The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Then keep him safe," Starbuck said, "and keep yourself safe."

  "I ain't going to be killed," Lucifer said confidently. "Every corpse here thought that," Starbuck said grimly. Lucifer shook his head. "I ain't," he insisted. "I ate a Yankee grave." "You did what?"

  "I found a dead Yankee's grave," Lucifer admitted, "and I waited till midnight, then I ate a scrap of dirt from the grave. No Yankee can kill me now. My mother taught me that."

  Starbuck heard something pathetic in the last few words. "Where is your mother, Lucifer?" The boy shrugged. "She's alive," he said reluctantly. "Where?"

  The boy jerked his head, then shrugged. "She's alive." He waggled the useless trigger. "But they sold me out. Reckoned I was worth something, see?" He touched his skin. "I ain't real black. If I'd been real black they'd never have sold me, but they reckoned I could be a house slave." He shrugged. "I ran away."

  "So where is your mother?" Starbuck insisted.

  "Hell, she's probably sold by now. The master never kept the niggers he'd slept with, not usually. I don't know where she is." He said the last words angrily, as if to demonstrate that he did not want to talk about the subject any more.

  "And your mother taught you magic?" Starbuck asked. "It ain't magic," Lucifer insisted, still angry. "It's a way of staying alive. And it ain't for you." "Because I'm white?"

  "Alice Whittaker," Lucifer said suddenly, not looking at Starbuck. "That's her name. Ain't he a fine puppy?"

  "He's fine," Starbuck said. He wondered if he should ask more, but suspected that Lucifer had already revealed more than he wanted to. He leaned over and fondled Imp's ears and received a lick as a reward. "He's fine," he said again, "and so are you." He holstered his reloaded revolver and stood up. There was still sporadic firing higher up the wood, but he wanted to see what had happened to the formed troops who had been waiting on the Smoketown Road and so, warning Lucifer to stay where he was, he crept cautiously through the trees. He expected to find Yankee stragglers, but this part of the wood was almost empty. Two rebels limped past on their way to the doctors and a dead Pennsylvanian Bucktail lay against a tree with a look of surprise on his face, but otherwise the trees were deserted.

  Sergeant Rothwell was lying down at the edge of the wood where Starbuck had left him. There was blood on his back and Starbuck's first thought was that the man was dead, then he saw an arm move. He ran to the Sergeant's side and carefully rolled him over. Rothwell moaned. His teeth were chattering, his face was yellow, and his eyes closed. There was blood on his chest. "Rothwell!" Starbuck said.

  "In the back," Rothwell managed to say, then he stiffened and his body shook in a terrifying spasm. Another moan escaped his throat. "In the back," he said again, "but I never turned my back. Honest to God, I didn't turn." He was desperate to deny that his wound denoted cowardice. "Oh, Jesus, sweet Jesus," he said. He was crying from the pain. "Sweet Jesus."

  "You're going to be all right," Starbuck said.

  Rothwell caught hold of Starbuck's hand and gripped it hard. His breath was coming in short, shallow gasps. His teeth chattered again. "They shot me," he said.

  "I'll get you back to the doctor." Starbuck looked around for help. A dozen rebels were running north through the trees, but the deafening sound of the battle in the cornfield drowned out Starbuck's shout. The men ran on.

  "In the back," Rothwell said, then suddenly he screamed as the pain whipped through his body. The scream faded to a pathetic moan. He gulped in air and the breath scraped in his throat. "Becky," he said, and the tears rolled down the dirt and sweat on his face, "poor Becky."

  "Becky will be fine," Starbuck said helplessly, "so will you." He used his free hand to wipe the tears away. Roth-well's body heaved in a spasm and the tears came more freely. "It hurts," he said, "it hurts." He was a strong man, but now wept like a child and each breath came harder and harder. "Oh, Becky," he finally managed to say in a voice so feeble that Starbuck scarcely heard it. Rothwell was still alive, for his fingers were pressing on Starbuck's hand. "Pray," he said, then whimpered again.

  Starbuck said the Lord's prayer, but before he had reached the words "Thy kingdom come" the Sergeant died. His belly heaved up in a massive spasm and his mouth suddenly brimmed with blood that spilled down both cheeks. He shook his head, then slumped back still.

  Starbuck prized the dead fingers away from his hand. He was shaking himself, terrified by the horror of Rothwell's death, and when he looked up to stare across the fields where the Yankees had been formed he could not see because of the tears in his eyes. He cuffed the tears away and saw that the Yankees were still waiting at the far side of the two wide fields. Other Northerners were retreating toward those troops, pursued by rebel bullets. For the moment the Yankees had been hurled clean out of the East Woods, but not, it seemed, out of the cornfield, for Starbuck could still hear the full fury of rifle and cannon fire still thundering and cracking on the far side of the woods.

  He stood and slung his rifle. It was time to sort out the chaos, to find the survivors of his battalion and report to Swynyard. He walked through the trees and back across the Smoketown Road. A Yankee reeled in front of him— dazed, whimpering, and wearing a mask of blood through which his frightened eyes showed white. Two prisoners were being prodded toward the rear by a small man with a bristly beard and a smoothbore musket. Two squirrels, killed by shellfire, hung from the rebel's belt. "Dinner!" he called cheerfully to Starbuck, then pushed the two frightened Yankees onward. The wounded and dead lay in clumps where the fighting had been fiercest and every' where a sheen of gunsmoke hung between the trees like a hint of autumn mist. So many scraps of leaf had been blown from the trees by shells and bullets that the ground between the trunks was green as parkland. Starbuck, suddenly overcome with weariness and with despair for Roth-well's miserable death, leaned against a bullet-scarred trunk. Sweat trickled down his face.

  He was feeling in his pouch, hoping to find a cigar among the handful of remaining cartridges, when a familiar figure showed among the distant trees. There were a score of rebels in sight, most of them searching the dead for plunder and ammunition, but there was something peculiarly furtive about the plumpish figure who advanced through the trees with an elaborate caution, then suddenly saw something and darted to one side and knelt on the ground.

  Tumlin. God damn Billy Tumlin. Starbuck pushed away from the tree and stalked the big man. Tumlin glanced to left and right once in a while, but saw nothing to disturb him. He was stripping the blue coat from a Yankee corpse and was so intent on dragging the sleeves off the dead man's awkward arms that he did not know Starbuck was near him until the warm rifle barrel touched the back of his neck. Then he jumped in alarm.

  "You got a thing about coats, Billy?" Starbuck asked.

  "Coats?" Blythe managed to say as he stumbled backward against an elm trunk.

  "You're wearing a new one today. Ain't as small as your last one." Starbuck slung the rifle, then touched the blood patch on Tumlin's chest. "Got hit, Billy?"

  "Nothing serious," Blythe said. He wiped sweat off his face and offered Starbuck a grin.

  Starbuck did not return the smile. "So where have you been, Billy?"

  Tumlin shrugged. "Saw a doctor," he said.

  "He patched you up?"

  "Kind of," Blythe said.

  Starbuck frowned at the mess of blood on the gray coat. "Looks bad, Billy. Looks real bad. Man could die from that kind of chest shot."

  Blythe gave what he hoped was a brave smile. "I'll survive."

  "You sure?" Starbuck asked, then he punched the blood patch, punched it forcefully enough to push the heavy man back against the tree. Blythe winced at the blow, but he did not react like a man who had been hit on a fresh wound. "I hear you've been skulking in the graveyard, Billy," Starbuck said.

  "No," Blythe said unconvincingly.

  "You bastard," Starbuck said, suddenly overcome with a blinding anger, "you white-livered piece of shit." He punched Tumlin on the bloody patch again, and
this time the man did not even flinch. "That ain't a wound, Billy. It ain't even your jacket." Blythe said nothing and Starbuck felt a pang of pure hatred for a man who did not do his duty. "Was John Brown wearing a coat when he was hung?" he asked.

  Blythe licked his lips and glanced left and right, but there was no escape in sight. "John Brown?" he asked, confused.

  "You saw him hang, didn't you?"

  "Surely did," Blythe said.

  "You and the whore, right? And she was leaning out the window and you were leaning on top of her, ain't that right?"

  Blythe nodded nervously. "About the size of it," he said.

  "So tell me about it, Billy," Starbuck said.

  Blythe licked his dry lips again. He wondered if Starbuck had gone mad, but guessed he had to humor the fool whose face was so drawn and hard. "I told you," Blythe said, "we watched him swing on a gallows outside Wager's Hotel."

  "In Harper's Ferry?" Starbuck asked.

  Blythe nodded. "Saw it with my own eyes." He flinched as a shell crashed through the branches overhead and exploded further down the wood. Leaf scraps sifted down.

  Starbuck had not moved as the shell whipped overhead. "John Brown was hung in Charlestown," he said, "and that's a fair ways from Wager's Hotel, Billy." He took out his revolver. "So what other lies have you told, Billy?"

  Blythe glanced at the revolver and said nothing.

  Starbuck pulled back the revolver's hammer. "Take off the coat, Billy."

  "Take it off!" Starbuck shouted and rammed the revolver's muzzle up under Blythe's plump chin.

  Blythe hurriedly unbuckled his belt, let it drop, then pulled off the borrowed coat. The only blood on his shirt was the small stain that had rubbed off from the inside of the jacket.

  "Drop the coat, Billy," Starbuck said, grinding the foresight of the Adams into the bulging flesh. "You don't deserve to wear that coat. You ain't a man, Billy Tumlin, you're a coward. Drop the coat." Blythe let the coat fall and Starbuck pulled the revolver back and lowered its hammer, making the gun safe. Blythe looked relieved, but then Starbuck whipped the pistol's heavy barrel across Blythe's face to open a cut on Blythe's right cheekbone. "Now you're really wounded, Billy," Starbuck said. "And get the hell out of my sight. Go on, go!"

  Blythe stooped to retrieve his revolver, but Starbuck put his foot on the belt. "Without a weapon?" Blythe asked.

  "Go!" Starbuck shouted again and watched the heavy man blunder away.

  Starbuck picked up the revolver and walked in the other direction. "Lucifer!" He saw the boy leading his new dog. "Here! New gun for you." He tossed Tumlin's belt to the boy. "Now get out of here before a Yankee shoots you." He saw Truslow shouting at men to stop looting the dead and get themselves up to the wood's edge, then he heard something far worse. Drums and cheers. He turned and ran back to where Rothweli's body lay. Then swore.

  Because the Yankees were coming again.

  Billy Blythe was weeping as he worked his way back north through the woods. He was not weeping because of the cut on his face, but for shame at being humiliated by Starbuck. He imagined an exquisite revenge, but first he had to survive the horror of this battle and get back where he belonged—in the North.

  He found the body he had been stripping of its jacket and, after checking that Starbuck was not in sight, he dragged the coat free. He looked for his revolver, but it was gone. He cursed, then pulled on the bloody gray coat, which still lay beside the elm tree. He bundled the blue jacket under his arm, then, touching his pants pocket to make sure his precious United States commission was still safe, went on northward. Men were running past him, going to the wood's eastern margin, where a new rattle of rifle fire was filling the trees with sound. They ignored Billy Blythe, taking him for another wounded man.

  He went as far north as he dared and there discovered what he had been seeking. He found a log pile, and behind it were three Northern bodies, still warm, all of them bloody and all of them dead. Blythe crouched, peeled off the gray coat and pulled on the blue, then wriggled down beside the logs and heaved the three corpses on top of him. He knew the Yankees were attacking again, and this time, he reckoned, the rebels would not stand. Blythe believed the battle was turning, and it was time for him to turn with it. A shell whipcracked through the trees overhead, making him whimper, but then at last he was deep in the leaf mold beside the logs and protected by the warm bodies above. He lay still, feeling a dead man's blood trickle onto his back. He wished he could repay Starbuck for that blow across the face, but guessed Starbuck would not be alive to take the repayment. He hoped Starbuck's death was agonizing, and that thought consoled him as he waited under the corpses for rescue.

  Billy Blythe had survived.

  Belvedere Delaney was making himself useful. Lee had gone to the higher ground, but he had not invited Delaney to accompany him and so Delaney had searched for his servant, George, thinking it was time for the two of them to begin preparing for a tactful withdrawal. Delaney had discovered George carrying pails of water to the wounded men waiting for the surgeons in the garden of a house just north of the village. These men were the fortunate wounded, the handful that had been brought down from the fighting to the comparative peace in the rebel rear. Most of these men were victims of Yankee shells, for the men with bullet wounds were too far forward to be fetched back by the handful of ambulance wagons and those men would suffer where they lay, but these men were receiving the best care the Confederate army possessed. The worst afflicted could not be cared for at all because the surgeons' efforts were being saved for the men who stood a chance of survival. Some ether was available and the lucky few were thus anesthetized before the saws and knives slashed at their broken legs, but most men were given a slug of brandy, a leather gag to bite on, then told to play the man, be quiet, and lie still. Orderlies held them firm on the table while a surgeon in a blood-soaked apron sliced into the mangled flesh.

  Delaney's first instinct was to shy away from the horror, but an overwhelming pang of pity made him stay. He carried cups of water to wounded men, then held their heads up as they sipped. One man went into spasm and bit the cup's rim so hard that the china shattered. Delaney held another man's hand as he died. He wiped sweat from the forehead of an officer with bandaged eyes who would never see again. Six or seven women from the village were helping with the wounded and one of them was defiantly wearing a small Stars and Stripes pinned to her apron as she moved among the blood and vomit and stench of the garden. George crouched beside a South Carolina sergeant and tried to staunch the blood that kept haemorrhaging from a crudely bandaged slash at his waist. The man was dying and wanted reassurance that the battle was being won, and with it the war, and George kept saying over and over in a soothing voice that the rebels were charging forward, that the Yankees were falling back, and that victory was imminent. "Praise the Lord," the Sergeant said, then died.

  One man pleaded with Delaney to find his wife's daguerreotype at the bottom of his cartridge pouch. Delaney pulled out the rounds and there, under them all, was the precious scrap of copper sheet wrapped in a piece of chintz. The woman looked heavy-jawed and dull-eyed, but just glimpsing her face gave the dying man peace. "You'll write her, sir?" he asked Delaney.

  "I will."

  "Dorcas Bridges," the man said, "Dearborn Street in Mobile. Tell her I never did stop loving her. You going to write that down, sir?"

  "You're going to be all right," Delaney tried to reassure the man.

  "I'm going to be just fine, sir. Before this day's through, sir, I'll be with my Lord and Savior, but Dorcas now, she's got to manage without me. You will write to her, sir?"

  "I'll write." Delaney had a stub of pencil and carefully wrote Dorcas's address on a scrap of newspaper.

  Delaney collected a dozen other names and addresses and promised to write to them all. He would write, too, and he would say the same thing in each letter, that their husbands or sons had died bravely and without pain. The truth was that they had all died in horrid pain. The lucky
lost consciousness, but the unlucky felt the agony of their wounds right till the last. At the rear of the house, where an herb garden grew, a pile of amputated arms and legs grew higher. A small child watched the pile with wide eyes, thumb in her mouth.

  While on the high ground the guns went on and on.

  Starbuck found the remnants of Potter's company still miraculously clinging together. They were close to Rothwell's body, lining the edge of the East Woods and firing toward the Yankees who marched south. A tatterdemalion mix of men were in the rebel line. There were Georgians, Texans, Virginians, Alabamians, and nearly all had lost touch with their officers, but were simply joining the nearest rebel line and fighting on. The noise in the wood was deafening. The Yankees had brought up new guns that were banging case shot into the trees, there were Northern skirmishers behind the limestone outcrops in the plowed fields, and all the while the fight in the cornfield was swelling into its old fury.

  The Yankees were advancing in a column of companies, making themselves a tempting target for the rebel riflemen. "I wish we had cannon," Potter shouted to Starbuck, then pulled his trigger. Truslow fired steadily and grimly, each bullet thumping into the mass of blue uniforms that kept coming forward, though the closer the attack came to the trees, the more chaos was ripped into its leading ranks. Colonel Maitland had come into the woods, where he was swinging his sword and shouting drunkenly to kill the swine. Swynyard came running south through the wood and knelt beside Starbuck at the edge of the trees. He waited till Starbuck had fired. "They're in the woods again," Swynyard shouted, pointing north.

  "How many?"

  "Thousands!"

  "Shit," Starbuck said, then poured powder into his barrel, spat in the bullet, picked up his ramrod, and shoved it down hard. His right arm was tired and his right shoulder one agonizing bruise from the gun's recoil. "Who's holding them?" he asked Swynyard.

  "No one."

  "Jesus," Starbuck swore again. He waited for the smoke to clear and suddenly, right in front of him, he saw a