The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (6 page)

Jehan was terrified already, so the fact that the dwarf knew all this gave him little further distress. “And you?” he said, in a quavering voice. “Are you . . . ?” He could not say the word. His grandmother had been twice devout, once as a Catholic and once as a Protestant, and had prayed incessantly for her father in either mode, but Jehan had never been able to put quite as much trust as that in the attentiveness of Heaven or the menace of Hell. Even so, for the moment, he could not say either “the Devil” or “Pittonaccio.”

“Not even his great-grandson, Master Jehan,” the dwarf said. “My name is Friedrich — very ordinary, as I’m sure you’ll agree; but I’m Master of Andernatt nevertheless, at least for now, and I do have the clock. I have nearly completed its reconstruction, but have faltered lately for lack of proper tools and a skilful hand. Have you brought your own tools?”

“I’ve brought my grandfather’s,” Jehan confessed.

“Then you’re a wiser man than those who came before you. Did you also bring his skill?”

The truth seemed to have taken firm hold of Jehan Thun’s tongue; he could not seem to twist it. “I’m not a watchmaker,” he confessed. “I’m a printer — or was. The mob was as anxious to smash up my press as to break my neighbours’ heads. I can cast and trim type, and work in wood, and I have some skill as an engraver, but I haven’t curled a spring or wrought a fusée since I helped my father in his shop as a boy. Times have changed, and it’s the printing press that has changed them. There are hundreds of clockmakers in Paris, but only a dozen printers as yet — at least one less, now.”

The dwarf looked at him long and hard then, as if he were following some train of thought to an unexpected terminus. “I have a printed book,” he admitted, finally. “It’s a Bible.”

“I printed a great many of those myself,” Jehan told him. “Too many, perhaps.”

“Well,” said the dwarf, “whether you called out or not, Master Jehan, you’re a guest now, and the most welcome one I’ve ever had. Come to breakfast — and then I’ll show you the clock.”

The corridors that Jehan Thun had thought rather labyrinthine the previous evening were even more extensive and complex than he had imagined. They were, however, far better ventilated than the initial barrier of bat droppings had suggested and many of them were dimly illuminated by daylight creeping through window-slits and cracks in the masonry. One such slit overlooked the “garden” to which the master of the ruins had referred — which was actually a vegetable-plot and orchard. Jehan Thun saw immediately why he had not caught sight of it before; the dell in which it was situated was itself a covert, hidden by a massive buttress of rock. There was evidently another way into the cavernous part of the edifice from that side, which allowed the dwarf to avoid the difficulties of the way by which Jehan had gained entry.

The dwarf took him to a room more brightly lit than the rest, which also looked out over the garden. It had a fire burning in the grate, but the chimney let out into the same covert, so its smoke would not have been easily visible as Jehan Thun had approached on the previous evening. There was a cookpot simmering beside the fire, and various items of game hung from a rack on the chimney-breast. The furniture was sparse but there was a sturdy table and two good chairs. Jehan sat down gladly, and ate a good meal.

The printed Bible that the dwarf had mentioned was laid flat on a shelf; the dust on its binding implied that it had not been opened for some while. Jehan lifted the cover to inspect the quality of the printing, but the type was florid Gothic and the text was not in Latin.

“Come, Master Jehan, my godsend,” said the dwarf. “I will show you what you came to see.”

According to Jehan’s grandmother, the iron clock of Andernatt had been fastened to the wall of a great hall. It had been shaped by Master Zacharius to resemble the facade of a church, with wrought-iron buttresses and a bell-tower, with a rose-window over the door in which the clock’s two hands were mounted. The same witness had testified that the clock had exploded and its internal spring had burst out like a striking snake to secure the damnation of its maker.

The clock was not in a great hall now but in a small room that had no window. The buttresses and the bell-tower must have been transported in several pieces, but they had been reassembled so carefully that they seemed whole again. The window had been pieced together, and all of its glass replaced, although the cobwebbing cracks made it obvious that the stained-glass had once been shattered. The doors of the church had been replaced, with newer wood, and they stood open to display the inner works of the clock — but the giant spring that Master Zacharius had set in place was not there now, nor was the verge-escapement that had regulated it. There was, instead, a more complex mechanism. Its most prominent feature was a mysterious brass rod, mounted vertically on a spindle, pivoted so that it might swing from side to side, whose lower extremity was shielded by a polished silver disc.

This remarkable object caught and held Jehan’s gaze for several seconds, delaying his search for the clock’s most unusual feature: the copper plate between the door and the dial, in which words appeared as each hour struck.

His grandmother had described this plate as a magic mirror, on which words appeared and disappeared by diabolical command, but his grandfather had assured him that there was nothing magical about it. There was actually a series of twelve plaques mounted on the rim of a hidden wheel, which rotated as the clock’s spring unwound and the hands made their own rotation. Each plaque was itself held back by a tiny spring, which would release as the hour struck, displaying the motto inscribed on the plaque with startling suddenness in a space that had been occupied only a second before by a blank face of copper.

The original set of plaques furnished by Master Zacharius, Aubert Thun had assured his grandson, had been inscribed with conventional pieties, many of them taken from the Sermon on the Mount — but once the clock had been installed at Andernatt, its owner had replaced the plaques with a new set offering different maxims.

“Your grandmother is convinced that the replacement was the work of the Devil,” Aubert Thun had told him, “but it was not even a task that would have required a locksmith’s metal-working skills, once the wheel’s casing had been removed. Her father was already mad, but the discovery that his work of art had been altered was the ultimate insult. That is why he tried to stop the clock — but the spring broke because its iron was too poor to sustain its stress. No spring could power a clock like that for very long, for the alloy is not yet discovered that can bear the strain of continual winding in a strip so vast. Now that the necessity is obvious, better materials will doubtless be devised, but Zacharius could only work with what he had, and it was not adequate to his ambition.

“It was Zacharius’s vanity, not his soul, that was embodied in the mechanism — and it was his vanity, not some diabolical bargain, that struck him dead. My wife would never believe it, though, and she will swear to her dying day that she saw the dwarf Pittonaccio disappear into the bowels of the earth with the spring in his grasp, bound for the Inferno. She believes that she and I were cursed on the day he died, and that all the force of her constant prayers — and mine — has only served to keep the curse at bay. Your father is an exceedingly devout man, and I do not criticize him for that, but you must make up your own mind what to believe, and there are better fates than to live in fear.”

Jehan had taken his grandfather’s word over his grandmother’s, far more determinedly than his father had, and had tried very hard not to live in fear. Aubert Thun had not lived to see the death of his son on St Bartholomew’s Day in 1572, and Jehan driven into exile — but Jehan knew that Aubert would have been adamant that it was the way of the world that had brought that evil day about, and that Jehan’s printing-press was no more to blame for his father’s death than the residue of any curse that had once attached to the Clock of Andernatt. Jehan Thun’s grandmother had, however, carried the conviction to her grave that she and her son were cursed — and now that Jehan had seen the cellars and inner rooms of the Château of Andernatt, he understood far better how she might have witnessed the broken spring being borne into the hollows of the mountain, whether or not it was bound for Hell.

Jehan asked the dwarf about Zacharius’s broken spring, but the present Master of Andernatt told him that it was long discarded, replaced by a far better mechanism.

As the dwarf had said, the clock was not quite finished, but very nearly so. The parts scattered on the floor of the room were all tiny, and they all required to be fitted into the narrow space above the rose-window, behind the part of the facade that resembled a bell-tower — an awkward task, hampered by the casing of the wheel bearing and concealing the motto-engraved plaques.

“The face of the tower can still be removed,” the dwarf told Jehan, “and I can compensate for my lack of stature by standing on a stool, but I don’t have your slender fingers or your delicate touch. Even if you have not dabbled in clockwork since you were a child, your own work must have maintained your dexterity; my escapement is not as delicate as a fusée. You could complete the work in a matter of days.”

“I don’t understand the mechanism,” Jehan Thun objected. “I’ve never seen its like.”

“It’s simple enough, once explained,” the dwarf assured him.

Jehan Thun’s gaze redirected itself then to the blank copper plate that would presumably be eclipsed by a plaque if the mechanism were actually to prove capable of moving the hands and activating the chimes.

“You need have no fear on that score,” the dwarf said. “I’ve replaced the maxims that caused your grandmother such distress.”

“With the original set?” Jehan Thun asked.

“Those were discarded long ago. I made my own replacements. They’re all in place, but now that the casing is sealed they can’t be seen until the clock is completed and started. I trust that you didn’t come here with no bolder hope than to melt down the remains of the mechanism and separate out the precious metals therefrom. You did say, did you not, that you are no bandit?”

“I expected to find the clock in ruins, like the château,” Jehan Thun said, hesitantly. “My grandmother told me that the place was considered accursed, and that no one would be living here.”

“Calvin redoubled the fear of the Devil that the good people of Geneva already had,” the dwarf told him, “but there are always men who are careless of curses. Had I not been here to hide and stand guard over the pieces of the clock they’d have been looted long ago. Even I could not resist a whole robber band — but it’s a clock, after all, not a gold mine. You wouldn’t have come so far just for a little metal, I’m sure — but I’m equally sure that you haven’t come in the hope of reclaiming the spring that might or might not have been the soul of Master Zacharius.”

Jehan considered the possibility of telling the dwarf about his grandmother’s sorrows and delusions, and how she had begged his father to make the journey in order to destroy the last remnants of the clock and lift the family curse with prayer, but he did not want to do that. “I came to examine the fusée,” he said, eventually, although he was not entirely certain that it was true. “One of the few things on which my grandparents agreed, save for the fact that they loved one another very dearly, was that it was a new type, better than any previously used in a spring-driven clock. Aubert thought that he could reproduce it, but he never contrived to do it, and came to believe in the end that he had misremembered some small but essential detail. Alas, he was in Paris by then.”

“You came to study the fusée?” the dwarf repeated, in a tone that had a strange satisfaction in it as well as a certain scepticism. “But you say that you’re not a watchmaker, Master Thun — merely a printer.”

“There’s nothing mere about printing,” Jehan retorted. “Had printers not put the word of God directly into the hands of every man who can read there would have been no Lutheran armies, no Calvinist legions. Printing is changing the way that men think, believe and act — but I’m a printer without a press, and there are hundreds of clock-makers in every city in Europe eager to discover a better escapement for watches. Is that escapement the one my great-grandfather built to regulate the missing spring?”

“No — but your grandparents were mistaken about the originality of the first escapement. There was only one thing new about the fusée I discarded, and that was its material. It was brass, not iron; it did not rust, but if it worked any better as a regulator than any other it was by virtue of the quality of its workmanship, not the detail of its design. The one I have made is better adapted to its own mechanism; it could not regulate a watchspring any more than a pendulum could drive the hand of a watch. On the other hand, what you say is perfectly true: there are a hundred clockmakers in every city in Europe who would be eager to know what might be done with my mechanism, and you shall share in the profits that will accrue from the dissemination of the secret if you will help me finish my work. Once we have completed the clock, you will be better equipped than you could have hoped to spread new knowledge throughout the continent — and beyond, if you care to. The world is, as you doubtless know, a sphere, and there is always further to go in every direction than the cities we already know. There’s a new world now, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, and a vast number of undiscovered islands in the far Pacific.”

It did not seem remarkable to Jehan that the dwarf’s comment about the world being a sphere was echoing a statement he had made the day before, in another place. “Very well, then,” he said. “I shall fetch my grandfather’s tools. If you will explain what needs to be done, I shall do my very best to carry out your instructions.”

Jehan Thun was as good as his word, and so was the dwarf. Working to instruction, Jehan’s nimble hands pieced together the last parts of the mechanism, although it was no mere matter of assembly. There was a good deal of drilling to be done, a great many threads to be worked, and an abundance of accurate filing, as well as a certain amount of casting. Fortunately, the dwarf possessed a crucible and a vice, and a good stock of charcoal with which to charge his furnace. The dwarf’s own fingers were thick and gnarled, and he could never have done the delicate work that Jehan did, but he was a clever man with plans and his strong arms could certainly work a bellows hard.