“It’s Thermopylae, Adam,” Starbuck said earnestly, “think of it as Thermopylae.”

“It’s what?” Ethan Ridley demanded. Ridley had never heard of Thermopylae, where Xerxes’s Persians had stolen a flank march on Leonidas’s Greeks to snatch victory, nor how the three hundred Spartans had sacrificed themselves so that the other Greeks could escape. Nathan Evans seemed an unlikely Greek hero, but today he was playing the Spartan role and Adam, given a classical context to the emergency, instantly understood that his father’s tenants and his father’s neighbors had marched off to become heroes and he could not simply let them die alone. A Faulconer had to be there, and if his father was absent, then Adam must be present.

“We have to fight, don’t we?” Adam said, though unhappily.

“You should go to your father!” Ridley insisted.

“No. I have to go with Nate,” Adam said.

Ridley felt a pulse of victory. The crown prince was siding with the king’s enemy, and Ridley would replace them both. Ridley turned his horse. “I’m going for your father,” he called back as he spurred away past Joe Sparrow’s body.

Adam looked at his friend and shivered. “I’m frightened.”

“So am I,” Starbuck said, and thought of the severed leg spinning across the road spilling its trails of blood. “But so are the Yankees, Adam.”

“I guess they are,” Adam said, then clicked his tongue to urge his horse forward. Starbuck followed more clumsily on Pocahontas, and thus the two friends rode down the hill to follow the Legion northward. Above them, in the clear summer air, a howitzer shell drew a trail of smoke across the sky, then fell to earth and exploded somewhere in the woods.

It was still not nine o’clock in the morning.

Advancing in column of companies had not been Major Bird’s happiest inspiration, but he had thought it the quickest way to get the Legion moving and so he had ordered it. The formation demanded that the companies march in line abreast, four ranks deep, each rank comprising nineteen or twenty men depending on the company’s strength, and the ten companies making a long, broad column with the color party at its center and the band and Doctor Danson bringing up the rear.