Or you could range farther afield, as Victor was doing. So many things here in the south seemed strange to an Atlantean who'd grown up near New Hastings. The weather was a good place to start; it reminded him of a steam bath. New Hastings could get weather like that. So could Hanover. Down here, the news came when it wasn't beastly hot and beastly muggy.
With the different weather went different plants. The theme was the same as it was all over Atlantis: conifers and what the Atlanteans called barrel trees and ferns. But instead of the pines and towering redwoods near New Hastings, instead of the firs and spruces north of Hanover that made such splendid masts, here most of the conifers were cypresses growing on knees half lifted out of the swamps. The rest, on higher ground, were scrubby pines different from the ones farther north. There were more varieties of barrel tree, too; both Frenchmen and Spaniards cooked up a formidable spirit from the sap inside some of them. And the ferns grew in riotous profusion wherever there was shadow and moisture-which is to say, almost everywhere. Victor had seen them sprouting from between the bricks of country homes. In every shade of green, in every size from smaller than his hand to twice as tall as he was, they formed the forest's understory.
Something almost under Victor's boot said, "Freep!" and jumped into the water with a splash. He froze for a moment: he hadn't seen it till it moved and croaked. Only a frog, he thought. Down here, though, only wasn't necessarily so. Some of the frogs here had bodies twice the size of a man's fist. They ate anything that wasn't big enough to eat them.
Others were of more ordinary size, but colored black streaked with vivid scarlet or gold or turquoise. Nothing ate them-not more than once, anyhow. They were poisonous. It was almost as if their colorful hides warned the world to leave them alone.
A flapjack turtle peered at Victor from the swamp. All he could see of it were its pointy-nosed head and snaky neck. Flapjack turtles made better eating than the frogs. But they could fight back. One that size could bite off a man's finger with no trouble at all.
A lizard skittered away into some ferns. Another one, larger, eyed Victor from a cypress branch well out of his reach. Both of them were harmless. Some of the lizards down here, though, grew longer than a man was tall-and those were the ones that lived on land. It said nothing about the sawbacked monsters that haunted streams. The Spaniards called them all dragons even if they didn't breathe fire. The name seemed fair enough to Victor. They were formidable beasts, with formidable teeth and claws. They couldn't flourish up in the English regions of Atlantis; the winters were too cold. Victor didn't miss them a bit.
When up in New Hastings, he also didn't miss the snakes big enough to coil round these lizards, suffocate them, and swallow them. He kept a wary eye on the fern thickets through which he pushed. A snake big enough to kill and eat a dragon was big enough to kill and eat him, too.
They also had flying snakes down here, and you didn't have to get into the barrel-tree juice to see them. Victor supposed they didn't really fly, but the name had stuck. They spread themselves flat and glided from one branch to another or from a branch down to the ground either to escape from becoming something else's dinner or to catch their own. Three or four different kinds had learned the trick; one was venomous, but the rest weren't.
Victor's nostrils suddenly twitched. He stopped in his tracks. His right hand fell to the stock of one of the flintlock pistols he carried on his belt. He smelled smoke. Smoke meant men, and men, even more than dragons or flying snakes, meant trouble.
Men could be doing any number of unsavory things. They could be backwoodsmen from English-speaking Atlantis like him, down to see what the Breton-and Basque-and French-and Spanish-speaking settlers were up to. They might come from any of the groups that didn't speak English, and they might be spying on any of the others-or even on their own. They might be settlers who'd moved deep into the swamps because they wanted nothing to do with their own lords. They might be French or Spanish soldiers, coming after settlers who'd moved deep into the swamps.
Or they might be runaway slaves: Negroes or copperskinned Terranovan natives. New Hastings had a few slaves, and big, rich Hanover more than a few. Most of the blacks and Terranovans up there were domestics-cooks and maids, coachmen and body servants. Rich merchants owned them for the sake of swank, and treated them as they would have treated servants of a lighter hue. Most blacks and copperskins in English Atlantis were freemen and-women.
Things were different here in the south. Down here, slaves worked in the fields, and they worked hard. The plantations that raised indigo and cotton, rice and sugar cane, pipeweed and peanuts, couldn't have functioned without them. Getting the most labor from slaves and giving them as little as was necessary to keep them working and to keep them from rising up was an art in these settlements.
It wasn't an art the Terranovans and Africans appreciated. They took off whenever they saw the chance. Better to scratch out a free living in the swamps, they thought, than to live on their masters' dubious bounty. And if they could get up to the English-speaking settlements, they would probably stay free. Litigation between settlements from one kingdom and those from another could go on for years-or it could move a little slower than that.
Plantation owners and overseers hunted slaves with hounds and with guns and sometimes even with fist-trained eagles. Runaways fought back with mantraps and anything else their ingenuity could devise. Some of them-the Terranovans especially-were good bowmen. Victor Radcliff knew the first English settlers in Atlantis had been formidable archers. That was three centuries gone by, though. These days, any white who wanted to shoot something did it with a gun.
Victor thought about giving the campfire or whatever it was a wide berth and going on his way. Regretfully, he shook his head. He couldn't be sure he'd be able just to go on his way. If he knew those strangers were out there in the swamp, one of them was liable to know he was here, too. All the undergrowth was made for snipers and bushwhackers. Maybe somebody was drawing a bead on him right now…
When you had a thought like that, your first instinct was to duck. If you had any brains, you followed that instinct, too. It might save you. Victor pulled in his head like one of those flapjack turtles. He ducked down so the ferns all around did a better job of hiding him. Then he crawled away.
Maybe he was crawling away from nothing. He didn't know for sure. He didn't mind making a fool of himself in front of turtles and frogs and oil thrushes and parrots. In fact, he ended up making a fool of himself in front of a mouse. It twitched its whiskers and vanished under a drooping frond a couple of inches above the ground.
"Damned things are everywhere," Victor muttered to himself. There hadn't been a mouse or a rat or a dog or a cat in Atlantis before settlers started coming. Now you found them even in the wilderness.
By contrast, honkers had grown scarce, especially in long-settled districts. Before long, they might all be gone. Victor shrugged. That wasn't his worry.
He sniffed again, then crawled toward the fire. Follow your nose, he thought. Well, what else could he do when he couldn't see the campfire or hear the people who gathered around it?
And then he could hear them. He froze, then moved forward even more slowly and carefully. Yes, the bad French and Spanish said they were runaway slaves. One Negro and two copperskins, he thought; they had distinctively different accents. His own French was nothing special, though he could make himself understood.
Another sniff brought him the scent of roasting meat. His stomach growled. He winced-a noise like that could betray him, and it was nothing he could do anything about.