underground, I reckon.' He spoke quietly, after having closed the door behind him.
Apicius gave the mixture in the iron pot another stir. 'Might say that,' he replied after a moment. He gave Cincinnatus a thoughtful glance. 'How'd you get mixed up with those underground folks, anyways?'
'Wish I hadn't, pretty much,' Cincinnatus said, 'but the white man I used to work for, he's one of 'em, and he was always pretty decent to me. 'Sides, from what I've seen, I ain't got much use for the USA, neither.' He met and held Apicius' eyes. 'How 'bout you?' Unless he got answers that satisfied him, he wasn't going to say anything more.
Apicius' massive shoulders went up and down in a shrug. 'First time the Yankee soldiers come in here, they clean me out of everything I got, they say they shoot me if I squawk, an' they call me more kind o' names'n I ever hear before. They ain't done nothin' like that since, mind you, but it don't make me want to cheer for the Stars an' Stripes.'
'Yeah, that's about right.' Cincinnatus sighed. 'I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin' any kind o' square deal after the war, an' it don't matter if the USA or the CSA win.'
'Dat's the exact truth,' Apicius said emphatically. 'The exact truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help me God.' He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court — not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, 'On de odder hand, there's undergrounds and then there's undergrounds.'
'Is that a fact?' Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.
And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, 'You ever hear tell about the Manifesto!'
He didn't say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn't heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. 'Be you one of the people who — ' He didn't go on. He'd heard about Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn't really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.
'We git justice for ourselves,' Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. 'Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin' man like dirt only on account of he be black.'
That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides — 'Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don't look like they gonna give us up.'
'Revolution comin' in the USA, too,' Apicius replied with calm certainty. 'Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA — we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an'- What so funny?'
Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, 'We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an' use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an' use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain't funny, what is?'
Apicius' smile was thin (the only thin thing about him), but it was a smile. 'You wif us, then?'
When Elizabeth found out, she'd want to kill him. He had a baby now. He was supposed to be careful. That consideration made him hesitate a good half a second before he answered, 'Yes.'
Up in Pennsylvania, Jake Featherston had been acutely conscious that he'd come to a foreign country. Houses looked different; the winter weather had been harsher than he was used to; the local civilians, those who hadn't fled before the advancing Army of Northern Virginia, had looked and sounded different from their counterparts in the CSA; and they hadn't made any bones about despising the men in butternut who'd overrun their farms and towns.
Now the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't advancing any more. It wasn't in Pennsylvania any more, either. Hampstead, Maryland, where Jake's battery in the First Richmond Howitzers was stationed, looked a lot more like a corresponding small town in Virginia than had anything he'd seen in Pennsylvania. The Old Hampstead Store, for instance, wouldn't have been out of place in some rural county seat outside of Richmond: a two-story clapboard building, a hundred years old if it was a day, in the shape of an L, with a massive water pump shielded from the street by the longer side of the L.
Nero was working the pump. When he'd filled a bucket, Perseus lugged it over to the horse trough. The draft animals that had pulled the battery's can nons and ammunition limbers drank greedily. 'Don't give 'em too much too fast,' Jake said warningly. 'They're liable to get the colic and peg out, and we can't afford that, not now.'
'Yes, suh, Marse Jake, I knows,' Perseus answered. 'But they got to drink some. They been workin' hard.'
'I know,' Featherston said. 'I don't think we'll do much more moving back, though.' He paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. 'We belter not, or we'll be fighting this damn war back in Virginia.'
Jeb Stuart III came round the corner in time to hear that. 'It will not hap pen, Sergeant,' he said crisply. 'They will not get past us. They will not come any farther. All right: we couldn't take Philadelphia. That's too bad; it might have made the damnyankees roll over and show us their bellies like the cow ardly curs they are. But Maryland we hold, Washington we hold, and we're going to keep them.'
'Yes, sir,' Jake said-you didn't get anywhere arguing with your captain. But he couldn't help adding, 'If the damnyankees are such terrible cowards, how come they're moving forward and we're going back?'
'We aren't,' Stuart said. 'Not one more step back-I have that straight from the War Department in Richmond.'
When Jeb Stuart III had something straight from the War Department in Richmond, he had it straight from his father, who'd worn the wreathed stars of a Confederate general for a good many years. That sort of information came straight from the horse's mouth, then. Featherston said, 'It's good to hear, sir-if the Yankees cooperate.'
For a moment, Stuart seemed more a tired modern soldier than the cava lier he tried to be. His shoulders sagged a little. 'The trouble with the Yan kees, Sergeant, is that God was having an off day when he made them, because he turned out altogether too many. They die by thousands, but more thousands keep coming-as you may perhaps have noticed.'
'Who, me, sir?' All too well, Featherston remembered the U.S. barrage that had cost him his first gun crew, and remembered pouring shells into oncoming green-gray waves till they broke barely beyond rifle range of his piece. 'There's a lot of weight behind them,' he agreed.
'There certainly is — weight of metal and weight of men,' Stuart said. 'And they use that advantage of size in place of true courage, battering us down by stunning us with their big guns and then drowning us in those as saults that leave hillsides and meadows paved with broken bodies from one end to the other. You ask me, Sergeant, that has very little to do with real courage, real elan, as our gallant French allies call it. Elan consists of throwing yourself at the foe regardless of his size, and in going forward for the simple reason that you refuse to admit to yourself you might be beaten. Look what it did for us in the opening days of the war.'
'Yes, sir,' Jake said. 'Took us all the way to the Susquehanna — but not quite to the Delaware.'
'If we'd made it to the Delaware, we surely would have crossed it and broken into Philadelphia,' Stuart agreed, 'and Baltimore would have withered on the vine. But without elan, could we have stopped the Yankee break out from Baltimore before it trapped all our forces up in Pennsylvania?'
'I guess not, sir,' Featherston said, which, by the sour look Stuart gave him, was not a good enough answer. But he didn't know whether it had been elan or good field fortifications that had stopped the U.S. drive. For that matter, he didn't know for a fact it was stopped. The Yankees were still shipping men and materiel down into the bulge around Baltimore. Sooner or later, it would burst again, like any carbuncle. 'But if they break past Poplar Springs toward Frederick, we may have to skedaddle out of here yet.'
Now Stuart looked angry: he'd had his theory contradicted. He put a bit ing edge in his voice: 'Sergeant, I've seen the trench lines we've constructed to make sure the Yankees don't break out. I am confident they will hold against any pressure brought to bear against them, just as I am confident the lines ahead of us will hold against any conceivable pressure from the north.'
'Yes, sir,' Featherston said woodenly. He was kicking himself for dis agreeing with the captain after he'd told himself not to be so foolish. But, damn it, wasn't he a free white man, with the right to say anything he chose? The way the Army treated you, you had to act like a Negro to your superiors. He didn't see the justice in that.
