The Romance of Certain Old Bones

by Holly Messinger

  It was tough reading. Most of the writing was French or Latin, which Jacob could read to one extent or another, but the penmanship was abysmal and the spelling eccentric. He had the impression he was reading the work of an unbalanced mind. But then, who else would collect such awful knowledge? Desecrating graves, defiling corpses, unnatural sexual acts… he’d seen enough of this sort of thing to realize much of it was nose-thumbing at Catholic ritual. Having had his own falling-out with the Church, he could understand the nasty satisfaction one might glean from such defiance. But he’d never before found an instance in which these spells worked.

  Had Ryan brought this book out here knowing what he would find? Or had he merely been dabbling, and chanced upon a source of power compatible with his own desires? Obviously he’d warped the minds of his classmates, using the mosasaur’s bone-magic, but he and Carruthers had been plotting something before that. Had Ryan also managed to influence Hope, to win a coveted place on the professor’s expedition?

  Near the back of the book a new hand appeared on the pages, this one bolder, more focused. In a mishmash of Latin and pig-Latin it spoke of things like cycles of evolution and ancient Indian legends, which apparently were discussed earlier in the book. Jacob flipped back until he found the story, in queer antiquated French, of an “old trapper” who had heard the story of “ancient monsters” suspended in stone, trapped by the Creator and thereafter seeking escape. These creatures were mortal enemies of the “thunder-birds” and would eat their young whenever possible.

  Jacob waited until they reached a wide place in the trail and then rode up alongside Stanley. “Listen to this,” he said, and translated the passage aloud. “Is that what you were talkin about, the bulukse’e and the thunder-birds bein enemies?”

  Stanley nodded once. “It’s an old story. Like one of your Bible stories. A young man, a great hunter was taken by the thunder-birds because they needed a hero to save their babies. The water- monsters came up through the earth whenever there was a rain and ate the little birds in their nest.”

  “Did the hunter kill the monsters?”

  Stanley nodded.

  “How?”

  The boy thought for a minute. Jacob could almost see him picking through the fabric of language and world-knowledge, selecting the few strands that could be knotted into something resembling English. “Hot rocks,” he said at last. “The hunter heated rocks and pitched them down the monster’s gullet.”

  And David slew Goliath with a slingshot, and Perseus used Athena’s shield to slay the Gorgon, Jacob thought. These old stories were always so weirdly specific and damn vague at the same time. “Then what happened to the hunter?”

  “The thunder-birds turned him into a bird, and he flew home.”

  “A crow?” Jacob guessed.

  Stanley smiled a little. “You know, my people aren’t really called ‘Crows.’ We’re Apsáalooke— children of the bird with the big beak.”

  “What bird? A condor?”

  “No one knows. But when my grandfather brought me out here, he told me that story. He said he thought we came from the thunder-birds. That big winged creature you found for Hope? That might be my ancestor.”

  Jacob grimaced. “Well, I’m sorry for that, then. You shoulda said something, I wouldn’t have—“

  “Whoa!” Boz called suddenly, to be echoed back and forth along the passage behind them. Jacob looked back to see Boz had stopped at the last hairpin turn in the canyon.

  He and Stanley wheeled their horses and backtracked, to find a confusion of men, wagons, and horses clogging the passage. Too many men and horses: an extra clutch of white boys on tired-looking cattle seemed to have slid down a side passage into the path of the Yalies’ wagons, and gotten tangled up there. Professor March sat astride a barrel-backed pony that was too short for him, cursing and bellowing while the Yalies shouted objections and insults at March’s students, and Hope’s horse backed into a wall, trying to rear to get away from March’s upraised whip and booming voice. “Dammit, Hope! Control that beast!”

  Boz got there first, by sheer nervy skill. He wedged his horse’s head between the two professors, caught March’s bridle and turned the little pony toward the open trail. The pony leapt down the path, away from the confusion, and March had to drop the whip to grab the pommel. Jacob and Stanley both turned their mounts into the pony’s flight, and the little horse skidded to a halt in front of Jacob, who caught up the reins as both pony and rider huffed with agitation.

  18

  They were lost, of course. March didn’t come out and say so, but of course Jacob already knew they’d lost their scouts (“I only hope they ran for their lives and weren’t killed by the marauders,” March said, which raised him a bit in Jacob’s estimation) and the two old prospectors who’d led him to the dig site had been killed the night before.

  Jacob noticed March never implied that Indians had been responsible for the assault on his camp. Instead he kept casting worried, suspicious glances at the Yalies, who sat together in a silent, watchful cluster atop their wagons and horses, gathered up close around the passage where March’s men huddled and glared back at Hope’s.

  “All right,” Jacob said, when March’s awkward blustering had run its course. “We’re all headed the same direction, you might as well fall in with us. Stanley knows the route out of here.”

  March nodded to the Indian boy, took in his calico shirt and stiff-combed pompadour. “You’re not Sioux,” he said. “Crow?”

  “Yessir,” Stanley said.

  “Polite, too,” March said with a sniff, as if it were more than he could say for some people.

  As if to prove the point, Hope said sharply, “Mr. Tracy, I am not sanguine about this arrangement—“

  “What’s the matter, Hope, afraid I’ll make off with your paltry specimens?”

  “If the glove fits,” Hope sniped, but Jacob waved him to silence. “March, you ride up front with Stanley. Your men will follow after. Hope, you stay with me and Boz in the middle, and then we’ll make sure nobody goes pokin in anyone else’s wagon.”

  “I appreciate your good sense, sir,” March said. “Mr. Tracy, is it?”

  “Trace is fine,” he said.

  It took twenty minutes to get the column sorted out and underway. Jacob for one was glad to have some extra sane people on hand. Ryan’s face suggested he was less than pleased, but when Jacob caught his eye the bulukse’e smirked and shrugged as if to say he’d play along.

  As they were moving out again, Boz rode up and said quietly, “Look at the sky.”

  Jacob had noticed the light going funny—bright and brittle, with dark shadows skittering over the canyon floor and walls. He looked up and saw the clouds were starting to stack, like dirty bolls of cotton sliding across a glass plate.

  “We need to get up out of this bowl,” Boz said.

  “I know.”

  “You tell Stanley?”

  “He knows,” Jacob said, and nudged Blackjack into motion.

  19

  Stanley led them unerringly south and east, through winding rocky channels and between the towering spires. He kept them moving at a good pace, faster than they had first set out, so that the Yalies with their rickety and heavy-loaded wagons began to fall behind.

  The temperature dropped sharply as the wind kicked up. The sky grew steadily darker overhead, and Boz kept looking backwards and reporting on the looming apocalypse.

  Jacob had no need to look. Electrical storms called to the curse in him, woke it up and made it restless, like a badger running round and round in his head. Worse, he could feel the excitement of the bulukse’e, also circling and sniffing him, like a dog that knew he had a treat in his pocket.

  Water coming, maxpé-man! it told him. Waddya say we give ol’ Ryan the slip and go for a swim? You and me?

  Jacob didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t like the sound of it.

  The sky began to spit just as they emerged from the narrow canyon to a wider pla
in between the formations. A wider, flat-bottomed gorge, with a ribbon of milky, alkaline water running through it. A bad place to be with a storm coming on—there were several arches and tunnels of rock leading to passages above and below this basin, showing that flood waters often came through this place.

  Fortunately it was short—maybe a quarter-mile across and half that wide—and dead ahead was a table-land, one of the low grass-covered buttes like the one they had camped on. Stanley, at the head of the column, went straight for it, with March close behind.

  A rumble of thunder sounded overhead, sending a lick of nerves up Jacob’s spine. Almost instantly the first wave of showers slashed across the valley, as if someone had flung out a giant dish-pan over their heads. Beads of clay and silt splashed up around the horse’s hooves. And in the subsequent pause as that cloud passed over, Jacob heard the rain coming behind it, beating off the rock formations behind them and roaring in the higher canyons they had just left.

  He stood up in his stirrups and hollered, “Step it up!”

  “Hee-yaw!” Boz echoed, and the call was taken up, forward and backward by the drivers along the line, urging their cattle on faster. The lead wagons crossed the quarter-mile to the tableland in a matter of minutes, but the path that Stanley pointed out to March was too narrow for the wagons to climb.

  Without hesitation, March turned to his students, made a few gestures and shouted instructions that the wind snatched away. The drivers jumped down and began to unhitch their mules, while those on horseback dismounted and snatched essentials out of the wagons to sling across their saddles. They moved fast and in concert—either March had picked his students for their trail-sense or he had drilled them into shape over the summer.

  Even so, only the first pair of mules had started up the path when the heavens opened up in Biblical measure.

  The ground turned instantly to soup. Jacob felt Blackjack’s hooves splay and his stride break as he slowed to pick his way through the shifting earth. The air became so thick one needed gills to breathe, and the landscape more than ten paces away faded to a gray haze. Jacob could see little more than the painted rump of Boz’s horse, but he followed it, until suddenly they were at the base of the tableland, where March was ushering the last of his boys up the path.

  Here Hope balked.

  “My men!” he shouted at Jacob, over the din of falling water and crashing clouds. “They are still back there!”

  Jacob was well aware of the fact, but he dismounted and turned to look. He could make out two of the Yalies’ wagons, a dozen yards away. “I’ll see to them! Get yourself to high ground!”

  “What’re you doin?” Boz said, appalled.

  “I’m goin back for ‘em!”

  “Goddammit, Trace!”

  “Goddamn yourself!” Jacob fought his way out of his oilcloth coat—he was instantly drenched to the skin—flung it over Blackjack’s back, and handed his hat and the reins to Boz. “Just do it, will you? And keep an eye on him!” He pointed at Hope, but it was March, surprisingly, who slapped a meaty hand on Hope’s thigh and took hold of his horse’s bridle.

  “Best foot forward, Hope!” March bellowed. “Can’t have you getting washed away out here! I need your mediocrity to make my work more brilliant!”

  Hope’s reply to that was drowned out by a crack of thunder, which was probably for the best.

  Jacob dashed the hair out of his face, closed a hand over the Colt on his hip, and started jogging back across the bowl toward the oncoming wagons. Water splashed out from beneath his boots with every step, the ground squishing and shifting as if he were walking on flesh.

  He passed Clark and Duessler, the former on horseback and the latter struggling with the mules’ reins as they slipped and slid against the rushing water. Clark turned and pointed back along their trail as Jacob got close, yelling something about a wagon being broke down.

  “Get to the table! Get those horses up top!” Jacob doubted they heard. He had to stop running and start trudging, the water over his calves now, and met Matheson and Walsh, each leading a pair of cattle, the mules still in their traces.

  “He’s goddamn crazy!” Matheson shouted, hatless and spitting. His brow was freshly split open, blood sheeting down into his eye and washing away in thin trickles. A thunderclap obliterated his next words, but Jacob had already turned away.

  In the middle of the floodplain he could make out the two stranded wagons and someone standing in the back of one, hands thrown up in the air, body arched in ecstasy. The last pair of mules were tangled up in each other, backing and dancing to get around the wagon in front of them, standing in water up to their hocks. The flow was starting to nudge the tops of Jacob’s boots and broke around the bundle—no, it was a body—that had been dropped like an old flour-sack against the wheels of the wagon, where Ryan was standing and bellowing into the rain like a bull-moose in rut.

  Timothy was dead. Jacob’s curse knew that even before he got close enough to see the man’s eyes were open and the shirt he wore was stained red. Half his neck had been ripped away.

  And just as Jacob saw this, Ryan ceased his yawp and threw himself at the corner of the wagon bed, leaning out over it so Jacob recoiled, thinking the lunatic was going to hurtle himself right into Jacob’s chest.

  And then he knew he wasn’t dealing with Ryan anymore. The young man’s face was a raw nightmare, the jaws distorted and bloody, his teeth elongated and sharp as daggers.

  “Well, hey there, maxpé-man!” he chortled, his voice guttural and almost unintelligible. His neck looked thickened and dark, as well, the shoulders sloping back, the hands that curled over the buckboard broad and flat like paddles. “Come for that swim after all, did you?”

  And then he did leap over the side. Jacob fumbled for his gun and fired, but Ryan belly-flopped into the knee-high water and vanished under the wagon bed with the current. The mules shied and whinnied at the commotion, and Jacob quickly climbed up on the cross-brace between them, got his feet out of the water, and reached down to slip loose the breeches and the trace buckles. The off-mule got free first and lunged into the swirling water, making for the tableland. But it had barely gone a full length before something with two arms and too many teeth breached the water and fastened onto its head, pulling its nose down into the drink. The mule screamed, and the one in harness screamed, and Jacob fired three quick shots at the long body in the water before it turned loose of the mule, which struggled on, although its head was down and it was listing.

  Jacob ripped at the straps holding the second mule to the wagon, got the traces free and let the pole drop. He took a fistful of the animal’s mane as it lurched forward, swimming valiantly now, the water up to its belly. Jacob half-knelt on its back, scanning the rushing water, trying to see through the driving rain and the gathering darkness. Nightmarish minutes seemed like hours before the mule’s hoofs struck solid ground, near the first of March’s wagons. If not for the loads of rock the wagons would have been in danger of floating now, the four of them huddled up like sheep near the base of the tableland. He could make out Boz and Stanley standing on the path, Boz with his hands cupped around his mouth, Stanley keening in his native tongue, both of them shouting encouragement and curses.

  Boz slid down almost into the water and grabbed the mule’s bridle, urging it up the steep slippery trail while backing up and swearing he was partnered with the biggest fool this side of the Platte. Stanley got on the mule’s off-side and began to urge him on as well, while Jacob slid off the animal’s rump, slipped between it and the wall, which was fortunate because at that moment a huge, reptilian head surged out of the shallows and clamped its teeth around the mule’s hind leg, dragged the screaming beast down off the ledge and took Stanley with it.

  20

  Jacob dived, but not into the water. He went for the pick-axe bundled on top of the nearest of March’s wagons, wrenched it free of its trappings, and then he launched himself at the massive, crocodilian skull.

  He mi
ssed.

  The pick sank into the tough hide above the shoulder, and the monster thrashed, the mule screamed, they all rolled over in the water and then Jacob didn’t know what was happening, it was all battering limbs and rocks and roaring in his ears and his lungs burning for air.

  He fetched up against a cropping of rock, hard. Scraped off a couple of fingernails and no small amount of skin wrapping himself around it, getting to the lee of the current, coughing and gagging and trying to see where he was. The rain had slacked off some but it had gotten darker. The sky overhead was a backlit quilt of black clouds and the jagged spires of rock stood out above his head like a judgmental ring of chess pieces—or teeth, as if the whole Badlands was one big gaping maw waiting to swallow up the foolish traveler.

  He gave his head a shake and wished he hadn’t. His brain felt like it was trying to press out through his ears. His left hand, he found as he lifted it to fling over the rock ridge, was still clutching the pick-axe. Probably that was what had hit him in the head.

  Something bumped his leg in the water. Not the random bump of a tree branch, either. This was fleshy and familiar, stropping itself against him like a cat, rough hide scraping at his clothes and knocking him against the rock for ten or twelve feet of bullying nudges before it peeled away.

  As soon as it was clear Jacob boosted himself up on the rock, clung there precariously with shaking bones. Even without the head-knock, it was cold, and he was dangerously close to exhaustion. He found a foothold higher up, and another, and kept climbing until he was out of the water, high enough to see part of the skyline and the rushing torrent below.

  “Stanley!” he shouted, and winced as his head pulsed in pain.

  “Traaaace!” came the answer, from down the ravine, and then all the attention in his body rushed toward that small dark figure against the rock. He couldn’t see Stanley with his eyes, but he knew where he was, he felt the boy’s presence in the world just as he had felt the vibrations of the bones in the rock, and moreover he felt the living-dead presence of the bulukse’e turning like a whip, abandoning its vigil under Jacob’s ledge and aiming itself at Stanley down-current.