Warriors of the Night (6 page)

“You stayin’ here?”

“For a little while.”

The boy nodded sagely. “You need anything, I know this ol’ house inside and out. There’s a apple jar in the pantry and I can slip into the wine cellar through a crack in the door anytime I wants.” Toby flashed a broad grin.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ben said, smiling back. Then he started across the courtyard. He had no time to admire the stone fountain in the center of the patio. The fountain was bone dry, the water lilies a thing of the past. The dry, dead stalks of flowers sprouted from uncared-for beds. Only one herb garden near the kitchen showed tending, no doubt by Toby and his mother.

Ben might have lingered to explore the detritus of so many yesterdays, but a premonition kept him moving toward the back gate and the confrontation that waited beyond.

Spotted Calf balanced on his tiptoes, the noose tight around his neck. He was having visions of his ancestors dancing in the glare of a campfire, with the sky behind them splitting into scarlet streaks, as the oxygen slowly left, his brain.

“You’ll talk now, you red butcher, or by heaven I’ll stretch your scrawny neck,” Snake Eye Gandy said, keeping a tight grip on the hemp rope he’d tossed over the limb of a cottonwood tree out behind the governor’s palace. He hadn’t wasted any time in making his way to the calaboose. He’d come to interrogate the Comanche the only way he knew how. And that’s where Ben McQueen found him.

Squint-eyed Virge Washburn was there, looking a might uncomfortable, though not near as much as Spotted Calf. And leaning against the front of the ten-by-ten adobe jail was a stocky, hard-bitten Ranger who abandoned his position and swaggered forward to plant himself firmly between Ben and the cottonwood.

“The name is Clay Poole,” the man said. He cocked a thumb toward the scene being played out over his shoulder. “This ain’t none of your look-to.” Poole was bald, with a fringe of brown hair around his head. His bushy brown beard looked thick enough to conceal a bird’s nest. A Patterson Colt rode high on his left hip. He kept a tomahawk thrust through his gun belt on his right. The black iron blade was honed sharp enough for a man to shave by. Poole’s tone of voice was firm but nonthreatening. Though Ben towered over him, both men knew that height wasn’t the measure of a man.

Ben saw no reason to waste time trying to face the man down. Besides, Clay Poole probably had as much give in him as forged steel. The lieutenant stepped around the Ranger and headed straight for Gandy and Spotted Calf, who was indeed at the end of his rope. Clay Poole quickened his pace and fell in step alongside the soldier in blue.

“Now see here, younker, maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” Poole said, still hoping to avoid a confrontation. Snake Eye Gandy was in a particularly dangerous mood and no man to be trifled with or to brook an interference.

Gandy slowly and inevitably hauled the warrior up on his tiptoes. The Comanche’s hands were securely bound behind his back and there was nothing he could do to prevent his strangulation.

“Just give the nod and I’ll ease off. I want to know what brings the Quahadi down from your mountain haunts. Are you just out for blood? Is the whole tribe on the move?” Snake Eye thumbed the taut rope strung between the brave and the cottonwood. “Talk or die. Either way don’t make me no never mind.”

Spotted Calf groaned. His legs were cramping. He could no longer balance. He dreaded the white man’s hanging death but he refused to give his old enemy the satisfaction of seeing a warrior disgrace himself. It was ended. He must die and there would be no life for him among the spirits. He would never join his grandfather and father on the last great hunt and dance in the circle of the All-Father or hold again his first child, the son whom the spirits had taken away in the seventh month of his life.

The noose tightened about his neck, reducing his air intake to a trickle. Gandy seemed to be speaking to him from far off. Spotted Calf ceased to resist and dropped.

Ben McQueen’s hand was a blur as he reached to his left and snatched the tomahawk from Clay Poole’s belt and hurled it with uncanny accuracy. With a whisper rush of air, the iron blade bit deep into the cottonwood tree, severing the rope that circled the trunk. Spotted Calf collapsed to earth, pulling the frayed end of the rope over the branch and down on top of his back. He rose up on his knees, surprised to find he was still alive and even more shocked to discover that his rescuer was none other than the soldier he had tried to kill earlier in the day.

Snake Eye stared at the length of rope remaining in his hands. He stared at the Comanche. He lifted his gaze and stared at Ben, and still couldn’t believe what had happened. Clay Poole, standing behind the lieutenant, grimaced and shook his head, and his features flashed an unspoken communication to Virge Washburn. The wiry, bowlegged Ranger recognized the warning and braced himself for the coming storm.

“Lawd, Lawd, Lawd. Ummm-mmmm,” another voice called out. It was young Toby. He stood with his forearms crooked through the wrought-iron gate, black as the iron tracery that framed his face. The nine-year-old shifted his stance and waited. He pitied the lieutenant.

Ben ignored Gandy and slipped the noose off the Comanche brave. Spotted Calf climbed unsteadily to his feet, leery of his benefactor. The Comanche had another surprise coming to him. Ben loosened the slipknot binding the brave’s wrists. With his hands free, Spotted Calf gingerly rubbed his neck. Now he glanced at Snake Eye, wondering if the Ranger was up to some new trick. He saw at a glance that Gandy was dumbstruck. No one had ever interfered with him before. His ugly features turned uglier. His frown wrinkled the livid white scar tissue where the scalp had been sliced away. The rattlesnake in his eye socket seemed ablaze, a trick of reflected sunlight, but effective all the same.

“Come with me,” Ben told the brave, and steered him toward the calaboose.

“The hell!” Gandy muttered. He drew his long-barreled Colt and pointed the revolver at Ben’s chest.

Ben experienced a flash of fear but brought it under control and kept his expression free of concern.

“You won’t shoot. If you did, the general and no doubt Captain Pepper would have you dancing from the end of a rope all to yourself.”

“Might be worth it,” Gandy dryly observed. He kept the octagonal barrel trained on Ben for what seemed an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a minute. Then he lowered the gun and returned it to his holster.

“I am your enemy. Why you do this thing?” Spotted Calf asked in his halting English.

Ben looked from Gandy to the brave and shrugged. “I doubt either of you would understand.” He gestured once more toward the jail. Spotted Calf started down the path, then stopped and faced the white man.

“My people have fled the mountains. Evil is there.”

“What could be worse than you red devils?” Virgil Washburn said, drawing up alongside Gandy.

Spotted Calf took them in at a glance, then focused on Ben. “The warriors of the night.” The Comanche continued on back to the jail with Ben keeping a respectful distance, a hand on his gun.

The Rangers gathered at the cottonwood while from the gate, young Toby cried out, “Oo-eee, Mister Bluebelly sure is somethin’. Yes, sir.”

Gandy fumed and gnawed at his lower lip while Clay Poole retrieved his tomahawk. Poole had to give the “hawk” a sharp tug to free it from the tree trunk. He examined the blade, spit on the metal edge, and then scratched at his bushy brown beard.

“Best watch yourself, Snake Eye,” said Poole with renewed respect for the Easterner. “Appears there’s more to that younker than Philadelphia.” He returned the weapon to his belt. Virge Washburn silently concurred with a nod of his head.

“Oh, shut up,” Gandy scowled, and stalked off, trailing the short end of the severed rope.

F
IRE GIVER SUFFERED FOR
his people. He suffered so that Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness, would bring him a vision of what he must do, a vision of where Fire Giver must lead his warriors. Already they had traveled far from the mountains of home, on a pilgrimage whose goal had yet to be revealed. Tezcatlipoca, the blood-eating god, was angry. By opposing him Fire Giver hoped to put an end to the spotted sickness that had crept across the ancient ridges and found the People in their place of solitude, the Valley of Eagles. Home lay many walks behind them—still the warriors followed the high priest, because they trusted his vision. Weeks ago, Tezcatlipoca had whispered in his ear and told Fire Giver to follow the rising sun. The high priest had obeyed. And he would continue to do so. But now he sought direction, the purpose of his journey, that revelation which all men seek.

And so Fire Giver sat alone among the weathered rocks on the lonely summit of a thirsty peak and stared into the flames of the ceremonial fire before him while the warriors watched from below. Like the soldiers who had followed him, Fire Giver was small of stature, wiry as whipcord. His chest and shoulders rippled with red muscle and his eyes were the same color as the caked blood that matted his waist-length black hair. He was covered from head to toe with a sootlike paste denoting his station as a high priest, the reflection of the dark god, and wielder of the sacrificial knife. Suddenly he rose and stood completely naked, his hands held palm outward in an attitude of submission. Blood already trickled down his back and chest and forearms where thorns of the maguey cactus pierced his flesh. Now he waited, trembling as two of the warriors from farther down the slope left their vantage points and climbed the dozen yards separating them from the priest. The two men wore eagle-head helmets made of hide and feathers that hid their blue and yellow painted features behind beaklike visors. Body armor of quilted cotton soaked in brine covered their hardened torsos.

Striker, the closest warrior, was covered with battle scars and brandished an enormous wooden club studded with razor-sharp obsidian chips. An obsidian dagger was thrust through the woven belt at his waist. Young Serpent followed close behind Striker and carried an atlatl (a spear thrower favored by the elite warriors} and several obsidian-tipped javelins. Young Serpent had recently buried his wife, a silky-skinned maiden who, like many others, had succumbed to the spotted sickness. This night the two men knew what was expected of them and they quickly set down their weapons beside the great axe wielded by Fire Giver when in battle. Its serrated obsidian edge had split the skulls of countless foes.

Fire Giver’s limbs were already crisscrossed with tiny crimson rivulets. Another pile of thorns wrapped in a tanned elkskin had been placed upon the ground at his feet. These cruel slivers of the maguey were capable of inflicting extreme pain. Striker and Young Serpent began to chant softly as they went to work, inserting the thorns in the high priest’s thighs, calves, and scrotum.

“God of darkness, ancient killer, see how your shadow embraces his suffering. Drink of the blood of your shadow, accept his gift, and grant him what he seeks. Open his eyes that he may see.”

They sang this song until the last of the thorns had pierced the flesh of Fire Giver. Then Young Serpent and Striker reverently gathered their weapons and dipped the stone blades in Fire Giver’s blood. The other elite soldiers in their eagle helmets and war-painted faces climbed the hillside to join them. Barbed javelins, axes, stone swords and knives, war clubs both curved and straight were baptized in the blood of the high priest. No sound did he make as he stood unmoving—eyes glazed with pain, his breath ragged. He stood searching—waiting.

Images rushed to him in waves of white-hot pain. The night seemed ablaze with searing fire and an incandescent light that flickered on the periphery of his vision, then stabbed toward the center of his sight.

He saw himself, suffering, wrapped in the crimson ribbons of his own life’s fluids. He saw a great eagle, with wings that blotted out the sky, swoop down and clutch him in its golden talons and bear him aloft. The world lay before him like an unrolled blanket: a vista of dry hills and craggy, windswept peaks dotted with ocotillo cactus and the sacred maguey whose roots could be pounded to a mash and fermented into pulque.

Fire Giver saw every hidden spring and every shaded tinaja where bees hovered above pools of collected rainwater. Down through the shimmering light the eagle soared until it alighted upon a peculiar mountain whose eroded slopes had been sculpted to resemble a crouched jaguar. In the folds of the mountain’s front paws, beneath the volcanic stone head, burned a pyre beside an altar, a place of final sacrifice.

And when the last weapon had been pressed to his tortured flesh the high priest cried out and collapsed. Striker and Young Serpent caught him and lowered him to the ground and began to remove the thorns.

Fire Giver did not stir until the morning sun climbed above the weathered mountains to the north. Then the high priest opened his eyes, rose, and walked along the ridge until he came to a pool of rainwater that filled a cavity in the stone beneath an overhanging ledge of eroded rock. He lowered his face into the cool shallows and drank till his belly felt about to burst. When he straightened, Young Serpent and Striker were standing behind him. Striker carried the high priest’s robes and Young Serpent the priest’s quilted armor. Both men appeared anxious to learn, yet were loath to pressure the high priest or ask an unseemly question of one who was the shadow of a god.

“I saw a mountain like a sleeping jaguar. It waits there.” The high priest pointed to the north. “We must go and find the sleeping jaguar. There we will feed Tezcatlipoca what he most desires. And when the Smoking Glass tells us, we will return to our people. And the spotted sickness will be no more.” Fire Giver gingerly slipped into his robes and armor and led the way back along the ridge to the place of his suffering. Another couple of warriors waited, holding a young Comanche brave between them. He struggled, to no avail, in their grasp. He moaned and pleaded, for the brave knew what was coming. There had been others before him. He was the last of the captives.