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And it was long past the sullen winters when he would set upon a plain sparsely habited by sagebrush and trekked between the outcrops to the old shack sending the rodents scurrying home to their young up to where the wizened ragman sat in his filthy abode watching the sun flee and the colors fade into one on a distant dust line where all points converged into hallucinations conjured up by drunken minds beseeching deaf Gods in their unreachable heavens. Their saviors approaching eternally in measured paces across the dry lands in a haze that would last as long as their thoughts and no more.

He slunk up to the stream and he crouched and tried filling his palms but there was only a trickle and so he fell upon his bloody knees bare to the land through the holes in his dress and sipped for an hour till his thirst was sated and he leaned back and looked upon the world anew.

Nothing in its place, he thought. I am God. I am God. And forge the world different I shall. A world unmoored from life and limb and the terrible struggle. You will be without it. I would make you of sand and stone and iron and of the elements that permitted this great wretchedness I’d do away with. Let them be forgotten. Let nothing colligate. May each grain and each atom and that which builds both remain separate. May they never unite, may they never come together.

He wrote the genesis of this world in the dust with his finger and before he finished it swirled away and he spat upon the wind and he bent and drank more.


Feral dogs howling long and loud that bitter night when the cold came, a scalpel meant for his beating heart. Him on firelights border wrapped in himself and his rags like a pile of orphan clothes discarded even by those who knew not their progenitor’s love. Pitch night without neither star nor lunar moon to light it.

Behind him the fire snapped loud and embers rose on the winds like the thousand fireflies which once amazed.


A red dawn saw a long trail in the dust leading to him gazing up at the mesa’s sheer cliffs and speculating what mighty ocean had once buried this land and what monsters had lurked where he now stood. All the life buried in the stone waiting for sentience to discover their secret lineages but who would now and what secrets could they offer that would be of use? Of the dark esoteric of life he was already privy and of what might lie beyond that of what matter was it? He said to the Ragman once, if life comes after life I’d hurl myself into suns infinite until a God took pity on me.

The Ragman had only nodded once and lifted a hand to stroke his beard.


He’d said it was five days to Hiro and on the fifth evening it loomed large in the horizon like a reeling neon beast broke free of its shackles and running rampant across the sky in sick shades of urine like a gangrenous wound suppurating its poisons into parts not yet dead and he sat on the crest of the ridge looking down imagining a lone rider coming out to meet him.

Off with you, he’d say gently. Into the desert for this is no city of refuge and your blood would surely run in its flooded gutters.

He waited a long night to see if the lights would dim but they did not and when the sun broke out again like a malarial infection he stood and dusted himself with quick swipes and descended into the valley which held the city.

Upon his head he lacked hair and ears and the barman stared at him demurely and when he set a hand with only three fingers upon the counter he began to sweat and he loosened his collar with a fat finger and gestured to the shelves behind him.

¿Desea usted un bedida?

But he only shook his head and fixed upon the barman with a baleful glare such that he turned away from him.

Dejo obtene un bedida. He said and from the top shelf he took a bottle of whiskey and from beneath the counter a filthy glass and he set them side by side and poured the man a drink.

Aquí.

He pushed the glass to him and he took it and drank and set it down and the barman refilled it and he did this again and when he set it down then he pulled from his leather waist belt a revolver and put it to the barman’s forehead.

The shot echoed through the bar and the barman’s head and his head vomited its contents upon the floor where it soaked into the wood and slipped between the boards.

In the streets no sign was shown of the knowledge of his crime and so he walked down the narrow alleys past the dilapidated whorehouses and the stallholders crying their wares in the marketplace and the emaciated urchins there who crowded about his legs and tried to rob him only to find nothing upon his person and cursing his name with a strange inflection he could not understand as he slinked away up chapel stairs worn smooth by the numberless pious and pulled open the oak doors and stepped inside.

The doorman greeted him with surprise and in reply he says I’ve not been here in my time, I’ll not linger long. He walked up the aisle and their the pilgrims bore sight of him and scented him and they winced at the wretch and his reek and when he reached the priest he took his pale hands and laid upon them a brother’s kiss like a traitorous genuflection and then he left.

He was all day walking back into the desert. On a forgotten highway where the asphalt had risen and declined madly as though it’d been quaked times uncountable since its laying and the cavernous fissures that snaked from one shoulder to the other held the Hades of man so hard did the sun beat down upon the tar. Where cyclonic dust formed and whirled about him, as if he were one of the old titans walking the earth when chaos still had reign and Zeus was only a babe and Loki had just begun his trickery, and then disintegrating again into the air like dark locusts set out to scour the world.

I’d not redeem you, he said to the howl that carried across the desert highway. I’d still your breath and I’d accept neither your blessing or curse and the world would be better for it.

He’d somewhere acquired a straw hat and he wore it tight on his head and with a single hand held it in place and tilted down to hide his features and hunched his form as if to ford through the walls of sand that barred his path.

There was a ranch house with no ranch materializing through the clouds of dust and he stopped once and looked about with surprise and then he walked up to it and mounted the porch steps and there eyed the disassembled swing sitting there and the open tool case lying beside it. He bent down and fished its contents and took a claw hammer from it and then rapped on the door with white skinned knuckles the color of pain.

A middle age man what answered and before his mouth could form the words he’d embedded the claw just below the bridge of his nose and dragged him out into the world screaming and cast him into the dirt and there bludgeoned his head in with great blows like a smith forging a sword. He stood above catching his breath and watching the blood pump until it ceased and then went and stood in the doorway and beyond in the foyer a young carpenter, in stained overalls and long black hair and her hands at her side trembling after what she bore witness to.

At full dark he laid in the master’s bed naked staring at the ceiling and the stilled fan hanging from wires where he ripped it out of its anchoring and he took a long drag from his cigarette and blew it out into the air. Wrapped in the slick sheets he felt cold and he thought for a second he was still weathering across a long winter night when the clouds boomed overhead and rain fell in sheets out across the plains hunting coyotes with his long rifle but he was not and he looked to his right and there she was dead as the day was done and he rolled her off the soaked mattress and onto the floor.

What are you to me, he said. You’re nothing.

He got up and took his blackened wife beater and pulled it on and then his jacket and his jeans and his socks riddled with holes and his worn leather boots and then he took the phone and dialed numbers and listened to the tone.

After a moment a woman ended the monotonous ringing and to her he reported in a calm voice the murders and then he replaced the phone and sitting on mattress’ edge waited until flashes of red and blue traversed across the far wall. Doors opening and slamming and a radio’s indecipherable cackle. Soft boot falls grinding the sand. They were long getting inside and between the shades he watched them bending down before the corpse waving their hands over him to dispel the stench and then watched them take the porch steps in two massive steps and disappear at the door. And it creaked open slow on its hinges and through the walls he could hear it turn and hear them speak.

Esto es la policía. ¿Hola alguien aquí?

¿Hola?

He stayed silent. Got up and walked to the bedroom door and there he waited with the cocked revolver listening to the stressing floor boards and the hasty oaths they muttered as they made their way down the hall each more severe than the next and the doors cracking open but never swinging wide as they glimpsed into one nightmare after the next and a long while before the first officer had gathered his courage and stepped through the door and saw the scene plain and felt his soft rasping against his cheek and looked and saw his bloody visage and voiced a final utterance of the mater dei before he shot him through the heart. He grabbed him before he could fall and held him up by his throat and the second officer racing down the narrow corridor with his gun drawn calling out to a dead man. He stuck the revolver between the dead officer’s arm and fired blindly until he heard a body crumple and he let the man he held fall to the floor and stepped out to see the cop lying there in a pool of blood spreading towards him like an augur of things to come as if what had come before were not warning enough.

Three days later in sand red in the dawn he did write with a twig:

Sometimes I feel my soul is as black as oil
On a moonless night
When the storm clouds rage
It is then I feel most alone
It is then I pray for a heart of stone


The Ragman having forewarned of this and other things and he was not surprised. No place in the world was there for men such as he and it’d be better to forget what lie beyond the borders of the desert’s dusty veil and be content with the intimacy of the scoria that covered the endless expanses.

But he dragged on his smoking cheroot staring at his wizened face between the thin cloud of his breath and he said a life roamed in the desert is none life at all. The wisdom of the world lies outwards and is only ever gleaned through the interactions with others. What would Plato have been without Aristotle and him if not for Socrates? It is upon the relationships that are built and maintained that advances the human whole and from which is drawn the potential to progress or regress depending on what is given and what is taken away.

The Ragman considered this for only a second and he fixed upon him a knowing gaze and said it would regress under your watch.

And for that he’d no reply.


He was camped in the lee of a mountain that reared up against him like a boxer’s fist ready to strike and silhouetted by the pale moon dominating the clear night sky was a single lobos with his grey muzzle in the gut of a fresh kill near a sheer cliff of red stone and he could hear the sounds of tearing muscles and the gnaw of bones above the rustling of the trees and the shake of their trunks.

And the sand had begun to choke the air once more when he laid down for the night and he continued watching the lobos from his bed now loping away from the carcass across a ridge lit by an anonymous sulphuric glow and he thought as he nibbled at his hardtack what had become of that lone rider to dissuade him, had he shot him down before he came.

He was awake when dawn was only a sliver of orange leaking into the world like a rising torchlight born upon a cavalry regiment’s standard bearer rounding a burned mountain covered in the dead husk of trees each its own world. Spreading like ink across the vast expanse, a deep orange ever becoming bolder against the stars until they hid themselves and the pale moon sullied and then it sulked red like coagulated blood flaking off and flying farther into an empty void.

He walked farther into the desert and behind him the rising smoke trail weaning itself from the fire pit and feeding the sky now in full bloom like incense. Scent of woodchip trailing him all the way to the wide river where he stripped and bathed in the muddied water and scrubbed himself down with a cured strip of leather until his flesh was raw and red. He got out then and he dressed and set off.

In the late afternoon he came across the final resting place of a painted horse picked clean by the buzzards and the sand and he crouched before those white washed bones as if preparing to pray and he was down not two seconds that he heard a rattler’s hiss and looked into the dead horses sockets and there hiding was a diamond back coiled in the horse’s thoughts and he watched it for a moment and then he spoke to the snake saying, I am you.

Through an abandoned village of adobe mud houses and thatch huts already being eroded by the blowing elements and on the many doorsteps scenes of violent struggle and in the homes there was butchery abounding. A man on a windowsill pad in hand appearing to be taking notes on the spawning storm twenty miles south and its silent flashes. From his chest there jutted three arrows and out his back he could see they were broadheads and the blood ran down the wall and mixed with the collective pool of his brothers and sisters forming a dark dried lake still moist as if the boundless earth could not hold much more or maybe it so thick that it could only dry in the sun or perhaps it was that the vileness had simply been rejected lest what evil had slain them spread. There were lines of bullet holes in the mud walls denoting last stands and eventually they all lead to corpses some skinned and hung by the feet and some scalped and others ripped limb from limb in an orgy of violence. An arm in the galley hanging from the rack where were hung pots and pans and spatulas and pokers and in a fire pit the charred bones of a child still smoking and slaughtered beside it the remains of she who birthed it. A foul light splintered between the cracks of the wooden door splattered with blood whose lock was broken and on the first step a river of dried blood avowing things mortal eyes have no right seeing. The whole village choked with the smell of voided bowels and gangrene and rot and gunpowder and nowhere more than the chapel where the meek had fled into the arms of a silent God. Piled haphazardly over the pews bare to their lord’s omniscient eyes and broken hands unable or unwilling to commute their ghastly fates. In the wide chapel’s opened maw he stood like a penitent looking in debating should he go in or should he go without. Finally in the darkened streets one of the assaulters and this dead man dressed in uncured buckskin and tattered moccasins and being no Indian he’d ever seen or heard of. A round hole in his head so fine one could look and wonder how he truly died. A black sheet of cumulus charging on devil winds and the heat wave vanguard swinging the three bodies hung on the edge of town from a lone tree bare of leaf but not of branch and he stood beneath their dangling feet and saw they were wrapped together in barbed wire and the barbs digging into their waxy skin.

He walked on and when the village was still in sight it began to rain and it rained for six days after and sooner than that he crested a hill overlooking the plains and saw the flood waters rising fast as if the earth could not endure the filth that had accumulated on its miserable surface.

No timber dry enough to catch and so he sat there watching lakes form those days drinking from them and watching the lighting strike and the cacti drown and the kingdom entire scrambling for high ground seeing him and wandering could they make it if they swam and could they make it with him. Few survived either option but they did survive and when the rains finally stopped they returned to their burrows and ate their dead and slept peacefully.

He continued on past bloated drowned dead of man and beast alike in a mire that was already drying under the brutal desert sun. Reverting to its old fissured vista like the very grounds of hell after Noah’s flood drained down through the caves of the world carrying the screaming wicked and quenching for brief seconds the furnaces that burned for the devil below.

A rider materialized on the hazy line and coalesced into two trotting side by side and when they drew near enough he hailed them and they him.

¿A Dónde vas?

Wherever you’re coming from.

¿Qué? ¿Hablas español?

Eh sí sí.

The rider repeated the question and he replied as he had before in a language he’d understand.

No. Said the rider and his companion nodded gravely.

¿Por qué no?

Todos muerto donde acabamos de venir.

Todos muerto donde acabo de venir.

Do you speak English?

Nada.

Forget it then.

He walked past them and they continued their own way and when he was sure they’d gone far enough that they’d not look behind he took the revolver from his belt and shot both men in the back. The man who’d spoke fell from his saddle and the other man’s horse was startled and it rode on and with him upright as if he were steering it still and after a while he slipped from its back and was dragged until he came loose.

He bothered not with that one. Instead he walked to the stilled horse and took its reins and ran a steadying hand down its muzzle. At his feet was the dead rider and wetting across his breast a wave of dark red. He emptied his pockets onto the ground and sorted through them and selected from it a compass though he could dead reckon like none other and a pouch of jerky and some snuff and he put either of those in his own pockets and then he snatched the rider’s colt from its holster and the belt of rounds and laced that across his chest and then he mounted the steed and turned it smartly around and went from whence they came.

Another village slaughtered and he circumvented that by a narrow trail and he was not sure if he was following the butchers’ wake or had the posse already passed him by. He rode cautiously and came across a sign marking the trail for the righteous and farther on a shrine dedicated to the mater dei and her there with arms welcoming and at her stone base a dead woman who’d been pregnant before death clutching at her ankles begging salvation in the hour of her death.

He rode on. Up the path into a system of sparse hills that sloped down into a barren plain that he was five days crossing and which saw no soul but himself and when he finally breached its dry border his lips were cracked and his throat was dry and his skin felt like the soil must have under all that sun. He rode a further ways past that and finally cut paths with a paved road and he steered the horse with his knee onto it and went a distance before coming across a fruit tent pitched in front of a produce farm. With some of the dead rider’s dollars he paid the elder merchant for a pair of apples and a tangerine and he wolfed them down and then paid for water and drank till he vomited and then drank more. When he could drink nothing else he dismounted and let the horse to graze and laid down in the shade there and the merchant must have been near blind for she made no fuss of him lying there. Only fanned herself with a pamphlet and speaking softly to him in the Spanish tongue recounting days gone by when she’d been the talk of the town and the apple of many eyes before the farm life claimed her and he laid there listening saying nothing but si si si.

When he left he left in a hurry and with a leather bag of stolen fruit bouncing against his back and he rode the horse hard down the dusty road towards the city that rose up from the horizon like a metal god’s hands eternally grasping upwards for his life. It was not until he came through the outskirts that he slowed the beast and saw that the city was as all the others he’d seen before and he rode slow past the tin shacks and the orphans squatting in gak and he went deeper then into the city.

Streets thick with the poor and the foreign and none looked at him as he passed. A few automobiles honked their way through the crowds but mostly there were packanimals and saddled men forcing their way through and with his straw hat tilted low he blended with them for he was none dirtier than those that walked. There was a hitching fence in front of a bar and he dismounted there and hitched the horse and went up the creaking steps and pushed the doors in gently and looked about.

There were many men there, some hunched over their drinks at the bar and a group of Dutchmen playing cards and rambling in their tongue and a used whore sitting at a booth in a dark corner her brown thighs barely covered and barely seen and a bouncer at the top of the stairs eying all below and the bartender was the Ragman and he walked in and the Dutchmen’s chattering ceased as all eyes fixed on him and the bouncer eyed him especially and in the small of his back he reached and cocked a hammer and crossed his arms. He sat at the bar.

What are you drinking?

Long Island.

Alright. The ragman turned and from the shelf he began collecting an assortment of liquors and he lined them up the vodka, tequila, the rum and the gin, the triple-sec and the sweet and sour and the coke and he mixed them in a tall clear glass until it turned a shade of dark hazel and dropped in a trio of cubes that bobbed at the surface and then he placed the drink in front of him.

He took it and sipped and he grabbed a coaster and set it upon it.

No lemon?

None for three weeks now.

Cause of Raiders?

Probably.

He took a straw from the dispenser and he swirled the black thing around in his drink and through it sipped the dark liquor. The Ragman went and attended to the other customers and he sat there alone in the crowd drinking and every time his glass ran empty the Ragman would refill it without asking till the night was wrapping up and the bar closed and they sat out on the steps one next to the other the Ragman with his hands laced together and him with a bottle of beer both watching what went by.

The homeless masses shifting from dark alley to dark alley never lingering long in the soft islands of the lamplight illuminating scenes up and down the street. A pair of jokers on a bench smoking and talking of past mistakes and plotting future ones they aught commit. An emerging trench coated man who disappears into the darkness of the city. The spurious appearance of gloomed apparitions like the ancient poor’s elders that begged the streets up and down before the waste claimed them and their bereft souls filled with shame could hold no more.

Have you wandered far?

Farther than a man rightly aught.

Hmm.

I went to Hiro and I went through the Indian country and passed two villages that’d been massacred and I came up the highway and I rode down this street and on that horse to boot.

He pointed to the horse still hitched and drinking from the water trough.

Hmm.

I’m heading back out again come morning after I sleep. I doubt you’ll see me ever again.

Then I guess I should call in that tab you ran up.

I’ve been running that tab for years.

I know I was thinking when you finally came up with the money I’d retire.

Then I guess you’re gonna die a working man.

Hmm.

Where are you goin?

Indian Country.

Off to live with the Chichimec.

He laughed. Hell’re you talking bout, they’re all dead.

And the Ragman shook his head. Hell’re you talking about, they’re all over.


The city diminishing behind him and him riding the horse south for twelve days until it collapsed under him from exhaustion and died from a bullet and he took a knife and cut away lengths of its hide and dried and salted them and started walking day and night without stopping for near two moons and on the third day there was a lake he’d thought was a mirage but when he stepped into the cool waters they were real and he stripped and swam and slept the night and in the morning continued on.

He came to a trading post two hundred miles from the highway and on no road save what the wagons had impressed upon the earth and here it was crossed and recrossed by the tracks of wolves, coyotes and dogs and men. He walked his own tracks cross it up to the piked walls of timber that encircled the post and at the closed gate a man accosted him from on high.

The man was wearing a straw sombrero and he held a rifle in his hands.

You speak English?

I do.

What do you want?

What do you got?

Food drink and Julia.

How much?

We don’t take no peso gak here.

I got American dollars.

Hell you don’t look it.

What’s it to you what I look?

I just don’t know how I feel about letting some rag ass loner in here.

All I want’s some goddamned food and water.

If that’s all you want we can conduct that business right here you just hold on.

He was about to say something more but the sentry disappeared somewhere onto the ramparts and he could hear him calling out to another below. A few moments later the gates were pushed open and a runner came out bearing two bags one a deer bladder brimming with water and another bag of another skin from another animal. The runner handed off both to him and he took it and pulled open the bag and looked inside.

That’s five dollars.

For this gak?

Lew says take it or leave it.

He looked up at the runner and then at the man watching him on the ramparts and he snapped the bag shut and dug in his pockets for what the Ragman’d given him and he smacked it into the runner’s open palms and then he walked off into the desert again.

There was a brother once he’d had by the Christian name of Samuel and he’d died on his seventh night and his mother not long after that and the townsfolk entombed them both beside his dead father on a barren knoll in stone coffins that six men were all morning carrying there. A cold summer day that’d been and a greyer sky he’d not seen since and the wind whipping up the dust into his small eyes and all around them the dead bits of sage and thistle and after the curt eulogy there were no lingerers to wish the family a safe journey into whatever might lie beyond save himself and he sat crosslegged in front of the trio of granite tombstones studying the lichen growing at the base of his father’s marker like plague rising from the black soul trapped beneath.

He was standing before gravestones now. A long row of them cracked by the weight of ages installed in what must have been the only soft ground laid on that whole desert continent and the one desert tree seeming to rear up over the whole scene and not too far off the smoldering village and they seemed oddly apart to him, the grave and the village. He surmised it would be such that men who died natural causes would benefit differently than those who lay murdered in the streets and as he was walking through the gated cemetery a thought struck him and he stopped in his tracks wondering what number tombed in that hallowed ground might lay such a claim, that their deaths were natural in the eyes of God and man, and how many were deaths such as he knew. And what was natural? Could the shock of the bullet be counted as equal to the wasting of age and the predations of disease and even that constant was being chiseled slowly away and so what could be called natural in a world where the natural was ever upset and man seeks to alter the universe? Would they not all declare their passings unfair, that before their time they’d been took. That the vaccine might have saved them or the vest protected them or the elixir prolonged them.

At that he spat and he left the ancient dead in their coffins and stepped onto the cobblestone street that ran through the town. There was a scene much like others he’d been witness to. The rifled corpses left to rot and the buzzards perched in their backs with strings of meat hanging from their gored beaks. There was a pueblo house with its battered wooden door ajar and from within a man came into the street holding a dead infant in either hand with their brains bashed out and he held them up to the light like a connoisseur examining curiosities or a priest holding up his accusation.

The man was dressed like the lean rugged of a strange time, bare skin under a light cotton poncho and tied round his legs were armored greaves of a leather make like from medieval times and a webbed belt at his waist with pistol cartridges and a holster at his side with a Smith and Wesson. A slender frame fit in it all and had there been more he’d still be comfortable. When he saw his ragged figure walk up like a nightmare phantom he let the infants fall to the ground and turned to regard him a hand on the Smith.

Hey who’re you?

Does it matter?

It might.

Well I’m not someone who robs dead babies from their graves if that’s what you’re asking. I’m also not one to care if you are.

I wasn’t stealing em I just wanted a better look.

Not sure why you’d want to look in the first place.

A man can’t be curious?

Some things don’t need knowing.

That’s fair enough but the question still stands.

Which one?

Who are you?

I’m the devil who’re you.

Are you gonna be a hard ass about this?

I think I already am.

They fixed their eyes on each and his dark furies seemed to flare with the absence of life and light and his three fingers twitched oddly towards his revolver. The child thief saw the darkness in his opponent’s eyes and though his hand was already on the Smith’s grip he conceded.

Alright be mysterious if you want but you should know there’s three dozen men nearby and they’re all armed.

So you’re the raiders.

No were the one’s tasked with killing em.

Really?

Yep can’t say I think we should though seeing as they’re doing us a favor. The child thief pointed at the dead all around him. If it wasn’t them it’d a been us eventually.

Is that so?

Tis.

Well then don’t let me stop you.

You know we lost a few men coming here we could use another hand if you’re good.

I’m good but I’m not about to sign on with you.

You wouldn’t be signing on with me you’d be signing on with Captain Patrick.

feth’s Patrick?

Cap Pat’s the head. He’s taken us over two thousand miles cross dry wash, desert, mountain, plain, river, forest, you name it we been there maybe save jungle but I hear he’s been there and he’ll probably lead us there one of these days.

I ain’t going through no fething jungle.

Well were not anytime soon, we’re going East to find these savages and then after that we’re going to Hiro to collect the bounty.

I still ain’t going.

Suit yourself.

I will.

They were done talking then and the child thief was reluctant but eventually he turned his back to him and began trekking down a narrow alley out of town to where must have been his two dozen compatriots and Captain Patrick and he kept walking down the main street and when he passed the alley the child thief had went down he pulled his revolver and emptied every chamber in there and then kept walking.







At the precipice of a vast dry wash there was no end to he stood, his hand shielding his eyes from a murderous sun that baked what lay before him and its heat rolling off the ground in mirage waves that rose like a storming ocean. There were hoofed tracks leading into the wash and out a ways on the flanks there were the tracks of wolves and he followed those for two days until they faded out at a sheer rock wall that rose up like a border of worlds or a prison wall. He camped in a recess of that wall and drank from a vapid pond that had formed in a depression and he undressed and slept naked under the dead moon.

He was up and dressed before dawn and was having a meal of wolf meat from the leather satchel when it began. Slow, like all worldly things. Growing as if the very earth had given way and there on that new world’s edge the light of hell was enlightening a hale blue sky, telling what would happen next. The red morning light a thin line against the rock cliff slipping over everything, over the mountains, the hills, the plains, the valleys, the world, till he himself sat in its frenzied glow, undisturbed. A hot day foretold where all shadow would be banished and the only coolness that might be found was in the grave or underground and the tempers of man would be like matches struck in kerosene.

He sweated the last stretch of the wash in that suffocating heat going where he thought the wolves might’ve and along the way he found one of their numbers disemboweled alone in the desert. The bloating carcass picked clean by its fellows and the skin beneath its dusty coat was drier than the leather he wore at his waist and from its exposed underbelly there was a dark trail of blood and entrails for some distance and he followed that visceral guide till he heard screams and gunfire and saw the smoke trails rising over the crest of a bare hill mad like a forest burned awaited there.

Prone and a revolver in each filthy claw did he arrive at the hill’s crest and bore witness to the goings on of the valley. Where a village of mud huts built on an arroyo’s edge and its inhabitant’s being swiftly depopulated by that band of Raiders rumored and bountied and they upon horseback and foot and armed to the teeth with lance and hatchet and pistols dating from previous centuries and machetes dripping with blood and spears and cutlasses and claw hammers and sledges and picks and their bloodied fists. They were as ragged a bunch as he’d ever laid eyes upon and so coated in the gore of their victims that he could not tell their color, if they were wandering savages or mad white men driven to barbarity by the sun and the Spanish so slick were they.

The raider’s numbers were just over a hundred and they were all invested in the butchering of the villagers and that with every scrap of their being and a rare spectacle their unbridled slaughter was such that he could never recall an instance like it in all his murderous years. Primal violence performed in its infinite varieties heralding back to previous times of medieval nature when man was pitted against man with only God as lawmaker and He silent in his apocryphal heaven.

Him with eyes wide open so that he might attest this day when come his trial before the Lord and he’d say here is what happened: In the sparse weeds growing long on the arroyo’s bank did a man slathered in blood desecrate a woman’s corpse and farther up another was slitting a child’s throat and in the huts screams could be heard in that universal tongue as they were sodomized and a pair of raiders stripped to the waist forcing a spear through a man’s anus and a pack of their number chasing down the fleers grabbing their hair and dragging them to the dusty earth and scalping them there and a man without arms walking dumbly each stump jetting arterial fluid into the air like mist and a spearman with a half-dozen infants spitted upon his spear and another man this one in cured buckskin with a severed head in either hand their mouths ajar and they were stringing parts of men and women and their progeny to the bushes and on the far edge of the village they were taking those still alive to a tall dead cyprus and bounding them there with a length of barbed wire that buried itself in their skin and everywhere they were hacking off limbs and disemboweling them and the communal howl that rose up from the village in protest was lost to the wind and fell on no God’s ears.

It was the hour of noon when Captain Patrick’s assemblage of bounty hunters appeared to the north rounding out from the lee of a hill interspersed with dry brush. They were in a diamond formation charging hard for the center of the village. They were brandishing muskets and pistols and at two hundred yards they let out a volley that he swore only hit one of the villager’s folk that had seen their blue coats and run out to be saved. Their volley alerted the tribe of butchers who paused in the midst of their carnal acts to look and there saw the bounty hunters hollering madly and they mounted their horses and rode out to meet them, all their merciless number and when the two bands collided it was as if a new sin had been born by that collection of men and so it was he had no words for it.

A dust cloud kicked up by that impact and men were thrown from their horses and the horses fell into the dust and never recovered. He saw a raider on foot drag a hunter from his saddle and bludgeon his head in with a rock and he saw that same raider nearly decapitated and stumble back his head looking behind him and hanging only by a string of muscle and then he saw another hunter sawn in half by a devilish pair armed with hacksaw and how when that man was bisected how one of the men took his entrails and garroted another man with them and there a hunter surrounded firing into the raiders impelling towards him with his revolver until it clicked empty and him being dismembered completely till no limb was attached to the torso and how they blended together in such madness that he could no longer discern who was who and the man straddled upon another his bald head upon his enemies chest like the faithful in prostration, him gouging out the man’s eyes, he was locked in the destiny of all men who war one upon the other and he was eternal.

When the battle was done he saw that only the Raiders remained standing and so he slithered away upon his belly and the Raiders returned to the village, victorious.


Dawn next morning and a red one at that that he woke to. Still in the inconspicuous depression in the desert flatlands not fifty yards from the hill where he’d laid in hiding for the remainder of that day and that night. He’d heard the Raiders drive their horses off the night before running from that fading sun but he’d not moved from his ditch fearing that one might see his ragged figure and call down the horde upon him. He was up now though, walking in the snake tracks his belly had left to the crest of the hill and there he descended half-stepping down the opposing slope and wading through the slowly draining arroyo inked thick and red in emulation of Moses’ demonstration in the Nile.

He stepped into the village and the repugnant smell of corpses which weighed heavy in the air did not even register with him. He walked from hut to hut looking for salvageables and there were baked clay jars and bowls and tin cups and pewter utensils and plates and corpses bloating in the heat and little of use besides some shell casings he might reload. The Raiders had taken all else. He went then out to where Captain Patrick’s gang had been defeated not thirty yards from the village and he began rooting through what was there but the raiders had picked them clean too though he did find a canteen and he drank from it till his thirst was quenched and then he added what was left to the deer bladder and kept searching.

He was rifling through the pockets of a man whose jacket had sergeant’s stripes on the shoulders when he heard a wet cough sound from behind and he turned and saw a man stirring. He was dressed finely and what he wore was embroidered with gold and his leggings were of quality leather and the pants beneath it could be seen were tailored to exacting standards and his jacket and his vest and his undershirt even complimented each other well and it was an officer’s dress through and through.

The officer coughed once more and then he was awake and looking about himself in a daze. The wind was blowing steadily and the dust was gathering upon him and in him catching in his graying stubble and watering his eyes. The officer held up a hand in defense and it was then he saw the specter crouching before him his forearms resting upon his knees and his hat pulled low against his devil eyes.

Wakey wakey.

The officer spat.

Give me a report man. How long was I out?

Your vision must be going, I ain’t from your posse.

Then who are you?

I’m the devil who’re you?

The officer put a gloved hand to his mouth and coughed and when he removed it there was blood. There was blood too on his vest where he’d been lanced through the right lung and he was sitting in a damp patch of earth that had been damped by the blood of his followers.

Retired Army Captain James Patrick. Said the Captain.

Alright.

And yourself?

I already told you that.

Don’t jack me around son what’s your name?

He spat at the Captain’s booted feet and shifted his footing in the dirt. You hunting bounties out here?

I am.

You mean you were.

No I mean I am. This is only a setback. I’m going to find a horse and go to back to Hiro and get a new crew and then we’ll give these bastards what’s coming.

You could do that I guess.

That new crew could start with you.

Anything’s possible. What’s in it for me?

I aim to start a new company you could be my second.

Where’s your old one?

The Captain extended a finger towards a point behind him and he looked over his shoulder at where the Captain gestured and there a man dead on his back with a broken shaft three feet long protruding from his forehead and a rotted wooden hilt jutting from his heart.

And I’d want walk in his shoes cause?

Pay is good, very good. Hell, at the central trust in Hiro I got fifteen thousand dollars just collecting dust. You do no more than find me a horse and take me there two of that’s yours. You see this through to the end with me I’ll make it so that when time comes to split the bounty, 150,000, I’ll make sure you don’t work again.

Hell I don’t work now.

Well you can not work in luxury then.

A gurgling sound then rose from his throat and though a smile was plain on his features the Captain could not decide if he was laughing or choking.

That is something to consider.

The Captain smiled then and he began easing himself up uttering grunts of pain as he did.

Little help for a wounded man?

He shook his head. No.

No?

No.

What the hell do you mean no?

He stood up and turned around.

Where in God’s name you think you’re going boy?

Where the second in command had met his fate he walked and crouched, his lank fingers wrapped round that decayed hilt and those jerking the thing from between the dead man’s flail chest. He turned the archaic tool over in his hands, studying it. A rusty blade barely four inches long it was and he ran the edge against his hand finding it duller than any knife he’d ever wielded. He looked back at the Captain up now and staring worriedly at him.

Boy what’re you doing?

He rose up again and faced the captain the blade in his hand and at once the wounded officer began dragging himself away his eyes darting over the land for a weapon with which to defend his life but there was none.

He strolled cross the short span between them and when he was close enough he grabbed the Captain’s collar and the Captain his grabbing arm and then he stuck the knife in the Captain’s throat and watched the life void his eyes.

There was no food left in the village. Neither grain, nor flour and the livestock had all been herded off in honor of that ancient primal law that first governed the lands of man. He went from hut to hut searching each thoroughly but nary was there a jar even half-empty or crumbs left upon the dusty hut floors. Of the jerky he’d purchased earlier there was little left and in the coats of the hunters and the cotton rags of the villagers he found nothing of worth but a pack of cigarettes. All else had been looted. He stood in the village center his hands on his hips an unlit cigarette clenched between his yellowing teeth.

Nigh was the day’s meridian nearing by strained inches in the cloudless firmament. A hot wind blew gently through the village and a sudden shear made him tilt his hat low against his eyes and look to where it came. Eastward where they’d gone as if their absence had left a void that the desert desired filled. A stretch of barren land and a gentle slope into a salt flat that way laid and he’d little inclination of traversing those hazards without edibles. So he turned away from that country and returned his attentions to the village where he stood.

A dismal place even it’d not been massacred. The huts were made from what the land had to offer and that little more than clay and mud and reed and he could tell it’d not been long since their construction nor long before the structures were eroded to their foundations. The average villager there wore threadbare clothes sewn from cotton and so shoddy was the tailoring that it made his own dress seem fancy. He studied their corpses but soon lost interest and he wandered out of the village towards where the captain lay murdered.

There he began stripping the man of his clothes, his coat, vest, undershirt, boots, leggings, socks, pants, and underwear until he was naked as the day he was born. Then he rolled the body over onto its belly and he took hold of the back skin and pulled it upwards and then with the rusty scraping knife he began cutting lengths of meat away and those he skinned and quartered and he went from man to man repeating the process and what was harvested he took to a round wooden table that had been for some lost purpose taken into the dirt street and he stretched them out there and went off in search of salt. There was none in the village and so he stood on the eastern edge of the village looking out, his hat in his hands. He looked up at the sun and then at the ground radiating heat and he wiped his brow and set his hat upon his pale dome and then he went out.

The salt flats took him three hours to reach and when he was there he scooped handfuls of the stuff and tucked them into his pockets and then he returned to the village and salted the meat and left it to dry.

Afternoon saw the wolves loping down from the northern hills and when he saw them he took the meat from the table and set it upon one of the hut’s roofs for safekeeping and there he sat as if he were king presiding over an empty domain which seemed at last to exist in the natural order of things. He watched them a while and at evening when the sun was like rust on the horizon he even walked among them and they bared their teeth and gave deep growls but none moved against him.

On the second day’s morn a rider coalesced on the horizon plodding towards the village. From his vantage on the roof he studied the figure trying to decide what to do and finally he decided and he hopped off the roof with a revolver in each hand and when he landed he startled one of the sleeping wolves but when it looked it saw only him and it returned to sleep. He set out to meet the rider following the tracks he’d made the day before and when the rider was close enough he called to him but got no reply and so he stopped and called again.

You dead? He shouted.

And he was.

The rider was hunched over the reins with two arrows sticking from his chest. He was garbed in monk’s clothes and around his neck he wore a large silver crucifix which shone in the dawning light and his mount was a donkey both wide-eyed and crazed.

He studied the mount and the dead monk for a moment and then he went and took the donkey’s reins and the beast thrashed away and the monk slipped from his saddle onto the ground. He took a new hold on the reins and he forced the beast’s head down and he beat the thing about the head with the knob of his fist until the packanimal submitted. By the time it had his fist was bruised and his knuckles were bleeding and he cursed the animal loudly in all the languages he spoke. When he’d had his say he led the beast into the village where he stabled it in the hut upon whose roof he’d laid the meat and tied it to a massive cast iron pot. He left then shutting the door behind him and then he went to the table in the street and dragged it to the door and set it so that none could leave nor gain entrance. When he was finished barring the door he went out in search of a bucket and this he found in short order and then he walked to the arroyo and filled it as much as he could and then he returned to the hut and with the bucket in one hand he stepped onto the table and climbed to the roof where he dropped down the access and watered the beast.

That evening in a twilight minced of sunset and moonrise he was sat upon the thatched roof which was his throne watching as nature coalesced in all the cardinal directions storms which flashed noiselessly, overcoming ephemerally their sheet veils of liquid haze. That night every storm would exhaust itself over that desert country as if in somber recompense and he’d watch them brood silently from his rooftop learning how rivers sculpted the land with their being and pondering if these tempests might be enacting the ritual with which the world sustained itself.

This once he’d proposed to the Ragman: That the night sought always to hide the vileness that plagued the day and if the darkness offers the solace of rain than it is by this nocturnal liturgy that the world is rechristened for time eternal.

Morning light saw him unmoved from his vantage and from there too he watched the day aggregate in its cruel way, an intrusion in the east which fast spread cross the horizon like the glow of wildfires and as those crimson rays intensified he saw that earth’s ceremony had failed and he was not surprised.

In that brightening light: The corpses which had not been devoured by the wolves were rotting badly and by noon those who bellies had not been punctured were bloated obscenely and the gangrenous pus which bled through their waxy skins seemed to him the endeavor of all life constrained and so noxious were the vapors they exuded that it was driving away the wolves and at noon when the pack was retreating into the hills he walked about his reign appreciating all that lay within and all that lay without. In two days time on a hot afternoon he’d hear wet bursting sounds from without his hut, one after another like watermelons dropped from windows onto stone roads, and when he set out with pistol in hand to investigate he’d find exploded corpses in patches of thick white pus and dark blood and viscera and he’d shift those around with the toe of his boot as if trying to ascertain a divination from that gory amorphous of entrails like the ancient oracles of Greece.

There were no augurs in the man or any man who lay in the village or none revealed themselves to be and so he sighed and returned to his hut and fell asleep.

There were long days then of unquenchable heat and unending nights of bone chilling cold that he weathered like a cloistered stoic and so removed was he from the worries of the world that twas not long before he became bereft of civilized time and begged deference to the illustrious orb which ebbed and eddied in accordance with an unknowable whim. He partook of the flesh of the dead hunters and he took to exploring his new home and for many hours at a time he would pass through the windblown streets into the huts where he’d hold surreptitious inspections of their stores that would sometimes produce stone-age tools and familial heirlooms and sketchbooks and journals and a silver chalice and faded watercolor paintings applied to dried sheepskin depicting assemblages of kin and sometimes yielding nothing at all. He found a sledgehammer in one hut and he took the thing by its long wooden handle and turned it over in his hand feeling it’s weight and then he went about demolishing the four walls that enclosed him and when he was done the hut was rubble and he was coated in dust lending him such a pallid look that he appeared the risen dead. He went outside the village borders back onto the hill and surveyed the village and then he walked to where the wolves had fled and then he looked out from there too at the three and twenty huts still standing and the demolished one still in a faint cloud of smoke which was still yet visible. Then he walked back.

No rain all those days nor sign of rain and the arroyo was fast drying and on the twelfth day it was constituted of nothing but the same sand and clay that lay everywhere and he sat inside his hut with the donkey still hitched and regaining some of its craziness and he with the deer bladder and inside that the last drops not yet drunk. He had thought that there must have been a well nearby that had supported the village but in all his wanderings he found none and he took to wondering how might these people survived and after sustained thinking on the subject he concluded that these slain pagans were nomads who’d thought to dabble in permanent residence and had chosen this ill spot on account of vanished flood waters and thus they’d have died anyways and his heart stirred not for them. He thought perhaps to divvy what was left in the bladder between himself and his mount and then he thought better and drank what was left and then he unhitched the donkey and forced the barred door open and he mounted the beast and then he turned it smartly with his knee eastward and rode.

He rode into the salt flats and for a day and a night and a filthy morn till he was away from that dead sea he allowed his mount no rest. When he had surpassed the plain of stark white he dismounted and squatted in the dawning light looking for tracks but there were none and then for landmarks but only sun washed skeletons of animals scattered in an indecipherable pattern written in the universal law adorned that endlessness. He spat at the wind looking from horizon to horizon and to the south he saw what he thought was the distortion of rain and not long after that he was slouched in the saddle riding in that southern direction. Within an hour his rags were heavy with rainwater and he was laughing madly and he pressed the beast harder onwards until they reached a gullies’ steep ledge where he peered down at the water churning dark and muddy below.

He drank heartily that day and he ate what was left of the Captain and his men and then he tended to the ass, watering it and then tracking down what shrubs clung to the land and when they were both satisfied he laid down to sleep.

He’d once asked the Ragman whether he thought a God lived in those lands and the Ragman had requested clarification, was the question whether God existed or whether he existed here. He’d said the latter and the Ragman had reclined in his den and dragged heavily upon his pipe exuding a scent of wood smoke.

I imagine you ask because you’ve an opinion on the matter.

I might but I’d hear yours first.

Which God, there are many that are worshipped in these lands.

There was a crucifix affixed to a beaded necklace and it hung from a nail posted in the sole beam that held up the Ragman’s dwelling. He pointed to it with a finger he no longer had and the Ragman nodded his head demurely.

God is by definition omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. If he is than he is everywhere and thus here too and even now he sits among us participating in this very conversation and every act we commit is foretold in the vast tome stored in his throne of gold. He cannot be if He be not here thus your query was proposed in err, you meant the former.

But you didn’t answer my question.

How old are you boy?

Twenty-seven in July.

In your years what indication has been given that a merciful being exists over watching us? What spirit stays our guns and our blades and who spares the children that lay dead and buried by our hands? And of the mysterious purpose that is served by their passing what purpose did it serve for them? That they should die horribly? To be starved, raped, and eaten and that sometimes alive and sometimes buried alive and scalped and shot and left to bleed out and hunted all their short years and to be abducted, snatched from their homes and the dead arms of their fathers tell me what purpose does it serve and continues to serve for it certainly has not stopped nor even slowed though we advance. For we are advancing and the more so the more we bury the comprehension of our primality and the more we relish it’s dark enticement and is this a boon offered from which we might somehow obtain enlightenment or a punishment levied to rot our souls and how might we tell the difference? I say this, if scripture is true and by His hand then all things came from him for in the beginning there was nothing not even his heaven, save Him. Even you and that cannot be.

Thus I say to you be not held by superstitions, there is no hand upon your shoulder or star to guide your way. The Word has not spoken to me nor do I expect it to you anymore than I expect that Shiva should join our debate or Loki escape his chains and repent his ways. Boy He is not here.











He did not stir till morn next and when he opened his eyes he found himself amidst patches of switchgrass budding from the soil on the edges of a mountain shadow whose outline was as jagged as his soul and home to legends. He was on the far bank of the gully brimming with muddy water and he sat up looking about in that vermillion sunrise and on the cliff above him there were brittle vines lacing the gully’s verge and sprouting from their thin lengths was verbena in full bloom and they were mixed with the white petals of cliffrose and the redness of the rise tainted both beautifully.

He rose and stretched and scratched himself and wandered off into the reeds where he loosened his belt and urinated loudly onto the sandstone rocks rocking back and forth on his heels as he did. He stood in a cool breeze that rattled the reeds and when it passed he shook twice and was done.

A sun was rising in the west already above that borderline yet it was not upon him that it shined and in that lightened mountain shade he undressed. He slid his pants to his ankles and kicked his boots into the reeds and pulled each tattered legging away and peeled socks from blistered feet and stripped his shirt and slipped his undershirt over his head. He folded them in a neat pile on the ground and laid his guns upon them and his hat upon those and then he stepped into the water and waded out till that still brown line was at his waist and then he plunged himself below like a baptismal reject lorn of his parish performing his birth rite where none might bear true witness so he liveth life unsaved in the eyes of man’s entirety. He held himself below, his hands gripped upon his knees and his eyes wide and searching those murky depths and he remained below till his vision swam and his thoughts implored and his muscles twitched and his vessels ran with acid to the depths of his lungs where the gates of hell had opened.

He rose and he wiped the grime and sweat from his temple with the grime and sweat of the kingdom.

When he finished rinsing himself the sun had aureoled all but the peak of the mountain and that white summit a bezel incandescent and still in its shadow he robed himself and then he was in the light.

There were tracks fresh in the damp mud and he followed those away from the gully a distance near two hundred yards into a clearing patched with brown grass as tall as his knee and there among junipers gnarled and leaning was the ass grazing and oblivious. He flattened the grass to the ass and took its reins and studied it and ran a hand along its flanks. He waited a moment and then he mounted the beast and rode on.

Eastward he rode on the threshold of that jejune land into less arid territories where there were plains carpeted with grass and a spartan woods of dead juniper and to each seemed bound a forefather not of this time and they reclined all in his direction as if pointing him onwards or in prostration or in great lament of perhaps in all. Down into floodlands and then out of them again to where Verde grew tall and the red buds of ocotillio swayed in the wind between and below those urinous clouds where the first bird he’d seen that year was not carrion and no blood in sight. He rode towards the mountain with no soul to study but his own and that night the mountain and its companion range towered over him like the outline of a beast that obscured the stars themselves. He rode up the hills and then into the foothills and all night as he trekked he heard packs of wolves howling and tearing at each other. He passed along goat trails littered with the bones of goats and what he thought was swine and after a while he came to a narrow gorge in the mountainside with rock walls as smooth as polished granite and there he dismounted and led the ass through and the wolves howls and the wind sung through that black passage and each seemed an ancient cry that’d gone unanswered too long. The gorge retched him upon another trail this one narrow and of silt and it took him through the lowest places in the mountain’s range and by that path he circumvented the steep grades in which were rooted trees that appeared in that starry light a delineated representation of all the ranks of hells demons haunting him might where he go.

At morning in the first light he stopped and slept.

When he awoke it was afternoon and to the sound of nomads sojourning southwards. The mountain range was behind him and beyond him lay land much like the rest of what he’d seen and there was a dust cloud rising behind those myriad packanimals and the carts they drew. He stood and donned his hat and he watched them and soon there was a shout and not long after that a vanguard of three detached from the main body and they galloped towards him on painted horses of brown and white and when they neared him they reined in their mounts and the horses as one rose on their hinds and shunted from him.

The lead Vanguardist kneed his horse and began circling him and he turned to regard him in every degree. The Vanguardist was of the complexion of the savages and he was armored wholly in Spanish plate detailed with the faded heraldry of some vanished noble house and his companions wore chainmail that hung loosely on their frames as if to lend emphasis on that first and prime disadvantage. They were armed too with Spanish weaponry, the halberd and the sabre and all their palms were upon either the shaft or the hilt and they were eyeing hard the revolvers tucked into his belt.

¿Quién es usted? ¿Es usted un viajero? Shouted their leader.

He made no answer and the Vanguardist turned to his fellow and remarked knowingly, El habla la bastarda lengua.

¿Qué hace usted fuera aquí?

The Vanguardist gestured with his hand as he spoke pointing at the ground and then at him and setting an inquisitive face that might communicate the rest.

No ser asunto de uno.

His voice was raw as bleeding meat and the Vanguardist halted in his circling and he turned the horse smartly and walked it up to him so that its flaring nostrils blew into his face.

Su negocio es mi negocio.

He made no reaction and the other two men shifted nervously in their saddles. He looked up at the Vanguardist and he at him and he was about to swear an oath upon that guardian’s life when from the caravan rode another pair and they called out something in Indian. The Vanguardist looked over at the two riders and he spat at the ground before where he stood and nudged his horse and rejoined his minions.

The two riders stopped beside their protectors and when he regarded them he was instantly reminded of a photo that was laid on the Ragman’s filthy mantel of when he had ridden with the Bedouin through the deserts of Syria. A woman and a man were the riders and the former was veiled behind a strip of silk that left only her eyes exposed and that at odds with the stained chemise she wore which was cut to the clavicle and ended at the elbows. Her companion was dressed in the cotton rags that so prevailed in that country and he addressed him formally as if he were ambassador to a nation of cannibals he wished not to agitate.

Me llamo Itzli Y soy de este tribu. Yo respectfulyl solicita su nombre.

¿Qué es el nombre de la chica?

¿Quién? ¿Ella? Eso es mi amigo de mujer. Por favor yo sabría con quien hablo.

¿Ella consiguió una lengua? Puede ella habla?

Puedo.

¿Qué es su nombre?

Citali se calló.

¿Es eso su nombre? ¿Citali?

Yo le haré un amigo de última vez.

I ain’t your fuckin friend.

The words when he spoke had the effect of a curse upon the Vanguardian and he began to draw his sabre though whether in idle threat or real he could not tell and did not care. He drew his revolver and shot the man through the neck and he recoiled out of his saddle onto the ground where he pumped out the last of his life.


The Vanguardist was not yet dead and he was already drawing a bead on another guard who sat dumbly in his saddle unbelieving what had just occurred when an arrow whistled overhead and embedded itself in the man’s chest. He coughed blood once then slumped forwards, dead.

They stared at this newly made husk for a quiet moment and then a war cry sounded from above and behind and he twisted round drawing the second revolver in that same motion and there in the foothills the Raiders were pooling like a seething mass of disheveled Visigoths and they were at a range of 150 yards loosing arrow and shot expertly at him and the caravan and no sooner had he turned did a cloud of sand explode in front of him and a flurry of arrows fly past and one stuck fast in his side and he fell to the ground. The ass that had thus far remained passive rose with a pair of shafts protruding from its mangy flank and began retreating towards the mountain with a speed he didn’t know it possessed and cursing he snaked up and ran after the beast forgetting the other guard and the diplomat and his wife and ran to it one hand steadying the arrow shaft and grabbed its reins and with the beast as a shield headed for the safety of the mountain.

He ran hard and so fast his hat flew away and he not noticing that, only that over the ass’s back the horde was beginning its charge against the caravan and they obscured in tendrils of desert sand kicked up by their frightened steeds and nowhere was a resistance forming to break that charge. He ran harder. Like a desperate convict until he was near those raised slopes and when he was at their base a detachment of those tribal savages appeared and he dropped like a brick onto his side out of sight and let the beast run up alone into their numbers and there the ass was felled by a sword blow that split its head.

There were six riders in that detachment and behind them there were footed raiders armed with antique muskets and lances and they were some armored and others bare and they were all sprinting down that slope and he stood suddenly and drew his pistol and commenced to killing them. He shot five of the riders down and the last one veered away and then he emptied each chamber into the advancing mob and when each gun was dry he turned and sprinted towards the caravan where a battle was now raging between those two nomadic tribes. Running whilst reloading the pistols and all the while musket balls whizzed past and he was in his peripherals watching the sixth rider coming in for another pass his lance held high and ready to strike and he’d almost bore down upon him when the last cylinder had been filled and he turned and cocked the hammer and shot the man down and then he aimed at the footed men and unleashed a volley into them too and then he was gone.

Towards the caravan where a furious melee was taking place between the two tribes of nomads who were all with everything at hand butchering each other with the tenacity of the cornered and the damned and they all one mass indistinguishable from the other and to his surprise there were no fleers at the rear wagons or false dead upon the ground and even those who were mauled horribly were upright and bludgeoning with maces and pans and stabbing with tent stakes and crushing skulls with rocks picked from the ground and they were hurling themselves like rabid fanatics against the horse and footmen who were some in that mass and some isolated in pockets of fighting and so occupied by that frothing crowd that none saw his approach until he breached their ranks.

Within where he began snapping necks and lashing out with the scraping knife at exposed jugulars misting the air with blood and when they finally took notice of this demonic force there were six dead and he now armed with a Kilij taken from a man howling with the scraper buried deep in his eye. The first raider who affronted him was a tall savage painted white and smeared with blood and before he could even raise his sword he’d cleaved his face open and then he twisted and parried a spear and then he lashed at the spearman and decapitated him and blood spurted like rain and then he plunged the sword into a man whose back was to him and ripped it loose in time to deflect a downward cut and in recovery he bashed the striker with his shoulder and with a wicked upward strike amputated his leg at the knee and then he was forging his way like a demon towards the caravaners cutting down every man and horse in his path and when he finally reached them there was in his wake a trail of eviscerated corpses and severed limbs and whining horses and from them all the blood ran like the molten rivers of hell.

At first sight the caravaners believed him leader of those sanguine primalities and they began to refuge away from him so fast did those crimson rivulets stream from his chin and his sword and slaked was he but then he began slaughtering the raiders to his left and right and this grisly scene lent them a fractionate hope and they again set themselves against the raiders who were themselves being massacred and when their lines clashed there was the overwhelming clang of metal on metal and frantic screams and the sawing of flesh and bone as men were dragged from their horses and cloven into their parts and he among them cutting a swath through those barbarian ranks ignoring the arrow in his side now broke and the lacerations that were a common adornment on his flesh and this lasted but two minutes before the raiders wavered and the deserters at their backs began to flee and once that was seen they were routed completely.


Carcasses lay scattered in a dusking light that was hued saffron and their sickly scent was born upon a whipping wind and it was not long before the carrion flocked to that battle place and gorged themselves like starving orphans set loose upon a feast. From somewhere he’d gotten a scabbard in which to sheathe the Kilij and it hung from his belt and the revolvers were tucked there too and even the scraping knife he’d retrieved. He was still impaled by the arrow and there were cuts still weeping on his person and the hardened blood was flaking off him and this how he walked among those squawking crows and vultures stopping every so often at a corpse to crouch and inspect and move on all in pursuit of a recondite purpose that none who watched him could guess.

There was a wide stream two miles to the south of that place and the caravaners had made for it leaving only a small band of mounted scouts to see if the raiders would return and they remained on the edge of that battle site some studying him others occupying themselves with trivial activities. When night came they mounted their horses and a single brave soul rode out to him with a spare stallion black as night and invited him to come along or to take the stallion and go where he willed.

He took the stallion and rode with them his teeth gritted the whole while and when he came in sight of the stream he saw that the caravaners had deployed their tents and their lodgings around a bonfire that pulsed like a beacon in the quickening wind. When they rode into the camp one of the scouts pointed at the arrow still lodged within him and pointed to a tent that had been converted to an infirmary and he nodded his head and kneed the horse there.

The infirmary being a canvas tent with the walls rolled up so to allow the air to circulate and where cots illuminated by torchlight had been set in rows and upon them laid the triaged wounded exhibited in all their severities that it might have been said that here stood the museum of woe. Men and women and children, some with raw stumps still leaking and some with avulsions and others like him with protruding arrows and some without eyes and ears and noses and some mangled beyond recognition and those bereft of fingers and with wounds that ran deep and those whose organs had slipped from their bodies and lay beside them on their cot still operative and those who had been dismembered wholly yet clung on and there were calls for the Mater Dei and Jesucristo and in Latin minstrels were reciting Ave Maria and Pater Noster and taking the last confessions of those who’d not live and there was the air of misery which had clung to man since his conception.

He dismounted the stallion and led it to the tent post and tied it there then he walked down the rows like an exhausted brigand returned from a failed sacking and he was studying each casualty till he came to a rounded wooden table where was displayed an assortment of improvised surgical devices and from them he selected a pair of needle-nosed pliers and a gauze pad and then he went down the rows again till he came to an empty cot on the far side where he set down. He placed the pliers beside himself and he popped the bones in his neck with quick jerks and then he studied for the first time properly the shaft that had burrowed in his side. On his right lodged just below the eleventh rib where a nucleus of dried red had formed in that crusty fabric. He tore the shirt away from around the shaft revealing a wound still oozing blood near dark as night. He sighed in annoyance and then he wiggled the shaft carefully to see how much give it had and that enough so he took the pliers and clamped their jaws as close to the arrowhead as he could, sucking in his gut to expose more of the shaft, and then as he exhaled he pulled with all his might and his teeth grinded loud against one another dry and dragging. When he finally wrenched the arrowhead loose he tossed it aside and slapped the gauze pad against the wound and held it tight and after how many minutes he knew not he peeked beneath the pad and saw that the bleeding had stopped.


Near ninety souls lay in that hospice and all night amateur physicians in their blood smeared smocks labored over their patients in that flickering torchlight and despite their efforts more than half of whom were laid down succumbed to their wounds in those first hours alone and in the days following disease would run rampant among the survivors and arms would swell to the size of thighs and the features of faces would be lost as the pus evened them into weeping spheres and bellies would grow in such grotesque size that one would think the place was a maternity ward for abominations and all this would claim a score more and when everything was said and done there emerged not more than twenty who were unbound in cloth and could stand upon their feet.

At that lustrous tributary independent of the desert rains there was being held a service with all those vagabond emigrates in attendance and they were spread across the bank like spectators and from that congregation there wailed a lyrical discordance from the throats of women whose families were wrapped in animal skins and even now being conveyed upon sagging shoulders and one after another relinquished to that steady current which channeled those waters to oceans.

He was awake and had been for some time and he was leaned against a tent pole observing this procession apathetically. All night the physicians had been working and sometime before morning they’d expended their medicinal supplies and they’d turned from gauze to torn cloth and they were using tooth brushes and steel wool to remove dirt and whiskey in a mason jar to sterilize their bloody instruments and it was this jar he’d taken and sipped from now. A deep amber tinged red throughout and with a scalpel still floating inside. There were still ministers about allaying what pain they could within that place and performing the final rites and from time to time they would glance at him but none approached him and none spoke to him and when he lost interest in that mass burial he walked through the confines of those miserable rows of bedridden as if on a stroll until appeared that wedded emissary in the center of camp headed for the infirmary.

Into that spacious center he staggered to greet that bringer of news in his languid manner and when he neared enough he raised the mason jar in a mock salute that went unreturned.

Ellos dijeron que yo le encontraría aquí.

He smiled and regarded the emissary and found him worse for wear than he’d seen last. For bare-chested was he with his one arm cravatted and the other guarding it and a long festering wound sutured by black cotton thread that ran across his shoulder.

You ain’t dead.

I am not.

And you speak English.

I do.

He made a show then of looking about himself and then as his upper half was turned away he twisted his neck towards the emissary and spoke to him.

You ain’t got no guards with you.

He nodded. Si. Everyone is at the river bank but I am sure they will execute you once there is time and they have come to their senses.

Consequences and The History Of The World

He turned then his whole self towards the procession whose aquatic burial ground had now by a crimson cloud been tainted red. And where within those tendrils of life’s blood were carried by a rapid current into wider channels where others might see them and speak of them and further still to waters which would tender this wretchedness to an ever swelling ocean that accepted all. And this he postulated: That they were one all contributors to the ocean of history and each in their turn would endow the whole of their beings to that boundless repository and thus this no prodigal occurrence, that had been given so many times before.

And the conception of this hypothesis spawned within him a viperous notion and to the emissary did his vicious sight return.

Everyone’s down there?

Yes.

Even your wife?

The emissary reddened and averted himself quickly away trembling with rage and it was long moments before he was able to compose himself back into a facsimile of proper manner.

He let out a short wet laugh.

That’s too bad.

He sipped and watched those mourners mourn then sipped again.

As he drank the emissary spoke to the strands of cirrus that lined the sky like white trenches dug into an aerial ocean.

Quahtli, our Tlataoni, has invited you to attend a dinner tonight in honor of the service that you have performed for us.

Really?

Yes.

And nothing said about your dead man out there?

I don’t presume to speak for him.

No I ‘spose you don’t.

His gaze then wandered over to the stream where the last body was being committed to that opaque surface and at the end of that final interring the crowd began to disperse in ones and twos and threes and with them they carried a virulent sadness that was the stain upon their ancestral memory and this would be carried through generations so that the far removed progeny of these people would be haunted by this day yet. He sighed and then the emissary still shunted from him he called by name in a conciliatory tone and only once but no response was given. He shrugged and looked into his cup and from it took one last sip and then he held it out and poured its fiery contents upon the emissary’s mangled shoulder and he crumpled unconscious without a word.

Near those waters all that blistering day when the sun scattered those few grayed blemishes present at dawning’s ascension was he. And till even-tide where then those grave waters once clotted with corpse and florid had run clear and there was no longer a stain or a corpse he lay on his belly or prostrate upon his knees in those daylight hours whispering to the waters over and over, Gam zeh ya’avor.

Deep in the west that lightly star was pulled and its final scions of color were like strings of zinc sent wild and they played over him on his floored seat. Where before laid a table of spitted pork served with corn and fresh bread in the Italian style and garbanzo beans and cote de Bourg and water with ice and they laid upon a silk cloth that blanketed that wooden surface and across it was Quahtli. Dressed in royal attire, but such a rabid emperor was he in a velvet toga as the Romans wore over a vest of gold and beneath that, quilted silk and upon his face were the warrior paintings of the apaches and in his hand he regarded a statue of Tezcatlipoca which was drenched in blood.

Quahtli said, here is my reward, all that I can offer you.

And he thanked him.

There were others as well sat at that table. The emissary was present and he was eying him with undisguised contempt and flanking him were two other dignitaries with whom he’d not yet exchanged words. An honor guard too, made up of what few of the caravan’s guards remained, lined the tent’s open lengths with pikes and sabers with orders to prevent any interruption as if within some grand strategy was being devised that would brook no intermission.

Quahtli raised his chalice in toast. First to he who was silent in his constant pondering and then to a sun fading fast and quiet. All attending followed suit save him and when every filled cup was upheld in that red light Quahtli turned to him and spoke.

To our newest friend, whom without we’d not be among the living.

All but he drank to that and then they commenced eating. He laid into his meal like an admonished savage employing no use of utensil, his fingers alone. In his mouth he stuffed the pork and slopped its gravy up with bread and with bare hands he grabbed fistfuls of corn and sucked them betwixt his fingers until his plate was empty. This all he washed down with a mighty swig from his cup and he belched loudly when he was done and then he noticed all those wide-eyed stares regarding him in disgusted awe.

He licked his lips and reclined and his eyes passed from one man to the next and only Quahtli would hold his gaze and that for a while. Eventually those perturbed onlookers returned to their own meals barely touched. When all was finished they began to converse.

They spoke of many things and as they spoke blacks removed their empty plates and replaced them with others brimming with food. Quahtli was speaking of the happenings in the desert which all present had witnessed to some extent and of other happenings in the jungles far to the south when a servant removed his plate and set before him another like which had been originally present.

He watched the servant and then he interrupted Quahtli.

I’m not sure I like a [see forum posting rules] handling my food.

Quahtli said without pause. One hand is the same as another.

[see forum posting rules]’s hand’s not same as mine.

The [see forum posting rules] did not respond to this, he only continued in his duties.

The same muscles bind his hand as yours. Strip from your body your skin and you will see muscle and tendon the same as his.

It’s not the muscle I care much about.

Elaborate.

Well, I’d rather a wolf bear my platter and my wealth for such a beast is only subservient to an extent and only to those which will keep with them a solemn covenant that if ever broken would result in their immediate rebellion.

He motioned at the [see forum posting rules]. But these animals will serve under any condition without thought and to elaborate, without thought of themselves and their rights and thus forfeit both. I cannot respect such a creature and I would worry that it is some disease they carry for they hold the shape of men but act far unlike them.

You speak as though you know them origins and culture all.

I speak only what I see. Bred within their number I see a cruel subservience to all their betters and a merciless brutality to all their lessers. They do not strive against their condition. They relish in it. They are more than willing to root with the swine which we butcher and this without protest and if they do protest it is not to us and not manifested in act. Why then should I care for their stature in life, whether it be as kings or swine? And if they are no more than bipedal piglets why should I deign their servitude?

But you speak only of what you see.

I do.

How old are you?

At this he did sit up and he set his eyes upon Quahtli, who was far older than he, with a novel curiosity.

I’m thirty-six.

Is the world static?

A static world is a dead world. If life exists upon it, it would soon be overcome by the forces which inhabit it. If ever there was one, it exists no longer.

Very true. Is it so hard to believe then that such a people might be of greatness and might return to it?

That a great people have been reduced, I doubt that none. But that a reduced people might return to greatness, I say no, not so long as a greater people persist in the dominion of man and always man subverts man and seeks reign over one another in all forms of warfare for that it was drives man whether he wage it with the coin or the pen or the sword. A man who has been broken rarely rises above his station without spurning and thus is no more than domesticated cattle to be used as seen fit.

And if the holders of these men, if they too are diminished?

All things in cycles, it is not a question of if. As they enslaved before those who were their inferiors, so it is now with them and so shall be with us when comes our time.

Then you propose that no endeavor should be made to improve their station in life? What of the contributions their people could add to the human whole? Of the millions more minds that would be exhausted upon the theories of mathematics as opposed to the tending of the fields? How far would the human sciences advance with such thought levied against it?

He paused at this statement and placed upon his chin his hand and leaned forward, his elbows in the crook of his knees. He like this remained for some time and he was silent at that table. Finally he spoke.

No devoir am I bound to decreeing myself an aid of these unfortunate auxiliaries and what circumstance that came to pass to bring me to your table I say it is as all things are, chance. If chance should lend to me an impetus to aid a man, then I shall aid him as it is not my warrant to do otherwise. However, bereft of such a need I’ll not pledge myself to the betterment of these people or any people, for such would be at the expense of myself and the proffering of such a writ would bind me to their common fortune which is their own and no one else’s. Nor would a benefit be brought about by their live’s improvement. Quite conversely, I foresee detriment done to the fabric of societies whose frivolous Samaritans would dedicate themselves and their lineage to this cause and if that their charge, so be it. Know this though, change comes from without and between two parties there must always be an equal exchange or near to such else the lesser becomes parasitic of the other.

No answer though, that you’ve levied.

I did. I levy I don’t care.

The Emissary spoke then, I suppose no one would be surprised if apathy is chief among your attributes.

He snapped up and was near to draw his gun and the guards reacted likewise with their pikes but before any could shed blood Quahtli rose with a swiftness unexpected of his age and bid peace between all.

No violence here. Not at my table.

Quahtli waved the guards back to their posts and ordered the Emissary to apologize who complied reluctantly and then motioned for him to return to his seat.

Alright, he said. He sat back down and took his cup and drank from it. Then he cracked his neck and his knuckles and drummed his three fingers on the wooden table.

Quahtli addressed the table then and the emissary especially. Our qualities are the products of our survival, as is of you and of Itzli and I and of our servants too. These traits which you may despise are what have allowed them to flourish and remember these men were once children too. If a child learns it is best to avoid the lash through complete subservience who could blame him? Should they not in some degree be lauded for persevering?

He did not say. He was bristling still but he studied hard the [see forum posting rules] like an expeditious domesticator gazing upon some new species on a grand plain. Deciding should this herd be tamed and slave or should for them a place be made? Around this notion his thoughts lay so concentrated that he did not hear Quahtli’s further ruminations on the subject, the weights of manhood and its unending burdens and how expected of each is to what he can and no more and should that more be forced upon him who is to blame if he expires or retreats into his primal self, only the Emissary’s contribution he heard. This the Emissary said:

Nothing can go on forever. All this will change, people will learn and what once was will become again.

He looked at Quahtli who looked at the Emissary and then he looked at that stiff figure too, suddenly nervous in his seat.

What did you say?

I said things will change.

You said that. By your own admission.

By your own you said the same.

You said something else too.

I did.

You said people will learn.

I did.

And another thing.

Si. That things will return to the way they once were.

He shook his head. No they will not. All old ways are buried beneath the ubiquity of the passage of time and great calamity and the modernization of older traditions and this neoteric rebirth while minutely different will be repeated in an infinite cycle and will always supersede those of previous generations till no vestige of the old ways remain. It will be this way and not some other way that the memories of the Nahuatl will fade into nothing. Under the boot of Cortes and his Tlaxcalteca and the ravages of small pox and the sound of the gun, there will be nothing left.

A silence pervaded the table then and he waited for someone to speak but no one did. Finally he took his cup and drained it and then he reached over the table and took the Emissaries’ cup and drank that too. He dropped the cup onto the table and walked out. No one called after him. He was not two feet out of the tent that he turned around and went back in. He grabbed his cup and refilled it and toasted Quahtli.

To the last roaming emperor, he said then tilted his head back and as he did the cup too till it was empty and then he cast it into the ground and said further, may you find your fething reward.


A debouched darkness had shadowed the land by then and in defense the caravaners had erected torches along the perimeter and by them stood warily as if these alighted wards needed constant manning lest they be snuffed by the warm wind that blew. He returned to the infirmary brushing past the minstrels who were still tending their charges and paying him a cautious heed. There was a man upon his deathbed who was a claimant of gangrene and this man he rolled moaning from the cot to the sand floor and took his place. He laid upon his back and removed his revolver and held it to his breast and waited for exhaustion to overtake him. But it did not come and no matter that no minstrel bothered him that night nor that the wind was warm and benevolent, he could not sleep.

He laid there till a grey morning’s arrival which was fraught with blanketing overcast and then he rose. He went to the stallion and mounted it and without word was gone from that dying race.

He drove the stallion for a great many hours stopping once to water it in the day’s meridian and again just before the lonely recantation of the sun began. That night he rode farther still not content with those miles previously crossed along a lonely ridge where grew brush whose identification was defied by the pervasive dark which was not unlike a vast ocean that encompassed all the possibilities of strange encounter and whose viscous shadows perverted benign dimension and conjured those menacing genius and gave portents and it was within this unseeable possessor that was augured the fate of all men and women and their progeny and to this earliest which all would return. He descended from the ridge by means of a trail that snaked down its steep slope and followed it further through a grass that was taller still than he even on horseback. Behind him in the miles past there was a dawning that no longer could be seen but he knew it to be there nonetheless. There too would be smoke rising from that place and that trail of floating carbonized refuse would be invisible against that coal sky that prevented all the bearings of the stars and he did not look back to see it for very still was he. He rode farther upon that weary beast till there became prevalent wild ferns that flourished all around him and those circinate fronds pulsing gently and steadily as though breathed upon by some animalistic spirit that kept this jungle land. Wherein he entered and his three pronged hand twitched for the gun at his belt.

He was a mile into that forested caricature that did mock him wildly every trunk and sung his downfall that the stallion collapsed beneath him and this occurrence not unexpected. He kept on. He took his pack from the beast and threw it on his shoulders and he kept on without worry and when he finally stopped he’d been awake for nearly 53 hours. But he did not sleep. He sat upon a fallen tree and took the smith from his belt and checked the cylinders and holstered it again and then he pulled the hem of his shirt to reveal the wound which had not begun to bleed though he’d expected so. He released the hem and he stood and he kept on. Through foliage greening in the dawning light he walked and for many hours crossing many streams and fording the bracken that was everywhere upon that floor and auding was he those bird calls and listening to the tromp of antelope and the rooting of boars in the acidic earth.

Some time after noon he crossed paths with the endemic people of the jungle and these three, a man a woman and an infant, were browned and scantly dressed in clothes derived of the local flora. When they set eyes on each other the natives froze but the infant had been crying loudly and continued to do so such that he had heard their approach long before they his. He was leaned upon a Ceiba in bloom and there were agouti scurrying about its roots and darting around the stalks of his legs. The man was armed with a spear carved of mahogany and carved with stone and he leveled it ever so slightly in his direction. He rested hand upon the smith and gazed at him and the natives at he. The infant was crying. He stepped forward and they backwards and he then again. He crossed quickly to the woman batting as he did the spear away and then tripping the man who fell upon his haunches. He took the infant from the woman’s shaking arms and turned and held it against his shoulder and patted its back and burped it and then it was silent. He held it a moment more and then he handed the newborn back and kept on.

Into plains of bright green grass taller than he and thick like strangler vines wrapped about the trunk of a tree he pressed through and these hylean lands stretching for miles farther than he could see if he could see above them. So that he was walking blind but know these lands did he and he walked without err. When night came he set down to rest in a bog that was misted and infested with insects of all genus and on his skin that night they crawled but so gone was he, he did not notice.

When he awoke he was covered in sores and bites and he swatted away all those buzzing creatures from his raw hide. The day was half over too when he woke and he peered at that hidden orb from beneath the canopy thinking, what will tomorrow be? He spat and scratched himself and then resolved to not scratch and then he removed his guns and held them over his head and waded through the bog.

A game trail that he crossed next following its stamped path up a hill and then down it again until eventually the trail narrowed and then simply vanished. Leaving him at a brook’s bank where flowed waters as clear as ever did through the Ennis. Here he knelt and drank and he looked at the world anew.

All in its place, he thought. I am God. I am God. And returning am I. A world this was, hinged still in the primeval of things not upturned or altered and never was heard here the blow of an ax. And the songs of the birds did harp rhapsodic in a gentle melody that was constant and undisturbed by the clanking of the machine that cogged within the souls of urban men. Here lay no wretchedness save himself.

He looked about that idyllic place and he spat, I fething hate the jungle.

In the noon of that day he came to his destination. The edge of a village of thatch huts where a people lived and ate and slept and bred and gathered round fire-pits where was cooked the produce of the hunt. Nary was there a domesticated animal and these people looked not unlike animals themselves and they were dressed as the natives he’d encountered earlier in loin cloths near the color of their skin. Two men came out to meet him. They beheld him with a terrified awe and one of them could not contain this dread and he said in horror, my god what happened to you?

I came to get my boy. He said.

They looked one to the other and then to him and the taller of the two shook his head slowly.

I said I came for my boy.

I heard you. The man said softly.

Well go get him.

I can’t.

You can’t or you won’t?

The man shook his head again. Why did you come back? You know you’re not welcome here you’ll never be welcome here.

He pulled the smith from his belt and he leveled it at the native.

You get my boy or I swear I’ll shoot you through the head right where you stand.

I can’t get your boy.

He cocked the hammer. The man closed his eyes.

Your boy’s dead.

What?

He died two years ago.

You’re lying. You’re a fething liar.

It was pneumonia there was nothing that could be done.

You’re lying. He said again.

I can take you to his grave.

You get my boy or I swear I’ll kill you.

And I swear your boy is dead and buried.

We can take you to his grave.

I can take you to his grave.

He looked about himself the gun now faltering in his hand. He breathed heavy. The gun fell.

We can take you to his grave but then you have to leave.

You understand then you have to leave.

After we show you his grave you have to leave.

He was rooted in that place. He could barely move. The two messengers turned and motioned for him to follow and his feet were like stone and he quaked slowly behind following them through the village he’d once slept in and lived in to a clearing where laid no marker but a collection of painted stones iridescent and many nacreous and made artificially so. He looked at the men and they left him and he stood above that lonely grave for a time that was to him somehow apart of the natural order of things as if this was not the way, as if events had taken some gross deviance to what should have occurred.

He stood for a long while. Then suddenly he turned and walked through the village for a final time and as he was diminishing in that brush a young woman appeared and ran to him and was intercepted by one of the messengers and in his restraining arms she heaved and cried,

Louis. Louis. Come back.

But he did not come back then and he never would.

There are a couple things about Dakka Fiction that aren't covered anywhere, and they really should be. First, people have really short attention spans. Posts of 500-2k words are about as long as you'll have people. Second (and maybe unfortunately), it is reserved for wargaming related fiction.

I haven't read through the whole thing, only the first section, but I really enjoy the almost stream-of-consciousness style writing. It just needs some refinement. In fact, I will probably study what you've written over the next couple days and see where I could improve it and use it. Off the top of my head, using slightly more concise language would help give the reader an anchor.

Aye I'm glad you like it and aye some editing may well be in order but tell the truth I kind of enjoy writing those looooong sentences

And just to by the by this is the first time anyone's ever said they're gonna study my work, I feel rightly flattered