But Frederick didn't want to live like that. "Helen and me, we done got along good for a hell of a long time. Why should I want to change now?"

" ' Cause fresh pussy's more fun than the same old thing every God-damned time?" Yes, Lorenzo had an answer for everything.

One trouble: Frederick thought it was the wrong answer. If lying down with someone whose likes you knew and who knew what pleased you wasn't better than sleeping with a stranger… then it wasn't, that was all. Some men-and some women-preferred the one, some the other. Frederick saw no point to arguing about it. Would you argue about liking duck better than pork?

He did amble over toward the fires himself. Behind him, Lorenzo laughed a filthy laugh. In spite of himself, Frederick's back stiffened. That only made Lorenzo laugh harder.

"It's the Tribune!" one of the cooking women said.

"Stew won't be ready for a while yet," another one told him. Even as she spoke, chunks of turtle meat went into a big iron pot.

"It's all right. I'm just seein' how things are going, I guess you'd say," Frederick answered.

"How about that?" Admiration filled the copperskinned woman's voice. By the way she eyed him, Frederick didn't think he'd have to work very hard to get her into his bed.

But, no matter what Lorenzo thought, that wasn't what he had in mind. All the people doing the cooking were women. Both they and the men seemed to take that for granted. Frederick wondered why. It wasn't as if men couldn't cook. Most boss cooks all through the slaveholding states were men. Frederick sadly remembered Davey. He'd been someone to reckon with, somebody who'd had a lot of influence on the master and mistress. The way to the heart did-or could-go through the stomach.

That had been fancy cooking, though. Women handled the plain job. Men cooked for superiors, women for equals. Maybe that was what was going on here. You couldn't get much plainer cooking, or cooking more intended for equals, than what went into feeding an army.

Frederick was ready to fight to the death to make Negroes and copperskins equal to whites in Atlantis. That women might be equal to men had hardly crossed his mind up till now. As it did, he shook his head. White men, black men, and copperskinned men were all the same under the skin. Anybody (well, anybody who wasn't a white slaveholder) could see that. But men and women? Men and women were different. Anybody could see that, too. Hadn't people of all colors been telling stories and making jokes about the differences since the beginning of time?

In the early days of the uprising, some of the men might have been hearing those old jokes inside their heads. They loudly doubted that women had any business picking up rifle muskets and taking potshots at white soldiers. And they plainly expected the women to break and run when soldiers fired at them.

Well, they knew better now. Some women had run when the shooting picked up-but so had some men. Women mostly weren't as big or as strong as men, so they had trouble fighting hand to hand. But the two sides didn't fight hand to hand all that often, which meant that mattered less than Frederick had feared it would. Wounded women shrieked on higher notes than wounded men. Still and all, though, no one who'd seen women in action would claim they couldn't fight.

Since they could… Didn't that argue that a lot of other differences were smaller than they seemed at first glance? Frederick rubbed his chin. Thanks to his famous grandfather, his beard was thicker than most Negroes'. He could have done without that part of Victor Radcliff's legacy.

What would his fellow fighters say if he told them that, after they won the war for freedom against the Atlantean army, they would have to give women the same freedom: freedom to vote, to hold property, to divorce for all the same reasons? They wouldn't like it, not even a little. Which argued that he should keep his big mouth shut.

And if you keep it shut, don't you slam the door on freedom, same as the whites want to do? That was an interesting question-no two ways about it. The way it looked to him, if he tried to win everything at once, he only increased his chances of winning nothing at all. Once he established the principle that Negroes and copperskins had the right to be something more than property throughout the USA, before too long someone should get around to establishing the principle that women had the right to be more than property.

Yes, that would be easy, wouldn't it? Of course it would. Frederick was sure of it. And, because he was, he decided not to try to push his followers any further than they were likely to want to go on their own. Equal rights for women could wait a while.

"Nigger equality? Mudface equality?" As usual, Jeremiah Stafford freighted the phrases with as much obscenity as they would carry, and a little more besides. "No white man from south of the Stour will put up with that nonsense for a minute, and you know it perfectly well."

Leland Newton only raised an eyebrow and rustled the latest batch of newspapers that had come into camp. "But there is more to the United States of Atlantis than white men from south of the Stour, and the rest of the people are getting damned sick of a war going nowhere," the other Consul said. "If they get sick of spending money on it, the states south of the Stour can fight it by themselves-and good luck to them."

After an outright triumph by the insurrectionists, that was what Stafford feared most. "If we don't get help from the rest of the country, why should we bother staying attached to it?" he said.

"Don't let the door hit you in the backside when you leave," Newton said cheerfully, which was also nothing Stafford wanted to hear. And that cheery tone rasped worse than the words.

Could the southern half of Atlantis-the smaller half, the poorer half, the less populous half, the half racked by servile insurrection-make a go of things on its own? Consul Stafford had no idea. "If we leave, and if we win our fight, how many niggers and mudfaces do you suppose we'll leave alive afterwards?" he said.

"I couldn't begin to guess," Consul Newton asked. "But if you murder them all, what happens to your precious social system then? I've asked you that before. Who brings in your crops? Who cuts your hair? Who cooks your supper? How soon before you're bankrupt because your wonderful whites from south of the Stour won't do nigger work to save their lives?"

Those were all… intriguing questions, much more intriguing than Stafford wished they were. Even so, he said, "We'd be taking care of things our own way. Nothing else matters."

"Then what am I doing here? What are all the soldiers from north of the Stour doing here?" Newton asked. "If you don't want our help, we'll leave, believe me-and we'll be glad to do it, too."

"We want your help. We deserve it, by God," Stafford said. "But if you don't care to give it we'll go on by ourselves."

They scowled at each other. Stafford had the feeling they were talking past each other, as they had so often and for so long in New Hastings. He also had the feeling this was the worst possible time for them to be doing that. The trouble was, he didn't know how to fix it. Newton would not take him seriously; he didn't think Newton took himself seriously. And, doubting that, Stafford couldn't take Newton seriously, either.

Since he could, he saw only one thing to do: win the fight against the insurrectionists while the Atlantean army remained opposed to them. But that meant getting Colonel Sinapis to do something with it. And Stafford was unhappily aware how much he hadn't endeared himself to the colonel.

He tried to take a light tone when he asked Sinapis, "If you aren't using the army, may I borrow it for a little while?"

By the way the colonel's eyebrows came down and together, by the way his mouth tightened to a bloodless line, Stafford knew the approach had failed. "I am using it, your Excellency, in case you had not noticed," Sinapis answered in a voice like winter.