end of the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes on a chilly day in May of 1816.

  “Mama,” she said to the growing shadows on the wall. For over a year, ever since the great singing with the white girl and the brown girl that brought the ship out of Silence, Maggie had been designing a machine in her head.

  “I wish there was another way, I do,” she thought. “Why blood? I fear it, I don’t want it so. But I can taste it in my mind. Aceldama in the music, blood on the tonal fields.”

  A grey thrush landed on top of the wall, started his vespers.

  “A musical instrument like no one has ever seen,” Maggie said, admiring the fieldfare in song as the light turned wan.

  She envisioned a structure larger than a house, with wires and gears, struts and enjambments, a tabernacular engine.

  “Like in size to the organ at St. Macrina’s, but much more . . . complex.”

  She arranged in her mind levers and pipes, knobs and buttons.

  “The method of fluxions will not be enough,” said Maggie, scratching out a calculation with a stick in th
e ash-kettle. “To build and steer this choir-boat, we will need Mr. Laplace’s celestial mechanics, Mama, and something of his latest on probability—if only I knew French better. Not neglecting the monadology either.”

  Maggie had spent hours by candlelight alone in her tiny attic room dissecting a broken timepiece she got from the rag-and-bone man, contriving models made from scraps she found in refuse heaps and middens, drafting schematics and charts with pencil and a pale blue crayon. She read every book and paper on mathematics that she could convince Mrs. Sedgewick to buy or borrow for her. On her Saturday afternoons, she haunted the watchmakers’ district in Clerkenwell, and once she spent a day’s wages to visit the Mechanical Museum on Tichbourne off Haymarket, having first been denied entrance at the Adelaide National Gallery of Practical Science on the Strand (serving as it did, “only the most esteemed and genteel elements of the Publick.”)

  Night by night, the plan became clearer.

  “Chi di, we need seven singers,” she whispered to the thrush. “Not you, little friend, but six others besides me. The white girl and the brown girl . . . they are two. I heard others when those two sang, but I cannot see them.”

  Maggie traced a pattern on the brick of the wall below the thrush.

  “The ghost-stitches of our wanderings,” she explained to the bird. “Another girl also sings alone, like me. A girl with black hair, very straight, and she has pale golden skin. I see her when I dream, I watch her sing, but I hear no music from her. She is very, very far away. I think she must come to me or else the great machine cannot work.”

  Maggie shivered and wondered if the machine needed the distant girl to be the seventh singer or to be something else.

  “Ancestors—ndichie—help me,” thought Maggie.

  Only the thrush responded, singing more loudly as night fell and the moon rose.

  “Seven singers . . . and blood to glaze the enamel, burnish the copper, oil the engine, to wax the casings. I wish, oh Mama I wish it wasn’t so . . . but I see blood in the machine’s making . . . I fear this, but the calculations are quite clear on the matter.”

  The head-maid called from the house, sharp words. Maggie sighed and hoisted the ash-pot.

  “Here I am little better than a slave,” Maggie said. “That Mrs. Sedgewick treats me like her pet, a fancy monkey who does tricks.”

  Maggie walked towards the house.

  “White folks think they know us but they don’t, not at all,” she whispered. “Not sure but I should take my machine to Maryland, Mama, when I am through with it in the other place.”

  At that moment, a phantom echo—a shriek not heard but felt in the marrow—crossed the moon and the thrush stopped singing. Maggie did not flinch. She shook her fist at the sky.

  “You are not seen, but I feel you,” she said.

  Halting at the doorway to the house, she sensed that the thrush was gone from the wall. He would sing no more this night.

  “No more pint o’salt,” she said and went inside.

  Sally had the carriage stopped at the corner of Mincing Lane, unable to go on.

  “What is it, niece?” said Barnabas.

  Sally could not say. Ever since landing at London’s East India Docks that morning, on the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes, a chilly day in early May of 1816, Sally had felt uneasy. In the carriage, passing what should have been familiar places, she could not shake the feeling that something was—as Mr. Sanford would put it—“out of place.”

  “Figs and fiddles,” said her uncle, when she confessed her fear to him. “Just getting your land-legs back is all, I reckon, after all our months at sea, first on The Gallinule through the foggy, complainin’ places, now so many more months on an East Indiaman from the Cape.”

  Isaak stood with her two back legs anchored in Sally’s lap, peering here and there and back again through the carriage window, face framed by her two front paws. Isaak lashed her tail, a threat and a greeting combined.

  “Perhaps Uncle, and maybe,” Sally said, holding Isaak by the belly. But she thought the streets of London felt even narrower and more askew than she remembered, the rooflines subtly unbalanced, the dome of St. Paul’s minutely off centre. The rooks overhead seemed even shiftier and louder than she remembered.

  “I fear a trick of the Owl,” she said to Reglum and Dorentius. “Might he not have altered our course, magicked the Fulginator to send us to some other London on some other Karket-soom?

  “Especially with me so badly hurt, that’s your thought is it not?” said Dorentius, shifting his amputated leg as the carriage jounced along a particularly poorly surfaced section of the Great East Road.

  “No, no, dear Dorentius, I did not mean . . .” said Sally, putting her hand out to the place where his leg used to be, then withdrawing it with a little gasp.

  “You could never offend me, Sally, you know that,” said the Yountish chief-fulginator. “Only Reglum here can do that, given that he insists on Oxonian superiority in all matters!”

  Sally smiled at the jibe, her heart full of relief and love for the brave Dorentius, whose leg had been shattered by a cannonball as The Gallinule escaped from Yount Great-Port. The night Afsana fell, shot by the Arch-Bishop’s Guards . . . Sally’s smile was short-lived.

  “I do not doubt the Wurm has power to cozen even the leys and vortices of the Interrugal Lands, but I do not think our Fulginator played us false, especially not with both of you doing the fulginating,” said Reglum.

  “Could be just that we have been away so long,” said Sanford. The others listened intently—his pronouncements were famously laconic. “Bonaparte’s been defeated, for one. For the other, we McDoons have grown accustomed to being very nearly the only white people in our gatherings. It is strange to say it, but it is odd now to see so very few brown and black faces.”

  His speech at an end, Sanford settled back into customary silence, his eyes keen and bright as they surveyed the London cityscape through the carriage window. He looked for all the world like an old setter, nose outthrust.

  “Why, ’tis true, of course, old Sanford has it precisely, in fact, I declare that I never saw so many pairs of blue eyes in all my life!” said Barnabas. “There, Sally, your fancy is nothing more than getting your senses reacquainted with what has now become foreign to us.”

  Still, Sally could not bring herself to travel the final hundred yards to the house on Mincing Lane.

  Sally thought of Tom, as she did every day. She looked at Tom’s boon companion Billy Sea-Hen, sitting quietly next to Mr. Sanford. She thought of Afsana . . . dead? She thought of Jambres, the Cretched Man. She thought of the Fraulein Reimer.

  “She’ll never come back,” Sally whispered. “‘The solace of salvation’, that’s what she put on the needlework. . . .”

  “Ah, alas, well no, she cannot come back,” said Barnabas, blowing his nose to hide tears.

  “Dearest,” said Reglum, clearing his throat, holding Sally’s hand, offering a handkerchief to dry her tears. “I feel this to be London, the real and true London, not some Wurm’s illusion . . . and surely you know London far better than I do.”

  “Dear, sweet Reglum,” she thought, looking at Reglum, dabbing at her cheeks.

  And then there he was, alive in all his pleadings, uncoiling in her mind: James Kidlington.

  “James!” she shouted in her mind. “No, no, not you, James Kidlington . . . ‘I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name’ . . .”

  “Sally?” said Reglum.

  Sally sat up, squeezing and then releasing Reglum’s hand.

  “’Tis nothing, dearest,” she said. “Verily.”

  She folded Isaak to her breast, and said, “I can go on.”

  Sanford rapped on the roof of the carriage and the horses moved.

  Suddenly there it was, their home on Mincing Lane, with its blue trim (recently repainted, as Sanford noted with satisfaction) and its dolphin door knocker. They had sent a messenger on ahead of them from the dock, so they were expected.
The door to the house flew open even as they spilled out of the carriage and Isaak bounded up the steps.

  “Salmius Nalmius!”

  “Why, Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris in the flesh, looking very well indeed!”

  “I must ask you straight away, lads, about my smilax root . . .”

  Sally did not dismiss her fears even then, not until. . . .

  “Here now, you lot, let me through this moment or I will clout you black and blue!” said the cook, pushing her way past her niece and Mr. Brandt and all the others. A fleshy avalanche, smelling of dough and mustard-sauce, the cook enveloped Sally.

  “Mr. Sanford, Mr. McDoon, sirs, it is good to have you back at last!” said the cook. “And here is our Isaak-tiger come home to us as well!”

  The cook fair thundered her next:

  “Best of all, may all saints and their servants be praised, sirs, it’s Miss Sally, our own little smee! Welcome home, welcome home, welcome home!”

  James Kidlington marvelled at his clean fingernails, at his fresh-pressed clothes, and the new hat on his head.

  Standing on Effra’s Bridge, where the Fleet River met the Thames, James shifted his attention from himself to the spectacle of London on a cold day in May of 1816. He followed the movement of barges and wains, loaded with coal and grain, and the rumbling of great carriages bearing travellers from as far away as Glasgow and Liverpool. He listened to a thousand voices raised in devotion to commerce, finding one among the clamour especially intriguing.

  “Wheaten buns,” sighed James, as he tracked the vendor who dodged and danced his way through the crowd. Not even the tannic stink of the rivers could blunt James’s craving for a hot, blanch’d bun.

  James made as if to approach the bun-seller but stopped at the sight of the tall figure next to him.

  “Might I just pause for . . . ?” said James.

  “No time,” said the man. “No time, we are late enough as it is.”

  James sighed again, gave one last lingering look at the blanch’d bun, quieted his lust, and resignedly followed his escort. After all, the man had a gun and an evident ability to use it, while James was unarmed . . . and his hands were bound.