Blaise shrugged. "Don't care about gettin' rich. Care about…" He paused, considering. "About not hatin' myself. Yeah. I care about that."
"Have it your way. You will anyhow." With the war over, Victor didn't need a sergeant-cum-body-servant any more. If he went back to exploring, he didn't need a body servant, either. An explorer with a servant was like a musket with a chamber pot: having one added something absolutely unnecessary.
Which wasn't to say Blaise couldn't take care of himself in the wilderness. He could, at least as well as Victor could himself. And, if Victor dismissed him, Blaise could take care of himself in English Atlantis, too. Blaise might be black, but he was as generally competent a man as Victor had ever met.
That went a long way towards explaining why the two of them got along as well as they did, even if Victor had never thought of it in those terms.
"Well, if you don't want a plantation, how do we reward you for shooting Roland Kersauzon?" he asked.
"Money is good," Blaise said seriously. "What you reckon he's worth?" He was always ready to haggle.
He looked so ready now, Victor started to laugh. "Are you sure you're not a Jew under your skin?" he said.
Blaise took the question literally. "Don't even know what a Jew is."
"They're white people who aren't Christians," Victor replied. "Too foolish to know the truth, in other words."
"They don't believe in God?" Blaise asked.
"They believe in God, but they don't believe Jesus is His Son."
"Oh. Like Muslims," Blaise said.
It was Victor's turn to be confused. A bit of back-and-forth made him understand Blaise was talking about Mahometans. A bit more made him understand that the black man knew much more about them than he did. "How do you find yourself so well informed?" he asked.
"Some of the tribes north of us, they Muslim," Blaise answered. "They send their men, want us to be Muslims, too."
"Missionaries. Muslim missionaries," Victor Radcliff said wonderingly. "Now I've heard everything. We Christians send missions to Africa, too, you know."
"Muslims send missionaries. They take slaves. Christians send missionaries. They take slaves," Blaise said. "Us-we believe what we believe. We don't send no missionaries."
"Do you take slaves?" Radcliff asked.
"Oh, yes. People we catch in war, things like that," Blaise said. "We don't work them the way the French and Spaniards do, though. Don't have big plantations." He paused. "These Jews, they send missionaries?"
"No. At least, I've never heard of it if they do." Victor tried to imagine what would happen to a Jew proselytizing in Rome or Paris or London-or Hanover, come to that. Nothing pretty. The Jews knew better. That, in turn, made him wonder why Christians and Mahometans didn't. He found no good answer.
Blaise wasn't finished. "These Jews, they take slaves?"
"Some rich Jews own them, I'm sure," Victor said. "They buy and sell them now and again." Most of that trade, though, at least between Africa and Atlantis, lay in Christian hands. Uncomfortably, he finished, "They don't raid the coast to grab them, anyhow."
"Huh," Blaise said: a thoughtful grunt. "Maybe I turn Jew, then."
Victor didn't tell him that kind of conversion was against the law. He wasn't sure it was, or needed to be. Who not born to the Jewish faith would want to assume all the burdens it entailed? Speaking of those burdens…"Do you want to get circumcised?"
"Fancy word. What's it mean?" Blaise said. Victor told him what it meant. The Negro set a protective hand in front of his privates. "Muslims do that, too. Why would anybody want to?"
"I don't know why Mahometans do it. I didn't know they did. Jews think God requires it of them."
Blaise took the hand away. He was getting ever better at aping white people's notions of polite manners. "Ain't gonna be no Jew," he declared.
"Amen," Victor said, unaware he'd just come out with a Hebrew word.
When Victor-and Blaise-rode south into what had been French Atlantis, no customs barrier delayed them at the border. There were no customs barriers between English and French Atlantis any longer, no more than there were between New Hastings and Hanover. King George ruled them all.
The innkeeper at whose establishment they stayed was French. They both spoke his language. That pleased him. They also both stayed reasonably sober and reasonably quiet. That pleased him even more.
Men from English Atlantis filled the inn to bursting. They shouted demands in English. The innkeeper understood them well enough; so close to the old border, it wasn't as if he'd never had English-speaking guests before the war made him an involuntary English subject. But, by the way the newcomers acted, French might have been as dead as Aramaic.
They drank. They pinched and patted the barmaids. They ate as if they'd just discovered food. They bragged about the fortunes they were going to make by screwing the Frenchies. (That the innkeeper was listening, and might decide to season their capon with rat poison, never seemed to cross their minds.) They went on drinking. They brawled, and broke crockery brawling.
"That will go on your scot!" the innkeeper cried. (He might put rat poison in the beer and wine and barrel-tree rum, too.)
"What makes you reckon we'll pay you a ha'penny, you filthy, motherless scut?" one of them bawled.
A heartbeat later, he found himself staring down the barrel of Victor Radcliff's pistol. A pistol aimed at your face, as Victor had reason to know, seemed to own a bore as wide as a fieldpiece's. "You'll pay your scot right now, and then you'll get the devil out of here," Victor said quietly. In the sudden, vast silence, he didn't need to shout.
"And if I don't?" The trader had nerve-more nerve than sense, as far as Victor was concerned.
He said, "In that unfortunate circumstance, your heirs will be responsible for what you owe this gentleman…and for the cost of your funeral. Add in the farthing you're actually worth and it comes to a tidy little sum."
The other settler's bloodshot eyes crossed as he stared down the barrel of the pistol. "Who the hell are you, anyways, throwing orders around like you're God's anointed?"
"I am Major Victor Radcliff," Victor answered evenly. "If I have to ask your name, sir, you will not be glad of it: I promise you that. Now…Do as I told you or prepare to join the majority."
"That's fancy talk for 'die,' Ben," another trader said, in case Ben was too dense or too sozzled to figure it out for himself.
He wasn't-or he didn't let on that he was. "I know what it's fancy talk for, dammit," he said. With an effort, he looked at Radcliff rather than his weapon. "Put that miserable thing away so we can talk this over like a couple of sensible people."
"I am not a sensible person, and do not pretend to be," Radcliff said. "I have spent this whole war killing people who got in my way. If you think one more will bother me to the extent of a fart on a dung heap, you are making what I assure you will be your last mistake."
Ben considered. Victor knew the questions that had to be uppermost in his mind: could he knock the pistol aside before Victor blew his head off? If he could, could he win the brawl that would follow a split second later?
He must not have liked the answers he came up with. He said, "I'm going to reach down for some money. I'll do it slow, and I won't go for anything else. That all right by you?"
"Yes-as long as you mean it. If you don't, I promise that my friend and I will make you…briefly…wish you did."
"Your friend? You mean that…colored fellow?" Ben was almost, but not quite, too slow. He did have the brains to realize tagging a gun-toting Negro with an ugly name wasn't the smartest thing he could do. He took out enough money to cover his tab and then some. After setting it on the table, he walked off into the night.