But that wasn't the point. "So you have masters there, too?" he asked. That was.
Reluctantly, Blaise nodded. "We have them."
"You never thought it was wrong and unnatural?"
"I never was a slave before. You see-if someone buys and sells you, won't you think it wrong and unnatural?"
"I daresay I should. But suppose you never got caught and sold. Suppose you grew to be a rich man in your own country. Would you not have slaves of your own now? Would you not be as contented a slaveowner as any white man in the old French set-dements or down in Spanish Atlantis?"
This time, Blaise did not answer for some little while. At last, his face troubled, he nodded again. "Maybe I would. You ask nasty questions-do you know that?"
No doubt people had said the same thing about Socrates in Athens long ago. He'd ended up drinking hemlock because of it, too-something modern gadflies sometimes tried to forget. "I will tell you something, Blaise," Victor said. "So do you."
The French regulars showed no more love for the interior of Atlantis than the redcoats ever had. "It is unfairly difficult to subsist an army here in such an empty land," the Marquis de la Fayettecomplained.
"Not always easy, true," Victor Radcliff answered: a honker-sized understatement if ever there was one.
As he had a while before, he thanked heaven the French soldiers ate anything that didn't eat them first. That helped keep them fed. But you could gather up only so many frogs and turtles and snails and wingless katydids (the French regulars found them better than tolerable, especially with a dash of garlic). And there wasn't any bread to gather up away from farms, nor even fruits and nuts. Some Atlantean ferns had parts you could eat- fiddleheads, country folk called them. Even so…
"We need to get into more settled country," Victor added.
"I should say we do." The marquis' crooked grin seemed all the more surprising on the face of a man so young. "Otherwise, we shall be no more than wraiths by the time we have to fight the English. In one way, that might aid us, eh? It could be that bullets pass through wraiths without doing harm. But I do not believe our soldiers would appreciate the diminution of their corporeal frames even so."
"Er-yes." Victor didn't know how to take that. He realized it was a joke, and chuckled to show he did: he didn't want de la Fayette to think him nothing but an ignorant backwoodsman. But it was perhaps the most elaborately phrased joke he'd ever heard. It might have seemed much funnier in a Paris drawing room than it did in this sparsely settled stretch of Atlantis.
That very afternoon, one of the handful of French mounted scouts rode back to the main body of de la Fayette's troops in high excitement. "Beeves!" he cried. "Wonderful beeves!"
They weren't wonderful beeves, or they wouldn't have been to men not staring hunger in the face. They were ordinary cattle: distinctly on the scrawny side, in fact, and of no particular breeding. The same description applied to the two men who kept an eye on them as they grazed in the meadow.
No wolves in Atlantis. No bears. No lions. But French regulars could be even more ravenous. The herdsmen stared at them in bleak dismay. "Is it that they hope to be paid?" de la Fayette asked Victor.
"I don't know how happy even that will make them," Radcliff replied. "Atlantean paper's gone up some since France came in on our side, but we'd have to give them a bushel basket full of it before they got their money's worth."
"Paper?" The marquis sniffed. Then he shouted for the army paymaster. That worthy repaired to one of his wagons. De la Fayette waved to the herdsmen, summoning them into his presence. They came, apprehensively. The paymaster, a sour look on his face, gave them three small gold coins each. The herdsmen stared as if they could hardly believe their eyes. Victor knew he could hardly believe his. "It is good?" de la Fayette asked in accented but understandable English.
"It's mighty goddamn good, your Honor!" one of the herdsmen blurted. The other man, startled past speech, nodded dumbly.
"Haven't seen so much specie in a devil of a long time," Blaise said in a low voice.
"Nor have I," Victor whispered back. He had to gather himself before he could speak to de la Fayette: "Your king provided for you lavishly."
"I will have need to pay the soldiers. I will have need to purchase victuals, as now," the French commander said, shrugging. "And so his Majesty has made it possible for me to do these things."
"So he has," Victor Radcliff agreed tonelessly. The Atlantean Assembly had made it possible for him to do those things, too. The only trouble was, the Assembly hadn't made it possible for him to do those things very well. France was rich, populous, and efficiently-many would say, tyrannically-taxed. The United States of Atlantis were none of those things. Here in this meadow, Victor got his nose rubbed in the difference.
French army cooks proved to roast beef in much the same fashion as their Atlantean counterparts. It was charred black on the outside, as near raw as made no difference on the inside Along with garlic-which Victor didn't much fancy-the French cooks had salt to add to the meat's savor, which Atlanteans might well not have.
"Is this from the salt pans of Brittany?" Victor asked.
De la Fayette looked at him as if he'd started using Blaise's language. "I have no idea." He asked some of the cooks. When they told him it was, he sent Victor a curious look. "Now haw would you have guessed that?"
"Well, my ancestor, Edward Radcliffe, was in Brittany buying salt when Francois Kersauzon sold him the secret of the way to Atlantis for a third of his catch," Victor said. "Kersauzon found it first, but Radcliffe settled first."
"Atlantis, sold for salt fish." The Marquis de la Fayette sighed gustily. "France has had many long years to repent of that bargain."
"If you'd asked Kersauzon, he would have told you he was a Breton, not a Frenchman," Victor said. "Still a tew-not many any more, but a few-in French Atlantis who remember the difference even now."
"I saw as much in Cosquer. They are fools. But England has those, too, n'est-ce pas? Welshmen who cling to Wales and the like," de la Fayette said. "Have they no settlements of their own in Atlantis?"
"A few small ones. No big ones I know of," Victor said. The marquis raised an eyebrow at the qualification. Victor explained: "West of the mountains, plenty goes on that people on our side, on the long-settled side, don't find out about till later, if we ever find out at all."
"How charming!" de la Fayette exclaimed, which was hardly the word Victor would have used. Something in his expression must have given him away, for the young Frenchman quickly went on, "In my country, there is no room for villages full of mystery, villages of which the king and his servants know nothing."
"I see," Victor said, and he supposed he did. "In Atlantis, there is still room for people who want to be left alone, yes." He wasn't so sure that was charming. Some of the people who wanted to be left alone weren't far removed from maniacs. Others were just robbers and runaways who had excellent reasons to want to remain undiscovered.
But de la Fayette said, "This is the liberty I am proud to assist: the liberty to be oneself."
That night, Blaise softly asked, "Well, who else can you be but yourself?"
"I don't know," Victor replied. "You have to admit, though, it sounds a lot better in French."
As they came up from the southwest, Victor realized they weren't more than a couple of days' travel from Hooville. He shook his head in bemused wonder. He'd stopped in the little town on his way to Hanover when the fight against England was just on the point of breaking loose. And, if they were only a couple of days away from Hooville, they were only three days from his own farm.