Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

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.

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.

A spear comes past, already falling. I’m gone.

About a kilometer and a half past them, I see the runner ahead, still in his casual lope. He hears the hoofbeats, he turns his head, he gives a little jump, and when he comes down he turns into a copper streak.

The distance between us actually widens a moment. This guy is fast. Then the horse’s hooves eat up ground. Ahead of the runner to the right of the path is a small stone shelter of some sort, maybe for travelers caught out in the rain.

We both close on it. I’ve got my club, and I raise it. He’s looking back over his shoulder at me; he moves ahead again; I lean over to hit him as we draw even.

There is a dull crash and he disappears as the edge of the rock house whizzes past. Like a left fielder after a line foul, he’s watching me and not the road, and he ran into the wall, face first.

I turn and watch him bounce once, sideways out into the pathway. I put up the club and watch my riding.

It’s like I’m pain in a body, and the runners are nerve impulses trying to tell the body that something’s wrong. Only I’m moving faster than they are. My intention is to give the Huastecas a toothache all the way down to their insteps.

I pass more blockhouses, and other houses too. I meet some runners. Some of the guards actually get off a spear or arrow before I go by.

The closest brush comes when I overtake one of the casual runners about half a kilometer before a blockhouse. There are cultivated fields all around now, but no one seems to be working them. A holiday? Of course. Come see the gods eat the mound-builders. Have a bite while you’re at it.

I’m thinking all this while the messenger ahead of me is in the low-running position. He looks like a cartoon, all arms, pumping legs, strobing bare feet. And he’s still got lungs enough to yell so they can hear him at the guardhouse.

There are four or five of them, they have lots of warning, they are awake. One of them’s giving orders, they’re fanning out, bracing their spears in the roadway, which is now four meters wide and occasionally paved. The guy giving orders is scared but grim.

The runner ahead of me gives one last burst and heads off into the field, trampling corn, duty forgotten.

I kick the horse and head for the waiting guards.

What they tell you to do with an arrow that’s not in a vital spot is to push it through until the head protrudes, break off the shaft, and pull it back out the entry hole.

On horseback, that’s not as easy as it sounds. The arrow was in the meat of my left arm. It already had an exit hole. I spurred the horse, got a kilometer past the guardhouse, then reined in.

I pushed the head the rest of the way out, screaming all the time. It felt like the world’s worst zit pain all the way through my body. The arm went numb. I took out my bayonet, cut the arrowhead off, then tried to pull the shaft back out.

There was no way I could do it. I closed my eyes and yanked. The shaft came out of my arm; I came out of the saddle.

I held on somehow.

Behind me, they’d started a fire. Daring and resourceful guards were getting word to the city. The King of the Huastecas would probably reward them with my head when they caught me.

I slapped a local anesthetic and an astringent on the hole, tied a dressing on the arm with the other hand, and turned the horse off across the fields, paralleling the roadway.

The city was like a white Oz. The suburbs, cornfields, sunflower stalks, old pumpkin vines, and small adobe huts had blocked my view long enough. When I came to a cleared plaza in one of the hamlets and saw the city, I thought I was on another planet.

It had a wall around it, but not a very high one. There was a river to discourage attack. What showed over the walls were gleaming brown and white buildings three and four stories tall. The tops of flat pyramids rose above those. There was some hullabaloo going on at the central one. That was my target.