Blood and Iron (84 page)
Once she crawled out of bed, the aromas of tea and frying eggs and potatoes floating up to the bedroom from the kitchen helped get her moving. She put on the same skirt and sweater with a different shirtwaist and hurried downstairs. “Good,” her mother said when she made her appearance. “Another five minutes and I’d’ve sent Julia after you. Here you are.” She used a spatula to lift a couple of eggs from the skillet and set them on Mary’s plate. Potatoes fried in lard went alongside them.
“Thanks, Ma.” Mary put salt on the eggs and potatoes and pepper on the eggs. She ate like a wolf. Her mother gave her a thick china mug full of tea. Mary poured in milk from a pitcher and added a couple of spoonsful of sugar. She drank the tea as hot as she could bear it.
Julia was already on her second cup. “How do the Americans stand drinking coffee all the time?” she wondered aloud. “It’s so nasty.”
“It’s disgusting,” Mary said. She honestly believed she would have thought that even if the Yankees hadn’t done what they’d done. She’d tried coffee a couple of times, and found it astonishingly bitter.
To her surprise, her mother said, “Coffee’s not so bad. Oh, I like tea better, but coffee’s not so bad. It’ll pry your eyes open even better than tea will, and that’s nice of a morning.”
Hearing Maude McGregor defending something Mary thought of as American and therefore automatically corrupt rocked her. She didn’t quarrel, though; she had no time to quarrel. As soon as she finished breakfast, she put on rubbers and an overcoat that had belonged to Alexander. It was much too big for her, even though she nearly matched her mother’s height, but that didn’t matter. Along with earmuffs and mittens, it would keep her warm while she did the chores.
“I’m going out to the barn,” she said. Her older sister shut the door behind her.
Instead of heading straight to the barn, Mary paused at the outhouse first. It didn’t stink the way it did in warmer weather, but she would almost rather have sat down on a pincushion than on those cold planks. She got out of there as fast as she could.
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.
Praise for
American Empire: Blood and Iron
“The shocks of seeing history and current events in radically altered perspectives are perfect examples of the mind-blowing, mind-expanding capabilities of science fiction…. Harry Turtledove is obviously a master of the form.”
—
Science Fiction Chronicle
“Anyone who loves a good story with surprising plot twists and vivid characters will love this book. Anyone who loves history will love what Harry Turtledove can do with it.”
—L
ARRY
B
OND
New York Times
bestselling author of
Red Phoenix
“
Blood and Iron
is what alternative history should be, where not only people, places, and events are changed, but ideas, too.”
—Cinescape.com
“For sustaining a consistently high level of literary quality, for boldness of imagination, range of exploration, brilliant but totally unpainful subliminal education (his books never fail to get you thinking!), and above all for providing grateful readers with hour upon hour of slam-bang, really first-rate entertainment, Harry Turtledove has no real challenger for [his] title. He has earned it…. I, for one, can hardly wait until book two of
[American Empire]
.”
—
Realms of Fantasy
“As always with Turtledove, there are no clear heroes or villains, just a broad assortment of proud, flawed, skillfully detailed personalities.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
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A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2001 by Harry Turtledove
Excerpt from
American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold
copyright © 2002 by Harry Turtledove
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-345-49428-3
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