The Woodcutter and the War-walker: a steampunk fairytale

Part 2

Inside the war-walker, all was dark except for a square of pale light that showed through another opening up above. The woodcutter's son climbed up the ladder towards it. In its feeble sheen, he saw the inner-workings of the war-walker – huge cogs and pistons, much like those on the steam-trains that he had admired with so much awe, hoppers full of lumps of coke that were greening around their edges, and massive metal water-tanks. The smell of smoke and oil and rust hung thickly in the still air. It was a smell of far away, so different from the earthy smells of the forest, but the boy recognised it instantly; he had smelt it often enough after his father's visits.

Up past the machinery he went, up and up into the dome-head of the walker. There the ladder ended in a wide circular space, with a padded leather seat facing the wheels and levers and pedals that would set the metal contraption in motion. Beside the levers were navigation-tables, compasses and dials. Just below the eaves of the armour-plated cap were the observation-slits, crowded with crows' nests. The crows cawed at the boy as he emerged, affronted that he should invade the space that they called their own.

The woodcutter's son knew that he would not have long before his father returned, and in truth, he had not entered the war-walker with any kind of plan – he was simply overcome with curiosity. Now that he stood there, among the metal and the muck, he did not know what to do. He sat for a moment in the seat where the driver would sit, and reached out for the levers and the wheels. What a fine thing it must be to actually be able to set the beast in motion! The size and the power of it, the mastery of man over machine.

Next he examined the dials, all dusty and dead, and the chart-table where there were maps all folded neatly; some, the woodcutter's son noticed, were blackened along their edges, as if burnt or stained with blood. Beside them was a book. The woodcutter's son could read a little – his father had insisted that poverty was no excuse for ignorance – but the words that he saw written inside the book made no sense to him. At least, not at first.

Then he mumbled the words aloud, and as he turned the letters into sounds, he heard in his head the language of lullabies and of whispered words that his father had spoken to him when he had been but a small child. He could not understand much, but he saw that the book was a record, a journal, of a military campaign fought far to the north. He turned a few pages, seeing the handwriting change, and then he saw what he knew he had been expecting – the shapes of his father's stiff hand appeared, marching across the pages in neat rows.

A noise below alerted him to his father's return. There was little that the boy could do: down was no way out, not with his father climbing the ladder burdened with two full buckets of water. The circular space of the cabin also offered few hiding places. There was only one way to go if he was to avoid a confrontation, and that was out through a small observation-hatch in the ceiling.

Up and out the boy went, sprawling among the bird-lime and the old leaves and twigs. He kept to one side of the hatch, and with care he could see down into the cabin to observe what his father did.

The boy had hidden himself quickly, and the woodcutter did not climb straight up into the cabin. First, there was the hollow clop-clop sound of water pouring into an empty space. A light flared down below, the sudden strike of flint on stone, and a flicker as the tinder caught. The smell of burning wood wafted up through the chimney-stack beside the boy. Then a clang sounded as some opening was closed. Then another, as something that had been closed was opened, and the coke rumbled down its chute to feed the firebox.

Then his father came up into the cabin. He sat himself in the seat beside the dials, tapping them with his fingers and polishing them with a rag that was stuffed behind some pipework. After a few moments, the woodcutter seemed pleased with what he saw. Up on the armour-plated roof, the thin smell of smoke from the chimney had mixed with the thick fug of steam, and along with it came the deep, throaty noise of something large and heavy as it started to turn down below – just like the water-mill, the boy thought to himself. He watched as his father took up the steering-apparatus.