Mixcoac. Portal to the heavens. A gallows. Six trunks with a long, sturdy crossbeam drawing a thick line in the haze. Thirty nooses, snares pulling expectantly towards the underworld in hesitant dawn air on the crest of a bare hillock.
The first sunlight seeped into the Valley of Mexico, and Mixcoatl, the cloud serpent, donned his mask and steadied his net for game.
A mule bayed, puffs of steam spurting from its nostrils, and the muleteer clacked his whip. A wagon tugged with a jolt, and one of the deserters, their hands and feet bound, fell from a crude bench to its floor. The thick wooden doors of the stone warehouse at Tacubaya that had been their jailhouse and courtroom opened, and the convoy passed into daylight. Soldiers in sky-blue tunics shouldering feverishly polished muskets trudged dutifully alongside.
They clattered slowly past the church, its red dome worn like a crown over plain white walls. A shrivelled woman sat on the steps, dozing beneath a bright shawl, chickens crowded into a basket at her feet. In front of a sickly orange pulquería, a body was stretched in the gutter sleeping off the night’s bitter fermented sap. Beside the battered swinging doors, a gay painting of a couple in fine attire was pock-marked with holes from lead balls fired by truculent gunslingers.
The wagons rumbled along a rutted lane past huddled shanties of pine cleaved from the slopes surrounding Mexico City. The land slept, and their only witness was a scrawny dog sniffing the mud between curling agaves. They reached low buildings on the outskirts of Mixcoac then filled the plaza, cobbled from the stones of razed temples, with the rattle of wheels and hoofs. Violent bursts of bougainvillea sagged purple from walls of volcanic rock, catching the still curious eyes of men about to die. The condemned sighed in silence at the sight of the first rays of sunlight burnishing deep green leaves on their last day.
Brenton, hoar hair phosphorescent beneath his forage cap and stabbing from his grizzled chin, tugged at the reins of his mount. The American officer cantered to the head of the pathetic column then trotted back, glaring through the slits of fearless eyes with a hatred he preserved for repulsive blood. He stopped, and expectorated across a wheel, his phlegm stained brown from chewed tobacco. A more wretched band you would not find, caked in dirt and stripped of the treasonous overcoats of the deadly Mexican artillery. A miserable race the Irish, he thought, sharing the countenance of insolent disdain that betrayed a bastard origin. Traitors and peasants to a man. Eyes poked into ruddy, scarred faces, smashed noses, cracked and broken lips and jagged stubble sneered at his Protestant virtue. Stunted, unruly half-breeds with hunched shoulders and surly ways, ignorant of civilisation and with an unnatural thirst for liquor.
The morbid procession left the plaza through a gateway in a stone wall then snaked up the hillock through spiny clumps of cactus, shaking precariously on the gradient. Each wagon was edged awkwardly into position under the great beam, nooses dangling above the heads of the ragged prisoners.
Brenton was more familiar with the buck and gag and with hanging papish scum by their green thumbs. But it was the loop he had favoured to silence the squeals of squaws he had ravished in the Florida swamps and the slaves he had violated. He bawled at the guards to fix their bayonets and ordered the Irishmen to stand. The soldiers pricked them crudely to their feet, and the wagons swayed as they dressed necks with rope then manhandled the men roughly to face north-west with the rising sun to their backs.
There, in silence, the condemned began their tragic vigil, forced to watch a battle unfold. In the distance, bugles sounded. Thousands of ants milled back and forth at the foot of Grasshopper Hill.
Chapultepec, bastion of warriors transformed into butterflies. The only royal castle in the Americas reached up from the plain at a fuzz of clouds, perched solidly atop smooth rocks on the western approaches to the city, a natural, sturdy defence. Steep volcanic augite and white masonry crowning the cliffs shone brilliantly in the light. Puffs of smoke announced the boom of siege guns and mortars, pounding yet again this last redoubt. A Mexican tricolour, tiny in the distance, flapped above the parapet.
The heat rose and a small gathering of Mixcoac’s townsfolk formed at the base of the hillock, reluctant witnesses loyal to the foreigners who had fought for their honour.
Brenton rode back and forth, his field sword drawn and pointed at the scene of battle. He gurgled cheerfully. “You’ll stand to attention until our beloved flag triumphant rises to the heavens that you ungodly rascals will never reach. It’s Hell for you, boys!”
They remained silent, willing him harm with glares of disdainful bravado, yet pitifully aware of their plight.
Nuns scuttled across the plaza, a dispensation to abandon the cloister. They would pray for the condemned. They joined the swelling crowd, knelt before the gallows, and crossed themselves, supplicating Our Lady of Guadalupe in whispers.
A tall priest, a halo of bleached yellow hair glowing above a dusty cassock, glided with long strides across the cobblestones clutching a distraught child to his shoulder. He stroked her head with a hand as wide as a plate. She buried her face in his chest, her eyes shutting out the horror of the world. He held a hollow cheek lovingly against her blue-black head, trying to calm her sobbing.
The prisoners watched and listened to the war, occasionally turning awkwardly to glance down at the small crowd of onlookers and brave the barks of guards and prods of bayonets. They hoped that misgivings about the assault would prove prophetic. American casualties mounted at the outer walls and arched aqueduct at the foot of the rock as the Mexicans resisted, fuelled by the dread of the besieged patriot. Bodies littered the craggy feet of the escarpment, and cannons and snipers firing from the castle’s elegant balconies and oval windows plucked lives from troops among the cypress groves and boulders. Splinters of rock and brick, flailed from the castle walls by giant mortars, dismembered with deafening cracks the boughs of trees below. Scaling ladders readied in anticipation were scattered like kindling.
A strained cry momentarily broke the silence. A hoarse “Hooray for General Bravo” rang out, and the doomed men joined in the reckless chorus as best they could.
The girl was roused. She looked up from the shoulder of the priest, her woe giving way to curiosity. Now she saw the gallows, and the horrid sight of the weary men forced to stand as they awaited their fate. Flies circled and harassed the perspiring faces. Her eyes went along the line, measuring the stooping bodies until she reached a lean, graceful figure. There he was, hands tied behind a back held stiff, his auburn hair cropped crudely at his nape. She drew in her breath.
She jumped from the priest and he tried to restrain her, reaching for her shoulder, but she shook him off and wove through the crowd to the front then stared up, a witness at calvary.
At the castle walls, scaling ladders swung forward in arcs. Suddenly, it seemed like hundreds of blue voltigeurs were streaming up and over the parapets. Some fell under fire, others swarmed over crumpled bodies up ramps and stone stairways towards the gates and inner walls of the fortress. Round shot gave way to grape that ripped through the invaders as the defending Mexicans fought in panic at close quarters. Soon, the distant din of cheering hordes breaching their defences then violating the halls of Moctezuma drifted south, pricking the ears of Brenton’s charger. It snorted. It recognised the sound of victory.
A great sacrifice was being made yonder, as military cadets confronted veteran bayonets. The tall knight, a watchtower in the citadel of Chapultepec, wilted. Out of sight, a savage retreat was beaten towards the city by Bravo’s troops. Another night of tears in Tenochtitlan. The cadets, but children, entered history through a vainglorious final stand. The Mexican flag disappeared from its flagpole and Juan Bautista Pascacio Escutia y Martínez clasped the torn emblem, wrapped it around his noble frame, and threw himself to his death below. Warrior. Yaotl. Greatest of our heroes. Tlacelel. One who is loved. Tlazohtlaloni. Juan, John, Seán.
Soon, the ebb and flow of the waning battle would no longer measure the lives of the deserters watching from the hillock. Some mumbled prayers and muttered final, pathetic farewells to their comrades. Brenton turned, and pulled from under his tunic the crumpled execution order.
The priest knelt beside the child, still towering above her, and placed a hand gently on her tiny shoulder. He felt the delicate bones and the warmth of her soft skin, and examined her vigilant and fearful expression. He looked up at the line and recognised among the frightened faces men he had prayed with. Dreamers who had fled an island starved by an unforgiving master.
Again she pushed away his large hand and ran deftly past the guards. They chased her clumsily as she glided up the slope weaving left and right. The priest ran too, his calls unheard, “Conetl.” Child. “Tochtli.” Rabbit. They let him pass.
She halted and faced the men stood awkwardly in the wagons, oblivious to their agonised discomfort. They watched with joy and grief, uplifted at the childish gesture so mocking of their oppressor, but bereft at her lightness of living.
She moved along the line, observed in silent wonder, then stopped in the dust to face a tall, erect prisoner with muddy hair and beard, his head unbowed in the heat. She looked up at him in adoration.
“Tajtli, tajtsin.” Father, beloved father.
Aware of the commotion, but unprepared for further pain, he shut his eyes at the sound of her voice, sparse tears forcing their way from under noble eyelids to melt in the perspiration upon his cheeks.
“Iníon baistí, siuakomkonetl, iníon.” God-daughter, daughter. “Caithfidh tú imeacht anois.” You must leave now.
The soldiers caught up with her, and one clutched her shoulders, but she shook off his hands and stepped closer, digging her little feet into the dry ground. She clenched her tiny fists in anger, and stared at her guardian’s pained face. Her childish rage was itself a war.
“Athair, Lynch!” Father, Lynch! she shouted, stamping her feet desperately.
The soldiers stood back, as if in sudden realisation. The priest caught up and they stepped aside. He knelt beside the child, his expression bleak. Lynch opened his eyes slowly, calmly, and lowered his face. He smiled as best he could, and spoke softly.
“Téigh leis an sagart, tabharfaidh sé aire duit anois a leanbh.” Go with him. He will look after you now, child.
He glanced at the priest, who nodded gently then put his hands under the girl’s arms to lift her effortlessly. He held her there, both of them looking for the last time at Lynch’s kind face, then turned. As they descended, she kept Lynch’s gaze as long as she could, then buried herself in the old man’s neck.
“Athair,” she sobbed with birdlike breath. The crowd parted gloomily to let them pass.
Lynch strained to follow the priest’s black figure across the square.
“Slán,” Goodbye, he mouthed a hundred times before he could make them out no more. He turned his face to the sky, whimpering inconsolably.
The last, distant booms of cannon fire subsided as the bombardment was curtailed. American forces flooded forward. A din of charging men evaporated as suddenly as it had begun. The fray was at an end, and with it the lives of the San Patricios who had put green dreams of freedom before the red welts of officers’ canes and the blue barbs of their Protestant tongues.
Brenton turned in his saddle to mock the powerless. He projected a deep, chesty laugh across the hill with all the uncompromising joy of absolute victory.
In the distance, the smoke was lifting and the debris and ruin of war were becoming more clearly visible. Old Glory, a tiny stars and stripes, rose cautiously at first, then rapidly, up the flagpole above the castle’s main arched balcony. A cheer stretched across the open ground to executioner’s hill as the blue ranks erupted with huzzahs.
Brenton gripped the dull steel scabbard of his field officer’s sword and drew it slowly, prolonging the suspense, grinning broadly at the assembled crowd, his troops, and the condemned. It grated with a metallic whine as it slid from the sheath and its red knot swayed lasciviously.
Unpolished, stained, the curved blade glinted nonetheless.
The dragoon laughed again as he pointed the tip at a drummer waiting attentively for his signal. The drum rolled. Mixcoatl drew open his net.
Lynch was shortlisted in the 2021 Wexford Literary Festival: Colm Tóibín International Short Story Award