Hospitality satisfied, and the pot drained, the Rider sat back down and the lead man spoke.
“What are you doing out here, indah?”
“I’m making for Tombstone,” the Rider answered. He had not slept in a proper bed….well, in a long time. The last time he’d slept under a roof was Doc Holliday’s saloon in Las Vegas. The gunslinging dentist’s fortuitous robbery of the Las Vegas post office on his behalf had alerted him to the bounty placed on him by the governor and someone named H.T. Magwood in Delirium Tremens, before the justice of the peace and his killer marshals had known he was there. He’d left in a hurry, stopping only to spend the last of his money on meager provisions for the journey back to Arizona.
“Show me your pistol,” the Indian said, gesturing to where the gun belt lay coiled like a black snake on the stone.
The Rider hesitated, but in the end leaned over and reached for it. The Indian made no move for his own gun.
The other men stiffened, but the lead man waved them off.
The Rider held its night cooled handle in his palm, felt its weight. He could draw and maybe kill one of them. Maybe two. The lever action on the Volcanic was slower than their single action revolvers and repeaters. The others would shoot him down.
“Take it out,” the Indian said.
The Rider slowly eased the weapon from its scabbard, and the firelight danced on its golden surface, on the twenty-two Solomonic wards, on the Hand of Miriam, and on the Hebrew script etched into it.
The Indians murmured to each other, nodding, as if satisfied.
“This is the Yellow Star Gun. You are Rider Who Walks,” the Indian said, and the Rider was amazed, as he had never met any of these men as far as he knew. ‘Rider Who Walks’ was the name the Indian shaman Misquamacus had given him almost fourteen years ago, when as a young man just out of the Army, he helped the elderly medicine man return home.
Misquamacus had not been Apache. As far as he’d known, he had claimed Cheyenne ancestry, though he had also claimed to be the supreme living shaman of any tribe anywhere. Was his name known to the Apache? If so, this was fortuitous, as the venerated medicine man had proclaimed himself indebted to the Rider for his help.
“We have been looking for you,” said the Apache. “You will come with us to see Tats’adah.”
“What is Tats’adah?’ the Rider asked.
“Tats’adah is ten and three,” he said, as if it were enough. “We will ride out in the morning.” He turned to one of his fellows and said something in a rapid language peppered with glottal stops. The listener answered with a nod, stood, and went off into the dark. The speaker turned back to the Rider.
“But who are you?” asked the Rider.
“I am Piishi,” he said.
“Why do you want me to go to-- (and here he paused to try the word), Tats’adah?”
“Go to sleep, and we will talk more in the morning,” said Piishi. “It is bad to speak of ill things in the night.”
The man who had gone out in the dark returned with a string of shaggy, bareback ponies with braided hackamore bridles and he saw that they intended to bed down in his camp.
The Rider contemplated trying to sneak off in the night, but the Indians kept a vigil one by one, backs to the fire as though on guard against something. He knew he had no chance of evading them in their own land anyway. Their knowledge of the name Misquamacus had given him did not give him the sense that they meant to harm him in his sleep at any rate, and so he obliged.
Of course, sleep came only in brief snatches. The unseen influence of Lilith’s children had grown. Nehema’s protective rosette token kept the spirits from tearing him to pieces undefended, but they did not protect his food and water, nor did they shut out their power entirely.
Now when he closed his eyes to sleep, he saw only horror: curved talons plowing through infant flesh, jags of human bone adrift on rivers of blood through which deep shadows swam, the severed heads of his parents spinning rapidly in star-less space, screaming; cackling, decrepit hags squatting over burning menorah, and more terrible things still. He jolted awake again and again. Eleven times in the night, he counted.
Sometimes the images of death and blasphemy did not dissipate before his open eyes, and he knew not if his soul was in his body or in the world of dreams, or in the Yenne Velt. Somewhere, they were slowly pulling him from the crumbling fortress of his wasting body, like a long besieging army of barbarians dragging staunch and starving defenders from the ruins to at last take out the frustrations of the campaign upon their hapless heads.
In the morning, he put on his phylacteries and prayed, but the words felt automatic, and he was distracted by the whispered voices in his ears that profaned God and told him his prayers were not heard. He had to start and stop again a few times. The Indians waited and watched. He gathered his gun, knife (noting that the Indians made no move to take his arms), and bedroll and repacked the onager with the salea blanket and aparejo saddle he had bought in New Mexico. He brushed the sand from his dark rekel coat and slid his blued glasses over his nose. The glasses did nothing much now but shade his eyes from the desert sun.
They offered him a breakfast of dried meat, but he refused politely, citing the sacred oath he had kept since he had come of age. They respected this, and instead shared with him a bag of pinion nuts and some dried berry cakes, which he accepted out of politeness, though the little demons shat and pissed upon them in the time it took for his hand to go to his mouth. They tasted of feces and he tried hard not to choke as he nibbled.
“Will you tell me where we are going?” the Rider asked again.
Piishi indicated the far off mountains to the west. It was at least a full day’s ride.
“Tats’adah,” he said.
“Why must I go?”
“I was told to find a man in black with a white burro and a yellow gun bearing stars.”
“Who told you to find me?”
“Tats’adah,” Piishi said again.
The Rider nodded. Then Tats’adah was a person, not a place. He thought to question the man further, but decided Tats’adah, whoever he was, would better answer any question he had. He didn’t suppose Tats’adah meant him harm; he would have been dead already. At any rate, he was curious to find out who this person was that knew of him. Curious, maybe to a fault.
“Do you know Misquamacus?” he ventured.
“I do not know that word,” Piishi answered.
When they had finished eating, Piishi announced;
“You will leave your burro and ride with one of us. We will divide up your goods and bring them along.”
Reluctantly, the Rider nodded. He had no strength to walk at their pace.
“You can divvy up my pack so I can ride, but my animal goes with me,” the Rider said.
“He is too slow,” Piishi argued. “He will take too long.”
“No, he’ll keep up,” the Rider said, cinching the wide grass strap on the animal’s belly and scratching behind its ear.
“We will kill it and pack the meat.”
“You do the same to me, then,” the Rider said, standing in front of the onager. It nuzzled his ear.
Piishi frowned deeply.
They set out in a single file, scattered like a line of industrious ants across the desert.
His pococurante companions said nothing even to each other.
It was a mild day, and they wound at a lazy pace through the lowland. The blasted ground gave way to grasses and brushes of juniper and manzanita, and trees of oak and pine took root. Then the land grew rocky again, and the gleaming limestone slopes of the mountains burst forth, pushing the conifers and fir trees high above the desert.
Up a steep and narrow trail obscured by trees they passed, the bristly pine branches reaching out and stroking his knees like the groping fingers of superstitious villagers seeking luck. Here the onager proved more sure footed than the ponies, and never stumbled, whereas one of the Indians gripped the long mane of his mount until
his copper knuckles shone pale in the dusk.
The sunset eroded into a blue, starry evening as they picked their way up the stony path, and still they ascended well into the growing night until the Rider could only see the hunkered silhouettes of his guides sky lit against the stars. The moon shouldered into a cloudy coat and denied its thin light to the obscure trail.
The trail grew more and more a rabbit path, and the horses pushed through a lace of branches. The Rider couldn’t see how his escorts could possibly find their way, but their progression remained instinctual, as if they sensed the path rather than saw it, or had traveled it so often they were like blind men moving about familiar surroundings. Even in the day the Rider doubted he could have found the way.
Now the branches clawed at them, and he touched his chin to his chest and leaned low over the onager’s neck. Denied of sight, the trees gave him an odd feeling, coming unseen out of nothing to run their knotty fingers over him.
The onager, still slightly visible in its pallor, quivered. It stopped in its tracks, and the horse behind him butted up against it and whinnied in irritation. The Rider had traveled too long with the animal to mistake its manner for mere stubbornness. This ebullition was born of fear.
He touched his pistol and opened his mouth to hiss a warning to the Indians, but it seemed they shared some sixth sense with the onager, for ahead of him they all stopped in their paces and the Rider could see one of them craning his neck and straightening like a wary desert hare.
There was a rattling sound, unmistakably that of the sort of snake that frequented the desert, cooling in shadows and draping themselves over flat rocks to soak up the warmth of the sun. This sound was more menacing however, than any the Rider had ever heard. It was overlarge, and after a moment, it was joined by another, and another.
Piishi called out a warning in his own language and suddenly something heavy struck the horseman behind the Rider and knocked him into the brush. At the same moment the other Indians took up the cry and drew their weapons, one of the trees caught on his coat.
He sought to free himself, and found the skeletal grip that pulled at him was not that of a branch at all, but thin, clawed fingers belonging to some wiry man or creature reaching out at him from the trees. He grabbed at it, and his hand encircled a powerful wrist sheathed in rough, leathern skin. His free hand could not reach his pistol, but he did manage to whisk his heavy knife from its scabbard. He hacked at his unseen assailant, and it withdrew in shock and pain. He heard not a man’s scream, but a weird hiss, and briefly in the dim starlight siphoned through the tree branches, he had the impression of two anthropoid eyes gleaming black in a flat, inhuman head.
The guns started going off then, and the smell of powder and the hissing of the attackers were all around them in the dark. The Rider twisted to look to the man behind him who had fallen, and heard his pony go crashing off through the trees the way they’d come. He drew his pistol, but knew the Indian was on the rocky ground wrestling with whatever had surprised him. He couldn’t fire blind. He crouched by the onager’s legs and widened his eyes to let in enough light to find a target.
A knife flashed and a wriggling shadow intertwined with the grunting man. There came the sound of rending cloth and scattering stones from that direction and the cracking of the Indians’ rifles and shouts from behind. He turned to the front of the line and heard a horse scream and fall.
In a transient blast of light from one of the Indian’s carbines, the Rider glimpsed something large and snake-like coiled around the neck of the horse that had fallen, its maw buried in its throat, and two very humanoid arms hugging its thrashing head. Its skin was a mottled, spotted black and beaded orange like a Gila monster’s. It was at least partially humanoid, the size of a large child. Then it was gone back into the shadow, an amorphous blob of violet fading from his eyes.
He stood holding out his golden pistol and his ensanguined knife, too stunned to act and filled with such a supernatural dread as he had not felt since he was a child. He had passed between realities and seen the sights of heaven and hell, but never had he beheld something so twisted and unreal in this, the mundane world of air and blood. It plunged a cold spear of dread into the center of his being, spreading a poisonous fear through his loins and up his spine.
The Indians were dying. He heard their shouts, even above the rattle and hiss of their inhuman enemy. He moved, but he was too late. One of them leapt onto his shoulders, its tail whorling around his midsection, seizing him in a python’s grip, squeezing the wind out of him. Its strong hands latched onto his arms, digging their talons into his shoulders as he struggled. He felt its sharp breath on his neck, heard its alien hiss hot in his ears, felt the stinging fleck of its poisonous saliva as it reared its head to kill him as it had the horse.
Then the onager brayed and kicked out with its Herculean back legs, possibly out of terror, or else to save its master. It connected with terrible blunt force on the side of the thing. The shocking impact of the double kick slackened the compressive grip around the Rider’s trunk and the thing flopped crazily back, shredding his sleeves and almost pulling him down on top of it. It swiftly regained its senses and reared up. The Rider pivoted, slashing with the knife, driving its keen edge half into the thick neck, scoring its vertebrae. The Rider’s pistol darted forward, the barrel jamming under its clicking jaw. The gunshot that ensued sent most of its head scattering back into the trees.
It fell to the ground, lashing in death, and a second sprung up at him. Probably it had finished the combat with the Indian and had seen its comrade die. The Rider fired at it, but it twisted in mid jump and the bullet only glanced its side. Claws raked at his cheek in passing, drawing blood. He turned to follow it, firing the whole time, and the muzzle flashes traced its retreat into the underbrush like the fulguration of a photographer’s flash powder. It bounded on the flats of its palms and its serpentine hind end propelled it slithering out of sight.
The Rider turned to face however-many-more of the creatures he didn’t know, but found his arc of fire silent but for the groaning of a wounded man and the shrill screams of dying horses. The onager nuzzled against his bleeding shoulder, as if to reassure him that the danger had passed.
Another rifle shot cracked out after a moment, but the Rider realized its purpose as one of the horses writhing in the trail went still. Another shot, and another, and no horses at all. A single set of quiet footsteps moved up and down the line, pausing to inspect the damage. The Rider heard a muffled conversation in the Indian tongue, and then one last rifle spoke. The moaning man was no more.
From the direction the last report had come, Piishi spoke;
“Are you alive, Rider?”
“Yes.”
“Were you bit?”
“No. I don’t think so.” He ran his fingers over his wounds, panting and cold from fear sweat. “No.”
“These things are poisonous,” he said. “You must be sure.”
The footsteps came closer, and a second set of questing fingers touched his shoulders and his neck and his face.
“Then let’s keep going,” Piishi said. He turned and started back up the trail.
The Rider shook his head, incredulous at the Indian’s nonchalance.
“What were those things?”
“Soldiers of the Black Goat Man. The Master of Red House.”
* * * *
Piishi led the Rider and the onager silently on up the mountainside, until the Rider spied a dim orange incandescence in the distance. They made for this light, until it grew into a red hairline crack in the earth, actually a narrow fissure which barely admitted the donkey, but widened as it deepened into a concealed box canyon. In the light, Piishi paused to once again inspect the Rider and himself. Piishi bore the cuts and bruises of struggle, but no feared mark of fang. At last the narrow passage opened into a comfortable natural shelter in the rock, its walls dancing with firelight, the sky a dark ribbon far above. The campfire burned in front of an eight foot
tall dwelling fashioned from bound yucca and branch—a wickiup, the Rider had once heard its type called, the traditional hut of the highland Apache.
But the man who sat cross legged before the fire was not Indian. He was brown skinned and had a shaven headed pate, and Indians always wore their hair long, he knew. The bareness of his skull was made up for in the luxuriant white beard that trailed from his chin to his knees. He was an elderly man, by the worn skin of his neatly folded hands and his bare feet, and the tracks and faint lines that marred his otherwise smooth face were like the fading footprints of long journeys across untouched sand. He was thin, but strong looking, and he wore a seamless robe of unabashed sky blue which the Rider had not seen the like of in his western travels. The man was sleeping or meditating, his eyes closed.
Piishi approached the fire and spoke;
“Tats’adah.”
Whether he meant it to introduce the Rider or to rouse the man himself, the man called Tats’adah opened two eyes of deep, thoughtful umber, and regarded first the Indian, and then the Rider.
To Piishi, the strange man inquired in the Apache’s own language. Piishi replied, no doubt telling him of the fate of the others. The man’s soft eyes exuded a palpable sorrow, then they looked once more to the Rider.
“Welcome, Merkabah Rider, Son of the Essenes,” he said in a musical, Hindi accent that startled the Rider almost as much as the acknowledgement of the title of his secret order. “I am Chaksusa, disciple of Shar-Rogs pa the Ancient One, the blue abbot of Shambhala. Please sit down. Our time is short, but we will take a moment and pray for the souls of the men who died tonight, that they be granted light to find their way home by.”
The Rider settled in wordlessly across the fire as Chaksusa (or Tats’adah?) produced a loop of worn black wooden prayer beads and began to chant hypnotically in a foreign tongue. The Rider silently offered up his own prayers for the men who had died to bring him here, asking that the Lord might grant them a commuted sentence in Sheol, in spite of whatever pagan idolatry or animism they might have subscribed to.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 15