"TheTimes!" Carroll's voice was a mouthed rasp protracted by the whistling of air through the hole in his trachea. He held out his rifle to Yeats. "Go!"
Yeats took it, set Carroll down, then tore for the corner. Four remaining men waited there, winded and indecisive. Yeats passed them on the run. "With me!" he yelled, and fired his gun in the air. He looked back. The men were with him.
Yeats swung around, facing forward again. Turning into Abbey Street, advancing in a line abreast and at a slow trot, was a squad of fusilliers led by a florid-faced sergeant. There was no time for either side to fire. Yeats hit the gap between two tommies, swinging his rifle barrel across the cheekbone of the man nearest him. He could hear it crack as the man went down. Yeats was through with three of his men behind him. They were near the burned-out Liberty Hall now, and friendly fire covered them in their dash to theTimes' print shop. Lights blazed within. No low-country hearth had ever looked so beckoning.
"Good work with that rifle." Harry Joyce grinned at Yeats as Yeats pounded on the door with his rifle stock. Joyce nodded approvingly. "That's all she's good for now, General, until you reload. She's a single shot."
The place didn't feel like a newspaper office, but it was going to do for one. Print shop or no, there were desks there. Yeats had commandeered one and was writing away at white heat.
"What is it to be?" Doheny, the night editor asked, waiting patiently until Yeats had put down his pen.
"Narrative poem," Yeats said. "Not Wandering Aengus, Cuchulain, Cathleen ni Houlihan. A poem of modern times and modern men. Here are the first pages."
Doheny scanned them, then looked up.
" 'A terrible beauty is born. Aye, but that's a good line, and true." He nodded. "Many fine lines."
The sky was lightening, the ruddiness of the sun playing over the glass shards by their feet.
"More light for their gunners," Doheny said gloomily.
The door below shook with heavy pounding. Joyce edged to the window, unslinging his rifle and edging it out before him.
"It's Ned Daly's men!" bellowed a voice below. "Let us in."
"Reinforcements," Joyce said. Yeats bent back to his writing. The sound of heavy boots broke his concentration and a draft of cold dawn air caused him to look up for his coat. His eyes met the black stare of a hard-featured, lean figure, erect in bearing and not the vainglorious lout Yeats wanted him to be.
"MacBride," he said, and felt sick.
"Yeats."
This was too much. Yeats knew quite well that though it was Ireland that he was fighting for, it was also the shade of the professional soldier-personified in his life by Sean MacBride-that he was fighting against. Or at least trying to outdo in his own head and perhaps in the affections of Maud Gonne.
But MacBride was no shade. He was here, very much alive and very much-so it seemed-a comrade in arms.
Yeats turned away to face the night editor.
"When can you go to press, Mr. Doheny?"
Doheny's answer was drowned in the explosion of an artillery shell's immediate impact. Yeats' eardrums felt like bursting as the explosion rocked the room. The shock knocked him to the floor, plaster and lath caving down on him from the ceiling above. A wave of heat followed behind. Men screamed.
"The paper rolls! The bastards have hit the newsprint!"
"Everybody out!" MacBride ordered, his body outlined by the inferno behind him. The smoke was roiling before the flames, turning the air black. Yeats crawled, then stumbled to the front door, MacBride behind him.
Yeats looked up at a squad of soldiers, khaki clad not green, rifles ready and bayonets deployed not six feet from him.
"Put up your hands," MacBride said softly behind him. "Or we'll be dead before your next breath."
"A visitor, Major," Banks said. His voice held a softer and even awed tone, one that Yeats had not heard before from the jailer. He looked toward the door.
A figure in black, taller than Banks, stood in the shadows by the jamb. A priest, perhaps?
"Maud!" MacBride whispered hoarsely.
"Sean, Willie," Maud Gonne said, and strode into the room. A backwards glance from those glittering eyes sent the jailer scuttling back, closing the cell door and locking it before tramping away.
"They let you in," MacBride said. A silly remark, Yeats thought, saved from fatuity only by the heaviness of the situation.
"They've let me little else," Maud said, throwing her cape aside in a careless but graceful gesture. Stage manners without thought. "For once the Church is good for something. I'm your wife."
She moved between the two men and took the hand of each.
"Still your friend, Sean. And yours always, Willie." She paused. "You bold, foolish men."
Yeats nodded. "That we are."
"They're going to shoot you." Yeats felt Maud's grip tighten. She let drop her hands and turned away.
"I expected no less, Maud," MacBride said. "This is my second go at them. They've not forgotten the first."
"That I know, Sean, and little could I do for you. And I tried for you, Willie. So did our friends in England-Wilde, Pound, Shaw. They've tried to get the Prime Minister's ear."
"I've lunched with Asquith," Yeats said. "Little good that will do me."
"They fear the power of your pen, Willie. They'll take the heat of public indignation to your ongoing threat to rally Eireann."
"Bad news but expected. I'd rather hear it from your lips than any other's."
Maud took a step back to better survey them. Dark hair a helmet to that fairest of faces. Beautiful still and always.
"I come to deliver more than news. Ireland's love and mine. It's yours and always will be." She looked at Yeats. "And some words to water it down the years? Have you that for us?"
Yeats reached to the table behind him.
"Two poems."
Maud took the papers, turned away to read.
"They're grand, Willie. 'Easter 1916. That will hold the day green. But this second one. And what do you know of Irish airmen?"
"Little enough. But I know something of foreseeing my death. I learn more each minute."
Maud looked at him. "Ah, Willie-the poems you might have written! What a bargain you have made!"
Yeats focused on the pin at Maud's breast, Ireland's green and gold. He moved his eyes up to see in hers a respect and regard he'd not seen before.
"A good bargain, Maud." He paused. "The best."
Labor Relations
Esther M. Friesner
It was in the Month Without Gods, in the third year of the great invasion of the three Korean kingdoms, that Old One's great-great-granddaughter Snow Moon went out to fetch water and came home with a Japanese soldier. She found him slumbering behind some thorn bushes that grew on the mountain where Old One's special seeing-spring leaped forth from the rocks. He wore atanko over his clothes-the short-bodied iron cuirass favored by the invaders-with his helmet and spear laid out on the ground beside him. It would have been an easy thing for even a child to grab the spear and spit him through the throat, then and there, but he was young and handsome and, since the war had begun, Snow Moon had come to an age when such things mattered.