Foreword
Welcome to The Circus of Brass and Bone. This story is free, but donations are what keeps it going. All proceeds go to help cover my mother's treatment for advanced ovarian cancer.

Now settle back and enjoy the circus. It's the end of civilization, but the show...must go on.

Episode 12

Monkey Business

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Not far from New York City

It was late afternoon, and nobody had returned yet from New York. The circus sat idle.

Nobody else had noticed that the fortune teller was missing. That excitement was still to come. I could have told everyone--but I still wanted a way to persuade the Indian mahout to be on my side, even if I didn't know yet how useful he would be. Simply keeping his secret wouldn't be enough. It wasn't as if the other circus members would take my word for anything, anyway. I needed to figure out what he wanted.

That afternoon, he seemed to want to stay on the opposite side of the circus camp from me, leaving me frustrated. Betty and Roxane were chattering about fashionable dresses or some such tedious subject.

Maybe, I thought, I'll make Betty and Roxane take a walk with me out into the woods tonight. That will give them something to worry about!

In retrospect, I'm very grateful that I did no such thing. If I had, our bones would be mouldering in that forest, a freak show curiosity for anyone who found them.

#

Isaac the animal trainer

Port Rumsey, New York City

Isaac opened his eyes. It felt like he'd just closed them, but the sky above him was a darkening, cloudless blue and the shadows of the ship's rigging had shifted around him. Why was he lying on his back, anyway? Christopher, the new ringmaster-in-training, sat nearby. Maybe he knew why. Isaac tried to speak, but it came out as a harsh croak.

Christopher jumped. "He's awake!" he called.

A woman's head intruded into Isaac's field of view. She smiled broadly, showing rows of sharpened teeth that a shark would be proud of. "How are you feeling?"

"Gah!" Isaac pushed himself upright and backpedaled away from her. Memory returned. "You shot me!" he accused her. Then, "Hey, why doesn't my arm hurt anymore?"

He lifted his arm and moved it back and forth. It wasn't entirely true that it didn't hurt anymore, but the searing pain had muted to a dull ache. He studied himself. A scorched hole decorated the right side of his shirt, just below his collarbone. He poked his finger in the hole.

"Yowch!" he yelped, jerking his hand away. His head swam.

"I wouldn't say your arm doesn't hurt anymore," Christopher said dryly, "but you won't die. Captain Angie was kind enough to use some of her store of bone aether to knit you back together."

"Captain--?"

"He's muzzy-headed from blood loss," the woman said. "I've seen it before." She made a mock curtsey. "Angie Endo, Captain of the Beauty's Reward."

The movement dizzied Isaac. He shut his eyes. Then they sprang open again as what she'd said earlier penetrated. "You wasted bone aether on me?"

Even before the storm, if he'd broken a bone or been careless around something with sharp teeth, he'd healed in his own time. Bone aether was too expensive to waste on anything less than a life-threatening wound. He shuddered to think how expensive it must be now, after the storm spoiled most of it.*

"You sprang a pretty good leak," Captain Angie said. "I'd rather not kill somebody by mistake. Besides," she grinned, "I want to go to the circus."

Isaac shook his head. The world didn't spin around him. His head must be clearing. How had he gotten here? He and Christopher had come into New York with the others and then split off to look for Mr. Ben Doom. A booze-addled bum had suggested they look for the monkey with the sailors. They'd gotten to the port--and boy was it different from the subdued, fearful city! He'd been looking at the ships and he'd seen--.

"Doom!" he hollered.

Captain Angie buried her face in her hand. "Not this again!"

"At least you know not to shoot him this time," Christopher said. "Hey!" He put his hand on Isaac's uninjured shoulder and shook him. "It wasn't your monkey, okay? It wasn't Mr. Ben Doom."

Isaac stopped. "It wasn't?"

"No. It was hers." He nodded to Captain Angie. "Go on."

She put her fingers to her mouth--the proximity to all those pointed teeth made Isaac wince--and whistled. Something scuttled through the rigging above them. Isaac looked up, just as a four-legged thing plummeted down to land on the deck.

It had the size and shape of a monkey, but if Isaac had seen more than its shadow, he never would have mistaken it for Mr. Ben Doom. Like the circus' aether-powered elephant, this had been made from the bones of a living creature, but it was a far cruder creation than the elephant. Instead of the morbid elegance of bone and brass, a patchwork of dog hide covered it up to the skull. Underneath that bunched, loose skin, gears and joints shifted awkwardly.

The monkey-creature ran over to them with a weird, jerky scuttling motion and crouched beside Captain Angie. Naked bone grinned at Isaac when it turned its head in his direction.

Isaac shuddered and looked away. "No," he said. "That's not Mr. Ben Doom."

Late afternoon sun sparkled on the waves in the harbor. A breeze ruffled the slack sails. Beside the powerful, towering modern steamships, Captain Angie's sailing ship seemed quaintly old-fashioned.

"You don't know where our monkey is, do you?" he said quietly, keeping his eyes on the other ships.

"No." She sounded sorry. "He's not in the port, though. I would have heard. We're all bored silly--word of something new would spread like syphilis."

He had nothing to say to that. Silence stretched.

Eventually, she said, "I'm just glad I'm not captain of a steamship."

Startled, Isaac glanced at her. She wasn't looking in his direction. She'd followed his gaze to the modern ships berthed nearby. "What? Why?" he asked.

"Why do you think so many of them are still sitting in port? They don't want to waste their aether catalyst unless they have a damn good reason. Me, I'm free to travel wherever the wind blows."

"So why don't you?"

She smiled wryly. "I have a cargo to sell. Here seems as good a place as anywhere else--at least they haven't stormed the dock. Yet. The military forts are on our side, and the Commissioner is keeping a tight rein on his people. You might not think it--" she waved her hand at the licentiousness on display, "but this is one of the safest ports around. The dock might get a little rowdy--" on land, a shouted argument was resolved when one of the disputants smashed a bottle over the head of the other, "--and the Commissioner might just be waiting for his chance, but there's a lot worse out there."

She stared out over the sun-sparkling water, but she was seeing something else.

"You were out to sea when the storm hit," Christopher said softly. "This wasn't the first port you tried, was it?"

"No. We never sailed in close enough to dock anywhere else, though. I saw--bodies floating in the sea, and the hulks of ships burned down to the waterline. I lost crewmen anyway. A few had family in those ports. I wouldn't dock and I wouldn't give them a boat. They just--dove into the sea. They were pretty good swimmers. They should have made it to shore." She shook herself. "I like New York. Things are holding together here. A girl can disembark to get a drink or a little friendly male company without coming back to find her ship pillaged."

Isaac didn't know where to look, but he felt his face growing red at her frankness.

"Did I shock you?" She chuckled. "Maybe I'm too used to sailors. But like I said, it's not so bad here. I miss the old New York, though. The theaters, the restaurants, the dress shops--" She noticed the incredulous looks Isaac and Christopher exchanged. "What?" She grinned. "You should see the expression on those prissy shopgirls' faces when I smile ever so nicely at them and say I want to try on every dress in the shop! Such bargains I get, it's piracy!" She sighed. "And then I wear a pretty new dress and go to a park or the zoo--"

"Wait!" Isaac struggled to push himself up into a sitting position. "Did you say the zoo?"

"Yes." She looked quizzically at him. "There's a quite nice little family-run zoo in Manhattan. Planning some sightseeing? Oh--wait. I see. You think your monkey might have gone there."

Rising hope choked any words in his throat. He nodded furiously.

Christopher interrupted. "The monkey might have, but we can't. Look at the sky. It would be twilight by the time we got to the zoo. We'd never make it out of New York before curfew. We have to get back to camp and make our report."

"I'm going to the zoo," Isaac insisted. "You do what you like!"

"I can't just leave you! Remember? Nobody should go alone."

"Then I guess you're going too."

"An expedition to the zoo!" Captain Angie clapped her hands. "I'm glad you came to my ship. This is so much more fun than tedious war games. I got to shoot a man, the circus is coming to town, and now we're going to the zoo. Just like old times!"

"Not--quite," Isaac managed. He felt he ought to protest the way she counted shooting him as a fun thing, but she'd also saved his life and he didn't want to be ungrateful.

She sighed. "Maybe not quite like old times. I'd better get a few things to take with us. Wait right here!"

Before he could protest that she really shouldn't risk herself, she was gone.

When she returned, she wore a dark gray shawl and a long drab skirt. Isaac suspected that she still wore her scandalous trousers underneath. The skull-monkey skittered beside her, a blanket-wrapped bundle strapped to its back. Behind her loomed a silent, burly man with more tattoos than Isaac had seen outside the circus before.

"This is my first mate," she introduced him. "He'll be watching the ship while I'm gone, and he wanted to eyeball you lot before I left. In case anything happened."

Isaac gulped and tried to look harmless. He hoped the bullet hole helped.

Christopher eyed the skull-monkey askance. "What's in that pack?"

"Oh, just a few things I thought we might need."

Some of the shapes under the blanket had a distinctly weaponlike profile. Captain Angie might not be wearing her revolvers at her waist, but there were two lumps of about the right size in the package. A suspicious mind might think that long, thin shape resembled a rifle. Isaac poked a square shape. Something rattled inside, rather like cartridge shells. And. . . "Do I smell sausage?"

She smiled. "I'll never tell."

"You're not worried about them catching you with contraband? Or being trapped away from port after curfew?" Christopher asked.

"I never spent the night in a zoo before. Should be entertaining." She shrugged. "Even if the zoo is--inhospitable--we'll be fine. We just have to avoid the special patrolmen."

Isaac narrowed his eyes. Not that he would let fear of the patrolmen stop him, but she seemed mighty confident. He looked at the aether-powered monkey's horrible misfitting dog-hide coat and its gleaming bone face. He remembered the hobo saying, "I ain't never forgetting that skull-monkey."

"You been out in new New York after curfew!" he accused. "You and your monkey-thing."

"The captains decided somebody had to scout out the lay of the land," she said. "Somebody small and quick enough to hide, but strong enough to fight their way out of any trouble. Besides, I was bored."

"They sent a woman?" Christopher asked blankly.

"You say 'they' like I'm not a captain! We sent me."

"What if they caught you?" Isaac exclaimed. "We saw what they do to people who break their laws."

"They might catch me, but they can't hold me."

Her hands went to the neck of her shirt. Isaac didn't know what she was doing. Then she parted the buttons, and he knew she was opening her shirt but he had no idea why or what to do about it.

When she pulled her shirt open, he saw why. Brass tendrils arched up from her ribcage, curving over startlingly white flesh to flatten against her collarbone. Now that he looked for it, he saw other ridged outlines crisscrossing under her shirt.

"You're wearing a slave harness!" he blurted.

"What once was a slave harness," she corrected him swiftly. "I'm no slave and never was! An inventor of my acquaintance modified this harness to remove the master controls and to pull from bottled aether instead of spindling it from my bones. It's not as powerful as a war harness, but I have a strength advantage over any man in this port."

"But that's not--"

"And you should be happy I do," she continued. "How do you think I just happened to have bone aether to spare to heal up some fool who boarded my ship without permission, shouting, 'Doom!'?"

"But--." He stopped himself. "Thank you."

She nodded. "That's more like it." The motion made her shirt fall open further.

He averted his eyes, feeling heat creep up his cheekbones. "You can--" He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of her shirt.

She chuckled but took mercy on him and buttoned her shirt up again. When Isaac felt it was safe to look, he found Christopher staring searchingly at Captain Angie, a frown on his face.

"The captains sent out a scout. Are you expecting trouble? Do you think the Commissioner is going to storm the docks?" Christopher asked.

"If he tries it, he'll learn his mistake fast enough. He may have stopped the riots. He may control the city. But he doesn't have the artillery to take the port. The ships at sea when that hell-storm struck? All their weapons still work, not just the simple projectile ones. Sure, most ship stores of aether catalyst are low, but low is more than the nothing he has."

Christopher winced. "He's got more men, and whatever weaponry is in the civilian armory. From the sound of it, he's been stockpiling for a while. You might not be able to handle him."

Captain Angie grinned sharply. "You know how the Commissioner learned about the disturbances to aether-powered mechanical devices? He'd squirreled away a couple of Striders, those fire-spitting tanks the North used during the War of the Rebellion*. He was going to use them against his own civilians to enforce order! Instead, the tanks exploded. If you ask me, it was fitting that the men willing to commit such abomination died in the backfire."

Her voice harsh and low, she continued, "We'll not be turning our cargoes over to some tin-pot dictator just because he says so. We can fight off pirates at sea, and we can fight off pirates on land. You see those steamships out there?" She pointed to the massive cargo ships anchored farther out.

Christopher nodded.

"Those are the ships he wants. Their holds are packed with tasty edibles. But they know it's too risky to dock. So he can't storm them from the land. And the military forts have made it known that they won't tolerate piracy on the sea, no matter what happens in new New York. But!" She clapped her hands. "Enough grim talk! It's time for an outing to the zoo!"

#

"It don't say it's a zoo." Isaac frowned at the locked wrought iron gate in front of them. To either side stretched a fifteen-foot-high brick wall whose top bristled with jagged glass shards and pointy spikes. Beyond the gate, trees arched over an overgrown path. Snow caked on the thick underbrush.

Captain Angie squinted at the top of the gate. "It used to say 'Zoo' in big fancy letters on top of the gate. Look, you can see where the letters were sawed off."

The fresh cuts to the metalwork on top of the gate gleamed in the rays of the setting sun. Their sharp, jagged edges gave the gate an appearance about as friendly as an alligator's smile.

"Perhaps this isn't the best time to visit," Christopher said. "It's probably a wild goose chase anyway."

Before Isaac could round on him, Captain Angie took care of it. "Would you rather be on the streets of new New York after curfew? We don't have enough time to get back to Port Rumsey. It's your choice." She bared her teeth in a gleaming grin. "I'll have fun either way."

Christopher mumbled something to the effect that since they were there anyway. . . .

"That's what I thought you'd say." She rattled the gates. "Shouldn't be hard to climb the gates as long as you avoid the sheared off bits on top. It's a hell of a lot less risky than climbing up the wall, with all those spikes and that broken glass on top, and hyenas on the other side."

Isaac perked up. "They got hyenas?"

Captain Angie gave him a look. "It was an expression. I'm just saying that climbing over the main gate is the safest way to get in." She grabbed the bars, braced her feet against the bottom of the gate, and heaved herself upward.

The sound of a rifle being cocked from inside the zoo made her drop down, lift her hands, and take a few steps back. "Or, of course, it could be a trap," she continued. "Make every other way in difficult and dangerous, but leave one spot looking vulnerable. Then you can concentrate on guarding that one spot. It's a good trap. I should have thought of it."

"Sir, we don't intend any harm!" Christopher called to the unknown rifleman. "We're strangers in town. We heard there was a zoo. We'd dearly love to see it, if it's possible to arrange such a thing."

No response.

"I work with animals myself," Isaac tried. "At the circus." That exhausted his store of diplomacy. "I really need to see your monkeys! Honest!"

No response.

Captain Angie clicked her tongue to summon her skull-monkey. When it skittered up beside her, she untied the blanket pack it carried and began rummaging around inside.

Fearing she might be planning to start a shootout with the zoo's invisible guard, Isaac hissed, "Don't start nothing--please!"

She straightened with a string of sausages in her hand. "Don't fuss," she told him. "I know what I'm doing. I've traded with natives in hostile ports before, you know." Raising her voice, she called, "I'm not from New York. I'm a trader, a sailing ship captain. I thought chocolate and some sausages might be a fair trade for a visit to the zoo."

The bushes rustled. A young girl on the verge of womanhood poked her head out. "Sausages? And chocolate?"

Captain Angie smiled. "And chocolate. If you need anything in particular, I could maybe arrange a trade for you."

The girl pushed her way out of the bushes. Like the captain, she wore men's trousers. In her case, Isaac thought they might be a new addition. The cuffs were rolled up like they were hand-me-downs from an older brother. As a concession to modesty, she wore a knee-length skirt over them, similar to the Bloomer costume* some women had tried to adopt twenty years earlier. Her eyes fixed on the length of sausages Captain Angie dangled, but she kept the rifle pointed in their direction.

"I'm Captain Angie Endo," the captain said, as calmly as if gunpoint introductions were an everyday occurrence. For her, they might be! "What's your name?"

The girl thought about it but appeared to find no danger in introductions. "Rosie Sasse."

"That's better." Captain Angie smiled. Waving a hand in their general direction, she added, "This is Isaac, the animal handler, and Christopher Knall, who claims to be some sort of clown and ringmaster-in-training."

"Um, pleased to meet you," Rosie mumbled.

Captain Angie beamed like the girl had invited them in for a sit-down family dinner.

"Wait," Rosie said. She braced the rifle against her hip, reached up, and pulled on a cord dangling from the tree branches near the gate. A bell jangled in the distance.

Now that his attention was drawn to it, Isaac saw that the cord swooped down between tree branches all the way back along the path.

"I can't let you in," she said apologetically. "Papa has to decide."

"That's fine. Sensible costume you're wearing," Captain Angie approved.

"Er, thank you." For a moment, the rifle wavered in Rosie's hands. She cleared her throat and steadied her stance. When she spoke again, her voice was gruff. "Why were you going to break into our zoo?"

"We're hunting a monkey--" Isaac began.

Rosie braced the rifle against her shoulder and looked down the barrel at him. "We're not selling any of our animals, and we're not going to let you take them!"

"No, it ain't like that! You see--"

A short, broad-shouldered man with a bushy beard and mucky Wellingtons charged down the path toward them, an old musket in hand. He skidded to a halt when he saw the gate inviolate and Rosie with her gun. "What's this, then?" he demanded.

The bushes on either side of the path rustled.

"They want to hunt our monkeys, Papa!" Rosie said. She narrowed her eyes and moved her finger to the trigger of her rifle.

Feeling he was close to being shot for the second time that day, Isaac hurried to say, "No, no! We're from a traveling circus! I'm looking for one of our monkeys who went missing. I'm worried about him."

If anything, Rosie's scowl deepened.

The bushes to the right of the path shook furiously. A massive, majestic yellow-maned head poked out. Isaac froze as the lion turned topaz eyes to gaze at him.

After due consideration, the lion pushed his way out of the bushes and paced over to sit in the middle of the path. He yawned widely, incidentally displaying his long, white, wickedly sharp incisors.

Beside Isaac, Christopher opened and closed his mouth several times before managing to say, "Um. Lion. Backing away." He suited action to word.

Isaac studied the other areas of the underbrush where there had been movement. "He ain't feral, or they wouldn't never let him near the children." Indeed, small faces peered out from around the trees near the entryway. "They're the easiest prey." The little faces popped back into the underbrush. "The lion's comfortable around them, and they're comfortable around him. That means the lion's fed well enough that he won't attack just anything. Besides, it's the females who hunt. They're the ones you got to watch out for."

"Maybe they trained him to attack," Christopher offered from a distance away.

Isaac shot him a disparaging glance. "It's hard to train a lion. Easier if you start young, but--no. He's a zoo lion. It don't make sense to train him to attack the customers."

As if sensing that his role was over, the lion yawned, flopped onto his side, and stretched.

"You know your lions," Papa Sasse said approvingly. "Maybe you're not one of those barbarians who thinks a zoo is just a farm with funny-looking animals. We had a few of those come around, thinking that we should share the butcher's bounty."

"Oh, no!" Isaac gaped, aghast that anyone might think that he--. "I'd never! That's worse than eating humans! I'd starve first!"

Behind him, he heard Captain Angie mutter, "Worse. . . ?"

"He's here about the monkey, Papa," Rosie said.

Isaac rushed forward and seized the bars of the gate with both hands. Rosie jerked a step backwards and raised her rifle.

Captain Angie chuckled. "Your friend, he doesn't learn fast, does he?" she said to Christopher.

Isaac ignored that. His eyes fixed on Rosie, he demanded, "The monkey? You've seen him? You have him?" He looked past her, searching the the treetops. "Mr. Doom?" he called. "Mr. Ben Doom? Doom! Dooooom!"

"Oh, not this again," Captain Angie grumbled.

"You have no idea," Christopher said under his breath. "The first time he did that, at our campsite? We all thought he'd snapped. Or that the world was ending. Again."

"Doooooooom!"

"Settle down, son!" Papa Sasse told Isaac. "I knew something wasn't right when another monkey just showed up out of nowhere. We'll let you and your friends in to see him. Rosie, unlock the gate."

"You can't!" Rosie whirled on her father. "They're so happy, you just--you just can't! It isn't right!"

"Now, Rosie. . . ." her father began, raising his hand placatingly.

Isaac stared at the girl. What was she talking about? It couldn't be Mr. Ben Doom. The monkey wouldn't be happy away from the circus. He was a member of their monkey troupe. Even if he wasn't particularly close to any of the other monkeys, Isaac took really good care of him, making sure he got his share of the food and was groomed properly. He wouldn't just leave him--wouldn't just leave them, Isaac corrected himself.

"Unlock the gate, Rosie," Papa Sasse said. "They deserve to know what happened to their monkey. Think how you'd feel if it were Marigold."

Scowling, Rosie walked over to the gate and unlocked it. "You can't make him go if he doesn't want to," she warned Isaac.

He hardly heard her as he hurried inside. Mr. Ben Doom might have ran away from the circus, but Isaac couldn't imagine anything that would keep him from coming back.

(To be continued in Episode 13: The Importance of Apples.)

---

If you enjoyed this episode of The Circus of Brass and Bone, consider making a donation to keep it going (and get a character named after you, and a copy of the final book). All proceeds go to help cover the costs of my mother's treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. If you can't afford a donation, tell a friend, or blog about it.

Acknowledgments

This episode is brought to you by the generous donations of Deborah Rowan, Alice Marks, Katherine Nave, and Angie Endo.

The Circus of Brass and Bone is written and recorded by Abra Staffin-Wiebe. My main website is at www.aswiebe.com, and I blog at cloudscudding.livejournal.com.

Music is courtesy of Vermillion Lies. Go to their website at vermillionlies.com to hear more.

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