A boy took the travelers' horses. Victor tipped him a penny apiece for them. The boy grinned, knuckled his forelock, and made the broad copper coins disappear.
Smoke and noise greeted Victor and Blaise when they walked into the tavern. The taproom was nearly full. A pockmarked man raised his tankard in salute. "Here's to the major!" he called.
"To the major!" Mugs rose. Men drank. A dozen years earlier, Victor had been the highest-ranking officer from the English Atlantean settlements in the war against France and Spain. He saw several people here who he knew had fought under him. Some he knew by name. Others were just familiar faces.
"And here's to the major's shadow!" shouted the fellow who'd hailed him before. Amidst laughter, the topers drank again. Blaise smiled, his teeth white against his dark skin. What he thought was anyone's guess. But, as a practical man, he must have known he couldn't keep people from noticing and remarking on his blackness.
"Let's get us something to drink," he said. "Now you're talking," Victor replied. They made their way over to the tapman and ordered mugs of flip. The potent mix of rum and beer, sweetened with sugar and mulled with a hot poker, went a long way toward letting a man forget he'd been in the saddle all day-or, if he didn't forget, at least he didn't mind so much.
"Something for your supper, gents?" By the way the tapman said it, he was stretching a point to include Blaise in that, but stretch the point he did. Nodding toward the big fireplace, he went on, "My brother-in-law shot a wild boar this morning, so if you hanker for pork…"
"Bring it on, sir, bring it on," Victor said expansively: the flip was hitting him hard. Blaise nodded. Victor lifted his mug on high. "And God bless your brother-in-law, for turning an ugly beast into a fine supper."
"Good to think God will bless him for something," the tap-man said. But then, men who spoke well of their brothers-in-law were few and far between.
The cheap earthenware plates were locally made. So were the pewter forks. Victor and Blaise cut the pork with their belt knives. They drank more flip and listened to the Hooville gossip. Part of that was the inevitable local scandaclass="underline" So-and-So had run off with Such-and-Such's daughter, while Mr. Somebody was supposed to be paying entirely too much attention to Mrs. Someone Else.
Mr. Somebody had some sympathy among the Hoovilleans. "Can you blame him, when the body he's stuck with is cold as Greenland winter?" a well-lubricated fellow asked.
"How do you know?" cried another drinker, and everybody laughed.
Sooner or later, though, the talk veered toward politics, the way it did in any tavern sooner or later. "Major, how come England thinks it can tax us here?" somebody asked Victor. "Doesn't the king recollect our grandsires crossed the ocean to get away from all that nonsense?"
As far as Victor knew, his many-times-great-grandsire came to Atlantis because of the cod banks offshore. Men still fished those banks today, even if the man-sized monster cod the old chronicles talked about had grown rare. But cod weren't what this fellow was talking about. Radcliff had to pick his words with care: "The king recollects that he spent a pile of money keeping the French from taking these settlements away from us. He wants to get some of it back."
"He's got no right to do it the way he's doing it, though," the man insisted. "England can't tax us, not in law. Only we can tax ourselves."
"That's how we see it. England sees it differently." Again, Victor spoke carefully. Ordinary people could talk as free as they pleased. No one cared about them. But chances were somebody in this crowded room would report his words to the English authorities… and someone else would report them to the local leaders squabbling with those authorities. He didn't want either side to conclude he was a traitor.
He didn't want the two sides banging heads, either. Whether he could do anything to stop them might be a different question.
Another man banged his mug down hard on the tabletop in front of him. "Me, I'm damned if I'll buy anything that comes from England, as long as she's going to play these dirty games," he declared. "We can make do with what we turn out for ourselves."
"That's right!" someone else shouted. Heads bobbed up and down. Support for the latest boycott ran strong.
A hundred years earlier, the settlers couldn't have done without England. The mother country made too many things they couldn't make for themselves. No more. Oh, some luxury goods, furs and silks and furniture and fripperies, still came from across the sea. But Atlantis could do without those, even if certain rich Atlanteans-some of them Radcliffs and Radcliffes-still pined for them.
"D'you buy English, Major?" asked the man who'd said the king had no right to tax Atlanteans.
A hush fell. Everyone waited on Victor's answer. He passed it off with a laugh, or tried to: "What? This far inland? I didn't think they let English goods get past the coast."
When the laugh rose, it was an angry one. England might think of the Atlantean settlers as bumpkins one and all. The rich merchants in the seaside towns resented what the English thought of them-and thought the same thing of their inland cousins.
"You can't win. No matter who you are, you can't win," Blaise said. The color of his skin gave him uncommon authority on such questions.
"Someone will have to win, I think," Victor said later that evening, hoping the mattress he'd lie down on wouldn't be buggy.
"Mm-maybe." Blaise still didn't sound convinced. "When he wins-if he wins-will he be happy in the end?"
Victor said the only thing he could: "I don't know." He blew out the candle he'd carried from the taproom. It was guttering towards an end anyhow. The landlord wasn't about to waste a quarter of a farthing by giving a customer any more light than he absolutely had to. Darkness fell on the bedchamber like a cloak. Victor fell asleep before he found out whether the mattress held bedbugs-but not before Blaise, whose first snores he heard as darkness came down on them.
By the time Victor and his colored companion got to Hanover, they were both scratching. One inn or another-or, more likely, one inn and another-had proved buggy. Victor was more resigned than surprised. Blaise was more apt to complain about big things than small ones.
Hanover was a big thing, at least by Atlantean standards. With about 40,000 people, it claimed to be the largest city in Atlantis. Of course, so did New Hastings, farther south. And so did Freetown, south of New Hastings. Croydon, north of Hanover, also had its pretensions, though only locals took them seriously.
Down in French Atlantis, Cosquer might have been half the size of the leading English settlement towns. Of course, most of the people who'd flocked there since the end of the war came from one English settlement or another. The same held true for the still smaller St. Denis, south of Cosquer, and for New Marseille, smaller yet, on the west coast of Atlantis. As for Avalon, north of New Marseille, it wasn't a pirates' nest any more, but it remained a law (or no law) unto itself. Nobody could say how many people lived there, which suited those who did just fine.
None of Atlantis' leading cities would have been anything more than a provincial town in England or on the Continent. Even Terranova to the west, settled later by Europeans, boasted larger human anthills than any here. Of course, the Spaniards, who dominated the richer parts of the western continent, built on the wreckage of what the copper-skinned natives had done before they arrived. Atlantis was different. Atlantis was a fresh start.
Cross-topped spires dominated Hanover's skyline. Churches here and farther north were Anglican or belonged to one of the sterner Protestant denominations. Officially, New Hastings and points south were also Anglican. Unofficially, Popery thrived there. The southerly English settlements in Atlantis were a lifetime older than the Reformation. Kings had always had trouble enforcing their will here. Sensible sovereigns didn't try too hard. Victor's mouth tightened. George III and his ministers seemed unwilling to stay sensible.