Liahona (5 page)

He fortified himself with a sip of whisky from the shot
glass in front of him.

Upon consideration, he scratched out the last item, and
sighed.
 
Any crime Burton had
committed, he’d committed too, as an accomplice.

What are you doing here, Absalom? he asked himself.
 
You’re thousands of miles from home, on
a fool’s errand and shackled to a baboon.
 

There is a war to avert, he reminded himself.
 
Or if it cannot be averted, then the
Empire’s interests must be protected, and England, as everyone knows, expects
that every man will do his duty.

And, of course, there is Abigail.

He looked up from his Note-Paper-Book and his eye fell on an
angel.
 
She sat one-quarter-turn
pivoted away from him, as did the man graced with her presence, so Absalom
could see them both clearly.
 
He—he was nothing, another brute American, a surly-looking thug
whose brushy mustache and gorilla eyebrows would have suited some redcoat in
India, but here looked overstated, an exaggeration, a false and overly
masculine swagger.
 
Something in
the back of his mind told him he should recognize the man, but he had no
patience either for the man’s face or for the nagging thought.
 
He was focused entirely on…
her—she was grace and refinement and elegance and beauty, all bound in
the delightful package of perfect, freckle-kissed feminine charms under a crest
of curly brown hair.
 
Absalom
thought he could smell her perfume, over all the human stinks of the Saloon,
from where he sat, twenty feet away.

“Why no,” the Angel was saying to the Brute, “I know
shockingly little of the Mississippi River, really.
 
I was carried across it as a small child, and have not been
back since.
 
Please, tell me all about
it.”

“Your first problem with the Mississippi, Miss Annie,” the
Brute began to spout back in answer, “is distinguishing fact from fiction.”

“Does that make it different from any other place, really?”
she asked.

“Some would say not,” the Brute admitted with a
chuckle.
 
“But when a man’s riding
a river that’s so wide he can’t see either bank, I find that he becomes
particularly susceptible to the pernicious influence of fable.”

“Tell me more,” the Angel urged him on.

“Consider the case of the famous Mike Fink,” the Brute
mused.
 
“You’ll have heard of Mike
Fink, I take it?”
 
He stubbed out
his cigar.
 
The cigar, anyhow,
smelled sweetly civilized to Absalom, and he regretted its disappearance, but
the Brute immediately fumbled in the inner pocket of his coat for another.

“He was a boatman of some sort, was he not?”
 
Clearly, distinctly, unmistakably… the
Angel looked Absalom in the face and winked at him.

Absalom’s heart stood still and he was dimly aware of his
Patent Metallic Note-Paper-Book falling to the Saloon floor from nerveless
hands.
 
Some time passed, and some
conversation between the Angel and her Brute, and all Absalom could hear was
the rushing of his own blood and the outrageous hammering of his own heart.

“…but he did in fact, that scalawag, ride a moose,” the
Brute was saying when Absalom’s hearing returned.
 
“Saddled an ornery bull and rode it around the muddy streets
of St. Louis when that good old town wasn’t much more than a trading post for
Frenchmen and Injuns.”

Absalom swallowed with a very dry mouth and, feeling
suddenly terrified, raised his eyes to look upon the face of his Angel.
 
She was nodding at the Brute’s droning
oratory, and smiling, but when Absalom looked at her, she shifted her eyes
slightly to look back at him, and her smile widened a little more.

“Mr. Fink sounds terribly brave,” she observed to the Brute.

Instantly Absalom dropped his gaze, stared at the
floor.
 
Good heavens, man, get hold
of yourself!
 
He tried to seize
command of his suddenly shaky spirits.
 
Are you a Cambridge man or aren’t you?
 
Don’t shame the Foreign Office by acting the overgrown
child!

He swallowed again, still dry, and couldn’t raise his
eyes.
 
The drone filled his
ears—he found he couldn’t make out the Brute’s words at all, but every
mmm,
hmmn
and
I see
of the Angel rang like a church bell.

On the floor he saw his Note-Paper-Book.
 
He must pick it up, mustn’t leave work
papers on a Saloon floor, those were property of the Crown, really.
 
He stood from his stool, shaking
slightly in the knees, stooped to the floor, wrapped his fingers around the
paper—

and suddenly found himself propelled face-first across the
room.
 

Absalom gasped for air and almost dropped the
Note-Paper-Book.
 
Midsections of
dancing people and the startled faces of gamblers swerved in and out of his
vision as he launched horizontally forward.
 
His trousers seemed to be dragging him ahead as if
possessed, and when Absalom twisted to look back, he saw that he was gripped
with both hands by the belt by a wild-eyed man with a gnarled and bushy beard.

“Unhand me!” Absalom meant it as a manly command, but even
in his own ears it rang as a shrill squeak.

The wild-eyed man swung Absalom through the doorway and into
the back hall of the Saloon.
 
There
were heated lavatories, he knew, in this hallway, and an exit, but little
traffic.
 
The stranger slammed
Absalom up against the wall, held him there with one fist twisted in his shirt,
and stared into his face.

Absalom gulped.
 
The stranger wore an eye patch, and his one unveiled eye drilled into
Abalom with the piercing blue stare of a madman.
 
His face was scarred and weatherworn, his beard tangled and
streaked with gray, and whatever hair he had was hidden under a large bear-fur
hat like that worn by the Coldstream Guards, though shabbier and more
thoroughly used.
 
He stank of meat,
smoke and sweat.
 
He was half a
foot shorter than Absalom, but somehow he seemed enormous.

“You use me ill, sir,” Absalom managed to protest, though he
felt it was a weak expression of his true sentiments.

“I need to be sure I got your full attention,” the stranger
growled.
 
His free hand disappeared
from Absalom’s view, and when it returned, it held a long, triangular,
straight-edged knife.

Chapter Two

Burton threw the whisky back and let it burn.
 
He looked to the bar again and saw that
Fearnley-Standish’s stool was empty.
 
Where had that pompous little pigeon-fart gone?
 
He was probably off getting into
trouble, trying to exercise the authority of his patently fraudulent commission
letter over the Shoshone, and Burton would have to go drag him from the fire
again before he sizzled.
 
At least
the Shoshone weren’t cannibals, like the Kwakiutl, or like the Iroquois had
once been.
 
Not that Burton had
anything against cannibals—he’d had more than one good friend who’d been
an eater of man-flesh.

Why the Foreign Office had really sent Absalom
Fearnley-Standish, Burton might never know.
 
Why
, or
whether
.
 
He
seemed like a paper-shuffler, a time-server, at the best of times a passably
competent civil servant, and not like the diplomat he made himself out to
be.
 
Burton’s own letter gave him
wide discretion and referred only to a
companion who may assist you
in diplomatic appeals, directed as you see fit
.
 
He poured himself another shot.
 
He’d been told he’d be getting a skilled
bureaucrat, and instead he got a two-penny Napoleon.

“Is there enough whisky in that bottle that you’d be willing
to share?” a woman asked in a husky voice.
 
She sat down opposite him and Burton completely forgot about
Absalom Fearnley-Standish and all the obnoxious things he had ever done.
 
The woman was small, with a face of
straight lines and a natural grace to her movements that made Burton’s heart
stammer.
 
Her appearance was
ageless, though faint lines around the eyes suggested to Burton that she might
be his age, or even older.
 
Not
that that put him at ease—the she-wolf can bite to her last breath.
 
Her dress was a shiny scarlet crinoline
with what looked like whalebone snaps down the front of it, the most
eye-catching thing in the Saloon, without the steel bell around the hips that
so marred the fashions of London, hiding women’s legs and buttocks, their most
naturally fascinating lures.
 
The
nearly-unveiled glimpse of her form made him regret the frock coat and
waistcoat that hid Burton’s own excellent, manly physique.
 
At least he had good, virile facial
hair.

“Permit me to get another glass, ma’am,” he told her after a
hesitation that seemed to him to last forever.

In answer, she lifted his shot glass to her own lips and
took a sip.
 
“If you feel you need
one, sir,” she said, mocking him with her arched eyebrows and poker face.

Burton heard her statement as a challenge and his blood
boiled within him.
 
Still,
something held him back, and it took him a moment to identify the restraining
impulse.
 
“I must tell you, ma’am,
that I am not entirely at liberty.
 
I am affianced, betrothed, engaged to be married.”

“You make it sound so lawyerly,” she commented, eyes and
brows smiling at him though the lines of her lips were rather pursed and
skeptical.
 
“Shouldn’t love be an
adventure?”

Ishtar’s pearly teeth, but wasn’t that the truth?
 
“I will not tell my solicitor that you
have so thoroughly dismissed his profession,” Burton managed to riposte,
weakly.
 
Who was this woman?

She took a second sip, smaller this time, and shrugged.
 
“And yet I don’t mean to.
 
I have a lawyer myself, a good
one.
 
For that matter, I have a husband.
 
And I also have… adventures…”
 
Her dark eyes glittered.
 
“Sometimes every cog must slip its
casing.”

Burton wanted to resist, but he felt himself becoming
intrigued.
 
“Are you a traveler as
well, ma’am, or do you reside in Fort Bridger?”

The woman laughed lightly.
 
“You mean, am I a woman of virtue passing through, or am I
some disreputable Wyoming whore?
 
Have no fear, sir, your wallet and your venereal health are both safe
from me; I am here
di passagio
, on my
way to the Great Salt Lake City and merely looking for company with which to
pass a slow and chilly evening.”

“I meant no disrespect to you, ma’am,” Burton joined her in
laughing, a little ruefully.
 
“Nor,
for that matter, to whores.
 
The
history of the race is replete with powerful and—” he leaned forward to
whisper the word, “
sexual
women.
 
Think of Bathsheba, for instance.”
 
He wanted to claim the initiative of
the conversation, wrest back some of the control he had lost to this aggressive
houri.

“Nefertiti,” she countered.

“Cleopatra.”
 
Part of Burton mutely rebelled against the conversation.
 
What if Isabel could see him now?
 
But he felt compelled, by pride and
also by lust, to press on.

“The Queen of Sheba,” she smiled.

“Her name was Balqis, according to the Arabs,” Burton
offered.
 
“They should know,
they’re experts in all things pertaining to the
harim
.”
 
Was
he sweating?
 
He thought he could
feel drops of moisture beading onto his forehead.

“And are you an Arab, then, sir?
 
You might be, with that dark, wild, romantic look of yours,
those mustachios and those scars, and your foreign accent.”
 

Burton laughed out loud again.
 
“No, ma’am, I’m a true subject of Her Britannic Majesty
Queen Victoria and an Englishman of Anglo-Irish heritage, though it’s been
suggested I might have Traveler blood in me.”
 
He effected a slightly awkward bow, still sitting in his
chair.
 
“Richard Francis Burton, at
your service.
 
I’m known formally
as
Captain Burton
, but I’m often called
less flattering things.”

“Such as?”

“
Ruffian Dick
is my
favorite,” he offered.
 
“Most of
the others are unprintable.”

“My name is Roxie,” she told him, “Roxie Snow.”
 
She made a small curtsy from the waist
up.
 
“I’ve been called more than
one unprintable thing myself.”
 
She
took a third sip from the shot glass.

Burton hesitated.
 
He felt quite strongly attracted to Roxie, who was obviously being very
forward with him.
 
He was by no
means averse to
adventures
, as Roxie
named them, but now he was engaged to be married, and being engaged meant he
was no longer a free man.

Not only did he have Isabel to consider, but there was also
Fearnley-Standish.
 
Burton tried to
look about the room to spot the Foreign Office man, but found he couldn’t take
his eyes off Roxie.
 
Fearnley-Standish, too, was an anchor chained around Dick Burton’s
neck.
 
Burton was chained to
orders, chained to a mission, chained to authority, chained to a useless
companion and a cold, boring fiancée.
 
He was totally unfree.

The weight of his servitude hung on him hard and heavy.

He took the glass and raised it.
 
“To the unprintable,” he toasted, and drained the glass.

*
  
*
  
*

Tam poked his head up out of the stairwell first.
 
Like a bloody woodpecker, he thought,
sticking its feathered face out the tree trunk for a look around.
 
The
Liahona
was much bigger than the
Jim Smiley
, with multiple cabins and two levels below decks and
great crushing metal treads where the
Jim Smiley
had its India rubber tyres, but its lights were
dimmed and most of its crew and passengers seemed to be away, probably washing
down the dust of the road in the Saloon.
 
The few men whom Tam had run into aboard had exchanged hat-tips with him
(and wasn’t Tam as good as any other man, and as worthy to share a doffing of
hats with?) and passed by without a second glance.

That was the America he loved, Tam thought.
 
You leave your baggage lying about
unwatched like you own the whole bloody-damn-hell country, and if anyone
touches it without permission, you shoot the presumptuous bastard full of hot
lead.
 

He knew it was the
Liahona
(what was that, anyway, some kind of bloody Indian name?) because he’d
listened to the talk in the Saloon, and nothing else in the yard could approach
this beast in size or sheer rhinocerontic majesty.
 
He wouldn’t have known it from the side of the
vehicle—where its name should have been painted, in plain
bloody-damn-hell English, which Mother O’Shaughnessy had taught Tam to read,
instead there was a stream of some odd-looking characters Tam didn’t
recognize.
 
Squirrelly, curling
letters, like the work of some idiot genius who couldn’t read English and was
trying to imitate the Book of Kells.
 
Maybe, he reflected, it
was
an Indian vehicle after all.

The deck was empty, so Tam wrapped his scarf around the
lower half of his face, hoisted the box off its resting place on his knee and
finished his climb, emerging out the dimly-lit hall into the chill darkness of
night.
 
The metal crate was heavy
in his arms and
clanked
, but it looked
like it had all of Sam’s precious tools (and of course it had the patches;
Mother O’Shaughnessy hadn’t raised many idjits, and the ones she
had
raised weren’t named
Tamerlane
) and Tam didn’t have that far to carry it.

The man vomiting at the door of the Saloon had collapsed
now, facedown onto the gravel.
 
Out
of sheer sympathy for fellow human beings, Tam thought, patting himself
mentally on the back, I hope the fellow passed out before he fell into his own
vomit.
 
Tam didn’t see anyone else,
and for lack of a better means, he got the tools down to the ground by simply
dropping the crate over the rail.

Crash!

He slipped down the ladder and looked around.
 
Was that a shadowy figure, standing
over in the darkness of the stockade yard, hidden by the building’s corner from
the fuzzy glare of the Franklin Poles?
 
Tam couldn’t be sure.
 
Making a show of adjusting his pants, he undid the leather cord that
held the Webley Longspur strapped into its holster and checked the thin,
spring-loaded stiletto tied to his right wrist.

The shadowy figure, if figure it was, didn’t move.

Tam stretched to pop his neck and all the joints in his
arms, then picked up the crate again.
 
He walked softly across the yard, making extra sure that his pace looked
natural but displaced no gravel, like a ferret, like a blue tit hopping across
the yard after a fallen seed, so he could listen over the soft
pad-pad-pad
of his own footfalls and hear anyone approaching
from behind.
 
It wasn’t quite as
good as eyes in the back of his head, but Tam’s hearing could be shockingly
sharp.

His precautions were rewarded with a
crunch
sound behind him.
 
Heavy boot in gravel, he thought.

Bloody Pinkertons, that’s who’s hiding in the darkness.

No, Tam, you damnfool idjit, that could be anybody.
 
Could be someone else getting off the
Liahona
, or maybe the drunk fellow came to his senses and is
standing up.
 

Or maybe it was someone lurking in the shadow of the
building, waiting for me to come out of the
Liahona
.
 
Could
be one of the English.

Or a Pinkerton, of course it could be, by damn.

Another
crunch
.

Tam forced his brain to analyze the situation as his steps
brought him closer to the
Jim Smiley
.
 
Could the Pinkerton know it was
him?
 
Didn’t seem likely.
 
Better bet was that the Pinkerton was
hiding in the yard to see what he could see, and it was just Tam’s rotten Irish
luck that the Pinkerton had seen
him
.

If it was a Pinkerton, Tam had to kill him.
 
He was spotted now, and there was no
way to simply disappear from view.
 
And if it wasn’t a Pinkerton, Tam might have to kill him anyway—it
could be some other enemy of his, or maybe someone badly in need of a lesson
that you don’t follow other people around in the dark, that’s just creepy, and
if you aren’t careful you’re going to get yourself knifed.

Thank Brigit for the scarf, for the cold and for the
disguise.
 
Tam made a show of
dropping the crate to the gravel and arching his shoulders back to display how
heavy it was and how much pain he was in.
 
Then, without delay, though at the same time making a pantomime of how
slowly he moved, he turned to see the approaching party, source of the ominous
crunches
.