byChrisWhite – 2025

An original gothic fiction story inspired by a book I’m reading called “Empire of the Summer Moon.”

The land there held no kindness. It stretched flat and hot and featureless as judgment and the sky above it hung like a sheet of hammered copper, hard and lidless. The wagons moved slow across the Llano Estacado like beetles dragging the carcass of ancient empire and the wheels made no mark the wind did not erase by sundown. A party of Spaniards, twelve wagons in column with mules and oxen yoked dumbly to their task, moved north from the bones of San Juan Bautista toward Santa Fe. Soldiers and priests. Convicts and campesinos. A widow with her belly full and a Jesuit who whispered dangerous secrets in his sleep. Their passage meant for glory or God or gold, though none could say which was to be most vital, not the captain, not the priests, not even the king.

They camped on a bluff rimmed in juniper near a meadow of wildflowers. The land fell away in all directions, featureless and ancient. They built no fire. The stars came out like shiny knives.

They did not yet know the name Peta Nocona.

On the third night the guards died. They were found seated against a mesquite stump, their bodies posed in caricature. Luis Hernández’s arms had been wrenched from the sockets and folded over his own thighs like an abbot posed in false prayer. Corporal de la Cruz sat beside him, emasculated, his genitals removed to silence his screams, lips bloodied from the effort of holding what had been his in his mouth, now grotesquely laying upon his lap. Their eyes were gone and the blood on their cheeks was black with sand and cooling into gel.

Captain José del Valle cursed them for their weakness and ordered the bodies burned. He ordered the company to pray. He ordered the prayers himself. When he finished, no one met his gaze.

On the fourth night, more screaming. A sharp bleating that ended quick. The guards were again gone by sunrise. One they found crucified, his stomach opened and organs displayed like the offerings of a pagan altar. The other they found only in part. His head upon a pike. His mouth stuffed again with flesh not his own. His fingers had been threaded through his eyes, gouging inward. The women began to fast. The men stood mute and afraid, and Father Alvaro took to sleeping with his crucifix clutched in both hands as if in supplication to something older than the God responsible for making the cruciform famous.

They did not bury the dead that day. The bones were burned. The ashes scattered. The Captain stood over the flames and spat.

The fifth night brought fog and fire. The earth exhaled a vapor from its crust and that surreptitious haze crawled low and white across the sand until the entire camp was blind to itself. When the sun rose, the eastern watch was gone. Only a scorched mound remained. Ash and blackened femurs. One skull had been cleaved through and a rosary melted into the jaw like jewelry in bone. There were no prints. No tracks. The priests swore the devil himself had walked the camp. The soldiers didn’t dare argue.

Among them rode a man named Vargas. A Castilian of dark bearing whose beard grew in thick irregular patches and whose name was spat even in Spanish courts. He was tall and hollow-eyed and wore a sword not of Spanish make but a thing of Moorish steel taken from a dead Arab mercenary whose throat he’d cut in Valencia over a girl neither man could still name. Vargas rode without prayer nor bible and bore on his saddle horn a necklace of Apache ears.

He had earned them. 

Years ago, near Presidio del Norte, he’d led a troop of lancers through an Apache camp while the men were gone to war. He’d taken no prisoners. What he left behind could not be buried whole. The women were nailed to the lintels of their lodges. The children flayed and stacked like kindling. He’d hanged a mother by her hair and hung her infant from her nipples, laughing. His men wept. He made them watch. Later, they marched those ruined bodies in parade through a Pueblo town, the corpses swinging from wagons in mock coronation.

Every tribe of the plains knew the story. They remembered. They always did.

He did not know.

Vargas.

Riding east beneath the red sky with the sun in his teeth and the dust in his mouth.
He thought the Apache fierce. Thought them the devil’s own. But he had not yet met the ones who made devils bow. 

Peta Nocona.

They rode like wolves and struck like lightning and vanished like smoke.
And the Apache, for all their teeth, were nothing but bitches beneath them.
As were the Tonkawa, the Jumano, the Nadaco, the Shawnee.
Each one brought low.
Each one broken like horses in the dust.

He did not know.
But he would.
They all would.

It was the sixth night that they came.

No warning. No breath of wind. The fog returned, and in its midst the horses were first scattered, then came the thock of arrows and the shriek of mules and oxen and men screaming as they fell into firelight holding their own viscera like military secrets. One priest leapt into the flames by his own hand. A boy with no name vanished. Father Alvaro stood bare-chested in the dark with his arms spread, begging for Christ. They slit him ear to ear. He made no sound. 

Vargas did not sleep. He stood barefoot in the sand and faced the darkness with his saber drawn and the moon behind him like a god watching from above. They did not come for him that night.

They waited.

On the seventh night, he fled.

He did not speak. He did not rouse the others. He took the last living horse and rode it hard into the black plain. Two days later they found the animal gutted and split open and Vargas nailed to the inside of its ribcage, his body crimped like a letter of revenge. His eyes had been sewn shut with sinew by strands of his own skin. Between his lips was a carved amulet: a sun with teeth.

Back at the camp the others tried to burn what remained. They heaped their maps and journals and silver into a pit and poured pitch and tar over it. The standard of Castile they burned last. The wind caught its ends and whipped it like a soul. Then they sat and waited.

When morning came, there were no voices.

Twelve wagons. Forty-six souls. Nothing remained but a single mestizo boy, found naked and curled inside a broken wheel by a band of Tonkawa heading west.

He had no eyes.

They asked him his name. He answered nothing. Just three words again and again, in a tongue that was neither French nor Spanish nor Latin.

Dientes de Sol.
Teeth of the Sun.

The Tonkawa, as was their nature, quickly cooked and ate the annoying mestizo boy; calories and fat, his last redeeming quality.

In time the Spaniards would learn. That in that endless sea of grass rode a pragmatic and isolated people whose memory was long and whose rage was patient. They joined no confederacy, submitted to no authority but their own, and used distance as a buffer against betrayals and disease. A tribe of natives born in the saddle and nursed on conquest, who saw no sin in revenge and no peace in mercy. They learned the word. Not from tongues, but from smoke and from silence. From blades left buried in the bellies of their bravest. From children who woke screaming from dreams they did not understand.

Peta Nocona.

The word rode with fear.
And with fire.
And the pale light of vengeance, still burning, in the dust of El Llano Estacado.

One hundred years later Spain sold it.
Not for coin.
Not for conquest.
But to be rid of it.

They called it a treaty. The men in Washington with their quills and their wax and their ledger books. But there was no gold passed. No silver exchanged. Just a signature on paper and the weight of five million dollars in debts not yet paid, born not of Spain but of the Americans themselves. Settlers and cutthroats and dreamers who’d set fires in the king’s name and then forgot his name altogether.

Spain gave up New Spain like a man shakes off a sickness. Quick and without fuss. 
They gave it to Quincy Adams, to the republic, to time.
Not out of friendship.
But because they’d had enough of the place.
The dust. The blood. The horsemen who came like ghosts in the night and left only guts and blood and horror in their wake.

They did not offer a prize.
They abandoned a burden.

They did not sell it because it was settled. Nor for gold nor treaty nor some gentleman’s notion of peace. They bargained it because they were afraid to stay.

The land in question was never theirs. Not in spirit. Not in truth. They’d claimed it in script and seal, mapped it with scattered mission churches and ink that bled like a dying man’s wound, but it was not theirs to take nor sell. It belonged to no man who could not ride a horse at full gallop and loose death from a bow at dusk. It belonged to no man who feared the dark.

Peta Nocona came like a storm born of dust and bone. He did not parley. He did not pause. He cut the tongues from priests and burned the chapels to the ground and left the bells to melt in the sun. The Spanish built missions. Peta Nocona burned them. The Spanish offered God. Peta Nocona offered silence and the belief of no God nor rule.

Spain sold the land not to build a new republic but to escape an old reckoning. They believed Peta Nocona would kill every white man on the continent. And maybe they would. Maybe that was their right. The empire packed its bags and left the blood to someone else.

There was no ceremony. No flag lowered, none raised. Just dust and hoofbeats. And the long shadow of men who would not be governed and could not be caught. Not until, that is, a man equally capable of evil and far more adaptable would move westward. We now call those men Texan’s. And in the order of convergent evolution, Peta Nocona became the bitch of those Texans.