Golden Heart (The Lazarus Longman Chronicles) (12 page)

Chapter Twelve

In which an alliance is struck

The morning mist dissipated slowly, revealing the Confederate supply depot as if it were a ghost from another era, emerging spectrally in the secluded forest valley. Tents had been pitched over ammo dumps and machines were undergoing repair. Men in grey uniforms milled about, some on guard while others played cards and polished their weapons. They were relaxed but not so relaxed as they might have been several days ago. Even from his position behind a fallen log, Lazarus could see their twitchy hands and their casual glances to the shadows under the trees.

This was the second supply depot they had hit in three days. Reynolds had several of them set up in the southern half of the basin to reinforce his advance through the valley. Both the western and southern cities had fallen to his troops, and one of the cities in the centre of the valley would undoubtedly fall next.

Lazarus turned to the twelve Cibolans at his back. They awaited his signal, and he felt the ludicrousness of the situation; he, an Englishman who hadn’t believed these people had even existed mere days ago, leading them into battle without speaking a word of their language. But he had mastered the hand signals from Hok’ee—
Pahanatuuwa
, he corrected himself—and hoped that his signal to attack would be clear enough to them. He should really be following one of them, but they claimed that due to the industrial superiority of their enemy, somebody who knew their workings was called for to lead the attack. And after, they had seen him fell a Confederate with his Colt Starblazer, and they were convinced that he was a demi-god of only slightly less status than Pahanatuuwa.

Vasquez and Pahanatuuwa had taken a secondary force around to the south of the depot, and would form the diversion to draw the enemy’s fire so that Lazarus and his squad could storm the camp and make off with its munitions.
Pahanatuuwa’s Jericho should provide distraction enough,
thought Lazarus. The Cibolans were convinced that it was the tool to bring them victory.

The Jericho tore out three bursts of fire and the Confederates leaped up in alarm, seizing their weapons. Lazarus could feel the excitement in the Cibolans behind him, and turned to make sure that none of them got carried away and charged prematurely. They held, tense and ready, as the enemy soldiers scattered in the direction of the attack. When it looked like no more would be leaving the camp, Lazarus finally gave the signal and they rushed the depot.

The remaining Confederates looked up in terrified surprise as Lazarus and his twelve Cibolans came whooping down the slope, and barely had a chance to get a shot off before they were upon them. Lazarus drew first blood, aiming his revolver at the chest of the nearest guard and hurling him backwards with a shattered ribcage. The Cibolans swung their terrible war clubs and tore through flesh with the chunks of razor-edged obsidian, splintering bone and hacking men down.

It was over in moments. Not a single Cibolan had fallen.
With more battles like this,
thought Lazarus with elation,
the Cibolans might actually stand a chance against Reynolds
. They began rooting through the supplies. The Cibolans were fascinated by the guns of the white men and seized them in great armfuls, oblivious that they required ammunition. Lazarus had considered speaking with Mankanang and Tohotavo on the matter of teaching their people how to use modern weapons. It would undoubtedly be an aid in their war, but whether or not they had time to outfit and train an army in a wholly new kind of warfare before the next battle was another matter.

They were in the process of dividing up the loot between the warriors to bear it back to their city when Vasquez and Pahanatuuwa emerged from the trees, their men at their back. “You sure let them have it,” said Vasquez, looking around at the dismembered corpses.

“Well, there weren’t too many of them left after your diversion,” said Lazarus.

“Diversion, hell! We didn’t get a shot off! They headed off in a different direction leaving us to rejoin you here!”

“What? But we heard…”

“A Jericho? So did we, but it wasn’t Hok’ee’s.”

“Then who?”

“Search me. It came from the west and that’s where the Confeds hurried off to. They went right past us. Listen! I can hear them fighting!”

Lazarus could hear it too, gunshots and cries coming from nearby. “Either they have a splinter faction in their ranks or something is sorely amiss.”

“I would put it down to another clan attacking them, but that was definitely a Jericho I heard.”

They hurried through the trees cautiously, not wanting to blunder into whatever was happening further west. The gunfire drew nearer and they slowed to a halt. The Cibolans, even as bemused as they were as to this new turn of events, drew up in close formation, weapons ready. The ground sloped down from them into a rocky dip before rising up into the red mountains that formed the western wall of Cibola. It was in this dip that the fight was taking place.

“Well I’ll be goddamned!” exclaimed Vasquez.

Lazarus might have said something similar had he not been lost for words. Down, in the bottom of the dip, surrounded by gun-toting figures, was the Worm. Its front portion emerged from the mountain like the head of an eel peeping out from its cave. Men and women wearing the blue of the Union stood on and around it, firing on the Confederates. At the head of the mechanical behemoth stood a woman with long blonde hair twisted into cables, holding a Springfield rifle aloft like a battle standard as she screamed for her troops to retreat.

“Townsend,” said Vasquez. “And look, over there.”

Lazarus saw a black man firing round after round at the advancing men in .

“Thompson. So they ain’t dead after all. But how in the hell did they find Cibola? We took the map with us.”

Lazarus had already been scanning the fighters and had found the one he was looking for. “Katarina,” he said. She was firing a Springfield rifle and picking off targets like she was a crack marksman, which she may very well have been for all Lazarus knew. Her dress was the same one, but torn and oily in places. Her hat was gone and her black hair hung loose.

“She memorized the map?” asked Vasquez.

“Or Townsend did.”

The rebels fell back behind the Worm and fired off a few answering shots as they made for the trees. The Confederates, few in number now, seemed reluctant to follow them and began to inspect the Worm; that piece of mechanical ingenuity that had eluded and frustrated their general for months.

“We’d better head back and report this to Mankanang,” said Vasquez. “Although the very sight of those damned Rebs makes me wanna shoot them all right now, they may be a useful diversion and take the heat off the Seven Cities for a while.”

“They may be more useful than that,” said Lazarus. “What if we were to actively work together; us and Townsend’s partisans against Reynolds?”

“You mean like
compañeros
?”

“Exactly.”

“I ain’t much for that idea. Maybe you forget, last time Townsend and I met she wasn’t too friendly.”

“But a common enemy can unite even the fiercest of foes.”

“Well, you can explain it to Mankanang.”

The chief of the northern city was about as welcoming of his plan as Vasquez had been. His people had faced annihilation at the hands of one group of white men and their guns. Welcoming a second such group as allies sounded far too dangerous. He wasn’t even happy about his warriors using the captured rifles and revolvers. Already, a dire accident had been narrowly averted when one of them had fired off a round and almost hit a passing woman. Lazarus had decided to go ahead with the drilling of his men in the use of guns, with or without Mankanang’s approval, merely as a safety measure.

Pahanatuuwa and his brother held counsel for a long time. It was clear that Mankanang disliked his prodigal brother, but had been forced to accept him as a valuable tool against the enemy. He had already made it known that he blamed Pahanatuuwa for bringing the white men here, and if it had been up to him he would have had him executed, for clearly exile was an ineffective punishment for one who kept returning.

But the rest of the clan hailed Pahanatuuwa as a hero of their people. His mighty right arm and his unmatched ferocity as a warrior made up for any transgressions in their mind. It was a point of contention between the royal couple and the clan they ruled, with the latter all too happy to have these outlanders leading their warriors, and the former forced to sullenly accept them as a necessary evil.

Lazarus wasn’t too sure what Pahanatuuwa had been saying to the chief, but eventually, with the urging of Tohotavo and the rest of the clan, Mankanang agreed to the plan. A large force of warriors would be assembled to rescue Captain Townsend and her troops from the Confederates and bring them back to the northern city as allies.

As the clan celebrated this new opportunity to use white man’s own weapons against him, Mankanang and Xuthala seethed in their pueblo, clearly irked at having their authority trumped once more by the popularity of the returned exile.

The following day, the host assembled. Refugees had flooded in from the cities in the valley basin, which was now wholly under Reynolds’s control. Only the eastern and northern cities remained now. They assembled on the ridge at dawn, painted and ready for war. Lazarus itched to be off, thinking of their potential allies—and Katarina in particular—under fire. He hoped that they would get there before Reynolds had time to send reinforcements from his main army that was somewhere in the basin.

Pahanatuuwa was to lead the force with Lazarus and Vasquez as his lieutenants at the head of flanking squads. A handful of Cibolans who looked to be the most promising sharpshooters—or at least the less likely to kill anybody on their own side—had been issued with rifles which they carried in an alarmingly casual fashion, as if they were just a different kind of war club.

Before they set out, Kokoharu came down from the pueblo to give Pahanatuuwa some parting words. And a kiss. The pair of them had grown very close over the last few days, and it pleased Lazarus to see the big fellow wear a smile once in a while. But right then, he just wished they could be off without any further hold ups. Katarina was down there, and he intended to give her a piece of his mind once they were back on the same side. He noticed Mankanang and Xuthala brooding from the doorway, surrounded by the women and children. Xuthala’s scowl put her husband’s to shame and seemed to deepen when Kokoharu planted a kiss on Pahanatuuwa’s cheek.

The battle must have been raging all night in a series of skirmishes that had drawn the Confederates further and further from the Worm. The eyes of the Cibolans were wide as they took in this demonic behemoth from another world. It had been ransacked and detritus lay all about it; cases, tools and digging equipment.

“Check the engine room for mechanite,” said Lazarus.

Vasquez and two warriors did so and returned empty handed. “Too much to hope for,” the bandit said. “Reynolds won’t let a single chip of the stuff fall into our hands if he can help it.”

“Pahanatuuwa’s supply for his gun is running low,” said Lazarus. “We’ll need to find some more and soon if we are to continue fighting this war.”

Shots could be heard through the trees.

“You got enough mechanite for one more battle, buddy?” Vasquez called over to Pahanatuuwa.

The Cibolan nodded. He had also found a band of cartridges the Confederates had somehow missed. He slung it over his shoulder and led his men through the forest towards the sound of the fighting.

The gunfire was elusive; every time they felt they were getting close, they found that the battle had moved on to someplace else.

“We are nearing one of the central cities,” said Pahanatuuwa.

The ground was rising up rapidly into a mesa that fell away on all sides as steep cliffs. It was probably the highest point in the valley; the perfect place for the Cibolans to build one of their fortresses.

“On the other side of this mesa is the lake,” he continued. “The partisans have probably taken refuge in the deserted city. They would have spotted it from a distance last night.”

True enough, the city was visible from the bottom of the trail that led up onto the mesa. Minarets of rock poked up out of the forest, and the houses built into them looked down on the trail like towers in a medieval castle. Springfields cracked out from one of the rock towers and they all ducked, but the shots weren’t aimed at them.

“Confeds must be laying siege to the place,” said Vasquez. “They can only be a little way ahead.”

They pushed on through the forest, and caught up with the tail end of the Confederate squad as it mounted another attack on the city.

“Come on, men!” shouted their captain. “There’s only twenty of them and nearly thirty of us! If we can wipe these rebels out, the general will give us all medals! One final push!”

Lazarus felled the man from a distance with his Springfield. The Confederates looked about in shock, knowing that it couldn’t have been a lucky shot from the tower. Pahanatuuwa let his Jericho rip into them, sending them scattering. Several fell to shots from the Cibolans, and the rest fled into the city to be picked at by sharpshooters in the towers. They were trapped.