Purgatory's Shore

by Taylor Anderson

  She was repelled by the thought of drinking after him, but she’d gladly use the water to soften the fouling on her pistol. She took the canteen and carefully dribbled its pitiful contents on the gummy, blackened Colt. “Why?” she murmured.

  Lara shrugged. “One of the bullets in your pistola maravillosa might kill a lizard that’s trying to kill me.” He looked away. “And because you hate me. I don’t want to die being hated.”

  Leonor snorted. “A few drops of water an’ spit’ll change that?”

  “I hope so.”

  Leonor started working the hammer first, trying to draw it back, then gently encouraged the cylinder to turn. Finally, the hammer made it to the half-cock notch, and she turned the cylinder more briskly. Then she sighed. “It’s nothin’ personal against you, Alferez,” she finally managed, “though it is mighty personal. I don’t hate you as a man, right here, right now—I just hate Mexican soldiers. Can’t help it.”

  Lara’s . . . compelling eyes narrowed in his dark, handsome face. “Soldados . . . harmed you,” he guessed.

  “Mexican ‘soldados,’ yes,” she hissed. “As bad as you can imagine.”

  Lara was silent a moment. “Then I’m very sorry.”

  Leonor shook her head, exasperated. “That’s the crazy part. I know you got nothin’ to be sorry for, but that don’t change how I feel.”

  Lara chuckled dryly. “Very well. Then I must be content to die hated only for what I am, not who. That’s worth a few drops of water and spit.”

  Leonor actually rolled her eyes and stifled a smile that tried to form. “Go away.”

  “No. I think the next attack will be very difficult,” he said in all seriousness, then grinned. “And I must remain close to the pistol ball that will save my life.”

  It dawned on Leonor then that if Alferez Lara, like Lewis Cayce, didn’t already know she was a woman, she’d practically just confirmed it. Well, my vest’s open and my shirt’s loose, so I guess it’s easy to tell, she considered bitterly, quickly buttoning her vest back up. Beyond doing that, she was just too tired, sore, and scared to try to reintroduce doubt, or even much care. But Lewis made sure I had his horse, and now Lara wants to protect me. The hell with that! “I guess I can take care of myself,” she said frostily, lifting the pistol. “I killed more lizards last night than anybody but father, an’ maybe the howitzers.” She glared at Lara. “An’ I’ve killed more real Mexican soldiers than you’ve ever seen in your fleabag, backwater post!”

  Lara turned somber. “I doubt that. I was born in San Juan de Villahermosa, in Tabasco, which is not a ‘fleabag,’ and once raised its own rebellion against the current president of Mexico. Yet it was attacked by Americano soldados after I transferred home to command militia and recover from wounds I had at Resaca de la Palma. So I have no reason to love Americanos—and perhaps you almost killed me as well?”

  Before Leonor could respond, the young black man dressed like a soldier—his name’s Barca, Leonor recalled—sprinted through a sudden storm of arrows, a bulging knapsack under one arm and a sloshing bucket in his hand. A tinned cup dangling from a piece of twine rattled as he came. Leonor was glad none of the arrows came very close to the swift, agile youngster, even though the light was growing fast. More men were doing the same as Barca, all at once, farther down the line, and that probably distracted the archers enough for them all to make it. Plowing into the sand by Leonor and Lara, losing more precious water, Barca wiped his sweaty brow and flashed white teeth. “Here’s water,” he announced unnecessarily, pushing the bucket to Leonor. “Take a quick gulp and pass it along.” He shook the knapsack at Private Cox, who stared dumbly back. “This is full of musket cartridges. Take a double handful and pass the rest along as well. Just make sure nobody drops their pipe in there!”

  Lara grabbed some of the paper cartridges for his smoothbore musketoon, before Cox stirred and took the knapsack. Lara’s weapon, like nearly all in the Mexican Army, was British made and .75 caliber. It had been cut down for mounted use from an “India Pattern Brown Bess.” Though larger-bored than the .69 caliber American muskets, it would still shoot these only slightly looser-fitting projectiles. They wouldn’t be very accurate, but then his weapon never had been. He could count on hitting a man-size target—somewhere—at fifty paces. Past a hundred, a man—or lizard—probably had more to fear from lightning. American muskets with tighter tolerances were much better, but only a rifleman could consistently kill at two or even three hundred paces.

  Lara drank water after Leonor dropped the cup back in the bucket, then passed it to another man, eyes greedy and staring.

  “Are you going back now, Barca?” Leonor asked.

  “No. I’m staying here.” He grinned again. “If those lizards want to eat me, they’ll have to fight for the bite.”

  “You’re not armed,” Lara pointed out.

  “There are plenty of muskets lying unused out here.”

  “Do you know how to use one?”

  Barca sat up straighter behind a barrel. “Yes.”

  Leonor wasn’t surprised. The young man had the air of more than a servant. “What’re you doing here?” she asked.

  Barca looked at her and blinked. “Bringing water and cartridges, and preparing to fight.”

  “No, I mean why were you here in the first place?”

  Barca nodded back toward the rough fort. “I belong to Colonel De Russy.”

  Leonor was surprised. “He’s from Pennsylvania, ain’t he? I thought there weren’t any slaves there.”

  “Some say that,” Barca hedged, then shrugged. “We’re not in Pennsylvania now.” He lowered his voice. “The Colonel . . . bought me in New Orleans before we came here. He says I’m free.” His eyes flicked back and forth. “Some in this army may not respect that, and as far as they know, I remain the colonel’s property. But I chose to serve him and follow him, for my own reasons,” he added with a strongly stressed defiance that implied there was a great deal more to his story.

  “In Mexico—if we are in Mexico,” Lara inserted uncomfortably, “there is no slavery.”

  Leonor glared at him again. “No, the poor live so much better here, while the rich and the Church lord it over ’em,” she retorted sarcastically. “Sayin’ there ain’t a kind of slavery in Mexico is the most hypocritical thing I ever heard!”

  “I didn’t mean to start a fight,” Barca objected softly.

  “You didn’t start anything,” Leonor hissed, eyes blazing. “Me an’ Alferez Lara were already fightin’. We’re at war, in fact.” She sighed and looked back at Barca. “But it ain’t your battle.”

  Barca frowned, then gestured over the barricade. “This one is, I think,” he said darkly.

  Curious, Leonor turned over and despite the pain in her arms and shoulder and stiffening muscles, raised up to peer toward the tree line. It was light enough now to see hundreds of bodies lying on the beach. All were their attackers. Quite a few Americans had been caught in the open when the attack began, and others were pulled over the barricade and killed, like Leonor nearly was. She’d seen some carried straight away, lizards already tearing flesh from their bodies. It sickened her and left no doubt what their eventual fate would be. But Leonor saw few if any dead Americans beyond their defenses. Now, just at the tree line, about two hundred yards distant, scores of their heads had been staked out in the darkness like another long, macabre palisade, with every dead, bloody face staring back at them.

  Leonor was no stranger to atrocity. Too many times her father’s Rangers had happened upon charred, smoky cabins and seen the grisly work of marauding Comanches. The constant cross-border warfare between Texas and Mexico got pretty ugly too. And sometimes she was horrified to see what her own people did to Indians they caught. She thought she’d grown immune. Now, if there’d been anything in her stomach besides a single slurp of water, it would’ve come back up.

 
; “We saw them putting that up from back behind,” Barca explained, voice hushed. “Saw it for a while. But only the riflemen would’ve had a chance to stop them and with hardly a glimmer to see by, they would’ve missed as often as not. They were busy fighting anyway, so there was no sense drawing their attention from the business in front of them.”

  A heavy-shafted arrow lofted up and came down to stick in the sand not far behind her, and Leonor realized someone was shooting at her. She kept watching the mass of shadows she’d seen moving in the trees for a moment longer. “You better fetch that musket now, Barca, if you mean to stay.”

  “They’re coming again?” Lara asked.

  “I expect so.”

  A roaring rumble erupted in the trees—the voices of hundreds of lizard warriors—punctuated by the yipping and yelping of Indian archers. Drums thundered behind the one-sided timber fort, calling the exhausted men back to action. Few actually stood, however. Most were too wise to the arrows and waited tensely behind their barricade, knapping flakes off dull gunflints, picking the clogged vents of their muskets, and seeing to the priming in the pans. Some had to stand, brave infantrymen clumsily and inexpertly aiming and shifting the four howitzers positioned on the line. (One remained outside where it had been overrun, and the other was still in the wreck.) A final screeching shout heralded the rise of another cloud of arrows, and the four big guns roared—too soon—spraying the trees with canister. Almost instantly, the gathered monsters burst from those trees and swept down on the weary defenders.

  Leonor didn’t know where her father was, and Sergeant Ulrich, the other man Leonor first met here, was calling commands for this part of the line. Too many junior officers had fallen early on, seeming to think they must expose themselves to inspire their men. That left men like Ulrich, and increasingly corporals and respected privates to lead.

  The last of the arrows stood bristling in the sand, and Sergeant Ulrich roared, “Mark your targets an’ commence firing!” Even though one hadn’t been called for, a virtual volley crackled out from all around the perimeter, and dozens of the lizards tumbled screeching in the sand. Leonor and those around her waited a moment longer, taking careful aim, and also fired at near the same instant. Leonor saw her target spin and fall. Barca fired as she hunkered down to reload—the lizards would be on them in an instant, and she had no bayonet—and she saw with satisfaction that De Russy’s servant hit his mark as well. He immediately, coolly, reloaded as quickly as she did and raised his weapon again.

  Leonor couldn’t help wondering how Barca gained such proficiency. If De Russy had “bought” him, he’d likely been born and raised a slave regardless of his current status. It wasn’t unknown for trusted slaves on the frontier to be allowed hunting rifles to put meat on their masters’ tables, but New Orleans wasn’t a frontier, and the loading process for a hunting rifle was different from a military musket. Barca’s technique looked straight out of Scott’s Militia Tactics. Leonor shook her head. This wasn’t the time to contemplate that.

  Sergeant Ulrich bellowed no more commands, but joined the terse, clipped, soldier talk Leonor had learned was common in combat, nearly everyone snapping or shouting things like:

  “Get that one, Bill, I ain’t loaded yet!”

  “Pour it in, ye bastards!”

  “Me goddamn flint broke! Someone gi’ me another!”

  “Mal, you fool, you jus’ shot yer damn rammer at ’em!”

  “Bleedin’ Jesus, what are them things?”

  “It’s enough that they bleed, idn’t it? Pay no mind ta the looks o’ ’em!”

  “Steady, lads, they’re almost on us. You’ll not forget to pull your stickers out hard an’ fast if you want to keep yer musket. Pokin’ the bastards is the easy part.”

  Pouring a measure of gunpowder into her cupped left hand—Leonor never poured straight down a barrel from a flask—she dumped the charge in before spitting one of several lead balls she’d popped in her mouth down after it. She wouldn’t take time to patch the ball for accuracy, and didn’t even ram it down. Without the patch, the ball was loose enough to seat just by thumping the butt in the sand a couple of times. As quickly as that went, she wouldn’t trust that enough powder had trickled through the vent to the pan, but before she could prime it from the little horn dangling from her shooting pouch, the lizard monsters struck.

  The shooting around her quickly diminished as the ravening, roaring horde slammed into the breastworks with a terrible, clattering smash, jabbing past the bristling bayonets with long, obsidian-pointed spears. Screams of all sorts joined the crash of battle. Some of the beasts carried on, using the backs of their comrades as springboards to leap over and behind the defenders. Leonor finished priming her rifle and shot one of these before it caught its balance, blowing its throat and much of its neckbone out in a fountain of bloody bone chips. Twisting around, she slammed the butt of her rifle into the head of another, feeling the now-familiar crunch of the skull.

  The line was giving way, physically heaved back from the breastworks amid frantic cries for support. Barca was plying his bayonet desperately, if less expertly than those around him. Leonor drew her revolver, hoping it hadn’t stiffened back up, and quickly shot two monsters trying to beat their way past Lara and Sergeant Ulrich. Another flung Lara to the ground, snarling as it poised its spear to nail him to the sand, and Leonor shot it in the eye. Lara rolled the corpse aside and sent her a grateful glance, perhaps aware of the same irony as she, but now she only had one bullet left and the enemy had sensed weakness here. Momentarily pushed back from the middle by a devastating blast of canister, they were massing at this teetering point.

  Leonor was feverishly loading her rifle again when she felt three gentle pats on the small of her back. Despite the dire circumstances, she almost melted with relief because only one person in all the world would dare comfort her so, and the way the pats came were as familiar and reassuring as a voice. “Father,” she murmured around the mouthful of rifle balls, her voice cracking.

  “Take your time, do it right,” encouraged Captain Giles Anson, speaking the beloved phrase he always used to drive away frustration or fear. Stepping past her, her father was absolutely washed in blood. She prayed it wasn’t all his. Then she knew it wasn’t, because, though his rifle was slung diagonally across his back once more, he held a dragoon’s or rifleman’s saber that was so thickly, disgustingly covered with drying, blackening blood, even the underlying shape of the blade was hard to discern. Taking the saber in his left hand, he drew one of the massive Walker Colts from where he’d stuffed them both in his belt. Still walking forward, he blasted lizards down with every shot, the ear-shattering pressure of each report making men flinch, but also sending unhurt lizard warriors reeling back to the breastworks. Just like the Indians with the strange “Yellows,” these creatures obviously knew about guns or they’d never have pressed so costly an attack, but pistols that fired more than once, particularly with the awesome power of her father’s, apparently struck them as unnervingly magical. They didn’t flee in terror—none of them had all night—but they gave ground, and the imminent breakthrough was contained.

  The hammer on Anson’s Colt snapped on an empty chamber. He stuffed the big pistol in his belt and retrieved the other one, waving it menacingly at the enemy even as the infantry resumed their killing. A pair of tediously loaded howitzers belched cloud banks of white smoke and seething swarms of canister, point-blank, into the mass of lizards to the left. “These are my last loads,” her father advised Leonor when she joined him, rifle ready. “A few other officers may have Patersons, but I won’t have any more forty-four-caliber bullets until I cast ’em with my mold.” He snorted at the rising sun through the haze of gunsmoke, already standing clear of the horizon. “I doubt I’ll get the time,” he continued dryly. “This attack’s bigger an’ it’s lasted longer than others. I think it’s startin’ to taper off as they’ve done before, but we won�
��t get a rest this time. Every damned lizard in the world must’ve joined ’em in the night, an’ I expect they’ll hit us with new arrivals as soon as the front’s clear.”

  He sighed wearily. “I say all that like it makes sense—an’ none of it does at all.” He chuckled bitterly. “Me, predictin’ what unknown Indians combined with hellish lizard warriors will do! But I’m too tired to ponder the meanin’ of any of this anymore. Thank God the men are just as philosophical—or exhausted an’ afraid—or we’d all be dead.” He studied the infantrymen, firing again as the lizards did indeed start pulling back, leaving a gap for them to load. “We’ve lost near half our number. Most to wounds that’d heal, given time,” he allowed, “but I don’t think they’ll get it either. Still, they’ve fought damn well—even Lara and his Mexicans,” he grudged. “I’m proud to have fought with ’em.”

  “You sound like you’re givin’ up,” Leonor accused, shocked.

  Anson smiled at his daughter before stooping to stab his saber in the sand, raking it around and trying to abrade the dry blood away. It didn’t help. “I’ll have to step down to the sea an’ wash it,” he murmured before looking at Leonor. “You know me better than that. I’ll never give up, an’ I refuse to die until I know what’s happened to us, how we got in this mess in the first place!” He grimaced. “But I won’t spew false enthusiasm either. Look,” he quickly added, “we better get under cover.”

  The lizards had only pulled about halfway back to the trees. There they stood, hissing, shrieking, brandishing weapons, and making odd gestures with clawed hands even while the howitzers flailed them with canister and rifles and muskets kept peeling them away. But arrows lofted once again, and another, larger mass of warriors was flowing out of the woods behind them, using the very bodies of the withdrawn assault to shield them as they deployed.