CHAPTER 8
THE PRICE OF SILENCE
The main yard of the Cross Ranch had turned into a genuine desert of blue smoke and grave-silence.
The violent echo of the last shot out of Nero’s Colt Patersons was still humming in the survivors’ ears when he, with a cold mechanical movement, put the modified pistols away in their rawhide holsters.
Thirty men, the elite of the Texas mercenaries, had gone down onto the red earth.
Up on the hilltop, positioned strategically out of direct reach of the lead and the butchery, Gideon slowly lowered his heavy-lensed goggles.
He was watching the rear alongside the mounts and the pack mule, his heart beating hard against his ribs as he confirmed, even at that distance, that his rapid-loading engineering had worked with surgical perfection.
The yard was completely cleared; the mechanical heresy had collected its price.
Nero advanced toward the main house. His steps, slow and heavy and firm, left a trail of bloody prints mixed into the mud of the yard.
Elena appeared just behind him, emerging from the dark flank of the stables with the little Derringer held rigid in a shaking hand.
Her dark eyes were fully dilated with adrenaline and with dread of what she would find inside that fortress of stone.
With a violent, precise kick Nero broke open the double doors of solid rosewood, which gave way with a dry crack of splitting timber.
The inside of the opulent residence smelled of snuff tobacco, of expensive carpets imported from Europe, and of the sour odour of human fear.
The weak grey light of dawn filtered through the panes shattered by the explosions, lighting the luxurious sitting room with shafts of suspended dust.
“Mia!” Elena’s desperate cry tore through the funereal silence of the house, echoing hard off the high walls and plaster ceilings. “Mia! It’s me, it’s Elena!”
No sound came back out of the shadows of the house. Only the irritating, rhythmic, hypnotic tick of a tall pendulum clock standing in the dark corner of the room marked the passing of time.
The Fall of the Tyrant
Nero took three steps forward without removing his hat.
His glacial blue eyes went straight to the top of the monumental oak staircase that led to the second floor.
A dark trail of blood, thick and still wet, came down step by step, staining the fine wood.
There, holding weakly to the carved banister to keep from falling, was Colonel Jonathan Vance.
He no longer wore the tunic with the gilded buttons of his old days of military glory; his white linen shirt was completely soaked in red, courtesy of a metal fragment that had torn deep into his left shoulder during the shooting outside.
The old tyrant coughed violently, spitting dark blood on the floor, and collapsed exhausted at the foot of the stairs, the heavy-framed revolver with its empty cylinder slipping out of his weak and unsteady fingers.
Facing the imposing silhouette of the hunter in the long coat and the dammed-up fury in the lines of Elena’s face, the Colonel let out a hoarse, broken, toothless laugh.
“You did some fine damage, stranger…” Vance hissed with difficulty, looking up at Nero before fixing his dull pupils on Elena’s face. “But you got here far too late, vaquera. Your executioner’s lead cleaned out my yard, but it won’t have the power to put that girl back in your arms.”
Elena came at him like a wounded wolf, dropping to her knees on the wood and pressing the cold double barrel of the Derringer hard against the Colonel’s exposed throat.
“Where is she, you bastard? What did you do with my own blood sister? Tell me the truth, or I swear to God I’ll take your head off right here!”
Vance gasped heavily, feeling the cast iron sink into his sweating skin, but the cruel and contemptuous smile did not leave his grey lips.
“Your sister has not set foot in the territory of Texas in more than two years…” he spat, his stare loaded with pure dying sadism.
“A girl with real Kansas vaquero blood in her… strong, hard-boned, perfect for rough work. She grew up fast in this ranch. Grew a hide. She was worth far too much gold in the right hands to be left serving food and whiskey to my ignorant hired men. I sold her.”
“To whom?” Elena’s cry came out ragged, mixed with a tear of pure hatred that ran down her cheek.
“To the Czar’s men,” Vance answered, his voice visibly failing as the last breath of life escaped his broken body. “A high-ranking party from the Russian-American Company came down out of the northern territories to buy blood horses and war supplies.”
“Their commander, a merciless officer named Volkov, paid five hundred dollars in hard gold for her. By now your Mia has turned thirteen and she is serving as a slave in their fortified enclave at Fort Ross, right on the Pacific coast. Where your feeble law will never have the strength to reach… and where the winter never ends.” The oak floor seemed to disappear entirely from under Elena’s feet.
Thirteen years old. The little sister with the childish, innocent features she had left behind was now an adolescent surviving under the whips of a foreign army of fur hunters, thousands of miles away, at the far edge of the American continent.
Vance gathered the last of his dying strength to lift his neck and spit directly onto the bounty hunter’s black leather boot.
“You cleaned out my ranch, Nero… but to fetch that girl you’ll be obliged to cross the impassable desert of the Indians and face the bayonets of the Russian army. You don’t have the stomach for that kind of war…” Nero took one firm step forward.
The massive shadow of his hat brim covered the dying face of Colonel Vance completely. The glacial blue shine of his eyes seemed to cut the gloom of the sitting room like two blades. With a slow movement he raised the cavalry sabre in both hands, setting the dark steel in the air.
“The desert doesn’t frighten me in the least, Colonel,” Nero pronounced, his voice cold and cutting as the ice of the northern mountains.
“And my lead speaks Russian every bit as well as it speaks English.” The descending, annihilating arc of dark steel brought the dynasty of Jonathan Vance’s oppression to a definitive close.
The Colonel’s body toppled onto its side across the carpet imported from Europe, and silence came back to occupy the sitting room.
Nero wiped the blade on the lining of an armchair and returned the sabre to the sheath on his back.
That was when the sound came from above: three dull, spaced-out knocks, as though somebody were kicking wood with whatever strength their body had left.
Elena raised her head slowly. The hatred in her face gave way to a hope that hurt worse than any bullet.
“Mia?” she called, and her voice failed in the middle of the name.
The knocking answered. It was coming from the end of the second-floor corridor.
Nero went up the staircase two steps at a time, the left-hand Paterson raised to shoulder height.
At the end of the corridor there was a reinforced door with a heavy iron latch bolted to the outside — not the inside.
A room built to keep people, not to shelter anybody.
He did not waste time on the padlock: he kicked the lock twice and the wood gave.
Curled into the corner between an iron bedstead and the wall was a young woman of about eighteen.
Her hair was the colour of dirty wheat, tangled down her back; she wore a good cotton dress torn at the shoulder, and her wrists were marked by a rope somebody had tied with care.
She raised both hands against the light and backed away until the wall left her no more room to back into.
“No… please, no…”
Elena went past Nero and knelt three paces from her.
She set the Derringer down on the floorboards, plainly in view, and pushed the gun away with her fingertips.
Then she took the wool coat off her own shoulders and held it out in front of her body, exactly as an old pastor had once done for her, years before, in the mud of the main street of Bitter Creek.
“It’s over,” the vaquera said. “Nobody lays a hand on you again. What’s your name?”
The young woman took a long time to answer.
“Sarah,” she said at last. “Sarah Cross.”
Nero stayed on the threshold of the door. Under the brim of his hat, his blue eyes travelled over the iron latch, the rope dropped on the floor, and the window nailed shut from the outside with pine slats.
“Old Ethan Cross’s daughter,” he said. It was not a question.
“They killed my father last winter and kept the land. Kept the name too.” Sarah swallowed hard, and her voice came out cracked from so long without speaking to anyone who answered. “The Colonel used to say I was worth more whole. That there was a man in New Orleans waiting on delivery.”
“The man in New Orleans isn’t coming,” Nero said. “And the three who were going to take you are in a shallow grave up in Kansas.”
Elena did not look away from the young woman’s face. When she spoke again, her hand shook for the first time since the yard.
“Was there another girl in here? Dark-haired, almond eyes. Her name was Mia.”
Sarah nodded slowly.
“She used to bring me water when the men forgot.” The young woman looked at the wall, as though she could see straight through it.
“They took Mia away before last winter, in a train of wagons, with some fellows in heavy coats who spoke a language nobody could understand. She didn’t cry when she climbed up.
She only asked me to keep her name, in case somebody ever came asking. ”
Elena shut her eyes. Somebody had come asking. Two years too late, but somebody had come.
The Pacific Horizon
Outside, Gideon was coming slowly down the hill, carefully leading the horses and the pack mule that carried the black coffin with the rotating reaper.
He broke off at the entrance to the utterly ruined yard, weighing with his own eyes the bodies laid out and the thick smoke still climbing from the frames of the burned towers.
When Nero and Elena crossed the shattered doorway of the main house, the inventor raised his eyebrows: between the two of them, wrapped in the vaquera’s wool coat and blinking against the first daylight she had seen in months, came a third figure he had not expected.
Elena’s stricken face, however, said without words that the blood victory at the Cross Ranch tasted of cold ashes.
The territory of Texas had been left behind for good.
The trio’s real odyssey, toward the freezing waters of the Pacific and the defences of Russian Fort Ross, was only beginning.
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