Teancum (15 page)

He stopped the truck parallel to the Strider, which also
stopped, and crouched to bring its crew and passengers level with the
steam-truck’s wheelhouse.

Pffffffft-ankkkh!

Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat in the carriage of the
Strider, with Annie Webb by his side and three Stridermen in uniform about
them.

“Good mordigg, Captaid Burtod!” Fearnley-Standish called
through a broken nose.
 
He sounded
happy and manly, despite the ridiculousness of his voice, and not the
sniveling, whining, petulant child Burton was used to dealing with at all.
 
He also sounded surprised.

“Good morning, Ambassador!” Burton called back.
 
“Someone’s hit you, I see!”

“Dod’t soudd too edvious whed you say that!”
 
Fearnley-Standish laughed.
 
When the laughter ended, a grin
remained, with a touch of regret in it.
 
“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I.”
 
Burton grinned his best piratical grin.
 
“More than once.”

“I forged my commissiod letter, you dow!”

“I know,” Burton said, and he looked over his shoulder down
the road south.
 
“Relocating to
Mexico, are you?”

“Lookigg for Johd Lee,” Fearnley-Standish said
cheerfully.
 
He pointed at his
nose.
 
“I have him to thack for the
dose.”

“Lee killed nuestro Ambassador Armstrong,” one of the
Strider’s crew added.
 
Burton
recognized her by her voice as Master Sergeant Consuelo Jackson.
 
“Our President will expect la
justicia.”

“Lee’s a Dixie man,” Annie Webb added, and Burton saw that
each woman had a hand on one of Absalom’s elbows.
 
“So we’re heading to St. George to try to cut him off.”

“I came lookigg for my sister,” the Foreign Office man
continued, “add foudd her.
 
Odly
she’s happy here, so I deed a dew task.”

“A new
quest!
” Burton
suggested.
 
“I am sorry to hear
about the Ambassador.”

Jackson and the other Stridermen nodded solemnly and crossed
themselves.

Burton couldn’t help looking at the two women holding
Absalom Fearnley-Standish’s arms and smiling.

“It isd’t a perfect arradgemedt,” Fearnley-Standish said
ruefully.

“No arrangement is,” Burton agreed.
 
“Godspeed, Absalom.”

“Godspeed, Dick.”

They waved, and Burton put the steam-truck into gear and
rolled north, into the Salt Lake Valley.

*
  
*
  
*

Dick Burton stomped gamely across the lobby of the Deseret
Hotel.
 
He wore his gun and sword
openly, in the Deseret fashion, and the shiny Order of the Nauvoo Legion medal
that Brigham Young had pinned to his chest three days earlier appeared never to
have come off since.
 
“Clemens,”
the Englishman growled.

“Burton!” Sam snapped right back at him, flashing his best
grin around the unlit Cohiba he was chewing.
 
“You look so spry, I almost suspect it doesn’t hurt you to
walk anymore!”
 
The bandages were
all under Burton’s clothing, but Sam knew they were there.
 
The man was a walking infirmary.

“In the best tradition of the American West,” Burton told
him, “I’m self-medicating.”
 
He
pulled a flask from his coat pocket.
 
“Care for a shot?”

“Thanks, I believe I will,” Sam said, though it was early
morning yet, and he intended to drive the steam-truck himself.

“Surely you’re planning on wearing your medal,” Burton
said.
 
“Or does the democratic
egalitarianism of your President Buchanan prohibit it?”

“Oh, sure I am.”
 
Sam wiped his mustache dry, handed back the flask and fished around in
the pockets of his fornication pants… his Levi Strauss denim pants.
 
“When the right opportunity presents
itself.”

“It is something of a formal occasion, after all.”

“We’re just
leaving
,”
Sam objected.
 
“In this country,
the principal formality of departure is remembering to lock the door behind
you.”

“Ha!” Burton didn’t seem able to have even friendly, casual
conversations without growling, snapping and barking.
 
“We’re envoys, setting out with important messages to our
governments.
 
The Kingdom of
Deseret is to side with peace.
 
She
will intervene against any party commencing hostilities, and if Jefferson Davis
and his southern leaders are to secede, they will do so through peaceful
negotiation.
 
There will be few
greater occasions in this century.”

“Good thing I’m such an accomplished liar,” Sam said.
 
He pinned the medal on his jacket,
noticed that it was askew, and tried to reposition it to achieve something
approaching the military crispness of Burton’s medal.

“Virtra’s dusty belly, man!” Burton roared.
 
He pulled the medal from Sam’s hand and
fussed at it, pressing it neatly into place parallel with Sam’s shoulders.

“Thanks, Dick,” Sam said.
 
“You’ll make some woman a fine wife one day, if you can ever
bring yourself to shave that mustache.”

“What are you talking about,
liar?
” Burton demanded.
 
“Young had promised that he will intervene on the side of
peace, and that’s the message we’re to bear!”
 
He took another sip from his flask and then put it away.

“Without the air-ships,” Sam laughed, “who cares if he
intervenes?
 
Without Pratt’s fleet
and his phlogiston guns, Deseret is a gaggle of badly-armed mountain men who
only fight part time at best.”

“There’s John Browning,” Burton pointed out.
 
They exited the hotel doors onto South
Tabernacle, nodding at the desk clerk, who was still arranging for their
luggage to be carried behind them.
 
“His
machine-gun
is impressive.”

“No more impressive than the work of Sam Colt, or Horace
Hunley, or Isambard Brunel,” Sam shook his head.
 
“No, with Pratt’s four ships destroyed and him dead and no one
else in the know on how to squeeze rubies and get out his phlogiston-burning
rays, Deseret is a paper tiger at best.”

“Only three ships were destroyed,” Burton pointed out.

“Yes,” Sam admitted.
 
“And the fourth disappeared, with Pratt on it, and persona non grata in
the Kingdom.”

“Then lie,” Burton said.
 
“Lie like hell.
 
Lie like hell, for heaven’s sake.
 
The cause is worthy.”

“True,” Sam agreed.
 
He took a lucifer from the box in his jacket, sparked it off the rivets
on his Levi Strauss pants and lit the Cohiba.
 
“I’d take another sip of that bourbon, if there’s any left.”

They walked down South Tabernacle.
 
In the five days since Brigham Young’s return to his office,
the street had been repaired and most of the windows, but the avenue’s many
trees remained blasted and withered stumps, or bare baked earth, and much of
the old plascrete still had black scorch marks on it, obscuring the sparkle.

“If only you Americans had put in your transcontinental
railroad or your telegraph earlier,” Burton commented as they neared the Lion
House, “we’d have been spared the journey.”

“There won’t be a railroad,” Sam said, “not for a
while.
 
And Young still isn’t
convinced about the telegraph.
 
Young doesn’t really want either of them in the first place, and, at
least for a little while, he’ll need to keep outsiders out of the Kingdom, to
avoid giving away his bluff.
 
Besides, don’t you want to get home to your fiancée Isabel?
 
And to writing your books?”

“I do,” Burton admitted.
 
He looked slightly embarrassed as he said the words.
 
“I have in mind a memoir of this
journey, though I don’t know whether anyone would believe it.”

“Sell it as fiction,” Sam suggested.
 
“I think you’ll find you can tell a lot
of interesting truth, if you’re willing to stoop to writing novels.”

Burton guffawed and slapped Sam on the back and then they
had arrived.

The
Jim Smiley
sat
idling on the grass beside the Lion House, surrounded by the accordion-filled
glass bells, repaired, restored to operation and pumping away softly.
 
The glass tubes overhead hung silent,
many of them shot to pieces on the night of what had begun to be called the
Battle of the Tabernacle.
 
The
Tabernacle itself sat silent and still in the background, a burnt out hulk and
the final grave of Edgar Allan Poe, Eliza Snow, Sergeant Ortiz and others whose
names Sam didn’t know.
 
It, and the
splintered, bullet-riddled shambles of the Lion House, were the last two things
untouched by the hand of any repairmen.

The
Jim Smiley
had
been pulled from the Tabernacle’s wreckage toasted but mostly intact.
 
Captain Dan Jones and John Browning and
others had been hard at work on it since the morning after the battle, and now
it stood shiny and gleaming in the morning sun, looking as good as new with
coal smoke and steam puffing gently from its exhaust pipes.

A crowd stood around the steam-truck, dressed in long coats,
high hats and gloves on the one hand and crisp bonnets and dresses on the
other.
 
Beyond and around the crowd
stood horse-mounted Shoshone braves, looking just as formal, in their proud and
savage fashion.
 
A calotypist stood
to one side with his boxy tripod-mounted device, and Brigham Young and Heber
Kimball (both nearly as bandaged as Burton was, Young’s neck wrapped in white
all the way up to his jaw like a cravat) and Chief Pocatello stood in front of
it, in a small cleared space.

“We have a lot to talk about still, Sam Clemens,” Brigham
Young snarled to Sam as they shook hands.
 
Then the President of the Kingdom of Deseret broke into a broad
grin.
 
He clasped Sam’s arm, and then
Burton’s.

“You won’t persuade me.”
 
Sam grinned as he spoke, covering up his fear of death and
nothing and his unresolved questions about his brother Henry.
 
“But I’m inclined to let you keep
trying.”

“You’ll always be more than just a cog to me.”

“Don’t believe him,” Pocatello said with a straight
face.
 
“He says that to all the
girls.”

“And it works!” Heber Kimball roared.
 
“They all marry him!”

Sam and the English explorer and the Mormon prophet and
Heber Kimball and the Shoshone chief together froze and showed their teeth
while the calotypist counted down from three and then the flash powder flared
and told them they could relax again.

“Any sign of Cannon?” Burton wanted to know.

Heber Kimball growled like a bear, but Young shook his
head.
 
“It doesn’t matter,” he
said.
 
“There have always been
dissidents, and there always will be.
 
The machine rolls forward, whatever the individual cogs decide to do.”

Sam couldn’t decide whether to shake his head or nod or what
to say, so he smiled and grasped Young’s hand a final time and turned to his
steam-truck.

“The last time I was aboard your vessel,” Burton said,
blushing, “I was up to no good.”

“Ha!” Sam snorted.
 
“Me, too!”

Dan Jones stood on deck, feet squarely under his shoulders
and hands clasped behind his back, with young John Moses beside him and the
dwarf Jed Coltrane.
 
As Sam and
Burton climbed the ladder onto the
Jim Smiley
, Jones gestured to the porters of the Deseret Hotel, who had finally
caught up.
 
Sam’s and Burton’s
travel cases were shoved up the side of the
Jim Smiley
and stowed below decks in short order.

“You gents planning to ride all the way to the United
States?” Sam asked.

“Or England?” Burton added.
 
Sam arched an eyebrow at the explorer, and he pointed at the
steam-truck’s paddle-wheel.
 
“I
know she floats, Sam.
 
I’ve seen it
myself, remember?”

Sam laughed.

“Just to Fort Bridger, boyo, if you don’t mind,” Captain
Jones said.
 
“We wanted to say
good-bye, the boy and I.”

John Moses said nothing, but stuck close to Jed Coltrane.

“You said you could use a hand,” the dwarf reminded Sam.

“I can,” Sam agreed.
 
“And the pay is terrific.
 
At least until they shut down my expense account.”

A one-horse buggy rattled to a halt among the Shoshone, and
as Sam turned to look, Orrin Porter Rockwell nearly fell out of it, and then
hobbled, half-leaning on his wife, over to the side of the
Jim Smiley
and up its ladder.
 
He reached the deck grunting and sweating, with her on his
heels, smiling.
 
She looked as fine
as any Sunday stroller in crinoline and hoops, though more deeply tanned than a
conventional belle, and he looked like he always did, in buckskins and furs,
with knives and guns hanging all over his body.