Prophecies, Libels & Dreams

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  Pow reaches the Single Officers’ Quarters and staggers up the steps into the blessed shade of the porch—a few degrees cooler and the air slightly moist from the water olla hanging from the porch eaves. He pulls down the olla, hearing his muscles crackle like dried cornstalks. The olla is fat and round, beaded with moisture, but almost empty. He licks the droplets off the clay, oh delicious wetness, and then throws the pot on the ground, where it shatters.

  As a first lieutenant, Pow’s only entitled to one room, and this room is now empty of his gear, its only furniture a steamer trunk and an iron cot. Pow collapses on the iron cot, unable to take another step. His thirst is sharp and pointed, it’s overwhelming and all encompassing, it leaves little room inside him for anything else. All around him he can sense moisture, but he himself is parched.

  He shakes his head, feeling the tendons in his neck wheeze and burn. There a rattling sound inside of his skull—his brain perhaps, now shrunken to a desiccated nubbin. That would account for the thickness of his thoughts. Something falls into his lap; at first he thinks it’s a piece of jerky, then he realizes it’s his ear. He tries to stick his ear back onto his head, but it won’t stay, so he puts it in his pocket for safekeeping.

  A shadow slinks in the corner of the room; two silver eyes glitter. Freddie, Pow’s pet gila monster, which he raised from an egg, is peeking out of its den, a hole in the adobe wall. The lizard waddles across the floor and nips at the toe of Pow’s boot, its usual method for requesting a treat. Lacking anything else, Pow gives the gila monster his ear—his hearing seems fine without it—and Freddie nibbles daintily. Pow reaches for the lizard; Freddie spits a shiny squirt of silvery poison at him. Pow licks the slippery venom off his fingers—it’s lovely wet.

  The lizard is fat with moisture; underneath that scaly skin, it’s heavy with wetness, its meat saturated with blood, bile, venom, juice. Pow makes a dry clucking noise with his splintery tongue and reaches for Freddie again. As if sensing his intent, the gila monster scuttles away, but desperation makes Pow quick. He snatches.

  III. Dry

  Pow’s retreat from the hog ranch to his quarters did not go without notice; indeed, when he had staggered onto Fort Gehenna’s parade ground, a long file had straggled behind him. In addition to the habitués of the hog ranch, who gave him a respectable head start before following, the brigade included the herd guard, a couple of privates who were loitering in the shade of the sinks watching an ant fight, the tame broncos (as the soldiers call Arivaipa’s natives) who live behind the remuda corral, and the dog pack, tempted out of the arroyo by Pow’s smell, which, now that his clothes have dried, is quite strong: a meaty kind of decay.

  This crowd now stands outside the SOQ, and it has attracted the attention of Lieutenant Brakespeare, Gehenna’s adjutant and current acting quartermaster, and Sergeant Candy, Gehenna’s ranking noncom. When they arrive to investigate, a multitude of voices in several languages all begin to babble at once. Lieutenant Brakespeare ignores the shouting and enters the SOQ, only to find Pow’s room empty. The contents of his trunk are strewn about the room and every item packed therein that once contained anything moist—boot polish tin, a bottle of Madama Twanky’s Sel-Ray-Psalt Medicine, fly ointment—lies wrecked upon the floor.

  The destruction continues across the hallway and into Lieutenant Brakespeare’s quarters—the lieutenant swears horribly when she sees the mess—and on into the kitchen beyond. There Berman, the lieutenants’ striker, stands surveying a battlefield of crumpled tin cans, smashed sauerkraut crocks, broken wine bottles, and the splintered remains of a water barrel.

  “He went that way,” Berman says, that way being into the back yard. There Lieutenant Brakespeare and Sergeant Candy find Pow facedown in a laundry tub, sucking up soapy water, while the laundress stands over him, whacking at his shoulders with her wash-board. They heave Pow out of the almost empty tub. He burps a giant soap bubble, which pops into an appalling stench of sweet-sour decay, and shakes the soldiers off. He feels deliciously waterlogged, heavy and solid. He feels much much better.

  The crowd has rushed around the back, and now a rotund figure—Captain de Poligniac, Gehenna’s commanding officer—pushes through, almost invisible underneath a huge black umbrella, an item that officers in uniform are strictly forbidden to carry. When he reaches the SOQ back porch and lets drop the shade, Polecat (as the good captain is called even to his face) reveals that he’s not in uniform anyway, just a pair of dirty red drawers and a white guayabera. He’d been in his quarters, riding out the furnace of the afternoon on an herbal haze, and he is annoyed at being disturbed.

  “What’s all that infernal racket, Lieutenant Brakespeare?” Polecat complains. He catches sight of Pow, and his voice trails off. His lips pucker in puzzlement, and he stares at the rapidly dehydrating lieutenant.

  “Pow!” Polecat says. “I thought you were dead!”

  IV. Arid

  Of course, 1st Lieutenant Powhatan Rucker is dead. Not just dead, but drowned. How can you drown in a desert? In an Arivaipa thunderstorm, all too quickly. One minute the sky is as blank as a sheet of paper; the next minute it roils with quicksilver clouds, from which lunge enormous purple-silver prongs of lightning. And then rain bullets down, water floods into the arroyos, and anything not on the high ground is swept away. Ten minutes later the desert is dry as a bone again, and the sky empty.

  He died a hero’s death, Lieutenant Rucker did, trying to save, not another comrade, but rather the hog ranch’s entire supply of beer. The story is short and tragic: the freight train dropped fifteen cases of beer at the hog ranch, before proceeding on to Rancho Kuchamonga; an inexperienced drover off-loaded the beer in the arroyo below the hog ranch; when the storm came up, Pow organized his fellow whist players into a bottle brigade and supervised the shifting of fourteen cases to higher ground; the water was already foaming when Pow went back for the last case—refusing to allow the others to join him in harm’s way; Pow heroically managed to shove that case up the bank, just as a wall of water twenty feet high came roaring down the ravine.

  After Pow’s battered and soggy body was found tangled in an uprooted paloverde tree, he was borne off to Gehenna’s sandy cemetery, where he was given a full military funeral and toasted by the entire garrison with bottles from the fateful case that killed him. But now that sandy cemetery has spit Pow back up, a circumstance that no one in Gehenna can ever remember occurring before.

  “If Pow is dead, how can he be alive?” Polecat says in bewilderment. They’ve retired to his office for privacy, although the crowd still loiters outside, hoping that voices will be raised enough to facilitate eavesdropping. Considering that the walls of the office are mud-covered brush, and the ceiling more brush, under which hangs a piece of canvas which keeps centipedes from falling on your head, the voices do not have to be very loud. Polecat plops behind his desk, trying to look official, while the Lieutenants Brakespeare and Rucker stand before him in semi-respectful stances. Lieutenant Fyrdraaca, retrieved from the privy, isn’t quite as drunk as she was before, but she’s not sober enough to stand at attention, so she has sprawled upon Polecat’s well-used daybed.

  Polecat puts his spectacles on to examine Pow more closely; the lieutenant is still crusted with a fine silt, but the few bits of skin visible look downright shriveled. He is twenty-two years old, but now he looks a hundred.

  “I think alive is stretching it a bit, Polecat,” Buck says. “I mean, Pow is animated, but he looks a bit rough to actually be alive. I would say he’s definitely dead.”

  “Then what am I doing here?” Pow asks, bewildered.

  “I called you back.” Lieutenant Brakespeare says. She sounds rather smug.

  “You brought him back from the dead?” Polecat moans. “Why in Califa’s name did you do that, Azota?”

  “His quartermaster accounts were a mess—and short, too.” Lieutenant Brakespeare purses her mouth into a small knot. “I’m not going to be responsible for his shortages, or pay for his mi
stakes.”

  At the time of his death, Pow had been Gehenna’s quartermaster, and thus responsible for all of Gehenna’s rations, uniforms, equipment, ordnance and equipage, for the previous three months. During that time he’d not done a lick of paperwork, preferring instead to while away the days playing mumblety-peg with the QM clerks. To say that Pow’s QM accounts were a mess was being charitable. Actually, they were a catastrophe.

  When Lieutenant Brakespeare (only shortly graduated from Benica Barracks Military Academy but already well on her way to being a properly stuck-up yaller dog, as staff officers are called) assumed the QM duties upon Pow’s death, it had taken her fourteen days of non-stop paper pushing to complete the QM returns properly, and even then she couldn’t account for all the shortages in the QM inventories. Since officers in the Army of Califa are personally responsible for items on their inventory returns, someone is to going to have to pay for these shortages. Lieutenant Brakespeare has no intention of being that someone.

  Polecat complains: “But you shouldn’t summon someone back from the dead just to make up a shortage.”

  “I didn’t,” Lieutenant Brakespeare says primly. “Officers are forbidden by The Articles of War to attempt or achieve any magickal acts. Article 3, Section I, Sub-section 2.”

  Buck, from the settee, observes: “Maybe forbidden themselves, but there’s nothing in The Articles of War about paying someone else to attempt or achieve magickal acts for you, eh? Who’d you get to do it?”

  “The curandero,” Lieutenant Brakespeare admits. The curandero is an elderly bronco who, having decided he was too old and wise to fight, made peace with the Califians and moved into a wikiyup near the river, from which he dispenses charms, foul-smelling ointments, and philosophical advice, in return for rations. “Anyway, Lieutenant Rucker can go back where he came as soon as he either produces the inkwell or pays for it. I don’t care which.”

  “Inkwell?” says Polecat.

  “Ayah, so. Pow signed a receipt for fifteen glass inkwells, shipped from Fort Ludwig to here—” Lieutenant Brakespeare fishes a sheet of paper out of her sack coat and consults it. “On Martes 12. One arrived broken and was dropped from the inventory. One was issued to Corporal Candy on Martes 15; one was issued to the AG, and one to the CO. Leaving eleven on the return. But there were only ten in the QM store. Where’s the missing inkwell?” She looks accusingly at Pow.

  “I don’t know,” Pow says. He has no idea where the missing inkwell is, but there’s a burning feeling in his throat, a scratchy roar that is extremely distracting. The dry Arivaipa air has sucked his moisture away, and his thirst has returned with a vengeance. Something wiggles on his neck; despite the canvas a centipede has fallen from the brush. Pow pops the flailing bug into his mouth and it squishes wetly between his teeth. The others don’t notice.

  “How much is the inkwell valued at?” Polecat asks.

  Lieutenant Brakespeare consults the receipt again. “Fifteen lisbys.”

  “Fifteen lisbys!” Polecat reaches for the cigarillo box on his blotter, which does not contain cigarillos. “Fifteen lisbys! That’s pocket change!”

  “You always gotta do things the hard way, Tiny Doom,” Buck chortles, and Lieutenant Brakespeare gives her a poisonous look.

  “Have you got fifteen lisbys, Pow?” Polecat asks.

  Pow feels in his pockets, but if he ever had fifteen lisbys, the Arivaipa desert has them now. He tries to answer; his jaw creaks like dry wood, and no words come out, only a puff of dust.

  “I’ll take that as a no. Here, I’ll give you fifteen lisbys, Pow, and you can pay Lieutenant Brakespeare, and that will be that,” Polecat says, his head now wreathed in soothing herbal smoke. He fishes around in his top desk drawer. “Buck, do you have two lisbys?”

  There’s an ink bottle sitting on Polecat’s desk, half-full of ink. Pow can smell the dark delicious wetness—

  “I don’t want your money, Captain,” Lieutenant Brakespeare complains. “It’s Lieutenant Rucker’s responsibility, and he should either find that inkwell or pay up—”

  Pow’s entire focus is now pointed at that ink bottle and the promise of liquidity within. His thirst burns; his blood has long evaporated, and his veins feel like rawhide thongs, taut and stretched. He reaches a claw-like hand toward the bottle. The ink tastes thick and dark; but most deliciously, it tastes wet.

  The others have stopped their squabbling and are staring at him. Pow licks his now black lips and sets the empty bottle back on Polecat’s desk.

  “Anyway, it’s not just the inkwell,” Lieutenant Brakespeare says triumphantly. “There’s also a small matter of the paymaster funds, which are also missing, and which Pow, as QM, is responsible for.”

  Polecat blanches. “How much?”

  “Five thousand divas.”

  “Paper or gold?” Polecat asks faintly.

  “Gold.”

  V. Parched

  Suddenly Lieutenant Brakespeare’s actions no longer seem quite so drastic. Fifteen lisbys is nothing; even a private can probably scrounge up fifteen lisbys, the price of a beer. But five thousand divas in gold—Fort Gehenna’s entire payroll for the entire year! If the troopers find out their pay is gone, they’ll riot, they’ll mutiny, they’ll desert. They’ll raise a howl that will be heard in the War Department back in Califa, a howl that, since Pow is dead, will thunder down upon the shoulders of his superiors: Polecat and Lieutenant Brakespeare. They’ll be court-martialed for sure, and lucky to escape cashiering. And they’ll still have to pay back the cash. Five thousand divas in gold is a pretty good reason for raising the dead.

  Polecat and Lieutenant Brakespeare pounce on Pow, but their berating questions get nowhere. He can hardly hear them; they are distant mirages in his parchedness. The ink has only whetted his thirst—not quenched it—and now his only interest is in moisture. He can smell the wetness; not in the air, which is as dry as dust, but in the living bodies around him—wet blood, wet bile, wet sweat, wet saliva. They are soggy with wetness, fair dripping, and he can feel himself shriveling for the lack of it.

  Pow stares at Polecat, upon whose white brow stand little drops of sweat, whose rosy cheeks are flushed and bedewed. Polecat’s lips are moving, opening to display the moist cavern of his mouth—the desire to lunge toward that wetness—tear Polecat’s tongue out by the roots, suck out all its moisture—is rising like a dust devil inside of Pow, twisting and turning and—

  “Hey,” says Buck. She’s now standing next to him, a bottle in her hand. “Have a drink, Pow. You look like you could use it.”

  His hands are too gnarled now to grasp the bottle; creakily he leans back, and Buck pours the coarse whiskey into his mouth; as it flows down his throat he feels his flesh expanding, reconstituting itself, plumping out. Delicious delicious wetness.

  Lieutenant Brakespeare turns on Buck: “You could be helping. You signed the receipt for the paymaster. This will hit you, too.”

  Buck protests: “I am helping. While the two of you shriek like owls, I’ve been thinking. You know, the night Pow died, I was at the hog ranch, too.”

  “Where else?” says Lieutenant Brakespeare bitterly. She’s never set foot in the place.

  “Callate, Azota. I wasn’t feeling so well, so I left early—callate, Azota!—and thus missed Pow’s heroism, but I do recall now that when I left Pow was playing cards with the scout, Lotta, Pecos, and some other guy. Pow was losing, and losing in gold, too.”

  “Who was winning?” Lieutenant Brakespeare asks.

  “The scout,” says Buck triumphantly.

  So Polecat puts his sack coat on and orders Lieutenant Brakespeare to arrest Pow, which she does. Then they all march, under colors, down to the hog ranch to demand the return of the payroll. They find the scout eating pickles and playing mumblety-peg with the ice elemental. He freely admits that he won the divas off Lieutenant Rucker, but he refuses to return them. A bet lost is a bet won by someone else, fair and square.

  While Polecat dithers,
and Buck and Pow have themselves another drink (or two), Lieutenant Brakespeare puts the screws on the scout. She starts out politely persuasive, then turns to choleric threats, but neither attitude makes the slightest dent. The scout is part-bronco, part-coyote, rumour has it, and a shavetail lieutenant don’t scare him at all. Lieutenant Brakespeare sends a detail to search the scout’s miserable shebang. No gold. Another detail holds the scout down and searches his greasy-buckskin-clad person. No gold. She’s urging Polecat to allow her to tie the scout to a wagon wheel and set his hair on fire—I’ll wager he’ll cough up the gold then!—when Buck offers a lazy solution.

  “A wager,” Buck says. “Let’s make a wager.”

  Arivaipa Territory is arid and dull; the soldiers must make their own fun and what’s more fun than a wager? At Gehenna, they’ll bet on anything. I’ll stand you four divas, five lisbys, six glories that you can’t: leap a prickly pear cactus; eat six jars of jalapeño pickles; stand on your head for six hours; ride that strawberry roan; stay in bed two weeks; walk from the hog ranch to the flagpole blindfolded. The inhabitants of Gehenna have bet on ant wars; mule races; tennis matches; foot races; marksmanship; whose bed sheets are whiter; whose corporal is fatter, and whether or not lightning is attracted to a picket pin dangling from the flagpole. (Yes.)

  The scout’s eyes, deep in red-painted sockets, gleam. “A wager?”