Julian Comstock: A Story of 22-nd Century America

1

Here begins that portion of the narrative with which my readers may already be somewhat familiar, that is, the passage of Julian Comstock into the person of Julian Conqueror; but that transformation, and its consequences, have been so often misrepresented that even a scholar of Recent History may be surprised by the story as I saw and experienced it―and by my part in it, for that matter.

Certainly Julian was no Conqueror as we arrived at the mustering camp, though he soon enough ceased to be a Comstock.

“Give a false name,” Sam told Julian when, as a part of a line of sullen men from the Phantom Car, we approached a tent in which Army physicians waited to examine us and Army clerks stood ready to enter us into the rolls. “Do that, and we’ll be safe from the inquiries of your uncle―if not ‘safe’ in any other sense of the word.”

“What name should I give?”

Sam shrugged. “Anything that appeals to you. ‘Smith’ is a popular choice.” (Though I couldn’t picture Julian as a Smith, a Jones, a Wilson, or any of those penny-a-bushel names: they didn’t just suit him, somehow.) I asked Sam if it would be all right for me to continue as Adam Hazzard, and Sam said he supposed so, much to my relief. My family name may not have been aristocratic, but my father would have been ashamed if I had altered it.

But before we were set down on paper we had to be evaluated by the medical faculty: two bald men whose stained cotton smocks might once have been white, who listened to our hearts, and thumped our backs, and generally made quick work of their observations―though they did turn away seven men. [One of the men was clearly tubercular, while two others showed evidence of active Pox about their wrists and throats. Five more were turned back simply because they had lost a great number of teeth, or their teeth were too loose in the jaw to be useful. A toothless man could not bite or chew Army hardtack, and such men had been known to starve to death on a long march.]

I don’t know what happened to the rejected men. I believe they were put back aboard the Phantom Car, perhaps to be abandoned at some switching station along the main line, and probably robbed in the process.

Sam himself was the object of considerable scrutiny because of his age. He told the examining physician he was thirty-two; but we were required to disrobe, and Sam’s body betrayed the lie in its wrinkled and leathery flesh. But he was also strong, and lean, and sound of breath; and after only a little discussion the doctors gave him their approval. Julian and I were ushered through more quickly.

Then we were made to line up beside a trench into which we dropped our familiar clothing, retaining only a few possessions in satchels or “ditty-bags” provided by the Quartermaster, while a scrawny recruit doused our naked bodies with yellow powder from a bucket―an insecticide, intended to kill lice, fleas, and other vermin.

The dust was noxious, and it coated our hair, our skin, our throats, and our lungs. It burned our eyes so badly that we were soon weeping as helplessly as infants, and we coughed and gagged like consumptive patients in the final stages of that disorder. We were nearly murdered by it, in other words; and I suppose even the lice among us must have been badly inconvenienced, though at the end of a week they had rallied and staged a come-back.

As soon as we had recovered our breath we were lined up in front of a Company Clerk, who marked our names on a list of inductees. Sam gave his name as Sam Samson, which drew a skeptical look. I registered as Adam Hazzard, and pronounced my name proudly despite the fact that I was shivering, and clad mainly in a coating of insecticidal dust. Then Julian stepped up. He was still dizzy under the influence of the yellow powder, and when asked his name he began, “Julian, Julian Com―” at which point Sam delivered a kick to his shins. “Commongold,” Julian finished, adding a little cough.

It was a striking pseudonym, I thought, and entirely appropriate: Julian Commongold, gilded in lice powder and abandoned among the common folk; but a noble name for all that, rich with dignity. “It suits you,” I whispered.

“Little else does, today,” he whispered back.

Then we were administered an Oath―a pledge of loyalty to Flag and Savior, to the worldly power of the Executive Branch, the wisdom of the Senate, and the spiritual majesty of the Dominion. That was a solemn moment, in spite of our nakedness and uncontrollable shivering. [The Oath, though we swore to it under a sort of compulsion, was not meaningless to me. I held those Institutions of Liberty in awe, and I had been feeling guilty about my draft-dodging, necessary though it seemed at the time. By swearing fealty I felt washed clean ―despite the bug powder clinging to my mortal fraction.]

Then we lined up for uniforms, which were handed out with only cursory attention to size and fit, so that we spent another half-hour bartering coats and pants among ourselves, and warming ourselves at the trench in which our civilian rags had been soaked in spirits and set aflame. At the end of that time a sergeant escorted us to a mess tent in which we were given a hot meal of beef stew, much to the delight of the vagabond men among us, for whom this simple but reliable bill of fare was and would continue to be the Infantry’s great redeeming virtue.

At last we were assigned to cots, which were arranged in rows under a canvas tent large enough to house a circus (as I imagined), and we had a few moments to ourselves, to smoke or talk as we preferred, by the light of scattered lamps, before “all dark” was sounded on a trumpet. During this time Julian reminded me that New Year’s Day must have come and gone while we were aboard the Caribou-Horn Train. The year 2172 had exhausted itself, and passed into that haunted sepulcher we call the Past; and now it was 2173, a year in which Julian’s uncle Deklan would be inaugurated into yet another term as the uncontested President of the United States, sea-to-sea and equator-to-pole; and I reminded myself that I was now a warrior in that cause, and would remain one for some time to come. By Spring I might be fighting to drive the Dutch from the sacred precincts of Labrador, to reclaim our right to the wood, water, and minerals of that contested State, and to assert our God-granted master of the Northwest Passage. I was, in short, and irrevocably, an American Soldier.

“You have fallen out of obscurity, Adam, and into history,” Julian said, with only a little of his customary cynicism.

It was a daunting thought, but exciting, and I was still dwelling on it when my fatigue overcame me and I fell asleep.

I will not narrate every trivial detail of camp life, or postpone indefinitely my attention to the battles and conflicts in which Julian and I participated. In any event we did not long remain in that crude camp on the winter prairie. We were kept there only for the most basic kind of training, and to weed out men with hidden epilepsy or pox-gaunt, or who were prone to fits of madness or mad-melancholy. By Easter all such draftees would be mustered out, or put to such simple duties as suited them.

Those of us who remained were naturally curious about our future. Some of the formerly indentured men were ignorant of the nature and purpose of the War in Labrador, an ignorance that made them more fearful than they needed to be. In the great cities there were newspapers to recount the course and outcome of this or that battle, and to chart the overall progress of the War, so that even clerks and wage-laborers might be reasonably well-informed; but the majority of the draftees were landless men and deaf to such sources of information. They took their intelligence where they could find it: from Sunday All-Camp Service or from rumor and hearsay. And some of them took Julian’s counsel on the subject.

It must not be assumed that our time at the mustering camp was one long round of historical and philosophical debate―of course it was not. We were up early in the morning for reveille, roll call, sick call, mess call, followed by squad and company drill (as soon as we had been assigned to squads and companies), guard mound, adjutant’s call, policing camp (which meant picking up trash); then it was battalion drill until noon, another mess call, regimental drill until the five o’clock mess, general parade, tattoo, and taps―six days out of seven. On Sundays there was no drill, and nothing more formal than a morning All-Camp Service, which allowed for restorative rest and conversation.

We learned the presentation of arms and the intricacies of parade, and we were introduced to the Pittsburgh rifles that would accompany us into battle. We learned to take our weapons apart and put them together, to keep them clean, dry, and oiled, and in general to treat them with all the tender feeling a young mother might attach to a firstborn infant. As the winter became less severe, and the month of February ended, we were taken on marches across the damp patch of prairie where the camp was situated, allowing our boots to make accommodation with our blisters and vice versa; and we were ordered into mock battles, and tutored in the digging of entrenchments, and taught how to negotiate a cutwire fence, how to attack an enemy’s lunette, and how to follow a regimental flag. We refined our marksmanship on the firing range. We learned to call out marching cadences without blushing at the obscenities in the chants―toughening us against moral as well as physical hardship. In short, we were worked hard and fed well, until we felt proud of ourselves for having survived the ordeal, and considered ourselves superior to the general run of civilian clerks and laborers. We suspected we could not be bested in genuine warfare, and certainly not by the Dutch (as we called the Mitteleuropan forces).

Julian and I benefited from Sam’s prior tutelage, and we were among the more skillful recruits for that reason―though Sam warned us not to make ourselves too conspicuous. Julian in particular had to feign a certain clumsiness during our drills with horses, otherwise he might have been taken up into the cavalry and out of Sam’s sphere of protection. Sam himself (by design or because of his age) put in a mediocre performance on the endurance exercises, but he was steadily and expertly working up another line of influence. He made a friend of the camp’s Quartermaster, who was also a veteran of the Isthmian War. The rivalry between the Army of the Californias and the Army of the Laurentians meant that neither Sam nor the Quartermaster could expect any favoritism because of their prior experience; and for reasons of anonymity Sam could confess to nothing more than a short “stint” as a foot soldier. But the two men supported each other in extra-curricular ways, and did each other collegial favors; and Sam was soon adopted into the small circle of Isthmian veterans who had found their way into the Eastern forces, including officers. Sam used his influence to keep Julian and me within arm’s length, and to guarantee that the three of us would stay together even after we were dispatched to Labrador.

Labrador was the subject of many Sunday sermons. Sunday Service was conducted by Dominion Officers, and for that reason, the conflict was cast mainly in spiritual terms. That is to say, the war was presented as a battle between Good and Evil. What was good was full ownership of North America by its natural masters; and what was evil was the claim of “territorial interest” advanced by that ungodly commonwealth of nations known as Mitteleuropa.

We listened with due attention to these sermons, often delivered at white heat, and we took them to heart. But in the free hours after All-Camp Meeting many of the inductees (including Lymon Pugh and myself) gathered around Julian “Commongold,” to hear him air a more pragmatic version of War History.

Those talks took place over consecutive Sundays. What Julian told us, in brief, was that the possession of Labrador had been contested, in principle or in fact, ever since the False Tribulation of the last century. The allied nations of Mitteleuropa, while America was still in the grip of civil unrest, had recognized the significance of the Northwest Passage (opened to shipping by a warming climate) and coveted its rich natural resources. They asserted what some call the Stepping-Stone Theory of International Entitlement: that because Europe controlled Iceland and Greenland―and because Greenland was just adjacent to Baffin Island―and Baffin Island to the Hudson Strait―hence Hudson Bay―hence Labrador and Newfoundland―therefore all this territory ought to be administered by Mitteleuropa from its bureaucratic palaces at Munich. [Airier justifications were sometimes cited, including the theorized ancient landing of Vikings on the eastern shores of North America; but Julian assayed the tolerance of his listeners, and confined his argument to the most pertinent points.]

By the time the Union had rallied and was ready to dispute that claim there were Mitteleuropan coaling stations from Devon Island to Kangiqsujuaq, Mitteleuropan trawlers plying the rich waters of the Foxe Basin, Mitteleuropan warships patrolling off Belcher Island, and Mitteleuropan troops and colonists ashore at Battle Harbor and Goose Bay.

America fought back, of course. This all happened in the reign of President Otis, who consolidated much of North America under his own unitary rule. It was Otis who gained us such boreal states as Athabaska and Nunavut, and added immense territories to the Union. But Otis’s campaign against the forces of centralized Europe was less successful, and is passed over lightly in the official texts. Suffice to say that at the end of President Otis’s thirty-year term of office the Dutch had secured a permanent foothold in Labrador, occupied rebellious Newfoundland, and taken control of the northern bank of the St. Lawrence all the way from the sea to Baie Comeau. [Even this thumbnail sketch of history taxed the geographical understanding of his auditors, and Julian was reduced to scratching maps in the dirt with the point of his bayonet.]

There the matter had rested―or festered; for what followed was decades of clashes between American and Mitteleuropan warships, accusations of piracy, skirmishes along the Laurentians, stern diplomatic notes sent and received, etc. Nevertheless a sort of modus vivendi had prevailed, in which the continuity of commerce took precedence over national pride. The so-called Pious Presidents, who ruled during this interlude, were more concerned with entrenching the power of the Dominion of Jesus Christ, and regulating land use in the prairie West, than with battling foreigners.

The Union grew in power and prosperity during the long and sunny reigns of the Pious. Our great rail network was perfected and enlarged, while the Estate System imposed legal regularity on the patchwork of land and indenture customs that prevailed prior to that time. Food was reasonably plentiful, the population began growing after the catastrophic mass deaths of the False Tribulation, the Pox took fewer children during those years, and international trade turned our ports into respectable cities harboring tens of thousands of inhabitants.

That was the State of the Nation when Julian’s grandfather Emmanuel Comstock assumed the presidency. (Julian’s narrative, as I have said, was not as dry and abbreviated as mine, or he would never have held an audience. In fact his theatrical instincts served him admirably on these slow Sunday afternoons. He spoke in lilting cadences, adopted comic voices or postures to suit his subject, stroked his wispy beard to imitate the Pious Presidents, etc. And when he discussed the Comstock dynasty Julian’s impersonations became sharper and more cutting―though I doubt any of his listeners noticed.) Emmanuel Comstock, the first of the imperial Comstocks, was a brutal but far-sighted President who made it his business to modernize the Armies and bring them under the discipline of the Church of the Dominion. His work was successful, and before long the Nation possessed a fighting force to be reckoned with―a force Emmanuel Comstock wasted no time in exercising. The newly-reformed Army of the Laurentians attacked the Dutch north of the St. Lawrence, while Admiral Finch’s Red-and-White Fleet inflicted dramatic losses on the Mitteleuropans off Groswater Bay.

During the course of these conflicts Emmanuel Comstock took for his wife a Senator’s daughter, and in the fifth and sixth year of his reign the union produced two sons: Deklan, the eldest, and Bryce Comstock. Emmanuel Comstock was determined that his sons would not be aristocratic idlers, so the brothers were trained from infancy as warriors and statesmen, and as soon as they reached maturity they were given military commissions in order to hone their command skills: Deklan was made a Major General in the Army of the Laurentians, and the younger Bryce received a comparable rank in the Army of the Californias.

Different as the brothers were―the kindly, happily married Bryce and the brooding, solitary Deklan―both proved able-enough commanders. The first Comstock’s victories had pushed back the Mitteleuropans but had not driven them from North America: the Stadhouders, or Dutch Governors, were too firmly entrenched in the vast tracts of northeastern land they had ruled and exploited for so many years. But the Army of the Laurentians, under Deklan Comstock, captured and occupied all of Newfoundland, and the rail link between Sept-Iles and Schefferville passed into American hands.

That was the famous Summer Campaign of 2160. [Described in the novel The Boys of ’60 by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.]

In its wake, core elements of the Army of the Laurentians marched to New York City for a Victory Parade. Soon afterward Emmanuel Comstock died of a fall from his horse while hunting on the grounds of the Executive Palace; and Deklan, by the consent of a passive Senate, assumed the Presidency. [Coincidentally―or so the textbooks say.]

(Here Julian called his listeners into a closer circle, so that his impersonation of Deklan Comstock’s shrill voice and petulant manner would not be overheard by passing officers. Sam was not present, or else he would have put a stop to the proceedings. Sam had already warned Julian against displays of Atheism or Sedition; but Julian saw no reason why his induction into the military should interfere with those interesting hobbies.) Deklan had been competent enough as a figurehead General, but he proved to be a jealous and suspicious President. He was especially jealous of his younger brother Bryce, whom he saw as a potential rival, and it was partly to put Bryce in harm’s way that Deklan conjured up the Isthmian War. [See Mr. Easton’s Against the Brazilians.]

An American warship, the Maude, had exploded while passing out of the Panama Canal―probably due to a faulty boiler; but Deklan Comstock declared it an act of sabotage and blamed the canal’s Brazilian custodians. He wanted the Canal in American hands; and after a keenly-managed campaign the Army of the Californias―under the command of Bryce Comstock―gave it to him.

Panama should have been a fine gem in Deklan’s diadem. But the younger Bryce had frustrated his brother’s dark hopes simply by surviving, and aroused further jealousy by the much-discussed brilliance of his military career.

The Western armies could not march all the way to New York for their celebrations. Bryce was called back to that city alone, ostensibly to have the Order of Merit bestowed upon him. But no sooner had Bryce Comstock left the train than he was surrounded by Eastern soldiers and taken up on charges of treason.

(I will not weary the reader with a description of that “trumped-up” charge, as Julian called it, or the fratricidal logic that transformed a victorious officer into an enemy of the Nation. Suffice to say that the trophy to be placed around the neck of Bryce Comstock went from Gold to Hemp, and that his true reward was a place at the throne of a Ruler more majestic than the reigning Commander in Chief.) And so matters had stood, Julian told his eager listeners, for the last decade―a stalemate in Labrador, a victory on the Isthmus of Panama, and Deklan Comstock growing ever more brooding and self-absorbed in the marbled corridors of the Presidential Palace. At least until last year. America’s acquisition of the Canal had alarmed the Mitteleuropan powers, who were forced to depend ever more heavily on the Northwest Passage for their trade into the Pacific, and they feared American dominance there. So they had fortified their remaining American possessions, enhanced their military and naval forces, and soon enough launched a massive counterattack against the Army of the Laurentians.

“This is the war we are to fight?” asked Lymon Pugh, whose attention had been strained by Julian’s narrative.

“That’s exactly the war we are to fight, and it isn’t going well for us. The Dutch are arrayed in force, we’ve already lost the railroad to Schefferville, and both Quebec City and Montreal are threatened by the enemy. The Army of the Laurentians took heavy casualties last summer, which is why the draft was doubled up.”

“Sounds like we have the short end of the stick, then,” another soldier remarked.

“Perhaps not,” said Julian, for he was not a defeatist, or a friend of the Dutch. “The enemy are well-provisioned, but their supply lines stretch all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and our Navy is making things hot for Dutch shipping. Their army is of a fixed number, while ours is growing. And,” Julian added, grinning broadly, “we’re Americans, and they are not, which makes all the difference.”

There followed a cheer for the Union, and much chest-thumping, and the crowd of draftees went off bragging about how they would rout the enemy, and show the Dutch what American soldiers were truly made of. It was Lymon Pugh, lingering behind, who asked, “How do you know all these things, Julian Commongold? Are you some kind of scholar? You talk like one.”

Julian deflected the question with a shrug. “I’m from New York City―I read the newspapers.”

This put Lymon Pugh’s mind back on the subject of reading, and literacy in general, and he grew thoughtful as we broke for mess.

Of course Julian’s tutorials on the state of the war did not escape the attention of the camp’s ranking officers for long. Word spread, and (according to Sam, who kept his ear to the ground) the Dominion men on the staff were unhappy with Julian for his editorializing, and wanted him to receive a reprimand. But the camp’s military commander vetoed that idea, for Julian was a promising soldier, and his blunt talk had braced the men more effectively than a dozen fire-breathing Sunday sermons.

Sam was not bound by such scruples, and chastised Julian roundly for his loose talk―reminding him that in the long run notoriety might be as dangerous as combat―but Julian paid little attention.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Sam said to me after one of these confrontations. “It’s the Comstock in him.”

“He’ll make a fine soldier, then,” I said.

“Or a famous corpse,” said Sam.

We were scheduled to be shipped east for the spring campaign; but before then, on another Sunday afternoon, Lymon Pugh approached me once again on the subject of reading and writing.

“Thought perhaps I could learn all about it,” he said sheepishly. “Unless I left it too late. What about that, Adam Hazzard? Is it something only children can learn?”

“No,” I said, for I considered myself, in this community, a sort of Evangelist of Literacy. My writing skills had been mooted about, and many of the men came to me to help them read or compose letters. “Anyone can learn it at any time. It’s not especially difficult.”

“Could I learn, then?”

“I expect you could.”

“And will you teach me?”

I was feeling magnanimous―the day was bright, the air had a delicate warmth, and a general languor had descended over the camp (along with the swampy smell of the thawing prairie and an unfortunate breeze from the latrines). I reclined on my cot with my boots off and my toes exposed to the air. Lymon Pugh sat on the cot adjoining, where he greased his rifle in a distracted way, his scarred hands moving almost of their own volition. A charitable act did not seem out of order. “But I can’t do it in one lesson, mind. We’ll have to begin from first principles.”

“I expect we’ll have plenty of time, if neither of us is killed in the war. You can give it to me piecemeal, Adam.”

“In that case we’ll begin with the letters of the Alphabet. The Alphabet is a collection of all the letters there are, and once you learn them no unexpected letters will come along to confuse you.”

“How many of these letters are there?”

“Twenty-six altogether.”

He looked crestfallen. “That’s a large number.”

“It only seems so. Here, I’ll write them out for you, and you can keep this paper and study it.” I took a page from my notebook and copied down all the letters in their large and small incarnations, thus: Aa―Bb―Cc―(etc.) “Seems like you’re wrong on the count,” Lymon Pugh observed when I had finished. “That’s at least fifty, I estimate.”

“No, only twenty-six, but each one comes in a greater or lesser variety, the larger being called a capital letter.”

He studied the page uncomprehendingly. “Maybe we should call this off… it don’t seem like anything I could ever commit to memory.”

“You underestimate yourself. Suppose, while you were wandering east from the Willamette Valley, you came upon a village with just twenty-six people in it, and decided to stay there. You’d learn the names of the whole tribe soon enough, wouldn’t you? And many other things about them.”

“People aren’t scratches on a page, though. People walk about, and talk, and such.”

“Letters may not walk about, but they do talk, for each one represents a sound. Look, we don’t have to introduce you to all twenty-six at once. That would make you like a stranger at a crowded social event, which is always an uneasy experience. Take the first three by themselves, as if they were sitting around a campfire and invited you to join them.”

“This is fanciful.”

“Bear with me. Here is A, and his companion the lesser a,” and I pronounced the sound of the letter and its variations, and instructed Lymon Pugh to repeat them, and to associate the sounds with the letter’s shape, the way he might connect a face with a name. When he had done this satisfactorily we proceeded to blunt, simple Bb and the more elusive and chameleonic Cc. By the time he mastered these three letters nearly an hour had passed, and it seemed to me that Lymon Pugh, like a sponge, had absorbed all the knowledge he had room for at the moment, and any more of it would simply leak out around the edges.

He agreed to defer further instruction until the next lesson―perhaps the following Sunday―but observed, “These are only sounds, and I don’t see how they connect to writing or reading.”

“You can stack and arrange them to make words, ultimately. But don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Is there a word I might make with just these three?”

The only one I could think of was the word CAB, so I wrote that out for him, and he was delighted by it. “Damn if my uncle didn’t drive a cab in Portland some years back, and it was a fine rig, with a four-horse team. I wish I could have written out that word for him! He would have thought I was a Dominion scholar, or an Aristo in disguise.”

“Practice the letters in your spare time,” I said, giving him a blank page to work with, and an extra pencil I had stolen from the Quartermaster’s tent last week previously (because I like to keep a stock of pencils on hand: they’re perishable, and often hard to come by). “You can write CAB,” I said, and showed him, “or cab―they mean the same―but you should practice both.”

“I will,” he said, and after a moment’s pondering added, “But this is too generous, Adam Hazzard. I ought to pay you for all this work.”

I was happy enough that he had got out of the habit of striking me with his fists, and that was all the payment I wished for; but to smooth the awkwardness I said, “There must be many things you know about that I don’t. Someday you can teach me one or two of them.”

He frowned over this idea, taking up his rifle again and finishing its assembly.

Then, as he set aside the last oiled rag, he brightened. “I guess I can tell you how to make a fine Knocker.”

“That might be a good example, since I don’t know what a Knocker is.”

“Oh, well,” (warming to his subject), “I guess anyone can make a crude sort of Knocker―you’ve probably done it yourself, though maybe they call it by some other name in Athabaska. A Knocker, Adam, you know: the thing you use when you want to knock someone about the head.”

“Perhaps if you described it.”

“Put a stone in the end of a sock and you have one. Swing it in a circle and bring it down on the skull of your enemy: bang!”

I was startled by his violent exclamation. “Do you need to do this―very often?”

“Did in the Valley. Most of us boys did, if we wanted to make any money outside of the slaughterhouse, by taking it from drunks, for instance, or when we set to fighting each other. But a stone in a sock is a poor sort of Knocker, the very worst.”

Here Lymon Pugh launched into an exposition of the way to make a superior Knocker, of which the owner might justly be proud. You begin, he said, by cracking a chicken egg, “only not in the usual style: you must crack it very fine at the narrow end, to make a small hole, and then empty out the soft parts and let the shell dry. Then you melt some lead―an old candlestick, a handful of bullets, or some such thing. Bury the shell up to its hole in sand and pour the molten lead inside. You let it settle overnight; then you dig it out and peel away the shell, and what’s inside is a good smooth heavy slug in the shape of an egg. Then you make a sling for it―an old sock won’t do for a respectable man―of pressed leather or strong hemp, and tie it with a leather thatch, and stitch on a bead or a brass button if you’re feeling artistic. The whole assembly tucks into your pocket real neat―it’s not bulky―but a Knocker like that will crack a man’s head just like an egg.”

“Thus bringing the process full circle,” I said, slightly appalled.

“How’s that?”

“Never mind. That’s a fine piece of knowledge, Lymon, and I thank you for it, and I consider myself paid in full, though I don’t have any use for a Knocker right at the moment.”

“That’s all right,” said Lymon Pugh, grinning. “I don’t have anyone to write to, either, except maybe the grocer, or any books to read. But you never know when the Alphabet might come in handy.”

“Or a Knocker,” I said; and then the mess call sounded.

It must not be assumed that our adjustment to the military life was easily made. Many were the nights in that camp on the prairie when I fell asleep with tears trembling in my eyes, thinking of what seemed like a carefree existence back in Williams Ford. If I had been scorned by other boys, or treated roughly in the stables, or nipped by a brood mare now and then, those memories receded, so that all my previous life appeared as one lazy summer on the banks of the River Pine, where squirrels fell from the trees like tropical fruit, and I was forever a-doze in a sun-dappled glade, with a book open on my chest, dreaming of pleasanter wars than this one.

My thoughts turned, too, to the gentler sex, who were in scant supply at the moment, and I wondered if I would ever again be allowed to gaze on a smiling face or examine a pair of feminine eyes from close proximity. The male urge was not dormant in me, and I was afraid I might grow as lonely and desperate as some of my fellow soldiers, who dispelled their lusts in obscene and indescribable pursuits. A copy of Acts Condemned by Leviticus circulated furtively among the men, and I confess I glanced at it once or twice, out of curiosity.

But in general we were kept too busy to feel sorry for ourselves. For many of these men the Army was a marked improvement on the lives they used to live, and had its compensations in regular meals and the small but dependable pay.

We were paid for the first time shortly before we were due to ship east, where there might be an opportunity to spend some of our geld, especially if we were stationed near Montreal or Quebec―or so the speculation ran. In any case it was a novelty to hold cash in our hands. Many of the soldiers promptly sewed the scrip and coin into secret pockets in their ditty-bags, or hid it in their clothing or in makeshift belts tied about their waists. But because the money was a new thing to me―all I had seen of money in Williams Ford was lease-chits and antique pennies―I repaired right away to the dormitory tent to handle and examine it, where Sam and Julian joined me.

“We’re off in the morning,” Sam said as he came in, “for better or worse. Celebrating Easter in Montreal I think. And then battle―the real thing.… What are you staring at so steadfastly, Adam Hazzard?”

“These coins.”

Of the coins I especially liked the largest, the One Dollar coin. It was not as finely wrought as the coinage of the Secular Ancients, but still very neatly pressed and stamped. The dollar contained a measurable amount of real silver, and had milled edges, and vine stalks engraved around the face, and the words In God We Trust written in letters so ornate as to be all but illegible, and in the middle of all this a relief portrait of a stern-looking man with small eyes and a pointed nose. There were silhouettes on the coins of smaller denomination, too, some of which I recognized from illustrations in The Dominion History of the Union as the historic patriots Washington, Hamilton, and Otis; but the face on the Dollar was unfamiliar to me, and when I showed it to Julian he laughed. “So the old villain’s vanity finds yet another expression! That’s my uncle, Adam―Deklan Comstock, or a flattering facsimile of him.”

“He’s on a coin now?”

“A new coin for a new year. And plenty of them, I imagine. The Mint must be working overtime to pay for the war effort.” Julian directed my attention to the obverse of the Dollar, on which was written DEKLAN COMSTOCK POTUS, [President of the United States] and the year 2173, with a representation of two Clasped Hands, signifying the concord of the Armies of the East and West, alongside the stamp of the Boston Mint, and the ambiguous but vaguely threatening legend NOW AND FOREVER.

“Let me see that,” Sam said, and on examining the coin he remarked, “Yes, that’s him, a flattering-enough likeness. He could drill holes in wood with that nose of his. It was Bryce who got all the looks in the family.”

Here we approached territory which I had not dared to explore―that is, the subject of Julian’s family. But I was not a stable-boy right at the moment, and Julian was not an Aristo. We were both soldiers, and would so remain, at least for the duration of our involuntary enlistment. So I dared to ask, “What was your father like, Julian? Did you know him well before he died?”

Sam and Julian exchanged glances.

“I knew him well enough,” Julian said in a softer voice. “I was but eight years old when he died, and he went to war two years before that. To be honest, Adam, he’s more an impression in my mind than a solid memory. He was always kind to me. He never condescended to me, though I was a child, and he was patient enough to explain what I didn’t understand.”

“And your mother?”

To my surprise it was Sam who answered. “Emily Baines Comstock is as fine a woman as you’ll ever meet,” he declared, “and perhaps you will meet her, someday. She’s exactly the kind of woman a man like Bryce Comstock deserved to have at his side, and she loved him dearly, and was inconsolable for a long time after his death. Emily’s more than just beautiful―she’s clever and resourceful.” And here he reddened, and cleared his throat.

“Does she live in the Executive Palace?” I asked.

“There’s a cottage reserved for her on the Palace grounds,” said Sam, “but she keeps a row-house in Manhattan where she prefers to stay. Emily doesn’t care for the rivalries and jealousies of the high-born. She’s happier with artists, actors, scholars―that type of person, from whom she has little to fear.”

“My mother’s a cultured woman,” Julian added, “and doesn’t care to be in the presence of Deklan Conqueror, who is as ignorant as he is villainous.”

That was how Julian had come to be raised in Manhattan, which was where he had seen so many plays and movies, and spoken with Philosophers, and picked up his heretical ideas. “But you must have met your uncle face-to-face,” I said.

“Too often. After my father’s death it was all I could do to restrain myself from calling him a murderer. Oh, those holiday dinners at the Executive Palace! You have no idea, Adam. My mother and I pressed in with Deklan and his crowd of sycophants, while the craven agents of the Dominion blessed his every whim and impulse. We were on display, I think―Deklan’s way of announcing that he could command the loyalty even of his murdered brother’s widow and son. We were powerless against him. He could have snuffed us out at any time. He tolerated my mother because she was a woman, and me because I was a child, and both of us because we were a perverse emblem of his supposed generosity.”

I had touched a hostility that ran deep in Julian, and the edge in his voice was impossible to ignore. The way he spoke of those Palace dinners, and the clergy who presided at them, made me wonder if this humiliation might be the ultimate source of his apostasy. But such speculation was not useful, and I dropped the subject because it made Julian so conspicuously unhappy.

“There!” Sam said. “Do you hear that?”

It was the sound of a train whistle wind-borne over the thawing prairie―not the Caribou-Horn Train that had brought us here from Bad Jump but an Army train, which we would board first thing in the morning, and which would carry us to the battle-front in the East.

“Pack away those Comstock dollars,” Sam said, “or you’ll have nothing to spend on women and liquor by the time we get to Montreal.”

I blushed at his joke, and tried to laugh, though there was more truth in it, ultimately, than I like to admit.

2

The social atmosphere aboard the troop train to Montreal differed in instructive ways from that aboard the Phantom Car. Months had passed since we left Bad Jump, and those of us who had been strangers then had since become, if not friends, at least confederates―intimately known to one another, for better or worse. If we were afraid of the war to which we were being delivered, we kept that tender feeling to ourselves. We sang a great deal, to maintain high spirits, and I was not the prude and child I once had been, and I joined in on the less obscene choruses of Those Two-Dollar Shoes Hurt My Feet. Not because vulgarity had become especially desirable, but because merriment is an antidote to dread.

I noticed, too, how the soldiers often appealed to “Julian Commongold” for an opinion or a verdict in some dispute, and accepted his judgment as settled law. This despite Julian’s evident youth, unsuccessfully disguised by his sparse yellow beard. It was as if he carried around with him an invisible but perceptible aura of authority, which perhaps was what Sam had called “the Comstock in him.” It manifested in his square-set shoulders, his careful grooming, and the easy way he wore the blue-and-yellow uniform of the Infantry. But it was a comradely authority, too, coexistent with his confident sense of himself and the evident pleasure he took in socializing even with those beneath his original station in life. He smiled often, and it was a smile only the most truculent among us could fail to give back.

The train carried us out of the prairie and into a land of forest and lakes. Rain beat down steadily most of the day, but it made no difference to us, for we were inside a fully-equipped passenger car, with protection from the weather. This was train travel as I had always imagined it. I sat at a window watching raindrops glide sideways as we passed in and out of cavernous pine forests and followed the smoky shore of a great gray lake. To the pagans of ancient Rome, Julian once told me, the Easter season had represented Death and Rebirth. Certainly there was no lack of Rebirth in the countryside through which we passed. Ferns unrolled in shady glens, the sodden limbs of trees were budding afresh, and cattails poked through ponded winter marshes. And there was Death, too, if you looked for it, in the occasional ruins we passed―not just old settled basements, as in Lundsford, but whole stone buildings, mossy-green, and once or twice the remains of entire towns, slouching brick boxes that shed raindrops as we rattled past them at thirty miles to the hour. Crows nested in those old buildings, and their eaves were crowned with chalky dung, and the only visitors were the local deer, or an occasional wolf or bear, as might be.

I gazed on many more such overgrown ruins until night fell. It was wholly dark when we approached the outskirts of Montreal, where campfires smoldered in the rainy distance. We heard an occasional growl of thunder (or perhaps it was cannonade), and it was at this point that the singing stopped, and a wary silence replaced it, and we fell into less pleasant reveries about the future and what it might hold for us.

An entire Regiment of draftees had been packed into the train―a big body of men, but it was nothing compared to the great Army assembled by General Galligasken outside of the City of Montreal. Our company was, in the common phrase, “a drop in the bucket”―and it was a large, ungainly bucket, uninterested in welcoming new drips. As soon as we collected our gear and left the train we were conducted to a muddy field in which we were invited to make our own contribution to a sea of tents―nothing but mud and canvas as far (in the rain and the night) as the eye could see. After much flailing about, during which we repeatedly slipped and stumbled in the glutinous muck, and cursed, and were cursed in turn by the soldiers trying to sleep in adjoining quarters, we had erected our own rough sleeping-places, and we tumbled into them fully-dressed, and woke a few hours later when reveille sounded, our uniforms all scabbed with mud.

I could not help looking about curiously as we formed up in companies for roll call. The rain had ceased during the night. The morning was brisk and bright, and high clouds careened across the sky like runaway melon-carts. Everywhere, in every direction, men were being bugled out of bed and mustered up, and regimental flags popped in the breeze with a sound like knots bursting in a pinewood fire. The vast flat field in which we stood was cross-cut with muddy roads, and already horses and mules crowded these paths, straining to pull provision wagons or caissons; and I discerned in the distance the grander tents of regimental and battalion commanders. Otherwise there was nothing but an ocean of soldiers on all sides―infantry, cavalry, artillery. The nearest thing I could see that was not a part of the Army of the Laurentians was a line of low trees, as far away as a cloud seems when it sits upon the horizon.

“Is this Montreal?” I asked Sam. If so, the city was considerably less grand than I had imagined it, though still very large.

“Don’t be idiotic,” Sam said. “The City of Montreal is some miles distant, most of it on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Do you think they would muster so many men in the midst of a modern city? Half of them would be drunk by noon, if that was the case―the other half having absconded to the whore houses. And don’t blush like that, Adam: you’re a soldier now, you ought to be hardened to such things.” [The sensitive reader, not so hardened, may dislike to see rough talk set down verbatim on the innocent page. I apologize, and rest my defense on the cold grounds of veracity.]

It has been said, I forget by whom, that you can’t throw a stone in the City of Montreal without hitting either a church or a whore house. I would soon enough find out for myself the truth of that statement, for it was announced at noon mess that our regiment was to be allowed a supervised leave, and we would be escorted to the city for Easter services in one of the grand ancient Dominion churches there.

“Do Jews celebrate Easter?” I asked Sam as we marched to the outskirts of Montreal. “I don’t suppose they do.”

“It would be surprising if they did,” Sam agreed, “though we have our own holiday about this time of year, which is called Pass-Over.”

“What event does it mark, if not the Crucifixion and Resurrection?”

“The fact that the Jews were exempted from the plagues that fell upon Egypt.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s something to be grateful for,” recalling my Bible studies under Ben Kreel. “Those were unpleasant plagues, and not to be taken lightly.”

“More than unpleasant,” Julian chimed in, and I was glad that the sound of tramping feet, though muffled by the damp ground, was loud enough to prevent anyone eavesdropping while Julian dilated on this delicate subject. “Inventive, I would say, almost to the point of madness. Insects―boils―the butchery of children―such work by any other agency would be considered an example of unexcelled sadism rather than celestial justice.”

I was quietly shocked (though hardly surprised) by this fresh apostasy. “God is jealous by nature, Julian,” I reminded him. “It says so in the text.”

“Oh yes,” Julian agreed, “jealous, certainly, but also forgiving ; merciful, but vengeful ; wrathful, but loving ―in fact just about anything we can imagine Him to be. That’s the Paradox of Monotheism, as I call it. Contrast a Christian with a nature-worshipping pagan: if the pagan’s cornfield is ravaged by a wind-storm he can blame the bad manners of the Cyclone-God; and if the weather is kind he addresses his thanks to Mother Sunshine, or some such; and all this, though not sensible, has a kind of rude logic to it. But with the invention of monotheism a single Deity is forced to take responsibility for every contradictory joy and tragedy that comes down the turnpike. He is obliged to be the God of the hurricane and the gentle breeze together, present in every act of love or violence, in every welcome birth or untimely death.”

“I could do with a little less Mother Sunshine at the moment,” remarked Sam, applying a handkerchief to his brow, for the day had grown warm, and the march was tiring.

“But you can’t blame the Jews for celebrating their exemption from His wrath,” I protested.

“No,” Julian said, “no more than I can blame the sole survivor of a train wreck for crying out a heartfelt, ‘Thank God I was allowed to live!’―though the same God who spared him must therefore have abstained from preventing the wreck, or rescuing any other person from it. The impulse to gratitude on the part of the survivor is understandable, but shortsighted.”

“I don’t see how monotheism makes it any worse, though. It seems to me, once you start multiplying your gods, you might not know just where to stop. A crowd of gods so numerous you can’t recognize most of them seems hardly better than no god at all. Especially once they begin to bicker among themselves. Don’t you often tell me to seek out the simplest explanation for a thing?”

“One is a simpler number than a dozen,” Julian admitted. “But none is simpler than one.”

“That’s enough of this, thank you,” said Sam.

“Why Sam,” said Julian, grinning mischievously, “are you afraid of a little Philosophical Conversation?”

“This is Theology, not Philosophy―an altogether more dangerous subject, Julian; and I’m not so much afraid of the loose talk as I am of the loose tongue behind it.”

“Where is the Dominion that we should censor ourselves?”

“Where is the Dominion? The Dominion is everywhere―you know that! The Dominion is at the head of this very march,” referring to our newly-installed Dominion Officer, one Major Lampret, who strode before us, a handsome man in a handsome uniform. [A Dominion Officer, who is by definition a commissioned officer trained at the Dominion Academy in Colorado Springs, wears the standard uniform of an Infantryman of his rank, but adorned with red-and-purple pipings and blazons, and a pair of silver Angel’s Wings pinned to the chest, and the soft wide-brimmed hat sometimes called a “chaplain’s crown.”]

Julian might have insisted on continuing the conversation, if only for the purpose of aggravating Sam, but by this time we had come upon a great iron bridge, by which we crossed a body of water so immense that I could hardly credit its christening as a River. Vessels from many nations moved beneath that bridge, some with immense white sails and some powered by boilers, some warping toward the Port of Montreal and others bound for the inland Great Lakes trade or for the wide ocean far to the east; and beyond this bridge lay the astonishing City of Montreal, and it was the City that finally drew all of our attention―all of mine, at least.

I would see bigger cities in my life, and travel farther from home; but as Montreal was the first true City I had seen I could not help but contrast it with Williams Ford. By that measure, it was immense. And it had once been even larger, Julian reminded me, for we had all morning passed through a landscape that was essentially one vast Tip, played-out and burned-over, with scrub brush and low trees overlying what must once have been zones of industry or sprawling suburbs. What remained was only the core of the city as it was known to the Secular Ancients, all its rind and peelings having been stripped away.

But that central core preserved many wonderful antique structures. “The buildings are so tall!” I could not help exclaiming, and Julian said, “Though once much taller. Even these buildings have been scavenged, Adam.” He drew my attention from the stark concrete walls, complexly chambered, to the crude peaked roofs above them with their fluted red-clay tiles and slumping chimneys: “You see how the roof is less sturdy than the building under it, though considerably newer? There’s nothing much over four or five stories tall here (yes, yes, ‘tall enough,’ and stop gawking, Adam, you’ll embarrass yourself), but some of these buildings were once almost ten times higher, the greater part of them having been taken down by inches for their wood, wire, and aluminum. Even their steel frames were eventually whittled down and sent to the re-rolling mills, leaving only the subdivided stumps for people to inhabit. If you think this city is magnificent, Adam, conjure up in your mind’s eye the city it once was. Run the decades back and you’d see marvels of steel and glass―man-made mountains―a city halfway to infiltrating the sky itself. New York City is the same,” he added with evident pride, “only larger.”

I was not daunted by his comparisons, however, for modern-day Montreal seemed quite astonishing enough, with its bricked or cobbled streets and busy occupants. Let Julian dwell on the glories of the past―there was enough here to occupy the inquisitive mind.

The people were almost as surprising as the city in which they resided. Because we marched in a unit our regiment made a kind of martial parade, and the inhabitants of the city stood back (not always graciously) to accommodate our passage, while horses and wagons took alternative routes at the sound of our approach. The women of the city wore colorful clothes, dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and seemed both aloof and alluring as they strolled through the vernal sunshine and passed in and out of the innumerable shops and markets. The men dressed more conservatively―more peahen than peacock ―but their trousers and shirts and coats were clean and pressed. Even the children were well-dressed, and only a few of them went barefoot. I asked Julian, “Are these folks Aristos?”

“Some, but mostly not. The eastern cities are not Estates, with a tightly-controlled leasing class. The business of the city requires artisans and laborers to be able to move freely between various jobs, and managers and petty owners can negotiate loans and establish factories or shops as they please, and profit from them. The cumulative effect is a population some of whom are prosperous enough to dress extravagantly―at least at Easter―even though they aren’t propertied in the full sense of that word.”

“Hasn’t the war harmed the city?”

“It’s been a mixed blessing, I gather. In the recent past the city has been exclusively in American hands, and the presence of garrisoned troops has created an economic boom, along with a bumper crop of larceny and vice. Look there, Adam, that should impress you―I believe that’s the cathedral in which we’re supposed to worship.”

After this sarcastic comment I could not admit how astonished I truly was, though Julian laughed once more at my gawking. We had come up a low rise and around a corner into the neighborhood of a huge church. It was the largest I had ever seen―not the largest church but the largest thing I had ever seen, meaning a man-made thing and not an act of nature. [Railroad bridges aside. But even the airy trestle at Connaught, which crosses the River Pine, might have fit inside this cathedral, if properly folded.]

Its spires were tall enough to snag clouds, and I could hardly catch my breath as we marched under its shadow and through the enormous and ornate wooden doors. We paused in the dimness of the foyer, under the direction of Major Lampret, and took off our caps and stuffed them in our pockets, out of respect. Then we passed through a second set of doors into the body of the “cathedral,” as Julian called it, which was like the Dominion Hall back in Williams Ford, if the Dominion Hall had been inflated to monstrous size, its modest walls exchanged for vaulted granite, and its woodwork shaped and polished by an army of imaginative and slightly mad carpenters. Everywhere, in every direction, was filigree, down to the finest scale, and alcoves and cubbies in which more filigree was on display, and candles more numerous than stars in the sky, creating a miasmic odor of smoky wax, and above all this were several great Stained Glass Windows, as tall as the pines of Athabaska, illustrating ecclesiastical themes, and of sun-shot colors so radiant as to seem Edenic.

There was some awed commentary among the troops, few of whom had ever been inside a Cathedral, and several of the men hooted loudly in order to hear their voices come echoing back from the high arched ceiling, until Major Lampret cuffed them into a respectful silence. Then we took our places in the pews.

“Does it gall you,” I whispered to Sam, “to be in such a place for a Christian religious service?”

“I was raised by Christians after the death of my true parents,” he reminded me, “and I’ve been inside many churches on many Easters, and on other occasions too, and I try to conduct myself as a well-mannered guest, if not a genuine devotee. Now be quiet, Adam Hazzard, and listen to the singing.”

As it happened, we were stationed near the choir. At first the choir seemed only a vague crowd dressed all in white. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I realized the choristers were female, and most of them young, and I am ashamed to say that I was pleased by that discovery, for the city women possessed a beauty just as striking (it seemed to me right then) as all the stained glass saints and marble martyrs in Christendom.

Skeptics will put that down to the deprivations of Army life―and there is, of course, some truth to that―but I am convinced there was also an element of Destiny in my fascination, for standing in the front rank of the choir was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

I won’t attempt to set down here the emotions this anonymous woman stirred in me, for the superlatives would embarrass the mature writer. Summoning all my powers of objectivity, then, this is what I saw: a short female person of approximately my own age, in a cloud-white surplice, her body what some might call stout and others would call healthy ; with a pink and radiant face, and large eyes whose color I could not at this distance discern, although I imagined them (correctly, as it turned out) to be a handsome chestnut-brown; and a crown of hair that coiled like a vast collation of ebony springs, the light behind her making a spectacular Halo of it. If she noticed me staring at her, she showed no sign.

I could not distinguish her voice from the voices of the other female choristers, but I was sure it was at least as pure and angelic as the rest. They sang a hymn that was unfamiliar to me, with references to the Fortress of Virtue, the Armory of Faith, and other metaphorical architecture. Then―unhappily, for I was transported by the sound―the singing stopped, and Major Lampret himself stepped up to the pulpit. All eyes were suddenly on him, including those of the choir, and I found myself resenting the trim figure he cut in his Dominion uniform, its angel-wing breast pin glinting in the multicolored light.

Major Lampret, employing his parade-ground voice so as to reach the back pews, explained that the Cathedral, though nominally a Catholic church, had agreed to allow its premises to be used for nondenominational Christian services, Dominion-contrived and Dominion-approved, for the spiritual benefit of such divisions as the Army could spare from duty at the front. He thanked the local clergy for their generosity; then he admonished us all to keep silent, and refrain from eating any food we might have concealed about ourselves, and not to interrupt the service with cries of “That’s so!” or “Go on!” or other vulgar ejaculations, nor to clap and whistle at the end of the sermon, but rather to sit tight and think of Redemption.

Then a local clergyman―a priest, I suppose, for Catholic clergy are so called―mounted the podium and began to read the sermon that had been prepared for him by the Dominion scholars. The lesson bid fair to be a long one―it began with palm leaves, and promised a leisurely route to the Resurrection (which for me was the highlight of the story, for I had always enjoyed picturing the astonishment of observers at the discovery of the Empty Tomb)―and the clergyman had mastered that peculiar ecclesiastical drone which, in combination with the heat, and the fatigue of the march, and the smoky air, caused more than a few nodding heads among his temporary parishioners. Julian, sitting next to me, seemed deeply attentive, but I knew better than to believe the appearance, for Julian had once told me what he did during church services (an Atheist being as much a foreigner in church as a Jew): he passed the time, he said, by imagining the movie he would one day make, The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin, rehearsing in his mind the individual scenes, and the dialogue, and how he might decorate the sets, or work out the plot for maximum drama.

I fought off my own drowsiness by occasionally glancing back at the choir, where the woman who had captivated me stood patiently. She betrayed no boredom with the sermon, though she occasionally cast a glance heavenward, more in exasperation (it seemed) than in prayer, and twice raised her left foot to scratch the calf of her right leg. As the day grew warmer a bead of sweat formed on her forehead and trickled down her cheek, absorbing and reflecting the colorful light. It fascinated me.

An hour passed. The clergyman was halfway through his oration (or so I deduced, since we had got past Judas and were about to embark on the nasty business with Pontius Pilate) when there was a distant crack as of thunder, followed by a low rumbling that traveled up the wooden pews and into our spines. This caused some muttering in the ranks; but the priest carried on regardless, and Sam whispered, “Artillery fire―no danger to us; the Dutch don’t have a cannon capable of reaching Montreal from their trenches.”

That reassured me. A few more minutes passed―the Stations of the Cross were painstakingly negotiated―then came another explosion, nearer this time, causing the clergyman to hesitate and a rain of dust to sift down from the ceiling. “That was close!” I exclaimed to Sam.

He was frowning. “It shouldn’t be possible…”

Major Lampret hushed us. But it came again: a sharp report and a rolling boom, so loud that it seemed to be―perhaps was ―right next door. I heard the distant clangor of fire bells, and someone in the city began to crank a hand siren―a dolorous and eerie sound, which I had not heard before.

Now the regiment stood up in alarm, and the clergyman at the pulpit waved his hands in an urgent but indecipherable gesture, and Major Lampret shouted, “Form up!

Form up and march out, boys, we’re wanted elsewhere, but don’t run, you’ll clog the doors―”

Then a shell struck a deafening blow to the cathedral itself, causing the illustrated windows to shatter and fly inward from their frames. Shards of glass, brightly colored and razor-sharp, cascaded down around us. I saw a man near the pulpit pierced by some crystalline splinter from a glass saint―the wound was almost certainly mortal―and then a general panic began in earnest, despite Major Lampret’s shouted orders. At first I joined the rush for the door. Then I turned back to see what had happened to the fascinating chorister. But she was gone―just a flash of white among a flock of billowing surplices as the choir hurried into an adjoining chamber.

I followed behind Sam and Julian, and had almost achieved the exit, when some force from behind (probably an over eager infantryman) pushed me off-balance, so that I fell, and struck my head on the exquisitely carved backboard of a pew, knocking myself quite unconscious.

I was not out of my senses for long―just long enough to become separated from my regiment.

I raised my head in confusion, aware of the pain in my temple and little more. The great cathedral was still intact, except for the shattered windows, and the stampede had left it almost deserted, save for the priest and a few other clergymen who were attending the wounded man down front. I touched my scalp where it had impacted the pew, and my fingers came back stained with blood. I looked around for Sam, or Julian, or even Lymon Pugh, but they were gone with all the rest―gone back to camp, I guessed, to prepare some response to this fresh Dutch outrage. I was sure they would have taken me with them, except that I had fallen between the rows of pews, and would have been easily missed in the rush. I reasoned that I ought to rejoin my regiment as soon as possible, lest I be set down as Absent Without Leave or marked as a deserter.

But when I stumbled out of the cathedral I was immediately lost. The shelling had caused no little damage in the neighborhood, and the street by which I had arrived here was blocked with debris and partially aflame. City folk rushed about haphazardly, some wounded or burned, and red-painted fire-reels drawn by panting dray horses clattered down the open roadways with their brass bells fiercely clanging. But only certain areas of this vast City had been damaged―it was so large that most of it seemed untouched―and after a brief thought I resolved to work my way north until I came within sight of the iron bridge my regiment had originally crossed. It was with this purpose in mind that I set out along a side street undamaged in the attack, where the four-and five-story concrete buildings had been divided into shops, and the floors above were balconied and iron-railed and decorated with spring flowers. The picturesque alley was not straight, however; it twined like a serpent, and when I reached the next intersection I couldn’t tell which way to go.

In the meantime crowds of city people continued to brush past me. Not a few of them were fleeing the artillery attack in the cathedral district, and they were too absorbed in their own misfortune to notice one dislocated infantryman. I stood helpless in my confusion, until my eyes were drawn by a flourish of white across the way―a surplice robe, as you may have guessed, and it was worn by none other than the woman with the spring-loaded hair and lustrous eyes. I dashed across the street, heedless of the many passing carriages.

“You were in the church!” I said when I reached her; and she turned to squint at me, her small fists clenched in case I proved hostile.

“Yes?” she said brusquely.

“Were you―ah―were you hurt?”

“Obviously I was not,” she replied, in a tone so cool that I supposed she must have grown accustomed to being shelled by the Dutch from time to time, the event being no more surprising to her than a summer squall.

“I was!” I managed to say. “I injured my head!”

“How unfortunate. I hope you recover.”

She turned away.

“Wait!” I said, and gestured back toward the billowing smoke. “What’s happening here?”

“It’s called war, ” she said as if she were addressing an idiot who had inquired about the color of the sky (and in her defense, that must have been how I sounded). “The Dutch have launched an artillery barrage. Though it seems to be finished for the moment. Shouldn’t you be with your regiment, Soldier?”

“I should be; and I would be, if I could find it. Which way is the big iron bridge?”

“There are several, but the one you want is just down that direction.”

I thanked her and added, “May I see you safely home?”

“Of course not,” she said “My name is Adam Hazzard,” I said, remembering the importance of a polite introduction.

“Calyxa,” she said grudgingly―the first time I had heard that interesting name. “Go back to your regiment, Adam Hazzard, and put a bandage on your head. It’s bleeding.”

“You sing very beautifully.”

“Huh,” said she, and walked off without looking back.

It was a brief meeting but a pleasant one, even under these extraordinary circumstances, and as I hurried to the bridge, despite my anxiety, and the blood trickling down my face, and the smoke rising from the city behind me, I thanked Providence, or Fate, or Fortune, or one of those other pagan deities, for having brought the two of us together.

3

“They have a Chinese Cannon,” said Sam.

I had caught up with my regiment, and both Sam and Julian had apologized for not rescuing me, or even noticing that I was missing until after the cathedral was evacuated. I took this as a commentary on the chaos that followed the attack rather than on my own insignificance, and a hearty welcome dispelled any lingering resentment on my part.

I expected we would be thrust into immediate battle, in order to punish the Dutch for their impudence. But a modern Army is a sedentary beast and slow to move. General Galligasken, who commanded the Army in total, was a notoriously cautious leader, reluctant to unleash his forces until every contingency had been accounted for and all preparations were fully in place. It was a tendency that frustrated the Executive Branch, Julian said, but it made Galligasken a popular figure with the troops, who were well-fed under his regime, and whose lives were not recklessly squandered. (The veterans among us had shared stories of the harsh rule of Galligasken’s predecessor, General Stratemeyer, a disciplinarian who squandered thousands of lives in futile and unproductive trench attacks. General Stratemeyer had been killed early last year, when he rode away from his camp to consult a cavalry commander but took a wrong turn, placing him athwart a line of Dutch skirmishers, who were pleased to employ him for target practice.) For these reasons we did not march into battle at once, but sat in camp while scouts and pickets probed the opposing lines, and brought back captives who disgorged useful intelligence about the enemy’s capabilities and intentions. Sam, though still a mere private, worked his connections until he was well-educated about the current state of military affairs. A week after the attack on Montreal the three of us huddled in our tent against another interval of rain, and Sam told us about the Chinese Cannon, while a springtime zephyr whipped the canvas above our heads.

I asked him what made a cannon Chinese, and why it was to be particularly feared.

“The Chinese,” he said, “have been waging wars of their own for many years, and they’re cunning in the production of field artillery, especially long-bore cannonry. Some of these weapons they sell abroad, to help finance their own military expeditions. Chinese Cannons are formidable but very expensive. The Mitteleuropans must have bought one, or are using their own factories to mimic the design.”

“We have artillery pieces aplenty,” I protested, for I had seen them about the camp.

“Many, and well-made,” Sam agreed. “But the Chinese Cannon has a greater range than anything of ours. It can deliver shells and canister deep into an opponent’s territory. I suppose we could build a similar cannon along traditional lines, but it would be clumsy to transport. The genius of the Chinese Cannon is that it quickly breaks down into what are called ‘sub-assemblies,’ which can be moved by horse or rail as easily as a conventional artillery piece.”

“We need to capture or decommission this cannon,” I said firmly.

“Probably General Galligasken has thought of that,” said Julian, “though your reasoning, as far as it goes, is flawless, Adam.”

Sam ignored Julian’s sarcasm and said, “We will do so, or at least make the attempt, but it needs forethought and careful planning. I expect we’ll see action before the week is out. Curb your impatience, Adam―the Dutch are just as eager to get you in their sights as you are to punish them.”

I would punish them grandly, I declared, for it was cowardly of them to have attacked helpless civilians at Montreal (putting Calyxa, among others, at risk). “You’ll see worse things before the Army is done with us,” said Sam; and in that, as in most of his prophecies, he was entirely correct.

The next day the rain stopped, and a few days after that the roads had dried, and General Galligasken himself rode through camp, which we took to be the signal of an impending attack.

I caught a brief glimpse of the General. One wide dirt lane cut through the entirety of the Army encampment, connecting several parade grounds, and it was down this route that General Galligasken rode. Infantrymen pressed the margins of the road on all sides, waving their caps and shouting as the General passed by. I was determined not to miss such a spectacle, and by a determined use of my elbows I made my way to the front of the crowd, or close enough that by some well-timed jumping I could see the whole of the procession.

What surprised me was the General’s relative youth. He was not a young man, especially, but neither was he a grizzled veteran―last year’s campaigns had been a success for the Dutch, Sam had explained, and there were fewer grizzled veterans extant than there ought to have been. Many younger men had been catapulted up the ranks. General Bernard W. Galligasken was one of these, and he cut a sprightly figure in the saddle, smiling serenely at the lapping ocean of infantrymen that surrounded him. He was vain, some said, about his appearance, and certainly his uniform was tailored to within a fine inch, and bright in all its colors. The blue-and-yellow costume suited him, however, and his long hair brushed his stiff starched collar in a jaunty fashion. The alabaster handle of his Porter & Earle pistol glinted from the supple leather holster at his hip, and there was a great deal of stamped metal on his chest, to mark the battles he had endured and the bravery he had displayed in them. His hat was a broad-brimmed extravagance with a turkey feather attached.

(The Chinese Cannon spoke twice during this display, and one of the shells burst less than a quarter of a mile from our camp; but the Dutch did not exactly have our range, because of the great distance from which they aimed and their inability to spot the impacts. It was a haphazard affair, which we all ignored.) [The Cannon, Sam said, used particular and expensive ammunition, which the Dutch were probably hoarding for the more intense fighting to come.] This procession of General Galligasken with his train of subordinates and standard-bearers was a little more “fuss and feathers” than would have been deemed proper back in Williams Ford; but the General was not in camp solely to make a show. He met with his battalion commanders that night in a Council of War. Final plans were laid, and we were instructed by our superiors to “sleep on our arms,” and be ready to move before dawn.

The next morning we marched to battle.

At first it was “route march,” in which we were not held to a strict formation; though our Regiment, aware of its unblooded status, kept up in dignified lines-of-four. Things went slowly in the darkness of the early morning, and the roads were still damp, so that mule trains and horse-drawn wagons struggled in the soft spots. As dawn pearled the horizon the sound of marching feet, creaking leather, rattling canteens and tinkling spurs was joined by an incongruously joyful chorus of bird song. It was spring, and the birds were nesting, unaware that their homes might be destroyed by cannonade or rifle fire before the day or the season was out.

The territory through which we passed had been overbuilt in the days of the Secular Ancients, but only a few traces of that exuberant time remained, and a whole forest had grown up since then, maple and birch and pine, its woody roots no doubt entwined with artifacts from the Efflorescence of Oil and with the bones of the artifacts’ owners. What is the modern world, Julian once asked, but a vast Cemetery, reclaimed by nature? Every step we took reverberated in the skulls of our ancestors, and I felt as if there were centuries rather than soil beneath my feet.

The skirmishing began as soon as the sun cleared the horizon, or perhaps it had begun sooner, since we were in the rear of the advance and the hilly terrain around us obscured the sounds of battle. In fact the battle announced itself like a coming storm, by a series of ominous signs: first, the pall of smoke over the hilly ground ahead of us; second, the low growl of artillery; third, the crackle of small-arms fire; fourth, the acrid smell of gunpowder. These tokens of conflict increased in volume and intensity as the sun rose, and then we began to see a sight that disheartens any soldier: wagonloads of casualties being carried to the rear. “It must be fierce fighting,” I said in a low voice, as a canvas-back Dominion wagon (as these makeshift ambulances were called) jounced past, its passengers concealed but their groans and screams all too audible on the morning air.

Then we topped another hill, and the battlefield was briefly laid out before us like a game board―much of it, however, masked by smoke. I thought I saw General Galligasken observing from this same ridge, and our longest-range cannons were here arrayed, banging and recoiling repetitively. Down below were the nearest of the enemy’s trenches.

It was my first glimpse of the Dutch. [Or “Deutsche,” as they are more properly called, for Germany is the heart and brain of Mitteleuropa, and “Deutsche” is another name for the German language. But many of the foreign soldiers in Labrador, and most of the foreign settlers, were former residents of the Netherlands, which had lost much of its land to the sea in recent times.]

I could hardly contain myself at the sight of their massed army. All my life I had heard of the vicious and aggressive Mitteleuropans, until they became a kind of legend to me, often cited but never seen. But here they were in the flesh, and even at this great distance, through the coiling smoke and the air hot with gunfire, I caught glimpses of their characteristic black uniforms and blue helmets, and their curious cross-and-laurel flags.

They seemed from this height to be in well-defended positions, with their trenches arranged in a broad semicircle dotted with lunettes and redoubts and abatisses, each end anchored against a riverbank firmly controlled by enemy artillery. Currently an American division was making a brazen frontal attack, with some diversionary skirmishing at the sides. The attack was not going well, however, to judge by the numerous corpses already littering the ground before the Dutch entrenchments.

Sam leaned close to Julian and asked, in his tutelary voice, “What do you see?”

“A battle,” Julian said. His voice was unsteady, and I had seldom seen his face so bloodless, though he was pale by nature.

“You can do better than that! Keep your wits about you, and tell me what you see !”

Julian suppressed his fear with a visible effort. “I see… well, a conventional attack… boldly conducted, but I can’t imagine why the General is wasting so many troops this way… there seems to be no strategy about it, only brute force.”

“Galligasken is a cannier officer than that. What do you not see, Julian?”

Julian gazed a little longer, then nodded. “The cavalry.”

“And why would Galligasken not put his cavalry into battle?”

“Because they’re elsewhere. You’re implying that he does have a strategy, and that it involves our mounted forces.”

“That, at least, is what I’m hoping.”

It was true that the fight seemed bold but in effective. The American attack began to buckle as we watched―one of our veteran divisions had come under especially galling fire, and the commander failed to rally his troops. A standard-bearer fell; his flag was not recovered. Terrified men lay motionless or turned and dashed for the rear, and it might have been the beginning of a rout, except that our regiment was sent into the fray as reinforcements.

A soldier whose arm had been shattered walked past me as we advanced into the smoke and noise. His left forearm was all but detached―connected to its elbow by a few mucilaginous strings―and he clasped it against his belly with his right hand as a child might clutch a bag of candy to protect it from thieving playmates. His uniform was thoroughly doused with blood. He seemed not to see us, and although he opened his mouth repeatedly no sound emerged from it.

“Don’t look at that man!” Sam scolded me. “Eyes ahead, Adam!”

Sam was the only soldierly one among us. He advanced in a crouch with his Pittsburgh rifle held steadily. The rest of us moved across this scarred meadow like cattle up a slaughterhouse chute (a process Lymon Pugh had described to me). Our company commander shouted at us to stop bunching together or be killed like geese, and we separated, but reluctantly. At such a time any normal person craves the presence of another human being, if only to have something to hide behind.

We were protected for a time by the thick pall of smoke, stinking of cordite and blood, that lay over the battlefield, though shells from enemy artillery exploded around us at intervals and some in our company were wounded by the shrapnel. But as we approached the enemy’s lines volleys of bullets flew past at close proximity, and our company was not exempt from casualties. I saw two men fall, one wounded in the face, and one of our men who had been in the vanguard we re-encountered as a corpse in a bomb-crater, his vitals so widely scattered over the bloody earth that we had to step carefully to avoid treading on his steaming viscera. This was so irregular that I became convinced that I was mad, or that the world had suddenly become so. War, in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, was not conducted with such savagery. Mr. Easton’s wars allowed for bravery, pluck, patriotism, and all that tribe of reassuring virtues. The present war seemed to make no such allowances; it was purely a matter of killing, or being killed, as chance and circumstance would have it. I kept my rifle at the ready, and twice fired at wraiths in the smoke, without any way to determine whether the shot went home.

Among my swirling thoughts was a passing concern for Julian. I could not help thinking of the time we had spent hunting squirrels and other game back at Williams Ford, and how Julian had enjoyed every part of those expeditions except the killing. He was one of those gentle souls who instinctively recoil from death and who dread inflicting it on others. This was not Cowardice but a species of Innocence―an admirable if innate tenderness of feeling, which I suspected was about to get him killed.

At that moment a wind sprang up, clearing some of the haze from the becalmed, though savagely active, battlefield. With the next gust the nearest lines of the Dutch defenders were revealed to us in stark clarity, as if a curtain had been drawn. A line of rifle-barrels protruded from earthen breastworks like quilly spines from a porcupine, and these were hastily leveled at us, now that visibility permitted careful aiming; and smoke erupted from their barrels.

“Down!” Sam shouted―forgetting for the moment that he was not the company commander, but only an ordinary soldier. Nevertheless it was sturdy advice, which we all obeyed. We dropped: most of us voluntarily, though several fell in a fashion that indicated they might not rise again. The Dutch bullets whined past us with maddening insectile noises, “mosquito-voiced but deadly in their flight,” as Mr. Easton once wrote, in this case correctly. We hugged the ground as if the familiar metaphor of Mother Earth had become a fact―suckling pigs could not have been more intimately connected to their maternal sow.

All of us except Julian. As soon as I dared to look up, I was shocked to find him still standing.

That image of Julian has been so deeply impressed upon me that, to this day, I see it from time to time in dreams. He had washed and dried his uniform just yesterday, anticipating battle as if it were a social soiree, and despite the rigors of the march he seemed as clean and unspoiled as a stage-soldier in some New York operetta. He frowned as if what confronted him was not the barbarous enemy but an especially perplexing puzzle, which required deep thought to work out. He held his rifle at ready but didn’t aim or fire it.

“Julian!” cried Sam. “For the love of God! Down!”

The love of God did not add any weight to the admonition―Julian had always been impermeable to God, and just now it seemed he might also be impermeable to bullets. The volleys surged around, and kicked up dirt at his feet, without interfering with his person. By this time nearby soldiers had noticed him standing like a sentinel in the rain of sizzling lead; and we waited for what seemed an inevitable lethal impact, already impossibly postponed.

For the Dutch shooters were finding their range as the air cleared. A bullet like a flicking finger tugged at the collar of Julian’s uniform. Another doffed his cap for him. Still he didn’t move. The spectacle entranced us all, and small appreciative or despairing cries of “Julian Commongold!” began to sound above the clamor of battle. He stood and kept standing―it was as if an angel had dropped down to Earth in the guise of a foot soldier―the crude material world couldn’t touch him, and he was as immune to bloodshed as an elephant to flea-bites.

Then a bullet creased his ear. I saw it happen. There was no impact, since the bullet passed through the fleshy part of the lobe, spraying just a little blood; but Julian turned his head as if he had been tapped on the shoulder by an invisible adjutant.

The contact shook him into a fresh awareness of his situation. He did not drop to the ground, however. It was only that his puzzled frown evolved into a grimace of anger and disdain. He lifted his rifle with grave deliberation, sighted it on the enemy breastworks, and fired.

Though Julian had said nothing, the men around him reacted as if he had given an order to advance. Our standard-bearer, who was hardly more than a dozen years old, leapt up and ran forward with the regimental flag in his hands. The rest of us fired our weapons almost in unison, and then joined the charge, whooping.

The smoke of battle provided cover enough that we came close to the Dutch entrenchments without being decimated, and our reckless charge had a greater than anticipated effect. Only a moment seemed to pass before we were athwart the Mitteleuropan trenches, firing our Pittsburgh rifles with abandon or dropping to reload them with fresh cassettes. The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it―well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn’t be placed at my feet.

This private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose.

I lost sight of Julian in the melee, and in truth I could not spare much thought for him at this chaotic moment. Even today the memory is little more than a collage of noise and ugly incidents. The battle evolved quickly, or took forever―in all honesty I cannot say which―and then we heard a new and alarming sound. It was a sort of gunfire: not the sharp report of a Pittsburgh rifle but a staccato chain of gunshots, sustained for seconds and then repeated.

Sam explained later what had happened. General Galligasken had sent his cavalry out on a flank attack against the Dutch positions―hardly an unusual maneuver; but the cavalry had been training in secret with a new weapon, which was our answer to the Chinese Cannon.

This weapon, which came to be called the Trench Sweeper, was a heavy rifle with an enormous cassette the size and shape of a pie-plate, which fed bullets to its chamber and fired them in rapid succession―a volley of gunshots continuing for as long a time as the trigger was depressed. The Porter & Earle Works had produced relatively few of these guns, but a number of them had been distributed to Galligasken’s cavalry division for occasions such as this.

The cavalry, riding into the Dutch at their flanks, encountered a fierce resistance; but the Dutch commander had been fooled by Galligasken’s frontal attack, and he had weakened his left and right in order to shore up the center. A good many American cavalrymen were killed before the Dutch defenses were penetrated, but eventually the Trench Sweepers were brought to bear, and the resultant rain of fire caused enemy troops to panic and abandon their positions in increasing numbers. Before long they were fleeing across the river at which they had made their stand. Scores of them were drowned in the process, and their bodies littered the shore like branches from a thunderstruck tree.

It was a rout, ultimately. More than a thousand of the enemy were killed, and twice that number were taken prisoner. Our own corpses numbered just a little over five hundred.

General Galligasken ordered a pursuit of the fleeing Dutch army, and captured a few stragglers and some supply wagons and horses; but the main column disappeared into the hills and forests, and Galligasken wisely held back, fearing an ambush, and was content with the spoils of the day. This was eventually called the Battle of Mascouche (“Mascouche” being the name of a nearby Tip). It was a stirring victory, all in all, except that we did not capture the Chinese Cannon; it had been kept to the rear of the action, and was dismantled and spirited away before we could reach it.

In the aftermath of the battle I found Sam and Julian, both more or less un-hurt, and we made a new camp on the riverside as supplies were trucked forward and field hospitals established for the wounded. By nightfall we had been fed, and were resting in our tents. It was an incongruously warm, benevolent evening, sweet as April butter, and the moon was bright and cheerfully indifferent to the shed blood congealing beneath it.

Julian said very little that evening. In truth, although he had survived the fight with only a nick to his earlobe, I was afraid for him. It seemed that something just as vital as blood had drained out of him during the exciting events of the day.

As we were getting ready to sleep he leaned from his bedroll and whispered, “I don’t know how many men I killed today, Adam.”

“Enough to help ensure a victory,” I said.

“Is it really a victory? What we saw today? It more closely resembled a fire in a charnel house.” He added, “It’s a bitter thing to kill a stranger―worse to kill strangers beyond counting.”

He was speaking hyperbole; but the very flatness of his voice suggested a grievance too deep for words. And to a degree I shared it. To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one’s fellow man―even a fellow man striving to do the same to you―creates what might be called an unassimilable memory : a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.

“We can never again be what we once were,” Julian whispered.

I sat up indignantly. “I’m still just Adam Hazzard. Adam Hazzard from Williams Ford hasn’t gone away, Julian. He just went to war. Someday he’ll go somewhere else. New York City, perhaps.”

Julian evidently took some comfort from my crude philosophizing, for he grasped my hand warmly, and said in a trembling voice, “Thank you for saying so.”

“Sleep on it,” I suggested. “Perhaps we won’t have to kill anyone tomorrow, and you can get some useful rest.”

But I couldn’t take my own advice―couldn’t sleep, despite my exhaustion, any more than Julian could; so we lay awake while the moon shone down on the battlefield where we had driven back the Dutch, and on the hospital tents with their detritus of severed limbs, and on the river that flowed somewhat bloodstained to the mighty St. Lawrence and all the way to the shoreless sea.

4

Because of General Galligasken’s humanitarian concern for the Army of the Laurentians we were not obliged to fight the following day, nor did we march in pursuit of the enemy, but stayed where we were, and buried our dead, and consolidated our defenses in case the Dutch attempted a counterattack.

In another month or less this land would be a steaming Gehenna, hospitable only to the mosquitos and the horseflies that feed on human and animal flesh; and our marches, should we make any, would be mortal contests of endurance. Already the hospital tents, where they were not wholly preoccupied with wounded men, hosted a number of invalids down with “the summer complaint,” and there was the ever-present danger of an outbreak of cholera or some other communicable disease. We drew water from local streams to drink, for the Army barrel-water was stagnant and fusty; and we hoped for the best.

But the weather held calm and pleasant for a few days more. On Sunday afternoon after Dominion services a general lassitude fell over the camp, and I wandered among the tents like an Aristo strolling through his garden (though aristocratic gardens are generally more pleasing to the nose than military encampments).

It was while I was strolling, and sampling the sunshine, and humming tunes to myself, that I heard a noise which puzzled and interested me.

There are all sorts of noises around an army camp: army engineers banging wood for inscrutable purposes, army blacksmiths bending horseshoes on an anvil, infantrymen at target practice, and any number of other clattery pursuits. But most of those sounds had abated on account of the Sabbath. What I heard was a sound that could be mistaken, at a distance, for the irregular knocking of a woodpecker on a tree, or a boy drummer unsuccessfully attempting some novel rhythm. But the sound had a brittler, more mechanical quality than that; and once my curiosity was engaged I could think of nothing else but to track the noise to its source.

Its approximate source, I soon discerned, was a square canvas tent situated up a sloping meadow that became, farther east, a respectable hill. The tent’s flaps were open so I wandered past it, hands clasped behind my back, feigning indifference but sparing a subtle glance or two inside. But it was difficult to see inside in any meaningful way―my vision was hampered not just by the shade of the canvas but by an obscuring miasma of tobacco and hemp smoke, which wafted into the sunshine in coiling exhalations as if the tent itself were alive and breathing―and I had to make several passes before I could discern the agency responsible for so much smoke and noise: it was a man seated at a flimsy wooden table, working a machine.

My effort to remain inconspicuous was apparently not successful, for on my seventh or eighth pass the mysterious man called out, “Stop hovering there, whoever you are!” His voice was rough, and he spoke with a nasal accent not unlike Julian’s. “Come in or go out―I don’t care which―but choose one.”

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I said hastily.

“I was disturbed before you came along; don’t take all the credit… What are you staring at?”

“That machine,” I admitted, taking an uninvited step into the shade, and resisting the temptation to hold my breath. As my vision adapted to the dim light I could see that the man had equipped himself with an ashtray, pipe, leather poke-bag, and a flask that added the astringent odor of alcohol to the already dizzying assortment of musks in the air. He was not dressed as an infantryman, and in fact he seemed to be a civilian. His clothes were threadbare and patched but must have been respectable at one time. He wore a narrow hat slouched over his eyes.

But this was only a sparing assay of the man, for I was much more interested in the machine.

The machine, though not much larger than a generously-proportioned bread box, was as intricate as a pocket watch turned inside-out, finished in black enamel and studded with round ridged buttons on which letters were etched, one per key. A sheet of paper was squeezed around a cylinder like a rolling pin set behind all this, and words were printed on the page.

“It’s a typewriter,” the man said. “I suppose they don’t have typewriters in whatever hamlet you hail from.”

I ignored this implied insult to Williams Ford and said, “You mean it’s a printing press? Are you making a book?” (For I had not yet inquired into the mechanics of book-making, and I guessed this might be the way books were manufactured: by grubby men copying them one letter at a time.) “Do I look like a publisher to you? You ought not to impose on my hospitality and then insult me.”

“My name is Adam Hazzard,” I said.

“Theodore Dornwood,” he muttered, and returned his attention to the business before him.

“That’s an admirable machine,” I persisted, “even if it’s not a printing press. What do you do with it? Do you make signs or notices?”

“I’m not a publisher, I’m not a sign-maker, and I’m not even a company clerk. My station in life is below all those. I’m a writer.”

That startled me―I had never seen a writer before, nor met anyone who described himself as one. My eyes widened; and I exclaimed without much in the way of forethought, “So am I!”

Mr. Dornwood caught the smoke from his pipe the wrong way and began to cough.

“At least,” I added, “that’s my ambition. I mean one day to write books such as the ones by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton―I assume you’ve heard of him?”

“Of course I’ve heard of him. His books litter all the stalls in Hudson Street.”

“Where is Hudson Street, then?” (Thinking that if this street were in Montreal I might be willing to part with some of my Army pay in order to catch up with Mr. Easton’s recent work.) “Manhattan,” Mr. Theodore Dornwood said, casting a glance at the page in his typewriter with a certain rueful longing.

“You’re a New York writer, then?”

“I correspond for the Spark.”

The Spark was a New York City newspaper. I had never seen a copy―of the Spark, or any other newspaper―but Julian had mentioned it once or twice as a popular if vulgar daily journal.

“Is that what you’re doing now―corresponding?”

“No! Just at the moment I’m passing the time with every idle infantryman who happens to wander by; but I was working, curiously enough, before you began hovering at the tent-flap.”

Since Theodore Dornwood came from Manhattan I was tempted to ask whether he had met Julian Comstock there, or passed him on the streets; but I remembered that any careless identification of Julian as a Comstock might attract the attention of Julian’s murderous uncle. [And Deklan Conqueror must be uniquely sinister, I had lately thought, if he was more dangerous to confront than a legion of armed and angry Dutchmen. The difference, Sam explained, was that our enlistment would only last a year or so, while the threat from Julian’s uncle would persist throughout his reign.]

Therefore I left Julian’s name out of the discussion and said, “Well, I wish I had a machine as fine as that one. Do all New York writers own one?”

“The privileged few.”

“How does it work?”

“You push the keys―like this, see?―and the letters are impressed on the paper―at least when the operator is allowed sufficient privacy in which to work.”

“Isn’t it a slow process, compared to handwriting?”

“Faster, if you’re trained to it, and the finished manuscript is easier to set as copy… Hazzard, you said your name was? Are you the soldier who’s been teaching these country boys their letters?”

The lessons I gave Lymon Pugh had been so successful that a few other infantrymen had begged to be included. I was pleased that Mr. Dornwood had heard of me. “I’m the one.”

“And you write, too?” He inhaled from his pipe and gave out a Vesuvius-load of smoke. The pungent air in the tent was beginning to make me feel light-headed, though it seemed to have no such effect on Dornwood, who must have saturated himself in his vices so long that he had acquired an immunity to them. (He wasn’t old, in the sense that Sam Godwin was old, but he was at least ten years older than myself―old enough to be hardened to his own bad habits.) “What are you working on at the moment, Adam Hazzard?”

I blushed at the question and said, “Well, I do keep paper and pencils handy… though I don’t have a writing-machine with springs and levers… I mark down a word or two from time to time…”

“No modesty between scribblers,” said Dornwood. “Fiction, is it?”

“Yes―a story about a Western boy kidnapped by Chinese traders, and taken to sea against his will, and when he escapes his captors he falls in with pirates, but what they don’t know is―”

“I see. And how many pirates have you met, Adam Hazzard?”

The question took me by surprise. “In life? Well―none.”

“But you must have studied them extensively, from a distance?”

“Not exactly―”

“Well, are you absolutely sure pirates exist ―since they’re so foreign to your experience? No, don’t answer that; I’m making a point. Why write about pirates, Adam, when you’re embedded in an adventure at least as momentous as anything C. C. Easton ever imagined?”

“What are you saying―that I should write about the war? But I’ve only seen a little of it.”

“No matter! Write what you know : it’s one of the abiding principles of the trade.”

“The worse for me, then,” I said ruefully, “for I don’t know much at all, when you come down to it.”

“Surely everybody knows something. The Battle of Mascouche, for instance. Weren’t you in the thick of it?”

“Yes, but it was my first.”

“Wouldn’t it be a sensible exercise to set down in pencil what happened on that day? Not what happened to the Army of the Laurentians―leave that to the historians―I mean what happened to you ―your personal experience.”

“Who would be interested?”

“It would be an exercise in writing, if nothing else. Adam,” he exclaimed, standing up from his desk, and flinging an arm around my shoulders in a surprising display of conviviality, “why are you wasting your time here? A writer must write, first and last! Don’t squander precious minutes gazing at my typewriter―or worse, touching it―now is the time to hone your literary skills, while the Dutch are quiet and the weather’s fair! Take up your humble pencil, Adam Hazzard, and set down in all the detail you can remember the events of a few days past.”

This made immediate sense to me―in fact I was excited by his suggestion, and reproached myself for not having thought of such an exercise before. “And when it’s done, shall I show it to you?”

He sat back down as if the wind had gone out of him. “Show it to me?”

“My account of the battle. So that you can point out what an experienced writer might have done differently.”

Mr. Dornwood knotted his brows and looked uncomfortable; then he said, “Well, all right… I suppose you can bring it to me next Sunday, if neither of us is killed by then.”

“That’s very generous!”

“I’m a well-known saint,” said Dornwood.

I meant to go straight to my tent and practice my literary skills as Dornwood had suggested, but on the way back I was distracted by a crowd of men who had gathered around the tent of Private Langers.

Langers, the reader will remember, was a passenger on the Caribou-Horn Train: a colporteur, as he pleased to call himself, who had been in the business of selling religious pamphlets on delicate topics to lonely men, who enjoyed the printed illustrations for reasons not necessarily allied to piety or faith. Private Langers had been put out of that trade by conscription, and he was just another infantryman now. But his entrepreneurial instincts had survived the transformation, and it seemed like he was back in business―some kind of business―judging by the eager crowd around him.

I asked another soldier what was going on.

“Langers was on burial duty,” the man said.

“Surprising that that should have made him so popular.”

“He collected all sorts of things from the bodies of dead Dutchmen. Jackets and hats, badges and wallets, eyeglasses and glass eyes, brass buckles and leather holsters…”

Enemy armaments had to be handed over to the Quartermaster, but everything else, I gathered, was fair game for the burial detail. I knew that men were often tempted to take a souvenir or two from their fallen foes, if their stomachs were strong enough for the treasure-hunt. But he had gone far beyond that modest impulse. He had harvested the fields of the fallen with a bushel basket, and put the culled trinkets on display. Dozens of Dutch prizes were arrayed on a blanket in front of his tent, under a sign which read: EVERYTHING $1.

It seemed to me an odd price. A few of the objects were obviously worth more than that, such as the collections of Dutch coins, which could be traded in Montreal for legal tender. But most were worth much less. The jackets almost all had bullet-holes in them, for instance; and even the glass eye, though lifelike, was cracked. But there was a trick to it, the soldier next to me explained.

“It don’t mean you pay a dollar and take what you like. Everything has a number beside it, written on those scraps of paper. And Langers has a jar, with similar scraps inside it. When you pay your dollar he says, ‘Reach into the jar,’ and you do so, and you pull out a number and find out just what it was you bought. It might be something good, like that mermaid buckle there. But it might be a sad little leather bag, or a shoe with a hole in it.”

“Isn’t that Gambling?”

“Hell no,” the soldier said, “it’s not half as much fun.”

I had been warned against gambling all my life, both by my mother and by the Dominion Reader for Young Persons, though the only gambling I had ever seen first-hand was the kind the indentured folks indulged in, betting tobacco or alcohol on dice or cards. Most of those games ended in fist fights, and I was never tempted by them. But Private Langers’s pick-a-number enterprise was more difficult to resist. I was curious about the Dutch, and felt that I ought to know a thing or two about the people I had been shooting at and, occasionally, killing. To own one of their possessions seemed almost a religious act (if I can be excused that small apostasy), like the custom primitive peoples have of eating their enemy’s hearts―a more Christian enactment of the same urge.

So I pushed to the front of the crowd, and took a Comstock dollar from my pocket, and paid it over for the privilege of reaching into Private Langers’s Lucky Mug. The number I retrieved was 32, which corresponded to a small leather satchel, much-scuffed and disappointingly slender. This was not, by any standards, a valuable thing to have bought―and Langers smiled with satisfaction as he tucked away my dollar and handed over the satchel. But my disappointment didn’t last; for the satchel, when I opened it, contained a letter, apparently written by a Dutch soldier shortly before his death. Again, this had no monetary value, and Langers had every reason to crow over the bargain; but as a souvenir of a man’s life, and a glimpse into the habits of the Mitteleuropan infantry, the letter interested me terrifically.

I unfolded the two closely-written pages I had bought, and thought about that deceased Dutchman putting his pen to paper, little suspecting that his words would become the property of a Williams Ford lease-boy (much less the booty of a corpse-looting colporteur). I took the letter to my tent and stared at it for nearly an hour, thinking about fate, and death, and other weighty and Philosophical subjects.

Lymon Pugh came by as I was deep in these reveries, and I showed him the letter.

He puzzled over it a moment. “My lessons in reading don’t seem to have advanced this far,” he said.

“Of course you can’t read it. It’s written in Dutch.”

“Dutch? They don’t just speak that noise, they also write it down?”

“That’s their habit, yes.”

“But you know all your letters, Adam: can’t you decipher it?”

“Oh, I can read the letters all right―so can you, though you might not be accustomed to cursive script. This word here, for example: L-I-E-F-S-T-E―those are all familiar letters.”

“I can’t make out what they spell, though.”

“It looks like it might be pronounced leafst. Or leaf-stee, depending on how they use their terminal vowels.”

Lymon Pugh looked scornful. “That’s not a word.”

“It’s certainly not a word in English; but in Dutch―”

“If they’re going to write out letters, why can’t they do it decently? No wonder we have to fight them. But I suppose it’s not meant to be understood. Not by the likes of us, at least. Perhaps it’s a code. Maybe what you have there is a plan of action, written from one Dutch General to another.”

That had not occurred to me. The suggestion was troubling, and I determined to show the letter to Major Ramsden of our regiment. Major Ramsden spoke a little Dutch, since his father had been a stranded Dutch sailor, and it was Ramsden who interrogated captured prisoners in their own language.

I found him dozing in his tent, taking advantage of the Sabbath calm, and he was not delighted to see me; but he agreed to look at what I’d brought him.

When I handed him the letter he turned it half-sideways, and squinted at it, and ran his fingers over it, and hummed to himself at length. He was so reluctant to render a translation that I wondered whether he might be illiterate―able to speak Dutch but not read it. But when I hinted at that possibility he gave me a venomous look, and I let the matter drop.

I have preserved the letter through many years, and it sits beside me as I write, and this is how it looked, though the ink is faded now and some of the letters are uncertain: Liefste Hannie (it began), Ik hoop dat je deze brief krijgt. Ik probeer hem met de postboot vanuit Goose Bay te versturen.

Ik mis je heel erg. Dit is een afschuwelijke oorlog in een vreseleijk land―ijzig koud in de winter en walgelijk heet en vochtig in de zomer. De vliegen eten je levend, en de bestuurders hier zijn tirannen. Ik verlang er zo naar om je in mijn armen te houden!

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Major Ramsden frowned some more, and looked at me resentfully; then he said, “It’s all about how he hates America.”

“He hates America?”

“They all do―the Dutch.”

“What does he hate us for?”

Major Ramsden squinted at the text.

“For our freedoms,” he said.

This had been the subject of today’s Dominion Service, by coincidence: our God-given freedoms, enumerated, and the enemy’s instinctive hatred for them. “Does he say which freedoms upset him so? Is it the Freedom of Pious Assembly? The Freedom of Acceptable Speech?”

“All those.”

“And what about this?”

I pointed out the second sheet of the letter, on which the Dutchman had committed a drawing. The pen sketch was ambiguous: it appeared to show some sort of animal, or perhaps a sweet potato, with spots and a tail. Under it was written: Fikkie mis ik ook!

“It says, ‘All Americans are dogs,’ ” the Major explained.

I could only marvel at the fanaticism of the Mitteleuropans, and at the unreasoning hatred their rulers had instilled in them.

5

For the next few months our Regiment was largely exempted from the war, though not from its consequences. It was explained to us in a series of general camp meetings that the Dutch attack on Montreal , as it turned out, had been little more than a feint by a few divisions of the Mitteleuropan army. The real action was at the Saguenay River where it entered the St. Lawrence east of Quebec City. That was where our freshwater navy under Admiral Bolen fought a pitched battle with a fleet of heavily-armored enemy gunboats, which had been assembled in Lake St. John by the stealthy Dutch. We had lost many a vessel in that encounter; and the burning wrecks, some still flying the Thirteen Stripes and Sixty Stars, had been seen floating down the St. Lawrence like the candled boats the Japanese launch in honor of their dead. [Mr. Easton describes this poignant custom in his novel of 2168, A Union Sailor in the Orient.]

The Dutch proceeded to build fortifications near Tadoussac overlooking the river, and brought up their best artillery, including a Chinese Cannon, to harass Union traffic and strangle American trade, and it quickly became apparent that the purpose of the Campaign of 2173 would be to reduce these fortifications while maintaining a protective cordon around both Montreal and Quebec City.

Much of the Army of the Laurentians, therefore, was put aboard boats and shipped east to participate in the land battle. But Montreal itself must still be garrisoned, and that responsibility fell to the less seasoned troops, which included our Regiment of western conscripts.

I was sad not to be included in the summer action, but Julian scoffed at that sentiment, and said we were lucky, and that if our luck held we might be released from the military without seeing more bloodshed than the Battle of Mascouche, and that would be a fine thing. But my patriotism, or naïveté, burned more brightly than Julian’s, and I was occasionally distraught to think of all the Dutchmen being killed by other soldiers, creating a shortage for the rest of us.

And yet it was not all bad news, for we would be allowed many recreational leaves in the City of Montreal that summer, and I was eager for another chance to meet with Calyxa, and perhaps even to learn her last name.

Our first leave was nearly canceled, however, because of an event which involved Julian and cast a pall over the entire camp.

A new-fashioned Colonel, lately assigned from New York City , had decided our encampment ran too close to our breastworks, and I was assigned to help relocate the offending tents. The tents by this time had taken on all the qualities of Homesteads, however, with rude cooking-pits, flues made of mud, lines strung to dry laundry, and all such small domestic entanglements; thus the work had lasted well into the night, and I had not had very much sleep when I was awakened by Sam Godwin’s hand on my shoulder the following morning.

“Wake up, Adam,” he said. “Julian needs your help.”

“What’s he done now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes with hands still gritty from the night’s work.

“Only the usual intemperate talk. But Lampret has got wind of it, and Julian has been called to the Major’s headquarters for what Lampret calls ‘a discussion.’ ”

“Surely Julian can handle a discussion all by himself? I would like to sleep an hour longer, and then go down to the river to bathe, if it’s all the same.”

“Bathe later! I’m not asking you to go with Julian and hold his hand. I want you to conceal yourself outside Lampret’s tent and listen to their conversation. Take notes, if necessary, or just apply your memory. Then come and tell me what transpired.”

“Can’t you just ask Julian about it, after the thing’s done?”

“Major Lampret is a Dominion officer. He has the power to assign Julian to some other company, or even send him off to the front, at any time he chooses. If Lampret is angry enough he might not give Julian time to pack—we might not see Julian again, in the worst case, or discover where he’s been sent.”

That made sense, and was alarming. I said (as a last wistful defense), “Can’t you listen in on their conversation as well as I can?”

“A muddy young private who’s been on work detail all night might be excused for dozing off among the ropes and barrels outside Lampret’s tent. I have no such excuse, and my age makes me conspicuous. Go on, Adam: there’s no time to lose!”

So I roused myself, and drank a little tepid water from a canteen to bring myself fully awake. Then I walked over to Major Lampret’s headquarters, which was just a big square tent pitched next to the Quartermaster’s warren of fresh supplies. It was this surplus of barrels, boxes, ropes, and loose equipment that provided my cover, as Sam had suggested. Three convoys had unloaded just yesterday, and our Quartermaster was overworked trying to distribute, store, and apportion the bounty. As a result I was able to saunter into a labyrinth of stacked goods and negotiate my way to the layer of provisions which happened to abut Major Lampret’s tent. By some quiet and artful shifting I created a blind, and I curled up in it just adjacent to Lampret’s canvas.

Sam had not told me when the meeting between Julian and Lampret was set to take place, however, and as I waited I was tempted again by sleep, for the day was warm, and so was my uniform, and a barrel of salt pork nearby had drawn a crowd of flies whose droning became a kind of lullaby, and the resinous boxboards sweating in the sunlight gave off a dolorous perfume. My chin dipped from time to time; and I was afraid I would be found here, hours later, dreaming contentedly, only to discover on waking that Julian had been shipped off to Schefferville or points north. I used this unpleasant prospect to torture myself into alertness; nevertheless I was relieved when I caught sight of Julian approaching across the parade ground, his head erect and his uniform clean and square.

“Reporting as ordered,” Julian said when he arrived, and although I could no longer see him his voice was as crisply audible as if he had spoken into my ear.

“Julian Commongold,” said Major Lampret said. “Private Commongold—or should I call you Pastor Commongold?”

“Sir?” Julian asked.

“I understand you’ve been lecturing the troops on religious subjects.”

Since I was unable to see either party to this conversation I mean to transcribe it as if it were dialogue in a Play: that is, without benefit of observation, for that is how I experienced it, thus: J ULIAN : “I’m not sure I know what you mean, sir.”

LAMPRET : “Let’s be straightforward with one another. I’ve had my eye on you for a while now. You’re not like the other men, are you?”

JULIAN (hesitating): “No two of us are alike, as far as I can see.”

LAMPRET : “You’re literate, for one thing, and obviously well-read. You have opinions on current events. And I’ve been a few places, Private Commongold, and I know a Manhattan accent when I hear one.”

JULIAN : “Is that so uncommon?”

LAMPRET : “Quite the opposite. One of your type turns up in every regiment sooner or later—if not a Manhattan cynic, then a barracks lawyer from Boston or a would-be Senator with a rural address. I’m just trying to sort out which kind of problem you are. Raised in New York , and you had a comfortable life there, by the look and bearing of you… Who was your father, Julian Commongold? Some up-and-coming rag merchant? A mechanic with enough money to buy the illusion of prosperity and a storefront education for his son? Toadying before his betters by day and cursing them at night in the privacy of his kitchen? Is that why you decided to leave your family and join the Army? Or did you just get drunk and end up on the wrong train, like a lost schoolboy?”

JULIAN (coolly): “The Major is very perceptive.”

LAMPRET : “Or if not that, something similar… I suppose you were the sort of boy who always had his way on the playground? A few impressive words and everyone wants to be your friend?”

JULIAN : “No, sir—not everyone.”

LAMPRET : “No—there’s always the inconvenient few who see through the charade.”

JULIAN : “The Major is surprisingly well-informed about life in New York City. I was under the impression that he had spent most of his time in Colorado Springs.”

That was a daring and dangerous thing for Julian to say. The Dominion Academy in Colorado Springs had produced some fine Strategists and Tacticians; it had also produced, and in greater abundance, a legion of spies and informers. According to Sam the Dominion Military College was once an authentic Military Academy , back when the Union still operated an Air Force—that is, a battalion of Airplanes, and Air-Men to fly them. [This is the sort of thing I would once have dismissed as another of Julian’s historical fantasies, except that the Dominion History of the Union made passing reference to it. War in the Air!—another of the unimaginable pastimes of the Secular Ancients.]

But that institution declined with the End of Oil, although strategic stockpiles, it’s said, kept the Air Force flying a few years into the False Tribulation. After that the Air Force Academy came increasingly under the sway of the Dominionist center of power at Colorado Springs—became, ultimately, a sort of institutional liaison between the Dominion and the Generals.

Dominion men are full officers, and entitled to issue orders. But their real power is disciplinary. Unlike other COs , a Dominion Officer can bring up a man on charges of Impiety or Sedition. A soldier convicted of those crimes might face anything from Dismissal with Prejudice to ten years in a stockade.

It was a power seldom exercised, for the relationship between the Army and the Dominion had always been a delicate one. Dominion Officers were generally not well-liked, and were often regarded as priggish and potentially dangerous interlopers. A good Dominion Officer, from the point of view of the men of the line, was one who would do his share of the work, who would foster piety by example rather than punishing its absence, and whose Sunday sermons were brief and to the point. Major Lampret was well-enough liked by the men, for he seldom threatened them. But he was aloof in their company, and watched them carefully from a distance. There was about Major Lampret something of the aspect of a well-fed Colorado Mountain Lion: lethargic, but muscular, and ready to pounce the moment his appetite revived.

Had Julian whetted Major Lampret’s appetite for apostates and contrarians? That was the question I asked myself as I listened from my nest of ropes and boxes.

LAMPRET : “You might want to consider your tone of voice, Private Commongold. May I offer you a lesson in Civics? There are three centers of power in the modern Union , and only three. One is the Executive Branch, with its supporting host of Owners and Senators. One is the Military. And the last is the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. They’re like the tripod feet of a stool: each supports the other, and they work best when they’re equal in reach. But you’re not a propertied person, Mr. Commongold, as far as I know; and you’re certainly not a Clergyman; and the Army in its wisdom has put you in the lowest possible rank. Your position doesn’t entitle you to an opinion, much less the loose expression of it.”

JULIAN : “There is proverb, sir, that opinions are like—like—”

LAMPRET : “Say noses.”

JULIAN : “Noses, in the sense that everyone has one.”

LAMPRET : “Yes, and like noses, some opinions are less noble than others, and some are thrust in where they don’t belong. You may have all the opinions you want, Mr. Commongold, but you may not share them if they undermine the piety or preparedness of American troops.”

JULIAN : “I have no love for the Dutch, sir, or any intention of undermining American soldiers.”

LAMPRET : “That’s a guarded denial! Do you think I’m a bully, Private Commongold, looking for an excuse to exercise my authority? On the contrary. I’m a realist. By and large, the men under my command are untutored and ignorant. I understand that and I accept it. For these men religion is little more than their mothers’ half-forgotten admonitions and the promise of a better world to come. But that’s what serves them, and I expect that’s how the Lord intended it. I don’t want my men to go into battle harboring doubts about their personal immortality—it makes them poorer soldiers.”

JULIAN : “Not in my experience. I fought beside those men, and they gave exemplary service. The Major may not have noticed, since he wasn’t there.”

That was a gauntlet thrown at Lampret’s feet, and my concern for Julian escalated to real fear. It was one thing to argue with the Major, it was another thing to bait him. Dominion Officers were traditionally excused from combat. They carried pistols, not rifles, and they were more useful behind the lines, where they ministered to the spiritual needs of the troops. The commonest slur made against Dominion men was that they were cowards, hiding behind their angel’s-wing badges and their big felt hats. I could not, of course, see the Major’s reaction to Julian’s statement; but a kind of steely silence radiated from the tent like the heat from a smoldering coal-pile.

Then there was a sound of rustling paper. Major Lampret spoke next, evidently quoting from a document.

LAMPRET : “‘On consecutive Sundays Private Commongold was observed speaking to soldiers on the parade ground behind the Meeting Tent. On these occasions he talked without restraint or decency about the Holy Bible and other matters that fall within the purview of the Dominion.’ Is that correct?”

JULIAN (less audibly, no doubt surprised by the written evidence): “In so far as it goes, I suppose it is; but—”

LAMPRET : “Did you, for instance, suggest to these men that there’s no evidence of Divine Creation, and that Eden is a mythical place?”

JULIAN (after a lengthy pause): “Perhaps I compared the Biblical account of Genesis to other mythologies—”

LAMPRET : “To other mythologies —suggesting that it is one.”

JULIAN : “Sir, if my remarks are to be taken out of context—”

LAMPRET (reading again): “‘Private Commongold went on to assert that the story of the expulsion of the first man and woman from Eden might be understood in unorthodox ways. He claimed that, as it seemed to him, the chief virtue of Eden was the relative absence from it of God, Who created the First Couple in His image and then left them undisturbed in their innocent revels. Private Commongold also suggested that the Tree of Knowledge and its forbidden fruit was a hoax worked up by the Serpent, who wanted the Garden all to himself; and that Adam and Eve had probably been expelled by trickery when God wasn’t looking, since God, the Private said, was an incorrigably inattentive Deity, judging by the sins and enormities He habitually leaves unpunished.’ ”

JULIAN (in an even quieter voice, since he must have realized by now that Lampret had a spy among the troops, and that he was at risk of more than an upbraiding): “It was only a sort of joke, Major. Really nothing but a pleasing paradox.”

LAMPRET : “Pleasing to whom, though?” (clearing his throat): “‘Private Commongold further hinted that the Dominion, though it claimed to speak with the authority of Holy Writ, was more akin to the voice of that Serpent, sowing fear and shame where there was none before, and no pressing need for it.’ Did you in fact say this?”

JULIAN : “I suppose I must have… or words that might be mistaken for it.”

LAMPRET : “The report is lengthy and detailed. It cites apostasies too grotesque and numerous to mention, capped with your enthusiastic endorsement of the ancient and discredited creed of Biological Evolution. Need I go on?”

JULIAN : “Not on my account.”

LAMPRET : “Is there any doubt in your mind that these remarks constitute a breach not just of decency but of explicit regulations for the conduct of enlisted men?”

JULIAN : “No doubt whatsoever.”

LAMPRET : “Do you understand that one of the fundamental services the Dominion of Jesus Christ performs is to prevent harmful or mistaken religious ideas from circulating among the gullible classes?”

JULIAN : “I do understand.”

LAMPRET (lightening his tone abruptly): “I’m not in the business of harassing infantrymen without cause. I’ve spoken to your commanding officers, and they all say you’re a competent soldier, and useful in battle, in so far as you’ve been tested. Some even think you might have command potential, when your greenness and arrogance begin to rub off. And the rank and file seem to approve of you—if they scorned your apostasies we wouldn’t need to have this discussion, would we?”

JULIAN : “I don’t suppose so.”

LAMPRET : “Then let’s get to the meat of the matter. These atheistic lectures must stop. Is that understood?”

JULIAN : “Sir, yes, sir.”

LAMPRET : “They must stop completely, along with any denigrating mention of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth, or any other duly constituted arm of the government. Do you understand?”

JULIAN (a whisper): “Yes.”

LAMPRET : “I hope you’re sincere about that—I won’t be so generous in the case of a second offense. Remember, Private Commongold, it’s not your soul I’m worried about. I can’t control your thoughts—those are between you and your maker. You can absorb heresies until they bleed out your pores, for all I have to do with it. But I can, and will, stand between your vulgar jokes and the integrity of the Army of the Laurentians. Is that clear? Innocent men must not be sent into battle with their immortal souls at risk, just because Julian Commongold is bound and determined to go to Hell.”

JULIAN : “I understand, sir. And I expect I’ll see you there.” (a pause): “In battle, I mean, of course.”

I have been asked many times whether Julian when I first knew him was an Atheist or an Agnostic.

I’m not a Philosopher, much less a Theologian, and I don’t understand the distinction between those two species of nonbelievers. In so far as I have an image in my mind, I picture the Agnostic as a modest man, politely refusing to kneel before any Gods or Icons in which he does not place his complete confidence; while the Atheist , although operating from the same principles, brings a hammer to the event.

Readers may draw their own conclusions about Julian’s later career and the convictions he carried into it. As for his Biblical heresies, these must have seemed novel and alarming to Major Lampret; but I had heard them all before—I was an old customer, and jaded. I thought his stories were, in a way, testimony to the close attention with which Julian had read the Bible, even if his interpretations of it were too imaginative by half. I’m an indifferent student of Scripture, myself, and I prefer the sensible parts of that Book, such as the Sermon on the Mount, while I leave the more perplexing passages—the ones that mention seven-headed dragons, the Whore of Babylon, or any of that crew—to scholars, who relish such conundrums. But Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.”

That was appalling enough that I hastily dropped the subject; but it hinted at some of the motives behind Julian’s early apostasies.

I made my way out of the maze of boxed and barreled supplies shortly after Julian left Major Lampret’s tent. Since Julian hadn’t been sent off to Schefferville, I felt no pressing need to add my penny’s-worth to the dialogue Sam and Julian must already be having. But I wanted Sam to know I had done what he asked of me, so I slow-walked back to our encampment, and came in on the end of an argument.

Their raised voices stopped me from interrupting. I gathered Sam had begun to lecture Julian on the importance of not attracting undue attention, or creating any controversy that might snag the attention of the Executive Branch. “We’re a fair distance from the Presidential Palace,” Julian retorted as I entered the tent.

“Not as far as you think,” Sam said angrily. “And the very last thing you need is to become prominent in the eyes of the Dominion. Major Lampret is no Deklan Comstock, but he could have you sent to the trenches just by snapping his fingers—especially now that General Galligasken is fighting battles up the Saguenay. You don’t act as if you realize that.”

“But I do realize it!” said Julian, returning Sam’s anger ounce-for-ounce. “I’m bitterly aware of it! I just stood in the presence of a man not fit to polish my boots, and listened without objection to his insinuations and his sneers! I looked him in the eye, Sam, and as he barked and whined I thought how little he suspected what I could do to him, and how quickly he would genuflect if that truth came out! I wasn’t raised to grovel before an Army parson! And yet I did it—I swallowed my pride, and I did it—but that’s not enough for you!”

“You might have swallowed your pride a little sooner, and thought twice about holding classes in sedition for the enlisted men! In fact I recall forbidding you to do any such thing.”

“Forbidding me!”

Julian stood up so stiff-spined he seemed an inch taller than he really was.

“I was entrusted by your father with the duty of protecting you,” Sam said.

“Do it, then! Do as you were told, and protect me! But don’t mother me, or censor me, or question my judgment! That was never your province! Do what you were asked to do, and do it like any other sensible servant!”

The words struck Sam as if they had real weight and momentum. His face contorted, then stiffened into a soldierly mask. He seemed full of words, unspoken or unspeakable; but what he said, in the end, was, “All right, Julian—as you prefer.”

It was a servile response, and Julian was quite undone by it. All the rage went out of him in a rush. “Sam, I’m sorry! I was just—well, the words came without thinking. You know I don’t think of you as a servant!”

“I wouldn’t have said so, until now.”

“Then forgive me! It isn’t you I’m unhappy with—never you!”

“Of course I forgive you,” said Sam.

Julian seemed ashamed of himself, and he hurried away without acknowledging me.

Sam was a silent a long while, and I began to wonder if I had become altogether invisible; but just as I was about to clear my throat to signal my presence he looked at me and shook his head. “He’s a Comstock, Adam. A Comstock heart and soul, for better or for worse. I let myself forget that. Don’t make the same mistake.”

“I won’t,” I said—but only to reassure him.

Major Lampret made a display of singling out Julian at the next Sunday meeting, in a sermon on Unhelpful Thinking. He denounced Julian’s apostasies, and mocked them, and ridiculed the idea of an Army private giving out opinions on theological matters. Then he told us weekend leave was canceled, not just for Julian but for all the men of our company, to punish Julian for treading on the angels’ coat-tails and us for being foolish enough to listen to him. It was tactic meant to make Julian unpopular among his peers, and undo some of the goodwill the other soldiers felt toward him. And the ploy was successful, at least for a time. Disparaging remarks were made in Julian’s presence by men cruelly deprived of the opportunity to squander their pay in Montreal whore houses; and Julian was cut by these barbed comments, though he was careful to say nothing in return.

But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Just about then—and for weeks thereafter, in a steady crescendo—a certain libel about Major Lampret began to circulate and gain currency: that the Major was a Colorado Springs cloud salesman who was careful never to get in the line of fire, because of all the immortal souls entrusted to his care his own took first place, and was too precious to be exposed to flying lead—in other words, that he was a coward who reveled in his noncombatant status.

There was no discernible source for this talk; it passed like a fog from one group of soldiers to another, never adhering to anyone in particular; but I noticed Julian always smiled when he heard it.

I was as upset as anyone else over missing my first opportunity to return to Montreal , for I wanted to seek out Calyxa and make myself better known to her. But I consoled myself with the hope that I might get another chance, and I used the empty time to finish my report about the Battle of Mascouche, and deliver it to Mr. Theodore Dornwood, the journalist.

Dornwood had forgotten his agreement to read my work, and I had to remind him of it; but at last he relented and took the papers from me. While he read them I admired his typewriter once more. I took my time looking over the mechanical device, and even fingered the keys, in a gingerly manner, and watched the greased levers rise and fall, and felt the intoxicating power to make Letters—solid booklike letters, not pencil scratches—appear on a blank white page. I was determined to get one of these machines for myself. No doubt they were expensive. But I would save my pay, and eventually I would buy a typewriter, even if I had to go all the way to Manhattan to acquire one. This I solemnly resolved.

“Not actually bad,” Dornwood said, in a thoughtful tone, when he had finished reading my work.

It was as much praise as I had expected from him—more, in fact. “It’s all right, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Would you say you liked it?”

“I’d go that far.”

“You might even call it good?”

“I suppose so—in its way, quite good, actually.”

I savored that word, good , coming as it did from a genuine New York City newspaper correspondent, even at the expense of a little prodding. And not just good, but quite good. I was beside myself with pride.

“Not that you haven’t got a thing or two to learn,” Dornwood added, deflating me.

“How’s that?” I asked. “I tried to write it as truthfully as possible. I didn’t include elephants, or anything of that nature.”

“Your restraint is admirable—perhaps even excessive.” Dornwood paused to gather his thoughts, which could not have been a trivial task, given how much liquor he had consumed (judging by the empty flasks scattered about the place) and how the aroma of hemp smoke still suffused the air. “As much as I like what you’ve written—it’s clear, grammatical, and orderly—this piece would have to be ‘punched up’ if it were submitted for newspaper publication.”

“How so?”

“Well, for instance, here. You say, ‘Private Commongold walked ahead of me, very steadily, toward the fighting.’ ”

“That’s how it happened. I was careful about the phrase.”

“Too careful. A reader doesn’t want to hear about someone walking steadily. It’s not dramatic. You might say, instead, ‘Private Commongold ignored the shot and shell exploding all around him to such devastating effect, and strode with fierce determination straight into the beating heart of the battle.’ You see how that livens it up?”

“I guess it does, though at the expense of a degree of accuracy.”

“Accuracy and drama are the Scylla and Charybdis of journalism, Adam. [At the time I took “Scylla and Charybdis” to be New York City editors with whom Dornwood had dealt, or perhaps a publishing firm. In fact they were two great Nautical Rocks, in Greek mythology, which had the unusual ability to move about under their own steam, and had formed the bad habit of crushing sailors.]

Steer between them, is my advice, but list toward drama, if you want a successful career. In fact, ‘Private Commongold’ is a little tepid, regarding rank, though the name itself is good—so let’s promote him. Captain Commongold! Doesn’t that have a ring to it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Leave these papers with me,” Dornwood said, casting a glance at his typewriter, which had been silent lately, perhaps due to his consumption of fiery spirits. “I’ll give the subject further thought, and render you more useful advice next week. In the meantime, Adam, in the event of further military action, please repeat the exercise: write it up, as dramatically as the facts allow, and bring it to me. If you do that, I may be willing to show you how to work that typewriter you love to stare at, since you’re an aspiring writer of some talent. How does that sound?”

“Excellent, Mr. Dornwood,” I said, all unsuspecting.

6

The fighting continued up the Saguenay, and things were mainly quiet around Montreal. There was occasional skirmishing, of course, for Mitteleuropan forces remained scattered through the Laurentians, and they would sally forth now and then for a little fun and distraction. I duly wrote up these exchanges for Theodore Dornwood, in return for literary advice; but there was very little to it. During this time Julian distinguished himself by holding a vital artillery position when it came under heavy fire from the Dutch; and his reputation among the men steadily improved—while Major Lampret’s continued to decline.

But what mattered most to me that summer took place in the City of Montreal, during the weekends on which, after Lampret lifted the ban, we were offered leave.

“So,” Lymon Pugh said, his sleeves rolled up to expose his hideously scarred and muscular forearms, which often frightened strangers, and of which he was very proud, “only the two of us left.”

We were in Montreal , and we had just entered a tavern on Guy Street. Lymon was there to get drunk; but it was the sort of establishment that served food as well as liquor, and I meant to smother my sorrows in a beefsteak, while Lymon drowned his in a bucket of beer. (As for drink, I took a dipperful of plain water from the ceramic jug by the door as we entered. The water was brackish and tasted of tobacco—perhaps one of the previous customers had mistaken the jug for a spittoon.) “Only the two of us left,” Lymon repeated—by which he meant that Sam and Julian had gone off to separate entertainments this Friday night.

Summer was a fearfully hot and humid time around the City of Montreal. The horseflies, which the locals called Black Flies, had lately come into season, and they patrolled the streets in brigade strength, alert for human flesh. The day had been overcast, and the air was thick as butter, and although we were fresh from camp our shirts were already sodden. We wore what scraps of civilian clothing we still possessed or had recently purchased, so that we would not be mistaken for men on active duty, and would blend in more closely with the local population.

But as I had learned on previous expeditions into the city, a soldier is never quite at home in Montreal. The local citizens did not hate us exactly—at one time they had been under garrison by the Dutch, and the memory of that unhappy time persisted, and the Army of the Laurentians was a more comfortable master than Mitteleuropa had been, taken all in all. But we were their masters, at least nominally, for Montreal was under military law, and many of its citizens chafed at the constraints imposed upon them. The Catholic clergy were especially volatile, still smarting over the Dominion’s interference in their affairs; and local men of Cree descent had been known to challenge soldiers on the street, out of some grievance never fully explained to me.

But it was not difficult to avoid the worst of such unpleasantness, and the obverse side of that coin was the generous hospitality of the less political residents of Montreal , including restaurant-owners and barkeepers. We had been given a good table in this tavern, which was called the Thirsty Boot, and we ordered what we wanted from a pleasant woman in an apron, and we were otherwise left to ourselves.

“I swear I don’t know what those two do with their time,” Lymon Pugh was saying. “For instance, what on Earth does Sam want with all those damned Amish?”

“Amish?”

“You know—those black-hatted and bearded men he consorts with whenever we come into the city.”

Lymon was laboring under a misapprehension. Judaism was legal in Montreal , and the city had a substantial community of very devout Jews, with whom Sam had begun taking religious services. It was true that the men in that part of town often sported beards, and wore wide black hats, or small ones that sat on their scalps as if glued there. But they weren’t Amish. “I think the Amish live in Pennsylvania , or Ohio , or somewhere like that,” I said.

“You mean to say those men aren’t Amish? They fit every description I ever heard.”

“I think they’re Jews.”

“Oh! Then is Sam a Jew of some kind? He don’t resemble them in his dress.”

Sam had not made any public announcement about his unusual religion (though neither had he gone to any lengths to disguise his association with the Jews of Montreal), and I could not bring myself to indict him quite so frankly. “Perhaps he’s fond of their cuisine. The Jews have their own special menu of foods, just as Chinamen do.”

“The sight of all those beards might inhibit my appetite, if it was me,” said Lymon, who was religious (figuratively) about shaving his chin, “whatever they eat for dinner. But to each his own.”

“Julian wears a beard,” I pointed out.

“What, that fringe of his? Yellow as a female’s wig, and just about as ridiculous. Speaking of Julian Commongold, I’m confused about his habits, too. Once again he’s gone to that coffee-shop, or whatever they call it, down in the narrow streets by the riverside. Did you get a look at the other customers there, Adam? Frail, loose-limbed types—I don’t know what he sees in them.

The place is called Dorothy’s, and I’m sure I don’t know who Dorothy is—perhaps the only woman ever to visit the establishment.”

“Philosophers,” I said.

“What?”

“Julian has made friends among the city’s Philosophers, just as Sam has made friends among the Jews.”

“Those are Philosophers? I suppose that means Philosophers also have their own particular foods, and that Julian is partial to Philosophical dinners?”

“Yes, in a sense, though it’s more likely the conversation than the food that attracts him. Philosophers discuss Time, and Space, and the Purpose of Humanity, and such topics as that, in which Julian is deeply interested.”

“They have enough to say about those subjects to carry over more than a few minutes? I doubt I could talk about Space any longer than a second or two before I ran out of thoughts altogether. In any case, I overheard two of those Philosophers who followed Julian into the coffee-shop, and their discussion was all about some musical review that opened here in town.”

“I don’t know all the details,” I confessed, “but Julian says there are Aesthetes among the Philosophers, who are more concerned with Art than with human destiny.”

“They seemed more concerned with the fellow who played the romantic lead in the piece.”

“I imagine that’s a legitimate subject of debate among Aesthetes.”

“Well, it’s all beyond me,” said Lymon Pugh, and he called for another pitcher of beer. “You, too, Adam, if you don’t mind me saying so— you’re a mystery! You come into a city as fine as this one, with all its sinful opportunities, and you wander from church to church like a Godstruck pilgrim, though it’s not even Sunday.”

This wasn’t a topic I cared to discuss. “I was looking for someone,” I said. Of course the person I had been looking for since Easter was Calyxa. But I had not been able to find her. When I approached the choirmaster at the Cathedral where I had first seen her, he explained that the Easter chorus had been put together specifically to sing to the troops. The Church’s own choristers refused to entertain “occupying forces,” as they called us; and the choirmaster had been forced to hire substitute singers at fifty cents an hour plus a free lunch. But the names of these women had not been recorded. That led me to make inquiries at several other grand Churches, of which the city possessed a dizzying number—all without success. “What about you, Lymon? Since you find our pursuits so unrewarding, what are your plans for the weekend?”

“Well, to get drunk, first of all…”

“That’s a noble ambition—or at least easily achieved.”

“But not stinking drunk. Not so drunk I can’t navigate. Then it’s off to the Shade Tree Hotel.” The Shade Tree was one of those establishments in which “women sell their virtue for money, and throw in their diseases free of charge,” as Major Lampret had put it in one of his sermons. I asked Lymon whether he was not afraid, as Lampret had also put it, that he would come back “absent those three essential possessions of any decent man: his health, his savings, and his hope of salvation.”

“The women at the Shade Tree are pretty clean,” Lymon said earnestly. “And what I’m afraid of is that I’ll come back absent what I came to get, which is the satisfaction of a man’s deepest need, the unsatisfaction of which can also make him sick, or at least surly.”

He clenched his scarred fists as he said this, and I told him he was probably correct in wanting to avoid any condition that left him surly. “But shouldn’t you brace yourself up before you begin such an adventure? And I don’t mean with liquor. Have something to eat.”

“I am a little hungry,” he admitted, and I watched with a quiet pride as he puzzled out the items on the menu board. He was surprised that the word “eggs” did not begin with A , as it was pronounced—but by this time he had become resigned to the inevitable inconsistencies of the written language, and accepted them without rancor.

Both of us ordered meals, and we enjoyed them as the tavern grew busier around us. Lymon had just made quick work of a plate of boiled eggs and stewed onions when he detected an expression of astonishment on my face and said, “You look like you’ve been ambushed.”

And, in a sense, I had.

She didn’t recognize me; but—of course—I recognized her.

She had been sitting just yards away, hidden by the crowd of coarsely-attired men and women who shared her table. It would have been easy to miss her altogether. But right now she stood up, and strode through billowing pipe smoke light and humid air to the tavern’s small stage; and I knew her at once—Calyxa!

She wasn’t dressed as she had been at the Cathedral. If that Calyxa had seemed unworldly in her white surplice, this Calyxa was entirely earthbound, in a man’s black shirt a size too big for her and stiff denim trousers. [At first I had been shocked by the sight of Montreal women wearing trousers rather than skirts—in Williams Ford no respectable female wore trousers past the age of ten—but social customs vary by location, as Julian had taught me, and clothes signify differently in different parts of the world. I had lately begun to take pride in my ability to accept such unusual behavior as female trouser-wearing, and I considered myself a sophisticate, far in advance of my old crowd of Williams Ford lease-boys.]

The easy confidence of her walk suggested that she was at home in this place, and as she took the stage to genial applause I was sure of it.

“Look at that! That one’s a fireplug,” Lymon Pugh said. “Do you suppose she means to sing to us?”

“I hope so,” I said, annoyed.

“Her pants are cut too short, though. Pretty enough face, but look at the thick ankles on her.”

“I’m sure I don’t need to hear your opinion of her ankles! Her ankles are her own business.”

“They’re right there hanging off the ends of her legs—as much my business as anyone’s, I’d say!”

“No one’s business, then! Please be quiet.”

“What bit you?” Lymon asked; but he subsided, for which I was grateful.

Calyxa did begin to sing, then, in a voice that was pure but also precise and pleasingly workmanlike. She did not adopt trills, tremolos, theatrical asides, illustrative whistles, or any of those musical furbelows so common among contemporary singers. Instead she sang the songs as they had been composed: plainly, that is, deriving all her nuance from the words and melodies, and not their decorations.

Nor was she wildly demonstrative in her singing. She just clasped her hands, cleared her throat, and went at it. This was too subtle for some of the audience, judging by the occasional cries of drunken critics; but I took it as an expression of her natural modesty—a striking contrast to the songs themselves.

She performed five songs before she was finished, most of which had verses that would not have been out of place aboard the Caribou-Horn Train, or wherever less respectable people gather. At first I was dismayed by this. But I was reminded—perhaps for the first time truly convinced—of Julian’s doctrine of cultural relativism, so-called. For these songs, which had sounded so corrupt in other voices, were purified in hers. I reflected that Calyxa must have been raised among people for whom such songs and sentiments were, in effect, their daily bread, and not counted as obscene or irregular in any way. In other words her innocence was innate , and not compromised by the vulgarity of her upbringing—it was a kind of indestructible primal innocence , as I came to think of it.

Two of the songs she sang were not in English, which astonished Lymon Pugh. “That’s some nerve on her part, to sing a song in Dutch!”

“Not Dutch, Lymon, but French. The language was spoken here for centuries, and still is, in places.”

Apparently Lymon had believed there were only two kinds of human speech, American and Foreign, and he was dismayed by the news that languages were prolific, often coming packaged one per country. “Just when I learn to write a language they begin to multiply like rabbits! I tell you, Adam, there’s a catch to everything. The world is as meanly rigged as that Lucky Mug of Private Langers.”

“English will suit in most circumstances, unless you travel abroad.”

“I’ve traveled far enough, I thank you—this is as foreign a country as I care to see, even if it is America.”

I begged him once more to be quiet, as Calyxa finished her singing. She ignored the applause, stepped down from the stage with an air of calm satisfaction, and headed back to her table. I was consumed by the need to attract her attention, and I did this by standing up abruptly as she passed, nearly knocking my dinner plate onto the floor, and exclaiming in a choked voice, “Calyxa!”

I may have spoken too loudly; for she flinched, and there was a lull in the conversation in the tavern, as if some of the patrons expected violence to follow.

“Do I know you?” she asked, when she had recovered her composure.

“We met at Easter. I was in the Cathedral where you performed, before Dutch artillery closed it up. Don’t you remember? I hurt my head!”

“Oh,” she said, smiling faintly, and by this reaction causing the other customers to relax their vigilance, “the soldier with the small injury. Did you find your regiment?”

“Yes, I did—thank you very much.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and walked on.

Naturally I had not expected her to prolong the conversation, or to ignore her friends on my behalf. Nevertheless this response was a disappointment.

“She blew you off pretty quick,” Lymon Pugh said, laughing to himself. “You’re wasting your time here, Adam. That type of woman don’t make herself available on a moment’s notice. Come to the Shade Tree, and your luck will change.”

“I won’t.” Not when my quarry was so close.

“Well, suit yourself. I have a schedule to keep.”

Lymon Pugh stood up, not as steadily as he might have, and after some exploration found the door of the tavern, and left.

I felt conspicuous sitting alone at a table when everyone else in the tavern seemed to have arrived with a party of friends; but I suppressed my uneasiness, and ordered an entire second meal, which I did not plan to eat, simply to keep the waitress from frowning at me.

Calyxa continued to sit with her companions. Other singers or musicians took the stage from time to time, apparently by arrangement with the management. None was as talented as Calyxa, and the vulgarity of their singing was not adulterated with any kind of Innocence, Primal or otherwise. She herself talked amiably, as it seemed to me, with her friends, who were a mixed group of men and women, all as young as Calyxa herself—my age, that is, or only slightly older. The females among them shared Calyxa’s simple taste in clothing, along with a certain inattention to the finer points of hairdressing and such feminine arts. The men of the group took this charming roughness to another level entirely, seeming to pride themselves on their tattered pants and hempen shirts. Several of them wore woolen caps, despite the heat of the evening, as if they needed something available to tug or pull low at dramatic moments in the conversation. Their gestures were dramatic, their voices were curt and insistent, and their opinions, though I could make out only a few words, were vehement and complex, almost to the point of Philosophy.

It occurred to me in a dismaying moment that Calyxa might have a male friend or even a husband among the crowd. Tragically, I knew so little about her! I set about studying her, in the hope that I could glean a few facts by observation.

I noticed that she glanced occasionally at the tavern’s door, and that whenever she did this an expression of anxiety darkened her features. But that was all that happened for an hour or so, and I could make no sense of it, and I had begun to despair of ever passing another word with her, when a series of unexpected events brought us together in a surprising way.

The waitress who served my table appeared to be on friendly terms with Calyxa. They put their heads together now and then to exchange words. After one of these exchanges an expression of profound concern once more overcame Calyxa, and she nodded solemnly at whatever news the waitress had delivered.

And dire news it must have been; for Calyxa, although she remained at the table, dropped out of the conversation swirling around her, and seemed lost in the most sobering kind of thoughts. Several times she called the waitress back, and they conferred again; and on one of these occasions they both looked at me in a pointed fashion. But I couldn’t deduce the significance of any of these maneuvers.

That they had some significance I did not doubt, for before long the same waitress returned to my table, and she pulled out the chair Lymon Pugh had left vacant, and sat in it.

I was surprised by this bold move on her part. Fortunately the waitress took the commanding role in the talk that followed. “You’re a soldier,” she said, in a tone that was brisk but not unfriendly.

I agreed that I was.

“And you have some interest in Calyxa Blake?”

Finally I had learned her surname!—admittedly, at second hand. I wondered if Calyxa Blake had mistaken my intentions, and had communicated her apprehension to the waitress. “Only the most benevolent interest,” I said sincerely. “I was impressed with her singing, when she sang at one of the enormous churches of this city, last Easter. After that I spoke to her, but only briefly. I was injured at the time. But she was kind to me. I want to thank her for that—well, I have thanked her for it, in fact—and as much as I would like to speak further with, uh, Miss Blake,” hoping I was right about the Miss, “I would never force my attention on her. If I upset her with my clumsy greeting, please tell her I meant nothing by it, except to mark my pleasurable surprise at recognizing her.”

That was a pretty speech, though extemporaneous, and I was proud of it.

The waitress sat and examined me with her eyes, displaying no reaction. Then she asked for the second time, “You’re a soldier?”

“Yes, a soldier. I was drafted away from my home, which is in Athabaska—”

“Does that mean you carry a pistol? They say all you soldiers do.”

I was off-duty, and not in uniform, but it was standard practice for an American soldier in these parts to keep his pistol with him at all times. My pistol was strapped under the waist of my shirt, where it wasn’t easily visible, because I didn’t want to alarm anyone, or provoke any unnecessary confrontation; but it was within easy reach. I nodded. “Does that frighten her?”

“No.”

“Does it frighten you, then?”

She almost smiled. “A pistol in hands such as yours doesn’t frighten me, no. What did you say your name was?”

“Adam Hazzard.”

“Stay here, Adam Hazzard.”

I nodded in mute if bewildered consent. After servicing the handful of customers who had begun to shout in an aggrieved manner for her attention, the friendly waitress returned to Calyxa’s table, and there was more fervid whispering between the two of them, and I tried not to blush at the unusual attention they paid me.

Not fifteen minutes passed, during which Calyxa stared at the door as if she expected the devil himself to burst in, before the waitress came to my table and whispered, “She’ll meet you upstairs, Adam Hazzard.”

I was afraid that my interest in Calyxa had been too broadly interpreted, and that an assignation had been set up—but of course Calyxa was not the type of female who would “make herself available at a moment’s notice.” So I was confused by the suggested arrangement; but the waitress evinced some urgency about the matter, and the grave expression on Calyxa’s face seemed to confirm the need for haste; and I nodded and said, “Whereabouts, upstairs?”

“Second landing. Third door to the right. Don’t run right up there, though. Wait a moment or two after I leave. Don’t be conspicuous about it.”

I agreed to all these conditions. The next few minutes passed slowly; then I stood up, affecting a nonchalance that might have been a shade too theatrical, judging by the way Calyxa rolled her eyes from her place at the adjoining table. But that couldn’t be helped. Shortly thereafter I was up the dimly-lit stairs, and I found the appointed room and let myself inside.

It was a small room, containing only a chair, a few boxes loosely stuffed with straw packing, a barrel marked SALT FISH (empty), and a rusty hurricane lamp, which I lit up. The room smelled of moist, mildewed wood. A single grimy window overlooked the crowded stalls and torch-lit shops of Guy Street. From the window I could see a little of the night sky, which was very dark and shot through with distant flashes of lightning; the wind had a gustiness that flapped all the Guy Street awnings, and I guessed a storm was imminent. Certainly the air in the city was humid enough for it—and swelteringly hot, especially in this upstairs chamber. I perched on one of the boxes, thinking Calyxa might prefer the chair, and waited for her to arrive, trying not to perspire.

She opened the door not ten minutes later. The reader may imagine the excitement and the curiosity her visit aroused in me. Her hair was a skein of ebony knitwork in the light from the hall. She put her hands on her hips and regarded me.

“Evangelica thinks you’re harmless,” she said. “Are you harmless?”

I guessed “Evangelica” was the name of the waitress. “Well, I’m not dangerous, if that’s what you mean.”

“Adam Hazzard—that’s your name?”

I nodded. “And you’re Calyxa Blake.”

“Adam Hazzard, I don’t know who you are—you’re only a loose soldier to me—but I need a favor, and Evangelica thinks you might be willing to help, without wanting too much in return.”

“Of course I’ll help, whatever your situation, and without demanding anything at all in return.”

“Western boy. Just as Evangelica said. How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” I said, exaggerating by less than a month.

“Do you know how to use the pistol you carry around with you?”

“As a soldier I’m supposed to, and I do.”

“Have you ever used it? To shoot at someone, I mean?”

“I’ve shot at many people, Miss Blake, all of them Dutchmen, with my Pittsburgh rifle; and hit some of them, I don’t doubt. As for my pistol, it’s only shot targets to date, but I understand the principle and I’m not a stranger to the practice. Do you mean for me to shoot someone? That’s a tall order… not that I’m backing down… but an explanation would be welcome.”

“You can have one, if there’s time.” She glanced around the narrow room.

“Take the chair,” I suggested, “if you want to sit.”

“I do want to sit, but I want to look out the window while I do it.” She dragged the chair in that direction. She didn’t need help—Calyxa was a sturdy girl, evidently accustomed to performing such tasks on her own hook. She sat with her head turned, so that she could watch the window while we talked, putting her neck in profile. “This is awkward,” she said.

“You can sit on a box if you’d prefer it.”

“I mean the conversation.”

“Well, that’s because we hardly know each other… though I’ve thought of you often since Easter.”

“Have you? Why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Of all the women in the choir, what set you onto me? Most of the soldiers I’ve met are more interested in whores than choristers.”

“To be honest, I can’t say. You seemed—exceptional.” I could hardly speak for blushing.

“How childish. But never mind.” She scanned the street again. “I don’t see them… though in this murkiness it’s hard to tell.…”

“Who are you expecting?”

“Some men who mean to harm me.”

“In that case I guarantee you every protection in my power! Who are these villains?”

“My brothers,” she said.

We talked for most of an hour more, alone in that airless chamber. What she told me—with a frankness I found admirable, if surprising—was that her parents had died when she was just three years old, and that she had been raised by her brothers, Job and Utty (Uther) Blake, who were bush runners. [“Bush runners” are men who operate in the wilds of the Laurentians and up into the rocky wastelands of Labrador , living on the margins of the law. Some of them form guerilla bands, and might align themselves temporarily with the Americans or the Mitteleuropans; but their main business is horse thievery, smuggling, and opportunistic pillage.]

Calyxa was not of much use to them, as a female, and her brothers had never been patient or kind toward her. Her only relief from their autocracy was a four-year period when Job and Utty were sent to prison, and she was installed in a charitable Church School in Quebec City , where she learned to read and write. The school was not a paradise, but she had thrived on three regular meals a day and had enjoyed at least some access to the world of learning. Her innate curiosity and liveliness had been engaged, and she had fought bitterly against her return to the custody of her paroled siblings.

But the law was stern, and she was eventually given back to them. To her horror, they no longer considered her a useless encumbrance, but had worked out a scheme by which she could be sold to a Montreal brothel, or, failing that, bartered to some other guerilla band in exchange for considerations.

That did not suit her plans, and she resolved to escape before the transaction could be consummated. Fortunately her brothers still thought of her as a child, at least in her mental and spiritual faculties, and assumed they could bully her into submission. They were wrong. Calyxa had grown up considerably during the time they languished in prison. She was not just clever enough to outwit them, she was wise enough to disguise herself as meek, and lull her captors into equanimity, until an opportunity for escape presented itself. When Job and Utty left her alone in the wilderness cabin from which they ran their autumn trap lines—trusting in the isolation of the place, and a few stern threats, to keep her docile in their absence—she recognized an opportunity and took it.

She packed up what little food was available, along with a compass she had stolen from Utty, and set out for Montreal. She spoke reluctantly of that grueling, lonely journey, and would only say that she had arrived in the city exhausted and starving. A few nights spent on the streets convinced her she needed to support herself in better style, and that was when she took up singing—at first on sidewalks, for pennies, and then in establishments such as the Thirsty Boot. She had learned singing from the clerics at the residential school, and she had a natural aptitude for the work.

Since then she had got along all right, and had fallen in with better company than Job and Utty Blake. But her escape from her brothers would never be complete as long as they lived, for they were angry at the loss they had suffered. In their eyes she had stolen herself from them; and they meant to have her back, and to punish her for the crime of self-theft.

Calyxa was determined not to let that happen. During the winter months there was little to fear, for the Blake brothers wintered on land held by the Dutch Governor of the Saguenay Region, poaching and drinking and hiring themselves to the Mitteleuropans as spies. But in summer the brothers became more ambitious, and often came into Montreal with furs to trade or money to gamble away. For three years now Calyxa had spent the summer months dreading the chance that her brothers would discover her whereabouts. She relied on friends, who were sympathetic to her cause, to keep their eyes and ears open; and so far, though the brothers had twice come to the city, they hadn’t found her, or heard anything about her, and she always had sufficient warning to keep herself out of their view.

To night, however, Calyxa had received the worst possible news. Job and Utty were back in town, and they had picked up hints of her presence and were actively hunting her. In fact—so Evangelica had heard from a friend—the Blakes had learned that she frequented the Thirsty Boot, and they were hastening this way even now.

“You ought to go home, then,” I said, “and hide. I’ll escort you, if that’s what you need.”

“That would be exactly the wrong thing to do. Job and Utty—especially Job, he’s the smart one—probably formed a plan to watch the tavern rather than barge inside to make trouble. They’re hunters, Adam Hazzard, and they know how to stalk prey even when the prey has got wind of them. It’s true—I hope it’s true—they don’t know where I live. But if I leave now there’s every chance they’ll follow me, and break in when there are no witnesses present.”

“You live alone, then?”

“I do.”

“No male companion right at the moment?”

“No, but what does that matter?”

“Well, it increases the risk. What will you do, if you can’t go home?”

“All I can do is hide here. Evangelica will warn me if Job and Utty come inside. Even then I should be all right, unless my brothers search the building. That’s why I wanted you here with me—specifically, that’s why I wanted your pistol here with me.”

“Are your brothers armed?”

It wasn’t legal for citizens to go about armed within city limits, and the majority adhered to the rule. Her brothers weren’t among that majority, Calyxa explained. Both were experienced pistol-fighters, and unabashed about advertising the number of men they had killed. That brought home to me the severity of her crisis, and I advised her to check the street once more, to make sure the brothers hadn’t crept up on us unannounced.

Enough time passed, however, that we eventually began to let down our guard; and I was admiring her clockspring hair by lamplight, and beginning to feel brave again, when she stood up from her chair at the window and said, “Oh, Hell!” [Or an even stronger word, best understood under the generous allowances of Cultural Relativism, and not printable here.]

“They’re coming?”

She nodded. I hurried to the window, and caught a glimpse of two burly men, one in a patched wool coat and one in what looked like a sailor’s pea-jacket, as they strode across the torch-lit street to the entrance of the Thirsty Boot directly below us.

“Put out the light!” Calyxa said. “But before you do, unlatch the window.”

“Why, what for?”

“In case we need a quick escape.”

“There’s nothing outside but the street, and that’s two stories down,” I said.

“Consider it a last resort,” she said.

We huddled in the darkened room, anticipating disaster. The heat was oppressive. I could smell the approaching storm—a heavy, salty odor—and I wasn’t very fresh myself, though I had bathed that very morning. Perhaps Calyxa was equally conscious of her own scent—I was aware of it, but it wasn’t offensive to me—to me she smelled steamy and utterly distracting—but I won’t dwell on the matter.

Her brothers kept themselves downstairs for a great length of time, perhaps drinking and evaluating the tavern. But they were here for a purpose, and it was not to be indefinitely postponed. We heard footsteps on the stairs… it was Evangelica, the friendly waitress, come in stealth to warn us.

She knocked very faintly at the door of the room. “They’re coming up!

” she whispered. “Arnaud and the bartender threatened them, but the Blakes showed their pistols and everyone is cowed. They mean to search all the rooms in the building—I have to go back! Be prepared.”

“Is your weapon loaded, Adam Hazzard?” Calyxa asked in a firm voice.

I took it out and made sure it was ready to fire.

“Give it to me, then,” she said.

“Give it to you!”

“I don’t want to burden you with the work of killing my brothers.”

“It’s not a burden—I only hope it doesn’t become a necessity.”

“Not a burden for you, but a positive pleasure for me.” (She was pretending to be bloodthirsty in order to spare my feelings, and my heart melted a little at her generosity.) “Give me the gun,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Well, then, will you shoot them? Shoot them dead? Do you promise to shoot them?”

“At the first hint of a threat—”

“The hint has been given! Adam, they’re experienced murderers ! You must shoot them, as soon as you see their shadows—and shoot to kill, not to wound —or we’re already lost!”

“They can’t be as ferocious as all that.”

“Dear God! Give me the gun, I beg you.”

“No—if there must be bloodshed, I want it on my conscience, not yours.”

“Conscience!” She pronounced the word as if it were a lament. “A quel genre d’idiot j’ai affaire? [Calyxa, unlike myself, was fluent in French, and sometimes fell into that language at odd moments. French has always been a mystery to me, and remains so; but I have taken pains to make sure her words are accurately transcribed.]

Maybe the window is the better option, if you won’t hand over the pistol…”

“Surely we needn’t jump to our doom!”

“I’m not suggesting we jump! The only danger is that we might fall. Quickly, Adam, I hear them on the stairs… take off your shoes!”

I obeyed without question, because she seemed to have some plan in mind, though I was not pleased that it involved the window. “Why am I taking off my shoes, though?”

“Leather doesn’t grip like flesh. Holster your pistol, to keep your hands available. Now follow me.”

I followed her as closely as I could through the darkened room, though not without stubbing my toe on a barrel-rim. Then she threw open the hinged window, admitting a gust of rain and a lightning-flash. The storm, which had threatened all day, was upon us. The rattle of thunder was continuous, and the wind howled mercilessly. I watched with disbelief as Calyxa put her upper body through the open window and squirmed until she was standing outside of it, her toes clasping the narrow sill. Then she grabbed a gable on the roof above and hauled herself up.

At last her pleasant face appeared again, upside down in the high end of the window frame. “Hurry, Adam! Take my hand.”

It was embarrassing to be assisted by a girl at such a time, but it would have been more embarrassing to be trapped by a Blake brother and shot, or to tumble to my death; so I took her hand, and put my bare feet on the rain-drenched sill, and tried not to think of the hard surface of the street below, or of the lightning that forked about the sky and fingered the lightning-rods of the city’s countless steeples.

“Now grasp the rim of the roof and pull yourself up!”

I doubted I could do so—I was convinced I could not—but a few breaths later I was lying beside Calyxa on the half-pipe ceramic tiles that capped the Thirsty Boot. We were inclined at a reckless angle, and in danger of sliding into the void. Rainwater sluiced over us freely. But we were, for this fraction of a moment, more or less safe—if that word can be stretched to cover the situation.

I turned to speak to Calyxa—her face was only inches from mine—but she put a finger to her lips and hushed me. “Your pistol?”

I took it from where I had secured it. It was a Porter Earle military revolver of modern design, and I was almost certain it wouldn’t be badly affected by the weather.

“Point it,” she said.

“At what?”

“Between your feet!” Where the roof ended, she meant: at the eaves-gutters, where we had just lofted ourselves up. I obliged her whim, steadying my right hand by bracing it with my left, and pressing the tiles with my feet to keep from falling. As warm as the day had been, the rain was plummeting down from some glacial height of the atmosphere, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from shivering. “Probably it won’t occur to them to look for us here,” said Calyxa. “But if they do, you must shoot the first person who attempts to cross the margin of the roof. In other words, if you see a head , put a hole in it. Now be quiet!”

I had no difficulty keeping quiet, and in any case it was a noisy night. The rain had the velocity of artillery fire, and it burst upon the roof with a similar impact. The roofs of these Montreal City buildings were irregular—they didn’t bear the stamp of the work of the Secular Ancients, which is an exacting symmetry; rather, they had been built over the dismantled remnants of older buildings, with haphazard attention to detail and no coherent plan. Water gushed down labyrinthine flues and runways, cascaded into bricked cisterns and holding tanks, and ran across the tiles in glistening washes. We might have been inside a flooding river, for all the noise we could contribute to it.

But Calyxa was listening intently for sounds from inside the room we had recently left, below us. She cupped her ear in that direction, and I tried to listen as well, though without success—or with too much success, for I imagined I heard innumerable thumps and rattles, any one of which might have signaled the approach of an angry Blake Brother. Suddenly Calyxa stiffened, and her eyes went wide. “Be ready, Adam!” she said.

I put all my attention on the eaves of the roof, though my heart was beating a military tempo. Rainwater in my eyes gave the scene a liquid inconstancy. I saw the tile-ends, and the edge of the eaves-gutter, and the high building across Guy Street , and a section of the street far below. There was a sound that might have been a window swinging wide and bouncing on its hinge-stops. Calyxa inhaled fearfully, and I reminded myself to continue breathing.

Seconds passed. Rain fell; thunder cracked; lightning crazed the tumbled clouds.

Then there was motion at the gutter by my feet. Two sets of knuckles, left and right, gripped the eaves-trough. That was the Horizon of the Roof, as I suddenly thought of it; and now a hairy Moon began to rise.

The lunar object was a Blake Brother, investigating what he must have deduced was his sister’s escape route. Perhaps the brothers’ opinion of Calyxa’s mental and physical capabilities had improved since her last encounter with them. I did not doubt that this was one of her brothers, for there was a family resemblance about the hair: the hair on this unwelcome Rising Moon curled like Calyxa’s, but it was unkempt, and washed only by the gusty rain, and so oily that it gave back the lightning-flashes in an inky blue reflection. The hair was followed by a forehead even more uncannily lunar in its scarped and pitted aspect; then rose a pair of eyes, yellow-rimmed and threaded with blood. Those eyes met mine and narrowed, as I imagine the eyes of a savage cat narrow when it spies its next meal a-hoof.

“Fire!” shouted Calyxa.

I don’t know that I could have brought myself to do as she asked—to fire on an apparently unarmed man, even a hostile one, when he was in a position of such vulnerability—except that her voice startled me, and caused my finger to compress the trigger of the pistol. The result was instantaneous. The pistol kicked in my hand. The sound of the concussion joined the rattle of thunder. There was a flash of red and white (of bone and blood, I supposed) where the head of the Blake Brother had been; then a rending screech, and terrible thumps as the injured man was pulled back inside the window, presumably by his outraged sibling.

I was too dazed to think of what to do next—this wasn’t much like shooting Dutch uniforms across an earthworks—but Calyxa had retained all her presence of mind. She grabbed my free hand and yanked on it. “Now run!” she said.

She set an example for me, scrabbling up the slope of the roof, her bare feet sliding back an inch for every two they gained. I lurched after her. Eventually we achieved the peak of the roof, where a series of crude chimneys leaned into one another like arthritic pickets on a ridge top. I glanced back at the eaves-gutters, and I saw a hand waving a pistol and shooting it blindly. A bullet clipped a chimney-brick just adjacent to my head, and Calyxa tugged me forward, so that we slid down the opposite angle of the roof—to our doom, I expected; but this slope conjoined another one next to it, so that we found ourselves in a sort of clay-tile riverbed, through which we splashed a few yards more. Then Calyxa leapt across a narrow gap between two buildings, ignoring the empty air below her, and again I followed her example. There was no bravery in this—I felt every raindrop as if it were a shot between the shoulder-blades.

I will not record all the arduous climbs, giddy descents, perilous slides, and painful near-disasters that befell us as we fled across the darkened roofs of Montreal City that stormy night. After a time we slowed, and began to move more cautiously. It did not seem that we were being followed—understandably, perhaps, for I had killed or severely wounded one of the Blake Brothers, and the other might not be willing to leave his wounded sibling and chase us about the tiled slopes of the city, especially in weather so severe that funnel-clouds were seen spinning down the St. Lawrence River. It’s enough to say that we arrived at last at an iron fire-escape more than a mile from the Thirsty Boot in some direction that was incalculable to me, and that when I descended to street level my bare feet left bloody prints on the rusty ladder rungs. “Do you live near here?” I asked Calyxa hopefully, once I had gathered breath enough to speak.

The rain had drenched her—every part of her was slicked or drooped by it except her hair, which, amazingly, kept its all curly depth. Her mannish shirt clung to her body in a way that might have been indelicate if I had allowed my attention to linger on it. She had laced her shoelaces together and carried her shoes looped around her neck like clumsy pendants. She put them back on her feet, bending over to tie them. I had no such option—my own boots had been abandoned at the tavern.

“Not far,” she said, standing up.

“Then, this time, please let me walk you there.”

She managed to smile, despite the horrifying circumstances. “I won’t leave you barefoot in the rain, Adam Hazzard,” she said. “Not on a night like this.”

There is a kind of urban living, I have discovered, in which poverty and luxury mix together, and become indistinguishable. That was the case with the rooms in which Calyxa Blake lived. She occupied several chambers in a building that had been divided up into dark but rentable spaces by some absent and inattentive Owner. The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides.

But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it.

We entered dripping from the effects of the storm, which continued to beat its wings against the windows of Calyxa’s snug if threadbare retreat. As soon as she had thrown the several latches behind her and lit the nearest lamp she began unselfconsciously to strip off her sodden clothes. I looked away, blushing. “You too,” she said. “No exceptions for Western prudishness—you’re dripping all over everything.”

“I have nothing else to wear!”

“I’ll find you something. Undress yourself—those pants won’t dry while you’re wearing them.”

That extraordinary statement was inarguably true; and I did as she suggested, while she went to another room in search of something to cover herself, and me. She came back wearing a kind of Chinese robe, with fanciful Dragons embroidered on it, and carrying a similar garment, along with a towel, which she handed to me.

I dried myself willingly but balked at the robe. “I think this is a woman’s item.”

“It’s a silk robe. All the better Chinese persons wear them, men included. You can buy them down at the dockside—cheap, when the boats come in, if you know the right vendor. Put it on, please.”

I obeyed, though not without feeling slightly ridiculous. But the robe was comfortable, and supplied just the right degree of warmth and concealment. I was content with it, I decided, as long as some Blake brother didn’t break down the door and shoot me, for dying in such a garment might provoke awkward questions.

Calyxa started a fire in the kitchen stove and put a kettle on to boil. While she worked I examined her book-cases more closely. I hoped to find an unfamiliar title by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, which I could borrow. But Calyxa’s taste didn’t run in that direction. Few of the books were fiction, and even fewer bore the Dominion Stamp of Approval. I guessed the authority of the Dominion was more powerful out West than in these border lands, which had so often changed hands with the Dutch. Here were titles and authors altogether unfamiliar to me. Some were in French, and could not be decrypted. Of the English titles, I selected one called American History Since the Fall of the Cities, by Arwal Parmentier. It had been published in England—a country which, though sparsely inhabited, had a long history of its own, and whose allegiance to Mitteleuropa was more formal than devotional. I took the volume closer to a lamp, opened it at random, and read this paragraph: The ascent of the Aristocracy should not be understood solely as a response to the near-exhaustion of oil, platinum, iridium, and other essential resources of the Technological Efflorescence. The trend to oligarchy predated that crisis and contributed to it. Even before the Fall of the Cities the global economy had become what our farmers call a “Monoculture,” streamlined and relatively efficient, but without the useful diversity fostered in prior times by the existence of National Borders and Local Regulation of Business. Long before plague, starvation, and childlessness reduced the population so dramatically, wealth had already begun to concentrate in the hands of a minority of powerful Owners. The Crisis of Scarcity, therefore, when it came, was met not with a careful or prepared response, but by a determined grasp of power on the part of the Oligarchs and a retreat into religious dogmatism and clerical authority by the frightened and disenfranchised populace.

It was quickly obvious to me why this volume had not received the Stamp of Approval, and I moved to replace it on the shelf, but not before Calyxa, returning from the kitchen with a cup of tea in each hand, saw me handling it. “Do you read, Adam Hazzard?” She seemed surprised.

“I do—as often as I can.”

“Really! Have you read Parmentier?”

I confessed I hadn’t had the pleasure. Political Philosophy was not a subject I had pursued, I told her.

“Too bad. Parmentier is ruthless on Aristocracy. All my friends read him. Who do you read, then?”

“I admire the work of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“He’s a novelist. Perhaps I can introduce you to his work sometime.”

“Perhaps,” Calyxa said, and we sat down on the sofa. She took a sip of tea, and seemed more or less at ease, considering that she had just seen her homicidal brother shot in the head, and had spent the evening leaping about the rooftops of Montreal. Then she put down her cup and said, “Look at your feet—you’re bleeding all over the carpet.”

I apologized.

“It’s not the carpet I’m concerned about! Here, lie back and put your feet on this towel.”

I did so, and she fetched a medicine for me—an ointment that smelled of alcohol and camphor, and burned on application, but soon began to feel soothing. She examined my feet closely, then wrapped them in a linty bandage. “And you left your boots behind,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That wasn’t wise. Army-issue boots. Job will recognize them for what they are. He’ll know I was with an American soldier, and it won’t improve his temper.”

Shooting his brother in the head had probably angered him right up to the hilt, I thought, and the boots wouldn’t add much of a fillip to it; but I took Calyxa’s concern seriously. “I’m sorry to say this, Calyxa, and I don’t mean to insult your family, but I begin to wish I had shot both of them.”

“I wish you had, too, but the opportunity failed to present itself. Your poor feet! We’ll fix them up a little more, come morning, and replace your boots with something better before you have to march back to your regiment.”

I hadn’t thought that far ahead, and the prospect was daunting, but she didn’t dwell on it. “Adam Hazzard, I thank you for all you’ve done for me today. I was afraid of your motives at first, but Evangelica was right—you’re just as simple as you look. I want to reward you,” and here she put her arm around my shoulder, and drew my head closer to hers, and kissed me lightly on the cheek, “and I want to reward you in the best possible way, but it’s not practical right at the moment—”

My skin still tingled where her lips had been. “You don’t need to explain! I would never question your virtue, or make any claim on it, just because I helped you fend off your brothers!” (And I readjusted my Chinese robe to disguise any testimony to the contrary on the part of my masculine nature.) “It isn’t that. I do want to thank you, Adam. It would be my pleasure, as well as yours. Do you understand me? But the time is not propitious.”

“Of course it isn’t, with the gunplay and all.”

“What I mean is—”

“It’s enough that I can sit and talk with you. I wanted your friendship, and now I have it—that’s my reward.”

“J’ai mes règles, espèce de bouseaux ignorant!

” she said, a little impatiently, and I took this to be another testimonial to her gratitude to me, which was irrepressible. I expected nothing from her, but I hinted that a second kiss would not be unwelcome… and she gave me that, and I returned it, and I was as happy as I had ever been, despite all the rooftop calisthenics and bloody violence. Such is Love in a time of War.

I slept on the sofa, and she woke me in the morning. She examined my feet again, and said the injuries inflicted by the sharp tiles of the Montreal roofs were not as bad as they might have been, and she re-wrapped the bandages, and added a layer of leather, one for each foot, to function as soles, and more bandages, so that I could walk out of doors without re-injuring myself. “That ought to get you where we’re going,” she said.

She wanted to replace my boots with something better than bandages, and she wanted to find out what the ultimate outcome of the events at the tavern had been. She said she knew a place where both those needs might be addressed.

She put on a large sun-hat, to conceal her face if she crossed paths with a Blake brother, and I took her arm, and we stepped out into the sunny morning.

Last night’s tempest had washed the air clean, and the ferocious wind had been domesticated into a pleasant breeze. If not for the danger, and the pain in my feet, our stroll would have been entirely enjoyable. But it was brief, and it ended at the door of a basement shop on a street I didn’t recognize. The shop, a tannery and bootery, was closed—by law, because it was Sunday. Nevertheless Calyxa knocked loudly. “I know the owner,” she said.

The owner turned out to be a bearded and irritable man who would not have been out of place at the table she had occupied in the tavern last night, except that his attention to his clothing was more particular. He looked at Calyxa curiously, and at me with an undisguised mixture of loathing and distaste. “Let us in, Emil, I don’t want to dawdle here,” she said; and he waved us inside reluctantly.

His shop was a cellar, rank with the smell of tannin and glue, but he had some very nice boots on display. “Can you fit my friend?” Calyxa asked.

“Anything for you,” Emil said slowly, “you know that, but surely—”

“He needs something supple and sturdy on his feet. He lost his boots doing me a favor.”

“Don’t his army masters give him boots? Tu es folle d’amener un soldat américain ici!”

“Il m’a sauvé la vie. On peut lui faire confiance. En plus, il n’est pas très intelligent. S’il te plaît, ne le tue pas — fais-le pour moi!”

This exchange, whatever it meant, mollified Emil a little, and he agreed to measure my feet, and when he had done that he searched among his stock of pre-made boots, and showed me a fine pair of deerskins, calf-high and golden-brown. I was sure I couldn’t afford them.

“This has to do with your savage brothers,” Emil said to Calyxa. “I heard about what happened at the tavern last night.”

Calyxa became more attentive. “What do you know about Job and Utty?”

“Job was badly creased by a bullet. He lost a lot of blood, but his skull wasn’t cracked, and the story I heard is that he’ll survive it. Utty threatened to shoot a few people just for show, but Job’s wound distracted him. They left the tavern for the charity clinic—I expect Job’s still there, unless he had the grace to die during the night. That’s all I know, except that the military police took notice, and they’re holding a warrant on both men.”

Calyxa smiled as if this were welcome news, and I suppose it was; but sooner or later, it seemed to me, the Blake brothers would be back, angrier than ever, and I was afraid for her.

The boots were expensive even at Emil’s grudging discount. I was reluctant to spend the money—I was saving for a typewriter—but I didn’t want to appear tight in front of Calyxa, and I did need boots; so I paid the proprietor his ransom.

And I was not sorry. Even to my injured feet the deerhide boots felt like an upholstered corner of Heaven. I had never owned boots that fit me so neatly. The men of my company would be envious, I thought, and they would mock my vanity, and call me dainty; but I decided I would endure all that without complaint, for the boots comforted my feet and reminded me of Calyxa.

She and I walked a little farther, but the day was passing quickly, and I couldn’t stay away from camp much longer. We parted at the great iron bridge. Calyxa asked whether I might be back next weekend, and I promised I would try to see her, if the military situation allowed, and that I would think of her constantly in the meantime.

“I hope you do come back.”

“I will,” I vowed.

“Don’t forget to bring your pistol,” she said; then she kissed me and kissed me again.

7

I kept my promise, and returned many times to the City of Montreal that summer, and became better acquainted with Calyxa and with the city in which she lived. I won’t weary the reader with a description of all our encounters (some were too intimate to record, in any case), but I will say that we were not further troubled by the Blake Brothers—not that season, anyhow.

Camp life was easy for a time. My feet healed quickly, thanks to light work and those supple deerhide boots. The Dutch sallies became less frequent, and the only fighting for a while (locally, I mean) was between our scouting parties and a few enemy pickets. Contradictory rumors continued to emerge from the Saguenay campaign, however: a great victory—a great defeat—many Mitteleuropans killed—scores of Americans sent to early graves—but none of that could be confirmed, due to the slow pace of communications and the unwillingness of high staff to share intelligence with soldiers of the line. But around Thanksgiving we had a substantial hint that things had not gone well. A new regiment of draftees and recruits—soft, naive lease-boys, as I now saw them, mostly drawn from the estates and freehold farms of Maine and Vermont—arrived in camp. They were quickly trained in the business of garrisoning Montreal City and maintaining its defenses, which freed up those of us with battle experience for that most dreaded of military maneuvers: a Winter Campaign.

“Galligasken would never have approved of this,” Sam said when our regimental orders were finally cut. “The orders must have come down from the Executive Palace itself. This smells of Deklan Comstock’s meddling and impatience. The news of some defeat nettled him, so he ordered all his forces into a strategically absurd retaliation—I’d bet money on it.”

But there was no arguing with orders. We packed our ditty-bags and slung our Pittsburgh rifles, a whole division of us, and we were carted to the docks and loaded into steam-driven boats for the journey down the St. Lawrence to the Saguenay. There wasn’t time to say goodbye to Calyxa, so I wrote a hasty letter, and posted it from the quayside, telling her I would be away at the front for an undisclosed time, and that I loved her and thought of her constantly, and that I hoped the Blake Brothers wouldn’t hunt her down and kill her while I was gone.

The boats on which we rode burned wood rather than coal, and their smudge hung over the river and followed us in the wind, a poignant, earthy smell.

I had never been out on a boat before. The River Pine back in Williams Ford was too swift and shallow for navigation. I had seen boats, of course, especially since our arrival in Montreal , and they had fascinated me with their elephantine grace and their negotiations with the unpredictable and oft-stormy St. Lawrence. Consequently I spent much time at the rail of this little vessel as it traveled, experiencing what Julian called the “Relativistic Illusion” that the boat itself was stationary, and that it was the land around it that had gone into motion, writhing to the west like a snake with a war in its tail.

We had been issued woolen coats to protect us from the weather, but the day was fine and sunny, though autumn had the countryside in its final grip. We approached and passed the great fortifications at Quebec City , and followed the North Channel beyond Ile d’Orleans, where the river grew much wider and began to carry the tang of salt. The foliage along the north bank was umber and scarlet where it had not already abandoned itself to the wind. Denuded branches cast skeletal silhouettes against a dusty blue sky, and crows swept the forest-top in wheeling masses. Autumn is the only season with a hook in the human heart, Julian had once said (or quoted). This fanciful figure of speech ran through my mind right then— the only season with a hook in the heart —and because it was autumn, and because the land was vast and empty, and the air was chill and smelled of woodsmoke, the poetic words seemed to make sense, and were apt.

About then Julian came to stand beside me at the rail, while the other soldiers milled about on deck or went below to try their luck at mess. “Last night I dreamed I was on a ship,” he said, the long light falling on his face as the wind tousled the hair that flowed out beneath his cap.

“A ship like this one?”

“A better one, Adam. A three-masted schooner, like the ones that sail up the Narrows to Manhattan. When I was a child my mother used to take me to the foot of Forty-second Street to see those ships. I liked the idea that the ships came from faraway places—the Mediterranean Republics , or Nippon, or Ecuador , as it might be—and I liked to pretend some spirit of those places still clung to them—I convinced myself I could smell it, a whiff of spice above the stink of creosote and rotting fish.”

“Those must be very fine ships,” I said.

“But in my dream the ship was leaving New York Harbor, not arriving. She had just caught the wind in her sails—‘took the bone in her teeth,’ as sailors say; and she was passing under the old Verrazano Bridge. I knew I was being carried away somewhere… not to a safe place, exactly, but to a different place than I was accustomed to, where I might change into someone else.” He smiled sheepishly, though there was a haunted look in his eye. “I don’t suppose that makes sense.”

I said I guessed it didn’t, and I didn’t believe in prophetic dreams any more than Julian believed in Heaven; but something about the melancholy way he spoke made me think his dream must be another Poetic Metaphor, like that figure of speech involving hooks and hearts—the kind of riddle that cuts close to the tear ducts in its nonsense.

Around dusk we sailed past the Dutch fort at Tadoussac. It had been taken by American forces, and among the soldiers on deck a cheer went up at the sight of the Thirteen Stripes and Sixty Stars flying above those battle-scarred and broken walls on the high headland. What did not please us so much was the litter of broken ships clinging to that stark shore. Half-sunken hulls gutted by artillery fire stood sentinel over islands of charred debris trapped by the whorl of the river. Here there had been fighting of the fiercest kind, both ashore and afloat; and it was a dire and oppressive place by the fading light of day.

We reached the craggy mouth of the Saguenay shortly thereafter, and our flotilla of troop-ships, their wood-fired engines straining, sailed up that “fjord,” [As I believe the Dutch called it.] making a scant few knots against the current. Most of us tried to sleep in the narrow bunks that had been assigned to us. But we kept our arms close, and come morning we could hear the distant sounds of war.

They landed us at the Siege of Chicoutimi, and we spent three weeks in the trenches.

The companies of our Regiment were kept close together, to prevent our morale from being deflated by the long-term infantrymen who had fought their way here from Tadoussac over the course of the summer, and whose losses had been staggering. It had been a badly-planned and deadly campaign, and the Staff had not been spared the effects of its winnowing. It was rare to see an officer at Chicoutimi even as old as Sam Godwin. High rank and hasty promotions had been handed out to boys no older than myself, and commanders’ tents had become kindergartens from which one graduated to the grave.

The “siege,” in fact, was a stalemate.

Our entrenchments had encountered their entrenchments, and it was all we could do to keep the daily killing at an equitable level—no grander goal could be imagined. We controlled the Saguenay right up to River-of-Rats, but the Mitteleuropans held Chicoutimi in a firm grip, and their supply lines were secure all the way to the railhead at Lake Saint John , where the Stadhouders had established farms, mills, mines, refineries, shipworks, and a flourishing community of workers and owners. No matter what artillery we dragged upriver to attack them, they could float some equivalent weapon downstream to repulse us. And because of their greater numbers, we were in constant danger of being outflanked.

On top of all that, winter was coming fast. Cold weather had already driven off the Black Flies, but that was the only good thing about it. Our lines were a wasteland devoid of trees or vegetation. We had dug our trenches and redans out of the soil, which in this neighborhood was thick with the debris of the Efflorescence of Oil—bricks, broken foundation-stones, and that tarry crumble with which the ancients paved their roads. Our entrenching tools turned up human bones from time to time. The bones were not useful to us, [Though some of the men carved scrimshaw out of venerable ankles, or employed knobby old forearms as hooks on which to hang blankets to dry.] but the bricks were largely sound, and we worked them into our defenses. Some of the more ambitious men made entire brick fortifications, with mud for mortar, but these barricades were a two-edged sword: fine against rifle fire but dangerously unstable when artillery shells exploded nearby. Craftsmanship was everything, and men with bricklaying experience were in high demand for their advice, at least until the ground froze over, making it impossible to dig bricks or mortar them. These are the subtler arts of war.

We had nothing to eat but trail rations, and little enough of that. It was difficult even to keep warm. There were days when all we had to burn were fragments of rotted wood and asphalt. And there was no relief by night, for the Dutch loved to shell us during the hours of darkness, and our artillery companies were obliged to return fire. By the end of three weeks the lack of sleep, constant cold, and inadequate rations had turned us all into automatons, shuffling through frozen or muddy trenches according to orders given by distant madmen or local commanders no older than ourselves. Major Lampret was with us—the stories of his cowardice and self-regard had made it mandatory that he travel to the front lines, or lose all credibility with the men—and he conducted Sunday services on three occasions, each event less well-attended than the one before. His rivalry with Julian still simmered, and I expect Lampret wished he had demoted or even imprisoned “Private Commongold” when the opportunity presented itself; but Julian was well-liked, and Lampret could not do anything against him. Sam knew that Lampret had a spy among us, and he had concluded that the informer was most likely Private Langers, our entrepreneurial colporteur, who had been seen conferring with Lampret on several occasions; and certainly there was nothing about Langers’s moral character that would make the charge implausible. But Langers was careful, and no money or favors were seen to change hands.

The last Camp Meeting held by Major Lampret drew a larger audience, but that was because we were ordered to it. We stood in a circle on cleared ground, under cloudy skies, in a spitting snow, as grim news was announced. General Galligasken had been injured by shrapnel from an enemy shell, even though his headquarters had been set up out of the range of conventional artillery—perhaps a Chinese Cannon was responsible. The General still lived, but he had been taken down to Tadoussac for emergency treatment, and he would probably lose an arm, if he survived. His replacement was a new General from New York City named Reddick. A pawn of the Executive, Sam whispered, and a lackey of the Dominion as well. This was bad news indeed.

There was worse to come. Reddick in his enthusiasm had ordered an all out dawn attack. We were to sleep on our arms, and be prepared for heavy action come morning.

The quartermaster issued us double rations—a welcome change, though as a “last supper” it did little to dispel the gloom—and fresh rounds of ammunition. We were more convincingly cheered by the arrival of a new division of cavalry, men armed with Trench Sweepers of the type that had proved so effective in the Battle of Mascouche. Perhaps we were not doomed after all. That faint hope sustained us.

The sky was red with dawn when all the bugles sounded and all our artillery fired at once, announcing the attack.

We deployed by regiments, and ours was in the vanguard. I asked Sam what the strategy might be, but he couldn’t tell: the armies were too large for one man to survey them, and this battle was being coordinated by staff in the rear. Telegraph cables had been laid to help Reddick communicate with field commanders, and there were messengers and horsemen to carry intelligence back and forth. But this was a clumsy way to manage something as fluid as a massive battle, Sam said, so most of the initiative would be in the hands of regimental captains. Julian asked pointedly, and loudly, whether Major Lampret would deign to involve himself in the attack, or whether he would supervise, in a spiritual sense, from behind. Lampret overheard this comment—as he was no doubt meant to—and announced to the assembly that he would take up a rifle if there was one to spare. This won him a few scattered hurrahs; though his face, when he made the offer, was chalk-white, and he gave Julian a long daggered stare.

Then we were in the thick of it. I will spare the reader the ghastly minutiae of that awful morning, except to say that our company was reduced to half its numbers before an hour had passed; and I saw so much of what ought to have remained inside the human body, but hadn’t, that I passed beyond revulsion into a kind of emotionless efficiency. The roar of battle was all but deafening, and if not for the organizing genius of flags and bugles I suppose we would have abandoned all order and fought for our lives, individually.

Here, as in Mascouche , it was the Trench Sweeper that made the difference. I had learned to recognize the sound of those heavy rifles—a sort of deadly, prolonged cough—and so had the Dutch troops, who dreaded it. The Army of the Laurentians began to make a striking advance as soon as those weapons were brought to bear, though I was still not sure what our ultimate objective might be. But General Reddick ordered a pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and we had no choice but to oblige.

The battle passed out of the cratered no-man’s-land of trenches and abandoned redoubts as the Mitteleuropans fell back to prepared positions on forested, hilly land. The order for pursuit rang out from all quarters, and Sam (who had been slightly wounded in the thigh, but stanched the bleeding with a cotton handkerchief) guessed that Reddick intended to destroy the Dutch army in detail, if our cavalry could flank them and get in their rear. To this end our regiment was ordered into the trees, to keep the enemy moving, and acquire any loose supplies or animals they left behind, and capture or kill any stragglers.

It was a bold plan, and we might have been a useful part of it, except for the consequences of a single bullet.

Our company commander was Captain Paley Glasswood, formerly a New York City counter clerk, who was at least ten years younger than Sam Godwin—perhaps about Major Lampret’s age—but senior in rank to most of us. Today he led us through a volley of fierce but (as it then seemed) ineffective sniper fire, into the woods, and across a stream, and along the bow of a gentle ridge, then down into a forested valley, never encountering the enemy even once; and we marched for more than two hours in this fashion, patient but puzzled, before the Captain stopped and said in a ringing voice: “I’m tired, boys, and the stars are awfully bright.”

Then he sat down on a log, sighing and mumbling.

We were hours from darkness, though the day was gloomy, with little squirts of snow now and again, so his comment about the stars surprised everyone. Sam went up to Captain Glasswood to ask him what was the matter, but got no response. Then he examined the left side of the Captain’s head and grimaced. “Oh, Hell! Here, Adam—help me lay him down.”

Captain Glasswood made no protest as we stretched him out on the cold forest floor under a canopy of creaking pines. The Captain’s gaze was distant, and the pupil of one eye had grown as large as a Comstock dollar. He looked at me solemnly as I cradled him down to the ground. “Oh, now, Maria, don’t cry,” he said in a petulant voice. “I haven’t been to Lucille’s since Tuesday.”

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

Sam, who had been holding the Captain’s head, lifted up his palm and showed me streaks of clotted red. “Apparently he was shot,” he said with disgust.

“Shot where?”

“In the skull. Through the ear, by the look of it.”

That was a dreadful thing, I thought, to be shot in the ear. The idea of it made me shudder, despite all I had seen today. “I didn’t hear any rifle fire.”

“It must have happened during the battle, or just after. Perhaps one of those sharpshooters got him.”

“That long ago! Didn’t he notice?”

“The wound didn’t bleed much, externally. And he has a bullet in his brain, Adam. People with bullets in their brains lose all kinds of sensibility, and sometimes they don’t even know they’re hurt. I expect he still doesn’t know he’s wounded. And never will. He’s dying. That’s a certainty.”

I was afraid that Captain Glasswood might overhear this unhappy diagnosis and be upset by it, but Sam was right; the news, if he understood it, didn’t trouble him at all. The Captain just closed his eyes and curled on his side like a man making himself comfortable on a feather bed. “Can’t you get a blanket from the cedar chest?” he asked wistfully. “I’m cold, Lucille.”

Then he screamed once and stopped breathing.

There were not quite twenty of us left in the company, and we had lost our only commanding officer. There was Lampret, of course, who was accompanying us. But Lampret was a Dominion man, not a seasoned combatant. And at the moment he was no more useful than a stick of wood, staring at Captain Glasswood’s corpse as if it had popped up from the ground like a poisonous mushroom. The men of the company, by some unspoken mutual instinct, looked to Julian for leadership. And Julian looked to Sam, and by so doing bequeathed on him the respect and obedience of the common soldiers.

“Post a guard,” Sam said, when he realized the burden of command had fallen on him. “But I guess we’re far enough from the battle that we can bury Captain Glasswood without attracting enemy fire. We can’t carry him back, at any rate, and it doesn’t seem right to abandon him.”

It was, of course, impossible to truly bury him in the frozen ground; so we scraped a shallow trench out of pine-needle duff, and rolled Captain Glasswood into it, and covered him over. This would not protect his body from wild animals for very long, but it was a Christian gesture; and after a little prodding we even got a funeral prayer out of Major Lampret, though he delivered it in a small and quaking voice. Julian seemed moved by the death, and he did not make any disparaging remarks about God. All of us were badly taken by the Captain’s death—as peculiar as that might seem, given how much death we had already witnessed and absorbed today. It might have been the loneliness of the woods that made the difference, or the clouds leaking frigid grains of snow, or the conspicuous absence of banners and bugle-calls.

The problem we confronted now, though Sam did not say so explicitly, was that Captain Glasswood had led us, according to what we all imagined was some clever strategy, deep into the wilderness, and away from the field of battle. But the only strategy at work had sprung from the Captain’s damaged mind, and it was no longer available to us, if it ever existed.

In other words—words I was reluctant to pronounce even in the privacy of my own thoughts—we were lost in the wilds of the upper Saguenay.

The sound of battle had faded behind us long ago. Either the Dutch had been chased from their trenches, stragglers and all, and the war had entered another pause, or we had simply passed out of hearing of it. The latter possibility was undeniable, for we had crossed many wooded ridges, which baffle or amplify sounds in unpredictable ways. The best plan now, Sam told the company after we had finished prayers for Captain Glasswood, would be to return to our own lines. But that return might not be direct, he said, “until we get firm bearings,” and in the meantime we must act as a scouting party, and note the position and defenses of the Dutch, should we stumble across any. Sam said he would try to backtrack us. Whether he truly possessed this skill or was only saying so to buoy our spirits, I couldn’t tell.

We walked for hours more, and by nightfall we seemed to be no closer to our lines. Sam remained mute on the subject. We dared not make a fire. We carried only minimal rations, and we ate sparingly, and made what shelter we could, and wrapped ourselves in blankets in order to sleep… which I suppose some of us were able to do, though the bare limbs of the trees creaked like the timbers of a ghostly ship, and the wind made a sound like the sea.

“It seems to me,” Lymon Pugh said, “that we’re sunk pretty deep in a vinegar brine of trouble,” and that truth was impossible to deny.

Lymon Pugh was as emaciated as the rest of us after all our time in the trenches, but his muscular forearms, sliced by flensing knives and tattooed by beef blood, were still impressive, even buried under the sleeves of his thick woolen jacket; and he made a reassuring companion. We walked behind Sam, who was scouting a path. We had come a good distance up a wooded hill, all of us sweating despite the frosty air.

The day, though cold, was fortunately not overcast, and the position of the sun gave us some clue as to the cardinal points of the compass. We knew we were east of the Saguenay , and probably well north of our own lines. It was fortunate for us that this part of the country was not much inhabited, or we might have been taken captive long ago. But we could not avoid civilization for long, unless we set up housekeeping in the woods, and that would have been a tall order, since there was nothing much to eat—even small game had been chased away by warfare or scoured up by hungry Dutch soldiers. So we continued to climb this increasingly steep bluff until, as we reached the top, Sam held up a hand, signaling us to stop, and whispered that we should not make any noise.

We came up singly or in twos, crouching.

From the height of this ridge we could see a long declining counterslope, gentle enough that a railroad (of the narrow gauge the Dutch prefer) ascended it at an angle, passing close to where we stood. This was presumably the line between Chicoutimi to the Mitteleuropan estates at Lake St. John, or perhaps it ran all the way to the rocky Atlantic—the Dutch had built skeins of railroads across occupied Labrador in the decades during which they controlled this land.

The most important fact about this railroad was its connection to the town of Chicoutimi , which we could also see, though dimly, across a misty expanse of winter wilderness, attached like a smudged appendix to the blue ribbon of the Saguenay. And that meant we were no longer lost—though we were still a great distance from where we wanted to be. The way ahead was clear and obvious: we need only follow the railroad until we could veer off toward more friendly territory. And our hearts were light, for that did not appear to be an insurmountable task. We might even be back with our old regiment in time for a hot meal before bed.

But the journey had to be postponed a few moments more. Sam urged us to keep silent. He had seen a train approaching from the east—he pointed out a trail of smoke hovering over the eastern passes. “Stay hidden until it goes by, every one of you.”

We were only a few yards from the track where it crossed the peak of the ridge to begin its descent into Chicoutimi , and soon the train would be just adjacent to us. “Shouldn’t we fire on it, or do something soldierly such as that?” asked Lymon Pugh.

“It may not be a military train,” said Sam. “I don’t see any great advantage in shooting unarmed civilians, even among the Dutch. And gunfire would draw attention on us, in any case, and probably get us killed.”

No one was inclined to argue the point. We were low on ammunition, anyhow, for we had wasted some of it shooting unproductively into empty squirrels’ nests in hopes of bringing down a little fresh meat. We sat tight among the rocks and spindly winter bushes until we could hear the train’s Dutch engine straining against the slope, and feel the rumble of it. I had not seen a Mitteleuropan train before, and I wondered what it would look like.

It hove into view, finally, and it was not much different from an American train, in so far as function dictates form in these matters, though it did look very smoothly-built, and the engine was painted an unusual blue-gray color. What was alarming was not the design of the train but its speed, which was slow, and, worse, slowing. In fact it seemed as if the train was coming to a stop.

We raised our heads despite Sam’s warning. The train was a military one. That much was patently obvious. The engine was drawing only a pair of cars, both of which bore the sinister cross-and-laurel insigne of the Mitteleuropan army. “We ought to have pulled up the track,” Lymon Pugh whispered to me, “to keep that thing from reaching Chicoutimi with whatever it’s carrying.”

“There wasn’t time,” I said, “even if we had thought of it. Perhaps we can tear up the tracks later; but keep your wits about you, Lymon, I believe that train isn’t going any farther than right here.”

We had no plan for this unexpected contingency. Sam hastily motioned at us to move a little ways up along the ridge, though still keeping the mysterious Dutch train within sight. Why had it come to this hilltop near Chicoutimi , and why had it paused right near us? No simple explanation sprang to mind.

Sam halted us in a stand of naked birches where the hummocky ground made it easy to disguise ourselves against accidental discovery. We watched the train in breathless anticipation. Someone wondered aloud whether the train might not have been sent explicitly to hunt for us; but one misplaced American infantry company was not significant to the Dutch, Sam said.

Major Lampret stirred from his funk and said, “We ought to get as far from that thing as possible. We endanger ourselves by sitting here—why don’t we retreat?”

“We’re as safe here as anywhere,” Sam said coolly, “as long as we’re not seen. Stay put.”

“Don’t presume to give me orders,” said Lampret.

Evidently Major Lampret had regrown his spine; but he had chosen a poor time to enter into an argument over rank, I thought. The men of the company thought so, too, for they hissed at him to keep quiet. “I suppose we could all fly home, if we had Angel’s Wings,” one man muttered.

Lampret gave way, fearing mutiny; but he said to Sam, in a low tone, “We’ll talk about insubordination when we get back to camp.”

“That would be a more convenient time to discuss it,” Sam agreed; and Lampret lapsed back into his sullen silence.

In the meantime the Dutch train had halted altogether, noisily bleeding steam from its valves, and a few Mitteleuropan soldiers clambered off the rear car. What appeared to interest them was a little clearing just at the western side of the train—a granite shoulder covered with pebbles and tufts of brittle weeds. The Dutch soldiers scouted out that flat space meticulously, and shaded their eyes, and peered off toward the distant Saguenay , and spoke their unintelligible language to one another. Then they returned to the train, and rolled back the door on one of the twin boxcars.

The open door admitted a shaft of sunlight and revealed the car’s contents, at which we all gasped: for the train was carrying a Chinese Cannon.

Sam detailed a pair of men to count the enemy soldiers as they disembarked and prepared to assemble the Cannon. I asked Julian what he thought was going on.

“Isn’t it obvious, Adam? They mean to set up an artillery battery.”

“What—here? It’s a long way from the fight.”

“You forget the extraordinary range of the Chinese Cannon. That’s the advantage of it: it can be placed far from the active lines, and still be an effective weapon. The drawback is that it’s bulky and has to be carried by a whole convoy of wagons, or by a train, for instance in those two cars.”

Both boxcars had been opened now, and we could see that the assembly and activation of the Cannon would not be a simple task for the gunners. Its great Rotary Base occupied one car, and the Barrel of the thing, broken into telescoping pieces, occupied the other. The cargo of the train also included a couple of mules, to assist in haulage and enstationment, and winches and levers and other necessary tools. There was also a number of crates marked BOMBE , a word even Lymon Pugh was able to translate from the Dutch. [Or Deutsche, in this case, I’m told.]

We counted fifteen artillerymen, give or take, plus whatever crew remained aboard the engine.

“We outnumber them,” Julian remarked.

“Perhaps,” Sam said. “But they’re conspicuously better-armed.”

“But we have the element of surprise.”

“Are you suggesting we engage the Dutch artillery?”

“I’m suggesting we have a duty not to let those shells fall on American soldiers, if we can help it.”

That was a bold but bracing declaration, and it pleased some in our company who were anxious to make the Dutch pay a price for inconveniencing us with their war, and for the cowardly act of shooting Captain Glasswood through the ear. Sam smiled. “Well said. But we have to be clever about it, Julian, not just belligerent. What would you do, if it was your command?”

“Capture the train,” Julian said.

The company of us had all gathered around, and some grinned at this, though Major Lampret scowled and shook his head.

“That’s an objective,” Sam said patiently, “not a plan. Tell me your plan.”

Julian took a moment to assess the situation, peering at the train and the surrounding landscape. “Post most of our company on that lip overlooking the ridge where the tall trees are—do you see? We can conceal ourselves and make every shot count, which is important, given our limited munitions; and from there we can range in on anyone who hasn’t deliberately taken cover.”

“Thus employing the element of surprise,” Sam said.

“Surprise and distraction. We could leave a couple of men here, to make some sort of demonstration, and draw the attention of the Dutch in exactly the wrong direction.”

The two of them discussed the idea at length, with others in the company chiming in with suggestions. Then Sam said: “It might work. I think it will work, if we execute it correctly. But that would leave us in possession of a train containing a Chinese Cannon—what do we do with it once we have it?”

“Drive it down toward Chicoutimi,” said Julian.

“For what purpose?”

“It depends on the state of the fighting. If the rail happens to cross into territory held by our forces, we can deliver the Cannon to them—and be feted as heroes, no doubt. Failing that, we can destroy the Cannon and render it useless to the Dutch.”

“Destroy it how?”

“Put some sort of fuse on those shell-casings and blow it all up, I suppose. We might even turn the entire train into a sort of bomb—set it on fire and send it hurtling into Chicoutimi.”

“Hard on us, though, that scenario.”

“We can leap off at the closest approach to our lines, and make our way home.” Julian smiled. “If nothing else, it might save us a few miles walking.”

It was that humble suggestion that clinched the issue. We were all tired of walking, and the idea of riding a captured enemy train even halfway home was a pleasant one to contemplate.

All of us agreed to the plan, at least tacitly, except Major Lampret, who insisted that we were lunatics and mutineers for undertaking this battle without his consent, and that there would be “consequences” if we carried it out, assuming we weren’t all killed by our own foolishness. But Lampret’s credibility had been so thoroughly undercut that he was easy to ignore.

I was in favor of the attack, and my only disappointment when it was approved was that Lymon Pugh and I were assigned to provide the “useful distraction.”

I asked Sam what he wanted us to do.

“Wait here until the rest of us are in place. I’ll signal you when it’s time to begin the proceedings.”

“Begin them how, though?”

“Just make a noise of some kind—nothing too belligerent, just something that will draw all eyes. It needn’t be anything fancy—the firing will commence at once.”

The Dutchmen were beginning to harness up their mules, so we had to move quickly. Lymon and I watched the other men of the company scuttle away, backs bent and weapons ready, to their hiding places a few hundred yards to the east.

Lymon said, “You’d better orchestrate this thing, Adam. I don’t know how to distract a Dutch soldier, except by shooting at him. Maybe you can call out to them in their own language.”

“Perhaps I would, except I don’t speak it.”

“You have that letter you bought from Langers’s Lucky Mug. I’ve seen you reading it over and over.”

“But not for the sense of it. And I can only guess at the pronunciation, based on what I’ve heard from Dutch prisoners. They wouldn’t believe me for a second.”

“They don’t have to believe you—Sam’s instruction was only that we should obtain their attention.

Look there!—Sam is already waving his hand—I believe the time is ripe—go on, Adam, call out to them !”

I was flustered by the rapid progression of events, and I could think of nothing to do except to adopt Lymon Pugh’s suggestion.

I cleared my throat.

“Louder!” Lymon said. “Make yourself heard!”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and cried out, “Lieftse Hannie!”

“What’s that mean?” Lymon asked.

“I don’t know!”

“They can’t hear you. Wasn’t there something about Americans being no better than dogs?”

I racked my brain.

“Fikkie mis ik ook!”

I shouted, so loudly that the obdurate syllables pricked my throat like thorns.

“Lieftse Hannie! Fikkie mis ik ook!”

That did the trick. For one fragile moment—a fraction of time as motionless as a bug in amber—every Dutch soldier looked in my direction, and each one wore an identical expression, of confusion bordering on bewilderment.

Then a barrage of rifle fire began to cut them down.

At the end of the ambush we had taken a two-car train, a Chinese Cannon, and three prisoners, and left a score of dead Mitteleuropan soldiers scattered about. The prisoners consisted of an artilleryman and two civilian engineers. They were not cooperative, and had to be bound and tied.

Everything that had been taken from the train we put back in place. (None of the heavy parts of the Chinese Cannon had yet been unhitched.) This was indeed a fine haul, if we could get it into American hands. Fortunately one of the men of our company—a long-haired mechanic named Penniman, from Lake Champlain—had studied trains, and understood the theory of steam-driven engines well enough that he could discern the use of the controls even though they were labeled in a foreign language. While he got up pressure in the boilers the rest of us policed the area, collecting Dutch rifles and pistols from their former owners. Then Julian and I went to join Sam in the cab of the engine, while the rest of the company found room for themselves in the heavily loaded boxcars. [We were forced to evict the mules.]

This had all gone very smoothly, and would have been a complete triumph except that, as it turned out, one of the Dutch soldiers had been “playing dead,” and had secreted his rifle beneath his apparently lifeless body. Just as soon as Penniman released the brake and the train began to move, this troublesome Mitteleuropan grabbed up his weapon and fired on us. Bullets flew through the cab, and Penniman was lightly injured. Sam cursed and took up his own rifle. He leaned around the coal hopper and fired three shots. I thrust out my head long enough to see the Dutch rifleman retreat into a thicket of skeletal, leafless trees.

We would have kept on rolling without further incident, I suppose, since the artilleryman could hardly have followed us, except that the door on the rear boxcar rolled open and Major Lampret popped out of it, shooting his own rifle wildly. “Brake up!” Sam cried disgustedly, and Penniman did so. The train vented steam-clouds into the cold air.

I managed to discern more of the action despite the veils of mist that obscured it. Apparently Major Lampret had decided to demonstrate his courage, which had been so severely questioned in recent days, and to restore himself to command. Perhaps he deemed the odds respectable—himself against one desperate Dutchman. Or it may be that his motives were sincere and patriotic, if misguided. In any case, his act of bravery or stupidity produced no good result. The Dutch infantryman fired back, and his defense was more calculated than Lampret’s attack. Major Lampret took a bullet and slumped to the ground.

At this point Julian astonished me by leaping out of the engine-cabin and running toward the place where Major Lampret had fallen.

Sam was equally astonished; but he kept his wits, and shouted, “Fire on the enemy! Give cover!”—while doing so himself. Other men of our company began to follow his example, though none of us was willing to make himself as vulnerable to the Dutchman’s bullets as had Julian.

I fired my rifle, too, though part of me felt frozen in the event, watching Julian dodge and dash toward an injured a man who had once threatened to imprison him. When Julian reached the Major he didn’t hesitate, but thrust his hands under Lampret’s inert arms and began to drag him back to the train. Geysers of icy dirt flew up around Julian and the Major—these were the impacts of hostile bullets, each one coming closer to its mark. Then the Dutchman gave out an audible cry from the thicket where he was hidden, and threw up his arms and fell forward; and on this occasion his death was not feigned, but entirely authentic.

Several of our men jumped from the train to help Julian with his burden. Soon the Major was safely aboard. Major Lampret had been badly hurt—the artilleryman’s bullet had passed through his shoulder, leaving ugly wounds on the front and back of him—but he was breathing freely, and there seemed to be a decent chance that he might recover if he received prompt medical attention.

If Major Lampret had meant to establish his courage by this act, the attempt was a failure. I supposed it was brave of him to go after the Dutch soldier the way he had. But Julian’s bravery in the rescue was more conspicuous, especially as it was aimed at saving the life of a man he despised; and this was what drew admiration from the other men, while Lampret received only the most cursory attention in his suffering.

Lampret remained unconscious, and just as well, or his jealousy might have killed him on the spot.

The gunfire and the damage to Major Lampret made our journey down the hillside more eerie than triumphal. It was a feeling exacerbated by the land around us, for our captive train soon passed out of the winter forest into a Stygian realm of churned and frozen craters, cutwire fences festooned with corpses, and the blackened frames of burned-down farmhouses. The fighting had been fierce in our absence.

We began to calculate our options. From here the railroad ran straight to the embattled town of Chicoutimi. As far as we knew, that locality remained in the hands of the Mitteleuropans. But Julian found a Swiss spyglass among the articles left behind in the engine cabin, and he pointed it ahead of us, looking very distinguished, it seemed to me, in his battle-scarred uniform, with his long hair flowing out behind him. After a time he began to smile. The smile broadened. Then Julian handed the spyglass to Sam. “Look ahead, Sam—focus on the church tower on the hill.”

“Hard to see in this mist.” The valley through which we traveled was foggy in places, and a leaden overcast had blunted the blue sky. “But that must be the church tower—riddled with artillery impacts—it’s not very clear…”

“Turn the side-wheel with your thumb,” Julian said, “to bring it into focus.”

Sam fiddled with the adjustment, cursing. “The Swiss are too clever by half—too clever for their own good. I don’t think—ah! There.”

Then Sam smiled, too.

“What do you see?” I demanded. “Don’t make a secret of it!”

“Only a flag on the church tower.”

“Well, why shouldn’t there be a flag on the church tower?”

“No reason at all. What distinguishes this flag is that it has thirteen Stripes and sixty Stars.” He put down the spyglass and said more gently, “Our forces have taken Chicoutimi.”

Thus it was only a matter of slowing the train and rumbling into Chicoutimi with our prize.

A Dutch military train arriving from the east might not be the most welcome sight among American troops, Sam reminded us. We had already passed a couple of pickets, who had taken hasty shots at us. What we needed was some convincing signal of our amity.

“Major Lampret is a Dominion Officer,” Julian said. “Don’t they carry American flags with them at all times, for funerals and prayers?”

We stopped in an isolated place long enough for Julian to visit the men in the boxcars, who gave a spontaneous hurrah when he told them Chicoutimi had fallen, and to procure a flag from Major Lampret, who carried one folded inside his shirt.

Julian came back to the engine of the Dutch train, but he didn’t enter the cab. Instead he tied the flag to a charred tree-branch, which he found on the ground, and clambered onto the front of the engine, perching himself on an iron shelf just below the lantern-lens.

“Go in slowly,” he called back to Penniman.

The train lurched forward as Penniman released the brake, almost tumbling Julian onto the tracks, then proceeded more smoothly.

And that was how we arrived in the newly-captured town of Chicoutimi. A fine snow had begun to fall, and the afternoon was theatrical in its shifting scrims of sun and cloud. We rode all the way into the depot with Julian up front like a patriotic ornament. His uniform was ragged and dirty, and his face was alabaster with the cold, but he grinned irrepressibly and waved the Sixty Stars and Thirteen Stripes before the hundreds of infantrymen and cavalrymen who assembled at the sight of our smoke. The engine passed down a corridor of these astonished soldiers before it finally hissed to a stop. Then the doors of the boxcars were thrown open, and a great and jubilant outcry rose up, for it was obvious to every spectator that we had captured a Chinese Cannon all intact.

8

The scourge of cholera caught up with us later that month. Many brave men who had survived injury and starvation all the way up the bloody Saguenay were taken to their graves by the disorder. The stench, inconvenience, and tragedy of the disease made life unpleasant for all of us, sick or not, and eventually most of us did get sick, though we did not necessarily die. I did not, for example—and I was as sick as anyone.

The human mind edits from memory its feverish interludes, and I can recollect very little of January or February of 2174. When I came to myself, what astonished me most—apart from my emaciation and general weakness—was that I had been transported without my knowledge from Chicoutimi to a field hospital in Tadoussac, and from there to the Soldier’s Rest, a recuperation-house in the City of Montreal. I learned that many men I knew and liked had died in the outbreak, and that saddened me. But there was good news, too. Sam, Julian, and Lymon Pugh had survived the disease, though they were sickened by it; and all three of them were here in the Soldier’s Rest, also recuperating. Out of all of our small circle the sickest had been Julian; the doctors said he had come close to dying; but he was well enough now that he could sit up, and take medicinal soups and such. Sam and Lymon were in even better mettle, and would be leaving the Rest within days.

And there was another bright light on the horizon, which served to improve my mood. That was the prospect of our release from the Army of the Laurentians. The Draft Act of 2172 specified a single year of involuntary service (though an Aristo could contribute an indentured man “for the duration”); and although we were strenuously canvassed to re-enlist we resisted that temptation (except for Lymon Pugh, who felt the Army, despite its manifest dangers, was a more attractive option than the meat-packing trade). This meant that as early as Easter I would be able to leave here with Sam and Julian, and we would be bound for New York City—as civilians!—just as we had intended when we fled Williams Ford, though with a heightened sense of the injustices and opportunities of life.

During my enforced idleness I did a great deal of reading and writing. I wrote to my mother in Williams Ford, as I had written several times before, being careful not to disclose any dangerous information about Julian or our precise whereabouts, since there was always a chance the mail might be intercepted by some perfervid Dominion or Government agent still hunting the President’s nephew. That meant that I could not receive any letters from my mother in return, a sore trial for me; but I was careful to write as regularly as possible, and to reassure her about my health and welfare.

I also wrote to Calyxa Blake, confessing my continued love and my desire to see her again. She responded with letters of her own, but these were curiously brief, though friendly enough. Something in the tone of them worried me, and I vowed to seek her out as soon as I could convince the doctors to release me.

That did not happen immediately, however; so I pursued other kinds of writing. I wrote an account of the events of the winter—of our voyage up the Saguenay , the Siege of Chicoutimi, the fall of that town, and the capture of the Chinese Cannon. I tried to hew to the principles the correspondent Theodore Dornwood had taught me, that is, to remain within the borders of the truth but to veer, where there was latitude, toward Drama. I worked at the piece over several days, reading what I had written and re-writing it, until I was satisfied with the result. Then I pondered how to get the pages to Mr. Dornwood, if he was still anywhere near Montreal. Mr. Dornwood had praised my previous efforts, and—if the truth be told—I had grown somewhat addicted to his flattery, coming as it did from a professional War Correspondent.

In the end it was Lymon Pugh who offered to be my intermediary.

He was the healthiest of us, and he came to the ward-room the day he was due to be released. We talked idly at first. Then he saw what I was reading, and asked me about it.

It was A History of Mankind in Space.

I had kept this tattered and very ancient volume with me all through my military career, tucked into the bottom of my ditty-bag. It wasn’t heavy—the formidable stiff covers of the book had fallen off months ago. Really it was only a bundle of pages held together with a binding of threads which I had sewn myself (clumsily). “An old book,” I said to Lymon.

“How old?”

“More than a century. It’s from the last days of the Secular Ancients.”

Lymon’s eyes widened. “That old! Did they write in English back then, or did they have some language of their own?”

“It’s English, though some of the words and usages are peculiar. Here, look.”

Lymon had lately taken an interest in books, since he was now able to puzzle out enough words to make them intriguing to him—books, which had been mute lumps in prior times, were suddenly full of voices, all clamoring for attention. In the course of Lymon’s instruction I had read him chapters of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton’s Against the Brazilians, which had also survived intact in my ditty-bag, and I had even allowed Lymon to borrow the volume and read ahead, once he was captivated by the plot. [Lymon, though not experienced in reading, endorsed my opinion that Mr. Easton was probably the greatest of our living authors. He could not imagine a better one, at any rate. It was a miracle that anyone wrote books at all, Lymon said, much less good ones; and he was impressed by Mr. Easton’s formidable knowledge of foreign places, historic battles, pirates, and such interesting subjects.]

But the History of Mankind in Space seemed to oppress him as he leafed through its pages and inspected its photographs. His features knotted into a spindled emblem of perplexity. “It seems to say here that people went to the moon,” he uttered in a low voice.

“That’s exactly what it says.”

“And this is not a work of fiction?”

“It claims not to be. I don’t know whether folks walked on the moon or not. But the Secular Ancients clearly believed it, and so does Julian.”

It was a poorly-ordered world we lived in, Lymon said, if moon-visiting was deemed to be “non-fiction” while Mr. Easton’s straightforward narratives about wars and pirates were excoriated (as they had been, Julian once told me, in some quarters) as crude storytelling. “This isn’t a Dominion book, is it?”

“No. When it was written, there was no Dominion.”

“Keep your voice down—you’ll get us in trouble with that kind of talk.”

“It’s not ‘talk,’ only history. Even the Dominion admits that it came into being with the False Tribulation. Before that all the churches were independent, and disorganized, and had little sway with the government, or any way of fulfilling the ideal of a Christian World under the direct administration of Heaven.”

“That’s what the Dominion means to set up?”

“That’s its ultimate purpose—to unite the world in advance of the rule of Jesus Christ.” Which he would have known, if he had not slept through so many Sunday services.

“I’m not well-churched,” said Lymon, rubbing his left hand over his scarred right forearm. “Do you suppose that’s about to happen, with the fall of Chicoutimi and all?”

“The Dominion must conquer a great deal more of the world than just Labrador before the end of all worldly strife. I doubt we’ll see the Global Reign of Christianity in our lifetime.”

Lymon nodded with obvious relief. He said he didn’t mind the prospect of Christian government—he was willing to be ruled by Heaven—what troubled him was that Heaven might employ men like Major Lampret as intermediaries.

I asked whether the Major had recovered from the wounds he received during the capture of the Chinese Cannon.

“He did, and he even survived the cholera; but he’s gone back to Colorado Springs for the time being. The events up the Saguenay were an embarrassment to him, and he needs to improve his morale and reputation as much his health.”

“Good news for Julian, at least,” I said. “Lymon, since you’re leaving here shortly, and I’m still confined to bed, would you do me a favor?”

“Yes, certainly—what?”

“I have two packages I need delivered in Montreal.” I took these out from where I had stashed them beneath the bed. “The smaller one is a letter, to be delivered personally to Calyxa Blake. I’ve written her address on the envelope—can you read it adequately well?”

“I think so.”

“This bigger bundle of papers is meant for Mr. Theodore Dornwood, if he’s still around, and if you can find him.”

“Dornwood the newspaper writer? That might be difficult. Rumor is that he left the regiment when we went up-river, and that he sits in some cheap rental and posts lies to Manhattan , between bouts of drunkenness and debauchery. But I’ll try to find him, for your sake, if you want me to, Adam.”

The reader may imagine with what impatience and anxiety I awaited Lymon’s return, for each of the missives I had entrusted to him was greatly significant to me. The package for Theodore Dornwood contained my whole account of the Saguenay Expedition. The smaller letter, meant for Calyxa, was even more momentous. In it, I expressed my intention to propose marriage to her, should she find the time to visit me in the hospital.

But Lymon did not return that afternoon, nor in the evening. To forestall my uneasiness I talked with the two other patients with whom I shared the ward. One was a lease-boy like myself, but from a Southern estate, where he had been worked cruelly in the tropical heat; he had been wounded north of Quebec , and his whole right arm, though intact, was a useless appendage. My other companion was a cavalryman with a generous mustache and his head shaved bald, who wouldn’t say how he had acquired the injury that was hidden by a layer of bandages wrapping his belly. Neither of these men were scintillating conversationalists, since both were in constant pain; but the cavalryman owned a box of dominoes, and we passed an hour or two playing Estates. After that I asked the nurse whether the hospital had any fresh reading material, since I had memorized nearly every page of the History of Mankind in Space and Against the Brazilians.

“I think there might be something,” she said. But all she could scare up was a slender volume of stories by Mrs. Eckerson. Mrs. Eckerson was one of the classic authors of the nineteenth century, suitable for modern tastes, and preserved from extinction by the Dominion press; but she wrote mainly for young girls, and the book provoked memories of my sister Flaxie. Nevertheless I read until my eyes tired of it; and my bedside lamp, by the time I blew it out, was the last one burning.

In the morning I was treated to one of the hospital’s Hygienic Baths—a mandatory ordeal, overseen by nurses, and damaging to male dignity—and when I returned to my bed I found Lymon Pugh waiting in the visitor’s chair. He was alone.

“Well?” I said. “Did you deliver the messages I gave you?”

“Yes,” he said, with an apparent uneasiness.

“Well, don’t make a mystery of it! Tell me what happened.”

He cleared his throat. “I found that Theodore Dornwood for you. The stories about him are true, Adam. He’s living by the docks, in a shack not much better than a stable. He lies in a yellow bed and drinks whiskey and smokes hempen cigarettes all day long. He still possesses that ‘typewriter’ you always talk about, but he don’t seem to employ it much.”

“His bad habits don’t concern me. Did he accept my account of the Saguenay Expedition?”

“At first he didn’t want to see me at all—he’s surly when he’s drunk, and he called me a poxy hallucination, and said I was absurd, and things of that nature. Ordinarily I wouldn’t take that from anyone, but I took it from him, Adam, on your behalf, and he mellowed somewhat when I mentioned your name. ‘My Western Muse,’ he called you, whatever that means. And when I showed him that bundle of papers his eyes lit right up.”

The praise tickled my vanity, and I asked whether Mr. Dornwood had said anything more on the subject.

“Well, he took the papers out and began to read them, and then he looked at the last few pages and grinned. He said it was excellent work.”

“That’s all?”

“If he said anything else, it wasn’t to me—he shooed me away without a thank-you. But the package must have improved his mood, because I heard a great deal of clacking and tapping from his machine as I walked off.”

“I’ll seek him out when I’m released,” I said, pleased by the report of Mr. Dornwood’s enthusiasm, though it had lacked any flattering specifics. A vastly more important question loomed. “And did you deliver my letter to Miss Blake?”

“Well, I went to the address you gave me.”

“Wasn’t she home?”

“No, and hadn’t been for quite a while, according to the neighbors. So I asked after her down at the Thirsty Boot. It took some effort, because those people are not universally well-disposed toward American soldiers, but I finally found out what had become of her.”

He paused at this critical juncture, as if considering his words; and I said, “Go on! Whatever you learned, tell me!”

“Well, I—I found her, at the place where she’s now residing; and I gave her your letter—that’s the bones of the story.”

“Flesh it out, then! Didn’t she have any response?”

“She was thoughtful about it. She read it a couple of times over. Then she said, ‘Tell Adam I find his suggestion interesting—’ ”

“Interesting!”

It wasn’t an acceptance of my proposal, but neither was it a rejection—I held that small hope close to my heart.

“‘Interesting,’ she said, ‘but unfortunately not practical right at the moment.’”

“Not practical!”

“I expect she meant, because of where she lives.”

I could not help remembering that her villainous brothers had threatened to sell her into a brothel, and I was terrorized by the notion that they might have succeeded. “Lymon, I’m strong enough for the truth—what terrible place has she gone to, that prevents her from coming to see me?”

Lymon blushed and looked at his feet. “Well—”

“Oh, say it!”

“She’s in—and don’t take this too hard, Adam—she’s in prison.”

I set up a meeting between myself, Sam, Julian, and Lymon Pugh, in order to plan strategy, and in defiance of the rules of the Soldier’s Rest. We convened in the ward where Julian was recovering, ignoring the protests of the nurses, and it was quickly agreed that we ought to rescue Calyxa, although my proposal—that we leave immediately and storm the prison—was rejected. It was unwise strategy, Sam said, to attack a target before acquiring reliable intelligence about its strengths, its weaknesses, and the mood of its defenders. I was forced to admit the truth of this; though sitting in idleness while Calyxa endured confinement was not a comfortable chore.

Sam was as healthy by now as Lymon Pugh, and he agreed to leave the hospital for the purpose of scouting out the prison. I would stay here, in the meantime, with Julian, who was less recovered, though he took a keen interest in the subject.

I shook hands with all parties at the conclusion of the meeting, and I was profoundly moved, and struggled to control my emotions. “It’s more than I ever expected to have such friends as would risk themselves on my behalf—despite the difference in our stations in life—and I want you all to know that I would do the same for each one of you, if the boot were on the other leg.”

“Don’t be so eager to thank us,” Sam said, “until we actually accomplish something.”

But I could tell that he was moved, as well.

I sat with Julian a while longer after Sam and Lymon left. Julian appeared more frail than I liked to see him. His skin was very white, and it cleaved to the bones of his cheeks, for he had lost considerable weight, and Julian had never been stout. Something about his eyes had changed, too, I thought, as if they had absorbed an unpleasant wisdom, which dulled their color. That might have been due to the cholera, or to war in general and all the death he had seen. It made me nervous, and I thanked him again for his kindness, addressing him as if he were an Aristo, and I was a lease-boy… which of course we were ; but it had never seemed so, between us.

“Settle down, Adam,” he said. “I know how fond you are of this Montreal woman.”

“More than fond!” I confided in him, and shared my secret, that I hoped to marry her.

He grinned at the news. “In that case we must certainly have her released from jail! It would never do to have my best friend wedded to a prisoner.”

“Don’t make light of it, Julian—I can’t bear it. I love her more dearly than I can describe without blushing.”

He said, more gently, “It must be wonderful to feel that way about a woman.”

“It is; though it has its distressing aspects. I know one day you’ll meet a suitable woman, and feel about her as I do about Calyxa.”

I think he appreciated this kindness on my part, for he looked away, and smiled to himself. “I suppose anything is possible,” he said.

What was not possible was for us to converse much longer, for the hour of lamps-out was approaching, and the nurses had rallied and were preparing to descend on us in force. I told Julian he needed his sleep. “You must sleep as well, Adam,” he said, “though it might be hard to keep from worrying all night long. Sleep confidently—that’s an order.”

“An order from a fellow Private?”

“But I’m not a Private anymore—didn’t Sam tell you? Both Sam and I were given promotions while we were unconscious.”

I expect it was an attempt on the part of the Staff to induce them to re-enlist, or else a result of the terrible casualties the Army of the Laurentians had suffered during the Saguenay Expedition; but, for whatever reason, Sam was now officially a Colonel; and Julian was a Captain—Captain Commongold—just as Theodore Dornwood had predicted.

I stood up and essayed a salute, but Julian waved it off: “Don’t, Adam—I need a friend far more than I need a subordinate. And we’ll all be out of the Army soon, and on an even footing once again.”

I supposed that was true, in the sense he intended it; but in another sense we would never be “even” again—if we ever had been—for, whatever else we were, we were no longer boys. We had survived a War; and we were Men.

Sam and Lymon returned in the morning with their scouting report.

The good news was that Calyxa was being held in a military prison, not a civilian jail. That was a boon because the rules applying to military prisons were more flexible than civil law—she hadn’t been convicted of anything, and was serving no fixed term, but was being held “on suspicion,” which meant that it required only an official adjudgment to have her released.

“What was her crime?” I asked.

“She was hauled in,” Sam said, “as part of a gang of troublemakers who call themselves Parmentierists, after some European philosopher, when they were marching down the street with signs reading ALL SOLDIERS OUT OF MONTREAL and such slogans as that.”

“Surely it’s not illegal to carry a sign, even under military occupation.”

“It wasn’t the sign-carrying that got them arrested. The mob she was with ran into a pair of backwoods ruffians who had some grievance against them, and gunfire was exchanged. She was found to be carrying a small pistol, which she had fired.”

The backwoodsmen, I suspected, were none other than Job and Utty Blake, her murderous siblings; but Sam couldn’t confirm it, since he had confined his inquiries to Calyxa’s particular circumstances. “Will they let her out, then?”

“Not without orders from headquarters… which is a problem, since the leadership of the Army of the Laurentians is in a state of flux, and trivial matters are being ignored. It could be months before the situation returns to normal.”

“Months!”

“Obviously we need to retrieve her sooner than that. But it might take delicate maneuvering, and perhaps some forgivable chicanery. May I suggest a plan?”

He did so—and it was an admirable plan, which I will describe in its enactment—but it required that we function as a group, and some question remained about Julian’s health and fitness. The nurses refused to discharge him, but they couldn’t physically prevent him from leaving… which is what he did, standing up, a little shakily, and demanding his uniform, which was presently delivered to him. He was pale and perilously thin, but seemed to improve as soon as we stepped into the sunshine. The season was young yet, with Easter still a week in the future, but Montreal was pleasantly warm under a cloudless, breezy sky. We proceeded to a tavern, where we rented a room to store our possessions; and we waited there while Lymon Pugh went off to seek Theodore Dornwood once again.

It wasn’t Dornwood we needed but the use of his typewriter. Mr. Dornwood had been reluctant to allow it, Lymon said on his return; but Lymon had cited urgent necessity, and flexed his enormous arm muscles in a conspicuous fashion, until the journalist relented.

“It was lucky I caught him when I did,” Lymon said. “He was packing up. Says he’s been called back to Manhattan by his newspaper. Another hour and he’d have been gone by train.”

“But you got what we needed from him?” asked Sam.

“Here it is.”

Lymon Pugh unfolded a piece of paper, and placed it on the table before us.

“This isn’t exactly the text I requested,” Sam said.

“Dornwood wouldn’t consent to type it—I had to pick it out myself. And I couldn’t remember quite everything, at least not the way you said it.”

The message as printed said: HEADquaRTERS ARMy of the LORENSHENStO THE ARMY JAIL MONTReALL PleASE RELEASE to the BARER OF this NOTEone PRISONERof the naME OF Calixa BLAKEBein a Female Person of Athletic BuildCurly blacK Hair ThiCK ANKELS BY ORder of Colonel SAM SAmSON, signed.

“Is it all right?” Lymon asked anxiously. “I wrote ‘Colonel’ as you wanted me to, Sam, though the spelling seems irregular to me. That machine is a menace, Adam, I don’t know why you crave it so—it took me most of an hour to peck out the letters on it. Writers must suffer as badly as beef-boners, if they’re attached to such a device all day.”

“The spelling’s not important,” said Sam. “The night guards at the prison are almost certainly illiterate. The printed letters are what will impress them, along with my rank, or so I hope.” In order to further impress them Sam had purchased a bottle of blue ink, which he spilled onto a cloth napkin; then he took a Comstock dollar from his pocket and pressed the side of it bearing the image of Julian’s uncle into the ink, and used the coin on the paper as a sort of stamp or imprimatur, which indeed looked very official, and would have fooled me if I had been less schooled in reading.

After that it was only a matter of waiting. We ordered meals of cut pork and kidney beans all around, to brace us for the evening, and to advance the cause of Julian’s improving health. Those of us who drank spirits took beer or wine. I took plain water, as usual, though I added a small amount of red wine to the cup at Sam’s insistence, to discourage any microscopic disease germs flourishing therein (for the cholera had not spared Montreal ). It was a medicinal, hygienic precaution; and it did not make me drunk, or even count as a sin, as far as I could see, though perhaps the angels account it differently.

We waited until well after sunset, and then until the evening crowds had abandoned the streets and all but the overnight torches had been extinguished. Then we left the tavern and walked as a group to the prison where Calyxa was unjustly confined.

The prison was a building with thick, ancient stone walls. It had been divided into a habitation for the guards and staff, on the top floor, and cells for the inmates, on the ground floor and in a basement below. Perhaps the building had served a civic purpose at one time; but the Army of the Laurentians had made the building their own, and draped it with military banners, and posted guards at the rusty iron doors. Our sole advantage, Sam said, would be in our confident bearing. We had to present ourselves as men assigned a necessary but unexciting duty; so we were not to speak furtively, or cast around nervous glances, but to play the role “to the hilt.” Colonel Sam led the way, of course, his bar of command freshly sewn to the shoulder-strap of his overcoat (useful now that the day’s heat had evaporated), while “Captain Commongold” acted as his adjutant, and Lymon and I as ordinary soldiers.

The guards at the door glanced at Sam’s insignia of rank, and briefly at our counterfeit note, before allowing us inside. We came into a kind of anteroom, where a sleepy-looking officer of the guard regarded us from behind a desk.

He was surprised to have visitors at this late hour, and his expression wasn’t welcoming. “You have some business to conduct?” he asked.

Sam nodded regally and presented him with the certificate Lymon Pugh had printed on the typewriter of Mr. Dornwood.

The guard looked it over. He was a skinny man not much older than myself, aspiring to a beard. He gave the note back to Sam and said, “I have misplaced my eyeglasses, Colonel—best if you read it to me.”

Sam did so.

“This is an irregular hour for a prisoner transfer,” the guard said.

“I don’t care that it’s regular or irregular,” said Sam. “I’m here to do a job, and if you have to wake your commanding officer before I can do it, then wake him, please, and do it promptly.”

“I don’t know as that’s necessary… as long as you’ll sign for the prisoner.”

“Of course I’ll sign for her! Where is she?”

The head man did not bestir himself, but called one of his underlings from door duty. “Packard, show these men to the cellar. Take the keys.”

We followed Packard down a set of stairs into a dimly-lit and stinking arrangement of iron-barred cells—a man-made Hell, I might even say, except that it was rather more cold than warm at the moment. I looked around this awful place for any sign of Calyxa, but what I saw was something much worse: the unhappy faces of Job and Utty Blake.

The two villains jointly occupied a single cell. Our passage had waked them up, and they gazed at us with sleepy suspicion. I did not doubt they were the Blake brothers, though I had only seen one of them before, and then only the top of his head. That one was Job; and if he recognized me by the dim light of the guard’s lantern he showed no sign of it.

Both brothers possessed the family signature, which was a crown of bushy, curly hair; but Job’s incarnation of it had been altered by my prior encounter with him. At the top of his forehead a wide swatch of hair was gone, replaced by a conspicuously scarred and wrinkled divot where my pistol shot had creased his skull. I cannot say I took pride in the sight of the wound I had inflicted on this terrible man… but it didn’t entirely displease me.

I was careful to betray no reaction, however, for it would have been awkward had he known me. We proceeded on to a much larger cell, as big as a room, in which several people had been confined together—the “Parmentierists,” of whom Calyxa was one. She sprang to her feet at the sight of me; but I made a cautioning gesture, and she spoke not a word.

“That’s her there,” the guard said, pointing.

“Let her out, then,” Sam demanded.

Packard fumbled with a ring of keys by the dim glow of the lantern. While he was doing that Calyxa stepped forward and stood where she could whisper to me without being overheard.

“What do you want, Adam?” she asked with unexpected coolness.

“What do I want! Didn’t you get my letter?”

The other inmates—I recognized some of them from her circle of friends at the Thirsty Boot—were frankly curious about this midnight visit; but they kept their distance from us, once Calyxa had given them a fierce glare.

“Yes,” she said. “I got it and read it. You said you want to marry me.”

I did, of course, but I hadn’t thought to discuss it so baldly, or through the bars of a prison cell. “I want to marry you above all other Earthly things,” I said. “If you consent to be my wife, Calyxa, the world won’t hold a happier specimen of a man. Once you’re free of this place—”

“But if I don’t consent?”

“Don’t consent!” That bewildered me. “Well—that’s your decision—all I can do, Calyxa, is ask.”

“I won’t consent to any such arrangement until I know the details of it. There’s a suspicion of you among my friends, who aren’t inclined to trust a soldier of any breed or nationality.”

“What am I suspected of?”

“Bargaining my freedom in exchange for my betrothal.”

“I don’t understand!”

“I can’t make it any plainer. Am I free to go, whether I marry you or not? Or am I to rot in this prison unless I consent?”

I was astonished that she could suspect me of such blackmail, and I put it down to the bad influence of her political companions. At least, I thought, the expression on her face was more hopeful than despairing. I said, “I love you, Calyxa Blake, and I won’t let you linger here an hour longer even if you despise me with all the passion in your body. To see you set free is all I care about right now—we can discuss the rest of it another time.”

I said this loudly enough to be heard by the cynical Parmentierists, who responded by giving me a cheer, perhaps not altogether ironical in intent; and they started up an impudent chorus of Piston, Loom, and Anvil, as Calyxa shot them a vindictive look that said, in essence, I told you so!

Unfortunately I was also overheard by the slack-jawed guard, Packard, who looked alarmed, and pulled back his key from the key-hole. “What’s this about?” he asked, and he persisted in his questioning until Lymon Pugh was forced to silence the poor man. [Lymon had amused himself during his hospital confinement by making himself a Knocker—a very fine one, consisting of a lead egg in a hempcloth sack, just as he had once described to me—and it was this device he employed to relieve the guard of his senses.]

Sam retrieved the keys from Packard’s limp hand and opened the door, and said to all those it contained, “You might as well take the opportunity, you boys—there are only two guards in the outer office, and if you handle them fast they won’t have time to raise an alarm.”

The Parmentierists seemed impressed by this act of generosity on the part of an American soldier, and I hoped it would make their political views more nuanced in the future. They crowded out quickly, eager to overwhelm the remaining guards, and Calyxa came into my arms.

“Well, will you?” I asked, once we had breath enough to speak.

“Will I what?”

“Marry me!”

“I suppose I will,” she said, sounding surprised at her own answer.

My joy was unconquerable, though it ebbed as we passed the cage where Job and Utty Blake were confined.

Utty sat at the back of the cell, scowling and muttering. But Job, whom I had shot, came up to the bars, and rattled them as savagely as a gorilla, and spat out curses in the French language.

“I don’t guess we’ll set these two free,” Sam said, the keys still jingling in his hand.

“No,” said Calyxa, “please don’t —they’re murderers, bush runners, and spies for the Dutch when the money is good—they’ve already been convicted and sentenced to hang.”

She explained that in the melee between the Blake Brothers and the Parmentierists several shots had been fired, but only Job and Utty had struck targets. Job had killed a young Parmentierist, and Utty had gunned down a luckless bystander. Some Colonel or Major of the local garrison had promptly appointed himself a court and sentenced the pair to public hanging… perhaps not a wholly legal procedure even under the rules of military occupation; but no one, apart from the Blake Brothers, had taken exception to it.

Job had heard all about Calyxa’s dalliance with a soldier, and he had deduced by the events of this evening that I was that person, the one who had come within an inch of blowing out his brains. He directed more curses and not a little saliva at me, before turning his vulture’s gaze on Calyxa.

“Tu nous sers à rien, mais pire… tu nous déshonores! Dommage que tu sois pas mort dans l’utérus de ta mère!”

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“He says he regrets that I was ever born.”

I looked Job Blake hard in the eye. “We all have regrets in this life,” I said, philosophically. “Tell him I regret I didn’t aim lower.”

9

The wedding was arranged to take place on the Saturday after Easter, by which time Sam, Julian, and I would be civilians again; and after the ceremony we would all board the train for New York City , and begin our lives afresh.

I won’t strain the reader’s attention by narrating every detail of our mustering-out. Suffice to say that we rejoined our Regiment and concluded our business there. Sam performed one duty enabled by his new rank, which was to rebuke Private Langers, whom he suspected of having acted as a spy for Major Lampret. Langers had survived the Saguenay Campaign, and was running his “Lucky Mug” business whenever a skirmish with the Dutch provided fresh corpses to loot. Sam waited until a crowd had gathered around Langers’s tent. Then he demanded to see the entire contents of the Lucky Mug, which he proceeded to inventory, demonstrating to the assembled soldiers that the numbers on the slips corresponded to the worthless trinkets, but never to the valuable goods. This revelation so incensed the Private’s customers than no further discipline on Sam’s part was necessary. I learned later that Langers survived his chastisement.

We signed ourselves out of the Army of the Laurentians and were given documents testifying to our discharge, along with something called a “recall number” which would summon us back to active duty in case of an emergency—but we gave that prospect scant thought. Sam, Julian, and I said goodbye to Lymon Pugh, who had re-enlisted, and vows of friendship were exchanged, and Lymon promised to write occasionally, now that he was able to do so. Then we rode a wagon to the City of Montreal , where Calyxa was waiting for me.

A few days remained before the wedding. Sam used the time to say goodbye to friends he had made among the Jews of Montreal, though they were not satisfied with his degree of orthodoxy. Sam was firmly a Jew, in his own estimate, and had been born such, but he never adopted the refined and intricate doctrines and habits that characterize that faith, such as not working on Saturday (a day the Jews had apparently mistaken for the Sabbath), or attending “shool” on a regular basis, or following every commandment of the Torah (which was some sort of cylindrical Bible, as Sam described it). “I was taken from those things too early,” he lamented to me, “and they don’t come naturally at my age. I never underwent a Bar-Mitz-Va. I don’t read or speak Hebrew. I’m lucky to have had a bris, come to that.” [A custom that can’t be described outside of a medical textbook; though by Sam’s account of it I was astonished that he would consider himself “lucky.”]

“Don’t the Jews of Montreal understand your limitations?”

“They do, but they’re impatient with my apostasy. Properly so, it may be.” He shook his head. “I’m not one thing or the other, Adam. There’s no suitable faith for people like me.”

I told him not to feel sad, and that he was not the only person daunted by the complexities of religion, even under the generous rule of the Dominion of Jesus Christ. For instance, there was no congregation of the Church of Signs in Montreal , which meant I couldn’t marry Calyxa in the faith of my father (had I wanted to—I confess I did not). We had settled on an interdenominational Dominion marriage, to be performed by the local Dominion man who licensed dioceses and collected tithes on behalf of Colorado Springs. We would at least be married in a church, albeit a nominally Catholic one. The church charged fees for its use by those who confess to other faiths, and the going rate was steep, and it used up much of the money I had saved toward the purchase of a typewriter; but Calyxa was worth it, I thought.

Julian had also made friends in Montreal , and he used the time before the wedding to take his leave of them. These were the Philosophers and Aesthetes who gathered at the coffee-shop called Dorothy’s. Julian had not introduced me to any of them, and they seemed exactly as loose-limbed and pallid as Lymon Pugh had described them, when I saw them from a distance; but I was no judge of Philosophers. At least they did not parade around with unpatriotic signs, or get themselves locked up in military prison. [They were sometimes locked up for other reasons, Julian said; but he changed the subject when I asked him to explain.]

As for me, I spent my time with Calyxa. Part of this devotion was practical, since there were arrangements to be made and invitations to be delivered. But it was an indulgence, too; for we were at that stage of betrothal in which we craved each other’s company in all ways and at all hours. If we “anticipated our vows,” perhaps the reader can forgive us for our eagerness; and I’ll say no more on the subject, except to repeat that it was a very happy time for me.

Of course I wrote to my mother to announce the occasion, and to apologize for not being able to bring Calyxa to meet her, though I assured her I would do my best to make that happen, preferably sooner rather than later. Calyxa had no family except Job and Utty, who had a prior engagement—they were to be hanged on the day of the wedding—but all the Parmentierists would be there, and the staff of the Thirsty Boot, and assorted street musicians and sundry revolutionaries; and “my side of the aisle” would be full up with survivors of the Saguenay Campaign, and perhaps a few Philosophers, Jews, and Aesthetes, at the invitation of Sam and Julian.

In the end it was a wedding like any other—familiar enough in its trappings to subdue the need for description. In short: we were wed; we kissed; there were cheers; refreshments were served.

A carriage had been hired for our trip to the train station. It was not quite a “wedding carriage,” for Sam and Julian shared the transportation with us. All of us had purchased tickets for the New York Express, which was due to leave Montreal at sundown. I rode with my arm around Calyxa, and we cooed at each other, and uttered pleasant trivialities, while Sam and Julian blushed, or coughed into their hands, or made a point of staring out the curtained windows even though the city was dull in the fading light and decorated only with gray banners announcing BOIL ALL WATER or similar hygienic instructions.

There was one stop Calyxa insisted on, however, before we reached the train station, and that was the public square where the Army of the Laurentians conducted its hangings.

Job and Utty had already met their fate, at about the time Calyxa and I solemnized our vows. I suggested she might not want to sully the memory of the day by visiting a gallows; but she needed reassurance that her brothers were truly dead, she told me, and that they wouldn’t spring back to life at some inconvenient time in the future.

So I told the hired driver to stop where the hangings had taken place. It was the policy of the Army of the Laurentians to leave corpses dangling from the gallows until a day or two had passed, so the dead would serve as a useful advertisement of the wages of vice and rebellion. This custom had been but partially honored in the case of Job and Utty. Two ropes dangled from the elaborate scaffold, but only one was occupied. I asked a bystander about this, and the man explained that Utty Blake had been hanged first, but that the scaffold had been built too high, or the rope made too long, and at the critical moment Utty’s head had been “nipped off,” as the man put it, so that the body no longer depended from the rope, but slipped through at the neck and had to be hauled away in two pieces. Stains on the ground attested to the truth of this.

But Job was still “on duty.” He looked much smaller in death. His face was purple, and not pleasant to contemplate, though I had seen uglier corpses during my military career. A chill wind had come up, and it flapped the banners adorning the nearest buildings and turned Job’s corpse like a pendulum at the end of his mournfully creaking rope. Ponderous clouds swept through the darkening sky, and the mood of the place was altogether dour and unhappy.

Nevertheless Calyxa sprang from the wedding carriage energetically, and walked right up to the unkempt and frankly foul body of her brother. His bootless feet dangled at about the level of her shoulders.

I let her stand alone on that dusty, windy square, in contemplation of the ephemerality of life and all worldly things, for many long minutes. Then I joined her, and put a consoling arm around her waist.

“As awful as your brothers were,” I said, “this must be hard to endure.”

“Not very hard,” she whispered.

“Say your goodbyes, then, Calyxa—we have a train to catch.”

I was moved by her somber expression, which implied a soul less hardened than she liked to pretend; and I was even more moved when she found the Christian charity to utter a quick prayer for the soul of poor dead Job. [“Passe mon bonjour au Diable quand tu le verras.”]

Then we climbed back into the carriage, and I instructed the driver to take us on to the train station. The atmosphere had cooled somewhat, and there was no more post-nuptial cooing. Instead, Calyxa attempted to make conversation.

She didn’t know Sam or Julian very well just yet. In a sense she didn’t know them at all: despite the confidences we shared, I had avoided telling her that Julian was actually Julian Comstock, the President’s nephew, or that Sam had been the best friend of Julian’s murdered father. I had promised Sam and Julian that I wouldn’t mention these awkward truths, and I had been true to my promise.

But I had told her other things about my friends and my adventures with them. She looked squarely at Julian and said, “You like to tell Bible stories.”

Julian was uncomfortable—as he often was in the presence of women—and seemed not to know how to respond. He swallowed repeatedly, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Ah, well… do I?”

“According to Adam. Bible stories of your own invention. Most of them blasphemous.”

“Perhaps Adam exaggerates.”

“Tell me one,” Calyxa said, as the carriage rattled down the gloomy, windy street, and a small rain began to fall. Her gaze drifted to the window of the carriage. “Tell me an Easter story, if you know one.”

I didn’t like the trend of this conversation. Julian’s apostasies were often shocking to the uninitiated, and I had hoped Calyxa would get to know him better before he trained the cannon of his Agnosticism on her at close range. But Julian liked a challenge; and I think he was charmed by Calyxa’s boldness and directness.

He cleared his throat. “Well, let me see.” The overhead lantern teetered on its gimbals. Rain drummed on the carriage-roof, and Julian’s breath hung visibly in the chill air. “God created the world—”

“That’s starting a long way back,” Calyxa said.

“Perhaps it is; but do you want to hear this story or not?”

“I beg your pardon. Continue.”

“In the beginning God created the world,” Julian said, “and set it turning; and let events transpire without much in the way of personal intervention. He stage-managed a few tribal disputes, and arranged a misguided Flood that cost many lives and solved very few problems; but in the end He decided the human race was too corrupt to be salvaged, and too pathetic to destroy, and so He stopped tinkering with it, and left it alone.

“But humanity, on the whole, was conscious of its fallen condition, and went on petitioning God for unearned gifts or the redress of grievances. All this badgering, in God’s eyes, amounted to a lament for lost innocence—a nostalgia for the abandoned paradise that was Eden. ‘Make us innocent again,’ humanity cried out, ‘or at least send innocence among us, to serve as an example.’ “God was skeptical. ‘You wouldn’t recognize Innocence if it handed you a calling card,’ He said to humanity, ‘and Goodness exceeds your grasp with the regularity of clockwork. Look for these things where you find them, and leave Me alone.’ “But the prayers never ceased, and God couldn’t indefinitely ignore all that grief and lamentation, which lapped at the walls of Heaven like a noxious tide. ‘All right,’ He said at last, ‘I’ve heard your noise, and I’ll give you what you want.’ So He fathered a child by a virgin—in fact a married virgin, for God was fond of miracles, and for a woman to be simultaneously a wife, a virgin, and a mother seemed like a miracle with compound interest accrued. And so in the fullness of time a child was born—innocent, bereft of sin, invulnerable to temptation, and good-hearted down to the very marrow of him. ‘Make of him what you will,’ God said grimly, and stood back with His arms folded.”

(I tried to evaluate Calyxa’s reaction to these blasphemies. She kept her face motionless, but her eyes were attentive and unblinking. The rain came down stiffly, and the wheels of passing carts made a muted sound in the dusk.) “A quarter-century or so went by,” Julian continued. “And eventually that child of God was returned to his Creator—scorned, insulted, beaten, humiliated, and finally nailed to a splintery cross and suspended in the Galilean sunshine until he died of his wounds both physical and spiritual.

“God received this much-abused gift by return mail, as it were, and He was ferociously scornful, and said to humanity, ‘See what you do with Innocence? See what you make of Love and Goodwill when it looks you in the eye?’ And so saying He turned His back on Mankind, and determined never to speak to the human race again, or have any other dealings with it.

“And even this,” Julian said, “might have been a useful lesson, taken as such; but Man misunderstood his own chastening, and imagined that his sins had been forgiven, and put up effigies of the tortured demigod and the instrument on which he had been broken, and marked the event every Easter with a church service and a colorful hat. And as God made Himself deaf to Man, so Man became deaf to God; and our prayers languished in the dead air of our cavernous churches, and do so to this day.”

The carriage was silent in the aftermath of this cruel and frankly blasphemous narrative. Sam sighed and stared out into the rain. The vehicle’s springs creaked as we bounced over wet cobblestones, a sound that reminded me of the creaking rope where Job Blake had been hung. Julian looked at Calyxa boldly, if a little apprehensively, while she pondered her response.

“That’s a fine story,” she said finally. “I like that story very much—thank you, Julian. I hope you’ll tell me another one some day.” She essayed a smile. “Perhaps I’ll make up one of my own, now that you’ve shown me how.”

It was Julian’s turn to gawk in astonishment. He slowly took the measure of Calyxa’s sincerity. Then he grinned—perhaps the first genuine grin I had seen on him since the Saguenay Campaign.

“You’re welcome!” he said. Then he turned his grin on me. “You married well, Adam! Congratulations!”

“Oy,” said Sam, in the cryptic language of the Jews.

10

The future defied our expectations. The future always does, as I’m sure Julian would say. “There’s no predicting Evolution,” he used to say, “either in the long or the short term.”

Still, the shock of our arrival in New York City can hardly be overestimated.

This is what happened.

Our train, although an Express, slowed at every switch yard, and the journey lasted all night. Calyxa and I had a stateroom to ourselves. We were awake until the early hours, and consequently slept past sunrise. We did not see anything of the City of New York until the porter knocked at the door to announce our imminent arrival.

We dressed quickly, and joined Sam and Julian in the passenger car.

I was sorry I hadn’t arisen earlier, for we were already well within the boundary of Manhattan. I will not detail its wonders here—those will emerge in the later course of the story. But I knew something exceptional was going on as soon as we rolled into the columned interior of the great Central Train Station. Visible through the rain-streaked windows of the passenger car were many bays and depots where trains could embark or dispense passengers, and the one we approached was crowded with people in all kinds of colorful dress, many of them carrying signs or banners. A wooden stage had been erected, and a band played patriotic songs. The exact details were hard to distinguish through the smudged and grimy glass, but the mood of excitement was unmistakable.

We asked a passing porter what the occasion was, but he didn’t know. “Someone famous in from the battle-front,” he said, “probably.”

Someone famous! It would be ironic, I thought, if we had come all this way with General Galligasken for a fellow traveler; but there was no hint that such was the case. We didn’t know which passenger was being honored until we stepped out onto the platform. Then a ticket-taker pointed at us—at Julian, specifically—and the band promptly struck up a march.

“Dear God!” Sam said, paling, as he read the signs and banners held aloft by the crowd—and I read them, too, and my expression must have been equally gap-jawed.

WELCOME THE HERO OF THE SAGUENAY CAMPAIGN! said one.

NYC POLICE FIREFIGHTERS SALUTE THE CAPTOR OF THE CHINESE CANNON!—another.

And a third said, simply, HURRAY FOR CAPTAIN COMMONGOLD!

Sam trembled as violently as if he had looked at the jubilant crowd and seen, in its place, a firing squad.

Julian was even more bewildered. He opened his mouth and couldn’t muster the strength to close it.

At that moment a white-haired woman came to the fore of the crowd. She was not young, nor especially thin, but her manner was vigorous and purposeful. She was clearly an Aristo—she was dressed expensively and gaudily, as if she had marched through a milliner’s shop and a tropical aviary and emerged with bits of both places adhering to her. She carried a wreath of flowers on which was laid a paper banner bearing the words WOMEN’ S PATRIOTIC UNION OF NEW YORK WELCOMES CAPTAIN COMMONGOLD. The wreath was so extravagant that her face was all but concealed by it, until she lifted it up with the intent of settling it around Julian’s neck.

Then she got a good look at the intended object of all this adoration, and froze as if she had been struck by a bullet.

“Julian?” she whispered.

“Mother!” cried Julian.

The wreath dropped to the floor. Julian’s mother embraced him. The photographers in the crowd grew interested, and hoisted their cameras, and the reporters took their pencils from behind their ears.