Blaise appeared as if by magic. "Did I hear somebody call me nigger?" He could hear that word where he might miss others.

Well, who could blame him? What man with the faintest hope of being a gentleman wasn't sensitive to slights?

"He did. You did," Victor said wearily. "He meant nothing by it, though. He was in a temper at me, not at you."

"Huh," Blaise said: a wordless sound packed with disbelief. "Anybody says nigger, he means something by it, all right." He spoke like a man very sure of what he was talking about. Chances were he had every right to be.

Even so, Victor said, "I showed him how and why his harebrained scheme was harebrained, and he responded with all the gratitude you might expect."

"What scheme is this?" Blaise asked. Victor explained. The Negro grunted. "Well, you told him true. That scheme is harebrained from mouth to arsehole."

Victor would have said from top to bottom, which didn't mean he disagreed with the more pungent phrase. "Sometimes Habakkuk simply needs to get things out of his system," he said.

Blaise grunted again. "If he's costive, let him take one of those little pills. That'll shift him." He rolled his eyes. "Those little pills'll shift anything."

"No doubt." Victor knew the ones Blaise was talking about. They were made from antimony. If you had trouble moving your bowels, you would swallow one. A few hours later, you would think a barrel of black powder had gone off in your gut They weren't cheap, but they did the trick, all right. You could, if you were so inclined, rescue the little devil from the chamber pot, wash it off, and save it for the next time you needed it.

"Ought to knock him over the head." Blaise returned to the subject at hand. "That will get things out of his system, too. And it will save you trouble. You see if it don't-doesn't." He corrected himself before Victor could.

"He'll be all right," Victor said. Blaise rolled his eyes once more. He was as stubborn as Habakkuk Biddiscombe, if in a different way. He would have been highly offended had Victor said so, so Victor didn't. He did remember the conversation for a long time afterwards.

Every so often, a loyalist would take a potshot at Victor's soldiers from behind a roadside tree, then try to get away. Rebellious Atlanteans who fired at redcoats marching past were heroes, at least to other rebellious Atlanteans. When Victor's men captured the loyalist snipers, they hanged them without ceremony.

Cornwallis' soldiers did the same thing to the insurrectionist marksmen they caught. Every printer who favored the Atlantean Assembly damned them to Satan's fiery furnace as murderers on account of it. Victor Radcliff noticed the irony, which didn't mean he intended to stop hanging loyalist francs-tireurs.

One of them put on a brave show, saying, "I am proud to die for my king."

"You won't be once the rope goes around your neck," Victor predicted. "And you aren't dying for your king. You could have been as loyal to George as you pleased, so long as you didn't fire at my men from ambush."

"I should prove myself a traitor to my sovereign did I not take up arms against those treacherously in arms against him." Yes, the loyalist had pride.

It did him no good. "You and your friends should have joined a properly enrolled company, then," Victor said coldly. The man was hanged with the three or four other bushwhackers Victor's soldiers had flushed out of the woods. They died hard, strangling from the nooses instead of getting their necks broken as a proper hangman's knot might have done. Or it might not have, when they were hanged from branches instead of getting a long drop from the gallows.

Blaise eyed the limp bodies and discolored faces with cold dispassion. All he said was, "They had it coming."

"I think so, too," Victor said. "But if you listen to the likes of them, we're the ones who deserve to dance on air."

"Dance on air." The Negro tasted the words. "I like that."

"It's not mine, I fear," Victor told him. "I don't know where I first heard it. Use it as you please. People will understand you when you do."

"All right." Blaise glanced toward the corpses again. "They don't dance."

They'd had their feet tied together and hands bound behind them. "I've seen livelier jobs, with the legs free," Victor said, gnawing on the inside of his lower lip at the memory. "Only a cruel man could enjoy the spectacle, believe me."

"They are enemies," Blaise said. "Why should I be sorry to watch enemies die?"

"I have nothing against enemies dying," Victor replied. "But rejoicing in suffering, even in an enemy's suffering, strikes me as unchristian."

"Maybe I don't make such a good Christian, then," Blaise said.

He and his wife had gone to church with Victor and Margaret most Sundays since the fighting in French Atlantis ended. He attended divine services with the other soldiers in Victor's army. Radcliff suddenly wondered how much he really believed. How much of his piety was no more than fitting in where he had to live, and how much of his savage creed from Africa still lurked below?

No matter what he wondered, he didn't ask. Papists and Protestants of all sects and even Jews joined together in the Atlantean Assembly and in its army. If there was room for all of them, wasn't there also room for one perhaps unregenerate African?

Despite the snipers-most of whom, being as woodswise as Victor's men, escaped instead of getting captured-the army pressed on toward Hanover. More loyalists, not daring or caring to meet it in arms, fled before it with nothing but what they could carry. Men who preferred the Atlantean Assembly's cause gleefully swooped down on the homes and fields and livestock they abandoned. "Buggers made us sweat while they was in the saddle," one man told Victor. "Now let's see if they ever set eyes on what used to be theirs again."

Strict justice might have made Victor speak of courts and due process of law. "We'll use them as they deserve," he said, and the local nodded.

A few days later, the army was camped near a village called Brandenburg. A cavalryman rode up to Victor. After a sketched salute, the man asked, "General, have you seen Major Biddiscombe? I needed to ask something of him, but he's nowhere about."

"I haven't got him," Victor answered.

He thought no more about it till the army was getting ready to move out the next morning. There was still no sign of Habakkuk Biddiscombe. A man who'd been on sentry duty said, "He rode out past me not long after we stopped here. He said he was going to reconnoiter what lay ahead."

"By himself?" Victor's eyebrows leaped toward his hairline.

The sentry only shrugged. "You know how he is."

Victor Radcliff did, much too well. "Even for Major Biddiscombe, that's excessive," he said. "When he comes in, I'll give him a talking-to he'll remember for a month of Wednesdays." The sentry laughed, but Victor wasn't joking.

Only Habakkuk Biddiscombe didn't come in. Victor feared he'd fallen into the hands of English scouts or local loyalists. The only trouble was, his own scouts turned up no signs that the enemy was operating anywhere close by.

Another fear began to grow in him-and not in him alone. "How bad was that last quarrel you had with him, sir?" Blaise asked.

"Well, it wasn't good." No one would accuse Victor of exaggerating, anyhow.

"Uh-huh," Blaise said thoughtfully. Then he asked, "How much harm could he do us if he went over to Cornwallis?"

"He wouldn't do that!" Victor squawked, and he could hear himself protesting too much. After a moment, he added, "I hope he wouldn't do that," which was nothing but the truth.