The Marquis de la Fayette's troops were relentless foragers of another sort, too. Victor had never seen so many outraged fathers and husbands as congregated outside the marquis' tent. De la Fayette at first seemed inclined to make light of it. "I lead soldiers, not eunuchs," he observed. "They are men. It is war. These things happen. These things will always happen, so long as men go to war."
Were he merely defending a philosophical position, he would have had a point. Rather more than abstract philosophy was at stake, however. "Nothing obliges folk here to remain on the Atlantean Assembly's side," Victor pointed out "If your army makes people hate our cause, they will turn to King George and England instead. We don't want that. You aren't campaigning in enemy country, you know."
"What would you have me do. Monsieur?" De la Fayette seemed genuinely perplexed.
"Next time you find someone who can point out a woman's ravishers with certainty, hang them," Victor said.
"You're joking!" the marquis exclaimed.
"Not a bit of it," Radcliff answered. "I hanged a few of my men for crimes like that, and I rarely have to worry about them any more."
"But these are soldiers," de la Fayette said again.
"Let them find willing women," Victor said. "There are plenty. If the people here decide your men act worse than the redcoats, they'll shoot at us from behind trees and fences. If your soldiers go behind some ferns to answer nature's call, they'll get knocked over the head. They'll have their throats slit. I shouldn't wonder if they don't get their ballocks cut off, too."
"Barbarous," de la Fayette muttered.
"Well, so it is. But what would you call holding a woman down and forcing yourself on her?" Victor returned.
"Half the ones who screech rape afterwards were happy enough while it was going on," the French nobleman said.
"It could be, but so what? That still leaves the other half," Victor said stubbornly. "Your Grace, you have a problem here, and you don't want to look at it. But if you don't, you'll have a worse problem soon. And so will the United States of Atlantis. I don't intend to let that happen."
"Do you presume to give me orders?" the Marquis de la Fayette inquired. "You travel with my army, if you recall."
Victor looked through him. "You travel in my country, your Grace, if you recall." De la Fayette turned red-and turned away. Victor wondered if he'd pushed too hard. He couldn't make the Frenchman do anything, no matter how much he wished he could.
Three days later, a girl was able to point out the four men who'd taken turns with her. "What will you do about them?" she asked de la Fayette. The smirking soldiers hardly bothered to deny it. Their bravado turned to horror and disbelief when he ordered them hanged.
"To encourage the others," he said after the deed was done, so he knew his Voltaire, too. Then he asked Victor, "Are you now satisfied?"
"That you are serious? Yes, and your men will be, too," Victor said. And so it proved.
Chapter 18
Blaise looked around. So did Victor Radcliff. There wasn't much to see: ferns and evergreen trees and occasional bits of grass, a landscape more nearly Atlantean than European. "Where the devil are we?" Blaise asked, and proceeded to answer his own question: "In the middle of nowhere, that's where."
"More like the edge of nowhere, I'd say," Victor answered judiciously.
"Honh!" Blaise's voice might have served as an illustration for skepticism, could voices only have been illustrated. "I wouldn't be surprised if we saw one of those honker birds, like we caught over on the west side of the Green Ridge. If they don't live in the middle of nowhere, I don't know what does."
"I should be surprised if we saw one," Victor said. "You're always surprised to see them on this side of the mountains. I'm not sure how many are left here, or if any are."
"If any are, they'd live in a place like this," Blaise insisted. He paused, struck by a new thought: "Lot of meat on a honker bird."
"That there is," Victor said. "As much as on a deer, say. I wouldn't mind seeing a deer in these parts, either."
As if to underscore that, his stomach rumbled. The Marquis de la Fayette's Frenchmen had indeed left the redcoats behind by marching into the interior of Atlantis. They'd also come perilously close to leaving human habitation behind. As a result, they were living off the countryside, and the countryside had less to offer than Victor would have wished.
Things would have been worse were they Englishmen, or even troops from English Atlantis. Being French, they cheerfully gathered the fist-sized snails in the woods, and made tasty stews of the frogs and turtles they took from the streams they crossed and the ponds they skirted. Blaise ate such fare without complaint if with no great enthusiasm. So did Victor, who'd fed himself on similar victuals in his journeys through the Atlantean wilderness. But plenty of his countrymen would have turned up their noses… till they got hungrier than this, anyhow.
Victor might have thought the Marquis de la Fayette would turn up his nose at a large snail broiled on a stick over a fire. The French nobleman ate it with every sign of relish. He also failed to falter at flapjack-turtle stew. To see what he would say, Victor remarked, "You can also eat the big green katydids that scurry through the leaves and rubbish on the ground."
"Is that a fact?" Rather than disgusted, the marquis sounded fascinated. "You will have done this for yourself?"
"I will have indeed," Victor answered. "If you're hungry enough, you'll eat anything you can get your hands on."
Whereupon de la Fayette caught a katydid and toasted it over the flames. He chewed meditatively. "You have reason. Monsieur le General," he said when he'd finished. "They may be eaten. And, as you say, hunger likely makes the best sauce."
"No doubt," Victor answered, eyeing the young Frenchman- was he even twenty?-with new respect.
"Well, well," Blaise said that night as he and Victor lay side by side rolled in blankets. "More to him than meets the eye."
"There is," Victor agreed. That well well secredy amused him: his factotum was borrowing the phrase from his own way of speaking. "Pretty soon, we'll have to see how well the Frenchmen can fight. If they do it as well as they march, no reason to worry about them."
"I think they will do all right," Blaise said. "French people used me for a slave, so I don't love them. But in the last war, no one ever said the soldiers from France couldn't fight. They fought as well as the redcoats did, but there were not enough of them to win."
"True, every word of it. Besides, they would be embarrassed to fight badly when this bug-eating marquis is watching them, eh?" Victor said.
Blaise didn't answer. A moment later, a soft snore passed his lips. A moment after that, Victor was snoring, too.
Naturally, the Marquis de la Fayette called the river that divided what had been French and English Atlantis the Erdre. That name had gone into French atlases since the fifteenth century. Coming from the other side of the border, Victor just as naturally thought of it as the Stour. Thanks to the way the political winds blew, the English name waxed while the French one waned.
Not all the bridges over the river had been destroyed. Not all of them were even guarded. The French army crossed into English Atlantis without getting its feet wet and hurried northeast.
"You see?" Victor said to Blaise a few days later. "We'd gone farther west than this when we came north with those two copperskins all those years ago. I wonder what ever happened to them. I suppose they went west over sea to Terranova, the way they wanted to. That was the middle of nowhere."