American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,95

they don’t start again. One of these days, I expect we’ll have to raze one of these prairie towns to the ground. It’d serve the bastards right. And after we do that, the other Canucks will get the idea that we mean business.”

“Maybe, sir,” Dowling said, his tone plainly making that maybe a no. Sometimes you couldn’t be too plain for Custer, so he went on, “If we do that without good reason, the rest of the world will raise a big stink.”

“To hell with the rest of the world,” Custer said grandly: the philosophy of a lifetime, boiled down to eight words. Through the whole of his long span, Custer had done very much as he pleased. He’d had a good many breaks along the way, but no one could deny he’d made the most of them.

“Will there be anything more, General?” Dowling asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is one other thing.” Custer hesitated, which was most unlike him. At last, he resumed: “I’m afraid Libbie and I have had to let our housekeeper go. Could you arrange for the hiring of another one?”

“Wouldn’t your wife sooner take care of that for you, sir?” Dowling asked warily. When Elizabeth Custer joined her husband at a posting, she ran their household with a whim of iron.

Custer coughed a couple of times. “This once, Lieutenant Colonel, I’d like you to take care of it. Libbie is a marvelous woman—God never made a finer—but she does have a habit of hiring sour, dried-up sticks with whom I have a certain amount of trouble getting on well. I was hoping you might find a capable woman of cheerier disposition.”

“I see.” And Dowling did. Libbie Custer hired housekeepers in whom her husband could have no possible interest. That was only common sense on her part, for Custer did have an eye for a pretty woman. Whether anything more than an eye still functioned at his age, Dowling did not know. He didn’t want to find out, either. Now that Custer had a real command again, he didn’t need some pretty young popsy distracting him.

And Dowling didn’t want to anger Custer’s wife. Libbie made a far more vindictive, far more implacable foe than her husband ever dreamt of being. If Dowling hired Custer a popsy, she would not be pleased with him.

He had his own coughing fit. “Sir,” he said, “I really do think that’s something best left to Mrs. Custer’s judgment.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Custer said. “You handled such arrangements for me plenty of times during the war. Once more won’t hurt you a bit.”

“Whenever your wife was with you, though, sir, she did prefer to keep such matters in her own hands,” Dowling said. “I wouldn’t care for her to think I was encroaching on her privileges.”

“You’re not helping, Lieutenant Colonel,” Custer said irritably.

Dowling stood mute. If Custer ordered him to choose a housekeeper, he resolved to find the general the homeliest old crone he could. Let’s see you ask me to do something like that again, he thought.

But Custer gave no such order. Instead, he let out a long, wheezy sigh. “Here I am, in command of all of Canada,” he said, “and I find I’m not even in command of my own household.” Dowling wondered how many other famous generals had been defeated by their wives. A good many, was his guess, and he did not think that guess likely to be far wrong.

Scipio was in love, and wondered why in God’s name he’d never been in love before. The best answer he could come up with—and he knew it was nowhere near good enough—was that he’d always been too busy. First, he’d had an education forcibly crammed down his throat. Then he’d been butler at Marshlands, which under Anne Colleton was a job to keep any four men hopping. And after that, he’d been swept up into the affairs of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Now…Now, as far as anybody in Augusta, Georgia, knew, he was Xerxes the waiter, an ordinary fellow who did his job and didn’t give anybody any trouble. And Bathsheba, he was sure, was the most marvelous creature God had seen fit to set on the face of the earth.

He’d never had any trouble finding a woman to bed when he wanted one. But he’d never understood the difference between making love and being in love, not till now. He stroked Bathsheba’s cheek as they lay side by side on the narrow bed in his furnished room. “I is the