CHAPTER 16
A HORIZON OF STONE
The rest of the night was a march of ghosts.
Nero and Elena lashed Gideon’s unconscious body crosswise over the saddle of his chestnut mare, where he looked like a bale of old merchandise.
Walking on foot to spare the horses — which were still coughing up a black smoke of coal and bile — the hunter and the vaquera led the reins away from that cursed oasis, leaving the bodies of the Faceless behind them.
When the sun of the third day showed on the horizon, it no longer seemed so cruel.
The country was changing. The fine red sand of New Mexico was beginning to give way to harder ground, covered with grey gravel and low shrubs that stood up to the cold.
Far ahead, well beyond the dust, rose the immense blue and white outline of the Sierra Nevada.
The wall of stone that separated them from California.
A loud and theatrical groan broke the silence of the march.
“By the nails of Christ… just shoot me and be done with it,” Gideon grumbled, opening his eyes with difficulty.
He tried to move, but the rope holding him to the saddle creaked.
The inventor was upside down, his face full of dust and his tongue feeling like a strip of cured leather.
When he tried to spit, what came out was a completely black paste of coal.
Elena stopped her horse and looked down, letting out the first genuine laugh in days.
“Look at that, Nero. The genius of mechanics is awake. How does your salvation taste, Gideon?”
Nero cut the ropes with a quick stroke of the sabre, letting the machinist drop backside-first onto the gravel. Gideon swore, rubbing his ribs and trying to wipe his mouth on his coat sleeve.
“It tastes like death, vaquera,” Gideon coughed, accepting the canteen of water — which Elena had purified by boiling it with coal in a metal pot before they left.
He took a swallow and made a face.
“But my head is still on my neck and the reaper is in one piece. Where are we?”
“Almost out of the desert,” Nero answered, tipping his chin toward the foot of the mountains. “But the air is changing. Winter in the Sierra Nevada is coming down early this year.”
The Outpost
By midday the three of them reached the first buttresses of the mountain.
There, squeezed between two rocky slopes, stood an old abandoned trading post — a cabin of rotted pine logs that had once served as a stopping place for the caravans of the Santa Fe Trail.
There was nobody alive there, but Nero found fresh marks in the soft earth near the old water trough.
Prints of heavy boots, different from American horseshoes or from Indian moccasins.
They were broad marks, reinforced with iron nails in the soles.
Elena crouched beside Nero, examining the carcass of a green glass bottle left near the entrance. The label was torn, but it carried letters in a strange alphabet, angular and incomprehensible to her.
“Russians…” Elena whispered, her heart quickening in her chest.
“They’ve been through here.”
“Not the soldiers out of the fort,” Nero corrected, picking up the bottle and smelling the sour remains of the liquid inside. “Fur hunters. The promyshlenniki. They’re coming down the mountain to smuggle horses and guns with whatever is left of Vance’s bunch.”
“The Colonel is dead, but his trade route is still warm.” Gideon came up, settling his goggles on his forehead. The exhaustion of the poison was gone, replaced by the instinct to survive.
“If the Czar’s hunters are here, it means Fort Ross isn’t as far off as the map says,” the inventor remarked, looking at the steep climb of the mountain. “But it also means that from here on, every shadow in those trees might have a bayonet fixed to it.”
Nero put the Colt away in its holster and looked at the top of the Sierra Nevada, where the first snow clouds were beginning to gather.
“Let the horses rest for an hour,” the hunter ordered. “Then we climb. We’ll take those furs to keep ourselves warm. If we meet a Russian patrol on that mountain, there won’t be any warning.”
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