Jack Absolute by C. C. Humphreys
Jack lost the struggle with gravity. He fell, landing heavily on the big Captain, who cried out some strange profanity and fainted away. Jack rolled off him, ending up on his knees.
‘Took your time,’ he grunted, looking up at Até.
‘Been busy,’ the Mohawk replied. Jack wasn’t sure, as his vision was a little blurry, but it looked like there were at least three more scalps dangling from his friend’s hide belt.
He felt another surge of pain in his back and groaned.
‘Wounded?’ There was at least some concern on Até’s face.
‘No.’ Jack pulled up his shirt, looked at the red mark spreading there. ‘Just struck.’
‘You are getting old and slow. Four would have been no problem for you once.’
‘Well …’ Jack muttered, rubbing at his back and looking about. The main struggle seemed to be further on down the valley. And it appeared that most of the resistance was now being led by the Oneidas. Jack saw Brant charge a tall warrior, striped from crown to toe in yellow paint. War club met war club and the two men locked and spun into the mêlée.
‘I think your old schoolfellow can handle this. We should see how the main ambush goes. I am not so assured of the courage of our Loyalist friends.’
‘Then let us join them.’ A hand was offered and Jack used it to pull himself up, restraining another groan.
Até smiled. ‘And remember, Daganoweda. That is now seven to six.’ He ran ahead.
Jack watched his friend’s back moving away, then cursed silently as he began to follow. He never could remember how many times each had saved the other’s life. There was always dispute about some of the actions anyway, whether intervention was actually needed. Até was especially disputatious about such points. Jack knew he could have no argument about what had just happened, but hoped he would get a chance to even the score before the battle’s end. Otherwise the gloating around their next camp fire would be intolerable.
As he took his first painful step back down the valley, he felt the first raindrop. It ran down his face, soon joined in its trail by dozens more. A relief to some, but bad timing for the ambushers. Like everyone else on the battlefield not directly engaged in action, Jack tucked his powder horn and cartridge pouch under his shirt.
By the time Jack and Até had returned to the main site of the ambush, the rain was falling in walls of water. The approaching thunder, lost till then in the roar of musketry, now crashed overhead, following sharp stabs of lightning. Here and there, these illuminated for the briefest of moments a struggle between combatants too entwined to notice the deluge. A club would fall, or a blade find flesh, and a body would slide away. Only then would the victor look up, startled, to wipe raindrops and sweat from blurred eyes, then stagger off to his own lines.
Most had already withdrawn. Everywhere was the carnage of the sudden attack. Bodies in groups, some still moving, hands reaching in supplication to their comrades safe behind a tree stump or in any slight dip. Steam rose from all, joining the miasma of marsh and men’s exuded fear.
While the rain fell – twenty minutes, perhaps a little more – that was all the movement on the field. Then, as suddenly as it had come, it ceased. The ‘thunderbirds’, as the myth of the Iroquois named them, moved away to the east, lightning striking the slopes further down the valley. The drops shrank in size and a last line of them rode through the ravine, like a curtain being drawn across a stage. The Second Act of the drama was about to begin.
It took only a moment. The ends of paper cartridges, kept scrupulously dry, were bitten off, contents tipped into barrels, powder poured into pans.
‘For the King!’ a bass American voice shouted down.
‘For shit!’ came the reply from the valley floor. ‘I see you, John Chisholm. Got a nice crop of beet planted on your land, you traitorous arse.’
‘You’re the fucking traitor, James Dingham,’ the Loyalist’s deep voice sounded again, ‘and a thief. And I’ll plant you where you can see those beets grow, real close to.’
Laughter rose, from both sides, from both came the distinct click of hammers being cocked. ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah-Ah!’ was the cry from hundreds of Iroquois mouths. On the final ascending note, musketry exploded again down the length of the valley.
Jack lay beside Até and the two men became automatons – biting, pouring, ramming, cocking, firing. Gunsmoke pooled in the ravine bottom, though a slight wind had arisen that pulled and tore at the cloud. Through the shreds, grey figures moved, brief targets for their fusils, though the effect of any shot was hard to tell. The two men kept loading and firing anyway.
A bullet bit into the tree trunk Jack sheltered behind. It came from the side and, squinting, Jack perceived that some of the Rebels had forced their way up the slope and seized a hillock of land. In their midst lay the old general, last seen falling off a white stallion. He lay propped against a tree, obviously wounded, though the wound did not seem to affect his ability to fire off his musket while coolly puffing on a long pipe.
Jack suddenly noticed something else. The hillock was up the slope, close to the ranks of hitherto silent, spectating Seneca. Even as he watched, he saw some Militiamen pushing further up the hillside, and that the chiefs were having difficulty restraining the younger warriors. And watching, Jack knew what was to come. The Seneca were like any other Iroquois nation, glorying in war, in the acts of courage required.
He did not see the moment that provoked it, hothead brave or encroaching Rebel, but suddenly the Seneca lines rose as one and charged down the slopes.
‘Até!’ Jack gestured to the attack.
The Mohawk looked, grunted. ‘So, the Great Hill People have found their courage. About time.’ Then he turned his gun barrel again to the valley floor.
Jack watched the charge. A ragged volley halted the first of them, but the others came on, crying out their war whoop. When they got close enough, the warriors almost offered their painted chests as targets. As soon as the musket was discharged though, and if the brave remained unhurt, he would charge the soldier now frantically trying to reload. A hatchet would fall – once, twice – and a red hand would be raised in triumph, something bloody clutched in it.
Someone on the American side had noted the weakness. Perhaps it was the general still prone and puffing tobacco beneath his tree. Jack could see orders being shouted out. Men formed into pairs and when one fired and bent to reload, the other stepped forward to discharge his weapon at the charging Seneca.
The tactic wreaked havoc. Painted bodies soon lay scattered on the ground before the slight rise occupied by the Rebels. The Senecas kept coming. They had some success. But Jack knew this was not the Native way to fight. It was becoming a pitch battle and that was the last thing the King’s ragtag army needed.
‘Where are the rest of the fucking Loyalists?’ Jack shouted at Até. Only two companies of Johnson’s regiment and some of Butler’s men were engaged. The majority, under Major Watts, as they had been throughout the campaign, were tardy.
‘My gun is too hot and I tire of this.’ Até waved down the slope where targets had become hard to find. ‘Shall we go look for help?’
At a nod, the two men ran in a crouch up the slope. Bullets slapped and winged around them but they made the line of trees where some of the Seneca chiefs still sat, watching and muttering. Running behind them, they soon came to a little path that paralleled the valley below. Jack found that his sore back eased with movement. They began to run faster.
They did not have far to go. Below them, where the valley widened out, the movement of a body of soldiers could be discerned. Instantly, Jack and Até cut down the slope towards them, vaulting the low scrub and young trees in their way. They emerged in front of a column of green-coated men. A portly officer was at their head.
‘Leaving so soon, Absolute?’ the officer drawled. Major Stephen Watts, of the Royal Greens, had a way of speaking that complemented the slowness of his movements. He seemed to be in a perpetual yawn.
‘Looking for you, sir. The action is quite hot ahead.’
‘Yes?’ The syllable stretched out. As swiftly as he could, Jack précised the situation.
‘Really?’ Watts yawned again at the report’s conclusion. Jack wondered if the man had been at the laudanum. ‘Well, no doubt the Rebel will be hoping for a sally from the Fort to their aid. Let’s feed that hope.’ He waved his hand at a man beside him. ‘Captain! Turn coats.’
‘Aye, Major.’ The officer faced the ranks behind, then yelled, ‘Turn coats!’
The cry was passed back down the lines. Men gave their muskets to the man next to them and reversed their coats. From the green of a Loyalist they were transformed into something similar to the men back in the valley, the buff uniforms of the Tryon County Militia.
When his ranks were once more organized – an agonizingly long process to Jack – Watts lifted his tricorn hat and waved it above his head.
‘Strike me up one of those damn Rebel songs,’ he cried, and his fife and whistle players commenced a snail-like version of ‘Yankee Doodle’.
Gradually, though, the regiment advanced to the action. As they entered the ravine, Jack could see that the hillock had become a Rebel rallying point, Seneca dead and dying scattered before it.
‘There, Major. There’s the centre of resistance. Break them and the field is ours.’
‘I can see that perfectly well, Captain.’ Watts’s tone was frosty, the emphasis on Jack’s rank deliberate. He lifted his tricorn again from his head, waved it, and shouted, ‘For the Colonies! Freedom!’ His cry was echoed by his men as they marched cheering towards the hill, deploying in a line as they came.
For a moment, the sight of the regiment brought near silence to the field. Men on each side squinted through the gunsmoke at what they hoped were friends or feared were a new enemy. Hopes soared or sank as to their conclusions. Then a voice pierced the near silence. It came from the centre of the Rebel-held hill.
‘Bollocks, lads! It’s a trick. Look in the front rank there – that’s Isaiah Herkimer, the General’s traitor brother!’
Jack sighed. It was always a poor plan, he’d felt. Too many connections in a civil war. Knowing what was coming, he moved away from the main body of the troops, Até following. Behind them the advancing ranks halted.
‘And there’s my bloody cousin, Frank, Aunt Mary’s boy.’ Another voice came. ‘Always was a little bastard. Give ’em hell, boys.’
More recognitions, more voices rising, soon lost in ragged gunfire. It was not much of a volley; two men dropped in the front rank. The rest prepared to return fire. But Watts was staring at his hat, until a moment before aloft above his head. He put two fingers through two holes and it seemed to decide him.
‘Retreat, lads,’ he cried, clamping the hat on his head. ‘Regroup at two hundred paces.’
Then, with an alacrity he’d failed so far to display, he fled the field. Jeers and more bullets followed the buff backs. Jack knew that they would not halt at two hundred or two thousand paces. They would halt back at their camps.
‘I think this fight is over, Daganoweda.’ Até jutted his chin towards the battleground. They watched as the Seneca withdrew back up the slopes. To the left, the rest of Johnson’s Loyalist regiment were imitating their comrades and streaming back towards Fort Stanwix.
‘They hold the field, Até. But we have stopped them, hurt them. They will not relieve the Fort, at least.’ Jack shook his head. ‘But it could have been so much more. Shall we see if we can find our Wolves?’
On the higher path, Joseph Brant was leading his warriors back. Scattered among them, and roughly handled, were various Rebel prisoners. Jack noted that the huge Scots Captain he’d duelled with was being dragged along, clutching his bloodied side, cursing his captors continuously – and unintelligibly. Jack was surprised but, strangely, not altogether displeased to see him alive.
Brant grunted in frustration when he heard Jack’s tale. ‘Our White Father across the water is served by some poor sons this side of it,’ he muttered.
‘But not his Native sons.’ Até pointed to the slopes where the Iroquois – Seneca and Mohawk – were kneeling among the wounded and the dead. Lamentations were being uttered, voices raised in anguish. The Condoling Time, the Iroquois way of mourning, was beginning.
‘They fought like a marvel,’ said Jack, ‘in a way that was unfamiliar to them.’
‘And paid in blood,’ Brant said. The three men stood for a moment, as the agonized cries became more general, turning into one song of despair. ‘The white man can afford to lose this many. His supply is like your name, Daganoweda – inexhaustible. We …’
He did not need to go on, his gesturing hand falling slowly to his side. In their journey to Oswego, Jack and Até had already noted how scattered were the nations of the Iroquois, how thinly spread its people. This loss of its manhood was an horrendous blow.
‘Come,’ said Jack, ‘let us return to the camp. Maybe there’ll be some comfort for us there.’
They knew something was wrong long before they reached Fort Stanwix; they could smell it on the wind. A breeze, blowing from the west, bore into their nostrils the taint of smoke. At first it gave them hope that somehow the inefficient artillery had managed to set the Fort alight. But cresting the last rise, they saw that the black-grey columns spiralled up, not from the wood and earthen structure but away to the east and south of it. From the Indian camps.
Jack, Até, and Brant began to run. Soon, other sounds added to their dismay. Not only the staccato crackling of flames but the wails of men and women.
They sprinted into horror. The camp of the Iroquois was burning. Cedar-bark shelters and deer-hide tents were topped by crimson, those that had not already collapsed. Some warriors, newly returned from the fight, were rushing about desperately, seeking, calling. Bodies lay everywhere.
Jack bent to one. A young woman’s, curled up as if in sleep. Yet her deer-skin dress was not singed. It was neither flame nor smoke that had killed her but the deep gash in her back.
Jack rose. His voice croaked and he had to clear it to speak. ‘Bayonet,’ he said, wiping blood on to his shirt.
An old man sat near, knees drawn up to chest, long white hair falling to his shoulders, and Brant knelt swiftly beside him. ‘What happened here, Sagehjowah?’
‘Soldiers came. From the Fort. They brought their fire and the knives on their guns.’
‘The Fort?’ Jack squinted through the smoke to where the tops of Stanwix’s palisades were just visible. Above them still floated that strange banner of stars and stripes. ‘But they are under siege. How did they sally out? Weren’t the Regulars here to protect you?’
Coughing racked the old man and Até bent down, gave him water from a canteen. When he had recovered, they had to lean in closer, for he could only whisper. ‘The Green Ones guarded us, those who speak the language in the throat we cannot understand. One came, made them move to the other side of the Fort. The door opened, the Yankee soldiers came out to our camp.’
Another fit of coughing took him and he slipped on to his side. Jack was staring again, this time towards the Regulars’ encampment.
‘German is a language of the throat. And the Jaegers wear green.’
Brant was only giving voice to Jack’s thoughts. With Até at his side, Jack began running again, towards the Union Standard.
A table had been set up outside St Leger’s tent. The Colonel sat behind it, red-faced and sweating. Before him stood the two Loyalist commanders, Johnson and Butler, arguing furiously with each other, with him. Behind him were grouped his own officers, including, leaning on a cane and sporting a livid red bruise on his chin, the Count von Schlaben.
Jack strode straight into the centre of the group. ‘Who ordered the guard withdrawn from the Indian camps?’
‘Captain Absol
‘Who ordered the guard withdrawn?’
‘For shame, sir.’ Ancrum stepped forward, laying an arm on Jack’s. ‘You will not address your Commander in such a manner.’
Jack threw the arm off. ‘I care not a fig for that. Our allies’ camps are in flames, women and children lie massacred there, families of men who just sacrificed themselves for our cause in that damned ravine. And you wish me to be concerned about etiquette?’
A hubbub arose – the shocked Loyalists, the blustering St Leger, the reprimanding Ancrum. But it was a German voice, as ever, that cut through it all.
‘I ordered my Jaegers into a new position, Captain Absolute, to cover the withdrawal from the battle in the ravine.’ Von Schlaben stroked his jaw as if he could get it to function better. ‘I thought it the proper course to take.’
‘You thought it … proper?’ Jack rubbed his fingers together. They were still tacky with a young woman’s blood. ‘You allowed these people to be slaughtered, you …’
He ran out of words, anger choking them in his throat. As he tried to regain breath, as he took a step towards the German, St Leger finally managed to stand.
‘Your superior’s orders are not yours to question, Absholute,’ he slurred. ‘It was sound tactical thinking on the Count’s part. It may have had somewhat unfortunate results but—’
‘Unfortunate? Colonel, this tactic … that man … may have cost you more than half your army. If the Natives stay—’
A hand at his elbow halted him. Até jerked his head back the way they had come. Jack listened. A drum had begun a frenzied beat. Within the keening of loss, the wails of lamentation, an uglier noise was building.
‘Oh no,’ Jack murmured, ‘no.’ He turned and began to run, ignoring the immediate cries of ‘Captain Absolute’ that pursued him.
They arrived back at the smoking camp too late – and just in time. A gauntlet had been formed, two lines of warriors of all the Iroquois nations and others beside, men and women, united at last – in vengeance. They clutched war clubs, knives, brands snatched from the flames of their ruined shelters. They used these and their fists and feet to strike at white men, prisoners from the battle, and some Oneidas too, forcing them to run between the lines. Many had not made it, lay broken to the side where they’d been dragged. Those who did were knocked down at the gauntlet’s end, their heads pulled back, throats slit. A group was bottlenecked at the start, waiting their turn, some on their knees praying loudly, some crying, most just standing there staring, disbelieving.