Mechanized Masterpieces: A Steampunk Anthology (11 page)

“So he ain’t the Elephant Butcher, then?” I asks.

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” Dashwood admits. “The title of admiral isn’t honorary, and you don’t get that by stitching wounds, do you?”

I s’pose you never know a man, even when you see his handiwork. No one sees how the clock does the tickin’, ’cept the man that made it.

“No one leaves this ship without the express permission of the captain or myself!” Dashwood bellows from the helm. “Do so and you run the risk of being left behind. That may appeal to some of you, as you may not wish to be captained by a man that doesn’t walk on two feet anymore. If so, go now and Godspeed to you. The rest of you will get this ship fit to sail on whatever tide we may have need.”

Dashwood insisted on sortin’ out the crew herself, though I volunteered to go on me own.

“They’ll need to hear it from me,” she says. “No man wants a firm hand more than one who’s heard a mutinous rumor.”

The ship’s never this busy at night, men crawlin’ all over the riggin’, loadin’ crates and barrels from the docks, and scrubbin’ down anything weren’t movin’. There’s no sign of Beakman, though. I know’d it was bad idea leavin’ that limp bit o’ seaweed with the crew. No tellin’ what he’s got hisself up to, daft thing that he is.

“Martin, Harris, you’re with me,” Dashwood says over her shoulder as she goes walkin’ down the gangplank.

I’m just coming down behind her when me right wrist gets yanked across me, turnin’ me all about. I’m flying right off the gangplank, and I knows it’s bad ’cuz I can’t feel nothing in me arm at all as I’m droppin’. I lands in the drink, right in me face. I’m kickin’ and flailin’, but I gets me head above the water. There’s this pain racin’ up me arm, the salt searin’ the wound. I reach towards the dock. I try to grab the pilin’, spittin’ and splutterin’ from the water and the pain. But I can’t grab, ’cuz I got no hand to grab with no more. The pain makes sense now. I got no right hand. I pull the stump of what was me whole right arm in close to my chest, and I’m kickin’ and scramblin’ with my left hand tryin’ to clear the surface proper, trying to get hold of anything to pull meself up.

Martin’s the one pulls me out. I hear Dashwood shoutin’ like a fury, but her words make no sense over the pain in my hand. I take a breath, but it comes out a choke and then a scream and then her angel face is there in front of me.

“Is it bad Harris?” She reaches out her hand and I put out my stump. She holds it for a moment without no fear in her eyes. “It’s a clean cut. The Snake’s work to be sure. She could have taken your life, Harris. That makes you lucky, but she will pay for taking your hand.” She looks right in me eyes, makin’ sure I understand her. I just nods. “Good, now up you get.”

She and Martin haul me up, and I sway like it’s me first day ’board ship. “Hold him steady as we go, Martin. We’ve got to get to the admiral before her.”

It’s all a jumble from there. Lights and shadows and how my hand were screamin’ ’bout not bein’ there no more. We run longer than I thought it should take. I catches my boots on the cobbles and in the mud and in the reeds chokin’ the gutters. Me arm always shoutin’ at me to stop.

Finally, we gets to the door, and that elephant with the dirty great cog stickin’ out its back is the most welcome sight. But Dashwood is screamin’ again. And realize it ain’t just my vision that’s flickerin’ with the pain. This alley were like black pitch when I carried the cap’n that first night. Now I can see that elephant on the door like noonday sun. And it’s all ’cuz the roof of the hut is ablaze.

“Michael! Michael!” Dashwood never sounded more a woman than in her heartbreak. Martin drops me to the ground and pulls her back. She would have gone straight through that door if she thought she could save him.

I don’t know how long she screams or how long I sits there feeling every heartbeat in fingers that’s gone. The heat don’t help the pain, it blows into all the bloody, open spaces. I looks down the alley behind us, back into the dark we came from, and she’s standin’ there. Taller than I remember, with wickedness in every shinin’ whip.

“Dashwood, she’s here,” is all I says. It’s all that seems ’portant. She’s here to kill us for a life full of bitterness that started in Jakarta with a deed o’ kindness. Maybe it’s the pain in me voice, maybe Dashwood was ’specting her to be here, but Dashwood stops her wailin’. Her silence is bigger than the screamin’. Even the flames go quiet, ’fraid of what comes next.

That Snake moves first, though, runnin’ at Dashwood, wavin’ those shinin’ whips into a frenzy no eye could follow. And a howl builds in her that beats against Dashwood’s silence, but Dashwood don’t move. Martin and I is lookin’ to and fro, waitin’ for her to do somethin’, and watchin’ the Snake comin’ on like a thing out of a wee child’s nightmare.

Martin decides since he’s got two legs that he ought to use them, and runs off. I never pegged Martin a coward. It’s near as frightenin’ as the scene before me eyes, to see him turn tail.

The barbs of the whips reach the Dashwood before I can do nothin’, barely able to stand, and swoonin’as I do. They rips into her face and her shirt sleeves, makin’ a ringin’ clang as they do. Bits of cloth and Dashwood’s fine yeller hair go flyin’ away from her. She’s bleedin’ all over, but she don’t move. No man I ever knew could stand before such pain and not move.

Then that Snake’s neck is in her reach. One moment those whips are a blur and a fury and the next they lays limp at her side, and there stands Dashwood holdin’ her foe by the throat with a strength that defies reason. The Snake is chokin’ and strugglin’, her weapons in the way now so she can’t get hold of the hand that’s crushin’ the life from her. Dashwood’s face is shimmerin’ in the firelight, all covered in trails of blood.

I know’d a man from the Ivory Coast, once, could crush a snake in his bare hands. But that were just a plain old snake, and he were a sailor in the prime of his days. He would laugh when he done it. There ain’t no laughter in that alley.

Dashwood ain’t the angel from the parlor beyond the surgeon’s street. She’s cold and there’s a rage in her eyes, more quellin’ than all the waves of the great deep.

 “Margaret, stop!” comes a cry from a voice I never thought to hear again. The cap’n walks with another man supportin’ him, lurchin’ about as he goes. He comes to his wife and places a hand on her arm. “Margaret, that’s enough,” and he says it tender-like, so’s I’m almost embarrassed to hear it.

“Michael?” She blinks, and looks at his face like she’s seein’ him for the first time. “Michael?!”

“Put her down,” he says, like he’s talkin’ to a child. Dashwood just drops Whipsnake in a heap at her feet and, believe me or not, that witch is still alive. She’s gaspin’ and coughin’ like the typhus got her, but she’s alive.

Li Dao Ming comes toddlin’ up in her shortest height and lifts the Snake’s head, cradled in her hands. She starts whisperin’ in her foreign tongue so I don’t know what she’s sayin’, but a mother’s love sounds the same the world ’round. The Snake opens her eyes and just says, “Ma. Ma,” like she’s swallowed the coals of the fire she set in the admiral’s home.

I can’t stand the sight of that wretch what took my hand no more, but I can’t quite look at the cap’n neither as he’s all wrapped ’round Dashwood. So I just sits there holdin’ me arm ’til Martin comes runnin’ back.

“Fat lot of good you were!” I holler in his face. He just waves me and me breath away, ’cuz behind him is comin’ the admiral. He bumbles over, tskin’ and tuttin’ like me own mother.

“Oh, this won’t do, won’t do one bit,” he says, pokin’ about in the tenderest bits. I bite my tongue as every inch of my bein’ is cryin’ out. “Well, I know just the thing. Hoist him up, my good man, and come along with me.”

Martin helps me up amidst all manner of groanin’, and we wanders off into the dark of the Singapore streets. It don’t seem like it could be right, but it sounds like the admiral’s whistlin’.

The admiral tells me it won’t hurt none and that’s so, but I don’t know nothin’ else neither for two days. And when I can open my eyes again, my throat achin’ for water, there’s the sweetest face I ever seen starin’ back at me.

“Decided to rejoin the living then,” Dashwood says, and she hands me a cup, that sainted lady.

I gulp and sputter ’til it’s empty, and I sees all the little places in her face that been stitched back up since the Snake tore ’em apart. There’s even a bit o’ silver in the top of her left ear.

“Where is we?” I asks, not wantin’ to see the damage done in the light o’ day just yet.

“Only a fool in my line of work doesn’t have a second abode,” chimes the admiral from across the room. “A second abode and a back door or two.”

He minces over to stare into my face. He pokes and prods a bit ’til he’s satisfied I’m as livin’ as he can get me. “Most everyone got out, I think. Though, there are a few I haven’t heard from yet. They may have gone into hiding, or Whipsnake may have caught them as they ran.” A shadow passes over his face. “Of course, it did help that most everyone wasn’t there when she sent it up in flames.”

“What’s she got against your lot?” I asks.

“Oh, a good number of them are victims of her training and days as a mercenary,” he says, all matter-of-fact. “Whipsnake is not the only one who blames me for the path she was made to tread. I did what I could to make it right.”

I looks about as he rambles, and it’s all bamboo and thatch, with the sunlight seepin’ through. Could be a good place for a rest were it not for me hand. I realize I’m layin’ on a table so I tries to sit up, but I’m seein’ all the stars a sailor ever sailed by, and gives it up.

Once me head clears, I decides that I had best get it over with. I looks down at me hand. It’s a prettier thing now than it were in the flesh. Polished and hinged and strong as the steel it’s forged from, and there, on the back, the cogged elephant is raisin’ its trunk in triumph. I flex a time or two to test it, and it’s the pain of the night I lost it and the fire shootin’ through it all over again. I must moan somethin’ terrible, ’cuz Dashwood just laughs.

“Easy there, Harris,” says Cap’n, comin’ up behind her. “It takes time before you can go sprinting off. At least, the admiral keeps insisting that’s so.” He ain’t too steady on that new leg of his yet, neither. He has a stick ’stead of a man to prop him up, but you can see he’s gonna be strong on it, come all the wrath of Poseidon.

“You’re lucky that Martin fellow came running to find us, you know,” says the admiral, liftin’ my new hand, one finger at a time, admirin’ each piece as he moves it. “I had enough time to do some of my very best work, I think.”

“How did Martin know where’s to find you, then?” I asks, to keep from hollerin’ again.

“Oh, he didn’t. He was just running towards the surgeon’s street to find someone to patch up whoever was left,” Cap’n says. “We got to the ship, crew told us you had gone to the admiral, so we made our way back. Ran into him just before he made his destination.”

“Did we ever find where Beakman got hisself to?” I asks.

“Dead,” says Dashwood, like she ain’t too sorry ’bout it at all. “They found his body yesterday in a gutter behind that pub you were in. He must have gone to warn Whipsnake that the crew wasn’t going to cooperate, and she never gave him the chance. Must have thought he was the one that told me she was here.”

It’s a miserable end, and no mistake, but his mutinous heart made it for him.

“And I just need you to try flexing the fingers again, please,” says the admiral, and I can barely stand to do it, but each shinin’ finger obeys my command. My pain makes me think of why I’m lying in a hut, dirtier than the admiral’s first. My pain makes me angry, now.

“What happened to the Snake?” I asks.

Dashwood looks away, but the fury is still in her eyes. Cap’n pulls her close a moment.

“Li Dao Ming took her away that night,” she says. “Maybe to nurse her, maybe to bury her. No one has seen either of them since.”

It’d be just like a snake to slither to its burrow. Then again, when last I seen that witch, she weren’t breathin’ too well. It don’t satisfy my loss—not yet—but if she’s livin’, we’ll see her again. I may be a tired old sea dog, but I flex them fingers again, and think of what a hand of steel can do to a snake.