Out onto The Road with the sun rising a color like unpolished copper out in the West, shimmering heat mirages on both horizons and desert meadowlarks crooning their eerie song from the trees. A stiff wind rises as the morning grows long and soon The Band walks covered in the red dust of the desert, looking like crimson marionettes pulled woodenly by some unknown hand as they crest ridges and valleys through a veil of exhaustion dim but growing stronger by the hour. As they crest an especially high wave shaped dune Elijah halts at the front of their line, points off to the horizon Easterly.
“Look out there.” He says. Jesse shields his eyes with one hand and follows his finger, seeing there perhaps ten or fifteen miles out a raising cloud of dust, thick and grainy and coming twirling across the rocks like a mad dust devil of rusty red. Visible like tiny mounted miniatures at the front of the cloud perhaps fifteen or twenty riders, gunmetal glinting wickedly even from this distance.
“Riders.” Jesse says. He runs a hand over his bandages.
“How far out do you think?” He asks, turning to Elijah. The Knights all lined up there peer out to the expanse, sweat cutting lines of clarity down their red stained faces.
“A day, perhaps two if we don't rest tonight.”
“We’re unarmed. We’ll be slaughtered.” Duncan says, shaking his head.
“Unarmed now.” Elijah says.
“There many gunsmiths out in this section of the desert?” Duncan jibes.
“No, but there are pilgrims. Passing traders too.”
“What we got to trade with?” Jesse asks.
“Im not suggesting we trade with them.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“I’m suggesting we rob them.”
“We’ll do no such thing. We ain’t thieves.” Morgan says, getting in close to Elijah with a distolerant look in his eyes.
“But ye are murderers.” Elijah says. Morgan pushes Elijah at his shoulders and Elijah wheels back, Sunny stepping in front of him and holding off Morgan.
“Hey now.” Sunny says.
“We ain’t murderers. I’m bout done with your wicked words, drifter.” Morgan says. Jesse steps in and reaches a hand onto his brothers shoulder and eases him back.
“Not yet.” He whispers.
“Why?” Morgan says, raising his arms in protest.
“Why don't we just goddamn kill him?”
“Cause you’ll be needing me soon.” Elijah says.
“And for what? What the hell is he good for?”
“I know this land, boy. Know it better than anyone. Without me you’ll die out here.” Elijah says, his face perfectly calm. Morgan rubs at his neck and waves a hand and The Band sets out to walking westerly, this time with renewed pace.
As they walk and the day grows long they come surrounded by eerie memorabilia of ancient pasts, the wreckages of civilization both new and so archaic as to be forgotten by the history books altogether. The broken and decrepit wagons of doomed pilgrims, their white tarps picked apart by magpies and their stores by carrion, ancient fossils bleached white by sun and grinning out of extinct mouths, old cave paintings of vibrant pigment and telling of disremembered stories all worn out by the desert wind. Through great plains of scrub and fairy rings like a giants jewelry, past scuttering gilas of halloweenish scales who watch with beady atavists eyes as if sentinels of the desert itself, sentinels who most certainly consider this foreign band unwelcome.
Through Jesse’s body a growing fatigue, dehydration coupled with fresh pangs of starvation he finds strangely nostalgic, reminiscent of long ago times in Dullwater that city now so far away. He looks to his fellow knights and sees the same feelings etched on their faces, but when he looks to The Drifter he sees nothing at all, as if the man is moved not by his own legs but by the hand of some astral puppeteer of unknown motivation. He licks at his lips as he sees a tiny pink legged jerboa scuttle past, finding there a thin coating of irony tasting dust that tastes perhaps just as the mouse would.
“We’ll die soon, Elijah.” Jesse says. Elijah pays him no glance.
“You won’t die.”
“Easy for you to say. You look fresh as a daisy.”
“Aye, survivalism is as much a talent as any, and in its field I find myself quite well acquainted.”
“Thats no answer. You hiding something from us?”
“Nothing at all. When you need water God’ll show you to it.”
“He seems to like playing games then, don't he, cause I’m about to drop.”
“Perhaps you’re the one in error then.” Elijah says. Jesse only shakes his head and looks out to the horizon, watching the sun begin to drop low towards its vanishing point and the sky turn a dusky sort of purple almost like lavender. He sees there that they seem to be, unmistakably, on some kind of beach or shoreline-the sand here is a fresh gold and dotted with fossils of ammonites, mucrospirifer, trilobites like glittering geometric opals there, the land steadily slanting downwards. However, at this beaches end there is no water, instead stretching out to the horizon as far as the eye can see a plain of perfect snow white, glittering there under the sunshine and seeming to catch the color of purple and reflect it off of its mirrorlike granules. Rising out of the plane distant and alien like spires of stone to match, great and towering islands mountainous in scale all of that same glittering white mineral.
“What is this place?” Jesse asks, slowing down and looking about with a dumbstruck expression, his fellow knights looking similar.
“Once upon a time, this was a sea. It dried out, died, and this is all that’s left.” Elijah says, his voice almost mournful as he shades his eyes looking out over the great crystalline plane.
“We’ll die out there with no water, no food.” Duncan says. As he talks his pale scars seem almost a color to match the mineral.
“Food, I cant lead you to. Not yet. But water.” Elijah says, then walks out onto the sea, motioning to The Knights with a fresh glint in his eyes.
“See this, and see it well.” Elijah says. After he has walked perhaps fifty feet out onto the plain, he sits and produces from his coat a long knife, perhaps a foot in length and of curved hilt of blackstained ivory. As the knights stand around him in semicircular fashion Elijah locks eyes with each of them in turn, still grinning that wild grin, then plunges the knife into the floor of mineral. He twists it around, leaning into the blade, and then removes it in one emphatic motion. When he does, out comes a spouting of water of perfect pale blue clarity.
“Water, and fresh at that.” He says, leaving the knife on the sand and letting the knights rush like drinking dogs to the hole. They scoop up water into their mouths in turn in great greedy gulps and then dig more holes with the knife, faces fiendish and inhuman as they rush and shove to get to the water, Elijah standing back the whole while and laughing.
“This waters fresh?” Jesse says, looking up with wet mouth.
“Fresh as any. All the salt that was in it you see here.” Elijah says, motioning out over The Saltbound Sea.
“Beneath it, pure water.” Jesse nods, grimaces, goes back for another drink. The Knights only stop when they begin to feel the lurches of vomit come on, Duncan spewing out a thin strand onto the salt and looking up to The Drifter hatefully.
“You got us on a leash, don't you.” He spits.
“No leash. You’re free to go, you know.” Elijah says, motioning out back to the red sands right at their rear. Duncan only shakes his head, motions out west.
“No time to waste now.” He says, and begins to walk. After a moment the rest of the knights follow.
There they make their way across the floor of the dried and forgotten sea, finding around them wonders both microscopic and mind boggling in scale. The salt all painted by the dying light shades of purple and mother of pearl, across its grains the dried bones and traces of fossils of long extinct species of fish, anemones, microbial blooms painted in faded colors of red and green. Larger than that the bones of beasts made by man and God, of whale and shark and stranger and ancient leviathans almost biblical in scope stretching with bleached bone across that endless expanse, their ribs and skulls making almost geographic features onto themselves, strange calcite tunnels through which the knights walk with dread filled gazes. The skeletons of ancient vessels of a hundred different eras with sails now rotted and bones of timber now strewn about and peering out of them no human faces all carried away by some unknown hand of times ticking clock. The winged man-birds of aeroplanes, both two and four winged, which once upon a time crashed away into this sea and carried all the way to the bottom, perhaps on accident or perhaps out of nothing but experimental desire. The traces of ancient civilization holdfasting on crests and rises of land far up like small mountains on them ancient castles of great and sweeping architecture, made of strange stone of pearlescent color which seems turquoise from one angle and garish pink from another, their lengths decorated with ornate and multilayered carvings of ancient scenes of seafaring races and the beasts and tides on which they once forged their odysseys.
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It is in one of these great castles The Band makes their camp, climbing up its steep hill of scrabbled salt and pale stone, using its ancient blooms of threaded algae and bleached coral as handholds as they make its way to what was once its shore and now stands as the edge of a great cliff from which they can see all the way to the golden edges of this saltbound sea. There, perhaps ten miles away, a train of wagons, perhaps ten in number, lays resting with lanterns glowing amberlike on the seabed. Jesse points out towards them.
“Out there.” He says.
“Traders. As I told you.” Elijah says. Jesse grows silent, around the pair the knights gathering, their faces already covered with the mineralite dust of the sea and rendered into a mosaic of the salt and the sand, rogues of red and white freakish in appearance. Jesse looks back easterly and sees the camp of the riders there, three campfires chained together by smaller cigarette lights their smoke rising through the air now still.
“We rob them or we get run down.” Jesse says.
“Jesse.” Morgan says, furrowing his brow.
“We’ve got no choice.” Jesse says, running a hand through his hair. All of his fellows nod in agreement save Morgan.
“We ain't bandits.” Morgan says.
“No, we ain't. But we’ll have to be just this once.” Sunny says. Morgan looks among his fellows and shakes his head, walking off and into the halls of the ancient castle of the seafolk.
“Shit.” Jesse says simply. Sunny pats him on the back.
“He’ll come around. Nobody’ll get killed.” Sunny says. Jesse eyes him suspiciously.
“You promise me? You promise me that nobody’ll die?” Sunny smiles slightly.
“Why, you think me a murderer?”
“You are a murderer.” Jesse says, pointing at Sunny's necklace of dangling teeth. Sunny's smile breaks into a grin.
“I promise you nobody will die.” Sunny says. Jesse nods grimly.
That night Jesse looks out the window of the castles tallest spire, watching the constellations drift by wistfully and looking out easterly, towards home. There Eridanus, the whirling river, Hydrus, Tucana, Octans in their astral geometries glinting bright. The sky here so clear that the milky way seems to stand out like a tapestry, purples and ceruleans and viridescent hues all almost neon in clarity. He closes his eyes and begins to drift towards sleep when he feels a cool hand on his shoulder.
He whirls around, reaching for his gun and finding nothing there. The face he sees pallid and freckled, coated in dust, his own face on one side and its perfected reflection on the other, the face of his brother.
“Christ, Morgan. You spooked me.” He says. Morgan grins, an almost ghoulish expression when coated in its journeyman's dust.
“I meant to. Figured this was my chance since you couldn't shoot me.” Morgan says, and Jesse laughs. Morgan sits at his side and looks out the window with him, pointing up at the stars. He motions out the shape of a long constellation shaped almost like a stinger, and Jesse follows his finger from behind him peering up as if looking out of a telescope.
“Scorpius.” Morgan says, the stars there reflecting in the shades of his gray eyes.
“You remember them too.” Jesse says, sitting with his back to the window and pulling in his knees.
“How could I forget?” Morgan says.
“When pa used to.” Morgan trails off and Jesse nods.
“It hurts sometimes.” Jesse says.
“Hurts bad. I dream of their faces, you know.”
“I do too. What scares me, Morgan.” Jesse clenches his jaw.
“What scares me is that I’m starting to forget what those faces looked like.”
“Jesus. Jesse, I.” Morgan sighs, puts his hands to his eyes.
“I am too.” He says. The two fall silent a long time, the only sounds far off pipings of voices from the camps of the traders and their pursuers, warbled by the sweeping architectures of the castle, distorted into waves vaguely doglike and inhuman.
“You ain't no killer, Jesse.” Morgan says, opening his eyes and from them dropping tears. Jesse shakes his head.
“But I am. Back there.”
“It was an accident. It can be the only one, you know. The only innocent.”
“It will be.”
“I don't believe you.”
“And I don't know if I believe myself. But I promise I’ll try for it to be.”
“Will you?”
“I will. I swear to God I will.” Jesse says. Morgan says not a word and only walks off into the shadowed corridors of the castle, sparing a glance back with his boots clicking on that strange stone.
That night a strangest of dreams, soaked in a scarlet sepia and frightening in its vividness. The five knights, then only fourteen, mounted atop huge steeds of black hair the color of the nighttime surrounds and with the great furious eyes of warhorses. Slung in their arms fox-hunting rifles of artisan make, likely imported from some far off antique merchant or another, at their front their instructor Ishmael Cortland in his bulky entirety and The Good King, Peter. King Peter’s horse is the only not matching, a flaw in a perfect equine set, of purest white rendered mercurial in the moonlight, and his outfit also set apart-an absurdly gaudy outfit of rich purples and golds with feathered gamesman's hat, dissimilar to the others simple outfits of black cloak and boots. All around them the sounds of the game preserve the chittering of birds, hooting of owls, distant calls of rutting elks and their doe partners. Farther, outside of their environs, the chaos noises of the favelas which mark the outer ring of the kings game preserve, surrounding this enormous urban garden as a stark contrast to the fenced wealth inside.
King Peter turns to the knights with his inbred chin wide in a grin, and raises his golden dog whistle to his lips letting it dangle there. Behind them the hair of the dogs, black and lean and raging of face, prickles.
“Let’s commence then, boys.” He says in a drawl unbefitting a monarch, and whistles.
Therein the hunt, shadowy and strange in this dream realm but not dissimilar to the memory which makes its origin. Riding fast through bramble and along gravel footpaths turning the soil loose beneath the great hooves of the hunting horses, dogs growling in murderous fashion and the horses only breathing steady those great stoics. Along shadowy lines of pine, through lakes rendered silvery beneath the full moonlight and seeing his own reflection there to match the shadow of the fox, scarlet and scarlet, the fox mother and its two juveniles running and yipping in fear. Raising the rifle, a crack shot even at this young an age, inhaling, and firing. Down goes the mother in a rise of gunsmoke and an emphatic gun crack and its young sit there yipping at its smoldering corpse, picked off like ducks by two knights he never did find out who.
The two young corpses raised there to bask in the moonlight with glazed eyes. One of them took a bullet through its right eye right above the thin jawbone scar there and smoke rises from the hole like some grotesque ashtray. Those eyes there, seeming to accuse him. Accuse him of what?
The next day a great storm beginning to rage, faintly visible off on the southerly horizon the moving of the wagon train steady and trundling, on the westerly horizon the forms of the mounted riders flickering and ephemeral, shadow puppets there behind their curtain of blowing salt and mineralite wind. The day grows long sooner rather than later and the knights walk in a line through the storm, alternating leads to take the brunt of the wind the only refusing The Drifter, growing ever closer to that crawling wagon train. In Jesse’s eyes a growing hunger, the killing madness of a boy who was raised for just that.
The sun setting a dusty bronze far in the West casts the unfolding scene like a spotlight ominous, its rays piercing through the sand and painting one half of the tracking knights in its burnished hues and the other in jet black shadow. The wagoneers deathly oblivious, the rear riders turning not even an ear to the knights as they take up behind them like stalking jackals mad looking with their faces all painted in white-red dust and sweat, their shirts wrapped about their faces like bandanas and their forms hunched as they creep up to those rear riders and prepare to strike with footstep sounds lost in the wind.
The backriders come in pairs, two each, behind the wagons with their tarps of white linen billowing there. They look simple ranching men, not in the rich outfits Jesse is accustomed to traders wearing, perhaps of a simpler stock than one like Giles LeClerc. Sunny comes up behind the horse on his right and gives Jesse a nod and Jesse grabs the rider off of the horse, putting a hand over his mouth and muffling his shouts as he looks up with wild eyes, seeing Jesse’s eyes even wilder. Duncan and Giles step forth and knock the riders unconscious with vicious strikes to the forehead nonlethal but certainly debilitating, sending their eyes to whites and leaving their horses riderless there trotting across the sands. Before the horses can bray and alert the next riders Jesse and Sunny mount them and soothe them easily, riding steadily up to the next most riders and pulling them off of their horses where Duncan and Giles repeat the process, the four caravan guards left there asprawl on the salt in no particular fashion. As Duncan and Giles mount and toss Jesse and Sunny the spare pistols and ammunitions they thieved off the guards, leaving one gun each, Sunny points suddenly up to the tarp of the rearmost wagon.
He looks to Jesse with a fury in his eyes, and Jesse follows his finger to the pendant hanging there and jingling in the wind, a pendant of the rebels eye. Sunny pulls his pistol and cocks the hammer and Jesse shakes his head and it is too late, Sunny fires off a shot at one of the side riders and he tips off his horse and the massacre commences.
Sunny leaps from his horse and climbs into the rearmost wagon reloading his pistol and tearing powder satchel open with his teeth, his dark eyes rendered a well of bloodthirst. Jesse hears over the wind screaming from that wagon and gunshots, gurgling of death moans some of which are most certainly not of full grown men. Jesse turns to Morgan as he runs up behind the wagon there with wide eyes.
“These ain’t traders! They’re pilgrims!” Jesse shouts. Morgan looks up horrified and a gun crack sounds over the din, Jesse’s horse tipping sideways and spilling him onto the salt with a hole between its eyes. Jesse draws his pistol and sees there the front and side guards pulling around to face them, perhaps six in number total and hopelessly outmatched. The shooting is quick and efficient, cover taken by the still moving wagons as they exchange fire and the bullets fly askew in the wind but still hit their targets, all six guards soon lying dead on the sand. After that is the wagoneers, all sense of mercy now lost in the fray, pulled off their wagons and killed while pleading by bullet or by looted knife. Once the wagoneers are dead the oxen begin to pull off and their throats are too slit, teams of four and six lying there with glazing eye in the salt and their wagons inertia rendered moot.
At some point Sunny and Duncan makeshift molotov cocktails out of a wagons supply of rag and liquor, throwing them onto the rear and front wagon and sending them alight like howling torches, their flames billowing and dervishing infernal in the storm. When Jesse climbs into the wagon beds he sees the faces of the mothers and their children now and sees they are unarmed and sees their fear but he find he does not care, drawing pistol and blade and butchering them all the same. Pilgrims run out into the storm and are gunned down where they stand, no joy in the knights faces but all with the same bloodlust, even Morgan. Watching it all as blood stains the white salt red The Drifter, smoking a cigarette alit unlikely in the wind and grinning slightly.
When it is all said and done the wagon trains stand there all ten alight and soaked in blood like hellish monuments, their brave argonauts strewn about the salt chopped apart and dismembered and shot to bits and smoking, spilling crimson gore in disorderly fashion out onto the salt. Jesse looks down to his body and realizes he looks almost like the dead, covered in blood and soot and looking like some occultly illustrated devil. He looks to The Drifter and raises his new pistol, cocks the hammer and aims but before he can shoot he hears hollering from the West.
Therein come the riders from Rumrun, alive and their faces furious and in their hands fine blades, pistols, toted rifles beginning to light off with gunsmoke. Jesse feels a shock of pain through his adrenaline and raises a hand to discover that his right ear, the one burned beyond repair, has been shot off and is smeared across his bandages. Oh well, it wasn't much pretty anyway, he thinks, and draws his pistol.
“Kneel, bastards! Surrender!” Sheriff Franklin Coleman calls from the front of the charge, his chivalrous hunters riding out behind him like dust stained and angelic cavalry, their rifles raised and firing and their faces filled with revenge. No answer from the knights, only war whoops like horrific hunting dogs as they shoot back at the cavalry as they ring around, pulling knives and chopping at their mounts as they come close. One horse’s throat is cut clean down the middle by Sunny Miller and its rider goes flying directly into a burning wagon, his dying screams there faintly audible over the thunderous gunfire.
The Knights congregate by the middlemost wagons, forming a strange sort of vanguard there all with blood dripping from their bodies and furious faces. Rider after rider falls to the mineral floor, their aim outmatched and their number dwindling quickly. Jesse sees Sheriff Franklin Coleman charging right at him with two pistols raised-pistols Jesse realizes quickly were once his own-and lights off two shots. The first misses high and the second hits Morgan at his right squarely in the hip, sending him grimacing to the ground. Jesse stares Coleman dead down as he reloads his pistol, raising it and firing a bullet right through his horses eye where it falls down in a sprawl of equine limbs, spilling Coleman forth. Coleman gives Jesse a wry look and spits, running off into the storm and screaming loudly for a retreat.
The perhaps eight remaining riders fall back with him, quickly disapparating into the dust and two of their number wounded as they retreat. When they are gone all that is left is the howl of the wind and the carnage around them, the smell of smoke and blood rising its stench into the air.