“That box is this baby’s birthright and the final share due me from Jack,” she said. “It will lead me to a big enough score to lay down my sword. Can you fetch it for me, Dot?”
“Of course. Meet you here before dawn?” he asked. She stood and helped the old man to his feet as she did.
“No,” she said. “The north docks, near Fort James and the custom houses.”
“Done,” he said and headed for the door without another word. She got the impression Herodotus was glad to be ridding himself of the box and wanted to waste no time doing so.
She sat back on the bench and took another long sip on the bottle of port. The box was not natural—she knew that—had known it since she and Jack had taken it from the cargo hold of that merchantman headed back to England from Africa. One of Jack’s crew, a Spaniard named Thiago, had jumped from the crow’s nest onto the deck below, screaming of a city of monsters that was eating the dreams out of his skull. He screamed a name as he took his fatal plunge—“Carcosa.”
Both she and Jack had awoken from dreams of the necropolis squatting still and silent in the middle of some verdant, primal place. When they made it to port, they had consulted the smartest man either of them knew—Herodotus. He had no wisdom for them, but promised to keep the box safe.
She never told Jack but she, alone, had a final dream of the bone city. In it she stood in a sunbaked courtyard, vast like an arena. The floor of the place glittered with rubies, millions of them. She stood before a shining statue of a woman, flaring with the light of the bloated red sun. The statue was at the center of the arena, and was made of gold and ivory, diamonds and other precious stones, a king’s fortune a hundred times over, or a queen’s.
She was going to find that city and claim its treasures and its secrets, and she knew, she knew the first step on that path was the box, and then to head for Africa, from which it hailed. Now, sitting alone in the noise and life of the Witches’ Wrath, she recalled the eyes of the statue in her dream. They were terrible, the immortal gaze of a goddess—regarding her, judging her with eyes darker than a murderer’s soul, burning red at their core, hotter than any earthly forge.
She rubbed her eyes, and pushed the memory out of her mind. She realized then how much she wanted a pipe and some good tobacco.
“Now,” she said to the baby slumbering at her breast, “what do I do with you, you little snapper?” She noticed a man sitting alone at a table writing with an inkwell and pen in a ledger, occasionally popping his head up to look about, or to drink from his tankard. He was a slender man, his hair and beard the color of wheat. She rose, and moved toward him.
“Nate?” she said. “Nate Mist? I’ll be a fussock, it is you!” The man turned, frowning at first, but then broke into a wide smile once he recognized her.
“I heard your neck got stretched, Annie,” Mist said. She raised the port in salute and Mist raised his tankard.
“Haven’t found a rope clever enough,” she said. “I’m surprised to see you here. I heard you were back in England—a writer they said.”
“Publisher,” Mist replied. “Oh, and down here I’m going by Charles Johnson these days—Captain Charles Johnson. Ran into a spot of trouble back home. Thought I’d travel a bit and see if I could finish my research on the history of pirates I’m writing.”
“Well, ‘Captain,’” she said, laughing and taking another drink, “I’m a walking, talking expert on that lot.”
“That you are,” Mist said. He flipped to a fresh page in his ledger and dipped his pen in the inkwell. “Let me ask you about…”
“You’ll make a pretty bob off me and all my dead mates, won’t you, Nate?” Mist began to answer, but she waved her free hand to dismiss his reply as she sat at his table. “I’ll give it all to you, mate—you were always a good lad back then—always an honest sea dog. I’ll tell you the tale of the last days of Calico Jack and his crew. How old Eddie Teach supped with the devil and stole some of his cursed gold for himself. I’ll tell you the story of how we came across this great metal vessel the size of a hundred galleons! How it traveled under the waves and was captained by a mad genius.”
Mist leaned forward, frantically scribbling in his ledger.
“I’ll tell you the time I was stricken by the black mark—the one all pirates fear,” she went on, knowing she had Mist now, her eyes locked on his, her voice weaving her stories tight about him, “and how I had to filch wine from Neptune himself to dodge that curse. You want to know about the island where immortal cannibal children are led by a ten-thousand-year-old boy who has no shadow? I’ll give all the secrets of the pirates and the worlds they’ve been brave enough to sail through to you and you alone—enough for a hundred books—but first I want you to swear an oath to me, and do me a service, Nate. I want you to swear it on that god of yours that keeps getting you in so much trouble back home.”
“What’s the favor, Anne?” Mist asked.
She set the bottle on the table and slid her arms around and under the baby. “This,” she said. “Take him to my da in Charles Town, Oyster Point.”
“Carolina? The colonies?” Mist said. “I was thinking of sailing north in a few days. Why don’t you just go yourself?”
“I have something to tend to first,” she said. “You tell my father to keep him safe and I’ll be along once I’m finished.” She placed a bag of coins before Mist on the table. “For him and for you. Do you swear you’ll keep him safe and deliver him to my kin?”
Mist looked at the baby’s face, then to hers. “I swear it,” he said. They spit in their palms and shook to seal the oath. “Now,” she said, “let me start by telling you about the Secret Sea.…”
* * *
Night was unraveling in the East; threads of pink, orange and indigo frayed where the sky met sea. Herodotus hobbled along with the small chest. Sailors, eagerly preparing to leave with the morning tide, darted past the old man. There were shouts, curses, songs and orders in a dozen languages, all along the crowded row of docks and piers. Markham turned to look about and found himself facing a slender sailor, a man, his face shadowed with dirt that hinted at a beard. His long red hair was tied in a ponytail, the rest under a cocked hat. He wore a vest and tunic, a heavy blade and pistol held fast by a sash around his waist, breeches and boots. A ditty bag was hung over the man’s shoulder. The sailor smiled and Dot finally recognized her.
“You’re damned good at that, lass,” he said, keeping his voice low. She laughed and even that had a rough, male sound to it.
“Lots of practice.” She nodded to the box. “Thanks, Dot.” He handed her the oddly painted wooden cask and she held it with both hands. “My ship is off in a few moments.”
“You be careful with that twice-damned thing,” Herodotus said. “Where’s the boy?”
“Safe and on his way to my family in the colonies,” she said. “Here,” she said, handing him a purse full of coins. She had managed to increase her dwindling stolen stakes with a few games of bones on the docks while waiting for Dot. “There’s a ship leaving later today for the Carolina colony,” she said. “You remember Nate Mist? He’s a passenger aboard, and I’ve secured you passage as well. Nate has my boy, taking him to my da. I’d consider it a kindness if you’d accompany them and see to my boy until I return.”
“Nate’s a good man,” Markham said, nodding. He took the purse. “Very well, perhaps the change in climate will be good for what ails me.”
“Thank you,” she said. “And don’t worry. I’m taking this thing home, scoring one last haul of loot, and then I’m quits with this freebooter life.”
Herodotus laughed until he began coughing again. “I’ll believe that when I bloody see it,” he said. “You’re born to this, Annie, moon and tide, steel and gold.”
“Well, I’m retiring to be a proper lady,” she said with a grin. “One of goddamned means, to boot. Good-bye, Dot. Take good care of yourself and my lad.” They shook hands and she began to head for the gangplank of one of the ship
s.
“And good luck to you too, Lady…” Herodotus paused. “Anne, what the hell do I call you now? Lady Rackham? Cormac? What?”
She turned and gave the old pirate sage a wink. “I always liked my married name,” she said, “liked it better than I liked the fucking marriage. I’ll stick with that one, I think.”
“Fair enough,” Herodotus said. “Then good luck to you, Lady Bonny.”
2
The Queen of Swords
Northern Utah
December 5, 1870
(One hundred and forty-nine years later)
The train rumbled through the badlands, the ancient, snow-silvered mountains indifferent to its blustering advance. The Transcontinental Railroad was the great artery, the road connecting civilization to the wilderness, to the frontier.
With the planting of a single golden spike, a flurry of speeches, pomp and circumstance, the track had been made whole, and the gateway to the mythical West swung open. Alter Cline, sitting in the mostly empty passenger car, foresaw the railroad’s recent completion as a harbinger of death for that very myth.
Cline was twenty-four. His black hair fell to his shoulders in ringlets, parted on the side. He sported thick, stylish sideburns. Alter possessed a wiry, slender build with long legs. He stood a hair over six feet. His brown eyes were expressive and intelligent, and currently they were fixed on the striking woman sitting near the center of the passenger car.
The woman was traveling unchaperoned, which was queer. She was quite unaware of his notice, Alter was certain. Her hair was auburn, shot through with red-gold and silver strands. It was long, but she wore it up, away from her face, in a tight bun. Her skin was pale, her wrists small and delicate. Her figure was slight, and her overall appearance not the sort that would capture a man’s second glance in a crowd or a busy street. However, there was something—something that hid in this woman beneath her surface appearance. Alter enjoyed the mystery, the parlor game of guessing who she was, why she was here, where she had come from.
The mental exercise helped Cline take his mind off his unease that this untamed place, this magnificent frontier, was living on borrowed time. He was happy to be headed back to New York, but there was a freedom, a spirit awake in these wild lands, something that slept in a lot of people back East. He’d miss that rawness, that primal feeling once he was home—not that there weren’t a few neighborhoods in New York City that he was sure the toughest cow-puncher or gunslinger would find daunting.
It troubled him to think that when this frontier was gone perhaps that raw part of the human spirit would die with it. However, what he had witnessed out on the plains suggested that the same old human stains—greed, cruelty, callous indifference—traveled hand-in-hand with our primal selves wherever, whenever we go. It gave him grim reassurance that mankind was far from domesticated just yet. It made Cline wonder, too, that perhaps “civilized” people didn’t respect the freedom and the splendor out here enough to deserve it, or keep it.
He had been sent out by his editor to cover the brisk expansion in the business of buffalo skinning, as a perfect example of man’s knack for destroying wonder. It wasn’t truly buffaloes that blackened the plains in their vast numbers, that made the ground shudder like thunder in their passing, but bison. Not that those killing them in the hundreds of thousands and leaving their skinned corpses to rot on the plains, leaving sun-bleached mountains of wide, horned skulls, cared a damn about the semantics of what they were killing.
Alter had ridden out with a skinning crew for several weeks, chronicling their lives and gory, lonely work. He had lived and worked as one of them, though they joked he had no stomach for it. The demands for the hides back East were bringing more and more men, mostly restless young soldiers from the war, out to the frontier.
Alter understood that gnawing restlessness all too well, an unseen wound of the war. It was like a metal spring—humming, made of bright, warm brass—wound too tight inside you. He had felt it after the war. Sitting in one place too long would wind the spring tighter, make it snap from the tension. A soft bed, a quiet meal, silence in the darkness could fill him with a tension that he could not voice or explain to anyone who had not seen the elephant, and men did not speak of such things to one another in polite conversation. Men didn’t speak of it at all, if they could.
The pressure, the restlessness, was one of the reasons, perhaps the primary reason Alter had taken the position offered to him by The Herald. It afforded him the opportunity to travel—movement, the hint of action, those things seemed to unwind the bright coil within him. His parents, who had objected to him joining the Union Army, objected to him working for the newspaper too. They thought it unseemly, cheap and far beneath him. He didn’t care; he loved it.
Alter had used the trip West for the buffalo piece as an excuse to work on a second story, one he thought even more indicative of the dark side of the great frontier. Chinese railroad workers for Union Pacific were making thirty-two dollars a month in wages compared to the fifty-two dollars their white peers earned, and this was causing a row among those whites seeking work, and a growing anti-Chinese sentiment that the immigrants were unfairly competing for jobs. Alter had seen this less as an insidious plot by immigrants and more of an underhanded act by the Rail Barons to exploit cheap labor from an alien people far from home and with no protection or advocates.
He hoped he could convince his editors to run both stories; however, The Herald had a reputation for leaning a bit to the nativist ideology of the Know-Nothing Party. Still, he was bringing back an adventure tale of roughing it on the incomprehensibly vast plains. He had even sketched a few decent drawings of the mighty bison to include in the tale. The public back home was eager for any stories of the Wild West. Alter thought he had a chance of getting the labor story out, before things got truly ugly for the Chinese, by piggybacking it on a ripping yarn about cowboys.
Alter opened his copy of Around the Moon and tried to read again, but his attention kept drifting back to the woman. There was … something, something about her—about her bearing—that fascinated him. Whatever it was, it made it very hard for Cline to focus on Monsieur Verne’s prose. He used his skills as an investigator and professional observer to remain unobtrusive, and the lady’s continued lack of notice seemed to indicate he was doing a fine job.
A few aisles away, the object of Alter Cline’s attentions watched the Utah mountains drift pass her window. Maude Stapleton felt the young man’s eyes moving over her. He was trying very hard to be discreet, behind his book, and to untrained eyes he was doing a fine job, but there were few upon the Earth with senses as keen as Maude’s.
Maude’s mind drifted to Constance, her daughter, and to Martin, her father, and to all that lay ahead of her. That made her think of Mutt, of Golgotha, and of what she was leaving behind. She was pulled from her thoughts by the young man’s eyes, as insistent to her as if he had tapped her on the shoulder and cleared his throat.
The attention was pleasant and, if she allowed it, her blood would act of its own accord and produce a physiologic reaction, and she would blush. Maude decided it was best not to encourage the stranger, so she didn’t blush. She had only allowed herself that freedom, that dizzy abandonment—out of control of her body and emotions—with one living man, and this train was taking her farther and farther away from him, possibly forever.
Maude did not consider herself a woman who attracted notice; in fact, she had been taught how to blend in, not even becoming a memory in the minds of others. However, the young man seemed rather focused in his attention on her. Her features might be called plain, handsome, or mannish by some men. Maude could give less than a damn what “some men” thought.
Besides herself and her admirer, a Chinese family—a husband, wife and their two small children—were the only occupants of the passenger car. When Maude had boarded the train at Hazen, the closest train station to Golgotha, the conductor, a corpulent man, sweating in his heavy, dark-blue coat with
fancy brass buttons, had tried to roust the Chinese from the car.
“Don’t you worry your pretty little head, ma’am,” the conductor said, brandishing a wooden truncheon at the obviously terrified family, “I’ll chase these coolies straight back to the nigger car. They won’t give you a lick of trouble.”
The father stood, about to interpose himself between this ugly little man and his family. Maude caught his eye and silently entreated him for patience. She turned to the conductor.
“I’m sure that will not be necessary,” she said as she shifted her body language and vocal tone with the conductor, locking eyes with the odious creature. “You are a kind man, a merciful man, someone of great power and responsibilities. I can see that in your manner and bearing, sir. Obviously, such a menial chore is far beyond a man of your importance, isn’t it?”
“Er, I mean to say … yes?” the conductor muttered. He found himself absently nodding with each subtle movement of this woman’s head, her hands. Maude’s voice was gently playing upon his nerves like she might pluck the strings of a harp.
“In fact, don’t you think it’s best they stay here with me, where they won’t distress the other passengers?” In the end, the man had thought it his own idea, which was precisely what Maude had intended.
“Thank you,” the father had said, in English, as the conductor lumbered away, very pleased with himself. “We are returning to New York to work in my uncle’s business. My job on the railroad is complete. I did not know we were not allowed…”
“It’s a foolish rule, created by foolish people,” Maude replied in one of the Yue dialects of Chinese that Gran had taught her. “He won’t trouble you again. I hope you and your family enjoy your trip.” One of the children, the little boy, looked at her in amazement, having never heard the language of his parents coming out of a white person’s mouth before. Maude smiled. The little boy waved and Maude waved back. The boy hid his face in his mother’s lap and giggled.
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