For the moment, then, he was still alive.
An arrow smashed through the lightweight railing wall above her head, scattering splinters through her hair. She was surprised to feel a wave of anger washing fear away.
The unconscious sergeant’s long, hammerless army rifle lay smoking upon the deck beside him. Sitting up, she unfastened one of a dozen flaps upon the broad leather diagonal which encircled his body. She extracted three finger-length brass cartridges from their loops. She placed them between the fingers of her left hand in the regulation manner which her father had insisted upon teaching her.
With the same hand she supported the wooden fore-end of the rifle—its round, blued, tapered barrel was too hot to touch, and much heavier than the cut-down target weapons she was used to—while with her right she grasped the gracefully curving underlever, yanked it downward, lowering the breechblock at the rear of the receiver.
A spent casing sizzled past her, bouncing off her shoulder. It rattled across the deck.
She slid one of the fresh rounds into the breech, slammed the lever shut, and rested the muzzle of the long-barreled weapon upon the deck rail. That was better.
Another arrow lashed past her face, ruffling her hair.
Keeping both eyes open, as she had been taught, she laid her right cheek upon the polished walnut stock, wrapped her right hand about its wrist. She leaned forward, peering through the tiny hole in the rear sight toward the slim, bead-topped post atop the muzzle.
The movement of the howling, motorized savages was so rapid it was difficult to get one of them lined up in her sights, let alone to keep him there. Inspired, she pivoted her barrel toward the land-ship’s undercut bow, holding her sights upon an imaginary space just to its port side.
A different sort of howl unnerved her momentarily as the land-ship gave a slight lurch, grinding one unlucky rider and his machine beneath its giant iron wheels as he crossed the bow.
The instant she saw a second blurred flickering of movement—she had been taught, and properly, to focus her eyes upon the front sight—she squeezed the trigger, aiming to the left, giving the traversing Red Man an arm’s-length lead.
The heavy weapon roared, its all-consuming bellow becoming her entire universe for a moment which seemed to stretch into eternity. The rifle’s curved steel buttplate smashed cruelly against her frail, thin-clad shoulder, stunning her as if she had been shot herself. Her vision was obscured by shock and by infernal-odored smoke.
There was a scream, at first ahead of her. It drifted backward as the land-ship thundered onward. When it had passed out of the smoke, she looked back to see one naked savage struggling to get his machine upright, blood streaming down his chest.
He shook his fist at the land-ship.
She caught herself grinning, wondering whether—no, hoping that—he was the one she had shot at.
“Princess!”
Ducking behind the rail, Ayesha levered the breech open. Smoke curled from the chamber. Marya’s hysterical shout she ignored, concentrating instead upon the task of handling the awkward weapon without burning herself upon its overworked and overheated metal parts.
The extractor flung the empty cartridge casing from the chamber with a cheerful ping, repeated as it struck a hatch-cover behind her. Before it had bounced a second time, she took a new one from between the fingers of her left hand and reloaded.
The servant woman elbowed and kneed her way across the blood-slippery, arrow-cluttered deck from wherever she had been hiding, her breath coming in ragged, frightened gasps.
“Princess, you must stay inside! We shall all be killed!”
“Marya, do not distract me!” Ayesha shouted over the clatter and roar of battle. If her maidservant’s fractured logic was correct, she would rather be killed outdoors than in. “Go inside yourself—or find a gun!”
One of her father’s hired retainers—Abu, she thought it was—fell on his face a dozen paces ahead. Seeing his impact with the deck drive a reddened arrow shaft through his back, Marya began to whimper, then curled herself into a ball, her back against the railing wall.
This time, when Ayesha stroked the smooth curve of her weapon’s trigger—she was long past noticing its recoil—the rifle’s mind-shattering roar was matched by a secondary, louder bellow and a blinding burst of light. She had struck one of the riding-machines instead of its rider. There was an explosion. Something thudded heavily to the deck-planking just in front of her.
She glanced down briefly, expecting to be rewarded with the sight of a scorched, distorted fragment of the machinery she had just destroyed. Perhaps the boiler.
Instead, she saw a brown-ankled human foot, severed high upon the limb, still writhing, encased in lightweight bead-fringed suede.
She swallowed back an ugly taste.
With the greatest moral effort she could ever remember expending, the Princess Ayesha, cloistered daughter of the Caliph, emptied and reloaded the rifle once again, obtained three more fresh cartridges from the wounded sergeant’s bandoleer—he was still breathing, she observed absently—then sought yet another target.
She fired, uncertain this time whether she had hit her mark, took a calming breath, reloaded, and fired again.
Until this moment unaware of how her companions fared about her, she was suddenly conscious of a change. The rumble of the land-ship’s giant wheels had dropped in pitch. Its hull groaned mightily with the strain as, for some reason, its pace began to slow.
Past her rifle’s brass front sight, the air above it shimmering and dancing with the barrel’s metallic heat, Ayesha now made out a number of low sod buildings.
A big man, heavily bearded—unlike those smooth-faced savages upon their machines—yet accoutered and deep-tanned in an identically indecent manner, stood in the broad gap of a grass-topped earthen wall, his hands upon his hips, complacently watching the Saracen vessel as it began circling round the buildings. She was reminded of an ancient saying of her mother’s people: “In my weakness, I fled into the desert to escape my enemies—and the desert gave me strength to defeat them.”
Armed with undrawn sword and unpulled bow, scabbarded dagger and holstered pistol, he waved what seemed a casual gauntleted hand at one of the savage riders, who gave a shrill whoop, wrenched his speeding machine up on its rear wheel, and waved back.
A nearby sound distracted her.
Marya sat staring with dull surprise at an arrow buried half its length in her silk-covered thigh. There did not seem to be much blood, and whatever pain she was suffering could not compete with such uncomprehending terror as she had already endured.
Enough.
Aligning her sights upon the bearded man, Ayesha pulled the trigger.
XX: The Botherhood of Man
“Had there not overtaken him a blessing from his Lord he would have been cast upon the wilderness, being condemned. But his Lord had chosen him....”—The Koran, Sura LXVIII
Enough, thought Sedrich Fireclaw, is enough.
The breathless morning silence was over. A brisk, sage-laden high-plains breeze gusted away the brimstone odor lingering in a dense cloud about the ranch yard, leaving behind an underlying metallic smell of freshly spilled blood.
It wasn’t that the carmine-handed killer, always present, leering like a freshly unearthed skull deep within him, in any wise begrudged his painted cycle-riding brothers their innocent amusements. And, after all, this was their land, their home, their place apart from all others in a world where every living thing and every force of nature conspired to end the lives of the hesitant and unwary.
Moreover, in some spiritual sense he’d never fully understood himself, he knew that, in keeping the golden prairie swept clean of interlopers—in particular those intruding from the east—they were performing what they solemnly considered a sacred duty to the unforgiving gods who dwelt in mystery across the Great Blue Mountains.
But when a projectile whirred past his face, the survival sense he’d acquired at a terrible price upon
the untender breast of that same prairie told him it was time now—and perhaps time well past—to put a stop to the tribesmen’s harassment of the alien vessel circling round and round his freehold.
At least until he learned for himself something of the reasons which had brought it here.
Besides, he was discovering that he was curious again. His vision of long ago—and the bitter memories of its near-destruction—had been vindicated. This apparition, pressing wheel-marks wider spread and deeper than any vehicle before it into the cycle-rutted road before his gate, was a rotary-sailed land-ship of the very sort he’d himself conceived and been forced to abandon twenty years before.
More than that, he recognized certain details, solutions to the problems of mechanics which had been born in his mind alone. These had merely been expanded to accommodate the admittedly grander scale of the giant vessel now arriving at his doorstep amidst a sleet of arrows from his adopted relatives. He’d reason to appreciate such differences in engineering style: the Comanche warriors pursued the land-ship astride knee-guided steam-cycles he’d no hand himself in designing, but which he and Dove Blossom had spent many of their days, for fifteen years, repairing and maintaining for them, and with which he was thus intimately familiar.
Wheels roared past him, spattering him with sand.
Come to think upon it, one of those little machines—ridden, he thought, by his wife’s cross-cousin Porcupine Eater—had sounded a bit rough as it had passed him, its rider sending a flying shaft into the eye of one of the foreigners. Likeliest the drive-chain had gone a bit slack. Trail-wear in each of the bearing-holes of not more than a fine hair’s width, multiplied times the number of links in the chain, quickly added up to fingers’ widths, loading the engine at stops and starts, and each time the gears were shifted to a different ratio.
Have to see to it soon, ere it cause other difficulties.
Another gun barked. Elsewhere somebody screamed with pain.
But service to the Comanche was an everyday consideration, to be put aside for later. Now it was the land-ship which held his fascinated attention, and another, similar machine which occupied his thoughts.
There were differences, of course: the experimental vessel of his adventurous boyhood had been little larger than a rowboat. This two-masted monster was incomparably greater, a veritable mobile village. Its two dozen spinning sail-booms, twelve per mast, six up and six down, stretched wider, tip to bronze-shod tip, than his entire ranch house. Its sails—each resin-saturated expanse was greater than Dove Blossom’s garden. The glass-fiber masts themselves soared into the prairie sky, straight and tall as mountain evergreens. The great spoked wheels, rimmed in iron, stood three times the height of a tall man.
Fireclaw watched with interest as its desperate and motley complement discharged breech-loading rifles at their whooping tormentors, one slow and awkward loading after another. And to considerably less practical effect, he observed, than the tribesmen with their optically sighted longbows, quick to load and quick to reload.
Here was yet another surprise. He’d believed he possessed the sole firearm within many months’ journey of this place, perhaps upon the entire continent. They seemed to be forbidden or unknown to every culture he encountered.
Now here came a boatload of the things.
Nonetheless, these oddly clad assorted foreigners hadn’t learned a lesson yet which he himself had absorbed even before the first blood-drenched twelvemonth he’d settled here upon the western plains—that in order to survive, a lone warrior must be capable of fighting like many. This meant with a repeating weapon of some kind, like the fat-cylindered revolving pistol hanging now upon his left hip.
He scanned the land-ship with a practiced tactical sweep, complex ideas and images flowing, twining, braiding together wordlessly within his mind in fractions of an eyeblink.
Three upper decks the land-ship boasted, those at bow and stern a few steps higher than the center where the masts were stepped. At the tiller there growled and bellowed a shaggy laughing giant, long-barreled pistol and curved dagger thrust into his colorful sash, a man who might well have been his own father, Sedrich, dead these many years, save for the tangled orange of his hair and beard.
Some sort of gray exotic bird perched screaming upon his shoulder. A flash of crimson showed among its tail feathers.
By either side of this outlandish, noisy pair there crouched another man. One slight, blue-clad, and darkly bearded foreigner wore transparent coverings, set in polished metal frames, before his eyes. Even as the Helvetian watched, two barrels of his huge four-barreled pistol belched, generating twin balls of flame.
One of the riders fell, his face a ruin.
Another of them, slightly wounded several places in the same one-man volley, screamed with something more than pain and pointed at the shooter, cursing. Multiple projectiles, Fireclaw nodded approvingly, most likely pellets of iron or lead.
An angry flock of arrows coursed toward the eyeglass wearer.
He ducked behind a rail, untouched.
The Comanche—despite, or perhaps because of, their familiarity with telescopic sights—might well be taking the fellow’s eye-coverings for a sign of sorcerous capability. Fireclaw realized, in a flash of intuition, that these small windows compensated for short-sightedness such as Owaldsohn had complained of near the end of his life. He remembered, with a sad, hidden smile, watching his father hold his mother’s books at arm’s length, struggling to extract some meaning from the letters he was trying so hard to learn as an example to his son.
The window-wearing man fired another volley and reloaded.
The other figure beside the tiller was lean and brown, bereft of facial hair save for a thin, drooping mustache, almost naked and well muscled. Something deadly in this fellow’s posture seemed familiar, promising of reserves untapped. He fought in silence, defending the red-haired steersman with a weapon Fireclaw had never seen before, fitting a series of small spears—or perhaps large arrows—into a curve-ended stick, hurling them with surprising force at the enemy.
One such pierced a steam-cycle from side to side as Fireclaw watched, penetrating fuel tank and boiler. Another, following in its wake, trapped itself between two wheel-spokes, snapping the tautly adjusted wires, chewing the wheel free of its hub. Amidst a clattering uproar, the gutted machine ground itself into the prairie floor, flipping end over end in a spectacular cloud of dust and small parts. Porcupine Eater’s successor would need more done to this machine he inherited, after this day, than a simple tightening of the drive-chain.
That was it! This spear-launching fighter reminded Fireclaw in some way of his own brother-in-law, Knife Thrower. The Helvetian chuckled to himself, resolving to keep a wary corner of his eye upon the man as he took in the rest of the ship.
Besides the oddly assorted valiants upon the afterdeck, Fireclaw watched three others forward. Another brown, mustached, and loinclothed man with the squint eyes of a hired killer was armed, to Fireclaw’s astonishment, with a well-worn Helvetian shoulder-bow which he or his father might once have forged the prod for. He used it clumsily—an unfamiliar task which he was learning—missing shot after shot, yet kept reloading and discharging it as if he were himself a machine.
Fireclaw realized that this battle, a furious and desperate struggle for most of the participants aboard the land-ship, was merely finger-practice for the squint-eyed shoulder-bow man. When things are slack enough, a professional needs must acquire familiarity with as many outlandish weapons as one finds practical.
A swarthy rifleman beside the bowman was dressed much like the shaggy shouter upon the tiller deck, in bright, loose-hanging pants and jacket, weapon-heavy sash.
And—was not yon third rifle-wielder, more slender in vest and pantaloons, a woman? Little matter. She handled her gun as if she knew what she was doing.
Amidships was the one who’d shot at him. Also a woman.
Her shining eyes were big for the rest of her face, black as a moonl
ess midnight sky. A slight blood trickle drew a thin and ragged sinuosity from her hairline to a gracefully arched eyebrow, although she appeared not to have noticed it as yet. This one, thought Fireclaw, looked pale ’neath the olive cast of her flawless skin, inexperienced in combat, frightened into fearlessness, but determined. In his experience this made a dangerous and unpredictable mixture.
What was worse, her gaze never left him. Nor the front sight of a smoking breech-loader near as big as she was.
She’d bear watching, too.
He wondered whether there was anyone else aboard, belowdecks or behind the rail. Well, time enough to find out later. Glancing back past his shoulder to make certain Dove Blossom knew what he was about, and leaving his own weapons conspicuously untouched, he stepped out, empty-handed, into the very middle of the onslaught.
Delighted shrieks arose from one of the war-painted forms slashing by upon wire-spoked wheels. Hi-yi! A day to remember in lodge-song! An ancient enemy, and honored, was joining this splendid new game!
Like some magical and deadly sprout, an arrow blossomed in the dirt between Fireclaw’s feet. It was soon followed by another and another as rider after cheering rider swept past him in a swirl of engine exhaust and taunting screams.
Fireclaw, unflinching, pretended not to notice. This was different from the gunshot. They’d not harm him, this he knew. Everyone was in fine spirits this day.
One valorous warrior of perhaps thirteen roared toward Fireclaw, his gracefully curved war-club, with the smooth round river stone cemented in the end, upraised.
Grinning, Fireclaw lifted his hand, palm upward, received a tap from the club as its wielder flashed by.
This day, the young ones would go home at sundown to their mother’s houses, bragging of the wise in which they’d counted coup upon Fireclaw the Destroyer, Fireclaw the Hewer of the People.
Fireclaw the Strander of Souls.
Just as their bedtime tales, growing up, had been filled with imaginings about him, he had himself heard all of these names whispered of him many times, though ne’er to his face—save for that once, when Knife Thrower had bargained and paid for a truce.
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