Quaternity Page 20

  Doc Quillen drove the wagon until it threw a rim and broke its whiffletree, bouncing too fast across a washout.

  “Goddammit, Doc,” Spaw groused, “you kill everything you touch.”

  Later the Tonkawas reappeared and hove their horses to.

  “Looks like something’s got them riled up,” Spaw told Marwood.

  “I can think of only one thing that would do that,” Lovich said with worry.

  The band rode back with the Tonks, accompanying them like an honour guard. They sat their horses staring at two bodies hanging like spoiled fruit from mesquite stobs—an unimaginable harvest of violence and savagery.

  The dead men were skinned. Their red, mottled flesh was networked with white sinew and lumps of yellowish fat. The sharpened mesquite stob, with its black thorns, penetrated their lower jaws, and exited their mouths like caustic demon tongues.

  “Are they white?” Botis asked.

  Lovich leaned off his horse and spat on the ground. “Hard to tell, Captain. They might be white. Indians who done it all the same.”

  “I will ask you one more time: Are they white?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe they are.”

  “Cut them down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Spaw and Marwood were tasked with the job. Spaw climbed the tree, holding a branch with gloved hands to protect himself from the poisoned thorns. He raised his boot and pushed against the chest of the dead man. The body inched along the mesquite stob but got hung up in the thorns. He hacked at them with a machete. The branch cracked. The body jerked and fell half a foot. It swayed, a sickening red mass of pulped flesh. Spaw kicked it again, his boot squelching, and it fell to the ground with a wet spongy thump. Marwood whipped a lariat around the legs of the second dead man and pulled while Spaw hacked the limb. It, too, fell in a slump.

  “You want us to bury them, Captain?” Lovich asked Botis.

  “What the hell for? This country has to eat, too. Let’s ride.”

  They were almost off the Llano for good when they were beset by Comanche raiders.

  They were Quahadi, and their faces, and the faces of their horses, were painted black. They rode in a counterclockwise wheel around Botis and his men. Little Shreve lay dead in a pile of cactus, scalped, his heart taken as prize.

  The bandits again had the good fortune to hold the high ground—a bald limestone break surrounded by tall yucca. Botis’s men husbanded their shots. When arrows landed nearby Marwood grabbed them and broke the shafts so they could not be used again.

  The Comanches possessed a few guns, mostly eighteenth century flintlocks with slanting frizzen pans and other obsolete muzzleloaders. One Comanche warrior possessed a modern breech-loading rifle, but without forestock or sight. Another, dressed only in top hat and tails, carried an escopeta, the only decent working gun among them. Once the initial volley was over, during which Doc Quillen was crippled, they resorted to more traditional weaponry.

  They rode bareback, slipping over the offside of their horse with one leg across its back, shooting their short bows under the horse’s outstretched neck. They wove in and out of the standing yucca plants. Marwood could not draw a clear bead on them. Spaw took an arrow in his leg and sprawled helpless on the ground.

  After a somewhat curtailed flurry of violence, it was over. A second war party crested a grassy rise to the north. They stole the remuda and added their own covering fire until the first raiding party had disengaged from battle. Then they formed up and rode away together, into the Staked Plains with the stolen horses.

  Red Thunder looked first at his dead cousin and then at Botis. He walked to his horse and flung himself on its back. He lifted his Spencer rifle, reined his horse around with a violent jerk, and flew after the retreating band of Comanches.

  The men watched his dust plume shred up and disappear on the high desert wind.

  “You want us to go after him, Captain?” Lovich asked.

  Botis shook his massive head. “No. He is a man riding to his destiny. I can respect that.”

  He started away, stopped, gazed back to where Red Thunder had disappeared, and continued on. “He will find Cibola,” he said with something like envy.

  The arrow had pierced Spaw’s calf, transfixing the meat of the muscle. Marwood cut the iron head away, yanked out the shaft, and washed the wound with water. He peeled paddles of nopal and tied the green pulp to the entrance and exit wounds with jute. Spaw lay back on his elbows, his face ashen. His fancy ostrich plume had lost its fullness, and was naught but a naked quill.

  Doc Quillen was in a great deal of pain. He had taken a full load of rusty nailheads from the escopeta at close range, shredding his left leg from hip to knee. The damage was too extensive to sew up. The men did what they could to make him comfortable, and waited for him to die.

  Meanwhile, they held another war council and decided to pull out and make for higher ground. Spaw was down a horse and they had no spares, so he doubled up with Marwood. Lovich built a travois and they strapped Quillen to it with blanket strips. Quillen puffed a cigar while they dragged him along the bumpy ground. He held a tattered bumbershoot made with bone ribs and a sagging human skin canopy to protect his face from the fierce sun.

  Spindles of dust wobbled in the distance. As the company rode, dust devils tracked alongside them for the remainder of the day, like loyal shepherding dogs.

  They rode off the staked plains and struck out cross-country. They hit the Pecos river, camped and rested for a day, and followed it north into the territory of New Mexico.

  They came upon rancherias and prosperous estancias on the western rim of the Llano Estacado. Many houses had already been burned out by Comanche war parties. From those that had not, Botis took on water, food, and horses, and forced his men to keep riding.

  They rode into Fort Sumner, bought supplies and powder, and crossed the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Quillen was taking a long time to die. His leg had worsened, and though he was now able to ride horseback and could cup himself, he knew he was done in and ready for the casket.

  Marwood sat beside him one evening as they camped in an arroyo. The sky to the west was crimson. Petroglyphs engraved on the rocks along the arroyo walls shone snow white in the distance. Marwood remarked how he could see them shine. Quillen said he could not, that they only showed themselves to a man ready to see them.

  “I want you to have this,” the resurrectionist said. He handed Marwood a gold locket and chain. “That there belonged to my mother.”

  Marwood stared at the shiny locket in his calloused hand. “I don’t remember mine,” he said.

  “No,” Quillen said, “you would not.”

  “I have been thinking about what you said that night, in the dissection tent.”

  “Have you now?” Quillen puffed a petite cigarillo.

  “I don’t know what I am,” Marwood said in an embarrassed, confessional tone. “I don’t think I have ever known.”

  “No man does with any assurance,” Quillen stated. “Only Botis. Every other man must solve that mystery for himself.”

  “I believe I will go north, Doc.”

  Quillen studied him without speaking. “I believe that is the right thing to do,” he said at last. He fell silent, then said, “You make sure I get buried, Mar. Don’t leave me on the road like they did poor Ed Gratton.”

  “All right.”

  “You keep that locket, too. Give it to a girl one day.”

  “I will do that.” Marwood stowed the locket away. “What do you want me to do with your books and journals?”

  “Burn them,” Quillen said. “They don’t mean nothing anymore.”

  They limped into Agua Negra Chiquita on the first of September. The day was cold and bracing, and the wind felt as if it cut the flesh from their bones. Marwood sold his Hawken. He purchased a good Sharps rifle off a buffalo hunter who had mar
ried a twelve-year-old Cherokee girl and called it quits.

  “It’s a hell of a world,” the buffalo hunter told Marwood. “I killed those big shaggies from sunup to sundown. We used to piss down the barrels of our guns they got so hot. We’d dig slugs from their hearts and use them again. Made and lost a fortune twice over. Now I’m going to pick up their bones and sell them for fertilizer. You think God’s not laughing at that?”

  Botis and company left the tiny settlement and headed west. They passed between red and yellow sandstone cliffs, through more adobe pueblitos, and into the dirty, narrow streets of Santa Fe.

  Botis hitched his horse in the alameda. Marwood went off to buy a horn of gunpowder. Dirty, unkempt children ran through the street selling huge bundles of grass forage for a dime. Botis bought some, cut them open and threw them down in the street so the horses could feed.

  Marwood found a telegraph office in a sandstone building fronted with mud adobe. He paid for, and sent, a wire to Laredo. When that was done, he purchased his horn of powder and a new shotpouch from a bodega.

  He found Botis and crew eating heaps of boiled mutton and fried onions in a restaurant facing the Santa Fe River. The walls were planked with piñon. A hooded fireplace smoked and blazed, the wood popping. A Mestizo woman stirred a pot of red chili with a long wooden ladle.

  Marwood sat down. It had been another long day and he was glad for the break. They ate, drank a gallon of black coffee between them, and hammered out their plans.

  “We will have to hire new men,” Lovich said. “Scouts, too, if we can find any Indians we can trust.”

  “Some of these Tiwa know the country,” Marwood said.

  “Leastways we won’t have to pay them much,” Spaw said, reaching for the coffee pot. His injured leg was propped on another chair.

  “I think we four horsemen are enough,” Botis countered. He forked a mess of onions and peppers into his mouth. “Remember,” he said, chewing, “that morning in my office. In Piedras Negras? It was the four of us then.”

  Lovich sipped his coffee and contemplated the turn of events. “Looks like we’ve come full circle.”

  “Is that what you want, Captain?” Spaw asked.

  Botis wiped his mouth with a napkin. He glanced at Marwood and smiled broadly. His white teeth glinted behind his black beard.

  “It is what I have been praying for all my life,” he said.

  PART V

  Numank Maxana

  CHAPTER 23

  They were not men who could remain inside buildings long. The only roof they needed was the sky. They gathered their horses and rode six miles out of Santa Fe.

  Spaw built an outlaw’s fire at the mouth of an empty slot canyon. They crouched around the fire, surrounded by snow-capped mountains; they were like a band of Paleolithic savages more comfortable with knapped stone tools than gun, powder horn, and saddle.

  They rode into the Taos Pueblo the following Friday and attacked a government payroll wagon. Then they went up into the mountains with their gold and buried it. They lived like bears—sleeping during the day and coming down from the mountains at night to forage along the El Camino Real.

  In the weeks that followed there grew whispers and rumours of four horsemen who were attacking pack trains throughout the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It was said these horsemen rode from mountaintop to mountaintop with lightning between their hands, and they used unholy darkness to hide their movements. When men gathered in saloons at night, or in plazas during the day, they sat or stood in a close circle, drinking from a shared bottle. They assured one another these bandido yanquis fed on the souls of men, and dressed themselves with fire and burning ash. No mortal man was safe from their depredations, and their gold cache filled a great cave.

  When Botis and company rode through the Arroyo Seco one morning they discovered a crude bulto carving of four horses nailed to the front door of the Spanish mission. Below the carving was a clay bowl filled with gold and silver. Botis divided it among his men, and they mounted up and rode past the deserted village.

  They were making their slow way through Ratón Pass when Marwood spotted a white dove flying overhead. After a while they heard a creaking wagon beyond the trees behind them and stopped in the middle of the road. They took out their guns. A man driving a two-wheeled ambulance wagon, his burros hitched in tandem, came rattling around the bend. He wore a knee-length serape with faded bands of yellow and blue.

  The rickety Civil War wagon had broken leather springs and jounced like a child’s toy on the stony road. Their curiosity got the better of them and they drew nigh. While the driver sat patiently under their guns Botis pulled the wagon cover aside and peered into the back.

  “Are you Mestizo?” he asked the wizened old man.

  “Spanish, señor.”

  “What have you got in this here chock barrel?”

  “A quintal of salt.”

  “Salt?”

  “I am taking it to Pueblo.”

  “You mean Colorado?”

  “Sí.”

  Botis pulled the triangle of canvas back over the barrel. “Well, I will be goddamned,” he said.

  They rode alongside him. He told them his name was Domingo de Salazar. He was taking salt to his brother-in-law who lived in Pueblo. He said he thought many men were coming up behind them from Taos, men with evil on their minds, but he could not be sure.

  Five miles farther on they came to a hanged man in the bend of the road. Grackles flew from his chest and shoulders when they approached. The man had been strung up without his boots, his chest laid bare to the wind. Carved into the muscle were two letters.

  “Guess they don’t cotton to horse thieves in this neck of country,” Spaw said. “It will make for thin living on our part.”

  Marwood heard this but said nothing in reply. Spaw rode on, nibbling his already champered square of man leather with more than his usual preoccupation.

  They made camp and shared fire and meat with their new companion.

  “Are you looking for work, señor?” Salazar asked.

  “We are always looking for something,” Botis answered.

  “You will not find it in Pueblo,” Salazar assured him.

  “Why is that,” Lovich said.

  “There is nothing in Pueblo. No work. No women. No salt. I am bringing them salt. I can do nothing for their other problems.”

  “How did you get picked for this here job?” Lovich asked.

  The night was cold and the stranger pulled his serape close around him. He shrugged. “I volunteered. There was nothing to do in Chihuahua, either.”

  “Wait a minute,” Lovich said. “You hauled this hundredweight of salt all the way from Chihuahua?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “No more than any other man, señor.”

  Botis laughed. “They have salt in Pueblo, old man,” he said.

  “Yes,” Salazar agreed, “but not this salt.”

  “What’s special about this here salt?” Lovich was becoming nettled.

  “It is salt from Cibola.”

  Botis’s head jerked up. “Come again with that.”

  “This salt is from the city of Cibola. It is blood salt.”

  “Blood salt.”

  “Yes. It is the salt of the dead.”

  The men looked at one another. They went to the ambulance wagon and ripped away the sun-stiffened canvas. There was a loose angle iron lying on the bed. Marwood and Spaw used it to pry the lid off the cask.

  The inside was filled with pale red crystals the size of pencil points.

  Botis licked a finger and dipped it into the barrel. He tasted, then turned to gaze at the man slouched by the campfire. The other men tasted the salt, and they, too, looked at Salazar sitting unconcerned beside the fire.

  They went back to
the old man. Botis squatted in front of him, gun cocked out at his hip.

  “Who are you?” he asked quietly.

  “I think you know my name,” Salazar answered.

  “And you know mine.”

  “But of course.”

  “I am searching for Cibola,” Botis said.

  “Then how fortunate it was we met each other upon this road. Of all the roads in the world, señor, we met on this one. Do you not find that strange?”

  Lovich hovered in the halflight of the background, hand on his sawed off shotgun. “You speak damn good American for a greasy Spaniard.”

  The old man lifted his head with a slight grin. “Ik kan spreken elke taal die u wilt, meneer Lovich.”

  “Old man,” Botis warned, “I am not impressed by your parlour tricks. Tell me about Cibola. Tell me about the salt. Or I will kill you here and now.”

  “Cibola is a city of eternal men,” Salazar said. “It existed upon the desert, long, long ago. But men dreamed, and so it disappeared. The salt—that is another matter. The salt is a pinch of blood from every man who died searching for Cibola. All men, throughout their lives, search for Cibola. Or something very like Cibola. It is an inexpressible burden all men share. It is the burden of Long Blood. I carry the salt of Cibola. I seek the Lone Man. I carry the salt of the dead. I collect it. It comes to me but gives no comfort, as does a winter rain upon a graveyard.”

  “We saw a city on the Llano Estacado,” Botis said. “It was only a mirage. I know Cibola exists. I have known it all my life and in all the . . . all the pasts I have known. But what we saw that day was a mirage.”

  “You have not listened to a word I have said, señor.” Salazar turned his head and stared at Marwood. “This one. He is listening. He knows. Now he knows.”

  Botis looked down the dark trail behind them. He faced back around. “Who is coming up behind us?” he asked.

  “As I told you, evil men from Taos. They will kill you and your compatriots, and bring your bodies back to Taos. When I return there, I will collect the salt of your blood. Just as I have done for ten thousand years.”