Liahona (14 page)

“I’m a showman, of course, and I know it,” Archibald
continued, and then suddenly his words were cut off by a hard, wet coughing fit
that ended by being stifled into a white handkerchief.
 
“But
hypnotic hypocephalus
sounds much more impressive than
pillow
for mummies
, don’t you think?
 
And wouldn’t you rather have people
interested and looking at the antiquities, even with silly ideas in their
heads, than bored and looking away?”
 
He looked weaker for the coughing, thin and bed linen-white.

“Eh,” Burton muttered abstractly, feeling guilty for his own
suspicions.
 
“It’s nothing.
 
I’m not offended.”
 

The charlatan might even be right.

He felt the
Liahona
slow down and snapped himself out of the quagmire of his own thoughts to look
ahead; they were arriving.

A ring of thirty-foot-tall Franklin Poles, like the ones in
front of Bridger’s Saloon except that a queer green spark showed in the blue
light of these pillars, surrounded a low, rocky hill.
 
Dark, nearly invisible filaments hung between each set of
adjacent poles like a web; Burton might have missed them entirely except that
the filaments, too, occasionally crackled with blue electricity.
 
The dry earth was scorched free of
vegetation for a few feet on either side of the wires and the burnt air stank
of ozone.
 
Behind the filaments,
clustering all over the top of and around the bluff, sprouted a riot of skin-
and bark-covered teepees.
 

The explorer in Burton noted the teepees with
interest—this far from the Great Plains, he’d expected a different kind
of dwelling, something more in the lines of a hogan or a wigwam or even a
house.
 
Also, the incongruity of
teepees protected by a wall of electricks intrigued and amused him; he hadn’t
seen defenses like this in Egypt, or in the Horn.
 
He thought he could spot hints of riflemen lying among the
rocks of the bluff, too; assuming they were also armed with Brunels, that
height would give them a range of miles and make them devastating to any
encroaching force.
 
Anyone approaching
that was delayed by the sparking fence would be exposed and likely shot to
pieces in no time.
 
Burton had seen
the damage what the Brunel’s magnet-driven bullets could do, even at shockingly
long ranges.

“Astounding,” Jamison Archibald murmured.

A sparking, sizzling metal gate hung between two extra-thick
pylons, across the road in front of the
Liahona
, barring forward progress.
 
Burton watched in fascination as a brave stepped from the
Liahona’s
wheelhouse and yelled in the direction of the compound
ahead, whooping and waving an arm until the pylons hissed out a thick emission
of steam and smoke and the gate swung sideways on steel cables, opening to
admit the captured steam-truck.

The
Liahona
coughed
and ground forward again.
 
Watching
the electricks fence pass by, Burton suddenly became aware that Roxie, still
sitting at his side, was talking to someone, and not in English.

The man was Shoshone, and dressed like all the other Indian
warriors, though he was older than most of them.
 
He had a smile on his face but Roxie was furious.
 
Burton had been studying Shoshone,
along with Ute and Navajo, since his departure from London, and though his
skills were still rudimentary, they were enough to understand this
conversation, once he focused on it.
 
After all, he thought, allowing himself a moment of pride, he was quite
simply damn good with languages.

“Big Beard Chief Brigham will be big angry with you!” Roxie
snapped.
 
Her Shoshone was fast,
but heavily accented.
 
“Big Beard
Chief Brigham always friend to the Shoshone!”

The older man scratched himself calmly and answered in
smooth, articulate, native Shoshone.
 
“Captain Jones will get his truck back, don’t worry.
 
And I will personally come down to the
Great Salt Lake City on my best horse and drink a lager with Brigham to make
friends again.
 
I’ve had worse
losses today on my side—two of my men are missing.”
 
His eyes narrowed.
 
“In strange ways.
 
What is my Brother Orson doing these
days, that he is not sharing with his Brother Pocatello?”

Burton tried not to give any indication that he understood
the conversation.
 
Orson
, that must be Orson Pratt, the great
inventor—some said
madman
—of
the Kingdom, the man behind the mighty airships, the man whose genius drove
Burton’s mission.
 
But how could
any Shoshone be missing
strangely
?
 
He thought of the Pinkerton who had
disappeared from Fort Bridger, leaving his clothing behind; was that some new
and exotic weapon of Pratt’s, and if so, what could it be?
 
A flesh-disintegrating ray?
 

He shook his head, baffled.

And who was Roxie?
 
She seemed to be some sort of agent of the Kingdom, or at least of its
President.
 
He wished now that he
had investigated her a little better, at least asked her a few more
questions.
 
You’re an idiot,
Burton, he told himself.
 
You’re a
fool for nice legs in a skirt.
 
He
noticed then that the gypsy was looking at him curiously.

“What?” he snarled, and immediately looked away,
communicating disinterest in any answer.

Archibald only chuckled, until his chuckle ended in a soft
wet cough.

Roxie was talking again.
 
“If bad things in Kingdom because of you delay, I self make
Shoshone forever unhappy!”
 
The fox
yip of her voice was fierce enough to make Burton feel nervous, and he forced
his eyes to wander around the teepees, the tethered horses and the banked fires
as the
Liahona
ground again to a
halt.
 
“I make all ladies in
Kingdom wear Shoshone skin hat, eat Shoshone testicles!”

Burton shivered involuntarily.
 
Who
was
this
woman?
 
His spike of fear was
seasoned with sharp pangs of attraction.

The old Shoshone, though, was calm.
 
“I don’t know what bad things might
happen in the Kingdom because you arrive a day late,” he said urbanely, “but
I’ll take the risk.”
 
He turned
away and headed for the ladder.

Roxie hissed in exasperation and glared at Burton.
 
“Well?” she snapped in English.

Burton shrugged defensively.
 
“Nothing.
 
It
pleases me to see that you have friends among these savages.
 
Maybe you can talk them into letting us
go.”

“Savages, indeed!” Roxie snorted, rising to her feet to join
a line of passengers being dragged and Brunel-prodded towards the ladder by the
Shoshone.
 
“Savages, indeed!”

*
  
*
  
*

Absalom hadn’t come west expecting to be imprisoned, and
much less had he come expecting to be imprisoned in a cave.
 
Well, perhaps it wasn’t truly a
cave
, he thought, but it was at least a
pit
.

Blue electricks snapped and sparked here and there in the
walls, but they lit the cavern only dimly.
 
Further light, even dimmer over the artificial illumination
with which it competed, filtered down from the blue-grey circle of open sky
above.
 
Most of the illumination in
the pit, though, was orange-yellow and was thrown by several pole-length
torches, jammed into the soft ground at irregular intervals and adding a smoky,
woody note to the human reek that assailed Absalom’s nostrils.
 
The latrine trench in the corner,
complete with unsmoothed, barky log seat, didn’t help.
 
He resolved to hold off using it as long
as he possibly could.

Some of the
Liahona’s
other passengers seemed perfectly at ease with the situation.
 
Burton was one of them; shortly after
the Shoshone had thrown them into this chamber, sealing the entrance behind
them with a coal-powered, fume-spewing portcullis, Ruffian Dick had stomped once
around the big cell and then slumped down against one wall and gone straight to
sleep.
 
Other passengers had joined
him in dozing, as had the steam-truck’s crew, not to mention Absalom’s Angel,
who proved to be surprisingly rugged.
 
Absalom was one of those who were unable to sleep, and he paced about
the pit, wondering what he had gotten himself into.
 
Also pacing in circles was the
Liahona’s
captain, who looked supremely indignant and muttered
to himself with every step.

He had to save Abigail.
 
That’s what he was doing here, and that was worth any amount
of standing in a pit, or of being subjected to the bullying arrogance of Dick
Burton, or even of having to use a log-hewn latrine.
 
Also, if he could manage it, there were Foreign Office
objectives to achieve (Absalom’s real commission letter, issued after he called
in several favors and got several fellow-Harrovians roaring drunk, simply said
assist
Captain Richard Burton
) and the dignity of
the Empire to maintain.
 
The
dignity of the British Empire, of course, had survived all manner of primitive
latrines.

The portcullis puffed steam and black smoke and jerked up
into its rock-carved housing.
 
The
older Indian warrior whom Absalom had seen on the
Liahona’s
deck entered, and in his wake, to Absalom’s
surprise, came the two men who had surprised him the night before, behind
Bridger’s Saloon.
 
Despite his
disorientation, panic and anger, Foreign Office mnemonics training kicked in
and he remembered their names: Lee and Hickman.
 
The three men stopped inside the gate, surveying the
prisoners.

Absalom stormed across the pit to the three men, but Captain
Dan Jones got there first.

“This is bloody nonsense, Pocatello, aye, and you know
it!
 
When President Young hears
what you’ve done—Hickman!
 
Lee!”
 
He looked
astonished.
 
“What are you doing
here?
 
Tell the Chief he can’t keep
us locked up!”

Chief Pocatello raised a restraining hand and smiled
wryly.
 
“Spare me,” he said, “I
already got the whole speech from Sister Eliza.”

Lee grinned.
 
“I
guess you did, Chief.”

Hickman thumped Chief Pocatello on the shoulder with
enthusiasm.
 
“Sometimes even an
Injun can be a poor dumb unlucky son of a bitch, can’t he?” he shrilled in his
high-pitched voice.

Jones looked from one face to the next, puzzled.
 
“Will you not get us out of here,
then?”

“Don’t worry, Brother Daniel,” Lee reassured him, “the
Shoshone’ll let you go in the morning.
 
None of your passengers will be any the worse for wear.”

“Did you Danites arrange this?” Jones demanded to know, and
then he frowned.
 
“This isn’t
something Brother Brigham ordered, is it?
 
If he wanted to change my schedule or my route, he could have simply
told me so.”

Hickman snickered.
 
“Naw, we ain’t done this.
 
I
guess Pocatello ain’t such a tame Injun as you thought, is all.”

“Why are you laughing?” Jones demanded.
 
His face was turning red with rage and
frustration.
 
“Deseret’s premier
land-ferry from the Wyoming Territory has been waylaid by former allies with
all passengers and crew.
 
Is that
funny to you, Hickman?
 
Are you
amused that the
Liahona
was attacked?”

Hickman shrugged.
 
“I got an eclectic sense of humor, I guess.
 
I can laugh at jokes other men tell almost as easy as I can
laugh at my own.”

“Don’t worry, it would take a railgun the size of a piñon
pine to put a scratch on the
Liahona
,”
Pocatello added.
 
“And you must know
that your Brother Brigham has not yet seen fit to sell me a railgun.”

“I’m not worried about the
truck
!” the Welsh captain barked, his voice projecting
like a foghorn.
 
“I’m worried about
John Moses!
 
I can’t find the
little fellow, and Jonathan Browning will kill me first and then die of grief
himself if I lose his son!”

Pocatello’s expression seemed compassionate.
 
“I’ll have my men check the truck
again,” he told the
Liahona’s
captain.
 
“Maybe he’s hiding.
 
A boy that size, he might be under a
chair and we just missed him.”

Jones nodded stiffly, his face still a mask of fury and
fear, and walked away, throwing himself to a seated position in the sand.
 
The others seemed to finally see
Absalom, and he cleared his throat by way of annoyed greeting.
 
Perhaps these men could help him.