The Atlantean Assembly had come through the town. He heard that at least a dozen times as he ate half a greasy capon at the tavern that didn't put on airs. The men of the Assembly had kept on heading northwest, which only proved they had better sense than Victor had credited them for.
"They could have stayed here. I don't know why they didn't," said the girl who brought him the capon and fried parsnips and beer.
He could have told her. But she'd doubtless lived her whole life here, and so didn't know any better. Besides, she was blue-eyed, snub-nosed, and full-figured. That had more to do with his discretion.
Even with rain pattering down, he preferred his tent to anything Horsham's inn offered. He was about to blow out the candle when a sentry nearby challenged someone. Victor reached for a pistol. He'd told Blaise he didn't want to play the game of assassinations. He had no guarantee General Howe felt the same way.
A voice came out of the darkness. It was a vaguely familiar voice, but Victor couldn't place it, especially through the muffling raindrops. Then the sentry stuck his head into the tent. Despite a broad-brimmed hat, water dripped from the end of his nose He sneezed before he said, "Your cousin Matthew's here to see you, General"
"Bless you, Jack. And for God's sake tell him to come in before he drowns," Victor said. He and Matthew Radcliffe were cousins, but hardly more than in the sense that all men were brothers. Still, the Atlantean Assemblyman from Avalon wouldn't have come back from wherever the Assembly had gone unless something urgent was going on. Victor hoped he wouldn't have, anyway.
Once inside the tent, Matthew shook himself like a wet dog. He was as soaked as the sentry, or maybe worse. He sneezed, too. Victor produced a flask of barrel-tree brandy. "Here," he said. "A restorative"
"You're a good man, General. Damned if you're not." Matthew Radcliffe took a hearty nip. "Ahh! That'll warm me up, or I hope it will. I hope to Jesus something will."
"Did you see Noah's Ark when you rode back here?" Victor asked gravely after his own pull at the flask.
He didn't faze the man from the west. "See it? The old man dropped me off just outside your camp."
"Generous of him." Victor wasn't about to let anybody out-calm him. But small jests went only so far, especially by the dim light from a candle. "Why did you need to see me in weather like this?"
"Because in Honker's Mill-which is where the Assembly is right now, and may stay a while-I met a man who'd come over the mountains with news from Avalon." Matthew Radcliffe punctuated that with another sneeze
"God bless you." Victor drank from the flask again. "I don't suppose the news is good. If it were, it could have waited. The bad is what they have to tell you as soon as they can."
"Too right," his distant cousin agreed. "And I have bad news to give you, all right. The English, damn their black hearts, landed a band of coppers kin warriors from Terra nova south of our town. They've got hatchets and bows and arrows-and muskets and powder and ball the Englishmen gave 'em-and they're robbing and killing and burning and raping as they please. To tell you the truth, they're having a rare old time."
"Good Lord!" Victor had talked about copper-skinned mercenaries with Isaac Fenner, but he'd really expected to have to deal with Germans. Terranova's east coast, across the Hesperian Gulf from Atlantis, was dotted with Dutch and English and Spanish settlements. There had been French settlements there, too, but King Louis lost those along with the ones he'd ruled here in Atlantis.
White men were spreading into the interior of northern Terranova, but more slowly than they were in Atlantis. The barbarous copperskins fought against them-or sometimes, as here, fought for them.
"What can we do. General?" Matthew Radcliffe asked. "Can you spare men to send over the mountains or around the coast by sea? The Avalon militia is trying its best, but a lot of our men have already come east to right the redcoats."
Traveling across Atlantis' mountainous spine still wasn't easy. Small bands could make it, living off the land as they went. With farms and villages few and far between, a real army was liable to starve on the way west.
Most of the time, sailing would have been a better bet, in merchantmen or in fishing boats. Now… Now the Royal Navy was much too likely to snap them up like a cat killing mice that tried to sneak past it. "If I send a hundred men, most of them ought to get to Avalon," Victor said slowly. "And most of the ones who do ought to be able to fight. How many copperskins did the English turn loose over there?"
"I don't know exactly," Matthew Radcliffe replied. "I'm not sure anyone does know-except the savages and the damned sea captain who brought 'em, may the Devil fry his soul as black as his heart is already."
"Well, are a hundred soldiers and your militiamen enough to put paid to them?" Victor asked. "If they aren't, I fear you have more trouble than I know what to do with."
"Me, I fear the same thing," Matthew said. "But God bless you, General. I'll take your hundred men, and gladly. They're a hundred more than I reckoned you'd give me."
"We have to hold Avalon. It's our window on Terranova," Victor Radcliff said. "One of these days, travel across Atlantis will be easier. The west will be more settled. Avalon's the best harbor there, far and away-New Marseille doesn't come close. If the Royal Navy ties up in Avalon Bay, if the Union Jack flies on the hills there, they've got us by the bollocks. And they'll squeeze, too. They'll squeeze like anything."
"God bless you," Matthew Radcliffe said again. "Too many easterners can't see any of that. We ought to pay King George back for trying to bugger us this way." That wasn't quite the figure of speech Victor had used, but it got the Atlantean Assemblyman's meaning across. Matthew turned the subject: "Anything left in that flask?"
Slosh. "A little." Victor handed it to him. "Here."
"God bless you one more time" His cousin tilted his head back. His throat worked. He set the flask down. "Not any more, by Christ!" He bared his teeth in something more snarl than smile "But what the Devil can we do to England in Terranova? The settlements there are quiet. Quiet as the grave, if you ask me Quiet as the tomb. Those bastards don't give a farthing for freedom. If they'd risen with us. King George would have a harder time of it, to hell with me if he wouldn't. Am I right or am I wrong. General?"
"Oh, you're right-no doubt about it. I wish you weren't, but you are" Victor stared sorrowfully at the empty silvered flask, which gave back what candlelight there was. He wished he had another nip of his own. Well, no help for it: not right now, anyway.
"We ought to send missionaries to them, the way the Spaniards send missionaries to the copperskins they've conquered."
Matthew Radcliffe said. "If they can turn nasty savages into Papists, can't we turn nasty Englishmen into freedom-lovers?"
"Missionaries." For a moment, Victor chuckled at the other man's conceit. Then his gaze focused and grew more intense, like the sun's rays brought together into a point by a burning glass. "Missionaries," he said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.
"You've got some kind of scheme," Matthew said. "Tell me what it is."
Instead of answering him directly, Victor clapped on a hat and stuck his head out into the pouring rain. He spoke with Jack for a minute or two. The sentry let out a resigned sigh. Then he squelched off into the darkness.
"You have got some scheme." Matthew Radcliffe sounded half curious, half accusing.
"Who, me?" Victor, by contrast, did his best to seem innocence personified. By the look Matthew sent him, his best came nowhere close to good enough. The Assemblyman kept shooting questions at him. Victor ducked and dodged and finally said, "You'll find out soon, I hope." That also failed to leave Matthew Radcliffe serene.