Rebels of Babylon Read online

  I never even heard them. They dropped the net from a rooftop as I strode about complaining to myself. Its weight made me stagger as its meshes covered me.

  Before I could respond in any manner, someone played artfully on the ropes and I found myself on my back, caught like a fish.

  Next, I was hanging upside down, unable even to stretch out my arms to shield myself if dropped.

  Laughing at the ease of their catch, they began to haul me upward. My well-being failed to concern them. I bounced off the bricks like a ball of India rubber.

  Before I could get my bearing, a crew of rough-handed fellows pulled me over the parapet and dropped me onto a flat expanse of roof. Glimpsed through the mesh, my captors were black and white and every shade in between. But one among them drew my especial attention. He was a giant. With a pattern of scars on his broad, flat, caramel face.

  There was no sign of the snake-woman.

  “Give ’im the whiff, just give ’im a whiff right quick,” a bearded white fellow cried.

  In a moment, I smelled ether.

  I wriggled most ferociously. It would have been wisest of them to give me a crack on the head with a club, as they might have done a flounder. But they seemed determined to put me out with fumes.

  The mesh held me so tightly I could not defend myself. Still, I twitched about as if having a fit.

  I had one hope, see. I needed them to release me from the net. For when they harvested me, they caught my cane, which contained a lovely blade within its shaft. Properly armed and on my feet, I was ready to take on all the rogues in the world.

  “Get ’im, Pie! Jes’ conk that there dwarf-man over his haid.”

  “Watch he don’t bite, now.”

  A son of Africa tried to wrestle me flat. Larger than me by half, he still could not quite fix me. And no one helped him. Look you. At times it is a blessing, being made small. For those of greater stature underestimate you.

  “He jes’ ain’t got no give-up in him, Tiny,” my wrestling partner grunted. “He slippy as a cottonmouf.”

  Each time the drug-soaked rag approached my face, I forced the netting away from me, twisting and turning.

  “Just get him out of that damned fish-trap,” someone said. “You can’t get at his muzzle like that. He got you all foxed. Get that net off him, Pie.”

  “Jes’ help me hold him on down,” my assailant demanded. “I can’t do bofe things to once.”

  “Laissez! Laissez!” the giant snapped. “You make yourself a fool.”

  Miraculously, they began to loosen the meshes.

  When he knows you have come close enough, the cobra does not hesitate to strike. Nor does a veteran soldier, given a chance to survive.

  Before they realized themselves how loose the net had become—and while it still veiled my face—I discarded the sheath of my sword-cane and jabbed the nearest fellow in the groin. Not deeply, you understand. I did not want the blade getting stuck when I needed it. And two or three inches of steel will take your enemy from the battle, if the tip is properly placed.

  My victim howled to wake the dead. My blade had come as such a surprise that the lot of them stopped their doings and wasted a moment looking from one to the other.

  By the time they bore down again I was on my feet and free of the net’s restraint. I slashed the bearded fellow across the face, meaning to splash as much gore as I could. Only the boldest soldier can ignore the copious flow of his own blood. Then I pierced a yellow man’s belly. Low, where it gives the most pain.

  I had no wish to kill them, see. Not unless they insisted. But I could not afford to be gentle with my kidnappers.

  Twas then I made a mistake. I should have kept on cutting human meat. Instead, I took time to kick over the bottle of ether. I booted it back toward an open hatch in the roof. It struck wood and shattered.

  The three brutes who remained untouched by my blade produced a collection of weapons that lowered my hopes. Two of them—the giant called “Tiny” and a bald, brown fellow with a glass jewel in his ear—drew cutlasses they had concealed on their persons. In defiance of the provost marshal’s regulations, I must add. The third produced a billy as long as a bayonet.

  They attempted to encircle me. Employing needless profanity all the while.

  I had to avoid the three men already down, in case one might regain sufficient possession of himself to trip me up or take a knife to my legs. Nor did I wish to entangle a foot in that net.

  Jimmy Molloy would have laughed to see me jigging about that roof.

  I backed toward the parapet over which they had hauled me in. It promised a three-story fall.

  The fellow with the glass earring charged me first. Bullies they were, not trained to fight as partners. This lad was the sort who swings a blade wildly, pressing the attack with all his vigor, but with little strategy, expecting simply to overwhelm his opponent. We clashed our steel but twice before I hopped aside, bad leg or no. As he stumbled past, I swept my blade across the small of his back.

  He tripped and fell forward. Smashing his jaw on the parapet.

  Bad though his situation looked at the moment, he seemed the sort to get back up for another go. I would have liked to give him a proper sticking, but his comrades did not mean to spare me the time.

  I lunged for the fellow with the club, forcing him backward with the tip of my blade, then wheeled about on my good leg. Just in time to parry the giant’s cutlass.

  He had real might in those arms, that big mulatto did. The force of his blow near astonished me. Glad I was that my blade did not simply snap in two, thin as it was and so light compared to the cutlass.

  He had more skill than his underlings. Wise enough he was to know that a small man’s blade can kill as easily as the lance of the tallest Johnny Seekh in the regiment. He chopped at me as if cutting cane, forcing me backward without exposing his flesh.

  He was giving the fellow with the club the chance to maneuver behind me.

  “Oh, Jeezis Gawd,” a supine figure called. Twas a stunned cry. An instant later, flames rose at the giant’s heels.

  The fellow whose groin I had pierced had struck a lucifer match. I do not know whether he meant to burn his pain away, or to attempt to close the wound or to purify it. But the match had ignited the ether or some other substance dormant upon the roof.

  The poor, black bugger rose, a man of fire, clothes and hair as vivid as the sunrise.

  I nearly lost my poise, remembering another figure, a woman, who had become a creature of flames not long before, back home in Pennsylvania. But that has naught to do with the tale I must tell you.

  Twas another woman entirely who had brought me here. A sad, young lass who had washed up dead and embarrassed on a levee.

  The burning man hurled himself from the roof, as if he expected cooling waters to greet him. He screamed until we heard his body strike. After which we shared an instant’s silence.

  The roof was afire, burning like thatch. My enemies regrouped. The kidnapper with the slashed back and smashed jaw had got up on his hind legs again, while the belly-stuck devil produced a Bowie knife, clamoring for my blood between his groans. Staggering toward me, full of spunk. Only the fellow whose face I had slashed, half-blinded by his own blood, failed to rally. He merely tried to crawl away from the flames, struggling to gain the hatch in the roof and escape.

  Four of the devils stood arrayed against me, although I might have claimed a fifth to honor the giant’s size. Each and every one in a terrible temper, they pressed me toward the rear of the roof. What lay beyond, I knew not.

  The fire urged them on, and they urged me.

  The scars on the giant’s face formed the oddest pattern. As if his skin had been carved up with a purpose.

  I eyed that hatch in the roof. Twas bothered by flames and behind the big fellow’s back. But it was the only way off the roof that did not promise broken bones or worse.

  My best chance was to surge into the attack, to dart past the mighty mulatto, sla
shing as I went, then hurl myself through the opening and take my chances.

  The fire’s appetite grew. My assailants crowded me.

  My plan come to naught. They rushed me, four at once, before I could charge them. I parried madly, retreating toward the horizon.

  From the middle distance, a woman’s voice cried “Fire!” Another voice at once took up the warning. Still others joined in, shouting, bellowing, screaming.

  As I stepped back toward the edge of the roof, a feminine shriek rose behind me, seconded by a chorus of terrified wails.

  The fellow with the club made the error of looking toward the voices for an instant. And got his nose slashed open for his folly.

  He dropped his weapon, staggering backward into the fire’s embrace.

  Male voices called out “Fire!” now and church bells rang to summon up the water carts. Indeed, the old cathedral’s towers were in plain view above the flames and smoke.

  The giant aimed straight for me, brushing aside my blade with the ease of a drill instructor tutoring a private.

  I had to step me back to avoid his cutlass. And I took a step too far.

  The women’s screams redoubled as I fell.

  I dropped hard, but not far. I landed on a sloping roof and immediately slid downward. Still clinging to my blade, I struggled to dig the fingers of my free hand into the roof. Rotted through, the shingles broke into bits.

  I believe that, at such moments, we are supposed to review our lives. And I had much to review. But all I could think of was how foolish I had been to leave my Colt revolver in my room at the St. Charles Hotel, all because I had not wished to offend the Ursuline sisters with a firearm.

  Well, that is the reward of proper manners, I told myself, as I went over that second ledge on my way to the earth below.

  I bellowed.

  Abandoning my blade, I grabbed at the roof and gutter for dear life. But the roof was as weak as putty, the gutter was rusted through, and everything I touched seemed to disintegrate.

  Now, I believe that those blessed to own property have a Christian responsibility to keep things in good order. But that afternoon I had reason enough to be grateful for the disrepair of our Southland.

  Just as I was about to spill into space again, the gallery collapsed, dropping me onto a railing just below.

  The railing gave way in turn.

  Now, I am a Welshman and made robust by nature, but I took a nasty bruising, all the same. Still conscious, I found myself with the wind knocked from my lungs and with just enough of my torso sprawled on a porch to inhibit my continued fall.

  A dismayed negress stood over me, wiping her hands on an apron as broad as a sail.

  “Y’all done growed yo’self a whole passel of troubles, white folks,” she observed. “Bustin’ up Cap’n Dev’ro’s back-porch roof …”

  I meant to advise her of the fire above us, which seemed to me a matter of greater concern, but the giant mulatto swung down from a beam before I could speak.

  With a howl, he raised his cutlass.

  The servant granted us privacy.

  I had no choice but to drop again, with a blade slashing at my forearms.

  My cascade ended in a delirious instant. I crashed through the weak upper branches of a tree and stopped, nearly impaled, on the limbs below.

  My old bones were unhappy, that I will tell you. The age of thirty-four is too advanced for such a fuss.

  The giant leapt into the tree behind me. Swinging his cutlass and calling me names—not a few of which sounded French and nasty—he might have been Goliath in his prime. Branches split beneath his weight, but the limb below mine caught him.

  He roared as he yearned toward me with his blade. The fellow seemed determined to hack off a limb or two, preferring mine to the tree’s.

  I struggled and twisted to free myself from the grip of branches grown fond of my trousers. Increasing the confusion, a host of female voices, close at hand, screamed their delight and dread. They seemed to be choosing favorites, like Mr. Gibbon’s Romans at a spectacle.

  Church bells pealed across the quarter. For all the din about me, I heard cracking whips, galloping horses and mad shouts in the distance.

  Scrambling onto one of those fancy galleries, all iron-work and ornamentation, I found myself surrounded.

  A bouquet of women pressed against me, as distinguished by their various scents as by their many complexions. Their stems were uniformly the white of undergarments.

  Twas not an abode of virtue.

  Ruder than I am wont to be to the gentler sex, I pushed my way through the pack of them, limping the worse without my cane and angry at the world for all its contrariness.

  Mr. Seward had gotten me into a pickle this time. With his habit of doing favors for the rich men of New York.

  A burst of screams just at my back announced the giant’s arrival on the gallery.

  I hurried through a warren of rooms whose daytime shabbiness longed for evening’s shadows. Hurling myself down the first flight of stairs I saw, I found my path blocked by a missy and her gent.

  They were on their way up to a randy-voo, but I had an even more pressing need to go down.

  I plowed right through them. With some violence.

  But look you: That fellow was white of hair and beard and should not have been there at all, corrupting those girls. And he certainly should not have been there in the daytime. He was old enough to know better and should have been home reading sacred texts, while pondering the journey that loomed ahead.

  His enchantress gave me a slap as I plunged past.

  Steps thumped just above me. The lass I had just out-brazened screamed for dear life.

  Still, I was close to safety. I had the front door in sight. And I did not think our battle would be continued in the street before the public.

  The giant hurled himself over the banister, landing square in my path.

  In the moment it cost him to regain his footing, I wheeled about and fled into a parlor.

  Fear swept through me the instant I crossed the threshold. I thought I had been ambushed. Two heavy figures loomed, one to either side of my path. In the amber twilight of a large receiving room, with heavy drapes drawn and no lamps lit in welcome.

  But the figures did not move to intercept me. They were ancient suits of armor, of the sort preferred for general wear in the works of Mr. Scott. Guarding the interior of a fancy house.

  I tore a pole-axe from the mitt of the figure on my right, toppling the clattering hollowness in my haste. When the giant burst into the room, eyes bulging as a dog’s will in its fury, I stood there waiting with a proper weapon.

  As a once-respected instructor of the bayonet, I felt my confidence renewed.

  The huge mulatto roared and seized a halberd from the other knight.

  We two went at each other, neither in the mood for taking prisoners. My opponent was not unskilled and possessed the advantage of height and weight. But I had relearned my footing after my misfortune at Bull Run. Give me a weapon whose length resembles that of a musket with bayonet fixed, and I will give a proper account of myself.

  For all of our clanging and thrusting and banging, neither of us got our blade-end on the other. Although I gave his fingers a nasty whack.

  But I must not claim that the parlor was left undamaged. He swung at me and gutted a massive grandfather’s clock. In drawing his blade out again, he toppled the device over a table decked with plate.

  I missed a few attempts on his life, but slew a long couch draped in Turkey carpet.

  As we were cracking and clanging and baiting each other amid the wreckage of springs, split wood and slaughtered china dogs, a woman appeared in an archway at the rear of the room. She had hellish-red hair upon her head and an old, single-shot dragoon pistol in her right hand.

  She lifted the weapon and fired in our general direction.

  “Damn-yankee sumbitch worthless nigger no-good two of yuz,” she explained.

  Yet, our intervi
ew in that “sporting” house was polite and calm compared to the uproar in the street without.

  “Ya git jus’ git damn yuz all and stay git goin’ to be hell to pay Champ Boulez sees this mess kill yuz both an’ spit on your no-good graves,” our hostess elaborated.

  She then produced a second pistol and fired that one, too.

  By George, she winged the giant well enough to spin him about and spill him over a chair.

  I moved to take my leave, discarding the pole-axe with as much gentility as the press of events allowed.

  “Ya just come back here damn-yankee sumbitch worse’n Spoons Butler who said ya’ll could leave worthless blue-belly who’s to pay for all this mess not that no-good nigger, hear?”

  Good manners are ever of value. Had I paused to excuse myself, as a gentleman should have done, I might have fared far better.

  Instead, I took myself off like a guilty boy, dashing for the front door.

  They awaited me in the hallway, just beyond the parlor. Two grim survivors of our rooftop clash. Seizing me with greater respect than they had paid me previously, they slammed me against the wall and plastered the rag over my mouth before I could rally.

  The ether finished me.

  TWO

  WERE I A BETTER CHRISTIAN, I WOULD HAVE FOUND solace in prayer as death approached. Instead, I kicked against the masonry, shouting to bloody, blue blazes.

  The first thing I did when I woke was smack my head. Erupting from ether dreams, I nearly knocked myself unconscious again. My only salvation, if such it was, lay in the meager distance between my prickly bed and the ceiling of my prison. Twas hardly a pair of inches, as my forehead learned.

  The stink come to me next. Twas gagging ripe. I would have twisted onto my side to keep myself from choking, but when I tried to roll over I found myself shut in so snugly I could not shift my person. I was caught between old bones and the roof of a tomb.

  That is where I regained my senses: inside a burial vault. When I turned my head to the slight degree I could manage, my lips met a skull. With shreds of leathery flesh still clinging to it. I could not see in the blackness. Twas darker than the Maharanee’s cellars where we slaughtered her bodyguards after their surrender. But a man knows a skull when he meets it, tooth to tooth.