Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name (22 page)

It
was a mild day, and they wound at a lazy pace through the lowland. The blasted
ground gave way to grasses and brushes of juniper and manzanita, and trees of
oak and pine took root. Then the land grew rocky again, and the gleaming
limestone slopes of the mountains burst forth, pushing the conifers and fir
trees high above the desert.

Up
a steep and narrow trail obscured by trees they passed, the bristly pine
branches reaching out and stroking his knees like the groping fingers of
superstitious villagers seeking luck. Here the onager proved more sure footed
than the ponies, and never stumbled, whereas one of the Indians gripped the
long mane of his mount until his copper knuckles shone pale in the dusk.

The
sunset eroded into a blue, starry evening as they picked their way up the stony
path, and still they ascended well into the growing night until the Rider could
only see the hunkered silhouettes of his guides sky lit against the stars. The
moon shouldered into a cloudy coat and denied its thin light to the obscure
trail.

The
trail grew more and more a rabbit
path,
and the horses
pushed through a lace of branches. The Rider couldn’t see how his escorts could
possibly find their way, but their progression remained instinctual, as if they
sensed the path rather than saw it, or had traveled it so often they were like
blind men moving about familiar surroundings. Even in the day the Rider doubted
he could have found the way.

Now
the branches clawed at them, and he touched his chin to his chest and leaned
low over the onager’s neck. Denied of sight, the trees gave him an odd feeling,
coming unseen out of nothing to run their knotty fingers over him.

The
onager, still slightly visible in its pallor, quivered. It stopped in its
tracks, and the horse behind him butted up against it and whinnied in
irritation. The Rider had traveled too long with the animal to mistake its
manner for mere stubbornness. This ebullition was born of fear.

He
touched his pistol and opened his mouth to hiss a warning to the Indians, but
it seemed they shared some sixth sense with the onager, for ahead of him they
all stopped in their paces and the Rider could see one of them craning his neck
and straightening like a wary desert hare.

There
was a rattling sound, unmistakably that of the sort of snake that frequented
the desert, cooling in shadows and draping themselves over flat rocks to soak
up the warmth of the sun. This sound was more menacing however, than any the
Rider had ever heard. It was overlarge, and after a moment, it was joined by
another, and another.

Piishi
called out a warning in his own language and suddenly something heavy struck
the horseman behind the Rider and knocked him into the brush. At the same
moment the other Indians took up the cry and drew their weapons, one of the
trees caught on his coat.

He
sought to free himself, and found the skeletal grip that pulled at him was not
that of a branch at all, but thin, clawed fingers belonging to some wiry man or
creature reaching out at him from the trees. He grabbed at it, and his hand
encircled a powerful wrist sheathed in rough, leathern skin. His free hand
could not reach his pistol, but he did manage to whisk his heavy knife from its
scabbard. He hacked at his unseen assailant, and it withdrew in shock and pain.
He heard not a man’s scream, but a weird hiss, and briefly in the dim starlight
siphoned through the tree branches, he had the impression of two anthropoid
eyes gleaming black in a flat, inhuman head.

The
guns started going off then, and the smell of powder and the hissing of the
attackers were all around them in the dark. The Rider twisted to look to the man
behind him who had fallen, and heard his pony go crashing off through the trees
the way they’d come. He drew his pistol, but knew the Indian was on the rocky
ground wrestling with whatever had surprised him. He couldn’t fire blind. He
crouched by the onager’s legs and widened his eyes to let in enough light to
find a target.

A
knife flashed and a wriggling shadow intertwined with the grunting man. There
came the sound of rending cloth and scattering stones from that direction and
the cracking of the Indians’ rifles and shouts from behind. He turned to the
front of the line and heard a horse scream and fall.

In
a transient blast of light from one of the Indian’s carbines, the Rider
glimpsed something large and snake-like coiled around the neck of the horse
that had fallen, its maw buried in its throat, and two very humanoid arms
hugging its thrashing head. Its skin was a mottled, spotted black and beaded
orange like a Gila monster’s. It was at least partially humanoid, the size of a
large child. Then it was gone back into the shadow, an amorphous blob of violet
fading from his eyes.

He
stood holding out his golden pistol and his ensanguined knife, too stunned to
act and filled with such a supernatural dread as he had not felt since he was a
child. He had passed between realities and seen the sights of heaven and hell,
but never had he beheld something so twisted and unreal in this, the mundane
world of air and blood. It plunged a cold spear of dread into the center of his
being, spreading a poisonous fear through his loins and up his spine.

The
Indians were dying. He heard their shouts, even above the rattle and hiss of
their inhuman enemy. He moved, but he was too late. One of them leapt onto his
shoulders, its tail whorling around his midsection, seizing him in a python’s
grip, squeezing the wind out of him. Its strong hands latched onto his arms,
digging their talons into his shoulders as he struggled. He felt its sharp
breath on his neck, heard its alien hiss hot in his ears, felt the stinging fleck
of its poisonous saliva as it reared its head to kill him as it had the horse.

Then
the onager brayed and kicked out with its Herculean back legs, possibly out of
terror, or else to save its master. It connected with terrible blunt force on
the side of the thing. The shocking impact of the double kick slackened the
compressive grip around the Rider’s trunk and the thing flopped crazily back,
shredding his sleeves and almost pulling him down on top of it. It swiftly
regained its senses and reared up. The Rider pivoted, slashing with the knife,
driving its keen edge half into the thick neck, scoring its vertebrae. The
Rider’s pistol darted forward, the barrel jamming under its clicking jaw. The
gunshot that ensued sent most of its head scattering back into the trees.

It
fell to the ground, lashing in death, and a second sprung up at him. Probably
it had finished the combat with the Indian and had seen its comrade die. The
Rider fired at it, but it twisted in mid jump and the bullet only
glanced
its side. Claws raked at his cheek in passing,
drawing blood. He turned to follow it, firing the whole time, and the muzzle
flashes traced its retreat into the underbrush like the fulguration of a
photographer’s flash powder. It bounded on the flats of its palms and its
serpentine hind end propelled it slithering out of sight.

The
Rider turned to face however-many-more of the creatures he didn’t know, but
found his arc of fire silent but for the groaning of a wounded man and the
shrill screams of dying horses. The onager nuzzled against his bleeding
shoulder, as if to reassure him that the danger had passed.

Another
rifle shot cracked out after a moment, but the Rider realized its purpose as
one of the horses writhing in the trail went still. Another shot, and another,
and no horses at all. A single set of quiet footsteps moved up and down the
line, pausing to inspect the damage. The Rider heard a muffled conversation in
the Indian tongue, and then one last rifle spoke. The moaning man was no more.

From
the direction the last report had come, Piishi spoke;

“Are
you alive, Rider?”

“Yes.”

“Were
you bit?”

“No.
I don’t think so.” He ran his fingers over his wounds, panting and cold from
fear sweat. “No.”

“These
things are poisonous,” he said. “You must be sure.”

The
footsteps came closer, and a second set of questing fingers touched his
shoulders and his neck and his face.

“Then
let’s keep going,” Piishi said. He turned and started back up the trail.

The
Rider shook his head, incredulous at the Indian’s nonchalance.

“What
were those things?”

“Soldiers
of the Black Goat Man.
The Master of Red House.”

* * *
*

Piishi led the Rider and the onager
silently on up the mountainside, until the Rider spied a dim orange
incandescence in the distance. They made for this light, until it grew into a
red hairline crack in the earth, actually a narrow fissure which barely
admitted the donkey, but widened as it deepened into a concealed box canyon. In
the light, Piishi paused to once again inspect the Rider and himself. Piishi
bore the cuts and bruises of struggle, but no feared mark of fang. At last the
narrow passage opened into a comfortable natural shelter in the rock, its walls
dancing with firelight, the sky a dark ribbon far above. The campfire burned in
front of an eight foot tall dwelling fashioned from bound yucca and branch—a
wickiup, the Rider had once heard its type
called,
the
traditional hut of the highland Apache.

But
the man who sat cross legged before the fire was not Indian. He was brown
skinned and had a shaven headed pate, and Indians always wore their hair long,
he knew. The bareness of his skull was made up for in the luxuriant white beard
that trailed from his chin to his knees. He was an elderly man, by the worn
skin of his neatly folded hands and his bare feet, and the tracks and faint
lines that marred his otherwise smooth face were like the fading footprints of
long journeys across untouched sand. He was thin, but strong looking, and he
wore a seamless robe of unabashed sky blue which the Rider had not seen the
like of in his western travels. The man was sleeping or meditating, his eyes
closed.

Piishi
approached the fire and spoke;

“Tats’adah.”

Whether
he meant it to introduce the Rider or to rouse the man himself, the man called
Tats’adah opened two eyes of deep, thoughtful umber, and regarded first the
Indian, and then the Rider.

To
Piishi, the strange man inquired in the Apache’s own language. Piishi replied,
no doubt telling him of the fate of the others. The man’s soft eyes exuded a
palpable sorrow,
then
they looked once more to the
Rider.

“Welcome,
Merkabah Rider, Son of the Essenes,” he said in a musical, Hindi accent that
startled the Rider almost as much as the acknowledgement of the title of his
secret order. “I am Chaksusa, disciple of Shar-Rogs pa the Ancient One, the
blue abbot of Shambhala. Please sit down. Our time is short, but we will take a
moment and pray for the souls of the men who died tonight, that they be granted
light to find their way home by.”

The
Rider settled in wordlessly across the fire as Chaksusa (or Tats’adah?)
produced a loop of worn black wooden prayer beads and began to chant
hypnotically in a foreign tongue. The Rider silently offered up his own prayers
for the men who had died to bring him here, asking that the Lord might grant
them a commuted sentence in Sheol, in spite of whatever pagan idolatry or
animism they might have subscribed to.

The
Rider lost track of how long they prayed. When he had finished, the other man’s
chanting continued, and intermingled with a low singing that arose from Piishi.
He sat listening to their strange song, in a kind of wonder at it and at the
coincidences of life that had brought the three of them here to this place. It
was a song he knew had never been sung before and which he would never hear
again. Though he did not understand it, he felt his eyes grow wet.

It
ended abruptly, and the ensuing silence was deafening in its absence. Chaksusa
rose and went into his hut, returning shortly with the means to treat their
wounds: poultices, various herbal remedies and clean linen bandages. He
ministered to Piishi in silence and the Apache stared into the fire and allowed
it. When he was finished, Piishi stood and left the fire, moving back up the
canyon trail with his rifle to keep watch.

“How
did you know I was of the Sons of the Essenes?” the Rider asked, as Piishi
moved to attend to his own cuts.

“My
master instructed me in your traditions,” said Chaksusa, turning and inspecting
his arm in firm, but smooth healer’s hands. “It was one of his
Order
who taught them to your Teacher of Righteousness.”

The
Teacher of Righteousness, legendary founder of the Essene monastic sect from
which his own secret merkabah order, the Sons Of The Essenes was descended, and
“to whom HaShem made known all the mysteries of the words of His servants the
prophets.”

The
Rider met this claim with skepticism.

“And
what’s the name of your master’s order?”

“These
are things of other worlds,” said Chaksusa dismissively, “and no longer of much
concern to this one. You know of the worlds within worlds, for you have ridden
on the supernal winds and crossed the shadowy channels that flow to and from
this plane. There are other worlds yet, Rider, beyond even the glorious heaven
and deep hell that you know, and yet within their dominion, for all are the
domain of the One. You shall see tonight that the universe is a home to many
things strange and terrible, and you may know fear again.”