“My power allows me to be understood by all Indians. I speak all languages. I am heard in all ears. While you are with me, this Power will be yours too. There will be no misunderstandings anymore. No need for hand talk or painting pictures. We will be one nation.”
Juh nodded slowly and sat down, thinking.
Goyaałé remained standing, and folded his arms.
“There is nothing so eloquent,” he muttered, “as a rattlesnake’s tail.”
“Does Goyaałé of the Bedonkohe have something to say?” Misquamacus asked.
Goyaałé did.
“You say you are all Indians, but what kind? The Tonkawas were driven off to Texas because they were flesh eaters. All the Apache know this. The Pawnee want to be free to do the Morning Star ritual. Naiche, your father K’uu-ch’ish told me once that he got it from Tom Jeffords that in the Morning Star ritual, the warriors shoot arrows into a little child, and break open her head. And all the Apache know of the yee naldooshi, the skinwalkers. How many have died by their hands, or had their children stolen in the night for their evil magic? I do not even want to know what these swamp dwellers are about.”
Misquamacus glared at Goyaałé, disapproving, and his look was mirrored by his lieutenants.
“The Apache are not without their cruel ways,” said Slim Ghost, the leader of the skinwalkers. “They kill and torture.”
“Apaches pray to the sun and the sky, the moon and the stars, the clouds and the storms. We pray to Usen. We do not spill the blood of little children to gain his attention. We have never prayed against any person. We never blew corpse dust in their faces, or poisoned them with magic from afar. If we want vengeance, we take it ourselves, and when it is taken we do no more.” He fixed Bloody Jaw and his people with a hard look. “We do not eat the dead.”
Misquamacus’ army, uniformly insulted, rose as one, and the Bedonkohe leapt to their feet around their speaker.
The Rider felt Piishi’s pride well within his breast. He felt it himself, though he was not himself Apache. Heathen, animist beliefs aside, here was a mensch.
Vittorio stood then.
“Will Mis-kwa-macus ask us to do these things, as he asked us to drink the black drink?”
“I will not,” said Misquamacus. “Pawnee is Pawnee and Apache is Apache. I do not ask you to give up your beliefs, only your prejudices against each other. They do not serve. The whites are great because for all their differences, they are one.”
“Does Mis-kwa-macus want us to be as the whites are?” Goyaałé asked, as he had not sat back down yet.
“Only in the way I have said, and one other. Like them, we wage total war. We burn their lands. We kill their children. We take their women. We give no mercy.”
These words excited some of the Apache again, and many of the Bedonkohe sat down to listen.
Vittorio turned to Goyaałé.
“Does Goyaałé want these things?”
Goyaałé looked to his own people, staring up at him with hungry eyes. He shrugged.
“I do not hate the whites as much as some of you.”
There was muttering at this.
“But I would ride out right now if there were Mexicans to be killed.”
Grins flashed uncontrollably among all the gathered Indians. Misquamacus grinned too, and the Rider knew why. Goyaałé was well spoken, and he had reservations. He could turn the tide of the Apache against Misquamacus’ plan. But he had shown the chink in his armor. Mexicans had killed his old mother, his wife, and children. Piishi knew the story, and so the Rider knew it too. Goyaałé hated them for it, as he hated no others, and he warred with them whenever he could. As Vittorio was feared by the Americans, Goyaałé was a terror to the Mexicans, who called him Geronimo.
“Why ride, when I can bring the Mexicans to us?” Misquamacus announced. “Let me show you my power, Goyaałé. Then you will see if this is what you want. Where is Lozen?”
The warrior woman stood up.
“Lozen has power,” Misquamacus announced. “Power to see the enemy from afar. Will you use your power now?”
Lozen looked to her brother. Vittorio gave his consent with a nod.
“I will,” said Lozen.
The woman thrust her Winchester through her belt and raised her hands, directing her strident voice at the reddening sky.
Upon this Earth
On which we live
Usen has power
This power is mine
For locating the enemy.
I search for that Enemy
Which only Usen the Great
Can show to me.
She turned slowly in a circle, eyes closed, repeating the chant, and her strong arms began to quiver like dowsing rods. After about ten minutes, she stopped turning and opened her eyes, facing the southwest.
She pointed.
“Thirty men on horseback are looking for this place. Mexicans. Rurales. They are lost, but they are near.”
Misquamacus smiled.
“By this act, Goyaałé, you and your Bedonkohe will know the heart of Misquamacus.”
He took the bullroarer from his bag and let it fall to its length, then he began to swing it slowly around.
Rurales? Piishi ventured, for as the Rider knew of the rurales in Nacozari, so too did he.
It must be, the Rider agreed. He’s going to bring them here and kill them all.
There were streaks of red in the sky when Don Elfego came out of the trees to the place where the Apaches had burned his son for the second time.
Mendez knew it too, and he spurred his brush-slashed, heaving horse to come up alongside the African.
“What the hell is this? You’ve led us right back to where we were, you stupid black ape!”
Kabede turned in his saddle. He had done a decent job of misguiding the group up until this point, driving them through the brush and up and down craggy slopes in erratic patterns, but apparently he had done too good a job. He had gotten lost himself, and hadn’t realized the extent of his own deception. Plowing ahead with a false sense of purpose did that. He had meant to steer far clear of the old camp, but he had inadvertently come right back to it, albeit from a foreign angle.
Now he was in a dire situation, for as each of rurales entered the clearing, he heard oath piled upon oath. He could very nearly feel their exasperation and wrath weighing on the back of his neck.
“Oh my,” said Faustus, “Perhaps they doubled back?” he suggested.
“Yes,” said Kabede lamely. “That is what happened.”
Mendez spat and cursed in rapid Spanish.
Don Elfego came along the other side of Kabede and Faustus.
“Your man has cost us hours!” the caballero shouted, the reins in his fists trembling. “It is nearly sunset!”
“In the morning, perhaps—” Faustus began, but Mendez pulled out his pistol, cutting him off.
“In the morning the zopilotes will be sucking out his eyes.”
Kabede held up his hands, thinking quickly.
“Wait! Wait! The trail leads back down to the road. I think they must be scouting Nacozari. They must mean to attack.”
Mendez hesitated.
“Attack?”
“Ah yes,” said Faustus, relieved. “That does make sense.”
“Show us,” said Don Elfego.
Kabede turned.
“What?”
“Show us these signs you see. I want to see the trail myself.”
Kabede tensed.
“They’re traveling light…hiding their trail.”
“Then how can you be following it? Show.”
“It’s difficult to explain. You’re not a hunter.”
“Make it plain to me,” Don Elfego said, slapping a hand on his own pistol.
Faustus’ hand went surreptitiously under his arm to his own gun, and the corporal clapped a strong hand on his thin wrist and cocked his pistol.
“Go on, cholo,” Mendez said, his eyes narrow and sharp as knife points.
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br /> Kabede slowly dismounted from his horse.
“Leave the stick,” Mendez suggested.
Kabede jammed the staff point down into the earth beside Faustus. It quivered there until Faustus leaned down and rested his hand on the top to stop it.
Mendez covered him, in case the old man got the idea to try and use it.
Kabede walked slowly toward the tree-line, sweat beginning to pour from under his headdress. His Guycot rifle hung from the saddle he left behind. His eyes flitted to the ground and brush, trying to find something, anything that could be construed as the markings of the passing of a man or animal. Behind him, the entire company of rurales watched, he knew, with their guns on him. If he turned around without some kind of answer, he would face a tide of bullets. As it was, the same fate of Don Elfego’s late Indian tracker was already hanging very close over his head.
He considered bolting for the trees, trying to interpose the trunks and shrubs between him and their fire. But of course they would run him down anyway, and possibly shoot Faustus in the meantime. Perhaps the old man was not of this world, but he was still just an old man.
Then he heard a sizable clatter behind him which made his shoulders jump. The horses whinnied in dismay. At first he thought Mendez had lost his patience and signaled his men to fire, and that the noise was that of thirty pistols and rifles cocking. But there was no impact on him or on the foliage.
“Kabede!” Faustus exclaimed.
Kabede turned slowly, hesitating, and saw nothing. The company’s horses were turning excitedly in place, their saddles empty.
All their arms, the rifles and pistols they had been holding, even the knives in their boots and belts lay in piles on the ground.
“They’re gone,” Faustus remarked, a relieved smile breaking across his face. “They’re all gone.”
Kabede trotted back across what he’d previously presumed would be the last distance his legs would ever carry him over.
“What did you do to them?” Kabede asked in wonderment.
“This was not my doing,” Faustus said, swinging down off his horse and kicking at Mendez’s pistol.
“How could this have happened? Where are they?”
Faustus chuckled, shaking his head, but then as a thought passed across his mind so too a cloud fell over his mood, and his face assumed a thoughtful scowl.
“Misquamacus.”
“Could he do such a thing?”
Faustus nodded as he fished through his coat pockets.
“If he can, then he has grown stronger than I thought. Stronger than me, maybe.” He produced the mystic jeweler’s glass and fitted it into his eye.
“What of the Rider then?”
Faustus shushed him and put a hand over his naked eye, peering wholly into the glass.
“Yes. He has them. Misquamacus has them all. Why didn’t it work on us?”
Kabede snatched the Rod of Aaron from the ground.
“This protected you,” Kabede said. “My talismans must have protected me.”
“Yes. Or perhaps you weren’t taken because you were separated from the group.”
“The Rider.”
“He is alive,” Faustus confirmed. “Or at least, Piishi is. Anyway, he’s standing.”
“Then we go to them,” Kabede said, vaulting into the saddle of the horse.
“I can try to make out some of the landmarks, but we still don’t know where they are,” Faustus said, relaxing his brow and letting the glass drop into his palm. He tucked it into his vest pocket.
Kabede held the staff out over the horse’s head.
“Almighty Igzee’abaihier, this simple staff led Your people out of bondage and across the wilderness. May it guide Your servant now to the Rider.”
He kicked the horse’s flanks and galloped back up the mountain trail, leaving Faustus to shout and plead for caution as he snatched up the Rider’s engraved Henry rifle and climbed back atop his own pony.
Don Elfego fell to his knees and vomited. When he had been a young man, he had often born the brunt of abuse from his elder brothers because of his inability to weather, much less win, a horse race. He’d always had a weak stomach, and the jostling motion of a horse at full speed had always exacerbated this. He’d never had a problem with anything below a normal trot, but speed had never agreed with him. As a rancher’s son, this had been a source of continual embarrassment for him growing up, and for his father too. His two eldest sons could ride like Comanches, but Elfego had gained the nickname ‘Enfermizo’ for his constant motion-induced migraines and resultant vomiting. Even long wagon trips made him sick.
Only his masterful financial abilities and the accidental trampling of his eldest brother Chucho had secured the rancho for him in the end, but he had lived long years since, and all his subsequent accomplishments had put ‘Enfermizo Alvarez’ firmly in his past.
Or so he’d thought.
Now the old humiliating memories of his brothers’ taunts and jeers came back to him in a rush as he stared at his partially dissolved breakfast pooling on the red earth between his hands. One minute he had been watching the Africano walking across the camp where Mauricio had died, and the next there had been a rush of light and air and sound. He had felt himself jerked bodily and shaken, like a cat in a gunny sack.
The next thing he’d known, he had stumbled across muddy ground, been jostled by one of the gibbering rurales, and fallen face first. Then his stomach had turned a somersault and given up its contents.
Now he raised his head, fighting to hold onto his dignity, and saw something that made him give it up entirely.
The rurales were all around him, Mendez and the boy killer Pimpollo bumping against each other, back to back, mouths agape in uncharacteristic fear and shock.
Around them all were Indians. Apaches, yes. There were Apaches, but there were others too. Navajo maybe, and Indians in wolfskins and loincloths, and Indians such as he had never seen before. A hundred or more, armed with everything from stone clubs to repeaters.
One all in scarlet garb stood on a rock, lordly, above them. He twirled a rhombus, eliciting an unearthly howling noise, and chanting in his savage tongue. He was old as the dunes and stones, but his eyes were alight with a killer’s intelligence and hate. He may have been the Red King of All Indians, for all Elfego knew.
Crouching here in the red mud, trembling, vomit running through his beard, Elfego experienced a vision. In the vision he was an Indian himself. An unwilling supplicant from a forest dwelling tribe that knew nothing of the maquahuitl or the chimalli, and the mud in which he was forced to abase himself by two jaguar warriors was blood-soaked earth. The blood so deep it lapped at his wrists. The Red King was there, on high as he was now, but gone was the simple Apache medicine cap and the red tunic and dusty red leggings. In the vision his face was painted blue and yellow and black, and he wore a resplendent headdress and a costume of hummingbird feathers. He held aloft a curling snake and twinkling mirror staff, and the sun was blazing at his back, an ouroboros serpent of hellish fire and terrible light consuming itself in an insane, voracious need to consume its own horrible glory. There was blood on his hands and splattered in startling patterns on his naked chest. His eyes were fierce and thirsty as they were now. The hand that did not hold the elaborate staff cupped a pulsing, squirting heart, freshly torn free of its owner.
The vision was gone. Don Elfego blinked it away. He went for his pistol and his muddy fingers groped at an empty holster. Even his knife was gone.
The other rurales were praying, as if they, murderers and rapists that most of them were, had any right to call upon the Virgin and the saints to save them.
Don Elfego knelt, and his eyes moved from the old Indian man in red to the trickling waterfall behind him, to the great rock wall from which it flowed.
He saw the veins of glittering gold, sprouting outward in all directions like a vast system of hemic vessels through which coursed the glorious sunshine blood of a god on high.
&
nbsp; He thought of his old father and his son and he began to laugh.
The Rider/Piishi blinked and the rurales were falling out of the coursing waterfall, stumbling out of the water, and then tripping over each other in the circle of Indians like a herd of confused, sickly cattle about to be shot down.
Many were cursing, wide-eyed, shaking their heads. Many more were praying. Some were even kissing crosses that dangled from wooden bead rosaries around their necks, tucked into their dirty shirts so that the Lord did not see the terrible things they did, but so that He could be gotten to in a pinch if needed.
One among them, an old vaquero on his knees, was laughing. The Rider saw Mendez, the corporal. He stood bewildered, hands snatching at the empty holsters on his belt.
“They are for you, my brothers!” Misquamacus hollered above the din of the jabbering Mexicans, his voice powerful, resounding off the great rock walls. “Do with them what you want to do!”
And they did. Almost as one body the Indians fell hungrily upon the cringing Mexicans like a great mouth closing. Some gamely fought back, but they were unarmed and outnumbered and quickly dragged down. Not a single bullet was wasted. Those with rifles came at the rurales with the heavy butts of their weapons, dashing skulls open at a swing. Stone axes whistled and sunk into pleading faces, and were drawn out to scatter brains and teeth and then fall again. Knives flashed, passing through scalps pulled so tight they came free in the bronze fists that held them with a single swipe and left glaring patches bereft of hair and flesh, the faces of their howling victims swiftly vanishing in a curtain of blood. Machetes swept off hands and fingers interlaced in desperate prayer.
Big Anger and his Pawnees straddled their victims and worked vicious arts with their knives, slashing away age, race, and sex, leaving behind only meat, indiscernible from a butcher’s wares. Organs leapt into the air like hats on New Year’s Eve.
The Rider/Piishi saw Slim Ghost and the skinwalkers walking among the dead and dying with curved knives, stooping to extract eyes, hearts, livers, fingers, genitals, even twisting free bloody bones, all of which they stuffed into their hide satchels, for later use in their foul practices, no doubt.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 21
