"You're playing the schoolmaster here. Suppose you give me the lesson." Consul Stafford admired his own patience. Whether anyone else would admire it-or call it patience and not mulish intransigence-never crossed his mind.

And Newton seemed willing-maybe even eager-to do just what he'd asked. "The lesson is simple. If Negroes and copperskins go on being them and whites go on being us, Atlantis is ruined. We have to find a way for all of us to be Atlanteans together, or else we'll spend the next hundred years fighting."

"We had a way to live together," Stafford insisted.

"Yes, but too many people couldn't stand it. That's why we've got the insurrection now."

"Whites in the south won't like the way you have in mind. If blacks and Negroes can grab guns and fight, what makes you think white men can't?" Stafford said.

"That's simple enough." Newton aimed a forefinger at him as if it were a rifle musket. "You have to persuade them not to."

"We ought to try and grab New Marseille now," Lorenzo said. "We've got the white soldiers' guns. Besides, their hearts have to be down in their shoes. We should hit hard and fast, before they get reinforcements and fresh supplies."

Frederick Radcliff drummed his fingers on the outside of his thigh. A few weeks ago, he might have agreed with his marshal. Now… everything had changed. Or, if things hadn't changed, the insurrection still had no hope. "Ask you a couple of questions?" he said.

One of Lorenzo's eyebrows rose. "How am I supposed to tell you no? You're the Tribune. What you say goes."

That wasn't how Frederick thought of his power-which didn't mean it wasn't useful here. "What happens if the white folks get riled enough to throw everything they've got into the fight against us?"

"Well…" The copperskin pursed his lips. As with the raised eyebrow, it wasn't a showy gesture; it was, in fact, hardly noticeable. That he'd made it at all counted for a good deal. So did his hesitation before he said, "Wouldn't be easy. They send everything, we'd have to be mighty careful fighting pitched battles. Raids, ambushes-we could keep on with that kind of stuff for a long time."

"Would we win in the end if we did?" Frederick persisted.

"Damned if I know." Lorenzo's answering grin was crooked. "Tell you the truth, when this whole thing started I figured we'd both be dead by now-dead or wishing we were."

"You ain't the only one," Frederick replied with feeling, and Lorenzo laughed out loud. "But the way it looks to me is, there's a time to push and a time to go easy. We showed 'em we could beat 'em, and we showed 'em we didn't aim to kill all the white men we could. Seems to me we got to let 'em chew on that for a while, see what they do next. If we push 'em now, we only tick 'em off-know what I mean?"

"Sure do. What I don't know is whether you're right." Lorenzo took a deep breath and let the air whuffle out between his lips. "What the hell, though? Like I say, you're the Tribune. You've got us this far. Seems like you know what you're doing."

I'm glad somebody thinks so. But Frederick didn't say that out loud. One of the tricks to leading he'd learned was never to let your followers know you had doubts. Sometimes you could get away with being wrong. With being unsure? No. That made you look weak, and how could a weak man lead? Not even Helen knew about some of the fears that knotted Frederick's insides. What you didn't show, you didn't have to explain. You didn't have to wonder about it so much yourself, either.

For once, he and his army didn't need to do anything right this minute. The white Atlanteans weren't pressing them-couldn't press them for a while, as Lorenzo had pointed out. Food wasn't a worry. Hardtack and salt pork and bully beef captured from the soldiers' supply weren't exciting, but kept body and soul together. And the hunting in this sparsely settled countryside was better than it would have been with more people around-though there wasn't much livestock to take here.

Just waiting around felt good. It took him back to his days as a slave. You weren't always busy, working for the masters. But you always had to be ready to get busy, and to get busy at someone else's whim. That was how things worked here, too. If he'd made a mistake about how the white men would respond after being defeated and spared, they would be the ones who let him know it.

Slaves always kept their eyes on masters and mistresses. They needed to know what the white folks were up to, sometimes before the whites were sure themselves. And the Negroes and copperskins still slaving it in New Marseille were the insurrectionists' eyes and ears there.

Frederick Radcliff didn't think the Consuls' army could move without his knowing about it beforehand. The slaves in New Marseille saw no signs that it was getting ready to move. Frederick took that for a good omen.

So did Lorenzo, who heard about it as soon as he did, or maybe even sooner. "Looks like you know what you were talking about," the copperskin said.

"I'm as happy about it as you are-you'd best believe I am," Frederick said.

"How long you aim to give 'em?" Lorenzo asked.

"Till it feels right. Don't know what else to tell you," Frederick answered.

To his surprise, that got a smile from the marshal. "We're all makin' this up as we go along," Lorenzo said.

"Ain't it the truth!" Frederick never would have admitted it if the other man hadn't come out with it first, but he wasn't about to deny it once Lorenzo pointed it out.

After a while, fighters started slipping out of camp. They thought they'd already got what they wanted. And they didn't think the Free Republic of Atlantis had any business telling them what to do any more. They were free, weren't they?

Lorenzo and Frederick took a different view of things. With Frederick's approval, Lorenzo posted guards around the encampment to catch deserters and bring them back. The United States of Atlantis didn't let their soldiers walk away whenever the men happened to feel like it. As far as Frederick was concerned, the Free Republic of Atlantis shouldn't, either.

That highly offended some of the men who wanted to go home. "Who you think you are, playing the white man over me?" a black fighter demanded when he was hauled before Frederick. "You ain't nothin' but a nigger, same as me. You got no business tellin' me what to do!"

"If I had me ten cents for every time I heard that, I'd be the richest nigger in Atlantis," Frederick said.

"It's the truth, damn it," the other Negro said. "If I'm a free man, ain't nobody can make me do nothin' I don't want to."

"It doesn't work that way," Frederick answered. "Nobody can buy you or sell you. That's what bein' free means. But you're in the army now. Nobody made you join up. You did it your own self."

"That's right. And that means I can leave whenever I please, too," the prisoner said.

"Means no such thing. If people left whenever they wanted to, pretty soon we wouldn't have an army any more. You go in, you got to stay in till the job is done unless you made a deal beforehand to get out sooner," Frederick said.

"Nobody told me I could make a deal like that!" the other Negro exclaimed.

Frederick smiled sweetly. "Then it looks like you're in till the job is done, doesn't it? That's how my granddad did things, and that's how I'm gonna do 'em, too."

"Your granddad was nothin' but a white man, and he didn't set no niggers free," the other man retorted. "Look where you was at 'fore we rose up. House nigger, that's all you was, an' I bet you felt all jumped-up about it, too."

How right he was! Frederick was embarrassed to remember the way he'd looked down on field hands before he got stripes on his back and became one himself. He was also damned if he'd admit any such thing. Instead, he answered, "You've got to start somewhere. Everybody's got to start somewhere. Before Victor Radcliff done what he done, nobody in Atlantis was free. White folks had to do what the King of England and his people said-"