The Fugitive and the Vanishing Man

by Rod Duncan

  “No. But you should be!”

  “Are you thinking of a name?”

  “I am.”

  “Then try to keep my mind out from yours.”

  She held the ivory tablet to her forehead and fixed him with her eyes. Silence pressed down on the room. No one had seen such a competition. The fire crackled, shooting out a spark. As if that had been her cue, the woman shifted the tablet behind her back with one hand and the pencil with the other, and seemed to begin writing. The court magician looked to the crowd, smiling. The woman finished what she was doing and held out the ivory tablet once more, so the blank side showed.

  “What name did you think?” she asked.

  “You failed,” he said, then addressing the room. “She has failed. I thought of no name. I directed my mind elsewhere. If she had a grain of power, she’d know this.”

  “Then where did you direct your thoughts?”

  “To our glorious flag.”

  “Then what does it show?”

  “A blue pentagram,” said the king. “A five-pointed star on black cloth.”

  “What would be the punishment if I failed?” she asked.

  “To be thrown from the battlements,” said the magician.

  “What about my son?”

  “He will be thrown before you.”

  All this time she’d kept the writing tablet in the air above her head, in full view. A cunning observer might have noticed the hint of a tremble in her grip, as her thumb moved over the hidden side. But it was her eyes that held them, wide and staring. She placed the tablet face down on her palm, offering it to her enemy.

  “Carry this to your king,” she said. “Ask him to show mercy.”

  Something held the magician back from turning it over. Fear perhaps. He lurched towards the fire, as if to cast it into the flames.

  “Cease!” the king shouted. “You will bring it to me.”

  And so he did, his steps slowing as he approached the throne. It was the king who turned over that sliver of ivory to reveal a pentagram marked in pencil, a shaky line, very much as if it had been written behind the woman’s back.

  Seeing it, the magician fell onto his knees, crying “Mercy.”

  But his powers had been beaten by hers.

  He gabbled excuses and apologies as they hauled him up the stairs with the king leading and the whole court following in a mass behind. But he had fixed his own punishment with all of them as witness.

  His words had run out by the time a cloth bag was pulled over his head. He stopped struggling, went over the battlements limp and without a cry, so that the slack sound of his body hitting the rocks came faint but clear from far below.

  The king turned to the woman who had so ably defeated his magician. Her fame would spread. Found in a tavern, she had beaten his own man.

  “Will you stay with us?” he asked. He had no choice, really, though there’d never been a woman in such a position of power. First Counsellor and magician to the king.

  She bowed. “Yes, sire.”

  When at last they returned to the hall, her son was released and came running to hold her. She held him, wiped his tears and stroked his hair, saying, “Hush now, Edwin. All is well. We have found our new home.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Elizabeth’s boarding house smelled of boiled cabbage from the kitchen and turpentine from the factory next door. Her stolen money would have paid for a room in the best hotel. But she was wearing a poor man’s clothes. She could have walked into a tailor’s shop and had a smart suit prepared, but that too would have attracted gossip. It came to her, not for the first time, that changing appearance from one class to another was no less troublesome than swapping between genders. Either could be accomplished in secret. But a witness to the act would always feel disquiet.

  On her first day in Cleveland, she stayed inside her small room, staring at cracks in the ceiling plaster, listening to conversations through the walls, which seemed little more than cardboard. In the evening she went out, walked a few blocks following her nose, found a street of food vendors with barrows and oil lamps. Such a variety, she had never seen together. Unfamiliar scents of hot oils and spices drifted with steam lit yellow in lamplight. She stopped at a barrow adorned with Chinese writing, didn’t know what anything was called so pointed and watched as a mound of rice and meats of different kinds were scooped into a paper cone. Nor did she have the skill of eating with wooden sticks, so bought a spoon as well. The flavours were unfamiliar but delicious. A strange saltiness left her thirsty, so she strolled further down the street to a stall selling bottled beer from buckets of melting ice. Taking her lead from other customers, she drank right there on the roadside.

  As the sky darkened, more traders came out and the night market spread. Elizabeth stopped by a clothing stall. All manner of second-hand garments had been arranged on a canvas sheet, patched and darned. She asked if she might try on a coat. It seemed a fawn colour, though it was hard to be sure in the lamplight. It hung to her knees, but had been cut with a long back vent for riding. The sleeves were only an inch too long and, best of all, it had a quilted lining.

  The Cleveland air terminus would be watched by the Patent Office. But airships travelling west routinely put down in Vermillion, some forty miles from the city, for fuelling and to take on provisions.

  Three days after arriving, Elizabeth found her way to that stopover, bought a ticket and watched the airship approaching. The ground crew were ready. Three other passengers waited. Had they been agents, she thought she would have recognised them. It was a stopover, no more. A field next to the edge of the lake. The engines slowed as it descended, men caught the trailing ropes and made it fast before wheeling out a set of steps. Elizabeth showed her ticket and climbed aboard.

  She was surprised to find that she didn’t look out of place among the passengers. They were an odd assortment. Some expensively dressed, some in workers’ clothes, like hers. Mostly men but a scattering of women. A mixture of races.

  She took a seat on the port side.

  A white man in a top hat stood pointing out of a starboard cabin window.

  “The fuel’s brought in by ship,” he said. “You can see the jetty. The Vermillion stopover was established thirty-eight years ago by…”

  A wrinkle-faced man sitting opposite met Elizabeth’s eyes. His cheekbones were high and he had the complexion of a first-nationer. He leaned towards her and whispered, “You should have been with us in Cleveland. He was schooling the captain on the science of air travel. It’s going to be a long trip!”

  Elizabeth had never mastered the art of male laughter, but she grinned.

  The man’s name was Conway. Out of habit, she gave hers as Edwin, only thinking afterwards that it was her brother’s real name and that when the two-thousand-mile journey was drawing to a close, she would need to learn some other alias. In case he did yet live. She felt a pang of uncertainty mixed with hope. If her brother was there, perhaps too the mother that she’d lost.

  The engines roared, drowning out the discourse of the man in the top hat. The ship began to move forwards and tilt back in a steep climb. She watched the land receding below.

  “You know why I choose to face backwards?” Conway asked.

  She shook her head, expecting him to explain but he did not.

  The next stop was Joliet, outside Chicago. As the man in the top hat explained to the carriage, fewer stops would mean carrying more fuel which in turn would mean less passengers and cargo. Though it slowed the journey, it lowered the costs. And lower costs were good for the bottom line.

  Not caring to hear an explanation of what the bottom line was, Elizabeth stood and edged between the seats to a rack of newspapers at the back of the carriage. She rotated her shoulders, then stretched out her arms, coaxing her muscles into relaxation. Had she been dressed as a woman, such an exuberant taking up of space would have drawn frowns of disapproval. Selecting a copy of the Lewiston Morning Tribune, she returned to her seat.

/>   Lewiston was a border town, the most westerly settlement before the wilds of the Oregon Territory. That meant a military presence. A regiment of border guards were billeted there, protecting the civilised world from what lay beyond. It was the administrative base for the maintenance of many hundreds of miles of border fence. Then there were all the traders who served the military, and the traders who served them.

  With the paper spread on her knee, she perused a report of a bar brawl between soldiers and townsfolk. Other articles reported on a parade, and on the replacement of a fifty mile stretch of the border fence being put out to tender. There were a great many adverts, which she skimmed over. But on page five she found a story of particular interest. Bending low over the small type, she read of a woman, known only as Mrs Arthur, and two men, who were said to be her husbands. They had been charged with gold smuggling and found guilty. It was the seventh time they’d been caught and fined. The judge described them as reprobates and recidivists of the first order. It seemed unlikely they would desist, the Tribune observed, since the maximum permissible fine was clearly less than the money they were making on each trip back and forth across the fence.

  Their crime was to carry factory made goods out of the Gas-Lit Empire into the wilds and return some weeks later with a quantity of gold in the form of dust and small nuggets. Glassware, hand mirrors and brightly coloured linen were apparently popular with the people beyond. The article stated that Mrs Arthur and her husbands lived in a cabin on the north side of Snake River, away from the town.

  From the context of the article, it didn’t seem that having more than one husband was illegal or surprising, though the writer clearly disapproved. Elizabeth felt an instant liking for the woman. It was also proof that crossing the border was possible and not so dangerous as she might have feared.

  Feeling a hand on the newspaper, she looked up. Conway was leaning forwards.

  “Did you solve my riddle?” he asked.

  “Riddle?” Elizabeth had been absorbed in Mrs Arthur’s story. She glanced around the cabin. The man in the top hat was no longer lecturing the entire carriage, but was directing his wisdom towards a much younger woman sitting next to him.

  “Why do I sit facing backwards?” Conway prompted.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “Then why did you choose to face forwards?”

  “The seat was free.”

  He half smiled, making her think that she’d missed his point.

  “I’ve a question for you,” she said. “But it may seem rude.”

  “I’m not so easily shocked. But ask quietly, if you’re shy.”

  “I’m reading about a woman with two husbands. But I thought the first-nationers did it the other way around – one husband with many wives?”

  Conway shrugged. “There are five hundred nations here, they say, though I couldn’t name them all. We each have our own ways and customs. But you know, it’s often the white folks who come out west so they can live like that. The law won’t countenance it in the Free States or the Confederacy. Not all the white race are such good people. And I should warn you, border towns like Lewiston attract the worst of them.”

  “What makes you think I’m going there?”

  “The paper.”

  “Oh. Yes. You’re right.”

  “What business takes you to the border?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for work.”

  “Are you now?” The raised eyebrow suggested he didn’t believe it. “What’s your trade?”

  “I’m good with my hands,” she said, causing him to look at them. Realising the mistake, she stuffed them into her trouser pockets and pushed her knees further apart, in the way that men do.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “It’s a long journey. And you’re a puzzle. You’re English, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Most English I see out west are rich boys come to shoot buffalo. Or men with nothing to lose, signing up for the border guard. Escaped prisoners. Men with debts they’ll never pay. Sometimes there’s a professor who wants to see people like me living in tents and wearing beads, so he can go home and give lectures or write a book. What kind of Englishman are you, Mr Edwin?”

  It came to her, then, and so she said it: “You sit facing back so you can see where you’ve been.”

  He grinned. “Bravo. Most folks want to think about where they’re going. But the only thing you can be sure of in this world comes from facing the other way.”

  She couldn’t tell if he meant it or if he was having fun at her expense, playing a role for a gullible tourist. It felt more like a word game than a gem of folk wisdom.

  On the second day, they put down at Sioux Falls to take on a great quantity of packages and provisions. Most of the passengers disembarked. Elizabeth watched through the cabin window as they collected their baggage. One night sleeping upright in a chair had been bad enough. She wished she could be getting off as well.

  Having lost most of his audience, the man in the top hat came across the aisle to sit next to Conway. He introduced himself as Colonel Martinshaw and would have lectured them on the divisions of the border regiment if Elizabeth hadn’t feigned sleep.

  That evening they put down at Billings for a longer stop. They were obliged to disembark while engineers inspected the boilers and carried out routine maintenance. Following Conway’s lead, she arranged three chairs in the waiting room and lay down across them, thus managing a couple of hours’ sleep.

  Travelling on through the night, Elizabeth felt nauseous with fatigue. She woke again with dawn coming up and the sensation of the craft descending. Below lay mile after mile of wooded hills.

  “Is this it?” she asked.

  Conway put a finger to his lips and leaned forwards. “Don’t wake our friend here or he’ll relate the history of Post Falls back to its founding. That’s where we’re about to land.”

  Martinshaw’s head lolled and his eyes were closed. The top hat lay between his feet on the floor.

  “I’ve solved the puzzle,” Conway whispered.

  “What puzzle?”

  “You. We’ve been two days in the air. Look at the colonel here. His chin’s dark with stubble. But you…”

  Without thinking, Elizabeth raised a hand to cover her mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” said Conway. “I won’t tell your secret.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Some doors must be kicked through. Others will open to a touch. It is the eternal challenge of those who counsel kings to determine which door is which. That and deciding what to wear.

  “Enter!”

  At the king’s command, Edwin slipped through into the observatory. “Sire.”

  “Oh, it’s you.” A note of disappointment.

  At a wave from the royal hand, a glint from that fat ruby on his finger, the servants were bowing and backing away. Edwin waited until they were quite gone before approaching.

  The observatory was an octagonal room with a vaulted roof and glass windows on four sides. The large brass telescope had been angled down as if someone had been watching the boats on the river. Edwin had never seen the king using it. But the observatory was the place in which he seemed most relaxed.

  Fully en femme today, Edwin curtsied deep and slow. Blue silk from shoulder to ankle, clinging to show curves of hip and waist. A pale-yellow scarf. Earrings that might have been sapphires, but were glass.

  “It won’t do,” the king said.

  “What, sire?”

  “You’re here to beg that I change my mind. About the ox. But I say it won’t do. The animal must be killed.”

  Only two days remained until the full moon, the appointed time for the sacrifice. Preparations had already begun.

  “It’s my job to offer counsel,” Edwin said. “Won’t you listen?”

  “I can’t go back on my word. It’s been announced. I know you’re squeamish about these things. But there we go. It’s done. You’ll have to make the best of it.”

  �
�Janus set me up.”

  “Maybe he did. But the people need to be reassured. They need to know what the future will bring. And we haven’t had a show like this for years. So he was right, in a way. You’re not saying my consort doesn’t deserve such a spectacle?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Good! It’s what we’ve always done. Since before your time. Before your mother too. You’d best remember that.”

  “I only want you to consider the danger.”

  The king began to circle Edwin. When he was directly behind, he said: “Do you think I treat you differently like this? Is that why you put on a dress? Of all your magic, this is the bit I don’t understand.”

  Edwin felt the king’s touch, a finger brushing over the silk from shoulder to arm. There was a hint of pine resin in the air as he passed around to the side. The royal hand took the loose hem of the sleeve and rubbed the silk, like a dressmaker gauging quality.

  “I don’t always know why I dress one way or the other,” Edwin said, though the king had been right. This time it had been deliberate. To be deferential as a man was just as easy. But feminine deference felt somehow different. A different flavour, perhaps. If they’d been meeting in public, it wouldn’t have gone well. But in the privacy of the observatory, the curtsy and lowered gaze had often drawn a response that seemed almost paternal.

  “Be careful,” the king said.

  “Of what?”

  “Some of the men lust after you. And they hate themselves for it. I don’t want to lose another magician.”

  It was the first time the king had shown such an insight. Edwin wondered why he’d chosen that moment to speak it. Perhaps he’d noticed the way Timon had been staring. There were others, macho men whose eyes would follow the curve of a body sheathed in silk. But the king’s brother had never needed to learn restraint like an ordinary soldier.

  “It’s Janus I’m afraid of,” Edwin said. “He hates me.”

  “I wouldn’t call it hate. But he rather loves himself, I’ll grant you that. He was here not long ago. I’m surprised you didn’t pass on the stairs.”