“What is it?” the Rider asked, peering in.
“An apparition booth,” said Faustus. “A psychomanteum. The Greeks used it to communicate with the spirit realm and prolong divinatory trances. It will greatly extend your meditative powers, and prolong the time you can remain out of your body a hundredfold.”
The Rider looked doubtfully at the little mirrored box. He felt sweat break out on the back of his neck as he stooped and stuck his head inside.
He withdrew, a little too quickly. It seemed too small in there. How could that little box hold a man and keep him alive? Was there enough air?
“I don’t know if I can do it,” the Rider blurted.
“If you still don’t trust me…” Faustus began.
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” the Rider said, a little defensively. “I don’t do well with tight spaces.”
Since when? But he knew suddenly that it was so. He had never been claustrophobic so far as he knew, but he couldn’t remember ever being confronted with a situation like this. As a boy, he’d had a friend...Aloysius. Aloysius Monkowitz, a printer’s son. The kid had been afraid of everything. Dirt, germs, the outdoors themselves. He had passed out once when confronted with sharing a mikvah bath. The other boys at the yeshiva had always made fun of him. But of a sudden, he understood that strange, irrational fear.
“If it must be done,” Kabede said, “I can do it.”
“No, it has to be the Rider,” Faustus said. “You have no influence with Misquamacus.”
“I could pretend to be the Rider,” Kabede suggested. “You could tell me everything I need to know.”
“No,” said the Rider. “He’ll know whether it’s me or not right away anyway.” He closed his eyes and breathed in the way he had been taught, but it did little to slow the rapid beating of his heart. He rose abruptly.
“When do we leave?”
“In the morning,” said Faustus.
“We’ll gather our things.”
They had to lift Belden bodily and lay him in the barracks, and true to Faustus’ word, he didn’t stir, but snored in his usual manner, even when they stumbled and nearly dropped him onto his rope cot.
“Will we take him with?” Kabede asked, looking down on the sleeping man when it was done.
“I think we should,” the Rider relented. “I would hate to have him out alone in the wilderness and have the shedim or the Creed come across him. Dick wounded DeKorte, and he may come after him.”
“You are committed to doing this for the old man?”
“I see his point about the Apache,” the Rider said. “And Piishi is a friend. I trust him anyway. You can go to Tombstone and wait for me, you know. With the staff you should be alright. You could take Dick with you.”
“You cannot do this alone.”
“You heard the old man,” the Rider said, putting his hand on Kabede’s shoulder. “My fight’s nearly over. You’re going to have to be the one to carry on, to finish it. HaShem must have called you to take up the Rod of Aaron for that reason.”
Kabede worked his jowls, staring. He knew what the African was thinking. He didn’t want to go on alone.
The Rider squeezed his shoulder, and let his arm fall.
“We will go to Tombstone together,” Kabede said, almost lightly, turning and undressing for bed. “We will find a minyan there, and a Torah, and we will change your name. At any rate, if you are wrong about Shar-rogs Pa, or whatever he calls himself, you will need more than Dick Belden to save you.”
The Rider said nothing. He knew Kabede was right.
In the morning they told Belden of their intent as he cooked breakfast.
“If you boys trust this old buzzard,” Belden said, “that’s fine. I’ve got no particular place to go anyhow. I’d just as soon come along to watch out for that Apache for you.”
“Piishi’s a friend, Dick,” the Rider admonished.
“Don’t get me wrong, Joe. I’ve counted Yaquis, Navajos, and Cherokees among my friends, but Apaches are Apaches first. They don’t have white friends,” Belden observed, sipping his coffee and watching Piishi secure the camels’ rigging. “Black ones neither, Kabede,” he said as an afterthought.
Faustus and Piishi joined them for coffee and beans after they had watered and fed the camels. To Belden’s dismay, Kabede and the Rider refused to eat the bacon he’d fried.
“We don’t eat pork,” the Rider said. “Sorry, Dick.”
Belden grumbled something about Jewdoo and went to scrape bacon onto the Apache’s plate, but Piishi too held his hand over it
“No pig.”
“What? Apaches ain’t Hebrew!”
“Pigs eat snakes. Apache don’t eat snakes.”
“This pig came from the Herrera farm down in the valley. I’m pretty damn sure they didn’t feed it snakes.”
“Pretty damn sure ain’t sure enough,” Piishi said.
Faustus chuckled.
Belden shook his head and held the pan over Faustus’ plate. The old man held up his hand.
“I’m a vegetarian.”
“What am I supposed to do with all this goddamned bacon?” Belden said, exasperated.
“Eat it or bury it,” Piishi said.
After breakfast, the Rider led his onager out of the stable. The animal had benefitted from the long rest, and its flanks were swollen again, the ribs no longer visible. He ruffled the beast’s undamaged ear and tied it to the back of the vardo.
“A curious looking animal,” Faustus remarked. “Wherever did you get it?”
“Jerusalem,” the Rider said.
“You ported him all the way back here? Uncommon.”
“He’s an uncommonly good animal,” the Rider said. “Anyway, what about your camels? They’re not exactly native to Arizona.”
“For all intents and purposes these are. I bought them from a Turk in Quartzsite. The cavalry was experimenting with them before the war broke out. They’re good for the desert, but as you’ve seen, they tend to spook horses and mules. I’ve had to dissuade quite a few men from taking shots at them after their pack mules bucked and ran.”
Faustus let the onager smell his hand. Soon it nuzzled against him.
“He doesn’t usually take to strangers,” the Rider observed.
“Perhaps it’s a sign that you should trust me,” Faustus said with a wink.
The Rider said nothing, but patted the onager’s shoulder and joined Piishi at the front of the vardo.
“How did you come by this man, Piishi?” the Rider asked.
“He came to me,” Piishi said. “He knew my name. He said that the spirit of Tats’adaah had come to him and told him what had happened at Red House.”
Tats’adaah. Chaksusa’s Apache name.
“Did you stay in the mountains after Red House?”
“I went down to San Carlos to rest,” Piishi said. “The reservation. He came peddling medicine, and asking for me.”
“You believe him?”
“I told no one of what we saw beneath Red House.”
The Rider nodded. It was truly good to see Piishi again. They had faced Shub-Niggurath and the Cold Ones together, and had shared some brief mental connection when it was over. Both of them had known the all-engulfing hopelessness of The Outer God, the undeniable surety that to this cosmic thing, the whole of humanity was irrelevant. There was no one else alive who so shared the Rider’s experience.
“The Apache believe in one god, don’t they?”
“Usen.”
“Piishi, after the things we saw, do you still believe in Usen?”
The Apache nodded slowly.
“But if Usen is God, what did we fight at Red House? What is Shub-Niggurath?”
“I was taught that before there was light on the world,” said Piishi, “there were nameless monsters that dwelled in the dark. They ate the children of man so that the people could not grow. The birds made war on them, and Eagle killed their chief with a sacred stone. Like the one you had, I thi
nk. Anyhow, Usen doesn’t bother with the affairs of men. That is how I know he is God.”
“You felt what I felt. You know She didn’t care about man either.”
“Then why was She there? There are the Di-yin, the good spirits, and the Gan, the guardian spirits of the mountains, but there are evil spirits too, Rider. The Nameless who survived the war. They grow stronger from the blood of corrupt people. Usen didn’t make them, but they are there. That is what I think.”
“Why doesn’t Usen get rid of them then?”
“Who can say what is in the mind of God?” Piishi said. “Maybe it is a warrior’s test that they remain. Maybe it is for us to drive them out.”
The Rider shrugged. He envied all these men whose faith was so much greater than his own.
“When you go to the meeting, I’ll be with you. In your head.”
“That is the old man’s plan.”
“I want you to keep this with you,” the Rider said, taking the gilded Henry rifle from its scabbard and handing it over.
“A yellow star rifle,” Piishi said, in a hushed voice, his eyes alight at the workmanship, a rare and infectious grin splitting his dour face. “Like your pistol.”
“Yes. It bears the star eye,” the Rider said, tapping the largest emblem, the Elder Sign just in front of the breech, “like on that sacred stone. Keep it in the boot. It might help you-it might help us—when we need it.”
Piishi took the rifle and scabbard, checked the action, then slid it away. He looked at it thoughtfully and frowned.
“And this too,” the Rider said after some thought, and drew his cold iron Bowie knife with its sacred sigils from his belt.
“Too much, Rider,” Piishi said, shaking his head. “Too much. I am not a rich man. I have nothing to give.”
“You can give it back when I see you,” the Rider said. “It’s a holy knife. It’ll protect you. Us.”
Piishi shrugged and pushed it through his belt. He took his own knife out, a beaded, antler horn handled affair, and put it in the Rider’s hand. The Rider smiled and slid it into the sheath on his belt.
Then Piishi took a cord from around his neck and pulled a small, flat piece of wood from his shirt. He handed it to the Rider.
The Rider held it up. It was a lath, bearing an identical yellow lightning design and a dancing figure on both sides.
“What is it?”
“A tzi-daltai,” said Piishi. “The wood was split by lightning. With it, you can never be lost, and the spirits will know you are a friend.”
“We should get moving,” Faustus announced, pulling himself up onto the driver’s bench.
The Rider looked around and saw Belden loping over on the back of a sorrel horse, leading an Appaloosa behind.
“Boots and saddles, boys. I picked out horses for you two.”
“I don’t ride anymore, Dick,” the Rider said apologetically.
“What?”
“I took an oath. Kabede too.”
“What? I seen you ride!” Belden said to Kabede as he came over.
“When lives are in danger we are commanded to break our oaths.”
“Well hell,” Belden said, looking back at the two horses strung behind his own. “I’ll just about die of boredom waitin’ on you two. Don’t that count? How about the Indian?”
“He’ll be riding inside,” Faustus said. “The Mexicans don’t take kindly to Apaches. The Americans either.”
The Rider grinned.
“Sorry, Dick.”
He climbed up on the porch of the vardo himself.
“Lemme get this straight,” Belden said, watching in disbelief as Kabede mounted the step behind him. “You two can’t ride on a horse’s back but you can lounge about in that palatial rig? What’s the workaround here?”
“Nothing in our oaths about camels,” the Rider said, smiling.
“Actually, we are only forbidden from burdening an animal’s back with our weight,” Kabede explained.
“Jewdoo,” Belden said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes. He spurred his horse and loped across the parade ground. “No goddamned bacon, no goddamned horses…” he muttered to himself. But the rest of what he said was lost.
They slowly turned the wagon and circled the post. The Rider thought of all the dead beneath the ground. The population of the post cemetery had grown ten times. They’d had to knock part of the little stone wall down and build it back up several feet behind its original foundation. Camp Eckfeldt was quiet and empty, dead like everything else in the Valle del Torreon now. Even the ghosts had departed, after a brief, painless exorcism that morning. It would sit out a crumbling, silent watch over nothing till the buildings finally tumbled down and the plank board grave markers blew over or were washed away into the valley. Surely when the supply train showed up and reported its abandonment, the army would never bother to occupy it again. As Belden had said, it was just some bookkeeper’s oversight, corrected by the onslaught of the Creed and DeKorte’s undead army. No one would ever know what had really happened.
Belden had dismounted, and was at the hitching post in front of the silent commander’s office busily whittling at it with the point of a pocketknife.
“What’re you doing, Dick?” the Rider asked, craning his neck to see as they rolled past.
“Just some finishing touches. Figure I got to leave some kinda explanation for my replacement,” Belden said, chuckling darkly.
He climbed into his saddle and geed the horse in line with the big coach.
Carved on the hitching post in big block letters was the word ‘CROATOAN.’
For five days they rode comfortably south. They took turns driving the vardo, except for Piishi, who always remained inside. They spoke little of the task at hand. The plan had already been established, and there was not much more to say on the matter.
Belden retired in the vardo each night, winding down with a round of cards. He even taught Kabede and Piishi to play. Only Faustus was a better hand than he was, but no one had any money, so the appeal of the game was short-lived.
Belden was brought up to speed on their mission in Mexico, and took it all in stride, though one morning he waved the Rider aside.
“You sure you trust the Apache, Joe? How do you know he’s not gonna give you up once you’re up in those mountains?”
“I trust Piishi more than I trust the old man.”
“Yeah, I got that. What’s his story?”
“I don’t really know, Dick. You know, you don’t have to stay with us. You can go your own way.”
“Kabede told me who you’re up against, and what.”
The Rider said nothing. The man had been told, but did he really believe there were things besides God and the Devil vying for the world?
“He also says you’re not sure what side you’re on anymore.”
The Rider stared at him. How could he possibly understand?
“Y’know, in the war there were times I wasn’t sure I was on the right side, bein’ a Tennessean and all,” Belden began.
“This is a little more serious than where you born, Dick,” the Rider said.
“Yeah, I know. That’s what you told me back then too.”
“Kabede told you everything?”
“Yeah. Well, he better have.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I guess.”
“All of it?”
Dick shrugged, and the Rider studied his face. How could he take it all so nonchalantly? In the war Belden had seen shedim bushwhackers and other horrors, and he had come to believe what the Rider told him, that the war was being waged not just by north and south, but by Heaven and Hell. Now, if he truly knew everything, then he knew there had been a third faction. Rebel demons, allied with…what? Primordial beings beyond all understanding. And yet here he stood, sipping coffee brewed by an old man who claimed to come from another universe, going into Mexico to face something he couldn’t possibly imagine.
“Then you should know,” said the Ride
r. “You don’t want to get into a fight next to somebody who isn’t sure about the cause.”
“We didn’t all believe in the cause back then either, Joe. Hell, there were men among us who were ready to up and quit once they made the war about Negroes. But most of us stayed because by that time we weren’t fightin’ to preserve the Union anymore. We were fightin’ for the man on either side of us, to make sure that each of us got home. So when you get to feelin’ you don’t know what you’re fightin’ for, you take a look at who’s fightin’ with you, and that’s how you decide what’s right, and whether or not to go on.”
The Rider looked long and hard at Dick Belden. Did he dare risk the man getting involved? He would be in over his head.
“You can leave anytime you want,” he said again.
“So I keep hearin’,” Belden said, grinning. “Maybe after we’ve saved the goddamned world…and others besides.”
Belden smacked the Rider’s chest with the back of his hand, just as he’d always done.
The Rider shook his head.
Lord spare him, he prayed.
Kabede spoke very little on the journey. It was plain he did not care to match notes with Faustus, and whenever the old man tried to broach the subject of the Hour of the Incursion, and what they knew about it, the Ethiopian turned to the shuttered window.
The Rider was more forthcoming.
“I don’t see what use Adon has for Samael,” the Rider said. “You speak of the Angel of Death as being Adon’s most powerful ally, but from what Lucifer said, he’s only able to interact with the newly dead for as long as it takes to usher them into Sheol. What possible help can he be?”
“I don’t know myself,” Faustus admitted. “From what you say, Adon has ensured the loyalty of the Queen of Demons by promising to free him. He is a wild card. We have no idea if he will even want to join the Old Ones if freed, or if they know. How can they even communicate with him? But if he does, your legends tell of him laying waste to cities with his sword. The Sixteen Sided Sword of the Almighty will be the only weapon we have to match him.”
“Only we don’t have it yet,” said the Rider.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 15