Act III

Florian said,

"The hum of the flute,

a strum of the lute

brings us back to the horse's birth,

named Chain de Beest for its girth

and sold to Joost for less than it was worth.

Scrub back the orange land,

water it, grow grass and stand

in the fields as it waves,

stretches out to the horizon and graves

are dug around the back.

At first, Chain fears attack

from these strange creatures,

with their wheels and their gears and their bicycle features.

They sound like horses

They play like horses

But they sure ain't horses.

Just a foal, he misses his mother,

but Joost wrests him away. Turns one being to another.

The brain, the heart, the soul

is plucked from our foal

and poured into a metal frame.

Gone is the grass,

it now grows sparse

between the arid cracks of asphalt.

It never rains, but Chain cries.

His old body rots away as it dies.

He speeds along the fences with the other bikes

and he feels their sorrow, their fractured psyches

as Joost brings each one in to paint them.

A year passes, now and then.

Nothing changes, except their tires,

and more bikes, more horses are hammered out in the fires.

There's a hundred of them now,

and just as many graves.

None of them feel brave.

Then comes a very different day,

when an emissary from the Locust Queen rides along the way

and demands the fastest bike,

the strongest bike

that Joost can provide.

Whatever price he names, she'll pay.

He gathers up the bikes into the stable

and he works as fast as he is able

on his first experiment.

He leads Chain and his friend, Alain, behind the wall,

and he splits each in half and he welds them together.

They cry out in pain,

their mind is now the same,

they try to run but a crew of stablehands holds them by the reins.

Chain sees everything Alain has ever done,

every thought, every little victory he's ever won,

every battle lost, every trauma

and he can't look away from this assault

as the latter becomes the former.

Joost lets them go at last,

and they wheel about twice as fast.

Now he has a proof of concept,

he's hardly going to stop there, is he?

Behind his eyes imagined diamonds gleam.

Will it suit the queen,

he asks, to ride a bike with the power of a hundred horses?

At such a speed, of course, it should be possible to escape even prophetic forces.

Yes, says the emissary, opening up her coin purse.

That night the villagers of Fietspad got no sleep, so great was the racket and the flashes of colour that pierced their open windows.

By the morning, Joost's work was done, and Chain found himself lost in a stampede, tugged this way and that, no peace to his mind, only anguish, terror, and rage.

Horses aren't very good at agreeing what to do, nor are they very good at shutting up.

Joost had set the stage

for a massacre.

By noon most of the villagers were dead,

but the motorbike kept running, running to outpace the roar in its head.

So we find our fair town of Fietspad in the present,

the moon waxing and waning through crescents

as it lies in ruin."

Florian stopped playing and set down his lute upon the rafter, and he looked down with compassion upon the motorbike that was still doing angry donuts in the middle of the stable.

"Florian?" whispered Madelief. "I... I think I need another sandwich."

They sat and ate for awhile, taking the story in. They drank from their flasks, and Florian coaxed chromatic chords from his lute, reflecting Maddie's tangled up feelings. Slowly, floating downwards like a spirit, she lowered herself and landed upon the ground with firm feet.

The bike snapped in her direction. It roared, spinning in place, terrifying as ever, but now that she was thinking clearer she could hear the sorrow dripping off its hundred-fold voice, and she clutched her heart to quieten her anxiety, and as the bike's fumes engulfed the stable, she suppressed a cough to avoid startling it.

"I'd still be careful, if I were you," said Florian, pressing the flute to his lips. "What is it you're trying to do?"

Maddie looked among a pile of rags and extracted a clean, soft, cotton cloth.

"I've not been a very good hero," she said. "I was so focused on what the bike could do for me. I just saw it as a tool, Florian. It must be so scared... so angry..."

Indeed, the bike was snorting at her repeatedly. For a moment it shot forward, but just as soon it tugged itself back. Its gears ground together as it see-sawed back and forth.

"Shhh," whispered Madelief, floating over. "It's okay, horsie. It's okay."

The beast shied away from her. Her instincts, thirsty, wanted to pursue it, corner it, then bend it to her own goals, but she held those thoughts and she let them pass. Instead she clicked her tongue, and she tried to sing a lullaby, to imitate even slightly the depth of feeling in Florian's melody, and her personal space expanded around her as she let the world in.

So open as to be detached, viewing it all from far away, Madelief unveiled herself for the first time to the calls of vultures in the canyon, the chattering of sunset beetles, and the soothing pulse of the wind -- indeed everything she'd overlooked with her blinders on -- and the more attention she paid, the more the world spiralled out into endless fractals of detail, with Florian's cricket at the epicenter.

She felt with all her feeling the bike's hundred welding joints as she cradled them through the cloth; the way its purrs ran fuzzy through her body with every scrub; the way the dust ground like sandpaper into her skin as she got it all off. The bike leaned into her and nuzzled her and whinnied for more, brimming with life. By the time she'd got the Harley-Davidson sparkling gently like stars, the white cloth had stained black. She kneeled down to hug it.

"That's one way to make friends," cooed Florian. "I'm proud of you, Maddie, and all seems well as it ends."

The two of them stroked it -- Maddie in light flutters, Florian in a patting samba. For the first time since getting cursed, Madelief felt happy, and she even smiled a little. Then the bike did something which actually made her well up -- it rolled forwards, pointing its saddle towards them.

They climbed on and sank low into the soft leather, and Maddie reached out for the handlebars far above.

"You don't have to carry us if you don't want to," she said. "If even one of you hundred doesn't want it, we'll get off."

In response, the bike just revved its engine, and the entire world seemed to shake between their legs. But it had a soft side, and it conveyed them out of the stable to look down upon the canyon, now crawling with nocturnal life, with food chains playing out before their eyes.

Then it all went wrong; a rainbow coat flashed in their peripheral vision.

"I knew you were heroes," exclaimed Joost, coming up the road, batting away a cloud of mosquitoes. "You actually tamed it! You tamed my Harley-Davidson! So losing my family, my friends, my employees -- none of it was in vain! Hand it over, now, heroes, and I'll reward you handsomely. Consider the sidequest complete!"

As soon as the bike saw him, it flew into a rage and shot at him faster than a bullet. Madelief could only cling to the handlebars, stomach wrenched up into her throat, which wasn't all bad considering Florian had wrapped his arms tight around her belly, crushing all the wind out of her -- if it was even possible to breathe the air as it streaked past.

One judder later and the bike had knocked Joost aside like a bowling pin. He fell off the cliff, but the bike kept on rolling, accelerating more. The Harley Davidson sped down the hill road that had taken them half an hour to walk up, and then in a blur they left Fiestpad in the dust.

"They're fifty-fifty split!" belted Florian. "Half of them want to live, but the others want to quit!"

"Quit?" said Madelief, but she was too softly-spoken.

The bike's intentions soon became clear. They hurtled towards a wide canyon -- too wide to jump, and deep enough to have no hope of surviving the jagged bottom. It would only take seconds for them to get there.

GO, screamed the alarm bells, and this time they had a point. She tried to let go of the handlebars to clutch her amulet, but nearly lost her balance and fell off the bike. No, she had to keep holding on, but there was no time to be careful, and letting her moth out the amulet would be too risky in the wind... shit!

"If we jump off now," said Florian, "We can leave the bike to death and save ourselves... is that what you want to do, Maddie?"

She imagined fifty of the horses being dragged to the next life against their will, of the incredible deficit in memory it would leave the world, and how every sleepless night she'd picture the best friend horses and the husband horses and the wife horses she couldn't save.

"No! Maybe we can stop to help!" she shouted.

She took the risk and clutched her amulet, swerving the bike away from the canyon at the last moment. But the bike had other ideas and swerved right back, and then they were in freefall, plummeting down to the distant bottom of the canyon, and this really was it, this really was how she was going to die, and she had only herself to blame, and no time to repent.

"The horses at the eleventh hour agree," announced Florian, "They've changed the direction of their minds, and now they want to live! They regret not being able to join us in our fight against the Locust Queen!"

"I hate you and I hate your cricket," Madelief said, settling on a fine set of last words. So even without her moth she was changing directions for the worse, and now a hundred horses would regret their deaths. All she had to do now was find a way to not make that happen.

She could flip the direction of their fall, and soar back up towards the sky…

But it would have to be the perfect angle, or they’d crash into the cliff; and she’d have to hold onto both the bike and the amulet without losing grasp of either; and the bike might drive straight back down into the canyon; and she’d have to make sure Florian didn’t drop off as well. So much could go wrong.

She screamed and did it anyway. They fell upwards back out of the canyon, landing neatly at the top of their parabola. Only once they hit solid ground did she realise how calm she felt. All about her the world was shaking under the tremors of the bike, but Maddie? She felt an otherworldly, detached calmness.

The alarm bells had stopped ringing.

2 affairs remain until voting.