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

their nights in country inns or, when the weather was fine and Virginia's health permitted, wrapped in
blankets beneath the open sky. His friends had thought his interest in nature morbid. Buried in the life of
the city and the life of the mind, they could not understand how his soul was drawn skyward by the
experience of the outdoors, how close he felt to the Creator when he and Virginia shared a soft bank of
moist timothy and kissed and caressed one another beneath the infinite range of fiery stars"┬ж

Poe realized he was weeping again. He looked about and saw he had wandered far from his tent, amid
his soldiers' dying campfires.

Nothing like this had happened to him in years. The sight of that dead girl had brought back things he
thought he'd forgotten.

He mastered himself once more and walked on. The rising southern wind stirred the gray ashes of
campfires, brought little sparks winking across his path. He followed them, heading north.

Eventually he struck his entrenchments, a deep line of the kind of prepared works this army could now
throw up in a few hours, complete with head log, communications trenches, firing step, and parapet.
Soldiers huddled like potato sacks in the trenches, or on the grass just behind the line. An officer's mare
dozed over its picket. Beyond, Poe could hear the footsteps of the sentries patrolling.

Once, just after the war had first started, Robert Lee had tried to get this army to dig trenches--and the
soldiers had mocked him, called him "The King of Spades," and refused to do the work. Digging was
not fit work for a white man, they insisted, and besides, only a coward would fight from entrenchments.

Now the army entrenched at every halt. Three years' killing had made them lose their stupid pride.

Poe stepped onto the firing step, and peered out beneath the head log as he tried to scan his front.
Beyond the vague impression of gentle rolling hills, he could see little. Then he lifted his head as he
heard the challenging scream of a stallion. The sound came from away north, well past the
entrenchments.

The mare picketed behind the entrenchments raised its head at the sound. The stallion challenged again.
Then another horse screamed, off to the right, and another. The mare flicked its ears and gave an answer.

The mare was in heat, Poe realized. And she was flirting with Yankee horses. None of his men could be
out that far.

The wind had carried the mare's scent north, to the nose of one northern stallion. Other stallions that
hadn't scented the mare nevertheless answered the first horse's challenge.

Poe's head moved left to right as one horse after another screamed into the night. Sorrel's map hadn't
shown the Yankee line stretching that far, well south of the tributary, beyond Clingman's brigade to

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 No Spot of Ground

where Fitz Lee's cavalry was supposed to be, out on his right flank.

He listened as the horses called to one another like bugles before a battle, and he thought: The Yankees
are moving, and they're moving along my front.