Mantarakis fired, one of the first who did. Several Mexicans went down. He didn’t think they were all hit; they were taking cover, too. A bullet kicked dust into his face. He shivered despite the heat. A miss was as good as a mile, or so they said, but what did they really know, whoever they were?
Fire was coming at the Americans from the front and from both flanks. That wasn’t good. That was how you got shot to pieces. That was also probably why, after most of two years of war, the Americans hadn’t got to Santa Rosalia yet.
“Let’s get moving,” Mantarakis shouted to his squad. “We stay here, they’re going to chop us to bits.” Not without a pang of regret, he quit the unsatisfactory foxhole he’d dug and headed off to the right to see if he couldn’t do something about the flanking fire coming from that direction. His men followed him. He’d known of officers who found out too late they were moving all by themselves. Most of them hadn’t come back from moves like that.
Rifle bullets buzzed past him, clipped branches from the chaparral through which he ran, and made dust spurt up again and again. He noted all that only peripherally. What he did note, with glad relief, was that the Mexicans hadn’t brought any machine guns forward with them. Maybe machine guns were like proper artillery: too expensive for them to afford. He fervently hoped so.
He dove behind a sun-wizened bush, snapped off a couple of rounds to make the enemy keep their heads down, and then got moving again. He came cautiously around a yellow boulder that might have been there since the beginning of time-and almost ran into a Mexican soldier doing the same thing.
They stared at each other. The Mexican had two cartridge bandoliers crisscrossed over his chest, which made him look like a bandit. His bristly mustache and the black stubble on his chin only added to the impression.
Paul saw the Mexican very distinctly, as if a sculptor had carved him and the entire scene behind him into a sharp-edged simulation of reality. The man seemed to raise his rifle with dreamlike slowness, though Paul’s swung to bear on him no more swiftly.
They both fired at essentially the same instant. Time speeded up then. The Mexican let out a startled grunt and reeled away, blood coming from a small hole in the front of his uniform and a huge gaping exit wound about where his left kidney was-or had been.
With that hole in him, he was surely a dead man. He didn’t know it yet, though. He still held his rifle, and tried to aim it at Paul. Mantarakis discovered his left leg didn’t want to hold him. I can’t have been shot, he thought-I don’t feel anything. Falling heavily onto his side kept him from getting shot again, for the Mexican’s bullet cracked through the place where he’d been.
Then he fired once more, and the enemy soldier’s head exploded in red ruin. Paul tried to get up and discovered he couldn’t. He looked down at himself. Red was soaking through the dust on the inside of his trouser leg. Seeing his own blood flooding out of him made him understand he really had been hit. It also made the wound start to hurt. He clamped his teeth together hard against a scream.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody shouted, off to one side of him. He did an awkward, three-limbed crawl back behind the shelter of that boulder. Then he detached his bayonet and cut the trouser leg with it before fumbling for the wound dressing in a pouch on his belt.
His hands didn’t want to do what he told them. He’d barely managed to shove the bandage against the hole in his leg when a couple of U.S. soldiers grabbed him. “Got to get you out of here, Sarge,” one of them said.
“Got to get us all the hell out of here,” the other added. “Damn Mexicans got us pinned down good.”
“We’ll lick ’em,” Paul said vaguely. His voice sounded very far away, as if he were listening to himself along a tunnel. He wasn’t hot any more, either. A long time ago, hadn’t they bled people who had fevers? He tried to laugh, though no sound came out. Sure as sure, he wouldn’t have any fever now.
One of the men supporting him grunted just as the Mexican had and crumpled to the ground. A few paces farther on, the other soldier said, “Can you help any, Sarge? We’d move faster if you could do something with your good leg.” Getting no reply, he spoke again, louder: “Sarge?”
He stooped, letting his burden down behind another of the strangely shaped rocks that dotted the valley. When he got up again, he ran on alone.
Anne Colleton felt trapped. Living as the only white person at what had been-and what she was fiercely determined would again be-Marshlands plantation with the remnants of her field hands was only part of the problem, though she made a point of carrying a small revolver in her handbag and preferred not to go far from the Tredegar rifle when she could help it. You couldn’t tell any more, not these days.
That was part of the problem. The Red uprising had shattered patterns of obedience two hundred years old. The field hands still did as she told them. The fields were beginning to look as if she might have some kind of crop this year, no matter how late it had been started. But she couldn’t use the Negroes as she had before. She’d taken their compliance for granted. No more. Now they worked in exchange for her keeping the Confederate authorities from troubling them for whatever they might have done during the rebellion. It was far more nearly a bargain between equals than the previous arrangement had been.
But only part of her feeling of isolation was spiritual. The rest was physical, and perfectly real. She’d made trips into St. Matthews and into Columbia, trying to get the powers that be to repair the telephone and telegraph lines that connected her to the wider world. She’d had promises that they would be up two weeks after her return to the plantation. She’d had a lot more promises since. What she didn’t have were telephone and telegraph lines.
“God damn those lying bastards to hell,” she snarled, staring out along the path, out toward the road, out toward the whole wide world where anything at all might be happening-but if it was happening, how could she find out about it? She’d prided herself on her modernity, but the life she was living had more to do with the eighteenth century than the twentieth.
Beside her, Julia stirred. “Don’ fret yourself none, Miss Anne,” she said. Her hands rested on the broad shelf of her belly. Before long, she would have that baby. If she knew who the father was, she hadn’t said so.
Anne ground her teeth. Julia would have been ideally suited to the eighteenth century, or to the fourteenth century, for that matter. She let things happen to her. When they did, she cast around for the easiest way to set them right and chose that.
“Better to be actor than acted upon,” Anne said, more to herself than to her serving woman. She’d always believed that, though she’d had scant experience of being acted upon till the Red revolution cast her into the hands of the military. Having gained the experience, she was convinced she’d been right to loathe it.
She looked over toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. The cottage in which she was living now had belonged to Cassius the hunter. From what she’d heard, he’d had a high place in the Negroes’Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d been a Red right under her nose, and she’d never suspected. That ate at her, too. She hated being wrong.
Even more galling was having been wrong about Scipio, who was also supposed to have been a revolutionary leader. I gave him everything, she thought: education, fine clothes, the same food I ate-and this is the thanks he gave me in return? He’d vanished when the revolt collapsed. Maybe he was dead. If he wasn’t, and she found him, she swore she’d make him wish he were.