The Black Trail Read online

  In his left hand he gripped a shield much like the others of his warriors. Crow’s sharp eye for detail noticed that there was the mark of a bullet clean through the shield, towards its top, and that the one side of it was dappled with a dark brown substance that could only be blood. A strange round-headed club hung from a thong at Mavulamanzi’s belt and in his right hand he held a stabbing spear. Slung over his shoulder was a sort of quiver that held another four or five of the assegais. His armory was completed by a long-bladed knife on his hip.

  All of the guns of the white men had been discarded. What stood before Crow was a great leader and fighter.

  ‘I ask if you will help?’

  ‘Five thousand?’

  ‘Ten if you wish.’

  ‘Dollars American?’

  ‘Or pounds sterling. Or gold. I do not know what your price is.’

  ‘It’s high.’

  ‘I believe you, Crow. Tell me your fee.’

  ‘I haven’t…’

  ‘Thirty pieces of silver, possibly?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Crow without any heat or anger. ‘I go where I want. Your fight’s not mine.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Mikalawayo stood up, supporting himself on wobbly legs, resting a hand against the side of the wagon. Trying a smile that never quite made it.

  ‘I would be pleased.’

  ‘You asking me, Mick?’

  ‘Yes. I ask you, please.’

  ‘Fine. Then I’ll do it. I’ll guide you to the White Canyon camp where…’

  ‘That is where they have gone?’ asked Mavulamanzi, stepping closer.

  ‘Yeah. They…’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Too far for tonight I was sayin’ when you kept on leaping in on me that I’d guide you there for his “please” and for your ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘Good. It will take time to secure the money from England.’

  ‘For ten thousand dollars I’ll wait.’

  ‘Good. They have harmed me and my heart is torn by it. We sleep now?’

  Crow shook his head. ‘Guess not, Chief. They’re ahead of us. Way I figure it they’ll hole up for the night on the way. There’s a grove of trees near the bottom of a cliff by a river. More of a stream. Was a fire there some years back and most of the trees died.’

  They looked at each other in the poor light, the stench of death heavy in the air around them, the buzzing of feeding insects growing louder.

  ‘We go there?’

  ‘Close. Used to be a Dutch wagon train went through there. Leader was killed by Mescalero. Called Jansen’s End Trail along that way. We leave in an hour when it’s dark. I’m not certain sure they ain’t still around and watching us.’

  ‘On horse?’

  ‘Hell, no. We leave the stallions here. Ifn all goes well then we’ll be back in a day and a half. Ifn they don’t go well we surely won’t be greatly worried over a couple of starvin’ animals.’

  Mikalawayo was not able to move fast. Though he had not been physically wounded by the attack on his fellows, it had done him a great deal of mental harm. He stayed so close to Crow that the white man several times warned him about stepping on his heels.

  Chief Mavulamanzi brought up the rear, padding along in almost total silence, ignoring the sharp stones that littered Jansen’s End Trail. Crow was impressed at the change that had overcome the Negro. From the cruel and bored monarch, he had turned into a preoccupied and dedicated hunter.

  The moon was heavily veiled by a belt of low cloud that had come easing in from over Webb Peak, and the light was very poor indeed. On such a night Crow knew that all of his own great tracking skills would be worth very little. Whoever led the Mescalero band would have placed sentries and all they would need to do was sit patient and quiet and Crow and the two Zulus would simply blunder on top of them.

  ‘We’ll stop here and wait.’

  Mavulamanzi pushed past his servant and hissed his resentment, only agreeing when Crow patiently explained his reasons. So, a little over half a mile from where he guessed the Apaches would have camped, they too stopped for the night.

  Crow slept as calmly and easily as he always did, falling into his rest and never dreaming. Never having dreams that seemed worth the remembering. He was only disturbed once.

  A while before midnight they were all wakened by a long, reedy, bubbling cry that went on and on, bouncing off the mountains around them. A cry of implacable loneliness and pain.

  Crow had heard noises like that before and what they found among the grove of charred and dying trees the next morning came as no surprise to him.

  Chapter Ten

  They reached the lip of the arroyo less than an hour after dawn. The sun still hung low on the horizon, throwing great jagged shadows across the orange boulders. Crow went first, followed now by Mavulamanzi and the little Mick bringing up the rear. It was an odd fact, but Crow noticed that the Zulu chief’s command of the English language seemed to be weakening. Almost from the moment he threw away the clothes of civilization he had been speaking less often and less well.

  During the night before, as they all sat listening to the agonized screams, Crow had watched Mavulamanzi squatting cross-legged, crooning softly to himself as he rubbed the edges of the spears with a stone, honing them to an even keener finish.

  Cautiously, taking care to break the line of the cliff as slowly as possible, Crow peered down into the grove of trees. There were about thirty of them, most dead from the burning, with a few still carrying dusty leaves. The bottom of the river bed was dry and barren, rutted by the occasional flash flood. Beyond the eroded stream the trail wound on upwards across the face of the cliff opposite.

  But none of that took the eyes.

  There was a small fire smoldering down among the stunted trees, the smoke hanging in the air as though it was too much effort for it to climb up towards the lightening sky.

  Around the fire there were four men lying. All wrapped in blankets.

  ‘The rearguard,’ whispered Crow, sliding his Winchester forwards. Taking care to put a mixture of spittle and dirt on the barrel to prevent any light bouncing off it from the rising sun and catching the eye of one of the resting Apaches.

  ‘Oh.’ The squeak came from Mikalawayo, pushed in between his leader and the skinny figure of Crow.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There.’

  Crow followed the pointing finger, sucking in through his teeth as he saw what the small black had seen. He had looked first at the trail to see if the main party had left the overnight camp. Then to see who had been left behind. He hadn’t bothered to look in among the dead trees.

  Two of them. Guess they’re probably the men. They’ll have taken your woman on with them to the main camp at White Canyon.’

  At that distance - better than a hundred paces - and among the shadows, it was difficult to see. And what remained of the bodies of the Negroes merged in with the blackness of the burned trees. Crow’s vision was better than any man he’d ever met, but even he found it hard to make out any details. Not that he needed to actually see them. The noises in the night had been enough clue to what the Mescalero warriors had been doing to their two prisoners.

  ‘By bloody God! They do that to my servants! To my men. Crow, you must proffer all aidings to me to revenge this.’

  ‘That wasn’t the deal.’

  ‘You promised to take me to camp.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Those sleeping men there stop us.’

  It was a reasonable argument. And the odds weren’t that high against them. Three to four. The four sleeping, or resting. Mavulamanzi had no guns. Little Mikalawayo had a single pistol in his belt and a pocket filled with ammunition.

  Crow had his usual weapons. The scatter-gun, the Colt and the Winchester. The odds weren’t that high. If they waited too long then the rearguard might split up and become impossible for the three men to take by surprise. But if they attacked them using firearms, there was n
o way of knowing how far off was the main body of the Mescalero Apaches.

  The boom of the double-barreled Purdey could easily have brought the whole war-party down around the necks of Crow and his two companions.

  That meant close contact fighting. It wasn’t that hard to kill a man when you could scarcely see him, or if he was a tiny mute figure at the further end of a telescopic sight The closer you got, the harder it became to take life. Some men found that when they first faced another in a pistol duel. And they didn’t get to live for very much longer.

  And when you came down to knives or hands!

  When you felt the sweat of your enemy on your fingers and smelled his fear. That was when most men found it near to being impossible.

  Crow had no reservations about himself, and he knew enough about men to have confidence about Chief Mavulamanzi. The slight figure of Mikalawayo was a different matter and he talked over a plan with the giant Zulu that would keep Mick as a last reserve.

  ‘He keeps his own pistol and mine as well. Plus the Winchester.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you…’ began Mikalawayo, looking confused and upset, stopping as he saw the red glance from his leader.

  ‘You will do it,’ said Mavulamanzi and his servant nodded, looking unusually miserable. Crow wondered why but didn’t bother to ask.

  ‘Chief!’

  ‘What, Crow?’

  ‘That lovely bonnet of yours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not a good thing to wear ifn we’re going to try and stalk them without taking their attention.’

  ‘I always…’

  ‘Makes you stand out like a fart at a christening, Chief.’

  Reluctantly the black took off the head-dress of nodding white feathers, laying it gently in the dirt, behind the line of the ridge. Looking at Crow with a blank, impassive stare.

  ‘We will go, Crow.’

  ‘Very well. Guess we will at that.’

  Mikalawayo had made his cautious shuffling way down the further flank of the slope, ending up where he’d been told to go, close by the banks of the dry river, in a position where he could cover the path both in and out of the clump of trees. He had both pistols tucked into his belt and carried the rifle at the trail. Placing it in a niche in the rocks ready to hand. Muttering worriedly to himself in the Zulu language.

  From where he was he could see the corpses of the two other Negroes and he pulled a face and looked away. There was a constantly shifting veil of small insects covering the bound and charred bodies, feeding furiously at the wealth of dried blood. Here and there Mikalawayo could see the grayness of intestine and, breaking through the scorched black skin, the stark whiteness of bone. The little man hoped that it would be quick if he was taken.

  Somewhere out there he knew that his adored and feared lord, Mavulamanzi, was hunting. His assegais sharp and the brutal club, the knobkerrie, at his belt. And the white man, Crow, in his own way just as terrifying as Mavulamanzi, armed with the stubby shotgun and the strangely shortened army sword.

  Against four sleeping Apaches.

  ‘Oh, goodness gracious, snakes alive,’ whispered Mikalawayo to himself.

  From the new angle, so much lower down, he could see that all of the Indians were awake. Lying still in their blankets, but talking. Probably having just woken from a late night, he decided. Waiting and chatting before they took up positions ready to protect the rear of their main party. Which probably meant that the rest of the Mescalero band, and Lavinia Woodstock, had not been gone for very long.

  But what difference would all this make to the attack by Mavulamanzi and Crow?

  Crow was rarely surprised. He had suspected that the Mescalero warriors were not actually all sleeping. It would have been so unlike the Apaches to be that careless with men that were clearly delegated as sentries.

  Nor did he think that Mavulamanzi would be taken by surprise. The big man had snaked away in the opposite direction to Mikalawayo, making no more sound than a dead leaf landing on a shaded pool.

  The shootist drew his saber and crawled on down the hill, keeping the stumps of trees between himself and the Indians. Not bothering to move particularly quietly, knowing that there was no possibility of them hearing him at that distance. The time for silence would come when he was closer.

  The Purdey was held snugly in the long holster by the rawhide cord across the top of the hammers, keeping it from falling out when he was stalking. Not that Crow hoped to have to use it. Being very conscious of the way that sound could carry among the ridges of the arroyos and steep valleys.

  The shapes of the trees were grotesque. Some twisted and stunted. Some with branches still showing dusty green. One had been snapped off at about six feet in height, leaving a lance of smooth wood a yard long at its top.

  Crow came in towards the Apaches behind the bodies of the tortured Zulus, but he paid them no more attention than he did the trees. Creeping in past them, now taking the utmost care about where he placed his hands and feet Avoiding any dry twigs that might crack and betray him.

  Pausing when he was only about twenty feet from the nearest figure. Lying partly facing him. But all four of the braves were deeply involved in some sort of argument Perhaps talking over the old battles. Reliving hunting parties in the great days before the white man had ravaged their lands.

  He couldn’t see Mavulamanzi, but he would not have expected to. If the Zulu was as good as he believed him to be, then he wouldn’t see him at all. And neither would the Mescalero warriors.

  The plan was for them to work their way in as near as possible. Then Crow would lob a stone over towards the river-bed, where Mikalawayo waited. As the Apaches checked that direction, so Crow and the Negro would rush them, taking as many out as possible with saber and spear and club before they realized what had hit them. It would be a frantic fight where speed and controlled violence would be all that mattered.

  He had the stone ready in his hand. Sun-warmed and so deep a red it was close to black. Smooth on one side and chipped on the other. Crow held it, steadying himself on his left hand ready to throw it. Hoping that the Zulu had been able to move fast enough. It was vital that he didn’t delay in case the Indians moved and split up. Then it would be so much harder to kill them quickly.

  The blanketed figures kept their places.

  Crow was ready.

  When there was a hiss in the air on the far side of the small clearing and a flat sound. Like a hammer striking a side of meat hanging from a butcher’s hook. One of the Apaches jerked and started to rise to his feet, stopping the movement and spinning like a top, the blanket slipping from his shoulders. But not falling to the earth. Checked by a haft of wood that protruded from the center of his back.

  A cry of dismay from the others at the way death had sprung unbeckoned into their midst. Plucking their comrade from them in the winking of an eye.

  Crow opened his mouth to curse the premature start to their attack from Mavulamanzi, then changed his mind, seeing what a futile exercise that would be. Dropping the stone from his fingers and drawing the two and half feet of steel from the sheath on his left hip.

  When there was a second blur of light across among the trees and a second Mescalero man fell dead. This time with the smooth shaft of the assegai protruding from the point where his throat became his chest. He rolled once and then lay still.

  The invisible slayer unnerved the Apaches and Crow instinctively felt they were about to break and run. They had no idea they had two attackers to face and he readied himself. Slowing his breathing in anticipation of the need for action.

  A third spear came and this time the Indian saw it, ducking at the last second so that it whirred by his face and thudded into a tree, quivering with the force of the throw.

  Both of the survivors stood with their backs to Crow, both of them with rifles cocked and ready at their hips.

  ‘Time to move,’ muttered Crow, powering himself across the eight paces that separated him from the Apache
s, feet moving light as snow.

  He deliberately struck the first man with his shoulder, sending him spinning sideways while he drove in for the second brave, the saber ahead of him.

  The sharpened point caught the Indian exactly where Crow had aimed. To the young Mescalero it must have been as though he had been struck by a bolt from the gods. There can have been no sensation of pain. It was over too quickly for that. The blade slid through the grey blanket. Through the shirt. Skin and flesh and muscle. Between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left side, cutting so deeply that the tip of the saber stood out a hand’s breadth clear of the Apache’s chest, having burst the heart into tatters of bloodied sinew.

  The dying man fell so swiftly that it took Crow by surprise. The strings seemed all cut at once and as the body slumped its weight almost tugged the saber from the white man’s fist. It could have been fatal to lose it so Crow held on, rolling forwards and over, finally pulling the blade free from the flesh.

  He glanced round, expecting to see the last of the Mescalero warriors aiming the rifle at him. But the man was off and running. Striding out with arms pumping at the morning air, heading for the river. The blanket had been discarded and lay crumpled in the dirt among the trees behind the sprinting figure. He was bare-footed, dashing for safety. Or, Crow guessed, for where their ponies must be tethered. He cursed himself for not thinking of that. They should have gone round and dealt with the animals first.

  Crow untangled himself from the dead Indian, standing up and looking round for Mavulamanzi, who appeared further to the right than he’d expected. From what Mikalawayo had told him, Crow knew that the assegai was only a short stabbing weapon, of no accuracy above a few paces. And the Mescalero was a good fifty yards away already.

  ‘Bust him, Mick!’ called out Crow, wondering where the little Negro had gone. Seeing him suddenly, rising like an uncertain ghost, holding a pistol in each hand.