CHAPTER 29

Somehow, the same grizzled old Ocelomeh warrior who found the vantage point where Lieutenant Burton watched the Dom buildup at Campeche was not only still alive but had managed to return from another dangerous scout up the road toward Uxmal. He found Coryon, Ixtla, and Espinoza, along with their six surviving dragoons, thirty-three lancers, and two of Ixtla’s six remaining mounted Ocelomeh (the others keeping watch behind), concealed in the sultry woods near the washboard glade, where the Americans made their last camp on their way to Uxmal.

“They still don’t know we’re behind them?” Coryon asked when the man dropped from his horse and squatted in the leafy needles in front of him. He was referring to the Dominion lancers between them and Hayne’s detachment. “Those devils screening the main Dom army certainly know we’re here,” he added grimly. There’d been a few vicious scrapes on both sides of the dead city of Nautla, first when Coryon’s small force was caught from behind, and again when it was driven away from watching what the enemy did when they arrived there in force.

Ixtla translated the question and reply. “So intent on pursuing Sergeant Hayne, they seem to have no notion of us. They don’t even watch behind them,” Ixtla added significantly. “It appears our efforts to prevent communication have been successful.” They’d caught and killed eight couriers. “I would expect them to start, however,” he continued sourly. “Even if only because they’ve had no contact with the army behind them. They’ll leave watchers to report its approach.”

Espinoza grimaced. “If we don’t smash through the Doms ahead of us, we’ll be squeezed to death or forced aside into the woods, unable to report what we saw to our friends.”

“Forty-odd of us against two hundred?” Coryon asked with a small, grim smile.

“He says closer to three hundred,” Ixtla said with a glance at the scout.

Espinoza tilted his head at the almost disinterested-looking man, now gnawing a strip of jerky. “Some of us should live to carry word.”

Coryon reluctantly nodded. They’d lingered near Nautla long enough to watch the enemy begin to deploy as if for an attack and start practicing with their artillery against the city’s ruins. By Lewis Cayce’s standards, even those of the foot and coastal artillerymen he’d brought to this world, Dom gunnery was slow and inaccurate, their weapons of an older, heavy-for-caliber style, mounted on cumbersome, solid-wheel, split-trail carriages. But even Coryon could tell their field artillery was much more modern than the crude cannons they’d salvaged from the galleon. They also fired metal roundshot instead of stone. He didn’t know if it was iron or copper, but that didn’t matter, since their monstrous siege guns in particular had utterly shattered portions of the standing ruins of Nautla. They’d make equally short work of the walls around Uxmal from a distance even Lewis’s best guns couldn’t reply. “Some of us have to get through,” Coryon finally agreed aloud. “I don’t know Cayce well enough to say for sure, but he doesn’t strike me as the static defense sort. Why work so hard to make flying artillery out of foot artillery? I doubt he means to meet the Doms behind the walls of the city. But what if he has no choice? What if . . . others”—he glanced fleetingly at Ixtla—“feel so secure behind their walls they won’t let him go beyond them? He has to be told that can’t work.”

Coryon caught the expectant expressions on the tired faces gathered around. “Mount up,” he said, then looked at the old Ocelomeh. “Lead us back to the enemy, if you please.”