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

Sextus Pompeiius pulled the mare to a halt, and the general limped out of the buggy and leaned on his
stick. The Virginia Central yards were filled with trains, the cars shabby, the engines worn. Sad as they
were, they would serve to get the division to where it was going, another fifteen miles up the line to the
North Anna River, and save shoe leather while doing it.

The detestable Walter Whitman, the general remembered suddenly, wrote of steam engines in his
poems. Whitman surely had not been thinking of engines like these, worn and ancient, leaking steam and
oil as they dragged from front to front the soldiers as worn and tattered as the engines. Not trains, but
ghosts of trains, carrying a ghost division, itself raised more than once from the dead.

The lead formation, the general's old Virginia brigade, was marching up behind the buggy, their colors
and band to the front. The bandsmen were playing "Bonnie Blue Flag." The general winced--brass and
percussion made his taut nerves shriek, and he could really tolerate only the soft song of stringed
instruments. Pain crackled through his temples.

Among the stands of brigade and regimental colors was another stand, or rather a perch, with a pair of
black birds sitting quizzically atop: Hugin and Munin, named after the ravens of Wotan. The brigade
called themselves the Ravens, a compliment to their commander.

The general stood on the siding and watched the brigade as it came to a halt and broke ranks. A few
smiling bandsmen helped the general load his horses and buggy on a flatcar, then jumped with their
instruments aboard their assigned transport. The ravens were taken from their perch and put in cages in
the back of the general's carriage.

A lance of pain drove through the general's thigh as he swung himself aboard. He found himself a seat
among the divisional staff. Sextus Pompeiius put the general's bags in the rack over his head, then went
rearward to sit in his proper place behind the car, in the open between the carriages.

A steam whistle cried like a woman in pain. The tired old train began to move.

Poe's Division, formerly Pickett's, began its journey north to fight the Yanks somewhere on the North
Anna River. When, the general thought, would these young men see Richmond again?

One of the ravens croaked as it had been taught: "Nevermore!"

Men laughed. They thought it a good omen.

****

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 No Spot of Ground



General Poe stepped out of the mourning Starker house, the pale dead girl still touching his mind. When
had he changed? he wondered. When had his heart stopped throbbing in sad, harmonic sympathy at the
thought of dead young girls? When had he last wept?

He knew when. He knew precisely when his heart had broken for the last time, when he had ceased at
last to mourn Virginia Clemm, when the last ounce of poetry had poured from him like a river of dark