Propped up against the headboard, she listened to the sounds coming through the drapes. On the street, she could hear the tramp of boots punctuated by shouted orders. The marching men would come and go with long silences between. It was after curfew, and there was no movement outside. The stillness outside was near complete. It was hard to believe that Paris lay unseen all about her. It was more like a graveyard.
In the stretches of quiet, the faint echoes of a rumbling cadence reached her ears. She thought at first it was thunder, but it was too constant, too insistent. It was cannon fire. Was it the guns of the city’s defensive forts at Saint-Denis and Vincennes or the answering batteries of the invading army? Or was it both? The booming reached her as a leitmotif through the glass, resonant enough to cause unease, not close enough to cause alarm.
She decided instead to concentrate on the contented grunt of her son suckling at her breast. Caroline clung to this moment. This was all that mattered, all that was real to her. The rest was a surreal dream or half-recalled movie.
Stephen sated and burped, she found matches and lit an oil lamp. She held the baby to her shoulder and carried the oil lamp into the next room and lit some candles there. In the guttering glow, she found piles of clothing for her and the baby, along with more groceries and an open wicker basket large enough for the baby to sleep in. There was also a bundle of folded rags she could use for diapers.
All of the clothing was meant for her and the baby. There was nothing here for Samuel. She looked for a note of any kind but found none. Still, Caroline knew he had left them alone again, and she had no idea for how long.
She folded a blanket to make a cushion in the basket and, after negotiating a change of diapers, laid Stephen inside and covered him with a second blanket to keep out the chill. She then got a fire going in the iron stove and fed it from a fresh pile of split wood set on the hearth. Samuel had thought of everything.
Soon the little room was comfortably warm, the baby snug in his new bed and the food that needed to be kept cold set on the sill against the icy-rimed pane of the window.
Those simple chores completed, Caroline sat at the table and allowed herself the luxury of a good long cry.
28
Run and Gun
“I almost feel bad for them,” Jimbo said, his eye near the cup on his scope.
“I don’t,” Bat said, lying prone by his side.
They were both sighting on the bowmen trotting over the crest of a stony hill. Long shadows stretched before the running men as the sun sank low in the sky behind. The shadows reached like fingers for a pool of darkness spreading over the land below. The road moved through more open country here. The walls of the ravine gave way to broken hills created by massive flooding an epoch before.
Perhaps the deluge of the Torah, Bat thought, the first of God’s promises made good. The bowmen followed doggedly, never seeming to need rest even as the day wore on to darkness.
The team could easily stay ahead of them on horseback. But the archers would eventually catch up and, following a few hours behind them, the infantry column. The slow-motion chase was distracting from the search for the wayward slave caravan. The solution was clear to all, the Pima and the Israeli would provide a rearguard to slow pursuit and even halt it entirely. If these guys, as good as they were, took enough punishment they’d give up the game.
“Come on. You got to show respect. These guys are hard-chargers. Covering twenty miles or more double-time,” Jimbo said and moved his view to follow one archer hopping down the slope from one shelf of rock to another.
“They’re Syrians. They’re the oldest enemy of my people,” Bat said.
“I thought that was the Philistines.”
“Oldest living enemy. We killed all the Philistines.” She let out a long sigh and the rifle kicked back into her shoulder. On the hillside four football fields away, a man was tumbling lifelessly down the slope leaving a plume of rising dust behind him.
A second dropped as Jimbo fired.
“So this is like what? Retro payback?”
“Like if you got to go back and be at the Little Big Horn.”
“Not sure which side I’d take on that one.” Jimbo narrowed his eyes.
“They’re still coming,” Bat hissed as she sighted on another. There were more than twenty in view.
“Let’s stop subtracting and start dividing,” Jimbo said. “Watch what I do.”
Bathsheba Jaffe glassed the hill and heard the crack of the Ranger’s rifle. A bowman fell to the ground near the base of the hill. He was clutching a leg. Bat could see that his mouth was open and howling in pantomime. Two archers stopped their descent to come to his aid and lift him between them.
Bat found her own target and put a round through the hip of one of the running men. She watched as he sprawled face first and began clawing at the ground, face pinched in agony. Again distance kept them from hearing the agonized screams. Through the scope, she saw three archers carrying the man into the shadows at the base of the hill.
Jimbo fired again and took a man outlined against the ruddy sky at the crest of the ridge. A headshot.
The man collapsed, lifeless. Those closest
