Empire of bones Read online

  Castrillon's eyes brightened. "David Crockett, the great naturalist?" he asked. "The frontier clown?"

  Crockett had never heard it put quite that way and wasn't

  sure he liked it. "The former congressman from Tennessee," he answered with a slight bow picked up in the corridors of the House. "At your disposal."

  "Yes, yes," Castrillon said. "I have heard of you, you see. How small our great continent is."

  Crockett straightened his ragged nor'easter jacket and squared his billed cap and regretted the loss of his collar and tie. At one point on the long journey to Texas he'd nearly traded away his city clothes for a hunting shirt and a buffalo robe. He was glad now that he hadn't.

  "I present to you my companions," Crockett graciously remembered. He felt downright drunk with hope. Only a moment ago he'd been scratching the earth for his very existence. And now look, he was swapping chatter with a grand general of the enemy. New possibilities crowded in on him. The Mexicans would parole the prisoners—what else, Mexico was a civilized republic—then put them on a boat. By the time they reached New Orleans, Crockett could maneuver his role among the men, become their leader, and land a hero. Written up properly, it might even fuel another run for Congress. The sky was the limit, especially with King Andy decrepit in the White House and the Whigs clamoring for a man of the people. If only he'd been wounded!

  "Come." Castrillon motioned toward the door. "I will take you before the commander in chief. It will be safe there."

  Crockett fixed his sights on the radiant doorway. Stooped with stomach cramps, he stepped across the torn remains of the doorman at their feet. A new wave of cramps doubled him up. There was a touch at his elbow, a helping hand. It was Castrillon. "Allow me," the general said.

  "Gracias," Crockett said, exhausting half the Spanish he knew.

  "Life is a circle, I think. Perhaps one day your people will do a kindness to me."

  My people, Crockett thought. Unless Castrillon meant by that his stay-at-home Tennesseeans, Crockett had no people. Certainly not these poor limping remnants of Travis's calling. Crockett understood the Anglo-Saxon need for elbow room. "Be sure you're right, then Go Ahead" had served him well for a campaign slogan. He'd even come here to sample this wholesale takeover of foreign territory. But over the past fortnight he'd

  realized that understanding these invaders and their illusion of what was right was beyond him. Taking land from Creeks and Cherokees by inches and miles was one thing. Conquering a space larger than the thirteen colonies put together was another. There was so much empty land here that only a fool would want more. And yet they did. Well before this morning Crockett had felt defeated. Coming here had been a mistake, and not just the coming to the Alamo. Texas—a mistake. He didn't belong here. It was for a people different from him.

  Despite the early hour, the light outside was blinding. Crockett slit his eyes and licked the gunpowder out of his teeth. When his vision finally pieced together again he stopped, stunned. Behind him the other survivors disbelieved the sight, too.

  "It can't be," a Georgia man protested.

  The plaza was no longer a place of misty beauty. There was still an hour left to the sinking moon, but the sun was up and the smoke had dissipated, exposing a stage of hideous ruin. Between the front of the chapel and the far north wall, the acres of enclosure were littered with weapons, expended cannonballs, torn uniforms, musket balls, and severed limbs. Hundreds of dead and wounded men lay where fate had tossed them. The cries and groans were like cattle lowing.

  Mexican soldiers circulated through the mass of bodies. Some were washing the faces of the dead with gourds of water, and Crockett wondered if it were some sort of Papist habit. Others went about sticking and resticking the pale bulky American bodies with bayonets and lances and bending to swiftly strip away clothes or artifacts. He hoped whoever found his Old Betsy would treat her well. On second thought, he hoped it would blow up on them. That's how he would tell the story anyway, she snapped like a turtle and rearranged that dusky old hook's thieving face right there upon the bone. The prospect of aggrandizing on events put some vinegar back into his bloodstream.

  Guided by the general with the silver mane, Crockett and his huddle of survivors passed among their former friends and comrades. In the heat of battle men's hair and clothing had ignited from sparks and gunpowder, burning away their scalps and beards, denuding them of their vanities. It was horrible to see their teeth bared in grins that had no jokes, to see their skinny legs or barreled bellies, the inside of their rib cages. It

  was immodest. Crockett had seen much death in his day. It always made him blush.

  Side by side the two old men, one helping the other by his arm, threaded their way to the front of the hospital quarters. Blood had guttered into wheel ruts and depressions in the broad muddy plaza. Men had been dragged from their sickbeds and mutilated.

  "A sad day," Castrillon said.

  "Just put us with the others." Crockett could scarcely think.

  "The others?"

  "Let us have the comfort of our fellow prisoners."

  They would be gathered inside the hospital, hurt and scared, in need of a leader to soothe and assure them and negotiate fair treatment and a speedy parole. Suddenly it struck Crockett that this might be the very reason he'd been drawn to Texas and the Alamo, to lead these poor sheep away from destruction. He would bring them from this place back to their rightful homes. It would be biblical, their return.

  Castrillon broke in on his thoughts. "But you are the last ones," the general said. "The only ones."

  Crockett's lower lip worked nervously, contradicting his careless bachelor's beard. It hadn't crossed his mind that there would be a tax to his survival. No one else was left who could bear witness to the final days of some two hundred men. All those strands of life lay in his hands now. Just remembering their faces could take a whole lifetime.

  "I wish I'd never come to this place," he murmured.

  "But you are here," Castrillon shrugged.

  "It was an accident." Crockett was struggling to retrieve his composure, to make sense of his presence in a scene beyond his imagination.

  "Of course," Castrillon said.

  "That's the actual truth," Crockett lied, and in the lying remembered himself. It was one thing to have a true rifle and a sharp eye in this dark, tangled forest called life. But long ago he'd learned that the most dependable weapon, the finest warmth, the best banquet, was generally fashioned from the words that came out of one's own mouth. Folks never tired of a tall tale. Now Crockett tailored one of his tallest.

  "I came as a traveler to your country," he said. His head ached and he felt starved for the wildman language that was

  his trademark. His tongue seemed swollen and it was hard to think. But he forged on.

  "Amazing." Castrillon was nodding, and not unsympathet-ically, Crockett decided.

  "Yes." He warmed to it. "It was the hunting that drew me deeper. Things are so plentiful out here in this country. The game is twice as fat and the days are twice as long. And the Indians, every tribe I met, they were talking about a giant buffalo." His mind felt clarified with each new syllable. He was finding his stride again, the old Crockett.

  "Yes, sir, pure white," he went on. "Far to the far west, they said, always further on. It was that buffalo I was after, General, somewhere out upon the Staked Plains, as it's called. That's when I chanced upon this town, looking for a pinch of powder and a peck of human society and maybe a horn or two of the creature. By coincidence your army was just entering. Not knowing the local situation, I naturally took refuge in this sanctuary and have been trapped here ever since." Crockett stopped with his overall delivery. Had he been stumping, about now would be the time to refresh the voter with jug and twist. Get them to crack a smile and they would be for you.

  "Ah," said Castrillon, but now he seemed disappointed. "Another captive of fate."

  Crockett frowned. Had someone else used up the same lie then? The
thing of it was, fundamentally he wasn't lying. He had come to Texas to hunt and drink and talk and chew, not to provide cannon fodder for a real estate grab led by Jackson men and the land companies. His presence here this morning was altogether an accident.

  They turned the corner of the barracks building. Castrillon brought the little group of exhausted prisoners to where a quiet, remarkably still Mexican soldier was viewing the washing of corpses' faces. He looked serene in the midst of all the activity. The officers surrounding him were mostly larger men in elaborate military costume, but for some reason Crockett's eye fastened on this quiet man. Dressed unpretentiously in a plain blue field uniform, he could have been a chaplain overseeing the belated baptism of these dead souls. He was Crockett's height, perhaps five foot eight, but much thinner in the waist, much younger, and handsome.

  At Castrillon's approach, the man turned and Crockett had

  second thoughts. The soldier was eating a chicken leg as they cleaned the faces and his eyes were black as a savage's. There was red nigger in his blood, Crockett estimated.

  Castrillon stopped the prisoners. "Wait here," he told Crockett. "Perhaps His Excellency will want to speak with you."

  "It's Santy Any," the boy whispered to Crockett. "Why if I just had my frog sticker . . ."

  For an instant Crockett imagined himself springing upon the Mexican ruler like a tiger and snapping his neck and biting out his throat before the balls and blades chunked him to pieces. The absurd fantasy passed. "Hush, child," Crockett said, "he's about to grant us our lives."

  Crockett marveled. Here was the great tyrant himself, the most powerful man in Mexico. He had no horns sprouting from his skull, no tail nor fangs. Self-consciously the frontiersman who had dreamed of becoming president scrutinized this president who dreamed of becoming an emperor. He hunted for any clue to Santa Anna's uniqueness. What was it about a man that drew people to him on such an epic scale? Crockett had spent a lifetime despising and mocking such men and at the same time struggling to learn their secret in order to become one of them. Maybe someday he'd figure it out.

  Castrillon spoke with the commander for a minute. He went on for a long minute. Santa Anna glanced over at Crockett from the center of his ring of officers. Apprehending that he and his fellow prisoners probably looked like so much livestock bunched together, Crockett folded his arms and drew his chest up. I'm a ringtailed roarer, he wanted to bellow. Half horse, half alligator. I wash my hair in the hurricanes and clean my teeth with lightning. But his bowels spasmed again and he was left hoping the introductions wouldn't take too long. He had a powerful need to lie down and rest. Some water would help, too, say a gallon or two to wash out the taste of the war. Meanwhile he had to stand here with his belly sucked flat.

  Crockett tried to prepare a suitable greeting for Santa Anna, something bold but not insulting. You wanted to be first with the handshake, that was one thing. He'd known tyrants all his life, from shuffling brutes in buckskin to serpents like Daniel Webster and Calhoun and Biddle and Adams and the demon himself, Andy Jackson. It was a mistake to wait for their pleasure because they would stomp you flat. No, an aggressive strat-

  egy was always best, nothing invasive, mind you, but forward moving, definitely. They respected that.

  Santa Anna had the look of a family man, Crockett concluded. Family circumstances usually tempered a fellow, made him less wolfish about the head and ears. No doubt the Mexican would be suffering Crockett's same thousand-mile homesickness. Maybe they'd get around to discussing wives and children and how far away everything that really mattered was. First, no doubt, there would be some curiosity about what had brought a famous politician all this way to Texas, and Crockett would answer how that was like asking a man why he dreams his dreams, or where is the wind born, or how deep is the sea.

  Castrillon's deep voice barked suddenly, startling Crockett from his reverie. The conversation fell to silence and Santa Anna turned his back to Castrillon. He began pointing at a row of torn-up bodies. Now Crockett comprehended. The faces had been washed to distinguish the Mexican dead from their enemy. In pairs soldiers dragged each American body by the heels toward a large pile of wood, leaving long blood streaks. The Mexican bodies were getting loaded into a big two-wheeled cart for transport elsewhere.

  Castrillon's face darkened. Crockett tasted bile and his belly convulsed again.

  "What's going on?" the boy asked Crockett. "They're arguing."

  "Don't worry," Crockett said. "They are a tropical people. The sun gets in their blood and it makes them disputatious."

  Castrillon was attempting to resume the discussion with Santa Anna. All too clearly the commander had developed other priorities, though. Castrillon tried talking over Santa Anna's shoulder, which provoked several officers to angrily chastise him. One stocky man with a moustache and a small gold earring and a clean uniform started arguing with Castrillon. Castrillon cupped a beseeching hand toward the prisoners.

  Crockett looked away quickly.

  The sun had pried loose of the eastern flats, striping the clouds from the inside out. Doves and mockingbirds, disturbed by the battle, were returning to the big pecan tree and the cottonwoods. Cocking his face to the warm rays, Crockett closed his eyes. He drew their song to him, pulled it right through the plaza's bedlam and stench.

  Her brow would blow sharp with wrinkles, he knew. But she wasn't going to weep, not Betsy. He hoped she would feel more sorrow than disappointment, then changed it around and hoped she would go ahead and get mad, maybe cuss him with those severe lips, anything to keep her eyes dry. Even with all he'd put her through over the years, Betsy was a woman who liked to keep her chin high and back straight. It was a quality that had inspired him, though he'd never told her so. There were a lot of things he'd never told her. She deserved everything, and yet year after year he'd provided her with next to nothing except more work, more worry. Forgive me. The words jumped into his head.

  Just then the long sound of steel sliding free brought his eyes open. Crockett looked over and now Castrillon was gesturing at the stone walls, railing to himself. Several others had faced away, too.

  It was going to be the officers then, the lackeys who had missed their chance at combat. Swords in hand they were spreading out, circling the prisoners. Crockett felt his neighbors back against him. He would have preferred Castrillon were in on this. He'd felt a spark of companionship there.

  "Dear Jesus no," the one-eyed man begged.

  "Colonel?" the boy wondered.

  But Crockett had no answers left, only the gift to give to Betsy. With all the grace that was in him, Crockett opened his arms wide and held them out. He reached as far as he could reach and then started walking due east, into the sun.

  Someone screamed behind him. As high and deep as he could throw it Crockett released his soul toward the dawn, and suddenly all there was to hear was the birdsong, those doves in the cottonwoods and pecan. He took another step.

  The sun split in two. Like a golden apple separating into even halves, one for each hand, the brightness fell open along a thread of steel. Crockett reached for each half of the light, certain at last that he was going to make it all the way to wherever he was going. Now there would be a tale worth telling.

  Chapter One

  March 6, 1836

  Near dark the wind took on a taste.

  Alone, weary from a long week of spread-eagle revolution talk, Houston sat napping in the saddle, an old cut-down Mexican job on loan, his own having been taken for a monte debt. Rocking gently, the general covered a possible mile with that odd touch of smoke on his tongue. His skull wagged to the rhyme of creaking leather, and he verged on a dream of wine-dark seas and a crew of loyal sailors and monsters without end.

  At last something, maybe lice, maybe old memories, startled him awake. His gray eyes shot wide and Houston reined his yellow pony to a halt in the piney barren, somewhere—nowhere he recognized—deep in Texas. For the third time today he'd lost the trail. With an empire
waiting for his direction, it seemed he couldn't even lead a horse straight.

  There he sat on a pathway choked with soapweed and buffalo grass, staring all around as if discovering a strange new land. Texas was like that, part dream, part faith, one minute a dark bayou roaring with gators, the next a prairie so flat and golden it hurt to see. One day you thirsted, the next you swam. Close your eyes on a field of white flowers and you could open up to a thousand white cranes springing into the moonlight. It took a quick imagination to keep up with this land, and Houston figured that included visions that weren't bound by time and place. Sometimes you had to get lost in order to find your way. At least that was the hypothesis Houston kept handy for such moments as this, when the bearings were unfamiliar. In a way,

  it didn't matter where he was. He'd been promised a scout was waiting at some point along the way and would lead him on to his destination.

  Two days ago, in some rare bright sunshine in a shantytown grandly named Washington-on-the-Brazos, the revolutionary government had crowned him major general of the Army of the Republic of Texas, granting him sweeping control of all regulars, volunteers, and militias. With a hasty minimum of fanfare, the rebel convention had anointed him their military messiah and dispatched him to the western front at the head of a nonexistent army to save their nonexistent nation. It was said that a pride of several hundred Anglo-Saxon fighters stood in wait for him at Gonzales. Supposing that were true—and Houston knew his stock better than to suppose any such thing— it still wouldn't be good enough. A few hundred could never hope to stem, much less beat back, the dark tide of thousands of Mexican soldiers. On top of that, thanks to Bowie and the young maniac Travis, the Alamo needed rescuing before Houston could even begin his consolidation of Texas.

  The town of Gonzales lay roughly one hundred miles to the southwest. That would take three days of this kind of riding and he was glad for it. In between here and there was much to do. For one thing he had his usual cogitations to sort through, and then there was the war plan to craft, and some corncob and jerky and his thumbworn copies of Caesar and Gullivers Travels to digest, and sleep to recover. When it came time to hit the enemy, he wanted his strength up and his spirits high.