Terrible Swift Sword by William R. Forstchen Read Free Book Online Page B

Army of the Potomac.
    Did that proud army still march? he wondered, feeling a tug of nostalgia. It would be what year now back there . . . ? Funny, he didn't even think of it as home anymore. Home was here, the city of Suzdal, the Republic, and the world of Valennia.
    Almost four years now, so it'd be late 1868. No, most likely all the boys had gone home by now, the war over. The long swaying columns of blue, the circling fields of campfires, the serpentine river of men flowing over the countryside had disappeared by now, the hundred thousand parts drifting back to their homes, to loved ones, except for the dead. Except for the survivors of the 35th Maine, exiled here, wherever here was.
    He remembered a march a couple of days before Gettysburg, when a thunderstorm had rolled over the columns. The sky turned a dark black-green, illuminated by forked tongues of fire. He had paused atop a low ridge and looked back, the column snaking across the valley. With each electric blue flash it seemed as if twenty thousand muskets had picked up the light, reflecting back Thor's bolts of war, blinding the eyes with their brilliance. The rain had come, drowning the world in darkness, and yet they had marched on, shimmering in the flashes of light, an electric body of blue swaying toward their final destiny.
    He could remember the sound of their voices, the songs drifting down the marching columns, the laughter floating with the evening air, the triumphant shout as they rushed to victory, the paeans rising to the heavens, the rattle of drums in the distance, the haunting call of the bugle hovering over all when night finally came. Where were they now? Where are we?
    He looked up as he so often did, always thinking that they were somewhere out there, beyond the Great Wheel, obscured now by the driving storm. Was the old country safe? he wondered. Lincoln would be finishing up his term, and the memory of his old hero brought a sad smile. His second term would be ending soon, hopefully over a United States that was whole.
    "The old country," that was how he thought of it now, the same way Hans spoke of Prussia, Pat of Ireland, Emil of Hungary. Yet this was different. He had transplanted something of America here—"the United States of Rus," they called it now. They were molding it into a memory of home. At least in the woods beyond Suzdal it did in a way feel like home, like Maine, especially in the winter when the vast forests were still and draped in a crystalline white mantle. He could let it all drop aside, at least in those rare moments when he would ride north into the woods to be alone. It was so much like the land he'd grown up on—the boulder-strewn woods, the towering pines, the sharpness of the icy wind.
    God, how I miss Maine, he thought sadly. There was a time when he'd been nothing more than a professor of history at Bowdoin, in the quiet, tranquil backwaters of life, giving his lectures, reading in the library, walking the rocky beaches, and yet always dreaming of something beyond. That, he knew, was the lure of being a historian, the dreaming of what had been and the imagining that somehow, someday, one could play such a part. And when the bit part in the vast drama of the war had been offered he'd rushed to it, never realizing all that he'd be leaving behind. Winning his dream, he had lost a dream.
    Of course, I never could have imagined this, he thought with a sad smile: the last trip aboard the Oqunquit , the awakening in this nightmare world. Funny, now he found himself dreaming that somehow it could all come back, that he might awake as if from a dream. But then, he reflected, I would lose everything—Kathleen, the baby, Emil, Pat, Hans, Kal, and the strange pulse of power that this world has given me—as if I alone were shaping the destiny of an entire people. But at least there, before I left, I knew what peace was.
    Peace. He mulled over the word, letting it drift through his mind. Over two years of war against the