Liahona

by D. J. Butler

  “Permit me to get another glass, ma’am,” he told her after a hesitation that seemed to him to last forever.

  In answer, she lifted his shot glass to her own lips and took a sip. “If you feel you need one, sir,” she said, mocking him with her arched eyebrows and poker face.

  Burton heard her statement as a challenge and his blood boiled within him. Still, something held him back, and it took him a moment to identify the restraining impulse. “I must tell you, ma’am, that I am not entirely at liberty. I am affianced, betrothed, engaged to be married.”

  “You make it sound so lawyerly,” she commented, eyes and brows smiling at him though the lines of her lips were rather pursed and skeptical. “Shouldn’t love be an adventure?”

  Ishtar’s pearly teeth, but wasn’t that the truth? “I will not tell my solicitor that you have so thoroughly dismissed his profession,” Burton managed to riposte, weakly. Who was this woman?

  She took a second sip, smaller this time, and shrugged. “And yet I don’t mean to. I have a lawyer myself, a good one. For that matter, I have a husband. And I also have… adventures…” Her dark eyes glittered. “Sometimes every cog must slip its casing.”

  Burton wanted to resist, but he felt himself becoming intrigued. “Are you a traveler as well, ma’am, or do you reside in Fort Bridger?”

  The woman laughed lightly. “You mean, am I a woman of virtue passing through, or am I some disreputable Wyoming whore? Have no fear, sir, your wallet and your venereal health are both safe from me; I am here di passagio, on my way to the Great Salt Lake City and merely looking for company with which to pass a slow and chilly evening.”

  “I meant no disrespect to you, ma’am,” Burton joined her in laughing, a little ruefully. “Nor, for that matter, to whores. The history of the race is replete with powerful and—” he leaned forward to whisper the word, “sexual women. Think of Bathsheba, for instance.” He wanted to claim the initiative of the conversation, wrest back some of the control he had lost to this aggressive houri.

  “Nefertiti,” she countered.

  “Cleopatra.” Part of Burton mutely rebelled against the conversation. What if Isabel could see him now? But he felt compelled, by pride and also by lust, to press on.

  “The Queen of Sheba,” she smiled.

  “Her name was Balqis, according to the Arabs,” Burton offered. “They should know, they’re experts in all things pertaining to the harim.” Was he sweating? He thought he could feel drops of moisture beading onto his forehead.

  “And are you an Arab, then, sir? You might be, with that dark, wild, romantic look of yours, those mustachios and those scars, and your foreign accent.”

  Burton laughed out loud again. “No, ma’am, I’m a true subject of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria and an Englishman of Anglo-Irish heritage, though it’s been suggested I might have Traveler blood in me.” He effected a slightly awkward bow, still sitting in his chair. “Richard Francis Burton, at your service. I’m known formally as Captain Burton, but I’m often called less flattering things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Ruffian Dick is my favorite,” he offered. “Most of the others are unprintable.”

  “My name is Roxie,” she told him, “Roxie Snow.” She made a small curtsy from the waist up. “I’ve been called more than one unprintable thing myself.” She took a third sip from the shot glass.

  Burton hesitated. He felt quite strongly attracted to Roxie, who was obviously being very forward with him. He was by no means averse to adventures, as Roxie named them, but now he was engaged to be married, and being engaged meant he was no longer a free man.

  Not only did he have Isabel to consider, but there was also Fearnley-Standish. Burton tried to look about the room to spot the Foreign Office man, but found he couldn’t take his eyes off Roxie. Fearnley-Standish, too, was an anchor chained around Dick Burton’s neck. Burton was chained to orders, chained to a mission, chained to authority, chained to a useless companion and a cold, boring fiancée. He was totally unfree.

  The weight of his servitude hung on him hard and heavy.

  He took the glass and raised it. “To the unprintable,” he toasted, and drained the glass.

  * * *

  Tam poked his head up out of the stairwell first. Like a bloody woodpecker, he thought, sticking its feathered face out the tree trunk for a look around. The Liahona was much bigger than the Jim Smiley, with multiple cabins and two levels below decks and great crushing metal treads where the Jim Smiley had its India rubber tyres, but its lights were dimmed and most of its crew and passengers seemed to be away, probably washing down the dust of the road in the Saloon. The few men whom Tam had run into aboard had exchanged hat-tips with him (and wasn’t Tam as good as any other man, and as worthy to share a doffing of hats with?) and passed by without a second glance.

  That was the America he loved, Tam thought. You leave your baggage lying about unwatched like you own the whole bloody-damn-hell country, and if anyone touches it without permission, you shoot the presumptuous bastard full of hot lead.

  He knew it was the Liahona (what was that, anyway, some kind of bloody Indian name?) because he’d listened to the talk in the Saloon, and nothing else in the yard could approach this beast in size or sheer rhinocerontic majesty. He wouldn’t have known it from the side of the vehicle—where its name should have been painted, in plain bloody-damn-hell English, which Mother O’Shaughnessy had taught Tam to read, instead there was a stream of some odd-looking characters Tam didn’t recognize. Squirrelly, curling letters, like the work of some idiot genius who couldn’t read English and was trying to imitate the Book of Kells. Maybe, he reflected, it was an Indian vehicle after all.

  The deck was empty, so Tam wrapped his scarf around the lower half of his face, hoisted the box off its resting place on his knee and finished his climb, emerging out the dimly-lit hall into the chill darkness of night. The metal crate was heavy in his arms and clanked, but it looked like it had all of Sam’s precious tools (and of course it had the patches; Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised many idjits, and the ones she had raised weren’t named Tamerlane) and Tam didn’t have that far to carry it.

  The man vomiting at the door of the Saloon had collapsed now, facedown onto the gravel. Out of sheer sympathy for fellow human beings, Tam thought, patting himself mentally on the back, I hope the fellow passed out before he fell into his own vomit. Tam didn’t see anyone else, and for lack of a better means, he got the tools down to the ground by simply dropping the crate over the rail.

  Crash!

  He slipped down the ladder and looked around. Was that a shadowy figure, standing over in the darkness of the stockade yard, hidden by the building’s corner from the fuzzy glare of the Franklin Poles? Tam couldn’t be sure. Making a show of adjusting his pants, he undid the leather cord that held the Webley Longspur strapped into its holster and checked the thin, spring-loaded stiletto tied to his right wrist.

  The shadowy figure, if figure it was, didn’t move.

  Tam stretched to pop his neck and all the joints in his arms, then picked up the crate again. He walked softly across the yard, making extra sure that his pace looked natural but displaced no gravel, like a ferret, like a blue tit hopping across the yard after a fallen seed, so he could listen over the soft pad-pad-pad of his own footfalls and hear anyone approaching from behind. It wasn’t quite as good as eyes in the back of his head, but Tam’s hearing could be shockingly sharp.

  His precautions were rewarded with a crunch sound behind him. Heavy boot in gravel, he thought.

  Bloody Pinkertons, that’s who’s hiding in the darkness.

  No, Tam, you damnfool idjit, that could be anybody. Could be someone else getting off the Liahona, or maybe the drunk fellow came to his senses and is standing up.

  Or maybe it was someone lurking in the shadow of the building, waiting for me to come out of the Liahona. Could be one of the English.

  Or a Pinkerton, of course it could be, by damn.
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  Another crunch.

  Tam forced his brain to analyze the situation as his steps brought him closer to the Jim Smiley. Could the Pinkerton know it was him? Didn’t seem likely. Better bet was that the Pinkerton was hiding in the yard to see what he could see, and it was just Tam’s rotten Irish luck that the Pinkerton had seen him.

  If it was a Pinkerton, Tam had to kill him. He was spotted now, and there was no way to simply disappear from view. And if it wasn’t a Pinkerton, Tam might have to kill him anyway—it could be some other enemy of his, or maybe someone badly in need of a lesson that you don’t follow other people around in the dark, that’s just creepy, and if you aren’t careful you’re going to get yourself knifed.

  Thank Brigit for the scarf, for the cold and for the disguise. Tam made a show of dropping the crate to the gravel and arching his shoulders back to display how heavy it was and how much pain he was in. Then, without delay, though at the same time making a pantomime of how slowly he moved, he turned to see the approaching party, source of the ominous crunches.

  Tam recognized the man from his conversation with Clemens; it was Stovepipe. He approached at a calm but determined pace, one hand holding a sheet of paper in front of him and the other hand invisible inside his long duster. Probably holding a gun, Tam thought. Bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons. Tam shaded his eyes as if to protect them from the glare of the electricks and quickly scanned the yard while his features were in shadow. There was no one in sight—the time to act was now, and quickly.

  “Good evenin’, suh,” Tam said pleasantly, trying to fake a Virginia drawl through his scarf and wishing he were better at accents. “I wonder if you might give me a hand with this load? I find myself not quite up to the task, and you are a tall and strong-looking young man.” Don’t overdo it, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy me boy, he chided himself. The fewer bloody words, the better. Plus, you don’t want to make the fellow think your interest in him is romantic.

  “Pardon me,” Stovepipe said, holding out his sheet of paper and stepping closer, “but could you tell me if you’ve seen this man?” He squinted.

  Alarm bells went off in Tam’s head, and he didn’t wait. Releasing the spring of his stiletto, he grabbed the hilt of the knife as it leaped into his hand and punched straight out, swiping Stovepipe across his Adam’s apple. Stovepipe lurched back, but not fast enough to get out of reach, and blood sprayed forward and down onto Tam’s arm and shoulder, hot and wet and sweet-stinking.

  Tam slashed again and took a second slice out of the Pinkerton’s throat. Bloody bastard could take all the time in the world he wanted to die, so long as he didn’t call out to anyone.

  Chunk! Chunk! Small craters of gravel exploded around Tam’s feet. Is someone shooting at me? He wondered. But I don’t hear shots. Then he saw the holes in the front of the Pinkerton’s duster, heard a sharp zing! and saw another hole rip open just as an explosion of gravel kicked up beside him.

  A Maxim Husher, he thought. Bloody self-righteous Pinkertons with all their high talk and rules and principled objections to a little bit of traditional graft, and the bastard’s shooting at me with a silenced gun. He stabbed at Stovepipe’s eye—

  another zing!—

  at the same moment, Tam sank his stiletto deep into the private detective’s skull and felt a sharp bite in his thigh.

  The Pinkerton collapsed backward with Tam, off-balance and flailing, on top of him. For a moment, Tam could do nothing but catch his breath and fight to calm his wildly beating heart. Got to move, you dumb Irish bastard, he cursed himself, the Pinkerton didn’t come here alone, and he forced his body into action.

  He took the Pinkerton’s Husher (and aren’t you a strange-looking little fellow? he thought, looking at the pistol whose barrel looked like two onion bulbs stitched together, front and back), along with powder, shot and bullets, and shoved them into his own coat. Stovepipe was larger than he was, but Tam’s wiry frame was all sinew, and the adrenalin in his body now made it easy to drag the corpse a few dozen paces across the gravel, hiding it in the shadow of the Liahona.

  He searched the man’s coat and took the calotype. No sense leaving that to float around; he’d ball it up and throw it into the boiler of the Jim Smiley, and good riddance to it.

  When he stood up from that effort, the pain shooting through his leg reminded him that he’d been shot, and must be bleeding. He couldn’t see, so he felt with his fingers for the slickness to determine how bad the bleeding was (not so bad, all things considered), tied his scarf around the wound and then hop-walked quickly back to the crate. He examined the ground. The gravel was scuffed where the body had been dragged, but he doubted it would show footprints with any clarity at all, and Tam didn’t think he was leaving a trail of blood.

  He grunted, picked up the crate, and headed for the Jim Smiley. Be careful, O’Shaughnessy, he reminded himself. There’s still another one of those two-faced dirty bastards around here somewhere.

  * * *

  Burton led the way, but in his heart he knew that Roxie was directing his steps. It felt good, though, to wrestle with a woman who was his match. To feel at risk in the contest of the heart, that was what he wanted, what he needed.

  He shut thoughts of Isabel, his fiancée, out of his mind.

  A niggling worry about Fearnley-Standish tried to creep into their place, and he slammed that out as well.

  The transition through the Saloon doors was a plunge from a warm, smoky, amber bowl full of placid human goldfish into the cold, crackling, blue ocean floor, among sleeping leviathans who could with a single bite swallow you. As he crossed the crinkled gravel carpet, the spitting blue balls of the Saloon’s Franklin Poles propelled him out of their own sphere and into the bone-white realm of a dusty, enchanted moon. A carpet of pale moonlight like a silver dusting of snow lay across the nearest mountains, visible over the stockade walls, and all thoughts of Burton’s fiancée and his nebbish associate vanished. This was a wilderness, he was a man, and he was about to have the experience of this mysterious, exciting woman.

  He tightened his grip on her hand, which squeezed him back with a surprising strength, and headed for the near-side ladder, but Roxie pulled him to the right, underneath the ship-like prow of the vehicle and just beneath the exotic characters that Burton assumed must spell out its name; they looked vaguely like the Devanagari script, he thought distractedly, though not cursive. She pulled his body into hers. Her mouth was sharp, salty and exhilarating, a foamy wave concealing deadly shoals beneath, and he was hard put to breathe between kisses. “Dick,” she moaned.

  “Roxie,” he breathed.

  “Nefertiti,” she corrected. Her body blazed against his like a fire.

  “Nefertiti,” he agreed, intoxicated.

  “Cleopatra,” she continued. She smelled like an entire orchard of sweet pollen. He tightened from head to toe, poised for intimate combat.

  “Cleopatra,” he said, “Bathsheba.” This, by the fires of Vizaresh and the House of Lies, this was what a woman was supposed to do to a man!

  “The Queen of Sheba,” she added, and he thought her mouth was on the verge of drawing his very soul up from his chest and consuming it.

  “Balqis,” he agreed, then suddenly jerked to his full height, pulling away from her. “Vishnu’s beard!” he barked.

  “Yes, Vishnu,” she murmured. “Don’t pull back!”

  But Burton did withdraw his mouth from hers, and his hand went to the gun at his belt, the well-worn and deadly accurate Colt 1851 Navy Revolver. Behind Roxie, on the other side of the Liahona, invisible to the Saloon, someone lay on the ground. All he could see of the person were two heavy boots, toes up, poking around the corner of the vehicle.

  “There’s someone there,” Burton muttered. The boots weren’t moving, despite all the noise the pair had been making, and he didn’t hear any snoring. “Or a body.”

  “Yes,” Roxie breathed, but then she caught his tone, stopped, and looked where he was looking. “Oh,” she said simply.<
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  “It could be Isabel,” Burton said, and edged forward for a look.

  “Isabel?” Roxie asked. “Is that your fiancée, then?” There was no accusation in her voice, only amusement. Still, Burton gritted his teeth for his humiliating slip. “She has large feet.”

  “I… I mean Absalom,” he corrected himself. “I mean my colleague, Absalom Fearnley-Standish.”

  “Is Mr. Fearnley-Standish a drunk?”

  “No,” Burton frowned, and turned the corner of the Liahona to finally look at the body lying on the ground. “And neither is this man. He’s dead. Been cut several times to the head, neck and eyes.”

  “Be careful, Dick,” Roxie whispered, hanging slightly back. “Too much of that kind of talk may cool my ardor.”

  “I wouldn’t want that,” Burton murmured, and he meant it. He considered what his obligations might be. The dead man was one of the Pinkertons who had accosted him in the Saloon, demanding to know if he had seen some Irishman McNamara. He owed the Pinkertons nothing. Ought he to inform some kind of law enforcement officer of the Fort? He didn’t know who that would be, but didn’t he owe at least that much to the general principles of law and order?

  Roxie looked past Burton’s elbow at the dead man. “Yes, Dick, I believe he’s dead. Now I’m going up the ladder, and if you want an opportunity to show me how lively you are, you’d better move quick.” Then she was gone, and Burton heard her shoes crunch on the gravel and then click on the ladder of the Liahona.