Quaternity Read online

  Marwood scraped his elbow along the rough edge of the grave wall above Botis’s head. Sand spilled into the captain’s eyes. His grip loosed a fraction, and Marwood’s knife slipped and went in, deep, went in again, and stayed.

  Blood welled in Botis’s mouth. “My boy . . . my boy,” he said.

  Marwood lurched to his feet, hands on either side of the collapsing grave. He tried to keep the walls from calving in and burying them both. He stepped on Botis’s chest and jumped and grabbed the crumbling edge as earth spilled around his body with a hiss.

  He was out, rolled, and gasped air into his burning lungs. He was like a thing crawled from earth, dead.

  The grave finished collapsing in a depression of rock and fine sand.

  Marwood sat back with his hands resting on his knees, head down. He coughed, breathed, coughed again, and drew sweet air into his wracked lungs.

  He still gripped the knife. One by one, he loosened his fingers from the weapon. His arms and legs streamed blood runnels. The old Okipa scars had opened up—stigmata to mark his past and waypoint his future.

  He got to his feet when he thought he could stand without falling over. Acheron watched him across the open field of buried, nameless dead. Marwood walked up to the blue roan. It shied away, shaking its head and snorting with alarm. Marwood talked to it, called its name, tried to get close to it and catch the reins.

  Every time he drew near the big horse lifted its startled head and shied off.

  Marwood went to the saddle. He dug through the preserved scalps and human skulls piled on top, found a coil of rope. He tied it into a reata.

  He came back, swinging the noose in a gentle arc, and spoke to the animal again, called it by name. Acheron lifted his startled head, ears perked. Marwood threw the rope, and the lasso fell around the horse’s neck. He tightened the noose and pivoted with the horse as it ran in a circle around him. He jerked up the slack and the noose crimped. Acheron’s eyes were terror wild—mane flying, tail uplifted.

  Marwood wrapped the rope around the unknown headstone and, using it as a snubbing post, continued to choke the horse with the noose while it ran around him in ever tightening circles. He was merciless in how he drove the animal into the ground. Eventually Acheron, out of wind, rolled onto his side, chest barely heaving, neck outstretched as an offering. Marwood took up the rest of the slack, coiling the free end of the rope, and stood on the final yard. Acheron kicked his long legs, tried to get up, failed.

  When the horse was near dead Marwood loosened the rope all the way. He knelt down and placed his mouth over the horse’s nostrils. He blew air into its nose.

  A second time.

  A third.

  The horse bolted to its feet in a wild thrash of dirt. It stood, legs trembling like twanging cords, its blue coat covered with splotches of white lather.

  Marwood stroked its ears and nose. He spoke to it. The horse cooled, and became gentle. He stroked its forehead and muzzle, patted its withers.

  “Acheron.”

  The horse whickered and swished his tail.

  CHAPTER 29

  Marwood rode out of Mesilla. On the road past the last acequia he spotted a lone telegraph pole where the wires had been hacked down. A dead man hung from the pole without his boots. His neck was elongated, his face corrupted with black blood.

  He hung, a motionless strawman in the gloam. Marwood looked at him a moment, chucked the horse forward.

  He took the San Augustin Pass through the Organ Mountains, and when he came out the other side he saw the lights of a small town sparkling in a low, fertile valley. He was so high in the mountains the lights of the town twinkled like remote stars. Far, far away, they were the lightest dust imaginable, yellow-white pinpricks clustered in the dark.

  And when he saw the lights, he knew them for the place he would live, and the place he would die.

  Then, sitting Acheron, he saw Cibola for the fourth, and last time in his life.

  Gold pillars climbed from black desert. Long walls of ivory staked with onyx spheres. Shimmering, like an incandescent fever dream. The madness of men, and the caution they bring to the world as they war and battle for supremacy. Eternal, until that which is wrong is set right, and a man can stand alone, free, and unfettered by time.

  Marwood thought back to the lost canyon. The Llano Estacado. Bozeman Pass. Sangre Valley. In that quaternity he saw the circle travelled, and knew why he had been brought here.

  He could either go forward or go back. The choice lay before him.

  The city melted away, carried off by desert winds. Marwood rode another mile and came to a trading post fashioned of adobe brick and mountain stone. He tied his horse and went inside.

  The storekeeper who owned the trading post glanced up from a stack of green hides he was notching. He took in Marwood’s drab appearance in the weak glow of a tallow candle—one of dust and blood, and the ashes of the west.

  “Help you, mister?” he asked.

  “I am riding through the desert. I need beans and salt. Powder and lead, if you have it.”

  “Sure thing.” The man gathered up the order. As he did, he cast sidelong glances at Marwood, taking in his duds, his soiled face, and his hands covered with blood and powdered with grave dirt.

  The storekeeper laid the goods on the counter with care. Marwood looked it over and paid for the supplies before exiting. He packed his purchases in the saddlebags and mounted Acheron.

  The trader followed him out.

  “Mister,” he said, “if you don’t mind, what caused you to walk into my store in such a condition?”

  Marwood gathered the leather reins through his hands.

  “I was burying a friend,” he said.

  Epilogue

  The old man stopped by the graveyard to rest. Upon doing so, he spied a basin of sand in the middle of the cemetery.

  He went through the open gate and walked toward it, stiff-legged, for the burden on his back was incredibly heavy and he was very, very old.

  He stopped beside the strange hollow in the ground. Slowly, so he would not fall himself, he slipped the wide leather straps off his aching shoulders and put the salt barrel down.

  He sank to his knees, an attitude of forlorn prayer. He took a deep breath.

  Then he bent forward, and started to dig with his bare hands.

  About The Author

  Kenneth Mark Hoover is a professional writer living in Dallas, TX. He has sold over sixty short stories and is a member of SFWA, HWA, and WWA. His fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Strange Horizons, and others. You can read more at kennethmarkhoover.com or follow his blog at kennethmarkhoover.me or follow him on Twitter @kmarkhoover.