Shadow on the Sun Read online

  “What’s he doing?” Boutelle asked, sickened.

  “He has to purge himself of all impurities,” Finley answered. “There must be no food or drink inside him.”

  “It doesn’t sound likely,” Boutelle muttered, grimacing as he listened to the violent retching of the old man outside.

  Finley noticed Lean Bear shifting restlessly and knew what he was thinking. It was not completely dark yet and as long as the shaman was outside, he could be seen and there was just the chance—

  “For Christ’s sake, get back in,” he muttered.

  He relaxed a little—noticing that Lean Bear did the same—as the Night Doctor came back in, wiping at his lips. The buffalo robe fell back heavily across the opening.

  They watched as the old man put on a buffalo robe that had been beaten thin with rocks. The ritual robe, Finley thought.

  The shaman worked a leather thong across his head. Hanging from it was a round, metallic medallion with figures inscribed on it. Finley saw from the edge of his vision that Boutelle was looking at him for an explanation. He turned his head and shook it slightly. He dared not speak now. The ceremony was too close.

  The Night Doctor had picked up a leather bag and hung it at his waist, its strap diagonally across his bare chest. Then he picked up four pottery dishes with handmade candles in them and placed them at four equidistant points of an invisible circle. These were, Finley knew, the four points of the compass—east, west, north, and south.

  Removing a tiny piece of kindling from the fire, the shaman lit the candles.

  Then he picked up a deep, dishlike pottery container and scooped up wood coals, dropping them into the container.

  Immediately, a thick, greasy smoke began to rise from the dish. Before he had set it down in the center of the circle, the smoke was already starting to fill the cave. Some of it rose toward an opening in the cave roof; some appeared to drift through the hide-covered opening. Finley and Lean Bear both tightened as they saw that. Smoke would be visible for miles.

  And it was not yet dark outside. . . .

  He bent toward Lean Bear, murmuring, “Must there be such a fire?”

  “It is part of the ceremony,” Lean Bear responded, but clearly he was nervous about the smoke as well.

  “What is it?” Boutelle whispered.

  Finley gestured toward the fire, and Boutelle seemed to understand.

  “Why doesn’t he start?” he whispered, then winced as Lean Bear glared at him.

  By then, the Night Doctor was removing articles from another leather pouch and holding them one by one in the smoke from the fire. Boutelle assumed that it was to purify the objects: a wand, a knife, dried plants, a small leather bag, feathers from a large bird. Probably an eagle, Boutelle thought.

  Finley looked toward the opening in the wall again. The smoke had thinned, but some was still escaping outside. Get started, he thought urgently. If the son of Vandaih saw that smoke . . .

  A shudder ran up his back. They’d be helpless.

  He drew in a quick breath and looked at the shaman again, eyes smarting from the greasy pall of smoke in the cave.

  The old man was holding something above the smoking fire. It looked to Finley like strips of skin or dried flesh. He had no idea what they were.

  Only Lean Bear didn’t start as the Night Doctor began to dance around the fire slowly and rhythmically, chanting in his frail, hoarse voice. He had the wand in his left hand, the knife in his right, gesturing with them as he danced first toward the east, then the west, the north, and the south, chanting in each direction.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, you are the sun first rising in the east.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, you are the sun descending in the west.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, you are the winter sun in the north.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, you are the rising sun of spring in the south.

  “Spirits of fear and death give way to the sun! This is a place of sanctuary! The roof above, a roof of safety! The floor beneath, a floor of protection!

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, protect me from evil approaching from the east, the west, the north, the south.”

  Finley glanced at Lean Bear, seeing a look of wrath on the Apache’s face. He could understand now why the Night Doctor had failed as the shaman of the Pinal Spring band, why they had expelled him.

  Ignoring all else, the old man was performing a rite exclusively for his own protection.

  And they could do nothing about it.

  He had no doubt that the shaman was well aware of their helplessness.

  You miserable old bastard, he thought.

  He started slightly with Boutelle as the Night Doctor took some powder from the small leather bag and flung it onto the fire. It flashed momentarily, then exuded pale smoke which filled the air with a pungent smell that was sweet and sour at the same time.

  Boutelle shook himself, blinking hard and swallowing. The smoke from the burning powder seemed to fill his eyes and throat. He could see the Night Doctor only indistinctly. The old man looked to him like some figure from a mad dream. It seemed as though he could hear the thumping of the drum again. The same one-two-three-four rhythm he had heard in the Apache camp. That was impossible, though. There was no drum. It had to be imagination fixing on the rhythmic thud of the Night Doctor’s feet on the floor of the cavern—one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four.

  He felt himself beginning to sink again into the trancelike state he’d experienced in the mountain clearing. The sound of the Night Doctor’s voice rose and fell in volume and in pitch, sometimes mournful and suppressed, other times aggressive, vehement.

  Finley sat rigidly, watching the old man perform his rite of self-protection. He noticed sweat running down the old man’s body and became aware of the perspiration on his own face, too, and the many drops of it trickling down his chest and back beneath his shirt.

  He winced as the shaman suddenly jabbed at his left palm with the knife blade, drawing blood. Dancing on, he held the palm above the fire, letting dark drops of his blood fall into the glowing wood coals where they hissed.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, let this gift of my blood satisfy and please you that you will protect me from whatever evil is around me.”

  Soon, the old man would mention the son of Vandaih by name. After the sacrifice. But what would the sacrifice be? Finley tensed, his right hand rising to the hilt of the obsidian knife. The Night Doctor was sapped by age. Still . . .

  His hand lowered again as the shaman danced to a nearby corner of the cave and pulled a wolf’s hide from a bulky object to reveal a cage woven of twigs inside of which a scrawny hen was standing.

  The old man’s hands moved swiftly. Opening the cage, he seized the chicken by its throat (so it would make no noise, Finley knew) and carried it to the fire, dancing slowly around the smoking dish, extending the struggling hen to the east, the west, the north, and the south.

  Boutelle gasped as the shaman, with a blurring movement of his hands, lopped off the hen’s head with his knife, then tore the bird in half and dropped its bloody pieces on the fire.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, may the sacrificing of this hen also be accepted by you. May you return this gift by helping me in this time of peril.”

  What about us? Finley thought. Was Lean Bear thinking that as well?

  But then the Night Doctor held a folded piece of the animal skin above the fire and chanted, “I have placed the name of Vandaih’s son upon this skin, and when I drop this named skin in the fire, you, O, Usen, must, as fire consumes the skin, consume the son of Vandaih, making his body headless and his head bodiless.”

  Abruptly, he opened the leather bag at his waist and removed something, which he held above the fire. Boutelle felt his stomach twist with nausea.

  It was a shrunken, mummified head, and the shaman was swinging it above the fire by its lank, black hair.

  “O, Usen, O, Great Spirit, let it be, in this ceremony, that this head is
that of the son of Vandaih. O, Usen, please remove this head once more.”

  Finley felt himself becoming increasingly rigid with anxiety. He’d been wrong. The shaman did intend to destroy the son of Vandaih—and the ceremony was approaching its climax. He felt himself leaning forward tensely, eyes fixed on the old man as he danced and chanted in the dim, smoky light, his frail voice more and more agitated.

  “O, Usen, who created the night and the day! O, Usen, who created the earth and the skies! O, Usen, who created the darkness and the light! I plead with you to come now and destroy this vile abomination!

  “O, Usen, drive away this evil one like dust before the wind! You have the power to crush all things beneath your might! Crush this, my enemy, the son of Vandaih!

  “O, Usen, come at once and do what I desire! Let your terrible presence shake the air and destroy the evil that I ask you to destroy! The son of Vandaih, O, Usen! The cursed and murderous son of Vandaih!

  “Curse this demon, O, Usen! Hurl him to the bottom of the pit into a lake of fire! First, his foul head, then his foul body, down into the fiery waters of the center of the earth!”

  The old man stopped in his tracks and threw up his arms.

  “Be gone, son of Vandaih! Be cursed by Usen! Cursed by the earth! Cursed by the sun and the moon and the stars! Cursed—”

  He broke off with a gagging sound, face wrenched by sudden mindless terror.

  A rush of great wings could be heard outside the cave, a hideous screech, the same screech they had heard while Boutelle’s horse was being slaughtered.

  “Complete the ceremony!” Lean Bear shouted at the shaman.

  But the old man had slumped back onto the cave floor, eyes wide, lips spread, spittle running from his open mouth.

  It seemed to Boutelle that everything happened at once. Lean Bear and Finley were on their feet, lunging for the shaman, both crying out at once. The rush of wings became deafening, the ghastly shriek of the creature almost to the opening of the cave. Lean Bear reaching the old man first and clutching at his shoulder, shouting again: Finley repeating the same words.

  Lean Bear recoiling in shock and Finley groaning loudly as the old man fell back, dead from fear.

  Then the robe across the opening was ripped away, and the huge, winged creature stood before them, face unseen in the shadows. Boutelle had the fleeting impression of a curved beak on its face and talons where its feet should be.

  Then all was lost in movement, smoke, and noise as Lean Bear whirled and drew his knife and, with a cry that Boutelle knew was one of hopeless fury, hurled himself at the creature. Abruptly, they were one, a thrashing huge-winged, double-bodied figure, Lean Bear driving his knife into the creature’s chest, then screaming out in agony as the creature’s head darted forward, its curved beak tearing off the Apache’s face.

  Twisting around, the creature hurled the dying Indian through the cave opening, and Lean Bear disappeared in darkness, pitched into space and falling to his death without another sound.

  Boutelle stiffened, seeing Finley leap toward the creature while its back was turned, the obsidian knife extended in his hand. The agent drove it as hard as he could into the creature’s back. But the wings were too thick with heavy feathers and it glanced off a bony rib, barely breaking the creature’s skin.

  With a cry of pain at the stab of the obsidian blade, the creature twisted back, its left wing smashing across Finley’s outstretched arm, knocking the knife from his grip.

  Finley tried to lunge for it, but with a movement so rapid Boutelle could not follow it, one of the creature’s taloned feet lashed out and clamped around Finley’s right ankle, stopping him abruptly.

  The creature started dragging Finley back, its maddened yellow eyes glinting in the firelight.

  “Boutelle!” Finley cried.

  Boutelle moved before his mind could summon the command. Mindlessly, without considering what the pain might be, he grabbed up the fire dish and jumping toward the son of Vandaih, hurled the glowing, smoking contents into the creature’s face, seeing at the last moment its huge beak opening to tear off Finley’s face.

  The creature shrieked in pain as red-hot wood coals sprayed across its head, burning its eyes and setting fire to the dark gray plumage on its face. It staggered back and bumped against the cave opening, only the spread of its wings preventing it from falling through.

  In backing off, the creature had been forced to lose its grip on Finley’s ankle. Diving across the cave, the agent snatched up the obsidian knife, and before the creature could recover, he leapt up and flung himself at it, driving the black blade deep into its chest until he felt it pierce the creature’s heart.

  The cave rang with the deafening screech of the creature’s death.

  Boutelle stumbled back and fell against the cave wall as he saw what happened. He and Finley stared in openmouthed astonishment as they watched the giant wings retracting slowly, saw them thin and disappear into the arm flesh closing up. Saw the creature’s beak move slowly into the face and vanish with the plumage. Saw the talons withdraw and change back into human feet.

  With that, the son of Vandaih was a man again, the man they’d seen in Picture City, lying dead on the floor of the cave, the obsidian knife buried in his stilled heart, dark blood running down his chest.

  Finley slumped down clumsily, and he and Boutelle looked at one another. He felt unable to speak. All he could think of was what he had to do.

  But that would have to wait. He couldn’t move right now.

  At last he spoke.

  “You saved my life,” he said.

  “You saved both of ours,” Boutelle responded hoarsely. Not to mention the Pinal Spring band and God knew how many others, he thought. He sat down weakly, closing his eyes. My God, he thought. My dear God.

  Several minutes later, Finley struggled to his knees and crawled to the Night Doctor’s body. Reaching across him, he picked up the dead Apache’s knife and turned back to Boutelle.

  “Are you up to this?” he said.

  “Do I have any choice?” Boutelle asked.

  Finley shook his head slowly. “No,” he answered, “I need your help.”

  “All right.” Boutelle nodded. “One thing though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ll deny, to the end of my life, that I ever did this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Finley reassured him with a grim smile, “I’ll never mention it, believe me.”

  Boutelle labored to his feet and moved to the spot where the son of Vandaih lay in motionless silence. He sank to his knees beside the agent.

  “All right,” he muttered. He filled his lungs with a long, deep breath. “I’m ready,” he said.

  Finley made the first cut.