XIV Men of Peace

1

THE RANCH house was small, a one-room sod cabin, but the more defensible for that. Its two windows had heavy inside shutters and each wall a pair of loopholes. Picket stakes surrounded it, six deep. Men built like this in the west Texas cattle country—such of them as weren’t dead or fled.

“Lord, but I wish we’d cleared out in time,” Tom Lang-ford said. “You and the kids, at least.”

“Hush, now,” replied his wife. “You couldn’t run the spread without me, and if we gave up we’d lose everything we’ve worked for.” She leaned across the table, over the firearms and ammunition that covered it, to pat his arm. A sunbeam through a hole on the east side struck through the gloom within and made living bronze of her hair. “All we got to do is hold out till Bob brings help. Unless the redskins quit first.”

Langford kept himself from wondering whether the va-quero had gotten clean away. If the Comanches had spied him and sent pursuit with remounts, he must already lie scalped. No telling. Though you could see a long ways around here, by day, the war band had appeared at dawn, when folks were just getting started on the chores, and arrived faster than you might believe. Of the hands, only Ed Lee, Bill Davis, and Carlos Padilla had made it to the bouse .with the family, and not before a bullet smashed Ed’s left arm.

Susie bad set and bandaged that limb as best she was able after the warriors recoiled from gunfire and withdrew out of “sight. At the moment Ed had Nancy Langford on his lap.

The three-year-old clung hard to him, terrified. Bill kept watch at the north end, Carlos at the south, while Jim flitted between east and west in the pride and eagerness of his own seven years. A sharpness of powder still hung in the air, and some smoke seemed to have drifted in from the barn as well. The Indians had torched it, the only wooden building on the place. The roar of its burning reached the defenders faintly, like a noise in a nightmare.

“They’re comin’ back!” Jim shrilled.

Langford grabbed a Winchester off the table and sprang to the west wall. Behind him he heard Lee say, “Bill, you help the missus reload. Carlos, you be with Tom. Jim, you go ‘round and tell me where I’m needed.” The voice was ragged with pain but the man could work a Colt.

Langford peered through his loophole. Sunlight brightened the bare ground outside. Dust puffed and swirled ruddy from the hoofs of oncoming mustangs. He got a brown body in his sights, but then the pony veered and the rider vanished, except for one leg. Indian trick, hang yourself down the other side. But a Comanche without a horse was only half himself. Langford’s rifle cracked and nudged his shoulder. The mustang reared, screamed, went over, kicked. The warrior had thrown himself clear. He was lost in the dust and rampage. Langford realized he had pretty much wasted that shot, and picked his next target with care. The bullets had to last.

Riders would never take this house. They’d learned as much, first time. They galloped around and around, whooping, firing. One toppled, another, another. I didn’t get them, Langford knew. Carlos did. A real marksman, him. Brave, too. Could likely have gotten away from where he was when they showed up, but stuck with us. Well, I never did hold with looking down on a man just because he’s Mexican.

“Comin’ on foot, over here!” Jim cried.

Yes, of course, the mounted braves provided covering fire, distraction, for those who snaked amongst the pickets. Langford allowed himself a glance backward. Bill Davis had left the table to join Ed Lee on the north. The black cowhand wasn’t the best with a gun in these United States, but his targets were close, slowed down by the barrier, scornful of death. He blasted away. Susie brought him a reloaded rifle, took his emptied weapon back, fetched Ed a fresh pistol. The screams, hoofquake, shooting went on and on, world without end. You weren’t scared, no time for that, but at the back of your head you wondered if there had ever been anything else or ever would be.

Suddenly it was over. The wild men gathered up their dead and wounded and pulled off again.

In the silence that followed, the clock sounded nearly as loud as—a hammer nailing down a coffin lid. It was a big old grandfather clock, the single treasure from her parents’ home that Susie had wanted carted out here. The dial glimmered through a blue haze. Langford squinted eyes which the powder smoke stung and whistled softly. Just about ten minutes since the attack began. No more, dear God?

Nancy had crawled into a corner. She huddled hugging herself. Her mother went to give whatever comfort she could.

THE WIND across the high plains still bore much winter in it. This range wasn’t as bleak as the Llano Estacado, over which the travelers had come, but the spring rains had not started in earnest and only a bjeath of green touched endless sere grass. Trees—willow or cottonwood clumped by whatever streams ran through these miles, the occasional lonesome oak—reached bare limbs into a bleached sky. Game was plentiful, though. It wasn’t buffalo, except for white bones, the work of white hunters; buffalo were fast getting scarce. However, pronghorn, peccary, jackrabbit ran everywhere, with wolves and cougars to prey on them, while elk, bear, and cougar haunted the canyons. Jack Tarrant’s party hadn’t seen any cattle since well before they left New Mexico. Twice they passed abandoned ranches. The red terror woke to all its old fury while the states were at each other’s throats, and the Army had a lot of quelling yet to do, seven years after Appomattox.

Sunlight dazzled eastward vision. At first Tarrant couldn’t see what Francisco Herrera Carillo pointed at. “Hwno,” the trader said. “No proviene de ningun campamento.” He was ;a pale-brown man with sharp features; even on the trail he kept his chin shaven, mustache trimmed, clothes neat, as if to remind the world that among his forefathers were Con-quistadores.

Tarrant looked a bit like him, given aquiline nose and large, slightly oblique eyes. After a moment he too made out the stain rising athwart heaven. “Not from a camp, when it’s visible from below the horizon,” he agreed slowly in the same Spanish. “What, then? A grass ike?”

“No, that would be wider spread. A building. I think we have found your Indians.”

Burly and redbearded, hook newly strapped on to stick out of his right sleeve, Rufus Bullen stumped over to join them. “Christ!” he growled. Two missing front teeth made his English slightly slurred. If others than Tarrant noticed the new growth that had begun to push stubs through the gums, they had said nothing about it. “You mean they’ve set fire to a ranch?”

“What else?” Herrera replied coolly, holding to his own language. “I have not been hi these parts for some time, but if I remember right and have my bearings, that is the Lang-ford property. Or was.”

“What’ie we waiting for? We can’t let ‘em—“ Rufus broke off. His shoulders sagged. “Inutilis est,” he mumbled.

“We will probably arrive too late, and can certainly do nothing against a war band,” Tarrant reminded him, also in Latin.

Herrera shrugged. He had grown used to the Yanquis dropping into that lingo. (He recognized an occasional word from the Mass, but no more, especially since they spoke it differently from the priests.) This quest of theirs was mad anyway. “You wish to speak with the Comanches, no?” he observed. “You can hardly do that if you fight them. Come, let us eat and be on our way. If we’re lucky, they will not have moved on before we get there.”

His sons Miguel and Pedro, young but trailwise, had wakened at dawn and gotten busy. A coffeepot steamed and two pans sizzled on a grill above a fire of buffalo chips—an abundance of which remained—and mesquite. As hard as. the seekers pushed, without time off to hunt, no bacon was left except fat for cooking, but they kept plenty of corn meal to make tortillas and two days ago the father had had the good luck to knock down a peccary. It had been quite a ways off. Every Comanchero was necessarily a crack shot.

The travelers ate fast, cleaned camp gear, obeyed nature, left soap and razors till later, hit the saddle and set off. Herrera varied the pace between trot and canter, now and then a walk. The two whom he guided had learned to heed him. Easy though it seemed, this sparing of horseflesh covered many miles a day. Besides, the remuda amounted to just a pair of ponies each and three pack mules.

The sun climbed, the wind sank. Warmth crept into the air and drew sweet sweat odors from the mounts. Hoofs thudded, leather creaked. The tall dry grass rustled aside. For a while the smoke rose higher, but presently it thinned, blew apart, faded away. Wings as black wheeled where it had been. “You can usually tell a Comanche camp from afar,” Herrera remarked. “The vultures wait for the leavings.”

It was hard to tell whether Rufus flushed. Hats failed to keep skin like his from reddening and chapping. His voice did grate: “Dead bodies?” That was in Spanish, which he could speak after a fashion.

“Or bones and entrails,” Herrera replied. “They have always been hunters, you know, when they are not at war.” A minute went by. “Your buffalo killers destroy their livelihood.”

“Sometimes I think you like them,” Tarrant murmured.

“I have dealt with them since I was Pedro’s age, as did my fathers before me,” Herrera said. “One comes to a little understanding, whether one will or no.”

Tarrant nodded. Comancheros had been trading out of Santa Fe for a century, since de Anza fought the tribes to a standstill and made a peace that endured because he had gained then’ respect. It was a peace with the New Mexicans alone. Spaniards elsewhere, any other Europeans, the Mexicans who ruled later, the Americans—Texan, Confederate, Yankee—who despoiled the Mexicans, those remained fair game; and indeed by now there had been such bloodshed and cruelty on both sides that truce between Comanches and Texans was no more thinkable than it was between Comanches and Apaches.

Tarrant forced his mind back to his horse. He and Rufus had gotten fairly good at riding range style; but damn it, what they really were was seamen. Why couldn’t their search have led them into the South Pacific, or along the shores of Asia, or anywhere but this unbounded emptiness?

Well, the search might be near an end. No matter how often he had thought it before, that coursed through his blood and shivered up his spine. O Hiram, Psammetk, Pytheas, Althea, A t hen ais-Aliyat, Armand Cardinal Richelieu, Benjamin Franklin, how far has the River borne me from you! And all the lesser ones, beyond counting, down in dust, wholly forgotten save for whatever might glimmer in him, a comrade of decades or a drinking companion in a tavern, a wife and the children she bore him or a woman chance-met for a single night—

Herrera’s shout slammed him back into the day: “/Alto!” and a rush of alien gutturals. Rufus dropped left hand to pistol. Tarrant gestured him from it. The boys brought the pack animals to a stop. Their eyes darted around, they were new to this and nervous. Despite his earlier times between jaws ready to snap shut, Tarrant’s flesh prickled.

Two men had come around a brush-grown hillock where they must have been on watch. Their scurry-looking mustangs closed the distance in a few pulsebeats. They checked the gallop with invisible touch of knees and twitch of hackamore; seated merely on blankets, they seemed parts of the beasts, centaurs. Their own frames were stocky, bandylegged, swarthy, clad in breechclouts, leggings, and moccasins. Midnight hair hung in twin braids past broad faces painted in the red and black of death. Leather sunshades had been left behind and the war bonnet of the northern plains was unknown here. One man had stuck a few feathers into a headband. The other bore a great shaggy cap or helmet from which sprang buffalo horns. He carried a Henry repeating rifle. A bandolier of cartridges crossed his chest. His companion nocked an arrow to a short bow. Archers were rare of late, or so Tarrant had heard. Maybe this warrior was poor, maybe he preferred the ancestral weapon. No matter.-That barbed iron head could punch through ribs to the heart, and more shafts waited in their quiver.

Herrera talked on. Buffalo Horns grunted. The bowman slacked his string. Herrera turned in the saddle to regard his employers. “The fight is not ended,” he told them, “but the Kwerhar-rehnuh will receive us. Chief Quanah himself is here.” Moisture glistened on his face. He had gone a bit pale around the nostrils. In English he added, for many Co-manches knew some Spanish: “Be ver-ree careful. Sey ‘ave much anger. Sey can easy kill a w’ite man.”

THE RANCH buildings had already been visible. As he drew closer, they seemed to Tarrant, if anything, more small and lonesome in the middle of immensity. He recognized what must be the owners’ home, a bunkhouse, and three lesser outbuildings. Sod, they were little damaged. A barn was smoldering ashes and charred fragments; the family had doubtless spent a lot of money and hope on getting the lumber hauled to them. A couple of wagons had been pushed into the flames. A chicken coop had been emptied and smashed. Hoofs had trampled saplings that were to have grown into shelter against sun and wind.

The Indians were camped where a windmill stood skeletal by the cattle trough for which it pumped water. That put them out of rifleshot from the house and, probably, sight through loopholes. About thirty tipis lifted their gaudily decorated buffalo hide cones across what had been a pasture. At a fire near the middle women in buckskin gowns prepared captured, butchered steers for eating. They were rather few. The braves numbered maybe a hundred. They loafed about, napped, shot dice, cleaned firearms or whetted knives. Some sat grim in front of lodgings from within which sounded keening; they mourned kinsmen slain. A few, mounted, kept an eye on the many horses that grazed in the distance. They were as tough as their masters, those mustangs that could keep going on winter’s grass.

When the newcomers caught the notice of the camp, excitement kindled. Most people ran to crowd around and jabber. The stoic reserve of Indians was a myth, unless they were in pain or dying. Then a warrior’s pride was that not the most prolonged and agonizing torture his captors or their women could think of would make him cry aloud. It was an ill thing to fall into such hands.

Buffalo Horns shouted and pushed his pony through the ruck. Herrera called greetings to men he knew. The smiles and waves that he got in return made Tarrant feel easier. If they took due care, bis party ought to outlive this day. After at!, to these folk hospitality was sacred.

Close by the windmill was a dpi whereon were painted signs that Herrera whispered were powerful. A man too dignified to leave it for curiosity’s sake stood outside, arms folded. The travelers drew rein. Tarrant realized that he looked on Quanah, half-white war chief of the Kwerhar-rehnuh. The name of that band meant “Antelopes”—an American misnomer for the pronghorn, like “buffalo” for bison or “corn” for maize; and curious it seemed for the lords of the Staked Plains, the fiercest of all those Co-manches whom the United States had yet to conquer.

Save for lightning-like bands of yellow and ocher, he wore simply loincloth and moccasins, with a Bowie knife sheathed on a belt, xet there could be no mistaking him. From his mother’s race he took straight nose and a height that towered, thickly muscled, over his followers. However, he was even darker than most of them. His regard of the strangers was lion-calm.

Herrera greeted him deferentially in the tongue of the Nermerauh, the People. Quanah nodded. “Bienvenidos,” he rumbled forth, and continued in accented but fluent Spanish. “Dismount and come in.”

Tarrant felt relieved. In Santa Fe he had learned some of the Plains Indian sign language, but used it haltingly; and Herrera had told him that few Comanches were adept in it anyway. The trader had said Quanah might or might not condescend to speak Spanish with Americans. He had a certain grasp of English too, though he would scarcely handicap himself with it when he didn’t have to. “Muchas gracias, senor,” Tarrant said, to establish that he was the head of this band. He wondered whether he should have used the honorific “Don Quanah.”

Herrera left the remuda in charge of bis sons and accompanied Tarrant and Rufus into the tipi behind the chief. Its outfit was sparse, little more than bedrolls; this was a war band. The light within fell gentle after the glare outside, the air smelled of leather and smoke. The men settled cross-legged in a circle. Two wives left, posting themselves at the entrance in case of a task for them.

Quanah was not about to smoke any peace pipe, but Herrera had said it would be okay to offer cigarettes. Tarrant did while introducing himself and his friend. Deftly left-handed, Rufus took a matchbox from his pocket, extracted and struck a stick, lighted the tobacco. To have such a formidable-seeming man serve them honored both the principals.

“We have come a weary way in the wish of finding you,” Tarrant added. “We thought the Antelopes would be on their home grounds, but you had already left, so we must ask anyone we met, and the earth itself, where you were gone.”

“Then you are not here to trade,” said Quanah in Her-rera’s direction.

“Sr. Tarrant engaged me in Santa Fe to bring him to you, when he had learned I would be able to,” the trader answered. “I did pack along some rifles and ammunition. One will be a gift to you. As for the rest, well, surely you have taken many cattle.”

Rufus sucked in a sharp breath. It was notorious that New Mexican ranchers wanted stock and would buy without questions. Comancheros got small detachments of Indians to drive herds they had lifted out of Texas to that market, in exchange for arms. Tarrant laid a hand on the redhead’s knee and muttered in Latin, against the outrage he saw, “Stay quiet. You knew this.”

“Make your camp with us,” Quanah invited. “I expect we will be here until tomorrow morning.”

Hope quivered in Rufus’ tone: “Uh, you will spare them in yonder house?”

Quanah scowled. “No. They have cost us comrades. The enemy shall never boast that any defied us and lived.” He shrugged. “Besides, we have need of a short rest, as hard as we have fared—the better to fight the soldiers afterward.”

Yes, Tarrant understood, this was not really a plundering expedition, it was a campaign in a war. His inquiries had informed him of a Kiowa medicine man, Owl Prophet, who called for a great united thrust that would forever drive the white man from the plains; and last year such horror erupted that Washington’s attempts at peace came to an end. In fall Ranald Mackenzie took the black troopers of his Fourth Cavalry into these parts, against the Antelopes. Quanah led a retreat that was a running, fight, brilliantly waged—Mackenzie himself received an arrow wound—high up onto the Llano Estacado until whiter forced the Americans to withdraw. Now he was returning.

The stern gaze shifted to Tarrant. “What do you want with us?”

“I too bear gifts, senor.” Clothing, blankets, jewelry, liquor. Despite his remoteness from this conflict, Tarrant could not bring himself to convey weapons; nor would Rufus have stood for it. “My friend and I are from a distant land—California, by the western waters, which I’m sure you have heard of.” In haste, because that territory belonged to the foe: “We have no quarrel with anyone here. The races are not foredoomed to blood feud.” A risk that he deemed he should take: “Your mother was of our people. Before setting forth, I learned what I could about her. If you have any questions, I will try to answer them.”

Stillness fell. The hubbub outside seemed faint, distant. Herrera looked uneasy. Quanah sat expressionless, smoking. Time passed before the chief said, heavily: “The Te-janos stole her and my small sister from us. My father, Peta Nawkonee the war chief, mourned for her until at last he took a wound hi battle that got inflamed and killed him. I have heard that she and the girl are dead.”

“Your sister died eight years ago,” Tarrant replied low. “Your mother soon followed her. She too was sick with grief ‘and longing. Now they rest at peace, Quanah.”

The tale had been easy enough to obtain, a sensation remembered to this day. In 1836 an Indian band attacked Parker’s Fort, a settlement in the Brazos valley. They slew five men and mutilated them as was Indian wont, preferably before death. They gang-raped Granny Parker after a lance pinned her to the ground. Two of the several other women they violated were left with injuries almost as bad. Two more women they carried away, together with three children. Among these was nine-year-old Cynthia Anne Parker.

The women and boys were eventually ransomed back. Though this was by no means the first time the Comanches took females for slaves, the tale of just what those two suffered came to stand for hundreds; and the Texas Rangers rode with vengeance in their hearts.

Cynthia Anne fared better. Capriciously adopted, raised as a girl of the Nennernuh, she forgot English, forgot wellnigh everything of her early childhood, became an Antelope and presently a mother. By all accounts, hers was a happy marriage; Peta Nawkonee loved his wife and wanted no woman after he lost her. That was in 1860, when Sul Ross led a Ranger expedition in retaliation for a raid and fell . upon the Comanche camp. Its men were off hunting. The Texans shot what women and children fled too slowly, and a Mexican slave whom Ross believed to be the chief himself. Barely in time, a man saw, through dirt and dung-grease, that the hair of one squaw was golden.

The Parker clan and the state of Texas did everything they could for her. It was no use. She was Naduah, who only yearned back to the prairie and the People. Repeated _ attempts to escape finally forced her kinfolk to keep a guard on her. When disease robbed her of her daughter, she howled, tore and slashed her own flesh, sank into silence and starved herself to death.

Out on the plains, her younger son perished as wretchedly. Sickness dwelt always among the Indians, tuberculosis, arthritis, worms, ophthalmia, the smallpox that Europeans brought, a litany of ills without end. But her older son flourished, gathered a war band, became headman of the Antelopes. He refused to sign the Medicine Lodge treaty that would put the tribeson a reservation. Instead, he carried terror along the frontier. He was Quanah.

“Have you seen their graves?” he asked levelly.

“I have not,” Tarrant said, “but if you wish, I can visit and tell them of your love.”

Quanah smoked for a while longer. At least he didn’t outright call the white man a liar. Finally: “Why have you sought me?”

Tarrant’s pulse quickened. “It is not you, chief, great though your fame be. Word has come to me of somebody in your following. If I have heard aright, he hails from the north and has traveled widely and long. Yes, very long, longer than anybody knows, though he never seems to grow old. His must be a strange power. On your home grounds, uh, Nermernuh who stayed behind told us that he came along on this faring. My desire is to speak with him.”

“Why?” demanded Quanah. The bluntness, unlike an Indian, betokened tension below the iron surface.

“I believe he will be glad to talk with me.”

Rufus puffed hard on his cigarette. Laid across his lap, the hook trembled.

Quanah raised his voice to the squaws. One of them left. Quanah returned his look to Tarrant. “I have sent for Dertsahnawyeh. Peregrine.” —the Spanish for the Co-manche name: Wanderer.

“Do you hope he will teach you his medicine?” he went on.

“I have come to find out what it is.”

“I do not think he could tell you, if he were willing, which I do not think he would be.”

Herrera peered at Tarrant. “You only told me you wanted to find out what might lie behind those rumors,” the trader said. “It is dangerous to meddle in warriors’ affairs.”

“Yes, I call myself a scientist,” Tarrant snapped. To Quanah: “That is a man who seeks for whatever truth lies hidden behind things. How do the sun and the stars shine? How did the earth and life come to be? What really happened in the past?”

“I know,” replied the chief. “Thus you whites have found ways to do and make many terrible things, and the railroad runs where the buffalo grazed.” Pause. “Well, I suppose Dertsahnawyeh can take care of himself.” Starkly: “As for me, I must think how to capture yonder house.”

There was nothing more to say.

The tipi entrance darkened. A man trod in. While clad like the rest, he bore no war paint. Nor was he a native of these lands, but tali, slender, lighter-hued. When he saw who sat with Quanah he spoke gently in English. “What do you want of me?”

THEY WALKED over the prairie, Tarrant, Peregrino, Rufus trailing a step or two behind. Light spilled out of vastness, a measure of warmth lifted from soil. Dry grass rattled. Camp and buildings soon vanished among the tall tawny stalks. Smokes continued in sight, rising straight and slow toward the vultures.

Revelation was strangely subdued. Or perhaps it wasn’t strange. They had waited so long. Tarrant and Rufus had felt hope grow into near certainty while they quested. Peregrino had nurtured an inner peace to which any surprise was like a passing breath of air. Thus he endured his loneliness, until he outlived it.

“I was born almost three thousand years ago,” Tarrant said. “My friend is about half as old.”

“I never counted time until lately,” said Peregrino. They might as well use that name, out of the many he had had. “Then I guessed five or six hundred years.”

“Before Columbus— What changes you’ve seen!”

Peregrino smiled as a man might at a graveside. “You more. Have you come on any like us, besides Mr. Bullen?”

“Not quite. A woman once, but she disappeared. We’ve no idea whether she’s still alive. Otherwise, you’re my first since him. Did you ever?”

“No. I tried but gave up. For all I knew, I was solo. How did you get on my trail?”

“That’s kind of a story.”

“We got plenty time.”

“Well—“ Tarrant drew a tobacco pouch from his pants and, from his shirt, the briar pipe it would have been unwise to smoke before Quanah. “I’ll start with Rufus and me arriving in California in ‘49. You’ve heard about the Gold Rush? We got rich off it. Not as miners, as merchants.”

“You did, Hanno,” said the Van at his heel. “I tagged along.”

“And damn useful you’ve been, hi more tight spots than I can list,” Tarrant declared. “Eventually I dropped from sight for a few years, then showed up in San Francisco under my present alias and bought a ship. I’ve always favored the sea. By now I own several; the firm’s done right well.”

Having loaded his pipe, he laid fire to it. “Whenever I could afford to, I’ve hired men to look for signs of immortals,” he proceeded. “Naturally, I don’t teS them that’s what they’re after. By and large, those of our kind who survive must do it by staying obscure. These days I’m an eccentric millionaire interested in lineages. My agents figure me for an ex-Mormon. They’re supposed to locate—oh, individuals who seem much tike others that dropped from sight earlier, and are apt to appear carrying a pretty fair grubstake—that sort of thing. What with railroads and steamships, I can at last spread my net across the world. Of course, it’s not that big yet, and the mesh is awfully coarse, which may be why it’s caught nothing except a few that turned out false.”

“Until today,” said Peregrino.

Tarrant nodded. “A scout of mine, exploring around Santa Fe, caught rumors about a medicine man among the Comanches, who didn’t really belong to them—the description sounded like a Sioux or a Pawnee or what’ever—but he’d gained a good deal of authority and ... he’d been heard of elsewhere, earlier, several different times and places. Not that any civilized person had pieced this together. Who’d take the fancies of savages seriously? Uh, pardon me, no offense. You know how whites think. My agent didn’t suppose it was worth pursuing. He noted it in a couple of sentences in his report just to show me how industrious he was.

“That was last year. I decided to follow it up myself. Lucked out and found two aged people, an Indian and a Mexican, who remembered— Well, it seemed, if he existed, he’d joined Quanah. I hoped to find the Comanches in winter quarters, but as was, we had to track them.” Tarrant laid a hand briefly on Peregrine’s shoulder. “And here we are, my brother.”

Peregrino halted. Tarrant did. For a space they looked into each other’s eyes. Rufus stood aside, bemused. At last Tarrant formed a wry grin and murmured, “You’re wondering whether I’m a liar, aren’t you?”

“How do you know I speak truth?” the Indian replied as low.

“Tactful fellow, you. Well, in the course of time I’ve cached evidence, as well as getaway gold, here and there. Come with me and I’ll show you enough of it. Or you can simply watch me for twenty or thirty years. I’ll provide for you. Meanwhile, why else on earth should I spin you a yarn like this?”

Peregrino nodded. “I believe you. But how do you know I’m not out to swindle you?”

“You couldn’t have foreseen my arrival, and you did leave many years’ worth of trail. Not on purpose. No white who didn’t know what to look for would ever have suspected. The tribes—what do they make of you, anyway?”

“That depends.” Peregrine’s gaze went over miles where grass waved above buffalo skulls, on beyond the horizon.

When he spoke slowly, often stopping to form a sentence before he uttered it, his English became a language other than what he had been using. “Each lives in its own world, you know; and those worlds are changing so fast.

“At first I was a medicine man among my birth-people. But they took to the horse and everything that went with that. I left them and drifted for—winter after winter, summer after summer. I was trying to find what it meant, all that I lived through. Sometimes I settled down a while, but it always hurt too much, seeing what was happening. I even tried the whites. At a mission I got baptized, learned Spanish and English, reading and writing. Afterward I went deep into Mexican and Anglo country both. I have been a market hunter, trapper, carpenter, wrangler, gardener. I talked with everybody who would talk with me and read every printed word that came my way. But that was no good either. I never belonged there.

“Meanwhile tribe after tribe got wiped out—by sickness, by war—or broken and herded onto a reservation. Then if the whites decided they wanted that land too, out the redskins went. I saw the Cherokees at the end of their Trail of Tears—”

The quiet, almost matter-of-fact voice died away. Rufus cleared his throat. “Well, that’s how the world is,” he grated. “/ seen Saxons, vikings, Crusaders, Turks, wars of religion, witches burned—“ Louder: “I seen what Injuns do when they get the upper hand.”

Tarrant frowned him to silence and asked Peregrino, “What brought you here?”

The other sighed. “I finally thought—oh, I was slow about it—this life of mine that went on and on and on, with nothing to show for it but graves—it must have some purpose, some use. And maybe that was just in the long experience, and being ageless would make folks listen to me. Maybe I could help my people, my whole race, before they went under, help them save something for a new beginning.

“About thirty years ago, I came back to them. The Southwest was where free tribes were likely to hang on the longest. The Nermernuh—you do know ‘Comanche’ is from Spanish, don’t you?—they had driven out the Apaches; they had fought the Kiowas as equals and made allies of them; for three hundred years they had stood off the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, the Texans, and carried war to the enemy in his home country. Now the Americans aim to crush them once for all. They’ve earned better than that. Haven’t they?”

“What are you doing?” Tarrant’s question seemed to hover like the dark wings overhead.

“To tell the truth, I was among the Kiowas first,” Per-egrino said. “They are more open in their minds than the Nermernuh, also about long life. Comanches believe a real man dies young, in battle or the hunt, while he is strong. They don’t trust their old ones and treat them bad. Not like my birth-people, so long ago. ... I let my ... my reputation grow with time. It helped that I know some things to do for the wounded and the sick. I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet. No, I just went around from band to band, and they came to think I was holy. I did whatever I could for them in the way of healing or advice. Always I counselled peace. Finally—it’s a long story—I joined up with Quanah, because he was becoming the last great chief. Everything will turn on him.”

“Peace, did you say?”

“And whatever we can save for our children. The Comanches have nothing left from their ancestors, nothing they can truly believe in. That eats them out from the inside. It leaves them wide open for the likes of Owl Prophet. I found a new faith among the Kiowas and I’m bringing it to the Nermernuh. Do you know the peyote cactus? It opens a way, it quiets the heart—”

Peregrino stopped. A tiny laugh fluttered in his throat. “Well, I don’t mean to sound like a missionary.”

“I’ll be glad to listen later,” said Tarrant, while he thought: I have seen so many gods come and go, what’s one more? “Also to any ideas you may have about making peace. I told you I have money. And I’ve always made a point of getting wires in my hands. You savvy? Certain politicians owe me favors. I can buy others. We’ll work out a plan, you and I. But first we’ve got to get you away from here, back to San Francisco with us, before you take a bullet in your brain. Why the hell did you come along with these raiders anyway?”

“I said I have to make them listen to me,” Peregrino explained wearily. “It’s uphill work. They’re suspicious of old men to start with, and when their world is falling to pieces around them they’re afraid of magic as strange as mine and— They’ve got to understand I’m not unmanly, I am on their side. I can’t leave them now.”

“Wait a minute!” Rufus barked.

They stared at him. He stood foursquare, legs planted wide apart, hat pushed back from roughened red face. The hook that had pierced foemen looked suddenly frail under this heaven. “Wait a minute,” stumbled from him. “Boss, what’re you thinking? The first thing we got to do is save those ranchers.”

Tarrant moistened his lips before it dragged out of him: “We can’t. We’re two against a hundred or worse. Unless—“ He cast a glance at Peregrino.

The Indian shook his head. “In this the People would not heed me,” he told them, dull-voiced. “I would only lose what standing I have.”

“I mean, can we ransom that family? Comanches often sell prisoners back, I’ve heard. I’ve brought trade goods along, besides what was intended for presents. And Herrera ought to turn his stock over to me if I promise him payment in gold.”  

Peregrino grew thoughtful. “Well, maybe.”

“That’s giving those devils the stuff to kill more whites,” Rufus protested.

Bitterness sharpened Peregrine’s tone. “You were telling as how this sort of thing is nothing new on earth.”

“But, but the barbarians in Europe, they were white. Even the Turks— Oh, you don’t mind. You ride with these animals—”

“That’ll do, Rufus,” Tarrant clipped. “Remember why we’ve come. Saving a few who’ll be dead anyway inside a century is not our business. I’ll see if I can, but Peregrino here is our real kinsman. So pipe down.”

His comrade whirled about and stalked off.

Tarrant watched him go. “He’ll get over it,” he said. “Short-tempered and not very bright, but he’s been loyal to me since-before the fall of Rome.”

“Why does he care about ... dayflies?” the medicine man wondered.

Tarrant’s pipe had gone out. He rekindled it and stared into the smoke as it lost itself beneath the sky. “Immortals get influenced by their surroundings, too,” he said. “We’ve mostly lived in the New World these past two hundred years, Rufus and I. First Canada, when it was French, but then we moved to the English colonies. More freedom, more opportunity, if you were English yourself, as of course we claimed to be. Later we were Americans; same thing.

“It affected him more than me. I owned slaves now and then, and shares in a couple of plantations, but didn’t think much about it either way. I’d always taken slavery for granted, and it was a misfortune that could happen to anybody, regardless of race. When the War Between the States ended it and a great deal else, to me that was simply another spin in history’s wheel. As a shipowner in San Francisco I didn’t need slaves.

“But Rufus, he’s a primitive soul. He wants something to cling to—which is what immortals never can have, right? He’s gone through a dozen Christian faiths. Last time he got converted was at a Baptist revival, and. a lot of it still clings to him. Both before and after the war he took seriously what he kept hearing about the white race’s right and duty to lord it over the colored.”

Tarrant chuckled unmerrily. “Besides, he’s been without a woman since we left Santa Fe. It was a terrible disappointment to him when he found on the Staked Plains that Co-manche women don’t free-and-easy receive outsiders like they do, or used to do, farther north. There must be a white woman or two in yonder cabin. He doesn’t imagine he lusts after them himself—oh, he wouldn’t dream of anything except being respectful and gallant and getting adoring looks—but the thought of redskin after redskin on them seems to be more than he can bear.”

“He may have to,” Peregrine said.

“Yes, he may.” Tarrant grimaced. “I must admit I don’t relish it, nor the idea of ransoming them with guns. I’m not quite as case-hardened as ... I must behave.”

“I think nothing will happen for hours.”

“Good. I have to give Quanah my presents, go through any formalities—you’ll advise me, won’t you?—but not right away, hm? Let’s walk on. We’ve a lot of talking to do, you and me. Three thousand years’ worth.”

WARRIORS GATHERED around. Now they were still, in wildcat dignity, for this was a ceremonial occasion. The westering sun cast gleams over obsidian hair and mahogany skin; on the eastern side it lit flames in eyes.

Between the ranks, before his tipi, Quanah received Tar-rant’s gifts. He made a speech in his father’s language, lengthy and doubtless full of imagery in his fathers’ wise. Standing by the visitor, Peregrino said in English when it was done: “He thanks you, he calls you friend, and tomorrow morning you will pick out of his horses whichever you like best. That is generous for a man on the warpath:”

“I know,” Tarrant said. To Quanah, in Spanish: “My thanks to you, great chief. May I ask a favor, in the name of the friendship you so kindly give us?”

Herrera, in the front row though well back, started, tautened, and squinted. Tarrant hadn’t stopped by him upon returning, but had collected his presents and gone straight here. Word flew quickly about, and when he saw the braves assemble, Herrera came for politeness and wariness.

“You may ask,” said Quanah, impassive.

“I wish to buy free those folks you hold trapped. They are useless to you. Why should you spend more time and men on them? We will take them away with us. In exchange we will pay a good price.”

A stir went through the Comanches, a rustle, a buzz. Those who understood whispered to those who had not. Hands tightened on hafts, here and there on a firearm.

A man near the chief uttered a string of harsh words. He was gaunt, scarred, more deeply lined in the face than was common even for aged Indians. Others near him muttered as if in agreement. Quanah lifted a hand for attention and told Tarrant, “Wahaawmaw says we have our fallen to avenge.”

“They fell, uh, honorably.”

“He means all our fallen, through all the years and lifetimes, deathtimes we have suffered.”

“I didn’t think you people—thought that way.”

“Wahaawmaw was a boy in that camp where the Tejanos took Quanah’s mother,” Peregrino related. “He found cover and escaped, but they shot down his own mother, brother, two little sisters. A while back he lost his wife and a small son; the soldiers were using a howitzer. The same has happened, different places, to many who are here.”

“I’m sorry,” Tarrant said to any who would listen. “But those people yonder had nothing to do with that, and— well, I carry plenty of fine things like those I’ve given your chief. Wouldn’t you rather have them than a few stinking scalps?”

Wahaawmaw claimed the right to speak. He went on for minutes, snarling, hissing, flinging up his hands and crying aloud to heaven. Anger answered in a surf-noise. When he was done and had folded his arms, Peregrino scarcely needed to translate: “He calk this an insult. Shall the Ner-mernuh sell their victory for blankets and booze? They’ll take more loot than they can carry off the Tejanos, and the scalps as well.”

He had warned Tarrant to expect this kind of outcome. Therefore Tarrant looked straight at Quanah and said, “I can make a better offer. We have rifles with us, boxes full of cartridges, things you need as you need horses if you are to wage war. How much, for those poor lives?”

Herrera took a step forward. “No, wait,” he called.

Quanah forestalled him. “Are these in your baggage? If so, good. If not, you are too late. Your companion has already agreed to trade his for cattle.”

Tarrant stood moveless. Wahaawmaw, who must have gotten the gist, crowed at him. “I could have told you,” Herrera said through the rising crowd-noise.

Quanah brought that down while Peregrino breathed in Tarrant’s ear, “I will see whether I can talk them into changing the deal. Keep your hopes on a tight rein, though.”

He launched into oratory. His fellows responded likewise. For the most part they spoke soberly. The effort always was to reach a consensus. They had no government. Civil chiefs were little more than judges, mediators, and even war chiefs only commanded in battle. Quanah waited out the debate. Toward the end, Herrera had something to say. Soon after that, Quanah pronounced what he took to be the verdict, and assent passed among his followers like an ebb-tide wave. The sun stood low. Wahaawmaw cast Tarrant a triumphant glare.

Sadness dulled Peregrino’s English. “You have guessed, no? It did not work. They have not gotten much blood yet, and are thirsty for it. Wahaawmaw claimed it would be bad luck to give quarter, and quite a few were ready to believe that. They can spare the half a dozen to round up this ranch’s herd and bring it to New Mexico. They enjoy that trip. And the Comanchero told them he is not a man to pull out of a bargain once it’s been struck. That made them extra touchy about their own honor. Also ... Quanah didn’t argue either way, but they know he has an idea for taking the house that he would like to try, and they are curious what it may be.” He stood silent for part of a minute. “I did my best. I really did.”

“Of course,” Tarrant answered. “Thanks.”

“I want you to know I don’t like what will happen, either. Let’s ride off and not come back till morning, you and me— Rufus if he wants.”

Tarrant shook his head. “I’ve a notion I’d better stay around. Don’t worry. I’ve seen enough sacks in the past.”

“I suppose you have,” said Peregrino.

The meeting broke up. Tarrant gave Quanah his respects and walked among knots of warriors, whose looks on him ranged from sullen to gleeful, toward Herrera’s camp. It was several yards from the nearest tipi. The New Mexican found men to talk with and thus delayed himself.

His sons had a fire started. They were busy with preparations for supper, before the quick prairie dark should fall. Long sunbeams trailed through smoke. Bedrolls waited. Rufus sat idle, hunched, a bottle in his single fist.. He looked up when Tarrant approached and asked, needlessly once he had seen, “What happened?”

“No dice.” Tarrant lowered himself to the trampled grass and reached out. “I’ll take a swig of that whiskey. Not much, and you’d better watch it closer.” Its bite went beneficent down his gullet. “I’ve failed altogether. Peregrino won’t leave the Comanches, and they won’t take ransom.” Curtly he described the situation.

“That son of a bitch,” Rufus breathed.

“Who? Quanah? He may be enemy, but he’s honest.”

“No, Herrera. He could have—”

The trader glided into view. “Did I hear my name?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Rufus lurched to his feet, bottle in hand. He stayed with English, except for, “Vipera es. You snake. You greaser. You could’a—could’a—sold Hanno—sold the boss those guns an’—”

Herrera’s right hand moved toward his Colt. His sons edged left and right, not yet drawing their knives. “I could not change a bargain that had been made,” he said. Spanish was too soft a language to convey the full coldness. “Not unless they agreed, and they refused. That would have hurt my reputation, damaged my business.”

“Sure, you breed, you’re always ready for sellin’ white men, white women, sellin’ ‘em for—for money. Blood money.” Rufus spat at Herrera’s feet.

“We will not speak of blood,” said the trader most quietly. “/ know who my father was. And I saw him weep when the Yanquis robbed our country from us. Now I must step aside for them in the streets of Santa Fe. The priest tells me I should not hate them, but need I care what becomes of them?”

Rufus groaned. His hook slashed. Herrera slipped back in time. The pistol sprang forth. Tarrant jumped to his feet and caught Rufus by the arms before the redbeard could try to draw. Slowly, the boys sheathed their blades.

“Behave yourself,” Tarrant panted. “Sit down.”

“Not with these!” Rufus coughed in Latin. He shook free of the grasp on him. “And you, Hanno. Can’t you remember? Like that woman we saved, way back when hi Russia. And that was just a single man, and he wouldn’t have cut her belly open afterward, or given her to the females with their knives and torches—“ He stumbled off, away from everybody, still gripping the bottle.

Looks followed him for a little. Then Tarrant said to Herrera, “Let him be. Hell get his wits back. Thanks for your patience,” with less than total sincerity.

6

TWICE DURING the afternoon, Tom Langford ventured outside. When he saw the encampment, he stepped quickly in again and rebarred the door. Toward evening he said, “I s’pect they’ll try a night attack. Why else would they hang around this long? Maybe again at dawn, but could be any time. We’ll just have to keep alert. If we stand ‘em off then, they ought to up and go. Injuns don’t know how to lay a siege.”

Bill Davis laughed softly and richly. “We ain’t wuth it,” he opined.

“Los vecinos vendrdn indudablemente a ayudarnos—‘Elp weell come,” Carlos Padilla ventured.

“I dunno how fast, if ever,” Langford sighed. “S’posin’ Bob got through, the neighbors are scattered pretty thin these days. Maybe a cavalry troop is somewhere close enough.”

“We are in the hands of God,” Susie declared. She smiled at her husband. “Yours too, dear, and strong hands they are.”

Ed Lee tossed and muttered on the Langfords’ bed. His injury had lit a fever in him. The children were more than ready for sleep.

First there was supper, cold beans, bread, the last milk. They had no firewood to speak of, and little water. Langford asked his wife to say grace. Nobody minded when Carlos crossed himself. Afterward the men one by one and bashfully went behind a sort of curtain Susie had rigged in a corner to hide the bucket all muSt share. Langford had emptied it whenever he stepped out. He hoped nobody more would have any real business there till the Indians were gone. That would be kind of nasty, in these close quarters with a woman and a girl. The privy was sod, it ought to be around yet. If not, well, they’d have the tall grass for walls, the freedom of these acres for which he had saved and toiled and now fought.

Dusk thickened to night. A single candle burned on the table amidst the guns. The Langfords and the hale men stood watches, two peering out loopholes taken in turn while two caught naps, on the floor or alongside poor Ed. Stars crowded what they glimpsed of sky. The ground was gray-black vague. A waning sliver of moon would be scant help when it rose shortly before the sun. Meanwhile the cold and the stillness gnawed away.

Once the wife whispered from her side of the room, “Tom?”

“Yeah?” He allowed himself a look at her. In this dim light he couldn’t see dirt, exhaustion, hollowed cheeks and black-rimmed eyes. She was the girl of his courting days, from whose front porch he’d walk home on the rainbow.

“Tom, if—if they do get in and you have the chance—“ She must take a breath. “Would you shoot me—first?”

“Christ, no!” he choked, and could taste the horror.

“Please. I’d bless you.”

“You might live, honey. They do sell prisoners to our people.”

She stared at the floor, then quickly, remembering her duty, out a loophole. “I wouldn’t want to live. Not after—”

“Do you s’pose I’d ever turn my back on you? Reckon you don’t know me as well as I thought.”

“No, but you— I’d be without you on earth. Why not together in Heaven, at once?”

He knew the redskins wouldn’t spare his life. Unless he was lucky, he wouldn’t be a man when he died. Not that knives and fire, or being staked out under the sun with his eyelids cut off, would leave him in shape to think much about that. “Well, you might still manage to get the kids through.”

Again her head drooped. “Yes. I’m sorry. I clean forgot. Yes, I was bein’ selfish.”

“Aw, don’t you fret, sweetheart,” he said as cheerfully as he was able. “Nothin’ bad’s goin’ to happen.’Next week our biggest worry will be how we can keep from braggjn’ too loud.”

“Thank you, darlin’.” She turned her attention outward.

The night wore on. They had divided it into four watches, then all to be afoot in advance of dawn, when attack was likeliest. About three in the morning by the grandfather clock, the Langfords finished their second trick, roused the hands, and stretched themselves out, he on the floor, she beside Ed. Should the hurt man stir from the heavy sleep into which he had dropped, she’d know it and see to whatever need was his. The other men would shoot better, the more well rested they were.

A shotgun blast kicked Langford awake.

Bill thudded against the wall and fell. The lead had sleeted across the cabin and taken him in the back. By candlelight and monstrous flickery shadows the blood that gushed from him shone blacker than his skin.

Carlos crouched on the north side, rifle aimed and useless. Two broad muzzles thrust in by the west loopholes. One smoked. It withdrew. Instantly another took its place. Meanwhile the second roared.

Langford jumped to the bedside and Susie. Sick understanding billowed through him. Hostiles, just three or four, had crawled under cover of night, slowly, often stopping, shadows in the gloom, till they were among the stakes and under the eaves. When they shoved their guns through, maybe they hoped they’d fire straight into an eye.

No matter. Shooting blind, wedging the barrels to and fro, they made defense impossible.

Whoops lifted, nearer and nearer. Thunder beat on the door. No tomahawks, Langford knew; that was a regular woodcutting ax, probably his. Panels splintered. A gust blew out the candle. Langford fired and fired, but he couldn’t see anything for sure. The hammer clicked on emptiness. Where the hell were the loaded guns? Susie screamed. Maybe he should have saved a bullet for her. Too late. The door was down and the dark full of warriors.

THE RACKET brought Tarrant iwd the Herreras from their bedrolls, hands to weapons. Tumult went murky among the tipis. “El ataque,” the trader said beneath yowls and shots.

“What’re they doing?” Tarrant grated: “Another frontal assault, in the dead of night? Crazy.”

“I do not know,” Herrera said. The noise rose rapidly to crescendo. He bared teeth, a dim flash under the stars. “Victory. They are taking the house.” Tarrant bent to put on his boots. “Where do you go? Stay here. You could too easily get killed.”

“I’ve got to see if I can do anything.”

“You cannot. Myself, I stay, not out of fear but because I do not want to see what comes next.”

Tarrant’s pain lashed: “You told me you don’t care.”

“Not much,” Herrera admitted. “But it would be evil to gloat, nor have I the heart for it. No, my sons and I will pray for them.” He plucked the other man’s sleeve. You slept fully clad in such a place as this. “Do stay. You, somehow, I like.”

“I’ll be careful,” Tarrant promised, and loped off.

He skirted the Comanche camp. More and more torches came to life there, flared, bobbed, streamed sparks on their hasty way. Sight of them dimmed the stars that hi their uncountable thousands gleamed frost-bright across black. Nevertheless he had light enough to turn the soil gray for him.

Where the devil was Rufus? Probably snoring out on the prairie alongside the empty bottle. Just as well. No matter how self-controlled, a white man took a risk, showing himself to red men in blood-rut.

So why did he, Hanno, Lugo, Cadoc, Jacques Lacy, William Sawyer, Jack Tarrant, a hundred different aliases, behave like this? He knew he couldn’t save the ranchers, and didn’t mean to try. They must perish as star-many had perished before them and would in the future, over and over, world without end. History chewed them up and spat them out and soon most rotted forgotten, might as well never have been. Maybe the Christians were right and mankind was like that, maybe it was simply in the nature of things.

His intention was practical. He hadn’t survived this long by hiding from the terrible. Rather, he kept alert, aware, so he’d know which way to jump when the sword swung. Tonight he’d observe from the fringes. If an impulse arose to wipe out his party too, he could talk it down, .given help from Peregrine and maybe even Quanah, before it got out of control. In the morning he’d start back toward Santa Fe.

The chief stood huge near the cabin, a long-helved ax on his shoulder. Torchlight guttered across painted face and body, horned headdress; it was as if he flickered in and out of hell. The braves were mostly less clear, blobs of night that swarmed, pranced, screeched, waved their brands like battle flags. Squaws capered with them, knives or sharpened sticks hi hand. The doorway gaped hollow.

They kept clear a space in front of it. Three dead men sprawled at the threshold, dragged forth. The Anglo’s left arm was splinted; someone had cut his throat before stopping to think about sport. Rib ends stuck out of a hole torn in the Negro’s back. A third seemed Mexican, though he was so slashed and pulped it was hard to be sure; he had gone down fighting.

Lucky bastards. Two squaws held fast a small boy and a smaller girl who screamed, blind with fear. A tall Anglo sat slumped. Blood matted his hair and dripped onto clothes and earth. He was stunned. Two warriors locked the arms of a young woman who writhed, kicked, cursed them and called on her God.

A man bounded from the ruck. A torch swung near him for a moment and Tarrant recognized Wahaawmaw. He had slung his rifle to free his hands. The right gripped a knife. He laughed aloud, caught the collar of the woman’s dress in his left, slashed downward. The cloth parted. Whiteness gleamed, and a sudden string of blood-beads. Her captors forced her down on her back. Wahaawmaw fumbled at his breechclout. The man prisoner stirred, croaked, struggled to regain his feet. A brave gave him a gun butt in the stomach and he sagged, retching.

A grizzly bear growl resounded. From around the cabin stormed Rufus. His Colt was drawn. He swept his hook back and forth. Two Indians stumbled aside, faces gashed open. He reached the woman. The men who pinned her sprang up. He shot one through the forehead. He hooked an eye from the other, who recoiled shrieking. His boot smashed into Wahaawmaw’s groin. That warrior tumbled, to squirm by the white man. He sought to choke down agony, but it jerked past his tips.

Flambeau flare made Rufus’-obeard its own hue. He stood with his legs on either side of the woman, hunched forward, swaying a little, flaming drunk but the Colt rock-steady before him. “Aw right,” he boomed, “you filthy swine, first o’ you makes a move, 111 plug him. She’s gonna go free, an’—”

Wahaawmaw straightened on the ground and rolled over. Rufus didn’t see. There was too much else for him to watch. “Look out!” Tarrant heard himself yell. The Indian bowls drowned his voice. Wahaawmaw unslung his rifle. Prone, be fired.

Rufus lurched back. The pistol fell. Wahaawmaw shot again. Rufus crumpled. His weight sank onto the woman and held her fast.

Wild, Tarrant shoved men aside. He sprang into the clear space and went on his knees beside Rufus. “O sodalis, amice perennis—“ Blood bubbled from the mouth and into the red beard. Rufus gasped. For an instant it seemed he grinned, but Tarrant couldn’t really know in the shifty torchlight or even by the light of the stars. He clasped the big body to him and felt life ebb away.

Only then did he hear what a silence had fallen. He looked aloft. Quanah stood above him, the ax held out tike a roof or a buffalo-hide shield. Had he roared his folk into quietude? They were a massive blur, well back from him and the dead, the wounded, the captive. Here and there a blaze briefly picked out a face or made eyeballs glisten.

Tarrant hauled Rufus off the woman. She stirred, stared, mewed. “Easy,” be murmured. She got to hands and knees, made her way thus to the man. Squaws had let go of the children, who were already at his side. He’d regained consciousness. At least, he could sit straight and lay his arms around them all.

The warriors Rufus injured had joined the crowd, except for the slain one and Wahaawmaw. He had risen but leaned on his rifle, shakily, holding himself where the pain was.

Tarrant got up too. Quanah lowered his ax. The pair of them regarded each other.

“Bad is this,” said the chief at last. “Very bad.”

A skipper from Phoenicia learned how to snatch at every chance, no matter how thin a shred. “Yes,” Tarrant answered. “A man of yours has killed a guest of yours.”

“He, your man, broke murdering into our midst.”

“He had a right to speak, to be heard hi your council. When your Nermernuh would bar his way and likely attack him, he acted in self-defense. He was under your protection, Quanah. At worst, you could have had him seized from behind, as many men as you command. I think you would have done that if you had gotten the chance, for everyone calls you a man of honor. But this creature shot him first.”

Wahaawmaw groaned outrage. Tarrant didn’t know how much he had understood. The argument was weak, almost ridiculous. Quanah could dismiss it out of hand. And yet—

Peregrine stepped forth. He overtopped the chief by a couple of inches. He carried a medicine bundle and a wand on which hung three buffalo tails, things he must have brought from his tipi. A hiss and mumble went through the crowd. Torches wavered. Dertsahnawyeh, the undying one, had power to raise awe in the fiercest heart.

“Stay where you are, Jack Tarrant,” he said quietly, “while Quanah and I go talk.”

The chief nodded. He spoke certain commands. Wahaawmaw snarled but hobbled obediently off to lose himself in the throng. Several warriors came rifles in hand to keep guard on the whites. Quanah and Peregrino departed into the night.

Tarrant went over to the prisoners and hunkered down. “Listen,” he said low, “we may be able to get you free. Keep still, don’t make any fuss. This band’s had a shock that cooled them down some, but don’t do anything to remind them they meant to destroy you.”

“I got you,” the man answered, clearly if not quite firmly yet. “Whatever happens, we owe you our prayers, you and your partner.”

“He came like a knight of King Arthur,” the woman whispered.

He came tike a goddamned drunken idiot, Tarrant thought. I could have headed him off if I’d known. I would have. Oh, Rufus, old buddy, you always hated to be alone, and now you are, forever.

The man offered his hand. “Tom Langford,” he said. “My wife Susan. Nancy. Jimmy, uh, James.” For out of grime and drying tears and the start of a bruise, the boy had cast his father a reproachful look. Tarrant wanted to hoot laughter.

He choked it down, shook hands, gave his name, and finished, “We’d better not talk more. Besides, the Indians expect me to see to my dead.”

Rufus lay about ten feet from the Langfords. It might have been ten thousand miles. Tarrant couldn’t wash him, but he straightened the body, closed the eyes, bound up the jaw with a bandanna. He drew his pocket knife and cut himself in the face and along bared arms and chest. Blood welled and dripped, nothing serious but it impressed the watchers. This was their way of mourning, not the white man’s. Surely therefore the dead was mightily important, to be avenged with cannon and saber unless his friends were appeased. At the same time, the friend who was here did not wail over him, and that too was eerie. By ones and twos and threes, the Nermernuh melted off toward the comfort of their camp.

Well, Rufus, you did have fifteen hundred years, and you enjoyed just about every day of them. You wenched and fought and sang and gorged and swilled and adventured, you were a hard worker when we needed work done and a better yet man to have at my back when we needed that and in your rough gruff style a pretty good husband and father whenever we settled down a while. T could have done without your stupid practical jokes, and by ourselves for any length of time your conversation got so boring it was physically painful, and if you saved my life now and then, I staked my own as often to pull you out of some scrape you’d blundered into, and—and a lot of gusto went out of my world tonight, Rufus. A lot of love.

False dawn chilled the east. Quanah and Peregrino were dim in sight until they reached the cabin and halted. Tarrant rose. The guards glided deferentially aside. From the ground the Langfords stared dull-eyed, wrung dry, their children uneasily asleep.

Tarrant stood waiting.

“It is decided,” said Quanah. The deep voice rolled like hoofs over the plains. Breath blew ghost-white in the cold. “Let all men know that the Nennernuh are generous. They will heed my wishes in this matter. You, the trader, and his sons may go home. You may take these captives along. They are in exchange for your comrade. He brought his death on himself, but since he was a guest, let that be his price, because the Nermernuh set high their honor. Nor shall his body be harmed, but we will give him decent burial, so that his spirit may find its way to the afterworld. I have spoken.”

A shudder passed below Tarrant’s skin. He had more than half awaited worse than this. Somehow he kept it hidden and said, “I thank you much, senor, and I will tell my people that the soul of Quanah is large.” He believed he meant it.

For an instant the chief let his stateliness drop. “Thank Peregrino. He persuaded me. Begone before sunrise.”

He beckoned to the guards. They followed him toward the Comanche camp.

A mortal might have crumbled to pieces as the pressure came off, cackled and gibbered and swooned. An immortal had more reserves, more bounce. Nonetheless Tarrant’s words trembled. “How did you do it, Peregrino?”

“I pushed your argument as far as it would go.” Again the Indian took time to build and weigh each English sentence. “He wasn’t unwilling to take it. He isn’t a fiend, you know; he’s fighting for the life of his people. But he must convince them also. I had to ... call in all my chips, call on the spirits, finally tell him that either he released you or I left him. He does value my advice as well as ... my medicine. After that it wasn’t hard to get him to release this family too. I will help him convince the warriors that was a good idea.”

“He was right when he told me to thank you,” Tarrant said. “I will for as many centuries as I’ve got left.”

Peregrine’s smile was as bleak as the eastern light. “You need not. I had my reasons and I want my price.”

Tarrant swallowed. “What is it?”

The tone mildened. “I admit I did have to save you. Maybe you and I are the only immortals in the world, now. We must join together sometime. But meanwhile—”

Peregrino reached out and caught Tarrant’s arm. “Meanwhile, here are my people,” throbbed from him. “I wasn’t born to them, but they are almost the last of us who were born to this land and are still free. They won’t be much longer. Soon they will be broken.” Even as Tyre and Carthage were, Galtia and Britannia, Rome and Byzantium, Al-bigensians and Hussites, Basques and Irish, Quebec and the Confederacy. “I told you yesterday out on the prairie, I have to stay with them to the end, reason with them, help them find a new faith and hope. Else they’ll dash themselves to pieces, like buffalo over a cliff. So I will be working among them for peace.

“I want you to do the same. As I told Quanah, letting these few go can earn us a little good will. More will die, horribly, but here is a talking point for you. You claim you are rich and have the ear of powerful men. All right, my price for these lives is that you work on your side for peace, a peace that my people can live with.”

“Ill try my best,” said Tarrant. He truly meant that. If nothing else, the day would come when Peregrino held him to account.

They clasped hands. The Indian strode off. False dawn died away and he was quickly into the shadows.

“Follow me,” Tarrant called to the Langfords. “We have to hit the trail at once.”

What sum of years had Rufus bought for these four? Two hundred, maybe?

8

IN FAR Western eyes, the Wichita Mountains were hardly more than hills; but they rose steeply, treeless, yet under the spring rains turning deeply green and starred with wild-flowers. In its valley among them a big house and its outbuildings reigned over many acres of cropland, pasture, cattle, and horses, horses.

Grass shone wet after a shower and clouds drifted white when a hired carriage left the main road for the drive to the homestead. A farmhand on a pony, who had been inspecting fences, saw it and rode to inquire. Mr. Parker wasn’t here, he said. The driver, who was likewise an Indian, explained that his passenger’s business was actually with Mr. Peregrino. Startled, the worker gave directions and stared after the vehicle. It was almost as strange to him as the autos that occasionally stuttered by.

A side track brought it to a frame cabin surrounded by flowerbeds, kitchen garden in back. On the porch a man clad in dungarees and sandals sat reading. He wore his hair in braids but was too tall and slender to be a Comanche. As the carriage approached he laid his book aside, sprang down the steps, and stood waiting.

It stopped. A white man climbed out. His clothes bespoke prosperity only if you looked closely at material and tailoring. For a moment he and the dweller were still. Then they ran to grip hands and look into each other’s eyes.

“At last,” Peregrine said, not quite evenly. “Bienvenido, amigo.”

“I’m sorry to have been this long about coming,” Tarrant answered. “It happened I was in the Orient on business when your letter reached San Francisco. After I got home, I thought a telegram might draw too much notice. You’d written to me years ago, when I sent you my_ address, that just that bit of mail set tongues wagging. So I simply caught the first train east.”

“It’s all right. Come in, come in.” With long practice behind it the English flowed easily, colloquially. “If your driver wants, he can go on to the big house. They’ll take care of him. He can cart us to town—how about day after tomorrow? I’ve things of my own to see to, including stuff I’d like shipped after me. If that’s okay with you.”

“Of course, Peregrino. Damn near anything you may want is.” Having spoken to the other man, Tarrant took a Gladstone bag from the carriage and accompanied his host inside.

The cabin held four rooms, neat, clean, sunny, austerely furnished except for a substantial number of books, a gramophone, a collection of mostly classical records, and, in the bedchamber, certain articles of religion. “You’ll sleep here,” Peregrino said. “I’ll roll up in the back yard. No, not a peep out of you. You’re my guest. Besides, it’ll be kind of like old days. I often do it anyway, in fact.”

Tarrant glanced around. “You live alone, then?”

“Yes. It seemed wrong to me, getting married and having kids when I knew that in the end I’d fake something and desert them. Life among the free tribes was different. How about you?”

Tarrant’s mouth pinched together. “My latest wife died last year, young. Consumption. We tried a desert climate, everything, but— Well, we had no children, and this identity has been around nearly as long as is safe. I’m making ready for a change.”

They settled themselves in the front room on wooden chairs. Above Peregrine’s head a chromolithograph gazed from its frame at Tarrant, a Rembrandt self-portrait. Bad though the copy was, mortal sorrow lingered in those eyes. From his bag Tarrant had taken a bottle of Scotch. Illegally, he filled both glasses his host had fetched, He also offered Havana cigars. Mere creature comforts are still comforts.

“How’ve you been doing otherwise?” Peregrino inquired.

“Busy,” Tarrant said. “Not sure how rich I am—I’d have to go through the books of several aliases—but it’s a heap, and bigger every day. One thing I want you for, besides yourself, is to help me think what’s most worth spending it on. How about you?”

“Peaceful, on the whole. I cultivate my patch of land, make things in my woodworking shop, counsel my congregation—native church, so I’m not really like a white minister—and teach in a school. I’ll be sorry to leave that. Oh, and I read a lot, trying to learn about your world.”

“And I suppose you’re Quanah’s advisor.”

“Well, yes. But look, don’t think I’m the power behind bis sad little throne or anything like that. He’s done it all himself. He’s a remarkable man. Among whites he’d have been a, a Lincoln or Napoleon. The most I can claim credit for is making some things possible, or at least easier, for him. He went ahead and did them.”

Tarrant nodded, remembering— The grand alliance of Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, Quanah its paramount chief. The bloody repulse at Adobe Walls, the year of warfare and manhunt that followed, and the last starvelings, led by Quanah, going onto the reservation in 1875. The good intentions of an Indian agent three years afterward, when he arranged for the Comanches to ride out under military escort on a final buffalo hunt, and no buffalo remained. And yet, and yet—

“Where is be now?” Tarrant asked.

“In Washington,” Peregrino said. Receiving a look of surprise: “He goes there fairly often. He is our spokesman, for all our tribes. And, well, too bad about Mr. McKinley, but that did put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. He and Quanah know each other, they’re Mends.”

He smoked for a while in silence. The ageless are seldom hurried. At length he went on: “Among us Quanah’s more than a rather wealthy former. He’s a headman and judge, he holds us together. The whites don’t like the peyote nor his clutch of wives, but they put up with it because he doesn’t just keep us going, by doing so he keeps their consciences at ease. Not that he’s any sobersides. A genial sort, apt to tell stories or use language that’d make a sailor blush. But he is ... reconciliation. He calls himself Quanah Parker, in memory of his mother. Lately he talks about having her bones and his sister’s moved here, so they can rest beside his. Oh, I don’t blinker myself. We Indians have a steep, tough road to walk, and a lot of us will foil by the wayside. But Quanah’s gotten.us started.”

“And you brought him to that,” Tarrant said.

“Well, I worked against the prophets, I used what influence I had toward getting peace into the minds of the People. And you, from your side, kept your promise.”

Tarrant grinned crookedly. It had cost. You couldn’t simply buy politicians, you had to buy or push men who in their turn could strike deals with the grim incorruptibles. But Quanah did not go to jail or hang.

“I suspect you’re too modest,” Tarrant said. “Never mind. We’ve done our work. Maybe we’ve justified our long lives; I don’t know. So you’re ready to travel?”

Peregrino nodded. “I can’t do anything more here that others can’t whom I’ve helped train. And I have been on this reservation more than a quarter century. Quanah’s covered for me, kept me pretty much tucked in a corner, discouraged those who remember from talking to outsiders about me. But it isn’t like the prairie. Folks are wondering. If any real word leaked to the newspapers—ah, that worry’s at an end. I’ll leave him a letter, and my blessing.”

He looked out the window. It faced west. His hand lifted to his lips the brew of a people who themselves were once barbarians, southward raiding, northward retreating in war after war for their freedom. He said, “It’s time for me to start over.”  

XV Coming Together

1

RAIN ROARED. It washed away heat and grime, turned the air into flying, stinging gray. When lightning flashed, the hue became brief mercury, while thunder trampled down noise of motors, horns, water spurting from wheels. One bolt stabbed the new Empire State Building, but dissolved in the steel web under the masonry. Though the hour was early afternoon, headlights glimmered on cars and buses. Even mid town, pedestrians became few, trudging hunched beneath umbrellas or dodging from marquee to awning. Taxis were not to be had.

Uptown, Laurace Macandal’s street lay altogether bare. Ordinarily it bore life enough, and after dark bustled and glittered. Several night clubs had sprung up among the neighborhood’s modest tenements, small shops, and this old mansion she had renovated. Hard times or no, white folks still came to Harlem for jazz, dance, comedy, a little freedom from care such as they told each other Negroes were born to. Just now, everybody was inside, waiting out the weather.

She glanced at a clock and beckoned to one of the maids. “Listen well, Gindy,” she said. “You haven’t been long in service, and something very important will happen today. I don’t want you making mistakes.”

“Yes, Mama-lo.” Awe shivered in the girl’s voice.

Laurace shook her head. “That, for instance. I have told you before, I am only ‘Mama-lo’ at holy times.”

“I, I’m sorry, ... ma’m.” Tears blurred sight of the woman who stood before the girl—a woman who looked young and yet somehow old as time; tall, slim, in a maroon dress of quiet elegance, a silver snake bracelet on her left wrist and at her throat a golden pendant whose intertwined circle and triangle surrounded a ruby; too dark to be called high yellow, but with narrow face, arched nose, hair straight and stiff. “I keeps forgettin’.”

Laurace smiled and reached to pat the maid’s hand. “Don’t be afraid, dear.” Her voice, which could be a trumpet, sang like a violin. “You’re young, with much to learn. Mainly I want you to understand that my visitor today is special. That’s why no men will be around except Joseph, and he’s to stay with the car. You will help in the kitchen. Don’t leave it. No, there is nothing wrong with the way you serve at table, and you’re prettier than Conchita, but she ranks higher. Rank must be earned, by service as well as faith and study. Your time will come, I’m sure. Mainly, Cindy, you are to keep silence. You may not speak a single word to anybody, ever, about who my guest was or anything else you might happen to see or hear. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’m.”

“Good. Now be off with you, child. Oh, and do work harder on your English. You’ll never get anywhere in the world unless you sound educated. Are educated. Master Thomas tells me you aren’t deing so well at arithmetic, either. If you need extra help, ask him for it. Teaching isn’t just his job, it’s his calling.”

“Y-yes, ma’m.”

Laurace inclined her head and half closed her big eyes, as if listening. “Your good angel hovers near,” she said. “Go in peace.”

The girl trotted off, pert in her starched uniform, radiant in her sudden joy.

Alone, Laurace prowled about, picked up objects, fiddled with them, put them down again. She had made this room Victorian, oak wainscots, heavy furniture, thick carpet and drapes, glass-fronted cabinets for carefully chosen curios, a shelf of books still more select, on top of which rested the white bust of a man who had been black. Electric bulbs in a glass chandelier were dim; rain’s twilight crowded close. The effect was impressive without being overly strange.

When, from a bow window, she saw the car she had dispatched arrive at the curb, she set restlessness aside and straightened. Most would depend on what impression she herself made.

The chauffeur got out, unfolded a large umbrella, came around to the right side and opened the rear door. He escorted his passenger to the porch, where he rang the bell for her. Laurace didn’t see that, but she heard and knew. She likewise knew of the two maids who received the visitor, took her coat, and guided her down the hall.

As she entered the room, Laurace went to meet her. “Welcome, welcome,” she said, and clasped both hands in hers.

Clara Rosario’s fingers responded only slightly, as did her mouth to the smile offered her. She seemed alien, her own finery a little too bright-colored. Though her hair was marcelled midnight, skin tawny, lips full, she was of white race, hazel-eyed, straight-nosed, wide across the cheekbones. Laurace stood three inches higher. Nonetheless Clara carried herself boldly, as well she might, given a figure like hers.

“Thank you,” she said, with a staccato accent. Glancing about: “Quite a place you got here.”

“We’ll be private in the sanctum,” said Laurace. “It has a liquor cabinet. Or would you prefer tea or coffee? I’ll order it brought.”

“Uh, thanks, but I could use a drink right now.” Clara laughed nervously.

“You can stay for dinner, can’t you? I promise you a cordon bleu meal. By then we should have completed our ... business, and be able to relax and enjoy it.”

“Well, not too late. They expect me there, you know? I jolly them along and— Could be trouble, too, for me to head off. Men are kind of on edge these days, wondering what’s going to go wrong next, you know?”

“Besides, we don’t want anybody wondering what you’re up to,” Laurace agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll send you back in plenty of time.” She took Clara’s arm. “This way, please.”

When the door had shut behind them, Clara stood a while, tensed. Between curtained windows, the smaller room was wholly foreign; Straw mats -covered the floor, leopard pelts the curiously shaped chairs. Two African masks dominated one wall. On a shelf between them rested a human skull. Opposite stretched an eight-foot python skin. At the farther end stood a marble altar. Upon its red-bordered white cloth were a knife, a crystal bowl full of water, and a bronze candlestick with seven twisty branches. Lighting was from a single heavily shaded lamp on a table beside silver boxes for cigarettes and matches and an incense holder whose smoke turned breath pungent. Almost lost in their everydayness were the cabinet and console radio that flanked the entrance, or the coffee table which near the middle held glasses, ice bucket, seltzer, carafe, ashtrays, small dishes of delicacies.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Laurace. “You must have seen magicians’ lairs in the past.”

Clara nodded. “A few times,” she gulped. “You mean you—”

“Well, yes and no. These things aren’t for use; they’re meant to convey sacredness, power, mystery. Also,” Laurace added matter-of-fact!y, “nobody would dare open that door without my leave, under any circumstances whatsoever. We can talk in perfect safety.”

Clara rallied. She would not have endured through her centuries without ample courage; and her hostess offered nothing but friendship, of a sort and provided it be possible. “I guess we’ve gone mighty different ways, you and me.”

“Time we bring them together. Would you like some music? I can get two good stations.”

“No, let’s just talk.” Clara grimaced. “I don’t need music all the time, you know? I run a high-class house.”

“Poor dear.” Much sorrow was in the gentleness. “You don’t have it so easy, do you? Have you ever?”

Clara lifted her head. “I get by. How about that drink?”

She chose a strong bourbon-and-branch, together with a cigarette, and settled onto the sofa before the table. Laurace poured a glass of Bordeaux and sat down on a chair across from her. For a space there was silence, apart from the dulled noise of the rainstorm.

Then Clara said, half defiantly, “Well, what about it? What are we going to talk about?”

“Suppose you start,” Laurace answered, her words continuing soft. “Whatever you want. This is just the first of pur real meetings. We’ll need many more. We have everything to learn about each other, and decide, and finally do.”

Clara drew breath. “Okay,” she said fast. “How did you find me? When you showed up at my apartment and, and told me you’re immortal too—“ It had not brought on hysteria, but Laurace had soon realized she’d better go. Afterward it had been a matter of three careful telephone conversations, until now. “I thought at first you were crazy, you know? But you didn’t act it and how could a crazy person have found out? Later I wondered if you wanted to blackmail me, but that didn’t make sense either. Only ... all right, how do you know what I am, and how can 1 know you really are what you claim?” She raised her glass in a jerky motion and drank deep. “I don’t want to offend you, but, well, I’ve got to be more sure.”

“Naturally you’re cautious,” Laurace said. “Do you think I’m not? We’ve both had to be, or die. But look around you. Would something like this belong to any criminal such as you ever knew?”

“N-no... Unless the prophet of a cult— But I never heard of you, and I would have, as rich as you must be.”

“I’m not. Nor is the organization I lead. It does require me to maintain the appearance of, m-m, solidity. As to your questions, though;” Laurace sipped of her wine. Her voice grew slow, almost dreamy:

“I don’t know when I was born. If any record was made, I couldn’t tell where to find it, and probably it’s long lost. Who cared about a pickaninny slave? But from what I remember, and what I deduced after I began to study, I must be about two hundred years old. That isn’t much, set against your age. Fourteen hundred, did you say? But of course I wondered, more and more desperately, whether I was quite alone in the world or not.

“Any others like me must be hiding the fact like me. Men can go into a variety of occupations, lives. Women have fewer opportunities. When at last I had the means to search, it made sense to begin with the trade that a woman might very well, even most likely, be forced into.”

“Whoredom,” said Clara starkly.

“I told you before, I pass no judgments. We do what we must, to survive. One such as you could have left a trail, a trail often broken but perhaps possible to follow, given time and patience. After all, she wouldn’t expect anybody would think to try. Newspaper files, police and court records, tax rolls and other registers where prostitution had been legal, old photographs—things like that, gathered, sifted, compared. Some of my agents have been private detectives, some have been ... followers of mine. None knows why I wanted this information. Slowly, out of countless fragments, a few parts fitted together. It seemed there had been a woman who did well in Chicago back in the nineties till she got into some kind of trouble, curiously similar to one in New York later, in New Orleans later still, again in New York—”

Clara made a slicing gesture. “Never mind,” she snapped. “I get the idea. I should have remembered, in fact. It happened before.”

“What?”

“Back in Konstantinopolis—Istanbul—oh, Lord, nine hundred years ago, it must have been. A man tracked me down pretty much the same way.”

Laurace started to rise, sank back, leaned forward. “Another immortal?” she cried. “A man? What became of .him?”

“I don’t know.” Belligerently: “I wasn’t glad to be found then, and I’m not sure I am now. You are a woman, I guess that makes a difference, but you’ve got to convince me, you know?”

“A man,” Laurace whispered. “Who was he? What was he like?”

“Two. He had a partner. They were traders out of Russia. I didn’t want to go off with them, so I shook them, and never heard anything since. Probably they’re dead. Let’s not talk it about it yet, okay?”

The rain-silence descended.

“What a horror of a life you have had,” Laurace finally said.

Clara grinned on the left side of her mouth. “Oh, I’m tough. Between the times I work, when I live easy on what Fve earned and saved—or sometimes, yeah, I’ve married money—it’s good enough that I want to keep going.”

“I should think—you told me you’ve mostly been a, a madam since you came to America—isn’t that better than it ... used to be for you?”

“Not always.”

SHE HATED sleeping where she worked. In Chicago she had an apartment five blocks away. Usually she could go home about two or three A.M., and the afternoons were her own; then business was slack enough for Sadie to manage. She’d go shopping downtown, or enjoy the sunshine and flowers in Jackson Park, or visit one of the museums built after the Columbian Exposition, or ride a trolley out into the countryside, all sorts of things, maybe with a couple of the girls, maybe by herself, but always ladylike.

Gas lamps flared. Pavement stretched ash-gray, empty as the moon. Lightly though she walked, her footfalls sounded loud in her ears. The two men who came out of an alley were tike more shadows until they fell in on either side of her.

She choked down a gasp. Fear chilled and keened. He on the right was a hulk, bristle-chinned and smelly. He on the left was hardly more than a boy. He had no color in his face except for the pus yellow the lamps gave it, and from time to time he giggled.

“Hello, Mrs. Ross,” the big man said. His voice was gritty. “Nice evening, ain’t it?”

Fool, she raged at herself, fool, I should have been careful, I should have spent what a bodyguard would cost, but no, I couldn’t be bothered, I had to save every cent toward my next years of freedom— In a way that was ancient with her, she killed the fear. She couldn’t afford it.

“I don’t know you,” she said. “Let me be.”

“Aw, we know you. Mr. Santoni, he showed us on the street when you was passing by. He asked us we should have a little talk with you.”

“Go, before I call a policeman.”

The boy tittered. “Shut up, Lew,” said the big man. “You get too impatient.” To her: “Now don’t be like that, Mrs. Ross. All we want to do is talk with you a while. You just come along quiet.”

“I’ll talk to your boss, Mr. Santoni, I’ll speak to him again if he insists.” Buy time. “Later today, yes.”

“Oh, no. Not so soon. He says you been real unreasonable.”

He wants to add my business to his string, he wants to end every independent house in the city, we’re to do his will and pay him his tribute. Christ, before it’s too late, send us a man with a sawed-off shotgun!

It was already too late for her. “He wants Lew and me should have a little talk with you first. He can’t waste no more of his time arguing, you got me? Just come along quiet now, and you’ll be all right. Lew, put that goddamn shiv back.”

She tried to run. A long arm snapped her to a halt. The way they pinioned her was effective; further resistance could have led to a dislocated shoulder. Around the next corner waited a cabriolet and driver. The horse hadn’t far to go before it reached a certain building.

Several times the big man-must restrain the boy. Afterward he would sponge her, speak soothingly, give her a smoke, before they resumed. Drawing on past experience, she avoided damage that would be permanent, on her if not on a mortal. They actually let her out of the cab in front of a doctor’s house.

The hospital staff were amazed at how fast she healed, quite without marks. While they did not interrogate her, they understood more or less what had happened and expected it would be a very meek, obliging, frequently smiling person who left them. Well, a body so extraordinary might generate a personality equally jesilient.

Just the same, Carlotta Ross cut her losses, sold whatever she could and dropped from sight. She had never heard of the rival who later bushwhacked Santoni. She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually. She was content to start over elsewhere, forewarned.

“I GET along, though. I’m used to the life. Pretty good at it, in fact.” Clara laughed. “By now, I’d better be, huh?”

“Do you loathe all men?” Laurace asked.

“Don’t pity me! ... Sorry, you mean well, I shouldn’t’ve flared up. No, I’ve met some that I guess were decent. Not usually hi my line of work, though, and not for me. I don’t have to take them on any more myself; just take then-money. I couldn’t have anybody for real anyway. Can I? Can you?”

“Not forever, obviously. Unless someday we find others of our kind.” Laurace saw the expression before her. “Others we like.”

“Mind if I have a refill of this drink? I’ll help myself.” Clara did, and took a cigarette from her purse. Meanwhile she asked, no longer aggressive, almost shy: “What about you, Laurace? How do you feel? You were a slave once, you’ve said. That must have been as bad as anything I ever knew. Maybe worse. Christ knows how many slaves I’ve seen in my life.”

“Sometimes it was very bad. Other times it was, oh, comfortable. But never free. At last I ran away. White people who were against slavery got me to Canada. There I found ‘ work as a housemaid.”

Clara studied Laurace before murmuring, “You don’t talk or behave like a servant.”

“I changed. My employers helped me. The Dufours, they were: kindly, mildly prosperous, in Montreal. When they saw I wanted to better myself, they arranged schooling for me—after working hours, and servants worked long hours in those days, so it took years—but I’ll always be grateful to the Dufour family. I learned correct English, reading, writing, arithmetic. On my own, consorting with habitants, I picked up French of a sort. I turned into quite a bookworm, as far as circumstances allowed. That gave me a patchwork education; but as the years went on, I gradually filled many of the gaps in it.

“First I had to master memory. I was finding it harder and harder to pull whatever I wanted out of such a ragbag of recollections. It was becoming hard to think. I had to do something. You faced the same problem, I daresay.”

Clara nodded. “Awful, for maybe fifty years. I don’t know what I did or how, can’t recall much and everything’s jumbled. Might have gotten into real trouble and died, except—okay, I fell into the hands of a pimp. He, and later his son, they did my thinking for me. They weren’t bad guys, by their lights, and of course my not growing old made me special, maybe magical, so they didn’t dare abuse me, by the standards of the, uh, eighth century Near East, it must have been. I think they never let on to anybody else, but moved me to a different city every few years. Meanwhile, somehow, bit by bit, I got myself sorted out, and when the son died I felt ready to strike off on my own again. I wonder if most immortals aren’t that lucky. Somebody insane or witless wouldn’t last long without a protector, most times and places. Would she?”

“I’ve thought that myself. I was luckier still. By the early twentieth century we had a science of psychology. Crude, largely guess work, but the idea that the mind can be understood and fixed makes a huge difference. I found autohyp-nosis did wonders— We’ll talk about this later. Oh, we have so much to talk about.”

“I guess you never got too badly confused, then.”

“No, I kept control throughout. Of course, I moved around. It hurt to leave the Dufours, but people were wondering why I didn’t age like them. Also, more and more I wanted independence, true independence. I went from job to job, acquired skills, saved my money. In 1900 I moved back to the States. There a colored person was less conspicuous, and here in New York you can go as unnoticed as you care to. I opened a small cafe. It did well—I am a good cook—and in time I was able to start a larger place, with entertainment. The war boomed business. Afterward Prohibition made profits larger yet. White customers; I kept another, less fancy den for blacks. One of my white regulars became a friend. At City Hall Be saw to it that I didn’t pay off exorbitantly or have to worry about the mob muscling in.”

Clara considered her surroundings. “You didn’t buy this with the proceeds from two speakeasies,” she said.

Laurace smiled. “Shrewd, aren’t you? Well, the truth is that presently I took up with a pretty big-time rumrunner. White, but—”

DONALD O’BRYAN loved wind and water. At home he filled shelves with books about sailing ships, hung pictures of them on the walls, built models of them whose exquisite detail seemed impossible for such large hands. Besides the power cruiser he used in his business, he kept a sloop on Long Island Sound. When he started taking his black “housekeeper” on day trips, she went unchallenged by members of the yacht club. Everybody liked Don but nobody who was smart messed with him.

Heeled over on a broad reach, the boat rushed through swoosh and sparkle. Gulls soared white above.the wake, into which he had merrily cast scraps from lunch. When you ran before the wind, its booming was hushed to a cradle song and the air grew almost snug, so that you caught the live salt smell of it.

Reaching, a steersman must be careful. Don had secured the boom against an accidental jibe, but control remained tricky. He managed without effort. His body belonged where he was. His being had turned elsewhere.

Between watch cap and pea jacket, the snub-nosed face had lost its earlier cheerfulness. “Why won’t you marry me?” he pleaded. “I want to make an honest woman of you, really I do.”

“This is honest enough for me,” she laughed.

“Flora, I love you. It’s not only that you’re grand in bed, though you are, you are. It’s ... your soul. You’re brave and dear and a thousand times more bright than me. It’s proud Fd be to have you bear my children.”

Humor died. She shook her head. “We’re too different.”

“Was the Queen of Sheba too different from King Solomon?”

“In this country she would be.”

“Is it the law you fret about? Listen, not every state forbids marriage between the races, and the rest have to respect it once it’s happened where it’s allowed. That’s in the Constitution.”

The same Constitution that says a man can’t take a glass of beer after a hot day’s work, she thought. “No, it’s what we’d have to live with. Hatred. Isolation from both your people and mine. I couldn’t do that to our children.”

“Not everywhere,” he argued. “Listen, you’ve heard me before, but listen. I won’t keep my trade forever. In a few more years I’ll have more money piled together than we could -spend in a hundred. Because I am really a careful, saving man, in spite of liking a good time. I’ll take you to Ireland. To France. You always wanted to see France, you’ve said, and what I saw made me want to go back, during the war though it was. We can settle down wherever we like, in some sweet country where they don’t care what the color of our skins may be, only the color of our hearts.”

“Wait till then, and we’ll talk about this.” Maybe by then I can bring myself to it, to seeing time eat him hollow. Maybe I’ll be sure by then that he won’t grow bitter when I tell him—because I can never deceive him, not in any way that matters—and will even be glad to have me there in my strength, holding his hand as he ties on his deathbed.

“No, now! We can keep it secret if you want.”

She stared across the dancing waves. “I can’t do that either, darling. Please don’t ask me to.”

He frowned. “Is it you fear being the wife of a jailbird? I swear to God they’ll never take me alive. Not that I expect they’ll catch me at all.”

She looked back at him. A lock of hair curled brown from beneath the cap and fluttered across his brow. How like a boy he seemed, a small boy full of love and earnestness. She remembered sons she had borne and buried. “What difference would it make whether a justice of the peace mumbled a few words over us, if we aren’t free to stand together in sight of everybody?”

“I want to give you my vows.”

“You have given them, dearest. I could weep for the joy of that.”

“Well, there is this too,” he said, rougher-toned. “I don’t plan on dying, but we never know, and I want to make sure I leave you provided for. Won’t you give my heart that ease?”

“I don’t need an inheritance. Thank you, thank you, but I don’t.” She grimaced. “Nor do I want more to do with lawyers and the government than I can possibly help.”

“Um. So.” He gnawed his lip for a minute. “Well, I can understand that. All right.” His smile burst forth like the sun between clouds. “Not that I’m giving up on making you Mrs. O’Bryan, mind you. I’ll wear you down, I will. Meanwhile, however, I’ll make arrangements. I don’t trust bankers much anyway, and this is a profitable time to liquidate my real estate holdings. We’ll put it in gold, and you’ll know where the hoard is.”

“Oh, Don!” The money was nothing, the wish was the whole world and half the stars. She scrambled to her knees in the cockpit and pressed herself against him.

He bent over. His left arm closed around her shoulders, his mouth sought hers. “Flora,” he said huskily. “My beautiful strange Flora.”

“—WE LOVED each other. I’ve never been afraid to love, Clara. You should learn how.”

The other woman stubbed out her cigarette and reached for a fresh one. “What happened?”

Voice and visage grew blank. “A revenue boat intercepted him in 1924. When he bade fair to outrun them, they opened fire. He was killed.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

Laurace shook herself. “Well, we’re familiars of death, you and I.” Once more calm: “He left me a quarter million in negotiable instruments. I needed to get away, sold my night clubs and spent the next four years traveling. First Ireland, England, France. In France I unproved my French and studied about Africa. I went there, Liberia, then the colonies along that coast, hoping to discover something about my ancestors. I made friends in the bush and added to what I’d learned from books, more of how those tribes live, what they live by, faith, ritual, secret societies, tradition. That caused me to return by way of Haiti, where I also spent a while.”

Clara’s eyes widened. “Voodoo?”

“Voudun,” Laurace corrected. “Not black magic. Religion. What has sustained human beings through some of the crudest history on earth, and still does in some of its most hideous poverty and misrule. I remembered people here at home, and came back to Harlem.”

“I see,” Clara breathed. “You did start a cult.”

Momentarily, Laurace was grim. “And you’re/ thinking, ‘What a nice racket.’ It isn’t like that in the least.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean—”

“You did.” Laurace sighed. “Never mind. A natural thought. I don’t blame you. But the fact is, I had no need to prey on superstition. Investments I’d made before going abroad had done well. I didn’t like the look of the stock market, and pulled out in time. Oh, by myself I’d be quite comfortably off.” Seriously: “There were my people, though. There was also the matter of my own long-range survival. And, now, yours.”

Clara showed near-bewilderment. “What’ve you done, then, if you haven’t founded a church?”

Laurace spoke quickly, impersonally: “Churches and their leaders are too conspicuous, especially if they achieve some success. Likewise revolutionary movements. Not that I wish for a revolution. I know how little bloodshed ever buys. That must be still more true of you.”

“I never gave it your kind of thought,” Clara said humbly. Her cigarette smoldered unnoticed between her fingers.

“What I am organizing is—call it a society, somewhat on the African and Haitian mode!. Remember, those outfits aren’t criminal, nor are they for pleasure; they are parts of the whole, the cultures, bone and muscle as well as spirit. Mine does contain elements of both religion and magic. In Canada I was exposed to Catholicism, which is one root of voudun. I don’t tefl anybody what church he should go to; but I open for him a vision of being not only a Christian, but belonging to the whole living universe. I don’t lay curses or give blessings, but I say words and lead rites in which I am—not a goddess or Messiah, not even a saint, but she who is closer than most to understanding, to power.

“Oh, we have a practical aspect too. A Haitian would know what I mean by the surname I’ve taken. But I don’t call for gaining control—not by vote, like the Republicans and Democrats, or by violence, like the Communists, or by persuasion, like the Socialists. No, my politics is individuals quietly getting together under leadership they have freely accepted, helping each other, building a life and a future for themselves.”

Clara shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t quite see what you mean.”

“Don’t worry.” Warmth was in the reply. “For the time being, think of it on the spiritual side as offering my followers something better than booze and coke. As for the material part, now that breadlines have gotten long, more and more hear about us and come to us, black, white, Puerto Rican, every race. Openly, we’re just another among hundreds of volunteer groups doing poor relief. Quietly, as newcomers prove trustworthy and advance through our degrees of initiation—we take them into a community they can belong to, work in, believe in, modestly but adequately and with hope. In return, when I ask for it, they help me.”

Laurace paused before continuing: “I can’t explain it much better than that, today. You’ll learn. Truth to tell, I’m learning too. I never laid out any grand scheme, I fumbled my way forward, and still do. Maybe this will crash to ruin, or decay. But maybe—I can’t foresee. Immortal leadership ought to make an important difference, but how to use it, I’m not yet sure. About all that I feel reasonably sure of is that we have to keep ourselves from being noticeable.”

“Can you?”

“We can try. ‘We’ includes you, I trust.” Laurace lifted her wine glass. “Here’s to tomorrow.”

Clara joined in the toast but remained troubled. “What are your plans for ... for the near future?”

“Considerable,” Laurace answered. “And you can do a great deal. You save your money, right? Well, we, the society, we’re stretched thin. We badly need operating capital. Opportunities go begging. For instance, since the crash, stocks are at rock-bottom prices.”

“Because we’ve got a depression. I thought you said you left the market.”

Laurace laughed. “If I’d foreseen exactly what would happen two years ago October, I’d have sold short at the right point and now own Wall Street. But I am not a sorceress—nor do I claim to be—and I’ve learned to play cautious. That doesn’t mean timid or unthinking. Look, depressions don’t last forever. People will always want homes, cars, a thousand different good, solid things; and sooner or later, they’ll again be able to buy them. It may take fifty years to collect our profit, but immortals can wait.”

“I see.” Clara’s features came aglow. “Okay. With that to look forward to, I can stand another fifty years in the life.”

“You needn’t. Times are changing.”

“What men want won’t change.”

“No, though the laws may. No matter. Clara, shake free of that sordidness as fast as you can unload.”

“What for? What else can I do? I don’t know anything except—“ With forlorn determination: “I will not turn into a parasite on you. I won’t.”

“Oh, no,” Laurace answered. “We take no parasites in. Quite aside from the money you contribute, you’ll earn your keep. You may not appreciate it yet, but you have fourteen hundred years of experience behind you, with the insight, the intuition, that must have brought. Yours may well be a bitter wisdom, but we need it.”

“What for?”

“For the building of our strength.”

“Huh? Wait, you said—”

“I said I do not intend to overthrow the government, take over the country, anything stupid and ephemeral like that,” Laurace declared. “My aim is the exact opposite. I want to build something so strong that with it we can say ‘No’ to the slavers, the lynch mobs, and the lords of state.

“Men seized my father, bore him away in chains, and sold him. They hounded me when I escaped, and would have caught me if other men had not broken their law. A few years ago, they shot down the man I loved, for nothing worse than providing a pleasure they said nobody must have. At that, he was lucky. He might have died earner, in their damned useless war. I £ould go on, but why? You could tell more, as much longer as you’ve lived.

“What’s brought this death and misery, but that men have had power over other men?

“Don’t mistake me. I am not an anarchist. Human beings are so made that the few will always rule the many. Sometimes they mean well—in spite of everything, I believe the founders of the United States did—but that doesn’t long outlive them.

“The only partial security we who want to lead our own lives will ever have, we must create from within us. Oneness. Ongoing resolution. The means to live independent of the overlords. Only by guiding the poor and helpless toward this can we immortals win it for ourselves.

“Are you with me?”

XVI Niche

THE HOTEL was new and rather soulless, but it stood near Old Town, with a fine tenth-floor view of roofs and narrow streets climbing to the stones of the Citadel. That mass stood darkling athwart stars dimmed by lamps and lightful panes. On the west side, the comer suite overlooked modem Ankara, Ulus Square, the boulevard, radiance glaring and flashing, opulent storefronts, crowded sidewalks, hasty automobiles. Heat.of a day in late summer lingered, and the windows stood open to catch whatever coolness crept in off the river and hinterland. Height muffled traffic noise, even car horns, to an undertone hardly more loud than the large fan whining on its stand.

For the American patron and his dinner guest, room service had set an elegant table and carried up an excellent meal. Through most of it they had sparred with small talk. The language in which they could most readily converse turned out to be Greek. Now they were at the stage of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs.

Oktay Saygun leaned back, held his Drambuie to the light before he sipped, creased his jowls with a smile. He was a stocky, paunchy man, his nose the single impressive thing about him. While not shabby, his business suit had clearly been years in use and inexpensive when bought. “Ah,” he murmured, “delicious. You are a most knowledgeable gentleman, Kyrie McCready.”

“I am glad you enjoyed this,” replied the other. “I hope you feel more at ease with me.”

Saygun cocked his head in birdlike fashion, if the bird be a well-fed owl or parrot. David McCready was two or three centimeters taller than he, lean and timber. Though the dark hawk visage showed only geniality, the eyes—oddly Levantine for the name he bore—met his own and searched. “Did I give you the opposite impression?” Saygun asked. “I’m sorry. What a poor return for your hospitality. Not my intention at all, I assure you.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you. A telephone call, an invitation from a perfect stranger. I might want to lure you into some criminal scheme. Or I might be a foreign agent, a spy. These days they must swarm in every capital.”

Saygun chuckled. “Who would bother to subvert a little bureaucrat in the purely civilian archives? If anything, you would be the endangered one. Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants.”

“Still, this is an uneasy time.”

Saygun turned grave. His look wandered out the window, nightward. “Indeed,” he said low. “An evil time. Herr Hitler was not content with engulfing Austria, was he? I fear Mister Chamberlain and Monsieur Daladier will let him work his will on Czechoslovakia too. And nearer home, the ambitions.of the Tsars live on in Red Russia.” He turned his attention back, took forth a handkerchief, wiped his narrow brow and sleeked down his black hair. “Pardon me. You Americans prefer optimism always, not so? Well, whatever happens, civilization will survive. It has thus far, no matter what changing guises it wears.”

“You are quite well-informed, Kyrie Saygun,” McCready said slowly. “And something of a philosopher, it seems.”

The Turk shrugged. “One reads the newspapers. One listens to the radio. The coffee shops have become a Babel of politics. I seek occasional relief hi old books. They help me tell the transient from the enduring.”

He drained his glass. McCready refilled it and asked, “Cigar?”

“Why, yes, thank you very much. That humidor of yours appears to hold promise.”

McCready fetched two Havanas, a clipper which he offered first to his guest, and a lighter. As he settled himself again, his voice shivered the least bit. “May I get to my business now?”

“Certainly. You would have been welcome to do so earlier. I assumed you, wished to become acquainted. Or, if I may put it thus, to feel me out.”

McCready’s grin was wry. “You did the better job of that, on me.”

“Oh? I simply enjoyed a pleasant conversation with an interesting person. Everybody is fascinated by your wonderful country, and your career as a businessman has been remarkable.”

McCready started his visitor’s cigar for him and became occupied with his own. “We went on at length about me, when talk didn’t ramble over ordinary matters. The upshot was that scarcely anything got said about you.”

“There was nothing to say, really. I am as dull and insignificant a man as you will ever find. I cannot imagine you maintaining any interest in me.” Saygun drank smoke, rolled it around his tongue, exhaled luxuriously, chased it with a taste of liqueur. “However, at the moment I am glad. Pleasures like this seldom come to a minor official in a routine-bounded department of government. Turkey is a poor country, and President Ataturk was rather ruthless about corruption.”

McCready’s tobacco kindled less smoothly. “My friend, you are anything but dull. You’ve proved yourself very shrewd, very skillful at hiding whatever you want to hide. Well, it’s no great surprise. People in our situation who don’t have those qualities, or can’t acquire them, probably don’t last long.”

Beady eyes widened. “’Our’ situation? What might that be?”

“Still cautious, are you? Understandable. If you are what I hope, that’s an old, old habit. If not, then you are wondering whether I am a confidence man or a madman.”

“No, no. Please. Your newspaper advertisement last year attracted me. Enigmatic, but somehow ... genuine. Indeed, wonderfully phrased.”

“Thank you. Though composing it was largely the work of my partner. He has a gift for words.”

“I take it you placed the advertisement in many places around the world?” McCready nodded and Saygun continued: “I suppose not only the language but the text, the message, varied according to region. Here—how did it go?—Those who have lived so long that our forefathers are like brothers and comrades to them—yes, that appeals to a Near Easterner, a citizen of an ancient land. Yet the average person who chances to see it gets the impression that a scholar is interested in meeting old people who have studied and meditated upon history, with a view to exploring whatever wisdom may be theirs. Did many respond?”

“No. Most who did were not quite right in the head or tried to cadge money. You were the only one in this country whom my agent decided I might care to follow up.”

“It has taken you a considerable time. I had begun to think your organization was not serious, perhaps a hoax.”

“I had to study a number of reports. Most I discarded. Then I started off around the world. This is my third interview.”

“I gather an agent of yours met those who answered the advertisements everywhere that they were placed. Clearly, you have substantial resources, Kyrie McCready. For a purpose you have yet to reveal to me and, I daresay, have told none of the agents.”

The American nodded. “I gave them certain secret criteria to apply.” Peering through the smoke: “The most important was that a respondent look young and in good health, even though the call seemingly was for old people. I explained that I don’t want the fact publicized but I am searching for natural-born geniuses, with knowledge and insight far beyond their years, especially in history. With minds like that from different civilizations brought into contact, we may found a real science of it, beyond anything that thinkers like Spengler and Toynbee have proposed. The agents doubtless consider me a crackpot on this subject. However, I pay well.”

“I see. Have the previous two whom you met proven satisfactory?”

“You know that isn’t what I am really searching for,” McCready said.

Saygun laughed. “In the present case, that is just as well. I am no genius of any kind. No, a total mediocrity. And content with it, which shows I am doubly dull.” He paused. “But what about those other two?”

McCready chopped air with his cigar. “Damnation,” he exclaimed, “must we shilly-shally all night?”

Saygun leaned back in his chair. The broad face and small bland smile could be a visor over wariness, glee, anything. “God forbid I repay your generosity with discourtesy,” he said. “Perhaps it would be best if you took the lead and made a forthright statement.”

“I will!” McCready sat half crouched. “If I’m wrong about you, you won’t take me for merely eccentric, you’ll believe I’m a raving lunatic. In that case, I suggest you go home and never speak of this evening to anybody; because I’ll deny everything and you’ll be the one to look silly.” In haste: “That’s not a threat. For the convenience of us both, I request your silence.”

Saygun elevated his glass. “From your viewpoint, you are about to take a risk,” he replied. “I understand. I promise.” He drank as if in pledge.

McCready stood up. “What would you say,” he asked softly, “if I told you I am not an American by birth—that I was born in these parts, nearly three thousand years ago?”

Saygun gazed into his drink a while. The city mumbled. A drape stirred ever so slightly to the first night breath off the plateau of Anatolia. When he raised his eyes, he had gone expressionless. “I would call that a most unusual statement.”

“No miracles, no magic,” McCready said. “Somehow it happens. Once in ten million births, a hundred million, a billion? The loneliness— Yes, I am a Phoenician, from Tyre when Tyre was new.” He began pacing, to and fro on the carpet. “I’ve spent most of all that time seeking for others, any others like me.”

“Have you found them?”

McCready’s tone harshened. “Three certain, and of them a single one is still alive to my knowledge, my partner whom I mentioned. He’s tracked down two possibilities himself. As for the other two, we don’t age, you know, but we can be killed the same as anybody else.” Savagely, he ground his cigar out in an ashtray. “Like that.”

“Then I suppose the two you have spoken with on this journey, they were disappointments?”

McCready nodded. He slammed fist into palm. “They’re what I am officially after, highly intelligent and thoughtful ... young people. Maybe I can find a place for them, I do have my enterprises, but—“ He stopped on the floor, legs wide apart, and stared. “You’re taking this very calmly, aren’t you?”

“I admitted I am a dull person. Phlegmatic.”

“Which gives me reason to think you’re different from them. And my agent did make a quiet investigation. You could pass for a man in his twenties, but you’ve held your present job more than thirty years.”

“My friends remark on it. Not with much envy; I am no Adonis. Well, some individuals are slow to grow wrinkled and gray.”

“Friends— You’re neither sociable nor unsociable. Affable, but never intimate. Effective enough at your desk, promoted according to seniority, but unambitious; you do everything by the book. Unmarried. That’s uncommon in Turkey, but not unheard of, and nobody is interested enough in you to wonder seriously.”

“Your judgment is less than flattering.” Saygun didn’t sound offended. “Reasonably accurate, though. I have told you, I am content to be what I am.”

“An immortal?” McCready flung at him.

Saygun lifted a palm, cigar between fingers. “My dear sir, you leap to conclusions.”

“It fits, it fits. Listen, you can be honest with me! Or at least bear with me. I can show you evidence that’s convinced men more intelligent than either of us, if you’ll cooperate. And— How can you just sit there like that?”

Saygun shrugged.

“If nothing else, even if I’m wrong about you and you suppose I’m crazy, you ought to show some excitement,” McCready snapped. “A desire to escape, if nothing else. Or— But I think you are ageless yourself, you can join us and together we can— How old are you, anyway?”

Into the stillness that followed, Saygun said, a new steel in his tone: “Credit me with some brains, if you please. I have told you I read books. And I have had a year to consider what might lie behind that curious, evasive procedure of yours; and conceivably before then I have speculated about these matters. Would you mind taking your seat again? I prefer to talk in civilized wise.”

“My ... apologies.” First McCready went to the sideboard. He mixed a stiff Scotch and soda. “Would you like this?”

“No, thank you. Another Drambuie, if I may. Do you know, it never came to my attention before tonight. But then, only recently has Turkey become a modern, secular state. Marvelous stuff. I must lay some in before the next war makes it unobtainable.”

McCready overcame interior tumult and returned to the table. “What do you want to say?” he asked.

Saygun barely smiled. “Well,” he replied, “things were growing hectic, weren’t they? To be expected, no doubt, when you made such extraordinary claims. Not that I deny them, kyrie. I am no scientist, to decide what is and is not possible. Nor am I so rude as to call my host deluded, let alone a liar. But we should calm down. May I tell you a story?”

“By all means,” McCready rasped, and drank deep.

“Perhaps I can better label it a speculation,” Saygun said. “A flight of fancy, like some works of Mr. H. G. Wells. What if such-and-such were true? What consequences?”

“Go on.”

Saygun relaxed, smoked, sipped, let his voice amble. “Weft, now, shall we imagine a man bora rather long ago? For example, in Italy toward the end of the Roman Republic. Family of the equestrian class, undistinguished, its men seldom much interested in war or politics, seldom succeeding or failing greatly in commerce, often making careers in the civil service. The state and its conquered provinces had grown swiftly, enormously. There was need for clerks, registrars, annalists, archivists, every class of those workers who provide a government with its memory. Once Augustus had taken control, procedures were soon regularized, organization made firm, order and predictability instilled. For a peaceful man, the lower and median ranks of the civil service were a good place to be.”

McCready inhaled sharply. Saygun ignored it: “Next I would like to borrow your imaginative concept of the occasional person who never grows old. Since you have obviously considered every ramification, I need not spell out the difficulties that the years must bring to such a man. Perforce, when he reaches the normal retirement age, he gives up his position and moves away, telling his acquaintances that it will be to someplace with a mild climate and a low cost of living. Yet if he is entitled to a pension, he dares not draw it forever; and if pensions are not customary, he cannot live forever on savings, or even on investments. He must go back to work.

“Well, he seems youthful and he has experience. He re-enters the bureaucracy in a different city, under a different name, but quickly proves his worth and earns promotion from junior grade to about the middle of the hierarchy among the record-keepers. In due course he retires again. By then sufficient time has gone by that he can return to, say, Rome and start over.

“Thus it goes. I shan’t bore you with details, when you can readily visualize them. For example, sometimes he marries and raises a family, which is pleasant—or if it happens not to be, will pass, so all he needs is patience. This does complicate his little deceptions, hence he spends other periods in tranquil bachelorhood, varied by discreet indulgences. He is never in any danger of being found out. His position in the archives enables him to make cautious but’adequate insertions, deletions, emendations. Nothing to harm the state, nothing to enrich himself, no, never. He simply avoids military service and, in general, covers his tracks.” Saygun snickered. “Oh, now and then he might slip in something like a letter of recommendation for the young recruit he plans to become. Please remember, though, that he does do honest work. Whether he puts stylus to wax, pen to paper, nowadays types or dictates, he helps maintain the memory of the state.”

“I see,” McCready whispered. “But states come and go.”

“Civilization continues,” responded Saygun. “The Princi-pate hardens into the Empire and the Empire begins to crack like drying mud, but people go on getting bom and getting married, they ply their trades and die, always they pay taxes, and whoever rules must hold the records of this or he has no power over the life of the people. The usurper or the conqueror may strike off heads at the top, but he will scarcely touch the harmless drudges of the civil service. That would be like chopping off his own feet.”

“It has happened,” McCready said bleakly.

Saygun nodded. “True. Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs. However, certain jobs are not especially tempting, while at the same time their holders would be hard to dispense with. Then occasionally barbarians, fanatics, megalomaniacs attempt to make a clean sweep. They cause desolation. Nevertheless, more often than not, some continuity endures. Rome fell, but the Church preserved what it could.”

“I suppose, though,” McCready said, word by word, “this man ... you are imagining ... had moved to Constantinople.”

Saygun nodded. “Of course. With Constantine the Great himself, who necessarily expanded the government offices in his new capital and welcomed personnel willing to transfer. And the Roman Empire, in its Byzantine incarnation, lasted another thousand years.”

“After which—”

“Oh, there were difficult times, but one manages. Actually, my man was stationed in Anatolia when the Osmanlis overran it, and did not get back to Constantinople until they had taken it too and renamed it Istanbul. Meanwhile he had fitted into their order of things without many problems. Changed his religion, but surely you can sympathize with that, and with a certain recurring necessity that an immortal Muslim or Jew faces.” Saygun half grinned. “One wonders about possible women. Recurrent intactness?”

His mien went back to mock professorial: “Physically, this man would stay inconspicuous. The original Turks were not very unlike the people here, and soon melted into them the same as Hittites, Gauls, Greeks, Romans, countless nations had done before. The sultans reigned until after the World War. In name, at any rate; frequently not in fact. It made small difference to my man. He simply helped maintain the records.

“Likewise under the republic. I must confess I—my man prefers Istanbul and looks forward to his next period of working there. It is more interesting, and alive with ghosts. But you know that. However, by now Ankara has become quite liveable.”

“Is that all he wants?” McCready wondered. “Shuffling papers in an office, forever?”

“He is used to it,” Saygun explained. “Perhaps it actually has a trifle more social value than soaring hopes and high adventure. Naturally, I wanted to hear what you had to say, but—forgive me—the situation you describe is ill-suited to one of my temperament. Let me wish you every good fortune.

“May I have your card? Here is mine.” He reached in his pocket. McCready did likewise. They exchanged. “Thank you. We can, if you so desire, mail new cards to each other as occasion arises. The time may possibly come when we have reason to communicate. Meanwhile, absolute confidentiality on both sides, agreed?”

“Well, but listen—”

“Please. I detest disputes.” Saygun glanced at his watch. “My, my. Time flies, eh? I really must go. Thank you for an evening I will never forget.”

He rose. McCready did too and, helplessly, shook hands. Having bade goodnight, the bureaucrat, still relishing his cigar, departed. McCready stood in the hall door till the elevator bore him off, down into the city and its crowds of the anonymous.