The night was filled with a reef of stars. Spaw looked at the great Northern Cross and wondered aloud, if the stars were but pinpricks, how could there be so many?
Botis was seated on a buffalo skull across from Marwood. The horns curled out from behind his knees. “Remember the atlatl,” the apostate said. “The stars are the immortal expression of God. But, so is man himself immortal. It is not through government or architecture or family issue he finds this divinity. Man finds immortality expressly through the art of killing. Or, more specifically, through the specialized institution of war.”
Botis looked at each of their faces. “I have always believed war is a manifestation of man’s ultimate will,” he said. “Does history show us otherwise? As the stars manifest the sublimity of God’s own thoughts, so does war mirror the glory of man. War is considered evil, an abomination. It therefore reflects the corrective shape of man’s soul. This long blood of violence should never be avoided, but instead embraced, and worshiped.”
Marwood’s heart hammered. You are Long Blood.
“But why do men make war?” Tunk Quillen asked, chewing his biscuit. “Ain’t we ever for naught else but killing one another like apes?”
Botis faced the resurrectionist. “War is a manifestation of man’s practicality, Joshua,” he said. “Laws are made by the weak to limit the will of the strong. A strong man has no need of law. He shuns the very idea of restraint on his ineluctable right to elevate himself above others.”
He poked the fire with a bone and leaned back. “Man walks the red plain of life and, being man, demands an audience. As he fights, so do the women watch. Through war, he creates an evil beauty, which surpasses anything imagined by God. War dwarfs the infinite stars, and frees man from the shackles God himself imposed. It is a freedom God never intended man to have—it is the reason God detests war, and man embraces it. Therein lies its subtle power.”
Botis leaned close to the campfire, elbows rested on his knees and thick fingers interlaced. His naked upper torso and face were highlighted by red flame.
Behind him, in shadows, stood Acheron. The campfire was reflected in the horse’s eyes.
“War is man’s creation entire,” Botis declared. “God created the world. The Devil created man. Man created war. It is a singular progression to a summit upon which man stands alone and unchallenged.” He lifted his black eyes and stared directly at Marwood. “As the son destroys the father, so, too, will man destroy God, with his mathematical machines and cold science and dread will.”
Botis looked like a dark elemental from another plane of existence.
“God is nothing more than a gasping wretch,” he said, addressing the fire. “Why not put the poor bastard out of his misery?”
After sleeping several hours the men awoke, stretched, and moved about camp. It was midnight. They could not spare water so again they were left to chew dry coffee grounds. They brought the horses in, unhobbled them, and pulled out.
They rode until midday when they saw five Comanches sitting on horses of ancient Iberian lineage. The animals were barely fourteen hands high and painted with chevrons, stars, and other strange signs and mystic symbols of power.
“They ain’t doing nothing but watching us,” Lovich said.
“Belike they can’t believe how stupid we are,” Marwood said.
The Comanches wheeled their nimble ponies about and disappeared over a rolling hill.
An hour later, eight more reappeared on an altogether different point of the compass. They rode parallel with the company, dipped into a fold of land, and disappeared again.
“They’re trying to draw us into ambush,” Lovich said with stout conviction. “Thank God they do not know how little armed we are.”
“I hope they stay ignorant of that fact,” Spaw said.
Botis led them onward. They saw nothing and no one else for the remainder of the day. The Tonkawa scouts could not find water, so they cut fresh horses out of the remuda and rode through the night. Blue heat lightning shimmered and quaked the barren sky to the south until the sun rose in the paling east.
The company put as many miles under them as they could without bottoming out the horses. When the sun was high on their backs Botis called a halt and they made camp. Marwood pulled first watch as the men slept. Evening came warm and soft. They broke camp and rode on.
The following day they crossed a desolate playa. The ground was hard and cracked under the horses’ hooves. The sun reflected off the pan like a mirror; the men had to black their eyes, and the eyes of the horses, or they would have gone blind. They rode on seeing moon, then sun, then moon again.
They continued over the escarpment. Botis did not head directly west but rode a great analemma on the unending plain. They saw no sign of Cibola. They kept riding and they kept searching.
The days passed like beads on a string. Their water grew very short. The Comanches did not harry them.
“I don’t understand it,” Marwood said, watching as a large party of fifteen Comanches shadowed them on the horizon before disappearing in the searing heat.
“Maybe they recognize the captain’s power in this place,” Doc Quillen said, riding beside him. He had a neckerchief over the lower half of his face. “A man like him can make his own reality where he wants it.”
“I don’t know,” Marwood said. Botis was riding ahead, a distant figure. “I think maybe we’re so deep onto the Llano they don’t care for this here part of the world.”
“You mean like it’s sacred?” Spaw asked. “Well, let’s hope they don’t change their minds about it.”
The land would not change, either. There was always one more flattened hill, and beyond that, more seas of grass. Marwood felt diminished in a calculable way by the scorching, endless prairie. He felt swallowed and lost within the enormous space, which never changed, never altered its terrible and absolute face.
They came upon dead things—white bone, sun-bleached skulls, grass-choked ribs strewn across the ground. Beasts trying to reach some distant watering hole but died in the attempt.
The riders approached another playa. This one held an inch of water, but it was poisoned—alkali, through and through. They whipped and rowelled the horses past it so they would not drink.
Marwood’s eyes were haunted caves as he looked upon the sky reflected cotton blue on the water’s briny surface. The water hole was surrounded by dozens of blanched skeletons—some partially embedded in the hard pan, the grass growing through the bones they had been there so long.
The scouts found a little water one day and they kept going. Lovich cut a notch in his pommel for every day they were on the Staked Plains. He counted them one morning and he could not believe there were so many.
“We been out here goddamn near sixteen days,” he whispered to Ed Gratton one morning. All the men had taken to talking in low voices as if they were afraid to break the great silence surrounding them.
“The captain, he ain’t one to give up easy,” Gratton said.
“I’m near clinkered out,” Spaw replied. “Come on, he’s ready to go.”
They mounted up. The horses snorted and stumbled through the high, dusty grass. Thick foam and lather dripped from the mouths and nostrils of the animals. Their lungs blew and rattled like great winded engines. They were dying. The men were dying with them.
Marwood observed that even Acheron, that monster, was labouring.
He saw no more bones in the grass. Saw nothing but the empty world.
“I think this here string is about to play itself out,” Ed Gratton said one afternoon. They had stopped to rest the horses. He was sitting on his saddle on the ground, smoking a pipe.
Marwood nodded, his blood pounding in his ears from the stifling heat. He had never felt so lost and alone in such awful emptiness. The silence itself was oppressive. It was as if this vast emptiness had taken over the world
and everything he ever thought he knew.
“There’s not much left in me,” Spaw agreed, lying flat on the ground. His lips were cracked and bleeding. “Too much more of this and we’re all going to go crazy.”
Botis got up from his bedroll and started to saddle Acheron.
Gratton took his hat off and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I think we’ve been that for some time now,” the black man said.
They rode on. They were so worn out—both man and horse—Marwood didn’t think they made more than ten miles that day. The next day they faced an inescapable fact: they had no water left. Marwood and Spaw stopped to cut a horse out of the remuda. Red Thunder killed it with his knife, and the men drank its blood. They urinated what little they could in their canteens. When a horse in their string would stop and stale, the nearest man would jump off his saddle and fill his canteen.
“Don’t drink yer piss for the salt,” Quillen warned them. “Swish it in your mouth and spit it back into the canteen. It will last longer that way.”
Botis would not stop. They kept riding, searching that great void. Another waterless day, another horse killed. In the morning and night that followed, Marwood searched the barren sky for doves flying from, or to, water. He saw nothing. The Comanches had also disappeared. At night he heard no sound but the wind scouring the grass. Not even coyotes were this far out.
There was nothing. There was nothing here at all, he thought. Not for him, and not for Botis.
The men were as scarecrows. They ate leather for the food was all gone. They killed another horse and Marwood chewed the bloody meat in his saddle. Scabbed blood dried in his beard and the cracks of his hands. His hot breath rasped in his tortured lungs.
Doc Quillen’s horse collapsed and died under him the following day. Its heart had burst. The men opened its neck and crouched over the animal in a mad pantomime of camaraderie.
Quillen doubled up with Ed Gratton, but his horse could not carry them both, and the resurrectionist would not give up his tent and dissection tools. They took turns riding and leading.
When Marwood looked behind him the men were strung out in a long, staggered line, like dots on the prairie. Another horse died.
The next morning they saw Cibola.
They saw it to a man. They got off their trembling horses and stared in stunned disbelief. Spaw slowly sank to his knees in the high grass, his hands clasped over his heart. Giant ramparts and warping towers rose from the flat plain. They were mirrored with separate spires bisecting a thick line hovering through the sky. The city and its dark grey spires lined with gold and silver filigree, warped and twisted as if a dream brought to life, flexing its power over the broad earth.
The men mounted up and rode toward it, and as they came close the Fata Morgana melted and disappeared. They saw purple buttes in the distance and headed straight for them. Beyond those were blackened canyons and plateaued badlands filled with cactus, mesquite, and blackened juniper scrub.
Marwood fixed his eyes thoughtfully on Botis’s back as they rode.
Shadows of distant clouds raced up the vertical faces of cliffs. A lone turkey buzzard fought the wind sheared off the canyon floor.
“There is water here,” Red Thunder said.
They went down into the earth. The interlocking system of canyons had suffered a savage wildfire many years ago. Amid blackened mesquite trunks, charred lumps of cactus, and stumps of juniper, small green shoots poked from the lampblack ground.
“It is nigh impossible to eradicate life,” Botis said, “but man has taken it upon himself as his one great mission. Washed in blood, and sanctified by God.”
Away to the west, dark rain clouds lined the horizon. Long streamers fell from their swollen bottoms, like skirts brushing the canyons and limestone bluffs. They turned and rode toward the rain.
They reached the place where they thought the rain had fallen, got off their horses, and walked through the early morning sunlight. The trees and scrub around Marwood glistened and sparkled. The dry ground under foot and hoof had swallowed every last ounce of moisture.
Botis spotted more rain clouds building in a separate quarter. They headed for them, and missed the rain again.
“Goddamn this,” Lovich said. They stopped in the middle of a bone-dry ravine. The horses could not, and would not, go any farther. “We ain’t doing nothing but chasing our tails.”
Botis sat staring at a lone juniper bush growing on the point of a limestone break. “Daniel,” he said.
“Captain?” Lovich replied.
“Watch my horse.”
“Sir.”
Botis dismounted and stalked to the base of the sheer bluff. He tilted his head back and studied the juniper bush hanging precariously above him. He started to climb the sheer face of the break. The men watched him, mouths open. He crawled like a black and brown spider along crevice and ledge until he gained the crown, one hundred feet above them.
Botis took hold of the juniper. He tugged and wrestled it out of the unforgiving ground. Rock and sand spilled from the point. Marwood, standing near the base, had to back up to avoid getting pelted.
Botis ripped the bush from the soil. He lifted the green shrub over his head and hurled it into the gorge. Then he sat on the rocky promontory with the wind fingering his clothes, and watched the clouds, daring them to ignore his offering.
Fifteen minutes later, a single cloud cut the sun’s track. Blessed shade fell across the canyon. More clouds appeared, pregnant with warm rain. Soon the sky was covered with them.
Water poured upon their bare heads. The killers filled their canteens from rivulets dripping off the bare rock, while Botis’s laughter vied with the booming thunder overhead.
CHAPTER 22
They worked their way through the tangled web of canyons and out the other side. Marwood stood beside Botis on the rim of a high bluff. The two of them were studying the trail they had negotiated.
“This canyon,” Botis told him, “the entire west, covered in blood. This is my home, Mar.”
Botis took a deep breath. His eyes swept over the land. “When man first crossed into this country he looked around and went to killing. Not every man, and not every tribe, but kill he did. Then came the white man, and he killed, and both killed together. When the red man is finally eradicated, as he must be, then will the white man begin to kill himself. As he must. So the circle of history is joined. Is it any wonder a man like myself loves this country so much?”
“I’m still trying to understand what happened on the Llano Estacado,” Marwood said.
Botis looked at him and smiled. “If Cibola were easy to find all men would find it,” he said. “But one day I will have it in my grasp. I have foreseen it. Come on, let’s get the horses together.”
They rode into a small trading village called Muchaque. The post was little more than joined tunnels and shallow dugouts carved into arroyo walls. There were crude ladders extending from overhanging caves shaded with brush arbors, opening into other caves below. To the naked eye Muchaque looked more a chaotic anthill than a village.
“We need provender,” Botis said to the villagers.
The Ciboleros who lived here claimed they had nothing to take, and nothing to give.
“Comancheros come here all the time and abuse us,” one man said. He was dressed in mouldering buffalo skins and used an old Comanche war shield as a hat. He had set himself up as de facto jefe of Muchaque. “When we do kill buffalo they come and take what we have, and leave us dust to eat.”
A young boy pressed himself upon Marwood, meaning to sell obsidian flakes, polished shells, and bone awls from a wooden tray slung around his neck. It was all he had to sell. Marwood bought a quena—a whistle carved from buffalo bone—because he had never seen the like before. He gave the boy four bits for it, twice what he asked. The boy stared at the coins in his brown palm and wept.
He had never held such treasure in his life.
“Where might we find these Comancheros?” Botis asked. Such men would have guns, powder, and food.
“Take this trail leading out.” The jefe pointed to something that aspired one day to be a goat path. “That is La Pista de Vida Agua. You will find them, or they you.”
“Where does this trail end up?” Lovich asked.
“Across part of the Llano, señor. In the territory of New Mexico.”
“What about water?” Spaw said. “We already had a time on the Llano.”
“There are seepage springs a day’s ride from the trail,” the jefe explained. “But the comancheros will not let you use them. They will kill you, and your body will become dust.”
“We’ll see about that,” Botis said.
Four days later they fell upon a Comanchero wagon train like tatterdemalion demons conjured from a nightmare. They killed everyone, including a family of settlers from Maryland who had bribed the Comanchero raiders for safe passage across the Llano.
The family had a daughter of marriageable age. Lovich dragged her screaming behind a clump of cholla and tall flowering yucca. When he emerged, he had a dripping scalp in one hand and her bloody crinoline dress in the other. He wiped his sweating face with the hem of her dress and tossed it into the bush.
They burned four of the wagons but kept one of the rigs for themselves. The new horses and two jacks were turned out into the remuda. Botis parcelled out guns and ammunition stolen off the dead Comanchero raiders. They had lost but a single man: Ed Gratton was laid out on La Pista de Vida Agua with a bullet lodged in his right eye, and two poisoned arrows in his lower spine. His blood had splattered Marwood’s face and he was wiping it off with a neckerchief when Botis walked up.
“Get his gun and fold his horse into the remuda with the rest of the stock,” Botis ordered. “We ain’t got time to bury anyone.”
They rode through grass baked into yellow dust. Cholla grew in small dark clumps like weird, wind-blown candelabra scattered over the plain.
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