McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [217]
The Martian Agent.
a Planetary Romance
By MICHAEL CHABON
They were the sons of an imperial traitor, marked for life. Their only honor lay in their loyalty to each other. Their sole chance for salvation lay in the empire of the clouds
’Tis theirs to sweep through the ringing deep where Azrael’s outposts are,
Or buffet a path through the Pit’s red wrath when God goes out to war,
Or hang with the reckless Seraphim on the rein of a red-maned star.
—RUDYARD KIPLING
CHAPTER ONE
WHELPS
1.
The brothers first encountered a land sloop on the night, late in the summer of 1876, that one hunted their father down. It picked up their trail in Natchitoches country, two miles from Fort Wellington, at the ragged southwestern border of the Louisiana Territories and of the British Empire itself. The moon, as many sad partisans of the mutineer George Armstrong Custer were to record, hung fat in the sky, stained with an autumnal tinge of blood that, to some diarists, presaged hanging and debacle. Outside the windows of the coach in which the brothers and their parents rode lay the wilderness, flooded in black water and in a steady-flowing hubbub of night birds, insects, and amphibians. The coach bobbed and pitched as if borne on that current of bedlam and black water, down a road already ancient when the ancestors of these very insects had jabbed and goaded DeSoto’s men along it to their itching feverish deaths. The boot-heels of the coachman, a big, steady Vermonter named Haseltine, drummed against the front of the coach, just behind the boys’ heads, with the random tattoo of a broken shutter in the wind. The timbers of the carriage groaned with each jolt and stone in the road. The respiration of the mosquito-mad team, a pair of spavined drays for which, two days earlier, they had exchanged the last of their sovereigns, rattled out behind the coach like a string of tin cans.
The first shrill call of the steel throat in the distance left a rippling wake of silence.
—Train, said the little one, or—no.
The cry had sounded too forlorn, too lupine for a train. Before the little boy even saw the knot of grief that deformed the hinge of the father’s stubbled, powder-burnt jaw, he knew that whatever had uttered it was hungering for them.
—There are no trains, the older brother said. Not this deep into Indian country. Don’t be a dolt.
—I’m not a dolt.
—A train.
—Please, the mother said, boys.
The little boy seized his brother’s shoulder, gathering a scratchy wool handful of stained cadet gray. He won’t ever be a British officer now, nor will I. Though he was a good forty pounds lighter and seven years the junior, the little boy sent the older brother lurching clear across the coach, slamming his head against a brass fitting. Before the older brother could retaliate there was another cry from the valve, louder, nearer, a blurred double-reeded blat less like the call of a wolf than of an implacable iron toad. At the sound of it the little boy scooted across the bench and buried his head in the brother’s lap. The brother put an arm around him and stroked his hair. He pulled an old Ohio River Company trading blanket with its smell of dog and tallow, amid which they had huddled for most of the past week, up to their chins.
The mother turned to the father.
—Harry, she said. What is it? Could it be a train?
—Not here, said the father. Franklin is right. Not this close to Tejas.
They were less than ten miles now from the border and freedom—another fact which melancholy diarists of the failed rebellion would be inclined, in the days that followed, to record.
The father stood up and went to the door of the coach. The night and its furor of animals and bugs blew in and stirred the damp black strands of the mother’s hair. Her cheeks