Roland Kersauzon swept off his hat and bowed to the black man, who stared at him in astonishment. "It would not inspire me, either, Monsieur," Roland said. "I assure you of that." He gestured. "You may go. You are free-of me, anyhow."
"But you and your men are still fighting for the damned Spaniards and against the slaves," the Negro said.
"It is our duty," Roland said simply.
"If you turn me loose, it is my duty to kill you if you get in my way and if I have the chance," the Negro said. "I need to go after the Spaniards first, but you are their ally."
"Tell the other slaves to wait until los ingleses are gone from this land. If they do, we will not raise a finger against them," Roland said. "My quarrel is with the English, not with you."
"This is a good bad bargain, but it is still a bad bargain," the black man said. "If los ingleses are not here, the Spaniards will have nothing to distract them from us. They will put us down, and they will make us pay for rising against them. But if we fight them now, while they also have to worry about the English, we have a chance to beat them. Maybe not a good chance, but a chance."
He wasn't even wrong, not as long as he was talking about Spaniards. If the slaves did beat their Spanish masters, the French would invade and try to suppress them. Even the English would probably do the same thing. They might not have many slaves in their own settlements, but they didn't mind making money from other people's bondsmen.
And Roland was sure the English aimed to seize French and Spanish Atlantis for themselves if they won this war. They wouldn't want Negroes and copperskins running around burning things and killing people. No, not when those same Negroes and copperskins could be harvesting crops and putting black ink, not red, in the ledgers.
Kersauzon made as if to push the slave away. "You had better leave now, before I come to my senses and decide to hold you instead."
The Negro bowed politely. "You may try, Senor. I don't think you will have much luck." Then he disappeared, so quickly and so effectively that he might have been part of a conjurer's trick. A leafy fern stirred for a moment. Deeper in the undergrowth, a bird let out a startled chirp.
"He's a nuisance," a sergeant said. "You should have got rid of him while you had the chance."
"It could be," Roland said. "But even if I would have, how many more just like him are there?" The sergeant had no answer for that. Neither did Roland, not in numbers. But he knew there were swarms of them.
Victor Radcliff found himself and his little band of English marauders in an odd predicament. They helped protect Spanish fugitives from the wrath of their uprisen slaves. And they gave aid and comfort to the Africans and Terranovans against the men who were convinced they had a right to own them.
Blaise didn't mind that. On the contrary-one day he hurried up to Victor almost jumping in excitement. "A woman here, she speak my language!" he exclaimed.
"Well, good," Victor said. "That must be nice. What's her name?"
"They call her Maria," Blaise answered. "She has a name in our language, too. It means in English 'little star.'"
"Pretty," Radcliff remarked.
"I can talk with she-with her." Blaise made a face. "Don't always have to think through different kinds funny words. Just…talk!" He really did jump into the air then, but the leap put Radcliff in mind of a dance step.
He got to see Maria a little later. He didn't think her especially pretty, but then Blaise didn't seem to find white women especially pretty, either. The black man and woman could talk together, all right. Their language seemed full of clucking and mooing noises to Victor. But he knew how delighted he would have been to find an English-speaking woman if he were stranded in West Africa.
Voice dry, he said, "You might want to tell her we still have some fighting to do. You can't marry her till that's taken care of."
Blaise's skin was already dark, but it got darker as he blushed. "Good thing she doesn't talk English. She think you making promises for me."
"I can tell her myself in Spanish, or in French if she knows it," Victor said helpfully.
"Never mind," Blaise said-in English. "Maybe I marry she-her. Maybe I don't. Don't got to decide now, though."
"What are you two talking about in that funny language?" Maria asked in fluent Spanish. "You better not be talking about me when I can't understand what you're saying."
"We're talking about the fighting, Senorita," Victor Radcliff replied in the same language. "We still have to beat the Spaniards."
"And you will fight to the last slave's last drop of blood to do it." Maria had a tart wit.
"We are here, in Spanish Atlantis," Victor said. "We fought our way through French Atlantis to get here. We would fight the Spaniards even if the slaves did not rise up against them."
She weighed that. Blaise plainly hung on her decision. Victor was surprised to discover he cared, too. You had to take Maria seriously. Some people had that gift. At last, she nodded. "Bueno. The Spaniards have plenty to answer for. And so do you ingleses, for selling them so many slaves from Africa."
She didn't know-Radcliff hoped she didn't, anyhow-how deeply involved in the slave trade his family was. You could make a lot of money off Negroes. Plenty of people had. If you didn't sail to Africa yourself, your hands stayed clean while you did it, too. Radcliffs and Radcliffes were welcome in all the best places in English Atlantis. We'd better be, he thought. We founded a lot of those places.
But that was an argument for another day. "Let's get moving," he said. "We don't do anyone any good sitting around like snails on a leaf."
They left more mansions in flames as they moved south. The Spaniards who took refuge with them cursed them because they didn't do more to put down the rebellious slaves. The slaves cursed them because they didn't do more to help the uprising. Getting sworn at by both sides at once suited Victor Radcliff fine. To him, it meant he was following about the right course.
He heard rumors the governor of Spanish Atlantis had let soldiers from French Atlantis come south to deal with the English settlers. He disbelieved those rumors as long as he could: if they proved true, they would make his life harder. But he sent scouts out to the north as well as to the south. The only thing worse than having the French settlers there would be having them there and getting taken by surprise.
A scout rode up from the south shouting, "The sea! The sea!"
"Why you smile?" Blaise asked Victor. "What so funny 'bout the sea?"
Blaise had never heard of Xenophon. Victor would have bet the scout never had, either. But more than 2,100 years earlier, the Greeks escaping the Persian Empire had raised that same cry-"Thalassa! Thalassa!"-when they finally came to the Black Sea.
For Xenophon's Greeks, coming to the sea meant finding the broad highway home. Things weren't so simple here. Who could say what kind of ships lay off the coast? Any at all? British? Spanish? French? All of them at once, banging away at one another as if these were the bad old days of the pirates of Avalon?
Victor again remembered Ethel Radcliffe, who'd shot his great-grandfather. Mule-headed stubbornness seemed to run through every branch of the Radcliff(e) line. He needed some of his own here, and some luck, if this venture wouldn't be remembered as another piece of Radcliff(e) damnfoolishness.