Shadow Conspiracy

by Phyllis Irene

  Up the bayou she could see the boat chugging along. It was a slender vessel—no wider than the canoes and rafts used by Tcax’s people—designed for travel in the snaky bayous. The sides were low, and a long cabin took up most of the deck space. At the rear sat a huge box that puffed out steam. It was the box that made the noise, and the box that made the boat move much more rapidly than anything else that came down the Bayou Teche.

  “It is the crazy white man,” she shouted down to the others. By the time the boat docked, the whole village had come out to great him. Charles Dumont was popular among the people of the village, for he always brought with him unusual objects from the great city of New Orleans—metal pots, woven fabrics, ribbons that could be worked into baskets—and treated the village elders with great respect, for all that he had never learned their language, forcing them to communicate with him in their pidgin French.

  The roar of the engine—up close it sounded like the wind of a hurricane—ceased abruptly, and Dumont stepped off the boat, accompanied by two black men and a white woman. The black men, the people knew, were his servants, but the woman was someone very new. She was tall, for a woman, and had golden hair, though streaked with silver. Tcax heard one of the woman say, “She must be old enough to have grandchildren.” Despite the warmth of the day, she wore a long blue dress with a full skirt, tightly cinched at the waist and wide in the shoulders. To Tcax, attired in a loin cloth and moccasins, the clothing seemed excessive. Surely she must be suffering from the heat. Though she didn’t smell of sweat; she smelled of flowers.

  It was still early in the day, and Dumont and his servants set off into the brush, with one of the men as a guide. The woman stayed behind in the village, talking to the village women—she spoke French, though her accent was even stranger than Dumont’s. Tcax was torn between exploring the boat—she wanted to know how it moved so fast and why it made so much noise—and following the woman around. She decided on the woman; the crazy white man would come again, but this might be the only time he brought the woman.

  It developed from the conversation that the woman had neither grandchildren nor children, nor even a man. Apparently she ran her own life and lived as she chose, as if she were a white man. Tcax was fascinated, though she wondered why, if that were true, the woman wore such silly clothes. Granted, the crazy white man wore odd clothes, too, but his, at least, were more practical for walking through bayou country.

  The village elders had been debating whether Tcax would live as a man rather than a woman; since she had started to bleed, she showed no signs of wanting to stop wrestling and racing with the boys. And everyone—even the most disapproving old men—had to acknowledge that she was one of the best hunters among the children. But if they allowed her to live as a man, she would also dress as one.

  The white woman seemed equally fascinated by Tcax. “A girl who runs with the boys?” she asked. Tcax could not tell if she understood the response, but the woman beckoned to her, and Tcax sat beside her. “I am Elizabeth Freemantle,” the woman said.

  “Tcax.” Neither could pronounce the other’s name properly.

  “So you hunt?” Elizabeth asked, which prompted Tcax to tell a long story about shooting raccoons with her bow. Elizabeth appeared to get the gist of the story, though Tcax often lapsed into her native tongue.

  One of the village women asked Elizabeth to tell them about New Orleans and the conversation moved on to discussions of baskets, cooking, and other topics that bored Tcax. But she continued to sit by Elizabeth, even when the boys came racing past.

  The crazy white man and his entourage came back at dusk, bearing several bags of flowers. He was smiling, and spoke to Elizabeth in a language Tcax didn’t understand. His servants set up two tents—a separate one for Elizabeth—and the visitors joined the village for dinner. Tcax went off to her own home to sleep soon after. It had been a most satisfying day.

  It was the last such day in the village.

  An army of metal men was stomping through her village. Clomp, clomp, clomp, they marched along in unison. Tcax woke suddenly and lay very still, holding her breath. She heard nothing. A dream, she told herself, breathing once again. But a disturbing dream, one to ask an elder about.

  And then she heard the sound: Clomp, clomp, clomp. Completely awake now, Tcax nudged her mother, then snatched up her knife and crept to the door.

  The moon was half full and the night was clear. Tcax could see what looked to be a group of men at the other end of the village, walking along in unison. The moonlight glinted off their chests, and they clanked as they walked. They stopped abruptly at a house. One entered, and came back out dragging two people.

  Her mother came to the doorway, took one look, then moved to wake the younger children. Tcax slipped out through the back, and her mother followed with the baby in her arms and a firm grip on Tcax’s younger brother. Her mother motioned to Tcax to follow her. Tcax shook her head, and leaned close to her mother. “I must go fight, if I can.”

  Her mother frowned, but nodded. She leaned over and kissed Tcax on the forehead, and then moved on to try to get the little ones to safety.

  As she hid in the shadows of the trees along the bayou, Tcax heard explosive noises—like rifle fire, except that they came rapidly, as if the shooters did not need to reload after each shot—and the first of many screams. The screams frightened her; there was a level of fear in them that she had never heard before. She thought about turning to run after her mother. She was not yet grown up; she was not expected to fight.

  But the piercing screams and the marching men had made it obvious that this was no minor battle. Anyone who could fight must. And Tcax could fight.

  She moved along cautiously, keeping to the trees behind the houses, listening. When she heard footsteps nearby, Tcax quickly shimmied up the nearest tree. A man walked underneath with a rifle in his hand. He didn’t shine in the moonlight or clank as he moved, but he was not a man from the village or anyone she had ever seen before.

  He stopped directly underneath her, muttering something to himself in a language Tcax didn’t know and swinging the rifle in all directions. She was in a good position to drop down on top of him, but she hesitated. He was much bigger than she was; she knew she would have to kill him, because she would not be able to stop him otherwise. And while she had hunted animals, she had never killed a human being.

  Then the man fired his rifle, which gave several shots in rapid succession. She could not see what he fired at, but someone screamed. That gave Tcax resolve; she leaped down on his back and cut his throat before he could respond. She grabbed up his rifle—a large one—and climbed back up in the tree, trying to get a view of the village.

  The invading group had pulled several more people from the houses, children as well as adults. They shot them in a volley of fire—indeed, the weapons could fire multiple times—then dragged the bodies along. Tcax stuck her fist in her mouth to keep from crying out, though tears ran down her face. Even at this distance, she could recognize everyone, the man who had taught her to make a bow, the woman who had taken care of her when her mother nearly died of a fever, a boy she had played with only hours before.

  She could see many of the village men rushing around the village—all likely woken from a sound sleep as she had been—shooting at the invaders at every opportunity. But both arrows and bullets bounced harmlessly off the glinting chests, and neither bow nor rifle was a match for the repeating rifles. Tcax saw several men fall with gaping holes in their chests.

  Perhaps their own guns would kill these men. She pointed the rifle she had taken from the man she’d killed toward the gleaming invaders, and began to press the trigger, knowing that once she fired, they would be able to find her. I can at least kill some of them before I die, she told herself, trying to calm her pounding heart, to do what must be done.

  But before she could shoot, she heard gunfire and screaming from the direction in which her mother had taken the children. Instead of firing, she slid dow
n the tree and ran toward the screams.

  She arrived too late. Two of the invaders stood with rifles smoking before a pile of bodies. Tcax’s fear turned into rage; she screamed as she pulled the trigger on the odd rifle. It sent an explosive volley of shots into the men. One fell, but the other turned and began to walk toward her. She tried to fire again, but the gun jammed. Reversing it to use as a club, she ran directly at the man, knocking his gun aside and smashing her own weapon into his face.

  He did not fall down, or even seem to feel the gun hit his hands or his head. Instead, he grabbed for her. Tcax—so terrified by his lack of response that she wet herself—ran, scrambling among the trees. She heard him coming after her—he clanged—but he was not moving as fast as she. She got far enough ahead to climb a tree, and watched him walk beneath her.

  She wondered that he could not hear her heart, which sounded so loud in her own ears. Her panting breath was louder still, and she was shaking so much the tree limbs were swaying, but perhaps he thought it was the wind. Besides that, she smelled bad, but perhaps the creature could not detect an odour.

  Tcax doubted she’d be safe for long up the tree, but it did give her a minute to rest and think. Though the first thing that came to mind was the pile of bodies. She knew her mother lay there, along with her sister and brother and many others.

  Grief welled up inside Tcax; she thought the pain of it would make her vomit. She wanted to scream, to tear her hair, to roll on the ground. With great effort, she pushed all emotion aside. She must try to survive, try to save anyone who might still live, try to avenge the dead.

  The man had been made of metal, she was sure of it. She’d felt it when she struck him. Or it. Certainly he was not a regular human being. The explosive guns worked on these creatures, but nothing else seemed to affect them.

  But the man she’d killed earlier had been flesh; his blood had spurted everywhere. The invaders were both kinds then, flesh and metal.

  A shrill whistle sounded, followed by the clanging and clomping sounds made by the metal men. They moved. She saw one pass under her tree—perhaps the one who had chased her—and then heard no more of them near where she hid. She climbed down, and moved carefully behind them.

  They congregated in the centre of the village. A large oak grew there, but Tcax would have to run across open ground to get to it and the sky was beginning to grow light. Still, the tree was the best place to watch what was happening and the noise made by the metal men would at least keep anyone from hearing her. She took a chance, ran for the tree, and climbed rapidly until she was hidden among the leaves.

  The metal men—maybe fifteen of them—surrounded two white flesh men. Outside of their circle lay a pile of bodies. Tcax choked back a cry. Was everyone else now dead? A last metal man came up, dragging someone by a rope. It was the white woman, Elizabeth.

  Her dress was torn and bloody, but she glared at the two men with contempt. They said something to her in a language that Tcax did not understand; she replied, and then one of them struck her so hard that she fell to the ground. The metal man dragged her to her feet and tied her to the tree in which Tcax hid.

  The two flesh men were yelling at each other now. Tcax, watching their body language even though she could not understand what they said, thought they might come to blows, but they did not. Finally, they gave an instruction to the metal men, who began dragging bodies from the pile and taking them somewhere. She heard Elizabeth crying below her, though whether she cried for herself or the dead, Tcax could not tell. Perhaps both.

  Tcax closed her eyes so that she would not see the cruel treatment of the dead. She tried to think of practical things, to summarize what she knew. The metal men did not speak. They took orders from the flesh men, almost like animals.

  Even with her eyes closed, she could see the dead. She would see the dead in her mind’s eye forever after. Tears rolled down her cheeks, but she managed to keep from screaming by biting the back of her hand until she drew blood. Finally she realized that the clanking noise was farther away, and opened her eyes. The metal men were gone, and with them the dead. Only blood remained. The odour of it was overwhelming.

  The flesh men had also disappeared. They might not be far, might return at any minute, but Tcax knew this was her only chance. She climbed out on a branch, and dropped down in front of Elizabeth. The woman’s eyes widened, but she choked off a cry. Tcax cut the ropes that bound her, and they took off at a run. “Charles’s boat,” Elizabeth said. “If they haven’t bothered to guard it.”

  They hadn’t. It sat there, docked beside the rafts and canoes the village used. Tcax climbed aboard, and looked inside the small cabin. No one was there. Elizabeth untied the boat, and waded through the water to climb on herself. She sat at the rear, and used a lever to guide it. The boat began to drift downstream.

  “What about the...the others?” Tcax asked.

  “Charles died protecting me. His men died with him. I...I do not know if any of your people survived. But if they did, how would we find them?”

  Tcax nodded, though she wondered then—and ever after—if she had left people behind to die.

  Elizabeth let the current carry them until they were around a curve and out of sight of the village. Then she began to turn a crank on the metal box that dominated the rear deck. She cranked rapidly, and the box began to make hissing sounds, then clanging ones, and finally settled into the roaring that the boat always made. Over the noise, Tcax heard the shrill whistle the flesh men had used to call the metal ones, but now they were moving very rapidly—much faster than the metal men could move, she thought.

  “Where are we going?” she asked Elizabeth.

  “To New Orleans, first, and then far away from here,” the woman replied in a grim voice. “Very far away from here.”

  Tcax began to cry in earnest then, to keen and moan for all that she had lost. Elizabeth laid a hand on her shoulder, but did not try to stop her mourning. She cried most of the way to New Orleans.

  There was more to the story—how the authorities in New Orleans had shrugged when Elizabeth reported the massacre and how Tcax had become Jane Freemantle and travelled not just a few miles from her village, but halfway around the world to London—but it was the invasion and the escape that had bound the two of them together.

  “We may have raised enough money,” Elizabeth said. She was sitting at her desk, going over the receipts. The room was high-ceilinged, and panelled in walnut, but it faced east and got the morning sun. While the house was far smaller than Lady Fortescue’s, it too had a library. Elizabeth frequented hers; the lady had a small dark affair used only to store books.

  Jane sat on a window seat, reading a book on dirigibles. She nodded in response.

  “Are you sure you want to be part of the expedition? You are not required to do so.”

  Jane smiled. “You have already told everyone of any importance in the United Kingdom that I am going. I certainly cannot withdraw now.” Her English was excellent, though she retained a trace of French accent.

  “You may do anything you want. I know your researches are important to you.” Jane was doing experiments in electromagnetism in the basement.

  “Yes, but you also know I long for physical exertion. Target shooting and teaching ladies self defence is far from sufficient. My researches will be here when I return. And besides, you count on my succeeding, so you can show one more thing women might do.”

  “I do,” Elizabeth admitted. “And I know you will be much better at the task than any of those foolish young men.”

  “Yes. I am a very good killer.” She said it lightly, but Elizabeth jumped to her feet and rushed to her side.

  “You have never killed without necessity, darling,” she said, putting her arms around the younger woman.

  “I know.” Jane closed her eyes. “I am all right. But the fact remains that such a task as this requires someone who knows she can kill. The others will be soldiers. An ordinary woman, one who has never been at ris
k for her life, could not do this.”

  “I suppose that is true. And you have more reason than most to hate these manufactured creatures.”

  “Yes,” Jane said.

  Elizabeth had begun her fight against manmade life soon after their return from New Orleans. Her first effort was political: a campaign to outlaw automatons—who had become known as metalmen. That effort reached its pinnacle some six years previous, when Elizabeth and Jane had testified before the 1833 session of Parliament.

  The measure failed by a large majority. “To be blunt,” said a friend of Elizabeth’s who served as an advisor to one of the few MPs in favour of the ban, “your testimony probably produced a few votes for the other side. When you and Miss Jane described how the metalmen could be used in a battle, several thought immediately of expanding their use in His Majesty’s Army.”

  “How could they think that way? Did we not adequately describe the horrors?”

  “They saw themselves on the side of those running the metalmen, Elizabeth. Not on the side of their victims.”

  After that, Elizabeth turned her not inconsiderable organizing talents to more direct methods. But destroying all the metalmen in existence proved an insurmountable task; the British army was not the only military force in the world that saw the benefit of the metal warriors, and their use as servants was growing popular. There were far too many to wipe out.

  A campaign against ensouled automatons, however, proved possible. The various governments had prohibited ensoulment—as indeed they prohibited various kinds of black magicks—though it was suspected that the prohibition had more to do with the idea that soldiers and servants without souls gave better service.