Rain on a cobblestoned road was a nuisance. If you rode a horse, you wore a broad-brimmed hat and an oilskin slicker to stay as dry as you could. Many of the roads east of the Green Ridge Mountains were cobblestoned. Some were even macadamized. Traffic moved on them the year around.

Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that cobblestones and macadam were sadly scarce on the far side of the mountains. One day, no doubt, they would come, but that day was not yet.

And rain on a dirt road was not a nuisance. Rain on a dirt road-especially the hard, driving semitropical rain that pelted down now-was a catastrophe. What had been a perfectly ordinary, perfectly decent, perfectly respectable road turned into a long strip of something with a consistency between soup and glue. Foot soldiers swore as mud sucked boots off their feet. Cannon and limbers and supply wagons bogged down. The foot soldiers had to shove them through the muck by brute force. Not surprisingly, that made the men swear more.

On horseback, Consul Stafford had it easier than most of the men in the Atlantean army. His mount struggled to move forward, but it was doing the struggling. He wasn't. Colonel Sinapis, also on horseback, said something to him.

Whatever it was, Stafford couldn't make it out. The rain was coming down too hard. "Eh?" The Consul cupped a hand behind his ear.

"When I was a subaltern, we could not fight in weather like this," Sinapis said, louder this time.

"Why not? What makes the difference?" Stafford asked.

"Percussion caps," the Atlantean officer answered. "A wet flintlock is nothing but a fancy club-maybe a spear if you have a bayonet on the end of it. But a percussion cap will still go off in the rain."

"Interesting how a mechanical device can change the way we wage war," said Stafford, who hadn't dwelt on the idea before.

"This always happens." For Sinapis, such things fell within his area of professional competence. "If you doubt it, ask the Terranovan natives how much they have enjoyed opposing muskets with bows and arrows."

"Mm-no doubt. The next question is, how well supplied with percussion caps are the damned insurrectionists?" Stafford said.

"Better than I would have thought," Colonel Sinapis said, which was not what Stafford wanted to hear. Sinapis continued, "They showed every sign of having plenty at the skirmish yesterday. They fought quite well, in fact. Their steadiness impressed me."

That was something else Stafford didn't want to hear. "They're nothing but lousy mudfaces and niggers," he growled.

"No man with a rifle musket in his hand is 'nothing but' anything, your Excellency," the officer warned. "No man who holds his ground till he sees himself outflanked and then draws back in good order is 'nothing but,' either… sir. You will get us in trouble if you think of the rebels as 'nothing but.' "

"I want to get them in trouble," Stafford said angrily. "We haven't had much luck with that, have we?"

Balthasar Sinapis looked up into the heavens. A raindrop splashed on the end of his long nose. "If you can persuade God to ease this downpour, your Excellency, you will have shown me something I did not know before."

"Even when the weather was good, we didn't have much luck shifting the black bastards." Yes, Consul Stafford was in a fine fury.

If that impressed Sinapis, the colonel's face didn't know it. "This campaign is just beginning, sir," he said. "We will do some splendid things-I am sure of it. And we will have some terrible things done to us, and to the rebels those will seem splendid. Such is war."

"It shouldn't be war, not against these-these damned ragamuffins," Stafford protested. "It should be like, oh, cleaning up broken crockery."

"Never judge a soldier by the kind of uniform he wears, or by whether he wears a uniform at all," Colonel Sinapis said. "Some of the most dangerous men I saw in Europe looked like farmers. They were farmers, till they picked up the guns they'd hidden in barns and sties and pigeon coops. After that, you would have thought they were devils straight out of hell."

"What happened to them?" Stafford asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

"My men hunted them down and killed them," the foreigner replied dispassionately. "We did, perhaps, too good a job. That was one of the reasons I… left that service and pledged my sword to Atlantis."

Too good a job? What kind of howling wilderness had Sinapis' men left behind? Stafford didn't much care. As long as the insurrectionists got what was coming to them, nothing else mattered.

The rain came down harder. Stafford hadn't been sure it could. With a little luck, it would wash Frederick Radcliff and the rest of the insurrectionists out to sea. But that was bound to be too much to hope for. The Consul began to hope the downpour wouldn't wash him and the Atlantean army out to sea.

Every once in a while, a great storm would slam into southern Atlantis. Savage winds would tear off roofs and sometimes blow down buildings. The cyclones would roar inland till they finally weakened and petered out. This wasn't one of those. It wasn't blowing very hard at all. It was just raining and raining and raining.

Forty days and forty nights went through Stafford's mind. For hundreds of years, theologically inclined writers had wondered how Noah had put Atlantis' peculiar natural productions aboard the Ark, and how those productions had ended up here and nowhere else. That sort of writing seemed to have tapered off in recent times. The consensus was that nobody knew, except possibly God.

A junior officer came back to Colonel Sinapis from the vanguard. Stafford admired him. Moving against the tide had to be even harder than going with it. The officer spoke to Sinapis. Whatever he said-again, the drumming rain muffled it for the Consul-made Sinapis gnaw at his mustache. Stafford thought that a disgusting habit.

After gnawing, the colonel dipped his head. He might have been Zeus in the Iliad, which Stafford remembered from his college days. He said something to the junior officer, who looked relieved and sloshed forward again.

At last, Sinapis condescended to explain: "We stop here. We can't go forward any more. We will start killing animals if we do."

"Soldiers will start drowning, too," Stafford said.

"Well, so they will." Colonel Sinapis cared about losing his men when they faced the rebels. When it came to a downpour, he seemed to worry more about his horses and mules. Stafford almost called him on it. But the rain also drowned his urge for a brand new row.

Even making camp wasn't easy. Tent pegs didn't want to stick in the soggy ground. Once up, the tents leaked like billy-be-damned. All soldiers were supposed to have oilskin groundsheets so they could sleep dry. Some had never been issued them. Some had thrown theirs away. And even the ones who had them weren't happy, because muck slopped over the edges.

Cooking hot food-even boiling coffee-was impossible. Soggy hardtack made an uninspiring supper. Salt pork was next to indestructible, but in weather like this it was liable to start getting moldy, too.

Stafford's tent was bigger than the ones the soldiers used, but no drier. He sat inside glumly, wondering what would happen if the insurrectionists chose this moment to attack. Colonel Sinapis had posted sentries all around, but so what? How much could they see, and who would hear them if they yelled a warning? Then Stafford thought, If the rebels do attack now, they'll go over their heads in goo, and good riddance to them. He felt-a little-better.

Someone tugged at the tent flap. "Leland Newton. May I come in?" the other Consul asked.

"Why not? Everything else has gone wrong," Stafford said.

"Heh." Newton ducked inside and let the tent flap fall behind him with a wet, dismal splat. "You should take your comic turn on the stage. You'd make more than Atlantis pays us."