Auraria: A Novel (26 page)

Beneath him, the rocks were slick. He lost his footing and came down hard on his tailbone. He stood and fell again but was not deterred. On his hands and knees, he crawled to the center of the river. A funnel of water coming between two rocks sculpted a natural sofa. Holtzclaw placed himself into this basin and let the water crash around him.

The water in his natural spa turned cold. Crystalline fragments of ice pricked at his skin. In the sugary froth, there were flakes of gold. He reached out to scoop up the colors, but the foam vanished before his fingers. His skin had acquired a golden hue, which faded to green. It looked sickly on his skin; he felt sickly, and the recurring pain throbbed stronger than ever. He plunged back into the waterfall channel, but the water there was thick and oozing. He rolled back the extremities of his undergarment, and beneath, the stain was worse. He stood up, turned, shook himself, and shivered.

“Not the cleanest swimming hole, James,” said the princess.

On hearing the girl’s voice, Holtzclaw and his uncovered limbs scrambled into one of the deep wells. He was compelled by modesty. The icy waters fixed the golden residue against his flesh.

“Don’t dive too far,” said the princess. “There might be snakes down those basins.”

Holtzclaw scurried out of the pit and shielded himself behind a rock. His face was hot from embarrassment and chill from the water. He chattered and burned.

“James, you’re such a pitiable sight,” said Trahlyta. “Come out from there.”

“What’s happening up the river? What’s happening to me?”

“The moon maidens, like you, decided that the best cure for their ills was a bath. Sadly, you’re suffering from their runoff.”

“How can … how can that be? What’s this on me? Can I see them?” Veins of waterborne gold twisted downriver.

The princess shook her head. “Why? They are in a bad humor. The singing tree was supposed to perform for them, but he’s been unreliable of late. Their whole holiday is off, thanks to you. Even the current doesn’t wash as well as it once did. You’ve made it worse, with all the money you’re pouring into the water. Excuse me, I have tidying to do.”

A light rain started to fall. Wild wonder fish came to the surface and nibbled at shiny flakes; a larger catfish trawled the bottom with his whiskers.

“You’re doing this?” said Holtzclaw. “Washing the gold away?”

“Oh yes, James. Showers, storms, currents. They are my special talent.”

“I don’t understand, Princess. Why do you want to be rid of gold? Isn’t it as natural as any other rock?”

“It doesn’t belong in this valley. We should have springs and rivers, not mines and treasure tunnels. Gold is an unwelcome visitor. It works against the acclimation of people to the land.”

“I think that is a sentiment that can only belong to unearthly creatures,” said Holtzclaw. “We terrestrial people will never refuse gold, never say it’s unwelcome.”

“You won’t, will you? Ask Shadburn his opinion. And here you are, shivering and covered in gold, and you want more? Oh yes, for your floating hotel.” Holtzclaw tried to hang a puzzled look on his face, but he succeeded only in making the princess smile. “It’s hard to hide a steamship, James. Well, do you have enough gold now, considering what you have caked onto you?”

“I can’t spend this. I can’t even get it off me.”

The princess giggled. “How shall any of us get clean if the baths are dirty? Scrub up with Pharaoh’s Flour, I suppose.”

“And why is it funny?” said Holtzclaw. “I need every mote, even the ones between my toes.”

This caused the princess to quake with laughter. Her voice careened from the rocks of the river and the valley. The earth itself was laughing at him, in the round.

“Perhaps you would be so kind to show me, then,” said Holtzclaw, “where I can get some gold in a more dignified way.”

“Ask your friends, James!” said the princess, wiping tears from her cheeks. “They know where it is.”

“I am asking you, Princess. Show me where I can find the gold.”

“It is everywhere, James! Everywhere. That’s why you’re here, why I let you continue to be here. Because you are taking it away.”

“I’m so glad that I have your permission, princess!” said Holtzclaw, making a sweeping bow, unconcerned with how much of his bathing body he was exposing now. “I wasn’t aware that I operated only at your good pleasure. I hadn’t even seen you for weeks. And now I know it’s because you are letting us destroy your valley—or that you are powerless to stop it with anything but your strange sentiments.”

“James, I couldn’t let you destroy anything. That’s why I ruined your hydrocannon contraption, once I saw what it did. The poor Hag’s Head—she was quite a beauty in her time. Her hair of moss radiant in the summer sun, bluebirds nesting in her eyes.”

“So you’ll wreck the hydrocannon but let me demolish the town and build a massive dam? You’ll let me shut off the Terrible Cascade and drown the Cobalt Springs Lake and bury how many hundreds of springs? Without opposition?”

“These are only fragile changes, easily undone.”

“Not if I can help it. I mean for this lake—and my floating hotel, or whatever it turns out to be—to last as long as my employer and I wish.”

“Then that is where we differ, James. But please don’t feel too sorry when they don’t last very long.”

“You are wonderful at empty prognostications, princess. But I think if you had any real strength here, then the dam would have been attacked by typhoons or that the workers would have been drowned in mud. But I’ve faced no rainstorms, no mudslides, no interfering fish. It has been a cakewalk, Princess. Perhaps you are powerless after all. A local spirit. A little girl.”

The princess had stopped laughing. “Oh, James. You may think I am yielding, that I can be bottled and controlled. That is the way of water. It seeks the easiest channel, but it is powerful when released. I run cool and still. And when I please, and never before, I shall open the mountain and let the waters out.”

Chapter Seventeen

Three months later, on a gray morning, Holtzclaw and Shadburn stood on a dais high above the valley. The dais stood at the center of an iron bridge that spanned from the Great Hogback Ridge to Sinking Mountain. Originally, the dedication ceremony was only for the bridge, but Shadburn had insisted that it serve for the dam as well. It was time to close the floodgates and let the lake begin to fill.

Holtzclaw thought it was lunacy. Once the waters started to rise, the old town site would be underwater in a week, and the rest of the valley gone in a month. Far too soon! Holtzclaw had too much work still to do—for Shadburn and for Ms. Rathbun. He had yet to find any investors or any of Auraria’s promised fortunes. He did not have the capital to see either hotel to completion.

“Shadburn, it’s not too late to postpone the flood,” he said, while Dr. Rathbun swelled to a rhetorical flourish in his remarks to the crowd. “There’s no shame in waiting, only prudence.”

“First, Holtzclaw,” replied Shadburn, “I don’t want to endure the indignities and expenses of two opening ceremonies. One barrel of fruit drink will suffice for both of them. Surely you would approve of such frugality. And second, an unstoppable deadline always inspires the best and most rapid work. Set a fire. Start a flood. Place the explosives and light the fuses.”

“It is irresponsible,” said Holtzclaw. “I have hurried as much as our resources will allow.”

“And even then, it is too slow.”

Around the dais was only a handful of spectators. More would have come if the event had been better catered, but when word spread that there would be no cakes, no liquors, no roasted meats, many would-be attendees stayed home. Those who did attend seemed to regret their decision. A woman in a yellow bonnet yawned broadly. Two men in matching cravats studied each other’s shoes. The handful of children, too bored to play with enthusiasm, tugged at the hems of their clothing.

Holtzclaw looked over the valley below. It was a ledger of unfinished tasks and failures. Holdouts needed to be evicted and relocated up the mountain. Buildings and homes needed to be burned so they would not interfere with navigation on the lake. Farm fields had food in them still. Harvesters would take what was large enough to grasp—tomatoes, berries, young corn—and leave the rest for stray turkeys.

The unfinished outline of the Queen of the Mountains glared impatiently at him. Columns and poles and girders stuck out at awkward angles. The hotel’s lawns and gardens were only mud fields. Springs ran untamed; pavilions to cap them had not yet been built. It did not look much like a first-class hotel, but a first-class mess.

The Lost Creek Valley, over which the Queen of the Mountains was meant to preside, was no longer sublime nor picturesque. Forests had been harvested for the flume of the dam, the hotel, the company town, and many thousands of railroad ties. Stone and earth had been borrowed for the dam, leaving strange depressions and open wounds of mud. Even an ugly lake would be a welcome disguise for this scarred landscape. Despite the great deal of sweat and fretting that Holtzclaw had plowed into the land, the promised harvest, judging from the current state of the valley, would be meager indeed.

A silver streak far down the valley caught Holtzclaw’s eye. It was the hull of Ms. Rathbun’s floating hotel. Holtzclaw had deflected questions by telling the railroad men that it was part of the hotel, by telling the hotel crew that it was part of a civic water source, and by telling those responsible for pipes and springs that it was an integral part of the dam’s construction. Making the hull had required a great deal of his personal capital and nearly all of Ms. Rathbun’s as well, but they had made a seaworthy beginning. Had he not been trying to administer two projects, perhaps he could have had the valley cleared by now. But his efforts would do no good if he could not find more money. The empty shell of a boat will attract very few visitors.

In the distance, the dam bottled up the far end of the valley. At the top, the dam was twenty feet thick and stretched three hundred feet from rim to rim of the gorge. At the bottom, the dimensions were nearly reversed. Because the gorge walls came together, the dam was only a hundred feet wide at its base, but to resist the concentrated weight of the water, the dam was two hundred feet thick—thicker than it was wide. Large boulders were manhandled onto the lake-facing surface of the dam to protect the earthworks from tides and currents. The open side, facing toward the Terrible Cascade, was shielded with gravel as a protection from rain.

During construction, the Lost Creek was channeled into a narrow watercourse that passed below the body of the dam. Now floodgates were being lowered into the channel. Permanent plugs of rocks and earth would be added for reinforcement. The railroad twins swore that this was the only possible method, given the size of the lake. No screw or hinge would resist the force of such a large body of water, they said. If storms came, regular floodgates could blow out, emptying the lake into the lowlands. Thus, the design of the dam required that it empty itself, at both normal pool and storm surge, through the spillway. The wooden flume that carried the water away, over the head of the Sky Pilot and down to the powerhouse, was invisible over the dam’s horizon.

A smattering of applause issued from the crowd. Holtzclaw joined reflexively but was startled when Shadburn approached the podium. Shadburn had been a virtual recluse during the construction; he was appearing before an assembled public for the first time in many months. Holtzclaw had hied hither and thither while Shadburn bided his time, waiting for this very moment. For now was a grand moment for a grand speech. Shadburn would reap the fruits of their affections—the hat-waving and bowing and scraping due to every rich and respectable man.

Holtzclaw straightened up, coiled and tense, ready to be stirred to applause. Shadburn was no orator, but surely he had prepared a mighty speech.

“In a few months, we have done much for you,” said Shadburn from the dais. “Now we are nearly finished. You have a dam that will soon make a place to fish and sail. You will have a fine hotel to which the best people will come to be refreshed. You have a railroad to bring you wonderful things to buy. And best of all, you now have better work, which comes with salaries. I think you should be very grateful. You’ve got a better town now, and I gave it to you.”

Shadburn walked away from the podium, accompanied by polite clapping. Holtzclaw could not bring himself to applaud; his hands went limp. Shadburn’s words flopped feebly in the air, like fish out of water.

What could save face after such a farcical statement? Holtzclaw considered getting up, extemporizing a few words based on great monologues that he’d once committed to memory. But instead he did nothing. Would anyone really remember if he delivered a decent oration on the occasion? It would be forgotten, like so many other little tasks. Better that he leave the people to ponder Shadburn’s failures than his own middling successes.

Dr. Rathbun leaned over to Shadburn and whispered. Shadburn looked startled.

“Holtzclaw, I am supposed to open the bridge. How do I open the bridge?”

“I suppose you loudly declare it. Throw up your hands or some such.”

“I don’t want to do that. Can it not just … be open, without being opened?”

“Evidently, the people expect a gesture,” said Holtzclaw. “A respectable one.”