Skoll and his band had no need of birds though. They had waited for our coming, and if they could not come out to meet us fresh in all their savage, pagan regalia, they would make a stand these Westerners at least could appreciate. Rifle fire broke out. Puffs of gunsmoke erupted from the shuttered windows of the house, and we got down from our horses and formed breastworks. The rifles of the cowboys and the marshals spread across their horse’s necks, and the siege was begun.
For nearly ten minutes the barrage of fire from the house did not stop. It appeared to come from three different shooters. Two on the ground floor, firing through ports cut into the closed shutters, and one from an upstairs window. I could imagine the three immense blonde riflemen seated at their positions, firing through their barricaded apertures, each with a man whose job it would be to provide his comrade with a freshly loaded weapon. Somewhere, perhaps in a closet, I could imagine Callisto, fettered and gagged, or worse.
Ruddles advised the men not to return fire as their bullets were landing far out of range of our position. It was his plan to wait for a break in the shooting and then advance close enough to utilize our own long arms. But then one of the deputy marshals slumped over, dead from a bullet in the chest, and our army was thrown into confusion.
It was possible to discern among the constant shooting now the report of a larger weapon coming from the shooter in the upstairs position.
“He’s got a damned needle gun,” Coleman said. “Stan, that son of a bitch will rub us out one at a time from that window if we don’t do something to change his mind.”
“If you got an idea, Cole,” the exasperated Ruddles said, “don’t wait to let me know.”
Coleman looked around, then pointed out the pen where some of the giant horses were galloping about, frightened by the noise of the guns.
“Some men might be able to drag those water troughs over and use them for cover,” he said. “We could spread the rest out and surround the place. With that buffalo rifle only able to cover one side of the house at a time, we might close the noose around ‘em and give ‘em something to duck.”
“Them troughs ain’t nothin’ but clapboard,” Firebaugh argued. “Why don’t we put some men in the corral and just use the fence for cover? Then we can start layin’ in from two sides at least. You can still move some men around the back to keep that son of a bitch busy.”
It was agreed. Marshal Ruddles would lead four of his deputies to the corral, while Coleman, Ray, Tom, and Paul crept around back, and Firebaugh and the rest stayed here. I asked to go with Coleman, as I wanted to be among the first to penetrate the house. If there was a fight in close quarters, the men might be hard pressed to discern a woman from the enemy.
“Alright, Professor,” Coleman said. “You can come with us, but you better keep your head down, ‘cause we won’t be stoppin’ for tea.”
Ruddles led his deputies toward the corral first. They went rushing along, hunkered down like aged men, their belts creaking and their weapons clinking. They moved in an orderly line and did not break, even as the ground around them exploded into little puffs of dust. Their mission was twofold. Not only were they attempting to gain position, it was their intent to release the penned animals and deprive the Scandinavians of a means of escape, lest they hold out till cover of darkness and then steal into the corral.
The men inside could read this plan from their vantage, and poured a discouraging fire in the direction of the marshals. But only the upstairs, large-bore weapon had any hope of reaching them, and it claimed only mud and dust.
Ruddles himself led the foray, and was the first to reach the gate. He knocked off the latch and swung it wide, as his men vaulted the four-rail fence and landed on their bellies in the deep, pungent earth.
The marshals began shouting, and the attention of the big Scandinavian horses was drawn to the egress. The chief among them, a huge, blonde-maned stallion, made a cautious inspection of the open gate, and then plunged through with a snort. His fellows did not hesitate to follow, and Ruddles gave the last one further encouragement by laying the barrel of his rifle to its tremendous rump.
I did not have time to admire the magnificent horseflesh in flight as I had at Firebaugh’s. Coleman gave a harsh word of command and went running across the yard toward a position parallel to the southwest corner of the house. As we lurched to our feet, the marshals produced a distracting fire. They had crawled through the manure-laden plot to the corner of the corral behind the water trough, and were now in range to send bullets into the house. I heard the smashing glass and saw the shutters of an unoccupied window sprinkle with holes, and then I was running behind Tom Koots, my eyes fixed on the rushing ground.
The Scandinavians traded fire with the marshals as we went by unnoticed, but when we were within striking distance of our goal I heard a guttural exclamation from somewhere in the house. Bullets began buzzing past us like tsetse flies. I was reminded of Africa again, running through the brush as whistling missiles sought my destruction on every side.
In front of me, Tom Koots stopped and I barely avoided colliding with him. I ran past him without thinking, then turned my head to call to him. His hat had blown off and he had stopped to retrieve it. I saw him fall as a heavy bullet passed through his shoulder and emerged red from his lower side. Though I hesitated, something hot burst near my right foot, and I kept on. Coleman levered his rifle as he reached the corner of the house, and disappeared around the edge followed closely by Paul.
“Where’s Tom?” Ray demanded of me over his shoulder, lingering.
I shoved him forward and told him to spare no thought on it.
We slid to a stop at a few feet from the edge of the back porch, crouching at boardwalk level.
“Where’s Tom?” Ray repeated, going so far as to grab my sleeve when we were safe.
“If he ain’t here, don’t ask!” Coleman said, without looking back. The door leading off the porch was blocked by a heavy wagon whose left wheel had been hewn from the axle. There would be no access that way.
Coleman pointed to a cluster of old barrels that stood a few yards out, beside what appeared to be a door set into the side of a low hill. It afforded a good position on the house.
“There, next to that fruit cellar. See those barrels? That’s where we’re headed. C’mon, while they’re still movin’ to the back windows!”
We were on our feet again, running for the barrels, when the door to the fruit cellar burst open in front of us and one of the giant Scandinavians lurched out, still in his hide dress and drenched from head to foot in blood. One eye lolled in his head and he seemed barely able to stand.
Coleman brought up his rifle and fired three times.
The giant crumpled and lay still on his back in the doorway.
Coleman led us past the prostrate form and clambering over the smallish mound that was the roof of the fruit cellar, we fell behind the thick, rain-filled barrels just as the rear upper window of the house exploded outward and the barrel near my shoulder shuddered with the impact. The ground around it grew damp as the water escaped, and soon we were kneeling or lying in mud.
“Awright now, don’t be afraid!” Coleman said.
Ray, the boy who had worried over Tom Koots, huddled with his rifle in his arms and sobbed like a child whose play had suddenly gotten out of hand.
“We got to keep their heads down, so start slingin,’” Coleman went on. “‘Less you wanna spend the rest of your youths sittin’ on your asses behind these God-forsaken barrels.”
Paul reacted first, and, poking his rifle barrel through a gap in the cover, fired up into the house. Coleman stuffed ammunition into his weapon and joined in, and I added blindly to their volley with my revolver.
Ray stayed curled in on himself like a tortoise. We could do nothing for him.
A half hour passed before we realized he had been shot in the abdomen. By that time there was no hope for him, if ever there had been. I was reminded of young Ranny. The weight of another de
ath to speed Skoll’s descent into damnation.
In my heart I felt there was no hope that Callisto was yet alive. I could see her face, her dark eyes and curls, but she was pale as death behind my eyelids. The poor girl and her unborn child...was Skoll surely that insane that he would commit such an atrocity as the death of his own child and wife? Surely he was. Surely diabolism had been his intent all along. Doubly wicked is the crime that is perpetrated on the unsuspecting, on the innocent. All through the afternoon we called into the house for them to spare Callisto, to set her free. Our only answer was gunfire.
Then came a break in the shooting, when the sun was nearing its fall. For awhile only the sound of Ray’s failing breath was to be heard.
Then:
“Van Helsing!”
I recognized the throaty voice immediately. It was Skoll. He called to me in Dutch.
“Van Helsing, are you alive?”
“What the hell’s he sayin?” I heard one of the marshals shout.
“You know I am!” I answered.
“Who’s that?” another of our men in front of the house called out, before I heard Firebaugh’s voice calling for silence.
“You had better call them off, Van Helsing! Soon our power will have reached its zenith! Even you won’t be spared!”
“Set your wife free, you villain!” I called. “Or we will burn the house down around you!”
Skoll laughed in a mocking tone.
“My dear Professor! Do you still think I hold my own wife against her will?”
His words gave me pause.
“Is she dead, then?”
He only laughed.
“Do you covet my wife, Professor? Is this the source of your paranoia about her welfare?”
I felt the hairs at the nape of my neck uncurl.
“You’re insane!”
“There is a name for your condition too, Professor,” he answered, amused. “I’m sure a learned man like you must be aware of it. Uther felt it, when he besieged Cornwall for what he thought was love of Igraine. But it wasn’t love, Van Helsing. Shall I tell you what it was?”
“Dog!” I exploded, forgetting my Dutch and reverting to English in my wrath and embarrassment. “I won’t banter with a madman! Release Callisto! Surrender your arms! In the name of God, spare her and your child at least!”
If it would have made a difference, I might have clapped my hand across my foolish mouth to trap the words I’d spoken.
“Abraham!” it was her, and her voice was tortured and hoarse.
“Callisto!”
“Abraham! You promised you would not tell!”
There were the sounds of a struggle coming from upstairs.
Coleman was staring at me. I think I drove my teeth into my knuckle. I tasted blood.
“So be it, Van Helsing!” came Skoll’s voice again. “Tonight we will be at our strongest! None of you will live to see the morning!”
I entreated Skoll to speak further, but he said no more. I begged for Callisto’s life, and turned to cursing him and all his men. When I was exhausted, I laid my head against the empty barrel, and felt Coleman’s eyes upon me.
Later, the large bore rifle (Skoll’s rifle, I felt sure) began picking off our horses, and John Gridley was entrusted to move them out of range. There was no more shooting after that, unless one of our party attempted to move closer to the house. Marshal Ruddles lost another deputy who was too brave, and Ray succumbed at last.
As the evening grew deep and the distended shapes of the long shadows lost their forms and began to spread like ink across the field, Firebaugh came around to our side. He took off his hat when he saw Ray lying still, and there was a bloody crease on the top of his skull I had not seen before.
He offered us whiskey John Gridley had brought, and Coleman and Paul drank, but I would not. I felt sickly, disgusted at how my own lack of sworn secrecy may have turned the already dark fortunes of a misled girl a shade blacker.
“How long did you know?” Coleman asked.
“Since the party,” I answered.
“Will they kill her?” Paul asked.
No one answered. After a moment, the frightened cowboy spoke again.
“Will they kill us?”
“It’s twenty to five now by my reckoning,” Firebaugh said.
Silence for a few moments.
“I been meanin’ to write a letter to my maw,” Paul stammered. “I believe I’ll be about it, while it’s yet light.”
The night will be upon us in another hour. No sound comes from the house. Paul has finished his letter. I can no longer see to write. The light is fading fast...
CHAPTER 19
Recovered from the Papers of Mdme. Callisto Terovolas-Skoll
Night is coming, and over the hissing of the lamp in this windowless room I hear the grunting of the men as they begin their ritual downstairs. The oil burns, and light is sustained, but for how long? The babies kick as though they wish to emerge and join their father in his pagan immolation.
They will come soon. Sooner than even I had thought.
Sigmund bade me witness the ceremony, but I wished to be alone. In truth I did not want to remember him thus. Rather, I would think on him as the gentle eyed man who approached me fearlessly in the dark forest, his blue eyes glimmering, so exotic, so new. How happy he had been to find me. He had fallen upon his knees and pledged himself to me, with his foolish heart’s story of how he had seen me but briefly on a passenger ship.
‘I know you for what you are,’ he had said to me, heedless of my warnings. ‘I have spent half my fortune to find you. I will not leave, unless it is with you.’
I would see him now as I saw him then. A proud, strong hunter, and I his mate among the undergrowth, with the broken light through the branches spilling down on us.
I do not want the last vision of Sigmund in my mind to be him stooped among his fellows, grinding his teeth and pulling his beard and striking the floor with his fists. Yet the noise of their chanting and growling has already ruined his idyllic portrait in the eye of my mind.
I can see him now as though I were there, watching him stamp his feet and shuffle on his hands in that primitive parody of the wolf’s gait. I can see the hairs on his body rising...the tendons standing out on his naked arms like iron roots...the tidal foaming about his grimacing lips...and the unnatural widening of his irises. The black spreading to engulf the blue as though evil were swallowing good.
There is something in my love’s religion that strikes me as more than barbaric. There is a falsity to their animalistic posturing, which is not so simple or harmless as mere self-delusion. Their grim one-eyed god, hanging from his tree, and beckoning for his worshipers to join him in death, favoring them only when they attain some new height of self-destruction. What manner of god makes such demands of his subjects? Sigmund assured me again and again that I did not fully grasp the profound nature of their beliefs, and I am convinced that I do not.
Surely they think themselves blessed by their Allfather this night. This cursed, vile night, which reeks of impending death.
Why did Abraham betray me? What did Sigmund say to him? Matters are worse for us all.
For now that Sigmund knows I am pregnant, now there can be no silent escape in the night. There must be blood and hell. He and his men will throw themselves into the bullets of the Americans in the name of protecting me and my sons, for sons they are. Of that I am sure. I do not need their goddess Freyja or her seior rituals to know this, as I did to prophesy that Vulmere would die. In truth, I do not even remember saying any such thing. Sigmund swears that on the night of our wedding in the canyon, when I was initiated as their volva — their priestess — consumed the sacrificial stew, and succumbed to delirium, that I did so.
I wonder now if Sigmund did not take advantage of my state and plant the seed of self-destruction in Vulmere’s mind. I knew well that Vulmere plotted against my husband and coveted his position in the pack. He was hasty, and it was his rash vengea
nce against the man who had broken his nose which doomed him, I think. Sigmund was forced to comply in the plot to slay the man Searls and the constable by the influence Vulmere had over Judge Krumholtz and the new sheriff. Vulmere had swayed the pack against Sigmund’s better judgment. But I think my husband got his own revenge. Faith is a powerful thing. Sigmund could have passed a false prophesy to Vulmere. Perhaps it was the man’s own belief which slew him in the end.
Of the trance it was said I fell into following the night of chanting and eating that horrid stew in the canyon, I remember little. Flashes of dreams, really. Was there real prophecy there? Real power? I have never believed in such things. Had I been given some glimpse of the time to come, why could it not be about the fate of my children? Had I known they were to die here in flame, among these stinking cattle...But the only real visions I had were meaningless. Something about a large gray wolf, and about Abraham.
Abraham. He will die now, I should think. I could not bear to know he would be killed in the canyon with the others, not even for the dream of the land. Boundless, fenceless, game-filled land, where our dynasty could romp and hunt to the content of their wild hearts. It was a dream that brought us both across the ocean, each of us leaving forever our beloved homelands, where we were cast out. So much has been at stake. Life or death for my line, and the honor of my husband’s.
And yet, I could not bear the death of one sad, funny old man. I ran all night to prevent it. I offered him an escape. I even extended clemency to his companions for his sake alone. But it was for naught. I fear I will not be able to do the same again. Abraham, why didn’t you leave? If you had not come we might’ve all been happy, every one of us. Now, my children, my husband, what will become of them?
Will they see the world, and breathe its air but once—if at all?
My belly swells by the day. In three or four days they will be born.
I hear the resounding shout of ‘Gleipnir!’ down below. The last chain is broken. The men outside have lit brands of fire. I can smell it, even as I smell their dread, stinking and running down the intimate crevices of their nervous bodies. As I smell the heightened state of the men downstairs, as I smell my husband among them, and hear his heart beating fast as a diving kestrel’s even as his throat rumbles for war. So, it is coming. I bid adieu. Though these words may never be read, I am sorry Abraham.
Terovolas Page 19