Copperhead. Bernard Cornwell
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the rebel officer and bellowed with a kind of joy as he anticipated the clublike wooden head smashing his enemy’s skull, but Starbuck ducked hard down so that it hissed over his slouch hat and the momentum of the great swing was sufficient to sway the big man off-balance. Then it was Starbuck’s turn to shout in triumph as he rammed the bayonet up, hard up, pushing against the astonishing resistance of skin and flesh, and he was still screaming as the big man jerked and fell, twitching on the blade’s long shank like a gaffed fish dying.
Starbuck was breathless as he tried to pull his bayonet free, but the gunner’s flesh had closed tight on the steel and the blade would not move. The man had dropped his own weapons and was clawing feebly at the rifle in his gut. Starbuck also tried to twist the steel free, but the flesh’s suction gripped like stone. He pulled the rifle’s trigger, hoping to blast the bayonet loose, but still it would not move. The gunner gasped horribly as the bullet struck, then Starbuck abandoned the weapon and left the gunner dying on the forest floor. He unholstered his fine ivory-handled revolver instead and ran after his company only to discover that K Company was no longer alone in the woods, but was merely a small part of a gray and butternut tide that was overwhelming the northern defenders and driving the survivors in a terrible stampede off the bluffs summit and down to the narrow, muddy ledge beside the river. A New York sergeant screamed as he lost his precarious footing and tumbled down the slope to break his leg on a rock.
“Nate!” Adam had spurred his stallion into the trees. “Call them off!”
Starbuck stared uncomprehendingly at his friend.
“It’s over! You’ve won!” Adam said and gestured at the mass of rebels who had begun firing down the bluff’s steep slope at the Yankees trapped beneath. “Stop them!” Adam said, as if he blamed Starbuck for this display of gleeful, vengeful victory, then he turned his horse savagely away to find someone with the authority to finish the killing.
Except no one wanted to end the killing. The northerners were trapped beneath the bluff and the southerners poured a merciless fire into the writhing, crawling, bleeding mass below. A rush of Yankees tried to escape the slaughter by trampling over the wounded to the safety of a newly arrived boat, but the weight of the fugitives overturned the small craft. A man called for help as the current dragged him away. Others tried to swim the channel, but the water was churning and spattering with the strike of bullets. Blood soured the stream and was carried seaward. Men drowned, men died, men bled, and still the remorseless, unending slaughter went on as the rebels loaded and fired, loaded and fired, loaded and fired, jeering all the while at their beaten, cowed, broken enemy.
Starbuck edged his way to the bluff’s edge and stared down at a scene from the inferno. The base of the bluff’s escarpment was like a wriggling, sensate mass; an enormous beast dying in the gathering dusk, though it was not yet a fangless beast for shots still came up the slope. Starbuck pushed his revolver into his belt and cupped his hands and shouted downhill for the Yankees to cease fire. “You’re prisoners!” he shouted, but the only answer was a splintering of rifle flames in the shadows and the whistle of a fusillade past his head. Starbuck pulled his revolver free and emptied its chambers down the hill. Truslow was beside him, taking loaded rifles from men behind and firing at the heads of men trying to swim to safety. The river was being beaten into a froth, looking just as though a school of fish were churning frantically to escape a tidal shallow. Bodies drifted downstream, others snagged on branches or lodged on mudbanks. The Potomac had become a river of death, blood-streaked, bullet-lashed, and body-filled. Major Bird grimaced at the view, but did nothing to stop his men firing.
“Uncle!” Adam protested. “Stop them!”
But instead of stopping the slaughter, Bird gazed down on it like some explorer who had just stumbled upon some phenomenon of nature. It was Bird’s view that war involved butchery, and to engage in war but protest against butchery was inconsistent. Besides, the Yankees would not surrender but were still returning the rebel fire, and Bird now answered Adam’s demand by raising his own revolver and firing a shot into the turmoil.
“Uncle!” Adam cried in protest.
“Our job is to kill Yankees,” Bird said and watched as his nephew galloped away. “And their job is to kill us,” Bird went on, even though Adam had long since gone from earshot, “and if we leave them alive today then tomorrow their turn might come.” He turned back to the horror and emptied his revolver harmlessly into the river. All around him men grimaced as they fired and Bird watched them, seeing a blood lust raging, but as the shadows lengthened and the return fire stuttered to nothing and as the fear and passion of the long day’s climax ebbed away, so the men ceased firing and turned away from the twitching, bloodied river.
Bird found Starbuck pulling a pair of spectacles from a dead man’s face. The lenses were thick with clotted blood that Starbuck wiped on his coat hem. “Losing your vision, Nate?” Bird asked.
“Joe May lost his glasses. We’re trying to find a pair that suits.”
“I wish you could find him a new brain. He’s one of the dullest creatures it was ever my misfortune to teach,” Bird said, holstering his revolver. “I have to thank you for disobeying me. Well done.” Starbuck grinned at the compliment, and Bird saw the feral glee on the northerner’s face and wondered that battle could give such joy to a man. Bird supposed that some men were born to be soldiers as others were born to be healers or teachers or farmers, and Starbuck, Bird reckoned, was a soldier born to the dark trade. “Moxey complained about you,” Bird told Starbuck, “so what shall we do about Moxey?”
“Give the son of a bitch to the Yankees,” Starbuck said, then walked with Bird away from the bluffs crest, back into the trees where a company of Mississippi men was gathering prisoners. Starbuck avoided the sullen-looking northerners, not wanting to be recognized by a fellow Bostonian. One Mississippi soldier had picked up a fallen white banner which he paraded through the twilight, and Starbuck saw the handsome escutcheon of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts embroidered on the blood-flecked silk. He wondered whether Will Lewis was still on the bluff’s summit or whether, in the chaos of the defeat, the Lieutenant had sneaked off down to the river and made a bid for the far bank. And what would they say in Boston, Starbuck wondered, when they heard that the Reverend Elial’s son had been screaming the rebel yell and wearing the ragged gray and shooting at men who worshipped in the Reverend’s church? Damn what they said. He was a rebel, his lot thrown in with the defiant South and not with these smart, well-equipped northern soldiers who seemed like a different breed to the grinning, long-haired southerners.
He left Bird with the Legion’s own colors and went on hunting through the woods, looking for spectacles or any other useful plunder that the corpses might yield. Some of the dead looked very peaceful, most looked astonished. They lay with their heads tipped back, their mouths open, and their outreaching hands contracted into claws. Flies were busy at nostrils and glazed eyes. Above the dead the discarded, bullet-torn gray coats of the northerners were still suspended from branches to look like hanged men in the fading light. Starbuck found one of the scarlet-lined coats neatly folded and placed at the bole of a tree and, thinking it would be useful in the coming winter, picked it up and shook out the folds to see that it was unscarred by either bullet or bayonet. A nametape had been neatly sewn into the coat’s neck, and Starbuck peered to read the letters that had been so meticulously inked onto the small white strip. “Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,” the label read, “20th Mass.” The name brought Starbuck a sudden and intense memory of a clever Boston family, and of Professor Oliver Wendell Holmes’s study with its specimen jars on high shelves. One such jar had held a wrinkled, pallid human brain, Starbuck remembered, while others had strange, big-headed homunculi suspended in cloudy liquid. The family did not worship at Starbuck’s church, but the Reverend Elial approved of Professor Holmes, and so Starbuck had been allowed to spend time in the doctor’s house where he had become friendly with Oliver Wendell Junior, who was an intense, thin, and friendly young man, quick in debate and generous in nature. Starbuck hoped his old friend had survived the fight. Then, draping Holmes’s heavy coat about his shoulders, he went to find his rifle and to discover just how his men had fared in the battle.
In the dark, Adam Faulconer vomited.
He