Conquistador (73 page)

Adrienne looked at Tom: “They probably won't attack us,” she said. “Too many guns with us, and it's too close to civilization. Plus they value permission to come hunt here—a lot of game migrates south over the mountains in summer.” She turned back to Simmons. “How many?”

“About thirty warriors, and a dozen women for the skinning and drying. Ah . . .” He looked embarrassed.

“Yes, I'd better hang back while you talk with them,” she said sourly.

He nodded. “And I think I know exactly how to put them into a good mood,” he said. “They're here for meat.” He unslung his scope-sighted rifle. “My grandfather was always boasting about that record tusker he got back when we were in Kenya. Pity the old bastard's dead.”

Tom felt an irrational pang as the Scout rode a hundred yards closer and dismounted.
Hell, it's not an endangered species this side of the Gate,
he thought.
Not in Africa, and not here either.

It knew what a man with a gun was, too; it turned and trumpeted again as soon as Simmons got close, tossing its head from side to side and flapping its ears. Then its head went down and its tail went up, sure sign of a charge. The flat
crack
of Simmons's rifle sounded at the same instant—aimed at the third corrugation down on the trunk, the precise spot that would send a bullet through the vast spongy bulk of the skull and into the brain.

The elephant took three more steps and then stopped. The bullet hole was invisible at this distance, and the trickle of blood almost so. It swayed and crumpled forward, vast columnar legs buckling at the knee, then slumped to the ground with a thud that shook the earth and made his horse dance sideways.

“You don't need an elephant gun for elephant,” Simmons said a bit smugly. “Any mankiller with a full metal jacket will do, if you get a brain shot.”

Tom rode out with Simmons to meet the Nyo-Ilcha warriors—or hunters, he supposed—as they rode up in a cloud of dust colored ruddy by the setting sun.

Damned if I'm going to miss the chance of seeing some
really
wild Indians,
he thought. A couple days of travel had put the brief, nasty fight at the pass behind him, mentally as well as physically.
It would be fascinating to get out on the plains and see what's happened there, too.

There were about thirty of them, as the Scout had said, ranging from teens to wrinkled middle age. All of them looked tough as rawhide as they came closer, tall, leanly muscular men with broad, high-cheeked, narrow-eyed faces; their brown skins were weathered from a lifetime of desert sun and alkali wind. They were healthy-looking despite the horrible smallpox scars some bore and the occasional missing eye or finger, giving off a palpable sense of carnivore vigor.

I suppose any weaklings die pretty quick, out in the deep desert,
he thought.

A few were lighter-skinned and narrower-faced than the other tribesmen, and one had brown hair and blue eyes; he remembered what Adrienne had said about white renegades joining them, as well as the remnants of the coastal tribes.

You'd have to be pretty desperate to join this bunch, or crazy,
he mused.
It's not like back in colonial times in FirstSide America.

Plenty of white settlers had “gone native” then, but they hadn't been leaving flush toilets and TV—not to mention modern dentistry and medicine. An eighteenth-century Iroquois shaman was probably less of a risk to your health than an eighteenth-century European medico; at least he wouldn't bleed, blister and purge you to death.

All the Nyo-Ilcha wore their long hair twisted into twenty or thirty rope-like braids; ornaments of shell or silver and turquoise hung from their ears, or were stuck through the septum of the nose; many were tattooed in jagged patters of red and white and black. The overall effect reminded him of some old-style shock-rock musicians; or shock-rock musicians crossed with demons, because these guys weren't kidding or playing for effect. This was what they wore every day, and they really
were
this bad.

Some wore helmets as well, made from the tanned head-skins of animals stretched on wicker frames, with the hide trailing down their backs—heads of wolf, bear, bison, leopard, lion . . . and one that had him boggling for a moment until he realized it was a kangaroo, which was a bogglement in itself.

They went bare to the waist otherwise, apart from blankets slung around their shoulders; everyone wore leather pants and moccasins, and from the rank old-sweat-and-leather way they smelled, they didn't waste water on washing much. Their horses were tall, good-looking beasts, rougher-coated than the New Virginians' but of the same breeds, and a herd of remounts was nearby under the guard of several youths. Every man was festooned with weapons: big steel knives, tomahawks, war clubs that looked like giant potato mashers, round shields of painted hide slung at the cruppers of their simple pad saddles. About half had trade muskets resting across their thighs. Those were simple weapons, replica smoothbore flintlocks, but the stocks had been decorated with bits of semiprecious stone or bone or shell. The other half carried bows, and his eyes widened again at their shape—backed with horn and reinforced with sinew, the powerful double-curved Turco-Mongol type he'd seen in museums and sporting events in Central Asia. He whispered a question to Simmons.

“Some demented renegade taught them,” the Scout answered, sotto voce. “He belonged to a bunch of burks FirstSide who liked to play at middle ages; the bloody things are a menace, believe me. Fortunately they're not easy to make or use.”

Tom hoped the tufts of hair on the ten-foot lances every third or fourth man carried were from animals, but he didn't think so—any more than the filed-down butcher knives used for points were ornamental. From the looks he was getting, he was pretty sure any of them would make a welcome addition. He'd been on the receiving end of enough silent hatred for Uncle Sam abroad to recognize it here, and the Indians weren't being particularly subtle about it—some were fingering their knife hilts, hopefully an unconscious gesture.

The Nyo-Ilcha leader reined in and raised a hand when his horse's nose was about five feet from that of Simmons's mount; he was a thirtyish man with a rat-trap mouth shadowed by the lion's-head helmet he wore—it was complete with teeth, and with turquoises for eyes—and white bars painted horizontally across his scarred, sinewy arms. Kolo rode right behind the Scout; the Nyo-Ilcha glared at him, and he sneered back. Botha was on the right hand and Tom on the left, picked for their impressive size. They all carried their rifles in the crook of their left arms—not really as a threat, more as a matter of etiquette.

The two leaders began talking in a fast-rising, slow-falling language accompanied by many gestures. The chief's face went slack with surprise for a moment when Simmons made a swooping hand motion in front of his nose—imitating an elephant's trunk, Tom realized—and pointed behind himself to the south, toward the toppled oak tree.

The chief said something in reply and placed both thumbs near his upper lip, drawing them out in a swooping curve.

“Ahi,”
Simmons replied, throwing his right hand out in an extravagant wave with the palm curved back.

“Kwanaeami!”
the chief said, and reined his horse around.

Simmons blew out his cheeks in a relieved gust. “I told him they could have the elephant, and the ivory too,” he said. “It ought to keep them sweet for a while; that's six thousand pounds of usable meat, as much as they can carry, and the ivory will be worth a fair bit of trade goods. Not to mention all that tough leather, and the fat. They don't hunt elephant much themselves, although there are a few in the desert and a fair number down the Colorado.”

“Why not?” Tom asked curiously.

Simmons snorted. “Would you, if all you had was a spear or those single-shot guns made out of pieces of water pipe?

“We're reasonably safe with this bunch now,” he went on as they trotted off to join the others. “They accepted our gift—it's bad luck among the Many Tongues to eat your own kill, so swapping is something friends do for each other. Fear of retaliation aside, it's unlikely these will try anything sneaky, at least while we're still on this side of the mountains.” He gestured toward the San Gabriels to the north. “Over there, it'd be a different matter.”

The dozen women with the Nyo-Ilcha hunting party were all driving carts, two-horse vehicles with a pair of spoked wheels seven feet high, their sides festooned with water bags and nets full of gear, and hoops over the tops covered in hide. They looked at the dead elephant, unharnessed and hobbled their horses, and went to work with knives and hatchets. A few of the younger ones set to putting up stick-and-thong racks to dry the meat, and began to gather wood for smoking fires—the downed oak tree provided plenty of both. The women wore their hair in a simpler fashion than the men, cut square across the eyes and long behind, and they wore nothing but kilts or aprons of rabbit fur or trade cloth; their faces were painted in vertical stripes, and they had lines of tattoos running down from their lower lips over their chins. A few of them spat in the direction of the distant party of New Virginians.

“Good thing you speak their language,” Tom observed.

“I don't, really—we were talking trade pidgin, with sign language. From what I've read of FirstSide anthropology, a lot of customs like sign language drifted west in the centuries between the time Columbus
didn't
arrive and the time we did—more than in FirstSide history.”

At Simmons's suggestion, they pitched camp about a mile away from the nomads—too far for a rush, but close enough to remind them of the source of their current good fortune. The routine of setting up the tents and hobbling the horses went quickly; dinner was antelope, some kind with a fawn hide, a white belly and horns that curled up in pointed spirals. Kolo had brought it down with his bow; luckily eight people were enough to eat most of it at a sitting—fresh meat didn't keep in this weather.

Tom finished his bowl of stewed antelope with beans and chilies and dried vegetables; it wasn't bad, for trail food. He'd just mopped the enameled bowl with a biscuit when Tully ghosted in out of the night with his goggles pushed up on his forehead.

“Company, Kemosabe,” he said.

They all stood, weapons inconspicuously ready. It was the leader of the Nyo-Ilcha, alone and holding his open hands up as a sign that he came in peace. Kolo followed behind him, signaling that nobody was following, then faded out into the darkness beyond the circle of light to make sure that nobody did later.

Simmons moved forward, making an open-hand gesture with his right hand. The Indian extended his, which surprised the Scout, who took it nonetheless.

“Hamose kwa'ahot,”
the Nyo-Ilcha leader said. “Or, in English, Good Star.”

“Ah . . . you speak English?” Simmons said.

“Heap good English,” Good Star said dryly. “Me smart Injun. I spent three years at the mission school in Antelope Valley—what you Deathwalkers call Antelope Valley—off and on, when I was younger. One of Dad's better ideas.”

He spoke fluently, though with a thick guttural accent. “And I trade there now and then. I'm
kohata
—chief—of the Nyo-Ilcha.”

Simmons muttered beneath his breath: Tom thought it sounded something like,
I'm going to
kill
Dirk Brodie.
Then he went on aloud: “Jim Simmons, Frontier Scout.”

Good Star came and squatted by the fire. “I've heard of you,” he said. “Spare some of that coffee? And a cigarette would go down nice.”

Tom bit down on a bubble of laughter at the expression on the Scout's face and poured the Indian leader a cup from the blue-enameled iron pot sitting on the edge of the fire. Someone else produced a cigarette; he lit it from a splinter, and smoke drifted out from beneath the fangs of his lion-head helmet. As if that had reminded him, Good Star took it off and set it on the dirt beside him, before pouring sugar into the coffee and taking a sip.

“Ahhhh,” he said, sighing. “You know, coffee and decent tobacco are about the only good things you Deathwalkers brought here. Well, guns and horses, too. And booze, of course, and chocolate and steel knives.”

“And the aqueducts and roads,” Tully muttered under his breath; Tom didn't think anyone else heard him. “But besides that, not much.”

Simmons produced a bottle of brandy from his saddlebags and added a dollop to their guest's coffee cup. Then he cleared his throat.

“Why didn't you speak English this afternoon? Instead of wasting both our time with trade pidgin and sign language.”

Good Star's glittering dark eyes swept around the circle by the fire; Tom thought he caught a sardonic glint under the tattoos and the stink.