J.C. pulled Hamilton’s attention away from the hateful rag of a flag hanging from its tree. “We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said in a tight urgent whisper.
“Will you be coming with me?”
J.C. blinked, as if startled. “Of course. You think I want to be a part of this motley group? I told you. I’m no rebel. Any fight I’m in will be on my own terms.”
The words comforted Hamilton. He looked around once more at the ragged milling of the armed Colonists. There had never been any serious effort made to curb the manufacture and distribution of firearms. This had been such a dangerous continent, historically, from its discovery. Wild beasts, untamed wilderness, an inscrutable indigenous population. Arms had been the logical implements of those early settlers. Now the firearms were habitual, a part of the Colonial character almost.
When this war was done and everything returned to normal, someone simply must do something about all these guns, Hamilton mused.
“We can find a way over this wall,” J.C. said. “Or maybe we can just walk out the gate. It—”
“Not yet.”
“You hoping to make a few new friends here first?” snapped J.C.
Hamilton returned him a wry look. When they’d been wandering under the hot sun, he had started to have secret doubts about their predicament, whether they would even survive it. He hadn’t liked that helpless feeling. But here he could engage his military competence, flex those muscles of clear thinking the Fleet had so diligently developed in him.
“There is intelligence to be had here,” he said, watching a boy of fifteen or so trip over a tree root and drop a box that burst open, spilling what looked to be musket balls. “By that I mean military intelligence. Information. These people must have some picture of what is happening out there.”
“What’s happening is open season on Brits. Look, somebody’s going to ask the wrong question, or you or me is going to give the very wrong answer, and then the jig is going to be up. It’s too dangerous to stay. We probably should’ve just taken that electricar at gunpoint.”
Hamilton, confidence resurging, couldn’t resist a jibe. “Got a taste for gunplay, have you?”
He saw immediately that he’d overstepped. J.C.’s comely face darkened. “I didn’t like shooting that guy, okay? If there’d been any other way—”
Hamilton dropped a hand on his shoulder and said gently, “I’m sorry. That was crass of me. But back to the situation at hand. I imagine there’s a communications set in this camp. I need access to a crystal. At the least I must find out the official word on these past two days.” At the most, he added silently, he would call in an aerial bombardment on this position. If he could determine the coordinates.
J.C. still appeared to be reliving the last incident aboard the doomed airship, when he’d used the shotgun on one of the bandits. Hamilton hadn’t been aware it had affected him so. A sensitive soul, then. While he might have thought this a weakness in another man, it seemed only to add to J.C.’s character, giving him further dimension. No ordinary thief, this one. No ordinary man.
“What’s the smile for?” J.C. asked sharply, still managing to keep his voice low. No one in the camp was paying them any special attention. Lax, very lax.
“I wasn’t aware I was wearing one. Perhaps I’m just imagining happier times.”
“You got smarmy quick. What makes you so assured?”
“I believe we can outplay these knaves. Look, here comes our native guide.” The woman, Ramona, was emerging from the shack belonging to the “colonel”—no doubt a made-up title. It was there where a crystal set was most likely to be found. Hamilton heard the faint hum of an electricity generator in there.
Ramona came toward them. “Well, that’s Dr. Shelton delivered. Clyde. He’s got a good military mind. Knows his history. Ask him about any battle. Oh, I mentioned you two to the colonel. He says the details about how you got here can wait. He’s busy with other matters. Half of us are shipping out tomorrow. That might mean splitting the pair of you up. Any problem with that?”
“We don’t want to be apart,” Hamilton said, even as J.C. made to shape a response that was probably a bit less blunt.
Ramona, who stood nearly as tall as Hamilton, shifted her gaze back and forth between them. “You ain’t kin. What’s the connection, then? You two beaus?” This struck her as hilarious, and she let out a guffaw.
J.C. said, “I owe him at cards, and he won’t let me out of his sight. That’s not to say we aren’t beaus, of course.”
Ramona had to bend over and slap her knee at that. “You’re precious, blondie. Well, we’ll see how the outfits shake out. Maybe I can exert a little influence with my womanly wiles. C’mon, you two’re prob’ly still hungry, just eating the leftovers from me and Clyde’s lunch. I drove all the way to Chicago to get him.” She started away.
He and J.C. followed. Chicago? That was at the northern extreme of Illinois. How far had she driven? That would give him a rough idea of their present location.
“What are things like in Chicago?”
“Like you said they were in New Orleans. Starting to get busy. Ah, here. Looks like soup’s on.” They entered one of the rough structures, a fairly large one, where a veritable cauldron was being stirred. Hot, meaty aromas filled the interior, where people sat at crude tables, eating out of tin bowls.
Again there was no order, no discipline. People jostled around the big iron pot until they got served. Hamilton saw no officers’ table. In fact, there was no telling who, if anyone, was an officer. This was a rabble army, which of course didn’t mean they were harmless. If revolution were truly underway, there would be blood aplenty shed, and not only American.
Hamilton held to his belief that an organized response from the Airborne Fleet and the other military branches would keep these colonies under proper British control. But he had to think of personal survival as well. J.C. was right; they would need to get away from here. First, though, information.
Ramona sat with them, although she didn’t eat, instead at last lighting that cigar stump and drawing ponderously on it. Hamilton ate the hearty stew. There were chunks of stale bread on the table, which softened enough for chewing when dunked in the bowls. He was still carrying his bloodstained naval coat, still had the two pistols tucked under his shirt.
“As my young friend mentioned,” Hamilton said, “we’re new to the cause. To be frank, we’re not entirely clear as to what we have attached ourselves to. The scope of the thing, I mean.”
J.C. sat beside him, eating the stew with a wooden spoon. Though he maintained an easy, almost jovial outside air, Hamilton sensed his tension.
Ramona sat across with her noxious cigar. “You,” she said, gathering a breath as if to orate, “are a part of something great, something inevitable, something that’s been brewing and a-bubbling for near a hunnert years. We’re Americans, you and me. Americans. We ain’t some limb of the Brits. We’ve lived in this land and made it ours, struggled here, died, made babies, kept on fighting against rough odds, and we done it for generations. I don’t know what England’s like, and I don’t want to. But I do know it’s someplace else, somewhere with no real connection to this raw, lovely land. The Brits are a different people, and if God’s gonna suffer ’em to live, then so be it. But they don’t have any right to say what we can and cannot do, how we can live, who we gotta take orders from. We are not colonies, not no more. We were once, I grant you. Somebody had to sail over here and claim this land in some monarch’s name. That’s the way of the world, ain’t it? The savages who were here had to be tamed. But that was long ago. We stopped being British, if we ever really were. Personally I think a spirit inhabits this continent, and I believe my ancestors felt it and took it into themselves. It changed them, toughened them. We are made for this land. We belong here because we’ve put in the time. We’ve bled for our continued existence. Brit magistrates and Brit troops in their neat red rows and Brits flying airships don’t have the spirit of the
land inside them. They… they’re like jailors. Or custodians. They’re keeping watch on the place for somebody else, for Herself—may she rot.”
Reflex very nearly took over at that point. J.C., evidently following closely despite his outward nonchalance, nudged him hard under the table with his knee. Hamilton managed to maintain his calm appearance.
“So,” Ramona went on, as others at the tables turned to listen, “you are a part of a new people, a new nation. Births are bloody. There’s screaming and pain, and it seems impossible when it’s happening that anything good’ll come of it. I remember pushing out my little Charlie and thinking sure I would die. But I didn’t, and he didn’t, and when this fight’s won, he’ll be an American, truly and completely.”
Hurrahs erupted. Tin bowls were banged upon the crude tables. Ramona preened for the others. Hamilton couldn’t understand it. It was just so much infantile twaddle to his ears. “Spirit of the land”? What blather. Did these people think they were the only colony on earth? At least she had touched on a measure of truth when she’d said that colonization was the way of the world. Empires were driven naturally to expand. This America she spoke so glibly of was a portion of the British Empire, nothing more.
He turned to J.C., as if to silently confirm the absurdity of the woman’s assertions, but found instead J.C.’s face set in an odd cast. A light glimmered in his eyes.
Hamilton looked back at Ramona, still smugly absorbing accolades for her oratory. He felt an urge to reach across the table and slap her soundly. Instead he said, “Yes. I couldn’t agree more. But what I asked was a question of scale. How big the fight, not the temper behind it.”
The proud look slid slowly from her lined, middle-aged face. The cigar had gone out, and she wrapped it in a small cloth and tucked it into one of her leather vest’s many pockets. Hamilton wondered if he’d let too much annoyance into his tone. A man J.C.’s age came to the table with a bowl. He had shaggy hair rather like J.C.’s, though in a shade almost black. Hamilton recognized him as the man who’d earlier driven off with the electricar they’d arrived in. He must have returned to the camp.
Ramona said, without further bombast, “It’s big, Archer. The biggest. It’s everywhere, and it’s now. Every proud, virile American is with this cause. With the Brits’ own machines we spread the word, coordinated the strike. The crystal sets. We used codes. We whispered revolution for months, for years. Now whisperin’s done. Now’s time for the bellow.”
THEY WAITED until the latrine was otherwise empty, then went in together. Hamilton dropped the slat of wood into place on the door that would keep anyone else from entering.
Ramona had finally divulged some specifics. According to her, individual actions had been taken and were still taking place against British—“Brit”—forces all across the Colonies. Some of these were fairly large scale. Something on the order of an organized riot was supposed to be underway on the island of Manhattan. Other movements were small, instances of sabotage and assassination. The important thing, she’d said, was that they were occurring all at once. The response would be ungainly, counteracting forces spread too thinly, too quickly.
Of course, she might—as the Yanks sometimes said—be full of shit.
“All right, you got what information you wanted?” J.C. asked urgently.
“I got gossip from a backwoods yokel who thinks a history professor can advise an army. I need access to that crystal.”
“If there is one!” J.C. slapped a hand over his own mouth and brought himself visibly under some control. Tension held him in a shivering grip. More quietly he said, “We get a car, and we get out of here. That’s a plan, Hamilton. A sensible one.”
“But not the one we’re going to follow. I have a duty to something greater than myself, J.C. These people are at war with the nation I belong to. I must do what I can to resist this uprising, even if it’s a fraction the size that loutish woman proclaims it is.” He wrinkled his nose at the latrine’s smell, then fixed J.C. with a measuring gaze. “You seemed… taken, for a moment there, by her grandiloquent discourse. Spirit of the land and all that.”
“Yeah. And all that.” J.C. wasn’t cowed. He took a step forward and thrust his face at Hamilton’s. “I wouldn’t expect you to be moved by her words, but maybe you could understand the sentiment behind them. You Brits aren’t loved here. Your laws are tough, your justice too swift, and you don’t treat us like we matter, much less like citizens—even second-rate citizens—of your Crown. If we’re Americans, then a century or two of your boot heels on our throats have made us Americans.”
The words stung, but only for a moment. He recognized that J.C. spoke sincerely. Certainly he didn’t—couldn’t—regard this man as an enemy. They had already been through so much. J.C. had saved his life back on the ship by firing that shotgun. Hamilton hadn’t seen the man coming up behind him. He would have been helpless without J.C.’s drastic action.
In a stiff tone he said, “I acknowledge that your point has some degree of merit.”
J.C.’s face was still thrust toward his. After a few seconds, a grin suddenly and unexpectedly broke across his face. “You say such heartfelt things, my lovely beau.”
Hamilton’s palms went damp, and his pulse abruptly beat so hard he could feel it in his throat. But he managed to say back, “You bring out what’s best in me.”
“I’d like to bring out what’s hardest,” he said impishly. His eyes ticked back and forth like a pendulum, taking in the enclosed latrine’s malodorous confines. “This wouldn’t be the first toilet I’d given out a blowjob in. But I’ll settle for a kiss. Let’s kiss.”
He swept his hands up over Hamilton’s shoulders and closed them around the back of his neck. Automatically, Hamilton drew his arms around the man’s trim waist. Their mouths slid easily together. Arkwright kissed J.C.’s mouth, then he parted his lips, and their tongues made electrical contact. Every nerve came alive in Hamilton’s body. His senses heightened. The moment slowed.
It was an exquisite kiss. In the course of it all, the impishness went out of J.C., and when they broke it, each man panting and gasping slightly, J.C.’s eyes were wide and brimming with unnamed emotion. Hamilton held him close for another half-dozen accelerated heartbeats, then reluctantly released him.
Huskily J.C. said, “You’ve got till an hour after dark to find your crystal ball and gaze into it. Do whatever you have to do. By that time I’ll have procured a vehicle for us. We’re not waiting around to be found out, my good Captain. Goddammit, that was a fantastic kiss. Now let’s get out of here before I really do have to suck on your cock until you spew in my mouth. Go. Go!”
NINE.
IT WAS hard to keep that kiss off his mind. Once again, Jonny had felt himself transported by the simple contact. Maybe it was something physiological between him and Hamilton, like how some animals were supposed to respond aggressively to scent. Perhaps there was something in the good captain’s sweat glands that prickled Jonny’s flesh all over.
Or maybe he had serious feelings for Hamilton Arkwright….
No time for this! The day was waning. Jonny had set the time for their escape for an hour after sundown. He had left Hamilton at the latrine, even while all his sexual instincts really had had him wanting to go to his knees before the man, to taste, to suck, to swallow. If this was a passing whim of desire on Jonny’s part, it wasn’t passing very fast. He had been hired to cold-bloodedly seduce the man; instead he found himself quite enamored of him. It was crazy. And wonderful.
But the task before him was daunting. He had to get a vehicle. Apparently he was free to roam this walled compound in the woods. Nobody stopped him or demanded passwords or exhibited any of the military caution he’d seen on display at Algiers Point Airdock last night and hundreds of miles away. Dogs ran loose in the camp. There was a stable of sorts with horses, but he couldn’t ride one. When he’d left New York, horses had become a rare sight in the streets, what with the flood of electricars, which were mass-
produced and sold cheaply.
He already had a plan. It had been hatched instantaneously and was based on nothing more than a fleeting moment of eye contact. It had come while Ramona was making her—admittedly rousing—speech while they ate their stew. The silent communication had passed between himself and a male his age with bushy black hair who had come and sat at the table. Jonny remembered him from their arrival at this camp. He had driven off with the big-tired car as soon as he, Hamilton, Ramona, and Clyde reached the gate. The male had left only a flickering impression on Jonny, but he’d recorded the look of him nonetheless.
When he had sat down across the table, Jonny had looked up from his tin bowl, had noted the other man gazing back at him for a single deliberate beat, letting Jonny see that he saw him without looking immediately away. Eye contact. It was like queer semaphore. The message registered, and the dark-haired man busied himself with his portion of stew.
The remainder of the simple meal afforded Jonny the opportunity for a few more appraising looks. He was a fairly handsome creature, this male with the dark hair. He had a delicately boned face, a whisper of chin whiskers, and widely spaced, guileless gray eyes. Beneath his rough country clothes, his body looked a tad undernourished. It didn’t, of course, matter that he was passably good-looking. Jonny meant to use him. He could be a toad of a man.
Jonny prowled through the camp, seeking him. Hamilton apparently held these people in some contempt, probably because they didn’t resemble any Brit idea of a military organization. It would be foolish to underestimate them or their cause, however. Ramona might be a blowzy boor, as Hamilton had said, but she’d elocuted some truth about the American character, its ruggedness, its nativistic pride. Maybe Hamilton simply had a blind spot to such notions. It might be he’d been up too long in that airship of his, out of touch with the sentiments of people inhabiting the ground.
With a grunt Jonny dismissed the thoughts. He made sure that he appeared to be wandering the camp nonchalantly. He noted wheel tracks leading in from the closed gate. His guess was that these folk here had assembled from the surrounding countryside, arriving on foot or on horseback or else transported by vehicle. Ramona said she’d gone to Chicago to fetch that professor. Chicago. A big city. Jonny longed for the sight of streets and proper buildings again. Chicago, in fact, might have been one of the places he would have chosen to run to, if Brixton hadn’t been a liar and had actually paid him for hoodwinking Hamilton. Yes, Chicago. Somewhere blazing with electric light, with music and life and frivolity. Good food, hot running water, clean sheets, beguiling strangers with loose billfolds, handsome men on the prowl—
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