Frederick swore under his breath. If the Atlantean soldiers had headed straight east again-if they'd started back along the same road they'd used to get to New Marseille-he still could have imagined they were giving up the fight and heading off to the Green Ridge Mountains again. But no. They intended to keep on with their campaign, all right. In fact…

"Ain't that where we got us most of our fighters?" the messenger said.

"Yes," Frederick said, and left it right there. He'd wanted to spread the insurrection towards Avalon. The more of the southwest that fell under the influence of the Free Republic of Atlantis, the better, as far as he was concerned.

None of the whites needed to be Julius Caesar-or, for that matter, Victor Radcliff-to see as much. And they would have taken prisoners, and squeezed them hard. Frederick had to assume they knew as much about his plans as any of his ordinary soldiers.

He thought of something else: "Did they bring everybody out of New Marseille, or did they leave a garrison behind?"

"More soldiers in there now than there was before the white folks marched in," the messenger answered.

That made Frederick swear again. He knew it would make Lorenzo swear even more ferociously. But now he could truthfully tell the copperskin that he'd thought about trying to take the town, and he'd had good reason to decide it wouldn't work.

He got to tell Lorenzo exactly that a couple of hours later. Lorenzo only nodded. "Too damned many snowballs stayed behind," he said. If whites had rude names for their colored bondsmen, it was only natural that the folk who sprang from Terranova and Africa would return the disfavor.

"That's right," Frederick said, wondering how Lorenzo had got the news. Messengers were supposed to bring it straight to Frederick himself, not to anyone else. Well, that was a worry for another day. The worry for today was all those white soldiers on the move.

Lorenzo had to be thinking the same thing. "We can bush-whack 'em," he said.

"We can, and we'd better," Frederick said. "If they go wherever they want and we don't try to stop them, we've lost."

"I won't try and tell you you're wrong," Lorenzo said.

Frederick wasn't sorry to leave his swampy fastness. The state of New Marseille was warm and sticky and bug-ridden from one end to the other. Having lived there for so many years, Frederick knew that all too well. But things weren't quite so bad when he came out into drier country.

He carried a revolver taken from a dead Atlantean cavalry trooper. That gave him seven bullets to fire at the enemy-and one for himself if everything went wrong. After the raid, he'd decided the whites wouldn't take him alive. One pull of the trigger got everything over with in a hurry. They wouldn't be able to torment him, and they wouldn't be able to use him to scare other slaves who'd rebelled.

Most of the whites had fled this part of the country. A couple of big houses bristled with warning signs and had sentries parading outside of them. They might as well have been forts. Frederick thought his men could overrun them at need, but he didn't see the need. The whites holed up in them wouldn't come out to attack his fighters, which was all that really mattered. If the army went away or lost, the holdouts wouldn't count for beans. And if the army won…

If the army won, Frederick would be dead. He wouldn't care what happened later on.

The Negroes and copperfaces were eating what they scavenged from the countryside, and from granaries taken when plantations fell. Most whites lacked the presence of mind to set fire to barns or to pour water into storage pits before fleeing. A good thing, too, or the rebels would have had a-literally-thinner time of it.

Soldiers, from what he'd heard, often turned up their noses at frogs and turtles and the big flightless katydids that were more common than mice in the woods. Slaves couldn't afford to be so choosy. Nothing wrong with turtle stew, not if you'd been eating it since you were little and took it for granted.

Of course, the soldiers didn't have to worry about such things now. They had a baggage train, a luxury the rebels did without. The soldiers could ship hardtack and salt pork and bully beef into New Marseille and bring it along with them when they marched. No, they wouldn't go hungry.

Along with the other slaves, Frederick had sampled captured hardtack and bully beef. You could eat the stuff if you had to: no doubt of that. Given a choice, Frederick preferred turtle stew and frogs' legs and whatever flatbread his cooks could bake on griddles or hot stones.

Scouts-both blacks and copperskins-shadowed the Atlantean column. The gray-clad soldiers were moving into the country where Frederick wanted to spread the insurrection. If he could keep them out, uprisings against the local planters would stand a better chance.

But he knew he would have to win a stand-up fight against them to keep them from penetrating the country between New Marseille and Avalon. Shooting at them from behind fences and out of the woods wouldn't do it. The soldiers shrugged off those losses and kept marching. Their scouts also hurt the rebels. The whites were no stronger, not man for man. They were no better in the woods. But they were better shots, and they were better at supporting one another. They were professional soldiers, in other words, not the amateurs he led.

"Can we stop 'em in a regular battle?" he asked Lorenzo.

The copperskin shrugged broad shoulders. "Damned if I know," he said. "Time to try, though, don't you think?"

"Part of me does," Frederick said. "Then I start wondering how many of us get shot if we try it and it doesn't work."

Lorenzo only shrugged again. "It's a war. We hope we hurt the other bastards worse than they hurt us, that's all."

Frederick's other fear was that the insurrection would fall to pieces after a lost battle. That worried him less than it had in the early days, though. The Negroes and copperskins who fought alongside him had shown their resilience. Chances were a loss wouldn't scuttle everything.

And they might win. He would have had trouble believing that when the rebellion started, but they really might.

"Let's try it," he said. "You know a place where we can hold 'em up-and where we can fall back from if we've got to?" He didn't want his optimism running away with him.

"Not me." Lorenzo shook his head. "I ain't from around these parts, either. We've got some folks who are, though. Best thing we can do is find out from them. Bound to be somebody who'll know of one."

And a bald, long-faced Negro named Custis said, "Reckon I know a place. Got to slow the white soldiers down some, or they're liable to get to it 'fore we does."

Skirmishing with the column of white Atlanteans was easy. Making sure the skirmishes didn't get too costly proved less so. The soldiers seemed much more eager to mix it up with the bush-whackers than they had on their march to New Marseille. They usually had the better of it at close quarters, too. Like any other art, bayonet fighting took practice. The soldiers had more than the rebels did.

But the series of little fights did slow down the men in gray. And Custis' promised spot proved as good as he claimed. A stone fence near the top of a low rise gave cover against musketry. A stream to one side and woods to the other made the fence hard to outflank. The road ran just in front of the woods. Putting a barricade across it was easy. The rebels behind the fence could rake the soldiers with gunfire if they tried to decline battle.

"If we can beat 'em anywhere, this here is the place," Frederick said.

"I think so, too," Lorenzo agreed. "It's like the places where the white Atlanteans fought the redcoats way back when."

"It is!" Frederick nodded eagerly. He hadn't thought of that, but he could tell it was true as soon as Lorenzo said it. The Atlanteans under his grandfather had needed to fight in places like this. Less steady, less disciplined, than their English foes, they needed all the help the ground could give them. His own colored rebels needed that kind of help today.