Christian Cameron - Washington and Caesar

Sergeant McDonald came up out of the dark on a small horse, leading another. McDonald was wearing a greatcoat, and the other regulars with him were wearing their workshirts over their coats, too. They fell in with the Guides and the party moved off, passing the inner post with a whispered password and the outer post in silence. Then they halted for a moment and Caesar looked to Stewart and Martin, caught their eyes, and ordered the men to prime and load.

Martin kept walking up and down, a fund of nervous energy. He had passed his tests of fire, but this was a different kind of war and needed different nerves. Stewart sat in the starlight, a dark figure with an oddly shadowed face. Jason Knealey feared this silent figure even more than he feared McDonald, a deep-in-the-gut fear that made his flesh crawl, and he all but sobbed aloud when he saw the Guides clearly, row on row of black men.

“Bludner talks about them,” he said trying to sound friendly through his terror.

“Which, now?”

“The black men. He talks about them, an’ how he’ll get them someday.”

“Oh, aye. Weel, I dinna think he’s going to get this lot, but we’ll see.” McDonald was chewing tobacco and seemed lost in thought, and Knealey tried the bonds on his wrists. He felt the knife press his guts, just a pressure through his clothes, but firm and very steady, and he moaned.

“You’ll live to see the dogs start on ye,” said McDonald. Knealey just shook.

The last rammer rammed home the last cartridge while McDonald reviewed their destination with Knealey for the seventh time, and gave his captain the nod.

“Time to march?” asked Lieutenant Martin.

“Time to run,” said Sergeant Caesar, and Stewart nodded.

“Just so.”

“Van Sluyt, take two files ahead and don’t get beyond our sight. Stop and come back if you see anything. Virgil, four files to the left of our path. Stay fifty paces from the column and rejoin if you see anything or cannot pass a piece of ground otherwise. Jim, the same on the right. At the double then. March, march!”

They left the road across the unplowed ground of a fallow field, and in a moment they were lost to the sight of the last outpost.

“Where they goin’?” asked one of the soldiers on duty. The other shook his head.

“Glad they’re on our side.”

They moved for almost an hour without a pause, undiscovered through the night. The scouts reported nothing that could be construed as suspicious, and the column took its first rest halt in a gully at the base of a dark mass of hills. They were making a long arc to their destination to avoid intermixing with Colonel Robinson’s party. They had some hope that Bludner was expecting his messenger from the opposite direction.

After five minutes’ rest and no pipes, they moved again, now at a quiet march across dark fields. Anything in among the trees was invisible in the black, and the sky was an endless field of stars that covered the heavens and seemed to have a clarity and a depth more suited to a winter night.

They stopped when Virgil called a halt by waving, but he had only flushed a deer, and the astonished column watched as the big doe and her fawn raced down the whole length of their little column. Sergeant Fowver slapped the doe as she ran by and laughed softly.

“Bet she never been slapped befo’,” he said quietly, and Caesar glared at him. Then Caesar gave two soft pipes on his whistle, and they were moving again, through an apple orchard full of ripe fruit where Jim Somerset stopped them for reasons he couldn’t explain to Captain Stewart in a hurried conference. But Caesar respected Jim’s ways, and he sent Virgil forward with three old hands to feel out the last few hundred yards of the approach. Knealey sat and sweated, and the other men made their last checks of their equipment. No one spoke. Men filled their haversacks with apples.

To some, it seemed that Virgil returned in a moment, but to Caesar and Stewart he seemed to be gone half the night.

“Sentries out,” he said. “An’ more under cover, I reckon. Hard to tell in the dark.”

“And you have a route?”

“All the way to the last cover.”

Stewart called for all the NCOs down to the lowliest corporal to attend him, and they moved well off from the column to be as quiet as they could. Virgil drew them a hasty sketch in the dirt.

“A big barn heah, an’ the house. The yard is open an’ they ain’t no fence.” He was nervous, Caesar could see, almost shaking from what he had just done. Caesar thought of Polly and all the different ways that people were brave.

“Then this is a little patch o’ wood, and this is a wall, jus’ so high,” and he indicated his thigh. “They’s men behin’ that wall.”

“Cover for us?” said Stewart.

“These woods is empty, and these other woods, I dunno. We din’t get to them.”

Caesar nodded. “Fowver into the near woods and I go into the far.”

Stewart winced as he shifted his arm. He was still sitting on his horse. “One long blast from my whistle and in you go. Remember that we don’t want to give the alarm before Robinson. He’s only a mile or so away, perhaps two. He ought to open the ball in about an hour.”

Martin shook his head. “An hour is a long time lying in the dark.”

Stewart nodded. “I agree. Keep them here for half an hour.”

Caesar moved at the head of his men, cautiously entering the edge of the woods, completely alive and aware of every motion and every sound. The night trees were pitch black, but the gentle hum of insects and the chatter of birds told him the woods were most likely empty. He kept his fowler up and aimed into the darkness as he moved from trunk to trunk, his legs making noise in the underbrush that would easily give him away if there were foes here.

When he was in the middle, the brush was less and he could move better. He changed his posture, rising all the way up on the balls of his feet in silence and then sinking back down to change the weight on his back. He leaned forward, and then back, and felt his spine shift a little, and moved on, placing each foot to make the least noise. He couldn’t see anything, even the man behind him when he turned, and he had to stop himself from looking up at the sky just to find light for his eyes. In what seemed like an eternity he came to thicker brush, and then light-the far edge of the wood. He peered out softly and couldn’t even make out the bulk of the barn, except that there seemed to be a sharp edge on the horizon that must be a roofline. He waited. Virgil came up to him and he patted him off to the right, and then Jim came and was sent to the left. He could hear them make noise, and he expected an alarm at every moment, and he put his own whistle to his lips and held it there like a pipe stem, ready. And still there was no alarm. He realized that it was possible that the farm was empty, and that shook him more than the dread of discovery, but under these worries he was still in the grip of the calm that came in action. He crouched and waited.

The very first lightening of the sky came and with it a gentle rain, almost a mist. It didn’t last long but Caesar dumped his prime and reprimed from a little horn. After it stopped, the sky seemed to darken, and then it became difficult to tell the passage of time and Caesar grew concerned that something had changed, or that the darkness might be a sign of heavy rain.

Off to the north and west, there was a dull thump and the hint of a cry on the breeze, and then another thump as the sky grew brighter. Suddenly Caesar wondered if he had been asleep, because the roofline of the barn and house were each distinct, and the morning seemed farther along out in the open while it was still full night under the trees. A very distant sound, almost at the edge of hearing, so Caesar began to doubt each sound, and they were never repeated, but each was separated from the next by an interminable time. And then, quite close, a whistle blast, and he was on his feet and blew a blast on his own whistle, and the woods erupted, pouring Guides into the open ground.