At the end of the tent, just a few feet away from the woman, stood a tall moveable screen. It had once been white cloth, but now was spotted with red and yellow and black, from all the patients who had faced the surgeon’s desperate ministrations behind it. A sturdy table upon which operations were conducted sat behind that barrier, and one modest cabinet which stored the surgeon’s meager supply of drugs and tools.
The woman glanced up now and saw Foster watching, and she smiled, and he thought how beautiful she was, quite the loveliest he had seen in a long time. Her waist-length hair, caught at the nape of her slender neck, appeared to be a reddish gold, or so it seemed in the dim light. He could not see the color of her eyes though they seemed dark. Her lips were red and full, her skin pale, but that was the way of many of our Southern ladies, he reflected. She wore a gown of good cloth, a sober gray in color, much like the uniforms of Foster’s army.
Or the uniforms that we once had, he thought, as he noted the appearance of each of the patients. Some still wore the remnants of their uniforms—the gray with butternut trim, but most had only discolored rags, and even those with nearly whole uniforms had added a color; the men wore gray and butternut and blood.
The woman was bending over the young amputee now, holding his hand. Foster looked away. Perhaps she was a sister or the man’s fiancée.
He fell asleep soon after that, and when he woke again, the woman was gone.
The next day the young man died.
The doctors came by that afternoon and examined each man. They told Foster that he must rest more and spooned down some awful-tasting medicine. His meals that day were several mouthfuls of a thin gruel over which a chicken had been passed for flavor, or so he suspected, and in which floated a few wild onions. It was all that his stomach could tolerate.
That night he felt much worse than he had the night before, the pain radiating out from his side, coursing down his legs until he thought his limbs were on fire; his arm throbbed each time he took a breath. He forced himself not to think about his condition, forced his mind to other matters, such as his family.
His family waited for him at home in eastern Tennessee and, God willing, he would be with them soon. He wished he could get a letter home to his wife, but no one had come by, asking if he wanted to write letters, no one in the tent had pencil or paper for him to use. So he wrote the letters to Sarah, and to his parents, in his mind. Each night he revised the letter from the previous night; he concentrated on each word, each phrase. He thought it was the only way to keep the pain at bay.
He was not always successful.
That night he slept fitfully, and once he woke—or perhaps it was simply a dream—he saw the titian-haired woman again, and this time she was at the second cot from the door, and she had somehow crawled up onto the body of the sleeping soldier there, and she seemed to be leaning over his chest and whispering to him. Her hair hung in long burnished folds, and all Foster could see through that curtain was the tips of her breasts pushing at the confines of her gown. He blinked, his vision blurred, and when he awoke, the man in the second cot—an Irishman with flaming red hair—lay alone.
The next day as Foster struggled to sit upright he thought of his dream the night before. How curious it had been. He’d never dreamt anything like that before; never. And what did this most peculiar dream mean?
Perhaps it meant, he thought with what passed for a grin, he had been too long without a woman.
He saw that a man across from him was awake and spooning down the gruel the nurses brought them, and he decided that he would visit a little.
“John Francis Foster,” he said when he had caught the other man’s attention.
“Webster Long,” the other said.
They exchanged information on their individual companies and their fighting experiences real and exaggerated, and that last battle which had sent them to the hospital. Long, a private who’d volunteered as had Foster, had lost an eye to a bayonet and his head was nearly encased with dressings so that Foster couldn’t tell what color the man’s hair was. Long had a fair mustache, though, and pale blue eyes. Foster shifted slightly, wincing at the jab of pain.
“Did you see something odd here last night?” he asked when he’d settled himself more comfortably.
“Odd?” Long paused, a piece of corn bread in his hand.
“What do you mean by that?”
“A woman was here. I saw her last night and one night before.”
Long shook his head. “Didn’t see no woman. You must be dreaming.” He smiled. “Wisht I had those dreams.”
Foster grinned back. “No, brother, I tell you; I saw a woman. Down there.” He pointed with his chin where the red-haired Irishman lay.
“No; didn’t see it.” Long popped the last of the corn bread in his mouth, then brushed the crumbs from his mustache. “Was she purty?”
“Beautiful.”
“Tell me,” Long said as he leaned back against the wall.
Foster proceeded to describe the woman in great detail; it was true that after a moment or so he began to embellish the description. It was the look in Long’s remaining eye that made him do it. Long wanted something out of the ordinary, something to keep him from thinking of his condition, and Foster decided he would give it to the other man.
“An angel,” Long breathed.
“I would think so,” Foster said. It was true he had never seen a woman as lovely as this one. His Sarah was right comely, but not the way this other woman was. Sarah, too, worked the farm with him and she had red roughened hands and skin darkened by the sun. She was just as lovely, he thought, as the day he’d first married her three years before.
At that moment one of the nurses, a husky man—they had to be, Foster knew, strapping and strong so that they could hold down the screaming men whose arms or legs were being sawn off without the benefit of anesthesia—entered the tent. He was here to check each convalescing man; he began at Foster’s and Long’s end, and then when he reached the other end he shouted for another nurse, who rushed in.
“This man’s dead,” and the first nurse pointed at the red-haired Irishman.
Foster had thought the man was simply sleeping.
The two nurses managed to take the corpse out; Foster and Long looked at one another, but said nothing. An hour later another man, freshly injured in the fighting that continued, had claimed the vacant cot.
Foster spoke a little more with Long and several others who were that day more alert; and when nightfall came, and their last meal was being served, he knew he was ready to sleep.
Still, it puzzled him that Long hadn’t seen the woman; and neither had the two other men Foster questioned. He could see that Long might not have seen her because of the bandages across that side of his face. Still …
Foster ate his corn bread, slightly greasy but still tasting the best he’d ever had, and quickly slurped up his broth and called for more. It was the first time he’d ever wanted more than the one bowlful.
After using the chamber pot held by one of the nurses, a great ugly fellow who looked as if he much preferred to kill each one of the wounded men rather than wait upon them, Foster eased himself down onto his cot, pulled up the coarse sheet. The sun had long ago set and a light chill had set in. From outside he could smell newly mown hay, the last of the year, and he wondered if the hospital lay close to a farm still being worked. There were so few left intact since the war had begun.
He missed his own farm and wondered how it fared. He had men to work it, but had they left for the war as he had? What had his wife done, left with only her old infirm father and the handful of slaves they owned?
He caught a scent of something else now, a smell almost of spice, some exotic fragrance that seemed to have no place in this hell that reeked of urine and loosened bowels and unwashed bodies, and he opened his eyes and saw that the woman had returned. She was sitting primly in a chair alongside the bed of Patrick DeLance, a lieutenant in Foster’s own company. DeLance h
ad been injured a day or two before Foster, but his wounds were healing rather nicely. DeLance was talking intently with the woman, his eyes never once straying from her face. Their voices were low, so Foster couldn’t make out too many words, but once he thought he heard the name “Ariadne.”
Foster was a man of some education, having gone two years to college before returning home to the farm where he was needed, and he knew the name was classical in origin. The daughter of King Minos, as he recalled, the woman who had loved Theseus and had helped him find his way out of the labyrinth.
Ariadne. A beautiful name. He murmured it aloud. It set right on his tongue and lips.
Ariadne. It fit her. A beautiful name for a beautiful woman. He glanced once more at her, and like that one other time she seemed to have crawled atop the other man. He blinked; surely he could not be seeing what he saw, and yet even though the light in the tent was dim, he could make out the outline of the woman straddling the prone DeLance, the skirts of her gown spread out. She rocked back and forth, and murmured all the while, and he could hear DeLance groan.
Embarrassed, Foster still watched; he couldn’t look away. DeLance cried out in release, and the woman whispered, and bent down over DeLance’s lips and kissed him long.
Foster felt a warmth suffusing through his body and he closed his eyes tightly and thought of Sarah, good-hearted Sarah. Sarah who was just a little too thin because of their hard times; not with a voluptuous body like this woman … this Ariadne … here in the tent.
A woman in the hospital. Impossible, he told himself, and he looked once more, and Ariadne was rising from DeLance, straightening her skirts. Foster watched as she ran a hand down DeLance’s chest to his groin, and DeLance shuddered.
He glanced across at Long, but the man was asleep. Foster looked up and down the double rows and saw that of the other men he was the only one awake, the only one to see … what he had seen. But what was that?
The woman—Ariadne—had done something to DeLance. She had climbed atop—no, Foster decided, climbed wasn’t quite the proper word. Slithered? No.
She had seduced … no, that wasn’t the right word. Nothing was right, he decided, nothing tonight.
He closed his eyes and willed sleep to come, but stubbornly it refused.
The following day it rained, and the dampness seeped through the canvas walls and into the bones of the men, chilling them to their very souls. Foster felt the worst he had since coming to the hospital. The flap to the tent had been left open, and he could see the grayness outside, the dripping leaves, the subdued colors, and remembered what autumn was like at home.
He and the other farmers in the area would be done with their harvesting, and the wives and mothers and sisters would have been cooking all day long, and then toward sundown would come the dances in someone’s barn. Some man would bring out a fiddle and maybe a mouth harp, then maybe a bucket or two or even some old jugs—they didn’t much care what they used as musical instruments as long it made noise—and William, Foster’s oldest slave, a man who’d worked for his father, would bring out his banjo. They’d all dance, too, the slaves and their owners in their own separate circles. The barn would smell of drying apples and old manure, of new hay and dust which rose under the stamping of their feet on the dirt floor. A cow, somewhere down the line in a crib, would low in response, a bird in the eaves might flutter briefly, and in the flickering yellow light of the lanterns they would sing and laugh and drink homemade brew and celebrate the good harvest.
Only the past two years there’d been no good harvest; times had gotten rougher, and there’d been no dances. There’d been setbacks in the planting, he’d lost a crop or two, and several times army companies had marched through the farmland and taken what food they wanted. They’d also hurt Nell, William’s granddaughter, and William had grabbed a pitchfork before Foster could stop him and had run after the retreating soldiers. He’d been shot in the head and he’d simply sunk to his knees, lifeless already, and when Foster had finally reached the old man, his skin was already cooling.
Sarah had cried when Foster and Tom and George, William’s sons, buried the old man out on the hill behind the house.
And for a long time after that Foster had sat upon the porch thinking. It had been Confederate troops who had come through his farm, who had hurt Nell, killed poor old William.
His own kind, Foster kept saying. His own kind did this. But it was war, one part of him said. That doesn’t excuse it, another argued. And he knew then that if the Southern troops would do such awful things, what could he—and Sarah and the others—expect if the Yankees were to come down here, to come through these bountiful farms? What sort of horrors could they expect at these Northerners’ hands? What would these Yankees who hated them so much do?
And so the next day he’d kissed his wife goodbye, taken his best hat and best rifle and a pouch full of shot, and had left the farm to volunteer. He would fight, and he would keep the Yankees and the others away from his family. It was the only thing he could do.
But that had been a year ago, and he didn’t see that the Yankees were being pushed back. Sometimes the Union forces won a battle, sometimes his people did. And even when they did, there didn’t seem to be an advantage. More men got killed and injured, some lay in the fields for days, some were never found. And the officers didn’t seem to care for their men, as he thought they would. They weren’t the ones at the beginning of the charges. It was the young men like him, some men hardly more than boys, or the old men who should have been at home being waited on by their sons and daughters. It was these men who died, and whose bodies the horses of the mounted officers picked their way over.
Foster rubbed a hand across his face, felt the dampness at the corners of his eyes. A year of fighting, of eating off the land and mostly that meant not eating, of being either too hot or too cold, and mostly too wet, had soured him on the army—Northern or Southern.
He knew now that he should have stayed home, should have laid in as much food as possible, as many supplies as he could find, should have barricaded the house, and kept Sarah and the others together, and maybe they could have fought off anyone who approached.
Maybe it wasn’t too late now, though; he had to believe that. As soon as he got out of here he was going home. The doctors might say he was fit to go to the front lines again, but he wasn’t. He was going back to Sarah. He would worry about the Yankees when and if they came.
He had no appetite that day. He knew his fever was returning, and nothing tasted good. He laid on the cot, never opening his eyes, hardly moving.
All he could think of was his family, and he wondered if he would ever see them again.
That night Ariadne returned. She was closer now to Foster, and he could see the darkness of her lovely eyes; they looked almost as if they’d been lined with something black; Sarah had called it kohl and said all the fancy ladies wore it. Ariadne’s bodice was lower than he’d seen before, and her breasts were full and pale in the dimness.
She murmured to the young man three beds down from Foster, and he responded lethargically. She kissed the man, caressed the back of his hands with her curling eyelashes, and Foster once more felt the stirrings inside him.
He turned his head, though, so he wouldn’t watch, but he couldn’t escape the sounds of the couple’s passion. Illicit passion, he told himself, but those were empty words. What did illicit mean anyway when he’d seen men blown to bits by cannon, horses that screamed in their death agonies?
Once more Foster smelled the scent of Ariadne. Some spice almost like cloves or perhaps cinnamon mixed with musk, and he licked his lips. That strange perfume almost overcame the stench of blood and pus and sweat that pervaded the tent.
When he looked back, she was gone.
The next day when the doctor came, Foster asked when he could leave the hospital. The doctor seemed preoccupied and merely said soon. Still, those few words heartened Foster because before then the doctor had refused to say.
The nurses came in and carried out the body of the young man he had seen the night before.
Foster looked across at Long, who was sitting up once more. “Another one.”
“Yeah,” Long said. He was chewing a wad and leaned over his bed and spat into the chamberpot.
“She’s getting closer,” Foster said, his voice low.
“What’s that?”
“The woman I saw.”
“You on that agin? Long shook his head. “You need a woman, boy; I can see it plain and simple.”
Foster nodded, slightly distracted, then said, “But there was one. I saw her. She was at the sides of those three men—one of ’em that Irishman—and now they’re all dead.”
“Plenty o’ men here are dead, and there ain’t been no woman with ’em.”
“Not this time.”
Long shook his head again and pushed himself down and rolled over, and Foster knew their conversation was over.
That night the woman brought with her the scent of woodsmoke and spices, and she knelt beside the red-faced man.
In the morning he was dead. And when the nurses hauled him out, Foster could see that the drinker was no longer red-faced. The dead man was pale, paler than he should have been even in death, and he seemed to have shrunk down upon himself, as if something—his blood, his soul—had been … sucked … out of him.
Foster looked at Long. “She’s coming down this way.”
“You’re crazy, you know. Crazy.” Long concentrated on drinking his broth.
Foster pushed back the sheet and swung his legs over the side. Momentarily he felt light-headed, and his arm pained him. He tried to push up from the cot to stand, trembled, and fell back. He couldn’t escape, not even if he wanted to. He managed to get under the covers again, and saw that Long was watching him.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 32
