Author’s Proof

…

Copyright 2025 James LaFond

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

…

Dust Cover

With 39 years of faithful service to UPLINK, Auditor Matt is less than a year from retirement. The catch was, so was EARTH… the Mother of humanity was about to be retired as a technological human habitat. As the Colorado Regional Auditor tasked with decommissioning the last and final humanitarian mission on Earth, Matt, seated at his red oak coffee table before the picture window of Earth’s very last house, is assailed with guilt, haunted by doubt and faced with a crisis of faith. Matt’s spirit fell even further, as over the threshold of Wonderview Cabin, framed in the ancient stained beams, limped his new Conductor, the last of that busy kind, rendered as haggard as any of those poor earthbound souls to be fed by that wind-bitten hand one last time.

Extended Dust Cover

Conductor Ted did not remember the cities. He had seen their rubble expanses in his childhood, while they yet smoked, soon after the military had done their work. Other than that and the tormented nightmares of his orphaned youth, all Ted had known since age 15, was work, the long, hard, lonely work of a Conductor. He had been trained by Dave Billy, best of their kind, forty years ago up Wyoming way. Now he was the last of that transitory breed, transferred to Golden Colorado to feed some and Uplift others. He did not know his new Auditor, the last of so many—but he did smile when he saw for certain that Auditor Matt was human, and that he was younger than he, perhaps with still a smile left to go with that steaming cup of coffee.

…

Inspiration

A conversation had with my Colorado host by phone while I waited for a broken train in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A notion of a world purposefully left fallow by the Newly Anointed Tech Oligarchs with their hearts set on the stars, was breathed gray life from the 18th floor of a Chicago hotel as the snow scoured deserted streets far below, and confirmed, two days later, when I was welcomed to Wonderview Cabin, above Coal Canyon, overlooking a wilderness designated so, and being invited to enjoy a:

HUMANITARIAN DAILY RATION

Food Gift From The People Of The UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

…

Dedicated to Matt, who provided me the writing space of Wonderview Cabin for this project, as well as the nutriment mentioned above.

…

Inspirational Quote

“I have more than I need to survive, too much stuff, really. But in a potential time of need, I would like to be able to feed and arm my neighbors.”

-Matt, 2/14/25

Time Line

2041: Ted, who never recalled having a last name, was born in Portland, Oregon.

2045: Matt Styer, was born in Decatur, Illinois.

2050: UPLINK, SOULINK, ILION DAWN and Pyreon were instituted as part of the ARK Project, intended to return earth to its natural state while humanity colonized the Solar System.

2051: Human birth was strictly regulated and limited to nuclear families of three committed [1] to UPLINK.

2052: UPLINK to the solar colonies initiated.

2053: Reduction of cities by the military initiated the Fallow Earth process.

2056: Ted, at age 15, was apprenticed as a Conductor to David Billy.

2057: Matt, at age 12, was hired by UPLINK to interface with Automated Population Management or APM.

2058: Ilion Meek, CEO of UPLINK, initiated Humanitarian Daily Ration

2059: AI Gun Ban enforced by drone.

2060: APM followed the reduction of population centers with the reduction of all housing, production, resource extraction, fencing, and any building not strictly monumental in nature and symbolic in function, to include the decommissioning of all none APM equipment. All agriculture, including stock breeding, eliminated. [2,3]

2081: All dams broken as the final military task before Armed Uplift.

2096: Matt is tasked with Final UPLINK and assigned Ted, the last active Conductor, to assist in the mission.

Timeline Notes

-1. Contracts were replaced by commitments once astrophysicists had determined for certain that a comet was going to pass close enough to earth in 2097 to cause world catastrophe. This fact was not disclosed to the public, ever, was kept as a humanitarian secret, and was not disclosed to to the auditor class until 2086.

-2. AI facility management of nuclear reactors, tasked with precontamiation has preserved the physical structures of these power sources. These have been forbidden zones since the damns were broken.

-3. Bridges were deemed to be short term structures with an obvious symbolic value, as well as a short term humanitarian purpose, as well as rode ways and rail ways. All vehicles, however, that were practicable to be gathered at urban centers for demolition, were wrecked and burned. Rural vehicles were impracticable to gather, with their purpose reimagined to be analogous to that of ships scuttled in mass to form the substructure for new barrier reefs.

Pyreon the Story

Each Scene is Preceded by a Briefing and Exceeded by a Debriefing

Scenes

#1: Humanitarian Daily Ration

#2: The Fence Line

#3: The Overhang

#4: Brie

#5: The Well

#6: The Kin

#7: The Roughneck

#8: The Cave

#9: Sally

#10: Better Fed Than Dead

#11: Ilion Dawn

#12: Mountains My Witness

Pyreon Benedictions

-Elysium

-Nirvana

-Oblivion

-Heaven

-Paradise

-Valhalla

Author’s Proof

…

Copyright 2025 James LaFond

A Crackpot Book

Lynn Lockhart Publisher

…

Dust Cover

From the ascension of Alexander the Great in 336 B.C., throughout his unmatched series of victories, down to his death in 323 B.C., one unit of his expedition was cited, and saw more action, than any other. These men were semi-barbarian allies of the young king from the highlands of what is now Bulgaria. These unmatched fighters who began their conquest of the known world in animal hides, were more loyal than Alexander’s own guards, of his own race. Seeing more action than any other unit of the Macedonian army, the Agrianes, whose primary town had been occupied continuously for some 7,000 years before their bloody 13 year expedition, offer a view to the greatest adventure of antiquity.

Extended Dust Cover

Ode was bundled off from Temesa, in Hellenic Italy, across the Adriatic Sea to a town he had never known existed, and there sold, along with six other youths of about 12 years. On the very advent of manhood, when boys of free men and citizens were admitted into the town guard to patrol the countryside for the community, Ode, bastard to a lame goatherd and a shamed cook, found himself on a strange pier, in an uncaring land, alongside six strange boys of far off lands, gathered for sale before a hard man.

Grace is the story of Alexander’s rise to Kingship and his invasion of Greek Persia, related from the perspective of some of the nameless youths who became men in his wake, men hardened at the keen edge of his pathological will. This account is based directly on that of Arrian’s Alexander Expedition, and is intended as a seven-volume companion to The Son of God, a history by the same author, based directly on Arrian’s seven books.

Historical Sources

Of the three extant, comprehensive accounts of Alexander, those of Arrian, Plutarch and Quintus Curtius Rufus, all are from late Antiquity as far removed from Alexander and his time as we are from Columbus and his. There are fragmentary sources on Alexander, such as Didorus and Polybius, and a few curated fragments from closer to Alexander’s time. Arrian states that he followed Aristobulus and Ptolemy, who were generals to Alexander, as primary sources, and used others, most likely of Nearchus, another officer of Alexander and of Callisthenes, the official expedition recorder, and that of his successor. Such accounts, if differing from recollections that might affront the academic class, need not be destroyed. For a book to be omitted from the historical record, a simple decision not to copy it is enough to consign it to the dustbin of ages.

Additional to these now lost primary sources, Arrian mentions a great mass of “popular tradition,” which he did not discount, and assured the reader that the nature of Alexander the person, might be clearly reflected there. This ever growing popular tradition included a mass of romances, much of which Arrian sneered at, that would have been inflations and distortions of the popular tradition. What is utterly absent is an account from a soldier. Thousands of Alexanders soldiers were literate, and hundreds of them poets, in the oral campfire sense. It was a habit, a dedicated practice of Alexander to visit every wounded soldier and listen to his story. That practice was, in the view of this novelist, the root of the “popular tradition” of the Alexander Romances.

In many ways, Arrian is a cipher. Yet, as a writer, I see his reluctant hand clearly. I my self have labored as a writer against the system we live under and have omitted and edited out more statements that I suspect are facts than most popular writers publish. I see in Arrian a writer who withheld much of what he suspected was truth from his narrative so that his work would survive the ages. Each work, to survive, had to be copied under state sanction, which meant under the approving eye of the financiers who controlled both the politicians and the priesthoods, the ranks from which Arrian and Plutarch were drawn. Ovid and Virgil were punished as exiles for their writings, Paul executed within the memory of elders that would have been known to Flacus, Plutarch and Arrian. It is my intention to faithfully exemplify Arrian’s portrait of Alexander, from the perspective of his most dependable men as they come of age. The narrative idea is not to add a single action, not to expand on any aspect of the expedition, but to flesh out the experience within the framework passed down to us.

Narrative Premise

The Agrianes were never resupplied with fresh recruits from home as were other units. Yet, seeing more action than any, their strength never reduces. I suppose, based on the after action reports of women and children being disposed of, that replacements may have been drawn from the unseen army of slaves who carried the gear and food of the soldiers. Greek armies of the period had twice as many men as listed, with a groom for each horseman and a porter for each footman. The 300 Spartans had each of them, a helot slave, who was also a soldier. Furthermore, it is well known among military historians that the highly valuable Peltast class of light infantry, were drawn from youths [Roman Republican Velites], barbarians [Agrianes] and from slaves and freedmen [manumitted slaves] throughout the Greek world. During one engagement, Alexander’s scouts found “three girls, three boys and three black rams” lying dead as sacrifices to draw a curse upon Alexander. The expenditure of youthful life that we see as innocent to sacred under modern ethics, in Antiquity typed closer to spending money or using oil to light a fire, rather than any dedication to youthful humanity.

By all accounts, Alexander was the most humanitarian, and most kind conqueror of his age. He also became a man well before age 16 when he first led an army. A problem with his loyalty among men of his race was that they were as likely or not men of his father’s age. He would later face mutiny for wanting to induct boys from conquered races into his army. Based on his extreme close moral relationship with Longarus, King of the Agrianes, and the very similar shepherd/hunter camp culture of the Agrianes and the most hardy mountaineer folk that Alexander dealt with from Albania to Afghanistan, it is the “popular tradition” premise of this novel, that such accounts that abounded in Eurasia, to number over 180 romances, were originally composed about the camp fires of the undefeated Agrianes, about their undefeated King, forever a young man who was greeted as a Savior from ethnic slavery, monetary slavery, political slavery and above all from War, which he at once embodied and affronted, never sacrificing to War, but always to the Almighty, who so detested his angel of slaughter, son of heaven though he was.

-Portland, Oregon, Saturn’s Day, War Month, Day 1

…

Narrative Notes

In The Son of God, a history, my guide is Arrian, together with his own guide, Xenophon, as befits an Athenian author, [1] and Alexander’s personal guide Homer, as befits a heroic royal.

For Ode and his fellows, I have chosen as guides: Pausanius in his story of Euthymus and the demon who was a ghost of Odysseus’ marooned sailor, of Hesiod [Ode-singer] who was a shepherd and camp poet, and, like Alexander and Arrian, Xenophon, who described in finer detail much of the same sort of action over the same ground by the same means, that Arrian summarizes. Arrian wrote of battle in shorthand, one suspects, because of the vast scale of Alexander’s expedition compared to that of Xenophon.

I shall also lean on minor Greek Lyrics translated by Richmond Lattimore and of Italian Faerie Tales listened to on audio book between chapters.

I have chosen youthful characters as a means of overcoming a great short coming. I do not wish to write a novel set in a place I have not walked. I was denying Alexander’s relentless ghost knocking on the door to my muse cave when Major Wolf told me, at 7500 feet in the Laguna High Desert, that he was taking me up a box canyon and that I was following him on the spare ATV. He returned as I tried to figure out how the thing started, gave me a brief demonstration on starting and shifting, and tore off. An hour later I rolled the ATV, landed on my feet in the sage brush, and walked behind him up into the box canyon.

He stopped and peered down at me with his narrow military eyes, as we looked up at the boulder cliffs. He said, “There is a Tom Cougar up there! So, how did you like the scenery?”

“Haven’t seen a thing other than the ruts in the trail and your dust. Could have been surrounded by a herd of bison and I wouldn’t know.”

He laughed and left me in his dust again as I jogged down the trail to restart the ATV ahead of the 200 pound cat I had been assured was thirsting for my flatland blood…

This convinced me, that if I put my mind in the place of high stress, that is youth trying to keep up with men in combat, together with the adolescent male obsession with action and unconcern with the pedigree of vegetation and the color of rocks and such, that I could write an operational novel from the perspective of the slave boys hauling the blankets and barley meal and spare javelins and darts of veteran warriors. For, by the time those that survive would come of age, they would be in an alien land were many men I know have fought, the high deserts of Central Asia.

I pledge to keep the action as Arrian described, merely amplifying interior physical activity to do with combat. It is a happy fact that I have spent much time dueling with dull steel machetes of the very type the Agrianies would have used, a macheara, in fact, or cleaver, the very origin for our word machete. It is my intent to post the Areid, or war-ode or war-song or war-story [Acilleas, please rule on this linguistic subtitle] one chapter at a time on jameslafond.com and then put the book in print ASAP, just to get Alexander’s ghost out of my wan beard.

-JL, 3/2/25

The mouth of the path was a cave—it must be a cave, for it was not buttressed, nut built of block, or bored with hard tools. The Germans were at the mouth examining it, one apparently having been a hard rock miner in his youth, a bearded man of 50. Bing-Ham was ahead in the deeper gloom of the “cave” which in his concourse had been named ‘Caverns of the Cairn Keepers.’ Yet now, in his deepened mind, he realized, had been his translation of the fungal thought, as being a passage made by a will and a way not of his kind, not human.

The German sergeant lit a chemical torch, an illuminating cousin of the Congreve Rocket, an eye irritant of the first order, which Richard resented, especially since it ruined his vision. He could no longer see Bing-Ham down the way, making his way by scent and creeping feel into the mountain, along the rising path. His vision adjusted and he could see what so fascinated the men—except for LaFano and Pope, who were watching him with expectant wonder and also the forest down and behind them, a forest which seemed to quiver. This forest quivered; the great boughs of the cedars seemed to sway and shiver, the moss clothing their trunks and spent lower limbs hanging like mutt hair from its shivering owner, the ferns below shivering, birds of various kinds they had not noticed, hiding high and wide, shrieked, peeped, keened and took flight far above the tree tops, like bats up out of a chimney. As Levsky was noting that the tunnel appeared to have been carved by a great squid, which he fancied might have a lair below that connected with the lake or the ocean, the earth quaked. His feet felt the rock under him sing like a great, pain-racked thing.

Richard closed his eyes and concentrated…

In his deepened and expanded mind’s eye he saw a pyramid, the top of which supported a candlelabra of sorts. The arms of this thing were of great brazen pipes. Upon these pipes perched the Phoenix, roosting above the pinnacle of the pyramid in pairs. There were nine pairs of these beasts. A single one flew around them in wide angry circles. At the base of this pyramid gathered men and women, naked save for white headbands, bejeweled with belts, bracelets, anklets and necklaces of white beads, kneeling in prostration at the base of the pyramid, beneath their avian lords. These great and evil birds peeped into the brazen pipes, amplifying their already horrid, ear-splitting call. For all this terrible show of sound, causing the humans far below to writhe in pain and cover their ears, Richard knew that this was merely the mesmerist’s slight of hand, that the earth tremble, the quake, was being caused by the joint Phoenix Mind. He knew with his fungal sense, that the keening was in part a funeral for the ones the Phoenix had slain, and in part a means to cave in the mouth of this tunnel or knock rock down on the U-Boat…

“Back!” he yelled at his men, who stepped away from the tunnel mouth.

A deep rumble sounded above: dirt, timber, rock and moss crashed down before them, injecting debris into the cave.

Richard turned and covered his eyes, calling to Levsky, “Face me away from the torch, up the grade. Put the torch man at the rear.”

Richard held his palms, amazed that he had, without a thought, or even a recollection of it, sheathed his sword.

Levsky turned him like a blindfolded boy taking his turn at pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey while the mountain rumbled. He was pushed up the incline gently, the quaking subsided and the men filed behind, marching parade wise in high steps to the German sergeant’s cadence, a morale-maintaining NCO’s instinct to focus his men under fire.

Richard gradually uncovered his eyes and saw the gloomy world before him in signatures of heat, a lineal world terminating in a gray dot up and ahead. That gray dot, he knew, was the saurian sky, the half light of the Valley of the Phoenix where those terrible birds roosted atop their pyramid.

Marching in cadence with them men, for whom his Sergeant was keeping time with the strident clap of his hands, to the German’s count, Richard could see the savage, prowling outline of Bing-Ham, not far ahead. That retrograde soul was not looking back, but down and to the side into various holes that were about five feet across, where this tunnel was a good fifteen. The man prowled on his haunches, sometimes using his left hand as a third leg, the other cradling his tomahawk.

‘How far will he devolve?’

‘I hope not so far as to lose my opposable thumb!’ came a friendly thought.

“God Bless your savage soul, Bing-Ham,” Richard spoke in a low tone, a tone that filled the cave like an anthem to the cadence of boot heels, creaking leather, clanking and clinking metal and the slither of something awful from the tunnels off and below to either side.

“Triple-time!”

And like a machine made of men they sprinted in line.

Richard prayed for whichever kraut carried the Crank Gun on his shoulder, ‘God Bless that stout kraut.’

Richard did not have his heels scuffed by the man to his rear, whoever that was, as the line of men behind him was illuminated only by sound. The bobbing of the torchlight behind made for a stage-like sense of being a poppet in a play. The pride in his quick stride swelled in him as they ate up the steeply rising tunnel in triple-time. The gray dot became a hole, then a moon, then a bleak sun, then a great window on a world topped by ice-capped peaks.

In that window stood Bing-Ham, looking down and about, in his posture, warning them that they would find themselves high on an eminence accessible to wined foes. With 20 strides to go the torch went out behind him, the bawling of time was silenced by his raised hand, and they came to stand with Bing-Ham, on a towering mountain ledge, cut into a cliff face, above a forested valley. The valley was thirty miles round, roughly, another volcano it seemed. The center, a mile in either direction was richly cultivated crop land, bisected by a slow river, a river that circled the base of a pyramid—the one from his vision—as moat.

Levsky noted, “That river does not flow into he lake. We are a mile higher then that valley and only climbed half of that.”

Richard nodded as the men crowded around and Bing-Ham pointed down between two stone and stucco posts where the ledge projected from the cliff face, about which were fixed to thick lengths of rough rope. Richard stepped to the edge and looked down, to see that the only means of descent from this ledge was down a rope ladder, that Bing-Ham, tomahawk in teeth, was already climbing to another, bigger ledge, 200 feet below.

Richard saw a flight of Phoenix rising from the pyramid and barked, “Color Sergeant, Pope and Krauts, stay here and cover our descend, then retreat and mine out to the boat. Levsky, Suvarov, LaFono, on me!”

Over the edge of an alien world he swung, between those two posts. His boot heels hooked the rope rung below, and he instinctively looked up at Color Sergeant Major, who was saluting him. With a warm rush, through the mutton-chop window of the Sergeant’s face, he smiled at Mum, on her widow walk, waving off a cup of tea because he was not yet home from cards.

This ends the last open posting of A Gaslight Knight at jameslafond.com

To find out what happened to Richard Mogadishu Barrett in the deceptive depths of Antarctica there are a few options:

-1. Wait for the Graphomaniac Archive #2 to appear as an ebook on this site in January 2026.

-2. Go the Pulp Fiction Renaissance site where Richard may post the final two chapters.

-3. Wait for Richard to put the entire book in print, as it has been gifted to him for paperback publication by this writer.

Additionally, though Richard did survive his adventure, so far as Chester Pullman, editor of the Baltimore Daily Raven can ascertain from the news buoy capsule recovered, it appears that our young hero has been dealt a hand by wicked Fortuna worse than becoming a tasty repast for some wicked, ageless kite. He has been sucked through the ether, via some vortex, into a money hunting world, and held here, against his considerable will, a world away from Czarina Svetlana, where he stacks gardening supplies at a “Depot” that is not a base camp for some expedition into the unknown, but a supply dump for the inmates of a dissipation camp to decorate their prison cells. So, men, if you please, find a paperback copy of A Gaslight Knight and encourage our hero to complete the trilogy and toss those news capsule buoys into the Ocean so that the agents of Theography might hurry them back to their curator.

-JL, Portland, Oregon, 1/18/25

…

Remaining Scenes of A Gaslight Knight

A Mutinous Kind

Of Ageless Kites: Chapter 7: Part 2 of 3: Crew

A Muscular Mind

Of Ageless Kites: Chapter 7: Part 3 of 3: Crew

Having passed through the grove while Richard stood in strident concord and learned from his fungal tutor of the moment, the entire party waited on Richard. He was now the leader of their hearts, he knew, sensing it in his chest as We This One bestowed a final piece of advice, “Do not entrust the thoughts exchanged between you and We This One, to your kind, for your kind are not You That One, but a coil that chokes itself, a tangle ever resentful for being undone, as well for being begun. Keep our concourse between Richard The Outer One, and The Ultimate One.

“Agreed,” spoke Richard, still untrusting of telepathy and not yet sure of its extent, range, reception… there had been too many things to know of the Phoenix Kind:

That their females, to lay eggs must dine on these mushrooms in order to give birth to females, and that males were mute of mind, but not dumb. That those great pairs, never permitted to number more than twelve, were composed of a single motherly will that hated the human race as people hate cockroaches, bed bugs, lice and fleas. Unable to erase mankind Phoenix Kind sought to control their multiplication and the spread of the pathogens they carried, this being technology. This might have been guessed. But that those high order saurian minds had been driven here by the comet impact that destroyed most of their world and had also brought these sentient spores to this grove was beyond all reasonable theography.

‘This I might impart, but not the dream treading discipline gifted in parlay by We This One.’

No reply came from We This One, whose face now returned to its native, fungal form.

They awaited patiently, strung out behind the coppery, feral scout, who alone looked about and ahead, the rest looking at him as if expecting him to become a mushroom.

They then looked behind him with wider eyes as he passed through the large cedars that opened upon the steeper path winding up through the jagged-toothed jaws of the mountains, the river it has attempted to cling to having departed down to the right in a rushing of steep waters.

Richard turned and saw there, not the great mushroom or its hundreds of attendant fungi, but an onyx throne, upon which sat a creature that might have been an octopus, if it had thorny bark for skin and vines for tentacles, an organic creature, great-brained and narrow-mouthed, of great antiquity, frozen in some petrified state on that shiny black throne. The grove of trees, the ring as it were, remained, as did the blocks of volcanic rock spaced between. But the interior of the grove itself was now a tangle of thorny vines that quivered and shown with life, the vines themselves terminating in succulent purple flowers, very like the morning glories that had flourished among the tree trunks earlier. These were now replaced by these reeking, seeking buds, like so many thousands of little toothless mouths questing for nectar, drinking a few butterflies, whose surviving fellows yet flirted with flowery death.

Richard shivered and somehow knew that his communication had exhausted We This One, and that his psychic teacher slumbered for a nap that was likely to exceed Richard’s entire life.

Richard turned to face his men, the last waiting him being his faithful Sergeant and Levsky, “The intelligence did say that we must return to the lake by another, unspecified way.”

The Sergeant informed, “An hour until nightfall, Sir. You were sometime among the fungi.”

Richard looked for the sun and could not find it among the towering trees, knowing it to be low in the north somewhere. The Sergeant assured him, “Levsky has assured us that the night shall be brief in this latitude.”

‘I no longer care to define night or day, other than in shades of gray.’

“Yes,” he agreed, feeling how his feet had fallen asleep. Looking ahead at the gap in the trees afforded by the steeper and more narrow way up the gorge, he asked, “How far has it been scouted?”

“The Savage has been up to the top there. He no longer speaks English, has devolved on this very spot. He has intimated by gesture that you will understand him. At the top of the pass, a half hour’s way up rough going, he has indicated is a tunnel, formed by human hand, cut from solid rock.”

“I know. This is the entrance to the Caverns of the Cairn Keepers. We are to take no side passage, but stay to the elevated main grade. The ways were carved, but by no human hand, but by hands that yet reside among the byways which we are advised not to explore.”

‘I sound so empty and far away.’

He felt his left hand clench in anger at his failure to comfort his men, who looked at him in such terror, as if his words and the scene behind him had rendered him larger than life.

‘Oh, you taunting ghost hand!’ he looked down at what he expected to be empty space beside his sword hilt, and saw, his, left, hand, clenched… in, well, in anticipation of something to do!

He drew his sword in the rising guard, leveled it out to their gasping starts and pointed to the top of the pass, “Up the way men, behind our good scout, at the double, on allied alien assurances that the way to the top is clear, though the far side of the pass is thought to be by no means endeared to our arrival—and arrive we will!”

‘There, that had a little steel in it!’

Levsky looked at him level and with a question in his eyes.

“Yes, Commander, please, see if it feels real,” as he retired the riser of the double-edged blade to shoulder.

The Russian squeezed his wrist, poked his bicep, and examined the shoulder, were the sleeve so neatly ended. There they could see the more jagged wound trace, as if in shadow.

“I have the normal sensation of being griped and poked that I recall of boarding school bullies.”

Levsky agreed, took a close look at Richard’s right hand, shook it once, “Congratulations on your newfound friend, Captain. You are, I think, a Lucky man, some angel of God smiling upon you, and I should think that angel is Justice, that daughter of The Almighty that Hesiod fancied devolved her Father’s will on mankind. The Czarina was correct in measuring you an uncommon man.”

“Thank you, Commander. And I am sorry for the loss of your men. Shall we?”

The thin face, too dapper to be trusted fully and too confident to be doubted, grinned too boyishly to be affected, drew his own single-edged curved Cossack sword in his left hand, put it spine to shoulder and assured, “I I have the rear, Captain.”

Richard started out at the double, with no fear of his ankles failing him, for they seemed as good as old in their creaking cases of leather. As well, the Russian feet behind him had some work to do to keep up.

The way ahead, up the steep incline, reminded him that the Saxons had awaited his ancestors on an eminence, less lonely and no less daunting. He felt the voice that he had always fancied belonged to Wolfhound Barrett, the best of the line, well up from some depth within, a depth that pulsed into his veins and pumped as thought into his brains, ‘Feels like a Bit of 1066, My Somali-born Lad, if with a bit less kit.’

The thought felt like voice wrung from the sands of an hour glass to tinkle into a pool of clear water, and that pool felt like it was his mind.

‘Yes Wolfhound, You and Me This One!’

There it rang, in the deeps of his being, a laugh that slid like steel from leather, a laugh that he hoped world ring forever.

The stream was deep, about a fathom, swelling over rounded rock between mossy, fern-festooned banks near full flood. A man tossed into that current would be swept away.

Bing-Ham had tripped off his shirt slacks and tie to expose his bronzed stoutness in a savage loincloth. He stopped and took his left hand, the right forever holding the tomahawk and drew aside some moss to expose a black earth, a rich ashen clay which looked like potting soil. He used this to smear his body. He then took that sheet of moss and scrubbed his face, staining it, then streak his face with the black soil. This strange tableaux held for a minute as they all looked nervously about at their new primeval setting.

Something darted across the stream ahead of Bing-Ham, a large ostrich with an ax-like beak, much heavier than an ostrich, splashing through the from west to east, then looking north down the trail at they the invaders. This thing seemed entirely flightless, its wings used for balance only. In the eyes it demonstrated a brute, reptilian ferocity, a crimson red like the Phoenix, but without that keen intelligence. What intelligence there was there did denote a ravenous need to feed.

The thing keened like a horn stepped forward and Richard drew his revolver, raising is other hand to hold fire, and realized, once again it was not there. The Sergeant noted this and raised his. Something about that tall man raising his hand set the bird in a fury. It was perhaps nine or ten feet as it reared, then blew its horn like call, and strode off in a lumbering gait to the east, through the thick crackle of fallen boughs and the rustle of brushing ferns.

Bing-Ham breathed a sight of relief, as did they all and the pace was regained, a slow walk, that permitted the scout to check the trail and pick his way, the officers to look ahead and behind and the NCOs to the side, the soldiers following their leaders gaze for quicker action. Richard notes noted that his men LaFano and Pope were armed each with Colt 0.45 caliber revolvers on their right hip, a German trench knife on their left hip, and that a boarding ax, a wicked modern take on Bing-Ham’s Indian ax, rode easily, even criminally in their left hands.

Along a gentle rise they traced the east bank of the river among the ferns, giant ferns, cedars and willows. One gigantic alder, a great almost white tree, was hollow on its north-facing base, between two great roots. There, looked out upon them an armadillo that must have been as large as a prize hog. It backed further in and blinked its dull glassy eyes at them.

In the trees, parrots flocked, ravens stood off alone or in pairs, like witnesses to eternity. The river was inhabited mostly by trout and sturgeon. Where the birds spied upon them attentive to their presence, the fish, who could have been threatened by men, seemed unconcerned with their passage and even their drawing of water. This water was the coolest, most pure and satisfying water Richard had ever tasted.

‘Do Phoenix Kind dip into our habituation zone to feed on our minds, our souls, like we draw water and even fish from their life’s stage?’

‘Yes,’ came a thought into his mind, from a source he had not since been contacted in this way.

Svetlana was a telepath. Bing-Ham’s savage genes somehow permitted him to intuit his thoughts… and required close proximity. The terror bird that had somehow transferred to him this ability required one to hear its song or gaze into its eyes.

‘Who or what is this?’

‘Come closer,’ came the thought, ‘you know the way.’

“Yes,” he muttered, “300 paces ahead…”

“No,” cautioned Bing-Ham, placing is hand on Richard’s shoulder and breaking the spell, “Sir, do not muse or mull over thoughts. As men use traps, wire, mines to protect our fortresses, Phoenix Kind target the mind.”

Richard shook himself, and found he was being regarded by LaFano in a brash way. Richard snorted, “Why, of course you are immune!”

“To what, Boss?” answered the little old goon.

Richard, sighed, lowered his head, and asked, “Honorable footman, please, take the lead, just behind Bing-Ham, and let not a thought upon the fate of humanity trouble you passage.”

“Yez, Boss,” obeyed the brute, and jaunty as a cock took up the trace, Pope second, Richard next, and Color Sergeant Major fourth in the depleted Barrett contingent.

‘It is hard not to wonder in such a place of wonder.’

‘Yes, indeed Outer One,’ came the alien thought.

Barrett stopped and looked at Bing-Ham, hissing, “I am cursed with a rampant mind.”

“Or blessed,” hissed the man of science devolving to his savage ancestry before his eyes, “The footmen and I will stand watch, Sir.”

The Color Sergeant signaled for a watch of the line, to which the Germans crouched and faced in all directions, at the grim ready. The two Russians hurried to his side.

Richard hissed, “Are you getting the thoughts?”

“Captain,” whispered the Russian, “my mind is impenetrable. I am a duelist; what to others is empathy is to me an anatomy of my foe’s weakness. I, am a psychopath. Only honor and duty keep me from the monstrous path.”

“An intelligence is beckoning me to come to it 300 paces ahead. A trap, an ally, a ruse?”

The thin mustache of the Commander mimicked his narrowing eyes as he determined a course, “We are headed there, in any event—beating the bush will run us into one of those terrible flightless birds.”

Richard looked to his sergeant with a nod and the tall man signaled ‘Line ahead,’ and they marched, warily, deeper into the meadow which did decline and become moister before rising again some 300 paces ahead.

Levsky hissed, “Something on the first low bench, look at the size of those trees where the game path winds.”

“A grove, a circle of great cedars.”

Savage Bing-Ham was creeping up the incline ahead, LaFono and Pope spread out behind foot-padding their way through mossy deadfalls, waving ferns of an enormous size, the coppery trunks of cedars. A great variety of fungi sprouted in all colors. Something like morning glory, in great profusion, crept its ivy way up the certain trunks of the circle of great trees up and ahead about which no four men could link hands.

He was glad to see butterflies doing their work. Bing-Ham arrived at the grove and skirted it. The Footmen stopped at the base of two great trees upon which the white flowered morning glories, the bane of any a gardener worked their vampiric way.

In a mere minute Richard arrived between his footmen, who stood like sentinels, nervous ones as afraid to be afraid as they were of entering this ring of trees, trees that were so vast in size, that despite being fifty paces apart, but little sunlight filtered down to the meadow, a meadow absent grass yet lush with ground cover: heather, trumpet vine, clover and deep green moss clinging to the southern side of the trunks and large glassy rocks that seemed to have been placed between the tree trunks.

There was this one path entering up the slight rise, and then bisecting the grove, making a trodden circle around a purple dotted mushroom of unfathomable size.

Richard stopped, shocked at the sight of such a fungi. More shocking yet was the thought that came to his mind, ‘Welcome Outer One. Would you prefer a face after your form?’

He heard the men lining up behind him and forming a small cordon.

‘That would be nice, I suppose particularly for my friends.’

‘Enter, Please, Richard, the Outer One.’

Richard noted that the meadow was become profuse with large mushrooms. These were in kind like this five foot fungi with a round cap of purple dotted white, which grew to six feet, to these ankle-height attendants. As he walked in, the rest stayed back. The meadow floor fairly sprang to life with myriad tiny versions of this mushroom. The spongy under section of the cap, spotted with inky dots, gradually formed into something like a human face, giving the appearance of a large-nosed, narrow-faced man with alabaster skin spotted in purple. There was no mimicking of teeth in the mouth.

Standing before the giant mushroom, with a manlike face, he announced this weird audience, “Captain, Sir, Richard Barrett, In Service to The British Empire, in Association with Various Parties with grievances against the Phoenix, who have attacked us in our country, who we have traced to the valley at the head of your river. I seek permission to pass with my party.”

The mushroom was unable to make sounds, though the face mimicked his speaking mechanics, even the tilt of his head to the left for emphasis, which he did not think was so pronounced.

The thoughts were not harsh like those of the Phoenix:

“They feed upon We This One, fallen here as colonists when their kind where driven from your world by the extra solar body that brought We This One.”

Understanding something about gardening and foraging from his youth above Loch Raven, and knowing mushrooms to be clones, Richard responded, “Do you grow beyond this grove?”

‘We This One do not desire to propagate beyond.’

‘Richard, the Outer One, you and yours may pass. Thank you for not feeding upon us.’

“Do not eat the mushrooms—they are sentient, telepathically so,” so Richard waved the party onward through the grove, staying to the last as he was advised by We This One.

It was all a rush to avoid an opposed landing, opposed by air and underwater no less. The U-Boat had a number of inflatable skiffs that would be of dubious usage for equipment, especially with the infestation of short-necked saurian “sharks”; something like giant penguin filling the role of a sea lion and developing a blow tube fin on its back. These things kept their distance from the U-Boat.

Bing-Ham supposed that they had a sound wave feedback ability, like whale kind, sensitive to metal. The Crew Boat held 12 men. Four oars and a rudder required a mate and four sailors. The aluminum boat itself had been stowed in aft hatch, this itself a wonder of Teutonic logistics to Richard.

That left seven men for selection. This would be up to Richard as the terrestrial officer. All but the First Officer, now Captain, and a few crew were on deck. A deck gun had been cranked up out of a hatch, a 40 millimeter weapon with round sights designed for shooting things in flight. Three men manned that.

The Second Mate and the four most dauntless sailors stood at attention. They were each armed with a stamped steel 9 mm pistol in a belt case, which he thought was a neat wonder, but too weak to hurt the Phoenix. Each had an 8 mm Mauser carbine with a belt box of ammunition and bayonet. The Mate had one of the very interesting revolver carbines slung over his shoulder and a straight naval cutlass at his hip.

“Seven then,” he said.

Donetz affirmed this with a grave nod.

“Levsky and Suvarov, of course.”

Svetlana was giving him a sulking look, and so he passed over her in the selection.

“Myself, Color Sergeant Major, LaFano, Pope… Bing-Ham.”

“O’Neal, I am sorry. You distinguished yourself. But have suffered a wound of sorts. Besides someone my Mum can stomach listening to must survive, if I do not return.”

He noted the deep flows of three glacier steams feeding into this massive lake, knowing there would be certain lesser creeks and inlets hidden form view.

He nodded to the mate and Sergeant and the men began boarding the boat, armed to the teeth.

He then looked to Pullman, “Sir, do you have reporting capsules?”

Pullman grinned, “In the absolute, Captain,” and motioning to the reporter whose name Richard had never bothered with, for which he felt rude. This man brought forward a harness, like a grenadier would have with his long handled stick bombs strapped to it. Only this contraption, now put on and buckled by the newspaper man over his service jacket, had four gray metal tubes of ribbed steel. The reporter briefed him as he buckled:

“Each tube has ten pages of parchment, more survivable than paper, with a pen. The end unscrews and is air tight. The button inside the cap activates a wireless “sonar” ping developed by the German U-Boaters. What issues into this lake does reach the sea. Though we would rather greet your safe return, Sir. It is my honor. Your are buckled in.”

The boat was ready to make way. Richard took the man’s hand, looked him in his watery green eyes, under that fop of thinning hair, “The honor is mine, Sir. You are?”

“Bradly Kennan, Sir, investigative journalist with the Baltimore Daily Raven.”

Richard patted the man on the shoulder, saluted the slight crew, tipped his cap to the Czarina Svetlana, who was nearly in tears, and then took his way down expertly, clearly remembering his one arm, with boot and hand down the ladder, his revolver and sword riding easy on his hips and the four news capsules feeling like a bit of armored kit from some bygone age.

Helped down to the boat deck by Levsky, who handed him a nautical kraut spyglass, Richard felt the cold misty lake and the weird creatures swimming within. He looked overboard to see down through the azure clear water as the saurian sea lions swam down and away, some hundreds of feet, looking up at them with strange intent.

The men began to pull on those four oars and propel them at a gainful pace. A few hundred yards and they would be ashore. He saw LaFono, with the Furgeson Crank gun strapped to his back, knowing that any mishap would plunge his footman and the valuable equipment to the bottom.

He looked to the shoreline all about, over the 180 degrees not blocked by the surprisingly large U-Boat, and noted that the trees were not all ever green. No oaks or maples were there, but alder. The cedar with its hanging fronds and red skin-like bark were the predominant plant. The water cold water of the rivers hit the warming water of the lake and turned to a mild mist at the shore line, which lapped on mossy rocks of black, the stone predominantly volcanic. The 180 degrees west and north soared the towering cliffs of the inside of a shattered mountain, making for their expedition a grim backdrop. The only egress would appear to be the tunnel through that black wall.

Bing-Ham caught his inner note ad whispered, between the pull and dip of the oars, the only sound here about, “This is, I suspect, a volcanic caldera. Expect increasingly arctic conditions and a change from cedar to pine as elevation increases.”

A great sloth was seen drinking from one of the glacial rivers, the nearest one, the mouth of which was perhaps 30 paces across.

Bing-Ham noted, “I will make the maps, Sir. I have an exact topographical mind. Your impressions will be duly captioned,” as he tapped a leather case on his chest. The man also wore a tomahawk, a Bowie knife and a bone scalping knife.

‘No gun?’ thought Richard.

“No, Sir, I do not favor the gun. I will fashion a spear, and a bow, the sinew for which rides in this, my medicine bag.”

The man tapped a pouch on his hip as he pointed with his chin to a flight of real parrots, actual parrots, not the massive devil birds, but green, orange and blue decked birds with wingspans exceeding that of any eagle.

The shore was only 100 yards off as he glanced back to see the U-Boat growing small in the distance. Most of the crew was inside, the gunners and officers there, O’Neal waving to him from the deck, such a loyal man.

He could see her there and turned his spyglass, wanting to get one more look at that pretty face of deep serious calm.

She smiled, knowingly, so he thought, ‘See you soon, Milady.’

‘Yes,’ he felt her in his mind as she smiled and the broad shoulders of her maid interceded.

A touch on his shoulder brought him around with his spy glass, Levsky pointing to a distant peak between a gap in the forest caused by the river whose mouth they approached on the north side. Spying southeast he could see, with that magnification where the pass opened into a valley surrounded by hump-backed peaks to east and west. The valley was backed by a bald dome of a barren peak, and icy eminence that towered far above the perpetual cloud line that ringed this valley from the rising mist.

There, he could plainly see two of the great birds circling far and away, perhaps 20 miles distance as the Phoenix flies.

The boat ground to a stop on a bed of round, glassy river rock. He leaped out first onto the mossy shore, as he closed the spyglass, his ankles holding in his medical boots. He turned and ordered, “Stow and cover the boat between those two great cedars, Men, then after me up the river to the fiend’s den!”

‘Caution, my Gaslight Knight,’ her mind warned into his, and he smiled, not permitting his operational focus to be diverted by his weird and wonderful gift from those terrible birds.

‘Besides, Bing-Ham might be privy to our correspondence.’

“Not at all, Sir,” said Bing-Ham, sticking behind him like a shadow. “If you please, Sir, I should take the trace lead and check the way.”

“Of Course, Bing-Ham to scout.”

He then paused, “Levsky and crew, rear guard.”

The Russian officer and the German mate saluted him and waited for the scout to make ten paces while the men stowed the boat, then Richard lead off with his tiny force.

The Color Sergeant assured him, “Well done sir. A strong rear it is. Pope, LaFono be ready with the Crank.”

LaFano complained, “Fawking Hell, Boss, my back is bent to broke.”

Richard halted, “You are right. Sergeant, assign the heavy ordinance to the German crew. I dare say they will make better use of it.”

And the expeditionary shuffle was on, the final dispositions made at the pace in time where the green forest swallowed them and took away the view of their iron whale.

‘We Jonahs, Lord, please bless our way.’

A terrible peel, a sound like a ship’s whistle but such that it shook the sanity of those sensitive of ear, and as well those sensitive of heart, sounded outside the boat as it submerged. The blowing of ballast, the whirring of engines powered by something lighter that steam boiler, something that did not need such an acid reek of fuel as coal, and the pinging of something generated by the boat, did, he thought, save much of the crew from the dreadful call.

Standing next to Bing-Ham on the main deck, such a small thing, a hallway, really, he wondered at this machine, knowing better than to worry the Admiral and First Officer with questions, ‘Is this petroleum based power’ after all the disasters at well sites, suicides of engineers, commitment to asylums of inventors—somehow realized in defeat by kraut science?’

Bing-Ham whispered, low of tone, next to his neck, ‘Loss of The Great War was the best chance science had of developing. State Industry and capitalism are too easily infiltrated by the Phoenixian mind. As, well, the men of Theosophy have been vetted for peace of mind. Stoics are the only thinkers who have a chance before the Phoenix.”

Richard, his eyes taking in the scene of the men busy within their wondrous machine noted, as an experiment, in his mind, ‘Among men of action and clear conscience is another source of resistance?’

“Yes,” agreed Breck Bing-Ham, a much older soul that his unlined face and stout manner would suggest.

The proof that Bing-Ham could receive Richard’s thoughts was as unsettling as the terror bird’s song.

“Feelings too, Sir,” spoke the civilized Injun, “only since the attack on the airship. You have been inducted by the enemy, after a fact.”

LaFono came to him with that hard leather and brass case strapped to his back, a serious look on his face.

“Yes, Old Boy, first up the way we will be.”

O’Neal was standing by with a case of brass sticks that likewise brought a thrill to Richard, “God Bless Mister Ferguson,” recalling the old crank or crackpot tinker gunsmith who used to visit when he was a boy.

‘Might he have been driven mad by these damned conspiratorial avians?

Blackie was standing by with an Enfield service rifle, with un-fixed bayonet ready to hand.

The churning oblivion outside the shell of this steel whale sank and shuddered. A great scream, like the death knell of some gargoyle gurgled to the aft. Three, five, nine minutes, by the Color Sergeant Major’s pocket watch, then a tenth hellish minute of waiting for something to rend the steel skin and peel them out like sardines from a tin. At short last, a greater sense of buoyancy surrounded them.

Richard, now hung with sword and pistol, stepped up to the Admiral, who was ordering, “periscope up,” to an optical sailor, saluted, and declared to the Admiral, “My men and I will sally.”

Donetz saluted him and nodded for one sailor, “Quick on the hatch and low to the deck.”

The sailor donned a helmet, slung a strange looking carbine revolver with a forward pistol grip, over his shoulders to hang at his belt, and ran up the ladder. Blackie was next, then LaFono, then Richard, with the two tall men in reserve, the four short men in the lead for quick sally work.

Commands in German were being given on technical matters. Levensky and Suvarov were coordinating with the ladies in Russian. Under the stress of action, English had been abandoned by their allies for the smoother speech of their mother tongues.

The steel whale surfaced nose up and then broke water much like a flesh and blood whale might. A single scree of mind-splitting fright sounded outside and above. A more ragged call sounded mournful and forlorn near the aft. O’Neal commented, “The kraut screw must o’ chopped one of those devil ducks, Sir.”

“At the other, MEN!” he snarled as the German sailor unscrewed and popped the hatch on a three count. The fellow leapt out shadowed by a great down chopping yellow beak witch clanged against the steel deck.

The revolver spat flame into that wicked beak as one terrible eye looked down the hatch and Blackie stabbed that eye with the muzzle of his Enfield and charged with all the Bantu ferocity built up over 40,000 years in the torrid zone!

Blackie was up and out, standing shoulder to shoulder with the German sailor blazing away with his revolver, now empty of its cylinder—and they were gone, snatched away, the emerald sweep of feathers announcing their fate.

LaFono was climbing fast, Richard behind, O’Neal piling out behind him, “Blackie!” yelled Richard, as the best shovel in Maryland would not give up the fight, shoving the muzzle against that beak even as he and the dangling German were scissored in half by those razor sharp talons, legs walling one way, torso and shoulders the other,

The Color Sergeant was out on deck, “Yer Gawd Awful Crank, Sir!”

O’Neal and the Sergeant had opened the case still strapped to LaFono’s back as the Irishman grabbed the gunwhale with both hands, ducked his head between them, presenting a miniature machine of a gun on his back—Mister Furgeson’s good duck-hunting gift, which he had never thought proper for hunting Loch Raven Reservoir below Dark Hall.

The sights were up, the well oiled crank at 12 on the clock, O’Neal pressing a stick of 0.30 caliber rifled slugs in the top breach.

The devil duck of a kind that Mister Furgeson perhaps never imagined even in his worst whiskey dreams, arched high, and swooped down in a long lazy curve to have at them, rage in its great crimson eyes.

That beak was drawn across the bead before Richard’ sight—and he cranked! The weapon boomed in staccato gusto, nine spewing flames, one from each rotating barrel.

‘This was such a wonder!’ he thought at the bird, whose eyes lit on either side of the chipped beak as rounds sunk into its breast and it stalled, alighting on the fore deck, standing in an awful roost, glaring hate at them.

‘Ah, so you are the male of the pair!’ Richard thought, as the thing spread its wings for one final charge and O’Neal slammed home another brass hopper of 9 rounds—Bang-to-the-nine, in the breast and the terrible thing listed off right.

To the left he felt hate dripping from the sky and there looked. A lame bird, one of the three razor digits on its left claw missing, waddled from the water, shook off a hundred gallons or water at least, looked at him and piped, ‘!FOOD!’

O’Neal sank to his knees trembling.

Color Sergeant Major took over, loaded another hopper, and the bird, understanding, took terrible flight up and over the cedar forest that lined this glacial lake, the water warm from some volcanic source. Above into the midst, and higher still above that mist and towards forested foothills, set in chill relief by the blue white mountains, soared that monster.

“Now there, O’Neal, that’s a stout lad,” cheered the Sergeant as Levsky game through the hatch and Richard’s loyal coachman, nearing sixty years, stood on shaky legs and nodded at the vanishing thing, “Poor Blackie.”

Richard wilted a bit inside, then bristled when some furtive fins broke the water and gobbled what remained of the collier and the sailor.

Vomiting within such a confined can of a boat was out of the question for a Captain in Her Majesty’s Service. But, for a printer and news reporter, the act of heaving’ ones stomach contents into a bucket, thoughtfully provided with a lid, seemed to provide no shame. Richard had slept deeply until the calm, even serenity of underwater propulsion was interrupted by their tiny tubular world bobbing like a top upon the waves of a wrestless sea. The first sounds that greeted him were the vomiting in tandem of the printer and reporter.

Then came the kindly touch of a big hand. Richard opened his eyes to see the broad face of Bing-Ham regarding him with an urgent smile. That broad face and thin mustache and point of beard offered no contrast to those dark thoughtful eyes, the visage presenting something of a concord of learned curiosity.

“Sir,” said he in a voice as soft as the hand was big, “you are requested upon the tower. We have been at sea three days now.”

“Three days?” he erupted in a scandal of shame, not as shameful as the puking of the two newspaper men, but quite the equivalent for one who fancied himself so vigilant.

“The U-Boat surgeon sedated you for graduated observation, Commander Levsky as well. In the past, those who have faced the Phoenixiathan and survived have suffered mental illness, dementia, even violent insanity.”

‘My ego will not even consider the possibility!’

As if reading his mind through his face, Bing-Ham smiled as Richard became suddenly concerned with Levsky, “Is Commander—”

“Yes, Sir. He sent for you. He was kept under observation for a briefer period. Due to the proximity of your encounter, caution tinged the doctor’s judgment. You are needed above. Your men have already cleaned and dressed you.”

Seeing the great emerald neck feather in the cargo netting next to his bunk, Richard, pleased that his boots were on, grasped the thing and held it to his heart as the boat rocked and a poor soul down the way wretched. On his feet in a fury of urgency tinged with the shame of oversleeping twice now on this expedition, if under the influence—which was no excuse—he was bout Her Majesty’s business.

In less than a minute, this rocking world being so small, Richard was ascending the thirteen rungs of the ladder to the tiny deck above, Bing-Ham behind him, the quill bitterly gripped in his teeth, the broad feather silk-like brushing the epaulette above the useless limb taken by a dastard low-velocity Somali matchlock…

That bitterness was washed away by the look on her face, turning as she did between Levsky and Donetz. The German captain completed the military roster on this tiny deck, all four scholars now present. Svetlana appeared beautiful in her sky blue Air Service uniform, sadness for the loss of so many fellow service men, tinged with a real relief to see Richard.

This quite took him by surprise as he numbly presented the emerald feather to the Czarina.

“Thank you, Captain,” she spoke as she thought more tenderly in his mind, ‘Thank God you are whole.’

Turning away, the both of them, to defray any appearance of impropriety, a cold cruel, beautiful view opened to him. Sventlana passing the feather down to Hilda, who was now creeping up the ladder, whispered, “Dear Hilda, please place this in my rifle case, and do shoulder the rifle please. The feather needs to be studied, and more importantly concealed from its kind, who might be able to sense it in some mundane way, by sight at least.”

The women and the feather were soon forgotten, which brought some sense of expeditionary pride back to him. He began to wonder insecurely, ‘Where is Color Sergeant Major,’ and this brought two strange effects.

Sventlana pretended not to know his thought, with a scrunching of her pretty blue eyes. And Bing-Ham, feigning not to be privy to his thoughts, matter of factly noted, “Your Sergeant, Sir, is organizing your kit. The Admiral assures us we will soon ride at anchor.”

The man winked, with a face of friendly conspiracy, and pointed to to the towering ice cliffs facing the swelling bay, a deep dark water inhabited by bobbing ice bergs many like small mountains, others islands.

The cold summer wind bit his nose and he asked, “Might I ask where?”

The Admiral, who had, through a set of binoculars, been examining the ice cliffs that made a hundreds foot high beach wall before the towering white peaks behind it, nodded to the Captain. That stern officer, much shorter than his Admiral, broke open a hard octagonal case, which contained six spy glasses. These were handed around to the four scholars, Richard and Levsky.

He looked to Svetlana, wondering if she would like to use his spy glass. To this she smiled demurely, “Oh, thank you Captain. You so obviously serve a Queen. I have already seen it.”

Zephyr narrated in his droning dead pan, so languid for such a prying mind, “Czarina Svetlana located the Phoenixopolis through years of painstaking remote viewing.”

Gentlemen no more, but eager children of curiosity, the men put glasses to eyes as Svetlana pointed with her pretty finger, narrating with her sky-like voice, “Note the current that pushes the calved ice flow clear in that inlet to the southwest, at two of the clock.”

They affixed their gazes there and Richard saw through his open eye on the scope a river pouring into the natural harbor outward and upward from a tunnel of ice.

She continued, “They cannot top those mountains due to their weight, the thinness of the air, and their relatively slight wing span. They access our geographical world through that tunnel, out of which they swim, sunning themselves on the ice bergs like so many diabolical ducks, then set forth among us, only when necessary. They do most of their work through telepathy, working through the molded minds of men, dominating our theographical world.”

Her voice then struck a quivering chord, “We should dive, Admirable, please.”

With those words a shudder rent the U-Boat, a shudder that had been presaged in her quiver. A scree tore the air as a great emerald head soared up out of the water, over the tower, a terrible talon tearing off the German scholar’s head in a shower of blood. Bedlam now ruled. Richard made to draw his sword and it was not there, neither was his pistol on the other hip.

The U-Boat Captain was giving orders through a horn as the others descended in order, scholars first and military men last. She was clutching his knee in a shivering half swoon at his feet, both her hand wrapped about his mid leg, under the dubious shelter of his armless shoulder.

Levsky drew the Admiral’s pistol and the Captain’s, handing the latter arm to Richard, both of them standing ready as the others descended.

The deck listed forward as a great bird alighted there with metal grating talons. It’s eyes were fixed on the Captain, who began bleeding from the nose and ears and collapsed before them.

Levsky emptied his pistol expertly, ruffling the great green breast feathers.

He then pried Svetlana from Richard’s leg gently, speaking Russian, and took her down the ladder as Richard slowly squeezed off rounds into the face of the terror, half of them skidding off the armored beak.

The gun empty, the bird stalking close, Richard tucked the hot barrel into his belt, stepped down the ladder, grabbed the inside of the hatch and pulled it close above him as he climbed down with the aide of his left hand—which failed him again…

And there he hung, righting himself with braced ankles as he screwed the hatch shut and the sound of terrible munching upon the two dead Germans above competed with the din of diving sirens and the clanging on the haul of some great beast under the dark water.

The speed at which the U-Boat crew and the men under Levsky, Pullman and The Color Sergeant stowed all equipment on board the whale of a boat, absently amazed Richard as he stalked in real kind. He was stalking about the slain beast, a half ton parrot with 12 feet of height, 26 feet of wingspan, a head the size of a rhino, a beak like a titan tree-pruner, and an eye the size of a human head. The massive brain, thrice that of a person’s brain, was purple, not gray, and was threaded with great arterial vessels exposed by the shot of Levsky that tore off the crown of the saurian head.

Prodding about with his sword, not butchering or dissecting, but probing, Richard found, couched among nasal tubes, something of a second brain, connected to the main—probably an additional lobe, not an altogether separate organ. This gelatinous sack was filled with a kind of oil, perhaps an ichor such as was said to have flowed through titanic veins in ancient myth. Careful not to pierce this sack, in case it was corrosive as in the fables—which he thought were more than fable—Richard considered the burning mate of this creature, how its tail and head had flamed the brighter, the longer.

Levsky was shadowing him, politely, at a distance. They had fought this thing. It was their business. The officers and crew were more than capable of taking on the expeditionary effects. Richard paced around behind the great parrot and observed the tail, not a normal bird tail, but something that might belong to a penguin or a whale—perhaps a great mallard duck.

He heard his own voice wandering strangely and alone among the crackling, sizzling, roaring and steaming of The Czarina.

“I doubt if these things can gain great altitude. In the future, airship doctrine should be for radical lift when attacked by these. Like hawks, eagles or penguins, I wager these are a mated pair and that if one is slain the other will go all-in.”

He was behind the tail feathers now, touching them with his hand, “It looks tropical, but is more the duck, an aquatic bird. The organ in the forehead, the brain lobe, perhaps connected to the trumpet-like sinus, is its main mode of attack and control. Darwin would be astounded. Yet I think Mather would come closer to the mark in identifying this nightmare creature, as a daughter—for it is female, I think, based on its ferocious feeding language it directed at my mind—of Enchidna, a Tiamat.”

Levsky was stalking close, looking with interest at the creature as the remains of one of his sailors sizzled and moaned in the background. The sailor that had been left at his feet was still in death, with no doubt in Richard’s mind that the death of the creature that’s predacious brain had seized him in such agony, had released him of all possibility of earthly suffering.

“Sir,” continued Richard, in a tone oddly detached and quietly fanatic, which would have given him a pause of self-reflection if not for his tone being a true reflection of his myopic intensity, “the Chimera that scourged Enkidu for rending the terrible veil, the mother of Grendel, who was aquatic, the dragon that slew her slayer, Beowulf, and even the Worm Oroboros eating its tail—would not this creature prune its own tail feathers? Python and Typhon, the sirens with their ruinous song? Might the poets have warned as many times only to have us shrug our shoulders over the improbability of their fancy?”

Levsky said, deadpan, as his men and machine continued to burn, “The first one we have killed.”

“Beowulf might argue the point,” smiled Richard.

“We must go, before another pair come to their distant call,” urged Levsky.

“Yes,” smiled Richard, sheathing his sword and using both—no, just the one hand, as the left shouldered bent pathetically—to draw forth one great emerald feather, a smaller one from about the back of the neck, “I speculate that as whales communicate many leagues through sound waves under water, that these devil ducks do the same through the air.”

Within five brief minutes, Levsky and he were boarding the extruding spout of the steely Teutonic whale, up a ladder and onto a small deck for four men, and then down through a steel hatch. This moved him to think, “Are we finally imitating Jonah in his sorrowful quest, or Gilgamesh or Beowulf in search of truth?”

He stood now, comically, he thought, holding the two foot feather before Admiral Donetz, who completed his outer thought, “Odysseus, Jason, Aeneas, did not they all—to include Hanno, who failed to return from his final sally—so venture? They, like swans, but we, as you have observed, like Jonah, a prophet after all.”

This concord of thought brought Richard out of his tireless, detached trance, he regarded the Admiral and on impulse extended his hand, realized it had a feather in it, went to switch it from right to left, was reminded in a sickening start that he had but the one hand, causing his recent towering confidence to plunge.

Noting the turn of melancholy as they stood at the base of the ladder from the extruding spout, a sailor screwing the hatch shut and climbing down, the stern face of Donetz softened as he extended his left hand to take the feather and his right to take the sanguine hand of Richard.

His voice soothed in a low tone of high character, “Well done, my young fellow. Our losses are often not fully to mind for some time. I still wake expecting the crew of U-22 to be at their stations, though they long ago went forever below. I suppose you have brought this trophy for our darling clairvoyant, The Czarina?”

“Yes, Sir,” Richard spoke to the Admiral, so relieved to be so entirely outranked in age and station by the man before him that he was able to become tired and look about for a berth. This was noted by the Admiral with a sad smile.

The Captain gave some order in that nearly extinct language, generally reserved for scientific and engineering projects, and the steel well hummed to life. Confirmations and orders were spoken in German, as the Admiral himself saw Richard down a short narrow hall, to a rack of bunks, and put him to bed like Daddy once had, “Sleep Daunt Richard, we will soon be over The Wrack, and She, shall wake you from your hard won nap.”

He felt the feather quill placed in his hand, like a pipe of bamboo in his palm, his eye lids falling like pouring sand.

‘The poor soul,’ thought Richard as the Russian sailor continued to squirm and moan at Levsky’s booted feet.

‘What fine boots, of soft red doe hide, fringed with ermine below the knee—how I would like such boots, if my ankles were not shattered to bits and requiring these damnable medicals!’

So ranted Sir Captain Richard Mogadishu Barrett, [0] as he descended into the inward critiques and micro-myopic observations that occupied his fanatic mind at such times. It was his special curse, which he had shared only with the terrible crusader within; that when peril was nigh, time for him slowed, the world and its moving parts were bared to him, even as War barred the normal folk from such understanding. Richard could see the earth turning ever so slightly and also the magnetic sphere that was its aegis, only at such times, when details blurred for the rest of humanity, which apparently did not include Levsky.

‘Perhaps we are beasts of a kind?’

‘How else do we so callously ignore the terrible agony of our loyal fellow at our feet?’

Slowly, Richard’s telescopic mind focused within Time.

‘Perhaps, my lack of peripheral perception cursed me to a singular arm to mirror this singular focus?’

‘Focus.’

‘!NO!’ sang a hideous peep of razor cutting thought.

His body shook and quivered.

‘Yes!’ he thought, and “YES!” he spoke, cold, cool, strident, as the flames of the dying air ship back-lit a titanic avian form emerging with singed feathers from the outer flames. Those inner flames engulfed another such Phoenix of a titan, burning and screeching horribly among the melting men and burning gas, canvas and rubber—the aluminum itself melting like a great whale-formed Icarus made of candle wax.

“YES!” roared Levsky, like a drunk Turk calling a dancing girl to his cushioned throne.

What emerged, wattle-like, a head so heavy that it hung forward some seven feet from the ground, was a green bird. The plumage, where it was not singed, was emerald. The monster stood an easy 12 feet. It’s wings expanded, shaking off sparks and some smoldering feathers, each feather as big as a Somali shield, to a span of some 24 feet.

Richard’s ‘leisurely nigh mind’ as he thought of his fanatic focus, noted that it would not be such a good flier, only a marginal winged thing. Yet its giraffe-like legs were coils of great strength, talons larger than elephant feet, its tail feathers flexing like the back-fin of a whale. The talons at the base of the great legs, legs that joined the forward leaning mass of barrel-like plumage, scraped and tore the thick turf of the liftway to shear into the rocks below, picking one up, a rock the size of O’Neal’s large Gaelic cranium, and threw it forward.

Richard braced for God Almighty’s judgment, standing stark still, as he saw Levsky did three paces to his right, both of them with pistol upward and at rest.

Levsky might have gotten off a good shot at this range of a hundred paces, with that telescopic Kalishnakov dueling pistol with its 32 inch barrel. But there was a greater battle being fought here, a battle for control of their minds.

The speed of the hurtling rock was in excess of the best baseball pitch or football penalty kick. Richard saw it leave the talon as the thrower, that great bird of over ten feet in height, skipped with its other talon, taking a ten-pace one-legged hop, then gripping the turf and some grinding rocks underneath, pitched a speeding underhand.

Richard saw that rock, larger than his modest Norman skull, coming directly for his face.

‘May it take off my head and not deprive me of the remaining arm!’

He lost the ability to track the oncoming missile, it seeming to freeze like a photograph as it was released from the titanic talons.

Then he felt it thunder by in the same instant it disappeared from his sight, burning a glass black skid mark on the leather band of his service cap just above his ear, which likewise earned a skid mark, not unlike when he fell from his tricycle on the event of riding it down the stairs to the kitchen when he was a tyke.

Levsky barked a harsh laugh, “We must duel some day, Captain!”

Richard grinned, “After we swap firing irons, of course, Commander!”

Levsky laughed harshly and sneered, “Damned bird of hell!” and the deep punch of his Kalishnakov pierced the air, the bullet sizzling into the breast of the beastly bird. The bird stuttered on its one talon, its terrible red eyes glaring over and to either side of its wicked two-feet beak. With a psychic declaration of ‘!MEREST FOOD!’ invading his mind, it leaped at Richard.

He grinned from within his fortress of nigh serenity.

The wings spread for dynamic flight. But the Russian bullet, a rifle round of 7.62 millimeters, if he recalled from his dueling class, with Dutch-armed Schulz in Philadelphia, had disabled the powerful left wing. The beast was able to glide for its mark, and that mark was not Levsky, who was busy chambering a second round into the best oiled breach Richard had noted in action.

Something large and terrible died in the fire behind the Phoenix and it shuddered, like Svetlana had when her namesake ship had been attacked. The great bird’s glide was crooked, taking it to the left of Richard, who pivoted, tracking it over the bead of his revolver. As it landed, a mere ten paces off, a mere one beast hop from him, Richard fired. The round took the creature in the beak, punching a hole in it and causing its red eyes to glower a deeper crimson.

Levsky’s gun punched the sky behind him and the top of that great arched head, feathered in yellow, now gouted red, the crown of the skull taken off, revealing a brain much larger than should inhabit the idiot skull of a bird.

The bird turned in rage, looking at Richard, ignoring Levsky as he chambered another round.

Richard, cocking his 0.50 caliber revolver for another shot, felt his thumb fail in the action. Looking at his thumb he saw it cramp as a scree of hate pierced his mind, ‘!MONKEY OUR FOOD!’

In a white hot rage that this thing had caused his thumb to cramp by dastard way of some avian mesmerism, Richard crunched his lips, grit his teeth, dropped his pistol, and drew the colmarge sword, the right honorable sword that “Wolf Hound” Barrett had taken from traitor George Washington some 250 years ago.

‘I must thank LaFano for being too lazy to bear it and insisting by way of decorum on affixing it by the baldric! So Gaelic sloth and Norman steel forge on against evil!’

The great terror bird seemed offended, above all its agony, with Richard’s ‘thoughts.’ It screed at Richard as its left talon was wrecked by a well aimed Russian shot. The thing then listed onto it right talon, extending its left like a bleeding set of three Kyber knives at the advancing swordsman.

‘!MONKEY!” the enemy into his mind pined.

Another round from Levsky plunged into the breast of the great bird, which now leaned forward on its one good talon, which grew more huge as Richard stepped up to the great bird, which opened its scissor like beak to engulf him, lunging down and forward with a primordial hunger, its head twice as large as that of the greatest draft horse.

Richard side-stepped right with his right foot, then pass stepped right behind that with his left foot—and both broken and braced ankles held!

As Richard pass stepped, the terrible beak sliced off what would have been his left arm—if he had retained one for its dining pleasure!

‘God works in wonderful ways,’ he thought at this Satanic parrot, as he heel pivoted on his right, swinging his left and back side completely around, and thrust the point of ‘Ole Right Colmarge’ [1] through the eye of that monstrosity, the sword foible quivering, the fort of the blade fish tailing, and the hilt punching that great ostrich-egg sized eye into ruin!

Not a thought.

Not scree.

Nothing but a half ton of hateful sinew, beak and feathers hitting the turf at his feet as his sword slithered free.

‘Monkey, aye,’ and he grinned, at home in his nigh-found soul again.

…

Notes

-0. Barretts were not christened with a middle name, that identifier reserved for acts of renown and dignity in service to The Crown.

-1. This most honored Barrett heirloom seemed to have been possessed of a jealousy for the heavy caliber pistol, being such a rude loud weapon of such weight, which was more convenient to carry aboard ship, carriage and up spiral staircases. Richard would make note of this in light of the sword not running out of ammunition at Mogadishu, and credit angelic intervention with the failure of his thumb. No thumb hex by a big bird would ever be admitted in the telling of the battle. Rather an agent of the Almighty and the Queen of Arms, the sword, would be credited, for Richard, though not a Catholic, did not fancy that he rated direct attention from God.

The base could have been in a Norwegian fiord. Rather than early Autumn as it had been in Maryland, it was early Spring here, far below the equator at the terminus of the spiny ridge of the South American continent, upon the twisted origin of which Darwin had declined to speculate. The stagnation of industrial and technical evolution had, in Theographical circles, begun to encourage speculation that The Theory of the Origin of Species, of Evolution, in short, might not be so reason-clad as Richard had been taught. He had long suspected that Darwin himself did not “believe” so fervently in his reasoned speculations as his later day adherents did.

Such were the broad-scoped shadows, doubts trailing like gray cloaks behind their fiendishly hunched backs, that scudded across Richard’s rampant mind’s eye as he was lowered by hawser upon a pallet that contained his kit and sober footman. The Color Sergeant Major and O’Neal were already upon the liftway along with gray-uniformed men whose appearance gave Richard a start of wonder tinged with bitterness.

Richard was greeted with salutes by his Sergeant, by an Argentine General, a Russian Colonel, a Chinese Major, and, and a German Admiral, Commander, and a Captain. The last three were attired according to 70 year old military uniform codes so notable for their striking aesthetics. Entire books explored the nuances of uniform and operational methods and equipment employed by the army of that now extinct nation, Germany.

Richard looked up to these tall men, lean in their gaunt uniforms of deathly gray, saluted stiffly and stepped towards them as his footman and stevedore unloaded his kit and the pallet lift was hawsered back aloft. Commander Levsky was hurrying over from the forelift as Richard addressed the men, “Enemies of my forefathers? So it is true that some zeppelins escaped to Argentina and Chile?”

The admiral answered with a slight smile, “I am afraid that our airships all went down protecting the Fatherland. However, the U-Boats were never unleashed in battle, but saved for the survival of the entire human race.”

“U-Boats?”

“Young Captain,” soothed the Admiral, “I am Alfred Donetz, grandson of the Undersea Admiral. Three of our last four U-Boats have been lost this year. The Enemy is both areal and aquatic and is jealous of these domains. We launch before dawn while production is moved elsewhere—rockets were but a ruse. French, British and Russian submarine programs were open to sabotage. German U-Boat technology was developed in secret. We have a crew of 24, sons of Argentine and Kriegsmarine, all devoted to Supra-National Theographic Expedition.”

Bing-Ham, Zephyr, Pullman, the doormen, Mister Pete and the bar keep, printer and reporter converged from the aft.

Commander Levsky, Sergeant Suvarov, Sventlana, Hilda and two sailors converged from the fore hawser, bearing all their effects as Blackie and Pope were lifted down with the balance of Richard’s expeditionary articles. The fiord was enclosed as a natural compound. Three simple U-shaped docks, covered piers he was told, projecting into the cold inlet, were mirrored by three barracks surrounding a workhouse with higher roof and black out windows.

Richard was bemused, so impressed as he was with the speed, utility and vantage of the airship that yet hovered above them. “Why not by air, if we are bound for climes Antarctic, Admiral?”

He asked this as he noted that though the uniforms were German antique in design, the insignia was of a five-pointed star within the sphere of the earth, a symbol he took it of Supra-National Theography. Bing-Ham, Zephyr and Pullman exchanged pleasantries with a Teutonic scholar by the name of Mickles, speaking of retiring to the workhouse for planning and a geographical brief.

She then started, and he sharply, sickeningly, felt her wince with fright, “Czarina?” he asked, turning to see her squeezing Hilda’s thick hand and gasping in her silvery voice so lush with worry, “It sounds like the cutting of a rug, of a floor man ripping up carpet with a hook-beaked knife!”

The men fell silent.

Richard thought to himself, hoping she would know his thoughts, not wanting to clutter her trance with the wordy here and now, ‘Is it near?’

She groaned, “Oh, Captain Jones!”

The woman, so commanding, confident and fit, then swooned.

“To the Boat!” ordered the Admiral. Major Yu, see to the relocation of production. Captain Kleves load the expedition. General, Operation Odysseus is in play.”

‘How interesting,’ Richard mused, ‘that we are the least of the force, but the King’s English chosen for allied discourse.’

The calm words of command, issued by the Admiral echoed all around him as he signaled for the Sergeant to Get all hands and effects down to the boat shed.

Richard drew his revolver and stood about instinctively, knowing with a weird certainty, that something evil that way came.

Only Commander Levsky did likewise, seeming to cue off of Richard, as if privy to the ethereal connection between the Czarina and the strangely haunted and maimed provincial Captain.

Richard cocked his 0.50 Caliber revolver, held it to his right shoulder and shivered as he heard a cacophony of single song, a one tone, sharp and rising to infinity that would shake the confidence of any man not infected by the heady balm of fanaticism. That call rang like all the sirens of an extinct ocean and felled the one Russian sailor who had stayed to attend the commander, quivering on the air lift strip, frothing at the mouth, hands over ears, shaking like a winter-bitten leaf.

Levsky growled, “Come on, Jones!”

As if on cue, the aft and fore guns of the Czarina barked dreadfully above, shooting gouts of flame, evincing one dreadful pining call, as if a hawk the size of an elephant screed in rage.

The guns roared again, multiple times, tracking something. Small arms sparked and barked on the cat walks, Russian sailors seen outlined in the tiny spittings of firelight. Then, gray clouds swept aside and the moon was seen to glower behind the air ship, some winged thing passing over its top with a scree of ear-rending keens. The fore and aft guns thumped and flamed, lesser guns sparked and barked—

… came the cutting of the rug, a sound like a titan tearing a tapestry between his hands. [1]

The giant balloon listed, then burst into flame, guns still firing, a winged thing burning like a phoenix in the death grapple with the giant exploding albatross in its claws. The Czarina took horrible flame as the sound of Svetlana’s ether voice seared its sorrow into his brain, as if a great mechanical twin of hers died and she shared her pain through an astral embrace, “No!”

‘She is suffering with the doomed crew above even as she swoons below—not unconscious, but in some kindred state.’

A great flame erupted like a wall of burning night before them, falling to the inner foot of the fiord’s parapet. It was a wonder of disaster, a quenching of industrial sadness at the ends of the earth. Richard stood in wonder, and apart, sensing for the weirdness in the moment of annealing dread he knew was to come. Oh how he yearned to fight a monster!

Levsky said with a voice steady as steel, “Death is afoot, Captain. You and I are all that stand between the foul owl’s beak and the production crew, without which—”

A flaming phoenix rose from the blaze before them as Richard’s was singed by flames a hundred yards and more distant, the screams of incinerating men wafting their end up to heaven, and ushering a singular form of damnation towards he and Levsky.

…

Notes

-1. Over the past two weeks I have torn up carpet for an Alaskan family living in Portland, as I finish this novel. The sound was a much magnified version of that made by the beak of my Pittsburgh friend’s 6 ounce parrot as it tore apart the canvas backing of a chair. That terrible little avian, which attacks giant humans who fail to bow to its tyrannical demands is the basis for the Phoenixiathan. -JL, 1/11/25

Seven days and seven nights of Theographic discussion passed like a dream before Richard’s rampant mind’s eye. He found himself impressed by the fact that The Czarina, attended by Hilda, her severe maid, had a mind equal in depth and breath to his own. Richard made not a move or devoted a thought to courting this great lady. She was unattainable in any case, due to nationality and rank. She might, however, as a confidant of Queen Gloria, gain Richard some even higher commission than this, perhaps make of him a Drake of a fleet of sky dogs. Towards this end he showed utmost courtesy and military bearing to this impressive lady.

There was a part of him though, that wished this airship would crash in some fabled land, perhaps even through a portal—which Zephyr assured them existed—taking him and her to some alien planet. Perhaps, a smaller planet, like Mars or Venus, where Richard’s modest stature might be enhanced by his heavy gravity origins permitting him to leap like a tiger?

One night, over the vast Parana forest of evergreen clothing the confluence of Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, other, less refined dreams were realized at the Captain’s table in the bridge, Jones permitting the servants of the guests a revel. Hilda, the Czarina’s hand maiden, was the daughter of a captured Prussian Grenadier and a Mongolian princess who wanted a round-eyed child. Hilda was the result, twice as wide as her charge, boasted of having taken a bullet once already for her mistress, a through and through of one mighty mammary. She was perhaps 40, to her charge’s 24 years, had been an avid wrestler and dancer in her youth and, upon the disgrace of premarital pregnancy to an unknown officer of the Imperial Guard in Saint Petersberg, became the wet nurse and eventual nanny to Czarina Svetlana, to who she demonstrated a ferocious attachment.

The next to last night before docking in Patagonia, as dawn ushered the airship over forest and beyond over the Pampas, “Her Hunishment,” [1] Hilda, in some kind of fact-finding caper aimed at determining the character of Richard through the interrogation of his serving men, arranged the revel with Captain Jones, who, at the wheel, looked forever and away as he listened to phonographic music broadcast from his brazen record player. In rounds served up by the Bar Keep of The Raven, this mighty stout “maid,” initially over a game of cards, drank Richard’s entire serving staff under the table.

O’Neal fell first, the imprint of the beer mug remaining in his forehead for days...

Blackie soon nodded off on the bench.

The young liver of Tyler Pope failed him at around midnight.

The famously pickled brain of LaFano and that indifatigable liver, kept him conscious until nearly dawn. The four woke to czarist music blaring from the brazen phonograph, with empty pockets, groggy heads, the contents of their brains now possessed by the still sober Hunish Huss to report to her Mistress his every secret, down, he imagined, to the color of his medical socks!

The entire crew grinned at him as his four men stood in misery upon the main deck before Color Sergeant Major, LaFano still quite drunk, [2] “Seen the bullet riddled udder, I did, Sarge. Fine a shield as ever wrought by Mother Mary ta’ save a high lass.”

“Get ye some sleep in case ye mice are need for action against as yet unknown men,” sounded the Sergeant, who then turned to Richard, “Sorry you had to button up yourself, Sir. The Czarina’s maid had some sport with your men. I fancy she can name the staff of Dark Hall down to the lowest Hindoo sculler.”

“Good service then, has been rendered by all, Color Sergeant Major. We have nothing to hide.”

Breakfast was served to the Theographic dignitaries, by the bar keep and Hilda, as Mister Pete proudly stood guard next to the towering Sergeant, who could not wear his pith helmet within the cabins or on bridge. Only the cat walks, gang ways and main deck admitted a tall man with head gear.

Hilda reeked of alcohol as she reached over Richard’s right shoulder with his coffee and dish and whispered huskily in his ear, “Good Captain,” to which the Czarina, who always sat next to him on his left, next to his stump, smiled slightly and admitted, “Apologies for any damage done to the towering intellects among your menials, Captain. I, as a remote viewer, who have already been privy to your rampant fever dreams, and hence my request of Dear Gloria for your service, knew you to be of sterling character. However, as you have your own overbearing Color Sergeant, I have my Hunish Shield, who can trace her blood to Frederick The Great and Genghis Khan. My guardian must know things of her own ken.”

Breakfast coffee had all been served and Captain Jones offered a toast, “To the four her fell here in defense of the Lord’s Honor, may their heads pound the softer and their hearts soar loftier!”

He could not help but grin as Mister Pete clicked his heels and whirled his red fez of felt hung with its cloth of gold tassel and Bing-Ham cut loose some kind of cowboy whoop that sounded too Indian to come from a Theographic throat.

Commander Levsky then announced, “After the first hour of sundown, we dock at an autonomous base of the Extra-National Theographic Society. All expeditionary personnel other than Captain Jones and Crew, will disembark within an hour of anchorage. This vessel is in service to the Russian Empire, and may not dally.”

Her voice entered his mind, not through his ears, but through some other kind, “Yes, Richard, the time is nigh to quench Truth in the fire of The Lie.”

He turned his head and looked at her eyes, not wide or narrow, but focused in clear regard.

Her face seemed content in an odd tension of purpose.

His mind was quiet, except for an echo far and below.

…

Notes

-1. The entire crew seemed to be in on the joke. They nick named Hilda Her Hunishment based on her Prussian parentage.

-2. In 2022 a large breasted babe showed me a through and through shot from a recent 0.45 APC round she took at close range, before stomping the gunman. Hilda is based on that woman.

The broad sweep of the Atlantic now swelled far below, the Carolina Outer Banks to the west back-lit by the lowering sun, a curvature of seeming infinitude to the east.

The bar keep and Mister Pete served coffee and tea at the table.

LaFano and a burly Russian Airman stood guard, where they could be seen through the porthole, at the exterior of the door, in the chill breezeway above the catwalk.

Color Sergeant Major and Gunnery Sergeant Suvarov, of The Czarina, stood guard within.

Captain Jones stood by the captain’s wheel with a pair of binoculars at his eyes, speaking in low tones to the airman who held the wheel. Before him was a telephone by which he could issue commands to the main deck and communicate with the Honorable Optical Officer. Communication with the Fore, Main, Aft, Officers and Ether Deck were all denominated by switches. Richard now recalled the phone at the center of each deck, a mounted horn to speak into and a horn attached to a wire to listen through.

The table was set with snow goose, cheese and cherries.

Those in attendance were Pullman, Zephyr, Bing-Ham, Richard, Commander Levsky and a smartly uniformed woman of uncommon beauty. Her form was athletic and not much obscured by her Air Service Suit Skirt. Her hair was thick, red and lustrous, platted in what seemed a regulation coif, as this tail of hair was confined by a five star hairpin at the neck. Richard doffed his cap and bowed, “Czarina, I do apologize for the poor manners of my footman.”

Her eyes were a piercing green and her smile too knowing to engage half-heartedly. Her English was slightly accented in the most pleasing way, “Compliments and apologies accepted, Captain. And,” as she fixed him with a piercing gaze, “there is no need for you to fret over my condition. Three elder brothers and two sisters are ahead of me in line of succession. I am, sir, a member of Saint Peter’s Theosophy Society, and a Captain in the Woman’s Air Reserve, also a remote viewer, on this Joint Expedition after direct audience with your Queen—and not her Prime Sinister; for the politicians as well as the bankers are all in league with the Enemy of Mankind.”

Richard sat and looked over at Levsky, who grinned under his steel wool mustache, “Yes, Captain, this ship was built in secret by order of the Czar, for his daughter, his agent, a personal ally to your Queen Gloria. Pullman recommended you, and you alone, once the Czarina’s expeditionary stipulations were made known.”

*****

The discussion had at that table in the stateroom/bridge of the most advanced air ship in the Russian Navy ran for many hours under lamp light, heat pumped in from the main deck. And ran many more hours for a week to come as the air ship made its way over the Atlantic and South Atlantic. The particulars were not, to young Captain Barrett, acutely conscious of his missing left arm, nearly as daunting as the fact that the Czarina could read his thoughts, and must therefore know his suppressed desires concerning her, which had budded on the instant of his encountering her inscrutable, yet beautiful, person.

The points of discovery where:

All of the greatest inventors of petroleum-fuelled technology were not simply bought off by steam-liner and railroad concerns to maintain economic primacy, but were, many of them slain, vanished or gone mad.

Powered flight inventors and test pilots had likewise been subject to numerous acts of conspiracy.

Mister Kalishnakov, claimed to his daughter to have invented an automatic rifle, but was visited by angelic or demonic agents who warned him against this, lest he suffer the fate of a man named Maxim who had blown himself up in his own workshop in the time of Bismark. So, Kalishnakov had settled on the recoilless rifles for air ship usage and his infamous telescopic dueling pistol which had decimated the Russian officer corps.

All across the world scientific innovation had stagnated at heavy steam power, rifled bolt action firearms and canon, and fragile and low speed airship technology. Dozens of examples of sudden madness, suicide, murder and disappearance of technological innovators were presented by Pullman: to include the strange homosexual murder suicide of Tesla and Edison, the bizarre decent into cultic cannibalism and child sacrifices by a half dozen noted physicists, hung in mass after a much ballyhooed trial in 1941, pointed to a from of predatory psychiatry. The Czarina Svetlana, as well as Pullman were convinced that a form of wireless communication technology was in use, and that the repeated cutting of the 3,000 foot deep transatlantic telegraph cable by unknown forces was related to this crypto-comunications monopoly.

Zephyr put forth evidence that functional submarine vessels had many times been fielded by German, Royal, French, American and Russian navies and that maiden voyages of such craft had all ended disastrously, preventing the development of this entire dimension of naval operation. This, he put forth, along with the fact that every Arctic expedition of exploration had ended with the loss of the expeditions, to include Shackleton, Admunsen, Fagan and a dozen others, indicated that this secret power behind technological retardation through conspiracy was:

-1. ancient

-2. involved in finance

-3. and based in Antarctica, the only unexplored continent, with a power center only accessible through aviation or underwater navigation, probably about an inland glacier lake

Bing-Ham seconded Zephyr on these points and added that their unknown foes were likely:

-4. aquatic, and distinctly NOT human

-5. avian, with flight capacity in excess of air ship limits

-6. telepathic

-7. and that these cryptic monsters most certainly farmed humanity as men farmed poultry, probably dining on thought and sorrow as well as the meat, bones and organs of people. Hints to this hideous ancient race, that for some reason retreated from open sight in ancient times, may be found in the many myths of dragons, of the aquatic nature of Leviathan, of Jonah’s abducting whale, of Grendel’s terrible acquatic mother, of Tiamat, Kismet and Echidna…

Bing-Ham’s biological approach garnered much favor with the telepathic Czarina, who claimed dream and trance revelations substantiating these frightening claims, even naming American predecessors by the names of Edgar Casey and Ingo Swan as having been, along with numerous Russian colleagues, vanished or murdered on the brink of great revelations.

Pullman, the newsman, was furiously writing and contributed little except to opine, “So, if the assertions tendered are proven to be true by this expedition, this very effort will resemble something like the dogs in a kennel conspiring to overthrow their human keepers?”

“Yes,” blurted Richard, “what greater adventure could there be.”

He knew then that she favored him, with her thin whimsy of a grin.

‘Oh well, with a face like Candide what better aim for my heart than an Artemis of far-darting thought.’

Awakening above the clouds as the sun rose below, Richard thought he was at Heaven’s Gate unprepaired for Judgment. Then he realized he was in a hammock rocking along in a berth occupied by the three Theographers as well as a Russian officer, who were all up and about getting dressed, the officer in a Captain’s uniform, a Russian one with bearskin hat set with gold five-pointed star.

‘It is cold, my breath I can see from under these comfortable wool covers above which my head knocks so hideously!’

“Rest, Captain,” said the Russian. “Commander Levsky shall hold the briefing after dinner.”

He discontentedly swung gently in the hammock, gazing from his marsupial pouch out the window upon a world so high that birds did not venture under the clouds. He could make out the deep blue of the Atlantic, and by the sun’s position on his left determine that this airship was sailing south. Perhaps from a stateroom opposite this to his right—larboard, he reckoned—he might catch a glimpse of the Carolina Banks. Bing-Ham handed him a flask and assured him, “Green tea, ginko and birch extract, towards your recovery, sir. One of your men stands guard outside the door.”

Richard took the medicinal draught and fell back into fitful sleep, a great bell tolling in the church tower he and the last of his men were hold up in against the Mahdi hordes, the bell ringing with every musket ball that rang its tune…

*****

“Captain, Sir,” nudged O’Neal, “a briefing in the stateroom in an hour. There is an officer’s privy next door down here to the right, I have your dress uniform creased and laid out there, Blackie at the door.”

Richard looked up into the big, old, snowy mug and smiled, “Thank you, O’Neal. To it directly.”

O’Neal grinned, his point of chin offsetting the glint in his aging eyes, “Sir, you shall want to look your best—there is a lady aboard, quite, a figure of a lady. LaFano is already in the brig for looking at her thrice in the Commander’s presence.”

Richard sprang from the hammock, as much animated by the discipline of his brute footman as the prospect of adventuring with a LADY.

*****

Richard emerged from the officer’s privy, a small cold cell with sink, towels, mirror, and a toilet which discharged its contents upon the world below through a tube long enough to avoid defiling the aft deck. The schematics of the ship were presented on the wall, behind Blackie, between the starboard and larboard stateroom.

“Sir,” saluted Blackie Plimpton with utmost severity, handing Richard his sword, to which Richard declined, “Please behind my hammock. I cannot keep the thing from rattling with no left hand.”

A Russian Naval Airman, stood six paces for, before an aluminum and glass porthole door beyond which whipped cloud vapor. Another Airman stood 6 paces aft before another such door. Richard read the schematic. Both doors opened to the sky walks of aluminum frame that link this Officer’s Deck, with the Aft Deck and Main Deck.

The Aft Deck was equipped with ultra light Kalishnikov swivel rifles, one aft, one starboard, one larboard. These large caliber guns could not be shot from the shoulder as an elephant gun, for their lightness. They were mounted on spring swivels with optical devices. The Aft Deck was crewed by an Ensign and three Airmen, who resided there. This deck had a life boat, anchor and drop ladder. From it flew the Russian Flag. [1]

All decks were equipped with a rail walk.

The walk forward linked the Officer’s deck, which, as with all decks had a drop ladder and an inflatable rubber life boat, with the Main Deck. This deck was larger than the other three decks combined, housed the steam engine that powered the propellers on either side of the cabin, and housed the bulk of the crew who slept on the open, cold, aluminum decks. There were two away boats, a ten-man aluminum craft, for nautical enterprises. The steam engine that powered the propellers also acted in some fashion not understood by Richard, upon the Lift Deck above the Main, a small deck manned by special airmen regulating the lighter than air gas that filled the massive frame of the bullet-shaped balloon with its ether. And below this deck was a Brig, an unheated disciplinary box, where the lusty LaFano would be freezing his cods off.

The Foredeck was larger than the Aft Deck. The underside was exactly like the Aft Deck. The top side was the Bridge, where Richard would be headed for dinner and the commander’s briefing. Decks were linked by aluminum cat walks 10,000 feet in the sky, above the very clouds, and through the stark metal box of the Main Deck, upon which not a bit of artistry had been wasted in the habitation of the crew.

Clicking his heels, followed by Blackie, saluting the Airman who returned this salute and opened the light door for his passage, Richard walked out into the clouds, holding the manila rope rail as he walked along the aluminum grating for the catwalk, trying not to pitch overboard as this metal ropewalk swayed in the sky.

*****

The Main Deck entrance saw him greeted by the Captain, who saluted, “Welcome aboard, Captain Barrett. I am Captain Jones.”

The only insulation was the coats and kit hung from the aluminum walls. Naval cutlasses and carbines were racked on both sides.

Richard returned the salute and looked around. The men were shorter than normal, for the most part. One looked down into an optical sphere through a telescopic lens, obviously scanning the sky and below through refracted optics.

Jones keened, “Our right honorable optical, our chief advantage over British Naval arms, Nautical and Aeronautical. Yes, our grandfathers obtained the cream of the German Avionics Corp.”

“Richard looked at two small teams of Chinese men, on either side of the central boiler, two shoveling and stoking, and two turning a hand crank, like a pump for a nautical ship, but powering a bellows pointed upward. Again, Jones narrated, “The Chinese Coolie, the perfect industrial beast, powered by rice and born with bended knee.”

A burly gunnery sergeant motioned towards a side portal, which opened, to admit a stout sailor leading the shackled LaFono, who shivered and shrugged his shoulders. Again, Jones narrated, “Your footman nearly earned an execution leering thrice at Czarina Svetlana.”

“Czarina?” hissed Richard.

Jones nodded as LaFano was uncuffed and directed to warm himself by the boiler, to which he slunk, mumbling under his bent brow, “Sorry, Boss. Just scoutin’ matrimonial prospects fer ye—didn’ know she ‘as a Royal lass.”

Richard was aghast, and somewhat pleased, and expressed only the former, “LaFano, I shall be certain to tender your apologies to the Czarina.”

He was still wonder struck that the possible future queen of Russia was on such an expedition. He then looked to Jones, “And a Jones in Russian service?”

The man stiffened with pride, “Sir, the revolt your greatest ancestor put down by land was as well alive at sea. My revolutionary ancestor John Paul Jones, not only took a British frigate in fair fight, but entered the service of Czarina Catherine the Great as an admiral. Men of my blood have ever since been assigned to insure the safety and honor of the Czarinas.”

“Understood, as will I, on my Mum’s honor.”

A flash of genius possessed him, “Master Collier Plimpton, show these Celestial Chinamen how to shovel coal.”

Blackie was at it in a flash, having already spied a spare shovel.

“LaFano, you shall attend me, and swear your best rude apology to The Czarina.”

He then looked around and spied Pope and O’Neal and asked Captain Jones, “As we are in this together and expecting battle, I would like my driver, a good mechanic he is, and my young footman there to apprentice to their counterparts here adeck.”

Jones smiled wryly, “You are too transparent to offer this as a ruse to spy upon our Aircraft. Agreed.”

He then spoke in Russian to a midshipman and this fellow approached O’Neal and Pope while Blackie relieved one of the coolies.

Onward, past the saluting sailors, the burly and surly Irish doormen, the terrified printer and wonder-struck reporter, they marched, LaFano slouching behind him, rubbing life back into his low gnarly hands.

To be Continued in:

To Wit

Turns of Flight: Interlude

Notes

-1. Beginning in 1946 this red device was emblazoned with a black bear wearing a gold Christian Crown, its right paw holding down a blue planet. Military flags had, in addition, the martial star of five point, in gold, or rather brass.

He had neglected supper. He was not possessed of the iron liver of O’Neal or LaFono. So his head fairly swam with that glass of port. ‘Oh, my,’ he begged within for the strength not to show the effects of the theographic libation upon his nearly virgin mind.

‘Do not, Sir, drink with that Russian!’ commanded his inner Mum.

Despite his worries his feet clicked just fine up and around, as doors were passed on the narrow balcony and up a second flight of stairs they went. Further, after passing more doors on a second narrow balcony, the wooden stairs, which had narrowed along with the ascent, were replaced with a wrought iron spiral, quite an affair, which must ascend within an observation turret. Indeed, Theography included among its sub disciplines, geography, zoology, anthropology, archaeology, meteorology, astrology and astronomy, no less than three of these served by private observation turrets.

“Onward, at the double,” Mister Pete, encouraged Chess from below and behind to his black boy ahead and above.

The boy scampered and Richard trotted, his pack yet on his back, his sword at his side, which tapped and rang on every step as he had not a left hand to raise it, his right hand on the railing, trotting upward in heady excursitude. [1] Upward, round and round, the small black iron weave of steps he trotted, mightily keeping up with that fleet scion of Africa, the youthful Mister Pete. [2] Richard, having spent a full semester as a Leftenet in the Loyal Maryland Provincial Artillery had been trained to always count one’s steps, especially when scaling a feature, counted 200 steps, each step rising 6 inches, for a hundred feet of elevation above the third story of the house.

In mere yet tense moments, eased somewhat by his quick drunk, Richard was on solid floor board again, having emerged within a domed observatory, complete with a seat-mounted telescope that seemed a perfected form of heavy naval ordinance, yet pointed at the stars! His men were here, with their kit and his impedables. [3]

O’Neal, LaFano, Plimpton and Pope were at attention and in line with a tall, lean Irishman of wicked narrow make who was armed with a revolver in expeditionary holster on his left hip and a short straight naval cutlass in his right. This man he guessed by deduction was Easter McFadden, the backdoor man, a sinister post among the fancy. [4]

Mister Pete went to a door and stood at attention. Richard commanded him, “On Master Pullman’s order.”

Up the stairs and into the dome emerged, Pullman, huffing and puffing, Bing-Ham grinning manfully, Zephyr in languid excite, the tuxedoed mսlatto mixologist, indeed bearing a case of port, the two Russians in dutiful spirit, the printer and reporter who were fairly terrified, Color Sergeant Major, in full kit, and behind him, hulking up through the hatchless floor, the doorman, Brant Collins, with a case of whiskey under one arm, and a keg of ‘what?’

The hulk rumbled, “Imperial Stout for ye Rooskie crew,” and handed the keg, with one hand, to the Russian gunnery sergeant who nearly buckled under the weight, but bore it manfully in two hands like a man used to slinging large bore rounds into the breech.

Chess Pullman, caught his breath and gasped, “The merchant mob is already at the door. We are at your service, this Pub likely burnt to cinders by morning. Captain Richard Barrett to command on land operations, Commander Levsky to command at Sea and Aloft.

Agreed?”

Levsky took a bottle of Port from the bar keep, tore the cork loose with his horse-like Slavic teeth, handed that bottle to Richard, who took it in astonishment. He decapitated another bottle and formed Richard’s arm into a loop, bottle mouth to his lips, then looped his arm through Richard’s and growled, “Russian courage and British brass, one against our common foe, whose blood is signified by this red drink!”

‘Oh, My God, I thought this was a joke that the Russians drank before battle and that the Baltic feet sunk by the Japs at Tushima was manned by drunkards!’

‘I’m doing it, I must, I’m a Barrett. This must be the revenge of some moonshiner’s ghost for Old Blake hunting them down.’

The men were chanting, “Britannia! Britannia, as they chugged the wine, Levsky winking at him and slowing his own drink under his thick mustache, to give the young tea drinker’s liver a chance to keep up, while the gunnery sergeant chanted, “Russia, Russia!”

At last, the room spinning, the bottles were empty. Levsky then grinned and shattered his bottle against the crown of his rakish forehead.

Richard was horrified, ‘How can I keep to this masculine ritual.’

He began handling the neck of the bottle trying to factor the proper trajectory of doing something he had just witnessed and yet had never even imagined.

Levsky grinned and declared, “I do not mean to endanger the English brain of my Co-Commander!”

To this the voice of Color Sergeant Major boomed, “Irish in the breach, you will drink your bottle after as hazard pay.”

To this O’Neal reached forward to take the empty wine bottle, but LaFono, a notorious drunkard, darted under the big man’s extended arm, snatched the bottle as quick as you please, and dashed it to shards against his hard head under that ski cap, then crookedly saluted Levsky and returned to his post.

Richard noted after the din had died that a steam engine could be heard above, perhaps a hundred feet, and descending, “Commander of an air ship, I presume?”

Levsky spoke respectfully, “A Boradino Class 3, the Czar’s own flagship.”

Richard, becoming drunk and full of brass, and thrilled to be taking his first air ship adventure, commanded, “Mister Pete, lead us to the Sky Pier. Men, make way for Commander Levsky, who shall assign boarding.

“Commander,” he said, to Levsky with a salute, as Pete opened the door and the chanting of a mob below could be heard, along with the breaking of a window, “your Pier.”

Richard had handed off command just in time, for he began to weave on his feet, soon supported by Color Sergeant Major. He was soon looking up in wonder at a lowering air ship, a copy of the German Zeppelins used by the Russian and British navies.

The scramble for German Zeppelin and rocketry scientists at the end of the Second Great War was a legendary struggle that reignited the Great Game and turned it into what some called a Cold War. For the rocketry scientists acquired by both sides, mysteriously died of illness, seizure, murder, and both empires accused the other of these crimes against military technology. For, although winged flight as by birds, had been proven to be impossible due to the constant wreckage of test craft and the strange mania and psychosis that overcame test pilots and winged flight developers, usually resulting in suicide, Germany had improved rocketry to the point where some thought rocket flight, even to the moon might be possible. [5]

Such were the cryptic thoughts that washed upon the wine-stained shores of Richard’s rampant brain as he weaved on his feet, steadied by trusty hands, while riot and fire broke out below and a wonder of mankind’s seeking mind lowered to take on passengers, bound for adventure.

Up above lowered what seemed a great shark, bigger than a blue whale, hung with Air Decks underneath, and for a rudder had what could only be described as a godawful tail.

Richard heard himself slur, “Blast what Admiralty says—the Russians got the best German scientists.”

“Yes,” declared Levsky, “one was my grandfather.”

Notes

-1. A word created by old Blake Barrett to describe his bloodline’s affinity for risky service.

-2. Mister Pete was the American nautical term for negro sailors in the 1850s through 1890s. See Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast.

-3. An officers additional personal kit that must be born by others, prohibited in many colonial posts since the disasters at the Kyber and Indaswana.

-4. Sporting men, gamblers, boxers, rakes, duelists, inn keepers, etc.

-5. It was generally believed by psychiatry, whose greatest minds had been put to work on the problem of “Winged Design/Flight Psychosis” that the lack of the migratory magnetic compass present in the avian brain made the human brain prone to derangement. The dissenting opinion of Doctor Immanual Velikovsky, who had defected the scientific establishment for Theography, opined an imposed collective amnesia concealing a master race which afflicted humanity’s greatest minds with insanity.

A rope rail separated the flagstone walk from the cobblestone street, forming a fine path for their decent, if burly, procession south on Charles Street. A watchman, dressed in red suit and white cap, with a white cape against the early autumn chill, who held only a large watch, nearly a clock in his hand, saluted Richard. He returned the salute with his, right—and only hand.

The rhythmic clack of printing presses sounded ahead and to the left as they neared Fort Avenue. A doorman, dressed in black suit and cap, wearing a red sash, loomed tall and broad—a right Irish thug dressed in unconvincing gentility, stepped from the doorway of the Raven Pub at Fort and Charles, barring their way. There they stood under the eves of the Baltimore Daily Raven.

“Your business, Sir?” rumbled the monstrosity, like a white gorilla affecting human dress.

Richard stepped up to the man, looked up a full foot into that broad Gaelic face, and said, “Captain Richard Barrett, on The Queen’s business, seeking audience with Theographer and Newsman, Chester B. Pullman.”

The man whispered, “A lower tone is favored at the Theographic table, Sir. Enemies of the Crown with listening gadgets and skulking word burglars.” [1]

“Understood,” hissed Richard, for he could not, as much as he tried, whisper.

The doorman then doffed his cap with the left, shook Richard’s right hand and hissed down the line like a bellows expelling steam, “Ye footmen, bear yer kit down this breezeway and into the courtyard behind the pub. Ye will be served there whilst the Gentleman and Sergeant take to the Inner Table. Welcome to The Raven Inn. I am Brant Collins, head doorman. Easter McFadden is the back doorman, who ‘ill see to yer stowage.”

He then whispered to Richard as he opened the door, pulling on the heavy oaken portal plank, “You are expected.”

Knowing full well the Color Sergeant Major was at his back, those boot heels clicking to a cadence that had long given him comfort in times of peril, Richard could not suppress the grin on his face, though he did try and reform it into a smile of honor as the interior of this storied house, where his father and uncle had been entertained, open to his senses:

The black oak beams and rafters were low, at 7 feet. The portrait of Edgar Allen Poe rested upon the fireplace mantel, its upper frame touching the ceiling of stained cedar panels. The bar itself, of Jobolo wood, a gift from a King of the Congo, whose witch doctors, once convened here in 1930, joining with the Theographical Society, was a storied wonder. Seven bar stools were partially occupied by various locals, a printer, a reporter, a stevedore, a sailor whose kind were always welcome by the men at the table.

The table itself was of black oak with an ash wood raven perched on a trapeze-like roost above it, hung from an oaken beam. Three men where there seated at a five-faceted table, a busier type at the head, facing the door. The man had a round, almost flat face, a combed over rake of black hair, wore spectacles, a white button shirt and black bow tie, over black slacks and belt, rose excited and smiled, and said in a low soft tone, “Captain Barrett! Welcome.”

Richard was happy he was not the shorter, but the same height. Richard and The Sergeant entered as the door was closed behind them, guarded without by that menacing man. A low fire crackled slightly, poked by a little black boy of about 9 years, who was attired like his master, who rose, walked around the table with extended hand and then announced as they shook hands, “Chester B. Pullman, Royal Theographic Society—call me Chess, please, as my friends do.”

Then, as the man drew Richard into an awkward hug, he whispered, “Enemies among us, in this very house and above.”

Richard was aghast, frozen for a second as an enemy charge had ever been unable to effect.

“Let us repair, in full knowledge that our public house of Theography is host to honored visitors, servants of the Czar,” to which the sailor and the Stevedore raised their glasses of port and smiled, serious men by their make.

Richard saluted to the two men turned on their stools while they drained their glasses and set them back to be refilled by the barkeep, a mսlatto in tuxedo.

The printer and the reporter, much smaller men, were set here as a kind of guard, he supposed, as he motioned for the Sergeant to reinforce the right flank, which he did, standing tall, taking down his pith helmet for use as a shield against a wine glass and greeted the men, “Ivan, a bit keen of eye for a stevedore. I expect gunnery is your game. Alex, a captain by your set, a frigate I bet.”

The two men, small heavyweights, joked to each other in Russian, and then the one his sergeant had Christened ‘Alex’ extended his hand to shake, “Michael Levsky, Commander, Imperial Navy.” As they shook he introduced the man by his side, “Gunnery Sergeant Suvarov.”

All three men laughed. Then the Color Sergeant demanded, “Not being a dissembling theosophist, I would know your business?”

Nodding in recognition of the wine glass refiled behind him, the commander shrugged his shoulders, “Killed too many fellow officers in duels, so have been assigned to eves drop upon your big thinkers here. The brute at the door has confiscated my pistol.”

“A spy, then, Commander?”

“Intelligence collection, my Hero of Mogadishu. I would buy you a drink, Color Sergeant Major, Luxenberg”

‘Why, I still do not know his first name, and this prying Czarist knows his last!’ mucked Richard within.

Richard was being seated by Chess, who insisted, “The Russians are our covert allies in this, and have provided our expedition with a vessel capable of the mission the London Pub has put before us. The enemy among us is what I believe to be a mechanical listening device similar to a telephone, but wireless, eves dropping across the very ether, such thoughts as we seek to plumb leaving what might be called an ether trail. Those listening know what we know, what we wish, and, more importantly what we do not know, which they keep from us in a tight fist of predictive wits.”

Richard stood with his back to the door, between the two seats nearest the door, at the base of the five-faceted table. The seats were mahogany chairs worked in a five pointed star. Noting this, Chess motioned to a thick set, Mestizo, a fellow in his early forties in white shirt and tie, doffing his spectacles, and saying in a voice that was not of this region, but westward, perhaps Texas way, “Sir Richard, I am Doctor Breck Bing-Ham, at your service.”

Shaking hands, “Bingham?”

“Bing-Ham,” grinned the man, showing a pearly set of teeth, “Nebraska Crown University, Crypto Anthropology.”

To his left rose a tall, older, rail-thin support structure for a towering long-nosed intellect, who required no introduction, “Professor Robert Zephyr! I am honored to share a learned table with you,” blurted Richard in a tone much too high and strident for Theographic discourse, to which they all winced in varied ways according to type.

Richard took neither the left or right seat as the other men sat. When a Barrett drank, he did so on his feet, not seated. Four glasses of port wine were brought to the table by the barkeep, who informed Chess, in low but audible tone, “Our skypes whisper of a muster of banker thugs on Hanover Street, coming to shut down the press and burn this nest on account of your being said to harbor Russian spies, as well as the Baltimore Raven’s Great Game editorial.”

The Russian Commander spoke up, “Such an accurate opinion by a newsman in Russia would have been no less lethal to the author. But a mob of merchants and money hunters? Obscene! Long live your dainty Queen!”

Chess stood, “A toast to our Maiden Anglo-Russian expedition, against The Common Enemy of All Mankind!”

With a hearty cheer they drained their glasses as the doorman, entered, barred the door behind him, and handed a Kalashnikov Telescopic Dueling Pistol to the Russian Commander. Chess turned to the small negro child and nodded, to which the fellow fairly shot past them to the back wall, which was lined with three heavy book shelves. Grabbing the center one he smiled, clicked something in his little hand, and walked a section of shelving loaded with a half ton of books to the side, revealing an upward set of stairs.

Every one in the room then turned to look at Richard, who had a question in his eyes, answered by Chess, “Captain, your men are already in position.”

Richard pulled his service cap a little tighter and marched for the stairs, hearing his heels hit the hard wood floor with eager purpose, his steps echoed by the tread of the others.

A chill played in his heart, “Once again leading men I but barely know, if at all.”

Chess was behind him, “The briefing must now be in route, Captain. Time has not been our friend.”

…

Notes

-1. “Word burglary” is a great concern to the Royal Theographic Society, which moved them to semi public venues, such as The Raven Inn, named after the Poet Edgar Allen Poe, who had been hung by revolutionary patriots for dedicating his writing to the Crown as opposed to the “Cause” of Americanism. The death of Poe at the hands of the “Patriots” prior to the failed Succession of 1851 was the mythic foundation of Theography, or the study of esoteric conspiracy. The formation of the Royal Theographical Society in 1913, led by Bram Stoker, with Misters Bierce, London, Boroughs, thence descended down through Lovecraft, Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Lewis and Tolkien. The guiding spirit of Theography in Loyalty to the Crown could be none other than Poe, whose photo portrait shown in lurid shadow above the fireplace at each and every Public House of Theography.

-2. Skypes are local spies, guides, warders and informers cultivated by Theographers for defensive information collection while the Theographers themselves seek in a penetrative fashion after the secrets that have eluded science so reluctantly, like a rare and unclassified bird yet to give song in earshot or flight in view of the bird watcher.

No sooner had they passed the majestic Britannic Sun Building then they did pass to the south of the great Crown Hill, mounted with a real flapping flag, the largest in America. For, it was at the east end of this promontory, at Crown Fort, that during the Insurrection that followed the squashed revolt of 1775-6, was contained within the magazine of that fort. At that time Crown Fort, then named after some Gaelic so-and-such, and the conspirators were blown to bits before completing their dastard design. Ever since that storied time, Crown Hill, Crown Fort, Hanover Fort, and Ostend Gatehouse, guarding the bridges across the river to Brooklyn and over the railway to Pig Town, had assumed the moral heart of loyalist Baltimore. For much of Baltimore was yet a den of crime, conspiracy, nascent plots and nigh, even dreamed of revolt in the minds of the restive brute classes.

The gentry and the middling loyalists had done their best to offset this revolt-leaning mob mentality by importing as many submissive Hindoos, dependent Africans, compliant American Plantation Negroes, hard-working Chinese, and recently even mestizo laborers of an Aztec caste, all in a bid to render the indecent classes of whites pale in their own economy, unable to rise the social ladder in threat as once, twice, and even thrice, occurred since that first traitor year of 1775.

Queen Street was here, barred by no closed gate, against underclass access, but by an open gate, barred by pure loyalty by the Gentleman of the Crown Watch, on his great white mare, and his footmen, two grenadiers with halbreds, doing their duty in olden fashion. A Dutch gentleman would have the Ostend Street Bridge to the west, a German Gentleman—fugitive from his slain nation—did always guard the Hanover Street Bridge, making of this Peninsula an island of sorts. The geo-military weak point was the Charles Street corridor, where the shopkeepers kept their own militia and life was free of gangsterism and crime.

‘Why, the only crooked sorts of Gaelic and low Nativist type hereabout are riding athwart my very running boards!’

The three men in question kept their yaps shut as Blackie Plimpton damped the boiler and ceased his shoveling, no such conveyance permitted in this rarefied quarter.

The simmering of the engine, the racking of the gears and securing of the iron brake, was met with the clang of steel as the two halberds of the grenadiers barred their way and Color Sergeant Major, stepped smartly from the carriage, his long leg easily touching while seated within, stood to at attention, a salute held against is pith helmet over his missing right eye, and declared, “Captain Sir Richard Barrett, on The Queen’s business.”

Richard dismounted, his ankles holding steady in their braces under boot, turned and saluted the resident Captain, who he noted from cards a few years ago, “Captain, Winston… I am at your service.”

Winston saluted sharply and nodded with a horseman’s distaste for machinery, tinged by some wonder at the Car, and then shrugged towards a shed next to the fire station to the south, “The mechanic and the Firemen of the Watch are versed in such contraptions, and will take this over until your departure—will service it as well.”

“Thank you,” Richard answered as he reached within his vest pocket, “My orders—”

The tall, lean, Winston, a man of some sixty years, a veteran who had been known to Old Blake Barrett, cut him off, “Are none of my affair. The Bayonet of Mogadishu, would feign no low ruse. As well, your complete inability to maintain a poker face follows you like Candide’s cursed mask.”

Richard smiled and approached, extending his right hand up to the saddle bound officer, still a captain after all these years for lack of wars to win on horseback, what with the Indian tribes subdued a hundred and more years ago. His hand taken, he grinned, “It is an honor, Captain Winston. I am, Sir, in the theographical way.”

Winston whispered, “Then lower that tone, My Man, and march your men four blocks on, and one west to the Raven Pub at Fort and Charles, under the eves next door to the Baltimore Daily Raven, Chester B. Pullman be your man. You will hear the clack and stamp of those presses a block ahead of your arrival, soothes this mare’s soul on our return to stable.”

The Color Sergeant Major was commanding in low tones, “You men, the dollies: O’Neal, the instruments, Pope chests and casks, LaFono the expeditionary effects [1], Plimpton, the luggage—now at it, in order.”

Under the great mustached gaze of the Sergeant the four men produced 2 sliding tube dollies of hollow brass and one of iron pipe for the expeditionary effects, racked behind the cabin and began unloading the chests, packs, casks and crates from the top of the car. The sergeant did not reach within for his or Richard’s pack, as these would be placed upon their backs by O’Neal as part of his ever jealous duty.

Within minutes, under the watchful gaze of the three gentlemen, as fireman and mechanics crossed the cobblestones from the fire station and garage, the four men stood—Pope obviously having done some stevedore work, packing as good as the veterans—at various attitudes of attention, from LaFon’s slouch to Plimpton’s severe affectation of his betters, the fellow proudly handling his shovel—under the Color Sergeant Major’s scrutiny. This man looked down at his watch, witch he stopped, and declared, “Two-minutes, forty-seven seconds. Sound, if unremarkable.”

He then looked to Blackie as a coal-smeared fireman, a big hulking midland brute, approached from around the coal cab, in obvious need of the shovel, the engine simmering slightly and threatening to go cold. The Sergeant narrated, “There you go, Blackie, the fireman will take good care of ye shovel.”

Even so Blackie held firm to the shovel at first and blurted a bit, “Chalk on the handle, if you please.”

The big sooty white man grinned at the little brown fellow, near to black, “A collier after me own black ‘eart, a chalked sh‘ill be, polished of blade as well.”

“Now that’s a good fellow,” intoned the Sergeant as the firemen and mechanics gasped and chattered and muttered in wonder at the custom-built Barrett Car, and, among the prideful feelings Richard recalled the flag, sewn by Mum’s own hand, draped mist-sodden and coal-stained above.

“Sergeant,” he said saluting the flag.

The Color Sergeant Major cleared his strident throat, saluted the Union Jack and commanded, “O’Neal, she be your steed. Draw down the colors and entrust them to Plimpton.”

O’Neal, despite his size and age, was climbing above as the firemen complimented him on his maintenance and the Sergeant conducted this symphony of staff, “Blackie, furl, cover and pack the colors. You will bear the colors. Mind the lance tip, she is sharp, stave joint at the heart, [1] stake by the right knee, lance tip above the left brow.”

“Yes, Color Sergeant Major,” proudly boomed Blackie the only voice near to a challenge in volume to their NCO.

It was not a minute more that Richard, his kit on his back, sword at his side, marched through the Crown Street Gate, followed by Plimpton, a hundred pounds of luggage strapped to his back, and bearing the standard with both sooty hands, then by O’Neal, Pope and LaFono with their dollies loaded for adventure, the tail of this short column taken up by the most solid sergeant to serve Queen Gloria in her thus far brief reign of seven years.

‘Ah, to meet that beautiful queen! To bend the knee, proudly, the key to the Last Bastion of Zed in my hand… to kiss that great ring upon that dainty hand…’ dreamed Richard, so lost in wonder that he could have been trampled had not Plimpton hissed, “Sir!” and the carriage bearing a wise-looking man, whose face shown knowingly under the gaslight lamp at Crown [2] and Ostend as it clattered past into the misty murk of a still fresh night.

…

Notes

-0. Fort McHenry

-1. The brass joint that joined the two sections of the hollow steel flag staff.

-2. Light Street in the fictive Baltimore where the author was raised.

‘How I wish to be on those oaken, India-rubber running boards, hanging from the iron rails as this bullish car cuts the gaslit gloom!’

Richard mused fanatic in his mind Britannic as the chugging Barrett Car descended to the Inner Harbor, into gloom impenetrable issuing from water mist, steam foundry stacks, ocean going steamer stacks docked at wharf and riding at anchor. The lights of a destroyer above the rifled turret gun, the furled sails of a proud and outmoded clipper ship and the back-lit Union Jack upon Crown Hill were all that was clearly visible to his naked eyes. The reek of sooty coal, the sting of wood smoke, the belching of super-heated steam competed with the storm season humidity to choke one’s breath. One’s lungs were as afflicted by this pestilential desolation as the sight was dimmed.

‘To ride the deck of a swift sloop on the open ocean, or fly in a hot air balloon would be so grand!’

Onward O’Neal piloted the carriage around the dismal harbor, past red lit windows were harlots beckoned, “MiLord, a sweet ride awaits with this nameless bride!”

‘Oh, My, what a debased state women can fall to!’

A towering mսlatto in top hat and cape knocked his pimp cane upon a gaslight post of cast bronze, “MiLord, an Octoroon maidenhead awaits your conquest—a fit handmaiden for your Mum… lettered to a wince, memorized all of Luke and of Milton too…”

Onward O’Neal coaxed the great snorting beast, Blackie shoveling with precise and careful scrapes of his shovel behind the carriage, the footman warning off the gathering pimps, bawds, ruffians and a gaggle of sailors gawking at their passage:

LaFono in knit cap and dastard cape, all in black, snarled, “The brakes are given us a fit, best stand clear, mates.”

A Liverpool accent slurried from some sailor’s yap, “Regards to the ill-served lord what has such tramps fer footmen.”

Tyler Pope, too proud by half to be a servant, could be heard scampering up above, followed by the worst edification ever to announce a Barrett’s progress, “Foogin’ limey bastard, Boss Barrett bullies ‘ill brain ye simpler den you izz,” and a toss of some article evidenced itself by the play of feat above, echoed by a thudding impact and a mumbled gurgle, punctuated by his new most savage servant’s boast, “Another Exeter Alley brick ‘ill clear da next yap o ‘er chops!”

And a shower of bottles, tin cups, and a brick or two, thudded about the oaken, iron, bronze, India-rubber and brass car that could not quit this gloom quick enough for Richard’s sensibilities. The air was then cut by the stentorian roar of that voice that had commanded the last ten men under his command at Mogadishu to fix bayonets and charge the breach: “Out, Of, The, Way—A Barrett goes this Way!”

“Coachman, full steam!”

The grinding of gears, the shoveling of coal, the belching of the boiler stack and the curse of Lafono as he kicked some sailor under the wheels thrilled Richard. Curses and blows rained all around—and the great, “K-bump-Krunch,” of a sailor being wrecked to ruin under the tons of rolling fortitude brought a sinister chuckle from LaFono and a hearty “Haloo!” from Tyler Pope. That most frightening prince of the gutter then swung his grinning face down to the window, regarding Richard upside down holding himself aloft, it must be presumed, by hooking his knees on the runners and rack above, hopefully not defiling the brazen pole of the Union Jack hanging their in some serpentine curl of his bare feet. In this inverted posture the footman exclaimed, “Boss Barrett, a gift from yon’ limey scum!” and handed a barely drunk bottle of rum through the open panel window.

“Well done, Footman Pope, well done,” he acknowledged, and handed the bottle of regulation Pussers Rum to his Sergeant, “Into rations for the men, Sergeant, if you will.”

“Indeed, Sir, right spoils of war. May it be that what sailor filched this from the Quartermaster’s Stores be he since under our wheels.”

Richard nodded, as he knew better than to speak his thoughts, ‘Most improbable, yet most true of sentiment.’

A horse and buggy careened out of their way bearing a finely dressed lady bobbing like a top within, her coachman struggling to maintain his country horse.

‘Please, Lord, do not let that coach go down the way we came, I Pray.’

“Baltimore Street in our rear at last, Sir—most hazardous and unsavory,” informed Color Sergeant Major.

Richard watched as the witless country coachman took his good lady down that terrible street they had just quit at such a hazard. Hanging his head out besides Tyler Pope, who he somewhat envied for his youth and brash enthusiasm, he looked after that carriage as it passed the corner street light and faded into the gloom of which their car had so recently contributed.

‘I understand, now, why the true Gentry hate us so. What of that woman? Will I ever know? Have I contributed to her demise by way of this belching car that takes me so arrogantly on by?’

Richard tried to stop worrying as Pope gently pushed his head back into the car, “Mind the gaslight’s, Good Knight.”

Sure enough a gaslight nearly brushed the carriage and would have brained him or at least removed his service cap.

Fixing his cap, which he had no recollection of donning, Richard was stricken with more than the guilt over the damsel and the fate of the rude drunk sailor, but with doubt, for his steel trap brain had clean forgotten a rote act, the kind of which he had been proud to note in the ever expanding encyclopedia of his mind.

‘Have I now begun to fail, for my mind to shrink, to forget?’

“Now, Sir, none of that. Save your critical view for the enemies of The Queen, not, for her most loyal servant—the Britannic Sun Building ahead, Sir, to your left, well and nigh lit like day by such a gaslight array.”

The Sergeant had the forward view, he the backward. In a few more chugs the great newspaper concern so proudly built above the gallows where the Maryland Militia captains once swung fairly, brazenly glared. [1] Gas light lamps ringed the gallows shrine, lining the Walls of Reason, masonry sculpted in the manner of scrolls, the gate before the gallows with oaken doors carved in the image of a book. The iron domed roof shone like a minaret in the steam clouds of night, no stars dotting the undercast sky, but many a lamp lining walls, illuminating windows where men could be seen in suits at their desks. Above it all, formed like a great cloth flag, even the ripples affected by wrought iron, in blue, red and white lights, shone the Union Jack!

Richard and his Sergeant both saluted at once the symbol of their manifest loyalty, to Queen Gloria, the Virgin princess who bestrode a world, and Great Britain.

He could recall, though he never did hear, the axiom that Grandpa Blake Barrett was known to quip whenever he saluted the Union Jack: ‘Not a soul ever named Her Good-to-Middling Britain, by God!’

With some pride he noted that the foot men both hung from the right rail, his left, being backways seated, and that they saluted, one to his frump gutter cap of gray canvas and his elder to the knit cap that encased his Gaelic skull.

‘Even my rough and ready scrums, born under our thumb, salute The Mistress of the World.’

…

Notes

-1. The seven captains from their seven companies and an eighth, a poet and economist who had risen the rabble down here in imitation of restive Boston some 250 years ago, had swung. The gallows had ever after been painstakingly preserved with red paint, brass rails added, and New Year’s Eve marked with sham hangings of great, sad and comic faced poppets for the children.

“Sir,” gravely intoned Color Sergeant Major, “how is the shoulder?”

Richard shrugged the offended joint, which had no arm to wield, and felt the pain, the pain that did remain, an old wound now on a young man, to remind him of his limits. Meeting the eyes of the conscience that towered a head above him and a universe of patience beyond his ken, Richard flashed his impatient Barrett eyes and shrugged again, feeling the pain, saying nothing.

“Understood, Sir, the soul overcomes. That Welsh butcher did as a fine a job tidying that wing up as any Royal Navy surgeon.”

Richard grinned proudly, “What a mob we had, best action by a disciplinary platoon ever recorded. I hope that one of them at least has refrained from incarceration.”

Nodding, the Sergeant flashed eyes to the side where Lafono hung like a monkey from the rails of the thundering horseless coach, “A likely crew, good in a scrap, daft in the brain, and loyal as you like. O’Neal and Plimpton must guard the kit in the godforsaken brick of a pit whence we descend. I shall keep the door. It pains me, but this savage Irish squib would be your guard. I have not the sense for conspiracy and he for theography. I am, Sir, suspicious of this bit.”

Richard asked, “Despite or because of Queen Gloria’s writ?”

“Both, Sir, both. The height an order falls from determines its risk to the agent.”

The coach rumbled south down the wide boulevard, its twin bullseye lanterns mounted shining from spring mounted cressets on either side of the coachman to illuminate the cobblestone road ahead. Looking east and west, seeing slower single horse carriages with traditional lanterns on either side, provided Richard with a context in his mind’s eye.

“Sergeant, my birthday, as you know is exactly a month a way, it being September 25th today. The natural world has just begun to sleep and at this time the unnatural world opens to us. I am thrilled, I admit, to be invited to join in conclave the fellows that were the peers of my lost scions.”

“I like it not, in some public house, in this den of thieves and liars, ruffians and connivers?” grossed the Sergeant.

The lanterns on the various porches of the gentry lit the way down over the hill below the Loch, reminding him in repose, that his ancestors, his bold bloodsmen, looked down upon him from heaven—and that his lost father perhaps awaited rescue at Richard’s willful hand.

“Theography, Sergeant is the art of the secret wide open. These mindful men do not lurk in secret rooms, but hold forth in public houses where the eyes of evil are upon them—and can be seen. For evil never rests, My Man. In the Pub, we may spot their agents, as we speak in cipher as Homer and Hesiod and our bold Teraldus once did. We are the eagles of light coming to confer among the coiled serpents of the dark—like this very conveyance, piercing the night with right.”

The narrow blue eyes of his towering nanny, so tall even seated, slid to meet his in agreement, though from the sigh in his high-buttoned chest and the sad slide of his eyes, evinced the mourning of Mum Barrett back at Dark House, “You are The Barrett placed above Baltimore as agent against plots and revolts by tradition, yet called away in such haste, that I sense the hand of the Russian, that agents from Oregon and California have by clipper ship infested this city.”

“A hundred percent!” agreed Richard. “But, the Theographical Society, meeting here instead of London, I smell an expedition! Surely Russian agents will thwart us…”

That thought thrilled him the more. Richard became lost in reverie as the carriage bobbed along, the engine chugging behind them, visions of him crossing sword blades with some bear-like Russian thug swirling in his mind…

A few gentlemen, seated in wicker chairs in top hats, enjoyed pipes, wine glasses held by a negro boy, bottle and towel by a colored footman, each lord attended by a Hindoo footman, looked at Richard as he saluted them, O’Neal slowing so that Richard could hob a nob with his peers.. These men looked hard and disapproving of his smoking carriage, stood, motioned for their Hindoo man-servants to face the chairs about, and sat back down with their backs to the road.

Onward, downward, and into the closer yet cozy brick habitations of the middling class they rolled, O’Neal often giving out warning to children as he worked the levers, clutch and brake, keeping the progress slow as children yet played in the early autumn twilight, saying “Good evening,” to men seated under porch lanterns to enjoy an after dinner cigar and Scotch.

“That was pleasant enough—backbone of the empire, right there, Sergeant.”

Down the fourth hill of cobblestone road O’Neal guided them, into a more congested warren of three story brick homes with flat roofs, with brats running about unsupervised, men smoking cigarettes and drinking beer as they sat in tiny yards weary from the factory work that so obviously stained their big hard hands. One of them waived to O’Neal, “Good job ye ‘ave, mate—keep polishin’ that seat; beats all hell out O’ foundry toil!”

“The shipyard sucketh too, ye lucky thrift!” sounded another tired voice.

“That might be your Imperial spine there, Sir, what builds Her thews?”

“You are right—and there is nothing I can do but this,” and on impulse Richard stepped out on the running board, raising his hat in his right hand in salute to these worn-out working sorts, holding on to the roof rail with… and thank God for Lafono, who, seeing Richard’s shoulder raise in memory of an arm to hang from as he saluted the working men, grabbed his master with his own right arm and held him there.

‘You fool,’ he thought, but even as he excoriated himself for a memory of an arm nearly ending this expedition, he declared, “Hands of the Queen you are!”

To which one rougher sort quipped, “To see ‘er on the stamp, I’d as soon put hands to her lady favor,” and this was punctuated by the sound of a flower pot being hurled from the porch by a woman presumed to care…

That ruckus thankfully veiled the second portion of his embarrassment, as Lafono shoved him back into the arms of the Sergeant and hissed, “Boss, eyes ahead down the way—we headed through Crooks Warren.”

In a mere five minutes the same downward winding street, cobbled with enough bricks to make the Great Pyramid of Giza, saw them chugging through a close packed rpw of lower servants houses, brick shacks in fact, without porches and with a front door set to swing inward so landlords and police could more easily break it down, besides the fact that such a door if swung outward would nick a carriage wheel in the street. The children here played on the low roof tops, some tykes bombarding them with pebbles. Slaternly women peered from open windows from the backs of couches. Ragged youths stalked the street and gutters with surly countenances, some holding bricks, stick or palming a glint of steel. The sidewalks were the habitation of the men of this rough class, with broken noses, rude shoes to the bare feet of the youths, and clothes of a better sort then the working men up the hill. These men leaned upon light post and house front drinking from tin cups, every fifth one manning a rum cask.

“Stop!” shouted some maniac.

“Sir,” quizzed the Sergeant as Richard stepped out of the carriage, on to the rail, handing his hat to Lafono, and, as O’Neal brought her to a stop and Blackie stayed hidden from sight, Richard declared, looking at the street sign that proclaimed, Exeter and Calvert, “Exeter men, I seek a second footman, to man the far runner, a lightweight man handy with fists, cards and dice and can smell a dastard caper. I am Richard Dark Hall Barrett, and I pay in gold guineas and a daily drought of supernaculum.”

Among the men drinking was a tall, broken nosed, cannonball-shouldered affray of knuckles, with long black hair. He stalked forward and grinned, “I be busy with feud at the instant, Yer Pugnaciousness. But me son, Tyler, he needs for adventure en ya’ll seem set for the shit.”

Lafono and this man knew each other by a glance, with Richard’s footman declaring, “Nat Pope, Boss, coul’ narry lay a glove on ‘is mug.”

Nat grinned wider and took Richard’s hand, which he might have broken and shook, “Yer footman ‘ere is about worn out—my boy ‘ill make a fine replacement.”

Lafono laughed, knowingly and also shook the big hand, a hand that squeezed, and tested, pulled and pushed, and finally let go, “Dis Potato Negro ‘as got a scarp or two in ‘im. But a Barrett should be served by a right English Native.”

Nat Pope’s voice then boomed, “Tyler Pope, footman fer Sir Barrett, mount the left runner and learn from this runt mic thug—Exeter for the Barretts!”

The youth that sprang too was tall, lithe and wiry, like a faerie prince from fable.

So a dozen, then a score, and finally a hundred and more rough voices chanted, “Exeter for the Barretts!” as the prince of this gutter nation was sent off by its king.

Richard boarded with a bit more swagger than he had—ever, even at Mogadishu—and a second footman leaped to the far side of the Barrett c… ‘It should be a car, not a carriage, for it abbreviates passage—the Barrett car!’

The lurid lights of the Crook Warrens gave way to the crumbling brick and clapboard dens of the Negroes, overgrown with man-high weeds swaying in the post-summer breeze, presented naught but silence and the whites of fearful eyes, as an obvious and haughty agent of their lesser destinies rumbled like a lion on by.

“Well done, Sir.” intoned the now serene voice of the Color Sergeant Major.