Category Archives: Historical Short Stories

The Plundered

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A number of summers ago, when I was still stationed in Spain, I packed up my daughter, and a tent and all the necessary gear, and did a long looping camping tour of the southern part of Spain, down through the Extremadura, and to the rock of Gib al Tarik, and a long leisurely drive along the Golden Coast – I had driven from Sevilla, past the sherry-manufacturies around Jerez La Frontera (on a Sunday, so they were closed, although the Harvey’s people should have given me a freebie on general principals, I had sipped enough of their stuff, over the years), made a pit stop at the Rota naval base for laundry and groceries. I had driven into Gibraltar, done a tour of the historic gun galleries, seen the famous Gibraltar apes, and then waited in the long customs line to come back into Spain. We had even stopped at the Most Disgusting Public Loo on the face of the earth, at a gas station outside of San Roque, before following the road signs along the coastal road towards Malaga and Motril, and our turn-off, the road that climbed steadily higher into the mountains, the tall mountains that guarded the fortress city of Granada, and the fragile fairy-tale pavilions of the Alhambra.

The road followed the coastline, for the most part, sweeping through towns like Estepona and Marbella as the main thoroughfare, always the dark blue Mediterranean on the right, running wide of the open beaches, hugging the headlands, with new condos and little towns shaded by palm and olive trees, splashed with the brilliant colors of bougainvillea, interspersed with the sage-green scrublands. The traffic was light enough along the coastal road, and I began to notice a certain trend in place names; Torre de Calahonda, Torremolinos, Torre del Mar, Torrenueva – and to notice that most of the tall headlands, rearing up to the left of the road, were topped by a (usually) ruinous stone watchtower. Forever and brokenly looking out to the sea, and a danger that might come from there, a danger of such permanence as to justify the building of many strong towers, to guard the little towns, and the inlets where fisher-folk would beach their boats and mend their nets.

This rich and lovely coast was scourged for centuries by corsairs who swept in from the sea, peacetime and wartime all alike, savage raiders with swords and torches and chains, who came to burn and pillage – not just the portable riches of gold, or silver, but those human folk who had a cold, hard cash value along the Barbary Coast, in the slave markets of Algiers and Sale. It was a scourge of such magnitude that came close to emptying out the coastal districts all along the Spanish, French and Italian coasts, and even reached insolently into Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Iceland. The raiders from the port of Sale (present-day Morocco) grew fabulously wealthy form their expertise in capturing and trafficking in captured Christians from all across coastal villages in Western Europe, and from ships, crews taken in the Mediterranean and the coastal Atlantic waters. This desperate state of affairs lasted into the early 19th century, until the power and reach of the Barbary slave-raiders was decisively broken. For three hundred years, though, families all along this coast and elsewhere must have risen up from bed every morning knowing that by the end of the day they and or their loved ones might very well be in chains, on their way to the slave markets across the water, free no longer, but a market commodity. All of this was outlined in a recent history of the Sale corsairs, the so called ‘Salley Rovers’ – White Gold, by Giles Milton.

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This kind of life-knowledge is out of living memory along that golden    Spanish coast, but it is within nearly touchable distance in Texas and other parts of the American West, where my own parent’s generation, as children in the Twenties and Thirties would have known elderly men and women who remembered the frontier – not out of movies, or from television, but as children themselves, first-hand and with that particular vividness of sight that children have, all that adventure, and danger, privation and beauty, the triumph of building a successful life and community out of nothing more than homesteaded land and hard work.

There was no chain of watchtowers in the harsh and open borderlands, watching over far-scattered settlements and little towns, and lonely ranches in a country never entirely at peace, but not absolutely at war. The southwestern tribes, Comanche, Apache and their allies roamed as they wished, a wild and free life, hunting what they wanted, raiding when they felt like it, and could get away with it. Sometimes, it was just a coarse game, to frighten the settlers, to watch a settler family run for the shelter of their rickety cabin, fumbling for a weapon with shaking hands, children sheltering behind their parents like chicks. But all too often, for all too many homesteading and ranching families, it ended with the cabin looted and burned, the adults and small children butchered in the cruelest fashion, stripped and scalped.

And the cruelest cut of all, to survivors of such raids in Texas and the borderlands, was that children of a certain age— not too young to be a burden, not too old to be un-malleable (aged about seven to twelve, usually) were carried away, and adopted into the tribes. Over months and years, such children adapted to that life so completely that even when they were ransomed back, and brought home, they never entirely fitted in to a life that seemed like a cage. They had been taken as children, returned as teenagers or adults, to an alien life, to parents and family they could no longer see as theirs. Some of them pined away after their return, like the most famous of them, Cynthia Ann Parker, others returned to their Indian families. For parents of these lost children, that must have been so cruel, to lose a much-loved child not just once, but to finally get them back, and then to discover that they were no longer yours, they had not been a slave, in captivity, but that they longed to be away, roving the open lands as free as a bird. Texas writer Scott Zesch wrote perceptively of that particular tragedy, of his great-great uncle Adolph Korn, kidnapped by Comanche Indians as a boy of ten or so, and eventually returned to his parents when he was in his teens – but in that time, he had been trained and treated as a warrior, and a man, and was never able to reenter the world he had been wrenched away from.

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That experience haunted me, when I was researching for the story which would eventually become the Adelsverein Trilogy; the tragedy of a child taken, then restored, but forever lost to his parents. I worked it into the final volume, The Harvesting, with the story of Willi Richter – patterned somewhat after the experiences of Adolph Korn, and another famous Texas ‘white’ Indian, Hermann Lehmann – but with something more of sympathy for those parents and relatives who had mourned the loss of a child, and then lost them yet again.

Celia Hayes is the author of The Adelsverein Trilogy, which follows the half-century long saga of a family of German immigrants on the Texas frontier, beginning in 1844. More about her other books and writing is at her website, www.celiahayes.com.

Atalanta & The Erlking

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“Sabine!” called Mama from the bottom of the garden where she was making soap on a mild spring day. Mama did not wish to bring the smell of wood-ash lye and tallow near to the house, or the heat of the fire that it bubbled over, “Will you bring me more wood now!?” “Yes, Mama,” Sabine answered hastily. She emptied the tortoise-shell kitten out of her lap and set aside the book of her Papa’s that she was reading to her little sister Auguste. Sabine and her sister and the kitten had curled up on the rustic leather and wooden settee that sat in the breezeway of Heinrich Stalp’s farm, on Grape Creek in the Pedernales Valley. Sabine was thirteen years old; the older of the Stalp’s two daughters in this year that Papa said was 1864.

“A cursed year,” Papa had said with a sigh to Mama last night after supper, when he thought that Sabine was not listening, “A war that shows no sign of ending and the hanging band stalking these hills again! They took the schoolmaster from his house, on Market Square in the middle of Friedrichsburg, as bold as brass.”

“Who?” Sabine asked, curiously, “And what is the hanging band, Papa? Is it like the Erlking in the song that the singing-club sings?”

Papa and Mama both looked startled. They were accustomed to talk of adult matters in that hour after supper, while the sunlight faded from the sky and the pale moths began to flicker around the lamps hanging in the breezeway between the two tiny rooms of the Stalp’s log house. Mama would sew and knit, while Papa mended or sharpened his tools, or cast lead bullets for his long old-fashioned flint-lock rifle.

“They are bad men, Liebchen,” Mama answered quickly. Sabine thought that Mama would have said more, but Papa gently pinched Sabine’s cheek and said,

“That’s my clever girl – they are rather like the Erlking and his minions… but they do not steal the souls of children…”

“Rather, they take away the men who will not join their army, and fight for them, and hang them from trees,” Mama knotted and snapped off a thread with an abrupt gesture, her face tense and unhappy, “Heinrich, why didn’t we join my cousins in Milwaukee, in the north….”

“Juliana, don’t frighten the children,” Papa answered soothingly, “Because the Society offered us land here and there were already many of our folk,” and he smiled with affection at his daughter, “And the girls are happy here, are they not? No, the Erlking here does not harm children, so my girls have nothing to fear.”

“What does the Erlking look like then?” little Auguste piped up.

Papa put on that face that he used when he told stories, making up marvelous adventures to amuse his daughters and the other children from the little farms scattered along Grape Creek. Now and again he held lessons for them all, in the breezeway of his house – when the work of all their farms permitted such. “He’s a tall man on a tall horse,” he answered, “And he wears a tall black hat with a narrow brim… and the way that you can tell him from among his minions is that…” and he paused enticingly, until both Auguste and Sabine chorused,

“How, Papa… how will we know the Erlking?”

“Because,” Papa lowered his voice dramatically, “He has odd eyes… one pale blue eye and the other no color at all! That is how you will know the Erlking! Now!” he swept them both into his arms for an enthusiastic embrace, “It is time for sleep, both of you. Your mama wishes to finish making soap tomorrow, and I have to finish planting maize and beans.”

Sabine had taken her little sister by the hand, leading her into the part of the house that served as their parlor and at night their parent’s bedroom. She and her sister slept on pallet-beds in the loft over the parlor. They climbed the short ladder, and Sabine helped her sister take off her dress, and then she took off her own. Each of them had only the one dress, a simple garment with a narrow skirt, sewn out of sturdy janes fabric, originally blue but worn with wear and washing to the color of a bruise, or the grey-blue of the thunderstorm clouds when they pressed close over the Pedernales Valley and the little farms in the cleft of Grape Creek. Sabine had a plain linen shift to wear underneath and a pair of drawers, Auguste only the drawers, patched out of a piece of faded calico. Sabine had once overheard Mama upbraiding Papa, blaming them for being so poor, but Papa said that it was the war that made them poor, the war which ruined the district and kept him from seeking work outside their farm. Sabine considered for a moment, thinking on that. Were they poor? She didn’t think so, for no one else along Grape Creek had any better than what they had… except for Mr. Burg, and he had so many horses! She and Auguste, Papa and Mama, they had enough to eat, Papa’s books to read, the kitten and a roof that kept out the rain, the iron patent-stove in the parlor that kept them all warm in the winter and the other children to play with, all the summer day long. She tucked her sister into bed, after hanging up their meager garments on the pegs set into the end roof-beam over their heads, and saying their bedtime prayer.

“Good night, Auguste,” she said, as the tortoise-shell kitten hopped nimbly onto the foot of their pallet and curled up at their feet, purring so heavily that Sabine could feel the vibration of it. “Don’t fear what Papa said about the Erlking… that was just a story. Anyway, Papa and Mama are just outside – and they will always keep us safe.”

“I won’t, ‘Beena,” Auguste yawned. “Good night.”

The straw in the pallet rustled gently as Sabine and her sister found a comfortable position. The very last thing she remembered before she slept was the sound of Mama and Papa’s voices, outside in the breezeway.

Now, Sabine went to the woodpile, trailed by her little sister, where Papa had split rounds of oak tree-trunk into slabs that would fit into the stove, or onto the fire under the soap-kettle. She gathered up two armfuls and carried them to Mama. Mama smiled, as she wiped sweat off her forehead with the corner of her apron, an apron dirty with smears of ash and black soot. Soap-making was a messy, smelly business, boiling together quantities of wood-ash lye and rendered tallow. Mama always insisted on their house and their clothes being clean – or as clean as they could be, so it was a necessity.

“Thank you, Sabine – that is enough for now. I would like you to run an errand, now – two errands rather. Can you gather fresh greens for our supper? And mushrooms from that little patch in the oak-woods, if there are any to be found at this time. And then if you would take half of what you have found to Mr. Burg and his children…” Mama made a clicking sound with her tongue and sighed. “So sad, Matilde Burg taken from him and the children at such a time! Perhaps you should just ask if they would rather come sup with us? Poor little Maria is hardly old enough to even think of keeping house for her father and brother.”

“Oh, yes, Mama!” Sabine answered happily; it would be more fun to wander the creek-banks and meadows, gathering spring greens and mushrooms than helping Mama with the soap.

“Take your sister,” Mama stirred the bubbling brown soap carefully with a branch of rosemary, “And be careful. If you see any Indians, hide and run home as quickly as you may, once they have passed.”

“Why, Mama? Papa says we are at peace with them – that the Baron Meusebach made a treaty…”

“Not all of them Liebchen,” Mama answered with a sigh. Sabine took her sister by one hand and a shallow basket in the other. The tortoise-shell kitten followed them a little way, before being distracted by a butterfly.

Sabine loved the creek, water as clear and green as bottle-glass, in places so deep as to come to her waist, and in others only up to her ankles as it slipped chuckling over smooth-polished stones, as pure white and perfectly round as marbles. She made up a story for Auguste, that the creek-gravel was actually pearl-stones from the necklace of the Erlking’s daughter, telling the story to her all through the long afternoon. They splashed through the shallows below the Stalp place, and wandered along the bank, marveling at the gaily jeweled dragon-flies with their lacy wings, hovering over the water, and tiny frogs, hardly larger than the end of Sabine’s thumb. A pair of long-tailed squirrels frisked with each other, chattering furiously, before one chased the other up the trunk of a towering cypress tree. Auguste gathered a skirt-full of pecans from the grass and matted leaves underneath a pecan tree, but they were from last year, all black and half-rotted, full of little holes bored by hungry insects. Auguste was very proud of her efforts, none the less and Sabine said cheerfully,

“Well, take them home for the pig, then.”

At the end of an hour or so, she had a full basket of field greens, mustard sprouts and dandelions and such, and half a dozen pale round mushrooms. She and Auguste had also come around the bend of Grape Creek to find two boys fishing for minnows in a one of the deeper pools. Peter Petsch was ten, his friend Gustav Burg the same. Sabine knew both of them well, for they had both come for lessons from Papa and to listen to stories. Peter had freckles and a gap between his front teeth. Gustav was the son of their neighbor Mr. Burg. Sabine felt very sorry for him, for his Mama had just died, not four days past.

“My Mama said you should come and have supper with us,” she said to Gustav, who looked at the ground and mumbled,

“Papa won’t hear of it. The brown mare is in foal and he does not want to leave her.”

“Well, then we have some greens for your supper,” Sabine answered, “Mama said for me to take them to your father. It’s easy enough to fix them. I can show you and Marie, if your Papa is still busy with the mare.” Sabine had already noted that it was mothers who did the cooking. Gustav shrugged unhappily, but came readily enough. It was getting on to late afternoon, the time that Mama began cooking the evening meal. She thought it very sad, now that Gustav and Marie would only have the supper that their poor distracted Papa could fix for them. They walked, all four children, along the creek bank towards Mr. Burg’s pastures and the fine log house that he was able to build. It was larger than Stalp’s, having four large rooms and a real upstairs, but much the same kind of furniture; some few treasured things brought from the Old Country, but mostly rustic stuff, with chair seats made of cowhide. Already it had an indefinable aura of neglect about it. Marie Burg, only a few years older than Auguste, sat on the edge of the porch aimlessly swinging her legs and Sabine made the same disapproving “tsk!” sound that Mama made. Marie’s face and dress were dirty, and her hair straggled around her face. She looked the very picture of woe and neglect. The boys vanished in the direction of the stable, around the side of the house.

“Bring me a comb, Marie,” Sabine said as she set down the basket, “And I will do up your hair properly. I guess your Papa is still busy with the mare?”

Marie sniffed, tearfully, “He is. The foal is born, but Papa is just sitting there. I have asked about supper, but he just sits there. He started to say ‘ask your mama’, but then he looked so terribly sad.”

Sabine sighed, “Wash your face, Mariechen, and let me comb your hair. Then I will show you what our Mama does with the greens.”

By the time that she had Marie’s hair woven neatly into two plaits, the boys had emerged from the barn, with Mr. Burg leading the brown mare by the halter. Sabine thought the mare was the prettiest of Mr. Burg’s horses, dainty and gentle, hardly larger than a pony. And the new foal was a darling, hardly larger than a big dog and still a little wobbly on it’s broom-staff legs. She and Marie and Auguste giggled to see it nuzzling Peter’s hair; even Mr. Burg smiled, momentarily lightening the sadness in his face.

“Take them out to the upper pasture where the other brood-mares are,” he said, handing the end of the halter to Gustav, “Let them have a little fresh air before nightfall, not so? You should all go, so that the little fellow will be used to people. That’s the trick of taming them to harness, you know – if they are already accustomed to people, than the battle is half-won!”

Peter and Gustav disputed amiably over who would lead the mare, and who would lead the foal – who, truth to tell did not need much leading. He just frisked after his mother, now and again nuzzling one of the children with affectionate curiosity as they wandered along the path towards the upper pasture, some distance from the Burg house, and the main pasture. Mr. Burg had taken care to fence them both, for he treasured his horses. Sabine’s Papa said often that he was the best hand at breeding and training both – and that when the war was over, he would be the richest man in Gillespie County. The way towards his upper pasture was on the path that Sabine and Auguste would take to walk home from Burgs’ so they accompanied the boys and Marie

“I forgot the basket,” Sabine suddenly recalled, stopping short when they were halfway up the winding footbath between the trees. “With the greens for our supper…. Go on with Marie and the boys, Auguste. I will run back and fetch it, and meet you at the pasture.” She gave Auguste’s hand to Marie, who took it willingly – after all, what was there to fear along Grape Creek?

Sabine kirtled her skirt to her knees and ran; she was fast for a girl, and her bare feet were toughened by exposure. She ran easily along the dusty track that Mr. Burg’s horses and wagons had worn through the spring grass, but her heart pounded in her ears so hard that she could barely hear anything else, not the sound of distant hoof-beats, or the distant sound of something crackling like ice breaking on Grape Creek after a hard winter freeze.

There at last was the roof of the Burg house, dark among the surrounding trees – but there were men in the farmyard, men on horseback, a lot of men and more of them in Mr. Burg’s large pasture, yelling and whooping at his horses. What was this? Sabine slowed to an uncertain walk. Who were these men, where did they come from, shouting in a language she didn’t understand. Not Indians, for they wore white men’s clothes. Some of them had calico handkerchiefs or long scarves wrapped around the lower part of their faces. Was Mr. Burg selling his horses to someone, Sabine wondered? She walked a little closer. Now she could see the basket with the greens, exactly where she had left it on the edge of the porch – and there came Mr. Burg from within his house. He no longer appeared sad, but terribly angry, shouting at these men – what were they doing with his horses? Sabine walked faster; surely Mr. Burg would sort it out, now.

Mr. Burg came down from the porch, shouting at the man nearest to him. Sabine was close enough to see that his hands were empty. Suddenly another man on a horse rode in between Mr. Burg and the house, and swiftly drawing a long-barreled pistol from the breast of his shirt, took aim and shot him three times in the back.

The sound resounded like thunderclaps and Sabine froze in her footsteps, horrified. Mr. Burg crumpled, falling like something heavy dropped to the ground and lay motionless, save for a pool of bright red blood steadily widening from underneath his body. Sabine took one or two hesitating steps farther, thinking that this could not be real, this was a nightmare. She would wake on her pallet in the dark loft over the parlor, with the tortoise-shell kitten sleeping at her feet, and Mama calling comfort from below: ‘It is only a bad dream, Liebchen, go back to sleep.’

But no, this was not a dream. Sabine watched the bright tide of blood soak into the dust at its edges, and she lifted her eyes to look at the man who had shot Mr. Burg, a tall man on a tall horse. Just as Papa had assured her, the Erlking wore a tall black hat with a narrow brim… and he did indeed have odd-colored eyes, blazing in a face as pale as deaths’ head. For the briefest of moments they crossed glances, Sabine and the deathlike Erlking, who laughed a cruel and maniacal laugh as he held her gaze with his own, transfixed in the farmyard, like an insect pinned in a case of naturalists’ specimens. He still had his pistol in his hand. As she watched with her own blood frozen for horror in her veins, he lowered it. He aimed at Mr. Burg, lying motionless on the ground at his horses’ feet.

Sabine thought that he fired once or twice more. The sound of that cruel laughter echoed in her ears as she fled, ran as fast as one of the rabbits fleeing the plough in spring, all the world a blur around her until the noise of the men in Mr. Burg’s pasture and farmyard were dim in the distance behind her. Still she pelted, bare feet flying, until she caught her toes on a tree root and nearly fell.

“Sabine!” That was Peter Petsch calling her name, Peter with his face nearly as pale as the Erlking’s. He caught her arm, kept her from falling flat, but she collapsed onto the ground anyway, nursing her bruised toes and gasping for breath. Behind Peter, Gustav had the halters of the mare and colt both in his hands. He cried, “Sabine, they’re taking Papa’s mares… those men! And they shot the foals, all but this one! Why would the shoot the foals – it was as if they didn’t want them to follow after the mares – but they didn’t want us to have them either!?”

“What is the matter,” Peter’s eyes were worried; he was a clever lad, “Why are you running so fast, ‘Beena – what has happened at Burg’s?”

“The Erlking!” Sabine cried. She caught her breath again, seeing Marie and Auguste, “The Erlking and his followers… Mama called them the hanging band, come to take away and hang the men who won’t fight in their army! They came to Burg’s to take the horses…. and Mr. Burg is dead. They killed him… I saw…”

Marie began to cry softly; Gustav did not cry or flinch. Only his eyes widened dark in his face, like holes in a sheet of paper.

“They could not take the horses, otherwise,” he finally acknowledged wretchedly. The mare nudged his shoulder, and he stroked her muzzle, almost without thinking. “Papa… he would not let anyone take the horses, like that. He loved the horses nearly as much as us. Who are these men, Sabine? What should we do now?”

“If it is the hanging band, they are come here for more than horses,” Peter answered gravely, “Listen!” The five children held still, listening intently for those sounds which carried but slight upon the ear in the quiet afternoon, up from the lower land around the creek. They heard a faint crashing sound, like that of an ax in wood, and agitated voices. “That is from the Kirchner’s!” Peter added.

“We must warn them,” Sabine gasped, having recovered her breath, “Warn Papa, and all the men!”

“They have already gone to Berg’s” Peter added, “And if they are at the Kirchners, they have already been to Mr. Blanks’ and the Fellers’ as well… we can’t hope to out run them on the track… they have horses already.”

“Footpaths,” Sabine answered, and her chin lifted defiantly. “The little footpaths that only we and the deer know well! You and I, on either side of the creek! We must run to all the houses upstream from here. Gustav… you must take the mare and the foal into the nearest thicket, you and Marie and Auguste and keep them all safe from those men.” She folded her feet under her, kneeling before her sister and Marie. She made her voice sound strong, authoritative, as firm as Mama’s or Papa’s. “You must do as Gustav tells you. It is the Erlking, and he is not hunting children… but rather our Papa, and Peter’s Papa and all the others. Peter and I, we go to warn them!” She kissed her sister and scrambled to her feet.

“I’ll cross over,” Peter gasped, “My house first, then the others on that side…” he named four households, and Sabine nodded.

“Don’t let them catch sight of you,” she answered, “Not for anything – for they might guess what we are doing – and don’t waste time.”

“Don’t worry, ‘Beena,” Peter grinned, a flash of teeth in his freckled face, “I can shift myself faster through the fields and bushes than ever they can on their horses! Good luck!” And he was away, sprinting as fleet as one of the deer. Sabine looked over her shoulder, making sure that Gustav and the little girls were well on their way into a thicket with the mare and the little colt, before she kirtled her skirts above her knees again and began to run.

Thinking of the Erlking, his dreadful mismatched eyes in his face made her run all the faster. She thought of Atalanta, the huntress in one of the old tales that Papa read to her, Atalanta who was faster in a footrace than any man alive, but for three apples of gold. It was the Erlking that she must out-race, the dreadful Erlking on his tall horse – and not on the track through the Grape Creek farms, but on the little paths where a horse couldn’t follow. She could run, Sabine assured herself against a rising tide of panic at the thought of the Erlking shooting at her Papa, they way that he had shot Mr. Burg. She was almost to the Stalp farm – she could smell the faint smell of boiling soap on the wind.

“Mama!” She screamed as she burst out of the thicket of scrub trees that lined the edge of Papa’s fields, “Papa! It is the Erlking – the hanging band is come!”

She saw Mama, frozen in mid-stir over the soap kettle, Papa dropping the ax in mid-stroke as he chopped more wood. He came running to meet her, crying,

“Sabine- what is this!? Where is Auguste!”

“She’s hiding in the woods with the Bergs!” Sabine screamed, “They shot Mr. Burg and stole the horses! Papa, you must hide too! At once! It’s the hanging-band, and they are coming!”

There was only one thing more frightening than seeing Mr. Burg killed in front of her – and that was the expression on Papa’s and Mama’s face – for they believed her, instantly and they were afraid. What shelter was there in the world, if your parents were afraid, Sabine wondered? Mama dropped the rosemary branch, as Papa shouted,

“Juliana – into the woods! Sabine, you also!”

“No, Papa – I must warn the others!” Sabine answered, as she tore herself from her father’s arms and ran. She comforted herself with the thought that Papa would be able to hide himself and Mama, hide away from the house where the hanging-band would surely come looking for them. She ran, fearing at any moment to hear the pounding of the horses at her back, that the terrible Erlking would realize that she was more than just a barefoot girl in a threadbare faded dress – that she was Atalanta, the huntress and a messenger.

She ran to five more houses; each household listening to her gasped-out warning with instant belief, men and boys instantly grabbing hats and weapons, scattering from their supper-tables into the woods in all directions. After the last house her chest ached, with every breath stabbing like a knife. She rested, sitting on the edge of their porch with her head on her own knees, hardly hearing a word of what was said to her by the woman of that house. Her feet were cruelly bruised, but she hardly felt it until she began to walk. Her hair hung in a tangle, half-pulled out of her plaits by thorny branches that had scratched her face.

“You must stay here,” the woman told her, but Sabine answered firmly,

“No – don’t fear for me. I know the ways to go home where they will not dare to follow,” And so she went home the way that she had come, limping on her bruised feet yet feeling oddly triumphant. She saw nothing untoward, no strangers at all, and so she went down towards Grape Creek to soak her sore feet in the cool water. She found a long oozing scratch, the length of her shin that she had hardly noticed, so much had she concentrated on running. There sat Peter Petsch on the rocky bank, also breathless and disheveled, and he grinned at her.

“I beat you, I’ll bet,” he said mischievously.

Sabine made a fist and punched his shoulder as she had seen the boys do, answering, “You did not – there is none faster than Atalanta!”

She went limping home, and taking her time about it, for her feet hurt sorely – finding little house entirely empty; the kettle of soap cooling over a barely smoldering fire and the branch of rosemary laying where Mama had thrown it down, covered with congealing soap. The tortoise-shell kitten came and sat on her lap, winding its’ tail with the kink at the end around her wrist and burrowing it’s little face into the breast of her dress. Sabine cuddled it to her, feeling the fragility of the kitten’s bones in her two hands. Something so little and young had to be sheltered, kept safe – and that was the duty of those who were brave and big, like Atalanta. Like Mama and Papa. There was the sound of horses on the track, many horses. Sabine lifted her head – it could be none other, with so many horses in Grape Creek on this day. They spilled into the yard, as they had been at the Burg’s – those men with scarves and kerchiefs over their faces. That tall man, the Erlking, he rode up to the very porch of the Stalp’s house, shouting at her in that language which she did not understand. Sabine stared at him levelly, holding the kitten close to her. So that was the Erlking – Papa had said they did not hunt children. Just the men who would not fight for them, so she had nothing to fear from him and his minions. As Sabine looked at them, and felt no fear, not the least scrap of it. They were only men, neither demons or spirits. Only men, hunting for other men. And because of her, they were baffled in that aim. Sabine stared at him. No, she did not fear him; she was Atalanta. He was baffled, angry. Papa and the other men were safe, gone away into the woods and hills because she had run the best race of all – and she was not afraid either.

The Erlking shouted some more, and wheeled his horse – he and the others spilled out of the farmyard as rapidly as they had come into it. Sabine sat contented with the kitten in her lap, watching daylight fade into twilight, sensing the quiet that returned to Grape Creek. As the brilliant dark-gold sun set behind the hills beyond and shadows began to lengthen across the yard, Papa and Mama appeared. They came from the wagon track – by this, Sabine knew that the danger had truly departed. Papa carried Auguste perched on his shoulders, Mama led Marie Burg by the hand – and Gustav Berg followed after, leading the mare and her foal.

“My good, brave girl!” Papa said, as he kissed her forehead. “They are gone – all of them. They were frustrated of their intentions – which were, I think – to take and hang every man of this settlement who would not enlist to serve their despotic aims. They are baffled of that, thanks to you and young Petsch!”

“Papa!” Sabine answered, as she clung to him with desperate fervor, “Are we safe? They have truly gone?”

“For now, they have,” Papa smiled at her, “And we are safe…”

Mama made that exasperated “tsk” sound. “They took and hung Clara Feller’s husband, and Mr. Blank – and ransacked Mr. Kirshner’s house looking for money…”

“Hush, Juliana,” Papa smiled but with a warning look in Mama’s direction, “You are frightening the children…”

That night, Sabine lay in bed, on the straw pallet in the loft over the parlor, with the kitten settling in at her feet and Mama’s threadbare quilt pulled over her– oh, how her feet and shins hurt still! She had a little less room now, that Marie Burg now shared the pallet with her and Auguste. A little light seeped into the loft, from downstairs, where Mama and Papa still sat in the breezeway under the lantern. Papa was still talking to Gustav, his voice level and comforting.

“’Beena?” Marie asked, her voice tearful and hesitant, “Do you think those men will come again?”

“No,” answered Sabine, firmly, “There is noting for you to fear, Marie. The Erlking has gone quite far away. Mama and Papa are just outside. We will keep you all quite safe from him.”

(This is based upon a true incident, which happened in the Texas Hill Country during the Civil War. The dreaded hanging band, a pro-Confederate lynch gang raided the settlement along Grape Creek, and killed four local men – but the rest of the settlement was warned by the two children, Peter and Sabine, just as described.)

Celia Hayes, Author

The Adelsverein Trilogy

www.celiahayes.com

Palm Sunday,1836

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The Mexican soldiers came to march them away from the old citadel on the seventh day after Colonel Fannin had surrendered under a white flag. His little command of volunteers and militia had fought doggedly and hopelessly for a day and a night, pinned down in the open just short of Coleto Creek, tormented beyond endurance by gunfire, thirst and grapeshot. It was the grapeshot that did it finally and Carl Becker, all of sixteen and a bit had stood in the ragged ranks of the Texas Volunteers, the Greys, Shackelford’s Red Rovers and the rest, next to his older brother Rudolph. They silently watched Colonel Fannin march out of the ragged square under a tattered white banner made from someone’s shirt.

“What will happen to us now, Rudi?” he asked at last. He spoke in German, the language they spoke at home among the family but one of the other German boys, Conrad Eigener, who stood next to the Becker brothers laughed curtly and answered,

“With luck, take away our weapons and send us packing… to New Orleans, I think. They mean to break up all the Anglo settlements and throw the Yankees out of Texas. General Santa Anna means business.”

“They said General Cos brought eight hundred sets of shackles with him last year, to drag us back to Mexico City in chains,” Rudi answered. Conrad spat,

“That worked out real well for him. We kicked him in the nuts at Bexar and he went running home to Mexico City, squealing like a girl.”

“That’s why Santa Anna came back, breathing fire and swearing vengeance,” Rudi answered, “He took it personal, Cos being his brother in law.”

“What will they do to us, then?” Carl asked again. From the Mexican lines came the sound of a bugle call, and Carl could just make out another white flag, and the brilliantly colored uniforms of the men under it, advancing to meet Colonel Fannin and Major Chadwick.

“Nothing like what the Comanche would do, little brother,” Rudi answered. Carl would remember always how he smiled, a flash of teeth in a face blackened with powder smoke. “They’re real soldiers; they have rules they have to follow. We lost, fair and square, but they have to remember it could be them next time, and treat with us as they might wish to be treated then.”

“All right, then,” Carl answered, reassured. Rudolph was five years older, and he was almost always right. At first it did seem like his brother and the other men were right. The men and boys who were still fit were ordered by their surviving officers to stack their weapons and form up. Carl let his old flintlock rifle go with a pang, but it was what Rudi said to do and Captain Pettus and Colonel Fannin. Rudi had been telling Carl what to do for all of his life, Captain Pettus for most of the last year of it. As far as Carl knew, they were always right. Well, Rudi was always right, the captain was mostly right, but Carl had reservations about their commander, even before the fight at Coleto Creek.

Rudi gave up his own musket in a good temper, but scowled so fiercely at the Mexican soldier who took away his great long pig-sticker of a knife that another soldier menaced him with a bayonet. Carl pulled his brother away, as Rudi cursed,

“Damn them! What’s a man supposed to do without a knife?”

“I still have mine,” Carl whispered to him, very low, “I saw what they were doing, and I slipped it into my boot-top without anyone noticing.”

“Quick thinking, little brother!” Rudi murmured, his good humor restored as they followed after their discouraged comrades in Captain Pettus’s Company, First Regiment Texas Volunteers. “We’ll make a real soldier of you, yet!”

‘If this is real soldiering,’ thought Carl rebelliously, ‘I’m not sure I think all that much of it.’ At sixteen and not quite grown to his height, Carl appeared at first glance to be amiable and not terribly quick on the uptake. He and his brother had same broad, fair Saxon features, but Carl’s heavy eyelids always made him look a bit sleepy, and so many people were deceived into thinking he was a dunce. He didn’t mind letting them think so mostly, for he had found considerable advantage in that. He spoke two languages well, understood a third and even knew some of the Indian signing talk, but he was a quiet youth and not much given to putting himself forward. He and Rudi had grown up, hunting together and otherwise running wild in the untamed country near the Becker homestead in a little settlement far up on the Colorado River. It seemed quite natural for them to go off soldiering together in the fall of 1835 even before the harvest was done, for the situation with the Mexican government had come to a head and the American colonists had run clear out of patience. It was Rudi’s idea, his little brother just followed along as he always had. Left to himself, Carl preferred to sit still and watch; the sun dappling through the ever-moving leaves, the flash of a white-wing dove starting up from the ground and he liked to watch people and sort out what they were thinking.

The Mexicans marched their prisoners back to Goliad; they did not mistreat them particularly, but they shut them up in the old garrison chapel building, the wounded and the fit all crammed together and left them to sleep all crowded on piles of straw which became more soiled and bug-infested by the day. It was also very dim inside the tall stone chapel, for the shutters were fastened down over the few windows. Sometimes the prisoners were let out into the little yard, during the day, but always strictly guarded. The two doctors in Fannin’s command, Doctor Morgan and Doctor Shackleford, were taken away to tend the Mexican wounded in another part of the presidio. After a week of this, Carl was thoroughly bored. He had never before in his life had to spend a week inside walls, crowded in with three hundred other men.

“Did you hear? They’ve brought Colonel Fannin back from Copano,” said Ben Hughes, excitedly. He was Captain Horton’s orderly, and possibly the only one of the prisoners younger than Carl. Carl was leaning against a sun-warmed wall in the chapel yard, trying to amuse himself playing cat’s cradle with a long piece of stout string and he was glad of the interruption.

“What was he doing there?” he asked, as he wadded up the string and put it in his trouser pocket. Ben answered,

“Arranging for safe passage, I expect.” He sighed a small and wistful sigh, “Say, I might be glad to see ol’ Kaintuck again. I reckon we’ll all have to make our way home again, if we’re paroled. Where will you an’ your brother go home to?”

“I dunno.” Carl thought carefully. “Our Pa took a grant, near Waterloo on the Colorado. We’ve always lived there, since Pa was friends with the Baron an’ came out from Pennsylvania. I don’t rightly know where we’d go, if the Mexicans kick us out of Texas.”

“There’s always someplace,” Ben said, cheerfully, and Carl thought about that. No, there wasn’t; not if you had labored over a place the way that Pa and the family had. It was in your blood, your place, and no one had the right to take it from you, especially not a pack of fancy-dressed soldiers without so much as a by-your-leave, or a bunch of foreigners who only wanted to squeeze out of the settlers what they could in taxes and such. Carl knew about taxes and working the land, about Indians raiding and following a plow with a rifle on your shoulder. He knew about faraway governments and having to scrape for the favor of men with gold braid on their coats, who could take away everything a man had worked a lifetime for with a wave of the hand. No. Such like that wasn’t right, and it had no place in Texas. It saddened Carl to think that Colonel Fannin and Colonel Bowie and them had tried their best but looked to have failed to keep that from happening.

In the early morning, the word was passed to the able-bodied prisoners; gather up those few things they had left to them and prepare to march. “Hurrah for home!” said they, in jubilation at seeing an end to dank and filthy imprisonment. The Becker brothers stuffed what little had not been lost in the fight, or looted from them into their pockets. Rudi had been saving bits of bread and hard-tack and they had both been able to hold on to their water bottles. Only Rudy’s was a real, regular Army water canteen. Carl made do with a dried gourd, with a length of rawhide strap around the narrow neck.

“After Coleto,” said Rudi determinedly, “I don’t ever want to be without a full canteen near me, ever again.” His little brother had his knife, still secreted in his boot-top, a long coil of string and a lump of flint and a steel tucked into one of the pockets of his roundabout jacket.

“Leastways, we can build ourselves a fire, tonight,” he observed, “They’re making us travel pretty light, aren’t they, Rudi?”

“So’s we can move all the faster,” Rudi answered, cheerfully. To Carl, it made perfect sense; Rudi was always right.

Their spirits rose as they filed out onto the familiar parade ground of the old fort, into fresh air and seeming freedom. There was sunshine just breaking through the morning fog, a bell ringing from the chapel tower and a great company of Mexican soldiers in their fine parade-ground uniforms forming the prisoners up, into three groups of about a hundred men each.

“What day is this?” asked one of the others in same column as the Becker brothers and young Ben. Rudi smiled and answered,

“Sunday, I think – Palm Sunday.” He looked at Carl and Ben, marching alongside towards the fortress gate, and began to sing.

“All glory, laud and honor

To thee, Redeemer King!

To whom the lips of children

Made sweet hosannas ring!

Thou art the King of Israel

Thou David’s royal son…”

Carl joined his treble voice to his brothers’ tenor, until someone farther back said,

“Is this a funeral, or something, boys? We’re going home!” and launched into “Come to the Bower!” The men around them laughed and joined in and Rudi set his arm around his brothers’ shoulder, saying,

“As long as we are together, we’ll be all right, little brother.”

Carl saw there were people at the gate, watching them march past; two well-dressed women and a little girl, with an officer and a sergeant attending them. The officer had more gold braid on his fine coat than any of the others, so Carl reckoned that he was one of their high officers. The younger woman looked very sad and distraught. She turned and spoke to the older woman and the officer and seemed to point at Carl and Ben. She looked as if she would weep and Carl wondered why. The gold-braid officer spoke to the sergeant, who bawled for the column to halt, and the officer came right up to the Becker brothers and Ben Hughes.

“You two… you are just boys, too young for this. Senora Alavez would have you stay. She insists.” At a nod from the officer, the Mexican sergeant took Ben by the arm and pulled him away from the column and would have taken Carl, but that Carl resisted, saying,

“He is my brother, Pa told us we should stay together.” And Rudi set his arm around Carl’s shoulders and glowered at the officer. He looked at them for a long moment, seeming to chew on his mustache, before he said again,

“It would be better for you to go with Senora Alavez, boy.”

“I’ll stay with my brother,” Carl said firmly. The officer looked sad and answered,

“If that is your choice. Go with your brother, boy. Go with God.”

He nodded curtly at the sergeant who bawled at the column to move again. The last sight Carl had of Ben was of him standing between the two women, watching after the marching column with a bewildered look on his young face. The officer looked as if he too were about to weep like the younger woman, and Carl wondered why.

They went out of the gate, and turned left, a ragged column, two or three abreast, with a single file of guards on either side. It seemed like a lot of guards; there had not been so many when they were marched back from Coleto Creek into the old citadel. The American volunteers and the Texians were jubilant, the guards grim and unsmiling. They would not look directly at the men they escorted, or meet their eyes. When he was not very much older Carl would know how that could be, but the boy that he still was on that Palm Sunday morning only noticed without wondering why.

“This is the road towards Victoria,” Rudi noted with satisfaction. “I recognize that brush fence, you can see the river though that gap. I guess they’re going to march us all to…”

There was a quick rattle of shouted Spanish, a command so quick that Carl didn’t comprehend it, and suddenly the file of Mexican soldiers on their left faced right and shouldered through the prisoners, falling into line with their fellows on the column’s right, who had faced about themselves, and raised their muskets.

To the end of his life, Carl remembered how very long the next moments seemed, as if time slowed to an eternity and suddenly every sight, smell and sensation was vivid and pure, etched in the crystal of memory. The smell of sweat and dirty clothing, of damp wool and wood smoke, the clear green odor of new leaves and turned earth, the clean scent of running water wafting up from the river. Cheerful voices and song, abruptly dying away… shock and sudden comprehension, musket-fire in a sudden cloud of black-powder smoke; Carl knew in a blinding flash why the pretty woman at the gate and the gold-braid officer with her looked so sad, why the Mexican soldiers wouldn’t look them in the eye.

Rudi turned towards him in that instant of comprehension, spun the gawky, sixteen year old Carl around, pulling him away from the Mexican soldiers, shoving him towards the gap in the brush fence. For just that moment, Rudi stood between the black eyes of the musket-barrels and his little brother, just as the world erupted in a hell of point-blank fire and a cloud of powder-smoke and shouting. He shouted

“Run, Carl! Make for the river, they’re…”

And at that moment, Rudi’s head exploded in a shower of blood and white bone, and his body fell lifeless as a sack of old clothes, falling as men screamed and groaned. A voice that Carl barely knew as his own was screaming too, screaming his brothers’ name, but he was already moving as Rudi commanded in his last breath, plunging through the gap in the brush fence and pelting across the meadow beyond, towards the line of green trees that marked the river.

The fence and the cloud of black-powder smoke screened him just long enough from the executioners. He fell down the steep and muddy river bank and lay gasping for a second, before scrabbling on hands and knees towards the water. He struggled to his feet in water that rose deeper and deeper around his legs until he flung himself into the current and let it take him, diving under and holding his breath until it felt as if his lungs would burst. He came to the surface and floated on his back, looking up at the sky, the blue Texas sky that Ma had always said was the exact color of his eyes.

He held very still, while the current drifted him around a bend and fetched him up by a thicket of rushes on the farther side. The river bank was steep there, impossible to climb, and a tree overhung it. He rolled over in the water and cautiously lifted his head. There was no one in sight, but there were Mexican soldiers shouting in Spanish, in the direction from which he had run. No luck climbing the bank without being seen, or swimming father down the river. The soldiers’ voices sounded mocking and harsh like the crows wheeling and calling in the sky. He wished now that he had thought to smooth over the marks he had made on the bank, opposite. Anyone following, with a bit of woodcraft in them would know at once that someone had come down the river bank and gone into the water. Carl crawled deep into the thicket, taking care to pull the rushes straight after himself, so no one would be able to see from across the river, or look down from the bank above and know that he had taken refuge there. He curled himself into as tight a ball as possible, knees to chin, soaking wet and covered in mire, sheltering in a hollow of black river-mud and rotting drift timber deep in the heart of the thicket. From there he could hear the regular crackle of musket-fire in the distance… no, not from where he had run from, but farther away towards the north and the road to Bexar.

The horror of realization chilled him, striking deeper in his bones than the chill of spring-cold river muck; three columns of Fannin’s men, three roads away from the citadel and three executions. His brother was dead and the other German boys, Captain Pettus and Lieutenant Grace and Sergeant James and all of them, shot down in a storm of shot and black-powder smoke by men who wouldn’t look them in the eyes as they led them away; Dead and dead and dead again, three hundred and some times over.

For all that pretty young Senora Alavez and the high officer with gold braid, knew of it and protested it or and were appalled… it was happening, happening even as he huddled in the reeds and listened. At that moment Carl Becker knew two things with absolute clarity. He would never put any of his faith in a man who wore a fancy uniform and he would never, ever again go into a fight where he did not absolutely trust the man who led him not to surrender.

And also, for the very first time in his sixteen years, there was no one there to tell him what to do. Carl huddled in that thicket of rushes for an entire day, as women came down to the bank opposite to wash clothes from which the water ran red while dragoons and foot-soldiers searched up and down both sides of the river, thrashing the thickets and prodding into the thick bushes with their lances, looking for him. He nerved himself to hold still, to stay as quiet as a deer fawn in the fragile fortress of the thicket, all the hours of that interminable Sunday. Towards the end of that day, he dozed and woke with a start, afraid that he had cried out, living again that awful moment when the Mexican muskets spat a storm of lead and black-powder smoke at Fannin’s men. By the end of that day, he had thought over very carefully what he must do next. He took his time, for Carl had very little experience of making decisions for himself. Rudi, Captain Pettus, his father – all those people had always told him what to do. But now he was entirely alone, no one to tell him.

When it became full dark, Carl moved as stealthily as he could, from the thicket, on limbs that were clumsy and cramped from staying still for so long. He stood in the shallows, wet and cold, listening to the quiet ripple of water, the sounds of night-birds and the faraway howling of those shy little prairie wolves. He smelled smoke on the air, mixed with the smell of something like bacon burning. But he could not hear the voices of the Mexican soldiers, or the noises made by something large and clumsy moving through the brush by the riverbank. He was safe for now and almost for the first time in his life, completely alone. Never mind, Carl reminded himself; he had a knife in his shoe-top and string to make a snare. He had the flint and steel in his coat pocket, the river and the stars to guide him north. North. North to home, if home was even still there, if he could elude the Mexican soldiers and raiding Indian parties, the Comanche and the Karankawa. If he could keep himself alive, all alone. Well, Carl Becker told himself, as he set off wading along the river’s shallow margin – he might yet do better at that than anyone else had done so far. Certainly he couldn’t do any worse.

(This short story is a version of the opening to “The Adelsverein Trilogy” – and based on the story of the Goliad Massacre, known as the “other Alamo”, the garrison of the citadel at Goliad. When General Santa Anna received word of their surrender, he gave orders for their execution, as pirates and marauders. Those orders were followed, with reluctance, although some were spared, or managed to escape in the confusion)

Celia Hayes,

Author – To Truckee’s Trail and The Adeslverein Trilogy

www.celiahayes.com