Alex Archer - The Spirit Banner

“Good boy,” the priest whispered, petting its nose with one hand while grabbing onto the straps of the saddlebags it still wore with the other.

Using the straps for support, he hauled himself upright, using the strength of his arms and his one good leg. It took several tries, but at last he was standing on one leg, his arms wrapped around the horse’s neck to keep from falling.

He rested in that position for a moment, praying the horse wouldn’t make any sudden moves and dump him back down on the snow. When he’d caught his breath again, he reached for the pack still hanging around the horse’s hindquarters, right where he’d loaded it earlier that morning.

Working slowly and carefully to limit jarring his injured leg any more than necessary, he untied the drawstrings of the pack and withdrew the ceremonial robe he’d worn when appearing for his audience with the khan in Karakorum. The material was quite thick, something he constantly complained about when wearing it, but now he was silently thankful. He slipped the material over his shivering form and slumped against his horse, already exhausted and he hadn’t even tried getting himself up into the saddle.

A sudden sound to his left drew his attention.

He straightened up, trying to see.

Only the dead stared back at him.

The sound came again, a low moan, but this time he saw the fingers of a nearby form twitch in conjunction with it.

Another survivor!

“Hey! Hey, you! Can you hear me?” Curran called out in the Mongolian he’d picked up during his two months in Karakorum.

The strange croaking sound that came out of his parched throat surprised him. Until that moment, he hadn’t even been aware of his tremendous thirst. He coughed, then used a handful of snow to wet down his lips and throat before trying again.

“Are you okay? Can you walk?”

There was no response.

He knew he hadn’t imagined it. That meant the man was either too injured to respond or simply couldn’t understand him.

Curran had no choice; he was going to have to go over to the injured man and take a look. He considered climbing astride the horse, but decided the effort required to get up and then back down again was probably too much for him. Instead, he got the horse moving slowly in the direction he wanted it, using the animal as a makeshift crutch for support as he hopped along on his good leg. When Curran was close enough, he pulled the horse to a stop and dropped down in the snow next to the wounded man.

He rolled the body over and discovered that it was the man who had saved him earlier, Tamarak.

The feathered shafts of two black arrows jutted from deep in the man’s stomach and a sword blade had taken a bite out of the left side of his head. Given the barbed tips, Curran had no way of removing them. He’d been able to remove his own only because the arrowhead had come all the way through his flesh. These were embedded deep in the muscle. Pulling them out was likely to cause more damage than leaving them in. The best he could do was to make Tamarak as comfortable as possible and to stay with him until the end.

An end that could come faster than either of them wanted if they didn’t find some shelter and protection from the cold.

He dragged the other man closer to the horse, where, to his surprise, the animal got down on its knees, allowing Curran to haul both himself and Tamarak’s unconscious form onto the horse’s back.

The beast climbed to its feet, and for the first time since the Naiman war party had been sighted, Curran felt optimistic about his chances for survival.

As if in answer, the wind swirled around him and the falling snow began to thicken. The storm was here to stay, apparently.

Curran took a moment to get his bearings and then turned the beast about to face the direction in which they had been fleeing. There were caves back in the pass itself and it was Curran’s intention to hole up inside one for shelter from the storm.

He’d worry about how to get back to Karakorum in the morning.

First, they had to survive the night.

S EVERAL HOURS LATER Curran sat in a cave that was deep enough to filter out the winds howling outside. There had been a few sticks lying just inside the entrance. He combined them with some of the extra clothing from his pack, and made a small fire to keep them warm. It was still cold, though not as bad as it would have been had they been trapped outside. It would serve to keep them from freezing to death.

At least until the fuel ran out, he thought, and then just as quickly pushed the image away. The Lord will provide, he told himself. The Lord will provide.

At least we won’t starve to death, Curran thought, with a glance at the corpse of his horse where it lay just within the entrance tunnel. The poor beast had collapsed after carrying so much weight through the freezing cold weather without rest. Curran hadn’t yet managed to get up the nerve to start carving up the carcass. He didn’t mind eating horseflesh. He’d been forced to do so during other missionary journeys he’d been on and it hadn’t been all that bad. It was just that this particular horse had been instrumental in saving his life and it felt disrespectful to treat its remains in such a fashion.

Still, when the time came, Curran had little doubt that his reticence would quickly vanish. Starving to death wasn’t on his list of endings to this saga.

The dead horse was proof of what they had endured to reach this point. The trail had been difficult to find without the Mongols to guide him. The ever-increasing fury of the storm had cut their already-slow pace to a crawl, as did the times that Curran lost his grip and toppled off his patient mount. Thankfully, the horse had traveled this way before, and when he finally stopped trying to control it and just gave it its head, it took him where he wanted to go.

With the help of the firelight, Curran had cleaned Tamarak’s head wound and had broken off the jutting ends of the arrows to keep the wounded man from accidentally driving them deeper into his body.

After that, there wasn’t anything to do but wait.

The snow had continued to fall and the entrance to the cave was half-covered from the heavy accumulation. Curran didn’t mind, as it served to keep the heat from the fire trapped in the cave, warming him and his unconscious companion, while still allowing the smoke to escape.

Unable to sleep, Curran took out his worn leather journal and began to write, recording the events of the past several days in as much detail as possible to ensure that there was some record of what had happened to him should he not make it back to Karakorum. He’d been doing the same thing since his mission had started many months before, and what had once been an annoying chore had turned into a soothing balm for his spirit.

At the very least, it gave him something to think about other than the pain in his injured leg, he thought ruefully.

It wasn’t long before Tamarak, delirious with fever and pain, began raving aloud. At first Curran ignored it, knowing there was little he could do for the man, but then something Tamarak said caught his attention and he listened more carefully.

What he heard amazed him.

If it was true, he was being given the secret of the ages!

I really need a miracle now, Lord, he prayed, as he turned to a clean page of his journal and began writing frantically, trying to get it all down just in case the good Father decided to deliver on his request.

Mexico

Annja Creed was knee-deep in sacrificial victims when the shooting started.

At first, there was only a single gunshot, which was easy enough for her to ignore. After all, the sound of isolated gunfire was relatively common at a dig site this deep in the jungle. Someone fired off a weapon at least once a week. The reasons for doing so varied, but they usually had something to do with the local wildlife. Just last week, Martinez had found a twelve-foot python in his bed and had fired off four shots before he managed to hit the thing. A few days before that, the cook—a guy by the name of Evans—had used his shotgun to drive off the howler monkeys he’d caught raiding the food larder. The monkeys still managed to get away with the chocolate bars he’d been hording.