by Abra SW
“No. We never sailed in close enough to dock anywhere else, though. I saw—bodies floating in the sea, and the hulks of ships burned down to the waterline. I lost crewmen anyway. A few had family in those ports. I wouldn’t dock and I wouldn’t give them a boat. They just—dove into the sea. They were pretty good swimmers. They should have made it to shore.” She shook herself. “I like New York. Things are holding together here. A girl can disembark to get a drink or a little friendly male company without coming back to find her ship pillaged.”
Michael didn’t know where to look, but he felt his face growing red at her frankness.
“Did I shock you?” She chuckled. “Maybe I’m too used to sailors. But like I said, it’s not so bad here. I miss the old New York, though. The theaters, the restaurants, the dress shops—” She noticed the incredulous looks Michael and Christopher exchanged. “What?” She grinned. “You should see the expression on those prissy shopgirls’ faces when I smile ever so nicely at them and say I want to try on every dress in the shop! Such bargains I get, it’s piracy!” She sighed. “And then I wear a pretty new dress and go to a park or the zoo—”
“Wait!” Michael struggled to push himself up into a sitting position. “Did you say the zoo?”
“Yes.” She looked quizzically at him. “There’s a quite nice little family-run zoo in Manhattan. Planning some sightseeing? Oh—wait. I see. You think your monkey might have gone there.”
Rising hope choked any words in his throat. He nodded furiously.
Christopher interrupted. “The monkey might have, but we can’t. Look at the sky. It would be twilight by the time we got to the zoo. We’d never make it out of New York before curfew. We have to get back to camp and make our report.”
“I’m going to the zoo,” Michael insisted. “You do what you like!”
“I can’t just leave you! Remember? Nobody should go alone.”
“Then I guess you’re going too.”
“An expedition to the zoo!” Captain Angie clapped her hands. “I’m glad you came to my ship. This is so much more fun than tedious war games. I got to shoot a man, the circus is coming to town, and now we’re going to the zoo. Just like old times!”
“Not—quite,” Michael managed. He felt he ought to protest the way she counted shooting him as a fun thing, but she’d also saved his life and he didn’t want to be ungrateful.
She sighed. “Maybe not quite like old times. I’d better get a few things to take with us. Wait right here!”
Before he could protest that she really shouldn’t risk herself, she was gone.
When she returned, she wore a dark gray shawl and a long drab skirt. Michael suspected that she still wore her scandalous trousers underneath. The skull-monkey skittered beside her, a blanket-wrapped bundle strapped to its back. Behind her loomed a silent, burly man with more tattoos than Michael had seen outside the circus before.
“This is my first mate,” she introduced him. “He’ll be watching the ship while I’m gone, and he wanted to eyeball you lot before I left. In case anything happened.”
Michael gulped and tried to look harmless. He hoped the bullet hole helped.
Christopher eyed the skull-monkey askance. “What’s in that pack?”
“Oh, just a few things I thought we might need.”
Some of the shapes under the blanket had a distinctly weaponlike profile. Captain Angie might not be wearing her revolvers at her waist, but there were two lumps of about the right size in the package. A suspicious mind might think that long, thin shape resembled a rifle. Michael poked a square shape. Something rattled inside, rather like cartridge shells. And— “Do I smell sausage?”
She smiled. “I’ll never tell.”
“You’re not worried about them catching you with contraband? Or being trapped away from port after curfew?” Christopher asked.
“I never spent the night in a zoo before. Should be entertaining.” She shrugged. “Even if the zoo is—inhospitable—we’ll be fine. We just have to avoid the special patrolmen.”
Michael narrowed his eyes. Not that he would let fear of the patrolmen stop him, but she seemed mighty confident. He looked at the aether-powered monkey’s horrible misfitting dog-hide coat and its gleaming bone face. He remembered the hobo saying, “I ain’t never forgetting that skull-monkey.”
“You been out in new New York after curfew!” he accused. “You and your monkey-thing.”
“The captains decided somebody had to scout out the lay of the land,” she said. “Somebody small and quick enough to hide, but strong enough to fight their way out of any trouble. Besides, I was bored.”
“They sent a woman?” Christopher asked blankly.
“You say ‘they’ like I’m not a captain! We sent me.”
“What if they caught you?” Michael exclaimed. “We saw what they do to people who break their laws.”
“They might catch me, but they can’t hold me.”
Her hands went to the neck of her shirt. Michael didn’t know what she was doing. Then she parted the buttons, and he knew she was opening her shirt but he had no idea why or what to do about it.
When she pulled her shirt open, he saw why. Brass tendrils arched up from her ribcage, curving over startlingly white flesh to flatten against her collarbone. Now that he looked for it, he saw other ridged outlines crisscrossing under her shirt.
“You’re wearing a slave harness!” he blurted.
“What once was a slave harness,” she corrected him swiftly. “I’m no slave and never was! An inventor of my acquaintance modified this harness to remove the master controls and to pull from bottled aether instead of spindling it from my bones. It’s not as powerful as a war harness, but I have a strength advantage over any man in this port.”
“But that’s not—”
“And you should be happy I do,” she continued. “How do you think I just happened to have bone aether to spare to heal up some fool who boarded my ship without permission, shouting, ‘Doom!’?”
“But—.” He stopped himself. “Thank you.”
She nodded. “That’s more like it.” The motion made her shirt fall open further.
He averted his eyes, feeling heat creep up his cheekbones. “You can—” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of her shirt.
She chuckled but took mercy on him and buttoned her shirt up again. When Michael felt it was safe to look, he found Christopher staring searchingly at Captain Angie, a frown on his face.
“The captains sent out a scout. Are you expecting trouble? Do you think the commissioner is going to storm the docks?” Christopher asked.
“If he tries it, he’ll learn his mistake fast enough. He may have stopped the riots. He may control the city. But he doesn’t have the artillery to take the port. The ships at sea when that hell-storm struck? All their weapons still work, not just the simple projectile ones. Sure, most ship stores of aether catalyst are low, but low is more than the nothing he has.”
Christopher winced. “He’s got more men, and whatever weaponry is in the civilian armory. From the sound of it, he’s been stockpiling for a while. You might not be able to handle him.”
Captain Angie grinned sharply. “You know how the commissioner learned about the disturbances to aether-powered mechanical devices? He’d squirreled away a couple of Striders, those fire-spitting tanks the North used during the War of the Rebellion. He was going to use them against his own civilians to enforce order! Instead, the tanks exploded. If you ask me, it was fitting that the men willing to commit such abomination died in the backfire.”
Her voice harsh and low, she continued, “We’ll not be turning our cargoes over to some tin-pot dictator just because he says so. We can fight off pirates at sea, and we can fight off pirates on land. You see those steamships out there?” She pointed to the massive cargo ships anchored farther out.
Christopher nodded.
“Those are the ships he wants. Their holds are packed with tasty edibles. But they know it’s
too risky to dock. So he can’t storm them from the land. And the military forts have made it known that they won’t tolerate piracy on the sea, no matter what happens in new New York. But!” She clapped her hands. “Enough grim talk! It’s time for an outing to the zoo!”
~ * ~
“It don’t say it’s a zoo.” Michael frowned at the locked wrought iron gate in front of them. To either side stretched a fifteen-foot-high brick wall whose top bristled with jagged glass shards and pointy spikes. Beyond the gate, trees arched over an overgrown path. Snow caked the thick underbrush.
Captain Angie squinted at the top of the gate. “It used to say ‘Zoo’ in big fancy letters on top of the gate. Look, you can see where the letters were sawed off.”
The fresh cuts to the metalwork on top of the gate gleamed in the rays of the setting sun. Their sharp, jagged edges gave the gate an appearance about as friendly as an alligator’s smile.
“Perhaps this isn’t the best time to visit,” Christopher said. “It’s probably a wild goose chase anyway.”
Before Michael could round on him, Captain Angie took care of it. “Would you rather be on the streets of new New York after curfew? We don’t have enough time to get back to Port Rumsey. It’s your choice.” She bared her teeth in a gleaming grin. “I’ll have fun either way.”
Christopher mumbled something to the effect that since they were there anyway …
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” She rattled the gates. “Shouldn’t be hard to climb the gates as long as you avoid the sheared off bits on top. It’s a hell of a lot less risky than climbing up the wall, with all those spikes and that broken glass on top, and hyenas on the other side.”
Michael perked up. “They got hyenas?”
Captain Angie gave him a look. “It was an expression. I’m just saying that climbing over the main gate is the safest way to get in.” She grabbed the bars, braced her feet against the bottom of the gate, and heaved herself upward.
The sound of a rifle being cocked from inside the zoo made her drop down, lift her hands, and take a few steps back. “Or, of course, it could be a trap,” she continued. “Make every other way in difficult and dangerous, but leave one spot looking vulnerable. Then you can concentrate on guarding that one spot. It’s a good trap. I should have thought of it.”
“Sir, we don’t intend any harm!” Christopher called to the unknown rifleman. “We’re strangers in town. We heard there was a zoo. We’d dearly love to see it, if it’s possible to arrange such a thing.”
No response.
“I work with animals myself,” Michael tried. “At the circus.” That exhausted his store of diplomacy. “I really need to see your monkeys! Honest!”
No response.
Captain Angie clicked her tongue to summon her skull-monkey. When it skittered up beside her, she untied the blanket pack it carried and began rummaging around inside.
Fearing she might be planning to start a shootout with the zoo’s invisible guard, Michael hissed, “Don’t start nothing—please!”
She straightened with a string of sausages in her hand. “Don’t fuss,” she told him. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve traded with natives in hostile ports before, you know.” Raising her voice, she called, “I’m not from New York. I’m a trader, a sailing ship captain. I thought cacao beans and some sausages might be a fair trade for a visit to the zoo.”
The bushes rustled. A young girl on the verge of womanhood poked her head out. “Sausages? And chocolate?”
Captain Angie smiled. “And chocolate. If you need anything in particular, I could maybe arrange a trade for you.”
The girl pushed her way out of the bushes. Like the captain, she wore men’s trousers. In her case, Michael thought they might be a new addition. The cuffs were rolled up like they were hand-me-downs from an older brother. As a concession to modesty, she wore a knee-length skirt over them, similar to the Bloomer costume some women had tried to adopt twenty years earlier. Her eyes fixed on the length of sausages Captain Angie dangled, but she kept the rifle pointed in their direction.
“I’m Captain Angie Endo,” the captain said, as calmly as if gunpoint introductions were an everyday occurrence. For her, they might be! “What’s your name?”
The girl thought about it but appeared to find no danger in introductions. “Rosie Sasse.”
“That’s better.” Captain Angie smiled. Waving a hand in their general direction, she added, “This is Michael, the animal handler, and Christopher Knall, who claims to be some sort of clown and ringmaster-in-training.”
“Um, pleased to meet you,” Rosie mumbled.
Captain Angie beamed like the girl had invited them in for a sit-down family dinner.
“Wait,” Rosie said. She braced the rifle against her hip, reached up, and pulled on a cord dangling from the tree branches near the gate. A bell jangled in the distance.
Now that his attention was drawn to it, Michael saw that the cord swooped down between tree branches all the way back along the path.
“I can’t let you in,” she said apologetically. “Papa has to decide.”
“That’s fine. Sensible costume you’re wearing,” Captain Angie approved.
“Er, thank you.” For a moment, the rifle wavered in Rosie’s hands. She cleared her throat and steadied her stance. When she spoke again, her voice was gruff. “Why were you going to break into our zoo?”
“We’re hunting a monkey—” Michael began.
Rosie braced the rifle against her shoulder and looked down the barrel at him. “We’re not selling any of our animals, and we’re not going to let you take them!”
“No, it ain’t like that! You see—”
A short, broad-shouldered man with a bushy beard and mucky Wellingtons charged down the path toward them, an old musket in hand. He skidded to a halt when he saw the gate inviolate and Rosie with her gun. “What’s this, then?” he demanded.
The bushes on either side of the path rustled.
“They want to hunt our monkeys, Papa!” Rosie said. She narrowed her eyes and moved her finger to the trigger of her rifle.
Feeling he was close to being shot for the second time that day, Michael hurried to say, “No, no! We’re from a traveling circus! I’m looking for one of our monkeys who went missing. I’m worried about him.”
If anything, Rosie’s scowl deepened.
The bushes to the right of the path shook furiously. A massive, majestic yellow-maned head poked out. Michael froze as the lion turned topaz eyes to gaze at him.
After due consideration, the lion pushed his way out of the bushes and paced over to sit in the middle of the path. He yawned widely, incidentally displaying his long, white, wickedly sharp incisors.
Beside Michael, Christopher opened and closed his mouth several times before managing to say, “Um. Lion. Backing away.” He suited action to word.
Michael studied the other areas of the underbrush where there had been movement. “He ain’t feral, or they wouldn’t never let him near the children.” Indeed, small faces peered out from around the trees near the entryway. “They’re the easiest prey.” The little faces popped back into the underbrush. “The lion’s comfortable around them, and they’re comfortable around him. That means the lion’s fed well enough that he won’t attack just anything. Besides, it’s the females who hunt. They’re the ones you got to watch out for.”
“Maybe they trained him to attack,” Christopher offered from a distance away.
Michael shot him a disparaging glance. “It’s hard to train a lion. Easier if you start young, but—no. He’s a zoo lion. It don’t make sense to train him to attack the customers.”
As if sensing that his role was over, the lion yawned, flopped onto his side, and stretched.
“You know your lions,” Papa Sasse said approvingly. “Maybe you’re not one of those barbarians who thinks a zoo is just a farm with funny-looking animals. We had a few of those come around, thinking that we should share the butcher’s bounty.”
“Oh, no!” Michael gaped, aghast that anyone might think that he—. “I’d never! That’s worse than eating humans! I’d starve first!”
Behind him, he heard Captain Angie mutter, “Worse?”
“He’s here about the monkey, Papa,” Rosie said.
Michael rushed forward and seized the bars of the gate with both hands. Rosie jerked a step backwards and raised her rifle.
Captain Angie chuckled. “Your friend, he doesn’t learn fast, does he?” she said to Christopher.
Michael ignored that. His eyes fixed on Rosie, he demanded, “The monkey? You’ve seen him? You have him?” He looked past her, searching the the treetops. “Mr. Doom?” he called. “Mr. Ben Doom? Doom! Dooooom!”
“Oh, not this again,” Captain Angie grumbled.
“You have no idea,” Christopher said under his breath. “The first time he did that, at our campsite? We all thought he’d snapped. Or that the world was ending. Again.”
“Doooooooom!”
“Settle down, son!” Papa Sasse told Michael. “I knew something wasn’t right when another monkey just showed up out of nowhere. We’ll let you and your friends in to see him. Rosie, unlock the gate.”
“You can’t!” Rosie whirled on her father. “They’re so happy, you just—you just can’t! It isn’t right!”
“Now, Rosie,” her father began, raising his hand placatingly.
Michael stared at the girl. What was she talking about? It couldn’t be Mr. Ben Doom. The monkey wouldn’t be happy away from the circus. He was a member of their monkey troupe. Even if he wasn’t particularly close to any of the other monkeys, Michael took really good care of him, making sure he got his share of the food and was groomed properly. He wouldn’t just leave him—wouldn’t just leave them, Michael corrected himself.
“Unlock the gate, Rosie,” Papa Sasse said. “They deserve to know what happened to their monkey. Think how you’d feel if it were Marigold.”
Scowling, Rosie walked over to the gate and unlocked it. “You can’t make him go if he doesn’t want to,” she warned Michael.
He hardly heard her as he hurried inside. Mr. Ben Doom might have run away from the circus, but Michael couldn’t imagine anything that would keep him from coming back.