Washington and Caesar. Christian Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ the service, and the polished barrel glinted in the gray light. He could see the gun captain whirling his flaming linstock in the air over his head, a very martial sight that stirred Washington faintly.

      The linstock came down across the breech of the gun and it responded instantly with a fine mushroom of smoke. The sharp “bang” of a good shot and dry powder followed a moment later. The depression of the shot was too low for anyone to follow its fall or its line, but within a few seconds there was a commotion at the British advance post. Washington looked at it through the glass. Three of the smart King’s Own men were gathered around a fourth, prone. Washington could see from the numbers that they had been changing the guard. The downed man was spasming hard, probably screaming, but his voice was lost in the wind and the distance.

      “Hit with their own ball,” said Lee, in an odd, strained voice. He had friends in the British Army, but then, they all did.

      Washington watched the British pickets making shift to move their wounded man. Every man of them had a watch coat, a musket, and a bayonet, made by the same mills that made most of his army’s equipment. There was blood visible on the mud, even at this distance, and Washington knew from experience that the human body held a prodigious amount of blood. The shot must have taken off a leg.

      Washington handed Lee his glass and turned his horse away as the British artillery fired again.

      

       Great Dismal Swamp, October 1775

      It took Caesar another week to break the fever, and he was thin and listless, gradually moving from total apathy about food to a raging hunger that he lacked the energy to satisfy. In his fever, he couldn’t imagine what had happened; during his daily moments of lucidity, he still couldn’t understand where the others had gone or where he was himself. Unbeknownst to his rational mind, he crawled every day in his fever, dragging his hot and exhausted body through the tangle of undergrowth in a circle, so that he never awoke from the fever in the same place.

      When he finally came up from real sleep, listless but in possession of his faculties for the first time in days, he was unable to guess his location. He had nothing to hunt with and he couldn’t see open water where he might catch a frog. He tried eating the base of cat-tails but the bitter flavor made them hard to eat despite his hunger. They gave him a little energy, though, and he began to move north, as best he could, hoping to see something he would recognize. He had no reason to think he had drifted south from the camp, but he had to choose a direction, and north was the choice.

      He was almost naked: his shirt gone, his breeches a ruin that barely covered his legs, no boots, no jacket, and caked in mud and the fine vegetable matter that lay over every inch of the swamp’s floor. He was growing desperate for water. He began to suspect he was going to die after all, having survived the fever. When he tried to think back, he couldn’t decide whether the slave-takers’ attack had been real or part of his fever, although logic suggested that it had to be real or he wouldn’t be alone in the swamp. That depressed him further, as it meant that he alone had survived. The utter defeat and extinction of his little band made him a failure as a leader, and he tried to think what he might have done better. He mourned the men, even those he hadn’t liked so well. He felt tremendous guilt. Eventually he stopped walking, although a fitter man would have heard from the bird cries that he was near open water. Caesar slumped down at the base of a giant ancient swamp willow. He didn’t so much sleep as surrender. His eyes, puffy and dry, were open but unfocused. He began to lean a little sideways, gradually slipping down the trunk, curling a little to ease the griping in his gut, sweat dripping off his nose.

      He considered the possibility of standing up. It seemed reasonable. He was at the end, and death was near, and he decided that he would push himself up the trunk until he could stand if for no other reason than to spite the pain in his gut. And it occurred to him, as if from a distance, that despite his many failures and the ruin of his body, he was going to die free. That was worth something. He began to rise, slowly, almost glacially, and then with a mis-step and a stumble back against the trunk, he was erect.

      The movement saved him. Jim saw it away across an arm of the open water, like a deer moving, and he ran around the water and found Caesar standing on trembling legs, rocking back and forth. Jim didn’t have the training to recognize that Caesar had a ghost spear and a ghost shield and was holding them ready. Jim couldn’t see that, but he could just see that it was Caesar—his hero, almost his god—and in minutes Caesar was gulping water from a stolen leather fire bucket in a new camp. He was alive.

      

      It took him another week to recover, with food brought to his side every day. Virgil tried to keep the story of the slave-takers from him, but day by day he learned the whole of it, from the apparent treachery of the woman to the last shots in the woods.

      “How bad was they hurt?”

      “Little one hu’t bad, Caesar. I shot he face off!” Virgil was anxious to expiate the sin he had committed. The lives of Old Ben and Lolly were heavy on him, and he had buried them in the old camp with good crosses over them, although Lolly had not been a Christian man at all.

      “What about the woman?”

      “I won’ be goin’ to her again, Caesar.”

      Tom was sitting on a stump, whittling with his long razor knife. He looked up and laughed bitterly.

      “She’ll be long gone wi’ them slavers, you ninny. How’d a boy like you grow up so simple, Virgil? She was jus’ honey to catch flies.”

      “How bad was the othuh, the other, one hurt, Virgil?”

      “Jus’ roughed up, I think. I kicked him pretty ha’d in the weddin’ tackle.”

      “So they won’ be back after us right away?”

      “No. No, Caesar. We safe fo’ a whiles.”

      “Time to move again, though. We should go north. We haven’t been north in a long time. If they send militia, they look fo’ us down here, I think. An’ we need to hit a farm.”

      Long Tom looked at the pistol in his lap. He hadn’t fired a shot at the slave-takers, and he was in a mood.

      “We should hit that farm that this fool an’ the boy keep goin’ to.” He waved his hand. “They gave them slave-takers a home. Let’s burn ’em out and take what we want.”

      Virgil stirred. “They got black folks, and them slaves has helped us and helped us. We burn that farm an’ who’s gonna pay for it? Them black folks. I say no. I say we steal something, or just ax for it from the ol’ woman. But burn ’em out ain’t fair.”

      “He got happy memories o’ that place,” sneered Tom. The others murmured assent. They wanted blood.

      Caesar rolled off his fern pallet and looked around, his eyes still bloodshot.

      “We will go to the farm. We will not burn it!” He looked around at the survivors. “If we burn it and kill the farmers, we will jus’ draw the militia after us. Let’s jus’ take what we need an’ git. We might make it free that way. Tom, you shut it. You jus’ jealous that he got somethin’ you didn’. Now everyone jus’ go sleep. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

      The survivors of the band grumbled, but they went. And Caesar, still miserable over the losses, puzzled to figure out why he was still in charge.

      

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