They turned him loose at dawn.
It was a strange, almost ghostly scene. Hercules Nix stood like some graven idol, his men bayed behind him in a half-circle, watching with almost sardonic amusement as one of them ripped off Angel’s clothes. When they were done, he nodded.
‘You have a whole day, Angel,’ he said. ‘Don’t waste it.’
No trace of his urbanity of the previous night remained. He was cold and remorseless, and Angel clamped his teeth together so that the chill of the dawn wouldn’t make him shiver. The huge wooden gates were thrown back. On the gullied sides of the burros, light touched the rocks enough to make some of the darker shadows contrast with others.
‘Git movin’, Angel,’ Des Elliott said with a leering grin. ‘Flap your wings!’
Angel shook his head ruefully, and spat into the dirt at Nix’s feet.
‘You’re as crazy as a bug in a box,’ he said flatly. Without waiting to see Nix’s reaction, he turned and loped away from the stockade, his mind already intent on survival. He had no illusions about dying bravely, with a quip on his lips as they did in those stiff-upper lip stories for British boys. If there was any dying to do, he sure as hell didn’t intend it to be him who did it. He headed north along the edge of the river. After a while he looked back, but they were already gone, the gates of the stockade shut. He moved on, steadily. The gray land beneath the pinking dawn sky was as empty as the land of Nod before God sent Cain there.
After a while, Angel veered eastward, keeping up a steady jogtrot that he varied every fifteen minutes or so by walking for the same length of time. He had spent much of the night working out his movements, and until he reached his first destination, he could let his mind rove over the things he had learned during his stay in the Nix hacienda.
The most stunning, the most unexpected surprise had been the agonized appeal for help from Victoria Nix. What was behind it, Angel could only guess, but it reinforced his impression that there was something hugely wrong with the relationship between the woman and her husband. There had been no sign of her when Yat Sen had brought him down to the big living room in the pre-dawn darkness. He imagined she was kept away from the less savory of Nix’s activities on purpose. She had certainly given no indication that she knew what her husband planned for their guest. Either way, there had been nothing he could do. He could not even get a message to her, and did not see her again. Her terror-drowned eyes stayed in his mind all through the night. Now as he jogged across country he saw them again, and shook his head. His first priority was his own survival. From what he had been told by Nix, he would need all his craft and cunning.
‘Tyrrell, Tyrrell?’ Nix had said. ‘Oh, the Englishman. Yes, he came up here. Angry as hell. Claimed I’d sold guns to the Comanches and they’d killed some of his people. I said there was absolutely no proof that what he said was true. He damned my eyes and said he aimed to get some proof and stick it up my nose!’
‘What happened then?’ Angel asked, feeling quite certain that Nix was lying, lying because it was a more interesting way of telling the story rather than for any gain. From other hints in the man’s conversation, Angel was fairly sure Tyrrell had been given the same treatment that was awaiting him. But Nix went on with his embroidered yarn.
‘He said he was damned if he wasn’t going to ride over to the Comanche camp and talk to Koh-eet-senko himself. I warned him of the folly of such an action, but he was beyond listening to advice. He went out of here like a bat out of hell, and I never saw him again.’
‘You knew he was dead, though.’
‘Of course. There is little that happens hereabouts I don’t know of. But I could scarcely be held responsible for what Comanches do to a white man they find skulking about on their land.’
‘Land you provide for them.’
‘I believe in coexistence, Angel. It suits my convenience, and it is infinitely less wearying than constant war, as well as infinitely less dangerous. I observe their rules; they leave me alone. It is not the best of worlds, but it’s better than living in constant fear.’
‘But you do. You’re guarded twenty-four hours a day.’
‘I said I believe in coexistence. I didn’t say I was a simpleton. These savages respect only one thing: strength. I show them that I have it.’
Angel’s route led him across flat scrubland, its grass burned brittle by the sun’s relentless assault. He made a mental note of its expanse. He had another five miles to go, he reckoned. It was already appreciably warmer, the bright copper disc of the sun beginning its long trajectory from east to west across the burning sky. His exposed skin tingled. Later, if he remained in the sun naked, it would start to glow, and by nightfall he would have a bad sunburn. On the second day, it would turn to molten agony.
Away off to his left he could see the low line of trees behind which lay the Comanche village. Beyond it to the northeast he could just see the faint yellow-white line that indicated the edge of the desert. The whole valley was a jumble of contradictions, trees growing at the edge of desert, swamp at the feet of lava beds. He had asked his captor about that.
‘It is simple,’ Nix explained. ‘The basic necessity is, of course, water. Give the land enough water, and things will grow. Starve it, and it turns rapidly to desert. Everything else is merely a matter of degree, is it not? I have provided water in certain areas, controlled in certain ways. I control the environment. I designed it myself. Basically it is a circulating system: the well would not provide enough water for it to do as I wish otherwise. Thus the trees which shade the Comanche camp, the pool which supplies their water, are part of this expensive system. They know it. It is a useful reminder of my power, for I have the ultimate deterrent in my hands. One turn of a tap, and their life-support systems will begin to wither.’
‘You enjoy playing God?’ Angel asked bitingly.
‘I am not playing, Angel,’ Nix said. ‘As you will discover tomorrow.’
‘They ought to put you away,’ Angel said. ‘They ought to lock you up for good in a room with rubber-lined walls. You’re sick, Hecatt. Sick in the head!’
‘Ah,’ Nix smiled. ‘You are trying to provoke me again. I’ve told you, it won’t work, Angel. I can wait until morning. Then I will begin to enjoy my revenge. You will be an adversary worthy of the trouble I have taken to prepare this valley. Hunting you down will be a pleasure.’
‘Watch out you don’t choke on it.’
Nix had looked at Angel reflectively for a moment, the way a parent will look at a child to remind it that it may be going too far with a tantrum. Then he smiled a broad smile. ‘Do you know the works of Bacon?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Francis Bacon, 1561 to 1626. A contemporary of Shakespeare.’
‘I know that. What about him?’
‘It was he who said “Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper”,’ Nix quoted, and Satan himself could not have had a more malicious gleam in his eyes.
Angel reached his marker.
He had come into the valley knowing rather more about it than he had told Nix, and prepared for several eventualities, one of which was capture. He made a cache for the weapons he had in his rucksack very early on, burying his weapons in a tarp wrapper lightly wiped with gun oil. He lined up a peak on the eastern horizon with a low-lying butte that projected into the valley from the south, and along that line laid two sets of pebble arrows, the arrowheads pointing at each other, about a hundred yards apart. Between them a whitened stick laid casually across another to make a cross marked the cache, and Angel trotted up to it eagerly.
As he got nearer he saw something white fluttering in the faint breeze. It was a piece of paper in a cleft stick planted in the ground where the cache had been. The cache itself was gone, weapons, everything. The cleft stick held a piece of paper, and on the paper was scrawled a message from Hercules Nix: DO YOU TAKE ME FOR A FOOL?
Frank Angel stood in the bright morning sun, his shoulders slumped in defeat. He looked back across the bare valley to where the hacienda lay like a dark smudge at the foot of the folded slopes of the Burros and imagined Nix standing on one of the guard towers, watching through his telescope, smiling like a fox in a chicken coop.
‘Bastard!’ Angel shouted. He shook his fist in the direction of the stockade, kicked angrily at the turned earth which had concealed his weapons and hidden food. ‘Double-crossing bastard!’ He made a production out of it, his strung-out curses floating away on the heedless wind. Then, as if coming to a decision, he set off away from his cache toward the northwest, heading for the stand of timber in which the Comanche village lay hidden. He walked slowly, shoulders hunched, his whole bearing that of a man stunned, dejected, defeated. In his mind’s eye, he pictured Nix watching and smiling in triumph.
He sure as hell hoped he was, anyway.