“Are you going to fight them?” Emil finally asked, and Andrew said nothing.
“The men are with you. You know that?” Emil nodded behind them. He didn’t need to turn; he could hear the steady tramping of the cadets, the voice of Webster shouting out orders, urging even the veterans by the side of the road to fall in and “support their colonel.”
They passed the office of Gates’s Illustrated Weekly. The publisher was in the street, mounted, waiting, apprentices, printers, the rest of his staff pouring out, some of them carrying rifles or pistols. Gates fell in on Andrew’s flank.
“I thought the press was supposed to be neutral,” Andrew quipped. “What ever happened to the pen being mightier than the sword?”
“Like hell we’re neutral,” the publisher snapped angrily. “He has some senators with him, all of them armed.”
“Any troops?”
“No organized units. But there are some men, a few old boyars and former men-at-arms mostly. I knew we should have killed all of them after that last rebellion.”
“What happened?” Andrew asked.
“Flavius is dead. I know that for a fact; one of my reporters was in the building when it happened. Bugarin didn’t do it, though, at least not by his own hand. Again, it was like the shot at Kal. We don’t know. But once it happened Bugarin rounded up some followers and made straight for the White House. Apparently a few shots were fired there.”
“Kal?”
“No idea. But word is Bugarin dragged in one of the justices and Casmir.”
“So he’s getting himself sworn in,” Emil replied. “If he’s president, we’ve got to fight them, Andrew.”
“I realize that,” Andrew said quietly.
Sometimes the hardest thing was to do nothing, Hans had told him, and he smiled at the thought.
The great central plaza of the city of Suzdal was directly ahead, already filling with the citizens of the city. As he rode to the edge of the square a buzzing hum rose up from the crowd. Behind him Andrew heard Webster shouting for the company of cadets to move forward at the double and clear a path.
Andrew reined in sharply, then turned Mercury sideways. He looked back down the street and saw that several hundred men were now with him. Behind them a crowd was pressing up the street to watch the drama.
Drama, so much history and drama in this square, he thought. The first time we marched in. The day the envoy of the Tugars arrived. The charge against the boyars’ army and then the stand against the Tugars in their final assault. Grand moments, too, the victory parades, the first reading of the Constitution I penned myself, its public ratification and the declaration of the Republic and the inauguration of President Kalenka.
Now this.
He held his hand up, motioning for Webster to stop.
“I want this formation to halt and ground arms,” Andrew said. He spoke softly but firmly.
Webster looked up at him, confused.
“Mr. Webster, you are secretary of the treasury and no longer a soldier of rank with the Thirty-fifth, but I expect you to obey my orders nevertheless. Halt and stand at ease.”
Webster still did not react.
“William. Do you understand me?”
“Yes sir.”
Reluctantly Webster turned and shouted the order. There was a tense moment, several of the men shouting their refusal, but the order was finally carried out. He caught a glimpse of Kathleen in the crowd and forced a smile to try and calm her fears.
“Mr. Gates, you might as well come along as a member of the fourth estate. Emil, well I just want you along as well. Once you get the chance, go inside to check on Kal.”
He saw the colors of the 35th Maine hanging limp in the still morning air. A gentle nudge with his heels, and Mercury edged forward to the head of the column, where the color-bearer stood. The boy came to rigid attention at Andrew’s approach. He looked down and smiled at him.
“Son. do you know the responsibility you have?”
“Yes sir, the souls of the men who died beneath these colors”-he nodded up at the blood-soaked folds-“they float about us now. Their spirits live in the flag.”
The answer caught Andrew off guard and he stiffened. Of course the boy would believe that, he was from Roum. Two thousand years ago their soldiers believed their dead gathered about the standard of the legion.
Was Johnnie now here, Ferguson, Mina, Malady, Whatley, and Kindred, so many others?
Slowly he raised his right hand, eyes focused on the flag, his mind filled with all that it represented. He saluted the colors.
Quickly, before the men could see the emotion that was about to flood out, he turned Mercury about with a nudge of his heels and a whispered command, picked the reins up, and quickly urged the horse to a slow canter. Emil fell in behind him, the doctor cursing under his breath since he hated to ride.
The crowd gathered in the great plaza parted at Andrew’s approach; he could hear his name echoing across the square. As he passed they closed in behind him, surging forward toward the White House.
It was really nothing more than an oversize log structure, typical of ancient Rus, window shutters painted with gay designs, wildly fantastic ornamentation adorning the corners and steeply pitched tile roof. At Kal’s insistence the entire thing had been whitewashed, since after all that was the house a president lived in, a house painted white.
He wondered if poor Kal was still alive in there. His old friend, his first real friend on this world, had changed so much in the last year. It was almost as if a dementia, an exhaustion, had broken him. He at times wondered if Kal had simply been too gentle, too filled with compassion to be a president. Every single death at the front told on him. Barely a day went by when he was not in the cathedral at noonday, attending yet another memorial service for the boy of a friend, an old drinking comrade, or simply because he felt that a president should be there when someone mourned a life given for the Republic.
Andrew remembered how shocked he had been the last time he saw Lincoln, face deeply etched, eyes dark and sunken. When Lincoln noticed the empty sleeve, just a quick sidelong glance, then looked back into his eyes, he felt as if the president was filled with a fatherly desire and prayer that Andrew would be spared from any more agony in service to his country. That was Kal, even more so, and all the man wanted now was for the killing to stop.
And there was the paradox of war, that there were times that in order to save lives the killing must go on.
He reined in by the steps of the executive mansion. A cordon of troops ringed the last few steps into the building, the crowd nervously edging up on the lower level. Emil suddenly blocked his view, swinging his mount in front of Andrew'.
“Doctor, just what the hell are you doing?” Andrew whispered.
“Damn all, Andrew, there could be a sniper in any of those windows up there.”
“I know that, Doctor; now kindly move. The last thing I want at this moment is to see you get hurt.”
Emil reluctantly drew his mount around beside Andrew, but he continued to look up at the building, squinting.
Andrew was motionless, and the seconds dragged out.
“Andrew?”
“Yes?”
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
“Just waiting,” Andrew snapped, his tone making it clear that he didn’t want to talk.
The crowd was pressing around him, an old woman tugged at his leg, he looked down, she spoke too rapidly in Rus for him to understand, her voice drowned out by the rising clamor of the anxious crowd.
Finally, a captain came out the front door, leaving it open, stepped through the cordon of guards, walked down the steps, smartly snapped to attention, and saluted. Andrew recognized him as the officer in charge of Kal’s personal guard.