Ganymede (Clockwork Century)

by Cherie Priest

  She walked briskly past people who were opening windows to catch the breeze that would billow through before the rain came up behind it. They were tying back curtains and inviting the air to sweep on through, push out the odors of cayenne and Tabasco, crawfish and rum, red beans and rice, and cigars and cheap tobacco. The Quarter exhaled paraffin and charcoal, incense and manure. It breathed diesel and industrial lubricant, barbecue and salt.

  It whispered.

  Josephine stopped, unsure of what that sound had been—uncertain if it meant anything, or if it’d only been her imagination. A tumbleweed of newspaper went skipping across her path, rolling into the street and stopping in a puddle, where it unfurled to reveal the headline. The first words were blurred, but the remainder of them read, AT THE ST. LOUIS CATHEDRAL. As she stared, dirty water soaked through, obscuring even that scant message, but somehow revealing another, farther down the page—before the whole thing disappeared into soaked, illegible pulp.

  GARDEN

  She looked away from the sopping paper. It meant nothing, after all. She found herself casually surprised that she’d bothered to stop for it, and wondered why it’d seemed—even for a moment—like something worth examining.

  She resumed her pace. Her feet clapped against the hollow sidewalks with their planed slats, and her skirts skimmed the splinters. Still, she felt odd, as if she’d heard something but failed to understand it. As if she should’ve listened harder. Like she was being chastised at a distance, by a mother or grandmother whose voice she couldn’t quite pick out of a crowd.

  The creak of a sign hanging on a chain tickled at her ears. She spied it up ahead, and, catching its text from the corner of her eye, she drew up short again. She could’ve sworn—would’ve sworn, and at great length—that it’d said, TOO LATE TO WAIT. But it read only, TULANE WAITMAN, advertising a minister’s office.

  She stared intently at the sign as she passed beneath it. It performed no further tricks; it only swung squeakily in the shifting air ahead of the incoming storm.

  Where was she again? Oh, yes. Rue Galvez, just past Esplanade. Funny how she felt so turned around.

  She took the next turn and proceeded via dead reckoning, the kind that was engraved in her blood. She’d lived in the Quarter all her life, and she knew it like the corridors of the Garden Court. She could have navigated it blindfolded, in the fog, at midnight. Even so, her heart pounded, and she did not know why. She knew only that she had to keep moving. “Because of the curfew,” she muttered to herself, but did not believe a word of it.

  The streets were nearly empty, and this, too, was strange. True, the businesses were closing up shop against the storm, against the limits imposed by the Texians, but there was also … something else? It was a ridiculous thing to think, but Josephine thought it anyway, and she kept walking, and faster. Just short of a run.

  Running would draw attention. She did not want attention, did she?

  Well, why not? She was doing nothing wrong. It mattered little if anyone stopped her.

  A seagull squawked loudly and flapped far too close to her head, startling her into flinging her hands defensively upward. The bird chattered its displeasure and dropped with a soft slapping of its splayed, webbed feet onto the planks immediately in her path. It stretched its wings, opening and closing them as if in warning, or summons, or some other gesture the woman couldn’t decipher.

  “What?” she asked it, feeling ridiculous. “What do you want? Get out of the way,” she said, and prepared to aim a kick in its general direction. She knew from long experience that she’d never hit the thing; it’d be out of her way well in time, which was just as well. She didn’t care to hurt it, but she would not be bullied by a creature the size of a cat.

  It cawed once more and stared at something behind her, so she looked over her shoulder and spied—at a brief, outrageous glance—a storefront window that made her gasp. A large white skull filled the entire pane, but only for a split second … before it was replaced with a dress stitched for a bride, advertising the stock at Miss Delia’s Dresses and Wares.

  Josephine’s throat went dry, and a warm flush began creeping up her chest. Her hands tingled and went numb. “What’s going on?” she asked no one in particular. “What’s happening?”

  The gull answered with a scrap of stationery in its mouth. It hadn’t been there at first, but it was present when she turned around. The bird dropped the shred of paper printed-side up, declaring in someone’s overelaborate handwriting, Join us for something garbled and runny, dampened into meaninglessness. Then, at Jackson Square, the north corner gardens!

  Jackson Square. The Cathedral.

  A message, but from whom? From what? And who would communicate in such a fashion?

  It would be better to go find out than to always wonder—or that’s the conclusion she came to as the bird flew off, taking the paper with it. She adjusted her trajectory and increased her pace. At first she merely hustled, walking too fast for decorum, but soon she was all but skipping, then dashing outright.

  She wasn’t sure why she was running, or what she was running from, though she could take a guess.

  “Not yet, not yet, not yet,” she said under her breath as she tore along, ducking down alleys and cutting across intersections.

  The whole Quarter ushered her along, clearing the way.

  The doors moved and the sweepers stepped aside. Horses drew carriages out of her path, and rolling-crawlers lurched off as she darted toward them. Wisps of fog frayed and split at her approach, and Jackson Square was closer, closer, and closer.

  Her chest ached against the bones of her corset, straining against the stays as she panted her way closer to the river. Her skirts tangled around her ankles, twisting around her knees and trying to slow her, but failing. She kicked herself free and pushed onward.

  The texture of the streets beneath her changed. They shifted from the wood slats of lifted walkways as those side paths ended, then became the slick cobbles of humidity-damp stones that slipped beneath her feet despite her rubber-bottomed boots. She stumbled and recovered, ran out of steam, and leaned against a large, cool, stone square that turned out to be the foundation of the equestrian statue directly in front of the church.

  Gazing up at it, she wondered if it, too, might have some arcane message to pass along. But the rider and horse both kept their silence.

  Back behind the church, or somewhere past it, she heard a dull mumble punctuated with gasps and small cries. Catching her breath, she pulled herself together and continued onward, toward the ornate, dark church doors illuminated by fizzing electric torches on either side. She turned to pass them, still tracking the sounds and pushing toward their source.

  A tall black fence cordoned off the church’s back yards.

  It walled off the gardens.

  A crowd was gathering. Josephine joined it at full speed, stopping herself hands-first against the rails, leaving bruises on her palms that she wouldn’t notice for days. She thrust her face between the bars and gazed openmouthed at the scene framed in the vivid green grass of the shadowed yard behind the city’s holy Christian center.

  There on the ground, faceup in a state of peaceful repose with arms at her sides, Marie Laveau lay unbreathing, unmoving.

  On the lawn around her, items were accumulating. As Josephine watched, three gold coins were pitched through the gate with a prayer, shortly to be joined by hastily improvised bags as small as her thumb. One gris-gris after another went sailing over the fence or through it, to land in a gentle plunk near the serene, still body.

  Josephine wrapped her fingers around the chilly bars and struggled to breathe. She watched the small things fly—the ribbons, the coins, the buttons. The bags and beads, the twine-twisted bracelets and bootlaces, the flowers, pebbles, and nails. They accumulated around the queen’s corpse, yet none landed upon her. They gathered like a full-body halo, drifts of clutter, a fog of tiny gifts dredged from pockets and purses.

  “No,” she said in
half a breath, and with the other half she said, “Not yet. It’s too soon,” she added. “There’s too much I don’t know!”

  More mourners gathered, brought to the spot by whatever means had brought Josephine, or by word of mouth filtering from churchyard gardens throughout the Quarter. They joined her at the fence, gawkers who stood with eyes wet and heads bowed, whispering prayers or moaning.

  No one heeded the curfew, and as the sun set more fully, the Texians came out to see the fuss. The first who came started with commands to disperse, then saw the uncanny tableau spread out within the fence. They recognized the body lying there and stopped yelling their orders. They, too, joined the lookers at the fence, drawn up close and made quiet by awe, or shock, or some other odd familiarity that told them this was not the time to insist upon anything.

  Someone at the back cried, “What’s going on? What’s the meaning of this?” Josephine knew that whoever this was, he’d find his silence, too. But she recognized the voice and turned to spot the speaker. At the nearest corner where the gas lamps were sputtering to light under a colored child’s expert spark, she saw Horatio Korman.

  She watched understanding dawn on him and, closely following that, a nervous kind of horror. Their eyes met across the now-crowded side street.

  They shared the moment, the fear of knowing—alone, together.

  Thirteen

  Andan Cly ran his finger over the map as slowly as a man learning to read. He traced the curve of the Mississippi River gently, lifting his hand to see a detail here, a notation there. The map was an older one and it had been abridged, amended, and scrawled across to make it more pertinent to the present situation. This sheet included not only the serpentine bends and miniature ports that dotted the way between the city and the ocean; it also included the canals, both commercial and semiprivate—and the docks that Texas likely didn’t know about.

  The electric lamps had been dimmed down to nothing, leaving only the oil lamps and rickety wire-frame lanterns to give them any light.

  Outside, there were no sounds of soldiers or rolling-crawlers. No marching feet or passing patrols. The Texians had left—at least, those who were leaving were long gone, and no more were on the verge of exiting, so the time had come to put the finishing touches on the plan before putting it into action.

  Night had not yet fallen, but it was coming, and it would be there within the hour—black and thick, a perfect shield from the eyes of anyone too interested in knowing about the giant machine hidden inside the nondescript storehouse.

  “These are the forts, ain’t that right?” Cly asked, poking at a spot in the river just past a bend that kinked sharply north and to the east.

  “Fort Saint Philip on the north bank, and Fort Jackson on the southern one,” Deaderick told him. “Fully manned, mostly by Confederates.”

  “Not Texians?”

  “Naw. Texas lets them keep their forts as a matter of show. Makes it look more like a group effort, rather than an occupation. It’s bullshit, and everybody knows it.”

  “So the Rebs keep the forts in order to keep their pride. Got it. Are they dangerous?”

  “Dangerous enough to steer clear of them, as much as we’re able. They don’t have anything much in the water that we’ll have to bypass—no charges or anything like that. They can’t clog up the waterway with bombs. There are too many merchant ships coming and going to make it worth their trouble. But they do have lookouts aplenty keeping an eye on everyone who passes by—and anyone who goes steaming upriver.”

  Fang made a sign. Cly saw it out of the corner of his eye.

  Gatekeepers.

  “Gatekeepers,” the captain said aloud, since he doubted anyone else but Houjin could understand the message. “That’s all they are.”

  “Heavily armed gatekeepers. They’ve got cannon all over the place, and antiaircraft, too.”

  Rucker Little noted, “There’s nothing keeping the antiaircraft from becoming antiwatercraft. All they have to do is tip the things on their fulcrum, brace them, and aim them at the waves. A buddy of mine used to work for them, doing maintenance on machine parts and the like. He says they have a pair of antiaircraft shooters mounted on each of the fort’s two river-facing towers, and both of them have been modified so they can shoot up or down.”

  “Good to know,” Kirby Troost said.

  “We’ll stay out of their way. Out of their sight, anyway. Let me ask you something,” Cly said to Deaderick. “Is there any good reason we have to go right past them? They’re guarding the way to the ocean, but only if we stay in the river.”

  “This thing won’t grow legs and crawl, Captain.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. These canals, here and here.” He tapped at them. “Are they deep enough to hold us?”

  Deaderick rubbed at his chin. “Maybe. Not that one,” he indicated a sketched-in line at Empire. “But this one might—the one just past Port Sulphur.”

  Houjin perked up. “Isn’t that where we landed? When we first came into town? Those Texians made us set down there instead of landing at Barataria.”

  “That’s right,” Cly told him.

  Rucker sniffed. “Doesn’t surprise me. Texians trying to chase off perfectly nice pirates.”

  “They thought the Lafittes were hiding this thing.” Deaderick cocked a thumb at Ganymede. “We’d actually asked for their help, a few months ago, and they were interested in assisting us, but for a fee we couldn’t afford—and we couldn’t get the Union to spring for it. I suppose someone passed our request along. Some spies, somewhere.”

  “The bayou’s chock-full of ’em,” Rucker agreed. “Just as well we couldn’t take them up on it.”

  Kirby Troost stared at the map, baffled. “I don’t mind telling you, it blows my mind how little help you’re getting from the Federals. Here you are, trying to hand them a piece of hardware like this, and they just leave you hanging for the details.”

  Deaderick made a small grimace and said, “Eh, you know how it goes. They aren’t sure Ganymede’s worth the investment, and we can’t prove it until we show it to them. Funny thing is, the Rebs believe it. We wouldn’t have any trouble convincing them that the ship is valuable—they’re scared to death of it.”

  Rucker said, “And they know what it could do, in theory. They were the ones who commissioned the first ones, the Hunley, the Pioneer, and the rest. They know what a difference a craft like this could make in the war, and God knows they’re barely hanging in there these days. They can’t afford to let the Yankees to get this thing, take it apart, and figure out how to make more of them.”

  “You think they could do that?” Cly asked.

  “Sure. Within a few months, if they hire a few of us,” he replied, indicating himself, Mumler, and Anderson Worth. “For that matter, if it comes to it … we might just head back North and make a case ourselves. The three of us, plus a couple of others—we might be able to sit down and draw up our own plans. We know it better than anybody else.”

  Deaderick Early agreed, but with reservations. “Of course, if you boys did that … it’d be another year or two at soonest before you had something working. No, this is our best bet for ending things fast.” He glared down at the map as if he’d rather be looking at something else. “We’ve had trouble enough convincing those damn fools we know our heads from a hole in the ground. But we’ll show them. Once they get a look at the firepower on this thing, and they watch it in action … once they see what it can do…” His voice trailed off, then returned again, stronger. “At any rate, Port Sulphur. That’s the closest dock to Barataria, so it stands to reason that that’s where they diverted traffic. Do you think they’re still doing it? Guiding people away from the big island?”

  Deaderick said, “Probably not. They didn’t find the ship and they’ve sent their extra men home, so my guess is that they’ve mostly lost interest in what goes on over there.”

  “I don’t like to work on guesses.” Cly frowned. “But it looks like we’re st
uck between a number of uncertainties. The forts will be dangerous to sneak past. The canal at Port Sulphur might be safer, but it might be crawling with Texians.”

  Deaderick folded his arms, wincing as his shoulder shifted. “Might be, but I doubt it. Last word in from the city has it that there’s just a residual force on staff at the bay, cleaning up and sorting out what’s worth keeping and what’s not.”

  “You think they’ll set up a post there? A fort or something, where the pirates used to camp?” Troost asked.

  “Maybe. Or maybe they’ll scavenge for anything they can make use of, and let the place fall to ruin.”

  Cly shook his head. “It won’t fall to ruin. The pirates will take it back. That’s their hometown, their home nation. The only place they have with any history to it. They’ll be back for it.”

  “You say that like you’ve given it some thought yourself,” said Norman Somers, who was back to assist with the big trucks and the winch that would send the Ganymede swinging over into the river. “I’d be pleased to help you, if it means one less square of Louisiana that Texas gets to keep.”

  “Can’t say it didn’t occur to me. Can’t say I wouldn’t like to see it happen.”

  Kirby Troost stuck a match in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “There’s no time like the present, if you want it back. Or that’s the word in the sky.”

  “How would you know?” asked Rucker.

  “I got ears all over the place, that’s how. Pirates are going to grab for it, pretty soon.”

  “Who?” Cly asked, interested against his better judgment. “Somebody arranging an operation?”

  “Supposedly Henry Shanks is leading point, or that’s how it’s falling into place. He’s got One-Eye Chuck Waverly coming in from the Atlantic coast, and Jimmy Garcia swinging up from the Yucatán. Rumor has it even Sweet Bang Lee is interested in raising some hell. He’s on his way from California with Brigadier Betty and their son.”

  The captain breathed, “Jesus Christ Almighty. That’s one hell of a crowd. Ol’ Hank Shanks is in the lead, is he?”