Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  I dropped to my knees, panting; a trickle of something heavy, watered down by sweat, fell from my cheek to stain the sheer.

  There shouldn't have been enough light for me to see the two coyotes, a mated pair, push their way through the nearby scrub. Two screech-owls, almost as tall, landed on the earth nearby, their wings ruffling silently to their sides. Two dust-colored jackrabbits hopped up and settled catty-corner to the coyotes, their long, notched ears twisting in the stillness. Two puma slunk out of the darkness and settled, their fangs bared and dark with blood.

  They watched me. I watched them.

  A sudden urge to laugh welled up; laugh or cry or scream, I didn't know which. Dual-spirits, like me, they belonged to each other and within themselves. If I did what I intended, for the first time in my life, I would be almost singular.

  Singular sounded like freedom, like an eternity of captivity. Sage and cold cream and silk and dust and the sky closing in around me until the stars were a thousand thousand bright points of pain. But Rhianne, always Rhianne, and the low hum of her voice and the soft strength of her body and the deep throb of drum and lust and blood.

  I reached out to the bowl, feeling the smoke warm and viscous and smooth before touching the grit of the ash beneath. I curled my fingers, bringing them to my mouth. Paused. Opened eyes I hadn't consciously closed.

  My eight witnesses sat still in a half-circle just outside the boundary of the sheer.

  I touched the ashes not to my lips, but to the cut still bleeding beneath my eye. Rubbed them in, trying not to grimace at the pain. Reached back into the bowl. Fished up the silver coin. Held its distorted shape up against the ineffable blackness of the sky between the stars.

  "Oh."

  I barely breathed the exclamation, yet sound returned: the thumping of my heart in the rhythm of Rhianne's drum, the desert wind soughing through the brush. The small sounds of my companions. The pop and sizzle of the short-burning paper, extended to a solar wind, cacophonous and angry.

  In that moment, I could have released the coin and created a new moon. Devastated the earth with new magnetism and tides and to hell with everything. I could have destroyed everything I'd ever known or ever might know. The strange lingering remnants of the pre-cataclysm West. The carnival. The coyotes and the owls and the jackrabbits and the puma.

  Rhianne.

  I let go the illusion, the power, dropped the coin back onto my palm, nothing but silver remaining. The carefully created sharp edge dimpled my fingers but didn't cut through my skin. I tightened my grip. Dipped my hand back in the bowl, into the faintly swirling dark smoke, into the black heart of ash beneath. Brought my coated fingers to my mouth this time. Touched my tongue to the ash and the silken warmth of the smoke.

  I chose.

  The world started again when I retched. The witnesses, spooked, turned tail and ran. I retched again, dropping my hands to the ground and cutting my palm on the would-be moon. And again, some grotesque parody of birth knotted in the center of my chest, something sharp like antlers caught in my throat. Again, and Rhianne held my shoulders while I tried to draw in another breath around whatever was crushing my windpipe; she grabbed and pulled as my diaphragm contracted again and the silken bundle slid out onto the ruined sheer, trailing something behind it that I never wanted to feel or taste again.

  We wouldn't need the snare. I couldn't breathe until I used the silver as a makeshift knife to slice away the birthing caul and the tiny head broke loose, nostrils flaring even as I wiped them clean. We sucked in one heavy wet breath together, and I passed out.

  I came to with Rhianne leaning over me, the palest slice of pink and gold lighting her face, and my Wilding tucked in the crook of her arm like a baby. The pale ochre of its horns stood out around the warm copper of her bicep. My Wilding's nose twitched as she watched us with those wide, knowing rabbit eyes.

  Rhianne sat back on her heels, then pulled me up to a sitting position. I gripped her ribs, laid my head on her bosom, and sobbed like a baby.

  When I quieted, stroking the clean, soft fur of my Wilding's stomach, she spoke.

  "If they see you in two places at once, that should set their fears to rest."

  I nodded, and sighed.

  "I hope it's enough," I rasped, "and we can get away with 'a magician never reveals her tricks'."

  I spat blood, let Rhianne draw us both to our feet. Held my hands out for the jackalope; Rhianne passed her over without comment. We gathered everything up from the desert floor and headed back; across the scrub we could hear Pedro's shouting over the soft murmur of our home coming back to life.

  8

  Wolves Howling in the Night

  Faith Hunter

  1879

  Author’s Note: This is a story from the world of Jane Yellowrock.

  This short story takes place in 1879 in Arizona. Ayatas and Etsi are around forty years old.

  Ayatas touched his horse’s flank with a heel and guided him closer to the mount ridden by Etsi, his Everhart woman. They had been on the trail for days in the summer heat, with limited water, only enough for them and their mounts to drink sparingly. They had run out of even that twelve miles on the south side of Eagle Tail Mount and Dry Wash, which lived up to its name. The summer sun had baked the land dry. If they did not reach the town of Agua Caliente by nightfall, their plight would become desperate, yet Etsi still laughed, saying she smelled ripe, her scent as strong on the air as his own.

  The town they hoped to reach had abundant water, enough to have a bakery, saloons, a laundry, a livery, a feed and seed shop, a half dozen seamstresses, a school run by a woman from back east, and two dry goods stores. The newsletter they had read when they shared a campfire with a wagon train said that an inn was being built in Agua Caliente, “with a bathhouse,” as Etsi kept reminding him, a bathhouse with hot water that rose from the ground, from hot springs. Etsi would get a hot tub-bath with soap, as her own people, the yunega, the white men, bathed.

  He would wash out back with the other people of color—the Mexicans, Africans, and Indians. Though Ayatas might prefer to bathe in the Gila River, near the town, if Indian meant Apache or Pah-Ute. The Tsalagi and western tribes did not make peace together, and fighting would anger Etsi. His red-headed woman’s temper was hot like fire, and he had ached the few times she had turned her anger toward him.

  Tonight, Etsi would sleep in a real bed, and Ayatas would bed down with the horses or out in the night, under the stars, knowing that if she called him with her magic, he would hear the sound of her summons on the wind.

  Beneath him, the horse stepped higher and his head came up, moving better than the tired beast had all day. “I smell smoke,” Ayatas said. “And water.”

  “Hallelujah and praise the Lord,” Etsi said, her voice hoarse. She tied the small pouch of dalonige’i into her skirt to hide it. White men traded for gold, gave news for gold, stole land for gold, killed for gold. She was wise to keep it out of sight.

  Together, as the sun slid into the scarlet west, they studied the town from a small rise. Aqua Caliente was mostly low adobe houses and buildings, a few stone-built ones, and some dried brick buildings, all flat-roofed and mud colored. Wood smoke billowed in low waves down the main street, curling and mixing with the dust clouds. Horses and mules, saddled or loaded with packs, stood tied to hitching posts here and there. A scrawny, short-legged dog trotted down the street, her teats dragging on the dirt. A wagon rolled out of town. A Mexican woman with a white head scarf and dark skirts carried a heavy bundle into an alley and disappeared. The sound of a piano plinking and men singing echoed down the street.

  They let the horses have their heads, and the tired animals moved down toward the town. The noise got louder. Dogs barked. Chickens ran across the main road and under a bakery. There was much shouting from laborers, still working in the town, using the last light in the cool of evening. He spotted stonemasons, bricklayers, adobe plasterers, and tile layers constructing the inn that would make the town gr
eat and bring in more white people. And drive out more tribal people and people of color. The walls were rising, arches appearing where windows and doors would go. Heavy beams were in place to hold the roof. The wind spun and changed direction, bringing the smell of the town to them.

  The horses found a spill of water and a clay-lined pool outside the bathhouse. The puddle stank of soap, white men, and sulfur, but the mounts drank with desperation. “Son of a witch on a switch,” Etsi muttered. “I forgot how noisy and stinky towns are.” The stench of outhouses, saloons, fires burning, and food cooking was overpowering after so long in the wild.

  “White men always stink,” he said, keeping his own thirst at bay until he could get Etsi and the horses to safety.

  “Yes. Well. Don’t forget,” Etsi said, her tone telling him more than she knew, speaking of pain and long-held anger. “It’s only a game we play to keep you safe.”

  Ayatas grunted. The game claimed that he was her servant instead of her man. That he worked for gold instead searching for his dreams. But Ayatas would pretend many things to keep Etsi, which meant My Love in the tongue of The People, safe. His red-haired woman, who had gone by many names as they traveled, was possessed of a fiery nature, changeable as the wind, and was constantly searching out danger. She had been born Salandre Everhart, but when she ran away with him, she had changed her name to Igohidv Adonvdo, or Forever Heart, in Tsalagi. Now, after many years of travel and adventures, his fire woman used a different name in each town, but she was always and forever his Everhart woman, and Etsi.

  He pulled the horses away before they could take in enough to grow sick and jumped back into the sheepskin saddle. The mounts knew they would be fed now and trotted on into the town and up to the sheriff’s office. The man with the badge waited, his guns in clear view, an old hunting rifle in his arms, and a six-gun at his hip. They reined in the mounts in front of the man, and Etsi slid from the saddle to the ground. She groaned with pain on landing in the dusty street, knees stiff from all day in the heat, on horseback. Ayatas landed behind her, silent.

  “Good evening, Sheriff,” she said, approaching him and smoothing her skirts. His Everhart woman did not offer her hand, but the sheriff looked pointedly at her left hand, and the thin gold band that could be seen beneath her dirty gloves. “I’m Mrs. Everhart, reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, out of Tucson.”

  “A woman reporter?” The sheriff spat, the sink of tobacco strong on the air. He transferred his sharp gaze to Ayatas. “Women can’t work for newspapers. That your young buck? He don’t look like Apache or Ute.”

  “He is Cherokee, from back east,” Etsi said with asperity, “and he’s my guide. And women most certainly can be reporters. Watch your tongue, young man. You may be sheriff, but you are not above manners.”

  Etsi was no longer a girl, but a woman now, sharp tongued and stern, and she knew how to stop young men from showing disrespect. They had been together since 1860, and she had grown more fiery with each passing year.

  The sheriff laughed, the sound like sand scouring rock in a low wind, and when he spoke, it was with a tone of insult and amusement. “Manners. Yes, ma’am. I’ll mind my manners.” Before Etsi could respond he added, “You looking to take the baths and find a bed, Old Missus Smith can help you. Your guide’ll have to sleep in the stables with the other animals or outside the city. We don’t risk our scalps letting Injuns stay inside after sundown.”

  “You have nothing to fear from my guide, Sheriff.”

  “I ain’t afeard a no redskin.”

  “Hmmm.” Her tone suggested that he lied. The sheriff’s eyes narrowed. Etsi continued, “I’m sure he’d rather be as far from the white man as he can get. If you’ll direct me to the boardinghouse and the baths and point my guide to the livery?”

  The man with the tin star on his chest gave directions. Etsi turned to Ayatas and gave him six small coins, saying things she did not need to say, to appease the sheriff and to fulfill their roles. “Aya, take the horses to the livery and purchase their care. See if they will also feed you and let you sleep there. If not, go to the back door of the bakery and buy some dinner, and then bed down outside the gates.”

  Ayatas took the coins and nodded his head. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Gathering the reins, he led the mounts down the street, following the scent of manure and hay more so than the lawman’s directions. With his predator’s senses, he could feel several pairs of eyes on him as he walked, so he kept his shoulders slumped and his head down as befit the station of servant instead of the warrior and skinwalker he was, a beaten man instead of a man of much power and magic. It galled him. But the world was not kind to people of color.

  He had spent much of his youth in the Blue Holly Clan house, under the thumb of his uni lisi, grandmother of many children, in the Indian Land of the Western Cherokee. He had hated being with the women in the summer or winter houses, but with no father, and with the obstinacy of the grandmother, he had no one to take him in among the older men. Until his uni lisi taught him to shift into an animal when he was fifteen and he had learned to dance. Then he had many offers to join the hunters and many offers of marriage from the women, but he had refused them all. He had changed his name to Ayatas Nvgitsvle, or Fire Wind, for the raging fires he saw in his dreams.

  “Pride,” Uni lisi had said. “Foolish and stubborn pride.”

  “Dreams,” he had responded. “Dreams of fire and wind and magic,” such as his people had long ago lost to the white man. And he had left the Indian Land.

  At the livery, the white man and his two half-white sons sold him two stalls and enough feed for three days. They helped him to brush down the mounts, check their feet, and untangle their wind-tossed manes. One of the boys was good with animals, discovering a swollen place on the cannon bone of Etsi’s mount. The older man applied an herbal liniment and wrapped the limb. Ayatas gave the boy great praise. White men needed praise to feel worthy. Tsalagi warriors needed no such words to know their worth.

  The man and his sons gave him permission to sleep in the hayloft, sold him a meal of dried meat and cold beans, and sent Ayatas to the back of the bathhouse as he had suspected. His bath consisted of a bucket of water he poured over himself, a sliver of soap in hand. It cost a penny, but the water was clean and pure and still hot from the springs.

  As he dried off, Ayatas heard two white men talking within the men’s private room of the bathhouse. They talked about a bird that was to be sold. He thought nothing of it, except that the dove would be in need of cleansing, which he thought was strange. Etsi would likely understand and would explain it all to him, and perhaps in the telling, she would find a good story to write for the newspapers back east. Smelling much better, dressed in his clean canvas pants, wool socks, and cotton shirt, Ayatas bedded down in the small loft. Tonight he slept on layered sleep rolls and blankets and his serape, atop fresh hay. His pillow was his scarf, his gun and skinwalker necklace by his hand.

  He slept well until about three a.m. when a noise woke him, the squeal and creak of a buckboard with a wheel that rubbed, needing a wheelwright. Above the rubbing he heard a woman’s muffled sobs. The sound of a ringing slap. The woman fell silent.

  Ayatas rose and secured his clothing, hiding his weapons, tying his moccasins. He crept down from the loft to the stall where his own mount slept, standing, head low, and to the window that looked out onto the street. A wagon rolled by, a white man driving, two white men, a Mexican, and a black man in the bed. A woman was propped on a feed sack, her hands tied, her mouth tied with a gag. In the bright light of the moon, he could see that she had been beaten. Some of her clothing had been torn away.

  Abuse of women was a foreign thing among the Tsalagi. Had a man tried that on uni lisi or elisi, the women would have removed the parts that made him a man and put him to work in the fields. But Ayatas knew that white men were often cruel to women.

  The buckboard rolled on, and Ayatas thought on what he should do. His Everhart woman would ha
ve intervened, even at the risk to her own life, believing that her magic could protect her from anything. It was hard to keep her safe from her own actions, but he could not keep this from her even to keep her safe.

  Ayatas secured his long hair, rolled out the window, and landed silently on the dirt. Keeping to the shadows, he followed the buckboard to the biggest saloon. Etsi had taught him to read and write, and the sign over the door read Peacock Saloon. The words Faro and Dancehall were beneath it. Faro was a card game. Dancehall meant that women danced with men and then pleasured them for money, though the women seldom got to keep much of their earnings. It was a hard life, and the women died young and sickly. And … the women were called soiled doves. Ayatas recalled the conversation between the men in the bathhouse, the words about a bird that was to be sold and the dove that would be in need of cleansing. Were these men selling the woman to the saloon owner? Slavery was now illegal, but women were often kept as sex slaves, and the law did nothing to stop it. Ayatas remembered the sheriff and his insulting tone to Etsi.

  The buckboard stopped in the street. Ayatas climbed the rickety stairs of a building nearby and crawled across the flat roof to the next building, and then to the Peacock. He heard the sound of coins clinking. Gold made a dull sound, silver clinking sharply. The woman was crying behind her gag, making a single sound over and over. He thought it might be, “No, no, no…”

  He spotted an open shutter on the back wall of the saloon and dropped from the roof to the ground. There was no glass here to bar the way or to stop a breeze from cooling. Ayatas raced to the window and vaulted inside, landing on the wood floor in the dark. Silent. The smell of alcohol assaulted his nostrils, a sneeze threatened, but he forced the urge away, staying crouched, allowing his eyes to adjust. Gray shapes resolved out of the dark—large whiskey and beer barrels, a side of smoked hog hanging from a hook overhead, bags of flour and cornmeal. He was in a storage room. Still stealthy, he moved through the room and out the door to find himself behind the bar in the saloon’s main room, the barkeep asleep on a blanket on the floor, snoring.