Far Bright Star

by Robert Olmstead

  “He would challenge them,” Stableforth said, admiring the Rattler horse.

  “More like he’d fuck ’em,” he said.

  Stableforth repeated this as if a line heard at the theater. He thought it very funny and said so several times. The fool still did not understand the game that was afoot and however much he wanted him to understand, he knew the only lesson that would teach him and the price of that knowledge.

  “Where are those wagons?” Bandy asked him as he rode in, but he did not reply because in Bandy’s voice was the little boy and desperation. He needed Bandy to be a man. In all ways he needed every one of them to be better than they were and he needed to be better than himself.

  “Keep your chin up,” he told the boy. “Be steady.”

  A wind flared up and a dust devil scuttled across the land. Then another. Behind them scattered rifle fire broke out. It was long range and ineffective, but the first time these green men had ever been fired on.

  “Let’s get moving,” he said, his orders given to the horse, and there they would leave behind another fragment of their lives.

  They crossed the railroad tracks, the horses’ shoes clattering on the steel rails and shifting as much weight as possible onto his hindquarters, the Rattler horse plunged over the edge with fore hoofs in the air. It slid and broke a way down the steep, ballast-laden bank. They descended the other side in a small avalanche of stone and scree to the rocky soil below. The other horses sat to arrest their slides and at the bottom paused and found their strength in the crupper. Then they lifted up and scrambled onto their legs and were on the run again.

  In the sky there was developing a violent light. If these men were horses, he thought. If only we were horses. There was a cloud bank to the east and a rolling squall line was coming out of the north and it was in this direction he turned and stretched out the Rattler.

  To the west, brief clouds of dust were beginning to congregate and rise and still the high hot sun was beating on them, tolling them down. The distant riders continued to close and their envelopments continued to cut them off. They were fired upon, but the shots were mere sound and seemed without purpose except to usher them along. In all his soldiering he’d never seen such, or been so fooled. The trap was more elaborate than at first he realized and however he looked at it, he was now convinced he’d been leading them to this encounter: since a day ago, since two days ago, even three, as he bore them in the direction of the coming storm.

  The sky to the west swirled with its rising dust and now seemed strangely luminous. He pulled up and scanning the countryside with the field glasses he searched the likely draws for bushwhackers, for cover, for escape. Clear to see, an enormous weather formation surrounded by copper light was shaping up the valley and there was no way to tell which direction it would blow. Dust motes were catching the distant light and making watery shafts. The light was dense and yellowing and seemed impenetrable. He could feel the Rattler’s sides ticking like a clock under his hand. Whatever was coming was coming fast and whatever it was, it was going to be bad and if it was bad enough it could give them a slim kind of chance and maybe even save them.

  He reined up the Rattler and stood in the stirrups, the nickering horse dancing beneath him and he waved them on.

  Hurry, his mind kept whispering as the blood beat in his temples. The horse was champing at the bit, scattering flecks of foam, wanting the rein. A scribble of lightning etched the sky, milliseconds of stroke, quarter seconds of flash. It was the lightning that went before the storm and each added second of time was filled with consequence. Death was on the flank not a mile away and he was in the quest of lightning.

  “What are you going to do?” Bandy said as he rode in. He spoke as if the situation had little to do with him. But how could he know, being so young and yet to experience an enemy that sincerely wanted to kill him.

  “Something will come to mind,” he reassured the boy.

  “I guess this means we’re going to miss the motion picture tonight,” Bandy said.

  “Yes, son. It looks that way.” He smiled. He could not help himself for how boyish the observation and he thought perhaps something was inside the boy that would serve the troop and in turn deliver him.

  When the others were near he put spurs to his horse, but the Rattler, so mettlesome and aroused, had already taken the rein it wanted.

  By now the horses were rolling their bloodshot eyes and their sides were sunk in and they were gasping for breath, but still they were answering the call, still they were stretching their necks for power and distance, so afraid the Rattler would leave them behind.

  He could hear a peculiar, long-drawn sighing that grew louder. A brief troughing wind sprang up and skifts of sand lifted and blew and died away. At first the sky was yellow with sunlight refracting in the particle dense air and yet it was remarkably windless after the first wind, as if the storm had collected all the wind in the land.

  There was a deep hollow silence he remembered and an eerie green glow in the sky and then explosive thunders boomed and then they boomed again and did not stop, as if armies were fighting in the clouds, and then it burst upon them with thunderclaps of artillery, a nameless storm with inconceivable power.

  At first it was rainless and began slowly to build a thundery dust cloud that seemed to extend for several miles and through this they were caught in the billowing and were soon choking on the gritted and sculling wind. The wind increased and the sand lifted higher and blew cursive serifs that wrapped their bodies and cut their faces. While at first the wind blew against them, now the wind blew through them. They wore their goggles to keep the stinging from their eyes and pulled neckerchiefs to keep their throats clear.

  Inside the storm the world was shoreless and full of nothing. The air was rolling over at the same time it was plunging to earth and rooting up and lifting the loose debris. It was as if the darkness was rising from the depths of the earth and swallowing the mountains and the sky.

  In the storm it seemed as if nothing was real or would ever be real again. There was no time except time immediate. There was no place. They were not where they were and there was no worse danger than they were experiencing. There was no earth and there was no sky. There was no direction; the compass needle, if he could have seen it, would have swirled in his hand. The storm was everything.

  He kept them close together as best he could. It was fundamental. He could not allow them to become separated. The Rattler jerked its head and pricked its ears on high alert. The big stallion reared up to the vertical and settled as if floated to the ground on wings, its ears bent back and its mane hackled. The Rattler was telling him it wanted to run, it needed to run and to let the others follow if they could. He knew if they ran in the storm the Rattler could outrun the others and the horse would save him. In the storm he could disappear. He knew if he only had himself to save this he could do. He knew Extra Billy would make it too. But the rest would become lost and picked off one by one like so many flowers in a bloody garden.

  He let the Rattler horse have its head.

  They rode hard. He touched his spurs to the Rattler horse and the horse lengthened stride and stretched it out and found even more speed. He knew he could outrun their pursuers before they could circle and close again. Time and again he’d known this. At the same time he knew his responsibility lay with his men.

  Don’t think that way, he thought. Service and duty, he thought.

  He made the horse to slacken its speed.

  Their pursuers became the filled-in outlines of men on horses and far off or close he could not tell in the airborne fields of lifted and sheeting earth whose side they were on. The dense veil of sand cut like a razor when it lashed against him. It was an ill wind lifting, dusting and setting grit to fly at ever increasing velocity. It lifted the Rattler’s tail and mane and flattened them like blown over grass. There was a burning smell the wind carried and it filled his nostrils.

  He pulled up and waited for the men to ri
de in. Their hats were torn from their heads and their buttons undone by the wind. Then Extra Billy rode in, ransacked and steadfast, bringing up the rear, ushering in the failing riders. One of his eyes was closed and other was weeping for the dust blown into it.

  Napoleon was shamed to have run to save himself. He was shamed by this man’s ignorant loyalty and the responsibility it conferred. He stepped the Rattler horse to his side as if to talk, but he simply wanted to be close to the man if only for a moment. As he came alongside Extra Billy’s horse, its tail suddenly flickered and snapped and it happened again with a crackle and then the horse’s mane began to light and dance in the air. A jagged spear of light connected them and they were stung and shocked by its viciousness.

  He reached for the Springfield and when he touched the steel he was jolted again by another charge of static electricity. Their dull and lusterless metals began to glow with a bluish white light as if hot cadmium adorned them and in the exchange of current they were flush with radiance.

  Blue sparks began coming off all their metals and stinging them in their hands and arms and causing their teeth to grind. The energy of static electricity made by the scraping motes of sand, unable to ground out, was crackling and hissing and discharging all about them into the dry air and they glowed, and as the others gathered around them, their fields connected and they were all for a time lit this way, blue and white and awed inside the storm.

  9

  HE CALLED FOR THEM to follow and made a nicking sound and the Rattler broke for full gallop, hocks beneath, forehand lightened and body extended. The surge was instant and if he’d not called it up himself it would have left him sitting in the dirt.

  The horse seemed to turn of its own accord into the canyon wall and down a long stony corridor overhung with cliffs. It was a giant space they were entering, but he knew it was not as it appeared. He knew they were being directed and it was by intention they were riding into this place and any slim hope for escape in the storm was gone.

  To his right was a first outcropping of rock and then there was one to the left and behind it were armed men. Then the right wall began to rise and even more abruptly the left wall shot up from the desert floor and the corridor began to narrow. The trail twisted and wound among the rocks with high rock walls necking and rising overhead and seemed a strange, critical entrance into another world. The shadows deepened and joined as they continued into the funnel’s spout, the storm raging down its walls.

  There would be no escape. They continued on into the canyon and the canyon walls closing on them, as if into an hourglass they were blown with the sand by the wind. He knew at the next turn or the next there would be no opening but a wall of stone, and no way out. He looked back with bewilderment into the storm of wind and sand. Where did it go wrong? What should he have seen that he did not see? He was angry with himself. Try as he might he could not have turned the advantage. If he’d attempted to break through they would have been shot to pieces. His only course was to hold off death as long as he could. He set his teeth.

  By now there was not much left in man or horse. He’d held off as long as he could and he could not dwell on possibility any longer. It was time for the coming conclusions. Already the horses were tightening up, their loins and croups stiffening with agony after so extended and fast a trip they’d endured. Soon they would have difficulty moving and stop and collapse, or they would trip, or their legs would buckle and they’d go down, their eyes mystified by the dull hollows of pain.

  Either wall would serve as a strong point, but the west wall would deepen first and shadow the longest. It was tumbled where boulders had fallen from its heights and strewn the desert floor. This was their best advantage. It was also their only one. He made his decision to anchor their thin line at the west wall and extend it out from there. They would hold this way as long as they could and then they would close on the strong point at the west wall and dig in.

  Get closer to the ground, he told himself. Get under the storm.

  He dismounted the Rattler horse while it was still moving and tried to gentle its shivering and trembling chest. Its hide was dark with sweat down to its flanks and withers, its mouth a torrent of white combings.

  There was nothing left in any of the horses. They were blown and jaded and fogged from every ounce of flight wrung from within them. They’d gotten everything out of them they possibly could and truth be told they were broken and they would never be fit again. He commanded the Rattler horse to lie down at the center of his forming line and it did so promptly. The air began to crackle again and he saw a flicker and the flash of a spark and soon they were bathed in the glow of long blue lights again. Then his troopers emerged from a cloud bank of dust, riding knee to knee, and were so close he could hear the drumming of the horses’ lungs and they too were similarly lit in blue, their bodies made luminous and for the briefest moment they were as if firedrakes.

  As the rest staggered in, one after another, rearing and plunging, trails of dust and sand devils catching up with them, he directed them into position. He did not give their green minds an inch of leeway. In one hand he held the Springfield and in the other he held bandoleers of clipped ammunition.

  “Get them down,” he yelled. “Get them down,” and when Turner’s horse would not go down where he directed it, he stepped forward, unholstered his .45, and shot it through the ear.

  “You killed him,” Turner said, his horrified words torn off in the ferocious wind.

  “We kilt these horses two hours ago,” he said.

  His blood was blunt and his voice clear and cold. He commanded Extra Billy to his right and to his left he placed Preston, Stableforth, and Turner in order. He posted Bandy at the wall by a steep declivity with sheltering rocks a short climb away.

  There came a great cracking sound, as if a rifle discharged, and a horse screamed. He whirled on the sound, the Springfield at his shoulder. The gray Preston rode had broken a leg where it stood and fallen to the hard ground. Jagged white bone tore through the animal’s shoulder and stabbed out at the light. Without hesitating, he drew the muzzle of the .45 to the horse’s ear and ended its life.

  “We have some work to do today,” he told them, as if what just happened hadn’t happened at all. “It will require some courage.”

  He felt the heat flow emanating from his belly and a blood thrill traveling his arteries and returning veins. He called down his darker nature and was contemptuous of the awes and terrors of his history.

  Then he told them, “I wouldn’t have no other company for it, not for all the tea in China,” and their spirits soared and they smiled and laughed for how businesslike he’d suddenly become and how much in that moment they loved him and feared him. His eyes caught the look and the smile on the boy’s face, the haunt in his eyes. He turned to Preston and looked into him. By Preston’s own account he’d already killed about one of everything that crawled, walked, slithered, flew, or swam. Except a man. He’d hunted, but he’d never hunted a man or been hunted by one. He knew he was anxious for his chance at distinction. Now it just might come.

  On the ground at his feet the Rattler horse blew big sighs, making the creak of leather. He reached down with his knife blade and cut the horse’s bellyband and it sighed again with the release and stretched and pawed in the dirt. He kneeled down and touched the horse’s shoulder. It was fine and flat and in the Rattler’s eye he could see it knew his touch. This horse’s bones, tendons, blood, muscles, and nervous substance had given him all it had that day and now it lay in the dry crackling dust in blue flame ready to stop bullets for him.

  He opened his tobacco pouch and took a mouthful. His life seemed strange and silent and deathlike to him. He experienced a certain looseness in mind and thought. His earliest memories were of riding in the saddle in front of his mother. His grandfather had fought in old Mexico with Thomas Jackson and so too his father and now it would kill him and these men with him and this fine horse that lay at his feet.

  He th
ought, It will require courage to die, and launched a brown smear of tobacco juice into the sand in response to his own thinking.

  After the storm came a deep suspended silence and the dust it raised softened the horizon.

  The day’s protracted light was diminishing. The east wall painted red and gold and the west wall deepened in shadow. Present time was fading. Soon it would be dark and darkness would favor them. This day’s distance did not amount to much in actual miles, but they’d been turned so many times he’d lost track of their immediate location. He wondered if there was a possible conclusion without consequence, a conclusion without truth or meaning. He didn’t try to answer his wondering questions.

  The weaving channels of dust blew away, the light wavered and behind it, somewhere, the orient sun was a ball of fire burning out the western sky and in the distance before him there were riders and they were coming out of that slant sunlight.

  10

  HE TOOK THEM to be a stray band of Villistas, soldaderas, broken and maimed Dorados, the shock cavalry who charged willingly and with such elan at the battles of Celaya and Agua Prieta and were mowed down by the Maxims and thrown onto the barbed-wire entanglements where they experienced slow and potting deaths.

  Of the men and women, the women were always the hardest of the band. They knew what the men knew but they also knew what the men would never know. They knew hard work and hunger, but they also knew childbirth and they knew the death of those children. They knew rape and the death of their men. They knew hatred and no one returns hate like a woman.