Harry Turtledove

Dying Boudicca managed a feeble nod, and sent her last words out to a breathlessly silent Theatre:

"E'en so; 'Tis true. Oh!- I feel the poison!

We Britons never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when we do first help to wound ourselves,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue,

If Britons to themselves do rest but true."

She fell back and lay dead. Shakespeare strode forward, to the very front of the stage. Into more silence, punctuated only by sobs, he said,

"No epilogue here, unless you make it;

If you want your freedom, go and take it."

Pound got back into his uniform. “See you again, maybe,” he said. She nodded. If she was enthusiastic, she hid it very well. She didn’t mind his money, but she sure wasn’t thrilled about him.

Well, he was old enough to be her father. And he was a damnyankee. And she was a whore and he was a trick. That left it fourth down and time to punt.

Someone bumped into Shakespeare: Will Kemp. The clown made a leg- a cramped leg, in the crush- at him. "Give you good den, gallowsbait," he said cheerfully. "Go to!" Shakespeare said. "Meseems we are well begun here." "Well begun, ay. And belike, soon we shall be well ended, too." Kemp jerked his head to one side, made his eyes bulge, and stuck out his tongue as if newly hanged. With a shudder, Shakespeare said, "If your wind of wit sit in that quarter, why stand you here and not with the Spaniards?" "Why?" Kemp kissed him on the cheek. "Think you're the only mother's son born a fool in England?"

“Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”

“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy.

That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.

Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn’t make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.

“Stuck in fucking Alabama,” Armstrong Grimes grumbled. “What could be worse than this?”

Squidface was cleaning his captured automatic Tredegar. He looked up from the work. “Well, you could be in hell,” he said.

“Who says I’m not?” Armstrong said. It’s a godforsaken miserable place, and I can’t get out of it. If that’s not hell, what do you call it?”

“Pittsburgh,” Squidface answered.

Then he realized what it really was: a possum. It looked like a cat-sized rat that had got its nose stuck in a pencil sharpener. The long, bare pinkish tail seemed vaguely obscene. Lieutenant Colonel Torricelli was looking in the same direction. “If that’s not the ugliest thing God ever made, damned if I know what it is,” he said.

“Now that Jake Featherston’s dead, I agree with you.”

In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing.

You volunteered for this, Cincinnatus reminded himself. Were you born stupid, or did you have to study?

“Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind.

Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.