Instead he craned his neck up at Roy Tully’s voice, from the ledge of rock a hundred feet up where they’d all taken turns on lookout.
“Trouble, three o’clock!”
The smaller man was coming down the cliff at reckless speed. Tom knocked his boots together to evict any poisonous desert dwellers and scrambled into his salt-stiff clothing. That took less than a minute; then he had binoculars out and was looking east—three o’clock, in the conventional rendering that took north as twelve. The sand dunes were too far away to make out individual figures well even with magnification; horses were rice-sized black dots. But he could see a ripple and flash above them.
“Lanceheads,” he said.
“To think I was just about to comment on how swinging this far east had avoided trouble with the Indians,” Adrienne said. “How many?”
“A lot of them—and if the proportions are like our friends of the Nyo-Ilcha, that’s a hell of a lot of other men carrying less conspicuous weapons.”
“And I don’t suppose they’re employees of the Mohave Tourist Agency,” Adrienne said grimly; her face was all business once more; even then it had a Valkyrie beauty despite windburn and cracked lips.
“I wonder if Good Star sold us out,” Simmons muttered.
“Or one of his followers,” Adrienne said crisply. “But it doesn’t matter now.”
The others were on their feet as quickly, and everyone moved to break camp; they couldn’t abandon much equipment, not and survive for long in this desolation. The animals complained and brayed as the blankets and saddles were roughly thrown on their backs; they were used to waiting for the cool of evening, and that was several hours from now.
“We going to have to run?” Sandra said, a little white about the lips but calm.
“Yah, you betcha,” Tom said grimly.
“Then we’d better water the animals—give ’em the last of it. They’ll go farther and it’ll lighten the loads. Give ’em some barley, too.”
Adrienne thought for an instant, looked over at Jim Simmons, who jerked his head in agreement, then nodded. “Good idea; do it, Sandy. But leave the mules; they won’t be able to keep up. Put the packsaddles on the extra horses.” They’d kept the ones they’d taken from the dead rebels after the fight at the pass; turning them lose would raise too many questions… “Young Botha, you help her.”
They splashed water into folding plastic buckets, and the horses crowded around, shouldering each other and slobbering in their eagerness, the mules braying protest at their exclusion. Sandra took a lariat from her saddle and whirled the end to drive them off, desperate with haste.
Adrienne called the rest of them together for an instant.
“That looks like better than a hundred men,” she said. “Good Star’s un-friend Swift Lance earning his corn, would be my guess—but that doesn’t matter. We can’t fort up here; with our firepower we could beat them off, but there’s no water and we can’t call for help.”
“Ja,” Piet Botha said. He looked at Simmons. “Afton canyon?”
“Closest place with reliable water,” the Scout agreed. He looked at the distant hostiles. “Bugger. They’re a bit north of us—they’ll cut the angle and gain on us; we have to go two miles to their one. We can’t swing west; the hills are in the way. Bugger. Let’s get going. I wouldn’t want to be caught in the open.”
Well, this is a switch from thinking about being a daddy, Tom thought as he swung aboard his horse and jammed the floppy hat tighter on his head.
Sandra had a couple of extras saddled as well, with the stirrups tied up, in case someone had to switch horses in a hurry.
Bless you, my child, Tom thought—the prospect of having a horse go lame or lose a shoe at this particular moment and be stuck trying to transfer his saddle was nightmarish.
Nobody got in anyone’s way or wasted effort; the weeks they’d been on the trail paid off: camp was struck in less than five minutes. They turned their animals’ noses north and broke into a trot. He kept glancing right despite the kidney-jarring gait. Simmons had called it; with the ridge of broken ground close on their left, the Indians could slant toward them at an angle. Adrienne looked back white-lipped; the herd of spare horses was keeping up well enough, with Sandra and the young Boer chivvying them cowboy-style from the rear. Roy Tully was doing something with one of them, pulling items out of a packsaddle.
The Scout still had his binoculars out. “Dammit, they’re pushing their horses!” he said. “We’ll have to do it too. Go for it!”
He cased the glasses and leaned forward, flipping the slack of his reins to right and left. His horse rocked into a gallop, and they all followed suit. It felt faster than a car—but a horse couldn’t keep it up for long, particularly when it had been hard-driven on short rations and bad water for a while. It was hard on the rider’s gut and back, too.
“This is going to be close,” Adrienne said to him, calling across the rushing space that separated them. “If they get too close, we’ll have to circle the horses—use them as barricades—but then they can thirst us out.”
In which case we all die, he thought. On the other hand, this isn’t the first time people have tried to kill me, and most of them are dead.
He repeated that aloud, and Adrienne whooped and grinned. Dust billowed up around their hooves; the sound rose to a harsh drumroll thunder that shivered in his bones. Sandra drove the remounts and packhorses ahead and a little to their left, and two streams of dust smoked out behind them, mingling and drifting.
Tully passed him, swerving in a little to shout, “Help! I’ve fallen into a Lonesome Dove rerun and I can’t get out!”
The goblin grin was heartening; Roy always got that expression when he was about to pull a nasty on someone. On the other hand…
The Indians were much closer now. He could see details; they were equipped much like the Nyo-Ilcha, but the lances had backward-slanting collars of ostrich feathers below the points, and the men all had broad bands of black paint across their faces from the nose up, with yellow circles around the eyes.
“Northern clans, well off their usual stamping grounds,” Simmons said. “Akaka, I’d say, from the look and the paint.”
“From their looks, either they’re all auditioning for a remake of The Crow, or it’s the clowns from hell!” Tom called, and got another laugh.
The Akaka warriors weren’t in the least funny themselves, though. They were men who’d do their best to kill him, and no mistake. Their shrill yelping war cries cut through the hoof thunder, and he could see their open mouths and bared teeth as they crouched low over their horses’ necks to urge them on to greater speed. A little closer, and one with a crescent moon of silver through the septum of his nose and elk antlers on a hairy headdress caught his eye and shouted something, gesturing with the long lance he held, and then used the shaft to whack his pinto mare on the rump. It seemed to bound forward, perceptibly faster.
Doubtless he’s shouting variants on “Now you die, white-eye!” Tom thought, and gestured broadly with his own right hand—middle finger extended from a big clenched fist.
You know, friend, in the abstract I can feel a certain sympathy for you. In the concrete here and now, I’m going to kill your ass if I can.
The problem was that by slanting in from their quarries’ right, the Indians had made it nearly impossible for the New Virginians to shoot; you couldn’t use a two-handed weapon on horseback in that direction if you were right-handed, which all of them were. Or you could, but your chances of hitting anything would go down from low to zero.