Conquistador

by S. M. Stirling

  He grunted and took a swig of the spiked coffee. “I wish. That’s not Dreaming; that’s… what do you call it… jerking off. No way. But plenty of people like being told what they want to hear. We Water People got as many fools as anyone else, I reckon.”

  “Someone’s been slipping you… them… weapons, then?” Adrienne said.

  “Hell, yeah—the northern clans, at least. But if all of us had two of those smoke poles and enough powder and ball to shoot all year, you’d still have the fucking machine guns and helicopters, wouldn’t you? Not to mention you outnumber us more every year.”

  He shrugged and finished the coffee, smacking his lips. Silently Tom poured him more, and Simmons added another dollop of the Seven Oaks brandy.

  “Good stuff! Anyway, my plan is that we all pick up and move southeast—down Mexico way. Lot of empty land there since the plagues, and what’s left of the Ya-ke, Opata, Seri and such don’t have any guns at all, or many steel weapons. Then maybe if we were out of the way you fucking Deathwalkers would leave us alone. No offense.”

  “None taken. So who’s giving Swift Lance all these muskets?” Adrienne asked. “That might be… valuable information.”

  Good Star grinned, showing a mouthful of strong yellow teeth. “Wouldn’t we both like to know?”

  He shook his head. “Before Johnny Deathwalker came from beyond-the-world, all the Mohave clans stuck together, lived all mixed up, didn’t fight among themselves, from what the old bastards say. Ain’t like that anymore, not with the sickness and then all the outsiders getting adopted, and all the new ways and new critters. These days people are always stealing horses and sheep and cattle and guns from each other. Lot of those Akaka shits, they’d scalp their own cousins for a shot glass of cheap whiskey. Akaka, Othi-I, Kapata, Hukthar war-parties all over the west and north now. News travels slow.”

  Adrienne leaned back and whispered to Sandra, then was all attention once more, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.

  Good Star pointed northeast. “That’s where we Nyo-Ilcha have our grounds now, just over the mountains. The Akaka and their friends, they’re up around Old Woman Mountain, and the Bitter Lake, and west around Black Mountain and Willow Springs; they’re part of the mathal’a’thom, the northern clans—bunch of half Utes, if you want to know what I think. If you were heading that way—don’t. Well, gotta go. Thanks again for the ivory.”

  “Thank you for the pleasure of your company,” Adrienne said with a stately, archaic politeness Tom had noticed before.

  She rose and tossed him a bag Sandra had made up—one with a bottle of the brandy, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of aspirin, a sack of coffee beans, some sugar and a handful of chocolate bars. He caught it, slurped down the dregs from his cup, took a last drag on the cigarette, and rose with pantherish ease and walked off into the darkness.

  The party fell silent for a long time after the tall figure vanished into the night; Tom finished his coffee.

  “Well, well, well,” he said.

  Jesus, it’s hot, Tom thought. Then: Jesus, that’s lame.

  He and Adrienne were sprawled under the shade of their bell tent, stripped to their underwear, with the sides drawn up to catch any breeze—but the hot wind dried their sweat almost instantly, with little relief, and on their lips it tasted bitterly of alkali dust. The three tents were strung out in the meager shade of a low steep-sided hill, outlier of a mountain range to the west; it gave a little more protection as the sun declined, and the horses and mules crowded there with listless insistence. To the east stretched a desolation of flat rocky plain, rimmed by more mountains on the edge of sight to the east. It was studded here and there with the low sprawling creosote bush with its yellow-green-gray waxy leaves, a shrub that robbed the soil around it of moisture and nutrients until nothing else could grow; the occasional inch-wide yellow flower didn’t seem much compensation. The nearest bush had a diamondback rattler curled around its roots, waiting for sunset like a coil of deadly camouflaged rope. The sight reminded him to check his boots for scorpions when he put his boots back on, but the thought of moving was enough to make him tired.

  Nothing much moved in the hot, bright stillness, except grains of sand moved along by the oven-mouth wind, and the slow trace of the sun across the aching blue dome of the sky; even the blue was leached out to a tinted white.

  Around noon something had moved—a bird trying for the shade of the rocks had fallen out of the sky with a thump, struck dead by the heat in mid-flight. It still lay gape-beaked with its feet in the air fifty yards away, and the ants were beating a trail to it. Once a group of big red kangaroos had bounced by, stopping to munch on some barrel cactus, undeterred by the spines. Tom’s eyes tracked them with stuporous indifference; when their long hind feet came down on the creosote bushes a tarry, medicinal scent filled the air.

  In the middle distance was a long line of sand dunes. Tom watched them as his hand groped for the canvas water bag that hung from one of the struts of the tent. A little seeped through the canvas, cooling the contents all the way down to lukewarm by evaporation, and he sucked at the mouth with dogged persistence, ignoring the bitter taste and the rime of soda-rich dust on the outside that stuck to his chest hairs. He hated to think what the minerals were doing to his kidneys—and wondered how anyone could live in this desolation year-round—but you could dehydrate very easily here, and it had been a week since they crossed the mountains. Three days since the last spring of bad-smelling water.

  “You know the odd thing?” Adrienne said slowly and quietly, timing her words to the natural rhythm of her breath.

  “Tell me,” Tom said, handing her the water bottle. “Right now, funny would be good.”

  “This area is a beauty spot in the spring. The flowers are quite lovely.”

  That was funny. It was true, too. This wasn’t far from U.S. 40, on FirstSide, and he’d been through in March himself. It was probably even prettier here in the Commonwealth.

  “We should come back then, after this is all over,” Adrienne said. “It’s not so goddamned hot then, either.” There was a long pause. “Tom?”

  “Yah, Adri?”

  “I’m sorry for what I did to you.”

  He thought for a long moment; his mental processes seemed to be bleached out but had a sharp-edged clarity.

  “OK, apology accepted,” he said. After a moment: “You want to stay together after this is over?”

  “Get married, you mean?” Adrienne said.

  He thought again for a long moment. “Yah.”

  “Done. Provided we survive. There’s no giving in marriage in the afterlife, they say.”

  They shared an exhausted chuckle. “It must be love,” Tom said. “I still like being with you when all we can do is lie here and listen to each other sweat.”

  “It’d be nice to have kids,” she said softly. “Not too many. Four would be about right. Three-year intervals… or they can arrange twins, these days.”

  He opened his mouth to comment on that; he’d been thinking wistfully about children himself for a while, but the thought hadn’t been urgent—the world was still too crowded, after all. Only it isn’t, he thought. It really isn’t.

  Instead he craned his neck up at Roy Tully’s voice, from the ledge of rock a hundred feet up where they’d all taken turns on lookout.

  “Trouble, three o’clock!”

  The smaller man was coming down the cliff at reckless speed. Tom knocked his boots together to evict any poisonous desert dwellers and scrambled into his salt-stiff clothing. That took less than a minute; then he had binoculars out and was looking east—three o’clock, in the conventional rendering that took north as twelve. The sand dunes were too far away to make out individual figures well even with magnification; horses were rice-sized black dots. But he could see a ripple and flash above them.

  “Lanceheads,” he said.

  “To think I was just about to comment on how swinging this far east had avoided trouble with the In
dians,” Adrienne said. “How many?”

  “A lot of them—and if the proportions are like our friends of the Nyo-Ilcha, that’s a hell of a lot of other men carrying less conspicuous weapons.”

  “And I don’t suppose they’re employees of the Mohave Tourist Agency,” Adrienne said grimly; her face was all business once more; even then it had a Valkyrie beauty despite windburn and cracked lips.

  “I wonder if Good Star sold us out,” Simmons muttered.

  “Or one of his followers,” Adrienne said crisply. “But it doesn’t matter now.”

  The others were on their feet as quickly, and everyone moved to break camp; they couldn’t abandon much equipment, not and survive for long in this desolation. The animals complained and brayed as the blankets and saddles were roughly thrown on their backs; they were used to waiting for the cool of evening, and that was several hours from now.

  “We going to have to run?” Sandra said, a little white about the lips but calm.

  “Yah, you betcha,” Tom said grimly.

  “Then we’d better water the animals—give ’em the last of it. They’ll go farther and it’ll lighten the loads. Give ’em some barley, too.”

  Adrienne thought for an instant, looked over at Jim Simmons, who jerked his head in agreement, then nodded. “Good idea; do it, Sandy. But leave the mules; they won’t be able to keep up. Put the packsaddles on the extra horses.” They’d kept the ones they’d taken from the dead rebels after the fight at the pass; turning them lose would raise too many questions… “Young Botha, you help her.”

  They splashed water into folding plastic buckets, and the horses crowded around, shouldering each other and slobbering in their eagerness, the mules braying protest at their exclusion. Sandra took a lariat from her saddle and whirled the end to drive them off, desperate with haste.

  Adrienne called the rest of them together for an instant.

  “That looks like better than a hundred men,” she said. “Good Star’s un-friend Swift Lance earning his corn, would be my guess—but that doesn’t matter. We can’t fort up here; with our firepower we could beat them off, but there’s no water and we can’t call for help.”

  “Ja,” Piet Botha said. He looked at Simmons. “Afton canyon?”

  “Closest place with reliable water,” the Scout agreed. He looked at the distant hostiles. “Bugger. They’re a bit north of us—they’ll cut the angle and gain on us; we have to go two miles to their one. We can’t swing west; the hills are in the way. Bugger. Let’s get going. I wouldn’t want to be caught in the open.”

  Well, this is a switch from thinking about being a daddy, Tom thought as he swung aboard his horse and jammed the floppy hat tighter on his head.

  Sandra had a couple of extras saddled as well, with the stirrups tied up, in case someone had to switch horses in a hurry.

  Bless you, my child, Tom thought—the prospect of having a horse go lame or lose a shoe at this particular moment and be stuck trying to transfer his saddle was nightmarish.

  Nobody got in anyone’s way or wasted effort; the weeks they’d been on the trail paid off: camp was struck in less than five minutes. They turned their animals’ noses north and broke into a trot. He kept glancing right despite the kidney-jarring gait. Simmons had called it; with the ridge of broken ground close on their left, the Indians could slant toward them at an angle. Adrienne looked back white-lipped; the herd of spare horses was keeping up well enough, with Sandra and the young Boer chivvying them cowboy-style from the rear. Roy Tully was doing something with one of them, pulling items out of a packsaddle.

  The Scout still had his binoculars out. “Dammit, they’re pushing their horses!” he said. “We’ll have to do it too. Go for it!”

  He cased the glasses and leaned forward, flipping the slack of his reins to right and left. His horse rocked into a gallop, and they all followed suit. It felt faster than a car—but a horse couldn’t keep it up for long, particularly when it had been hard-driven on short rations and bad water for a while. It was hard on the rider’s gut and back, too.

  “This is going to be close,” Adrienne said to him, calling across the rushing space that separated them. “If they get too close, we’ll have to circle the horses—use them as barricades—but then they can thirst us out.”

  In which case we all die, he thought. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time people have tried to kill me, and most of them are dead.

  He repeated that aloud, and Adrienne whooped and grinned. Dust billowed up around their hooves; the sound rose to a harsh drumroll thunder that shivered in his bones. Sandra drove the remounts and packhorses ahead and a little to their left, and two streams of dust smoked out behind them, mingling and drifting.

  Tully passed him, swerving in a little to shout, “Help! I’ve fallen into a Lonesome Dove rerun and I can’t get out!”

  The goblin grin was heartening; Roy always got that expression when he was about to pull a nasty on someone. On the other hand…

  The Indians were much closer now. He could see details; they were equipped much like the Nyo-Ilcha, but the lances had backward-slanting collars of ostrich feathers below the points, and the men all had broad bands of black paint across their faces from the nose up, with yellow circles around the eyes.

  “Northern clans, well off their usual stamping grounds,” Simmons said. “Akaka, I’d say, from the look and the paint.”

  “From their looks, either they’re all auditioning for a remake of The Crow, or it’s the clowns from hell!” Tom called, and got another laugh.

  The Akaka warriors weren’t in the least funny themselves, though. They were men who’d do their best to kill him, and no mistake. Their shrill yelping war cries cut through the hoof thunder, and he could see their open mouths and bared teeth as they crouched low over their horses’ necks to urge them on to greater speed. A little closer, and one with a crescent moon of silver through the septum of his nose and elk antlers on a hairy headdress caught his eye and shouted something, gesturing with the long lance he held, and then used the shaft to whack his pinto mare on the rump. It seemed to bound forward, perceptibly faster.

  Doubtless he’s shouting variants on “Now you die, white-eye!” Tom thought, and gestured broadly with his own right hand—middle finger extended from a big clenched fist.

  You know, friend, in the abstract I can feel a certain sympathy for you. In the concrete here and now, I’m going to kill your ass if I can.

  The problem was that by slanting in from their quarries’ right, the Indians had made it nearly impossible for the New Virginians to shoot; you couldn’t use a two-handed weapon on horseback in that direction if you were right-handed, which all of them were. Or you could, but your chances of hitting anything would go down from low to zero.

  But…

  Adrienne whooped again, and Simmons called, “We’re going to get ahead of them! Our horses are fresher!”

  Tom checked, and the Indians were falling behind; their dash along the angle was going to cut through where the quarry had been, not in front of them or in direct collision. In a minute or two they’d have to turn to their right, fall in behind the New Virginians and make it a stern chase.

  The Akaka saw it at the same time, and a shout of fury went up from them. One rose in his stirrups and drew his bow to his ear; he was two hundred yards off, but the heavy horn-backed stave of mesquite wood reinforced with sinew sent the shaft flickering past Schalk Botha, the last in their column of twos.

  Then the moment of maximum danger was past, and the New Virginians were drawing their O’Brien rifles from the saddle scabbards. Tom followed suit, although he doubted his ability—or anyone else’s either—to hit anything at two or three hundred yards from the back of a galloping horse. In combat it was hard enough to score a hit when you were lying prone with good solid earth under both elbows for a brace; thousands of rounds of small-arms fire were popped off for every casualty.

  Tully didn’t pull his rifle. Instead he dropped a little be
hind and threw two fist-sized lumps aside. Twisting in the saddle, Tom saw them tumble away… and then two quick poplar-shaped columns of smoke with red snaps of fire at their hearts erupted from the dirt as the Indians galloped over the lumps. That had them yelling in panic and reining wide, their horses bugling and rearing and fighting their riders. Tully’s grin grew wider.

  “Semtex!” he shouted. “With timers!”

  It would probably work only once, but it had gained them some time. The pursuers shrank slightly as they dropped behind, and slowed a little more when several riders began firing at them, turning backward in the saddle—what the ancient Greeks had called the Parthian shot, from the trick horse archers used to discourage pursuit. The flat crack… crack… cut through the duller rumble of hooves, and the cartridges glittered as they spun away to the ground.

  Adrienne drew out of the column, racing along beside it for a moment so that she could look back free of the great cloud of dust twenty-five sets of hooves were kicking up. He could see her mouth work, and read her lips: Shit.

  “Slow down a bit!” she called as she swerved back into line. “The horses can’t take much more of this. The Indians are slackening off.”

  He suddenly noticed the heat radiating from his mount, and the white streaks of foam along its neck, and the bellows panting through its red-rimmed nostrils. Can’t be easy to carry me at this speed, he thought, and slowed—more a matter of shifting his balance a bit back than doing anything with the reins. He could feel the animal’s relief as its hoofbeat slowed a little.

  Good thing too. If we had to stop to change mounts now, they’d be far too close. We could discourage them with aimed fire, but they’d be ready to go….

  “What’s the bad news?” he called to Adrienne as she rejoined the column.

  “They’ve got a remuda of spare horses following them,” she said. “That means they can switch off—it’ll be easier for them than us—and a lot of us ride heavier in the saddle than any Indians are likely to do.”

  “Short form?” he called. Sorry, not familiar with cavalry logistics, he added to himself.