Blaise had a different question for them: "Do you lead blacks as well as Terranovans? Or do the blacks have their own leaders?"
Ramon and Martin looked at each other. "We have blacks in our bands," Martin said slowly. "Bands with black leaders have Terranovans in them, too. We both hate the Spaniards worse than we hate each other."
Blaise grunted. Victor might have done the same thing if the Negro hadn't beaten him to it. That was an…interesting response. Blacks and copperskins could work together. Blaise had escaped with a couple of Terranovans, after all. But they knew they were different from each other as well as from the whites who exploited them.
Guiding pack horses loaded down with weapons and lead, the Terranovans headed back to their own folk. Blaise muttered something in his native language. Victor looked a question at him. The Negro seemed faintly embarrassed. "Means something like, damned hardhead copperskins," he said.
This time, Victor did grunt. "What do they say about you?"
"Damned lazy mallates," Blaise answered without hesitation. "Mallate is like you say nigger."
"I've heard it before," Radcliff replied. "I wasn't sure you had."
"Oh, yes. I hear mallate. I hear nigger," Blaise said. "Can't help it if I black. Doesn't wash off." He made as if to scrub at one arm with the palm of the other hand. "Good when I run away-I am hard to see in woods. Other times?" He shrugged. "I all right where I from. You all right where you from. Terranovans all right where they from. Nobody from Atlantis, right? Everybody should be all right here."
That sounded good. Atlantis might have been a place where everyone could come together in equality. It might have been…but it wasn't. Not yet, anyhow. Victor Radcliff wondered if it ever would be. Let's smash up the Spaniards first, he thought. We can worry about everything else later.
XXII
E veryone in French Atlantis called the stuff that hung from the branches of cypresses and from the round trunks and outswept leaves of barrel trees Spanish moss. Roland Kersauzon had always taken the name for granted. Now, approaching the frontier with Spanish Atlantis for the second time in a fortnight, he really noticed how Spanish moss grew more common the farther south he went.
He also noticed how deferential the Spanish frontier guards were when he returned to the border. They bowed. They scraped. As Don Jose had said, they abased themselves before him.
"If you had let me cross when I came here last time, things would be better now," Roland pointed out in his deliberate Spanish.
"Oh, but, Senor, things were different then," said the teniente in charge of the frontier post. "We had orders to prevent you from entering Spanish Atlantis, and we were honor-bound to obey them."
"No matter how idiotic they were," Roland said acidly.
"Yes. I mean, no." The young teniente frowned. "You are doing your best to confuse things, Senor." He sent Kersauzon a reproachful stare. He had a long, thin Spanish face, a drooping mouth, dark eyes, and heavy black eyebrows: a face God might have made expressly for reproachful stares, in other words.
Roland gave back a bland, polite smile. "I always do my best," he said, which left the Spaniard scratching his head.
But neither the teniente nor his tiny garrison did anything to hinder the French settlers who followed Roland into Spanish Atlantis. That was the point. Given the inefficiency with which the Spaniards ran their settlements, Kersauzon had feared that the frontier guards wouldn't know their governor had begged him for help. Spaniards were indeed the kind of people who would open fire for the sake of honor, regardless of whether honor and sense lay within screaming distance of each other.
The first copperskin the French settlers saw in Spanish Atlantis took one look at them, then spun around and ran like a rabbit. (In the early days of settling Atlantis, there had been no rabbits, any more than there'd been sheep or cattle or horses. There were plenty of them now: maybe more than in France, for they had fewer natural enemies here. Of course, like a lot of Frenchmen, Kersauzon was fond of lapin aux pruneaux-or lapin prepared any number of other ways, too.)
"Should we shoot him, Monsieur?" asked a practical-but not quite practical enough-sergeant.
"I daresay we should have shot him," Roland replied. He hadn't been practical enough, either. "Too late now." Too late it was, without a doubt. The Terranovan had vanished into the undergrowth. He knew where he was going. Pursuers wouldn't. Roland could hope he would tread on a viper in his headlong flight; there were enough, or rather too many, of them down here in the south. But, that unlikelihood aside, the copperskin had got away.
Which meant-what? The fellow was bound to be a slave. He was also obviously a slave not tending to his master's affairs. Was he a slave who was part of a band of rebels? That was less obvious, but it matched the way he acted.
Would his band of rebels want to tangle with Roland's French settlers? Unless that band was a lot bigger than Kersauzon thought likely, they would have to be crazy to try it. Then again, plenty of white men were crazy. Why not copperskins and Negroes as well?
"Where do we go now, Monsieur?" the sergeant asked.
Roland realized he should have inquired of the snooty Spanish teniente. He was damned if he would turn around again, even if it was only half a mile or so this time. He hadn't seen any white men-let alone white women-on the road since entering Spanish Atlantis. That had to mean the uprising was a serious business…or that the whites thought it was, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.
The sergeant deserved-needed-an answer. Kersauzon scanned the southern horizon. He knew just what he was looking for: the thickest smoke. When he found it in the southwest, he pointed. "We go there."
It turned out to be farther away than he'd expected, which meant the fires down there were bigger than he'd thought. No one seemed to be fleeing toward his army. Several Negroes and copperskins fled from it. The French settlers caught a Negro. The man tried to deny everything.
"If you are as innocent as our Lord, why did you run from us?" Roland asked.
In reasonable-almost French-tones, the black replied, "If you saw lots of men with guns, Senor, wouldn't you run, too?"
"Not if I thought they were friends," Kersauzon said.
"I thought you were ingleses," the Negro replied. "Los ingleses are the friends of no one but themselves."
"You're right about that, by God," Roland said. "They will use you against the Spaniards, and the Spaniards against you. They will try to get the Spaniards to fight you instead of them. They don't care what happens to you, as long as it helps them."
"No doubt you are right, Senor," the Negro said. "But how much does it matter? If you are a drowning man, you grab for whatever you can get your hands on. If it turns out to be a log-bueno. You are saved. If it turns out to be a crocodile-at least you don't drown."
Crocodiles and the other toothy horrors usually called by the Spanish name for lizards-lagartos-were even more common in streams down here than they were in French Atlantis. There were hardly any near the English settlements; those lay too far north for the big reptiles to stay comfortable through the winter. All things considered, Roland would rather have drowned if a crocodile or lagarto was his other choice.
He also needed to ask, "Why did you have to run from los ingleses? After all, they gain if you rise up against the Spaniards."
"You said it yourself, Senor," the Negro replied with dignity. "I am a man. I am not a tool to be taken down from a shelf, used, and then put back. Slaves are nothing but tools to los ingleses. If these English"-he pronounced the name properly, and about as badly as Kersauzon would have-"said, 'Rise up, and we will help you become free men'…if they said that, I would be their man forever. But they do not. They care nothing for freeing us. All they say is, 'Rise up, and make los espanoles some trouble.' This does not inspire me, for some reason."