Timpanogos (15 page)

“Somehow, I doubt Iron County is worth five hundred
dollars,” he huffed.
 
He was
panting from the effort of wrestling now, and sweat from the back of his hands
trickled onto the pistol grip, making it slick and harder to hold on to.
 
He wrapped his second hand around his
first, to tighten his hold.

“Give yourself up, Brigham!” Lee shouted.
 
“Give yourself up and I won’t have to
kill this English fellow!”

The farmer Heber grunted and shoved aside the pillar that
had Young trapped, exposing at the same time Ambassador Armstrong, who lay very
still.
 
Brigham Young rose to his
feet.
 
He was dirty and battered,
but he stood upright in a strong motion, like a bear rising to sniff the wind,
or a lion announcing its presence on the savannah.
 
He sucked air in through his nostrils and his chest swelled.

“You don’t
have to
kill him now, John,” he rumbled, his voice low and threatening like a storm
cloud.
 
“Don’t pretend you’re a
puppet.
 
Be a man.
 
Choose.
 
Lay down your arms, and you might still be forgiven.”

“Choose?” Sam couldn’t help himself.
 
“What kind of cog
chooses?
”

“Shut up, Clemens!” Young barked at him.

“You’re right, Brigham,” Lee laughed.
 
“I
am
choosing.
 
Hell, I chose
years ago, and now we’re just playing out the consequences.
 
Surrender, or I’ll
choose
again, choose to stick this boy like a pig.”

Sweat poured down Sam’s forehead and neck and chest now,
too.
 
Any moment, he thought, I’ll
lose hold of this gun, and Lee will start shooting.
 
He half wished the farmer’s wife would go ahead and brain
the Danite with her pan.

“He’s dead.”
 
The farmer knelt by Ambassador Armstrong, checking the big black man’s
pulse and breathing.
 
“He didn’t
make it.”

Ire flashed in Young’s eyes.
 
“I can’t save you from hell, John,” he snarled.
 
“I can’t even save you from the
Mexicans.
 
But if you start running
right now, I can promise you that I won’t be the one chasing you.”

John D. Lee spat on the floor.
 
“
That
for your
promises, Brigham!” he shouted.
 

Sam felt his hands start to slip off the pistol—

Lee grinned triumphantly and jerked at the gun—

Sam stumbled back—

and Absalom Fearnley-Standish punched John D. Lee in the
kidney.

“Aaaagh!” Lee hollered, throwing his head back and tearing
the revolver out of Sam’s grip.
 
Now Sam saw that Fearnley-Standish was biting the Danite as well, his
teeth sinking into Lee’s neck until blood flowed.

Lee stabbed the Englishman.
 
He missed his neck, stabbing down instead shallowly across
Fearnley-Standish’s collarbone and into his chest.

Fearnley-Standish lost his grip and staggered back.
 

Lee raised the knife to stab again—

and Mrs. Kimball smashed him with her skillet.

Crack!

Sam heard Lee’s elbow break under the hammer of the heavy
iron at the same moment he tumbled back onto the rubble from which he’d
emerged.

“I ain’t gonna leave nothing for the Mexicans to take!” she
shouted.
 
She raised the skillet
again—

Lee staggered sideways in the direction of the door,
fumbling with the pistol to bring it up into position and cock it—

Annie Webb launched herself past the enraged farmeress,
spinning like a thrown saucer, boots-first in attack—

bang!

smoke poured from Lee’s pistol and Annie fell back, hitting
the floor hard in a tangle of arms and legs with the Englishman.

Lee stepped forward, raising his pistol to fire at Brigham
Young—

and the dwarf snatched it out of his hand, sailing through
the air in a leap worthy of any circus acrobat.

Heber Kimball grabbed his scattergun and swung it around to
shoot at Lee, but Lee didn’t wait for the shot.
 
He ducked out the farmhouse door and was gone.

Boom!

Heber’s scattergun kicked a hole in his own door, knocking
it back open again, and then Mrs. Kimball threw her frying pan out the door on
the Danite’s heels.

“And good riddance!” she shouted.

Outside, the shooting sounds grew fainter and more sporadic,
as if maybe the firefight was ending and drifting away from the Kimball farm.

“The day is ours,” Brigham Young pronounced.
 
He sounded very grave when he said it,
and also very tired, and then he turned to the farmer.
 
“Heber, I’m going to have to leave
Ambassador Armstrong with you, along with one or two other people.”

“Of course,” Heber said at once.
 
“And the meeting tomorrow morning?
 
The Twelve are supposed to be there, and the Seventy, to
replace you.”

Young’s face darkened.
 
“I’ll get into the Lion House tonight,” he glowered, “and send out
messages.
 
I’ll hold that meeting
tomorrow morning, all right, but it will be the trial of John Lee and Bill
Hickman.”

“But what about Port?” Mrs. Kimball pointed out.

“Rockwell!” Sam snapped.
 
He ached and his lungs wheezed, but he sent himself to
shifting timbers.
 
Other men joined
in, and it was he and the dwarf Coltrane together who slid aside a wide plank
to reveal the mountain man.
 
He lay
dirty and still under criss-crossing beams, with a trickle of blood at one
corner of his mouth.

“You alright, Rockwell?” Sam asked.
 
He was a little reluctant to touch what
was in all likelihood a dead body, but the dwarf wasn’t so finicky.
 
He slapped Orrin Porter Rockwell twice,
once across each cheek.
 
Young’s
bodyguard didn’t stir, until suddenly his lips cracked open and he spoke.

“No… bullet or blade… shall harm thee,” Rockwell intoned
slowly, without opening his eyes.
 
“And not no fallin’ ceilings, neither.”

*
  
*
  
*

“And what happens,” Poe asked, “if we succeed?”
 
He coughed, feeling his lungs tear and
bleed from the force of it.

The steam-truck rattled up the long tunnel towards the top
of Timpanogos Mountain.
 
Timber
supports flashed by in the truck’s forward lights like the ribs of a gigantic whale
through whose innards Poe now traveled.
 
He wondered whether he was being swallowed or regurgitated by the thing.

“We restore Brigham,” Roxie said.
 
“He will have to administer justice, of course.
 
Some men will have to hang, or be
exiled, but for all his gruffness, Brigham Young is a soft touch.
 
Most of Lee’s rebels will just go back
to their wives and children.
 
I
don’t know what he’ll do about someone like Brother Orson.”

She looked away, out the window.

“I mean
us
,” Poe
said.
 
“You can be evasive if you
like, but I know that you know that I mean
us
.
 
I want
to talk about our future, together.”

“You’re dying, Edgar.”
 
She turned back to face him.
 
In the blue glow of light emanating from the dials and meters of the
steam-trucks control panel, Poe saw tears gently sliding down her cheeks.
 

Poe slammed his fist in frustration against the
steam-truck’s wheel.
 
“Does that
mean I am incapable of love?” he demanded.

He bit back further words that welled up in his throat,
about her unfairness and about the injustice of the universe.
 
What kind of tyrannical God would make
him suffer his torturous love for this woman for so many years, and then take
it away, just at the moment he was about to touch it?

“Of course not,” she said softly.
 
“But it means that you have no future at all.”

“Is that the glorious secret doctrine of the Mormons, then?”
he pressed.
 
“You dragged your
wagons across the plains from Nauvoo, scattering your dead along the way like
seeds to the wind, for the mighty and seductive call
death is the end, o
man, gnash your futile teeth and despair
?”

“No,” she admitted softly.
 
“But whatever afterlife there is, I am bound to Brother
Brigham in it.”

“Oh?”
 
Poe
couldn’t let that one lie.
 
“And
when we first met, weren’t you bound to the King of Nauvoo?”

“Things change,” she acknowledged.
 
“It isn’t wise to resist the inexorable.”

Poe pounded his fist against the control panel.
 
“And is there no choice in it?
 
You were Joseph’s, you are Brigham’s…
may you not choose to be mine?”

“There is always choice,” Roxie said, “for all of us.
 
I choose fidelity to the promises I’ve
made.”
 
She hesitated.
 
“Fidelity after a fashion.
 
Such fidelity as I can manage.
 
I choose service to the whole, and to
the greater good.
 
I choose to play
my part in the plan.”

“Edgar Allan Poe be damned.”
 
He started coughing again, his chest shuddering and shaking
with the effort.
 
He spat out the
window, tasting the blood and phlegm on his tongue even after it was gone.

“I hope not,” she replied softly.
 
“Edgar Allan Poe be saved, and even healed.”

“You believe in miracles, then?”

“I do,” she agreed.
 
“I also believe in the surprising genius of Orson Pratt.”

The light ahead shifted, the tunnel suddenly turning,
leveling out, and debouching into a large space stacked with crates, like a
warehouse.
 
Men stood arrayed
loosely around the opening, including an old man whom Poe recognized instantly
as the Apostle Pratt.

“This seems surprisingly direct,” Poe murmured.
 
“It can’t bode well.”

“Follow my lead,” Roxie urged him.

Poe shifted the truck out of gear and attached the
brake.
 
Pratt shuffled around to
Roxie’s side of the steam-truck and squinted up into the cabin.

“Sister Young!” he squeaked.

Poe did his best not to cringe or gnash his teeth.

“Brother Pratt!” she hallooed back.
 
“My apologies for the late hour!”

“My condolences for the death of your husband,” Orson Pratt
responded.
 
“I’d have thought you
might be in widow’s weeds by now, comforting your sister-wives in the Beehive
House or the Lion House.”

“I would,” she agreed, “only Brother Lee asked me to bring
you something.”

Pratt frowned and shook his head.
 
“I’d have thought that snake would have plenty of strong
backs to do his work without troubled the bereaved women of the Great Salt Lake
City,” he harrumphed.
 
He held up
his hand, inviting her down.
 
“Come
visit with me.
 
That fellow there
can unload the materials, whatever they are.”

Roxie took his hand and hopped lightly down.
 
“Oh, that’s my cousin Jared.
 
He’s new to the valley, and offered to
help me.
 
Jared, come join us,
would you, please?”

Poe fought off a coughing fit by force of will as he climbed
down.
 

“I didn’t know your cousins were members of the Kingdom,”
Pratt said.
 
He arched his bushy
eyebrows, which made them jump almost to the top of his bald head.

“Jared isn’t,” Roxie clarified her lie.
 
“He’s come to tell me about a death in
the family.
 
An aunt.
 
I’m to have a small inheritance, it
seems.”

Pratt’s men climbed into the back of the steam-truck and
dragged out the crate they found there, beginning to lower it to the ground.

“Honest Jared,” Pratt mumbled in vague approval.

“He’s something of an amateur technologist,” Roxie
continued.
 
“I hoped you might like
to show him the
Teancum
.”

“Your air-ships are famous, sir,” Poe played along,
affecting enthusiasm and doing his best to imitate Roxie’s Massachusetts twang
in his voice.
 
“They were all the
talk at Fort Bridger, flying air-ships and phlogiston guns!”

Pratt chuckled.
 
“I’m pleased to entertain, sir.
 
Perhaps I can entertain you tonight even further.”

“How’s that?” Poe asked.

“Oh, Jared would be thrilled to take even a short ride
aboard one of the air-ships,” Roxie gushed.

Pratt’s men pried apart the crate with crowbars and stripped
away the cotton batting inside, revealing what Poe had known was in there all
along.

The Seth Beast.
 

It stood stiff and erect, like a shining steel sculpture of
a dog, life-sized if the dog in question were a very large hunting hound or a
small pony.
 
It wasn’t quite a dog,
though; very long, donkey-like ears sprang up at either side of its head,
square at their extremities, and the tail that shot straight up into the air
from its hindquarters forked at the end.
 
Its muzzle, too, had a little of the anteater about it, or maybe the sloth,
curving downward slightly at the nose, over powerful jaws bristling with long
steel teeth.
 
Hinges and ball
joints all over its body hinted at the movement the machine was capable of.