"Well, perhaps we should move on to item two," he said neutrally.

"Item two," Martha said dryly, giving him a glance.

All right, all right, so I've learned to be a politician. Someone has to do it.

"William Walker," she continued.

This time the expressions down the table were unanimous. Nobody liked the renegade Coast Guard officer, or any of the twenty-odd other traitors with him. Nantucket had had to fight an expensive little war to stop him over in Alba-and had ended up with a sort of quasi protectorate-hegemony-cum-alliance over most of southern England.

Cofflin cleared his throat and looked at the Councilor for Foreign Affairs and his Deputy-Ian Arnstein and his wife, Doreen. They handed around their summary, and Ian began, sounding much like the history professor he'd once been.

"Our latest intelligence reports indicate he managed to get all the way from the English Channel to Greece, arriving about three months after the end of the Alban War, and-"

There were long faces at the table when he finished; many had hoped they'd seen the last of Walker when he fled Alba years ago. Someone sighed and said it out loud.

"Wishful thinkin'," Alston snapped. "We should have made sure of him, no matter what it took. I said so then."

"And the Town Meeting decided otherwise," Cofflin said. The Republic was very emphatically a democracy. Back then they'd decided that the margin of survival was too thin to keep hundreds under arms combing the endless wilderness of Bronze Age Europe.

And they were right, Cofflin thought. Not much prospect of catching Walker, and if they'd chased him hard back then he'd have settled somewhere deep in the continental interior, where the Islanders couldn't touch him. Leave him alone, and his arrogance and lust for revenge would make him stop within reach of salt water-planning to build a navy someday and come back for a rematch.