Clash of Mountains

by Chloe Garner

  She was unfazed. He didn’t want her to do it. She could even respect it. A play to keep her from being the one who went was fine, so long as it didn’t rely on an impression of her inferiority to make it work.

  “Not me,” Wade said after another minute.

  “Why can’t they police themselves?” Rhoda asked. Sarah shook her head.

  “It doesn’t work like that, among peers. It doesn’t matter if you give one of them a gun and say he’s in charge, if no one respects him, they’re just going to steal it while he’s sleeping and take his keys. Bad case, they go ahead and shoot him, too. Worst case, they then all kill each other, fighting over the food as it gets destroyed in the process. We could go over there when the flood gives out and find nothing but a few hyper-violent animals who used to be men.”

  There was silence at the table as some of the Lawsons ate their raw beef slices and the more perceptive ones stared at Sarah, absorbing it. She hadn’t meant to speak that close to the truth, but the idea that they could leave a few boys armed and artificially empowered… It was a foolishness you had to see happen before you could understand how deep it went.

  “That’s what happened when we left,” Thomas finally said. Sarah nodded.

  “I had to put men down,” she said. “Ones who couldn’t look me in the eye, anymore.”

  She bit the inside of her cheek, remembering, then shook her head at the plate. So trivial. Pretentious. Imagining that the world were so simple and frothy that something like this held importance.

  “Men are going to die,” she said, looking at her plate. “They die every flood. Always have.”

  “No,” Jimmy said. “You don’t remember.”

  She looked at him, found his eyes on his own plate, but not seeing it. He nodded and looked up.

  “You don’t remember, and I don’t know how it’s possible, but my mother got everyone out of town. Every year.”

  “Where?” Sarah asked. Jimmy shook his head, his tongue running across closed lips.

  “That’s what they didn’t talk about, around us. She thought we had more time, and she didn’t want us worrying about life and death like that.”

  “Soft,” Little Peter said.

  “You’re excused,” Jimmy said. His eyes were locked on Sarah, and they’d both gone stiff at the same time. Sarah warned him.

  She warned him.

  She was armed.

  Heavily, heavily armed.

  This dress gave her all manner of places to stash guns, knives, even her bull whip.

  If he didn’t take care of it to her satisfaction, she was going to do it.

  “What?” Little Peter asked. The muscle in Jimmy’s jaw twitched and his hands closed tighter on the table as his fingers whitened.

  “I said you’re excused,” Jimmy said.

  “What, for saying she was soft on you two? On all of us?” Peter asked. “She babied us. Pa said so all the time.”

  “Get out,” Jimmy said. “You say one more word, and I will let Sarah do what she’s thinking right now.”

  She held Jimmy’s eye, her breath slow and shallow through an open mouth, only his eyes keeping her from going after Peter. She didn’t know what the elder brother did with the next three or four seconds, then he finally stood.

  “I knew the two of you idolized her, but I didn’t realize it was this bad,” Peter said, his chair scooting across the carpet. In a single motion, Jimmy was standing, moving toward Peter, his fist going through Peter’s face. Peter didn’t anticipate it, and while he was a seasoned barroom brawler, he wasn’t braced for it and it knocked his head back and tossed him to the floor. His feet might have come up off the ground. Jimmy stood over him and Sarah stood slowly to watch as Peter shook his senses back into his head. The room had gotten noisy, and people were moving, but Sarah just watched, her ears only for Jimmy’s next words.

  “You will never speak of her like that again,” Jimmy said, his voice low. Sarah doubted anyone else, save her and Little Peter, heard it. It was only intended for Little Peter, but Sarah knew Jimmy’s voice in a sandstorm.

  Rich and Wade were moving to hold Jimmy back and Thomas was checking Little Peter. Lise was standing, screaming, and Kayla was asking high-pitched questions. Rhoda stood, down the table from Sarah, and Sunny sat at the very far end, still eating her dinner with delicate fingers, her eyes on her plate.

  “Get him out,” Jimmy said. “Put him on a horse and point him at town.”

  “What about Lise?” Wade asked, pulling Little Peter off the floor with Rich’s help once the two of them were sure Jimmy wasn’t going to hit him again.

  “She’s welcome to do as she sees fit,” Jimmy said. Sarah sat again, cold. Jimmy looked into Peter’s stunned eyes. “You’re welcome.”

  He motioned, and Rich and Wade started for the front door. Jimmy went to the table, picking up a white cloth napkin and dipping it into his ice water, then wrapping his hand and sitting. He looked down the table, waiting as everyone else took their seats again, then he raised his left hand to motion Tania and the rest of the staff in.

  Someone took Sarah’s plate and replaced it with a bread-and-pasta-and-green-sauce thing that looked like it was trying to climb up out of its splash of sauce onto the side of her plate. It. Had. Arms. She raised her eyebrow at it, then lifted her head. No sense.

  “We will be building sentry booths up in the mountains after the flood,” Jimmy said. “Rhoda is helping me interview men who want to help with security and intelligence, and I am hoping to have at least three or four dozen of them hired by the time we have housing for them. She is also sending word to Elsewhere to find whether there are men there who want to work here.”

  “There will be,” Rhoda said. “They may be smart enough not to come down here without an invitation, but everyone up and down the range knows what’s happening, down here, and there aren’t many men in Elsewhere who don’t have some memory of what times were like when the money was coming in.”

  The table was quiet again, very much not like the Lawsons, but with Wade and Rich missing, and Little Peter dismissed, there weren’t many argumentative voices left, and everyone seemed stunned.

  Jimmy was looking at Lise again.

  “It isn’t enough people,” Sarah said. “I don’t care how many of them you put up in the hills, more are going to come, and they’re going to find where you’re positioned, and they’re going to avoid you. You can’t keep the location of the mines secret for forever.”

  Jimmy’s nostrils flared as he looked over at her. The way his eyes were just slightly wider, it might have been reprimand, but Sarah knew it for what it actually was - surprise. He thought she’d come in here and play his game, be the pretty woman in a dress sitting next to him supporting his plans.

  Not likely.

  “They’re going to have to have some security for short-term problems,” Jimmy said. “We are going to protect them against claim jumpers. No one else will be able to take absenta from their claims.”

  “No, but if they bring the absenta up out of the ground and someone walks off with it, that’s their problem,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “No. Not good enough.”

  “As always, if you have a suggestion for me to consider, I’m happy to hear it,” he said, tipping his head toward her.

  She shook her head.

  “You broke it. It’s yours.”

  He sucked on his lower lip, then looked at the rest of the table.

  “We have hard times coming. More money than people we trust. That’s why we need the satellite - so we can communicate with people we do trust, rather than sitting out here, blind, at the end of the line.”

  “You sound like you’re trying to sell something,” Sarah said. “This isn’t supposed to be where you have to sell things.”

  Again he looked at her, and she sat back in her seat, trying not to pay attention to the amphibianite sculpture on her plate.

  “No more, Sarah,” he said as Wade and Rich came back in and sat at th
eir chairs. Rich poked at the green goo and licked his spoon.

  “Did we talk about the bomb yet?” Wade asked.

  “Bomb?” Rhoda asked. “What bomb?”

  “The one Sarah used to blow everybody up in Jeremiah,” Wade said. “We aren’t talking about that, yet?”

  “No, I hadn’t gotten to it,” Jimmy said, cutting the lump on his plate in half with his spoon and swallowing it whole. He was angry. Really, really angry. Peter hadn’t helped anything, but Sarah was pushing him to his limit, where what happened next would be an explosion that she couldn’t readily take back.

  She caught Lise dabbing the corner of her mouth with her napkin, and Sarah’s own temper spiked again. A part of her wanted to push him over the edge just to prove she had the power to do it, but now wasn’t the time. Later, maybe, but not right now. The Lawsons had too many enemies outside the room for her to let it go that far, in here.

  The fight of motivations was a close one, in the end, but Jimmy put his palms on the table and looked at Wade as Sarah pursed her lips, settling on letting Jimmy finish what he had to say.

  “You brought it up,” Jimmy said. “Would you like to tell everyone what happened?”

  Wade gave a colorful but short account of the morning, Kayla getting paler and paler as he spoke.

  “You were that close to dying this morning?” she asked.

  “Honey, I’m always that close to dying,” he answered. “I just don’t always necessarily know about it.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “Exactly. We have to start acting like we know it. Doubt everything. If you don’t know where something has come from, be suspicious. If someone is acting strangely, let me or Sarah know…”

  “We don’t need you parenting us,” Rich said. “We can deal with it.”

  “No,” Jimmy said, short. He’d have been short, any time, but he was shorter now than normal. “Sarah knows everyone here, and the last thing we need are misunderstandings with the homesteaders. If it comes down to a war to keep Pythagoras out of Lawrence, they’ll be the best army we can ask for.”

  “Are you sure they won’t be shooting at you?” Lise asked, picking up her water and sipping it.

  “If your husband can manage to stop killing people indiscriminately in bar fights, we stand a better chance,” Jimmy said. “Next question.”

  “So, what, you want us to… tie a ribbon on them? Ask them to just hang out until we can find Sarah?” Wade asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What I want is for you to be the ones who know how to do things,” Jimmy said. “We’re Lawsons, dammit. Has everyone forgotten? What that means? In Intec, we lived not ten minutes from Descartes, but no one in town talked about Descartes and what he was doing. They talked about us. Just because we moved back here doesn’t mean we’re suddenly backwoods hill-country men without any sense of how this game goes.”

  “He sent an army,” Thomas said. “Yeah, we turned him back, but how many times can we do that? And how many times can he do that?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “I’m working on that. And I don’t think he’ll do it again, not until he’s sure we’re going to lose.”

  “No, he’s going to put bombs in cars,” Rhoda said.

  “If Sarah and I hadn’t seen them doing it, I never would have found it,” Wade said.

  “And we have friends at the station in Preston who should have done a better job securing the cars,” Jimmy said.

  “No,” Sarah said. “You need to punish the rail company for letting someone tamper with your shipment without anyone saying anything to them. Absenta coming out of Lawrence is one thing. We’ll have to do something special to protect that. But you’re talking about cars. Commodities out on the coast. There’s no excuse for them sitting back and watching while people put bombs onto shipping containers.”

  “What would you have expected them to do?” Jimmy asked. “They didn’t have Wade to disarm them and rearm them for offensive use.”

  “So you approve of them doing nothing?” Sarah asked. Jimmy tipped his head.

  “You really think I don’t have someone on each and every one of those trains who would have told me that something happened?”

  Sarah raised her eyebrows.

  No.

  She hadn’t thought of that.

  The train had always come to Lawrence with a conductor and an engineer aboard, men Sarah usually knew by face, but the rest of it was empty until recently, at which point it had just been loaded with a lot of strangers. The idea that there might be someone aboard just riding and watching hadn’t occurred to her.

  “You’re saying I should have let well enough alone,” Sarah said.

  “Never,” Jimmy said. “Fighting back, from surprising points is always in our best interest, right up until it gets you killed. You survived, so you did right.”

  Sarah nodded slowly. She caught the look of horror from Kayla out of the corner of her eye.

  “Wade almost died,” Kayla said. “And you think everything went right?”

  “I’m sorry, were you here when they came off the train with guns and motorcycles and came here to try to kill everyone?” Jimmy asked. “This is a war, and there are going to be battles. If we won the battle, everything went to plan.”

  “I didn’t almost die,” Wade muttered. “If anything was going to kill me, it was the gremlin beer.”

  “Lightweight,” Sarah said.

  “We will gain the ability to communicate with stations up-line with better communication,” Jimmy said. “I will have people I am paying watching the stations and the towns. We will be less blind. After that, we will make our move.”

  “You can’t fight Pythagoras,” Lise said, looking up from her empty plate. “If I had known that that was who you were planning on going up against, I never would have come out here.”

  “Is that so?” Sarah asked. “You’re really only here for the power?”

  “Certainly isn’t for the ambiance and culture,” Lise answered, giving Sarah a cool smile.

  “Shame you got yourself ballooned like you have,” Sarah said. “Otherwise you could have just left.”

  “I had much higher hopes for what Jimmy was going to accomplish out here,” Lise said. “My family is very disappointed with the match, as well.”

  She actually looked at herself as breeding stock like that. Sarah found it hard to imagine. Just being a link in a political alliance.

  “Well, that’s cheerful,” Rhoda said. “What is the next step, Jimmy? What are we doing?”

  Only Rhoda could have asked. Not Thomas, not Wade or Rich, and certainly not one of the other women. Sarah wouldn’t have put it to him publicly. Not like this. Not even when she’d caught him remembering Lise fondly like that and was ready to tie him to the chair and hang him from the ceiling by inches.

  What fun that would have been.

  “I still have things moving around,” Jimmy said. “I’m not ready to discuss it.”

  “Does that mean you don’t have a plan at all, or just that you don’t have enough faith in it to tell us what it is?” Sunny asked. Sarah didn’t even have to do it; the wives were coming for him.

  “It means that you are not a part of the decisions I’m making, and I have enough fights on my hands for things that are already inevitable without bringing up things that might happen.”

  “Maybe if you told us, ahead of time,” Rhoda said. “Gave us a chance to think about things before they were inevitable.”

  “What would it change?” Jimmy asked, giving Rhoda an even look. Rhoda wanted to say that they could help him, advise him, but Sarah saw the words get stuck in her throat. No one advised Jimmy Lawson without his advance consent. The brothers had even stopped trying.

  “No one married into this family thinking it was a democracy,” Sunny said. “We should stop pretending to expect anything to change, now that we’re here.”

  Tania and the staff came in once more, removing the green blob from in front
of Sarah and returning with a plate that was so cold there was water crystalized on it. Sarah looked at it skeptically, knowing a frozen desert when she saw one, but not trusting the chef’s taste in anything, after what he’d done so far. She didn’t recognize anything on the plate, a small menagerie of colors and textures, and she chose to leave her spoon on the table as the rest of the Lawsons picked at their own deserts.

  “The more absenta we find, the more aggressive we’re going to have to be, to defend it,” Jimmy finally said. “We always knew that. The proven claim has been turning out more absenta than we even guessed, and the test digs at several of the other claims look very promising. Maybe we would have chosen otherwise, but it was never our choice. We are going to be incredibly wealthy and incredibly powerful, but first we have to survive. If anyone has opinions on what I am doing to ensure that we do, as always, I have and will listen to those opinions. What I hear, though, isn’t concern about what I’m doing, but rather concern that we must do something, at all, and I assure you, doing something is not optional.”

  The table was once again quiet save for the clinking of spoons. Jimmy finished his desert and put his utensil down, giving them one firm nod.

  “Sarah will leave in three days for Intec with Sunny. Thomas and Wade will take the next train back to Jeremiah and figure out what, if anything, about the cars is recoverable, as well as spread around enough money for people to take it seriously that our success is their success. Rich, I need you to be visible in town. At Willie and Paulie’s, as well as at Granger’s. You are not getting drunk at Willie and Paulie’s. Rhoda, I am posting bonuses for men forming businesses in town to do critical work. I need you to vet the applications down to the groups most likely to actually do what they say they can do, before I speak to them.”

  “I’m working on Rhoda’s wedding,” Kayla said.

  “And I wouldn’t dream of interrupting that,” Jimmy said.

  “And I’m just supposed to sit at home and cook a baby,” Lise said, pursing her lips with a mouth-scowl.

  “Would you rather I assign you something to do in town?” Jimmy asked.