Territory (27 page)

“In San Francisco, you chose your own path. Not always wisely, I admit, but …”

“You’re a fine one to complain,” Jesse snapped. “I had a path picked out. I was on my way to Mexico. Now look at me.”

Lung did, sideways and with a question in it.

“You did take credit for getting me here, if you recall.”

“I do not seem to have got the person I thought I called.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lung frowned at the dirt between his boots. “The old Jesse would not be waiting to be shown what to do.”

“For God’s sake, Lung, what choice do I have?”

“Do you not wish to know the nature of the thing that troubles your dreams? Or even the identity of the sorcerer who threatened you?”

And how did Lung know about his dreams? “No. I want to take care of whatever you got me here to deal with, so I can leave.”

“They are the same matter. I thought you knew.”

He was caught in the spiderweb of this town. He felt it when he’d arrived. He should have paid more attention. “Fine. Show me what it is, so I can do it.”

Lung lifted his hands, then abruptly, angrily, let them drop. “You want me to show you what is already in front of you. How do I do that?”

“You could start by sounding less like a circus fortune-teller. If I’m so damned blind, I’m no use to you. I’ll just be getting back to my own business.”

“Breaking horses? That is not your business.”

Like a blow, the memory: standing over the fallen horse in Earp’s corral, and realizing that there were ropes around his own body, around his mind, a force that made him fight himself to a standstill. A force that could master him.

Another blow: his sister in her hospital bed, broken by this thing. Unlike the horse taming, it didn’t care if it destroyed what it mastered. He felt sick with fury and despair.

“So I should take my destiny into my own hands, and do what you tell me?” Jesse stood and dusted off his trousers. “You can’t have it both ways, Lung.” He walked over to Sam, who raised his head from his grazing and pointed both ears at him.

“Where are you going?” Lung called behind him.

“I’m going to the river with you and doing whatever damned thing needs doing. Then I’m going back to Tombstone, getting a night’s sleep, and riding on in the morning.” His life might not be his own, but he could at least wrench it away from this place. Not seeing Mrs. Benjamin. That caused him a pang. But he couldn’t stay.

And then what? What could he do but wait for the power to ride him where it pleased? Lung expected him to pick his own direction, but how could he, knowing this thing might pick another, and make him take it? He felt like a plague carrier. He needed to go before he spread the infection.

By the time Jesse was mounted, Lung was there, tying the bottle back in
place on his saddle. He swung up on the mule and urged it off at a canter. Jesse followed.

They rode in silence until they passed out of the shadows of the hills, and their own shadows were shortening before them. Jesse lost sight of the river as they dropped down to lower ground.

“I apologize,” Lung said.

“What?”

“You are correct. I had no right to complain that you let others direct your life, when I was one of those others.”

Jesse could remember fewer than a handful of times when he’d heard Lung apologize, and all of those had been demanded of him. He was still angry, but not, he realized, with his companion.

“Perhaps,” Lung added after a pause, “it is because I envy you.”

Surprise made Jesse tense in the saddle, and Sam tossed his head. “You what? Why?”

“You are expected to choose your own way. Your duty to family and community come second to your duty to yourself.”

That wasn’t entirely true. But Jesse only said, “As I recall, you’ve always done pretty much as you pleased.”

Lung smiled crookedly at the mule’s ears. “And it has always pleased me to be Chinese.”

Jesse opened his mouth to ask what that meant. Something in Lung’s expression made him say instead, “I expect I’m driving you crazy.”

Lung shrugged. “I am used to that.”

“Very funny.”

They rode on in something evolving toward peace.

At present, the San Pedro River was a narrow, quiet body, flowing along the bottom of its bed in the orange earth. The trees cast a broad line of breathing shade on either side and rose above it in places like flowers in a vase. But Jesse could see the marks the river had made in previous floods: snags of branches and trunks flung up on the banks far from the water’s edge, tumbled stones pushed to higher ground, now dry until the rainy season. The trees would have their feet in swift water then.

They followed the edge of the
bosque
north until they struck a wash, and followed it down the slope through thickening mesquite scrub. Lung stopped when it got too dense for the mule to pass, and slid down from the saddle. He
looped the reins to a good-sized branch and unbuckled his cinch. Their mounts would have shade and grazing here—and they’d be out of sight from almost anywhere.

“I take it we’ll be here a while,” Jesse said as he dismounted.

Lung shrugged. “That will depend on what we find. But I would rather pamper this creature than try to ride him home when he has a bad opinion of me.”

Jesse made Sam comfortable. “Where’s the scene of the crime?”

“I believe we are just above it.”

A big cottonwood leaned its boughs out over the mesquite here. Between the scrub, hidden from all angles but one, Jesse saw a winding narrow course of dry grass. It ducked under one of the tree limbs and disappeared into gray-green gloom toward the river. Probably a smugglers’ trail. Jesse waved at it. “After you.”

Lung quirked an eyebrow at him and started down toward the river.

Jesse went slowly, picking his way down the bank, studying the trees and the ground ahead for blood. There would have been enough to be hard to miss.

Ahead of him, Lung stopped. He must have found it—

Ice closed over Jesse’s head. He couldn’t breathe. Then the feeling passed, and he was on his hands and knees in the grass. Lung crouched over him. Lung’s lips moved, but nothing came out. No, it was that Jesse couldn’t hear him. He shook his head hard, and realized that Lung was saying Jesse’s name.

“Don’t tell me,” Jesse said when he got his breath back. “We’re there.”

“What was it?”

“Do you remember when the bridge plank let go and you fell in the Russian River?”

“Ah.” Lung helped him to his feet. “Do you need to be thawed?”

“Just fine now.” It wasn’t, of course. Not as long as something like that could happen to him without warning. But it would be worse if he didn’t know what was happening to him, and was surrounded by people who didn’t believe it was happening at all—if this had come to him as it had to Lily.

There was no sign anyone had been here since the girl was found. Dark dried blood stained the ground and the grass and the roots of the tree she’d been killed under. Jesse felt as if tiny things were crawling over the skin of his arms and back. He had no idea if it was simple revulsion or something more.

He searched for marks, fallen buttons or scraps of cloth, whatever might hint at the murderer’s identity. Lung, meanwhile, was behaving oddly.

He stood behind the tree and craned his neck around it, peering through the scrub first upriver, then down, then back across the valley. Then he strode off down the riverbank, stopped, and squinted back at the tree. He took what
looked like a small carpenter’s protractor from a pocket of his jacket, held it before him, and fiddled with it. Then he sprang up the bank and through the trees. Jesse could hear him just beyond the cottonwood and mesquite, moving back and forth.

When he came back to the riverbank his face was grim.

“What is it?” Jesse asked.

Lung sat heavily on a fallen tree trunk and frowned at Jesse. Or rather, as if Jesse were something else entirely, something Lung didn’t like the looks of. Finally he said, “It is difficult to explain. In China, it is understood that the fortunes of a family may be made or destroyed by where they choose to build their house, or where their ancestors are buried.”

“They can’t do much about that last, can they?”

“Oh, yes. Everyone knows the location of his family’s graves. The wealthy hire sorcerers to travel the country in disguise, to find the most auspicious sites for graves. Poorly located relatives may be moved to better burial places to improve one’s luck. And of course, one’s own grave must be carefully chosen. But the details are not important here.”

Jesse itched to ask Lung if he had his burial spot picked out. But he was afraid teasing would derail Lung’s explanation. “You did say it would be hard to make me understand.”

Lung gave a little embarrassed grin. “It is a lifetime’s study, and not, I am afraid, mine. But it is the study of the power in the earth itself, and its effect on human lives. The flow of that power can be read in the relationships of rivers to mountains, the shapes of bodies of water, the direction of light and wind, the presence of one element next to another. A sorcerer who studies these things can use the earthly power as his own.”

“Wait, wait—are you working up to saying that the person who killed that girl has studied this stuff? Because I don’t think many barbarians—I mean, whites—”

“He may have. But it is more likely that he is guided not by study but by instinct. The land itself has taught him, because he can feel the movement of power in it. He need not measure and observe the elements, as I did moments ago. He need only feel, and act.”

“In my experience, education beats instinct every time.”

“I hope not, because I cannot possibly educate you well enough to defeat this person.”

“Oh.”

“I have met others of this kind. They follow the gold and silver strikes, because they can feel the metals speaking to them. Often they do not know what
they feel or how to use it. They say they have a ‘hunch.’ However they explain it to themselves, they will follow the voice of the ore and find it.”

“Then all these fellows get rich?”

Lung shook his head. “If, as you did, they deny their gift, they will move from hunch to hunch, from one strike to the next. They believe they seek wealth, but when they get it, they find it is hollow, and they spend or wager it all and set out to search again. What they truly crave is control of the power they feel. But they do not understand what they are, and are helpless to seize what they crave.”

Jesse looked over the valley to the line of hills, then back at the bloodstained grass at his feet. “The one who did this. He understands.”

“If I have not mistaken the distances and compass points, he is attempting to place a very large area under his command, with Tombstone at its center.”

“You’re saying this”—Jesse pointed at the blood—“is a claim stake.”

A pause; then Lung nodded.

“How do we pull it up?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If a man marks a claim that isn’t his, he’ll come back to find his stakes have been pulled. If he made an honest mistake, it’s a warning to check his boundaries. If he’s not honest—then it’s a different kind of warning.”

“You are certain, then, that it is not his to claim?”

The idea stopped Jesse’s thoughts like a wall.

“Tombstone is full of those who have claimed riches by their strength and skill,” Lung continued. “Why should this man not be another? What law forbids it?”

“The one against murdering for gain.”

“Then if this man is brought before a judge, there will be justice for him in the court, and punishment if he is guilty?”

Jesse looked down again at the blood on the grass. The killer might get a year in prison, or six months, or nothing. It depended on how the judge felt about whores, Chinese girls, and the killer himself. Meanwhile, whoever he was, he would control this power that Lung talked about. The dead girl would continue to work for her murderer.

“I believe in the rule of law,” Jesse said at last. His voice was harsh in his own ears. “The law will deal with the murder. But the other … Lung, does getting control of this … thing usually call for killing someone?”

“It is not unknown, but it is not the common method.” Lung was watching him warily.

“If he’d done it some other way, I’d let his claim stand. But not … like this.”

“If you undo his work, you are correct—it will warn him.”

“I don’t even know if it
can
be undone. I was hoping you could do it.”

Lung shook his head. “My skills lie elsewhere.”

“Can you
tell
me how to do it?”

Again, Lung shook his head.

Back the way they had come, barely visible through the brush, the pointed hills bordered the valley like lace on a tablecloth. Beyond them, out of sight, lay the plateau where Tombstone was growing, sprawling, building, and at its rim lay the Tombstone Hills, studded with mine shafts. Those were the hills he’d dreamed of, sleeping on the cot in Lung’s house when he’d first arrived. He’d dreamed he
was
the hills, full of silver—

“Never mind,” he said. “I think I know how.”