Analog SFF, April 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Yes, sir, cap'n, except for being cold, tired, wet and miserable, begging your pardon, sir."

  "'If you want to see a good time, join the cavalry,'” Benton quoted the recruiting motto.

  "That's right, sir. It's bad enough out here in October. I hate to think of campaigning on the plains again come winter. And then that lightning, like we were back fighting Johnny Reb again. But just then I thought maybe we'd stumbled across a prairie dog town."

  "Did you miss a step, too?"

  "Yes, sir. I wondered if the dogs had torn up the ground, but I can't see none of their burrows, and we couldn't not see them even in this mess."

  They plodded onward, men and beasts enduring the storm because they had no other choice. In a small mercy, the storm began lifting before sunset, and by the time dark came on, the clouds had split to reveal the innumerable stars above. Benton walked among his soldiers after the company had halted for the night, ensuring they had taken what care of their mounts they could in these conditions, with everyone and everything soaked to the skin. There was little he and Sergeant Tyndall could do but reassure the men that another couple of days would see them back in Fort Harker.

  Lieutenant Garret, who had been walking with the rear of the column behind the supply wagons, straightened to attention and gave a precise salute. “I've had what dry hardtack remains distributed to the men, captain."

  "You found some? Well done.” Benton rubbed his forehead, feeling exhausted but knowing that like everyone else he'd be sleeping in soggy clothing on wet ground. At that, he was better off than the enlisted men, because his uniform was of decent quality and cut, while they were still forced to wear left-over uniforms hastily and cheaply manufactured for the Civil War since the War Department had no intention of buying new enlisted uniforms until every old one had worn out.

  For that matter, he should have an experienced first lieutenant in the company as well as a brand new second lieutenant, but Lieutenant Randall had died of cholera four months ago and the slow-turning wheels of the War Department had yet to produce a replacement. Fortunately, Randall must have contracted the ailment off the post, because no one else had fallen ill with it. “You've done well out here, lieutenant. Very well for a newly commissioned officer on his first field maneuvers."

  Garret seemed to lose a little of his own fatigue at the words. “Thank you, sir. At one point I thought I'd literally lost my balance today."

  "What's that?” Benton frowned at him. “Was it when the lightning hit?"

  "Yes, sir. The ground wasn't quite where I thought it would be. The men around me and my horse all stumbled, too. It was very odd."

  Benton's frown deepened. “It appears many of us experienced that, lieutenant, the lay of the ground being different in small ways than it had been a moment before. Did an earthquake strike, do you think?"

  Garret looked around as if seeking evidence of such an event. “I didn't think Kansas was earthquake country, sir."

  "I don't know about Kansas, but there were those earthquakes sixty or seventy years ago in Missouri. They still talk about them. One of them supposedly made the Mississippi River run backwards for a short time.” Benton shook his head. “Well, if it was an earthquake, it didn't last long or do any damage we know of aside from minor adjustments to the prairie. Get what sleep you can tonight, lieutenant. The horses are nearly spent. We'll have to walk all day tomorrow at an easy pace to let them recover."

  "Yes, sir."

  * * * *

  The next day dawned clear and crisp. Benton stood up, wincing from the body aches inspired by sleeping on the wet ground.

  "Good morning, cap'n,” Sergeant Tyndall declared, offering a steaming cup.

  "Coffee? How'd you get a fire going, sergeant?"

  "An old Indian trick, sir."

  Benton couldn't help smiling as he took the coffee. “Lieutenant Garret, I should inform you that any time Sergeant Tyndall accomplishes some remarkable feat he attributes his success to an old Indian trick."

  Garret smiled despite the fatigue still shadowing his young face. “You must have known a lot of old Indians, sergeant."

  "Yes, sir, lieutenant,” Tyndall agreed before searching the horizon and pointing. “Look there, cap'n. Those elevations. Right where they should be. We didn't lose our way at all yesterday afternoon.” He squinted. “Looks like something's up on one of them, though."

  Benton pulled out his field glasses and focused them on the higher ground. One was crowned by a squat tower he didn't recall seeing before. “What do you make of that, lieutenant?"

  Garret studied the view for a while. “It appears ruined to me, sir, as if it were taller once. You see those blocks of stone to one side?"

  "That explains it. It's not ruined, lieutenant. It wasn't there the last time we came this way. Someone must be building a tower up there and the stone hasn't fallen, it just hasn't been set in place yet."

  "Maybe Colonel Custer had the 7th build a monument to him, cap'n,” Tyndall suggested, deadpan.

  Tyndall, like many cavalrymen, didn't have a high opinion of Colonel Custer. Neither, for that matter, did Benton, but he couldn't openly agree with an enlisted man on the subject. So he confined himself to addressing exactly what Tyndall had proposed. “The 7th Cavalry went through here in May, sergeant. I think we would have noticed something like that before now."

  Less than an hour later the column was under way again, clothing, horses and men drying under the warmth of the rising sun and with the assistance of a brisk breeze. They walked their horses through increasingly familiar flat stretches and across rolling hills and vales, stopping at the upper reaches of the Little Arkansas River in the middle of the day to water horses and men.

  Tyndall cast a puzzled glance around as they led their horses through the river, the column having to shift northward as several men and horses unexpectedly floundered into deeper water. “Sir, the ford's not the same. It should be down there a little ways."

  "Lieutenant Garret and I wondered if we'd experienced an earthquake during the storm,” Benton commented. “Perhaps that changed the ford, sergeant."

  "Could be, sir.” But Tyndall kept throwing suspicious glances at the river until it was out of sight.

  In the late afternoon they came up out of a long, shallow gulley, following a well-known route, though oddly lacking in any signs that other horses or wagons had passed this way for a long time. “Cap'n?” Sergeant Tyndall was looking up and to the side, a baffled expression on his face.

  Benton followed the sergeant's gaze, blinked in disbelief, then looked again. “Where did that come from?” A low elevation overlooked the plains here, not so much a hill as a high point with gentle slopes in all directions. He had ridden past this area at least a dozen times that Benton could recall, and the ground had never shown anything but the long grasses of the prairie, a few outcrops of weathered sandstone, and crossing it at an angle the ruts from an old northern section of the Santa Fe Trail. Now something else stood there, what seemed to be the sprawling ruins of a fortress that had once covered at least fifty acres, if not more.

  Tyndall was rubbing his eyes and then staring at the ruins. “You see it, too, sir? Cap'n, I figure we're twelve or thirteen miles south-southeast of the fort, and that ain't never been here. How the hell could someone have thrown that up since we came past last time?"

  "I don't know.” Benton held up one hand. “Column halt! Lieutenant Garret, remain here with the company while the sergeant and I go examine that . . . whatever it is."

  Handing off their horses’ reins to the bugler, Benton and the sergeant found the walk to the edges of the ruins to be unexpectedly difficult, as the ground close to the walls proved to be studded with fragments of partially buried sandstone blocks. As they neared a broken section of the wall, Tyndall let out a low whistle. “Look at them rocks. Someone went to a whole lot of trouble building this place, cap'n."

  Someone had, Benton thought, studying the size and number of the sandstone blocks th
at had been set into thick walls, which might have risen a dozen feet when whole. He hoisted himself through a gap in the remains of the wall, Tyndall following.

  Picking their way along streets buried by blowing dirt, the tall prairie grass growing everywhere the dirt had found lodgment, they discovered badly eroded and fallen-in buildings covering the area inside the wall. The ever-present Kansas wind blew through the ruins, sighing as it swayed the prairie grass and caressed the ancient sandstone. At the end of the street they were following, Benton saw a massive structure whose walls still seemed mostly intact, though like all the other buildings, the roof had long ago collapsed. Walking up a short grass-covered slope that had once been a broad staircase, he passed through a broken entryway and into a courtyard.

  Sergeant Tyndall walked over to one wall, studying drawings that had been deeply incised into the sandstone before it had hardened, and were still mostly visible. “Lots of horses. But they ain't drawn like the Indians do ‘em."

  Benton came over to look closely at the drawings, nodding in agreement. An entire herd of graven horses gamboled across the broken wall, their lines still visible despite long weathering. The horse portrayals had a fluidity that he'd never seen in the drawings that the Indian tribes produced. Then he noticed the top of the wall. Part was missing, but on the remaining portion symbols he didn't recognize had been carved in a series of long unbroken lines. “Do you recognize any of this, sergeant?"

  Tyndall shook his head, looking mystified now. “No Cheyenne built this, cap'n. No, sir. And look how that sandstone's been weathered. I never seen anything built of sandstone weathered that bad. It'd take, I don't know, hundreds of years. But that's crazy. This wasn't here when we rode past last."

  That tower on the hill that Garret had thought ruined hadn't been there before, either, Benton recalled. “Go get Lieutenant Garret and send him up here while you stay with the column."

  "Yes, sir.” Tyndall seemed glad for the chance to leave the mysterious ruins, moving as fast as the broken surfaces permitted back toward the column.

  While he was waiting, Benton dug a little ways into the dirt. He found the remnants of what might have been a wooden beam, the wood long since turned to dust, but the dust blackened by the charring of fire. This place hadn't simply died. Someone had destroyed it.

  Lieutenant Garret arrived, examining everything with a stupefied expression. “Captain, I had no idea the plains Indians had built anything like this."

  "As far as I and the sergeant know, they didn't.” Benton indicated the ruins. “You had a classical education back east, lieutenant. What do you make of this?"

  Garret hesitated. “Honestly, sir?"

  "You can safely assume that when I ask you something I want your honest answer, yes, lieutenant."

  "Yes, sir.” Garret made a helpless gesture. “It looks almost Biblical, sir. Like something from Babylon. Or maybe even a little older. The way the wall is built, what's left of the houses. I've seen paintings of what people think the Hanging Gardens looked like and they'd fit in here, sir."

  "The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Benton decided not to make a sarcastic reply. He had asked for the lieutenant's opinion, after all. “What do you make of that?” he asked, pointing to the wall of horses and the symbols above the drawings.

  Garret examined it for a long time, then shook his head. “I don't know, sir. I haven't seen art like that. Those symbols look like early writing, but I'm sure it's not cuneiform.” He gave Captain Benton a worried look. “Sir, horses came to this continent with Europeans, a few centuries ago. But these depictions of horses, this whole place, feels a lot older than that."

  "How old does it feel to you?” Benton asked, realizing that he agreed with the lieutenant.

  Garret took a moment to think about that. “Older than anything I've ever seen, sir. Really old. A thousand years, maybe."

  That sounded ridiculous, but then again saying the ruins were even a decade old, even a month old, would be equally absurd. They hadn't been here and now they were.

  Picking their way out along another path, Benton paused before a deep opening that gapped in the earth, kneeling to examine it. “I think this was a salt mine. A long time ago it was a salt mine, anyway. This place must have been built around the mines to protect them. A whole walled town grew up here.” It all made sense, except that he wasn't talking about the ancient Middle East but about the central Kansas prairie.

  Benton wanted to have those disquieting relics out of sight, so he kept the column moving until the impossibly old ruins were no longer visible, the cavalry reaching the low, wooded areas alongside Thompson Creek before halting for the night.

  "What do you think they'll say at Fort Harker when we report that, cap'n?” Tyndall asked.

  "They may call us crazy.” Benton shrugged. “But they may have already heard of it. Plenty of civilians ride through this area."

  "Yes, sir. I been meaning to ask you about that, cap'n.” Sergeant Tyndall pursed his mouth, clearly and uncharacteristically hesitating to speak. “Where are they, sir? This area's been plenty settled in the last few years, especially since the railroad came in as far as Ellsworth. But we've seen no one else and seen none of the trails we should've crossed."

  "You think everyone disappeared and that ruined city appeared in their place?"

  "I don't know what happened, cap'n, but I do know that I'll be real happy when I lay eyes on Fort Harker again."

  * * * *

  By late morning the next day even Benton was feeling extremely uneasy. They should have passed some roads and farms by now, but the only road they'd found wasn't where it should have been and seemed to have been wide and very heavily traveled in the past. Aged ruins of abandoned buildings, some still bearing the scorches of fire on their walls, were spotted near once-cultivated fields gone wild. Even stranger, another desolate tower lay tumbled to one side of the large road not far from where the cavalry column crossed it. Lieutenant Garret was sent to investigate and came back bewildered. “It's not the same architecture as the fortress ruins, sir. The tower seems sort of Roman, like the ones on Hadrian's Wall."

  First the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and now Hadrian's Wall. “Kansas seems to be gaining ancient historical artifacts at a very unusual rate, lieutenant. How old is that tower, do you think?"

  "It seems a lot younger than the city, sir. I'd guess it's maybe a hundred years old, or maybe two hundred. That's just a guess.” Garret had been growing more and more puzzled. “Captain, are these ruins being kept secret for some reason? I've never heard a word about them."

  "That's because they haven't been here, lieutenant.” Feeling increasingly unsettled, Benton turned to face the column. “Mount up!” With he and his men settled into their saddles, he ordered the company into motion again, eager to see Fort Harker and the adjacent town of Ellsworth as soon as possible.

  It was well after noon when they came over the last of the rises before the river lowland holding Fort Harker and Ellsworth. They had come up from the south, so both the fort and the town should have been almost due north of them. The Smoky Hill River, which skirted both places, was there, but otherwise the landscape was marked only by another wide road leading east. There was no sign Fort Harker or Ellsworth had ever been here, no indication the railroad line coming in from the east and then up along the Smoky Hill had ever been built here. How could an entire town and a fort with more than seventy buildings have vanished within a couple of weeks? How could the rail line and the warehouses beside it, which had been there for a few years, also have disappeared without a trace?

  Sergeant Tyndall made a strangled sound as he looked east. Within a few miles the road entered a broad cultivated and cleared area, running through it, and up to the sealed gates of a city walled in stone which had been built between Spring Creek and Clear Creek. The city was miles east of where Ellsworth or Fort Harker should be, much bigger than either Ellsworth or the fortress to the south that they'd seen in ruins, and it was undisputedly
still occupied. “Cap'n, begging your pardon, sir, but what the hell? Where's the fort and where's the town and what's that?"

  "It's not Ellsworth.” Benton leveled his field glasses, making out banners on the top of high walls and some sort of castle or citadel in the center of the city. “There's fighting going on. People on the walls are defending the city against a force encamped before it. See the ladders the attackers are putting up against the walls?"

  Lieutenant Garret nodded, peering through his own field glasses. “Sir, I don't hear any gunshots."

  Neither did he, Benton realized. Nor could he see the impossible to miss clouds of gun smoke that should have veiled the battlefield.

  "What do we do, sir?” Tyndall asked.

  His instructions from the colonel hadn't covered this particular set of circumstances, but they had left him the authority to use his discretion if he encountered something not mentioned in those instructions. “There's a city under attack. That's clear enough. We're to defend Ellsworth and other towns or settlers if they come under attack. That's not Ellsworth, but it's a city. We'll ride that way, evaluate the situation as we get closer, and take appropriate action."

  Tyndall nodded, clearly relieved now that an officer had laid out a familiar and rational course of action.

  Benton rode up close to Garret and spoke softly. “The men know something is wrong, lieutenant. They don't know why any more than we do, but as long as their officers appear to be dealing with events in a calm and controlled way, the men will stay calm and controlled. Don't let the men see anything in you that might feed alarm in them. Understand?"

  Lieutenant Garret nodded, his worried expression smoothing out. “Yes, sir."

  The cavalry rode down from the hills to the river, splashing across and up onto the edge of the open area. The closer the column got to the walled city the more details they could make out. “They're fighting with swords,” Garret announced at one point. “I think they're wearing armor, too."

  Whoever had been attacking the city seemed to have noticed the cavalry company. While infantry continued to climb ladders to assail the walls, many other attackers ran back to their camp where a large herd of horses was visible, mounting up and forming into a mass facing the approaching cavalry. Benton watched the activity through his field glasses, shaking his head at the archaic armor, the brightly colored banners, and the lack of firearms. “Whoever they are, they're not dressed or armed like Indians. Neither are the people on the wall. But the city people aren't settlers like those in Ellsworth, either."