Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  One of the Apaches heeled his pony a couple of steps forward. The bright sunlight glittered on some­thing at his belt, such as an ax or a broad-bladed knife. The cavalry and the Indians kept their positions, with Ryan and his companions the meat in the hostile sandwich.

  "We could do some chilling with them sitting tight together on the ridge," J.B. suggested. "Get the re­taliation in first."

  "Mebbe they're not against us. Seems like the sec men don't see them as friends."

  Doc looked at Krysty, nodding at her words. His rheumy eyes blinked like a stone-warmed lizard's and the dust stirred in the deep creases around his beaked nose.

  "I've an idea, Ryan," he said. "I trust there is no objection to my… what did they call it? Ah, yes. To my running it up the flagpole and seeing if the cat brings it in." He hesitated. "Or something rather like that."

  "Go for it, Doc."

  "You're certain, Ryan?"

  "My best shot's heading down the hill with all blasters busy. That or sucking the .38. And that ain't my style."

  Doc stood, showing himself above the ring of pro­tective stones.

  "Get down!" Ryan shouted, seeing the old man fold at the knees like an ungainly heron, just before a scattering of bullets splintered close by him.

  "My goodness," the old man said, as mildly as if he'd been refused a second lump of sugar in his cup of coffee.

  "Can't you do it from there?" Krysty asked.

  "I believe so." Doc wriggled around so that he faced up the hill, toward the patient statues of the silent Apaches. Doc cleared his throat, then called up in a guttural, harsh voice, the words echoing across the flank of the mesa.

  The leader of the Indians leaned forward along the pony's neck, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. The rest of the line of warriors all began to chatter excitedly to one another.

  "What'd you say, Doc?" Krysty asked. "Sure put the wolf in the sheep pen."

  "Remember that my grasp of Apache was never more than somewhat rudimentary, friends," Doc re­plied. "I may have made a suggestion of the utmost obscenity concerning the sexual proclivities of the chieftain's mother."

  "But?" J.B. prompted.

  "But I hope that what I called out was a traditional appeal and offer of help. 'My enemies are your ene­mies. So shall they be, as long as the sun rides the sky and the grass grows.'"

  Ryan looked at the Apaches. "Sure hope it works, Doc. You got them fired up."

  As suddenly as they'd appeared, at a signal from their leader, the mounted warriors turned their po­nies and disappeared over the line of the ridge… And reappeared in a double, whooping line, heeling their small, nimble-footed ponies down the rock-tumbled slope, passing close by Ryan and his friends, who leaped away from the flying hail of pebbles and whirling dust.

  "They got about every kind of damned blaster I ever heard of," J.B. shouted above the bedlam of their passing. "Remingtons, Winchesters, Gallaghers, Springfields, Spencers, Burnsides and Sharps."

  "Saw a coupla M-16s in there," Ryan called. "Most patched and mended."

  It was an unusual luxury for Ryan Cawdor and the others to be able to sit back in relative safety and watch a firefight going on below them.

  The Apaches were masters of their animals and the cruel terrain, weaving and darting in close to the sec men, who suddenly found themselves the besieged in­stead of the besiegers. The Indians hung around the necks of their mounts, snapping off shots at the hid­den cavalrymen. There were puffs of powder smoke drifting across the serrated land.

  "Man on horseback doesn't shoot straight," J.B. said.

  "Also hard to knock down," Ryan added. "Could it be a hot spot standoff? Not enough power on either side to take the other."

  In less than five minutes his guess was proved to be right.

  Two of the Indians went down, in each case their animals being shot by the carbines. Both Apaches got up and jogged away unharmed, vaulting easily be­hind their comrades. From where they watched it wasn't possible for Ryan and the others to see if the sec men were taking any casualties. There was a passing temptation for Ryan to lead the four of them down and try to force the sec men out with their superior blasters. But it seemed a whole lot more sensible to stay where they were and await developments. It certainly looked as if Doc's appeal to the Apaches had worked.

  So far.

  "They're pulling out," Krysty said. "Guy with the pretty yellow hair just shouted for them to pull back to their horses."

  With her sharp hearing, the redheaded girl was right. While they watched the indeterminate battle petering out below them, the Apaches broke off the engagement, allowing the sec men to withdraw in good order. Ryan stood to watch them, and he saw the leader of the white men turn in his high saddle and stare back at him. There was the flash of sunlight off a spyglass and then the patrol and its leader vanished in a cloud of dust, heading away along the trail to­ward the north.

  "Now all we have to do is make our peace with the Apaches," Doc said, standing and stretching his creaking knees, brushing his coat clean of dirt.

  "Yeah, that's all." Ryan grinned.

  Before the Apaches could come back up the slope, Ryan led the others to where Lori was waiting with Jak. The albino boy was visibly sinking toward the long quiet of death. His breathing was so shallow that his chest barely moved at all, and the ruby eyes were closed.

  The teenage girl looked up, face pale with fear. "Muties gone? They ride on and then I hear blasters. Are we saving?"

  Doc stooped and kissed her on top of the head with a touching, infinite gentleness. "Don't worry, my dearest child. They aren't muties. Leastways, I don't believe that they are. They all looked just as they did when I visited with the Mescalero Apaches a few years…a few hundred…two hundred…five hundred miles away from home."

  "Here they are," J.B. said laconically, holding the Uzi casually in his right hand. Ryan held the G-12 against his hip, his finger on the trigger, watching as the stocky horsemen came whooping up the slope, then becoming silent at a command from their leader.

  Now that they were closer Ryan could see what had been glittering at the belt of the Apache war chief. It was a peculiar dagger, with a broad, triangular blade that gleamed with the sheen of gold. The hilt was studded with uncut stones of different colors. Even from a distance the weapon had the unmistakable pa­tina of age and genuine quality.

  The Apache reined in his horse a few paces from the small group, looking down intently at the uncon­scious boy. Ryan had seen Indians before; because of their way of life at the time of the long winters, some of the tribes had survived better than the people of many large cities. They made great trackers and hunt­ers, and still held their communities in the more dis­tant parts of the Deathlands.

  "Who speaks our tongue?" the warrior said in broken English.

  Doc Tanner cautiously raised his hand, showing his oddly perfect teeth in a smile as every single one of the Apaches stared at him. "I must confess that it was I who addressed you."

  "Anglos do not know the words of the people," the Indian insisted, face impassive.

  "I was among your people, close by here in the Canyon de Chelly, many, many years past."

  "You are muties."

  It was a statement and not a question, with an as­sumption that could mean a swift and sudden passing in many regions of the country.

  Ryan took a step forward. "We thank you for your help. We aren't muties. None of us."

  "The woman's hair." He pointed at Krysty. "And the hair of dead boy."

  "We're not muties," Ryan insisted.

  The expression on the face of the war chief made it obvious that he didn't believe the words of the tall white man.

  "The tongue of the Anglo is the tongue of the des­ert rattler," he said. "Not to be trusted by the peo­ple."

  The two groups looked at each other for several stretched seconds. One of the Apaches pointed with a long spear at the unconscious figure of Jak. He said something to the leader.

 
; "What'd he say, Doc?" Ryan asked.

  "I'm sorry, Ryan, but I fear that my grasp of their language was never outstandingly good. The dialect of the Mescalero is far from simple to try to compre­hend."

  "He says that the boy with hair like snow is near the long sleep without waking."

  "We know that," Krysty said.

  "The Yellowhair and his running dogs have done this thing?"

  "Is it Autie Custer?" Doc asked in English.

  "Custer died more than two hundred years past," the Apache replied, looking at Doc Turner with the kind of pitying expression you reserved for a leg-broke horse.

  "I know that… But it's the Seventh Cavalry. I saw the guidon. And his hair and—"

  "There is a story like the road down from a mountaintop, winding and slow and with many twists to it. Such is the story of the Yellowhair and the pony sol­diers who ride with him."

  "I'd kind of like to hear the story," Ryan said. "You got someplace we could take the kid?"

  The Indian swung down off the bright blanket that took the place of a saddle for the Mescalero. He knelt by Jak, studying him with dark eyes. "He will be with the spirits before the sun has slept below the far mountains."

  "Then we'll bury him," J.B. said.

  "We have a shaman who has the sight and the hands. He could—"

  "What's a shaman, Doc?" Ryan asked.

  "Kind of halfway house between a doctor, a priest and a faith healer."

  "The boy is losing the fight. He has fallen?"

  "Yeah. Into a trap for a mutie cougar, way back." Ryan pointed in the vague direction of the redoubt, not wanting to give away too much.

  "The lion of the mountains?"

  "Dead."

  The Apache stood, nodding, as though that answer had confirmed his decisions. "The travois you have built will be pulled by our horses. You will all come with us." He turned to his men, then faced Ryan Cawdor. "You are the enemies of Yellowhair?"

  "He sure isn't a friend."

  "Good. But if you betray us…"

  "Sure, Chief… We don't know your name."

  "We do not know your names. There will a time for that when we reach our rancheria."

  Ryan glanced at Doc Tanner for an explanation of the new word. "It means a kind of camp. Often up high. In the canyons."

  "Can this shaman save Jak?" Ryan asked quietly, while the Apache leader swung himself on his pony, calling orders to his warriors.

  "Can you, Ryan?" the old man replied.

  AS THEY LEFT THE SCENE of the abortive firefight, Ryan glanced over his shoulder, seeing that the spiraling dust cloud from the patrol of sec men was still moving steadily toward the north, where dark purple clouds were gathering. The cavalrymen had taken their dead and wounded with them, bodies tied ankle to wrist over the saddles.

  Jak's head lolled helplessly to one side as the makeshift litter bounced slowly along, drawn be­tween two ponies. His long white hair seemed dulled and lifeless.

  Ryan and the others walked along by the Apaches, toward the line of red cliffs that marked the side of one of the long mesas.

  Over the years he'd seen several old vids of what were called "westies," mainly about firefights be­tween the soldiers and different tribes of Indians.

  Now, unbelievably, he was living in one of those vids.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE RANCHERIA OF THE subtribe of the Mescalero Apaches was in a box canyon, nearly a two-hour ride from where they'd encountered the six whites.

  If Ryan and his friends had managed to get hold of a detailed map of that part of New Mexico, printed way before the holocaust, they'd have found it was named Drowned Squaw Canyon.

  The jaws of the canyon were less than a dozen feet across, barely wide enough for a pair of horsemen to ride in side by side, and it lay at the farther end of a wilderness of coulees and dry riverbeds that wound and twisted in an almost impenetrable maze. Even from fifty paces away, it didn't look to Ryan as if there were any way into the canyon.

  The trail continued for a hundred yards or so, be­tween two-hundred-foot walls of sheer crimson rock, gradually widening until it opened into an area about six hundred paces across. At the farther end, under the lip of a wall of seamless stone, was a pool of deep, clear water.

  There were small fires burning among fifty or sixty low huts, which Doc told them were called wickiups. As they walked into the canyon with the horsemen, women and small children came running from the huts, excitedly calling out to one another at the sight of the white strangers. The leader waved them back with his rifle, shouting out orders as he dismounted.

  "Do you want food?" he asked Ryan.

  "Yes, and water. But first the boy must be treated. You said—"

  "Our shaman is called Man Whose Eyes See More. I have asked an old woman to go and wake him. The whitehead will rest there, by the fire."

  While they waited for the shaman, Ryan led the other four around the camp of the Mescalero Apaches.

  At their leader's orders the Indians kept away from the visitors, but three of the older women, faces wrin­kled, eyes almost buried in the folds, brought them earthenware bowls of green chili stew, with chunks of mutton floating in it. They also gave them corn on the cob, blue corn bread and spicy yerba tea.

  Ryan hadn't realized how hungry he'd been after the action of the firefight, and he devoured two bowls of the hot stew.

  The sun had disappeared behind the cliffs to the west of the canyon, making the air feel cool and shadowed. They sat down near Jak, outside the turf-topped hut. The boy was now on the very brink of death. His breathing was so subdued that it was no longer possible to see respiration. J.B. had knelt be­side him, holding a small mirror to the bloodless lips, bringing only the faintest mist to the polished metal.

  "Where's their—" Krysty began, stopping as the buckskin curtain across the mouth of the nearest wickiup opened.

  It was Man Whose Eyes See More.

  He was so skinny that it looked like he'd have to run around in a rainstorm to get himself wet. Most of the Apaches were close to the five-foot-six mark, but the shaman was scraping at seven feet tall, weighing barely 120 pounds.

  Man Whose Eyes See More was dressed in an ele­gant pair of seersucker pants of ancient cut that were missing one leg below the knee. His top half was clad in a striped cotton shirt with a white collar and a bro­cade waistcoat with mother-of-pearl buttons. There was a flaming scarlet cravat knotted casually around his scrawny neck, which was held in place with a sil­ver stickpin with an empty claw setting. A pale cerise kerchief dangled from the vest pocket. His feet were bare and a whole lot less than clean.

  He looked slowly along the line of white men and women, utterly impassive. He stepped in closer to Ryan and reached out, laying a hand across his fore­head, gazing deep into the single eye.

  "The anger for your brother is ended," he said quietly.

  "Yeah. You could say that."

  The shaman also paused in front of Doc Tanner, his face crinkling in bewilderment. "You are of time and not of time. Dead and not dead. Living and not liv­ing. Old and not old."

  "Hungry and not hungry. Angry and more angry. Cut the quack's tricks and look at the kid there," Doc replied.

  "The Gan, the spirits of the mountain, will not permit too much hurry. Only Ysun, the giver of all life, can help your friend. I shall pray to White Painted Woman and she will help. If she wants to help."

  "What if she doesn't?" J.B. asked, struggling to muffle a chili-spiced belch.

  "She will…or she will not. That is the way now, as it was before the time of the great fires in the sky and before that. At the times of our forefathers, who lived in peace beneath the tall cliffs. Before the dry time came."

  "The kid's near dead," J.B. said with a dangerous calm, hand dropping to the butt of the holstered Steyr pistol. "Less talk, friend."

  "You talk threat to me, Anglo," the shaman said, with a superior smile. "I lift my hand and all of you are dust."

  "I pull this
trigger, wizard, and your guts spill around your ankles. Get to it."

  Man Whose Eyes See More nodded slowly. "There is much fire within you. Much anger. Much that is bitter and sour. But I shall do what I can. I do not feel there is bad in any of you." He stared intently again at Ryan as he spoke.

  Two of the old men ushered the five friends away from Jak. Ryan glanced over his shoulder, seeing that the tall shaman was sitting cross-legged, fumbling at a small leather bag slung around his neck by a narrow thong.

  The chief, golden knife at his hip, saw them com­ing and waved for them to sit around the crackling fire outside his own wickiup.

  "Leave Man Whose Eyes See More. He has the great power. Our people have not had such a true shaman for many generations. If he does not heal your companion, then he is past all help."

  It didn't seem like much consolation.

  The afternoon slipped gently into evening. The fires began to glow more brightly as the pools of shadow deepened and spread. The women of the rancheria went about the business of making the last meal of the day. Drowned Squaw Canyon filled with the scent of roasting chili and iron pots of stew bubbled. Children ran around like stocky models of their parents, the girls in long fringed dresses and the boys in cotton pants and bright shirts. Doc Tanner leaned back, puffing contentedly at a pipe given to him by one of the older warriors.

  "Upon my soul, but I believed when we saw General Custer leading out the Seventh Cavalry across the dusty landscape that we had inadvertently managed a chron-jump. It was so like the old pictures. Whatever happened to the faces in the old photographs? Boys, hell they were men that stood… What was I say­ing?"

  "Chron-jumps, Doc," Lori prompted, lying with her head in his lap, ignoring the disapproving looks and clucking tongues of the older women, who tossed their braided hair as they padded fatly by.

  "Chron… Was I?" His face brightened. "Indeed I was. Merciful heavens, but I fear that my brain has not yet returned to its former grandeur. I would like one day to meet dear Mr. Cort Strasser and repay a little of the debt."