"Good for you," Victor said.
A couple of miles farther east, another sentry challenged Victor and Jeremiah. This one stood by an earthwork not far from the Union-Jack-and-red-crested-eagle flag the United States of Atlantis were using. Victor proclaimed himself with more confidence this time. The new sentry said, "Well, hatch me from a honker's
egg if you ain't. Welcome back. General!"
That satisfied Jeremiah's curiosity once and for all. "Since you are who you say you are, I'm back to my friends." Away he went, never once thinking he ought to wait for a general's permission.
He was an Atlantean, all right.
Hanover looked much the same as it had when Victor left it. More shops stood empty than he would have liked. Forts made the Royal Navy think twice about drawing near enough to bombard the city, but the English warships stifled seagoing commerce. Even salt cod was in short supply, and expensive in specie-far worse in Atlantean paper. And when the coast of English Atlantis ran low on salt cod, the end of the world or something even worse lay around the next corner.
Victor found that Blaise had got into town a day ahead of him. That usually happened when they didn't travel together. Victor had to be circumspect and careful. Blaise didn't, as long as he wasn't in a land where he had to worry about being reenslaved. Not many people paid much attention to a shabby Negro riding along by himself.
"Oh, yes. The redcoats stopped me once," he said. "I played dumb. They let me go after a while. Some of them tried scrubbing my arm to see if the color came off." He laughed at their ignorance.
"Now we have to see how we go about smashing Cornwallis between our men and de la Fayette's," Victor said.
"That will be good-if we can do it," Blaise said. "Yes, that will be very fine-if we can bring it off." His mixture of hope and doubt seemed almost Biblical in its cadences.
Victor was glad he'd found a certain scrap of paper in his pocket. "What we ought to do next," he said, "is to get some pigeons into de la Fayette's hands."
"He has plenty of food for now." Blaise caught himself, and also caught Victor's drift. "Oh-you mean the messenger birds."
"That's just what I mean," Victor agreed. "Then we can speak back and forth with him without risking human messengers. The English are also less likely to learn what we say to each other if we use pigeons in place of men."
"I do like the idea," Blaise said. "To set words on the wings of the wind… We use drums in Africa to pass news from one village to another, but anyone can hear a drum and know what it means. The birds are a better answer." Then admiration seemed to curdle into anger, for he added, "One more thing you white men thought of that we did not."
"Well, we're going to use it against other white men," Victor said.
Blaise might not even have heard him. "When I saw the ship that would bring me here… It was so big, and had all the sails and all the ropes-the rigging-and it was like nothing my folk could have built. And then they chained me in the hold, and now I know what hell and damnation are like."
Victor had never gone aboard a blackbirder-an innocent-sounding name for a slave ship if ever there was one. But he had been in Cosquer harbor when one tied up there. The stink coming from the slaver was enough to knock a man off his feet even a furlong or two downwind. To cross the ocean in the middle of that stench, in chains, on short rations… Victor was glad he'd been born a white man, and an Atlantean.
But Blaise hadn't finished. "When I came on shore at last, all wobbly and thin and sick, almost the first thing I saw was a horse pulling a man in a two-wheeled carriage. And the first thing that went through my head was, What a good idea! Why didn't we think of mat?"
"Have you horses?" Victor asked.
"No. They sicken and die," the Negro answered. "White men try to use them in my country now and then, but they never last long."
"Have you wheeled carriages?"
"For children's toys. Not for carts and carriages and wagons- and guns. Without horses, without oxen, we have no beasts to pull them." Blaise grinned crookedly. "And I know your next question. We also have not the proper roads, only tracks for people on foot. So what good would the fine carriage be in Africa? But it was so clever!"
"One of these days, I hope the world will say the same about the United States of Atlantis," Victor said. "And I hope that what we do in Atlantis will speak even in Africa."
"Maybe so-if it speaks of freeing slaves instead of buying and selling them," Blaise said. And the old argument began again.
In days gone by, Avalon's pirates had pioneered the practice of posting by pigeon. Red Rodney Radcliffe and the other freebooters lost regardless. But the lesson of what they'd done, unlike so many, did not go to waste. Atlantis had been a pigeon fancier's paradise ever since.
Finding out where de la Fayette and the French were came first. The Atlanteans needed pigeons that homed for some nearby village. They also needed to provide the marquis with birds that would return to Hanover. Once those things were done, the two separated forces could easily and quickly talk back and forth.
All that proved harder than Victor Radcliff had dreamt it would. The English, unfortunately, had understood Atlantean predilections. While they held Hanover, they'd harassed and hunted anyone who raised homing pigeons. They'd taken birds, and they'd killed birds, too. Several breeders passed more time than they'd wanted in close confinement
"Didn't anyone keep a flock intact?" Victor cried in dismay- no, in something not far from despair.
One of the pigeon fanciers said, "Wasn't easy, General. By my hope of heaven, it wasn't possible-never mind easy. Too many folk loyal to King George in town. Someone who knew you had birds would run to the redcoats, and then it'd be all up with you. Out in the countryside, there are still birds that will home for Hanover. Hardly any left here to the little towns."
To a Hanover man, any town but his own was a little town. Some Hanover men would likely call London a little town. But that was the least of Victor's worries. He let out a heartfelt sigh. "Well, not every plan works the way you wish it would when you put it together."
"Runners, then?" Blaise asked.
"Runners," Victor agreed, and wished he didn't have to.
He also wished he would have arranged a code with the Marquis de la Fayette before separating from him. Then they would have had a chance to communicate without letting the English understand what they intended even if Cornwallis' soldiers captured a messenger. It would have been a good idea had he thought of it sooner. Of course, many things would have been good ideas had one thought of them sooner.
He had to explain the idea of codes to Blaise. Then he had to explain the explanation. Blaise could read and write, but he'd come late to both arts. The vagaries of English spelling still bemused him-when they didn't enrage him. "You scramble up the words even worse than they are already? Nobody never read them after that," he said in dismay. Grammar deserted him, but not sincerity.
"We scramble them in a fashion upon which we have agreed in advance," Victor said. "That way, they easily may be unscrambled once more."
"Easily? I think not," Blaise said, and maybe he wasn't so far wrong.
Victor's men did everything they could to strengthen the works protecting Hanover's harbors. He didn't know where the Royal Navy had gone-into Terranovan waters, to fight the new uprising there? or off into the eastern Atlantic, to find and fight the French fleet?-but he didn't want ships of the line unexpectedly returning and cannonading the city. He had to be able to give them the warmest reception he could.
In due course, one of his messengers returned with a letter from the Marquis de la Fayette. The fellow also displayed a tricorn with a bullet hole clean through the crown. "Good thing it's a trifle small, and sits high on my head," he told Victor. "Otherwise, you'd be a long time waiting for that there paper."