The Kingdom on the Waves Read online

  Slant, Pomp, and I listened for some time to these accounts, and then, the talk turning to other subjects, we whispered among ourselves. The three of us do not speak loudly in our barracks, perhaps because we are sensible that these are men, and we are boys; these others are whole, when we know ourselves broken.

  To calm Slant, who now looked about him with unease, I told them of a battle joined between the Romans and the Albans: It was seen that the slaughter from the meeting of their two armies would be senseless and complete; so the two generals came to agreement that, as there were triplets in each army, the two sets of triplets should fight to determine which army would be the victor.

  “It would be a fine . . . way to decide,” said Slant, “with less of killing.”

  Now Pomp had a look of dreams in his eyes, and bade us imagine instead how the battle would appear, were one a triplet: the long afternoon; the armor in the sun; seeing your own self cut down again and then again; and killing the same man, only to have him rise, just winded, and raise his sword to finish you.

  I asked them what they wished out of our present conflict.

  Slant answered that he wanted to have many children, and a farm, and a plump, good wife.

  Pomp said: “I suppose I wish to be a hero.”

  I have just set down this account of Peter’s arrival and our discourse; and now it is late, and I am beside the fire, and I think with anxiousness on the stories of those skirmishes to the south of this town, which even now preserve us from the enemy.

  We have not seen that violence here. We are not sensible of it. In this town, all is linearity and training. To fire muskets is not an act of war, but a routine with which we, ranked in concert, take up the hours between ten and noon. A fortification is a task, a line, a curve, not a bulwark. The arts of war are mere geometry.

  The regularity of drills has soothed, rather than excited, my more ardent passions; and I try now in vain to paint what those orderly ranks shall look like, were there grapeshot tearing through us, raining metal droplets from the skies on our open mouths.

  I recall the strife upon Hog and Noddle’s Islands, when the grass burned and the beach puckered with the shot of Marines. I put my life at hazard there, which some might account valor; but I knew it for the rashness of despair, the precipitation of utter despondence. Now that I am actuated by hopes more active — by anger at injustice and demand for benevolence — I fear I shall not be so reckless of my life.

  I have wondered lately about death. I attempt to recall that it is but an assumption into a better realm; and yet I cannot envision past the stifling eternal silence of it, as were one locked in ice, with the world entertaining its commerce above — and I lying cold, below, aching to move, with the chill invading the flesh.

  I had best prepare myself for action; the word is, it shall come soon.

  “There was once, there was a man,” said Pomp, delighted narrator of horrors, “there was a man so afraid for dying, he make a deal with Death himself. A true story.”

  “A true story,” said Slant in teasing tones.

  “True. I knowed this man.”

  “Then wh —, wh —, what was his name?”

  “See, it don’t matter. He make a deal with Death. James Wippleson. Of Nansemond County. He calls Death to him out in the forest and he says, ‘I don’t want ever die. What I got to do not to die?’

  “And Death, he says, ‘Aye, Mr. Wippleson, you don’t want die? I make a fine deal, sir. You don’t kill nothing — not one single thing — and so long as you don’t make work for me, so long as you don’t deal death, you don’t die.’

  “This James Wippleson, he thinks this a fine deal sure, so he shake Death’s hand, all bony and crunchy. He shake it. And Death laughed, and he gone in a trice.

  “This James Wippleson, he standing there at the edge of the forest. And the sun coming up. And James Wippleson, he standing there and he see all the living things — the birds and the trees and all the plants — and he’s joyful he alive.

  “So he starts off for home. And he ain’t taken one step before he sees: grass under his foot, and the bugs in the grass. And the crickets and the spittle-bugs. And all those tiny little things. And he can’t step on none of them. So he stops walking. And then he realize, he can’t eat. Can’t kill no plant or no animal.

  “And he look around again, and his life is over every second. The fly land on his arm, the mosquito-bug. And he can’t hit it. And no way he can walk out of that field. So he stand. And he stand.

  “All he got — all James Wippleson got for his . . . See, his immortalness, it’s a terrible thing. Because immortalness ain’t nothing but an endless carefulness. A man can’t live his life forever. James Wippleson, he still standing there, thin as a rake, seeing as he can’t starve, still standing there, not moving. And people go by and watch him, but he don’t say nothing to them or budge none. Because if he move like he alive — he dead.”

  Thus the sermon and the text as we await word.

  December 8th, 1775

  Drills and exercises.

  The command comes down from Major Byrd that we are to rest after supper but with our bedrolls and rucksacks in preparation.

  It appears we shall march tonight.

  December 15th, 1775

  For some days, I have not written here. Opportunity for transcription was wanting, though matter was abundant. And after the battle, I could not write of it; words seemed insufficient.

  We were occupied in the usual manner on the day of the eighth. We being ready to retire following our labor, we received orders that all companies should instead be prepared for deployment, but no word of our purpose. Accordingly, we returned to our barracks and ate our supper, prepared our weapons, and then waited uneasy for further command. Many of us fell to sleeping.

  The guns had just gone off on the ships to mark the evening when Corporal Craigie appeared and ordered us form into rank.

  Slant rose next to me. Pomp clasped him upon the arm, as he had seen men do, and, like a man, said, “Don’t you fear.”

  Slant gave a look expressive of rebuke. “Just because I — stutter,” said he, “don’t mean I’m afraid.” He grimly turned and rolled his blanket.

  I myself felt no fear as we passed out the doors; but this was not so much the effect of temerity as of the strangeness of the hour and the darkness, and the mystery of the errand.

  We assembled upon the square; we marched out through the streets of Norfolk, encountering a great parade of soldiers with whom we joined number. When we were free of the houses, we could espy the length of our column, which was great, the march being led by the regulars of the 14th Regiment and a small detachment of the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginian Regiment. We were cautioned to make no sound, though the scudding of our feet on the road made a continual grinding, histle, and scrape.

  I did not know whither we headed, but I fain would be there, be there — wheresoever there was — desired to be already engaged in confrontation, the terror full and present before me rather than measured out in paces of a foot and an inch.

  We walked for hours through the country; our Regiment stopping only once, that those of us with shoes might lend them to such of those as marched without, and thus give them some respite.

  Pomp was one of the unshod, and gentle-hearted Slant and I vied to proffer relief. He took my shoes, and watched me wind my feet in cloth to protect them from the extreme cold. He expressed his thanks; raised himself on his toes to even them out in too cramped a space, dropped back upon his feet, and said, “Now the big contest.” He squinted along the line. “We look like them armies of ghosts that walk through the skies. You know, damned. They seen them there in England, marching. True. True story.” Then he said to me, “You ain’t told us what you want do, when we won. When we has our triumph.”

  “I would like,” said I, tying a knot at my ankle, “to play violin in an orchestra. Symphonies of Arne and Sammartini.”

  Pomp regarded me with some amaze; Slant
said, “Friend, you — . . . when you are there playing the music with the candles and the . . . fine ladies, you think back on this moment, tying you rags to you feet.” He smiled and offered me a hand to pull me up.

  We set off again, our number sunk in complete silence. We passed farms and villages, lone dogs crying out at our vast column. Their voices were sharp and small, and their warnings were unheeded.

  As said Pomp, we looked like an army of phantoms, marching upon those roads. Our faces were sullen. In the absence of warning or explanation, we watched carefully, lest the enemy burst out upon us. There was no assault, however, and nought disturbed the countryside as we marched south toward the front.

  I must own that the two hours I walked without shoes were in the highest degree uncomfortable, not only for the roughness of the cold earth against my heels — which were not hardened as some others’ had been by years of such abrasion — but also for the extreme cold, which first chilled, and then dulled, the toes to insensitivity.

  We passed through homestead and swamp, traversing a distance of perhaps ten miles in all. After a time, the darkness was so great that we could see little.

  Some hours having passed, we were cautioned again to remain silent; and we found ourselves filing into a stockade in a broad marsh. Within, the stockade was cramped, some five hundred men gathered in a small and incommodious yard between tents.

  We did not know where we were come, or what this march portended; though now that we were within the stockade walls, there was a continual whispering and muttering of intelligence; ’twas said that we were at Great-Bridge, and that the enemy was across a river from us, and that we should be called upon to defend the approaches to Norfolk. Peter, he who had lately escaped from the rebels, vaunted to all who would listen that it was his intelligence had convinced His Lordship to launch this expedition; for which no one knew whether to thank him or cuff him, and so we turned away.

  It being perhaps three or four in the morning, our officers informed us that we could sleep for a time, each regiment directed to gather around their own campfires — all of which blazes were meager. There were some two hundred Negroes of the Ethiopian Regiment present, clustered around three flames that scarce would have warmed ten.

  I was half way between waking and slumber in the dark corner of the stockade, shivering beneath my blanket — my shoes once again my own — my spirits ebbing with fatigue. My gaze was fixed without object upon the encampment, the dim figures who, an arm or a cheek caught in the distinguishing gesture of flame, huddled or moved about the mob of soldiery. Before me, half-seen, men lay on scant blankets, or smoked pipes and chafed their arms; near me, six soldiers on their knees offered prayers together; Coromantee fellows muttered poems or praise-songs to each other to prepare for battle; white grenadiers drank toddies and cracked nuts with their teeth. An older man of some fifty or sixty years walked among the others of our Regiment, offering a compound in a bowl which he spread on muskets as a blessing. Many shunned him; a few nodded, and handed him their weapons; he rubbed the unguent on the stock and muzzle, all the while whispering to the firearm coaxingly in some unknown tongue.

  He came to a figure twenty feet away from me and offered his compound; and a voice replied, “What’s this, some fashion of luck grease? A man don’t need luck grease when he’s every inch of him superlative.”

  This voice thrilled every nerve of my being — caught at my heart — for I knew its accents as well as my own.

  I rose, disordered with delight, trepidation, confusion — I know not what — and said — louder than I liked, “Bono? Pro Bono?”

  For my voice, I received hard stares from some around me, but jubilation at reunion confounded any sensibility of censure; and I rushed to his side as he twisted his head to face me, swore, and, in a voice of doubt, called my name: “Octavian?”

  He half rose; I half sat; and hung thus between earth and air we grabbed at each other’s fingers — and he cackled a laugh, and clasped me to him. “Your Supreme Regal Highness Octavian Gitney,” he said, wonderingly. “This is a joy,” he said. “This is a genuine joy, to see your little cry-teary sulky-boy face.” Stepping back from our embrace, he swore, “Sweet Moses! You got a muscle in your arm. I felt it — a full muscle. Don’t you fret yourself, Prince O. It’s probably you been reading complete collected works instead of little poems.”

  “I am no longer Octavian Gitney,” I said. “I am now called Octavian Nothing.”

  “Well, I ain’t Pro Bono still. William Williams, Private. Like I told you, next time you saw me, I have a new name. So, sir.”

  We extended our hands and shook.

  “William Williams,” I repeated in wonder.

  He explained, “They seem to favor the English names, the white folk. It’s my interest to please their affable selves at every o’clock of the day. So I reckoned the pale, forgettable names was the best. Two, where one wouldn’t do. I tried John Johns and Richard Richards. Richard Richards set a barn afire and he slain a sheep, so now I’m William Williams.” He frowned. “I warrant I missed something fine with Henry Henry. But there is time, sir, there is plentiful time in this war for Henry Henry and, if I commence English, for Aubrey Aubrey, too.”

  He bade me sit, which I did, and we again expressed our mutual pleasure at our reunion, following which he asked after my fortunes, inquiring how long I had been at Norfolk. I answered him, and asked of him the same, and he replied to my counter-interrogative that he had been at Norfolk since Lord Dunmore had arrived there from Hampton; that he had been in His Lordship’s service since the summer, when he had found his labors elsewhere inconvenient; but any further disclosures on this lively subject were interrupted by another fervent question — for said he, “Your mother with you? She come down from Boston?”

  I baulked. I had not considered the question. Of course he did not know; ’twas as if I conceived that some shudder would have reached him, who was so close a companion to us; as it is said that when Lisbon shook in the great quake, the spires of Boston quivered.

  But unprepared, as I say, I baulked.

  He studied me. “Prince O.?” he said.

  Judge of my emotions upon being asked to recount her tale.

  And I am ashamed to say: After long delay, I answered, “She is in excellent health. She — she sends her compliments and asks me to convey her deep affection and regard.”

  At this, he smiled. “Princess Cass,” he said, in a tone of reverie. “When you seen her last?”

  “Three months hence,” said I; then, “Four months. April.”

  Bono, twitching my shirt, corrected, “That’s eight months.”

  “When I last saw her, she sate in the garden —”

  “And you left her behind? When you run?”

  This was sudden; I could not speak. My mouth was, I know, open.

  Around us, men slept upon the ground, or with subtle convulsion, approached the small fires. The watch walked the walls above us, their muskets at ready.

  “She is a beauty,” said Bono. He sat back and pulled the edges of his blanket around his knees. “Which garden?” he said.

  I begged his pardon.

  “Which garden?” he repeated. “Was you back at the College?”

  My wits were so disordered that I answered yes.

  “After the rebels surrounded the city?”

  Once again, I answered yes, miserably.

  He said, “Reckon it was too early for the delphiniums.” Uncertain, I nodded; he continued, “Only damned parcel of labor your mother’s ever tried her hand at. That garden. She and Mr. Gitney, ordering me up and down the borders. The names all jumble up in my head. Your lupine and your sweet-sultan and such.”

  Again, I nodded. Soldiers were rushing about near a white marquee, carrying casks.

  Bono said, “She is a treat in that garden. That’s a very fine place to see her. She fix the borders different this year? She and Mr. Gitney had a plan last summer.”

  “I regret I am not
aware,” said I.

  “They was going to have a switch in the midsummer. Take out the foxgloves when they die, put in the chrysanthemums, take out the daisies and the pansies and such, put in the — I can’t recall — the phlox or such.” He considered. “Lupine and foxglove. Them, they always muddled me. Both tall.” He asked, “You don’t know how the garden was?”

  “I left, regrettably, before it was in flower,” I said. “In April.”

  Bono nodded. “When a man puts in work, he wants to know it will bloom.”

  I wished we would speak of something else. Three men dragged an ammunition cart through the mob of bodies, hissing to waken the sleeping.

  Bono wrapped his hands in his sleeves. He said, “The enemy, he’s sitting, guess a half mile from where we is. We been here since the middle of November. We’ve had some skirmish. They send some fool across to us, we fire our guns a couple of hours; we send someone back, their snipers fire, we retreat, but no one can move a damn inch. Other day, me and a few others, we go and burned some houses.”

  “Why are we brought here tonight?” I asked.

  Bono shrugged. “Sally forth,” he said.

  He pointed to places that lay unseen through the stockade walls and told me about each: the mud around the fortress, which made it impossible to build rampart or redoubt; the village across the bridge to the south, now fortified by the rebels; the church where their insolent boys shimmied up the steeple to peer at our walls; the earthworks, lightly guarded, where the rebel marksmen lurked.

  “I have heard,” I said, “that there are a mere three hundred entrenched in the village.”

  “Don’t rightly know,” said Bono. “I reckon more than three hundred.”

  For longer we sat, content to be in company once more. At length, Bono opined, “I don’t believe those impatiens will ever grow near the pine tree. What do you reckon?”