The Guns of the South

*IV*

With his small, bald head, long nose, and long neck, Richard Ewell inevitably reminded everyone who met him of a stork. Having lost a leg at Groveton during Second Manassas, he could now also imitate the big white bird’s one-footed stance. He was sitting at the moment, however, sitting and pounding one, fist into the other palm to emphasize his words: “We smashed ‘em, sir, smashed ‘em, I tell you.” His voice was high and thin, almost piping.

“I am very glad to hear it, General Ewell,” Lee replied. “If those people send raiders down toward Richmond with the intention of seizing their prisoners there—and perhaps even the city itself—they must expect not to be welcomed with open arms.”

“Oh, we met ‘em with arms, all right,” Jeb Stuart said with a grin, patting the AK-47 that leaned against his camp stool. The repeater’s woodwork was not so perfectly varnished as it had been fresh out of the crate; it had seen use since then. Stuart patted it again.” And we sent Kilpatrick’s riders back over the Rapidan with their tails between their legs.”

Lee smiled. He’d liked Stuart for years, ever since the young cavalry corps commander’s days at West Point with Custis. He said, “Excellent. But don’t you think that leather might better have gone into shoes for the men?”

Ever flamboyant, Stuart wore crossed leather belts over, his shoulders, each one with loops enough to hold a magazine’s worth of brass AK-47 cartridges. The effect was piratical. But Stuart instantly became a contrite swashbuckler, saying, “I’m sorry, General Lee; it never crossed my mind.”

“Let it go,” Lee said. “I doubt the Confederacy will founder for want of a couple of feet of cowhide. But I take it I am to infer from your ornaments that you are pleased with the performance of the new repeaters in action.”

“General Lee, yesterday I sold my LeMat,” Stuart said. Lee blinked at that; Stuart had carried the fancy revolver with an extra charge of buckshot in a separate lower barrel ever since the war was young.

“The rifles are outstanding,” General Ewell agreed. “So are the men who furnish them. If I had a drink in my hand, I’d toast them.”

“I have some blackberry wine here in my tent, brought up from Richmond,” Lee said. “If you truly feel the need, I should be glad to bring it out.”

Ewell shook his head. “Thank you, but let it be. Still, had we not heard from those America Will Break fellows that Kilpatrick was on the move, who knows how much mischief he might have done before we beat him back?”

“As it was, I understand, some of their cavalry captured a train station on the line up from the capital not long after I passed through on the way back to the army,” Lee said.

“Fugitives from the main band, after we scattered them,” Stuart said. “I’m glad they got to the station too late to nab you. Otherwise, however badly the rest of their plan failed, they would have won a great victory.”

“If a republic will stand or fall on the fate of any single man, it finds itself in grave danger indeed,” Lee observed.

But Ewell said, “Our republic is in great danger, as well you know, sir. We would be in graver danger still, were it not for your Andries Rhoodie and his fellows. When Meade sent Sedgwick west with the VI Corps, when Custer went haring off toward Charlottesville, I would have shifted the entire army to meet them had Rhoodie not warned me of a possible cavalry thrust south from Ely’s Ford.”

“But Fitz Lee was sitting there waiting for the bold Kilpatrick,” Stuart said with the smile of a cat who has caught his canary. “General Kill-Cavalry killed a good many of his Yankees by Spotsylvania Court House.”

“I’m delighted Fitz Lee was there,” Lee said, thinking kind thoughts about his nephew.

“So am I,” Stuart said. “Also there was Rhoodie’s friend Konrad de Buys. General Lee, that man is wilder in battle than any of Stand Watie’s red Indians in the trans-Mississippi. He awed me, damn me if he didn’t.”

Any man about whom a warrior like Stuart would say such a thing had to be a man indeed. Lee said, “I wondered how the Rivington men would fare. But I wonder more how Rhoodie and de Buys knew Kilpatrick was coming. General Ewell, you say the Army of the Potomac feinted to the west to draw your attention to your left wing, and that the feint was competently executed?”

Ewell’s pale eyes turned inward as he pondered that. “Very competently. Sedgwick’s as good a corps commander as the Federals have, and Custer—what can I say about Custer, save that he wishes he were Jeb Stuart?” Stuart smiled again, a smile the brighter for peeping out through his forest of brown beard.

“Under normal circumstances, you might have been deceived, then, General Ewell, at least long enough for Kilpatrick to slip past you and make for Richmond?” Lee asked. Ewell nodded. “And you had picked up nothing from spies and agents to warn you Kilpatrick might be on the move?” Ewell nodded once more. Lee plucked at his beard. “How did Rhoodie know?”

“Why don’t you ask him, sir?” Jeb Stuart said.

“I think I shall,” Lee said.

Walter Taylor stuck his head into Lee’s tent. “Mr. Rhoodie is here to see you, sir.”

“Thank you, Major. Have him come in.”

Rhoodie pushed his way through the tent flap. With his height and wide shoulders, he seemed to fill up the space the canvas enclosed. Lee rose to greet him and shake his hand. “Have a seat, Mr. Rhoodie. Will you take a little blackberry wine? The bottle is right there beside you.”

“If you are having some, I wouldn’t mind, thank you.”

“I believe I set out two glasses. Would you be kind enough to pour, sir? Ah, thank you. Your very good health.” Lee took a small sip. He was pleased to see Rhoodie toss off half his glass at a swallow; wine might help loosen the fellow’s tongue. He said, “From what General Ewell tells me, the Confederacy finds itself in your debt once more. Without your timely warning, Kilpatrick’s raiders might have done far worse than they actually succeeded in accomplishing.”

“So they might.” Rhoodie finished his wine. “I am pleased to help in any way I can. Can I fill you up again, General?”

“No, thank you, not yet, but by all means help yourself.” Lee took another sip to indicate he was not far behind Rhoodie. He nodded imperceptibly to himself when the big man did pour again, as a fisherman will when his bait is taken. He said, “Interesting how you got wind of Kilpatrick’s plans when the rest of the army would have been hoodwinked by Meade’s motion toward our left.”

Rhoodie looked smug. “We have our ways, General Lee.”

“Marvelously good ones they must be, too. As with your rifles, they altogether outdistance that which anyone else may hope to accomplish. But how do you know what you know, Mr. Rhoodie? Be assured that I ask in the most friendly way imaginable; my chief concern is to be able to form a judgment of your reliability, so I may know how far I may count on it in the crises which surely lie ahead.”

“As I think I told you once before, General, my friends and I can find out whatever we think important enough to know.” Yes, Rhoodie was smug.

Lee said, “That hardly appears open to question, sir, not after your repeaters, your desiccated foods—though I wish you might find a way to provide us with more of the latter—and now your ability to ferret out the Federals’ plans. But I did not ask what you could do; I asked how you did it. The difference is small, but I think it important.”

“I—see.” Suddenly Andries Rhoodie’s face showed nothing at all, save a polite mask behind which any thoughts whatever might form. Seeing that mask, Lee knew he had been foolish to hope to loosen this man’s tongue with a couple of glasses of homemade wine. After a small but noticeable pause, the big man with the odd accent said, “Even if I were to tell you, I fear you would not believe me—you would be more likely to take me for a madman or a liar.”

“Madmen may babble of wonderful weapons, but they do not, as a rule, produce them—certainly not in carload lots,” Lee said. “As for whether you speak the truth, well, say what you have to say, and let me be the judge of that.”

Rhoodie’s poker face hid whatever calculations were going on behind it. At last he said,” All right, General Lee, I will. My friends and I—everyone who belongs to America Will Break—come from a hundred and fifty years in your future.” He folded his arms across his broad chest and waited to see what Lee would make of that.

Lee opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again while he did some thinking of his own. He did not know what he had expected Rhoodie to say, but the big man’s calm assertion was nothing he had imagined. He studied Rhoodie, wondering if he had made a joke. If he had, his face did not show it. Lee said, “If that be so—note I say if—then why have you come?”

“I told you that the day I met you: to help the Confederacy win this war and gain its freedom.”

“Have you any proof of what you allege?” Lee asked.

Now Rhoodie smiled, rather coldly: “General Lee, if you can match the AK-47 anywhere in the year 1864, then I am the greatest liar since Ananias.”

Lee plucked at his beard. He himself had brought up the excellence of Rhoodie’s equipment, but had not thought that very excellence might be evidence they were from out of time. Now he considered the notion. What would Napoleon have thought of locomotives to carry whole armies more than a hundred miles in the course of a day, of steam-powered ironclads, of rifled artillery, of rifle muskets with interchangeable parts, common enough for every soldier to carry one? And Napoleon was less than fifty years dead and had rampaged across Russia while Lee was a small boy. Who could say what progress another century and a half would bring? Andries Rhoodie might. To his own surprise, Lee realized he believed the big man. Rhoodie was simply too strange in too many ways to belong to the nineteenth century.

“If you intend to see the Confederate States independent, Mr. Rhoodie, you would have been of more aid had you chosen to visit us sooner,” Lee said, tacitly acknowledging his acceptance of Rhoodie’s claim.

“I know that, General Lee. I wish we could have come sooner, too, believe me. But our time machine travels back and forth exactly one hundred fifty years, no more, no less. We did not manage to obtain even the small one we have—steal it, not to mince words—until just a few months ago—just a few months ago up in 2013, that is. Still, all is not lost—far from it. Another year and a half and it would have been too late.”

Those few sentences held so much meat that Lee needed a little time to take it in. By itself, the idea of travel through time was enough to bemuse him. He also had to come to grips with the notion of two stations in time—in his mind’s eye, he saw them as train stations, with an overhang to keep passengers dry in the rain—each moving forward yet always separated from the other by so many years, just as Richmond and Orange Court House each moved as the Earth rotated on its axis, yet always remained separated from the other by so many miles.

Not content with those conceptions, Rhoodie had saved the most important for last. “You tell me,” Lee said slowly, “that absent your intervention, the United States would succeed in conquering us.”

“General Lee, I am afraid I do tell you that. Are you so startled to hear it?”

“No,” Lee admitted with a sigh. “Saddened, yes, but not startled. The enemy has always put me in mind of a man with a strong body but a weak head. Our Southern body is weak, but our head, sir, our head is filled with fire. Still, they may find wisdom, while we have ever more difficulty maintaining what strength they have. They force themselves upon us, do they, when all we ever wanted was to leave in peace and live in peace?”

“They do just that,” Rhoodie said grimly. “They force you to free your kaffirs—your niggers, I mean—at the point of a bayonet, then set them over you, with the bayonet still there to make you bow down. The Southern white man is ruined absolutely, and the Southern white woman—no, I won’t go on. That is why we had to steal our time machine, sir; the white man’s cause is so hated in times to come that we could obtain it by no other means.”

There was one question ‘answered before Lee had the chance to ask it. He sadly shook his head. “I had not looked for such, not even from those people. President Lincoln always struck me as true to his principles, however much I may disagree with those.”

“In his second term, he shows what he really is. He does not aim to stand for election after that, so he need not mask himself any longer. And Thaddeus Stevens, who comes after him, is even worse.”

“That I believe.” Lee wondered at Rhoodie’s claims for Lincoln, but Thaddeus Stevens had always been a passionate abolitionist; his mouth was so thin and straight that, but for its bloodlessness, it reminded Lee of a knife gash. Set a Stevens over the prostrate South and any horror was conceivable. Lee went on, “Somewhere, though, in your world of 2013—no, it would be 2014 now—sympathy for our lost cause must remain, or you would not be here.”

“So it does, I’m proud to say,” Rhoodie answered, “even if it is not as much as it should be. Niggers still lord it over white Southern men. Because they have done it for so long, they think it is their right. The bloody kaffirs lord it over South Africa, too, my own homeland—over the white men who built the country up from nothing. There are even blacks in England, millions of them, and blacks in Parliament, if you can believe it.”

“How do I know I can believe any of what you say?” Lee asked. “I have not been to the future to see it for myself; I have only your word that it is as you assert.”

“If you want them, General Lee, I can bring you documents and pictures that make the slave revolt in Santo Domingo look like a Sunday picnic. I will be happy to give you those. But, General, let me ask you this: Why would my friends and I be here if these things were not as I say?”

“There you have me, Mr. Rhoodie,” Lee admitted. Now he finished his glass of wine and poured another. Though it warmed his body, it left his heart cold. “Thaddeus Stevens, president? I had. not thought the northerns hated us so much as that. They might as well have chosen John Brown, were he yet alive.”

“Just so,” Rhoodie said. “You captured John Brown, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I was proud to be an officer of the United States Army then. I wish I had never found the need to leave that service, but I could not lead its soldiers against Virginia.” He studied Rhoodie as if the man were a map to a country he had never seen but where he would soon have to campaign. Fair enough; the future was just such a country. Normally, no man had a map into it; everyone traveled blind. But now—”Mr. Rhoodie, you are saying, are you not, that you know the course this war will take?”

“I know the course the war took, General. We hope to change that course with our AK-47s. We have already changed it in a small way: Kilpatrick’s raid would have penetrated much further into Virginia and caused much more damage and alarm had it not been for us—and for the valor of your troopers.”

“I understand your Konrad de Buys showed uncommon valor of his own,” Lee said.

Rhoodie nodded. “I’ve talked with him. He enjoyed himself. There’s no room for cavalry in our time—too much artillery, too many armored machines.”

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should get too fond of it,” Lee said. “I am glad to hear the horses, at least, are out of harm’s way in time to come. They cannot choose to go into battle, as men do.”

“True enough,” Rhoodie said.

Lee thought for a while before he spoke again. “You say you think you have as yet affected the course of the war in only a small way.”

“Yes.” Rhoodie’s poker face had disappeared. He was studying Lee as hard as Lee studied him, and not bothering to hide it. Lee felt as if he were back at West Point, not as superintendent, but as student. He had to assume Rhoodie knew everything about him that history recorded, while he knew—could know—only what Rhoodie chose to reveal of himself, his organization, and his purposes.

Picking words with great care, Lee said, “Then you will have knowledge of the opening events of the coming year’s campaign, but your knowledge thereafter will decrease as our victories, should we have such, deflect events away from the path they would have taken without your intervention. Is my understanding accurate?”

“Yes, General Lee. You understand as well as any man could. My friends and I hope and expect that, with the Confederate States a bulwark of freedom and strength, the white man’s cause all through the world will be stronger than in our own sorry history.”

“As may be,” Lee said with a shrug. “Bear with me a moment further, though, if you would. It follows from what you have said that our generals, including myself, will need to be informed as exactly as possible on the situation of the Federals in front of them at the moment the campaigning season resumes, that we may extract the maximum advantage from what you know.”

“I will draft you an appreciation of what the Army of the Potomac plans to do,” Rhoodie said. “One of our people will do the same for General Johnston in regard to the Army of the Tennessee. Other fronts will be less important.”

“Yes, Johnston and I have our country’s two chief field armies. I look forward to receiving your appreciation, Mr. Rhoodie. It may well give me an important edge as the year’s campaign opens. Afterwards, I gather, things will have changed, and we shall have to rely on the valor of the men. The Army of Northern Virginia has never failed me there.”

“You can rely on one other thing now,” Rhoodie said. Lee looked a question at him. He said, “The AK-47.”

“Oh, certainly,” Lee said. “You see how I am already coming to take it for granted. Mr. Rhoodie, now I have answers to some of the matters which have perplexed me for a long while. Thank you for giving them to me.”

“My pleasure, General.” Rhoodie stood to go. Lee also rose. As he did so, the pain that sometimes clogged his chest struck him a stinging blow. He tried to bear up under it, but it must have shown on his face, for Rhoodie took a step toward him and asked, “Are you all right, General?”

“Yes,” Lee said, though he needed an effort to force the word past his teeth. He gathered himself. “Yes, I am all right, Mr. Rhoodie; thank you. I ceased to be a young man some years ago. From time to time, my body insists on reminding me of the fact. I shall last as long as I am required, I assure you.”

Rhoodie, he realized, must know the year—perhaps the day and hour—in which he was to die. That was a question he did not intend to put to the Rivington man; about some things, one was better ignorant. Then it occurred to him that if the course of battles and nations was mutable, so small a thing as a single lifespan must also be. The thought cheered him. He did not care to be only a figure in a dusty text, pinned down as immovably as a butterfly in a naturalist’s collection.

“Is it your heart, General?” Rhoodie asked.

“My chest, at any rate. The doctors know no more than that, which I could tell them for myself.”

“Doctors in my time can do quite a lot better, General Lee. I can bring you medicine that may really help you. I’ll see to it as soon as I can. With the campaign coming up, we want you as well as you can be.”

“You are too kind, sir.” Yes, Rhoodie knew Lee’s allotted number of days could change. He wanted to make sure they didn’t unexpectedly shorten. Even that possibility made Lee feel freer. He thought of something else. “May I ask you an unrelated question, Mr. Rhoodie?”

“Of course.” Rhoodie was the picture of polite attentiveness.

“These Negroes you mentioned who were elected to the British Parliament—what manner of legislators do they make? And how were they elected, if I may ask? By other Negroes voting?”

“Mostly, yes, but, to the shame of the English, some deluded whites sank low enough to vote for them as well. As for what sort of members they make, they’re what you’d expect. They always push for more for the niggers, not that they don’t have too much already.”

“If they were elected to stand for their people, how are they to be blamed for carrying out that charge?” Storm clouds came over Andries Rhoodie’s face. Lee said, “Well, Mr. Rhoodie, it’s neither here nor there. Thank you once more for all of this. You’ve given me a great deal to think on further. And I do want to see that plan of what General Meade will attempt.”

Once off the topic of Negroes, Rhoodie relaxed again. “It will be General Grant, sir,” he said.

“Will it? So they will name him lieutenant general, then? Such has been rumored.”

“Yes, they will, in just a week or so.”

“And he will come east to fight in Virginia? Most interesting.” Lee frowned, looked sharply at Rhoodie. “The day you first came to this camp, sir, you spoke of General Sherman as commanding in the west, and Major Taylor corrected you. You were thinking of the time when operations would commence, weren’t you?”

“I remember that, General Lee. Yes, I was, and so I slipped.” He nodded and ducked his way out of the tent.

After a couple of minutes, Lee stepped outside, too. Rhoodie was riding back to Orange Court House. Lee started to call his aides, then stopped to consider whether he wanted them to know the Rivington men were from out of time. He decided he didn’t. The fewer ears that heard that secret, the better.

He went back inside, sat down once more at his work table. He reached out for that second glass of blackberry wine he had poured, finished it with two quick swallows. He seldom drank two glasses of wine, especially in the early afternoon, but he needed something to steady his nerves.

Men from the future! To say it was to find it laughable. To deal with Andries Rhoodie, with the new repeaters in almost everyone’s hands now, with the small, square ammunition crates growing to tall pyramids by every regiment’s munitions wagons, with the occasional shipments of desiccated food that helped keep hunger from turning to starvation, was to believe. The creaky machinery of the present-day Confederate States could not have produced such quantities of even ordinary arms and foodstuffs, let alone the wonders at Rhoodie’s beck and call.

Lee thought about General Grant. In the west, he’d shown both straight-ahead slugging and no small skill. From what Rhoodie said, he would win here too, defeat the indomitable Army of Northern Virginia.

“We shall see about that,” Lee said aloud, though no one was in the tent to hear him.

“Here you go, First Sergeant,” Preston Kelly said. “They’re ‘most as good as new.”

Nate Caudell tried on the shoes Kelly had repaired. He walked a few steps, smiled broadly. “Yup, that’s licked it. The cold doesn’t blow in between the soles and the uppers anymore. Thank you kindly. Pity you can’t do more; a good many of us don’t even have shoes to repair these days. Are you the only shoemaker in the regiment?”

“Heard tell there’s another one ‘mongst the Alamance Minute Men,” Kelly answered. “Couldn’t rightly swear to it, though. Them boys from Company K, they still stick close to themselves after all this time.” Alamance County lay a fair ways west of Wake, Nash; Franklin, and Granville, which provided most of the manpower for the regiment’s other nine companies.

“So they do,” Caudell said. “Come to that, I wish you were in my company, Preston. The Invincibles would all be better shod if you were.”

“Might could be, but then my boys from Company C’d be worse.” Kelly spat a brown stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. “When you ain’t noways got enough to go around, First Sergeant, some poor bastard always has to do without.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Caudell said. “Well, thanks again for finding the time for me.”

“Wasn’t but a little repair, with more nailin’ than new leather. You keep your gear in good shape, not like some folks as let things fall to pieces ‘fore they fetch ‘em in to be fixed. Hell, if I had more leather an’ there was five of me, we’d be fine, far as shoes go.”

That was one of the smaller ifs Caudell had heard through the long, hungry winter. He waved good-bye to the shoemaker and headed back to his own company’s area. The parade ground was full of men watching two base ball nines go at each other. He decided to watch for a while himself.

The bat was hand-carved, and the ball, even seen from a distance, imperfectly round, but the players didn’t mind. The pitcher underhanded his missile toward the batter, who took a lusty swing and missed. The catcher caught the ball on the first bounce and tossed it back to his battery mate. The pitcher delivered again. The batter connected this time, launching the ball high but not far.

“Mortar shot!” somebody yelled. “Y’all take cover!”

“Get out your bumbershoots—that one’ll bring rain,” somebody else said.

The shortstop circled under the ball. “Catch it, Iverson!” his teammates screamed. The shortstop did catch it. Everyone cheered except the batter, who had run to first base in the confident expectation he would be able to stay there. He kicked at the dirt as he left. Caudell didn’t blame him. With a muddy, hole-strewn field to traverse, catching a ball barehanded was anything but easy.

Another batter came up. After taking a couple of pitches, he connected solidly. If the earlier pop had come from a mortar, this ball was blasted out of the brass muzzle of a twelve-pounder Napoleon. It also flew straight to the shortstop. He leaped high in the air and speared it. The watching soldiers went wild. The batter flipped his club away in disgust. The shortstop threw the ball to the pitcher, then rubbed his hands on the ragged seat of his trousers—that one had stung.

“Is that Iverson Longmire from Company G?” Caudell asked the man next to him. “He’s something to watch.”

“That’s him,” the private answered. “Yeah, he’s a demon baseballer, ain’t he?”

After those two quick outs, four straight hits fell in, and two runs scored. Then another ball, this one on the ground, went to the intrepid Longmire. Caudell waited for him to gobble it up and throw it to first base. But at the last instant, it kicked up off a pebble and hit him right between the legs. He went down in a heap, clutching at himself. Two more runners crossed the plate—actually, a piece of wood from an AK-47 crate. The men who had cheered Longmire to the skies laughed until they had to hang on to each other to stay on their feet.

That was enough baseball for Caudell. He went past Captain Lewis’s tent and the company banner. A few soldiers leaned against their huts. More than one was stripping an AK-47 and putting it back together again. The fascination with the new repeaters had not worn off in the month since they’d been issued.

“Hello, Melvin,” Caudell said, seeing Mollie Bean outside her cabin. She was feeding rounds into a banana clip.

“Hello, First Sergeant,” she answered. “Reckon we’re gonna get ourselves some Yankees ‘fore too long?”

Caudell took a step. He squelched in mud. Thanks to the work he’d just had done, it didn’t soak his toes. All the same, he said, “My guess is, we won’t move for a while yet unless the Yanks try something sneaky. Marching on muddy roads wears a man down too much for good fighting afterwards.” Or even a woman, he thought, remembering to whom he was talking.

She said, “You’re likely right. Comin’ back from Gettysburg in the rain, wasn’t nothin‘ but slog, slog, slog till a body wanted to fall down dead at the end of a day.”

“Makes me tired just remembering,” Caudell agreed. The 47th North Carolina had been part of the rear guard at Falling Rivers, Maryland, as the Army of Northern Virginia drew back into its home state, and had lost many men captured because they could not keep up.

All at once, Mollie Bean became intensely interested in the AK-47 magazine in her lap, bending her head down over it. “I need to see you, First Sergeant,” someone said from behind Caudell.

He turned, lifted his hat. “Yes, sir. What is it, Captain Lewis?”

“Walk with me,” Lewis said. Caudell obeyed, matching his pace to the captain’s slow and halting strides. Lewis went by Mollie Bean without the least notice of her. With her head down, the brim of her cap hid her face from him. Caudell smiled to himself; she was expert at such small concealments. After a few steps, Lewis went on, “We have to get the most we can out of these new repeaters.”

“Certainly, sir.”

“I think that means thinning our firing lines,” Lewis said. “With these rifles, we don’t need to stand shoulder to shoulder to put out a large volume of fire. The more widely we space ourselves out, the more front we can cover and the smaller the target each individual man presents to the enemy.”

“Sounds good to me, sir,” Caudell said at once. “We were packed together so tight in the charge at Gettysburg, I still think it’s a wonder all of us didn’t get shot. The more space between us for the bullets to go by, the better.”

“Space for the bullets to go by,” Lewis echoed musingly. “I like that. You have a way with words, First Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir,” Caudell said, thinking that if he did, it was because he wrote so many of them for other people. As with anything else, practice made them come easier.

Lewis said, “You hit on something important there. If a skirmish line will let us hold our position or advance as we might have before with a full firing line, that frees up the rest to move round the enemy’s flank or probe his line for weaknesses. When we next go into the field, we’ll have to maneuver accordingly. Some drill with more widely spaced lines would seem to be in order.”

“I’ll see to it, sir,” Caudell said. George Lewis hadn’t been a teacher before the war—he’d dabbled in politics—but two years as an officer had taught him full respect for drill and practice.

“Good,” he said now. “Pass the word on to the sergeants and corporals. In battle, we’ll often be maneuvering by squads, so they’re the ones who will have to be able to put the men through the proper paces.”

“I’ll see to it,” Caudell said again.

“I’m sure you will. Carry on, First Sergeant.” Lewis limped away, a determined man who’d settled one piece of business but had many more to see to.

Nate Caudell lacked the captain’s abrupt decisiveness. He stood scratching his chin for several seconds, wondering whether he should head straight back to his cabin and tell whichever of his messmates happened to be there what the captain had said. At last, he decided not to. He’d see them all together at supper, and tell them then. Tomorrow morning would be time for Corporals Lewis—who was no relation to the captain—and Massey.

Having made up his mind thus, he ran into Otis Massey not five minutes later. “Makes sense to me, First Sergeant,” Massey said when Caudell was through relaying Captain Lewis’s words. “ ‘Course, rememberin’ it when them damnyankees is shootin’ at us might could take a bit o’ doin’.”

“That’s why we practice it beforehand,” Caudell said patiently.

Massey shifted his chaw from one cheek to the other, which made him look for a moment like a sheep chewing its cud. “Yeah, reckon so.” He’d always been a good soldier; that was how he’d got himself promoted. He was slower to grasp that, as corporal, he was responsible for his whole squad, not just himself.

Caudell walked down to his hut. He was about to go in when he saw a black man in Confederate grey going by with an AK-47 slung on his back. “How you doin’, Georgie?” he called.

George Ballentine looked to see who was talking to him. “I’s right well, First Sergeant, suh,” he answered. “How you be?”

“I’m all right,” Caudell answered. “So the boys in Company H let you have one of the new repeaters, did they?”

“Yassuh, they did. I’s a regular No’th Carolina Tiger, I is,” Ballentine said. “If’n I goes to the fightin’ with food or some such, I gets to shoot back if the Yankees shoots at me.”

“You’ve got a better rifle there than your master ever dreamed of. He’d have one too, if he hadn’t run away on us,” Caudell said. Ballentine had come to the regiment as bodyguard to Addison Holland of Company H. Holland was a deserter, six months gone now. Ballentine had stayed with the North Carolina Tigers as company cook, tailor, and general handyman. Caudell wondered about that. “Why didn’t you take off too, Georgie? We haven’t caught your master yet. Odds are we never would have got you.”

Something changed in the black man’s face; all at once it became a fortress to guard the thoughts behind it. Though he owned no slaves himself, Caudell had seen that guarded look on other men’s Negroes many times. “Don’ wanna be no runaway,” Ballentine said. Caudell thought that would end the conversation; the black man had said what a black man had to say to get by in a white man’s world. But Ballentine chose to elaborate: “I’s just about like a free man now. The men, they treats me like one o’ them. I don’ belong to nobody in particular—jus’ about as good as not belongin’ t’nobody at all. Like you say, I even gots this here nice gun. How’s I gonna do better’n that, runnin’ away?”

Go north was the unspoken thought in Caudell’s mind. It had to be in George Ballentine’s, too. But risks went with it. If a Confederate picket spotted him trying to cross the Rapidan, he was dead. The other thing that struck Caudell was how much Ballentine’s answer reminded him of Mollie Bean’s. Neither had any prospects to speak of in the outside world; both had found in the army niches that suited them and people who cared about them.

“Company H is lucky to have you, Georgie,” Caudell said. “They don’t have to eat their own bad cooking.”

Ballentine’s dark face split in a grin. “Ki! That’s a natural fact, First Sergeant, suh. Some o’ them fellas, they burns water if they tries to cook it. I gots to go now—got me some chickens to stew up.”

“Chickens?” Where Caudell had been mildly envious of the North Carolina Tigers before, now green-eyed jealousy woke to full clamor. “Where’d you come up with chickens, Georgie?”

“As’ me no questions, I tells you no lies,” the black man said smugly. He strutted on back toward his own company, visibly proud of his talent as a forager.

A horse came trotting off the road south from Orange Court House into the regimental encampment. Aboard it was Benny Lang. He pulled the animal up short in front of Caudell. His lean face was twisted with fury. He stabbed a forefinger in the direction of George Ballentine’s back. “You, First Sergeant! What the bleeding hell is that fucking kaffir doing with an AK-47? Answer me, damn you!”

“He’s not in my company, so I can’t answer you exactly, Mr. Lang,” Caudell said, speaking as carefully as if the Rivington man were an officer.

“Whose bloody company is he in, then?” Lang demanded.

“Company H, sir,” Caudell said. He explained how Ballentine had come to be there, and how he had stayed with the company after Addison Holland abandoned it. “I’m sure it’s all right.”

“In a pig’s arse it is. Teach a kaf—a nigger—to use a weapon, and next thing you know, he’ll be aiming at you. Company H, you say? Who’s captain there?”

“That would be Captain Mitchell, sir. Captain Sidney Mitchell.”

“I am going to have a small chat with Captain Sidney fucking Mitchell, then, First Sergeant. We’ll see if he lets a nigger touch a weapon after that, by God!” He jerked savagely on the reins to turn the horse, dug his heels into its sides. The animal let out an angry neigh and bounded off. Space showed between the saddle and Lang’s backside at every stride; he was anything but a polished rider. But he clung to his seat with grim determination.

Rufus Daniel came out of the cabin. Along with Caudell, he watched Benny Lang’s furious ride. “I take back what I told you a while ago, Nate,” Daniel said. “Wouldn’t want him for overseer after all—he purely hates niggers. That’d bring a farm nothin’ but grief. Georgie Ballentine; I druther have him alongside me ‘n half the white men in this company.”

“Me, too.” Caudell took off his hat so he could scratch his head. “Lang hates niggers as if they’d done something to him personally, not just—you know what I mean.”

“Reckon I do,” Daniel said. Hardly a white man in the South failed to look down on blacks. But the two races lived and worked side by side. They saw each other, dealt with each other, every day. Caudell could think of nothing likelier to spark a slave revolt than all whites displaying the ferocity Benny Lang showed.

“You know, I hope Captain Mitchell tells him where to get off,” Caudell said. He had no great love for Negroes himself, but George Ballentine was part of the fabric of the regiment in a way Benny Lang could never be.

“Don’t think he’ll do it,” Daniel said morosely. “Them Rivington fullers, they’re where the repeaters ‘n’ cartridges come from. Ain’t smart to rile ‘em. Stacked against that, poor Georgie’s a small fish.”

Caudell sighed. “I’m afraid you’re right, Rufus.”

Laughter and shouts of fury, mixed with harsh coughs, came from behind him. He whirled around. When he saw a cabin with smoke billowing out its door and windows, his first thought was that it had caught on fire. Then he noticed the flat board placed over the top of the chimney. It wasn’t a fire, it was a prank. To confirm that, the evident prankster stood a few feet away from his handiwork, laughing so hard he could barely stand up. That was unwise. Three men had been in the cabin, and they set on him with intent to maim. His laughter abruptly turned to cries of pain.

“Goddam fool,” Rufus Daniel said.

“Yup. Well, we’d better get ‘em apart.” Caudell raised his voice to a shout: “You there, that’s enough! Break it up!” He and Daniel ran toward the combatants. “Break it up, I tell you!”

The three turned loose the one. Now he could hardly stand because he’d been badly knocked around. Rufus Daniel put hands on hips, stared scornfully at the battered private. “Well, Gideon, looks to me like you got ‘bout what you deserve.”

Gideon Bass felt cautiously under his right eye. It was already purpling; he’d have a fine shiner tomorrow. But a grin quickly crept back onto his face. He was only nineteen, an age when a man is often willing to suffer for his art. “Oh, but weren’t it a hell of a fine smudge, Sarge?” he said.

Caudell turned on the three men who had been smoked out. One had just taken the offending board off the chimney, and was sidling around toward the back of the cabin. Caudell’s cough froze the would-be escapee in his tracks. “Nice try, John,” he said. “Now come on back.” As nonchalantly as he could, John Floyd rejoined David Leonard and Emelius Pullen. Caudell glared at all. three of them. “You don’t go beating on your mates.”

“You seen what he done, First Sergeant,” Floyd protested. His voice had an upcountry twang to it; he and Leonard were from Davidson County, a long way west of Caudell’s home.

“I saw it,” Caudell said. “You all should have just grabbed him and let Sergeant Daniel and me deal with him. We would have, I promise you that.” He turned to Daniel. “What shall we do with ‘em now?”

“Up to you, Nate” but I don’t reckon tomfoolery’s worth takin’ to the captain,” Daniel said. “These three done breathed smoke awhile, and this ‘un’s got a set o’ lumps. You ask me, it’s even.”

“Fair enough,” Caudell said after a pause intended to convey that he was going along with the suggestion only out of the goodness of his heart. When that pause had sunk in, he added, “This had better be the end of it. If there’s a next time, you’ll all be sorry. Understand?”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” the miscreants intoned with unctuous sincerity.

“Why don’t y’all go someplace else for a while, Gideon?” Rufus Daniel put in. “Someplace a good ways away, I mean, and stay there till suppertime.”

Bass strode away. As he rounded a corner, Caudell heard him guffaw. He rolled his eyes. “What are we going to do with him?”

“Hope nobody wrings his fool neck till the fightin’ starts. That oughta settle him down some, maybe,” Daniel said. “Hope Dempsey don’t hear about this, too, otherwise we ‘uns is gonna get smudged one fine day.”

“One fine day soon,” Caudell said; Dempsey Eure loved mischief. “Other thing is, Dempsey’s too smart to stand around waiting for us to come out and beat on him. He’d turn up an hour later looking all innocent, and we’d never be able to prove a thing.”

Rufus Daniel grinned. “We’d git him anyways.” He sounded as if he were looking forward to it.

When Sunday morning rolled around, Caudell joined most of the regiment at divine services. Chaplain William Lacy was a Presbyterian, while the majority of the men he served—Caudell among them—were Baptists, but he had proved himself a good and pious man, which counted for more than differences in creed.

“Let us bend our heads in prayer,” he said. “May God remember our beloved Confederacy and keep it safe. May He lift up his hand and smite that of the oppressor, and may our true patriots in gray withstand their test with bravery.”

“Amen,” Caudell said. He added a silent prayer of his own for General Lee.

Lacy said, “I will take as my text today Romans 8:28: ‘We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.’ We see it illustrated in the events of the past few weeks. When our army came short of success at Gettysburg, many may have suffered a loss of faith that our cause would triumph. But now God has delivered into our hands these fine new repeaters with which to renew the fight, and through them He will deliver into our hands the Yankees who seek to subjugate us.”

“You tell ‘em, preacher!” a soldier called.

Lacy paced back and forth as he warmed to his sermon. He was a tall, lean man with a neat beard and clean-shaven upper lip. He wore a black coat of almost knee length, with green olive branches embroidered on each sleeve to show his calling.

“In times of peace, the coming of a new rifle could hardly be taken as a sign of God’s love,” he said. “But here and now, when we battle for the freedom which is more precious than life itself, how can we view the arrival of these AK-47s as anything save providential?”

“That’s right!” a man said. Another shouted, “These here repeaters is gonna let us give the Yankees hell!”

The chaplain went on in that vein for a few more minutes, then called up soldiers who helped him pass out hymn books to the rest of the men. He didn’t have enough to go around, but almost all the soldiers knew the hymns by heart anyhow. “We’ll start today with ‘Rock of Ages’—page forty-seven, for those of you with hymnals,” he said. “I want to hear you put your hearts into it today—make a joyful noise unto the Lord!”

Caudell’s voice rose with the rest. The men sang enthusiastically; there were enough of them that good voices and poor mostly blended together. As the last notes of the hymn died away, though, Caudell looked around in puzzlement. Something was missing, but he could not place what it was.

Lacy noticed nothing wrong. “’Amazing Grace’ now—page, ah, fifty-one in the Army Hymn Book.”

“Amazing Grace” was harder to sing than “Rock of Ages,” which required little more than vigor. Maybe that was why, halfway through the hymn, Caudell figured out what had bothered him before. His own singing faltered as he looked around again, this time for someone in particular. He did not see him.

The hymn ended. In the distance, another regiment—probably the 26th North Carolina, whose camp was closest to that of the 47th—was singing “The Old Rugged Cross.” Caudell turned to the private next to him. “Where’s Georgie Ballentine?”

“Huh? The nigger? Ain’t he here?” the fellow said.

“No, he—” Caudell had to stop, for the regiment launched into “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” He looked around once more while he sang. No, Ballentine wasn’t here. His ears had already told him that—the black man’s molasses—smooth baritone anchored the regiment’s singing week in and week out, for be never missed a service.

Caudell spotted a corporal from the North Carolina Tigers close by. When the hymn was done, he caught his eye. “Where’s Georgie, Henry? Is he sick?”

Henry Johnson shook his head, made a sour face. “Nope, he ain’t sick. He done run off, day before yesterday.”

“Run off? Georgie?” Caudell stared at him. “I don’t believe it.” He stopped and thought. “No, wait a minute; maybe I do. Did they take his rifle away from him?”

“You heard tell about that, did you?” Johnson said. “Cap’n Mitchell, he didn’t want to, but that Benny Lang feller, he pitched a fit like you wouldn’t believe. Said he’d go to Colonel Faribault, an’ then to General Kirkland, and then to General Heth, an’ all the way up to Jeff Davis till he got his way—maybe on up to the Holy Ghost, if ol’ Jeff wouldn’t give him what he wanted. Georgie, he took it right hard, but there weren’t nothin’ he could do. Weren’t nothin’ nobody could do. Afterwards, though, he seemed to settle on down some. But he wasn’t there at roll call yesterday mornin’, so he must’ve been shammin’. You know how niggers can do.”

Just then, Chaplain Lacy called, “Page fifty-six, men—‘Nearer My God to Thee.’” Caudell sang mechanically while he thought about what Johnson had said. Of course blacks grew adept at hiding their thoughts from whites. They had to, if they wanted to stay out of trouble. But George Ballentine had been so at home in Company H—Caudell shook his head. The joy had gone out of the service.

When “Nearer My God to Thee” was done, Henry Johnson said, “You know, I hope ol’ Georgie makes it over the Rapidan to the Yankees, an’ I don’t give a damn who hears me say so. Even a nigger, he’s got his pride.”

“Yup,” Caudell said. Instead of waiting for the next hymn, he drifted away from the open-air assembly. Johnson had hit the nail on the head. Not giving George Ballentine a repeater in the first place would have been one thing. But to give him one and then take it away—that was wrong. He hoped Ballentine made it over the Rapidan to freedom, too.

But the slave’s luck as a runaway was no better than his luck with the AK-47 had been. Three days later, a wagon came squelching down the muddy highway from Orange Court House in the late afternoon. It wasn’t a scheduled stop. “You have a load of those desiccated dinners for us?” Caudell called hopefully as the driver pulled off the main road.

“No, just a dead nigger—picket shot him up by the Rapidan Station. He was headin’ for the river. Hear tell he likely belongs to this regiment.” The driver jumped down and lowered the rear gate. “Want to see if it’s him?”

Caudell hurried over, peered in. George Ballentine lay limp and dead on the planks, without even a cloth over his staring eyes. The lower part of his gray tunic was soaked with blood; he’d been shot in the belly, a hard, hard way to die. Caudell clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Yeah, that’s Georgie.”

“You gonna take charge of him?”

“Take him over to Company H, why don’t you? He belonged to them.” Caudell pointed the way. “I expect they’ll want to give him a proper burial.”

“What the hell for? He was a goddam runaway.”

“Just do it,” Caudell snapped. As if by accident, he brushed a hand against his sleeve to call attention to his chevrons. The driver spat in the roadway, but he obeyed.

Caudell’s guess had been shrewd. The North Carolina Tigers even went so far as to ask Chaplain Lacy to officiate at the funeral, and he agreed. That told Caudell what the chaplain thought of the Negro’s reasons for running away. Driven by guilt, Caudell went to the funeral too—had he not told Lang who Ballentine was and where he belonged, the black man would still be alive.

Lacy chose a verse from Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Caudell wondered about that. He saw no evidence of divine wrath in Ballentine’s death, only the wrath of Benny Lang. It did not seem an adequate substitute. He thought about talking things over with the chaplain, but ended up talking with Mollie Bean instead. However fine a man William Lacy was, he was also an official part of the 47th North Carolina. Caudell didn’t feel comfortable discussing Georgie Ballentine’s fate with anyone official. Mollie’s place in the regiment was even less official than the Negro’s had been.

“Ain’t nothin’ to be done about it now,” she said, a self evident truth.

“I know that. It gravels me all the same,” he said. “It wasn’t fair.”

“Life ain’t fair, Nate,” she answered. “You was a woman, you’d know that. You ever work in a bawdyhouse, you’d sure as shit know that.” Her face clouded, as if at memories she’d have sooner forgotten. Then that wry smile of hers tugged one comer of her mouth upwards. “Hell, First Sergeant Caudell, sir, you was a private, you’d know that.”

“Maybe I would,” he said, startled into brief laughter. But just as Mollie could not stay gloomy, he had trouble remaining cheerful. “I expect I’d know it if I were a nigger, too. Georgie sure found out.”

“Niggers ain’t the same as white folks, they say—they just go on from day to day, don’t worry none about stuff like that.”

“Sure, people say that. I’ve said it myself, plenty of rimes. But if it’s true, why did Georgie run off when they took his repeater away?” Corporal Johnson’s words came back to Caudell: even a nigger, he’s got his pride.

“I know what you mean, Nate, but Georgie, he didn’t seem like your regular nigger,” Mollie said. “He just seemed like people—you know what I mean?”

“Yup,” Caudell said. “I felt the same way about him. That’s why he bothers me so much now.” Ballentine had seemed like a person to Caudell, not just some Digger, because he’d got to know him. In the same way, Mollie seemed like a person to him, not just some whore—because he’d got to know her. He kept that part of his thought to himself, but went on in musing tones, “Maybe a lot of niggers seem like people to somebody who knows them.”

“Maybe.” But Mollie sounded dubious. “Some, though, you got to sell South, and that’s the truth. They ain’t nothin’ but trouble to their own selves an’ everybody around ‘em.”

“That’s true enough. But you know what else?” Caudell waited for her to shake her head, then said, “If Billy Beddingfield was black, I’d sell him South in a minute, too.”

She giggled. “And that Benny Lang, he knocked Billy sideways. So there’s one up for him, to go with the one down for Georgie.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. It’s not as big an up as Georgie is a down, not even close, but it’s there. Reckon it goes to show nobody’s all good or all bad.”

“You got that right. He brung us the repeaters, too, to whup the Yankees with.”

“So he did. That has to count for something, I suppose.” Right then, Caudell did not care to give Benny Lang any points, but he was too just to find a way around it.

Mollie looked at him out of the comer of her eye. “Did you just fall by to chat, Nate, or did you have somethin’ else on your mind?”

“I hadn’t thought about anything else, but as long as I’m here—”

Robert E. Lee took off his reading glasses, slid them into his breast pocket. “So Lieutenant General Grant will go through the Wilderness, will he? I had rather expected him to try to duplicate McClellan’s campaign up the James toward Richmond. It is the shortest route to the capital, given the Federals’ regrettable control of the sea.”

“He will send the Army of the Potomac through the Wilderness, General, at the beginning of May, as I’ve written there,” Andries Rhoodie said positively. “His aim is not so much Richmond as your army. If Richmond falls while the Army of Northern Virginia lives, the Confederacy can stay alive. But if your army is beaten, Richmond will fall afterwards.”

Lee thought about that, nodded in concession. “It is sound strategy, and accords with the way Grant fought in the west. Very well then, I shall deploy my forces so as to be waiting for him when he arrives.”

“No, you mustn’t, General Lee.” Rhoodie sounded so alarmed, Lee stared at him in sharp surprise. “If he knows you’ve moved and are lying in wait for him, he can choose to attack by way of Fredericksburg instead, or up the James, or any other way he pleases. What I know only stays true if what leads up to it stays the same.”

“I—see,” Lee said slowly. After a few seconds, he laughed at himself. “Here I’d always imagined no general could have a greater advantage than knowing exactly what his opponent would do next. Now I know, and find myself unable to take full advantage of the knowledge for fear of his doing something else because I have prepared for this one thing. Thinking of what is to be as mutable comes hard to me.”

“It comes hard to almost everyone,” Rhoodie assured him.

Lee tapped with his forefinger the papers Rhoodie had given him. “By these, I am to have General Longstreet’s corps returned to me from Tennessee before the campaign commences. I am glad to see that would have happened, for otherwise I should have been leery of requesting it, lest in so doing I disrupt the chain of events ahead. Yet were I without it, the Army of the Potomac would have overwhelming weight of numbers.”

“May I suggest, General, that when it does come next month, you station it around Jackson’s Shop or Orange Springs, rather than farther west at Gordonsville?” Rhoodie said. “As the fight developed, Longstreet’s men nearly came too late because they had so far to travel.”

“Will this change not make Grant change his plans in response?” Lee asked.

“The risk, I think, is small. Right now, Grant doesn’t look at the Wilderness as a place to fight, only a place to get through as fast as possible so he can battle your army on open ground. He’ll be wondering if you will choose to fight anywhere this side of Richmond.”

“Is that a fact?” Lee meant the phrase as nothing but a polite conversational placeholder, but Rhoodie nodded all the same. Smiling a huntsman’s smile, Lee said; “I expect we shan’t keep him long in suspense as to that point, sir.”

“The AK-47 s should also be an unpleasant surprise for him,” Rhoodie said.

“I should have attacked without them,” Lee said. “Where better than the Wilderness? In the forest and undergrowth, the Federals’ superiority in artillery is nullified—there are few places for it to deploy, and few good targets at which to aim. And my soldiers, farmers most of them, are better woodsmen than the Yankees. Yes, Mr. Rhoodie, if General Grant wishes to allow a fight there, I shall be happy to oblige him.”

“I know that,” Rhoodie said.

“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” Lee looked down at those irresistibly fascinating papers. “Will you excuse me now, sir? I confess I feel the need to study these further.”

“Certainly.” Rhoodie stood to go. Then he said, “Oh, I almost forgot,” and reached into a pants pocket. He handed Lee a bottle of small white tablets…If your heart pains you, let one or two of these dissolve under your tongue. They should help. They may bring a spot of headache with them, but it shouldn’t last long.”

“Thank you, sir; you’re most kind to have thought of it.” Lee put his glasses back on so he could read the bottle’s label…’Nitroglycerine.’ Hmm. It sounds most forbiddingly medical; I can tell you that.”

“Er—yes.” Rhoodie’s inscrutable expression made his face unreadable as he said, “It is, among other things, useful in stimulating the heart. And now, General, if you will excuse me—” He ducked out under the tent flap.

Lee stuck the jar in a coat pocket. He forgot it in moments, as he resumed his study of the information Andries Rhoodie had given him. Here, a month and more in advance, he read the ford by which each Federal division would cross the Rapidan and the road south it would take. Altogether without such intelligence, he had smashed the Yankees the year before at Chancellorsville, on the eastern fringes of the Wilderness. With it—

“If I cannot whip General Grant with what is in these papers,” he said to no one in particular, “I am willing to go home.”

A few minutes later, Perry brought in Lee’s dinner, set it on the table in front of him, and hurried away. He did not notice the black man enter or leave; the food sat a long time untouched. Lee’s eyes went back and forth from Rhoodie’s documents to the map spread out on the cot beside him, but his mind did not see the names of units or the symbols that represented roads and hamlets. His mind saw marching men and flashing guns and patterns of collision…

Lee slid off Traveller. The horse’s grassy, earthy smell mingled with the perfume of dogwoods at last in blossom. Spring had taken a long time coming, but was finally here in full force.

Sergeant B. L. Wynn came out of the hut that housed the Confederate signal station on Clark’s Mountain. “Good morning to you, Sergeant,” Lee said pleasantly.

“Morning, sir,” Wynn answered, his voice casual—Lee was a frequent visitor to the station, to see for himself what the Federals across the Rapidan were up to. Then the young sergeant’s eyes went wide. “Uh, sirs,” he amended quickly.

Lee smiled. “Yes, Sergeant, I’ve brought rather more company than usual with me today…, He paused to enjoy his own understatement. Not only were his young staff officers along, but also all three of the Army of Northern Virginia’s corps commanders and a double handful of division heads. “I want them to get a view of the terrain from the mountaintop here.”

“By western standards, this isn’t much of a mountain,” James Longstreet said. “How high are we, anyhow?”

“I don’t quite know,” Lee admitted. “Sergeant Wynn?”

“About eleven hundred feet, sir,” Wynn said.

Longstreet’s fleshy cheeks rippled in a snort. “Eleven hundred feet? In Tennessee or North Carolina”—his home state—”this wouldn’t be a mountain. They might call it a knob. In the Rockies, they wouldn’t notice it was there.”

“It suffices for our purposes nonetheless,” Lee said.” Standing here, we can see twenty counties spread out below us, as if on the map. Sergeant Wynn, may I trouble you for your spyglass?”

Wynn handed him the long brass tube. He raised it to his right eye, peered northward over the Rapidan. The winter encampment of Federal General Warren’s V Corps, centered on Culpeper Court House, leaped toward him. Smoke floated up from chimneys; bright divisional flags bloomed like orderly rows of spring flowers. Grant had his headquarters by Culpeper Court House. A couple of miles further east, by Stevensburg, lay Winfield Scott Hancock’s II Corps; the encampment of Sedgwick’s VI Corps was beyond it, past Brandy Station—Lee thought for a moment of Rooney, returned at last to Confederate service. Farther north and east, past Rappahannock Station and Bealeton, were the cabins and tents of Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps, with the Army of the Potomac but not formally part of it. Colored troops made up a good part of that corps, Lee had heard.

He lowered the telescope. “All seems quiet still in the Federal camps. Soon enough, though, those people will move.” He pointed east, toward the rank green growth of the Wilderness. “They will come by way of the fords there, Germanna and Ely’s just east of it.”

“You sound very sure,” Longstreet said. Of all Lee’s generals, he was most given to setting his own judgments against his commander’s.

“I think I should have suspected it in any case, but I also have intelligence I regard as trustworthy on the matter from the Rivington men.” Lee left it at that. Had he explained that Andries Rhoodie and his colleagues came from the future and thus could view Grant’s plans through hindsight rather than guesswork, he was sure most of the assembled officers would have thought him mad. Maybe he was. But any other explanation seemed even more improbable than the one Rhoodie had given him.

“Ah, the Rivington men,” Longstreet said. “If their ear for news is as good as their repeaters, then it must be very good indeed. One day before long, General Lee, at your convenience, I’d like to sit down with you and chat about the Rivington men. Had the I Corps not spent the winter in Tennessee, I’d have done it long since.”

“Certainly, General,” Lee said.

“I want to be part of that chat,” A. P. Hill said. His thin, fierce face had an indrawn look to it; the past year or so, he’d had a bad way of taking sick when battle neared. Lee worried about him. Now he continued, “I’d like to speak to them over the way they treat our Negroes, sir. They show more care to the animals they ride. It is not right.” The commander of III Corps was a Southern man through and through, but had even less use for slavery than did Lee.

“I have heard of this before, General Hill, and have hesitated to take them to task over what one might call a relatively small fault when the aid they have rendered us is so great,” Lee said carefully. “Perhaps I am in error. Time permitting, we shall discuss the matter.”

“May I borrow the telescope, sir?” Henry Heth said. Lee passed it to him. He turned the glass toward the Wilderness. With it still at his eye, he remarked, “The place is a bushwhacker’s dream.”

“Just so, Henry,” Lee said, pleased the divisional commander saw the same thing he did. “The enemy are at their weakest in that kind of fight, and we are at our strongest.”

Something hot and eager came into Heth’s usually chilly gray-blue eyes. He fingered the tuft of light brown hair that grew just beneath his lower lip. “If we hurt them badly enough there, they may skedaddle back over the Rapidan and leave us alone for a while.”

Longstreet shook his head. “I know Sam Grant. He’s never been one to back away from a fight. He will come straight at us every day he leads the Army of the Potomac.”

“We shall see what we shall see,” Lee said. “If what the Rivington men say is to be believed, the enemy will begin their move on Wednesday, the fourth of May.”

“Four days from now,” Richard Ewell murmured to himself. “My men will be ready.”

“And mine,” A. P. Hill said. Longstreet simply nodded.

“I am confident we shall all meet the test,” Lee said. Again he saw the upcoming battle in his mind’s eye. So real, so convincing were the images he summoned up that his heart began to pound, as if he were truly in combat. And on the heels of that pounding came pain that squeezed his chest like a vise.

He set his jaw and did his best to ignore it. Then he remembered the medicine Andries Rhoodie had given him. He took the glass bottle from his pocket. He struggled with the lid before he got it open; he was not used to tops with screw threads. He removed a tuft of cotton wool, shook out one of the little pills, and slid it under his tongue as Rhoodie had told him to do.

The pill had no particular taste. That in itself separated it from the vast majority of the medicaments he knew; which displayed their virtue by being either sweet or aggressively vile.

Rhoodie had warned him the—he put on his glasses for a moment to read the name on the bottle again—nitroglycerine might bring on a headache. Sure enough, blood thundered in his temples. Still, he’d known far worse after a few goblets of red wine.

Blood also thundered in his chest. The grip of the vise eased. He took a deep breath. All at once, he seemed able to get plenty of air. He felt as if the weight of ten or twelve years had suddenly fallen from his shoulders.

He looked at the bottle of pills again. In its own way, it was as startling as the repeaters Rhoodie had furnished to his army. But then, a future without wonders would hardly be worth looking forward to. He returned the bottle to his pocket. “Four more days,” he said.