Conquistador

CHAPTER TWENTY

The elephant put its forehead against the trunk of an oak and pushed, retreated, pushed again. It was a gray-brown mountain of flesh, the thick skin deeply wrinkled and the great triangular ears ragged; even a hundred yards away they could hear the quick exhaled huff of breath as it backed off. Then it curled its trunk high, trumpeted in anger and shuffled forward, head down and big curved tusks almost touching the dry earth as it charged the thing that had irritated it. Even with better than two hundred yards between them and the great beast, the party’s horses shied at the sound, and several of the mules threw their heads up and brayed.

Tom whistled softly, standing in the stirrups and shading his eyes against the setting sun with a hand. “What a monster!”

“I’ve never seen a bigger,” Botha agreed.

“We imported the savanna type from South Africa and Angola,” Adrienne said. “Couple of hundred young adults, mostly females, and they bred like bunnies; this could be one of the first generation. Piet, what size would you say he was?”

“Old bull, eleven, twelve feet at the shoulder… nine tons, maybe,” the Afrikaner said. “Big enough to push that tree over, by thunder.”

The big valley oak gave a groaning creak, and the branches at the top shivered; birds swept up from it in a cloud like twisting smoke. The elephant bull rocked backward, then thrust again. Roots broke, first isolated crack… crack… sounds, then a fusillade like the sound of battle. Another long groan, and the tree pitched forward, hesitated for a moment, then toppled over on its side. A big ball of the dry soil came up with it, leaving a pit deeper than a man in the earth, and a cloud of dust drifted away and fell. The elephant moved forward and began ripping off branches and stuffing them in its mouth, making small grunting sounds of contentment as it crunched leaves and acorns and twigs.

Tom pushed back his jungle hat and wiped sweat off his face onto his sleeve. They were in the northern lobe of the San Fernando now, northwest of the Verdugo Hills and not far from where Mission San Fernando Rey de España had stood in the other history. The coastal plain had been warm; the valley was no-doubt-about-it hot, nearly a hundred today.

“Maybe we should have started traveling by night before we crossed the San Fernando,” he said, uncorking his canteen and taking a long draft of warm water.

The mountains to the north were close, blue in the bright sunlight and rising in height from west to east; columns of smoke stood out in several places, marks of the brushfires to be expected at this season. Luckily they hadn’t run into any on the flat floor of the basin, nor into any of the occasional hunting parties who traveled here from the settled zones. They’d made good time across the open prairie with its groves of oaks, and its teeming herds of antelope and ostrich and bison, wild horses and feral cattle and innumerable birds. He could see all those right now, and more: particularly the circling buzzards, and probably condors, not far to the north.

“We’d have lost time, and it’s not as hot here as it will be in the Mohave,” she said. “Plus there’s usually nobody around here except…” She paused. “Oooops.”

As usual, Jim Simmons and Kolo had been riding point; they’d pushed on ahead to investigate what had brought so many carrion eaters together. Judging from the dust, they were coming back quickly.

Simmons reined in; his face looked a little strained. “Indians—Nyo-Ilcha,” he said. “Sun Clan of the Mohaves. They’ve all got peace brassards, and a helicopter visited them yesterday to make sure they weren’t involved in the attack on our rebel friends—pardon me, on the harmless hunting party with the sniper’s posts above the Glendale Narrows.”

Adrienne looked at Tom: “They probably won’t attack us,” she said. “Too many guns with us, and it’s too close to civilization. Plus they value permission to come hunt here—a lot of game migrates south over the mountains in summer.” She turned back to Simmons. “How many?”

“About thirty warriors, and a dozen women for the skinning and drying. Ah…” He looked embarrassed.

“Yes, I’d better hang back while you talk with them,” she said sourly.

He nodded. “And I think I know exactly how to put them into a good mood,” he said. “They’re here for meat.” He unslung his scope-sighted rifle. “My grandfather was always boasting about that record tusker he got back when we were in Kenya. Pity the old bastard’s dead.”

Tom felt an irrational pang as the Scout rode a hundred yards closer and dismounted. Hell, it’s not an endangered species this side of the Gate, he thought. Not in Africa, and not here either.

It knew what a man with a gun was, too; it turned and trumpeted again as soon as Simmons got close, tossing its head from side to side and flapping its ears. Then its head went down and its tail went up, sure sign of a charge. The flat crack of Simmons’s rifle sounded at the same instant—aimed at the third corrugation down on the trunk, the precise spot that would send a bullet through the vast spongy bulk of the skull and into the brain.

The elephant took three more steps and then stopped. The bullet hole was invisible at this distance, and the trickle of blood almost so. It swayed and crumpled forward, vast columnar legs buckling at the knee, then slumped to the ground with a thud that shook the earth and made his horse dance sideways.

“You don’t need an elephant gun for elephant,” Simmons said a bit smugly. “Any mankiller with a full metal jacket will do, if you get a brain shot.”

Tom rode out with Simmons to meet the Nyo-Ilcha warriors—or hunters, he supposed—as they rode up in a cloud of dust colored ruddy by the setting sun.

Damned if I’m going to miss the chance of seeing some really wild Indians, he thought. A couple days of travel had put the brief, nasty fight at the pass behind him, mentally as well as physically. It would be fascinating to get out on the plains and see what’s happened there, too.

There were about thirty of them, as the Scout had said, ranging from teens to wrinkled middle age. All of them looked tough as rawhide as they came closer, tall, leanly muscular men with broad, high-cheeked, narrow-eyed faces; their brown skins were weathered from a lifetime of desert sun and alkali wind. They were healthy-looking despite the horrible smallpox scars some bore and the occasional missing eye or finger, giving off a palpable sense of carnivore vigor.

I suppose any weaklings die pretty quick, out in the deep desert, he thought.

A few were lighter-skinned and narrower-faced than the other tribesmen, and one had brown hair and blue eyes; he remembered what Adrienne had said about white renegades joining them, as well as the remnants of the coastal tribes.

You’d have to be pretty desperate to join this bunch, or crazy, he mused. It’s not like back in colonial times in FirstSide America.

Plenty of white settlers had “gone native” then, but they hadn’t been leaving flush toilets and TV—not to mention modern dentistry and medicine. An eighteenth-century Iroquois shaman was probably less of a risk to your health than an eighteenth-century European medico; at least he wouldn’t bleed, blister and purge you to death.

All the Nyo-Ilcha wore their long hair twisted into twenty or thirty rope-like braids; ornaments of shell or silver and turquoise hung from their ears, or were stuck through the septum of the nose; many were tattooed in jagged patters of red and white and black. The overall effect reminded him of some old-style shock-rock musicians; or shock-rock musicians crossed with demons, because these guys weren’t kidding or playing for effect. This was what they wore every day, and they really were this bad.

Some wore helmets as well, made from the tanned head-skins of animals stretched on wicker frames, with the hide trailing down their backs—heads of wolf, bear, bison, leopard, lion… and one that had him boggling for a moment until he realized it was a kangaroo, which was a bogglement in itself.

They went bare to the waist otherwise, apart from blankets slung around their shoulders; everyone wore leather pants and moccasins, and from the rank old-sweat-and-leather way they smelled, they didn’t waste water on washing much. Their horses were tall, good-looking beasts, rougher-coated than the New Virginians’ but of the same breeds, and a herd of remounts was nearby under the guard of several youths. Every man was festooned with weapons: big steel knives, tomahawks, war clubs that looked like giant potato mashers, round shields of painted hide slung at the cruppers of their simple pad saddles. About half had trade muskets resting across their thighs. Those were simple weapons, replica smoothbore flintlocks, but the stocks had been decorated with bits of semiprecious stone or bone or shell. The other half carried bows, and his eyes widened again at their shape—backed with horn and reinforced with sinew, the powerful double-curved Turco-Mongol type he’d seen in museums and sporting events in Central Asia. He whispered a question to Simmons.

“Some demented renegade taught them,” the Scout answered, sotto voce. “He belonged to a bunch of burks FirstSide who liked to play at middle ages; the bloody things are a menace, believe me. Fortunately they’re not easy to make or use.”

Tom hoped the tufts of hair on the ten-foot lances every third or fourth man carried were from animals, but he didn’t think so—any more than the filed-down butcher knives used for points were ornamental. From the looks he was getting, he was pretty sure any of them would make a welcome addition. He’d been on the receiving end of enough silent hatred for Uncle Sam abroad to recognize it here, and the Indians weren’t being particularly subtle about it—some were fingering their knife hilts, hopefully an unconscious gesture.

The Nyo-Ilcha leader reined in and raised a hand when his horse’s nose was about five feet from that of Simmons’s mount; he was a thirtyish man with a rat-trap mouth shadowed by the lion’s-head helmet he wore—it was complete with teeth, and with turquoises for eyes—and white bars painted horizontally across his scarred, sinewy arms. Kolo rode right behind the Scout; the Nyo-Ilcha glared at him, and he sneered back. Botha was on the right hand and Tom on the left, picked for their impressive size. They all carried their rifles in the crook of their left arms—not really as a threat, more as a matter of etiquette.

The two leaders began talking in a fast-rising, slow-falling language accompanied by many gestures. The chief’s face went slack with surprise for a moment when Simmons made a swooping hand motion in front of his nose—imitating an elephant’s trunk, Tom realized—and pointed behind himself to the south, toward the toppled oak tree.

The chief said something in reply and placed both thumbs near his upper lip, drawing them out in a swooping curve.

“Ahi,” Simmons replied, throwing his right hand out in an extravagant wave with the palm curved back.

“Kwanaeami!” the chief said, and reined his horse around.

Simmons blew out his cheeks in a relieved gust. “I told him they could have the elephant, and the ivory too,” he said. “It ought to keep them sweet for a while; that’s six thousand pounds of usable meat, as much as they can carry, and the ivory will be worth a fair bit of trade goods. Not to mention all that tough leather, and the fat. They don’t hunt elephant much themselves, although there are a few in the desert and a fair number down the Colorado.”

“Why not?” Tom asked curiously.

Simmons snorted. “Would you, if all you had was a spear or those single-shot guns made out of pieces of water pipe?

“We’re reasonably safe with this bunch now,” he went on as they trotted off to join the others. “They accepted our gift—it’s bad luck among the Many Tongues to eat your own kill, so swapping is something friends do for each other. Fear of retaliation aside, it’s unlikely these will try anything sneaky, at least while we’re still on this side of the mountains.” He gestured toward the San Gabriels to the north. “Over there, it’d be a different matter.”

The dozen women with the Nyo-Ilcha hunting party were all driving carts, two-horse vehicles with a pair of spoked wheels seven feet high, their sides festooned with water bags and nets full of gear, and hoops over the tops covered in hide. They looked at the dead elephant, unharnessed and hobbled their horses, and went to work with knives and hatchets. A few of the younger ones set to putting up stick-and-thong racks to dry the meat, and began to gather wood for smoking fires—the downed oak tree provided plenty of both. The women wore their hair in a simpler fashion than the men, cut square across the eyes and long behind, and they wore nothing but kilts or aprons of rabbit fur or trade cloth; their faces were painted in vertical stripes, and they had lines of tattoos running down from their lower lips over their chins. A few of them spat in the direction of the distant party of New Virginians.

“Good thing you speak their language,” Tom observed.

“I don’t, really—we were talking trade pidgin, with sign language. From what I’ve read of FirstSide anthropology, a lot of customs like sign language drifted west in the centuries between the time Columbus didn’t arrive and the time we did—more than in FirstSide history.”

At Simmons’s suggestion, they pitched camp about a mile away from the nomads—too far for a rush, but close enough to remind them of the source of their current good fortune. The routine of setting up the tents and hobbling the horses went quickly; dinner was antelope, some kind with a fawn hide, a white belly and horns that curled up in pointed spirals. Kolo had brought it down with his bow; luckily eight people were enough to eat most of it at a sitting—fresh meat didn’t keep in this weather.

Tom finished his bowl of stewed antelope with beans and chilies and dried vegetables; it wasn’t bad, for trail food. He’d just mopped the enameled bowl with a biscuit when Tully ghosted in out of the night with his goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“Company, Kemosabe,” he said.

They all stood, weapons inconspicuously ready. It was the leader of the Nyo-Ilcha, alone and holding his open hands up as a sign that he came in peace. Kolo followed behind him, signaling that nobody was following, then faded out into the darkness beyond the circle of light to make sure that nobody did later.

Simmons moved forward, making an open-hand gesture with his right hand. The Indian extended his, which surprised the Scout, who took it nonetheless.

“Hamose kwa’ahot,” the Nyo-Ilcha leader said. “Or, in English, Good Star.”

“Ah… you speak English?” Simmons said.

“Heap good English,” Good Star said dryly. “Me smart Injun. I spent three years at the mission school in Antelope Valley—what you Deathwalkers call Antelope Valley—off and on, when I was younger. One of Dad’s better ideas.”

He spoke fluently, though with a thick guttural accent. “And I trade there now and then. I’m kohata—chief—of the Nyo-Ilcha.”

Simmons muttered beneath his breath: Tom thought it sounded something like, I’m going to kill Dirk Brodie. Then he went on aloud: “Jim Simmons, Frontier Scout.”

Good Star came and squatted by the fire. “I’ve heard of you,” he said. “Spare some of that coffee? And a cigarette would go down nice.”

Tom bit down on a bubble of laughter at the expression on the Scout’s face and poured the Indian leader a cup from the blue-enameled iron pot sitting on the edge of the fire. Someone else produced a cigarette; he lit it from a splinter, and smoke drifted out from beneath the fangs of his lion-head helmet. As if that had reminded him, Good Star took it off and set it on the dirt beside him, before pouring sugar into the coffee and taking a sip.

“Ahhhh,” he said, sighing. “You know, coffee and decent tobacco are about the only good things you Deathwalkers brought here. Well, guns and horses, too. And booze, of course, and chocolate and steel knives.”

“And the aqueducts and roads,” Tully muttered under his breath; Tom didn’t think anyone else heard him. “But besides that, not much.”

Simmons produced a bottle of brandy from his saddlebags and added a dollop to their guest’s coffee cup. Then he cleared his throat.

“Why didn’t you speak English this afternoon? Instead of wasting both our time with trade pidgin and sign language.”

Good Star’s glittering dark eyes swept around the circle by the fire; Tom thought he caught a sardonic glint under the tattoos and the stink.

“Didn’t have any reason to make things easy for you then,” he said. “It’s always better when the other guy doesn’t know how much you know.”

His glance lingered on Adrienne’s hands, where she sat on her saddle holding another of the tin cups; the firelight flickered on the circlet of gold and platinum on her left thumb.

“For example, that you know what a Thirty Families ring looks like.” He took another puff on the cigarette. “Sorta out of place on a humble squaw like you were acting, hey? Thanks for the elephant, by the way. Especially the ivory. The goddamned Akaka, Othi-I and Kapata are getting too many guns for comfort, and we Nyo-Ilcha need to buy more powder.”

Adrienne sipped from her own cup. “We’d heard something about that, Good Star,” she said smoothly. “And about a man named Swift Lance.”

Good Star spat accurately into the fire. “That crazy”—he dropped into his own language, then translated helpfully—“bastard fucker of his own nieces? Yeah, he’s the talk of the Mohave. Got a big Dreaming on him, about how we’re going to get enough guns to throw all you Deathwalkers into the salt water and take the good lands.”

“You don’t think that’s a good plan?” Adrienne said neutrally.

He grunted and took a swig of the spiked coffee. “I wish. That’s not Dreaming; that’s… what do you call it… jerking off. No way. But plenty of people like being told what they want to hear. We Water People got as many fools as anyone else, I reckon.”

“Someone’s been slipping you… them… weapons, then?” Adrienne said.

“Hell, yeah—the northern clans, at least. But if all of us had two of those smoke poles and enough powder and ball to shoot all year, you’d still have the fucking machine guns and helicopters, wouldn’t you? Not to mention you outnumber us more every year.”

He shrugged and finished the coffee, smacking his lips. Silently Tom poured him more, and Simmons added another dollop of the Seven Oaks brandy.

“Good stuff! Anyway, my plan is that we all pick up and move southeast—down Mexico way. Lot of empty land there since the plagues, and what’s left of the Ya-ke, Opata, Seri and such don’t have any guns at all, or many steel weapons. Then maybe if we were out of the way you fucking Deathwalkers would leave us alone. No offense.”

“None taken. So who’s giving Swift Lance all these muskets?” Adrienne asked. “That might be… valuable information.”

Good Star grinned, showing a mouthful of strong yellow teeth. “Wouldn’t we both like to know?”

He shook his head. “Before Johnny Deathwalker came from beyond-the-world, all the Mohave clans stuck together, lived all mixed up, didn’t fight among themselves, from what the old bastards say. Ain’t like that anymore, not with the sickness and then all the outsiders getting adopted, and all the new ways and new critters. These days people are always stealing horses and sheep and cattle and guns from each other. Lot of those Akaka shits, they’d scalp their own cousins for a shot glass of cheap whiskey. Akaka, Othi-I, Kapata, Hukthar war-parties all over the west and north now. News travels slow.”

Adrienne leaned back and whispered to Sandra, then was all attention once more, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.

Good Star pointed northeast. “That’s where we Nyo-Ilcha have our grounds now, just over the mountains. The Akaka and their friends, they’re up around Old Woman Mountain, and the Bitter Lake, and west around Black Mountain and Willow Springs; they’re part of the mathal’a’thom, the northern clans—bunch of half Utes, if you want to know what I think. If you were heading that way—don’t. Well, gotta go. Thanks again for the ivory.”

“Thank you for the pleasure of your company,” Adrienne said with a stately, archaic politeness Tom had noticed before.

She rose and tossed him a bag Sandra had made up—one with a bottle of the brandy, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of aspirin, a sack of coffee beans, some sugar and a handful of chocolate bars. He caught it, slurped down the dregs from his cup, took a last drag on the cigarette, and rose with pantherish ease and walked off into the darkness.

The party fell silent for a long time after the tall figure vanished into the night; Tom finished his coffee.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

Jesus, it’s hot, Tom thought. Then: Jesus, that’s lame.

He and Adrienne were sprawled under the shade of their bell tent, stripped to their underwear, with the sides drawn up to catch any breeze—but the hot wind dried their sweat almost instantly, with little relief, and on their lips it tasted bitterly of alkali dust. The three tents were strung out in the meager shade of a low steep-sided hill, outlier of a mountain range to the west; it gave a little more protection as the sun declined, and the horses and mules crowded there with listless insistence. To the east stretched a desolation of flat rocky plain, rimmed by more mountains on the edge of sight to the east. It was studded here and there with the low sprawling creosote bush with its yellow-green-gray waxy leaves, a shrub that robbed the soil around it of moisture and nutrients until nothing else could grow; the occasional inch-wide yellow flower didn’t seem much compensation. The nearest bush had a diamondback rattler curled around its roots, waiting for sunset like a coil of deadly camouflaged rope. The sight reminded him to check his boots for scorpions when he put his boots back on, but the thought of moving was enough to make him tired.

Nothing much moved in the hot, bright stillness, except grains of sand moved along by the oven-mouth wind, and the slow trace of the sun across the aching blue dome of the sky; even the blue was leached out to a tinted white.

Around noon something had moved—a bird trying for the shade of the rocks had fallen out of the sky with a thump, struck dead by the heat in mid-flight. It still lay gape-beaked with its feet in the air fifty yards away, and the ants were beating a trail to it. Once a group of big red kangaroos had bounced by, stopping to munch on some barrel cactus, undeterred by the spines. Tom’s eyes tracked them with stuporous indifference; when their long hind feet came down on the creosote bushes a tarry, medicinal scent filled the air.

In the middle distance was a long line of sand dunes. Tom watched them as his hand groped for the canvas water bag that hung from one of the struts of the tent. A little seeped through the canvas, cooling the contents all the way down to lukewarm by evaporation, and he sucked at the mouth with dogged persistence, ignoring the bitter taste and the rime of soda-rich dust on the outside that stuck to his chest hairs. He hated to think what the minerals were doing to his kidneys—and wondered how anyone could live in this desolation year-round—but you could dehydrate very easily here, and it had been a week since they crossed the mountains. Three days since the last spring of bad-smelling water.

“You know the odd thing?” Adrienne said slowly and quietly, timing her words to the natural rhythm of her breath.

“Tell me,” Tom said, handing her the water bottle. “Right now, funny would be good.”

“This area is a beauty spot in the spring. The flowers are quite lovely.”

That was funny. It was true, too. This wasn’t far from U.S. 40, on FirstSide, and he’d been through in March himself. It was probably even prettier here in the Commonwealth.

“We should come back then, after this is all over,” Adrienne said. “It’s not so goddamned hot then, either.” There was a long pause. “Tom?”

“Yah, Adri?”

“I’m sorry for what I did to you.”

He thought for a long moment; his mental processes seemed to be bleached out but had a sharp-edged clarity.

“OK, apology accepted,” he said. After a moment: “You want to stay together after this is over?”

“Get married, you mean?” Adrienne said.

He thought again for a long moment. “Yah.”

“Done. Provided we survive. There’s no giving in marriage in the afterlife, they say.”

They shared an exhausted chuckle. “It must be love,” Tom said. “I still like being with you when all we can do is lie here and listen to each other sweat.”

“It’d be nice to have kids,” she said softly. “Not too many. Four would be about right. Three-year intervals… or they can arrange twins, these days.”

He opened his mouth to comment on that; he’d been thinking wistfully about children himself for a while, but the thought hadn’t been urgent—the world was still too crowded, after all. Only it isn’t, he thought. It really isn’t.

Instead he craned his neck up at Roy Tully’s voice, from the ledge of rock a hundred feet up where they’d all taken turns on lookout.

“Trouble, three o’clock!”

The smaller man was coming down the cliff at reckless speed. Tom knocked his boots together to evict any poisonous desert dwellers and scrambled into his salt-stiff clothing. That took less than a minute; then he had binoculars out and was looking east—three o’clock, in the conventional rendering that took north as twelve. The sand dunes were too far away to make out individual figures well even with magnification; horses were rice-sized black dots. But he could see a ripple and flash above them.

“Lanceheads,” he said.

“To think I was just about to comment on how swinging this far east had avoided trouble with the Indians,” Adrienne said. “How many?”

“A lot of them—and if the proportions are like our friends of the Nyo-Ilcha, that’s a hell of a lot of other men carrying less conspicuous weapons.”

“And I don’t suppose they’re employees of the Mohave Tourist Agency,” Adrienne said grimly; her face was all business once more; even then it had a Valkyrie beauty despite windburn and cracked lips.

“I wonder if Good Star sold us out,” Simmons muttered.

“Or one of his followers,” Adrienne said crisply. “But it doesn’t matter now.”

The others were on their feet as quickly, and everyone moved to break camp; they couldn’t abandon much equipment, not and survive for long in this desolation. The animals complained and brayed as the blankets and saddles were roughly thrown on their backs; they were used to waiting for the cool of evening, and that was several hours from now.

“We going to have to run?” Sandra said, a little white about the lips but calm.

“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said grimly.

“Then we’d better water the animals—give ’em the last of it. They’ll go farther and it’ll lighten the loads. Give ’em some barley, too.”

Adrienne thought for an instant, looked over at Jim Simmons, who jerked his head in agreement, then nodded. “Good idea; do it, Sandy. But leave the mules; they won’t be able to keep up. Put the packsaddles on the extra horses.” They’d kept the ones they’d taken from the dead rebels after the fight at the pass; turning them lose would raise too many questions… “Young Botha, you help her.”

They splashed water into folding plastic buckets, and the horses crowded around, shouldering each other and slobbering in their eagerness, the mules braying protest at their exclusion. Sandra took a lariat from her saddle and whirled the end to drive them off, desperate with haste.

Adrienne called the rest of them together for an instant.

“That looks like better than a hundred men,” she said. “Good Star’s un-friend Swift Lance earning his corn, would be my guess—but that doesn’t matter. We can’t fort up here; with our firepower we could beat them off, but there’s no water and we can’t call for help.”

“Ja,” Piet Botha said. He looked at Simmons. “Afton canyon?”

“Closest place with reliable water,” the Scout agreed. He looked at the distant hostiles. “Bugger. They’re a bit north of us—they’ll cut the angle and gain on us; we have to go two miles to their one. We can’t swing west; the hills are in the way. Bugger. Let’s get going. I wouldn’t want to be caught in the open.”

Well, this is a switch from thinking about being a daddy, Tom thought as he swung aboard his horse and jammed the floppy hat tighter on his head.

Sandra had a couple of extras saddled as well, with the stirrups tied up, in case someone had to switch horses in a hurry.

Bless you, my child, Tom thought—the prospect of having a horse go lame or lose a shoe at this particular moment and be stuck trying to transfer his saddle was nightmarish.

Nobody got in anyone’s way or wasted effort; the weeks they’d been on the trail paid off: camp was struck in less than five minutes. They turned their animals’ noses north and broke into a trot. He kept glancing right despite the kidney-jarring gait. Simmons had called it; with the ridge of broken ground close on their left, the Indians could slant toward them at an angle. Adrienne looked back white-lipped; the herd of spare horses was keeping up well enough, with Sandra and the young Boer chivvying them cowboy-style from the rear. Roy Tully was doing something with one of them, pulling items out of a packsaddle.

The Scout still had his binoculars out. “Dammit, they’re pushing their horses!” he said. “We’ll have to do it too. Go for it!”

He cased the glasses and leaned forward, flipping the slack of his reins to right and left. His horse rocked into a gallop, and they all followed suit. It felt faster than a car—but a horse couldn’t keep it up for long, particularly when it had been hard-driven on short rations and bad water for a while. It was hard on the rider’s gut and back, too.

“This is going to be close,” Adrienne said to him, calling across the rushing space that separated them. “If they get too close, we’ll have to circle the horses—use them as barricades—but then they can thirst us out.”

In which case we all die, he thought. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time people have tried to kill me, and most of them are dead.

He repeated that aloud, and Adrienne whooped and grinned. Dust billowed up around their hooves; the sound rose to a harsh drumroll thunder that shivered in his bones. Sandra drove the remounts and packhorses ahead and a little to their left, and two streams of dust smoked out behind them, mingling and drifting.

Tully passed him, swerving in a little to shout, “Help! I’ve fallen into a Lonesome Dove rerun and I can’t get out!”

The goblin grin was heartening; Roy always got that expression when he was about to pull a nasty on someone. On the other hand…

The Indians were much closer now. He could see details; they were equipped much like the Nyo-Ilcha, but the lances had backward-slanting collars of ostrich feathers below the points, and the men all had broad bands of black paint across their faces from the nose up, with yellow circles around the eyes.

“Northern clans, well off their usual stamping grounds,” Simmons said. “Akaka, I’d say, from the look and the paint.”

“From their looks, either they’re all auditioning for a remake of The Crow, or it’s the clowns from hell!” Tom called, and got another laugh.

The Akaka warriors weren’t in the least funny themselves, though. They were men who’d do their best to kill him, and no mistake. Their shrill yelping war cries cut through the hoof thunder, and he could see their open mouths and bared teeth as they crouched low over their horses’ necks to urge them on to greater speed. A little closer, and one with a crescent moon of silver through the septum of his nose and elk antlers on a hairy headdress caught his eye and shouted something, gesturing with the long lance he held, and then used the shaft to whack his pinto mare on the rump. It seemed to bound forward, perceptibly faster.

Doubtless he’s shouting variants on “Now you die, white-eye!” Tom thought, and gestured broadly with his own right hand—middle finger extended from a big clenched fist.

You know, friend, in the abstract I can feel a certain sympathy for you. In the concrete here and now, I’m going to kill your ass if I can.

The problem was that by slanting in from their quarries’ right, the Indians had made it nearly impossible for the New Virginians to shoot; you couldn’t use a two-handed weapon on horseback in that direction if you were right-handed, which all of them were. Or you could, but your chances of hitting anything would go down from low to zero.

But…

Adrienne whooped again, and Simmons called, “We’re going to get ahead of them! Our horses are fresher!”

Tom checked, and the Indians were falling behind; their dash along the angle was going to cut through where the quarry had been, not in front of them or in direct collision. In a minute or two they’d have to turn to their right, fall in behind the New Virginians and make it a stern chase.

The Akaka saw it at the same time, and a shout of fury went up from them. One rose in his stirrups and drew his bow to his ear; he was two hundred yards off, but the heavy horn-backed stave of mesquite wood reinforced with sinew sent the shaft flickering past Schalk Botha, the last in their column of twos.

Then the moment of maximum danger was past, and the New Virginians were drawing their O’Brien rifles from the saddle scabbards. Tom followed suit, although he doubted his ability—or anyone else’s either—to hit anything at two or three hundred yards from the back of a galloping horse. In combat it was hard enough to score a hit when you were lying prone with good solid earth under both elbows for a brace; thousands of rounds of small-arms fire were popped off for every casualty.

Tully didn’t pull his rifle. Instead he dropped a little behind and threw two fist-sized lumps aside. Twisting in the saddle, Tom saw them tumble away… and then two quick poplar-shaped columns of smoke with red snaps of fire at their hearts erupted from the dirt as the Indians galloped over the lumps. That had them yelling in panic and reining wide, their horses bugling and rearing and fighting their riders. Tully’s grin grew wider.

“Semtex!” he shouted. “With timers!”

It would probably work only once, but it had gained them some time. The pursuers shrank slightly as they dropped behind, and slowed a little more when several riders began firing at them, turning backward in the saddle—what the ancient Greeks had called the Parthian shot, from the trick horse archers used to discourage pursuit. The flat crack… crack… cut through the duller rumble of hooves, and the cartridges glittered as they spun away to the ground.

Adrienne drew out of the column, racing along beside it for a moment so that she could look back free of the great cloud of dust twenty-five sets of hooves were kicking up. He could see her mouth work, and read her lips: Shit.

“Slow down a bit!” she called as she swerved back into line. “The horses can’t take much more of this. The Indians are slackening off.”

He suddenly noticed the heat radiating from his mount, and the white streaks of foam along its neck, and the bellows panting through its red-rimmed nostrils. Can’t be easy to carry me at this speed, he thought, and slowed—more a matter of shifting his balance a bit back than doing anything with the reins. He could feel the animal’s relief as its hoofbeat slowed a little.

Good thing too. If we had to stop to change mounts now, they’d be far too close. We could discourage them with aimed fire, but they’d be ready to go….

“What’s the bad news?” he called to Adrienne as she rejoined the column.

“They’ve got a remuda of spare horses following them,” she said. “That means they can switch off—it’ll be easier for them than us—and a lot of us ride heavier in the saddle than any Indians are likely to do.”

“Short form?” he called. Sorry, not familiar with cavalry logistics, he added to himself.

“Short form, they’ll catch us eventually, if we can’t break contact,” she said, obviously thinking hard. “Bad if they catch us where there’s water. Fatal if it’s a dry spot. Or possibly fatal anyway, since the only water near here is at the bottom of a canyon.”

“Afton canyon? Just east of Barstow?” he said.

“Right. Give me a minute.”

Think hard, think hard, askling, he thought—and even then was a little startled that he’d mentally used the Norski term for darling.

He looked around himself, and was startled at how close the sun was to the horizon. Adrienne rode side by side with Simmons for a moment, then dropped back to each in turn.

“We’re going to hit the Afton canyon soon,” she said. That was where the intermittent Mohave flowed east before it sank into the desert playas. “We’ll turn east, water the horses and fill our bags as fast as we can, then get up one of the low spots on the north face of the wall. If we can get into the Calico range north of there we can lose them and then swing west again.”

Tom looked back at the dust cloud their pursuers raised, tinged bloody by the setting sun, estimated times, and then called up his knowledge of the land.

“That’ll be shaving it pretty close,” he said. “They could cut the angle again, if they figure out what we intend. And that canyon gets pretty damned narrow in places; I’ve walked it and camped there.”

“You’re right, but it’s our best chance,” she said, loud over the drum of hooves and the rattle of iron on rock. Sparks flew up from the feet of her mount as she dropped farther down the column.

Jesus, what a woman! he thought warmly. Of course, we may die horribly in a couple of hours, but what a rush it’s been!

The pursuit slowed to a canter for a few minutes, and the pursued did as well. Then Tom saw the great clot of horsemen behind them split; sixty or so kept up the chase, and forty angled off to the right, eastward—toward the rim of the canyon through which they’d have to run…

This bunch are savages, right enough, he thought. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid, especially within their own stamping ground.

“That’s torn it!” he called to Adrienne.

“Going to make it interesting, at least,” she said.

“We’re going to have to sting them a bit at the crossing!” he shouted back. “Me first.”

The land was sloping down before them, sparsely dotted with sage and creosote and clumps of grass dried to blond straw; the plain was interrupted by mesas and buttes, all turning dark purple and gold as the sun sank on their left. It was almost too classically Western; this area had been used for a lot of movies, back FirstSide. Being chased through it by real live Indians intent on killing you gave a whole new perspective to memories of The Searchers….

“Yo!”

Adrienne’s shout gave them all warning, and they spurred their mounts. The dry bed of the Mohave lay before them—not quite dry here, a muddy trickle in the center, flanked by long grass, reeds, cottonwoods and willows. Water and soupy mud flew up in plumes to either side as the driven horses hit it at a gallop, then jinked hard to the right on the other bank.

Tom pulled in his own mount and let the others pass him; it reared slightly, neighing protest, then stood panting with its body parallel to the river. That put the charging Akaka warriors to his left. The horse was hunt-trained; when he squeezed it with his thighs it stayed motionless save for its rapid breath as he leveled the militia rifle. The Indians were out in the open, still well lit; he breathed out and let the blade of the foresight fall down across the circle of the rear aperture. Take up the slack and stroke the trigger…

Crack. The .30-06 rounds punched his shoulder harder than the assault rifles he was used to. No use trying for precision, not at two hundred yards in bad light and from an uncertain platform. Move the aiming point and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. One sharp blast merged into another in a ripple of fire as he emptied the magazine and spent brass spun away to his right; the muzzle blast was a strobing ball of red-yellow, dazzling the eyes.

Horses went down, and men. Some of the screams were of pain—horses sounded like enormous terrified children when they were hurt, an aspect of preindustrial battles he hadn’t anticipated and didn’t like at all. More were shrieks of rage; other muzzle flashes winked at him, muskets with a duller red than the nitro powder of this weapon, and the near-silent hiss of arrows. He didn’t wait to study the results of his fire; he pulled his horse’s head around and booted it into motion. The big gelding labored as it cross the riverbed, muck flying from its hooves, and its labored breathing reminding him of how hard it had worked; the smell of the wet earth was heavy in his nostrils after the long dryness of the desert. The Indians were closer, and arrows passed him on either side with hissing whup of cloven air; they’d sink to the feathers in him if they hit, or if they struck the horse… which would be almost as bad.

Worse, if they took him alive.

Then he was out of the swale and up on the sandy bank on the other side of the nearly dry river. A dark shape loomed there: Henry Villers sitting his horse, with the Bren gun trained on the shallow spot where the pursuers would inevitably bunch as they crossed. His smile was very white in the growing gloom.

“You stung ’em, Warden Tom,” he called out. “I’m just going to purely spoil their whole day, then follow right along.”

“Semper Fi, you betcha!” Tom called to him.

The canyon started as a wedge of flattish sand between two ranges of hills, but it rapidly grew narrower as he pounded east. After a minute he heard a sudden roaring stutter behind him—Villers emptying a thirty-round magazine into a crowd of men and horses; there was a brief pause, and the sound was repeated. Then silence, except for faint screams and shrieks, and the growing drum of a horse’s hooves.

Narrower still, rising walls on either side crowding him toward the chain of pools and trickles that made the river; the sun was right behind him, and the fluted stone curtains on either side were striated in red and salmon pink and green and black as the volcanic rock caught the dying beams of sunset.

He caught up with the rest at a broad shallow pool. There was a frenzy of movement around the northern bank, where firm ground ran down to the water under the shade of a stretch of huge cottonwoods. Sandra was trying to keep the desperately thirsty horses from foundering themselves, waving her arms and sometimes slapping noses with her quirt, leading one set in before the others wanted to leave, amid shrill squeals and a snapping, snorting chaos she managed to control—somehow. Jim Simmons was scanning the southern edge of the canyon’s cliffs with his scope-sighted rifle; he gave a shout as Tom slugged his horse back on its haunches.

“Company coming!” Simmons shouted, and fired.

“Leave him,” Sandra barked as she ran by, leading four more horses by their reins. “He’s foundered—just get your gear on this’n.”

He snatched at the reins she offered; the horse he’d been riding stood with its head down, wheezing painfully, staggering a little in place. Tom felt a stab of pity; it didn’t prevent him from stripping off the saddle and saddlebags and throwing them on the new mount with indecent speed. The saddle blanket was rank and running with sweat, and spattered with foam. The new horse was his original spare—even then he gave a thought of thanks for Sandra, who’d kept track through the confusion. She might well have saved his life; a smaller horse wouldn’t go nearly as far or fast under his weight.

His first mount made for the water with trembling legs. Then something went shwuup! through the umber-tinted sunset air and hit it with a meaty sound, lost under the huge, piteous scream of surprise and pain from the horse. He saw an arrow quivering in its withers as it collapsed; then more were flying at them from the south rim of the canyon. He could look up from the darkness beneath the cottonwood to see the cliff there ruddy and sunlit, the arrowheads winking as they reached the top of their arcs. The black shafts looked slow then, but that turned to zipping speed as they plunged down. Some went thunk into the big trees and quivered like malignant bees; others hit the sand with a shunking sound. Muskets banged as well; he could see the shooters bobbing up and down from cover, and the puffs of dirty smoke from muzzle and pan.

Simmons’s sniper rifle cracked, flashes in the dark and the sharp stink of nitro powder as he tried to keep the enemy suppressed, but there were too many of them—their firepower was diffuse, but huge. Henry Villers came up on a horse as badly blown as Tom’s had been, threw himself out of the saddle and prepared to add the Bren gun to the suppressing fire.

“No!” Adrienne shouted. “This place is a deathtrap. Get mounted, everyone; we have to make it past the narrows! Tully!”

“Trust me, trust me!” the little man shouted, scrambling components from one of the packsaddles into a canvas bag. “OK! Go for it! Go, go, go.”

Villers scrambled aboard one of the presaddled spares. Then they were all splashing through the pond and onto the only clear ground eastward—a strip of wet sand along the southern edge of the stream; elsewhere the floor of the canyon was boulder-strewn and brush-grown. It was also a pit of darkness now; Tom managed to get his night-sight goggles out of their pouch and onto his face, and a new magazine into his rifle, all at a pounding gallop and without losing anything but his hat. That went flying off into the night behind him like a bat as water-worn rock cliffs rushed by, swerving in a crazy snake’s passage as they wove among the rocks and fallen trees and ponds. Sand spurted up from the hooves of the horses ahead, flicking him in the face. The Akaka up on top of the canyon wall were pacing them on their right, shooting down into the riverbed—right ahead of him someone’s horse went down at the head, its hind legs and hooves flying up almost in his face, and then his horse had hopped over it in a sudden pig-jump that almost cost him his seat.

He risked a look behind. It was Sandra; she was up and running, and Tully was riding alongside her, bouncing around but staying on. He reached down; she grabbed his hand and stirrup leather and made an astonishing bounding jump, coming down on the horse behind him and clinging tight. His teeth and eyes shone wide, in a face that was all nose and chin and straining effort.

On the cliff face above him something swept through the night amid a circular trail of sparks—and Tom’s mind made a leap of its own: It was some sort of primitive grenade, gunpowder stuffed into a clay pot lined with rocks, then a fuse lit and the whole whipped around in a sling for throwing.

It soared down from the cliff, trailing sparks. Crannggg! And gravel-shrapnel spurted all around him; his horse missed a step for a heartstopping instant, and then was on its way again. But more circles of sparks flowered on the cliff….

Then they were out into a marginally broader part of the canyon, one where the river ran close under the steep southern cliffs. North of that bend was a broad patch of sand, and north of that a side canyon, a triangular wash that made a path to the northern rim of the canyon, littered with stones from gravel size up to chunks as big as his torso. It was passable… just.

“Sandy, young Botha, get the horses up—everyone else, rearguard! Quick, or they’ll catch us on two flanks!” Adrienne called.

“No, they won’t,” Tully said, panting, as Sandra slipped down.

He pulled a controller from a pouch on his harness, extended it westward and mashed his thumb down with vindictive force. A rolling boom shot around the curve of the canyon, with a cloud of dust on its heels.

“Satchel charge under a boulder,” he said, and threw back his head for a catamount-in-agony rebel yell that would have done one of his great-grandfathers proud. “That’ll hold ’em for a few minutes.”

“Good work!” Adrienne cried.

Tom slapped him on his shoulder as he passed, then took cover behind a big rock about ten yards up the cut.

“Jim, Henry!” he called. “Fall back by pairs, leapfrog!”

He took two turns of the rifle’s sling around his left fist, braced his elbow on the rock—what luxury, after bouncing around on a horse!—and sighted. It was a bit awkward with the goggles, but a lot better than trying to see in the dark like a cat. The range was two hundred yards away and a hundred up; only the height difference had let the arrows reach them. The smoothbores would hit only by accident at that range, but get enough of them going and accidents would happen, and he didn’t like the thought of being hit by one of those three-quarter-inch lead balls. They were the size of a kid’s biggest conker marble and traveling around eight hundred feet per second.

It’s times like this that you miss Uncle Sam’s expensive body armor, he thought, and squeezed off a round. Arrows came flickering back at the muzzle flash.

Up on the southern cliff where the sun was dying an Akaka slinger whirled another grenade around his head. Tom brought the blade of his foresight down on the moving blur, squeezed…

Crack.

The man lurched backward as a .30-06 hollow-point blasted through his chest and out his back, leaving a small round hole in his stomach and an exit wound the size of a bread plate. The grenade he’d been loading into the soft antelope-leather pocket of his sling fell at his feet, and three seconds later it exploded—right next to the other four in the pouch hung across his chest. A great snap of red fire lit the cliff, and rocks and dust and bits of his body shot out and fell downward over the steep rock.

Just then Henry Villers’s machine gun began to stutter, raking rock and water in a flurry of spouts and stone chips and ricochets, driving back the pursuers who’d finally come up along the canyon floor in their quarries’ tracks. Simmons’s rifle had never stopped. Tom shot his magazine empty, clicked in another one and jacked the operating rod.

“Fall back,” he said. “Jim, you and me—Henry, on the word! Watch your flanks, guys.”

Because unless the Akaka are conveniently stupid, they’re not going to rush a machine gun and two automatic rifles from the front in a narrow slot, he thought. Of course, a lot depends on how many Tully got with his satchel charge; no way to tell. Maybe we can sicken them of it. Maybe the horse will learn to sing. Fuck it.

The cut became less well defined as they scrambled up and north. A dead horse lay inconveniently—the stupid beast had slipped and broken its neck and someone had shot it; it said something about the situation that he hadn’t noticed. He clambered over the sweat-and-blood-stinking, foam-slick and unpleasantly yielding obstacle and into loose scree that slipped under his feet.

If he hadn’t been wearing the goggles, the silent tiger rush from his left would have taken him completely by surprise—the Akaka’s soft moccasins made no sound at all as he skipped from rock to rock and flung himself headlong at Tom.

A flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye brought him around and crouching; the duck and lift was purely instinctual. A hard, heavy weight slammed into his shoulders just as he heaved up, and the war shriek turned to a yell of dismay as the warrior flipped up and over. Tom used the same motion to wheel, but even so the Akaka had bounced back to his feet on the rough stone. He was a bundle of sinew and steel-spring muscle no more than arm’s length away, and the knife and tomahawk glittered in his hands—they would be in Tom’s flesh long before he could bring the rifle up to shoot. Instead he twirled it like a quarterstaff, and the muzzle smashed across the other man’s left wrist. The hatchet flew away; Tom’s hips swayed aside like a matador’s, and he clamped the knife hand between his arm and flank before the razor steel could do more than slice his bush jacket and sting the skin. The rifle clattered away.

The two men strained against each other in the dark for an instant, a private universe of fear-stinking sweat and desperate effort. The Indian’s free hand clawed for his eyes and slid off the slick surface of the goggles; Tom’s teeth snapped into the wrist, and blood ran sickeningly rank into his mouth. He spat it out and caught his own left wrist in his right hand behind the Indian’s back, lifting him off the ground with a surge and wrenching with arms like pythons. The painted gargoyle face inches from his contorted, screaming, and then Tom had to duck his head to save his eyes from the other’s teeth; they ground into his scalp, tearing the skin.

That loosed something deep in his gut; the berserkergang of his ancestors perhaps—if it was, it was colder than ice, not hot.

“Yaaaaaah!” he shouted, a hoarse, guttural sound that echoed through the night.

And his arms ground inward with the inexorable force of glaciers. The tough cotton drill of the bush jacket ripped from the neck halfway to the waist with a crack as his shoulders bunched, and red blood vessels writhed across his vision. The Akaka warrior screamed once more, high and shrill—then flopped limp with blood pouring out of his mouth, spine snapped and ribs driven into his lungs like daggers of bone.

Tom staggered and threw the corpse from him, glaring about. It took an instant for his vision to clear, and for him realize that the others were staring at him. He coughed and shook his head.

“Let’s get going,” he said, scrubbing his sleeve across the filmed surface of the goggles.

“He can’t ride with it,” Adrienne said. “He’d bleed out inside two miles.”

Schalk Botha lay facedown. The wound wasn’t one that would be fatal under any circumstances but these—the arrow had gone through the thicker fleshy part of his right buttock, a broad-bladed triangle of metal slicing down out of the night. Adrienne had cut off the shaft at the skin and freed it with a single long pull, then packed the wound with antiseptic pads and strapped them down with strong adhesive.

It would heal in a couple of weeks, without doing anything other than making young Schalk the butt of jokes for the rest of his life. Here and now, it was a sentence of death. The young man knew it, and his face had the strained impassiveness of someone realizing his own mortality and determined to meet it with eyes open.

Tom looked around at the circle of faces, ghostly in the moonlight. Everyone who needed it had been patched up; he had a pad along his forehead over the left eye himself, and another on his side a handspan down from the armpit. A couple of the others looked worse, but there was nothing crippling, nothing that would keep a man—or woman—from riding and fighting.

Piet Botha was crouched on his hams beside his son, both hands—his huge, scarred hands—on the stock of the rifle that rested with its butt between his knees. His brutal face was as impassive as ever; for an instant one hand reached out and touched the younger man’s hair.

“Nie.” he sighed. “Let there be no foolishness or waste of time.”

His chin jerked out toward the darkness. Not far away the Indians were holding some sort of ceremony over their dead, doubtless preparatory to coming after revenge. Their howls came out of the star-bright night and echoed up from the canyon, more chilling than wolves because they weren’t mindless.

“We must have a rearguard,” he said. “Or the rest will never break free. Schalk can still fight from cover. I also, of course. And one more fit man able to move about.”

The dark somber eyes flicked across their faces. I can’t believe what I’m going to say, Tom thought as he opened his mouth.

“Man, I cannot believe that I’m doing this,” Henry Villers said, pulling the Bren gun from its carrying rack behind his saddle. “And with these two. OK, you mothers don’t give me any shit, now. I’m a machine gunner, and I’m the oldest man here after big brother Boer. So we’ll hold them as long as we can, then pull up into those rocks. Tully, my man, you get me some of that Semtex and some detonators, right? And plenty of ammunition. See y’all later.”

Meaning in the afterlife, if any, Tom thought.

He shook hands with each of the men and silently walked toward his horse; so did Tully and Simmons. Adrienne paused for a second to speak quietly to each; Henry handed her a sealed letter he’d written days ago. Her face might have been carved from ivory as it passed him; Sandra was weeping quietly, wiping at her eyes with the backs of her hands.

“Hail and farewell,” Tom murmured to himself as he swung into the saddle. The desert sky above was an arch of hoarfrost, and the rocks glimmered to the northward.

“Let’s go,” Adrienne said, reining her mount’s head around. “If we push, we can make Jackhammer Gap by dawn.”