"Walter Jon Williams - No Spot of Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

No Spot of Ground




NO SPOT OF GROUND

Walter Jon Williams


The dead girl came as a shock to him. He had limped into the Starker house from the firelit military
camp outside, from a cacophony of wagons rattling, men driving tent pegs, provost marshals setting up
the perimeter, a battalion of Ewell's Napoleon guns rolling past, their wheels lifting dust from the old
farm road, dust that drifted over the camp, turning the firelight red and the scene into a pictured outpost
of Hell"┬ж

And here, to his surprise, was a dead girl in the parlor. She was perhaps sixteen, with dark hair,
translucent skin, and cheeks with high painted spots of phthisis red. Her slim form was dressed in white.
She lay in her coffin with candles at her head and feet, and her long-faced relatives sat in a semicircle of
chairs under portraits of ancestors and Jefferson Davis.

A gangly man, probably the dead girl's father, rose awkwardly to welcome the surprised stranger, who
had wandered into the parlor in hopes of asking for a glass of lemonade.

The intruder straightened in surprise. He took off his soft white hat and held it over his heart. The little
gold knots on the ends of the hat cord rattled on the brim like muffled mourning drums.

"I am sorry to intrude on your grief," he said.

The father halted in what he was going to say, nodded, and dropped back into his chair. His wife, a
heavy woman in dark silk, reached blindly toward him, and took his hand.

The intruder stood for a long moment out of respect, his eyes fixed on the corpse, before he turned and
put on his hat and limped out of the house. Once he had thought this sight the saddest of all; once he had
written poems about it.

What surprised him now was that it still happened, that people still died this way.

He had forgotten, amid all this unnatural slaughter, that a natural death was possible.

****

That morning he had brought his four brigades north into Richmond, marching from the Petersburg and
Weldon depot south of the James break-step across the long bridge to the Virginia Central depot in the

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Walter%20Jon%20Williams%20-%20No%20Spot%20of%20Ground.html (1 of 55)22-12-2006 21:55:25
 No Spot of Ground


capital. Until two days ago he'd commanded only a single brigade in the defense of Petersburg; but poor