The Guns of the South

* XVIII *

Lee wondered how Jefferson Davis had ever managed to inveigle him into accepting the Confederate Presidency. Even without counting the armed guards who surrounded the presidential residence on Shockoe Hill, he found himself a prisoner of his position. To do everything that needed doing, he should have been born triplets. The one of him available was not nearly enough: whenever he did anything, he felt guilty because he was neglecting something else.

He drank coffee as he waded through the morning’s stack of reports. General Forrest was shifting the main effort of his attack to southwest of Rivington, a telegram said. Lee glanced at a map of North Carolina on a stand by his desk, then shrugged. That direction of assault looked no more promising to him than any other, but Forrest usually had a reason for the things he did, even if the reason was not obvious. Often it wasn’t; being without any formal military training, Forrest made up his own rules as he went along. And if Lee couldn’t see what he was up to, likely the Rivington men couldn’t, either. Lee hoped they couldn’t.

The telegram also reported that Forrest had appointed a new officer to his staff, a Colonel Pleasants. The name was vaguely familiar to Lee, but he couldn’t place it. He reached for a book taken from the AWB sanctum: Lee’$ Colonels, by a certain Robert Krick, a man still a lifetime away from being born. It was a better, more comprehensive list of the higher officers of the Army of Northern Virginia than any from Lee’s own time.

It did not, however, mention Colonel Pleasants. Lee looked at the far wall of his office without seeing it as he tried to remember in what connection he’d noticed the colonel’s name. He pulled out the Picture History of the Civil War, a volume that over the past few months had come to seem like an old friend. Sure enough, Pleasants’s name appeared in the index. Lee flipped to page 472.

Reading about the grinding campaign that had not happened in 1864 still made him want to shiver, as if he were going through one of Poe’s frightening tales instead. Hard to imagine his incomparable Army of Northern Virginia trapped within siege lines round Petersburg, with the Federals using every expedient they could think of to break those lines.

He read of the mine Henry Pleasants had proposed; of the tons of powder going off beneath the Confederate trenches; of the Battle of the Crater that the Union forces seemed to have bungled beyond belief, for otherwise how could they have lost? Having read all that, he idly wondered how Pleasants had ended up in the South rather than Pennsylvania.

The idleness fell from him. He slammed the book shut with a noise like a rifle shot. “Mr. Marshall!” he called. “Come in here, please. I need you.”

“Sir?” Behind his spectacles, Charles Marshall’s eyes were worried; Lee rarely sounded so urgent. “What do you require?”

“Send a telegram to General Forrest at once, saying that I order him—be sure to use the word ‘order’—I order him not to include the name of the latest colonel to join his staff in any further dispatches, either telegraphic of postal. Do you have that?”

“I—think so, sir.” The aide repeated the message accurately enough, though his voice was puzzled. “I confess I don’t altogether understand it.”

“Never mind. Just take it to the telegrapher immediately.”

Marshall shrugged but hurried away. Lee returned the Picture History of the Civil War to its place on the shelf. If Henry Pleasants was planning to do now to the Rivington men what had been done to the South in 1864 until those same Rivington men helped change history, Lee did not want them reminded of his existence. If they were tapping the wires between North Carolina and Richmond, and if Pleasants’s name seemed vaguely familiar to one of them, as it had to Lee…

He shook his head, more than a little unnerved at stumbling over a new complication to fighting the men from the future. Not only did they have armaments and armor his forces could not match, they knew a great deal about the events of his own recent past and the people who shaped them. A mere name might have been plenty to warn them of what Forrest likely had in mind.

Lee set Forrest’s telegram aside and read the latest papers from Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. He did not think the British would get the Canadas back any time soon. Vancouver had just fallen to a U. S. force pushing up from Oregon. The Washington Evening Star was even reporting that the Russian Empire, alarmed at the progress of Federal arms, had offered to sell Alaska to the United States as preferable to seeing it conquered like the rest of North America. Lee smiled at that—what good were more square miles of snow and ice to anyone?

His smile faded as he read of continued English success at sea. The blockade of the eastern coast of the United States was probably tighter than the U.S. blockade of the Confederacy had been during the Second American Revolution, and the U.S. merchant fleet reduced to desperate straits. Confederate corn production was booming, to make up for the U.S. wheat no longer available to the British Isles.

That led him into the latest report from Julian Hartridge of Georgia, his Secretary of the Treasury. Reparations from the United States had allowed the Confederacy to payoff most of its wartime debts. That was important. The French had installed Maximilian in Mexico, not least because the previous government owed them money, and he did not want to give any European power a. similar excuse for meddling in Confederate affairs.

But new debts came every day: the manufactured goods the South bought were worth more and could be produced for less labor than the cotton and corn it gave in exchange for them. Gold kept flowing out of the country. Southern industry had made great strides during the war and Lee wanted to encourage it further, but the Constitution forbade a protective tariff.

He made a rueful noise, half grunt, half sigh. When the historians of a century hence came to write about his Presidency, he suspected they might call him the Great Circumventor, because the Confederate Constitution stood foursquare against most of what needed doing. All the South had wanted upon secession was to be left alone, but the world and the South itself had changed too much since 1861 for a return to the halcyon antebellum days to be possible, much less practical.

Or so Lee believed, at any rate. The proof of that belief lay in a draft bill on his desk, a bill with the deliberately innocuous title of “Legislation Regulating the Labor of Certain Inhabitants of the Confederate States.” That word inhabitants brought back his smile, though without much mirth to it: he could not have called the people affected by the legislation citizens, for under existing law slaves were not Confederate citizens. His bill would see to that—if it passed.

Despite all the startling documents from the captured AWB offices, despite the Richmond Massacre itself, he still worried about that. He thought he had convinced the legislators themselves of the wisdom of his course. But the people back home, despite having elected him, remained unenthusiastic about setting the Negro on the road to freedom. Lawmakers wanted to be reelected, not just to be right and to do right. In their wisdom, the framers of the Confederate Constitution made sure their President would not have to concern himself with that. Lee was pleased to recall a Constitution provision he wholeheartedly endorsed.

His daughter Mary came into the room. She served as hostess during the fortnightly levees he held, following the custom Jefferson Davis had begun. What with his wife’s infirmity, much of that duty might have fallen to her in any case. After March 4…he deliberately made himself shove that black, red-stained day out of the forefront of his mind, or as far out as he could. “What can I do for you, my deaf!” he asked.

“I have a parcel here for you, from Colonel Rains in Augusta, Georgia,” She handed him a small box closed with twine.

He opened it with the enthusiasm of a child getting a birthday treat. “From Colonel Rains, is it? Probably some new munitions.” But the box held, inside a protective layer of cotton wool, a corked bottle of pills and a note: “I am given to understand that the Rivington men, before their descent into vicious and brutal madness, prescribed nitrogenated glycerine as a medicine for you. In the hope that the enclosed may be of benefit, I remain your most ob’t servant. G. W. Rains.”

“I hope they help your chest pains, Father,” Mary said.

“They certainly should.” Lee paused, looked up at her over the tops of his spectacles. “How do you know what they are for? For that matter, how did Colonel Rains learn I was taking nitroglycerine? I scent a conspiracy.”

“I plead guilty. I found one of your old empty bottles and sent it to him, as the label gave the proper dosage to include in each pill. But the idea came originally from Mr. Marshall, who recalled both the nature of your old pills and that Colonel Rains was producing the identical substance. I’m only sorry neither of us thought of it sooner.”

“Don’t trouble yourself on that account, my dear; I seem to have survived to this point even without the medication,” Lee said, touched by their concern. His expression hardened. “I am not sorry to have a supply from a source other than the Rivington men.”

Mary nodded, her own face grim. Like her younger sisters, she still wore black to mourn her mother. But for blind luck, she would have been mourning him, too. The new nitroglycerine tablets rattled in the bottle as he picked it up. The Rivington men had been willing, even eager, to help him when they needed him, and help him they had, more than any contemporary could. But when his hopes for the South crossed theirs, they’d tried to discard him as casually as if he were a smeared sheet of foolscap.

He clicked tongue between teeth. “It is my country, not theirs.”

“Father?” Mary said. But he’d been talking to himself, not to her.

Thomas Bocock of Virginia, the Speaker of the House, said, “I now have the distinct honor and high privilege of presenting to you the President of the Confederate States of America, Robert E. Lee.”

Applause from congressmen and senators filled the House chamber as Lee stepped up to the rostrum. Bocock sat down in back of him. Albert Gallatin Brown should have been beside the Speaker, in his capacity as President of the Senate. But Albert Gallatin Brown was dead, which also meant that, if anything happened to Lee, Bocock would become the Confederacy’s third President.

Lee dismissed that thought from his mind as he took a few seconds to gather himself before launching into what might prove the most important speech of his administration. He said, “Distinguished Senators, members of the House of Representatives, I am of course aware of how unusual it is for a President to request of you the privilege of speaking to your assembled number in support of a particular piece of legislation, but I desire that you have my reasons for requesting of you a favorable vote on the bill now before you regarding the regulation of labor of certain inhabitants of the Confederate States.”

During the war, the Confederate Congress had usually met in camera, its deliberations secret. The policy carried over into time of peace as well. Lee did not altogether approve of it, but this once found it useful: not all of what he had to say belonged in the Richmond papers.

He made that clear from the outset: “All of you, by now, have seen the works the AWB brought back to our time. You have seen how with virtual unanimity the twentieth and twenty-first centuries condemn the institution of slavery with the same sort of loathing we might apply to savage tribes who devour their fellow men.”

Several legislators winced at the harsh comparison. Lee did not care; he aimed to state his case in the strongest possible terms. He went on, “The AWB sought to keep us just as we were, sought to freeze us in place forever so we might join them in defiance of what lies ahead, and sought to overthrow our duly elected government when we gave the slightest sign of contravening their desires. Their armed revolt continues to this day. A vote against this proposed legislation is a vote for the AWB and its methods. You will have seen that for yourselves in the AWB’s secret chambers; I wish to explicitly remind you of it here today so that you may retain no doubt as to the issues involved.”

He paused for a moment, looked out over his audience. This business of gaining his wishes through persuasion did not come naturally to him, not after a lifetime of simply receiving or giving orders. Save for one or two scribbling notes to themselves, senators and congressmen stared intently back at him. If not persuaded, they were at least fully attentive. That would do. Onward:

“Yet I believe, gentlemen, we should sooner or later have been compelled to confront this issue, even had we gained our independence by our own exertions, even had the AWB never existed.”

Had the AWB never existed, the South would not have gained its independence by its own exertions. Lee had known that since he first opened the Picture History of the Civil War. The members of Congress knew it too, intellectually: the books from the AWB sanctum made it abundantly clear. But in their hearts, most of them still surely felt their beloved country would have found some road to freedom without the intervention of the men from the future.

Lee went on, “The war itself and its aftermath taught us new lessons about the Negro, lessons, I admit, a fair number of us would sooner not have learned. Yet they remain before us, and we ignore them at our peril. We learned from the United States that colored men might make fair soldiers, a possibility we had previously denied. Let me now state what some of you will have gathered from your readings in the secret chamber: at the time when the Rivington men came to us, certain of our officers had already begun to suggest freeing and arming Negro slaves so they might battle the Northern foe at our sides.”

A murmur ran through the House chamber. Not everyone had noticed that part of the record, nor did everyone care to remember how little hope the war had held only a bit more than four years before.

“The arrival of the Rivington men and their repeaters obviated the necessity for such desperate expedients, but the Negro has continued to instruct us as to his capacities. Though the insurrections that so long plagued the Mississippi valley have been reduced to small, scattered outbreaks, the tenacity with which colored men maintained them in the face of overwhelming odds must give us pause if we continue to see those colored men only as the docile servants they appeared to be in days past.

“We have tacitly recognized this change, in that many blacks who escaped from bondage during the upheavals of the Second American Revolution remain at liberty, not least, perhaps, because, once having tasted freedom, they can no longer safely be returned to servitude. Further, during the war several states relaxed restrictions on what the Negro might be taught, the better to benefit from his intelligent exertions. Once having taught him, one may no longer demand that he subsequently forget.

“Yet if the Negro may learn, if he will take up arms in his own defense; if in our hour of peril we contemplated his taking up arms in our defense, where is the justice in leaving him in chains? To do so but exacerbates the risk of servile rebellion and gives our enemies a dagger pointed straight at our hearts. I submit to you, my friends, that emancipation, however distasteful it may appear, exists de facto in large stretches of our territory; gradually acknowledging it de jure will allow us to control its impact upon our nation and will shield us against the excesses we all fear.

“Gentlemen of the Congress, rest assured I do not lightly urge upon you the provisions of the legislation whose introduction I have proposed. I truly believe these provisions shall prove to be in the best interest of the Confederate States of America in the long run, and request of you their passage. The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what you do here. Let our descendants say that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and let them say that it began here today. I thank you.”

He stepped away from the podium. The applause that followed was more than polite, less than warm. He wondered how much of it he would have kept had the Confederate Congress known he was borrowing words from one of Abraham Lincoln’s memorial addresses. By all accounts, Lincoln’s little speech at Gettysburg had become famous in the world wherein the South’s independence had been crushed. Here in the real world, Lincoln and all he stood for were discredited, his words, no doubt, doomed to obscurity forever. Lee had read through that Gettysburg speech at least a dozen times. He thought it deserved to live.

Louis T. Wigfall got to his feet. “Mr. Speaker!” he boomed.

“Senator Wigfall?” Thomas Bocock responded as he resumed his customary place of honor.

“Mr. Speaker, I desire to say a few words in respectful opposition to—”

Bocock’s gavel came down on the rostrum with three sharp cracks, cutting through the building spate. “The honorable gentleman is not recognized. He will please recall that we are met in special joint session for the specific purpose of hearing President Lee’s address. He will, I am certain, have adequate opportunity to express his opinion of the measures proposed in that address when in deliberation within the confines of the senate chamber.”

Wigfall tried to go on with his speech anyhow; the Speaker of the House gaveled him down. At last, red-faced and sullen, he sat. Lee stared stonily at him. He might not have made his speech, but he had made his point.

Lee’s shoulders shifted slightly as he stifled a sigh. If not even the acknowledged voice of the future convinced some people of the folly of their chosen course, what could? Nothing was the answer that immediately sprang to mind. He hoped with all his heart such stubborn souls made up only a minority of the Congress.

A deep-toned whistle in the air, not a bird—”Mortar!” Nate Caudell yelled, along with twenty others. He dove into a deep bombproof, a timber-reinforced hole dug into the front wall of the trench. He landed on top of someone. Two more men jumped in on top of him.

The mortar shell burst less than a hundred yards behind him, hl the second line of trenches. Dirt fountained skyward; a clod found the bombproof opening and hit him in the back of the neck. Half a minute later, another round whistled past overhead, this one, by the sound, destined for some far more distant target.

The four men who’d taken shelter in the bombproof crawled out—no one could stand inside—made foredoomed efforts to brush themselves clean. Caudell also rubbed bruised ribs. Be glared about a quarter seriously at Dempsey Eure. “That’s the second time you landed on me the past two days. I’m starting to think you’re more dangerous than any damned mortar bomb.”

“Long as the Rivington men think the same way,” Eure answered with a chuckle.

“How many of them have you landed on?” Caudell asked darkly.

His friend said, “Reckon I’ll have my chance soon enough—if Henry ever gets that tunnel of his finished. He diggin’ under them guns up there, or is he headin’ all the way to China?”

The three weeks to a month Pleasants had promised to Nathan Bedford Forrest had already stretched into a month and a half. Proper tools and experienced diggers were in shorter supply in North Carolina than he’d imagined. Caudell had crawled down the tunnel himself a couple of times, carrying boards through blackness toward a flickering candle flame that gave a man with a pick a tiny dollop of light by which to work. He wanted to kiss the dry wash when he emerged, and marveled that some men endured a lifetime down in the mines.

Another mortar bomb went sailing off into the Confederates’ rear…Good thing they don’t seem to have a whole lot of shells for that beast,” he said. “It reaches almost all the way back to Nashville.”

Dempsey Eure nodded. “I was listenin’ to some artillerymen talkin’, and they say it’s got more range’n one of our hundred-pounder coast defense guns. Be switched if I know how the Rivington men do it.”

“Same way they do the AK-47s, I reckon.”

“Whatever that is.”

Caudell shrugged. Same way they get books full of photographs—and colored ones at that, he thought. Same way they get books printed in…was it 1996? He’d never spoken to anyone but Mollie about the Picture History of the Civil War she’d stolen. Who would believe him? He wasn’t always sure he believed himself. But getting back in the trenches against the endless repeater and the long-range mortar had undermined his doubts as surely as Henry Pleasants was undermining the bastion up ahead. He’d come to take the AK-47 for granted, but those other weapons reminded him afresh that they did not belong to 1868. They were also one more reason the tunnel was running late.

Captain Lewis walked down the wash. He dipped his head to Caudell and Eure. “Much to my surprise, it’s done at last,” he said. He sounded annoyed whenever he mentioned the tunnel; seeing Pleasants promoted from private to colonel in one fell swoop still rankled.

“We’ve been ready awhile now, sir,” Caudell said. He waved to the sets of packed-earth steps that led up from the bottom of the wash to the parapet. Excavating a hundred-yard shaft produced a lot of dirt. It had to go somewhere inconspicuous to keep the Rivington men from spotting it and figuring out its source. The steps served that purpose and, when the moment came, would also let the Confederate soldiers quickly go over to the attack.

“Pleasants will touch off the charge at sunrise tomorrow, or is supposed to, at any rate,” Lewis said. “Assuming it goes off, you know your orders?”

“Yes, sir,” Caudell and Dempsey Eure said together. Eure amplified: “Soon as it blows, we go over. We head straight for Rivington, and we don’t stop for nothin’.” The orders had come straight from Forrest and were imbued with his driving energy.

“That’s it,” Lewis agreed. “If it turns out to be that simple, we can get down on our knees and thank God the next time we go to church, But the general’s right—the first strike has to be right for the heart. The troops behind us can fan out and take whatever strongpoints are left from the flank and rear.”

“What if it doesn’t blow?” Eure said.

“Then General Forrest thinks up something new and, unless I miss my guess, Colonel Henry Pleasants turns back into a pumpkin—I mean, a private.” But, being a just man at heart, Lewis added, “He’s not stinted himself, I give him that. I hope it works as he claims; we shan’t have a better chance than this.”

“I hope it works, too,” Caudell said fervently. If it didn’t and the attack went on anyhow, the result would be gruesome, and he would be a part of that result. He wondered whether charging a nest of endless repeaters could possibly be worse than tramping across open fields toward the massed muskets and artillery atop Cemetery Ridge. Maybe not, but it wouldn’t be much better, either.

After darkness fell, men began moving forward in the zigzag network of trenches the Confederates had dug up to the dry wash. To help disguise that movement, long-range artillery fire started up. The fire had to be at long range; no matter how well protected cannon were, fire from the endless repeaters murdered their crews when they tried to get too near the Rivington men’s lines.

Confederate artillery fuses were imperfectly reliable; more than one shell burst above the soldiers’ heads rather than among their foes. But enough came down near their target for the Rivington men to answer with mortar fire. “Damned if I don’t halfway hope they hit somebody,” Caudell growled to Mollie Bean. “I’m sick of my own side shooting at me.” Just then, another shell fell short and made them both throw themselves flat.

Mollie said, “They ain’t tryin’ to kill us, Nate.”

“Does that make it better or worse if they do?” he asked. She thought for a few seconds, then shrugged. He didn’t know the answer either, but army life was easier to take when you had something to bellyache about—for one thing, it kept you from remembering you might get killed in the next few hours.

He broke a piece of corn bread in half, passed one chunk to Mollie. After she ate it, she rolled herself in her blanket, lay down. “I’m gonna sleep while I can—if I can. “The racket from the artillery duel made that anything but obvious.

Caudell wished she were safe in Nashville, but telling her so seemed pointless, since she wouldn’t listen to him and, even if she had, she could hardly get back there against the tide of soldiers moving the other way. For that matter, he wished he were safe in Nashville, which was just as impossible to arrange. He took a cigar out of a tunic pocket, lit it at a tiny cook fire, smoked in quick, savage puffs. The smoke failed to soothe him as he’d hoped. He tossed the chewed butt into the dirt. By then, Mollie had succeeded in falling asleep.

He lay down next to her, not really expecting to doze off himself. But the next thing he knew, someone was shaking him awake and saying, “Come on; get ready now.” He sat up, surprised to see the sky pale in the east. He put on his hat, grabbed his rifle and his haversack. He moved a couple of full banana clips from the latter to his trouser pockets where he could get at them easily. With that, he was as ready as he could be. Beside him, Mollie made the same sort of sketchy preparations.

As darkness faded, he could see farther and farther up and down the wash. There stood Captain Lewis, carefully cleaning his AK-47 one last time. And there—Caudell nodded to himself. He might have known Nathan Bedford Forrest would place himself in the first rank when the fighting started.

Henry Pleasants stood by the mouth of the tunnel he’d proposed and labored so mightily to build, a length of slow match in his hand. He looked toward General Forrest. Forrest was looking from the sky to Pleasants and back again. At last he nodded, a single abrupt motion.

Pleasants stopped, touched the slow match to a fuse that lay on the floor of the tunnel. The fuse caught. Pleasants sighed and straightened. Caudell noticed he was holding his own breath. How long for the flame to run from this end of the tunnel to that?

Before he could ask, Forrest beat him to it: “When will it go off?”

“Shouldn’t be long,” Pleasants answered. A Confederate shell screamed overhead, making him raise his voice. “In fact, it should be right about—”

Before he could say “now,” the ground shook beneath Caudell’s feet. He’d heard of earthquakes, but he’d never been in the middle of one before. A roar like fifty thunderstorms left him momentarily stunned. He saw Forrest’s lips shape the words “God damn!” but could not hear him through that echoing blast.

He did not know whether he was the next man out of the gully after Forrest, but he was sure no more than a couple of others could have been in front of him. Two or three steps past the parapet, he stopped dead in wonder. He’d never had a good look at that strongpoint while the tunnel was being dug: peering through a firing slit only invited a bullet in the face. And the bastion wasn’t there for him to examine anymore.

“God almighty,” he said softly. The gunpowder, brought in bag by bag, barrel by barrel, had blown the biggest hole in the ground he’d ever imagined—it had to be fifty yards across, fifty feet wide, and God only knew how deep. All around it lay broken chunks of earthwork, timbers snapped like dry twigs, guns tossed every which way, and twisted bodies in mottled green.

Like him, most of the others emerging from the Confederate works paused to gape in wonder and disbelief. Up ahead of them, Nathan Bedford Forrest turned, gestured furiously. “Come on, you bastards! And fetch the ladders right now, do you hear me? We ain’t got time to waste.”

That was true. Not only were the guns in the bastion itself destroyed, but the endless repeaters to either flank had fallen silent, the men at them momentarily stunned by the disaster that had befallen their comrades and doubtless wondering if the ground was about to heave up under them as well.

Caudell dashed forward, shouting for all he was worth. He reached the edge of the crater, slid down into it on his backside. More wreckage lay strewn over the bottom, and more bodies. Some of them moved as he scrambled past. He stopped and stared again, wondering how anyone could have lived through that explosion.

But Nathan Bedford Forrest, disdaining to wait for ladders, was already climbing the far wall of the hole and yelling, “Come on, come on, come on!” Caudell hurried after him—a general who went out ahead of his men could always pull them after him.

Forrest, grimy now as any private soldier, reached out a hand and helped pull Caudell up onto the flat ground beyond the crater. Behind them, teams of soldiers were carrying ladders across the bottom of the hole, leaning up against the wall so others could ascend.

Off to either side, the repeaters started their deadly stutter again. But hundreds of Confederates were almost to the crater, inside it, or coming up the ladders. There was Captain Lewis, shouting orders and waving to get the men into a line of battle. “Keep moving!” Forrest shouted. “Come on, keep moving!”

Bullets chewed the grass close to his feet, spat dirt into Caudell’s face. That was AK-47 fire from the bushes ahead; the Rivington men had detached fighters to try to plug the gap the Confederates had blown in their line. Caudell dove behind the closest cover he saw: a corpse wearing mottled green and brown, its head and neck twisted at an impossible angle. He fired several rounds before he realized the blank, staring face a few inches from his own belonged to Piet Hardie.

His lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage smile. He gave the corpse a familiar thump on the shoulder. “How many more wenches did you aim to torment to death, Piet? Too bad you won’t get the chance, isn’t it? Quicker than you deserved to go, too.” Maybe not, Caudell decided once he’d said that. A noose would have been quick, and if ever a man deserved a noose, Piet Hardie did.

Once out of their earthworks, the Rivington men were vulnerable. The Confederates knew how to attack mere riflemen, and their numbers counted for more than their foes’ armor and helmets. Some men in gray rushed forward in small groups, while others fired to cover their advance. Then the groups reversed roles, leapfrogging past one another as they fanned out to get around the handful of defenders.

“So long, Piet.” Caudell leaped to his feet and, hunched low, dashed toward a broken tree fifty yards away. Bullets whipped past him as he ran. He sprawled behind the scanty protection the tree trunk gave him, fired to support a double handful of men moving up on his right. Then he was running again, in the direction of a tall clump of grass.

Behind him and to his left, one of the Rivington men’s endless repeaters fell silent. A minute later, so did the one on the other side. Rebel yells rang through the continuing racket of rifle fire. Caudell whooped as loud as anyone. With those murderous repeaters out of action, the Rivington men could not hope to keep the whole Confederate army from going not only through Henry Pleasants’s crater but around it to either side.

Nathan Bedford Forrest saw that, too. “Forward, boys, with me! They ain’t got a prayer of holdin’ us back now.” He was normally soft-spoken; Caudell had noticed that back in Nashville and in the trenches. But at need, on the stump or in the middle of a fight, his voice swelled to carry as far as he wanted. He pointed north and east. “We’re an hour from Rivington. Let’s go!” The soldiers cheered like madmen.

Cheers or no, though, Rivington proved more than an hour away. If the Confederates knew how to advance against rifle fire, the Rivington men were artists on defense. They gave ground only grudgingly, in a reverse of the leapfrog pattern their opponents used to move forward. They made stand after stand, stalling the Confederates again and again, surely inflicting far more casualties than they suffered.

But the Confederates had soldiers to spend and the Rivington men did not. The gray line grew ever wider, flanking the Rivington men out of one position after another. Forrest did not, would not, let the advance flag. Whenever a handful of Rivington men held out against everything the Confederates could throw at them, he cried, “Come on, boys, we’ll go around. Pull the weed up by the roots and the leaves are bound to wither.”

“Nate!”

He whirled where he lay, his AK-47 swinging almost of its own accord to bear on the person who’d startled him. He jerked the barrel down in a hurry. “Jesus God, Mollie, I damn near shot you. Are you all right?”

“‘Cept for you just now havin’ your gun on me, sure. you?”

“Yup. How much farther to Rivington?”

She frowned as she thought. Such a serious, involuted, almost harsh expression should have made her face seem more than usually masculine, especially in this warlike setting. But instead she reminded Nate of a girl trying to remember where she’d put her pincushion. He wanted to carry her back to Nashville, a notion as tender as it was impracticable.

“Three, four miles, I reckon,” she answered at last. Then she brought her rifle up to her shoulder, fired a couple of quick shots. “Thought I saw somethin’ movin’ in them bushes up there. Reckon not, though. Come on.”

Caudell looked ahead for the next likely piece of cover. He pointed toward a thick stand of pine saplings. He went first, with Mollie ready to open fire on anyone who shot at him. When nobody did, he got down on one knee and covered her advance.

They were still near the foaming crest of the Confederate wave, for they could hear Nathan Bedford Forrest loudly and profanely urging his men on. He was also yelling something new: “We get into Rivington, don’t you go burning any houses, you hear me, not even if there’s some of these muddy green boys shootin’ from ‘em. Anybody burns a house and I catch him, he’ll wish a Rivington man put a bullet through his head instead, God damn me to hell if I lie.”

“What do you suppose that’s all about?” Caudell asked. While wanton arson was not a legitimate tool of war, he’d never heard it so specifically and vehemently forbidden.

“Nate, you got to remember I been in them houses.” Mollie hesitated. Nate grimaced, recalling how and why she’d been in them. When she saw he would do no more than grimace, she hurried on,” Ain’t nothin’ like ‘em nowheres else. The books, the lights, the cool air that blows—”

“The books!” he exclaimed. The Picture History of the Civil War had come out of one of those Rivington houses. If they held more volumes of that ilk, the Confederate authorities had good reason to want them preserved.

“Makes sense to me,” Mollie said when he quickly explained his reasoning. “Marse Robert, he was plumb took with the one you had me bring him.”

For the next few minutes, neither of them had much chance to talk. The Rivington men did their best to rally. They seemed to be in somewhat greater numbers now, reinforced by their fellows rushing down from the town. Rifle grenades bursting among the Confederates created brief consternation, but after weeks of intermittent mortar fire the small bombs were not so terrifying. And, now that they were forced from their fortified positions, the Rivington men, even reinforced, lacked the troops to halt determined attackers. Determined the Confederates were. The advance resumed.

Someone moaned from behind a clump of beggarweeds. Caudell and Mollie hurried over, ready to help a wounded comrade. But the man back there was not a comrade; his mottled tunic and trousers proclaimed his allegiance to America Will Break. Blood from a wound above the knee soaked one leg of those trousers, turning dark green and brown to black.

“Got you!” Caudell yelled.

Distracted from his pain, the Rivington man whipped his head around. It was Benny Lang. He was utterly defenseless; his rifle, lay several feet away. Caudell’s finger tightened on the trigger of his AK-47. “Don’t,” Mollie exclaimed, guessing what was in his mind. “He ain’t one of the real bad ones, Nate.”

“No?” Caudell remembered George Ballentine. But that memory wasn’t nearly all of why he wanted to put a bullet through Benny Lang. It wasn’t exactly as if Mollie had been unfaithful with the Rivington man…not exactly, but pretty close. But after a few seconds, Nate lowered the rifle a little. If he’d killed Lang here in the bushes, man against man and gun against gun, that was war, and fair enough. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t make himself think of blowing out the back or a wounded man’s head as anything but murder.

“Thanks,” Lang said when he no longer looked straight down the muzzle of the AK-47. “Help me cut my trouser leg off so I can get a bandage” He was half stunned from his injury and, no doubt, he didn’t remember seeing Mollie Bean in uniform, just as Caudell had never seen her in properly feminine clothes until that morning in church. But her voice must have registered at last, for he blurted,” Jesus Christ, Moll, is that you?”

Moll. The pet name made Nate ready to shoot him again. Mollie ground her teeth before she answered, almost inaudibly, “It’s me all right, Benny. I soldiered before—I’m sorry I lied to you when you ast me how I got shot. And this here”—she raised her chin, looked defiantly at Caudell, as if daring him to deny it—”this here’s my intended, Nate Caudell.”

The wounded man got out part of a laugh before it turned into a hiss. “Caudell. Christ, I remember you—I taught you the AK, didn’t I? Small bloody world, what?” Caudell, numb with suddenly having to be sociable on the battlefield, managed “a nod. Lang had both hands on his wound. Where his trousers looked black, those hands were red. He said, “I’m going to reach for my knife. I’ll do that very slowly, and I give you my word of honor I won’t throw the knife once I have it—there are two of you, after all, and only the one blade.”

Caudell nodded again, now with assurance—this was business. As Lang got out the knife, he scooped up the Rivington man’s rifle. He did not relax his vigilance, not one bit; after the Richmond Massacre, could a member of America Will Break be trusted to honor a parole?

But Benny Lang did only what he’d promised, slicing his pants leg so he could see the wound in the outside of his thigh. Had it been to the inside, he would have bled to death in short order. As it was, Caudell, who had enough experience with gunshot wounds to make a fair judge, thought he would recover if fever didn’t carry him off.

Lang might have been reading his mind. “I carry medicine to keep wounds from going bad. I’m going to get that now, and a pressure bandage.” Again he moved with slow care. The medicine came in a little packet. He tore it open, sprinkled some powder onto his leg, and slapped on the bandage. Then he held the packet out to Caudell. “There’s some left. You may need it in a while, or—or your Mollie.”

Caudell took the medicine packet, grunted gruffly as he stuck it in his pocket. He didn’t want to feel beholden to Benny Lang, not any which way. Gruff still, he said, “Stay here. Someone will take you back to the surgeons pretty soon.”

“Spare me that,” Lang said. “It’s a through-and-through wound; so your doctors won’t have to dig the bullet out—not bloody likely you’ll take me to one of ours, is it? I know your men mean well, but—” He shuddered at the very idea, then shook his head. “It all went so well for us, till Lee was elected. Since then, everything’s been buggered up.” He put a hand on the bandage, as if still unwilling to believe ruination could have chosen to visit him personally.

“He’s as settled as he’s going to be,” Caudell said to Mollie. “Let’s get moving.”

But before they could leave, something in Benny Lang’s pocket let out a flatulent burst of noise and then words: “Report your position and status, Lang. Over.”

Nate’s rifle came up again. “What the devil is that?”

“It’s called a radio,” the Rivington man answered. “Think of it as a talking telegraph without wires. May I answer?”

Curiosity and caution fought within Caudell. Curiosity won, barely. “Go ahead, but if you betray us, it’ll be the last thing you ever do.” He jerked the AK-47 to emphasize his words.

“Right.” Lang eyed the rifle’s muzzle with respect. He took out something a little smaller than a low-cut shoe, extended a telescoping metal rod from one end, spoke into the other: “Lang here. I am wounded and captured. Out.”

“You can talk with your people on that—radio, did you say?—any time you want, can’t you?” Caudell asked. When the Rivington man nodded, Nate held out a hand. “Give it here.”

Lang scowled. Instead of obeying, he smashed the radio against a good-sized rock, as hard as he could. Pieces flew in every direction. He said, “Do what you want with me. I won’t let you spy on us.” Caudell’s blood had cooled. After a moment’s anger, he reluctantly lowered his rifle. If he’d been in the Rivington man’s place, he hoped he’d have had the courage to do as Lang had.

Mollie thought of something else: “You’ve had these radio things all along, haven’t you? Ever since you came here?”

Benny Lang nodded again. Caudell saw what Mollie was driving at.” And you never let on, did you? Having these things would have helped us almost as much as our repeaters, I reckon. But you never let on. Why not?”

“If we’d needed to badly enough, I think we would have,” the Rivington man answered. “But we always thought it was a good idea to keep a few secrets of our own. You play poker?”

“Yes,” Nate said.

“Then think of them as an ace in the hole.”

“Fat lot of good they did you.” Caudell took a couple of steps toward the crackle of gunfire ahead. Mollie started to follow.

Benny Lang grimaced when he saw that. “You be careful, Moll. Bullets have no chivalry.”

“Found that out at Gettysburg,” she told him. “I hope you make it, I do.” But after that, she quickly turned back to Caudell. “I’m ready, Nate.” She left Lang without looking behind her.

As they pushed on, Caudell said, “So I’m your intended, am I?” He thought he kept his voice light.

It must not have been light enough; Mollie turned and looked at him through frightened eyes. “Well, ain’t you?”

He wondered how many battlefields had known arguments like this one. Precious few, he thought. Then he realized he had to answer Mollie. “Yup, reckon I am,” he said, “long as we both come out of this alive.”

Her face glowed with that special shine that could make her beautiful, even if she was not particularly pretty. Seeing her expression, Caudell felt himself grinning, too. Now that the words were said, he found he rather liked the idea of being an intended; it gave him a feeling of purpose conspicuously missing from combat.

But he’d said other words as well, and coming out of the fight alive was by no means guaranteed, for him or for Mollie. The woods ended so abruptly that he had to bring himself up short to keep from blundering into open country. Swearing at himself, he peered from behind a tree at the estate ahead.

The colonnaded big house, with wings spreading out to either side, would not have shamed any successful planter in the state. The rows of clapboard slave cabins also argued for extravagant prosperity. But Caudell scratched his head. The slaves had their garden plots, and there was a barn for livestock, but where were the broad acres of corn or cotton or tobacco needed to support such a grand estate?

When he asked that aloud, Mollie said, “The Rivington men ain’t all planters, Nate, but they all live like they was. Why not? They got the gold for it, remember, maybe from sellin’ all our rifles to the gov’ment.”

“Maybe,” Caudell said, though vivid memory reminded him the Confederate government had been a lot longer on promises than hard cash in 1864. But however they came by it, gold the Rivington men certainly had; he could almost feel the sweet heaviness of the one-ounce coins he’d got from the Rivington bank just after war’s end.

He shrugged: one more answer he’d never know. How the Rivington men got their money didn’t matter, not in the middle of a fight. What did matter was that for the moment, anyway, no one was shooting from the big house. Caudell rubbed his chin. The nearest slave hut was hardly more than fifty yards away. He pointed toward it. Mollie nodded. Nate dashed forward, bent at the waist to make as small a target as possible. He dove behind the hut, fetched up against it with a thump. As soon as he was safe, Mollie sprinted up beside him.

They lay there panting for a few seconds, then got to their feet—they still stooped, for the roof was too low to offer much cover—and sidled around toward the front of the cabin. They almost ran into a tall, skinny Negro man hurrying the other way—and almost killed him, too, for Caudell’s heart leaped into his mouth and his finger tightened on the trigger of his rifle. By Mollie’s gasp, the unexpected meeting frightened her just as badly.

If they were frightened, the slave was terrified. He jumped backwards, screaming like a woman, and threw his hands high over his head. “Don’ shoot me!” he squealed. “Don’ shoot poor ol’ raggedy Shadrach who ain’t done you no harm!” Then he seemed to see the uniforms Caudell and Mollie were wearing, instead of merely the AK-47s they carried. His eyes widened till they looked like splashes of whitewash on his black face. “Lawd God,” he said, “you ain’t them devils what owns us? You gummint sojers?”

“That’s right,” Caudell said, thinking that raggedy was a word that fit Shadrach like a second skin. Plenty of his first skin was plain to see, for his gray cotton jacket and trousers were little more than rags. By the ladder of ribs thus exposed, Caudell guessed he was fed no better than he was clothed.

Now his eyes got wider still; Caudell hadn’t thought they could. “Gummint sojers,” the Negro repeated wonderingly. He capered like a stick puppet, then leaped forward to fold Caudell and Mollie into a bony, rank embrace. “I’s powerful glad to see you gentlemens, ‘deed I is. You kill every one o’ them devils in green, you hear me? Kill ‘em daid! Every Rivington nigger there is ‘ll bless you fo’ it.”

Caudell blinked; he was not used to this kind of ecstatic greeting from a slave. During the Second American Revolution, Negroes had run away from Confederate armies, not toward them. He wondered again what sort of horrors the Rivington men worked on their blacks, though Shadrach’s condition gave him a clue. But that, for the moment, was by the way. He pointed toward the big house. “Any Rivington men holed up in there?”

“No, suh,” Shadrach said positively. “The massa, he off fightin’ ‘gainst you folks. Couple other devils run by here a while back”—he gestured vaguely—”but they don’ stop. You hunt ‘em down, suh, hunt ‘em down if’n you has to use dogs. Every nigger here, he never complain about nothin’ no mo’, not if’n you gets ‘em all. You give us guns, we shoots ‘em our own selves.”

“I believe you,” Caudell said. He did, too, where before the war he would have laughed at the idea that Negroes might make soldiers (before the war, of course, no Negro would have been so suicidally foolhardy as to ask one white man for arms to use against another).

“Marse Robert, he gwine set the niggers free like we hear tell?” Shadrach asked.

“A little at a time, yes,” Caudell said, which was plenty to set the slave dancing again.

“If that house is empty, we got to get going,” Mollie said. Caudell nodded. He glanced back as he trotted away. Shadrach was still capering beside the mean little slave cabins. A couple of women, gaudy in brightly striped skirts and wearing red handkerchiefs on their heads, stepped out of their huts. Shadrach pointed at Caudell and Mollie, said something. The women screeched for joy and started dancing, too. One of them was big with child. Hurrying past the big house, Caudell wondered who had put that child in her.

A few hundreds yards past the clearing, fighting picked up. The coughing snarl of an endless repeater brought Caudell to a respectful halt. Off to the right, he heard Nathan Bedford Forrest yelling, “I see the dirty son of a bitch! We’ll git him—he ain’t dug his self in yet.”

Sure enough, after a minute or so the Rivington repeater fell silent and rebel yells rang out in triumph. Caudell and Mollie moved forward again, past the dead gunner. He had sited his weapon well—say what you would of them, the Rivington men were no mean soldiers—but in this chaotic fighting had lacked time to use the spade. Now he also lacked most of his face.

Mollie and Caudell came up to another palatial mansion, this one also flanked by slave huts all the shabbier in comparison to the big house. Mollie frowned; after some little hesitation, she said, “That there’s Benny Lang’s place.”

“Is it?” Caudell’s voice was as neutral as he could make it. He paused for thought, finally found something safe to add: “He never seemed to notice his book was missing.”

“You’re right,” Mollie said. “Reckon with the war over and all, he didn’t need to read about it no more.” Caudell chewed on that a few seconds before he nodded. As Lang himself had said, everything—the war included—went the Rivington men’s way until Lee became President of the Confederacy. And when things went badly afterwards…”I think you put all this in train when you took that book.”

“Wasn’t all me, Nate Caudell,” she said, sounding almost angry. “You reckon I’d’ve ever thought of anything as crazy as goin’ up to Marse Robert by my lonesome? Not likely!”

“Maybe not,” he admitted. “I won’t lose sleep over my part, though. The way I look at it is like this: If the Rivington men are the sort of people who could do something like the Richmond Massacre, they aren’t the sort of people who ought to be near the top of the heap. They would have done something else just as bad sooner or later, with us or without us. They need putting down, and we’re just the ones who happen to be doing the job.”

“Might could be you’re right,” Mollie said thoughtfully, and, after a moment, “Reckon maybe you are. You got a good way of lookin’ at things, Nate.”

“Most important thing I want to look at now is the both of us getting through this alive…intended.” The way Mollie’s face kindled made Caudell glad he’d tacked on the last word.

They went by or near several more big new houses; the Rivington men had built far back into the woods from what once was the sleepy little town of Rivington. About a mile and a half from the western edge of what had been the town, the Rivington men made a serious stand. “You want to watch yourself,” a corporal warned as Caudell came up. “They got wire with teeth strung out up ahead. You try crawlin’ through it, it slows you down an’ they shoot you.” Bodies hung up at grotesque angles underscored the fellow’s caution.

From behind the wire, the Rivington men traded fire with the Confederates. Nathan Bedford Forrest stalked down the stalled Confederate line. His dark gray eyes flashed with frustration. “We got to keep drivin’. They get a chance to dig in here, we have to start allover again, Goddamn it.” Suddenly he pounded fist into open palm, laughed out loud. Turning to an aide who walked beside him, he said, “Major Strange, I reckon it’s about time to send in a flag of truce.”

Major J. P. Strange, Forrest’s adjutant, was a dark-haired man of about the general’s age, with a high, broad forehead, sweeping mustaches, and a graying beavertail of a beard. He said, “The usual message, sir? They’d best surrender, or we shan’t answer for the consequences?”

“The very same.” Forrest chuckled reminiscently. “Don’t know how many times we slickered the Yankees with that one during the war. ‘Course, after Fort Pillow they was more inclined to believe it than they had been before.”

“Let me scout out some white cloth and a stick, sir,” Strange said.

A few minutes later, he stepped out between the two lines waving the parley flag. Firing slowed, stopped. A Rivington man called, “Come ahead and say your say, graycoat. We won’t shoot for—say, an hour?”

Strange looked back at Forrest, who nodded. “Agreed,” the major said. Holding the white flag high, he walked forward. A Rivington man, almost invisible in his mottled clothes and what looked like green and brown face paint, took charge of him.

Caudell lit a cigar and prepared to enjoy the brief cease-fire. Long before the hour was up, though, he saw the white flag returning. A tall Rivington man accompanied Major Strange. “May I cross to speak with you, General Forrest?” he shouted.

“Come ahead, Mr. Rhoodie,” Forrest shouted back…The truce has a while to run.” He waited for the Rivington men to approach, then said, “How do you answer, Andries?” Caudell, listening, realized with a small start that the two men were—or had been—friends.

“I answer no,” Andries Rhoodie replied at once. “I know your tricks—I’ve read of them often enough, remember. You’ll not bluff me into giving up.”

Forrest’s swarthy face darkened further with rage. Few men care to be called predictable, especially men as wily as the Confederate general. “If you think I’m bluffing this time, Andries, you are mistaken. If you do not yield, you will likely die here.”

“And if I do yield, what will happen to me?” Rhoodie retorted. “After Richmond, if I’m taken I’ll dance on air, which you know as well as I. And we may hold you yet.”

“Hold us, sir?” Forrest’s laugh sounded more like a bay. “You haven’t the chance of a snake in the Garden of Eden of holding us.”

“How many battles did you win by bluff?” Rhoodie said. “You won’t bluff me.”

“I won by bluff when I was weak. I ain’t weak now, Andries.”

“You say so.”

“Want to see my army, so you know what I’ve got?” It was Rhoodie’s turn to laugh. “How many of them would I see three times, to make you look stronger than you are? You can trick damnfool Yankees that way, but don’t expect me to fall for it.”

“Git back to your lines, Rhoodie, or you’ll find the truce runnin’ out a mite early,” Forrest growled, taking a step toward the Rivington man. He was ten years older than Rhoodie and, while large, could not match his massive frame. Still, Caudell would have bet on him in a fight—he had a fire, a vitality, the Rivington man lacked.

But Andries Rhoodie, if stolid next to Forrest, was also stolid enough not to be overawed by him. He held his ground, glowering like a big slow bear facing a panther. “How many lives do you want to spend taking us down?”

“Few as I have to,” Forrest said. “But when it comes to that, Andries, I got more lives to spend than you. That worked for Grant against Lee till you came along, didn’t it? Reckon it can work just as well for us this time.”

Most of the Confederates who heard Forrest—even Major Strange—frowned and scratched their heads, wondering what he was talking about. Caudell started to frown with them until he remembered the Picture History of the Civil War. If Forrest hadn’t seen it, he knew of something like it and knew it was true. Rhoodie knew that, too; for the first time, Forrest succeeded in rocking him. He ground his teeth, once, twice, three times. Then, without another word, he turned and stamped back to his own line.

Nineteen ninety-six, Caudell thought as he watched that broad retreating back. But there was no dream to it; somehow, the Rivington men had slid back through time to change the way the Second American Revolution turned out. And, having changed that, they’d also tried to change the subsequent Confederate government—tried to change it by gunfire. Caudell’s hands tightened on his own AK-47. They weren’t going to get away with it.

Nathan Bedford Forrest muttered a curse which his mustache muffled. He, too, stared after Andries Rhoodie. When he turned back to his own troops, his eye fell on Caudell and Mollie Bean. His gaze sharpened. “I saw you two back at Nashville with Pleasants,” he said, not making it a question. “You’re from around these parts, then.”

“Yes, sir,” they said together. Mollie added, “Matter of fact, sir, I’m from Rivington.”

“Are you?” Forrest said, suddenly smiling. “Suppose you could guide a company around east to outflank these works the Rivington bastards are running up here?”

“Reckon so,” Mollie answered. “I expect we can march faster’n they can dig.”

“I expect so, too.” Forrest turned to his adjutant. “Major Strange, gather a force from the men moving up. Take command of it and go with Bean and Caudell here”—Nate envied the general his memory—”around to the right. I want you moving before the hour’s up, on account of they’re surely digging now.”

“Yes, sir,” Strange said, adding to his guides: “You two come along with me and help me assemble my force.”

“If you do get around them, drive straight for Rivington,” Forrest said. “Get into their rear one more time and they’re done for.”

“Question, sir,” Strange said; at Forrest’s nod, he went on, “Do you want us to strike for the town once in their rear, or back at the fighting men themselves? Your usual aim is to beat the army; with that accomplished, the place it defended will fall of its own accord.”

“Nothing is usual about the Rivington men,” Nathan Bedford Forrest answered. “In Rivington they have the engine they use to bring in their weapons—I gather they travel here through it, too, come to that. If it’s taken or wrecked, the fighters are done for, too. So this time I want the town.”

“You’ll have it,” Major Strange promised. “Caudell, Bean—do I have your names straight?—come along now. This time I really mean it.” Caudell stumbled over his own feet a couple of times as he followed Forrest’s aide—he wasn’t paying much attention to where he was going. His mind kept chewing on the idea of an engine that ran through time. It made perfect sense; the Rivington men had to come from somewhen that wasn’t 1868. But he’d never wondered about how they did it until Forrest set him thinking.

The soldiers he and Mollie helped Strange collect belonged to several different regiments; advance was as likely as retreat to break up an army’s neat ranks. When they’d rounded up about a company’s worth, the major said,” All right, Bean, get us around them.”

“Do my best, sir.” Mollie led the impromptu force east, saying, “We’ll go most of the way to the railroad tracks before I try and bring us north. There’s a little path runs alongside ‘em, about half a mile this way.”

“Good enough,” Strange said. “The line of the railroad itself is sure to be strongly held, but a path…” His features were not nearly so mobile as those of his commander, but anticipation sparked in his eyes.

The detachment had not been moving long when firing erupted up ahead. After a few minutes, mortar bombs began falling, crump, crump, crump, back around where Major Strange had chosen his men. Caudell said, “I’m not usually what you’d call fond of marching, but right this second, it looks pretty fine to me.” Major Strange, who tramped along in front of him, bobbed his head up and down in emphatic agreement.

The din of gunfire faded behind the Confederates. Caudell took that as a good sign, hoping it meant the Rivington men hadn’t the men to extend their wired line all the way from the position they’d been defending to the Wilmington and Weldon tracks. If they had—He took a deep breath which had nothing to do with how tired he was. If they had enough men for that, this detachment was going to get chewed up.

Mollie recognized the path when she came to it. Nate would have marched right by; it was so narrow and overgrown that he wondered if it went back to Indian days. That made it harder to follow north, but also raised his spirits: newcomers like the Rivington men might never have discovered it.

No wire with teeth reached out to trap him for enemy guns. The soldiers who marched with him had seen too much war to make a lot of unnecessary noise, but they grinned and checked their rifles. They knew what they were gaining here.

“How close to the town do the woods grow?” Strange asked Mollie.

“Inside half a mile, sir,” she answered. The major beamed like a cherub.

As it turned out, they didn’t do quite as well as Mollie expected. They came to a new clearing with a half-built big house in the middle of it. On the far side were four or five Rivington men hurrying toward the fighting. They stopped in comic dismay as the Confederates began coming out of the woods. Then one of them raised his repeater to his shoulder and started shooting.

The fierce little fire fight lasted only a few minutes: even with body armor, four or five were no match for a company. Major Strange was rubbing his chin as he trotted north. He waved the detachment to a halt, told off about a quarter of his little force and pointed them westward. “I know the general told me to drive for the town, but the Rivington men have to know we’re here now after the racket we just made,” he said. “I don’t aim to be hit from the side when I ‘m supposed to be doing the hitting myself.”

The men he’d split off from his main command went regretfully, but they went: Strange’s order made too much military sense to be disobeyed, even by soldiers who wanted to be in at the kill. They’d all been outflanked at one time or another and didn’t fancy ending up on the receiving end of that punishment ever again.

Strange waved once more. “Let’s go! Skirmish order.” The Confederates formed two lines, the men well separated from one another, and rolled forward. A few shots came from in front of them, but only a few. Nate let loose with a rebel yell as the whitewashed bulk of the Notahilton began playing peekaboo through the trees.

Gunfire crackled, not far off to the left. Mollie pointed toward J. P. Strange, nodded approvingly. So did Caudell: sure enough, the Rivington men had tried to swing back on the detachment. Always nice to have an officer who can see past the end of his beard, Caudell thought.

Something went pop under Strange. The noise was loud enough to make Caudell, who trotted along perhaps fifty yards to the right of the major, look his way. He saw a black cylinder bounce out of the ground, about to the level of Strange’s waist. A split second later came another, much louder blast. The major collapsed with gruesome bonelessness, almost torn in two. A couple of men closest to him on either side also went down. Small, deadly pieces of metal buzzed past Caudell like angry bees.

“Torpedo!” The cry rose from half a dozen throats.

Caudell wished he could glide through the air or, like Jesus, walk on water. But there was no help for it but to run on. “Once we take Rivington, we don’t have to worry about torpedoes again as long as we live!” he shouted, as much for his own spirit’s sake as for the men around him. He blinked when they raised a cheer.

And there, all at once, lay the town whose name had become a curse all through the Confederacy. Only a handful of men in mottled green were on the street. Caudell fired at one of them. Several other Confederates opened up at the same time, so even though the man fell, he was not sure his bullet had brought him down.

The other Rivington men scrambled for cover. Remembering Nathan Bedford Forrest’s orders to poor Major Strange, Caudell yelled, “Watch where they retreat to. That’ll be what the general wants us to take out.”

Following his own advice wasn’t easy. The Rivington men were far from the only people dashing this way and that: a great many shrieking slaves, some white men in ordinary clothes—the true Rivington men, Caudell thought—and a handful of women scattered in panic at the sound of gunfire.

“The railroad station!” Mollie said, and that did indeed seem to be where the Rivington men were retreating. One corner of Caudell’s mouth twisted down. He’d had a small taste of house-to-house fighting when the Army of Northern Virginia took Washington City, and he didn’t care for it of course, nobody ever bothered to ask a soldier whether he cared for the job he was doing.

He crawled down to the end of the horse trough behind which he and Mollie lay, looking for the next piece of cover he’d run to. As he did so, he saw two men in splotched green dart over the tracks. “It ain’t the station!” he said, forgetting all his carefully cultivated grammar. “They’re making for that shed across the way.”

He remembered the shed, and the armed guard who’d prowled around it, from his train trip through Rivington on the way home after the war. But for four years’ weathering, it looked the same now as it had then.

“They crazy?” Mollie said. “They can’t fight from the shed.”

She was right—the only thing that made the shed different from a big wooden box was its door. A determined squad in the train station could have held out for a long time, maybe even until the Confederates brought up artillery. But another Rivington man abandoned the station for the shed. A bullet knocked him sprawling before he got there. He crawled on, leaving a trail of blood behind him, until he made it through the doorway.

Crazy to go from the station to the shed, unless… “They must keep their time engine in there!” Caudell said. The men of America Will Break were losing their fight for Rivington, but if they’d come out of a distant time, they might be able to go back again. The idea angered Caudell—it seemed like an unfair escape hatch.

“Time engine?” Mollie said.

“Not now,” he answered absently. The tactics the Rivington men were using made him sure he’d guessed their game. The fighters in the train station were a rear guard, holding back the Confederates while their fellows, one by one, dashed for the shed. A couple of them stopped bullets and fell, but most ran the gauntlet of fire.

They knew their business. Even when but one man was left in the station, he kept firing now from this window, now from that, so his foes took a little while to realize he was alone. And he let go a long, sprayed burst before he sprinted across the tracks, forcing enough of the Confederates to duck that he made it to the shed safe. The door swung closed behind him.

Only when silence lengthened did some of the Confederates warily emerge from cover. A lieutenant—in the confusion, Caudell never had caught his name—trotted up to the shed. If any Rivington men remained inside, he was a dead man. But no one fired from in there. He waved his hat, signaling it was safe to approach.

Caudell came up slowly, wondering if things could be as peaceful as they seemed. The young lieutenant started to pull the door open, then thought better of it. He sent several rounds through the rough pine boards. When all stayed silent, he grinned and yanked on the iron handle.

A blast of yellow flame, a roar—The mine literally blew him out of his shoes. But for those shoes, all that was left of him was a great red smear on the ground and the train tracks. The three men behind him also went down as if scythed. So did the facing wall of the station.

“Another torpedo!” Half deafened by the explosion, Caudell could hardly hear himself scream.

Mollie saw something he had not. Pointing, she said,” All the blast came out in one direction. I wonder how they did that.” When Nate, head still ringing, helplessly spread his hands, she stepped close and bawled in his ear till he understood.

However the Rivington men managed their hellish tricks, he was just glad he hadn’t been right in front of the shed. Along with the four men instantly killed, several others were down, badly wounded. Their cries pierced the thick wool that still seemed to swaddle Caudell’s ears.

But the door to the shed was open—open for good now. Caudell glanced at Mollie. She nodded, though her face mirrored the dread he felt. They ran for the doorway together, shouting for all they were worth and firing as they went.

The air inside smelled hot and burnt. Caudell dove and rolled. He bumped up against a stack of crates, neatly stenciled MEALS, READY TO EAT. Mollie crouched beside him. He blinked again and again to make his eyes adapt to the sudden gloom. The shed wasn’t as dark as it should have been. Over in one corner, hidden behind more crates, a bright white light shone off the cobwebby ceiling.

Mollie pointed to it with the muzzle of her AK-47. “That’s the same kind of light Benny Lang had in his house, ‘cept he had ‘em all over, not just the one.”

“To hell with Benny Lang.” But Caudell was already scuttling forward on hands and knees. “Reckon we’ve got to find out what that is.” Mollie went right behind him, and several other soldiers, too. He waved them to a halt when he came to a turn in the maze of crates. “If I touch off another torpedo, no need for us all to go up.”

He rounded corners one by one, each time by himself. He didn’t think about bravery till long afterwards; at the time, the only thing in his mind was the luckless lieutenant’s empty shoes. If he did touch off a torpedo, he’d never know what hit him. Oddly, that helped steady him. He’d seen too many worse ways of dying.

Then he came to the last: turn. Ahead of him, the light spilled out bright as day, maybe brighter. One of the men in back of Mollie said, “Where the hell’d all them Rivington bastards get to?”

Caudell turned the corner. Since he had no idea what a time engine was supposed to look like, he couldn’t have honestly said the machine took him by surprise. It had a small platform, perhaps three feet square, that glowed almost like the sun. His first quick thought when he saw it was relief that it was no larger—who could say what deviltry the Rivington men might have brought from the future through a big time engine?

He blinked so he could squint through the glare, and to make sure he could trust his eyes. On that platform stood a Rivington man, but Caudell could see right through him, as if he were one of the ghosts old Negroes talked about incessantly. While one part of him chewed on that, another brought up his repeater. Before he truly thought about what he was doing, he squeezed off half a dozen rounds.

The bullets passed right through the Rivington man. He did not crumple—he disappeared. The glowing platform went dark, plunging the shed into blackness. The Confederates behind Caudell shouted in alarm; for that matter, so did he. The time engine spat sparks like a railroad car going forty miles an hour with its brakes locked. The wall behind it and the crates to either side caught fire almost at once.

“Let’s get out of here!” three people yelled together. The soldiers scrambled and stumbled and cursed their way back through the maze toward the light from the shed’s blasted doorway. Caudell, who brought up the rear, was coughing and choking on smoke by the time he made it to the blessed fresh air.

But even as he rubbed his streaming eyes, he wondered what had happened to the Rivington man on the platform when he shot up the time engine. Had the man made it back—or rather forward—to his own year? When the engine smashed to bits, was he rudely dumped into 1882, or 1923, or 1979? Or had he vanished into a limbo of no time at all? Caudell knew he would never find out—or stop wondering.

A brisk crackle of gunfire from the south made him quit speculating in a hurry. Here were the outflanked Rivington men, come too late to save their link to whatever year had spawned them. But they still carried rifles in their hands, and they’d proved themselves fighters as tough as any Caudell had ever run into. If they wanted revenge, they could take a fair-sized chunk of it.

Caudell ran south, away from the burning shed. He flopped down by the horse trough from which he’d fired at the train station, only now on the opposite side. Where was Mollie? There, shooting from behind the steps of the general store. A big knot of fear eased inside him when he saw her.

The shed and the supplies inside blazed fiercely now; he could feel the heat on the back of his neck from a hundred yards away. He looked over his shoulder. The thick column of black, black smoke mounting to the sky came from the funeral pyre of the Rivington men’s hopes.

He peeked round the edge of the horse trough for a muzzle flash at which to shoot. He fired twice. Then the AK-47 clicked uselessly—another clip empty. He clicked in his last one, chambered a round. As he did so, he remembered how nearly impossible it was to load a rifle musket while lying down. He crawled along, peeked round the other edge of the trough—maybe someone in mottled green was waiting for him to show up in the same place twice in a row. He hadn’t lived through the Second American Revolution by being stupid.

No muzzle flashes—but what was that, flapping from behind a pokeberry bush? “A white flag,” he said, doubting his own words while he spoke them aloud. But a white flag it was. A Rivington man stepped out from cover to wave it back and forth. Slowly, firing on both sides died away. The men of America Will Break emerged, one by one, hands raised in surrender.

Even after a couple of dozen fighters in mottled green, all of them rifleless, came out into the open, Caudell stayed low behind the horse trough. He had trouble believing the Rivington men, after battling so long and hard against everything the Confederacy could throw at them, would give up now. Nor was he alone. Hardly any Confederate soldiers left hiding places to take charge of their enemies.

So the Rivington men kept walking, hands up, heads down. That more than anything else at last convinced Caudell they really were giving up: they looked like beaten troops. He got to his feet, ready to dive back to safety in an instant at the least hint of danger. When Mollie made as if to join him, he waved her back, saying, “Keep me covered.”

Some of the other Confederates moved with him. Others stayed in place to support them: how many he was not sure, for when he turned around to look, he could see only a couple of them. He also saw the blacks and native whites of Rivington coming out of their hiding places now that the shooting had stopped. A few of them also started toward the men of America Will Break, the men who had ruled their town, ruled their lives, for the past four years and more.

The man with the white flag was the same big fellow who had parleyed with Nathan Bedford Forrest. Caudell searched for his name, found it: Andries Rhoodie. Rhoodie turned his head from one of the approaching Confederates to the next. Finally he made straight for Nate, hailing him with: “You seem to be the ranking soldier here, sir.”

“Me?” Caudell’s voice was a startled squeak. He looked quickly to either side. Sure enough, Rhoodie was right; no Confederate officers had broken cover—he wondered if any of the detachment’s officers were still alive—and no other first sergeants. He gathered himself. “Yes, sir, I guess I am at that. I’m First Sergeant Nate Caudell, 47th North Carolina.”

“Then you are the man to whom we must surrender.” Rhoodie sounded as if he would sooner have faced red Indians, scalping knives. He wore no sword, but took off a belt that held a holstered pistol, thrust it at Caudell. “Here.”

“Uh, thanks.” Though no connoisseur of surrender ceremonies, Caudell suspected they could be handled with more grace. Awkwardly, not wanting to let go of his AK-47, he belted the pistol round his own waist. Then he blurted, “What made you just up and quit like that?”

“What the bleeding hell d’you think?” Rhoodie stabbed a finger toward the burning shed. “With our time machine gone, how are we supposed to fight a whole country?” He did not even try to hide his bitterness.

Caudell forbore to mention that he was the one who’d ruined the time machine, Rhoodie had called it. But, nettled by the Rivington man’s tone, he said, “Even when you had it, we were whipping you—otherwise how did we get here?”

Rhoodie glared, then seemed to crumple. His shoulders sagged, the iron went out of his backbone, he stared down at his heavy boots. Behind Caudell, sudden shouts rang out: “Hey, what’s that crazy nigger doin’?” “Where’s he goin’?” “Look out!” “Somebody stop him!”

As Caudell turned, a short, scrawny black man wearing only a pair of tattered trousers shot past him. The Negro clenched a broken whiskey bottle. With a wordless shriek of hate, he drove the jagged end into Andries Rhoodie’s throat.

Blood spurted, spectacularly crimson in the afternoon sun. Rhoodie let out a gobbling, choking scream, brought up his hands to clutch at the gaping wound. But blood poured between his fingers, from his mouth, from his nose. He took a couple of wobbling steps, tottered, fell.

Another Rivington man grabbed for a bandage pack like the one Benny Lang had used, knelt by Rhoodie. “Andries!” he shouted, and then something in a guttural language Caudell did not know. Rhoodie lay still. After a minute or two, the other Rivington man stood up, shaking his head. Under dirt and streaks of green and black paint, his face was white.

The Negro threw down the broken, bloody bottle. He turned to the Confederates, saying, “Massers, y’all do what you want wif me. I ‘dured more’n man was meant to ‘dure from dat white devil. You look heah.” He ran his hands up and down his ribcage, which showed in even sharper relief than that of the slave with whom Caudell had talked outside of town. “An’ heah.” He turned to show his back and the scars, old and new, crisscrossing it. “I ain’t no ornery, uppity nigger, massers, sweah to God I ain’t—dat Rhoodie, he jus’ evil to his boys. I seen him heah, an’ I couldn’t take no mo’.”

Caudell and the rest of the soldiers in gray looked at one another in confusion, wondering what to do next. A black who slew a white had to die; so said generations of law. But if the white was an enemy of the Confederate States, a man who’d led the Rivington fighters, who was wanted in connection with the Richmond Massacre, and who, moreover, had abused the black outrageously? Generations of law said the black still had to die. Generations of custom dictated against bothering with much law.

No one raised a gun against the Negro. After a long pause, Caudell jerked a thumb back toward Rivington. “You’d better get out of here.” The Negro stared, then fled as fast as he’d come.

“But—that kaf—that nigger—he just murdered a blank—a white,” a Rivington man spluttered furiously.

“Shut up, you,” four soldiers growled in the same breath. One added, “Reckon the son of a bitch had it coming, by God.” Caudell thought the same thing, but hadn’t quite had the nerve to say it out loud. That someone did showed the South was indeed different from what it had been in 1861.