Saba had arranged to meet Miss Hewison for tea at Mrs. Finkler’s. When he arrived, she was already waiting, as was her aunt Mrs. Fandice. He took off his helmet and sat down opposite the prettier of the two.
“I hope you ladies weren’t waiting long,” he said.
“No we just arrived ourselves,” replied Miss Hewison.
Gaylene Dokkins came to the table, and rather than taking their order, she immediately began setting out dishes. Saba had made arrangements for a complete tea the day before, making sure that everything that might be expected was in stock. While Mrs. Finkler’s offered food as delicious as anywhere, the two women with whom he was dining had just arrived from the great city of Brech, and he didn’t want his first date to be a disappointment. There were scones and crumpets, with clotted cream, lemon curd, and berry jam. There were cress sandwiches, assorted cheeses, and at great expense at least for Saba, trifle. Finally the young waitress poured two cups of tea for the ladies, setting the pot in the center of the table, and put out a Billingbow’s Soda Water for Saba.
“Milk please, young lady,” said Mrs. Fandice.
Gaylene cast a quick eye at Saba and he gave her a very brief nod. She left and returned a moment later with a tiny milk pitcher. Saba knew that the milk contained within it was from a tin can that had probably been packaged in Greater Brechalon more than six months before. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted it, but Mrs. Fandice poured it into her tea and drank it without comment.
“How is your morning going so far?” asked Miss Hewison.
“The usual,” replied Saba.
“As bad as all that?”
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “Mrs. Fandice, I’m so happy that you were free to join us.”
“Mr. Rutan was kind enough to let me have the whole day,” she said. “After tea, Loana and I are going across the square and shop for dresses.”
Saba glanced quickly at Mrs. Fandice’s dress, which was a beige colored affair, covered with red and blue lace and heaps of artificial flowers. Normally he didn’t pay much attention to women’s fashion, but this was clearly a disaster. Miss Hewison saw the expression pass over his face and raised a hand to cover her smile. He looked unashamedly at her.
“How is the coal business?” he asked, looking back to her guardian. “I saw that you moved into your new offices.”
“Well, there’s not much for Mr. Rutan and myself to do, until they start actually bringing in some coal. We’re in shipping you know. But I think we will be very busy soon enough. Mr. Staff is preparing an expedition into the hinterlands. They expect to locate a great store of coal.”
Despite her severe looks, Saba found Mrs. Fandice to be personable enough. Of course his real interest was Miss Hewison, and while he enjoyed the meal with her and their chaperone, he missed the intimacy that they had shared when hiding from the velociraptors in the Wissinger home. His challenge would be to recreate that feeling without the associated dangers of vicious predators. They finished eating and left, Saba having paid the bill along with a generous tip ahead of time, and then he walked the two women over to Mrs. Bratihn’s Dress Shop.
Saba thought about going back to the police station, but decided instead, that he would walk home and try for an afternoon nap. He walked leisurely through the neighborhoods southeast of the square, the part of town that was most dense. In the tall trees to either side of him, colorful microraptors leapt from tree to tree. With the same long, feather-tufted tail of the velociraptors, which were a constant pest to colonists, the microraptors glided among the great redwoods on contoured feathers that sprouted from all four of their sharp-clawed limbs. Unlike their terrestrial cousins, these creatures tended to shy away from humans.
Saba owned a fairly large piece of property not too far from the Dechantagne family estate, a gift from them for his service. On one corner of this land, he had built a cute little cottage just right for a single man. He had vague plans in the back of his head to build a fine large house several hundred feet away when he someday married. The small, neat cottage was built on an A frame design, with a single room. The room held a cast iron stove, an icebox, a sink, a small table with a single chair, a couch, and a ladder leading up to the loft where a large, comfortable mattress was placed. The water closet, though attached to the house and featuring a fully modern flush toilet, had to be reached by going out the back door.
Retrieving a Billingbow’s soda water from the icebox, Saba pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and spat it onto the table, then found his copy of Twyla Gaskell’s The Derby lying face down on the couch where he had left it. He started reading even as he was unlacing his shoes, and by the time he lay back, nestling his head into the well worn arm of the couch, he was already well into the chapter. At some point he fell asleep, because he woke up with the book lying across his chest and the room filled with the last dying light of evening.
Still somewhat full from lunch, Saba decided that he would walk over to the Dechantagne house just to see what they were having for dinner. He put his shoes back on, grabbed his helmet and headed out, tossing the empty Billingbow’s bottle into the dustbin by the door. It was still light when he reached the home of the governor, the left corner of which faced in the direction of his own home. The constable walked toward the house through a section of trees whose heavy branches between them had managed to keep the ground accumulation of snow from being too deep.
He was almost right upon them before he even knew it. On the west side of the Dechantagne home, hidden from the main house by a small shed, Governor Iolanthe Dechantagne-Calliere and Mr. Radley Staff stood speaking in low tones. Saba was about to call out his presence so that he didn’t startle them, just appearing as he did from among the trees. Before the words left his mouth though, Mrs. C leaned forward and was swept by Staff into an embrace and a deep kiss. Saba stopped in his tracks, struggling for a moment, unsure of how to deal with the situation. The couple was still locked together, when he made a ninety-degree turn that angled him away from the house and kept as many trees as possible between them and him.
When he had reached the gravel street, Saba stopped and thought for a moment. He wasn’t really that hungry, he decided. And he wasn’t fooling himself. He really didn’t want to have to sit across from Staff or the governor after what he had seen. All in all, he reasoned, his time would be better spent completing paperwork than filling the extra seat at the colony’s most patrician table. He walked north through the houses of the wealthiest colonists. There was no shortcut through the wall here though, as there was to the west, so he had to eventually pass through the square and the great gate to reach the militia base and the police station.
Once there, he sat down at his desk and began completing the half finished police reports. There were only seven of them. Feeding each one into the mechanical typewriter, he forced his hands onto the correct key positions and tried to type without looking at his fingers. He managed to get “on the night of” before he missed the t key and had to turn paper advance knob so that he could reach the spot on the paper with a gum eraser. He was becoming ever more proficient with his typing and had already far surpassed his fellow constable in both speed and accuracy. Still it took him nearly two hours to finish these few reports. At last he pulled the last paper from the typewriter, placing all of the papers in the Festuary file folder, and placing the folder in the file cabinet.
There were no prisoners currently under confinement, so Saba decided to take a long walk around the colony before retiring back to his home. He stepped out the door of the police station and made his way north, out of the base and toward the cemetery. On the way, his attention was quickly drawn to Professor Calliere’s workshop. Lights were on in the massive two-story structure and the roaring sounds of the steam driven Result Mechanism were emanating from within. Saba walked up to the door on the northeast corner of the building. He thought about knocking, but there was no way that anyone would have been able to hear him inside with all the racket goi
ng on. He tried the knob. The door was locked. Not willing to give up just yet, he walked around the north side of the building, around the other corner and tried the door in the middle of the west side. It too was locked. Feeling vaguely uneasy about not being able to contact whoever was inside, he decided that it was just the unsettling events of the day that were affecting him—first the strange man he had seen getting off the ship and meeting the professor, and then the sight of the professor’s wife and Staff together. He turned on his heel and continued on.
Past the cemetery at the northern end of the peninsula, Saba spotted something moving in the road. It was a lamb. The poor thing had gotten out of the sheep yard and gotten itself lost. As the constable scooped the little creature up, it was shivering from fear and cold. He patted it gently on the head and continued on his way with the creature tucked under one arm. He dreaded going all the way out to the sheep yard, because this would take him the long way around the pigpen and the smell was dreadful. He saw a light ahead at the dinosaur pen though and decided to leave the little fellow with whoever was serving animal husbandry duty. He half expected to find Graham Dokkins riding around on Stinky, but it was the two Charmley twins shoveling dinosaur poo into a wheelbarrow. The two eleven year old boys, as alike as twins could possibly be, with long brown hair and very large brown eyes, looked around nervously as they worked. It was clear they were not yet as comfortable in their job as Saba had been when he was assigned to muck out the dinosaur pen. But then he had been five years older than they were, and there was a world of difference between eleven and sixteen.
“One of you boys want to take a break from scooping and take this little guy home?”
“I’ll do it,” said one. Saba thought it was Walter.
“We’ll both go,” said the other. Saba thought it was Warden.
Though the lamb was small enough that either of the boys could have probably carried it all the way to the sheep yard, instead one of them pulled a length of twine from his pocket, tying it around the animal’s neck, and began to lead him in that direction. The lamb, warmed up from being held and no doubt thankful for the attention, followed along readily enough behind the twins.
Saba followed the road around to the south into Augustus P. Dechantagne Park. It was dark enough now that it was difficult to see the pathway. He didn’t really need to see though; he had walked through this park so many times that it was permanently ingrained in his memory. He walked up the steps and into the gazebo, stood leaning against the railing and watched the stars twinkling in the sky.
He sighed. Brech had been such a complicated place. Then they had moved here, Saba and his mother and of course the Dechantagnes, and everything had seemed so simple. Life was hard and it was dangerous, but it was simple. Now life here was becoming complicated again—at least as complicated as it had been in Brech. It would soon be too complicated for a man to deal with on his own. Women, it seemed, could deal with all kinds of complications, but a man needed help. He thought about Miss Hewison. Would she be the kind of companion who would make a complicated life bearable? He didn’t know yet, but he was determined to find out. He would invite her to dinner. That was the natural next step. Courtship in Birmisia was abridged compared to Greater Brechalon, but Miss Hewison was new here and might not realize that. He would swing by Mrs. Bratihn’s and buy her a gift too.
Stepping lightly back down the gazebo steps, Saba continued on his rounds through the town. As the only half illuminated, but nonetheless bright moon rose above the mountains in the distance he reached the dockside, where the S.S. Majestic was still moored. Just as he had on that other night three weeks earlier, Saba saw a dozen lizardmen moving quietly through the darkness, carrying coffin sized crates from beside the ship.
Saba immediately dropped to the ground and crept to the closest building. He was not going to lose them this time in the darkness. He already knew which way they were going. As quietly as he could, he moved away from the dock and passed down Eighth Avenue. Then cutting south, he jogged through the apartment buildings and the small houses just beyond them. Running now, he made his way west again, reaching the door in the Emergency Wall through which the reptiles would soon be passing. He let himself through and locked it again, then hid behind some bushes thirty feet away. He tucked his face inside his reefer jacket, trying to slow his breath without freezing his lungs.
He didn’t have long to wait. In what seemed like complete silence, the door opened once again and lizardman after lizardman passed through, each pair carrying one of the long crates between them. There were twelve aborigines in all, carrying six crates. The last two through stopped, sat down the box, closing and relocking the door. Then they joined their comrades moving between the trees. They walked southwest, through the less densely packed portion of the colony, and Saba stealthily followed them. They passed right through the yard and right next to the burned out remains of Mrs. Yembrick’s home.
“Bastards,” said Saba, to himself.
The last two lizardmen stopped and looked around. Saba quickly ducked behind one tree. He suddenly wished he had a service revolver with him. After a moment, he peered back around the tree. The reptilians had evidently decided that they were unobserved and had continued on their way. Saba had to move quickly so they wouldn’t get too far ahead of him. He stayed far enough back though, that they wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of his footsteps. At least he hoped they wouldn’t. It was well known that a lizzie’s hearing was slightly less acute than that of a human being.
The lizzies moved very quickly through the forest, far more quickly than Saba would have believed possible. In fact, he had to strain to keep up. He was determined not to be left behind though. They left the town, continuing on in the same general direction, roughly parallel by the constable’s estimation to the railroad line. Saba continued to follow for miles, realizing vaguely in the back of his mind that this was the furthest away from town he had ever ventured by himself and essentially unarmed.
Morning had to be approaching, though there was still no light on the horizon. The half moon had almost completed its arc across the sky and was about to once again hide itself, when Saba heard something behind him. He stepped behind a large pine tree, so that the lizardmen wouldn’t see him. Then he turned to look behind him.
“Kafira,” he said in a whisper that was nevertheless far louder than he had intended.
While he had been following the lizardmen, he had in turn been followed himself. The massive form of a utahraptor could be seen moving through the trees, sniffing the air, and tilting its head from one side to the other to listen. Unlike its cousin the velociraptor, the utahraptor was a large and frightening predator, with a mouth that could take off a human head. Nowhere near as large as the tyrannosauruses that had once hunted the area of the peninsula, it was big enough. Seven feet tall and twenty-five feet long, it was covered in bristle-like feathers ranging from turquoise around the head to bright green at the tail. It was impossible to appreciate their beauty at night, and it was impossible to appreciate their beauty when the beast was hunting you in any case.
Immediately reaching for a tree branch, Saba hauled himself up and climbed as quickly as he could. The utahraptor reached the tree only seconds after he had reached a safe height. Whether the beast rightly belonged to the bird or dinosaur family didn’t matter much to the constable. That it could eat him; that’s what mattered. It reached up its three-foot-long head to snap at him with frightening, serrated teeth. It was only just below his feet. Had it managed to get hold of him, it would have been able to finish him off in four or five bites.
The monster didn’t bellow or squawk; it merely licked its lips and looked longingly at him. Saba climbed a bit higher. He looked to the southwest for the aborigines he had been following, but they were gone. The utahraptor waited at the base of the tree until well into the next morning, and only left when a herd of small, graceful parksosauruses caught its attention. Climbing down, Saba retraced his steps back to to
wn, happy to be alive but angry that once again he had lost the trail of the lizardmen. They were up to something but he didn’t know what. If he wasn’t going to be able to follow them wherever they were going, perhaps an investigation of where they had been would be illuminating.
Chapter Thirteen: In Search of Coal
There were ten members of the party that gathered in front of the office of M&S Coal, Radley Staff included. It was, he thought, small enough to be able to move quickly through the forest, and large enough to be safe from marauding dinosaurs. There were the Kanes, who were dressed alike in khaki shirt and pants, with pith helmets and frock coats. Femke Kane was attractive even without make-up and with her male hairstyle, but standing next to her husband Ivo, the two looked like a pair of peculiar twins. Beeman Glieberman had also traded his sharp suit in for khaki explorer garb with a heavy jacket, but Aakesh Mouliets wore a great coat of ferret skins over his traditional Mirsannan clothing. Miss Jindra had exchanged her very feminine gowns for black leather pants and knee high boots, but was covered with a butterfly cape coat, the lavish black hood of which made her beautiful features look dark and mysterious. Three lizardmen had been hired to carry equipment. Staff had made sure that he had learned their names—Cheebie, Sanjo, and Mimsie. Then there was the local boy that had been hired as a translator, the brother of the young waitress from the bakery café.
The boy was looking down the street. Staff followed his gaze and saw Senta standing on the corner looking back. She stood out in a beautiful new lavender dress the way the first spring flower stands out in the snow. The boy turned his back.
“Have a fight with your girlfriend?” wondered Staff.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said the boy angrily.
“All right. Are the lizzies ready to go?”
“Yeah, sure,” he said, then turned to the three reptilians and spat out a series of hisses.
The Drache Girl Page 19
