Opening Atlantis

XXVI

V ictor Radcliff didn't like Hanover. He never had. He didn't think he ever would. The place crowded too many people into too small a space. Army encampments did the same thing, but encampments were different. Everyone in them-well, almost everyone-accepted military discipline and knew his place.

Not in Hanover. People hopped after their own pursuits, as single-minded-or as mindless-as the big katydids that bounced across Atlantis' fields and forest floors. They all wanted more than they had, and they weren't shy about grabbing what they wanted with both hands.

So if Victor had had any kind of excuse, he would have stayed far away from the brawling metropolis of English Atlantis. But he had none. He was the hero of the war against the French. A hero had to be seen, had to be praised, to make a proper spectacle for the people. Victor dully and dutifully paraded at the head of a regiment of greencoats.

"Ah, well," he said over his shoulder to Blaise, who strode along behind him. "One good thing about this nonsense-if the boys can't get laid tonight, they aren't half trying."

"What about you, sir?" the Negro said, his voice sly.

"Not tonight, anyhow," Victor answered. He was no saint when he was away from Margaret, though he had no bastards he knew about. "Not tonight," he repeated. "I'm going to the feast for all the fancy Radcliffs and Radcliffes. Should be gruesome, but it can't be helped. Your friends you choose, but you're stuck with your relatives."

Not all the Radcliffs and Radcliffes at the banquet proved excessively fancy. Some of the young, pretty women wore the name only because of a marriage connection. They were no blood kin to Victor at all-but they were interested in getting to know him more intimately. He got to know one of them much more intimately in a servant's tiny room under the stairs-and he was smiling benignly at her husband, some distant cousin of his, five minutes later. That was amusing, even if he didn't tell Blaise about it afterwards.

But neither the parade nor the fete nor the naughty sport under the stairs would have drawn him to Hanover by itself. All three of them together wouldn't have. What brought him to London in Small-the town's proud boast-and kept him there was the certainty that details of the peace treaty would come to Hanover before they came anywhere else in Atlantis.

He rode down to the harbor every morning, sometimes with Blaise, sometimes alone. Ships of all sizes and ages came in, from England and her settlements around the world and her allies. Some of the people knew that talks to end the war were going on. No one seemed to know how they were going.

And then, one afternoon, a swift, rakish Royal Navy frigate, the Glasgow, sailed into Hanover. When Victor asked the officer of the deck if he had news of the peace, that young lieutenant looked down his nose at him and demanded, "Why do you presume that you deserve to know?"

"I am Major Victor Radcliff. Without me, the ministers wouldn't be talking about French and Spanish Atlantis," Victor answered. "Now, sir, who are you-and who is your next of kin?" His hand dropped to the butt of the pistol he wore on his belt.

The naval officer lost much of his toploftiness. "I…beg your pardon, Major. We do bring that word, as a matter of fact."

"If you tell me what it is-at once-I won't ask any more personal questions of you," Victor said. I won't kill you, he meant, and the lieutenant knew it.

"Well…" The younger man needed to gather himself. At last, he went on, "French Atlantis comes under English sovereignty. It is opened to English settlement without restriction. The dons keep Spanish Atlantis, but England gets trading concessions there. We take most of French Terranova, too, and almost all of French India."

Radcliff cared nothing about India, and only a little about Terranova. The lands on this side of the Hesperian Gulf were wide enough for him. He nodded to the lieutenant. "Thank you. That's good news."

It wasn't so good as it might have been. He would have loved to see the Union Jack flying over Spanish Atlantis, too. But the Spaniards weren't rivals, as the French had been. History had left Spain in a backwater. France, on the other hand, could have stayed ahead of England had she won this war.

She could have. But she hadn't.

"Who the devil are you talking to, Jenkins?" a senior naval officer demanded, scowling down at Victor.

"This is Major Victor Radcliff, sir," the lieutenant answered. "The man who helped our regulars take French Atlantis."

"Huzzah," said the captain, or whatever he was. "More troublemakers for the Crown to worry about."

"Would you rather they were here, sir?" Victor said. "Would you rather all Atlantis flew the fleurs-de-lys?"

"What a ridiculous notion," the senior officer said.

"It is now, sir-because we won," Victor replied.

The officer sputtered and fumed. Victor caught only a few words: "…damned settlers…lot of nerve…arrogant scut…" Then the fellow spoke more coherently: "As if this miserable, half-baked place mattered a farthing's worth in the grand scheme of things."

"Sir, to an Englishman it may not," Radcliff said. "Yet there are those of us who call Atlantis home, and who love it, and who would have grieved to see it lost to the French, not least after so much effort and so much blood expended to preserve it."

"Yes, yes." The naval officer still sounded impatient. "I see you can make pretty speeches when you care to. Well, you've got what you want. The French get a few islands off the Terranovan coast, where they can raise sugar cane to their hearts' content. And we…we get Atlantis, although I'm still damned if I know why we want it. An obstacle to navigation, that's all it is, and no one will ever persuade me otherwise."

Victor Radcliff bowed. "Then I shan't make the effort. But perhaps one day time will tell you what you don't hear from me."

When Victor had the chance to read the full terms of the peace, he found that they said nothing about the race of a prospective settler in French Atlantis. He told Blaise, "You ought to go down there. You're a clever man, and an able one-those two don't always march together. You'd get rich before you know it, and you could throw it in the Frenchmen's faces."

"The only way I get rich there is, I buy niggers and copperskins," Blaise said slowly. "Only way anyone gets rich down there, he runs him a plantation with slaves."

"Well, yes," Victor admitted. "You do need them in French Atlantis-what was French Atlantis, I mean." He paused. "Some slaves who've got free do run slaves themselves now. That isn't against the law down there, either."

"Don't happen real often," Blaise said.

"No, it doesn't, but it's not illegal."

Blaise set his chin. He didn't have the bony promontory that graced the lower jaws of a lot of white men. Somehow, though, the lack made him seem more stubborn, not less. "Done been a slave," he said, and added several French and Spanish pungencies to the remark. "Don't want to do that to anybody else."

"Someone else will if you don't," Victor said. "I daresay you'd make a better master than someone who'd never seen it from the other side."

This time, Blaise laughed in his face. That startled Victor Radcliff, and angered him, too. He wasn't used to such discourtesies from a Negro-certainly not here in Hanover, though he would have tolerated them better on campaign or out in the woods.

"If I'm a master, I'm as rough as anybody else," Blaise said. "You have slaves, you got to be. Or they don't work. They don't do anything. I know. I was one." He jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest. "Don't want to do that. So I won't. I stick with you, Major Radcliff, sir." He saluted, mixing some mockery-but not a lot-into the gesture of respect.

Gravely, Victor returned the salute. "You'll never get rich that way," he said.

Blaise shrugged. "Don't care about gettin' rich. Care about…" He paused, considering. "About not hatin' myself. Yeah. I care about that."

"Have it your way. You will anyhow." With the war over, Victor didn't need a sergeant-cum-body-servant any more. If he went back to exploring, he didn't need a body servant, either. An explorer with a servant was like a musket with a chamber pot: having one added something absolutely unnecessary.

Which wasn't to say Blaise couldn't take care of himself in the wilderness. He could, at least as well as Victor could himself. And, if Victor dismissed him, Blaise could take care of himself in English Atlantis, too. Blaise might be black, but he was as generally competent a man as Victor had ever met.

That went a long way towards explaining why the two of them got along as well as they did, even if Victor had never thought of it in those terms.

"Well, if you don't want a plantation, how do we reward you for shooting Roland Kersauzon?" he asked.

"Money is good," Blaise said seriously. "What you reckon he's worth?" He was always ready to haggle.

He looked so ready now, Victor started to laugh. "Are you sure you're not a Jew under your skin?" he said.

Blaise took the question literally. "Don't even know what a Jew is."

"They're white people who aren't Christians," Victor replied. "Too foolish to know the truth, in other words."

"They don't believe in God?" Blaise asked.

"They believe in God, but they don't believe Jesus is His Son."

"Oh. Like Muslims," Blaise said.

It was Victor's turn to be confused. A bit of back-and-forth made him understand Blaise was talking about Mahometans. A bit more made him understand that the black man knew much more about them than he did. "How do you find yourself so well informed?" he asked.

"Some of the tribes north of us, they Muslim," Blaise answered. "They send their men, want us to be Muslims, too."

"Missionaries. Muslim missionaries," Victor Radcliff said wonderingly. "Now I've heard everything. We Christians send missions to Africa, too, you know."

"Muslims send missionaries. They take slaves. Christians send missionaries. They take slaves," Blaise said. "Us-we believe what we believe. We don't send no missionaries."

"Do you take slaves?" Radcliff asked.

"Oh, yes. People we catch in war, things like that," Blaise said. "We don't work them the way the French and Spaniards do, though. Don't have big plantations." He paused. "These Jews, they send missionaries?"

"No. At least, I've never heard of it if they do." Victor tried to imagine what would happen to a Jew proselytizing in Rome or Paris or London-or Hanover, come to that. Nothing pretty. The Jews knew better. That, in turn, made him wonder why Christians and Mahometans didn't. He found no good answer.

Blaise wasn't finished. "These Jews, they take slaves?"

"Some rich Jews own them, I'm sure," Victor said. "They buy and sell them now and again." Most of that trade, though, at least between Africa and Atlantis, lay in Christian hands. Uncomfortably, he finished, "They don't raid the coast to grab them, anyhow."

"Huh," Blaise said: a thoughtful grunt. "Maybe I turn Jew, then."

Victor didn't tell him that kind of conversion was against the law. He wasn't sure it was, or needed to be. Who not born to the Jewish faith would want to assume all the burdens it entailed? Speaking of those burdens…"Do you want to get circumcised?"

"Fancy word. What's it mean?" Blaise said. Victor told him what it meant. The Negro set a protective hand in front of his privates. "Muslims do that, too. Why would anybody want to?"

"I don't know why Mahometans do it. I didn't know they did. Jews think God requires it of them."

Blaise took the hand away. He was getting ever better at aping white people's notions of polite manners. "Ain't gonna be no Jew," he declared.

"Amen," Victor said, unaware he'd just come out with a Hebrew word.

When Victor-and Blaise-rode south into what had been French Atlantis, no customs barrier delayed them at the border. There were no customs barriers between English and French Atlantis any longer, no more than there were between New Hastings and Hanover. King George ruled them all.

The innkeeper at whose establishment they stayed was French. They both spoke his language. That pleased him. They also both stayed reasonably sober and reasonably quiet. That pleased him even more.

Men from English Atlantis filled the inn to bursting. They shouted demands in English. The innkeeper understood them well enough; so close to the old border, it wasn't as if he'd never had English-speaking guests before the war made him an involuntary English subject. But, by the way the newcomers acted, French might have been as dead as Aramaic.

They drank. They pinched and patted the barmaids. They ate as if they'd just discovered food. They bragged about the fortunes they were going to make by screwing the Frenchies. (That the innkeeper was listening, and might decide to season their capon with rat poison, never seemed to cross their minds.) They went on drinking. They brawled, and broke crockery brawling.

"That will go on your scot!" the innkeeper cried. (He might put rat poison in the beer and wine and barrel-tree rum, too.)

"What makes you reckon we'll pay you a ha'penny, you filthy, motherless scut?" one of them bawled.

A heartbeat later, he found himself staring down the barrel of Victor Radcliff's pistol. A pistol aimed at your face, as Victor had reason to know, seemed to own a bore as wide as a fieldpiece's. "You'll pay your scot right now, and then you'll get the devil out of here," Victor said quietly. In the sudden, vast silence, he didn't need to shout.

"And if I don't?" The trader had nerve-more nerve than sense, as far as Victor was concerned.

He said, "In that unfortunate circumstance, your heirs will be responsible for what you owe this gentleman…and for the cost of your funeral. Add in the farthing you're actually worth and it comes to a tidy little sum."

The other settler's bloodshot eyes crossed as he stared down the barrel of the pistol. "Who the hell are you, anyways, throwing orders around like you're God's anointed?"

"I am Major Victor Radcliff," Victor answered evenly. "If I have to ask your name, sir, you will not be glad of it: I promise you that. Now…Do as I told you or prepare to join the majority."

"That's fancy talk for 'die,' Ben," another trader said, in case Ben was too dense or too sozzled to figure it out for himself.

He wasn't-or he didn't let on that he was. "I know what it's fancy talk for, dammit," he said. With an effort, he looked at Radcliff rather than his weapon. "Put that miserable thing away so we can talk this over like a couple of sensible people."

"I am not a sensible person, and do not pretend to be," Radcliff said. "I have spent this whole war killing people who got in my way. If you think one more will bother me to the extent of a fart on a dung heap, you are making what I assure you will be your last mistake."

Ben considered. Victor knew the questions that had to be uppermost in his mind: could he knock the pistol aside before Victor blew his head off? If he could, could he win the brawl that would follow a split second later?

He must not have liked the answers he came up with. He said, "I'm going to reach down for some money. I'll do it slow, and I won't go for anything else. That all right by you?"

"Yes-as long as you mean it. If you don't, I promise that my friend and I will make you…briefly…wish you did."

"Your friend? You mean that…colored fellow?" Ben was almost, but not quite, too slow. He did have the brains to realize tagging a gun-toting Negro with an ugly name wasn't the smartest thing he could do. He took out enough money to cover his tab and then some. After setting it on the table, he walked off into the night.

"Anyone else?" Victor inquired. "Or can you see screwing the Frenchies will be the same as screwing yourselves from now on?"

No one seemed inclined to argue with him. Short-tempered men who carried pistols often went without their fair share of disagreement, something he'd noticed before and was inclined to take advantage of. On the other hand, he didn't fool himself into believing he'd magically convinced the English settlers of the error of their ways. Lack of disagreement wasn't the same as agreement.

He suspected-no, he was sure-there would need to be laws to make sure the English didn't screw the Frenchies…too badly. Quite a few people would get rich down here before those laws went into place. If Ben wasn't one of them, Victor would have been surprised.

"Audace, audace, toujours l'audace," Blaise remarked as he and Victor undressed for bed. The innkeeper gave the two of them a room to themselves. None of the traders from English Atlantis would have wanted to bed down with them anyhow. As far as Victor was concerned, it was mutual.

He only shrugged. "It wasn't so audacious as all that, not when you were there to back my play."

"But who backed mine?" Blaise asked. "Two bullets, then-" He made as if to strangle himself.

"Oh, nonsense," Victor said. "What do you want to bet the innkeeper has a pepperbox pistol-or more likely a blunderbuss loaded to the muzzle with scrap iron-under the bar? He would have backed us both."

"Maybe," Blaise said unwillingly. "But maybe too slow to do us any good, too."

"The devil take worrying about might-have-beens," Victor said. "We did it, we got by with it, and there's an end to it. And now why don't you blow out that candle so we can get some sleep?" Blaise did. The room plunged into darkness scented with hot tallow. Victor never found out whether he or Blaise started snoring first, which probably meant he did.

Nouveau Redon would never be the same. English engineers systematically demolished the walls that had warded the great fortress of French Atlantis for so long. That made sense to Victor. Even without the spring, the site remained dangerously good.

He wasn't surprised to discover French settlers could see that as well as he could. They'd also noticed that the English regulars charged with wrecking their works spoke no French. With smiling faces, the locals called the engineers appalling names.

With those same smiling faces, they called Victor Radcliff some appalling names, too. He smiled back, and replied in his best French: "Ah, but if you think I'm bad, you should see your own mothers."

The setters who'd been making sport of him stopped, their mouths falling open. "Monsieur comprehends?" one of them said in alarm.

"Monsieur bloody well does," Victor agreed. "Monsieur also comprehends that you would do well not to bait the engineers. If they find out the tenth part of what you're saying to them, you are all dead men."

"It would serve you right, too," Blaise added.

"And who are you?" the settler inquired-cautiously. Most of the time, French settlers didn't want to hear anything from Negroes or copperskins. Most of the time, they didn't have to. Owning a man meant you didn't have to listen to him. (Owning a woman meant you didn't have to listen to her, either. That could be-and often was-even more convenient.) Having made one mistake, though, this fellow didn't want to make two. (A surprising-to Victor, a dismaying-number of people didn't care how many they made.)

"I am Sergeant Blaise Black, of the militia of the English settlements," Blaise answered, pride ringing in his voice. He must have taken the surname on the spur of the moment; it certainly suited him. He went on, "I also have the honor to be the man who shot Roland Kersauzon."

Nobody asked him any more questions after that. The French settlers couldn't disappear fast enough. "Now look what you did," Victor said.

Blaise shrugged in a way that showed he'd lived among Frenchmen. "I told them the truth. What's wrong with that?" In English, he sounded ordinary. In French, he could be eloquent. Maybe he still knew more French than English. Maybe the difference lay in the genius of the two languages.

As for his question…"Nothing's wrong with it," Victor Radcliff answered. "That doesn't mean it's a pleasant thing to do."

With another shrug, Blaise said, "They were throwing filth at us. You gave them something to think about. So did I."

"All right," Victor said mildly.

He did warn the captain in charge of the engineers that the locals were less friendly than they seemed. The grizzled officer said, "Well, I can't tell you I'm amazed. The brothel we went to tried to give us a freshly poxed girl so we'd have something to remember her by."

"And what did you do about that?" Victor inquired.

The captain made a fist. "Tore the place apart. Now we don't pay for it any more. We have fun anyhow. These French women-" His opinion of them was at least as low as the jeering French settlers' opinion of him and his men.

That wasn't surprising, even if it was a little sad. As long as it didn't start a riot, it also wasn't Victor's worry. He said, "I'm just glad you're making sure they won't use this place as a strongpoint against us again."

"You never can tell," the captain said. "They're liable to start rebuilding as soon as we get done and leave. We'll need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don't."

"I think we can do that," Victor said. "And the problem will solve itself before too long, I suspect."

"How's that, sir?" the graying English officer asked.

"When there are as many English settlers as French here, no one will want to use this place as a fortress."

"I hope not." The captain didn't sound convinced. Victor wondered why not. And then, all of a sudden, he stopped wondering-he knew. To this Englishman, settlers were settlers, and what blood they sprang from hardly mattered. They were all potential rebels, potential enemies.

Radcliff tried not to bristle in any obvious way. That would only have proved the captain's point for him. I'm as good a subject of King George as you are! Victor wanted to scream it. Screaming it wouldn't have done him any good, though. The captain would have thought he was protesting too much.

Of course, if this fellow and others like him despised settlers simply because they were settlers, wouldn't he make them despise him, too? The odds seemed good.

Blaise was thinking the same thing. "What can you do with such people?" he murmured…in French.

"I don't know," Victor replied in the same language.

"What is that jibber-jabber you're going back and forth in?" The English engineer aimed the question at Victor. "Did you learn this nigger's language so you could talk it without anybody knowing what you're saying?"

"No, you fool!" Victor exclaimed. "It's French! Don't you know French when you hear it?"

"I should hope not." The redcoat sounded proud of his own ignorance. "If it's not English, it's not worth learning."

"Didn't they ram Latin and Greek down your throat?" Victor asked, now taken by surprise.

"Not me." Again, the captain sounded proud. "I came up through the ranks, I did. I'm not one of those rich buggers who got to go to Oxbridge or Camford or one of those fancy places. I'm an officer on account of I'm bloody good at what I do. Don't need any damned foreign languages to know how to build a wall-or how to take one down, either."

"Good God!" Victor said. Some merchants in New Hastings and Hanover were as proud of what they didn't know as this fellow. Victor had always pitied them. The captain, on the other hand, frightened him. "How much do you know about Atlantis?"

"Not bloody much, and I don't care to find out more," the Englishman responded. "Damned place is full of Frenchies and niggers and copperskins. That's all I need to know, isn't it? King George has got to step on it with both feet, and I'm bloody proud to be the toe on one boot."

"I think we better get out of here, Monsieur, before I kill him," Blaise said through clenched teeth-still in French.

Also in French, Victor replied, "You would have to wait in line. I outrank you."

They walked away in a hurry. "That man…That man, he is more dangerous to Atlantis than Roland Kersauzon," Blaise spluttered. "To him, everyone here is a slave. Everyone! Not just me. I don't like when people think I am still slave, but I know why. I am black. In a white man's world, it happens. I understand, even if I don't like. But that man…" He paused again. "To him, you are slave, too. Everybody from Atlantis is slave, as far as he is concerned. Why?" He stopped, breathing hard.

"It's not England," Victor Radcliff said. "How can it be any good if it's not England?" He was joking, and then again he wasn't. If he didn't laugh, he'd burst into tears-or maybe grab the pistol on his belt.

"But you are from England, too," Blaise pointed out.

"Yes, I'm from England. But I'm not of England. My people haven't been of England for three hundred years," Victor said. "Our friend back there-"

"What friend?" the Negro broke in.

"That's what I mean," Victor said. "Our friend back there is of England. Anybody who's not of England is below the salt to him."

He had to explain below the salt to Blaise. Once the Negro understood, he asked, "What about King George? He is of England. Does he think Atlantis is below the salt, too?"

Telling Blaise that George was a third-generation German, and the first sovereign of his dynasty to be fluent in English, struck Victor as a waste of time. It also struck him as sure to confuse the black man. Besides, even though it was all true, Blaise had a perfectly good point. "He's my king, too. I have to hope he remembers that Atlantis and English Terranova and India and the rest of his realm matter as much as England does," Victor said.

"And if he forgets?" Blaise inquired.

Victor did the only thing he could do: he shrugged. He was hardly in a position to tell the King of England what to do, nor did he ever expect to be. "If he forgets…I'll just have to worry about it then."

The closer to Spanish Atlantis Blaise got, the more he muttered under his breath. At last, when Victor came right out and asked him what was on his mind, he explained why: "The French, they have slaves, but only a few really like to have slaves. The Spaniards, most of them like to have slaves."

"They have slaves because they enjoy owning other people, not just to get work out of them-is that what you mean?" Victor asked.

"Yes, sir. That's what I mean." Blaise nodded emphatically. "I still don't talk English so good, so I don't know how to say it right. But that is just exactly what I mean."

"Probably goes a long way towards explaining why the slave rising in Spanish Atlantis was-is-so bad," Victor said.

"Should give the blacks and copperskins guns, help them kill off the Spaniards," Blaise said. "They deserve it."

"We can't do that," Victor Radcliff replied. "The treaty we signed made us promise we wouldn't."

Blaise only looked at him. "And so?" Blaise didn't know much about treaties. He wouldn't have cared if he did. He only knew what he wanted, and how to go about getting it. Next to that, nothing else mattered.

"I can't do anything about it. People know me too well. It would get noticed, and the Spaniards would scream bloody murder. And under the treaty, they'd have a right to." Victor gave Blaise his most severe stare. "You can't do anything about it, either. You're my right-hand man, and people know it. You'd get blamed, and I'd get blamed, and England would get blamed. You can't-you hear me?"

"I hear you." The Negro looked mutinous.

"I'm sorry, Sergeant-by God, I am sorry-but that's an order," Victor said. "If you break it, I won't be able to help you, and I won't even try."

Blaise said something in his own language. Victor didn't ask him to translate. He didn't want to know. They didn't see eye to eye about this. They never would. Coming up to the border was something of a relief-at least it gave Victor something else to think about. Two Spanish soldiers stepped out of the customs post. They glowered at seeing a white man and a black together.

"What do you want?" one of them called in Spanish-flavored French.

"Do you speak English?" Victor answered in his own language.

"No, and I don't want to, either, por Dios." The soldier reverted to his native tongue. His comrade spat in the roadway. "What do you want?" the man asked again. He didn't raise his musket, but he looked as if he wanted to.

Victor wondered what would happen if he said who he was. His raid into Spanish Atlantis had touched off the slave rebellion that still sizzled. Would these Spaniards shoot at him to pay him back for what he'd done to their settlements? He decided he didn't want to find out.

"I am here following my king's orders," he said, which was at least indirectly true. "He wants to make sure that the border between his new realm and yours is quiet and safe and secure."

"Then he shouldn't send out a white man with a mallate," the Spaniard replied. "Nothing is quiet and safe and secure with mallates around."

Blaise said something incandescent in Spanish. Both soldiers at the border post started to raise their guns.

"Don't do that," Victor said, also in Spanish. "You insulted him first. And if you shoot us, you will start a war. Not only that, you will lose it. If you lose it, you will see English law in Spanish Atlantis. Do you want that?"

English law was much easier on slaves than Spanish law was. The border guards knew as much. They lowered the muskets with haste that would have been comical in a setting less grim. Victor Radcliff was lying through his teeth, and he knew it. If England kept slavery as it was in French Atlantis, she would do the same thing here.

Blaise also knew he was lying through his teeth. What Victor told the Spaniards went dead against what he'd said in all the arguments he'd had with the Negro. Victor wondered if Blaise would throw that in his face. To his relief, Blaise didn't. While the two of them disagreed, they showed a common front against the Spaniards.

"You are not permitted to enter into Spanish Atlantis, not with…him along," one of the Spanish soldiers said. He spoke to Victor alone, as if Blaise were nothing more than a beast of burden.

"Why do you think I want to enter it? To eat lizards? To let mosquitoes eat me?" Victor said. "Keep it, and welcome. As long as you don't cause trouble, I can report to the king that he doesn't need to take it away from you."

"Yet," Blaise added.

The Spaniards spoke with each other in low voices. "You have seen what you came to see. Now you should go," said the one who did the talking for them.

"Gladly," Victor said.

"Their turn will come," Blaise said as he and Victor rode north again.

"Without a doubt," Victor agreed. "One day soon, England will hold all of Atlantis."

"And then what?" Blaise asked.

"I don't know," Victor said, taken aback. "It will be a better place than it is now-I'm sure of that."

"Better how?" Blaise persisted. "Freer?"

Victor thought of freedom in terms of not needing to worry about foreign foes. Blaise looked at things rather differently. "I don't know," Victor said again.