"War is not about what is supposed to happen, Captain," Colonel Sinapis replied in tones so wintry, they should have frozen the subtropical landscape all around. "War is about what does happen, and about responding to it as best one can."

"Er-yes, sir," the captain said. That was one answer that was never out of place.

Not even Consul Stafford could complain about the way Sinapis and his officer corps got the men moving. The soldiers grumbled and swore, but soldiers always grumbled and swore. They marched along the muddy roads, which was what mattered. And the insurrectionists did not seem inclined to do more than harry them. Maybe that meant Frederick Radcliff didn't aim to attack New Marseille himself. Stafford hoped so, anyhow.

XII

More hard rain further slowed the army's march to New Marseille. Even after the soldiers got there, Leland Newton reminded himself, New Hastings would be a while learning of their misfortune. A ship or a land traveler would have to carry the news. The rebels had proved much too good at cutting telegraph lines. All the southern ones seemed to be out. Maybe a working line still ran from New Marseille up to Avalon. Even if one did, it wouldn't help much. There'd been talk of stringing wires from New Hastings to Avalon, but it hadn't happened yet.

Frederick Radcliff's irregulars kept sniping at the Atlantean soldiers, rain or no rain. "The reports said the damned insurrectionists somehow got their hands on proper percussion pieces," Jeremiah Stafford grumbled. "Why couldn't they have been wrong for once?"

"It could be worse," Newton said.

"Of course it could," the other Consul said. "They could have got their hands on a couple of batteries of field guns, too? Wouldn't that be delightful?"

Newton thought how he'd like to be on the receiving end of a cannonade. "Now that you mention it, no," he answered. He might sympathize with the downtrodden Negroes and copperskins, but not enough to lay his life on the altar in expiation for generations of white men's sins.

And then, just as he'd said it could, it proceeded to get worse. First one soldier and then several more came down with yellow fever. That did nothing to improve the morale of the men who managed to escape it. A good number of them were down with a bloody flux of the bowels. It was less dramatic than the yellow jack, which didn't mean it was a sickness anyone would want.

A few men trickled away. Colonel Sinapis responded by setting out even more sentries than he was already posting. Desertions slowed, though they didn't quite stop. Newton suspected more soldiers would have tried skedaddling had they not feared what might happen if the rebels caught them.

"God in heaven!" Stafford said. "The way things are going, I wonder whether we deserve to win."

"I've wondered all along," Newton said, drawing an irate glare from his colleague.

Colonel Sinapis looked at things from a different angle. "You must remember, your Excellency-these are green troops," he told Stafford. "Many of them have been in the army for years and years, but they are green anyhow, because whom has Atlantis fought in all that time?"

Instead of reacting to the obvious justice of the comment, Stafford only muttered, "Whom," as if he were a grammatical owl.

"Accusative case, is it not?" Sinapis said. "English is not my native tongue, but I do not care to make mistakes using it."

"You were accurate," Newton assured him. "You were more accurate than many people who grew up speaking English would have been."

"Oh. One of those," Colonel Sinapis said. "Every language has them, I suppose. They are like ambushes, set in place to trap the unwary."

A breeze from off the Hesperian Gulf blew the rain clouds to the east. It brought with it the scent of the sea. Newton was familiar with that sharp salt tang, of course; he couldn't very well not be, not when he'd spent most of his life in Croydon and New Hastings. But he thought the Hesperian Gulf smelled fresher than the ocean off the east coast of Atlantis. It probably was no coincidence that less sewage went into the Gulf than into the ocean off the East Coast.

A sentry rode back to the army and said, "Looks like there's a bunch of spooks and coppers laying for us up ahead."

"Can we give them a surprise for a change?" Consul Stafford asked.

"I command today," Newton said pointedly.

"Do you not wish to surprise the enemy?" Colonel Sinapis asked him.

Part of him wanted to say yes. If he did, he could get away with it-for the day. Sooner or later, though, the news would get back to New Hastings. Odds were it would get back in whatever distorted form Stafford chose to use. And Newton had discovered he liked getting shot at no better than any other human being.

Not without reluctance, he replied, "Proceed as you think best, Colonel."

"Maybe you are smarter than you look," Stafford said.

After a salute that might have come from a clockwork mechanism, Sinapis conferred with the scout. Then he sent a cavalry screen forward to keep the insurrectionists from getting a good view of anything else he was doing. With luck, the flanking party that hurried off to the right would do unto the enemy what he wanted to do unto the Atlantean army.

With luck… The thought brought Newton up short. The soldiers hadn't had much, not so far in this campaign.

He didn't need to wait long for another lesson on the dubious joys of being the target of flying lead. The rebels lurking among the ferns at the edge of a stand of hemlocks opened up on the Atlanteans from cleverly concealed positions.

Those positions didn't stay concealed for long, of course. When a rifle musket went off, it spat a long tongue of fire. And a cloud of black-powder smoke rose above the man who'd fired. If anyone ever invented gunpowder that didn't smoke, he'd make a fortune. Nobody'd come close to doing it yet.

"Return fire!" Colonel Sinapis shouted.

Quite a few of his men had already started shooting back without orders. They marched with loaded weapons, something they wouldn't do in anything but the most dangerous country. Two or three Atlantean soldiers fell. Screams rang out. One man, though, went down like a dropped rag doll. Shot through the head, he'd never get up again.

As they had more than once before, the Atlanteans in gray advanced on the ragged Negroes and copperskins harrying them. Before long, the rebels would slide back into the woods and disappear. Then the whole miserable process would start over a few miles farther down the road.

That was what the rebels thought, anyway. It was how things had worked out the last time they tried this stunt, and the time before that. It wasn't how things worked out today. As the copperskins and blacks started their withdrawal, the flanking column hit them. A great thunder of musketry from their left-the Atlantean army's right-announced the collision.

"That'll shift them!" Colonel Stafford yelled. "The biter bit-and let's see how the sons of bitches like being on the receiving end!"

By all the signs, the rebels liked it not a bit. That didn't surprise Leland Newton. In war more than perhaps in anything else, it was better to give than to receive.

Now that the rebels had to fight the flanking party, they couldn't simply fade away. The main body of the Atlantean army got into the scrap at close quarters. The soldiers had a lot of pent-up rage to vent.

Thinking about that, Newton turned to Balthasar Sinapis. "Colonel, don't you think you ought to order your men to take prisoners?" he said.

"Why?" Stafford yelped, as if he'd proposed requiring the soldiers to start practicing some unnatural vice.

Newton looked at him. "If you have learned the art of interrogating corpses, your Excellency, I hope you will be good enough to acquaint the rest of us with it."