Empire of bones Read online

  For John, Wesley, and Blake

  Acknowledgments

  Because this book emerged from my research for Duel of Eagles, I wish to repeat my thanks to all who helped with that project. One person in particular helped bridge the gap between that history and this fiction—Elizabeth Crook. Among the many documents she shared with me was a Texas Highway Department publication bearing the unpromising title Sidelights on the Battle of San Jacinto. Wary of a state travel brochure, I found instead a virtual Nuremberg trial of participants in the massacre at San Jacinto. Sidelights was in fact a two-volume compilation of depositions taken in 1859 from participants in the 1836 battle.

  At issue was the cold-blooded killing of a Mexican woman a quarter century earlier. Eyewitness accounts identified one officer, John Forbes, as the killer. Ironically, this was not a war-crimes trial but rather a libel case run by Forbes against a historian and fellow soldier, Dr. Nicholas Labadie, who dared to resurrect the sordid tale. Testimony was taken from two dozen ex-soldiers, including Sam Houston, on the eve of the Civil War. Judgment waited until 1866, when a weary Dr. Labadie issued an apology and Forbes dropped his suit. If not for Dr. Labadie, the incident would have been covered over long ago. Many thanks to Elizabeth for introducing me to forgotten realities.

  I wish to thank my editors at William Morrow: Elisa Petrini, Lisa Drew, and Katherine Boyle, and my agent, Doe Coover. Without their efforts, this book would still be galloping wild.

  Above all, I thank my wife, Barbara, whose long patience even a Texan can brag about.

  Prologue

  March 6, 1836

  One final blind shot through the loophole—touch the trigger, weather the hangfire, take the kick—then he drew the long rifle back into the room and did not load again. It was not because of the pitch darkness nor for lack of powder or patching or balls or any poverty of targets. But because the shooting had lost all profit, it only made him feel worse.

  He pressed one eye against the hole. His hair dangled in long greasy strings. "Oh Lord," he softly groaned.

  Part of him wished he'd stayed out in the open to do this down to the ground. From the start it had rankled him, getting penned up in this Alamo. Now he'd gone and penned himself tighter in an outright crypt.

  Behind him the darkness spoke. "Colonel Crockett?" it said. "Tell us what's to see."

  Crockett couldn't place the voice. Survivors coiled in the blackness, wracked and anonymous, one man panting in rapid bursts like a woman in labor. The sprawled barracks were honeycombed with these small cavelike rooms. Because it was so dark, Crockett had no idea how many men had taken refuge in this particular cell nor who they were. But someone knew him. Now they all did. Even here he was still accountable to his legend. They would not release him.

  "Well, boys," he rasped to them with artificial cheer. How could he begin to describe what was out there? "We have made the dawn." That was something anyway, wasn't it, to reach one more tomorrow?

  "No more?" a voice pleaded with him. They wanted salvation. Crockett kept his eye to the loophole and thought how it should have been ugly and loathsome out there. In truth the view was so opposite, he couldn't pull away from it.

  The plaza cupped a million twinkling stars it seemed, hung them in a fog of pale blue and white and dirty rose gunsmoke. Animals surfaced in the cold mist, some slow—eels sliding through a sulfur sea—some quick—hummingbirds, hurried, quizzical. Here and there they came together and grappled as if rutting, not stopping until one or the other put his head back to howl or shriek. They were soldiers, of course. But trapped between night and day, flight and crawling, they had become something else, enchanted creatures in a purgatory of noise.

  Underneath the cracking gunfire a steady patter of hailstones slapped against the limestone and adobe, raking their wood and bullhide door, the plaza, the sky, the earth, the soldiers—the whole world. Crockett pulled away from the loophole and turned around and sat against the wall. He cradled his Betsy across his lap. He couldn't see the smoke bleeding from the pan and barrel, but the smell of his own powder was familiar.

  Something slippery snaked up Crockett's bare lower leg. It reached into his lap, fumbling, and found his hand with a desperate grip. Crockett squeezed the hand in return, wondering whose it was. It was a thin hand hard with callouses and he went on holding it.

  A rattle of bullets gusted against the barracks wall.

  "What's that?" a weary boy's voice asked.

  Crockett rested his skull back against the chill stone and closed his eyes. Pretend, he wanted to tell the child. Pretend the spring rain has come early. He managed to conjure a quick image of cornstalks shooting green from the black dirt, of calves and foals and lambs dropping in wet bundles onto yesterday's loam. Boys would be hunting first flowers for their sweethearts soon. It was that season.

  The hand had gone dead in his. Crockett let go.

  A vast noise shook the walls, the very air, evoking god-damns and a cry of sheer terror from the men jammed into the darkness. Knees snapping, Crockett got to his feet again. He spied through the loophole.

  A twelve-pounder cannon—one of their own—stood

  smoking not fifteen feet away, aimed point-blank at the neighboring door. That meant the Mexicans had swept the walls and overwhelmed the Alamo's interior, all in a matter of an hour or less. Crockett was stunned by the speed of the Americans' defeat. It made a charade of their two-week "defense." All too obviously the Mexicans had allowed them to squat in this godforsaken place and at their convenience were evicting them.

  The Americans' artillery had been wheeled down from the ramparts to flush the last resistance out with grapeshot. Even as a dozen soldiers with bayonets swarmed through the shattered opening next door, an officer was directing his team to haul the cannon around, pointing at Crockett's little den with his sword.

  "Boys," Crockett pronounced to his invisible cellmates, "they'll be coming for us now."

  "Our Father . . ." someone prayed.

  "Someone of you come help me hold the door," a man commanded them.

  "You'd best get down," Crockett told him. "We're whipped."

  "You're whipped yourself. Not me."

  Through the loophole Crockett watched the Mexicans swab and load the cannon. They were using for shot what the Americans had used on them, chopped bits of horseshoe and iron scrap, a mutilating round. Another officer was rounding up soldiers to storm the room once the door blew in. With their bayonets fixed the muskets towered taller than the men toting them. On the far side of the plaza the mission walls had grown luminous, the color of ripe peaches.

  Crockett dropped to his hands and knees. He patted around in the blackness searching for a possible excavation. His hand landed on a dead man's face and he felt the liquid eyes staring before he could lift his fingers away: bad luck. He felt arms and legs moving, a hot rifle barrel, a cold knife blade. There was no trench dug into the floor in this room. Returning to the wall, Crockett lay down and socketed his face and chest and legs hard against the limestone.

  "Help me hold this goddamn door," the man bellowed at them.

  The door lifted inward with a rush of clean blue light. The explosion deafened Crockett for a minute, then he heard a hog squealing. It was the wreckage of a man. Through the smoke

  and dust, he saw how tiny the room was. Along the base of the back wall the earth moved, the dead stubbornly climbing back to life.

  The death squeal pealed on, finally tightening into a rattle. After the shock of daylight and thunder subsided, Crockett shook himself and cast around for a weapon, anybody's, anything. But the ceiling wands had torn loose and everything lay heaped in old dirt.

  Crockett pulled away from the gaping door on his elbows. He twisted onto his rump, jammed his back into th
e corner, and fixed his stare on the glowing entranceway, for it was the gate of hell.

  But no legion of dark angels issued in. Eyes wide, Crockett waited. Minutes passed. No enemy materialized. No shadow assaulted the bright doorway. Smoke and dust braided the air in slow eddies.

  "How come don't they come?" An apparition had risen to Crockett's left. His face and hair and red beard were powdered white with thick limestone dust and he lay propped on one elbow.

  Around the room the debris rustled and slowly produced several more figures. Crockett didn't recognize a single one by name, and the politician in him felt a little irresponsible about that. One man had a bead of blood running from an empty eye socket. Yet another began to howl and flail, throwing blood everywhere.

  "Hush, goddamn you," the man with one eye whispered, "they have forgot us and gone by."

  "Yes, that's so," hoped the boy Crockett had heard in the darkness. Crockett looked closely and tears streaked the child's grimy face. His fingernails were chewed to the quick. It had been a very long two weeks.

  And still the doorway remained empty.

  At last their wait ended. "In the name of God," an operatic voice boomed from the light, "if there is anyone in there, surrender and I will spare your lives."

  The words—in an English too refined for most Americans—knifed through the gunsmoke. Crockett drew a breath. He opened his hands and saw they were filled with dirt, not much of a weapon. Until that instant he had not realized the

  depths to which his faith had fallen. The possibility of escape beckoned brightly.

  "Surrender?" the one-eyed man said. He sounded awestruck.

  "But what would Colonel Travis say?" the boy remonstrated. "Fight, he'd say, I reckon. I reckon we should fight."

  Travis! That name again, that uncertain consideration. Crockett wanted to spit the bad taste out. But Travis was of their own doing. They had let the half-baked zealot seduce them into this madness. Crockett blamed himself more than the others for letting the monster go on. For one thing, at forty-nine years old, Crockett was older than almost anyone else in the Alamo. And for another, few knew demagoguery the way he did. He had seen the crazed glint in a president's eye, he had heard famous men rave wildly and be applauded and get elected.

  From the start this sprawled, crumbling fortress had felt to Crockett like a jailhouse. All too quickly it had come to remind him of an asylum, and yet he'd kept his mouth shut. Each time Travis emerged from his dark cave he'd seemed more disoriented than before, as if the sun were turning circles in the sky and he'd lost his north. When he spoke it had been to deliver their own hopes back to them, and that was where Crockett had failed them, for hope is never reality and he should have said so loud and clear, him or Bowie, except Bowie had drunk himself into foolishness and a deathbed. So it had been Crockett's place to be wise. He should have told them Texas wouldn't drop into their open palms like a ready fruit. He should have chided them for believing so fiercely in the whiskey patriotism they had grown up hearing their grandfathers concoct on cold evenings around the fire. They should have smelled the stink of their own recklessness and bolted for safety. They should have tied Travis up or turned him loose to wander in the Mexican desert or cut his throat. / should have split his tongue so his words fell among us like a beast grunting.

  "Travis?" another voice registered. The corpse that had squealed its life away shifted, then raised up and flopped over. A man surfaced from underneath, shoving the masquerade away with his feet. Layered in gore, he was badly hurt himself.

  "Travis," the man repeated. "I seen Travis before I run to here. He was first down, by God, down along the north wall."

  "Them goddamn Meskins!" the one-eyed soldier swore, and pawed at the dirt ferociously.

  "Wasn't Meskins kilt him."

  "Who then?" Crockett asked.

  "Travis kilt Travis. Took one look at the odds and put a ball between his own eyes."

  "That ain't so," Crockett's neighbor objected. "That was George Mitchell, he's the one shot himself in the head."

  "Maybe George Mitchell done it, too. Maybe a lot of boys. But I seen Travis. He took the dark leap on us."

  The fact—even the possibility of it—sobered the one-eyed man. The child was looking from one man to the other. All that showed in his mask of dirt and smoke were eyes as green as a Kentucky summertime.

  Crockett couldn't remember if this was a Sunday. But the Alamo was a church and so, somehow, resurrection didn't seem all that farfetched. After all wasn't it the chance for a second life that had drawn him to this primal land in the first place, to this giant sky and these far spaces? A second chance to be a congressman. A second chance to settle paradise, to restore his name, to have it all. Well here it was. His second chance.

  Then and there, Crockett resolved not to squander the opportunity this time around. He would walk through that door and get a horse and ride back to Tennessee. He would kiss his stern lonely Betsy and watch the seasons mount and fly from a chair upon his porch. He would let himself get old and tell his tales to grandchildren and the children of them, too. All it took was to quit.

  Crockett crawled into the word headfirst. Quit. Well it wouldn't be the first time, just the most public. And the alternative? Unthinkable.

  He got to his feet. Bits of warm grapeshot fell from his torn clothing and hit the floor like music falling apart. His belly clenched with dysentery and the backs of his legs were foul with liquid. Ears ringing, Crockett nearly fainted. He had to lean back against the wall. But he was on his feet, that was the important thing, up and ready to cast his vote for the promise. If it meant walking into the light alone, that's what he'd do.

  One by one the others threw in with Crockett. The one-eyed man staggered right, blinking, and staggered some more, not quite aware he'd lost half his vision. The boy migrated to

  Crockett's side. His shirt was missing: not a hair on his chest nor chin. Crockett absentmindedly brushed the dust from the boy's wheaten head. One of the other lads couldn't seem to find his balance and kept falling down, but Crockett didn't have any strength to lend. All told there were six of them, nine counting the dead and last gasping.

  "How should we do this?" someone asked.

  "Hell, I ain't never quit before."

  Outside, the squall of gunfire had ebbed. The rampant shouting and screams of agony were getting displaced by more businesslike commands in Spanish. Crockett took a peek through the loophole. Low angled sunlight was stabbing in through the smoke. The supernatural contest, animal to animal, had evaporated. Where before he'd witnessed shapes shifting, the plaza now displayed relatively calm drabness. The only figures still standing were Mexican soldiers in blue jackets. They steamed like horses in the cold March air.

  "What say, Colonel?"

  "The battle's done," Crockett said.

  "Then let's get this goddamn over," the man with red hair declared.

  "I'd let them season a bit," Crockett recommended.

  "Hell," the red hair said. "A promise is a promise."

  "At least hallo 'em. Say you're coming. Ask for safe passage."

  "I'll quit, by gum, not beg." Red pushed away from his wall. He bulled through the open doorway with his own best version of a contemptuous stride.

  No sooner did he leave than he returned, mincing slowly backward on tiptoe. His teeth showed in a mighty white grimace. A musket barrel appeared to be attached to his stomach. Now Crockett saw the tip of a bayonet standing through his back. Red stayed high on his toes, dancing away from the pain, absolutely silent except for his grinding teeth. After a minute he gently tiptoed forward, drawn away like a speared fish.

  Terror bounded into the room. Crockett had thought he had no more fear left, but his bladder released warmth down his thighs and the one-eyed man started howling. The boy slid to his haunches.

  A loud burst of Spanish erupted in the plaza. Someone with big lungs and a deep bass was losing his temper out there.

  The unmistakable cadence of or
ders being given and passed along followed. Five minutes passed.

  "Look it," someone shouted. A miserable-looking face had poked through the doorway, a Mexican soldier's face. Almost before Crockett saw it, the dark face was gone.

  "Now we're kilt, now we're kilt," the one-eyed man despaired.

  The Mexican's head appeared and disappeared again. He tossed a quick glance around the room. At last he dared to enter, in a fighter's crouch but with his hands empty.

  "Quick, kill the bastard," the one-eyed man urged. But right behind the soldier came a tall, patrician officer with silver hair and a uniform still smoldering from powder flash. He shoved the soldier to the ground with despite.

  "Here is a hand and a heart to protect you," he said to the huddled survivors and touched his big chest. "This reptile has shamed the Mexican army of operations with his disobedience. I offered you protection. I repeat my offer, gentlemen. Surrender to me and I will save you."

  These Mexicans were a tricky breed, Crockett ruminated. But at least the man was of the white persuasion, or seemed so with his sunburned nose and blue eyes and silver hair. Crockett unfastened the boy's embrace from his leg. While the offer was still warm he stepped to the middle of the room.

  "I do. We will," he said with a touch more enthusiasm than he intended. There was a code of manliness among these people and it was especially pronounced in the Creoles. It wouldn't do to show too much relief. He started over.

  "If you're an officer, and that's your word, so be it," Crockett said. "We will place ourselves at your discretion."

  The Mexican general was momentarily thrown off guard as Crockett threw his pumping hand out for a shake. When Crockett's meaning dawned on him, he took the hand in his own. "I am General Manuel Fernandez Castrillon," he said.

  Crockett's heart leapt. A general? Their luck was improving. "Crockett," he said. "I am David Crockett." He considered appending a credential or two, just to establish some pedigree. As it turned out, General Castrillon was quicker.