by Anne Groß
Thomas frowned. Without the rules, a fight would be just outand-out eye-gouging, hair pulling, kicks to the groin street fighting. It took only a moment to adjust to the new information, the equivalent of a mental shrug. So, he wouldn’t be shaking O’Brian’s hand or wishing him luck. If that’s the way the man wanted it, so be-it; that suited Thomas just fine. No rules, no false formalities.
His vision narrowed as his breathing deepened. The noise from the crowd faded from his consciousness as he found his balance and rolled his shoulders. He lifted fists that filled with an energy he’d taken for granted most of his life.
“Unhand me, vile woman!” cried a voice. “Get back!”
A scuffle, loud and heated, broke out in the audience. Thomas sucked in a breath. He would not allow himself to be distracted this time. She would not break his concentration. He took a wide step to the side—scratch lines were meaningless without the Rules. But she remained a blur in his peripheral vision.
O’Brian’s smile was smug and enraging. His eyes darted to the audience to assess the situation, then locked on Thomas as the scuffle broadened to involve more people.
Again, Thomas was forced to step to the side as a man was pushed into the middle of the ring. He heard Elise yelp in pain, and quickly scanned the crowd to find her. She was using her elbows to maintain her position in the front row. Richard’s white shirt slipped over her rounded shoulder and down her arm, revealing the corset she wore underneath. Through its tight laces, Thomas imagined he could see the glow of the strange jewel he knew she kept hidden between her breasts. The vision flooded him with an uncomfortable heat.
Circling to the right, Thomas put O’Brian directly between himself and Elise to block his view. Yet over O’Brian’s shoulder, he was drawn to look at her hair churning like a dark storm around her determined face. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have known that it was O’Brian’s view of Elise he was blocking, and not his own.
Someone pushed her to the floor. Recovering instantly, she slammed her slight body back against the crowd and the circle of men stretched like a knitted stocking to accommodate her. She crouched, elbows out, head down, ready for a second challenge, but none came. A smug, victorious smile played across her lips. She looked up with her green glittering eyes and met Thomas's gaze.
Suddenly his vision exploded in stars. O’Brian’s well-aimed left hook threw him sideways into three men who went down with him. The crowd jeered. They were churned up by bad rum and first blood, and gave him only seconds to clear his head before catapulting him back into the fight. That damned woman, Thomas thought as he was launched through the air, the image of her sharp features seared in his mind. Like a bull, he put his head down and caught O’Brian under his ribcage with his shoulder and flipped him up over his back. He turned in time to see his opponent land with a heavy thud.
“Get up, you bugger!” Thomas ordered. O’Brian was struggling to regain the breath that had been knocked out of him. He grabbed O’Brian by the collar and lifted him to his feet. “Stand and fight! You’ll not get off that easy.”
Still gasping, O’Brian managed to stand and lift his hands, but the audience didn’t appreciate that Thomas gave him time to recover. He was shoved, called names, spit upon, anything to get him to stop circling and start swinging. Finally, Thomas feinted left, and swung right. O’Brian ducked away, but ever the Irishman, he came back with a straight jab, fast and hard. It connected.
Again Thomas skittered back into the crowd, this time caught by Richard. “What the hell is wrong with you, Tom?” Richard muttered into his ear. “Pay attention. He’s swinging with his left.” He gave him a slug of rum from his canteen before pushing him back out into the ring.
Thomas heard Elise’s voice rising above the cheers of the crowd, but this time he didn’t look up. He needed both eyes on the grinning O’Brian, but now one of them was swelling shut.
He watched for his opportunity. A calm settled upon him as he kept himself out of the way of a third jab. Thomas had learned long ago that wild punches were effective only if you were lucky. He wasn’t in the habit of trusting luck. He needed to learn O’Brian’s style, and quickly, to use it against him. Keeping his hands raised, he watched his opponent’s chest as it rose and fell. The moment when that one breath was caught, lungs filling for the effort of throwing another fist, would be the moment O’Brian would be finished.
The sensation of heat rose from his fists up through his arms and into his shoulders and chest. The crowd faded away from his thoughts. Now there was only O’Brian. Thomas felt his muscles prickle with a flush of blood under his skin, hot and engaged. The deck floor rocked gently with the waves in the protected harbor and Thomas’s knees bent with the changes in the floor’s incline. Forward, back, forward, back, they rocked.
In the end, it wasn’t any one thing that finally launched Thomas and Ben O’Brian against each other. It was the irritating creak of the anchor chain; it was the bead of sweat that pooled in an ear; it was a small bubble of intestinal gas, unconsciously released. It was any and none of these things. Instinct took over, and Thomas was no longer the man he wanted to be. He was, once again, the man he was accustomed to being.
As a child at the Quiet Woman, it had been his job to punch down the dough after it rose. Growing up, he’d helped to bake countless loaves of bread in the warm kitchen behind the bar. He’d learned that to create a sustenance, a violence occurred. The transition from kneading bread to kneading patrons to persuade them to pay outstanding bills hadn’t been too difficult. The concept was the same, in practice as well as principle.
Every time his scarred knuckles connected with O’Brian’s face, Thomas was making bread in that wooden bowl. There was a fairness to it, a practicality. Unlike the last time when he’d lost control and beat that Frenchman to within an inch of his life, this fight was well considered. Three swings and a pause for a breath. Three more swings. Three more. They didn’t all land and they weren’t too hard. After all, O’Brian sparred better than most, and he was, as Patrick had reminded him, a member of his company. Their lives together were just beginning. Today they fought each other, tomorrow they’d fight side by side against a common enemy.
O’Brian stumbled and went down on one knee. It was already nearly over.
There was no hitch to the Irishman’s breath or flicker in his eyes. Nothing to warn Thomas that O’Brian would kick his feet out from under him. By the time he realized what happened, he was already staring at the ceiling. A second kick to his ribs knocked the air out of him and caused him to curl. He threw his arms over his head, insulating him from O’Brian’s vicious left foot.
Thomas had also done his fair share of grinding meat in the Quiet Woman’s kitchen. This now seemed more appropriate. When he was ready, he turned and took O’Brian’s right ankle into his hands and pulled hard. In the space of a breath, he was astride the downed man.
The swing that Thomas landed was a full-out, shoulder driven, cross from the right. It should have knocked the bastard out cold. Instead, it opened Thomas up for a counter that sent white-hot pain through his gut. The knife wound that hadn’t quite healed completely was slammed by a deliberately aimed blow. Again he was on the floor with his knees pulled up, this time because his abdomen wouldn’t uncurl. Thomas felt peeled open and turned out. He heard, rather than saw O’Brian struggle to pull himself on his feet. Then the man’s face, pulped and swollen, loomed over him. His teeth were red with blood when he grinned and cocked his fist. Everyone on deck hushed.
“Move one muscle and you’ll be skewered,” growled a strange voice. The sound of steel sliding from a scabbard made both fighters freeze. Despite the fact that Lieutenant James Mason was half his age and forty pounds lighter, Thomas didn’t doubt his warning. Beyond the sword that was pointed at his neck, Thomas could see a group of well-heeled gentlemen surveying the situation with stern faces as the scruffy crowd of infantry and whores began to slink away. The officers had returned to the ship.
“What in the name of God is happening here?” demanded Major Letchfeld. His long sideburns trembled with outrage over his round jowls. His tight waistcoat stretched dangerously as he took an affronted breath.
As the lieutenant lifted his sword to allow Thomas the space to stand, Sergeant Taylor stepped in. “Get up, you damned bastards,” he shouted unnecessarily. Both men were scrambling to their feet already. Sergeant Taylor had been whoring with the rest of the infantry while the officers were gone, but now he was wearing his jacket as though it’d never left his body. The brass buttons gleamed with hypocrisy.
“Come, come, men. Stand up, show some spirit,” Major Letchfeld barked. “You’d no trouble fighting like cockerels five minutes ago, let’s see you stand now.”
Thomas smoothed his black hair away from his face and came to attention. The wound in his side burned as he stretched his torso to its complete height.
The major’s eyes widened in surprise. “Well, aren’t you a craven looking beast? Look at this man, James,” he said to his lieutenant, pointing a plump finger. Mason sheathed his sword and peered curiously at Thomas.
“Eyes down!” screamed Sergeant Taylor. “Keep your bloody insolent eyes down!”
“Do you see? On view here,” continued the major in a conversational tone, “is an extraordinary example of the moral degradation in our rank and file. They can’t help it, you know, it’s the low breeding.” He brought his face inches away from Thomas to study him. “Tell me, Private. . .?”
“Private MacEwan, sir!”
“Tell me, Private MacEwan: what was your crime ere you took the king’s shilling? Were you a thief? No? A rapist, perhaps? Had you murdered? Ah, yes. Murderer.” The major made a satisfied cluck, having perceived some kind of twitch, some indication in Thomas’s face that he’d found the correct crime. “One can always tell these things, James. You’ll learn. You’ll learn, given enough time. You see, faces never lie, and this brute wears the marks of an illustrious life on his face.”
“So you say, sir,” Lieutenant Mason diplomatically replied. Thomas kept his chin up and his eyes glazed. “Shall I have these men flogged, sir?”
Thomas felt rather than saw O’Brian stiffen next to him, a surprising feat given their already rigidly at-attention bodies. A flogging would mean only a dozen more scars if he was lucky, fifty if he was not. He wondered what kind of man the major was—a cruel man or a fair man.
“What a devil of a thing to have to do, just as we leave for battle. No, James. I think not. There’s no time. Too much to do before we can get under weigh. But, by God, Sergeant Taylor, I order you to watch this sly dog. Do you hear, Private MacEwan? You will be carefully watched.”
“Yes, sir!” shouted Thomas.
The major was a lazy man, thought Thomas, the very worst kind of leader.
ON YOUR MARKS
“This is unacceptable!”
The scholars looked at the floor, they looked at the ceiling, they looked anywhere but at Napoleon Bonaparte, who was imperiously waving one finger in the air. All eight of them, to a man, were thankful not to have to speak directly to the Emperor—that exalted task being the responsibility of their project leader, the famous alchemist Heinrich von Flugelderhorn, brought all the way from his country estate outside of Vienna.
“You promised a formula. I see none before me. Where is my formula?” Bonaparte demanded, his finger now jabbing the blank scroll on the massive marble table in front of him.
The sound of air being sucked slowly through the emperor’s flared nostrils momentarily masked the sound of the dripping and bubbling solutions contained in a jungle of pipes and beakers assembled between the alchemists and their employer. With Napoleon’s captured breath, the noises returned, loud and unbearable like the squeaks of a trephine slowly working against the skull.
“To create a working formula,” von Flugelderhorn explained, “one must first have all the data, know all the variables.” In a gesture common to all professors of philosophy, he pulled his monocle away from his face with a patronizing smile, pausing to allow Napoleon the time to catch up with his reasoning. Then, placing his monocle back in his ocular orbit, he tapped a sheet of paper he didn’t need and wasn’t reading, and continued. “You see, we have only a small portion of the information nee—”
“I do not accept this!” Napoleon shouted. “You’ve had days. Weeks. And I see no progress. If you need further data, then get the data. Get it!”
Von Flugelderhorn nodded and smiled a conciliatory smile. Then he gestured to bring to Napoleon’s attention all the various scattered papers filled with lists of numbers and markings from languages long dead, and followed this with an almost imperceptible bow, nearly a shrug, indicating an inability to fight fate. He adjusted his monocle and cleared his throat. “Ahem. One cannot, you know, rush these kinds of investigations, your highness. These things take—”
“Time? I have no time! There is no time! Do not ask for time!”
With a great sweep of his arm, Napoleon cleared the table of everything in front of him. Glass exploded against the wall and on the floor. Chemical reactions began happening at random, fizzing and sparking in puddles that spread dangerously across the table. A cloud of noxious green steam hung over the mess causing handkerchiefs to appear at everyone’s noses. “England has the Stone, you idiot,” screamed Napoleon. ‘England has the Stone! How is it that you can speak twelve languages and yet understand nothing? Nothing!”
“Your highness,” started von Flugelderhorn as he slid shards of glass from the top of a particularly important sheaf of papers that was in danger of melting. “Please don’t misunderstand. Concurrent to these experiments, we are decoding the copies of the Rosetta Stone. And anyway, England is at least two years behind us and not aware that they’re engaged in a race. Even if they were to decipher it first, it would only be to our advantage. After all, should they make an important discovery, do you not think they’d share the information? Of course they would. They would trumpet their findings all over the globe just to embarrass France. England may laugh, but ours will be the last laugh.”
“YOUR EMPEROR WILL NOT LAUGH!” Napoleon’s shout rang out like a sledgehammer against the stone walls of the laboratory. Von Flugelderhorn had to concede the truth in that point.
He tried another tack: “I should say, despite difficulties deciphering the Rosetta Stone and the resultant delay in our ability to translate the Thoth tablets, we’ve been making headway with Nicolas Flamel’s notes.” He pushed an enormous tome along the table, a manuscript illuminated in brilliant inks of all colors on delicate vellum, and swung it around for Napoleon to read. “You see these scribbles in the margins of the text, here, and here?” He pointed to barely legible notes that surrounded Flamel’s text and lowered a magnifying glass for the emperor to see. Napoleon pulled it closer to himself to study the script. “Do you see? There. No, not there. There, where I’m pointing. We missed it initially, thinking it was merely the annotations of an uneducated monk, but luckily young Mougandmot here has excellent eyes. He saw that our good monk added quite a bit to Flamel’s text. Given this new information, we’re now able to theorize that what Flamel called the ‘breath of the dragon’ is—”
“So then you did find the formula!” Napoleon’s narrow eyes grew less narrow with excitement.
“Well. . . no.”
“No?”
“No. But we were able to theorize that the ‘breath of the dragon’ is—”
Von Flugelderhorn gasped in horror as the precious, handwritten fourteenth century book was hurled against the wall. Miraculously, the ancient leather binding held, although interior pages were unforgivably crimped.
“I’ll hear no more of your theories and postulations! I want only results! Results!” cried Napoleon. “Do I make myself clear?�
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The silence in the room was thick. Everyone nodded. The emperor glared at each scholar in turn and no one met his eyes. He straightened his waistcoat with a sharp downward yank in the kind of gesture that ends conversations. “Decode the Stone and translate the Thoth tablets. Forget Flamel. Forget these ridiculous experiments here. Flamel’s text is merely a shadow of what the tablets will reveal. Stop toying with your endless recipes like women and concentrate on the Stone. Europe can become united in only two ways: through war, or through Thoth. The sons of our Empire depend upon you. They tire of war.”
It was hard not to feel the truth of Napoleon’s barb—they did, all of them, so enjoy the hopeful promise of an alchemical recipe. Iterating each formula, in a controlled and slightly tweaked manner between each experiment, was the kind of work that made one breathless with wonder. Every alteration to the recipe held possibility. Each chemical reaction was met with excitement. Indeed, every single one of the men in that laboratory, at one time or another, wondered, red-faced, if they truly differed from a coven of witches hovering over a kettle.
The thought reminded von Flugelderhorn of something else. “Speaking of war, perhaps we may have solved a problem of an entirely different nature?” He waited for Napoleon to nod before charging ahead. “Jean-Claude, quickly! Show the emperor what you’ve discovered.”
A young alchemist, surprised at suddenly being singled out, dropped a pair of beaker tongs and they clattered loudly on the floor. “No, leave that. Leave the tongs, Jean-Claude. Go get the pot.” The young man nodded and ran out of the room.
“I think you’ll like what you see,” von Flugelderhorn said as they waited. They could hear Jean-Claude’s running footfalls on the marble floor, then a scrape of the soles of his feet as he slid into a turn at the end of the corridor. The sound of running grew distant.
A scholar in the back of the room coughed. Napoleon looked at the ceiling, then began flicking glass shards across the table towards a surviving experiment still bubbling over the heat of a candle. Von Flugelderhorn wiped a bead of sweat from his temple.