Gideon Smith and the Brass Dragon

by David Barnett

  “What is that noise?” asked Gideon.

  They saw the source soon enough in the gathering gloom. Tall towers topped with winding gears that clanked and banged in an endless, insidious rhythm; the burr of steel cables being wound onto immense turning barrels; the exhalation of steam from small, unlovely trains that tugged wheeled bins between the scattered workings. The whole landscape was blighted by the coal mines sunk deep into the Texas earth, and beneath the constant rattle and hum was another, more sonorous sound that Gideon realized was singing.

  From the bowels of the nearest mine a vast cage was being winched up to ground level, and emerging from it was a line of men, their shapeless clothing ragged. They were predominantly negroes, though scattered coal-dusted white men were among their number. It was the colored men who were singing, a low yet sweet lament.

  “Steal away, steal away! Steal away to Jesus! Steal away, steal away home! I ain’t got long to stay here!”

  Bent spat into the dry dust. “Slaves. I thought Wilberforce had done away with this sort of shit long ago.”

  “Across the Empire, maybe,” said Hart. “You’re not in the Empire anymore, Mr. Bent.”

  Gideon slowed his pace as the men fell into pairs and began to trudge forward. One of them glanced at Gideon then looked away.

  “My Lord calls me! He calls me by the thunder! The trumpet sounds in my soul! I ain’t got long to stay here!”

  “It’s barbaric,” said Gideon. The first time he had met Louis Cockayne, the Yankee had been in Africa, rounding up men to bring back to Texas. Now Gideon, who had freed Cockayne’s captives, knew where they had been bound.

  “At least they’re optimistic,” said Bent, sounding unconvinced. “All this talk of going home.”

  Around the mines were men with rifles who squinted at the newcomers. Hart raised a hand and nodded onward, in the direction the slaves were being marched. He turned to Gideon and said, “They’re not going anywhere, leastways alive. They’re singing for death.”

  “My Lord, he calls me! He calls me by the lightning! The trumpet sounds it in my soul! I ain’t got long to stay here!”

  Through the clamor and dust eddies of the mine Gideon could see lights ahead and the outline of wooden buildings.

  “Steamtown,” said Hart.

  “I thought we’d have more trouble getting in,” said Gideon.

  “As I said, it’s not getting in we have to worry about,” said Hart. “It’s getting out.”

  Bent moaned. “Jesus effing Christ. I’m a journalist. I shouldn’t be partaking in these madcap escapades.”

  Hart turned to Gideon. “Mr. Smith, if I might offer a word of advice.… You’re going to see some things in Steamtown that won’t be to your liking, not least of which is Thaddeus Pinch. My counsel is that you keep your opinions private until our mission is complete. We’re a long way from London, Mr. Smith. A very long way.”

  Ahead of them, the column of slaves was passing through a large gate. At either side of the gate tall coils of barbed wire rolled along the periphery of what he could now see was the main thoroughfare of a large town, lined with wooden houses and stores. Beyond he could see rickety tenements through wood smoke and steam mingled in the air. Coming the other way were more men, driven on by horsemen armed with rifles.

  “The night shift,” said Hart. “Steamtown’s mines work all day, all night.”

  “But Pinch can’t do this,” hissed Gideon. “Why isn’t Whitehall doing something?”

  “He can, and he does,” said Hart. “Rightly speaking, Pinch doesn’t call what he does slavery. He says the folks he brings down here—men for the mines, women for the brothels—are indentured.”

  “So why don’t they just walk away?” asked Bent.

  Hart shrugged. “They try, some of them. Those that don’t get a bullet in the back find they’ve nowhere to go. The desert is littered with the bleached bones of those who’ve tried to flee Steamtown.”

  “What do you mean by indentured?” asked Gideon as they approached the big gate. There were two men, one on either side, looking intently at them with raised Winchesters.

  “Pinch says they can work off their indentures, become free men. He reckons that takes ten years.”

  “Ten years!” said Bent. “I wouldn’t last five minutes down those mines.”

  “Me neither,” said Gideon. As a child he’d been terrified of enclosed, subterranean places ever since an ill-planned adventure in the caves near his home. He’d had to overcome his fears in Egypt, to save the day, but he had only just managed to conquer the terror he now felt crawling up his spine again at the thought of spending so much time underground.

  Hart smiled humorlessly. “Pinch works them so hard, only the strongest last long enough to earn their freedom. Average life expectancy down those mines? I’d say about five years.”

  They pulled up their horses at the gate. One of the armed men stepped forward and said, “What’s your business in Steamtown?”

  Hart said, “You know me. Tell Thaddeus Pinch I’m here. Tell him I’ve got with me two gentlemen from London to see him.”

  * * *

  “You know,” said Pinch, “folks like to believe that down here in Steamtown we’re little better than animals. That we are somehow inferior to other men. That we’re less cultured, less knowledgeable.”

  “My heart bleeds,” said Louis Cockayne. He was having trouble speaking, due to the fattened lip and at least two broken teeth he’d suffered in the beating Inkerman had taken great delight in inflicting on him in the dark, hot confines of the Steamtown smithy. Not Inkerman alone, of course, because the big ape was too cowardly for that. Inkerman and three others had punched and kicked Cockayne, setting about him with leather straps. One of them had fixed a cruel-looking set of brass knuckles to his hand, and Cockayne wasn’t wholly sure his jaw wasn’t broken. Now he was pushed forward over the wide anvil, a goon on each arm, looking forward over the blazing forge, beyond which Pinch ruminated. It had been bad. He was afraid it was going to get a lot worse.

  “We’re not barbarians, Louis,” continued Pinch. “I got some of the finest minds in the country down here, working on my designs, my engines. And some of us are very well-read indeed.”

  Cockayne said nothing, waiting for him to get to the point.

  When Pinch reached down and took the wooden handle of a long poker from the forge, Cockayne wished he’d used a different turn of phrase to himself.

  “I like reading about kings, Louis. Only fitting, for the King of Steamtown, that I should know my brethren down the long tail of history, no? Boys, take down his trousers.”

  Cockayne’s struggle earned a punch to the head that had him seeing stars. “Thaddeus…,” he said. “What the hell are you doing?”

  Pinch stared at the glowing orange tip of the length of forged steel. “Oh yes, I like to read about the kings and queens of old, Louis. You know Edward the Second? Sixth Plantagenet king, direct descendant of Henry the Second. Born in 1284, died 1327. Do you know how he met his end?”

  Cockayne shook his head. Pinch held the glowing tip close to Cockayne’s eyes, so close he could feel the heat prickling his bloodied and bruised flesh.

  “They shoved a red-hot poker up his ass.”

  “Pinch…,” began Cockayne, but the King of Steamtown had already moved out of his sight line. Cockayne’s head was gripped, facing him forward. He felt the heat on his buttocks. He roared, “Pinch!”

  “Last chance, Louis,” called Pinch behind him. “You know how much it’s gotta hurt, having a red-hot poker stuck up your ass? You’re gonna die, Louis. Talk to me.”

  Cockayne screwed his eyes tight shut and spat in the glowing forge in front of him. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Okay, Thaddeus. I guess my memory’s coming back.”

  Pinch didn’t move from his position at Cockayne’s rear. He said, “I’m listening, Louis.”

  Cockayne took a deep breath then said, “The dragon? It’s Egyptian. Ancient Egyptian. Impossi
bly old technology. No one knows how the hell it works.”

  “You do, Louis,” said Pinch encouragingly. “You made it fly.”

  “Not really,” said Cockayne. “I was little more than a passenger. The dragon needs … it needs a girl.”

  There was a pause, then Pinch reappeared in front of Cockayne. “A girl? You pulling my dick, Louis?”

  “Not just any girl. She’s called…” Cockayne felt his heart thud into his stomach. “She’s called Maria. She’s a clockwork girl. With a human brain. Don’t ask me how the hell that works, Thaddeus, because I haven’t got a fucking clue. But it does work, and she flies the goddamn dragon.”

  Pinch slowly put the poker back in the forge, his eyes staring into the middle distance. He brought up his metal arm with an exhalation of steam and scratched his iron jaw. “A clockwork girl?”

  “Some shit to do with an artifact in her head,” said Cockayne. “Thaddeus? Can I pull my goddamn trousers up?”

  Pinch waved absently and the goons released Cockayne. He shrugged their hands off him and pulled up his trousers, glaring through a blackened, half-closed eye at Inkerman. Pinch seemed off in a world of his own.

  “A clockwork girl,” he said again. “Imagine that. She’s what I’ve been looking for all my life.” His gaze snapped toward Cockayne. “Where is she, this Maria?”

  Cockayne shook his head. “I don’t know, and that’s the God’s honest truth, Thaddeus. Something went wrong up there and we crashed. I woke up here. I haven’t got a clue where she is.”

  “Take him back to the pen,” said Pinch absently.

  “We aren’t going to kill him?” said Inkerman, sounding disappointed.

  “No, not yet,” said Pinch. “Inkerman, did you speak to Billy-Joe after he ran into the Nameless?”

  Cockayne raised an eyebrow. It hurt like hell. But the Nameless? What was he doing around these parts?

  Inkerman nodded. Pinch asked, “He mention this girl he saw, over the Nameless’s horse? The girl with the key in her back?”

  Cockayne felt suddenly sick. He’d saved his own hide, but at what cost? Maybe it would have been better to die with his secret. He spat out blood and half a tooth and asked, “What’re you going to do, Thaddeus?”

  Pinch clanked around in front of him. “Do, Louis? Why, I’m gonna find this Maria. She’s going to make my dragon fly, and then … well, the King of Steamtown needs a queen, don’t you think?”

  As the punks started to drag Cockayne out of the smithy, a burly man with a Winchester pushed past them, nodding nervously at Pinch. “Sir, I need to speak to you. You know the party we sent out to get those heads of beef, up north of the Wall?”

  Pinch shrugged. “They back?”

  “Only one, sir. Rest of ’em are dead.”

  Pinch frowned. “That rat-ass little cattle farmer has killed three of my boys?”

  The man screwed his hat up into a ball in his fists. “That’s not all, sir. You know Jeb Hart? The scout guy?”

  “Sure,” said Pinch. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “He’s at the gate, sir. With two gentlemen from London.”

  Pinch cast the briefest of looks at Cockayne. “Get him back to the pen,” he said. “And go tell Jeb Hart to bring his visitors to me. I’ll be at Madame Choo-Choo’s.”

  13

  MYTHS AND LEGENDS

  Her father was already back from Nuevo Laredo when Inez returned to Uvalde. She found him in his study in their casa, a bottle of jerez half done in already. He was poring over papers on his desk and didn’t see her standing in the doorway. Suddenly he roared, making her jump, and cast the papers over his shoulder.

  “Father?”

  He turned unsteadily, scraping his wooden chair around on the polished floorboards, and regarded her with a heavy-lidded stare. “Where have you been?”

  “Out,” she said. “Riding.”

  He turned back to the bottle and poured himself another measure. “You’re late. You have missed dinner. I saw Father Eduardo when I got back. He said you weren’t at church on Sunday. He said you haven’t been to church for several Sundays.”

  “Neither have you,” she said.

  His eyes blazed at her. “I am busy. What is your excuse?”

  She looked at her feet. Telling him that she had spent her Sunday mornings in the arms of Chantico would not be wise. It was all right for the Governor of Uvalde to be a lapsed Catholic, but not his daughter.

  “Father?” she said hesitantly. “Was there bad news at Nuevo Laredo?”

  “There is always bad news at Nuevo Laredo,” he said, slurring. “Bastards.”

  Inez was shocked. She had never heard him speak like that. He gestured toward the papers scattered across the floor. “They are raising our taxes. They are reducing their supply runs to us to once every two weeks. The garrison they have been promising for a whole year now will not materialize at all. Ciudad Cortes is increasing their taxes and cutting their supplies, so they do the same to us. Madrid wages war with France, so Ciudad Cortes feels abandoned. It goes right down the chain until it stops with us, and there is no one for us to raise taxes or abandon. They wish to forget about Uvalde. They wish us to disappear from their concern forever.” He pinched his nose. “When places feel abandoned, they draw in their borders, wish to feel more protected. I heard at Nuevo Laredo that some Indian trading party was slaughtered by Texan raiders just a few miles from the garrison.”

  Inez gasped, and before she could stop herself, she had already murmured, “They would not have done this to Don de la Garcia.” As the words left her lips she tried to reel them in, but it was of course useless.

  Her father’s red eyes blazed. “Don de la Garcia! Don de la Garcia! I am sick to high heaven of hearing of Don de la Garcia! Let his name never be uttered in this house again!”

  Then, so shockingly that Inez could barely believe she had heard it: “Bitch.”

  She gaped at him. “Father?”

  “You heard me,” he said. “You think Don de la Garcia cared so much for Uvalde? Then why is he sunning himself in luxury in Madrid, hmm? Answer me that!”

  Inez’s head swam with the insult. But she rallied and said, “You know he was summoned back. He had no say in the matter.”

  Even as she spoke, her father’s venomous words tolled in her head. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

  “Did I want the job? Did I want to step into Don de la Garcia’s oh-so-polished boots? No, I did not. But someone has to run the affairs of Uvalde. Someone has to keep this place from disappearing beneath the sands.”

  “Why did you call me … that word?” she asked quietly. “What would Mother say?”

  Don Juan Batiste stood unsteadily and weaved toward her. He sneered. “She would say, like mother, like daughter.”

  Inez felt the blood pound in her ears. “How dare you! How dare you speak of her in those words! She was my mother. Your wife.”

  “Your mother, my wife,” he echoed. “But that does not make you my daughter. You are old enough to know the truth now, Inez. You are not mine. That … that whore got herself caught out after spreading her legs for the ever-so-perfect Don Sergio de la Garcia. And I rescued her from penury and shame, took her little bastard on as my own.”

  Batiste brought his hand back and swiped it across Inez’s face. She was smaller, faster, and lither than her father. She could have dodged the blow. But shock kept her rooted to the spot. As the sting of his palm reddened her cheek, she vowed to herself that no man would ever touch her in that way again.

  “What do you think to that, hmm?” spat Batiste. “Don de la Garcia didn’t just abandon Uvalde. He abandoned his daughter, too.”

  But Inez had already clamped her hands to her ears and fled.

  * * *

  Inez sat on the flat roof of the casa, her refuge since she was a small child. Now her childhood hung off her in tatters. The man she had thought of as father had never been close to her, never loving, but she had convinced herself that that
was merely his character. Don Juan Batiste had been the Deputy Governor of Uvalde since before she was born, and now she knew that every day he must have looked upon his superior, Don de la Garcia, with his own wife and two daughters, knowing that his own child was really the governor’s.

  Inez’s mother had died six years ago of cholera, and she had taken the secret with her to the grave. Inez truly did not know how to feel. On the one hand, it all explained—and perhaps allowed her to forgive—Batiste’s aloofness toward her over the years. A part of her felt almost sorry for him. On the other … he had taken in Inez’s mother, heavy with child. It would have cost him nothing more than it already had to love them both unconditionally, rather than nursing the resentment that had suddenly burst forth. A bigger part of her, she decided, hated him.

  And she could not shake a tiny thrill at the thought that the handsome, dashing, courageous Don de la Garcia was actually her very own father.

  Night had fallen over Uvalde, and the lanterns brightly lit the town square beneath the casa. She had brought three oil lamps to illuminate the roof, and from within her cocoon of pale light she watched the market stalls being packed away, the cafés and tapas bars opening up. Cicadas chirruped in the darkness, and she closed her eyes and inhaled the faint aroma of pine from the plane trees in the dusty streets around the square.

  Pecan, and the scent of Chantico. She didn’t know why, but after fleeing her father’s study she had riffled through her bag for the stupid El Chupacabras costume he had made, and slipped into the tight trousers and black shirt. She hadn’t bothered retrieving his makeshift blade, instead grabbing a rapier from her father’s cabinet in the hallway. She really must teach Chantico some proper blade work, the true art of La Destreza. Stepping back from the raised edge of the roof, she hefted the rapier and assumed the guard position, giving her imaginary opponent the courtesy of a brief nod before dancing forward into the line of his invisible blade, stesso tempo, parrying his thrust and fluidly transforming her defense into an attack that swiftly finished off her enemy. Since the age of seven she had been a fencing expert. Perhaps she also had something of El Chupacabras—wherever he had gone—within her, as well as Don Sergio de la Garcia.