The Wasteland Saga

You know what that means, Boy. Someone’s land.

High above he could see the pass that leads down into the foothills beyond. Beyond the pass, the city of Sacramento and finally on to the bay and I Corps.

I could ride hard and bypass the people who live here.

It was later, as they rode steadily up the broken grade, that the Boy realized they were being followed. Across the valley he saw movement. But when he stopped to look he saw nothing. Still, he knew they were watching him.

There was little left of the bent highway that once crossed over the pass. What had not been covered in rockslide had fallen away into a dark forest below. The years of hard winter had taken their toll on the old highway.

Men came out from the forest floor. They made their way to the foot of the trail the Boy was leading Horse down. Horse, sniffing the wind, gave a snort, and when the Boy looked behind, he saw more men coming out along their backtrail, high above them on rocky granite ledges. They carried bows, a weapon he couldn’t use because of his withered left hand.

The men were dressed for hunting: skins and bows. They were dark skinned, but every so often he saw fair skin among them.

Near the bottom of the trail he mounted Horse and adjusted the bearskin across his left side.

At that moment he thought it would be nice to have a piece of steel from an old machine he could hold onto with his left hand beneath the skin. A beaten highway sign with a leather strap perhaps.

He took hold of the tomahawk with his strong right hand, letting it hang loosely along his muscled thigh.

The men were mostly short and bandy legged.

All were covered in wide, dark tattoos that swirled like the horns of a bull on their bare skin.

A leader, long hair falling against the dark sweeping horns that coursed and writhed in ink across his considerable arms and torso, stepped forward and raised his hand.

Was this a warning or an order?

Be ready, Boy, you got speed with Horse, but arrows move just as fast. Maybe even faster.

In the end, he faced a semicircle of hunters and knew there were more behind him.

It’ll show weakness if you turn your back to check, Boy. It’s an interrogation. They just want to ask questions.

“Wasa llamo?” shouted their leader.

The Boy remained staring at them.

In the years of travel he had heard many languages. Sergeant Presley had taught him to speak English, though the Boy remembered that what his people spoke was different and yet the same.

English, Boy. English! Sergeant Presley had barked at him in the first years. One day, without remembering when, specifically, the Boy noticed Sergeant Presley never barked again. That lost language he had once spoken was yet one more thing the Boy could not remember about his people, just as he could not remember when he had first seen the feather in Sergeant Presley’s bundle and what, if any, was its meaning.

Who am I?

Focus, Boy. All that’s for another time. That’s who you were. Live past today and you might find out who you are.

“Wasa llamo?” barked their leader again.

The Possum Hunters had used llamo to mean “name.” He had learned enough of their language to get by during their year among them, enough when playing with their children.

The men jabbered among themselves, rapidly, like birds. It was too fast but the Boy caught words that may have once been English; words the Possum Hunters had also used, others that sounded completely different.

“Wasa llamo?” roared their leader.

Boy is what they called you, he heard Sergeant Presley say.

I have always just been Boy. It was enough.

And yet the broken feather from the bundle had once meant something to him.

“WASA LLAMO!” screamed the leader, unsheathing a curved hunting knife. It gleamed in the afternoon light of the bright sky. It was an old thing, a weapon from Before.

The leader turned to his troops, muttering something. The semicircle withdrew. It was just the leader now, facing the Boy.

The Boy tried to remember the words of the Possum Hunters. Words he could use to identify himself.

What was friend?

What was Boy?

How would he describe himself?

He remembered the children being warned to be careful of the bears that prowled the deep woods. “Oso,” he’d heard their mothers calling. Beware the oso. And the Possum Hunters, the men, had called themselves cazadores.

“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy in the quiet of the high mountain pass.

Silence followed.

The Boy watched the troop exchange glances, muttering, pointing at the bearskin.

The leader, his face like a dark cloud, shouted a long stream of words at the Boy, their meanings lost.

Until the last word.

The Boy heard the last word clearly.

“Chinese!”

As though it were an accusation.

An indictment.

Then the leader shouted it again in the still silence and pointed over his shoulder toward the west.

“Oso Cazadore,” said the Boy again.

The leader laughed, spitting angrily as he did so.

Another string of words most of which the Boy did not understand and finally the word the children of the Possum Hunters had used when calling each other liars.

Pick the biggest one, Boy. When you’re surrounded, pick the biggest one and take him out. It’ll make the rest think twice.

The leader was the biggest.

The Boy dismounted.

Horse could take care of himself.

The Boy pointed toward the leader with his tomahawk.

The leader crouched low, drawing the blade between them, waving it back and forth.

Holding the tomahawk back, ready to strike, the Boy circled to the right, feeling his left leg drag as it always did after he had ridden Horse for long periods of time.

Get to work, lazy leg! Be ready.

The leader came in at once, feinting toward the Boy’s midsection and at the same time dancing backward to circle.

The Boy moved his tomahawk forward, acting as though he might strike where the leader should have been. Sensing this, the leader flipped the knife and caught it in his grip, ready to slam it down on the unprotected back he knew would be exposed if the Boy struck with his full force at the feint. Instead the Boy shifted backward, willing the weak left leg to move quickly. Once he was planted, he raised the checked tomahawk once more and slammed it down through the wrist of the leader as the man tried to regain his balance from stabbing through thin air.

What the Boy lacked in power and strength in his left side was made up for in the powerful right arm that had done all the heavy work of his hard life. Like a machine from Before, the triceps and biceps drove the axe down through skin and bone and skin again within the moment that the eye shifts its gaze.

The leader planted his feet, intending to reverse the knife with just an adjustment of grip and then swing