Chapter 24 The Americans rode beneath a sky of blue, and they rode very high among the clouds with the long light of the crimson sunset across the prairie. In the reflected light birds were circling perfectly, their shapes like paper birds crossing on a wire. The company reached the valley floor, the terrain past the west a line of mountains that ended where the earth became a trench of stone save where the wind coming from nothing carved its face. Their horses walked the dark, and the horsemen navigated a land of absolute rock, with the shape of a lone ridge, sand or sulfate, and the lights of the furnace glowed red under the dark of the mountains. The legs of the animals kicked up dust, and the riders were lost in the lake and lost in the sun, and the dust thinned and there began to appear a likeness of their ranks inverted, with the anti-riders pendent from their mounts. The birds glided, and the height of flying bodies was determined by their tether, and they crossed like black cut-out birds on a pole. *** That night the company halted and camped. In the morning some of their horses began to scream, and afternoon found many of them blind from the sun that reflected on the land. The horses were so insane with pain that they were shot through the head, and fell dead as their blood became puddles then dried and turned black and was swept away. Hartford gathered as many twigs as there were horses, and broke as many twigs as there were murdered horses. He gave them to Jacobs, and Jacobs had all of the scalpers draw the sticks. The boy drew a short stick. They left him, along with five others, behind in the desolation. He did not stay with them. They eventually starved to death in the desert, and spoke their dying words. But last words are only words, and not always true, and this is likewise for the living. *** The boy had left them to die in the desert. He went on. It grew colder and the night was long. He followed in the darkness the ice, the molecular warfare of a water-drop. He moved all night and all day. He slept and woke and went on. He moved east all the day and the light began to fade. The stars set clockwise on their course and the constellations revolved, the stars on their tracks pioneering through the dark of space, and they sped hot and dying in a firmament and disappeared in the very roof of the vault. In the long evening he saw from the high brink of that place the collisions of battalions distant and silent upon the plain below, and the dark horses that circled and the shapes of mortal men who had lost their lives, and all of this passed before him silent and ordered until the warring horsemen were gone in the dark that fell over the desert and the land lay cold and the sun shown only on that high ground where he stood. He moved on and soon found he was in darkness himself. He slept curled among the stones with his pistol clenched to him. Then he realized it was their vicinity that was the source of his unrest, and he stood and went on. The desert thawed and burned, and he looked to see hawks flying perfectly opposed to the sun. The sun marked the hour upon the terrain and he was at vigil. In that waste he saw the world attending away to shimmering edges for several miles, and he went on watching the sky and the land to the north. When he came upon the squad again they had been watching his arrival, and they regarded him as if he were no part of them, for they were all so alike in anguish. They had lost four men and were deeply pitched gun-black. They did not know how far the Comanche were behind or ahead of them. Jacobs’s eyes were like seething circuits of absolute massacre. Someone threw the boy a canteen. He caught it and drank from it. Then he threw it back. The horse that the old-ex-cave-dweller brought him looked bad and used up and black about the eyes. That night the Mexicans ahead of them could see them as a point of light out in the desert like a single star in total darkness. (Working Title) Joe Churchwell
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 09:53:01 +0000
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