Blood Meridian(29)

That dark vexed face. He studied it and he drew the sergeant forward the better for him to observe and then he began a laborious introduction in Spanish. He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied paths conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant—as he told them—like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences. The sergeant listened to this and more with great attention and when the judge was done he stepped forward and held out his hand.

Jackson ignored him. He looked at the judge.

What did you tell him, Holden?

Dont insult him, man.

What did you tell him?

The sergeant's face had clouded. The judge took him about the shoulders and leaned and spoke into his ear and the sergeant nodded and stepped back and saluted the black.

What did you tell him, Holden?

That shaking hands was not the custom in your land.

Before that. What did you say to him before that.

The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

The black was sweating. A dark vein in his temple pulsed like a fuse. The company had listened to the judge in silence. A few smiled. A halfwitted killer from Missouri guffawed softly like an asthmatic. The judge turned again to the sergeant and they spoke together and the judge and he crossed to where the crate stood in the courtyard and the judge showed him one of the pistols and explained its workings with great patience. The sergeant's men had risen and stood waiting. At the gate the judge doled coins into Aguilar's palm and he shook hands formally with each ragged charge and complimented them upon their military bearing and they exited into the street.

At noon that day the partisans rode out each man armed with a pair of the pistols and took the road upcountry as told.





The outriders returned in the evening and the men dismounted for the first time that day and recruited their horses in the sparse swale while Glanton conferred with the scouts. Then they rode on until dark and made camp. Toadvine and the veteran and the kid squatted at a small remove from the fires. They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert. They watched the Delawares, of whom there were a number in the party, and they too sat somewhat apart, crouched on their heels, one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores. That night the kid would see one of them sort with his hand among the absolute embers for a right coal with which to light his pipe.

They were about in the morning before daybreak and they caught up and saddled their mounts as soon as it was light enough to see. The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. As the riders came up through the mesquite and pyracantha singlefile in a light clank of arms and chink of bitrings the sun climbed and the moon set and the horses and the dewsoaked mules commenced to steam in flesh and in shadow.

Toadvine had fallen in with a fugitive from Vandiemen's Land named Bathcat who had come west on legbail. He was from Wales by birth and he had but three fingers to his right hand and few teeth. Perhaps he saw in Toadvine a fellow fugitive—an earless and branded felon who had chosen in life much as had he—and he offered to wager as to which Jackson would kill which.

I dont know them boys, said Toadvine.

How do ye think then?

Toadvine spat quietly to one side and looked at the man. I wouldnt want to bet, he said.

Not a gaming man?