Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name by Edward M. Erdelac

Author:Edward M. Erdelac [Erdelac, Edward M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Jewish, Horror, Westerns, Fiction
ISBN: 9781615721900
Google: jO62cQAACAAJ
Amazon: 1615721908
Publisher: Damnation Books, LLC
Published: 2010-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

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Piishi led the Rider and the onager silently on up the mountainside, until the Rider spied a dim orange incandescence in the distance. They made for this light, until it grew into a red hairline crack in the earth, actually a narrow fissure which barely admitted the donkey, but widened as it deepened into a concealed box canyon. In the light, Piishi paused to once again inspect the Rider and himself. Piishi bore the cuts and bruises of struggle, but no feared mark of fang. At last the narrow passage opened into a comfortable natural shelter in the rock, its walls dancing with firelight, the sky a dark ribbon far above. The campfire burned in front of an eight foot tall dwelling fashioned from bound yucca and branch—a wickiup, the Rider had once heard its type called, the traditional hut of the highland Apache.

But the man who sat cross legged before the fire was not Indian. He was brown skinned and had a shaven headed pate, and Indians always wore their hair long, he knew. The bareness of his skull was made up for in the luxuriant white beard that trailed from his chin to his knees. He was an elderly man, by the worn skin of his neatly folded hands and his bare feet, and the tracks and faint lines that marred his otherwise smooth face were like the fading footprints of long journeys across untouched sand. He was thin, but strong looking, and he wore a seamless robe of unabashed sky blue which the Rider had not seen the like of in his western travels. The man was sleeping or meditating, his eyes closed.

Piishi approached the fire and spoke;

“Tats’adah.”

Whether he meant it to introduce the Rider or to rouse the man himself, the man called Tats’adah opened two eyes of deep, thoughtful umber, and regarded first the Indian, and then the Rider.

To Piishi, the strange man inquired in the Apache’s own language. Piishi replied, no doubt telling him of the fate of the others. The man’s soft eyes exuded a palpable sorrow, then they looked once more to the Rider.

“Welcome, Merkabah Rider, Son of the Essenes,” he said in a musical, Hindi accent that startled the Rider almost as much as the acknowledgement of the title of his secret order. “I am Chaksusa, disciple of Shar-Rogs pa the Ancient One, the blue abbot of Shambhala. Please sit down. Our time is short, but we will take a moment and pray for the souls of the men who died tonight, that they be granted light to find their way home by.”

The Rider settled in wordlessly across the fire as Chaksusa (or Tats’adah?) produced a loop of worn black wooden prayer beads and began to chant hypnotically in a foreign tongue. The Rider silently offered up his own prayers for the men who had died to bring him here, asking that the Lord might grant them a commuted sentence in Sheol, in spite of whatever pagan idolatry or animism they might have subscribed to.

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