Painted Horses

by Malcolm Brooks

  He looks at the gypsy king. “I want your word.”

  “My word?”

  “That you don’t eat these horses. Other horses, maybe. Do or die. Not these horses.”

  The gypsy bows.

  He leaves in the dawn with a belly full of bread, riding the gray dun and leading a single blood bay mare, the Mannlicher slung from his shoulder. The other horses nicker and call, strain against the highline. He leaves them in the girl’s hands now.

  He moves faster and farther with only two horses, crosses the French frontier and climbs into the mountains bordering Spain. He glasses into Andorra, sees the passes choked with fields of snow, and ventures farther west. He falls in with a sheepman driving a small band down a cobbled roadbed, travels along with him through a chain of river valleys, each more primitive than the last until finally they enter a place that progress has forgotten altogether, a region of oxcarts and village wells and implements that barely apprehend the invention of metal. The sheepman remains here but sends John H on his way with a map sketched on a stiff scrap of hide.

  He rides over a pass and down another broad valley with farms terraced up the sides of the hills, into a small town with a village square. Though many of the shop signs are in Spanish he can smell cooking that takes him back ten years and when he dismounts at a fountain to let the horses drink he hears through an open window a flash of Basque in a feminine voice and something inside him goes jump.

  Two days later he stops the horses at a creek bottom where a road ends at a watermill, sits the dun and watches the turn and turn of the wheel. He can hear the faint grind of the gears inside the mill even above the ceaseless sound of the water, splashing and dripping from the paddles.

  He rides past the race and follows the road through the trees and into the valley, and when the beeches fall away to reveal a village on the far side he knows he has arrived.

  The name Arrieta still occurs. He sees it on a signpost, knows if he found the cemetery he would see it there too. Instead he rides the dun and leads the bay up onto a flat of land with a good and expansive view, winter sky blue and brilliant overhead. He turns the bay loose, slaps it on the rump to move it along. It wanders a few feet and crops dry grass. He strips the Furstnow saddle from the gray and the gray drifts off as well.

  He takes the point of his knife and pops the crude stitching from the flap of the saddlebag, tears the flap open and lifts the tin from where it has rested all these years. The flex and rub of the leather has worn the paint off the edge of the lid, left a polished silver border that wasn’t there before.

  John H crosses the flat with the tin in his hands, walks up through a scattering of burled and gnarled winter trees on the slope.

  He climbs into steeper country, up to the black edge of the pines, then picks his way to the edge of a bare rock face, the horses like toys now on the bench below. He sees a bustle of movement over in the village, also the shrub-like figures of sheep in pasturage across the valley. Surely nothing has changed here in the decades since Jean Bakar left to make his way.

  He hefts the tin, tests its weight, and with a mighty draw of clear cold air flings the tin like a discus from the dizzying height, watches it turn and turn in the void, the sun splintering once off the silver border before the lid comes loose and a burst of ash smudges the air in a hanging, drifting cloud, chips and shards falling, raining down, into the waiting mantle of this last old country.

  The tin clatters in the rocks, then silence.

  He makes his own way down.

  Glyphs

  “Now your horse by general temper is an open-country sort of beast. He likes a view, likes to see what’s coming before it gets to him. Got eyes at the side of his skull for that express purpose.”

  They crouched in the sand over a river of tracks, dimples from hooves in a many-footed passing. Though the sky was not wide within the frame of the gorge the sun seemed to hang there endlessly. Jack Allen’s shirt had darkened hours ago in a stripe down his back, his wide straw hat throwing a dot of a shadow beneath the high white blaze. The back of Catherine’s neck burned like a stove lid.

  “He don’t see straight out like a hawk, or a wolf. He sees in two circles. You follow what I’m saying?”

  “Um, I think. If he spies a threat in the distance, something not so nice such as, oh, yourself, he has ample warning to run away?”

  Allen disregarded this. He pressed his fingers to the edge of a print, the dried rind of sand crumbling into granules, collapsing into the pock.

  Now she’d started and she was not inclined to quit. “What do you want with these poor horses, anyway? It’s not like you need to harass them. No one eats horsemeat anymore. Not in America, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, somebody ought to inform these hammerheads. You chase them and believe me, they run like hell.” He looked up at her, the corner of his mouth twisted with that smile. “Up and gone like red devils, dust and dirt flying. Finest sight you ever saw, tell you what. All that muscle and all that fire, heading for the hills quick as it can. What’s a fella to do?”

  Her mind flashed like a strobe to one of her father’s signature lines, a fox-hunting quote out of some English novel he loved. Wodehouse, maybe, or Sassoon. I loves ’em, I loves ’em, I loves ’em. And I loves to kill ’em.

  “Anyways, it ain’t all that much if you don’t happen to eat them. What do you feed Fido, cornflakes? How do you hold little Johnny’s kindergarten art project together?”

  Catherine looked at him warily.

  “It’s true, little girl. The glue’s on your hands too.”

  Catherine’s own eye went to her palm, a reflex she instantly regretted.

  “Hell, the horse himself ain’t what you’d call empty of malice. Cold-blooded as any snake, comes to him and his. Something raises his ire, even his suspicion, he’ll kill it on principle.”

  “He’s right,” Miriam piped up. “You can’t have horses in with newborn lambs. They’ll stomp the lambs right to bits.”

  “This is all very interesting,” said Catherine. “Unfortunately, live horses are one thing, ancient history is something else. Can we move it along here?”

  Jack Allen stood erect from the flow of tracks, brushed the sand from his hands. Somewhere in the rocks an insect buzzed. “Still not getting it. No wonder you can’t find what you’re after.”

  With that he sauntered back the way they’d come, back in the direction of camp along the river. Catherine looked at Miriam. “What does he mean by that?”

  In truth, she wasn’t uninterested in his elusive horses. They had three times encountered the signs of a herd in the past eight days, and Catherine began to catch herself studying the ground for fresh prints or scanning the horizon for dust. Easy alternatives to not finding stone tools or rock art. In truth, her fear of failure had begun to curdle in the long height of summer, day after sweaty day clambering over parched dirt and scorching stone, the angst of raw ambition souring into something more along the lines of simple boredom.

  And in truth, the competitive envy she felt toward her guide was matched only by her irritation that Jack Allen was necessary to the task at all. But he was.

  Allen on the other hand was not, by general temper, a beast inclined toward petulance. A beast, maybe—her mother would think so—but no can kicker or corner sulker.

  He’d changed tactics since their first expedition, this time had barely left her alone for five minutes. He led her into finger draws and high up onto narrow ledges that she wouldn’t have attempted on her own. Despite her own wavering attention span, Catherine understood that some newfound loyalty had not reared its noble head. Rather, Dub Harris wanted her monitored. This had become her single point of pride.

  Late in the night her mind raced in the white blare of the moon. She careered again to Allen’s horses.

  “I figured it out,” she told him in the morning.

  “You think so.” He was breaking down camp, their supplies used up and a report expected at Harris Pow
er and Light.

  “These horses live where they’re not supposed to. They don’t behave like normal mustangs.”

  He straightened from the tarp he was folding and gave her a look and though the hour hand on her watch was barely to eight o’clock he wore his glasses against the sun and she could see herself yet again. “Now how do you figure on finding your next arrowhead when you’re forever daydreaming about horses?”

  With that he put the final crease in the canvas, lifted the tarp and strode for the mules.

  “I’m right, aren’t I,” she said to his back.

  “You ain’t wrong,” he answered.

  They rode out upriver, through country they had yet to cover, making for a trail Allen had found on the map up a side draw that would take them out of the gorge. From the trailhead at the top he figured on a five-mile ride overland back to the trucks.

  But what showed on the map as a path proved a ghost on the skin of the earth. Vestiges of what may once have been a game trail appeared now and again, only to vanish in a matter of yards beneath a rockslide, or in the shape-shifting runnels of a wash.

  Jack Allen pushed ahead, even when the three of them had to dismount to lead horses and mules on foot above an unsteady scree field. Pebbles rolled loose and raced off downgrade with a sound like trickling water, and when one of the animals dislodged a chip the size of a slate shingle the chip in turn tripped a chain reaction among a million others, sliding and skipping in a widening cone until it seemed half the hillside had relocated itself into the boulder field below.

  “This seems really dangerous,” Miriam called, exactly what Catherine had been thinking except she didn’t care to be the one to say so.

  Jack Allen said nothing until they cleared the border of the scree and found the most prominent sign of pathway yet, a ribbon etched crosswise into the tilt of the grade. Above them a long wall of rock ran like a rampart in both directions. All he said was, “None of this country was ever mapped right to begin with,” and he swung back onto his horse.

  They didn’t make a quarter mile before the trail vanished again, this time into a vertical stone knob jutting from the stratified wall.

  “Now come on,” Allen barked. “It’s a damn dead end.”

  “What now?” Miriam said, without her usual vinegar.

  Allen dismounted. “Stand down and stay clear. I’ll get everybody turned around and we’ll head back out.”

  Catherine moved to swing down on the left side and he stopped her. He stepped up and took her horse by the bridle, told her to dismount on the right, between the horse and the hillside. She did as he said and then came forward when he beckoned. “Climb up there,” he said. He pointed uphill, to a flat boulder at the base of the rampart. “Don’t move.”

  Allen slid back to steady Miriam’s horse but before he could get there she’d already taken the cue and dismounted on the right. He sent her uphill as well.

  He turned Miriam’s horse first, taking the ends of the reins back as far as he could between the horse and the grade and then pulling its head around toward him. The animal turned fore for aft practically in place.

  He scratched the horse’s muzzle and worked back around it and repeated the trick with Catherine’s horse, then with the three mules, bulky panniers and all.

  The last horse in line was his own gray. He reeled its head back toward him and as its chest began to follow the horse began to resist, pulling back with its head and neck and in the process losing its outside rear foot from the trail and then regaining it again. Jack Allen cussed the horse and kept pulling, and the horse let out a tremendous, panicky neigh that split the air like a shock wave.

  Another horse called back, a neigh from out of the cliff itself. Jack Allen quit pulling.

  “That was a weird echo,” said Miriam from her perch.

  “Echo like hell,” said Allen. “That’s another horse.”

  The gray erupted again, and the neigh came back again.

  Catherine stood on her boulder and faced the rock rampart. From her full height the rim of the wall was just a few feet above her head and she looked for a toehold, found one and reached up and found a seam in the rock to grab with her fingers. She began to climb.

  “Catherine, what are you doing?” said Miriam.

  “It came from right up here.” She moved steadily higher, her fingers and toes finding crannies and knobs almost as though they’d been deliberately placed.

  “Good grief, be careful.”

  “No, it’s easy,” said Catherine, and with that she went up and over the rim.

  The rampart did not terminate. She’d climbed onto a shelf on the rock face, a ledge where the strata of one era had heaved forward beneath the tectonic grind of another. A second band of vertical stone striped the grade, most of it too steep even to consider climbing save a single cleft that split the wall before her, as though she were an Israelite and the stone were the wide Red Sea.

  Catherine peered up the chute and saw a narrow passage to the horizon. Steep, but no more than thirty feet. She heard Jack Allen yell down below, the sound of his voice like the rowel of a spur. She heard the trumpet of a horse again, the cry bouncing through the funnel in the rock, and she squeezed into the rift and started to climb.

  Again the going was easier than it appeared. Once a stone the size of a pineapple came loose beneath her foot and bounced off down the chute. Otherwise she made her way to the rim without a hitch.

  At the top she emerged blinking into sunshine, peering through a V in the wall of the canyon where the same broken fault inverted onto its edge. She heard a commotion, glanced back down the chute to see Jack Allen clear the first rim and hoist himself onto the ledge. She stepped into the V and hoped he hadn’t spotted her.

  The same trail that vanished into the knob down below seemed remarkably to resume up here. She practically ran now, winding through a jumble of boulders until she cleared the constricted aperture and found herself at the border of a small valley, a bowl with steep variegated walls and a floor littered with an inhospitable stone jumble. The sun menaced at the edge of a needle-like formation to the west, the final core of a mountain or butte, desolate now in the sky and reminding her for an instant of the spindly brick corners of London buildings, connecting walls blasted to rubble around them.

  She shielded her eyes and scanned the bowl. She looked for a stir of dust on the air, the flash of sunlight on a flank, anything to give away a horse. She saw nothing but stone.

  She climbed a stairway of boulders to the shadow beneath a sandstone lip, a horizontal slash not unlike the wide mouth of Inscription Cave outside Billings though shallower still, the shaded back wall faintly visible even at a distance. She crossed a span of hot cap rock, got into the blessed shade and went nearly blind in the cool dim light.

  When her eyes adjusted she looked back on the valley. The higher vantage gave a wider view, but still no horses. In fact the valley didn’t seem a likely place for any animal, with boulder upon boulder and barely a splash of vegetation anywhere. God the glare. She had a sudden, welling pang of homesickness, a craving for droplets and green leaves and damp gardens. The roses at her parents’ Tudor.

  She turned back into the overhang and its dim light. The composition of the wall reoccurred to her up close, the layers of colored rock one atop the other, like bands of a spectrum bleeding one into another, lavender and pink and red. The only flaw in these long even stripes cut in from one side to run diagonally across the lot of them, interrupting order and flow like a mustache on the Mona Lisa. A jagged, misplaced black band.

  Or a braid. A flint deposit. She whirled back to the opening and saw again the stone needle thrusting darkly for the sun, a nest of rocks in the shadow of the spire. She thought, How can I be this stupid.

  She exhausted the interior and moved back into the sunlight, eyes poring over the stone wall by the cave mouth so intently she wasn’t aware of the others until they climbed onto the cap rock with her.

  “See anything
?” Miriam asked.

  “What? No. Not a thing.”

  “Hush up,” said Allen. He faced the rock-littered expanse and cupped both hands behind his ears, stood that way for a full minute. Catherine turned back toward the wall, her eyes darting frantically over the stone. “Well, hell’s bells,” Allen finally muttered. “They here or ain’t they.”

  Catherine glanced across her shoulder, saw him shift a few steps and scan the upper end of the valley with binoculars. She glanced downward and her eye caught a lazy fault in the stone, a ghost of a scrape that tapered to a point and turned back to snake right in front of her. Etched parallel lines, cut and scribed into the granite with some primitive element. She followed the lines to a blunt forehead, the hump of shoulders. She was looking at an elephant. She stood on its trunk.

  Her heart walloped like a fighter’s jab, again again again. She wanted to drop to her knees and worship this thing, wanted to chortle and scream. She forced herself steady, looked away from the etching and over at Allen. He remained a study in the long view, eyes trained on the distance. The cap rock wouldn’t yield to a hoof so he wouldn’t think to look at the cap rock. This much she knew.

  She let her own eyes roam. Above the figure at her feet she saw another, smaller likeness of the same creature. Off to the side lay a separate series of lines that she couldn’t quite put together. She knelt and made to check her bootlace, ran her fingers over the mammoth’s trunk, the grooves worn so faint she could barely feel them, the stone itself hot as a skillet.

  Behind her she heard a gasp and she shot a glare at the girl and wagged her head sharply. Miriam stared back, eyes and mouth wide around with wonder. Catherine wanted to laugh and hug her tight at the same time but instead touched a finger to her lips, crooked the same finger at Allen’s back. She shook her head again. Miriam nodded, shifted uncertainly and moved into the shadow of the overhang.

  Jack Allen turned toward the cliff, looked at the rim overhead. “I halfway figured you’d come through that notch and run smack into something,” he said.