Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  “They drown!” she shouted over the screaming wind. Another drop of blood fell onto the sand, and she took a deep breath against the wind that sucked the air from her lungs. The buzzing in her head grew angry and frantic and her eyes began to water, the tears freezing on her lined cheeks. Lupita gasped and, black spots dancing in her vision, blew the sand out of the pot.

  The pot glowed with sudden heat and the sand exploded upward, scouring the skin of her face and stinging in her eyes. She tottered upright and upended the pot, tossing its contents out into the alley. Through streaming tears she saw the second lid shatter on the ground. Where the embers fell, snowy dancers sprang up to stamp them out.

  The wind subsided. After a pause, the Old God’s held breath blew out, now just a normal December gust and swirl. Powdery snow covered the ashes and drifted over the dead fragments of clay. Wiping sand out of her eyes, Lupita stooped to pick up the catatonic child as she heard the clatter of a wagon approaching down the narrow alley.

  The wagon was painted canary yellow and festooned with brightly colored banners and flags that snapped in the blustery wind, advertising dentistry, puppet shows, and other things Lupita didn’t have the English to read. Its driver was a sober contrast, dressed entirely in formal black save for a battered rosebud at the left lapel of his woolen greatcoat. Muttonchop sideburns framed a round, heavy-boned face hidden from the nose up by a broad-brimmed hat that he held against the wind as he stepped down amid the broken pottery. He kicked at the fragments, covering first one eye and then the other as they skittered across the earth and packed snow. The two horses, tall spotted grays, tossed their heads and stamped, trying to back away from the spot where the ashes lay covered. A whistle set on the wagon’s buckboard keened a note that rose and fell with every gust.

  “I’ve got a thermometer in the back,” Wide Hat said. “Fourteen degrees below zero and falling. Fourteen below, and you’ve nearly burned the city.”

  “You should know better than to trust mercury tonight,” Lupita said.

  He shook his head, then looked at her, his eyes still shadowed. “Did you get the girl?”

  She tilted her head at the bundle in her arms.

  “And you’ve brought the Pathfinders running, too, I’ll wager. Trouble like that could be worth my life. It ought to be worth yours,” he said.

  Lupita kicked a shard of clay at the horses, a rough triangle with the drop of her blood still frozen to it. The animals whinnied and shivered, rearing into their yoke. “Try to flay me, Wide Hat, and we’ll see who wears the other’s skin.”

  Jane thrashed suddenly in Lupita’s grip, nearly wrenching herself free. Wide Hat watched intently, covering his right eye. After Jane relaxed again, he stepped forward. “Did it work?”

  Lupita held the girl out to him. “See for yourself.” He hesitated for just the barest moment before taking her and peeling the wool serape away from her seared skin. She wailed as the fabric tore away and Wide Hat clapped a hand roughly over her mouth. Jane quited and he squinted his left eye shut to give her burns a cursory glance, then nodded as he rewrapped her in the serape.

  “There’s one more thing you agreed to do, am I correct?”

  Lupita nodded, shivering again at the bite of the wind.

  “Good,” Wide Hat said. He tossed a leather purse at her feet. She scooped it up and was gone down the alley before he had reounted the wagon.

  The girl wriggled in Riley Steen’s grasp again. He shifted her Into the crook of his arm and climbed back onto the wagon. She cried out, and he fished a plug of leaves from his pocket and worked itinto her cheek before flicking the reins to move back out onto Broadway. The drug, together with the wagon’s creak, seemed to soothe her a bit, and he caught himself rocking her as he turned south. Don’t get sentimental, Riley, he told himself. You know how this ends. You’ve been waiting nearly thirty years to have her.

  Steen looked to his left, in the direction of Richmond Hill: General Washington’s quarters during the Revolution, John Adams’s home when New York had been the nation’s capital, and later home of Aaron Burr. The Richmond Hill mansion had been the site of the first meeting between Burr and General James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory and consul to Spain who had first hinted to Burr that his political ambitions did not have to end with the killing of Alexander Hamilton. The Florida question might lead to war with Spain, Wilkinson said. In the event of such a war, a certain kind of man might be able to lead an army into Mexico, and once there, might be able to keep it. Might, indeed, be able to claim everything between the Rockies and the Alleghenies, the Isthmus of Darien and the Ohio River. Was Burr that sort of man?

  Burr thought he was, and he had in fact raised support from such luminaries as Andrew Jackson to equip his nonexistent army. On several trips through the West and south to New Orleans, Burr incited idle young men with talk of oppressed peasants and border incursions. Merchants built him boats and bought him guns. In the fall of 1806, he actually embarked on the enterprise, gathering an army of roughly one thousand men on an island in the Ohio River belonging to one Harman Blennerhassett.

  Blennerhassett had money, and revolutionary fervor—he’d once been involved in Irish terrorism before fleeing to the United States under suspicion of an incestuous marriage. He also had an interest in the sciences, particularly those of an occult flavor, and in the history of Mexico Blennerhassett had discovered the Holy Grail of both his learning and his ambition. “The Aztecs,” he said, “were once the most powerful people on this earth. Now they are forgotten, but the power they wielded may yet be ours.”

  With those words, Blennerhassett had sent the young Riley Steen to Mexico. Steen had spent a full year there, absorbing what lore he could and crating artifacts for shipping to Blennerhassett. At some point during that year, Steen had discovered he had a minor talent for magic, and when he returned to Blennerhassett’s island in August of 1806, he held more power over the Burr Conspiracy than either Burr or Blennerhassett knew.

  Burr was visiting when Steen returned, and the three of them gathered in Blennerhassett’s magnificent library on the mansion’s upper floor. “So at last it begins,” said Blennerhassett, and Burr nodded. “We go south in December,” he said. “The men will gather and provision here before setting out for New Orleans.”

  “And if you have not discovered rhe chacmool by then,” Blen-Berhassett asked nervously, “then what?”

  “Then we go ahead,” Burr snapped. “I have read the codices just as you have, Harman. April is the critical month. We must be prepared by then. But this is August, and I am certain that the chacmool lies buried somewhere in Kentucky. I will find it.”

  “Steen here has something that might help,” Blennerhassett said, and Riley Steen uncovered an obsidian bowl in the middle of Blennerhassett’s desk. It was nearly brimful of mercury. Blennerhassett gestured to Burr. “Look inside.”

  “I should think your study would be a better place for this, Harman.” Blennerhassett’s study, at the end of a long, curving hall leading away from the main house, contained a fairly sophisticated chemical laboratory and a fine selection of scientific and medical books.

  Why, Steen had wondered, is Burr hesitating? He has brought us to this point. Is he afraid to go through with it?

  Blennerhassett grew impatient. “It’s here, Aaron. We’re here. Look into it.”

  For a long moment Burr looked tempted. Then he held up a hand. “I don’t believe I should,” he said. “Leave sorcery to the sorcerers; if this works as you say it will, that will be proof enough. Who would I see? Wilkinson?”

  Burr had laughed then, and looking back on the evening, Steen laughed now, because even at that moment General Wilkinson had been drafting the letter that led to the collapse of the Burr Conspiracy, the exile of Harman Blennerhassett, and the slow, unnoticed ascent of Riley Steen. Whether out of belated loyalty to Spain or fear of his own life, Wilkinson had alerted Thomas Jefferson to the conspiracy. Jefferson had been hearing rumors of
it for at least a year but acted only in November of 1806, commanding the arrest of Burr and Blennerhassett. On December 10, the Wood County militia arrived on Blennerhassett’s Island just as the expedition force—and Blennerhassett himself—were escaping by boat. Before pursuing the traitors, the militia depleted the estate wine cellar, and Aaron Burr’s supposed army escaped down the river. Burr himself was in Frankfort, Kentucky, answering charges of inciting war.

  But of course none of them had known that at the time, when it seemed that they might really be able to bring it off. This had all been before the battle of Trafalgar had broken the Spanish navy and inclined Spain to sell Florida rather than fight over it, before Wilkinson had realized that supporting Burr endangered his lucrative spying arrangement with the Spanish government. Absent a war with Spain, Burr’s army of disaffected young men broke apart, providing the western territories—it would later be said—with an abundance of dance and penmanship instructors.

  Steen remembered that night as a lesson. The contrast between Burr and Blennerhassett had struck him at the time: Burr diminutive but fiercely handsome, charismatic, immersed in the pragmatic world of political ambition and personal advancement, and Blennerhassett tall, stooped, myopic and homely, his head full of ideals, concocting magical schemes while a thousand miles away a man wrote a letter that would bring all of his fantasies crashing down around him. If this goes wrong, Steen had told himself at the time, Burr will survive it. Blennerhassett will not. And Riley Steen? He would keep the power of his knowledge and his anonymity, and when the moment came, his moment, he would not hesitate to commit himself.

  “Well,” Blennerhassett had said when Burr refuset to look into the tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror. “Perhaps not. But perhaps it might assist you in locating the chacmool. April, as you said, approaches.”

  “Sorcery to sorcerers,” Burr repeated. “You and your man here can be trusted with it. And, I hope, with this.” He removed a leather-bound journal from his coat pocket. “The location of the chacmool is hinted at in this book, but I have spent a good part of the spring and summer scouring Kentucky and cannot find it, and I believe there is no longer time to look. April will have to take care of itself; I must concern myself with munitions, men, and statecraft.” He tapped the journal. “It is no longer safe for me to keep this. Can I trust your man here to return it to the correct parties in New York?”

  “Steen has never failed me,” Blennerhassett said. Burr’s uncertainty seemed to settle over him like an invisible weight. His stoop grew more pronounced, and he removed his spectacles to rub at the hooked bridge of his nose.

  “Never?” Burr said. “A remarkable record. Pray extend it, Mister Steen.”

  Steen took the journal and slipped it into his own coat pocket. “I will get it where it needs to go,” he said.

  “Excellent,” Burr had said, and fixed Steen with his commanding gaze. “Very good. And now, Harman, I must to Pennsylvania—after, of course, one last errand in Kentucky.”

  Steen had indeed gotten the journal where it needed to go: into the hollow of a great sycamore tree on Blennerhassett’s Island until December, after the militia had sacked Blennerhassett’s mansion, threatened his wife, and run off his slaves. Rumor had it that the great tree had shelteted (among other things) runaway slaves on their way across the Ohio River and love letters between Aaron Burr and Mrs. Blennerhassett, but all Steen found at his return was the journal, wrapped in canvas and jammed into a crevice above the height of a man’s head. It hadn’t been safe for him to take it to New York, not until he was more certain of how Burr’s escapades would turn out; the Tammany Society, then in its infancy, might have misused the information the journal contained. Once he had known the conspiracy to be doomed, known that he no longer had anything to fear from Aaron Burr, Steen had kept the journal himself. He had spent the intervening twenty-nine years puzzling out its contents and pursuing the possibilities he had discovered therein… with a little unsuspecting help from one Phineas Taylor Barnum.

  Twenty-nine years, Steen thought as he turned the horses toward a house he kept near the Hudson River docks. I was an Indian fighter then, with magic skulking into my soul, and I may yet be an Indian fighter again if this damned fire brings Maskansisil and the other Pathfinders—if any survive—sniffing about.

  When morning came, he would be gone from New York. In the back of the wagon he had surgical instruments, tinker’s tools, bottles of elixirs and emollients, and a complete set of hand-carved puppets rattling like the teeth of the girl tucked under his coat. He knew ways to get along, and he had been thinking about going into the carnival business. The girl would be his assistant, and he would travel into the West, continuing the search for the chacmool. Burr had been right about Kentucky. The chacmool was there, and now that Steen had a girl born at the right time and properly disfigured, he had seven years to set things in motion.

  In April 1843, the dream of Burr and Blennerhassett would come true. Sad that neither of them would live to see it. Blennerhassett was already dead, in February of 1831 somewhere in the British Isles—two months before Jane Prescott’s birth. Burr, nearly eighty years old and in poor health, was likely watching the fire from the window of his grimy hotel room in Staten Island. He would be lucky to survive the winter.

  For my part, thought Riley Steen as he guided his wagon into a darkened warehouse, I am going to do my damned level best to keep luck out of it.

  A frigid gust brought Archie up short as he rounded the corner onto Roosevelt. He hunched deeper into his upturned collar and shoved his hands deeper into the torn-out pockets of his tattered greatcoat, but he could escape neither the wind nor the sick embarrassed shame that crept along his skin like a fever. Udo would come through for him if he could, Archie didn’t doubt that. He knew James Gordon Bennett, and could probably get Archie on at the Herald. The real problem was whether, with or without Udo’s help, Archie would have anything left of his self-respect by the time the first of the year came around. This was all supposed to be different, he thought. My in-laws were supposed to think highly of my prospects, my neighborhood was not supposed to turn into a slum, my wife wasn’t supposed to find a church whose leader believes we have to bathe on Tuesdays during the winter. Nevertheless, all of that had happened, and Archie hadn’t held down steady work, and he hadn’t started a business, and his wife and little girl were living in a slum.

  God, it was easy to loathe oneself after drinking with a prosperous German like Udo. Archie shook his head ruefully. Your last three dollars and you’re out drinking. But that sort of guilt was cheap and easy to come by. It was also ultimately meaningless; if he wasn’t able to pay the rent come January, the twenty cents he’d spent tonight would make very little difference.

  What would make a difference tonight—or tomorrow, since it was after rwelve and the only shops open were groceries—was a little gift. Something unexpected. Candy canes would be good, or a little top for Jane and perhaps a book for Helen. Three dollars would cover it easily, and there was plenty of day work to be had with Yuletide just around the corner.

  A little something to say things will get better, Archie thought, and I love you, and even if you want to bathe our daughter when the cold would freeze the balls off a wooden Indian because crazy William Miller says the world’s going to end in 1843, I look forward to rowing across Lake Champlain with you when we’re seventy.

  Ahead, through the blowing snow and skipping bits of rubbish, he could see the broad intersection where Chatham Street widened and split into East Broadway and the Bowery. Almost home, he thought. Home to a warm wife and a sleeping child and never mind the filth and the looming rent and the who-knows-how-many neighbors coughing and screaming at each other all night. Udo would help him out. Bennett would give in, he was expanding after all, and Archie had schooling. There would be a job on the Herald for him. He’d start as a pressman perhaps, show Bennett he had a willingness to work, then start asking after assignments. It would all lead to a re
al house, around Madison Square would be perfect. Room to breathe and no stink of urine and disease choking them on their doorstep.

  The clattering din of horses and wagons at full gallop reached Archie as he stepped out onto Chatham. To his left a fire wagon loaded with a dozen men sped south, disappearing down Pearl Srreet. Looking over the tops of the buildings lining the broad avenue, he saw the hungry glow of fire, a huge one from the look of it, some distance to the south. A ship off the Battery, perhaps? He heard one of the new steam fire engines, its bell ringing and crew shouting, farther down toward City Hall, where Broadway and Chatham angled together. The fire had to be near the financial district.

  What a story that would be, he thought excitedly. Shouts were all around him now, scattered small groups of people running past him as he stood in the middle of the street. Firebugs, obviously, but what kind of a conflagration would get even a pyromaniac out in this weather? Bennett wouldn’t be able to turn down a firsthand account.

  I should be home, though, Archie thought. Should have been hours ago.

  Archie weighed the freezing night, the distance to Wall Street, and the thought of Helen warm in bed against the vision of the house on Madison Square. Devil take the cold, he decided. I won’t freeze.

  As he turned to follow the ringing fire bells, a group of people swept past, carrying bags, pillowcases, buckets, even washtubs. They continued on past him as if he wasn’t there, and behind them he could see the tenements of Mulberry and Mott Streets disgorging their dwellers, a flow of people swelling into a mob as if some signal had gone out. Archie recognized some of them, people he had worked with or bought fruit from or had sharpen Helen’s knives, and finally managed to catch hold of Mike Dunn, a rail-thin Irishman he knew from the neighborhood.

  “Mike!” he shoured over rhe din. “What’s going on here?” As he let go of Mike’s coat, his hand came away black.