The White City

by John Claude Bemis

  The land was still dark, the hazy Milky Way casting the only light. Ray took B’hoy’s body from his haversack and pried some rocks from the hard earth to stack them into a cairn. Tears beaded on his nose as Ray selected three feathers from each of B’hoy’s wings and three from his tail. Putting the black feathers aside, Ray placed B’hoy atop the cairn. Feeling too weary to construct a prayer or poem to bless his companion, Ray simply said, “Return in peace, old boy.”

  He watched the night breeze rustle the feathers across B’hoy’s back. He felt there was something right about leaving B’hoy exposed to the elements. Soon coyotes or vultures might eat him, or insects and grubs. This was the natural way of things: returning, providing nourishment for new life, continuing the cycle.

  Ray took the toby from around his neck, opened it, and placed the nine feathers inside. He had no plans for the tokens but wanted something to remember the crow by. As Ray did this, his fingers brushed against the dandelion petal. He thought suddenly about Peter Hobnob.

  Loneliness swelled in his chest, and Ray considered blowing on the flower, clapping his hands, and summoning his friend. But how long would it take the bumbling thief to arrive? And what purpose would it serve? Ray held the dandelion a moment longer, then with a sigh set the flower in his toby and hung the pouch back around his neck.

  Under the noon sun, Ray rode near a mining camp. The wood of the shacks and the canvas of frayed tents were bleached a pale gray, like nearly everything else on the plains. He spied a man splitting wood to feed an open-air brick oven. Another man was cutting up food at a table in the shade of a tent. The faint whistling of “Silver Threads Among the Gold” wafted by. It was a tune Ray had not heard since his boyhood in the streets of lower Manhattan. How strange to hear the song again, out here in this rough country.

  He could see no other inhabitants but caught the faint tink of hammers. He realized the other men were down in a mine somewhere, beating ore from the earth.

  Ray wondered if he should ask the cooks if they could spare a meal. But what if they had a telegraph? Word might have come across the wires warning of a horse thief recently escaped from the fort. Ray saw no telegraph poles but feared news might have arrived by another route. He couldn’t afford to risk capture again.

  But he was so hungry, and this camp seemed the only opportunity for food. He would just have to be quick, he decided.

  Ray led the mare down a slope and tied her reins to a trunk of sagebrush. She began eating the coarse leaves and tough grass immediately. Ray opened his shirt to take out the toby. He rustled through its contents until his fingers came upon a dried knob of poke root. A root worker in the Chesapeake lowlands had once shown him a driving-off spell. It would work, but only if Ray could find a candle in the mining camp and light it without drawing the men’s attention. A risk, Ray had to admit, but one worth taking for some food.

  Ray plucked a leaf off the sagebrush and tore it down the center. He snapped a corner of the poke root and crushed it with a rock into powder. Then, with the ingredients in his hand, Ray circled the mining camp until he reached the well for the miners’ water.

  He dropped one of the halves of the sagebrush leaf into the well, and then snuck up toward the camp. Through the tents and buildings, he spied the pair of cooks, whistling and chopping as they prepared the evening meal. His stomach whined painfully. Ray looked around until he decided they were the only two aboveground.

  He went into the nearest tent and found a candle stub perched in a chipped teacup. He lit the candle and left the tent, cautious to the movement of the cooks. The first had finished chopping the wood and was talking to the other as he took loaves of bread from the oven.

  “… you say she lives down in Denver with her sister?”

  “Yeah, I could have delivered the letters myself in less time than it took for the express rider to carry it.…”

  Ray walked carefully with the lit candle until he was behind the cooks’ tent. The side of canvas had been lowered to shade the men from the morning sun, and Ray knelt there to begin the spell. He snapped the candle from the wax in the cup and dropped the other half of the sagebrush leaf, along with the poke root powder, into the dried wax.

  “… this is the last of the beef. Have to hope the supply wagons get here soon.”

  “They’re two days late as it is.…”

  Ray tipped the candle and let the hot wax drip onto the leaf and powder. The wax cooled quickly, encasing the spell’s ingredients until they were little more than faint brown and silver shadows in the yellow bubbles of the tallow. Ray licked his fingers and pinched out the candle’s flame. He waited.

  The men spoke idly about supplies and relatives and the irritations in their bowels, but after a few moments, Ray heard the one man’s cleaver rattle on the chopping table and the other clapping his hands together to wipe off the flour. They walked together, speaking all the while, out from the tent. Ray slipped around the canvas wall and, crouching, watched them head toward the well.

  Tricking them didn’t bother him. They wouldn’t know what possessed them with desire to go to the leaf’s other half, floating in the well. They wouldn’t give their actions a second thought. They would talk together and draw water from the well, maybe deciding that thirst had brought them there, until one of the two touched the other half of the sagebrush leaf and the spell would be broken.

  Ray knew he wouldn’t have much time, but he’d have enough. When the cooks had disappeared from sight, he scrambled out and collected loaves of bread into a large square of cloth. Into another he cut sections of roasting beefsteaks, still bloody from the spit, and stacked them with raw onions and cabbage. Among some hardware on the ground were several twines of rope. Ray tied the satchels of food to a coil of rope and put it over his shoulder. This was as much as he could carry and more than he felt right about stealing.

  But he was hungry, and although suspicions and accusations might occur when the missing food was discovered, Ray would be far away. To settle his conscience, Ray selected a boneset leaf and a devil’s shoestring root from his toby and tacked them to the underside of the cook’s table.

  The charms would protect the camp from illness, and although they would never know he had given them this compensation, Ray felt better about it. When he’d put a few miles behind him, he sat on the ground and ate until his stomach grew sore and happy.

  The black ribbon of smoke followed him, edging ever closer as the steamcoach chased Ray across the rocky country. But at last, Ray reached the place where he saw the pass going up into the mountains. Sally and Quorl had gone that way with Jolie only a day behind them. Since the mare was not fretting, he pushed her on a little farther into the evening, ascending into the mountains’ foothills and patchwork forests of the dry eastern slopes. He camped for the night, eating the last of the steaks, since they would spoil, and saving the rest to mix with whatever could be foraged in the high country ahead.

  The following morning he spent some time searching out Élodie’s hoofprints before climbing farther. Although it had been nearly a week since Jolie had passed this way, there had been no rain to wash out the tracks. Ray felt certain no other traveler had come this way and set off, following the prints up the slopes.

  The course took him west, as he suspected it would, and the high country was full of fine air and beautiful scenery. As he reached a point where he assumed he would lose the view of the dusty plains behind him, Ray looked back for the steamcoach. The black smoke showed it had nearly caught up to him.

  He looked at the pass rising before him. The way was steep, a maze of loose rocks and boulders. With a sigh, Ray patted the mare’s mane and said, “Good girl. They’ll never be able to get that monstrosity up into these mountains.”

  He shook her reins and hoped he was right.

  For a day, Ray rode into the high reaches of the mountains and saw no sign of the steamcoach. The following afternoon, he found himself in a wide valley carved out by a distant wall of glacier and a
meandering river. In the grassy bottoms, he found a large wolf’s tracks and scanned until he saw a girl’s prints also.

  Ray followed their tracks up the mountainside until he came onto the ridge and eventually reached a forest of aspens, white as ghostly spears staked to a battlefield. Coming out from the trees, Ray spied the heap of a recent avalanche and cast a nervous eye to the rock face above. Clouds of snow blew from the top, but it seemed the heaviest of the snowpack had already fallen and wouldn’t fall again until the following spring thaw. As Ray urged the mare up into the snow, she sank to her belly, each step a struggle. He decided she’d have an easier time without him on her back, so he got down and led her by the reins.

  When he was nearly halfway across, his eyes fell on a set of tracks—the enormous canine prints of the rougarou. Ray stopped and looked around. Where were Sally’s tracks? Why wasn’t she with the rougarou?

  Then it struck Ray that Élodie’s tracks did not cross the avalanche either. Jolie had not followed Quorl over the snow.

  As he peered around in puzzlement, he heard a snort from the aspen grove. It was followed by the unmistakable flapping of a horse’s mane. “Who’s there?” Ray called, his hand going to his belt before he remembered that he no longer had his knife. He crouched in the snow behind the mare, peering back at the tree line.

  A horse whinnied and clapped its hooves. Ray spotted the quarter horse’s brown back and muttered, “Élodie.”

  Leaving the mare in the snow, Ray shuffled across the avalanche and, when he was back on hard earth, he ran to the horse. Élodie was still saddled, her reins hanging from her chin and tangled with leaves and bracken. “Jolie!” Ray shouted. “Are you here?”

  Ray listened. There was a faint cry, but he could not detect where it was coming from or what was making it. “Élodie,” Ray said, taking the horse’s neck in his hands. “Where is Jolie? Where’s she gone?”

  He had learned to issue a few commands to the horse Unole that he and Marisol had ridden to Omphalosa. And he had used his limited speech to urge the horses at Fort Hudson to escape. But to understand Élodie now, Ray had to enter the horse’s thoughts in a way he had never done before.

  “What’s happened to her?” Ray whispered.

  Élodie flicked her ears and turned her big brown eyes to him. Ray closed his eyes.

  The answer came not as speech, but as a flash of memory—the thunder of breaking ice and an enormous eruption of snow falling on a half-frozen lake.

  Ray opened his eyes and turned back toward the avalanche of snow. “Jolie,” he gasped.

  What about Sally? Had she been with Jolie when the snowpack broke?

  Ray had no experience with snow of this magnitude. Was one crushed by the fall, or were they buried alive? And if the latter, could they survive for a while in a pocket of snow? It had been nearly a week, and frost or starvation would surely have set in.

  Ray ran out onto the snow and began digging desperately with his hands. The snow was loose, and he managed to clear several holes before his fingers burned and throbbed with cold. He moved from spot to spot, calling out Jolie’s and Sally’s names as he plunged his hands into the powder and kicked the snow away like a fox building a den.

  Sweating and half frozen at the same time, Ray knelt in the snow to catch his breath. “Sally!” he shouted. “Can you hear me? Jolie!”

  He heard nothing. Élodie’s memory formed again in his mind. Before the avalanche, this had been a lake. There was water beneath the mountain of snow.

  Jolie might have survived in the water! But how was he to reach her? He had dug down deep in several spots and had reached nothing but harder snow. He couldn’t reach the lake even if he had a shovel.

  In desperation, fingers numb with cold, he pulled open the buttons of his shirt. He took out the toby and rummaged through the contents. What charm did he possess that could move this much snow? Nothing! But he didn’t need to move the snow, he needed to find Jolie beneath it.

  He had spent a month with a conjurer down in Georgia, a half Seminole who had used milk from an all-black cow to find buried treasure. He had said there was a better charm. What was it? A leafless plant. A little pale parasite that grew on the roots of some trees.

  Gall of the Earth!

  The conjurer had never used it because it was rare, growing only in cold places. Never in the marsh of southern Georgia.

  Ray ran to the grove of aspens. He kicked away the hard earth from the roots of the first tree he came to. Clawing and throwing away the dirt in clumps, he searched for the pale plant. Nothing. He went from tree to tree. He was about to give up when he pried back a wedge of half-frozen earth and saw it. Growing among a thick fungus covering the damp roots was a ghostly stem with tiny droplet-shaped flowers. This was Gall of the Earth. He knew it as he plucked the plant from the roots.

  As he hurried to Élodie, he tried to remember what the conjurer had taught him. To find buried treasure, he would need something that belonged to the person who hid the treasure. A button, a fingernail clipping, a … piece of hair! Ray searched the saddle until he found several strands of Jolie’s long hair tangled around the saddle horn.

  He took off Élodie’s saddle and tore a corner from the saddle blanket. Wrapping the hair and the Gall of the Earth in the fabric, he had a sort of doll, a totem that represented Jolie. He hurried out until he was toward the middle of the avalanche, where he guessed the lake to be. He dropped the doll.

  He watched the charm lying in the snow, the gray woolen sack stuffed with the Gall of Earth and Jolie’s hair. For a few moments nothing happened, but then the doll twitched. The snow shifted beneath it, crunching ever so softly, until the doll turned, its lumpy head sliding over the loose surface of snow.

  Ray followed the doll as it inched along. After a few yards, it stopped. Once more it twitched and nudged down into the crispy surface.

  The snow around the doll began to melt, and a depression formed. The charm went deeper as the snow puddled and shrank. Ray’s pant legs grew wet, and his boots filled with water. The snow melted inches at a time as he watched. Some areas upturned and collapsed more swiftly then others, and Ray backed away from the hole that was forming.

  Soon, the snow shrank to reveal blue-black water. The doll splashed and disappeared into the depths. Ray crouched at the edge and peered down. He saw nothing but murky shadow. Then some distance down—he could not judge the depth in the freezing waters—he saw a shimmer of skin.

  “Jolie!” he called. “Can you hear me?”

  She did not move.

  Ray ran back across the snow. From the saddle, he removed the coil of rope he’d taken from the mining camp. He tied one end to the mare’s saddle horn and unwound the rest out toward the snow.

  “Come on, old gal!” he shouted, pulling the horse reluctantly from her grazing. He stopped her at the edge of the snow and rushed out with the rope until he crouched again at the water’s edge.

  The limp form of Jolie’s body floated down in the dark waters. Luminous pale arms extended. Strands of hair drifting out and mingling with the murk.

  “Jolie!” he cried. He threw the bundle of rope into the water. “Grab it! Please take the rope.”

  The coil drifted down, knocking against her and disappearing into the black.

  “Jolie! Take it. It’s right there.”

  She did not move. It was clear she was unconscious. The lake couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing. How long could he survive in it?

  Ray grabbed the rope and twirled it around the hole, trying to catch on Jolie. But the rope simply brushed against her shoulders.

  He knew there was no choice left. He untied his laces and yanked off his boots. Throwing aside his hat, he took off his coat and shirt and pants. He dropped the toby on top of the pile.

  Ray tried to prepare himself, to compose his courage as he stood shivering at the edge of the blue-black waters.

  He plunged in. The cold was like nails driving into his skin. He kic
ked and fought to keep his mind from snapping shut. He dove deeper and opened his eyes to search for Jolie.

  A little deeper, her pearly skin shone from the dark waters. He swam down until he grasped her about the waist and reached out for the rope. Kicking his way up, he followed the rope back to the hole of light. His face broke the surface and he gasped for air.

  Holding tightly to Jolie’s arm, he climbed out of the freezing water. Then he got down on his knees and pulled until he hoisted her up onto the snow.

  Her eyes were shut, and her body fell limp and heavy against him. Ray lifted her into his arms and hurried off the frozen lake and back to the forest. “Jolie, can you h-hear me?” His teeth rattled. He shivered uncontrollably.

  Ray knew he had to get dry quickly if he was to help her. He ran back for his clothes.

  He could not imagine how Jolie had survived so long in the frozen lake. He had heard stories of trout frozen in Adirondack streams only to emerge in the spring, but he had always taken those for campfire tales.

  When he returned, he wrapped the wool saddle blanket around his shoulders and tried to dry off as best he could. Stripping off his wet union suit, he put on his dry clothes and with stiff fingers tried to tie his bootlaces.

  Jolie said nothing. Her eyes were open, but she seemed barely conscious as she lay on the ground. Her breathing came as shallow hisses. Her skin was an unnatural blue hue. Ray grabbed the saddle blanket and bundled it around her, thankful that her gown couldn’t hold water.

  “I’m going to build a fire,” he said, before rushing to the aspens to break off dry branches. The effort of collecting wood helped warm him, but his skin burned from the cold. He moved hastily and soon had a fire roaring. He propped Jolie against Élodie’s saddle before the blaze and hurriedly prepared teas from foraged herbs in his haversack.

  As the concoctions warmed, Ray rubbed Jolie’s arms and legs, trying to bring warmth and life back into them. The icy tinge was leaving her skin.