by John Jakes
Cordoba started to leave. It was Señora Esparza who stopped him this time. “We will look our fill. Butcher.”
“Please, señora! You and I are not enemies. We are people of the same nation—”
“No. I am a Texan, like my husband, Gregorio. I hate your Santa Anna just as he did. When my children and I go out, we will see what your dictator has done—and remember it until another time. Then we will repay you.”
Cordoba smiled in a humorless way. “I don’t doubt His Excellency worries about that very thing. That’s why he is in such desperate haste to put an end to the rebellion.”
The major vanished into the sunlit smoke. A few seconds later, Amanda heard him summoning men—cursing in the process.
Cordoba’s command of obscenities made her wonder about him. Was his apparent concern for the welfare of the noncombatants only a pretense? Or was the bluster, the cursing, the false part? She supposed it didn’t really make much difference so long as Angelina received prompt attention, and no one else was hurt.
Another burst of musket fire drew her attention to the chapel. The Mexicans were still mutilating the dead. Laughing, even singing, in celebration of the slaughter—
Amanda’s face hardened. As Señora Esparza had said, it would be a long time before the people of Texas forgot the dreadful dawn just past.
iv
In the final assault on the Alamo, Santa Anna’s army had pounded the walls with cannons, then scaled them with ladders and pushed the defenders back in hand-to-hand combat to last-ditch positions in rooms in the long barracks. But even Major Cordoba’s warning hadn’t adequately prepared Amanda for what she saw as armed soldiers escorted the survivors into the main plaza.
The plaza was literally a field of corpses, hundreds of them. For every American, there seemed to be ten of the enemy. There was a stench of blood and powder that the morning sun couldn’t burn out of the air. The faces and limbs of the dead were black with flies.
Several of the women began crying again. One of the Esparza children vomited. Amanda dug her nails into her palms and swallowed sourness in her throat. It was apparent that the Texans had given ground a foot at a time. The soldiers who had reached the chapel had done so over small mountains of bodies.
Amanda recognized almost all of the Texan dead. She had cooked for the men, joked with them—and now she saw them lying in grotesque postures, lifeless hands clenched around pistols and knives. She fought to keep from weeping herself.
By the time the captives and their guards were a quarter of the way to the open gate, Amanda’s shoes gave off a squishing sound. She glanced down, sickened. So much blood had been spilled, the hard ground couldn’t absorb it all. She had stepped in a sticky red pool of it.
Mexican soldiers searched for souvenirs among the heaped bodies. But near the wall, she noted an unusually large mound of corpses that the human scavengers seemed to be avoiding. Most of the dead appeared to be Mexicans, but she recognized one American among them. He lay on his back, his face a patchwork of bayonet cuts. At least two dozen other wounds had torn his hunting shirt and trousers.
Pacing at her side as he had since they left the chapel, Cordoba noticed her stare. “That man in the fur cap—is he the one called Crockett?”
“Yes.”
“I’m told it took a score or more to bring him down.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“You can see the soldiers fear to go near him even now—”
The sight of Crockett’s stabbed body unleashed new rage within her. It found a ready target in Cordoba’s continuing presence. “I don’t need your personal attention, Major. In fact I resent it.”
“Understandably.” Cordoba nodded. His brown eyes kept moving back and forth from one group of soldiers to another. Some of the soldiers watched the prisoners with sullen fury. “However, you must accept it until we are safely outside. I want no incidents—”
“What sort of incidents?”
“Noncombatants are to be spared—that was His Excellency’s order. But it won’t be obeyed voluntarily. I really think you still fail to understand the importance of this engagement, señora.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just this. Your General Houston has boasted too often that, with five hundred men, the province of Texas could be liberated from Mexico. His Excellency had to win this battle—at any price. To do so, he inflamed the passions of his men—”
Cordoba inclined his head toward a pair of soldiers busily plying knives. One soldier was sawing through the bone of a Texan’s ring finger in order to claim an emerald signet. His sweaty-faced companion had a different purpose. While Amanda watched, the soldier whacked off the ear of a dead man she recognized as one of Crockett’s twelve from Tennessee. With a gruff shout, the soldier displayed the souvenir to other Mexicans nearby. They laughed and applauded. Grinning, the soldier tucked the ear into his pocket.
“Indeed, señora, the very spirit with which your people resisted only heightened the desire for revenge. That’s why looting must be permitted. And why the faces are being cleaned—”
He pointed to other soldiers using rags to wipe the dirt from the fallen, Mexican and American alike.
Amanda shook her head, not understanding. Cordoba explained in a somber voice, “His Excellency wishes no mistakes made about the identity of each body. As I informed you, our soldiers will be buried. Your people will be burned.”
“Scum,” she breathed. “Murdering scum, that’s all you are—”
“Alas, señora, war is seldom an ethical business.”
“There could have been terms! Honorable surrender—”
“No. An example was needed. Besides, would your people have accepted terms?”
She pushed back a stray lock of dirty hair from her forehead, unable to reply. Thank God the gate was only a short distance away. Susannah Dickinson, accompanying the litter on which her daughter rested, had already reached the body-strewn ground between the mission and the river. Two black men were just following her out the gate. One was Sam, who had come from the sacristy. The other was Travis’ slave, Joe, captured in the long barracks. Both men were crying.
“Well, señora?” Cordoba prodded. “Would the Texans have accepted terms of any kind?”
She turned her head, gazing at the disheveled major. He was still something of an enigma. He had the erect bearing and outward flintiness of a professional. Yet there was a certain softness in his eyes that suggested another, more elusive man behind the façade. For the first time she noticed his tunic. It bulged noticeably; his belly was growing fat. And he looked tired.
Less angry, she answered, “I doubt it. When Anglos get pushed too far, they usually fight back. There’s a saying they use when someone threatens them—”
“A saying? What is it?”
“Turn loose your wolf.”
“In other words—do what you will?”
“Do what you will—but you’ll regret it.”
Cordoba sighed. “That was obviously the case here. However—”
Stumbling, Amanda uttered a little cry. The major caught her arm. One of the enlisted men walking with the captives noticed Cordoba’s quick reaction, and smirked.
Cordoba glared. The soldier blinked and swallowed, intimidated by the fury of the major’s eyes.
Amanda carefully disengaged her arm from Cordoba’s hand. He refused to look at her, staring instead at her cordage bracelet. His round face was still flushed.
By all rights she ought to hate him. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to it.
“Where are you taking us?” she asked finally.
“You and the Señora Dickinson are going to His Excellency. The Mexican women and children will be set free.”
A ripple of dread chased along Amanda’s spine. “And Susannah and I won’t be?”
“I can’t say. His Excellency received reports of non-combatants in the mission, and I was instructed to bring them to him for his personal disposition.”
“Where is he?”
“I am not certain of that either.”
“Maybe I’ll be lucky. Maybe he got killed.”
“General Santa Anna? Never. Do you imagine he would lead an assault in person—?” Was there faint contempt in his voice? If so, it was quickly hidden. “You may find yourself reasonably well treated, however. His Excellency has a certain fondness for attractive women.”
Amanda realized he meant it as a compliment. But this hardly seemed a suitable time or place. She didn’t bother to respond.
Cordoba then said, “You do know His Excellency took a wife in Bexar—?”
Startled, Amanda shook her head.
“It was the night we bridged the river. One of the general’s aides discovered a most charming young woman—and her mother—living just over there.”
Amanda’s eyes followed his pointing hand. She recognized the house he was indicating.
“Would the young woman’s name be Señorita Armendariz?”
“That’s it, I believe. Quite a beauty.”
“I have a different word for her.” The Armendariz girl and her mother were two of those who had refused to speak to Amanda on the streets of Bexar. Señora Armendariz had even urged the alcalde to close Gura’s Hotel. “I’m not surprised that little bitch advanced herself with the general—”
Cordoba almost smiled. “Alas, I don’t believe he had marriage in mind. But the señorita’s mother insisted.”
“Who married them? Don Refugio?”
“The parish priest? No, I’m afraid he would have considered such a ceremony—shall we say—irregular? The ‘priest’ was actually one of Colonel Minion’s aides. A lad who’s quite an actor. His Excellency is already blessed with a wife in Mexico City.”
“You mean Santa Anna deceived the girl?”
“And her mother. Evidently his desire got the better of him.”
“You don’t sound as if you approve.”
Expressionless suddenly, Cordoba shrugged. “Whatever my personal feelings concerning His Excellency, I am a soldier. I serve him without question.”
“Is that right?” Amanda studied him as they approached the gate. “Would you have served him without question if you’d been assigned another kind of duty? If you’d been required to kill Texans?”
“I would have obeyed orders.”
“If they included wholesale brutality?”
“I see no purpose to such a discussion,” Cordoba said quickly. “It’s purely theoretical.”
But Amanda realized she’d touched a sensitive spot. Her earlier suspicion was confirmed. It was Cordoba’s curse to be afflicted with a conscience.
“Then answer a question that isn’t. What do you honestly think Santa Anna will do with Susannah and me?”
“Señora, it is impossible for me to guess. He might be in an expansive mood as a result of the victory. He might parole you at once.”
Amanda halted in the gateway, turning to gaze back at the dead in the plaza.
“Major, how many men did you lose this morning?”
“Ten for every one of yours—at minimum. By the end of the third charge against the walls, for example, the Tolucca battalion under General Morales had little more than a hundred men remaining. Its original strength was almost eight hundred and fifty.”
“I doubt His Excellency will be in a mood to forgive that kind of loss.”
As if to confirm her fear, Cordoba didn’t answer.
v
The stench of the dead and wounded was even worse outside the Alamo than it had been within. Bodies of Mexican soldiers lay along the base of the wall. Here and there the wreckage of scaling ladders testified to the difficulty of breaching the mission defenses.
Details of men were already moving across the shell-scarred ground, dragging corpses toward the bank of the San Antonio. Overhead, buzzards were gathering.
As she walked, Amanda was conscious of Major Cordoba dropping behind. She didn’t see the frankly admiring way he continued to watch her. She was pondering what might befall her in the next few hours. Surely it couldn’t be any worse than the horror just concluded. Surely—
Something about the light interrupted the thought. She studied the angle of the sun and realized it couldn’t be much later than eight o’clock. The day had hardly begun. Sunday. God’s day. And so many had died—
But His Excellency was wrong if he believed cruelty would destroy the Texans’ will to resist. As Señora Esparza had promised, it would probably have the opposite effect. It did on her.
She turned again, gazing past Cordoba to the mission’s shot-pitted walls. The tricolor and eagle of Centralist Mexico had been raised above the long barracks. Hate welled within Amanda at the sight of the flag flapping in the sun.
Tired as she was, the hate would give her strength, sustain her through whatever might come before this day ended. She wouldn’t grovel in front of the self-styled Napoleon of the West, that much she promised herself.
Shoulders lifting a little, she trudged on toward the river. Her shoes left faint red traces on the hard ground.
Chapter III
The Bargain
i
AMANDA CROSSED THE SAN ANTONIO on one of the plank bridges erected by the Mexicans. It seemed to her that she was returning not to a familiar town but to one that was alien…alien and not a little frightening.
Northward, the low hills were covered with tents and wagon parks. Units of cavalry and infantry were reassembling noisily, raising huge clouds of dust.
Cordoba’s men soon encountered difficulty moving ahead toward the main plaza. The narrow streets of Bexar, so drowsy and pleasant only a few months ago, swarmed with soldiers and poorly dressed Mexican women. Many of the women were dragging children whose clothing was equally dirty and ragged.
The women were hurrying in the opposite direction, toward the mission. Band music drifted from the river now—music celebrating the victory. The women jeered at the captives. Amanda was glad Susannah couldn’t understand Spanish.
Some stones were flung. One struck Señora Esparza. Cordoba drew his sword and ordered his men to close up around the prisoners. After that, the soldaderas—the camp followers—had to content themselves with verbal attacks.
Despite her determination not to succumb to despair, Amanda found her spirits sinking with every step. Her mouth felt parched. Her head hurt. Her arms and legs ached. She wished for the peace and privacy of the tiny walled garden behind the hotel. There, whenever she was lonely or depressed, she had always found solace in simple physical labor. She yearned for the garden now. She imagined the sight of her tomato vines bursting with heavy red fruit in the mellow Texas sunlight. She savored the remembered aroma of strings of onions and yellow and red peppers drying in the shadow of the wall—
Gone. It was all gone. The sense of defeat swept through her like a poison. It seemed that every time she put her life back onto a stable course, something disrupted it. That had been the case for almost as long as she could remember—
She thought of her mother, dying in the street outside the Kent house in Boston. She thought of the terrible morning in Tennessee, when the man who claimed to be a preacher had beaten her cousin Jared, then raped her and carried her off to St. Louis, where he sold her to trappers traveling up the Missouri. She thought of her first night in the tepee of the young Sioux warrior who had bought her from the trappers—
She had endured all of it, calling on an inner strength bequeathed to her in some mystical chemistry of birth by her frail father, Gilbert Kent. She had endured hunger and pain and near-paralyzing fear, buoyed by her will to survive. In an hour, a month, or a year, she told herself, she would find an end to the suffering. And so she had—
But there always seemed to be more waiting.
Grief had nearly destroyed her after Jaimie’s death. She had fought with it like an enemy who wanted her life. She had fought, and she’d won another reprieve. Opened the hotel. Fussed over the three girls. Taken com
fort from the feel of the garden earth against her hands whenever doubt and sadness threatened her—
And now, because she’d decided she had no choice but to go into the mission, she was forced to begin still one more time—as a stranger in a town of enemies. She wondered whether she could do it.
She noticed a party of officers approaching on foot. Among them was a stout, mustachioed civilian wearing flared trousers, a tight-fitting velvet jacket and a sombrero. The alcalde, Don Francisco Ruiz.
Though never her close friend, Don Francisco had always been cordial. He realized that Gura’s Hotel fulfilled a need in Bexar, and he had resisted pressure from the Armendariz family and others when they wanted it closed. Don Francisco glanced at Amanda as he passed. One of the officers said something to him and he looked away quickly, without so much as a nod of greeting.
There had been shame in his eyes, Amanda thought. But the shame wasn’t powerful enough to make him speak to her. The alcalde understood very well who controlled Bexar now. Later, she learned that he had been sent to the mission by Santa Anna himself. He was to search through the bodies of the Texans and confirm to His Excellency that William Travis, David Crockett and James Bowie were indeed dead.
Don Francisco’s rebuff brought tears to Amanda’s eyes. She was ashamed of herself, yet she couldn’t hold the tears back. A soldadera—a young, coarse-faced woman with immense breasts and a large mole near the point of her chin—saw her crying, snatched up a stone and lobbed it between two soldiers.
The stone struck Amanda’s forehead. The pain jolted her from her self-pity. Eyes flashing, she closed her hands into fists and started after the Mexican girl.
Cordoba was quicker. He brandished his sword and cursed. The young woman laughed and hurried on as soldiers kept Amanda from pursuing her.
The major reached for Amanda’s arm. “Are you all right, señora?”
She avoided his hand. “Yes. And I told you before—I don’t need any help from you.”