Good Star spat accurately into the fire. “That crazy”—he dropped into his own language, then translated helpfully—“bastard fucker of his own nieces? Yeah, he’s the talk of the Mohave. Got a big Dreaming on him, about how we’re going to get enough guns to throw all you Deathwalkers into the salt water and take the good lands.”
“You don’t think that’s a good plan?” Adrienne said neutrally.
He grunted and took a swig of the spiked coffee. “I wish. That’s not Dreaming; that’s… what do you call it… jerking off. No way. But plenty of people like being told what they want to hear. We Water People got as many fools as anyone else, I reckon.”
“Someone’s been slipping you… them… weapons, then?” Adrienne said.
“Hell, yeah—the northern clans, at least. But if all of us had two of those smoke poles and enough powder and ball to shoot all year, you’d still have the fucking machine guns and helicopters, wouldn’t you? Not to mention you outnumber us more every year.”
He shrugged and finished the coffee, smacking his lips. Silently Tom poured him more, and Simmons added another dollop of the Seven Oaks brandy.
“Good stuff! Anyway, my plan is that we all pick up and move southeast—down Mexico way. Lot of empty land there since the plagues, and what’s left of the Ya-ke, Opata, Seri and such don’t have any guns at all, or many steel weapons. Then maybe if we were out of the way you fucking Deathwalkers would leave us alone. No offense.”
“None taken. So who’s giving Swift Lance all these muskets?” Adrienne asked. “That might be… valuable information.”
Good Star grinned, showing a mouthful of strong yellow teeth. “Wouldn’t we both like to know?”
He shook his head. “Before Johnny Deathwalker came from beyond-the-world, all the Mohave clans stuck together, lived all mixed up, didn’t fight among themselves, from what the old bastards say. Ain’t like that anymore, not with the sickness and then all the outsiders getting adopted, and all the new ways and new critters. These days people are always stealing horses and sheep and cattle and guns from each other. Lot of those Akaka shits, they’d scalp their own cousins for a shot glass of cheap whiskey. Akaka, Othi-I, Kapata, Hukthar war-parties all over the west and north now. News travels slow.”
Adrienne leaned back and whispered to Sandra, then was all attention once more, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees.
Good Star pointed northeast. “That’s where we Nyo-Ilcha have our grounds now, just over the mountains. The Akaka and their friends, they’re up around Old Woman Mountain, and the Bitter Lake, and west around Black Mountain and Willow Springs; they’re part of the mathal’a’thom, the northern clans—bunch of half Utes, if you want to know what I think. If you were heading that way—don’t. Well, gotta go. Thanks again for the ivory.”
“Thank you for the pleasure of your company,” Adrienne said with a stately, archaic politeness Tom had noticed before.
She rose and tossed him a bag Sandra had made up—one with a bottle of the brandy, a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of aspirin, a sack of coffee beans, some sugar and a handful of chocolate bars. He caught it, slurped down the dregs from his cup, took a last drag on the cigarette, and rose with pantherish ease and walked off into the darkness.
The party fell silent for a long time after the tall figure vanished into the night; Tom finished his coffee.
“Well, well, well,” he said.
Jesus, it’s hot, Tom thought. Then: Jesus, that’s lame.
He and Adrienne were sprawled under the shade of their bell tent, stripped to their underwear, with the sides drawn up to catch any breeze—but the hot wind dried their sweat almost instantly, with little relief, and on their lips it tasted bitterly of alkali dust. The three tents were strung out in the meager shade of a low steep-sided hill, outlier of a mountain range to the west; it gave a little more protection as the sun declined, and the horses and mules crowded there with listless insistence. To the east stretched a desolation of flat rocky plain, rimmed by more mountains on the edge of sight to the east. It was studded here and there with the low sprawling creosote bush with its yellow-green-gray waxy leaves, a shrub that robbed the soil around it of moisture and nutrients until nothing else could grow; the occasional inch-wide yellow flower didn’t seem much compensation. The nearest bush had a diamondback rattler curled around its roots, waiting for sunset like a coil of deadly camouflaged rope. The sight reminded him to check his boots for scorpions when he put his boots back on, but the thought of moving was enough to make him tired.
Nothing much moved in the hot, bright stillness, except grains of sand moved along by the oven-mouth wind, and the slow trace of the sun across the aching blue dome of the sky; even the blue was leached out to a tinted white.
Around noon something had moved—a bird trying for the shade of the rocks had fallen out of the sky with a thump, struck dead by the heat in mid-flight. It still lay gape-beaked with its feet in the air fifty yards away, and the ants were beating a trail to it. Once a group of big red kangaroos had bounced by, stopping to munch on some barrel cactus, undeterred by the spines. Tom’s eyes tracked them with stuporous indifference; when their long hind feet came down on the creosote bushes a tarry, medicinal scent filled the air.
In the middle distance was a long line of sand dunes. Tom watched them as his hand groped for the canvas water bag that hung from one of the struts of the tent. A little seeped through the canvas, cooling the contents all the way down to lukewarm by evaporation, and he sucked at the mouth with dogged persistence, ignoring the bitter taste and the rime of soda-rich dust on the outside that stuck to his chest hairs. He hated to think what the minerals were doing to his kidneys—and wondered how anyone could live in this desolation year-round—but you could dehydrate very easily here, and it had been a week since they crossed the mountains. Three days since the last spring of bad-smelling water.
“You know the odd thing?” Adrienne said slowly and quietly, timing her words to the natural rhythm of her breath.
“Tell me,” Tom said, handing her the water bottle. “Right now, funny would be good.”
“This area is a beauty spot in the spring. The flowers are quite lovely.”
That was funny. It was true, too. This wasn’t far from U.S. 40, on FirstSide, and he’d been through in March himself. It was probably even prettier here in the Commonwealth.
“We should come back then, after this is all over,” Adrienne said. “It’s not so goddamned hot then, either.” There was a long pause. “Tom?”
“Yah, Adri?”
“I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
He thought for a long moment; his mental processes seemed to be bleached out but had a sharp-edged clarity.
“OK, apology accepted,” he said. After a moment: “You want to stay together after this is over?”
“Get married, you mean?” Adrienne said.
He thought again for a long moment. “Yah.”
“Done. Provided we survive. There’s no giving in marriage in the afterlife, they say.”
They shared an exhausted chuckle. “It must be love,” Tom said. “I still like being with you when all we can do is lie here and listen to each other sweat.”
“It’d be nice to have kids,” she said softly. “Not too many. Four would be about right. Three-year intervals… or they can arrange twins, these days.”
He opened his mouth to comment on that; he’d been thinking wistfully about children himself for a while, but the thought hadn’t been urgent—the world was still too crowded, after all. Only it isn’t, he thought. It really isn’t.