by D. J. Butler
It made him think of the Molly Malones and the Pinkertons with something approaching nostalgia.
“Yeah, Sam,” he agreed, “only I was coming to rescue you, don’t you see?”
Clemens ignored him and turned to join the circle with the others.
“So it wasn’t right to mock me, is all I’m saying.” Tam sighed. He shuffled in close to listen, too, careful that he wasn’t leaning over the head of the louse-sized midget. The little bastard had armed himself with every knife he could find.
“It’s time for reciprocal revelation,” the man everyone called Poe was saying. He was saying it to Sam and he was wiping blood off the corner of his mouth with a white handkerchief. The man looked like a walking corpse. “You’re the Boatman, and you brought a delivery of rubies to Orson Pratt. How many were there?”
Sam Clemens might not always be nice to his associate, but he knew how to keep his cool. “I’m not saying it’s true, Mr. Poe, and I’m not saying it isn’t. But I would like to understand your reasoning a little better.”
“I took Pratt a delivery, too,” Poe explained. “My codename was to be the Egyptian but he accidentally called me the Boatman. I’ve seen your amphibious craft and I think the Boatman must have been you. You looked uncomfortable when I mentioned rubies to Hickman. How many did you bring him?” The bony-faced Mormon woman looked fascinated by Poe’s every word and Tam wondered what her game was.
“How many did you bring him?” Sam asked belligerently.
“What I gave Pratt wasn’t rubies,” Poe said.
“What was it?” This question came from the more manly of the two Englishmen. Tam thought his name was Burton. He looked a little offended, like all this was new information, and he wasn’t happy that people had been keeping secrets from him. “In the spirit of reciprocal revelation, I brought Pratt nothing.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Poe said.
“Your profession of ignorance doesn’t exactly inspire trust,” Sam joked.
“They were some kind of clocksprung devices,” Poe explained. “I don’t know what the devices were designed to do, but there were four of them and they were built into canopic jars, little Egyptian-looking jars with animal heads.”
“We know what canopic jars are,” harrumphed Burton.
Poe ignored him. “They might be ether-wave devices of some sort,” he said, “but that’s almost pure conjecture on my part. How many rubies?”
“Didn’t you say that Mr. Pratt has built four of his airships?” the Etonian bastard asked.
Since the fight ended, he’d been followed around by two women, the Mexican gunner and the young Mormon morsel. Tam would happily have instructed either girl in the secret beauties of the Irish avian population but they stuck to the effete little prat with his maimed headgear like blight stuck to a potato. Just the sight of the three of them made Tam want to spit.
The aristo weasel had two women slobbering over him. Poe had the bony Mormon lady making eyes. Sam Clemens and Burton yukked it up like they’d been hatched from the same egg and known each other all their lives. Even the dwarf had the little kid.
Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy was the odd man out.
He felt alone. It surprised him how much the feeling bothered him. Stop moping, you stupid bastard, he told himself. Mother O’Shaughnessy’d die of embarrassment over your womanish ways.
Of course, on top of being lonesome, good old Missouri Sam Clemens had as much as blamed him for kidnapping the child. Sure, Tam had had the child in his possession at one point, but for that matter, so had Sam.
It had been the dwarf who committed the kidnapping.
It just wasn’t fair.
“So what?” he interjected himself into the conversation. “Four ships and four jars, so-bloody-damn-hell-what? Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Four cardinal directions, by Brigit. Four arms and legs on a man, four fingers to a hand if you don’t count the thumb. How many fookin’ rubies, is this a game?” He also felt slightly put out that Sam hadn’t mentioned he was carrying around a bunch of precious stones, apparently for some kind of secret trade with the Madman Pratt.
It was like Sam didn’t trust him.
But then, maybe he was right not to.
“I don’t know how many,” Sam Clemens told them. “A small bag full of them. I thought I was best off not knowing the exact scale of the temptation.”
“Lee’s arming the airships,” Burton grunted.
“As far as I know,” the older woman said, “Brother Orson’s only ever built one working phlogiston gun and it wasn’t mounted on one of his ships.”
“Consider the facts,” Poe said. “Pratt arranged secret meetings in which he took delivery of some number of rubies and four mysterious devices, equal in number to the number of his aerial fleet. Pratt took delivery, I say, not Brigham Young and not John Lee. Our Mr. Hickman there clearly knows nothing about these transactions, so I think we have to infer that there is at least a strong possibility that Orson Pratt is acting on his own in this matter. He as good as said so to my … to colleagues of mine in Army Intelligence. Perhaps he is building additional phlogiston guns to arm all the ships. Perhaps the canopic jars facilitate the arming in some fashion; perhaps they are targeting devices or … who know what they could be?”
“Bombs,” Tam guessed.
“Bombs,” sneered the dwarf. “Like Hunley and his boys ever made anything so simple as a bomb.”
“I don’t think you can make an ether-wave bomb …” Roxie said hesitantly.
“I fear Pratt’s action may be imminent,” Poe continued. “He was very anxious as to timing when I delivered him the canopic jars. He commented that he was almost out of time. Did he give you any instructions about tomorrow morning, Mr. Clemens?”
Sam Clemens hooked his thumbs into his belt and furrowed his brow. “He wanted me by the Tabernacle at eight in the morning. North side. And the reciprocal revelation?”
“Same place, same time. Something’s happening tomorrow morning at eight and he wants us to witness it.”
“Or he wants to make sure we’re involved,” Clemens suggested.
“Or standing on a convenient target,” Poe finished.
“We have to get President Young back to the city,” the younger, prettier Mormon woman said. “We can’t let Lee win. And if we don’t stop tomorrow morning’s meeting the Twelve and the Seventy will have chosen a new President.”
“We also have to move to intercept Pratt,” Sam Clemens said. “What if he really does plan to launch an attack first thing in the morning?”
“Any attack might be imminent,” Poe agreed. “We may already be too late.”
“We split up,” Burton announced. “I’m going after the airships. Who’s with me?”
***
Chapter Thirteen
“So I expect you’re one cog that’s happy to be returning to its ordinary slot in the good Lord’s cosmic wonder-machine,” Sam suggested. He chewed on a cheap cigar he’d commandeered from one of the vanquished Danites; he’d chewed his way through the entire supply he kept on his person.
That was one more compelling reason to get back to the Jim Smiley as soon as he could.
“My people need me in my place,” Brigham Young agreed, glaring at Sam like a bear facing down a mastiff. “If you mean something more than that, I suggest you say it plainer. You’ll ruin Missouri’s reputation for producing straight-talking men.”
They rode horses taken from the Hot Springs Hotel & Brewery stable. Ahead of them, pffft-ankkkhing across fields of sugar beets and corn, went one of the Mexican Striders; the second brought up the rear of the procession. It was full night and they moved by the light of the half-moon slowly falling towards the western hills, not wanting to attract any more attention than they were already at risk of doing, just by the size of their party and the presence of the two big, clanking fighting machines. Someone’s crop was getting trampled, Sam thought. At least it was in a good cause. Or maybe it was okay because i
t all belonged to Brigham Young. Wasn’t this a kingdom, after all?
“You’ve got us wrong, Mr. President,” Sam said. “Missouri doesn’t produce straight-talking men, it produces skeptics. And what I mean to say is, I can see how our rescue might tempt you into thinking the hand of Providence was upon you but I would suggest that there are other explanations.”
“You mean luck,” Young guessed.
Young and Sam rode at the head of the horse-mounted middle of the procession, together with Ambassador Armstrong. Immediately behind them came Orrin Porter Rockwell, slouched over his horse like he was a naturally inborn part of the animal, and then Captain Dan Jones, with the boy John Moses in front of him on his saddle. The midget Coltrane banged along on a horse far too big for him, and behind him came Absalom Fearnley-Standish, his sister Abigail, and Brigham Young’s fetching vixen-agent, Annie Web, mixing in more or less among the crewmen of the Liahona.
“Luck,” Sam agreed. “The diligence of my associate and the persistence of your own loyal people, despite, I would like to point out, your apparent orders to them to stand down. Your own cogs saved you by jumping out of place. I also wouldn’t discount the incompetence of our kidnappers, or fail to mention our own manful efforts at overcoming our captors and escaping. Porter Rockwell deserves some kind of medal.”
“You don’t believe that God acts in the affairs of man,” Young asserted. When he wasn’t snapping his teeth in anger, he had a kind of dignity that Sam found attractive, and also a little unsettling. Young rode easily and upright even with his chest wrapped in a bandage, like he expected people to look at him and respect him.
He made Sam want to knock him off his pole, just a little. Not hurt him, but maybe get him a little dirty.
“I find that the victors in any contest are generally persuaded that God is on their side,” Sam answered. “The trodden down and beaten upon are not often so optimistic.”
Young was silent for a moment. Sam listened to the creaking of saddle leather and the soft jingling of stirrups and felt the cool night air on his face. Having spent much of the day in darkness and suffocated by the smell of apples, he experienced this as freedom, pure and undefiled.
“The best friend I ever had in this world,” Young finally said, speaking slowly, “was Joseph Smith, Jr.”
“The King of Nauvoo.”
“Brother Joseph was the President, Mr. Clemens. Jesus Christ was the King.”
“No offense intended. I only meant to identify Smith by his common nickname, so you know that I’m paying attention and know the man to whom you refer.”
“If you have heard of him, then you know that he was executed by an illegal firing squad in Carthage, Illinois.”
“I have heard various views on the legality of the action,” Sam acknowledged that he knew of Smith’s murder. “No offense. Your kidnapping is not the first piece of mischief to be perpetrated by men calling themselves Danites.”
“Nauvoo was a kingdom dredged from the mud of the Mississippi River, Mr. Clemens. No one wanted it when we went there, except for the mosquitoes, and without the aid of Heaven, the blood-suckers would surely have driven us out.”
“I’ve seen Nauvoo,” Sam said. “It’s a pretty town.”
“We made it so. And once they had murdered our Brother Joseph, our enemies came for our land. They killed us, they stole all our worldly goods, and they drove us across the Mississippi River into the howling Lamanite wilderness.”
“I don’t know what a Lamanite is,” Sam noted. “But it sounds bad. I’ll readily concede that you were mistreated, Mr. Young. That doesn’t make you unique, it makes you just like everyone else.
“For thousands of years on this continent,” Sam continued, “each Indian people oppressed the next, with tomahawk and obsidian club, human sacrifice and torture and cannibalism. Then the white man showed up with weapons even more vicious—the long rifle and the smallpox germ—and he joined the game. The Spaniards oppressed the Indians, the French oppressed the Spaniards, the Englishmen finally oppressed everyone else and won, and to celebrate the victory they changed their name to Americans.
“Someday,” he wound up to his dramatic finish, conscious of Brigham Young’s cool eyes on him in the darkness and half expecting to have to jump back to avoid a burst of rage, “the next hand of cards will be dealt and somebody else will oppress the Americans. Hell, maybe it will even be the Mormons, but that won’t mean that God is on your side, any more than He was on the side of the Iroquois when they sent the Lenape packing out of the Delaware Valley.”
“You misunderstand me, Mr. Clemens,” Young said quietly. “I am telling you that God was on our side when our enemies drove us out of Nauvoo. I am telling you that when all the world saw as us trodden upon and beaten down, we rode west into the wilderness cupped in the hand of the Almighty God.”
Sam nearly swallowed his cigar. “I must be misunderstanding you now, Mr. President,” he spluttered. “Are you suggesting that you were persecuted and robbed and murdered and chased into the wilderness, as you say—and that it was a good thing? That God elected you to defeat?”
“I am suggesting,” Brigham Young said, impressively calm, “that God moves in mysterious ways. Uprooting the Kingdom and moving it to the Rocky Mountains was hard, harder possibly than you can ever imagine, Mr. Clemens. Death and starvation and disease dogged our every step. But that move has made us strong and it has given us the space we needed to flourish and grow and become independent. And if your President or Mr. Jefferson Davis or even the Queen of England thinks to coerce us into any particular action with respect to this coming war, or any other thing for that matter … well, they will find that God has taught us to be prepared.”
“And has God prepared you for the actions of Mr. John D. Lee?” Sam asked. He felt impudent for his retort, but he was staggered by the things Brigham Young was saying and couldn’t leave them without rejoinder.
“God moves in mysterious ways,” Young repeated. “We are all cogs in slots in His cosmic wonder-machine, just as you said. Rockwell and Eliza and Annie disobeyed me and they were right to do so, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t acting as parts of the machine. God is the mechanick, Mr. Clemens, not Brigham Young. I am nothing but a cog that is happy to be returning to his usual slot.”
“If it all goes cock-eyed,” Sam Clemens had said, “remember whose side you’re on.”
“I’m on your side, Sam,” Tam had shot back. He’d felt like the girl in the corner of the dance hall, looking shyly away from her beau. Get a hold of yourself.
“You’re in the employ of the United States Army Intelligence,” Sam had reminded him, a little preachier than Tam liked. “That makes you on President Buchanan’s side. And remember this,” he’d leaned in close and looked around to be sure that no one was watching, “there’s still a war coming. If at any point it looks like Edgar Allan Poe is going to steal Pratt’s airships for Jefferson Davis and his cronies, you know what you have to do.”
And wasn’t Pratt the perfect name for a crazy old bugger living in the mountains, building airships and phlogiston guns and planning on burning down the whole bloody-damn-hell world?
“Kill Poe,” Tam had agreed. “Kill Pratt. Kill them all, if I have to.”
Sam Clemens had scowled and looked uncomfortable. Good old Sam Clemens, rugged Missouri hard-arse that he was, he was still a bit of an innocent, a bit of an old maiden auntie. “If you have to,” he had agreed reluctantly. “But I’d prefer that you steal the ships yourself first, or destroy them.”
Then he’d ridden off with His Mormon Majesty Brigham Young and the nasty dwarf and the Mexicans, without so much as a Please, O’Shaughnessy or a Thank you, friend Tamerlane, for coming to rescue me from the godawful Danites who wanted to shoot me dead. Tam understood that the man had to go show the people of the Great Salt Lake City that he was alive and an innocent man but still, manners were manners.
“Why the make-up?” Tam asked. “Are we going dancing and n
o one’s told me? And here I left me best frock behind on the Jim Smiley.”
The wheelhouse of the steam-truck they’d stolen from the Danites had two long benches that could have fit four men each in a pinch. Richard Burton sat on the front bench, behind the steering wheel, and drove, his sword across his lap and Roxie Snow beside him. The truck rattled and bounced along a rutted rocky road up and down low hills, a beam of light shot out by its electricks splitting the night in front of it. Burton held tight to the wheel and the others held tight to the benches’ arms.
Edgar Allen Poe sat with Tam on the second bench and worked, mostly one-handed, at affixing a false nose to his face with spirit gum. Tam watched the others and tried to be sneaky about the sips of whisky he was taking from the bottle in his coat pocket. He’d borrowed the liquor from the galley of that great dead shrieking behemoth the Liahona and if anyone minded, to hell with them.
He deserved a little drink for his efforts (What man doesn’t? but especially clever, dogged Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy.) and besides, the alcohol helped dull the throbbing pain in his arm, leg, and ear. He’d been having a rough time of it, these last few days.
“I’m impressed that you can do it without a mirror.” Roxie smiled.
“I’ve spent long hours carefully observing women to learn their secrets,” Poe said. “Though I have not yet mastered the legendary art of painting my lips using my cleavage instead of my hands.”
Tam laughed sharply. He sort of liked Poe. He’d miss the man if he had to kill him. He patted the Hushers to be sure he still had them both, and checked the stiletto against his forearm. Whatever came, he was ready. He’d just have to be sure to take Poe by surprise—the man had taken back his scarabs of death and was carrying them in his coat, now. Tam didn’t want to get crosswise with those nasty little Creation-disassembling buggers.
