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the Captain
here wanted the man stopped, he’d have been stopped.”   He leveled frank blue eyes at Burton.   “Who are you that I oughtta wind the
crank on my give-a-damn machine?”
    “He’s alright,” Jones muttered.
    Burton extended a hand and smiled a rugged, manly grin.   “Richard Burton,” he introduced
himself.   “That is to say, ahem , Captain Richard Burton, special envoy of Her
Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria.”
    Swenson shook it confidently.   “Jerry Swenson, second counselor, Elders Quorum, Cottonwood
Fourth Ward.   President Williams is
back up there with the artillery—he’s an old Battalion man, and knows his
big guns.   First counselor’s
fishing.”
    “Fishing!?” Jones spat, dismissive.   “And war coming and all?”
    Swenson shrugged.   “He’s taken to shaving every day, too.   He might be bucking for a release.”
    Burton heard a sharp whistle.   Swenson turned and sloped to the railing of the Liahona and Burton and Captain Jones trailed in his
wake.  
    Below stood another buckskin-clad youth, his fingers in his
mouth to whistle.   Stretching
beyond him, standing at still attention in faint curling jets of steam, was a
brigade of American soldiers mounted on clocksprung horses.   They had come up behind the Liahona —like Burton, they were entering the Kingdom.
    The animals were majestic.   Burton had seen clocksprung beasts before, in ones and twos
and even, in the possession of one of England’s great peers, a team of four of
them, perfectly matched and pulling a carriage together.   But here he saw a couple of hundred.   They shone like a dull sun through
smoke, polished bronze cared for by soldiers and buffed to a high sheen to make
an impressive entrance.   They
looked like real horses, only larger, especially in the shoulders and the
hindquarters, and the animal’s back, overly narrow by comparison, was devised
in the shape of a saddle.   They
even had short clubbed tails and stylized curly manes, both hammered out of
bronze, at least in the case of the rank and file.   A parade of real animals would have twitched and swished
collectively at flies, and shaken its many heads, but the metallic column stood
stock still.   At this distance,
Burton told himself, it must be his imagination, but he thought he could hear a
faint whir and the grinding of tiny
clockwork cogs.   Even standing
still, the faintest traces of steam clung to the beasts’— no , Burton, thought, they aren’t animals—to the vehicles’ legs.
    The train of soldiers wore the blue uniforms of the United
States Army, and they sat astride their mounts two abreast and, Burton guessed,
a hundred deep.   They were cavalrymen,
with sabers and rifles and pistols bristling about them and a confident swagger
showing in the way they sat their mounts.   At their head rode two officers.   Both the officers’ horses were marked out by steel-shining trim in their
manes, tails, hooves and saddle.   One of the men, whom Burton guessed to be a Captain or better by his
brass shoulder scales and broad-brimmed cavalry hat with crossed brass sabers
above the forehead, raised his hand in a sharp salute to Swenson.   The other, with similar scales but a
stubby-brimmed cap like a blue fez, sat on a mount whose two shoulders bore
holsters for flagpoles.
    One holster held a flagpole from which snapped a blue
flag.   Burton could make out its
details by squinting: a toga-clad woman stomped victoriously on the chest of a
fallen man whose crown lay nearby.   Words stitched into the banner proclaimed SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS and identified the flag as belonging to VIRGINIA .
    The other holster, ominously, was empty.
    “Great Lakshmi’s lotus,” Burton murmured, “has it begun
already?”
    “Captain Everett Morgan, Third Virginia Cavalry!” the
Captain shouted.
    “A Welshman!” Captain Jones called.   His voice sounded hopeful and a little
playful.
    “A Virginian!” Captain Morgan shouted back.