Ox Tallow and Broken Tooth

The first thing to decompose in the crypt was not the air, but the consistency of the tallow. Anselm kept his thumbs sunk in a lump of rancid ox fat—mixed a third with sulfurous mineral oil to keep mites from nesting in the bearings—and rubbed it with a wad of frayed tow against Brother Bartolomé's bronze kneecap. The friar sat on a blind oak bench, his brown habit rolled up over his scrawny thigh and his left leg rigidly extended toward the citrine light of the arrow-slit. The metal of the ball-and-socket joint was pitted by the acidic condensation of the lower boilers; every pass of the tow wrung out a sour screech that vibrated in the prosthetic tibia and traveled up the flesh-and-bone femur to the old man's hip. Sixty centimeters above their heads, the anchor escapement of the master dial governed the pit: a dull clack-tac of bronze against hardened steel that dropped every two and a half seconds like a lead shot right in the center of Anselm's sternum, reverberating in his lower molars through the black slate floor.

"Press harder on the rear groove," said Brother Bartolomé without looking at him, with the flat voice of one asking to be passed the salt in the refectory. "Coal dust gets between the guides and then screeches when it jams in the full turns."

"If I press harder, I'll wear down the brass seat," Anselm replied. His fingertips were blackened and numb from the cold of the metal, and a microscopic bronze shaving, shed the day before from a toothed crown, throbbed beneath the raw flesh of his right thumb's nail.

"Brass can be recast. My knees cannot."

"Brass nowadays won't take two pourings, brother. Bring iron slag."

Brother Bartolomé cleared his throat, a dry vibration in his chest that sounded strangely like a relief valve losing pressure.

"Everything brings slag now. Keep rubbing."

Anselm shifted his body's weight onto his left knee, feeling the familiar crunch in his own lumbar vertebrae, and smeared the spherical stump once more with the soot-stained tow. He had counted seven hundred and forty heartbeats of the anchor since kneeling on the damp floor; at seven hundred and forty-two he should have heard the dull hiss of the compensating steam making way for the secondary piston in the pit. Instead, the air stalled with an almost mineral stiffness. It wasn't an explosion or the clatter of stripping gears. It was a dull snap, a dry fracture transmitted through the cast-iron framework of the abbey: up in the master dial, the escapement froze dead mid-stroke. The inertia of three tons of counterweights suspended in the well rebounded against the building's mass and traveled in a fraction of a second through the bronze of Bartolomé's leg, the wet flagstones, and Anselm's heels, culminating with the violence of a glowing needle in the tin bolt soldered directly to his left temporal bone.

White.

A high-frequency bone hum drilled his skull from ear to ear, as if a red-hot wire had pierced the soft tissue of the brain on the verge of torsional collapse. Anselm fell sideways onto the grout and silt carpeting the floor, his eyelids clenched so hard he saw crimson filaments burning behind his retina. The taste of burnt copper and electrolysis flooded his palate, a pasty acidity he knew all too well: the acoustic implant had just discharged a matched shock into his auditory nerve. Half a meter away, Brother Bartolomé let out a guttural grunt; the mechanism of his kneecap had jammed at a strained angle of fifteen degrees and the friar was futilely beating the wood of the bench with his open palm, trying to release the latch only to bruise the bruised flesh of his thigh.

"What did you touch?" hissed the friar, spitting a fleck of saliva against the flagstones.

Anselm took seven full breaths to make his warm lungs admit the steam without coughing it back up in a dry heave. He brought his trembling fingers to his left temple, feeling for the pewter nut that joined the stem to the cranial suture: the surrounding skin was swollen, hot to the touch, giving off that faint stench of scorched keratin left by every torsional recoil. He didn't answer. It would have been useless to explain to Bartolomé that the dial was four levels above, suspended over the central nave like a blind cast-iron spider, and that a failure in an old man's kneecap could not have broken the march of a twelve-foot-radius master gear. He stood up, leaning against the weeping ashlar wall; his mechanic's glasses slipped down the bridge of his nose, slick with cold sweat and brackish vapor. He pushed them back up with the back of his wrist to avoid smearing the glass with ox tallow.

In the service corridor bordering the purge ducts, the steam formed a milky curtain smelling of salted herring and damp soot. Anselm moved forward, dragging his left leg in its brace and counting the rivets of the main pipe—forty-two to the landing, another nineteen to the inspection hatch—a habit acquired during winters when the lack of fuel forced them to turn off the carbide lamps and the artificers had to grope their way forward feeling the hot brass. On the first flight's landing, leaning against a decompression manhole where a whitish, dense condensation dripped, stood Sister Melisenda. She held between her hands a dented tin mug with a bark infusion that had been cold for hours; a grayish, iridescent film floated on the surface of the liquid, swaying to the rhythm of the well's residual vibrations.

The nun wasn't wearing her wimple, but the mandatory oilskin cap for the boiler hallways, leaving her chilblain-reddened ears exposed. She stared at him over the mug's metal rim.

"The dial jammed at a quarter to six," she said. Her voice had the dryness of wrapping paper rubbed against a file.

"I know," Anselm said, stopping two steps away.

"They haven't rung for vespers. The novices are on their knees in the choir not knowing whether to sing or stay mute."

"Let them sing whatever they want."

Melisenda lowered the cup. The click of the tin against the iron cover of the manhole echoed in the narrow hallway with the sharpness of a minor sentence.

"Brother Bartolomé will come up as soon as he can straighten that tin leg."

"It will take him twenty minutes to purge the cylinder with the three-way wrench," Anselm retorted. He rubbed the base of his right thumb; the metal shaving burned under his nail like a splinter of ice. "And the kneecap is bronze, not tin."

"It's all the same. It reeks of rancid grease from down here."

They looked at each other for a second. There was no alarm on the woman's face, only that cold, technical resignation shared by those who laboered below bell level: the certainty that things built by men sooner or later tear apart, killing a few in the process, and that afterward someone would have to sweep the floor with sawdust and keep feeding the furnaces. Anselm saw Melisenda pressing against her apron a small strip of paper stained with iron gall ink, but she thrust her fingers into her pocket before he could decipher the cramped script. Whether Sister Melisenda had descended before the quadrant's lockup, or had been in the high transepts when the three warning tolls rang out, was something she had no intention of confessing.

It didn't matter. Not yet.

This is what Anselm found in the main machinery pit: three tons of lead counterweights hanging in dead repose, a cloud of mineral vapor hovering over the lubrication crankcases like morning mist over a rotten pond, and a silence so heavy it drove into his ears like a wax plug. The gloom was broken only by the orange glints and dull glows of the forced-draft boiler sight glasses, which cast long, spasmodic piston shadows over the pit's black slate. The master gear—a colossal three-hundred-and-sixty-tooth bronze wheel, forged in the abbey workshops two centuries ago—rested obliquely against the retaining pawl. One of the teeth was not where it should have been. It had fallen onto the chip collection tray with a dull thud that now seemed fossilized in the air.

Anselm pulled from his waistcoat pocket a rag soaked in pure kerosene and his three-inch watchmaker's loupe, whose brass rim was nicked in three different places from past drops onto the slabs. He wedged the bakelite cylinder into his right eye socket, wincing as the cold metal pressed against his sweaty eyebrow. The piercing, volatile smell of the distillate instantly drowned out the stench of reheated pork fat. He pressed his left palm against the unpolished cast-iron master beam—the texture was rough like an ox's tongue, rough and motionless—and carefully rubbed the bloodied notch of black lubricant where the broken tooth had once stood. The filth gave way in a viscous film, revealing the bare flesh of the metal.

A break due to material fatigue or steam overpressure always leaves a striated, rough surface, similar to brown sugar smashed to pieces with a hammer; the bronze crystals tear following the lines of molecular tension until they open in an irregular, porous crack. This was not fatigue. As he cleaned the groove with the corner of the kerosene-dampened cloth, the watchmaker's lens revealed a straight, saw-cut slit, barely a millimeter wide, whose edges had been devastated by rhythmic passes of a fine blade. They had sawed the root of the tooth with liturgical patience, leaving just a millimeter-long bridge of metal so that the normal torsion of vespers would do the rest of the work. And there, wedged at the bottom of the cut to disguise the fissure before it blew sky-high, gleamed a tiny crust of bluish, dense, and cold wax. Anselm brought his thumb nail close and scraped the crust: it was pure liturgical beeswax, dyed with ground indigo, of the exact and very expensive sort that only burned in the high choir candelabra during the commemoration of the martyrs.

Bronze does not know how to lie about wear; when a piece gives way clean, the hand of a devotee has intervened. Anselm repeated the phrase to himself with the monotonous cadence of a litany prayed in the dark, feeling once more the warm, painful pulsation of the bolt in his temporal bone. He tucked the wax flake into the seam of his leather waistcoat.

He removed the loupe from his eye and slowly wiped it against the least greasy edge of his sleeve. The clock was blind, the entire abbey drifted in a dead hour that no sacristan would dare proclaim, and in the lower corridors the dragging footsteps of Brother Bartolomé's mechanical leg were already beginning to echo, climbing the slate steps with the rusted tenacity of an approaching damnation.

Who in the high choir needed six in the afternoon never to arrive?