Lewis felt strangely feverish but dismissed it to the excitement and his pounding heart. He was about to shout for everyone to cease firing and bring any prisoners back to the sprawling mound of dead and loudly wounded men when a giant stood in front of him. His bearded face was covered with blood pouring from a bullet crease across his forehead, yet even in the dark Lewis instantly recognized one of the guards standing by the Blood Priest Tranquilo in this very place, that very morning. He’d replaced the vestments of his twisted church with the coarsely woven gray tunic of his comrades, but still held the gold-tipped spear. Most troubling of all was the maniacal, blood-drenched fury on his face, and—no longer viewed from atop Arete—how truly huge he was.
With a roar, Tranquilo’s guard swept his spear in a wide arc, bashing Lieutenant Burton down. Stepping forward, he drew the spear back to pin the young officer to the ground. Lewis shot him right in the chest with the Paterson, but all it did was draw his attention. He tried to fire again, but the hammer only snapped on an empty chamber. The giant grinned as Lewis backed away, bringing his saber up to deflect the spear already lunging for him. The giant was so strong that Lewis barely managed to shift the glistening point at all, and it sliced into his coat and grazed his ribs near the old, aching wound. He gasped, staggering backward.
“Shoot him, Father!” Leonor screamed, frantically reassembling her pistol.
“Damn thing’s jammed on a burst cap!” Anson shouted, pulling back on the big revolver’s hammer while trying to turn the cylinder with his other hand. Leonor dropped the pieces of her Paterson and snatched the pommel holster off her father’s shoulder. Varaa had finished with her other opponent and rushed up to drive her rapier deep in the giant’s back. He roared in pain and spun, tossing Varaa aside like a doll, and she crashed down next to Burton. Dizzy now, Lewis charged forward and drove his saber into the huge man’s belly. The giant roared again and, finally dropping his spear, wrapped huge arms around Lewis and picked him up, crushing him against his chest. Lewis groaned as all the air gushed from his lungs, his back popped, and it felt like ribs were snapping like dry sticks. He was already dizzy, now unable to breathe, and a sparkling blackness swirled in his eyes.
He was barely aware of a booming crack nearby, an agonized grunt, and then a sense of falling. His impact with the ground jarred him to his senses, however. Scrambling drunkenly, painfully, to his feet, he saw Leonor standing by him, her pretty face no longer merely severe but contorted by rage as she held her father’s other big pistol in both hands, pointed at the giant’s face. He was on one knee now, spitting bloody hate at the woman with his eyes, but also still grinning in triumph. His other knee, both hands clasped over it, was a shattered ruin.
“She was afraid to shoot him without hittin’ you, so she knocked a stilt from under him,” Anson said with a mix of relief and pride. Without a word, Leonor cocked the big Walker Colt again and took deliberate aim.
“No,” Lewis whispered.
Lara and the dragoons were coming back now, prodding a few prisoners before them. One of the dragoons trotted over to their only seriously wounded man, but everyone stopped in their tracks when they saw the unexpected tableau.
Varaa and Burton were both sitting up, as if supporting each other, and Varaa said, “Finish him. You’re giving him what he wants.”
Lewis’s mind reeled. “What he wants?” he asked dumbly.
“You’ve forgotten already,” Varaa lamented, standing slowly and helping Burton to his feet. “They earn ‘grace’ through pain, and the worse it is, the better. The more ‘exalted’ they’ll be in their perverted afterlife.”
“Lord,” Burton murmured.
“I understand,” Varaa consoled. “It is hard to grasp. But here you see it before you.” She waved around. “He led these Holcanos against us, at Tranquilo’s command no doubt, utterly indifferent to their fates or even his own—beyond what’s happening now. The failure of the plan and all the suffering it caused is unimportant beside the grace we’re giving him as we speak!”
“That’s madness,” Anson said, deeply troubled.
“Of course it is!” Varaa actually yelled in frustration. “Yet that’s what we’re fighting, at its heart. A cultural and spiritual madness that promotes evil beyond anything I know on this world!” She glared at Leonor. “Kill him! Put him out of our misery!”
“Wait,” Lewis insisted, mind still reeling from what he’d heard and seen as well as the flaring dizziness and pain in his side. He wondered if it was mostly his new wound or the old. “Perhaps we can at least get him to confirm it was Tranquilo who put him up to this.”
“Between your sword and mine, he’s finished.” Varaa kicked the gold-bladed spear on the ground. “And that’s proof enough. You think you can induce him to tell us more? He’ll never live long enough for kindness to work, even if it could, and torture is useless. Blood Priests make men like him with pain!”
Suddenly nauseous, Lewis almost fell. Leonor grabbed him and held him upright, expression finally changing to concern. Maybe something else? Lewis wondered. Then he shook his head and gently pushed away, determined to spare this woman another painful memory, another callus on her soul. He was aware of how quiet it now was, the cannon thunder in the bay having ended, and the drums and bugles and musket fire in the camp outside the walls now silent. Did all that mean the crisis was past or only just beginning? He also vaguely became aware they were surrounded by many more people now: luminaries he’d met in the Audience Hall, more Ocelomeh, and there were Colonel De Russy and Dr. Newlin, watching him somberly alongside Alcalde Periz and Alcalde Truro. He was surprised to see Periz with a naked sword somewhat like Varaa’s, his expression tense and angry.
“Very well,” Lewis said, nodding at the dragoons and wounded Holcanos lying about. “Varaa says this spear will tie this man to Tranquilo. We have other prisoners. Perhaps they can link him to Don Discipo. I pray we’ve put an end to it for now, but regardless how close this effort may have come to succeeding, it strikes me as hastily and ill conceived. A move of desperation.” He looked straight at Periz and Truro. “It’s like Tranquilo knows how dangerous our cooperation and a united Yucatán will be and attempted to nip it in the bud.” He sighed and shivered despite the warm night air, and the pain in his side was as bad as when he was shot at Monterrey. “We won’t let that happen,” he ground out. “Instead, we’ll make sure this attack, on all of us,” he stressed, “only binds us tighter and helps us destroy the Doms when they come.”
Teetering forward, he quickly reached down and whipped his saber out of the giant’s belly before the man could react. Blood spurted from the wound and spattered the ground at his feet. “Even bleeding so freely, it might take you minutes to die, my friend,” he mumbled at the giant, then raised his voice. “Like the twisted empire you serve, I think your ‘grace period’ has lasted long enough.” With that, he lifted the bloody saber over his head and brought it down as hard as he could, slicing through the knotted muscle between the man’s neck and shoulder and deep into his chest. Wrenching the saber free with a grunt, he turned to look at Periz—but the man’s face was spinning, his expression of satisfaction turning to concern, and Lewis felt himself falling. He never seemed to reach the ground, but even as his vision went completely dark, he heard Leonor’s—and even Samantha Wilde’s—cries of alarm, and then Dr. Newlin shouting over the others who’d joined them: “My God, the man’s on fire with fever! Bring the caisson up at once, though a carriage would be better!”
“You can’t take him to your camp,” Varaa declared. “We don’t even know what’s happening there!”
“The room of the gran mapa!” Periz said firmly. “It is the place . . . most secure, and . . . conveniente para nuestros curanderos. Close to our healers,” he clarified.
“By God, whatever help they can offer’ll get no argument from me,” Newlin declared.
After that, for Lewis, except
for the odd feeling someone was holding his hand, there was nothing.
CHAPTER 21
Lewis knew he was hurt and even out of his head, but wasn’t sure exactly where he was, or even when. Sometimes he was sure he was still in the grimy field hospital outside Monterrey and everything that happened since had been wild, delirious dreams stacked up on one another and even comingled. Then he’d catch hazy glimpses of his surroundings—stone walls and heavy beams overhead—and believe with alarm he was back in the even more squalid and stifling hospital set up in the city, where the air was thick with the stench of disease, death, screams of pain, and harsh shouts of drunk or exhausted surgeons and insensitive orderlies.
But that wasn’t right either. Fevered or not, his mind still worked well enough to reason on some level, and besides the fact all he smelled was the pleasant odor of charcoal smoke, mixed with something like . . . almost minty sage, he often heard other voices, genuinely concerned, that he knew were more recent and real. His present beckoned him at times like that, and he came to understand there was a present he must return to. And even as his hot, restless mind recoiled from the frightening nightmare-like sense of his urgent present, he knew he belonged—and was needed—there more than anywhere he’d ever been.
Fresher memories and newer faces returned to his dreams as he finally slept more normally, more peacefully, and the full reality of his present returned. That’s how he knew with complete certainty he was dreaming of the past when he found himself sitting in the old white wicker rocker on the porch of his childhood home. His father, beard and wild hair streaked deeply with gray, was leaning forward in his own rocker, waving a smoldering pipe.
“I would’ve thought as a soldier—an officer now!—you’d have finally discarded such silly notions that the idealistic, hypocritical rantings of the ‘Constitutional framers’ were anything more than that.” He fumed. “Practical ‘equality for all men’ has never existed, nor can it!” the old man insisted in a voice even raspier than when Lewis left for the military academy. “I served my time under arms,” he reminded—as he so often did—“and there’s no purer example of the necessity for the separation between leader and led than the army!”
Lewis remembered this conversation well, further proof he was dreaming, but had to try to reason with the man once more, just as he had at that final meeting. “No matter how imperfect the men who wrote it might’ve been, I swore to defend that Constitution, Father, and that includes all the ‘ideals’ in it. Good ideals,” he stressed emphatically, but then tried another tack. “You were in the militia, called up against the Creeks.” He held up his hands. “I mean no disrespect. You did your duty. But you returned home when you were released, as did those who commanded you, and you were all ‘equal’ once more.” He shook his head. “I could resign my commission today and instantly be the legal ‘equal’ of any officer placed over me. I wouldn’t do it, but I could.” He glanced at the field east of the modest house where three black slaves in wide straw hats stooped under the hot June sun to twist yellow squash from their stems and drop them in baskets hanging from straps over their shoulders. “Do you ‘lead’ those men, Father? Will they be ‘released’ when their task is done? Will they be your equal then?”
“Of course not!”
“Why?”
“Because they’re mine,” the old man stated flatly, anger rising as it always did.
“Why?” Lewis persisted.
“Because I paid for them, boy, damn you!” He jabbed at Lewis with his pipe. “You sit there in a fine uniform, an officer in the army—against my wishes, I’ll remind you once more—because of the upbringing I gave you. An upbringing financed by the labor of slaves. We don’t have old money, hoarded and tarnished with age, or a sprawling plantation with rents as well as crops to live off when times are hard. We have a small farm, a good farm, which your mother and I—God rest her—hacked out of the wilderness with our own bleeding hands. We did the hard work, boy, harder than any slave we scratched up enough to buy has ever done since.” His face turned stormy. “And what choice did I have after your mother died trying to give me another son? I had a daughter and one dream-addled boy, neither willing to do the hard work it takes to keep this farm alive! Now all you ask is Why, why, why? like some half-wit infant pointing at the moon—or a starry-eyed lieutenant with his head filled with flighty, musty philosophy, pondering the meaning of life! The only answer to ‘why’—anything!—is ‘because that’s the way it is’!”
“I would’ve stayed here and worked with you, Father,” Lewis softly told the old man. “I never shirked a task and worked right alongside your slaves.” He paused. “But that’s how I learned there’s no difference between us, in God’s eyes—or yours. Is that why you sold the ones I befriended? Would you have sold me if you could?”
“Yes!” the old man snapped furiously. “If I could’ve replaced you as easily, I would have. So help me God!”
* * *
—
LEWIS JERKED HIS eyes open and tried to sit up. Gentle hands restrained him.
“Look at you!” boomed Captain Eric Holland, stooping to peer in his eyes, “wide awake at last, an’ alert as well! Call Dr. Newlin,” he said aside. “Man’s mortified enough that these ‘primitive witch doctors’ did more to save the good captain than he. He’ll swoop in an’ claim the cure!”
Only then did Lewis fully realize he was in the map chamber inside the Audience Hall. He was also quite naked beneath a stuffed, silklike comforter, and not only were two young women gently holding him in place, but Samantha Wilde stood from a chair to peer at him with a relieved expression. “You gave us all a scare, Captain Cayce,” she said.
“I was a little concerned myself, from time to time,” Lewis admitted hoarsely, remembering more, as Samantha poured something that looked like red wine from a big ceramic pitcher and held a mug to his lips. It tasted like wine too. Sweet but very bitter. At the moment, the fact it was wet was enough. “Thank you,” he said self-consciously, pulling the comforter up over his bare chest. That’s when he felt the soft bandage wrapped around his torso and was amazed to find that, though it hurt to the touch, the constant, deep burning ache he’d grown used to was gone.
Coryon Burton was the first to appear through the sturdy doorway, eyes bright with relief. Dr. Newlin pushed him aside and stepped purposefully toward the rigid but comfortable cot Lewis was lying on. He immediately plopped himself on a bench and seized Lewis’s wrist. “Show me your tongue, if you please,” he commanded. Varaa-Choon followed him in, huge blue eyes alight and a grin on her furry face.
“I apologize in advance for the cliché,” Lewis murmured, “but what happened?”
“The spear point that grazed your side was poisoned,” Newlin brusquely explained. “Not particularly deadly, but fast acting. Like the toxin in the tongue of the monstrous toad that wounded Lieutenant Sime. A deeper cut would’ve incapacitated you sooner.” He paused seriously. “The fever was more serious and already mounting, however. It was due to a combination of the climate, I fear—a number of the men are affected—and the old wound you wouldn’t let me see.” He frowned and peered scoldingly over his spectacles. “I’m tempted to tell you all the unpleasantness you’ve endured over the last several days only serves you right, but I won’t. Still, your stubbornness and the carelessness or incompetence of whoever first treated that ghastly hole very nearly ended you!”
“Really, Doctor,” Samantha said, rolling her eyes. “I applaud your restraint!”
“In any event,” Newlin went on, “with the, er, assistance of some of the extraordinarily knowledgeable locals, I decided it was past time to explore your long-festering wound.” He nodded graciously to the young women. Lewis now saw one was an Uxmalo and the other Ocelomeh, each wearing a silver gorget around her neck like he’d seen on respected, senior healers after the battle on the beach. He’d since learned it symbolized a quarter moon, radiating li
ght and holding life and knowledge. Newlin blinked. “Not only did we find a small curl of lead from the ball that struck you; we removed a splinter of rib and some fragments of the uniform you wore that day!” He shook his head in disgust. “But the infection was severe, and I honestly held out little hope for you.” He cleared his throat and added more gently, “Or us, for that matter, if you were lost.” He leaned back and regarded Varaa. “She’s the one who ultimately saved you, providing a small measure of some curative paste that arrested the infection at once! I’ve no idea what it is or why it works, and I must have more of it!”
“There is no more,” Varaa said regretfully. “Or at least as close to none as makes no difference. It’s called ‘polta paste’ and is made from a fruit that grows only in . . . the part of the world I originally came from. In the years we’ve been here, we’ve used up almost all we had. Fortunately for us—and you, Captain Cayce—the paste may be reconstituted with its curative properties intact long after it has dried and turned to dust.”
“We must have more!” Newlin repeated, insistent. “All the wounded I must treat . . . Captain Holland brought them in,” he reminded darkly, “and when the war starts, as it surely must . . .” He could only sigh.
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