No Spot of Ground by Walter Jon Williams

NO SPOT OF GROUND
    The dead girl came as a shock to him. He had limped into the Starker house from the firelit military camp outside, from a cacophony of wagons rattling, men driving tent pegs, provost marshals setting up the perimeter, a battalion of Ewell’s Napoleon guns rolling past, their wheels lifting dust from the old farm road, dust that drifted over the camp, turning the firelight red and the scene into a pictured outpost of Hell.
    And here, to his surprise, was a dead girl in the parlor. She was perhaps sixteen, with dark hair, translucent skin, and cheeks with high painted spots of phthisis red. Her slim form was dressed in white.
    She lay in her coffin with candles at her head and feet, and her long-faced relatives sat in a semicircle of chairs under portraits of ancestors and Jefferson Davis.
    A gangly man, probably the dead girl’s father, rose awkwardly to welcome the surprised stranger, who had wandered into the parlor in hopes of asking for a glass of lemonade.
    The intruder straightened in surprise. He took off his soft white hat and held it over his heart. The little gold knots on the ends of the hat cord rattled on the brim like muffled mourning drums.
    “I am sorry to intrude on your grief,” he said.
    The father halted in what he was going to say, nodded, and dropped back into his chair. His wife, a heavy woman in dark silk, reached blindly toward her husband, and took his hand.
    The intruder stood for a long moment out of respect, his eyes fixed on the corpse, before he turned and put on his hat and limped out of the house. Once he had thought this sight the saddest of all; once he had written poems about it.
    What surprised him now was that it still happened, that people still died this way.
    He had forgotten, amid all this unnatural slaughter, that a natural death was possible.
    *
    That morning he had brought his four brigades north into Richmond, marching from the Petersburg and Weldon depot south of the James break-step across the long bridge to the Virginia Central depot in the capital. Until two days ago he’d commanded only a single brigade in the defense of Petersburg; but poor George Pickett had suffered a collapse after days of nerve-wrenching warfare in his attempt to keep the city safe from Beast Butler’s Army of the James; and Pickett’s senior brigadier was, perforce, promoted to command of the whole division.
    The new commander was fifty-five years old, and even if he was only a division commander till Pickett came back, he was still the oldest in the army.
    At school he had been an athlete. Once he swam six miles down the James River, fighting against the tide the whole way, in order to outdo Byron’s swim across the Hellespont. Now he was too tired and ill to ride a horse except in an emergency, so he moved through the streets of Richmond in a two-wheel buggy driven by Sextus Pompeiius, his personal darky.
    He was dressed elegantly, English riding boots, black doeskin gloves, a spotless gray uniform with the wreathed stars of a brigadier on his collar and bright gold braid on the arms. His new white wide-brimmed hat, a replacement for the one shot off his head at Port Walthall Junction twenty days ago, was tilted back atop his high forehead. Even when he was young and couldn’t afford anything but old and mended clothes, he had always dressed well, with the taste and style of a gentleman. Sextus had trimmed his grizzled mustache that morning, back in camp along the Petersburg and Weldon, and snipped at the long gray curls that hung over the back of his collar. A fine white-socked thoroughbred gelding, the one he was too ill to ride, followed the buggy on a lead. When he had gone south in 1861 he had come with twelve hundred dollars in gold and silver, and with that and his army pay he had managed to keep himself in modest style for the last three years.
    As he rode past the neat brick houses he remembered when it was otherwise. Memories still burned in his mind: the sneers of