THIRTEEN

Jaime was absolutely right: the army training camp they at last reached after three weeks of riding chained in the rattling wagon was nine kinds of sheer hell. The chains he had never managed to escape were removed on arrival, but the camp itself was heavily guarded; chances of escape from its confines were slim, especially for two men. Although he kept his eyes open, the opportunity never came. The two of them managed to stay together, finally being recognized as official partners, and given a two-man tent to share in the field. Diego grabbed it without a word and attached it to his own pack, saving his friend those few pounds.

There was one saving grace in this madness, Diego realized after a time. The officers running the camp weren't actively trying to kill them. The goal was to somehow turn the men who came through it into soldiers, and marched off to be integrated into the Army of New Spain – even if only as cannon fodder. Still, they had to be able to march, perform standard field maneuvers, understand and react correctly to all of the usual orders, and load and fire the rifles they were issued on the second day as a unit.

And to learn all that, they had to practice.

Endlessly.

Diego knew intellectually that part of the process was tearing new men down psychologically in order to build them back up into a single mindless unit that would work and fight together. Knowing that and living through it are two different things, however. He took the first blow within five minutes of arrival, as all the men who had arrived that day – convicts, conscripts, and volunteers alike – were lined up to begin the process.

Diego was doing his best to follow Jaime's advice, standing straight, staring blindly ahead, as the drill sergeant worked down the line, one by one, sizing them up. He stopped before Diego and asked his name.

"De la Vega, Sir!" Diego replied crisply. The man hadn't wanted to hear anyone else's first name.

"De la Vega!" the sergeant mocked. "No it isn't! That's a name for a hidalgo, a caballero. You are nothing but a convicted criminal, a horse thief! Your name is simply Vega! Got that?"

"Yes, sir!" Inside, he was seething, but he didn't let it show.

"What's your name, convict?"

"Vega, sir!"

"Again!"

"Vega, sir!"

"Louder!"

"Vega, sir!" Diego shouted.

Finally the sergeant was satisfied, and stepped on to deal with Jaime. He knew him at once for a former soldier, and grilled him a bit about it, ending it on a sneering promise that things would be very different for him this time.

They undoubtedly were. Jaime was twenty years older and more than fifty pounds heavier than he had been the first time he was a recruit. Diego could tell Jaime was using everything he had to keep up on the long forced marches and other physical drills – but he did manage to keep up, not showing his exhaustion until they were allowed to collapse in their tent each night. Diego did whatever small things he could for Jaime then, to let him rest. Just as he'd predicted, Jaime was several pounds lighter by the end of their training camp – but he was also stronger, and less exhausted each night. He would survive.

They were given uniforms the first day; two pairs of pants and one overcoat of lightweight scratchy wool in dark blue, and two button-up shirts of lighter blue cotton cotton to wear underneath. Diego caught Jaime looking sourly at the pants and asked him why. "You see that wide red stripe along the outer seam? That marks us as convicts, mi amigo. Now everyone will know what we are, instantly." Diego hadn't noticed before, but when he looked around with new eyes, he could see the various markers of rank and status. Most of the new "recruits" wore the plain blue pants of volunteers or the narrow white stripes of conscripts. Those two groups didn't mix together much, but all of them stayed away from the convicts like themselves.

Diego's biggest struggle was just as Jaime had predicted: trying not to think. He finally remembered his philosophy professor at the university, Doctor Valentino. Diego had only taken a single year of philosophy, but after that, they had remained friends, and shared a number of interesting conversations. El Viejo, as he was also known for his very advanced years, had traveled the world, learning philosophy in many different parts of it. He had tried to teach Diego some of the Chinese Buddhist practices he had learned – he'd called it meditation. Diego bent all his thought to remembering them, and after a while it fell into place. He taught himself to divide his mind, one small part of it in the present to listen for commands and obey them, but most of his concentration building one of three memories, exact in every detail. The first was from childhood: lying in a meadow, the sun warming him pleasantly, eyes closed, the scents of earth and growing things and wildflowers filling his nostrils, listening to the bees buzzing and the birdsong. The second was his favorite place in the world: the vast old library at his university in Salamanca. He saw the endless stacks of exciting rare books, smelled the dusty leather bindings, felt their embossed covers under his fingertips, enticing him to open them and learn the exotic knowledge contained within, watched the sunlight slanting down upon the tables. And the third was back in the cantina, holding his precious Victoria tightly in his arms, her forehead tucked into the curve of his neck, his cheek caressing her hair. He didn't try to add any movement or words to any of the pictures, learning early that would lead to one of two disasters: either he would miss a command and blow it in the here and now, or he would be catapulted out of the memory and into his tired, aching body. But by the end of camp, he could finish a ten-mile forced march automatically, his mind very far away for every step.

In a very real way, it saved his sanity.

He couldn't dissociate like that while doing loading and shooting drills, or close maneuvers, but if he concentrated on each action alone, blocking out the bigger picture, he got through them as well. What he never noticed was that many of the other recruits, especially the other convicts, had begun to watch him and follow his lead, seeing – even if he didn't – that his methods of mute, dogged obedience at least earned him less of the sergeants' caustic, screaming remarks and petty vengeances.

At last, their group were deemed sufficiently trained to meet the minimum standards of cannon fodder, and about sixty of them were marched off together, heading for the main army encampment some fifty-odd miles northeast, in the foothills of the thousand-mile-long Sierra Madre Oriental. There, they were divided into squads of six to ten, and integrated into several different active companies as replacements. Vega and Mendoza, still partnered, ended up in the 101st Veracruz Rifles, under the command of Colonel Ramon Gallegos.

And that's where they ran headlong into Corporal Pedrona.

Pedrona was a short, ugly little man with crooked teeth, barely over five feet tall, with the hypersensitive, overcompensating attitude to match. He took an instant dislike to the much-taller-than-average Diego; a reaction only compounded by Diego's status as a hidalgo, which he couldn't hide no matter how he tried. It showed in his posture, his speech – what little he said, anyway; his uncalloused hands, still softer than any peasant's after two years of rough work he'd been doing. Pedrona rode "Private Vega" from morning to night, trying to egg him into lashing out so he could be "properly" punished and taken down a few pegs. Diego's jaw clenched tighter and tighter, but he kept his temper with the Corporal – just.

He only lost it once the first few weeks, one evening when he and Jaime were walking back to their tent after dinner – the company was still in camp to rest and train the new men before heading out to the field. Rounding the corner of one of the many log buildings, the pair were suddenly confronted in the shadows by two of the old-timers, recruits from the old country, who made conscripts' – and especially convicts' – lives miserable. Each of them was wielding their belt knife, honed to wicked sharpness, pointing them steadily towards their newest victims.

"Hand over that watch, Vega," the one on the left snarled. "You don't need one out here." His buddy was making similar noises towards Jaime.

"Oh, leave us alone," Jaime sounded more cross and tired than anything.

"Shut up, old man," the buddy snapped. "You're useless."

Unfortunately for them, Diego had no intention of ever losing his grandfather's watch – given to him by Don Alejandro the day he'd left for University. Without even thinking about it, his left hand darted out and grabbed Snarly's wrist, pushing it aside to make room for his right fist which connected with Snarly's jaw a moment later. Snarly staggered back two paces and plowed into the wall beside him, knocking his head. Diego stepped up, still holding onto the knife wrist, and delivered another pair of punches to accentuate his disagreement. By then the knife had dropped into the dirt. Diego stepped back, added his right hand to the wrist hold, and turned, pulling Snarly around and then throwing him to the ground several feet away.

"No," he said calmly.

Snarly gaped up at the man towering over him and did the smart thing for once. He scrambled to his feet and ran, leaving both his knife and his buddy behind.

Diego turned then to see how many pieces Jaime was in – but it was just one. Jaime had Snarly's buddy up against the same log wall, grinding his left forearm into the man's windpipe, and holding the man's own knife an inch from his eyes. "I may be old, and out of shape," Jaime growled, "but I will not be taken down by a useless punk like you. Leave... Us... Alone... Got it?"

Unable to breathe just then, the punk he was holding just nodded, his eyes bugging out. Jaime waited one more breath, then abruptly dropped his hands and stepped back, allowing the man to stagger away after his buddy.

"Remind me not to piss you off," Diego commented mildly. Jaime only snorted.

"I'm too old for this shit." He dropped the knife he'd taken off the would-be robber next to the one his buddy had left behind – they had their own in their belts. "It's been a long time since I've been in a knife fight," he said, as though talking of the weather. "Glad I still remembered some things."

Diego laughed and slapped his friend's back as they turned towards their tent.

Over the next couple of weeks a subtle change came over the company, as the other victims of the two would-be robbers noticed that the bullies stayed far away from Vega and Mendoza. And so the other convicts, and then more and more of the conscripts, began congregating a little closer to the pair from Los Angeles, while the veterans and bullies followed Corporal Pedrona's lead. Before long there was a split, just enough to be noticeable by Pedrona, even Mendoza – although Diego was seemingly oblivious to it. Pedrona went into overdrive, screaming orders and doling out hateful, filthy, menial tasks as punishments, but he couldn't seem to recapture his place as the feared and hated master of the company. The other corporals watched and snickered behind Pedrona's back, while their superior officers remained aloof and blind to what was going on.

All things end, and finally, three weeks after Diego's arrival at the main camp, their company received orders to move out and into the mountains, chasing after the rebel armies cobbled together by self-styled "Generals" Guerrero and Calderone, and dealing with the various groups of partisan fighters who had coalesced around dynamic leaders to harass the Empire's Army of New Spain. Many rumors and wild stories began to fly through the troops, as they always did: Mexico was independent; it had been retaken and leaders executed; various heads of state had been deposed or exiled; Napoleon himself was back from the dead and heading towards Mexico; and of course all the deeds and exploits of the various commanders in the field. Over time, wilder and wilder stories began to spread about one man in particular: the commander of a vicious partisan group who was known as El Halcón, the hawk.

Don't go into his mountains, they whispered. It's a death sentence. No one fights El Halcón and survives. If you escape from one battle, he'll track you down and kill you. He'll even find you in the middle of another battle, and leave a feather to mark your body.

Diego hardly listened to any of these rumors, concentrating on keeping his head and surviving. Jaime would snort derisively. "He's just a man. You're all jumping at shadows."

The soldier who had been speaking stared at him, unnerved. "You say that now. You wait. You wait until the day you hear it. The scream of a hawk – but the biggest, most monstrous hawk that ever lived, bigger than a horse. That's El Halcón. That's how he launches his attacks. You hear that scream... and you're a dead man." Jaime just snorted again.

Not long after that, the Veracruz Rifles met up with two other companies, and together they managed to bring General Guerrero to a battle – Diego's first. He had nearly managed to forget the inevitable end result of all that training, when suddenly he found himself in a long double line of soldiers, pointing his rifle at another such line a few hundred feet away.

Time slowed to a crawl. He heard himself taking ragged breaths, felt his heart pounding harder than it ever had. He watched the opposing commander gallop his horse from one end of his line to the other, seeming to take at least an hour. His hands were numb. He couldn't help but pick out the man directly opposite him, and fancied he could see the man's sweat under his armpits as he pointed his own gun back at Diego.

Jaime, standing on his left, noticed. "Diego!" he whispered sharply out of the side of his mouth. "Stop looking at them! Look only at your own gun, or at the ground!"

Inhaling sharply, Diego managed to wrench his eyes away from the man and down onto his rifle's stock. Time snapped back into place just in time for him to hear the order to fire, and he managed to pull the trigger, even if he closed his eyes to do so. Then it was rifle down, reload – and he slipped into the routine he'd done so many times that it was automatic, muscle memory, and managed to keep his focus on the end of his own barrel from then on. It was easier after the first time, as the smoke from all the firing on both sides obscured the view.

He had been so focused all these weeks on what he was going to have to do that it had never really dawned on him that he could be injured or killed himself – not until the man on his right was suddenly blown back a pace, gasped and fell. Diego stared wide-eyed at the man – he couldn't even remember his name at that moment – until Corporal Pedrona appeared out of nowhere at his elbow, screaming at him to reload and fire. He wrenched his eyes away from the downed man by sheer will and tried to go back into automatic load and fire mode, but every few seconds he'd glance that way, only to be yelled at again by Pedrona, who wouldn't leave him alone.

Then just as suddenly as it had started, it was over. He vaguely heard trumpets sound, and realized it was the other side calling a retreat. He prayed desperately not to be given the order to go forward and attack the retreating army with bayonets – and wasn't. Stand down, came down the line, then retreat to camp. For whatever unknown reason, General Guerrero's troops were being given a pass, this time.

But that battle catapulted Diego into a whole new waking nightmare, as every few weeks after that seemed to find him in another battle, either pitched or running – and a few times when they were overrun by the enemy, or overran their lines, in hand-to-hand combat. As Jaime had said, though, in the frenzy of the moment, it was stab or be stabbed. Yet he somehow managed to avoid making any fatal blows, either hanging back a fraction of a second or doing more shoving and dodging than stabbing or slicing. And in between, of course, endless long marches back and forth.

And he began to take Jaime's other bits of advice, on how to aim just ever-so-slightly high or low, to decrease the chances of his bullet hitting anyone. The rifles they used were notoriously bad, sending their shots every which way – and thus commanders relied on mass firepower rather than marksmanship. One hundred bullets all at once will do some damage to the other side, even if any given individual bullet goes wild. Nor were the soldiers ever given a chance for solo target practice, for the same reason; so Diego couldn't have sighted in his rifle if he wanted to. Not that he did.

In the middle of his third battle, Diego suddenly realized he had palmed a bullet without thinking instead of dropping it into the gun. He fired his blank, then managed to put the bullet back in the pouch when he went for another premade cartridge of powder and bullet, which were loaded and tamped down separately. It was so easy that he began doing the same thing about every fifth shot, giving that one tiny sop to his conscience. This time he wouldn't do any damage. Late each night, he would take the bullets out of the pouch and toss them away into shrubbery.

But he had forgotten about Pedrona.

The Corporal never stayed in one place, even during battle, but would stalk up and down behind the lines of his company, watching and yelling orders. He kept an especially close eye on the convicts, none of whom he trusted, and most especially on Vega and Mendoza, whom he despised. And of course he knew all the tricks a soldier might use to try to shirk his duty. He thought there was something wrong with Vega's shooting, but couldn't put his finger on it, until one day, watching secretly from behind, he was sure he saw Vega palm a bullet, and grinned his broken-toothed evil grin.

He waited till the battle was over, then, not letting the soldiers relax as usual, he called his squadron to attention in formation. Colonel Gallegos noticed and rode his horse over, demanding to know why. "You'll see in a moment, sir!" Then he gave the order for each man to empty his cartridge pouch on the ground in front of him.

Diego knew instantly he was caught. Pedrona was standing directly before him, grinning as he repeated the order. All up and down the line, the others were grumbling as they complied with the nonsensical order, crouching slightly so their cartridges landed in a small pile by their feet. Finally, he knew he had no choice, so Diego simply turned the pouch over and let everything fall out. Along with the dozen-or-so unused cartridges all the others turned out, another dozen loose bullets fell to the ground, their telltale clink as they hit rocks sounding loud in the sudden silence. Jaime closed his eyes and thought a silent prayer.

Pedrona turned towards Colonel Gallegos and began to explain, "Sir, this man has been palming bullets – ", but Gallegos needed no explanation. His face turning purple with fury, he finally spat out four words: "Twenty-five lashes. Now," before he turned and spurred away.

Grinning in triumph, Pedrona motioned to several of his sycophants standing near Diego in formation. "Arrest Vega!" Here we go again, flittered through Diego's mind as two of them grabbed his arms. He struggled briefly, until three others followed with their still-loaded guns pointed at his head and chest. Seeing them, he didn't have the death wish to continue.

There were no stocks to be had, of course, but a nearby tree sufficed. His captors led him to it, pulled off his coat and shirt, then tied his hands together with rope from a supply wagon, threw the end over a fat limb a few feet over his head, pulled it tight, and tied it off. He was still dazed by the sheer speed at which his world had turned upside down, yet again, and trying desperately to remain stoic about his fate and take his punishment like a man.

Then Pedrona stood the rest of the company at attention on three sides of a square, with Diego's tree on the fourth. He stood in the center, along with two of his followers still brandishing their guns, caressing his bullwhip – a thick, nasty, thirty-foot leather lash with a foot-long hardwood handle – enjoying the attention, the muttering both for and against him as emotions ran high all around. He let it go on a few minutes, building the tension before the release to come.

Then he turned and called Mendoza up out of the ranks.

Jaime stared. What was Pedrona doing? "Mendoza, report here NOW!" came the repeated shout, and Jaime's feet took him forward of their own volition. He was shaking with devastation and fear for his friend. He stopped before Pedrona, not bothering to salute him, and stared at him with hatred showing nakedly on his face. You called me up here to witness this first hand?

Pedrona just smirked.

And then he turned the bullwhip around, and held it out handle first to Jaime.