He put the best face he could on things: "On to New Marseille, then?"

Sinapis dipped his head. "On to New Marseille, your Excellency. We shall make sure the rebels cannot steal the place. "That would be"-he paused to look for words-"unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. To say nothing of embarrassing." The ones he found seemed to fit altogether too well.

They roused Stafford from his sorrowful lethargy, too. "New Marseille already has a garrison! It has cannon!" he said.

"It has cannon," Sinapis agreed. "Most of them point out to sea, to protect the harbor from enemy bombardment. It has a garrison: a small one. So far as I know, it has not been reinforced by sea. These people we are fighting have already done several things I had not imagined they could do while I was still in New Hastings. If they should surprise us again, it would not surprise me."

Newton tried to parse that last sentence. Logically, it made no sense. Logic or no, he understood what Sinapis was talking about. So did his colleague. "Well, we'd better get there ahead of them, then," Stafford said. "Or, if we can't manage that, we'd better drive them out once we do get there."

"Indeed," Colonel Sinapis said. "I should not care to be remembered as the man who lost the city." His mouth tightened. He must have been remembered for some failures back in Europe; he'd made glancing allusion to at least one of them. Plenty of people came to Atlantis to try to redeem failure elsewhere. Some succeeded. They were the ones who wrote their names in life's book in large letters. Others went right on failing. Most of those, by the nature of things, were soon forgotten. But a soldier who failed might end up better remembered than one who triumphed.

The same, Newton realized uneasily, held true for a Consul who failed. Newton had understood from the start that either he or Stafford wouldn't get what he wanted from this campaign. Now he realized neither of them might get what he wanted. And what would come of that?

BOOK III

XIII

They were gone. The last gunshots petered out at the edge of the wooded swamp adjoining the St. Clair plantation. Frederick Radcliff allowed himself the luxury of a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. He'd known the Atlantean soldiers were dangerous fighting men. He hadn't dreamt how dangerous they were till they almost snatched him from his redoubt here.

He wouldn't even be able to stay here any more. The soldiers were liable to come back without warning. If they did, his own men might not be so lucky holding them off.

How had the white Atlanteans learned where he made his headquarters? Only one answer occurred to him: they must have squeezed it out of a captive. What had they done to the men they took? All sorts of unpleasant possibilities occurred to Frederick. With the scars of the lash on his own back, he wouldn't have put anything past the enemy.

But he was still in the fight. That was the most important thing. The Free Republic of Atlantis remained a going concern. And it remained an inspiration for slaves all over the southern half of the USA. Not all the uprisings that had broken out from the Hesperian Gulf to the Atlantic were under his control. That had worried him at first. It didn't any more. They all had the same goal: to give Negroes and copperskins the freedom they deserved simply by virtue of being men and women.

Some of those distant uprisings had ended in massacre, either of whites by furious slaves or of slaves by victorious and vengeful whites. That kind of slaughter would make it harder for the two sides to come back together when peace finally returned, if it ever did. Frederick urged his followers and everyone who rose with him to limit killing whenever they could. And he hoped his urging did some good. He hoped, yes, but he wouldn't have staked more than ten cents on it.

His scouts still kept a close eye on the Consular army. The main body didn't seem to be coming after him. As far as the watchers could tell, it was heading for New Marseille.

Lorenzo clicked his tongue between his teeth when he got that news. "I told you we should have grabbed the town when we had the chance," the copperskin said. "Ain't gonna get it again."

"We might not even have taken it. We couldn't have held it," Frederick said, as he had a good many times before.

As Lorenzo had before, he responded, "But think of the newspapers yelling 'Rebel army takes New Marseille!' Headlines like that, they're worth money to us."

"Getting run out and shot up isn't," Frederick said. "Do you reckon we could keep those soldiers from running us out?"

"Well… no," Lorenzo admitted.

"There you are, then." Frederick would have boxed Lorenzo's ears if the copperskin had tried to tell him anything different.

"Here I am, all right," Lorenzo said mournfully. "Here I am, trying to cipher out what we do next."

"We hang on, that's what," Frederick answered. "Long as we hang on, sooner or later we're gonna win. They have to squash us flat to lick us. And even if they do, we'll just pop up again somewhere else."

"All right. I hope it's all right, anyway," Lorenzo said. "We ain't got killed yet, and when we started out I sure thought we would have by now. Reckon that puts us ahead of the game."

Frederick thought that put them ahead of the game, too. Had their cause failed, they wouldn't just have been killed. They would have been put to death with as much pain and ingenuity as their white captors could come up with.

A brightly colored little bird fluttered from branch to branch above Frederick's head. Every so often, it would peck at a bug. He pointed to it. The motion was enough to send it flying away. A lot of Atlantean creatures had no fear of man. As far as Frederick could see, the little warblers were afraid of everything.

He knew how they felt.

Lorenzo saw the bird, too. His thoughts went down a different track: "Not much meat on those, but they're tasty baked in a pie. Dunno why the rhyme talks about blackbirds. They ain't half as good."

Off in the distance, more gunshots erupted. Frederick frowned, but that seemed to be the last flurry. "If you're sure you don't want to have anything to do with New Marseille, maybe we'd better head north, up towards Avalon," Lorenzo said. "Plenty of plantations up that way. Plenty of mudfaces and niggers who'd be glad to see us, and plenty of white folks who wouldn't."

He commonly put his own kind first. Frederick commonly thought of Negroes first. That wouldn't matter unless the two groups paused in their fight against oppression and went after each other instead of the whites who held them both down. Some of the whites had tried to provoke them into doing just that. So far, it hadn't worked. Frederick wanted to make sure it wouldn't.

"We've got to remember: the white folks are the ones we've all got to go after," he said. "Blacks don't fight copperskins. Copperskins don't fight black folks, either."

"Well, sure," Lorenzo agreed. "We'd have to be pretty damned stupid to pull a harebrained stunt like that."

"Plenty of people are stupid. Doesn't matter what color they are. Fools all over the place," Frederick said. "What we've got to do is, we've got to make sure the fools don't drag everybody else into the chamber pot with 'em."

"That sounds good to me," Lorenzo said. "We've got enough trouble taking on the white folks, looks like to me. We fight our own little war while we're trying to do that, they'll lick all of us."

Frederick Radcliff nodded. "Looks the same way to me." He was glad he and Lorenzo both saw it like that. To Negroes, copperskins, even enslaved copperskins, had more touchy pride than they really needed. They were always ready for trouble, and would sometimes start it themselves if they couldn't find it any other way.