Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  “We here will be together then, all of us, to make that final stand.”

  He looked around the tent.

  “I cannot promise you victory, but I can promise you a near-run thing, and a battle unlike any this world has ever seen, the Merki hungry and desperate, and we as strong as we shall ever be. And when it is done, if we are victorious we will take this land back again rather than have our burned and cracked bones scattered across it. That is what I offer you; that is why we will not stand here.”

  Michael hesitated, looking straight at Mikhail.

  He lowered his head.

  “I am yours to command, Colonel Keane.”

  A growl of approval rose up from the men.

  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

  Andrew looked over to Gregory, the young Rus student of Shakespeare, and now chief of staff for what was left of Third Corps. Gregory’s eyes shone brightly with emotion.

  Andrew patted Mikhail on the shoulder and went back to the podium. He had given the hard message, and they would follow. He looked over at Kal, who begrudgingly nodded his approval, though Andrew knew that his old friend was filled with anguish to hear that this time they were leaving Rus behind, most likely forever.

  “John, would you go over the plan of withdrawal?” Andrew asked.

  John Mina came up to stand beside him.

  Andrew looked about once more at those who were so eager to follow him and then raised his gaze to the battle standards hanging from the canvas ceiling above him. The shot-torn standards of four of the corps were above him, clustered around each corps flag the standards and guidons of division and brigade commands. The standard of Third Corps was new, that of its first and second divisions missing. He pushed the thought away as his gaze shifted to the flag of the Army of the Republics, a golden eagle emblazoned on a navy-blue field, a gold star above each shoulder, flanked on either side by the faded stars and stripes and state regimental flags of the 35th Maine and 44th New York Light Artillery. It was as if all the ghosts now hovered above them.

  He looked back at the flesh and blood in the room, most of them all so young, a young army made from scratch, a commander considered old if he was forty, as I now am, Andrew realized.

  He looked at the men and wordlessly raised his hand in a salute, those before him coming to attention and saluting in reply. Without another word he turned and left the tent.

  Though the sides of the tent had been open, it had still felt too stuffy, and he was glad to get back out into the open air. In the background he could hear John Mina going into the details of the withdrawal— train schedules, rendezvous points, emergency fallbacks. He walked away, starting across the rail yard, barely acknowledging the salutes of the sentries who had been posted in a perimeter around the tent. Crossing over the main rail line, he started up the slope of the White Hills, skirting wide around a brigade encampment area, not willing to face all the rituals that a supreme commander would have to go through to get from one end of the camp to the other. From the corner of his eye he saw a young Roum captain standing next to a sentry who had summoned the officer. The two looked relieved that Andrew had gone in the opposite direction. He smiled to himself, remembering a similar moment shortly after Grant had taken command. Grant had gone on an unannounced early-evening tour, turning left to visit their sister regiment, the 80th New York. He had laughed to hear the mad scramble, while thanking God it had not been his own unit so rousted out. He was in no mood to subject others to that type of torture.

  He continued up the slope, weaving through a line of abatis, stepping carefully around trap pits, still marked with stakes, which would be pulled up when the Merki finally came. The lines of entrenchments and breastworks were empty, the men in camps preparing their dinners, the scent of frying fatback wafting on the breeze, mingled with wood smoke and the smell of brewing sassafras tea.

  The smell triggered pleasant memories, the memories of over a thousand nights camped in the field, on the march, or in winter quarters. Cooking fires were winking up from the encampments, with the stilling of the early-evening breeze the smoke curling straight up into the dark blue sky. To the west the sun was setting, a thin crescent of a moon dropping down behind it, the other moon already gone, not to appear until the hour before dawn.

  Finding a stump of a tree, he settled down against it and looked out over the fields. The army was spread out along the hills, camps arranged, those lucky enough to have tents pitching them in neat company rows, the other units making do with pine bough lean-tos. Distant laughter carried in the still air, sounding sharp and clear, songs floating, an unusual minor-key ballad of the Roum, and an old familiar song in Rus. The English words drifted in his thoughts as he followed along: “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” he hummed along quietly.

  It suddenly reminded him of a night like this, the week before Chancellorsville. The two armies, north and south, were encamped, facing each other on the Rappahannock River. It had started out simple enough, a group of rebs singing a tune, some Union sentries on the other side of the river joining in. Pretty soon thousands of soldiers from the two sides had drifted down to the riverbank, leaving their rifles behind in an impromptu truce, serenading each other in turn, a rebel “Dixie” to a union “Battle Hymn.” Back and forth they had sung through evening, the sun going down, the stars coming out, Orion on its last days of spring hanging low in the western sky, chasing the twilight.

  They were no longer enemies, they were away from home, boys of a common faith, once of a common country, caught in a drama of flags and drums and blood, who for this night had harkened back to a village green or a church picnic, singing the old songs together again.

  And then the tattoo had sounded, the call to return to quarters before the final whispering of taps. The two sides started to break up, and then from the southern shore a clear high tenor had started, singing in the first line. In an instant, in the thousands they had joined together, voices from both sides of the river joining together.

  “Be it ever so humble…”

  Hardly a voice finished the song, silent tears choking the voices off, men lowering their heads, weeping for home, for lost friends, for peace. In the darkness the song drifted into silence and they turned awayfrom each other to return to their camps. A week later, thirty thousand of them were dead or wounded in the woods of Chancellorsville.

  He found his eyes clouded from the memory of that moment, the most poignant of the war. He heard a rustling. Startled, and a bit ashamed, he looked up, quickly wiping his eyes as Kal came up out of the gathering shadows.

  “Just remembering,” he said quietly.

  Kal, smiling, nodded in understanding and sat down beside him.

  “Peaceful evening,” Kal said, leaning back against the stump, taking off his hat and wiping his brow. His shoulder touched against Andrew’s, and the two sat in silence for several minutes looking out over the encampments, the fields, the purple sky of sunset.

  “I can see how a soldier can come to love these…moments,” Kal said. “It’s so peaceful now, the work of day finished, the boys singing, food cooking.”

  He looked about the valley twinkling with firelight.

  “It's a good moment. Hard to believe somehow.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh…” The old peasant sighed. “Difficult to explain. You can feel it on the wind, their young pride, their eagerness to do well, their belief in all of this. I remember us so different, when I was their age. We were slaves, laboring in the fields, the boyars and the church keeping us in fear, the dreaded whisper of the approaching Tugars. I remember when they first came.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “I lost my first love, Anastasia. She was taken for their moon festival.

  “I loved her,” and his voice tightened. “You know, that was one of the reasons I so wanted to fight when you first came to us and I saw the chance. I feared my Tanya would be taken the same way.”

  Andrew
nodded, thinking of his own daughter.

  “We fight for ourselves when young, then we fight for our children,” he said quietly.

  “The young. That’s what they are, an army of boys.”

  “My army back home was the same,” Andrew said. “Boys who were men at eighteen.”

  He leaned back and looked up at the first stars of evening. “ ‘The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation.’ ”

  Kal looked over at him and smiled. “Lincoln. I remember Vincent telling me that, back near the beginning when he was recovering from his escape from Novrod and was in my cabin.”

  “I’m worried about that boy,” Andrew said, unable to say more, to admit the guilt he felt for so using Vincent, making him into a superlative general and destroying him at the same time.

  “So am I.” Kal sighed. “I don’t think the marriage with my daughter will last if he stays that way. She still loves him, always will, but she cannot live with a soul of ice who drinks himself into oblivion night after night.”

  “You’re speaking as if we have a future,” Andrew said, forcing a smile and looking over at his old friend.

  “I forget myself sometimes,” Kal replied. “I dream that this war is finished, that we’ve won, that life goes on.”

  “Hard to imagine somehow. I’ve been at it for eight years. Before we came here, through the tunnel of light, I figured in another six months my old war would be finished. The Confederacy was on its last legs.”

  “And you’d have gone home to your Maine?”

  Andrew sighed. Since coming here he had imagined that path. Perhaps Kathleen and he would have come together even back on earth. He would have returned to Bowdoin with her, picked up college teaching again, raised a family on his professor’s salary, and quietly slipped into middle age, saber hanging over the mantel, hair becoming gray, telling his children of his war, marching a bit stiffly in Fourth of July parades in Brunswick, Maine, and growing old in peace.

  But would he ever have been happy? He remembered a friend of his from the 20th Massachusetts who had finally quit the army after one wound too many to body and soul. How one night he had so completely summed it all up. “We have shared the incommunicable experience of war,” he had said. “In our youths our hearts were touched with fire.”

  There had been nearly five more years of it now. It was as much his life as breathing, eating, and, God forgive the comparison, even making love with Kathleen in the stillness before dawn.

  “In a way you do love it all, don’t you, Andrew?”

  Andrew could only nod his head.

  “I hate it,” Kal whispered. “That’s the difference. I’m sick to death of army camps, of looking at friends, their sons, standing stiffly in line, trying to look so brave. I almost wish I could just be a peasant again, singing some asinine ballad for my lord Ivor, the old drunken bully. The Tugars would be gone now for three years. Life would have gone on. That’s the difference between soldiers and peasants. I look at these boys and know that you’ve made them into something else. They’ll never be peasants again, and somehow that makes me sad. They’ve learned how to kill.”

  “And Tanya might be nothing but blackened bones.”

  Kal looked over angrily at Andrew.

  “She will be nevertheless.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  Kal lowered his head.

  “I try not to,” he whispered. “Two months ago, the morning after we heard about Hans, I told you that we’ll live or die by your decisions.”

  “I remember,” Andrew whispered, ashamed in a way that he had so thoroughly lost heart in everything on that shocking morning of defeat. He was still tormented by doubts, but in the last thirty days he had mastered his nerves again, knowing he had to if he was going to breathe any defiance back into an army, an entire race, that had been so thoroughly shaken by the first round of defeats and the loss of their country.

  “We’ve lost our land,” Kal said, and his voice was thick with pain. “To me, to the peasant, that is everything, his very soul. The boyars owned it all, but it was we who worked it, who brought life out of it. Not even the Tugars or the Merki can do that. They come and go, the name of the boyars changes from generation to generation, but the peasant is eternal. As long as he is on his land.” He leaned back, looking up into the night sky.

  “Half of all the Rus are dead now. Most of my friends are dead, and the rest are in the army, ready to die in another five days when the Merki finally get here.”

  “They’ll not die in five days,” Andrew said sharply.

  “They’ll die inside when they leave here forever.”

  “Damn you, Kal, do you want to lose?”

  Kal looked over at him.

  “Didn’t you hear what I was saying down there? This land is nothing—Suzdal, all of it. All that counts now is two things. The factories, to make more weapons—and for the moment they’re safe to the east,” and he nodded toward the flickering fires. “And the army.

  “That is what Vuka now has to defeat. He can occupy this entire damn world, but as long as the army exists and the tools for it to fight with are made, we still have a hope of winning.”

  “At what cost?”

  “You made your choice back in the beginning,” Andrew said coldly, his voice almost accusing. “On the night we were voting to decide whether to stay in Rus or to flee before the Tugars came, you started the peasant revolt in Suzdal.”

  Kal shifted uneasily beneath Andrew’s gaze.

  “My men voted then—they voted to come to your rescue and overthrow the boyars. You forced our hand. More than two hundred of those men who rushed to Suzdal that night are dead now, and most of the rest are scarred inside and out by what’s happened since.

  “But by God you are free. And better to die free than to live like the cattle you were.”

  He had chosen his word deliberately, and it stung. He could see Kal flinch at the word that no one now used, so loathsome were its connotations.

  Low to the west, a circle of kerosene lamps flickered to life, marking the landing field for the aerosteamer that was coming back in to land, the evening patrol finished. The two watched intently as the shadowy bulk of the flying machine circled in and its ground crew secured its nose to the mast and then struggled with its bulk to tow it back into its hangar. From behind them a train whistle sounded in the distance, low and mournful, the engine coming through the gap in the White Hills, a thin plume of sparks marking its passage.

  The night sounds were starting, crickets chirping, an owl hooting, a ghostly flutter of wings, while the silent flicking of fireflies blinked across the hillside, matching the campfires which illuminated the hills for miles around.

  “When this cruel war is over…”

  The voices echoed, mingling with other songs.

  “Oh Perm, hear us now at eventide…”

  “Bring the old bugle, boys, we’ll sing another song…”

  “There was a boyar’s daughter, a lass of golden hair…”

  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…”

  The voices mingled together, the dozens of songs drifting, joining together into one harmony of living at the edge of war’s destruction.

  Kal stood up, hat in hand, listening to the voices which floated about them. Overhead the Great Wheel stood high in the sky, filling the heavens with light. The ground about them glowed with campfires, diffused now by the beginning of a soft milky ground fog that seemed to rise ghostlike from the earth.

  Andrew stood up to join him, soaking in the life around him, feeling it in his heart, in his soul.

  He knew what would happen tomorrow as he looked westward, imagining the nightmare two hundred miles away. Tomorrow they would bury the Qar Qarth, the one he had killed himself as surely as if he had pulled the trigger. He knew the horror of what would happen there, and he could feel the terror of the hundred thousand or more who tonight would be looking at this
same sky, knowing that this would be the last night they would ever see such a sight.

  That thought had come to him more than once, the cold sense that tomorrow he most likely would be dead, and that the world would continue on without him.

  Tomorrow. God forgive me what happens tomorrow, he thought. He knew that he would not sleep tonight thinking about it, their fear reaching across all these miles to touch his heart.

  “Perm help them,” Kal whispered, and Andrew knew that Kal had been thinking the same thing.

  “And help us after tomorrow,” Andrew replied. “Let their deaths at least mean something for the future.”

  “Small comfort for the dying.”

  Andrew found he could not reply.

  He tried to push the nightmare away, the massacre that the Merki would perform on their prisoners to water the grave of Jubadi. He looked back to his army, to his men, and tried to draw comfort from them, their innocence, their life.

  A haunting tune drifted to him. Another old song from before, carried to this world, words changed to fit here… “Shenandoah.”

  He blinked back the tears as he listened.

  “Oh gentle Neiper, I long to see you.

  Roll away, you rolling river…”

  The song leapt from campfire to campfire, the other songs drifting away, thousands of voicing joining into one.

  “Oh gentle Neiper, I long to see you…

  Away, I’m bound away,”

  The night on the Rappahannock, and then a week later…

  He lowered his head.

  “Let’s go back, my friend,” Andrew whispered.

  “Kesus help us,” Kal sighed, putting his hat back on and looking up at Andrew. “I need your strength, Andrew.”

  “And I, Mr. President, need yours,” Andrew said in reply.