United States of Atlantis

Chapter 17

Denis was a small coastal town south of Cosquer, in what had been French Atlantis. Cosquer was an important place, and had been for three hundred years. St. Denis wasn't, and never had been. A few fishing boats went in and out. Every once in a while, a merchantman would put in at its rickety quays-as often as not, a badly navigated merchantman that had been bound for somewhere else.

Victor didn't know what made some towns thrive and others falter. Down in Spanish Atlantis, farther south yet, Gernika flourished… as much as any town in lackadaisical Spanish Atlantis flourished, anyhow. Not far away, tiny St. Augustine, also on the coast, drowsed under the semitropical sun. Yes, Gernika was older, but so what? New Hastings was older than Hanover, too, but Hanover had been the biggest, most bustling town in English Atlantis-in all of Atlantis-for a long time.

Now St. Denis was about to reappear in the history books, or at least in the footnotes. Victor looked down at the note on his desk (well, Erasmus Radcliff's desk, but Victor was using it these days).

That note still said the same thing it had when he first opened it a few minutes earlier. He read it again, just to make sure. French men-of-war and transports had evaded the Royal Navy and disgorged an army at St. Denis. He'd hoped that army would come to

Hanover. It was in Atlantis, but____________________

It was now moving north up the Atlantean coast. Its commander hoped to effect a meeting with the Atlanteans in the not too indefinite future.

"I will be damned," Victor murmured, reading the missive from St. Denis yet again. It still hadn't changed-not a single word of it.

The last time French troops landed in Atlantis, Victor and Cornwallis (then major and lieutenant-colonel, respectively, neither having yet acquired the exalted rank of general) beat them in a series of alarmingly close battles and forced the surrender of those who survived. Now Radcliff would be working with the French commander, whatever sort of officer this Marquis de la Fayette turned out to be, against the man who'd been his friend and ally in the last war.

Which proved… what, exactly? Only that life could turn bloody peculiar sometimes.

"Oh, yes," Victor muttered. "As if I didn't already know that."

He got to his feet and stretched. Something in his back made a noise like the cork exploding from a bottle of sparkling wine. He blinked, then slowly smiled; whatever'd happened in there, he felt better because of it.

He walked over and picked up the big honker skull William Radcliff had acquired back in the last century. "Alas, poor Yor-ick…" he began, holding it in the palm of his left hand.

Blaise came in. Confronted with the spectacle of the commander of the Atlantean army spouting Shakespeare at the cranium of a long-defunct bird, the Negro could hardly have been blamed for beating a hasty retreat. But Blaise was a tough fellow. Giving the honker skull no more than a raised eyebrow, he addressed Victor as if the latter had never heard of Hamlet. "Are the Frenchmen really and truly throwing in with us?"

"They are," Victor answered automatically. Only then did he set down the skull and send Blaise a startled stare. "How did you know about that, by God? The letter telling me of it only came just now." He pointed to the paper still sitting on the desk.

"No doubt." Blaise might have been innocence personified, if innocence came with slightly bloodshot eyes. He explained them, and himself: "But you see. General, I've been drinking with the lads who brought it to you, and they blabbed somewhat-or maybe a bit more than somewhat."

"Oh."

"Victor could see what would spring from that. "You're telling me all of Hanover will know of it by this o'clock tomorrow, and Cornwallis will know of it by this o'clock day after tomorrow."

"Not me." Blaise shook his head. "I don't need to tell you any such thing, since you already know it as well as I do."

Victor sighed. He wanted to start talking to the honker skull again. There was at least some hope it wouldn't turn around and repeat gossip as fast as it got it. Instead, he looked up toward the heavens and the God he hopefully believed in. "Dear Lord, will we ever be able to do anything or even plan anything without letting our foes learn of it almost before we do?"

"If ever you want to get ahead of the English," Blaise said, "go tell all and sundry you're about to do this, make as if you're about to do this, but then at the last moment, without telling anyone but the few who needs must know, turn about and do that instead. It will be their ruination. Ruination." He smiled as he repeated the word. "I do fancy the sound of it."

"Ruination." Victor also savored the word. And he savored the conception that had led up to it. "Maybe I should give you my epaulets. Or maybe I should just remember never to let the fox guard the chicken coop."

"You mean people need to remember things like that?" Blaise said.

"Well, remembering them is better than forgetting them, wouldn't you say?" Victor replied.

"It might be," Blaise allowed. "Yes, as a matter of fact it just might be."

The French army's rapid progress up the coast stopped just north of Cosquer. Cornwallis' regulars in Freetown-and the depressingly large number of loyalist troops the redcoats recruited in those parts-skirmished with the Frenchmen, fell back a mile or so, and then skirmished again.

They do not fight as regulars properly should fight, the brash young nobleman commanding the French force complained in his next

letter to Victor. It is to be expected that regular troops should form line of battle in open country and volley at one another until one side establishes its superiority, which the bayonet charge will then enforce. But the enemy forces shoot from behind trees and stones and fences, as if they were so many cowardly savages.

"Oh, dear," Victor said on reading that: a comment which worked on several levels. The redcoats had learned too much from fighting his Atlanteans, and they and their loyalists were now giving the previously uninstructed French some unpleasant lessons. And France, by all appearances, had learned very little. She'd sent another brave young seigneur across the Atlantic to lead her army during the last war. Marquis Montcalm-Gozon ended up dead despite his dash and courage. Victor had to hope the same wouldn't happen to this fellow.

He also had to flog his faltering French to respond in writing. As well wish for the moon as expect a French nobleman to read English. His pen scratched across the sheet of rather coarse paper: coarse, yes, but made in Atlantis. My dear Marquis de la Fayette: I regret that the redcoats' tactics have disconcerted you. Perhaps the arrival of an Atlantean officer of suitable rank to instruct your soldiers might improve the situation. Yours faithfully-Victor Radcliff, general commanding.

Off his response went, by the fastest fishing schooner then in Hanover harbor. He wished he could send it by semaphore or heliograph tower. Unfortunately, the enemy controlled most of the territory that lay between himself and the French. He had to entrust the communication to wind and wave.

In due course, and not a great deal later than he'd hoped, he got his reply. It was, if nothing else, short and to the point My dear General Radcliff, de la Fayette wrote, I look forward to your joining us at your earliest convenience. Your most obedient servant…

Staring, Victor said, "Where the devil did he get that notion?"

"What is the trouble now?" Blaise asked.

"I told the French general some officer of-I think I said something like 'the right rank'-would come and show his regulars how to fight in Atlantis," Victor answered. "And he thinks I meant I'd go myself!" He laughed at the absurdity.

To his surprise, Blaise didn't. "Maybe you should. If the French know the man they fight beside, it could be that they will fight better because of it. I mean truly know, you understand."

"But-" Victor found himself spluttering. "But-" He finally managed to put his main objection into words: "What if Cornwallis tries to take Hanover away from us again?"

"Not likely, not after he turned away when we beat him at Redwood Hill," Blaise answered calmly. "And even if he does, do you think the army can fight only if it has you to tell it how to go about things?"

Part of Victor thought exactly that. He knew better than to admit it, though. If the cause of liberty had an indispensable man, was liberty what the Atlantean Assembly was really fighting for? Or would the settlements-now styled states-merely be exchanging one master for another?

Slowly, Victor said, "When you put it that way…"

"I do," Blaise said. "Besides, don't you want to see with your own eyes what these French are like, what they can do?"

"I saw too much of that in the last war. This time, at least, whatever they can do, they won't be trying to do it to me."

"Victor wagged a finger at Blaise. "I think you're telling me I should go because you want to get down that way yourself."

"Who? Me?" Butter would have stayed solid forever in the Negro's mouth. "I don't know what you're talking about, General."

"Like fun you don't," Victor said. "But all right. Well see what we can do to get this de la Fayette's soldiers moving again, you and I."

"Good" Blaise said equably. Victor hoped it would be.

A brisk breeze from the north wafted the Rosebud out of Hanover harbor, bound for Cosquer or somewhere not far north. The schooner had been a big fishing boat before war came to Atlantis. Now she mounted a dozen eight-pounders: plenty for taking unarmed merchantmen, but not nearly enough to stand against even a small English frigate.

Victor Radcliff knew he came from a line that had gone to sea for generation after generation. He himself, however, made a most indifferent sailor. But he outdid Blaise. He'd seen before that the Negro was unhappy aboard ship. Setting a hand on Blaise's shoulder, he said, "Cheer up, friend. You won't end up on the auction block after we disembark."

Blaise gave back a sheepish smile. "You pinned it down, General; that you did. I know here that this is no slaver." He tapped his forehead. But then, touching his belly and his crotch in turn, he added, "Here and here, though, I'm not so sure. I doubt that that'd make sense to someone who's never lain in chains, but there it is."

"No, I've never done that," Victor admitted. He said nothing about the profit various offshoots of the Radcliff and Radcliffe clans had made from the slave trade. Blaise was bound to know already; still, casting it in his face would be rude. Instead, Victor said, "Maybe I can imagine a little of what you went through."

"Maybe." By the way Blaise said it, he thought Victor was talking through his hat. Since he had the experience and Victor didn't, he might well have been right.

Instead of arguing with him, Victor waited upon the Rosebud's skipper, a potbellied Hanover man named Randolph Welles. "What do we do if the Royal Navy calls on us to stop and be boarded?"

"Well, now, General, that depends." Welles' pipe sent upsmoke signals. "If we can run, why, run we shall-I promise you that. But if the choice is between letting them board and getting blown out of the water… All things considered, I'd sooner go on living." He spread his hands, as if to say there was no accounting for taste.

"I see," Victor said. "And who decides whether we shall run or yield?"

*I do," Randolph Welles snapped. Till that moment, Victor had thought him mild-mannered. Now he discovered he'd labored under a misapprehension. Welles went on, "On land you may do as you please, sir-that is your province. But I am captain of the Rosebud, General, no one else-she assuredly is my province. Let there be no misunderstandings on that score. They could cause unpleasantness: perhaps even worse."

"All right." Victor wasn't sure it was. If Welles wanted to surrender when that didn't look like a good idea to him… But what could he do about it? If the Rosebud's sailors seemed inclined to obey their skipper, precious little. Victor's best hope then might be diving over the rail and hoping he could swim to shore. He wasn't much of a swimmer. He could barely see the shore. If he didn't want the English to hang him, though, what other choice had he?

Generals borrowed a lot of trouble. Any commander worth having needed to worry about how he'd respond if the enemy did this, that, or the other thing. Many of the things a general could come up with were wildly unlikely. Most of the things a general could come up with never happened. But the day he didn't worry about them would be the day one came true.

So it proved aboard the Rosebud. Victor worried about what might happen if Royal Navy vessels came after the schooner. She saw never a one as she sailed south past New Hastings and Freetown. She did see a few fishing boats, all of them smaller and slower than she was. She had favorable winds and a mild sea. A day sooner than Victor expected her to, she slid into the harbor at Cosquer.

Even Blaise said, "Well, that wasn't too bad." Knowing how he felt about ships, Victor didn't think he could come out with higher praise than that. From his lips, even so much seemed extravagant

Cosquer had started as a specifically Breton town. You could still hear Breton in these parts if you knew which fishermen's taverns, which sailmakers' shops, which salt-sellers' establishments, to visit. You could also hear English; that had been true long before France lost its Atlantean possessions. But you were most likely to hear French.

And so Victor was not surprised to find himself hailed in that language: "Monsieur le General?"

"I am General Radcliff, yes," he replied, also in French.

"Excellent," said the tall, lean man standing on the pier. "I have the honor to be Captain Luc Froissart, aide-de-camp to the Marquis de la Fayette. Horses await you and your own aide, who would be…?"

Victor gestured. "Here is Sergeant Blaise Black, who has been my man of affairs since long before this war began."

Captain Froissart had bushy eyebrows. They jumped when he got a good look at Blaise's dark, impassive face. "How most extremely interesting!" he said. "I am sure the marquis will be delighted to acquaint himself with both of you. Is it that the sergeant speaks and comprehends French?"

"Me? Not a word of your language do I speak or comprehend," Blaise replied-in French.

Froissart blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. uEh bum, Sergeant, it seems you are one on whom we shall have to keep an eye."

"You white people have been saying that for as long as I was able to understand your speech," Blaise said. "Nevertheless, saying is easier than doing, or I should never have escaped from slavery." He eyed Froissart with a raised eyebrow. "The fellow who bought me when I first came to Atlantis was a Frenchman."

Victor waited to see how Froissart would take that "This fellow, he was not me," the French officer said. "He was not the marquis, either, or any of the soldiers who have come to Atlantis from la belle France. Please bear it in mind, Sergeant"

It was Blaise's turn to measure, to consider. "Well, I can probably do that," he said at last.

He might have angered or affronted Froissart if not for his earlier gibe. As things were, de la Fayette's aide-de-camp nodded judiciously. "Good enough. And can you also ride a horse?"

"How much you demand of me." Blaise sounded as petulant as a seventeen-year-old girl dreamt of being.

"You?" Victor exclaimed in mock dudgeon. "He doesn't even ask if I can ride."

Captain Froissart made a small production of charging his pipe and flicking at a flint-and-steel lighter till it gave forth with enough sparks to ignite the pipeweed in the bowl. After puffing a couple of times and ensuring that the pipe would stay lit, the Frenchman spoke in philosophical tones: "They warned me Atlanteans were… different. I see they knew what they were talking about."

Who were they? Victor almost asked. In the end, though, he decided he'd rather not know. All that mattered was that the French were on Atlantean soil, and on Atlantis' side. As long as he kept that firmly in mind, he could worry about everything else later.

When camped, French regulars pitched their tents with geometrical exactitude. The perfect rows of canvas might have been part of a formal garden: the effect was pleasing and formidable at the same time.

The effect the Marquis de la Fayette had on Victor Radcliff was almost the same. De la Fayette was both younger and better trained than Victor had expected. He also manifested far more enthusiasm for the Atlantean cause than Victor had looked for.

"It is not just a matter of giving England a finger in the eye, pleasant though that may be," de la Fayette declared. "But the Proclamation of Liberty? Oh, my dear sir!" He bunched the fingertips of his right hand together and kissed them-he was a Frenchman, all right. "This document… How shall I say it? This document shall live on as a milestone in the history of the world."

The praise sounded even more impressive in French, perhaps, than it would have in English. The marquis did speak English after a fashion, but both Victor and Blaise were more fluent in French. And, since several of the French officers had only their native tongue, they were happy not to have to try to learn Atlantis' dominant language on the fly.

"You gentlemen certainly have, ah, made yourselves at home here," Victor remarked.

"My dear sir!" de la Fayette said again. "It is from time to time necessary to fight a war. No denying that, however great a pity it may be. Still, it is not necessary to make oneself unduly uncomfortable while fighting it, eh?"

"So it would seem," Victor said, and left it there.

His allies lived under canvas: they were, as de la Fayette said, at war. But they'd brought over a variety of light, ingenious folding furniture-not just chairs, tables, and writing desks, but also bed frames and wickerwork chests of drawers-that let them feel as if they were back in their estates on the Loire or the Seine.

And they'd brought over some vintages finer than any Victor had ever tasted, and some brandies that taught him what brandy ought to be. They supplemented those with beer and ale and spirits taken from the countryside. And their chef… Blaise put it best when he said, "It's a wonder you gentlemen don't all weigh four hundred pounds. You've got some of the best victuals I ever tasted."

"You do," Victor agreed; he was thinking about letting his belt out a notch.

"Merci" the marquis said, smiling-he was an affable young man, no doubt about it. "I shall pass your praise on to Henri, who will be grateful for it." Henri was the genius who did things to poultry and beef the likes of which no Atlantean cook had ever imagined.

Captain Froissart said, "You will remember, my friends, that we get our exercise come what may." His colleagues grinned and leered and nodded.

Victor managed a smile himself. Most of the exercise the French officers got was of the horizontal variety. They hadn't been in Atlantis long, but they'd acquired mistresses or companions or whatever the word was. The girls were all uncommonly pretty. Quite a few of them, whatever they were to be called, had dark skins.

Victor wondered what Blaise would have to say about that. Blaise took it better than he'd expected. "If you sleep with an officer, you get presents you don't see from anybody else," he observed. "You hear things you don't hear from other folk, too. You do all right for yourself afterwards, I bet."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Victor said, and left it there.

Knowing the country between Cosquer and Freetown better than the newly come French-he'd fought against Montcalm-Gozon and Roland Kersauzon hereabouts in the last war-Victor accompanied the Marquis de la Fayette on reconnaissance rides to probe the English positions.

And, more than once, he accompanied the marquis on very rapid returns to the French army's positions. The redcoats also seemed to know the countryside quite well. Some of the Atlanteans who fought on King George's side knew it even better. Radcliff and de la Fayette barely escaped a couple of ambuscades.

"Nothing like being shot at when they miss, n'est-cepas?" de la Fayette said after some English musket balls missed by not nearly enough.

"It is an improvement on getting hit," Victor agreed. "Past that, I don't think it has a great deal to recommend it."

By then, they were almost back to the French commander's tent. "Come in and take some brandy with me," de la Fayette said. "You will see how much better it tastes now than it would have on an ordinary day when nothing interesting happened."

"I don't know about that, your Excellency, but I'll gladly make the experiment," Victor said.

One tumbler of brandy became two, and then three. Victor wasn't sure whether the bottled lightning tasted better than it would have on an ordinary day. He wasn't sure it got him anymore drunk than it would have on an ordinary day, either. Well before he finished that third tumblerful, he was sure it didn't get

him any less drunk.

The marquis seemed convinced he'd proved his point As he refilled his own tumbler, he solemnly declared, "There is also something else that improves after one is fired upon to no

effect."

"Oh?" Victor responded with a certain intensity of his own. "And what might that be?"

De la Fayette got a fit of the giggles. "It might be any number of things, my friend. But what it is… If you will excuse me for a few seconds…" He hurried out of the tent without waiting to find out whether Victor would excuse him or not. That affronted Victor, which only went to show he'd had a good deal to drink himself-not that he thought of it in those terms at that moment.

The marquis took longer to return than he'd promised. That didn't bother Victor Radcliff, who applied himself to the brandy with a dedication suited to-he supposed-celebrating a narrow escape.

Then de la Fayette did return-with his companion, a charming and intelligent (and Victor had seen that she was both) young mulatto woman named Marie. And with the two of them came another pretty girl, perhaps two shades darker than Marie. The marquis introduced her as Louise.

"Enchanted, Mademoiselle," Victor said, bowing over her hand with slow, exaggerated-well, drunken-courtesy.

Louise started giggling then. So did Marie. As far as Victor knew, neither one of them had been into the brandy bottle. The Marquis de la Fayette, who had, laughed so hard he almost fell over. Victor stared at him in owlish indignation. Slowly, de la Fayette straightened. Even more slowly, his laughter faded. He was as sober as an inebriated judge when he pointed to Louise and said, "Does she suit you, Victor?"

"Eh? What's that you say?" Victor wondered if his ears were working the way they were supposed to.

"Does she suit you?" De la Fayette spoke slowly and distinctly, as if to an idiot child. But he was not talking about childish things at all. "I would not make you sleep alone, not after you came all this way to show us the tricks of fighting in Atlantis-and certainly not after you almost got shot a little while ago. If you would rather lie down with someone else, though, that can be arranged."

Victor choked. No matter how much brandy he'd taken aboard, he couldn't very well misunderstand that. He wasn't always perfectly faithful when he was away from Margaret for a long stretch. On the other hand, he'd never acquired a mistress before.

He looked at Louise. She was more than enjoyable enough to the eye. "Is this what you want to do?" he asked her.

Her skin might be dark brown, but her shrug was purely Gallic. "Why not?" she replied.

That question had a large number of possible answers. Victor could see at least some of them. Seeing them and caring about them proved two very different things. He'd drunk a great deal of the Marquis de la Fayette's excellent brandy. He'd been shot at without result, as the French nobleman reminded him. He'd been away from Margaret for much too long. And Louise was sweet to the eye. Would she be sweet to the touch as well? He couldn't imagine any reason why she wouldn't be-and he wanted to find out for himself.

"Well, then," he said, as if that were a complete sentence

As he and Louise were heading out of de la Fayette's tent and off to his own, the French marquis said, "I hope you have a pleasant evening. Monsieur le General. I should also let you know that your man of affairs will not envy your good fortune, for I have arranged companionship for him."

"Have you?" Victor said foolishly. But why not? Blaise had been away from Stella as long as Victor had been away from Margaret. Victor nodded. "Good. That's good."

Louise tugged at his sleeve. "Are you coming?"

"I am, my dear. So I am," Victor said. The guards outside the Marquis de la Fayette's tent presented arms as he and Louise left. The guards outside his own tent presented arms as he and Louise went in. They knew what he'd be doing in there, all right. But they were Frenchmen, too. They might envy him, but he didn't think they'd blab. And if they did-well, so what? The brandy he'd diligently got outside of told him it wouldn't matter a bit.

The camp bed with which de la Fayette had equipped the tent was a masterpiece of compact lightness. It promised one person a fine night's sleep. Victor wasn't so sure it would bear the weight of two, and it was decidedly narrow for entertaining. He shrugged. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Louise was every bit as enjoyable as he'd hoped she would be. Whether she also enjoyed herself… Well, that wasn't a question you wanted to ask a woman who wasn't there because she loved you. Victor approached the issue by saps and parallels, as it were: "Is this but for an evening, or will you join me again?"

In the gloom inside the tent, her race was unreadable "I am to be yours for as long as you wish me to be yours, Monsieur It General," she answered, which didn't tell him what he wanted to know.

"Does that suit you?" he asked, much as he had in de la Fayette's tent.

And she said, "Why not?," just as she had then. Then she asked a question of her own: "Twice, do you think?"

"I don't know," Victor said in surprise. Twice? So soon? He wasn't such a young man any more. He wasn't an old man yet, though. "Well, let's find out."

Along with potent brandy, the Marquis de la Fayette had brought strong coffee from France. Victor found himself drinking more of it than he was usually in the habit of doing. Without it, he might have found himself nodding off at any hour of the day or night. War had its exertions, but so did… peace.

He noticed Blaise was also drinking more than his share of that dark-roasted coffee. "A man must keep his strength up," Blaise said seriously.

"Yes," Victor agreed, deadpan. "He must."

Blaise's companion was called Roxane. If not for the shape of her nose and mouth, she might almost have passed for white. The French in Atlantis had mingled with their slaves for as long as they'd brought Africans to this land. Victor wondered whether dark Blaise knew some special sense of conquest, lying with a woman so fair. Wonder or not, he didn't ask. If Blaise wanted to talk about that, he would. If he didn't, anything Victor asked would be prying.

De la Fayette's regulars skirmished with the redcoats and loyalists who blocked their way north. They made little progress. After a while, Victor said, "It might be better to pull away from the coast and try to slide around them. Doesn't look as though you're going to break through."

"But will they not pull away with us, to keep us from sliding around?" By the way the marquis echoed Victor's technical terms, he found them picturesque.

Patiendy, Victor answered, "You can use a screening force to harass the enemy and hold them in place while the rest of your army steals a march on them. Then your screeners follow along, leaving the foe racing a fait accompli."

"What an interesting notion! What a brave notion!" de la Fayette exclaimed. He hesitated once more. "I am not sure how many of the local women will wish to accompany us on this journey, or how many of their owners will allow them to do so."

"Cert la guerre," Victor said gravely.

"True." De la Fayette sounded mournful, but only for a moment. "It could be, could it not, that there will be other women in the interior of Atlantis?"

"Well, so it could." Victor carefully didn't smile.

"Good! We shall proceed, then," de la Fayette declared.

Proceed they did. Not only did they proceed-they thrived. Victor had seen enthusiastic foragers before. His own Atlanteans, because of their sadly anemic supply train, did a fine job of living off the countryside: and that regardless of whether the countryside cared to be lived on.

But he soon had to own that his own countrymen couldn't match the French regulars for the thoroughness with which they stripped the landscape of everything even remotely edible. "Worn d'un rum" Blaise said, perhaps surprised out of English at what the Frenchmen could do. "Not even locusts could empty things the way these men do."

"They have locusts in the country you come from?" Victor asked. Atlantis had a profusion of different kinds of grasshoppers. Great swarms of locusts, such as those that devastated Egypt in the Bible when Pharaoh hardened his heart, were fortunately rare.

"Oh, yes," Blaise replied. "They eat our crops, and we roast them and eat them. But they do more damage than avenging ourselves so makes up for."

Victor's stomach didn't turn over, though plenty of Atlanteans' might have. Out in the woods, he'd sometimes got hungry enough to skewer Atlantis' big flightless katydids on a branch and toast them over a small fire. They weren't even bad, so long as you didn't think about what you were eating. He suspected more than a few of his soldiers had done the same on the march to New Marseille. The only trouble here was, those big katydids were getting scarce in settled country. Dogs and cats devoured them without finicky human qualms, while mice outbred them and outran them and scurried through the undergrowth in their place.

The Marquis de la Fayette's troops were relentless foragers of another sort, too. Victor had never seen so many outraged fathers and husbands as congregated outside the marquis' tent. De la Fayette at first seemed inclined to make light of it. "I lead soldiers, not eunuchs," he observed. "They are men. It is war. These things happen. These things will always happen, so long as men go to war."

Were he merely defending a philosophical position, he would have had a point. Rather more than abstract philosophy was at stake, however. "Nothing obliges folk here to remain on the Atlantean Assembly's side," Victor pointed out "If your army makes people hate our cause, they will turn to King George and England instead. We don't want that. You aren't campaigning in enemy country, you know."

"What would you have me do. Monsieur?" De la Fayette seemed genuinely perplexed.

"Next time you find someone who can point out a woman's ravishers with certainty, hang them," Victor said.

"You're joking!" the marquis exclaimed.

"Not a bit of it," Radcliff answered. "I hanged a few of my men for crimes like that, and I rarely have to worry about them any more."

"But these are soldiers," de la Fayette said again.

"Let them find willing women," Victor said. "There are plenty. If the people here decide your men act worse than the redcoats, they'll shoot at us from behind trees and fences. If your soldiers go behind some ferns to answer nature's call, they'll get knocked over the head. They'll have their throats slit. I shouldn't wonder if they don't get their ballocks cut off, too."

"Barbarous," de la Fayette muttered.

"Well, so it is. But what would you call holding a woman down and forcing yourself on her?" Victor returned.

"Half the ones who screech rape afterwards were happy enough while it was going on," the French nobleman said.

"It could be, but so what? That still leaves the other half," Victor said stubbornly. "Your Grace, you have a problem here, and you don't want to look at it. But if you don't, you'll have a worse problem soon. And so will the United States of Atlantis. I don't intend to let that happen."

"Do you presume to give me orders?" the Marquis de la Fayette inquired. "You travel with my army, if you recall."

Victor looked through him. "You travel in my country, your Grace, if you recall." De la Fayette turned red-and turned away. Victor wondered if he'd pushed too hard. He couldn't make the Frenchman do anything, no matter how much he wished he could.

Three days later, a girl was able to point out the four men who'd taken turns with her. "What will you do about them?" she asked de la Fayette. The smirking soldiers hardly bothered to deny it. Their bravado turned to horror and disbelief when he ordered them hanged.

"To encourage the others," he said after the deed was done, so he knew his Voltaire, too. Then he asked Victor, "Are you now satisfied?"

"That you are serious? Yes, and your men will be, too," Victor said. And so it proved.