Conquistador (60 page)

“They're hostile?” Tom said.

“Very, some of them.” Adrienne sighed. “When we cleared out coastal southern California a couple of generations ago, we gave the surviving natives some presents and horses and pointed them east. Some of them kept going—some of them crossed the Mississippi! But a lot didn't; they joined up with the tribes who were already in the Mohave. A fair number of white renegades ended up there, too—deserters, criminals, escaped convicts. A mixed bunch, very tough, and more of them than you might think. There's enough continuous contact across the mountains with the New Virginian settlements that they don't get hit by once-in-a-generation plagues. Plus there are a couple of missionary groups there who do vaccination programs against smallpox and measles and so forth for children brought into their stations.”

Tom rubbed at his chin. “Can't see the Mohave desert supporting many people, though.”

“Some of them farm part-time along the Mohave valley and the middle Colorado,” Simmons put in. “The acclimatization program really changed the ecology in that region, too. Lot of introduced plants—spinifex, saltbush, smooth-skin cactus—and animals. Camels, and things like oryx that metabolize their own water from their feed and don't need to drink. Plus they learned a lot of tricks from us, well-drilling, herding and suchlike.”

Botha nodded. “They've been more active the last few years. The occasional hunter or trader in the desert gets chopped, even a few raids over the mountains to steal livestock—”

Tom held up a hand. “How
extremely
convenient for the Collettas,” he said dryly. “If they're trying to hide something on the other side of the Mohave Desert.”

There were a few heartfelt curses at that; evidently paying Indians to attack your fellow New Virginians was something that made the general treason more emotionally immediate and intolerable.

“A small party will be easier to hide,” Adrienne said. “But not too small, or we'd have real problems getting across the desert and past the tribesmen. Everybody here's in, I presume?”

Nods, and a grunt from Botha. “That makes seven,” Adrienne said. Botha and Simmons both turned to look at Sandra, who glared back.

“She's good with horses, she can shoot, and I can trust her not to talk. We need a couple more. Who can we trust, who's got the experience we need?”

Botha rumbled, “My eldest boy, Jan. He's twenty—lived on my
plaas
there more than half his life, and he's been over the mountains before, chasing stock thieves and hunting. Guided
Oom
Versfeld's son on a trip last year; wants to be a white hunter. No nonsense in the boy; I'll vouch for him.”

Adrienne nodded, her eyes lost in thought. “That gives us eight guns. I'd be easier with a dozen, but . . . wait. Ralph's too old and he was never a boots-and-saddles type, but Henry Villers would probably be up for it. And I
know
I can trust him.”

“Wait a bliddy minute, miss, not a kaffir—”

Adrienne's finger stabbed out at him. “Botha, don't be more of an idiot than God compels you to be. And
don't
try any of those boys'-school pissing-match tricks with me, either. I don't have time for them and I'm not equipped to enjoy them.”

They locked eyes for a moment, and then he nodded. “You're in charge, miss.”

“I am. While we're getting things settled, let's clarify things. I'm in overall command. Tom here is number two. Sandra will be horse wrangler; Jim will be trail boss. Everyone else is a ‘cork.' Jim, what'll we need?”

“Two horses each,” the man with the sunstreaked brown hair said. “Three would be better except for the lousy grazing . . . and six mules. Taking it slow and holing up most of the day—which we'd have to do anyway in high summer—two hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, call it three-fifty our way, and allowing for accidents and a fair share of bad luck . . . we're talking a month to get to Lake Salvatore. Ten, fifteen miles a day at most, and we'll have to stop and rest the beasts when we hit water. Have to carry some barley for them; the grazing will be sparse.”

“Make it ten,” she said. “I want to talk to Tom about some special gear that might be useful. He was a Ranger, after all. Do up a list of equipment, and we'll see about getting it together without leaving traces on Nostradamus.”

She smiled at them, or at least showed her teeth.
Quite the human whirlwind, you betcha,
he thought, amused and bemused at the same time.

“That leaves the question of when,” Simmons said. “I'm not fit for action right now; a week, maybe two, the quacks say.”

She sighed with exasperation. “I begrudge every minute . . . but we can't charge right in, not just after an interview with the Old Man. I've got to make it look as if I really think we wound everything up FirstSide. So do the rest of you . . . I've applied for long leave from the GSF; I'm overdue on it, anyway. Once the harvest's in, it'll be natural for me to go on holiday. And it'll be natural for you all to stay on until the harvest supper's over, at least—Jim, you and your tracker can use the rest, too. We can finish our planning, do some quiet training, get the gear together, then split up and make our separate ways to a rendezvous point.”

Botha shook his head. “High summer in the Mohave! God be with us.”

“I hope He is,” Adrienne said soberly. “I surely do.”

The harvest ended on Friday, with the last sheaves twisted into a rough human form and everyone following the flatbed into the long strip behind the barns where the wheat ricks were—like thatched huts for giants, each formed around a long pole set in the earth. The local Episcopalian priest blessed the sheaf, and then everyone went off to shower and sleep.

Saturday was a holiday for everyone except the cooks to rest up for the evening's banquet and dance; the smell of baking bread and cooking came in a faint mouthwatering waft from the kitchen wing, along with the woodsmoke smell of oak-fired ovens.

They stood in the gardens behind the manor house. A stone reservoir stood at the hillside end, and from twenty feet up its vine-covered side water poured from the mouth of a cast-bronze lion's head to fall in a shallow pool and then flow into the main basin. The young harvest hands Adrienne had hired were playing around it now, pushing each other under the flow of water and tobogganing down into the swimming pool; it was one of the perks the youngsters had signed up for.

“Up for a ride?” she said, nodding toward the mountains. “Things are going to get serious soon enough.”

“Why not?” he said.

“Good thing you were raised in the country,” Adrienne said as they walked through the lawns and groves toward the hedge that marked off the service sector of the house grounds. “It's a little rough up there for someone who's never ridden before.”

Tom grinned, and felt himself relaxing completely into the smile for the first time since the Gate.

“Hell,” he said, “I didn't learn to ride back in North Dakota. Nobody kept horses around our neck of the woods; that would have been a luxury. We used pickups. I learned to ride in Central Asia. Lot of rough unroaded country there, and sometimes we had to move over it in small teams.”

They walked through the hedges, down a dirt lane lined with pepper trees, fantastically gnarled light brown trunks and spreading branches that met thirty feet overhead in a tangle of light-flecked green, full of pendulous six-inch clusters of yellow-white flowers. The two dogs who'd followed them were tearing back and forth along the lane, wagging frantically and jumping, with a general air of
Going for a ride,
great
idea!

Board fences surrounded grassy paddocks; the stables themselves were a series of low buildings along brick-paved walkways, with adobe to five feet and wood-framed wire grates above. There was an air of neatness, in a stable-esque sort of way; wheelbarrows leaned against buildings, tools racked inside doorways.

The old Indian woman he'd seen on the first day here was sitting in a patch of sun with her back against a stable wall and her feet outstretched, crooning to herself as she wove a basket of willow shoots, sedge, and fern roots; feathers and pieces of abalone shell added to the strange beauty of the pattern. The senile haze cleared for an instant as she saw the two of them walking by and she grinned, exposing a few brown snaggles of tooth and calling out in her own language. Adrienne tossed a reply in the same tongue over her shoulder and the crone cackled louder.

“What was that in aid of?” he asked.

“A speculation about your, ah, height,” Adrienne said, glancing at him out of the corners of her eyes. “The Ohlone weren't shy, let's say.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Do you really want to know? It had to do with comparing the dimensions of a baby's head and those of—”

“No, not really,” Tom said hastily.

Am I blushing?
he thought.
Well, let's be honest. I
am
horny. Very.
It was hard not to be, next to a woman this good-looking, and one you'd made love with, one you liked as well as resented. Some of his mind was still angry; other parts of him had different imperatives.

“Need a horse, Adri?” Sandra Margolin said, setting aside a shovel. “Need an ox, Tom?” she went on with a good-natured smile, as she looked Tom over from head to toe.

“I'll have Ahmed, Sandy. Tom'll take . . . oh, Gustav, I think.”

“Oh, you
do
want an ox for him,” the part-Indian woman replied, then went on more seriously, “Good idea. We've been skipping things for the harvest, and they could both use some exercise.”

She leaned the shovel against a wall and whistled sharply for her assistants, then relayed the order. They led two horses up. He could guess which one was Gustav without much trouble; it was a gelding and stood a bit over seventeen hands, black and glossy and muscular.

He ran a hand down its neck and over the legs. “Sturdy,” he said. “I don't recognize the breed.”
Not that I'm an expert on horses.
“Reminds me a little of some I saw in the 'Stans. A lot bigger, though.”

“Gustav's a crossbreed,” Adrienne said. “Hanoverian warmblood on a Kabardin mare—you know, those north Caucasus mountain horses. Gustav here's certainly plenty agile for his size, and he has extremely tough feet.”

Her mount was more lightly built, an Irish hunter, dapple-coated and two inches over fifteen hands. Sandra Margolin and a
nahua
stable hand came out with the blankets and saddles; they were a modified Western type, with several rings in the frame for ropes or gear, and machetes strapped to the left side beneath a coiled lariat; the horses champed a little with eagerness to get going. The young woman came back with the rifles, and they slid them into the molded-leather scabbards that rested at each rider's right knee.

The lane ran through the stables, then out into a big grass paddock right at the foot of the hills, and then through a gate in a deer-high fence and into rougher country, grassland scattered with blue oak. Beyond, it turned into a track up alongside a rivulet that was probably small in spring and had shrunk back to about half that size now. The tinkling of the water over rock made a pleasant counterpoint to the clop of hooves, the occasional jingle of harness and creak of leather, the happy panting of the dogs as they cast back and forth and charged up the steep slopes to either hand, covering four or five times the ground the mounted humans did.

The track showed more deer and elk sign than horse hooves; the north-facing side of the V-shaped notch they were riding in was covered in big timber. Sparse-needled digger pine on the higher rocky slopes gave way to good-sized madrone and blue oak, goldcup oak, with Douglas fir and the odd redwood near the trickle of water—none of the king trees was a real giant like the ones up on the north coast, but they still towered over everything else, rising from forest shadow into the sunlight like great straight-shafted spears. The wildflowers were dying down as June wore on, but there were still clumps of ocean spray with drooping sprays of tiny creamy-white flowers, thickets of bitter cherry with silvery-bronze bark and sweet-smelling snowy clusters of blossom, thimbleberry and trailing blackberry beside the creek, blue chicory beside the trail. Silver-blue and long-tailed coppery butterflies started up from the horses' hooves, though fortunately there weren't many mosquitoes.

The air grew cooler as they angled up the ravine. After an hour or so he noticed something odd—a silence. The dogs stopped running through the underbrush and came back to stand by the horses; the mounts themselves tossed their heads a moment later. They both reined in and scanned the trees as their horses stamped and tossed and shifted their weight from foot to foot as a way of indicating they thought it was a bad idea to stop just then. One of the dogs gave a low growl and pointed, its nose locked on a big canyon oak about a hundred yards away. Tom peered closely, pushing back the brim of his hat with one big hand; dapples of sun and shade moved on the scaly gray bark of the trunk and thick limbs, but he thought that about thirty feet up . . .