Fog drifted in front of Victor Radcliff like a harem girl's veil in a spicy story about the life of the Ottoman sultan. Here and there, he could see fifty yards ahead, maybe even a hundred. But the men to either side of him were indistinct to the point of ghostliness.

One of those ghosts was Blaise. "Are we still going west?" he asked.

"I think so." Victor had a peer at a compass to be sure. He nodded in some relief. "Yes. We are."

"You could have fooled me," Blaise said. "Come to that, you could be fooling me now. I'd never know the difference."

"We may not keep on going west for long," Victor said. The pass through the Green Ridge Mountains twisted and doubled back on itself like a snake with a bellyache. A path of sorts ran through it, but only of sorts. Travelers had passed this way, bound for New Marseille. An army? Never.

Because the pass climbed, the weather here reminded Victor of that farther north. Not only was it moist, it was also surprisingly cool. Ferns and mushrooms grew lush. One horse had eaten something that killed it in a matter of hours. Seeds? A toadstool? Victor didn't know. Neither did anyone else. That discouraged the men from plucking up mushrooms, which they eagerly would have done otherwise.

Pines and towering redwoods grew on the slopes above the pass. They hadn't been logged off here, as they had so many places farther east. Strange birds called from the trees. Blaise pointed atone when the fog thinned. "Is that a green woodpecker?"

"I think it may be," Victor answered.

The bird drilled on a branch, proving what it was. "Never seen one like that before," Blaise said.

"Neither have I." Victor wondered whether some wandering naturalist had ever shot a specimen. Did a preserved skin sit in a cabinet in the museum in occupied Hanover, or perhaps across the sea in one in London? Or was the woodpecker nondescript- new to science?

He shrugged. He had more urgent things to worry about. Getting through the pass came first. Getting to New Marseille with his army more or less intact ran a close second. Then came beating General Cornwallis and driving him away. Next to those, Victor couldn't get excited-he couldn't let himself get excited-about a green woodpecker.

A man slipped on a wet fern or on some muddy moss or a rotten mushroom and landed hard on his backside. He took the name of the Lord in vain as he got to his feet. "You don't want to say such things, Eb," chided one of his comrades. "God, He punishes blasphemy."

"Well, I expect He must," Eb responded. "If He didn't, why would He afflict me with idiots for friends? You come down the way I did, you're just naturally going to let out with something with a bit of spice to it."

"But you shouldn't. You mustn't," his friend said earnestly. "For all you know, God made you fall just then so He could test you. If He did, things don't look so good for you."

Eb had one hand clapped to his bruised fundament. He clapped the other to his forehead. "God knows everything that was or is or will be, ain't that right?"

"I should hope it is," his friend answered.

"All right, then. In that case. He knew ahead of time I'd call on Him, like, when I slipped there. So how can He get angry at me for doing something He knew I was going to do anyhow?"

"That isn't how predestination works, Ebenezer Sanders, and you know it blamed well." Now Eb's friend sounded shocked.

"You sound like a parrot, giving back what the preachers say," Eb replied. "The only one who knows is God. Preachers are nothing but damn fools, same as you and me."

His friend spluttered. No more words seemed to want to come out, though. Blaise showed Victor he wasn't the only one who'd listened with interest to the argument, asking, "Do you think God knows everything ahead of time? Do you think we do things because He wills it?"

Victor shrugged. "I'm a Christian man-you know that. But I'm with Eb on one thing: the only One who knows God is God. He's the only One Who can know. People do the best they can, but they're only guessing."

"I suppose so." Blaise pursed his thick lips. "Gods in Africa don't pretend to be so strong. Well, except the Muslims' God. Is He the same One you worship?"

To Victor, what Blaise called Muslims were Mahometans. He'd also discovered Blaise knew more about them than he did. He shrugged again. "I can't tell you."

A little to his surprise, the answer made Blaise smile. "One thing I have to say-you're an honest man. When you don't know something, you say so. You don't try and talk around it, the way so many people do."

"Do they do that in Africa, too?" Victor asked.

Instead of smiling, Blaise laughed. "Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. Doesn't matter what color you are, not for that. Black or white or copper-skinned, lots of folks won't even tell themselves they don't know something."

"I know it's true of white men," Radcliff said. "I shouldn't wonder if you're right for the others."

"You'd best believe I am… sir." Blaise sounded absolutely certain. "And if your fancy ships find an island full of green men, or maybe blue, some of them will talk bigger than they know, too."

That set Victor laughing. "Right again-no doubt about it. Green men!" He chuckled at the conceit.

"You never can tell," the Negro said. "I wouldn't have believed there were white men till I saw one-and till our enemies sold me

to them. I wouldn't have believed a lot of the things that happened to me after that, either."

"It hasn't been all bad, has it? You wouldn't have met Stella if you'd stayed behind in Africa," Victor said.

"No. But she was taken and sold, too." Blaise's face clouded. "And what white men do with-do to-their slave women… It isn't good. It's maybe the very worst thing about keeping slaves. The worst."

"Do you tell me black men don't treat slave women the same way?" Victor asked. "Or copperskins? Or the green and blue men on that mysterious island out in the Pacific?"

"Oh, no, sir. We keep slaves, too, some of us, and our men futter the women," Blaise answered. "But that doesn't make it right. Not for us, not for you, not for nobody. Do you say I'm wrong?" Before Victor could say anything, Blaise added, "So the settlements of Atlantis are the liberated United States of Atlantis? How can they be, really, when so many folk in them aren't liberated at all?"

Victor discovered he had no answer for that.

"On the downhill slope. General," one of the scouts told Victor, "No doubt about it-not a bit."

"Good," Victor said. If it's true, he appended-but only to himself. Aloud, he asked, "Have you come this way before?"

"Not me," the scout said, and Victor discounted the report almost as steeply as Atlantean paper money was discounted against specie. But the fellow went on, "The Frenchie I'm riding with has, and he says the same thing."

"Well, good." The report's value jumped again. Victor wished Atlantean paper would do the same. Maybe the Proclamation of Liberty-and his victory outside Nouveau Redon-would help it rise.

Here in the wilderness, money didn't need to be the first thing on his mind. He and his men couldn't get their hands on any they hadn't brought with them, and couldn't buy anything they hadn't likewise brought along. Life would have been simpler-but less interesting-were that more widely true.

He sucked in a lungful of hot, humid air. He wouldn't breathe any other kind this far south in the lowlands on the west side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The Bay Stream brought warmth up from the seas to the southwest, and western Atlantis got its share before the current went on towards Europe.

Victor had heard Custis Cawthorne and other savants speculate that, absent the Bay Stream, Europe would be as chilly as was the land at corresponding latitudes of northern Terranova. He didn't know enough to form an opinion pro or con there. From everything he could see, neither did the savants. That didn't stop them from speculating, or even slow them much.