He hesitated for a moment. The men had been gearing for a showdown fight, a grim Alamo-like stand on the edge of their territory. He had been arguing this point with Kal and the senators for the last month. He had to admit that he had been lying to them from the first day that he had conceived of this mass evacuation and the assassination of Jubadi. Kev would not be the final fallback position-he had from the beginning felt that it would be impossible to hold. He could sense as well that the Merki now believed that they could rush forward for the knockout blow. He would leave them only thin air to strike at.

"Tonight, army artillery reserve and corps artillery reserve for all five corps will be evacuated back to Hispania. Tomorrow night and the night after, all available trains will evacuate Third Corps and First Corps back to Hispania, where you will start to dig in at once. At the end of four days the only formations left here will be a brigade from Pat's corps and the newly formed mounted light cavalry units."

He waited for a moment for the angry confusion to die down.

"That'll leave just over two thousand men and a couple of batteries of the four-pound guns to cover the entire White Hills front," Schneid said.

Andrew nodded.

"It's a question of mobility. It's always been mobility," Andrew replied. "We've got thirty-eight trains, and from the work they've been doing we'll be lucky to have thirty engines up and running by the end of the week. If we meet the Merki here and they break the line, we'll be able to evacuate only two corps at most. That'll mean thirty thousand men get left behind with all equipment, to be surrounded and wiped out by horse-mounted Merki warriors. It'll be the end of any hope of winning."

"Winning?" the angry brigadier replied. "Hell, you're telling us to abandon what little of our country we have left. I'm going to die, we all are going to die, we knew that two months ago, and I want to die on my own soil, the land of Rus."

Andrew felt a flicker of anger at the brigadier's defiance but let it pass. This might be the army, but it was the army of a republic, and he was telling these men that they had lost their country and were going into exile.

He stepped off the dais and went up to the brigadier, who looked nervous at his commander's approach.

"Mikhail of Murom, isn't it?"

The man nodded.

"Barry's corps, bloody second division," the man replied.

"I know you. You've been in the army from the beginning, haven't you."

The tent was silent, the Roum translator in the back speaking in a hushed whisper.

"I started as a private in Hawthorne's company, served on your staff during the Tugar siege, was promoted to lieutenant colonel after St. Gregory in command of the 1st Murom, and to brigadier with a Medal of Merit for holding the Ford on the Neiper."

The man rattled off his record with pride.

"And you were a peasant before the wars, before the republic?"

The man nodded, looking about at his comrades, who, like him, had risen the hard way, through skill, intelligence, and more than a shade of luck.

Knowing it was melodramatic, Andrew reached down and scooped up a handful of dust from the tent floor and stood back up. He held his hand out and let the dust trickle out between his fingers.

"This is nothing," he shouted.

He flung the rest of the dust down and then stepped forward and put his hand on the man's shoulder.

"And you, you are everything."

The brigadier blinked nervously.

Andrew looked away from him.

"You men here, you are everything, you are the hope of Rus, the only chance for a future we shall ever have. It is your blood, your hearts, your minds, and you strong right arms that will win this war. The soil, the land, it will be here now and forever. It cares not. It is unfeeling. It is the land. It will wait for us and we shall have it back!"

The men stood silent, gathering in around him to hear his words.

"An army can fight only as long as it lives. You, my friend," and he pointed back to Mikhail. "You think that this war is about the land. That is often how some think of war-a moving from place to place, victory counted by who holds what land, what town. I tell you that is not the way this war now is. It is about armies. Their goal is not to conquer the land, their goal is to destroy this army, just as our goal is to destroy theirs by whatever means possible.

"I need your flesh and blood to stay alive, and I have only thirty-eight trains to do it with. When they break the White Hills line-and there is no doubting they will do it-I will not have one man more here than I can evacuate in a single night. That means that nearly all our strength will already be far to the east.

"Our fight here will not be to the death because we are not yet ready and they are too strong."

He turned away, went back up to the map, and pointed to the vast stretch of open steppe between Kev and Hispania.

"We will give them this place if they come on strongly. We will fall back to the Penobscot, the Kennebec and then finally back to the Sangros. All the time falling back, destroying what they can use. Perm willing, if the grass of the steppe dries we'll burn it. We'll leave them nothing but ashes."

He looked back over to Bob Fletcher.

"What the colonel's getting at," Fletcher explained, "is that the farther they come after us the tougher it'll get. We'll pull out by rail but they'll be following on horse, a million horses to feed. The area east of the Penobscot for nearly eighty miles is damn near a desert, and a month from now there'll be precious little water if the rain holds off. The ground between the Kennebec and the Sangros is high prairie grass-at best eight or nine horses per acre per day can graze there, maybe even less, especially in the heat of summer. What the colonel here and I are figuring on is that we can let the land help us, slow them down, wear them out, make them pull their belts in tight. If we hold the Sangros line, within a matter of days they'll have to start picketing their horses thirty or forty miles to the rear to keep them alive. That'll cut their mobility down, which has always been their biggest advantage over us."

"And sooner or later we'll have to stand," Mikhail said, his words sounding now more like a question than defiance.

Andrew stepped back up to him and put his hand on the man's shoulder.

"Yes, in the end we'll stand. But they will have advanced across five hundred miles of barrenness to reach us and we will have fallen back all the way to Hispania."

He looked over to the center of the pavilion where Vincent stood.

"And two fresh corps under General Hawthorne will be waiting there to join us, armed with the new weapons that even now are being produced again in the factories we took all the way from Suzdal to Hispania and Roum. There'll be a hundred additional field pieces, millions more rounds of small-arms ammunition. We'll have an army of near seven corps, over one hundred thousand men, rather than half the survivors of a massacre who retreated pell-mell with the Merki on their heels.

"We here will be together then, all of us, to make that final stand."

He looked around the tent.

"I cannot promise you victory, but I can promise you a near-run thing, and a battle unlike any this world has ever seen, the Merki hungry and desperate, and we as strong as we shall ever be. And when it is done, if we are victorious we will take this land back again rather than have our burned and cracked bones scattered across it. That is what I offer you; that is why we will not stand here."

Michael hesitated, looking straight at Mikhail.

He lowered his head.

"I am yours to command, Colonel Keane."

A growl of approval rose up from the men.

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

Andrew looked over to Gregory, the young Rus student of Shakespeare, and now chief of staff for what was left of Third Corps. Gregory's eyes shone brightly with emotion.

Andrew patted Mikhail on the shoulder and went back to the podium. He had given the hard message, and they would follow. He looked over at Kal, who begrudgingly nodded his approval, though Andrew knew that his old friend was filled with anguish to hear that this time they were leaving Rus behind, most likely forever.

"John, would you go over the plan of withdrawal?" Andrew asked.

John Mina came up to stand beside him.

Andrew looked about once more at those who were so eager to follow him and then raised his gaze to the battle standards hanging from the canvas ceiling above him. The shot-torn standards of four of the corps were above him, clustered around each corps flag the standards and guidons of division and brigade commands. The standard of Third Corps was new, that of its first and second divisions missing. He pushed the thought away as his gaze shifted to the flag of the Army of the Republics, a golden eagle emblazoned on a navy-blue field, a gold star above each shoulder, flanked on either side by the faded stars and stripes and state regimental flags of the 35th Maine and 44th New York Light Artillery. It was as if all the ghosts now hovered above them.

He looked back at the flesh and blood in the room, most of them all so young, a young army made from scratch, a commander considered old if he was forty, as I now am, Andrew realized.

He looked at the men and wordlessly raised his hand in a salute, those before him coming to attention and saluting in reply. Without another word he turned and left the tent.

Though the sides of the tent had been open, it had still felt too stuffy, and he was glad to get back out into the open air. In the background he could hear John Mina going into the details of the withdrawal- train schedules, rendezvous points, emergency fallbacks. He walked away, starting across the rail yard, barely acknowledging the salutes of the sentries who had been posted in a perimeter around the tent.

Crossing over the main rail line, he started up the slope of the White Hills, skirting wide around a brigade encampment area, not willing to face all the rituals that a supreme commander would have to go through to get from one end of the camp to the other. From the corner of his eye he saw a young Roum captain standing next to a sentry who had summoned the officer. The two looked relieved that Andrew had gone in the opposite direction. He smiled to himself, remembering a similar moment shortly after Grant had taken command. Grant had gone on an unannounced early-evening tour, turning left to visit their sister regiment, the 80th New York. He had laughed to hear the mad scramble, while thanking God it had not been his own unit so rousted out. He was in no mood to subject others to that type of torture.

He continued up the slope, weaving through a line of abatis, stepping carefully around trap pits, still marked with stakes, which would be pulled up when the Merki finally came. The lines of entrenchments and breastworks were empty, the men in camps preparing their dinners, the scent of frying fatback wafting on the breeze, mingled with wood smoke and the smell of brewing sassafras tea.

The smell triggered pleasant memories, the memories of over a thousand nights camped in the field, on the march, or in winter quarters. Cooking fires were winking up from the encampments, with the stilling of the early-evening breeze the smoke curling straight up into the dark blue sky. To the west the sun was setting, a thin crescent of a moon dropping down behind it, the other moon already gone, not to appear until the hour before dawn.

Finding a stump of a tree, he settled down against it and looked out over the fields. The army was spread out along the hills, camps arranged, those lucky enough to have tents pitching them in neat company rows, the other units making due with pine bough lean-tos. Distant laughter carried in the still air, sounding sharp and clear, songs floating, an unusual minor-key ballad of the Roum, and an old familiar song in Rus. The English words drifted in his thoughts as he followed along: "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home," he hummed along quietly.

It suddenly reminded him of a night like this, the week before Chancellorsville. The two armies, north and south, were encamped, facing each other on the Rappahannock River. It had started out simple enough, a group of rebs singing a tune, some Union sentries on the other side of the river joining in. Pretty soon thousands of soldiers from the two sides had drifted down to the riverbank, leaving their rifles behind in an impromptu truce, serenading each other in turn, a rebel "Dixie" to a union "Battle Hymn." Back and forth they had sung through evening, the sun going down, the stars coming out, Orion on its last days of spring hanging low in the western sky, chasing the twilight.

They were no longer enemies, they were away from home, boys of a common faith, once of a common country, caught in a drama of flags and drums and blood, who for this night had harkened back to a village green or a church picnic, singing the old songs together again.

And then the tattoo had sounded, the call to return to quarters before the final whispering of taps. The two sides started to break up, and then from the southern shore a clear high tenor had started, singing in the first line. In an instant, in the thousands they had joined together, voices from both sides of the river joining together.

"Be it ever so humble ..."

Hardly a voice finished the song, silent tears choking the voices off, men lowering their heads, weeping for home, for lost friends, for peace. In the darkness the song drifted into silence and they turned away from each other to return to their camps. A week later, thirty thousand of them were dead or wounded in the woods of Chancellorsville.

He found his eyes clouded from the memory of that moment, the most poignant of the war. He heard a rustling. Startled, and a bit ashamed, he looked up, quickly wiping his eyes as Kal came up out of the gathering shadows.

"Just remembering," he said quietly.

Kal, smiling, nodded in understanding and sat down beside him.

"Peaceful evening," Kal said, leaning back against the stump, taking off his hat and wiping his brow. His shoulder touched against Andrew's, and the two sat in silence for several minutes looking out over the encampments, the fields, the purple sky of sunset.

"I can see how a soldier can come to love these moments," Kal said. "It's so peaceful now, the work of day finished, the boys singing, food cooking."

He looked about the valley twinkling with firelight.

"Its a good moment. Hard to believe somehow."

"Why?"

"Oh ..." The old peasant sighed. "Difficult to explain. You can feel it on the wind, their young pride, their eagerness to do well, their belief in all of this. I remember us so different, when I was their age. We were slaves, laboring in the fields, the boyars and the church keeping us in fear, the dreaded whisper of the approaching Tugars. I remember when they first came."

He paused for a moment.

"I lost my first love, Anastasia. She was taken for their moon festival.

"I loved her," and his voice tightened. "You know, that was one of the reasons I so wanted to fight when you first came to us and I saw the chance. I feared my Tanya would be taken the same way."

Andrew nodded, thinking of his own daughter.

"We fight for ourselves when young, then we fight for our children," he said quietly.

"The young. That's what they are, an army of boys."

"My army back home was the same," Andrew said. "Boys who were men at eighteen."

He leaned back and looked up at the first stars of evening. " 'The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation.' "

Kal looked over at him and smiled. "Lincoln. I remember Vincent telling me that, back near the beginning when he was recovering from his escape from Novrod and was in my cabin."

"I'm worried about that boy," Andrew said, unable to say more, to admit the guilt he felt for so using Vincent, making him into a superlative general and destroying him at the same time.

"So am I." Kal sighed. "I don't think the marriage with my daughter will last if he stays that way. She still loves him, always will, but she cannot live with a soul of ice who drinks himself into oblivion night after night."

"You're speaking as if we have a future," Andrew said, forcing a smile and looking over at his old friend.

"I forget myself sometimes," Kal replied. "I dream that this war is finished, that we've won, that life goes on."

"Hard to imagine somehow. I've been at it for eight years. Before we came here, through the tunnel of light, I figured in another six months my old war would be finished. The Confederacy was on its last legs."

"And you'd have gone home to your Maine?"

Andrew sighed. Since coming here he had imagined that path. Perhaps Kathleen and he would have come together even back on earth. He would have returned to Bowdoin with her, picked up college teaching again, raised a family on his professor's salary, and quietly slipped into middle age, saber hanging over the mantel, hair becoming gray, telling his children of his war, marching a bit stiffly in Fourth of July parades in Brunswick, Maine, and growing old in peace.

But would he ever have been happy? He remembered a friend of his from the 20th Massachusetts who had finally quit the army after one wound too many to body and soul. How one night he had so completely summed it all up. "We have shared the incommunicable experience of war," he had said. "In our youths our hearts were touched with fire."

There had been nearly five more years of it now. It was as much his life as breathing, eating, and, God forgive the comparison, even making love with Kathleen in the stillness before dawn.

"In a way you do love it all, don't you, Andrew?"

Andrew could only nod his head.

"I hate it," Kal whispered. "That's the difference. I'm sick to death of army camps, of looking at friends, their sons, standing stiffly in line, trying to look so brave. I almost wish I could just be a peasant again, singing some asinine ballad for my lord Ivor, the old drunken bully. The Tugars would be gone now for three years. Life would have gone on. That's the difference between soldiers and peasants. I look at these boys and know that you've made them into something else. They'll never be peasants again, and somehow that makes me sad. They've learned how to kill."

"And Tanya might be nothing but blackened bones."

Kal looked over angrily at Andrew.

"She will be nevertheless."

"Do you honestly believe that?"

Kal lowered his head.

"I try not to," he whispered. "Two months ago, the morning after we heard about Hans, I told you that we'll live or die by your decisions."

"I remember," Andrew whispered, ashamed in a way that he had so thoroughly lost heart in everything on that shocking morning of defeat. He was still tormented by doubts, but in the last thirty days he had mastered his nerves again, knowing he had to if he was going to breathe any defiance back into an army, an entire race, that had been so thoroughly shaken by the first round of defeats and the loss of their country.