Chapter 19 Five days later they reached the Colorado. The waters coming down steady into the desert. Two birds rose from the shore and flew away and the horses at their venture watched uneasily. They rode up the sheer rock mountains set endwise in the earth and the wind coming from nowhere. They rode up the rim of the canyon a thousand feet above the clouds, and the clouds hung above the mountains like the black fold of the cosmos themselves, and the limits of the universe were suspended in vast day-break above the riders. One horse in the ascending column clopped its hooves on the unsure stone beneath, then scurried madly for more level ground, as the rider attempted to right the wrong, and the horse tumbled screaming from the cliff and the rider along with it, and they dropped wheeling into the void below and slammed onto a rock. The packs saddled to the horse burst open, and rider and horse both went twirling down into darkness absolute that absolved them forever from the memory of any living thing there was, and they vanished like a shout into the chasm. *** If ruin is not the word of God God never spoke. *** The Apache were perhaps a quarter mile distant, six of them. Jacobs on horseback brought the rifle up and rotated the barrels and fired. Then he slid out the ramrod, dismounted and went to one knee. He readied the rifle, and reckoned the wind, and reckoned against the sun. The shot was flat and loud across the land. Gray smoke drifted away. The leader of the group fell from his horse to the ground. Jacobs yelled and climbed aback his steed and surged forward. Four men followed. The horse that carried the wounded chief ran on. The Apache raised up their leader to a new mount, and riding double they set out again. Jacobs fired with his pistol, and the men behind fired their rifles, rotated the barrels, fired again, drew out the ramrods. The horse that bore the leader faltered, and the Apache were attempting to take the leader off the wounded beast when it collapsed. *** Jacobs was first to reach the dying man, and he knelt with that foreign and barbarous head cradled between his legs, like some reeking outland nurse, and he fended off the savages with his revolver. They circled on the lip of the hill, shook their bows at him, and lofted a few arrows, then howled out blood-oaths in their stone-age tongue, and invocations to whatever gods of war or fortune would hear of their retreating upon the sands until they were very small indeed. Blood bubbled from the man’s chest, and he breathed blood, and now in his final incarnation he may have sought to speak words of blood, but he would have discovered that all words pale and lose their savor, while pain is always beyond speech and always new, and no words can appease it, nor any measure of blood, and so perhaps in his dying this Indian would have by some gesture or by some conjuring made it known that the closest bonds men have are bonds of grief, and the deepest community one of sorrow, but he did not, and he turned his lost eyes upward, and reflected in them was the world that was, and the veins in the eyes broke apart and the world was squandered, as is the very story of it, and the irises disconnected, and in each pupil lay a mirrored and perfect sun. *** Jacobs sat looking into his eyes, looking at the capillaries break in the eyes, looking at the light fade, looking at his own image disintegrate in that destroyed world. When he rode back to the front of the column he had the chief’s head hanging by its hair from his belt. The men were stringing up scalps on leather cords. Some of the deceased had broad slices of hide cut from their backs for the making of belts and harnesses. Others looked like patchworks of other dead put back together by demented vivisectionists. The bloody skulls blacked in the sun. The dead lay in piles where dust rose along the perimeter of the land and blew down the void like smoke. Most of the wickiups were burned to the ground, and some men were kicking through the smoldering ashes for anything redeemable. Jacobs mounted up a lance, impaled the head upon it, and stuck the other end in the bloody soil. He turned to see Hartford looking at him. “That’s not him,” Hartford said. “What’s not?” “That.” “Then who do you reckon it is?” “It is not Still Cloud.” “How do you know?” “I have seen that man before and that man is not him.” “Will it pass for him?” “No.” “You seen that dog around here?” “Do you intend to fight those yahoos when they regroup?” “Until I’ve been made to quit.” “That might be soon.” “It might be.” “How long do you think it will be until they come back in number.” It was not a question and Jacobs did not answer it. “Where’s your horse?” “Gone.” “If you intend to ride with us you’d better be about getting you another one.” “Ah,” said Hartford. He stalked away. Jacobs looked at the head. “Some chief,” he said. He spat. He took up the lance from the earth and strode toward the stream. The Tennesseans were knocking through the sacked encampment. When Jacobs came back from the waters edge he carried the scalp of the heathen.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 05:21:02 +0000
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