Some of them still spoke buzzing Breton instead of French or English Victor didn't think all the strange names he heard riding into Cosquer were compliments. As long as no one did more than mutter in a half-forgotten tongue, he didn't care.

He went on to the quays, hoping some longshoreman or tap-man or even doxy had heard where Cornwallis planned to sail. No one who might have seemed to want to tell an English Atlantean, though. The tapmen and doxies were willing enough to take his men's silver. As for the longshoremen…

"How soon will you get out of here?" asked one of the few who condescended to speak to Victor at all.

"When we're ready," Victor said. "How soon will you learn some manners?"

"When I'm ready," the local answered cheekily. "Don't hold your breath-manners are for friends."

"I am not your enemy. You should be glad of that," Victor said.

"Stinking Saoz," the longshoreman said, and turned away.

That one Victor did know: the fellow'd called him an Englishman. "Save that name for Cornwallis," he said. "I'm an Atlantean, by God."

"A Saoz is a Saoz no matter where he's whelped," the longshoreman answered. "God may care about the details, but I don't."

"God has better sense than you do." Victor rode away to see if he could find answers anywhere else.

But no one in Cosquer seemed to know anything. No one who did seemed inclined to tell it to a Saoz, anyhow. To Victor, they amounted to the same thing. Then he got a rush of brains to the head. He hunted up Blaise and handed him some money. "What's this in aid of?" the Negro asked.

"Take off your uniform. Put on some ordinary clothes, none too fancy," Victor answered. "Wander through the taverns. Buy yourself a few drinks. See what you can hear about where the English went."

"Maybe I won't hear anything," Blaise said. "Maybe you won't," Victor agreed. "But maybe you will, too. Make them think you're a slave on a toot. White people talk too much in front of slaves. They think the slaves aren't listening or can't understand."

Blaise raised an eyebrow. "I know things like that." He brushed two fingers of his right hand against the back of his left to show off his black skin and to remind Victor how he knew. "Why do you know them?"

Radcliff used the same gesture the Negro had. "Because I'm a white man myself, and I know how white men think. I would have thought the same way-I did think the same way-before I met you. I hope I know better now."

"Ah," Blaise said, and then, "Well, maybe you do." With that faint praise Victor had to be content.

Off the Negro went on his mission of espionage. Victor fell asleep before he came back from it. Lamps weren't bright enough to tempt the general to stay up long after the sun went down. He did wonder whether Blaise would remember what he'd heard come morning.

And when he got a look at Blaise the next morning, he wondered even more. "Oh, my," he said sympathetically. "Oh, dear."

With trembling hand, Blaise reached for a tin mug of coffee. He was badly the worse for wear, the whites of his eyes yellowish and tracked with red. "Don't know why you brew that hellwater you call rum," he said. "People feel mighty bad after they drink it. Mighty bad." He gulped the steaming coffee, then gulped again, hoping it would stay down.

"Most folks don't worry about the day after while they're drinking," Victor observed. "That goes for blacks and copperskins and whites alike. I expect it goes for Chinamen, too, but I can't prove it-I don't know any."

After one more gulp, Blaise seemed to decide things would stay where he wanted them to. "Well," he said, "no one will ever tell me I did not earn the money you gave me last night."

"No one is trying to," Victor said. "Did you learn anything except that a hard night leads to a harder morning?"

"Oh, doesn't it just!" Blaise agreed with the fervor of a reformed sinner. Or perhaps not completely reformed: he held out the tin cup, saying, "Have you got any brandy to help me take the edge off?"

Not many Atlanteans with pretensions to being gentlemen failed to carry a flask. Victor had one. You never could tell when you might need a nip against the cold or simply want one. Victor poured a careful dose into Blaise's coffee.

"Obliged, sir." The Negro drank. He nodded. "Oh, yes. Much obliged."

"Better now?" Victor inquired.

"Some." Blaise nodded. He didn't seem to fear that his head would fall off any more, or even to hope it would. Having been through some long drunken nights himself, Victor knew progress when he saw it.

He tried again: "How much of what you heard in your tavern crawl do you recollect? Anything interesting?"

"Maybe." Blaise took another sip of the improved-no, here in French Atlantis, they would call it corrected-coffee. "People seem to think Cornwallis will come up on the west coast. One of them called it buggering a sheep."

"Heh," Victor Radcliff said uneasily. The redcoats could steal a march on him over there, sure enough. Atlantean forces, even counting the men sent west to fight the copperskins the English had imported, were thin on the ground. But, having landed there, what could Cornwallis do next? Cross the Green Ridge Mountains and return to the more settled parts of the country? Maybe, if he landed at New Marseille or one of the smaller towns south of Avalon. Hunting was still supposed to be very easy in the southwest. Even so… "How sure are these, ah, people? Did they hear his plans from some English officer? Or are they guessing, the way you will when you don't know?"

"Some of them sounded pretty sure," Blaise answered. "I don't think I heard one of them say an Englishman told him what the redcoats were doing, but they thought they had a good notion."

"All right." Victor paused. Eyeing the Negro's decrepit condition, he decided something more than that was called for. "I thank you, Blaise. You did everything you could, and you did Atlantis a good turn."

"I hope so." Blaise seemed to have gone through the mill, all right. "What are you going to do now?"

Even more than To be or not to be, that was the question. Victor had even more trouble than Hamlet had coming up with a good answer. Unhappily, he said, "I don't know. Getting our army across to New Marseille… We might do it. Or we might lose two men out of three, sick or starving, if we try. Taking a lot of men across Atlantis has never been easy."

"You were going to do it when we were down in the Spaniards' country, till the Royal Navy came and took us back to Freetown," Blaise said.

Still unhappily, Victor nodded. "We were in trouble, then- and we'd've been in worse trouble if we'd had to try it. And we had a lot fewer men then than we do now."

"More settlers in the back country now than there used to be," Blaise observed.

"That's so." Victor admitted what he couldn't very well deny.

But he went on, "Are there enough to subsist us on the way? I think not Whatever we need, we'll have to fetch with us."

"Or kill along the way," Blaise said.

"Honkers. Oil thrushes. Deer that run wild through the woods. Rabbits, too, I suppose. I hope we aren't down to eating turtles and frogs and snakes by the time we get to the Hesperian Gulf. And we can't very well kill cannon along the way. Somehow or other, we'll have to get our field guns over the mountains. I don't look forward to that."

"Mountains down here are lower than they are farther north. Some tracks through them, too," Blaise said. "I was thinking about running off that way, but I decided to go north instead. I hear there are villages of runaway blacks and copperskins across the mountains."

"I've heard it, too," Victor said. "I don't know if it's true."

"Oh, I think so." Blaise sounded more certain than he had when he was talking about what the English intended. How much did he know? How much of what he knew would he tell a white man? A good deal and not very much, respectively-that was Victor's judgment. And, all things considered, who could blame him for that?