Ghosts of Time (26 page)

He evidently saw them, for he began to raise his revolver.

At that moment, another tar barrel caught fire directly behind him, and the gout of flame enveloped him, turning him into a writhing human torch. There was nothing human in his scream.

“Welcome to Hell, Stoneman,” Jason heard Mondrago say.

Moved by an impulse he could not define, Jason aimed his Colt.

Before he could fire, the portion of the bridge under Stoneman’s feet collapsed. Like a flaming comet, the Transhumanist fell into the river along with all the other burning debris, adding to the hissing steam rising from the waters.

For a moment, they all gazed at the river. Then, without a word, they turned and trudged south.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Rufus led them to a tarpaper shack not far from the railway, on the bluffs overlooking the riverbank. There they could wait until April 5, without any chance of encountering Pauline Da Cunha. (Jason Mk I and his party had, by this time, already departed.) As they rebandaged Gracchus’s wounds and Dabney’s less severe one, they could look out across the river from Mayo’s Island to the city, as the sun rose higher in the smoke-fouled sky to reveal a scene of hideous desolation.

Between the north shore and Council Chamber Hill, over twenty blocks lay in smoldering ruin—“the burnt district,” Dabney said it would always be called afterwards, even when all trace of the conflagration had vanished from everything except the collective memory. Some fires were still burning, and there was still the occasional roar of exploding shells, when the first Union troops appeared at about 7:00 AM, less than an hour after they had crossed the bridge. Blue-clad cavalry and artillery began moving along the debris-littered streets, through a scene of pandemonium as the drunken, looting mobs, swelled by the newly homeless, ran riot, their howling faintly audible even across the river. Also audible were the tunes played by military bands—Dabney identified them as “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—as the endless blue columns of infantry snaked through the streets toward Capitol Square.

At 8:00 they could discern activity at the capitol building. The Confederate flag came fluttering down, and the Stars and Stripes went up. And above all the distant sounds rose what were clearly roars of jubilation.

“The Union forces include the all-black Twenty-Fifth Corps,” Dabney explained. “Most white Richmonders who still have homes are staying inside them with doors locked and shutters drawn. But the blacks are pouring into the streets, mobbing the Federal troops, plying them with flowers and fruit and jugs of whiskey—although the officers will smash those with their swords. And later this morning, when the black troops march through, they’ll be almost unable to believe their eyes.” The historian chuckled. “The Union officers were as unable to understand the euphoria as the white Southerners were.”

“They would be,” said Gracchus from where he lay on a filthy blanket. He let out a long sigh. “I wish I was over there to see it. But tomorrow, I
will
be there, one way or another.”

“Don’t rush it,” advised Novak.

“I’ll be there,” said Gracchus, his voice beginning to slur. “I’ll be there. . . .” He slipped off into unconsciousness.

In the afternoon, with nothing to do but wait and with a very strenuous and entirely sleepless night catching up with them, they all drifted off. Jason was the last, for Gracchus’s words troubled him.
Yes,
he reflected before finally letting sleep take him,
he’s determined to endanger himself by going there, come hell or high water, because I broke the rules with an audible snap and told him who is going to be in Richmond on April 4.

I’m never going to tell Rutherford. He’d be even more insufferable than usual.

The next morning, Rufus found a small rowboat, which had doubtless washed ashore after coming adrift from one of the abandoned Confederate Navy ships. Now it was early afternoon, and they stood looking east toward the ruined naval base at Rocketts, where a side-wheel steamer had pulled up to the dock and a commotion was visible. Of course, it was too far to discern a tall stovepipe hat above the throng. But Dabney had assured them that Abraham Lincoln and his son, guarded by ten sailors, were about to commence the two-mile walk to Capitol Square.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Jason asked, indicating Gracchus’s immobilized right arm.

“Sure. Rufus will do the rowing. And in all the excitement, nobody will notice us tying up at Shockoe Slip.” The black man started to turn away. Then he stopped and, with an obvious effort, turned. “Commander, you saved my life night before last. There’s nothing I can do for you that will repay that. But at least I owe it to you to start being honest.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jason, puzzled.

“I’ve lied to you,” said Gracchus bluntly. “That letter—the one that said you had to go to Port Royal . . .”

“Yes,” Jason prompted. “Nobody knows who he was who wrote it.”

“Except that he’s not really unknown. Or, rather,
she
isn’t unknown.”

For a very long moment, there was silence. Or at least it seemed a long moment to Jason, who wondered if, on some level, he hadn’t known all along what he now knew, on some other level, what Gracchus was about to tell him.

“You mean..?”

“Yes. Zenobia wrote that letter.”

“But she couldn’t have!” blurted Jason, angrily unwilling to believe. “She died in the Port Royal earthquake of 1692. I saw her die. Damn it, I saw the tsunami carry her out to sea!”

“You saw that. But you didn’t actually see her die. She survived. There was a ship, the frigate HMS
Swan
, that the tsunami carried inland, over the tops of houses—”

“Yes, I think I remember seeing that.”

“—but which then stayed upright and served as a kind of life raft for many, as the wave crested as high as some of Port Royal’s tallest structures and then swept wreckage and people back out toward the harbor. Zenobia was one. She was badly battered, but she held on. And despite her internal injuries she lived on—for nine more months.” Gracchus smiled briefly. “And she knew what she had to do. She wrote the letter I showed you—the letter you had told her you had read, and which had meant nothing to her at the time you told her about it. And she also wrote a
second
letter, to be handed down to her descendants, telling them that when one of them would encounter you in 1864 he was show you the first letter and tell you the lie I told you. And that you couldn’t be allowed to know the truth until you came back to 1865 a second time—as you have now.”

For a moment, Jason simply existed, stunned, in a maelstrom of whirling thought. But then a single word separated itself from the chaos and registered on his consciousness in all its manifest impossibility.

“Wait a minute . . . did you say ‘descendants’? Zenobia had no children!”

“She had none when you last saw her.” Again, Gracchus smiled. “Remember I said she lived nine more months?”

For several seconds, Jason simply stared, in a silence that the other members of his party were disinclined to break. They all wore looks of incomprehension . . . all except Mondrago, who understood.

“I don’t know whether or not she already knew she was carrying your child,” Gracchus resumed. “Probably not—it was too soon. But she soon realized it. And given her injuries, the childbirth was very difficult. She died. But the child lived.” The black man took a deep breath. “There’s something else I haven’t been honest about with you. I’ve spoken of her ‘successors.’ I didn’t mention that the succession is through her bloodline.”

As though from a great distance, Jason heard himself speak. “You mean . . . ?”

“Yes, Commander. I’m your descendant. Your great, great, great grandson, to be exact. And it has been an honor and a great gift to meet you.”

This time the silence lasted very long indeed before Jason could speak again, because for the second time in as many days he felt the immanence of ghosts. “No . . . it is I who have been given a gift.” He extended his left hand. Gracchus took it.

“And now,” Gracchus finally said, “I have to go.” He stepped aboard the boat with the help of Rufus, who poled it out onto the river and then began to row.

“Gracchus,” Jason called out, moved by a sudden impulse, “tell me one more thing. Do you have children?”

“Yes. A young son, back in Jamaica. So you see, Commander, the bloodline goes on.”

Jason said nothing, for he lacked the words. He stood watching the boat recede into the distance. Presently Dabney joined him.

“While passing the docks between Rocketts and downtown Richmond, Lincoln is going to be mobbed by the newly freed blacks. They’ll swarm around him, trying to touch him, practically worshipping him as a messiah. One of them will go to his knees before him. Lincoln will remind him that he is now free, and say, ‘Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only.’” The historian smiled. “I wonder if Gracchus will see that?”

“Maybe that will
be
Gracchus,” said Jason . . . but absently, for most of his mind was on one thought.

You were honest with me, Gracchus. But I wasn’t entirely honest with you. I couldn’t be. I withheld one piece of information, for your own protection. I didn’t tell you that the man you’re crossing this river to see is going to be killed in ten days.

I couldn’t tell you that, because if I had you might have gone to Washington and tried to prevent it. And I couldn’t let you try to defy the Observer Effect, which you can’t possibly understand. Reality protects itself. It might have killed you to do it.

Please don’t think less of me, a week and a half from now.

He blinked the beginnings of a tear from his eyes. When he could see again, the little rowboat had rounded the eastern tip of Mayo’s Island and was lost to sight.

The next morning, the morning of April 5, came. The nanobot cache on Belle Isle could now be destroyed.

Temporal retrievals were always timed for the small hours of the morning, when the locals were most likely to be asleep. So it was still dark the following morning when Angus Aiken’s TRD was timed to activate. Jason couldn’t give him a second-by-second countdown, but they knew approximately when he would vanish. Hands were shaken all around, and then they waited.

“Just before dawn, we’ll do the deed and then I’ll activate our TRDs,” Jason told him. “So tell Rutherford that we’ll be along shortly.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Angus, it was never in the plan for you to have to survive for months in this milieu on your own. You’ve performed outstandingly, and I’m going to tell Rutherford as much.”

“Thank you, Commander,” the young Scot stammered.

“In fact, I think you deserve something.” Jason reached inside his tunic and withdrew the tiny laminate case. He placed it in Aiken’s hand. “I want you to have the honor of being the one to take this back with you and give it to Rutherford—and tell him what it contains, and what it means.”

Aiken turned as red as his hair. “But . . . but, sir, I couldn’t possibly—”

And he was no longer there. Jason felt a faint breeze on his face as the air filled the man-sized vacuum that had momentarily been created by his vanishment.

Mondrago cocked an eyebrow at Jason. “I can’t believe you’re passing up the opportunity to see the look on Rutherford’s face.”

“You know,” said Jason with a smile, “I have a feeling that it’s still going to be there when we arrive.”

They turned, and started toward Belle Isle.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The present writer was born in Virginia in 1946 and therefore grew up visualizing God as a slightly imperfect version of Robert E. Lee. One always tries to recognize, and compensate for, the biases inherent in one’s upbringing. But no revisionist historian has ever shown me any compelling reason to disagree with Carlos Dabney’s assessment of Lee at the end of Chapter Nine. His opinions on slavery and secession were as I have represented them, based on his own writings and recorded utterances; his advocacy of freeing and arming the slaves is a matter of historical record. If any are still in doubt as to his statesmanship—along with that of Generals Grant, Johnston and Sherman—in averting the postwar devolution of America into Bosnia writ large, I refer them to that brilliant work
April 1865
by Jay Winik.

The White House of the Confederacy (which in fact is, appropriately enough, gray) has been beautifully restored. It, and the adjacent Museum of the Confederacy, are very much worth a visit—if, that is, you can find them, tucked away as they are among the large modern buildings of the Medical College of Virginia.

Elizabeth Van Lew’s story is an epic of espionage. Everything herein about her, including her appearance and opinions, is accurate. So, to the extent possible, is everything about that altogether more shadowy figure, Mary Bowser—or Mary Richards, or Ellen Bond—except, of course, for her obviously fictional connections with the entirely imaginary Gracchus. The same, incidentally, goes for the slave boy Daniel Strother. If fact, except for Gracchus and his associates in the Order of the Three-Legged Horse, every nineteenth-century individual I have named actually lived.

The skirmish in Chapter Ten is fictional, and in fact the period in question was one of relative inactivity for Mosby’s Rangers; but it is an accurate representation of the tactics used by them and the psychological effect those tactics had on the Union forces. Everything else herein about John Singleton Mosby, a.k.a. the Gray Ghost, and his Partisan Rangers is true to history and biography, again with the obvious time-travel-related exceptions. These exceptions include those connected with the unexplained fusillade of shots outside the Lake house on the night of December 21, 1864 when Mosby received one of his numerous wounds. They also include the involvement of Angus Aiken and Gracchus in Adolphus (“Dolly”) Richards’ raids in the Shenandoah Valley in January, 1865, which otherwise occurred exactly as I have depicted them, even to such details as Richards’ attested exchange with Hern in Chapter Eighteen. The same goes for Aiken’s role in the Mount Carmel action in Chapter Twenty-Six, which is otherwise factual even to the recapture of Jeremiah Wilson in time for his wedding; no one seems to know which two Rangers hid with Richards behind a wall panel, so I have felt no compunctions about making them Hern and Aiken. In these matters, I have relied on
Mosby’s Rangers
by Jeffrey D. Wert,
Gray Ghost
by James A. Ramage, and of course Mosby’s own memoirs. And I make a particular point of acknowledging my indebtedness to Curt Phillips, who has generously given me the benefit of his expertise in Civil War history. Any inaccuracies or infelicities are entirely the fault of the author.

It is a safe bet that Mosby never read Sun Tzu, even in his later years in China, but if he had he would have discovered a kindred mind. In his still-mentally-acute eighties, commenting on the stupid slaughter then occurring on the Western Front of World War I, he practically paraphrased Sun Tzu: “The object of war is not to kill. It is to disable the military power.” Judging from photographs and paintings (and one bust) dating to various periods during and after the Civil War, the man simply could not make up his mind whether to be clean-shaven or full-bearded; I have therefore felt at liberty to represent him one way or the other at any given time.

The plot to assassinate Lincoln by bombing the White House is factual. The attempt was made only a few weeks before the end of the war, and was foiled as a result of a chance encounter with a Union patrol. The idea that this was a
second
attempt (the first having been aborted by the loss of one infernal machine in January, 1865) is a product of the author’s imagination, but the dates work.

The Transhumanist perversion of Voodoo in
Pirates of the Timestream
and the present novel is of course fictitious. But it is synthesized from actual elements of the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions, on which subject (and also that of Jamaican folkways) I am deeply indebted to Zora Neale Hurston’s
Tell My Horse.

Contemporary eyewitness accounts of the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 read like something out of the imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, but modern seismology verifies them. My depiction follows them without exaggeration, and does not even cover the
real
horrors that followed in the lawless and starving aftermath.

I have likewise not exaggerated the fall of Richmond, which is so well documented that I have been able to attempt accuracy even about such details as the stage Dr. Minnegerode’s Communion service at St. Paul’s had reached when the courier rushed in and gave Jefferson Davis the fatal news, even to the hymn that was being sung. Equally factual is the incident of the release of the slaves in the railroad depot, as are all incidents connected with the fire, although it is not always possible to ascertain the order in which they occurred. Captain Sullivane’s final seven words before burning Mayo’s Bridge are a verbatim quote. Unlike Port Royal, Richmond was subsequently photographed; the photographs of the burned-out districts resemble Hiroshima after the bomb.

I have used the nineteenth-century names of all the Virginia hamlets that figured in Mosby’s operations, even though some of them have subsequently changed. Salem, for example, is now called Marshall; Harmony is now called Hamilton. Incidentally, Mosby’s ambush of Reno’s men at the latter place as described in Chapter 27 was the Partisan Rangers’ last significant action. They never surrendered. A few days after the surrender at Appomattox, Mosby slipped a man into Richmond to ask Lee if they should take to the hills and carry on guerrilla warfare as many, up to and including Jefferson Davis, had proposed. Lee replied as he always did to everyone who would listen—which meant everyone, because he was Lee: “Go home, all you boys who fought with me. Help to rebuild the shattered fortunes of our old state.” Mosby obeyed. On April 21, 1865, he called the Rangers together at Salem and simply disbanded them. They left the field with honor.