"Unfair? Don't look that way to me, sir." The sergeant seemed to think Newton was an idiot, too. Like Elizabeth, he wasn't shy about telling him why: "Jesus Christ, they were doing their damnedest to murder the lot of us! Were we supposed to kiss 'em on the cheek and invite 'em to a waltz, like?"

"No, but you weren't supposed to, to rape them, either!" Newton had to fight to get the dreadful word out.

"Chance they take if they fire at us." The underofficer and Elizabeth used the same brutal logic.

Seeing he would get no satisfaction-under the circumstances, perhaps not the perfect word-there, Newton stormed off to talk to a captain. The young officer only shrugged. "What do you expect from men who find women in arms against them, your Excellency?"

"Civilized behavior?" Newton suggested.

Sarcasm rolled off the captain's back. "War is not a civilized business," he said.

"It has its rules and customs. On the whole, the insurrectionists have lived up to them."

"Well, what do you want me to do about it? Put 'em up on charges?" the captain asked. That was exactly what Newton wanted, but the younger man's laughter told him he wouldn't get it-not here, anyhow.

Fuming, he stomped away to talk to Colonel Sinapis. The colonel had given Consul Stafford a hard time, so Newton assumed he would find him reasonable. He didn't. Sinapis said, "The soldiers took the women after the women fought against them?"

"That's right," Newton said. "It's disgraceful. It's barbaric. It's-"

"It is to be expected," Sinapis interrupted. "Officers may be gentlemen. Your regulations say they are. So do the ones in most of the kingdoms of Europe. Perhaps that makes it so. But soldiers? My dear fellow! The Duke of Wellington, a very fine commander even if he is an Englishman, calls them the scum of the earth. Believe me, your Excellency, he knows what he is talking about, too."

"All the more reason to punish them harshly when they do something this outrageous!" Newton exclaimed.

"Outrageous?" Sinapis tossed his head, as he often did where a native Atlantean would have shaken it. "I think not. This is revenge. What would you do if a woman tried to shoot you?"

"Not that, I hope," Newton answered.

Sinapis studied him. The colonel's eyes lingered-insultingly long?-on his crotch. At last, Sinapis said, "It could be that you would not. But a great many men would, and I see no point to punishing them for it. That would cause the army more problems than it would solve."

"What if the women they ravished were white?" the Consul from Croydon demanded.

"Violating women for the sport of it… No good officer can allow that. If white women had tried to kill our troops in combat, though… That would be the women's lookout, and their misfortune," Sinapis said.

He was consistent, anyhow-if he was telling the truth. If he wasn't, his face didn't know about it… which, if he was any kind of card player, meant nothing. "I had hoped for more cooperation from you, Colonel," Newton said reproachfully.

"I had hoped for more sense from you, your Excellency," Sinapis replied. "We do not always get what we hope for, though, do we?"

"Evidently not," Newton said. "Please make sure, however, that your soldiers do not molest these women again."

"Now that the heat of battle has cooled, I believe I can do that. Very well, your Excellency." Sinapis delivered a precise salute.

"And please issue orders that other women taken prisoner in combat are not to be violated," Newton continued.

The colonel's mouth twisted under the eaves of his drooping mustache. "I dislike giving orders sure to be ignored. It weakens discipline, which is the last thing any army needs."

"If you issue them strongly enough, the men will follow them," Newton said.

"You have never been a soldier. You have never tried to lead soldiers. This is as plain as the nose on your face-as plain as the nose on my face, even." Sinapis stroked his formidable proboscis. "I am very sorry, but issuing those orders is a waste of time."

Newton's voice went hard and flat: "Do it anyway."

"Yes, your Excellency." By contrast, Sinapis' voice held no expression at all. This time, his salute seemed more reproachful than anything else. Leland Newton didn't care. Some things he would not put up with, and this was one of them. Whether the orders really would do any good… he preferred not to think about.

A copperskin brought a hatchet down on a flapjack turtle's neck. Pouring blood, the turtle went into its death spasm. The head flew some distance from the body. Its fearsome jaws opened and closed, opened and closed. No one got anywhere near it. Like a snake's, it could bite for some time after being detached. And those jaws could easily take off a finger.

To white folks, flapjack turtle was something you ate when you couldn't get beef or pork or mutton or poultry. As a house slave, Frederick Radcliff had something of the same attitude. Field hands eked out the rations their masters gave them with anything they could get their hands on.

"I'll take this to the girls now," the copperskin said with a grin, picking up the turtle's carcass. The legs still flailed feebly; they didn't want to believe the beast was dead.

"Don't let them hear you call them that, Joaquin," Frederick said. "You won't like what happens if they do."

"I ain't afraid of them." Joaquin swaggered off.

"Any man who ain't afraid of women-he ain't as smart as he ought to be," Frederick remarked to Lorenzo.

"Yeah, there is that." Lorenzo's chuckle sounded distinctly wry. "Always knew they could fight-any fella ever had anything to do with 'em knows that. But I never reckoned they could fight like this, with guns and everything."

"Well, neither did I," Frederick said. "Don't suppose the white soldiers reckoned they could, either."

"Last surprise some of those bastards ever got," Lorenzo said. "Good thing, too."

"Oh, sure," Frederick agreed. "Kind of tough on the gals the whites catch, though."

Lorenzo nodded, but not with much sympathy. "They knew what they was gettin' into. And they knew what was liable to get into them if somethin' went wrong."

"White folks don't cornhole the ordinary fighters they catch," Frederick said. "We don't cornhole their fighters when we catch 'em. They shouldn't ought to fuck the gals."

"It's different," Lorenzo said, and Frederick found himself nodding. He couldn't have said just how it was different, but he also felt it was. Maybe because most men didn't enjoy cornholing other men, where any man who was a man would jump on a woman any chance he got.

"Still and all," he said slowly, "it doesn't seem right. We been fightin' straight up. So have the white soldiers, pretty much. Whole bunch of fellas jumpin' on a woman on account of she was carryin' a gun-that ain't straight up."

Lorenzo's eyes slid toward the cooking fires: the direction in which the younger copperskin with the flapjack turtle had gone. Slyly, he said, "You ought to go sing your song over there. You'd have all those pretty young gals crawlin' under the sheets with you faster'n you could-" He snapped his fingers.

"That's what I need, all right!" Frederick rolled his eyes. As any middle-aged man would have, he thought about an embarrassment of riches. Even were the spirit willing, the flesh was definitely weak. And his spirit wasn't so willing. "Reckon Helen'd have herself a thing or three to say about 'em."

"Give her one in the chops. That'll make her shut her big yap, damned if it won't." Lorenzo found simple answers for all worries except military ones. He'd lived with a lot of different women while he was a field hand-with none for more than a couple of years. Now that he was a general, or as close to a general as any man in the Free Republic of Atlantis was, he cut as wide a swath through the women who'd joined the insurrection as a man his age could hope to do.