by D. J. Butler
Just to be on the safe side, Jed Coltrane drew his stolen pistol.
* * *
Burton endured the indignity with all the grace he could muster, gritting his teeth against the bile that threatened to rise up in his throat at the thought of it. Being captured was one thing—Burton had resisted, as was his manly duty, and had only been taken prisoner after felling three of the Shoshone, two with one of the Liahona’s iron chairs and the third with a traditional punch to the teeth—but being held prisoner in the company of the snake oil salesman was entirely unacceptable.
They sat on the deck in the night’s chill, three to a bench, as the Liahona thundered away from the main road on some side track, under the alert glare of several Shoshone braves. The Indians were armed like desperadoes with a miscellany of powerful personal weapons. Burton saw several electro-knives and at least one vibro-blade cutlass, Maxim pistols as well as the more usual Colts, tomahawks, clubs and brass knuckles and one repeating cross-bow, the vicious head of its loaded bolt staring cruelly at the passengers under guard and reminding them to sit very, very still. One or two of them carried a Henry or a Remington, but their standard issue weapon seemed to be the Brunel rifle, long and heavy, which they leaned on like staffs or spears, heavy coiled-magnet-engine-end down. They didn’t use bayonets, but in the squabble he’d seen more than one brave use his Brunel like a quarterstaff; the heavy guns were highly adaptable to this purpose and had proven effective, as a welt on Burton’s own forehead told him eloquently. A number of the Indians wore dark goggles over their eyes, and Burton wondered at their purpose—did they confer some sort of darkness-penetrating vision? He’d never seen their like. A few wore metal breastplates, though most covered their chests with leather, bead and bone. They wore their hair long down their backs, decorated with feathers and strips of brightly-colored cloth.
To Burton’s left sat Roxie, elegant, cool and collected, and he wished they were alone. He would have liked to ask her, indirectly and cleverly, of course, about the contents of his glass, and whether she had drugged him, or tampered with his official correspondence, and just who she really was. Also, he would have liked to throw her to the deck and make passionate love to her, body and soul and damn any watching eyes, like the savage that his enemies accused him of being. Like the savage that, with half his heart, he wanted to be. Like the savage he knew he could never be with Isabel.
At least, he thought, he should compliment her on her work in the stateroom fray.
“You have an impressive right hook, for a woman,” he told her, and though he meant it as an ungrudging compliment, she looked amused and underwhelmed.
“You did well enough against the Shoshone yourself, Dick,” she returned the compliment. “You might do nicely for yourself in the Rocky Mountains. You could prospect, or trap, or be a bounty hunter.”
Oh, yes? he wanted to shout. Is that because I am a man of action?
But he refrained, and said nothing, and threw no one to the deck for passionate lovemaking. Instead he just harrumphed a not-quite-polite acceptance, and felt a lesser man for his own emotional stinginess.
“If you learned a little needlework,” she added, “who knows how many exciting careers might open up to you?”
“I find myself in agreement with the lady,” said the charlatan Archibald, who sat to the other side of Burton. He seemed to shrink, to melt into himself, to rest small and inobtrusive in Burton’s own shadow. Burton wondered if Roxie could even see the man. “I hope there are no hard feelings on the subject of the antiquities, and in particular the use of the hypocephalus. I wouldn’t want to offend a man of your stature and known talents.”
A man of action? Burton wanted to gripe, and then caught himself. Hanuman’s thumbs, must he suspect everyone?
Of course not. Roxie was as innocent as the gypsy, he thought, and then he remembered the mysterious crystals in his glass. However innocent that was. And how did the snake oil Egyptianeer recognize him? Stature and known talents, indeed. He snorted. Vicious maneaters, all of them, and he’d do well not to forget it.
“I’m a showman, of course, and I know it,” Archibald continued, and then suddenly his words were cut off by a hard, wet coughing fit that ended by being stifled into a white handkerchief. “But hypnotic hypocephalus sounds much more impressive than pillow for mummies, don’t you think? And wouldn’t you rather have people interested and looking at the antiquities, even with silly ideas in their heads, than bored and looking away?” He looked weaker for the coughing, thin and bed linen-white.
“Eh,” Burton muttered abstractly, feeling guilty for his own suspicions. “It’s nothing. I’m not offended.”
The charlatan might even be right.
He felt the Liahona slow down and snapped himself out of the quagmire of his own thoughts to look ahead; they were arriving.
A ring of thirty-foot-tall Franklin Poles, like the ones in front of Bridger’s Saloon except that a queer green spark showed in the blue light of these pillars, surrounded a low, rocky hill. Dark, nearly invisible filaments hung between each set of adjacent poles like a web; Burton might have missed them entirely except that the filaments, too, occasionally crackled with blue electricity. The dry earth was scorched free of vegetation for a few feet on either side of the wires and the burnt air stank of ozone. Behind the filaments, clustering all over the top of and around the bluff, sprouted a riot of skin- and bark-covered teepees.
The explorer in Burton noted the teepees with interest—this far from the Great Plains, he’d expected a different kind of dwelling, something more in the lines of a hogan or a wigwam or even a house. Also, the incongruity of teepees protected by a wall of electricks intrigued and amused him; he hadn’t seen defenses like this in Egypt, or in the Horn. He thought he could spot hints of riflemen lying among the rocks of the bluff, too; assuming they were also armed with Brunels, that height would give them a range of miles and make them devastating to any encroaching force. Anyone approaching that was delayed by the sparking fence would be exposed and likely shot to pieces in no time. Burton had seen the damage what the Brunel’s magnet-driven bullets could do, even at shockingly long ranges.
“Astounding,” Jamison Archibald murmured.
A sparking, sizzling metal gate hung between two extra-thick pylons, across the road in front of the Liahona, barring forward progress. Burton watched in fascination as a brave stepped from the Liahona’s wheelhouse and yelled in the direction of the compound ahead, whooping and waving an arm until the pylons hissed out a thick emission of steam and smoke and the gate swung sideways on steel cables, opening to admit the captured steam-truck.
The Liahona coughed and ground forward again. Watching the electricks fence pass by, Burton suddenly became aware that Roxie, still sitting at his side, was talking to someone, and not in English.
The man was Shoshone, and dressed like all the other Indian warriors, though he was older than most of them. He had a smile on his face but Roxie was furious. Burton had been studying Shoshone, along with Ute and Navajo, since his departure from London, and though his skills were still rudimentary, they were enough to understand this conversation, once he focused on it. After all, he thought, allowing himself a moment of pride, he was quite simply damn good with languages.
“Big Beard Chief Brigham will be big angry with you!” Roxie snapped. Her Shoshone was fast, but heavily accented. “Big Beard Chief Brigham always friend to the Shoshone!”
The older man scratched himself calmly and answered in smooth, articulate, native Shoshone. “Captain Jones will get his truck back, don’t worry. And I will personally come down to the Great Salt Lake City on my best horse and drink a lager with Brigham to make friends again. I’ve had worse losses today on my side—two of my men are missing.” His eyes narrowed. “In strange ways. What is my Brother Orson doing these days, that he is not sharing with his Brother Pocatello?”
Burton tried not to give any indication that he understood the conversation. Orson, that must be Or
son Pratt, the great inventor—some said madman—of the Kingdom, the man behind the mighty airships, the man whose genius drove Burton’s mission. But how could any Shoshone be missing strangely? He thought of the Pinkerton who had disappeared from Fort Bridger, leaving his clothing behind; was that some new and exotic weapon of Pratt’s, and if so, what could it be? A flesh-disintegrating ray?
He shook his head, baffled.
And who was Roxie? She seemed to be some sort of agent of the Kingdom, or at least of its President. He wished now that he had investigated her a little better, at least asked her a few more questions. You’re an idiot, Burton, he told himself. You’re a fool for nice legs in a skirt. He noticed then that the gypsy was looking at him curiously.
“What?” he snarled, and immediately looked away, communicating disinterest in any answer.
Archibald only chuckled, until his chuckle ended in a soft wet cough.
Roxie was talking again. “If bad things in Kingdom because of you delay, I self make Shoshone forever unhappy!” The fox yip of her voice was fierce enough to make Burton feel nervous, and he forced his eyes to wander around the teepees, the tethered horses and the banked fires as the Liahona ground again to a halt. “I make all ladies in Kingdom wear Shoshone skin hat, eat Shoshone testicles!”
Burton shivered involuntarily. Who was this woman? His spike of fear was seasoned with sharp pangs of attraction.
The old Shoshone, though, was calm. “I don’t know what bad things might happen in the Kingdom because you arrive a day late,” he said urbanely, “but I’ll take the risk.” He turned away and headed for the ladder.
Roxie hissed in exasperation and glared at Burton. “Well?” she snapped in English.
Burton shrugged defensively. “Nothing. It pleases me to see that you have friends among these savages. Maybe you can talk them into letting us go.”
“Savages, indeed!” Roxie snorted, rising to her feet to join a line of passengers being dragged and Brunel-prodded towards the ladder by the Shoshone. “Savages, indeed!”
* * *
Absalom hadn’t come west expecting to be imprisoned, and much less had he come expecting to be imprisoned in a cave. Well, perhaps it wasn’t truly a cave, he thought, but it was at least a pit.
Blue electricks snapped and sparked here and there in the walls, but they lit the cavern only dimly. Further light, even dimmer over the artificial illumination with which it competed, filtered down from the blue-grey circle of open sky above. Most of the illumination in the pit, though, was orange-yellow and was thrown by several pole-length torches, jammed into the soft ground at irregular intervals and adding a smoky, woody note to the human reek that assailed Absalom’s nostrils. The latrine trench in the corner, complete with unsmoothed, barky log seat, didn’t help. He resolved to hold off using it as long as he possibly could.
Some of the Liahona’s other passengers seemed perfectly at ease with the situation. Burton was one of them; shortly after the Shoshone had thrown them into this chamber, sealing the entrance behind them with a coal-powered, fume-spewing portcullis, Ruffian Dick had stomped once around the big cell and then slumped down against one wall and gone straight to sleep. Other passengers had joined him in dozing, as had the steam-truck’s crew, not to mention Absalom’s Angel, who proved to be surprisingly rugged. Absalom was one of those who were unable to sleep, and he paced about the pit, wondering what he had gotten himself into. Also pacing in circles was the Liahona’s captain, who looked supremely indignant and muttered to himself with every step.
He had to save Abigail. That’s what he was doing here, and that was worth any amount of standing in a pit, or of being subjected to the bullying arrogance of Dick Burton, or even of having to use a log-hewn latrine. Also, if he could manage it, there were Foreign Office objectives to achieve (Absalom’s real commission letter, issued after he called in several favors and got several fellow-Harrovians roaring drunk, simply said assist Captain Richard Burton) and the dignity of the Empire to maintain. The dignity of the British Empire, of course, had survived all manner of primitive latrines.
The portcullis puffed steam and black smoke and jerked up into its rock-carved housing. The older Indian warrior whom Absalom had seen on the Liahona’s deck entered, and in his wake, to Absalom’s surprise, came the two men who had surprised him the night before, behind Bridger’s Saloon. Despite his disorientation, panic and anger, Foreign Office mnemonics training kicked in and he remembered their names: Lee and Hickman. The three men stopped inside the gate, surveying the prisoners.
Absalom stormed across the pit to the three men, but Captain Dan Jones got there first.
“This is bloody nonsense, Pocatello, aye, and you know it! When President Young hears what you’ve done—Hickman! Lee!” He looked astonished. “What are you doing here? Tell the Chief he can’t keep us locked up!”
Chief Pocatello raised a restraining hand and smiled wryly. “Spare me,” he said, “I already got the whole speech from Sister Eliza.”
Lee grinned. “I guess you did, Chief.”
Hickman thumped Chief Pocatello on the shoulder with enthusiasm. “Sometimes even an Injun can be a poor dumb unlucky son of a bitch, can’t he?” he shrilled in his high-pitched voice.
Jones looked from one face to the next, puzzled. “Will you not get us out of here, then?”
“Don’t worry, Brother Daniel,” Lee reassured him, “the Shoshone’ll let you go in the morning. None of your passengers will be any the worse for wear.”
“Did you Danites arrange this?” Jones demanded to know, and then he frowned. “This isn’t something Brother Brigham ordered, is it? If he wanted to change my schedule or my route, he could have simply told me so.”
Hickman snickered. “Naw, we ain’t done this. I guess Pocatello ain’t such a tame Injun as you thought, is all.”
“Why are you laughing?” Jones demanded. His face was turning red with rage and frustration. “Deseret’s premier land-ferry from the Wyoming Territory has been waylaid by former allies with all passengers and crew. Is that funny to you, Hickman? Are you amused that the Liahona was attacked?”
Hickman shrugged. “I got an eclectic sense of humor, I guess. I can laugh at jokes other men tell almost as easy as I can laugh at my own.”
“Don’t worry, it would take a railgun the size of a piñon pine to put a scratch on the Liahona,” Pocatello added. “And you must know that your Brother Brigham has not yet seen fit to sell me a railgun.”
“I’m not worried about the truck!” the Welsh captain barked, his voice projecting like a foghorn. “I’m worried about John Moses! I can’t find the little fellow, and Jonathan Browning will kill me first and then die of grief himself if I lose his son!”
Pocatello’s expression seemed compassionate. “I’ll have my men check the truck again,” he told the Liahona’s captain. “Maybe he’s hiding. A boy that size, he might be under a chair and we just missed him.”
Jones nodded stiffly, his face still a mask of fury and fear, and walked away, throwing himself to a seated position in the sand. The others seemed to finally see Absalom, and he cleared his throat by way of annoyed greeting. Perhaps these men could help him.
“Why look, it’s the Englishman,” Bill Hickman squeaked, and then walked past Absalom with no further salutation.
“We’ve already seen this one,” Lee added to the Shoshone Chief, and then he, too walked on, leaving Absalom floundering alone.
Chief Pocatello shrugged and followed the two white men. The three of them paced around the pit, examining the Liahona’s passengers and crew. Absalom trailed them at a short distance, feeling ineffectual but unable to think of anything to say that would get their attention and respect. Some of the crew seemed to recognize the two white men and glared at them, but Hickman and Lee reserved their interest for certain of the passengers. They whispered to each other about Burton, and Hickman even bent to toss a small dirt clod at the man, like you might test a wild animal, but Ruffian Dick lay stil
l, breathing deeply and giving no signs of anything but restful slumber.
They smirked at Burton’s lady friend Roxie too, and separately at Absalom’s Angel, who sat with the older woman; the former spit on their boots and the latter looked away, bored. Hickman and Lee continued on, then stopped for a long time staring at the Egyptian antiquities showman Archibald. He sat quietly on the dirt and looked back, gently. Absalom positioned himself by the two ladies and tried desperately to think of something to say to confront their captors.
“That ain’t a natural beard, is it?” Hickman asked, squinted. He pulled up one of the torches and held it over the other man.
“No,” Archibald agreed, “it isn’t. I’m a showman. My show is a serious one, and requires the gravitas of a beard. Lamentably, I myself do not grow a good one, so this beard is… borrowed.” He smiled.
“Didn’t you have a helper of some kind, back at the Fort?” Lee inquired. “A short man, a dwarf?”
“I did,” the exhibitor agreed. “Tell me if you find him—he’s disappeared, along with some of my tools.”
“Lots of folks are vamoosing all of the sudden around here. Maybe,” Hickman suggested, eyes glinting cruelly as he planted the torch, stepped closer and pulled a long knife from his belt, “the little bugger’s hiding in that haystack on your chin.” He lashed out quickly, like a snake, and grabbed the carnival man by his neck. Lee stepped back a pace and put his hands on the butt of the pistols on his belt, as if warning bystanders not to intervene. Doctor Archibald made no move to resist or flee, but lay limply in the other man’s grip while his false beard was shaved down to gum and stubble.
“There, now,” Hickman said as he finished the rough shave and re-sheathed the knife. “You look presentable, much more like your picture. I guess Brother Brigham’ll be happy to see you now.”