Inventing a Tinker

Part 4

Mr. Kodahl had been furious when I arrived back at the shop at half past two. The shop had been closed for nearly three hours; customers had been greeted by a locked door in the middle of the day. He had only been placated when I told him that it was due to a girl. Mr. Kodahl grew such a look of perplexity as I had never seen on him. I didn't know whether I should have been more insulted that he couldn't imagine me with a woman or if he thought I was lying. Either way, I was let off the chopping block with a warning not to let it happen again.

But it happened again. And again. Jennai worked strange hours, so she was always popping up unexpectedly. After a month of this, I came to expect her at any time, and the days began to gnaw at me. No clock was enough to lose myself within. No job stifled thoughts of her. Whatever thought was foremost in my head, she was right there beside it, smiling.

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It was nearing summer solstice, and the evenings were growing late. Jennai had stopped by the Kodahl's shop and asked me to meet her on a beach an hour's walk west of Buou. She said she had something special planned. With that in mind, I went to the market and bought a basket with hard cheeses, bread, and a bottle of wine worth half a week's pay. Though it was not foremost in my mind at the time, an hour was a long while to walk for someone used to eleven minutes at a stretch, and the basket grew heavier by the step. Just shy of the beach, I had to stop and rest. I didn't want Jennai to see me winded and dripping sweat from a few miles of hiking.

Jennai was watching the waves when I arrived, and had her back turned to me. It was a sheltered cove, the terrain too broken for settlement and the water too shallow for ships. There was no use for it at all, save for the purpose the two of us had found. It was perfectly secluded.

I called her name. She turned and waved, leaning back so far on her rocky perch that it looked like she might tumble over. Her dress was sleeveless, with a pleated skirt that fell to her knees; her shoulders and calves were bare and glistening with sweat. Her feet were dusted with beach sand; a pair of practical shoes and stockings lay discarded higher up the beach.

"Get down here," she shouted back. "The sun's going to set any minute." I set down the basket and left my shoes beside hers before trudging down the sand to meet her among the rocks.

I had never watched a sunset. I'm sure I had been out of doors at the very moment the sun crossed the horizon, but I had never taken the time to simply witness the occurrence. As it turned out, there was more to a sunset than just the sun. Settling in beside Jennai, I watched in silence as the waters of the Katamic Sea reddened and the clouds turned to pink. Jennai leaned in close, pressing against my side until I took the hint and put an arm around her.

"I know you don't mind being shut up inside all the time," Jennai said softly. "But I just wanted to show you what else is out here."

The sunset gave way to the ghostly light of a full moon, and one by one the stars poked through the veil of blackness above. Without quite disentangling herself from my arms, Jennai reached into a crevice between the rocks and picked up a square of slate that I hadn't noticed earlier.

"What's that?" he asked. I referred not to the slate itself, but rather the chalked drawing that it bore.

Jennai handed it over. "You tell me. What do you think it does?"

The picture was no result of amateur artwork, but instead showed a curious mechanism. It had a wheel and cranks and lever arms, and two reservoirs of what I presumed was water by the little waves Jennai had drawn inside. A candle flame was placed below one of the reservoirs. My mind ticked like one of Kodahl's clocks, piecing thogether how it must work.

Heat would boil the water and force the plunger forward. The arm attached to the plunger would turn the crank. The crank would push the other arm, which in turn would force water from one reservoir to the other, resetting the machine to its initial state. "It turns candle wax into motion," I concluded.

"Your turn," Jennai said. She fished a piece of chalk from a cleverly concealed pocket in her dress and passed it to me. "Draw something for me to guess."

I was aghast. Looking down at the beautifully clever illustration, I couldn't bring myself to erase it. "I can't destroy this. It's brilliant."

"I can draw it again if I need to," Jennai said. She smudged the drawing beyond recognition with the heel of her hand, which she then wiped on the skirt of her dress. I liked that about her—no pretext or pretension.

I out my handkerchief and did a more thorough job cleaning the slate, trying all the while to come up with some puzzle to pose to Jennai. She was clever, but I didn't want to make a fool of her by delving to deeply into clockwork esoterica. I sketched a quick music box, wondering if she had ever opened one to look inside.

"Cute," she said as she inspected the finished drawing. "I can't tell what song it plays; your hand sketching needs work."

"Fine," I snarled in mock frustration, erasing the music box. It was Jennai's turn again. "I suppose that one was too easy."

She set to work immediately, with a sure hand and a good eye for proportion. Surely there was artistic talent within her somewhere, but she seemed preoccupied with gadgetry.

"It looks like some sort of pistol," I said as she finished. "But what's that cylinder do?" She had drawn cross sections and side views; it was all laid before me. Something there was oddly familiar. It scratched at the inside of my skull, like I should have known what it did.

"Don't give up so easily," Jennai chided. She pointed to a rectangle that tapered to a point, set apart from the rest of the drawing. "That's a pistol shot that carries its own powder charge. I might not have drawn it well enough to tell, so that's a free hint."

A spark caught flame in my mind. "The holes in that cylinder hold extra shots."

"And..."

I squinted close, looking at the detailed mechanism near the trigger and hammer. "It increments the cylinder each time it fires! How did you come up with this?"

Jennai laughed. "It's a trick, but I won't tell you how I've done it. You won't believe me, yet."

The nighttime hours slipped beneath the moonlight, the two of us drawing pictures of devices few could conceive. We supped on bread and cheese, and shared wine from a single glass, after Jennai grew tipsy and dropped one among the rocks.

For every bit of clockwork I threw at her, Jennai came back with wonders beyond imagining: a device that worked like a printing press, with lettered hammers slamming an ink-soaked ribbon against paper; a pair of levered pliers that could grip tight as a vice; a quill that held its own ink. My own attempts were repetitive and mundane by comparison. I needed to innovate.

"That's a thunderail," Jennai said, guessing my best attempt after a mere second of perusal.

"A what?" I asked. "How is it that you get to name it? It's my invention. I dreamed it up." I'd taken her candle-powered oscillating pump and scaled it up, using a wood stove to heat power a carriage along a track.

"I believe you," Jennai said. "I have dreams like that, too."

"Wait... you what?"

Jennai set the slate aside and reclined into my arms, staring up into the night sky. Her closeness was more intoxicating than the wine. "A world full of things like we've both just drawn, and hundreds more. Where clockwork is commonplace, and steam engines like I drew and thunderails like yours exist in every city."

That brought a smile to my face. "It sounds wonderful." So few people felt the need for the precision and order that precise timekeeping facilitated. A world of thinkers and builders was a place better suited to me than Khesh, with its traders and coin-pinchers, pirates and peddlers.

"Some of it is," Jennai said with a sigh. "But if we're lucky, tonight I can share it with you."

I was feeling the wine's punch, and thought I must have misheard her. Her words carried more than a faint whiff of proposition. It was a long way back to Buou, and the night air off the sea was balmy. I had brought a blanket so we could eat without getting sand in our meal, and Jennai curled up beside me atop it. I fell asleep with the scent of Jennai's hair tickling my nose.