FORT PILLOW

“If they could have got those off, they would have taken them, too,” Leaming answered. Both sailors laughed, but he wasn't joking.

He groaned again when they set him in the rowboat, and again when other sailors on the Platte Valley took hold of him and laid him on the deck. Somebody gave him more water and half a hardtack. Then people seemed to forget about him for a spell.

He dozed a little, only to wake with a start when someone asked, “Where are you hit, Lieutenant?”

“Why do you-?” Leaming stopped. The man crouching by him wore a surgeon's green sash. He had a professional interest in Leaming's wound. “The minnie caught me below the shoulder blade and dug down. It feels as though it stopped in my, ah, rump.”

“I see.” The surgeon looked up toward Fort Pillow. “Were you by any chance standing on the bluff there, and shot from above?”

“Yes, that's what happened,” Leaming said. “Will you cut out the bullet or leave it where it is?”

“If it's where you say, I doubt it's doing you much harm at present,” the other man replied. “Digging it out would give you another wound, with all the risk of suppuration and septicemia attendant on such things. So I will let that sleeping dog lie for the time being, I think. Are you in much pain?”

“Some.” Leaming didn't want to sound like a weakling. But he didn't want to be a martyr, either, so he added, “Maybe a bit more than some.”

“I shouldn't wonder.” The surgeon took a small brown glass bottle out of the wooden chest he carried with him. Drawing the cork with his teeth, he handed Leaming the bottle, saying, “Here-take a swig of this.”

“What is it?”

“Laudanum, Lieutenant. Best-quality laudanum. I've had excellent results with it in Memphis, and it should help you, too.” The surgeon beamed. “Not all drugs in the pharmacopoeia work as advertised-I've seen that too many times to doubt it. But laudanum, by thunder, will shift pain.”

Leaming needed no more convincing. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank from it. The taste was strong, and not particularly pleasant: cheap brandy with a heavy infusion of poppy seeds. He had to force himself to swallow. It burned all the way down to his stomach. “It seems-strong.” He had to cast about for a polite word.

The physician smiled. “I know it's nasty, but it will turn the trick. This is no humbug. I'll come round again in half an hour. If I have told you a falsehood, call me a liar.” He picked up his case and went over to the next wounded man. “Where are you hit?”

Half an hour. Usually, that didn't seem very long. Half an hour walking with a pretty girl went by in the blink of an eye. Half an hour with a gunshot wound… was a different story. Leaming couldn't even look at his watch to see how the time passed by. That thieving Confederate had lifted it.

He hardly noticed when his head first began to spin. When he did notice, he blinked in bemusement. He hadn't had much brandy, not very much at all. But it wasn't the brandy that left him floating away from himself: it was the opium dissolved in it. “Well, well,” he murmured, and then again: “Well, well.” Laudanum really did banish pain, in the most literal sense of the word. The torment didn't disappear, but it went off to a distant province where it didn't seem to matter nearly so much. If that wasn't a miracle, it would do for one till something better came along.

“How are you, Lieutenant?” the surgeon asked. “Sorry to be a bit longer than I said I would-I had to take a poor devil's leg off. God willing, the wound won't go bad now.”

“I hope it doesn't. How am I?” Leaming felt… untethered, almost as if he were floating above his own body like one of the hydrogen-filled balloons the Federals used in Virginia to peer behind Confederate lines. “I am… much improved, thank you.” Finding words took a distinct effort.

“I'm glad to hear it.” The surgeon smiled. “I'll give you another dose when this one wears off.”

“Another dose.” Echoing the surgeon was easier. And those two wonderful words held more promise than Mack Leaming had ever imagined.

Matt Ward tripped over a chunk of driftwood on the riverbank. He almost dropped his end of the plank that had a wounded Federal on it. The bluebelly groaned. The Confederate trooper at the other end of the plank said, “Watch what you're doing, dammit! What the hell's wrong with you, anyways?”

“Too much rotgut yesterday,” Ward admitted. His stomach was sour, his head pounded, and his eyes felt as sensitive to the light as those of a man long poxed.

“Well, be careful, for God's sake,” the other trooper said. “That's right,” the wounded Federal added.

“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” Ward said furiously. “I'll take it from him – he's on my side. But I don't have to put up with anything from a goddamn Tennessee Tory, you hear me? I'd sooner tie a rock to your leg and chuck you in the Mississippi than haul you to your damn boat, and that's the Lord's truth.”