City of the Saints

by D. J. Butler

  They were a crowd of beautiful girls, scandalously dressed in nightclothes and without even a smudge of makeup. They sheltered in the doorways of a long hall and fired at the Danites with pistols and rifles. Absalom stepped to one side, to be sure none of their stray shots could whistle through the hall and strike him down.

  Absalom felt an urge to simply clap his gun to John Lee’s head and blow out the man’s brains, but he mastered his wrath, split his aim between the two pistols, one each on Lee and Cannon, and forced his voice into a calm, Wellington-worthy baritone.

  “Good evedigg, gedtlemed,” he said, and smiled. He regretted that he had no hat to doff and, for that matter, no third arm to doff it with, and he regretted even more that he’d been punched in the nose.

  John Lee spun around like lightning, and Absalom saw too late that the other man had a pistol in his hand, too. He felt the pistol nearly as soon as he saw it, thrashing across his own cheek and jaw and knocking him back.

  Bang! Bang!

  Absalom fired but missed. He saw Cannon rushing out the door and he tried to aim at the little man, but Lee pistol-whipped him again and he dropped both his guns. Lee raised his pistol a third time, cocking the hammer and drawing a bead on Absalom’s face.

  “Damb,” Absalom cursed.

  ZOTTT!

  The street outside the lobby’s windows, South Tabernacle, exploded into flame. Lee staggered and Absalom seized his chance, kicking at the Danite’s knees. As John Lee fell back and tried to recover his balance, Absalom grabbed his own fallen pistols and started firing.

  Bang! Bang!

  They were wild shots but he was firing point-blank and Lee ran from them. Absalom looked over his shoulder just long enough to see the women in nightgowns overwhelming the remaining Danites, and then he crashed out the doors on John Lee’s heels and into the street.

  At the last moment, it occurred to him to worry about the Third Virginia, but he needn’t have. The explosion, whatever its source was, seemed to have targeted them. A ditch of flame and wreckage ran in a straight line down the middle of the street, and scorched men and machines lay in it and to either side. Absalom turned to look at the message room windows and saw that Annie Webb and Consuelo Jackson fought hand to hand with cavalrymen among the shattered glass. He spared a single pistol shot, hitting Annie’s man in the back of his thigh, and then he turned to follow Lee again.

  John Lee was no coward. He sprinted straight for the fire and, as Absalom watched, jumped through it. His movements were lopsided because one arm still hung useless at his side, but his legs were strong enough to get him across and he landed heavily on the other side.

  Absalom knew he’d never make the leap; he was no long jumper. He shot his pistols instead, emptying every last bullet he had remaining and missing with every shot. Lee ducked, he weaved, and he stumbled, but he disappeared from view on the other side of the street, running in smoke and flame.

  ZOTTT!

  Remembering the talk of airships and phlogiston guns, Absalom looked up in time to see a great flying thing, like a Viking ship, snap off its flame-ray from a second shot. This time the shooter had targeted the soldiers on the other side of the message room, in the garden between it and the Tabernacle, and he had reduced their horses to slag and the men to charred heaps.

  Burton, Absalom thought. It must be Burton.

  He raised an empty pistol and waved it in salute at the ship, and then he saw that something was wrong. The airship had four appendages like stubby legs that were turned-down cups glowing within in the shape of luminescent golden rings, only two of them were smashed to pieces and evidently not working, because the ship was slowly sinking and drifting to one side, apparently out of control.

  It drifted down toward the Tabernacle.

  “Burton!” he gasped, and lurched towards the impending collision. He raised a hand, too little, too late, and much too far away.

  The airship hit the wall of the Tabernacle. The impact looked incongruously gentle from where Absalom stood, but the Tabernacle was already burning and as the ship struck, flames erupted from the point of contact, and then the airship exploded in a ball of flame.

  KABOOM!!

  Whatever didn’t burst into flame and evaporate crashed through the wall of the structure, and then the ship was gone.

  Absalom dropped both his pistols, stunned. Armed women in nightgowns rushed past him, chasing Danites and cavalrymen who scattered from their path, but he could only stand in the bright warm sunshine of the early morning and stare at the flames and the ruin all about him. Numbness settled over him. He’d come with Burton as a diplomat to the Mormons, fighting with the man every step of the way, and now the Mormon capital burned and Burton burned with it, like a dead Viking chieftain aboard his warship. It was fitting, somehow, but it was horrible, and it was not what Absalom had expected or wanted.

  When he was finally able to move, Absalom reached into his coat pocket and took out his Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book. Without even opening it to remind himself of all the offenses of which he had once kept meticulous track, he took two weary steps over to the flaming rut that ran down the center of South Tabernacle and threw the Note-Paper-Book into the fire.

  As it burned, pages browning and curling up into ash shavings, he heard the cloppity-clop-clop of horses’ hooves about him. Absalom looked up to see Chief Pocatello at the head of forty or fifty of his men, in rattling bone-and-metal breastplates, with long Brunel rifles rising high like knights’ lances from special stirrups beside each rider’s boot.

  The Third Virginia, or what was left of it, might have rallied and resisted, but it didn’t. The Virginians’ commander, Captain Morgan, fled first, vanishing away down one of the city’s right-angled streets, flamboyant facial hair bouncing with the gallop of his clocksprung horse. His men followed, catch-as-catch-can and mostly on foot.

  “Oh, good,” Absalom said, mostly to himself. He raised one hand to wave it at Chief Pocatello, who waved back and grinned. “The Iddiads are here.”

  Richard Burton loaded his Smith & Wesson Model 1. It was fancy enough, but he missed his 1851 Navy, which was much more handsome and just as deadly. With the loaded pistol tucked into his pocket, he dragged every Pinkerton body he could find into the hut at the center of Orson Pratt’s mooring platform and stacked them like cordwood. He ached all over, which made it slow work, and he slowed it even further by frequently stopping to check the saw-toothed, rugged horizon for any sign of returning airships.

  But no airships returned, and no other people appeared to disturb his work.

  Last of all he dragged in Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy. The Irishman had been crazy and a criminal, but he had fought and died bravely at Burton’s side. Burton propped O’Shaughnessy into sitting position on top of the stack of dead men like a king on his throne.

  Then, emboldened by the cool hush of the morning, he went down into Pratt’s facility. He found his own Colt (loaded) and sword in a pile that included the Irishman’s two silenced pistols. They were stolen from the Pinkertons in Bridger’s Saloon, Burton thought, but that seemed to make them all the more appropriate as trophies.

  He found a galley, too, and appropriated a bottle of whisky.

  Back up on the mooring platform, Burton took several slugs of the whisky, then tucked the bottle into O’Shaughnessy’s dead hand and laid both Maxim Hushers on the Irishman’s lap.

  Then he ransacked his memory for every scrap of lyric he could think of and gave the corpses the best rendition he could of “Danny Boy.” He thought the rictus on O’Shaughnessy’s face looked almost warm, and certainly pleased.

  Then Burton stepped back from the plascrete shed, picked up Orson Pratt’s hand-held phlogiston gun, and burned the shed, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy, and all the trophies of victory to calx. In less than two minutes, the entire pile was a heap of smoking ash.

  He found the Danite steam-truck in the Bay, its furnace reasonably full of coal though its tender was empty. A few minutes’ drivin
g down the tunnel, more recklessly than was really called for, and he burst into daylight again under the Deseret squiggles that Roxie Snow had taught him to read as Koyle Mining Corporation.

  Hell of a woman. He wondered where she was, though only idly and for a moment, because he found that thoughts of her quickly and surprisingly turned to thoughts of Isabel. He’d had enough adventure to last him for a good long while, he realized, and enough of these Hades-damned Mormons, with their Danites and their plotting and their phlogiston guns and their airships.

  “Kaveh’s apron,” he grumbled to himself, “I’d like a cup of hot coffee, a bit of Welsh rarebit, The Sunday Times, and my feet before a hot fire.”

  And Isabel in a nice house frock.

  The Dream Mine’s long gravel drive ended at the highway, and Burton turned right, toward a shoulder of the mountain that shrugged down before him and blocked the Salt Lake Valley from view. The highway rose to the shoulder and then hugged it all around, and at the furthest point out, right above a sodden, muddy, burnt and blasted ruin that Burton recognized as the remains of Porter Rockwell’s Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery, he saw a Mexican Strider, southbound and coming his way.

  He stopped the truck parallel to the Strider, which also stopped, and crouched to bring its crew and passengers level with the steam-truck’s wheelhouse.

  Pffffffft-ankkkh!

  Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat in the carriage of the Strider, with Annie Webb by his side and three Stridermen in uniform about them.

  “Good mordigg, Captaid Burtod!” Fearnley-Standish called through a broken nose. He sounded happy and manly, despite the ridiculousness of his voice, and not the sniveling, whining, petulant child Burton was used to dealing with at all. He also sounded surprised.

  “Good morning, Ambassador!” Burton called back. “Someone’s hit you, I see!”

  “Dod’t soudd too edvious whed you say that!” Fearnley-Standish laughed. When the laughter ended, a grin remained, with a touch of regret in it. “I thought you were dead.”

  “So did I.” Burton grinned his best piratical grin. “More than once.”

  “I forged my commissiod letter, you dow!”

  “I know,” Burton said, and he looked over his shoulder down the road south. “Relocating to Mexico, are you?”

  “Lookigg for Johd Lee,” Fearnley-Standish said cheerfully. He pointed at his nose. “I have him to thack for the dose.”

  “Lee killed nuestro Ambassador Armstrong,” one of the Strider’s crew added. Burton recognized her by her voice as Master Sergeant Consuelo Jackson. “Our President will expect la justicia.”

  “Lee’s a Dixie man,” Annie Webb added, and Burton saw that each woman had a hand on one of Absalom’s elbows. “So we’re heading to St. George to try to cut him off.”

  “I came lookigg for my sister,” the Foreign Office man continued, “add foudd her. Odly she’s happy here, so I deed a dew task.”

  “A new quest!” Burton suggested. “I am sorry to hear about the Ambassador.”

  Jackson and the other Stridermen nodded solemnly and crossed themselves.

  Burton couldn’t help looking at the two women holding Absalom Fearnley-Standish’s arms and smiling.

  “It isd’t a perfect arradgemedt,” Fearnley-Standish said ruefully.

  “No arrangement is,” Burton agreed. “Godspeed, Absalom.”

  “Godspeed, Dick.”

  They waved and Burton put the steam-truck into gear and rolled north, into the Salt Lake Valley.

  Dick Burton stomped gamely across the lobby of the Deseret Hotel. He wore his gun and sword openly, in the Deseret fashion, and the shiny Order of the Nauvoo Legion medal that Brigham Young had pinned to his chest three days earlier appeared never to have come off since. “Clemens,” the Englishman growled.

  “Burton!” Sam snapped right back at him, flashing his best grin around the unlit Partagás he was chewing. “You look so spry, I almost suspect it doesn’t hurt you to walk anymore!” The bandages were all under Burton’s clothing, but Sam knew they were there. The man was a walking infirmary.

  “In the best tradition of the American West,” Burton told him, “I’m self-medicating.” He pulled a flask from his coat pocket. “Care for a shot?”

  “Thanks, I believe I will,” Sam said, though it was early morning yet and he intended to drive the steam-truck himself.

  “Surely you’re planning on wearing your medal,” Burton said. “Or does the democratic egalitarianism of your President Buchanan prohibit it?”

  “Oh, sure I am.” Sam wiped his mustache dry, handed back the flask and fished around in the pockets of his fornication pants … his Levi-Strauss denim pants. “When the right opportunity presents itself.”

  “It is something of a formal occasion, after all.”

  “We’re just leaving,” Sam objected. “In this country, the principal formality of departure is remembering to lock the door behind you.”

  “Ha!” Burton didn’t seem able to have even friendly, casual conversations without growling, snapping, and barking. “We’re envoys, setting out with important messages to our governments. The Kingdom of Deseret is to side with peace. She will intervene against any party commencing hostilities and if Jefferson Davis and his Southern leaders are to secede, they will do so through peaceful negotiation. There will be few greater occasions in this century.”

  “Good thing I’m such an accomplished liar,” Sam said. He pinned the medal on his jacket, noticed that it was askew, and tried to reposition it to achieve something approaching the military crispness of Burton’s medal.

  “Virtra’s dusty belly, man!” Burton roared. He pulled the medal from Sam’s hand and fussed at it, pressing it neatly into place parallel with Sam’s shoulders.

  “Thanks, Dick,” Sam said. “You’ll make some woman a fine wife one day, if you can ever bring yourself to shave that mustache.”

  “What are you talking about, liar?” Burton demanded. “Young has promised that he will intervene on the side of peace and that’s the message we’re to bear!” He took another sip from his flask and then put it away.

  “Without the airships,” Sam laughed, “who cares if he intervenes? Without Pratt’s fleet and his phlogiston guns, Deseret is a gaggle of badly-armed mountain men who only fight part time at best.”

  “There’s John Browning,” Burton pointed out. They exited the hotel doors onto South Tabernacle, nodding at the desk clerk, who was still arranging for their luggage to be carried behind them. “His machine-gun is impressive.”

  “No more impressive than the work of Sam Colt or Horace Hunley or Isambard Brunel.” Sam shook his head. “No, with Pratt’s four ships destroyed and him dead and no one else in the know on how to squeeze rubies and get out his phlogiston-burning rays, Deseret is a paper tiger at best.”

  “Only three ships were destroyed,” Burton pointed out.

  “Yes,” Sam admitted. “And the fourth disappeared, with Pratt on it and persona non grata in the Kingdom.”

  “Then lie,” Burton said. “Lie like hell. Lie like hell, for heaven’s sake. The cause is worthy.”

  “True,” Sam agreed. He took a lucifer from the box in his jacket, sparked it off the rivets on his Levi-Strauss pants and lit the Partagás. “I’d take another sip of that bourbon, if there’s any left.”

  They walked down South Tabernacle. In the five days since Brigham Young’s return to his office, the street had been repaired and most of the windows but the avenue’s many trees remained blasted and withered stumps, or bare baked earth, and much of the old plascrete still had black scorch marks on it, obscuring the sparkle.

  “If only you Americans had put in your transcontinental railroad or your telegraph earlier,” Burton commented as they neared the Lion House, “we’d have been spared the journey.”

  “There won’t be a railroad,” Sam said, “not for a while. And Young still isn’t convinced about the telegraph. Young doesn’t really want either of them in the first place and
, at least for a little while, he’ll need to keep outsiders out of the Kingdom, to avoid giving away his bluff. Besides, don’t you want to get home to your fiancée Isabel? And to writing your books?”

  “I do,” Burton admitted. He looked slightly embarrassed as he said the words. “I have in mind a memoir of this journey, though I don’t know whether anyone would believe it.”

  “Sell it as fiction,” Sam suggested. “I think you’ll find you can tell a lot of interesting truth, if you’re willing to stoop to writing novels.”

  Burton guffawed and slapped Sam on the back and then they had arrived.

  The Jim Smiley sat idling on the grass beside the Lion House, surrounded by the accordion-filled glass bells, repaired, restored to operation and pumping away softly. The glass tubes overhead hung silent, many of them shot to pieces on the night of what had begun to be called the Battle of the Tabernacle. The Tabernacle itself sat silent and still in the background, a burnt out hulk and the final grave of Edgar Allan Poe, Eliza Snow, Sergeant Ortiz, and others whose names Sam didn’t know. It, and the splintered, bullet-riddled shambles of the Lion House, were the last two things untouched by the hand of any repairmen.

  The Jim Smiley had been pulled from the Tabernacle’s wreckage toasted but mostly intact. Captain Dan Jones and John Browning and others had been hard at work on it since the morning after the battle, and now it stood shiny and gleaming in the morning sun, looking as good as new with coal smoke and steam puffing gently from its exhaust pipes.

  A crowd stood around the steam-truck, dressed in long coats, high hats, and gloves on the one hand and crisp bonnets and dresses on the other. Beyond and around the crowd stood horse-mounted Shoshone braves, looking just as formal, in their proud and savage fashion. A calotypist stood to one side with his boxy tripod-mounted device, and Brigham Young and Heber Kimball (both nearly as bandaged as Burton was, Young’s neck wrapped in white all the way up to his jaw like a cravat) and Chief Pocatello stood in front of it, in a small cleared space.