From ahead, tiny in the distance, came the crackle of rifle fire. “Deploy from column into line by the left flank-move!” Captain Connolly shouted. The soldiers moved: awkwardly, because they hadn’t had enough training in such maneuvers before they got thrown into action against the Red rebels.
Out ahead, through the dust of the march, Pinkard saw men on horseback blazing away at the advancing Confederates. Yankee cavalry, he realized. As Connolly had said, the land was wide hereabouts. Cavalry had room to maneuver, as it didn’t farther east.
He didn’t see the field artillery with the horsemen, not even after it started shelling him. He heard a whistle in the air, and then a crash somewhere close by. A moment later, he heard screams. Another whistle, another crash. More screams.
“Get down!” Sergeant Cross screamed. Jeff was already on his belly, wondering how the Negroes in Georgia had fought on without guns to give as they received. At Cross’ order, he and his comrades started shooting at the U.S. cavalrymen. “Nothing to worry about-just a skirmish,” the sergeant said. Pinkard supposed he was right, and found the prospect of a big battle even less appealing than supper the night before.
XI
Paul Mantarakis looked around. Most of what he saw was mountains baking under a savage sun. The rest was waterless valley full of boulders and cactus and nothing any man in his right mind could possibly want to own, let alone want it badly enough to take it away from the poor fools unfortunate enough to be in possession of it at the moment.
When he said that out loud, Gordon McSweeney’s big, fair head went up and down in agreement. “Amen,” the Scotsman said. “The Empire of Mexico is welcome to it, for all of me.”
“You ought to take another couple of salt tablets, Gordon,” Paul said. “You look like a lobster that’s been in the pot too long.”
For once, he was thankful for his swarthiness. Even here in Baja, California, all he did was go from brown to browner. Back in the normal world of the USA he dimly remembered, the whiter you were, the more breaks you got. Here, all you got was sunburn and heatstroke.
Captain Wyatt tramped past them. He wasn’t cooked quite so badly as McSweeney, but he was suffering, too. He said, “If we take this miserable stretch of land away from the Mexicans, we’ll be able to keep an eye on the Confederate Pacific coast-if the Rebs have any Pacific coast left once the war is done.”
“That’d be fine, sir,” Mantarakis said. “But once we’ve got bases here, how do we keep them supplied? No railroads except the one we built ourself. No roads, either, not unless you call what we’re on a road.”
“This isn’t just a road, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “This is damn near the road.” He paused to swig from his canteen. The water it held, if it was anything like what Paul had, was bloodwarm and stale. Wyatt went on, “We cut across the peninsula here to Santa Rosalia, and then we can look across the Gulf of California at the Rebs in Guaymas.”
“A shame and a disgrace that the Rebs still are in Guaymas,” Gordon McSweeney observed.
“Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows,” Captain Wyatt said. “But they are, and, from everything I’ve heard, it’s not much easier fighting over in Sonora than it is here.” He made a sour face. “And, of course, we’re starved for everything here, because we’re so far west. The war on the other side of the Mississippi is the big top; we’re just the sideshow.”
Something glinted for a moment, high on the side of the conical mountain ahead. Mantarakis pointed to it, saying, “Sir, I think the Mexicans-or maybe it’s the Rebs; who knows? — have an observation post way the hell up there.”
“Up on the slope of the Volcano of the Three Virgins, you mean?” Wyatt said. Paul nodded. The captain shrugged. “I would, sure as the devil, if I were in their shoes. I didn’t see anything. Show me again where you think it’s at.” After Mantarakis pointed, the captain nodded. “A little bit above that crag there?” He shouted for a runner, gave the fellow the location Mantarakis had spotted, and told him, “Pass it on to the field artillery. Maybe a howitzer can reach him from here. If that’s no good, we’ll just have to get used to them keeping an eye on everything we’re doing.”
Mantarakis said, “Haven’t seen much in the way of real fighting since we got down here. Not that I miss it,” he added hastily, “but are these Mexicans any good?”
“They won’t be as good as the Mormons were,” Ben Carlton put in. “’Course, nobody’s going to be as good as the Mormons were, unless I miss my guess. But if they were all that bad, we’d’ve already licked ’em.”
“Something to that,” Captain Wyatt agreed. “But we’ve been fighting the terrain as much as the Empire of Mexico, and there are some Rebs, too, helping their pals. But if you ask me-”
Paul didn’t ask the company commander. He didn’t have a chance to ask the company commander. A whistle in the air made him throw himself to the ground without consciously thinking he needed to do that. A shell burst, maybe fifty yards away.
He had his entrenching tool out and was busy digging himself a foxhole before the second shell came down. “Where are they coming from?” somebody shouted. “Don’t see any flash or anything.”
“Got to be a trench mortar,” Paul yelled back. “They must have put a couple of them on these hills, figured they’d drop some bombs on us. Trouble is, we don’t have any trenches.” He felt naked trying to fight without one, too.
“I’ll lay odds you’re right, Sergeant,” Captain Wyatt said. “The Mexicans don’t have any money to speak of; they can’t afford real artillery. In a place like this, though, what they’ve got is plenty good.”
It was, in Paul Mantarakis’ opinion, better than plenty good. Shells or bombs or whatever they were kept falling on the Americans. The ground, under a few inches of sandy dust, was hard as a sergeant’s heart (that Paul thought such things proved he’d come up through the ranks). He couldn’t get the foxhole deep enough to suit him.
And then somebody shouted, “Here come the bastards!” Resentfully, he threw down the entrenching tool and set his rifle against his shoulder. The enemy wasn’t playing fair. How was he supposed to kill them without getting hurt himself if they wouldn’t let him dig in properly?
Trench mortars up on the hilltops might have been Mexicans. Like any American, he thought of Mexico as backwards and corrupt and bankrupt; if the Emperor had been able to pay his bills, he wouldn’t have had to sell Chihuahua and Sonora to the CSA. And when the United States had fought Mexico, back before the War of Secession, they’d actually won. So Paul, in spite of what Captain Wyatt had said, expected any soldiers bold enough to charge to be Confederates propping up their allies.
But he was wrong. These men wore a khaki lighter than Confederate issue, so light it was almost yellow. In this terrain, it gave better protection than green-gray. They wore widebrimmed straw hats, too, not felts or steel derbies. And their shouts yipped like coyotes’ howls; they weren’t the cougar screams the Rebs used for battle cries.
Mantarakis fired, one of the first who did. Several Mexicans went down. He didn’t think they were all hit; they were taking cover, too. A bullet kicked dust into his face. He shivered despite the heat. A miss was as good as a mile, or so they said, but what did they really know, whoever they were?
Fire was coming at the Americans from the front and from both flanks. That wasn’t good. That was how you got shot to pieces. That was also probably why, after most of two years of war, the Americans hadn’t got to Santa Rosalia yet.
“Let’s get moving,” Mantarakis shouted to his squad. “We stay here, they’re going to chop us to bits.” Not without a pang of regret, he quit the unsatisfactory foxhole he’d dug and headed off to the right to see if he couldn’t do something about the flanking fire coming from that direction. His men followed him. He’d known of officers who found out too late they were moving all by themselves. Most of them hadn’t come back from moves like that.
Rifle bullets buzzed past him, clipped branches from the
chaparral through which he ran, and made dust spurt up again and again. He noted all that only peripherally. What he did note, with glad relief, was that the Mexicans hadn’t brought any machine guns forward with them. Maybe machine guns were like proper artillery: too expensive for them to afford. He fervently hoped so.
He dove behind a sun-wizened bush, snapped off a couple of rounds to make the enemy keep their heads down, and then got moving again. He came cautiously around a yellow boulder that might have been there since the beginning of time-and almost ran into a Mexican soldier doing the same thing.
They stared at each other. The Mexican had two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed over his chest, which made him look like a bandit. His bristly mustache and the black stubble on his chin only added to the impression.
Paul saw the Mexican very distinctly, as if a sculptor had carved him and the entire scene behind him into a sharp-edged simulation of reality. The man seemed to raise his rifle with dreamlike slowness, though Paul’s swung to bear on him no more swiftly.
They both fired at essentially the same instant. Time speeded up then. The Mexican let out a startled grunt and reeled away, blood coming from a small hole in the front of his uniform and a huge gaping exit wound about where his left kidney was-or had been.
With that hole in him, he was surely a dead man. He didn’t know it yet, though. He still held his rifle, and tried to aim it at Paul. Mantarakis discovered his left leg didn’t want to hold him. I can’t have been shot, he thought-I don’t feel anything. Falling heavily onto his side kept him from getting shot again, for the Mexican’s bullet cracked through the place where he’d been.
Then he fired once more, and the enemy soldier’s head exploded in red ruin. Paul tried to get up and discovered he couldn’t. He looked down at himself. Red was soaking through the dust on the inside of his trouser leg. Seeing his own blood flooding out of him made him understand he really had been hit. It also made the wound start to hurt. He clamped his teeth together hard against a scream.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody shouted, off to one side of him. He did an awkward, three-limbed crawl back behind the shelter of that boulder. Then he detached his bayonet and cut the trouser leg with it before fumbling for the wound dressing in a pouch on his belt.
His hands didn’t want to do what he told them. He’d barely managed to shove the bandage against the hole in his leg when a couple of U.S. soldiers grabbed him. “Got to get you out of here, Sarge,” one of them said.
“Got to get us all the hell out of here,” the other added. “Damn Mexicans got us pinned down good.”
“We’ll lick ’em,” Paul said vaguely. His voice sounded very far away, as if he were listening to himself along a tunnel. He wasn’t hot any more, either. A long time ago, hadn’t they bled people who had fevers? He tried to laugh, though no sound came out. Sure as sure, he wouldn’t have any fever now.
One of the men supporting him grunted just as the Mexican had and crumpled to the ground. A few paces farther on, the other soldier said, “Can you help any, Sarge? We’d move faster if you could do something with your good leg.” Getting no reply, he spoke again, louder: “Sarge?”
He stooped, letting his burden down behind another of the strangely shaped rocks that dotted the valley. When he got up again, he ran on alone.
Anne Colleton felt trapped. Living as the only white person at what had been-and what she was fiercely determined would again be-Marshlands plantation with the remnants of her field hands was only part of the problem, though she made a point of carrying a small revolver in her handbag and preferred not to go far from the Tredegar rifle when she could help it. You couldn’t tell any more, not these days.
That was part of the problem. The Red uprising had shattered patterns of obedience two hundred years old. The field hands still did as she told them. The fields were beginning to look as if she might have some kind of crop this year, no matter how late it had been started. But she couldn’t use the Negroes as she had before. She’d taken their compliance for granted. No more. Now they worked in exchange for her keeping the Confederate authorities from troubling them for whatever they might have done during the rebellion. It was far more nearly a bargain between equals than the previous arrangement had been.
But only part of her feeling of isolation was spiritual. The rest was physical, and perfectly real. She’d made trips into St. Matthews and into Columbia, trying to get the powers that be to repair the telephone and telegraph lines that connected her to the wider world. She’d had promises that they would be up two weeks after her return to the plantation. She’d had a lot more promises since. What she didn’t have were telephone and telegraph lines.
“God damn those lying bastards to hell,” she snarled, staring out along the path, out toward the road, out toward the whole wide world where anything at all might be happening-but if it was happening, how could she find out about it? She’d prided herself on her modernity, but the life she was living had more to do with the eighteenth century than the twentieth.
Beside her, Julia stirred. “Don’ fret yourself none, Miss Anne,” she said. Her hands rested on the broad shelf of her belly. Before long, she would have that baby. If she knew who the father was, she hadn’t said so.
Anne ground her teeth. Julia would have been ideally suited to the eighteenth century, or to the fourteenth century, for that matter. She let things happen to her. When they did, she cast around for the easiest way to set them right and chose that.
“Better to be actor than acted upon,” Anne said, more to herself than to her serving woman. She’d always believed that, though she’d had scant experience of being acted upon till the Red revolution cast her into the hands of the military. Having gained the experience, she was convinced she’d been right to loathe it.
She looked over toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. The cottage in which she was living now had belonged to Cassius the hunter. From what she’d heard, he’d had a high place in the Negroes’Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d been a Red right under her nose, and she’d never suspected. That ate at her, too. She hated being wrong.
Even more galling was having been wrong about Scipio, who was also supposed to have been a revolutionary leader. I gave him everything, she thought: education, fine clothes, the same food I ate-and this is the thanks he gave me in return? He’d vanished when the revolt collapsed. Maybe he was dead. If he wasn’t, and she found him, she swore she’d make him wish he were.
And the Ford she was driving these days made as unsatisfactory a replacement for her vanished Vauxhall as the nigger cottage did for her vanished mansion. She hated the balky, farting motorcar. The only thing she would have hated worse was being without one altogether.
An automobile rattled past on the road, kicking up a trail of red dust as it went. It was, she saw, an armored car, with a couple of machine guns mounted in a central turret. Resistance still sputtered in the swamps by the Congaree. Otherwise, that armored car would have been of far more value shooting down damnyankees, its proper task.
Julia’s eyes followed the armored car till it disappeared behind a stand of trees. Despite her broad lips, her mouth made a thin, hard line. She swore up and down that she’d never been a rebel, that she hated everything the Reds stood for. Anne’s opinion was that she protested too much. Wherever the truth lay there, Julia did not take kindly to seeing such deadly machines out hunting black men. That was also true even of the Negroes who had, Anne thought, genuinely disapproved of the Socialist uprising. Anne sighed. Life kept getting harder.
A couple of minutes later, a party of horsemen turned off the road and onto the path leading up to…the ruins of Marshlands. Two of the three riders had the look of superannuated soldiers, and carried carbines across their knees. The third, the postman, wore a Tredegar slung on his back.
Anne walked toward him, nodding as she did so. “Good morning, Mr. Palmer,” she called. With the telephone and telegraph out of commission, the postman was her lifeline to the wide
r world.
He swung down off his horse and touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. Producing a pencil and a printed form, he said, “Mornin’ to you, Miss Colleton. Got a special delivery you got to sign for-and quite a special delivery it is, too. Ah, thank you, ma’am.” He passed her the envelope, and then the rest of the day’s mail. That done, he gave her another half-salute, remounted, and urged his horse up from walk to canter. The two armed guards rode off with him, their eyes hard and alert.
“Richmond,” Anne said, noting the postmark on the envelope before she spotted the return address in the upper left-hand corner, in a typeface that might have come straight off a Roman monument:
RESIDENCE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
Her head went up and down in a quick, decisive nod. “About time Gabriel Semmes got off his backside and wrote to me.”
“Who it from, Miss Anne?” Julia asked.
“The president,” Anne answered, and the Negro woman’s eyes got big and round.
Anne tore the envelope open. The letter was in Semmes’ own hand, which partly mollified her for not having heard from him sooner. My dear Miss Colleton, the president of the CSA wrote, Let me extend to you my deepest personal sympathies on the loss of your brother and the damage to your property during the unfortunate events of the recent past.
“Unfortunate events,” Anne snorted, as if the two words added up to some horrible curse-and so, maybe, they did. Before he’d been elected, Gabriel Semmes had made a name for himself as a man who went out and did things, not a typical politician. Anne had thrown money into his campaign on that basis. But if he called an insurrection an unfortunate event, maybe she would have been better served spending it elsewhere.
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