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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: White Desert
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The Stronghold
“It is never a
good idea, Deputy Marshal Murdock, to take advice from one's enemy.”
It seemed when I opened my eyes that this conversation had been going on for a while. I was looking up at the rafters of the great dining hall, and certain numb spots in my back told me I was stretched out atop one of the trestle tables. Something cool and damp touched my face; I turned my head just in time to see Fleurette take away the wet cloth and wring it out over a chipped enamel basin balanced on the edge of the table. I knew without turning my head that Philippe stood on the other side.
I said, “Someone's been talking in his sleep.” Taking in air to speak brought needles of pain to my injured side.
“We French are not able tacticians,” he said. “It must not be forgotten that Napoleon was Italian. Still, it is no great revelation to determine that the logical direction to take in a fight with a man twice one's size is away from him.”
“I'm not prone to argue.”
Fleurette laughed at that, proving that she did know some English. She had a light, musical titter.
“Where's Claude?” I asked.
“I sent him for our horses. We are free to go as soon as you are ready to ride.”
Fleurette said something, and the two conversed in French for a minute. He put an end to it with a harsh “
Non
!” To me: “You can ride, Deputy Marshal Murdock, yes?”
“I can if it's away from here. Are you sure I'm included? I lost the fight.”
“You should have asked for an explanation of the rules of combat in Shulamite. It is not necessary that you win, merely that you survive. Evidently that is no small feat where Brother Babel is concerned.”
“I had a little help.”
“So I see.” He knocked a knuckle against the buckskin wrap, and I realized my shirt was spread open to expose it. “One would think you knew what was in store.”
“One would be wrong. God must love a fool or there wouldn't be so many of us my age.”
“It was not just the hide. Queen Fidelity commanded Babel to stop when you were senseless. I gathered from the excitement that it is very rare for her to take a hand in such matters. You must have made a favorable impression upon her.”
“I think she liked my name.”
“A formidable woman. It is a shame that she must go to hell.”
Fleurette crossed herself, then reapplied the damp cloth to my face. She had a sure and gentle touch. The various rebellions and buffalo hunts in which her man had taken part had made her an expert in tending to the sick and injured.
“How far is Cree Lake from here?” I asked.
“Two days in good weather,” Philippe said after a moment. “The Sioux stronghold is there. Many of them rode with Crazy
Horse in the Little Big Horn fight. You will find the free African community of Shulamite a place of great warmth and hospitality once you approach the stronghold.”
“Hebron says that's where I'll find Bliss and Whitelaw.”
“Hebron said you would be wise to step inside the arms of Babel.”
“He didn't have any reason to lie to me about Bliss and Whitelaw if he expected Babel to kill me. They're there, all right. You have your family to look after, so if you'll direct me to the lake I'll say good-bye. You've earned that second double eagle and a share of the reward as well.”
“My family and I have nothing to fear from our brothers the Sioux. We will go with you. An American can lose himself in that country for a month.”
I made a note to stop at Donalbain's farm on my way home and set the old Scot straight about the Métis.
Against Fleurette's protests in rapid French, I sat up and buttoned my shirt. The pain in my ribs was as bad as it had been the first time they were broken, but I had survived it before, and anyway I was sore all over from the beating I had taken, so I just rolled it into the inventory. With Philippe's assistance I got into my bearskin and we went out. The little snake-faced mustang, the gray, and King Henry were packed and waiting for us at the base of the steps. Brother Babel was holding them.
The big man had his boots on now, along with a heavy canvas coat and his floppy hat. There was a purple swelling along the side of his jaw where my fist had raked it, but aside from that he didn't look any the worse the wear for our fight, any more than a tree whose bark I'd nicked with my initials. When I appeared he showed a wealth of teeth—minus one—as crooked as neglected tombstones in what I took to be a grin of recognition from one combatant to another, although twenty-four
hours earlier I might have seen it as a savage challenge. If the scar tissue on his face was any indication, I gathered that it was a rare thing when one of his opponents lived for him to grin at.
The members of the Committee of Public Vigilance were standing nearby. The look on Brother Enoch's gaunt face was no greeting. Gripping his Spencer tightly, he turned to say something to Brother Hebron, who shook his head and stepped forward. He didn't offer his hand.
“I didn't mean to give you bad advice,” he said. “It was one thing no one ever tried and I was curious to see what would happen.”
“No charge for settling the question,” I said.
“Queen Fidelity is resting. She claims to be a hundred and ten, and she looks it, so I'm guessing she needs what she gets. She asked me to give you something.” He took a small leather pouch from his coat pocket and held it out.
I accepted it after a moment. It was tied with a cord and something made a whispery sound inside when I shifted it on my palm. It was barely heavier than air. I started to undo the cord.
“Don't open it. She says you'll waste the magic. It's just old bones. She said they belonged to an eagle her grandfather captured with his bare hands. Apparently you impressed her. She says he was a powerful chief.”
“Everybody's grandfather was.” But I left the knot alone. “Voodoo?”
“She says it's older than that. The magic belongs to the ancient gods, who died before the white man came. She says it will see you home safe.”
“What do
you
say?”
“I say bones are bones and there's nothing saying those
couldn't have come from last week's chicken. This is the magic I trust.” He drew my Deane-Adams from his belt and held it out butt first. “Your long guns are on your horses.”
I inspected the loads in the cylinder and holstered the revolver. “I guess this makes me the first white man to leave Shulamite alive.”
“That's just a story the Mounties tell to scare the little Mounties. They wouldn't let this settlement stand five minutes if we went around killing every pale-skinned American we saw.”
“What made me a special case?”
“Every now and then I have to throw one to the committee. It was just your bad luck to have come along at the end of a long dry spell.”
I lowered my voice. “You want to watch your topknot around Enoch. He's hungry.”
“That's why I made him number two man. If I learned anything in the army it's to keep your enemies close.”
“Indians don't sneak up on that easy.”
“I wasn't talking about Indians.” He wasn't smiling.
Philippe gave me a boost into the saddle and I rode out in front with my right side on fire. I didn't look back, and I never saw Shulamite or Brother Hebron again, although I heard a year later he came to a short end when one of his own fellow settlers shot him by accident while they were out hunting meat for the winter. There is close, and there is too close, when you do your measuring by the length of a Spencer's barrel.
An hour out of
Shulamite, the snow I'd been smelling all day came pouring out of the low clouds like bits of candy from a piñata.
The flakes were big to start, floating like paper and melting with sizzling sounds where they landed on coat sleeves and the backs of gloves. They hung up on our eyelashes and left wet trails behind when they slithered down our faces. As the sun descended and the wind picked up, they became smaller and harder, bits of jagged granite rattling against our standing collars and welting our skin. The wind lifted the snow where it fell and threw it at us in buckets. Philippe gave Claude a hand up behind Fleurette and steered King Henry in close to the mustang to shout into my ear, but the wind snatched away his words at a distance of six inches. He jabbed a finger at a patch of shadow a hundred yards ahead. I nodded energetically and we made for the shadow.
It belonged to a stand of virgin pine, the straight trunks so close together we had to go in single file, Philippe's big dun leading the way. We rode for miles through that dense wood,
the wind howling outside as around a stockade, before we found a clearing big enough to make camp. While gathering wood in the thickening dark, I stumbled over something and discovered it was the stone foundation of a cabin, the logs having long since burned or rotted away.
“
Coureur de bois,”
said Philippe, once we had built a fire big enough to warm our hands. “One of the first, I should imagine. He must have been the only white man for a thousand miles. Perhaps he died of loneliness.”
Fleurette said something.
Her husband nodded. “
Oui, ma petit
. More likely he was eaten by a bear. You see what I mean, Deputy Marshal Murdock, about a man alone?”
“You said an American.”
“I intended no offense. You carved North America from the wilderness, killed the Indians and the buffalo and felled the trees to make room for your civilization. Here in Canada we did not conquer the wilderness, merely made our peace with it. But a truce with a bear is only valid until he hungers again.”
“‘Grandmother's land,' the Indians call it,” I said. “After Victoria. But it's no place for old ladies.”
“My grandmother was a Cree, a fierce, white-haired woman who buried two husbands and once beat a puma to death with a piece of firewood. She would feed and shelter you if you loved her, but she never forgot a wrong, and she never slept. You must never think Canada is asleep, or that she has forgiven you your transgressions. Our
coureur
may have expired peacefully in his bed. It is more likely that he fell down a ravine and broke his neck. It would have been a ravine he had descended a thousand times without slipping and thought as safe as a pasture.”
“Tell me about the stronghold.”
“It is well named. Ten thousand years ago, the big ice that
scooped out Cree Lake pushed a million tons of rock into a tower on its eastern shore. It sits like a lion upon its haunches and can only be scaled from the north, where one side of it was beaten into rubble by storms that would have destroyed our
coureur's
cabin a hundred times a hundred. That side will be guarded heavily. We will not climb it without the permission of those who live on the crest.”
“Tell me about them.”
“They are Sioux from America. They came here with Sitting Bull after the Custer fight, as you know, and retreated to the stronghold when Sitting Bull agreed to return. They are led by a man called Wolf Shirt. His sister married Crazy Horse, who Wolf Shirt advised not to give himself up to General Crook. It was wise counsel, as history proved.”
“I doubt he's reasonable on the subject of white Americans.”
“After Crazy Horse was murdered, his wife starved herself to death at the Red Cloud Agency. Peace with white Americans deprived him of his friend and his sister. He has reason to be unreasonable.”
“Well, we sure are popular up here.”
Philippe blew through his flute to clear it of lint from his pocket. “
I
like you, Deputy Marshal Murdock. However, I do not run with the herd. The one time I did I got shot.”
“Brother Hebron said Wolf Shirt harbors fugitives to make himself a nuisance.”
“He was right. The Sioux know they cannot win this war, but they can make winning less pleasant for the victors.” He moved his shoulders in a Gallic shrug. “It is a small thing, but it is all your army has left them.”
“The Sioux must want something they'll take in trade for Bliss and Whitelaw.”
“The Black Hills of Dakota, free of white settlers. And sixty million buffalo.” He played the flute.
 
 
The storm blew for a week, after which the sun came out and we waited another week for the drifts to melt before we could resume our journey. We finished the bacon and the last of the moose. Claude earned his keep by running down snowshoe hares and bringing them into the clearing at arm's length, kicking and screaming at the ends of their powerful hind legs, for Fleurette to bash in their skulls with a chunk of firewood and then skin and clean and cook them on a spit made from pine branches. For variety I went goose-hunting with the Winchester, and nearly wound up meat myself when what I thought at first was a big muskrat hut sticking up out of a frozen pond raised itself to its full height, streaming water, and I found myself staring face to face at eight and a half feet of grizzly. It was covered with silver-tipped hairs like hoarfrost. Its head, with the hair parted in the middle the way bartenders wore it, was as big as a pig, with the little black eyes glittering alongside the great snout, so like the butt end of a charred log.
Bears are nearsighted, but they can detect movement at a greater distance than most humans can. I froze. If I was lucky it would take me for a tree. It grunted, the noise as loud as gravel shifting at the bottom of a sluice, and raised its snout, the nostrils working. I hoped I was downwind. A .44 Winchester will stop a bear, they say, but the bear doesn't always realize it. Not in time to do the shooter any good. At thirty yards only ten leaps kept us apart. I wasn't sure if I could get off twelve rounds in that time, or whether twelve rounds would do the trick.
I willed myself into a pile of rock. A magpie could have landed on me and plucked out an eye and I wouldn't have
budged. An eye is a fair trade for not being eaten. The patch and the story would keep me in free drinks for the rest of my life.
The grizzly wasn't any more sure of me than I was. If it thought I was another bear in my coat, it might challenge me for the fishing hole, or go off and look for some less populated spot. It made a test roar: a ripping, rending sound like someone tearing corrugated iron with a wrecking bar. It made every hair on my body stand out, but I didn't move. When it lowered itself I thought it was getting ready to charge. Instead it slapped at the water with a paw the size of a kitchen table, splashing water out over the edges of the jagged hole and onto the ice. Still I didn't react. The bear grunted again and sat back on its haunches, sinking into its rolls of fat and fur in an attitude of frustrated contemplation. It did everything but scratch its head.
It sat there a long time, although nowhere nearly as long as it seemed. I second-thought my plan. If I could shoot it where it sat; but I couldn't will myself to raise the carbine and trigger an attack. I could make a run for it, climb a tree. This time ignorance held me. I couldn't remember if it was a black bear or a grizzly that could climb trees like water rushing up a straw.
And I wondered why in hell this brute wasn't hibernating with all the rest of the bears.
All of which helped to pass the time while the grizzly got tired of waiting. It raised itself again, cuffed the air with a set of claws like railroad spikes, roared again, then shifted its fifteen hundred pounds or so of fur and fat and muscle and short temper onto its forefeet and turned around and mounted the bank on the other side of the pond. It shook itself, water radiating everywhere in lances, and looked back at me over its shoulder one last time, just in case I'd moved or grown a moustache or done something else to make myself look edible. Then it swiveled
its head back around and moved off into the trees, making no more noise than a drawer sliding shut.
I held my position, and my breath, for another minute. I didn't want to repeat the episode of the returning moose. Then I heard a crashing back in the underbrush, the bear picking up speed as it went in search of less complicated prey. I let the barrel of the Winchester droop finally. My shoulders ached and the muscles in my jaw felt as if I'd been chewing rawhide for an hour. My clothes beneath the bearskin were drenched. I couldn't have been wetter if I'd swum across the pond. The chill set in then and I turned back toward camp. I completely ignored a goose that exploded from the ground ten feet in front of me and flew in a long rainbow loop down to the hole in the ice the bear had made. I had lost my taste for meat.
I found Philippe clawing the tangles out of King Henry's shaggy coat with a curry comb and told him about the bear.
“You disappoint me, Deputy Marshal Murdock. A bear steak is worth ten rabbits for stamina on a hard trail. The heart will take you as far as Siberia.”
“It was more a question of how far that bear could travel on a Murdock steak.”
“You are armed.”
“So was he.”
“You are sure it was a grizzly?”
“It was big and hairy and a swipe of one of its paws would have sent my head into camp ahead of the rest of me. I didn't ask for further identification.”
“Up here the black bear grow nearly as big. Some of the older ones are tipped with silver, as well. One way to make certain is to anger him and then climb a tree. If he climbs up after you, he's a black. The grizzly will merely wait with the patience of Saint Anne for you to come down and be eaten.”
“I wasn't that curious.”
“You disappoint me,” he said again. “I was told all you American frontiersmen shit bear and keep puma for pets.”
“That was Jim Bridger. He died last year of a goiter.”
“You should have brought the marvelous Evans rifle. Even if you did not kill him the weight of the lead would have slowed him down so you could walk up to him and cut off a steak for your friend Philippe.”
“I went out after geese. I didn't think I'd need eighteen rounds to bring down a gander. Do you want to talk about that bear all day?”
“I did not introduce the subject.” He slapped the big dun on the neck and got a purring snort in reply. Then he slipped the comb into the kit at his feet and stretched the kinks out of his small frame. Currying was strenous work; he'd chucked his coat and rolled up his sleeves to expose muscles in his arms as big as train couplings. “How were the drifts?”
“Down,” I said.
“Good. We will leave for the stronghold at first light.”
 
 
The sun was well up when we cleared the woods at last and squinched up our eyes against a plain of white as bright as a salt flat. The trees stood out like embroidery on a sheet, and the sky was bottle-blue and just as clear. A bald eagle had it all to itself, flapping its wings dreamily between updrafts, where it rode the air like a kite. I thought of the eagle bones in the leather pouch in my pocket and hoped they were genuine. It wasn't country for chickens.
“
Monsieur le depute!
” Philippe's whisper was a harsh rasp, accompanied by his upraised hand.
I heard nothing but the wind in the pines behind us; but the ears of the Métis were as sharp as a deer's. I drew rein.
Fleurette removed her arms from around her husband and craned her neck, pointing her sharp features to the sky as if to smell the air. Young Claude, who had been walking behind King Henry to avoid wallowing in snow to his waist, leaned out to see past the big dun, fixing his bright eyes on what appeared to be an empty space of ground some three hundred yards from where we were waiting. I felt blind and deaf.
The landscape was deceptive. It was not as flat as it seemed under its blanket of snow, which masked long deep depressions gouged by glaciers, like the troughs between waves at sea. As we waited amid clouds of steam from our horses, I heard the first silvery tinkles and flatulent leathery creaks that Philippe had been hearing for minutes, and the others had heard before me. The sounds chilled me to the marrow. In a magnesium flash I was transported back to Murfreesboro, where I had waited with a small patrol in a stand of hickory, covering our mounts' muzzles with our hands to keep them from wickering while Braxton Bragg's Confederate cavalry passed by within pistol range.
The nearest trough shallowed out where Claude was watching. I caught a glint of sunlight off burnished steel, then the brown head and neck of a horse whose coat gleamed like a well-polished boot, and then in a burst like a flock of cardinals, the bright red tunics and brass buttons and spiked white cork helmets of the North-West Mounted Police drawing a brilliant slash four abreast and a quarter of a mile long against the stark white countryside. The Mounties had come to the stronghold.

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