by N. D. Wilson
Grease dribbled onto his chin and Glory stepped forward, raising her hand, but hesitating.
“Do you need me to . . .”
Sam quickly ground his chin against his shoulder. His face was burning hotter than his tongue.
“I’m fine,” Sam said. “Fine. Just . . . don’t worry about me.”
Did Glory think he was a baby? Did she want to be his mom? He wanted to snarl and spit and say something mean. He wanted his words to scratch. But the priest was watching him, waiting with unblinking firelit eyes. Sam swallowed and let the anger drain out of him, and some of his shame went with it. Stiff arms could make him messy—they had hundreds of times. But they didn’t have to make him nasty.
“Sorry,” Sam said.
“For what?” Glory smiled at him.
Sam didn’t answer.
“Right,” said the priest, after a moment. “Well, I didn’t mean to be confusing. We are in the same place because we haven’t moved any distance. This is the location of the Bunk House, but seven hundred and seventy-seven years after our previous moment. When moving through larger blocks of time, increments of sevens are the easiest to work with. And moving into the future is always easier, because that is what all of humanity is always doing anyhow. The ranch did not simply disappear. It was erased over centuries.”
Glory perched on the edge of a boulder, flattened her palms, and exhaled slowly, focusing her attention entirely on the priest. Sam chose his own rock, lowered himself onto it, and for the first time—at least that he could remember—he forced every last ounce of his attention at another human. He didn’t want to forget a single word that might be said.
“Just start at the beginning,” said Glory. “But get to everything.”
Sam didn’t even nod. It might have distracted him.
For a long moment, the priest looked at the fire. Sand rustled across the ground, sifting and sorting itself around the old man’s feet.
“I do not live stories as you do,” Father Tiempo said. “And yet, I live as all mortals do, from the first page to the final page. From the first moment when a man became my father through the warmth and safety of my mother’s womb to my many days under the sun, I march, as we are all meant to, toward my own grave and the stars beyond. I have lived a past, I live a present, I live into my future. Looking out of my eyes, life runs in a straight line. But my past may be in your future. My future will hold moments previous to this one by your reckoning.”
The priest looked up. “In history’s tapestry, I am a red swirling thread among the blue, woven on my own course and given my own tasks. You, Sam, were one of those tasks, and my greatest failure.”
“Wait,” Glory said. “So you are a regular person? A mortal. Not an angel or something.”
Sam was thinking about threads and colors. He pushed those thoughts away and refocused.
“An angel?” The priest laughed. “No. Not in the way that you mean. And yes”—the priest slapped his knee—“this flesh will end. But I am an angel in another sense, because I am sent and I go. I am charged and I obey, and the darkness between times obeys me, but not for my sake. It too has been charged and it obeys. But none of that will help you understand. Know only that I walk the secret paths between times, not the main road. And Sam has often walked with me.”
Sam cleared his throat. “Could we get to that part?”
Father Tiempo smiled. “I promised a story. A long time ago a bloodthirsty man, consorting with powers beyond his imagination, learned how to wander the elsewhens of this world.”
“But how does that even work?” Glory asked. “I mean, is it magic? It seems that way when you do it. Is it some kind of trick that anyone could learn? Or is there some kind of machine or rings or anything?”
The priest smiled at her. “You will never find a corner of this world where there is not magic. But that word will distract you. Think of it as power. Ability. To some it is given, even without their asking—like a bird is given wings. Others seek to steal it. With forces beyond the natural, or with machines, it does not matter to them, so long as it works.”
Sam’s eyes wandered back to the sausages, but he refocused quickly. This was important.
“This man was a very effective thief indeed.” The priest grimaced, deepening the caverns on his face in the firelight. “Young, he was merely a killer and a gangster, the type normally devoured by history by the thousand. He killed whom he wanted and took what he wanted. But what he wanted was forbidden knowledge. The great secrets. The hidden powers. He lived in a grim, soulless, and mechanical age, and he believed that if he could just find the levers and gears of time and learn their secrets, then he could reshape all of history to his own tastes and bind it to his own bloody pleasures. He could fly between times, feeding where he willed.”
Sam shifted on his stone as the embers spat. The priest stared at him. Glory was silent.
“He succeeded,” the priest said quietly. “Time is more wind and river than any machine, but even wind can be bridled. Rivers can be dammed. He communed with the dark keepers of dark secrets, allied himself to the most ancient of all thieves, and set out to steal the story of the world.”
The priest stopped and stared at the fire. Sam licked his chapped lips and waited. After a moment, Glory leaned forward.
“So what happened to him?” she asked. “That kind of thing has to go really, really wrong. It has to.”
The priest smiled. “So I pray, so I hope, so I must believe. As he labored to lay foundations for his new eras and new histories, he constantly feared his own end. In all time’s byways, in all the in-betweens, he consulted with spirits and bodiless reeks until he was finally given a vision of his own death—learning what I already knew. In the old west, when the city of San Francisco was still young, the great thief and killer called El Buitre—the Vulture—would fall in the street to a young gunfighter out to avenge his sister. The gunfighter was known only as—”
“Poncho,” Glory blurted. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She laughed, uncomfortably, and looked at Sam. He wasn’t laughing. “El Buitre? I’ve read The Legend of Poncho enough times to know where you’re getting this stuff. Man, I feel like an idiot. I was actually believing you.” She stood up and looked around like she expected the world to vanish, like some trick had been revealed. “I don’t know how you did the sand-whooshing thing, or what your point was, but we should get back. Are you a hypnotist or something? Come on, Sam.”
Sam shook his head. It might be one of his dreams, but he knew it wasn’t a trick.
The priest just stared at Glory. She shifted in place and then crossed her arms, nervous. The world around her was still very real. The fire popped. Coyotes barked, and the moon slid slowly through a ragged slice of cloud.
“You got the ending wrong,” Glory muttered. “Poncho doesn’t kill the Vulture. The Vulture kills him.”
“That,” said the priest, “is the problem. The story is no longer as it should have been.”
Sam shut his eyes. He’d read The Legend of Poncho a dozen times, and he’d imagined its sweeping scenes of blood and loss and gunfights at least daily since his first time through. And he knew that it had shaped his dreams. But he’d never once thought the story might have been real. Father Tiempo continued speaking, and in his mind, Sam saw the scene, but not because of the priest’s description.
Horse-drawn wagons plowed slowly down a muddy street in San Francisco. A boy with hard eyes and sunken cheeks slid off a bedraggled horse and looked around. Two revolvers were hidden beneath his fraying poncho. Every building on the block was owned by the same man. A giant hotel and tower built with brick and glass and black iron. An opera house with a massive tarnished copper planetary mobile slowly swirling around a tall spire crowned with a smoking copper sun. And a strange tall building without windows that was “capped with a tangled crown of chimneys breathing steam.” That was how the book described it, and Sam thought it was perfect. In front of this building, El Buitre himself was standing on the wide
wooden sidewalk, surrounded by the kind of gunslinging killers who wore suits and bowler hats and oiled their mustaches.
Sam opened his eyes refocused on Father Tiempo’s face, lit warm from the fire below and cold from the moon above.
“Poncho didn’t look like much,” Tiempo said. “Just another poor boy drifting through the west. But to quote the book, ‘his hands were faster than a spark jumping between fingertips.’ Poncho called out to his enemy and the Vulture was proud enough to face him. The outlaw drew first, but he couldn’t even fire before both of Poncho’s guns had been emptied. This was El Buitre’s dark vision of his own end. The great outlaw watched himself die, and from the moment of his waking, he set out along the hidden paths of time, to learn the true identity of the boy called Poncho. And to kill him young.”
“I like the book,” Glory said. She looked at Sam. “Poncho dies at the end and meets his sister again in a sunshiney dream place that was probably supposed to be Heaven. But El Buitre just goes on getting more rotten.”
“Not in my version,” Sam said. “Not in any of my versions.”
“The story has been lived many times now,” Father Tiempo said. “And in all of them, El Buitre has triumphed. Only in that first stolen vision of the future did the boy called Poncho defeat him. Then the train of history was derailed, the real boy was killed in his youth, and El Buitre became the arch-outlaw he still is, ruling his own time like a nightmare with no fear of morning, continually reliving the years of his choosing over and over again, growing his knowledge and strength and dominance and efficiency as he repeats them, creeping further into the future with each of his demented cycles. Eventually, he will choose to no longer double back. He will release a reservoir of changes on the world. He and they will flow into the future, toppling this reality at the foundation.” Father Tiempo splayed his fingers at the fire, and then clenched both hands into fists, pressing them down into his knees.
Glory and Sam were silent, waiting for more. The priest looked up at the moon, and he spoke toward the stars.
“Since that first moment of his triumph, I have labored to repair the damage he has done. To find some way to right the train, to sort through the wreckage and make repairs. But it is easy to smash and hard to build. Easy to poison a stream, difficult to purify it. And thus far, I have failed. In all of my adjustments, after hundreds of lived versions, the boy has been killed in every one but the last.”
“What happened in the last one?” Glory asked.
Father Tiempo grimaced and looked back down at the fire.
“He was brutally maimed, and his arms were made useless.” Father Tiempo looked at Sam. “But his mere survival was enough to worry the Vulture, and his villains did not stop hunting for the boy. Hoping for a chance at healing, and time to heal in, I hid the boy in a future moment as safe as any I could find. But I failed you again, Sam. You have not healed, they have found you once more, and my only remaining plan is more desperate than you could possibly imagine.”
Sam was feeling dizzy. He flexed both arms against his bone-fused elbows. Glory was staring at him with her eyes wide and her mouth slack. His tongue was sandy dry and thickening quickly. He practically choked trying to swallow.
Throwing up was one option.
So was crying.
Sam scrambled up to his feet, breathing hard, sweat beading on his face.
“The daydreams,” he said. “The things I see . . . when I don’t know where I am?”
“Memories,” Father Tiempo said. “Glimpses of our other attempts at now. With everything your mind has been through, it struggles. We’ve actually had this entire conversation many times before. And memory is essential. I placed Jude’s book here to help keep some of your memory from other times awake, but Glory will be more helpful than anything. If she’s willing.”
Sam was rocking in place. Blinking. Head twitching. So many images flickering through his mind. So many things he’d been told to push away.
Wait. Jude’s book?
“Jude?” Sam asked. “He wrote The Legend of Poncho?”
Father Tiempo nodded. “He will. It is the last story he will ever write. Assembled in his old age when the dust has settled on all your adventures and your life is fully known.”
“I have a story,” Sam said. His face felt heavy. Numb. His ears were ringing. “But I die. I’m the one who dies.”
“You have died more times than I care to count,” Father Tiempo said. “Shot. Poisoned. Crushed. Stabbed. Drowned. Burned. Most people cross that cold river only once. But most people also only have one chance to get their living right.”
Sam stumbled forward, almost falling onto the fire.
Glory jumped up, grabbing his shoulders. “Sam! Sam! I was wrong,” she said. “You were totally right. The ending was terrible. New ending for sure, okay? Totally new ending. I’ll help you.”
Sam nodded. Then he looked down at his hands, at his stiff arms. They looked like bad art—scrawny except where they were lumpy with scars, slightly crooked and unmuscled. They could never be fast enough to change the ending.
Glory tapped his chin back up, catching Sam’s eyes with hers.
“Let’s change the title, too. I never liked it.” She smiled. “The Legend of Sam Miracle sounds way cooler.”
“Sam,” the priest said. He stood up behind Glory. “I need you. You’ve been through so much already, and you’re badly broken. But your work here isn’t done.”
Sam closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see the priest. He didn’t want to think about being broken. It was easy to recall the scenes he had read in Poncho. Harder to think of those scenes as real. As his.
A girl with long straight blond hair stood on a front porch looking down at him. Her blue eyes were wide and worried, and seven long golden watch chains bound her to the porch posts. The house behind her heaved flames up into the night sky, but his sister held a pie in her chained hands.
Millie.
Sam wanted to cry. Millie would burn. Millie, who had cared for him when everyone else was gone, who had fed him and sung to him and told him stories about old and new lands, about brave hearts and faithful loves and bold heroes who had both. Sam tried to lunge forward, but his dream feet wouldn’t budge. He tried to reach for his sister, but he had no hands.
“I can’t!” Sam yelled.
“Bet my life you can,” Millie said. “Breathe, brother. Be calm. You have been lost for so long. But now you are found. And you must fight.” She smiled while the flames grew behind her. “I made you pie.”
Her voice was soothing, and Sam quieted.
“Is he okay?” The voice was Glory’s.
“Apple?” Sam asked.
“Strawberry,” Millie said. The flames behind her were growing. “And rhubarb. Like Mama used to make.”
Sam opened his eyes, suddenly back in the desert night. Glory was holding him up while the priest watched.
“Where is my sister?” Sam asked. His heart felt like hot stone, heavy in his chest, heavy and unbreakable. “Tell me.”
“You’ll see.” The priest smiled, but sadly. “Tomorrow we will begin the first day of your final reliving.”
4
Reliving
SAM WAS SLEEPING. HIS ONLY DREAM WAS DREAMLESSNESS. Dark, cool, and calm. He wanted more. His bedsprings squealed as he rolled over.
And then the loudspeaker in the courtyard began to blare.
“Good morning, sun!” Mr. Spalding’s prerecorded voice rattled the windows. “Good morning, boys! Welcome to another day in which to excel!”
Beds rocked and shifted all through the Bunk House as the boys rose. Feet dropped off the top bunk above Sam, and Peter landed heavily in front of his face.
Peter stretched. “How you feeling, Sam?”
Sam groaned and shut his eyes.
Jude crossed the bunk room on bare feet. He had loose pages in his hand and a pencil stuck in his curly hair.
“Any dreams?” Jude asked. “Anything strange? Yesterday w
as a little crazy.” He pulled the pencil out of his hair and dropped into a crouch, propping the pages on his bare knobby knee, ready to write.
Barto leaned against his bed across the way, examining his patched-together glasses with his long hands.
“Leave him be, Jude,” Barto said. “We chased that guy off.”
Sam looked around. All the boys were out of bed, most in boxers and undershirts, all were watching him. Tiago and Simon were missing—most likely out before the sunrise, checking traps.
Broad-shouldered Drew moved between the rows of bunks, pulling on a fresh shirt as he walked, finally stopping beside Peter.
“Think that guy will come back?” Drew asked quietly. “Will Sam need to hide?”
Peter’s face was hard, but his voice was low. “They all come back. They never stop coming back.”
Sam didn’t sit up. His pillow was too comfortable, and he was tired. “What guy?” he asked.
“Tall,” Jude said from his crouch. “One eye and a big scar. Motorcycle boots. Nickname: Tiny.”
“He didn’t hang around long,” Drew said. “Shot out a window before he left. Mama Spalding won’t recover for . . . I don’t know.”
“Ever,” Barto said. He slid his glasses on and blinked down at Sam.
“That was yesterday?” Sam yawned and shut his eyes. His memory of Tiny was blurry, but he could remember the campfire sausage perfectly. Probably because the taste still lingered in his mouth.
“Right,” Peter said. “Everybody out. Let him sleep. I’ll tell Mr. S. he’s sick.”
“Someone should stay with him.” The voice was Jude’s.
“Not this time,” Peter said. “New plan this—”
Sam didn’t hear the rest. He had burrowed back into the perfect stillness of sleep. And he stayed there until a cold hand slapped his face.
Sam jerked into full consciousness. Glory was leaning over him. The boys were gone. Her dark hair was in a ponytail and she was wearing a backpack.
“Do you ever remember anything?” she asked.
Sam pushed her away and sat up. The Bunk House was completely empty. “I was asleep! What am I supposed to be remembering?”