Romulus Buckle and the Luminiferous Aether (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin #3) (9 page)

XVI

THE FRIENDLY SOCIETY

Max took a seat on the stool alongside Cornelius Valentine.

“What’ll it be?” the barmaid asked, leaning towards her.

Max kept her head down, sending the woman off with a wave of her black gloved hand.

“You come in, you buy something, damned—” the barmaid said through gritted teeth. “Sell your cursed apothecaries outside!” She slapped the counter and moved away, responding to the call of another, paying, customer.

Max peered sideways through her hair and around her hood at Valentine. Slumped forward, he had his hands around a half-empty tankard of ale sitting in a pool of beer and half-sunk penny farthings. Short white and brown hairs bristled on his head and surrounded his red ears. His jaw hung slack, his eyes unfocused, and he stank of blood and antiseptic. He was dead drunk or very close to it.

“Valentine,” Max whispered.

Valentine did not respond. Perhaps he had passed out with his eyes open.

“Valentine!” Max shouted into his ear. There was no reason to whisper in the noisy tavern. And she wanted to leave.

Valentine jerked and turned his head towards Max. “What do you want, woman?” he asked, slurring the words. “If you came to rob me, I have spent all of me paltry coins. If ye came to offer the bordello, I have spent all of me paltry coins.”

“It is time to go,” Max said.

Valentine narrowed his brutish eyebrows as he tried to focus his eyes on her. “I am not your eunuch, woman.” He grumbled.

Max opened her hood, just a fraction, enough for only Valentine to see her face within.

Valentine’s eyes shot wide. He shook his head. “Go away, Lieutenant,” he whispered.

“No,” Max answered. “Come with me.”

Valentine slapped his hand on the counter. Max felt droplets hit her chin. “You are not my officer anymore, you hear me?”

“You are still a crewman of the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
and under my command,” Max said.

“I quit,” Valentine moaned. “I quit before you drummed me out. No zeppelin can use a one-legged boilerman. Now leave me be and let me die in peace.”

“Have you signed your discharge?” Max asked.

“No.”

“Then you are still my crew,” Max insisted. “Leave with me.”

“Ha!” Valentine laughed bitterly. “I am out. Do you think that if I leave my mark on the discharge, which I cannot read as it is, makes any difference to the way things are? I am out. You go, Lieutenant!”

Max lifted her hand to try to calm the rising volume of Valentine’s speech. A handful of patrons glanced their way, glassy-eyed, probably hoping to witness a fight. The Ophir was no place for a Martian, yes, but it was also no place for officers. “Follow me out, crewman. Now.”

“Leave me be,” Valentine hissed. “And stay out of my head. I cannot abide you knocking about in my head!”

Max blinked. The man remembered when she had entered one of his dreams where he had recognized her as an intruder and awakened. The act had been unintentional, a weird function of her Martian side. “My intrusion into your dream state was unexpected and unfortunate and for that I apologize,” she said. It was unforgettable however, the dream’s misty scene—laden with the telltale elements of old memory, fuzzy at the edges, layered with emotion and grafted with elements and textures filtered through the always busily re-inventing subconscious mind—of a woman waving farewell to him as his airship lifted away from an airfield. Max leaned in closer, the edge of her hood touching Valentine’s cheek. “I am not leaving until you come with me.”

“You are breathing on me.”

Max leaned back. “I am not leaving unless you leave with me.”

Valentine hunched his shoulders and stared straight forward. Max coughed, parched, her throat like sandpaper, crackling with an itch that made her choke and her eyes water. “May I trouble you for a sip of your beer?”

Valentine stiffened. “If you promise to leave,” he grumbled, sliding the half-full beer mug across the counter, spilling a portion of it in one looping slosh.

“Thank you,” Max whispered. She took the mug in both hands, lifted it inside her hood cave and swallowed all that was left of the bittersweet beer. Rum was her preference though she tended to eschew alcohol, but in that moment nothing had ever tasted better and it soothed her throat. Slightly dizzy, she placed the empty mug on the counter and slid it back to Valentine.

“Leave … me … be,” Valentine snarled, pushing the mug away with one finger and sinking his head between his shoulders.

“Enough of this. I order you to come with me.” Max said.

“Leave … me … be,” Valentine repeated through gritted teeth, head lower, his voice shaking.

“Get out of that chair and come with me, Mr. Valentine, or I shall have you clapped in irons for insubordination.”

“Leave … me … be!” With the last word, Valentine lashed out, swinging his right arm on the backhand.

Max had not expected her crewman to strike her. His forearm, big and muscled from a lifetime of shoveling coal, struck her across the base of her throat and knocked her off the stool. The tavern whirled and she landed on her back on the beer-splattered floor. The stitches running up and down her torso felt like they blew apart and she released a sharp cry of pain.

Perhaps she had pushed Valentine a little too hard.

Max rolled over onto her hands and knees and leveraged herself up onto her feet. The squeak of her boots on the wet floorboards was too loud. The tavern had fallen silent. She froze, lantern light piercing through the rivers of her black hair hanging over her face, hurting her eyes. Her hood had fallen back, the weight of the wool soft against the back of her neck, the humid heat of the tavern tickling her ears.

“Martian!” someone shouted. “A damned Martian!”

Chair legs scraped across the uneven floor as seated patrons jumped to their feet. A low, angry howl rose from the assembled crowd.

“It surely is!” a woman shouted, drunk and belligerent, her clipped accent unique to the Black Diamond clan. “Hidden among us like a snake, she is!”

Ignoring the brutal throbbing in her back, Max stood as tall and straight as she possibly could. She threw her hair back and faced the sea of slack-jaw, snarling faces. Valentine sat on the floor, the swing of his blow having also carried him off his stool. He looked stunned and hurt, gripping the joint where his peg leg attached to his knee, the shortened trouser leg now stained with fresh blood.

“Vile zebe!” a Gallowglass zeppelineer, a big, burly lout with a blond beard, yelled, drawing a knife from his belt. “Here selling delirium poison!”

Max backed up a step. She both saw and sensed the predator-like encroachment of The Ophir’s rough crowd as they left their drinks on the tables and slowly, pack-like, crept up to encircle her. Max did not recognize one face among them. If the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
had been in harbor there might have been a few of her own crew there and, regardless of their personal feelings, duty would have brought them running to her defense.

Max’s hand instinctively slid to the spot on her hip where her saber handle would have been but even as she grasped for it she knew it wasn’t there. She should have borrowed a sword on her way out of the citadel. Martians were strong but, unarmed and hurt, she would not be able to hold so many with her bare hands. She snatched an iron candlestick holder off of a table, the paraffin candles tumbling across the floor in rolling flickers. The holder made for a worthy club but it would do her little good once the crowd pinned her down.

The blond-bearded Gallowglass brute, his drink-bright eyes gleaming with the prospect easy violence, led the advance upon Max. “I take first crack, you blackhearts!”

The mob surged in, tightening the circle. Max saw the gleam of brass knuckles and knives. The beer aftertaste in her mouth turned sour and she wanted to spit, though that was something she would never do, etiquette-wise. Her eyes itched terribly, needing moisture; rapid blinking eased the discomfort but it also blurred her vision.

Blood-weak and half-blind.
Perfect
, Max thought.

Someone stepped in front of her with the clomp of wood thumping on wood, placing his barrel-chested form between Max and the Gallowglass man. “Stand down,” Valentine shouted. “There shall be no violence here.”

“You have been hypnotized to stand with this freak, brother,” the Gallowglass man raged, though he looked surprised. “Brain-addled by a zebe. We shall teach her a lesson! Do not interfere with your own revenge!”

“Nay, brother,” Valentine replied. “She is Max of the Crankshafts, the adopted half-breed daughter of Admiral Balthazar. You hear me? Lay not one hand upon her, charlatans, for if you harm a child of Balthazar’s it shall be most unlikely that you escape the Punchbowl with yer lives. Stand down!”

“Balthazar is not here,” The Gallowglass trader replied, aghast. “And you, brother, you stand with this monster? You, a sky dog? A Roustabout? One of us? One of us whose leg must be paid for?”

“She is my officer,” Valentine growled, rocking between his good leg and peg leg in his drunkenness. “I do tend to dislike her, you see, but she is my Lieutenant and I am bound by oath to defend my shipmates to the death. Such is the oath of all zeppelineers and I wager that all of you have taken it. So if you pick a fight with her you pick a fight with me, brother.”

The forward lean of the mob shifted back in a tiny, near imperceptible way. Max felt it. She was rescued.

The bearded Gallowglass man grimaced, glancing back at the group. He threw his arm out, pointing at Max over Valentine’s shoulder. “You are most lucky, you stinking zebe bitch, that your filthy hide is owned by the leader of the Crankshafts and that one of our own has stood up for you in this public house. Because if it were not this way I’d already have your striped hide tacked up on that wall.”

“Time to go, Mr. Valentine,” Max said.

Valentine held up a penny, glaring at her with half-open eyes. “But I got enough for one more beer—”

Max snatched Valentine by the collar and, at the cost of more pain in her back, yanked him around table after table and knot after knot of leering faces until she squeezed him out the door.

The cold of the night air focused Max’s mind. She dropped the candlestick without being aware of it and the loud clang of its iron on the cobblestones startled her. Faces turned in the dark street, peering at her in the weak lantern light. Max threw her hood back over her head. Valentine tore free of her grasp to stumble up against the side of the tavern, bend over and vomit.

It seemed to take forever as Max waited for Valentine to finish puking. The people in the street had turned back to their own nefarious deals, however—the sight of a Martian, a cassiderium dealer, perhaps— did little to rattle them.

“You owe me a shilling’s worth of beer, damn you,” Valentine spit, gasped and vomited again.

“I shall reimburse you,” Max replied. She felt as if she had slipped into the surreal where the flickering snowfall and ice-rimed cobblestones gleamed weightless under the illumination of the street lamps. Everything pulsed red-yellow, red-yellow with the throb of her barely healed wounds. Most painful was the knowledge that Valentine had saved her from a beating, saved her perhaps even from death, and she was unhappy owing anything to a man like him.

XVII

AN ODD COUPLE

The journey through the Devil’s Punchbowl was slow but much easier for Max. With her hood on and Valentine at her side, drunk and argumentative, hobbling along on his peg, they fit right in with the town’s nocturnal crowd. She was a cloaked apothecary of dark drugs, he the addled and addicted customer, out for a stroll. The cold air, sweet after the sickly warm miasma of The Ophir, braced the body. Above the yellow haloes of the streetlights the clouds glowed with a peculiar sheen of moonlight, a rippling silver and blue ceiling the people called ‘Pearlie’s blanket.’

Valentine’s wooden leg slipped across the cobblestones and he nearly fell. “Blast the frog-eared ghost of the frog-headed bastard who fathered me!” he roared.

“The airship corps shall provide you with a mechanical leg,” Max said. “Traversing cobblestones shall be no hindrance then, and less cause for babblement.”

Valentine spit, wiping his mouth his sleeve. “I don’t want nor need no clockwork device attached to my person. The peg suits me just fine, it does.”

“Suit yourself,” Max said.

“How about we just don’t talk at all, Lieutenant?” Valentine grumbled. “That would suit me.”

It would have suited Max as well. Valentine’s breath stank of bile. “You need to sleep. Go home.”

“You damn well dragged me outta my home,” Valentine grumbled.

“I meant where you sleep, Mr. Valentine.”

Valentine sighed. “I always slept on my flying machine.”

“You have no home, no place to sleep beyond the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
?”

“I always slept on my assigned airship from the day I was brought on at sixteen, with the exception of a few inns here and there on leave. I started with the
Albert
, then the
Bromhead
and now the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
.”

Valentine’s lack of a ground home did not surprise Max. The crew who came into the zeppelin service young and poor often need no other residence, especially if they remained unmarried. “I’ll find you a bunk in the citadel, then.”

Valentine guffawed. “What, Lieutenant, do you plan to bed me? You are far too young and pretty to fancy a rough old coot like me, even with your nasty skin.”

Max halted, not out of any affront taken from Valentine’s words—the man could spew insults all night long and not bother her—but the street had taken a steep rise and her strength, falling away, threatened to fail her again; she feared another step might result in her knees collapsing.

Valentine cleared his throat and she felt him looking at her hood. “Begging your pardon, Lieutenant. My mouth runs ahead of my brain more often than not.”

“The open sewer of your mouth is of no concern to me, crewman,” Max whispered. Every intake of breath hurt her back. Something hot trickled down the left side of her ribcage.

“Yes, well, I did save yer striped hide this evening, did I not?” Valentine replied, heartiness returned, born to deliver unintentional insults. “I suppose that might buy me a little room for my indiscretions.”

“I am making exceptions because you are hurt and drunk, Mr. Valentine,” Max said. “But continue after such a fashion and it will buy you the brig in the morning.”

“Aye, Lieutenant,” Valentine responded softly, almost with a tone of remorse, as if melancholy had suddenly overwhelmed him. “I do expect a punishment.”

“A punishment?” Max asked, still, fighting dizziness.

“For striking a senior officer. I am still on the ship’s roll. I expect punishment.”

“I recall no such transgression,” Max said. “And let us leave it at that.”

“I do regret hitting you, Lieutenant.”

“No such thing happened. Do not speak of it again.”

The earth tilted. Max would have toppled over had not Valentine caught her in his big, dirty hands.

“Hold fast, Lieutenant,” Valentine said gently, his arms around her. “Are you injured?”

“I just need to sit, to sit down,” Max whispered; her voice sounded weak and it angered her.

“Here,” Valentine replied, guiding her to a seat on the stones of a low wall.

Max removed her gloves and pressed her hands against her aching eyes. She had gone too long without the goggles, the irritation exacerbated by the stinking smoke of The Ophir. “Thank you, crewman.”

“Aye,” Valentine answered softly. “Is it your wounds, Lieutenant? The surgeon, he told me about how you saved Captain Buckle, about how the sabertooths ripped you up at Tehachapi.”

“No,” Max answered. A burst of frustration brought her new energy and she stood up.

Valentine chuckled to himself and nodded. The boilerman was odd. But then, again, most pure humans struck Max as odd much of the time. “Where are we going, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind me asking?” He sounded less drunk than before. “This isn’t the way to the citadel.”

Max took a deep breath and felt more blood meander down her back, which she ignored by resuming her walk, briskly this time. “Our destination is the public jetty. If we are going to get back to the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
we’ll need a fast ship to get us to her.”

“Shouldn’t they be on their way back to us already?” Valentine asked. He looked pale in the pools of lamplight and the intervening shadows, his peg clicking on the cobblestones as he drew himself alongside her.

“Unknown,” Max said. She had no idea how she knew it but she was certain Buckle was not heading home. “Our airship needs us.”

“Your airship needs you, Lieutenant,” Valentine said. “I am no good for her now.”

“You shall remain a part of my crew. I shall see to it.”

“And how shall you do that?” The shred of hope in Valentine’s voice made putting up with him easier.

“Captain Buckle has accommodations for a personal steward, a station he has resisted filling. I shall draft you into that service.” This was the solution Max had devised on her way to The Ophir, the way to keep Cornelius Valentine on the
Pneumatic Zeppelin
. Buckle would fight the idea, deeming the job unnecessary because he ate what the crew ate, but she knew how to outmaneuver him on such matters. The Captain’s steward was one of the few idler positions which would allow a disabled airman to remain with his airship.

“Captain’s steward?” Valentine spluttered. “Me? I can’t boil a rat in a bucket. I would poison the captain with my cooking skills, I would.”

Max wanted to smile. “You can fry an egg on a boiler, can you not?”

“That’s not going to make a captain happy.”

“It is a start. You shall learn. And our captain shall endure that difficult journey with you. Do we have an agreement?”

“I … don’t the Captain pick his own steward?”

“He has not done so and now I have done it for him. As first officer I am responsible for recruiting.”

They walked for a quarter mile in silence, Valentine considering. Max smelled fabric stiffening dope and the parsley-infused aroma of Gallowglass lamb stew; they were approaching the jetty.

“Maggots in the biscuits,” Valentine muttered. “I accept the position. But why do this for me?”

“Since Lady Fortune has both damaged us and cast us together I recommend we do all we can to make the best of it. And let’s just say I owe you one, Mr. Valentine.”

Valentine cleared his throat and belched with it. “Since you have salvaged me from certain beggary in the gutter I suppose I have no choice but to accept, and with gratitude. But I still do not enjoy your company overmuch, Lieutenant.”

“The feeling is mutual, I assure you.”