And Sophy No-Last-Name curled in on her child, praying, ’til the rising wave of white choked her. ’Til only Mesach Love’s name was left on her bitter lips.
Hours after, as the sun rose, Bewelcome gave it back from every angle, a bleak wilderness of mirrors. In the end, everything had turned to salt — no exceptions. Oh, there’d be wind-wear and erosion to come, ’til the town’s edges lost their clarity, and travellers struggled to identify the place as made by human hands. For now, however, it was pristine, so clean it cut.
Rook looked over at Chess, so triumphant before at Love’s expense — and saw him waver, reeling under the full weight of what’d just happened: the spectacle of Love’s dead congregation, his woman fallen to her knees and bent double to hide her baby from the tide of rime. Same baby whose pudgy hand still protruded from the folds of her shawl, the two of them already blurred together, inseparable.
“Jesus, y’all right?” Hosteen asked Chess, genuinely worried. Chess spat and shuffled himself back upright, batting the older man away from him.
“Fine, idjit!” was all he said. But Rook, like Hosteen, knew better. Because they could both see what Chess had brought up, shining there amongst the drifts — a spray of liquid jewellery, bright red on endless white.
I can’t see him killed, Rook cast out into the ether, his mind reaching for that Indian woman’s — Grandma, why not? I won’t.
To which she sent back, faintly, from someplace far away — her Yellow Mountain? — You do not want to. But you will have to see it, eventually, knowing what he is . . . what you are. Unless . . .
Unless?
“You’re goin’?” Chess demanded. “Where? Why? Alone?” He paused. “For how long?”
“Don’t know, exactly. It’s this mountain over in Injun territory, back by the border — ”
“You’re a Bible School-bred liar, Ash Rook. I come in here alone, get myself beat to shit for you, and you lie right to my face? I killed the Lieut for you!”
“You were plannin’ on killin’ him anyhow, I believe.”
Chess threw up his hands. “Yeah, sure . . . but when I did it, I did it for you!”
Rook grit his teeth, and began again. “Chess, what happened here just ain’t right, and you know it. I don’t whip this thing, I might hurt — somebody — I don’t want to.”
“So you’re gonna leave me behind!”
“I don’t want you hurt, Chess. Is that so hard to understand?”
“Yeah, well — talk’s cheap, Rev. Prove it!”
Rook paused, sighed, heavy as Balaam’s laden ass — and clapped a hand over Chess’s face, willing instantaneous sleep into him with one muffled burst, a soft mortar-round. Chess folded back into Hosteen’s grip, without a hint of protest.
“I just did,” Rook told him, knowing Chess couldn’t hear. To Hosteen: “Look after him.”
“I wil
l,” Hosteen replied. “I mean, much as he’ll let me.”
Not much point in further goodbyes, from Rook’s point of view. So he just nodded — I know you will, Kees — and left, heading for open desert. Thinking, as he did: Okay, then.
Show me somethin’.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two days later, as Grandma’s Yellow Abalone Shell mountain rose to scar the sky, Rook suddenly realized that this was the longest he and Chess had been apart since the day he’d been hung. But the desert was a shockingly empty place once you faced it alone, and he’d been walking slow enough now, for long enough, to let it steal a good portion of the daily sound and fury of Chess’s companionship away, though parts of him ached for lack of what he’d increasingly come to regard as their due reverence. In fact, without Chess here to do him worship, Rook’s formerly swelled head was deflating like a popped pig’s bladder.
Like coming down off a three-week drunk, your very piss still alcohol-laced enough to light up blue and high-flaming at the slightest touch of a dropped lucifer. Or maybe the morning after signing up, when he’d come to already in uniform.
Now, Rook stood in the peaks’ shadow, knowing San Francisco lay somewhere on the other side: that terrible city which had spit his own true love out into an unsuspecting world — all teeth from the very start, yet still quite the prettiest thing Rook’d ever seen, let alone killed for.
You’re doing this for him, he told himself. So you can build something together — something ain’t just bed and bullets, something no one can touch but you. Not even —
( She, deep in the murk with her dragonfly-cloak flapping, where all shed blood sluices away down steep black chutes to keep the world’s gears grinding.)
Dragging himself away from the cold touch of Lady Rainbow’s shadow, with some not-inconsiderable effort, Rook forced himself to look up at the mountain instead. He opened his mind wide, and waited.