The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [128]
The scalped man answered in a language Tug didn't know, even as he hopped nimbly away from the blade. Tug watched the Indian, who was dancing lightly on the balls of his feet. How could he be so fast? Tug circled a little more warily, aware that all his wounds were open again. Still, he felt only a little dizzy, even with the new one.
“Y'know what he did one time?” Tug said. “When we first met? All I could do was insult him, make fun o’ him. But when the lot o’ us got captured, he grabbed a red-hot musket barrel in his hands. They were heatin’ it up to torture ‘im. Swung the motherfucker right at ‘em, he did, laid about foursquare. That's why I'm alive today, alive so'as I can do—urk.”
He hadn't even seen the move, and suddenly the edge of the ax was in his throat. He could sort of taste it, even, or maybe that was the blood. The scalped man grinned cruelly.
Tug dropped his cutlass and grabbed the scalped man by the throat with both hands. The scalped man kept grinning— only now he smiled like one of those college boys who thought they knew so damned much and didn't mind lording it over you. Like he knew something Tug didn't.
Oh, he did. He was strong, stronger than Tug. His neck was like the rope of a ship's anchor, and now he was prizing Tug's hands from his throat, and it wouldn't take long, not with all of that red life coursing out of his own veins and filling up his windpipe.
But Tug did notice one thing—strong as the Indian was, he still didn't weigh all that much. So he picked him up and slammed his head into the steel ceiling. The scalped man's eyes went wide. And Tug did it again, and that damned bald head split just like a cushaw.
Good thing, too, because his legs were about done. He dropped the scalped man and sank slowly against the wall. He hoped someone would tell Red Shoes what he had done and that the Indian would be proud of him.
“You can't win. You know that,” Oliver said.
Not a blow had been struck, yet. They inched back and forth, just out of distance of each other.
“Do I, Oliver? Then why do you imagine I bother?”
“Love, of course. You were always an idiot when you were in love.”
“I love her, true.”
“As true as you loved me? And see—you try to kill me.”
“Because you never loved me.”
“You think she does?” He edged closer. She backed away.
“I think she does. But it also doesn't matter. Besides, you killed Hercule, a friend of mine.”
“I think you still love me.”
“Yes, of course I do, Oliver. Why not come get a kiss to prove it?”
“I wish I could. But you are being extraordinarily unreasonable these days. What of our wild, dark times? That tinkerer in ‘Stanbul, the German prince in Liepzig, the notes we stole from beneath Newton's very nose?”
“I value them. They taught me what I don't want to be.”
“And what would you be?”
“I would be the one who kills you.”
And then she saw he was as close as he wanted to be, and he struck.
They had slipped less than a mile west of the battlefield as they fell, so Franklin didn't have to run far before he encountered members of the fleeing armies.
Unfortunately, even running, some of them still had it in their heads that they ought to be fighting. He could hear sparse gunfire everywhere, even above the moaning of the hell wind. The pines creaked, and the crackle of lightning filled the sky. A hawk-faced warrior, eyes wild, ran within twenty yards of him, raised his gun, fired, and kept running, without waiting to see if his bullet sped home.
It didn't. Franklin had turned his aegis off so he could see better, but the bullet lodged in the ground a yard from his feet.
He kept running, shouting Lenka's name at the top of his lungs. At times the sheer futility of it nearly stopped him, but he drove himself on, cursing.
She was with the French, that was what Voltaire had told Nairne. With the French. And Voltaire had gone after her, so maybe if he found Voltaire …
He reached a stream clogged with bodies, crossed it on the backs of the dead, his voice growing hoarse as he added the French philosopher's name, until at last he came over a