EPILOGUE
THE HUNTER’S CODE
The beat of the black stallion’s hooves on the firm ground outside the fort broke the silence of the morning.
Gideon, riding just behind on the pack horse that now carried the rotating reaper, cleaned and oiled, looked back one last time.
In the rear-view of his mind he could still see the silhouettes of Elena and Mia crossing the threshold of the Volkovs’ warm house.
The vaquera seemed to have finally let her shoulders down, free of the weight of years of hunting.
Gideon cleared his throat, settled his goggles on his forehead, and looked at the hunter beside him.
Lashed crosswise over the load, alongside the reaper, travelled four Berdan rifles and a short-framed revolver that the Commander had sent to the inventor at the hour of their departure, with no receipt and no witness.
Volkov had said, with that rare and tired smile of his, that nobody in the Empire would notice the absence of five pieces from a fort the Czar already considered lost. Gideon ran his hand over the tarpaulin covering the bundle at least three times before he touched the reins.
“Aren’t you going to say goodbye to her?” the inventor asked, curious about his road companion’s sudden coldness.
Nero did not so much as turn his head. Under the dark brim of his hat, his glacial blue eyes stayed fixed on the dirt trail climbing toward the giant redwoods and the fog still hanging in the mountains.
“No need. She knows,” the hunter answered, his voice low and firm and rough, carried off by the cold California wind.
He gave a light pull on the reins, putting the stallion into a quicker walk.
“Besides, I don’t do anything expecting gratitude.”
Gideon smiled at one corner of his mouth and shook his head.
He finally understood the man he was travelling with.
Nero was no hero out of a chapbook, and no knight in shining armour.
He was a survivor of the old West. A man driven by a code of his own, written in iron and powder, in which a word once given was worth more than any fistful of gold or any tearful thanks.
At a dry command the two horses picked up their pace, leaving the gates of Fort Ross behind them for good.
As they climbed the slope, the salt breeze of the Pacific gave way to the smell of wet pine and frozen earth.
The blue smoke of the vodka fire down below had already gone, and the howling of the Hidebehinds was only a sinister memory of that night of terror.
The winter of the Sierra Nevada was waiting for them with open arms, full of new dangers, new trails and new bounties.
Nero settled the canvas duster, feeling the familiar weight of the Colt Patersons knocking against his thighs.
The road was long and the world was violent, but as long as there was lead in the cylinder and a horizon ahead, the hunter would go on riding.
The climb along the redwood trail was slow, but the silence did not last long.
Gideon, jolting along on the chestnut mare’s saddle while the rotating reaper knocked against its mount, frowned and looked at his own hands, dirty with soot and monster grease.
The full weight of the madness he had just lived through seemed finally to have landed on him.
He pressed on until he was level with the black stallion.
“Nero, tell me something here…” Gideon began, gesturing with one hand. “Now that it’s dawned on me. How exactly did I end up in this mess with you?”
Nero did not take his eyes off the road. He only adjusted the brim of his hat against the cold sun.
“I never called you. You came on your own.”
“No, hold on!” Gideon’s eyes went wide behind his goggles, his voice rising a tone in pure indignation. “You’re not telling me I walked out of my workshop, out of my nice warm furnace, left the saloon and my whiskey behind, and damn near froze and got gutted, of my own free will?”
“Yes.”
Gideon locked up for two seconds, his mouth open, processing the hunter’s short and cutting answer.
“No, stop everything! You’re a warlock, aren’t you?
Tell me the truth!” Gideon jabbed an accusing finger at him, entirely convinced of his new theory.
“You put a spell on me or something! There’s no other rational explanation for a man of science like me following a lunatic in a canvas coat into a nest of Russian demons! ”
Nero glanced sidelong at the inventor. The corner of his mouth sketched the beginning of another dry smile. Instead of answering, the hunter touched his spurs firmly to the black stallion’s flank. The horse shot off at a gallop down the dirt trail, raising a curtain of dust and packed snow.
“Hey! Don’t you run off, Nero! Come back here!” Gideon shouted, slapping his reins to send the chestnut mare after him. “You owe me that answer! What kind of gypsy witchcraft did you use on me?”
The inventor came along right behind, talking without a pause, his voice echoing among the ancient redwood trunks as the two silhouettes shrank away, riding side by side until they disappeared completely into the golden line of the California horizon.
High on the dark timber wall of Fort Ross, the cold wind stirred Elena’s dark hair.
She stood with her hands on the log parapet, watching the two distant points disappear into the immensity of the American west. She did not wave.
She did not call out. That was not their way.
But there, under the pale winter sun, with her chest finally at peace and knowing that her little sister was safe and warm in the house just below, the vaquera allowed herself to close her eyes for a second.
She looked toward the place where the horses’ dust was still settling on the horizon and, in a whisper only the mountain wind was able to hear, she murmured: “Thank you.”
The End
FINAL NOTE — THE FATE OF THE IRON
Three years after the night described in these pages, the Russian Empire gave up on California.
Fort Ross was emptied in haste: the cattle, the boards, the bells, the doors and whatever was in the magazines changed hands in a single winter, and the Czar’s ships carried far less back north than they had brought down.
What was left behind passed into American hands, and a good part of that proprietary arsenal — rifles that appeared in no catalogue, breech mechanisms that did not yet have names in English — ended up on the benches of frontier gunsmiths, who took them apart piece by piece to understand how they worked.
None of those men filed a patent. None of them could say where the idea had come from.
But over the two decades that followed, those same fittings, springs and cylinders began to reappear, one by one, in the guns that legend would christen the armament of the Old West — carried by men who had never heard of Fort Ross, or of a rotating machine gun hidden in a coffin, or of a stubborn mechanic who came down a snowy mountain with a broken rifle under his arm.
The rest, as always, became a story told around fires.