Empire of bones Page 3

  But that scent in the wind ... it troubled him. He sampled the air. He worried it. It was so faint—just a touch of smoke— that it may as well have been nothing. Rain was coming, there was that in the air. And while it was too cold for flowers still, the oaks were budding, a woody musk for the tree frogs. Old horse dung festered in the trail. But it was none of those things. He let the air loose.

  The pony shifted under Houston's weight, some 240 pounds last time he'd bothered with a feed scale. She was a sturdy mountain mustang, just as happy with grass as oats, which extended the range he could travel on her. But her legs were short and his were long and that left his boots dangling ridiculously close to the ground for the commander of an army and a founding father of a nation. He could have regretted her

  for humbling him so publicly. But the truth was he found it charming that she should burden him as much as he did her.

  The pony cropped a mouthful from a patch of threadleaf sedge. The sedge was early. Most years, a short winter would be cause for celebration. Not this year. Lord. Houston prayed, working his chew. He spit. Spare us your goddamn bounty. His wasn't the only pony that could thrive on the local grass. The Mexican horses ate it, too, and so did Comanche stock, being stolen Mexican horses. Every sort of enemy would be mobile now. They would have to guard against the north as well as the south this season.

  He searched the darkening sky for his totem eagle. It usually came to him in times of need. At Horseshoe Bend, as he lay dying of bullets and the arrow, the eagle had appeared and given him hope. On his first trip to Washington as a Tennessee senator it had come again, drafting on the river heat. And again, after the belle Eliza left him in ruins and he fled into the wilderness, the eagle had cut overhead and showed him the way. But with dusk dropping fast all that appeared was a wedge of honking geese.

  He dismounted and started up the trace on foot, due west—upwind—toward the sinking sun. At a slight knoll he came to a halt and waited patiently for the next good current. When it came he drew a deep lungful and the black frock coat lifted with his rib cage. Slowly, delicately, he separated out the wind's parts.

  Somewhere nearby a fawn was watching him. He could smell the doe's sweet milk and the fetal sac, not yet eaten by the owls and beetles nor dried out by the sun. That would make the fawn a day old, younger by just a few hours than the self-declared Republic of Texas. With a soft "howdy do," the commander in chief welcomed mother and child under his breath. It wasn't a birth he was smelling for, though, and he tried again. This time he caught it, or almost did. But there were too many echoes in the wind.

  "Goddamn it," he muttered, and then the wind shifted slightly. This time he got met with a burst of smoke blown raw from someone's new-made campfire. Judging by the smell of rabbit grease, the fire wasn't far off.

  Houston scanned the treetops. It was too dark to see the smoke but just dark enough to spy the glow, probably a mile

  off. He'd been figuring on a cold camp tonight. Now, with care, he might actually land some meat and a piece of company for the night.

  On board his pony Houston made for the evening star, off which he'd marked the twinkling campfire. Fifteen minutes passed before he closed on it. The trees took on sharper, cleaner silhouettes as the glow magnified. Riding slow, he whistled a tune to advertise his presence.

  It came as no surprise when he entered a well-lit clearing that was empty. He reined up and took stock of the camp. There was a good-sized rabbit—bullet creased across the spine—roasting over a one-man fire, conservative, built for the meal and little else. Houston could tell an early-to-bed man because his own fires were so opposite, constructed for good illumination and late reading.

  It was a white man's camp. Indians—Cherokees and Creeks, anyway, the tribes Houston knew—fed a campfire with the tips of wood, edging the logs in as needed. White men burned everything, middle out, gorging on the light and heat. Some travelers declared that was because the Anglo-Saxon naturally had more appetite than the common heathen. Houston had come to believe his people just had more demons and night fears.

  Something moved in the penumbra, back among the trees, a large shape, a small motion. Houston froze. Texas was filled with every breed of outcast—dimwits and lunatics and recluses and plain bad men. And he had just laid himself at a stranger's mercy. Part of him regretted his bold entrance. On the other hand, fate had her ways.

  After a minute there was another motion and he saw that it was a horse in the shadows, shifting from one hobbled leg to another. She was a big black Spanish mare with white stockings peeking at him from the trees. That was the bait. Any horse thief foolish enough to grab for her would end up rotting in the needles.

  Houston sat there and kept his hands still and clearly on the saddle horn and waited for the gun. It would surface on a side, he decided, that or from the back. He waited. It seemed like three minutes passed. Houston was starting to feel foolish sitting there with his rusting dress sword and the slouch hat

  which he'd shaped into an old-fashioned Revolutionary War-era tricorner, a leftover from some speech he'd made years ago dressed as George Washington. Finally four feet of glistening hexagonal barrel came sliding out from the brush on his right. Houston turned his head to face it, smiling, meaning to be smooth about this. What he saw made him start.

  The figure looked for all the world like an orange-haired gargoyle, a man dressed as an animal or an animal disguised as a man. He was crouching on the brink of shadows with the barrel of a beautiful Pennsylvania long rifle trained on Houston's belly. The two studied each other.

  "Evening," Houston greeted him.

  The man stood up and stepped back, surprised, as if Houston's language itself were a weapon. His serape spread like broad wings. Underneath it he had on a forest green frieze coat. His sombrero, dangling back on a thong, formed a dark leather halo. A fresh scar ran across his forehead, purple and furrowed. The man didn't answer. Instead he held one finger to his lips in the manner of hushing Houston, that or listening to a faraway sound.

  The man finally reached a decision. "You're Houston," he said, and let the cock down to half-cock and lifted the barrel. The voice was so high it piped like a young girl's.

  "I am." Houston waited. When it became apparent the gargoyle wasn't going to volunteer a name in return, he ventured a question. "Are you my scout then?"

  "Evidently you don't need one." He spoke with a slight Spanish cadence, less an accent than a melody. "I was told to find you. You found me."

  "I was smelling the wind," Houston explained, "something in the wind. Then it turned all to meat. Your rabbit there ruined the wind."

  The scout regarded his supper. He made another decision. "Light, General," he said. "Rest yourself."

  Houston got down and unsaddled the pony. He laid the saddle blanket out by the fire, then sat close to the heat. However warm it got in the day, when night descended, winter was waiting. Houston envied the man his serape, a red and white beauty with a tight weave that would keep the rain out and the cold off.

  "Supper?" the man offered.

  "That's yours," Houston politely declined, then waited for a second invitation. There wasn't one.

  "Well then," the scout said. Cradling the spit of rabbit in his lap, he started picking pieces off with his fingers.

  Here was a blunt, literal man. It paid to select your words carefully around folks like this. Houston unbuckled his saddlebags and rustled around for a corncob. He shucked the leaves and propped it by the fire, a poor second to the rabbit.

  "It seems there's a storm coming in," Houston offered. But the homely fellow didn't reply and Houston returned his attention to the bright flames and the snap of resin. On a thought, he shucked his boots. While his supper cooked he passed his boots back and forth over the fire, a Cherokee preventive against snakebites. Some said it worked against bullets just as well.

  After maybe five minutes of silence the scout suddenly spoke out. "It is my opinion we have brought a tempest on our heads," h
e volunteered.

  "Is that so?" Houston said.

  "It is." The scout evicted a rabbit bone from his mouth.

  "And who might you be, sir?"

  "I am Erastus Smith."

  The name meant nothing to Houston. There were a thousand Smiths flooding the territory. He leaned forward, twisted his roast. "This being a military affair, do you mind sharing with me your rank, Mr. Smith?"

  "No rank, no title," the scout answered. "We are all good Christians in this grand war." The "grand" was mocking and that aroused Houston's curiosity.

  "You sound almost sorry for the fight," he said.

  "Not almost," Smith said, then shut up.

  "There's men who came two thousand miles to put themselves in harm's way," Houston said. "Now here it is at last, the war."

  "I would go all the way to the Indies to get away from what's coming." The scout's homely face was creased and sunbaked right up to his baby-white hatline, with not a trace of laughter in his whole life.

  "And what's that what's coming, sir?" Houston asked, and caught his breath. There was a species of person who could see

  into the future, and he'd always figured scouts and trackers were born of it. If Smith really did have the sight, it might help to keep them all alive.

  The scout's eyes shaded over, though. It was obvious he was simply despairing at the violence in general. Still it was comforting to know Texas held at least one sane man besides himself.

  "I have to say you've got me confounded," Houston said. "Louisiana's not half so far as the Indies. For a man who doesn't like war, there's many another place to be than here."

  Smith fixed him with a look through the camp smoke. "If I could find my family, that's where I'd surely be, another place."

  That only deepened the mystery for Houston. It made no sense how a pacific man—a scout, no less—could misplace his family this close to a war, especially with every white woman and child who wasn't in Gonzales safely back in the settlements further east. And then it came to him who this particular Smith was.

  This was the one they called El Sordo, the Deaf One. Or near deaf. Houston had heard of him. A buffalo hunter and surveyor and small-time ranchero, he'd been living in-country so long, married to a San Antonio Tejana of such beauty, that many questioned if Deaf Smith might not have gone completely native and become, in the jargon currently at large, a Tory. Houston had suffered similar misgivings himself from his years spent among the Cherokee with his own dark-eyed beauty, a wife of sorts, Tiana. Civilization had a way of drawing a very thick line around itself.

  "Is your family trapped in Bear?" Houston asked, using the American slang for San Antonio de Bexar.

  Smith cut him a hard glance full of suspicion. Vm the first to ask after their welfare, Houston realized. The man had no friends out here. He was an exile among exiles.

  "Travis asked me to ride a message out from the Alamo, and ever since there's been no getting back in. Not into the town. Not now." Smith's worry showed in the way his boney hands went blank and lay motionless.

  "The Mexican army will let them go," Houston said, then handed Smith's own words back. "We're all Christians in this one." In truth Houston didn't know the Mexicans at all. Like

  most Americans in Texas he'd stuck to the eastern country where Mexicans generally didn't stray unless they had horses to sell or tobacco to buy. Tales of their barbarity had hatched like mad hornets over the past few months. Suddenly every Mexican was lazy and bloodthirsty and lusted for white women, but that was all propaganda written for the American uprising. Houston knew, because he'd written some of it himself and seen it distributed on broadsides crying for more men with rifles to come to Texas.

  "Maybe so," Smith reckoned.

  "They will have as much mercy in them as we do in us," Houston declared, and it seemed to relax the scout's knotted face. "Now, Mr. Smith, what can you tell me about my army?"

  "Which one would that be?" the scout gently scoffed. It wasn't a malicious reply, just one stripped of all the niceties. Texas was in chaos, and only partly because Santa Anna had brought 6,000 soldiers up to defend Mexican territory from what the Americans were calling a revolution.

  In point of fact they were lucky to have the Mexicans to call their enemy, otherwise there might have been bloodshed among their own factions. There was an army of 500 men under Colonel Fannin at Goliad, an army of 150 under Colonels Bowie and Travis at the besieged Alamo, plus a few hundred men theoretically awaiting Houston's command at Gonzales, and who knew how many other bands of armed men roaming around. Combined they would have amounted to a force exceeding one thousand. The problem was that, to this date, none of the officers along the western front seemed willing to follow a single instruction Houston had issued them, nor to pull back from their forts and pool their numbers. And now, like hounds that wouldn't heel, they had a mouthful of porcupine quills.

  "The Gonzales bunch, let's start with them," Houston said.

  "They're coming in by twos and threes. By the time we get there we'll see three hundred maybe. On the other hand we might see none. They're not the sort to wait for long. There was talk of going on."

  "Where to?"

  Smith shrugged. "Deeper."

  "The Alamo," Houston said. "Tell me about them, then. How were the Bear men managing when you left them?"

  Smith tsk'd. "Travis had their heads stuffed with nonsense.

  And there were some shooting stars one night. They're sure of victory."

  "How about you?"

  The scout fiddled with his lapful of rabbit bones. "They said the place would hold. I said, t'won't."

  "I warned them, too, both of them," Houston confided.

  Smith stared at him skeptically.

  "Bowie carried the order, my order," Houston said. "Back in January, before Santa Anna ever got close. I instructed him to destroy the Alamo, then fall back. And now . . ." He left it dangling to see what Smith had to contribute.

  Smith's sorry-looking face stayed sorry. "It's a sin to kill yourself."

  "It's a worse sin to kill your command," Houston said.

  After a minute of thinking about it, Smith visibly arrived at a decision. "Well," he said, "we'll need leading." Not they. We.

  Houston nodded, pleased. He had won the man. Here was his first soldier. He spit on his fingertips and lifted his dinner away from the fire and bit in.

  The two men didn't talk anymore. There was no awkwardness to it. Smith watched the tiny flames for fifteen minutes, thinking his thoughts. Then he lay back and went to sleep.

  Houston pulled out his Swift and added a few twigs to the fire. He turned to the passage about the warmongering Lilliputians. Usually that piece appealed, but tonight it unsettled him. After a few pages he tucked the book back into his saddlebag and lay his head down to sleep.

  He dreamed, but it was more like walking through a memory. He was a young man in a blue uniform, leading a charge on foot against the Indian breastworks, fanning his sword, bellowing war cries, vaulting feetfirst into battle. By the time his men could join him, he was reeling and bloody, with a barbed arrow jutting from the side of his groin. The stone tip grated against the inside of his pelvic saddle and Houston ordered a friend at sword point to jerk the arrow free. The hole was big enough for a surgeon to insert four fingers. Then General Jackson came riding by on a great white horse and looked down at him.

  He dreamed of a gaunt wand of a man papered with yellow skin and eyes so jaundiced they were nearly golden. The long

  skeletal face appeared above him with his white hair slashed upwards, a lion's mane, and the apparition smiled. He spoke. Samuel. It was the name of God.

  "General." There was a whisper, a touch upon his shoulder.

  Houston woke. Deaf Smith was squatting to one side, blocking the spray of stars with his head. It was the wolfs hour, not yet dawn. Beneath his head Houston felt his books and his two pistols inside the saddlebags. The fire was dead and he was curled in on himself, sweating and shivering
at the same time.

  "What is it?" Houston copied Smith's whisper, uncertain if they were in peril.

  "You said you smelled something." The scout stood up, agitated in his own way. "Is this it?"

  Houston unhugged his arms and took his hands out from inside his jacket. He got to his feet, his old injuries aching with the cold. He put his hat on.

  "It woke me," Smith said, nosing the air.

  Houston pulled the morning breeze in through his nose, eyes closed, part contemplation, part pain. He exhaled in a burst, shocked. The air was thick with the smell.

  So it was true.

  Here was how it had smelled a quarter-century earlier at Horseshoe Bend after Old Hickory gave the gee-haw and loosed them on a nation of Red Sticks tucked in the distant brakes. It was the smell of sulfur and woodsmoke and scorched limestone. Reluctantly, necessarily, Houston breathed the wind again. And there it was, his final proof of battle. The stink of meat.

  Burnt.

  Human.

  Houston snorted to get the odor from his nostrils. He knew how far the scent had carried: two hundred miles, give or take. But that was logic, not sense. Two hundred miles was the distance from here to San Antonio.

  The fall had come then.

  The Alamo was gone.

  Chapter Two

  Houston dispatched Deaf Smith in the direction of San Antonio. "There will be survivors," he told the scout. "There always are. Find them. Bring them to me at Gonzales."

  Smith started off, then paused and twisted in the saddle and said, "Vaya con Dios." He said it shyly like a blessing.

  "I will," Houston lied and plowed on alone.