“Perhaps I should venture to offer a small chastisement to the brute, Sukie?”
“Beat the tar out of it for all I care, Doc. Long as you don’t get blood on me.”
He drew the Le Mat from his belt and reversed it, gripping the ornately decorated barrel, his spread fingers obscuring most of the delicate golden lettering of GEN. J.E.B. STUART. Judas looked up at him out of his deep brown, mournful eyes, his long head drooping, braying quietly, scuffing at the dusty trail with one of his front hooves.
“Oh, look, Doc. I guess that this is his way of letting us know that he’s sorry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
She smiled and patted the animal on the side of its neck. “I guess we can forgive him just one little mistake, can’t we, Doc, dearest?”
“One?”
“Well, he didn’t actually manage to get his teeth into me the first time, so that doesn’t truly count. We should show a little Christian charity to poor dumb beasts.”
Doc shook his silvery head. Sighing, he lowered the big Le Mat and slipped it back into its holster. “You damnable denizen of the basest levels of great Dante’s Purgatorio!” The mule whickered softly. “And if you should ever again do aught to harm the person of this great lady, then I swear I shall drive your brains clean out of your rectal orifice.”
“You got such a fine, round way of saying things, Doc,” she said.
“Why, thank you, my little chickadee.”
They carried on, picking their way slowly across the flank of one of the nameless mountains, ever closer to the desert floor and ever closer to the ranch where the others would be waiting patiently for Doc’s return.
AT LUNCHTIME they sat together and discussed places that they’d visited.
For Sukie, this meant talking mainly about frontier villes across the Midwest and up into the wildness of the high plains country.
Doc kept her entranced by his tales of other big cities around the world. He still hadn’t broken the news of his being time-trawled, though he was going to during the afternoon, so he wrapped up his anecdotes as though they were things that he’d once read when he’d come across a substantial predark library, buried among some hidden ruins.
“There is a fabled city in Spain,” he said.
“Where’s that? Think I went there once. Pesthole in the Black Hills.”
“No, this Spain was a country in Europe. Far across the mighty waters of the Atlantic Ocean. The Lantic as it now seems to be known.”
“Is Europe like the home ville where those yellow slant-eyed people come from?”
Doc was puzzled. “Yellow? That would probably be either China or Japan, my dear. But however did you come to hear of Orientals? In my experience there are precious few of them in Deathlands.”
She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve, refusing Doc’s automatic offer of his kerchief. “No thanks. Those yellow outlanders. Seems I heard some rumors of posses of them, raiding and raping and burning and all. Far west, they said. And right up to the north.”
“Really? That is fascinating, my dear.”
“But you were telling me about this place Spain and a story about it.”
“Ah, yes. Mighty Valencia in the ancient days of glory that was Spain. Home of the leader known as El Cid. But it had its critics and its enemies.”
Sukie nodded wisely. “Don’t we all, Doc, dear? And ain’t that the truth!”
“Yes, it is. Well, these men who hated Valencia created this little sort of poem about it. I’ll translate it, Sukie, but first in its original. ‘ En Valencia las legumbres son agua, los hombres son mujeres y las mujeres nada .’ It means that in Valencia all of the vegetables taste of water and the men are all women and all the woman are worth nothing.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “I really like that a lot, Doc.”
At that moment he realized that he was in serious danger of falling in love with the woman.
AFTER A SPARTAN LUNCH of the last of the jerky, washed down with almost the last of their fresh water, they had decided to lie down and take a siesta.