Consul Stafford liked it not at all. He took Newton and Colonel Sinapis aside to see how they felt about it. "What choice have we?" Sinapis asked bleakly, the wails from the wounded underscoring his words. "They can go back to killing us whenever they please."

"I don't believe they would violate the terms once made," Newton added. "They don't want to make themselves infamous in the eyes of Atlantis as a whole."

"You hope they don't," Stafford said.

"Yes." The other Consul nodded. "I hope."

They stopped talking. They didn't seem to have much else to say. When they turned back to Frederick Radcliff, he asked, "Well? What's it going to be?"-which made things no easier.

Consuls and colonel all looked at one another. Nobody wanted to say the fateful words. But someone had to. After a long, painful moment, Colonel Sinapis took the duty on himself. "We agree," he said, and then, sensing that that by itself wasn't enough, "We surrender."

When Cornwallis' troops surrendered to Victor Radcliff, their band played a tune called "The World Turned Upside Down." No bands played here, but the idea stayed with Leland Newton all the same.

Insurrectionists had come out to make sure the white militiamen and regulars held to the terms of the surrender Frederick Radcliff had imposed on Newton, Stafford, and Sinapis. Most of the Negroes and copperskins, though, stayed under cover. If the whites didn't go along, the rebels could always open fire again.

Once officers convinced the regulars that the insurrectionists would also abide by those terms, the professional soldiers were willing enough-even happy enough-to stack their rifle muskets and pile up leather cartridge boxes below them. The artillerists drove spikes into the touch-holes on their fieldpieces, but nothing in the surrender terms said they couldn't. Frederick and Lorenzo hadn't thought of it, so the rebels would do without cannon a while longer.

That wasn't the truce's real danger point. Persuading the militiamen to hand over their guns was. The militiamen hated and feared their opponents much more than the regulars did. Many regulars, after all, came from north of the Stour; they might well be personally opposed to slavery. All the militiamen favored it. They all hated the idea that the insurrectionists might win freedom on the battlefield, and they all feared-no doubt with reason-that their former chattels might seek vengeance as soon as they caught their white foes unarmed.

Newton had to admit that Jeremiah Stafford did what he could to calm their fear, even if he was also bound to feel it himself. "They'll let us go," Stafford said, over and over again. "They'd be idiots if they did anything else."

"Damned right they're idiots!" a militiaman burst out. "Copperskins and mudfaces can't hardly be anything but!"

"Since we're stuck in their blamed trap, what does that make us?" Stafford inquired dryly. The militiaman blinked. That didn't seem to have occurred to him. Maybe he really was an idiot.

Hiding a rifle musket was next to impossible. When tipped with a two-foot bayonet, the weapon was taller than a man. Even without a bayonet, you couldn't very well stick one up your sleeve or down your trouser leg. Pistols-eight-shooters and old-style pepperboxes and even older flintlocks-were a different story.

"Not the end of the world, your Excellency," Colonel Sinapis said when Newton remarked on it. "Some of our men will be able to protect themselves from robbers or shoot game for the pot. You cannot make war with pistols, not against rifle muskets."

"I see the sense in that," Newton replied. "But will the insurrectionists? Or will they use a few holdout pistols as an excuse to treat our men more harshly than they would have otherwise?"

Sinapis' smile tugged up the corners of his mouth without reaching his eyes. "You think of such things, your Excellency. So do I, coming out of the cynical school of Europe. But that ploy never occurred to Frederick Radcliff or even to Lorenzo, who is less naive than the black man. When I mentioned it, they both promised they would not take it amiss, as long as the militiamen do not try anything foolish."

"That's good news." Newton tempered the remark by adding, "I hope so, anyhow."

"As do I," Sinapis agreed. "A few hotheads could greatly embarrass us by doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I would not be sorry if the rebels made an example of them. I fear I would be sorry if those people made an example of all of us."

"Sorry. Yes." Consul Newton left it right there. The more rifle muskets went up in neat stacks of six, the more vulnerable the white survivors became. One thing was clear: even if the fighting continued after this disastrous battle, the insurrectionists would not lack guns, cartridges, or percussion caps for a long time to come.

Here and there, blacks or copperskins robbed disarmed white soldiers. A handful of militiamen-no regulars-died suddenly. Maybe they refused to take orders from men they still thought of as natural inferiors. Maybe slaves recognized owners they hadn't loved. Leland Newton found himself in a poor position to ask too many questions.

The whites started back toward New Marseille the next morning. They hadn't been able to bury all their dead. They had to rely on promises that the insurrectionists would see to it. And what were those promises worth? Anything? Newton had no idea.

He also had other, more immediate, worries. He kept looking back over his shoulder. If the Negroes and copperskins came swarming after the defeated Atlantean soldiers, what could the white men do? Die, Newton thought.

Stafford also kept looking over his shoulder. Nervous, are you? Newton couldn't twit him about it, not when he was nervous himself.

Some of the rebels, still carrying weapons, walked along beside the soldiers who'd surrendered. Newton didn't see anyone prominent. Frederick Radcliff wasn't coming along. Neither was Lorenzo. They had more important things to do with their time. Probably taking charge of gathering up the loot, Newton thought. Both the Tribune and his marshal were bound to think that was the most important thing they could do right now.

"Well," Stafford said, "we'll be marching like a couple of privates from the regulars by the time we get back to New Marseille."

"So we will. I know I'm in better shape than I was when I got on the train in New Hastings," Newton answered.

"So am I-here." Consul Stafford brushed his leg with the palm of his hand. "But here…?" He brought his hand up to his heart for a moment, then sadly shook his head. "Everything I ever believed in is coming to pieces."

"Everything outside of church, you mean," Newton said.

"No. Everything." Stafford shook his head again. "I always truly thought it was God's will that whites should rule over niggers and mudfaces. Hell's bells, man, I still want to think so."

"The evidence would appear to be against you," Newton said carefully.

"Yes. It would. And I don't like that for beans." Stafford's voice was cold as an iceberg drifting past North Cape in dead of winter. "Maybe God has changed His mind about the way things work-the way they ought to work, I should say. And if He has, then we're all worse sinners than I ever thought we could be. That's pretty bad, too, believe me."

"I don't know anything about that. I leave God to the preachers. Taking care of myself seems hard enough most of the time," Newton said.

He won a thin chuckle from the other Consul. "It does, doesn't it? So you say you want to leave God to the Preacher? I didn't know you'd taken up with the House of Universal Devotion."

"That's not what I said, and you know it damned well." A touch of irritation came into Leland Newton's voice. No educated Atlantean could take the Preacher-even when he got called the Reverend-or the House of Universal Devotion seriously. Atlantis had spawned its share of sects and then some. That no educated man could take the House of Universal Devotion seriously hadn't kept it from becoming one of the more successful and prosperous of those sects. No one had ever gone broke betting against the ordinary fellow's good sense.