The Mammoth Book of Steampunk (26 page)

“I thought those were all destroyed.” The woman spoke in breaths of pleased shock.

“It’s hard for a coin to disappear entirely from the historical record, genuinely hard, even when a selfish king wishes for it. But please, tell me where you got this.”

Hope filled her voice for the first time since her expulsion from the university. It swelled in her, peculiar. Her cheeks felt hot.

“I understand that you are in the business of making coins,” the woman said.

And she hardened again. No one understood the wonder of her work, no one glimpsed its necessity in the understanding of ancient coins – how could anyone theorize the emotions felt by the kings and queens who ordered coins struck, overseeing the creation of the stamps and feeling the first siluhs falling over their hands like tears, without repeating their actions? As Tilodah Tu worked into countless nights, producing a hundred of each known type, sinking her hands into pots of metal bearing deified profiles, gods, young monarchs too slow for the blades that put broad-nosed men on the next coins, young monarchs so bright and fierce their names never faded from popular histories, she had grown to understand the desires of the people who made these coins. She had felt, faintly, the shape of the very few coins missing from the historical record. She had struck them.

No one spoke of her work except to condemn it.

“Please.” The strange woman pressed the peach against Tilodah Tu’s clenched fists. “Please. Please.” The earnest expression on her face made Tilodah Tu hold back her anger. “I can’t
say
it, here, in public. Please. Eat the peach.”

And read the stone.

Suddenly Tilodah Tu’s heart beat faster. She’d heard rumours, quickly dismissed. Alleyway nonsense.

She bit into the peach, tore at its flesh, swallowed it down, not caring for the hunger it appeased, nor for the divine sweetness on her tongue. The flesh didn’t cling to the stone. Instead, words covered it, pale on dark:

My expertise in coins is poor. My work is crude. I seek an expert to spread my image and my tale across the city. Will you assist in this?

“Yes. Yes, of course.” The woman’s name hung on the edge of her lips, unspoken.

Viu took Tilodah Tu’s hands in hers, smiling, and said, “Tell me about your machinery.”

“It gathers dust.” Other, safer words slid out from her like molten metal. “I haven’t the money to buy extra water for it, to produce enough steam for even a modest run of coins. Sometimes I play with it, drip too-bitter tea into its chambers, set fire to the wood I scavenge from the gardens of the rich, and I produce a single coin, or two, and it’s enough, I suppose.”

She thought of the coins sewn into her shirt sleeves, to bring fortune – to keep them safe. No one had yet dared to steal her machine, or parts of it, but coins left in a house were fair pickings for the first clever fingers.

With each sway of her hems at wrist and knee, Tilodah Tu felt fabric-covered coins brush over her skin.

Viu was smiling. “May I visit your house?”

In honour of his first anniversary of rule, King Naranh began issuing coins with his profile on the obverse face. His long hair curled like steam. On the reverse face, the eagle dropped towards the Shining Sea, and contemporary numismatists murmured quietly among themselves, unsure whether this signified the eagle diving at prey or plummeting in death.

King Naranh sent his coins across the growing network of train tracks that linked the cities and towns of a region that officially belonged to many monarchs and governmental bodies. Over the thirty years prior to his rule, the coins issued in the City of the Shining Sea had largely replaced local currencies and become the standard unit in trade. The new issue was readily adopted and, in sanctioned mints, reproduced locally.

The trains powered by hearts of steam remained solely the property of the City of the Shining Sea.

The coins that issued from Tilodah Tu’s small mint were privately considered masterpieces. In public, the wise bowed their heads to King Naranh’s command that all such coins be collected and melted down, and any person reluctant to hand over even a single one would lose a hand along with the offending item.

Each of the seven coins told part of the story of how Naranh tried to kill Viu for whispering to him in the darkness of their room, that first night they ruled together.

Viu, still raw from the abrupt, almost violent end to her relationship with Naranh, devoted much of that space to documenting her disgust at him: at his hands, touching her body, even though she loved him genuinely at the time, in the poeticized tradition of the ancient sibling-monarchs who founded the City of the Shining Sea; at his narrow-mindedness, sending knives to her throat instead of embracing the new power she discovered; at his inability to find and kill her in the city he called his own.

The coin that so many thousands of people retold had the following words in minute, careful letters, spiralling out from the centre of the obverse face:

Lost in the Royal Steamworks, in clouds of steam, I followed the great bird. At first I saw nothing. Then it raised its wings around me, it set its taloned feet on the ground, it stood as tall in the body as me, formed like a man except for its head, wings and feet, and we stared eye to eye. It spoke to me. It tilted back my head and breathed steam into my body, filling me so that I thought I would be consumed. I was not. I knew, afterwards, that steam is a power to control, and that the god gave it to me.

On the reverse face: a small image of Viu, in profile, with her chin tilted higher than in the hand-chiselled issue. The attention to detail in her nose, slightly dented from a childhood break, confirmed that Viu was personally overseeing the production of these coins.

With their careful distribution, Viu gained many of her most devoted early allies.

“I want to be your only mint,” Tilodah Tu said. “I want to be the only source of your coins. I want to feel every one.”

If she plunged her hands into a bag of the seven-part issue, she felt Viu’s hopes: for the people of the city to love her, to understand her, to forgive her for sharing the knowledge that made them so rich and other cities so beholden to them. To follow her. She felt her own desires: to craft coins that would shine from the historical record like small suns, to be remembered well in the libraries of the future.

She felt, faintly, the Steam God’s longing to be known and honoured.

She could no longer imagine a day without feeling so intensely.

“You will always mint coins for me.” Viu leaned against the machinery, where recently she had breathed steam into its heart, and smiled fondly. “Why wouldn’t you, when each one is so perfect?”

From each one that was flawed, Tilodah Tu knew Viu’s desires for that coin, and honed it in private before holding out the perfect handful: an offering, a request for permission to fill bag after bag with bronze and tin.

Sometimes she felt that she would burn under her coins, like Sitor who tried to summon the sun in myth.

Yet when Viu proposed a new coin, a new step in her plans, Tilodah Tu only said, “What do you need me to do first?”

“There is a theft.”

On a night when the moon garlanded itself in cloud, they slipped through the city as quiet as a coin being turned over and over between two fingers.

In the mints of the other cities, a concerted effort was made to ensure that every issue of King Naranh’s siluhs and lesser denominations mirrored exactly those produced in the City of the Shining Sea. Yet irregularities occurred. An entire issue missing King Naranh’s ear. Individual coins poorly stamped: the design half on and half off the metal circle, the design rendered unclear by an inferior or over-used stamp, the design restyled to give the king a bigger crown, a sign of honour among the people of one city.

King Naranh tolerated this, because the tributes – not formally given this term, but it hung on the edge of everyone’s tongue like a shadow – reached him on time and the visiting dignitaries bowed their heads accordingly.

Gradually he became aware of another issue.

To anyone incapable of reading the written script used in the City of the Shining Sea, it appeared only a careless error by whoever had crafted the stamp. Yet every other detail was perfect in a way few foreign issues were. King Naranh had heard of the theft, shortly after the second anniversary of his coronation, of three stamps from the royal mint.

The error crossed out the final letter of the word ‘king’: the silent letter, the ancient mark, the sceptre-straight line that signified the presence of a deity. All mints were instructed on the necessity of this letter.

Viu’s seven-part issue had ceased only a month before the first mutilated coins reached the City of the Shining Sea from across the plains.

Of Tilodah Tu’s issue of fake Naranh siluhs, little is said. One does not need to read the surviving chapters of her
History
to imagine her disinterest in the coins, besides their monetary value in a world that did not yet accept Viu’s face. She scored a single line in the stolen stamps and set her machine to work, driven by Viu’s steam, and barely ran any over her palms.

They were a small group: a wagon for the mint, two horses and five women.

When she was not minting small quantities of coins to use in markets across the world, Tilodah Tu recorded their story in her journals, using the same minute hand that had become so famous on the seven-part issue.

“You’ll be my historian too,” Viu said, the day she realized quite what Tilodah Tu was writing.

“Your original source. Although I’m sure my work will be lost, with only fragments from a pseudo-Tilodah Tu remaining to taunt future historians. But before these pages and their duplicates are swallowed by fires and mould and insects and the eventual fragmentation of almost all paper, a later historian will write another history of you, drawing on my work, and he or she will be renowned for reaching the closest to accuracy.”

Viu couldn’t help smiling. “You have the strangest fantasies.”

“It’s more of a prophecy – although perhaps I’ll be one of the fortunate ones. Perhaps we should start scribing this on stone. And there’ll be the coins, of course. Many of them will undoubtedly survive.”

If Viu had witnessed Tilodah Tu burying small hoards in the desert sands, carefully held in ceramic jars bought at one of the markets, she chose not to speak of it.

Other work occupied Viu’s mind.

At first Viu entered settlements carefully, whether they were small villages or cities almost as large as the one she had left behind. In the plains her group was free to talk and mint and plan. In places where her brother’s allies might live, she took no risks. She watched. She and Tilodah Tu and the other three women dispersed into the markets, temples, sparring grounds and meagre baths – for in these places, the water did not lap at the sides of streets, and required careful use among sizeable populations – and collected information far more valuable than any saffron or gold.

Gradually she learned what she had expected: most leaders resented King Naranh’s refusal to share the methodologies and the full benefits of his steamworks.

In a town where custom dictated the adornment of the body with turquoise beads, Viu contacted the leader and requested an audience. In the chamber, which was so blindingly blue that she struggled not to dip her gaze, she said, “I am Viu, formerly Queen in the City of the Shining Sea. I come to you with a proposal.”

A tall, broad-shouldered woman with beads in lines like scars across her cheeks translated between the two languages.

“I did not know that there was ever a Queen Viu,” replied the leader. So much turquoise covered his body that Viu struggled to discern his face.

Tilodah Tu held out the coin that she had acquired long ago, when she still hurt from the recent discrediting of her research. The bead-cheeked woman took it and passed it to the leader.

“My brother did not wish me to rule,” Viu said as he examined it. “I told him that I was visited by a god of steam, who gave me the gift of creating steam without needing to first heat water. I told him that I intended to share this gift with people in cities and towns such as yours, where water is in limited supply. So he tried to kill me and I fled.”

The leader cared little for the coin. “I would see this ability.”

Viu waved her hands through the air. Delicate wisps of steam trailed from her fingers. “I assure you that I can produce far more than this. Only, I do not wish to damage your property.”

“And what do you want in return?”

“The god gave this to me – a gift. I do the same. I ask that you give me and my people safe haven, but I do not require it. We can flee your walls if my brother brings an army. You cannot.”

Even through the turquoise, Viu saw the disbelief on his face.

“I am not in the business of building an empire,” Viu said.

“Then what manner of queen are you?”

The bead-cheeked woman watched her as intently as the leader, and Viu wondered if her role was greater than that of a valued translator.

“A new one.”

After a long silence, the woman said, “We would see your abilities in a different environment to this.”

When Viu stood on the plain outside the town and directed jets of steam ten times higher than the Turquoise Palace into the air, she won her first allies. She breathed steam into Gyan, as the god had instructed, and told the woman to practise away from the town at first. Afterwards, she gave Tseri and Gyan the schematics she had acquired before leaving the City of the Shining Sea.

Steamworks began to grow in every town, city, village, nomadic group, caravanserai and monastery through which Viu’s group passed.

A new issue of coins was used to finance the armies of Emperor Naranh in their extensive campaigns.

It no longer depicted the falcon. A plume of steam burst from the edge of the coin, almost entirely covering the reverse face. King Naranh declared this the city’s new emblem, and displayed it on many thousands of banners and garlands and chest plates.