She fell straight down. The smells of various bowels emptying in death suddenly made the cantina feel very crowded.
The serpent squirmed free of the fingers of the severed hand, which were spasming open and closed, and tried to burrow into the sawdust. The trader’s right foot stamped on it with a surprisingly solid sound, as if there was stone inside the simple moccasin, instead of flesh. It crushed its arrowhead-shaped skull against a floor of clay set with fresh blood and trampled hard by countless feet.
But the eyes of the woman whose neck Zamora had just broken were open and aware. They drew his as if by some even stronger version of the magic that had held them before. This time he was sure his pecker wasn’t involved.
But where before the eyes had seemed like black pools they were really that now: all black, even where the whites should be. They glared at him with cold and infinite fury.
“I . . . See . . . you,” the lips said, in a voice that no more belonged to the woman who had tried to seduce him into accepting venomous fangs than it did to him.
Then the eyes returned to what they had been before: brown irises around dilated pupils, in slightly yellow whites. They were unseeing as marbles. The woman was well and truly dead.
“Get the fuck out of my bar, cabrones!” the proprietor shrieked. Zamora looked over to see him half crouched behind the counter, brandishing a woodsman’s ax. “I run a respectable place, here.”
“Yeah,” Zamora murmured. “Respectable enough for murder, but not self-defense.”
The trader had shouldered his well-stuffed pack. The trader had a shaved head, an eagle beak, and maybe a few years on Zamora. He wore an ancient T-shirt that read I’M WITH STUPID. He touched Zamora lightly on the arm as he brushed by.
“He’s right,” he said in well-educated Mexico City Spanish.
It sounded quaint even to Zamora. You didn’t hear it much these days.
“Best we find someplace else to be, pronto. Before more of them come along.”
Zamora was reaching down to recover his bowie from the first man’s chest. He froze as he saw the heavily stylized eagle tattooed on the corpse’s right biceps.
Then he grasped the hilt, braced his boot sole against the man’s ribs, and pulled the big blade free.
“You said ‘them,’” he said, straightening. “You don’t mean the white guy too?”
The trader grinned with yellow but surprisingly straight teeth. “Check him out, chico.”
A glance showed a second eagle tat on the pallid thigh-thick arm.
“¡Hijo de la chingada!” he said fervently. “An Anglo Eagle Knight?”
“Huitzilopochtli has an equal-opportunity blood cult, these days.”
In passing—purely by accident—Zamora’s glance strayed across the woman’s upturned breasts, which were now entirely bare and lay sprawled off by gravity toward either armpit. They didn’t count, anyway; they were dead-chick breasts.
But what did catch his glance was the equally stylized, and far more hideous, figure carved into the jade medallion lying on her sternum between them.
“What’s one of Her priestesses doing hanging out with a pair of Eagle Knights?”
The trader just smiled at him and pushed out into the now visibly waning sunlight. He limped heavily, favoring his right foot—the one he’d used to crush the rattler. The crow that stood right beneath the swinging doors hopped peevishly to one side to let him pass, but did not take wing.
“Hey, mister!” One of the drinkers at last stirred himself to speak. “It was like that bird warned you. Does he talk to you?”
“Just random cawing,” Zamora said. “What do you expect? It’s just a crow.”
* * *
“Well, that was a new twist,” said Memory—Recuerdo—fluttering down off the parapet of the flat cantina roof to light on Zamora’s shoulder. “Killing off all your potential informants before they could give you any information. You think you learned enough mystic human bullshit to follow ’em into the afterlife?”
“They forced my hand.”
“They wouldn’t have told you anything, anyway,” the trader said. “So, the crows do talk to you.”
Zamora shrugged. “They talk to anybody, man. I just listen.”
As a grad student in Psych, he’d been studying communication among birds—crows in particular, since they were clearly smart and also common as assholes in Albuquerque—when the Change hit. Funny, but it was only since then that he’d really begun to understand them.
He reckoned it was because he started paying more attention. He had incentive. Like survival.
“I say you should make them let us in,” said Pensamiento—Thought—fluttering up to Zamora’s other shoulder. “Discrimination.”
“I hate being indoors,” Memory said. “No place to stretch your wings. Nothing in there for a crow, anyway.”
“¡Yo quiero tequila!”
“You can’t handle that shit. You’re even stupider drunk. And you fly into things.”
“TEQUILAAAAA!”
“Enough,” Zamora said. Then, to his human companion: “So how come you understood what he said?”
The trader just shrugged back and smiled. Again. He had dark Indian skin and dancing eyes. He limped south along the track that passed by the cantina. Zamora found he had naturally fallen into step beside him. Even though it was back the way he’d just come.
It wasn’t as if he had any better direction to go, just now.
“I’m Zamora,” he said after a moment.
“The one they call the Seeker, right? Born in an onion field near Nuevo Casas Grandes, son of a Chicana law student from Albuquerque with a social conscience, and a Mexican-Apache day laborer without much evidence of a conscience at all.”
“My father was a good man,” Zamora mumbled. “In his own way. How do you know all this about me, anyway?”
The trader shrugged.
“You’re quite the legend, in some circles. Also distinctive, with that hat and the two crows. Plus your proficiency with knives.”
“Eh. People gossip. Without TV, what else they got to do?”
“I don’t have much memory of television.”
“I do. Plenty. And I had you sized up as maybe older than me.”
“Oh, I am, I am . . . but I forget my manners. Thank you for rescuing me, Señor Buscador. I am Nocheviento.”
Zamora grunted. It was something he was finding himself doing even more than usual. The name didn’t really make sense. It was the Spanish words for “night” and “wind,” but crammed together into one. Which was more the English way of doing things than the castellano.
Then again, the Mexican and U.S. cultures had gotten pretty well crammed together themselves, before the Change. And the recent reversal of the military fortunes of Trans-Pecos’ ally, Boise, had caused an upheaval in the Republic that had resulted in a fresh influx of refugees south. Most of whom were Anglo, which was ironic, since for the last few years Trans-Pecos had been trying to block immigration.
“So why were Eagle Warriors beating on you, anyway?”
“They thought I had something they wanted. Even cultists of Left-Hand Hummingbird and the Rattlesnake Mother have their reasons to stoop to highway robbery, I suppose. Why did you want to question them?”
Zamora frowned. But he couldn’t think of any reason, paranoid though he was, not to tell Nightwind the truth.
“My buddy was murdered,” he said. “By rattlesnakes, looked like.”
“An ugly way to die.”
“Yeah. So I followed the tracks that led away from the scene. They matched the three I found jacking you up in that cantina. And the fact that strange woman tried the same trick on me tends to back up that they were the guilty ones.”
“Why would they want to kill your friend?”
“No clue. Brodie was a
con man, sure. But totally nonviolent. He even disapproved of me being violent, even when I had to beat some ass to save his. Why would he get mixed up with a bunch of hard-core bloodletters like Eagle Knights—or that priestess with the crazy eyes?” He shook his head. “But I reckon that doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve avenged him.”
“Maybe. And maybe not.”
Zamora gave his companion a narrow look.
“I believe he may have been caught up in a larger scheme,” Nightwind said. “Much larger.”
“How do you mean?”
“You asked why a priestess of Coatlicue would be keeping company with a pair of Eagle Knights—dedicated warriors of Huitzilopochtli, at least since his cult re-arose after the Change. Well, in the course of my travels, I have run across evidence that they’re up to something together. My brother—”
He stopped.
“Your brother what?” Zamora prodded.
“He’s . . . caught up with the Eagle Knights. And he won’t listen to me. Even though the Rattlesnake Mother has always had an agenda of her own—and definitely doesn’t have Huitzilopochtli’s best interests at heart.”
“You talk about ’em as if they were real people.”
“Who’s to say they aren’t?”
I am, the rationalist part of Zamora’s mind wanted to say.
But he kept his peace. Arguing with people didn’t do much good, he found. And until he found out the whys and the wherefores of the Change, he didn’t feel as if he was standing on ground firm enough to go throwing many stones . . .
“Okay. I know a lot of people have gone back to believing in old ways. Even phony old ways, like that Lord of the Rings was an actual history book.”
“So you’ve encountered the self-proclaimed Dúnedain, have you? You’ve been northwest, to Montival?”
“I’ve been everywhere, man.”
“Like the Johnny Cash song?”
“Yeah. You know about Johnny Cash?”
“Know about him? I knew him. We were like that.”
“Huh.”
But you don’t remember much about television, Zamora thought. Funny.
The two crows, getting bored, took off again and winged south.
“So they spy for you?”
“Good to have eyes in the sky.”
“Did they track your friend’s killers, then?”
“I’m a better tracker than they are, actually,” Zamora said. “But they’re good at spotting tracks in the open fast. Aerial reconnaissance and all.”
“A mysterious wanderer with a broad-brimmed hat and two corvid servants? So you’re basically a Mexican Odin.”
Zamora laughed. “Not hardly. Still got two eyes, you’ll notice. And no plans to go dropping either of ’em in any wells. So where we headed now?”
“You and I are parting company. Here, in fact. You will want to follow this road south.”
“Where does it lead?”
“To the reason your friend was murdered. That’s the first part of my reward to you for saving my humble life. And it may be your eventual reward would become greater still, if you got to the bottom of what our cultist friends are planning. And survived, of course.”
“You’d pay me?” Zamora asked skeptically. “How would you get in touch with me? Not like we got telephones anymore.”
“I have my own ways of knowing. Some almost as cool as having a pair of crow spies. And now: farewell, my child. Good luck. Even you will need an abundance of it.”
And with that he set off toward the hills to the west, with a swinging gait that belied his years and gimpy foot.
Frowning, Zamora watched him go for a moment. Then he turned his head, put two fingers in his mouth, and whistled.
Another moment, and Pensamiento and Recuerdo were circling three meters over his head.
“What is it, boss?” Recuerdo asked.
“How about you keep an eye on that dude, find out where he’s going.”
They spiraled higher. Almost at once they swooped back down to orbit Zamora’s hat once more.
“Funny,” Recuerdo said. “No sign of him. But there’s a jaguar, loping down the far side of that hill he went up. Big one.”
“I hate those bastards,” Pensamiento said.
Zamora didn’t care about any damn tigres. They didn’t fuck with humans. Usually. And none had been known to fuck with him twice.
A lot like humans, come to think of it.
“How’d he vanish into thin air?”
“You’re the naked monkey with the big brain,” Recuerdo said. “We’re just birds.”
“Sarcastic asshole birds.”
“What do you expect? We’re crows.”
* * *
“Have you seen this man?”
The old lady’s face was wrinkled like a raisin. She had a blue-green bandanna wound around her head and was puffing on a fat joint as she hung steaming clothes on a line to dry. From inside the little adobe hut came the sound of an infant crying.
She paused in her work to study the object he held out in his hand. It was a hand-formed slab of red clay, into which he’d engraved a sketch of Brodie’s face with his not-inconsiderable drawing skills. He had fired it overnight in the banked embers of his campfire, and then rubbed a slurry of charcoal and water into the engraving to add contrast.
She frowned and shook her head.
“No, I haven’t. Kind of a fish-faced gringo, ¿qué no?”
She offered her joint. He took a deep, grateful hit.
“He’s a friend of mine who’s dead, ma’am,” he said, exhaling. He handed back the joint.
She crossed herself. Then she frowned.
“If he’s dead, why are you looking for him?”
* * *
The ground got higher as he followed the road south. He asked about his dead friend at every settlement, outpost, and random hut he came to.
People reacted with a certain amount of suspicion. They were poor, but not so poor that they might not attract the attention of bandits. Especially if those bandidos were the local baron’s men. Nor was it unheard of for a lone hombre to scout for a gang of whatever sort.
But the mysterious—and improbably named—Nightwind was right. Zamora was the Seeker. Even if he had seen little evidence his fame had spread quite so far and wide as the trader made it out to have. And after all, he could be forgiven for laying it on a bit thick with a man who had rescued him and asked for no reward. Zamora had a well-practiced way of seeming harmless.
Which, unless you tried to do ill to him or his, was perfectly legitimate.
It was at least no particular disadvantage that his scarred, craggy features, which had never been mistaken for a movie star’s even when he was young, now looked like a hundred hectares of malpaís: lava rock and heartbreak. North of the Rio Grande he was a scary Mexican, even to Latinos who were U.S. born and raised, like his mom, bless her memory. And with the Republic of Trans-Pecos trying to strengthen its hold by stirring up old racial feuds and divisions, he would’ve run shit out of luck in short order there.
Here, he was just another campesino scuffling to get by.
It was as such that he hailed a couple of farmers hoeing weeds out of an acequia: “¡Escuchenme, hombres! Give a brother a little help, here?”
He walked up to the irrigation ditch where they stood waiting with their hats pushed back on their heads. After all these years he still wasn’t used to seeing Mexicans wearing conical constructions he thought of as “coolie hats.” But Asian influence was stronger in Mexico before the Change than most norteamericanos realized, and woven straw hats cost way less than a proper hat like his, with felting and such.
In their patch the bean plants were already beginning to twine their way up stalks of spring corn. Beyond them a huddle of adobe houses stood on the far side of a strea
m running down from the foothills. Let the gringos in the Northwest cling to their odd, parochial notions that native peoples around the world had mostly died out; they sure hadn’t down here in Mexico. The people adapted to the fall of technology just as they had to its rise. A village like this looked little different than it would’ve a hundred years ago. When the lights went out, there were plenty of abuelos who remembered what things were like before electricity and running water.
Hell, there were plenty of people who never had ’em to miss.
As usual, people working in the hot sun weren’t any too averse to taking a break. “What you got for us?” asked the gap-toothed older one. The pair were small, dark, and sturdy even by Mexican standards, suggesting they were mostly indio.
“Was wondering if you’d seen this dude,” he said, holding out his clay tablet. “He’s my friend, man. I’m looking all over for him.”
“Your friend?” the older man asked. The grooves the sun had dug in his face got deeper. His eyes almost vanished into them as he squinted at the image.
“He’s one of them!” the younger guy shouted. And he took a swipe at Zamora with his hoe so hard he overbalanced and splashed into the ditch.
The older dude jumped back. He crouched, menacing Zamora with his out-stretched hoe.
Over his shoulder he yelled to the other workers, “It’s a child stealer! ¡Matenlo!”
* * *
“I think you lost ’em now,” Recuerdo said, fluttering down to perch on a rock near Zamora’s temporary hideout on top of a ridge. “They’re stumbling all around with their hoes and machetes a good half kilometer off.”
“Good thing they weren’t very good shots with those bows and arrows, huh?” Pensamiento said.
Zamora took a last swallow of water from his gourd, stoppered it, and let it hang from its sling across his shoulder. He wasn’t too worried yet that it was nigh empty. Even if his father’s people hadn’t taught him the skill of finding water in the desert, he had the crows to scout for it. Though the rainy season was a month or two off, this close to the mountains it wasn’t hard to find springs or even streams.
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 24