Bloody Red Flag
Alhaeron (formerly T.R.)
Disclaimer: Oh, I'm sure you all know by now. Don't own The Patriot, Tavington, anybody in it, blah blah blah blah blah. Blah. No profit.
A/N: Back again by popular demand. I wrote this in 2005 and I decided, because I have way too much free time, to re-post it. That being said, I have no electronic copies of it, only hard ones, so this could take a while. Also, due to the fact that I'm writing a real book, that takes precedence, so if I have to choose between working on this and UFS (the book), it'll be UFS. Anyway, like I said way back when, this is a time travel fic. It's not a Mary Sue. It's going to be edited a little bit, because I've gotten a lot better at writing since then and there are some things I wrote that I just can't stand to read now, so I'm not going to inflict them upon you.
Chapter Four: Brutality Commended
We had been marching endlessly through muddy fields—it had been raining hard the last few days—and we were dog-tired. Rain had soaked into our wool uniforms, our hats, our underwear, ourselves, and each soldier smelled like a dog that makes a habit of puddle-jumping. I thought I'd never get the smell out. It was so quiet—none of the usual mosquitoes and musket balls that you had to slap away from your ears. Even the anger was quiet, quieted by boredom and exhaustion and rain that dripped from my soaking hat down into my chest cavity, where it dropped in small droplets and made the tight core of anger where my heart had been sizzle, fizz, hiss.
I led my company in silence. The day was still, the roads were still—just the rain and us—when suddenly, the sky began to crack open. Up ahead, not far, someone said, and I looked up from my automatically walking boots. It was true. If I had been particularly religious, I would have said some words of praise, and truth be told I felt like it. Instead, I tightened my grim lips further. My men knew me as not saying much but being a strict disciplinarian and a fair leader. Or at least, I hoped they did. Maybe they were just scared of me. I was content either way so long as they did what I told them to do.
And then, just as the sun poked a tentative ray through the gap in the clouds ahead, the field to our right came alive with musket-flashes. "Down!" I said, already on my stomach, and the rest of them followed suit. I did not stop to see whether we had lost anybody; I just heard the majority of bodies making loud splutches in the mud as they pressed themselves down into it. I began to move to the trees on our left, and heard the squishy sound of my company following suit. I no longer had to give them orders to wipe their noses and tie their bootlaces; they knew when to follow me, when to stay put, and when to go crazy. It wasn't typical British training, and my superior officers knew it, but it had worked so far so they'd let it continue.
The minute I'd received command, I began to overhaul the preconceived notion that you had to stand like a scarecrow waiting for an officer to tell you what to do. That had been the time I'd said the most to my subordinates, telling them that they were free-standing people and had to be able to at least walk and talk on their own. It was radical new thinking for most of them, but eventually they began to come around, and soon every man jack of them could have taken control of the company and led them to safety should their commanding officer go down. But I didn't really plan to.
I hit the edge of the tree line and threw my body behind a tree. As I did so, I was making calculations. A larger force was not far off; we were the frontrunners of this particular expedition, a little tendril of the army poking tentatively into the unknown landscape. If I managed to send someone off, we'd have reinforcements in a short time. But would it be fast enough? I did some more calculations, but couldn't come to a conclusive answer. The Dragoons weren't far off either, I knew, and if the Regular infantry couldn't be reached… Not that it was guaranteed that Tavington would come to our help. Camp gossip said he was continually being browbeaten by the Lord General, Cornwallis, for his part in creating the Ghost, a militia colonel that was wreaking merry hell with our supply trains and executing amazing ambushes. My company hadn't come up against him—yet. I would have liked to say that we could at least give him a run for his money, but if camp scuttlebutt about the amount of survivors he left (none) was true, I couldn't say that for sure. Of course, I knew that the Ghost was none other than Benjamin Martin, thanks to what Chris had told me of the plot, but nobody'd asked me, so I wasn't telling. Word was, though, that the Butcher was getting obsessed, and he would only respond to a call of distress if it had something to do with the Ghost and his militia.
Even with reinforcements being so close at hand, our prospects weren't particularly promising. We were out-gunned and out-manned, although by no means outmatched. Still, an inordinate amount of musket balls were imbedding themselves in my tree. They knew how to recognize officers, and they were gunning for me. It was against all rules of war, but this was clearly militia. They were in it to win, not to give the enemy a sporting chance. Martin had the right idea, but while I'd been busy upsetting the constraints of British battle tactics, there were still lines my superiors were not quite open to letting me cross.
Something had to be done, and fast. I had two options if I wanted to live. I could send a runner behind to Lieutenant Mahoney, and hope to have him arrive in time. Or I could send someone to locate Tavington with a dispatch informing him of some "ghostly" action. He'd come riding into the fray, chop off everybody's heads, and then examine them, only to find out that I'd completely lied about the Ghost's presence. And while any other officer would be content to let the chain of command have its way with me, Tavington probably would probably just run me through himself.
The man was a force to be reckoned with, both on the battlefield and off, and I had ruined my hopes of him arriving simply for the pleasure of my company (in a manly sense, of course) when I'd cheeked him repeatedly a month before. I'd gotten out of that one alive only by the good humor of Captains Bordon and Wilkins, who'd thought my smart mouth pretty funny and had held their commanding officer back after finishing laughing at me, although Tavington had taken that time to give me a magnificent black eye that had swelled to the size of an egg. They were a decent sort, though, because most other officers would have been content to sit back and watch their commander turn me into mincemeat. I'd been officially disciplined, yes, but word of the joke must have reached higher-ups, or Tavington just wasn't well-liked, because my punishment was little more than the proverbial slap on the wrist.
I didn't get it. I didn't maintain my normal grim and taciturn manner around him. I cheeked him, and laughed at him when his angry back was turned, and delighted when I saw his hackles rise. We might have been friends, had he any other disposition than that which he possessed, but I took great pleasure in watching him flare up. I didn't get it. Maybe you could just tie it into my death wish.
And I suppose it was that damn old death wish that made me decide to do what I did. As I reloaded my musket, having ordered everyone to plug away at the enemy for as long as they had shot (being the front-runners, we traveled light, with the idea being that we would camp out every week or so in a safe spot and wait for the supply trains to catch up and refresh us), I summoned our fleetest of foot and handed him a hastily scribbled note. "Find Colonel Tavington," I told him. "Give him this and bayonet him until he comes for us." Private Jenkins looked at me in shock. "I'm kidding about that last bit. Now go!" He saluted.
"Sir!"
I had long gotten over the need to giggle when someone called me 'sir.' When I'd first done it, I had chalked it up (for my men) to not being used to being addressed like that. I was young for sergeant, I said. People usually called me 'boy' or other, meaner things, but never 'sir.' They'd asked me if they could call me 'boy,' and I'd said, "What do you think?" And we were back to discipline. They were the privates, I was the sergeant, so if anybody was to be calling anybody 'boy,' it would be me.
I fretted. Had I done the right thing? Tavington would be able to turn the trick, even against so many, even with the skeleton force left him, the rest being detailed (much to his fury) to guard the supply line through this rebel-infested territory as it wended its way north. But would it be better not to have him come? The Continentals didn't give me much time to ponder this, though, as I saw them massing for a charge. They're insane, was my first thought. We'll blow them to bits. But we had no cannon. Ten or twenty of them would fall and the rest would keep coming, and butcher us all. There was only one thing to do. I pointed my bayonet at their still-forming ranks and bellowed, "Charge!"
We caught them by surprise, thank God; if they'd been prepared, it would have been suicide. But they were still forming up when we thundered across the road and crashed against their ranks. They recovered quickly at the sight of their comrades dying, and began to put up a good fight. But I'd trained my men to be ruthless and efficient, and these people still had hearts, so they were little match for us. A kid who couldn't be much older than sixteen took one look at what I'd done to his companion with my stolen sabre and retched. I ran him through as he knelt on the ground, gasping out for mercy, then turned to the next one. A deadly calm had fallen over me, and I heard anger sing in the silence. The back of my mind was like a movie projector, and I saw, over and over again, Chris's dead body, and her last words: "We come in pea—" It was so ironic that I laughed out loud as I heard it, a laugh that might have scared me if I heard it before all of this happened.
I was no longer aware of myself. My legs were running, my arms were slashing and hewing and slicing, but these were actions independent of my being. It was as though all of me had been withdrawn into the corner of my mind where Chris's death was on replay, like someone kept pressing the rewind button on my life. I kept going back to that moment, to those words, and it was like I might never catch up with real life, but was going to be stuck on that one page forever.
Despite our fighting like demons, the Continentals were gaining ground. More and more of us fell, although they died hard and took a bunch of Continentals with them, like I'd trained them. If help didn't arrive in the next few minutes, we were going to die, all of us. And then I heard the sweetest sound I've ever heard: the sound of marching feet, interspersed with galloping hooves. After killing my current opponent, I risked a glance behind me, and saw a small pack of Dragoons coming up behind me, with a large infantry force moving at double-time not far behind them. My message had arrived!
As the Dragoons rode into the fray, the Continentals realized they'd been beaten. But they couldn't turn now; we'd be too hard on their heels. As I turned back to the battle, I felt a sharp pain slide through my right side. It felt like a white-hot lance of fire gliding through my flesh. I put my fingers against the pain, and they came away sticky red. I bellowed like a bull and killed the one who'd done it, and he fell, a permanent expression of shock frozen to his face. A Continental, sensing weakness, charged at me. I sidestepped and parried, and while I had none of the subtleties of the great swordsmen, I had figured out enough of this thing to use it well. More pain shot through me as the movement agitated the wound. I could feel my entire side stiffening up, all of its functions centering around that one spot.
I'd been wounded before, of course, but they were just little scratches, nothing that a bandage couldn't fix. I'd tended to them myself, daubing them with alcohol confiscated from my men and binding them tightly with scraps of cloth. I kept a multitude of these scraps in several sizes, each soaked with alcohol to sterilize them. I trusted none of the camp doctors and refused to let them see me, on the pretence of having had had experiences with them. But I really feared they might inadvertently expose the secret of my gender. It was an "if I told you, I'd have to kill you" thing, and while I could probably make it look like a painful accident, I didn't want to have to. But at the moment I wasn't sure I had much choice, given the seriousness of this wound.
I had considered, several times, telling someone, making them my confidant and hopefully my friend. But a friend would ruin my reputation, and I always came back to the point that there was no one who could be completely and unequivocably trusted. So I went without; I continued on. I had to. The world came back to me, and I heard the screams of the dying, the shrieks of horses—someone drove a bayonet into the shoulder of a Dragoon's horse, and it toppled to the ground. But he jumped, rolling clear of the fall, and was up in an instant, wreaking merry hell among the Continentals that were still putting up resistance. There were few who could say that.
Clutching my side, I stared at the carnage wreaked, at those who stood around me—some panting and ruddy, some ashen-faced and tight-lipped, some grinning. To my right, the Dragoon was examining his horse. He muttered a soft curse and pulled out his pistol. Before I could say anything, he'd pulled the trigger and shot the animal. He felt my shocked eyes on him and turned. Blood streaked along his face, and I couldn't recognize him, or force myself to. "Bayonet through the sternum," he said. "Ten minutes of suffering, or a quick end. Which would you choose?" I honestly couldn't say, but he wasn't really looking for an answer, and quickly moved off.
***
We pitched camp there, as the day was almost done. I knew I was due to report in sooner or later, and my superiors would probably be getting more and more anxious, but I preferred later and was dreading it. I didn't really care to explain my lie about the Ghost, because no matter how I put it, I'd end up offending somebody. I was quiet that evening, sitting by myself in the corner of the tent that I'd staked out as my own, going about my evening business as though this were just another day of unending drudgery. I left once, heading off to the woods under pretence of taking a leak to clean and bind my wound, and I put on a fresh shirt. If you didn't mark the stiffness and care with which I walked, it seemed as though nothing had ever been wrong.
The summons came at dusk. I had seen gangs of soldiers and officers out examining the dead, so now I figured they'd reached the incriminating conclusion. A very young private arrived at the tent-flap and stammered out, "M-m-message for you, sir. L-Lord G-Gen-General C-C-Cornwallis req-requests your presence i-in the m-main tent." I nodded and said, "Don't stammer so much, Private. People might think you were afraid of something." I donned my uniform jacket and brushed by him, leaving him to gibber. (That had not been fair. I'd been giving him my stoniest death-glare the entire time he'd been in my presence, and that had been formidable even before the monster's coming.)
I walked through the now clear evening, birds singing, crickets chirping, frogs muttering their songs in their algae-encrusted ponds and occasionally breaking off with a sharp plop. Summer was dying; a chill settled over us at night, and we began to reach for the woolen blankets that had seemed annoying formality during the warm days, just hanging dead weights at the bottom of our packs, suspended on leather thongs. I ambled along slowly in the quiet, assorted sounds of tired soldiers, knowing that this relative peace would not last, that the war would only get harder, rage hotter. I didn't have much more time to muse, though, because I was walking up the hill to the Lord General's grand gilt tent.
I opened the tent flap and ducked my head under it. Flickering shadows danced like a movie across the canvas walls, cast there by candlelight. The candles were in silver candlesticks, upon little tables covered over with little cloths. And in there waited the general. He was fat and wore a white powdered wig, and wore the finest uniform I'd seen yet on any officer in the army. His face was grave and stern-looking, but his eyes were kind. He reminded me of my grandfather.
There were two other men in the tent. One of them also wore fine dress, with gold and epaulets and braiding strung all over it, and a powdered wig, but this man, considerably younger, also wore an idiotic look of self-importance that made me dislike him entirely too much for never having met him. And the third man I knew all too well: Colonel William Tavington, Green Dragoons.
As I entered the tent, he was bellowing at Cornwallis, something along these lines: "—a lie, an outright lie, wasting valuable time and resources! We've lost horses, we've lost men, all because of his blatant disregard for—"
"Nothing we could not stand to lose, Colonel," said Cornwallis in a grave tone of command, shutting Tavington up immediately. "As far as I'm concerned, it is a victory." This was much to my relief, as I had no illusions as to what Tavington was talking about. I lurked half in and half out of the tent flap until Cornwallis addressed me.
"Sergeant Stevenshire, you may enter." I did so, and gave a formal bow: deep enough to convey great respect, but not deep enough to appear fawning. Then I stood stiffly at attention until Cornwallis said, "At ease. Sergeant, word of your…antics has just reached my ears," he began slowly. "Your results are unquestionable, even though some of your…tactics, and battlefield commands, are certainly not regulation." I fought a cringe. So he knew about that…
"Some might even call these procedures…revolutionary," Cornwallis said, with a critical look. "Which is why, after examining your record, I have reached a decision on how to deal with you." He reached behind him to one of the little tables, and picked up a folded and sealed piece of paper. He offered it to me, and I took it with the unsteady hands of the surely doomed, sure I would find a dismissal lurking underneath the seal. I did not open it.
Cornwallis looked at me for a minute, blinked when I did not open it immediately, and then shrugged. "In it you will find a field commission…" And now I was opening it with clumsy fingers, trying to restrain myself from ripping it to bits in my haste to reach the contents. A small sound of tearing paper split the air, and I froze. Tavington snorted and rolled his eyes. A little coil of anger rose from my stomach, and I calmed myself. I would face whatever came, Tavington be damned.
The Lord General seemed amused by my disconcertion, and took a moment to hide his laughter before he continued. "I am well aware that you are an enlisted man, but in light of your considerable prowess, we feel that you have earned a promotion. So, I have awarded you a field commission as—"
"Captain," I breathed, having finally opened the seal.
"Green Dragoons," said Cornwallis, and I nearly fainted with shock. When I felt as though I wouldn't fall over with a hair's breadth of movement, I risked a glance at Tavington. He looked as shocked as I felt. His eyes were wide as saucers, and his jaw hung open in a look that might have been comical had it not been so very not funny.
A/N: Wow, really ripping through these chapters. But as some of you may have noticed, they don't come unless the reviews come. There's a direct correlation here. Carrot…or stick. You choose.
Alhaeron
