Balum's Harem by Orrin Russell

Author:Orrin Russell [Russell, Orrin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-19T05:00:00+00:00

18

Joe didn’t stop for sleep when he reached her. Only a few hours remained of the night, and he rode on through it with Valeria leading the way and the coyotes calling out around them in a mournful serenade as though sending them off to certain death. The Scarlands lay within reach; Big Tom would not catch them. Not out in the open anyway. Yet as Joe rode behind his querida , his mind began to function. The first time in a long time. He pushed away the clouds of infatuation that had blurred his thinking for so long and considered coldly and without exaggeration what options lay before them.

Once in the cliff houses he could keep Big Tom and his gang at a distance. The Spencer rifle would see to that. At night would be another matter, but from what Joe had seen of other cliff dwellings, he knew they were built to withstand attack. That was not where the problem lied. It was the waiting. Even taking for granted that a water source existed in the cliffs, there was no food. No fuel for fire. And that was Big Tom’s advantage. But where else to go in all that wretched tundra was a question to which he had no answer. And so he rode in silence behind his woman and quickly let himself be mesmerized by the rising sun reflecting off her silken hair that swayed so gently there before him.

The horses, on arriving several hours later, swung their heads from side to side, and likewise did Joe and Valeria, for they were wholly unprepared for the majesty of the Scarlands. Two ridgelines folded together to form a wrinkle in the land. In this wrinkle, carved into the cliffs, were the old abandoned homes of the ancients. The silence of the place weighed heavy. Echoes of hooves on stone rose off the ground. The creak of the saddle, the swish of tails.

At the cliff bottom Joe turned his horse after Valeria and they rode single file up an old stone path that disappeared and reappeared between massive boulders and sudden switchbacks that each time revealed a more stunning vista as they climbed higher into the cliffs. The first dwellings they reached were constructed from clay and brick and bore high walls that served as shields against the open desert. The path they rode gave way to steps dug from stone. The horses walked these mazes with their noses poking curiously into doorways and windows, all of it open and empty and the tan rock worn smooth over time.

The highest homes blended so perfectly into the cliff face that not until they were directly upon them did Joe and Valeria realize they had reached the uppermost dwellings. They sat their horses a moment and looked back out over the desert to where Big Tom and his men and their horses and spares crawled closer like black moving stains below. Dust plumed up and hovered in a long cloud after them.

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