The tribes below and beyond the wall roared, punctuating their approval with whoops and screams.
The drumbeats began to roll across the forest floor of the valley, echoing off the distant mountains, lost in the crash of the high waterfall over which flaming logs tumbled into plumes of steam.
The Chinese would be defeated.
Night fell and campfires beyond the Boy’s counting sprang up across the valley floor. The chattering of languages, one as seemingly alien as the next, murmured across the distances between the camps.
The Rock Star’s People formed their camp, unsure what to do in her absence.
But then the bloated skin of fermented drink arrived, carried on a pole between two large warriors—black wolf skins and ash-covered faces, machetes made from the guts of old machines in great scabbards at their backs—and the Rock Star’s People found their purpose.
All the tribes were drinking.
It is good to hear your voice, Sergeant.
The Boy mounted Horse and began to ride the twilight camps. He smiled at those he suspected kept poison on their bows and when they smiled back, the smile was sloppy, happy, lugubrious, as if there was a friendship formed in all those cold miles between the mountain lake and this friendly place.
The Boy checked the great pile of stone and fallen timber that was the Lodge and saw only two torches guttering blackly at the gate. He rode to a nearby fire. Here there were men and women warriors, long spears, and woven hair like muddy ropes. They smiled after their guttural greeting failed to find meaning in the Boy’s ears. They seemed to wish him well, and one woman even cast a hungry eye upon him. When he sensed the bearers of the poison arrows coming from the campfire of the Rock Star’s People, shadowing him in the early dark, he rode back to their fire as if to reassure them.
The noise was getting louder across the valley floor as fires grew in leaps and explosions, sending sparks high into the star-filled night.
He got down from Horse and took a drink from the bloated skin.
The hunters cheered at what they perceived to be a long draft by the Boy beneath the un-corked stream of the drinking skin.
They smiled and chattered at him, forgetting he understood very little of what they spoke. He laughed and took a bigger drink and they all roared their approval.
We are all mighty hunters around the campfire.
Yes, that is something Sergeant Presley might have said, though I can never remember having heard him say anything like it. All the same, it seems like something he would have said.
When the night seemed alive with revelry and recklessness, the Boy lay down in the dark, not the least bit taken by drink.
Someone screamed. The pain of a wound was evident.
In the moments after, the mood was much more somber.
The Boy waited.
You are always stiff, my left side, especially when I have been lying on the ground for some time.
Now you must do your part.
The Boy rose and returned to Horse.
He laid his hand atop the long equine nose, looking into those forever uncaring brown eyes. The Boy raised his index finger to his lips as he led Horse away from the sleeping hunters.
They had almost faded into the shadows of tall trees beneath a starry night above, when a voice spoke softly to him.
“Nice night for a ride, Boyo.”
The voice was a whisper.
The voice was the shadow of a grave.
In the dark a man came close, and though the Boy smelled the stranger, he did not hear him break the forest floor as he walked toward the Boy and Horse.
“Come with me.”
Beyond a moment’s hesitation, the Boy led Horse after the stranger, following the lanky figure through the shifting shadows of the night forest.
The Boy slipped the fingers of his good hand to his tomahawk, hovering above the haft.
When the shot is clear I’ll take it. I’ll put it right between his shoulder blades.
The stranger moved fast, like some dark liquid seeking the path of least resistance, relentless as he slipped the tall pines back to the bric-a-brac wall that surrounded the Lodge.
They emerged onto the wide dirt porch of the ramshackle castle.
Two men walked from the shadows beyond the gate and the stranger, maintaining his loping, soundless stride, directed them to take charge of Horse.
The stranger turned to face the Boy as the ash-faced guards moved to obey.
By the light of the torches at the gate, the stranger is a drooping mustache and sad eyes that stared coldly back at the Boy.
“There’s something you should see inside.”
When the Boy didn’t move, the stranger said, “C’mon,” and dropped his eyes to the Boy’s grip on the tomahawk. “It’s good from now on. You can trust me.”
The Boy followed the sad-eyed stranger through the break in the wall of rotten pine logs and earthworks surrounding the once grand and unknown building of Before turned collapsing fairy-tale castle now more than anything else.
After a few dogleg turns within the wall, they arrived in a weedy courtyard at the entrance to the Lodge. Smoke-stained stones rose up to a sagging roof as windows gaped like open and jagged wounds.
The Boy spelled a sign above the entrance.
A-w-a-h-n-e-e L-o-d-g-e.
A wagon and a team of horses waited near two once grand doors.
Ash-faced guards worked in teams carrying bodies out from the dilapidated castle to the back of the wagon.
The Boy stood with the sad-faced stranger as the last body was thrown into the waiting transport.
When the last body was thrown with an unimpressive thump onto the other bodies in the back of the wagon, the sad-faced stranger led the Boy to the wagon, and before a tarp was pulled and tied, he showed the Boy the leaders of the tribes.
Underneath rictus grins, foaming mouths, and upward-staring eyes, a head of hoary gray hair rested above that same openmouthed, wide-eyed stare the Boy had seen at the beginning of this day, as the two of them had sat by the fire before dawn and she’d told him the story of her life as a young girl on the day the bombs fell.
The Boy listened for the voice of Sergeant Presley.
I understand what you meant, Sergeant. I understand “involved,” now.
The stranger let the tarp fall, covering the horrified faces and contorted bodies.
“Now,” said the sad-faced stranger. “MacRaven wants to meet a Bear Killer.”
Chapter 25
“You really kill that bear you’re wearing, boy?” asked MacRaven.
The sad-faced stranger had led the Boy through the rotting pile of wood that was once a tourist lodge to a grand ballroom of warped planks, cobwebs, and guttering candles for an audience with MacRaven.
Everywhere there was dust and broken glass and damage. In the big room, moonlight glared through
