Dactyl Hill Squad

by Daniel José Older

  The Golden Circle was a planned expansion of the slaver states into the Caribbean and Central and South America. The Knights of the Golden Circle were comprised of various pro-slavery advocates throughout the Americas who were dedicated to bringing their plan to fruition.

  The Ocarrion is a made-up boat, but there was indeed a famous case where a group of black New Yorkers took over a Brazilian slave ship in New York Harbor and freed the enslaved people on board. In a similar incident, David Ruggles boarded a slave ship and personally apprehended the captain, bringing him before the court in a much-publicized case.

  For obvious reasons, a lot less is known about dinosaurs than about Civil War–era New York. Because of this, and because this is a fantasy novel, I took more liberties with the creation of the dinosaurs in this story than I did with the history. Experts can make intelligent guesses based on the fossil data, but we don’t really know exactly what prehistoric animals looked like, smelled like, or how they acted. In the world of Dactyl Hill Squad, the dinos never went extinct, but humans did subdue and domesticate them as beasts of burden and war.

  The brachiosaurus was a humongous herbivorous (meaning it ate plants) quadruped (meaning it walked on four legs). Its long neck allowed it to eat leaves from the tallest trees. It lived during the Late Jurassic Period and probably didn’t hoot the way the ones in the Dactyl Hill Squad world do.

  Sauropod is a general term for the gigantic quadrupedal dinosaurs with long necks, long tails, and relatively small heads. In the Dactyl Hill Squad world, they are used for transportation, cargo carrying, and construction.

  As Magdalys points out, pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs, they were pterosaurs, flying reptiles closely related to birds. They flew through Jurassic–era skies munching on insects, fish, and small reptiles. Generally about the size of seagulls, they weren’t really large enough to carry a person. A group of pterodactyls is not called a squad (although maybe it should be!) and scientists don’t suspect them to have been pack dependent as described in the book. But who knows?

  Raptors were a group of intelligent, bipedal (meaning they walked on two feet) carnivores (meaning they ate meat). They had rod-straight tails and a giant claw on each foot, and they hunted in packs during the Late Cretaceous Period.

  Like pterodactyls, mosasauruses weren’t dinosaurs. They were mosasaurs, a group of large aquatic (meaning they lived in the water) reptiles that roamed the oceans in the Late Cretaceous Period. Fierce hunters with giant heads, they grew to be fifty feet long — bigger than a T. rex!

  Triceratopses were herbivorous quadrupeds about the size of an ice cream truck that roamed the earth during the Late Cretaceous Period. They had three horns: one protruding from the snout and two longer ones that stuck out from a wide shield over their eyes that stretched out over their neck.

  Ankylosaurs were armor-backed dinos of the Late Cretaceous Period. They probably didn’t move quite as fast as the ones in the world of Dactyl Hill Squad do, which may have made it easier to fire a musket while riding one.

  The tyrannosaurus is probably the most famous of the dinosaurs. It lived during the Late Cretaceous Period in western North America and was known as the king of dinos. It was bipedal, carnivorous, and about as long as a school bus.

  Pteranodons were large, mostly toothless pterosaurs without long tails. In fact, their name means “toothless lizard.” Quetzalcoatlus, the largest of pterosaurs, was as big as a fighter plane — forty-five feet long. They ruled the skies of the Late Cretaceous Period.

  Pachycephalosaurs (“thick head”), known here as knuckleskulls, were bipedal herbivores that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period. They ranged from the size of small dogs to fifteen feet long and their skulls were as thick as bowling balls.

  Plesiosaurs were giant fish-eating ocean reptiles of the dinosaur age. They had long slender necks and four big paddle-shaped flippers. The largest of them grew to nearly fifty feet long.

  In this messy, broken time of mass shootings and state violence, it’s important to note that guns almost always create more problems than they solve. More than that: Young people suffer with trauma from those problems in increasing and heartbreaking numbers. This is an adventure story, and it takes place during a war, in an era when folks were being kidnapped and sold into slavery and an invading rebel army threatened the nation’s capital. Guns are one of the parts of life in the time that I chose to include in this story, but I hope that a) the dangers, both physical and emotional, of gun violence ring loud and clear on the page, and b) we one day live in a time when gun violence doesn’t exist anymore at all.

  Flintlock pistols were hard to load: You had to put gunpowder in the muzzle along with the bullet, shove it in with something called a ramrod, and then put some more black powder in a little chamber near the trigger, pull back the hammer (which had a little piece of flint in it, hence the name), thus cocking the gun, and finally fire, which would result in a big smoky explosion. Whew! That’s a lot of work for one shot. Soldiers in the Revolutionary War used flintlock pistols and muskets. By the time of the Civil War, most people had upgraded their flintlocks to a much speedier mechanism called a caplock, but there were still a few around.

  Cymbeline’s favorite weapon, the double-barrel shotgun, was for the most part a civilian weapon in the 1860s, meaning that it was not an official military-issued gun, although some soldiers did carry them into the Civil War battlefields. It is generally a smoothbore gun, meaning that the inside of the barrel is smooth, not rifled (a process that makes ridged spirals in the barrel and increases aiming capabilities.) The shotgun is a short-range weapon, and usually fires a bunch of small projectiles called shot or a single one called a slug.

  A blunderbuss is a clunky old ancestor of the shotgun. It’s a smoothbore and has a short barrel that widens at the muzzle. That wide muzzle is where you would put the slug or shot in, which is why it’s called a muzzle-loading firearm.

  Rifled muskets are enhanced versions of the old Revolutionary War firearms. The rifled muzzles gave these weapons greater precision, and their caplock mechanisms made them easier to load and fire than their flintlock ancestors. Rifled muskets, both Enfields and Springfields, were the most commonly issued guns on both sides of the Civil War.

  Many rifled muskets were armed with a bayonet, a sharpened sword attached to the muzzle that could be used to stab an attacker.

  The carbine is smaller and lighter than the rifled musket, with a shorter barrel. Because they are breach-loading, meaning you insert the bullets at the middle of the gun instead of into the muzzle, they are easier to shoot from horseback (or dinoback) and thus were favored by cavalry (mounted) units.

  A cutlass is a short, broad sword that usually had a sharpened cutting edge used for slashing. The handle often had a protective basket guard around it. The cutlass was a favorite sword of pirates.

  The howitzer is a short-barreled smoothbore mobile artillery cannon that could fire shells of twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-two pounds in a high trajectory. They were used as defensive weapons and to flush enemies out of their entrenched hiding places.

  Besides taking the liberty of adding dinos to nineteenth-century American history, I also gave myself a little bit of leeway with language. The characters of Dactyl Hill Squad don’t speak much like what the actual folks in 1860s New York spoke like. I opted to go with more modern dialogue and lingo, in part because I didn’t want their conversations to be distracting and feel distant. However, I did keep a few slang words of the era in the book.

  Here’s a list of some cool gangster slang from the streets of nineteenth-century New York (compiled from the book The Rogue’s Lexicon, by George W. Matsell):

  arch coves: n., chief of a gang. Headman. Governor.

  ballum rancum: n., a ball where all the attendees are members of the gangster community.

  bandog: n., civil officer. Cop.

  Billy Noodle: n., a fool that thinks he’s a ladies’ man.

  bracket mug: adj., irredeemably ug
ly.

  cocum: adj., sly, wary.

  crosleite: v., cheating a friend.

  cull: n., man.

  drab: n., mean woman.

  flash your ivory: idiom; smile.

  hickjop: n., a fool.

  hobinol: n., a clown.

  jazey: n., unnecessarily hairy man.

  jinglebrains: n., someone who acts recklessly without thinking.

  looby: n., a fool.

  moose-face: n., a rich but ugly man.

  nocky boy: n., an obtuse male child.

  scrobe: v., to chastise privately.

  stow your whid: idiom; shut up.

  For more information on criminal life in old New York, check The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury.

  “WHERE ARE WE?” Two Step grumbled, sliding down from Stella’s saddle and glancing at the field around them. This was the first time he’d set his feet on land without breaking into one of his signature dance moves, Magdalys realized, watching her friend’s wary face.

  “A whole bunch of mountainous, forest-filled miles east of Chattanooga,” Mapper reported, stretching and helping Sabeen work her way onto the stirrups so she could climb down. “In other words, somewhere near where Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina crash into each other.”

  Behind him, Amaya shook her head. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Even while he’s asleep,” Magdalys said. “It’s uncanny.” She’d been the first one on solid ground and was scanning the edge of the forest for movement. Cymbeline had hopped down right after her and immediately headed out into the darkness without a word. Probably looking for a spot to camp, Magdalys figured, trying to ignore the roiling uneasiness she felt.

  “What kind of dinos do they have down here?” Amaya asked.

  “If it’s anything like Pennsylvania and Maryland,” Two Step said, “not many and what ones there are will be boring and a nuisance.” It was true: besides a few wandering microraptors scavenging for food, they’d barely encountered any at all since they’d left New York.

  “Boring dinos are almost the best kind of dinos,” Amaya said. “Second only to no dinos.”

  Magdalys tried to remember what Dr. Barlow Sloan had written in the Dinoguide about Tennessee species, but all she could come up with was a typically crotchety paragraph about how North American megafauna tended to get weirder and even more mega the further south you went. A good number of the dinos in big cities like New York had been imported from other parts of the country anyway, so everything was all mixed up, as far as Magdalys could tell.

  “The forests are empty because of the fighting,” Cymbeline said, walking back from the edge of the trees. “Many of the dinos migrated west to get away from all the explosions. And plenty were captured for use in combat or as cargo-luggers. There’s a path through the forest up there. We can follow it in some and find a spot to camp.” She picked up a rucksack and headed back toward the tree line.

  “Remind me again why we stopped in the middle of the night,” Amaya said, falling into step beside Magdalys.

  Magdalys shrugged. “Cymbeline said since we don’t know the terrain as well and we’re in enemy territory we have to be more careful.”

  “I thought we were being careful by flying at night.”

  Magdalys didn’t say she’d been thinking the same thing; she just kept walking toward the trees. “Hey,” she said, a few paces later. Behind them, the boys were playing another game of I Spy while Sabeen sang quietly to herself. The Rearguard dactyls spun wide circles in the open sky above them.

  “Hey what?” Amya said.

  “You never told me what the letter said.”

  Now it was Amaya’s turn not to say anything. Her father was a white man — some big time Union general, in fact — and he’d raised her, training her like a soldier since she was a little kid. But then the war had broken out and he’d dumped Amaya at the Colored Orphans Asylum and she hadn’t heard anything from him right up until the day the orphanage burnt down. A letter had come from the General in the same bundle with Private Summer’s message about Montez being wounded, but Amaya hadn’t been ready to read it, and one of the matrons had kept it and then the riots broke out and they’d thought it was gone forever, until another of the matrons showed up with it just before they took off.

  “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” Sabeen sang. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.”

  “That song is so grim,” Mapper sighed. “I love it.”

  “I spyyyyyy with my little eye,” Two Step said behind them, “something … that starts with s.”

  “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering — the sky — in the grave.”

  “This game is impossible!” Two Step complained. “There’s only like two things anywhere we go. Hickjop trees and hickjop sky!”

  “No need to be rude!” Mapper chided with a chuckle.

  “His soul’s marching on!” Sabeen finished.

  “I haven’t read it,” Amaya said flatly.

  Magdalys stopped in her tracks. “What?”

  Amaya grabbed her arm, shoving her along. “Keep walking!” she whispered. “Do you think I want the whole world bugging me about this? You know they’re gonna ask.”

  “I wasn’t bugging you about it,” Magdalys said. “I was just —”

  “Hey, what you guys whispering about?” Mapper called.

  “Nothing!” Magdalys and Amaya said together.

  “It’s fine,” Amaya hissed.

  “Oh, wow, okay,” Mapper said. “Excuuuse me!”

  “I spy,” Sabeen said, “with my little eye. Something…that starts with b.”

  “Butt!” Two Step yelled, pointing up at the circling dactyls.

  Everyone stopped and stared at him.

  “Get it? Because they’re the Rearguard! Rear! Like rear end! Ha! You guys! Wait up!”

  “Why didn’t you read it?” Magdalys whispered once they’d gotten a little ahead of the others.

  “I just …” Amaya shook her head, shrugged. “I can’t?”

  “Bats?” Mapper said. “Do you see bats? Because if you do, they’re probably about to be pterofood, so don’t get too attached.”

  “Nope!” Sabeen said.

  “I know I seem tough,” Amaya said. “But the truth is I’m a coward.”

  Magdalys scoffed. “That’s definitely not true.”

  “Who else but a coward would leave the only letter they’ve ever gotten from their father unopened for days on end?”

  “Blankets?” Two Step tried. “There’ve gotta be blankets in one of these rucksacks, right?”

  “Nope!”

  A familiar hooting sounded across the sky above them. Everyone stopped in their tracks and looked up. Two long dark shapes stretched up above the treetops ahead of them.

  “Brachiosauruses!” Mapper and Two Step yelled at the same time.

  Magdalys and Amaya traded a glance. “Does that mean —” Amaya started. She didn’t have to finish. Brachies were plains dinos, according to Dr. Sloan. If one was out in the forest, it probably meant someone had brought it there.

  “I dunno,” Magdalys said.

  “Up here!” Cymbeline called from the forest. “Hurry!”

  “Hurry?” Magdalys glanced around. Dark shapes were moving toward them across the field.

  “Amaya!” Magdalys whispered, nudging her friend. They both drew the carbines they had holstered and fanned out to either side as the boys and Sabeen rushed forward.

  “What is it?” Two Step asked.

  “Something’s coming,” Magdalys said, backing toward the trees. “Can’t make it out.” The shapes got closer. There were three of them and they were tall and very fast. “Run! Get to the woods!”

  A shot cracked through the night and Magdalys almost crumpled into herself from surprise. It was Amaya, she realized.

  Out in the field, a dino squealed and someone yelled, “Ho, there!”

  “Hold your fire,” Cymbeline called. “Ge
t into the woods!”

  Magdalys and Amaya backed into the shadows of the trees together, guns pointed out at the approaching riders. Cymbeline stepped forward, a lit lantern raised above her head, shotgun in the other hand. “Declare yourselves!” she hollered. “Or get annihilated.”

  “Whoa, there, whoa,” a low voice muttered in a long Tennessee drawl as the riders dismounted and stepped forward. “Almost winged Horace.” In the dim lantern light, Magdalys could make out their faces. All three men sported beards trimmed to line their jaws with no mustaches. And, except for a long scar running down the man in the center’s cheek, all three had exactly the same face. Worse than that, they wore the gray uniforms of Confederate cavalrymen. Magdalys gasped.

  “Card!” Cymbeline said, shaking her head and laughing. “It’s about time! Where have you been?”

  CYMBELINE!” THE WHOLE Dactyl Hill Squad gaped at the same time.

  “You … you …” Magdalys stuttered. On the other side of Cymbeline, Amaya raised the carbine, her face steel.

  Cymbeline shook her head. “No, wait, slow down everyone! I see what this looks like, and it’s not …” She sighed. “They’re not Confederates, okay?”

  “Then why …” Two Step demanded, waving his arms in exasperated, self-explanatory little circles. “Why!”

  The man in the middle smirked. “You can see why they might think we were though, Cymbie.”

  “Card is a Union scout,” Cymbeline said. “He goes behind enemy lines to find out their positions and —”

  “We know what a scout does,” Mapper seethed.

  “Then you can understand why he’s dressed like that.”

  Magdalys felt like all the blood in her body was rushing into her brain. This whole situation was rotten, from the moment Cymbeline had said they should land onward. “What I want to know is how did they know where we were going to be and why were you expecting them?”

  Cymbeline looked at her, brows raised, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. The only other time she’d seen her make that face was when the Zanzibar Savannah Theater where she lived and worked had gone up in flames right in front of her. “It was …” Cymbeline started. Her voice trailed off.