United States of Atlantis

Chapter 14

Habbakkuk Biddiscombe rode back to Victor Radcliff with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. Radcliff eyed the cavalry officer a trifle apprehensively. Biddiscombe wore that smirk when things were going very well-and when they were going anything but Which would it be this time? Do I realty want to know? Victor wondered.

"I have news, General," Biddiscombe said portentously.

"I thought you might," Victor said. "Otherwise-I do hope- you would have stayed in your assigned position, with the men you lead." That failed to quash the bumptious cavalryman. Biddiscombe also failed to disgorge whatever he'd brought back. Sighing, Victor prompted him: "And that news is…?"

"Without question, General, my men have reached the east-em slope of the Green Ridge Mountains." From the pride in his voice, Habakkuk Biddiscombe had only a little less to do with that eastern slope than the Almighty Who'd created it in the first place.

"Well, I am glad to hear that." Victor meant it. His men wore lean and hungry looks, and did not wear them gladly. "We'll be much better able to subsist the soldiers once we return to civilization."

"Civilization?" Biddiscombe flared a nostril and curled his lip. "Nothing but Frenchies, and not a devil of a lot of them."

"Some English Atlanteans, too," Victor said mildly. "And don't be too quick to sneer at the French. We stand a much better chance to make the Proclamation of Liberty good with France fighting England at our side."

"England licked France the last time they quarreled," Biddiscombe said. "You ought to know about that, eh, sir? You helped England do it."

"England and English Atlantis together beat France and French Atlantis." Victor was stretching a point. He did tell the truth… for this part of the world. In Terranova, in India, on the Continent, England had done fine against France with no help from Atlantis. But France, shorn of much of her former empire, would be fighting a smaller war this time. Victor went on, "Add France's weight to ours and the pan swings down."

''Till the Frenchies jump out of it and run away. They can afford to do that. We can't." No, Habakkuk Biddiscombe wasn't convinced.

Victor tried a different tack: "News that France was in the war made Cornwallis pull out of New Marseille as fast as he could go. He must think it means something. So must his commodore."

"More likely, they're a couple of little old ladies." Biddiscombe didn't bother hiding his scorn.

"General Cornwallis isn't, I assure you. As you said a moment ago, I ought to know about that. And the Royal Navy isn't in the habit of giving little old ladies command of a flotilla." Victor wanted to shake sense into the younger man. The main thing holding him back was the near-certainty it would do no good. He did say, "Having a real navy on our side is bound to help. The French have worked hard to build up their fleet since the last war."

"They're still French, so how much good will all that work do?" Yes, Biddiscombe's opinions were strong-and fixed.

Victor shrugged. "If they make England pull ships away from Atlantis, that will let us get back some of our strangled commerce.

It may let us build warships of our own, or at least get more privateers out on the sea."

"Fleabites." The cavalry major scratched melodramatically.

"We aren't going to land greencoats outside of London. It isn't in the cards." Victor held tight to his patience. "Enough fleabites, and George's ministers will decide we make England itch more than we're worth. That's the best hope we have." As far as Victor could see, it was Atlantis' only hope. He didn't say that. It would be just his luck to dent Biddiscombe's confidence when he didn't mean to.

"Fleabites," Biddiscombe repeated. Then he made handwashing motions; he would have been a natural up on stage "Well, General, now that I've given you the news, I will return to my men. Good day, sir." His salute was one more piece of overacting. He booted his horse off toward the east.

Riding after him to give him a proper boot in the backside was a temptation Victor had to fight hard to resist. One of the messengers who habitually accompanied him said, "That man is nothing but trouble."

Not without regret, Victor shook his head. "If he were nothing but trouble, I could dismiss him in good conscience. But he's more dangerous to the English than he is to us."

"Are you sure, sir?" the youngster asked.

"Sure enough," Victor said. "Nobody else could have done what he did last winter."

"All right." The messenger didn't seem to think it was.

"And his men did a great deal to keep us fed while we were on this side of the mountains," Victor added. "My biggest worry was that we'd get so hungry, we'd come to pieces. That didn't happen, and our cavalry are the largest reason it didn't."

"Yes, General," the messenger said resignedly. He sounded more interested as he asked, "What will we do once we get back to the east?"

"First thing we must do is find out where Cornwallis has landed," Victor replied. "After that… After that, we'll do whatever looks best."

The messenger looked dissatisfied. Victor would have, too, getting an answer like that. He would have thought the person who gave it didn't trust him. That wasn't true here; he wouldn't have kept the young man in his service without thinking him reliable. But he had nothing better to say. Maybe Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar knew what he would do months before he finally did it. Maybe… but Victor had trouble believing it. He would have bet General Cornwallis felt the same way. In that, at least, the two of them were well matched.

After a spell marching through the wilderness, even scattered farms and occasional villages seemed downright urban to Victor. Unfamiliar faces, some of them belonging to women… Taverns… Shops… For a little while, till he got used to them again, they almost overwhelmed him.

He sent a rider to the Atlantean Assembly, announcing that New Marseille was in Atlantean hands once more. He also sent messengers to the coast, to pass on that same news and to see what he could learn of Cornwallis' movements.

Even on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, keeping his army fed was harder than he would have liked. The locals, whether of French blood or English, resented having to part with their grain and livestock. One of them bluntly asked, "What have you done for me, that I should cough up my hard-won substance for your ragamuffins here?"

"We hope to free you from the King of England and his greedy, lawless officials," Victor said. "Is that such a small thing?"

"King George never bothered me his own self, and I never saw any of his officials way the devil out here. That's why I dwell in these parts," the man replied. "But you, now, General, you're the one hauling off my wheat and my cattle. Why shouldn't I get my firelock and go after you?"

"You may do that, if you like," Victor said politely. "If you do, and if we catch you, I shall regret giving the order for your hanging."

"Which doesn't mean you won't do it." The farmer's voice was bleak.

"That is correct, sir. It doesn't mean I won't do it," Victor agreed. "Were you in my place, you would act the same way, I assure you."

"It could be so," the farmer said. "But if you were in ray place… Well, you'd think about getting out your firelock and doing something about it."

Out of slightly more than idle curiosity, Victor asked, "Have you Radcliff blood?"

"On my mother's side," the man answered. "But there's a devil of a lot of Atlanteans who can claim it one way or another. Even a lot of the Frenchies, if you listen to them. If the whole mob took up arms against you, you'd lose."

He was bound to be right about that. But they wouldn't. Victor had quite a few cousins he knew about in the army, and doubtless many more of whom he knew nothing. He said, "Most of them would sooner fight for Atlantis than against her."

"That's a fancy way to say you aren't robbing most of them right this minute." The farmer certainly had his share of Radcliff directness-and then some.

"I am not robbing you, sir," Victor said stiffly. "You are being repaid with paper the Atlantean Assembly will make good come victory."

"Preachers talk about heaven, but they don't cobble the road for you," the farmer said. "I expect it's the same way with your precious paper. And it looks like it'd be scratchy if I used it on my backside."

"I am doing the best I can to compensate you. Had I gold or silver enough, I assure you I would spend them," Victor said.

The rustic eyed him. "I may even believe you, odd as it seems. But you haven't got 'em, which is the point of it, eh?"

Victor wondered whether he ought to post a guard to keep an eye on this farm after he rode away from it. If the farmer came after him with a musket-or, more likely, with a rifle-odds were he stood a good chance of hitting what he aimed at. In the end, ¦Victor didn't. No one tried to assassinate him, so he supposed he'd judged the local's temper correctly. He'd also judged that not trusting the fellow would more probably set him off than acknowledging that he had reason to complain but there was nothing to be done about it.

A rider came back, reporting that, wherever General Cornwallis was, he wasn't at Cosquer. "Somewhere in the north, then," Victor Radcliff murmured. "Unless he's gone to Gernika, that is."

"To Spanish Atlantis? I wouldn't think so," Blaise said. "But he might have had the fleet turn around and head for Avalon once it got out of sight."

Victor shook his head. "I would believe that at some different time in the war, but not now."

"I don't follow you," Blaise said.

"All the reasons he left New Marseille are reasons he wouldn't go to Avalon," Victor said. "He needs to put his ships between the French fleet and our east coast. France could break into Croydon or New Hastings or maybe even Hanover without the Royal Navy to hold her at bay. Cornwallis' redcoats are less important right this minute. But he has to have those ships in place."

He waited while Blaise thought it over. After a moment, the Negro nodded. "Now that you point it out to me, I see it," he said. "I don't think I would have on my own. In my head, I can picture how war works on land. But out on the ocean-" He broke off, grimacing. "All I know about the ocean is, I don't want to go out on it any more."

"It's rather different when-" Now Victor was the one who stopped in sudden embarrassment.

Blaise grinned crookedly. "When you are not chained be-lowdecks, with niggers packed in tight as so many hams?" he suggested.

"That's… not exactly what I was going to say." Victor heard the stiffness in his own voice.

"Why not? It's the truth." Blaise looked down at his wrists. "I used to have scars from the chains, but they are gone now. I wonder when they went away." He shrugged. "Ah, well, what difference does it make? The scars on my heart, the ones on my spirit, those never heal up."

"You have not got a bad life here." Victor still sounded stiff, even to himself.

"No, I have not. I have a good wife-herself brought hither against her will, but good even so-and I have a good friend," Blaise said. "But it is not the life I would have chosen for myself, and that makes a difference, too."

Imagining himself making the best of things in a jungle full of lions and elephants and black men speaking peculiar languages, Victor could only nod.

Hanover. General Cornwallis was at Hanover. In Cornwallis' place, Victor supposed he would have gone to Hanover, too. It was the biggest city in Atlantis, and the best port on the east coast. Though less centrally placed than New Hastings or Freetown, it did let the redcoats strike to north or south.

He set his own men moving north and east, back toward the settlements of English Atlantis from which most of them had sprung. They grumbled, as he'd known they would. They would have grumbled more had he pushed them harder. He would have, too, were he more confident of supplies. He was still close to the Green Ridge Mountains, and settlements still sparse.

Some of his men were willing enough to march toward the settlements from which they'd sprung. They weren't exactly the ones Victor would have had in mind, though: they were soldiers whose terms had expired. When they came back to the farms and towns in which they'd grown up, they weren't going to fight. They'd just head for home.

"Sorry, General," one of them said, and he even sounded as if he meant it. "I signed up for a year, and that's all I aim to give." He produced a dirty, much-creased-and-folded sheet of paper that showed he had indeed met his promised commitment.

It only irked Victor more. "God damn it to hell," he ground out. "I begged the Atlantean Assembly that henceforward all terms of enlistment were to be for the war's duration."

"Don't reckon they listened to you." Yes, the soldier did sound sympathetic, which was the last thing Victor Radcliff needed. With a whimsical shrug, the insufficiently embattled farmer added, "And what else is new?"

"Not a thing," Victor said heavily. "Not a… stinking thing. Well, that's one letter I shall have to write over again."

He did, too, when the army stopped for the night. When he sanded the sheet to blot up excess ink, he was amazed smoke didn't rise from the paper. He'd put heart and soul into the missive-and spleen as well. He glanced down at his midsection. Yes, if his spleen wasn't well vented by now, it never would be.

He stepped out of his tent and shouted for a messenger. The youngster who came up to him looked alarmed-he was usually a quieter man. Right this minute, Victor cared nothing for what he usually was. He thrust the letter at the youth. "Get this to the Conscript Fathers in Honker's Mill quick as you can."

"I'll do it, General," the young man said. "But how come you're so all-fired angried up all of a sudden?"

"Because, as near I can tell, the Assembly and the settlements' parliaments are doing their level best to lose us the war," Victor answered. "You wouldn't think the gentlemen there assembled could be such dunderheads, would you? Especially not after France has come into the war on our side, I mean. But they are. By God, a thundermug's got more sense in it than half the heads at Honker's Mill."

That won him a chuckle from the messenger, who asked, "What have they gone and done now, sir?"

"They keep recruiting short-term soldiers, that's what. Why would I want men who can go home just when I'm likely to need them the most? Answer me that, if you please."

"Beats me." The messenger sounded much too cheerful. But then, why shouldn't he? Recruiting soldiers and retaining them wasn't his worry. It was Victor Radcliff's. And it was supposed to be the Atlantean Assembly's. Expecting the Assembly and the parliaments with which it had to dicker to remember as much was evidently too much to hope for.

The messenger rode away. Victor stood outside the tent listening till the horse's hoofbeats got too distant to make out, and then a little longer besides. When he finally went back inside and lay down on his cot, he wondered whether he'd sleep. He tossed and turned for some time. Just when he was sure the Atlantean Assembly's idiocy would cost him a night's rest, he dozed off. Next thing he knew, the army's buglers were blowing morning assembly.

Instead of tea or coffee, he drank a brew of roasted native roots and leaves. He made a point of eating and drinking no better than the men he led. Even well-sugared-that, the Atlanteans could do-the brew tasted nasty. Worse, it was less invigorating than the ones that had to be imported. But it was what the cooks had left, so Radcliff drank it.

"Enjoy your coffee, General," said the man in the dirty apron who filled his tin mug.

It was no more coffee than Victor was Czar of all the Russias. And enjoying it stretched the bounds of probability if it didn't break them. A man could learn to tolerate it, and Victor had.

None of that showed on his face or in his voice. "Much obliged, Innes. I expect I shall," he said, and smiled when he said it. Sometimes you had to deceive your own men as well as the enemy.

More soldiers whose terms had expired marched away from the Atlantean army. To Victor's well-concealed surprise, fresh companies joined him. Some of them had enlisted for six months or a year. He gave their men a choice: they could fight the English till the war ended, or they could go home at once.

"Do whichever suits you," he told them. "I am better off without you than I would be to have you for a short term. If I must plan my campaigns around your enlistments, I would do better to pray General Cornwallis' mercy now."

He exaggerated; most of the time, short-term soldiers were better than no soldiers at all. To his relief, most of the new recruits agreed to serve for the duration. "Ha!" Blaise said. "Only shows the dumb strawfeet don't know what the devil they're getting into."

"I shouldn't be amazed if you were right," Victor agreed. Then he chuckled. "Strawfeet, is it?"

"Oh, they are, General. You can tell by looking at them," Blaise said.

Atlantean drillmasters often despaired of teaching country bumpkins the evolutions they needed to learn if they were to move from column to line of battle or do any of the other things soldiers had to do. Baron von Steuben frequently ran out of English when he tried to show them what they needed to do. They couldn't understand his German, but it sounded as if it ought to be worth remembering.

Among the worst complaints the drillmasters had was that raw recruits couldn't reliably tell their right feet from their left. They did know the difference between hay and straw, though. Drill sergeants tied a wisp of hay to their left feet and straw to their right. "Hayfoot!" a drillmaster would call. "Strawfoot! Hay-foot! Strawfoot!" It was an awkward makeshift, but it worked. And, more and more often, Atlantean veterans called new men strawfeet. (Von Steuben called them everything he could in English, and worse than that auf Deutsck.)

Naturally, the new men were inclined to resent the name. Just as naturally, the veterans didn't care. There had already been several scraps about it. Victor expected more to come. As long as veterans and recruits didn't squabble with the redcoats in front of them, he wouldn't worry.

A courier rode up. "I have a letter for you, General, from the Atlantean Assembly," he said importantly.

"Oh, you do, do you?" Victor growled. He took the letter, broke the seal, and unfolded the paper.

It was, to his utter lack of surprise, a missive censuring him for what the Assembly characterized as his "ill-bred, ill-tempered, intemperate, and altogether ill-advised communication of the twenty-seventh ultimo."

Had they recalled him from his command, he would have gone home without a backwards glance. If they didn't care for the way he was carrying on the fight, they could go ahead without him.

But they didn't do that. Several of his officers were convinced they could command Atlantis' forces better than he. The Atlantean Assembly and he might snap at each other, but the Assembly wasn't minded to give any of those ambitious officers a chance to show what they could do.

A small force of foot soldiers skirmished with the Atlantean army after it crossed the Stour. Victor's men took a few prisoners as the enemy fell back. They brought them to the commanding general. "Shall we hang these traitor bastards from a branch, sir?" one of the guards growled.

The prisoners looked frightened. Except for wearing brown coats rather than green, they also looked just like their captors. "You can't do that! We fought fair!" one of them said. His accent was the same as that of the man who wanted to hang him. And well it might have been: they were both Atlanteans, probably from the same settlement.

Victor Radcliff glowered at him. "So you'll spill your blood for a king who won't lift a finger for you?" he said.

"He is my king. England is my country." The prisoner set his chin. "He's your king, too, by God, and England's your country."

"Atlantis is my country. I have no king," Victor said. His men cheered. Some of their captives looked defiant, others alarmed. Victor turned to his troops. "Did they fight like soldiers?"

"We are soldiers," another prisoner said. "Third company of King George's Atlantean Rangers, that's me."

"Shame!" one of Victor's men said. Several others hissed.

They might have started hanging the Atlantean Rangers then, but Victor held up a hand. "No, we shan't do that," he said, "not if they didn't play the savage against us. It's easier to start hanging people than to stop."

"They've got it coming!" one of his men said hotly. "Goddamned traitors!"

"Traitor yourself!" a captive yelled, and almost won himself a hempen cravat in spite of everything Victor could do.

He had to draw his fancy sword (which he supposed balanced out the letter of censure) to keep his Atlanteans from lynching the bold prisoner. "No!" he shouted. "What will they do if they take some of our men next time? Do you want a war like that?"

Some of his men nodded, which scared him. But more looked worried. A war like that could keep on poisoning Atlantis long after it ended. How many feuds, how many barn burnings and stock killings and murders from ambush for revenge, would spring from it? Too many. Victor might have had to point that out, but his soldiers could see it once he did. The men from King George's Atlantean Rangers remained prisoners of war.

After the excitement was over, Blaise said, "None of those scuts even thanked you. Not a single one."

"I didn't expect it of them," Victor answered.

"Why not?" the Negro exclaimed. "If not for you, they'd be dead." He laid his head on his shoulder and stuck out his tongue as if hanged. "If that isn't worth some thanks, what is?"

Patiently, Victor said, "If they thanked me, they would have to own to themselves that I'm not such a bad fellow. Then they might have to own that my cause isn't so bad. And then they might have to wonder about the one they chose. How many people care to do that? Here, not many. Is it different in Africa?"

"Everything here has more gears turning round. Everything." Blaise did not sound as if he were complimenting Atlantis.

Victor shrugged. "It is what we have. Changing from belonging to the king to belonging to ourselves is hard enough-the Rangers show as much. But if you want to change human nature at the same time…" He shook his head. "Good luck to you, that's all. I don't believe it can be done."

"And you expect men to live without a chief or a king or whatever you call him?" Blaise shook his head, too, laughing at the silly notion.

He was no political philosopher, but he had a keen feel for what was real. "No," Victor said, "only without a leader who can do as he pleases no matter what the laws say."

"Only?" Blaise threw his own words in his face: "Good luck to you, that's all."

Habakkuk Biddiscombe thought each of his schemes was finer than the one that had gone before it. "We can spirit Cornwallis out of Hanover and strike off the enemy's head!" he told Victor.

Did he mean that as a figure of speech or literally? However he meant it, Victor shook his head. "I don't think that's a good notion."

"Why not?" Biddiscombe swelled and turned purple. Victor wondered if he'd explode. No man was ever so enamored of his own schemes as the cavalry officer.

But Victor ticked off points on his fingers: "Item-chances of success strike me as slim. Item-any men captured whilst making such an attempt would assuredly wear a noose soon thereafter. And, item-even if your plan should be accomplished in every particular, so what?"

Habakkuk Biddiscombe gaped. "What d'you mean… uh, General? I told you what would happen then."

"Indeed. You did. But, I say again, so what? Someone might well capture me. If that unpleasantness came to pass, this army would continue the struggle under our second-in-command. We might do as well with him as we have with me. For all I know, we might do better, though I dare hope not. Why do you suppose the redcoats to be in a different situation?"

"Well…" Biddiscombe faltered. "Isn't the best man commonly placed in command?"

"Again, in our case, I dare hope so. Yes, that may be true. But it is also possible that the general commanding is but the most senior officer present. General Cornwallis is not elderly and is clever, but I doubt he will ever be spoken of in the same breath with Gustavus Adolphus or Turenne. Another man, thrust suddenly into his place, might well match his accomplishments."

"Only reason you don't want to try it is on account of I'm the one who came up with it." Anger clotted Biddiscombe's voice "If you or your nigger thought it up, you'd be all for it." He turned on his heel and stormed away.

Blaise appeared as if by magic. "Did I hear somebody call me nigger?" He could hear that word where he might miss others.

Well, who could blame him? What man with the faintest hope of being a gentleman wasn't sensitive to slights?

"He did. You did," Victor said wearily. "He meant nothing by it, though. He was in a temper at me, not at you."

"Huh," Blaise said: a wordless sound packed with disbelief. "Anybody says nigger, he means something by it, all right." He spoke like a man very sure of what he was talking about. Chances were he had every right to be.

Even so, Victor said, "I showed him how and why his harebrained scheme was harebrained, and he responded with all the gratitude you might expect."

"What scheme is this?" Blaise asked. Victor explained. The Negro grunted. "Well, you told him true. That scheme is harebrained from mouth to arsehole."

Victor would have said from top to bottom, which didn't mean he disagreed with the more pungent phrase. "Sometimes Habakkuk simply needs to get things out of his system," he said.

Blaise grunted again. "If he's costive, let him take one of those little pills. That'll shift him." He rolled his eyes. "Those little pills'll shift anything."

"No doubt." Victor knew the ones Blaise was talking about. They were made from antimony. If you had trouble moving your bowels, you would swallow one. A few hours later, you would think a barrel of black powder had gone off in your gut They weren't cheap, but they did the trick, all right. You could, if you were so inclined, rescue the little devil from the chamber pot, wash it off, and save it for the next time you needed it.

"Ought to knock him over the head." Blaise returned to the subject at hand. "That will get things out of his system, too. And it will save you trouble. You see if it don't-doesn't." He corrected himself before Victor could.

"He'll be all right," Victor said. Blaise rolled his eyes once more. He was as stubborn as Habakkuk Biddiscombe, if in a different way. He would have been highly offended had Victor said so, so Victor didn't. He did remember the conversation for a long time afterwards.

Every so often, a loyalist would take a potshot at Victor's soldiers from behind a roadside tree, then try to get away. Rebellious Atlanteans who fired at redcoats marching past were heroes, at least to other rebellious Atlanteans. When Victor's men captured the loyalist snipers, they hanged them without ceremony.

Cornwallis' soldiers did the same thing to the insurrectionist marksmen they caught. Every printer who favored the Atlantean Assembly damned them to Satan's fiery furnace as murderers on account of it. Victor Radcliff noticed the irony, which didn't mean he intended to stop hanging loyalist francs-tireurs.

One of them put on a brave show, saying, "I am proud to die for my king."

"You won't be once the rope goes around your neck," Victor predicted. "And you aren't dying for your king. You could have been as loyal to George as you pleased, so long as you didn't fire at my men from ambush."

"I should prove myself a traitor to my sovereign did I not take up arms against those treacherously in arms against him." Yes, the loyalist had pride.

It did him no good. "You and your friends should have joined a properly enrolled company, then," Victor said coldly. The man was hanged with the three or four other bushwhackers Victor's soldiers had flushed out of the woods. They died hard, strangling from the nooses instead of getting their necks broken as a proper hangman's knot might have done. Or it might not have, when they were hanged from branches instead of getting a long drop from the gallows.

Blaise eyed the limp bodies and discolored faces with cold dispassion. All he said was, "They had it coming."

"I think so, too," Victor said. "But if you listen to the likes of them, we're the ones who deserve to dance on air."

"Dance on air." The Negro tasted the words. "I like that."

"It's not mine, I fear," Victor told him. "I don't know where I first heard it. Use it as you please. People will understand you when you do."

"All right." Blaise glanced toward the corpses again. "They don't dance."

They'd had their feet tied together and hands bound behind them. "I've seen livelier jobs, with the legs free," Victor said, gnawing on the inside of his lower lip at the memory. "Only a cruel man could enjoy the spectacle, believe me."

"They are enemies," Blaise said. "Why should I be sorry to watch enemies die?"

"I have nothing against enemies dying," Victor replied. "But rejoicing in suffering, even in an enemy's suffering, strikes me as unchristian."

"Maybe I don't make such a good Christian, then," Blaise said.

He and his wife had gone to church with Victor and Margaret most Sundays since the fighting in French Atlantis ended. He attended divine services with the other soldiers in Victor's army. Radcliff suddenly wondered how much he really believed. How much of his piety was no more than fitting in where he had to live, and how much of his savage creed from Africa still lurked below?

No matter what he wondered, he didn't ask. Papists and Protestants of all sects and even Jews joined together in the Atlantean Assembly and in its army. If there was room for all of them, wasn't there also room for one perhaps unregenerate African?

Despite the snipers-most of whom, being as woodswise as Victor's men, escaped instead of getting captured-the army pressed on toward Hanover. More loyalists, not daring or caring to meet it in arms, fled before it with nothing but what they could carry. Men who preferred the Atlantean Assembly's cause gleefully swooped down on the homes and fields and livestock they abandoned. "Buggers made us sweat while they was in the saddle," one man told Victor. "Now let's see if they ever set eyes on what used to be theirs again."

Strict justice might have made Victor speak of courts and due process of law. "We'll use them as they deserve," he said, and the local nodded.

A few days later, the army was camped near a village called Brandenburg. A cavalryman rode up to Victor. After a sketched salute, the man asked, "General, have you seen Major Biddiscombe? I needed to ask something of him, but he's nowhere about."

"I haven't got him," Victor answered.

He thought no more about it till the army was getting ready to move out the next morning. There was still no sign of Habakkuk Biddiscombe. A man who'd been on sentry duty said, "He rode out past me not long after we stopped here. He said he was going to reconnoiter what lay ahead."

"By himself?" Victor's eyebrows leaped toward his hairline.

The sentry only shrugged. "You know how he is."

Victor Radcliff did, much too well. "Even for Major Biddiscombe, that's excessive," he said. "When he comes in, I'll give him a talking-to he'll remember for a month of Wednesdays." The sentry laughed, but Victor wasn't joking.

Only Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn't come in. Victor feared he'd fallen into the hands of English scouts or local loyalists. The only trouble was, his own scouts turned up no signs that the enemy was operating anywhere close by.

Another fear began to grow in him-and not in him alone. "How bad was that last quarrel you had with him, sir?" Blaise asked.

"Well, it wasn't good." No one would accuse Victor of exaggerating, anyhow.

"Uh-huh," Blaise said thoughtfully. Then he asked, "How much harm could he do us if he went over to Cornwallis?"

"He wouldn't do that!" Victor squawked, and he could hear himself protesting too much. After a moment, he added, "I hope he wouldn't do that," which was nothing but the truth.