"Merry Christmas," Mantarakis repeated. He kept walking. It was Christmas for McSweeney, it was Christmas for everybody in his unit-and for the Rebs in their wet trenches a couple-three hundred yards away-but it wasn't Christmas for him. It wouldn't be Christmas for him till January 6. The Orthodox Church had never cottoned to the Gregorian calendar. Maybe I should tell McSweeney it's Papist, Mantarakis thought with a wry smile. That would give the Bible-thumper something new to get in a sweat about, not that you could sweat in this miserable weather.

He shook his head. For one thing, having McSweeney act like a human being for a change was too good to fool with. And, for another, he was too used to having the whole world celebrate Christmas almost two weeks ahead of him to try and change anybody's mind about it now.

"Hey, Paul!" Sergeant Peterquist called from a little way down the trench. "We got us a sheep here-Ben brought it up with the regular supplies. Don't know where he came by it, but I'm not asking questions, neither. You wanna see what you can turn it into?"

"Sure will, Sarge," Mantarakis said. He wasn't officially company cook, but he was better at the job than Ben Carlton, who was supposed to have it, and everybody knew as much. And what a Greek couldn't do with mutton couldn't be done. He added, "Merry Christmas," as he came up to the sergeant.

"Same to you, Paul," Dick Peterquist answered. He wasn't much bigger than Mantarakis, but towheaded instead of swarthy. Because he was so fair, he looked younger than the forty years Mantarakis knew he had. He might have carried a few gray hairs, but who could tell, in amongst the gold? He pointed down to the carcass at his feet. "Doesn't that look good?"

Paul whistled softly. It wasn't really a sheep, it was an almost-yearling lamb from this past spring's birth. "Ben outdid himself this time," he said. Carlton might not have been much of a cook, but he was a hell of a scrounger. "You said sheep, Sarge, and I figured something old and tough and gamy. This here, though-" His mouth watered just thinking about it. "Make stew with some and roast the rest, I guess. You can't beat roast lamb."

"You do it up the best way you know how, that's all," Peterquist said. "Make us a hell of a Christmas dinner."

Mantarakis nodded. He figured he'd save the tongue and the brains and the kidneys and sweetbreads for himself; nobody else was likely to want them, anyhow. To most soldiers, they were "guts," and not worth having. He wished he could get his hands on a little wine so he could saute the kidneys in it. Of course, he wished he were back in Philadelphia, too, so what were wishes worth?

He unsheathed the bayonet he wore on his left hip: twenty inches of sharp steel. It wasn't a proper butcher knife, but it would do the job. He'd just squatted down over the lamb when a Southern voice, thin in the distance, called, "Hey, you Yanks! Wave a hankie an' stick a head up! We won't shoot y'all-it's Christmas!"

"What do we do?" Mantarakis asked Peterquist.

"Shit, they ain't gonna lie to us like that," the sergeant answered. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, then gave it a dubious look: it was more nearly brown than white. He waved it anyway, and stuck his head up above the front lip of the trench. Now he whistled. "I'll be damned."

That made Mantarakis look, too. The calls kept coming, from up and down the Confederate line. Some men in butternut were walking about in front of their trench line. Any other day of the year, they would have been asking to be shot dead. On Christmas, no. U.S. troops were coming up out of the trenches, too, and heading on over toward the drifts of barbed wire that separated one line from the other.

Without waiting on anybody's permission, Paul scrambled up onto the ground between the trench lines and headed toward the Confederate positions, too. He waited for Peterquist to yell at him or try to drag him back, but, a moment later, the sergeant was right up there beside him. "I'll be damned," he said again, and Mantarakis nodded.

Realizing he was still holding the bayonet he'd intended to use to cut up the lamb, he stuck it back in its leather sheath. He wasn't going to need it, not today. Rebs and U.S. soldiers were snipping through barbed wire not to kill one another but to get together, say "Merry Christmas," and shake hands. For a day, or at least a moment, fifty years and more of hatred vanished as if they'd never been.

Some of the Confederates had rifles slung on their shoulders, but they, like he, seemed to have forgotten about them. "Hey, you! Yank!" one of them called, and pointed at him. "Want some seegars? Got anything you can swap me for 'em?"

This was tobacco country, but the fields had been fought over, not harvested. And cigars, with any luck, were going to be Habanas, anyhow. Kentucky tobacco couldn't come close to what they grew in Cuba . "I've got some garlic powder and some mint," Mantarakis answered. "Make your stews taste better, if you want 'em."

"Don't like garlic," the Rebel said, and made a face. "Stinks, if'n you ask me. But mint's right nice. What other kind o' tasty things y'all got?"

"Got some cinnamon, a little bit," Paul said. He hid the scorn he held for the Confederate: how could you dislike garlic? But the fellow's eyes lit up when he mentioned cinnamon, so maybe they had some hope of a deal after all. Mantarakis dug in his pack and displayed the little tins of spice, whereupon the Rebel held up four cigars. After some dickering, they settled on six.

By then, a couple of paths through the wire had been cleared. Paul went through one of them, toward the Confederate lines. He had the feeling of being partly in a dream, as if nothing could happen to him no matter what he did. It was the exact opposite of what he usually felt on a battlefield: that he was liable to end up dead or mangled in spite of everything he could do to prevent it.

He handed the tins over to his Confederate counterpart and received the cigars in return. The bands, printed on shiny, metallic paper, bore the picture of a fellow with a bushy gray beard, who, the gold letters underneath his face declared, was Confederate President Longstreet, who'd licked the United States in the Second Mexican War. Maybe the cigars were Habanas, then. He sniffed them. Wherever they came from, they smelled pretty good.

"Merry Christmas, Yankee," the Confederate said. He was a mediumsized, stocky fellow with muttonchops and light brown hair that stuck out from under his cap in all directions. As he stowed away the spices, he laughed a little. "Don't think I hardly ever said nothin' to a damnyankee before, 'cept maybe somethin' like 'Hands up 'fore I shoot you!' "

"Yeah, I'm the same way with you birds, pretty much," Mantarakis said. Oh, maybe a Confederate sailor or two had come into one of the Philadelphia greasy spoons where he'd worked, but taking an order for a sandwich or a steak was damn near as impersonal as talking from one side of a rifle to the other. He gave his name, then said, "Who are you? What do you do?"

"I'm Colby Gilbert, Paul," the Rebel answered. He stuck out his hand. Mantarakis shook it. The Reb grinned. "Right glad to meet you, Paul, long as you don't ask me to say your last name. What do I do? I got me a farm, forty, maybe fifty miles outside o' Little Rock, Arkansas. How about your own self?"

"Cook in Philadelphia," Paul answered.

"No wonder you got them nice spices, then. You got a family?" Gilbert asked. Before Mantarakis could answer, the Reb pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket: himself, a plain blond woman, a little boy, and a baby of indeterminate sex, all in what had to be Sunday best. "This here's me and Betsy and Colby, Jr., and Lucy." The baby was a girl, then.

"I'm not married yet," Mantarakis said. "A couple of my brothers have children, so I'm an uncle." He trotted out a family joke: "One of my sisters is expecting, so I'll be an aunt pretty soon, too."