The praise sounded even more impressive in French, perhaps, than it would have in English. The marquis did speak English after a fashion, but both Victor and Blaise were more fluent in French. And, since several of the French officers had only their native tongue, they were happy not to have to try to learn Atlantis' dominant language on the fly.
"You gentlemen certainly have, ah, made yourselves at home here," Victor remarked.
"My dear sir!" de la Fayette said again. "It is from time to time necessary to fight a war. No denying that, however great a pity it may be. Still, it is not necessary to make oneself unduly uncomfortable while fighting it, eh?"
"So it would seem," Victor said, and left it there.
His allies lived under canvas: they were, as de la Fayette said, at war. But they'd brought over a variety of light, ingenious folding furniture-not just chairs, tables, and writing desks, but also bed frames and wickerwork chests of drawers-that let them feel as if they were back in their estates on the Loire or the Seine.
And they'd brought over some vintages finer than any Victor had ever tasted, and some brandies that taught him what brandy ought to be. They supplemented those with beer and ale and spirits taken from the countryside. And their chef… Blaise put it best when he said, "It's a wonder you gentlemen don't all weigh four hundred pounds. You've got some of the best victuals I ever tasted."
"You do," Victor agreed; he was thinking about letting his belt out a notch.
"Merci" the marquis said, smiling-he was an affable young man, no doubt about it. "I shall pass your praise on to Henri, who will be grateful for it." Henri was the genius who did things to poultry and beef the likes of which no Atlantean cook had ever imagined.
Captain Froissart said, "You will remember, my friends, that we get our exercise come what may." His colleagues grinned and leered and nodded.
Victor managed a smile himself. Most of the exercise the French officers got was of the horizontal variety. They hadn't been in Atlantis long, but they'd acquired mistresses or companions or whatever the word was. The girls were all uncommonly pretty. Quite a few of them, whatever they were to be called, had dark skins.
Victor wondered what Blaise would have to say about that. Blaise took it better than he'd expected. "If you sleep with an officer, you get presents you don't see from anybody else," he observed. "You hear things you don't hear from other folk, too. You do all right for yourself afterwards, I bet."
"I wouldn't be surprised," Victor said, and left it there.
Knowing the country between Cosquer and Freetown better than the newly come French-he'd fought against Montcalm-Gozon and Roland Kersauzon hereabouts in the last war-Victor accompanied the Marquis de la Fayette on reconnaissance rides to probe the English positions.
And, more than once, he accompanied the marquis on very rapid returns to the French army's positions. The redcoats also seemed to know the countryside quite well. Some of the Atlanteans who fought on King George's side knew it even better. Radcliff and de la Fayette barely escaped a couple of ambuscades.
"Nothing like being shot at when they miss, n'est-cepas?" de la Fayette said after some English musket balls missed by not nearly enough.
"It is an improvement on getting hit," Victor agreed. "Past that, I don't think it has a great deal to recommend it."
By then, they were almost back to the French commander's tent. "Come in and take some brandy with me," de la Fayette said. "You will see how much better it tastes now than it would have on an ordinary day when nothing interesting happened."
"I don't know about that, your Excellency, but I'll gladly make the experiment," Victor said.
One tumbler of brandy became two, and then three. Victor wasn't sure whether the bottled lightning tasted better than it would have on an ordinary day. He wasn't sure it got him anymore drunk than it would have on an ordinary day, either. Well before he finished that third tumblerful, he was sure it didn't get
him any less drunk.
The marquis seemed convinced he'd proved his point As he refilled his own tumbler, he solemnly declared, "There is also something else that improves after one is fired upon to no
effect."
"Oh?" Victor responded with a certain intensity of his own. "And what might that be?"
De la Fayette got a fit of the giggles. "It might be any number of things, my friend. But what it is… If you will excuse me for a few seconds…" He hurried out of the tent without waiting to find out whether Victor would excuse him or not. That affronted Victor, which only went to show he'd had a good deal to drink himself-not that he thought of it in those terms at that moment.
The marquis took longer to return than he'd promised. That didn't bother Victor Radcliff, who applied himself to the brandy with a dedication suited to-he supposed-celebrating a narrow escape.
Then de la Fayette did return-with his companion, a charming and intelligent (and Victor had seen that she was both) young mulatto woman named Marie. And with the two of them came another pretty girl, perhaps two shades darker than Marie. The marquis introduced her as Louise.
"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 Fayet
te 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.
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 th
e 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."
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