Shoshone, Midnight Motte

"Gradually, the pine nuts left the mountains and up a sharp cleft only dead junipers grow there now," Jean said over orange-black coals snuffed by the cold Kansas night, prior to morning.

Morning meant preparations. Maps, measurements, scouting. The local language, the local threats. Prefacing it all, the young Indian recanted a story from his youth. With creative liberties, of course. He hadn't really seen what this mythical fruit outside of his mind's eye. He imagined their color blue or black.

He thought well, they wanted context, so they get a tale.

Pleased at the empty encore, he clapped an invisible book shut with his hands. He patted down his sandy trousers, stood from his sitting log, and took another swig of whiskey; his throat parched.

Joshua Blackmore winced. "Dead? How can you gestate a dead thing? We hired you to explain the territories in New England's Frontier, not spin bloody yarns."

Jean licked his lips, savoring grape wine. "Stories make the land, Joshua—"

"—hush, that's Lord Blackmore, half-y."

Jean sighed. The half mentioned was in his surname, "Charbonneau." In full, he was Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, born from a French father and an Indian mother. As such, Jean, keen on the invisible pecking order, reappropriated his words.

"Lord Blackmore," he said. Only Blackmore wasn't one.

"Good," Lord Blackmore said. "Do the Kaw Tribe know of these-these mountains?"

"The census in my hand says yes," Jean said. "Seems to indicate they get their water from up the river around here, next to our destination near the mountain-face."

"If our buyers weren't so damned picky, for deadman's fruit."

Joshua Blackmore's family was poor and he himself could barely read. Aiming a rifle did not require good breeding. However, he might as well have been a Lord. Full-blooded whites were always the Lords, Princelings, Plantation Owners, Barrons, Mayors, Sheriffs, and Landholders. Not many were like Lewis and Clark. Not many paid attention to the land: her buffalo, her wolves, her visions, her people, her stories, and her woes.

Another Prince sallied furs onto his stallion. "I'm quite peckish, so I vote that we taste the fruits of our labor before handing it off to our buyers. I have caught a whiff of Thailandese durian before."

Jean grinned. "Oh, and was it stolen from Coyotes as well, like ours?"

The (future) Duke Paul Wilhelm of Württemberg nodded. "No. But they were ghastly, absolutely, ghastly."

"Tasted them?"

"Tasted great! I still can't wash the stench of horse manure from my nostrils, but it was grand."

Jean's brow waggled. He remembered Paul, title and all. Seldom did the cousin to the King of Germany announce himself as such.

Everyone had saddled onto their horses by this point. They strode up the sandy incline to the X marked on Blackmore's map. Jean grew curious and finally asked, "what's Thailand like?"

"Oh," Wilhelm stroked his chin. "It is a place of heretical temples to fringe Eastern religions, bountiful foreign fruit and spices, and divinely dressed dancers."

"Colorful way of saying prostitute."

"Colorful people, not unlike you're own," Wilhelm surmised.

"Yes, yes, we can have whore later - I mean - it's only a hundred-paces backward whence we came," Blackmore interjected, his black steed limping. The creature neighed at the weight of the rotund man on its saddle. He dressed in an ill-suited black vest bursting at the buttons. Jean pitied the creature.

"Mister Wilhelm, we must get there before sundown," the fat-sack-of-crap said, his chin-folds bouncing like lapping waves.

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