Swords and Saddles (10 page)

In the late afternoon they came up out of a long, shallow gulley, following a well-known route, though oddly lacking in any signs that other horses or wagons had passed this way for a long time. “Cap’n?” Sergeant Tyndall was looking up and to the side, a baffled expression on his face.

Benton followed the sergeant’s gaze, blinked in disbelief, then looked again. “Where did that come from?” A low elevation overlooked the plains here, not so much a hill as a high point with gentle slopes in all directions. He had ridden past this area at least a dozen times that Benton could recall, and the ground had never shown anything but the long grasses of the prairie, a few outcrops of weathered sandstone, and crossing it at an angle the ruts from an old northern section of the Santa Fe Trail. Now something else stood there, what seemed to be the sprawling ruins of a fortress which had once covered at least fifty acres, if not more.

Tyndall was rubbing his eyes and then staring at the ruins. “You see it, too, sir? Cap’n, I figure we’re twelve or thirteen miles south-southeast of the fort, and that ain’t never been here. How the hell could someone have thrown that up since we came past last time?”

“I don’t know.” Benton held up one hand. “Column halt! Lieutenant Garret, remain here with the company while the sergeant and I go examine that…whatever it is.”

Handing off their horses’ reins to the bugler, Benton and the sergeant found the walk to the edges of the ruins was unexpectedly difficult, as the ground close to the walls proved to be studded with fragments of partially-buried sandstone blocks. As they neared a broken section of the wall, Tyndall let out a low whistle. “Look at them rocks. Someone went to a whole lot of trouble building this place, cap’n.”

Someone had, Benton thought, studying the size and number of the sandstone blocks which had been set into thick walls which might have risen a dozen feet when whole. He hoisted himself through a gap in the remains of the wall, Tyndall following.

Picking their way along streets buried by blowing dirt, the tall prairie grass growing everywhere the dirt had found lodgment, they discovered badly-eroded and fallen-in buildings covering the area inside the wall. The ever-present Kansas wind blew through the ruins, sighing as it swayed the prairie grass and caressed the ancient sandstone. At the end of the street they were following, Benton saw a massive structure whose walls still seemed mostly intact, though like all the other buildings the roof had long ago collapsed. Walking up a short grass-covered slope which had once been a broad staircase, he passed through a broken entryway and into a courtyard.

Sergeant Tyndall walked over to one wall, studying drawings which had been deeply incised into the sandstone before it had hardened and were still mostly visible. “Lots of horses. But they ain’t drawn like the Indians do ‘em.”

Benton came over to look closely at the drawings, nodding in agreement. An entire herd of graven horses gamboled across the broken wall, their lines still visible despite long weathering. The horse portrayals had a fluidity which he’d never seen in the drawings which the Indian tribes produced. Then he noticed the top of the wall. Part was missing, but on the remaining portion symbols he didn’t recognize had been carved in a series of long unbroken lines. “Do you recognize any of this, sergeant?”

Tyndall shook his head, looking mystified now. “No Cheyenne built this, cap’n. No, sir. And look how that sandstone’s been weathered. I never seen anything built of sandstone weathered that bad. It’d take, I don’t know, hundreds of years. But that’s crazy. This wasn’t here when we rode past last.”

That tower on the hill which Garret had thought ruined hadn’t been there before, either, Benton recalled. “Go get Lieutenant Garret and send him up here while you stay with the column.”

“Yes, sir.” Tyndall seemed glad for the chance to leave the mysterious ruins, moving as fast as the broken surfaces permitted back toward the column.

While he was waiting, Benton dug a little ways into the dirt. He found the remnants of what might have been a wooden beam, the wood long since turned to dust, but the dust blackened by the charring of fire. This place hadn’t simply died. Someone had destroyed it.

Lieutenant Garret arrived, examining everything with a stupefied expression. “Captain, I had no idea the plains Indians had built anything like this.”

“As far as I and the sergeant know, they didn’t.” Benton indicated the ruins. “You had a classical education back east, lieutenant. What do you make of this?”

Garret hesitated. “Honestly, sir?”

“You can safely assume that when I ask you something I want your honest answer, yes, lieutenant.”

“Yes, sir.” Garret made a helpless gesture. “It looks almost Biblical, sir. Like something from Babylon. Or maybe even a little older. The way the wall is built, what’s left of the houses. I’ve seen paintings of what people think the Hanging Gardens looked like and they’d fit in here, sir.”

“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Benton decided not to make a sarcastic reply. He had asked for the lieutenant’s opinion, after all. “What do you make of that?” he asked, pointing to the wall of horses and the symbols above the drawings.

Garret examined it for a long time, then shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen art like that. Those symbols look like early writing, but I’m sure it’s not cuneiform.” He gave Captain Benton a worried look. “Sir, horses came to this continent with Europeans, a few centuries ago. But these depictions of horses, this whole place, feels a lot older than that.”

“How old does it feel to you?” Benton asked, realizing that he agreed with the lieutenant.

Garret took a moment to think about that. “Older than anything I’ve ever seen, sir. Really old. A thousand years, maybe.”

That sounded ridiculous, but then again saying the ruins were even a decade old, even a month old, would be equally absurd. They hadn’t been here and now they were.

Picking their way out along another path, Benton paused before a deep opening which gapped in the earth, kneeling to examine it. “I think this was a salt mine. A long time ago it was a salt mine, anyway. This place must have been built around the mines, to protect them. A whole walled town grew up here.” It all made sense, except that he wasn’t talking about the ancient middle east but about the central Kansas prairie.

Benton wanted to have those disquieting relics out of sight, so he kept the column moving until the impossibly-old ruins were no longer visible, the cavalry reaching the low, wooded areas alongside Thompson Creek before halting for the night.

“What do you think they’ll say at Fort Harker when we report that, cap’n?” Tyndall asked.

“They may call us crazy.” Benton shrugged. “But they may have already heard of it. Plenty of civilians ride through this area.”

“Yes, sir. I been meaning to ask you about that, cap’n.” Sergeant Tyndall pursed his mouth, clearly and uncharacteristically hesitating to speak. “Where are they, sir? This area’s been plenty settled in the last few years, especially since the railroad came in as far as Ellsworth. But we’ve seen no one else and seen none of the trails we should’ve crossed.”

“You think everyone disappeared and that ruined city appeared in their place?”

“I don’t know what happened, cap’n, but I do know that I’ll be real happy when I lay eyes on Fort Harker again.”

#

By late morning the next day even Benton was feeling extremely uneasy. They should have passed some roads and farms by now, but the only road they’d found wasn’t where it should have been and seemed to have been wide and very heavily traveled in the past. Aged ruins of abandoned buildings, some still bearing the scorches of fire on their walls, were spotted near once-cultivated fields gone wild. Even stranger, another desolate tower lay tumbled to one side of the large road not far from where the cavalry column crossed it. Lieutenant Garret was sent to investigate and came back bewildered. “It’s not the same architecture as the fortress ruins, sir. The tower seems sort of Roman, like the ones on Hadrian’s Wall.”

First the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and now Hadrian’s Wall. “Kansas seems to be gaining ancient historical artifacts at a very unusual rate, lieutenant. How old is that tower, do you think?”

“It seems a lot younger than the city, sir. I’d guess it’s maybe a hundred years old, or maybe two hundred. That’s just a guess.” Garret had been growing more and more puzzled. “Captain, are these ruins being kept secret for some reason? I’ve never heard a word about them.”

“That’s because they haven’t been here, lieutenant.” Feeling increasingly unsettled, Benton turned to face the column. “Mount up!” With he and his men settled into their saddles, he ordered the company into motion again, eager to see Fort Harker and the adjacent town of Ellsworth as soon as possible.

It was well after noon when they came over the last of the rises before the river lowland holding Fort Harker and Ellsworth. They had come up from the south, so both the fort and the town should have been almost due north of them. The Smoky Hill River which skirted both places was there, but otherwise the landscape was marked only by another wide road leading east. There was no sign Fort Harker or Ellsworth had ever been here, no indication the railroad line coming in from the east and then up along the Smoky Hill had ever been built here. How could an entire town and a fort with more than seventy buildings have vanished within a couple of weeks? How could the rail line and the warehouses beside it which had been there for a few years also have disappeared without a trace?

Sergeant Tyndall made a strangled sound as he looked east. Within a few miles the road entered a broad cultivated and cleared area, running through it, and up to the sealed gates of a city walled in stone which had been built between Spring Creek and Clear Creek. The city was miles east of where Ellsworth or Fort Harker should be, much bigger than either Ellsworth or the fortress to the south that they’d seen in ruins, and it was undisputedly still occupied. “Cap’n, begging your pardon, sir, but what the hell? Where’s the fort and where’s the town and what’s that?”

“It’s not Ellsworth.” Benton leveled his field glasses, making out banners on the top of high walls and some sort of castle or citadel in the center of the city. “There’s fighting going on. People on the walls are defending the city against a force encamped before it. See the ladders the attackers are putting up against the walls?”

Lieutenant Garret nodded, peering through his own field glasses. “Sir, I don’t hear any gunshots.”

Neither did he, Benton realized. Nor could he see the impossible to miss clouds of gun smoke which should have veiled the battlefield.

“What do we do, sir?” Tyndall asked.

His instructions from the colonel hadn’t covered this particular set of circumstances, but they had left him the authority to use his discretion if he encountered something not mentioned in those instructions. “There’s a city under attack. That’s clear enough. We’re to defend Ellsworth and other towns or settlers if they come under attack. That’s not Ellsworth, but it’s a city. We’ll ride that way, evaluate the situation as we get closer, and take appropriate action.”

Tyndall nodded, clearly relieved now that an officer had laid out a familiar and rational course of action.

Benton rode up close to Garret and spoke softly. “The men know something is wrong, lieutenant. They don’t why any more than we do, but as long as their officers appear to be dealing with events in a calm and controlled way, the men will stay calm and controlled. Don’t let the men see anything in you that might feed alarm in them. Understand?”

Lieutenant Garret nodded, his worried expression smoothing out. “Yes, sir.”

The cavalry rode down from the hills to the river, splashing across and up onto the edge of the open area. The closer the column got to the walled city the more details they could make out. “They’re fighting with swords,” Garret announced at one point. “I think they’re wearing armor, too.”

Whoever had been attacking the city seemed to have noticed the cavalry company. While infantry continued to climb ladders to assail the walls, many other attackers ran back to their camp where a large herd of horses was visible, mounting up and forming into a mass facing the approaching cavalry. Benton watched the activity through his field glasses, shaking his head at the archaic armor, the brightly-colored banners and the lack of firearms. “Whoever they are, they’re not dressed or armed like Indians. Neither are the people on the wall. But the city people aren’t settlers like those in Ellsworth, either.”

“The ones attacking the city look more hostile to me, cap’n,” Tyndall commented. “It appears they’re aiming to hit us, too.”

“I’d prefer to parley first, but if they want a fight, they’ll get it. Bugler, sound form a line.” The sweet notes of the bugle resounded as the troopers in the cavalry column swung out to ride abreast, the two platoons of the company forming two lines, one behind the other, extending across a front facing the oncoming riders.

Benton halted the cavalry, standing in his stirrups and raising one empty hand high in the universal sign of parley.

The mass of horsemen facing them, now less than two miles distant, shouted what sounded like battle cries and came riding toward the cavalry without much semblance of a formation.

Captain Benton evaluated the terrain, looked at the enemy with their armor and swords, and made his decision. Experience told him that the people in the city should be settlers, and the attackers hostiles. Moreover, the attackers gave every sign of having decided to attack the cavalry as well. His company’s horses were tired, there were only about one hundred men all told in the company against what seemed four or five times that number of attackers, and he wasn’t about to have his soldiers trade saber blows with a mass of men wearing armor. “Lieutenant Garret, Sergeant Tyndall, form two dismounted lines of battle.”

Tyndall saluted, turned to face the cavalry and bellowed his commands. “Company B, dismount! Form line of battle, first platoon front, second platoon rear!” The commands echoed along the cavalry ranks, the cavalrymen pulling their Sharps carbines from their saddle scabbards and dismounting. One of every four took control of four horses, leading them back a ways to where the wagons waited, while the remaining three soldiers fell into two long, open lines facing the enemy, the front rank kneeling and the second rank standing, each man about a yard from the men to the left and right of him. Less than a minute after Tyndall had shouted the orders, the cavalry was arrayed for battle.