by D. J. Butler
Sam Clemens regained consciousness to the sound of gunfire. Some of it came from handguns but there was bigger artillery in the mix, he could hear it.
It took him a moment to remember where he was, and then another to realize why everything around him was dark.
He tried to move and discovered that his arms were free. He pushed, shifted planks away from his head, and found himself in a pile of rubble on the farmhouse floor. Yellow light from a kerosene lantern overhead illuminated a scene Sam had not expected to see.
Jug-eared, square-headed John D. Lee held the Englishman Fearnley-Standish hostage. He edged sideways towards Sam, facing off against an irate-looking bald man holding a scattergun aimed straight at the center of Fearnley-Standish’s head, as if he thought he could punch through both men in a single shot, and beside him hunched a woman who looked the part of his wife and hefted a heavy iron skillet in one fist. Young Annie Webb was with them, Annie who had been such a sweet conversationalist at Bridger’s Saloon, but who now held her skirts and petticoats hiked up with both fists clenched and gritted teeth, as if, of all things, she planned to kick Lee. Poe’s dwarf stood at bay in the corner of the room with a knife held up defensively in front of him, apparently protecting a huddle of children.
“Anybody tries to stop me, I kill the Englishman.”
Lee’s grip on Fearnley-Standish was not the conventional hostage-taking maneuver. He held the other man like one tired boxer clinches another, pinning Fearnley-Standish’s head to his own clavicle, and holding a Bowie knife to the side of the Englishman’s neck.
Sam clambered out, coughing at the dust his movements threw up. Lee stepped closer to him, and he saw what the other man was after.
A pistol lay on the floor between them.
Lee switched his knife to his other hand, pointing the tip now against Fearnley-Standish’s collarbone, and reached for the gun—
—Sam grabbed it—
—Lee snatched the other end, and pulled.
Sam held tight and was hauled to his feet.
“Don’t let go!” Annie shouted. Sam didn’t.
Sam sneezed, blowing sawdust out of his hair and mustache. To his relief, he found he was holding the grip-end of the pistol and Lee was holding the barrel.
“Let go or I’ll stab him!” Lee barked. He yanked again, but Sam held tight.
“I believe the threats customarily belong to the man with the trigger end of the weapon,” Sam quipped. He pulled at the gun too, but couldn’t wrest it from the Danite chieftain’s grip. They tugged back and forth like children struggling with a knotted rope over a mud puddle. The loaded gun between reminded Sam not to laugh at the thought.
Beside Sam on the floor, Brigham Young struggled to free himself. Heavier timbers lay across him than had pinned Sam, and he was still stuck. “Heber!” he roared. “If you could stop trying to commit murder for just a minute, you might free me!”
The farmer looked abashed. He rushed to Young’s side and started heaving at the largest of the beams. His wife, though, stayed right where she was.
“I think one of us should stick to the plan of committing murder,” she grumbled, taking an experimental swipe at the air with her skillet. “Or at least battery.”
Brigham grunted, a sound that might have been agreement.
Sam and Lee struggled.
Bang! Bang! The shooting outside continued.
“I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” Sam offered. “Just let the Englishman go and leave the Kingdom tonight.” That would be an expenditure he’d be happy to account for to the green eyeshade boys in Washington.
Lee eyed the efforts to free Young like a wild horse fighting the bridle. “I’ll give you all of Iron County!” he snapped back. “Just let go of the gun!” The Danite didn’t relinquish his hold on the English diplomat.
Sam really wished he could bring himself to pull the trigger. Any other man in the room would have killed John D. Lee by now. But Sam couldn’t do it. His brother Henry had died in government service, in a riverboat accident, of course, but it was much too close to dying as a soldier in uniform for Sam ever to feel cavalier about taking another man’s life.
“Somehow, I doubt Iron County is worth five hundred dollars,” he huffed. He was panting from the effort of wrestling now and sweat from the back of his hands trickled onto the pistol grip, making it slick and harder to hold on to. He wrapped his second hand around his first, to tighten his hold.
“Give yourself up, Brigham!” Lee shouted. “Give yourself up and I won’t have to kill this English fellow!”
The farmer Heber grunted and shoved aside the pillar that had Young trapped, exposing at the same time Ambassador Armstrong, who lay very still. Brigham Young rose to his feet. He was dirty and battered, but he stood upright in a strong motion, like a bear rising to sniff the wind, or a lion announcing its presence on the savannah. He sucked air in through his nostrils and his chest swelled.
“You don’t have to kill him now, John,” he rumbled, his voice low and threatening like a storm cloud. “Don’t pretend you’re a puppet. Be a man. Choose. Lay down your arms, and you might still be forgiven.”
“Choose?” Sam couldn’t help himself. “What kind of cog chooses?”
“Shut up, Clemens!” Young barked at him.
“You’re right, Brigham,” Lee laughed. “I am choosing. Hell, I chose years ago and now we’re just playing out the consequences. Surrender, or I’ll choose again, choose to stick this boy like a pig.”
Sweat poured down Sam’s forehead and neck and chest now, too. Any moment, he thought, I’ll lose hold of this gun, and Lee will start shooting. He half wished the farmer’s wife would go ahead and brain the Danite with her pan.
“He’s dead.” The farmer knelt by Ambassador Armstrong, checking the big black man’s pulse and breathing. “He didn’t make it.”
Ire flashed in Young’s eyes. “I can’t save you from hell, John,” he snarled. “I can’t even save you from the Mexicans. But if you start running right now, I can promise you that I won’t be the one chasing you.”
John D. Lee spat on the floor. “That for your promises, Brigham!” he shouted.
Sam felt his hands start to slip off the pistol—
—Lee grinned triumphantly and jerked at the gun—
—Sam stumbled back—
—and Absalom Fearnley-Standish punched John D. Lee in the kidney.
“Aaaagh!” Lee hollered, throwing his head back and tearing the revolver out of Sam’s grip. Now Sam saw that Fearnley-Standish was biting the Danite as well, his teeth sinking into Lee’s neck until blood flowed.
Lee stabbed the Englishman. He missed his neck, stabbing down instead shallowly across Fearnley-Standish’s collarbone and into his chest.
Fearnley-Standish lost his grip and staggered back.
Lee raised the knife to stab again—
—and Mrs. Kimball smashed him with her skillet.
Crack!
Sam heard Lee’s elbow break under the hammer of the heavy iron at the same moment he tumbled back onto the rubble from which he’d emerged.
“I ain’t gonna leave nothing for the Mexicans to take!” she shouted. She raised the skillet again—
—Lee staggered sideways in the direction of the door, fumbling with the pistol to bring it up into position and cock it—
—Annie Webb launched herself past the enraged farmeress, spinning like a thrown saucer, boots-first in attack.
Bang!
Smoke poured from Lee’s pistol and Annie fell back, hitting the floor hard in a tangle of arms and legs with the Englishman.
Lee stepped forward, raising his pistol to fire at Brigham Young, and the dwarf snatched it out of his hand, sailing through the air in a leap worthy of any circus acrobat.
Heber Kimball grabbed his scattergun and swung it around to shoot at Lee but Lee didn’t wait for the shot. He ducked out the farmhouse door and was gone.
Boom!
Heber’s scatter
gun kicked a hole in his own door, knocking it back open again, and then Mrs. Kimball threw her frying pan out the door on the Danite’s heels.
“And good riddance!” she shouted.
Outside, the shooting sounds grew fainter and more sporadic, as if maybe the firefight was ending and drifting away from the Kimball farm.
“The day is ours,” Brigham Young pronounced. He sounded very grave when he said it and also very tired, and then he turned to the farmer. “Heber, I’m going to have to leave Ambassador Armstrong with you, along with one or two other people.”
“Of course,” Heber said at once. “And the meeting tomorrow morning? The Twelve are supposed to be there, and the Seventy, to replace you.”
Young’s face darkened. “I’ll get into the Lion House tonight,” he glowered, “and send out messages. I’ll hold that meeting tomorrow morning, all right, but it will be the trial of John Lee and Bill Hickman.”
“But what about Port?” Mrs. Kimball pointed out.
“Rockwell!” Sam snapped. He ached and his lungs wheezed, but he sent himself to shifting timbers. Other men joined in and it was he and the dwarf Coltrane together who slid aside a wide plank to reveal the mountain man. He lay dirty and still under criss-crossing beams, with a trickle of blood at one corner of his mouth.
“You alright, Rockwell?” Sam asked. He was a little reluctant to touch what was in all likelihood a dead body but the dwarf wasn’t so finicky. He slapped Orrin Porter Rockwell twice, once across each cheek. Young’s bodyguard didn’t stir, until suddenly his lips cracked open and he spoke.
“No … bullet or blade … shall harm thee,” Rockwell intoned slowly, without opening his eyes. “And not no fallin’ ceilings, neither.”
“And what happens,” Poe asked, “if we succeed?” He coughed, feeling his lungs tear and bleed from the force of it.
The steam-truck rattled up the long tunnel towards the top of Timpanogos Mountain. Timber supports flashed by in the truck’s forward lights like the ribs of a gigantic whale through whose innards Poe now traveled. He wondered whether he was being swallowed or regurgitated by the thing.
“We restore Brigham,” Roxie said. “He will have to administer justice, of course. Some men will have to hang or be exiled, but for all his gruffness, Brigham Young is a soft touch. Most of Lee’s rebels will just go back to their wives and children. I don’t know what he’ll do about someone like Brother Orson.”
She looked away, out the window.
“I mean us,” Poe said. “You can be evasive if you like, but I know that you know that I mean us. I want to talk about our future, together.”
“You’re dying, Edgar.” She turned back to face him. In the blue glow of light emanating from the dials and meters of the steam-trucks control panel, Poe saw tears gently sliding down her cheeks.
Poe slammed his fist in frustration against the steam-truck’s wheel. “Does that mean I am incapable of love?” he demanded.
He bit back further words that welled up in his throat, about her unfairness, and about the injustice of the universe. What kind of tyrannical God would make him suffer this torturous love for this woman for so many years and then take it away, just at the moment he was about to touch it?
“Of course not,” she said softly. “But it means that you have no future at all.”
“Is that the glorious secret doctrine of the Mormons, then?” he pressed. “You dragged your wagons across the plains from Nauvoo, scattering your dead along the way like seeds to the wind, for the mighty and seductive call death is the end, o man, gnash your futile teeth and despair?”
“No,” she admitted. “But whatever afterlife there is, I am bound to Brother Brigham in it.”
“Oh?” Poe couldn’t let that one lie. “And when we first met, weren’t you bound to the King of Nauvoo?”
“Things change,” she acknowledged. “It isn’t wise to resist the inexorable.”
Poe pounded his fist against the control panel. “And is there no choice in it? You were Joseph’s, you are Brigham’s … may you not choose to be mine?”
“There is always choice,” Roxie said, “for all of us. I choose fidelity to the promises I’ve made.” She hesitated. “Fidelity after a fashion. Such fidelity as I can manage. I choose service to the whole and to the greater good. I choose to play my part in the plan.”
“Edgar Allan Poe be damned.” He started coughing again, his chest shuddering and shaking with the effort. He spat out the window, tasting the blood and phlegm on his tongue even after it was gone.
“I hope not,” she replied softly. “Edgar Allan Poe be saved, and even healed.”
“You believe in miracles, then?”
“I do,” she agreed. “I also believe in the surprising genius of Orson Pratt.”
The light ahead shifted, the tunnel suddenly turning, leveling out, and debouching into a large space stacked with crates, like a warehouse. Men stood arrayed loosely around the opening, including an old man whom Poe recognized instantly as the Apostle Pratt.
“This seems surprisingly direct,” Poe murmured. “It can’t bode well.”
“Follow my lead,” Roxie urged him.
Poe shifted the truck out of gear and attached the brake. Pratt shuffled around to Roxie’s side of the steam-truck and squinted up into the cabin.
“Sister Young!” he squeaked.
Poe did his best not to cringe or gnash his teeth.
“Brother Pratt!” she hallooed back. “My apologies for the late hour!”
“My condolences for the death of your husband,” Orson Pratt responded. “I’d have thought you might be in widow’s weeds by now, comforting your sister-wives in the Beehive House or the Lion House.”
“I would,” she agreed, “only Brother Lee asked me to bring you something.”
Pratt frowned and shook his head. “I’d have thought that snake would have plenty of strong backs to do his work without troubling the bereaved women of the Great Salt Lake City,” he harrumphed. He held up his hand, inviting her down. “Come visit with me. That fellow there can unload the materials, whatever they are.”
Roxie took his hand and hopped lightly down. “Oh, that’s my cousin Jared. He’s new to the valley and offered to help me. Jared, come join us, would you, please?”
Poe fought off a coughing fit by force of will as he climbed down.
“I didn’t know your cousins were members of the Kingdom,” Pratt said. He arched his bushy eyebrows, which made them jump almost to the top of his bald head.
“Jared isn’t,” Roxie clarified her lie. “He’s come to tell me about a death in the family. An aunt. I’m to have a small inheritance, it seems.”
Pratt’s men climbed into the back of the steam-truck and dragged out the crate they found there, beginning to lower it to the ground.
“Honest Jared,” Pratt mumbled in vague approval.
“He’s something of an amateur technologist,” Roxie continued. “I hoped you might like to show him the Teancum.”
“Your airships are famous, sir,” Poe played along, affecting enthusiasm and doing his best to imitate Roxie’s Massachusetts twang in his voice. “They were all the talk at Fort Bridger, flying airships and phlogiston guns!”
Pratt chuckled. “I’m pleased to entertain, sir. Perhaps I can entertain you tonight even further.”
“How’s that?” Poe asked.
“Oh, Jared would be thrilled to take even a short ride aboard one of the airships,” Roxie gushed.
Pratt’s men pried apart the crate with crowbars and stripped away the cotton batting inside, revealing what Poe had known was in there all along.
The Seth-Beast.
It stood stiff and erect, like a shining steel sculpture of a dog, life-sized if the dog in question were a very large hunting hound or a small pony. It wasn’t quite a dog, though; very long, donkey-like ears sprang up at either side of its head, square at their extremities, and the tail that shot straight up into the air from its hindquarters forked
at the end. Its muzzle, too, had a little of the anteater about it, or maybe the sloth, curving downward slightly at the nose, over powerful jaws bristling with long steel teeth. Hinges and ball joints all over its body hinted at the movement the machine was capable of.
“My goodness!” Pratt ejaculated. “Brother Lee didn’t make this. No one in the Valley, not even John Browning, made something like this!”
“I don’t know where it came from,” Roxie said. “I do know that John has been dealing with southerners a lot today.”
Pratt paced a circle around the Seth-Beast, examining it closely. The whistle on Poe’s breast felt very heavy.
“And how does it work?” Pratt asked. “Where are the controls?” Poe would have sworn that the long hair standing up at the back of his head stood up even straighter as he examined Hunley’s craftsmanship, like curious antennae.
Roxie shrugged and shook her head. “He didn’t say.”
Pratt stopped pacing and clapped his hands together once. “Well,” he said, “there’ll be plenty of time to play with this new toy later. As I was saying, your arrival here is very timely. Tonight … or rather, tomorrow morning, you will be witness to a unique spectacle, a great first time event in the history of mankind.” He turned, and gestured to his men at the Seth-Beast. “Leave this here, gentlemen; we can deal with it later.”
“What’s that?” Poe asked uneasily in his false twang.
Pratt turned back to face them, and he held a gun in his hand. Not a weapon of any sort that Poe recognized—it was bulky and square, to be held in two hands, and its muzzle was far too big for anything resembling an ordinary bullet.
“Why, Mr. Poe, the complete destruction of the Great Salt Lake City, of course,” Pratt said calmly. “By aeronautical assault and phlogiston rays.”
“No!” Roxie gasped.
Poe considered, and couldn’t see any reason that the obliteration of the Mormon capital would serve Lee’s interests. “I thought Lee wanted to be President,” he said mildly, dropping the false accent. No point denying his identity, since Pratt had obviously recognized him. “Either his plan is so Byzantine I cannot penetrate it or it is misconceived.”