The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Marseille, Victor knew, lay in the south of France. Maybe that was why the French Atlanteans had named their western town after the older city. The weather here certainly was southern in nature. It was hot and humid. The army could have marched faster in a cooler climate. Too much haste here, and you were much too likely to fall over dead. A handful of soldiers did. They got hasty, lonely graves, like the one for the man bitten by the coral snake. The rest of the army pushed west.

  Victor waited for someone to come over the mountains and tell him General Cornwallis had pulled a fast one, landing his army somewhere on the east coast of Atlantis. If the English commander had, Radcliff didn’t know what he could do about it, not right away. Local militias would have to try to keep the redcoats in play till he shifted his men back to the east. And how obedient his army would stay after getting marched and countermarched like that was anyone’s guess.

  But Habakkuk Biddiscombe brought a couple of French Atlanteans before him. “I found them fleeing from the west,” Biddiscombe said. “I don’t talk much of their lingo, but I know you do.” By his tone, speaking French lay somewhere between affectation and perversion.

  Ignoring that, Victor asked the strangers, “Why were you running through the woods?”

  “Because swarms of soldiers have landed in New Marseille,” one of the men answered. “When soldiers come out of nowhere, it is not good for ordinary people.” He eyed Victor and the troops he led as if they proved the point. Very likely, in his eyes, they did.

  “Are their warships still in the harbor?” Victor asked.

  “They were when we left,” the French Atlantean said. His comrade nodded. After a moment, so did Victor. The Royal Navy wouldn’t drop Cornwallis on this half-settled shore and then sail off to do something else far away. It would support him and, if need be, take him somewhere else.

  Victor tried a different question: “Did anyone try to fight to hold the redcoats out of New Marseille?”

  Both French Atlanteans looked at him as if they had trouble believing their ears. The one who’d spoken before said, “Suicide is a mortal sin, Monsieur.” He didn’t add, and you are an idiot, but he might as well have. His manner would have offended Victor more if he hadn’t had a point.

  “Have you heard of the Proclamation of Liberty?” Victor asked. “It announces that Atlantis is to be free of the King of England forevermore.”

  “Has anyone given this news to the English soldiers in New Marseille?” the refugee enquired in return.

  “We are on the way now to deliver the message,” Victor said.

  “When the hammer hits the anvil, the little piece of metal in the middle gets flattened,” the French Atlantean said. Was he a blacksmith? His scarred and callused hands made that a pretty good guess. Whether he was or not, his figure of speech seemed apt enough.

  Victor had to pretend he didn’t understand it. “Will you guide us to New Marseille and help us take your town back from the invaders?”

  The local and his friend looked anything but delighted. “Do we have another choice?” he asked bleakly.

  “In a word, no,” Victor said. “This is a matter of military necessity for the United States of Atlantis.” Les États-Unis d’Atlantis: he thought it sounded quite fine in French.

  If the refugees thought so, too, they hid it well. The one who did the talking for them said, “How generous you are, Monsieur. You offer us the opportunity of returning to the danger we just escaped.”

  “You escaped it alone. You return to New Marseille with the Army of the Atlantean Assembly at your back,” Victor said.

  “And where is your navy, to drive away the English ships?” the French Atlantean asked.

  Victor would rather have heard almost any other question in the world. “One way or another, we’ll manage,” he said gruffly.

  The French Atlantean had no trouble understanding what that meant. “There is no Navy of the Atlantean Assembly,” he said.

  Since he was right, Victor could only glare at him. “Nevertheless, we shall prove victorious in the end,” he declared.

  “But the end, Monsieur, is a long way away,” the other man said. “In the meanwhile, much as I regret to say it, I fear I prefer the chances of the Englishmen. Good day.” He wanted nothing to do with the Proclamation of Liberty or any other idealistic project. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone. But King George’s forces and the Atlantean rebels seemed unlikely to pay the least attention to what he wanted.

  An eagle screeched overhead. Victor looked up. As he’d thought, it wasn’t the red-crested eagle that stood for the uprising, but the smaller, less ferocious white-headed bird. Instead of boldly attacking honkers—and livestock, and men—white-headed eagles ate fish and carrion. One of their favorite ploys was to wait till an osprey caught a fish and then assail the other bird till it gave up its prize. As far as Victor was concerned, the white-headed eagle made a fine symbol for England.

  He laughed at himself. He might have become a fair general, but he knew himself to be the world’s most indifferent poet. And he would never get better if he couldn’t come up with imagery more interesting than that.

  Victor stood on a rise a couple of miles east of New Marseille, peering down into the town and its harbor through his brass telescope. He muttered under his breath. The redcoats were there in force, all right. They had already ringed New Marseille with field fortifications. They’d gone to some effort to conceal their cannon, but he could still pick out the ugly iron and brass snouts.

  And General Cornwallis couldn’t hide the Royal Navy ships that had brought him here and still supported him. They filled the harbor of New Marseille. More anchored offshore. Avalon Bay farther north could have held them all with ease. Because New Marseille’s harbor was so much less commodious, it had neither the checkered past nor the bright future of Avalon.

  A little warbler with a green head hopped about in the tree that shaded Victor. The tree itself, a ginkgo, was curious not only for its bilobed leaves but also for its existence. Others like it grew only in China. Scholars had expended gallons of ink trying to explain why that should be so. Custis Cawthorne—Victor’s touchstone in such matters—was of the opinion that none of them had the slightest idea, but that they were unwilling to admit as much.

  Thinking about the ginkgo and about Custis made him wonder how the printer was doing in France. He also wondered how news of his victory over General Howe and the subsequent Proclamation of Liberty would go over there. All he could do was wonder and wait and see.

  He didn’t think he could do much more about New Marseille. If he hurled his army against those works, the redcoats and the Royal Navy would tear it to shreds. If he didn’t . . . Sooner or later, Cornwallis would come after him. The English could bring in supplies by sea. He was proud of keeping his army fed in its overland march across Atlantis. If it had to stay where it was for very long, though, it would start running out of edibles.

  He contemplated the prospect of retreating across Atlantis. After a moment, he shuddered and did his best to think about something else. He almost wished he hadn’t crossed the Green Ridge Mountains—but if he hadn’t, he would have tamely yielded western Atlantis to the enemy. Sometimes your choices weren’t between bad and good but between bad and worse.

  Blaise came up beside him. “What do we do now, General?” the Negro asked: one more question Victor didn’t want to hear.

  He parried it with one of his own: “What would you do in my place?”

  Blaise eyed the redcoats’ fieldworks. He didn’t need the spyglass and the details it revealed to come up with a reasonable answer. “Wait for whatever happens next,” he said. “That is a strong position. Mighty strong.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” Victor said mournfully. “I wish our engineers were as good as theirs.”

  “Why aren’t they?” Blaise asked.

  “Because we never needed professional soldiers till this war started,” Victor said. “I suppose the United States of Atlant
is will from this time forward—and it will have them, too. But we don’t have them yet, worse luck.”

  That made Blaise grunt thoughtfully. “Too peaceful for our own good, were we? You wouldn’t think such a thing could be so.”

  “I fear it is,” Victor said in mournful tones.

  Blaise grunted again. “Well, if my tribe had more warriors, and better warriors, I never would have crossed the sea. I’d still be back there, still talking my own language.” He spoke several incomprehensible syllables full of longing.

  “Your life might have been—would have been, I suppose—easier had you stayed in Africa. But I would have missed a friend.” Victor set a hand on the Negro’s shoulder.

  “Too late to worry about it now,” Blaise said. “You are a friend, but this is not my land. It never will be.”

  “The United States of Atlantis should be any free man’s land,” Victor said, more stiffly than he’d intended to.

  “Should be, yes.” Blaise used that gesture Victor had seen before from him, brushing two fingers of his right hand against the dark back of his left. “Easier to talk about should be than is.”

  “Mmm, maybe so. We do what we can—nothing more to do,” Victor said. “We aren’t perfect, nor shall we ever be. But we keep heading down the road, and we’ll see how far we fare.”

  He got one more grunt from Blaise. “Heading down the road on the backs of blacks and copperskins.”

  “Not on the backs of freemen, regardless of their color,” Victor said uncomfortably.

  This time, Blaise didn’t answer at all. That might have been just as well. The United States of Atlantis might be heading down the road towards a place where a man of one color was reckoned as good as a man of another. Victor wasn’t sure the land was heading toward that place, but it might be. He was sure it hadn’t come close to getting there.

  All of which brought him not a hairsbreadth nearer to deciding what to do about New Marseille. Attacking those works looked like something only a man who craved death would try. Going back the way he’d come yielded Atlantis west of the mountains to England, and God only knew what it would do to the army’s morale. Unfortunately, things being as they were, he couldn’t simply stay where he was for very long, either.

  He ordered his men to start digging works of their own. If the redcoats came after them, they had to be able to hold their ground if they could. As far as he could see, General Cornwallis would have to be a fool to attack him, but maybe Cornwallis was a fool, or at least would turn out to be one this time. Victor could hope so, anyhow. He realized he wasn’t in the best of positions when hoping for a foe’s mistake was the best he could do.

  A couple of days went by. Not much came from the far side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The hunters shot less than he’d wished they would, too. Before long, the army would get hungry. It might get very hungry.

  He began planning an attack. It wasn’t one he wanted to make, but when all his choices looked bad he had to pick the one that wasn’t worst. He’d thought about that not long before, and now it stared him in the face again. Still, if he could take New Marseille from the English, he’d redeem this campaign.

  If he could . . .

  And then, to his amazement, the redcoats abandoned the town. They did it with their usual competence, leaving fires burning in their outworks to fool his men into thinking they remained there through the night. When the sun rose, the last few Englishmen were rowing out to the Royal Navy ships. The warships’ sails filled with wind, and they glided off to the south.

  Victor’s first thought was that smallpox or the yellow jack had broken out in Cornwallis’ army. But the English commodore would scarcely have let soldiers onto his ships in that case. Knowing only his own ignorance, Victor rode into New Marseille.

  If the locals were glad to see him, their faces didn’t know it. They seemed more French—and more superciliously French—than most southern folk on the other side of the mountains. Englishmen? English-speaking Atlanteans? If they recognized the difference, they didn’t let on.

  And they seemed proud of themselves for their Frenchness. “Don’t you know why this Cornwallis individual absconded?” one of them demanded.

  “No,” Victor replied, “and I wish I did.”

  “Well, it’s all because of King Louis, of course,” the local told him.

  “Perhaps you would be good enough to explain that to me?” Victor said. The King of France hadn’t done much lately, not that he knew about.

  But he knew less than the local did. “Word came here that France has declared war against the rascally English,” the fellow said. “And . . . oh, yes . . .”

  “What?” Victor asked, now eagerly.

  “And recognized your United States of Atlantis,” the man told him.

  XIV

  Habakkuk Biddiscombe rode back to Victor Radcliff with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. Radcliff eyed the cavalry officer a trifle apprehensively. Biddiscombe wore that smirk when things were going very well—and when they were going anything but. Which would it be this time? Do I really want to know? Victor wondered.

  “I have news, General,” Biddiscombe said portentously.

  “I thought you might,” Victor said. “Otherwise—I do hope—you would have stayed in your assigned position, with the men you lead.” That failed to quash the bumptious cavalryman. Biddiscombe also failed to disgorge whatever he’d brought back. Sighing, Victor prompted him: “And that news is . . . ?”

  “Without question, General, my men have reached the eastern slope of the Green Ridge Mountains.” From the pride in his voice, Habakkuk Biddiscombe had only a little less to do with that eastern slope than the Almighty Who’d created it in the first place.

  “Well, I am glad to hear that.” Victor meant it. His men wore lean and hungry looks, and did not wear them gladly. “We’ll be much better able to subsist the soldiers once we return to civilization.”

  “Civilization?” Biddiscombe flared a nostril and curled his lip. “Nothing but Frenchies, and not a devil of a lot of them.”

  “Some English Atlanteans, too,” Victor said mildly. “And don’t be too quick to sneer at the French. We stand a much better chance to make the Proclamation of Liberty good with France fighting England at our side.”

  “England licked France the last time they quarreled,” Biddiscombe said. “You ought to know about that, eh, sir? You helped England do it.”

  “England and English Atlantis together beat France and French Atlantis.” Victor was stretching a point. He did tell the truth . . . for this part of the world. In Terranova, in India, on the Continent, England had done fine against France with no help from Atlantis. But France, shorn of much of her former empire, would be fighting a smaller war this time. Victor went on, “Add France’s weight to ours and the pan swings down.”

  “Till the Frenchies jump out of it and run away. They can afford to do that. We can’t.” No, Habakkuk Biddiscombe wasn’t convinced.

  Victor tried a different tack: “News that France was in the war made Cornwallis pull out of New Marseille as fast as he could go. He must think it means something. So must his commodore.”

  “More likely, they’re a couple of little old ladies.” Biddiscombe didn’t bother hiding his scorn.

  “General Cornwallis isn’t, I assure you. As you said a moment ago, I ought to know about that. And the Royal Navy isn’t in the habit of giving little old ladies command of a flotilla.” Victor wanted to shake sense into the younger man. The main thing holding him back was the near-certainty it would do no good. He did say, “Having a real navy on our side is bound to help. The French have worked hard to build up their fleet since the last war.”

  “They’re still French, so how much good will all that work do?” Yes, Biddiscombe’s opinions were strong—and fixed.

  Victor shrugged. “If they make England pull ships away from Atlantis, that will let us get back some of our strangled commerce. It may let us build warships of our own, or at least
get more privateers out on the sea.”

  “Fleabites.” The cavalry major scratched melodramatically.

  “We aren’t going to land greencoats outside of London. It isn’t in the cards.” Victor held tight to his patience. “Enough fleabites, and George’s ministers will decide we make England itch more than we’re worth. That’s the best hope we have.” As far as Victor could see, it was Atlantis’ only hope. He didn’t say that. It would be just his luck to dent Biddiscombe’s confidence when he didn’t mean to.

  “Fleabites,” Biddiscombe repeated. Then he made hand-washing motions; he would have been a natural up on stage. “Well, General, now that I’ve given you the news, I will return to my men. Good day, sir.” His salute was one more piece of overacting. He booted his horse off toward the east.

  Riding after him to give him a proper boot in the backside was a temptation Victor had to fight hard to resist. One of the messengers who habitually accompanied him said, “That man is nothing but trouble.”

  Not without regret, Victor shook his head. “If he were nothing but trouble, I could dismiss him in good conscience. But he’s more dangerous to the English than he is to us.”

  “Are you sure, sir?” the youngster asked.

  “Sure enough,” Victor said. “Nobody else could have done what he did last winter.”

  “All right.” The messenger didn’t seem to think it was.

  “And his men did a great deal to keep us fed while we were on this side of the mountains,” Victor added. “My biggest worry was that we’d get so hungry, we’d come to pieces. That didn’t happen, and our cavalry are the largest reason it didn’t.”

  “Yes, General,” the messenger said resignedly. He sounded more interested as he asked, “What will we do once we get back to the east?”

  “First thing we must do is find out where Cornwallis has landed,” Victor replied. “After that . . . After that, we’ll do whatever looks best.”