Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  The Sharps kicked back and his vision was blinded by the burst of smoke. At his side, Cuchillo jumped, as though the bullet had struck him. He looked out across Many Deer Canyon.

  Understanding.

  The corpse of Corn Planter slumped in its bonds, a small dark hole drilled an inch above the breastbone.

  Bright blood trickled from the wound—surprisingly little blood for a fatal wound.

  "Your gun, Chief," Ryan said, handing him the smoking rifle.

  "I could not do it… I thank you, brother. You set his spirit free."

  "Hope so, Cuchillo."

  There was again a scattering of shots from beyond the smoldering fire, but none of the bullets came any­where near the crouching men. J.B. jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the far end of Many Deer Canyon.

  "Mebbe we oughta move, Ryan."

  "Be nice to find some way of leveling the score against those bastards."

  "You killed one of them. That does not happen often," Cuchillo Oro said, reloading the heavy weapon.

  "They killed two of us," Ryan retorted. "I guess that we probably have just about as many fighting men as they do. We got a camp we can hold against them. They got this fort they can hold against you. They got better weapons. Discipline. And you said last night that they got a mess of self-heats out back of the museum."

  "Yes. There is what is called a small redoubt hid­den under the mesa. And they have deep water that stays all year."

  The firing died away, and the canyon was silent once more. Ryan glanced up at the darkening sky. It would be dusk in a couple of hours. With a dozen armed men out there, it would be a good idea to get moving as soon as possible.

  "I would wish to remove the body of Long Knife," Cuchillo said quietly.

  "Not now. You think they aren't going to be look­ing for that? Send a couple of your young men to­morrow or the next day, Chief. Long Knife's dead. A couple of days won't hurt him none. If we try now the sec men can bring their tally up to five for the day. Is that what you want?"

  "No. But it is another cut in the coup stick against the Anglos."

  A bullet smacked into the top of the boulder, close by Ryan's head, showering them all with knifing splinters of rock. As he ducked again, Ryan felt something beneath his fingers. The dry crackle of old paper, partly buried in the fine sand. He dug it out, unfolded it and read the faded lettering: Ma's Cinna­mon Rolls. Have the Nicest and You'll Have a Nice Day.

  He could catch the taint of scorched flesh from the corpse of Corn Planter.

  "Yeah."

  Chapter Eighteen

  "FIGHT WITH BASTARDS and you have to fight like bastards!"

  Ryan was beginning to lose patience. They had re­turned safely to Drowned Squaw Canyon, free from pursuit by the sec men. Cuchillo Oro had spoken lit­tle, riding his pony with his head down, locked into his own thoughts. J.B. and Ryan had talked tactics, fi­nally agreeing that they needed some sort of show­piece victory. It might only be a skirmish that left the final battle as blurred as before, but it would show Yellowhair and his cavalry renegades that they meant business. And it would encourage the Mescalero for any future conflict.

  Now, the next morning, Ryan was finding it very hard going. He felt like he was flicking cherry pits at a lump of dough. His ideas stuck there, and nothing happened.

  The Armorer had been looking at a torn and crum­pled map of the area, trying to scout a possible loca­tion for a confrontation. One that would leave the odds firmly and safely on their side.

  But the Apache didn't like it. Didn't like it at all.

  The oldest man of the tribe, who was nearly blind and who spoke very poor English, eventually struggled to put their side of the argument. His name was Many Winters.

  "Bad is here. Yellowhair and pony soldiers are bad. Do bad things. Wish to chill all people here at rancheria. We fight. Always fight. But with honor. Anglos do not know honor. If the spirits say we win, then we win well. Not bad like Yellowhair. But you come and say beat bad with bad. We say beat bad with good. It is only truth way."

  Ryan had stood and shouted, "Fight with bastards and…"

  He saw that the faces of the elders of the tribe were looking at him with hooded eyes, blank, overlaid with contempt. For a moment he saw the futility of it.

  "Fine. That bakes the biscuit, friends. We came here and you helped us. Saved Jak's life. And we thank you for it. Fireblast! Course we thank you. And you got troubles. Bad ones. Fuck honor, Many Win­ters! The sec men have no honor. They rape and kill and torture. Life means less than a rat's fart to any of them."

  Man Whose Eyes See More unfolded himself ele­gantly from the far side of the council. He wore a white shirt with a ripple of lace down its front, over dark blue chinos. The mirrored sunglasses flashed as he looked at Ryan, who saw a tiny, stretched double image of himself reflected in the twin lenses.

  "You tell us that Yellowhair is evil and has no honor. We know these things, Ryan Cawdor. And you tell us this plan to win a small victory."

  "Better small victories than defeats. Any defeats," J.B. interrupted.

  The shaman shook his head slowly. "You see as children, through a mist. Your ways of fighting are no different from those of the pony soldiers. Winning is not all."

  "Winning's the only thing," Krysty said, face flushing with her own building anger.

  None of the Mescalero even looked at her. Man Whose Eyes See More went on as if nobody had spo­ken. "It is better that the people leave their home. Better than to fight on bellies."

  Doc Tanner also stood up, waving his hands like an agitated windmill. His voice was strong and clear, his mind, for once, seeming completely free from the time-jump muddle.

  "I've heard enough. In my time I have been fortu­nate enough to spend a little time among the people. I admire you, Cuchillo Oro, and everything you be­lieve in. When it comes to religion, the Christians could learn plenty of lessons from the Apache. But times they are changing, my brothers."

  "Honor—"

  "Who has honor?" Doc bellowed, his voice echo­ing the length and breadth of the canyon, drawing the attention of every man, woman and child there. "I'll tell you who has persnickety honor! He who died Wednesday. Honor is a shield to bear home a slain warrior. It is a rag to wipe the tears of the widow. Does Long Knife have honor? Does Corn Planter have honor? Oh, my dear friends… give me leave a moment.... If honor is to die, then go, and ride against the pony soldiers. Death is cheap. Death with honor is easy." He paused for dramatic effect. "It is living that is hard."

  In one of the wickiups, everyone could hear the frail sound of a baby crying. Other than that, the canyon was quiet. Doc looked around him, catching Ryan's eye. The old man's hands were trembling.

  The shaman still stood, his enormous height mak­ing everyone look up at him. He turned to Cuchillo, who nodded for him to reply.

  "You and your companions are all touched with death. I can taste it on you. It sits at your shoulder like the shadow of a man carrying a scythe."

  Nobody answered him. The crying of the baby was suddenly stopped as a young woman ran to comfort it.

  "It cannot be right to lie and cheat in order to beat Yellowhair," the shaman continued.

  The reply came, unexpectedly, from Jak Lauren. The boy, growing stronger by the hour, was already well enough to leave his bed for a few minutes at a time. He'd joined the council, leaning against the stump of a small tree. Ryan had noticed that Steps Lightly Moon, the teenage daughter of Cuchillo, had appeared at the edge of the council of warriors, sit­ting as close as she could to the white-haired boy.

  "You don't know what you're talking about," Jak said. "I'm only fourteen, but I know more about the world than an old woman like you." He pointed at Many Winters. "I've seen killings. More than any you."

  "The cub thinks he may teach—" one of the vet­eran warriors began, but Jak startled him by laughing scornfully.

  "It's not cubs an' bears an' that crap. It's sec men an' blasters an' blood. You wan
t to break an' run like girls. Do it! Get the fuck out. Let 'em piss all on you. But if want fight an' win… do it our way."

  The boy sat back, eyes closing, looking once more on the brink of exhaustion. The shaman made his way around the group and knelt beside Jak, holding his wrist in his long, thin fingers.

  It was Cuchillo, finally, who answered for his peo­ple.

  "We have heard the words from the Anglos. From the old and from…the young." He almost smiled. "Words that were not good to our ears. I have lis­tened hard and thought long. And I believe that some truth has been spoken this day. It might be that we are too set in the old ways." Seeing half of the senior warriors around the council ready to argue, he held up his hand for silence. "No, brothers. This is our home. To run would not show honor. It would show we are like dry branches. Old and strong, but ready to crack and to break at the first cruel wind. We shall try the ways of the Anglos."

  The plan that Ryan had worked out with J.B. was simple, involving an offer of peace talks that would enable them to ambush the sec men. It was treacher­ous and it was clever.

  Ryan had explained it to Krysty before the council of war.

  "We'll send word to Yellowhair that we want to talk. Try to sort out a way of living peaceably to­gether. We'll meet at the ghost town fifteen miles to the west in the foothills. They'll expect a trap, but we'll hit them first on the way toward the meeting place. It should work."

  THERE WERE SEVERAL TRAILS into the ghost town, which had been a mining center during a brief boom period in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Called Sometime Never it had housed three and a half thousand miners at its peak. Two years later there was no sign of the mother lode, and the population of Sometime Never had shrunk to twenty-three.

  By 1911 it was down to four.

  In the mid 1970s there was a burst of interest in the old lost towns of the Southwest, and Sometime Never boomed briefly again. The dirt road was graded and a few shops opened, selling stones, pots and glass. A couple of eateries, an art gallery and a store special­izing in genuine reproduction patchwork quilts did well for a few heady years.

  It wasn't the last World War that did in Sometime Never. There'd been an earthslide that made driving up the road difficult, but the nail that sealed the cof­fin was the establishment of a gay commune. The big AIDS scare of the early nineties brought a visit to the town, very late one Friday night in mid-December. A couple of dozen good ol' boys, juiced to the cortex, arrived in mud-smeared pickups, several with pump-action shotguns. The idea was to throw a scare into the disease-spreading wimps up on the hill.

  It all got a little out of hand.

  The rednecks didn't know that the gays had an ar­mory of M-16s, in anticipation of just such an attack.

  Eventually the body count reached the respectable total of fifteen, split eleven to four in favor of the commune.

  Armageddon passed almost unnoticed in Some­time Never.

  By 2001 there was only one inhabitant left, and he wasn't even three cents in the dollar. He'd built a small shrine in his garden to a country singer called Dwight Yoakam, who he claimed was a prophet and whose songs contained hidden clues to the coming of a new master.

  The old man heard the distant sounds of rumbling explosions and saw the skies darkening all around him. But he took it as a sign of the eternal's wrath with him and he tried to play his Dwight Yoakam albums more often and louder. But there was no electricity coming up the line to his shack. The EMP had knocked out all generators and power-operated in­stallations across the land.

  It was winter, and cold at night up in the hills of New Mexico. The old man offered to fast in order to purge himself of whatever sins of omission or com­mission he might have been guilty of.

  The fast went very well and in just under five days he was dead.

  THE NEXT DAY RYAN TOOK Krysty and the others with him to the ghost town. Jak was, amazingly, well enough to come with them, riding on an amiable swaybacked mule. Cuchillo didn't accompany them, being occupied with the funeral arrangements for Corn Planter and Long Knife. But his daughter came as guide, keeping herself as close to Jak as was possi­ble.

  Steps Lightly Moon was so busy chattering to Jak that she nearly missed the turnoff to the deserted ghost town.

  All of them stopped at a burst of crackling explo­sions from the far side of the wide valley. The purple chem clouds had been gathering ominously for an hour or more and had finally begun to spill their load over the mountains. Great jagged bolts of lightning burst along the orange flanks, exploding with the bit­ter iron taste of ozone. It was possible to see the rain teeming from the roots of the clouds, dulling the view. Thunder rolled and rumbled all around them, mak­ing any conversation difficult.

  Ryan stood in the stirrups, licking his lips, tasting the storm on his breath, figuring the prevailing wind would carry it away from them.

  "It will not come this way," Steps Lightly Moon said.

  "I know it," Ryan replied.

  "The village of spirits is not far from here."

  "We call ghost town." Jak grinned.

  "I do not have a cunning with the words of the An­glos."

  "Talk better'n me," the boy replied.

  The Apache girl flushed at the compliment, letting her fingers tangle in the pony's mane as she rode along the rising trail.

  It was Ryan's intention to check out the township from every direction. He hoped to cover all the trails in, find somewhere that would tell them how the cavalry would come cantering in. If the sec men were led by General Yellowhair, then his death would be a powerful bonus. It was clear that the serious trouble with the renegades only dated from the arrival of the mysterious stranger, the tall lean man with the hollow eyes. Yet again Ryan heard the far-off susurration of memory's bell. But the identity wouldn't come at his bidding. There was no doubt that the Mescalero saw the General as the physical embodiment of evil, and that his corpse would give them a greater will to fight against the whites.

  TWO ROTTING PIECES of wood supported the remains of a painted board, hanging only by a couple of rusted nails. Lori swung out of her saddle, picking her way carefully over the rutted ground in her brilliant crim­son boots with the teetering heels. The miniature sil­ver bells on the razored spurs tinkled sweetly at every step.

  "What does it say, oh moon of my delight that knows no wane?" Doc asked, spitting with a delicate aim at a tiny, skittering lizard that darted away from the shadow of the horses.

  The girl bent down, following the peeling letters with a long finger.

  "Can't read it," she called.

  "Let me, my dove of innocence." Doc clambered out of the high saddle.

  He peered at the board, wrinkling his eyes. "I must confess that it is more than somewhat difficult. It's probably the most nugatory piece of… Ah, now I see it. Well, well. A fine example of twentieth-century folksiness."

  "What's it say, Doc?" Krysty asked.

  "Any Stranger's a Dead Stranger. Clear enough. Sometime Never must have been the xenophobia cap­ital of the world."

  They tethered their animals outside a single-story building that still bore stenciled lettering on the adobe facade: Visitor Center.

  The remains of the ghost town straggled up a nar­row gulch, with scattered mesquite bushes and red-tipped spears of ocotillo. Jak reached for his big can­non of a pistol at a flurry of movement among the scrub.

  Out came the skinniest cat that any of them had ever seen, arching its back and mewing plaintively.

  "Come, kitty," the boy said, kneeling down, winc­ing at a stab of pain from his ribs. The Mescalero girl was at his side before he could even begin to straighten up.

  "Take care, Eyes of Wolf. You know our shaman warned to step with the light until the healing way is done."

  "I'm sorry, Steps Lightly Moon," he said, pursing his lips and looking like a kid caught with his hand inside the cookie jar.

  Ryan and Krysty exchanged glances and grins.

  The scrawny gray cat, t
ail poised over it like a peri­scope, stepped toward the boy with a strange air of unctuous pride.

  "We ate cats back home," Jak said, holding out his hand to the advancing feline.

  "Been places in Deathlands where the cats would've eaten you," J.B. said, poker-faced as ever.

  Just as Jak was about to pet the lean cat, its face became a mask of malevolent hatred and it hissed at him, claws raking at his eyes. The albino threw him­self back just in time. Steps Lightly Moon had her knife out, poised to throw, but the cat got away clean into the bushes.

  "Friendly little ville," Jak said, trying for a grin. Not quite making it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE STEEP-SIDED VALLEY WAS a blaze of color. Tiny yellow flowers of honey mesquite, in dazzling golden banks, smudged around the base of the tumbled buildings. The pale blue of bristly gilia bloomed in a delicate patch along the sides of the dry washes lining the main valley of Sometime Never. Flame-red desert mallow mingled with clumps of Indian paintbrush wherever the eyes settled.

  The scent that lay over everything was that of the ubiquitous yellow creosote bush. Krysty shook her head in wonderment. "Gaia! It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen, Ryan. There were quiet valleys a few miles from Harmony, and an aban­doned reservoir with cool places, but this is triple-lovely. You can't blame that old hermit the Apaches spoke about who used to live here and tried to stop anyone ever coming up."

  Steps Lightly Moon was just behind them, waiting for Jak to catch up. She heard what the fire-haired woman had said.

  "The people do not come here. The spirits are not friendly. Over the years there have been disappear­ances. Some who went and never returned. There are many deep holes in the hills around."

  "Mine shafts," Doc said. "Old workings riddle the land hereabouts. I guess the little girl's speaking the truth. Looks like the townspeople just slipped out for a while and never came back."