Conquistador (76 page)

“Leave him,” Sandra barked as she ran by, leading four more horses by their reins. “He's foundered—just get your gear on this'n.”

He snatched at the reins she offered; the horse he'd been riding stood with its head down, wheezing painfully, staggering a little in place. Tom felt a stab of pity; it didn't prevent him from stripping off the saddle and saddlebags and throwing them on the new mount with indecent speed. The saddle blanket was rank and running with sweat, and spattered with foam. The new horse was his original spare—even then he gave a thought of thanks for Sandra, who'd kept track through the confusion. She might well have saved his life; a smaller horse wouldn't go nearly as far or fast under his weight.

His first mount made for the water with trembling legs. Then something went
shwuup!
through the umber-tinted sunset air and hit it with a meaty sound, lost under the huge, piteous scream of surprise and pain from the horse. He saw an arrow quivering in its withers as it collapsed; then more were flying at them from the south rim of the canyon. He could look up from the darkness beneath the cottonwood to see the cliff there ruddy and sunlit, the arrowheads winking as they reached the top of their arcs. The black shafts looked slow then, but that turned to zipping speed as they plunged down. Some went
thunk
into the big trees and quivered like malignant bees; others hit the sand with a
shunk
ing sound. Muskets banged as well; he could see the shooters bobbing up and down from cover, and the puffs of dirty smoke from muzzle and pan.

Simmons's sniper rifle cracked, flashes in the dark and the sharp stink of nitro powder as he tried to keep the enemy suppressed, but there were too many of them—their firepower was diffuse, but huge. Henry Villers came up on a horse as badly blown as Tom's had been, threw himself out of the saddle and prepared to add the Bren gun to the suppressing fire.

“No!” Adrienne shouted. “This place is a deathtrap. Get mounted, everyone; we have to make it past the narrows!
Tully!
”

“Trust me, trust me!” the little man shouted, scrambling components from one of the packsaddles into a canvas bag. “OK! Go for it! Go, go,
go.
”

Villers scrambled aboard one of the presaddled spares. Then they were all splashing through the pond and onto the only clear ground eastward—a strip of wet sand along the southern edge of the stream; elsewhere the floor of the canyon was boulder-strewn and brush-grown. It was also a pit of darkness now; Tom managed to get his night-sight goggles out of their pouch and onto his face, and a new magazine into his rifle, all at a pounding gallop and without losing anything but his hat. That went flying off into the night behind him like a bat as water-worn rock cliffs rushed by, swerving in a crazy snake's passage as they wove among the rocks and fallen trees and ponds. Sand spurted up from the hooves of the horses ahead, flicking him in the face. The Akaka up on top of the canyon wall were pacing them on their right, shooting down into the riverbed—right ahead of him someone's horse went down at the head, its hind legs and hooves flying up almost in his face, and then his horse had hopped over it in a sudden pig-jump that almost cost him his seat.

He risked a look behind. It was Sandra; she was up and running, and Tully was riding alongside her, bouncing around but staying on. He reached down; she grabbed his hand and stirrup leather and made an astonishing bounding jump, coming down on the horse behind him and clinging tight. His teeth and eyes shone wide, in a face that was all nose and chin and straining effort.

On the cliff face above him something swept through the night amid a circular trail of sparks—and Tom's mind made a leap of its own: It was some sort of primitive grenade, gunpowder stuffed into a clay pot lined with rocks, then a fuse lit and the whole whipped around in a sling for throwing.

It soared down from the cliff, trailing sparks.
Crannggg!
And gravel-shrapnel spurted all around him; his horse missed a step for a heartstopping instant, and then was on its way again. But more circles of sparks flowered on the cliff. . . .

Then they were out into a marginally broader part of the canyon, one where the river ran close under the steep southern cliffs. North of that bend was a broad patch of sand, and north of that a side canyon, a triangular wash that made a path to the northern rim of the canyon, littered with stones from gravel size up to chunks as big as his torso. It was passable . . . just.

“Sandy, young Botha, get the horses up—everyone else, rearguard! Quick, or they'll catch us on two flanks!” Adrienne called.

“No, they won't,” Tully said, panting, as Sandra slipped down.

He pulled a controller from a pouch on his harness, extended it westward and mashed his thumb down with vindictive force. A rolling boom shot around the curve of the canyon, with a cloud of dust on its heels.

“Satchel charge under a boulder,” he said, and threw back his head for a catamount-in-agony rebel yell that would have done one of his great-grandfathers proud. “That'll hold 'em for a few minutes.”

“Good
work!
” Adrienne cried.

Tom slapped him on his shoulder as he passed, then took cover behind a big rock about ten yards up the cut.

“Jim, Henry!” he called. “Fall back by pairs, leapfrog!”

He took two turns of the rifle's sling around his left fist, braced his elbow on the rock—what luxury, after bouncing around on a horse!—and sighted. It was a bit awkward with the goggles, but a lot better than trying to see in the dark like a cat. The range was two hundred yards away and a hundred up; only the height difference had let the arrows reach them. The smoothbores would hit only by accident at that range, but get enough of them going and accidents would happen, and he didn't like the thought of being hit by one of those three-quarter-inch lead balls. They were the size of a kid's biggest conker marble and traveling around eight hundred feet per second.

It's times like this that you miss Uncle Sam's expensive body armor,
he thought, and squeezed off a round. Arrows came flickering back at the muzzle flash.

Up on the southern cliff where the sun was dying an Akaka slinger whirled another grenade around his head. Tom brought the blade of his foresight down on the moving blur, squeezed . . .

The man lurched backward as a .30-06 hollow-point blasted through his chest and out his back, leaving a small round hole in his stomach and an exit wound the size of a bread plate. The grenade he'd been loading into the soft antelope-leather pocket of his sling fell at his feet, and three seconds later it exploded—right next to the other four in the pouch hung across his chest. A great snap of red fire lit the cliff, and rocks and dust and bits of his body shot out and fell downward over the steep rock.

Just then Henry Villers's machine gun began to stutter, raking rock and water in a flurry of spouts and stone chips and ricochets, driving back the pursuers who'd finally come up along the canyon floor in their quarries' tracks. Simmons's rifle had never stopped. Tom shot his magazine empty, clicked in another one and jacked the operating rod.

“Fall back,” he said. “Jim, you and me—Henry, on the word! Watch your flanks, guys.”

Because unless the Akaka are conveniently stupid, they're not going to rush a machine gun and two automatic rifles from the front in a narrow slot,
he thought.
Of course, a lot depends on how many Tully got with his satchel charge; no way to tell. Maybe we can sicken them of it. Maybe the horse will learn to sing. Fuck it.

The cut became less well defined as they scrambled up and north. A dead horse lay inconveniently—the stupid beast had slipped and broken its neck and someone had shot it; it said something about the situation that he hadn't noticed. He clambered over the sweat-and-blood-stinking, foam-slick and unpleasantly yielding obstacle and into loose scree that slipped under his feet.

If he hadn't been wearing the goggles, the silent tiger rush from his left would have taken him completely by surprise—the Akaka's soft moccasins made no sound at all as he skipped from rock to rock and flung himself headlong at Tom.

A flicker of motion out of the corner of his eye brought him around and crouching; the duck and lift was purely instinctual. A hard, heavy weight slammed into his shoulders just as he heaved up, and the war shriek turned to a yell of dismay as the warrior flipped up and over. Tom used the same motion to wheel, but even so the Akaka had bounced back to his feet on the rough stone. He was a bundle of sinew and steel-spring muscle no more than arm's length away, and the knife and tomahawk glittered in his hands—they would be in Tom's flesh long before he could bring the rifle up to shoot. Instead he twirled it like a quarterstaff, and the muzzle smashed across the other man's left wrist. The hatchet flew away; Tom's hips swayed aside like a matador's, and he clamped the knife hand between his arm and flank before the razor steel could do more than slice his bush jacket and sting the skin. The rifle clattered away.

The two men strained against each other in the dark for an instant, a private universe of fear-stinking sweat and desperate effort. The Indian's free hand clawed for his eyes and slid off the slick surface of the goggles; Tom's teeth snapped into the wrist, and blood ran sickeningly rank into his mouth. He spat it out and caught his own left wrist in his right hand behind the Indian's back, lifting him off the ground with a surge and wrenching with arms like pythons. The painted gargoyle face inches from his contorted, screaming, and then Tom had to duck his head to save his eyes from the other's teeth; they ground into his scalp, tearing the skin.

That loosed something deep in his gut; the
berserkergang
of his ancestors perhaps—if it was, it was colder than ice, not hot.

“Yaaaaaah!”
he shouted, a hoarse, guttural sound that echoed through the night.

And his arms ground inward with the inexorable force of glaciers. The tough cotton drill of the bush jacket ripped from the neck halfway to the waist with a crack as his shoulders bunched, and red blood vessels writhed across his vision. The Akaka warrior screamed once more, high and shrill—then flopped limp with blood pouring out of his mouth, spine snapped and ribs driven into his lungs like daggers of bone.

Tom staggered and threw the corpse from him, glaring about. It took an instant for his vision to clear, and for him realize that the others were staring at him. He coughed and shook his head.

“Let's get going,” he said, scrubbing his sleeve across the filmed surface of the goggles.

“He can't ride with it,” Adrienne said. “He'd bleed out inside two miles.”

Schalk Botha lay facedown. The wound wasn't one that would be fatal under any circumstances but these—the arrow had gone through the thicker fleshy part of his right buttock, a broad-bladed triangle of metal slicing down out of the night. Adrienne had cut off the shaft at the skin and freed it with a single long pull, then packed the wound with antiseptic pads and strapped them down with strong adhesive.

It would heal in a couple of weeks, without doing anything other than making young Schalk the butt of jokes for the rest of his life. Here and now, it was a sentence of death. The young man knew it, and his face had the strained impassiveness of someone realizing his own mortality and determined to meet it with eyes open.

Tom looked around at the circle of faces, ghostly in the moonlight. Everyone who needed it had been patched up; he had a pad along his forehead over the left eye himself, and another on his side a handspan down from the armpit. A couple of the others looked worse, but there was nothing crippling, nothing that would keep a man—or woman—from riding and fighting.

Piet Botha was crouched on his hams beside his son, both hands—his huge, scarred hands—on the stock of the rifle that rested with its butt between his knees. His brutal face was as impassive as ever; for an instant one hand reached out and touched the younger man's hair.

“Nie.”
he sighed. “Let there be no foolishness or waste of time.”

His chin jerked out toward the darkness. Not far away the Indians were holding some sort of ceremony over
their
dead, doubtless preparatory to coming after revenge. Their howls came out of the star-bright night and echoed up from the canyon, more chilling than wolves because they
weren't
mindless.

“We must have a rearguard,” he said. “Or the rest will never break free. Schalk can still fight from cover. I also, of course. And one more fit man able to move about.”

The dark somber eyes flicked across their faces.
I can't
believe
what I'm going to say,
Tom thought as he opened his mouth.