The Golden Cut

by Merl Fluin

  Blue lightning flashed. Red thunder crashed. Bullets of noise skimmed their ears and pelted the earth. Rocks closed in around them and cracked open, spilling their guts in a red-hot stream of pentagons and triangles.

  An explosion of thunder hurled a broken saguaro into their path. The horse dashed its legs against the fallen trunk and pitched over, throwing Cantos and TJ forwards and clear onto freezing dry sand.

  ***

  “Rise and shine, little huckleberry. It’s going to be a fine fiery morning in a couple of hours.”

  “Ugh. Is there coffee?”

  “Certainly there is coffee.”

  TJ sat up inside the blanket. Cantos stood by the horse and stared at the moon as it set on the horizon. He was smoking one of his black-paper cigarettes. There was a thick coating of dried mud on his coat and trousers.

  They drank their coffee.

  “What’s the plan for today? You been out tracking?”

  He smiled. “Something along those lines and angles.” He poured himself another cup, emptying the can. “I believe we’ll head due south today, at least until the sun hits a note too high for riding. Then we’ll pause and take stock. Would you check on the horse while I put out the fire and strike camp?”

  TJ petted the black mare’s muzzle, brushed dried mud from its flanks and legs, and put the blanket and saddle on its back. “This doesn’t make a lick of sense, Cantos. Why are we going south now when we’ve been travelling north for half the night?”

  “Why no, child, we haven’t been travelling north. That direction is for another night.”

  “I’m sure we were heading north by the stars.”

  “Tush, what do you know about the stars? My compass is a star, and it shows five directions, and our direction is south.”

  She scratched a spot between her brows. “Guess I fell asleep.”

  “I doubt anyone could have slept through last night’s monkeyshines.” His tone was offhand and bantering, but he was watching her. “You’ve been as awake as you are now.”

  “If you’re about to ask me if I can fly, I’m going to –”

  He laughed and finished packing away what was left of their kit.

  Mounted behind him as they started off at a trot, TJ pulled off her right glove and inspected her thumb. The eyelid flickered open and the dark eye gazed up at her. It was rheumy; she licked it clean, then pulled the glove back on. She gave the thumb of her gloved hand a light kiss before turning her gaze to the sunrise.

  The desert was a blaze of freshly blooming flowers. Glorious drifts of purple and yellow turned the spaces between rocks and cacti into rolling meadow. As the sun warmed the world, insects bubbled up from the ground and floated between the stems, and small bright birds swooped and dived after them. The increasing heat drew out the scents of the flowers, some sweet as honey, some pungent and oily. Snakes of pollen moved languidly from the flowers as the mare’s legs brushed through them. Cantos stopped from time to time to scan the landscape with a spyglass he took from inside his coat.

  At forenoon they stopped to let the midday heat pass. They drank rainwater from the hollows of plants and trees. Cantos found some fruits and greens that they could eat.

  They hobbled the mare and left it nipping at low-lying greenery while they spread the blanket in a stretch of shade. TJ’s hat had been lost with the pony, so Cantos lent her a cloth to drape over her head and shoulders.

  Birdsong mingled with the rustlings of reptiles in the undergrowth. TJ gazed at Cantos from hollow eyes. Her face was slack, and blank with dust.

  “How far away is Cowhead now?” she asked eventually.

  “I can gauge distance or direction, but not both at once,” he replied. He had lost his teasing, bantering tone and spoke as if offering a confidence. “All we can do is to stay on course. But we’re certainly on her right trail now.”

  “Is someone riding her, or leading her along, or has she been corralled somewhere, or what?”

  “One thing at a time. Let’s follow the trail and see what we find at the end of it.” He leaned over and rested his hand on her forearm. “I know you’re worried, and you feel that time is pressing because you’re scared about what might be happening to her while she’s out of sight.” TJ rubbed her thumb. “But try not to panic. I am taking you towards her just as fast as I can.”

  “Thank you.” A pregnant whiptail skittered across the edge of their blanket, then wheeled and ran back the way it had come, into the vegetation. “When we stopped at the water yesterday, and there were those Invisibles’ markings on the rock. Did you understand those markings?”

  “Understanding is not for everyone.”

  “But you went around the rock, and you didn’t come back for quite a time. Did the rock show you which way to go?”

  Cantos’s face broke into a smile. “They’re not a map, if that’s what you’re asking. More like a table of logarithms.”

  “Logos rhythms?”

  “Kind of a slipstick. Like architects use.”

  “Oh.” A pause. “What happened last night?”

  “Geometry and bad weather, and that’s how we found our way.”

  9.

  After their third moonrise in the desert they came upon the corpse of the pony.

  The landscape had changed: more arid, colder, more silent. Pinched, desperate brushwood clutched at loose-lying soil; lichen stuck to rocks in the daytime heat. At night the colour of the sand below matched that of the moon above.

  The black pony lay broken at the bottom of an arroyo. It was still wearing the saddle and saddle roll, but the bowie knife had gone. The saddlebags, flung out to the side of the body, had been emptied of everything except the hand mirror, which was in jagged pieces. The pony’s haunches were stained with blood and marked with deep spiralling cuts. Its mane was knotted into short, knobbly plaits.

  Cantos’s face was pale, his shoulders hunched. “This is going to slow us down some,” he said. “We have to untie those knots.”

  Patting its neck and murmuring to it, TJ led the mare around a bend in the arroyo, out of sight of the pony, and hobbled it. When she came back Cantos was by the pony’s neck, his fingers working in the mane.

  “We could cut them out with a knife.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s better to untie them. They’ve taken the pony’s life to give that life to something or someone else, with some purpose in mind, and for all we know cutting the knots might feed that purpose. Safer to undo what’s been done than to introduce a blade.”

  Without further conversation TJ sat opposite him and set to work. After a few minutes she paused to remove her gloves. The knots in the mane were thickly tangled, and her fingernails broke and split as she tugged at them. A viscous liquid seeped from the curved slit in the back of her right thumb, gathering in droplets on the hairs that fringed it.

  They worked on. The moon set in the west, then rose again, also in the west. The night unspooled across the sky. Their fingers bled until they healed.

  Cantos pulled loose the last of the knots, then placed his hand over the pony’s muzzle for a moment before pulling away and getting to his feet.

  “This is bad,” he said. “It may be mere coincidence that it’s your pony that has been used in this way, but coincidence is the most dangerous causation of all.”

  “Was it Little Dove or False Uncle that did this, do you think?”

  “More likely someone who did for Little Dove or False Uncle the same way they did for the pony. Could be enemies to us, or could be rivals. Either way, they’re on our trail and willing to do wrong to get in our way.”

  The pony’s saddlebags still lay where he had found them. He went over and pulled out TJ’s now unbroken hand mirror. He placed it glass-side down on the pony’s unmoving flank.

  “I asked you once,” he said, “whether you were a member of the Eleven Twenty-Threes, and you said no, and I know you were telling the truth because no Eleven Twenty-Three would carry a mirror around with them. Tell m
e the truth again and explain what you brought this mirror along for. Because if you have a different kind of enemy following you than the ordinary town-and-circus grudges I already know about, it’s more than high time to come clean.”

  TJ looked down at her stained clothes and dirty hands.

  “I brought it because I’m vain,” she said. “I guess mirrors are another one of those things you know more about than I do. All I know to use them for is taking off grease and putting on greasepaint.”

  “You can use them to check which direction time is flowing, same as anything breakable. But some folk also use mirrors to transmogrify themselves, or to summon others.” He sighed. “Never gone in for that sort of thing much myself,” he said, pushing the mirror towards her, “but they give me the abdabs all the same. If you have to keep it, put it away somewhere that I won’t keep seeing it.” He ran his hands through the pony’s mane and over its neck. “Poor beast. What have you become?”

  The pony’s mouth fell open and a nighthawk flew out. The air through its feathers made an eerie bleating as it swirled away.

  ***

  When the sun appeared on the horizon, Cantos scrambled up the bank of the arroyo. Stones and dry plants scattered like bullets beneath his hands and feet. The bank was short but steep; he grabbed at the trees and vegetation to pull himself over the lip.

  TJ peered up at him, shading her eyes. He sat at the top, his red and blue coat in loose folds around him, a dry branch crooked in his left arm with a single green leaf showing between his thighs. His golden hair and green eyes glowed.

  He looked past TJ along the length of the arroyo. A black hawk landed at his left hand. It was acting strangely and seemed to have a damaged wing.

  Cantos twisted around, his back towards TJ, and gazed out into a landscape she could not see. Then he called down to her: “Let’s take action.”

  He rode the scree back down and pulled her to her feet. His face was flushed.

  “Something is better than nothing,” he said. “There are glyphs over there – not little rock glyphs, huge land glyphs carved into the ground. Wonder what might happen if we slide those rules around, eh? Where’s the horse?”

  TJ nodded towards the bend in the arroyo, then back at the rim where the black hawk crouched.

  “I want to see,” she said.

  “Be my guest. I’ll fetch our things.”

  Cantos disappeared around the bend as TJ began to climb. Her feet trod lightly on the unstable earth, and in a few minutes she stood where Cantos had sat. The hawk was gone, but she did not look for it. She stared out at the great geometric shapes carved into the ground low down beyond the arroyo. There was a huge triangle, with a smaller triangle nested inside it at one corner. The small triangle in turn contained a smaller, which contained an even smaller, which contained another... Curving lines swept through and around all the triangles, stark in the pale light. TJ moved back and forth, peering at the shapes from different angles, shading her eyes.

  She ran to join Cantos. He was already in the saddle.

  “The Invisibles?” she asked.

  “I’ll say.” He winked. “The game’s afoot.”

  She climbed into the saddle behind him. His pulse showed quick in his throat as the mare trotted out of the arroyo.

  They stopped and dismounted when the rough edges of the earthworks came into sight. On this plane, seen from ground level, they were razor-straight lines hewn into flat rocky ground, and it was impossible to tell what shapes or angles they formed when they met. Their scale was too large to be visible except from above – larger by far than they had appeared from the rim of the arroyo; so large that one would have to fly above to be able to decipher them clearly.

  They left the mare and went on foot into the petroglyph. They had only taken a few paces when the earth began to scorch their feet through their boots. Everything they had left behind them – arroyo bank, grass, horse and all – disappeared behind a shimmer. The sun was high overhead. No birds, insects or reptiles stirred here, just two incongruous mammals. Sweat sparkled in TJ’s beard. She drew her cloth over her bare neck and head.

  Cantos pulled up when an angle formed by two intersecting lines appeared at their feet.

  “Would you be so kind as to lie down on your back with this angle at your heels?” he asked.

  She obliged.

  He grabbed her arms and dragged her upper body around in an arc, scuffing the ground with his boots as he walked. When she sat up she saw that he had scratched a dusty circle, with bisected lines radiating like the rays of the sun. She was inside the circle, and he was outside of it.

  Sitting down to face her without crossing the circumference, he told her to make herself comfortable and not leave the circle.

  They sat staring at each other. Red lips, green eyes, golden hair.

  A small golden triangle began to form on his breastbone. Its apex pointed at his Adam’s apple. It flashed and twitched as if it were about to pop open in his chest.

  She heard his voice as if from above her: “Can you fly?”

  She looked down onto the petroglyph as she rose. The largest triangle became visible, the one that contained all the others. Then she rose higher and saw that the largest triangle was just one of five that formed the arms of a star with a pentagon at its centre. She rose higher still to see –

  The impact of the ground on her back winded her. It was a time before she could sit upright.

  She was back inside the circle, and she was alone.

  10.

  The black mare was waiting where they had left it. It was still saddled and bridled, but Cantos’s Winchester and saddle bags were missing. His blanket roll lay open on the ground, the war bag and other belongings scattered around it. TJ picked up the war bag and gingerly turned it inside out. A roll of dollar bills landed at her feet. She counted them out: one hundred.

  She inspected the ground around the horse’s hooves, turning over rocks and stones with her hands. Boot marks and hoof prints showed in the dust. Some led back towards the arroyo; others trailed away along the path she and Cantos had taken into the petroglyph.

  She stood with a grunt and then bent to reassemble the bedroll, which she refastened behind the saddle. The mare moved on dull hooves, snorting. TJ put her hands on either side of its head and rested her forehead above its muzzle, speaking in a soft voice:

  “I don’t know either, girl, but we’ll figure it out. Either he’s left us here on purpose while he goes off to do one of his magick things, or else something has happened to him. If he’s gone off to reconnoitre, he’ll be back soon. Let’s give it a little while before we freak out, eh?”

  Horse and horsewoman stood skull to skull, each breathing the other’s breath. Then TJ pulled her head away, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She removed her right glove and gazed deep into the open amber eye on her thumb. Her shoulders sagged. The eye gazed back at her.

  “Cowhead,” she said. “Where are you?”

  The sun was lower in the sky now, but the heat was increasing. She took the canteen from around her neck, held it beside her ear, shook it, then removed the stopper and took three slow gulps. Refastening the stopper and putting the canteen back around her neck, she mounted and retraced their step until they re-entered the arroyo.

  Beyond the bend, the bottom of the arroyo lay in shadow. It was cooler than the area around the petroglyphs, although still dry as a snake. She unsaddled the mare and tethered it to a dry tree, then wrapped herself in Cantos’s blanket and huddled on the ground.

  Towards sunset she got to her feet, crouched over the heap of bedding and rummaged through it, her hands moving fast, her shoulders hunched. The she went through her own pockets, pulling out the derringer, the roll of dollar bills and the shards of broken mirror. The latter were wedged inside a cactus fruit husk so that the sharp edges were tucked inside the skin. She sat on her heels and bit her lip, then started to scramble up the bank of the arroyo towards the rim. The bank was steep and
crumbling, and her shoes and gloves slid as she climbed. When she reached the top, she saw out over a wide plain surrounded by distant rocks and canyons. Bands of green showed at their foot; patches of greyer green and brown dotted the plain. The petroglyphs glinted in red light that angled down from the west like the hypotenuse of an invisible triangle.

  TJ shaded her eyes and watched a bundle of smudgy movement cross one of the brown patches: several shapes close together that could have been humans on horseback. A plume of white smoke was visible at the base of a rock over to the far left, far away from the movement and creating a drifting motion of its own. A black hawk skimmed above her head, flying towards the smoke.