"Do you want to stop and hunt?" Victor Radcliff asked. As if to tempt a yes, the oil thrush called again. Like a lot of Atlantean creatures, the flightless birds didn't know enough to be wary of men. But, reluctantly, Blaise shook his head. "I reckon not," he said. "We know where our next meal's coming from. I do like that. Don't need to take the time."

"Sensible. I was thinking the same thing." Radcliff laughed at himself. "Funny, isn't it, how often we think He's a sensible fellow means the same thing as He agrees with me?"

Blaise laughed, too. "Hadn't looked at it like that, but you're right, no doubt about it."

Victor's good humor faded faster than he wished it would have. "No wonder Englishmen don't find Atlanteans sensible these days, then, and no wonder we don't think they are, either."

"What can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?" Blaise was, above all else, a practical man. Victor supposed anyone who'd been a slave would have to be.

"I don't know," Victor answered. "Along with seeing my manuscript off to the printer, finding out whether we can do anything makes me put up with going to Hanover. I won't have to wait for the news to come out to the farm."

Blaise looked at him sidelong. "Thought you liked it there."

"I do," Victor said. "God knows I do. But Edward Radcliffe came here three hundred years ago so he wouldn't have lords and kings telling him what to do. They seem to have forgotten that in London." Air hissed out between his lips. "Some people in Hanover seem to have forgotten, too."

They came into the little town of Hooville as afternoon neared evening. Only an antiquarian-of which there were few in Atlantis-would have known it was named for the Baron of Hastings in the mid-fifteenth century. The sun going down toward the Green Ridge Mountains cast Victor's long shadow, and Blaise's, out ahead of them.