Several motorcars were coming up the road from the U.S. border toward Rosenfeld. The snow that scrunched under Mary's rubbers sprayed up from their tires. They were all painted green-gray, which marked them as U.S. Army machines. I hope something horrible happens to you, Mary thought. But the motorcars cared nothing for her curses. They just kept rolling north.
The railroad line ran to the west of the farm. Coal smoke spewing from the stack, a train rumbled past. The shriek of the whistle, far off in the distance, seemed the loneliest sound in the world. The train was probably full of Yankees, too. More and more these days, the Yankees were tying the Canadian railroads to their own.
"Damn them," Mary mouthed, and went into the barn. It was warmer there; the body heat of the horse and the cow and the sheep and the pigs and, she supposed, even the chickens helped keep it that way. And the work she had to do certainly kept her warm. She gathered eggs and fed the animals and shoveled manure that would go on the fields and the vegetable plots when warmer weather came again.
As she worked, she looked around. Somewhere in here, her father had made the bombs that did the Americans so much harm before one of them killed him. U.S. soldiers had torn the farmhouse and the barn to pieces, looking for his tools and fuses and explosives. They hadn't found them.
Of course they didn't find them, Mary thought. My father was cleverer than a hundred Yankees put together. He just… wasn't lucky with General Custer, that's all.
She picked up the basket of eggs, which she'd set on an old broken wagon wheel that had been sitting in the barn as long as she could remember-and probably a lot longer than that. She sighed. She didn't want to go back out into the cold, even to take the eggs back to the farmhouse. Idly, she wondered why her father had never repaired and used the wheel-either that or got a few cents for the iron on the tire and the hub. He hadn't been a man to waste much.
If I had the tools, if I knew how, would I make bombs and keep fighting the Americans? Mary nodded without a moment's hesitation, despite the thought that followed hard on the heels of the other: if they caught you, they'd shoot you. More than most children her age, she knew and understood how very permanent death was. Losing Alexander and her father had agonizingly driven home that lesson.
"I don't care," she said, as if someone had said she did. "It would be worth it. We have to hit back. We have to." One of these days, I'll learn how. It won't take so long, either. I promise it won't, Father. She picked up the basket of eggs from the old wagon wheel and, however little she wanted to, went back out into winter.
F lags flying, horns blaring, rails decked in bunting of red, white, and blue, the USS O'Brien came into Cork harbor. The Irish had laid on a spectacular welcome for the destroyer with the fortunately Hibernian name, with fireboats shooting streams of water high into the air. On the shore, a brass band in fancy green uniforms blared away. Schoolchildren had the day off. Some of them waved American flags, others the orange, white, and green banner of the Republic of Ireland-which, with U.S. help, had finally gained control over the whole island.
From his station at the forward four-inch gun, Ensign Sam Carsten grinned at the celebration. He'd seen the like before, in Dublin. He was a tall, muscular, very blond man who burned whenever the sun came out, no matter how feebly. A cloudy day in Irish late winter suited him down to the ground. He didn't have to worry about smearing zinc-oxide ointment and other things that didn't work onto his poor, abused hide, not for a while he didn't.
He turned to the petty officer who was his number two at the gun. "They wouldn't have been so friendly if we'd come in while the limeys were still running this place, eh, Hirskowitz?"
"You're right about that, sir." Nathan Hirskowitz was a dour Jew from New York City, as dark as Carsten was fair. He had swarthy skin, brown eyes, and a blue-black stubble he had to shave twice a day.
Getting called sir still bemused Carsten. He was a mustang, up through the ranks; he'd spent going on twenty years working his way up from ordinary seaman. If the officer in charge of the gun he'd served on an aeroplane carrier hadn't encouraged him, he didn't think he would ever have had the nerve to take the qualifying examination. He wished he were still aboard the Remembrance; naval aviation fascinated him, even if he was a gunnery man first. But the carrier hadn't had any slots for a new-minted ensign, and so…
"Matter of fact, they'd've tried to blow our heads off," Sam said. Hirskowitz nodded. Carsten scanned the harbor. Lots of fishing boats, some merchant steamers, a couple of old U.S. destroyers now flying the Irish flag, and… He stiffened, then pointed. "We've got company. Nobody told me we were going to have company."
Hirskowitz let out a disdainful sniff. "You think they're going to tell you things you need to know just because you need to know them?"
The S135 was a German destroyer, a little smaller than the O'Brien , mounting three guns rather than four. The German naval ensign fluttered from her stern: a busy banner, with the black Hohenzollern eagle in a white circle at the center of a black cross on a white field. In the canton, where the stars went on an American flag, was a small version of the German national banner: a black Maltese cross on horizontal stripes of black, white, and red. As the O'Brien edged toward a quay, the S135 dipped her flag in salute. A moment later, the American ship returned the compliment.
"You see? They're allies," Nathan Hirskowitz said.
In a different tone of voice, that would have sounded light, cheery, optimistic-all words noticeably not suited to the petty officer's temper. As things were, Hirskowitz packed a world of doubt and menace into four words.
"Yeah." Carsten did his best to match him in one. Without a doubt, the United States and the German Empire were the two strongest nations in the world these days. What was in doubt was which of them was stronger. Officially, everything remained as it had been when they joined together to put Britain and France and the CSA in the shade. Unofficially…
"If our boys go drinking and their boys go drinking, there's liable to be trouble," Carsten said.
"Probably." Hirskowitz sounded as if he looked forward to it. After making a fist and looking at it in surprise-what was such a thing doing on the end of his arm?-he went on, "If there is trouble, they'll be sorry for it."
"Yeah," Sam Carsten said again. For one thing, the O'Brien had a bigger crew than the German destroyer. For another, winning the Great War had made him certain the USA could win any fight. He shook his head in bemusement. That was certainly a new attitude for an American to take. After losing the War of Secession and getting humiliated in the Second Mexican War, Americans had come to have a lot of self-doubt in their character. Amazing what victory can do, he thought.
He peered toward the S135. By the polished way the sailors over there went about their business, they'd never heard of self-doubt. And why should they have? Under Bismarck and under Kaiser Bill, Germany had gone from triumph to triumph. Victories over Denmark and Austria and France let her unite as a single kingdom. And victory in the Great War left her a colossus bestriding Europe in almost the same way the USA bestrode North America.
Sailors aboard the O'Brien threw lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the destroyer fast to the quay. "Welcome!" one of the longshoremen called in a musical brogue. "I'll be glad to buy some of you boys a pint of Guinness, that I will."
"What's Guinness?" Hirskowitz asked Carsten.
"It's what they make in Ireland instead of beer," Sam said helpfully. "It's black as fuel oil, and almost as thick. Tastes kind of burnt till you get used to it. After that, it's not so bad."
"Oh." Hirskowitz weighed that. "Well, I'll see. They make real beer, too?"
"Some. And whiskey. Got some good whiskey the last couple of times I was here."