Blaise had already escaped the city. He and Victor had gone their separate ways precisely because they were known to stick together. Blaise had got away clean. Victor'd expected nothing less. Englishmen-Atlanteans, too-had trouble taking black men seriously.
And now it was time for Victor to get away himself, if he could. Coming into Hanover, he'd worn the clothes of a prosperous farmer, which he was. Leaving the city, he was by all appearances a down-at-the-heels shoemaker. He even rode a swaybacked nag, the kind of horse such a man would have if he had any horse at all.
The English had checkpoints west of Hanover. They also had men scattered between the checkpoints. If you got caught trying to sneak out, you landed in real trouble. Things at the checkpoints were supposed to come closer to routine.
They'd better, Victor thought. Up ahead of him, the redcoats were searching a fat man's carriage. The fat man didn't like it, and let them know he didn't. "I'm a loyal subject of good King George! It's not right for you to treat me like a common criminal," he said.
"Everybody's a loyal subject… when he talks to us," said the underofficer in charge. "Find anything, Charles?"
"No, Sergeant. He's not a smuggler, anyhow," said a soldier, presumably Charles. "Do we strip him to his drawers?"
"No. I expect he's clean." The sergeant nodded to the fat man. "Pass on, you."
"Strip me to my drawers?" the fat man spluttered. "You'll win few friends playing such games."
"And do you think we care?" the sergeant said. "If you settlers weren't in revolt, we wouldn't have to worry about keeping you from sneaking guns out of Hanover. If you haven't got guns, who cares if you're friendly or not? Now get going, or we will find out if your linen's clean."
Still spluttering, the fat man rolled on. The soldier called Charles gestured Victor Radcliff forward. "And who are you, friend?" he asked.
No friend of yours, Victor thought. "My name is Richard Saunders," he replied. Some Radcliffs and Radcliffes favored the English; the clan was too large to have uniform opinions. But if the redcoats knew they had hold of Victor Radcliff, they'd never let him go.
"Well, Saunders, what are you doing coming out of Hanover?" the sergeant asked. "Where are you bound?"
"I'm heading for Hooville," Victor answered, which was true, although he wouldn't stop there. Then he blossomed into invention: "I was seeing my solicitor. My uncle just died childless, and looks like I'll have to go to law with my cousins over his property and estate." He tried to seem suitably disgusted.
The sergeant and Charles and the rest of the redcoats put their heads together. "Are you loyal to his Majesty, King George III?" the underofficer demanded fiercely.
"Of course I am." Victor lied without compunction. As the redcoat had said to the fat man, who would tell George's soldiers no?
And the English soldiers' crooked grins said they understood the likely reason for his answer. "Then you won't mind if we search you?" the sergeant asked.
"Yes, I'll mind," Victor said. "Not much I can do about it past minding, though, is there?"
"Too right there's not, friend." Charles used the last word to suggest anything but its literal meaning. "Why don't you get down from that sorry piece of crowbait you're riding?"
"Sam's a good horse," Victor protested. The redcoats laughed. In their boots, he would have laughed, too.
They patted him down and looked inside his saddle bags. They found nothing to make them suspicious-Victor wanted to look as harmless as he could. The sergeant still seemed unhappy. "You've fought in war," he said, and it wasn't quite a question.
Victor nodded. "I fought the French here, back about the time your beard sprouted."
The English underofficer scratched at a side whisker. "We were on the same side then, England and Atlantis."
"I am on England's side still," Victor Radcliff said once more. "Yes, of course you are." The sergeant didn't believe it, not for a second. But he had no real reason to disbelieve it, no proof Radcliff was anything but what he claimed. He looked unhappy, but he jerked a thumb toward the swaybacked horse. "Climb on your old screw and get out of here."
"Obliged." Victor pretended not to notice his reservations. When he mounted Sam, the deep curve in the horse's spine left the stirrups only a few inches above the ground. He pressed his knees against the animal's sides and flicked the reins. Away Sam went. He'd get where he was going, but he wouldn't do it in a hurry.
Don't look over your shoulder, Victor told himself. He didn't want to give the redcoats any more chances to see his face. Sam ambled along. The soldiers could still call him back. They could, but they didn't. The road swung around behind a stand of native pines. Only then did Victor breathe easier.
He was riding a better horse by the time he came to Hooville. Someone took Sam back to the farm where he'd labored for a lot of years. Maybe his role in helping Victor escape Hanover would be celebrated in songs and paintings in years to come. He couldn't have cared less. All he got out of it were a couple of carrots. Blaise waited in Hooville. "Good to see you," he said when
Victor rode in. "I wasn't sure I was going to."
"Well, neither was I," Victor said. "But here I am. They didn't know they had me in their hands, and now they don't, and so they won't."
"Custis Cawthorne is loose, too. He's on his way to New Hastings," Blaise said.
"Good for him-and that's the right place for him to go, too," Radcliff said. New Hastings held fewer loyalists than any other town in English Atlantis. Other places might be noisier in their disapproval of the mother country, but it ran deeper and wider there than anywhere else.
"Not everybody's going to get away, though. The redcoats do hold Hanover," Blaise said. "What can we do?"
"Right now? I don't quite know. If this is truly war…" Victor Radcliff no doubt looked as unhappy as he sounded. If this was truly war, Atlantis stood alone against the mightiest empire in the world. "If this is war, I see only one advantage on our side."
Blaise raised an eyebrow. "Well, that's one more than I see."
"Oh, we've got one." Victor waved to the barmaid for another mug of flip. He'd drunk enough that he should have felt it, but he didn't, or not very much. As she set the mug in front of him, he went on, "We're a long way from England. She can't move quickly against us, and she won't find it easy or cheap to ship soldiers across the sea."
After a moment's consideration, Blaise said, "Huzzah."
Victor wondered whether the Negro had been so sardonic in the African jungles where he grew up, or whether Blaise had learned it from him. If the latter was true, as he feared, then he had a lot to answer for. Sardonic or not, the Negro had a point with his sour acclamation. Atlantis had merchantmen and fishing boats to oppose the Royal Navy, farmers to face professional soldiers. She was short of gunpowder, and even shorter of firearms. And she was short of people-and how many of the ones she had would take England's side?
"What will the French down south do?" Blaise asked.
"Good question," Radcliff said. French Atlantis had passed under English rule only a dozen years before. Since then, the more numerous English-speakers had flooded into lands formerly barred to them. Would the older settlers rise against King George, or against the interlopers disrupting their way of life?
"Have you got an answer?" Blaise seemed surprised to discover his mug of flip was also empty. He waved for a refill, too. "Only We'll have to see," Victor replied. The barmaid didn't come back for Blaise as fast as she had for Victor. Was that because he was servant, not master? Because he was black, not white? Or only because she had other orders to fill first? Sometimes you could read too much into things that in fact carried no great meaning. Sometimes you could miss meanings in things that seemed ordinary at first.
Blaise brushed two fingers of his right hand against the dark skin of his left forearm. Victor had seen Negroes use that gesture before. It meant. You did that because of my color. His factotum knew what he thought, then. And he knew what he thought of Victor's comment as welclass="underline" "Is that good enough?"