The men looked at one another and nodded. There was no disagreement on this principle. They had to a man passed beyond routine social constructs like honour and loyalty to their employers. They were one entity, and had but a single purpose. They were a Hydra, multi-headed with a voracious appetite and collective focus.
“We will hit them at sundown,” Botis said. “Get your gear.”
The men prepared themselves, talking in hushed whispers. Some glanced in the direction of the sleepy town then went back to cleaning their guns.
Spooner sat on the far side of the camp, watching Marwood. When Marwood caught his gaze the tall black man looked away, or looked at the ground under his feet.
Spaw sidled up to Marwood. “We’ve crossed the border so many times I lost count what side we’re on,” he said.
“We’re in Mexico,” Marwood said.
“You sure?”
Marwood finished loading his gun. “Yep.”
Spaw turned his head and spat. He looked at Botis across the way, back to Marwood.
“What are we doing here?” he whispered. “These bastards ain’t done us nothing wrong.”
“Mayhap you can ask the captain that question,” Marwood said, eying him quietly. “See what answer he gives. Spaw?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing. But this isn’t on our contract.”
Spaw shook his head and walked away.
A few men used Rachel to work off their edge, but for the most part each kept himself centred and honed for the upcoming battle.
When the sun’s red disk touched the horizon they blacked their faces with lampblack and grease oil, tightened their saddles, and waited to be unleashed.
CHAPTER 6
Marwood watched the Cajun and Bill Rota drive the stolen mules and horses through the cobblestone plaza. As they rode they displaced layered bands of wood and gun smoke that drifted through the streets of the burning town.
Rota carried his harpoon in his right hand, the leather thong curled around his forearm. He and the Cajun disappeared with the running horses into a dry wash. Behind them, the clapboard shacks and trampled crops flamed and charred.
Spaw and Marwood sat their horses at either end of an alameda. Spaw covered the terminus of the road where stood a white Spanish mission crowned with flowering nopal. A weathered cross, painted gold, topped the church roof. The wooden shutters were locked tight.
Sheets of fiery ash rained from the sky and obscured the bell tower. Outside the mission, bodies sprawled, mouths and eyes agape in death. Many had run flaming into the night, some of the women with their hair smoking, only to be shot down by murderous crossfire.
Those villagers who remained alive were imprisoned inside the church walls. Marwood heard their plaintive cries behind the thick masonry. They wanted their sons and daughters, they cried. They wanted to live.
Spaw turned in his saddle, lifted in his stirrups. He looked where homes were gutted by fire and swept his eyes along the flat azoteas.
“Spooner rode behind this tienda not more than ten minutes ago, Mar,” he said. “I never did see him ride out the other side.”
Marwood unleathered his Colt’s Dragoon and opened the gate with his thumb. He checked the percussion caps and loads by feel. He closed the gate, put the gun on half cock, and reholstered it in his usual crossways fashion.
He listened to the screams inside the church.
That’s bad if Spooner got himself killed, he thought. Or worse, if he ran.
Spaw turned around, dropped back in his saddle. “Mar, did you see Spooner ride out on your end?”
The red light from the town fires wobbled. The ground was dark. The street and the bodies in it were dark.
All the world was dark.
“No,” Marwood answered. “I didn’t hear any shots come from that direction, either.”
Spaw yanked his brass-framed Henry rifle from a saddle scabbard. He cocked the weapon. “I never thought it possible,” he claimed. “I never thought Spooner would light out on us.”
“I didn’t know him like you did,” Marwood said, and fell silent.
Somewhere in the mean dark Lovich fired his shotgun—a reverberating explosion that could only come from a sawed-off, double-barrelled .10-gauge. Killing loads that shredded a man to splintered bone and gobbets.
Marwood wondered if Lovich had caught Spooner trying to slip away from the battle. Better for Spooner if that was so, he thought. Maybe, better for them all.
Enter Botis. Rachel perched on the wooden cantle behind him, her hands on the broad shoulders of the apostate.
Marwood wondered if Botis would kill the people inside the church. Or kill the children under the guns of the two Tonkawa scouts, Red Thunder and his humpbacked, half-idiot cousin, Little Shreve.
“Captain,” Spaw called, “I think these Mexers did for Spooner after we rode in. We can’t find him.”
Botis rode by without checking his big horse. The jingling traces of the blue roan glinted dull red in the shifting firelight. He dismounted outside the mission, led the roan and Rachel a few more paces before dropping the reins in the dirt. He pulled a Bowie knife with a staghorn handle from his belt. The knife’s bolster and guard were polished silver and a fresh scalp hung from the tang. The long blade gleamed like ice.
Captain Botis went down the street from corpse to corpse. Jubal Stone and Dan Lovich cantered up and joined him in the butchery. They worked one end of the street to the other. They took scalps, ears, and noses as it pleased them. Botis added ears and fingers to a wire scapular hanging from Acheron’s throatlatch. The remaining scalps were bundled together and tied to saddle gullets.
Once finished Botis remained in the middle of the street. The knife in his hand dripped.
“You believe Spooner lit off on us?” he asked Spaw.
“I do not know, Captain.” Spaw drew a shaky breath. “Yes, I think he did so.”
“You see him leave, Mar?” Botis asked.
“I did not, Captain.”
“Back to Bexar, maybe,” Lovich suggested.
“He’s got a woman there,” Jubal chimed. Lovich nodded in concurrence, and spat as if that put an end to any discussion.
Botis wiped his knife blade on the bottom half of his shirt. “Where is the alcalde?” he asked.
The men listened to the staccato pop and snap of burning vigas and wood frames. Thus, Spooner’s fate was sealed, and no man present would speak up in his defence.
“I’ll get him, Cap,” Jubal Stone said. He unlocked the tienda, the one Spooner was supposed to have guarded. Stone went inside the dark interior and pushed the alcalde out. The alcalde stumbled toward them in a rising cloud of dust. He was a thinning rail of a man, with shock-white hair and glassy eyes. His arms were tied behind his back with baling wire. Marwood could hear the bones in his shoulders crack under the strain.
Hemp rope was knotted around the alcalde’s neck. It hung between his shoulder blades to his bluing hands. He walked with bent, splayed knees, and had to look at his captors sideways. If he tried to straighten his body, the slipknot around his throat would send him kicking throttle-faced to the ground.
Botis shook a paisley handkerchief from his vest and methodically wiped his hands. He cleaned each nail with delicate care. When he finished, he folded the handkerchief and returned it to his vest pocket. He allowed himself a moment to consider the trembling prisoner before him. He plucked the fingerpiece pince-nez and placed it square on his nose.
“Donde esta Cibola?” Botis asked, viewing the alcalde through the small glass windows.
Marwood straightened when he heard the name of the city. His mouth was dry and his heart thumped.
“Que?” The old man gawked in disbelief at the mad creature standing before him.
“Siete ciudades de Oro,” Botis said.
The al
calde stared with growing wonder at the grim faces pressing close. Men of dark light and crackling shadow. As wolves, deeply hungered, or iron kings who drove their enemies before them like leaves before a storm.
The alcalde swung his eyes and saw the blue roan with its bridle of human skin, and the wet scalps hanging from the saddle. He thought of his little grandson, and the children in the dry wash waiting for the pale wings of death to clatter over them, and he wept.
“No hay tal cosa,” he told Botis.
Botis pulled an 1861 Navy Colt with gutta-percha grips and put the barrel against the alcalde’s forehead.
“Somos pobres,” said the old man, quaking. “No hay oro. No hay oro.”
Botis rolled the hammer back.
“Una ves mas.” Botis let his words sink in with finality. “Cibola. Donde esta Cibola.”
The alcalde shook his head again. The pistol barrel followed his movement. “Por favor, Dios,” the alcalde said. “No se lo que estas hablando.”
Botis fired. The man spun and fell. His blood pooled.
“Bring the rest of them out,” Botis ordered.
He waited for the captives to file into the central street. Botis opened his gun and with his thumbnail flicked the spent percussion cap away. He used a powder horn to recharge the bore and patched and rammed a new ball.
The central street filled with shrieks and moans. Women clapped their hands over their mouths when they saw the tonsured, grinning skulls of the scalped victims. Botis watched them run back into the church and return. They piled a meagre offering at his feet, what little wealth the church possessed: two clay cruets, a brass chalice with paten, a silver-gilt ciborium. They brought forth a porcelain washing bowl, and linens and vestments from the sacristy. Alms from the offering box were surrendered, amounting to twelve dollars American, plus change.
As the frightened women piled the treasure at the boots of their conquerors, the men of the company whistled and shouted lewd suggestions. Many of the women turned away. One or two stopped to look with dark eyes and tangled hair, perhaps hoping to spare their lives a little longer. The men laughed and called to them.
Lovich kicked the priest from the crowd and shoved him to the fore. The robed man faltered. Lovich grabbed his arm and whirled him around. He whipped the walnut stock of his shotgun behind the man’s knees. The priest collapsed to the dirt, his robe flaring out around his bare legs. An older woman in the crowd fainted. No one tried to pick her up.
Botis walked up and, in one movement, levelled his gun and fired into the back of the priest’s head. He then picked four more men at random out of the crowd and shot them, one by one, in the back of the head. As he recharged his pistol a woman in a blue rebozo broke and ran headlong for the gully. Perhaps she had a child there, or maybe she thought the people in the gully would be the last ones killed. Whatever her reason, Lovich spun on his boot heel and discharged both barrels into her. Lovich broke the barrel of the shotgun open, blew down the tubes, and reloaded.
Marwood watched and thought about Sand Creek.
“Me paseo con los demonios,” Botis told the frightened peasants. “Y he venido entre vosotros.”
Women screamed anew. Men turned their faces. Some fell to their knees, weeping, and raised their arms to Botis in supplication.
Botis quieted them with a raised hand. “Quiero encontrar Cibola. Donde esta?”
The words whipped from his mouth like a command. The villagers told him they had no gold. They had nothing, only their lives, which he would take from them this night.
They fell to their knees with hands clasped and they pleaded and begged. Women kissed the hem of his bloody shirt, his hand.
“Por favor,” they said, “no maten a los niños. No tenemos oro.”
“Let them go,” Botis told his men. “I think they’re quits, and they don’t know anything that can help us.”
The villagers did not wait for the translation. They rose and ran, some staggering and retching with relief. Most went after the children, while others began to sift through the blackened wreckage of their homes, turning over cracked plates and shattered furniture.
The killers mounted their horses and filed out of the ruined town.
“What about Spooner?” Spaw asked.
Botis did not answer. He was watching the horned moon, contemplating its barren glow.
Sam Decker’s voice growled out of the night. “What happened to Spooner?”
“Ran off like a scalded cat,” Charley Broadwell said, a black hat over his eyes.
Decker shook his head back and forth. “No shit, you say. Crazy nigger.”
The entered a dark scope of woods west of the border town and the other smoking settlements they had all but destroyed.
“Maybe Spooner followed Rota and the cabrón Cajun back to camp,” Calvin Zapata suggested, ducking under a low hanging limb. He kicked his horse forward and caught up with Marwood. “Maybe he is there, and the jefe won’t kill him. What do you think, Mar?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s bad, either way.”
“I hope he’s back at camp,” Zapata said.
The other men agreed this was a possibility. At the very least, it would be best for Spooner if it were true.
They rode until dawn.
CHAPTER 7
They stopped to breakfast in a wide field of prickly pear; long blades of light stretched over the empty land and surrounding hills. Faces blackened, clothes stinking of wood smoke and blood and gunpowder, the scarecrow band of killers dismounted.
They stalked with collective weariness between the cactus plants, picked the ripe tunas, and ate. Purple juice stained their lips and fingers. Men sucked their fingers and tossed the pulped remains back into the cactus stand while startled doves circled above them, their wings whistling.
There was a large oval clearing in the centre of the cactus patch. Spaw and Jubal gathered enough loose wood to build a fire in this clearing. The rest of the men kicked away rocks and dug shallow holes in the dirt in which to sleep. They lined their wallows with wool blankets and bedrolls and turned in.
Spaw dug up a mano and metate while making his bed. He kept digging and turned up an atlatl. He brought them to Botis for inspection.
“What are they, Cap?” he asked.
“The Alpha and Omega of primitive man.” Botis weighed the implements in his hands.
The men drifted off to their separate beds. Marwood awoke in the late afternoon. He tipped his hat to protect his face from the sun, watching as a slim form rose from a rumpled bedroll and stood cameo to the westering sky.
Rachel shook out her long hair. Her thin cotton dress clung to her like second skin. Her legs were white and bare below her knobbed knees.
She glanced in Marwood’s direction and approached the smouldering fire. Marwood edged a few sticks into it lengthwise. The flame caught. Rachel sat down beside him, her arms wrapped around her skinny legs.
“Ain’t there nothing else to eat on?” she asked. Her pointed chin and fingers were stained purple from the tuna juice. Her face was smudged with traces of lampblack. She looked like some disaffected mummer from a road carnival. Her uncombed hair and hollow eyes were wild, more animal than girl.
“I have charqui,” Marwood said.
“What’s that?”
“Buffalo jerky.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I guess so.” He gave her a strip from his rawhide pouch.
She chewed the dry meat and watched the fire with solemn eyes. “My name is Rachel.”
“I know that.”
She studied his quiet profile. “You don’t much want me, do you? The other men do, but you ain’t never called on me as yet.”
“How old are you?” he asked her.
“I’m old enough to get my monthlies, I guess.” She took another bite of jerky and chewed. Her li
ps were chapped from the dry wind and she kept licking them.
“Well, when I want you, or any woman, I’ll let you know,” he told her.
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “If you don’t, then you don’t. You ain’t doing me no favours. It’s better than a beating is all I’m saying.”
“Who beats you?”
“My Pa used to, lots.” She finished the meat and sat with her elbows pressed in the pit of her stomach. “Mama died when I was born, so Pa, he strapped me and the other kids some. It don’t matter. He’d a done it anyway because he’s a man.”
“Where is your Pa?”
“Up to Salt Lake City, last I heard.” She picked her teeth with a broken fingernail. “He went Mormon and churched a widow and turned deacon. Last I saw of him was in Auraria, the night he kicked me out of the house for good. He told me he had a new family to worry about and I was none of his lookout no more.”
“Is that why you ran away?”
Rachel looked at Marwood as if his question were so crackbrained it didn’t warrant an answer. She bent her head and played with the hem of her frayed chalina. Marwood thought she was crying, but when she looked up her eyes were bright with fury.
“I ain’t got no place else to go,” she said. “This here camp is as good as anywhere.”
Marwood paused, thinking of his own past—what little he remembered. How it all fit together, if it did.
Where he belonged. If he did.
“You may be right,” he admitted. “This place is as good as anywhere.”
Rachel looked like she was ready to talk about something else. “You think Spooner run off like they said?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Looks like he might have done.”
“What is he going to do?” she asked.
“Who?”
Rachel pointed to the sleeping form of Abram Botis.
Marwood looked across the rincon where horses cropped grass.
“I think he’s already gone and done it,” he told the girl.
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