The Voyage of the Minotaur

  THE VOYAGE OF THE MINOTAUR

  By Wesley Allison

  Smashwords Edition

  The Voyage of the Minotaur

  Copyright © 2010 by Wesley Allison

  Revision 2-08-15

  All Rights Reserved. This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If sold, shared, or given away it is a violation of the copyright of this work. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual people, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Wesley Allison

  Cover Image Copyright © 2010 Photowitch | Dreamstime.com

  ISBN 978-1-4523-0655-1

  For My Own Vicki

  Senta and the Steel Dragon

  Book 1

  The Voyage of the Minotaur

  By Wesley Allison

  Chapter One: The Woman in the White Pin-Striped Dress

  The woman in the white, pin-striped dress walked briskly across the plaza. She was easily the most beautiful woman there. Two carefully shaped brows above the most striking aquamarine eyes. A precise nose. Lips, that had they been one jot fuller, would have been too full. And she had a strong chin, which along with her lips were the only parts of her face uncovered by the gauzy veil, which hung down from her hat. That chin was held just high enough and at just the right an angle, to let everyone know that she knew how beautiful she was. None of her body was truly visible, though it must have been just as perfect as her face. Her form and posture was such that it could only have been achieved by the most rigid and tightly laced of corsets. The white, pin-striped dress fit tightly around her long neck and reached to her wrists, blossoming at both neck and wrists in finely wrought, black silk lace, which matched the black, silken gloves. Black silk trimmed the bottom of the dress, where it trailed along the cobblestone street. Behind the prominent bustle was a large black bow. A row of tiny, matching black bows decorated the bodice. Atop the beautiful woman’s head was a black top hat, a feminine imitation of a man’s top hat, with the gauzy black lace veil falling down from it to below those incredible eyes.

  Eight-year-old Senta picked the woman out of the crowd easily enough. She had watched her on many previous occasions and she watched now as the woman stepped from the cobblestone street onto the cement sidewalk. She was just one of many women—many people—in the plaza this time of day. It was one of the busiest locations in the great city of Brech after all, only four blocks from the great train station, and just east of Avenue Boar, where the city’s banking district was located.

  Senta didn’t need to stop work to notice all the people going here and there. She had spent so much time in the plaza, that it just came naturally for her to notice the people. It was one of the best things about working there. The horse drawn trolleys passed every three minutes, and they were full of commuters. A few people still passed in old-fashioned carriages—in one of them, a woman in a brilliant blue dress looked like she might have been a princess. And the street was thick with steam-powered carriages, spewing smoke, hissing steam, and constantly honking. Pedestrians either dodged the dizzying array of motorized and non-motorized vehicles on the street, or fought their way down the crowded sidewalks. Three women, two of them quite old, and the other very young, but wearing matching yellow dresses and matching floppy hats passed by Senta, carrying on an animated conversation about the “short men”.

  Senta wondered what the woman in the white pin-striped dress was up to today. She saw her often, sometimes visiting the telegraph office across the avenue, sometimes visiting the alchemist next door. She supposed that the woman must be purchasing beauty potions or happiness potions, though why she would need either, the girl couldn’t understand. Often, the woman would visit Café Carlo, where Senta worked each afternoon, sweeping the sidewalks, cleaning the wrought iron railing, and polishing the brass dragon by the door. Today it seemed as if that was just what she was going to do, because she was walking directly toward Senta. The woman stepped to the gate of the café, paying no more attention to the skinny little girl pushing along an enormous broom than she had the horse drawn trolley, or the honking steam carriages, or the old-fashioned carriage with the brilliantly blue clad princess, or even of the old man pulling the little donkey laden with crates of carrots.

  Senta looked up at that perfect face as the woman passed. The woman didn’t look back. She didn’t look at anyone. She didn’t even look at Carlo, when he rushed out of the entrance of the café, his starched white shirt, stained with sweat under the armpits and with a dribble of morning coffee just below the collar, and stretched to the limit by his corpulent middle. He ran to greet her with a bow. She didn’t look at him, but she acknowledged him with an ever-so-slight nod of her head.

  “Would you like your usual table, Miss?” said Carlo.

  His fawning, almost whining tone as he spoke to her was nothing like the booming voice he used when calling for one of his waitresses to get back to work, or when he ordered Senta to clean the brass dragon. It was nothing like the grunting noise he made when he paid Senta the fourteen copper pfennigs she received from him each week. It was the tone of a small child who wanted to be noticed by an adult, but who was seldom if ever noticed, and it would have surprised Senta to hear it come from Carlo’s great form, if she had not heard it from him when the woman had previously visited the café.

  “No. We have a party of three today.”

  The woman’s voice was a clear and melodic soprano. Senta thought that she must be a singer in the opera, though having never been to the opera, she really didn’t know what the voice of a singer might be like. The woman’s voice was authoritative without being harsh. It commanded respect. But it was lovely.

  Carlo led the woman to a table near the wrought iron railing, which marked the boundary between the café and the sidewalk. He carefully pulled out a chair and dusted it with his dishtowel. Senta thought the woman would be angry. This wasn’t the seat that she would have chosen if she were her; if she could have demanded anything and expected to get it. This seat was too near the street. A passing steam carriage could conceivably blow smoke right on her. The woman didn’t complain, however, but spread her white, pin-striped dress with her hands, and delicately, so as not to damage her bustle, sat on the chair. Her chin remained high in the air, and her back remained ever so straight, a good eight inches from the chair back.

  Continuing to sweep the walkway, Senta only occasionally looked over to see what the woman was doing. Carlo brought tea. He brought fancy cucumber sandwiches on white bread with the crusts carefully removed. His waitresses saw to the needs of the other patrons of the café—there must have been nearly two dozen, mostly people stopping while on their way to the train station, wearing wool traveling cloaks or business attire, but Carlo himself returned again and again to the woman. He even came back once to do nothing more than make sure that the white linen tablecloth was hanging down the same length on all sides of the table. By then, Senta had finished sweeping the sidewalk along the entire breadth of the café, so she took the enormous broom around the building to the janitorial closet in the back of the building—the one which could only be reached from the outside, exchanged it for a bucket of warm soapy water and a bristle brush, and then walked back around to the front of the café.

  Having swept the dust and dirt and mud from the sidewalk, it was now time to clean the wrought iron railing. It was covered in soot. It was always covered in soot. Of course, everything in the entire city was covered in soot. The soot came from the smoke stacks of the factories that lined the waterfront. It came from the trains that rolled through the city to the great station four blocks north of the plaza. It came from the steam-powered carriages that drove about the wide streets o
f the city. Fortunately, there were plenty of children looking for work, so that at least the beautiful places, and the important places, and the places where beautiful and important people were likely to congregate could be cleaned of the soot on a daily basis.

  Senta started scrubbing the wrought iron railing on the right hand side of the café. She might have been better able to watch the woman in the white, pin-striped dress drink her tea and eat her fancy cucumber sandwiches, if she had started cleaning on the left side of the café, but she had started cleaning on the left side the day before. She always alternated. One day, she cleaned from the left to the right. The next day, she cleaned from the right to the left. It wouldn’t be right to clean from the left to the right, when she had cleaned from the left to the right the day before. So by the time that she had finished cleaning all the wrought iron railing to the right of the entrance and had crossed over and begun cleaning the wrought iron on the left of the entrance, the woman had been joined by two men—two soldiers.

  One soldier was sitting to the woman’s right. The other was sitting to her left. Both wore similar types of uniforms. Their jackets, which were tight fitting and came down to their waists, were dark blue. They both had gold epaulets on each shoulder. And both wore khaki trousers tucked into high, black boots. The soldier to the left of the woman had intricate, crimson, brocade piping at the ends of his sleeves, up along the single row of brass buttons from his waist to his neck, and around his thick, upright collar. His cap, which he had hung from the back of his chair, was the same color as his jacket, and featured the same crimson piping on the bill. The soldier to the right of the woman had no crimson piping on his jacket at all. In fact, with the exception of the brass buttons running up the front, in rows on either side of his broad chest, and the four brass buttons at the end of each sleeve, and of course those gold epaulets, it was unadorned. His hat, which was lying upside down on the table across from him, was a stiff, broad-brimmed hat, the same khaki color as his trousers. It was turned so that Senta could see a blue cord that was tied around the hat, with blue tassels at each end, now hanging limply toward the table top. She could also see the golden dragon symbol on its front, much more stylized and much less realistic than the brass dragon by the door. She thought this dragon looked unhappy to be flying upside down at the moment.

  The soldier to the left, the one with the crimson brocade piping on his uniform, had a thick shock of light brown hair, and long sideburns. He had a slightly sleepy look on his face, half closed eyelids obscuring his light blue eyes. He leaned back in his chair, with one leg stretched out and the other crossed over it.

  “I’m telling you, sister dear, we’ve made the right decision,” he said. “Birmisia is the promised land. There are riches there, just waiting for someone to go out and pick them up. No one is there yet. Mallontah is thriving, but it’s thousands of miles away. We’ll have to build our own infrastructure.”

  “What do you know about infrastructure, Augie?” said the woman.

  “I know you need it.”

  The soldier to the right, the one with no crimson brocade piping on his uniform, was older, his darker brown hair showing the first bits of grey at the temples. He, like the woman, sat rigidly in his seat, though Senta doubted that in his case this was necessitated by a tightly-laced and rigid corset. His features spoke of his family connection as well as the other soldier’s words had. His dark blue eyes looked kind—kind but sad.

  “So we aren’t considering Cartonia?” he asked.

  “Cartonia was never a serious consideration,” the woman replied. “It was simply obfuscation.”

  “Well, you had better be sure,” he said.

  “I am sure. I’ve used every ounce of influence the family has, to set this up.”

  “I’m sure too,” said the younger soldier. He and the woman both looked at their older brother.

  “All right,” he said.

  Senta didn’t hear any more of the conversation. She had moved far enough along, as she cleaned the wrought iron railing, that the conversations of other patrons, though to her mind far less interesting, obscured that of the woman and her two soldier brothers. There was also the noise of the street. So the eight year old girl continued scrubbing, now with nothing as exciting as the far away lands of Cartonia and Birmisia to occupy her. Soon enough she was finished cleaning the railing, and returned once again to the janitorial closet in the back of the building, where she exchanged her bucket of soot-filled water and scrub brush, for a clean cloth and a small jar of polish.

  Her last job of the day was to polish the brass dragon at the entrance to Café Carlo. It was about three feet long, including its serpentine tail, and about four feet wide, its wings outstretched. It sat on a stone plinth, so that it could just about look Senta in the face. She didn’t know for sure, but it always seemed to her that the brass dragon was very old. She was sure that it had been sitting here in this very same spot long before Café Carlo was here. It might have even been here before the plaza. Maybe before the great city was even here. Senta polished the entire body, head, tail, and wings of the dragon, taking great care to get the creamy abstergent worked into every nook and cranny. Taking care of the dragon was by far her favorite part of her job. When she was done, she returned the supplies to the janitorial closet and went back around to the front to wait for Carlo. She was careful to stand in a corner, out of the way of any patrons, and clear of the path of the waitresses.

  She had to wait several minutes for Carlo to notice her. He was busy delivering sandwiches to the two soldiers who sat with the woman in the white pin-striped dress. Not cucumber sandwiches on white bread. Their sandwiches were thick slices of dark bread, piled high with slab after slab of ham. This was no surprise to Senta. Soldiers were always hungry. She had seen them eating many times: the officers here at Café Carlo, and the common soldiers purchasing food from vendors near the park, or at the beanery in her own neighborhood. At last, Carlo noticed her and held out his hand to her, dropping her fourteen copper pfennigs for the week into her callused palm. They were small coins, with the profile of the King on the obverse side, and the front of a stately building, Senta didn’t know which building, on the reverse side. She stuffed the coins, a few fairly bright, but most well worn, into her pocket.

  “See Gyula,” said Carlo.

  A surprised Senta nodded and scurried back to the kitchen. This was an unexpected boon. Gyula was the junior of the two line cooks, which meant that he was the lowest ranked of the four people who prepared the food in the café. An order to see him was an indication that she was being rewarded with foodstuffs of some kind. When she entered the kitchen, Gyula looked up from his chopping and smiled. He was a young man, in his mid twenties, with a friendly round face, blond hair, and laughing eyes. He was chopping a very large pile of onions, and the fact that he had only his left hand to do it, seemed to hinder him not at all. When Gyula was a child, about the same age as Senta was now, he had worked in a textile mill, where his job was to stick his tiny arm into the gaps in the great machines and remove wads of textiles that had gummed up the works. In his case, as in many others, the restarting machine proved quicker than his reflexes and snipped off his arm just below the elbow.

  “Hey Senta!” said Gyula, setting down his knife and wiping his left hand on his white apron.

  “Carlo sent me back.”

  “Excellent,” said Gyula.

  He became a one-handed whirlwind, as he carved several pieces of dark bread from a big loaf, and piled an inch of sliced ham, slathered with dark, brown mustard between them. He wrapped the great sandwich, which Senta happily noted was even bigger than those the soldiers had received, in wax paper. He likewise wrapped a monstrous dill pickle, and placed both in the center of a large, clean, red, plaid cloth; folding in the four corners, and tying them in a bow, to make a bindle. Gyula handed the package to Senta, smiling. When he had the opportunity, the young line cook favored Senta with great, heaping bounties of food, but he dare
d not do it without Carlo’s permission. It wouldn’t be easy for a one-armed man to find a job this good, and no one in his right mind, however kind-hearted and happy-go-lucky he was, would endanger it for a child he didn’t really even know.

  “Thank you, Gyula,” said Senta, and grabbing the red, plaid bundle, scurried out the door and down the sidewalk.

  It was a beautiful day—though Senta didn’t know it, it was the first day of spring. She made her way along, dodging between the many other pedestrians. It was warm enough that she felt quite comfortable in her brown linen dress, worn over her full-length bloomers, and her brown wool sweater. The weather was very predictable here in the Brech. The early spring was always like this. Late in the afternoon, the sky would become overcast, and light showers would sprinkle here and there around the city. Most days, they were so light that a person would scarcely realize that he had been made wet before he was dried off by the kindly rays of the sun. Still, the ladies would raise their parasols to protect their carefully crafted coiffures from the rain, just as they now used them to protect their ivory complexions from the sun.

  Summers here were warm and dry, but not so hot that people wouldn’t still want to eat in the outdoor portion of Café Carlo. Not so in the fall or winter, however. The fall was the rainy season. It would become overcast, and stay that way for months, and it would rain buckets every day. The streets would stay slick and shiny. Then winter would come and dump several feet of snow across the city. The River Thiss would freeze over and they would hold the winter carnival on the ice. And the smoke from all of the coal-fired and gas-fired stoves, and the smoke from all of the wood-filled fireplaces would hang low to the ground, and it would seem like some smoky, frozen hell. The steam carriages would be scarcer, as the price of coal became dearer, but the horse-drawn trolley would still make its way through the grey snow and make its stops every three minutes.