by Jeff Long
"Yes."
"Well the animals came through last night. And the sun was hot today." Bryan was grimacing. "I've never seen such things."
So that was it, Houston realized. They were haunted. They had walked among the ghosts and bones. He knew what they must have seen. The wounds would have opened wider beneath the fangs and beaks of predators, and the sun would have split them wider still. There was no worse sight than human flesh reduced to carrion.
"You ordered no plundering," Bryan went on, his voice almost too soft to hear.
"And they plundered." Houston wasn't surprised, not a bit.
"And more," Bryan said. He halted again. "Some of the men . . ." Bryan's voice faded away.
Houston didn't spare him. "Tell me," he insisted.
"Some went through the dead," Bryan spoke. "With knives."
"I know," he said.
Bryan looked sick. Houston pitied him. You want it back, don't you? But it's gone. If only they could retrieve what was lost so easily, by simply blaming its loss on an accident. Or on madness.
"It was only some of the men," Bryan added. "The rest were sickened. They would have nothing to do with it."
Houston snorted. Their humanity had arrived a day too late.
"And there was something else," Bryan said. "There is a woman."
"You found a woman?"
"I don't know who saw her first. She's a Mexican woman. A camp follower, probably. I've seen her. A beautiful woman. Very beautiful."
"She's dead?"
"Killed."
Houston made a guess. "And my heroes mutilated her as well."
"Oh, no, General. No one would defile such beauty."
He talked as if she were an angel fallen to earth. "I don't understand, Mr. Bryan. More than six hundred men were cut down yesterday. This is just one whore."
"You don't understand?" Bryan pleaded.
Houston regained his patience. "Your chivalry is admirable," he said. "But with so many bullets flying yesterday, an accident to a lady was inevitable."
"But that's just it, sir. It was no accident. The men are quite upset. She was stabbed with a saber."
Then a saber, Houston almost snapped. But there was a difference. Between random bullets and a handheld sword there could be all the difference in the world. "Nonetheless," he said, "in the heat of battle, with all the smoke, it could have been one of her own. . . ."
"No sir," Bryan said. "It was deliberate. There were witnesses. And they have identified the killer as an American officer."
Even foggy with pain and lost blood, Houston saw the implications. His soldiers were killers, but they were southerners first. And a woman, especially a beautiful woman, was supposed to enjoy the protection of their arms, especially a southern officer's arms. Under ordinary circumstances this might have been a serious charge. But Houston found it hard to believe that, on the day after a massacre, anyone besides an overwrought nephew of Austin's would really care. He was wrong.
"What officer?" Houston asked.
Bryan was about to answer, then held up a finger and said, "Listen."
"What is it?" Houston asked.
"They're doing it again," Bryan said. "All evening . . ."
Now Houston heard it.
From far away an American voice was floating through the trees. "Who killed the woman?" it cried out.
What happened next stunned Houston.
Hundreds of voices lifted up from around the different fires. It was like some ancient Greek chorus chanting to the dark night wind, and Houston suddenly recognized that this was the same name he'd woken to. All in unison they roared it to the stars.
"Colonel Forbes."
Houston lay there speechless. He was incapable of making sense of the moment. If Old Hickory himself had commanded them to shout all at once, they wouldn't have done it. And yet
they had just answered the crime with one voice. They were subordinate after all. The force of their obedience—the unrequited mystery of it—frightened Houston the way it evidently frightened the men. Something had been unleashed among them.
Chapter Thirteen
In the morning, at Houston's order, the army returned to comb the fields for whatever remained of the Mexican arms and war machinery. Grumbling, the soldiers fanned out and set off. By daylight their dread was manageable, but the bodies had begun to decompose. Even at this distance Houston could smell the death.
With the men off to scour the fields, the camp quieted. Houston forced down a little scorched beef and some coffee. After a while he felt strong enough to have a passing soldier prop him a little higher against his tree root.
Like hogs sensing the autumn slaughter, the prisoners had been agitated all night. But they visibly relaxed once the bulk of their executioners departed. They quit milling around in the pen and got on with the task of daily subsistence. Mexican officers detailed some of their men to scoop the human dung off to one corner. Soldiers started fires to cook the bull that had been driven into their enclosure. Under heavy guard five tiny Mayans began an endless round of hauling water from the river to the pen. Houston could see a row of bare feet, their wounded who had died. Some of the Mexicans joined in little songs of prayer that sounded almost serene. Houston closed his eyes and listened.
Before long Houston's colonels began to drift over. "They say you're dying," Three-Legged Willie said to him. He had a sword cut across his pegleg.
Houston was in pain and the fever and blood loss had
wracked him. All he could do was lie there as the officers surrounded his carcass. "It's not true," he said.
"Sure looks true," Willie said.
Burleson wandered over, his homespun jacket split open along every seam. Wylie Martin looked like he'd just won an election, all teeth. And Sherman had added another silver star to his collar, although for the sake of modesty he'd pinned it to his opposite collar and kept himself a one-star general. Forbes entered on horseback and dismounted with a flourish, showing off a magnificent sword. It was obviously plunder. Crowned with an eagle head, the hilt had gold wrapped around carved ivory with silver inlay. The eagle had eves made of rubies. The scabbard alone was more handsome than any weapon Houston had ever seen.
"Yesterday it belonged to General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna," Forbes announced. "Today it belongs to me. And for you, General Houston," he opened his hand, "the snuffbox of Santa Anna." On his palm lay a pure gold box.
Houston was too dismayed to speak. The audacious colonel had helped himself to the best of the plunder, and, worse, done so in front of the entire army. It was a terrible example, one bound to cause resentment. No wonder the men were making a sacrifice of his reputation.
"Sit down, colonels," Houston said. "Tell me what's going on out in the world."
Burleson led off. Captain Seguin's vaqueros were reporting that major elements of the Mexican army were still advancing from the west. They numbered in the thousands and were led by an able corps of generals.
"You worrv over nothing," Old Wylie chastised Burleson. Apparentlv they'd been arguing among themselves.
"We have to prepare," Burleson insisted. "They'll come for us now."
"Didn't we just take on twice our numbers and thrash them down?'' Sherman said. "Let them come. If they want death and destruction, we have plenty to spare for them."
They bickered for an hour, by which time clusters of soldiers were returning to camp from the battlefield. Thev cut through the grasses with their arms and hands full of clothing so stiff with blood it looked starched and with weapons and other trinkets. Behind them the skv was thick with carrion birds
wheeling. The soldiers had dread and nausea written on their faces. Clearly the fields had grown more horrifying.
Surrounded by his child troops, the cannoneer Ben McCul-loch came in wearing a hat woven out of grass and palmetto leaves. He carried the same shattered expression as the rest.
"Hail that soldier," Houston said to Burleson.
"Boy," Burleson shouted. "Come over here."
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McCulloch approached warily.
"Sergeant," Houston addressed him. "Report on what you found out there today."
"Out there?" The boy had been among ghosts, Houston could hear it in his voice. His Adam's apple squeezed up and down. "Sir, the hands . . ."
The hands are reaching up from the field. Houston could see it still.
"The eyes are gone, sir. The birds come. And not a one has his eyes left." McCulloch was in shock. The child was no longer a child.
Colonel Sherman leaned back, lighthearted. "I hear the buzzards will eat the horses, but won't touch the greasers for all the spice in them."
"Oh no, that ain't so," McCulloch said. "The animals been eating on everything out there. Why there's arms and legs scattered from here to yonder."
"Do tell."
"Yes, sir."
"And the woman?" Houston interrupted. Colonel Sherman ate his grin. The other officers glared at Houston with the contempt of victims. As for Forbes, he froze.
Until that instant, Houston had considered the charge against Forbes just a malicious invention. He was an ass and the men had been rankling him for weeks. Now he was dipping into the plunder while the rest of the army was forbidden to. Even if Forbes actually had sabered her, Houston would have excused the act as an accident.
But Forbes was guilty. He had killed the woman, and not by accident. Houston was taken off guard. He didn't know why he knew exactly, not after all the deception and death that had passed to now. But Forbes was guilty. He stared straight ahead.
"I went up to her," McCulloch answered. "She's just lying there on her back. Yesterday I'd've said hush, she's sleeping.
And she was so pretty. But today . . ." He screwed up his mouth and whispered the rest. "They took her eyes, too, sir."
Suddenly Forbes erupted. "I demand a court of inquiry," he yelled out. "By God, I am innocent."
Sherman reached over and patted the colonel's leg. "Of course you are, man. There's no need for a court."
"By God." Forbes shivered. "I demand to clear my name. I demand an immediate court of my peers. I demand . . ."
He would have gone on demanding, too. But something was going on among the prisoners. It began as a murmur and rapidly built into a leaf storm of words, and it reached over to Houston and his colonels.
Forbes quit his shouting and they all looked across at the corral of captives, then out to where they were pointing. It was midday and the sunlight was yellow and jumpy on the green grass. Deaf Smith was wading through the emerald glister on horseback with a bedgraggled imp of a Mexican mounted right behind him on the rump. The scout had taken a prisoner.
At first Houston thought the prisoners were celebrating the sight of one more living comrade or perhaps cheering his two days on the wing. For his own part Houston was relieved to see Smith with a prisoner in tow, for it meant the old scout had quit the killing as Houston had ordered.
"What's that they're saying?" Burleson said.
Now Houston paid attention to the clamor.
"£/ Presidente," the Mexican prisoners were crying out. "Santa Anna."
"Can it be?" said Houston.
It was so.
They brought Santa Anna before Houston, who lay against the oak tree. A huge crowd of Americans developed, some carrying rope for a hanging, some guns and knives. In their bloody battle-torn uniforms, they looked like a graveyard in rebellion. It was not an auspicious start for the emperor of Mexico.
Dressed like a circus monkey in a slave's cotton pants, a moldy leather cap, a discarded round jacket—once blue, now a patchwork of rainbow colors—and a linen blouse with diamond studs, Santa Anna stood there with one hand upon his heart. When they'd rousted him from his hiding place in the bayou that morning he'd been wearing a pair of red silk morocco
slippers on each foot, and carrying a box of chocolates and a gourd of water wrapped in a white sheet, looking more ready for bed than escape.
It was impossible to say which was having the worse effect on the prisoner, the thick ring of men clamoring for his immediate death, or their laughter at his scavenged costume. His fingers trembled like a very old tailor's, rebelling in principle against his overall stillness. Otherwise the captive managed to contain his agitation. He had black eyes and a long neck that tapered aristocratically.
The men swarmed together in the manner of peeking at a human deformity or some exotic animal. In a way Santa Anna was both, part Napoleon and part Don Quixote, a creature of the New World that could only have flourished in a place like Mexico City. Or, Houston reminded himself, in Washington, D.C. Here was a figure of such charisma that, with words alone, he could carry an army of seven thousand men and women and children a million miles from their jungles and huts and cities into this hostile North called Texas. Here was a butterfly who'd presumed to change the world with the brilliance of his colors.
How powerful he must be, Houston thought. He has so much to teach me. Houston's rabble was of a different mind, of course. They took one look at Santa Anna's wonderful strangeness and his magical authority and howled for his extermination.
"Hang him."
"Shoot the son of a bitch."
Old Jimmy Curtis was present. 'Til nail him to a tree and skin him piece by piece. Give the bastard to me for what he done to Wash Cottle."
With every shout Houston's gunshot throbbed a little harder, reminding him that his own chances of surviving the birth of an American Texas probably weren't much better than Santa Anna's. He wanted to bellow for silence. But he was enough of a spectacle already, filth encrusted and lying in the dirt, a general with no uniform who had pissed his own pants. He did what he could to put a little more elevation in his prostration and wished there had been time to have one of the beautiful Mexican blankets spread underneath him. There was no excuse to let down his own theater, not even with a mortal wound.
"One of you men bring a crate for my guest to sit on. And
you," he pointed at a bald fellow with bad teeth, "go fetch some coffee and meat over here."
"For him?"
The cluster of men grew larger, reminding Houston of magpies that multiply around a bright object. A wooden ammunition box got hauled over.
With the timing of a natural-born diplomat, Moses Bryan forced his way through the crowd and took his place beside Houston. Houston fastened his gaze upon the slender prisoner and closed out the yammering crowd. "General," he began, "would you have a seat, sir."
Bryan bowed slightly and introduced himself to Santa Anna, then softly translated Houston's invitation to sit on the crate. Santa Anna dipped his chin with courtly acceptance. First, though, he asked Bryan to formally present him to Houston as one ruler to another, name first, followed by his credentials, a long list.
"Also," Bryan went on translating, "he wishes to put himself at the disposition of the brave General Houston. He asks to be treated as a general should be treated when a prisoner of war."
"You can tell the general his treatment won't be one bit worse than what our men enjoyed as his prisoners," Houston replied. It would have been a lie to promise anything more, and the Mexican seemed satisfied with Houston's candor.
Santa Anna seated himself with a tired whispered "ay." He was visibly relieved to descend beneath the canopy of death threats and hostility. He kept his back straight and his expression firm, but Houston didn't miss how under his sunburn and the mud on his face he was pale and weary. He sat still with flies buzzing around his head. Houston had wondered what this notorious ruler would look like. Would he have decadent eyes or hands crisscrossed with battle scars? Would he have the clenched jaw of an Andrew Jackson? What Houston saw was an ordinary man who had reached high, only to fall. But he had managed to land on his feet, that was important. Yes, there was much to learn here.
"Does the general have any immediate needs?" Houston asked Bryan. The young man had crouched upon his heels between the two generals. He relayed the question, then the answer.
"He says it would be a
courtesy of state if you would allow him one of his own aides."
It brought to mind the world of diplomacy Texas would now have to engage in. Lead balls and butcher knives could gain them only so much. "Fair enough," Houston said. "Who among them survived?"
"Let's see," Bryan considered, "there's Juan Almonte."
"Almonte's in the bunch?" Houston hadn't known. "I'll be." He'd met Almonte several years earlier when a group of Mexican scientists and officers passed through Texas on a factfinding expedition. Almonte had charmed the Anglos with his perfect English, his fine humor, his understanding of American and European ways. He was the bastard son of a priest, Morelos, who was a great revolutionary hero in Mexico. Not long before the firing squad got him, Morelos had sent his child to the United States for safety and education.
"Yes," said Houston. "Bring Almonte over."
While they waited for Almonte to be brought, Santa Anna swallowed a piece of Houston's opium and took a sip of water. It would take ten minutes or so for the medicine to melt into his veins, but already his anxiety seemed to be loosening. He looked at Houston with an expression—a blink, a tiny dimpling—that bordered on fraternity. Houston had noticed the bonding effect of opiates before, but this was different. Encircled by a lynch mob with ropes and guns and drawn knives glinting in the sun, this was more like two men being trapped in a tiny cabin by a terrible hurricane. In a sense that's what it was, the storm of history.
Santa Anna spoke. Bryan leaned down toward Houston's head. "The general asks, how many thousands of soldiers did you use to defeat him?"
Houston was tempted to inflate the actual figure. But Almonte and some of the other Mexican officers would surely have estimated his troop strength by now, and anyway the truth was more satisfying. "Less than eight hundred," Houston said.
When Bryan told him, Santa Anna's face congested. His black eyes flared, as if Houston had just insulted his intelligence. Then he decided it was a joke after all, and smiled. Finally, with another glance around, he realized it must be the truth and something like beatific resignation surfaced. Houston watched the emotions slide across his face. He'd known only one other man whose countenance could leap from the lion to the lamb so naturally, and that was Old Hickory.
