“I note that Mercer alludes to our private arrangements but dodges the matter.”
“Censorship, Mister Skye. He could not very well discourse in a public newspaper on the subject without incurring the wrath of the crown’s censors. It might even get him in trouble with the church, or the sedition laws, or the blasphemy rules.”
“Yes, you have it, Colonel.”
“What the hell is this stuff?” Victoria demanded.
Skye turned to her. “Mercer is aching to tell his readers in London that he thinks I … ah … take my pleasure of both of you, but he can’t quite manage to say it.”
Mary sat straight in her chair. “Ah, Skye! I wish you would!”
She began to howl happily. Skye was amazed. He thought such a sentiment might rise from Victoria but in Mary it was an astonishment.
Skye suddenly felt the need to steer the conversation elsewhere. That was all too intimate for Colonel Bullock’s ears, no matter that the post sutler was an old friend.
“Ah, I shall see about the rest, here,” Skye said, rattling papers to restore decorum. “Let me see. There’s a piece or two about the prairie fire. It seems he and his teamsters might have survived it without loss if the renegade Skye had not insisted on staying put rather than outrunning the flames.”
Victoria looked grim.
“Find the story of the bones,” Mary said.
Skye opened several more, and finally found one that might be about bones.
“A Savage Shrine on the Missouri River” was its heading. Skye delved into it, and soon found absorbing material:
“‘When the wretch Skye, who was always angling for a small tip with which to buy whiskey, suggested he could take my party to a place on the Missouri River that was sacred to the savages in the area and a great mystery, I immediately was all ears. This was a place of fossil bones buried in sandstone, and known but to a few tribesmen, it having been hidden for aeons from others. He would probably demand a shilling for it, but I succumbed, always on the search for new discoveries.
“‘What sort of religion?” I asked, fearful that we would be invading someone’s Westminster Abbey.
“‘Why, lord love a duck, matey, it’s just a heap of bloomin’ bones and they have invented mighty stories to explain them,” says this rude philosopher of the wilds.
“‘With that we proceeded across uncharted country, the oaf getting us lost time after time. I had to straighten him out by employing a compass. But it due course we did strike that mighty trench, after crossing a vast country never before seen by Europeans. Once we hit the river valley, he sobered up enough to know where to go, and in due course we ended in a sinister little flat, shadowed from the world by huge bluffs, and there, under a protective ledge shielding the bones, were the remains of an ancient beast, protruding slightly from the stone.
“‘I measured these extraordinary remains, a task which alarmed the older of Skye’s squaws, who thought I was somehow violating the spirit whose bones these were. With some sharp questioning, I ascertained that her people believed the bones were those of a monster bird, and out of the beak of this bird her people had come to populate the world. So she considered the bones to be those of her grandfather. Other tribes, it seemed, had similar explanations.
“‘Indeed, these bones were unusual. The skull measured more than six feet in length from snout to the back of the tiny cranial sheath. There were monster femurs and tibia, and the remains of a long tail. One three-toed foot was visible. I took detailed measurements, employing a buffalo hide for a ledger because my journals were destroyed by fire. In due course, having studied the bones, I discerned that they were of a lizard nature. Not a new species, but a sport, a singular anomaly of nature, in which a creature becomes something other than what it was intended by God to be. And so this ordinary lizard simply grew to truly gargantuan proportion and it was easy to see how the superstitious savages could turn the bones into the remains of their gods.
“‘Now about this time, a party of Sarsi, a small band living in crown possessions to the north, came to visit the bones, and this brought peril to me, as they considered my scientific observations to violate some savage taboo of their own. If that lout of a translator, Skye, had been more accurate I might have been spared the ordeal to come, but in fact he was in his cups and botched the whole business and I soon found myself a captive …’”
“I have heard enough,” Victoria said.
Skye had his fill too, and folded up the papers. “I’ll read these some other day. Perhaps you would keep them for me, Colonel.”
“May I read them?”
“Just don’t believe them.”
“How could I possibly believe them? Were you paid?”
“Not a cent.”
“Were you tagging along looking for a handout?”
Skye stood. “They all have their stories, don’t they? We invent stories to explain everything. Even the way we cheat others.”
“If I find clients for you to guide, the first thing I’ll do is make sure you’ll be paid.”
“That would be helpful.”
Skye knew the colonel would devour the British papers and during the next days would brim with questions, and maybe some sly humor too. That was all right. Mercer was writing more about himself and his reputation as a great explorer than about the world he had come to explore, and Bullock would understand that.
Skye wondered whether this bundle of half-truths and untruths would hurt him, and decided they would. Truth sometimes hurts, but all lies eventually hurt someone or something. There were people in England who might still remember him, and what would they think now? Mercer had not only cheated him, but had wounded him. But it was not something to brood upon. Mercer was far away.
“I shall entertain myself with these,” Bullock said. “Are these to be kept secret?”
“No. They’re published.”
Bullock considered a moment. “The temptation is to make a fool of Mercer. All I have to do is show these pieces to a few people. But when I reflect on it, Mister Skye, I think I will say nothing. For your sake, and for the sake of your ladies.”
“You are a friend, Colonel.”
“I mean to be, sah. You are a man of reputation, and I mean to honor it.”
forty-nine
They erected their lodge in a quiet place up the river a bit from the post, out of sight of the fort and its blueshirts and its gossip. He was at peace. That night, in the sweet dark, he and his wives lay on their backs looking at the stars parading across the smoke hole.
“Mister Skye,” said Mary, “I have something to tell you.”
“Yes, Mary?”
“We have made a child.”
“Made a child? You’ll bear a child?” he asked, full of wonder.
“Our child,” she said. “Yours and mine. And Victoria’s too.”
“You lucky bastard,” said Victoria.
Skye thought that was as good a verdict as any.
BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
SKYE’S WEST
Sun River
Bannack
The Far Tribes
Yellowstone
Bitterroot
Sundance
Wind River
Santa Fe
Rendezvous
Dark Passage
Going Home
Downriver
The Deliverance
The Fire Arrow
The Canyon of Bones
Virgin River*
Aftershocks
Badlands
The Buffalo Commons
Cashbox
Eclipse
The Fields of Eden
Fool’s Coach
Goldfield
Masterson
Montana Hitch
An Obituary for Major Reno
Second Lives
Sierra
Sun Mountain: A Comstock Novel
Where the River Runs
SAM FLINT
Flint’s Gift
/> Flint’s Truth
Flint’s Honor
*Forthcoming
Praise for Richard S. Wheeler
“A much-honored Western writer from Livingston, Montana … [Wheeler] creates another fascinating novel rooted in history.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer on The Exile
“He is among the top living writers of Western historical novels—if not the best.”
—Tulsa World on Masterson
“Wheeler’s Westerns just keep getting better and better … . Wheeler is a master of character and plot, and this novel showcases his talents at their peak.”
—Publishers Weekly on Downriver
“Wheeler is a master storyteller whose many tales of the Westward Movement … weave fact, fiction, and folklore into pure entertainment.”
—Library Journal
Author’s Note
Graves Duplessis Mercer is based on the real Sir Richard Burton, British explorer, ethnographer, translator, and journalist. In 1860 Burton visited North America, focusing on the polygamous life of the Mormons in Salt Lake City. Burton eventually published forty-three volumes dealing with his explorations, provided thirty volumes of translation, and was fluent in many languages. He was fascinated by the mating practices, rituals, and cults of various tribes and peoples in the Near East, Africa, and Asia, and recorded these in his diaries and journals for many years. He so affronted Victorian sensibilities that he was forced to live the last decades of his life away from England. When he died in 1890, his wife burned the journals
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE CANYON OF BONES
Copyright @ 2007 by Richard S. Wheeler
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429928007
First eBook Edition : March 2011
First Edition: April 2007
First Mass Market Edition: January 2008
The Canyon of Bones Page 26
