Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

XIX

The doctor had been bound for California when the ferry fell into his hands for the most by chance. In the ensuing months he’d amassed a considerable wealth in gold and silver and jewelry. He and the two men who worked for him had taken up residence on the west bank of the river overlooking the ferrylanding among the abutments of an unfinished hillside fortification made from mud and rock. In addition to the pair of freightwagons he’d inherited from Major Graham’s command he had also a mountain howitzer—a bronze twelvepounder with a bore the size of a saucer—and this piece stood idle and unloaded in its wooden truck. In the doctor’s crude quarters he and Glanton and the judge together with Brown and Irving sat drinking tea and Glanton sketched for the doctor a few of their indian adventures and advised him strongly to secure his position. The doctor demurred. He claimed to get along well with the Yumas. Glanton told him to his face that any man who trusted an indian was a fool. The doctor colored but he held his tongue. The judge intervened. He asked the doctor did he consider the pilgrims huddled on the far shore to be under his protection. The doctor said that he did so consider them. The judge spoke reasonably and with concern and when Glanton and his detail returned down the hill to cross to their camp they had the doctor’s permission to fortify the hill and charge the howitzer and to this end they set about running the last of their lead until they had close on to a hatful of rifleballs.

They loaded the howitzer that evening with something like a pound of powder and the entire cast of shot and they trundled the piece to a place of advantage overlooking the river and the landing below.

Two days later the Yumas attacked the crossing. The scows were on the west bank of the river discharging cargo as arranged and the travelers stood by to claim their goods. The savages came both mounted and afoot out of the willows with no warning and swarmed across the open ground toward the ferry. On the hill above them Brown and Long Webster swung the howitzer and steadied it and Brown crammed his lighted cigar into the touch-hole.

Even over that open terrain the concussion was immense. The howitzer in its truck leaped from the ground and clattered smoking backward across the packed clay. On the floodplain below the fort a terrible destruction had passed and upward of a dozen of the Yumas lay dead or writhing in the sand. A great howl went up among them and Glanton and his riders defiled out of the wooded littoral upriver and rode upon them and they cried out in rage at their betrayal. Their horses began to mill and they pulled them about and loosed arrows at the approaching dragoons and were shot down in volleys of pistolfire and the debarkees at the crossing scrabbled up their arms from among the dunnage and knelt and set up a fire from that quarter while the women and children lay prone among the trunks and freightboxes. The horses of the Yumas reared and screamed and churned about in the loose sand with their hoopshaped nostrils and whited eyes and the survivors made for the willows from which they’d emerged leaving on the field the wounded and the dying and the dead. Glanton and his men did not pursue them. They dismounted and walked methodically among the fallen dispatching them man and horse alike each with a pistolball through the brain while the ferry travelers watched and then they took the scalps.

The doctor stood on the low parapet of the works in silence and watched the bodies dragged down the landing and booted and shoved into the river. He turned and looked at Brown and Webster. They’d hauled the howitzer back to its position and Brown sat easily on the warm barrel smoking his cigar and watching the activity below. The doctor turned and walked back to his quarters.

Nor did he appear the following day. Glanton took charge of the operation of the ferry. People who had been waiting three days to cross at a dollar a head were now told that the fare was four dollars. And even this tariff was in effect for no more than a few days. Soon they were operating a sort of procrustean ferry where the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers. Ultimately all pretense was dropped and the immigrants were robbed outright. Travelers were beaten and their arms and goods appropriated and they were sent destitute and beggared into the desert. The doctor came down to remonstrate with them and was paid his share of the revenues and sent back. Horses were taken and women violated and bodies began to drift past the Yuma camp downriver. As these outrages multiplied the doctor barricaded himself in his quarters and was seen no more.

In the following month a company from Kentucky under General Patterson arrived and disdaining to bargain with Glanton constructed a ferry downriver and crossed and moved on. This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan’s headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.

Easter in that year fell on the last day of March and at dawn on that day the kid together with Toadvine and a boy named Billy Carr crossed the river to cut willow poles at a place where they grew upstream from the encampment of immigrants. Passing through this place before it was yet good light they encountered a party of Sonorans up and about and they saw hanging from a scaffold a poor Judas fashioned from straw and old rags who wore on his canvas face a painted scowl that reflected in the hand that had executed it no more than a child’s conception of the man and his crime. The Sonorans had been up since midnight drinking and they had lit a bonfire on the bench of loam where the gibbet stood and as the Americans passed along the edge of their camp they called out to them in Spanish. Someone had brought a long cane from the fire tipped with lighted tow and the Judas was being set afire. Its raggedy clothes were packed with squibs and rockets and as the fire took hold it began to blow apart piece by piece in a shower of burning rags and straw. Until at last a bomb in its breeches went off and blew the thing to pieces in a stink of soot and sulphur and the men cheered and small boys threw a few last stones at the blackened remnants dangling from the noose. The kid was the last to pass through the clearing and the Sonorans called out to him and offered him wine from a goatskin but he shrugged up his rag of a coat about his shoulders and hurried on.

By now Glanton had enslaved a number of Sonorans and he kept crews of them working at the fortification of the hill. There were also detained in their camp a dozen or more indian and Mexican girls, some little more than children. Glanton supervised with some interest the raising of the walls about him but otherwise left his men to pursue the business at the crossing with a terrible latitude. He seemed to take little account of the wealth they were amassing although daily he’d open the brass lock with which the wood and leather trunk in his quarters was secured and raise the lid and empty whole sacks of valuables into it, the trunk already holding thousands of dollars in gold and silver coins as well as jewelry, watches, pistols, raw gold in little leather stives, silver in bars, knives, silverware, plate, teeth.

On the second of April David Brown with Long Webster and Toadvine set out for the town of San Diego on the old Mexican coast for the purpose of obtaining supplies. They took with them a string of packanimals and they left at sunset, riding up out of the trees and looking back at the river and then walking the horses sideways down the dunes into the cool blue dusk.

They crossed the desert in five days without incident and rode up through the coastal range and led the mules through the snow in the gap and descended the western slope and entered the town in a slow drizzle of rain. Their hide clothing was heavy with water and the animals were stained with the silt that had leached out of them and their trappings. Mounted U S cavalry passed them in the mud of the street and in the distance beyond they could hear the sea boom shuddering on the gray and stony coast.

Brown took from the horn of his saddle a fibre morral filled with coins and the three of them dismounted and entered a whiskey grocer’s and unannounced they upended the sack on the grocer’s board.

There were doubloons minted in Spain and in Guadalajara and half doubloons and gold dollars and tiny gold half dollars and French coins of ten franc value and gold eagles and half eagles and ring dollars and dollars minted in North Carolina and Georgia that were twenty-two carats pure. The grocer weighed them out by stacks in a common scale, sorted by their mintings, and he drew corks and poured measures round in small tin cups whereon the gills were stamped. They drank and set down the cups again and he pushed the bottle across the raw sashmilled boards of the counter.

They had drafted a list of supplies to be contracted for and when they’d agreed on the price of flour and coffee and a few other staples they turned into the street each with a bottle in his fist. They went down the plankboard walkway and crossed through the mud and they went past rows of rawlooking shacks and crossed a small plaza beyond which they could see the low sea rolling and a small encampment of tents and a street where the squatting houses were made of hides ranged like curious dorys along the selvage of sea oats above the beach and quite black and shining in the rain.

It was in one of these that Brown woke the next morning. He had little recollection of the prior night and there was no one in the hut with him. The remainder of their money was in a bag around his neck. He pushed open the framed hide door and stepped out into the darkness and the mist. They’d neither put up nor fed their animals and he made his way back to the grocer’s where they were tied and sat on the walkway and watched the dawn come down from the hills behind the town.

Noon he was red-eyed and reeking before the alcalde’s door demanding the release of his companions. The alcalde vacated out the back of the premises and shortly there arrived an American corporal and two soldiers who warned him away. An hour later he was at the farriery. Standing warily in the doorway peering into the gloom until he could make out the shape of things within.

The farrier was at his bench and Brown entered and laid before him a polished mahogany case with a brass nameplate bradded to the lid. He unsnapped the catches and opened the case and raised from their recess within a pair of shotgun barrels and he took up the stock with the other hand. He hooked the barrels into the patent breech and stood the shotgun on the bench and pushed the fitted pin home to secure the forearm. He cocked the hammers with his thumbs and let them fall again. The shotgun was English made and had damascus barrels and engraved locks and the stock was burl mahogany. He looked up. The farrier was watching him.

You work on guns? said Brown.

I do some.

I need these barrels cut down.

The man took the gun and held it in his hands. There was a raised center rib between the barrels and inlaid in gold the maker’s name, London. There were two platinum bands in the patent breech and the locks and the hammers were chased with scrollwork cut deeply in the steel and there were partridges engraved at either end of the maker’s name there. The purple barrels were welded up from triple skelps and the hammered iron and steel bore a watered figure like the markings of some alien and antique serpent, rare and beautiful and lethal, and the wood was figured with a deep red feather grain at the butt and held a small springloaded silver capbox in the toe.

The farrier turned the gun in his hands and looked at Brown. He looked down at the case. It was lined with green baize and there were little fitted compartments that held a wadcutter, a pewter powderflask, cleaning jags, a patent pewter capper.

You need what? he said.

Cut the barrels down. Long about in here. He held a finger across the piece.

I cant do that.

Brown looked at him. You cant do it?

No sir.

He looked around the shop. Well, he said. I’d of thought any damn fool could saw the barrels off a shotgun.

There’s something wrong with you. Why would anybody want to cut the barrels off a gun like this?

What did you say? said Brown.

The man tendered the gun nervously. I just meant that I dont see why anybody would want to ruin a good gun like this here. What would you take for it?

It aint for sale. You think there’s something wrong with me?

No I dont. I didnt mean it that way.

Are you goin to cut them barrels down or aint ye?

I cant do that.

Cant or wont?

You pick the one that best suits you.

Brown took the shotgun and laid it on the bench.

What would you have to have to do it? he said.

I aint doin it.

If a man wanted it done what would be a fair price?

I dont know. A dollar.

Brown reached into his pocket and came up with a handful of coins. He laid a two and a half dollar gold piece on the bench. Now, he said. I’m payin you two and a half dollars.

The farrier looked at the coin nervously. I dont need your money, he said. You cant pay me to butcher that there gun.

You done been paid.

No I aint.

Yonder it lays. Now you can either get to sawin or you can default. In the case of which I aim to take it out of your ass.

The farrier didnt take his eyes off Brown. He began to back away from the bench and then he turned and ran.

When the sergeant of the guard arrived Brown had the shotgun chucked up in the benchvise and was working at the barrels with a hacksaw. The sergeant walked around to where he could see his face. What do you want, said Brown.

This man says you threatened his life.

What man?

This man. The sergeant nodded toward the door of the shed.

Brown continued to saw. You call that a man? he said.

I never give him no leave to come in here and use my tools neither, said the farrier.

How about it? said the sergeant.

How about what?

How do you answer to this man’s charges?

He’s a liar.

You never threatened him?

That’s right.

The hell he never.

I dont threaten people. I told him I’d whip his ass and that’s as good as notarized.

You dont call that a threat?

Brown looked up. It was not no threat. It was a promise.

He bent to the work again and another few passes with the saw and the barrels dropped to the dirt. He laid down the saw and backed off the jaws of the vise and lifted out the shotgun and unpinned the barrels from the stock and fitted the pieces into the case and shut the lid and latched it.

What was the argument about? said the sergeant.

Wasnt no argument that I know of.

You better ask him where he got that gun he’s just ruined. He’s stole that somewheres, you can wager on it.

Where’d you get the shotgun? said the sergeant.

Brown bent down and picked up the severed barrels. They were about eighteen inches long and he had them by the small end. He came around the bench and walked past the sergeant. He put the guncase under his arm. At the door he turned. The farrier was nowhere in sight. He looked at the sergeant.

I believe that man has done withdrawed his charges, he said. Like as not he was drunk.

As he was crossing the plaza toward the little mud cabildo he encountered Toadvine and Webster newly released. They were wildlooking and they stank. The three of them went down to the beach and sat looking out at the long gray swells and passing Brown’s bottle among them. They’d none of them seen an ocean before. Brown walked down and held his hand to the sheet of spume that ran up the dark sand. He lifted his hand and tasted the salt on his fingers and he looked downcoast and up and then they went back up the beach toward the town.

They spent the afternoon drinking in a lazarous bodega run by a Mexican. Some soldiers came in. An altercation took place. Toadvine was on his feet, swaying. A peacemaker rose from among the soldiers and soon the principals were seated again. But minutes later Brown on his way back from the bar poured a pitcher of aguardiente over a young soldier and set him afire with his cigar. The man ran outside mute save for the whoosh of the flames and the flames were pale blue and then invisible in the sunlight and he fought them in the street like a man beset with bees or madness and then he fell over in the road and burned up. By the time they got to him with a bucket of water he had blackened and shriveled in the mud like an enormous spider.

Brown woke in a dark little cell manacled and crazed with thirst. The first thing he consulted for was the bag of coins. It was still inside his shirt. He rose up from the straw and put one eye to the judas hole. It was day. He called out for someone to come. He sat and with his chained hands counted out the coins and put them back in the bag.

In the evening he was brought his supper by a soldier. The soldier’s name was Petit and Brown showed him his necklace of ears and he showed him the coins. Petit said he wanted no part of his schemes. Brown told him how he had thirty thousand dollars buried in the desert. He told him of the ferry, installing himself in Glanton’s place. He showed him the coins again and he spoke familiarly of their places of origin, supplementing the judge’s reports with impromptu data. Even shares, he hissed. You and me.

He studied the recruit through the bars. Petit wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Brown scooped the coins back into the poke and handed them out to him.

You think we caint trust one another? he said.

The boy stood holding the sack of coins uncertainly. He tried to push it back through the bars. Brown stepped away and held his hands up.

Dont be a fool, he hissed. What do you think I’d of give to have had such a chance at your age?

When Petit was gone he sat in the straw and looked at the thin metal plate of beans and the tortillas. After a while he ate. Outside it was raining again and he could hear riders passing in the mud of the street and soon it was dark.

They left two nights later. They had each a passable saddle-horse and a rifle and blanket and they had a mule that carried provisions of dried corn and beef and dates. They rode up into the dripping hills and in the first light Brown raised the rifle and shot the boy through the back of the head. The horse lurched forward and the boy toppled backward, the entire foreplate of his skull gone and the brains exposed. Brown halted his mount and got down and retrieved the sack of coins and took the boy’s knife and took his rifle and his powderflask and his coat and he cut the ears from the boy’s head and strung them onto his scapular and then he mounted up and rode on. The packmule followed and after a while so did the horse the boy had been riding.

When Webster and Toadvine rode into the camp at Yuma they had neither provisions nor the mules they’d left with. Glanton took five men and rode out at dusk leaving the judge in charge of the ferry. They reached San Diego in the dead of night and were directed to the alcalde’s house. This man came to the door in nightshirt and stockingcap holding a candle before him. Glanton pushed him back into the parlor and sent his men on to the rear of the house from whence they heard directly a woman’s screams and a few dull slaps and then silence.

The alcalde was a man in his sixties and he turned to go to his wife’s aid and was struck down with a pistolbarrel. He stood up again holding his head. Glanton pushed him on to the rear room. He had in his hand a rope already fashioned into a noose and he turned the alcalde around and put the noose over his head and pulled it taut. The wife was sitting up in bed and at this she commenced to scream again. One of her eyes was swollen and closing rapidly and now one of the recruits hit her flush in the mouth and she fell over in the tousled bedding and put her hands over her head. Glanton held the candle aloft and directed one of the recruits to boost the other on his shoulders and the boy reached along the top of one of the vigas until he found a space and he fitted the end of the rope through and let it down and they hauled on it and raised the mute and struggling alcalde into the air. They’d not tied his hands and he groped wildly overhead for the rope and pulled himself up to save strangling and he kicked his feet and revolved slowly in the candlelight.

Válgame Dios, he gasped. Qué quiere?

I want my money, said Glanton. I want my money and I want my packmules and I want David Brown.

Cómo? wheezed the old man.

Someone had lit a lamp. The old woman raised up and saw first the shadow and then the form of her husband dangling from the rope and she began to crawl across the bed toward him.

Dígame, gasped the alcalde.

Someone reached to seize the wife but Glanton motioned him away and she staggered out of the bed and took hold of her husband about the knees to hold him up. She was sobbing and praying for mercy to Glanton and to God impartially.

Glanton walked around to where he could see the man’s face. I want my money, he said. My money and my mules and the man I sent out here. El hombre que tiene usted. Mi compañero.

No no, gasped the hanged man. Búscale. No man is here.

Where is he?

He is no here.

Yes he’s here. In the juzgado.

No no. Madre de Jesús. No here. He is gone. Siete, ocho días.

Where is the juzgado?

Cómo?

El juzgado. Dónde está?

The old woman turned loose with one arm long enough to point, her face pressed to the man’s leg. Allá, she said. Allá.

Two men went out, one holding the stub of the candle and shielding the flame with his cupped hand before him. When they came back they reported the little dungeon in the building out back empty.

Glanton studied the alcalde. The old woman was visibly tottering. They’d halfhitched the rope about the tailpost of the bed and he loosed the rope and the alcalde and the wife collapsed into the floor.

They left them bound and gagged and rode out to visit the grocer. Three days later the alcalde and the grocer and the alcalde’s wife were found tied and lying in their own excrement in an abandoned hut at the edge of the ocean eight miles south of the settlement. They’d been left a pan of water from which they drank like dogs and they had howled at the booming surf in that wayplace until they were mute as stones.

Glanton and his men were two days and nights in the streets crazed with liquor. The sergeant in charge of the small garrison of American troops confronted them in a drinking exchange on the evening of the second day and he and the three men with him were beaten senseless and stripped of their arms. At dawn when the soldiers kicked in the hostel door there was no one in the room.

Glanton returned to Yuma alone, his men gone to the gold fields. On that bonestrewn waste he encountered wretched parcels of foot-travelers who called out to him and men dead where they’d fallen and men who would die and groups of folks clustered about a last wagon or cart shouting hoarsely at the mules or oxen and goading them on as if they bore in those frail caissons the covenant itself and these animals would die and the people with them and they called out to that lone horseman to warn him of the danger at the crossing and the horseman rode on all contrary to the tide of refugees like some storied hero toward what beast of war or plague or famine with what set to his relentless jaw.

When he reached Yuma he was drunk. Behind him on a string were two small jacks laden with whiskey and biscuit. He sat his horse and looked down at the river who was keeper of the crossroads of all that world and his dog came to him and nuzzled his foot in the strirrup.

A young Mexican girl was crouched naked under the shade of the wall. She watched him ride past, covering her breasts with her hands. She wore a rawhide collar about her neck and she was chained to a post and there was a clay bowl of blackened meatscraps beside her. Glanton tied the jacks to the post and rode inside on the horse.

There was no one about. He rode down to the landing. While he was watching the river the doctor came scrambling down the bank and seized Glanton by the foot and began to plead with him in a senseless jabber. He’d not seen to his person in weeks and he was filthy and disheveled and he tugged at Glanton’s trouserleg and pointed toward the fortifications on the hill. That man, he said. That man.

Glanton slid his boot from the stirrup and pushed the doctor away with his foot and turned the horse and rode back up the hill. The judge was standing on the rise in silhouette against the evening sun like some great balden archimandrite. He was wrapped in a mantle of freeflowing cloth beneath which he was naked. The black man Jackson came out of one of the stone bunkers dressed in a similar garb and stood beside him. Glanton rode back up along the crest of the hill to his quarters.

All night gunfire drifted intermittently across the water and laughter and drunken oaths. When day broke no one appeared. The ferry lay at its moorings and across the river a man came down to the landing and blew a horn and waited and then went back.

The ferry stood idle all that day. By evening the drunkenness and revelry had begun afresh and the shrieks of young girls carried across the water to the pilgrims huddled in their camp. Someone had given the idiot whiskey mixed with sarsaparilla and this thing which could little more than walk had commenced to dance before the fire with loping simian steps, moving with great gravity and smacking its loose wet lips.

At dawn the black walked out to the landing and stood urinating in the river. The scows lay downstream against the bank with a few inches of sandy water standing in the floorboards. He pulled his robes about him and stepped aboard the thwart and balanced there. The water ran over the boards toward him. He stood looking out. The sun was not up and there was a low skein of mist on the water. Downstream some ducks moved out from the willows. They circled in the eddy water and then flapped out across the open river and rose and circled and bent their way upstream. In the floor of the scow was a small coin. Perhaps once lodged under the tongue of some passenger. He bent to fetch it. He stood up and wiped the grit from the piece and held it up and as he did so a long cane arrow passed through his upper abdomen and flew on and fell far out in the river and sank and backed to the surface again and began to turn and to drift downstream.

He faced around, his robes sustained about him. He was holding his wound and with his other hand he ravaged among his clothes for the weapons that were not there and were not there. A second arrow passed him on the left and two more struck and lodged fast in his chest and in his groin. They were a full four feet in length and they lofted slightly with his movements like ceremonial wands and he seized his thigh where the dark arterial blood was spurting along the shaft and took a step toward the shore and fell sideways into the river.

The water was shallow and he was moving weakly to regain his feet when the first of the Yumas leaped aboard the scow. Completely naked, his hair dyed orange, his face painted black with a crimson line dividing it from widow’s peak to chin. He stamped his feet twice on the boards and flared his arms like some wild thaumaturge out of an atavistic drama and reached and seized the black by his robes where he lay in the reddening waters and raised him up and stove in his head with his warclub.

They swarmed up the hill toward the fortifications where the Americans lay sleeping and some were mounted and some afoot and all of them armed with bows and clubs and their faces blacked or pale with fard and their hair bound up in clay. The first quarters they entered were Lincoln’s. When they emerged a few minutes later one of them carried the doctor’s dripping head by the hair and others were dragging behind them the doctor’s dog, bound at the muzzle, jerking and bucking across the dry clay of the concourse. They entered a wickiup of willowpoles and canvas and slew Gunn and Wilson and Henderson Smith each in turn as they reared up drunkenly and they moved on among the rude half walls in total silence glistening with paint and grease and blood among the bands of light where the risen sun now touched the higher ground.

When they entered Glanton’s chamber he lurched upright and glared wildly about him. The small clay room he occupied was entirely filled with a brass bed he’d appropriated from some migrating family and he sat in it like a debauched feudal baron while his weapons hung in a rich array from the finials. Caballo en Pelo mounted into the actual bed with him and stood there while one of the attending tribunal handed him at his right side a common axe the hickory helve of which was carved with pagan motifs and tasseled with the feathers of predatory birds. Glanton spat.

Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.

When they entered the judge’s quarters they found the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor. Behind them also naked stood the judge. He was holding leveled at them the bronze barrel of the howitzer. The wooden truck stood in the floor, the straps pried up and twisted off the pillow-blocks. The judge had the cannon under one arm and he was holding a lighted cigar over the touch-hole. The Yumas fell over one another backward and the judge put the cigar in his mouth and took up his portmanteau and stepped out the door and backed past them and down the embankment. The idiot, who reached just to his waist, stuck close to his side, and together they entered the wood at the base of the hill and disappeared from sight.

The savages built a bonfire on the hill and fueled it with the furnishings from the white men’s quarters and they raised up Glanton’s body and bore it aloft in the manner of a slain champion and hurled it onto the flames. They’d tied his dog to his corpse and it was snatched after in howling suttee to disappear crackling in the rolling greenwood smoke. The doctor’s torso was dragged up by the heels and raised and flung onto the pyre and the doctor’s mastiff also was committed to the flames. It slid struggling down the far side and the thongs with which it was tied must have burnt in two for it began to crawl charred and blind and smoking from the fire and was flung back with a shovel. The other bodies eight in number were heaped onto the fire where they sizzled and stank and the thick smoke rolled out over the river. The doctor’s head had been mounted upon a paling and carried about but at the last it too was thrown onto the blaze. The guns and clothing were divided upon the clay and divided too were the gold and silver out of the hacked and splintered chest that they’d dragged forth. All else was heaped on the flames and while the sun rose and glistened on their gaudy faces they sat upon the ground each with his new goods before him and they watched the fire and smoked their pipes as might some painted troupe of mimefolk recruiting themselves in such a wayplace far from the towns and the rabble hooting at them across the smoking footlamps, contemplating towns to come and the poor fanfare of trumpet and drum and the rude boards upon which their destinies were inscribed for these people were no less bound and indentured and they watched like the prefiguration of their own ends the carbonized skulls of their enemies incandescing before them bright as blood among the coals.