He'd thought one of the nice things about being an aerial observer was not having to kill anybody personally. War down on the ground was a filthy, nasty business, filthier and nastier than anyone had expected when it broke out. Watching the slow advance across the Niagara Peninsula had shown Moss that. And he'd seen it from high in the air, as if he were looking down on a chess match where both players could move at the same time. An awful lot of poor damned pawns had been captured and removed from the board.

"I was above all that," he muttered, meaning it both literally and metaphorically. Like a knight, he could jump over intervening space and appear where he was needed on the board. Now, abruptly, he realized that, like a knight, he also faced danger. He too could be sacrificed.

He'd killed, yes, but it was a fair fight. So he told himself, over and over. The fellows in the Avro had had just as much chance to send his aeroplane spinning down in ruins as he'd had to shoot down theirs. He wasn't some conscript rifleman, reduced to a corpse by a machine gunner who wasn't aiming at him or by an artilleryman back of the line who'd never seen him at all, merely pulled a lanyard and hoped for the best. Thousands of randomly killed men lay down there; sometimes the stink of them made him wish the Super Hudson would fly higher, to let him escape it.

A fair fight, single combat… Maybe that did make him a knight, not one from a chess set but a noble warrior from the days of chivalry, going forth into single combat as if into a joust. That was a better way to look at things, he decided: it shielded him from the blunt reality of having killed two men to keep them from killing him.

"A knight," he said, and touched the Maxim gun as if it were the lance a knight in shining armor carried into battle with him. "A knight of the air."

He carefully scanned the sky to make sure the Canadian aeroplane had been as alone up here as his own machine. He spied no other aircraft with red maple leaf inside white circle inside blue. Yes, it had been true single combat. If you were going to fight, that was the way to do it.

He had a sudden mental image of Teddy Roosevelt going into the gladiatorial arena against-would he fight Robert Borden or the Duke of Con-naught, prime minister or governor general? Either way, Moss figured TR would quickly dispose of his foe. Then he could take on Woodrow Wilson. And, after he'd slain both enemy leaders, the United States would be declared winner of the war and could take whatever spoils it wanted from Canada and the Confederacy.

"That would be the easy way, the cheap way, to go about it," he said. It was also a pipe dream, as he knew full well. Statesmen didn't go out to fight for themselves; that had fallen out of fashion after the Crusades, he didn't know exactly when. Statesmen sent young men out to do the killing-and the dying-for them.

"If you have to do it," Moss muttered, feeling on the shaky side still as he turned back toward his aerodrome, "I suppose being a knight of the air is the way to go about it."

The only trouble was, nobody had seen fit to issue him a suit of shining armor.

Jake Featherston yanked the lanyard of his three-inch field gun and hoped for the best. The piece belched flames. The other five men on the gun crew, working like steam-powered machinery even though two of them were raw replacements, reloaded the gun. Five seconds after the first round, another was on its way.

"Hell of a gun!" Featherston shouted appreciatively. "Them Frenchies, they knew what they were do in' when they made the model." He pulled the lanyard yet again. Boom! Another shell went on its way toward the Yankee positions just outside of Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. Thanks to the muzzle brake on the French-designed howitzer, its recoil was a lot less than that of U.S. guns of similar caliber, which meant corrections between rounds were also less, which meant a good gun crew could get off a dozen rounds a minute. Featherston had a damn good gun crew.

A horse-drawn wagon full of wooden crates stenciled with the Confederate battle flag came rattling up. Jake Featherston and his crew let out a cheer. "'Bout time we got more rounds," shouted Jethro Bixler, the loader. "You didn't show up soon, they was gonna give us Tredegars an' stick us in the damn infantry."

"Can't have that," the driver said, his grin exposing a missing front tooth. He glanced over to the colored servants who were standing by the team of horses that would move the field gun ahead as the Confederacy continued its conquest of southeastern Pennsylvania and Maryland. "Git your asses over here, you lazy damnfool niggers. Unload this bastard so's I can go fill 'er up agin."

Nero and Perseus came-at a faster clip than they'd used when the war first broke out. Then, they might have been picking cotton for a plantation owner they despised. They'd come to realize, though, that keeping their crew in shells was liable to mean keeping themselves alive. As with the soldiers they served, survival was a powerful incentive toward good performance.

Each crate held twelve shells. Counting the weight of the wood in the crate itself, the weight the blacks were hauling was up close to a couple of hundred pounds each go. Grunting with effort, they unloaded crates as the driver and the gun crew watched. Then, sweat running down their faces, they went back to the animals they'd been watching.

"Lazy," the driver repeated. He flicked the reins. The horses strained in harness. The driver tipped his hat to the artillerymen and headed southwest down the dirt track called School Road toward the division supply dump.

Jethro Bixler attacked the tops of the ammunition crates with a pry bar. Nails squealed as the tops came up. Bixler flung each aside in turn. He would have made two of either Nero or Perseus: a big blond broad-shouldered fellow with the look of a blacksmith to him. When one of the ammunition crates wasn't close enough to the howitzer to suit him, he picked it up single-handed and set it where he wanted it. Then he struck a circus strongman pose, as if to proclaim to the world that that had been a deliberate demonstration of prowess, not a white man stooping to do nigger work.

Other wagons turned off from School Road for the rest of the guns in the battery. The Negroes attached to the artillery unit stopped what they were doing to unload the shells. Through the roar of guns that kept firing, Featherston listened to the artillerymen screaming at the blacks to hurry.

"Flip those lids over, Jethro," Featherston said when Bixler was through opening up the new crates. "Don't want anybody stepping on a nail. He'd miss all the fun." He let out a wry chuckle.

"Right y'are, Sergeant," Bixler said. "I tell you, I done had just about all the fun I can stand, thank you kindly.' Fore we started, wasn't nobody said it'd be like this here. The damnyankees, they're tougher'n Paw an' Granddad made 'em out to be."

Several of the other men nodded agreement to that, Jake Featherston among them-it was hardly something you could deny. Featherston said, "If everything went the way it was supposed to, we'd be over the Susquehanna by now, drivin' for the Delaware River."

"Yeah." Jethro Bixler slammed a meaty fist into an equally meaty thigh in his enthusiasm. "My family, we had kin in Baltimore, back before the War of Secession. Hellfire, for all I know, we still do, but nobody on our side o' the border's heard from 'em in fifty years. We should have taken Maryland away from the damnyankees after we made peace with 'em the first time."

"And Delaware," added Pete Howard, one of the shell carriers. "All that country is ours by rights, by Jesus."

"Before it's ours, we got to take it," Featherston said, which drew more nods from the rest of the crew. "We ain't even in Baltimore yet."