Liberating Atlantis

XXV

Frederick Radcliff thought he knew everything there was to know about living in a warm, muggy climate. As soon as he got off his steamship-another first-and rode inland from St. Augustine, he realized he was an amateur. Sweat sprang out on his skin. But it didn't cool him, because it didn't-it couldn't-evaporate. It just clung, leaving him hot and wet.

One of the men in the cavalry escort the national government had given him wore spectacles. The trooper took them off and polished them with a rag, then set them back on his nose. Ten minutes later, he did it again. "God-damned things keep steaming up," he grumbled.

The ground was flat and swampy. Frederick saw shades of green he'd never imagined before. Ferns grew everywhere. They even sprouted from the sides of brick walls. Herons-blue and gray and white, some of them almost as tall as a man-stood in shallow pools. Every so often, one of those bayonet beaks would plunge into the water. A wriggling fish or frog or salamander would vanish at a gulp.

Vultures spiraling down out of the sky drew Frederick's notice to carrion before his nose caught the sickly-sweet reek. The men from his escort smelled it about the same time he did. "Something's dead," one of them said.

"Something big," added the trooper with the eyeglasses. He tried to wipe the condensation off them one more time. By the way he swore under his breath as he stuffed the rag back into his tunic pocket, he wasn't having much luck.

They rode around a corner, and then all reined in at once. A corpse hung from the branches of a cypress tree. Frederick thought it was a Negro's, but it might have been a copperskin's. Not easy to be sure: it was bloated and blackened, and the carrion birds had already been at it. A turkey vulture perched on the branch, not far from where the noose was tied. It sent the travelers a beady jet stare.

So battered was the body that it might even have been a white man's, hanged by the insurrectionists. It might have been, but it wasn't: a placard tied to it warned SLAVES STAY QUIET. They were still in country white men controlled, then.

"How much longer till we get to where the slaves have kicked off the traces?" Frederick asked.

"Should be pretty soon," a cavalryman answered. "When they start shooting at us from ambush, that's a pretty good sign."

Was it? Frederick wasn't so sure. Rebellious slaves might want to fire at government soldiers, yes. But disgruntled white men could also want to shoot at a Negro who'd already led a much-too-successful uprising.

You knew that before you came down here, Frederick reminded himself. And so he had, but the knowledge hadn't seemed so immediate in New Hastings. What would keep a white man from hiding in the ferns near that tree and potting the fellow who'd helped turn his world inside out?

The stink would, you fool. Frederick wouldn't have wanted to wait in ambush here. Maybe one of the vultures would have, but he couldn't think of anyone else who was likely to.

Then they rode past the hanged man. With the way the breeze was blowing, that took the stench away. Frederick started looking apprehensively at every clump of ferns or bushes, every stand of squat barrel trees, every fence and slave cabin. If somebody wanted to take a shot at him, it would be easy, guards or no guards.

Before long, the death reek returned. They'd passed from land the whites controlled into country the rebels held. Here and there, animals lay bloating in the fields. There were only a few of those, though. Frederick understood why: most of the beasts would have been butchered and eaten. But he wouldn't have seen any in a peaceful countryside. Human bodies lay in the fields, too. His nose told him many more people had died somewhere out of sight.

Slave cabins stood empty, some with doors yawning open. So did big houses, the ones that hadn't burned. Many of the planters' houses had had their windows smashed, so that they stared out at the muddy road like so many skulls with big, black, blind eye sockets.

In rebel country, several cavalrymen held up white flags of truce. Frederick wondered how much good they would do-and whether they would do any. Then he decided they had to do some. Without them, he was sure his party already would have been attacked.

"How do we get them to come out and to us talk?" asked the lieutenant who commanded his guards. Maximilian Braun's side whiskers had gray in them; he spoke with a heavy German accent-like a Dutchman, most Atlanteans would have said. Like Colonel Sinapis and a good many others, he'd washed up on these shores because of some European political upheaval. He would be grayer yet before he got a captain's third small star on either side of his collar.

One thing Frederick was sure of-like most Europeans, Braun had no use for slavery. "Maybe we should stop and stay in one place a while," the Negro said.

"Why not?" Braun said. "That will them a better chance give to surround us and wipe us out." No matter what he thought about slavery, he had an acute sense of self-preservation. Well, who didn't?

But the officer gave the necessary orders. His men set about making camp. They ran up a large Atlantean flag. The scarlet red-crested eagle's head on dark blue had never meant much to Frederick-he was in Atlantis, but not of it. Now that might change. He hoped it would.

Along with the national flag, the soldiers also went on flying a large flag of truce. Frederick hoped it would do some good. If it didn't… If it didn't, he was liable to discover in short order that Lieutenant Braun hadn't been joking. The immigrant didn't sound as if he had been.

Braun set out sentries at the cardinal points of the compass. The rest of the troopers tended to their horses. Having watched cavalrymen before, Frederick knew they worried about the mounts ahead of themselves. As soon as the animals were brushed and fed and watered, the troopers sat or squatted on the ground and started shooting dice. One of them glanced up at Frederick. "Want to get into the game?" he asked, sounding friendlier than white men commonly did.

Frederick needed only a heartbeat to figure out why: the trooper saw him as a victim to be fleeced-or, more likely, skinned. It wasn't as if Frederick had never made the little ivory cubes spin himself. But… "Sorry," he said. "I've got me a rule against gambling with the other fella's dice."

"You ain't so dumb," the trooper said, not without regret. "Too bad. I was kinda hopin' you were." He eyed the Negro in a different way. "You really think you can get these rebels to behave?"

"I'm here to try," Frederick answered.

"Sure, sure." The cavalryman nodded as he rattled the dice in his right hand. "But what are the odds?" He threw the dice. "Seven!" he said happily, and scooped up the money on the ground.

What were the odds? Frederick shrugged. "We'll just have to find out, that's all."

"Wonderful," the trooper said. "We're liable to find out they'd sooner kill us than talk to us. What do we do then?"

"Try and fight them. Try and stay alive," Frederick replied. He could have given the answer in one word, but he preferred not to say that word out loud. Die. Yes, they could easily do that.

Leland Newton wished he were down in Gernika. He couldn't remember the last time such a longing had overtaken him. He didn't think such a longing had ever overtaken him before, come to that. Ever since Atlantis acquired it from Spain, the new state had drowsed under the subtropical son. If its Senators were more impassioned about slavery than men from other states south of the Stour, it didn't send many of them to New Hastings: its free population was small. Newton understood that; he wouldn't have cared to make his home in the midst of such humid heat, either.

Ten or twelve years earlier, a great cyclone had chewed across Gernika's southern peninsula. Not all the damage from it was repaired, even yet. Nothing happened fast down in Gernika. Up till now, that might as well have been a law of nature.

But times changed. If that wasn't a motto for the bustling, driving nineteenth century, Newton didn't know what would be. When he was a boy, steam engines had been rare, expensive novelties. Now steamships plied the seven seas. Railroads with steam-driven locomotives tied the land down under an ever-tightening web of iron. And another web, this one of copper wires almost as thin and insubstantial as gossamer, brought news from one place to another as soon as it happened. Who at the turn of the century would have dreamt of any of that?

Who at any time in all the prior history of the world would have dreamt of change fast enough to be visible in one man's lifetime? No one. Now the nineteenth century, and the men of the nineteenth century, had to try to cope with it.

Some tried to cope by denying that that change was real. Slavery's diehard defenders seemed to Newton to be such men. But the change was there whether they liked it or not. Even a sensible conservative like Jeremiah Stafford could see as much. That he could finally see as much went a long way toward making him sensible in Newton's eyes.

And some tried to push change along even faster than Newton thought it ought to go. He was pretty sure Stafford and he could eventually get the Slug Hollow agreement through the Senate. The slaves in Gernika didn't want to wait. They'd had enough of waiting at white men's orders for white men's profit. Newton didn't know what they aimed to do on their own. He suspected they didn't, either. But it would be of their choosing, which was what they wanted.

If Frederick Radcliff could calm them down and persuade them to wait, the prestige he gained in so doing would surely help the Slug Hollow accord. According to Stafford, that was Frederick's calculation. But if things didn't go the way the Negro hoped, the cost was unlikely to remain only political. Chances were Frederick wouldn't come back to New Hastings again.

He had to know it, too-know it better than anyone. But he'd gone all the same. Some whites still insisted on calling the insurrectionist slaves a pack of cowards. Newton hadn't believed that before he saw his first battlefield. In all the fights against the Negroes and copperskins, he hadn't seen them perform any less bravely than their white foes. And going forward into the face of what was much too likely to be death in Gernika took a courage of its own.

So Leland Newton thought, at any rate. Several Senators from south of the Stour saw things differently, and weren't shy about saying so on the Senate floor. "The sooner that Radcliff nigger's disposed of, the better off everyone will be," declared a diehard slaveholder from Nouveau Redon.

"By 'everyone,' no doubt, the honorable gentleman means the entire population of Gernika except for whites, copperskins, and Negroes," Newton observed dryly.

"Yes. I mean, no!" Too late, the Conscript Father realized he'd stuck his foot in it. Not only did Consul Newton mock him from the dais, but jeers rose on the floor both from northern Senators and also from men who would normally have supported him. With a baleful stare, the Senator from Nouveau Redon shook his fist at Newton. "You tricked me!"

"It wasn't hard," Newton answered. "That may perhaps-only perhaps, note-indicate that the honorable gentleman was talking through his hat."

The honorable gentleman didn't believe he was doing any such thing. Somehow, Newton hadn't thought he would. The honorable gentleman tried to demonstrate he was doing no such thing by talking through his hat some more-at interminable length.

Interminable, at any rate, till Consul Stafford terminated the torrent of verbiage with several sharp raps of his gavel. "That will be quite enough of that. Quite a bit too much of that, in fact. The gentleman is out of order."

"By God, sir, I am not!" the Senator shouted furiously.

"I'm afraid you are," Stafford said, more in sorrow than in anger-for the time being, at any rate. "You are so far out of order that it would take a most superior watchmaker to pop off your back, tighten your mainspring, oil you up, and generally get you running again as you should."

"Watchmaker?" the Senator spluttered. "What nonsense are you spouting now? God-damned watchmaker? And you said I was talking through my hat?"

"No, he didn't. I did," Newton said. "And you were. And you are. And it looks like you'll keep right on doing it unless you sit down and shut up. So why don't you do that instead… sir?"

"Hear! Hear!" As the laughter had before, the cry rose from northern and southern Senators together. Outraged but even more downcast, the Senator from Nouveau Redon sank into his chair and resentfully fell silent.

Newton turned to Stafford. "Thank you, your Excellency."

The other Consul nodded back. "Thank you, your Excellency." They smiled at each other. Newton couldn't remember that happening up on the dais before the Slug Hollow agreement. However little Stafford might want them to, they found themselves on the same side now… and on the same side as Frederick Radcliff.

That would all fall apart if the Negro came to grief in Gernika. I should be down there helping him, Newton thought again. But, for the life of him, he didn't see what he could do to help. Frederick Radcliff's position and power might lie outside the Charter, but they were no less real for that.

They'd been camped west of St. Augustine for three days before a rebel slave showed himself. Lieutenant Braun had a bad case of the fidgets by then. Frederick Radcliff didn't. Far better than the white officer, he understood how leery of authority the insurrectionists were. He'd wondered whether any of them would appear at all, or whether they would melt off into the swamps and the barrel-tree thickets till he and the Atlantean soldiers went away.

But a copperskin did come out of the greenery. The flag of truce he carried had been hacked from a bedsheet. A planter's bedsheet, Frederick thought-the cloth was too white and too fine ever to have belonged to a slave.

"You really Frederick Radcliff?" the copperskin called to him, plainly not wanting to come any closer than he had to.

"I really am Frederick Radcliff," Frederick shouted back. "Who are you?"

"My friends call me Quince," the other man answered, pronouncing it in two syllables-keen-say-not like the name of the fruit. "It means 'fifteen' in Spanish."

"Why do they call you that?" Frederick asked, as he was obviously meant to do.

"Oh, maybe it's because that's how many white men I've done for," Quince said, eyeing the cavalrymen with Frederick. "Or maybe it's because-" He glanced down at himself with unmistakable male complacency. He wore baggy slave trousers, so it was impossible to be sure what he had in mind, but…

A trooper got the same idea Frederick did, and at the same time, too. Frederick was constrained by what he saw as diplomacy. The trooper wasn't, and hooted in derision. "Now tell me another one!" he bawled in Quince's direction. "My God-damned horse ain't that big!"

"Poor creature," Quince said. If he was joking, he joked with a straight face-or something. Frederick shook his own head like a man harassed by mosquitoes. At the moment, he wasn't that kind of man, but in Gernika he was liable to turn into that kind of man any second now. He had some gauzy netting to sleep in-and he had some bites.

"I don't care how you're hung," he told Quince. "Come on in and talk with us if you don't want to get hanged."

The trooper who'd doubted Quince's attributes groaned. Several other cavalrymen sent Frederick reproachful stares. Maybe they hadn't thought Negroes could make such bad puns. If they hadn't, it only proved they hadn't been around Negroes much.

As for Quince himself, he gaped at Frederick. Then he threw back his head and yipped. He sounded more like a fox barking at the moon than a man laughing, but the grin on his face declared that that was what he had to be. "Nobody told me you were a funny fellow," he said, walking toward Frederick and the troopers.

"Don't worry about it," Frederick answered. "Nobody told me I was, either." That drew more yips from Quince. Frederick went on, "Can you speak for all the slaves who've risen up in these parts?"

"If I can't, nobody can," Quince declared. The trouble was, maybe nobody could. As Frederick Radcliff had reason to know, insurrectionists lacked the Atlantean army's neat chain of command. The army relied on hundreds of years-thousands of years, some officers said-of military tradition. Every band of rebels made things up as it went along.

Lieutenant Braun's thoughts must have run along a similar track. "Can you for these slave rebels speak?" he demanded, as if he were contemplating seizing Quince for impersonating a spokesman rather than for any of the real crimes the copperskin must have committed. For all Frederick knew, the Dutchman was contemplating exactly that. He seemed a very… orderly officer.

But Quince nodded back at him. "I can. I do. I will," the copperskin said, an enumeration thorough enough to satisfy even Maximilian Braun. Casually, as if the matter were of no great importance but did need mentioning, Quince added, "Anything bad happens to me, it'll happen to you people, too-only slower." He walked into the encampment.

"Ja, ja." Lieutenant Braun sounded impatient, not afraid. Frederick admired his coolness, unsure he could imitate it himself. The Negro's eyes surveyed the ferns from which Quince had emerged. He saw no other fighters, which proved nothing. They would be out there.

A sergeant muttered something to one of the troopers. The man looked surprised, but nodded. He brought Quince a square of hardtack, some chewy army sausage that was about half salt, and a tin mug of coffee. "For now, we're friends," the soldier said. He sounded none too friendly, but sometimes actions spoke louder than words.

Quince eyed the food as if wondering if it was laced with rat poison. In his place, Frederick would have wondered-had wondered-the same thing. Trusting the men who'd bought and sold you didn't come easy for a slave in Atlantis. But the Gernikan rebel leader ate. He showed no great enthusiasm, but who could get enthusiastic about rations? After washing down the bite of hardtack with some coffee, he nodded back at the trooper who'd fed him. "For now," he agreed.

"Maybe for longer. I hope so," Frederick said. "You know about the Slug Hollow arrangements, the ones they're talking over now in New Hastings?"

"Heard little bits-that's about all," Quince said. "Masters don't like that kind of news getting to slaves, so they sit on it as hard as they can."

Frederick Radcliff nodded. Back in his days on the Barford plantation-only last year, though they seemed as far away as China or Japan-he'd seen the same thing. Slaveholders weren't fools. And, like the army, they had lots of experience on their side. If slaves didn't hear news that had to do with them, they couldn't get all hot and bothered about it. And so slaveholders did their level best to keep their two-legged property in the dark.

"What it comes down to is, the Senate's working up toward saying these arrangements are the way things ought to be in Atlantis from here on out," Frederick told him. "Slaves'll be free-free as white men. They'll have the same rights-all of 'em. They'll get to own property. They'll get to vote. If somebody elects 'em, they'll get to go to statehouses or to the Senate. Their kids'll go to school, same as white boys."

"And you say the Senate's gonna do this?" Quince didn't call him a liar, not in so many words, but he might as well have. "How'd that happen?"

"On account of the slaves I led whipped the snot out of the Atlantean army the Senate sent out against us, that's how," Frederick said proudly.

Quince's eyes lit up. "And you killed all the fuckers? Nigger, you're my kind of man!"

Frederick Radcliff was far from sure he wanted to be Quince's kind of man. But he did want Quince to be his kind of man here. "No, we didn't," he replied. "The government never would've let us alone if we had. We took their guns and let them go and made terms with them. There won't be any slaves left in Atlantis after the Slug Hollow agreement goes through-if it does."

"But those God-damned asswipes in New Hastings won't let it happen, huh?" Quince said. "Sounds like them, by Jesus!"

"No, that's not what was going on," Frederick answered. "I think they would have passed it sooner or later. But then they got word of this uprising. They got to wondering if I could bring slaves along in the deal, or if folks'd just keep on fighting."

"Can you blame us for rising up against these fucking dons?" Quince said. "And the shitheads who came down after Atlantis bought Gernika are just as bad." He paused, then shook his head. "Nah, they're even worse, on account of they don't know when to quit and the Spaniards do. Well, sometimes."

"How can I blame you for rising up when I rose up, too?" Frederick said. "But there's a good time to do that stuff, and there's a time that ain't so good. You could've picked a better one."

"Huh." If Quince was impressed, he didn't show it. "And what happens when we put down our guns? White devils jump on us with both feet, that's what." He answered his own question before Frederick could.

But Frederick said, "No, that's not how it'll work. You put down your guns now, it'll be like it was a war, and nobody'll come after you later on."

"Give me a new story, why don't you?-one I'll believe." Scorn filled Quince's voice.

"If the government in New Hastings has to, it'll send in soldiers to keep white folks off your back," Frederick insisted.

"Go on! You're tryin' to fool me," Quince said.

"No such thing. Honest to God, Quince, I mean it." Frederick raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. "But you got to do it pretty quick. If you don't, if the important white folks back in New Hastings decide I can't deliver the goods-"

"I got you." The copperskin stabbed a forefinger in his direction. "You want to be a big fella himself, and you want to get big on account of us."

"I'm already a big fella," Frederick said. "What I want is for slaves to get free. That's the size of it. You keep doing what you're doing, you could mess that up for niggers and mudfaces all over Atlantis."

"Says you."

"Yeah, says me," Frederick answered. "And the reason I say so is, it's true. You go on killing people and burning stuff, they'll send lots of soldiers after you, and I won't be able to do anything about it."

"So we'll lick 'em. You say you did." Quince seemed stubborn enough to make a proper leader for a rebel band. He might have got on well with Lorenzo.

"We did. And maybe you will. But even if you do, you'll still be hurting all the other slaves in Atlantis," Frederick said.

"Why should we care? When did them other fuckers ever care about us?"

Before Frederick could answer, Lieutenant Braun unexpectedly broke in: "One of your poets in English wrote, 'No man an island is.' He was wise, in spite of an Englishman being. Whatever you do, to other folk it makes a difference. Whatever they do, to you it matters. Believe me, I would not be in this strange land a stranger if this were not so."

"Huh," Quince said. "I can't decide here on my own. I got to go back and talk with some other people, know what I mean?"

"Sure," Frederick said. "Do that, then."

"Strange. Even insurrectionists find it needful to invent again the committee," Braun said. "This may God's judgment upon us be."

"Huh," Quince repeated, not knowing what to make of that. Frederick Radcliff didn't know, either. Still scratching his head, the copperskin eased away from the people who'd entered his territory and slipped off into the woods.

"It could be that you him convinced," Lieutenant Braun said.

"Could be, yeah," Frederick said. "Could be you helped, too. Hope so." He shrugged. "Now we wait and see what happens next, that's all." For Jeremiah Stafford, waiting and seeing what happened next was the hardest part of having Frederick Radcliff go off to Gernika. If the Negro persuaded his fellow slaves to abandon their revolt, he would be a hero. If the slaves kept fighting, whites in the Senate would decide Frederick couldn't keep his own side in line-which would doom the Slug Hollow agreement. And if some angry white man down by St. Augustine shot Frederick, Negroes and copperskins in the rest of the country would explode-which would also doom the Slug Hollow agreement.

Dooming the Slug Hollow agreement would also doom Consul Stafford-politically, anyhow. Frederick Radcliff was liable to be doomed in the far more literal sense of the word. He'd understood that when he set out for Gernika, but he'd gone anyhow. That was admirable or stupid, depending on one's point of view. Stafford wanted to think the black man was nothing but the usual dumb nigger. He wanted to, but he couldn't. Whatever Frederick was, usual he wasn't.

And the two of them were bound together now, like those occasional sets of twins that seldom lived long. If Frederick failed, he pulled Stafford down with him. That was part of what went with signing the accord at Slug Hollow. For the life of him, though, Stafford still didn't see what else he could have done.

Some of his Senatorial colleagues from states south of the Stour understood why he'd done what he'd done. Not all of them were willing to admit it where a reporter-or even a waiter-might overhear them and quote them, but they would when they talked with him in private.

Others understood nothing and didn't care to be enlightened. A Senator from Gernika with the euphonious name of Storm Whitson thundered against "that interfering nigger" with every breath he took. And Storm Whitson had taken a lot of breaths. He was up past ninety. As a youth, he'd carried a musket against King George's redcoats. Later, he'd moved south to Gernika and made his fortune in indigo and rice-and in clever slave-dealing. Stafford wished he could blame Whitson's intemperance on senile decay. But, while the old man wore thick glasses and cupped a hand behind his ear to get the drift of what other Senators were saying, his mind was clear. He'd been thundering about Negroes and copperskins for as long as anyone could remember.

He stood up on the Senate floor now-leaning on a stick, yes, but despite that straighter than many younger men-and shouted, "These inferior breeds must remain under our thumb! God has ordained it, and we would go against His will if we were to change the way we have done things for so long!"

Heads bobbed up and down. Not so long before, Stafford's would have been one of those nodding heads. He too had believed the slaveholders' course was ordained by God. But, if it was, why had God let the insurrectionists beat the stuffing out of the Atlantean army in the backwoods of New Marseille?

Before he could ask the question, his comrade on the dais found a different one. "I realize the honorable Conscript Father is a man of remarkable experience," Consul Newton said-loudly, to make sure Senator Whitson heard him. "But will he tell this house he was present at the Creation and heard from Jehovah's lips this onus laid upon the darker races?"

Senators from north of the Stour laughed. So did some from south of the river. Storm Whitson simply stood there, a living illustration of the third part of the riddle of the Sphinx. "Beware, your Excellency, lest God punish you for your iniquity," he said.

"If you are so sure He will, then He must speak to you, eh?" Newton said.

"God will speak to any man who opens his heart and listens," Senator Whitson replied.

"Any man who opens his mouth and talks can say God speaks to him," Newton observed. "But saying something doesn't make it so."

"As you have proved time and again," Whitson snapped. He might be getting frail, but his wits had indeed stayed sharp-sharp enough to make Newton wince.

Stafford used his gavel. "Discussions of God and His purposes do not belong in the Senate," he said. "As the Atlantean Assembly ordained even before we won our freedom from England, our people may follow any faith they choose. Or, if they choose, they may follow none."

"The Lord will punish them if they choose to follow none," Whitson declared.

"Maybe. As a matter of fact, I think so, too. But"-Stafford shrugged-"neither of us can prove it. It's between them and God, not between them and us."

"I always thought the Atlantean Assembly made a mistake," Whitson said. "A proper Christian country has no business putting up with Jews and freethinkers and other unrighteous folk."

"By law, the United States of Atlantis are not a proper Christian country," Stafford said. "Follow the Bible in your own life if you want to. No one will tell you you may not. But in the Senate, we will follow the law."

"Follow it even when it takes us straight to ruination," Whitson jeered.

"Change isn't ruin. We need to get used to that. We need to remember it," Consul Newton said. "I've had reason to think about that quite a bit lately. Change is only change. It can be good or bad. It doesn't have to be either one."

"When you've seen as much change as I have, young fellow, you'll know it's mostly bad," Senator Whitson said. "And this change you want to ram down our throats is the worst one yet. Nigger equality? Pah!" He made as if to spit.

"The way it looks to me, we have one choice besides liberating our slaves: we can kill them all, or try," Jeremiah Stafford said. "We can't trust them to go on serving us the way they did before. The Slug Hollow agreement may not be a wonderful bargain for Atlantis. It is the best bargain we could get, things being as they are."

"Nonsense!" the Senator from Gernika said.

"It isn't," Stafford answered. "Even now, part of me wishes it were, but it isn't."

Frederick Radcliff couldn't have been any more bored waiting for Quince to step out of the undergrowth again. He knew the copperskin might tell him the rebels didn't intend to lay down their arms. He knew Quince might not come back alone, but at the head of a swarm of slaves. If Quince did, Frederick wouldn't see New Hastings or Helen again.

But he couldn't do anything about any of that. He also couldn't worry about it all the time. And so… he was bored.

He was so bored, he did get into the cavalry troopers' seemingly unending dice game. He lost five and a half eagles in less time than it takes to tell. After that, he got out of the game again.

"Sure we can't talk you into sticking?" one of the horsemen asked, rattling the bones as temptingly as he could.

"Nah. I've already been as much of a sucker as I can afford to be, and some more besides," Frederick answered.

"You might win this time." The trooper rattled the dice again.

"Slim odds." Frederick left it right there. He didn't know the game was crooked. He didn't want to waste any more money on a voyage of discovery, either. A lifetime of slavery had convinced him each and every gold eagle-each and every silver ten-cent piece-was precious. Losing so many so fast… What Helen would say if she ever found out… No, he didn't want to play any more.

Then the troopers quit coaxing him. They all grabbed for their eight-shooters. One of them pointed. "Here's that mudfaced son of a bitch again!"

Sure enough, there stood Quince at the edge of the open ground. Lots of dirt in the southern states (though not that of Gernika) was reddish, which was how copperskins got their nasty nickname. Quince waved his big white flag. "Come on in!" Frederick called. "The truce holds no matter what you tell us."

Maybe so, maybe not. If the cavalrymen decided plugging Quince would help them, they'd do it. How could Frederick stop them? He couldn't. He knew it, and Quince had to know it, too.

But the rebel leader did come in. Along with the flag of truce, he had a pepperbox pistol on his right hip. Chances were it had been some planter's prized possession… and chances were that planter needed it no more and would never need it again. Ceremoniously, Quince laid the fancy pistol at Frederick Radcliff's feet. "We're gonna try peace," Quince said, as if it were a dangerous, possibly poisonous, medicine, like mercury for the pox. "If we can put down our guns and still get free… That's worth doing. But if it don't work out, nigger, you'll answer to me."

One black could call another nigger without a jolt. The word packed some in a copperskin's mouth, as mudface did in a Negro's. Quince had used it before, mostly in admiration. Frederick didn't think he intended malice this time. "Fair enough," he answered. "But if it don't work out, you got to stand in line. Plenty of other folks'll want to nail my hide to the wall."

"I believe that," Quince said. "Nobody's gonna come down on us 'cause we rose up, or 'cause of stuff we did while we were fighting?"

"That's the deal," Frederick said. "Nobody'll go to law with you on account of any of that." White survivors might try to take private revenge. If they came to trial, white juries might-likely would-acquit them. Frederick didn't know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn't come up with anything. But it was outside the law, and Negroes and copperskins could also play those games once they were free.

"They for true gonna pass that arrangement up in New Hastings?" Quince asked.

"If they don't, we all start fighting again," Frederick answered. "They got to know that, too. Chances that they will pass it just got better, too, if your people honest to God do quit fighting."

"Still a couple of snowball cocksuckers I wouldn't mind finishing, but I guess I can let 'em live," Quince said. Frederick nodded. Those whites were just as sure to want Quince dead. Well, they and he would have to forgo the pleasure… if the Slug Hollow accord passed. It has to now, Frederick thought. Doesn't it?