Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  But if he went away, who won? Victor Radcliff did, damn his black heart. He had no compunction about roving through Spanish Atlantis. He wandered as he pleased, destroying whatever got in his way. And he didn’t need to wait for permission from Don José blasted Valverde!

  “We ought to boot these Spanish guards out of the way and do what we need to do,” one of Roland’s lieutenants said.

  “And then we would be fighting the English and the Spaniards for the rest of the war,” Kersauzon answered gloomily. “And the Spaniards would fight us, too. Never doubt it for a minute. They understand spite. They don’t understand much else, God knows, but they understand spite.”

  After what seemed forever and was really a week later than he’d hoped, a horseman finally came up from Gernika. Roland almost dragged him out of the saddle. The rider presented him with a letter gorgeous with multicolored ribbons and seals. When the Spaniards made something official, they made it official.

  All of which mattered not two pins to Roland. “What does the miserable thing say?” he demanded.

  “Monsieur, I have no idea,” the fellow replied. “Another fellow gave it to me and said, ‘Here. Take it on to the French commander.’”

  “Oh,” was all Roland said to that. It sounded more deadly than an hour’s worth of inspired profanity.

  He got a little satisfaction from tearing off the ribbons and cracking all the seals. Then he unfolded the letter. Some secretary must have written it; the handwriting was improbably perfect. The French in which it was written was also perfect—even a governor on a distant shore needed a decent command of the language of diplomacy.

  And the letter was perfectly infuriating. With all due respect to the French commander, the governor of Spanish Atlantis wrote, I am confident we shall be able to treat these English marauders as they deserve without requiring assistance from him or his men. Therefore, while appreciating his generous offer, I must decline it. I of course remain his most obedient servant…. The fancy squiggle under the body of the letter probably came from Don José’s own hand.

  “What does it say, Monsieur?” the horseman asked.

  “It says that the governor of Spanish Atlantis is a God-cursed fool, that’s what,” Roland answered. “If he hadn’t used such rough paper, I would wipe my backside with it, and better than it deserves, too. As is…” He tore the letter in two and let it fall to the ground with the bits of ribbon and wax. Then he ground the pieces under his heel and stalked away.

  His officers exclaimed in amazement and fury when he gave them the news. “The Spaniards couldn’t catch the pox in a brothel!” one of them exclaimed. “How do they think they’ll catch the English settlers? And why do they think they’ll beat them even if they do catch them?”

  “I have no answers for this,” Roland said. “Sometimes, observing another man’s stupidity, you find yourself compelled to admire it. You want to watch and see exactly how it leads him to disaster. This seems to me to be one of those times.”

  “What do we do now?” the captain asked.

  Kersauzon made hand-washing motions, as if he were Pontius Pilate. “If Don José doesn’t want our aid, he won’t get it. I intend to leave some of our men here near the border. If the English settlers come back—no, when they come back—our soldiers can slow them down till we bring more troops to bear. With the rest, I aim to go north again. Montcalm-Gozon, at least, has the sense to know we men of French Atlantis are worth something.”

  “The Spaniard will find out,” the captain said. “He’ll also find out his own men have not the value of a counterfeit sou.”

  “Yes, I do believe he will.” Roland Kersauzon spoke with the anticipation any man might show while contemplating the discomfiture of someone he despised. A slow smile spread across his face. “And soon, too.”

  A company of Spanish settlers formed a line of battle, ready to stop the English invaders if they could. Victor Radcliff didn’t want to show all of his men at once, for fear of making the Spaniards run away. He brought them forward out of the woods a few at a time. After exchanging a volley or two with the enemy with roughly even numbers, he could show more of his hand.

  “Will you look at those old-fashioned buggers!” he said, staring at the swarthy soldiers a couple of hundred yards away.

  “How do you mean?” Blaise asked—a handy question that fit almost any situation.

  “Why, their officers are wearing helmets,” Victor answered. “A couple of them even have corselets—back-and-breasts. Armor.”

  “Good idea, no?” Blaise said.

  “Good idea, yes—if you’re fighting savages without guns,” Victor said. The Spanish conquistadores had gone through the copperskinned natives of Terranova like a dose of salts. But that was a long time ago now. No European armies used armor any more—armor stout enough to turn bullets was also heavy enough to slow a man down and make him uncomfortable.

  And in this weather…If those Spaniards weren’t stewing inside their fancy ironmongery, he couldn’t imagine why not. He wore linen and wool, and felt stuck in a pot waiting for a housewife to throw in the onions. The Spaniards really did encase themselves in metal.

  His men started banging away at them without waiting to form a neat line. He doubted the enemy would find that sporting, but it wasn’t his worry. And the gunpowder smoke screened the reinforcements he ordered out of the woods.

  The Spaniards were brave. They tried to advance against his musketry, and didn’t seem to understand why it kept getting heavier. More and more of them fell. They didn’t break, though, till he sent horsemen around their flanks. That did it. Like a lot of inexperienced troops, they were as wary as so many virgins about flank attacks.

  His men didn’t pursue very far. They plundered the enemy dead and did what they could for the living. Victor was relieved to find the English hadn’t lost more than a handful of soldiers. He couldn’t afford heavy losses, because he couldn’t imagine how the English settlements would reinforce him way the devil down here.

  Way the devil down here…When the phrase first crossed his mind, it was more one of annoyance than anything else. But Old Scratch would have felt right at home in this part of Atlantis. If hell wasn’t like this hot, steamy, swampy, snake-infested place, Satan was missing a trick.

  Blaise had a furrow on his left arm where a bullet had grazed him. He hissed when a surgeon poured rum on the wound. “Stings, don’t it?” the surgeon said cheerfully—his arm was fine.

  “Yes,” Blaise ground out through clenched teeth.

  “Got to get it clean if I can,” the white man said. “Down here, a wound’ll fester easy as you please.”

  Victor hadn’t thought of that. One more reason for Satan to set up shop in Spanish Atlantis. He went over to a prisoner. “You can’t beat us, you know,” he said in his bad Spanish.

  The captive only shrugged. “God was against us,” he said. A bloody bandage covered one ear, or more likely where the ear had been.

  “You can go home if you want to,” Radcliff told him. The Spaniard went from dejected to suspicious in one fell swoop. Victor went on, “You can. Tell people not to fight us any more, that’s all. If they don’t fight, we take what we want but we don’t hurt people. If they do fight, we make them sorry.”

  “Even if I tell them, they won’t listen to me,” the Spaniard predicted with the gloom so common in his folk.

  “They listen to our muskets. They listen to our bayonets,” Victor said. A dead Spaniard lay on the ground not far away. He’d been gutted like a trout. A bayonet was the last thing he’d ever heard.

  “If you are crazy enough to let me go, I will say what you want me to say,” the prisoner said. He was eyeing the dead Spaniard, too. “But I promise nothing. If the fighting keeps on, no tengo la culpa.”

  “Yes, I know it won’t be your fault,” Victor said. “Go on, though. You won’t be the only one we turn loose to spread the word.”

  Something shrewd glinted in the captive’s dark, liquid eyes. �
��If we go, you don’t have to feed us. You don’t have to doctor us. You don’t have to bring us along…or kill us if we get in the way or make trouble.”

  He was right on every count. Victor Radcliff smiled. “Yes? And so?” he said blandly.

  “You are an Englishman. But you are not a stupid Englishman, are you?” the Spaniard said.

  “I hope not,” Victor replied. With a thoughtful nod, the prisoner got to his feet and left the field. An English settler looked back toward Victor, who nodded and waved for him to let the Spaniard go. With a shrug that might have matched the prisoner’s earlier one for fatalism, the sentry did.

  Radcliff preached the doctrine of nonresistance to other Spaniards and sent them off to the east, too. That done, he went back to see how Blaise fared. The Negro stood there opening and closing his fist, making sure all the tendons still worked the way they were supposed to.

  “Not too bad,” Radcliff ventured.

  “No, not too. But nobody ever shooted me before.” Blaise’s grammar still sometimes left a bit to be desired. He looked down at the bandage the surgeon had given him. “It will make a brave scar, though.” Was that more of his eccentric English, or did he mean exactly what he’d said? Victor wasn’t sure.

  “Did you pay back the man who did it?” Victor asked.

  The Negro nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. That him there.” He pointed to the gutted Spaniard. “I am a blooded warrior again.”

  “He won’t argue with you—that’s certain sure,” Victor agreed. So Blaise won his warrior stripes whenever he killed somebody? Victor knew of white men—English, French, and Spanish—who shared the same attitude.

  His little army couldn’t stay in one place very long. It soon started eating the countryside bare. It moved on, plundering small farms and plantations the way it had all through French and Spanish Atlantis. Some of the hidalgos tried to fight back, others didn’t. Maybe the released prisoners hadn’t spread the word. Maybe the men defending their property just didn’t want to listen. Spaniards could be as stubborn as Englishmen.

  Two days later, Radcliff got a new surprise. His vanguard ran into Spaniards coming their way. The new arrivals weren’t soldiers, but men, women, and children with no more than the clothes on their backs and whatever they could carry. “Save us!” they shouted when they saw the English soldiers.

  They spoke Spanish, of course. “Hold fire!” Victor yelled, for the benefit of his men who didn’t understand the language. “They’re friendly!”

  “Devil you say!” an unconvinced settler declared.

  Ignoring him, Victor asked the nearest Spaniards, “Why do you need us to save you?”

  “Because the slaves have risen up!” one of them cried. “The copperskins and the blacks, they want to kill us all!”

  “What’s that bugger going on about?” At least half a dozen men who spoke only English asked the same question in almost identical words. Instead of answering them right away, Victor Radcliff glanced over toward Blaise. The Negro knew some Spanish. By the predatory smile on his face, he knew plenty to understand that.

  Heading up through French Atlantis toward the northern border and the war against the English settlements, Roland Kersauzon was not a happy man. He would gladly have sent Don José to hell or to London, whichever was worse. He’d known about Spanish arrogance before, but the refusal to let him enter Spanish Atlantis proved he hadn’t known all about it.

  He was more than halfway back to the war he’d left behind when a courier coming up from the south caught him from behind. The man looked to have ridden hard for a long time. He thrust a letter into Roland’s hand. Roland stared at the fancy seals and ribbons bedizening it. “Don’t tell me this is from—?”

  “Oui, Monsieur,” the courier replied. “From his Excellency, the governor of Spanish Atlantis. I don’t know what he says.”

  “I don’t care what he says,” Kersauzon growled. “I might like to meet him with seconds, but any other way? I think not.”

  “Do you want that, then?” The other horseman pointed to the letter at the same time as he used his other hand to pat his blowing mount’s neck.

  “Want it? Dear God, no!” Roland said. “But I suppose—I suppose—I’d better read it anyway.” He took a certain satisfaction in ripping off the ribbons and breaking the seals. If he tore the paper a little, too—well, so what?

  The first thing he saw when he opened the letter was that the secretary hadn’t written it. It was in Don José’s own cramped script, and began, General Kersauzon, please believe that I abase myself before you. With all my heart, I beg you to return to the land that previously rejected the helping hand you put forward.

  “Well, well!” Roland said, and then again: “Well, well! Here we do have something out of the ordinary!”

  “What is it?” The courier was no less eager for news than any other mortal.

  But Roland waved him to silence. He was still reading. Not only do the English afflict us yet, Don José wrote, but we are also tormented by a servile insurrection their invasion has touched off. We are in danger of being murdered in our beds by those who should aid and comfort us. And you must know this is a sickness which, if not nipped in the bud, may soon infect French Atlantis as well.

  “Nom d’un nom!” Kersauzon muttered, and then a couple of Breton obscenities he only half understood.

  “What’s going on, Monsieur?” the courier asked once more.

  “The slaves in Spanish Atlantis have risen up,” Roland replied, which made the other man swear in turn. Roland went on, “Now the Spaniards want us to pull their fat from the fire.”

  “Are we going to do it?” the courier demanded, and did his best to answer his own question: “Lord knows they don’t deserve it.”

  “No, they don’t.” Roland Kersauzon sighed. “Which doesn’t mean they won’t get it anyhow. Don José is right about one thing, damn him: an uprising could easily spread from his land to ours.”

  “If we kill enough slaves, the rest will remember their manners pretty quick,” said the man who’d brought the letter. “Or if they don’t, we can bloody well kill them all.”

  They couldn’t. Roland knew that perfectly well, even if the courier didn’t. Without slaves, French Atlantis—and Spanish Atlantis, too—would grind to a halt. But they would also grind to a halt from an uprising. You couldn’t let slaves get away with rebellion, or with thinking they were as good as their masters. The whole system would fall apart if you did, even once.

  And so, reluctantly, Kersauzon called to a bugler and said, “Blow halt.”

  Obedient but puzzled—the French settlers had been pushing hard toward the northeast—the man obeyed. The soldiers weren’t sorry to stop. Soldiers were never sorry to stop, from everything Roland had seen. Some went off to take a leak. Others lit up pipes or cigars.

  Roland rode out in front of them. “My friends, I am sorry to have to tell you that we must reverse our course again,” he said.

  The men muttered among themselves. “Who spilled the chamber pot into the soup this time?” one of them asked.

  In spite of his own fury, Roland smiled. “That sums it up only too well, mon vieux,” he said. “I learn that the slaves in Spanish Atlantis have risen.” He held up the letter to show how he’d learned it. “The governor wants our help against them—and, I suppose, against the English settlers who inspired the revolt. And if we would rather not see an uprising in our own settlements, we would do well to give him what help we can.”

  They weighed that with grave attention. Not many of them came from plantation families, but even ordinary farmers who were doing well for themselves had a couple of Negroes or copperskins to give them a hand. Like plantation owners, they had to worry about their property absconding with itself.

  One by one, they started to nod. Somebody said, “It’s a damned nuisance, but we’d better do it.”

  “Once we get down there again, we ought to kick that damned Spaniard around the block,” another soldier added, wh
ich brought more nods.

  “Damned slaves are jumping on the Spaniards when they’re down,” yet another man said. “We need to teach ’em they can’t get away with that kind of crap with us.” That too produced a growing chorus of agreement.

  “You are gentlemen—and it hasn’t turned you into blockheads, the way it has with the Spaniards,” Roland said. His soldiers grinned and nudged one another—they liked that. Roland wasn’t lying, either. He pointed back the way they’d come. “About-turn, mes amis. We have two jobs of work to do, and with luck we can do both of them at the same time.”

  Had Montcalm-Gozon or the French regulars watched the settlers reverse their course, they probably would have laughed. Kersauzon’s army wasn’t long on spit and polish. It didn’t drill constantly, the way a European army did. But it could fight when it had to. It had already proved that. As far as Roland was concerned, an army that could fight didn’t have to look pretty…and an army that looked pretty was worthless anyhow if it couldn’t fight.

  He rode past the marching men to take his place at the head of the army once more. The soldiers seemed profanely determined to punish the slaves, the English settlers, and the Spaniards for making them march and countermarch. Roland smiled to himself. If that wasn’t the right attitude for an army to have, he couldn’t imagine what would be.

  Victor Radcliff knew less about copperskins than he wished he did. Far fewer had been brought to the English settlements in Atlantis than to those of the French and Spanish farther south. Meeting with the leaders of the slave revolt in Spanish Atlantis taught him how proud the copperskins were.

  “Why shouldn’t we kill all the whites?” one of them demanded. His Spanish name was Martín. He had another one, the one he’d used in the broader lands of Terranova, but Victor couldn’t begin to pronounce it. Martín would have to do. Black eyes blazing, he went on, “They don’t care if they kill us.”