No Spot of Ground by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

himself. He had never fought in Greece when young, or served, as he had also claimed, in the Russian army. Instead—— penniless, an outcast, thrown on his own resources by his Shylock of a stepfather—— he had enlisted in the American army out of desperation, and served three years as a volunteer.
    It had been his dread, these years he’d served the Confederacy, that he would encounter some old soldier who remembered serving alongside the eighteen-year-old Private Edgar A. Perry. His fears had never been realized, fortunately, but he had read everything he could on Byron and the Greek War of Independence in hopes he would not be tripped up by the curious.
    “Ah,” Poe said. He pointed with his stick. “The men are moving.”
    “A brilliant sight, sir,” Moses’s eyes shone.
    Calls were rolling up the line, one after another, from Barton on the left to the Ravens next in line, then to Corse—— all Virginia brigades—— and then to Clingman’s North Carolinians on the right. Poe could hear the voices distinctly.
    “Attention, battalion of direction! Forward, guide centerrrr—— march !”
    The regiments moved forward, left to right, clumps of skirmishers spreading out ahead. Flags hung listlessly in the damp. Once the order to advance had been given, the soldiers moved in utter silence, in perfect parade-ground formation.
    Just as they had gone for that cemetery, Poe thought. He remembered his great swell of pride at the way the whole division had done a left oblique under enemy fire that day, taking little half-steps to swing the entire line forty-five degrees and then paused to dress the line before marching onward.
    Sweeping through tendrils of mist that clung to the soldiers’ legs, the division crossed the few hundred yards of ground between the entrenchments and the forest, and disappeared into the darkness and mist.
    Poe wondered desperately if he was doing the right thing.
    “Did you know Byron, sir?” Moses again.
    Poe realized he’d been holding his breath, anticipating the sound of disaster as soon as his men began their attack. He let his breath go, felt relief spreading outward, like rot, from his chest.
    “Byron died,” he said, “some years before I went abroad.”
    Byron had been feeding worms for forty years, Poe thought, but there were Byrons still, hundreds of them, in this army. Once he had been a Byron himself− an American Childe Harold dressed in dramatic black, ready with the power of his mind and talent to defeat the cosmos. Byron had intended to conquer the Mussulman; Poe would do him better, with Eureka , by conquering God.
    Byron had died at Missolonghi, bled to death by his personal physician as endless gray rain fell outside his tent and drowned his little army in the Peloponnesian mud. And nothing had come of Byron in the end, nothing but an example that inspired thousands of other young fools to die in similar pointless ways throughout the world.
    For Poe the war had come at a welcome moment. His literary career had come to a standstill, with nine thousand seven hundred fifty-one copies of the Complete Tales sitting in his lumber room; his mother-in-law had bestirred herself to suggest, in kind but firm fashion, that his literary and landscaping projects were running up too fantastic a debt; and his relations with Evania—— on Poe’s part at least—— were at best tentative.
    When Virginia seceded and Maryland seemed poised to follow, Poe headed south with Sextus, a pair of fine horses, equipage, a curved Wilkinson light cavalry sword, Hardee’s Tactics , a brace of massive nine-shot Le Mat revolvers, and of course the twelve hundred in gold. He kissed Evania and his beloved Mrs. Forster farewell—— within a few months he would return with an army and liberate Shepherd’s Rest and the rest of Maryland. He, as well as Byron, could be martial when the cause of liberty required it. He rode away with a singing heart.
    Before him, as he woke in his bed his first