The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Lee was glad to prove a good prophet. The Texans did not attempt another night attack. Such assaults were chancy things, for those making them and for those resisting alike. Some foolish accident might hand a fortress over to the assailants, or, equally, might leave the best-laid attacking scheme overturned in a ditch, wheels spinning uselessly.

  March 4 came and went. Ben McCulloch rode forward under flag of truce to call curses down on the head of “that great, ugly abolitionist baboon” now occupying the White House and to call on the bluecoats to abandon “his satanic cause.” To the surprise of no one save perhaps McCulloch, the call inspired no desertions.

  “I do not love Abraham Lincoln. I never have. I doubt I ever shall,” Lee told Major Thomas. “But to hear him reviled by the likes of that…that individual surely makes me like him better.”

  “I know what you mean, sir,” Thomas replied. “When somebody you can’t stand cusses out somebody you’re on the fence about, it sure makes you think there must be something to the second fellow after all.”

  Lee nodded. “It does indeed, Major. It does indeed.”

  The siege wore on. Texas officially joined the Confederate States. The Stars and Bars rose alongside the Lone Star flag, opposing the tattered Stars and Stripes still defiantly floating over the Alamo. Every so often, a bluecoat or a militiaman got shot. His screams reminded friend and foe that this was war: a filthy business if ever there was one.

  And then, five days into Abraham Lincoln’s term, something new was added to the mix. The Texans unlimbered a battery of brass twelve-pounders. “Uh-oh,” George Thomas said, staring down the muzzles of the cannon. “Somebody must’ve had a rush of brains to the head. Where did they steal all those Napoleons?”

  “From a U.S. fort, unless I am much mistaken. They could hardly manufacture their own.” Lee did his best to hide his dismay. Big guns had been knocking down fortress walls since the Middle Ages. In fact, the ability of big guns to knock down fortress walls was one of the things that had ended the Middle Ages.

  Napoleons weren’t very big guns. The twelve-pound iron balls they threw were only a bit more than four and a half inches through the middle. Then again, the Alamo wasn’t much of a fortress, either. Its walls were high, but not especially thick. They weren’t faced with earth, either, to lessen the shock of a cannonball’s impact. Major Babbitt had never dreamt the compound he rebuilt would need to stand a second siege.

  Major Thomas reached his verdict in a hurry: “We’re in trouble, sir. A lot of trouble, as a matter of fact.”

  “We have been in a lot of trouble since we chose to defend this fort, and with it the honor of the United States.” Lee hoped he sounded calmer than he felt. “All we can do now is await developments.”

  They didn’t have to wait long. One by one, the Napoleons opened fire. The Texans serving the guns were obviously trying it for the first time. One cannonball flew clean over the compound and crashed into an adobe building on the far side. Another plowed a brief furrow in the ground before it skipped along and banged into the wall.

  But the militiamen got the hang of things. They had plenty of roundshot and plenty of powder. Before long, they were hitting the wall on the fly with almost every shot. And that was all they needed to do. When they hit near the top, flying stone chips became as deadly as musket balls. Even when they didn’t, every cannonball spread cracks and fissures through the stonework. Every sharp smack of impact spread dread through the garrison.

  “It’s going to fall down.” Thomas put the dread into words.

  “Yes,” Lee said. “I know.”

  “What do we do then, sir?”

  “Let us wait until an effectual breach is created before we consider that,” Lee replied.

  A little past noon, a stretch of wall about ten feet wide sadly slumped into a pile of rubble. The Texans surrounding the Alamo whooped. The artillerists capered and waved their hats. Amateurs or not, they’d done what Ben McCulloch needed them to do. Anyone could see they were able to widen the breach at need.

  Major Thomas looked a question at Lee. He didn’t ask it aloud, for which Lee was duly grateful. Lee said, “Have some men fasten a piece of white cloth—three feet by three will do—to a staff, if you would be so kind.”

  “You’re surrendering? We’re surrendering?”

  “Yes,” Lee said, though the word tasted like ashes in his mouth. “With the wall shattered, how can we hope to resist? I came here to make a point, not to kill myself and the whole garrison with me. That would follow upon further defense, plainly.”

  He waved the flag himself. The firing took a little while to die away. Then Colonel McCulloch rode up to treat with him. “You’ve had enough?” the Texan said.

  “We have,” Lee answered.

  And he discovered, to his relief, that McCulloch also seemed uninterested in going to extremes now: “Will you undertake to march away under safe-conduct and not to fight against Texas or the Confederate States until you are properly exchanged?”

  “We will,” Lee said at once—those were almost the terms the Texan had offered at the start of things. “Is that the sum of your demands?”

  “Damn straight it is,” McCulloch said. “We want you bastards the hell out of Texas. This is our state, not the abolitionists’. You can even carry your personal weapons, for all I care. Cost us enough men and enough time to get you to quit.”

  Lee’s sigh might have come from a beaten man. “Very well, Colonel McCulloch. Please write up two copies of the surrender terms: I will want one to show to my superiors on returning to territory that recognizes the authority of the United States. After I sign them, we shall depart your state.”

  “Bet your boots you will,” McCulloch said. “I’ll send ’em to you directly.”

  Directly stretched past half an hour, which suited Lee well enough. He drew up his men, lowered the flag under which they’d fought, and made certain other arrangements. The terms, when they came, were exactly what Colonel McCulloch had announced. Some clerk with a fine hand had written them; McCulloch’s scrawled signature made each copy official. Lee appended his own signature in duplicate, then led his men out of the Alamo compound.

  Ben McCulloch even doffed his hat as the U.S. soldiers emerged. Lee gravely returned the courtesy. He handed the Texan one copy of the surrender accord. “Obliged, Colonel Lee,” McCulloch said.

  One of his men—an officer, by the fellow’s flannel armband—suddenly pointed to the Alamo, from which smoke had begun to rise. “Somethin’s burnin’ in there!” the militiaman burst out.

  McCulloch stared, then swore. “What in damnation are you playing at, Lee?” he roared—no fine manners now.

  “Destroying the supplies stored there,” Lee answered calmly. “They are U.S. government property, as I have said again and again. “They would be of use against us now that secession has become insurrection, and so….” A brisk pop-pop-pop! punctuated his sentence. He nodded. “Ah, the cartridges have started to cook off.”

  “You filthy, rotten, conniving—!” Words failed McCulloch, but not for long: “I ought to hang you higher than Haman!”

  “Why, Colonel? The terms we both signed do not forbid me from acting as I did. I would have surrendered the supplies intact had you required it of me; with our wall breached, I was in no position to refuse you anything. But since you did not, I served my country as best I could.”

  Despite being within his rights, he wondered if McCulloch would order his men to take their revenge on the bluecoats. The U.S. soldiers had their personal weapons, yes, but they were dreadfully outnumbered. They wouldn’t, they couldn’t, last long.

  Maybe Colonel McCulloch would have, but some of the militiamen started to laugh at how he’d got outfoxed. McCulloch went red, then deadly pale. “Take your soldiers and take yourself away from here,” he snarled when he could speak again. “If we ever meet again, I will shoot you on sight.”

  Lee politely raised his hat once more. “Well, Colonel, you are welcom
e to try.”

  Washington had always been Lee’s home town, as much as a man with the peripatetic life of an Army officer could have one. His family estate, Arlington, lay right across the Potomac from the nation’s capital.

  At the moment, Arlington lay in another country: the Confederate States of America. Now that Lee was out of the Alamo and back in the USA, he’d caught up on what had happened while Ben McCulloch’s Texans besieged his small command.

  As he and George Thomas had foretold, James Buchanan did nothing but wring his hands and make deploring noises in his last few miserable days in the White House. Whatever one thought of Abraham Lincoln, the new President was made of sterner stuff than that. In his inaugural address, he called for 100,000 volunteers to preserve the Union. Men from the North and West, the sections that had elected him, stormed to the colors.

  But men from the slaveholding states stormed the other way. Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia promptly left the USA for the CSA. Kentucky and Missouri trembled, the forces of secession and union almost perfectly balanced within their borders. And U.S. Army troops held Maryland down by force, lest she bolt and take with her Washington’s only railway link to the rest of the United States.

  Virginia was the state that mattered to Lee. Unlike Major Thomas, he’d always thought of himself more as a Virginian than an American. He had trouble imagining fighting against his state. Yet the same attack in Texas that had led to Virginia’s secession had left him a national hero in what remained of the United States.

  He’d been paraded through the streets of Washington after the train brought him into town. How the people cheered! Children waved the Stars and Stripes, the flag he’d defended. Indeed, the very flag he’d defended was paraded through the streets with him. Every tatter, every bullet hole, showed what the enemies of the United States had done.

  And every cheer Lee heard made him more uncomfortable and more miserable. Now, the day after the parade, he’d been invited to the White House. Soldiers guarding the Presidential mansion against Confederate sympathizers (of which Washington had more than a few) came to stiff attention and saluted as Lee’s carriage pulled up to the entrance. And, as Lee got down from it, President Lincoln came out of the White House to greet him in person.

  Lee was a tall man: close to six feet. Lincoln had four or five inches on him, and seemed taller still because he was very thin and because he wore a black stovepipe hat. Now Lee saluted him, murmuring, “Your Excellency.”

  Lincoln held out his hand. Lee took it. “I am very pleased to meet you in person, Colonel,” the President said. He wasn’t merely abbreviating Lee’s rank; some of the first news Lee had got on leaving the Alamo was that he’d been promoted for his stout defense of the place. Lincoln gestured. “Won’t you step inside?”

  “At your service, sir.” Lee covertly studied the new President. Lincoln seemed neither buffoon nor knuckle-dragging great ape, as the South often portrayed him. He was odd-looking, but that was scarcely his fault.

  Once they were inside, a Negro servant brought lemonade, then disappeared. The cool drink went well; the morning was sticky, and gave promise of heat. Lincoln came straight to the point: “General Scott tells me you have declined command of the U.S. Army.”

  “Yes, sir. It is a great honor, but I had to do as I did,” Lee said. “I will not lift my sword against my own state.”

  “Yet you fought for the USA against men now on the same side as Virginia,” Lincoln said in musing tones.

  “I did,” Lee agreed. “It puts me in an embarrassing position now, I admit. But Virginia yet remained in the Union then.”

  “Is that not a quibble?” the President said. “The principle for which you risked your life remains as much in force now as it did then. I aim to preserve the Union. So did you, when you refused that Texan’s arrogant demands.”

  “I was not fighting Virginians then,” Lee said miserably. “And…” Eyeing Abraham Lincoln, Lee let his voice trail off.

  “And I wasn’t President yet?” Lincoln suggested. However odd he looked, his wits worked fine. Lee nodded, embarrassed anew. Lincoln chuckled, but then got down to business again: “I am President now, and I will preserve the Union or die trying. You made that same choice, did you not?”

  “Yes, sir.” From many men, Lee would have taken or die trying as so much bombast. He believed it from Lincoln, which surprised him.

  “So you fought to preserve the Union, but you do not care to fight Virginians,” the President said. Lee nodded once more. Lincoln steepled his fingers. His hands were enormous. “How would this be?” he asked. “Suppose I send you to the Mississippi Valley, to command U.S. forces in those parts? This war is a continent wide. You could serve your country, and serve it well, without ever harming a hair on the head of a man from your home state.”

  “Directly,” Lee said.

  “Directly, yes,” Lincoln allowed. “But that caveat has been in place since the shooting started, as you must know.”

  Lee temporized: “I may not fight at all for the time being, as I have not yet been properly exchanged.”

  “Oh, yes, you have.” Lincoln’s smile made him ugly in a different way. “The western part of Virginia, as you may have heard, loves secession no more than the tidewater loves union. In the skirmishing there, a bright young fellow named McClellan bagged a couple of Confederate militia colonels. We sent one of them back with a pretty ribbon around him and out compliments, so you are free to do this if you will.”

  Like Lee, McClellan came out of the Corps of Engineers. He’d been a new-minted second lieutenant during the Mexican War, and won several brevet promotions for bravery. Instead of staying in the Army, he’d gone into railroading and made a pile of cash. Now, evidently, he was back, and doing well.

  All of which was by the way. “My state and I would still stand on opposing sides in this quarrel,” Lee said.

  “True,” Lincoln said. Lee admired him for that; most political men would have talked around the problem instead of meeting it head-on. The President continued, “But you’ve already fought for the Union once. Would you feel easy fighting against it after what happened in Texas? And you would hardly be the only Virginian to stay loyal to the USA, as you must know.”

  “Well, yes,” Lee said; George Thomas had made his views unmistakably clear. Lee spread his hands in misery. “I feel torn in two.”

  “The U.S. Army did not open fire at the Alamo, thanks to you. Nowhere has the U.S. Army opened fire. The insurrectionists have, again and again. If that does not tell you something, perhaps it should.”

  “I had not looked at it that way, not so plainly,” Lee said. He let out a sad, slow sigh. “Very well, your Excellency. I shall go to the West. But if I find my conscience cannot bear it, I reserve the right to retire at any time and plant corn.”

  “Agreed,” Lincoln said at once. “Since your lands lie unpleasantly close to what has become the border, I will even give you a farm and a mule and seed corn to put in the ground, to show how glad I am you have chosen our side.” He held out his hand once more. After a long, long pause, Lee took it.

  While he was in the West, he reflected, he might meet Ben McCulloch once more. Yes, indeed. He just might.

  END

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Harry Turtledove

  Art copyright (C) 2011 by John Jude Palencar

  Books by Harry Turtledove

  GERIN THE FOX

  Were Blood

  Werenight

  Prince of the North

  King of the North

  Fox and Empire

  VIDESSOS

  The Misplaced Legion

  An Emperor for the Legion

  The Legion of Videssos

  Swords of the Legion

  Videssos Cycle (omnibus)

  Bridge of the Separator

  KRISPOS

  Krispos Rising

  Krispos of Videssos

  Krispos the Emperor

  WORLDWAR

 
; In the Balance

  Tilting the Balance

  Upsetting the Balance

  Striking the Balance

  TIME OF TROUBLES

  The Stolen Throne

  Hammer and Anvil

  The Thousand Cities

  Videssos Besieged

  GREAT WAR

  How Few Remain

  The American Front

  Walk in Hell

  Breakthroughs

  DARKNESS

  Into the Darkness

  Darkness Descending

  Through the Darkness

  Rulers of the Darkness

  Jaws of Darkness

  Out of the Darkness

  COLONISATION

  Second Contact

  Down to Earth

  Aftershocks

  WAR BETWEEN THE PROVINCES

  Sentry Peak

  Marching Through Peachtree

  Advance and Retreat

  AMERICAN EMPIRE

  Blood and Iron

  The Center Cannot Hold

  The Victorious Opposition

  CROSSTIME TRAFFIC

  Gunpowder Empire

  Curious Notions

  In High Places

  The Disunited States of America

  The Gladiator

  The Valley-Westside War

  SETTLING ACCOUNTS

  Return Engagement

  Drive to the East

  The Grapple

  In At the Death

  Pacific War

  Days of Infamy

  End of the Beginning

  Gap

  Beyond the Gap

  The Breath of God

  The Golden Shrine

  Atlantis

  Opening Atlantis

  The United States of Atlantis

  Liberating Atlantis

  War That Came Early

  Hitler’s War

  West and East

  The Big Switch

  Novels

  Agent of Byzantium

  Noninterference

  A Different Flesh

  Kaleidoscope

  A World of Difference

  Earthgrip

  The Guns of the South

  The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump