“Hell of a thing that Yankee-hating captain did,” whispered Jonesy as they paused for a respite. “Sending me off up here, not caring if I come back.”
“Where you’re from don’t have nothin’ to do with it,” Sam whispered back. “I’ve lived my whole life in Texas.”
“Then why’s he keep picking me? First that landslide canyon and now this.”
Sam was getting annoyed; there were more important things to worry about. Parting the vegetation at his face, he futilely tried to peer ahead. “Thought you’d be glad to have somethin’ new to tell.”
“Oh, my Mary Jane’s going to be enthralled, all right, hearing all my experiences.”
As he voiced his sweetheart’s name, Jonesy’s voice rose in excitement. But Sam had no sweetheart, and he sank inside before cautioning the New Jersey native to silence and pushing on.
For days, Sam had thought he would never be warm again. But as he struggled higher for agonizing minutes—his throat burning from furiously inhaling the cold, thin air—exertion succeeded where even a campfire had failed. He paused to unbutton his coat, and as Jonesy stopped alongside, Sam heard shuffling ahead.
Sam alerted Jonesy with a gesture toward the ravine’s head. The sound died away, but Sam waited patiently, knowing he hadn’t been mistaken. Then it came again, and he quietly separated the slender sotol leaves before him and saw movement through the brush. It was only twenty yards away, a dark form stirring against bright sky, but the intervening growth was too dense to give up its secrets. As Sam craned left and right, however, he finally pieced together his glimpses.
“What is it?” Jonesy whispered.
Not wanting to risk even a quiet exchange, Sam patted his hip as if whipping a horse. Sure enough, in the last clump of piñons at gully’s head stood a staked bay.
Sam wormed forward, a scared man who had to learn more. Never had the rasp of brush across his hat seemed so loud, or the grate of forearms and belly against rubble been so jarring to his ear. Considering a horse’s sense of smell, he was thankful that he and Jonesy approached from downwind. But just as Sam advanced to within several yards of the bay, the animal raised its nose and curled back its upper lip, a sure sign that it had detected them.
Sam froze. Now that he was closer, he could see the horse framed against a sky so low that the bay had to be just below the crest. The ravine was relatively shallow here, its undergrowth hiding between limestone bluffs three or four feet high. Motioning for Jonesy to check left, Sam crawled to the ice-glazed bank on the right, knowing that the Mescalero trail summited beyond.
Removing his hat, he peered out. He squinted to the sparkle of the sun against snow, but twenty yards away he distinguished a lone figure, squatting just off the bare crest on a rock shelf overlooking the trail below. The Apache lookout adjusted a woolen blanket about his shoulders as a stiff wind set the eagle feathers in his war cap dancing.
Sam quickly dropped behind cover. There had been a single-arc bow and feathered arrows, a war club and a bone-handled knife, a metal-tipped lance and a glinting rifle—implements of death that had taken so much from him.
Sam sat back against the icy limestone and gripped his Winchester so tightly that it quaked. His temples pounded as a great rage surged through him. Here at last was what he had sought for months, and all he needed to do now was slide the barrel of the carbine over the bank and squeeze the trigger. He wanted to watch the filthy animal flop in the snow. He wanted to see the murdering devil jerk to slug after .44 slug.
Then Sam remembered Franks’s counsel, and he knew that greater vengeance lay ahead if he and Jonesy could dispatch the lookout without gunfire.
The mountainside on the opposite side of the ravine must have been clear, judging by Jonesy’s unchanged demeanor as he withdrew from the far bank. But Sam’s bearing must have revealed plenty, for Jonesy’s face went white as soon as the northerner turned. In case the ranger had any doubts, Sam held up one finger and motioned over his shoulder.
From here, Sam knew he would have no chance to rush the lookout unawares. But he had a plan, and by gesture and by mouthed words, he conveyed it to Jonesy and then started alone for the ravine’s head.
He worried most about the reaction of the horse, which had turned and pointed its ears toward him. But the bay stayed calm even as Sam quietly broke through a final goldeneye bush and came up before its forelegs, which framed the gentle swell of a summit ridge that was bare except for snow. Beyond, only thirty or forty feet distant, the world abruptly fell away—the half-mile cliff Franks had described.
But it was what grew at Sam’s right that seized his attention. Here at the head of the ravine, he lay in the shade of one last piñon, its wind-twisted limbs hovering over a smaller piñon with gray-green growths that he knew as old-man’s beard. Through it, thirty-five feet down and away, he could make out the Apache.
Sam rose to a crouch and drew his knife. It seemed strangely heavy, and he tilted it one way and then another, watching a ray of sunlight play in the blade. He rasped his thumb across the sharp edge and the weapon shook in his grip. The whetstone in his war bag had done its job, but there had been nothing with which to hone Sam’s courage.
Then he remembered why he was here, and he steadied himself. A man already dead had no reason to fear dying.
Picking up a dead limb, Sam snapped it in two. The Apache glanced around but disregarded it; the horse frequently shifted position. But when Sam popped a limb a second time and then a third, the warrior lay aside his woolen blanket and approached through the snow.
With the Mescalero’s every step, Sam could see the sun gleaming in the Remington carbine. He could see the gaudy headband of red flannel, and below it a face hideously painted in streaks of white and black. But most of all, he could see the heartless eyes of a butcher who had been party to a murder that had taken away Sam’s soul.
He just hoped that Jonesy was vigilant and would do as promised.
The Apache was only strides away when Jonesy’s shrieking epithet exploded from down the ravine. The warrior spun away, and Sam broke from his hiding place and lunged for him.
But Sam hadn’t counted on a snowdrift slowing his attack. With a cry he met a rifle barrel swinging in his direction, and then he was at close quarters, falling upon the fiend with eight months of pent-up hatred.
The rifle fell and they went down, rolling across the barrel in the cold snow, the knife catching sunlight as they struggled over it. Sam shed the grip of one hand on his wrist, only to see an Apache blade flash up from the warrior’s waist. For a moment, all seemed lost, and then a shadow fell over them and the Indian went limp to the thud of a Winchester butt against his skull.
Gasping for breath, Sam rolled away and looked up, finding Jonesy silhouetted against the sun. He was surprised at the ranger’s courage, but he felt less thankful than angry.
“You had no right!” Sam climbed up weak and trembling. “He was mine!”
Jonesy seemed perplexed. “What difference does it make?”
Sam stepped away from the Apache so he could see Jonesy’s deformed features without looking into the sun. “All you was after was somethin’ to brag to Mary Jane about!”
“I still don’t understand why it should matter.”
“Damn it, that son of hell was mine!”
For a minute or two, they continued to argue, but while they did, something else was happening, and the New Jersey native was the first to notice.
“There!”
Sam wheeled. The Apache was up and staggering across the narrow crest in a daze, his scalp dripping blood in the snow.
“I have him!” Jonesy yelled, his carbine swinging up abreast of Sam.
“No!”
Sam knocked the barrel aside and gave chase across the snow, his knife poised to kill silently. Some corner of the bewildered Apache’s mind still must have functioned, for the warrior hesitated as he reached the snowy rimrock. There, just shy of the terrifying precipice, he sank to his knees,
a helpless figure shaking his head pitifully as he tried to regain his senses.
But Sam showed no mercy as he overtook the Indian. With a cry that could be heard across all the months since Bass Canyon, he plunged the knife between the shoulder blades. He drove it deeper and twisted, the most personal of kills. He kept the blade there through all the terrible squirming and gurgling, and as the body collapsed to the snow, he could feel the death throes through the bone handle.
Sam stepped back and looked at the blade. It dripped with another man’s blood, and there was much more of it pooling before him. A minute ago, the snow-covered rimrock had been pristine, but now with its stark contrast of red against white, it was as horrid as it was beautiful.
Sam lifted his gaze to the cliff and the shining beds of salt far below, and then up to the bluest of skies staring down at him. Across so many dark days and fitful nights he had anticipated this moment, but now that it was here, he felt nothing.
Nothing!
Elizabeth was just as dead, and even if he wiped every Mescalero off the face of the Earth, she would still be just as dead—and so would he, deep inside.
CHAPTER 11
Nejeunee’s sacrifice of her dignity may have spared the People from the ghost-cold, but the spirits were still displeased.
As soon as the Ndé band gained the Diablo crest in early morning, Gian-nah-tah stood on the frozen rimrock and again sought the power to find enemies. With arms outstretched, he faced Sháa, the sun, and prayed for Bik’egu’indáán to show him the Indaa. He caught sunlight in his upturned palms and chanted desperately, but no matter how many directions he turned, Bik’egu’indáán continued to withhold the power.
Gian-nah-tah rode away as a man twice destroyed, his shoulders slouched and his head hanging. Nah-kay-yen the gutaaln and all the other Ndé who followed him north along the summit ridge did so in grave concern, their confidence in him no longer merely in doubt, but shattered. Nejeunee could see it in their faces, and in the way they too slumped on their horses.
Gian-nah-tah had brought it on himself, something that Nejeunee understood well as the only marriageable woman. Only after she had set her blouse afire had the four winds warmed the darkness—an indication that she must have grieved the Gáhé by persisting in mourning. Now it was clear that the spirits still held Gian-nah-tah culpable for blaspheming the traditions of courtship, if not for committing outright sorcery. If any Ndé had used his power for evil rather than good, Nejeunee knew it to be Gian-nah-tah.
Maybe the sins of the long-ago salt basin were just now catching up with him.
Unfortunately, his penance was also judgment against all of them. Without his power to find enemies, no one knew if the Indaa still followed, and if they did, how far behind they might be. Gian-nah-tah’s only recourse had been to station Quick Talker’s husband, Klo-sen, where they had summited, so that he might watch for pursuit and bring warning.
In one way, Nejeunee reveled in Gian-nah-tah’s humiliation, for his standing among the Ndé was so dependent on his special power. If not for Little Squint Eyes, whose safety was all that mattered, she would have mocked this killer of innocent señoras. After all, it was the way of Ndé women to motivate the men by upbraiding them when they failed.
But only a woman as spiteful as One Who Frowns could do so and criticize Nejeunee at the same time.
“Your man’s weak,” One Who Frowns said as they rode abreast. With hoofbeats deadened by snow, her voice must have carried even to Gian-nah-tah. “His power is no more. He’s like a pitiful old woman. He turns around on the rock like a blind child. You’re even weaker for choosing him.”
“Idzúút’i,” Nejeunee said quietly. “Go away.”
“The power to find enemies—hmph! Any man among the Ndé has greater power. He couldn’t find itsá, the eagle, if it perched on his head.”
One Who Frowns was so pleased with her last comment that she repeated it. As the woman broke into derisive laughter, Nejeunee saw Gian-nah-tah sag even more astride his paint pony. Had it been any other warrior, she might have felt sorry for him.
On a sorrel just ahead of Nejeunee, Quick Talker had been too distraught about their plight to do more than wail and brush her eyes. But incited by One Who Frowns, she too joined the criticism.
“How could you do it, Nejeunee?” she asked as she turned. “How could you pick him? His power is gone!”
“She’s a fool,” said One Who Frowns.
“We’ll die like she-we-cannot-speak-of!” cried Quick Talker, whose grief for Brushing Against was still strong.
“Nejeunee’s child will be the next one the owls take,” One Who Frowns was quick to add.
“The Indaa—they’re many and Klo-sen my husband is just one!” Quick Talker continued. “The Gáhé are upset and won’t protect him as he watches from the mountain. Nejeunee! How could you choose someone who must have made them angry?”
Nejeunee knew the consequences of losing the blessings of the spirits, but she could endure no more from Quick Talker.
“Who is it told me to rap him with a stick?” Nejeunee reminded her. “ ‘Next time you walk by, do it’—isn’t that what you said?”
Quick Talker began to weep more, but Nejeunee wasn’t finished.
“That’s how you got your husband, you told me. Don’t you remember?”
“I never!” sobbed Quick Talker.
“Does my sister have the memory of a field mouse? Four mornings later you were cooking for Klo-sen at his kuughà.”
“Oh, Nejeunee, how could you be so mean? The owls may have already come for Klo-sen!”
Maybe they had, and maybe they hadn’t. But Nejeunee knew what it was like to lose the one who was above all others. Her eyes began to sting, and she wanted to tell Quick Talker she was sorry. But Quick Talker had already fallen across her horse’s neck with sobs so loud that she wouldn’t have heard.
For a long while, Quick Talker rode that way, letting her sorrel nod along behind Nah-kay-yen’s horse. She didn’t look up even as the old gutaaln rattled beads of turquoise and chanted to his spirit animal, the great cat whose claws he had survived. But Nejeunee saw every detail: a medicine man’s face more withered on one side than ever, an arm so crippled that he could no longer wave the feathers of eagles, fingers so stricken that taking a pinch of tádidíné between thumb and forefinger was a challenge.
Facing the sun, from whom he claimed his strongest power, Nah-kay-yen blew the yellow powder into the air and sang even more fervently.
“Do not let us die, o Sháa.
O Sháa, do not let us die.”
Nah-kay-yen’s wavering voice grew weaker the longer he prayed, but finally it awakened something in Quick Talker. Collecting herself, she sat up to watch and listen. Eventually, the weary chant became a whisper and then went silent as the old man’s shoulders bent and his chin dropped to his chest.
“Gutaaln,” Quick Talker asked, “is there nothing you can do?”
At first, Nah-kay-yen did not answer, as though it was pointless to respond. When his words did come, they were as lifeless as a man whose spirit was broken.
“The Gáhé have forsaken us,” he said. “They deny me the power of lightning and ídóí, the great cat. Even Sháa, the sun, hides its strength.”
“Help us, gutaaln,” pleaded Quick Talker, her emotion all but exhausted. “Please help us!”
His head still hanging, he looked over his shoulder at her with wide, wild eyes.
“No one can help a People already dead.”
Overcome with fear, Nejeunee scanned the sky, knowing there was nothing she could do to fight away the owls when they came for Little Squint Eyes.
They rode on, a People without hope, stripped of strength and will. Nejeunee had felt this way only once before, on that numbing day when she had walked with warriors as they had carried he-who-cannot-be-mentioned to the cleft in the rock for burial. Now she followed another dark, lonely path that wouldn’t end until she and Little Squint Eyes joined h
im in the after-world.
Following the meandering Diablo backbone, they trailed alongside the sheer precipice on their right and the snowy descents and brushy canyons on their left. Nejeunee could feel the waning strength of her small roan as it carried her up steep rises of two hundred feet and down again, a course through rock and ice that demanded more than her animal had to give.
In one respect, the summit ridge was like the top of the world, for Nejeunee could look down on clouds that cast shadows across the salt flats. What she couldn’t understand was how a hogback so lofty and frozen could make her feel as if she rode through infierno, the fiery trenches of judgment.
This was a place fit for witches, and chief among them must have been Gian-nah-tah.
In midday he held his horse and let all the Ndé pass, and as Nejeunee’s roan topped out on another rock-rimmed prominence, she looked back and saw him. Still in place astride his paint, he seemed a helpless figure against the majesty of the snow-capped ridge and the sprawling flats far below. Desperate to draw power from wherever he might, he had his arms spread wide to yá, the sky.
Gian-nah-tah disappeared from sight as Nejeunee descended into the next swale, but One Who Frowns did not let anyone forget him. As the miles dragged on, she kept up her ridicule to the swoosh of travois frames against snow, and no one reproached her for it.
In a hollow between two close-set summits, where chalky rocks and tufts of bullgrass protruded from the snow, One Who Frowns voiced her favorite insult yet again.
“Your man’s a fool,” she told Nejeunee. “The droppings of the eagle could run down his cheek, and Gian-nah-tah still couldn’t find itsá perched on his head.”
Apache Lament Page 10
