Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (21 page)

“No,”
smiled the Rider. “I don’t think I’ll be doing that.”

“Are
you alright?”

“I’m
fine,” the Rider said, nodding. “Have the translations forwarded to Tombstone
in Arizona Territory. Address them to Miss Josephine….Miss Sadie Marcus.
Instruct him to include a note saying the papers are intended for her cousin.
I’ll look for them there.”

Spates
had removed a journal and begun scribbling. He finished as the Rider ceased
speaking.

“
I’m trusting
you and your colleague with a great deal.”

“You
can count on us, Rider. Are you certain you’re alright?”

“No,
but I’ll be fine. I have to go.”

Spates
nodded warily and held out his hand.

“What
about the advice?”

“Leave
town.
As fast as you can.
Don’t leave your name
anywhere, and don’t tell anyone you’re going,” the Rider said, looking grimly
into his eyes as he held Spates hank in a firm and perspiring shake. “If Dr.
Sheardown told anyone else you were to acquire this stone for him, others may
come looking for it. And when they find you don’t have it…”

Spates
held his grip, looked curiously at him.

“Who?”

“No
one you’d care to meet.”

“Perhaps
I’ll deliver your correspondences personally, then.”

“It
might be a good idea.” He squeezed Spates’ hand once more for emphasis.

“Goodbye,
Arthur,” he said. “Thank you.”

Spates
nodded and watched him turn away, then went himself up the stairs to his room,
the bundle of papers tucked under his arm. He quickened his step as he reached
the landing.

The
Rider stepped out of the Rincon into the bustle of the sunny plaza, unhitched
the onager, and walked briskly out of town, lowering his hat and turning up his
collar against the eyes of all he met.

For,
behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be
remembered, nor come into mind.—Isaiah 65:17

The
white onager sensed them before they came to the fire. Its long ears perked and
it gave a short blast of the nostrils to signal their coming. The Rider tensed,
but did not reach for his gilded
Volcanic
pistol,
draped in its tooled holster over a nearby stone. If they wanted to kill him,
he would have been dead. His fire was a bright beacon in the desert night that
cast a nearby boulder in a red glow. Maybe it had been a foolish place to build
a fire so close to Apache country, but he was well past exhaustion and in
unfamiliar land.

“Don’t
shoot, indah,” said a deep voice from the dark. “We are coming to your fire.”

He
heard them then, their light footsteps scranching the pebbly ground. He knew it
was solely for his benefit. They had very likely been out there for some time
already.

They
came into the firelight, six of them, and gathered in a semicircle around his
meager camp. He assumed they were Apache. The wild hair that framed their
uniformly hard faces was long and unbraided, kept from their dark eyes by wide
cotton bands. They wore shirts of trade cotton and calico, and some were bare legged
beneath long breech cloths, their feet bound in rough leggings or moccasins.
They carried knives and pistols and carbines, and they moved slightly hunched,
like prowling cats desperate to hide their doings from the light of the stars.

He
wasn’t sure what to feel. Relief, that they weren’t New Mexican bounty hunters
seeking the thousand dollars reward for his capture, that they weren’t Adon’s
riders come to kill him for the arcane texts he’d taken from his lieutenant,
Dr. Sheardown. And yet, these were Apache. In the middle of the desert, that
didn’t bode well.

The
Rider stood, not knowing what else to do, and touched the pale head of the
nervous donkey reassuringly as it shuffled in its hobbles and gathered in their
wild scent with quick snorts of air.

He
did not know which of them had spoken. All seemed roughly the same age. He did
not know which to address, and so he addressed them all, keeping his hands at
his sides, eyes going from one to the other in turn.

“I
have coffee if you want some,” he said wearily.

He
was spent. His food wasn’t staying down these days, and he’d taken to broth.
Whatever the invisible demons Lilith had unleashed on him were doing, it was
taking its toll. He was a gaunt shadow of his former self, like something found
wandering amid tombstones.

Twelve
dark eyes watched him before two relaxed, and the owner of these settled on his
haunches across the fire. This one was the leader, but the Rider sensed he was
more of an acting chief than one who had commanded his brethren long. The
others hesitated a moment longer before hunkering down slowly on either side of
him.

The
Rider did not have cups, save for his own. He poured the coffee he had brewed
and handed it over to the lead man, who drank it in one swallow though it was
piping hot. He gave the cup to the man beside him, and the Rider poured more.
This went on until they had all drunk. The Rider sipped the dregs as a show of
good faith, but to him they were as bitter as something culled from old
grounds.

Hospitality
satisfied, and the pot drained, the Rider sat back down and the lead man spoke.

“What
are you doing out here, indah?”

“I’m
making for Tombstone,” the Rider answered. He had not slept in a proper
bed….well, in a long time. The last time he’d slept under a roof was Doc
Holliday’s saloon in Las Vegas. The gunslinging dentist’s fortuitous robbery of
the Las Vegas post office on his behalf had alerted him to the bounty placed on
him by the governor and someone named H.T. Magwood in Delirium Tremens, before the
justice of the peace and his killer marshals had known he was there. He’d left
in a hurry, stopping only to spend the last of his money on meager provisions
for the journey back to Arizona.

“Show
me your pistol,” the Indian said, gesturing to where the gun belt lay coiled
like a black snake on the stone.

The
Rider hesitated, but in the end leaned over and reached for it. The Indian made
no move for his own gun.

The
other men stiffened, but the lead man waved them off.

The
Rider held its night cooled handle in his palm, felt its weight. He could draw
and maybe kill one of them.
Maybe two.
The lever
action on the Volcanic was slower than their single action revolvers and
repeaters. The others would shoot him down.

“Take
it out,” the Indian said.

The
Rider slowly eased the weapon from its scabbard, and the firelight danced on
its golden surface, on the twenty-two Solomonic wards, on the Hand of Miriam,
and on the Hebrew script etched into it.

The
Indians murmured to each other, nodding, as if satisfied.

“This
is the Yellow Star Gun. You are Rider Who Walks,” the Indian said, and the
Rider was amazed, as he had never met any of these men as far as he knew.
‘Rider Who Walks’ was the name the Indian shaman Misquamacus had given him
almost fourteen years ago, when as a young man just out of the Army, he helped
the elderly medicine man return home.

Misquamacus
had not been Apache. As far as he’d known, he had claimed Cheyenne ancestry,
though he had also claimed to be the supreme living shaman of any tribe
anywhere. Was his name known to the Apache? If so, this was fortuitous, as the
venerated medicine man had proclaimed himself indebted to the Rider for his
help.

“We
have been looking for you,” said the Apache. “You will come with us to see Tats’adah.”

“What
is Tats’adah?’ the Rider asked.

“Tats’adah
is ten and three,” he said, as if it were enough. “We will ride out in the
morning.” He turned to one of his fellows and said something in a rapid
language peppered with glottal stops. The listener answered with a nod, stood,
and went off into the dark. The speaker turned back to the Rider.

“But
who are you?” asked the Rider.

“I
am Piishi,” he said.

“Why do you want me to go to-- (and here he paused to try the
word), Tats’adah?”

“Go
to sleep, and we will talk more in the morning,” said Piishi. “It is bad to
speak of ill things in the night.”

The
man who had gone out in the dark returned with a string of shaggy, bareback
ponies with braided hackamore bridles and he saw that they intended to bed down
in his camp.

The
Rider contemplated trying to sneak off in the night, but the Indians kept a
vigil one by one, backs to the fire as though on guard against something. He
knew he had no chance of evading them in their own land anyway. Their knowledge
of the name Misquamacus had given him did not give him the sense that they
meant to harm him in his sleep at any rate, and so he obliged.

Of
course, sleep came only in brief snatches. The unseen influence of Lilith’s
children had grown. Nehema’s protective rosette token kept the spirits from
tearing him to pieces undefended, but they did not protect his food and water,
nor did they shut out their power entirely.

Now
when he closed his eyes to sleep, he saw only horror: curved talons plowing
through infant flesh, jags of human bone adrift on rivers of blood through
which deep shadows swam, the severed heads of his parents spinning rapidly in
star-less space, screaming; cackling, decrepit hags squatting over burning
menorah, and more terrible things still. He jolted awake again and again.
Eleven times in the night, he counted.

Sometimes
the images of death and blasphemy did not dissipate before his open eyes, and
he knew not if his soul was in his body or in the world of dreams, or in the
Yenne Velt. Somewhere, they were slowly pulling him from the crumbling fortress
of his wasting body, like a long besieging army of barbarians dragging staunch
and starving defenders from the ruins to at last take out the frustrations of
the campaign upon their hapless heads.

In
the morning, he put on his phylacteries and prayed, but the words felt
automatic, and he was distracted by the whispered voices in his ears that
profaned God and told him his prayers were not heard. He had to start and stop
again a few times. The Indians waited and watched. He gathered his gun, knife
(noting that the Indians made no move to take his arms), and bedroll and
repacked the onager with the salea blanket and aparejo saddle he had bought in
New Mexico. He brushed the sand from his dark rekel coat and slid his blued
glasses over his nose. The glasses did nothing much now but shade his eyes from
the desert sun.

They
offered him a breakfast of dried meat, but he refused politely, citing the
sacred oath he had kept since he had come of age. They respected this, and
instead shared with him a bag of pinion nuts and some dried berry cakes, which
he accepted out of politeness, though the little demons shat and pissed upon
them in the time
it
took for his hand to go to his
mouth. They tasted of feces and he tried hard not to choke as he nibbled.

“Will
you tell me where we are going?” the Rider asked again.

Piishi
indicated the far off mountains to the west. It was at least a full day’s ride.

“Tats’adah,”
he said.

“Why
must I go?”

“I
was told to find a man in black with a white burro and a yellow gun bearing
stars.”

“Who
told you to find me?”

“Tats’adah,”
Piishi said again.

The
Rider nodded. Then Tats’adah was a person, not a place. He thought to question
the man further, but decided Tats’adah, whoever he was, would better answer any
question he had. He didn’t suppose Tats’adah meant him harm; he would have been
dead already. At any rate, he was curious to find out
who
this person was that knew of him.
Curious, maybe to a fault.

“Do
you know Misquamacus?” he ventured.

“I
do not know that word,” Piishi answered.

When
they had finished eating, Piishi announced;

“You
will leave your burro and ride with one of us. We will divide up your goods and
bring them along.”

Reluctantly,
the Rider nodded. He had no strength to walk at their pace.

“You
can divvy up my pack so I can ride, but my animal goes with me,” the Rider
said.

“He
is too slow,” Piishi argued. “He will take too long.”

“No,
he’ll keep up,” the Rider said, cinching the wide grass strap on the animal’s
belly and scratching behind its ear.

“We
will kill it and pack the meat.”

“You
do the same to me, then,” the Rider said, standing in front of the onager. It
nuzzled his ear.

Piishi
frowned deeply.

They
set out in a single file, scattered like a line of industrious ants across the
desert.

His
pococurante companions said nothing even to each other.