"Enchanted, Mademoiselle," Victor said, bowing over her hand with slow, exaggerated-well, drunken-courtesy.
Louise started giggling then. So did Marie. As far as Victor knew, neither one of them had been into the brandy bottle. The Marquis de la Fayette, who had, laughed so hard he almost fell over. Victor stared at him in owlish indignation. Slowly, de la Fayette straightened. Even more slowly, his laughter faded. He was as sober as an inebriated judge when he pointed to Louise and said, "Does she suit you, Victor?"
"Eh? What's that you say?" Victor wondered if his ears were working the way they were supposed to.
"Does she suit you?" De la Fayette spoke slowly and distinctly, as if to an idiot child. But he was not talking about childish things at all. "I would not make you sleep alone, not after you came all this way to show us the tricks of fighting in Atlantis-and certainly not after you almost got shot a little while ago. If you would rather lie down with someone else, though, that can be arranged."
Victor choked. No matter how much brandy he'd taken aboard, he couldn't very well misunderstand that. He wasn't always perfectly faithful when he was away from Margaret for a long stretch. On the other hand, he'd never acquired a mistress before.
He looked at Louise. She was more than enjoyable enough to the eye. "Is this what you want to do?" he asked her.
Her skin might be dark brown, but her shrug was purely Gallic. "Why not?" she replied.
That question had a large number of possible answers. Victor could see at least some of them. Seeing them and caring about them proved two very different things. He'd drunk a great deal of the Marquis de la Fayette's excellent brandy. He'd been shot at without result, as the French nobleman reminded him. He'd been away from Margaret for much too long. And Louise was sweet to the eye. Would she be sweet to the touch as well? He couldn't imagine any reason why she wouldn't be-and he wanted to find out for himself.
"Well, then," he said, as if that were a complete sentence
As he and Louise were heading out of de la Fayette's tent and off to his own, the French marquis said, "I hope you have a pleasant evening. Monsieur le General. I should also let you know that your man of affairs will not envy your good fortune, for I have arranged companionship for him."
"Have you?" Victor said foolishly. But why not? Blaise had been away from Stella as long as Victor had been away from Margaret. Victor nodded. "Good. That's good."
Louise tugged at his sleeve. "Are you coming?"
"I am, my dear. So I am," Victor said. The guards outside the Marquis de la Fayette's tent presented arms as he and Louise left. The guards outside his own tent presented arms as he and Louise went in. They knew what he'd be doing in there, all right. But they were Frenchmen, too. They might envy him, but he didn't think they'd blab. And if they did-well, so what? The brandy he'd diligently got outside of told him it wouldn't matter a bit.
The camp bed with which de la Fayette had equipped the tent was a masterpiece of compact lightness. It promised one person a fine night's sleep. Victor wasn't so sure it would bear the weight of two, and it was decidedly narrow for entertaining. He shrugged. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Louise was every bit as enjoyable as he'd hoped she would be. Whether she also enjoyed herself… Well, that wasn't a question you wanted to ask a woman who wasn't there because she loved you. Victor approached the issue by saps and parallels, as it were: "Is this but for an evening, or will you join me again?"
In the gloom inside the tent, her race was unreadable "I am to be yours for as long as you wish me to be yours, Monsieur It General," she answered, which didn't tell him what he wanted to know.
"Does that suit you?" he asked, much as he had in de la Fayette's tent.
And she said, "Why not?," just as she had then. Then she asked a question of her own: "Twice, do you think?"
"I don't know," Victor said in surprise. Twice? So soon? He wasn't such a young man any more. He wasn't an old man yet, though. "Well, let's find out."
Along with potent brandy, the Marquis de la Fayette had brought strong coffee from France. Victor found himself drinking more of it than he was usually in the habit of doing. Without it, he might have found himself nodding off at any hour of the day or night. War had its exertions, but so did… peace.
He noticed Blaise was also drinking more than his share of that dark-roasted coffee. "A man must keep his strength up," Blaise said seriously.
"Yes," Victor agreed, deadpan. "He must."
Blaise's companion was called Roxane. If not for the shape of her nose and mouth, she might almost have passed for white. The French in Atlantis had mingled with their slaves for as long as they'd brought Africans to this land. Victor wondered whether dark Blaise knew some special sense of conquest, lying with a woman so fair. Wonder or not, he didn't ask. If Blaise wanted to talk about that, he would. If he didn't, anything Victor asked would be prying.
De la Fayette's regulars skirmished with the redcoats and loyalists who blocked their way north. They made little progress. After a while, Victor said, "It might be better to pull away from the coast and try to slide around them. Doesn't look as though you're going to break through."
"But will they not pull away with us, to keep us from sliding around?" By the way the marquis echoed Victor's technical terms, he found them picturesque.
Patiendy, Victor answered, "You can use a screening force to harass the enemy and hold them in place while the rest of your army steals a march on them. Then your screeners follow along, leaving the foe racing a fait accompli."
"What an interesting notion! What a brave notion!" de la Fayette exclaimed. He hesitated once more. "I am not sure how many of the local women will wish to accompany us on this journey, or how many of their owners will allow them to do so."
"Cert la guerre," Victor said gravely.
"True." De la Fayette sounded mournful, but only for a moment. "It could be, could it not, that there will be other women in the interior of Atlantis?"
"Well, so it could." Victor carefully didn't smile.
"Good! We shall proceed, then," de la Fayette declared.
Proceed they did. Not only did they proceed-they thrived. Victor had seen enthusiastic foragers before. His own Atlanteans, because of their sadly anemic supply train, did a fine job of living off the countryside: and that regardless of whether the countryside cared to be lived on.
But he soon had to own that his own countrymen couldn't match the French regulars for the thoroughness with which they stripped the landscape of everything even remotely edible. "Worn d'un rum" Blaise said, perhaps surprised out of English at what the Frenchmen could do. "Not even locusts could empty things the way these men do."
"They have locusts in the country you come from?" Victor asked. Atlantis had a profusion of different kinds of grasshoppers. Great swarms of locusts, such as those that devastated Egypt in the Bible when Pharaoh hardened his heart, were fortunately rare.
"Oh, yes," Blaise replied. "They eat our crops, and we roast them and eat them. But they do more damage than avenging ourselves so makes up for."
Victor's stomach didn't turn over, though plenty of Atlanteans' might have. Out in the woods, he'd sometimes got hungry enough to skewer Atlantis' big flightless katydids on a branch and toast them over a small fire. They weren't even bad, so long as you didn't think about what you were eating. He suspected more than a few of his soldiers had done the same on the march to New Marseille. The only trouble here was, those big katydids were getting scarce in settled country. Dogs and cats devoured them without finicky human qualms, while mice outbred them and outran them and scurried through the undergrowth in their place.