The woman smiles and imitates her gesture and sound.
Ivy nods. “I won’t tell anyone where you are. Not that I would know. You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
The woman squeezes her shoulder and steps back.
“Thank you.” Ivy gestures to her wrapped wounds, then Chucklehead and Elsewhere, then back to the woman. “Thank you for saving us.”
The woman smiles and nods.
The old man who saddled Elsewhere steps forward to give her a leg up and she scrambles painfully into the broad saddle, her legs aching, her bruised right shin burning. Although her tattered skirts allow for the ride without too much difficulty, she discovers another trouble when she looks down to see the stirrups are at least six inches too long.
The young man shortens them for her, hands her Elsewhere’s reins, and the three of them turn away with a final thanks. In an unmoving hush to match the prairie stretching endlessly around them, the family watches her go.
It takes Ivy only seconds to realize she might have been more thoughtful of the horse before abandoning their rescuers. She and Elsewhere are not the only ones injured. Chucklehead limps on both a fore and hind. Though his head is up, his ears lie back, tense with hidden discomforts.
She should get down and walk. Ground below, so much farther than on Luck, mocks her. If she dismounts, she will never get back up in her present condition. Can she walk at all?
“I’m sorry.” She strokes his mane, leaning awkwardly forward, feeling her legs are spread at right angles, so uncomfortable and unnatural is the posture.
He turns his head left, but she keeps him moving north, the sun to their right. Elsewhere limps along at their flank, eyes half-closed. Both animals appear leaner than they did in Silver City, their coats harsh, steps slow.
After half an hour, Chucklehead moves more easily, having worked off some of the stiffness. Still looking west. He might be game for a jog, yet she feels sure the motion would kill her, even if it did him no harm.
Gingerly holding her wounded side, focused on continuing to breathe and remain conscious and on the rocking saddle with her acrobat legs, Ivy squints across the horizon in all directions.
She must have been with those people ... how long? Two or three days? And no one came for her? Did they look about the gorge the next day, then start back to Santa Fé when they could not find her? Did they find a settlement or ranch to stop over and recover from their own injuries? Sam and Grip may have avoided the wave, so high on the wall as it broke. But Melchior and Luck? What happened to them? Was Sam pulled in by Luck? Is the whole company scattered? Grip the only one who made it out? None of them? Where are they now?
She sees no sign of gorge or flood or river. Only a vast plain with hills at some distance, mountains far beyond. Country like that of the horse ranch where she lived with Aunt Abigail and Uncle Charles for nearly a year.
Fear tingles down her spine, settling in her gut like a mass of snakes. They could be gone. All of them. By drowning or injury or risers. Even if they are fine, they may be anywhere by now. They could be searching the countryside for her. She could have been laid up longer than she realizes and them back to Santa Fé. Regardless, all she has is going north. All she can say for certain in this open maze of wilderness is Santa Fé remains north of her current location.
If only the stubborn stallion did not fight her.
Not the same, out here alone. Never the same. A great, empty land with nothing but snakes and wolves and risers, a blazing sun, nothing to eat or drink. Perhaps a few starving Indians who talk like birds.
Ivy pulls Chucklehead’s bit. He twists his ears back, looking left.
She shifts painfully to check the way they came. Stick house gone. The family gone. Every horizon seems cut from matching molds. Every direction terrifyingly similar. Terrifyingly vast. She catches her breath, closing stinging eyes.
Chucklehead turns. Again, she draws up reins, heart hammering. He lashes his tail and arches his neck, back tense.
Hands trembling, Ivy eases forward to stroke his mane. She looks west, following his gaze, then down at him as his ears prick, his back to the sun. Not that way, of all directions....
But she takes a deep breath, lets reins slip far through her fingers, and says, “You always return, right? Find him.”
Thirty-Seventh
A Death-Dealing Country
As they cross the blazing prairie, Ivy repeatedly resists turning the horses—miles sliding away, no help or habitation coming into sight. Instead, she clings to the heaving saddle, stomach in knots, the covered wound on her side burning.
As they cross the blazing prairie, Ivy resists turning the horses—miles sliding away, no help or habitation coming into sight. Instead, she clings to the heaving saddle, stomach in knots, the covered wound on her side burning.
The three of them travel through midday, cutting a steady line across a vast, rocky range of scrub and slight hills, few trees and distant mountains. How can everything feel so dry again so quickly? Without a cloud in the sky, Ivy feels as if blazing air draws moisture from her with every inch she passes through. Sweat soaks skin and clothes, trickling down her back, irritating her wounds, running into her eyes, into her stockings. Her parched tongue throbs along with her wounds, her eyes sting, her exposed face and hands feel as if they are on fire.
The horses run with sweat, streaking their necks, their flanks, sliding down their legs, as the sun swings above.
Black birds ahead in the sky, circling. Waiting for us, Ivy thinks, but she must close her eyes against light. Do vultures try to eat risers? According to her father, there is nothing to distinguish a riser from a dead man. Besides the fact that the riser is up walking around.
Circle, circle, immense black wings. If not risers, something else. Or someone? The sight gives her something to go on, slight confidence for the first time in her decision to let the horse choose their path.
An animal moves nearby, small and quick. Ivy looks about to see a tiny bird vanish underground. A prairie dog tunnel taken over by a burrowing owl. Aunt Abigail used to tell her about the creatures who roam this desert plain—while Ivy silently wondered why any human or animal would want to roam it. Now the sight of the miniature owl makes her wish for her gun back. Maybe prairie dogs as well. Maybe weasels, a badger, a desert cottontail.
Chucklehead stops. Elsewhere walks up beside the stallion before his eyes open and he snorts, lifting his head. Ivy blinks. All three are motionless, gazing out to the deep gorge running ahead.
“You brought us back?” Ivy’s voice is a whisper, her lungs and throat and mouth parched as her skin runs with sweat.
The gorge is shaded as afternoon sun lowers to the west, the bottom dark and moist in places, though mostly the ground is cracked and littered with debris—sticks and rocks out of place, bits of bodies not yet cleaned up by carrion beasts: from a whole dead cottonmouth, to the head of a rock squirrel, to tufts of gray and gold fur which might come from a coyote. Bones also lie about the gorge. The smell of rot makes both horses toss their heads and finally shy away.
Ivy squints in all directions. Chucklehead turns off, starting north along the eastern side of the gorge, ears again pricked as he looks ahead.
Black birds, circle, glide, never a beat of the wings.
Small creatures move and clamber below them, out of sight as they go, hunting for leftovers. Elsewhere shies from the edge and pulls them to a less rancid distance. Chucklehead marches on north, apparently intent on something far away. Watching his ears, Ivy wonders if he purposely follows the birds.
Pain and heat wracking her body, thirst and hunger making her lightheaded, Ivy finally sees, still ahead, a dark lump by the edge of the gorge. Here is what the vultures covet. She tries, with trembling arms, to rein Chucklehead in. He ignores her, never altering his pace. He does not even flick one ear back in acknowledgment.
Near now, sun halfway down the sky, Ivy squints toward the dark mound. It makes no sense: a gray blob, pe
rhaps a few feet high, like an impossibly smooth rock. A ... blanket? A blanket across a rock? No sense. Her eyes have not been right since the water hit her. She has no sungoggles and the sun blazes against the left side of her face like the gates of Hades have opened across that gorge.
If a blanket on a rock is impossible, what is it? Crunch of hooves seems to beat extra loud in her ears as she struggles to listen.
Painfully aware of her weaponless state as much as her own wounds, Ivy tries to sit up in the saddle, shielding her face with a hand as they close to twenty yards, below a dozen circling vultures.
“Hello?” A tremble in her gasping voice. She clears her throat and calls again, “Hello?”
After a pause, the heap shifts.
Both horses jump, then stand half-turned, ready to bolt.
“Easy,” Ivy says, heart pounding. Risers do not sit under blankets. “Who’s there?” Hoping panic does not come through in her voice.
A fold of wool is tossed from the dusty ground. Someone looks up at them from his seat on dirt. He lifts both hands to his eyes, cupping his fingers about his face, squinting against the sudden blaze of sun and burning golden landscape.
“Ivy?”
At the sound of the voice, Ivy lets out her held breath in a rush. Chucklehead tosses his head and starts forward, Elsewhere limping after.
“Melchior.” Ivy sags in the saddle, clutching the horn for support. “What are you still doing here? Where are the others?”
He squints up at them as Chucklehead steps to him, dropping his head to sniff Melchior’s face. Apparently dazed, Melchior reaches to stroke the stallion’s black nose. He does not look at Ivy again, but shudders, leaning away as Chucklehead’s hot breath blows against his swollen brow.
Melchior’s hair is matted with blood. His blue bandana and shirt across his shoulders are also stiff with blood, a black, red, dirt-caked trail running down his ears and neck. He wears no hat, but sits with his fire-shooter and Sam’s rifle across his lap and his wool blanket, dry and crusted in dirt, still draped about him.
“What happened?”
He will not look at her, but presses a black palm to his forehead as if faint, or trying to dispel a nightmare.
“Melchior?” Just as frightened now as when the mound moved, Ivy forces her off foot from the stirrup and, with agonizing slowness, inches her knee over the cantle and dismounts.
She clutches the stirrup for balance, shaking so violently she must lower herself with this assistance to her knees. When she looks down, she finds not only sweat, but fresh blood from her reopened side wound leaks through her dress.
On her knees, she inches around Chucklehead’s forefeet until she is beside her cousin.
“What happened to you?” she asks again, panting, wiping sweat from her eyes with her sleeve.
He looks through her, eyes seeming to focus on a horizon miles away rather than the face inches from his.
“Ivy,” he says. “Can’t ... stay awake. Since the flood.”
“You what?”
He turns his face away but she catches his chin and looks into his eyes as she has seen her father do. His pupils are widely dilated, one so full it turns the blue iris into an outline O, the other as much as might be expected if he were in a dim room.
“God,” Ivy whispers, releasing him. “Where are Sam and Grip? We must find them.”
“Looking,” he says, bowing his head and shielding his eyes with both hands. “Looking and looking—all the way up the barranca—walking. Not a sign. Thought you were dead—and him.”
“You walked all the way up here alone?”
“Walking and walking....” He sways. “Damnation.” Gritting his teeth, he clutches his head.
“Right,” Ivy says, fighting for each breath. Not supposed to be like this. Finding them, any of them, was supposed to be better, not worse. “Right.” Breathe. “You have a concussion. We need somewhere safe for the night. There are hills north that the gorge runs into. Where the flood must have come from. We can get there before dark and will ... find water. Right? How do we find water that’s not poisoned with carrion?”
He remains hunched over, holding his head, murmuring, “Walked and walked. Fire and ... Jesus Christ. She send you back?”
“She?”
“Why’d they send you back alone?”
Shuddering, Ivy grabs his arm, trying to pull both of them upright. “We will go on to the hills. Find water. Find Sam and Grip.”
“Shouldn’t’ve sent you back.”
“You’re hallucinating, Melchior. Dehydrated, in the sun for days. Focus on Chucklehead, all right? He found you. He brought me here. I don’t know how, but he knew where you were.”
“Everything’s checked out in there,” Melchior says hoarsely.
“We are going to find help. Get up. Hold onto the saddle.”
“Not in there. Scrawny bodies....”
“That is not where we are looking for them.”
It seems to take an hour to get them both back on their feet, Chucklehead’s stirrups lengthened, and Melchior in the saddle. Ivy shoves the rifle into the sheath on Elsewhere’s saddle, throws the bedroll up with Melchior, and ties the fire-shooter behind.
She starts out on foot, leading both horses, Melchior talking to himself as he hunches over Chucklehead’s neck, holding his bloody head.
Clutching Elsewhere’s neck for a crutch, Ivy manages no more than fifty yards before her spinning head and shooting pain from limbs and side drops her to her knees. Blood mingles with sweat to mat her chemise and dress against her skin. The sun seems to twirl over her, blinding, so close she could reach out to touch it.
She vomits on the rocky ground beside Elsewhere’s still hooves, though only bile comes up. Leaning against his sweat-soaked foreleg, she gasps and spits and tries to get in a deep breath. The bay does not move as Ivy drags herself back up to his shoulder with the stirrup.
“I am so sorry,” she says, gripping his crest. “I know you’re hurt.” She lowers the stirrup as far as it will go so she can reach it with her left boot, then heaves her shaking body into the saddle. Another age seems to pass as she fights herself into place on the motionless gelding.
At last, she leans forward, clumsily stroking his mane. “Walk on, Elsewhere. That’s it.”
They are still riding, both hunched over their mounts’ withers, moving at a limping pace suited to broken down nags, when the bottom edge of the sun touches the horizon. The hills appear alarmingly distant, Melchior’s silences making her as uncomfortable as his unintelligible mutterings, as Ivy notes the vultures are still overhead. Somehow, more than her own pain, her cousin’s condition, or the horses’ long-suffering toil, Ivy finds this realization most disturbing.
Sunlight wavers, orange and gold, across the edge of the world behind the gorge they still trail beside. Heat waves ripple across stark country. A crow flutters up from the gorge. The horses hardly look around. A hawk or eagle calls from the east. A black-footed ferret watches them almost invisibly below a clump of sagebrush.
All of these creatures need water. Ivy closes her eyes. They have always had water, always rationed water and been careful with their bottles. In the mountains around Santa Fé all spring there was plenty of water: streams, creeks, small waterfalls cascading through looming pines to crystal clear pools below. Coming to Silver City, the coach stocked barrels of water rationed to both horses and humans, refilled from the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque.
How did the Indians have water? She thought them desperate, starving to death, but they had water.
Ivy opens her eyes to discover twilight’s purple haze clouding her sun-scorched sight. The land looms vast and unmoved, a golden brown landscape of death without one thing about it that does not seek to kill and consume all those who enter.
Beside her, Chucklehead throws up his dark head and neighs a long, piercing note which makes Ivy jump. Scarcely has he finished when a distant horse’s voice answers with a light, thready call.
>
Ivy rubs her eyes, squinting, breathing fast.
Two riders canter toward them from the north.
Thirty-Eighth
Snakes and Bones
Ivy would cry at the sight of Sam and Grip jumping from their mounts, but she feels dry as an old snake skin. She only sits, vision blurred, silent, as Sam asks what happened to them, looking from Melchior’s bloody head to Ivy’s yellow dress, turned rust and black.
Grip reaches his left arm up to her. “Climb off before you fall. How did you all manage to keep together?”
“We did not,” Ivy mumbles, her tongue feeling twice its normal size. She holds his arm and the saddle horn, sinking to earth beside him.
“Where’d you go?” Melchior asks Sam as the latter also reaches up, trying to get Melchior down. His voice is so thick and slurred Ivy can hardly understand him.
“He has a concussion, Sam,” Ivy pants, leaning her weight on Grip as her knees buckle, pain sending white lights popping behind her lids. “And no water for ... I don’t know how long. He should lie down. He should not be moving at all.”
“We’ll make camp,” Grip says.
“Were you caught in the flood? What happened?” She opens her eyes to see Sam helping Melchior from his saddle.
“Only your mare. Got the four of us clear after a fight, then couldn’t find any of you.”
Ivy can hardly hear Grip.
Sam’s left arm is bound close to his body with linen gauze, his right around Melchior’s waist, then shoulders as Melchior dismounts like a drunk. Melchior hugs him, bloody face against Sam’s shoulder, one hand across his back, the other in his hair.
“Looked and looked for you. Walking—couldn’t stay awake—sorry.”
“We were held up—” Sam’s voice is a painful gasp as Melchior crushes the wrapped arm between the two of them.
“Walked and walked—”
“It is all right, Mel. You found us.”
Melchior will not let him go, mumbling against Sam’s shoulder. Sam hugs him with his right arm, though his teeth are clenched, his face bloodless in fading light.
Lightfall Three: Luck, Lost, Lady (Lightfall, Book 3) Page 2
