Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  “You caught me fair and square,” she said when she could speak again. “What will you do with me?”

  He hadn’t been anticipating such a question. Standing so near to her, what he wanted more than anything was to kiss her. But she would slap him back down the hill for that, and rightly so. “Reckon I’d like to get to know you better,” he said. It seemed a reasonable intermediate step.

  “I said I would tell you what I could.”

  “Then tell.”

  Little Wing gave his hand a squeeze, then released it. She hugged herself, as if simply thinking about her own past was terrifying. He was a little sorry he had asked, but if it meant she would open up, not too sorry.

  She started back down the hill, in the direction of town. Now Cale saw that the Apache scout had followed along, keeping them in sight. “I had been born in Virginia,” she told him after a while. “I had grown up like any little girl, I suppose. My family had had little, but I had played with my doll. I had had tea parties in my room.”

  “Why do you say it like that?” Cale asked. “You had had tea parties?”

  “I am merely trying to be accurate,” Little Wing said. “That is what you want, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let me go on,” she said. “I will try to describe it the way you would like.”

  “I don’t care how you say it, Little Wing. I just want to know.”

  The late afternoon was hot and sticky, but Little Wing didn’t appear to be perspiring at all. “As a girl, I was without faith,” she continued. She spoke more slowly now, as if making an effort to consider not just what she said, but what phrasing she used. “That changed one day, when I had a revelation.”

  “What kind of revelation?”

  “The kind that comes about when you suddenly realize that the world is a gloriously complicated place, yet everything in it makes sense. Trees house insects, birds eat insects from the trees and use their branches for their homes, we use birds for food and companionship, and we enjoy the shade the trees offer and the wood they provide. Rivers feed the trees and the birds and us. All is connected. Take away one part of it and the whole collapses. From this, I had de—I mean, I deduced that only a wise and powerful God could have made the world in just this way. Without words, with just a growing warmth in my heart, God told me that I was right, and showed me the path I must take.”

  “What path was that?” Cale asked. When his parents had been alive, the family had attended mass regularly. Since becoming a cowboy, he’d had precious little opportunity, although sometimes on Sundays a few of the hands said prayers together and talked about the Good Book.

  “A path that led me to dedicate myself to the Sisters of Charity.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you ever run out of questions?”

  “I just want to know about you,” Cale said, feeling sheepish. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “I am not angry, Cale. Asking questions shows intelligence. Asking about other people shows unselfishness.” Unsure how to take that, he didn’t answer, and she went on with her tale. “The Sisters of Charity are an order dedicated to serving the Lord through acts of charity in this life. We fed the hungry, cared for the sick, looked after widows and orphans. We ran field hospitals during the war, tending to the wounded from both sides. I was blessed. At … at one such battle…”

  Cale looked at Little Wing. Her face had taken on a sickly pallor, and she was biting hard on her lower lip. She looked afraid of something. Cale turned this way and that, looking for any threat. He didn’t see whatever it was that scared her, then realized it must have been a memory, something to do with the story she was telling. “It’s all right,” he said softly. “I’m here, Little Wing. You’re safe.”

  “No!” she said sharply. “There is no safety here, Cale. None at all.”

  “Why not? What’s like to hurt us here?”

  “I cannot … I cannot see it. I cannot say it.”

  “You don’t have to,” Cale said, mostly just to be talking.

  “I was telling you about … the time. The time I…” She hesitated. She had her fists clenched so tight he was worried she would cut her palms with her nails.

  “Yeah?”

  “The battle was bad. The worst in the war.”

  “The whole war?”

  “The whole thing. So many people died there.”

  The war had been a long one, with many brutal battles. Battlefields across the country were soaked in blood; when Cale imagined what they must be like, he pictured himself walking across that scorched, tortured ground, each footstep bringing to the surface a wet, scarlet imprint.

  But the one they talked about, the bloodiest of all, was Gettysburg.

  He’d heard stories about it—many too outlandish to be believed—since he was a little boy.

  That would mean she’d have been a little girl, though. Surely a small child couldn’t help at a field hospital.

  “I thought Gettysburg was the worst one,” he said.

  At the mention of the name, Little Wing blanched. She rocked back on her heels, and Cale caught her arm in case she fainted. “Yes,” she said. Her voice sounded far away, and her eyes were fixed on some distant point that Cale couldn’t see.

  “Little Wing,” he said. She gave no sign that she heard, so he said it louder, and sharper, and accompanied it with a shaking of her shoulder. “Little Wing!”

  She continued as if her spell hadn’t happened. “Yes, Gettysburg was the worst. The dead littered the fields like leaves in autumn. Everywhere the smells of blood and powder enveloped me. I tried to only breathe through my mouth, but then I could taste it, and that was worse. And the wounded! I helped a man whose arm was gone, severed just below the shoulder. He wore his own blood like a second shirt. He died. There was a man whose chin was missing—beneath his mouth, nothing but a ragged, bloody mess, like a shred torn hastily from a bolt of cloth. He died, too. One who lived lost both his leg and his privates. He survived, although I often thought he would rather not have.”

  “But how could you—?” Cale began.

  “Blessed,” she said. She had said earlier that she was blessed. He assumed she meant blessed to be able to work alongside the Sisters of Charity, but he didn’t know for sure.

  “Everywhere I looked, they were dying. Some went quickly, quietly. Others wailed and cursed the heavens. The wounded were even worse; crying out for help, screeching with pain. Weeping like lost children. We tried to help. My clothes were stiff with the blood of the wounded, my arms coated in it, red past the elbows. Mostly, they came to us, but sometimes we had to go to them, those who could not walk and no one would carry. I was tending to one of those that I … that I…”

  “What?” Cale asked.

  Little Wing offered a brief smile, sincere for all that it was short and quickly vanished. “You would not understand. Would not believe.”

  “Little Wing, I don’t think you would lie to me.”

  “And I would not. Nonetheless, you could not trust my words.”

  “How can you know, lest you try?”

  “Let me just say that strange things happened. I thought I was—” She drew back the hair over her right temple, and Cale saw a long scar there. It had long since healed over, but he could hardly imagine that such a wound could be survived.

  “How much have you heard?” she asked. “About what happened there?”

  “Just bunkhouse talk. I’m sure most of it’s made-up nonsense.”

  “Perhaps. I do not know which stories you were told. But some might be true.”

  Cale tried to catalog in his mind the tales he’d heard. Most, as he had indicated, had been told in the bunkhouse or around campfires, late at night, by cowboys trying to scare each other. He had always believed the stories about the savagery on display there, the nearly constant raining of lead down upon the soldiers on both sides, the wounded men stabbed with swords or bayonets, souvenirs taken in the form of ears o
r noses or fingers. Those tales were horrible, but possible. Probable, even, in the midst of that carnage.

  But one hand, whose older brother had reportedly been in the battle, had told other stories. The battle, he said, had been furious and deadly to uncounted soldiers. But as the fields were beginning to quiet, when the two sides had retreated to their own positions to regroup and treat their wounded, there had come what the cowboy said his brother could only describe as a wave, a tidal surge, not of water but of something else. “Evil,” the cowboy had said. “I can still see Clem tellin’ me about it. He was sittin’ on his bed, and I was standin’ in the doorway. Clem had lost his arm from the elbow down, and I was still tryin’ t’figger out how he’d get by. But when he tole me this, he was as serious as all get-out. He weren’t jokin’ or funnin’ me. He was scairt, still, though it had been four or five months since the battle. I was just a sprout, and Clem, he stopped what he was sayin’, and said, ‘I shouldn’t orter tell you this, on account of you’re too little and will have nightmares over it.’ I tole him he already started to, and now he had to finish or I’d tell Pa, who’d whup him good.”

  Somehow, that detail had always made it all seem more real to Cale. Not that he was inclined to believe the story. But he believed that the cowboy did, and probably his brother Clem had, too.

  The cowboy leaned in and told the rest of the story in a rush, as if he couldn’t wait to get it out, to be shut of it. The wave of evil, his brother had said, washed over the fields, flooding the valleys and climbing the rolling hills, covering everything and everybody, living and dead. He couldn’t see it, but he could sense it, somehow, not quite tasting it or smelling it, but something in between.

  And when it was past, he saw the dead rise.

  At that, a couple of the other hands had broken out in laughter and disparaging remarks. The cowboy had sat and waited, his expression somber, and when they quieted again, he continued. The first dead man he saw get up was a Confederate lieutenant who had taken a minié ball in the throat. He had fallen, then tried to get up again, making it as far as his knees before the Union soldier who had shot him rammed a bayonet through his skull. Clem had, he swore, seen brain matter come out the other side of his head, on the bayonet’s tip. The lieutenant went down again, as dead as anyone Clem had ever seen.

  But after that wave went by—Clem said it made him feel dirty, even though he had not bathed in weeks—the dead lieutenant stood up. His skull was destroyed, his throat had been mostly torn away, and a mongrel dog had been chewing on his left hand. But he rose and started walking, listing a little to his left but otherwise almost normally. A soldier who knew him ran to his side, believing him only badly wounded and offering to show him to a field hospital.

  “And this lieutenant,” the cowboy said, “he grabbed the soldier by the face. Drove his fingers right through the man’s flesh and pulled him close and tugged the skin away, then bit into it like it was fine calf and he a starving man.”

  Well, that was when Cale had stopped believing. The cowboy claimed that other dead men got up and attacked those nearest them, which in most cases meant those from their own side. He said the dead killed more folks at Gettysburg than the battle had. Cale had doubted the veracity of that.

  But he hadn’t forgotten it, either. He still remembered almost every word the cowboy had said, though he couldn’t even recall the man’s name.

  Little Wing was looking at him—looking through him, almost—as if she knew every thought he had. “Yes,” she said. “That.”

  “When the dead rose?”

  “I was … I was innocent. Pure. I served God, as a Sister. I tried to care for the sick and the wounded. And when I…” She let the sentence trail off, and touched the scarred place on her temple, hidden again by long hair. “A different power touched me that day. Not evil, but good.”

  “You don’t mean to say that you was dead, and came back.”

  “I have told you too much, already.”

  “But … tell me that much. Is that what you mean? Did the dead really rise that day?”

  “So it is said.”

  “And…” He almost couldn’t bear to ask the question, but he couldn’t stop himself. “And you? Did you … rise, too? Were you…?”

  She touched her scar again, and held his gaze with her deep brown eyes. Her lips curled into an almost-smile, and dimples carved her cheeks. “There are things that can be known, Cale. And others that cannot. Some, I can speak of, others I am forbidden to mention.”

  “Forbidden by who?”

  She ignored that question and tilted her head in the direction of Fort Huachuca. “If it were allowed, I could tell you about the way that fort will change; the things that will come to pass there, the weapons and machines of various sorts that will be used against enemies you can’t even imagine. I could tell you about an ancestor of Kuruk’s, so long ago that Kuruk has never heard his name, who very near this spot encountered three rattlesnakes twined around one another. When Kuruk’s ancestor stepped into the circle they made, the snakes separated and wrapped themselves around his ankles. None bit him, and when he left, they were once again twining around one another’s tails. While they were on his legs, though, they told him secrets, and it is those secrets I cannot speak.”

  “Are you saying you can see what’s gonna happen? And what happened long ago?”

  “I am saying only that the mysteries of this world are greater than you can imagine, Cale. In number and in majesty, and in some cases, in depravity. I am saying that you are part of those mysteries, now—that you have a role to play.”

  “Me?” Cale asked. “I never done anything special.”

  “Perhaps,” Little Wing replied. “Perhaps not. But your time will come. This much, I can say for certain.”

  “I don’t … I ain’t no kind of hero or nothing. I’m just a cowboy. I know horses and cattle, and that’s about it. You’re smart, not me. I don’t know much of anything.”

  She took his hands and held them tight. “Cale, there is so much I do not know. But I know this: life is struggle after struggle after struggle. Any time it looks easy, beware, because that simply means you cannot see the next threat. But then you feel the warmth of a loved one’s smile, or you experience faith or the unfailing joy of service to a cause bigger than yourself, or you see something like this.” Using his hands, she turned him toward the landscape they had just run in. The sun had dropped another degree or two in the sky, and its light was snagged on more surfaces than ever; every leaf, every branch, every thorn or stone or tuft of grass seemed to catch it and throw it back, so that the whole expanse appeared to have been littered with flakes of gold. “You see something so beautiful that it takes your breath away, and you remember what your purpose on this earth is: to live, to feel, to experience all that life has to offer, the dark as well as the light. Only by seeing darkness do we appreciate the light when it comes.”

  Cale stared at the scene before him. As unexpectedly moved by it as he had been at first, it was even more lovely now. Breathtaking, as Little Wing had said. It was nothing he hadn’t seen thousands of times, but he saw it with fresh eyes, with new appreciation. And having done so, he didn’t think he would ever not see it again.

  “Life is struggle after struggle,” Little Wing continued. “But life is rich and full and wondrous and touched with magic and grace and joy and love and beauty, and those things make the struggle worthwhile. More than. And life is tinged with mystery, as you will soon find out. You are up to it, Cale. This I know. I do not know as much as you think I do, but I know that.”

  Cale didn’t understand how she could, but there was no doubting the certainty in her voice and in her words. She believed it.

  He dearly hoped she was right.

  Chapter Forty-one

  Watching Jasper Montclair, a mixture of terror and lust burned in Sadie’s chest and loins. He was naked, as she was, and covered in designs she had made there, following his directions, with blood from a po
t he kept inside his house. He had made similar designs on her, painting her with his fingers. His chest was deep, his shoulders broad, and for a man so lean he was surprisingly muscular. He had built a fire that blazed, throwing its yellow-red glow on his body, gleaming off the blood patterns, which still glistened as wetly as if she had just now drawn them. She ran a finger over one on her own breast, which looked as fresh, but it came away clean.

  The sky was filling with clouds, pregnant with rain. To the south, lightning lit them from within, and the sound of thunder reached her ears, carried on gusty winds that fanned the fire and brought its sharp scent and the softer smells of distant downpours. The afternoon was hot, but when the rain came that would change.

  She still wasn’t sure what she was doing here, but Jasper had told her that her part was critical, and her reward would be great. For reasons she could not understand, she took him at his word and didn’t ask questions.

  On the ride over, in his buckboard, he had talked almost without stopping to breathe. Sadie caught a little of what he said, and understood less of it. “Look at that landscape,” she remembered him saying, indicating with a sweep of his arm what he meant. The mountains were behind them, and they were descending into the shallow bowl of the valley. “All of it belongs to me now. To us. Do you like it, Sadie?”

  She had muttered something in reply. She couldn’t remember what. There was so much she couldn’t recall, blank spaces in her mind. The land looked strange to her, not what she would have expected to see. But somehow, with Jasper beside her, it looked right.

  Jasper pointed to a jumble of rocks cascading down a slope toward a wash. The way they were arranged suggested a corpse, with one arm reaching toward a head that had been separated from the rest. Patches of weeds added to the impression, and a yucca stalk jutted out from between some of the bigger stones, suggesting that it had impaled the figure. “It’s called ‘terrorforming,’” he said. “Fear—the fear from the people in the town, people at the fort, travelers passing through, even the Apache—transforms the land. To some extent, I can control it. After tonight, that control will be much greater. Almost without limits.”