Crack in the Sky

This lathering his tonsils with whiskey wasn’t as much fun as it used to be.

For an anxious moment he worried that he might have puked on himself while he’d lain there passed out. Sickened with the throbbing of a dull drum in his head, he stopped, braced himself against the wall just beneath one of the low, sputtering candles, and inspected the front of his shirt. Wiping a dirty hand down his chest, across his belly, and then lifting his breechclout to give it a quick inspection, Bass was satisfied he hadn’t made a mess of himself.

The air grew chillier the closer he inched to the mouth of the cavern. A stiff breeze drifted down the riverbed the moment he stepped out into the morning air, nudging his wild, tangled hair. As he stood watering the ground, Bass realized the hangovers were beginning to hurt more than they ever had before. Maybeso the older he got, the more his body rebelled at the way he abused it.

Tucking the breechclout back over himself, Scratch fought the dizzying headache doing its best to blind him, then swallowed down a little of the bile revolting from his stomach. How his head pounded, reverberating with the dull echo of distant gunshots.

Then his stomach had finally had enough of his standing upright. What he had left from last night’s bear and corn mush flung itself against the back of his tongue violently. Folding at the waist, Titus spilled it onto the ground until he gagged nothing but a burning bile. Slowly he straightened, distressed that his head still echoed with the hammering of those distant gunshots—

“Get them others rousted, goddammit!”

Turning, Bass strained valiantly to focus his bloodshot eyes on where the voice had come from—finding Workman coming out of the gloom of that cold, gray dawn. The man took shape out of the dizzying rocks, that rifle across his arm.

“Get Hatcher!” the whiskey maker shouted, his voice shrill, ringing off the narrow canyon walls. “Roll ’em out!”

Behind him Scratch could hear others stirring, muttering inside the cave. Groggy, he grumbled, “What?”

Workman came to a stop before him there at the entrance to the cavern. “There’s trouble in the village an’ we gotta go.”

“Trouble?” Elbridge Gray asked as he emerged from the dark, swiping a big hand over his face several times.

“Gunfire,” Workman said, starting to push past Gray. “Where’s Jack?”

“I’m coming,” Hatcher’s voice was heard. Then he stood in the cold with the rest of them shoving up behind him.

“Hush! Listen,” Rufus demanded.

They did, for the space of a few heartbeats until Workman spoke.

“Grab your guns, boys—and foller me.”

“We gonna saddle up, Willy?” Caleb Wood asked.

“Ain’t got the time!” he ordered. “We gotta go now!”

They had led their horses out of the pole corral and were on the cold, bare backs, crossing that dark bottom ground between the cavern entrance and the stone mill house, urging their mounts up the trail cut along the gentle side of the canyon onto the high ground, where Workman led them out at a stiff lope. The wind at their back, the eight rode toward the graying horizon, toward the gunshots, toward the rising screams of the women.

This was something totally new to Bass, this mix of rifle fire and those cries—the shrieks, the fear and horror of women. Never before had there been any womenfolk mixed in with the times he had been forced to spill blood.

But of a sudden he remembered Annie Christmas’s gunboat on the Mississippi River. Moored up to the pier both bow and stern, what was once a Kentucky flatboat had been converted by its madame into a floating saloon and brothel. Just the sort of place where a man who drank too much might well never wake up. He recalled how Hames Kingsbury ended up having to gut the whore who came for him with blood in her eye. On Annie’s boat the whores were every bit as treacherous as were the river pirates themselves. Leaving dead men and women behind, they had fled Natchez by the skin of their teeth, praising the fates for sparing their lives.

One of those big iron bells began to ring in the chill gray air—not two, as there had been at dusk last night. Just one bell, its tolling both a shrill warning, and a plaintive call for aid and succor. When the hair prickled on the back of his neck, Scratch tugged the coyote-fur cap down a little farther on his wild, unruly hair, hoping to make it more secure over the blue bandanna as they raced toward the outer buildings that gradually took form out of the gloom.

Someone was blowing a horn now—its clear, brassy notes shrill on the air between each resounding peal from the cathedral bell. But by now the gunfire was fading quickly, falling off to a few scattered shots, then a final volley by the time the horsemen tore into the western outskirts of the village. Down a narrow street they clattered across the icy, rutted ground pressed between two rows of low-roofed dirt buildings, the dawn-gray walls like skulls pocked with black-doored nose rectangles and empty eye sockets of lightless windows. Dodging a dog here and there, reining aside for a crude, wood-wheeled carreta shoved up against its owner’s house, the eight kept on, stringing themselves out into a long file as Workman led them toward the center of town—

Where the screaming grew louder, wails and shrieks of horror and distress swelling like a massive wave rumbling toward them, about to engulf the horsemen, when Bass saw the crowd take shape out of the dark.

“Pray it ain’t one of our boys,” Isaac Simms growled beside him.

“One of our—”

Simms interrupted, “Gone under, Scratch. Gone under.”

As the crowd congealed, become an organic, growing wild thing filling the street’s entrance to the town square, that cathedral bell continued clanging its call of danger, the brass horn kept raising its stuttering, clarion call from somewhere else in the village. Perhaps a rooftop, its braying alarm coming from on high, Scratch figured.

They brought their guns up about the time Workman and Hatcher each threw up an arm to signal a halt. For another breathless heartbeat it appeared the crowd was turning to rush them, whirling away from the village square with murderous intent.

“It’s the wimmens!” Jack bellowed as he yanked back on the reins, sawing them savagely to the left to spin his horse aside as the women surged toward the horsemen, screaming in utter chaos.

In a swirl of shawl and dress, they poured around the riders, every arm held up to the horsemen, every hand imploring the Americans, eyes wide and fear filled, tears streaming down their faces, mouths chattering a wild, confusing, ear-taunting cacophony of a foreign tongue.

“What’re they saying?” Jack shouted at Workman as their horses wheeled about, jostling, bumping into one another as the rest of the riders came to an abrupt halt, trapped in the narrow confines of the icy, rutted street. “Ye make it out?”

“Comanche!” Workman barked the single word the rest of the horsemen could understand.

“Hatcher!”

Out of the milling mass of frightened women emerged the huge figure holding a rifle overhead at the end of his arm.

“Kinkead!” Jack bellowed.

It took several moments for the big man to force his way through the stream of women who flooded round him, and that tiny woman who dared not leave the safety of that shelter right beneath his left arm. They pulled at Matthew’s clothing, touched his face with their fingers, stumbled backward in front of him as they screamed and cried out their warnings, their pleas, their prayers.

“Yer Rosa all right?” Hatcher asked as Kinkead and the woman reached the side of his horse.

He pulled her closer beneath his bulk. “Rosa ain’t hurt. She came along—helped reload my guns.”

Hatcher managed to get his horse close. “Willy says it was Comanche!”

With a nod Kinkead replied, “They hit us in the dark, Jack. Come in on the south side of the village.”

Rufus asked, “Where’s Rowland?”

“I ain’t see’d him,” Matthew declared. “But I heard him hollering for me during the fight.”

“Heard him?” Jack inquired.

“His gun, heard it,” Kinkead explained. “And I thought I heard him yelling for me too.”