Empire of bones

by Jeff Long

  Saracen shifted from leg to leg. He swung his great head away from the flies. Houston looked into the faces of Company D and tried to read what was really in their minds. He searched for the right thing to tell them, something about not forgetting the men they were. When he spoke, though, it was only to stammer.

  "Remember," he started. "Remember . . ."

  Baker usurped the sentiment. "Remember the Alamo," he declared to his company. "Remember Goliad. Remember what the bastards done to us, and goddamn do it back to them. Remember, boys."

  "Remember the Alamo!" a soldier shouted.

  Chapter Eleven

  It began.

  A thousand yards wide, the line of men let loose of the woods' edge to drift across the green savannah like thistledown blown by a child. There was no crouching or slinking or bellying forward for these brazen men. They moved upright across the open field as if they were invisible. They could have been the Redcoats walking into Old Hickory's guns at New Orleans, except they had no order to their ranks and talked aloud whenever a thought came to mind, whistling tunes to calm their nerves, brandishing curses and, more softly, prayers. Luckily the meadow dampened their language.

  Deciding the two-deep formation was not for them, the men behind quickly skipped up into the front rank and the line fanned wider still. Where soldiers encountered puddles or hurried their pace or helped to push the Twin Sisters or paused to fix a shoe or tighten a belt or pick a burr from between two toes, the line bent and wavered. As they walked men and boys fiddled with their flints and hammers. Miraculously no one tripped and pulled his trigger. The dominant sound was of sick men coughing and wheezing for breath and of the grass whipping slickly against their pantlegs. Their military inexperience wrote itself all across the plain in a large messy scrawl. War had no poetry in their big hands, no elegance.

  Houston rode well ahead of them, thirty yards in front, nudging his white stallion back and forth along the line, trying simply to keep them at the same pace. A mile separated them

  from the Mexican camp but it could have been all of Texas between them and any other human being, enemy or otherwise. The plain was empty. It was peopleless. Even the meadowlarks had quit singing.

  Up ahead the savannah swelled so imperceptibly that the only way to actually tell there was an incline was the increasing heaviness of their two cannon. The artillery crews and various wagoneers had tied rawhide ropes to the gun carriages for pulling, but soon soldiers were having to push, too. There was a definite angle to the plain and it was tilted against them.

  No one could say for sure what might lie on the far side of that rise. Houston couldn't imagine how a Mexican encampment ought to sound or smell. Even ahead of his troops, cleared of their stink and noise, he couldn't sense a thing. He was puzzled, too, that the enemy had no patrols out. It was conceivable that Santa Anna had crossed over the river or pulled back to another position overnight. What if they reached the crest of the hill and found no one left to fight?

  The army went on shoving through the sunbeams and lush green like there was no end to the afternoon. Their immodest Liberty fluttered in the breeze. Her bare right teat rolled in and out of the folds. Someone had attached a belle's white glove to the very top of the staff and every now and then it filled with air and seemed to be pointing east toward Louisiana. The piece of red cloth that Company D had fixed to a stick disappeared. Apparently no one wanted to be troubled carrying it anymore. Houston told himself that the soldiers had put its grisly message out of mind.

  Ten minutes went by. It seemed like an hour. The men broke a sweat. It gleamed like hog grease on their faces. Big white clouds scudded against the south horizon, a ghost armada docking upon the Gulf.

  Without warning a horseman suddenly came dashing from the forest to their right. Dozens of soldiers threw their rifles up to their shoulders just in case the stranger needed knocking out of his saddle, but it turned out to be Deaf Smith. The old scout sped along the serpentine line. His Spanish pony's remarkable long tail streamed out behind. As he rode Smith gave his news to anyone who wanted to hear it.

  "The Vinces' bridge is burnt," his voice squeaked at them. "I burnt it out. The bridge is gone."

  Houston watched for their reaction.

  There was a faltering. All along the line men missed a step as the scout went sliding past on horseback with his terrible message: Retreat was impossible. Smith's few words staggered their momentum. Like a field of grass caressed by a breeze, the line bent. For a moment it seemed the whole army was ready to stop and reconsider its extreme course. But then Wharton commanded the musicians to start their flute and drums.

  It took the three musicians a minute to coordinate their rhythm. What finally appeared—more mud than song—was not a martial step but a popular tune about lovemaking. The momentary confusion melted off men's faces. The soldiers resumed their deadly march. Those who knew the words sang to themselves. Those who didn't hummed and grunted along.

  Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you? Our bed shall be roses all spangled with dew. There under the bower on roses you 11 lie With a blush on your cheek but a smile in your eye.

  The sight of soldiers—especially these anarchists and land thieves—marching into battle with romance on their lips charmed Houston. It made him believe more than ever in them. Only yesterday the Mexicans had played death threats to them. In return they were throwing a love song back to the Mexicans.

  With no forewarning they topped the grassy rise. Houston was first. It was such a subtle prominence he didn't know this was the top until he was actually on it. To a man the whole army came to a halt on every side of him. The drum beaters quit and the flute's trill died with a whistle.

  'Til be goddamned," said a soldier.

  The Mexican camp lay before them, no more than two hundred yards away. Spreading from their left across to the savannah's center, it looked a mile wide with white tents and beautiful red and green and turquoise blankets and serapes propped on sticks for shade and men and horses milling among the trees lining the bayou. Little brushstrokes of smoke rose from fires that had been banked for the afternoon. Except for some cannon near the midpoint and the long tangled breastwork made of single-axle Mexican wagons and chopped

  brush and tree branches and saddles, it looked like a traders' caravan.

  Houston pulled out a telescope and searched in vain for sentinels or roving patrols. What few soldiers he saw were gossiping or lounging about, and not one was looking in their direction. A man appeared from a small lake in the rear, riding one horse bareback and leading another two dozen from their watering. In the whole camp Houston counted only five horses that were even saddled up.

  The Mexicans were asleep!

  "Can it be?" Houston asked Deaf Smith.

  Smith kept silent. He wasn't the sort to enjoy surprise, making him the sort who didn't like to show it. But the scout was surprised. Houston could see it in his lips which moved like an old man's trying to read a primer to himself.

  Down the line Mosely Baker summed it up. "We caught 'em in their goddamn siesta."

  Houston went on studying the camp, trying to unravel its details. He sniffed at the air. Folded within the woodsmoke, the scent of corn and chiles came to him, a lunch of tortillas. He could see where the reinforcements who'd arrived that morning were fast asleep in a meadow to their left. No doubt they'd been marched through the night. Their stands of muskets were clumsy and many had fallen to pieces.

  Houston slowly comprehended the opportunity. The Bible and the Iliad thundered with such moments, when events cracked open under the weight of their own predestiny. It seemed incredible to him, but the gods had wrapped Houston's army in clouds and transported them here to fall upon these Mexicans in their magical sleep. There was no other way to explain it. This was meant to be.

  With a hiss that ended up ringing, Houston drew his long sword from its scabbard. "Now," he cried out to his army. "Fire upon them. Now's the moment. Fire away!"

  What
followed was supernatural. Not a shot banged out. Not a man pulled his trigger. There was silence.

  Houston looked around at the army, stunned, thinking they must not have heard him, for they surely hadn't come these hundreds of miles just to have a look at the Mexican army and turn around.

  "Fire," he bellowed again. The advantage was theirs, but only for the instant. They had the high ground. They had surprise. They were prepared and the enemy was not. But all of that could change in the space of a heartbeat.

  "Goddamn you. Fire away!" Houston yelled at them. It was as if he were a ghost.

  Instead they moved down the rise, slashing through the grasses with their whip-whip of long legs. Right and left men and boys looked to their pans to double-check their powder, some blowing out the old powder and splashing in new and closing up the pans. The sound of seven hundred rifles cocking clattered like locusts. Then they stabbed down the rise in cold silence, each man making for the point closest to him.

  The long line wrapped around the camp. Like wolves they started loping faster, some even with a big-footed sideways gait. And still no one fired. The Twin Sisters screeched on their ungreased axles, rolling downhill now, moving hotter and hotter. From here on there was no stopping.

  Houston dug his spur into Saracen's side, thinking that if he could just get far enough ahead of the tide, it might look like he was in command of it. With the wind in his eyes and beard, it felt like an abyss had opened up and he was plunging over the precipice.

  The first fifty yards vanished in a blink. Saracen strained to outstrip the pell-mell warriors. The stallion's muscles sprang and gave and seemed ready to sprout into vast wings. Flanked with equal halves of his army, Houston felt like his horse was already flying. He bent toward the pommel, and held his sword out.

  Saracen reached harder. White foam lashed Houston's face. The earth shook beneath the stallion's great hooves. Houston tried braking his horse just to reassure himself of his control. But the giant animal ignored the rein. If anything, the horse deepened his stride.

  The army closed on the camp in a din of pounding hearts and chattering teeth and footsteps falling like fists on a drum. The breastworks, so solid at a distance, became an intricate weaving of wood and leather that wasn't solid at all. Suddenly, up close, there were a thousand holes in that puny wall. The holes gaped as actual gateways.

  On the far side of the breastwork the few Mexican soldiers

  on their feet began to notice the havoc descending upon them. Houston saw them look up from their card games or pieces of beef and tortillas or their afternoon conversations. Like men peering up at a cloud that's just blocked the sun, their faces took on a gentle inquisitiveness. Even when they saw Houston with his enormous wings spread on either side the soldiers didn't startle, not initially. Houston watched one man in particular, a slender young man standing near the cannon with a book in his hands, and he was touched by the reaction. The young Mexican wasn't alarmed. He seemed fascinated and actually marked his place before closing the book.

  When the gunfire came it crackled in a long ragged popcorn volley on Houston's left side. He shot a glance down the line. The far flank—infantrymen in the 2nd Regiment—had nearly tagged the nearest corner of the breastwork, down where the Mexican reinforcements had gone to sleep. They would be waking now.

  The Twin Sisters boomed. Chopped scrap and horseshoes flashed wide of Houston on either side, sizzling through the fat summery air. It pattered against the breastwork and Houston saw three Mexicans promptly vanish, caught at head level by the metal hail.

  Now the rest of the army added their musket and rifle fire to the breaching. Their muzzleloaders banged and popped and roared. Some snapped on damp powder or bad flints. Any general in the world would have preferred his army to walk in order and fire all at once, in effect creating a huge, moving shotgun. But that was out of the question with these men. Houston was grateful just to have them pulling their triggers at random.

  The air whined and zipped. Houston realized he was too far in front of the line because most of the lead was coming from his own men. He hauled on the reins again and almost sliced his thumb off. But the charging stallion had lost its mind to the sheer motion and refused to be harnessed in.

  Houston cast a glance back at his army and saw, to his horror, that the horse had taken him directly in front of one of the Twin Sisters. The barrel's mouth had no lines or angles supporting it. It was just a black hole surrounded by concentric circles and on top a flaming torch descending to touch it off. So this is how it ends, Houston thought, in a mess of iron. There was

  no time to duck nor even feel sorry for himself. It was going to be over that fast. But in the next instant he saw a head jut up from behind the carriage wheel and the torch lifted away from the touch hole. It was Ben McCulloch. The boy snatched off his slouch hat and waved it madly at his general.

  Each of the Twin Sisters boomed a second time. Brushed by invisible fingers, the grass quivered in waves that expanded outward from the smoking muzzles. Again Houston heard the mangling loads beat a devil's tattoo against the breastworks and the cart walls trembled and a saddle slipped from the construct.

  A Mexican soldier poked his handsome head above the breastwork, for all the world a ground squirrel stretching above his hole. It was the wrong moment to get a view of the norteameri-canos. That quickly Houston saw the long Indian hair lift backward and the beautiful face jellied with gore. Immediately it was gone. With a single blink Houston would have missed the awful sight altogether. But he had seen it. And now his fear became terror.

  Inside the breastworks hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers were rising up from the grass and running about in disarray. They jostled one another and yelled and pointed to the north, the dread north. The soldiers rushed about, grabbing muskets from stacks and tripping toward the wall of carts and branches under their officers' screamed directions. Houston saw a small forest of gun barrels lower onto him. Once more he tasted the certainty of his own annihilation. On a command the Mexicans fired. Their volley was even less disciplined than the Americans' had been. It erupted with a loose sporadic cadence. The balls sang in a thick curtain that passed fully ten feet overhead. Houston breathed his relief. It was true what they said then, that the Mexican army was taught not to aim.

  The Mexican volley did have one effect, though, and that was to turn Saracen away from the enemy line. Houston had grown up hearing stories about men whose fiery steeds had carried them right into the enemy camp, delivering them to torture or ridicule. At the first puff of shot powder Saracen veered away from the breastworks.

  Without slowing his magnificent pace the stallion now went galloping in a bead for the western sun, equidistant between the Mexican and American lines. His long legs pumped at the earth. The beast seemed ready to run all the way off the battle-

  field and over the bayous and across the prairies into deeper Texas. For just an instant Houston imagined galloping all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I'll go, he thought to himself, and he leaned closer to the white neck.

  But their fantastic course abruptly closed off. Up ahead one of the Mexican cannon belched a load of grape. Not missing a stride, Saracen looped around and reversed his direction, this time bolting for the east. It looked to Houston as if he was doomed to be carried hither and thither at his horse's fancy.

  "Hurrah, Old Sam," someone shouted loud. They thought Houston was rallying them.

  Back and forth Houston raced in the crossfire. Both sets of foes had found their trigger fingers now and Houston found himself bracketed by walls of gunfire on either side.

  Wide streamers of dirty white gunsmoke began to fill the emerald plain. The smoke blotted out the light, then parted to rake them with sunbeams all over again. But the darkness was fast overwhelming the light as the smoke clotted in greasy clouds overhead. Less than two minutes had passed since the Americans had started down the rise, enough time for a soldier to shoot and stop and reload three or four times. Whenever they felt l
ike it Houston's soldiers came to a stop in the grass and yanked out their long ramrods and eyeballed measures of powder from their horns into the throats of their gunbarrels or poured it premeasured from paper cartridges. A number had squirreled extra balls in their cheeks and would spit one into their fingers and seat it on the patching. A quick jab of the rod, a splash of powder in the pan, and they were off again.

  It all happened willy-nilly. They ran wherever they wanted, fired at whatever interested them. As his horse careened back and forth Houston scanned his army and saw nothing but lone men acting out their own individual conceits of combat. Nowhere did he see more than three men working in unison. For the most part they performed like a nest of mice chasing after sunflower seeds.

  Saracen continued his terrified dash between the gunfire and Houston simply hung on, every now and then lifting his sword overhead for the sake of appearances. Over where the 2nd Regiment was making contact with the breastworks, the dozing Mexican soldiers had woken to a nightmare and panicked en masse. Houston saw the Mexicans' entire left flank

  crumbling in rout. The reinforcements—hundreds of them— were crowding backward into the main camp like sheep. Not one in ten had a weapon in his hands. Adding to the chaos the Mexicans' bareback horses had broken loose within the camp and were stampeding in a wide crescent, trampling tents and fires and anything else in their way. The long string of tethered hobbled mules was inspired to a wild frenzy of hopping and kicking. The confusion was contagious. Other portions of the Mexican army were beginning to run, too.

  But long sections of the breastworks were still abundantly manned. There was still fire in the Mexican belly. Houston could feel their heat on the side of his face. Some of Santa Anna's soldiers had seen more combat in revolutionary Mexico than most Americans ever dreamed about. Providing their army didn't melt away in complete panic, these veterans were perfectly capable of turning back this free-for-all offensive, and Houston knew it. The Mexican resistance—which Houston measured in the quantity of firepower—seemed particularly potent surrounding each of the cannon emplacements. As Saracen carried him irresistibly to the east, Houston spotted Tom Rusk galloping across the meadow with his buckskins flapping, trailed by Dr. Patrick. The doctor suddenly doubled over in the saddle, clutching at his stomach. His beaver hat toppled, followed by its gutshot owner, and Rusk reined short. "We've breached the flank," Rusk yelled at Houston. "We're inside their line."