With that hole in him, he was surely a dead man. He didn’t know it yet, though. He still held his rifle, and tried to aim it at Paul. Mantarakis discovered his left leg didn’t want to hold him.
Then he fired once more, and the enemy soldier’s head exploded in red ruin. Paul tried to get up and discovered he couldn’t. He looked down at himself. Red was soaking through the dust on the inside of his trouser leg. Seeing his own blood flooding out of him made him understand he really had been hit. It also made the wound start to hurt. He clamped his teeth together hard against a scream.
“Sergeant’s down!” somebody shouted, off to one side of him. He did an awkward, three-limbed crawl back behind the shelter of that boulder. Then he detached his bayonet and cut the trouser leg with it before fumbling for the wound dressing in a pouch on his belt.
His hands didn’t want to do what he told them. He’d barely managed to shove the bandage against the hole in his leg when a couple of U.S. soldiers grabbed him. “Got to get you out of here, Sarge,” one of them said.
“Got to get us all the hell out of here,” the other added. “Damn Mexicans got us pinned down good.”
“We’ll lick ’em,” Paul said vaguely. His voice sounded very far away, as if he were listening to himself along a tunnel. He wasn’t hot any more, either. A long time ago, hadn’t they bled people who had fevers? He tried to laugh, though no sound came out. Sure as sure, he wouldn’t have any fever now.
One of the men supporting him grunted just as the Mexican had and crumpled to the ground. A few paces farther on, the other soldier said, “Can you help any, Sarge? We’d move faster if you could do something with your good leg.” Getting no reply, he spoke again, louder: “Sarge?”
He stooped, letting his burden down behind another of the strangely shaped rocks that dotted the valley. When he got up again, he ran on alone.
Anne Colleton felt trapped. Living as the only white person at what had been-and what she was fiercely determined would again be-Marshlands plantation with the remnants of her field hands was only part of the problem, though she made a point of carrying a small revolver in her handbag and preferred not to go far from the Tredegar rifle when she could help it. You couldn’t tell any more, not these days.
That was part of the problem. The Red uprising had shattered patterns of obedience two hundred years old. The field hands still did as she told them. The fields were beginning to look as if she might have some kind of crop this year, no matter how late it had been started. But she couldn’t use the Negroes as she had before. She’d taken their compliance for granted. No more. Now they worked in exchange for her keeping the Confederate authorities from troubling them for whatever they might have done during the rebellion. It was far more nearly a bargain between equals than the previous arrangement had been.
But only part of her feeling of isolation was spiritual. The rest was physical, and perfectly real. She’d made trips into St. Matthews and into Columbia, trying to get the powers that be to repair the telephone and telegraph lines that connected her to the wider world. She’d had promises that they would be up two weeks after her return to the plantation. She’d had a lot more promises since. What she didn’t have were telephone and telegraph lines.
“God damn those lying bastards to hell,” she snarled, staring out along the path, out toward the road, out toward the whole wide world where anything at all might be happening-but if it was happening, how could she find out about it? She’d prided herself on her modernity, but the life she was living had more to do with the eighteenth century than the twentieth.
Beside her, Julia stirred. “Don’ fret yourself none, Miss Anne,” she said. Her hands rested on the broad shelf of her belly. Before long, she would have that baby. If she knew who the father was, she hadn’t said so.
Anne ground her teeth. Julia would have been ideally suited to the eighteenth century, or to the fourteenth century, for that matter. She let things happen to her. When they did, she cast around for the easiest way to set them right and chose that.
“Better to be actor than acted upon,” Anne said, more to herself than to her serving woman. She’d always believed that, though she’d had scant experience of being acted upon till the Red revolution cast her into the hands of the military. Having gained the experience, she was convinced she’d been right to loathe it.
She looked over toward the ruins of the Marshlands mansion. The cottage in which she was living now had belonged to Cassius the hunter. From what she’d heard, he’d had a high place in the Negroes’Congaree Socialist Republic. He’d been a Red right under her nose, and she’d never suspected. That ate at her, too. She hated being wrong.
Even more galling was having been wrong about Scipio, who was also supposed to have been a revolutionary leader.
And the Ford she was driving these days made as unsatisfactory a replacement for her vanished Vauxhall as the nigger cottage did for her vanished mansion. She hated the balky, farting motorcar. The only thing she would have hated worse was being without one altogether.
An automobile rattled past on the road, kicking up a trail of red dust as it went. It was, she saw, an armored car, with a couple of machine guns mounted in a central turret. Resistance still sputtered in the swamps by the Congaree. Otherwise, that armored car would have been of far more value shooting down damnyankees, its proper task.
Julia’s eyes followed the armored car till it disappeared behind a stand of trees. Despite her broad lips, her mouth made a thin, hard line. She swore up and down that she’d never been a rebel, that she hated everything the Reds stood for. Anne’s opinion was that she protested too much. Wherever the truth lay there, Julia did not take kindly to seeing such deadly machines out hunting black men. That was also true even of the Negroes who had, Anne thought, genuinely disapproved of the Socialist uprising. Anne sighed. Life kept getting harder.
A couple of minutes later, a party of horsemen turned off the road and onto the path leading up to…the ruins of Marshlands. Two of the three riders had the look of superannuated soldiers, and carried carbines across their knees. The third, the postman, wore a Tredegar slung on his back.
Anne walked toward him, nodding as she did so. “Good morning, Mr. Palmer,” she called. With the telephone and telegraph out of commission, the postman was her lifeline to the wider world.
He swung down off his horse and touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. Producing a pencil and a printed form, he said, “Mornin’ to you, Miss Colleton. Got a special delivery you got to sign for-and quite a special delivery it is, too. Ah, thank you, ma’am.” He passed her the envelope, and then the rest of the day’s mail. That done, he gave her another half-salute, remounted, and urged his horse up from walk to canter. The two armed guards rode off with him, their eyes hard and alert.
“Richmond,” Anne said, noting the postmark on the envelope before she spotted the return address in the upper left-hand corner, in a typeface that might have come straight off a Roman monument:
RESIDENCE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA
Her head went up and down in a quick, decisive nod. “About time Gabriel Semmes got off his backside and wrote to me.”
“Who it from, Miss Anne?” Julia asked.
“The president,” Anne answered, and the Negro woman’s eyes got big and round.
Anne tore the envelope open. The letter was in Semmes’ own hand, which partly mollified her for not having heard from him sooner.
“Unfortunate events,” Anne snorted, as if the two words added up to some horrible curse-and so, maybe, they did. Before he’d been elected, Gabriel Semmes had made a name for himself as a man who went out and did things, not a typical politician. Anne had thrown money into his campaign on that basis. But if he called an insurrection an unfortunate event, maybe she would have been better served spending it elsewhere.
She read on:
