Photography: kankie

For the AW Flash Fiction Carnival the Third.

The Third Princess of the Second Imperial Court of Hang-sing shifted restlessly in the afternoon summer heat, sitting in a regal, if uncomfortable, lacquer chair. On her lap rested a small wooden pallet on which lay linen paper, and her pale hand, holding a graphite stick, rested upon it. She watched her tutor, Master Liu-Ho, writing upon the black Western chalkboard. It was bad enough to be using the chalkboard, but that paled in comparison to what the Third Princess had asked Master Liu-Ho to teach her for the last five years.

On the board, he had written, in seven characters of his own devising, “The Perfection of Aerodynamics.”

It would be her fiftieth lesson of the year on it, building upon the foundation of over a thousand other lessons.

The elegant style of his brushwork still showed up in the thin chalk lines, and she could not help but admire it. Of course, the workings of things were more important than their looks, but she still had a fondness for elegance that had been drummed into her from childhood, and by now she had accepted it. She had seen the designs from the West anyways, and their machines still carried exotic Victorian ornamentation, all the more strange for its incorporation side-by-side with clockwork and pneumatic levers and steam spouts. It took some getting used to, but she could point out the beauty of the imported engines and devices from the West to her father, who only grunted and complained about the lack of phoenixes and dragons and the prominence of unattractive Grecian ladies and chubby cherubs, and how only a fanciful girl could see the beauty in the Western science-art.

Her own engines and devices, she had decided two years ago, would have phoenixes and dragons and be Eastern science-art, hiding in innocence more efficient internal connections and her new idea for an interlacing structure augmenting the usual somewhat crude clockwork. She would take the world by storm.

That would take careful planning, however. Already it was taking careful planning now, these lessons that no young girl in Hang-sing–much less the Third Princess of the Imperial Court–should be learning. Master Liu-Ho had been a precious find.

As he wrote equations on the board, using Western numbers and the mathematical notation so much more efficient than what her countrymen had come up with after 300 years, she processed them in her mind like so many coins passing through the hands of a merchant, organizing and filing away the ideas and connections into endless boxes in her rapacious mind. He talked about them in his quiet voice, explaining the derivation of each concept and variable, the inter-relations between them that required a certain amount of memorization, but it was far easier than learning her first 5000 characters, and the relationships more logical.

But for some reason today, the warm and stifling heat felt soporific, and she drifted in a sea of formulae and principles, idly drawing her own connections between them and designs she had seen over the past seven years. She felt free and happy, in a way that she never had when learning needlepoint from Madame So-hia, or poetry from old Pau-wai, or the tiresome epics from Master Dai-yu.

She daydreamed, an unusually unfocused act for her.

She dreamed she was floating above a sea turned liquid gold from the sunset in the Northwest, walking on low-flying clouds like the Immortal Bieu-hang, patron of artists and–in her daydream, anyways–mathematicians. Around her, thoughts were crystalizing into white foam carried away into wisps on the playful sea breeze, curling upwards above and high into the sky, filling it like a sea of white plum blossoms in the palace gardens in spring. She stopped and admired the shapes it formed: airships, steam-driven contraptions for all manner of purposes she did not always know, clockwork. Somehow, clockwork always found its way in.

There was an anomaly in the thought-clouds, she saw; a flicker red-gold lightening up in the orange-touched white puffs, but it disappeared quickly. She felt anticipation stirring her stomach, a hunger in her mind, and she almost reached out for it, as if she could cross the thousand-feet and catch the thing in her hands.

Another flicker, this time on the right, and she had a brief glimpse of scales or perhaps close body feathers, undulating before disappearing in the sea of clouds above.

She waited and watched for it, and for what seemed like hours, it did not appear. The sun was starting to disappear beneath the horizon, and frustration ate at her as orange and red transmuted to purple.

And then she saw it emerge from the clouds, hot iron steaming away the clouds from its form in all directions as it flew, nobly gigantic above her. The last rays of the sun, the final gold of the day, reflected off the trim of its complicated scale hide and wings, its chromium clawed feet, and the articulation of its head and tail feathers.

The clockwork phoenix soared, faster than any airship, far larger than any small craft, and, to her eyes, more elegant than any design she had ever laid eyes upon from the West or the East, and that included the six-story dragon pagoda given to her aunt.

And in her mind was every line of it, every gear and chain lacework and canvas holding and wooden planking, trimmed over with anodium gold alloy.

She woke up suddenly at the sound of Liu-Ho, asking her a question about the best reticule for the antigone structure in Francois Beataea’s Belle Ange. She smiled, and answered crisply. He nodded, and corrected her on a small detail. Dutifully, she filed away the correction, and the lesson ended for today.

As he flipped the chalkboard into its hidden recess and pulled the gilt screen depicting Bei, the main capital of Hang-sing, across it, he turned around, and saw her smiling.

“Sa’ Jia,” he said, “is there anything you would like to share with me?”

“I saw the Phoenix dance.”

“Another one of those prophetic Princess dreams?” he asked, his quiet and sarcastic tone not quite hidden.

“No. I saw the Phoenix dance.”

He paused as he cleared away the chalk dust. “You mean your airship?”

She smiled. “Better than any airship, Teacher. A true propelled craft, far faster and far more flexible.”

“That is something the Europeans have been telling us is impossible, Sa’ Jia.”

“Everything in my mind fits together,” she said. “Torelle’s equation was the catalyst…and all else? Elementary. As simple as turning lead into gold.” She gave him a look out of narrowed eyes and satisfied-cat smile. “And they told us that was impossible as well.”

Master Liu-Ho folded his arms. “Show me the math, and then I’ll believe you.”

And that was why he was a treasure. Any other tutor–assuming they would let her get away with her lessons, or that they could even teach them–would have been an impugnacious yes-man.

“I will prove it, Teacher.”

He nodded. “Until next Tan-yobi.”

“Until then.” She would have a lot of work to do.

It pleased her, and now she had the Phoenix to chase.

Tags: flash fiction, liu-ho, sa' jia

Trackback URI | Comments RSS