William Gibson - The Difference Engine

Fraser seemed pained. "London's never what she might be, in summer… "

"But look at the river!" Tom cried innocently. "And look, look, yonder comes a ship!" A large paddle-steamer was working her way up the Thames, and a very queer-looking craft she was indeed, with her hull flat as a raft's, and a cheese-box cabin of sloping, riveted iron, the walls of black armor patched bow-to-stern with large white squares: cannon-hatches. On her bow, two sailors, in rubber gloves and nozzled rubber helmets, took soundings with a leaded line.

"What sort of vessel is that?" asked Mallory, wiping his eyes.

Brian rose unsteadily, leaned across the wall, wiped his mouth, and spat. "Pocket ironclad," he announced hoarsely. "A river gun-ship." He pinched his nose shut and shuddered from head to foot.

Mallory had read of such craft, but had never seen one. "From the Mississippi campaign, in America." He stared beneath a shading hand, wishing for a spyglass. "Does she fly Confederate colors, then? I didn't know we'd any of her class here in England… No, I see she flies the Union Jack!"

"See what her paddle-wheels do!" Tom marveled. "That river-water must be thick as neat's-foot jelly… "

No one saw fit to remark on this observation. Fraser pointed downstream. "Listen, lads. Some rods away lies a deep-dredged channel. It leads into the moorings for the West India Docks. With the river this low, with luck, a man might creep through that channel, to emerge within the docks unseen."

"Walk o' er the mud o' the shore, you mean to say," Mallory said.

"No!" Brian cried. "There must be another stratagem!"

Fraser shook his head. "I know those docks. They've an eight-foot wall about 'em, topped by a very sharp cheval-de-frise. There are loading-gates, and a rail-head, too, but they'll be close-guarded sure. Swing chose well. The place is nigh a fortress."

Brian shook his head. "Won't Swing guard the river, too?"

"Doubtless," Fraser said, "but how many men will stand sharp lockout over this stinking mud, for Swing or anyone else?"

Mallory nodded, convinced. "He's right, lads."

"But it'll daub us neck to foot with smeechy filth!" Brian protested.

"We're not made o' sugar," Mallory grunted.

"But my uniform, Ned! D'ye know what this dress-coatee cost me?"

"I'll swap ye my gurney for that shiny gold braid," Tom told him.

Brian stared at his younger brother, and winced.

"Then we must strip for it, lads," Mallory commanded, shrugging out of his jacket. "Like we were farm-hands, a-pitching sweet hay on a nice Sussex morn. Hide that city finery in the rubble, and be quick about it."

Mallory stripped to the waist, tucked his pistol in the belt of his rolled-up trousers, and lowered himself down the embankment wall. He half-slid, half-hopped to the evil mud below.

The river-bank was as hard and dry as brick. Mallory laughed aloud. The others joined him, Brian coming last. Brian kicked a cracked dinner-plate of mud with his waxed and polished boot. "Damme for a fool," he said, "to let you talk me out of uniform!"

"Pity!" Tom taunted. "Yell never launder the sawdust out o' that fancy forage-cap."

Fraser, removing his collar now, was in white shirt and braces—surprisingly dandyish items, of watered scarlet silk. A new shoulder-holster of pale chamois held a stout little pepperbox pistol. Mallory noted the bulge of a neat padded bandage beneath the shirt and strap. "Don't go griping, lads," Fraser said, leading the way. "Some folk pass their very lives in the mud of the Thames."

"Who's that then?" asked Tom.

"Mudlarks," Fraser told him, picking his way. "Winter and summer, they slog up to their middles, in the mud o' low tide. Hunting lumps o' coal, rusty nails, any river-rubbish that will fetch a penny."

"Are you joking?" Tom asked.

"Children mostly," Fraser persisted calmly, "and a deal of feeble old women."

"I don't believe you," Brian said. "If you told me Bombay or Calcutta, I might grant it. But not London!"

"I didn't say the wretches were British," Fraser said. "Your mudlarks are foreigners, mostly. Poor refugees."

"Well, then," Tom said, relieved.

They tramped on silently, breathing as best they could. Mallory's nose had clogged solid and his throat was thick with phlegm. It was a relief of sorts, to be spared the sense of smell.

Brian was still muttering, a monotone to match their tramping step. "Britain's a sight too hospitable to all these damn foreign refugees. If I'd my way, I'd transport the lot to Texas… "

"All the fish here must be dead, eh?" said Tom, stooping to rip up a china-hard platter of mud. He showed Mallory a mash of flattened fish-bones embedded in it. "Look, Ned—the very image of your fossils!"

They reached an obstacle a few yards on, a dredger's muddy hollow, half-filled with black silt, marbled with veins of vile pale grease like the lees from a pan of bacon. There was no help for it but to leap and dodge and splash across the ditch, and Brian had the evil luck to miss his footing. He came up foully smeared, flicking muck from his hands and cursing wildly in what Mallory took to be Hindustani.

Beyond the ditch, the crust grew treacherous, plates of dried mud skidding or crumbling underfoot, over a pitchy, viscous muck full of ooze and bubbling gas-pockets. But there was worse luck yet at the entrance-channel to the Docks. Here the channel's banks were close-packed tarred pilings, slick with greenish fur and oily damp, rising fifteen feet above the water-line. And the water itself, which filled the broad channel from bank to bank, was a chilly grey sump, seemingly bottomless, writhing with leg-thick wads of viridian slime.

It was an impasse. "Now what's our course?" asked Mallory grimly. "Swim?"

"Never!" Brian shouted, his eyes reddened and wild.

"Scale the walls, then?"

"We can't," Tom groaned, with a hopeless look at the slimy pilings. "We can scarcely breathe!"

"I wouldn't wash my hands in that damn water!" Brian cried. "And my hands are caked in stinking muck!"

"Stow it!" Fraser said. "Swing's men will hear you sure. If they catch us down here, we'll be shot like dogs! Stow it, and let me think!"

"My God, the Stink!" Brian cried, ignoring him. He seemed near panic. "It's worse than a transport—worse than a Russki trench! Christ Jesus, I saw 'em bury week-old pieces of Russki at Inkermann, and that smelled better than this!"

"Knife it!" Fraser whispered. "I hear something."

Footsteps. The tramp of a group of men, coming nearer. "They've got us," Fraser said in sharp desperation, gazing up the sheer wall and putting a hand to his pistol. "Our number's up—sell your lives dear, lads!"

But in one moment—a series of instants shaved so thin as to be normally useless to the human mind—inspiration blew through Mallory like a gust of Alpine wind.

"Don't," he commanded the others, in a voice of iron conviction. "Don't look up. Do as I do!"

Mallory began to sing a chantey, loudly, drunkenly.

"C'mon, you lads!" he urged cheerily, with a boozy wave of his arm. Tom and Brian, direly puzzled, chimed in the chorus, faltering and belated.

"Next verse!" Mallory crowed.

"Ahoy!" came a brusque shout from the top of the wall. Mallory glanced up, in feigned surprise, to see foreshortened bodies. Half-a-dozen marauders were looming over them, rifles slung over their backs. The speaker crouched at the top of the pilings, his head and face swathed in kerchiefs of knotted silk paisley. He held a gleaming, long-barreled pistol, with seeming carelessness, across his knee. His trousers, of white duck, looked immaculate.