"Well, hot damn!" the sufferer exclaimed. "Take me to 'em, by Jesus!"
He died the next morning, unable to breathe, his heartbeat fading to nothingness. "Sorry, General," one of the surgeons told
Victor. "We did everything we knew how to do, but____________________
" His shoulders wearily slid up and down. If a poisonous serpent bit you, you were in God's hands, not any surgeon's.
"I'm sure you did," Victor said. "We'll bury him and we'll go on. Nothing else we can do."
On they went. Some supplies did come over the Green Ridge Mountains after them-some, but not enough. Victor would have been more disappointed had he expected anything more. The path west to Avalon was far and away the best on this side of the mountains. He'd never thought he could keep an army of this size supplied from the far side of the mountains even on that track. This route to New Marseille didn't compare.
Well, the hunting was better down here. He'd told himself that before. He did once more, hoping he was right.
Red-crested eagles screeched from cypresses. Seeing and hearing them raised Victor's hopes. The eagles were dangerous-men reminded them of honkers, their proper prey. But in this part of Atlantis, red-crested eagles could more readily find that proper prey.
And if they could, people could, too. So Victor hoped, anyhow. And Habakkuk Biddiscombe's horsemen did. They brought back more than a dozen of the enormous birds on the backs of packhorses. Each honker carcass would feed a lot more than two to four soldiers.
Victor imagined his many-times-great-grandfather gaping at a salted honker leg in some low tavern in Brittany. That was how the story of Atlantis started, with Francois Kersauzon telling Edward Radcliffe about the new land far out in the sea. The English had always put more into this land and got more out of it. So Victor thought, anyhow. Any French Atlantean ever born would have called him a liar to his face.
His horse splashed across a stream. A frog as big as his fist hopped off a rock and churned away. He hoped there were no crocodiles or so-called lizards in the water. They'd come far enough south to make it anything but impossible, especially on this side of the mountains.
Blaise took the notion of crocodiles in stride. "They have bigger ones back in Africa," he said.
"Well, they're damned well welcome to them, too," Victor said.
"Maybe one of these is big enough to eat up General Cornwallis when he gets off the boat by New Marseille," Blaise said. "How much does he know about crocodiles?"
"Only what he learned the last time he was in Atlantis-if he learned anything at all," Victor answered. "They haven't got any in England. It's colder there than it is by Hanover."
"No wonder people from England want to come here!" Blaise said. He came from a land with weather worse than Spanish Atlantis'. Weather like that surely came from Satan, not from God. Good Christians denied the Devil any creative power. Such weather was the best argument he could think of for turning Manichee.
"It's not always sticky. Dry half the year. But always warm. All what you're used to," Blaise said. "The first time I found out what winter was like, I thought the world had gone mad. I was afraid it would stay cold like that forever. I wondered what I'd done to deserve such a thing."
"But now that you know better, aren't you glad you're not in a bake oven all the time?" Victor asked.
Blaise shrugged. "This right here, this is not so bad." By the way he said it, he was giving the local weather the benefit of the doubt.
To Victor, this right here was an alarmingly authentic approximation of a steam bath. "A wise man who lived a long time ago said custom was king of all-a fancier way to say 'All what you're used to,' I suppose. Me, I'd prefer something cooler."
"Even here, it will get cooler in the wintertime." Blaise made that sound like a damned shame. To Victor, it sounded wonderful. Sure enough, they bowed to different kings of custom.
But neither one of them bowed to the King of England. With a little luck-and with good fortune in war-they never would again.
Victor had heard that runaway Negroes and copperskins lived in villages of their own on the far side of the Green Ridge Mountains. Stories said they tried to duplicate the life they'd led before they were uprooted and brought to Atlantis. He'd never known whether to believe those stories. They sounded plausible, but anyone above the age of about fourteen needed to understand the difference between plausible and true.
The stories turned out to be true. Habakkuk Biddiscombe's men led him to what was plainly a copperskin village. The huts, which looked like upside-down pots made of bark over a framework of branches, were like none he'd ever seen before. Near them grew fields of maize.
Everything was deserted when he rode up to look the place over. "Some of the savages are bound to be watching us from the woods," Biddiscombe said, gesturing toward the tall trees surrounding the village. "But even if they are, we won't get a glimpse of them unless they want us to."
"Or unless they make a mistake," Victor said. "That does happen every now and again."
"Not often enough," the cavalry officer said, and Victor couldn't disagree with him. Biddiscombe continued, "Now that we've found this place, I suppose you'll want us to tear it down? If the weather were even a little wetter, I'd say burn it, but too easy for the fire to run wild the way things are."
The weather was wet enough to suit Victor and then some. "Why would we want to wreck the village?" he asked in genuine surprise. "These copperskins have done nothing to us."
His surprise surprised Habakkuk Biddiscombe. "They're runaways, General," Biddiscombe said, as if that should have been obvious to the veriest simpleton.
And so it was. But its consequences weren't, at least to Victor. "Well, yes," he replied. "They seem to be happy enough here, though. If we rob them of their homes, they may try to hunt us through the woods. They aren't our enemies now, and I'd sooner try not to make them hate us unless we have some reason for doing so."
"They're nothing but runaways," Biddiscombe repeated. "Copperskin runaways, at that."
"Leave them alone. Leave this place alone. That is an order," Victor said, so the cavalry officer could be in no possible doubt "If they harry us, we shall make them regret it. Until they do, I prefer to concentrate on the English, who truly are the enemy. Do I make myself clear?"
"Abundantly." Biddiscombe might have accused Victor of picking his nose and then sticking his finger in his mouth.
"Carry out your orders, then-and no 'accidental' destruction for the sport of it, either." Victor did his best to leave no loopholes in the orders. By Habakkuk Biddiscombe's expression, he'd just closed one the horseman had thought about using.
He wondered if he would have been so firm about protecting a village built by Negro runaways. Somehow, whites had an easier time looking down their noses at blacks than at copperskins. Blaise wouldn't have approved of that, which made it no less true.
Before long, Victor became pretty sure his men would be able to keep themselves fed on the road to New Marseille. He must have put the fear of God in the quartermasters at Nouveau Redon: supplies did keep coming over the Green Ridge Mountains. They weren't enough by themselves to victual the soldiers, but they were ever so much better than nothing. With oil thrushes and honkers, with fish and turtles taken from the streams (and with snails almost the size of roundshot and big, fat frogs taken by the French Atlanteans in the army), the men got enough to eat.
Marseille, Victor knew, lay in the south of France. Maybe that was why the French Atlanteans had named their western town after the older city. The weather here certainly was southern in nature. It was hot and humid. The army could have marched faster in a cooler climate. Too much haste here, and you were much too likely to tall over dead. A handful of soldiers did. They got hasty, lonely graves, like the one for the man bitten by the coral snake. The rest of the army pushed west.