The Confederates were like lions-they'd bite if they got half a chance. But he had claws of his own. The Tredegar's weight, which often annoyed him, seemed more like a safety net close to the prisoners. 'I had a gun myself, I'd shoot you for totin' that thing,' a POW said, shaking his fist.
'You could try,' Cassius answered. 'Some other ofays done tried before, but I'm still here.'
'You know what happens to uppity niggers?' the POW said.
'Sure do. They git shot.' Cassius started to unsling the rifle. 'Same thing happens to uppity prisoners.' The Confederate shut up. Cassius let his hand drop.
Some of the other POWs weren't uppity. They were just hungry. They begged from U.S. soldiers, and they begged from Negroes, too. 'Got any rations you don't need?' one of them asked, stretching out his hands imploringly to Cassius.
'You feed me if I was in there?' Cassius asked.
'Well, I hope so,' the man answered after a perceptible pause for thought. 'I'm a Christian, or I try to be.'
'Reckon Jake Featherston's a Christian, too?'
'Sure he is,' the POW said, this time without hesitation. 'He loves Jesus, same as you'n me. Jesus loves him, too.'
'Fuck you, you ofay asshole.' Cassius turned away. 'You can starve.'
'You ain't no Christian,' the Confederate called after him.
'If Jake Featherston is, I don't want to be.' Cassius walked off. He wondered if the POW would cuss him out as he went. But the man kept quiet. A few untimely demises had convinced the C.S. prisoners that they needed to watch their mouths around the surviving Negroes.
Cassius' mother would have landed on him like a thousand-pound bomb if she heard him say he didn't want to be a Christian. She prayed even when things looked worst-no, especially when they did. And she got caught in church, and went straight from church to one of Jake Featherston's murder factories. What did that say about how much being a Christian was worth? Not much, not so far as Cassius could see.
Maybe she was in heaven, the way she always thought she would be. Cassius hoped so. He had trouble believing it, though. He had trouble believing anything these days.
He found Gracchus that evening. Gracchus thought about things, too. 'You reckon we'll ever fit in again?' Cassius asked.
The former guerrilla leader didn't even pretend not to understand what he was talking about. 'In Georgia? Naw.' Gracchus shook his head.
'Don't just mean Georgia,' Cassius said. 'I mean anywhere. The Confederate ofays all hate us.' He didn't love whites in the CSA, either, but he left that out of the mix, continuing, 'Ofays from the USA don't all hate us, I reckon, but they's so different, ain't no way we belong in Yankeeland, neither. So what does that leave?'
'Nothin'.' Gracchus managed a crooked grin. 'When you ever know a nigger who had more'n dat?'
'You got somethin' there,' Cassius admitted. His father had had more: a kingdom of the mind, a kingdom whose size and scope Cassius was only beginning to realize he'd never fully grasped. But what did all of Xerxes' quiet wisdom win him in the end? Only another place on the train bound for hell on earth. Cassius said, 'I could kill ofays for the rest o' my life an' not even start payin' them fuckers back.'
'It's a bastard, ain't it?' Gracchus said. 'Maybe Jake Featherston wins, an' maybe he loses. But we-uns, we- uns already done lost.' Cassius started to answer, but what could he say that Gracchus hadn't?
Y es, the front was Richmond. There had always been a danger in putting the Confederate capital so close to the U.S. border. Richmond made a magnet for U.S. ambitions. McClellan had threatened it in the War of Secession; a better general likely would have taken it then. Even in the Second Mexican War, the USA dreamt of marching in. During the Great War, the flood tide of green-gray had reached Fredericksburg on its way south before the Confederate government decided it had had enough.
And now…Now Jake Featherston was red-hot, almost white-hot, with fury, but not even his unending, unyielding rage could stiffen the Confederate armies north of the capital. 'God damn it to hell!' he screamed at Nathan Bedford Forrest III. 'We need to bring more men into the line up there!'
'Sir, we haven't got any more men to move,' Forrest replied.
'Get 'em from somewhere!' Jake said.
'Where do you recommend, sir?' the chief of the General Staff asked. 'Shall we pull them out of Georgia? Or maybe out of Alabama?'
'No! Jesus Christ, no!' Featherston exclaimed. 'The fucking country'll fall apart if we do.' The country was falling apart anyway, but he knew it would fall apart faster if he pulled soldiers away from the sectors where they were fighting hardest. 'What have we got left in the Carolinas?'
'What was there is either up here or down in Georgia,' Forrest replied. 'It has been for weeks.' He paused, then licked his lips and asked, 'Are you sure you aren't overworked, Mr. President?'
'I'm tired of nobody doin' what needs doin'-I sure am tired o' that,' Jake growled.
'That's…not quite what I meant, sir.' Nathan Bedford Forrest III licked his lips again. 'Don't you think the strain of command has been a little too much for you? Shouldn't you take a rest, sir, and come back to duty when you're refreshed and ready to face it again?'
'Well, I don't rightly know,' Featherston said slowly. 'Do you really reckon I'm off?'
'The war hasn't gone the way we wish it would have, and that's a fact.' Forrest sounded relieved-and surprised-that Jake wasn't hitting the armored ceiling in fourteen different places. 'Maybe somebody with a fresh slant on things can stop the damnyankees, or at least get a peace we can live with out of them.'
'I suppose it's possible, but I wouldn't bet on it.' Under the desk, out of the general's sight, Jake's left hand hesitated between two buttons. The first one, the closer one, would send the nearest guards rushing into the office. But the chief of the General Staff plainly had a coup in mind. If he hadn't suborned those guards, he wasn't worth the paper he was printed on. 'Who do you have in mind to take over afterwards? You?' Keep the son of a bitch talking. Jake's finger came down on the other button.
'I'll take military command,' Nathan Bedford Forrest III replied. 'But I think Vice President Partridge is the better man to talk peace with the United States. Everything stays nice and constitutional that way.' He was keeping Jake talking, too, waiting till his men got here to back his play.
You stupid piece of shit. Only way to get me out of this chair is to murder me. Featherston let a little anger show, but only a little-the sort he might show if he was thinking of stepping down. 'Do you reckon even the Yankees are dumb enough to take Don Partridge seriously?' he demanded. 'I sure as hell don't.'
'If he's speaking in the name of the President, or as the President, they'll have to listen to him.' Nathan Bedford Forrest's eyes kept slipping toward the door and then jerking back to Jake. The President of the CSA wanted to look that way, too, but he didn't. He had more discipline in his pinkie than Forrest did in his whole worthless carcass.
'So who all figures the country'd be better off without me?' Jake asked. 'Don must be in on this, too, right? How about Clarence Potter? He's a fellow with pretty fair judgment-always has been.' He was also a fellow Featherston had suspected for years.
To his surprise, Forrest shook his head. 'As a matter of fact, no. He thinks you're the best war leader we've got. I used to think so, too, but-'
He broke off. There was a commotion outside, shouts and screams and then a couple of gunshots and more screams and shouts. One of the bullets punched through what was supposed to be bulletproof glass in the door. Almost spent, it ricocheted off the wall above Jake's head and fell harmlessly to the floor.
An instant later, the door flew open with a crash. Four soldiers in camouflage uniforms burst into the President's office. Jake and Nathan Bedford Forrest III pointed at each other. 'Arrest that man!' they both yelled.
Four automatic-rifle muzzles bore on the chief of the General Staff. So did the.45 Jake Featherston plucked from a desk drawer. 'Hold it right there, traitor!' one of the soldiers roared.
'Freedom!' the other three shouted. They were Party Guards, not Army men. Nathan Bedford Forrest III seemed to notice that for the first time. His face turned gray as tobacco smoke. Jake Featherston watched with almost clinical interest. He'd never seen a man go that color before-not a live man, anyhow.
'How-?' Forrest gasped. That used up all the breath he had in him. He might have been a hooked crappie, drowning in air he couldn't breathe.
