Cosquer didn't fall easily. Victor had hoped it might, but hadn't really expected it to. He remembered how well Cornwallis, then a lieutenant-colonel, had fortified Freetown after General Braddock fell. The new English commander was no less diligent now, his engineers no less clever.

And the redcoats in the works remained ready to fight. Maybe they weren't quite so eager to face the Atlanteans in the open field as they had been. But they didn't mind letting Victor's soldiers come to them. Why should they, when they hoped to bloody the locals on the cheap?

But Victor didn't oblige them. Attacking field works was a fool's game, or a desperate man's. He wasn't desperate, and he hoped he wasn't that kind of fool, anyhow.

Even if he had been tempted to assault Cornwallis' entrenchments, knowing Royal Navy frigates and ships of the Line lay offshore would have made him think twice. Their firepower didn't reach far inland, but within its reach he had nothing that could reply to it. Heavy guns on land sat in forts. They moved slowly, if they moved at all. Ships carried them faster than unencumbered men could march, as fast as cavalry scouts could ride. "Can we starve them out?" Blaise asked.

Unhappily, Victor shook his head. "Not as long as they rule the sea. They can bring in food from other parts of Atlantis, or even all the way from England."

"What are we doing here, then?" Blaise asked, a much more than reasonable question.

"Holding them in," Victor answered. "They can't do anything much as long as we pen them there."

Blaise grunted. "Neither can we."

"Yes, we can." Victor said it again: "We can. They have to beat us, to make us quit fighting. All we have to do is show them they can't do that. As long as we stay in the field, as long as we prove to them they can't do whatever they please in Atlantis, they will lose. I'm not sure they understand that yet. I'm not sure how long they will need to understand it. But we have to keep fighting till they do, however long it takes."

The Negro grunted again, but on a different note. "Anyone who knows you knows how pigheaded you are-"

Victor assumed a pained expression. "Stubborn, please. People you don't like are pigheaded. Your friends are stubborn, or hold to their purpose."

"Stubborn, then," Blaise said… after a pause to show he was thinking it over. "You are, yes, but can you keep your army stubborn?"

He knew how to get to the bottom of things, all right. He always had. Victor said the only thing he could: "I aim to try, anyhow."

He wondered whether Cornwallis would get reinforcements from farther north. If the English officer did, Victor feared he had a decent chance of breaking out of Cosquer. What would he do then? What could he do? Fight more battles like the ones the redcoats and Atlanteans had tried the year before? What would that prove? That the redcoats were better than the settlers in the open field if they didn't get careless? It might not even prove that. The Atlanteans were improving with every fight they had. They might not match Cornwallis' veterans yet, but they were getting close.

Green-coated riflemen sniped at the English soldiers in the trenches. That wouldn't decide anything; Victor knew it, and Cornwallis had to know it, too. But it did sting the redcoats, and they seemed to be without riflemen of their own to reply in kind. Maybe it could sting them into doing something foolish.

Victor also had to keep his own men from doing something foolish. Habakkuk Biddiscombe wanted to storm Cosquer. "We can beat them, General!" the cavalry officer insisted. "By God, we can! And then everything below the Stour is ours for good!"

"If I order an attack, we will make one," Victor said. "Until I order one, we won't. I don't think we can succeed."

"I do!" Biddiscombe said.

"When you wear a general's sash, you may use your men as you can find best," Victor said, as patiently as he could. "For now, though, the responsibility still rests on my shoulders-and there are times when I think Atlas had it easy holding up the heavens, believe me."

"There are times when I think…" The cavalry officer left it there, which was bound to be lucky for both of them.

Then General Cornwallis solved the Atlanteans' problem, withdrawing from his fieldworks. He did it with his usual skill. He left fires burning in the works all night long to fool the Atlanteans into thinking his men still occupied them. By the time the sun came up to show they had gone, they were already back in Cosquer.

And they, and the rest of the redcoats with them, were climbing into boats and going out to the warships anchored offshore. It was as if Cornwallis were saying, Well, if you want Cosquer so much, here it is, and be damned to you.

Victor did want Cosquer, but not at the price of bringing his soldiers under the Royal Navy's guns. If the redcoats were pulling out, he'd let them go. He unlimbered his field guns and fired at them from long range. He probably knocked over a few of them, but they had to know, as he did, it was only more harassment. It didn't change their evacuation a farthing's worth.

Once the English army had boarded the warships, sails blossomed on their masts. Slowly at first but then building momentum, the ships sailed off… toward the south.

"Where do they think they're going?" Habakkuk Biddiscombe sounded angry, as if he suspected Victor had been listening in on Cornwallis' deliberations and hadn't told him. "Do they think they can land in Spanish Atlantis and then come back up and go on with the war that way?"

"I wouldn't be surprised if they do," Victor answered. "Have you ever had anything to do with the dons?"

"Not me." The prospect seemed to affront the major. English and French Atlanteans both looked down their noses at the Spaniards farther south. Spain had a rich empire in Terranova, but her Atlantean dominions were an afterthought, and had been for many years. Most Spanish settlers here were men who'd failed or hadn't dared try in the broader lands beyond the Hesperian Gulf. The dons also had a reputation for being uncommonly cruel to their slaves: one reason uprisings always bubbled just below the surface.

"For my sins, I have," Victor told Biddiscombe. "They are the touchiest human beings God ever made. If Cornwallis landed at Gernika, say, without their leave, they would drop all their private feuds-of which they have a great plenty, believe me-to do him all the harm they could."

"I'm sure he loses sleep over that." Scorn filled Habakkuk Biddiscombe's voice. Spain had, and had earned, an unenviable military reputation. The only reason England hadn't seized Spanish Atlantis at the end of the last war was that she hadn't thought it worth seizing.

But Victor said, "Rile a Spaniard and he'll try to kill you without caring for his own life. A Spanish army is nothing much. Spanish bushwhackers… It's no accident that 'guerrilla' is a Spanish word."

Biddiscombe said a few Spanish words Victor hadn't thought he knew. When he ran out of foreign incendiaries, he added, "You can bet Cornwallis feels the same way about them."

"No doubt," Victor said. "But the question is how they feel about Cornwallis-and about whether he purposes landing there at all."

"Where else would he go? Down to the islands?" Biddiscombe answered his own question with a shake of the head. "Not likely! That'd take him clean out of the war. He has to head for Spanish Atlantis."

"No one has to do anything." Victor spoke with great conviction. By the way Habakkuk Biddiscombe eyed him, he might suddenly have started spouting Blaise's language.

Cosquer greeted the incoming Atlantean army the same way it had probably greeted the incoming English army: with indifference New Hastings was a trifle older, but Cosquer's founder, Francois Kersauzon, had stumbled upon Atlantis even before the Radcliffes. People in Cosquer remembered, even if hardly anyone else in these modern times did. They looked down their noses at all latecomers.