"Aha!" Victor struck like a lancehead or some other southern viper. The quartermaster officers flinched as if he really did have fangs. He wished he did-he would have bitten both of them. In lieu of that, he said, "Do your Excellencies suppose a march west from here in the direction of the Hesperian Gulf might possibly be a military situation requiring the release of stores from Nouveau Redon?"

"It… might," said the quartermaster who talked more. He wasn't about to admit anything he didn't have to-oh, no, not him.

"Let me ask the question another way, gentlemen." Victor said in his iciest tones. "Do you suppose that, if you don't turn loose of what I need, I won't cashier the lot of you and clap you in irons?"

"You can't do that!" the quartermaster gasped.

"Watch me," Victor said. "I took Nouveau Redon back in the days when it didn't need to haul water up from the Blavet. I can damn well take it again if I have to. Cornwallis and I were on the same side then. I didn't think you were on his side now. Perhaps I was wrong."

"General, that is an insult," the man from Nouveau Redon said stiffly. His colleague nodded.

"Not by the way you act, it isn't," Victor told them. "This is a military necessity. You have the supplies I need. You can release them to me in accordance with the orders I am lawfully entitled to give by virtue of my appointment at the hands of the Atlantean Assembly-or you can declare yourselves the foes of Atlantis' freedom. Which will it be, gentlemen?"

He drew his sword. The quartermasters, as befitted their un-military soldiering, were unarmed. But Victor didn't assail them… directly. Instead, he drew a circle in the ground around their feet.

"Be so kind as to answer me before you step out of that," he said, not sheathing the blade.

The quartermaster who'd been quiet up till then spluttered, "We are not Antiochus' officers, General!" He'd had some classical education, too, then.

Victor grinned savagely. "That's true. You're my subordinates. Can you imagine what a Roman general would have done with a set of insubordinate officers? Lucky for both of you that we don't crucify these days, or you'd have more in common with our Savior than you ever wanted."

When the men from Nouveau Redon tried to retreat, he held them in place with the sword-they hadn't answered him. "You'll get what you want," the talkier one said. With a sudden access of spirit, he added, "We commonly find it wiser to humor madmen."

"If you drive me mad with excuses, who's to blame?" Victor slid the sword back into its sheath. "Go on, both of you. And remember one thing: Atlantis isn't big enough for you to hide in if you play me false once you get back inside those walls."

They hurried away. Supplies started corning out of Nouveau Redon. Victor nodded to himself. He hadn't expected anything else.

Blaise was of less sanguine temperament. Where Victor saw things going well, the Negro saw things that might go wrong. "What happens if, once we get farther away, they stop sending wagons after us?" he asked.

"Simple," Victor answered. "I send back a detachment, and I start hanging quartermasters. Pour encourager les autres." He quoted Custis Cawthorne quoting Voltaire.

Since French was the first white men's language Blaise had learned, he followed with no trouble. He smiled like a crocodile- like a wolf, an English-speaker in a land where there were wolves would have said. "Yes, that will work," he said. "Those people, they put on uniforms, but they would piss themselves if they had to fight."

Victor nodded. "I shouldn't wonder," he said. "But have you seen how many soldiers do piss themselves or shit themselves when they almost get killed? You can't always help it. I don't think I've ever done it, but I know I've come close. What about you?"

"I've seen it," Blaise replied. "I never quite did it myself. I wouldn't admit I was close if you didn't say the same thing first.''

"I'm the general. People will think I'm brave till I do something to show them I'm not," Victor said.

"I wish they felt that way about me." Blaise shrugged. "Won't happen, not the color I am. Folks see a black man, they think, He's a nigger. He's a coward. Makes it easier for them to keep slaves, I reckon. They do the same damn thing with copperskins, too."

"Wouldn't be surprised," Victor said. He'd heard Africans were made house slaves more often than Terranovan natives were. They were reckoned less likely to stab their owners in the middle of the night and abscond after setting the house afire. But anyone who thought Blaise and a lot of blacks like him were docile would make his last mistake.

Nouveau Redon fell well behind. The Green Ridge Mountains rose higher in the west. Supply wagons kept coming. Blaise nodded in somber approval. "You did put the fear of God in them," he said.

"Here's hoping. The real worry is, what happens once we cross the mountains?" Victor said. "Wagons won't be able to follow us then."

"We manage. One way or another, we manage," Blaise said, which left Victor wondering which of them was the sanguine one after all.

He also wondered what Isaac Fenner had been talking about in his last note. Usually, Victor grimaced whenever a courier from Honker's Mill came up. The Atlantean Assembly couldn't run his army from a distance, which didn't always keep it from trying. That left him with the unwelcome choice between idiotic obedience and mutinous disobedience. If they told him what they wanted and then let him try to do it…

If he expected that to happen, he was sanguine, all right Or possibly stark raving mad.

Now, though, he would have welcomed news from the backwoods capital. And, no doubt because he would have welcomed it, none came, He wondered whether couriers could follow over the mountains, too. He'd soon find out.

A rider caught up with the army just before it started heading up into the foothills. The man was brandishing a big sheet of paper even before he came up to Victor. "Proclamation!" he shouted. "The Atlantean Assembly's proclamation!"

"Well, let's see it," Victor said gruffly. He sometimes thought the Assembly's proclamations came three for a farthing Two of the Conscript Fathers couldn't blow their noses at the same time without convening a meeting to issue a solemn proclamation commemorating the occasion.

He quickly read through this one. "What does it say?" someone asked.

"It's a-a proclamation of liberty," he answered. "It says that King George has mistreated the settlements so badly, no one here can stand to live under him any more. It says the settlements are free, independent states from now on. And it says they come together of their own free will to form what it calls the United States of Atlantis. It says we're as much of a country of our own as England or France or Spain or Holland. And it says we'll fight to the death to hold the rights God gave us." He waved the Proclamation of Liberty himself. "God bless the United States of Atlantis!"

"The United States of Atlantis!" the soldiers shouted, and, "Down with King George!" and as many other things in those veins as they could come up with. This time, Isaac Fenner was right. The Assembly hadn't done anything small.