"So they are," Roland said heavily. "Well, we can let them go-this time. Then we'll tear down the barrier and advance again. We'll be more careful from now on." I'll be more careful from now on, he meant. The young lieutenant politely nodded.
Once in English Atlantis, Juan and Francisco went their own way. Francisco talked of traveling overland to Avalon and then crossing the Hesperian Gulf and going back to Terranova. How he would find his own clan again, Victor Radcliff had no idea. He was welcome to try, though.
Juan simply wandered off. Maybe he went looking for his own folk, too. Maybe he just went looking for work or a woman or whiskey or whatever else he might want. He was a free man here.
So was Blaise, but he seemed inclined to stick with Victor. "You do interesting things, Monsieur," he said in his oddly accented French. "I think I do more interesting things myself with you than without you."
Victor had never had-and never wanted-a body servant. He couldn't very well tell the Negro that staying with him was pointless, because he'd be spending so much time in the woods. Blaise could take care of himself there, at least as well as Victor and maybe better. And so…Victor found himself stuck.
His fiancee thought it was funny. Margaret Dandridge was a level-headed girl from a New Hastings trading family. "He's very sweet," she told Victor. "And he's sharp-he's already starting to pick up English."
"I know," Victor answered. "He's learning to shoot, too. They wouldn't let him do that while he was a slave. He's good at it. I think he'd be good at anything he turned his hand to."
"You're lucky to have him, then," Meg said.
"I suppose so." Victor didn't sound so sure. After a moment's hesitation, he explained why: "Do I have him, or does he have me?"
He had plenty of other things to worry about. No one in the English settlements had looked for the French settlers to move so aggressively after war broke out. An English army was supposed to be on the way across the sea. Everyone had thought the French would do the same, so forces from the two mother countries fought it out.
But Roland Kersauzon had other ideas. English Atlantis had to dance to his tune, one way or another. Either the settlers had to recruit forces of their own, or they had to yield to Kersauzon without fighting and hope the professionals from the home island could rescue them.
They recruited, of course. Every farmer with a shotgun for bagging ducks and driving off wild dogs, every backwoodsman with a rifle, made a likely soldier. The men who joined on their own or were dragooned into the service of crown and settlements got green coats of several different shades, some of cotton, more of linen-cotton came from the French and Spanish south.
Because he was an experienced backwoodsman-and because he was a Radcliff-Victor acquired a major's commission, with gilt epaulets on the shoulders of his green coat. He didn't particularly like the emblems of his rank; they made him a better target. No one wanted to listen to him, so he wore the epaulets in camp. When he got to the field, he could take them off.
Somehow, Blaise acquired a sergeant's stripes. He wore them proudly. Victor hadn't asked for any rank for him. Maybe he got it by magic. Maybe he knew which palms to grease, though he had precious little money for greasing.
Victor thought the Negro's new status would cause trouble, and it did. A hulking young man named Aeneas Hand told him, "I'll be damned if I let a lousy nigger order me around."
Blaise was there to hear that. He tapped Hand on the shoulder. "You no like?" he asked in English flavored by both French and his African birthspeech-he was a quick study.
"No, I don't." The white man-who had perhaps four inches and forty pounds on Blaise-set himself. His hard hands balled into fists. "What are you going to do about it, you turd-colored monkey?"
Flat-footed, without changing expression or even seeming very interested, Blaise kicked him in the crotch. Aeneas Hand let out a startled grunt and folded up like a clasp knife. Blaise kicked him again, this time in the pit of the stomach. Hand couldn't have fought back after the first disaster. The second left him on the ground, desperately struggling to breathe. Blaise kicked him one more time, in the side of the head. Hand went limp.
"Did you kill him?" Victor asked.
"Nah." The Negro shook his head. He hadn't even broken a sweat. He continued in French: "Throw water on him. He wake up. Head hurt two, three days, same with balls and belly." He looked down at Aeneas Hand. "What he call me? I don't understand it."
"Never mind," Victor said in the same language. "If you knew, you would have killed him."
A couple of other recruits came over to stare at their fallen comrade. "Godalmighty!" one of them said. "What happened to him?"
"He offended the sergeant here." Victor pointed to Blaise. "And he found out that wasn't such a good idea, didn't he?"
"Sure did." The man looked from Aeneas Hand to Blaise and back again. "Offended him, did he? If he really went and got him mad, I reckon he'd be in pieces."
"Wouldn't be surprised," Victor Radcliff agreed. "Fetch a pail of water and souse Aeneas with it. He's learned a lesson. I hope nobody else in this company has to."
Hand had begun to stir by the time the water cascaded over him. Sure enough, it revived him. Blearily, he looked up at Blaise. "You don't fight fair," he said.
"Fight fair? Fight fair?" That startled the black man out of English and into profane French: "Sacre merde!" Blaise thought for a moment before going on, in English again, "You right. I no fight fair. I fight, I win. Only way to fight. I sergeant." He tapped his stripes. "You mess me again, I kill you. Understand?"
Aeneas Hand nodded, then winced and looked as if he wished he hadn't. Water dripped off his chin and from the end of his pointed nose. "Reckon I do."
"Reckon I do, what?" Blaise touched the chevrons again.
"Reckon I do, Sergeant," the big recruit allowed.
"Good." Blaise allowed himself a smile. He reached down and hauled Hand upright. "We get on now."
And they did. Having been so thoroughly beaten, Aeneas Hand spread the word that Blaise was sudden death on two legs. A couple of smaller incidents with other recruits did nothing to show he was wrong. Victor Radcliff began to wonder whether he or his man would have worn the epaulets had Blaise been born with a white skin.
Gravediggers' spades tore into the soft brown earth. Dirt thudding on dirt had an ominously final sound. Roland Kersauzon watched as a priest gabbled quick Latin over the shrouded corpse, then jumped away. A sickly-sweet stench rose from the body. It wasn't because the young soldier had stayed unburied too long; he'd died that night, only a few hours before this dawn. But smallpox had its own fetor.
Roland muttered to himself. Too many soldiers were dying of smallpox and measles. Men who grew up on farms out in the countryside and spent their lives alone in the woods missed the diseases in childhood, when they were most often milder. Catch them then and you were immune forever after. Catch them as an adult…
He rubbed his arm. He had smallpox scars there, but nowhere else. He'd missed the sickness as a boy himself. He'd been inoculated with it at Nouveau Redon and taken a light case. Now he was as immune as if he'd been through a harsh bout caught by accident.
Inoculation had come to the French settlements from the English, to Atlantis from England, and to England, he'd heard, from Turkey. He wondered how widely it was practiced in English territory here. Were the English settlements' recruits less likely than his own men to come down sick? He hoped not-that could decide who won the war.
The gravediggers tipped the corpse into the hole they'd made. Both of them had smallpox-slagged faces; they feared no contagion. The priest was unmarked. No wonder he didn't want to stay by the body a moment longer than he had to. But a dying man, or a dead one, needed a hope of heaven. If a priest wouldn't shrive him, he'd surely go to hell instead.