Chapter 10 The child gazed out to the desert and watched a dust storm hundreds of miles distant. The sun declining in a red firmament over the rim of the earth. The red horizon tinted from pink to purple, until the world was darkness all. Darkness with no depth nor dimension. They slept with dreamless faces on the earth. The temperature became very cold. Then the dreams. The wind blew, it was cold, dream-winds are so. And in the dark and in the cold of the night the boy had a dream. Of his mother, a creature perfectly adept to meet its own end. He had never seen her. She had died and the cold it left behind was all he knew of her, and her final gift: torment. Saxon bloods ancient and black in his brain circulated. The dreams bore the look of sacrifice. He did not know what to make of such siren worlds. But he despised to wake. Then wake he did, to a hand on his shoulder. He rolled over. “Hey,” whispered the old ex-cave-dweller. “I dreamt of the end of the world. There were machines, and machines making machines.” The ex-cave-dweller leaned closer. “How much d’ye bet we’d get for ole nickel-teeth’s teeth?” The boy shrugged. “A nickel?” *** There is a great beast loose in the world of men. It had been constructed in the darkness, to fight enemies. It awoke and breathed fire upon the nation, and yet when that was done, when the lands were cleared and the civilizations lain, the keepers of the beast found that it would not return to its slumber. The beast had many heads, and on its heads were written names. Colt. Remington. Smith and Wesson. Winchester. Derringer. And it was very, very hungry. There has not been one American generation that has not seen a war, and there shall not be one yet, and young men rejoice at war, and old men rejoice for them. *** That bloody dawn the desert lay motionless in the heat and the flies, a smoking region of wild vapors where there was no reflection and no world. There was no shape until out of the sullen shore of the void a collective thing gathered itself in the house of the sun and roamed along the edge of the eastern world, whether it be armies or plague or pestilence. This thing approached apparitional in the steaming air, blazing and shimmering in the heat of the void, then took on solidity along the wall where earth and sky were one, silhouettes of horse and rider, casting back after them blurred likenesses thrown up at hearsay after the untranslated things in themselves had faded in men’s minds. They emerged from the elements themselves, a pack of vicious looking humans on unshod horses, bearded, barbarous, brutal, filthy, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land, where they and others like them fed on human flesh. The reeking horde of commodore looked as though they had stumbled onto some ritual dormant in their dark blood, whereby their shadow-shows bore something of the men themselves, and in so doing made it seem as if there might be some deeper substance to their shades where they stayed the sun which must be reckoned. They advanced and the shadows of the men and their mounts were cast before them like lengths of the night from which they had rode, like strands to bind them to the darkness yet to come. They crooned things to each other that sounded like words of love. They rode down the stunned street, and they smiled and bowed to the ladies about, and doffed their filthy hats. In the cage, watching, the ex-cave dweller said: “You ever killed any Indians before?” “No,” said the orphan. “I am a seasoned Indian killer.” The child made a little noise. “Don’t tell them that you are not, because I am about to tell them that we are some of the best.” *** The child and the ex-cave-dweller and the other new recruits were given clothes and horses. They were armed. The pack, deployed by a government which shaped events along such a calamitous course, consisted of Texans and Irishmen and a freed Negro, and a Cherokee and Dutch and Delawares, and Tennesseans and a man named Hartford, a giant with a naked gastropod like brow, and there were French Canadians, and a Comanche, and a Mexican. Everyone was riddled with firepower. Around all of their waists they wore at least six revolvers of various weights, some of them enormous and heavy, Colt’s patent, United States issued. Strapped to their backs there were three rifles and no less. They had many knives, bowies the size of claymores. They wore leather, leather coats, leather hats. They hauled a cannon and cannon balls made of solid copper that when fired crashed through the sky like fallen suns. They hauled lead, pure galena. Slung to the mounts were bags that yielded dried Indian scalps that looked as if they were furs. The wild mounts drooled, known man-killers, oafish and crazed in the eye. Some of the hunters wore human scalps fastened by beaded cords at their clothes. The leader of the squad, Captain Jacobs, led the company forward, and so rode all of them forward in what seemed a ceremonial. Jacobs had fought in the Mexican war, had been one of the few to escape the massacre of General Urrea, the man who now employed him and his band as scalp-hunters. He was a small man with long black hair. The hooves of his horse clopped on the heated floor of the desert stone. They rode into the rippling swelter. They rode without reverence to rock or man or sun or God. They rode out of the north road as would parties bound for more deficient annexes, and before they were yet out of the city they had turned their tragic horses to the west, and they rode infuriate and half insane toward the red decline of the day, toward the lands in sundown and the distant postmeridian of the sun.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 00:06:59 +0000
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