Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [143]
He leaned forward and closed the hole with his right index finger. As he did so he seemed to feel another bullet skim down the whole length of his spine. That much was lucky. Be damned if he’d stop to change horses now.
He was near enough to see the faces of the Yankees. The frost of alarm passing over them as they began to grasp that the horse, though certainly shot dead, was not going to stop carrying Forrest with his arms and his rage into their midst. In fact the unnamed horse was moving smoothly now. Through the wound that united them, Forrest could feel the heartbeat of the animal flowing into his own.
Had he lost one of his pistols, when he stooped to stop the blood-gush? No he must have dropped it into a coat pocket, where he could feel it now bouncing against his hip … another sore spot there, where Gould had shot him back in June. His right hand was busy but he could still reach the other pistol with his left. He drew the double-edged sword instead and whipped it once around his wrist. The flexible Damascus blade sang as it sliced through the rushing air.
The Yankees could have, should have, got off a few more shots at him, but by now they must have cottoned onto the idea that no number of bullets would be enough to stop this charge. The Yankees turned and whipped their horses away toward Missionary Ridge.
Keep up the skeer—Forrest didn’t know if it was him yelling it or Anderson or Strange or any of the many others to whom he’d taught the phrase and concept; maybe he was just hearing it inside his own head. He spurred up the slope. The Yankees were scattering into the thickets. He locked onto one of them, the nearest, who sensed the pursuit, looked back once to see it coming, his mouth a little red ring of fear. The Yankee rider whipped his horse faster, twisting and turning through the briars of the thicket like a rabbit on the run.
Locust thorns clawed at Forrest’s coat sleeves. He saw the Yankee break his crop on his horse’s backside, then fling the useless handle away. The blue coat billowed, catching air like a sail. Forrest squeezed an ounce more speed from his horse, raised his sword and howled as he struck. The enemy squealed as the coat parted and the sword’s tip drew a red groove in the flesh to the right of his spine, all the way down from neck bone to coccyx. A shallow wound, hardly worth holleren over so. Forrest thought of the claw marks on his mother’s back, and different niggers he’d had to whup—it was damn awkward to swing a sword out of this crouch and yet he dursn’t straighten up for then his finger would come out of the horse’s neck and then the horse would bleed out and die.
Swop his damn head off Goddammit right now, Forrest told himself, spurring up to close again. The tail of the Yankee’s horse lashed across his face and he spat out a thread of coarse hair as he cut again with the sword, the blade chopping into the other man’s shoulder this time, instead of the throat as he’d intended—hard enough to knock the Yankee out of the saddle, though Forrest didn’t much think he had killed him.
He rode past, thinking irritably that he’d still have to claim an enemy life for this dead horse he was still flogging forward. They broke out onto the open road, and here the Yankees had picked up speed, the dust of their departure just settling around the next bend. One of the new Spencers lay by the roadside, trigger guard snagged by a twig of a sapling, and Forrest wanted to stop to retrieve it, but there was the same problem about the hole in his horse’s throat and anyway somebody coming behind would get it—the Yankees were throwing down so much as they ran it would take all day to get everything picked up.
He could hear some of his own men clattering around the bend and took a quick glance over his shoulder, remembering the last time he’d done so that