“Now you can die with your Chinawoman.”
From the ground, Amos looked over at Yun, still sitting on Mustard. She made no attempt to get away. Indeed, he could tell that she was thinking of coming over to his aid, even if they would both die.
He locked eyes with her, and then quickly glanced over at the boxes of gold, making sure she remembered.
He dragged his left arm listlessly on the ground, through the leaves, the bits of bark, and the dark soil, as though he was in too much pain to control himself. As Yun stared at him, her eyes full of fire, he traced out the strokes of the character tien: one, two, three, and then the last stroke, a defiant diagonal, like a ladder to the sky, like lifting off the weight from a limpsy heart.
Her eyes grew wet. But she nodded, almost imperceptibly.
What I assume you shall assume.
“Now, run!” Amos shouted.
Yun dug her heels into Mustard’s sides, and the mare leaped down from the hill, galloping away toward the woods.
Pike’s men scrambled to aim their guns at her fleeing figure. No one was paying any attention to the dying old man.
With every bit of his remaining strength, Amos snatched up his rifle.
Yun had wrapped three cartridges in the words of the Star Spangled Banner: red glare, bombs, and rocket.
He had shot two, and now the last one was levered into place.
He pulled the trigger, and Pike and his gang—along with the smiling Amos—disappeared in a great ball of fire.
* * *
YUN
When Yun came back, she saw a little charred crater where the fallen trees had been.
She jumped off Mustard, who sniffed the ground, whinnied, and then kept her head low. Yun knelt next to the crater and bowed her head to the ground three times.
“Today, I have seen a true hsiake,” she whispered.
The wind carried a few pieces of paper, their edges burnt, to her feet. She picked one up:
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.
* * *
Author’s Note: The Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (1850–64), or Taiping Tianguo, did indeed modify the way the character tien is written in its name; however, the particular modification presented in this story was used only on coins minted in a particular province for a brief period.
In general, Wade-Giles is used instead of pinyin to romanize Chinese names in this story for historical reasons.]
THE DEVIL’S JACK
A STORY OF THE DEVIL’S WEST
LAURA ANNE GILMAN
The Territory, Three Days’ Ride Northeast of the Canyon, July 1801
The horse was an old one, and piebald to boot, warning he’d go lame sooner rather than not, but Jack would be damned if he’d give up and walk.
The fact that his stubbornness came too late for his soul didn’t make him any more willing to relent.
“Whoa now, hoss,” he said, reining back gently with his left hand, shifting his weight to ease the ache in his buttocks, and squinting at the horizon. The smudge in the distance might be an outcropping of stone… or it might be yet another hallucination brought on by exhaustion and hope.
Only way to find out was to ride on.
The sun had shifted to the western half of the sky, casting his shadow odd-angled in front of them, a beast with four legs and two heads and a sway to its movement that looked more like a shambles-beast than anything living.
There were days Jack wondered himself if they’d already died and been too stubborn to fall.
But if he’d have died, the devil would have called his name for sure.
“We’re still here, hoss,” he told the piebald. “For all the good it does us.”
The horse had no opinion. It lifted one foot in front of the other with weary determination, moving forward across the broken plain because going back was not an option, and they neither of them were fool enough to stop.
* * *
Hooves hitting stone woke Jack from his riding doze, the change from the softer clodding of dirt and dust jarring his senses into full alertness as much as the singing of an arrow or the smell of black powder.
He’d been right: rock, an entire massive ridge cresting out of the hill, solid and deep. Deep enough down to touch the core of the world. Deep enough down to be protection, for a little while. Jack let out a sigh and the piebald’s sides heaved in echo, its head drooping down to its knees.
“Yeah, you’re a good hoss,” he said, patting the withers with almost-affection. “Time for a rest.”
Jack swung out of the saddle before he could talk himself out of it. His thighs protested the move, and his feet ached with the weight of his body, but the press of his boot-soles against rock was a sweet pain.
He paused, almost unwilling to breathe, but the rock remained steady underfoot, and his thoughts stayed his own.
Deep enough, for a while.
Unhooking the canteen from his saddle, Jack took a long swig, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and considered pouring the rest over his head to wash the dust and grime from his skin.
“No, hoss. Can’t do that,” he said. “No telling how long we might be here.”
Not that long, never that long; soon enough he would have to move on, driven to another town, or farmstead, or fugitive’s trail.
He looped the rawhide reins loosely around the horn so they wouldn’t drag, and then stepped forward, trusting the piebald to follow behind.
The ridge was lumped like the bare bones of a skeleton, dusty-dry and rust red. Not even moss grew on them, here under the blazing sun.
Hard rock was good. Hard rock was safe.
For now, experience told him. Don’t you dare relax.
There were strips of jerky in his saddlebag, and another canteen of water, half-full and stale, but drinkable. The piebald could graze and drink when they came to pastures, but Jack had not sat to a meal without worry since longer than he could easily remember.
“No,” he said, thinking back. “Two weeks past? The riverboat, coming up past Louistown.”
Water was safe, too. Water and stone.
Stone was better, though. The devil couldn’t reach through that much stone.
* * *
“You played. You lost.”
The gambler had had a jovial look that Jack had distrusted at once. But only a fool trusted the man who held the deck, and Jack prided himself on being no fool. Young, yes, and green, he owned to that, but never foolish. He sat warily and played carefully and never bet more than he could afford to lose. That was how you got to be old, in the Devil’s West.
“I played and I lost and you’ve taken your winnings,” Jack said. “And now I’ll be stepping away from the table, like a sober man.”
More sober now than he’d been an hour before: the dealer had a run of luck that could only be cursed, and every card that turned called out for mortals to beware, until the river turned and drowned him, once and for all.
And the other men at the table had breathed a sigh of relief that it had been Jack, and not them.
“Leaving, broke and sober. ’Tis often the fate of mortal man,” the dealer agreed, and his jovial expression was only kind. Jack’s left hand flexed, feeling for the gun that did not hang by his side.
You removed your weapons before you sat at the table. The saloon girl with the saucy eye held them for him, his gun and his hat, and no way to reach either before he was dead. The fact that every soul in the saloon was in the same boat did not warm Jack, not with the way the dealer watched his face, and not his hands. This dealer feared no powder and shot, nor an arrow from ambush, nor a knife in the dark.
Jack had known who he played with, when he slid his coin across the felt. That had been the point. That was why men came here, to test their luck. He swallowed, the sick feeling he had at the loss—everything he had, from cash to horse—eclipsed by a worse sensation in his gut. Not two years on his own, and he had
failed, utterly. The devil cherished the prideful, his mentor had warned him, the better to break them of it.
“One more hand, to win it all,” the dealer said, and his hands moved over the cards, shuffling them without sound. “One more hand to win it all, and more.”
It was a devil’s bargain, in the heart of the Devil’s West, and only a green-sapped fool would have taken it.
But Jack-as-was had not been as wise as he thought.
* * *
The rock eased his pain, and Jack slept soundly within its hard embrace, no darkly sounding whisper searching for him, poisoning his rest. That knowledge had been hard-won and cherished, that through the solid rock and shifting water, the bones and blood of the Earth, the devil could not call.
Before the sun rose, he woke, curled under a rough blanket, still fully dressed save his boots, those tied to the piebald’s saddle to keep scorpions or worse from making them a home.
He had played that final hand and lost. The fruit of his bargain, the payment of his debt: seven years and seven and seven again, he was bound. The devil’s dog, the devil’s boy. But there was a loophole: if he did not hear the call, he could not be summoned. If he could not be summoned, he could not do the devil’s work.
It must amuse his master to play this game, to let Jack play at it, the days and weeks he could avoid the call, only for the devil to yank him back the moment he came within reach. Seven years and seven and seven again to pay, and nearly sixteen of them gone now, along with even the memory of the things he had hoped to regain. Sixteen was eight twice: numbers of protection for normal men, but there was no protection for Jack, save water and stone, the blood and bones of the earth, and that lasted only so long. If he died while bound, he was the devil’s forevermore.
Jack had long ago lost the taste for living, but he had no intention of dying any time soon. He rose and stretched, saluting the morning sun rising clear across the face of the outcrop, the sky still clouded and dim behind him.
“Human.”
Jack turned and spun, reaching not for the pistol that once pressed against his thigh but the packet of herbs he now carried in the holster, the dried bits catching in the wind as he scattered them, a free-moving arc of glittering brown-green.
“That’s hardly polite,” another voice said, this time behind him, and it sounded both amused and hurt. Two? More? Or one demon, inhumanly fast?
Magicians roamed these lands, and demons, and the devil. Jack feared none of them, anymore, but lack of fear did not mean lack of caution.
“You came to us and slept in our home. We came merely to say good morn, and you react… thus?”
Two… no, four, or five, from the shadows that crept around him. Slender and dark-skinned like savages, bare in their skins, dark hair long and wild, braided with feathers of impossibly bright colors, like a fancy-girl’s beads. Like humans, until you saw them move, joints turning too smoothly, eyes glittering too bright. Until you saw the shimmer like heatstroke under their skin.
The herbs had pushed them back, but they had not fled. The horse, dumb beast that it was, shifted its weight from leg to leg, but did not otherwise react. It had seen far worse, in its time under Jack’s leg.
“We don’t scare you?”
“Only a damned man isn’t cautious around demons,” Jack replied. He couldn’t tell which one spoke, they moved so restlessly, and he didn’t want to watch their mouths, not so close to those glittering eyes. “Never heard of your kind taking to hard rock, before.” It wasn’t a question—even a damned man did not ask a demon questions it might answer.
“You know many demon, then, human? To carry bane, and not a pistol, to wear the sigil instead of a cross?”
He’d never worn a cross, not even back then. The sigil on a thong around his neck wasn’t much more use—but it showed a certain amount of respect. Demons and magicians knew the Hanging Man, who had been here long before the bleeding god.
“I’m the devil’s Jack,” he said, having no desire to play their game. “You may have heard of me.”
They hissed, but did not back away. The devil had no claim on them, as soulless as the piebald. But they would—most like—not interfere with his dog, either.
“We grant you the use of our rock,” one of them said. “You may remain as long as you like.” Mocking: they knew he could not remain, dared not stay too long.
“I may leave freely, then.” Again, not a question, but merely to confirm: to make them agree, and not slide a card out from their sleeve.
“Yes. Yes, blasted human, you may.”
They could not. Their words, the tone of their words, gave them away. They had been bound to this hard ridge—some magician exercising his power, for some reason only magicians understood.
A wise man—and a damned man both—avoided thinking too much why a magician did anything.
“You could stay, and amuse us,” another one said. “We are so terribly bored.”
That was why they had come to him, then. Something new, on this barren ridge, to distract them. He felt no pity: they were demon. And yet, to be trapped on this ridge, for however long, was not a fate he would wish on any creature.
He had spoken truth, earlier: demon did not take to hard stone. They lingered on river banks and in shadowed caves, not here under the hot dry sun. “No doubt some terrible act angered the magician, that he bound you here, with no release.”
“Not so terrible. Not so anger-making. He was far more terrible than we, and woe to the human who bore him. His magic would have ripped him from her womb and burnt her to ashes from the hot malice in his bones.”
Magicians were made, not born. But there was something in the demon’s tone that made the story ring true.
Not that Jack would ever know, one way or another. Yet, demon had no reason to lie for sheer meanness; they were no more evil than a tornado, merely set on having their way no matter what a human might wish or do.
Much like humans, he knew. It was a rare soul who came at you with unselfish good. It simply wasn’t the way the world had been made.
This ridge offered safety, but a lack of evil did not mean a lack of harm, from tornado or demon, and a wise man got out of their way.
“I’ll water and feed my hoss, and be gone,” he said. “No need to fret yourselves on my account.”
They stared at him, like wolves in winter stare at elk, and he lowered his head and set his shoulders, same as the elk might do. Do not mess with me, his posture warned. You might win, but you would not like the cost.
They stared, and then scattered, gone as swift as they’d come, and the piebald and he were alone on the rocky ridge.
* * *
The ridge ran some distance toward the north, and Jack walked it through the morning, not pausing when the sun reached devil’s peak and bore down on him, rivulets of grimy sweat sticking his shirt and pants’ legs to his skin. The piebald’s girth was loose, its step slow and steady, and every now and again it reached over to nip at Jack’s hair in a gesture of what he thought might well be affection. Or hunger.
“Grazing for you, soon enough,” he promised it. “Just a bit longer.” The ability to stretch his legs without worry was sweeter than fresh water. He would have to leave this haven before long and be on his way, but not just yet.
He thought, safe on rock, of his mother and his sister. His teachers, back East. His first riding companion, near twenty years back, who had taken the green youth under his arm and taught him how to survive.
Old Matthew, who’d died north of Smithtown when the savages overran their camp. Died by his own hand, rather than be taken captive. “Never let them take you,” Matty had said. “Never do anything other than by your own free will. Promise yourself now, to never give up that will.”
He had been, in the end, no better a student to Matty than he had been at reading the law.
Those memories were only safe on rock, and they never did him any good. Jack forced his mind to consider each step, the colors and stri
ations of the rock, the crunch of his boot heel on timeworn rubble, and the sough of the wind against his ears, until his brain went numb once more.
Finally, the day came to a close, and while the ridge ran on a while more, there was the blur of blue shadow in the distance that told Jack there was a town off to the south.
People—settlers and traders, common folk—were wary of him, knowing without being told there was something gone wrong with him, but he missed hearing them speak, even when they did not speak to him. To sit, briefly, at a table, and pretend he could stay… it broke him, every time, and yet still he could not resist.
If he was fortunate, his master would have no summons for him.
* * *
Briar, the signs at the boundary line named the town, and it seemed well-called: sparse and spare, the color of deadwood and sand. But the buildings were sturdy, and the children clean and strong-limbed, and the sound of their play was the first thing he heard when he rode into town.
“Trust in God but Watch the Border” was inscribed at the archway of the church, a lookout on its spire, and Jack stared at the arch a while before riding on.
The saloon looked clean and orderly, and Jack barely hesitated before swinging down off the piebald’s back, wincing as his soles touched dirt.
Silence. Silence in his head, silence in his bones.
Looping the piebald’s reins around the post, he gave it a pat and a cube of close-hoarded sugar, and went through the sand-brown doors of the Briar’s Last Hope.
* * *
As usual, the folk gave him a wary circle: other strangers might be pestered for news or begged for a story, but they left him to his table and his whiskey, the girl serving him a plate of something that looked well-marbled but tasted of gristle and bone. He ate it, and the dry potatoes, and drank his whiskey, and let the noise wash over him, better than any bath he’d ever had.
And then it came.
No words: there were never words, only the command. The game was over, for the nonce: he had all-unwitting come where his master wanted him, where men waited, dreading, unknowing, for his hand on their necks.
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