Soldiers' encampments dotted the fields outside of town. The men in them wore whatever they would have worn at home. They carried whatever muskets they happened to own. None but a few veterans of the fight against French Atlantis had the faintest conception of military discipline. But they were there-till the terms for which they'd enlisted ran out, anyhow.
And they were enthusiastic. They cheered Victor whenever he flags: some showed honkers, others fierce red-crested eagles. Real honkers and the eagles that preyed on them-and on men-were rare almost to extinction in this long-settled part of Atlantis. They were growing scarcer everywhere, from what Victor had heard.
That was the least of his worries. Turning enthusiastic militia-* men into real soldiers was a bigger one. Keeping those militiamen fed well enough to fight might have been a bigger one yet. And dealing with the Atlantean Assembly towered over all of the others.
It was, Victor supposed, as close to a native government as Atlantis had. But it wasn't very close. Atlanteans had never liked being governed; that was one of the reasons they or their ancestors came to Atlantis in the first place. It was one of the reasons they fought England now. And it was one of the reasons the Assembly was what it was and wasn't anything more.
It couldn't tax. It could ask the settlements for money to support it and what it did, but couldn't compel them to give it any. It decided things by two-thirds majority vote. If fewer than two-thirds of the settlements voted in favor of any measure, it failed. If two-thirds or more did vote for it, it passed-but still wasn't binding on the settlements whose delegations voted no. It wasn't quite the Polish liberum veto-but it wasn't far removed, either.
With an organization like that, the Atlantean settlements seriously proposed to beat the greatest empire the world had seen since Roman days. That struck Victor as madness-a glorious madness, maybe, but madness even so.
It struck Blaise the same way. "You know the English, they are going to fight," he said when he and Victor got settled into their room at an inn not far from the old redwood church.
"Well, yes," Victor agreed, splashing water from the basin onto his hands and face. Whiskers rasped under his chin. He hadn't shaved coming down from his farm. Unless he was going to grow a beard-something only frontiersmen did in Atlantis-he needed to take care of that. He went on, "We wouldn't have come here if they were just going to sail away."
"But this Atlantean Assembly… This militia…" Blaise's African accent made the words sound faintly ridiculous. By the way he shook his head, that was the least of how he felt about them. "They are a joke. If they had to decide to go to the privy, they would shit themselves halfway there."
Victor snorted, not because he thought the Negro was wrong but because he thought Blaise was right. "They're what Atlantis has," he said.
"I know," Blaise replied. "This is what worries me. Maybe you should go home and not tell the English you were ever here."
"Too late for that," Victor Radcliff said. "We are going to fight them. The way things are, we cannot avoid fighting them. We have a better chance if I do what I can than if I don't. I had to explain all this to my wife before we set out."
"I know," Blaise said again. "I had to explain to my wife, too. I know what England has. Now I see what we have. I think I was a fool." He didn't say he thought Victor was a fool; that would have been rude. Whether he thought it or not was a different question,
"No one is keeping you here against your will. You were a slave in French Atlantis. You are no man's slave now-certainly not mine," Victor said. "If you do not care to be here, you may leave. You may surrender to the English and tell them everything you know. Chances are they'll make you an officer if you do."
"Thank you, but no," Blaise replied with dignity. "Atlantis is my land, too, now. I do not want to leave it. My roots here are not as old as yours, but they are firm. I want to make this place better if lean."
Victor Radcliff held out his hand. "In that we are certainly agreed." Blaise clasped hands with him.
The Atlantean Assembly met in the church, it being the building in New Hastings best suited to containing their number. On Sundays, most of the Assemblymen worshiped there. Some few, from New Hastings and points south, were of the Romish persuasion, and found other ways and places to commune with God as they saw fit. And from Croydon in the north came Benjamin Benveniste, the Assembly's one and only Jew.
Some people said he was the richest man in Atlantis. Others, more conservative, called him the richest man not a Radcliff or Radcliffe. Benveniste would always laugh and deny everything. Victor didn't know if the Jew was wealthier than some of his own merchant kinsmen. He was sure Benveniste had more money than he did himself.
"What difference does it make?" Benveniste replied when another Assemblyman asked him just how rich he was. "The more I have, the more others think they can take from me. Wealth is a burden, nothing less."
The other Assemblyman was from New Grinstead, a backwoods town with not much wealth and not much else. Wistfully, he said, "I'd be a donkey if it meant I could carry more."
"Chasing money too hard will make an ass of anyone," Benjamin Benveniste said-a shot close to the center of the target.
"Well, what does that make you?" the other Assemblyman said.
Benveniste sent him a hooded glance. "A patriot, sir-if you will let me be."
"We have room for everyone here," Custis Cawthorne said before the man from the backwoods could reply. "Why, look at me- they have even made room for a scurrilous printer. Next to that, what does it matter if you're Christian or Jew or Mahometan?"
Plainly, several people thought it did matter. None of them felt like antagonizing Cawthorne, though-he could be as scurrilous! in oral debate as he was when setting type.
"I am able to care for myself, Custis," Benveniste said.
"I didn't do it for you." Cawthorne sounded surprised. "I did it for Atlantis."
"Ah." The Jew nodded. "Well, that I have no trouble with."
By easy stages, the debate drifted around toward formally appointing Victor Radcliff commander of the Atlantean forces in arms against the British Empire. Nothing the Atlantean Assembly did seemed to move very fast. When men from all the settlements came together to protest to the mother country, that was one thing. When they aimed to conduct a war against that mother country, it was liable to be something else again.
Victor wondered if telling the Assemblymen as much would do any good. He decided it would only put their backs up. He would have to work with them for-how long? Till the war was over, one way or the other. If it was the other…
"We have to win" Custis Cawthorne said. "If we lose, they will hang us pour encourager les autres. Do I say that correctly, Monsieur
du Guesclin?"
"If you mean it ironically, then yes," replied the man from what had been French Atlantis. "Otherwise, you would do better to say pour deeourager les autres"
"Getting my neck stretched would certainly discourage me," Cawthorne said, "but I was alluding to the eminent Voltaire's remarks about the reason why the English hanged Admiral Byng."
Several Assemblymen smiled and nodded. So did Victor Radcliff, who admired Voltaire's trenchant wit. But a storm cloud passed across Michel du Guesclin's darkly handsome features. "Speak to me not of that man, if you would be so kind. He believes not in God nor in the holy Catholic Church."
"Look around you, Monsieur" Cawthorne advised, not unkindly. "I will not speak of any man's belief in God save my own, and then only with reluctance, but you will find precious few of Romish opinions here in New Hastings."