Queen of Swords
Page 64

Through the telescope, Hannah watched the British camp seethe and roil like an anthill kicked in by a bad-tempered boy. There was a mad rushing, frantic action; fires were doused, and then she could catch only glimpses of what was happening when powder flashed from muzzles and shell after shell crashed into the camp. Even from so far away she could smell the black powder smoke. And added to all this, a misting rain and a fog rising off the river.
And then the shelling stopped as suddenly as it had started. Another signal rocket, and following it, the bugles called out to the troops waiting in the dark, from the ciprière to the levee.
“Here now,” said Dr. Rousseau. “Here it starts.” He was as calm as an elder telling a story of a battle fought generations before. Hannah was not surprised. She thought of her father, who might be here tomorrow or the day after, of her uncle, who had come to take them home, but who would first fling themselves into this cauldron in the blind faith that they could climb out again whole. She thought of Ben Savard, who had taken up arms for the O’seronni without hesitation.
Men liked battle, that was the truth of it. And another truth: She could do no less than offer her help, once they had purged themselves of the need to draw blood.
The doctor had turned again, this time toward the fields, where sputterings of light and sound, gunfire and wild shouting, made it clear that the infantry had engaged the British. And then the Carolina began again with her bombardment of the British camp.
He said, “We had best get out of the open.”
When Hannah thought of battle, it was the noise she remembered most clearly, the pounding that made the eardrums ache and the whole world tremble. And still it took her by surprise. The relentless battering of sound that shook the ground and the walls and made it impossible to speak. The Carolina gave no quarter. As long as she had munitions, she would give none.
In the makeshift field hospital, they waited in the dark for their work to begin, reluctant to waste lantern or candlelight until it was most needed. Now and then Père Tomaso would go out and speak a few words to Mose, or someone else out of Hannah’s line of sight. He would come in again, and in the next pause in the shelling he would give them what news he had heard: The British three-pounders were not of a caliber to reach the Carolina, moored as she was on the far side of the river. They seemed not to have any bigger guns, which was good luck that could not last; no doubt the artillery was on its way, and unless the supply lines could be cut, the one-sided nature of the battle would not last long.
“The infantry?” Hannah asked.
“The fog is worse, and they are hampered for it.”
“Wounded?”
“A handful. At the other field hospital.”
Hannah could make out shouts now and then, in the pauses between shells, a shout for ammunition, a muffled scream. A child wailed nearby, and was hushed. Horses thundered by on the Levee Road from the city and then back again.
She sat with her back to the wall and her forehead pressed to her knees, and reached for calm. Memories of other battles rose and fell or were pushed away. She felt Strikes-the-Sky close by, the shape and scent of him. He rarely spoke to her anymore and she found it harder, now, to know what he was thinking. How he felt about her being here, looking after men who fought for Jackson and the O’seronni. If he would understand, if he would forgive her.
If he would disapprove of Ben Savard as he had disapproved of Kit Wyndham.
She remembered the new wound on Ben’s side, neatly stitched by some woman who lived in the Disputed Territories, a woman he called a friend.
He hadn’t come to her bed last night, and she had slept badly, and now he was out in the night and the fog, killing men who had stepped onto American land in the hope of claiming it for themselves. Something he would never be able to do, even if he lived through this battle, and the next one, and the one after that. Ben Savard might be among the dead already. He might die before her father and uncle arrived, an idea that struck her like a fist. He could die fighting this white man’s war, and then all the things she wanted to ask him, all the things unsettled between them, would stay that way forever.
She had asked him one question, in the moment before he went off with Juzan and the Choctaw.
“Why are you fighting this war, really?”
Maybe he knew her better than she believed, because he seemed to have been waiting for the question. He said, “Because when the dust settles, this place will be American. In another fifty or a hundred years the whole damn continent will be American. There won’t be anywhere to hide.”
Hannah said, “So your plan is to become your enemy.”
“Do you see any alternative?”
“No,” Hannah had said. “None at all.”
The air heavy and wet, cold hanging gauzy white in the night sky. The stink of gunpowder and blood.
Dr. Rousseau stood at the open door, his mouth drawn down at the corners while he watched two Choctaw carry in the wounded man and put him on the scrubbed table. Père Tomaso was speaking to them in their own language, asking questions and getting short answers in response. Then they slipped away, back into the night.
“This one is no stranger to battle,” Dr. Rousseau said.
“His name is Nittakechi, he’s the son of Pushmataha. A chief closely allied to Jackson.” Père Tomaso said the name as if he believed they must be familiar with it.
“We’ll do what we can for him,” said Hannah. “No matter who he is allied to.”