Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (30 page)

“Does Mis-kwa-macus want us to be as
the whites are?” Goyaałé asked, as he had not sat back down yet.

“Only in the way I have said, and
one other. Like them, we wage
total
war. We burn
their
lands. We kill
their
children. We take
their
women. We give
no mercy
.”

These words excited some of the
Apache again, and many of the Bedonkohe sat down to listen.

Vittorio turned to Goyaałé.

“Does Goyaałé want these
things?”

Goyaałé looked to his own
people, staring up at him with hungry eyes. He shrugged.

“I do not hate the whites as much as
some of you.”

There was muttering at this.

“But I would ride out right now if
there were Mexicans to be killed.”

Grins flashed uncontrollably among
all the gathered Indians. Misquamacus grinned too, and the Rider knew why.
Goyaałé was well spoken, and he had reservations. He could turn the tide
of the Apache against Misquamacus’ plan. But he had shown the chink in his
armor. Mexicans had killed his old mother, his wife, and children. Piishi knew
the story, and so the Rider knew it too. Goyaałé hated them for it, as he
hated no others, and he warred with them whenever he could. As Vittorio was
feared by the Americans, Goyaałé was a terror to the Mexicans, who called
him Geronimo.

“Why ride, when I can bring the
Mexicans to us?” Misquamacus announced. “Let me show you my power, Goyaałé.
Then you will see if this is what you want. Where is Lozen?”

The warrior woman stood up.

“Lozen has power,” Misquamacus
announced. “Power to see the enemy from afar. Will you use your power now?”

Lozen looked to her brother.
Vittorio gave his consent with a nod.

“I will,” said Lozen.

The woman thrust her Winchester
through her belt and raised her hands, directing her strident voice at the
reddening sky.

Upon
this Earth

On
which we live

Usen
has power

This
power is mine

For
locating the enemy.

I
search for that Enemy

Which
only Usen the Great

Can
show to me.

She turned slowly in a circle, eyes
closed, repeating the chant, and her strong arms began to quiver like dowsing
rods. After about ten minutes, she stopped turning and opened her eyes, facing
the southwest.

She pointed.

“Thirty men on horseback are looking
for this place. Mexicans.
Rurales
.
They are lost, but they are near.”

Misquamacus smiled.

“By this act, Goyaałé, you and
your Bedonkohe will know the heart of Misquamacus.”

He took the bullroarer from his bag
and let it fall to its length, then he began to swing it slowly around.

Rurales?
Piishi ventured, for as the Rider knew of the
rurales
in Nacozari, so too did he.

It must be, the Rider agreed. He’s
going to bring them here and kill them all.

There were streaks of red in the sky
when Don Elfego came out of the trees to the place where the Apaches had burned
his son for the second time.

Mendez knew it too, and he spurred
his brush-slashed, heaving horse to come up alongside the African.

“What the hell is this? You’ve led
us right back to where we were, you stupid black ape!”

Kabede turned in his saddle. He had
done a decent job of misguiding the group up until this point, driving them
through the brush and up and down craggy slopes in erratic patterns, but
apparently he had done too good a job. He had gotten lost himself, and hadn’t
realized the extent of his own deception. Plowing ahead with a false sense of
purpose did that. He had meant to steer far clear of the old camp, but he had
inadvertently come right back to it, albeit from a foreign angle.

Now he was in a dire situation, for
as each of
rurales
entered the
clearing, he heard oath piled upon oath. He could very nearly feel their
exasperation and wrath weighing on the back of his neck.

“Oh my,” said Faustus, “Perhaps they
doubled back?” he suggested.

“Yes,” said Kabede lamely. “That is
what happened.”

Mendez spat and cursed in rapid
Spanish.

Don Elfego came along the other side
of Kabede and Faustus.

“Your man has cost us hours!” the
caballero
shouted, the reins in his
fists trembling. “It is nearly sunset!”

“In the morning, perhaps—” Faustus
began, but Mendez pulled out his pistol, cutting him off.

“In the morning the
zopilotes
will be sucking out his eyes.”

Kabede held up his hands, thinking
quickly.

“Wait! Wait! The trail leads back
down to the road. I think they must be scouting Nacozari. They must mean to
attack.”

Mendez hesitated.

“Attack?”

“Ah yes,” said Faustus, relieved. “That
does make sense.”

“Show us,” said Don Elfego.

Kabede turned.

“What?”

“Show us these signs you see. I want
to see the trail myself.”

Kabede tensed.

“They’re traveling light…hiding
their trail.”

“Then how can you be following it?
Show.”

“It’s difficult to explain. You’re
not a hunter.”

“Make it plain to me,” Don Elfego
said, slapping a hand on his own pistol.

Faustus’ hand went surreptitiously
under his arm to his own gun, and the corporal clapped a strong hand on his
thin wrist and cocked his pistol.

“Go on,
cholo
,” Mendez said, his eyes narrow and sharp as knife points.

Kabede slowly dismounted from his
horse.

“Leave the stick,” Mendez suggested.

Kabede jammed the staff point down
into the earth beside Faustus. It quivered there until Faustus leaned down and
rested his hand on the top to stop it.

Mendez covered him, in case the old
man got the idea to try and use it.

Kabede walked slowly toward the
tree-line, sweat beginning to pour from under his headdress. His Guycot rifle hung
from the saddle he left behind. His eyes flitted to the ground and brush,
trying to find something, anything that could be construed as the markings of
the passing of a man or animal. Behind him, the entire company of
rurales
watched, he knew, with their
guns on him. If he turned around without some kind of answer, he would face a
tide of bullets. As it was, the same fate of Don Elfego’s late Indian tracker
was already hanging very close over his head.

He considered bolting for the trees,
trying to interpose the trunks and shrubs between him and their fire. But of
course they would run him down anyway, and possibly shoot Faustus in the
meantime. Perhaps the old man was not of this world, but he was still just an
old man.

Then he heard a sizable clatter
behind him which made his shoulders jump. The horses whinnied in dismay. At
first he thought Mendez had lost his patience and signaled his men to fire, and
that the noise was that of thirty pistols and rifles cocking. But there was no
impact on him or on the foliage.

“Kabede!” Faustus exclaimed.

Kabede turned slowly, hesitating,
and saw nothing. The company’s horses were turning excitedly in place, their
saddles empty.

All their arms, the rifles and
pistols they had been holding, even the knives in their boots and belts lay in
piles on the ground.

“They’re gone,” Faustus remarked, a
relieved smile breaking across his face. “They’re all gone.”

Kabede trotted back across what he’d
previously presumed would be the last distance his legs would ever carry him
over.

“What did you do to them?” Kabede
asked in wonderment.

“This was not my doing,” Faustus
said, swinging down off his horse and kicking at Mendez’s pistol.

“How could this have happened? Where
are they?”

Faustus chuckled, shaking his head,
but then as a thought passed across his mind so too a cloud fell over his mood,
and his face assumed a thoughtful scowl.

“Misquamacus.”

“Could he do such a thing?”

Faustus nodded as he fished through
his coat pockets.

“If he can, then he has grown
stronger than I thought. Stronger than me, maybe.” He produced the mystic
jeweler’s glass and fitted it into his eye.

“What of the Rider then?”

Faustus shushed him and put a hand
over his naked eye, peering wholly into the glass.

“Yes. He has them. Misquamacus has
them all. Why didn’t it work on us?”

Kabede snatched the Rod of Aaron
from the ground.

“This protected you,” Kabede said. “My
talismans must have protected me.”

“Yes. Or perhaps you weren’t taken
because you were separated from the group.”

“The Rider.”

“He is alive,” Faustus confirmed. “Or
at least, Piishi is. Anyway, he’s standing.”

“Then we go to them,” Kabede said,
vaulting into the saddle of the horse.

“I can try to make out some of the
landmarks, but we still don’t know where they are,” Faustus said, relaxing his
brow and letting the glass drop into his palm. He tucked it into his vest
pocket.

Kabede held the staff out over the
horse’s head.

“Almighty
Igzee’abaihier
, this simple staff led Your people out of bondage
and across the wilderness. May it guide Your servant now to the Rider.”

He kicked the horse’s flanks and
galloped back up the mountain trail, leaving Faustus to shout and plead for
caution as he snatched up the Rider’s engraved Henry rifle and climbed back
atop his own pony.

Don Elfego fell to his knees and
vomited. When he had been a young man, he had often born the brunt of abuse
from his elder brothers because of his inability to weather, much less win, a
horse race. He’d always had a weak stomach, and the jostling motion of a horse
at full speed had always exacerbated this. He’d never had a problem with
anything below a normal trot, but speed had never agreed with him. As a rancher’s
son, this had been a source of continual embarrassment for him growing up, and
for his father too. His two eldest sons could ride like Comanches, but Elfego
had gained the nickname ‘Enfermizo’ for his constant motion-induced migraines
and resultant vomiting. Even long wagon trips made him sick.

Only his masterful financial
abilities and the accidental trampling of his eldest brother Chucho had secured
the rancho for him in the end, but he had lived long years since, and all his
subsequent accomplishments had put ‘Enfermizo Alvarez’ firmly in his past.

Or so he’d thought.

Now the old humiliating memories of
his brothers’ taunts and jeers came back to him in a rush as he stared at his
partially dissolved breakfast pooling on the red earth between his hands. One
minute he had been watching the Africano walking across the camp where Mauricio
had died, and the next there had been a rush of light and air and sound. He had
felt himself jerked bodily and shaken, like a cat in a gunny sack.

The next thing he’d known, he had
stumbled across muddy ground, been jostled by one of the gibbering
rurales
, and fallen face first. Then his
stomach had turned a somersault and given up its contents.

Now he raised his head, fighting to
hold onto his dignity, and saw something that made him give it up entirely.

The
rurales
were all around him, Mendez and the boy killer Pimpollo
bumping against each other, back to back, mouths agape in uncharacteristic fear
and shock.

Around them all were Indians.
Apaches, yes. There were Apaches, but there were others too. Navajo maybe, and
Indians in wolfskins and loincloths, and Indians such as he had never seen
before. A hundred or more, armed with everything from stone clubs to repeaters.

One all in scarlet garb stood on a
rock, lordly, above them. He twirled a rhombus, eliciting an unearthly howling
noise, and chanting in his savage tongue. He was old as the dunes and stones,
but his eyes were alight with a killer’s intelligence and hate. He may have
been the Red King of All Indians, for all Elfego knew.

Crouching here in the red mud,
trembling, vomit running through his beard, Elfego experienced a vision. In the
vision he was an Indian himself. An unwilling supplicant from a forest dwelling
tribe that knew nothing of the
maquahuitl
or the
chimalli
, and the mud in
which he was forced to abase himself by two jaguar warriors was blood-soaked
earth. The blood so deep it lapped at his wrists. The Red King was there, on
high as he was now, but gone was the simple Apache medicine cap and the red
tunic and dusty red leggings. In the vision his face was painted blue and
yellow and black, and he wore a resplendent headdress and a costume of
hummingbird feathers. He held aloft a curling snake and twinkling mirror staff,
and the sun was blazing at his back, an ouroboros serpent of hellish fire and
terrible light consuming itself in an insane, voracious need to consume its own
horrible glory. There was blood on his hands and splattered in startling
patterns on his naked chest. His eyes were fierce and thirsty as they were now.
The hand that did not hold the elaborate staff cupped a pulsing, squirting
heart, freshly torn free of its owner.