Distant Flame

Prologue

Prologue LOOD SPILLED DOWN THEman's neck in crimson runnels, and Charlie prayed, kneeling beneath the murderous flight of lead, that the convulsions and fear would end soon. The twelvepounder Napoleons on both sides gnawed the air into tatters. The dying man blinked, coughed twice, spoke in bright red syllables. Charlie leaned close, heard nothing but Enfields and artillery. He looked around helplessly for aid. "Don't move!" Charlie screamed, but his own voice might have been the silence of graves. His fingers felt swollen from the heat. A stench drifted across the field—horses and men, sweat, fear, gunpowder , blood, bone, excrement. The dying man's hair hung from his face in black curls. Shrieking minie balls displaced the air near Charlie's left ear. He felt the heave of tears again, a shoving of the breastbone from inside, like a violent hand thrusting outward to catch or push. The smell arrived and left, arrived once again with more urgency. The oven air swarmed with shot and the distant, then closer, crump of Napoleons and Parrott guns. Charlie knew he must stand and go for help, but the space above his kneeling form held a sea of fire, thousands of bullets, fused balls, shrapnel ripping through brambles, lifting earth upward in small spikes. So Charlie lay down and held him and wept as one red claw rose from the dark-haired man, rose toward Charlie, then fell onto the sweat-fouled shirt and lay there, motionless. B 2 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS Men swarmed past him then, and one knelt over them and spoke, but the syllables swam away in gunfire. Charlie rolled to his side and saw the wounded man's eyes blink once, his tongue come out as if searching for water or speech. Then his eyes opened wider and stayed that way, dust already settling on the glazing eyeballs, and the tongue, covered with the words of its own blood, did not slide back. A small stream of liquid spilled from the corner of his mouth and flowed just beneath his left ear, then down his neck. "Don't move," choked Charlie. He shook the man gently,then with increasing urgency. "Don't move, don't you move, don't you move!" The gray-coated soldiers who had flowed past him were fleeing backward now, and one grabbed Charlie beneath his arm, pulled him up, screamed. The air filled with angels. They were sentient, fair as young girls, with smooth skins and the song of morning. Charlie could not feel the ground with his feet, and he thought he might be drifting toward or away from something. He looked down, and his feet were three inches off the ground, and he could steer on the currents of gunfire. Strandsof rifle fire braided beneath him into a warm walkway. He stepped upon it. He was heading into the maw of a battery from Arkansas. General Cleburne stood to one side holding a chessman and smiling. Charlie felt fear release him. Then he was not moving, and the Federals had gained, were now spilling him over the field, but none dared touch him. They gave wayas he rode the highway of screaming fire. He rose above tree level, then came back down, avoiding bristling spikes of abatis that drew scars around the city. He drifted above the smoke then back into it, but the dust did not choke him; instead, it was a tonic, a shearing of agony and exhaustion. He sipped it sweetly. Charlie came back to the wounded man and folded into stone by his side. "Get up, and I will lead you," whispered Charlie, and the man blinked blood three times and stood beside him, dusting caked blood from his chest. "You knew I would come back and get you, didn't you?" "I always knew that," said the man. Charlie touched his hand, and the man's feet rose, too, and they came east over the lines toward home. July knelt, stunned with heat and noise. Broken bodies, bent into strange, inhuman shapes, crowded below them. Down the blue line of Federal artillery, unbroken rows of men stood and fired, ripped ramrods out to reload, and the cannon spoke with a singular core of vio- A Distant flame 3 lence, a giant's roar, the prelude to earth's ending. Charlie and the man rose higher, and he seemed uninterested in stopping their...