Blaise thought that over. His smile would have made any slaveholder's blood run cold. "You've got something there. Put together an army of blacks and copperskins and all this part of Atlantis runs for its mother."
Victor Radcliff laughed, even if his heart wasn't in it. He hoped Blaise couldn't see that. One of these days, Atlantis would have to face up to slavery and either let it go or decide it was a positive good and cling to it more tightly than ever. He had the bad feeling that that choice would prove rougher and nastier than the one between the Atlantean Assembly and King George-which was proving quite rough enough on its own.
He also had the bad feeling that that struggle shouldn't start till this one was over. One thing at a time, he thought. Sometimes accomplishing even one thing at a time seemed much harder than it should have.
"General Radcliff! General Radcliff1." someone shouted.
Blaise's grin reverted to its usual mocking self. "Somebody needs you he said. "We can talk about this other thing some more later."
"All right," Victor said. Sometimes not accomplishing something didn't seem so bad. He waved and raised his voice. "Here I am! What's the trouble?" Something had to be bunged up. People didn't yell for him like that when everything was rosy.
A cavalryman came over to him. "There's Frenchies shooting at us when we try and forage," he said. "They're coming out with all kinds of daft nonsense, like here we are invading them again."
"Oh." Victor swore in English, French, and, for good measure, Spanish. He wished the Atlantean army included more French settlers. He'd tried to include some of the ones he did have in all of his foraging parties. "Why didn't these Frenchies want to listen to the people who tried to tell them we aren't after them-we're fighting the English?"
Without being in the least Gallic, the cavalryman's shrug was a small masterpiece of its kind. "Why, General? On account of they're French, I reckon."
"Can you tell me more than that?" Victor clung to patience.
"They say we're robbing them again, same as we did before," the horseman answered.
"But we're not. We're paying for what we take."
"Victor eyed the man who'd brought him the bad news. "You are paying for what you take, are you not?"
"Yes, General." Butter wouldn't have melted in the horseman's mouth. "But they don't fancy our money, and that's the Lord's truth."
Radcliff took the Lord's name in vain again. His army couldn't pay gold or silver-or even copper-for what it requisitioned from the countryside. It paid in paper printed by the Atlantean Assembly: possibly printed by Custis Cawthorne in person. If all went well in the war against England, that paper might be redeemable for specie… some day. As things were, it was worth what people decided it was worth-at the moment, not so much. With better choices, Victor wouldn't have been delighted to get Atlantean paper himself.
But the French Atlanteans had no better choices. They could take the paper money they were offered, which was worth some' thing. Or they could take nothing. Or they could get killed and have their property run off anyway. Victor couldn't see anything else they might do.
"Do you want to go softly, or do you want to crush them?" Blaise asked.
"I was wondering the same thing," Victor answered. "I'll try to go softly at first-I don't want to make them hate us."
"More than they do already," the cavalryman put in.
"More than that," Victor agreed. "The war is against King George If we have to fight the French settlers, too, that only makes things harder. If they join General Howe, that also makes things harder. So I want to keep them sweet if I possibly can."
Blaise made a discontented noise deep in his throat. Victor might have known he would. French Atlanteans were enemies to the Negro, and always would be. He had his reasons for that. Victor even sympathized with them, but his own concerns overrode them.
He shouted for a groom to fetch his horse. "Let's see if they'll listen to me," he said.
"What if they don't?" the cavalryman asked.
"They will wish they would have," Victor replied.
He found his cavalrymen just outside musket range of a stone farmhouse and bam. He could see men moving around inside the house. Maybe friends had gathered together to oppose the cavalry, or maybe it was one of the huge families common in Atlantis. He rode forward under flag of truce.
"Is that smart, General?" one of his men asked.
"Even if they fire, chances are they'll miss," Victor answered. He raised his voice and switched to French: "I am General Radcliff! I wish to parley!"
A farmer stuck his head out a window. "You wish to steal, you and all the other English Atlanteans!"
"We will pay you for what we take," Victor answered.
"In worthless paper," the farmer jeered.
"It is not worthless," Victor said, which was technically true He went on, "Your only other choice is to die fighting. We have no quarrel with you, but we must eat."
"So must we," the farmer said. "And how do you propose to kill us? If you attack, we will shoot you down as you come. We know how to deal with mad dogs, by God. You cannot force us from this house. It is our patrimony."
"We do not want to fight you, but we will if we have to." Victor couldn't let the farmer get away with too much, or he would spend the next five years parleying at every little homestead in French Atlantis. "We will bring up our cannon and knock your patrimony down around your ears."
The fanner disappeared back into the house. Victor could hear argument inside, but couldn't make out what was going on. Some of the defenders seemed to realize they couldn't hold out against field guns. Victor didn't want to slaughter them. But war made you do all kinds of things you didn't want to do.
When the farmer came back to the window, he shook a fist at Victor. "You are a bad chalice!" he shouted, which was anything but an endearment from a French Atlantean. "I will take your paper, and you will redeem it, or I will hunt you down and make you sorry."
"It is agreed," Victor said. If the rebellion won, the Atlantean Assembly's paper would be redeemed-he hoped. And if the uprising failed, more people than this rustic would be on his trail.
He gave the man the paper money as the cavalrymen rounded up livestock. "This looks like a lot," the French Atlantean said. "If it really were a lot, though, you'd give me less." He wasn't wrong. The farmers whose ancestors had sprung from Britanny and Normandy were commonly canny, and he seemed no exception.
"Do please remember-you have one other gift of me," Victor said.
"Oh?" The farmer quirked a bushy eyebrow. "And what may that be?"
"Your life, Monsieur. I was not joking about the artillery."
"I know," the farmer said. "If I thought you were, I would have shot you out of the saddle."
"We don't have to love each other. All we have to do is work well enough to keep from shooting," Victor said.
"You have more guns, which makes this easier for you to say," the farmer replied-and, again, he had a point. Since he did, Victor tipped his hat and rode away. No one from the farmhouse or the bam shot him in the back, which was as good a bargain as he could hope for.
General Howe's army landed at Cosquer, the oldest French town on the coast. Victor had expected that. The only other choices the redcoats had were to land at St. Denis, a seaside hamlet south of Cosquer, or to sail around the Spanish-held southern coast of Atlantis and put in at New Marseille or even at Avalon. No one could stand against them in the west, but they would be too far away from the more settled regions to harm the uprising much.