Conquistador (75 page)

The Scout still had his binoculars out. “Dammit, they're pushing their horses!” he said. “We'll have to do it too. Go for it!”

He cased the glasses and leaned forward, flipping the slack of his reins to right and left. His horse rocked into a gallop, and they all followed suit. It
felt
faster than a car—but a horse couldn't keep it up for long, particularly when it had been hard-driven on short rations and bad water for a while. It was hard on the rider's gut and back, too.

“This is going to be close,” Adrienne said to him, calling across the rushing space that separated them. “If they get too close, we'll have to circle the horses—use them as barricades—but then they can thirst us out.”

In which case we all die,
he thought.
On the other hand, this isn't the first time people have tried to kill me, and most of
them
are dead.

He repeated that aloud, and Adrienne whooped and grinned. Dust billowed up around their hooves; the sound rose to a harsh drumroll thunder that shivered in his bones. Sandra drove the remounts and packhorses ahead and a little to their left, and two streams of dust smoked out behind them, mingling and drifting.

Tully passed him, swerving in a little to shout, “Help! I've fallen into a
Lonesome Dove
rerun and I can't get out!”

The goblin grin was heartening; Roy always got that expression when he was about to pull a nasty on someone. On the other hand . . .

The Indians were much closer now. He could see details; they were equipped much like the Nyo-Ilcha, but the lances had backward-slanting collars of ostrich feathers below the points, and the men all had broad bands of black paint across their faces from the nose up, with yellow circles around the eyes.

“Northern clans, well off their usual stamping grounds,” Simmons said. “Akaka, I'd say, from the look and the paint.”

“From their looks, either they're all auditioning for a remake of
The Crow,
or it's the clowns from hell!” Tom called, and got another laugh.

The Akaka warriors weren't in the least funny themselves, though. They were men who'd do their best to kill him, and no mistake. Their shrill yelping war cries cut through the hoof thunder, and he could see their open mouths and bared teeth as they crouched low over their horses' necks to urge them on to greater speed. A little closer, and one with a crescent moon of silver through the septum of his nose and elk antlers on a hairy headdress caught his eye and shouted something, gesturing with the long lance he held, and then used the shaft to whack his pinto mare on the rump. It seemed to bound forward, perceptibly faster.

Doubtless he's shouting variants on “Now you die, white-eye!”
Tom thought, and gestured broadly with his own right hand—middle finger extended from a big clenched fist.

The problem was that by slanting in from their quarries' right, the Indians had made it nearly impossible for the New Virginians to shoot; you couldn't use a two-handed weapon on horseback in that direction if you were right-handed, which all of them were. Or you could, but your chances of hitting anything would go down from low to zero.

But . . .

Adrienne whooped again, and Simmons called, “We're going to get ahead of them! Our horses are fresher!”

Tom checked, and the Indians
were
falling behind; their dash along the angle was going to cut through where the quarry had been, not in front of them or in direct collision. In a minute or two they'd have to turn to their right, fall in behind the New Virginians and make it a stern chase.

The Akaka saw it at the same time, and a shout of fury went up from them. One rose in his stirrups and drew his bow to his ear; he was two hundred yards off, but the heavy horn-backed stave of mesquite wood reinforced with sinew sent the shaft flickering past Schalk Botha, the last in their column of twos.

Then the moment of maximum danger was past, and the New Virginians were drawing their O'Brien rifles from the saddle scabbards. Tom followed suit, although he doubted his ability—or anyone else's either—to hit anything at two or three hundred yards from the back of a galloping horse. In combat it was hard enough to score a hit when you were lying prone with good solid earth under both elbows for a brace; thousands of rounds of small-arms fire were popped off for every casualty.

Tully didn't pull his rifle. Instead he dropped a little behind and threw two fist-sized lumps aside. Twisting in the saddle, Tom saw them tumble away . . . and then two quick poplar-shaped columns of smoke with red snaps of fire at their hearts erupted from the dirt as the Indians galloped over the lumps. That had them yelling in panic and reining wide, their horses bugling and rearing and fighting their riders. Tully's grin grew wider.

“Semtex!” he shouted. “With timers!”

It would probably work only once, but it had gained them some time. The pursuers shrank slightly as they dropped behind, and slowed a little more when several riders began firing at them, turning backward in the saddle—what the ancient Greeks had called the Parthian shot, from the trick horse archers used to discourage pursuit. The flat
crack . . . crack . . .
cut through the duller rumble of hooves, and the cartridges glittered as they spun away to the ground.

Adrienne drew out of the column, racing along beside it for a moment so that she could look back free of the great cloud of dust twenty-five sets of hooves were kicking up. He could see her mouth work, and read her lips:
Shit.

“Slow down a bit!” she called as she swerved back into line. “The horses can't take much more of this. The Indians are slackening off.”

He suddenly noticed the heat radiating from his mount, and the white streaks of foam along its neck, and the bellows panting through its red-rimmed nostrils.
Can't be easy to carry me at this speed,
he thought, and slowed—more a matter of shifting his balance a bit back than doing anything with the reins. He could feel the animal's relief as its hoofbeat slowed a little.

“What's the bad news?” he called to Adrienne as she rejoined the column.

“They've got a remuda of spare horses following them,” she said. “That means they can switch off—it'll be easier for them than us—and a lot of us ride heavier in the saddle than any Indians are likely to do.”

“Short form?” he called.
Sorry, not familiar with cavalry logistics,
he added to himself.

“Short form, they'll catch us eventually, if we can't break contact,” she said, obviously thinking hard. “Bad if they catch us where there's water. Fatal if it's a dry spot. Or possibly fatal anyway, since the only water near here is at the bottom of a canyon.”

“Afton canyon? Just east of Barstow?” he said.

“Right. Give me a minute.”

Think hard, think hard,
askling, he thought—and even then was a little startled that he'd mentally used the Norski term for
darling.

He looked around himself, and was startled at how close the sun was to the horizon. Adrienne rode side by side with Simmons for a moment, then dropped back to each in turn.

“We're going to hit the Afton canyon soon,” she said. That was where the intermittent Mohave flowed east before it sank into the desert playas. “We'll turn east, water the horses and fill our bags as fast as we can, then get up one of the low spots on the north face of the wall. If we can get into the Calico range north of there we can lose them and then swing west again.”

Tom looked back at the dust cloud their pursuers raised, tinged bloody by the setting sun, estimated times, and then called up his knowledge of the land.

“That'll be shaving it pretty close,” he said. “They could cut the angle again, if they figure out what we intend. And that canyon gets pretty damned narrow in places; I've walked it and camped there.”

“You're right, but it's our best chance,” she said, loud over the drum of hooves and the rattle of iron on rock. Sparks flew up from the feet of her mount as she dropped farther down the column.

Jesus, what a woman!
he thought warmly.
Of course, we may die horribly in a couple of hours, but what a rush it's been!

The pursuit slowed to a canter for a few minutes, and the pursued did as well. Then Tom saw the great clot of horsemen behind them split; sixty or so kept up the chase, and forty angled off to the right, eastward—toward the rim of the canyon through which they'd have to run . . .

This bunch are savages, right enough,
he thought.
That doesn't mean they're stupid, especially within their own stamping ground.

“That's torn it!” he called to Adrienne.

“Going to make it interesting, at least,” she said.

“We're going to have to sting them a bit at the crossing!” he shouted back. “Me first.”

The land was sloping down before them, sparsely dotted with sage and creosote and clumps of grass dried to blond straw; the plain was interrupted by mesas and buttes, all turning dark purple and gold as the sun sank on their left. It was almost too classically Western; this area had been used for a lot of movies, back FirstSide. Being chased through it by real live Indians intent on killing you gave a whole new perspective to memories of
The Searchers . . . .

“Yo!”

Adrienne's shout gave them all warning, and they spurred their mounts. The dry bed of the Mohave lay before them—not quite dry here, a muddy trickle in the center, flanked by long grass, reeds, cottonwoods and willows. Water and soupy mud flew up in plumes to either side as the driven horses hit it at a gallop, then jinked hard to the right on the other bank.

Tom pulled in his own mount and let the others pass him; it reared slightly, neighing protest, then stood panting with its body parallel to the river. That put the charging Akaka warriors to his left. The horse was hunt-trained; when he squeezed it with his thighs it stayed motionless save for its rapid breath as he leveled the militia rifle. The Indians were out in the open, still well lit; he breathed out and let the blade of the foresight fall down across the circle of the rear aperture.
Take up the slack and stroke the trigger . . .

Crack.
The .30-06 rounds punched his shoulder harder than the assault rifles he was used to. No use trying for precision, not at two hundred yards in bad light and from an uncertain platform. Move the aiming point and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. One sharp blast merged into another in a ripple of fire as he emptied the magazine and spent brass spun away to his right; the muzzle blast was a strobing ball of red-yellow, dazzling the eyes.

Horses went down, and men. Some of the screams were of pain—horses sounded like enormous terrified children when they were hurt, an aspect of preindustrial battles he hadn't anticipated and didn't like at all. More were shrieks of rage; other muzzle flashes winked at him, muskets with a duller red than the nitro powder of this weapon, and the near-silent hiss of arrows. He didn't wait to study the results of his fire; he pulled his horse's head around and booted it into motion. The big gelding labored as it cross the riverbed, muck flying from its hooves, and its labored breathing reminding him of how hard it had worked; the smell of the wet earth was heavy in his nostrils after the long dryness of the desert. The Indians were closer, and arrows passed him on either side with hissing
whup
of cloven air; they'd sink to the feathers in him if they hit, or if they struck the horse . . . which would be almost as bad.

Worse, if they took him alive.

Then he was out of the swale and up on the sandy bank on the other side of the nearly dry river. A dark shape loomed there: Henry Villers sitting his horse, with the Bren gun trained on the shallow spot where the pursuers would inevitably bunch as they crossed. His smile was very white in the growing gloom.

“You stung 'em, Warden Tom,” he called out. “I'm just going to purely spoil their whole day, then follow right along.”

“
Semper Fi,
you betcha!” Tom called to him.

The canyon started as a wedge of flattish sand between two ranges of hills, but it rapidly grew narrower as he pounded east. After a minute he heard a sudden roaring stutter behind him—Villers emptying a thirty-round magazine into a crowd of men and horses; there was a brief pause, and the sound was repeated. Then silence, except for faint screams and shrieks, and the growing drum of a horse's hooves.

Narrower still, rising walls on either side crowding him toward the chain of pools and trickles that made the river; the sun was right behind him, and the fluted stone curtains on either side were striated in red and salmon pink and green and black as the volcanic rock caught the dying beams of sunset.

He caught up with the rest at a broad shallow pool. There was a frenzy of movement around the northern bank, where firm ground ran down to the water under the shade of a stretch of huge cottonwoods. Sandra was trying to keep the desperately thirsty horses from foundering themselves, waving her arms and sometimes slapping noses with her quirt, leading one set in before the others wanted to leave, amid shrill squeals and a snapping, snorting chaos she managed to control—somehow. Jim Simmons was scanning the southern edge of the canyon's cliffs with his scope-sighted rifle; he gave a shout as Tom slugged his horse back on its haunches.

“Company coming!” Simmons shouted, and fired.