The clock was being drawn by four horses and escorted by the dwarf and his cohort of young thugs. Its broad roof was crowned by the dragon. But what a beast! It looked poised as if ready to spring, as if indeed invested with life. The skin of the house was decorated in carnival colors, burnished with gold leaf. The fishermen gaped as it drew near.
Before the dwarf could announce the time of the performance, before the crowd of youths could draw out their clubs, Frex leaped on the lower step of the thing—a fold-down stage on hinges. “Why is this thing called a clock? The only clock face it has is flat, dull, and lost in all that distracting detail. Furthermore, the hands don’t move: Look, see for yourselves! They’re painted to remain at one minute before midnight! All you’ll see here is mechanics, my friends: I know this for a fact. You’ll see mechanical cornfields growing, moons waxing and waning, a volcano to spew a soft red cloth done up with black and red sequins. With all this tiktok-y business, why not have a pair of circulating arms on the clock face? Why not? I ask you, I’m asking you, yes, you, Gawnette, and you, Stoy, and you, Perippa. Why no real clock here?”
They were not listening, Gawnette and Stoy and Perippa, nor were the others. They were too busy staring in anticipation.
“The answer, of course, is that the clock isn’t meant to measure earthly time, but the time of the soul. Redemption and condemnation time. For the soul, each instant is always a minute short of judgment.
“One minute short of judgment, my friends! If you died in the next sixty seconds, would you want to spend eternity in the suffocating depths reserved for idolaters?”
“Awful lot of noise in the neighborhood tonight,” said someone in the shadows—and the spectators laughed. Above Frex—he whirled to see—from a little door had emerged a small, yapping puppet dog, its hair dark and as tightly curled as Frex’s own. The dog bounced on a spring, and the pitch of its chatter was annoyingly high. The laughter grew. Evening fell harder, and it was less easy for Frex to tell who was laughing, who now was shouting for him to move aside so they could see.
He wouldn’t move, so he was bundled unceremoniously from his perch. The dwarf gave a poetic welcome. “All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we hear a voice of prophecy, or see a miracle play? Beneath the apparent sham and indignity of our ratlike lives, a humble pattern and meaning still applies! Come nearer, my good people, and watch what a little extra knowledge augurs for your lives! The Time Dragon sees before and beyond and within the truth of your sorry span of years here! Look at what it shows you!”
The crowd pushed forward. The moon had risen, its light like the eye of an angry, vengeful god. “Give over, let me go,” Frex called; it was worse than he had thought. He had never been manhandled by his own congregation.
The clock unfolded a story about a publicly pious man, with lamb’s wool beard and dark curly locks, who preached simplicity, poverty, and generosity while keeping a hidden coffer of gold and emeralds—in the double-hinged bosom of a weak-chinned daughter of blue blood society. The scoundrel was run through with a long iron stake in a most indelicate way and served up to his hungry flock as Roast Flank of Minister.
“This panders to your basest instincts!” Frex yelled, his arms folded and his face magenta with fury.
But now that darkness was almost total, someone came up from behind him to silence him. An arm encircled his neck. He twisted to see which damned parishioner took such liberties, but all the faces were cloaked by hoods. He was kneed in the groin and doubled over, his face in the dirt. A foot kicked him square between the buttocks and his bowels released. The rest of the crowd, however, was not watching. They were howling with mirth at some other entertainment put on by the Clock Dragon. A sympathetic woman in a widow’s shawl grabbed his arm and led him away—he was too fouled, too much in pain to straighten up and see who it was. “I’ll put you down in the root cellar, I will, under a burlap,” crooned the goodwife, “for they’ll be after you tonight with pitchforks, the way that thing is behaving itself! They’ll look for you in your lodge, but they won’t look in my keeping room.”
“Melena,” he croaked, “they’ll find her—”
“She’ll be seen to,” said his neighbor. “We women can manage that much, I guess!”
In the minister’s lodge, Melena struggled with consciousness as a pair of midwives went in and out of focus before her. One was a fishwife, the other a palsied crone; they took turns feeling her forehead, peering between her legs, and stealing glances at the few beautiful trinkets and treasures Melena had managed to bring here from Colwen Grounds.
“You chew that paste of pinlobble leaves, duckie, you do that. You’ll be unconscious before you know it,” said the fishwife. “You’ll relax, out will pop the little sweetheart, and all will be well in the morning. Thought you would smell of rosewater and fairy dew, but you stink like the rest of us. Chew on, my duckie, chew on.”
At the sound of a knock, the crone looked up guiltily from the chest she was kneeling before and rummaging through. She let the lid close with a bang and affected a position of prayer, eyes closed. “Enter,” she called.
A maiden with tender skin and high color came in. “Oh, I hoped someone would be here,” she said. “How is she?”
“Nearly out and so is the babe,” answered the fishwife. “An hour more, I reckon.”
“Well, I’m told to warn you. The men are drunk and on the prowl. They’ve been riled up by that dragon of the magic clock, you know, and are looking for Frex to kill him. The clock said to. They’ll likely stagger out here. We’d better get the wife safely away—can she be moved?”
No, I cannot be moved, thought Melena, and if the peasants find Frex tell them to kill him good and hard for me, for I never knew a pain so extraordinary that it made me see the blood behind my own eyes. Kill him for doing this to me. At this thought, she smiled in a moment of relief and passed out.
“Let’s leave her here and
run for it!” said the maiden. “The clock said to kill her too, and the little dragon she’s going to give birth to. I don’t want to get caught.”
“We’ve got our own reputations to uphold,” said the fishwife. “We can’t abandon the fancy ladything in mid-delivery. I don’t care what any clock says.”
The crone, her head back in the chest, said, “Anyone for some real lace from Gillikin?”
“There’s a hay cart in the lower field, but let’s do it now,” said the fishwife. “Come, help me fetch it. You, old mother hag, get your face out of the linens and come dampen this pretty pink brow. Right-o, now we go.”
A few minutes later the crone, the wife, and the maiden were trundling the hay cart along a rarely used track through the spindles and bracken of the autumn woods. The wind had picked up. It whistled over the treeless foreheads of the Cloth Hills. Melena, sprawled in blankets, heaved and moaned in unconscious pain.
They heard a drunken mob pass, with pitchforks and torches, and the women stood silent and terrified, listening to the slurred curses. Then they pressed on with greater urgency until they came upon a foggy copse—the edge of the graveyard for unconsecrated corpses. Within it they saw the blurred outlines of the clock. It had been left here for safekeeping by the dwarf—no fool he; he could guess this particular corner of the world was the last place jumpy villagers would seek tonight. “The dwarf and his boykins were drinking in the tavern too,” said the maiden breathlessly. “There’s no one here to stop us!”
The crone said, “So you’ve been peering in the tavern windows at the men, you slut?” She pushed open the door in the back of the clock.
She found a crawl space. Pendulums hung ominously in the gloom. Huge toothed wheels looked primed to slice any trespasser into sausage rounds. “Come on, drag her in,” said the crone.
The night of torches and fog gave way, at dawn, to broad bluffs of thundercloud, dancing skeletons of lightning. Glimpses of blue sky appeared briefly, though sometimes it rained so hard that it seemed more like mud drops falling than water. The midwives, crawling on hands and knees out of the back of the clock-wagon, had their little discharge at last. They protected the infant from the dripping gutter. “Look, a rainbow,” said the senior, bobbing her head. A sickly scarf of colored light hung in the sky.
