Deseret (4 page)

“Fishing!?” Jones spat, dismissive.
 
“And war coming and all?”

Swenson shrugged.
 
“He’s taken to shaving every day, too.
 
He might be bucking for a release.”

Burton heard a sharp whistle.
 
Swenson turned and sloped to the railing of the
Liahona
and Burton and Captain Jones trailed in his
wake.
 

Below stood another buckskin-clad youth, his fingers in his
mouth to whistle.
 
Stretching
beyond him, standing at still attention in faint curling jets of steam, was a
brigade of American soldiers mounted on clocksprung horses.
 
They had come up behind the
Liahona
—like Burton, they were entering the Kingdom.

The animals were majestic.
 
Burton had seen clocksprung beasts before, in ones and twos
and even, in the possession of one of England’s great peers, a team of four of
them, perfectly matched and pulling a carriage together.
 
But here he saw a couple of hundred.
 
They shone like a dull sun through
smoke, polished bronze cared for by soldiers and buffed to a high sheen to make
an impressive entrance.
 
They
looked like real horses, only larger, especially in the shoulders and the
hindquarters, and the animal’s back, overly narrow by comparison, was devised
in the shape of a saddle.
 
They
even had short clubbed tails and stylized curly manes, both hammered out of
bronze, at least in the case of the rank and file.
 
A parade of real animals would have twitched and swished
collectively at flies, and shaken its many heads, but the metallic column stood
stock still.
 
At this distance,
Burton told himself, it must be his imagination, but he thought he could hear a
faint
whir
and the grinding of tiny
clockwork cogs.
 
Even standing
still, the faintest traces of steam clung to the beasts’—
no
, Burton, thought, they aren’t animals—to the
vehicles’
legs.

The train of soldiers wore the blue uniforms of the United
States Army, and they sat astride their mounts two abreast and, Burton guessed,
a hundred deep.
 
They were cavalrymen,
with sabers and rifles and pistols bristling about them and a confident swagger
showing in the way they sat their mounts.
 
At their head rode two officers.
 
Both the officers’ horses were marked out by steel-shining trim in their
manes, tails, hooves and saddle.
 
One of the men, whom Burton guessed to be a Captain or better by his
brass shoulder scales and broad-brimmed cavalry hat with crossed brass sabers
above the forehead, raised his hand in a sharp salute to Swenson.
 
The other, with similar scales but a
stubby-brimmed cap like a blue fez, sat on a mount whose two shoulders bore
holsters for flagpoles.

One holster held a flagpole from which snapped a blue
flag.
 
Burton could make out its
details by squinting: a toga-clad woman stomped victoriously on the chest of a
fallen man whose crown lay nearby.
 
Words stitched into the banner proclaimed
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS
and identified the flag as belonging to
VIRGINIA
.

The other holster, ominously, was empty.

“Great Lakshmi’s lotus,” Burton murmured, “has it begun
already?”

“Captain Everett Morgan, Third Virginia Cavalry!” the
Captain shouted.

“A Welshman!” Captain Jones called.
 
His voice sounded hopeful and a little
playful.

“A Virginian!” Captain Morgan shouted back.
 
“Is one of you gentlemen in charge here?”

“That’s a pity,” Jones muttered, and Burton felt he had to
agree.
 
The Virginian Captain’s
standard bearer wasn’t showing the Flag of the United States.
 
Was this a sign that Virginia was
already in revolt?
 
If it was, what
was his duty?
 
Should he approach
Captain Morgan and propose a joint conversation with Brigham Young?
 
That seemed premature.
 
He should get closer to the Captain and
find out more, he decided.

“I’m in charge, Captain,” Swenson called, and shimmied
quickly down the ladder to meet the soldiers.
 
Burton observed the Captain.
 
He was a paunchy man, but had the sort of hard paunch that
one sees on a man of action who is also a horseman; he looked hard and fierce
and dangerous.
 
His chin and upper
lip were scraped meticulously clean, but curly russet hair covered his ears and
the angles of his jaw and sprouted above his squinting eyes like an angry
thicket.
 
He had two pistols,
six-shooters, on his belt, grips pointing forward in the cavalry style, and two
more on his steel saddlehorn, and all four holsters looked well-oiled and
-worn.

Burton had just resolved to climb down and talk to the man
when the
Liahona
jolted again into
forward motion.
 
He drifted back
along the deck through chatting and scenery-ogling fellow passengers and sat
down on one of the last benches so he could watch Swenson and Morgan negotiate
the Third Virginia Cavalry’s entrance into the Kingdom of Deseret over the back
end of the
Liahona
.
 
Swenson was business-like, competent,
and unconcerned, reviewing papers and talking with the Virginians’
Captain.
 
Burton wished he could
hear what they were saying, and though, after peace, his instructions were to
seek alliance with and the benefit of the southern states, he more than half
hoped that young Jerry Swenson would bar entry to Captain Morgan and his Third
Virginia.

Then Captain Jones passed the artillery bank and turned a
corner and the mounted soldiers were lost from sight.

Burton heard a loud collective gasp and several cries of
alarm.
 
He shifted in his seat to
look forward and nearly fell out of his seat.

Above the
Liahona
,
something hung in the sky.
 
His
first impression was that it
filled
the sky, but then he decided that that was only because the sky over the canyon
was narrow.

But no, he recovered himself.
 
The sky wasn’t all that narrow.

The
thing
—could
it be a
vessel
?—was
huge
.

From beneath, it looked like a sailing ship might look to a
fish, complete with copper-sheathed (though flattened) hull.
 
Four cups were affixed to the corners
of the craft, turned down, like the four shoulders of a great crawling beast,
and the insides of the cups pulsated with golden light.
 
Burton could barely guess from his
vantage point what the upper side of the vessel might look like, but it seemed
to curve up at its front and back, like an exaggerated Viking ship, or an
ancient Sumerian Magur-boat, and some sort of shimmering sail stretched up
above it.

Like some mythical beast, like some weird Rocky Mountain
bakunawa
or
vârcolac
, it rose through the air and blocked out the sun.

And it was immense.

He’d seen his share of montgolfières, big silk bulbs of hot
air that Her Majesty’s military forces, like all civilized nations, used for
reconnaissance and weather observation.
 
This was something else.
 
It
was impossible to tell its exact size, but Burton realized from their straight
wings and soaring flight that the birds passing in front of the… thing… were
raptors, hawks or maybe even eagles of some kind.
 
And though he saw their outlines clearly, they were dwarfed
by the flying ship.
 
He wished he
could see a human figure on board to get a more precise notion of scale, but he
guessed roughly that the cups must be ten or fifteen feet across each, and the
thing was, more or less, the size of an actual ocean-going sailing craft,
roughly like an ocean-going clipper, like a Viking ship.

But it flew.

“Sweet Siduri’s ankles!” Burton cursed softly.
 
It was true, then.
 
This was why Victoria, if there was to
be a war, didn’t want Brigham Young and his wild mountain Mormohammedans
fighting against her.
 
Flying
ships.
 
Put a hundred trained
riflemen on her, and they’d be a deadly striking force, especially for raiding.

And what about the rumors of phlogiston guns, then?

The ship turned.
 
It pushed forward slowly, sail bellying out and turning to make the ship
tack, though Burton had the uneasy suspicion that the craft’s movements were
undetermined and unaffected by the currents of the air.
 
The cups continued to pulse, the light
emanating from them intense, but leaving unmarked by shadow the canyon below,
as if it were light that an observer could
see
, but not light any observer could
see by
.
 
With
the splatter of illumination, the vessel pushed off the mountains and flitted
away out of sight.

“Yudhisthira’s dice!” he swore again.

“Oh yes, boyo,” he heard Captain Jones say.
 
He shook himself out of his trance and
saw that the Welshman stood nearby, watching him with an amused smile on his
face.
 
“And that’s the
old
one.
 
He’s built four of them now, and if you think the
Captain
Moroni
is something, wait until you get a
glimpse of the
Teancum
.”

*
  
*
  
*

It was good healthy criminal habits that saved Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy from the Pinkertons when he went back to the Deseret Hotel.
 
If he’d still been with Sam Clemens, he
might have had no good choice but to follow Sam, right in through the big shiny
glass front doors just as he’d come out of them, but since he was alone, he
took a less direct route, away from the stinking masses of ordinary law-abiding
citizens.

Tam slunk past the Deseret on the opposite side of the
street, trying not to limp too much on his injured leg, porkpie pulled down
over his brow.
 
There again, on the
front of the Hotel as on the front of the other buildings he looked at, was a
scrawl of that ugly wiggly Indian-looking writing he’d seen on the side of the
Liahona
.
 
What
was wrong with these people?
 
Latin
characters had worked fine for fifteen hundred years of Irishmen, what on earth
made the Mormons think they had to go and start meddling with the alphabet God
made?
 
If Jesus and all his
bloody-damn-hell apostles could use A, B and C, who were the Mormons to go and
make up some other shite?

The streets of the Great Salt Lake City were mastodontic,
enormous-wide and flat and coated with tar, so huge Tam could see in his mind’s
eye a pack of these clean and pressed Mormons chasing a bison herd right down
the middle of any one of them.
 
All
that was missing was a cliff to drive the bison off of, and queer as this place
was, Tam wasn’t so sure that he wasn’t about to turn a corner and find that
very thing.
 
Or a herd of bison
themselves, for that matter.
 
The
width of the street meant that Tam had to really squint hard out of the corners
of his eyes, and that at the far end of a parabolic sweep of his birdlike
skull, to get a good look at the Deseret’s doors.
 

And there, sure enough, was a Pinkerton.
 

Tam recognized the man personally—Harris or Harolds or
Harlow or Harrow or something, the name didn’t matter, he’d seen the man in
Pennsylvania more than once and knew who he was—but even if he hadn’t,
the funny mix of stealth and obviousness would have given him away.
 
It was like the cock-of-the-walk trying
to sneak a bite of cookie dough from the kitchen, that was how the
bloody-damn-hell Pinkertons always looked.
 
They were just too full of themselves to be really sneaky
(and wasn’t it like them to stick a man to follow Tam who was so instantly
recognizable?).
 

No wonder the Mollies and others always cottoned on to them
so fast.

It was probably also the width of the street that prevented
Harris, or whatever his name was, from seeing Tam.
 
That or the Sunday Picnic girls.
 
The Pinkerton loitered in the door smoking a cigarette and
reading a newspaper, but the paper was held at the level of his chest rather
than his face, and his eyes scanned the street over the top of it.

He scanned the street, and especially he scanned a trio of
pretty girls, thirty feet ahead of Tam.
 
The girls giggled and chattered and beamed in that way that only girls
who are absolutely convinced of their own unblemished and bouncing perfection
can.
 
Tam didn’t know if they were
really going to a picnic, but they were too pretty and too silly to be doing
anything else.
 
Harris the smoking
Pinkerton, though, seemed to feel differently.
 
He watched the flibbertigibbets carefully for any signs of
criminal action.