Pony Soldiers

by James Axler

  Ryan was peering down. "Any moment now," he said. "Many Winters'll come out from behind cover and then Strasser'll pick him off easy as squashing a bug on your hand."

  "That blaster's got a real distinctive noise to it," the Armorer said. "Know it if I get to hear it anywhere."

  The Dragunova barked once more.

  The white-haired Mescalero threw his arms wide, the coup stick flying high in the air, feathers whirling. The chant ended abruptly, choked as the 7.62 mm rimmed bullet tore out the front of the warrior's throat, sending him kicking off the pony's back in a welter of tumbled blood.

  There was a cheer from the watching sec men. "Good shooting, General," Sergeant McLaglen called.

  "Fucking awful," Strasser muttered, knowing that he should have opened fire much sooner and chilled the old man minutes ago. "Mount up and let's get af­ter those bastards!" he yelled, the order repeated by the noncom.

  By the time they reached the flanks of the butte, Ryan and the others were already dust, a mile or more away from them.

  McLaglen waited for the word from the General, but Strasser simply stood in the stirrups, shading his eyes against the lowering sun, watching the snaking pillar of orange dust.

  "General?"

  "Yeah?"

  "We going to follow them?"

  The man turned with a terrifying smile hooked on his thin lips. "Follow them? Course we follow them, Sergeant. We follow Ryan Cawdor into the jaws of the grave."

  IT WAS A DESPERATE SCRAMBLE. The three surviving Mescalero warriors led the way, whooping and kick­ing their heels into the slats of their animals. J.B. struggled next, barely keeping them in sight through the weaving trails of the narrow canyons. Ryan and Man Whose Eyes See More rode together, falling be­hind, trying to keep alongside Jak, who was suffering once more from his injuries.

  Twice Ryan risked a glance over his shoulder, seeing that the swirling sign of the pursuers' dust was clos­ing in fast. Now he cursed himself for not insisting that the boy went on with the others. They were still some distance from the hidden mouth of the box canyon and the sec men were drawing nearer.

  After what seemed an eternity, Ryan glimpsed the narrow opening to Drowned Squaw Canyon. The cavalry patrol was less than three hundred yards be­hind them.

  The die was cast.

  Killing time had come.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE LIGHT WAS FADING FAST, great banks of menac­ing purple chem clouds gathering all across the west­ern horizon. Almost as if it were greeting their arrival in the canyon, there was an echoing peal of thunder, the pressure of the sound squeezing between the high cliffs.

  The rancheria looked normal. Not far off the fifty or so wickiups were scattered about the base of the half-mile-wide canyon. Cooking fires gleamed brightly, and there was the strong scent of chili stew cooking in the iron caldrons. Ryan followed the po­nies of the rest of his group, noticing the stacks of barrels of cooking oil piled high against the one wall, not far from the wickiup that had been the home of the Anglos.

  Everything was precisely as it would have been on any one of ten thousand other evenings at the Mescalero rancheria.

  STRASSER HAD DRAWN the brass-hilted cavalry saber, waving it over his head as he led the mad dash through the narrow entrance to the box canyon, past walls of rock that clamped in on the riders, less than a dozen feet across. He whooped exultantly, the sound almost drowned in a rumble of distant thunder.

  "It's their fucking ville!" he screamed to Sergeant McLaglen, who was almost at his stirrup.

  There were low huts, each with a small fire glowing in the half-light. The sec boss's nostrils brimmed with the smell of spicy cooking. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a pile of kegs of oil, near the cliff.

  Everything was precisely as it would have been on any one of ten thousand other evenings at the Mescalero rancheria.

  Except that there was nobody there.

  No men relaxing by their homes, smoking a last pipe before eating their evening meals.

  No women bustling about with the cooking, scur­rying to ready the children for their beds.

  No children running and leaping and screaming, eager to hold off the moment when their mothers would catch up with them.

  No horses feeding contentedly near the placid pool of water.

  Nobody.

  At the farthest end of the canyon floor there was a walled depression, where Cuchillo Oro had told Ryan their ancestors used to keep and breed cattle. The old corral was two hundred feet across, with high earth walls, backed by the cliffs above the mirrored lake. Ryan was the last one inside, leaping from his horse and letting it go. If the plan worked, he'd be able to recover it later. If the plan didn't work, then he wouldn't be doing any more riding. Not ever.

  The three Apaches were at the earthworks, rifles at the ready, J.B. and Jak joining them, the boy walking with a pained stiffness.

  "How far are they?" Ryan shouted.

  "On top of us," the Armorer replied. "They haven't spotted the— Yeah, yeah, they have now."

  Strasser wasn't the first one to notice. It was Ser­geant McLaglen, spurring on at the flank of the blond-haired death's skull, who realized there was some­thing badly wrong.

  "Nobody!" he screamed, voice cracking with sud­den gut-tearing fear. "Nobody! The bastards are gone! General! Halt for God's sake!"

  The terror spread like a brushfire in a dry summer. All the sec men began to look around them, the blinding heat of the chase cooling as they saw there was no exit at the far end of the canyon, just the bit­ing jaws at the entrance. Some men reined in imme­diately, while others tugged their animals to left and right. One fell, then another, horses crying high and thin. The flailing hooves kicked up a blinding dust that made it impossible for anyone to see what was hap­pening.

  Strasser's voice rose above the bedlam. "Take Cawdor! Find the one-eyed man and bring him to me! They can't have left the canyon. Find them and kill them!"

  "Pour in some lead," Ryan called from their hid­ing place.

  Even firing blind they couldn't fail to find targets. Men began to go down, yelling, clutching bullet wounds. More maimed animals fell, bringing down others.

  Ryan heard the voice of the sergeant, bellowing above the chaos. "Withdraw! Get the fuck out of here… Way we came in… Way we came in!"

  "No," Ryan said to himself.

  Cuchillo—with Krysty, Doc and Lori—had mar­shaled his forces well, keeping everyone out of sight as the trap was baited. The Apache women and children were already more than a mile away, in a small can­yon, guarded by a half dozen of the younger war­riors. Every other man of the people who could carry a blaster was there, either climbing up the side trails to line the cliffs, or spilling from hiding to turn the nar­row entrance to Drowned Squaw Canyon into a mael­strom of instant death.

  It took several minutes for the dust to clear. In the confusion, several of the fires had been knocked over, setting light to three of the wickiups. Smoke began to billow around, making it hard to see just what was happening. Above the reek of cordite, the canyon was brimming with the flavor of chili stew.

  Ryan held his own fire after the initial burst of shooting, wanting to conserve ammo as much as pos­sible, readying himself to pick targets when they showed. But the clearing of the dust showed that he wasn't really needed.

  The old Remingtons and Winchesters of the Apaches had done sterling work. Already better than half of the attacking cavalry patrol was dead or dying. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere, flung to the dirt. The sound of firing from the rim of the canyon and from down by the entrance was constant. The chem storm seemed to be flooding closer, seamed with silvery-purple slashes of lightning. But if there was any thun­der roiling in the heart of the storm it was drowned by the noise of the killing field.

  J.B. was at Ryan's elbow, peering cautiously over the top of the age-old wall of the corral. Jak was sit­ting, legs out in front of him, holding his arms wrapped around his chest. The shaman was stooped at
his side, trying to help him, looking like a bizarre stick insect.

  "We got 'em," the Armorer said, never a man to use four words when he could get by with just three.

  "Looks like it. They won't break out. Entrance blocked with dead horses and men. Rest are running around like chickens with their heads gone."

  One of the older warriors, still levering and firing enthusiastically, pointed out into the canyon, beyond the water, and shouted something in the Apache tongue.

  "What's he say?" Ryan called to Man Whose Eyes See More.

  "Fire! He sees a fire."

  "There's dozens of fires around. Look, there." He showed J.B. where there was a flare of smoky, golden light under the far wall.

  "Cooking oil's gone up, Ryan!"

  "Fireblast! Look at that bastard smoke coming up from it."

  "They can't get out. Unless they're like that man they said climbed the cliff above the lake."

  "Wings on Feet," the shaman said, towering over them in the demonic light of the spreading blaze. "But that was legend."

  "Heard Doc once say something about if the leg­end got bigger than the facts, then you stuck with the legend," Ryan said.

  "I looked at that rock face," J.B. told them, "and nobody human could get up it. Even with the hounds of hell at your back."

  The smoke was becoming thicker. The shooting persisted, but now the volleys were becoming more scattered. The distinctive crack of the Springfield car­bines came less frequently as the sec men were butch­ered by the jubilant Apaches.

  A couple of troopers, bareheaded, eyes wide in near panic, broke around the side of one of the burning wickiups and ran toward the old corral, each man holding a smoking Colt Navy blaster.

  "Mine!" Ryan shouted, steadying himself, the SIG-Sauer clamped in his right hand. He braced himself, legs slightly apart, squeezing the trigger four times. Two spaced shots at each man. The range was a scant twenty yards. At that distance, using the excellent blaster, Ryan was able to put eight rounds from eight inside a circle of two inches across.

  The leading sec man was hit a finger's width above the sternoclavicular joint, plumb in the middle of his chest. It stopped him in his tracks, frozen as the sec­ond round took him through the heart, smashing the spine on the way through, punching an exit hole the size of a baseball. The impact knocked him over in the dirt, his pistol flying in the air, eventually falling with a soft splash into the pool.

  The second man saw his friend go down and made a late, doomed effort to dodge sideways, ducking for cover. Both bullets hit him in the lower part of his face. By a ballistic freak, they completely tore away the man's bottom jaw, sending it flapping to the earth, like a bizarre, crippled bird.

  The trooper tumbled backward, head thrown up. Ryan had seen some dreadful sights in his life, but even he winced at the horror. The dying man's tongue flopped down, across his neck, writhing in his death agony. Exposed by the loss of the bottom jaw, it was a hideous length, gray-purple in color. It looked as if the sec man had swallowed a monstrous worm, but hadn't quite managed to get down the last fourteen inches of its tail.

  "Fireblast!" Ryan leveled the blaster and fired a third round. The bullet punched through the cavalry­man's forehead, putting him out of his suffering.

  "Getting soft, friend," J.B. said. "Waste of a per­fectly good round of ammo."

  It wasn't much of a firefight. Cuchillo Oro had taken the time bought by Ryan and by Many Winters to place his warriors well, making sure they stayed in hiding, picking off the trapped pony soldiers where they scurried for shreds of cover.

  Within fifteen minutes it was virtually over and done. A few, a very few, of the sec men had managed to find places to make a last stand, and there was still the sound of sporadic shooting. The smoke from the burning oil billowed everywhere, rank and thick, coiling all around the walls of the canyon. The sun had virtually disappeared, and the rancheria was in near darkness.

  Ryan walked cautiously from the old corral, mov­ing along the flank of the pool of water. The body of one of the sec men lay partway in the lake, the back of his head blown away by a large caliber bullet, the blood spreading languorously from the waving hair.

  The smoke hung thickest at the box end of the can­yon. It was virtually impossible to see the cliffs be­yond the bloodied pool. Ryan tried to look up and see the top of the sheer rock face. For a frozen fragment of a second a gust of wind from the speeding storm tore a window in the smoke. Ryan blinked his good eye, unable to believe what he thought he'd seen.

  J.B. caught the moment. "What is it?"

  "Thought I saw…"

  "What?"

  "No. Can't be. Looked like the ghost of old Wings on Feet halfway up the cliff, hanging there like a spi­der." He shook his head. "No. Couldn't be. Trick of the shadows."

  The Armorer wiped his glasses on his sleeve, push­ing back the brim of the fedora and looking above the dark mirror of the pool. "No. Can't see a damned thing up there."

  "Guess so. Come on. Let's go help pick up the pieces."

  "CAN'T BE CERTAIN-SURE until dawn," the shaman said. "But it looks like General Yellowhair managed to fool us all."

  Ryan punched his right list hard into the palm of his left hand. "That's what I saw on the face of that bas­tard cliff. That was fucking Strasser."

  "Might be hiding in one of the wickiups," Krysty suggested.

  "No. My people have searched every place."

  Ryan looked at Cuchillo. "So, he's gone?"

  The war chief nodded slowly. "Only a demon of the night winds could have climbed that cliff to escape us."

  "That's Cort Strasser," Doc agreed, his arm still tightly around Lori. "A man from the deepest circle of Hades."

  "We do not think any other of the soldiers got away from us," Steps Lightly Moon said. The girl had im­mediately made for Jak when she and the other women were summoned back to the canyon.

  The sun was long set, the floor of the rancheria sodden with darkness. Fires burned once more, and once again there was the rich smell of cooking. The bodies had been dragged out beyond the neck of the canyon, to be moved farther away when morning came.

  And there were the prisoners.

  Despite the overwhelming firepower of the defend­ers, six of the sec men had managed to hole up in a rocky corner, protected by an overhang, keeping a brisk fire against the Mescalero. But they finally ran out of ammo and were beaten to the earth. Sergeant McLaglen had been in charge and he had fought bravely with his saber, killing three warriors before they finally overcame him.

  Now he and the other four survivors, one of his party having been killed in the final storming of their redoubt, had been taken prisoner and were bound and tied to stakes in front of the chiefs wickiup.

  In all, nine of the Mescalero had died during the great battle.

  "They died with much honor," Cuchillo Oro said, a touch pompously. "They have saved us all. The people have won again. Never more shall Anglos threaten our way of living."

  "Until next time," J.B. whispered.

  Ryan was bone-weary.

  All he wanted to do was get to bed and rest after the suffering and tension of the past couple of days. He'd eaten his fill of chili stew and beans, enjoying the pleasure of being again with his five friends. Man Whose Eyes See More joined them for a half hour, and Ryan realized how much he'd come to like the wry humor and natural wisdom of the shaman.

  "Time for bed, folks," he said, reaching a hand down to help Krysty to her feet. The others followed suit, Jak gently disentangling himself from the fond arms of Cuchillo's daughter.

  The boy caught Ryan's eye, beckoning him to the far side of the fire.

  "What is it, Jak?"

  "Just that Steps Lightly Moon and father kind of want come along."

  "I know that."

  The boy's hair was cleaned and neatly brushed back off the high, white forehead. "Yeah. He wants talk you."

  "Now?"

  "Yeah."

  "All right, Jak. Listen, one othe
r thing I gotta say."

  "If it's 'thanks' then don't."

  "Okay. It was, but I won't. But thanks all the same."

  "You'd done same. Any of us would. That's why so close."

  "Would you like Cuchillo and the girl to join us, Jak?"

  "He's brave fighter. She's…"

  The shaman had silently joined them. "I see Eyes of Wolf makes eyes of sheep," he joked.

  "Boy wants advice."

  The shaman smiled, eyes enigmatic behind the in­evitable sunglasses. The storm had passed by the can­yon, but they could still hear the occasional rumbling of distant thunder.

  "He wishes to see tomorrow. And many more to­morrows. Every man wishes that at some time in his life. It becomes harder to see yesterday as you grow older, Jak."

  "Me an' the—"

  "The girl, Jak? It all comes to wanting and being able. A man could stand on top of those cliffs and want to fly safely to the earth. It's a good idea and would be wonderful if he was able to do it. But to leap because you want is not always the best idea."

  "Then you think shouldn't—"

  The shaman held up a skeletal hand. "I do not tell you, Jak. You must decide. Perhaps time will help you."

  "Don't have a lot of time," Ryan said. "Guess we'll be moving on tomorrow or the day after. Our work's done."

  "Like the wind." The shaman gently mocked him. "I know. There are times when to move on is much to be desired."

  "Jak says Cuchillo wants to talk with me about joining us."

  "He does."

  "Do us a favor, Man Whose Eyes See More. Tell him I'm totally wasted. I'll speak to him in the morn­ing."

  "I'll tell him, Ryan. And sleep in peace, my friend."

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  THE SCREAMING WOKE HIM, a sound filled with shock and piercing pain, so dreadful that Ryan felt the skin tighten protectively around his balls. He opened his eye, looking first at the luminous wrist chron. It was a few minutes before one in the morning. Outside the wickiup he could see that the fires must have been built up. There was the orange brightness of soaring flames and skipping shadows moving past.