“But Fitz Lee was sitting there waiting for the bold Kilpatrick,” Stuart said with the smile of a cat who has caught his canary. “General Kill-Cavalry killed a good many of his Yankees by Spotsylvania Court House.”
“I’m delighted Fitz Lee was there,” Lee said, thinking kind thoughts about his nephew.
“So am I,” Stuart said. “Also there was Rhoodie’s friend Konrad de Buys. General Lee, that man is wilder in battle than any of Stand Watie’s red Indians in the trans-Mississippi. He awed me, damn me if he didn’t.”
Any man about whom a warrior like Stuart would say such a thing had to be a man indeed. Lee said, “I wondered how the Rivington men would fare. But I wonder more how Rhoodie and de Buys knew Kilpatrick was coming. General Ewell, you say the Army of the Potomac feinted to the west to draw your attention to your left wing, and that the feint was competently executed?”
Ewell’s pale eyes turned inward as he pondered that. “Very competently. Sedgwick’s as good a corps commander as the Federals have, and Custer—what can I say about Custer, save that he wishes he were Jeb Stuart?” Stuart smiled again, a smile the brighter for peeping out through his forest of brown beard.
“Under normal circumstances, you might have been deceived, then, General Ewell, at least long enough for Kilpatrick to slip past you and make for Richmond?” Lee asked. Ewell nodded. “And you had picked up nothing from spies and agents to warn you Kilpatrick might be on the move?” Ewell nodded once more. Lee plucked at his beard. “How did Rhoodie know?”
“Why don’t you ask him, sir?” Jeb Stuart said.
“I think I shall,” Lee said.
Walter Taylor stuck his head into Lee’s tent. “Mr. Rhoodie is here to see you, sir.”
“Thank you, Major. Have him come in.”
Rhoodie pushed his way through the tent flap. With his height and wide shoulders, he seemed to fill up the space the canvas enclosed. Lee rose to greet him and shake his hand. “Have a seat, Mr. Rhoodie. Will you take a little blackberry wine? The bottle is right there beside you.”
“If you are having some, I wouldn’t mind, thank you.”
“I believe I set out two glasses. Would you be kind enough to pour, sir? Ah, thank you. Your very good health.” Lee took a small sip. He was pleased to see Rhoodie toss off half his glass at a swallow; wine might help loosen the fellow’s tongue. He said, “From what General Ewell tells me, the Confederacy finds itself in your debt once more. Without your timely warning, Kilpatrick’s raiders might have done far worse than they actually succeeded in accomplishing.”
“So they might.” Rhoodie finished his wine. “I am pleased to help in any way I can. Can I fill you up again, General?”
“No, thank you, not yet, but by all means help yourself.” Lee took another sip to indicate he was not far behind Rhoodie. He nodded imperceptibly to himself when the big man did pour again, as a fisherman will when his bait is taken. He said, “Interesting how you got wind of Kilpatrick’s plans when the rest of the army would have been hoodwinked by Meade’s motion toward our left.”
Rhoodie looked smug. “We have our ways, General Lee.”
“Marvelously good ones they must be, too. As with your rifles, they altogether outdistance that which anyone else may hope to accomplish. But how do you know what you know, Mr. Rhoodie? Be assured that I ask in the most friendly way imaginable; my chief concern is to be able to form a judgment of your reliability, so I may know how far I may count on it in the crises which surely lie ahead.”
“As I think I told you once before, General, my friends and I can find out whatever we think important enough to know.” Yes, Rhoodie was smug.
Lee said, “That hardly appears open to question, sir, not after your repeaters, your desiccated foods—though I wish you might find a way to provide us with more of the latter—and now your ability to ferret out the Federals’ plans. But I did not ask what you could do; I asked how you did it. The difference is small, but I think it important.”
“I—see.” Suddenly Andries Rhoodie’s face showed nothing at all, save a polite mask behind which any thoughts whatever might form. Seeing that mask, Lee knew he had been foolish to hope to loosen this man’s tongue with a couple of glasses of homemade wine. After a small but noticeable pause, the big man with the odd accent said, “Even if I were to tell you, I fear you would not believe me—you would be more likely to take me for a madman or a liar.”
“Madmen may babble of wonderful weapons, but they do not, as a rule, produce them—certainly not in carload lots,” Lee said. “As for whether you speak the truth, well, say what you have to say, and let me be the judge of that.”
Rhoodie’s poker face hid whatever calculations were going on behind it. At last he said,” All right, General Lee, I will. My friends and I—everyone who belongs to America Will Break—come from a hundred and fifty years in your future.” He folded his arms across his broad chest and waited to see what Lee would make of that.
Lee opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again while he did some thinking of his own. He did not know what he had expected Rhoodie to say, but the big man’s calm assertion was nothing he had imagined. He studied Rhoodie, wondering if he had made a joke. If he had, his face did not show it. Lee said, “If that be so—note I say if—then why have you come?”
“I told you that the day I met you: to help the Confederacy win this war and gain its freedom.”
“Have you any proof of what you allege?” Lee asked.
Now Rhoodie smiled, rather coldly: “General Lee, if you can match the AK-47 anywhere in the year 1864, then I am the greatest liar since Ananias.”
Lee plucked at his beard. He himself had brought up the excellence of Rhoodie’s equipment, but had not thought that very excellence might be evidence they were from out of time. Now he considered the notion. What would Napoleon have thought of locomotives to carry whole armies more than a hundred miles in the course of a day, of steam-powered ironclads, of rifled artillery, of rifle muskets with interchangeable parts, common enough for every soldier to carry one? And Napoleon was less than fifty years dead and had rampaged across Russia while Lee was a small boy. Who could say what progress another century and a half would bring? Andries Rhoodie might. To his own surprise, Lee realized he believed the big man. Rhoodie was simply too strange in too many ways to belong to the nineteenth century.
“If you intend to see the Confederate States independent, Mr. Rhoodie, you would have been of more aid had you chosen to visit us sooner,” Lee said, tacitly acknowledging his acceptance of Rhoodie’s claim.
“I know that, General Lee. I wish we could have come sooner, too, believe me. But our time machine travels back and forth exactly one hundred fifty years, no more, no less. We did not manage to obtain even the small one we have—steal it, not to mince words—until just a few months ago—just a few months ago up in 2013, that is. Still, all is not lost—far from it. Another year and a half and it would have been too late.”
Those few sentences held so much meat that Lee needed a little time to take it in. By itself, the idea of travel through time was enough to bemuse him. He also had to come to grips with the notion of two stations in time—in his mind’s eye, he saw them as train stations, with an overhang to keep passengers dry in the rain—each moving forward yet always separated from the other by so many years, just as Richmond and Orange Court House each moved as the Earth rotated on its axis, yet always remained separated from the other by so many miles.