From the south came two men: Abednego Higgins and Michel du Guesclin. Maybe Higgins stood for the English-speakers down there and du Guesclin for the Frenchmen, or maybe things had just worked out that way. They were both very tall, the one broad-shouldered, the other slim as a rapier. Du Guesclin, Victor knew, was somehow connected to the Kersauzon family, as prominent down there as Radcliffs and Radcliffes were in English Atlantis.
As soon as Victor came inside and saw them, Margaret said, “They want to talk to you.”
“Well, I expected they could find rum and something to mix it with somewhere closer than here,” he answered.
His wife sent him an exasperated look. “No. They want to talk to you about something important.”
“I was afraid they did.” Victor Radcliff was also afraid he knew what the gentlemen of the Atlantean Assembly wanted.
“You aren’t going to throw them out?” Despite the way Meg said it, it wasn’t really a question.
Victor sighed. “No, I suppose not.” As if in ironic counterpoint to that, Matthew Radcliffe raised his mug in salute. Abednego Higgins tossed a well-gnawed chicken bone onto the platter from which he’d taken it when it was meatier. The gentlemen from the Assembly did not expect to be sent on their way. With another sigh, Victor stepped past his wife and nodded to them. “Hello, my friends,” he said, wondering how big a lie he was telling.
Radcliffe from Avalon raised his mug again. Du Guesclin, full of French politesse, bowed in his seat. Uncle Bobby grabbed the bull by the horns, saying, “Do you recall what the Discoverer did when the Black Earl tried to tax him without his leave?”
“Yes, I recall,” Victor answered. Every schoolchild in English Atlantis knew what Edward Radcliffe had done when the exiled Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, tried to set himself up as king in Atlantis. What had happened then helped shape Atlantean history for the three hundred years between that day and this.
But Robert Smith went on as if Victor hadn’t spoken: “He died, that’s what he did. He died fighting tyranny, and his sons put it down for good.” That was the story schoolboys learned. Some people said what had actually happened was more complicated. Victor Radcliff didn’t know; he hadn’t been in New Hastings back in 1470.
Isaac Fenner was descended from the first man to die in Atlantis (and, if some tales were true, from the girl the Black Earl had taken as his bedwarmer, maybe even from Neville himself). He said, “The damned Englishmen still haven’t learned their lesson. They think they can tax us as they please. Do we let them get away with that? Do we let them make us into slaves?”
Both du Guesclin and Higgins shook their heads at that rhetorical question. They owned slaves: copperskins from Terranova to the west and Negroes like Blaise brought in to do hard work in a climate not well suited to white men. Maybe that gave them extra cause not to want to be enslaved themselves. Maybe it meant they feared their own bondsmen would rise against them given even half a chance. Maybe they had reason for such fears.
“We are in arms around Hanover—you’ve seen that for yourself, Radcliff,” Uncle Bobby said. “And we are in arms in Croydon, too. We rose before Hanover did.” He spoke with a northerner’s pride: doing anything ahead of Hanover and New Hastings mattered a lot up there.
“What has this got to do with me?” Victor asked, much in the way, almost eighteen centuries before, Jesus had said, If it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt. Jesus must have known it wouldn’t be possible. And, in the same way, Victor knew what it had to do with him. If Jesus could hesitate, he thought he was entitled to do the same.
Now Smith spoke as to a child: “We are at war with England, Victor. The settlements have armies. We need to join them into one army, into an Atlantean army. We need a man under whom they will be glad to combine, a man who can command them. Who else but you?”
During the war against French Atlantis, France, and Spain, Victor had been the highest-ranking Atlantean soldier fighting alongside the redcoats he was now expected to oppose. Wasn’t one war enough for one man? “I should sooner stay here on my farm and live as an ordinary private person,” he said.
As if activated by some clockwork mechanism, the delegates from the Atlantean Assembly shook their heads in unison. “If you sit on your hands here, we’ll lose,” Abednego Higgins said bluntly.
“Il a raison,” Michel du Guesclin agreed. He continued in accented English: “I can think of no other English man the French of the south will follow.”
“Do you want to let the Discoverer down?” Matthew Radcliffe added. “If we lose this fight, England will do to Atlantis what the Black Earl, damn him, tried to do to New Hastings. Come on, coz! Isn’t fighting those bastards from across the sea in your blood?”
In the last war, the men from across the sea had been allies, and vital allies at that. They hadn’t sought to ram taxes down the Atlanteans’ throats, not then. Afterwards, though . . . Afterwards was another story, as afterwards so often was.
Up until a little more than a century before, Avalon had been a pirates’ roost. Did Matthew Radcliffe carry some of the freebooters’ blood in his veins? Victor wouldn’t have been surprised. His distant kinsman certainly seemed ready, even eager, to brawl.
“This won’t be the Battle of the Strand, one fight and it’s over,” Victor warned. “This will be a war like the last one—worse than the last one, unless I miss my guess. England won’t want to let us go our own way.”
“No. She wants us to go her way, and she aims to drag us along if we don’t care to follow on our own,” Isaac Fenner said. “Is that what you have in mind for Atlantis till the end of time, Radcliff? Is that why your forefathers first took folk away from the greedy kings and nobles on the other side of the sea?”
There were days when Victor Radcliff wished he sprang from a less illustrious family. This was one of those days. People expected things from him because of who his forefathers were. He could have done without the compliment, if it was one.
“England is the greatest kingdom in Europe. England is the richest empire in the world,” he said. “Even if she runs short of her own soldiers, she can buy poor men from the German princes to do her fighting for her. We are . . . what we are. Can we fight her and hope to win?”
“Can we bend the knee to her and look at ourselves in the glass afterwards?” Matthew Radcliffe returned. “You are our best hope, coz, but you are not our only hope. We aim to fight with you or without you.”
“Chances with you are better than without you, though,” du Guesclin said.
“They are,” Abednego Higgins agreed. “We need a general we can all respect. If anybody in Atlantis fills the bill, you’re the man.”
I’ve never been a general. The protest died before Victor let it out. What Atlantean had? He’d led a good-sized force of soldiers in the field, which put him one up on almost everyone else who opposed England.
“You gentlemen are mad,” he said: one last protest.
Uncle Bobby stood up from his chair to bow. “We are, sir. We are,” he agreed. “But it’s a grand madness. Will you join us in it?”
Victor looked around. He’d been comfortable here ever since coming home from the war against France and Spain. He’d wanted to live out the rest of his days as a gentleman farmer, not as a man of war. But, if Atlantis called on him, what could he do but answer the call?
He sighed. “Join you I will. I note that it was our idea, not mine. May none of us ever have cause to regret it.”
“Oh, I expect we will, sooner or later—probably sooner.” Abednego Higgins was a man of melancholy temperament. Victor wasn’t, or not especially, but he suspected the same thing.
But then all five men from the Atlantean Assembly crowded around him, pumping his hand and slapping his back and telling him what a lion, what a hero, he was. If he’d believed a quarter of what they told him, he would have been sure he could run every redcoat out of Atlantis by day after tomorrow at the latest.
Fortunately—or, odds were, unfortunately—he knew better.
News from the east came slowly. That was one of the reasons Victor Radcliff had settled where he did. More often than not, he was happier not knowing. His livelihood didn’t depend on hearing things before other people could.
If he was going to take up the sword again, though . . . “Must you do this?” Margaret asked. She hadn’t wanted him going off to fight the French Atlanteans and their overseas reinforcements, either, and they weren’t even married then.
“If I don’t, someone else will—and worse,” he said. “The settlements are going to rise up against England. No, they’ve already risen up, and they won’t quiet down till they win or till they’re too beaten to fight any more. The redcoats have pulled out of New Hastings.”
The redcoats had pulled out of New Hastings more than two weeks before. He’d only just got the news. That was one of the reasons he needed to travel east. Farming might not depend on the latest news. War did.
“What difference does it make to you whether King George orders Atlantis about or we make our own mistakes?” his wife demanded.
“I don’t want anyone across the sea telling me how many pounds I owe on this farm,” Victor said. “If some Englishman can do that, he can take it away from me, too.”
“So can a honker from New Hastings,” Meg retorted. Properly speaking, only people from New Hastings (and perhaps Bredestown) were honkers. Englishmen were in the habit of using the name for—or against—anybody from Atlantis.
“At least I have some say in what those people decide,” Victor said. “London won’t pay attention to me. London never pays attention to Atlantis, not unless someone else is trying to take it away . . . or unless Parliament decides it needs to squeeze money from us.”
“Whether London takes it or we do, the money’s gone,” Margaret said.
Victor grunted. “I should like some choice in where it goes. London will use it to pay fat, sweating soldiers to tyrannize over us. Whereas if we spend it ourselves, we’ll—”
“Use it to pay fat, sweating soldiers to keep England from tyrannizing us,” his wife broke in.
He stared at her. Such sarcastic gibes were usually his province. He couldn’t even tell her she was wrong, because she was much too likely to be right. If Atlantis was to cast off the mother country’s yoke, it would need to assume the trappings of other nations. He said the most he felt he could say: “They’ll be our soldiers, not redcoats or those German barbarians from Brunswick and Hesse and God knows where.”
“Oh, hurrah,” Meg said. “Do you think they’ll come cheaper on account of that?” He didn’t answer, mostly because he thought no such thing. Understanding as much, Meg gave him a knowing nod. “I see.”
“What would you have me do?” Victor asked. “Tell the gentlemen of the Atlantean Assembly that I’ve changed my mind and will not fight for them? They will carry on regardless, the only difference being the greater likelihood of their defeat and our subjection.”
“I would have you—” Margaret Radcliff broke off, tears filling her eyes. “What I would have you do doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what Atlantis would have you do. Atlantis would have you carry on till you catch a musket ball in your teeth, and then proclaim you a fallen hero to rally more fools to the cause.”
Again, she was much too likely to know what she was talking about. As patiently and calmly as he could, Victor said, “I don’t intend to get shot, Meg.”
“Who does?” she retorted. “But the graveyards fill up even so. Died for his country, much too young, the tombstones say. I want you to live for your country.”
“If you think I want anything else, you are very much mistaken,” Victor said. “But Atlantis is my country. Shall I pretend I have not got one, or that I care not who rules here?”
“No-o-o,” Meg said slowly, in a way that could mean nothing but yes. Then she sighed a wintry sigh. “It may be necessary, Victor, but that makes it no easier for me.”
“I’m sorry. By God, I am sorry. I wish England weren’t doing any of this. I’d like nothing better than to live here in peace and bring in my crops every fall,” Victor said. “But life gives what it gives, not what you like.”
He wished he could talk about passing the land down to their children. To say anything along those lines, though, would only dredge up pain older and deeper than any about his marching off to war. Losing children young was hard on men, but harder on the women who bore them.
They both knew how the argument would end. He would leave the farm and lead whatever armies the Atlantean Assembly scraped together against the ferocious professionals from the mother country. He’d served with those professionals in the war against the French Atlanteans and France and Spain. He knew their virtue, their unflinching courage, their skill. Fighting alongside such men was a pleasure. Fighting against them would be anything but.
He rode out the next morning. Meg saw him off, biting her lip and blinking against more tears. Blaise’s wife seemed no more enthusiastic about his military venture.
Once out of reach of the farmhouse, Victor asked, “Did you have fun getting ready to go on your way?”
“Fun?” Blaise rolled his eyes. “I don’t know if I would call it that. Stella wanted me to stay right where I was. You know how women are.”
“I have some idea, anyhow,” Victor said. “I’d better, after all these years. But the thing needs trying. I don’t believe anyone can do it better than I can, and you will help me a great deal. Even with you, I do not know if it can be done. I do know it would be harder without you.”
“I thank you,” Blaise said. “I tried to explain this to Stella. ‘He needs someone to take care of him,’ I said. ‘No one can do that better than I can,’ I told her. She did not want to listen to me. Not even when I talked about freeing the colored folk down in the old French settlements did she want to hear me.”
Victor Radcliff grunted uneasily. Freedom from England for the white man was one thing. Freedom from the white man for the black was something else again. One thing at a time, Victor thought, and rode on.
III
New Hastings struck Victor as old. The first English settlement in Atlantis had more than three hundred years of history behind it now. Next to London or Paris, Rome or Athens, that was but the blink of an eye. Next to anywhere else on this side of the Atlantic, it seemed as one with the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
The church and some of the buildings nearby dated from the fifteenth century. The church had originally been Catholic, of course. How could it have been anything else, dating as it did from before the Reformation? Anglicanism and sterner Protestant sects predominated in Atlantis these days, but not to the extent they did on the other side of the ocean. England had needed many years to take a firm grip on these settlements. Now, wanting to make it firmer yet, she had a war on her hands.
Soldiers’ encampments dotted the fields outside of town. The men in them wore whatever they would have worn at home. They carried whatever muskets they happened to own. None but a few veterans of the fight against French Atlantis had the faintest conception of military discipline. But they were there—till the terms for which they’d enlisted ran out, anyhow.
And they were enthusiastic. They cheered Victor whenever he showed himself among them. They fought under a crazy variety of flags: some showed honkers, others fierce red-crested eagles. Real honkers and the eagles that preyed on them—and on men—were rare almost to extinction in this long-settled part of Atlantis. They were growing scarcer everywhere, from what Victor had heard.
That was the least of his worries. Turning enthusiastic militiamen into real soldiers was a bigger one. Keeping those militiamen fed well enough to fight might have been a bigger one yet. And dealing with the Atlantean Assembly towered over all of the others.
It was, Victor supposed, as close to a native government as Atlantis had. But it wasn’t very close. Atlanteans had never liked being governed: that was
one of the reasons they or their ancestors came to Atlantis in the first place. It was one of the reasons they fought England now. And it was one of the reasons the Assembly was what it was and wasn’t anything more.
It couldn’t tax. It could ask the settlements for money to support it and what it did, but couldn’t compel them to give it any. It decided things by two-thirds majority vote. If fewer than two-thirds of the settlements voted in favor of any measure, it failed. If two-thirds or more did vote for it, it passed—but still wasn’t binding on the settlements whose delegations voted no. It wasn’t quite the Polish liberum veto—but it wasn’t far removed, either.
With an organization like that, the Atlantean settlements seriously proposed to beat the greatest empire the world had seen since Roman days. That struck Victor as madness—a glorious madness, maybe, but madness even so.
It struck Blaise the same way. “You know the English, they are going to fight,” he said when he and Victor got settled into their room at an inn not far from the old redwood church.
“Well, yes,” Victor agreed, splashing water from the basin onto his hands and face. Whiskers rasped under his chin. He hadn’t shaved coming down from his farm. Unless he was going to grow a beard—something only frontiersmen did in Atlantis—he needed to take care of that. He went on, “We wouldn’t have come here if they were just going to sail away.”
“But this Atlantean Assembly . . . This militia . . .” Blaise’s African accent made the words sound faintly ridiculous. By the way he shook his head, that was the least of how he felt about them. “They are a joke. If they had to decide to go to the privy, they would shit themselves halfway there.”
Victor snorted, not because he thought the Negro was wrong but because he thought Blaise was right. “They’re what Atlantis has,” he said.
“I know,” Blaise replied. “This is what worries me. Maybe you should go home and not tell the English you were ever here.”
The United States of Atlantis Page 4