Empire of bones Page 4

  It took four more days to reach Gonzales. He followed the old scout's careful directions—to jog left at the oak split in thirds by lightning strikes, to follow his morning shadow in a beeline, to ford the fourth stream two hundred yards below the blaze marks, and so on. He found his sudden urgency a good compass.

  Each day the north horizon bruised bluer and bluer. The temperature sank like a pebble in a rainbarrel. / was born for a storm, Jackson once confided to him. Calm does not suit me. He'd known the old tyrant's meaning instantly, because no storm had ever failed to embrace him either. Riding into the wind Houston breathed battle smoke the whole way.

  The town of Gonzales represented the farthest reach of Anglo-Saxon colonizing. For a scant decade it had grown up against the prairie's edge, a tenuous bridging of eastern Texas's American energies and the ranchero economy of the Latino west. In asserting their roots, the Americans of Gonzales had eschewed the Tejanos' adobe, preferring split oak to sheathe their frame-built houses.

  Houston reached town at dawn in a cold blue drizzle. His

  shocked first impression was of a massacre. Hundreds of men lay everywhere, in the dog runs, on the street, piled against the houses, curled around trees. For a bad moment he thought the Mexicans had swept through here, too, and left him a town full of dead. A bear dog with wet tan fur came up, the sort that could bite through a cow's spine, and it sniffed at Houston's stirrup.

  He nudged the pony's ribs and moved among the bodies. It took no effort to smell their liquor and vomit and hear their breathing. A single fire hissed in the center of the lane, steaming gray under the fine spray. Beside it a sentinel slouched over his knees, dozing, toes bare. He had no blanket, and his hunting shirt—soaked by the rain—had more patches than cloth.

  The firepit showed a mesh of charcoaled fence posts and a chair leg. A half-burnt page lay in one corner. The soldiers had been burning books. Houston bent forward and twisted his head. It was a title page. The Black Dwarf, by Sir Walter Scott.

  Houston nudged the sentinel with his boot tip. "Wake," he said.

  The slouch hat lifted. It was a child, not thirteen yet. His eyes peeled open sleepily.

  "Give me the watchword, boy," Houston demanded.

  "Watchword?" the boy answered.

  "How about a drum? Is there a drum to beat reveille with?"

  "No drum, by gawd."

  "Goddamn it," Houston grumbled. Most of these warriors had never seen a war nor served a militia nor heard a command. It was going to take a sharp knife to cut Texas free from Mexico, and what he had instead was a blunt stone. "Is that yauger loaded?" he asked.

  The boy nodded.

  "Hand it up then."

  "Me gun?"

  Houston reached down and took the contraption from his reluctant grip. It was of old Harper's Ferry manufacture, stamped 1803, a rusty-looking thing with its lock strapped tight with a sewn, tacked buckskin patch and the barrel wired to the stock with buckskin lacing and loops of buckskin underneath to hold the ramrod. In ordinary times if Houston had spotted such a weapon lying in the road, he would have ridden right

  over it as a piece of scrap. It was hardly worth chopping into chunks to shoot as grape from their cannon.

  Water beaded the long barrel, but the boy had managed to fall asleep with the flintlock mechanism protected in his lap. Houston pulled back the cock, aimed at the sky, off toward where the sun ought to be rising, and pulled the wobbly trigger.

  Flint sparks jumped in the gray light, followed by a dull crack of slow smoky powder. A flock of starlings jumped into the air. Houston sniffed at the cloud of gunsmoke. This wasn't the Double Dupont he was toting in his horn, not close. The boy must have loaded up with some of that Mexican powder the Americans had captured at the Alamo during the fall campaign. The powder was worthless, close to shooting with ground charcoal. The charge he'd just fired wouldn't have thrown a ball fifty yards.

  The gunshot's effect was almost as slow as the shot itself. All around him Houston's army emerged from the mud like maggots in a wound. "Rise up, rise up," Houston called through the camp. The dog followed him off to one side.

  They surfaced from their blankets and draped coats and, the lucky ones, ponchos that were nearly waterproof. Some of the men wore striped hickory shirts, some linsey-woolsey cinched at the waist with bale rope or strips of animal hide, deer, cow, horse or snake. Buckskin clothed some, city cloth others. Houston passed a foxskin cap, ears alert on top, the red tail hanging to the man's liver.

  There was not one stand of arms in the whole mass of them, no military order at all. It was every man for himself. Most carried butcher knives heavy enough to fell small trees; otherwise the array of weapons was more a menagerie than an armament. It even included tomahawks, axes, and a few Mexican lance tips mounted on long sticks.

  All told there were a half dozen handmade long rifles in the bunch, as exquisitely crafted as they were expensive. But most of the firearms Houston could see came in the form of double-barreled shotguns, ancient muskets, pistols, and even a blunderbuss or two. If there was a standard in this pack of arms, it was the British-surplus Brown Betsys captured from the Mexicans after the first "fall" of the Alamo back in December when the Americans had overrun San Antonio.

  They'd laid siege, they'd shed blood, they'd gained a town in the deep west of Texas. Commanded by the Alamo's huge eighteen-pounder cannon, San Antonio de Bexar had been theirs for a matter of only three months. All they had to show for it now were a few dozen surplus muskets and some kegs of inferior powder. Houston sighed. They had squandered their advantage for nothing. Now they were going to have to begin all over again.

  "Who's in charge here?" Houston demanded of the sleepy men.

  "Houston?" A man hailed him from a doorway with horse-hide for hinges. He had cropped yellow hair and a bluejacket too tight across the shoulders. Houston was relieved that anyone among these flea-bitten strangers recognized him, though wary that it was Ned Burleson doing the recognizing.

  "You've come from Washington-on-the-Brazos?" Burleson asked. He had a face like a dirt clod, common and forgettable, but he possessed a violent Scotch-Irish integrity that border men liked and trusted. His neck was bigger around than his head and his eyes were small and dangerous. If he said something was going to be done it generally got done, one way or another.

  "I'm fresh from the convention."

  "Did they do their job?"

  "We have a declaration of independence," Houston confirmed.

  "Independence," Burleson snorted to himself. It was a charade, of course, and anyone who'd lived in Texas for more than a month knew it. From their declaration of independence to their broadsides against taxation without representation and their committees of safety and even their antiquated weaponry, they were plagiarizing the theater of their grandfathers' glorious Revolution. They didn't want independence nor, with the Mexican army advancing, did they really want defense. What they wanted was to be left alone on the land, and that meant conquest, plain and simple.

  "So they've done their clerking," Burleson said. "We got our piece of paper. We're official now. And what about you? Have you your star?"

  For the last few days Houston had been hoping Burleson wasn't going to begrudge him the promotion. With enormous

  guile and stern gray eyes and his meaty handshake—talking cracker to the squatters and high finance to the eastern land agents and patriotism to all the rest—Houston had gained the leadership of an army that rightfully belonged, by some interpretations, to the man standing before him.

  Last fall Burleson had tried his hand at leading the army against San Antonio and the Mexicans holed up in the Alamo. Houston had missed the excitement, but from all accounts Burleson had treated warring like a farm chore: plow, sow, and reap. That was fine in itself, except that Burleson had lost his entire army. He'd lost it, not to the enemy, but to the army itself. When bands of dashing mercenaries with names like the New Orleans Greys and Alabama Red Rovers had showed up from the St
ates, Burleson's plowboy approach had offended them. The ugly fact was that the men had mutinied and the officers had usurped their clay-footed general. Humiliated, Burleson had sat out the conquest of San Antonio in a tent.

  "I got the star," Houston acknowledged. "They voted me commander in chief." He waited to see the reaction. He wanted Burleson with him, or at least not against him. Houston had thought this through and decided Burleson's abysmal failure as a military leader was a crucial asset. The man had made serious mistakes during the fall campaign, but one way or another Houston meant to learn from them. This was a different season, and hopefully, with Burleson close by, he could make this a different army.

  Burleson wrinkled his pug nose, digesting his fall from grace. Finally he said, "I don't want the goddamn army. All I want's my fight."

  Houston relaxed. "If we must fight, we will," he said.

  "We will," Burleson insisted. The man had much pride to recover.

  "Has my scout Smith showed up yet?"

  "Deef s not with you?" Burleson said. "Then he's gone back to his casa and chile. We figured him to jump the line."

  "You figured wrong," Houston said. "I sent him spying." Then, to get it out of the way, he added, "Colonel." Not Ned, not General. Colonel.

  Burleson's jaw bunched at the word, but he swallowed it. "No matter," he said, "we can find our way without a scout."

  "How many men have we got here?" Houston asked.

  "With guns or without?"

  "Total."

  "Last night, three hundred seventy-four. And their blood is up. Some of us have been waiting here for a week or more. We can leave inside the hour."

  "Leave?"

  "Go," Burleson growled peevishly. "To the Alamo."

  That startled Houston. He studied Burleson's eyes to be sure he was in earnest, then checked through the soldiers' faces around him. Hadn't they smelled the death in the air? But there was too much bravado and listless optimism everywhere, not a hint of grimness. They didn't know about the Alamo, hadn't even guessed. And since they hadn't, Houston saw no reason to panic them.

  Houston's musket shot and the ensuing commotion in the streets had woken the whole town. Right through the slat walls, he heard babies crying and mothers cooing hush. Dogs barked, igniting some Mexican donkey's bray. Children darted from houses, ganged together under a tree, started a game. Houston smelled coffee.

  For some reason, the tan dog had taken a shine to him, or at least to his ancient sword. Feeling a tug at his belt, Houston looked down and the animal had the tip of his scabbard in its teeth and was yanking tentatively. "Get," Houston told the dog, and pushed it hard with his boot.

  Up and down the brief street Houston's other officers began appearing at doorways with bits of straw in their hair, itching at bug bites, opening their flaps or untying their strings to piss into the muddy street. Wylie Martin, who belonged in a rocking chair not a saddle, began muttering vile curses at his reluctant bladder, for all the world a demented old monk. Most were faces Houston knew, a distinct advantage. Like officers in any war they had garrisoned themselves in the best accommodations, in this case anything with a roof over it.

  Houston swept his gaze through them and was startled that they looked so mortal and more, downright vulgar. Misfits. The word jostled into his head. Maybe it was the hour or their shabby backdrop, maybe it was their week of waiting for a commander, but his officers looked flaccid and bored and irrelevant. They lacked a pattern, and not one had a hungry look to him. There

  was no telling the colonels from the majors or the majors from the men sleeping in the street. Except for Colonel Sherman and his bunch, brand new to Texas, there wasn't a uniform in the lot. One and all, they looked like they'd just tumbled from a New Orleans brothel. Judging by his wild hair, John Wharton had fallen asleep upside down. Three-Legged Willie Williamson could barely keep aloft on his wooden crutch, he was so hung over.

  The officers became aware of Houston incrementally, eyeing him as he eyed them. Like a colony of prairie dogs, they peered at him from their doorways, measuring the authority about to rule over them. Only one seemed happy to see him, and that was the regrettable Colonel Forbes.

  "Great God, the general's come!" he boomed out.

  Houston hissed under his breath. Forbes was a stout Cork-born Scot, blessed with great leonine cheek whiskers the color of sea sand, but cursed with the manner of a motherless calf, sucking whatever tit came in reach. He'd first met Forbes in November, shortly after the man arrived in Texas and started granting all other newcomers like himself certificates of citizenship. Inventing his own jurisdiction, he had sworn in three quarters of the Americans now posing as Texans. The line between being a mercenary and a revolutionary was very narrow this year, and Forbes considered it a patriotic duty to boost every manjack he could into a facade of respectability.

  "Do we march for the Alamo before or after breakfast?" Forbes cheerfully bayed.

  The whole street seemed to grow quiet and Houston silently damned the colonel. Even if he had defined a strategy, a public street was not the place for revealing it. But all eyes were on him.

  Just then a pair of men clutching books emerged from an empty shed like children heading off to school. Houston saw his escape and took it. "You soldier boys," he called to the two, and the attention of the street swung away from the general's battle strategy. "Take back those pages," he commanded.

  The two soldiers stared at Houston as if through eye holes in old battle helmets, the fine rain draining down their whiskers and scar lines and crow's-feet. "Who are you?" one said.

  "I'm Sam Houston, and I'm the general."

  "Well I'm cold."

  "Heat up, boys," Houston told them, "but not with those books."

  After a moment one snorted indignantly and dropped his handful of books in the mud. His partner did the same and they slapped away on bare feet. Houston dismounted. He went across to pick up the books.

  Every last one had come from the pen of Sir Walter, and Houston almost chucked them back in the mud. The sooner Americans quit pretending they were buckskin knights and highlander warriors and took on homegrown American heroes, the better. So far as he was concerned, Scott's windy romances and fool talk about the Great Heart were a plague upon the South, seducing young men with notions of aristocracy and confederacy and pretty militarism. But for every Ivanhoe or Waverly they burned in their campfires, a Virgil or Homer or Plato would go up in flames as well, and Houston was not about to help create a Texas barren of poets and scholars.

  He stacked the books neatly on a plank—at the same time leaving them exposed to the drizzle—then turned and threw his voice hard so the entire street could hear him. "We've come here to build a nation, not loot it," he said. "The next man who burns a book or fires a fence or a stick of furniture, I'll have you court-martialed and horsewhipped."

  But a woman's roupy voice reached across. "You didn't say, mister," she said. "When are you off to Bear?" In light leached gray by the rain, the rawboned woman looked a century old, though she couldn't have been out of her twenties. Her blouse was open to the belly and she had an infant at one nipple and a sticklike child of four or five leaning against her hip, sucking at the other.

  Houston flinched. They wanted answers and weren't going to let go of him until something got said.

  "Madam," Houston said, and gave her part of a French bow.

  Stone cold she stared like he'd just asked her for a dollar. "Two weeks ago we sent our men off to the Alamo. My brother, my husband, her father, her two kin," she pointed at other women crowding doorways, "her uncle, her son. More than twenty of them. And when our men left they said, Don't you worry, more fellers will come on later. And now more fellers

  come, you fellers. But look at this. This ain't right, all these men in my street and our Gonzales men all off to the Alamo."

  "I count every life as precious," Houston evaded her. It was the kind of thing a politician was expected to say.

  "Whoever you are
," the haggard mother said to Houston, "take this army and go on to Bear. Fetch back our men."

  Houston took a deep breath. Texas had not been kind to this woman and it was about to be less kind still. But short of telling her the time had passed for saving the Alamo, what could he say? It seemed too soon for such tragedy, too soon for terror. Besides, except for the stink of dead souls on the wind, he had no evidence. Houston stood there in the center of the street, freighted with his own ignorance. He wanted to say something true and comforting to her, to all of them, the way great leaders did in storybooks. But the sky was falling and he felt helpless to spare them what was about to come.

  "Get on to the Alamo," the mother railed at them, "or goddamn you all."

  But then another woman's voice broke in. "Don't you goddamn them. They'll go when they go," it said from a house. Mosely Baker happened to be occupying that particular doorway, and the woman with the voice stood behind him in the shadows. Wearing his round hat with half the brim trained up and a long black raven feather in the band, Mosely was a handsome Black Irish, one of the best-looking men in Texas. He craned his head around and admonished her with a whisper. But it was too late.

  At the sound of the voice the skinny mother went from sour to mad. "You," she yelped at her hidden neighbor and twisted so fast her nipple popped from the boy's mouth. Her long breast dangled naked like an eyeball out of its socket. "What do you care, Molly? You'd be happy if my brother never come home."

  "Aye, you'd be happy, too," the shadow woman answered from behind Mosely. "Simon's a hard brute of a husband. I'm tired of his beatings. I didn't come to Texas for hard knuckles and no whip. I come to be a bride and be loved."

  Mosely shifted uncomfortably. He detached his shoulder from the doorframe and grinned self-consciously. He had some sort of connection with the woman called Molly, and it wasn't hard to guess what sort. Colonel Baker was good friends with

  another eager lawyer turned to military opportunities, Buck Travis. Houston remembered the pair from last spring when they'd taken nine dollars from him in an all-night card game. With Travis's reputation for bedding whatever moved, it was no surprise that Mosely would have found some amusement here in Gonzales. Now he was paying the piper.