Twigleg's Diary Chapter One
Editor's note – this diary, written in tiny writing and in 16th-century Gothic calligraphy, was found in the basement of a house in North-West England in 2017, shortly after the inhabitants, a pair of German academics who had been living in England with their two children, moved to Norway. The early entries are bilingual, with a diary entry written down the left-hand page in languages ranging from Early New High German (the language of the Lutheran Bible) to Latin, Ancient Greek, Urdu, Hebrew, and Arabic. On each right-hand facing page would be an English translation, often written in a confused mixture of Shakespearian English, Chaucerian English and Anglo-Saxon, sprinkled with modern words such as 'internet'. To avoid embarrassment to the author, we have translated the document into modern English throughout.
Hamburg, Monday 10th August 2015:
I have decided to choose an English name.
Perhaps I am just overreacting to something that happened on the journey to Europe. It took sixteen hours to travel from Pakistan to here, I think, though it's hard to be sure when the days and nights are in such different places.
When Professor Greenbloom and his wife (actually, I think she's a Professor, too, of art history – I don't know whether English has a feminine form of 'Professor', but I'll think of her as the Professora) – anyway, when they explained that we would be flying home in an aeroplane, I felt puzzled and terrified. Puzzled, because I didn't see how four humans could possibly fit in an aeroplane; and terrified, because even a flight of a few minutes with Lola is enough to turn my stomach inside out. It seems horribly ungrateful to write this about a good friend, especially one who has saved my life, but she doesn't really believe that not everyone finds sudden dives and rolls and loop-the-loops as much fun as she does. I don't want to tell her that, personally, I think aeroplanes are nearly as horrible a form of transport as ravens, and much more uncomfortable than dragons.
Human aeroplanes, though, are another matter. They are like great long buildings, with rows and rows of seats inside them, and they're so enclosed that it's possible to forget that you're flying at all, especially if you're hiding inside someone's pocket. I wondered whether I ought to hide in a rucksack, but the Professor explained that bags have to go through an X-ray machine, which is something that can see through canvas and layers of clothing to anything hard, like the skeleton of a person hiding inside a sock. So instead, I crouched inside my Master's jacket pocket, and if anyone wondered why he was wearing a jacket in the hot Pakistan summer, nobody said anything.
The Professor and Professora say that they need to put all my Master's clothes through a washing-machine (which seems to be some sort of robot washerwoman), and then decide what needs to go to a charity shop, and what needs to go to fabric recycling. I hope they let me keep one item unwashed, so that I can breathe in the smell of my Master when he isn't there. At the moment, I'm curled up in the jumper that got torn in numerous places when he had to escape through the side of the Roc's nest. I hope the charity shop doesn't want it.
I'm not sure what a charity shop is. I know that 'charity' is English for divine love, but I don't see how you can buy love in a shop. Over three hundred years ago, after my brothers were killed, I began researching all the religions I could learn about. I read that Christians believe that God is love, and that humans are made in God's image and should love as God loves. I wondered why they didn't. The only human I had ever met, who was presumably made in God's image and who had made us in the image of humans, didn't love anyone. When my brothers were alive, we had loved each other, but who was there for me to love now? I knew Christians believed you should love your enemies, but I couldn't imagine loving Nettlebrand. The only way I could survive was to refuse to feel anything, grief or love or hope or pity, and let my heart grow as cold and still as a hibernating lizard, until I didn't know any more whether it was alive or dead.
And then, finally, it woke up. I met someone who showed me what the ancient writers meant about the love that is patient and kind, that keeps no record of wrongs, and that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. He protected me, and it made me want to protect him. He trusted me, and so I wanted to become trustworthy. He doesn't want me to think of him as my Master, but he is the only person who can help me to become the person I need to be.
I am writing this by torchlight, in a hotel bedroom in Hamburg, while my Master, and Miss Guinevere who is (we hope) about to become his sister, are asleep. The Professor and Professora, who are (we hope) going to be his parents, are in the room next door. We're all trying to rest, before the tension of what happens tomorrow. But I'm so anxious that I can't sleep. Tomorrow…
No, I can't even write about it. I'll write about minor worries first, and edge my way up to the big one. Next on the list: my name.
There was a play on the aeroplane. I'd never seen a play being acted before, but I'd read some, in the castle where I was created. This one wasn't being acted by actors who were on the aeroplane with us. Humans have some kind of spell to record a play so that they can show it on a screen at any time. I suppose it's not so different from recording words by writing them down in a book.
The play was about a man who seemed very like the alchemist who created me and Nettlebrand. In the story, he creates a monster – not an artificial dragon like Nettlebrand, but an artificial human made of bits of dead people sewn together. When the monster is brought to life, it turns out to be evil, and lurches around attacking people. It wasn't a very good play, but I couldn't stop myself peering out of my Master's pocket to see what was happening. It reminded me of home.
Miss Guinevere said (apparently to my Master, but she intended me to hear, too) that it wasn't like the book – that in the book, the Creature isn't an evil monster. He's just sad and lonely, because his creator abandoned him as soon as he was switched on, and all the people he tries to make friends with also run away from him, because he's so big and ugly. There's a bit in the book where the Creature explains how he had briefly become friends with a blind man, but when the man's family came in and saw what the person he had been chatting to looked like, they screamed. The Creature asks his creator, Dr Frankenstein, to build him a wife so that he doesn't have to be always alone; but when Frankenstein refuses, the Creature goes mad with despair and loneliness, and murders Frankenstein's girlfriend and his family so that he'll know how it feels to be alone.
The Professor said (apparently to my Master and Miss Guinevere, but again, making sure that I could hear) that it's terrible to be that isolated, but that it's a good thing that, in real life, so many people manage to cope with loneliness without becoming murderers, and eventually find someone to love. All the same, he said, that didn't excuse Dr Frankenstein's cruelty. He said that being literate means knowing that 'Frankenstein' was not the monster, but being intelligent means knowing that, actually, he was.
But then he added something else, just as an aside: that while 'Frankenstein' is a perfectly normal German name, to English people it always sounds like something from a horror story. That made me wonder whether my own name, Fliegenbein, sounds similar enough to have the same effect. I don't want people who meet me to start worrying about whether I'm going to go mad with grief over being the last of my species and turn into a serial killer.
I could just use the English translation, Fly-leg. We all chose insect names for ourselves, because we were created from spiders or insects, but sometimes we used other names as well, depending on what mood we were in. So Beetling was also called Crimson, because of his dark red hair, and Stick-Insect was just Sticks, for short [see s/10093447/1/Twigleg-s-Story], and Flea was also called Mizell [see s/4522554/1/The-Other-Homunculus].
Of course, these were just the names we used amongst ourselves. Nettlebrand sometimes randomly called us all 'Oi, spider-shanks!' but more often just 'armour-cleaner' or 'hey, you!' The alchemist, when he experimented on use, referred to us in his notes as H1, H2, etc. My label is H12. It is branded onto my back, just below the shoulder-blades.
That is my first memory: one huge hand lifting me from the jar and holding me still while the other pressed something against my back that made me gasp with pain, and so I started breathing. Then the hand set me down on a shelf with eleven other people like me, all newly-decanted and naked, and all with fresh scars on their backs. Some were whimpering, others trying to be tough and stoical. We couldn't hug without irritating each other's wounds, but we could squeeze each other's hands reassuringly, and promise: we are family. Together till the end.
Anyway, there's no point thinking about all that now. I've got a new family, and I'm choosing a new name. When we arrived at the hotel, we saw an English tourist in the foyer eating snacks out of a packet labelled 'Twiglets'. So I might rename myself Twigleg, when we reach England, unless I can think of a better idea by then.
But first, we have to get there.