Breakthroughs

twice, I’ll be sorry-and so will you. I am going to be perfectly plain with you: yes, I have to squat when I piss. That does not mean I can’t blow your heads off with a rifle at a range beyond any at which you could hit me, and it does not mean I know nothing of war and am unfit to give you orders.”

If she couldn’t get them to obey her any other way, she’d fluster them into doing it. She’d never seen such a collection of red faces in her life. These men and boys had gone through their whole lives never imagining a woman would remind them that she pissed, let alone how she went about it.

“If you’re going to give orders, just give ’em, for God’s sake,” Captain Barksdale said, now not daring to meet her eye. “Don’t go on about…other things.” He shuffled his feet like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“That is what I was trying to do,” Anne said briskly. “I have some reason to believe I know where the Red bandits will strike next. You’ll have to hit them harder than you did last time to do any good.”

“Put us where we can hit ’em and I reckon we’ll do it,” Barksdale replied. The gunners-many of whom, Anne was convinced, could not have hit the ground if they fell off a horse-nodded.

“I will,” Anne said. I hope, she added to herself. Scipio was not to be trusted, not any more, not after shells had come crashing down around him. Had the shells killed Cassius and Cherry, she would have reckoned it worthwhile. As things were…as things were, she contemplated Scipio the exacting perfectionist huddled in the swamps, and knew she had a measure of revenge with every breath he took.

Captain Barksdale said, “We’d be even likelier to hit, ma’am, if you could get us some more shells to practice with.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I count myself lucky if I’m able to pry loose enough shells for you to use in combat.” That was an understatement. From the start of the war till now, the three-inch field gun had been the workhorse of the Confederate Army. It served on every front, and every front screamed for shells. Detaching any had taken every wire she could pull.

The militia gunners hitched limbers and guns to horses and drove back to St. Matthews. In town, she saw two women on the street in trousers: not so fine as hers, but trousers. She accepted that as no less than her due. She’d been a leader in style and fashion before the war began. It was only natural that she should continue to lead now.

She was about to go up to her room when a messenger boy halted his bicycle with the heels of his boots. “Telegram for you, ma’am,” he said. She took the envelope. He hurried away after pocketing a ten-cent tip.

Ripping apart the flimsy paper was not an adequate substitute for settling Cassius and Cherry for good, but it had to do. When Anne was done reading the wire, she tore it to shreds, threw them in the air, and let the wind blow them away. None of the news from her brokers had been good lately. The markets in Richmond and London and Paris were faltering; the investments that had sustained her even after the ruin of Marshlands faltered, too.

She could not imagine when Marshlands would recover. She had trouble imagining when her investments would recover, either. If they didn’t…If they didn’t, she wouldn’t be the leader around these parts much longer. She had trouble imagining that, too, but less trouble than she would have had in the spring of 1916 and ever so much less than she would have had in the spring of 1915.

A train pulled into the station a couple of blocks away. The fire engine might not have been replaced after the Red uprising, but labor gangs, some working at gunpoint, had put the railroads back together in a hurry. Those iron rails bound the CSA together as nothing else could.

From the direction of the station, someone called her name. Her head turned. Coming her way was a tall man in a butternut uniform. “Tom!” she yelped in glad surprise, and ran toward her older brother.

Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colleton stared at Anne as she drew near. “Good God, Sis, what are you wearing?” he said.

She put her hands on her hips and glared at him. He didn’t flinch, as he would have before the war. In a way, that made her proud: he’d gone from an overage boy, a useless drone, to a man on the battlefield. In another way, it irked her more than ever: even as a man, he thought women should be useless toys.

With precision that showed how tightly she was holding her temper in check, she replied, “I am wearing the clothes I need to wear to go hunting bandits in the swamps of the Congaree-or did you want that rifle you sent me to gather dust in the closet?”

Tom took a deep breath, then decided not to make a scene. “All right,” he said. “You sure as the devil took me by surprise, though. I never would have reckoned the day would come when women showed off their shapes that way.”

“Really?” she asked, as if in innocence. “What sort of joints do you go to when you’re on leave but you don’t come home?” She had the satisfaction of watching a blush climb from his throat to his hairline. Deciding to let him down easy, she asked, “How are things at the front?”

He grimaced, but in an impersonal sort of way. “Not so well. We’ve lost just about all the ground we took back from the Yankees in the counterattack last fall. We’re shoved away from Big Lick and the Roanoke River, back toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dammit, it’s not that they’re better soldiers than we are. The trouble is, there are more of them than there are of us.”

“What about the black troops?” Anne asked.

Her brother shrugged. “They’re starting to come into the line. They’re raw. God only knows how they’ll do when push comes to shove. And even with ’em, there are still more damnyankees than there are of us. Defending is cheaper than attacking, thank God. If we’re lucky, sooner or later the USA will get tired of throwing away men against us and against the Canucks, and they’ll make some kind of peace we can stand.”

“And if we’re not lucky?” Anne said quietly.

Tom didn’t answer for a while. When he did, it was obliquely: “We’ve made the USA eat a lot of crow since South Carolina stopped flying the Stars and Stripes. I wonder what the bird tastes like, and how they’d serve it up. They remember every morsel, and that’s a fact.” He dug in his pocket, found a coin, and tossed it to Anne.

It was a U.S. quarter-dollar. On one side, it bore a bust of Daniel Webster, whom Confederate schools vilified for opposing secession. Anne turned it over. The other side showed arrows and lightning bolts superimposed on a star, with the word REMEMBRANCE stamped across it.

She handed the coin back to her brother. “Till this war, we hadn’t fought them for more than thirty years,” she said. “Foolish for them to keep on harping on things when the last war was over and done with so long ago- before either one of us was born.”

“When you lose, Sis, the last war’s never over and done with,” Tom answered, scratching the scar that seamed his cheek. “I’ve questioned a lot of prisoners. The Yankees remember ever single slight from the day this state seceded all the way up to the day they’re captured.”

“The thing to do, then, is to make sure they don’t have the chance to make us eat crow,” Anne said, as if stating an axiom of geometry.

“Yes, that would be the thing to do,” Tom Colleton said.

Anne chose to ignore the incompleteness of his agreement. As she would have before the war, she took charge of him. She took him to St. Matthews’ only functioning hotel, checked him in, and then led him to the better of the town’s cafes. With only two open in St. Matthews, it rated merely the comparative, not the superlative. It wasn’t that good, either; a third one likely would have been the best.

With an air of big-brotherly amusement, he let her do all that. He didn’t depend on her to do it, though, as he would have before the war. He ordered a beefsteak that proved less tender than it might have, stuck a fork in it, and let out several piercing brays. Anne was chewing a bite, and almost choked from laughing.

He gave her a peck on the cheek after supper, saying, “We’ll talk more in the morning, Sis.”

They did, and had plenty to talk about: the night was enlivened when the Reds brought a machine gun out of the swamp and fired several belts of ammunition into St. Matthews from long range before melting away under cover of darkness. Anne had a window shot out, and was nicked on the hand by flying glass.

“Is it like this all the time?” Tom asked.

“They haven’t done that in a while,” Anne said, “but they can, till we hunt down the last of them. We’re having trouble with that, though, because so much of everything goes straight to the front.”

“We’d have worse trouble yet if it didn’t,” Tom replied. Anne’s mouth twisted in something less than a smile. She had no good answer for that.

Sam Carsten peered out of the narrow vision slit in the sponson that housed his five-inch gun as the USS