Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier Read online

  It was the hottest part of day when Turner offered Etsi a small repast and left the room to order a bowl of fresh greens, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of wine be brought to the study. Ayatas slipped inside, and Etsi whispered, “He thinks I am a fool, to be drugged.” Her expression was stern, and he knew she feared the food would contain the mushroom peyote or opium.

  “You have never been a fool, my fire woman.” Quickly he ducked back out and into the shadows. Turner and the housemaid came and went, leaving the door open. Turner continued his seduction, but Etsi ate little, drank only water and, as soon as the meal was over, insisted that she and her guide would walk back to town. Turner countered, equally insistent, that he drive them back. Etsi agreed.

  The buckboard was brought around, and Turner helped Etsi up to the seat. They rode back to town on the bench seat. Ayatas sat on the back of the wagon, staring into the distance, planning how he would kill the man who sought to woo his woman.

  “Is she still in room seven?”

  Ayatas dropped his chin in the Tsalagi way. The scent of Turner’s wife had come out of the window, along with the scent of opium. She had been drugged. The two of them would free her before the sun set. And kill her husband by morning.

  “Where is the sheriff?” Etsi asked, her voice low so that Mrs. Smith, if she came back from her errand early, would not know that she had a man in her room.

  “The sheriff and the dead man are at the ranch.”

  “Ayatas,” she protested, laughter in her voice. “Dead man. Really. Here. Help me into the boots.”

  “They drink and play cards,” Ayatas said, inserting the boot hooks in the leather loops. “In the morning, they will tell you that the ranch hands found what was left of the body and brought it in. They think you will not know the difference between the bones of a deer and the bones of a woman if there is no head.”

  “Of course. Women are uniformly stupid and gullible. And when not, then easily bruised and forced. Pull.” She stood and Ayatas lifted the metal hooks against her weight until her left foot slipped in and then the right, snug. Etsi was dressed in dark gray and black, men’s breeches and riding boots, shirt and black scarf over her hair and face. She wore a small gun at her waist and a knife at her thigh. He had taught her to fight. She was not a warrior, but she was capable. And she had magic.

  “Is Mrs. Lamont still at the bakery?” Two hours past, they had talked to Mrs. Lamont, telling her the story of Amandine. The baker did not want to believe that Turner sold his wife to the saloon, the sheriff assisting, claiming that no white man would do such a thing. But she had been convinced and would help with the rescue and then care for Amandine through the night.

  He dropped his head in agreement again, but this time his fire woman gripped his chin and pulled him to her. “What we do is good.” Her kiss was heated, and she laughed low in her throat. Long minutes later, they were sprawled on the narrow bed, her shirt unbuttoned and his discarded. She whispered, “We’ll be late if we keep this up.”

  “I do not care,” he growled.

  She smiled and trailed her finger across his brow and down his cheek. “We will save her and fix things and then we will leave this place for the wild lands. Just us two beneath the stars, the wolves howling in the night.”

  “You will write your story while I hunt.”

  “And we will indulge ourselves beneath the moon.”

  “You are my fire woman.”

  “You are my beautiful man.” She drew his long black braid through her fingers and kissed him before standing. “Work before pleasure.”

  In the heat of day, they had prepared for the night, gathering a ladder, ropes, a blanket, and medical supplies. Their horses were saddled, needing only the girths tightened to be ready for a fast race out of town.

  At the back of the saloon, they waited for dusk to fall and Mrs. Lamont to take action. They did not expect the noise that followed.

  Women screamed, shouted, and guns were fired. Men shouted. Footsteps thundered. Etsi’s eyes went wide. “Go!” she whispered.

  Ayatas raised the ladder to the window of number seven and ground the legs into the dirt to secure it. He raced for the window of the storeroom. Dove inside. His last sight of his woman was her rounded form climbing the ladder.

  He came up in the dark and raised the scarf over his face to hide his identity. Pulled his knife and his six shooter. He raced from the storeroom into the saloon. And he nearly stopped dead.

  Mrs. Lamont and Mrs. Smith stood shoulder to shoulder with the school teacher and a man in a black robe. A priest. The women held guns on the saloon owner and three other men. “Shoot them! Shoot them!” the owner shouted. But the men with him could not decide what to do.

  The priest shouted, “You have dishonored women! Repent!”

  Ayatas raced up the stairs, his moccasins silent, his passage unnoticed by any but Mrs. Lamont. The gray-haired woman tilted her head at him, shouldered her shotgun, and shouted at the saloon owner, “We’ve heard that your doves are here against their wills! Drugged! Abused!”

  Ayatas reached the far room and turned the knob. It was locked, and he had no key. He tightened his grip on the darkened bronze knob and drew on his skinwalker strength. The lock broke inside with a harsh snap. He put a shoulder to the door and slipped into the dark.

  Amandine was deeply drugged, tied to the bed, her breaths shallow, her face bruised and streaked with tears. Her scent was sick and broken. But he knew a woman could survive many horrible things and become strong again. His mother had survived, and no one called her victim.

  Etsi had cut the bonds on the woman and used the ropes to tie the blanket over her. Together they lifted Amandine up and over his shoulder. Etsi adjusted both their scarves so no hair and only their eyes would show. Ayatas drew his weapon with his free hand. Etsi drew her gun and the knife at her thigh. She raced from the room and down the stairs. He followed into the bright lights and the shouting and the sound of gunfire.

  Halfway down, the saloon owner spotted them and raised his gun to fire. Etsi paused, aimed, and shot him. The saloon owner stumbled, screaming, a spot of blood on his chest beginning to spread. The smooth action, the lack of twice-thinking her actions, brought fierce happiness to Ayatas. But the owner was not dead. He lifted his gun again and this time aimed at the women gathered in front of him. He fired.

  Mrs. Smith fell. Mrs. Lamont raised her shotgun and fired. His head blew back, blood and brains hitting the wall behind him. The saloon owner dropped. The other three men raced away.

  Ayatas and Etsi carried Amandine into the early night. Hoof beats galloped away, one sounding lame already. “They’ll go for the sheriff and the ranch,” Etsi said. “Let’s get Amandine to safety.” They took her to the bakery. No one was there, but the door was open. Gently, Ayatas placed the unconscious woman on the small bed in the corner.

  “We owe you.”

  Etsi whirled, aiming at the door. But it was, Mrs. Lamont. Etsi dropped the weapon.

  “We all knew there were too many young women disappearing, most as they passed through. The sheriff blamed it on Apache, or panthers, or jaguars. Once a raiding party of Comanche, though Agua Caliente is a mighty long ways from their territory. And no young men disappeared. We—the women—knew something was wrong. But we didn’t know what to do, not until you came.”

  “You’ll care for her?” Etsi asked.

  “All of them.” Mrs. Lamont sat in the only chair, beside Amandine. “There’s five other young women. Been abused something awful. We’ll take care of them. Give them a place to stay.”

  “The sheriff?” Etsi asked.

  “Oh. I have a feeling he’ll disappear.” Her tone was cunning, her expression amused. “Mrs. Smith is securing his rooms and the jail cell, making certain it’s all locked up. One of us will stay there all night. If he ever shows up again, the sheriff’s out of a job. But you, well, you best hurry if you want to … finish your night’s work.”

  “Thank you,” Et
si said. “We couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “And we wouldn’t have done it without you.”

  Ayatas and Etsi sped to the livery and within seconds were trotting out of town, warming up the horses. As soon as they safely could, they gave the mounts their heads and leaned forward, across the saddle horns, into the night wind.

  They passed a man leading a horse. It was limping. Ayatas wanted to shoot the man for abusing the animal. Perhaps on the way back. They passed a second horse, this one lying on the ground, grunting with pain. His leg was broken. They rode past. Ayatas would come back and put the animal out of its misery. They ran for half a mile and walked the animals for half a mile. The lights of the ranch house came into view.

  Ayatas and Etsi slowed their mounts. The horses were sweating and blowing, and Ayatas worried about the cannon bone on Etsi’s mount, but it wasn’t limping, not yet. Perhaps they hadn’t damaged the horse. Through the night air came the sound of shouting and then silence. “The other rider got here just now.” Etsi sounded sad. “They’ll all ride in together, too many for just us to stop. And I doubt the town’s women will have the gumption to face down a well-armed group of men.”

  But Ayatas knew men. The sheriff and Turner would not wait for the ranch hands to gather. They would believe that the two of them could handle the town’s women. He slid from his mount and gave the reins to Etsi. “Take the mounts into the brush. I will shift into jaguar. I will herd the horses as they leave the ranch. Spook them. I will take one, you the other.”

  She looped the reins to her saddle. “Be careful.”

  “I most certainly will not,” he quoted her.

  Etsi laughed like the young girl he fell in love with nearly two decades before. She led the horses into the brush. Ayatas stripped off his clothing and tied it in his scarf, securing the weapons so they would be at hand when he shifted back. Naked, he tied the scarf around his neck, leaving the fetish necklace in place, pulling the heavy bundle uncomfortably tight. Then he sat and called upon the snake in the center of all things, calling upon the life-force of the jaguar in the bones of the fierce beast. He was not moon-called, but it was easier to shift into another shape when gauwatlvyi was full. It was only two days to Guyequoni—the Ripe Corn Moon of the month the white man called July. His shift was fast and painless.

  Ayatas raced to the middle of the street when horses came at a run. Tilted his ear tabs, finding their speed and location with his cat-ears. He squatted, leaving fresh piss in the middle of the street. Then he leaped thirty feet to the top of a pile of boulders and crouched. Waiting. As the horses passed at a hard run, bright silver-green in his cat-night-vision, he growled, the sound rising. He screamed out his big-cat roar, a chuff of territory claiming, a roar of sound.

  The horses screamed and leaped to the side, shying as they passed over his piss. One tucked his head and began to buck. The other raced off the road. The man on the bucking horse cursed, lost his stirrups, and then the horn. He was tossed high. He landed. The cursing stopped. The horse bucked its way into the night. The man on the ground groaned.

  The wind began to rush, fiery with magic. In the distance, Ayatas heard a man scream.

  Ayatas trotted to the man on the ground. It was the sheriff. Ayatas hungered after his shift. It took energy to feed his shape-changing magic. He sniffed the man. He bled. He was injured prey. Ayatas leaned and blew on the sheriff’s face. The man screamed. Ayatas chuffed again. The sheriff screamed and tried to pull his gun. Ayatas bounded and caught the man in his claws. Flipped him over. Pounced on his chest. The man screamed again. Ayatas chuffed with laughter.

  “Stop playing with your food, Aya,” Etsi said.

  Hungrily, Ayatas tore into the sheriff’s throat and ate. The man died, bleeding out on the dirt, gasping wetly for breath. Ayatas sank his fangs into the sheriff’s liver. He ate enough to appease the cramping in his own belly. He ripped out part of a lung and both kidneys, eating voraciously. Had he eaten of a human while in human form, he would have endangered his skinwalker energies, but as predator cat, he was free from such fears.

  Full, he strolled away, leaving many tracks in the blood and in the dirt of the road. In the darkness, he shifted back to human form and dressed. All the attack had taken perhaps ten minutes in the white man’s time.

  He and his Everhart woman rode on to the ranch and alerted the ranch hands, who were gathering their gear in preparation to follow their boss into town. “Hello the house!” she called as they neared the bunkhouse. “There’s a dead man in the road!”

  At dawn, a very tired Ayatas and Etsi were in the saloon, sitting at a table in the dark beneath the stairs, sharing a pot of coffee. Etsi was writing her story, a sheaf of paper at her elbow, with pen and inkwell. They were watching and listening to what his Everhart woman called a ruckus.

  The two dead men were lying on tables pushed together in the center of the saloon. The rest of the space was taken up by men, drinking and arguing and staying as far away from the women as they could. Because the women were angry and the men were rightfully afraid. The women were being led by Mrs. Smith, formidable even when wounded. All carried loaded weapons.

  A mob of armed angry women was a frightful thing to observe, unless one had been raised under the heel of uni lisi and elisi. Nothing was more frightening than those two in a rage. Ayatas sipped his coffee. It had been served in his own tin cup, to keep his filth from contaminating the cups used by the whites. Ayatas found it amusing and thought that before he left, he might shift into jaguar again and piss into all the cups.

  The hands from Carleton’s Buckeye Springs Ranch were all drunk. Other ranchers from the surrounding area stomped the horse manure off their boots and entered. The men were all business and worried about the safety of their stock and children, most likely in that order. The undertaker, aware of his audience, measured the bodies for caskets. The doctor (who cut hair and shaved men at the bathhouse) was studying the wounds. He stood and tucked his thumbs into his vest lapels and pronounced, “These men are dead! The new owner of Carleton’s died by a broken neck. The sheriff died by a broken leg that left him game to a …” He raised his voice. “To a marauding mountain lion.”

  “We need to track down that mountain lion and shoot it,” a stranger said.

  “No!” Mrs. Lamont shouted. The room quieted. “No one will be leaving this saloon until justice is served.”

  Amandine walked slowly into the saloon, and the place went as silent as the dead men. She stood straight, her bruises purpled and scarlet. She looked around the room as the other women moved to cover the exits with their bodies and their guns.

  “You all know me,” Amandine said. “You know that I was married fast to a man who appeared to be all that was ever in a girl’s dreams. Then my father died, and it was proved to me that man I thought loved me was a flimflam man. Now he is dead. According to my father’s will, the ranch is mine. Is that understood?”

  The men around her nodded. Two men edged toward the doors.

  “My husband sold me two nights past to Ramon Vicente, the owner of the saloon.” Several of the men in the group drew weapons. Several others leaned in to study her face. “He and two of my former ranch hands abused my body and my person. Vicente is dead. The ranch hands who abused me are Jimmy Jon Akers and Slim Tubbers.”

  The two men bolted. Mrs. Lamont raised her shotgun and coldcocked one. The other was tripped. One woman sat on him, another beat his head against the floor. A third kicked his side so hard the snap of broken ribs could be heard across the room. Etsi laughed. She was taking notes as fast as her pen could flow across the paper.

  “I have witnesses. I call the reporter, Mrs. Everhart, and the baker, Mrs. Lamont, to speak to the truth of my statement.”

  Etsi stood and told the story of the night Amandine had been brought into town, telling it as if she had been the witness. She told about finding Amandine and setting her free. About riding out to the ranch. His forever woman was a wonderful story
teller.

  “The two men tried to get away,” Etsi said. “You saw them. They abused the body of a woman. Where I come from that means either a neutering or a hanging.”

  Ayatas did not think the men would neuter the rapists. But one did pull out a length of rope and start braiding.

  Satisfied, Etsi motioned for him to follow, and they left the saloon.

  That night, under the stars, Etsi read him the story called “Savior of the Doves.” It was wonderful. And then she fell into his arms on their layered bedrolls and they loved together beneath the nearly full moon, as they always had, as they always would. If he could keep his Everhart woman safe.

  9

  To Hear a Howling Herd

  Gunnar De Winter

  Quietspring hung in the nothingness.

  He let the sensorsuit enter his mind.

  Once upon a time, his people put their ears to the ground of the prairie on Old Earth to locate bison. Now they hunted for the spacetime ripples that announced a herd of rays.

  Something slid through him, over him, past him. A faint flicker of movement. A bashful beacon.

  Quietspring tugged the rope attaching him to the front craft of the caravan. He was reeled in.

  A pair of strong hands peeled away the tight black suit that encased him. Vision returned when the opaque face cover was removed.

  “Well, son?”

  “Twenty-five, thirty-six.”

  “Excellent, that’s our heading.” The pat on his shoulder reverberated through Quietspring’s entire body. His father, Ironlung, was a big man, working in the high gravity engine rooms. “How many?”