Liberating Atlantis

XII

More hard rain further slowed the army's march to New Marseille. Even after the soldiers got there, Leland Newton reminded himself, New Hastings would be a while learning of their misfortune. A ship or a land traveler would have to carry the news. The rebels had proved much too good at cutting telegraph lines. All the southern ones seemed to be out. Maybe a working line still ran from New Marseille up to Avalon. Even if one did, it wouldn't help much. There'd been talk of stringing wires from New Hastings to Avalon, but it hadn't happened yet.

Frederick Radcliff's irregulars kept sniping at the Atlantean soldiers, rain or no rain. "The reports said the damned insurrectionists somehow got their hands on proper percussion pieces," Jeremiah Stafford grumbled. "Why couldn't they have been wrong for once?"

"It could be worse," Newton said.

"Of course it could," the other Consul said. "They could have got their hands on a couple of batteries of field guns, too? Wouldn't that be delightful?"

Newton thought how he'd like to be on the receiving end of a cannonade. "Now that you mention it, no," he answered. He might sympathize with the downtrodden Negroes and copperskins, but not enough to lay his life on the altar in expiation for generations of white men's sins.

And then, just as he'd said it could, it proceeded to get worse. First one soldier and then several more came down with yellow fever. That did nothing to improve the morale of the men who managed to escape it. A good number of them were down with a bloody flux of the bowels. It was less dramatic than the yellow jack, which didn't mean it was a sickness anyone would want.

A few men trickled away. Colonel Sinapis responded by setting out even more sentries than he was already posting. Desertions slowed, though they didn't quite stop. Newton suspected more soldiers would have tried skedaddling had they not feared what might happen if the rebels caught them.

"God in heaven!" Stafford said. "The way things are going, I wonder whether we deserve to win."

"I've wondered all along," Newton said, drawing an irate glare from his colleague.

Colonel Sinapis looked at things from a different angle. "You must remember, your Excellency-these are green troops," he told Stafford. "Many of them have been in the army for years and years, but they are green anyhow, because whom has Atlantis fought in all that time?"

Instead of reacting to the obvious justice of the comment, Stafford only muttered, "Whom," as if he were a grammatical owl.

"Accusative case, is it not?" Sinapis said. "English is not my native tongue, but I do not care to make mistakes using it."

"You were accurate," Newton assured him. "You were more accurate than many people who grew up speaking English would have been."

"Oh. One of those," Colonel Sinapis said. "Every language has them, I suppose. They are like ambushes, set in place to trap the unwary."

A breeze from off the Hesperian Gulf blew the rain clouds to the east. It brought with it the scent of the sea. Newton was familiar with that sharp salt tang, of course; he couldn't very well not be, not when he'd spent most of his life in Croydon and New Hastings. But he thought the Hesperian Gulf smelled fresher than the ocean off the east coast of Atlantis. It probably was no coincidence that less sewage went into the Gulf than into the ocean off the East Coast.

A sentry rode back to the army and said, "Looks like there's a bunch of spooks and coppers laying for us up ahead."

"Can we give them a surprise for a change?" Consul Stafford asked.

"I command today," Newton said pointedly.

"Do you not wish to surprise the enemy?" Colonel Sinapis asked him.

Part of him wanted to say yes. If he did, he could get away with it-for the day. Sooner or later, though, the news would get back to New Hastings. Odds were it would get back in whatever distorted form Stafford chose to use. And Newton had discovered he liked getting shot at no better than any other human being.

Not without reluctance, he replied, "Proceed as you think best, Colonel."

"Maybe you are smarter than you look," Stafford said.

After a salute that might have come from a clockwork mechanism, Sinapis conferred with the scout. Then he sent a cavalry screen forward to keep the insurrectionists from getting a good view of anything else he was doing. With luck, the flanking party that hurried off to the right would do unto the enemy what he wanted to do unto the Atlantean army.

With luck… The thought brought Newton up short. The soldiers hadn't had much, not so far in this campaign.

He didn't need to wait long for another lesson on the dubious joys of being the target of flying lead. The rebels lurking among the ferns at the edge of a stand of hemlocks opened up on the Atlanteans from cleverly concealed positions.

Those positions didn't stay concealed for long, of course. When a rifle musket went off, it spat a long tongue of fire. And a cloud of black-powder smoke rose above the man who'd fired. If anyone ever invented gunpowder that didn't smoke, he'd make a fortune. Nobody'd come close to doing it yet.

"Return fire!" Colonel Sinapis shouted.

Quite a few of his men had already started shooting back without orders. They marched with loaded weapons, something they wouldn't do in anything but the most dangerous country. Two or three Atlantean soldiers fell. Screams rang out. One man, though, went down like a dropped rag doll. Shot through the head, he'd never get up again.

As they had more than once before, the Atlanteans in gray advanced on the ragged Negroes and copperskins harrying them. Before long, the rebels would slide back into the woods and disappear. Then the whole miserable process would start over a few miles farther down the road.

That was what the rebels thought, anyway. It was how things had worked out the last time they tried this stunt, and the time before that. It wasn't how things worked out today. As the copperskins and blacks started their withdrawal, the flanking column hit them. A great thunder of musketry from their left-the Atlantean army's right-announced the collision.

"That'll shift them!" Colonel Stafford yelled. "The biter bit-and let's see how the sons of bitches like being on the receiving end!"

By all the signs, the rebels liked it not a bit. That didn't surprise Leland Newton. In war more than perhaps in anything else, it was better to give than to receive.

Now that the rebels had to fight the flanking party, they couldn't simply fade away. The main body of the Atlantean army got into the scrap at close quarters. The soldiers had a lot of pent-up rage to vent.

Thinking about that, Newton turned to Balthasar Sinapis. "Colonel, don't you think you ought to order your men to take prisoners?" he said.

"Why?" Stafford yelped, as if he'd proposed requiring the soldiers to start practicing some unnatural vice.

Newton looked at him. "If you have learned the art of interrogating corpses, your Excellency, I hope you will be good enough to acquaint the rest of us with it."

"You mock me, sir." By the way Stafford said it, his seconds would confer with Newton's at any moment to arrange the terms and time of the duel. The code duello wasn't dead south of the Stour, so maybe that was exactly what he had in mind.

Whether he did or not, Newton didn't. "Don't be a bigger blockhead than you can help," he said, which made Stafford gape. He went on, "You've been mocking me since before we left New Hastings. Have you seen me take offense?"

"Some people are more sensitive to slights than others," Stafford said, but his heart didn't seem to be in the quarrel any more.

Newton looked back to Colonel Sinapis. "Prisoners," he prompted.

"Yes, yes. The point is well taken." Sinapis gave orders to a captain, and sent the junior officer forward to convey them to the troops. Then he sighed. "I hope they will heed him."

That hadn't occurred to Newton. When he thought of an order, he thought of its being obeyed without fail. But men and all their works were imperfect. What ever happened without fail?

Some captured rebels might have got shot or bayoneted, there in the woods with no one but angry Atlantean soldiers to see the job done. This was one of those places where asking too many questions didn't look like the best idea in the world. All the same, the soldiers did lead out more than a dozen disgruntled rebels, most with their hands tied behind them, a few with nooses already around their necks.

"We ought to smoke them over a slow fire," Stafford said. "That would give us what we need to know, and in a hurry, too."

"In my experience, torturing prisoners is usually more trouble than it is worth," Colonel Sinapis said. "Not always, and not in all circumstances, but usually. A better way is to question them separately, telling each man his answers will be compared to those of the others. Anyone whose answers do not match his friends' will know he is to be singled out for punishment. This has proved a good way to get at the truth."

It struck Consul Newton as a good way to get at the truth, too. "Let's do that, then," he said eagerly. Too eagerly? he wondered. Maybe so, but he had no stomach for tormenting captives.

And even Jeremiah Stafford gave a grudging nod. "We can try it," he said. "First."

Sinapis carefully instructed the men he told off to question the captives. Chances were he didn't think they'd be gentle without careful instruction. Chances were he was right, too.

"Do we keep moving toward New Marseille?" Newton asked him. "Or do we wait to see what we find out? If we can strike at the heart of the uprising…" Had he just said that? Damned if he hadn't.

Stafford neither sneered at him nor clapped him on the back. That other Consul left him to stew in his own juices. That was liable to mean Stafford was cleverer than Newton had given him credit for: one more worrisome thought among so many others.

"I don't know, your Excellency. You are the commander… today." Colonel Sinapis' long face showed what he thought of Atlantean practice. It certainly had some flaws the framers of the Charter hadn't thought of. The colonel continued, "I am here, as I understand my position, to put your orders and those of Consul Stafford into effect. As long as I am doing that, I may legitimately give orders of my own. Otherwise, those orders lie outside my region of responsibility." His fleshy nostrils quivered. No, he didn't like Atlantean arrangements even a cent's worth.

"I am not asking you for orders, Colonel," Newton said, as diplomatically as he could. "I am asking for your opinion, for your professional judgment."

"Ah. My opinion. That, I am certain, is worth its weight in gold." Sinapis could be formidably sardonic in a language not his own. "My opinion, your Excellency, is that it is better to put out a fire while it is still small, because dousing one after you let it get bigger will be much harder."

Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford. Again, his colleague failed to rise to the bait. Newton wondered whether something was wrong with him. He had the perfect chance to tax Newton for not letting the army move sooner-and didn't use it. Such restraint seemed out of character.

Or maybe Stafford was letting events bludgeon Newton. Even if in the abstract you admired someone's cause, it was much harder to feel loving-kindness toward him after he'd almost killed you. Newton had had that thought before. It came home to roost again.

He deliberately turned his back on the other Consul. Stafford's soft chuckle said he had much too good an idea of what Newton was thinking. Ignoring it, Newton addressed Colonel Sinapis: "You want to go after Frederick Radcliff, then, if we find the chance?"

"I do." Sinapis dipped his head, which he seemed to do more often than not in place of nodding. Newton thought again of Zeus in the Iliad. Sinapis made a mournful, bedraggled excuse for a Greek god. Well, what these days was so fine as it had been once upon a time? The officer's figure of speech wasn't Greek at all: "Maybe we can put the genie back into the bottle after all. Do they tell that story in Atlantis?"

Newton had heard it or read it, though he couldn't remember where or when. Stafford did. "'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,'" he said, and Colonel Sinapis dipped his head again. The other Consul added, "Ali Baba may be stuck in The Arabian Nights, but, believe me, the thieves made the crossing here ahead of you."

"It would not surprise me," Sinapis said. "I have never found a place where thieves did not make the crossing. Perhaps heaven is such a place. Perhaps not, too…" A long pause. "We shall pursue Frederick Radcliff, then, given that chance?"

"We shall," Newton and Stafford said together. They eyed each other suspiciously. Newton couldn't guess which of them that agreement bothered more.

Colonel Sinapis looked most dubious as he peered up from the ground at Jeremiah Stafford on horseback. "Are you sure you must ride with them, your Excellency?" he asked in tones that couldn't have meant anything but Are you out of your mind, your Excellency?

But Stafford nodded. "You'd best believe I am, Colonel. If they-if we-catch the rebel, I can make sure he gets what's coming to him on the spot."

"A written order carried by the commander of the raiding party would accomplish the same thing," Sinapis said.

"No doubt. But I would not see it happen," Stafford said.

The colonel sighed. "Have it your way, then. You will anyhow. I cannot give you orders-only suggestions. Still, if you slow down the men with whom you ride, you will make them less likely to do what you most want done."

Flicked on his vanity, Stafford said, "I won't slow them down."

He hadn't been riding long before he wondered if he'd told Sinapis the truth. The raiders were mostly young, bandy-legged, and small. They spoke in gleeful obscenities. And they seemed to think the presence of an Atlantean Consul was the funniest thing they'd ever run into.

"If I was back in the real world," one of them said to him, "I'd think holding slaves was the wickedest thing a man could do." The trooper's accent proclaimed him a northern man, from Hanover or possibly Croydon.

"The real world?" Stafford waved. The ferns and grass and hemlocks and barrel trees all around seemed real enough to him and then some. "What do you call this?"

"This here?" The cavalryman thought the question was pretty funny, too. "Your Excellency, this here is fucking Nowhere with a capital N." His friends on horseback nodded. They thought it was fucking Nowhere, too.

And they had a point. The only work of man in sight, besides the narrow road that might have started its career as a honker track, was a ruined, tumbledown shack. Stafford didn't think the insurrection was the reason it was empty. By the look of it, nobody'd lived in it for the past twenty years.

"How do you feel about slaves rising up and killing their lawful masters?" Stafford asked. "How do you like it when they try to kill you and your friends?"

"On account of something's lawful, that don't make it right," the young soldier answered. "But the other part of that there… You'll have to wait a while before you find the next fella who tells you he's only happy when some God-damned son of a bitch is shooting at him."

Again, the other cavalrymen nodded. Consul Stafford would have been hard-pressed to tell the northern man he was mistaken. The captain leading the detachment glanced down at something in his hand-a sketch map, Stafford supposed. But for the gold braid on his hat and the three stars on each side of his collar, he looked little different from his men: not much older than they were, either.

"We swing in here," he said, pointing down an even narrower track toward the dark woods ahead. "Lousy rebels are in there. We pitch into 'em from the flank, drive 'em off, and snatch the shitheel who tells 'em what to do." Stafford couldn't place him by the way he talked. Maybe he'd come from England or Ireland when he was young. He didn't seem hesitant about what they were doing, anyhow. That was good. An officer who didn't believe in the cause for which he was fighting could easily contrive to botch his mission while making the failure look like an accident.

As soon as they got to the edge of the woods, the captain told off horse-holders to tend to the other men's mounts. He didn't choose very many, which pleased Stafford: he wanted to get as many soldiers as he could into the fight.

They plunged into the woods. Some of the cavalrymen carried carbines. Others had eight-shooters at the ready. Stafford had a revolver himself. A carbine or a rifle musket could easily outrange it. In a forest where you couldn't see past pistol range, though, so what? And, with eight bullets in the cylinder, he could put a lot of lead in the air in a hurry if he had to.

Would the insurrectionists even bother posting sentries on their flanks? Copperskins and Negroes were notoriously lazy and shiftless, so Stafford wouldn't have been surprised if they didn't. But that thought had hardly crossed his mind before somebody let out a startled, "Who's there?"

"The Atlantean army and the Lord Jehovah!" the captain answered, stealing a line one of Victor Radcliff's officers had used a lifetime earlier.

"Well, shit!" the enemy lookout exclaimed. If the redcoats had said anything like that in response to the Atlanteans long ago, it hadn't got into the history books. It probably wouldn't get into the history books now. The shooting started a couple of seconds later. Shooting would make the books. Shooting always did.

Bullets cracked past people. They slammed into tree trunks. They whispered through the undergrowth, cutting leaves and fronds as they went. And a few of them smacked into soft flesh. Shrieks rose up along with the shots and the fireworks smell of gunpowder smoke.

Something up ahead moved. Jeremiah Stafford thought it did, anyway. He squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked and roared in his hand. Maybe he drilled a vicious Negro right between the eyes and dropped him to the forest floor before he could even blink. Or maybe he'd wasted a bullet on ferns stirred by a vagrant breeze. Unless he tripped over a corpse on his way forward, he'd never know.

On the Terranovan mainland, they called something like this a copperskin fight. Both sides hid behind trees and shot at each other as they tried to move. The savages on the western mainland used bows and arrows, too: silent, unnerving weapons. The copperskins here banged away like their black brethren.

So did the Atlantean cavalrymen. They still had the advantage of surprise, and tried to make the most of it. Frederick Radcliff was in there somewhere. The faster they could grab him, the better.

When Stafford ran forward, his shoes sank into the ground. His feet felt wet-water was leaking in. Almost without his noticing, the hemlocks and pines were giving way to moss-draped cypresses. A flapjack turtle stared at him out of cold yellow eyes from a puddle-one of too many puddles that suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere.

"Sweet suffering Jesus!" he exclaimed. "We're in a swamp!"

The cavalrymen had made the same unwelcome discovery at about the same time. Their complaints were even more heartfelt, and much more profane. Stafford started swearing, too, though he was an amateur alongside virtuosos. It might have been funny if it weren't so revolting. This whole mission had been predicated on speed and surprise. Surprise was gone, shot dead by an alert sentry. As for speed… How could you do anything in a hurry with mud trying to suck the shoes off your feet, and maybe trying to suck you down into it?

Another maybe crossed Stafford's mind. Maybe the insurrectionists' leader wasn't so foolish to base himself in a place like this. Maybe he wasn't so foolish, period. That might have made the Consul wonder whether Negroes and copperskins generally were as foolish as he'd always thought. It might have, but it didn't. Instead, it made him decide that Frederick Radcliff had his grandfather's blood in him, all right.

"Those lying, poxed-!" The captain's furious voice broke off, as if he couldn't find anything bad enough to say about the people he had in mind, whoever they were. That came a moment later, when he tried again: "Nobody said anything about this being a God-damned mudhole!"

Back in the Atlantean camp, the captured insurrectionists would no doubt claim their captors hadn't asked them the right questions. Technically, Stafford supposed they'd be telling the truth. All the same, he couldn't help wondering what would have happened had the soldiers hurt them a little, or more than a little, to make sure they weren't withholding.

It couldn't very well have turned out worse.

"Snake!" a trooper wailed on a rising note of horror. "Lousy snake just bit me!" That gave Stafford one more thing to worry about: not what he needed at such a crowded moment.

"Frederick Radcliff!" the captain shouted. "Come out and surrender, Frederick Radcliff!"

A chorus of voices told him what he could do with his surrender. Their curses showed more ingenuity than Consul Stafford would have expected from such a pack of colored riffraff. "Go after them!" Stafford called. "The more noise, the more insurrectionists, and the more likely we are to catch our man."

He wondered whether they would know their man even if they caught him. What exactly did Frederick Radcliff look like? Who would bother painting a slave's portrait? Nobody-no money in it. And the leader of the uprising wasn't likely to have sat stock-still for a newfangled photograph, either. Stafford pictured Frederick Radcliff as looking like his famous grandfather, only with dark skin and kinky hair. That might be right, or it might not. He wasn't sure within twenty years how old the jumped-up slave was. That might make things harder, too.

But much harder? Stafford didn't think so. Some Judas among the insurrectionists would give their leader away if he saw him. Maybe the copperskin or black wouldn't do it on purpose. An involuntary gasp of surprise would serve well enough, though. And then Frederick Radcliff would dance on air or face a firing squad or suffer whatever other lethal fate his captors decided upon.

And then… what? Would the insurrection quietly fold up and fail because the man who started it got what was coming to him? Stafford hoped so. That was why the raiding party had come here, after all.

But what would happen if someone else-that damned arrogant Lorenzo, say-kept things going even after Frederick Radcliff was dead and gone? What would happen farther east, where slaves were rising up even though chances were they'd barely heard of Frederick Radcliff?

Stafford muttered under his breath. It wasn't a happy kind of muttering. The closer he looked at the insurrection, the worse it seemed. Back in New Hastings, he'd thought everything was simple. Sally forth, slaughter the insurrectionists, and march home in triumph.

He hadn't imagined the uprising was like the Hydra, sprouting two heads for each one you chopped off. But just because he hadn't imagined it back in New Hastings, that didn't mean it wasn't so.

To make matters worse, the enemy must have heard his well- intentioned advice to the cavalrymen. The Negroes and copperskins started making a racket first here, then there, then somewhere else. Anyone who tried following the trail of noise would be chasing a will-o'-the-wisp.

Panting, his heart pounding, Stafford thought, Sinapis was right, damn him. I am too old for this. He pushed through the ferns anyhow. Maybe he would stumble over Frederick Radcliff. Maybe-a bigger unlikelihood, however little he cared to admit it to himself-he would recognize the rebel leader if he did stumble over him. Or maybe something else worthwhile would happen.

Something else did happen, worthwhile or not. The green curtain in front of him parted. A Negro carrying a musket he must have stolen off a planter's wall was also hurrying forward. They stared at each other in mutual shock and horror for a split second, the dapper, middle-aged white man and the young black in filthy, ragged clothes. Then, after simultaneous gasps, they both raised their guns and fired.

And they both missed.

They couldn't have been ten feet apart, but they missed anyhow. The twin shots and the crack of the insurrectionist's bullet darting much too close past Stafford's ear all but stunned the Consul. The Negro looked as desperately unhappy as Stafford felt. But they were in different situations. It would take the insurrectionist at least half a minute to reload and fire another round. All Jeremiah Stafford had to do was pull the trigger.

The black man figured that out in an instant. Had he been the natural-born coward Stafford assumed him to be because he was a Negro, he would have thrown himself down in the thick undergrowth or tried to run away. Instead, he clubbed his musket and rushed at the Consul.

Stafford did fire again. He didn't miss this time. The bullet caught the insurrectionist just to the left of the middle of his chest. Stafford couldn't have placed it any better aiming at a target with all the time in the world to shoot.

When you shot somebody-especially when you hit him right where you wanted to-you expected him to fall over. Stafford had done enough hunting to know that deer didn't always fall over as soon as you shot them. He'd thought it would be different with people, though. For one thing, no deer ever born had tried to smash in his skull with a reversed musket.

He ducked the stroke that would have scrambled his brains. Then he fired yet again-and hit the Negro yet again. The man still didn't fall over, though he did grunt in surprise and pain when the bullet bit into him. He also dropped the musket, but only to try to snatch the eight-shooter out of Stafford's hand.

"Why don't you die, damn you?" Stafford groaned.

"Fuck your mother, you white devil," the Negro said. He opened his mouth to add another unpleasantry, but blood poured out between his lips and from his nostrils. For a heartbeat or so, he looked astonished. Then-at last!-his eyes rolled up in his head and he slowly crumpled to the forest floor. A sudden nasty stench amid the forest's green odors said his bowels had let go.

He twitched a few times, but now he was plainly dying fast. Stafford stared down at him. He smelled the man's sweat and his blood as well as his shit. He'd never dreamt killing could be so dreadfully intimate-the Negro was the first man he'd ever known he'd slain. All at once, he doubled over and was sick. Some of his vomit splashed the black man, but it seemed more tribute than defilement.

"You all right, Consul?" a rough voice asked. A sergeant with grizzled side whiskers stood there. He jerked a thumb at the corpse. "Never done for anybody before, have you?"

"No," Stafford choked out. "Have you got anything I can rinse my mouth with?"

"Here you go." The sergeant handed him a tin canteen with a cloth cover.

"Thanks." Stafford undid the cover and gulped. He'd expected water. He got barrel-tree rum. He almost puked again, as much from surprise as for any other reason. Then he spat out some of it.

The sergeant nodded. "That's the way, friend. Gets rid of the taste better'n water would, doesn't it?"

"It does," Stafford agreed, a different kind of surprise in his voice. He took another swig, and swallowed this time. Then he handed back the canteen.

After putting it on his belt again, the sergeant said, "I don't think we're going to catch the son of a bitch."

"Neither do I, I'm afraid," Stafford said. "But even if we don't, we're making him run away. We're making the insurrectionists dance to our tune for a change." Potent excitement and even more potent rum were hitting him the way the Negro's musket ball would have had it connected. "That's got to be worth something, doesn't it?"

"Well, we can hope so, anyways," the veteran answered, and with such doubtful assurance Stafford had to be content. Leland Newton nodded to himself when the cavalry column came back without the rebel leader. Then he noticed that his fellow Consul was splashed with blood and distinctly green around the gills. "Are you all right, Jeremiah?" he asked, more real concern in his voice than he'd expected.

He watched as Stafford looked down at himself and noticed the blood for what seemed likely to be the first time. "Oh," Stafford said, and then, as if explaining everything in three words, "It isn't mine."

"Well, good," Newton said. "Ah, whose is it, then?"

"This nigger and I saw each other in the woods at the same time," Stafford answered. "I ended up shooting him."

Newton would have thought the Consul from Cosquer would sound proud of himself after doing something like that. Instead, Stafford seemed unwontedly subdued. Colonel Sinapis understood that before Newton did. "Your first time, your Excellency?" the officer asked.

"That's right." Stafford nodded jerkily. "You aren't the first one to ask me, either. It must stick out on me like spines. Is that the mark Cain wore?" He sounded altogether in earnest. Newton hadn't killed. He had no idea what it would be like, and wasn't anxious to find out. Whatever Stafford had learned about himself, it seemed to have come closer to shattering him than bucking him up.

Sinapis' gaze swung to the captain who'd commanded the raiders. "You did not capture the rebel chief. Did you kill him?"

"No, sir, not that I know of," the captain said. "My guess is that he was there, or somewhere close by. There were plenty of insurrectionists in those parts, and I can see no reason why there would have been if they weren't guarding something or someone important to them." He paused for a moment. "I wish we would have had a better description of the scalawag, and I wish someone would have told me we'd be squelching through a bog after him."

"Were you?" Sinapis said, his eyebrows leaping. The captain nodded-unhappily, if Newton was any judge. "We did not learn that from the prisoners who told us where Frederick Radcliff would be hiding?"

"We sure didn't, sir," the captain said. "Maybe they were holding out on us, or maybe we just didn't find the right questions to ask. Any which way, we got into something we weren't prepared for. The troops performed bravely. Not catching our man wasn't their fault. They did everything they could. They might have done better if they'd known what they'd be getting into."

"It must be the fault of the questioning," Colonel Sinapis said. "Had we asked the question we needed, we would have got the right answer. A bog? Malakas!" He didn't bother to translate that. He sounded splendidly disgusted. With the bog? With the questioner? With the captives, for not volunteering more? With the whole campaign? That last seemed most likely to Newton.

He put the best face he could on things: "On to New Marseille, then?"

Sinapis dipped his head. "On to New Marseille, your Excellency. We shall make sure the rebels cannot steal the place. "That would be"-he paused to look for words-"unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. To say nothing of embarrassing." The ones he found seemed to fit altogether too well.

They roused Stafford from his sorrowful lethargy, too. "New Marseille already has a garrison! It has cannon!" he said.

"It has cannon," Sinapis agreed. "Most of them point out to sea, to protect the harbor from enemy bombardment. It has a garrison: a small one. So far as I know, it has not been reinforced by sea. These people we are fighting have already done several things I had not imagined they could do while I was still in New Hastings. If they should surprise us again, it would not surprise me."

Newton tried to parse that last sentence. Logically, it made no sense. Logic or no, he understood what Sinapis was talking about. So did his colleague. "Well, we'd better get there ahead of them, then," Stafford said. "Or, if we can't manage that, we'd better drive them out once we do get there."

"Indeed," Colonel Sinapis said. "I should not care to be remembered as the man who lost the city." His mouth tightened. He must have been remembered for some failures back in Europe; he'd made glancing allusion to at least one of them. Plenty of people came to Atlantis to try to redeem failure elsewhere. Some succeeded. They were the ones who wrote their names in life's book in large letters. Others went right on failing. Most of those, by the nature of things, were soon forgotten. But a soldier who failed might end up better remembered than one who triumphed.

The same, Newton realized uneasily, held true for a Consul who failed. Newton had understood from the start that either he or Stafford wouldn't get what he wanted from this campaign. Now he realized neither of them might get what he wanted. And what would come of that?