Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [142]
They rode fanned out through groves raked all the previous day by minié balls and grapeshot from the cannons. Wood of the torn trunks stood out stark and pale among the dark boles of undamaged trees. Everywhere the scent of wounded wood mingled with the odor of slow-drying blood. Anderson leaned sideways from the saddle to pluck a splinter for a toothpick, made a light remark and laughed as someone hushed him. Overhead the canopy of leaves was fracturing into fine blue lines like cracks in a china teacup, as dawn washed out the weak light of the stars.
Just ahead through a thinning of the trees the downhill slope of another pasture glowed, steeped in dew. At the bottom where there might be a creek, where certainly there were remains of a disintegrating rock-wall fence, enemy horsemen circled, clustered, faced Forrest’s party as it began to break into the open.
“I don’t make’m many,” Forrest said, squinting in the faint light as Anderson and Major Strange pulled up either side of him. “I don’t make’m worth slowen down fer.” He’d have called the Yankee cavalry at between a hundred and a hundred and fifty, though of course more might be hidden where the thickets began again, halfway up the swell of the next rise.
He glanced back and caught sight of Willie’s pale, excited face as he came riding out of the grove behind them. A dark spot on his cheekbone might have been a bruise or a scrape from one of his scuffles with Matthew—and why did those boys seem to need a session of stomp and gouge even after a long day of battle? Or no, they’d given up all that foolishness lately, hadn’t they?—so Willie’s smudge might just as well be something else, and anyway Matthew was riding well off to the left, so that for the moment Forrest held his horse between them.
“Sir?” Anderson was saying.
“They won’t stick. Not where they’re at. Not even thinken about it,” Forrest said. “Come on and let’s give’m a dare.”
The yell went up as he dug his heels into the flanks of the unnamed horse. His throat hurt but he couldn’t tell what part of the whole wildcat scream was his. It seemed to float above them all, like the lifting, dissipating morning mist.
The Yankee horsemen wheeled, clustered, rode across the damp ditch line beyond the remnants of rock wall, twenty yards or so up the next rise, and then they turned. Would they have a mind to charge to meet him? No. But now they were close enough for him to see their weapons as they raised them. Long guns. Forrest’s horsemen were still too far out for their Navy sixes to count for much and so the men were holding their fire.
At the first volley he heard the thump of metal penetrating flesh, and turned for an instant to see that the colored feller he’d picked up by the side of that Kentucky road had been shot dead in the saddle. Henry. Ornery, in his odd French way of pronouncing it. He’d taken the bullet on the bridge of his nose and the shock had rocked his whole upper body back, but now it slumped forward into the horse’s mane, where his copper-colored fingers still convulsed on the reins.
Forrest faced front, where the Yankees surprised him with a second volley hard on the first. By damn they must have got holt of some of the brand-new Spencer repeaters—he needed to get some of them for his own folks. Six-guns among his own party were beginning to pop here and there, though the range was still a shade long for them. Forrest, like the better disciplined members of his troop, continued to hold his fire.
His horse leapt over some stones of the wall, more clumsily than it should have done, missing a stride as it came down, then partially recovering. There was in fact a little creek beyond the wall, narrow enough some of the horses jumped it too, but Forrest’s mount plunged straight in—it wasn’t more than fetlock deep. The bottom was paved with smooth