Far Bright Star (6 page)

Then the Dorado fell forward onto the neck of his white horse, shot through the heart, the blood pouring from his wound. Then came instant the flat cracking report of a rifle that was not a Springfield or Winchester or Mauser. It was Preston’s custom-made English rifle and he was standing upright and still holding the butt tight to his shoulder, his cheek pressed to the wood.

For some reason the animal did not break but stopped and would not move and stood stock still on the center ground. Runnels of blood seeped from beneath the man and down the horse’s shoulders. The heart pumped steadily, emptying the man’s blood onto the horse’s shoulders and legs until its white hide was caped red. The horse pawed and shrugged and the man slid to the ground, slowly at first and then all in a rush as if desperate to meet the rising earth and the forever that was waiting for him.

11

T
HE SOUND OF
the shot echoed in the hollow air, seeming time without end, rebellowing off the rocky walls, and when finally diminished it was a sound like the sift and drag of sand. Men on both sides paused and were shocked at its event.

“You witless bastard,” Napoleon said. “You have just kilt us.”

But Preston seemed indifferent. He’d wanted to demonstrate his courage and this he would do, no matter how thoughtless, uncharitable, and condemning. What he would have and what was required made no difference to him.

“Don’t fly at me,” Preston said. “It’s done and there’s no undoing it.”

“No. I’d say you are right on that account. There is no undoing it.”

In the old days he’d have shot Preston on the spot for such insubordination and not even have been questioned. You only led by the consent of those you would lead. You only commanded because there were those who agreed to be commanded and he knew Preston was his failure. Napoleon wondered about himself. In how many battles had he fought on the side of murderers? How many times in his life would he have willingly changed sides?

With the death of the Dorado was the death of possibility. Now it was time come for them to encounter their fears. They would have to reach down and fetch up what was inside them, knowing they would surely die and there would be little time to spend hoping for deliverance and the wondering was it a Godless world.

His mind was quickened and was without doubt. Fire would now answer fire. There was no reality beyond this reality and all time was now. His green men would have their baptism in the desert. He knew Extra Billy had the murderous spirit, but would the rest of them? Being a long-range killer was one thing, but this would soon be a different matter. The lowness of their professional competence he’d experienced before. But this day they’d drop their blood because of it and if they knew anything they knew this.

With the westering sun the shadows lengthened and deepened. Overhead the sky was still light, but where they held was darkening. He recalled words his father read to him when he was a boy:
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, . . . lend the eye a terrible aspect; . . . set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit.

Suddenly the air sang and the rocks and ground stitched as if an iron needle driven by a great treadle and then was sound—the clatter of a machine gun. The bullets flashed overhead and ripped against the canyon walls and a thousand shards of stone flew in the air.

He threw the binoculars to Stableforth and instructed him to find the gunner and to do it now. The machine gun continued its clattering, lurching, stuttering, coughing, and the bullets continued to fly in all directions. The gunner had no apparent experience as the first bullets went into the ground and then climbed and swung wildly left and right and shot their holes in the sky.

He lay prone and perched on his elbows he wove his left arm through the sling of the Springfield. With Stableforth’s directions he found the gunner in the crosshairs. The man was squatting and bouncing behind the weapon that controlled him. He timed the shot to the beating of his heart, squeezed the trigger ever so gently and absorbed the kick.

“You got him,” Stableforth yelled out.

“That will teach them,” Turner cried out.

“What are they doing now?” he said, resting his cheek on his bunched fist.

“Just looking at him.”

“Is there another?”

“There doesn’t seem to be.”

“Then there won’t be,” he said, and then thought, Now they need a machine gunner.

Again, he measured their chances of life. It did not look good for the future but right now they were still alive. But now there were two dead and this would be unacceptable to them.

He stood and addressed his men.

“We are now the dead,” he said, his voice as hard as death itself, “so fight like you cannot be kilt.”

He puffed out his chest and strutted across the front of their line. He carried the Springfield, the butt tucked into the pit of his arm.

“They will come on us in a rush,” he said, his left arm sweeping out before him.

He knew them well, their love of the shock tactic, the headlong charge a mile over rough ground, then eight hundred yards at full gallop, firing carbines and pistols. In the past the Dorados had paid dearly the fearful toll of attacking entrenched positions protected by concentric circles of coiled barbed wire. They jumped it and tangled in it, the wire barbs catching and hissing across the earth as it rose up to embrace what it’d caught in its snarling trap. Held in momentary arrest, the machine guns short hammer, and their bodies dying as threaded statues, upright and floating on wire spools as if sculpted for memorial.

As with the ancient Macedonians, the Dorados preferred the moral superiority of close combat over fighting at a distance and it got them killed. It was this moral superiority that so badly winnowed their numbers when again and again, they charged and were entangled in barbed wire and cut down in swaths by Maxims. That’s how they’d come when they came. They didn’t know any other way.

“Each man, do your best,” was the rest of the more he could say.

Soon all hell would break loose and this would be a no-good place. The next actions would be motion undefined. Action requiring response. Action lurching off in directions beyond prediction. Knowing when to act yourself. And even then the odds unknown and changing so suddenly it would take a thousand patterns reconfiguring in an instant and an instant and an instant.

“Come on,” he said, and as if summoned, mounted men pranced into view. He felt the judder in his stomach and snugged the Springfield to his ribs. What a story he would have to tell his brother when next he saw him.

“Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, and stepped forward. He could feel the pounding of his arteries as they came on at a controlled pace and then broke into an all-out gallop, their ranks serried in their race to the enemy. They rode with reins in hand or reins in teeth and a pistol in each hand.

As they came on, his wildness flared inside him and the certitude that he should exist and his existence would not be taken away from him. The violence was not exciting to him but simple in calculation and fascinating in experience, and he knew he was ready and would soon enough experience the relief of conflict. He looked to the sky, the paired and silver sun dogs residing there, an omen of the forthcoming. He stepped again, stepped out to meet them. He thought, I am the first and the last and the always and raised the Springfield to his shoulder and emptied the clip. At first he could hear the rattle of the rifle bolt as three riders fell backward over their horses’ croups and two more slumped forward onto their horses’ necks as if a spell had been cast. Then he could only hear the fugue of repeated and interlocking explosions as he reloaded the Springfield and fired five more times and four riders fell headlong with stunning violence and a horse buckled and rushed down to the earth.

He loaded again and five more of the surging buckled and crashed down into the onrushing earth.

He watched as one of the fallen, his foot caught in the stirrup, pulled his pistol from off his hip and calmly shot down his own horse that was dragging him. He thought, What a remarkable feat and was proud of the man.

Still the charge came on as if forever, each horse animating the one next to it, and soon it was a race to his thin line, unrestrained and out of control, and they were crashing into his thin line. With a fury swifter than thought they sifted through them, threw their bodies back, collected their horses, wheeled, and came again, at top speed.

Turner was the first of their number to be shot and killed. The bullet went singing through his jaw and then he was shot again while stumbling forward, the second bullet nicking his heart through the hollow under his left shoulder. He held on in pain and amazement as the blood pumped from the hole in his ribs and washed his side.

“Get up,” Napoleon yelled.

“I can’t,” Turner cried, his complexion whitening, his thready voice, little by little, the last of him.

“You have to,” he yelled.

Another wave sifted through them as if a wind and there was the smoke of discharged powder. A rider carried a double-barreled hammer gun with pistol grips and sawed off to a short handy length. When he laid it down and fired there was a short stabbing flame of gunfire and it took Turner square in the face and he was gone.

Napoleon turned on the rider, his body corkscrewed, and pulled the trigger on the Springfield. The bullet found the back of the rider’s skull and came out through the orbit of his eye. The man fell tangled in his stirrup and his crazed horse dragged him from the battlefield.

Preston and Stableforth were reloading. Extra Billy, the sleeves of his shirt rolled to his elbows, was stretching his palm flat trying to make it work. He’d been shot through the hand.

He looked up and glimpsed for Bandy in the rocks. He reloaded the Springfield. All around them were the fallen, the dead and mortally wounded, contorted and silent. All around them the crazed riderless horses, the chaos of stirrups and shod hooves bludgeoning the air and then they were gone.

The blood pounding in his arteries, he went down on one knee and whistling through his teeth, he stroked the cheek of the Rattler horse. The horse flashed a clean dark eye on him and held his gaze. Softly whistling he covered its eye with his hand. The horse laid back its ears and he felt the lid blink and close. They breathed together for a few moments and then he stood erect and struck a match and made a show of lighting a cigarette. He knew they’d come again.

This time there came a lone rider, a Yaqui, who rode a white horse naked with a bloody knife clenched in his teeth. The white horse’s small hooves barely touching the ground, it crossed in snorts and huffs from deep in its chest. They watched it come on, red nostriled, its eyes rolling back, its entire body quivering with wildness in its desperate run.

The Yaqui, smeared with the sweat and foam and blood, rode without saddle or bridle and did not turn off but came straight for them, the white horse red and wet and mesmerizing and instantly was rearing in their midst and so near he could see its eyes and he swore it was an albino. The Yaqui, swart and hard faced and eyes black as wells, had cut incisions in the hide of the white horse, releasing the bright hot arterial blood contained within, and now it coursed the horse’s sides. The white horse reared and plunged, but the rider kept his seat. The white horse reared upward in pirouette, its eyes wide and fear bright, its front hooves pawing the air as rivulets of blood spun from its turning body, spun in the air, spun in their eyes. The blood sprayed from its shoulders and forearms, its croup and stifle. The air was flung with the white horse’s blood as red as scarlet as the horse whirled about and they fought back, bewildered by what horror was unleashed in their center. The Yaqui came straight at him and when he held his ground whooped and flared off to the side and then came again.

He leveled the Springfield to fire from his hip, but it was Extra Billy, his hand bullet mangled, who raised his .45 and shot the white horse in the head two times before it fell. The horse rushed down to the earth, the quivering animal at his feet, and when it fell he stepped forward and shot the naked tumbling rider in the back and chest and in the back again, ejected the empty magazine, and slammed home another.

Extra Billy looked up, and across the distance they found each other’s eyes. His skin was burnished amber with sun. His eyes alight, he held up his bloody hand, his fingers curved as if holding a whisky glass. He held his hand up too and when Extra Billy tilted his empty hand to his lips, he nodded and drank with him from the curl of his fingers.

Then they were coming again and from above it must have appeared as a violent storm. Their world was bounded by the loom work of rock, steel, lead, and fire. There was sluicing blood, torn flesh, split bones, and concurrent explosions.

He fired into a ewe-necked mare as it barreled in his direction, intent on barging him to the ground and running him beneath its hooves. He stepped aside at the last moment as it made its pass but was so close the rider slashed with his whip and kicked out and caught Napoleon with a vicious kick in the chest. Staggering and quivering, he fell back, desperate to shake off the thundering shock of the blow. He could not find his breath and could not keep his feet.

The fight became desperate at every elevation: men on knees and men standing, men on horseback and men falling from horseback and still fighting, still shooting, still cutting the air with bullet lead and steel blades as their bodies curved and unfolded and knifed to the hard stony ground.

Another gun exploded off his right ear and he was deafened. He fired the .45 into the massed riders and the heavy bullets knocked men against men, made horses scream. He emptied the clip and drove in another. They could count life in the chaos of brass shell casings that littered the ground. They could count life in the slashed and exploding air. They could count life in the fallen warhorses, the stained and torn and moiled earth.

“Please help me,” cried a voice winnowed in the throat. He heard the cry, the voice a crying airless falsetto filled with a childlike fear. “Please help me.”

It was Stableforth. A bullet had cut his throat and he could barely speak. He held his hand clasped to his neck and still his blood leaked from between his fingers. A second bullet shot him through his belly and he buckled forward holding his ripped guts as if swung on a hinged prong. He was making an unearthly moaning sound, his body folded in half. The bullet had passed through his bowels and destroyed them and he must have thought a bonfire lit inside his belly.

He knew they must see their commander and so he stood in the midst of their onslaught and as they came again in another wave he emptied the clip of his .45 into them and slammed home yet another. At his feet fell more of the horses and riders.

He looked again to Stableforth. Wide eyed and helpless looking, he sat holding his own entrails—yellow, purple and gray—in the dimming light. He was dying in his passage from one convulsion and into another. He must have known there would be no deliverance from death because all at once he lifted his .45, put the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.