Battle Flag tnsc-3

by Bernard Cornwell

  "Hoofbeats, sir!" Mallory said excitedly. "Hear them?" And sure enough the sound of horses' hooves and the jingling of curb chains sounded above the endless river noise. "Cavalry coming!" Starbuck shouted to warn the men in the rifle pits behind. He began to reload his rifle as Mallory's picket slid their guns across the wall. "We'll give the bastards a volley," Starbuck said, then checked his words because the hoofbeats were not coming from the west but from behind him, from the direction of the Brigade's lines. He turned to see a light moving among the trees above the ford, and after a few seconds he saw that the light was a lantern being carried by a horseman.

  "Starbuck!" the horseman shouted. It was Major Hinton. "Starbuck!"

  "Stand down," Starbuck told the picket. "Major?" A second horseman appeared from the trees. "Starbuck!" the newcomer shouted, and in the lantern's light Starbuck saw it was General Washington Faulconer who had shouted. Moxey's ratlike face appeared next; then the three horsemen cantered down into the open ground beside the ruins of Mad Silas's cabin. "Starbuck!" Faulconer shouted again.

  "Sir?" Starbuck shouldered his half-loaded rifle and walked to meet his Brigade commander.

  Faulconer's horse was nervous of the distant storm and edged sideways as a volley of thunder roared in the mountains. Faulconer gave the beast a hard cut with his riding crop. "I gave orders, Mr. Starbuck, that no changes of disposition were to be made without my express permission. You disobeyed those orders!"

  "Sir!" Major Hinton protested, wanting to point out that Starbuck had only been obeying Swynyard's instructions. Hinton himself had been busy at a neighboring brigade's court-martial all day, else he would have reinforced Colonel Swynyard's instructions himself. "Captain Starbuck received orders, sir," Hinton began.

  "Quiet!" Faulconer rounded on Hinton. "There is a conspiracy, Major Hinton, to subvert authority in this Brigade. That conspiracy is now at an end. Major Hinton, you will take these three companies back to the Legion's lines immediately. Captain Moxey, you will escort Starbuck to headquarters. You are under arrest, Mr. Starbuck."

  "Sir—" Starbuck began his own protest.

  "Quiet!" Faulconer shouted. His horse pricked its ears back and tossed its head.

  "There's a horseman down the path—" Starbuck tried again.

  "I said quiet!" Faulconer shouted. "I do not give a damn, Mr. Starbuck, if the archangel Gabriel is on the goddamned path. You have disobeyed my orders and you are now under arrest. Give that rifle to Major Hinton and follow Captain Moxey." Faulconer waited for Starbuck to obey, but the Northerner remained stubbornly motionless. "Or do you intend to disobey those orders, too?" Faulconer asked, and underscored his implied threat by unbuttoning • the flap of his revolver's holster. Truslow and Coffman, their faces dim in the lantern's small light, watched from the tree line.

  Starbuck felt an insane urge to fight Faulconer, but then Paul Hinton leaned down from his saddle and took Starbuck's rifle away. "It's all right, Nate," he murmured soothingly.

  "It is not all right!" Faulconer was exultant. His evening, which had begun so ill with his precipitate flight from Gordonsville, had turned into a triumph. "Discipline is the first requisite of a soldier, Major," Faulconer went on, "and Starbuck's insolence has corrupted this regiment. There'll be no more of it, by God, none! There are going to be changes!" Lightning ripped the west, shattering the night over the mountains, and its sudden light betrayed the blissful happiness on Washington Faulconer's face. He had confronted his enemies and he had routed them both, and the General, for the first time since he had donned his country's uniform, felt like a soldier triumphant.

  And Starbuck was under arrest.

  Starbuck was put into Colonel Swynyard's tent. An embarrassed private from A Company stood guard outside, while inside the tent Starbuck discovered Swynyard sitting slumped on his camp bed and cradling what Starbuck supposed was a Bible. A wax taper burned on a folding table to shed a sickly and wan light. The Colonel's head was bowed, so that his hair fell lank across his bony face. Starbuck sat at the other end of the bed and announced his presence with an oath.

  "A contagion," Swynyard responded mysteriously, without offering any more formal greeting to his fellow prisoner, "that's what I am, Starbuck, a contagion. A contamination. An infection. A plague. Unclean. Out of step. Do you ever feel out of step with all mankind?" The Colonel raised his head as he asked the question. His eyes were red. "I tell you, Starbuck, that the world would be a better place without me."

  Starbuck, alarmed at the wild words, looked more closely at the object in the Colonel's hands. He had presumed it was a Bible and now feared to see a revolver, but instead he saw it was an uncorked bottle. "Oh, no," Starbuck said, astonished at his own disappointment. "Are you getting drunk?"

  Swynyard did not answer. He just stared at the bottle, turning it in his hands as though he had never seen such an object before. "What did Faulconer say to you?" the Colonel asked finally.

  "Nothing much," Starbuck said, using a tone of indifference to show defiance. "He said I'd disobeyed orders."

  "You obeyed my orders, but that won't make any difference with Faulconer. He hates you. He hates me, too, but he hates you more. He thinks you took his son away." The Colonel went on staring at the bottle, then shook his head wearily. "I'm not drinking. I took a sip and spat it out. But I was going to drink it. Then you came in." He held the bottle close to the dripping, spluttering taper, so that the feeble light refracted through the green glass and amber liquid. "Faulconer gave it to me. He says I deserve it. It's the best whiskey in America, he says, from Bourbon County, Kentucky. None of your bust-head tonight, Starbuck. No rotgut or pop-skull, no red-line special, no brain-buster, no skull-splitter, no tanglefoot tonight." The mention of tanglefoot whiskey evidently prompted some memory that made the Colonel close his eyes in sudden pain. "No, sir," he went on sadly, "only the best of Bourbon County whiskey for Griffin Swynyard. Clear as a dewdrop, do you see?" He again held the bottle to the taper's light. "Isn't that beautiful?"

  "You don't need it, Colonel," Starbuck said softly.

  "But I do, Starbuck. I need either God or whiskey, and whiskey, I have to tell you, is a great deal more convenient than God. It is more available than God and it is more predictable than God. Whiskey, Starbuck, does not make demands like God, and the salvation it offers is every bit as certain as God's, and even if that salvation is not as long in duration as God's salvation it is still a true and tried remedy for the miseries of life. Whiskey is a consolation, Starbuck, and a very present help in times of trouble, and never more so than when it comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky." He swirled the bottle slowly, gazing reverently at its contents. "Are you going to preach to me, Starbuck?"

  "No, sir. I've been preached at all my damned life and it didn't do neither me nor the preacher one damned bit of good."

  Swynyard lifted the bottle to his nose and sniffed. He closed his eyes at the smell of the liquor, then touched the bottle's rim to his lips. For a second Starbuck was sure that the Colonel was going to tip the whiskey down his throat; then Swynyard lowered the bottle again. "I guess preaching didn't do you any good, Starbuck, because you're a preacher's son. Probably hurt you rather than helped. If a man tells you all your born days to keep away from the women and the whiskey, then what else will you look for when they let go of the leash?"

  "Is that why you looked for them?" Starbuck asked.

  The Colonel shook his head. "My father was no preacher. He went to church, sure, but he was no preacher. He was a dealer in slaves, Starbuck. That's what it said on our house-front. Said it in scarlet letters three feet high: 'Jos Swynyard, Dealer in Slaves.'" The Colonel shrugged at the memory. "Respectable people didn't come near us, Starbuck, not near a dealer in slaves. They sent their overseers and managers to buy the human flesh. Not that my father minded; he reckoned he was as respectable as any man in Charles City County. He kept a respectable household, I'll say that for him. None of us dared cross him. He was a flogger, you see. He flogged his s
laves, his women, and his children." Swynyard went silent, staring down at the bottle. The sentry shifted his feet outside the tent, and pots clattered in the farmhouse kitchen as the servants cleaned up after Washington Faulconer's late supper. Swynyard shook his head sadly. "I treated my slaves bad."

  "Yes, you did," Starbuck said.

  "But he never flogged his dogs." Swynyard was thinking of his father again. "Never once, not in all his years." He smiled ruefully, then lifted the bottle to his nose and smelt it again. "It really ain't a bad kind of whiskey, judging by its smell," he said. "Have you ever drunk Scottish whiskey?"

  "Once or twice."

  "Me, too." Swynyard was silent for a few heartbeats. "I reckon I drunk just about everything a man can pour down his throat, but I once knew a man who called himself a connoisseur of whiskeys. A real connoisseur"—Swynyard rolled the word round his tongue—"and this connoisseur told me there wasn't nothing in the whole wide world he didn't know about whiskeys, and do you know which whiskey he reckoned was the best?"

  "Tanglefoot?" Starbuck guessed.

  Swynyard laughed. "Tanglefoot! Well, it works, I'll say that for tanglefoot. It works like a mule kick to the head, tanglefoot does, but it ain't the best liquor in the world, not if you want your mule kick to taste better than horse liniment. No, this man reckoned he'd drunk every kind of whiskey that this vale of tears has to offer us, and the best, the very best, the absolute real stuff, Starbuck, was whiskey from Ireland. Ain't that the strangest thing?"

  "Maybe he was drunk when he tasted it?" Starbuck suggested.

  Swynyard thought about that for a second, then shook his head. "No, I reckon he knew what he was saying. He was a rich man and rich folks don't get rich by being fools. At least they might, but they sure don't stay rich by being fools, and this man stayed rich. And he didn't drink much either. He just liked the taste, you see. He liked his whiskey, and he'd pay a rich man's price for Irish whiskey, but the guzzle he liked most of all was the widow's champagne. Clicquot!" He raised the whiskey bottle in a tribute to Madame Clicquot's champagne. "Have you ever drunk Veuve Clicquot?"

  "Yes."

  "Good for you. Be a sad thing to die without tasting the widow's champagne. But sadder still to die without salvation, eh?" Swynyard asked, but he seemed confused by the question. He stared at the bottle and again seemed about to drink from it, then, at the very last second, relented. "There was a time, Starbuck, when I could afford the widow's champagne morning, noon, and night. Could have watered my horse in it! Could have watered all my horses in it! I was rich."

  Starbuck smiled but said nothing.

  "You don't believe me, do you?" Swynyard said. "But there was a time, Starbuck, when I could have purchased Faulconer."

  "Truly?"

  "Truly," Swynyard said, gently mocking Starbuck's accent with the repetition. "I wasn't always a soldier. I left West Point, class of '29, forty-sixth in my class. You want to guess how many there were in West Point's class of '29?"

  "Forty-six?"

  Swynyard extended a pistollike finger at Starbuck and made a clicking noise of affirmation. "Forty-sixth out of forty-six. I didn't exactly distinguish myself. Fact is, twenty years later I was still no more than a captain, and I knew I wasn't going to rise any higher than a captain, and I wasn't ever going to kill anything more dangerous to the Republic than a Comanche or a Mexican. I always reckoned I might be a good soldier, but the whiskey made sure I never was. Then one night in '50 I got drunk and offered my resignation and that was the end of my career."

  "What did you do?"

  "I did what every sensible soldier wanted to do. I went to the Feather River. Ever heard of the Feather?"

  "No."

  "California," Swynyard said. "The gold fields. Feather River and Goodyear's Bar and Three Snake Run. That's where I struck it rich. I found a lump of gold the size of a dog. Gold," the Colonel said, staring into the heart of the whiskey, "real thick gold, soft as butter, pure as love, and big as a coon dog. In just one day, Starbuck, I made thirty thousand bucks, and all of it before breakfast. That was before they made gold-digging mechanical. Nowadays, Starbuck, they sluice that gold out of the gravels with water jets. That water flies so hard you could kill a regiment of Yankees with that hose, except it takes a regiment to build all the flumes and dams, and not even the Yankees are stupid enough to stand still while you construct it. But I was lucky. I got there early when all a man had to do was climb high and start rolling the rocks aside." He fell silent.

  "And you lost it all?"

  Swynyard nodded. "Every last cent of it. It all went down the gullet or across the barrelhead. Poker. Women. Whiskey. Stupidity. I lost these fingers, too." He held up his left hand with its three missing fingers.

  "I thought those went to a Mexican saber cut," Starbuck said.

  "That's what I tell people," Swynyard said, "or what I did tell them before I met the Lord Jesus Christ, but it ain't true. The truth is, Starbuck, that I had them blown away when me and a German miner were using black powder up above Shirt Tail Creek. Otto, his name was, and he was mad as a snake. He reckoned there was a load of nuggets at the top of Shirt Tail and it took us a week to carry all our gear up there, and then we blew the thing wide open and there wasn't nothing up there but dirt and quartz. Only Otto blew it early, see, thinking he'd blow me to hell and get to keep all the gold to himself."

  "And what happened to Otto?" Starbuck asked gently.

  Swynyard blinked rapidly. His hands were gripping the whiskey bottle so hard that Starbuck feared he might break the glass. "I have many sins on my conscience," Swynyard said after a while, "many. I killed Otto. Took a long time a-dying and I mocked him all that while. God forgive me."

  Starbuck waited a few seconds, praying desperately that the Colonel would not suck on the bottle. "And when the war started?" Starbuck finally asked.

  "I came back east. Reckoned I could have a new beginning. I kind of persuaded myself I could do without the whiskey so long as I could be a proper soldier again. I wanted to redeem myself, you see? A new country, a new army, a new beginning. But I was wrong."

  "No," Starbuck said, "you weren't. You've been off the whiskey for days now."

  Swynyard did not answer but just stared into the golden depths of the expensive Kentucky whiskey.

  "You don't want it, Colonel," Starbuck said.

  "But I do, Starbuck, and that's the plain hard truth of it. I want a drink so bad that it hurts."

  "Put the bottle down," Starbuck said.

  Swynyard ignored him. "I never thought I could give up the drink, never, and then God helps me to do it at last and just as things are starting to be all right again, Faulconer does this to us. What was I supposed to do? Leave the ford unguarded?"

  "Colonel," Starbuck said, reaching for the whiskey bottle.

  "You did the right thing. You know that. And do you know why Faulconer gave you that bottle tonight?"

  Swynyard would not relinquish the whiskey, but instead held the bottle just beyond Starbuck's reach. "He gave it to me," the Colonel said, "because he wants to humiliate me. That's why."

  "No," Starbuck said. "He did it so you won't be in a fit state to testify at a court-martial. He wants you drunk, Colonel, because the son of a bitch knows he's in the wrong, but he also knows that no court will exonerate a staggering drunkard. But if you stay sober, Colonel, he's going to back down and there won't be any court-martial."

  Swynyard thought about Starbuck's words, then shook his head. "But I did disobey his orders. Not that it matters, because Faulconer don't care one way or another about Dead Mary's Ford. He just wants to be rid of me. Don't you understand? It isn't what I did or didn't do, it's because I made an enemy. You too. We're being purse-whipped by a rich man, Starbuck, and there ain't nothing we can do about it."

  "Goddamn it, there is!" Starbuck insisted. "Faulconer doesn't run this damned army, Jackson does, and if Jackson says you're right and Faulconer's wrong then it won't matter if you and I disobeyed Geor
ge Washington's orders. Not all of Faulconer's money can change that, but I tell you one thing: If you go in front of Old Mad Jack with a hangover, or with whiskey on your breath, or looking like you used to look before you let Christ into your heart, then Old Mad Jack will have you out of this army faster than you can spit." Starbuck paused and held out his hand. "Now goddamn it, Colonel, give me the whiskey."

  Swynyard frowned. "Why would Jackson care what happens to us?"

  "Because we'll make him care. We'll tell him the truth.

  So give me the bottle." He still held his hand outstretched. "Come on! I'm thirsty!"

  Swynyard held the bottle out, but instead of handing it to Starbuck he tipped it upside down so that the liquor gurgled and slurped onto the tent's pine floorboards and there trickled between the cracks into the dirt. When the bottle was empty, Swynyard let it fall. "We've got a battle to fight, Starbuck," the Colonel said, "so let's both be sober."

  "Son of a bitch," Starbuck said. The smell of the whiskey was tantalizing in the tent. "I was thirsty."

  "And tomorrow you'll be sober," Swynyard said. Far in the distance the thunder grumbled. The sentry sneezed, and the Colonel closed his eyes in prayer. He had resisted temptation and endured despair. And now, like the soldier he knew he could be, he would fight.

  Mad Silas began pulling the felled trees off the road that led north through the woods. It was hard work, especially as he had his darling Mary's skull in a sack hanging from his neck and he did not like to bump the skull too hard in case it hurt her. He talked to her as he worked, saying how he was keeping the road clear because the man in the blue coat had asked him to, and the man in the blue coat had said as how all the black folk would be better off if the blue ones beat the gray ones, and even though the white men in the gray coats had been polite to Mad Silas and had even given him some cigars, he still believed the blue horse soldier because the blue man had been young Master Harlan Kemp, the son of old Master Kemp who had given Silas his freedom.