Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  "Nobody will disturb us here," she said, sitting down in a rustle of movement, beckoning to him to join her.

  Jak, somewhere in his fourteenth year, was finding that his breathing was becoming more and more con­stricted as he sat beside the dark-haired girl.

  "Tomorrow will be a good day," she said to him, smiling up into his face.

  "Good day t'die. That what Cuchillo says?"

  "My father says that you are the bravest white man he has ever seen. To ride in and fight the General on your own, slay him and then return to us with your friend One Eye Chills."

  "Not going to fight General. Try get in and get out with Ryan."

  The girl sighed. "Such bravery, Eyes of Wolf. My father says that it would be an honor to welcome such a man into the people, though you are not of the peo­ple."

  Jak sat down carefully, trying to avoid straining his ribs. The mystical healing power of the tall shaman was going well, and he already felt hugely better. But there was still discomfort that verged on pain. The boy was no horseman, and he was dreading the ride over the broiling desert to enter the fortress ville of the sec men. Particularly, as J.B. had pointed out, since he'd have to remove all the strapping. His story wouldn't support that kind of medical treatment.

  Though he was only fourteen years old, Jak Lauren was a skilled practitioner in the ways of death. There'd been an old man down in Louisiana who'd told him that "killing is like everything else. It has to be learned and then practiced."

  Jak had taken that advice to heart.

  But as he sat in the scented grass next to the slim girl, his mind was flooded with a mixture of doubt, fear and anticipation. He'd never done "it." Never. Friends younger than him had either done it with willing girls from the ville, or saved up jack to go with local gaudy whores. But not Jak.

  Now it seemed as if they were going to do it. Steps Lightly Moon was going to allow him to make love to her.

  "Will you kiss me, Eyes of Wolf?" she whispered. "It would give me much happiness."

  He leaned over her, the tumbling flood of pure white hair hiding them both beneath its curtain. Jak moved hesitantly, his lips brushing the smooth warm skin of her cheek, finding her mouth. He gasped in a breath as the girl's tongue darted between his lips. Clumsily he reached around her back, gripping her to him.

  "Do it softly, Eyes of Wolf."

  JAK WAS OVERWHELMED. He'd finally done it—done it properly and done it well, if the moans and sighs of the girl were anything to go by.

  After the second time they'd made love, Steps Lightly Moon had unwound the length of bandages from Jak's damaged ribs. There were smears of purple bruising across the dead-white chest and stomach, but most of the swelling had gone down. And the boy had recovered most of his former agility.

  When he finally woke he could see the shimmering glow of first light through the deep-cut window holes. Steps Lightly Moon was asleep at his side, one arm across her eyes, the handwoven blanket just below her firm breasts. The boy felt himself becoming aroused again, but he turned away, reaching for his clothes, knowing that he had another, greater obligation.

  Jak could already catch the faint scent of frying meat from across the canyon. The older women would have prepared a breakfast for him and for those who'd accompany him on the first stage of his perilous jour­ney to the sec men's fort.

  He pulled on the familiar leather-and-canvas jacket in camouflage colors of gray, green and brown, taking care not to cut himself on any of the shards of ra­zor blades that he had carefully sewn into the material. Jak's ponderous handgun, the massive satin-finish .357 Magnum, went into its holster on his hip, and he checked that the leaf-bladed throwing knives were in their hidden sheaths. The combat boots went on last.

  He hesitated, brushing a hand through his white mane of hair. He looked down at the sleeping girl, wondering if he should wake her before he left. He licked his lips and sighed. Going to the fireplace and picking up a broken branch that had a charred end, the boy painstakingly wrote a message on the wall near the door, where Steps Lightly Moon would see it when she woke.

  "See you when I get back. I love you like you love me." He was going to sign it "Jak," but on a second thought he wrote "Eyes of Wolf."

  And then he left her.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  "I AM NOT A MAN GIVEN to hasty decisions, Ryan Cawdor."

  Food had been brought, the ubiquitous mess of stodgy beans, with some indeterminate meat, badly fried, and some reasonable corn bread. The mug con­tained some freeze-dried coffee that Ryan guessed must have come from the sealed redoubt. It was a long time since he'd drunk anything so good.

  Cort Strasser had come looming into the cell, yel­low hair streaming across his shoulders. He carried a dark blue slouch hat ornamented with gold braid.

  "I don't give a flying fuck about you, Strasser. What you do or what you think."

  "Big words again, Ryan Cawdor. I can snuff out your life between finger and thumb, or I can keep you alive for days, mute, halt, in perpetual darkness, in your own filth."

  "You can only do it once."

  "But you will die," the lean man said, unable to hide his disbelief.

  "We all do, Strasser."

  The wig came off, revealing the bald scalp beneath. The sec boss of Fort Security leaned against the table, flicking at the dust with his gauntlets. Ryan noticed that he was now wearing a side arm, a 9 mm Stechkin blaster with a powerful laser nightsight attached.

  "Hot morning, Ryan."

  "Yeah."

  What was going on inside the man's elongated skull? The slit eyes gave nothing away. Yesterday af­ternoon, after he realized who his captor was, Ryan had genuinely expected that he would be dead before the turning of the moon. Indeed, death was the very best he could have hoped for.

  But now?

  A sidewinder was a model of directness compared to the subterranean maze of Cort Strasser's perverted mind. If he was going to keep Ryan alive a while longer, then he had a good reason.

  Strasser moved from the table to stand directly in front of Ryan, taking care to keep just beyond the reach of a flailing boot.

  "You're wondering why, aren't you?" he asked.

  "Why you haven't chilled me already?"

  "Yes."

  "Sure."

  "Want to know why?"

  "Fireblast! Can't we cut out the games, Strasser? You've got a reason. A reason that you hope might benefit you and your plans. So why not save us both some time and tell what it is? Then I can have a good laugh, and we can take it on from there. How about that?"

  "I have read much. Anyplace I find an old book or mag or a vid to view… I know that in pulps the hero of darkness often asks the hero of light to join him. Never happens. Not in the fics, it doesn't. But what of real life, Ryan?"

  "You…you drugged me, Strasser. Fucked my hearing so I'd hear weird things. Like you asking me to join you."

  Strasser's parchment face stretched into something close to a smile. "Grin in the jaws of death, eh, Ryan Cawdor?" With no warning and no change of expression he kicked out, the toe of his polished com­bat boot thunking into the helpless man's thigh. Ryan groaned and dragged his leg clear.

  Strasser carried on as though nothing had hap­pened. "Don't disappoint me. Don't be a stupe when I know you aren't. Don't try to jolt-mouth me, specially not in front of the troopers, or you get hurt. Hurt bad, Ryan. This is good advice I'm giving you, like mother's milk. So listen to me, and listen real good."

  "I'm listening, Strasser."

  "You scarred me, Ryan. Ruined years of work and planning. Stole things I wanted. Not many men do that. I don't have a single enemy, Ryan, but for you. Not one."

  "No enemies, Strasser?" Ryan said disbelievingly. "Not one?"

  "Alive, Ryan. Man like me needs another man the same. Don't say anything smart-ass, or I'll chill you now. Come in with me and take a half share for you and the other three. Persuade them to join me and ride with me."

  If he'd had any doubts befo
re, Ryan knew than Cort Strasser was sublimely, totally insane; mad beyond the craziness of any ordinary lunatic. His dreams of con­quest had tipped over the abyss what little sanity had remained.

  But the knowledge offered a peephole of light for Ryan if he stepped cautiously like a man walking on explosive eggs.

  "I'm listening to you, Strasser."

  The face split, making the lopsided jaw look even more bizarre. "Then come around Fort Security with me, Ryan. And we can talk some more."

  JAK'S RIBS WERE ON FIRE. The jolting of the nimble little pinto pony had undone much of the shaman's good work. Every time he tried for a deep breath, jagged pain lanced through his body. It felt as if someone was rubbing the ends of two broken bottles together inside his chest. Twice he'd had to dismount to vomit. The second time the horse nearly broke away from him, but he just managed to hang on to the bridle.

  Flurries of wind kept swirling around him, bring­ing a pillar of red-gray dust that made him cough. He had borrowed a cotton kerchief from one of the war­riors, which he knotted over his mouth and nose.

  At the last moment J.B. had suggested that it might be better to leave the big Magnum behind.

  "Kid like you…blaster like that. If you're going to get in without too much fuss, then leave the handgun behind."

  As he rode slowly along, following the detailed in­structions of Cuchillo Oro, the boy found that his mind kept turning to Steps Lightly Moon and the pleasure she had given him.

  The memory cheered Jak, and he kicked his pony's flanks, moving toward the fort with a renewed sense of purpose.

  STRASSER DIDN'T TAKE any chances. Despite his pro­testations that he wanted Ryan to become his friend, he kept him securely cuffed, both at ankles and wrists.

  Coming out of the dim light of the prison block, Ryan blinked in the dazzling sunlight.

  The flagpole carried the fluttering pennon of the Seventh Cavalry. It was a truly amazing sight. If he hadn't known better, Ryan could easily have been convinced that a chron-jump had been made success­fully, and that he was back in the late 1800s. Only the dune wag and Strasser's Russian blaster gave the game away.

  "Bastards like this would have ruined everything," the sec boss said. "If I hadn't come along and showed them the right way, they'd probably have burned down the redoubt and the museum by now, and gotten themselves chilled over some Mescalero torture fire in the bargain. I showed 'em different."

  "What's that?" Ryan asked, pointing at a large blaster set between two cart wheels. It seemed to have several barrels.

  "Gatling gun," Strasser answered. "General Custer had one when he went up into the Black Hills of Dakota, the sacred lands of the Sioux. Didn't do him a lot of good. It's like a machine gun. Got too hot and jammed a lot. Looks good for show."

  As he glanced around the fortified building, Ryan felt the sullen swell of despair. Even if, by some mira­cle, he avoided being chilled by Strasser, he didn't see any hope of the undisciplined Apaches being able to defeat the sec men. Fort Security was too powerful and the General too shrewd… unless they could somehow be lured out from behind the thick walls into the neutral killing ground of the desert....

  JAK SAW THE MOUNTED PATROL before it saw him. He'd stopped among a jumble of rounded orange boulders to take a couple of mouthfuls of precious water from the canteen and eat a strip of jerked meat.

  During the rising heat of the morning, the boy had seen innumerable dust devils, whirling clouds of wind-borne sand that danced across the land and collapsed in on themselves as suddenly as they'd appeared. But this column of dust was different: larger and higher, moving steadily toward him along a trail that Cuchillo Oro had shown him on a rough map. A trail that he knew led to the fort.

  He didn't bother to get up and mount the horse again. At their present speed he figured that the sec men would reach him in something under a half hour.

  Jak wasn't in that much of a hurry. He leaned back, shading his sensitive eyes against the sun, and waited.

  "SERGEANT MCLAGLEN."

  "Yes, General?"

  The big raw-faced noncom snapped off a cracking salute. His face creased in a genial smile, but it was a smile that failed totally to get anywhere near the arc­tic-blue eyes.

  "Showing Mr. Cawdor here around our home. It's possible that he might be joining us."

  "Is that so, General?"

  "Do I hear a note of doubt, Sergeant?"

  "Course not, General. You order it, then begob but it's as though you wrote in on a marble tablet."

  "McLaglen here was number two in a big sec unit for a ville out east. Folks come on a sailer from Europe, didn't they, Sergeant?"

  "They did, General. Bad hots over there. Took 'em near two months in a leaking barrel."

  "McLaglen had to leave his ville suddenly, didn't you, Sergeant?"

  "Them bastards would have strung me up by the balls, General. You know why."

  "Tell Mr. Cawdor."

  The big man shuffled his boots in the raked sand of the parade ground. "Sure and I wish you'd not make me, General."

  "Tell him," Strasser said, his voice like the silken caress of a whore's whip.

  "Just that I had to punish a couple of men that stepped out of the line. Didn't expect them to get chilled."

  Ryan was only half listening, using the time to look around the place, trying to find a weakness. But there wasn't one. Cort Strasser was too good at his chosen profession.

  "I think most men would have thought their chances of survival were slim, Ryan," Strasser smiled. "Go on, Sergeant."

  "I was about staking the bastards on some rocks by the sea." He paused. "Well, I suppose they were more in the sea, as you might say."

  "They drowned," Ryan finished flatly, not want­ing to get into this murderous game playing that Strasser had begun.

  Sergeant McLaglen threw his head back and bel­lowed with laughter, showing a mouth filled with rot­ten teeth, sprinkled with a few aging plas-dents. "Sure and that's what they all think, isn't it, General? No, it wasn't the Lantic got to 'em, though they was a mite wet and cold from it. I'd clean forgot that there was some mutie king crabs on that stretch of the coast. Clean forgot, I had."

  A picture flashed into Ryan's mind.

  When he was a young boy he'd gone out on a hunt­ing trip with his father, the Baron Titus, and his brothers, Morgan and Harvey. Ryan would have only been about four years of age. They'd gone in wags from the ville in the Shens, heading eastward until they reached the rolling gray waters of the Lantic. For rea­sons that Ryan couldn't recall, he'd been left alone on a stretch of dismal shingle, while the others went off in search of something or other.

  And the crabs had come for him.

  If he closed his eye, Ryan could still see them, could hear the noise of the scaly shells as they skittered over the wet stones. There'd been a mist drifting in from the water, veiling both ends of the beach, leaving him ut­terly isolated and alone.

  The creatures looked as though they'd been around for all eternity, scuttling about the great feet of the meat-eating dinosaurs at the time that rocks melted and the oceans steamed. Their spiked tails left furrows in the pebbles, and they were moving toward Ryan as fast as a walking man. The nearest of them was four feet across the top of the carapace, seven feet to the tip of its tail. But it was followed by a mutie monster, fully fifteen feet across and nearly thirty feet to the end of the menacing tail.

  Ryan had screamed for help, his voice vanishing in the fog, swallowed by the endless tumbling of the breakers. He'd run, his little legs scampering, slip­ping and falling in the treacherous hollows of the long beach. All he'd had to defend himself with was a dag­ger, a pretty toy, with a maroon hilt, taped with a light blue ribbon. The blade was no longer than six inches.

  The safety of some low cliffs, easily climbed, beck­oned the toddler, but the huge leader of the king crabs was closing on him, so near he could hear the harsh sound of its breathing. If he'd fallen then the creature would have overwhelmed him.
/>   Only yards from safety, the young boy had turned, tiny knife in his chubby fist. He watched the ap­proach of the nightmare horror, his feet planted apart for balance, falling by some primitive instinct into the classic knife fighter's crouch, knife held point up.

  The thing was on him, hardly hesitating, seeing no threat in its puny opponent. Instead of backing away, Ryan dived in, jumping over the top of the thing, cut­ting down at the boggling eye.

  Desperately wounded and half-blind, the crab shuddered to a stop, seeking its prey. But Ryan was quicker. Dancing around it, he stabbed through the other eye, feeling its clammy ichor spurting over his fingers and wrist, clear to the elbow.

  The boy had escaped easily after that, watching while the other crabs turned on the helpless giant and devoured it.

  The memory was so powerful that Ryan almost forgot where he was. Strasser's voice tugged him back into the present.

  "And the crabs began at their feet and worked their way up, did they not, Sergeant?"

  "Indeed they did, General. One of the bastards had his head, chest and left arm remaining. The other was just a head, rolling around in the surf like a large pink rock."

  Once again there came the bellow of raucous laughter from the noncom.

  Strasser smiled indulgently as though one of his pet hounds had just performed a clever trick.

  McLaglen's merriment stopped as quickly as it had begun, and he stared belligerently at Ryan Cawdor. "Seems like he don't think it's funny, General. Mebbe he's not the man for the Seventh. Mebbe he ought to prove to us that he's not just a one-eyed piece of spare baggage."

  Ryan had been challenged often enough in his life to know that this wasn't a joke anymore. And he knew enough about Cort Strasser to feel confident that this had all been engineered.

  "Sergeant's right, Ryan. New man here might have to face up to a challenge. Who d'you suggest, Ser­geant?"

  "Trooper Rourke's gentle as a newborn lamb, General. Mebbe Mr. Cawdor might care to come 'cross with him, d'you think?"

  Ryan saw the logic behind the madness. If he beat the sec man, who he guessed was the best they had at hand-to-hand, then it would establish him if he ac­cepted Strasser's offer. If he lost, then a good beating would give some pleasure to Strasser.