The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  “He’s as settled as he’s going to be,” Caudell said to Mollie. “Let’s get moving.”

  But before they could leave, something in Benny Lang’s pocket let out a flatulent burst of noise and then words: “Report your position and status, Lang. Over.”

  Nate’s rifle came up again. “What the devil is that?”

  “It’s called a radio,” the Rivington man answered. “Think of it as a talking telegraph without wires. May I answer?”

  Curiosity and caution fought within Caudell. Curiosity won, barely. “Go ahead, but if you betray us, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” He jerked the AK-47 to emphasize his words.

  “Right.” Lang eyed the rifle’s muzzle with respect. He took out something a little smaller than a low-cut shoe, extended a telescoping metal rod from one end, spoke into the other: “Lang here. I am wounded and captured. Out.”

  “You can talk with your people on that—radio, did you say?—any time you want, can’t you?” Caudell asked. When the Rivington man nodded, Nate held out a hand. “Give it here.”

  Lang scowled. Instead of obeying, he smashed the radio against a good-sized rock, as hard as he could. Pieces flew in every direction. He said, “Do what you want with me. I won’t let you spy on us.” Caudell’s blood had cooled. After a moment’s anger, he reluctantly lowered his rifle. If he’d been in the Rivington man’s place, he hoped he’d have had the courage to do as Lang had.

  Mollie thought of something else: “You’ve had these radio things all along, haven’t you? Ever since you came here?”

  Benny Lang nodded again. Caudell saw what Mollie was driving at.” And you never let on, did you? Having these things would have helped us almost as much as our repeaters, I reckon. But you never let on. Why not?”

  “If we’d needed to badly enough, I think we would have,” the Rivington man answered. “But we always thought it was a good idea to keep a few secrets of our own. You play poker?”

  “Yes,” Nate said.

  “Then think of them as an ace in the hole.”

  “Fat lot of good they did you.” Caudell took a couple of steps toward the crackle of gunfire ahead. Mollie started to follow.

  Benny Lang grimaced when he saw that. “You be careful, Moll. Bullets have no chivalry.”

  “Found that out at Gettysburg,” she told him. “I hope you make it, I do.” But after that, she quickly turned back to Caudell. “I’m ready, Nate.” She left Lang without looking behind her.

  As they pushed on, Caudell said, “So I’m your intended, am I?” He thought he kept his voice light.

  It must not have been light enough; Mollie turned and looked at him through frightened eyes. “Well, ain’t you?”

  He wondered how many battlefields had known arguments like this one. Precious few, he thought. Then he realized he had to answer Mollie. “Yup, reckon I am,” he said, “long as we both come out of this alive.”

  Her face glowed with that special shine that could make her beautiful, even if she was not particularly pretty. Seeing her expression, Caudell felt himself grinning, too. Now that the words were said, he found he rather liked the idea of being an intended; it gave him a feeling of purpose conspicuously missing from combat.

  But he’d said other words as well, and coming out of the fight alive was by no means guaranteed, for him or for Mollie. The woods ended so abruptly that he had to bring himself up short to keep from blundering into open country. Swearing at himself, he peered from behind a tree at the estate ahead.

  The colonnaded big house, with wings spreading out to either side, would not have shamed any successful planter in the state. The rows of clapboard slave cabins also argued for extravagant prosperity. But Caudell scratched his head. The slaves had their garden plots, and there was a barn for livestock, but where were the broad acres of corn or cotton or tobacco needed to support such a grand estate?

  When he asked that aloud, Mollie said, “The Rivington men ain’t all planters, Nate, but they all live like they was. Why not? They got the gold for it, remember, maybe from sellin’ all our rifles to the gov’ment.”

  “Maybe,” Caudell said, though vivid memory reminded him the Confederate government had been a lot longer on promises than hard cash in 1864. But however they came by it, gold the Rivington men certainly had; he could almost feel the sweet heaviness of the one-ounce coins he’d got from the Rivington bank just after war’s end.

  He shrugged: one more answer he’d never know. How the Rivington men got their money didn’t matter, not in the middle of a fight. What did matter was that for the moment, anyway, no one was shooting from the big house. Caudell rubbed his chin. The nearest slave hut was hardly more than fifty yards away. He pointed toward it. Mollie nodded. Nate dashed forward, bent at the waist to make as small a target as possible. He dove behind the hut, fetched up against it with a thump. As soon as he was safe, Mollie sprinted up beside him.

  They lay there panting for a few seconds, then got to their feet—they still stooped, for the roof was too low to offer much cover—and sidled around toward the front of the cabin. They almost ran into a tall, skinny Negro man hurrying the other way—and almost killed him, too, for Caudell’s heart leaped into his mouth and his finger tightened on the trigger of his rifle. By Mollie’s gasp, the unexpected meeting frightened her just as badly.

  If they were frightened, the slave was terrified. He jumped backwards, screaming like a woman, and threw his hands high over his head. “Don’ shoot me!” he squealed. “Don’ shoot poor ol’ raggedy Shadrach who ain’t done you no harm!” Then he seemed to see the uniforms Caudell and Mollie were wearing, instead of merely the AK-47s they carried. His eyes widened till they looked like splashes of whitewash on his black face. “Lawd God,” he said, “you ain’t them devils what owns us? You gummint sojers?”

  “That’s right,” Caudell said, thinking that raggedy was a word that fit Shadrach like a second skin. Plenty of his first skin was plain to see, for his gray cotton jacket and trousers were little more than rags. By the ladder of ribs thus exposed, Caudell guessed he was fed no better than he was clothed.

  Now his eyes got wider still; Caudell hadn’t thought they could. “Gummint sojers,” the Negro repeated wonderingly. He capered like a stick puppet, then leaped forward to fold Caudell and Mollie into a bony, rank embrace. “I’s powerful glad to see you gentlemens, ‘deed I is. You kill every one o’ them devils in green, you hear me? Kill ‘em daid! Every Rivington nigger there is ‘ll bless you fo’ it.”

  Caudell blinked; he was not used to this kind of ecstatic greeting from a slave. During the Second American Revolution, Negroes had run away from Confederate armies, not toward them. He wondered again what sort of horrors the Rivington men worked on their blacks, though Shadrach’s condition gave him a clue. But that, for the moment, was by the way. He pointed toward the big house. “Any Rivington men holed up in there?”

  “No, suh,” Shadrach said positively. “The massa, he off fightin’ ‘gainst you folks. Couple other devils run by here a while back”—he gestured vaguely—”but they don’ stop. You hunt ‘em down, suh, hunt ‘em down if’n you has to use dogs. Every nigger here, he never complain about nothin’ no mo’, not if’n you gets ‘em all. You give us guns, we shoots ‘em our own selves.”

  “I believe you,” Caudell said. He did, too, where before the war he would have laughed at the idea that Negroes might make soldiers (before the war, of course, no Negro would have been so suicidally foolhardy as to ask one white man for arms to use against another).

  “Marse Robert, he gwine set the niggers free like we hear tell?” Shadrach asked.

  “A little at a time, yes,” Caudell said, which was plenty to set the slave dancing again.

  “If that house is empty, we got to get going,” Mollie said. Caudell nodded. He glanced back as he trotted away. Shadrach was still capering beside the mean little slave cabins. A couple of women, gaudy in brightly striped skirts and wearing red handkerchiefs on their heads, st
epped out of their huts. Shadrach pointed at Caudell and Mollie, said something. The women screeched for joy and started dancing, too. One of them was big with child. Hurrying past the big house, Caudell wondered who had put that child in her.

  A few hundreds yards past the clearing, fighting picked up. The coughing snarl of an endless repeater brought Caudell to a respectful halt. Off to the right, he heard Nathan Bedford Forrest yelling, “I see the dirty son of a bitch! We’ll git him—he ain’t dug his self in yet.”

  Sure enough, after a minute or so the Rivington repeater fell silent and rebel yells rang out in triumph. Caudell and Mollie moved forward again, past the dead gunner. He had sited his weapon well—say what you would of them, the Rivington men were no mean soldiers—but in this chaotic fighting had lacked time to use the spade. Now he also lacked most of his face.

  Mollie and Caudell came up to another palatial mansion, this one also flanked by slave huts all the shabbier in comparison to the big house. Mollie frowned; after some little hesitation, she said, “That there’s Benny Lang’s place.”

  “Is it?” Caudell’s voice was as neutral as he could make it. He paused for thought, finally found something safe to add: “He never seemed to notice his book was missing.”

  “You’re right,” Mollie said. “Reckon with the war over and all, he didn’t need to read about it no more.” Caudell chewed on that a few seconds before he nodded. As Lang himself had said, everything—the war included—went the Rivington men’s way until Lee became President of the Confederacy. And when things went badly afterwards…”I think you put all this in train when you took that book.”

  “Wasn’t all me, Nate Caudell,” she said, sounding almost angry. “You reckon I’d’ve ever thought of anything as crazy as goin’ up to Marse Robert by my lonesome? Not likely!”

  “Maybe not,” he admitted. “I won’t lose sleep over my part, though. The way I look at it is like this: If the Rivington men are the sort of people who could do something like the Richmond Massacre, they aren’t the sort of people who ought to be near the top of the heap. They would have done something else just as bad sooner or later, with us or without us. They need putting down, and we’re just the ones who happen to be doing the job.”

  “Might could be you’re right,” Mollie said thoughtfully, and, after a moment, “Reckon maybe you are. You got a good way of lookin’ at things, Nate.”

  “Most important thing I want to look at now is the both of us getting through this alive…intended.” The way Mollie’s face kindled made Caudell glad he’d tacked on the last word.

  They went by or near several more big new houses; the Rivington men had built far back into the woods from what once was the sleepy little town of Rivington. About a mile and a half from the western edge of what had been the town, the Rivington men made a serious stand. “You want to watch yourself,” a corporal warned as Caudell came up. “They got wire with teeth strung out up ahead. You try crawlin’ through it, it slows you down an’ they shoot you.” Bodies hung up at grotesque angles underscored the fellow’s caution.

  From behind the wire, the Rivington men traded fire with the Confederates. Nathan Bedford Forrest stalked down the stalled Confederate line. His dark gray eyes flashed with frustration. “We got to keep drivin’. They get a chance to dig in here, we have to start allover again, Goddamn it.” Suddenly he pounded fist into open palm, laughed out loud. Turning to an aide who walked beside him, he said, “Major Strange, I reckon it’s about time to send in a flag of truce.”

  Major J. P. Strange, Forrest’s adjutant, was a dark-haired man of about the general’s age, with a high, broad forehead, sweeping mustaches, and a graying beavertail of a beard. He said, “The usual message, sir? They’d best surrender, or we shan’t answer for the consequences?”

  “The very same.” Forrest chuckled reminiscently. “Don’t know how many times we slickered the Yankees with that one during the war. ‘Course, after Fort Pillow they was more inclined to believe it than they had been before.”

  “Let me scout out some white cloth and a stick, sir,” Strange said.

  A few minutes later, he stepped out between the two lines waving the parley flag. Firing slowed, stopped. A Rivington man called, “Come ahead and say your say, graycoat. We won’t shoot for—say, an hour?”

  Strange looked back at Forrest, who nodded. “Agreed,” the major said. Holding the white flag high, he walked forward. A Rivington man, almost invisible in his mottled clothes and what looked like green and brown face paint, took charge of him.

  Caudell lit a cigar and prepared to enjoy the brief cease-fire. Long before the hour was up, though, he saw the white flag returning. A tall Rivington man accompanied Major Strange. “May I cross to speak with you, General Forrest?” he shouted.

  “Come ahead, Mr. Rhoodie,” Forrest shouted back…The truce has a while to run.” He waited for the Rivington men to approach, then said, “How do you answer, Andries?” Caudell, listening, realized with a small start that the two men were—or had been—friends.

  “I answer no,” Andries Rhoodie replied at once. “I know your tricks—I’ve read of them often enough, remember. You’ll not bluff me into giving up.”

  Forrest’s swarthy face darkened further with rage. Few men care to be called predictable, especially men as wily as the Confederate general. “If you think I’m bluffing this time, Andries, you are mistaken. If you do not yield, you will likely die here.”

  “And if I do yield, what will happen to me?” Rhoodie retorted. “After Richmond, if I’m taken I’ll dance on air, which you know as well as I. And we may hold you yet.”

  “Hold us, sir?” Forrest’s laugh sounded more like a bay. “You haven’t the chance of a snake in the Garden of Eden of holding us.”

  “How many battles did you win by bluff?” Rhoodie said. “You won’t bluff me.”

  “I won by bluff when I was weak. I ain’t weak now, Andries.”

  “You say so.”

  “Want to see my army, so you know what I’ve got?” It was Rhoodie’s turn to laugh. “How many of them would I see three times, to make you look stronger than you are? You can trick damnfool Yankees that way, but don’t expect me to fall for it.”

  “Git back to your lines, Rhoodie, or you’ll find the truce runnin’ out a mite early,” Forrest growled, taking a step toward the Rivington man. He was ten years older than Rhoodie and, while large, could not match his massive frame. Still, Caudell would have bet on him in a fight—he had a fire, a vitality, the Rivington man lacked.

  But Andries Rhoodie, if stolid next to Forrest, was also stolid enough not to be overawed by him. He held his ground, glowering like a big slow bear facing a panther. “How many lives do you want to spend taking us down?”

  “Few as I have to,” Forrest said. “But when it comes to that, Andries, I got more lives to spend than you. That worked for Grant against Lee till you came along, didn’t it? Reckon it can work just as well for us this time.”

  Most of the Confederates who heard Forrest—even Major Strange—frowned and scratched their heads, wondering what he was talking about. Caudell started to frown with them until he remembered the Picture History of the Civil War. If Forrest hadn’t seen it, he knew of something like it and knew it was true. Rhoodie knew that, too; for the first time, Forrest succeeded in rocking him. He ground his teeth, once, twice, three times. Then, without another word, he turned and stamped back to his own line.

  Nineteen ninety-six, Caudell thought as he watched that broad retreating back. But there was no dream to it; somehow, the Rivington men had slid back through time to change the way the Second American Revolution turned out. And, having changed that, they’d also tried to change the subsequent Confederate government—tried to change it by gunfire. Caudell’s hands tightened on his own AK-47. They weren’t going to get away with it.

  Nathan Bedford Forrest muttered a curse which his mustache muffled. He, too, stared after Andries Rhoodie. When he turned back to his own troops, h
is eye fell on Caudell and Mollie Bean. His gaze sharpened. “I saw you two back at Nashville with Pleasants,” he said, not making it a question. “You’re from around these parts, then.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said together. Mollie added, “Matter of fact, sir, I’m from Rivington.”

  “Are you?” Forrest said, suddenly smiling. “Suppose you could guide a company around east to outflank these works the Rivington bastards are running up here?”

  “Reckon so,” Mollie answered. “I expect we can march faster’n they can dig.”

  “I expect so, too.” Forrest turned to his adjutant. “Major Strange, gather a force from the men moving up. Take command of it and go with Bean and Caudell here”—Nate envied the general his memory—”around to the right. I want you moving before the hour’s up, on account of they’re surely digging now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Strange said, adding to his guides: “You two come along with me and help me assemble my force.”

  “If you do get around them, drive straight for Rivington,” Forrest said. “Get into their rear one more time and they’re done for.”

  “Question, sir,” Strange said; at Forrest’s nod, he went on, “Do you want us to strike for the town once in their rear, or back at the fighting men themselves? Your usual aim is to beat the army; with that accomplished, the place it defended will fall of its own accord.”

  “Nothing is usual about the Rivington men,” Nathan Bedford Forrest answered. “In Rivington they have the engine they use to bring in their weapons—I gather they travel here through it, too, come to that. If it’s taken or wrecked, the fighters are done for, too. So this time I want the town.”

  “You’ll have it,” Major Strange promised. “Caudell, Bean—do I have your names straight?—come along now. This time I really mean it.” Caudell stumbled over his own feet a couple of times as he followed Forrest’s aide—he wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going. His mind kept chewing on the idea of an engine that ran through time. It made perfect sense; the Rivington men had to come from somewhen that wasn’t 1868. But he’d never wondered about how they did it until Forrest set him thinking.