The Black Stallion Legend (15 page)

The minutes lengthened into hours as the stallion scaled the twists and folds of stone, his hoofs kicking up huge clouds of dust. Alec rode with jaws clamped shut to keep his teeth from chattering in the cold. His eyes ached and stung. It was worse for his horse, he knew. Yet they kept going, their bodies stiffening from the cold despite their labors.

Alec looked longingly for the sun, hoping it would bring the true day. It was up there somewhere but it was wasted and sickly behind the brown sky. He could
see its edges from time to time, cutting wan patches of broken morning light.

Finally the sky turned amber above the dust-laden air, becoming ruddy and red-edged. It continued to pale, and suddenly darkness left the land as the sun appeared like a round burning hole in the thick dust.

In the first reaching rays of the sun, Alec could find nothing of what he had known before. There was only a dead and ravaged land as far as he could see. The earth was clogged with ash and debris. Trees were uprooted and lying in tangled heaps, their trunks burned and stripped clean. Devastated by violent upheavals of the earth, all the land had an unreal, blasted appearance.

Even the mountains were nothing he had known before. Their summits had collapsed into great steaming depressions with craters gaping miles wide. There was no longer any snow or ice, only gashed remains of the eruptions that had taken place. Domes and peaks had been torn away, and even as he watched, great rock avalanches slid down the sides of remaining cliffs.

The destruction of the land was complete and Alec recalled Alph’s warning:
“There is only death outside the pueblo.”

Alec’s gaze continued to sweep across the gray and lifeless terrain before him. Could anyone, anything, have survived the awesome force that had caused such destruction?

“But we’re alive, Black,” he told his horse. “You and I … we’re going to find someone, somewhere.”

Alec rode for a long while before he spotted what
looked like the remains of a trail leading down a ridge. Flowing mud and debris poured down to either side of it, but he believed that if he followed it, he might find safety below.

Reaching the trail, he looked for footprints, hoofprints, tracks of any kind. He wished he could find just one person, one animal, alive, so he would know he was not alone in his world.

Hearing the rumble of thunder overhead, Alec looked up to see huge, dark clouds sweeping across the sky, driven by what seemed to be hurricane winds. Soon the clouds would blot out the sun and it would be dark again. He moved the Black on while there was still enough light to see his way.

As the great clouds passed overhead, the pale sky turned inky black. There was only a sliver of light on the horizon to the east. Alec rode toward it, guiding his horse carefully, cautiously. A cold wind swept over him and then a fine rain fell.

The rain came down heavier, matting the ash that covered the way before them. The Black’s strides faltered, then the stallion stumbled and Alec knew the ground was shifting beneath his hoofs. The horse plunged down the ridge, his way strewn with logs, until he finally reached the bottom.

“Good fellow, good fellow,” Alec said. “You made it. It’s got to be easier from now on.”

Alec rode on, glad for the rain, which cleared the air temporarily of ash and gas. Straining, he pulled clean air into his tortured lungs and knew the Black was doing the same.

Hours later the sun set in the colorless sky and dusk fell upon the ravaged land. Alec didn’t know how long he’d ridden when suddenly the Black snorted loudly. Before them Alec saw a sickly lake of gray-brown water where the flow of melted snow had been blocked by mud and the trunks of countless trees.

Reaching the water, Alec slipped off the Black. He felt sick from the vapors that had filled his lungs and parched his throat. He held on to the stallion, both hands around him, his head resting against the hot, sweated side. The rise and fall of his labored breathing matched the horse’s. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but his hands trembled and his stomach burned. Gagging, he vomited bloody froth into the dirty mud beside him.

The Black lowered his head to the water, and Alec heard the pulling suck of his lips as the fluid gurgled up the rings of his throat. It sounded good. It sounded wet. Alec decided to take his chances too, for he couldn’t feel worse than he did. He dropped to his knees and lowered his head to the water. He tasted its muddy, tepid wetness, letting it run over his tongue and down his throat. He raised his head as his horse did, then dipped to drink again, not swallowing the tepid water this time but rinsing his mouth and squirting water.

Moments later, knowing they could go no farther that night, Alec pulled a canvas bag of parched brown corn from his pocket and, cupping his hand, offered it to his horse.

“Just a little, Black, only a little,” he said.

Then, when he took his empty hand away from
the soft lips of the Black, he filled it again with corn and wetted it with water. He ate his skimpy meal, knowing there was only enough corn left for another day.

The food stuck sour in his throat as he lay still on the ground, thinking how it had been at home with his horse rubbed down and fed, safe in a stall with clean straw, close beside a tack room with saddles and bridles and the smell of clean, polished leather. Then Alec fell asleep and dreamed as he had not dreamed in years.

He was a small boy and wanted a horse of his own very much, but he lived in a city and could not have one. Then something wonderful happened and he was riding a great, black horse. Someone said in his dream, “You will never be able to ride that horse. You cannot keep him.” He cried because he wanted to ride the black horse very much …

Alec awoke with a start and there were tears on his cheeks from his dream. He knew it was time to get up and soak his head in the water. There was no need to go back so far, even in dreams.

It was shortly before daybreak, the coldest time of the darkest hour. He got to his numbed feet, shivering and stretching to ease the stiffness from his legs and back. The Black was standing nearby and Alec went to him, holding him close for his love and the warmth of his body.

“It was no dream,” he said softly. “You’re here, and we’re going to find our way out somehow.”

Alec mounted his horse and rode from the clearing. By dawn he was climbing the strewn gullies that rimmed the edge of what was left of the trail, his breath smoking in the cold but clean air.

An hour after daylight a strong wind came up and
swept across the ravaged land. It blew over the tumbled stones of the mountains and across the bare land, but none of it was as bad as the day before. The trail led downward, ever downward, toward the desert, where Alec knew they would find warmth and, he hoped, peace and safety.

The desert loomed before Alec in a fluid tremor of heat, but he welcomed the warmth after the numbing cold he had felt for so long. As the hours passed and the Black traveled through the ever-mounting warmth, Alec knew he wasn’t thinking clearly anymore. He had trouble focusing his eyes on the rutted trail ahead. He didn’t have to see, he told himself. His horse knew where he was going.

Finally night fell upon them once more and the stars began to show in the sky. A breeze rustled through the brush of a nearby clearing, and Alec smelled water and damp grass.

The Black made his way to a pool of clear water ebbing from the rocks, and there Alec drank with his horse, long and without hurry. They had found their place for another night.

Moments later Alec ate the last of his corn while the Black fed on whatever grass he could find near the water, pulling and munching hungrily, moving faintly in the darkness but never far away.

Alec stretched out on the ground, listening to the muffled sound of his horse’s teeth and wondering what they would find beyond.

“Sleep good, Black,” he called. Then he fell asleep, hungry.

Sometime during the night Alec felt a prickle-footed
thing crawling across his face. He jerked up, slapped it off and jumped to his feet to see a centipede squirming in the earth. He raised his foot to mash it with the heel of his boot. But he could not bring his foot down to stomp it into pulp in the dirt. It was the first sign that life remained in his world.

An hour after daybreak Alec was on his way again. He had forgotten how long it had been since he’d left the sacred pueblo. Two days? Or was it three?

Suddenly Alec checked the Black’s strides; then he bent over to study the trail and, finally, slid from his horse to read the hoofprints deep in the earth.

Shod hoofs! The Black’s!
They marked the ground in a regular order of strides. Alec studied the soil grains edging the tracks and knew he and his horse had traveled this way when they had first come to this land. He mounted again and rode on eagerly, hopefully.

It was more than an hour later when Alec pulled up the Black again, stopping sharp and squinting into the sun with his hands shading his eyes. He was able to make out the corners of adobe huts and fence posts hidden in the haze beyond. He rode toward the lonely village, thinking of the people he might find there and the food he might get while he was with them … meat and tortillas and corn for his horse.

Not a leaf, not a stem, stirred in the sweating hush of the day as Alec neared the settlement. Suddenly the Black stopped of his own accord and stood riveted to the ground. Then he screamed and the sound of his shrill whistle rang through the still air.

Alec saw what lay ahead. There was nothing left of the village. There were no homes, no people. The walls and roofs of adobe shacks were scattered about. Tawny stone, pale mud brick and bodies lay everywhere. He saw the black humps of rubble where the homes had been, the scorched trees, roofless walls, window holes, all in gaping ruins.

The Black was in sudden veering panic, but Alec got him moving forward, sweeping wide of the ruins. As Alec rode away he talked to his horse, more to console himself and to make sense of what he had seen, as much as he was able to do.

“I hope I can tell someone what happened here. I wish I could help everybody who lived here, but I can’t. It’s over, and I don’t know what’s ahead.”

The wetness of the stallion’s neck and the swing and push of his haunches kept Alec conscious, if not alert. He knew he was going to be sick. At every pound of the Black’s hoofs he felt his backbone ram into his skull, like a hammer pounding his head. He leaned over and vomited beside the stallion.

“Keep going or you are done,”
he warned himself.
“You have to find your way to whatever is ahead.”
He felt the drive of the Black’s legs beneath him. He didn’t look back.

Two hours passed and Alec held on to his horse
with desperate hands and great effort of will. The sun was hot, the going rough. Rocking in the twist of inner as well as outer pain, he tried to throw off the fevered weakness that was slowly overpowering him.

Alec rode across the vast immensity of the desert with its dunes and far horizons. At the top of a sandy rise, he recognized the area as the one in which he had left his truck and trailer so long ago! He squinted in the glare of the sun, trying to find some sign of the vehicles.

Darn his eyes, he couldn’t see!

There was a familiar shallow dish in the land to his right. It could be where he’d parked the truck, he decided. It could be, but where was it? He narrowed his eyes still more, trying to see. There, there … he thought he saw the outline of something in the sand.

The Black was moving toward the shallow dish of ground, his strides lengthening, his ears pitched forward.

“That’s fast enough,” Alec cautioned his horse. “Don’t use all you got left. You don’t need to use it all.”

The light from the sun had moved down, reddening the way before them, when Alec reached his truck and trailer buried deep in sand and ash. He rode up to what remained of the hulking body of the engine, then alongside the flattened horse trailer, its body splintered into pieces strewn about the area.

Alec knew he could follow the road that led ever southward, the way they had come so long ago. Eventually he would reach the highway. But had he the strength to go on? Had his horse? And what would they find there? Only death and destruction as well?

Alec’s gaze swept over the waste of lifeless
desolation all around him. He felt his own smallness under the immensity of it all.

His eyes returned to the shattered body of the horse trailer, then suddenly he slipped off the Black and went to it. Dropping to his knees in the sand and ash, he uncovered one of the pieces that stuck in the earth like a signpost. He read the lettering on it while holding it in the air, high in the sun.

HOPE

It was all that was left of “
HOPEFUL FARM
” but enough for Alec to know he had to go on, to find his way back to whatever life still held for him.

Alec rose to his feet. The road beyond led down a steep slope to a plateau below. He’d better get going. Before long it would be dark and impossible for him to find his way.

He mounted the Black and rode on, no longer feeling total despair but a glimmer of hope, hope for himself and all mankind. Life without his beloved Pam would always be a kind of doom, he knew. But he had learned that one lives with his loss until it can be accepted, and something that was not his alone but that he shared with Pam would always live within him. He had come to this land seeking peace for his troubled mind. From the Indians, those who had lived and died, he had learned the power of their faith and courage. In many ways, they were showing him the way back home.

“This is your emergency radio station in Flagstaff, Arizona.

“Scores of desert and mountain residents are arriving daily, having miraculously survived a mighty earthquake that scientists report to be one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history. The series of huge tremors, which had seismographs quivering at the top of the scale, laid waste to upland areas for hundreds of miles.