Part 2

Beauregard had had his doubts about speaking out against resisting the federal government with the threat of force. Now he thought he had done right: war would have been terrible, and the South could not have won such a war. And it was his statesmanship at that conference, and Governor Gentry's lavish praise of it, that had set him up to succeed Gentry as governor.

Beauregard sighed peacefully. He had done right and the world was better for it.

The door opened, and Piquette's golden, black-eyed face peeked around it.

"It's four-thirty, Governor," she said. "Will you want me for anything else?"

"Not just now," he said, smiling.

She smiled back.

"Room 832," she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. Then she was gone.

Beauregard's blood quickened, but he was disturbed. This that he was going to do was not right. But what other course would a normal man take, when his wife was so estranged that she had become nothing more than a front for the married happiness the people demanded of their governor, a figure-head who lived in another wing of the mansion?

He had met Piquette eight years before, briefly, when he was a staid, climbing Nashville lawyer. Not knowing she was of mixed blood then, he had been drawn to her strongly. He had thought her drawn also to him, but for some reason their paths parted and he had not seen her again until after his election to the governorship.

She had been among a group of applicants for state jobs, and Beauregard had happened to be visiting the personnel office the day she came in. He employed her in the governor's office at once. She was a good secretary.

Nothing untoward had passed between them in that year she had worked as his secretary. In nothing either of them said or did could any members of his staff have detected an incorrect attitude. But there were invitations of the eyes, caresses of the voice ... and a week ago their hands had touched, and clung, and he had found she was willing....

Beauregard heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. Briefly, he felt sorry for Lucy. He would eat supper downtown tonight, but it would be in Room 832.

* * * * *

Beauregard awoke slowly, with a hand shaking his shoulder. Reluctantly he abandoned a dream in which the South had remained at peace and he was governor of his state.

Piquette's flower-like face hovered over him in the dimness. She rested on one elbow in the big bed beside him and shook his shoulder.

"Gard!" she said urgently. "Wake up! It's after midnight."

"Oh, damn!" he groaned, rolling out of the warm covers. "And the Northerners will attack today if my intelligence service hasn't gone completely haywire."

"Get dressed," she said, dropping her bare feet to the floor and smoothing her nightgown over her knees. "I'll fix you some coffee."

He pulled on his uniform, the Confederate grey with the stars glittering on the shoulders, while she plugged in the hotplate and started the coffee. Outside, the eastern sky was streaked with dim light, against which the sleeping houses of Winchester thrust up stark silhouettes.

She sat across the little table from him, a flowered robe drawn around her, while he sipped his coffee and thrust the last wisps of dreams from his head.

"Quette," he said, "I want you to pack and get out of here. Before daylight, if you can get ready. Head south, for Birmingham. I'll send a staff car around for you as soon as I get to headquarters."

"I don't want to leave you, Gard," she objected.

"You've got to, Quette. We can't hold these Federals. We're in a bulge here, and the only reason they haven't cracked us out yet is Chattanooga holding our right flank."

He kissed her goodbye, a long kiss, and strode down the street to the Franklin County courthouse, where he had set up headquarters for the Army of Middle Tennessee when the Union troops had forced them out of Nashville. The place was a beehive of activity.

The eastern sky glowed red over the Cumberlands and the artillery was thundering in the north when General Beauregard Courtney rode out toward the front. He had his driver park the staff car on a slight rise overlooking his troop formations.

The war was going badly for the South, and Beauregard unhappily took much of the responsibility on himself. Perhaps he had been wrong in making that impassioned speech at the Governors Conference in Memphis which, he was sure, had swung the weight of opinion in favor of the Pact of Resistance. Certainly he had been wrong in recommending a farflung northern battle line, at the start of the war, which stretched from Paducah, Kentucky, north of Nashville to Knoxville, with its eastern anchor on the Cumberlands.

It had been his idea that a defensive line so far north would give the South more time to mobilize behind it, would hold the rich industries of Tennessee for the South, and would give the South a jumping off place for a strike across the Ohio River. But the North had mobilized faster, and Northern armies had crunched down through the Southern defenses like paper.

Now all West Tennessee and a segment of Mississippi was in Federal hands. The Southern defense in East Tennessee had been forced back to the mountains around Chattanooga. And his own troops had fallen back from stand after stand after the Battle of Nashville. Even now, Federal armour was reported to have crossed the Tennessee River and be heading south-eastward toward Columbia and Lewisburg.

He hoped Piquette had left Winchester by now. Perhaps he should not have kept his quadroon mistress with him through the constant danger of defeat, but with Lucy way down in New Orleans....

As the morning wore on, the guns thundered below him and the tanks rumbled across the Tullahoma plain, spouting fire. Several times his sergeant urged him to withdraw, out of danger, and return to headquarters, but he stayed. He wanted to direct this battle personally, giving his orders over the car radio.

A great pall of smoke hung over the battlefield. Then the attack came, wave after wave of blue-clad infantry, pouring down from the north. Tanks and planes supported them, and atomic artillery shells burst in the Southern trenches. The grey lines began to crumble.

"Colonel, throw in the 112th and the armored reserve, and let's try to get an orderly withdrawal to the Alabama line," Beauregard ordered into his microphone. He turned to his driver. "Sergeant, I think you're right. We'd better get out of here."

The staff car swung around and headed back toward Winchester over the bumpy highway. As it left the rise, Beauregard swore fervently and reached for the microphone. From the west came a great cloud of dust and a mass of rumbling tanks. The Federals had broken through the left flank at Lynchburg.

Jet planes streaked overhead from the north, flying low. The flash of exploding bombs and rockets was visible in Winchester, ahead of them.

Speaking swiftly into the microphone, Beauregard glanced out of the car's back window.

"Sergeant!" he yelled. "Strafers!"

The driver twisted the wheel so quickly Beauregard was thrown against the door. The speeding car leaped a ditch and bounced into the fields.

Out the window, Beauregard saw the jet swooping down at them like a hawk. It was a speck in the sky, and almost instantly it was on them in a terrifying rush.

He saw the flare of the rockets leaving the plane's wings, he felt the shock of a thunderous explosion, and the blackness engulfed him.

* * * * *

Beauregard opened his eyes painfully. His head ached, and his left arm hurt horribly.

He was lying on a rumpled bed in his torn uniform. Piquette and a wizened, very black Negro man were standing beside the bed, looking down at him anxiously. He recognized that he was in the house in Winchester, in the room where he had spent last night ... or was it last night?

"Quette!" he croaked, trying to sit up. He couldn't make it, and he gasped at the pain in his arm. "I thought I told you to leave Winchester."

"I didn't want to leave you, Gard," she answered softly. "And it's lucky I didn't. Some men on an ammunition truck found your car. Your driver was killed and your arm blown half off. They brought you here."

"Dammit," he complained, "why didn't they take me to the base hospital?"

"Because the base hospital took a direct hit from a bomb."

That startled Beauregard into the realization that there was no sound of firing, no crash of bombs, outside. There were men's shouts and the normal sounds of a town occupied by the military. Had the Union forces been repulsed by some miracle?

"Well, for Pete's sake, call the medics and get me to a field hospital," he ordered. "And you head south for Birmingham, like I told you to."

"Gard," she said soberly, "I thought it ought to be your decision, and not mine. If we call the medics, they'll be Federal troops. Winchester was captured hours ago, and it's just chance that they haven't entered this house and found you before now."

Beauregard lay silent, stunned. The strange man beside the bed spoke for the first time.

"It is not his decision," he said. "There is work that I must do which may be delayed forever if he is captured."

"This is Adjaha, a friend of mine," said Piquette. "He came to Winchester to see you. He thinks he knows a way to end the war."

"Poppycock!" snorted Beauregard weakly.

"General Courtney," said Adjaha intensely, "you spent last night with Piquette. Where did you spend the night? Here or in Chattanooga?"

Beauregard opened his mouth to say, "Here, of course." Then he stopped. Suddenly a vision, almost a memory, rose up before him and he could not be sure. There was a chandelier, and a black voodoo charm....

"You do remember some of it!" exclaimed Adjaha delightedly.

"It seems that I dreamed the South was winning, and I was going to drive on Tullahoma, and I went to Chattanooga to see Piquette," said Beauregard slowly. "But it's mixed up in my mind with another dream, in which there was no war at all, and I was elected governor...."

"Those were not dreams," said Adjaha. "They happened and yet they did not happen."

"I remember you in a dream," said Beauregard faintly, "and words about 'fan-shaped destiny'...."

"You have to understand this or I can do nothing," said Adjaha hurriedly. "The South was doing well, although it could not have won in the end. You were preparing to advance on Tullahoma, and you did go to Chattanooga last night to see Piquette. This happened.

"But it didn't happen, because I utilized the ancient knowledge of my people, involving dimensions beyond time, to change the factors that led to it. Decisions of different people were influenced differently at a dozen points in the past so that Piquette did not become your mistress before you went to Memphis, and your own emotional attitude was changed just enough to steer you on a different course.

"Then the other things you call a dream happened instead. There was peace instead of war."

"Then how is it that we actually have war and defeat?" demanded Beauregard, his voice a little stronger.

"Piquette," said Adjaha gravely. "You found her again, and she became your mistress after you were governor."

"But I remember that now!" exclaimed Beauregard. "That's three years in the future ... and there was no war."

"It is difficult to understand, but the future can change the present," said Adjaha. "General Courtney, even more than I realized at first you are the 'man of destiny,' the key to war or peace in the South, and Piquette is the key to your own emotions.

"Try to comprehend this: _you cannot love Piquette in a South that is at peace!_ The whole social fabric in which you were nurtured demands of you that a woman of Negro blood cannot be your paramour unless she is socially recognized as an inferior and, in a very real sense, not your co-equal lover but the servant of your pleasure. When Piquette became your mistress, even five years after the decisive moment of the Memphis Conference, the entire framework of time and events was distorted and thrown back into a sequence in which the South was at war. This time, unfortunately for you, a slightly different time-path was taken and the South does not fare so well."

"Then you've failed, and things are worse than they were if you hadn't interfered," said Beauregard.

"No, I must try again," said Adjaha. "Piquette's mother must never have brought her to Nashville as a child, so there will be no chance of your ever meeting her at all."

There was a thunderous knocking at the front door. Federal troops who were investing the town at last had reached this house. Adjaha gave Beauregard one sympathetic look from his dark eyes, and slipped quietly from the room, toward the rear of the house.

The knocking sounded again. Beauregard lay in a semi-daze, his blood-encrusted left arm an agony to him. Through the haze over his mind intruded a premonition that bit more deeply than the physical pain: Never to know Piquette?

He clutched her hand to his breast.

"Quette," he whimpered.

"Be still, darling. I won't leave you," she soothed him as a mother soothes her child. Her cool hand caressed his cheek.

* * * * *

United States Senator Beauregard Courtney of Tennessee crossed Canal Street cautiously and plunged into the French Quarter of New Orleans with a swift, military stride.

He had always urged Lucy that they take a trip to New Orleans, but she always had demurred; she said the city reminded her of war and trouble, somehow. Now he had been invited to be the principal speaker at the annual banquet of the Louisiana Bar Association tonight. He had welcomed the opportunity to make the trip, without Lucy.

It had been ten years since his voice at the Memphis conference had swung the South away from war and onto the path of peace. His statesmanship on that occasion had brought him great honour. He had served a four-year term as governor of his state and, on leaving that office, had been advanced to the U. S. Senate. His light-coloured hair and mustache were beginning to grey slightly.

Lucy had been a good wife to him, even though there had been that near-estrangement when he was so busy as governor. Perhaps she still did not agree with him entirely on his acceptance of the fact of racial integration without bitter resistance, but she was more tolerant now of his sincerity than she had been once. He was sorry she was not here: she would have enjoyed the Old World atmosphere through which he walked.

Beauregard moved up fabled Bourbon Street, past Galatoire's and the Absinthe House. He stared with interest at the intricate ironwork of the balconies that overhung the narrow sidewalk, at the bright flowers that peered over the stone walls of gardens, at the blank wooden doors flush with the sidewalk.

How far, he wondered, was he from Rampart Street, where the Creoles had kept their beautiful quadroon mistresses in one-story white houses in days long gone? He knew nothing of the _Vieux Carre_, and had no map.

As he penetrated more deeply into the French Quarter, he began to pass the barred gates that stopped the dim corridors leading back to ancient courtyards. These fascinated him, and he tried several of the gates, only to find them locked.

He never knew later, studying the map, whether the street he had just crossed was Toulouse, St. Peter or Orleans, when he came upon one of those gates that stood ajar.

Beauregard did not hesitate. He pushed it open and paced eagerly down the shadowed corridor until he emerged into the sunlit courtyard.

There was a stone statue, grey and cracked with age, in the midst of a circular pool in the center of the courtyard. Flower-lined walks surrounded it. The doors that opened into the courtyard were shadowed by balconies, on which there were other doors, and to which steep flights of stairs climbed.

On a bench beside the pool sat a woman in a simple print dress. Her skin was tawny gold and her hair was black and tumbled about her shoulders. Her eyes were black and deep, too, when she raised them in surprise to the intruder. She was beautiful, with a poignant, wistful beauty.

"I'm sorry," said Beauregard. "The gate was open, and I was curious."

"Mrs. Mills forgot to lock the gate," she said, smiling at him. "All of us who live here have our keys and are supposed to lock the gate when we go out. But Mrs. Mills forgets."

"I'll leave," he said, not moving.

"No, stay," she said. "You're a visitor to town, aren't you? There's no reason why you can't see a French Quarter courtyard, if you wish."

Beauregard moved closer to her.

"I'm Beauregard Courtney," he said. For some reason, he omitted the "Senator."

"Gard," she said in a low voice, her big eyes fixed on his face. "Gard Courtney."

Somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, faint memory stirred. Was it the memory of a dream?

"Have I dreamed that we met before?" he asked slowly. "Piquette?"

"You know!" she exclaimed, her face lighting gloriously. "I didn't dream alone!"

"No," he said. "No. You didn't dream alone. Your name is Piquette, isn't it? I don't know why I said that. It seemed right."

"It is right."

"And you live here?"

"Up there," she said, and pointed to one of the doors that looked out on the balcony.

Beauregard looked up at the balcony and the door, and he knew, as though he had prevision, that before he left the courtyard he would go through that door with Piquette.

He took her hands in his.

"I'll never let you leave me," he murmured.

* * * * *

General Beauregard Courtney sat under the open-sided tent that was his field headquarters and stretched long legs under the flimsy table. He gazed morosely out toward Tullahoma in the north, where the trenches stretched endlessly from east to west and only an occasional artillery shell broke the quiet of the battlefield.

Stalemate.

"I thought trench warfare went out with World War I," he growled to his executive officer.

"No, sir. Apparently not, sir," replied Colonel Smithson correctly, not interrupting his preparation of tomorrow's orders.

Stalemate. The Northern armies and the Southern armies had collided with great carnage on that battlefield. Fighting had swayed back and forth for weeks, and at last had settled down to a stubborn holding action by both sides.

That had been months ago. Now trenches and fortifications and tank traps extended across southern Tennessee from the Cumberlands to the Mississippi. Occasional offensives came to naught. Only the planes of both sides swept daily over the lines, bombarding the rear areas, reducing the cities of Tennessee to rubble.

Beauregard toyed with a pencil and listened idly to the news over the little radio at his elbow. It was a Nashville station, and Nashville was held by the North, but he had learned how to discount the news from the battlefront.

"... And our planes destroyed thirteen Rebel tanks and an ammunition depot in a mission near Lexington," the announcer was saying. "A gunboat duel in the Mississippi River near Dyersburg was broken off after severe casualties were inflicted on the Rebel crew. Our armored troops have advanced farther into the Texas Panhandle.

"Wait. There's a flash coming in...."

There was a momentary pause. Beauregard bent his ear to the radio. Colonel Smithson looked up, listening.

"My God!" cried the announcer in a shaky voice. "This flash ... a hydrogen bomb has exploded in New York City!"

Beauregard surged to his feet, upsetting the table. The radio crashed to the ground. The other men in the tent were standing, aghast.

"It isn't ours!" cried Beauregard, his face grey. "It's a Russian bomb! It must be...!"

The voice on the fallen radio was shouting, excited, almost hysterical.

"... The heart of the city wiped out.... Number of dead not estimated yet, but known to be high.... Great fires raging.... Radioactive fallout spreading over New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania....

"Here's a bulletin: the President accuses the Rebel government of violating the pact not to use large nuclear weapons. Retaliatory action has already been initiated....

"Here's another flash: Detroit and Chicago have been H-bombed! My God, has the world gone mad? There's a report, unconfirmed, that the Detroit bombers came from the _north_...."

"They can't believe we did it!" muttered Beauregard. All the men in the tent, irrespective of rank, were clustered around the radio. No one thought to pick it up from the ground.

A staff car drove in from the south and rocked to a stop in front of the headquarters tent. Beauregard hardly noticed it until Piquette got out, followed by a slight, grey-haired Negro man in civilian clothes.

Beauregard strode out of the tent. The car radio was on loud, and the same announcer was babbling over it.

"Quette, what are you doing out here?" he demanded.

"Gard, this is Adjaha, a friend of mine," she said hurriedly. "I couldn't wait for you to come back to town tonight. I had to get him out to see you before it was too late."

"Dammit, it is too late," he growled. "It's too late for anything. Haven't you been listening to that damn radio?"

"This is extremely important, General," said Adjaha in a mellow voice. "If I may impose on you, I'd like to talk with you for a short while."

Beauregard frowned and glanced at Piquette. She nodded slightly, and her face was anxious.

"I suppose I have plenty of time to talk," he said heavily. "We can do nothing but sit here with useless armies while the country tears itself apart. Sergeant, turn that damn car radio off and go bring some chairs out here. You can listen to the radio in the tent."

They sat, the three of them, and Adjaha talked. Beauregard listened skeptically, almost incredulously, but something within him--not quite a memory, but an insistent familiarity--caused him to listen. He did not believe, but he suspended disbelief.

"So you see, General," concluded Adjaha, "there is some drive within you and Piquette--call it fate, if you wish--that draws you together. When it was arranged that she did not become your mistress before the Memphis Conference, she did after you became governor. When it was arranged that her parents did not move to Nashville with her, you were drawn to New Orleans to meet her. Apparently you must meet if there is any possibility that you meet, and when you meet you love each other.

"And, though you can't remember it, General--for it didn't happen, even though it did--I explained to you once, on this very day, that you cannot love Piquette in an unrebellious and peaceful South."

"If we were fated to meet, I'm happy," said Beauregard, taking Piquette's hand. "If these fantastic things you say were true, I still would never consent to not having met Piquette."

"But you must see that it's right, Gard!" exclaimed Piquette, surprisingly.

"Quette! How can you say that? Would you be happy if we were never to know each other?"

She looked at him, and there were tears in her eyes.

"Yes, Gard," she said in a low voice, "because ... well, Adjaha can see a little of the future, too. And on every alternate path he sees.... Gard, if the South is at war, you'll be killed before the war ends!"

"We can't take any chances this time, General," said Adjaha. "Should events be thrown back into a path that leads to war again, this time you might be killed before I could reach you. Piquette's parents must never have met. _She must never have been born!_"

Suddenly, Beauregard believed. This quiet little black man could do what he said.

"I won't permit it!" he roared, starting to his feet. "Damn the South! Damn the world! Piquette is mine!"

But Adjaha, moving like lightning, was in the staff car. Its motor roared, it swung in a cloud of dust and accelerated toward the south.

"Sergeant! Colonel! Get that stolen staff car!" Beauregard bellowed. He whipped out his service pistol and fired two futile shots after the diminishing vehicle.