He followed the old man into a cave.
And was amazed to hear him speak English.
‘You must draw something for Knife tomorrow,’ said the old man. ‘Draw him a picture of himself that he will like. Flatter him but tell him that you need more time to make it perfect. That way he will let you live.’
‘I don’t understand.’ Backenhauser slumped on a hard blanket, accepting the cup of tiswin the old man offered him. ‘Why should you help me?’
The old man held up one of the Englishman’s sketches. ‘Is this not Azul? You must have known him a while to set him still enough to draw this.’
‘Sure,’ said Backenhauser. ‘I know him. Why?’
‘I know him, too,’ said Cuervo. ‘From a while ago, when we came together and I saw his path. He still rides the gray horse?’ii
‘Yes,’ said Backenhauser; confused. ‘How’d you know that?’
The old man chuckled and poured more tiswin.
‘How I know does not matter. What does is that I do. That knowing tells me two things.’
‘What?’ The Englishman drained his earthenware cup and fought to stay sober as fear and Apache liquor churned through his mind. ‘What are they?’
Cuervo poured more tiswin, and said:
‘One is that Azul will look for you. He will come after you because you have drawn his likeness and so keep a hold on his soul. You are bound together, and he is a man who keeps his promise; like the earth and the wind.’
‘That’s one,’ said Backenhauser. ‘What’s the other?’
‘He knows what will happen if the bluecoats attack us,’ said Cuervo. ‘He knows that what Knife is doing does no good. Only brings the soldiers down on all the people of Apacheria. He will try to save you to stop that.’
‘You make him sound like some kind of hero,’ said Backenhauser. ‘Like a messiah.’
‘I don’t know what that word means,’ said the old man, ‘but isn’t he the first: a hero?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the artist. ‘I don’t know!’
Cuervo held up one of the sketched portraits of Azul. ‘Why did you draw this?’
Backenhauser shrugged. ‘I suppose he struck me as a good subject.’
‘But you want to paint a picture of him,’ said Cuervo. ‘Don’t you?’
The artist nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘So you’ll make him a hero,’ said the old man. ‘By painting him.’
Chapter Eight
AZUL REACHED THE far side of the bowl and dismounted. The badlands flanking the enormous depression loomed above him in a jumble of rock and shadow. The moon was hidden now behind a bank of low cloud, and more was blowing up from the south, hiding the tumbled stone in eerie shadows and pools of pitch-black darkness. The wind carrying the clouds up brought with it a hint of rain, that soft, almost-sweet taste of airborne moisture.
He stared up at the rocks, deciding on his next move.
He was certain the eight Apaches he had seen attacking the stage had come this way. They had hidden their tracks well, but their decision to take Backenhauser along had meant bringing an extra horse. And the animals that hauled the stages were not war-trained like Apache ponies: they left marks.
An Apache mustang was light and tough. Capable of short bursts of speed or a relentless canter that ceased only when the animal got so badly winded it was blowing frothy blood from its nostrils; and then an Apache would run it some more with a moss fire tied against the pony’s testicles. A stage horse was capable of sustaining a faster pace over longer periods, but not the swift dashes of the Indian ponies. They could not live on the often-sparse forage that kept the mustangs alive. And they were not war-trained. The droppings Azul had seen at the entrance to the depression were thick and rich with grain; there were no droppings from the mustangs.
Yet now, faint on the moisture-laden air, he caught the pungency of fresh excrement. He tethered the gray part-Arab and hung his Stetson on the saddle horn. Then he wrapped the leather war-band around his temples, holding back his mane of shoulder-length blond hair, and slid the Winchester from the scabbard.
He stroked the animal’s velvet muzzle, murmuring softly in the reassuring non-language his people used with horses, and drifted into the darkness.
The acrid stink of the droppings seemed to come from his right, and after several minutes of casting around he found the source of the smell.
There was a huge boulder, fifteen or more feet high and perhaps twenty across, that had split from the main part of the rock and tilted over. On its left side there was a kind of lip where the base had torn loose from the ground and pushed up a low wall of stone. To the right, the enormous slab hung menacingly over a narrow trail that cut deeper into the badlands, the path shaded and guarded by the massive stone. Azul sniffed the air and turned to the left side.
An Apache mustang, its hooves unshod, would leave few marks. But a white man’s horse, with its metal shoes, could score rock. And where the stony lip came up there were the marks of metal horseshoes. And beyond, there was a pile of droppings.
Azul paced warily down the narrow trail. It was little more than a knife-slice cut here, just wide enough to take a single horse, the walls high as a three-story house, shutting out the light, closing in like the sides of a huge coffin.
After about four hundred yards the cut opened on to a wider trail that curved gradually upwards along the edge of a secondary canyon. Directly ahead the badlands folded into a series of ravines that got lost in the darkness. The canyon ran away to the west, seeming to cut through the side of a mesa that lifted up several hundred feet over the tumbled stone below. Azul followed the trail.
At first it ran gently upwards, wide enough to accept three ponies, the ground sandy, dotted with stubby cholla along the edges. Then it turned southwards and got narrow again, the angle of ascent steepening so that the half-breed was walking along a ledge that fell away on his right to the jagged stone below. He held to the inner edge, not from fear of the height, but because he was in shadow there, hidden from guards.
The fact that there were none indicated the confidence the broncos felt in their hideout.
Azul moved on, breathing deeply as he rose higher, hugging the rock face as the trail wound round on itself and dug deeper still into the body of the mesa, like the curving path of a worm into an apple. After a while it turned west again, disappearing into a natural tunnel. The half-breed halted, thinking about his next move.
The tunnel was black, totally devoid of light. There could be sentries inside the hole, or posted at the far exit. But on the north side, the rock fell away in a sheer face that was just bare stone, empty of ledges or bushes or handholds. And to the south the walls of the canyon rose up towards the top of the mesa, steep and shale-laden, so that climbing above the tunnel would be near impossible. Azul went forwards.
Sometimes, old Sees-Both-Ways had told him, a man is confronted by a choice that is hard to make. There is a road ahead and a road behind, perhaps one to the side. Ahead there is danger. Behind, the shame of cowardice. To the side, he doesn’t know. When a brave man faces that choice he learns to know himself. And after that he will never look back.
