Mad Amos listened a while, then muttered right back at him.
The would-be sorcerer’s eyes went wide. “How comes a White Devil to know the secret words of the Shao?”
“That’s a long, nasty story. Course, I don’t know all of ’em, but I know enough to know you don’t know what the hell you’re invoking about. I suspect that’s what got you into trouble the last time. I know enough to know this is all a show to impress your hardworking kinfolk out there. You ain’t no Mandarin, Wu-Ling, just as you ain’t no Shao sorcerer. You’re nothing but a clever amateur, a dabbler in darkness, and I think you got yourself in over your head with this dragon business.”
“So that is what inflicts you upon me. That damnable beast!” He threw his cap to the floor. “May its toenails ingrow a thousand times! I knew it would bring me problems from the moment the incantation expanded beyond my ability to control the signs.” He sat heavily on a cushion, no longer bold and commanding, now just a distraught young would-be lawyer whose pact with the forces of darkness had been overturned by a higher court.
Watching him thus, Mad Amos was able to conjure up a little sympathy for him, no small feat of magic in itself. “How’d you come to have to call him up, anyways?”
“I needed something with which to cow my ignorant kinsmen. There had been mutterings…a few had begun to question my right to claim their support, saying that I was not a true sorcerer and could not threaten them as I claimed or work magic back in the homeland for their relatives and friends. I required something impressive to forestall such uncertainties once and for all.”
“I see. How’d the railroad feel about your brothers supporting you in luxury while they worked their tails off?”
“The White Devil bosses care nothing for civilized behavior so long as the work is accomplished on time.”
“So you finally had to produce, magically speaking, or risk going to work with your own delicate fake-Mandarin hands. That about right?”
“It is as you say.” Wu-Ling turned and assumed a prideful air. “And I did produce. A dragon of whole cloth, of ancient mien and fierce disposition, did I cause to materialize within the camp one night. Since then there have been no further mutterings among my kinsmen, and my support has multiplied manyfold.”
Mad Amos nodded and stroked his luxuriant beard. “Yup, you got a nice little racket going here. Course, there might be some trouble if I were to stroll outside and announce that you’ve got no more control over this dragon than I do over a thunderbird’s eye. I think your toiling kinsfolk would be a touch unhappy.”
The young man’s boast quickly turned to desperate pleading. “Please, you must not tell them that, White Devil! Please…they would linger over my killing for weeks if they once learned that I have no power over them.” His gaze sank. “I confess all this to You Who Know the Words. I have no control over this dragon. I tried to make it vanish once its purpose had been accomplished. It laughed at me and flew off toward the high mountains. I have tried to call it back, to no avail. Now it does as it pleases, threatening your own people as well. I was an overanxious fool, determined to overawe my people. I should have settled for a less dramatic materialization.”
Mad Amos nodded sagely. “Now you’re learning, inheritor of troubles. It’s always best to make sure you’ve put all the parts back into a disassembled gun before you go firin’ it. I kinda feel sorry for you. The main thing is, the damage this dragon’s already done wasn’t by your direction.”
“Oh, no, Honored Devil, no! As I confess before you, I have no control over it whatsoever. It does as it desires.”
“Okay, then, I’ll strike you a bargain. You quit dealing off the bottom of the deck with your brothers out there. Pick up a hammer and go to work alongside them. I promise it won’t kill you, and you’ll gain merit in their eyes by working alongside ’em when you supposedly don’t have to. Tell ’em it’s time for you to put aside wizardly things and exercise your body for a change. You do that and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
The young man rose to his feet, hardly daring to hope. “You would do this for me? My ancestors will bless you a hundred times.”
“They’d damn well better. I’ll need all the help I can gather if I’m going to do anything about this dragon you cooked up, Wu-Ling.”
“But you cannot! It will surely slay you!”
“Sorry. I’m bound to try. Can’t just let it wander about, ravaging the countryside. Besides which, this country of mine is a young one. It ain’t quite ready to cope with dragons yet. Havin’ enough trouble recoverin’ from the war and the devils it spawned. Now, this ain’t one of those types that likes to carry off women, is it?”
“It would be in keeping with its lineage if it chose to abduct and consume a virgin or two, l am afraid.”
Mad Amos grunted. “Well, even so, that ain’t a worry. There ain’t a virgin between here and Kansas City. That means it’s just this gold affinity we got to worry about. That’s a new one on me, Wu-Ling. What’s it want with this gold it keeps stealin’?”
“I thought one so wise as thyself would surely know, Honored Devil. Gold is a necessary ingredient in the dragon’s diet.”
“It eats the stuff? Well, I’ll be dogged. And all this time I thought it was doin’ something normal with it, like buying up spare souls or accumulatin’ a memorable hoard of riches or some such nonsense. Gulps it right down, you say?”
“Truly,” Wu-Ling admitted.
“Huh! World’s full of wonders. Well, gives me something to think on, anyways.” He gazed sternly down at Wu-Ling. The would-be sorcerer paid close attention. A baleful look from Mad Amos Malone was something not to be ignored. “Now, you mind what I told you and quit leeching off your kinsfolk out there. They’re good people, and they deserve your help, not your imaginary afflictions. It’s tough enough gettin’ by in a foreign land. I know; I’ve had to try it myself. I’ve ways of knowin’ when someone gives me his word and then backs off, and I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. You follow me, son of importunate parents?”
“I follow you, Honored Devil.”
Wu-Ling allowed himself a sigh of relief when the giant finally departed. He wondered by what method the dragon would slay him.
* * *
—
Mad Amos worked his way up into the heights of the Medicine Bows despite the signs that winter was arriving early that year. It would be bad if he were caught out on the slopes by a blizzard, but he’d weathered bad storms before and could do so again if compelled to.
Near a fork of the Laramie River he paused and made camp, choosing an open meadow across which the river ran free and fast. To the west the crests of the mountains already slept beneath the first heavy blanket of snow.
“Well, Worthless, I guess this is as good a spot as any. Might as well get on with it. Oughta be an interesting business, unless I’ve figured it all wrong. In that case, you hie yourself off somewhere and have a good time. These mountains are full of herds. Find yourself some fine mares and settle down. Bet you wouldn’t be all that sad to see me go, would you?”
The horse let out a noncommittal whinny, squinted at him out of his bad eye, and wandered off in search of a nice mud wallow to roll in.
Mad Amos hunted until he found a willow tree of just the right age. He cut off a green branch, shaped it, and trimmed off the leaves and sproutings. Then he sharpened the tip with his bowie, fired it in charcoal, and used the white-hot, smoking point to etch some strange symbols in the earth around his kit. Some of the symbols were Chinese ideographs, some were Tibetan, and a few were not drawn from the lexicon of man.
Next he rummaged around in his battered old saddlebags, which some folk whispered held things it were best not to talk about. Out came an owl’s head, a bottle of blue goo, several preserved dead scorpions, three eagle feathers bound together with Zuni fetishes, and similar exotica. He
reached in a little farther and withdrew a shiny metal bar. It was five pounds of enriched tumbaga, a gold alloy made by the Quimbaya Indians of the southern continent, composed of roughly sixty-five percent gold, twenty percent copper, and the rest silver. This he set carefully down in the center of the inscribed symbols.
Lastly he pulled the rifle from its fringed and painted holster. The holster had been fashioned by one of Sacajawea’s daughters. Good gal, that Sacajawea, he mused. Someday when they were both ruminating in the Happy Hunting Ground, he hoped to meet her again.
The rifle had an eight-sided barrel, a black walnut stock, and a breech large enough for a frightened cottontail to hide inside. It was a Sharps buffalo rifle, fifty-caliber, with a sliding leaf sight adjustable to eleven hundred yards on the back. It fired a two-and-a-half-inch-long cartridge loaded with a hundred grains of black powder and could drop a full-grown bull buffalo in its tracks at six hundred yards. The bandoliers draped across Mad Amos’s chest held oversized three-and-a-quarter-inch shells packed with 170 grains of black powder.
The Sharps was a single-shot. But then, if you could fire it proper without busting your shoulder, you only needed a single shot. To Mad Amos’s way of thinking, such built-in caution just naturally led to a man improving his marksmanship.
He loaded it with more care than usual this time, paying special attention to the cartridge itself, which he carefully chose from the assortment arrayed on his chest.
Then he settled down to wait.
The moon was setting and the sky had been temporarily swept clean of most clouds when he heard the wings coming toward him out of the west, out of the mountaintops. Soon he was able to see the source of the faint whistling, a streamlined shape dancing down fast out of the heavens, its long tail switching briskly from side to side as it sniffed out the location of the gold.
It landed between the river and the camp and strode toward the lonely man on feet clad in scales of crimson. Its neck was bright blue, its body mostly yellow and gold, its wings and face striped like the contents of a big jar stuffed with assorted candies. Moonlight marched across scimitarlike teeth, and its heritage burned back of its great eyes. “Whoa up there!” Mad Amos called out sharply in the dragon tongue, which is like no other (and which is hard to speak because it hurts the back of the throat).
The dragon halted, eyes blazing down at the human, who had one foot resting possessively on the golden bar. Its tail twitched, flattening the meadow grass and foxgloves, and the tendrils bordering its skull and jaws twisted like snakes with a peculiar life of their own. Its belly ached for the cool touch of yellow metal; its blood burned for the precious golden substance that purified and helped keep it alive.
“Oho!” it replied in its rasping voice. “A human who talks the mother tongue. Admirable is your learning, man, but it will not save you your gold. Give it here to me.” It leaned forward hungrily, the smell of brimstone seeping from its garishly hued lips and parted mouth.
“I think not, Brightbodyblackheart. It ain’t that I resent you the gold. Everybody’s got to eat. But you scared the wits out of some good people hereabouts and killed a couple of others. And I think you’re liable to kill some more afore you’re sated, if your appetite’s as big as your belly and your desire as sharp as your teeth. I’m not fool enough to think you’ll be satisfied just with this here chunk.” He nudged the bar with his foot, causing the hungry dragon to salivate smoke.
“You are right, man. My hunger is as deep as the abyssal ocean where I may not go, as vast as the sky which I make my own, and as substantial as my anger when I am denied. Give me your gold! Give it over to me now and I will spare you for your learning, for though gluttonous, I am not wasteful. Refuse me and I will eat you, too, for a dragon cannot live by gold alone.”
Casually, Mad Amos shifted the rifle lying across his knees. “Now, this here’s a Sharps rifle, Deathwing. I’m sure you ain’t too familiar with it. There ain’t the like of it where you come from, and there never will be, so I’ll explain it to you. There ain’t no more powerful rifle in this world or the other. I’m going to give you one chance to get back to where you come from, hungry but intact.” He smiled thinly, humorlessly. “See, I ain’t wasteful, neither. You git your scaly hide out of this part of the real world right now or by Nebuchadnezzar’s nightshade, I’m oath-bound to put a bullet in you.”
The dragon roared with amusement. Its horrible laughter cascaded off the walls of the canyon through which the Laramie runs. It trickled down the slopes and echoed through caves where hibernating animals stirred uneasily in their long sleep.
“A last gesture, last words! I claim forfeit, man, for you are not amusing! Gold and life must you surrender to me now, for I have not the patience to play with you longer. My belly throbs in expectation, and in my heart there is no shred of sympathy or understanding for you. I will take your gold now, man, and your life in a moment.” A great clawed foot reached out to scratch contemptuously at the symbols so patiently etched in the soil. “Think you that these will stop me? You do not come near knowing the right ways or words, or the words you would have uttered by now.” It took another step forward. Fire began to flame around its jaws. “Your puny steel and powder cannot harm me, worm-that-walks-upright. Fire if you wish. The insect chirps loudest just before it is squashed!”
“Remember, now, you asked for this.” Quickly, Mad Amos raised the long octagonal barrel and squeezed the trigger.
There was a crash, then a longer, reverberating roar, the thunderous double boom that only a Sharps can produce. It almost matched the dragon’s laughter.
The shot struck Brightbodyblackheart square in the chest. The monster looked down at the already healing wound, sneered, and took another step forward. Its jaws parted farther as it prepared to snap up gold and man in a single bite.
It stopped, confused. Something was happening inside it. Its eyes began to roll. Then it let out an earthshaking roar so violent that the wind of it knocked Mad Amos back off his feet. Fortunately, there was no fire in that massive exhalation.
The mountain man spit out dirt and bark and looked upward. The dragon was in the air, spinning, twisting, convulsing spasmodically, thoroughly out of control, screaming like a third-rate soprano attempting Wagner as it whirled toward the distant moon.
Mad Amos slowly picked himself off the ground, dusted off the wolf’s head that served him for a hat, and watched the sky until the last scream and final bellow faded from hearing, until the tiny dot fluttering against the stars had winked out of sight and out of existence.
From his wallow near the riverbank, Worthless glanced up, squinted, and neighed.
Mad Amos squatted and gathered up the tumbaga bar. He paid no attention to the coterie of symbols he’d so laboriously scratched into the earth. They’d been put there to draw the dragon’s attention, which they’d done most effectively. Oh, he’d seen Brightbodyblackheart checking them out before landing! The dragon might bellow intimidatingly, but like all its kind, it was cautious. It had taken the bait only when it was certain Mad Amos owned no magic effective against it. Mere mortal weapons like guns and bullets, of course, it had had no reason to fear.
Malone used his tongue to pop the second bullet, the one he hadn’t had to use, out of his cheek and carefully took the huge cartridge apart. Out of the head drifted a pile of dust. He held it in his palm and then, careful not to inhale any of it, blew it away with one puff. The dust duplicated the contents of the bullet that had penetrated Brightbodyblackheart: mescaline concentrate, peyote of a certain rare type, distillate of the tears of a peculiar mushroom, coca leaves from South America, yopo—a cornucopia of powerful hallucinogens that an old Navajo had once concocted before Mad Amos’s attentive gaze during a youthful sojourn in Canyon de Chelly many years before.
It was not quite magic, but then, it was not quite real, either. The dragon had been right: Mad Amos had not had the wo
rds to kill it, had not had the symbols. And it wasn’t dead. But it no longer lived in the real world of men, either. In a month, when the aftereffects of the potent mixture had finally worn off and Brightbodyblackheart could think clearly once more, it might wish it were dead. Of one thing Mad Amos was reasonably certain: the dragon might hunger for gold, but it was not likely to come a-hunting it anywhere in the vicinity of Colorado.
Carefully he repacked that seemingly modest pair of saddlebags and prepared to break camp, casting an experienced eye toward the sky. It was starting to cloud over again. Soon it would snow, and when it started it again, it wouldn’t stop until April.
But not for two or three days yet, surely. He still bad time to get out of the high mountains if he didn’t waste it lollygaggin’ and moonin’ over narrow escapes.
He put his hands on his hips and shouted toward the river. “C’mon, Worthless, you lazy representative of an equine disaster! Git your tail out of that mud! North of here’s that crazy steamin’ land ol’ Jim Bridger once told me about. I reckon it’s time we had a gander at it…and what’s under it.”
Reluctant but obedient, the piebald subject of these unfounded imprecations struggled to its feet and threw its master a nasty squint. Mad Amos eyed his four-legged companion with affection.
“Have t’ do somethin’ about that patch on his forehead,” he mused. “That damn horn’s startin’ t’ grow through again….”
Ferrohippus
I love Latin. I never studied the language, but I love the sound of it, the rhythms. Every time I encounter Latin, usually as a quote from some famous long-dead native speaker, my mind immediately flashes to the glory that was Rome. I see massive temples, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, and the Appian Way. We actually lived on a street called Appian Way. Not the Roman one. Ours ran right by the famous Santa Monica Pier in southern California. The only thing even remotely Roman about it was a nearby pizza place.
Mad Amos Malone Page 3
