* * *
—
Hau led the way up the western slope of Pu’u Kukui, which was steeper and brushier than that of Haleakala. They were guided by the baleful light of Kanaloaiki’s work, which pierced the darkness like a malevolent eye.
“There!” The ali’i pointed, and Malone found he could see clearly.
The old man was as wrinkled and bent as an old ohia tree, but his voice was unbowed. The fire into which he was casting ingredients and words blazed higher with each successive addition. Kanaloaiki took those from a pile off to his right, a pile that was growing smaller by the minute.
“See here,” Malone suggested, “why don’t I just ride on over and have a word with the old gent.”
“He is protected.” Hau was looking around worriedly.
“By what?” Malone searched the kahuna ’ana’ana’s immediate vicinity. “I don’t see anything.”
“If you do, you will die.”
“Pretty good protection,” the mountain man agreed solemnly. “How do we deal with guardians if we can’t look for ’em?”
“They will declare themselves. Listen for their presence. Listen for the chanting. The old chanting.” They continued to approach. Once Malone thought he saw Kanaloaiki glance in their direction and smile evilly before returning to his work, but he couldn’t be certain.
What he could be sure of as they drew very near indeed was the rise of a distinctive moaning, the echo of a dirge signifying the proximity of doom incarnate, and the smell of death drifting like black floss on the wind.
Hau shut his eyes tight and turned his back to the sorcerer’s position. “That is it; that is the sound of which I spoke! The Marchers of the Night! To look upon them is to die.”
Unperturbed, Malone spit to his right. A small spot on the ground sizzled. “Marchers of the Night, eh? What sort o’ outriders might they be?”
“The souls of dead ali’i. Only a kahuna ’ana’ana can control them, because his withered soul is given over to evil. Somehow we must get close enough to Kanaloaiki to break the spell the instant it has begun, but we must do so without looking directly upon him.”
“Kind o’ like workin’ in Washington.” Fumbling in a saddlebag, Malone removed a scratched, chipped, but still serviceable mirror. Pulling hard on the reins, he turned Worthless about. Using the mirror to scope their route, they resumed their ascent, Worthless following Malone’s guiding tugs on his reins while methodically advancing hind end first.
“A clever trick.” Hau kept pace by the simple expedient of walking backward alongside Worthless. “What made you think of it?”
“Old acquaintance o’ mine name of Perseus had to deal with a similar dilemma once. Involved a woman.” He adjusted the mirror. “Works better with a bronze shield, but it’s danged hard t’ fit one o’ those in a saddlebag.”
“Ah,” Hau murmured. The moaning rose louder around them. “It will still be difficult to get close to Kanaloaiki with so many Marchers about.”
“Actually, I had kind o’ another notion for dealin’ with them.” So saying, he extracted not from the capacious saddlebags but from a pocket a small tubular instrument. Placing it in his mouth and using the fingers of one hand to manipulate the notes, he began to tootle a winsome tune.
Hau winced. “A strange music but somehow attractive.” Malone could only nod a response, his mouth being full of instrument.
The moaning grew shrill and strident. Then, astonishingly, it began to mellow, harmonizing with and eventually chanting in counterpoint to the tune Malone was playing. Still backing Worthless up the mountainside, he played on until he had all the dead ali’i moaning in perfect time to his music. Gradually they drifted away, sighing softly and, Malone was convinced, contentedly. Only when the last of them had vanished into the all-absorbing night did he remove the instrument from his mouth.
“Reckon we kin turn about now. I expect they’re gone.”
“How did you do that?” Hau asked. Ahead of them Kanaloaiki saw that his protective spirits had departed and worked furiously to finish his spell.
“Friend o’ mine named Louie Gottschalk composed that little tune. It’s a cakewalk; they’re pretty much irresistible. This variation incorporates a little voodoo. Louie’s from New Orleans, and he doesn’t publish everything he composes. I figured an enchanted cakewalk was bound to work on any bunch o’ spirits called the Marchers. Jest weren’t completely sure it’d sound good enough on a kazoo. But they all seem to have cleared out right promptly.”
“Powerful magic!” Hau exclaimed.
“But not powerful enough,” declared old Kanaloaiki with a sneer, overhearing them. Stepping back and raising his arms, he pronounced the final words of the spell. As the earth began to tremble, the old kahuna ’ana’ana started to laugh. “Say farewell to all the evil that is Lahaina, for the earth is soon to take her back! Sprite of Pele, heed my call!”
For the first time since Malone could remember, Worthless lost his footing. The mountain man was thrown to the ground. Recovering quickly, he staggered to the unicorn’s side as the earth heaved and buckled beneath them. Hau didn’t even try to rise. Sprawled helplessly on his side, the ali’i looked on in horror.
In front of old Kanaloaiki the ground split asunder. An unholy refulgence bolted from the depths as a hellish yellow-red glow illuminated the sky. Slick and viscous, aa lava could be seen rising within the dilating cleft, bubbling and boiling, ready to pour down the mountainside and roar through Lahaina, incinerating and inevitably burying everything in its path.
“The Manai ikalani!” Hau shouted. “Quickly, Amos Malone!”
“I’ve got ’er!” Malone was fumbling with the saddlebags.
“The line,” the ali’i yelled, “what about the line? Do you think it will be strong enough?”
“I reckon!” Malone hollered back. “Figured since you said we were liable to be dealin’ with some serious heat, we’d want something that wouldn’t burn too easy!”
A mountain man must be self-reliant in everything, must know how to cook as well as shoot, repair leather as well as hunt, even has to know how to fix his own clothing when there’s nary a tailor within a thousand miles. So Malone had no trouble threading the line through the fishhook, though drawing one of the iron links through his teeth in order to make it thin enough to fit through the hook’s eye did set his mouth on edge a trifle.
With the hook securely fastened to the line, he began to twirl one end of it over his head, the sacred Manai thundering through the air like a hog-tied earthquake. What he was about to try was not unlike roping steers down in Texas, except that his target this time was at once larger and more difficult to hold down and the line itself was just a tad heavier than your ordinary lariat.
Not knowing if he’d have an opportunity for a second chance, he did his best to fling the hook straight and true. It soared across the expanding seam in the ground, trailing the spare anchor chain from the Pernod behind it. The iron links clanked above the roar of the superheated earth as they landed on the far side of the widening chasm.
The fishhook struck the earth…and stuck. With a sharp tug Malone set the hook. Making sure the other end was secured to the pommel of Worthless’s saddle, he swung himself up and slapped his mount on the side of his scruffy neck.
“Ready there, Worthless? Back, boy! Back ’er up now!”
As Hau looked on in awe and Kanaloaiki in aghast fury, the muscular quadruped slowly began to back to the south, digging his hooves into the ground and pulling the anchor chain with him. The crack stopped expanding and began to contract as Malone drew it shut, binding up the wound in the earth as neat and clean as any surgeon would stitch up a wound. A few dollops of lava boiled out of the ground before the rift was closed completely. By the time Malone called a halt, the lava near the top of the vent had cooled sufficiently to seal the opening.
/> No ordinary horse could have managed it, or even an ordinary unicorn, but Worthless, for all his equine peccadilloes, was special indeed.
“Attaboy. Now stand!” Malone patted his steed on its neck as he dismounted. Worthless snorted and fell to cropping the nearest bush, breathing no harder than if he’d just pulled a wagon from a shallow muddy-bottomed creek.
Avoiding the site of the vent, where the ground was still too hot to walk on, Malone joined Hau in approaching the stymied sorcerer. The frustrated kahuna ’ana’ana did not try to contest their approach, did not even lift an arm to defend himself as Hau raised his formidable club.
Malone put out an arm to forestall the blow. “Easy there, Hau.”
The ali’i looked at him. “But if we let him live, he may try again.”
Malone shook his head. “I don’t think so. Take a good look at him. Can’t you see he’s done for?”
It was clear that the excruciating effort had used up the old sorcerer utterly. As he lay back, his breath came in increasingly difficult gasps. A grim-faced Hau stepped aside, satisfied.
“Summonin’ evil kin be exhausting,” Malone murmured.
At that the frustrated sorcerer turned to face him. “You are a great kahuna. I did not know there was such among the haoles.”
“Not many,” Malone told him. “Say, how come you can speak good English?”
“I, too, went to the haole school.” With obvious difficulty, the old man sucked air. “It is not haole learning I was trying to kill. Only haole culture. It overruns the land like a big wave. It is overrunning this land.”
Hau stepped forward. “I do not know about that, old man, but I do know that it is wrong to kill innocent people. I will have a kapu put on this spot so that none will come here and see what you have tried to do. No one will disturb the metal rope, and this ground will stay peaceful.”
“You will see,” the old man wheezed. “One day you will see. Or your children will.” His head fell back as he gazed into the star-flecked black crystal of night. “I hear the Marchers. They could not protect me, and now they come for me. Life is never just; death always is.”
With that he went away, eyes open to the darkness and unfulfilled.
“Reckon that’s that.” Malone began to secure both ends of the anchor chain, choosing volcanic spurs that were firmly a part of the solid rock of the mountainside. Hau tried his best to help, but though he was accounted a strong man among his own people, he could not move any part of the heavy chain, which Malone handled with apparent ease.
* * *
—
“You have done a good thing this night, Amos Malone. Give me the Manai.” Without word or objection, Malone removed it from the chain and handed it over.
“What’ll you do with that?”
“It is too dangerous to keep where others might find it. I will take paddlers and a canoe far south of here, to the southeast even of the big island, where the sea is very deep. There I will throw it into the ocean. It will fall to the depths and not raise any more land until it is safe.” A sudden thought made him look closely at the massive haole. “What will you tell your friend about our cattle lands?”
“That he’d better get here fast if he’s interested before these españoles already working the slopes buy up all the good grazing. And I reckon you might try to buy some fer yourself as well now that the king’s allowed as how private folks kin own their own plots. Me, I’d recommend acquirin’ thet beach where we met up.”
“Beach?” Hau made a face. “What would a man want with empty beach? You cannot grow anything on it or raise any animals. There is no good water there. Such places are worthless.” The unicorn pricked up its ears, whinnied querulously, and then returned to its cropping.
“Mebbe they are now.” Malone swung himself up into the saddle. “But take my word on it. Your grandchildren’ll thank you.” So saying, he started downslope toward the flickering lights of Lahaina, its raucous inhabitants blissfully unaware of the fiery death they had barely avoided.
Hau followed at his own pace, thinking hard as he descended the slope. Beach? What would any man want to own beach for? He decided that his new haole kahuna friend was joking with him. There was beach all around the island, most of it even more desolate, white, and sunstruck than the place where they had met. No one owned it because it was not worth a single American dollar.
And surely never would be.
Venting
Yellowstone is a wild fantasy landscape all by itself. As it exists, it needs no embellishment. Viewing the place, one imagines all manner of possibilities. Imps in the hot rivers, ethereal beings rising from the innumerable steam vents, all manner of illusory beings gamboling among the hot springs and geysers. Arthur Rackham would’ve loved it.
Given the excessive thermal nature of the region it is only natural for one to envision the possibility of its being home to less than benevolent beings. Since the earth itself seems downright angry most of the time, there’s no reason to expect that any elemental abiding therein would be of an agreeable nature. Dyspeptic, more likely. Quick to take offense and prone to easy aggravation. Full of fire and brimstone and hot spittle.
Just the sort of personality to rub Amos Malone the wrong way.
* * *
—
“You’re going where?” the clerk exclaimed, gaping at his customer. He exclaimed because of what the customer had just told him. He gaped because the individual looming over the service counter was not just a mountain man, but a mountain of a man.
Mad Amos Malone had that effect on people.
It wasn’t just his height—a couple of inches short of seven feet. It wasn’t just his size—bigger than most men and not a few bears. A lot had to do with his attitude: as if he’d already seen and done most everthing, and weren’t ashamed to admit to it. Attitude, and maybe his eyes. They seemed to go in and out of focus, like the lens of a telescope, as if one moment the crazy giant was looking right at you, and the next, at some far-off distant land ordinary mortals knew nothing of and wouldn’t dare visit even if offered the chance for an escorted tour.
“Yellowstone.” Methodically, Malone fingered out coins from a leather pouch to pay for his goods. Salt pork and sugar, coffee and beans, tobacco, bacon, salt, pepper, bullets. Really big bullets, each one three and a half inches long. For buffalo, the clerk assumed. For other things, though Malone did not tell him what.
The clerk, who was young, and skinny, and red-haired, and full of the cocky confidence of a youth too handsome and insufficiently wise, shook his head in disbelief. “Hard to believe they just made a park out of it. Who’d want to take a vacation trip to Hell?”
“Folks who git cold easy.” The mountain man’s massive arms enveloped his supplies and he turned to leave.
“Why you going there?” When Malone turned with a frown, the clerk (who while not wise was not entirely stupid) hastened to add, “If you don’t mind my asking?”
Malone smacked his lips, two leathery lumps of flesh just visible in the depths of his black beard. The clerk thought he saw something else moving in there, but was chary of staring too long.
“Guvmint agent asked me t’ check out a certain part o’ the new park. Somethin’ ’bout some trailbreakers tryin’ to chart a new course into the backcountry. Course, the whole park is new country. Fer most folks.”
The clerk was unable to keep himself from probing just a little further. “What about them trailbreakers?”
“Seems they didn’t come out again.”
The young man had another question or two tingling his tongue. He decided not to ask them, looking on as the giant ducked his head to clear the general store’s front doorway and turned sideways to squeeze through. After allowing a discreet few moments to pass, however, he ambled outside. Doc Jensen was there, too, on the plank sidewalk, and Millicent Lawrence, the w
ife of Samuel Lawrence, the owner of the hardware store. The three of them stared in unison as the huge visitor rode out of town. As the extraordinary figure trotted past them, other townsfolk also stopped to gawp. But not for too long, lest their gawping be repaid in kind.
“Now, what do you make of that?” Mrs. Lawrence’s voice was a blend of emotions. “I declare, that is the largest human being I have ever set eyes on. And also the strangest. Almost as strange as that odd creature he is riding. I think it must be a horse, but of what breed I cannot for the life of me say.”
“Told me he was going into the Yellowstone.” Her marital status notwithstanding, the red-haired clerk had on occasion entertained impure thoughts regarding the attractive Mrs. Lawrence, and was pleased at the opportunity, however brief, to show off his knowledge of things passing strange.
Doc Jensen nodded sagely and adjusted his spectacles. “I should say an entirely appropriate destination, from the look of him.”
* * *
—
Worthless complained most of the time it took to reach the borders of the proud young nation’s first national park. He continued complaining as they entered and proceeded to progress beyond the limits of the first tentative, hesitantly marked trails, pushing into mountainous backcountry that was unknown and unsurveyed. It was possible that beneath the camouflaging leather patch on his forehead, the unicorn’s trimmed-down horn was irritating him again. The next time they stopped, Malone would put some of that special ointment on it, the golden goo he had bought in a bazaar in Jaisalmer some considerable time ago, when crossing the Thar Desert.
It certainly was an outlandish place, this new park. In parts down low between the mountains, the ground steamed and hissed and suppurated, so that in the chill of autumn, clouds rose upward to air-wrestle with those descending. The result was a climatological confusion that often left him squinting to see through the resultant heavy fog. The surveyors and soldiers who had forced fitful penetration into this isolated pocket of the country feared stepping into concealed pools of water hot enough to fry man and mount alike, or being swallowed by steaming mud that would boil off a man’s boots before he could reach stable ground. Such concerns didn’t worry Malone. Even with one eye locked in a permanent squint, Worthless could sense and avoid dangerous earth long before he put his hoof in it, so to speak.
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