There was an indefinable feeling of age about the voice. As though it had come from some long closed catacomb in the deeps of a forgotten city. It spoke a strange kind of formal, slightly stilted English. Crow had little doubt that the voice was that of an Indian.
But an old, old man. Each word sounding as though an infinite effort had been needed to fetch it some great distance over difficult terrain.
The shootist drew the Purdey, bracing it in his right hand, triggers back. Finger on the triggers. Though the mysterious voice didn’t seem to hold any threat for him, it would be madness to take any kind of risk.
“Come, my son. Come.” A harsh, croaking sound, like an unprimed pump. “It is a good day, Crow.”
The phrase disturbed echoes in the mind of the shootist. “It is a good day.” It kept coming up again and again.
“Do you fear?”
“Yes,” replied Crow, honestly and simply.
Once again that croaking noise that must be the old man laughing.
“Always truth, man in black.”
“Should I enter?”
“Yes. I have been waiting you.”
“You knew?”
“Come.”
The shootist stooped, stepping past the small fire, his eyes adjusting to the dimness within. Seeing now that the cave ran in for several yards, turning like a dog-leg to the left. Around the corner there was the shadowy glow of another fire. He kept his hands firmly on the Purdey.
Ready.
“Come.”
“No tricks.”
“I cannot promise you there will not be “tricks”, man called Crow.”
The shootist walked cautiously into the cave, around the corner. Finally seeing the owner of the voice, sitting shrouded in a beaded blanket, pulled over his head.
“You may return the short gun to your hip, my friend.”
“In a whiles.”
“Such care.”
“I’d have been dead years back without taking care, old man.”
“Sit down. There is stew in that iron bowl. It will hold off the cold.”
It wasn’t as bitter chill within the low-roofed cavern, but the warm soup, thickened with several herbs and vegetables that Crow recognized, and some that he didn’t, blazed a fiery path through his body. He drained that bowl, rubbing his finger around the bottom to catch the dregs, sucking them from his hand.
“Mmm, that sure hit the spot, Mister.”
He finally holstered the Purdey, taking the decision to leave the leather thong off the hammers. In case he needed to make a fast draw.
The old man looked across the fire at the shootist as he squatted on his haunches. For some moments there was silence between the men, broken only by a whisper of sound as a burned branch collapsed in soft gray ash.
“You wonder who I am and how I knew your name, do you not, Crow?”
The shootist smiled. “You’re the shaman called White Snow by my people.” He used the Chiricahua name in full. “White Snow That Sets Upon The Tallest Of The Mountains.”
“Yes. I did not think …”
“That I’d know? Sure. Nobody else you can be. But, I’m surely surprised to see you alive.”
“There have been words of my passing, Crow. Many times.”
In the shadowed cowl of the blanket the shootist could catch the fiery sparkle of the old medicine man’s eyes. Glittering brightly from a darkness blacker than the wing of a raven.
White Snow. A legend among the Apache people. With the possible exception of Casa Negra who had been rumored to be more than a hundred years old when he’d died. He had been the greatest of the Apaches” wise men, skilled in lore and myth with necromantic arts beyond anything that most white men could ever imagine. Casa Negra had died a good ten years back. Something about some soldiers and the fabled gold of Hernando. And the lone Mimbreños Apache warrior, Cuchillo Oro. Black Cave and Golden Knife.
Nobody now knew where truth ended and legend began. If in doubt, print the legend.
“You are very old, White Snow.”
“It is truth, Crow. In the counting of your people I am close to one hundred winters. Perhaps I have passed that number. It is magic to you?”
The shootist hesitated. “Not magic. But to reach one hundred years means being damned special.”
“It is not special to live long. Many die young and are more special.”
“I don’t see how you could know I was out here, old man.”
The head beneath the blanket moved slightly, with a strange juddering movement. A kind of regular trembling.
“You saw John Dancer at Fort Garrett.” It wasn’t a question and Crow said nothing. Waiting. “When there was trouble then my people left that place and came to the hills once more.”
The shootist considered interrupting to ask where Cyrus Quaid was. Little Cyrus. Vicious little bastard that he was, there didn’t seem much doubt that the friendly Indians had taken him. That the white boy was probably somewhere within five miles of where Crow sat in the smoky cave, feeling the warmth of the stew layering his stomach with well-being. There had been something in the gruel that he hadn’t been able to quite recognize. Some herb?
He stayed silent.
They are safe with their leader, Small Pony. Your soldiers will not find them, I think.”
“I can find them, old man,” replied Crow.
“Why would you hunt them?”
They have done wrong. They have stolen a boy from the fort.”
“A boy?”
“Around fifteen or so. Cyrus Quaid. Son of the sutler at Garrett.”
“I know of that man. But the boy …”
Crow didn’t trust most people. If it came down to it then he wouldn’t trust anyone at all, less’n he had to for some reason. And just because White Snow was a famous and respected shaman, and was a hundred years old, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to tell lies just like a five year old with his fist clamped to the cookie jar.
“You didn’t know Dancer had lifted the boy?”
“No. It will be bad.” A long hesitation for fifty stuttering heart-beats. “If it is true.”
The place was searched for the body. It wasn’t there. No tracks out. But for Dancer and the rest of that group. With the scouts.”
“Yes. They say the red-hair gold star is close to the end of his road.”
Crow nodded. Lovick’s condition had led him speedily to the same conclusion.
“It must be twenty years when Bascom slaughtered for the breed, Mickey Free,” mused the old Indian. “They were bad days for my people and for the great Cochise.”
“Seventeen years, White Snow,” said Crow. “It will happen again.”
“Then darkness will come again to our land. You have many pony soldiers with you?”
“It does not take many of us, old man,” evaded the shootist.
“No. There is also a boy missing from the fires of Small Pony. The son of Man Who Leads To Water. You do not know of him?”
Crow considered the question for some moments. There was something truly weird about this old witch-doctor of the Chiricahua. Here, alone, in bitter weather. Not frightened. Not anything. The calmness and quiet seemed to take them both out beyond any normal areas of time and space.
“The words you do not speak say much, young friend,” said the Indian, voice quieter than a snake’s belly rustling over sun-warmed stone.
“The circle closed for him, White Snow,” replied the shootist. “We saw him in the poor light of evening. A soldier shot at his horse, but he missed. The boy tried to escape. We still didn’t know that he was … was so young. He died immediately.”
The blanketed head nodded slowly. “I had seen it in my dream. So, he will not hunt with his friends again, but will lie forever in the sky. You did not bury …?”
“Hell, no. It’s in a draw about twelve, fifteen miles back, a couple a hundred feet off the trail to the fort. He wasn’t touched.”
“Then it was a good death.”
“That’s mighty stupid for a man lived as long as you, White Snow. There’s no good death. I seen plenty, old man, and none of them were good.”
“I am well reproached, Crow. The words slipped too easily to my mouth and I spat them out when I should have swallowed them. It is right.”
“You didn’t know about Cyrus Quaid?”
“I did not know. I do not know. John Dancer’s words were of the chase that would come. He did not say why that would be harsh.”
“Dancer and the Garrett party’s with Small Pony?”
“Yes. Will you have more of the stew, Crow?”
“No. Kind of makes my head to spin. What the Hell was in it?”
“Some meat. Deer. Snake meat. Beans. Leaves. Roots. Mushrooms. It is the mushrooms. They will help you to see.”
The walls of the cave seemed to be shimmering. Swelling backwards and forwards like high surf on the coast of California. The smoke from the fire gusted and streamed about the face of the shootist, even though there was no wind in the dark cavern. It sought out his narrow eyes and made them blink and water. There was a bitter, acrid taste to the smoke that reminded Crow of times long past, not worth forgetting, when he’d lived among various tribes of Indians. A smell of antique traditions and race memories that stirred him.
“The blood races in my body, old man,” he said, conscious that the words he used came from an infinite distance inside his head. His hands felt heavy as though they’d been filled with pellets of lead.
It was a bizarre idea and Crow grinned at it. Laughing suddenly. Realizing that the laughter threatened to run away with him, taking control of his cheeks and making the back of his neck hurt.
“I have long heard of you, Crow. That you seek the straight road.”
“I do.”
“And you look to live a life in the manner that you will it?”
“Yes. I will pay the price for that.”
“Price?”
“It’s like sums I did as a child, White Snow. You set balances against each other.”
“What stands on either side?”
“On the one is the loneliness. Nights alone and days without ending.”
“Nobody you know?”
Crow laughed again, his voice sounding harsh to his ears. He lay back and rested, closing his eyes, finding his brain filled with a thousand shifting images every second. But even that was easier than the effort of remaining upright. The shootist realized that he’d been drugged by the elderly shaman, but the knowledge didn’t bother him.
“I know a lot of people, old man. A whole damned lot. Hard-eyed whores in every town from Juarez to the Lakes; Faro dealers; rooming-house robbers; drunks; crooked lawmen; soldiers buckin’ for promotion or for retirement; frontier preachers with a taste for young girls; young girls with a taste for cheap killers; kids who hear my name and want to ride to glory on the back of it. Most times they finish up dead.”
The blanketed figure from across the fire was nodding at the words.
Crow found his mouth was unaccountably dry. “You got water?”
A hand came and pointed to the corner of the cave. The hand of an old, old man, weathered and lined, blotched with time. The fingers crooked and bent, the nails long like claws.
There was a small pitcher of brown earthenware against a pile of furs and Crow took it, lifting it to his lips with an effort that surprised him. Drinking deeply.
“I thank you,” he said, returning to his place by the smoldering fire.
“Balances? You spoke of balances.”
“Yes. I did. It is the life I’ve picked. To use my skill with guns and tracking to hunt other men for silver and for gold. Men pay me and smile in my face. And spit in the dirt behind my back. Their hands stay clean and mine grow …”he waved his fingers, bending and flexing them. “Mine get bloodied, White Snow.”
“So what is to set against all this?”
The shootist sat still and thought about it. Seeing faces in his mind’s eye. Dead faces. Men, women and children. Some resigned and some angered. Some puzzled and some almost relieved.
“The other side …”he said, the words heavy on his tongue.
“You are not of the whites. You are not a real person. Not of my people, Crow. You stand between them and your feet do not touch the earth in the camps of either.”
“Perhaps.”
“I curse your religion, Crow. It teaches the young men that their fathers were wrong. That is not good.”
“No. It is not a good day. ... A good thing, old man.”
“And what of you?”
A phrase came back to him. “I hunt my own knowledge, White Snow.”
“Aye, my son. I too think that. I sit here, and I drink my own whiskey. And there are nights that I sing the old songs until the morning light comes through the hills beyond.”
“I hunt my own knowledge. I step aside for no man. I owe nothing to any man.”
“You have no friends, Crow.”
The fire was almost out and the shootist’s head was spinning with too many thoughts. Sleep appeared and beckoned to him.
“I have no friends, White Snow. And I have no enemies, old man.”
“No enemies, Crow. A hired gun and you have no enemies.”
The white man smiled again. A secret, thin smile that never even approached his shadowed eyes.
“None.” He paused. “Alive.”
Crow slept.
Waking later.
How much later? Seconds? Minutes? Hours?
Centuries?
His head throbbed and his brain felt as though someone had crept up on him during the blackness and shrouded it in old butter-muslin. The fire blazed more brightly again and White Snow had disappeared.
The shootist reached for his Purdey, expecting to find that his weapons had been taken from him while he lay in a drugged slumber. But the scattergun was still snug in his holster. Trusting as ever Crow drew it and checked the load. Both barrels still full-charged. He slid it into the greased leather and lay back again on the cave floor.
When he jerked awake more time had slithered by and the fire had again sunk to a pile of glowing embers. Outside, for the first time, Crow could hear the wind raging around the Arizona hillside, but inside White Snow’s sanctuary it was calm and still.
The old man had reappeared, sitting with his back to the white man, hunched over a small, steaming container of what looked like green glass. He seemed to be inhaling the vapors rather than drinking from it.
And he was talking to himself.
A long, droning monologue. This time his English was left behind and he spoke in the Chiricahua tongue. The shootist lay quiet and listened.
“Over the red sky-ripping hills I ride, my ponies harnessed to a coach of bone. White and clean, washed by suns and dried by winds. Below me the land flows like changing waters. Foam-topped. I see my peoples. Oh, oh, my people!”
For a few moments White Snow was quiet, but it seemed to Crow that old shaman was weeping. The frail shoulders shook and the steam from the glass bowl streaked and danced in swirling columns.
“They rise like the corn in the fields of green. And are cut down and do not rise again. I hear the sound of the death chant from throats long slipped away. The soldiers come to the land. A number more than there are rocks in the mountains. We fight. Fight them. Their horses trample over wickiups. Babies are slaughtered in snow that runs crimson. Long knives rise and rise and rise and fall. Our guns speak but the sound is thunder from another moon. The dancing ends. The gods help us. The dancing is done.”
It was dawn.
Crow stretched himself, sighing at the stiffness in the small of his back where he’d been lying awkwardly. The fire was out and he ran his fingers through the ashes, feeling them as cold as stone. The green glass beaker lay on the further side of the cave, by the piled furs. He got up and walked over to pick up the pitcher. Finding a thin film of ice across the water in it. Sipping at it, allowing it to take the edge of his thirst.
His eyes felt heavy, as though he’d been drinking all night. Whatever drug it was that the shaman had given him, it had been damnably powerful. Even now he wasn’t quite certain where reality began and ended. Where the dreams of the previous night stopped.
He’d woken once more. Or had he?
White Snow had been standing, looking down at the shootist. His face had not been that of an old man, and his body had been tall and strong. His voice had been soft and gentle, like a father telling stories of bravery to his youngest child.
But the words?
“Death will always sit upon the shoulder of a killer, like a dark shadow in a summer’s day.”
That had been it.
Crow looked around the cave. It had a strange feeling to it. Like a long abandoned suit of clothes. There seemed no link with any human being. It was cold and deserted. He didn’t bother to call out to White Snow. Wherever the shaman was now, he certainly wasn’t within hearing.
There was nothing for Crow to do but untether his black stallion and ride back along the winding ravine, to rejoin the patrol.