The Time Traveler's Almanac (71 page)

“Elizabeth,” I said.

“What’s the matter with—”

I grabbed her and pulled her down and rolled halfway on top of her, and there was a moment as short as a heartbeat during which she was too surprised to react and the woods were silent except for a subdued, almost featureless sort of background bee swarm murmur, and then, abruptly, the murmur resolved itself into the sounds of men and masses of men thrashing and crashing about in the underbrush, and yells of excitement, and an eruption of reports, quite close this time, and quite emphatic, and now much less like the sound of popcorn popping than like that of pebbles or dried peas being shaken in a large gourd, and there were more zinging explosions among the trees. Some of the yelling turned anguished. The sounds were all around us now; we weren’t near a battle, we were in it. I risked a look but there was nothing to see except a thick haze of gunsmoke drifting among the trees. I pulled my head back in and lay on my belly beside Elizabeth in the mud.

The woods grew gloomier as gunsmoke collected under the branches. There was a bitter smoky stench in the air that stung our eyes and burned our throats, and now, between blasts of gunfire, we could hear men crying out in pain and terror. From just downstream, off to our left, came a blurry bawled command, the rustle and crash of heavy movement through underbrush, then splashing noises. I glimpsed shadowy forms pushing through knee-deep water at the nearest bend of the creek. From upstream came another thunderous rattle of gunfire. Orange flames flickered among the trees, and there were more cries, more sounds of movement.

There were other sounds, too, a rising roar of wind among the treetops, a crackling, a hissing. I couldn’t imagine what they signified. Then came a different sort of smoke smell, and at almost the same moment Elizabeth put her mouth close to my ear and yelled, “The woods are on fire! We’ve got to get out of here!”

As though on cue, flame curled through a tripod of dead pines not twenty feet from where we lay. Elizabeth made to get up. I grabbed her arm roughly.

“You want to get yourself shot?”

She jerked away. “I sure as hell don’t want to burn to death or suffocate!”

“Keep down, or you won’t have to worry!”

“Come
on,
if you’re coming!” and she slid herself into the water.

Better shot than cooked, I decided, and followed. I found myself wading in knee-deep water, with soft, ankle-deep mud sucking at my boots. Behind us, the fire suddenly roared along the bank, seeming to leap from treetop to treetop, consuming everything immediately combustible, scorching everything else. The air filled with sparks, and the heat was so intense, the smoke so thick, that we were momentarily driven onto the other bank. A cloud of airborne burning bits engulfed us like a swarm of hellish insects, stinging as they alighted on our faces and hands. Breathing was like swallowing heated needles. Our hair and clothing began to smolder, and Elizabeth screamed and started beating at herself. I looped an arm around her waist, forced her back into the water, dunked us both. She pulled free and surfaced several feet away, sputtering and clawing hair out of her eyes.

“Go!” I yelled at her. “Go! Go!”

And we went, blistered, half-blinded, and choking, through Hell.

Everywhere there was fire and smoke and noise and horror.

Once, we heard someone in one of the thickets along the bank cry out that he was burning and beg to be shot. His pleas abruptly broke off in a wail of agony that must have persisted for a full minute. Elizabeth unexpectedly grabbed my hand, and I felt her fingernails bite into my palm; under the mud and the soot, her face was bone white.

Farther downstream, as we skirted a fire that burned all the way down the bank to the water, a flame-swathed figure lurched blindly out of the inferno. It was pawing at itself and moaning hideously, and as it broke through the thicket, burning vines dragged and snatched at it as though to pull it back into the heart of the blaze. It slipped in the mud on the bank opposite us and seemed to dissolve in a boiling cloud of steam.

I covered my eyes with my hands as we plunged past.

In some places there was no fire, only shadows and that infernal, constant pow-pow-pop, now close by, now remote. Once again, we were caught in a cross-fire and lay clutching each other in terror against a reedy bank while bullets clipped small branches and pieces of bark overhead. The shooting quickly rose to a furious crescendo, then died away as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun.

When we had heard only distant battle sounds for a long time, Elizabeth leaned close to me and said, “This is it for me. I’m worn out, and I’ve lost a shoe in the mud. This is as far as I go.”

“We aren’t safe here.”

“We aren’t safe anywhere in this goddamn swamp. May as well die here as anywhere else.”

“We’re not going to die. John—”

“Oh, screw John, and screw you, too,” and with that she crawled up the soggy bank and flung herself down on relatively dry ground. There was nothing for me to do but follow her into the thicket. For no reason I could imagine save that I was stuck in character again, I pulled off my ruined jacket and offered it to her. She looked at it and at me with consummate distaste and declined to accept. The whole exchange was leaden pantomime. We were too tired for actual argument any more, though not too tired to disagree. She wadded up her own jacket for a pillow and apparently fell asleep as soon as her head touched it. I was dead tired, too, and hungry and thirsty as well, but I was too worried to fall asleep. Where was John?

And night fell, but the shooting never died away completely, and neither did the brush-fires. I could hear the intermittent crash of gunfire all about, often punctuated by shouts. The smell of burning was everywhere, and its crimson glow was reflected among the trees and against the sky. One blaze flared up not twenty yards from us. I went forward to keep an eye on its progress, and by its light saw dead men lying among a jackstraw pile of pine trunks. The fire had already gone over them, charring them and their garments beyond recognition and leaving a sickening seared-meat smell hanging about the area. As I turned to leave, I was startled by some firecracker-like explosions among the smouldering corpses – lingering flames were setting off the unused cartridges in the dead men’s pouches.

I returned to Elizabeth, sat down beneath a tree, leaned against it. Though it seemed that I closed my eyes for only a moment, when I opened them, the woods were suffused with a sickly gray light, and somewhere a bird was cawing.

Before me stood a stranger.

He was dressed in rather dusty and shabby dark clothes and carried an antiquated but effective-looking short rifle. The muzzle, which was pointed at my midriff, looked wide enough to accommodate a banana. By his right hip hung an equally antiquated revolver in a holster, by his left, a wooden canteen on a strap. His black slouch hat had seen better days. The shadow of its brim smudged the details of his face above his whiskery chin and solemn mouth.

I raised my hands and showed him my palms.

He gestured with the rifle in the general direction of the burned area and asked, in a low, soft drawl, “You looked at all that?”

I found my voice, but it was barely more than a hoarse whisper. “Y-yes.”

“What do you think?”

“It – it’s horrible.”

The stranger tilted his head back slightly, and something like a smile distorted the solemn mouth. “Oh, I don’t know. Those’re the first Yankees I’ve seen in a while that are cooked just the way I like ’em.”

I had the distinct sensation of icy fingers stroking my shoulder blades.

“Not much like the videos at all,” he said, “now, is it?”

“You’re from up the way!”

“You folks ain’t from around here, either.” The “ain’t” sounded like an affectation. “I could tell that even without seeing your trails. You’re anachronistic at worst,” and he shot a look at Elizabeth, “and inappropriate at best.”

Elizabeth was still asleep, with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped protectively around her head. I knelt beside her and shook her gently. She gave a grunt and a heave, and that was all.

I shook her again and got a petulant moan out of her this time. She rolled onto her back, ran her parched tongue over her cracked, blackened lips, peered out from under the arch of her elbow.

“Company,” I said, nodding in the stranger’s direction.

She blinked, not understanding. I helped her into a sitting position, and then she noticed him. They studied each other for several seconds.

“Another time-traveler,” I told her. Elizabeth looked relieved. I didn’t know how to set her straight.

“Judging from your clothes,” he said, “or what’s left of ’em, I’d say you’re just a couple of lost sightseers.” There was offhanded contempt in his voice as he spoke the word “sightseers.”

“I think she’s some kind of reporter—”

“Documentary film-maker!”

“– and I’m from the University of—”

He cut us short with an impatient wave of his rifle. “Where you folks suppose’ to be?”

“The Crystal Palace exposition in London, England,” I said. “Eighteen fifty-one.”

“That so? Then you only missed it by about a dozen years and a couple thousand miles. This is Virginia—”

“Virginia!” Elizabeth and I exclaimed in unison.

“– and it’s the first week of May, eighteen sixty-four.”

He let us gnaw on that all we could stand. After a while, Elizabeth struck her knee with her fist and bawled, “Where the hell is
John?
”

The stranger made a shushing sound at her with his mouth, a shushing motion with his hand. “My guess is your guide’s trying to sort your trail out from everybody else’s. There’s been a lot of fighting right around here over the last few years, and there’ll be some more for a while to come. There was a big battle over by Chancellorsville just last year. Big or little, past or future, each one of these fights has got its own crowd of spectators. You can just see ’em out of the corner of your eye. Well, I guess you can’t see any of ’em, since you’re just passengers. But when I look, this whole area’s all criss-crossed with – it’s like seeing one of those time-exposed photos of a highway at night. All streaks of light, except that this ain’t just a time-exposed picture. It’s double- and triple-exposed a hundred times over.”

“May we please have some water?”

Elizabeth had cut in just as he obviously was getting going on a subject dear to him. He stopped and glared and seemed to have to shift mental gears.

“We’re very thirsty,” she continued. “We haven’t had anything to drink since yesterday. We’re incredibly hungry, too.”

He stared at her for a moment more, then shifted his rifle to draw the canteen strap up over his head. He handed the canteen to me. I uncorked it and handed it to Elizabeth. “You’re so gallant,” she said as she took it.

“Now don’t gulp,” the stranger warned her.

She took a gulp and began to cough.

“Serves you right,” said the stranger. “Sip.”

She gulped again and coughed again.

Since she patently wasn’t listening to him, he spoke to me. “Can’t give you food. Only got some hardtack and a little salt meat, and it’s got to last me a bit. Just make you thirsty again anyway. But you won’t starve before your guide finds you and takes you home.”

“I’ll be sure to mention your solicitude to the folks back home,” Elizabeth said, dangerously close to sarcasm. I could have strangled her.

“I’ll be obliged if you don’t mention my solicitude or anything else to the folks back home.”

Elizabeth handed the canteen over to me. I raised it to my lips and took a careful sip. The water was warm and strange-tasting. The idea crossed my mind that tadpoles had probably swum in it, perhaps swam in it even now, but I didn’t care, and I swallowed gratefully. Then the idea crossed my mind that burning men may have been extinguished in it as well, and I quickly re-corked the canteen and handed it to its owner. He slipped the canteen’s strap back over his head.

“You’d best lay low here till your guide comes. Last thing anybody wants is dead passengers around here, so you keep your heads down. This is a dangerous place for you. Actually” – there was that smile again – “this is a dangerous place for just about anybody. There’re Yankee soldiers and Confederates scattered every which way in these woods. You’re just off the end of the whole battle line.”

Without further ado, he turned to go.

“Wait!” Elizabeth said. “Can’t we stay with your passengers until our guide gets here?”

“Don’t carry passengers.” He was already walking away.

She called after him plaintively, “Can’t you
please
take us home?”

He paused, half-turned, touched his hat brim. “Ma’am,” he said, “this is home,” and with that he strode off and was quickly lost to view and to hearing as well.

I suddenly realized that I had been holding my breath for some time. I let the air rush out of me and sagged deflated against a tree.

“Now there,” Elizabeth murmured, “is a truly weird person.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

She looked at me curiously, but I just turned away. My hands and knees were shaking. I didn’t know much about the American Civil War, but I recalled reading or hearing that northern Virginia was some of the most fought-over real estate in North America. Anyone who wanted to be a spectator to the Civil War could do worse than to visit Virginia. Anyone who wanted to
live
the Civil War, and had the power to reach it, and didn’t burden himself with passengers, could come to this place at this time and stay indefinitely and never run out of opportunities to participate – if not, perhaps, in the crazy hope of changing the outcome, then only, perhaps, with the crazy joy of contributing to the carnage.

I felt those cold fingers brush along my spine again.

“What do you think he meant,” Elizabeth said, “when he said this was home?”

“I think,” I began, and paused to ask myself if I really wanted to go on and tell her I believed he meant that this was a mighty fine place to kill people. The answer was no, so I shrugged and lied. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”