I hugged her to my dirty body. She kissed me. ‘I’ll bring him back. Stay here. Take care of everybody.’
I went back past the plaza and out to the River. I put my things down, jumped in, washed the dirt and grit of the tomb off me.
Several dozen people were watching me as I came back in the gate with my fatigues on. I went over to the pen and saddled my horse and brought him around to the front of the temple mound.
I passed the rows of bodies. Curly and Larry were there, their tattoos as bright in death as they had been in life. Larry’s head was turned wrong. Curly had two or three holes in him.
Dreaming Killer lay not too far away.
I handed the reins to one of the priests. He didn’t like it, but he held them. The horse was nervous.
‘What about Moe?’ I asked Sun Man, using his real name.
‘Captured. I think he was knocked out when they got him. They wanted a lot of prisoners.’ A woman came up and handed me enough food for four days.
‘It is four days’ hard march due west,’ said Sun Man. ‘It is a big city. They will kill you before you can get to the gates.’
I turned and went up the stairs toward the temple, which had been rebuilt after the fire during the storm last fall. A priest made to stop me. Sun Man held up his hand. He waved to the priests at the top. They stepped aside.
As I walked up I heard the sounds of axes chopping the logs for tombs. People scraped dirt loose from the far edge of the plaza, preparatory to the funeral rites and the start of a new mound. The village around me which had once been beautiful in its way was now charred and half in waste.
I went into the darkness of the temple. I went into the inner sanctum. I picked up the Woodpecker God costume from its box and stuffed it into my pack. Then I put the headpiece with its bright scalp and gleaming bill under my arm.
I came back out to the top of the platform. The air was blue, the sun bright to the east. It was a beautiful morning up above.
Someone yelled when they saw what I had. The high priest dropped to the ground like a stone and lay still. The priests on the temple steps didn’t move.
I went down the steps to my horse.
I swung up into the saddle and tied the pack to the saddle horn.
The people all bowed except for Sun Man.
I turned the horse and rode out across the plaza, and out the west gate. It slammed shut behind us.
I put our shadow in front of us.
Bessie XII
The motorcycles and the gleaming white cars pulled up onto the bluff. There was a break between storms. The waters of the bayou lapped against the coffer dam and its sandbags, eating at it.
Men in black suits with bulges under their arms jumped off the cars, eyed people with lizardlike gazes, moved some of the crowd back.
Perch and Kincaid went to the middle car of the five. A man in a white suit and hat lounged in the back of the car. He sat up on the folded convertible top, looking at the tents, the dam, the mounds, the bayou.
Bessie watched from her tent. She was tired; she wanted to sleep for weeks. She saw Kincaid and Perch point to the bayou waters, the mounds, the dam. They indicated the workers filling the sandbags, the mired tractor, the tarps and tents over the mounds.
Then they talked like she had never seen them do before; their hands shaped mounds, crowns, royalty, lost heritages, millennia, mysteries. They talked for ten full minutes.
Bessie came from her tent and walked to the knot of men. One of the bodyguards nodded to her. She walked up within a few feet of Kincaid as he finished his plea.
The man in the white suit pulled a long cigar from his left coat pocket, pulled off the cellophane but left the band on. He snipped off the end of the cigar with a penknife the size of a fingernail. He looked down at the mound, over at the bayou.
He lit the cigar.
‘Bodeaux?’ he said around it.
‘Yo, Kingfish!’
‘Call the highway department. Give these people what they want.’
‘Yes, Kingfish.’
Then the man in the white suit winked at Bessie. She blushed.
Men jumped on running boards up and down the line. Sirens started up. The motorcycles wheeled ahead. The cars bounced back to the road, the man in the white suit puffing on his cigar.
As the convertible turned its wire-spoked wheels out onto the road toward Baton Rouge, he flicked his cigar out onto the highway and put his hands behind his head.
Leake XIV
‘Dead folks are past fooling.’
I rode west, and the trail wasn’t hard to follow. They must have walked eight abreast when they left the siege. It looked like someone had driven herds of cattle through the grass where they left the trail.
I was weak as a kitten. The jolting of the horse didn’t help. I kept it at a steady trot, stopping to rest and water it every two hours or so.
When it got too dark to see, I stopped for the night, hobbled the horse and fell into an exhausted sleep, a free-lunch counter for mosquitoes.
Dawn came up like thunder, and the noise caused me to have a splitting headache. I ate half the food I had with me for the whole trip, got some dirty water for my canteen, and rode again.
Soon I left the last of the country I knew. We went through flat land with high grass, water, pines. A rice grower’s dream, if there’d been any rice in this part of the world yet.
I was fevered and aching, but in pretty good shape for a guy who’d been given up for dead and been buried for three days.
I had to catch up to the Huastecas. Maybe they’d lost their minds, like Sun Man said after the battle. They never attacked villages, except those of their own which were in constant revolt against them. They’d never come this far east. They had never fought to the death before that battle we’d had with them last moon.
What the hell. Is everything going to fall apart just when I show up? Maybe Dreaming Killer was right; maybe the Death Cult is on the right track. Maybe Death is becoming the next big thing in this world, after centuries of status quo.
I think of Took, Moe, the others. Headed for the cannibal pot, or whatever the Huastecas use. I kick the horse into a faster trot.
Night again, though I ride blind until long after I should. The horse feels the way. It’s still like a two-lane highway through the grass. I stop when the grass changes to a packed-earth trail.
Morning. Calm. Outside the grove of trees in which we spent the night, the path goes straight as a bullet to the west. The land that way is flatter. A storehouse squats across the pathway. Somebody leans on a spear.
Their lands start here, then. I can’t be more than thirty kilometers from their regional capital. Only a few hours behind them. They should have reached the city last night. I doubt they let the captives slow them once they got this far.
So this is it: man vs. a society gone mad in a world he did not make. I ready my pistol and carbine while the horse grazes. I put on my helmet, and over that, and my back and shoulders, I drape the Woodpecker God costume.
Its giant beak hangs over my forehead. I tie the straps around my neck. I mount the horse, gentle it down, watch the stone house two hundred meters away. I hang my three grenades on the carbine sling.
A naked guy leaves the stonehouse at a hot trot, toward the west. A messenger, and what he has to say is all quiet on the Eastern Front. I wait until he’s out of sight.
Then I turn the horse out onto the pathway and ride for the blockhouse.
The guy leaning on the spear comes up, looks at me, puzzlement on his face. Then he starts to yell, and guys come out like bees around a bear, spears up, sleepy-faced. Their waking-up faces change to Os, all mouth and eyes. While they stare, I ride right over them.