He disguised a shrug in a stretch as he walked back to unload another crate. Whites in the CSA had better sense. Black men in the Confederacy did everything but fight. They drove, they cooked, they washed, they dug trenches. Without them, white Confederate manpower would have been stretched too thin to have any hope of holding back the U.S. hordes.

When the long day was done, the paymaster gave Cincinnatus the fifty- cent hard-work bonus. "God damn!" said Herodotus, who stood behind him in line. "That there's gettin' to be your reg'lar rate."

"Got me a baby in the house now," Cincinnatus said, as if that explained everything-which, to him, it did.

Herodotus said, "Plenty fellers here got five, six, eight chillun in de house. Don't see them gettin' no bonus."

Cincinnatus shrugged again. That wasn't his lookout. An awful lot of people in this world wanted just to get by, no more. He'd always had his eye on doing better than that. Even now, in the middle of the war, he had his eye on the main chance. He didn't know what would come of it, but he did know he couldn't win if he didn't bet.

Herodotus made a point of not walking home with him, as if to say he disapproved of such effort. That meant Cincinnatus was by himself when he noticed a wonderful smell in the warm, wet, late summer air. A moment later, a delivery wagon with the words Kentucky smoke house painted in big red letters rounded the corner. He waved to the driver, Apicius' son Felix.

Felix slowed down and waved back. "My pa, he say for you to come in some time before too long," he called. "He got somethin' he want to talk over with you."

"Do it right now," Cincinnatus said. Felix nodded, flicked the reins, and got the wagon moving again.

When Cincinnatus got to the Kentucky Smoke House, the aroma there reminded him how hungry he was after a day hauling heavy crates. Apicius' other son, Lucullus, was basting the meat that turned on a spit over the firepit. Seeing Cincinnatus, he waved him into a little back room.

In there, Apicius was stirring spices into a bubbling pot, making up more of the wonderful sauce that went onto his barbecued beef and pork. "Ha!" he said when Cincinnatus came in. "Saw Felix, did you?"

"Sure did," Cincinnatus answered. "He said you wanted to see me 'bout somethin'. Somethin' to do with the underground, I reckon." He spoke quietly, after having closed the door behind him.

Apicius gave the mixture in the iron pot another stir. "Might say that," he replied after a moment. He gave Cincinnatus a thoughtful glance. "How'd you get mixed up with those underground folks, anyways?"

"Wish I hadn't, pretty much," Cincinnatus said, "but the white man I used to work for, he's one of 'em, and he was always pretty decent to me. 'Sides, from what I've seen, I ain't got much use for the USA, neither." He met and held Apicius' eyes. "How 'bout you?" Unless he got answers that satisfied him, he wasn't going to say anything more.

Apicius' massive shoulders went up and down in a shrug. "First time the Yankee soldiers come in here, they clean me out of everything I got, they say they shoot me if I squawk, an' they call me more kind o' names'n I ever hear before. They ain't done nothin' like that since, mind you, but it don't make me want to cheer for the Stars an' Stripes."

"Yeah, that's about right." Cincinnatus sighed. "I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin' any kind o' square deal after the war, an' it don't matter if the USA or the CSA win."

"Dat's the exact truth," Apicius said emphatically. "The exact truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help me God." He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court -not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, "On de odder hand, there's undergrounds and then there's undergrounds."

"Is that a fact?" Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.

And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, "You ever hear tell about the Manifesto!"

He didn't say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn't heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. "Be you one of the people who -" He didn't go on. He'd heard about Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn't really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.

"We git justice for ourselves," Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. "Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin' man like dirt only on account of he be black."

That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides – "Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don't look like they gonna give us up."

"Revolution comin' in the USA, too," Apicius replied with calm certainty. "Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA -we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an'- What so funny?"

Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, "We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an' use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an' use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain't funny, what is?"

Apicius' smile was thin (the only thin thing about him), but it was a smile. "You wif us, then?"

When Elizabeth found out, she'd want to kill him. He had a baby now. He was supposed to be careful. That consideration made him hesitate a good half a second before he answered, "Yes."

Up in Pennsylvania, Jake Featherston had been acutely conscious that he'd come to a foreign country. Houses looked different; the winter weather had been harsher than he was used to; the local civilians, those who hadn't fled before the advancing Army of Northern Virginia, had looked and sounded different from their counterparts in the CSA; and they hadn't made any bones about despising the men in butternut who'd overrun their farms and towns.

Now the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't advancing any more. It wasn't in Pennsylvania any more, either. Hampstead, Maryland, where Jake's battery in the First Richmond Howitzers was stationed, looked a lot more like a corresponding small town in Virginia than had anything he'd seen in Pennsylvania. The Old Hampstead Store, for instance, wouldn't have been out of place in some rural county seat outside of Richmond: a two-story clapboard building, a hundred years old if it was a day, in the shape of an L, with a massive water pump shielded from the street by the longer side of the L.

Nero was working the pump. When he'd filled a bucket, Perseus lugged it over to the horse trough. The draft animals that had pulled the battery's can nons and ammunition limbers drank greedily. "Don't give 'em too much too fast," Jake said warningly. "They're liable to get the colic and peg out, and we can't afford that, not now."

"Yes, suh, Marse Jake, I knows," Perseus answered. "But they got to drink some. They been workin' hard."

"I know," Featherston said. "I don't think we'll do much more moving back, though." He paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. "We belter not, or we'll be fighting this damn war back in Virginia."

Jeb Stuart III came round the corner in time to hear that. "It will not hap pen, Sergeant," he said crisply. "They will not get past us. They will not come any farther. All right: we couldn't take Philadelphia. That's too bad; it might have made the damnyankees roll over and show us their bellies like the cow ardly curs they are. But Maryland we hold, Washington we hold, and we're going to keep them."