The Shaman's Secret

by Natasha Narayan

  Waldo sat next to me on the ride through the valley, pressing into me and shading me from the sun coming in through the window. We were both sweating, damp with exhaustion. He paid no attention to me. Still, he seemed a little less hostile. Before we entered the desert, he had seemed to take pains to sit as far away from me as possible.

  When all the others were dozing I took my opportunity to say a few words to him.

  “Waldo,” I whispered, “I’ve never thanked you properly for what you did for me. When I was in a coma, I mean.”

  He shifted uncomfortably, trying to move his arm away from me. I noticed his face was pink, his lip beaded with sweat.

  “It was nothing,” he murmured.

  “I could hardly have been very good company.”

  “You were more … relaxing … than usual, certainly.”

  I flushed. “That’s not very kind.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe your coma knocked some sense into you.”

  “What? You think I’m better off in a coma?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  I looked at him. His blue eyes gleamed at me through layers of sweat and grime. A lock of sun-streaked hair fell into his eyes.

  “Look, Waldo, I was just trying to say thank you. Why do we have to argue? Why—”

  “Why can’t we just be friends?” he interrupted, finishing my sentence. “Because friends respect each other. Friends listen to each other. You’ve never taken the blindest bit of notice of what I say. You always charge along in your own bullish way, and I feel, frankly, that you’re not safe. You—”

  “That’s not fair,” I cut in. “You said yourself I was quieter—look, Rachel said you sat with me all the time when I was ill. I was just trying to be polite because she said—” I stopped suddenly because I noticed that in the heat of the argument we had raised our voices. Aunt Hilda, Rachel and Isaac had woken up and were all staring at us, grinning like idiots.

  “It’s just like the good old days,” Isaac said. “Waldo and Kit at daggers drawn.”

  “Just a little lovers’ tiff,” Aunt Hilda said. “Take no notice.”

  I bit my lip, humiliated. Waldo moved further away, which is hard to do when squeezed into a sweltering stagecoach.

  “You’re quite mistaken, ma’am,” he said to Aunt Hilda. “Your niece and I can barely tolerate each other.”

  I was so angry and ashamed I could hardly look at anyone. Well, here it was in black and white. Waldo could barely tolerate me. And I’d thought he was a friend, a good friend.

  I’d have to try to be more formal with him in the future.

  Aunt Hilda hadn’t had enough of embarrassing us both: “Stuff and nonsense, Waldo. You adore my niece. Anyone would. Stop talking guff.” She grunted. “Look at you two. Carrying on like a couple of—”

  Midway through her sentence she stopped as gunfire cut her off. One, two, three shots. Thunderclaps that reverberated deafeningly around the interior of the stagecoach. We were cantering down a steep road which was overhung by a sharp slab of reddish rock covered in pinyon pines and thorny shrubs. Now our horses lurched to a halt in a cloud of dust. The seven black mares and one tawny stallion all neighing and rocking in alarm. Our coach swayed giddily from side to side.

  Peering out in front of us, I couldn’t see anyone firing a gun, just the desert stretching away down below in monotonous whirls of sand. Then a man on horseback emerged from a crack in the rock. He had a coiled length of rope slung over one arm and a pistol pointing straight at Mr. Baker.

  “I got y’all covered,” the man boomed. “Anyone moves and your friend gets hisself a bullet right through the neck.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Driver!” Aunt Hilda shrieked. “Shoot him.”

  A flour sack covered the rider’s face, with holes cut out for his eyes.

  “Don’t try anything,” he said. Lazily he waved his gun toward some bushes. “My men have got you pegged out and hung up to dry.”

  Glinting from the bushes were the barrels of other guns. One, two, three, four … I counted at least five. One of the unseen bandits let out a warning volley, which whistled over our heads and exploded harmlessly in the desert.

  “Now y’all get out the coach. Fast—before my men peg you full of holes.”

  “Driver!” Hilda shrieked again as we clambered out of the coach and lined up at its side. “Waldo! Do something!”

  “Calm down, Aunt Hilda,” I hissed. My heart was hammering, my hands clammy. “If we give them our money, they’ll leave us alone.”

  The driver wasn’t putting up any manner of fight. He was dismounting, his hands held over his head. The bandit threw him a coil of the rope he was wearing.

  “Tie that guy up,” he ordered, pointing to Baker. “Hands together real tight.”

  The driver tied Baker’s hands together and shoved him down the track at the side of the road.

  “Faster!” the masked outlaw urged Baker. “Quit stallin’. Ain’t no lawman gonna save your sorry soul.”

  While the bandit’s attention was distracted, Waldo slid his pistol, a nickel-plated Colt 54, small but lethal, out of its holster and slipped it into his left boot. He did it in one swift movement, turning away from the outlaws in the bushes. I don’t think anyone noticed except me.

  Then he pressed against me for a moment. He breathed in my ear: “If you get a chance, distract them.”

  With Baker tied up, the outlaw turned his attention to the rest of us. He jumped off his horse and, shooing the shaking driver in front of him, came round to the stagecoach. I noticed the duster coat he wore, made of sand-colored linen, was tattered and had several patches. Close up his stovepipe hat was worn. He walked up and down inspecting us as we stood alongside the coach. Finally he came to a stop. His eyes were on Rachel, following her through the holes in the sack.

  “You ever been to Dodge City?” he asked her

  “I’m English.”

  “I saw this singer there, looked just like you.” The outlaw let out a low whistle and his gun barrel skimmed Rachel’s hair. “Why, I believe a pretty little gal like you could have a mighty fine time in Dodge.”

  Rachel drew closer to me.

  My thoughts were racing. If this gang intended to harm Rachel, it would be better to take our chances right now. I glanced at Waldo and he nodded. I planned to cause a diversion, faint on the outlaw, groaning theatrically and using his body as cover. Perhaps we could get Waldo’s pistol on him before his men in the bushes started shooting. But the outlaw was too quick. Noticing Waldo’s empty holster hanging off his belt, he grabbed him by the collar. If I made a mistake now, he would blow Waldo’s head off.

  “Where’s your gun, sonny?” His voice was muffled through the sack.

  “I lost it.”

  “Bull—you ain’t lost nothin’.” He twisted Waldo’s shirt in his hand, making him squirm. Then he shook him off.

  “Take off them boots!” he said, waving his gun.

  “Who, me?” Waldo said.

  “Yep, you, Johnny Englishman.”

  “I’m more American than you,” Waldo protested. “I’m an honest—”

  “Cut it. Don’t make no difference—take ’em off.”

  Waldo did as he was told.

  “Turn ’em upside down and shake ’em,” the outlaw ordered.

  Waldo shook his boots. His pistol fell out, thudding onto the sand. The outlaw bent forward to pick it up. Now was Waldo’s chance. He could kick the thug in the head. But I was forgetting the other members of the gang, hidden in the bushes. They were awfully quiet, I thought suddenly, those other outlaws. Quiet and almost invisible, except for the glint of the silver gun barrels.

  Waldo disposed of, the bandit in the stupid flour sack was taking his time. Now he was whistling through his teeth as he stripped us down. One by one he patted us for weapons, lingering over Rachel, and then made us all line up by the side of the road. He stripped us of all our valuables: coins, watches, Cyril’s gold pillbox ring
, Aunt Hilda’s mannish signet ring, which had belonged to my grandfather. All that was most precious to us. I watched him take my mother’s locket. It would mean nothing to him.

  Now the outlaw made the driver go through our things in the stagecoach. The two of them stripped us of everything. The pouch of gold pieces Mr. Baker had hidden in one of the trunks, our store of dollars, food, best clothes.

  Waldo was made at gunpoint to give up the fine gold watch that had belonged to his father, which he had hidden at the bottom of his trunk. At that I felt sick and Rachel gasped, but Waldo said nothing. I knew how he loved that watch. His father had died years ago, when Waldo was a little boy. He couldn’t remember him at all—that watch was the only thing he had of his. But the thug didn’t care. He was working fast now, shoveling our booty into the leather saddlebags on his horse. He threw out another set of bags, which he made us fill.

  “Hey, Mr. Flour Sack,” I said, “why do the other guys leave all the hard work to you?”

  Through the sack, the bandit began to chuckle. He turned to his comrades in the bushes. “Hear that, Jesse? This young lady thinks I’m doin’ the sweatin’ here.”

  While he talked, the outlaw made the driver unhitch the reins so that all the horses were let loose. All except one, the handsome stallion. The bandit slapped the mares on the rumps and fired a couple of shots in the air, which made them canter down the track, disappearing round the bend in a haze of dust.

  Our horses were gone.

  Then he mounted his own horse and motioned the driver to mount the stallion, a tawny beauty with powerful forelegs and a foaming mane. I looked at the driver, my suspicions mounting. The man hadn’t said a word during the entire hold-up. He was meant to protect us, but he hadn’t done a single darn thing.

  “I’m taking your man with me as a hostage,” the outlaw said. “You wait here for half an hour before you move.”

  “You’ve let our all horses go,” Aunt Hilda grunted. “How precisely will we go anywhere?”

  “Don’t you English dames ever shuddup? Like I said, one step outta line and my men will get you.” He pointed to the gun barrels, and then he was gone, riding that trail into the bushes, herding the driver before him.

  Waldo sat down on the track, letting out a heavy groan. Slowly he began to put his boots back on. He had only been standing on the sand for a few minutes, but already his feet were burned raw. His movements were halting, I noticed. Waldo is always a bit clumsy. He lost his little finger in India to frostbite and would have not been so clever with a gun if Isaac hadn’t made him an artificial finger.

  I sat down next to him. The sand was burning through my cotton traveling skirt. Everything around us was desolate, no creature alive within sight except a single dark vulture wheeling in the burning sky. Above us was the slab of red rock covered in thorny bushes and down below the Mojave Desert. Mile after mile of hot sand with nothing growing but those strange contorted cacti. Little hope of rescue, for no one, not even the toughest pioneers, lived in these parts.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” Waldo said, looking toward the haze of dust, which was all that there was left of the outlaw and our driver.

  “Know what?” Isaac asked.

  “Whether that driver was in league with the outlaws?”

  “Oh—I’m pretty sure he was,” Isaac said. “I mean he didn’t exactly do anything, did he? And he was supposed to be this big, tough cowboy hero … Anyway, one thing’s for sure.”

  “What’s that?” Aunt Hilda snapped.

  “We’re never going to see them again. Not the driver, not the outlaw and least of all our money.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Mr. Baker coughed apologetically, holding his hands out in front of him. They were still firmly tied, the string cutting into his wrists.

  “This is rather uncomfortable,” he said.

  Waldo moved over. A knife would have cut through, but the bandit had taken all our weapons. It was a struggle to untangle them and in the end he had to use his teeth to bite through a particularly stubborn knot. The outlaws hadn’t left us anything with which to cut the string, not even a pocket knife.

  “Well, I guess that we should gather anything we’ve got left to eat and get moving,” I said. Our stagecoach was useless now, a hulking black thing, burning in the sun.

  “What about the other bandits?” Rachel pointed to the bushes, where the rifle barrels still glinted. “They’re watching.”

  “Haven’t you realized?” I asked.

  “So you cottoned on.” Isaac grinned.

  “What … are you talking about?” the others chorused.

  “They aren’t real,” I said, pointing to the glinting barrels.

  We turned to look at the bushes, dotted with five gun barrels all trained on us. Five gun barrels that hadn’t moved an inch during the entire hold-up. Five outlaws who hadn’t showed their faces in support of their leader.

  “Real outlaws don’t just sit in the bushes,” Isaac said. “Surely you noticed.”

  Waldo was fuming, his face red with anger. “If you two are so clever, why didn’t you tell the rest of us? … Darn it,” he began to shout. “If I had known there was only one man with a gun, I WOULDN’T HAVE LET HIM TREAT ME LIKE AN IDIOT. I WOULD HAVE KILLED HIM—”

  “Calm down, Waldo,” I cut in, raising my voice above his. “I only realized too late.”

  Aunt Hilda, who shared Waldo’s loud indignation, was marching up to the bushes behind him. The rest of us followed. We went up to the gap between the pinyon pines through which the outlaw had appeared. A lizard scuttled out of my way. It was easy to spot where a path had been forced into the shrubbery.

  There, in and behind the bushes, we found the rest of the “outlaws” and their “guns.” Five bottles rigged up on a system of twigs and string. Five bottles, their silver-painted necks sparkling in the sun, looking just like gun barrels.

  Isaac began to laugh—and I couldn’t help joining him. It really was a neat little ruse. “Really ingenious that outlaw,” Isaac said. “He had me fooled for a—”

  “Ten seconds?” Aunt Hilda barked. “Next time share your insights with us, Israel.”

  Isaac giggled, but a look at our glum faces and the dawning realization of the hole we were in made him stop, fast. We really were stuck. In front of us was desert, behind us was desert, and to the side was arid rock. All that grew here were tough plants, like the bulbous Joshua tree. They dropped their roots deep into the sand, searching for every drop of water. Like the desert fox and the lizard, they had learned to survive. But with the sun beating down on our heads, and the scorching sand reflecting the heat back up, we wouldn’t last long.

  “How much water do we have left?” Aunt Hilda asked.

  Isaac was scrabbling in the trunk that held the food—the measly bits the bandits had left us. His face as he turned to us was grave.

  “Just two canisters,” he said. “That’ll last the six of us a couple of days at the most.”

  I looked at the horizon, toward the end of Death Valley. There was a blue smudge visible. Hope, water, a town or homestead and our salvation. But, tramping on our own two feet under that merciless sun, it would take a lot more than a couple of days to reach it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  By the second day of walking my feet had become separated from my body. They marched on of their own accord, while my head floated somewhere in the cloudless sky. By my side Aunt Hilda groaned, her cheeks flaming in the shade of her cowboy hat. I rarely glanced at Waldo, who was all grim concentration as he plodded on in his leather boots. The desert stretched ahead of us and all around: whorls of sand, barren mountains and those endless shifting dunes. It was bare of all but the most scrubby plants.

  I had traveled through an endless desert before, in Egypt. I knew firsthand what it was like: the searing heat; the sand that chokes the back of your throat, creeps into your nose and ears, makes the very act of breathing a painful battle against dust. But in our last voyage th
rough the desert we’d ridden camels and carried provisions. Above all, we’d had water.

  Now we walked and walked and walked. With each step the way became harder on our legs and our hearts.

  Our water was severely rationed. Waldo had been elected to carry it and gave us just a sip at a time. Enough to wet our parched lips, and moisten the back of our throats. Not enough to have an actual drink. Not enough to feel the sweet liquid glug down your throat and soothe the fire in your gut. Not enough to quell the raging thirst that consumed me.

  Have you ever been thirsty before? Really thirsty, dying of thirst?

  If the answer is yes, you will know how it is. All you can think of is water. Our vitally important mission to the Grand Canyon to find the tablet that would save our lives and thwart Cyril’s evil twin did not cross my mind. I had almost forgotten what we were doing here; our desperate journey was obscured by burning sand. All I thought of was a trickle of cool water gurgling down my gullet.

  “Is it the same for you?” Cyril asked toward evening on the second day as he stumbled on beside me. The burning sun was sinking below the horizon. Falling in the bleached sky, veiled by a shimmering haze of white. A land of white sun.

  “What?” I asked, licking a trickle of sweat off my upper lip. “Wanting water?”

  I glanced at him with dislike. I had almost forgotten he had sacrificed his wealth for this journey. I saw only a strange, pale creature, his ghastly eyes popping out of his head. Unlike the rest of us, he hadn’t been roasted raw by the sun. Rather, it had seemed to bake all the juices from his body, leaving it a shriveled white husk.

  “No, not that. The other thing. Don’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” I said, a bit impatiently. Words wasted energy and made our throats feel even more sore, like sandpaper.

  “I think my brother has left my mind.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then turned my head to peer forward. Was that something, just the faintest shine of cool blue on the desert floor? Water. Water. Please let it be water.