Ganymede

by Priest, Cherie

  Josephine suspected it had more to do with leaving loopholes for Texians to wander off during their leaves, but there was no time to stew about the injustice of it all, not when Rick was hurt and surrounded by pirates.

  She dashed up to the first carriage, manifesting under the closest gas lamp like an apparition. The driver gasped. He was an older man, with dark skin as wrinkled as last month’s apples. Pulling himself to his feet, he stepped off the curb and said, “Hey, now, ma’am. It’s after curfew, and here you are sneaking about—”

  She cut him off. “What do you care who sneaks where, so long as we can pay? We’ve left the Quarter with Texas’s permission,” she lied outright. “We need a ride, and we have money. Get on your seat and drive us.”

  “Now, that’s no way to talk to—”

  “If you’re not interested, we’ll just ask one of those other gentlemen over there.”

  “Nobody said I wasn’t interested. But you fine … folks,” he said as Gifford and Ruthie emerged from the shadows of the cross street. “You can get an old feller in trouble! We’re not supposed to move nowhere, not without a note from the new man’s office.”

  “We have no such note. If you won’t drive us, we’ll try the next man in line.”

  Ruthie stepped forward, positioning herself so that her very best angles were lit by the grimy, fog-smeared light. She pushed herself very close into the driver’s space, and he recoiled, but only in a perfunctory manner that was quickly eased by the prostitute’s pretty smile.

  “You wear no ring,” she observed.

  “No, miss, I … my wife, she done passed on. She’s a long time gone, God rest her soul.”

  “Then let me sweeten the deal for you, eh, sugar?” She placed one long-fingered, perfectly manicured hand up against the driver’s head and whispered behind it into his ear. The whispering took longer than Josephine liked, but the look on the man’s face told her that whatever Ruthie was promising, it was working.

  “I’ll drive you, I’ll drive you!” he stammered. “That’s a real generous offer, and, and, here.” He hustled to the side of the carriage and opened the door. “Y’all just climb right up inside and I’ll take you where you’re going.” He paused. “Where are you going?”

  Josephine accepted Gifford’s hand and climbed up onto the carriage’s step, stopping only to say, “Get us to the ferry at Tchoupitoulas.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am.”

  Gifford crawled in behind her, and both of them settled into an interior that was cramped and dark, but clean. Ruthie poked her head up to the window nearest Josephine and said, “I will ride up front.”

  “Good girl, Ruthie.”

  Gifford sat forward, asking very close to her ear, “Is she … Is she—?”

  “Don’t ask if you don’t want to know, Mr. Crooks.” The carriage took off with a lurch. Their heads nearly knocked together, but they dipped away from each other at the last moment. “We are what we are, and we use the tools at our disposal.”

  “But she shouldn’t have to—”

  “She chooses to.” And almost brightly she concluded, “Look, we’re moving—and like the wind, I’ll note.”

  Gifford Crooks settled back against his seat, his face unreadable in the flickering shadows of the gas lamps in the city as it disappeared behind them. Queasily, he said, “I hope our driver can keep his eyes on the road. Not every man can pay attention to two things at once.”

  “True, but I know plenty of women who can—and Ruthie is an excellent horsewoman, should the situation call for it. Don’t worry, Mr. Crooks. Not yet.”

  “So I’m allowed to worry later?”

  “Allowed? I’ll positively encourage it. We’re headed to a pirate bay that’s under siege. The night will get worse before it gets better.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, unable to hear anything from the driver’s seat and unwilling to speak until the river, where the lights of the ferry and the sound of its steam-driven paddle wheel were a huge relief, though not huge enough to take away any of Josephine’s simmering terror. At any time, her baby brother could die from his wounds—away from home, away from the bayou, with no family and only the rough ministrations of his fellow guerrillas and unwashed privateers to soothe the pain.

  She wouldn’t have it. She’d arrive in time, and she would save him.

  She squeezed her gun like a talisman, as if it could help her, or help Deaderick—beyond commanding someone to assist him. There might be someone else present—someone with needles, salves, and tinctures. Pirates came from all walks of life, she knew this from experience. A doctor, disgraced from some terrible malpractice. A field medic, having escaped the war. Some foreigner with the training of a different land.

  Anything was possible.

  She’d heard that North Africans had good medicine, that the worshippers of Muhammad were well trained in math and surgery. The Chinese, too, were known to be great healers, though their medicine was strange to the Western mind.

  Pirates didn’t much care about an officer or medic’s race or God, so long as a fellow could patch a body back into a single piece.

  For that matter, Josephine mused as she stumbled down from the cab’s step, she’d settle for a woman. A nurse would do in a pinch, if she could find one. If one were so mad as to surround herself with men like those at Barataria.

  At the river’s edge, the glowing pier looked like matchsticks against the flowing expanse of the Mississippi, snaking through the night. The river was awesomely black and sparkling, so wide that the other side was not apparent; so powerful that it moved like the monstrous leviathan of legend, undulating south to join the Gulf. It rustled and rushed, making the usual music of water being pushed and churned by the tens of thousands of tons.

  As soon as the carriage stopped, Josephine and Gifford could hear the Gulf, and tried to take comfort from it. “Almost there,” Josephine lied to herself and to him—and though he knew better, he did not correct her.

  She threw open the cab’s door before the driver could see to it, and as she jumped down off the stair, she heard Ruthie climbing to the ground on the other side. Ruthie walked around the front, stopping to pat the horse’s sweaty brown head. She rejoined her employer by the time Gifford could extricate himself.

  Josephine handed off a few coins, one of which ought to be several days’ wages for the old driver. He thanked her with a mumble, grasped the front of his pants, and tucked in his shirt. He tipped his rumpled cap and wished the lot of them a good night, and he was on his way immediately—leaving the three would-be rescuers standing at the edge of a milling group of other travelers, all of them waiting for the ferry.

  The low, flat barge was sidling up to the pier even as they watched. Its engines rumbled with the same sound and the same fuel as the rolling-crawlers, forcing the side wheel to dig deep through the current and haul the thing along. Carriages, horses, and two or three stray messengers and merchants crowded eagerly forward. Sailors on board threw ropes to the workers on the pier, lining up the long, pale boat and cinching it against the launch. Then a wide double ramp was lowered drawbridge-style from a power-driven pulley, allowing the ferry’s late-night guests to disembark.

  There weren’t many people on board—not at this hour, coming up close to nine thirty, and not with the curfew dealing a death blow to the nightlife.

  Only a few tired-looking travelers led yawning horses off the boat, and behind them came half a dozen Texians. Three were in uniform, three were not; but anyone who’d seen a Texian official knew the posture anywhere. Josephine recognized it as easily as the smell of baking bread. They wore an insouciance and a swagger she found infuriating. They walked as if they had authority, and they did not expect to be asked any questions about it.

  Still, she smiled tightly and with civility. Some of them ignored her; one said, “Ma’am,” in passing; and the last one off the boat tipped his hat in her general direction. As this final passenger debarked, a Texian
almost too young to wear the uniform went running up to him, saying, “Ranger Korman, there you are. It’s so good to meet you, sir. I’m so glad you could make it.”

  Rangers. Hat tip or no, they were the worst of the bunch.

  A dockhand made the call for travelers to board with fares in hand. Gifford Crooks led the way, still in his Texian uniform and looking like less trouble than his two companions. Then again, considering that he was accompanied by two ladies of the evening, perhaps he looked like the most trouble anyone had seen all week.

  Josephine might have passed for a respectable spinster—someone’s governess or middle-class aunt, hidden under her cloak—and she might have even passed for white, for Gifford’s mother, in a pinch. But Ruthie, in her flamboyant garb, darkened eyes, tea-colored skin, and brightened lips, would fool no one on any count.

  They scrambled aboard quickly and settled in for the trip, but no one was very settled, except perhaps Ruthie, whose face had firmed into a look of grim, ambitious concentration. Despite her initial vows to the contrary, Josephine was glad Ruthie had insisted on coming along. She even reached out and took the woman’s gloved hand in her own, just to have something to hold that wouldn’t mind being squeezed a bit too hard.

  Across from the pair of them, seated on a bench and trying not to slump there, Gifford Crooks worked hard to appear alert and ready for action; but it was easy to see that he’d had a rough afternoon, and he hadn’t intended to go back to Barataria tonight.

  The ferry fought the river, foot by foot, and the paddle wheel dragged the lightly laden barge to the west bank. The engines strained and the diesel spewed out over the water, where fish occasionally slapped against the surface and floating logs rolled over as lazy and large as the alligators that hung closer to the marshes—outside the current’s pull, where the water was stagnant and smelly.

  Behind them, the French Quarter drifted away. Its gas lamps struggled against the darkness, signaling the stars and mimicking the moon. But the fog had rolled in hard, and it blanketed the blocks with its warm coverage and left the curfew-quieted neighborhood a low, gray smear against the waterline.

  Finally the ferry pulled up against the western pier, and another crane lowered another drawbridge down against the deck. The passengers disembarked into near emptiness.

  Josephine shivered despite herself, and despite her too-warm cloak. “Now comes the hard part,” she breathed.

  “Pourquoi?”

  Gifford Crooks answered Ruthie as they walked away from the water, back toward the docks and the small shipping district that springs up around any ferry’s destination. “Now we have to cross the marshes. Now we have to get to the island.”

  Ruthie nodded. “Then, on y va! Before it gets any later.”

  Josephine asked, “You’ve never been to Barataria before, have you?”

  “How do you know?”

  “If you’d ever been, you’d understand why the rest of the trip is a problem. Gifford?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Where’s our boat?”

  “A mile from here down the river road, on the edge of the canal,” he said quietly.

  She asked, “Are you sure?”

  “No, but that’s where we’ve been leaving the blowers for coming and going—and that’s where I left mine, when I came to town to give you Fletcher’s message. If it’s not there, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

  “If it’s not there, we’ll come back and look for something else. Mr. Crooks, do you have a light?”

  “I do,” he promised, and he pulled an electric torch from his jacket. It was small, but it’d have to do. The roads up and down the marsh’s edges were not uniformly lit, and they were dangerous.

  Now Ruthie’s concern showed through, only a little, leaking past her determined demeanor. “We will walk a mile, in the dark?”

  “Mostly in the dark,” Josephine confirmed. “But it shouldn’t be too bad. The Texians are purging the bay, aren’t they? We shouldn’t run into any robbers or mercenaries.”

  “Unless they have been chased out of the bay,” Ruthie mused. “Some of them are alive. Deaderick’s still alive.”

  Gifford tried to reassure them. “Most of the pirates went out to the Gulf, heading south if they could. There are ships at the coast to take them in—and those who didn’t get that far went deeper into the swamps. There are dozens of islands between the pirate docks and … and anything else. The rest of Louisiana. The river. The ocean.”

  “And we have to wade past them.”

  “The blower has an engine,” Gifford informed them. “We’ll get through pretty quick, all things considered.”

  “I hope it has oars, too,” Josephine said, setting off down the packed-earth stretch leading in the direction Gifford had indicated. “Because we can’t risk the noise. Not once we get past Bay Sansbois.”

  The Pinkerton man took a deep breath and said, “Sooner than that, to tell you the truth. We’ll have to take the water straight down to the edge of the islands at Point à la Hache, and then cross our fingers, cut the motor, and slink over to the big shore.”

  Ruthie asked, “What about the siege?” and she darted to catch up as Gifford pumped a switch, then flicked it—sparking a filament to create a wobbly yellow beam. The small device hummed in his hands. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a glove, which he wrapped around the torch like an oven mitt. Within twenty minutes, the thing would be too hot to hold.

  He took Ruthie’s elbow with his free hand, guiding her to walk beside him. “The siege … I don’t know. They’d done their worst by the time I left ’em, and mostly they were just sweeping the place, blowing up what airships they could reach, and wreaking havoc to wake the devil. If we’re real lucky, they’ll have gotten bored and gone home. They’ve done what they set out to do, haven’t they?”

  “It depends on what they were up to. I mean, what they were really up to,” Josephine worried aloud. “If all they wanted to do was scare some pirates, or blow Lafitte’s old docks to pieces, I guess they’ve done their duty. Texas can afford to waste the time and ammunition on a bunch of outlaws who’ve been camped there for a hundred years, but why now? Why would this new fellow make it a priority, first thing? The pirates didn’t have anything to do with his predecessor getting eaten.”

  Gifford speculated, “Maybe they don’t know that. Maybe they think the bay boys had something to do with it, and they don’t know anything about these … about the dead, down by the river.”

  Josephine didn’t respond right away. She walked on Gifford’s left, with Ruthie on his right, and she scanned the narrow strip of road she could see by the light of the electric candle. Eventually she said, “Deaderick was there, and Fletcher Josty. I hate to wonder, but I can’t help it.”

  “Wonder what?” he asked.

  “Wonder if Texas didn’t follow them down from Pontchartrain. Wonder if Texas is killing two birds with one stone, uprooting the Lafittes and going after the Ganymede in one big push. Ganymede isn’t at Barataria, but Texas doesn’t know that.”

  And then all of them were silent, all the way down to the canal.

  Six

  North Texas was as good a place to stop as any, and on the edge of Oneida was a temporary hydrogen dock—the kind that was scarcely temporary anymore, and had become a small town of its own, hanging on to the settlement’s edge like a barnacle … a barnacle that might explode and take half the desert with it, given just the right sort of accident. Bigger cities had bigger, better regulated docks; but on the unincorporated frontier, these mobile constructions squatted wherever they found a place to do so. Dangerous, dirty, and marginally managed by whoever was richest and had the biggest guns, the docks were not popular with travelers or merchants, but they were necessary. And heaven knew the air pirates were happy to make use of them.

  All across the Panhandle, the flat, brown earth was speckled with tufts of dark grass, cactus nubs, and tumbleweeds being kicked about by the occasional dust devil.
It was a dry, dull, featureless place in Cly’s opinion, but he didn’t have to live there, so he didn’t feel moved to complain about it.

  As the Naamah Darling arrived, the whole settlement—hydrogen barnacle and all—was digging out from underneath a windstorm that had knocked down horses, sent water troughs rolling through the streets, and picked roofs off buildings only to fling them miles out into the empty, prickly nothing beyond the town’s grid.

  Pale yellow sand the color of sun-bleached leather drifted into piles in the corners of fences and up against the warped wood walls of the church, bar, saddle company, law office, laundry, jail, dry goods store, and clapboard train station with its lonely pair of tracks. Men were already setting upon the tracks and sweeping them, and from the drifts of bone-dry dirt, the occasional flap of canvas would disturb the seamless layer of brown.

  Dirigibles large and small were tangled together on the dock’s eastern edge, implying a western zephyr that had moved with the might of a bored god’s fist. Riggers and engineers swarmed around these docks, shouting to cooperate and untangle the lobster claws and lines, and to dig out the pipes themselves to determine what had been uprooted, and what had only been bent out of place.

  But the western line of the dock was nearly unoccupied, save for two small mail express dirigibles that had been battened down with better rigging. Cly set his own bird down beside them, and ten minutes later he was on his way to town.

  Fang and Kirby Troost remained with the ship to see if the sulfuric acid vats were stable and could be hooked up to the hydrogen hoses, and if not, to assist with repairs. But Houjin accompanied the captain, ostensibly to get a gander at Oneida. Houjin was seventeen, and nothing short of brilliant. But he’d spent most of his life sheltered under the Seattle streets. Any chance to get out of the city was a chance for him to learn, observe, and drive people crazy.