L Neil Smith - [North American Confederacy 06]
Page 10
“Sure.” I ignored the implication of my incompetence. She was like that: anybody provided with toes and fingers didn’t need to think, couldn’t possess the intellectual capabilities of a sea-slug. “There’s plenty of gossip in the streets, take your pick, most of it related to the latest fashions, depressingly concealing; what’s going on in Paris, beheadings by the basketful; the price of crops, never high enough to satisfy farmers; and, as always, who’s bundling with who.”
“Whom.”
“All right, get touchy on me. What useful scuttlebutt I’ve separated out amounts to this: one, no mention of British soldiers, starting a new state, or invasions from Mars—”
“Invasions from Mars?” Paddling her flippers in the water, Ooloorie wrinkled her forehead, an expression she’s acquired from humans.
Encased in dirty buckskins, I suppressed the urge to spend the next several hours scratching. “Never mind. Two, somebody named James Ross, along with other ‘levelheaded’ citizens, is trying to persuade David Bradford and James Marshall, now viewed as the leading insurrectionists, to ‘spare Pittsburgh’ in exchange for placing Abraham Kirkpatrick, Presley Neville, General John Gibson, James Brison, Edward Day, and Thomas Butler in a sort of exile. The townsmen will then march out onto Braddock’s Field the next day to display their solidarity with the rebels.”
Ooloorie sighed. “Humans.” Absently, she caught a herring swimming by and munched it down. “How much of this solidarity is there?”
“Ooloorie, there’re thousands of armed insurgents gathered outside the city. Pittsburgh’s self-appointed civic leaders are pretending to be wheeling and dealing with the rebels, while remaining sympathetic with the government’s excise laws. The average guy’s burying his savings, silverware, and family heirlooms in his backyard—protecting them from whom, I don’t think even he’s sure.”
She made sympathetic noises. “I remember reading about that.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s an old story. I just hadn’t realized how old. Like that amnesty of Brackenridge’s. Somehow, this revolution’s been turned on its own tail, becoming a matter of people versus people, instead of all the people versus the real enemy of peace, progress, and prosperity everywhere. Go figure it.”
“Machinations at the top?”
“That’s what you commissioned me to find out. Sorry, from here I just don’t know. But unless somebody does something fast, the Rebellion will be lost before it’s begun—which is what happened in my home time-line.”
“That somebody will have to be Albert Gallatin,” Ooloorie said.
Which brought my mind around to Ed. While Lucy and I were otherwise occupied in Pittsburgh, he and Ochskahrt had been shadowing the Swiss country gentleman, who’d responded to the Braddock’s Field militia call along with five or six thousand other local inhabitants.
“Edna can strike at any time, Ooloorie, but our plan is still not to meet the old fellow—I still think of him that way, from images on coins, I guess, despite the fact he’s just thirty-three years old at the moment. We’ll just unobtrusively watch his back.”
The fishy scientist nodded. “If things go right, he’ll never know it’s being done. If they go wrong,” added the cynical cetacean, “he’ll never know that, either.”
I glanced at my wristwatch, discovered it wasn’t there this century, decided it wasn’t worth messing with my skinsuit-instruments to find out the exact time. I rose. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I’ll begin elbowing my way through the crowd toward the end of town nearest Braddock’s Field. I’m late already. It’s my turn to mind the baby, while Ed plays Philip Marlowe for you.”
We signed off. I peeled down my hood, tucked it into the neck of my shirt, opened the door, and stepped out through the buzzing of the flies, back into the sunlight.
I ran into Lucy, right on schedule, as I was down the street arranging for a horse.
“Lookie here, you simpering cephaloplegic!” One hand managing her extra skirt-yardage, she shook a scrawny fist, her face screwed into its own center like a dried-up apple. It was hot in the rough plank building, over a sort of olfactory bass-note of horse droppings, the baritone of burning hardwood and tenor of hot metal filling the air. For the moment, though, the percussion section—blacksmith’s hammer—was silent. He was occupied with other, more pressing business.
Lucy said: “We’re gonna settle this account, here an’ now, macho a macho, or I’m gonna know the reason why!” She’d changed back into eighteenth-century feminine attire. Now she was trying, without success, to settle the rental on the pony. The stableman, an overmuscled, sweaty specimen with a singed ponytail, had his thighlike arms folded across his grimy leather apron, a grim, unforgiving expression on his unshaven face—mixed with a glint of avarice in his small, piggish eyes. He rumbled, “A bargain, madame, is a bargain.”
Putting a hand on Lucy’s shoulder I asked, “ ‘Cephaloplegic’?”
She jumped, then turned to me. “Somebody paralyzed from the neck up—” She whirled back to the blacksmith. “An’ don’t you dast commence that ‘madame’ business again, you misbegotten iron-pumper. We had ourselves a deal, ordinary day-rates. What I done with the horse, long as I brought her back healthy, ain’t none of your nevermind!”
The horse-renter’s eyebrows shot up. He reached into an apron pocket, smiled, produced the feathered tomahawk, holding it up for inspection. “But you see, madame, there must be an additional price, for public sedition, payable by the authorities—once defaulted upon by the traitor.”
15
Tie a Yellow Ribbon
The blacksmith took a step forward, another sideways, stretched a stubby hand in the direction of the hammer lying across the anvil.
Licking my thumb, I ran it along the front sight of my rifle, raised the weapon to port, and drawled, “I wouldn’t try that, friend.” ! don’t know what that bit’s supposed to accomplish, but it looks neat. Glancing at Lucy, I added, “Man gets upset when you hit his mother on the hand with a hammer.”
“Sure t’leave a bad impression on her mind,” she responded, hitching her skirt. There was a surprise there for the stableman—fourteen of them—if she could get at it. I caught a glint of metal in my peripheral vision. She had both seven-shooters trained on him.
The larcenous horse-trader swiveled his fire-hydrant neck, looking from one of us to the other. He decided we meant it, started an angry expression on his broad grimy face, then converted it to resignation. He let his racket-sized hand drop and backed away from the anvil. No armistice, just a cease-fire.
I sidestepped away from the door toward a wall, not liking empty space behind my back. As I did, the doorway darkened. I lowered my rifle, letting it rest on its curved brass recoil-pad. Lucy’s pistols disappeared. A pair of well-dressed Pittsburghers entered, interrupting our business conference with the request that the horses they boarded be readied for a ride to Braddock’s Field. The unkempt proprietor nodded, going along with the masquerade, began hollering orders.
An undernourished pimple-face materialized to carry them out. Grabbing a double armful of posterior-polished leather, he dragged it toward the stalls at the back. The boss stood around, kicking straw and grunting commonplaces with the clientele—while keeping one suspicious eye over their shoulders on my aged mother. Who stood fuming and speechless.
In the interim, I’d had time for thought. My waistband held another handkerchief like the one worn by the mysterious tomahawk-wielder. I extracted it from beneath my homespun, wadding the cheap material in my fist. Pretending to examine some horse-tackle on the wall, I watched the owner in a reflective bit-escutcheon, his attention divided between Lucy and his clients. When he turned to bellow his assistant up to a higher velocity, I stashed the yellow band in the bottom of a feed-bag firebranded house property.
I turned. Horses had been brought out. The customers were being waited on. Now the proprietor had time for us again. Lucy didn’t wait for the others to leave before she was back to hagg
ling. “This here’s blackmail, an’ you know it!”
The blacksmith smiled, displaying black gaps in his brown teeth. “Madame, be so good as to lower your voice, unless you want the accusation leveled here and now, to nobody’s profit.” He tossed a glance toward his clients, climbing aboard their animals.
Rifle in hand, I stepped up to him. “Look here, stablekeeper, blackmail is a two-way street.”
“A two-way street?” Puzzlement furrowed his forge-darkened features. “Pray tell what street is not a two-way street? Wherever do you come by such a peculiar phrase?”
I blew air through my nose, grounded the rifle, put a hand on my Bowie-pommel, and started again. “I mean sedition is like witchcraft. Anyone can accuse anyone else and make the charge stick. Take it from an excop—er, make that former constable, and... what’s that, Lucy? Oh all right, Goddamn it, town marshall, then.” I stopped to catch my breath. The man’s eyes had widened at the casual blasphemy, lowering my opinion of local blacksmiths. “My mother has paid you your due. Take it while you can.” He started to interrupt. I didn’t let him. Thumping him with each word in that tender spot between the collarbones, I warned, “You whisper a word of this to anyone, and I’ll produce uncontrovertible proof that you yourself are one of Tom the Tinker’s men.”
“G’wan!” he sneered. “There’s no such—”
“I know there’s evidence,” I told him. “I planted it here, while you were busy with the paying customers.”
He opened his mouth. He shut it.
We left.
Tenting tonight,
Tenting tonight,
Tenting on the old campground.
Braddock’s Field lay eight miles outside the city, below where Turtle Creek joined the Monongahela, an open plain along the eastern bank. Getting here, the back-country militia had crossed a ford used by Braddock’s ill-fated army ascending through cuts made by British engineers for their wheeled ordnance. In 1794, the place was used for horse-pasture. Farther from the river, the ground became hilly, serrated by ravines, wooded.
Five thousand unmilitary beings were sandwiched into the place, cheek-to-figurative-cheek, in an area not much larger than a football stadium. There was canvas everywhere—guy-ropes a positive menace to navigation—and a constant ground-fog of campfire smoke we came to be grateful for, owing to a proliferation of unwashed humanity and their equine mass-transit, or rather the road-pollution it was leaving behind. The spectacle resembled a mismanaged scout jamboree, complete with oversized boys and underqualified counselors. Drill teams with mismatched firearms and clothing hup-hoop-beeped across hill and dale, led by volunteer captains with generals’ stars in their eyes. The sloppy columns often ran smack into each other like rehearsing contingents of Keystone Kops. Disorganized confusion was the rule, just like in Pittsburgh at the moment, but in the Braddock’s Field encampment, on a more ambitious scale. Incidental street-talk was another difference: Alexander Hamilton—what he would persuade the President to do—was the unspoken subject of every conversation.
It took Lucy and me an hour to find the Confederate contingent. Safe inside our tent, we reported camp news to Ed, who’d taken my place in the city. Ochskahrt was laced up inside his sleeping bag, playing “Beautiful Dreamer.”
“—riel Blakeney,” I was saying into my suit-face, passing on a tidbit we’d picked up, “and William Meet-kirk, prominent citizens, also Absalom Baird—he was the guy who ordered Lenox’s arrest—have agreed to transmit rebel terms to the Pittsburgh town meeting called to deal with the emergency. They’ll accept Pittsburgh’s offer to exile the Federalists and return the mail we went to all that trouble stealing.”
“Shhh!” Lucy protested, “the walls have ears!” She stopped, scratched beneath her short ribs. “Or something, anyway.”
“—ugly catch—” Ed telepathized, taking a break from his legwork for a quick bite of jerky near the wooden Indian I’d made acquaintance with. “—is that they’re to be interviewed at this end by Wallace, Brackenridge, and John Wilkins, Junior—Pittsburgh’s leading fencestraddlers—with Presley Neville present and John Gibson presiding.” He paused. “Oh, yes. There’s been an additional development. It’s being announced that a ‘Committee of Twenty-one’ has taken over city government for the duration...”
He panned along the street for our benefit. Town criers were doing the announcing, others nailed up printed handbills. People sniggered: another committee.
“A peculiar coup d’etat,” my look-alike commented, “leaving the same city-hall loafers in control as the day before—reorganized so none of them have to take individual responsibility for what comes next: asking Mssrs. Kirkpatrick, Brison, Day, and the rest to ‘absent themselves for the good of all.’ No one can quite summon up the courage to brace Gibson and Presley about leaving.” An eerie electronic chuckle issued from his implant. “Gossip has it that the situation wasn’t even mentioned to them—until Henry Purviance, one of the committee, insisted.” He laughed. “The Committee spent a good deal of time adopting a swell-sounding resolution for the benefit of Braddock’s Field, to be printed both as newspaper ad and handbill. It’s already leaked all over the place.”
“Here, too,” Lucy offered. “John Scull, of the Pittsburgh Gazette, demonstratin’ a cynicism I didn’t know’d already developed in his profession, plans t’labor through the night typesettin’ the Committee’s pretense that they’re entrenched against the excise.”
“You should hear Brackenridge: ‘Pittsburgh’s rebellious sons will be represented at Braddock’s Field on the morrow.’” Ed snorted. “And they want to come to Parkinson’s Ferry!”
I laughed. Outside, an increase in the genreal clamor caused me to peel my face and peek out through the flaps into the failing light. Fife, drums, and the squish, squish, squishity of feet stomping out of time. Up and down the muddy avenues between the tents, David Bradford, dressed in a bright, custom-tailored generalissimo’s outfit, complete with a feathery cocked hat and enough brass buttons to cast small cannon from, was giving his troops a series of drills. I hadn’t known District Attorneys had troops. Was everybody in this century crazy?
Not quite. When I replaced my face-piece, Ed was watching a young family of Pittsburghers out in their yard. Mama held a lamp, swatting away the moths it was beginning to draw; Papa made with a shovel—the kids were busy sounding out a handbill stuck to one of their trees, promising Peace In Our Time—burying their valuables.
16
Rain of Terror
AUGUST 2, 1794
“Aaaachooo!”
An old familiar tension braiding my insides, I hunched in the midnight mist, a sheet of oily latigo turning to soup around me while it failed to protect me from the drizzle. I had a case of stake-out jitters, telling me that tonight was the night.
Suppressing a second sneeze, I half leaned on my rifle, checking the fit of the rawhide muzzle-cover. And the priming pan for the ten-thousandth time. It made an individual appreciate the nineteenth century and self-contained metallic cartridges. What I wouldn’t have given for a .45 Peacemaker or a lever-action Winchester. “Keep your powder dry” was more than just an idle turn of phrase in the 1700s; it was a way of life. One hoped.
I shivered, wanting a cigar I couldn’t have—the
glow would give me away, and it was too wet—wishing I could send my nerves back on warranty. Something important was about to happen. Judging from the centipedes rappelling down the back of my neck, it wasn’t going to be nice.
It really was a dark and stormy night, overcast and moonless. An occasional third-rate lightning flicker gave me tachistoscopic glimpses of endless badly ordered tent rows stretching across the muddy plain to the Monongahela. In view of my earlier illness, Ed had cautioned me to wake him if it began precipitating in earnest, but I hadn’t. There’s that streak in all men that resents being mentioned in the same context as poultry excretion. No dignity, calling in sick in a life-and-death situation, however circumspect it may be.
Don’t get me wrong. There was some joy in what was rapidly becoming Mudville, would have been boisterous, whiskey-powered celebration, if it hadn’t been for the weather. That afternoon, before the rain, breathless reports had arrived of outbreaks against the excise in the Shenandoah Valley. Kirkpatrick and Bri-son had been seen skulking out of Pittsburgh, the first of the Federalist exiles to do so. Intelligence (Ed, poking around the city) suggested that General Wilkins had received an emergency order from Governor Mifflin to bring us rioters to swift, stem justice. I’d have guessed that to be Thomas Butler’s job—never did get protocol straight. In any event, Wilkins had acted with prompt decision—by hiding the order. His father, a Pittsburgh merchant, was coming out in a day or so to talk us out of burning his establishment to the ground. Fine. Nobody’d thought of doing such a thing until he suggested it.
The Rebellion seemed to be getting somewhere.
So why the willy-fidgets on my part? For one thing, I needed to go to the bathroom—a mile across the rain-drenched field to the river, another mile in the dark, downstream, to keep things sanitary. Ed wouldn’t be here to let me off the hook for another long hour. For another, while everybody else was logging downtime, I was stuck in the rain, guarding Albert Gallatin’s tent, trying not to be conspicuous, and sort of resenting the fact that Edna hadn’t had the courtesy to show up. So far. And for another—
“Monsieur?”
“GHAAA!!” I jumped three feet when the hand clamped on my shoulder, whirled, heart pounding, my own sweaty digits on the handle of my Bowie. I followed the intruding appendage up as it became a lace-decorated wrist, a silk-encased forearm, a stylish elbow... At its other end was a neat, small-framed, gentle-looking specimen, with twinkling gray eyes behind thick spectacles, an ironic twist of a smile, and even less hair than Ochskahrt made a habit of wearing. He’d even thought to bring an umbrella.