“So it will,” Anne said. She’d driven into Columbia a few days before, and sent Tom half a dozen pairs of leather-and-wool gloves. She’d also bought a crate of the usual trinkets for the workers on the plantation. She couldn’t make herself believe they deserved anything but the back of her hand, but couldn’t afford any more trouble with them. She had troubles enough. A little bribery never hurt anything, and a congressman, for instance, would have been far more expensive.
“De tree sho’ smell fine,” Julia said. “Jus’ a little feller dis yeah, not like in de old days.”
In the old days, Anne had had the halls of Marshlands in which to set a tree that was a tree. Here in the low-roofed cottage, this sapling would have to do. She was making the best show she could with tinsel and a cheap glass star on top.
Julia cleaned at a glacial pace. Anne had learned hurrying her was useless. She would just look hurt and stare down at her baby. She’d been slow before she had the baby. She was slower now. Anne waited impatiently. Maybe she let the impatience show. Julia dropped and shattered the chamber pot, then spent what felt like half an hour sweeping up shards of china. Anne was ready to kick her by the time she finally left the cottage.
At last, the mistress of Marshlands, such as there was of Marshlands these days, got down to her own work without anyone peering over her shoulder. She was gladder by the day that she’d been in fine financial shape before the war started. She wouldn’t be in fine shape by the time it was done. If she survived, though, she knew she’d be able to get her own back once peace finally returned.
She picked up the telephone mouthpiece to call a broker down in Charleston. The line was dead. She said something pungently unladylike. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to, not any more. It was either write another letter or drive into St. Matthews to send a telegram. She wrote the letter. More and more these days, she felt nothing at Marshlands got done unless she stayed here to see it get done.
To add to her foul mood, the postman was late. When he finally did show, up, he rode toward her with a bigger armed escort than usual. “You want to watch yourself, ma’am,” he said. “They say them Red niggers is feelin’ fractious.”
“They say all sorts of things,” Anne answered coldly. She took the envelopes and periodicals the fellow gave her and handed him the letters she’d written. He stuck those in his saddlebag and rode off.
Once he was gone, she regretted snapping at him. The guards accompanying him argued that people in St. Matthews were taking seriously the threat from Cassius’ diehards.
She checked her pistol. It lay under her pillow, where it was supposed to be. Wondering if Julia or one of the other Negroes had pulled its teeth, she checked that, too. No: it was fully loaded. That eased her mind somewhat, arguing as it did that the Marshlands Negroes didn’t expect an imminent visit from their friends and comrades skulking in the swamps of the Congaree.
“Comrades.” The word tasted bad in her mouth. Now that the Reds had degraded it, it wasn’t a word decent people in the Confederate States could use comfortably any more. No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than she laughed at herself. Before the war, she’d had nothing but contempt for the stodgy, boring folk who counted for the Confederacy’s decent people. Now she reckoned herself one of them.
She laughed again, though it wasn’t funny. It was either laugh or scream. The Red uprising had proved as painfully as possible how much she had in common with her fellow white Confederate Americans.
Julia brought in chicken and dumplings for supper. Anne ate, hardly noticing the plate in front of her. Her body servant took it away. Anne lighted the lamps, one by one. They didn’t give her proper light by which to read, but they were what she had. She wasn’t holding her breath about getting electricity restored to Marshlands, any more than she was about getting back a telegraph line. On the off chance, she tried the telephone again. It was still silent, too. She snarled at it.
A couple of magazines told in great detail how the CSA might yet win the war. She would have had more faith in them if they hadn’t contradicted each other in so many places. She also would have had more faith in them if either author had shown more signs he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t whistling in the dark.
She poured herself a cup of coffee. The coffee remained good. As long as the Caribbean remained a Confederate lake, imports from Central and South America could still reach Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola.
However good it was, the coffee did nothing to keep her awake. She drank it so regularly, it had next to no effect on her. When she started yawning over a particularly abstruse piece on Russia’s chances against the Germans and Austrians in 1917, she set down the magazine, blew out all the lamps but the one by her bed, and changed into a nightgown. Then she blew out the last lamp and went to bed.
She woke up sometime in the middle of the night. As she’d tossed and turned, her right hand had slipped under the pillow. It was resting on the revolver. That, though, wasn’t what had wakened her. “Coffee,” she muttered under her breath. She reached down for the chamber pot, only to discover it wasn’t there and remember why. Off to the privy, then—no help for it.
Her lips twisted in frustrated anger as she started to get out of bed. Marshlands had had flush toilets longer than she’d been alive; it had been one of the first plantation houses in South Carolina to enjoy such an amenity. She’d taken indoor plumbing for granted. The refugee camp had taught her it was too precious, too wonderful, not to be properly admired—and, at the moment, she had not so much as a pot to call her own.
Even in the mild climate hereabouts, a nighttime trip to the privy was a chilly business. She shut the door behind her to keep the cold out of the cottage. Going to the privy was also a smelly, disgusting business. And spiders and bugs and occasional lizards and mice visited the place, too.
Almost absentmindedly, she scooped up the pistol and carried it along with her when she went out into the darkness. She was halfway to the outhouse before she consciously recalled the warning the postman had given her. When she got to the privy, she set the little handgun down beside her before she hiked up her gown.
She spent longer in the noisome place than she’d expected. She had just risen from the pierced wooden seat when she heard voices outside. They were all familiar voices, though she hadn’t heard a couple of them in more than a year. “She in dere?” Cassius asked. The hunter—the Red revolutionary leader—wasn’t talking loud, but he wasn’t making any special effort to keep his voice down, either.
“She in dere,” Julia answered more quietly. “You don’ wan’ to wake she up, Cass. She gots a gun. She come out shootin’.”
“Den we shoots she, and dat de end o’ one capitalist ’pressor,” Cassius said. “We gots dis cottage surrounded. Ain’t no way out we ain’t got covered. I oughts to know—de place was mine.”
“Shootin’ too good fo’ dat white debbil bitch.” Another woman’s voice: Cherry’s, Anne realized after a moment.
“Oh, is you right about dat!” Julia agreed enthusiastically. “I wants to watch she burn. She use me like I’s an animal, she do. Ever since she come back, I wants to see she dead.”
See if I give you a Christmas present this year, Julia, Anne thought. She’d got the idea Julia didn’t much care for her, but this venomous hatred…no. She shook her head. She’d thought she’d known what the Negroes on Marshlands were thinking. She’d been fatally wrong about Cassius, and now almost as misled about Julia. She wondered if she understood at all what went on inside blacks’ minds.
Cherry said, “Her brudder done use me. He have hisself a high old time, right till de end.” Her laugh was low and throaty and triumphant. “He don’ find out till too late dat I usin’ he, too.”
So Scipio told me the truth about that. Thinking about what had happened kept Anne from worrying unduly about the predicament she was in now. She’d seen some of it for herself; Cherry had put on airs, even around her, on account of what she did
in the bedroom with Jacob.
Cassius said, “Don’ matter how she die, so long as she dead. Top o’all de other crimes she do, I hear tell she behin’dat bill dat mystify de niggers to fight fo’ de white folks’ gummint. We strikes a blow fo’ revolutionary justice when we ends de backers o’ dat wicked scheme.”
“So light de matches, den,” Cherry said impatiently.
Through the tiny window cut in the outhouse door, light flared, brilliantly bright. Cassius and the other Reds must have doused the doorway to the cottage—and maybe the walls as well—with kerosene or perhaps even gasoline. Had Anne been inside there, she wouldn’t have had a chance in the world to get free. The most she could have hoped for would have been to blow out her own brains before the flames took her.
“How you like it now, Miss Anne?” Julia shouted, exultation in her voice. “How you like it, you cold-eyed debbil?”
Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds howled abuse at the cabin, too. After a moment, so did a rising chorus of Marshlands field hands, roused from their beds by shouts and by flames.
Anne realized that, if she was going to escape, she would have to do it now, while everyone’s attention was on the burning cottage and nowhere else. She opened the privy door and stepped outside, holding up a hand to shield her face from the fierce glare of the fire. She started to step away from the outhouse, but then stopped and shut the door behind her—no use giving her foes (which seemed to mean everyone on the Marshlands plantation) a clue as to where she’d been. Maybe the Reds would think smoke and fire had overcome her before she woke up.
She wished her nightgown were any color but white. It made her too easy to spot in the darkness. Putting the privy between her and the fire, she made for the closest trees. Those couple of hundred yards seemed ten miles long.
No sooner had Anne reached the trees than the harsh, flat crack of gunfire came from behind her. Remembering everything Tom and Jacob had said about combat, she threw herself flat. That took care of her worries about the white nightgown, because she landed in cold, clammy mud. Shouts of alarm from the Negroes behind her told her what the gunfire was: rounds in the box of revolver ammunition in the cottage cooking off.
Deliberately, she rolled in the mud, so her back was as dark as her belly. Then she set out for St. Matthews, four or five miles away. A couple of plantations between Marshlands and the town had a sort of spectral half-life, but, after what had just happened to her, she was not inclined to trust her fate to any place where the field hands vastly outnumbered the whites. “I kept the government off them,” she said through clenched teeth, “and this is the thanks I got? They’ll pay. Oh yes, they’ll pay.”
After Scipio had visited Marshlands, she’d taken him off her list. When she was in Columbia, she’d learned he’d quit his job and didn’t seem to be in town any more. That had been wise of him. She bared her teeth. In the end, it would do him no good. She’d have her revenge on him as on all the others now.
She stayed in the undergrowth alongside the road instead of going straight down it. That slowed her and wounded her bare feet, but left her less visible. As far as she was concerned, the latter was more important.
Every so often, she stopped in the best shelter she could find and listened to try to find out if anyone was pursuing her. She heard nothing. That made her feel only a little safer. She knew how good a hunter Cassius was. But every painful step she took brought her closer to safety.
She was, she thought, more than halfway to St. Matthews when a horse-drawn fire engine, lanterns blazing in the night, came clattering up the road toward Marshlands. A couple of armed guards on horseback trotted along beside it.
Anne stepped out into the roadway, waving her arms. She was so muddy, the fire engine almost rolled over her instead of stopping. “Jesus Christ!” one of the firemen exclaimed. “It’s Anne Colleton.”
“Don’t go any farther,” she said. “You haven’t got enough firepower. Cassius and his Reds will be waiting to bushwhack you. And besides”—her mouth twisted—“the fire will have done whatever it can do.”
The fireman who’d recognized her helped her up onto the engine. It stank of coal smoke from the steam engine that powered the pump. From a long way away, a rifle barked. The fireman grunted and crumpled, shot through the head. Another shot rang out, the bullet ricocheting off the engine before the sound of the report reached her.
“Get the hell out of here, Claude!” one of the guards shouted to the driver. The other guard started shooting in the direction from which the shots had come.
Claude could handle horses. He turned the six-animal team and headed back toward St. Matthews faster than Anne would have thought possible—but not before another fireman got hit in the foot. He cursed furiously, pausing every so often to apologize to Anne for his language.
Cassius, she thought. It has to be Cassius. The iron bulk of the pump shielded her from any more bullets. All she had to do, all the way back to town, was think about how the hunter, the Red, had ruined her twice. But she was still alive, still fighting—and so, in spite of the Negro uprising and everything else, were the Confederate States.
We’ll whip the Yankees yet, she thought. And you, Cassius, I’ll whip you.
Books by Harry Turtledove
THE GUNS OF THE SOUTH
THE WORLDWAR SAGA
WORLDWAR: IN THE BALANCE
WORLDWAR: TILTING THE BALANCE
WORLDWAR: UPSETTING THE BALANCE
WORLDWAR: STRIKING THE BALANCE
COLONIZATION
COLONIZATION: SECOND CONTACT
COLONIZATION: DOWN TO EARTH
COLONIZATION: AFTERSHOCKS
HOMEWARD BOUND
THE VIDESSOS CYCLE
THE MISPLACED LEGION
AN EMPEROR FOR THE LEGION
THE LEGION OF VIDESSOS
SWORDS OF THE LEGION
THE TALE OF KRISPOS
KRISPOS RISING
KRISPOS OF VIDESSOS
KRISPOS THE EMPEROR
NONINTERFERENCE
KALEIDOSCOPE
A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE
EARTHGRIP
DEPARTURES
COUNTING UP, COUNTING DOWN
HOW FEW REMAIN
THE GREAT WAR
THE GREAT WAR: AMERICAN FRONT
THE GREAT WAR: WALK IN HELL
THE GREAT WAR: BREAKTHROUGHS
AMERICAN EMPIRE
AMERICAN EMPIRE: BLOOD AND IRON
AMERICAN EMPIRE: THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
AMERICAN EMPIRE: THE VICTORIOUS OPPOSITION
SETTLING ACCOUNTS
SETTLING ACCOUNTS: RETURN ENGAGEMENT
SETTLING ACCOUNTS: DRIVE TO THE EAST
THE BEST MILITARY HISTORY STORIES OF THE 20TH CENTURY (editor)
THE BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY STORIES OF THE 2OTH CENTURY
Don’t miss the next explosive chapter in the War to End All Wars, THE GREAT WAR: BREAKTHROUGHS by Harry Turtledove, The Master of Alternative History
Klaxons hooted the call to battle stations. George Enos sprinted along the deck of the USS Ericsson toward the one-pounder gun near the stern. The destroyer was rolling and pitching in the heavy swells of an Atlantic winter storm. Freezing rain made the metal deck slick as a Boston Common ice-skating rink.
Enos ran as confidently as a mountain goat bounding from crag to crag. Ice and heavy seas were second nature to him. Before the war sucked him into the Navy, he’d put to sea in fishing boats from Boston’s T Wharf at every season of the year, and gone through worse weather in craft a lot smaller than this one. The thick peacoat was warmer than a civilian slicker, too.
Petty Officer Carl Sturtevant and most of his crew were already at the depth-charge launcher near the one-pounder. The other sailors came rushing up only moments after Enos took his place at the antiaircraft gun.
He stared every which way, though with the weather so bad he would have been hard pressed to spot an aeroplane before it crashed on the Ericsson’s deck. A fri
gid gust of wind tried to yank off his cap. He grabbed it and jammed it back in place. Navy barbers kept his brown hair trimmed too close for it to hold in any heat on its own.
“What’s up?” he shouted to Sturtevant through the wind. “Somebody spot a periscope, or think he did?” British, French, and Confederate submersibles all prowled the Atlantic. For that matter, so did U.S. and German boats. If a friendly skipper made a mistake and launched a spread of fish at the Ericsson, her crew would be in just as much trouble as if the Rebs or limeys had attacked.
“Don’t know.” The petty officer scratched at his dark Kaiser Bill mustache. “Shit, you expect ’em to go and tell us stuff? All I know is, I heard the hooter and I ran like hell.” He scratched his mustache again. “Long as we’re standing next to each other, George, happy New Year.”
“Same to you,” Enos answered in surprised tones. “It is today, isn’t it? I hadn’t even thought about it, but you’re right. Back when this damn war started, who would have thought it’d last into 1917?”
“Not me, I’ll tell you that,” Sturtevant said.
“Me, neither,” George Enos said. “I sailed into Boston harbor with a hold full of haddock the day the Austrian grand duke got himself blown up in Sarajevo. I figured the fight would be short and sweet, same as everybody else.”
“Yeah, so did I,” Sturtevant said. “Didn’t quite work out that way, though. The Kaiser’s boys didn’t make it into Paris, we didn’t make it into Toronto, and the goddamn Rebs did make it into Washington, and almost into Philadelphia. Nothin’ comes easy, not in this fight.”
“Ain’t it the truth?” Enos agreed fervently. “I was in river monitors on the Mississippi and the Cumberland. I know how tough it’s been.”
“The snapping-turtle fleet,” Sturtevant said with the good-natured scorn sailors of the oceanic Navy reserved for their inland counterparts. Having served in both branches, George knew the scorn was unjustified. He also knew he had no chance of convincing anyone who hadn’t served in a river monitor that that was so.
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