‘What is it?’ I said, suspicious. ‘I’m not going to promise to play it safe. If I take this mission I have to follow where the trail leads me.’
‘I know that, Kannon. I know you … But you have to promise me that you will not be late for your due time of return.’
The NTA’s fancy time technology had some drastic limitations. There was no way to communicate with or even monitor a time traveller once they went through the portal. The only way to keep track of them was through their due time of return. If they were late, a special rescue team was automatically sent through the portal after them.
‘Don’t worry, Honeycutt, I’ll be okay.’
‘You’d better be on time, Kannon,’ he warned me. ‘You’d better not be late home. Because if you’re even one second over your due time of return then I’m going to come through the portal after you.’
I gaped. ‘But you can’t, Daniel! They won’t let you!’
He was deadly serious.
‘No, Daniel! If you managed to force your way through the portal not only would that be the end of your career, but as soon as we got back the NTA would arrest you and put you in the deepest, darkest gaol they could find!’
Lightning lit his features; his jade-green eyes gleamed. ‘Then don’t be late.’
PART TWO
NEW MEXICO,
1867
11
THE BOUNTY HUNTER
The wave that’d swept through the time portal peaked and departed, leaving me standing on top of a dusty hill. The heat was stifling. I squinted under the brim of my hat. After rainy San Francisco, the New Mexican sun was brutal, piercing me like an arrow from a clear blue sky. I sought protection in a grove of pine-cone-covered pinyon trees; they gave me cover while I oriented myself.
It was noon at the start of summer in 1867 and I was standing on a hilltop in the long desert valley that held Santa Fe.
Around me the snow-capped tops of three sets of mountains shimmered blue in the heat. The Jemez were to the west, the Sandias to the south and the mighty Sangre de Cristos — the Blood of Christ — to the northeast. The Sangre de Cristos, with peaks over twelve thousand feet high, stretched all the way up to Colorado. Santa Fe itself was over seven thousand feet above sea level and the elevation could cause altitude sickness. But I was fit and knew exactly how to ameliorate the symptoms.
Just below me, to the south, lay the city of Santa Fe, a vestige of Imperial Spain’s North American empire …
It was a cluster of mainly adobe houses with taller, more stately buildings lining the central plaza, which held the Palace of the Governors — the administrative heart of New Mexico. On the other side of town flowed the Santa Fe River. It was the water supply for the population of seven thousand-odd people, three quarters of them of Hispanic ancestry. From here, it looked like all of them were in the central plaza and that someone’d stuck a big stick in and stirred ’em up like a hornet’s nest.
The massacre at Dry Gulch had roused their worst fears.
I scanned the southeast. A few hours away in that direction a troop of US cavalry was reluctantly trudging back towards the packed town square. They were not the bearers of glad tidings. Unfortunately for the cavalry, their already incensed reception committee was going to have a long wait in the hot sun. Every now and again an angry roar surged up to me. Santa Fe was not happy with the bad news that a forward army scout had brought them — the search for the Dry Gulch killers had not been a success.
According to the records I could scrape up, Hector Q. Kershaw was somewhere down in that hornet’s nest. All I could find out was that he’d arrived in Santa Fe two weeks ago, managed to survive the Dry Gulch massacre two days later and was due to catch the stagecoach out of town next week. Which meant his diary, if indeed it did exist, was somewhere down there too. I had to find out what happened to it.
Which meant I had to find Hector.
Spanish voices touched my ears. The translator hidden there kicked in.
‘Hail Maria, full of grace …’
Just twenty feet away, a layer of black-clad bodies covered the very peak of the hill like a cloth skin. About fifty Hispanic women lay prostrate before a tall, wooden cross. The women hadn’t seen me yet; the deep shade kept my secret.
In this time New Mexico had been US territory for only the past nineteen years; one of their trophies, together with California, of the 1848 Mexican – American War. For the previous three centuries it’d been proclaimed Spanish and then, after Independence, Mexican land. But the Spanish had wrenched the territory away from the various Native American nations who’d made this their home first.
The very topsoil of this land was drenched with the blood and the tears of centuries of territorial warfare …
The women’s voices carried on the desert wind. ‘Holy friars, we beseech you … Preserve us from our enemies, we are weak and cannot withstand the sacrifice you made.’
New Mexico, yet again, was at the start of another armed conflict.
The women were praying for heavenly intercession from their holy dead. They were praying before the Cross of the Martyrs after all.
Santa Fe’s full name was La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís — the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of Saint Francis of Assisi. It was founded in 1608 as yet another bastion of the ever-expanding empire that Spain had sliced for itself out of the fabric of North and South America. Colonisation by Spain had brought this land the cold steel of the conquistadors’ swords and the equally sharp-edged zeal of their religious orders.
But the Native American nations of the southwest had not gone quietly. They took their vengeance against Spain. In 1680, after years of crushing oppression, they overran Santa Fe and held it for twelve years. The hilltop cross that the women bowed before was a memorial to twenty-one Catholic martyrs — all Franciscan missionaries — who died in the revolt.
These black-clad women knew very well that the city of Santa Fe had been taken back by the native people before. So today, in the baking noonday sun, they prayed with the desperation and fervour of mothers who risked their children and husbands to the unswerving hand of fate.
I moved from the shadows, my saddlebag over my shoulder.
The youngest present, a girl of perhaps twelve, gasped, ‘Mother of God.’
Ever vigilant, the others jerked their heads up to watch me with mouths agape. Two crossed themselves, unable to freeze completely. They stumbled to their feet and out of my path. It was time for me to descend. I had an appointment to keep.
The young girl whispered, ‘Who is he, Mama? Is he the answer to our prayers?’
My tall, muscular frame was also clad in the blackest of black … their mirror image in colour at least, but their opposite in all other possible ways.
I wore a leather vest over a shirt and pants, and a pair of crossed bandoliers, full of gleaming bullets, camouflaged my carefully flattened chest. A pair of black-handled pistols, made this very year here in Santa Fe, hung ready at my side.
‘Be quiet, girl!’ the hissed reply came back. ‘Don’t move an inch.’
What scared them was my dyed, fire-red hair. It hung down my back in two tightly dressed braids, Viking-style, and was partially covered by a black satin top hat. This was the mark of John Eriksen, a baby-faced killer. One of the most feared bounty hunters in the Wild West. He always wore black, the colour of mourning …
And no one was safe when he was around.
12
OLD SANTA FE
The old adobe city was ringed by a wall of dust, kicked up by panicked refugees flocking in.
I descended the hill to the Paseo de Peralta, the road that virtually encircled Santa Fe. It teemed with heavily laden wagons and carriages — mainly Hispanics hauling their families and their prized possessions into town for safety. The piled-high bags of food and numbers of livestock attached to the rear of their wagons indicated that they estimated their stay would be a long one.
I stood half behind a
spindly pine, waiting for a break in the traffic and glad to be unnoticed in the pandemonium. No one looked left or right. Everyone was fixed on getting to their destination — some adobe bunker, deep in the shadow of Fort Marcy. The fort slumped on a hill to the north, overlooking the scared city like an elderly soldier counting his days to retirement. It’d been built by the US army when they first took over, but the neglected fortifications didn’t inspire me with any confidence.
There was a break in the long line of wagons, and I was about to cross over the road and into the city proper, when the sound of gunfire and bloodcurdling yells brought everyone to a jittery halt.
I touched the pistol hanging at my side, ready.
All around me men and women were reaching for their rifles with one hand and their children with the other.
We all searched the road to the north.
An overcrowded buggy pulled by a gelding lathered in sweat and whipped into a frenzied gallop by his master streaked past the procession of families. The fierce-faced driver wrenched his exhausted horse into a savage right turn off the main road and into a little side street. He almost overturned them.
Around me, people crossed themselves.
The driver and his two limp passengers were Anglos; they were covered in a blackened coating of dirt and dried blood.
Unable to withstand the sight of so much blood, everyone dropped their reins to follow.
I followed too.
The buggy came to a dust-raising stop outside an adobe building marked ‘Pelletier’s Special Services’. There was no indication what those services actually were or just how special, but the blood-covered driver hurled himself through the shop door, bellowing for attention.
I slid into the shade of the porch opposite. It was empty and high enough to give me a clear view over the anxious crowd. Everyone had gathered around the buggy, and the two wounded men it carried, in tight formation.
‘What ’appened, signor?’ demanded a shaggy Mexican old-timer in heavily accented English. He’d shouted the question into the ear of the wounded man on his side of the buggy.
The casualty was a craggy-faced Anglo on the wrong side of forty. The man’s blue eyes were open, staring up into the noonday sun. He didn’t answer.
Impatient, the old-timer grabbed the buggy passenger’s limp shoulder and shook … then gaped at what the motion revealed. Three broken arrows stuck out of the man’s blood-soaked back. His head lolled on his shoulders, then flopped, with a resounding crack, onto the side of the buggy. The old-timer jumped back in horror.
‘Injuns,’ drawled a young vaquero — a Hispanic cowboy with a big black droopy moustache — from the other side of the buggy. His accent was a twangy mix of Texan and Mexican.
The vaquero spat, sending a black stream of tobacco juice into the dust, then tapped the other casualty lying in the buggy. He was a white-faced boy in his early teens. The boy’s eyes were closed and his pain-filled face was covered in a greasy sweat. The arms of his shirt were blue but his torso was soaked browny-black with dried blood.
‘Who was it, son?’ asked the vaquero. ‘Where did they get ya?’
The teenager opened his blue eyes, the same hue as the corpse next to him, and gazed at the Hispanic cowboy through a haze of suffering. He was pale with shock and, from the pool of blood that’d congealed on the seat of the buggy next to him, very close to death.
‘Water … Can someone give me some water?’ pleaded the boy through cracked lips.
A short Hispanic woman of wide girth pushed the vaquero aside to offer the dying Anglo boy a sip from her canteen. She tenderly stroked his sweaty forehead, whispering a prayer as she held the canteen to his lips.
The boy took a long thirsty gulp. Some missed his mouth to wash rivulets of dust from his face and drip down his chin … but of what got in, more than half of it gurgled back out of a hole in the shirt over his stomach.
The woman looked down, blanched and grabbed the canteen away from his parched lips.
The boy refocused on the vaquero. ‘It was Apache …’
The crowd gasped. The woman crossed herself.
‘They caught us up on the Rio Grande,’ said the boy. ‘Just above where the Rio Hama flows into it. We was down at the river, watering our herd, when the Apache came from behind …’
‘Apache …’ murmured the woman with a horrified expression.
The Native American nations that occupied New Mexico were all desert-hardened warriors who survived this harsh land through clever adaptation and sheer bloody-minded determination.
The survival strategies of the Navaho, the Zuni and the Puebloan peoples were to become semi-nomadic graziers or put down roots in pueblo towns. These tactics enabled them to flourish in a harsh environment but also made it easier for their enemies to find them. Which made them easier targets for the US cavalry — the steely hand of discipline in this territory — to strike at will.
The Apache, however, were mobility specialists, tacticians on horseback. They were lethally efficient hunters who operated in small bands that swept through the territory like the wind. They rode like they were born with hooves and their fierce guerrilla strategies would keep the US army running in circles. Apache leaders would become the stuff of legends … Mangas Coloradas, Cochise and their last great war chief, Geronimo, who successfully outwitted the US army — as well as the Mexican one — for decades.
‘The Apache … I knew it,’ declared the shaggy Mexican old-timer, ‘I knew they’d strike back!’ He cursed long and hard enough to make the compassionate Hispanic woman put her hands over her ears. ‘Those fools … what have they brought down on our heads?’
The young vaquero swelled up like a bantam rooster about to crow. ‘Well, old man, what did you expect us to do? These red dogs slaughtered our governor and his wife and little babies. We had to teach them a lesson! If we sit around waiting for the Americano cavalry to find that devil, Coyote Jack, then the tribes will think we are weak cowards. That we have no honour left to defend.’ He shook his finger in the old man’s leathered face. ‘And then they’ll hunt us like the wolf hunts sheep.’
‘So this is your doing?’ barked back the old-timer. ‘Were you one of those fools who went out and shot every last redskin they could find?’ He jerked his shaggy head down at the boy. ‘Because of you, now they’re all out for revenge!’
The front door of Pelletier’s Special Services burst open. A tall, thin man in a long black coat raced out. The bloodstained driver of the buggy was on his heels, closely followed by an assistant wearing a long filthy apron around his waist and bearing what looked like a doctor’s bag.
The crowd parted and the tall, thin man made his way through. He was completely bald and his face was so emaciated it hurt to look at it. That, together with his too thin body, meant he resembled a walking cadaver.
He examined the middle-aged man, collapsed against the side of the buggy. He looked back at the buggy driver and snapped, ‘Forget this one, it is too late,’ as though accusing the driver of wasting his precious time. His English was cultured and, from the faint roll of his Rs, still held the trace of a French accent.
‘Pa …’ whispered the buggy driver, too exhausted to react. He collapsed down onto the dirt, his trembling legs no longer able to hold him upright.
The tall, thin man slipped around the buggy to the teenage boy. He sniffed once, curled his narrow, bloodless lips with disdain, and proceeded to prod the boy’s blood-clotted shirtfront with one long claw-like finger. The boy moaned in agony, but his tormentor gave absolutely no regard to the pain he was causing.
‘Be gentle with the boy, signor,’ implored the little Hispanic woman.
He ignored her.
‘What about my brother, Monsewer Pelletier?’ urged the buggy driver, begging for a hopeful answer. ‘Did I get him here in time?’
Pelletier didn’t reply, merely signalled to his assistant for his medical bag. He opened it and took out a huge pair of shears, which he used to cut the
boy’s shirt away from his stomach.
The compassionate little woman hissed at the sight and backed away, holding her nose.
A big black arrowhead protruded through a gory mess of gaping flesh, dried blood clots and grey-green tubes. The wound stank of faecal matter — the boy’s perforated intestines were exposed.
I shivered.
Bow and arrows were lethal and had been the weapon of choice for millennia with very good reason. Armies had used them to subdue nations and they could even be modified to pierce the metal armour of knights. In North America, the flint and chert arrowheads were powerful enough to drop buffalo — the largest beast on this continent — where they stood.
An arrow from the bow of an expert could kill you as fast and as surely as anything on the planet.
The Apache were experts.
That razor-sharp arrowhead, as well as boring a tunnel through the boy’s body, would’ve carried bacteria-soaked clothing with it. That, together with severing his intestines, meant the boy now had a rotting time bomb exploding from his wound.
The Hispanic woman fought back her tears to clasp the boy’s dazed head to her massive bosom. She recited a prayer for his soul.
‘Get the stretchers,’ ordered Pelletier, impatient to be inside. His bald head was now dripping with sweat from the hot sun.
His apron-clad assistant shook his head. ‘Can’t, sir. The boys took them out this morning to collect those other bodies from the …’ He paused, realising the crowd was drinking in every detail.
Pelletier snapped, ‘Then find something to cart them into the shop.’ He looked down at the boy, his gory wound still exposed. ‘They both already stink; we have to get them out of the heat before the maggots start.’
The dying boy gazed up at Pelletier in horror.
His assistant raced inside.
‘What about my brother?’ insisted the buggy driver, still collapsed in the dirt, a fresh red stain spreading across his left shoulder. He was refusing to accept what we all knew: that if he was lucky his brother would die quickly rather than linger. There was no help for his wound in this time and place.
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