Trail of Bones

by Mark London Williams

  So we climb back into the boat, and Sally and Thea and I take turns with the pole, pushing and steering our way toward the lake.

  And during my turn piloting the boat, I realize that in my months with the Corps, I’ve grown. My body’s gotten bigger. My arms are stronger. I’m changing.

  But then we get to the lake, and all the thoughts about how long we’ve been here in this time, or how glad I am that Thea and Clyne and I are together, all those thoughts disappear in one huge thunderclap of surprise.

  You’d think the surprise would be that the governor’s troops were already there —a whole group of men, some of them soldiers, some who looked like farmers. Most of them brought rifles and fire. They brought dogs with them, too. Bloodhounds, I guess. Used for tracking.

  And they had a bunch of people lined up, black people, sitting on their knees. They were all in costumes, or parts of costumes — wings and masks and papier-mâché animal heads — like they’d just come from a big party.

  Didn’t Sally say it was carnival time?

  But none of this is fun; none of this was celebrating anything. They all have their hands behind their backs — men, women, children — and they’re weeping.

  You’d think all of that would be the biggest surprise, the biggest shock, but it isn’t.

  The biggest surprise of all is seeing Clyne’s ship.

  It’s kind of wedged between two gnarled oak trees, pulsing, emitting a steady, low glow, and looking a little like—it’s melting.

  “The doorway,” Sally said. “That must be it.”

  She meant Clyne’s ship.

  “Nexus watch! Careful!” I hear Clyne but don’t see him right away in the all the shadows. Then a torch emerges from between the oak trees, near the ship. The light briefly touches on one of the dogs, who’s digging furiously in the mud.

  The light also shows Clyne with chains on his wrist. He’s being led by one of the soldiers, one of the guys in an actual uniform. He holds up the torch directly in front of Clyne’s face.

  “Get that costume off now, boy!” He tugs at Clyne’s head.

  “Ouch! Grab-twisting is not called for!”

  “Don’t talk to me. Don’t try to fool me.” Frustrated, the man turns away from Clyne, and toward us. He seems familiar.

  “Howard!” Thea gasps. “Jefferson’s guard.”

  “Sure enough,” Sally says. “It’s Mr. Howard. I better get over there and talk sense to him before someone gets hurt really bad.”

  “No!” Thea says. In English.

  “We have to keep him from doing something stupid to those people,” Sally says.

  Know.

  “No what?” I ask. But I’m not sure if that was Thea or Sally. And my lingo-spot is itching like crazy.

  “No,” Thea says. “Not again. It’s just like Tiberius.” The gang of men, the torch light — it reminds her of what happened in Alexandria, to her and her mother. She’s having that thing that people who’ve been through war get — a memory throwback. A flashback. Whatever it’s called.

  “No.”

  Know.

  “No,” I tell her again. “This is not like Alexandria. We’ll be all right.” I hold her. I don’t want her to run and get hurt by the dogs. “It will be all right.”

  “It’s always men with fire,” she whispers to me.

  “Yes,” I agree. And soon we are surrounded, clamped into chains, and there’s nowhere left to go.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Clyne: Prime Nexus

  February 1805

  Perhaps it’s too soon to think of abandoning my studies and becoming an Earth outlaw. We have found the prime nexus.

  I am sure of it, and would love to pursue my thesis further.

  The great turning point of history that may have drawn my ship here wasn’t the journey of Eli’s friends Clark and Lewis, or the death of Birdjumper, or anything else that transpired while we’ve been here, each of which, in its own away, will affect all history that flows afterward.

  It wasn’t even Steek’s Theorem, which I was beginning to strongly suspect might explain everything: the loop-the-loop theory, from my home world, which postulates that by his or her very arrival, the time-traveler causes the upheaval in history — the disturbed time-wave — that draws that traveler or vessel to the prime nexus in the first place.

  It’s a good hypothesis, and Steek is a venerated scientist, but the prime nexus here has been found in bones and a medallion.

  “A trail of American bones, each one yielding surprises.” Jefferson, the clan, or nest, leader, whom Thea and Eli both already know, said that a few moments ago. He’d arrived in a wooden, wheeled conveyance — a carriage, I believe it is called — pulled by those four-legged mammals called horses.

  Following Jefferson out of the conveyance was another man, dressed like a snake or serpent. Apparently, he had been attending festivities earlier in the evening, called Mardi Gras. I have yet to ascertain the reason for this festival. Perhaps the costumes indicate a human willingness to celebrate sharing their planet with other life forms.

  The snake man took off his masquerade head, revealing a quite human head, with facial hair, underneath. He quickly let it be known he was a kind of nest leader, too — a “governor.” Governor Claiborne.

  An additional handful of men— either actual military soldiers, or dressed as soldiers for purposes of costumed fun— emerged from the conveyance as well. This was, evidently, the governor’s retinue.

  King Temm actually tried to ban the custom of “retinues” — bands of followers who travel with the powerful or famous — on Saurius Prime. But there are still those at home who follow the powerful in hopes it will rub off on them. Certainly the same is bound to be true in a species as volatile as human mammals, on a planet as unpredictable as Earth Orange.

  Governor Claiborne grabbed my face.

  “Ouch!” I said. “No derma-tugs, please! It’s uncalled for!”

  “What kind of accent is that, boy? You think you’re clever keeping that costume on? We’ll get it off. We’ll figure out who you belong to.”

  Costume? Did he mean my chrono-suit, which was indeed looking a bit tattered? And what is this strange notion humans have of one life form belonging to another?

  “Here is our problem, Mr. President,” Governor Claiborne said, pointing to the fused mass that used to be my time-vessel. “Some kind of voodoo shrine bringing the runaway slaves out here. Here’s that ‘doorway’ they’ve been using.”

  I thought this perhaps would be my chance to explain to everyone that what we were witnessing were side effects of plasmechanical technology becoming infected with local slow pox. Indeed, I wanted to warn everyone to be careful, since I hadn’t established whether the biomechanical material was capable of spreading the disease to its local surroundings. Somehow, the combination of slow pox’s cellular reproduction mechanism, crossed with the molecular replication aspects of the vessel itself, have caused this new, highly-advanced Saurian ship to fuse with the landscape. Its time-displacement features had somehow ruptured, creating local time vectors of uncertain calibration. In other words, it had created a large-scale time-sphere. Through which people were evidently disappearing.

  Too many people time-traveling all at once, from the same historical moment, could have very wide-ranging and unpredictable consequences.

  And I don’t believe anyone on Earth Orange is prepared to deal with such consequences. After all, on their planet, time-voyaging was only recently discovered by Eli’s parents and Thea’s mother, at their respective junctures in history. It’s still so new for them.

  Concurrent with these field hypotheses, I noticed a dog mammal digging furiously in the vicinity of my ship, and I was worried it might slip into the vessel’s sphere of influence and disappear into the time stream, too.

  The dog was barking excitedly about something it was uncovering.

  I tried to talk to it in wolfish, but the effect was to startle the dog, all the other dog
s nearby, and most of the humans.

  Governor Claiborne gave my face another derma-tug. “Somebody get this costume off!” he yelled.

  The one named Jefferson came up to me, holding his own torch, and regarded me with intense curiosity.

  “What if it’s not a costume?” he said. Then he gave me his own derma-tug, pulling my cheek skin out, like a nest full of grandmames, clucking over hatchlings. “What if it’s an incognitum?”

  Further local meteorological disruptions flashed and sounded just then.

  “Sir! Sir!” The one named Howard was trying to get Jefferson’s attention. “The only discovery here is that there’s been a conspiracy! Led by your own Sally — along with that runaway girl, Brassy!” He was pointing at Thea and her friend.

  “How do you explain this?” Jefferson asked, pointing at me.

  “Frankly, sir,” Howard went on, “up until a few moments ago, I wasn’t entirely sure anyone else saw it. It’s something of a relief that you do.”

  “Can’t we just let these wretches go back to their owners, then be done with it?” Jefferson asked, still looking at my face. He then asked me, in a tongue different than English — the Latin, I think, that Thea has been known to use — “What exactly are you?”

  “I am a student who is somewhat overwhelmed by his research,” I replied.

  Jefferson stepped back in surprise upon my reply. Then he said, “Well that makes two of us.”

  “We need to make examples of them, Mr. President,” Governor Claiborne insist-droned. “We have to let it be known that your new Louisiana territory will not be soft on slavery.”

  My friends Eli and Thea were bound in the chains apparently used on the “slave” class. I allowed myself to be similarly caught and bound when it became apparent that rescue of my friends would be temporarily impossible, and any kind of skirmish or disruption might lead to weapons-discharge with a high, immediate flesh-rendering and deep ouch-factor, and I would not wish that on my friends.

  As I stood, attempting to finish my conversation with nest leader Jefferson, someone else was brought into camp and chained, as well. It was the one known as Howe. Upon catching sight of me, he burst into laughter, raised his chained fist, and shook it at me. He was holding a sklaan.

  A sklaan!

  The last sklaan I’d seen was the one Thea had in the time-vessel, the one she’d given away at the terrible factory cave. That was another place built upon the strange idea of human mammals owning one another.

  Howe kept up his fevered laugh, all the time waving the sklaan at me. Apparently chronological displacement had not gone well for him.

  Thea was then roughly separated from Eli and brought over with Sally.

  “Hello once more, K’lion,” she said.

  “Who is teaching all these foreign languages to slaves!?” Governor Claiborne screamed. “And why is that man’s costume still on?”

  “These two,” Howard said. “Brassy and Sally. You have to make examples of them.”

  “You have be strong, Tom,” Governor Claiborne declared. “The strength of the republic’s at stake.”

  “I worry for a republic whose strength is based on keeping slaves,” Jefferson said.

  “You keep yours,” Sally pointed out to him.

  “Would you have left me, Sally? Were you going to run away?”

  “I’m too famous, Jefferson. Where would I run to?”

  “Potentially anywhere,” I said, pointing to the time vector surrounding the ruins of my ship. “Considering the vast expanse of time in which none of us is known at all.”

  “That’s what happens there, when you step through the doorway?” Sally asked, raising her chained hands toward the ship.

  “It is my best theory. A temporal disruption caused by an unforeseen biomechanical reaction caused by a local disease vector. Though I am somewhat bereft of field equipment to fully test it.”

  The dog who had been digging by the time-vessel started barking again.

  Governor Claiborne was talking — barking, too, really — at Thea.

  “My wife’s been missing you for months. How could you do this to us?“ He held up a torch, close to her face. “And how come you look different? Will somebody make that dog shut up?”

  He spun around, fluster-bothered.

  “I believe it’s trying to tell us something,” Jefferson said. “Look.”

  He leaned down and reached into the hole. He pulled out a pair of muddy bones. Then he extracted a stained silver chain, which revealed, after he knocked off the dirt, a piece of wrought, metal-smithed jewelry affixed to the end.

  He looked at the bones closely, then wiped his hands, and set them down very carefully, as if he had new respect for them.

  “Perhaps somebody here would like to say a prayer,” he said. “I believe these are human.”

  Governor Claiborne wasn’t looking at the mammal bones, however. He was transfixed by the small chain. He held it up to the torch flame.

  “Look.” He was holding up the locket. “A silver crescent. A symbol of New Orleans. There used to be a small green stone in the middle.”

  “How do you know,” Jefferson asked.

  “Because,” the nest-governor said, studying the small, smithed piece of jewelry on both sides, “I recognize it. My wife gave it to Brassy. As a gift, because she”— he turned to look at Thea, then back at the hole in the ground— “she had grown fond of the girl, even though she was a slave. You’re not Brassy,” he said to Thea.

  “No,” Thea said.

  “That’s Brassy down there,” the governor stated, to no one in particular. “She didn’t get very far after all. Then who are you?” he asked Thea.

  Human mammals, it appears, struggle often with the idea of who they might be, and who everyone else might be.

  “I am Thea,” she said in Eli’s tongue. “Hypatia’s daughter.”

  That’s when Jefferson made his comment about surprises and bone trails.

  And that’s when I knew we had found our link. I hypothesized that if the ship had been here before Brassy’s escape, then she may have made it into the time stream somewhere. But something happened to her. She perished, and her perishing could have been the very thing to alter history, drawing my time-ship to it when it tumbled out of the Fifth Dimension, and creating a —

  “Prime nexus!” I called out.

  “Is that a signal?” Howard asked suspiciously. “Watch those slaves!”

  “Prime nexus! The one named Brassy! That’s why the ship was drawn here, to this place, to this time!”

  “What do you mean, K’lion?”

  “Her early sad death changed everything! Had she not died while trying to escape, had she lived — I do guesswork here, but there is science to back me up — she would have had some tremendous role to play here on Earth Orange! A whole different history would have unfurled!”

  “You mean, she would have changed history? How, Clyne?” Eli wondered.

  “We shall never know. But all the equipment on the ship, sensitive to great time disruptions, was drawn to this spot. This grave.”

  “Our little Brassy,” Governor Claiborne exclaimed, “was going to be…important? Necessary? What the hell are you saying, boy? And why won’t that mask come off?”

  I was about to make another potentially agitating observation when Banglees walked into the clearing, carrying a wrapped bundle.

  “Just whose side are you on, anyway?” Eli asked.

  “Whoever pays me,” he responded. “Whoever’s ahead.”

  And so the attention of the human mammals shifted again. This all happened in the past few moments as I was still trying to get them to understand that a prime-nexus spot must be preserved for further research and examination.

  But either no one here agrees with me, or they’re just not focused on their studies.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Eli: Vanishing Tale

  February 1805

  The last rocket of the night explodes i
n the sky, back in the direction of New Orleans, crackling with sparks of red and blue.

  At least, it feels like the last one. There’s a tremendous silence after the sparks fade from the sky. There isn’t even any more thunder and lightning.

  Maybe this is my chance to tell Thomas Jefferson the truth about this whole situation. If I did, maybe he’d help us out. Wasn’t he the president who believed in honesty, anyway? The one with the cherry tree?

  “I think we need to make some arrests,” Claiborne says.

  “He looks like Serapis,” Thea whispers to me, pointing to his snake costume. “I had no idea the Alexandrian gods would last so long, considering how determined Tiberius was to destroy them.”

  “Mere arrests? We must burn this voodoo shrine, Mr. President,” Howard says. “We must stamp out all vestiges of this conspiracy, and then let it be known that your firm hand was behind it.”

  Jefferson gives a big sigh. “Sometimes, I can scarcely wait to not be president, and retire full-time to Monticello.”

  Howard picks up another torch from one of the soldiers, so he has one in each hand. He starts walking toward the crash site of Clyne’s ship.

  “Arlington Howard! I order you once again to stand down!”

  Jefferson’s voice is loud and booming, in contrast to the laughter coming from Mr. Howe.

  “Arlington Howard! You even got his name right!” Mr. Howe jumps in front of Jefferson. If his hands weren’t chained up like the rest of ours, I think he might have grabbed him by the throat.

  “Are you in on it?” he asks Jefferson, then Claiborne. “Are you? Are you?” He looks at Thea, then rattles his chains at me.

  I couldn’t rattle back, though, even if I wanted to. My hands are bound tight, and on top of it all, the packet of portable soup that Lewis gave me is leaking all over the place now, dripping inside my jacket and sleeves. The whole thing makes me realize that I probably need a really, really good bath.