The Difference Engine (37 page)

Brian glanced at him in surprise, then laughed, a bit oddly. “Well, they surely tried that at first, at Alma and Inkermann. But we gave ‘em such a hell of a toweling that it knocked ‘em into a panic. You might call that partly my doing, I suppose. The Royal Artillery, Ned.”

“Do tell,” Mallory said.

“We’re the most scientific of the forces. They love the Artillery, your military Rads.” Brian snuffed another fat smokestack spark with a spit-dampened thumb. “Special military savantry! Dreamy little fellers with specs on their noses, and figures in their heads. Never seen a sword drawn, or a bayonet. Don’t need to see such things to win a modern war. ‘Tis all trajectories, and fuse-timings.”

Brian watched with alert suspicion as a pair of men in baggy raincoats sidled down the road. “The Russkies did what they could. Huge redoubts, at the Redan, and Sevastopol. When our heavy guns opened up, they came apart like cracker-boxes. Then they fell back into trench-works, but the grapeshot from the mortar-organs worked like a marvel.” Brian’s eyes were distant now, focused on memory. “You could see it, Ned, white smoke and dirt flying up at the head of the barrage-line, every round falling neat and true as the trees in an orchard! And when the shelling stopped, our infantry — French allies mostly, they did a deal of the footwork — would trot in over the palisades, and finish poor Ivan off with wind-up rifles.”

“The papers said the Russians fought with no respect for military decency.”

“They got mortal desperate when they found they couldn’t touch us,” Brian said. “Took to partisan work, fighting from ambush, firing on white flags and such. Ugly business, dishonorable. We couldn’t put up with that. Had to take measures.”

“At least it was all over swiftly,” Mallory said. “One doesn’t like war, but it was time to teach Tsar Nicholas a lesson. I doubt the tyrant will ever tug the Lion’s tail again.”

Brian nodded. “It’s right astonishing, what those new incendiary shells can do. You can lay ‘em down in a grid-work, neat as pie.” His voice fell. “You should have seen Odessa burning, Ned. Like a flaming hurricane, it was. A giant hurricane . . .”

“Yes — I read about that,” Mallory nodded. “There was a ‘storm-fire’ in the siege of Philadelphia. Very similar business, very remarkable principle.”

“Ah,” said Brian, “that’s the problem with the Yankees — no military sense! To think of doing that to your own cities! Why, you’d have to be a cack-handed fool!”

“They’re a queer folk, the Yanks,” Mallory said.

“Well, some folk are too chuckleheaded to manage themselves, and that’s a fact,” Brian said. He glanced about warily as Tom piloted the Zephyr past the smoldering wreckage of an omnibus. “Did you take to the Yankees, at all, in America?”

“Never saw Americans, just Indians.” And the less said about that the better, thought Mallory. “What did you think of India, by the way?”

   ”It’s a dreadful place, India,” Brian said readily, “brim-full of queer marvels, but dreadful. There’s only one folk in Asia with any sense, and that’s the Japanese.”

“I heard you took part in an Indian campaign,” Mallory said. “But I never was quite sure who those ‘Sepoys’ were, exactly.”

“Sepoys are native troops. We had a rash of trouble with mutineers, Moslem nonsense, about pig-fat in their rifle-cartridges! It was sheer native foolishness, but Moslems don’t care to eat pork, you know, all very superstitious. It looked dicey, but the Viceroy of India hadn’t given the native regiments any modern artillery. One battery of Wolseley mortar-organs can send a Bengali regiment straight to hell in five minutes.”

Brian’s gold-braided shoulders glittered as he shrugged. “Still, I saw barbarities at Meerut and Lucknow, during the rebellion . . . You’d not think any man could do such vile, savage things. Especially our own native soldiers, that we ourselves had trained.”

“Fanatics,” Mallory nodded. “Your common Indian, though, must be surely grateful for a decent civil government. Railroads, telegraphs, aqueducts, and such.”

“Oh,” said Brian, “when you see some Hindu fakir a-sitting in a temple niche, filthy naked with a flower on his hair, who’s to say what goes on in that queer headpiece of his?” He fell silent, then pointed sharply over Mallory’s shoulder. “Over there — what are those rascals doing?”

Mallory turned and looked. In the mouth of an adjoining street, the paving had been taken over by a large and thriving ring of gamblers. “They’re tossing dice,” Mallory explained. A knot of shabby, disheveled men — scouts of some primitive kind, lawless pickets — were standing lookout under an awning, passing a bottle of gin. One fat ruffian gestured obscenely as the Zephyr chugged past, and his startled companions booted disbelieving taunts from behind their rag-masks.

Brian flung himself full-length across the coal-wain, and peered over the wooden wall. “Are they armed?”

Mallory blinked. “I don’t think they mean us any harm —”

“They’re a-going to rush us,” Brian announced. Mallory glanced at his brother in surprise, but to his greater astonishment he saw that Brian was quite right. The shabby men were capering after the Zephyr, almost skipping down the empty street, with a shake of their fists and a slosh of their gin-bottle. They seemed possessed with an angry yapping energy, like farm-dogs pursuing a carriage. Brian rose to one knee, untoggled his holster-flap, set his hand to the large queer pistol-butt within it —

He was almost flung from the wain as Thomas hit the Zephyr’s throttle. Mallory grabbed his brother’s belt and hauled him back to sprawling safety. The Zephyr racketed smoothly up the street, a small cascade of coal pattering out the back with the shock of acceleration. Behind them the pursuers stopped short in disbelief, then stooped like idiots to pick at the fallen coals, as if they were emeralds.

“How did you know they would do that?” Mallory asked.

Brian knocked coal-dust from his trouser-knees with a pocket-kerchief. “I knew it.”

“But why?”

” ‘Cause we’re here, and they’re there, I suppose! ‘Cause we ride and they walk!” He looked at Mallory red-faced, as if the question were more trouble to him than a gun-fight.

Mallory sat back, looking away. “Take the mask,” he said mildly, holding it out. “I brought it just for you.”

Brian smiled then, sheepish, and knotted the little thing about his neck.

There were soldiers with bayoneted rifles on the street-corners in Piccadilly, in modern speckled drab and slouch hats. They were eating porridge from mess-kits of stamped tin. Mallory waved cheerily at these minions of order, but they glared back at the Zephyr with such militant suspicion that he quickly stopped. Some blocks on, at the corner of Longacre and Drury Lane, the soldiers were actively bullying a small squad of bewildered London police. The coppers milled about like scolded children, feebly clutching their inadequate billy-clubs. Several had lost their helmets, and many bore rude bandages on hands and scalps and shins.

Tom stopped the Zephyr for coaling, while Fraser, followed by Mallory, sought intelligence from the London coppers. They were told that the situation south of the river was quite out of control. Pitched battles with brickbats and pistols were raging in Lambeth. Many streets were barricaded by pillaging mobs. Reports had it that the Bedlam Hospital had been thrown open, its unchained lunatics capering the streets in frenzy.

The police were sooty-faced, coughing, exhausted. Every able-bodied man in the force was on the streets, the Army had been called in by an emergency committee, and a general curfew declared. Volunteers of the respectable classes were being deputized in the West End, and equipped with batons and rifles. At least, Mallory thought, this litany of disaster crushed any further doubts about the propriety of their own venture. Fraser made no comment; but he returned to the Zephyr with a look of grim resolution.

Tom piloted on. Beyond authority’s battered boundary, things grew swiftly more grim. It was noonday now, with a ghastly amber glow at the filthy zenith, and crowds were clustering like flies in the crossroads of the city. Clumps of masked Londoners shuffled along, curious, restless, hungry, or desperate — unhurried, and conspiring. The Zephyr, with merry toots of its whistle, passed through the amorphous crowd; they parted for it reflexively.

A pair of commandeered omnibuses patrolled Cheapside, crammed with hard-faced bruisers. Men waving pistols hung from the running-boards, and the roofs of both steamers were piled high and bristling with stolen furniture. Thomas easily skirted the wallowing ‘buses, glass crunching beneath the Zephyr’s wheels.

In Whitechapel there were dirty, shoeless children clambering like monkeys, four stories in the air, on the red-painted arm of a great construction-crane. Spies of a sort, Brian opined, for some were waving colored rags and screeching down at people in the street. Mallory thought it more likely that the urchins had clambered up there in hope of fresher air.

Four dead and bloating horses, a team of massive Percherons, lay swollen in Stepney. The stiffened carcasses, shot to death, were still in their harness. A few yards on, the dray itself appeared, sacked, its wheels missing. Its dozen great beer-casks had been rolled down the street, then battered open, each site of rapturous looting now surrounded by a pungent, fly-blown stickiness of spillage. There were no revelers left now, their only evidence being shattered pitchers, dirty rags of women’s clothing, single shoes.

Mallory spotted a leprous plague of bills, slapped-up at the site of this drunken orgy. He hit the top of the Zephyr with a flung lump of coal, and Tom stopped.

Tom decamped from the gurney, Fraser following him, stretching cramps from his shoulders and favoring his wounded ribs. “What is it?”

“Sedition,” Mallory said.

The four of them, with a wary eye for interference, marched with interest to the wall, an ancient posting-surface of plastered timber, so thick with old bills that it seemed to be made of cheese-rind. Some two dozen of Captain Swing’s best were freshly posted there, copies of the same gaudy, ill-printed broadside. The bill featured a large winged woman with her hair afire, surmounting two columns of dense text. Words, apparently at random, had been marked out in red. They stood silently, attempting to decipher the squirming, smudgy print. After a moment, young Thomas, with a shrug and a sneer, excused himself. “I’ll see to the gurney,” he said.

Brian began to read aloud, haltingly.

” ‘AN
APPEAL
TO
THE
PEOPLE! Ye are all free Lords of Earth, and need only
COURAGE
to make triumphant
WAR
on the Whore of Babylondon and all her learned thieves. Blood! Blood! Vengeance! Vengeance, vengeance! Plagues, foul plagues, et cetera, to all those that harken not to universal justice!
BROTHERS
, SISTERS! Kneel no more before the vampyre capitalist and the idiot savantry! Let the slaves of crowned brigands grovel at the feet of Newton. WE shall destroy the Moloch Steam and shatter his rocking iron! Hang ten score tyrants from the lamp-posts of this city, and your happiness and liberty be guaranteed forever! Forward! Forward!!! We take hope in the human Deluge, we have no recourse but a general war! We crusade for the
REDEMPTION
, of the oppressed, of the rebels, of the poor, of the criminals, all those who are
TORMENTED
by the Seven-Cursed Whore whose body is brimstone and who rides the nightmare horse of iron . . . ‘ ”

There was much more. “What in the name of heaven is the wretch trying to say?” asked Mallory, his head buzzing.

“I’ve never seen the like of this,” murmured Fraser. “It’s the ranting of a criminal lunatic!”

Brian pointed at the bottom of the bill. “I cannot understand about these so-called ‘Seven Curses’! He refers to them as if they were dreadful afflictions, and yet he never names and numbers them. He never makes them clear . . . ”

“What can it be that he wants?” Mallory demanded. “He can’t think that a general massacre is any answer to his grievances, whatever they may be . . . ”

“There’s no reasoning with this monster,” Fraser said grimly. “You were quite right, Dr. Mallory. Come what may — no matter what risk — we must be rid of him! There is no other way!”

They returned to the Zephyr, where Tom had finished the coaling. Mallory glanced at his brothers. Above their masks, their reddened eyes shone with all the stern courage of manly resolution. Fraser had spoken for them all; they were united; there was no more need of words. In the very midst of this low squalor, it seemed to Mallory a moment of true splendor. Touched to the core, he felt his heart soar within him. For the first time in seeming ages, he felt redeemed, clean, utterly purposeful, utterly free of doubt.

As the Zephyr rolled on through Whitechapel, the exaltation began to fade, replaced with a heightened attention and a racing pulse. Mallory adjusted his mask, checked the workings of the Ballester-Molina, exchanged a few words with Brian. But with all doubt resolved, with life and death awaiting the coming roll of the die, there seemed little enough to say. Instead, like Brian, Mallory found himself inspecting every passing door and window with a nervous care.

It seemed that every wall in Limehouse was spattered with the wretch’s outpourings. Some were vivid madness pure and simple: many others, however, were cunningly disguised. Mallory noted five instances of the lecture-posters that had libeled him. Some might have been genuine, for he did not read the text. The sight of his own name struck his heightened sensibilities with a shock almost painful.

And he had not been the only victim of this queer kind of forgery. An advert for the Bank of England solicited deposits of pounds of flesh. A seeming offer of first-class railway excursions incited the public to rob the wealthy passengers. Such was the devilish mockery of these fraudulent bills that even quite normal adverts began to seem queer. As he scanned the bills, searching for double-meanings, every posted word seemed to decay into threatening nonsense. Mallory had never before realized the ubiquity of London’s advertisements, the sullen omnipresence of insistent words and images.