Liahona

by D. J. Butler

  Sam took another sip of coffee out of habit and then spat the red mud out onto the deck. “Mercy!” he snapped, and poured the rest out to avoid repeating the mistake. “Is that some business of yours, mister?”

  “Will it make you feel better about my intentions if I let your friend get the drop on me?” the mountain man called. “Hell, if I’d wanted you dead, you gotta figger, I’d a killed you in the night.”

  “I suppose I should count my lucky stars you’re such a gentleman, then,” Sam countered, but he nodded to O’Shaughnessy and the Irishman stood upright and showed his head. He kept the strange gun at his side, though, Sam noticed, and therefore out of sight.

  “You aren’t a Pinkerton, are you?” O’Shaughnessy asked.

  “No!” The grizzled stranger barked a noise that might have been a laugh. “I’m a Deseret Marshal, though, if you’re looking for a lawman. Name’s Rockwell.”

  “Mostly, Mr. Deseret Marshal,” the Irishman said, smirking at Sam, “it’s the lawmen that come looking for me.”

  Idiot didn’t know when to shut his mouth. “What can we do for you, Mr. Rockwell?” Sam asked.

  The mountain man hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat it into the dust settling around his horse’s hocks. “You can turn this pretty little steam-truck of yours around and go home,” he said gruffly. “It ain’t safe for you in the Kingdom.”

  Sam ruminated on this communication for several long moments, but couldn’t figure out what the fellow was up to. “This is a strange way to deliver a threat, sir,” he finally countered. “We outnumber you and we have the higher ground.”

  “That’s ’cause it ain’t a threat,” Rockwell objected. “I’m just stating a fact. I’m telling you that I am the law in the Great Salt Lake City, and I can’t guarantee your safety.”

  Sam scratched his head, a gesture that turned into a vigorous brushing off of dust. “Well, Mr. Rockwell,” he finally said. “We haven’t broken any laws of the Kingdom of Deseret, nor do we intend to. We have lawful business there, official business even, and as far as I can see, there’s no reason we can’t carry it out. Your dark intimations are very dramatic, and I think you yourself would cut a fine buccaneerish figure on the stage, but I have things to do, and I estimate that the curtain is about to close upon our conversation here.”

  “You ain’t listening to me!” Rockwell snapped, and swung down from his horse. He reached for the Jim Smiley’s ladder, but as his hand grasped the first rung, O’Shaughnessy tsk, tsked at him, and Sam looked over to see his associate aiming the bulb-gun at the mountaineer.

  “We’ll stay better friends, Mr. Marshal,” the Irishman smiled, “if you stay off our fookin’ vessel.”

  Rockwell spat again, stared at both men like a hungry hawk, and then swung back into the saddle. “When you’re lying on the red rock,” he bellowed at them, “holding your guts in your hands and weeping out the last seconds of your lives, you remember this! You wanna call for your mama in that moment, you can. You wanna call for Jesus, go right ahead. Just don’t waste your damn time calling for Orrin Porter Rockwell!”

  With a snort of indignation, Rockwell turned his horse’s head and trotted towards Fort Bridger’s westward-facing maw.

  “Bloody hell, I hate these people already,” O’Shaughnessy griped, holstering his fancy gun. The holster, Sam thought, reminded him of the ones he had seen tied to the Pinkertons’ hips.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sam disagreed, watching Rockwell turn north off the road into the sagebrush and scrub grass. “I kind of like a place that sends out a welcoming committee.”

  * * *

  “Mummies!” cried Edgar Allan Poe, flinging his hands up in a conjuror’s wave before him. “Mummies, of both man and mysterious beast!”

  He stalked the deck of the Liahona, cool breeze snapping around his ears under the brim of his tall hat and blowing behind his smoked spectacles, threatening to dry out his eyeballs and his skin despite all the oil in his air. At least, between the Liahona’s speed and the height of its deck off the ground, the air was free of the reddish dust that the steam-truck’s huge tracks churned up and spewed in its wake. He could barely keep from coughing as it was, and a lungful of dust would surely drag him down into paroxysms.

  A little boy, dressed in overalls, a miniature sailor’s jacket and slouch hat and carrying a length of wire towards the wheelhouse, stopped to listen. Passengers’ heads turned, including the heads of the two Englishmen… good.

  “Mummies!” he cried again. “Mummies and other curious, fascinating and even… repellent… evidences of the wisdom and high craft of ancient Egypt!”

  From within his coat he produced one of Pratt’s four canopic jars, the one with the baboon head, and spun on one heel in a slow pirouette with the little object held forward in his hands, showing it to the benches full of passengers. It hadn’t been made to be used in this sort of a show, of course, but what Orson Pratt and Horace Hunley didn’t know was unlikely to hurt them. He deliberately clicked to a stop facing the Englishmen, sitting on either side of a woman in a red dress, and assessed them carefully through his tinted lenses.

  One man was younger, in his middle twenties, perhaps, and had the pale, flustered and determined look of a privileged young fellow trying to make his way in the world. Something had carved a bite-shaped chunk out of the brim of his top hat, giving him a comical appearance, but he seemed delighted with Poe’s theater, clapping vigorously as Poe tucked away the canopic jar and produced instead the cylinder of scarabs. Absalom Fearnley-Standish, Poe thought to himself, who are you, really, and what are you doing here?

  His companion was older, nearing forty, and was hard, dark, scarred and masculine. He was dressed in a frock coat and waistcoat like he might have worn on the streets of London, but he was hatless, and his clothing showed the dust and wear of many miles of road. Richard Burton, famous explorer, etcetera. Well, Mr. Burton, Poe mused, let’s assay you a little bit, test your metal.

  Let’s test you both.

  “And magic!” he cried and, reaching into his canister, he pulled out a handful of the brass scarabs and scattered them across the laps of Burton, Fearnley-Standish and their female companion.

  “Aagh!” shrieked Fearnley-Standish, and would have jumped from his seat if Burton hadn’t restrained him with a hand on his arm.

  “Arjuna’s bow, man, they won’t eat you!” the explorer snorted.

  Then Poe saw their female companion’s face and froze. She was short and dark, all straight lines and grace, and though he would have recognized her through any disguise, she wore none.

  It was Roxie.

  Robert, you didn’t mention… but then, of course…

  She smiled at him, the polite and slightly flirtatious smile of a woman who is casually attached to another man but conceals within her a voracious, insatiable wolf. She didn’t recognize him, obviously, but then it had been years, and Poe was proud of the verisimilitude of his false nose. Within his breast a desire to seize her in his arms, sweep her to his chest and devour her mouth with his warred against an equally strong urge to pull his pistol from inside his jacket and blow out her vicious, wicked, conniving brains.

  “Well, man!” Burton snapped. “Get on with it!”

  He felt stunned, his vision out of focus. He floated, lost. Then, in the sea of passengers’ faces under flapping parasols, he saw the physiognomy of his accomplice, the haggard dwarf Jedediah Coltrane. Coltrane was mouthing something to Poe, a nervous look on his face; Poe’s professionalism reasserted itself and he tore his eyes away from Roxie’s.

  Stepping back, he raised both hands about his head, one of them holding the cylinder by its lid, and cried out in a loud voice, to be sure that the entire deck could hear him. “Behold the incantations of Thoth! Behold the power of Hermes Thrice-Greatest! Behold the might of the Egyptian priests, able to reach through the curtain of death itself and command the obedience of the inanimate and the damned!” When he was sure they were all watching him
, he waved his empty hand in a great circular flourish over the scarabs, carefully thumbing the recall button inside the canister’s lid. “Nebenkaure, panjandrum, Isis kai Osiris!” he shouted.

  The clocksprung beetles sprang instantly to life. With a great chittering and clacking, each metal bug rolled upright, oriented itself, and then began its trek. From the laps and boots of Roxie and the Englishmen, from the bench they sat on and the floor beneath them, the brass beetles swarmed in a great mass towards Poe. He raised his hands, stood still and laughed as diabolically and mysteriously as he could as the bugs climbed his clothing, laughed when he felt the first brass legs touch the bare skin of his neck, laughed with his whole chest and belly as the scarabs detoured around his head and crawled up his left arm, kept laughing as they swarmed ticklishly about his fist and dropped one by one into their native canister, and then, for effect, stopped laughing at the exact moment in which he slammed the canister shut.

  The spectators went wild.

  “That wasn’t Egyptian,” Burton said sourly, but the passengers all about him applauded, and a few whistled or whooped in excitement. Coltrane clapped along with the crowd, shooting shrewd appraising looks at the people around him. Sizing up the marks, Poe thought. The man had the ingrained instincts of an inveterate carny. The little boy with the loop of wire stood stiff as a statue, his eyes so wide they threatened to swallow his face.

  “They’re scarab beetles, Dick,” Fearnley-Standish pointed out.

  “I meant the words,” the darker man growled. “Pure higgledy-piggledy. Nonsense. Arrant balderdash.”

  “My name is Doctor Jamison Archibald!” Poe announced. “Tonight, at seven o’clock by the Captain’s watch, in the stateroom, for the very reasonable sum of two copper pennies, any passenger may see exhibited and explained these and other marvels, visual and auditory. See the uncanny hypnotic hypocephalus in action, stealing the souls of men! Witness the muscular terror of the dire Seth Beast!”

  “Will children be admitted free of charge?” inquired a plain-faced, reedy-voiced, gray-wrapped matron in a blue prairie bonnet, clutching under her bony wings a trio of similarly undernourished-looking brats.

  “My dear madam,” Poe stage-whispered, meeting her eyes over the rims of his spectacles, “the things I have to display are dark and terrifying apparitions, the stuff of nightmares. Children will not be admitted at all.”

  The little boy with the loop of wire shuddered.

  “There’s nothing hypnotic about a hypocephalus,” Burton huffed to Roxie. “It’s just a damned pillow!” He glared at Poe. “The Geographical Society would cut you to pieces, you knave!”

  Burton was the genuine article, then, and not some impostor. He also seemed to be a tough customer, and his fuse was none too long. Poe decided he would have to be careful around the explorer. On top of everything else, the man seemed very attached to Roxie. Was he playing her?

  Was she playing him?

  Poe felt uneasy. “For an additional three cents,” he quipped with a bow in Burton’s direction, “you may join me at the lectern tonight and share your commentary.”

  Burton’s jaw went rigid and his face began slowly turning purple. “As for the Seth-Beast, you humbug, there’s no such animal! It is a mere symbol of chaos, and the Egyptians made it up!”

  Coltrane woofed! raucously in the ear of the little boy, who jumped nearly out of his skin and went scuttling on to the wheelhouse to complete his errand. The dwarf laughed heartily at his own prank.

  Poe bowed again, deeply, and raised the canister to incite another round of applause. He turned and walked away, upstaging Burton and not letting him finish.

  “It’s just a jackal!” Burton shouted after him across the deck. “With the ears and tail of a jackass!”

  * * *

  Absalom cleared his throat. Annie didn’t look up.

  He felt ridiculous, leaning slightly into the wind to keep his hat on his head, coattails flapping behind him, a mint-spiked lemonade in each hand. What if she thought he was an idiot? She had looked so happy talking to the Brute the night before—maybe he was actually the sort of man she liked. Absalom was uncomfortably conscious of his smoothness, his refinement, his lack of facial hair, the humiliating look of his damaged hat. He didn’t think he could bear it if she mocked him, not in front of all the other passengers.

  But then, he thought to steel himself, a man who would dare to court an Angel must needs risk a terrible fall.

  He cleared his throat again. Still she didn’t look up. Her nose was buried in a book of some sort, a cheap-looking print with a soft cover that appeared to be profusely illustrated with dreadful pictures of gunmen and wild animals.

  “Pardon me, miss,” he said. “I thought you might enjoy taking some refreshment.”

  The Angel looked up and smiled. “Aw,” she said, “that’s so sweet of you.” Absalom smiled and handed her the lemonade. “Thank you,” she said, took the drink, and returned to her novel.

  Absalom stood by her side for a few seconds. When he couldn’t think of anything to say, he turned and lurched away.

  * * *

  Burton’s head hurt, and he badly wanted to stab someone. Anyone.

  He’d woken up in discomfort and had immediately been saddened to see Roxie sitting at his cabin’s dresser, fully dressed and finishing up with her coiffure.

  “You are one hell of a woman.”

  Roxie had stood, smiled, and then stooped to kiss his cheek. “Remember that,” she had said simply, and then she was gone. He was left with the salt-creamy smell of her of body and astonishing memories.

  He shivered.

  At least he had slept soundly—that in itself was a luxury for Burton, who was a terrible insomniac. He had luxuriated in the rest, lying in the little bunk as long as her smell and the warmth of her body lingered, eventually forcing himself to shave, dress and rejoin human society.

  His head-butting with the gypsy circus-man calling himself Archibald on deck had been pointless, the fruit of Burton’s irritability and a further aggravation to it. After the showman had announced his schedule and disappeared below decks, Burton had begged to take leave of Roxie for an hour or two to handle some personal business and had come back to his cabin.

  He sat at the tiny wooden table that folded down on a hinge from the wall, a blank page before him and a Robinson’s Patent Metal Self-Inking Stylus clutched in his fist like a spear. You’re a man of letters, damn you, he told himself, you can write this.

  Dear Isabel, he scratched out at the top of the sheet, and then ran out of words.

  A drink would fortify him. His glass and Roxie’s from the night before still sat on the dresser. He could tell which was which because hers was marked at the lip with smudges of lipstick, and he instinctively reached for the smudged one—

  but he stopped himself.

  He must be fair to Isabel. He, Dick Burton, had made a mistake. Men made mistakes, but this one, he resolved, was a mistake that needn’t affect his engagement in any way, that Isabel needn’t ever know of. He could carry this guilty cross alone, but he must break off his fling with Roxie before it went any further. Certainly before Isabel learned of it.

  He took the other tumbler, his glass from the night before, and the square bottle of gin. About to pour the liquor, however, he paused. There were crystals in the bottom of his glass, fine and few, like a little crusted sugar or salt, maybe, but nothing that the gin could have left behind.

  He sniffed the glass—the crystals were odorless. He looked at Roxie’s glass; no crystals.

  Hmmn.

  He pushed away the glass with crystals, poured half a shot of gin into Roxie’s tumbler and took a sip.

  I am well into the Rockies, and the American West is everything I expected it to be, he continued, the Stylus pouring its black ink out smoothly as he wrote. I have seen mountain men, red Indians and wild animals, not to mention vistas to match or exceed anything I ever witnessed in Goa or the Horn. Still, he lied, without y
ou I find it sterile, uninviting and dead. I wish you were here, my darling.

  He looked at what he had written and snorted in disgust. “Dick Burton, you faithless worm,” he rebuked himself, and he crumpled the sheet into a ball and threw it into the corner of the room.

  He looked at his glass again.

  What were those crystals? He didn’t remember adding anything to his drink, though, frankly, his memory of the night before had become a little hazy. He must not have slept well, he thought, but he didn’t remember waking during the night.

  He finished the drink, and on a hunch he pulled out his attaché case. The case was where he kept the three documents that were at the core of his mission: his own commission letter from Her Majesty (personal to him and making no mention of Fearnley-Standish), the letter credentialing him as an Ambassador from the Court of St. James (not a word in that letter, either, of Fearnley-Standish or what his role might be) and a sealed letter, addressed to President Young. Burton had not read the letter to Young, but he thought he knew its contents—Her Britannic Majesty expressed a willingness to negotiate with the President towards ceding certain assets to the Kingdom of Deseret in exchange for an appropriate posture vis-à-vis the emerging American conflict and the government of the Confederate States-to-be. The assets, which Burton was instructed to identify only verbally, were large stretches of Alberta and British Columbia, all the territory bordering the northern edge of the Kingdom and running to the Pacific Ocean. Brigham Young would gain wheat fields, coal mines and a major port—Burton didn’t see how Deseret could turn the offer down, as it needed to feed its people and power its machines just like any other nation did, and he expected his mission to be over within forty-eight hours. Upon boarding the Liahona he had hidden the slim black case underneath his bunk, locked its combination and, as an alarm to warn him of tampering, he had closed the case with one of his own hairs pinched in it.

  Now the hair was gone.

  Burton stared at the case.