Conquistador (72 page)

Tom nodded, feeling his gloom lift. Tully came up with the Bren gun. “Ready to handle this?” he asked Villers.

“
Hell,
yes,” Villers said cheerfully. “Good gun. The melancholy Dane's been brooding at me here.”

“I know how you feel,” Tully said. “Sweet Christ, do I know how you feel.”

“He does the Hamlet with you too?” Villers asked.

“Oh, incessantly. Gloom, guilt, silences, despair. Well, you know Danes.”

“How do you stand it?”

“I keep refusing to marry him, for starters,” Tully said seriously. “You know how it is—you can't really change someone that way, no matter what they promise.”

“Sociopaths,” Tom said, grinning. “Both of you. And it's Norway my folks came from, not Denmark. Hamlet was probably half Swedish. Danes are too goddamned
hygge
to brood.”

“What's
that?
” Villers asked curiously. “Hi-ge? Huggy? Some Scandinavian brand of kink?”

“H-Y-double-G-E. Sort of like ‘cute' or ‘cozy,' but not so sternly unyielding, and without the harsh overtones. Did you think it was an accident Denmark's greatest contributions to world culture were Tuborg, a sweet fruit pastry and the Little Fucking Mermaid?”

Adrienne was a little way off, sitting behind a bush and looking down into the valley with the high-tech binoculars, her elbows on her knees. Botha sat beside her, making notes on a map. She spoke, raising her voice without taking her eyes from the glasses. “If you three have finished with the male-bonding thing, could you come over here for a moment?” she said dryly.

They did, crouching low. West and north the valley floor opened out, silvery in the moonlight even without their night-sight goggles. Save for the area along the river and some of the washes that came down from the south, there was little of the dense growth that covered much of the coastlands. It was replaced by a savanna of knee-length grass, scattered with big round-topped oaks, sagebrush and cactus on dry sandy spots, and the odd walnut tree. A mile away a campfire flickered in the night—the rebels were keeping up the pretense of being an innocent hunting party.

“Now, one of them was a blond, you say?” she said.

“Yes,” Tom replied. “Teenager.”

“Johann Lang,” Botha confirmed. “Just turned nineteen.”

“All right,” Adrienne said. “Tom's Ranger stunt went off like clockwork.”

Even then he felt a small glow of pride at the pride in her eyes.

“But I think this calls for real sneakiness, which is my specialty,” she went on.

“Where's Johann?” Frikkie Lang said. “He should be back by now.”

“Probably still getting his dues from
Oom
Andries,” Dirk van Deventer said, poking at the fire.

He'd built the fire up a bit since they'd finished cooking; you needed a bed of low coals for that. They both kept their voices down; they were about Johann's age, and along on sufferance. Johann's father and Pik van Deventer were not ones to tolerate what they considered idle chatter or disrespect among the younger generation, particularly not on an important mission like this, vital to the future of the
volk.
Pik was sitting in a camp chair near one of the big tents, with a hurricane lantern hanging over him from its frontal awning, reading his Bible.

“Serves him right, and now
we
don't have to do
kaffir
work cleaning up for a week,” Frikkie said. “Pretty soon we'll all have
kaffir
to do the
kaffir
work.”

Dirk lowered his voice and smiled as he leaned close to his friend—both the older men with them were straitlaced.

“Not to mention
kaffir meids
to work on their backs. I hear they—”

They could have discussed
that
subject for hours, both being teenage males, but the sound of a horse's hooves interrupted them. Both of them were farm-born and -raised; they could tell it was a single mount, ridden at a slow walk. The sound came from the east toward the pass.

“Johann!” the boy's father shouted. “Get your lazy backside over here.”

The two young men rose, looking away from the fire and slitting their eyes to get their night vision back with the automatic gesture of those who'd hunted since they were twelve. That let them see what was coming: an Indian with bowed head and hands tied behind his back, walking in front of a lone horseman who held his rifle with the butt resting on his right thigh. It had to be Johann; they recognized his horse, and the bright hair that caught the edge of the firelight.

“Prisoner!” the horseman shouted, his voice high and shrill with excitement. “Prisoner!”

“You
sklem!
” Frikkie shouted joyfully, running out. “It wasn't a bear after all!” The others were all on their feet as well; Dirk ran after him, and the two older men stood to watch. Frikkie had just enough time to realize that the horseman was a woman when the Indian's arms came out from behind his back. The right hand flashed, and as the young man began to bring up his rifle something struck him a massive blow beneath the chin. He never saw the tomahawk that split his throat, only felt a huge wetness when he tried to draw breath, saw darkness, heard a distant fusillade of shots and the stuttering rattle of a machine gun.

Then nothing, ever again.

“Well, that was easy enough,” Adrienne said.

“It usually is, when you've got surprise on your side,” Tom replied.

The party's own horses and mules had come up; they were some distance from the camp of the dead. Botha had insisted on that; it turned out several of the younger rebels had been friends of his son.

“There are things a man should not see too young,” he said.

Adrienne and Tom both looked after the big man as he walked off to help with loading the plunder on the captured horses—all the things Indian raiders would have taken, the cloth and tools and weapons and liquor. Kolomusnim had found some of that, and was now resting with his belly over a horse's saddle.

“I wouldn't have thought Piet had it in him,” Adrienne said quietly. “Granted he was never quite as bad as Schalk, but . . .”

“It all depends on who you consider human,” Tom said. “I suspect Botha has a fairly narrow definition, but he's quite human himself within those limits.”

Their hands intertwined. “And I was scared
spitless
when you went in like that,” he said, his voice husky for a moment.

“You didn't say anything,” she pointed out.

“Wouldn't have done any good,” he said. “Besides, you were right.”

That got him a sudden tight squeeze. “God, you're a find!”

“You're another,” he said, and released her.

Tully got an all-out hug and kiss of relief from Sandra Margolin.

“Hey, I'm alive,” he said, when she let him come back up for air.

“That's why, you idiot!” she said, and kissed him again.

And now to work,
Tom thought.
We're just getting started.

The elephant put its forehead against the trunk of an oak and pushed, retreated, pushed again. It was a gray-brown mountain of flesh, the thick skin deeply wrinkled and the great triangular ears ragged; even a hundred yards away they could hear the quick exhaled huff of breath as it backed off. Then it curled its trunk high, trumpeted in anger and shuffled forward, head down and big curved tusks almost touching the dry earth as it charged the thing that had irritated it. Even with better than two hundred yards between them and the great beast, the party's horses shied at the sound, and several of the mules threw their heads up and brayed.

Tom whistled softly, standing in the stirrups and shading his eyes against the setting sun with a hand. “What a monster!”

“I've never seen a bigger,” Botha agreed.

“We imported the savanna type from South Africa and Angola,” Adrienne said. “Couple of hundred young adults, mostly females, and they bred like bunnies; this could be one of the first generation. Piet, what size would you say he was?”

“Old bull, eleven, twelve feet at the shoulder . . . nine tons, maybe,” the Afrikaner said. “Big enough to push that tree over, by thunder.”

The big valley oak gave a groaning creak, and the branches at the top shivered; birds swept up from it in a cloud like twisting smoke. The elephant bull rocked backward, then thrust again. Roots broke, first isolated
crack . . . crack
. . . sounds, then a fusillade like the sound of battle. Another long groan, and the tree pitched forward, hesitated for a moment, then toppled over on its side. A big ball of the dry soil came up with it, leaving a pit deeper than a man in the earth, and a cloud of dust drifted away and fell. The elephant moved forward and began ripping off branches and stuffing them in its mouth, making small grunting sounds of contentment as it crunched leaves and acorns and twigs.

Tom pushed back his jungle hat and wiped sweat off his face onto his sleeve. They were in the northern lobe of the San Fernando now, northwest of the Verdugo Hills and not far from where Mission San Fernando Rey de España had stood in the other history. The coastal plain had been warm; the valley was no-doubt-about-it
hot,
nearly a hundred today.

“Maybe we should have started traveling by night before we crossed the San Fernando,” he said, uncorking his canteen and taking a long draft of warm water.

The mountains to the north were close, blue in the bright sunlight and rising in height from west to east; columns of smoke stood out in several places, marks of the brushfires to be expected at this season. Luckily they hadn't run into any on the flat floor of the basin, nor into any of the occasional hunting parties who traveled here from the settled zones. They'd made good time across the open prairie with its groves of oaks, and its teeming herds of antelope and ostrich and bison, wild horses and feral cattle and innumerable birds. He could see all those right now, and more: particularly the circling buzzards, and probably condors, not far to the north.

“We'd have lost time, and it's not as hot here as it will be in the Mohave,” she said. “Plus there's usually nobody around here except. . .” She paused. “Oooops.”

As usual, Jim Simmons and Kolo had been riding point; they'd pushed on ahead to investigate what had brought so many carrion eaters together. Judging from the dust, they were coming back quickly.

Simmons reined in; his face looked a little strained. “Indians—Nyo-Ilcha,” he said. “Sun Clan of the Mohaves. They've all got peace brassards, and a helicopter visited them yesterday to make sure they weren't involved in the attack on our rebel friends—pardon me, on the harmless hunting party with the sniper's posts above the Glendale Narrows.”