From a High Tower

by Mercedes Lackey

  “I would like to practice that before I tried it in public,” she replied, honestly.

  “Kin ya split a playin’ card edge-on?” She stared at him; that sounded impossible. He smirked. “Annie Oakley kin. Every time.”

  Well, if the famed sharpshooter could do it without the aid of sylphs, surely she could manage it with magical help! “I will try that too—in practice,” she promised. He laughed.

  “We kin work in whatever ye manage t’get up, jest let me know when ye wanta change yer act. Cap’n wants ta know what ya wanna call yerself. He says it cain’t have no more letters’n Ado Ellie,” Ned continued. “We’re repaintin’ her sign fer ya.”

  She stroked Lebkuchen’s neck while she mulled that over. “Ellie” was not all that far from “Giselle,” so it would make sense to keep that part of the name. She considered the names she knew from Karl May’s books. “What about Rio Ellie?” she asked.

  “That’ll do!” Ned crowed, and scuttled off, his bowlegs making his gait very comical.

  By the time she had finished her trick-shot routine, she was feeling as if she had all this business of being on display well in hand.

  But then came Captain Cody’s idea—target-shooting at the gallop with handguns. Initially, she hadn’t objected; she’d seen how easily Cody and the other men handled their revolvers when they were firing blank cartridges during the battles with the Indians and the bandits.

  But now that she was faced with the task, she was liking the idea less and less. She mounted Lebkuchen, Ned handed her the weapon, and that decided her. The only “pistol” she had ever shot wasn’t hers, and it wasn’t anything like the Colt “Peacemaker” revolvers. They were extremely heavy. And the moment she took one in her hand, she knew that even with the sylph’s help, if she tried to shoot one from the back of a galloping horse, she’d probably injure or even kill someone.

  “No,” she said, firmly, handing the revolver back to Ned and getting off Lebkuchen.

  Cody looked down at her from atop Lightning. “No?” he echoed, his moustache drooping with sudden disappointment.

  “Not merely no,” she repeated. “Absolutely not. Lebkuchen is not accustomed to having me shoot from her back. I have never shot from a walking horse, much less a galloping one. I’ve never shot a revolver in my life, and if I try this insanity, someone will end up with a bullet in him—or her. I do not think that bleeding customers will encourage more ticket sales.”

  Cody sighed theatrically. “Ado Ellie did—” he began, and was interrupted by someone from the company.

  “You been eatin’ loco-weed!” called a little bantam of a man in a cowboy’s outfit. “Ado Ellie never did no such thing, an’ yer a consarned liar, Cody Lee!” This was followed by jeers and a great many rude noises from some of the others in the crowd. Little Fred pushed himself to the front and stood just under Lightning’s nose, shaking his finger at the star of the show.

  “Jest because you got your name plastered all over this here show, don’t you think you kin push this liddle gal inter somethin’ she thinks she cain’t do jest cause ye wanta prove you’re better’n her with a Colt!” The Captain’s moustache drooped further. Giselle sensed that Fred had hit on the real reason why Captain Cody had tried to get her to do something that would likely prove dangerous. His masculine pride had been touched, because she was better than he with a rifle. He wanted to prove he was as good a shot or better with the revolvers.

  Well, he could have his victory!

  “I wasn’t born in the saddle, and I’ll not risk anyone’s safety on my aim with a revolver,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, as Fred pointed out, it is your face and name that are the basis of this show; your expertise should be the last turn the audience sees before the closing number.” And with that, she led Lebkuchen out of the arena, leaving Cody with no alternative but to run through his mounted trick-shots.

  It wasn’t as if he actually needed her as part of this turn! He combined his trick-riding with extremely accurate target shots, shooting while hanging from positions all over his poor horse. “I don’t know how he gets Lightning to put up with that,” she remarked to Lebkuchen, as he hung off the patient horse’s neck while shooting. “He truly is a ‘Wonder Horse.’ It’s a wonder he doesn’t throw the Captain right off!”

  Lebkuchen snorted, as if in total agreement, then it was time for her to mount up for the concluding Grand Parade. As she passed through the tent flaps and turned aside, Ned seized Lebkuchen’s reins. “We all reckon yer fit fer the show,” he said, flatly. “I’m a gonna send Carmelita t’help ye sort out yer costumes an’ get ’em set up here fer changin’.” He cackled. “Time t’start earnin’ yer keep!”

  Her heart was pounding and her mouth was as dry as the desert sands as she lined up with the others for the Grand Parade. She didn’t feel anything like ready! It was one thing to perform in front of people who—truth be told—had not expected more of her than of their previous girl sharpshooter. It was quite something else to perform in front of a potentially critical audience, who were expecting . . . well . . . were expecting something like a Karl May hero!

  But she had no choice. Although Ned had spoken as if in jest, she could read behind his words that he was quite serious. She was getting quite a fine bit of money, and it was his estimation that she’d better start earning it now.

  The outfit she was wearing for the Grand Parade and her first turn was rather like the female version of Ned’s own buckskin suit: fringed gold-colored leather ornamented with round silver buckles. Lebkuchen was wearing a different sort of saddle than the one that both of them were used to; it had a very high pommel, with something called a “saddle horn” that the cowboys used during their roping exercises, and was much larger and stiffer than the little riding saddle she used. Lebkuchen had laid her ears back on being presented with this thing, and had snorted at the additional weight, but seemed to have adjusted to it.

  Somehow, Karl May had never mentioned these saddles in his books, even though they were wildly unlike a German saddle, and as much as he liked to describe things in prose, one would think he would have at least mentioned them! She was beginning to wonder if he had ever set foot in the West at all!

  But all that went quite out of her head as the music began on the other side of the canvas. This was the music she remembered from watching the show, the brazen, bellowing, exciting stuff that made a thrill run down her back, not the lazy tootling of the rehearsal.

  Ahead of her, Captain Cody’s horse Lightning pranced in place and tossed his head, impatient for his gallop into the arena. Cody sat straighter in his saddle and seemed to somehow grow taller and more impressive than he had been a moment before. And then one of the curtains was pulled aside just enough for a single rider, and Lightning leapt through the opening.

  Then the curtain was pulled aside again, and the color guard—the quartet of Indians and cowboys that carried in the flags—surged across the magic threshold.

  And then, it was her turn.

  She sat frozen as the curtain was pulled aside, suddenly too terrified to move—

  She heard a slap behind her, and Lebkuchen bolted under the raised curtain, propelling both of them out into the arena. And she heard Kellermann call out through his megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen, the most beautiful sharpshooter on the prairie, the lovely, and deadly, Rio Ellie!”

  Somehow she managed to bring Lebkuchen to a halt exactly where she was supposed to, in the middle of the arena. Somehow she managed to bow gravely to either side of her. And somehow she managed to get Lebkuchen moving again, to the end of the arena, and then around to the left, lifting her hand to wave at the audience on that side, as Texas Tom rode out to the tumult of his own applause. Her chest felt tight, her face felt flushed, and the tent seemed utterly airless—and yet, as the assembled company rode back out again, she couldn’t wait for her turn to ride back in again.

 
; 6

  “AND there are no mountains in Texas?”

  Determined to reconcile what she knew of Indians and frontiersmen from Karl May’s books with what she had seen in her dreams the night that Leading Fox and she exchanged languages, Giselle had cornered Captain Cody.

  They were about to pull up the tents and move on tomorrow, having, in Kellermann’s opinion, extracted all the money from the local economy that they were likely to. Their next engagement was for next week; they would have plenty of time to travel the three-days’ journey and practice on the way.

  Giselle went out of her way to find Cody after the second show to cross-examine him. He invited her to a glass of beer in the outer room of his spacious tent, which served as a species of drawing room.

  This close questioning was under the guise of being able to adequately counterfeit being a girl who could properly be called “Rio Ellie,” but the fact was, she already knew it didn’t matter what she told Austrians and Germans. If what she told them matched Karl May, they would go away happy.

  No, this was purely for herself, because she was determined to know the truth.

  The Captain had supplied her with beer, drawn from the little barrel of it he kept in this “drawing room,” and made sure the tent flaps were tied open for the evening breeze. And there was an evening breeze, not too cold, not too damp, supplied thanks to Giselle’s powers. An oil lantern fastened at the peak of the roof provided decent illumination, and out in the camp, the sounds of people packing up their belongings for the move tomorrow made an undercurrent to their conversation.

  As they sat side by side in tolerably comfortable folding chairs of clever design, Cody scratched his head and settled back against the canvas of his chair. “Mountains in Texas? Not the sorta thing y’all call a mountain, no,” he admitted. “They’re all rock an’ brush, there ain’t no forest on ’em. Like if you scoured yer mountains here bare, down to the valley, an’ jest scattered bushes over ’em. It’s mostly desert where the mountains is.”

  If it had not been for those hectic visions, she would not have had an idea of what he was talking about. But she did. Even as he described those mountains, they rose, hazy, sunbaked, in her memory. She did not have to ask him about the lush forests so picturesquely described by May; she already knew they were a lie. She thought kahuraaru in Pawnee and what rose in her mind was not the deep greens, mosses, tender plants and towering trees of her own Black Forest, but trees scarcely taller than a good, two-story German cottage, deciduous trees of a green-brown or yellow-brown color with sparse foliage and small leaves, or evergreens of some sort that were no taller. And this was not the emerald lushness of her forest, These trees were widely separated, with parched and rocky ground covered with thin, dry grasses in between.

  “And pueblos?” she demanded, for Winnetou’s Apache people lived in a pueblo, very distinctly described to the point where, if she had had the talent, she could have painted it; a stone city of several stories, built against and part of a cliff. “Are there tall stone pueblos, cliff-dwellings, four and five stories tall in Texas?”

  Cody looked at her as if he thought she had gone mad. Even his moustache conveyed his doubt. “Ain’t nothin’ like that in Texas,” he averred. “Ye cain’t build against a cliff, it’s all clay an’ sandstone an’ shale, an’ it’ll crumble—”

  And in her mind’s eye, she could see that, of course, as those hazy mountains became clearer in her mind. The slopes of rock and gravel beneath any vertical surfaces only showed that those surfaces were unstable, and anyone building against them would be insane.

  “Th’only pueblos I know of in Texas are made of mudbrick,” Cody continued. “They ain’t but one floor tall. Be crazy to build ’em any taller. I heerd there’s stone ones off t’the West, but I ain’t seen ’em. Why’re you askin’ me this hokum, anyway?”

  “Because . . . because of a book-writer,” she admitted, finally, and clumsily tried to explain the “Old Shatterhand and Winnetou” books to Cody, and how virtually everything that most people in Austria and Germany knew of the West and Indians and the frontier came from those books, and those about “Old Surehand” and “Old Firehand.” She had to give Captain Cody a great deal of credit. He didn’t laugh. And he didn’t interrupt her. Although several times it looked to her as if he wanted to explode. His moustache fairly took on a life of its own.

  When she finished, he let out a long, exasperated sigh. “Well,” he said, finally, “Bein’ as I ain’t read these-here books meself, all I kin say is that Mister May of your’n ain’t set foot west of the Mississippi for sure, and I’d lay good money he ain’t never been in the United States a’tall. Seems t’me like he got hisself a buncha books by fellers that had, an’ he studied ’em good and hard, but there was a buncha stuff they either left out or figgered people already knowed, an’ that there is where he falls all over hisself makin’ mistakes. Like, I kin tell you from personal experience, Apaches of whatever stripe ain’t never been farmers and ain’t never gonna be, they ain’t never lived in pueblos, an’ they ain’t real fond of the Dineh, which is to say the Navaho, and the Navaho ain’t real fond of them. In fact, there ain’t no tribe whatsoever that’s fond of the Apache, ’cept another Apache, bein’ as they live by huntin’ an’ raidin’. The ideer an Apache chief’d be any kinda peacemaker ’mongst t’other tribes is enough t’make a cat laugh. An’ sure, there’s what y’all’d call a real forest or two in Texas, but they ain’t a day or two’s ride away from the mountains, it’s more like weeks, an’ they’re over toward Loosiana. And there ain’t never been no carbine ever shot 25 bullets without reloadin’. Only thing close is the Henry Rifle, an’ thet’s sixteen iff’n you got one in the chamber. But—” he continued, holding up his hand to keep her from speaking “—here’s the thing. We ain’t sellin’ the gold. We’re sellin’ the treasure-map.”

  She knitted her brows in consternation. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, hesitantly.

  “We ain’t here t’edumacate nobody,” he explained. “Back home, you bet we gotta be careful. There’s plenty of people that’d call us phonies in the papers if we got it wrong. Here, well, what you jest tol’ me is thet what people know is what they read in this May feller’s books. It ain’t our place t’tell ’em they’re wrong. We don’ need t’sell ’em gen-u-wine gold, we jest sell ’em a treasure map they ain’t never gonna foller, an’ it don’t matter if thet map’s a Lost Dutchman. So, I reckon you an’ Kellermann kin go right on tellin’ ’em what they wanta hear, an’ that’ll be all right. An’ I’ll pass word on thet if any of us tell ’em somethin’ thet don’t agree with what they think they know, not to argue ’bout it, jest say somethin’ like, ‘Oh, well, thet’s ’cause we’re from Wyomin’, or Colorado, an’ thet’s what it’s like there.’ You jest pick me out a couple’a places this May feller never wrote ’bout, an’ thet’ll do.”

  She must have looked crestfallen—and she certainly felt somewhat crushed to have discovered that this idolized writer had betrayed her faith in his words. Here, all these years, she had been dreaming about Old Shatterhand and Winnetou, and those sweeping landscapes through which they traveled, and now to discover it was all a lie—she could scarcely bring herself to answer Cody.

  And he looked sharply at her, then reached for her hand. “See here, liebchen,” he said, squeezing her hand comfortingly. “Don’t go thinkin’ just ’cause he made it all up, thet means them stories ain’t no good! Hellfire, people been makin’ stories up fer as long as they been people t’hear ’em! It ain’t whether th’ stories is true, doncha see?”

  “No,” she said, choking back a sudden sob, “I don’t see!”

  He patted her hand, his moustache drooping with distress.

  “Stories ain’t about the feller what wrote ’em, even if he pertends they are. They don’ even hev t’be true to be right! Stories are ’bout what they make you feel. If’n they make you
feel good, an’ make y’all wanta be brave, an’ good, an’ do what’s right, thet’s the important thing!” He suddenly seemed to realize he was holding her hand, and let it go with a laugh. “Think ’bout that there Odyssey! Hunnerds an’ hunnerds of years, people been listenin’ to it, an’ readin’ it, an dreamin’ bout it, people make up their minds what a hero is, ’cause of it! An’ there ain’t a word of truth in it! Pshaw! You think there ever was them one-eyed giants, or men thet was part horse, or big brass stachoos what fight? ’Course not! It’s all made up! But thet don’t matter, not one particle! So what if’n this May feller made it all up? Ain’t that what storytellers is supposed t’ do? He jest made up a liddle more’n y’all thought he did, makin’ out like he did all thet stuff. Thet’s all right. Reckon ol’ Homer made out like he was right there an’ heerd it all firsthand too.”

  She nodded, slowly.

  “Give him this fer bein’ honest. He tried t’find out stuff best as he could. An’ it weren’t like he were makin’ all thet up for a guidebook, where he could git people in trouble with what he wrote.” Cody leaned back, evidently seeing that he was convincing her, and took a long pull on his beer. “There you go. Jest go right on readin’ an’ likin’ the books. You wanta look at a fine man what’s a Injun, you don’t haveta look no further’n Fox an’ his boys. An you was disposed t’like ’im on account of that there Winnetou. So ain’t no shame in still likin’ them books. I’m mighty partial t’Mister Verne an’ Mister Twain, an’ there ain’t a word of truth in thet, neither, an Mister Twain right often makes out like he was there!”

  She sighed. What Cody said made a great deal of sense. The stories were still good stories; the characters were fine people, people she wished she knew! They just weren’t . . . true.

  And Cody was right. They didn’t have to be true to be good.

  But that brought up something else. “I overheard you saying something to Kellermann . . .” she ventured. “About not understanding why there were so few people who came to the show a second time.”