Freedom Fire, page 7
Magdalys didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t being fair and she knew it; who was she to judge how a soldier did his job? The first dead body she’d seen had been Mr. Calloway, the caretaker at the orphanage, who’d been hanged by a mob the night of the riots, and that hadn’t been that long ago. Hannibal had probably already lost track of the death that had piled up around him.
“Bring us into a glide behind them,” Hannibal said. “I don’t expect you to understand it, sis. I don’t even understand it, and I been in the thick of it for the past year. But I know I gotta keep moving, no matter what — we all do — and I’ma keep doing whatever I have to do to do that. Duck, please.”
Up ahead, the two flyers had widened the gap between each other, almost to the point that they were flying in different directions.
“The green-and-gray one,” Magdalys said. “That’s the reason we’re going after these two and not the other three. If you have to get one and not the other, get —”
She was interrupted by two shots exploding over her head in quick succession. Up ahead, both dactyls shrieked and spun out of control, one of them throwing its rider into the trees below with a yelp.
“Forgot to mention that I taught your brother everything he knows,” Hannibal said with what Magdalys was sure was a smirk.
“Not bad,” she said, “but that one’s still going.”
The green-and-gray dactyl had pulled back into a lopsided flutter, its rider frantically pulling himself into the saddle. The other flapped crookedly downward and disappeared beneath the canopy of leaves.
Magdalys gazed down, urging Grappler after them. Had the man died? From the way his dactyl tumbled out of sight, it looked like the bullet had winged it, probably without hitting the rider. But a fall like that could surely kill someone, right?
Blam! The Confederate cavalryman’s pistol sang out over the wind. They hadn’t been hit — that dactyl was flying too erratically to get any kind of steady shot — but it snapped Magdalys back into focus.
“You with me, Mags?” Hannibal said, positioning his carbine again.
She nodded, swooping them a little lower so they could come up at the rider from below.
“What’s so special about this guy anyway?”
“He’s a freak like m—” Magdalys started to say, but then the dactyl executed an impressive roll just as Hannibal let off another shot, swooping out the way and then diving suddenly into the trees.
“That!” Magdalys growled.
“How in the —”
“Dive!” yelled Magdalys, and Grappler’s ecstatic fuuuuuu lanced through her mind as the forest raced up to greet them.
BRANCHES RAKED SHARPLY against Magdalys’s face for the second time in as many days, but at least it was daylight and her dactyl hadn’t been shot from under her.
Not yet, anyway. A few more cracks rang out from the woods ahead of them, one smashing loudly into a tree barely a foot away.
“Yikes,” Hannibal said dryly. “This guy won’t quit. Can you bring us a little lower so I don’t get my eyes gouged out?”
“Working on it,” Magdalys grunted. She dipped Grappler down further, below the thickest cluster of branches, swung into a hard roll to avoid a maple tree and then swooped between two bifurcating trunks. Another shot whizzed past, shattering a twig to her right, and then she caught movement up ahead. The rider had perched his dactyl on a sturdy branch and dismounted to take potshots, and now he was clambering back on.
“No, you don’t,” Magdalys whispered, urging Grappler straight for them.
“What’d you say?” Hannibal said. “Oh my —”
Grappler whipped to the side of another tree, pulling her wings tight to her body at the last second, and then flicked them out and back again in a sudden flap that sent them bursting through a thick mesh of foliage. She ducked her head just as they emerged and rammed the bony crest on her forehead straight into the enemy dactyl before it could take off.
The dactyl flung forward in a messy tangle of wings and claws and the rider went tumbling through the underbrush with a yell, crashed through snapping branches and twigs all the way down, and then thudded heavily on the forest floor below.
“Down,” Magdalys said to Grappler just as Hannibal folded up the carbine stabilizer and yelled, “After him!”
They swooshed into a dive, Grappler arching her rear legs beneath her and slowing with a tilt of her wings as they approached the writhing soldier.
“Get back!” the man yelled, and Magdalys spotted the glint of light on the barrel of his raised pistol. Grappler had come up on him fast though; she landed with a claw pinning each of his arms to the ground.
Ka-BLAM!! The pistol went off, sending a bullet crackling through the woods off to the side. Hannibal slid out of the saddle and snatched the gun out of the man’s hand. Magdalys climbed down and signaled Grappler that she could step back.
A scraggly goatee framed the Confederate’s long face. He wore a dirty gray uniform with two bars on the sleeve that Magdalys was pretty sure meant he was an officer of some kind. One leg lay twisted beneath him at an unfortunate angle. His bright blue eyes blinked up at Magdalys and Hannibal and his breath came in short, desperate pants. “Shoulda figured I’d be captured by two —”
Hannibal cut the man off with the sound of his own six-shooter cocking a round into the chamber. “I’m guessing you don’t want to finish that sentence,” Hannibal said, leveling the pistol between the Confederate’s suddenly wide eyes.
“Never did like the dang Confederacy anyway,” he grumbled. “Dunno how I ended up in this ol’ mess.”
“Oh yeah,” Hannibal sighed. “All y’all just hate the Confederacy once you end up on the wrong end of a pistol. That was the fastest tune change I’ve heard yet though. Mags, search him.”
Magdalys blinked for a second, then nodded and gingerly started patting down the man’s pockets and supply belt for anything that felt like a gun or knife.
“Name and rank,” Hannibal demanded.
“Lieutenant Hardy L. Hewpat.”
“You one of Bragg’s men?”
Hewpat snorted up something nasty and blood-tinged and hocked it into the grass. “That demented hack! Never! I’m with General Forrest’s Tennessee Air Cavalry, 3rd Division, the Smokys’ Fighting Finest!”
“Alright, alright,” Hannibal snapped. “Didn’t ask for all that. Got anything, Mags?”
She stood and shook her head, then stared Hewpat in his laughing eyes. “How do you know how to dinowrangle so well?”
“Heh,” Hewpat chuckled. “We’re the finest flyers this side of the Missi —”
“No,” Magdalys said. “You. How do you know? These others weren’t as good.”
He smirked. “I mean, that’s mighty kind of you, but …”
“Answer the question,” Hannibal growled. “You don’t have much choice, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t I?” Hewpat closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“What happened?” Hannibal said. “He dying?”
Magdalys squinted at him. The high-pitched fuuu sounded like it was coming from a hundred miles away but closing fast. A twig snapped from somewhere up above and then a vision of what was about to happen exploded like a firework in her mind. There wasn’t time to explain to Hannibal. She shoved him out of the way, pulling his bayonet blade out of its sheath as she passed him and then swinging it with both hands in a wide upward arc across her body as the Confederate dactyl came screeching down at her.
The blade sheared a bright red gash across its belly and the dactyl yelped and hurled itself off to the side, slashing Magdalys’s arm as it went. It crashed into the dirt a few feet away and scrambled to its feet, blood weeping freely from the bayonet wound. The dactyl let out a fierce caw and lurched toward Magdalys, snapping with its armor-plated beak.
Magdalys took one step back, bayonet raised, and then a blue-and-gray blur blasted out of the woods and slammed full force into the dactyl, lifting it clear into the air.
“Grappler!” Magdalys yelled. Grappler held the enemy dactyl in her claws just long enough to send it barreling into a tree trunk with a mighty THUNK! The dactyl slid to the ground and landed in a pile of broken limbs sticking out in all the wrong directions.
“Lil’ Calhoun, baby! No!” Hewpat gasped. “My baby!”
Grappler flapped to a sturdy branch above them and gazed serenely off into the distance.
“You killed Lil’ Calhoun!”
Magdalys realized Hannibal was staring at her. “You … saved my life.”
She shook her head, held up his bayonet with the point facing herself. “Grappler saved us both. Here.”
He took it and nodded his thanks, still blinking like the sun had just risen in the middle of the night.
“Y’all savages gonna kill me already or what?” Hewpat said between pants. “Might as well, seeing as how you murdered poor Lil’ Calhoun.”
Hannibal sheathed the bayonet. “Stop talking. And no, we’re not going to kill you. We’re bringing you back to Major General Sheridan so you two can have a long talk about what you know.”
SOMEONE ELSE LIKE me, Magdalys thought as they flew just beneath the foliage with Lieutenant Hewpat trussed up and slung over the back of Grappler. There was no other explanation: the cavalryman had been wrangling his ptero just like Magdalys did. That was why she couldn’t even reach out to his mount as he was attacking Sol. That was why he flew so much better than the others, and how he’d had Lil’ Calhoun attack them right when he needed help.
She shook her head. There were others like her. Who knew how many? What if … the image of an unstoppable surge of Confederate raptors and pteroriders came billowing into her mind.
“There!” Hannibal yelled, pointing down at a perfectly still lump of gray and pink down below.
“Rosworth!” Hewpat yelled, writhing against his bindings. “Aw, Rosworth! You murderers! You killed Rosworth!”
Rosworth was indeed dead, Magdalys realized as they glided slowly over his contorted body and empty eyes. She shuddered.
“He had two children,” Hewpat moaned. “And a pretty young wife, Sarahbelle.”
Magdalys tried not to imagine them, but the vision surfaced anyway: a gram delivered by minidactyl; a white woman in a fancy pink dress with curly hair opening it, two squirming kids by her side, their little faces contorting as they found out their daddy wouldn’t be coming home.
Their daddy who would’ve killed Magdalys in a heartbeat and was fighting to keep her people enslaved. The whole world seemed to spin and tilt around her and she felt like she might hurl up the hardtack they’d had for breakfast over the side.
“Quiet,” Hannibal ordered, and Magdalys silently repeated the command to her own troubled mind. “All it takes is one tip of this ptero and you will have a sudden reunion with the ground, Hewbert.”
“Hewpat!”
“What’s that?” Hannibal said, rocking Grappler back and forth a few times. “I didn’t hear you over the sound of me being about to toss you over the side.”
“Nothing!”
Less than an hour ago, Magdalys thought, they’d all been singing a battle hymn along with Octave’s coronet, marching through the sunlight on trikeback. Solomon had been alive. So had Rosworth. And now … the world seemed to spin faster and faster around her.
“What happens now?” she asked, guiding Grappler back up through the canopy of leaves into the open sky.
“Ol’ boy will get interrogated,” Hannibal said, “and sent to a prison camp and probably released in a few months for political reasons or some nonsense and be back taking potshots at us from the air.”
“That’s messed up,” Magdalys said, “but I meant …” She shrugged and gazed down at the peaks and valleys sprawling beneath them.
“Oh, Private Solomon?”
She nodded, relieved at not having to explain herself. The long stretch of bright blue sky seemed to slow the spin of the world. Magdalys took a deep breath.
“He’s dead. There’s nothing to bury, from what I could tell, so we’ll just hold a ceremony tonight by the campfire and that’ll be that.”
“I mean …”
“If we was back in New Orleans, we’d throw him a big ol’ marching band funeral — a second line, it’s called — and Octave and the boys would play some of the finest music you ever heard. Not that straight-laced military band nonsense, I mean real music, and everyone would come out from their houses and join the party, cuz it would be a party. And it’d feel like the whole world was there, celebrating, and even the trikes and stegos would be decorated and covered in sparkly outfits and streamers as they hauled that empty casket all along the avenue to the cemetery.”
“Sounds beautiful,” Magdalys said, breathing deeply again, letting the world slow back down even more.
“That’s what I was trying to say earlier, Mags. That’s how we do death down there. My folks anyway. My family’s been part of the Mardi Gras Indians for ages —”
“The what?”
“Hard to explain. It’s like a club, you know? We make these beautiful feathered outfits and we know how to make a funeral right. It’s a celebration, not because they died but because they lived, whoever they were. And that’s how we gotta do it here in the war too. Solomon lived. He was a pain in the butt sometimes, but he had a girlfriend on Iberville who’ll be sad he’s gone, and a married white society lady who’ll probably be even more sad he’s gone, but that’s another story —”
“Wait …”
“And he had the best handwriting of all of us and folks in the Guard would dictate letters back home to him.” Hannibal shrugged. “If we stopped to mourn each death, we’d be the next one to die, and what good would that do poor Sol? So we just gotta keep moving.”
Magdalys nodded, breathed, nodded. “I’m sorry about what I said before. I made it sound like you don’t care about what you do and that’s not fair. I … I really don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s arright,” Hannibal said, his Louisiana drawl growing longer with thoughts of home. “You made up for it by saving my life, so we even now.”
Up ahead, two dactyls swooped out of the trees. Magdalys squinted at them, but Hannibal had already pulled out his spyglass. “That’s Octave on one.” He chuckled. “Looks like he lassoed himself a Rebel. Got him trussed up on the back just like ours. Guess he still getting the hang of riding that thing though.”
“Is Mapper on the other?” Magdalys asked, trying not to sound desperate. In all the commotion, she had forgotten her friend was off having his own adventures.
“Yeah, your little buddy’s alright. He got himself a Rebel too! Wonder where the third one is….”
“Probably reaching our lines right now!” Hewpat yelled from behind them.
“Quiet, Hewbert!” Hannibal yelled. “When we’re curious about your opinion we’ll drop you over the side and ask whatever’s left on the ground.”
“Ayyy!” Magdalys called, urging Grappler forward behind the other two dactyls. Hannibal was right about Octave — his mount swooped and scuttled in that ungainly way they had when they knew a rider had no idea what they were doing.
Mapper glanced back and a wide smile broke out on his face. “Mag-D!” he yelled, waving, and the dactyl he was riding swerved sharply to the side, nearly tossing him. “Whoa! Easy, Beans!” He wrapped both arms around its neck and clung on as his mount glided back into position.
He named the dactyl Beans? Magdalys just stared at him wide-eyed. “Mapper, careful, man!” she yelled.
“Good hunting, Private Hannibal?” Octave asked, rearing his dactyl back some so it flew neck and neck with Grappler. On the back, a kid about Hannibal’s age, all in Confederate grays, lay unconscious, his hands and feet expertly bound up and a shiny blue lump rising on his face.
“Excellent, Private Rey,” Hannibal said. “One captured; one didn’t survive the fall.”
“Mags!” Mapper said, pulling Beans along the other side of them. “Octave has a lasso! And he straight up just lassoed a dude! Two dudes!”
“Told ya,” Hannibal said.
“And one other dude tried to get away and fell so like, he didn’t make it, but Octave lassoed the other two like … Whew! Like cattle, Mags! And then he like, reeled ’em in and trussed ’em up and —”
Mapper’s dactyl lurched suddenly upward, throwing Mapper backward on top of the tied-up Confederate. “Whoa!” Mapper yelled. “Be cool, Beans! Be cool!”
“What’s happening?” Magdalys called, sending Grappler after them. “Mapper!”
Beans surged forward; Magdalys could see Mapper still trying to untangle himself and find something to grab on to, his hands flailing as the Confederate struggled and cursed. Then the dactyl squawked and spun into a barrel roll, sending them both over the side.
“GRAB ANYTHING!” MAGDALYS yelled as Mapper’s feet flew out from under him and he tumbled off the dactyl.
“Gah!” the Confederate yelled. Octave had secured his hands to the saddle and now he dangled by his wrists in midair, Mapper grasping on to his waist for dear life. “Let go of me, kid!”
“Hold tight!” Magdalys yelled. “We’re coming!” Beans had lurched off again, flushing down and then back up in a messy zigzag through the sky. Magdalys sent Grappler racing after them as Octave spurred his mount on behind.
“If I could just …” Magdalys said out loud as they came up behind Beans. She concentrated as hard as she could, reaching out for Beans’s mind, grasping for any hint of his thoughts or even a single fubba to let her know she was on the right track.
Nothing.
She was blocked out just like she’d been from Lieutenant Hewpat’s dactyl earlier.
Of course!
“Hewpat!” the Confederate dangling from Beans yelled. “That you, Lieutenant? Can you … can you right us, sir?”
Magdalys pulled Grappler directly below Mapper and the Confederate. “Mapper! Drop!”
“Are you su—” Mapper started to say and then Beans spiraled into a steep dive. “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”
