Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  "It's right," Ryan said. "Look, we send the mes­sage to the fort saying we want peace. Not from me but from your people. Offer a meet in three days from now in Sometime Never. Say there'll only be Cuchillo and one other warrior. Ask for the General and one sec man to come. They'll try treachery. Bound to. But we get there first. Ambush the trails and hit 'em on the way in. They won't look for that."

  "Which road in will they take?"

  "Covered that," J.B. said, unable to conceal his mounting irritation. "Ryan goes in and checks out all the trails."

  "Sure. The word goes tomorrow. Day after that I'll go in to the ghost town on my own and recce it thor­oughly."

  "I'll come with you," the Armorer said.

  "And me," Cuchillo added. "This is our war."

  "Fine," Ryan agreed. "Day after tomorrow, we all go up there and check it out."

  By evening of the following day they knew for sure that the Seventh Cavalry had safely received the invi­tation to a meeting. It had been written, after some argument and disagreement, by Doc Tanner. The final draft was short and to the point.

  The armed conflict between us is harmful to both. I suggest a meeting in the ruined ville of Sometime, at noon, three days from now. I, Cuchillo Oro, war chief of the Mescalero Apache people, will be there with only one companion. If you wish a negotiated settlement, come with one other and we will talk. It is the only way for peace with honor.

  Three copies were made, each taken by a trusted warrior to a point where the sec men's patrols were known to ride. By evening one of them brought news that the message, placed in a conspicuous red-painted carton, had been picked up by a ten-man patrol of the pony soldiers.

  "Now we wait," Ryan said. "And we'll go recce some more tomorrow morning."

  The day had passed peaceably enough. The Anglos were regarded as honored guests, and the women of the Mescalero almost fought for the chance to bring, them food and drink, or to wash or mend any of their clothes that were showing the strain of their ceaseless traveling.

  During the hot time of the early afternoon, when many slept, Cuchillo Oro had come alone and asked to speak with Ryan.

  "Sure. Come in."

  "Alone."

  Krysty raised an eyebrow at Ryan, who shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the cool, shady wickiup into the dazzling heat of the long canyon.

  "Here. By the water. We can talk."

  The Apache children were shooed away by their mothers as Golden Knife and his dangerous one-eyed Anglo friend sat at the edge of the deep pool beneath the cliff.

  "I wish to know where you come from. And how you travel. I have sent out scouts, and they have backtracked your feet beyond where we saw you."

  "How far back?"

  "Past chilled lion."

  Ryan repeated the question. "How far back d'you track us?"

  "To the rancheria of hot death. You came from there."

  "The redoubt? Yeah, we did."

  "There is only death there. A great illness lives within, a spirit that slays all. Why did it not chill all of you?"

  Ryan nodded. "You're right. The rad count was pushing at the top end of the scale, but we didn't stay long."

  Cuchillo Oro had drawn the great golden dagger, absently pricking a pattern of small holes in the moist earth by his soft leather boots. "I say again, Ryan Cawdor. Where d'you come from?"

  Ryan rapidly rehearsed a variety of lies, testing them, and finding them all wanting. It was one of those rare occasions when the best story was actually the true one.

  "It's a long story, Chief. Goes like this…"

  IT TOOK A LONG TIME to explain about the redoubts and the mat-trans gateways within some of them. Ryan realized that Cuchillo Oro was torn between be­lief and suspicion, wanting to believe the magical tale of being able to travel from one end of the Deathlands to the other in the blinking of an eye.

  "Life in Drowned Squaw Canyon is harsh, my brother," he said. "Times I would like to get away."

  Ryan considered mentioning that he believed some gateway chambers could also be used for chron-jumps. Doc was living proof that this was so. But he hadn't seen any evidence of them being safe to try and he figured that they would only confuse the Mescalero chief even more.

  "There's good and bad about the gateways," Ryan admitted. "But there's some lost or pulverized to dust or drowned under the seas when the nukings came."

  "And you travel far and fast? Just the six of you? It must be a fine life for a warrior…and for his women."

  Ryan suspected that Cuchillo Oro was leading up to something, maybe even asking if he could join them. There was no doubt that the Apache was a brave and skillful fighting man. And there'd been times that Ryan had wished desperately for more strength in a firefight. Yet there was the doubt remaining. The Mescalero came from a totally different culture. Better a close-knit team of six than a rabble of sixty.

  In the end, Cuchillo Oro reined himself in just short of actually asking the question. So Ryan didn't need to answer it.

  HE AND KRYSTY MADE slow, gentle love to each other during the evening, and a second time around three in the morning. Ryan was tugged from sleep by the feather-light touch of fingers on his body, insistently searching, finding.

  Warm lips nibbled at him, drawing the inevitable response. His body tensed, his fingers locked in Krysty's sentient hair, feeling it rustling about his hands, caressing his skin.

  "Nice," he said.

  "Mmm," Krysty agreed. "Sure you don't want me to come tomorrow for the recce?"

  "Sure. Me, J.B. and Cuchillo. Fewer the better. We won't be gone long."

  "Too long."

  They lay together, hand touching hand, hip touch­ing hip, for a quarter of an hour or so. Ryan was mentally picturing Sometime Never, with all the winding trails around it, coming in from top and bot­tom of the derelict main street, trying to make it clear in his mind where it would be best to hit the sec men.

  "Nickel for your thinking, lover," Krysty whis­pered at his side.

  "Thinking it was time that we did some more love-making."

  DAWN CAME UP WITH A sulfurous yellow glow. It had begun to get warmer around five, with an unpleasant, humid heat. The clouds stretched, unbroken, from edge to edge of the canyon. The three horses that were brought out were spooked, eyes rolling, whinnying their unease.

  "When the ponies scent trouble, then the wise man is careful," said the skeletal figure of the shaman, who materialized wrapped in a filthy buffalo robe. His mirrored glasses hid his sunken eyes.

  "I'll remember that, Man Whose Eyes See More," J.B. said, hunching himself lower into the collar of his brown shirt.

  Cuchillo frowned as he joined the two white men. "It is not a good day, brothers. Should we wait and do this on the morrow?"

  "Tomorrow's too late." Ryan swung up into the saddle. He'd left the G-12 behind in the wickiup, car­rying only the SIG-Sauer P-226 on his hip.

  The sky was so low it seemed to press down on the shoulders of the three men as they cantered slowly toward the ghost town. There was no conversation be­tween them.

  Ryan felt depressed. The possibility of failure lay flat and sour in his mind. This General who had appeared like a night demon out of nowhere… The way the Mescalero talked about him, he had to be some­thing out of the ordinary.

  He scratched the stubble on his chin, trying to visualize the tall figure with the bizarre mane of golden hair. Ryan was certain-sure he'd seen the man before.

  "Where?" he muttered to himself.

  Anywhere in Deathlands. There were enough renegade killers stalking the hot spots. But there was something special about this one. Ryan spit, clearing his mouth of dust. It was no good. The memory was stubborn, insisting on staying where it was.

  ON THE PREVIOUS VISIT, Sometime Never had ap­peared attractive, a quaint relic of the long-gone past.

  Now, it looked sinister. The tumbled shacks seemed filled with shadows, threatening.

  "It going to rain?" J.B. asked, as they tether
ed their horses to an old hitching post at the bottom of the street.

  Cuchillo hesitated. "When the sky is yellow, it is well to keep your animals close to the rancheria. It may be a storm of wind."

  "Best get this done fast, then," Ryan said. "Fast, but careful. I'll go up the far end and over the ridge beyond Hillbilly Heaven. J.B., take the western side and Cuchillo the east. How's that sound to you? Okay, then, let's go. If there's any trouble, fire a shot. Others come running."

  The wind was rising, from the north. It brought fine dust to blind Ryan's eye, filling his throat with the bitter taste of nitrate. It rustled through the banks of mesquite, loud enough to hide the approach of any kind of animal or reptile. Ryan stepped cautiously, head turning, sticking to the main trail. He'd passed the stores and shacks he'd investigated with Krysty the previous day, not bothering to check them out again. That wasn't what he was there for.

  J.B. and Cuchillo Oro had vanished behind him, going to recce their quadrants.

  Ryan paused near the top of the trail, only a few yards below the crest of the ridge. The old hermit's cabin was to his right as he swung around. He looked back down the street and across the baked land of New Mexico toward the maze of mesas and arroyos that concealed the rancheria of the Mescalero.

  Because of the noise of the wind, Ryan never heard the sec man who'd crept up behind him, never saw the club that smashed across the back of his skull like a bolt of lightning. He plunged into a deep lake of sticky blackness.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FOR A COUPLE OF MINUTES after he recovered a kind of consciousness Ryan Cawdor thought that he'd been blinded. Then he realized he'd been strung over the back of a horse, wrists tied brutally tight and linked to a length of whipcord knotted around his ankles. Blood had trickled down from the cut on his head and run into his eye, sealing it under a patch of congealing gore.

  Every step of the animal sent a stabbing pain through his skull. His shoulders and ribs ached, and he felt as if the sec men had given him a good kicking before binding him and throwing him on the horse like a sack of flour.

  His mouth was filled with dirt. He probed cau­tiously with his tongue, checking that none of his teeth had been damaged. One felt loose in the gums, but none were missing.

  What really hurt was that he'd made the classic mistake of overconfidence. He'd underestimated the cunning of the General, and now he was likely to pay the highest price in the marketplace of death.

  Since they hadn't simply killed him on the spot, Ryan figured that he was being taken back to the cav­alry's fort for questioning. Having been second-guessed by Yellowhair, Ryan knew he didn't have much to look forward to. It was obvious, now, that the sec man had suspected a trap the moment he got the message with the peace invitation and had sent out a patrol to ambush the potential ambushers. Ryan wondered what had happened to J.B. and Cuchillo Oro. Since he couldn't see a damned thing, it was possible that they were hog-tied right alongside of him.

  Gradually, as his head cleared, he was able to pick out voices around him, over the jingling of harness and the clattering of hooves on stone.

  The jolting made him feel sick, and he battled to clear his mind of the pain and nausea. The horse wasn't saddled, which meant a pack animal. Which meant, in turn, that they'd come prepared to take a prisoner. Or several prisoners.

  Unexpectedly the shaking cleared the scabbed blood from his right eye. For a moment he was dazzled by the brightness of the sunlight, and he had to squeeze his eye shut to try to blink the dust out of it.

  "Fucker's woken, Sarge," a voice bellowed from his left.

  "Put him to sleep again, Rourke," another voice replied.

  "Leave him be. General said keep him from being spoiled, and sure that's what we'll be doing. Or I'll have the skin off any man does One-Eye any grievous hurt."

  With a great effort of will, Ryan was able to lift his head, neck muscles straining, and saw that he was the only prisoner of the mounted patrol. There were around a dozen sec men, in dark blue uniforms pow­dered with pale dust, all with Springfield carbines bucketed at their saddles. From his taut, agonizing position, Ryan couldn't make out much more of the men. And it wasn't worth the effort of trying to see. They were obviously going back to their own ville.

  He slumped forward again, trying to relax against the tightness of his bondage and the jolting of the horse.

  "GENERAL LIKES TO HEAR singing, me merry buckos, and we wouldn't want to be letting the General down, now, would we?"

  Ryan realized that he'd slipped into an uneasy half-world that lay between sleeping and unconsciousness.

  The voice, coming from the big sergeant, brought him back to the real world of biting discomfort. He coughed and spit, fighting to clear his nose and throat of the raw dust.

  "One and two and three…" bellowed the sec man's voice, and the patrol began to sing. It was a ragged sound, barely carrying the tune, the words curiously old-fashioned.

  Instead of Spa, we'll drink down ale,

  And pay the reckoning on the nail.

  No man for debt shall go to jail,

  From Garryowen to glory.

  Long years ago Ryan remembered that he'd seen an old westie vid about General Custer, riding bravely to perdition at the Little Big Horn, long yellow hair streaming in the studio wind. The tune brought the memory back. It was the marching song of the Sev­enth Cavalry, "Garryowen."

  Viewing the world upside down, Ryan saw massive wooden gates swinging open and a flag blowing above some buildings, which were made from hewn logs and adobe. The flag was blue, bearing crossed sabers and the golden number seven. The singing swelled to a roaring climax and then stopped.

  "Platoon, halt!" came the shouted command from the sec man at the head. "Right face."

  The horse that carried him was tugged around and then the morning was filled with a sudden near-silence, broken only by the occasional snuffling or the restless movement of hooves, or the jingling of a bridle as one of the animals tossed its head against the flies.

  "Patrol returned safely from Sometime Never, General. Mission completely successful."

  "Well, done, Sergeant. Take the prisoner inside. I'll see him shortly."

  Ryan was on the blind side and couldn't see the speaker, but he knew it had to be the man the Apaches called Yellowhair. Yet again, despite the danger and discomfort of his position, Ryan tried to rack his memory for that voice. A low, calm, chilling voice. A voice that raised the short hairs at his nape. But the memory refused to become unburied, and all that Ryan sensed was that the memory was a bad one.

  "WALK, YOU BASTARD Indian-lover," cursed one of the sec men, a tall, overweight trooper whose belly hung over the broad leather belt. He carried an old knife scar over the left eye that gave the impression he was winking at you. He and a shorter man had cut Ryan off the back of the horse, leaving his wrists tied in front of him. With the circulation cut off for three or four hours, Ryan stumbled and would have fallen to the raked earth of the parade ground if it hadn't been for the sec man with the three stripes on his arm. He'd caught Ryan and held him upright.

  "Now, now, you don't want to go falling about and hurting yourself. There'll be plenty of time for that after you've had a nice talk with the General, won't there?"

  Once he was upright Ryan had immediately started to try to get his bearings. Cuchillo had talked a little about the newly built fort, but his description was necessarily vague. None of the people had ever been into the fort and lived to tell of it.

  The compound was rectangular, the long sides about a hundred and twenty paces, and the short about eighty. There was a wall of spiked logs sur­rounding the parade ground, around eighteen feet high. Two barrackslike blocks ran down one side, and Ryan could also see some stables. A glowing fire and the ringing of iron on iron showed him the black­smith's forge, and a single-floored adobe-walled building, with another flag flying over it, was prob­ably the headquarters of the fortified ville.

  There was no time to take in a
nything else. Ryan was grabbed painfully by the upper arms and hustled across the square. He had a moment to see that the threatening yellow sky had cleared, and the sun was shining from a bowl of unspoiled blue.

  Just as he entered the main building, Ryan heard the roar of an engine and glimpsed a dune wag with huge tires driving out past the forge.

  It was the first sign of anything approaching mod­ern life that he'd seen for days.

  The distant rumbling of a powerful generator was almost drowned by the humming of an air-conditioning plant just inside the main doorway. The cool air struck Ryan like the touch of a whip, refresh­ing after the sullen heat outside.

  Pushed and jostled, all he could do was snatch an impression of the building: offices and living quar­ters, with guns on walls; barred doors; and two sets of guards to pass. He was shoved through a double sec door and found himself inside a jail—but a jail that obviously doubled as a torture chamber. A smolder­ing fire in a metal brazier had several long imple­ments resting in the coals, long rods, some with curved or hooked ends, and handles wrapped in rags to pro­tect the user from the heat. There were several whips in a rack, and a long shelf held all manner of knives and scalpels, pincers and hammers, tools for the giv­ing of pain, in so many differing ways. It was like the workshop of some demented and sadistic psychotic.

  Another pair of guards had appeared, both hold­ing old cap-and-ball Navy Colts. But Ryan's expert eye spotted that they weren't the decrepit antiques they should have been. These were more modern replicas, handled by men who looked like they knew their trade.

  "General says against the wall, there. Cut his hands. We'll cover him."

  One of the sec men pushed Ryan against the adobe wall, near a set of iron rings, placed at differing heights. "Keep still."

  "You got a lot of guts," Ryan said. "Four of you. Don't take any chances, will you?"

  The looping right hit him under the ribs, knocking every atom of breath from his body. He doubled over, gagging, dropping to his knees.