Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead

tonight,” Bandy said.
    “Yes, son. It looks that way.” He smiled. He could not help himself for how boyish the observation and he thought perhaps something was inside the boy that would serve the troop and in turn deliver him.
    When the others were near he put spurs to his horse, but the Rattler, so mettlesome and aroused, had already taken the rein it wanted.
    By now the horses were rolling their bloodshot eyes and their sides were sunk in and they were gasping for breath, but still they were answering the call, still they were stretching their necks for power and distance, so afraid the Rattler would leave them behind.
    He could hear a peculiar, long-drawn sighing that grew louder. A brief troughing wind sprang up and skifts of sand lifted and blew and died away. At first the sky was yellow with sunlight refracting in the particle dense air and yet it was remarkably windless after the first wind, as if the storm had collected all the wind in the land.
    There was a deep hollow silence he remembered and an eerie green glow in the sky and then explosive thunders boomed and then they boomed again and did not stop, as if armies were fighting in the clouds, and then it burst upon them with thunderclaps of artillery, a nameless storm with inconceivable power.
    At first it was rainless and began slowly to build a thundery dust cloud that seemed to extend for several miles and through this they were caught in the billowing and were soon choking on the gritted and sculling wind. The wind increased and the sand lifted higher and blew cursive serifs that wrapped their bodies and cut their faces. While at first the wind blew against them, now the wind blew through them. They wore their goggles to keep the stinging from their eyes and pulled neckerchiefs to keep their throats clear.
    Inside the storm the world was shoreless and full of nothing. The air was rolling over at the same time it was plunging to earth and rooting up and lifting the loose debris. It was as if the darkness was rising from the depths of the earth and swallowing the mountains and the sky.
    In the storm it seemed as if nothing was real or would ever be real again. There was no time except time immediate. There was no place. They were not where they were and there was no worse danger than they were experiencing. There was no earth and there was no sky. There was no direction; the compass needle, if he could have seen it, would have swirled in his hand. The storm was everything.
    He kept them close together as best he could. It was fundamental. He could not allow them to become separated. The Rattler jerked its head and pricked its ears on high alert. The big stallion reared up to the vertical and settled as if floated to the ground on wings, its ears bent back and its mane hackled. The Rattler was telling him it wanted to run, it needed to run and to let the others follow if they could. He knew if they ran in the storm the Rattler could outrun the others and the horse would save him. In the storm he could disappear. He knew if he only had himself to save this he could do. He knew Extra Billy would make it too. But the rest would become lost and picked off one by one like so many flowers in a bloody garden.
    He let the Rattler horse have its head.
    They rode hard. He touched his spurs to the Rattler horse and the horse lengthened stride and stretched it out and found even more speed. He knew he could outrun their pursuers before they could circle and close again. Time and again he’d known this. At the same time he knew his responsibility lay with his men.
    Don’t think that way, he thought. Service and duty, he thought.
    He made the horse to slacken its speed.
    Their pursuers became the filled-in outlines of men on horses and far off or close he could not tell in the airborne fields of lifted and sheeting earth whose side they were on. The dense veil of sand cut like a razor when it lashed against him. It was an ill wind lifting, dusting and setting grit to fly