Clara lay motionless, her bound hands out before her and her fingers clasped in a prayer, the red-and-white bandanas still binding her mouth and eyes. Raif could hear her quiet sobs. He didn’t reveal to her what had happened but moved her roughly with his hands, trying to mimic the renegade so she wouldn’t cry out. He feared if she saw it was him she’d let loose with a wail. He grabbed the renegade by the hair and dragged him across the river into thick brush where he scalped him, stuffing the pelt into his shirt; he then cut off his ears and gouged out his eyes, tossing the parts into the river. He took the reins of the renegade’s pony and waited to see if he needed to stab it to keep it from bolting but it stood their docile with no concern for its former owner. He put Clara back in the saddle and led the horse and girl down the river toward the rock outcroppings.
When he reached where the river paralleled the outcroppings he took her down from the saddle, tied the pony to a tree, and moved her into the company’s position in the outcropping. The North County men stared in silence as Raif, cradling the naked niece in his arms, approached from the tree line.
Caleb grabbed a blanket and placed it over her shoulders, wrapping her in the fabric like a funeral sheath. Gabriel cupped his hand over her mouth where the red bandana was still taut about her mouth and removed the white cloth from her eyes. She was wild-eyed, scanning the faces about her as if her eyes had no common purpose but each one fell hither and there upon the different men. She began to cry, a low sobbing as if the pain bubbled up from somewhere deep in water.
Jed looked at Gabriel and saw his eyes were a black, lifeless wild. He looked at Raif and his left eye twitched, its gaze wandering off on some unknown path on a tangent of its own design. Jed muttered to Abner, “Well, this is gonna be one interesting fight.”
Gabriel warned her not to yell and took the gag from her mouth. He held her briefly and shifted her to a place underneath one of the rocks that had a shelf of stone and then told her, “Keep still. No matter what happens stay beneath this rock until someone comes for you after the shooting stops.” Gabriel asked her if May was still alive and she nodded. He said there were no guarantees in the coming dogfight of who’d be there to fetch her and he handed her a pistol. Gabriel pulled her once more tight to his chest and pushed her back under the shade of the rock, saying only, “If it ain’t one of us, you need to take that pistol to yourself.” She nodded again and said, “Nanna said you’d save us.”
Raif, Gabriel, and the colonel split up and took positions separated from each other by thirty feet across the hundred-foot front of stone outcroppings; the massive rocks dropped like pebbles along the valley floor by a glacier thirty millennia before the birth of man. Abner, Jed, Caleb, Wesley, and Joe formed the five-man reserve. Upon the colonel’s whistle the reserve would either go to Raif, Gabriel, or the colonel’s position, depending on the enemy’s action. The colonel would reckon during the fight which position was most vulnerable. Eight men grew exponentially to have the firepower of eighteen using this tactic. The concentration of fire at the vulnerable pressure points would blunt the enemy’s tactics of racing in one at a time trying to gain the glory of close combat.
Seth and Toby stewed in the ravine watching the horses. The renegades would shoot and scatter the horses if they spotted them, to strand the company. The renegades would then circle about them on the sides of the valley and kill or starve them out if necessary. If the numbers were too great, the company would need to ride for it. Seth and Toby seethed but recognized the orders were rational and to be followed.
The White Lion’s army descended down the pass, and Miguel ran to the stone temple, his steps falling in patters as the heat and fatigue crippled his senses. He stood in a daze as a hunting party of twenty horsemen ran headlong into him and circled him about the desert floor, whooping their terrible cries and staring down at him with their fierce painted faces. A warrior dismounted and raised his blade, but the child cried out that the White Lion was in danger. Miguel told them of the ten whites who had slaughtered the Germans, and that the priest had sent him to warn the Lion. The painted warrior heard it was only ten and rode hard for the fourth valley, sending one horseman to take the child to the temple and then ride to the lake and summon another fifty warriors.
At the top of the valley, the Lion sat high in the saddle with May. She was his prize. He knew the moment he looked into her eyes by the fireplace in the ranch house. His father had been a prince of his nation when they ruled the lands to the north of the Crossing, and, as an old chief, he had taken a dead settler’s pilgrim daughter as his third wife. His mother had taught him many things, to speak the tongue of the invader, to read from the black book of old warriors and prophets. She had died of the fever on the Path of Blood to the south when he was seven, but he remembered the gentleness of her touch upon him. She never beat him as the other mothers did their sons. She had taught him her language because she wanted him to recite the useless prayers to the invisible god, but that magic never worked. The priest had shown him the power of the fire gods, the secrets of the flames, the power that burned in this world. When he had returned from the raid with the pelt of a white lion years before, the priest had told him it was an omen and that it was time for the ritual of the flames and his purification as Leon Sagrada.
As he descended down to the valley, he looked over the horse and cattle, and he was pleased with it. He had not seen Bird for two hours, but he considered it impossible for Bird to be taken without a warning shot. He was called Bird because of his sight; he could see in the dark like an owl and in the day like a hawk. The Lion thought of the girl upon Bird’s horse and of Bird’s weakness, a gnawing anxiety growing in his chest, but his nearness to the lake eased his mind. He looked about him at the youthful faces of his warriors and realized he had lost too many of the tested. The northern raid had been too costly; it would take two winters before those around him would season into warriors, but they had done well, and the raid is what the priest wanted. The herd of stolen cattle and horses meandered with the warriors in its midst in a slow rambling down the valley floor, each warrior nearly asleep on his pony, their horses knowing the way south.
In this dreamy state, the warriors drew nearer the company secreted in the midst of the rock outcroppings.
Wesley, Jed, and Abner crawled in the brush to the cannons and lit the fuses, and a horrid breath of fire, rock, and nail swarmed out upon the renegades. The roar of the cannons engulfed the valley. The cattle reared left and right, and the horses bolted upright, throwing riders into the paths of the steers, the chaos destroying the war party’s ability to execute collective action. The few older warriors bade the young forward, knowing that to defeat cannon one had to rush past its maws and into the ranks of those who lit the fuses. Those who survived the initial volley rushed into the cloud of dust and smoke thrown up by the blasts of the cannon only to be met by muzzle flashes in the chaos. The dust and smoke concealed the numbers of the company, and the older warriors feared they had run into an entire cavalry troop. On they pressed, launching their short arrows into the dust cloud, screaming, drawing knives, and rushing into the smoke, only to be cut down by pistol and rifle, the enemy hidden and cagey, firing with rapid succession and en masse. The young warriors fell like corn, dying without knowledge of what was killing them.
The White Lion reeled upon his white mare and spurred her to the far western side, searching for a path past the rock outcroppings, knowing that the strong position was where the unseen enemy was striking. He needed to reach the lake. He galloped past the stone outcroppings and he wended his way down the valley and came upon the twenty warriors riding to the north to join the fight. He told them of the enemy’s positions in the stone outcropping and bade them to attack from the south as he fled away across the cracked and bleached seashells of the alluvial plain toward the stone temple.
As the White Lion’s army was being annihilated, it braved one last charge at the company. Raif stood to the side of the boulder and watche
d three warriors bolt from out of the dust clouds before him. Two were to either side of a third warrior who was astride a blue roan. The once wild pony’s skin was striated with corn marks, and the color of the old wounds ran black against the gray of its hide. Raif’s pistols were empty and he raised from its scabbard the cavalry sword and with his left hand drew from his belt the twisted horn. The wicked rasp of an arrow sliced past his head, and he swore that he felt the feathers of its fletching prickle his ear. Above the din, he could hear the colonel’s whistle, but he knew the reserve of gunmen would not reach his position in time. He knew that rider of the blue roan would be upon him and that he was once again alone.
Raif did not move but stayed square and drove his blade into the roan’s shoulder joint. The steel raced through the flesh until its tip lodged in the scapula. The horse and rider cascaded into him, and the warrior flew over the roan’s head and dove upon Raif with his eyes ablaze with bloodlust. The warrior gripped the shaft of an arrow in his right hand and stabbed, embedding the thousand-year-old flint arrowhead into Raif’s shoulder. The two rolled as one back upon the earth. The other two warriors moved to finish him, but Raif’s collapse cleared the shot and Wesley and Joe poured fire upon the two, killing them in a hail of bullets. Raif flipped the warrior over and rose up, straddling the rider of the blue roan between his knees, and he drove the length of the twisted horn into the warrior’s right eye.
Jed rushed over and grabbed Raif. He pulled him behind the boulder as Abner sprayed the dead with buckshot. He gripped the arrow and broke off half the shaft. He cursed at Raif and said, “Lord knows it wouldn’t hurt to have gotten your sorry ass behind that rock with that pony com’n.”
“Well, I was hoping the Lord was done toy’n with me, but I reckon he ain’t.”
Jed shook his head and said, “Why would the Almighty? Watch’n your silly shit never gets old.”
The colonel surveyed his ranks and saw Raif with an arrow sticking out of his shoulder and Abner with a broken shaft sticking out above his knee. Caleb and Joe bled from wounds about the forehead as the two had dragged a warrior to the ground, the warrior slashing furiously with a knife before Caleb put a barrel to his ribs and shattered his innards. The colonel was about to order the reserve to Raif’s position when he turned and saw the twenty riders coming hard from the south. He sent Joe to Toby and Seth’s position to gather up the last of the ammunition. He didn’t think they had enough, and he knew it would be hand-to-hand before the day was out. His last thought was that there were too many and they were depleted now by their wounds. It would be a dogfight among the outcroppings and the Lion was close to home; there would be reserves committed before the day was done. The colonel believed they were finished, and he sent Joe to run to the boys.
Joe reached the boys and grabbed the last bandoliers from the two pack horses and said, “There’s a raiding party from the south. They gonna be on us. Colonel says for you two to follow the river and ride north up the valley and head to the fort and don’t stop for noth’n. Now, git going.” Joe bolted back to the company’s position with the bandoliers slung over his shoulders.
Seth and Toby mounted up and reined the horses to ride up the creek north but looked at one another.
Toby said, “That ain’t the play and the colonel knows it.”
Seth, “Yeah. I reckon he’s gett’n us mov’n ’cause he thinks they maybe ain’t got enough to stop ’em.”
“You know the play, Gabriel run us through it a hundred times. It be hammer and anvil—the horse the hammer; the infantry the anvil. We head south until we at the last of the cover and we lay low, when they ride past we come out behind ’em and drop ’em in the back as they go’n into the charge,” Toby drawled.
The boys rode slowly south in the creek bed until the foliage and thick brush gaps grew too much. They held the horses in the stream with the hooves still in the water and moved to a position under the bows of a low brush near the bank and looked out upon the plain. The war party’s shields played with the light of the day. The numbers were many and they rode at a steady trot up the valley floor across a meadow of scrub grass. The tribesmen rode past their position, and they counted maybe a score, mounted on painted ponies, adorned in a hundred different colors, flashings of light echoing about the trinkets, stones, and flakes of gold set upon their shields and chest pieces, and braided in their hair. The renegades began to increase the pace; Seth and Toby heard a great cry arise from their ranks, and they began to charge.
Seth turned to Toby and said, “Gabriel didn’t tell us one thing.”
“The hammer’d be scared shitless.”
Seth responded, “I reckon.”
The war party’s charge pulsed tremors through the ground, and the water in the river rippled, the ground pulsing under their boots with the weight of the war party’s hooves upon the earth.
Toby said, “I reckon now’s the time—hard out, hard left behind ’em; wait ’til the shoot’n starts and then start plugg’n in the back, I got the right out and in the turn.”
“I reckon,” Seth responded.
The two boys mounted their stallions and broke from the riverbank out onto the valley floor. They rode straight out hard and then reined a hard left separating by thirty feet and galloped after the war party riding ahead of them. They followed until they heard the company commence firing and heard the colonel’s whistle. Toby wished the main party knew they were coming, a wave of fear cutting through the boys that they’d be dropped by an errant shot from the anvil, but on they rode, and he reckoned the colonel knew they was coming.
As they gained on the war party, they began emptying their pistols into the backs of the warriors. The boys rode with the reins in their teeth and emptied the first of two pistols and then grabbed two more that hung from string cords about their riding coats.
To Toby, it was all a slow-moving dream, as if the whole world had stopped spinning and time stretched before him on a path of his choosing so that he was living in this moment and the eternal clock of time was not running against him. He selected each mark with minute detail, a warrior with the shape of a V painted down his back, the axis running from his shoulders down to the point that converged in the center of his lower back above the crack of his ass. He placed his round dead center of the V. The warrior fell to the horse’s shoulder and slipped from his pony to be trucked under its legs, animal and man disappearing in a twist of limbs and dust.
The next warrior wore a chain of feathers and beads that adorned his front, but the wind of the ride had sent it awkwardly over his left shoulder. The beads slacked down his back in an emerald chain dazzled in places with long white feathers. Toby selected a single green glinting stone and swore he hit it with his shot. The warrior bolted upright and let loose with a great yell, reining his horse in a short stop, slipping off the horses as its ass reared up. Toby rode past and put the second shot into the warrior’s face as he turned to see what had lanced his back, the round chiseling in between the end of the white stripes painted symmetrically on both cheeks. He emptied his third pistol and then his fourth, the last was a boy no more than thirteen, and as Toby came alongside him, the boy looked over at him expecting a fellow warrior only to be dropped from his horse with startled eyes as the round entered his sternum. Toby shot again at a second warrior he came abreast of; this time the round slammed into that hard skin that sits between the tufts of the eyebrows.
He reined up at the rock outcropping staring down at his father, his four pistols spent and smoking, hanging from the cords lashed to his riding jacket. He did not recall missing with a single shot. He looked over and feared Seth was dead but he was only falling with his horse to the ground. Seth’s stallion had taken an arrow through its side. piercing its heart, and it collapsed in the dust.
Seth looked up at Toby and yelled, “Weren’t that the craziest shit!”
The colonel grabbed Ulysses and spun Toby and horse around and faced him south down the valley, yelling, “Look yonder, T
oby! See that sumbitch on the plain? He’s got May.” Toby looked off in the distance and could see the dust trail of a solitary horse kicking up about a mile off down the valley.
“I see him, sir.”
“Ride that sumbitch down and kill him and bring May back. Ride him down, you hear me, boy?”
“You shoot that son-of-bitch and don’t let him chant. Cut off his ears and carve out his eyes,” Raif said.
Gabriel rushed over. “Toby, that mare is spent, you got to ride him down, his horse’ll break ’fore yours, kill him from the saddle, don’t scrap with him, kill him with the rifle.”
Toby bolted away but the ride was tough, weaving through the valley floor that was dotted with boulders and scrub branches. He looked out and fretted that he wasn’t making up time on the Lion. He left the valley and out onto the hard calcareous shale of the plain. He got his toes into the stirrups and raised himself knee-high onto the shoulders of Ulysses. He put his hands together over the pommel and made himself small against the wind and spurred the stallion, yelling, “See ’em, boy? See ’em? We got to catch him! Now go, boy, go.”
Ulysses could feel the new position and the grip of his hooves on the hard pack, and it pleased the horse, and he began to run wild and hard.
Toby galloped across the hardpan and could see the White Lion’s mare was running awkward; the weight of the Lion and the girl mixed with the horse’s exhaustion, manifesting in the animal’s humping gait.
As Ulysses caught sight of the white mare, the racing instinct took hold. Ulysses stepped up his speed to catch the lead horse, and Toby felt his true speed for the first time. Toby was up on his toes now, and the horse and boy were one, the horse oblivious that a rider was upon him, the rhythm of their movements now a single vicious animal. The gap closed, and Toby could see the shape of the bowler hat. He was still a good distance from the southern hill. He didn’t know if he could close the gap before they reached the hills, so he drew his rifle from the scabbard, and at a full gallop aimed for the bowler hat, its blackness standing out starkly against the shaded brown sand of the stone rise beyond. He aimed high so as not to hit May, and his shot sent the bowler spinning from the White Lion’s head.
Angels of North County Page 25
