65
ALAMANCE
The Governor then sent Captain Malcolm, one of his Aides-de-Camp, and the Sherif of Orange, with his Letter, requiring the Rebels, to lay down their Arms, Surrender up their outlawed Ringleaders &c. About half past ten Capt. Malcolm and the Sherif returned with the Information that the Sherif had read the Letter four several Times, to different Divisions of the Revels, who rejected the Terms offered, with disdain, said they wanted no time to consider of them, & with Rebellious Clamours called out for
Battle.
—“A Journal of the Expedition against the Insurgents,” Wm. Tryon
“YE’LL WATCH FOR MACKENZIE.” Jamie touched Geordie Chisholm’s shoulder, and Geordie turned his head, acknowledging the message with a slight nod.
All of them knew. They were good lads, they’d be careful. They’d find him, surely, coming back toward them.
He told himself so for the dozenth time, but the reassurance rang as hollow this time as it had before. Christ, what had happened to the man?
He moved up into the lead, shoving aside the brush with as much violence as though it were a personal enemy. If they were watching out, they’d see MacKenzie in time, not shoot him by mistake. Or so he told himself, knowing perfectly well that in the midst of enemies and the heat of battle, one fired at whatever moved, and there was seldom time to check the features of a man who came at you out of the smoke.
Not that it would make so much difference who did for MacKenzie, if anyone did. Brianna and Claire would hold him responsible for the man’s life, and rightly so.
Then, to his relief, there was no more time to think. They broke out into open ground and the men spread out and ran, bending low, zigzagging through the grass in threes and fours as he had taught them, one seasoned soldier to each group. Somewhere behind them, the first boom of cannon came like thunder from a sunny sky.
He spotted the first of the Regulators then, a group of men running, as they were, coming from the right across the open ground. They hadn’t seen his men yet.
Before they could, he bellowed “Casteal an DUIN!” and charged them, musket raised overhead in signal to the men behind him. Roars and shrieks split the air, and the Regulators, startled and taken unawares, stumbled to an untidy halt, fumbling their weapons and interfering with each other.
“Thugham! Thugham!” To me, to me! Close enough, it was close enough. He dropped to one knee, crouched over the musket, brought it to bear, and fired just over the heads of the milling men.
Behind him, he heard the grunt of his men falling into firing order, the clink of flint and then the deafening noise of the volley.
One or two of the Regulators crouched, returning fire. The rest broke and ran for cover, toward a small rise of grassy ground.
“A draigha! Left! Nach links! Cut them off!” He heard himself bellowing, but did it without thought, already running himself.
The small group of Regulators split, a few making off toward the creek, the rest bunching like sheep, galloping for the shelter of the rise.
They made it, disappearing around the curve of the hill, and Jamie called his troops back, with a piercing whistle that would carry over the rising thunder of the guns. He could hear firing now, a rattle of muskets, away to their left. He sheared off in that direction, trusting that they would follow.
A mistake; the land here was marshy, full of boggy holes and clinging mud. He shouted and waved again, back toward the higher ground. Fall back there, let the enemy come to them across the bog, if they would.
The high ground was heavy with brush, but dry, at least. He spread his fingers wide and waved, gesturing the men to spread out, take cover.
The blood was pumping through his veins, and his skin prickled and tingled with it. A puff of gray-white smoke drifted through the nearby trees, acrid with the scent of black powder. The boom of artillery was regular now, as the gun-crews fell into their rhythm, thumping like a huge, slow heart in the distance.
He made his way slowly toward the west, keeping an eye out. The brush here was mostly sumac and redbud, with waist-high tangles of bramble and clumps of pine that rose above his head. Visibility was poor, but he would hear anyone coming, long before he saw them—or they saw him.
None of his own men were in sight. He took cover in a stand of dogwood and gave a sharp call, like a bobwhite quail. Similar calls of “bob-WHITE!” came from behind him, none in front. Good, they knew roughly where one another were. Cautiously, he went forward, pressing through the brush. It was cooler here, with the shade of the trees, but the air was thick and sweat ran down his neck and back.
He heard the thump of feet and pressed back into the branches of a pinetree, letting the dark-needled fans swing over him, his musket raised to sight on an opening in the bushes. Whoever it was was coming fast. A crack of snapping twigs underfoot and the sound of labored breath, and a young man shoved through the shrubbery, panting. He had no gun, but a skinning-knife glinted in his hand.
The lad was familiar, the first glance gave him that, and Jamie’s memory put a name to the young man’s face before his finger had relaxed upon the trigger.
“Hugh!” he called, low-voiced but sharp. “Hugh Fowles!”
The young man let out a startled yelp, and swung round staring. He saw Jamie and his gun through the screen of needles, and froze like a rabbit.
Then a surge of panicked determination rose in his face, and he launched himself toward Jamie, screaming. Startled, Jamie barely got his musket up in time to catch the knife-blade on its barrel. He forced the knife up and back; it sheared down the barrel with a screech of metal, glancing off Jamie’s knuckles. Young Hugh whipped back his arm for a stab, and he kicked the boy briskly in the knee, stepping back out of the way as the lad lost his balance and lurched to one side, knife swinging wildly.
Jamie kicked him again, and he fell down, the knife embedding itself in the ground.
“Will ye stop that?” Jamie said, rather crossly. “For Christ’s sake, lad, do ye not know me?”
He couldn’t tell whether Fowles knew him or not—nor even whether the boy had heard him. Face white and eyes staring, Fowles was thrashing in a panic, stumbling and gasping as he tried to get up, trying at the same time to wrench his knife free.
“Will you—” Jamie began, and then jerked back as Fowles abandoned the knife and threw himself forward with a grunt of effort.
The boy’s weight knocked Jamie backward, and hands scrabbled at him, trying for a grip on his throat. He dropped the musket, turned a shoulder into Fowles’s grip, and put a stop to this nonsense with a quick, brutal punch to the lad’s midsection.
Hugh Fowles collapsed and lay curled into a ball on the ground, twitching like a wounded centipede, and making the shocked breathless faces of a man whose breakfast has just been knocked up into his lungs.
Jamie put his right hand to his mouth, sucking blood from his grazed knuckles. The boy’s knife had skinned all four, and the punch hadn’t helped; they burned like fire, and the blood had the taste of hot silver in his mouth.
More feet, coming fast. He had barely time to seize his musket before the bushes burst open once more, this time to reveal Fowles’s father-in-law, Joe Hobson, his own musket held at the ready.
“Stop right there.” Jamie crouched behind his gun, training the muzzle on Hobson’s chest. Hobson halted as though a puppet-master had jerked his strings.
“What have ye done to him?” Hobson’s eyes flicked from Jamie to his son-in-law and back.
“Nothing permanent. Put your gun down, aye?”
Hobson didn’t move. He was grimed with filth and sprouting a beard, but the eyes were live and watchful in his face.
“I mean ye nay harm. Set it down!”
“We’ll not be taken,” Hobson said. His finger rested on the trigger of his gun, but there was a dubious note in his voice.
“Ye already are, fool. Dinna fash yourself, nay harm will come to you or the lad. You’re a deal safer in gaol than out here, man!”
A whistling crash punctuated his statement, as something flew through the trees a few feet overhead, shearing branches as it went. Chain shot, Jamie thought automatically, even as he ducked in reflex, bowels clenched.
Hobson jerked in terror, swinging the barrel of his musket toward Jamie. He jerked again, and his eyes went wide with surprise, as a red stain flowered slowly on his breast. He looked down at it in puzzlement, the muzzle of his gun drooping like a wilted stem. Then he dropped the gun, sat down quite suddenly, leaned back against a fallen tree, and died.
Jamie whirled on his heel, still squatting, and saw Geordie Chisholm behind him, face half-black with the smoke of his shot, looking at Hobson’s body as though wondering just how that had happened.
The boom of artillery came again, and another missile crashed through the branches and landed nearby with a thud Jamie felt through the soles of his boots. He flung himself flat on his belly and writhed toward Hugh Fowles, who had got himself up on hands and knees now, retching.
He grabbed Fowles’s arm, disregarding the pool of vomit, and jerked, hard.
“Come on!” He scrambled up, seizing Fowles by waist and shoulder, and dragged him toward the shelter of the copse behind them. “Geordie! Geordie, help me!”
Chisholm was there. Between them, they got Fowles onto his feet and half-dragged, half-carried him, running and stumbling as they went.
The air was filled with the pungent scent of tree-sap, oozing from the severed branches, and he thought fleetingly of Claire’s garden, turned earth, churned earth beneath his boots, the fresh-turned earth of furrows and graves, and Hobson sitting in the sun by the log, the look of surprise not yet gone from his eyes.
Fowles stank of vomit and shit. He hoped it was Fowles.
He thought he would vomit himself from sheer nerves, but bit his tongue, tasting blood again, and clenched the muscles of his belly, willing his wame to go back down.
Someone rose from the shrubbery to his left. He held the gun in his left hand, raised it by reflex, fired one-handed. He stumbled through his own smoke, seeing whoever he had fired at turn and run, smashing heedless through the trees.
Fowles had his feet back under him now, and Jamie let go his arm, leaving Geordie to it. He fell to one knee, groping for powder and shot, ripped the cartridge with his teeth and tasted gunpowder tinged with blood, poured and rammed home, filled his priming pan, checked his flint—all the while noticing with a sense of bemusement that his hands were not shaking in the least, but went about their business with a deft calm, as though they knew just what to do.
He raised the barrel and bared his teeth, only half-conscious of doing it. There were men coming, three, and he raised the gun to bear on the first. With a last shred of conscious thought, he jerked it higher and fired above their heads, the musket jolting in his hands. They stopped, and he dropped the gun, ripped the dirk from his belt, and charged them, screaming.
The words seared his throat, raw from the smoke.
“Run!”
As though from a distance, he watched himself, thinking that it was just so that Hugh Fowles had done, and he had thought it foolish then.
“Run!”
The men scattered like fleeing quail. As a wolf might do, he turned at once after the slowest, bounding over the broken ground, a ferocious joy flooding his legs, blooming in his belly. He could run forever, the wind cold on his skin and shrill in his ears, the spring of the earth beneath him lifting his feet so he flew over grass and rock.
The man he pursued heard him coming, glanced back over his shoulder, and with a shriek of terror, ran full-tilt into a tree. He threw himself upon his prey, landing on the man’s back and feeling the springy crack of ribs beneath his knee. He gripped a handful of hair, slick and hot with greasy sweat, and jerked back the man’s head. He barely stopped himself cutting the naked throat that lay before him, stretched and defenseless. He could feel the shock of the blade on flesh, the hotness of the spurting blood, and wanted it.
He gulped air, panting.
Very slowly, he drew the knife away from the leaping pulse. The movement left him trembling with need, as though he had been dragged from his woman’s body on the verge of spilling seed.
“You are my prisoner,” he said.
The man stared up at him, uncomprehending. The man was weeping, tears making tracks through the dirt on his face, and trying to speak, sobbing, but unable to draw enough air to make words with his head wrenched back. Vaguely, it occurred to Jamie that he had spoken in Gaelic; the man did not understand.
Slowly, he loosened his grip, made himself release the man’s head. He groped for the English words, buried somewhere under the bloodlust that pulsed through his brain.
“You are . . . my . . . prisoner,” he managed at last, panting for air between words.
“Yes! Yes! Anything, don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!” The man huddled under him, sobbing, hands clasped to the back of his neck and shoulders hunched around his ears, as though he feared Jamie would seize his neck in his teeth and snap his spine.
At the thought, he felt a dim desire to do so, but the thrum of his blood was even now dying down. He could hear again, as his heartbeat faded in his ears. The wind no longer sang to him, but made its own way, heedless and alone, through the leaves above. There was a popping of distant gunshots, but the boom of the artillery had ceased.
Sweat dripped from chin and eyebrows, and his shirt was sodden with it, reeking.
He slid slowly off his prisoner, and knelt beside the prone body. The muscles of his thighs trembled and burned from the effort of the chase. He felt a sudden inexpressible tenderness for the man, and reached to touch him, but the feeling was succeeded by a sense of horror, quite as sudden, and as suddenly gone. He closed his eyes and swallowed, feeling sick, the place where he had bitten his tongue throbbing.
The energy the earth had lent him was draining from his body now, flowing out of his legs, going back to the earth. He reached out and patted the prisoner’s shoulder, awkwardly, then struggled to his feet against the dead weight of his own exhaustion.
“Get up,” he said. His hands were shaking; it took three tries to sheathe his dirk.
“Ciamar a tha thu, Mac Dubh?” Ronnie Sinclair was at his side, asking if he was all right. He nodded, and stood back as Sinclair pulled the man to his feet and made him turn his coat. The others were coming, in ones and twos: Geordie, the Lindsays, Gallegher, catching up and clustering round him like iron filings drawn to a bit of magnet steel.
The others had bagged prisoners, too; six in all, looking sullen, frightened, or simply exhausted, their coats turned lining-out to show their status. Fowles was among them, white and wretched.
His mind had cleared now, though his body felt limp and heavy. Henry Gallegher had a bloody graze across his forehead; one of the men from Brownsville—Lionel, was it?—carried one arm at an awkward angle, obviously broken. Bar that, no one seemed to be injured; that was good.
“Ask if they have seen MacKenzie,” he said to Kenny Lindsay in Gaelic, with a small gesture toward the prisoners.
The gunshots had mostly ceased. There was only a random firing now, and a flock of doves passed overhead in a racket of wings, belatedly alarmed.
None had seen Roger MacKenzie, to know him. Jamie nodded, hearing, and wiped the last of the sweat from his face with his sleeve.
“Either he has come back safe, or he has not. But whatever’s done is done now. Ye’ve done brawly, lads—let’s go.”