Opening Atlantis
Page 47
“The only way I get rich there is, I buy niggers and copperskins,” Blaise said slowly. “Only way anyone gets rich down there, he runs him a plantation with slaves.”
“Well, yes,” Victor admitted. “You do need them in French Atlantis—what was French Atlantis, I mean.” He paused. “Some slaves who’ve got free do run slaves themselves now. That isn’t against the law down there, either.”
“Don’t happen real often,” Blaise said.
“No, it doesn’t, but it’s not illegal.”
Blaise set his chin. He didn’t have the bony promontory that graced the lower jaws of a lot of white men. Somehow, though, the lack made him seem more stubborn, not less. “Done been a slave,” he said, and added several French and Spanish pungencies to the remark. “Don’t want to do that to anybody else.”
“Someone else will if you don’t,” Victor said. “I daresay you’d make a better master than someone who’d never seen it from the other side.”
This time, Blaise laughed in his face. That startled Victor Radcliff, and angered him, too. He wasn’t used to such discourtesies from a Negro—certainly not here in Hanover, though he would have tolerated them better on campaign or out in the woods.
“If I’m a master, I’m as rough as anybody else,” Blaise said. “You have slaves, you got to be. Or they don’t work. They don’t do anything. I know. I was one.” He jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest. “Don’t want to do that. So I won’t. I stick with you, Major Radcliff, sir.” He saluted, mixing some mockery—but not a lot—into the gesture of respect.
Gravely, Victor returned the salute. “You’ll never get rich that way,” he said.
Blaise shrugged. “Don’t care about gettin’ rich. Care about…” He paused, considering. “About not hatin’ myself. Yeah. I care about that.”
“Have it your way. You will anyhow.” With the war over, Victor didn’t need a sergeant-cum-body-servant any more. If he went back to exploring, he didn’t need a body servant, either. An explorer with a servant was like a musket with a chamber pot: having one added something absolutely unnecessary.
Which wasn’t to say Blaise couldn’t take care of himself in the wilderness. He could, at least as well as Victor could himself. And, if Victor dismissed him, Blaise could take care of himself in English Atlantis, too. Blaise might be black, but he was as generally competent a man as Victor had ever met.
That went a long way towards explaining why the two of them got along as well as they did, even if Victor had never thought of it in those terms.
“Well, if you don’t want a plantation, how do we reward you for shooting Roland Kersauzon?” he asked.
“Money is good,” Blaise said seriously. “What you reckon he’s worth?” He was always ready to haggle.
He looked so ready now, Victor started to laugh. “Are you sure you’re not a Jew under your skin?” he said.
Blaise took the question literally. “Don’t even know what a Jew is.”
“They’re white people who aren’t Christians,” Victor replied. “Too foolish to know the truth, in other words.”
“They don’t believe in God?” Blaise asked.
“They believe in God, but they don’t believe Jesus is His Son.”
“Oh. Like Muslims,” Blaise said.
It was Victor’s turn to be confused. A bit of back-and-forth made him understand Blaise was talking about Mahometans. A bit more made him understand that the black man knew much more about them than he did. “How do you find yourself so well informed?” he asked.
“Some of the tribes north of us, they Muslim,” Blaise answered. “They send their men, want us to be Muslims, too.”
“Missionaries. Muslim missionaries,” Victor Radcliff said wonderingly. “Now I’ve heard everything. We Christians send missions to Africa, too, you know.”
“Muslims send missionaries. They take slaves. Christians send missionaries. They take slaves,” Blaise said. “Us—we believe what we believe. We don’t send no missionaries.”
“Do you take slaves?” Radcliff asked.
“Oh, yes. People we catch in war, things like that,” Blaise said. “We don’t work them the way the French and Spaniards do, though. Don’t have big plantations.” He paused. “These Jews, they send missionaries?”
“No. At least, I’ve never heard of it if they do.” Victor tried to imagine what would happen to a Jew proselytizing in Rome or Paris or London—or Hanover, come to that. Nothing pretty. The Jews knew better. That, in turn, made him wonder why Christians and Mahometans didn’t. He found no good answer.
Blaise wasn’t finished. “These Jews, they take slaves?”
“Some rich Jews own them, I’m sure,” Victor said. “They buy and sell them now and again.” Most of that trade, though, at least between Africa and Atlantis, lay in Christian hands. Uncomfortably, he finished, “They don’t raid the coast to grab them, anyhow.”
“Huh,” Blaise said: a thoughtful grunt. “Maybe I turn Jew, then.”
Victor didn’t tell him that kind of conversion was against the law. He wasn’t sure it was, or needed to be. Who not born to the Jewish faith would want to assume all the burdens it entailed? Speaking of those burdens…“Do you want to get circumcised?”
“Fancy word. What’s it mean?” Blaise said. Victor told him what it meant. The Negro set a protective hand in front of his privates. “Muslims do that, too. Why would anybody want to?”
“I don’t know why Mahometans do it. I didn’t know they did. Jews think God requires it of them.”
Blaise took the hand away. He was getting ever better at aping white people’s notions of polite manners. “Ain’t gonna be no Jew,” he declared.
“Amen,” Victor said, unaware he’d just come out with a Hebrew word.
When Victor—and Blaise—rode south into what had been French Atlantis, no customs barrier delayed them at the border. There were no customs barriers between English and French Atlantis any longer, no more than there were between New Hastings and Hanover. King George ruled them all.
The innkeeper at whose establishment they stayed was French. They both spoke his language. That pleased him. They also both stayed reasonably sober and reasonably quiet. That pleased him even more.
Men from English Atlantis filled the inn to bursting. They shouted demands in English. The innkeeper understood them well enough; so close to the old border, it wasn’t as if he’d never had English-speaking guests before the war made him an involuntary English subject. But, by the way the newcomers acted, French might have been as dead as Aramaic.
They drank. They pinched and patted the barmaids. They ate as if they’d just discovered food. They bragged about the fortunes they were going to make by screwing the Frenchies. (That the innkeeper was listening, and might decide to season their capon with rat poison, never seemed to cross their minds.) They went on drinking. They brawled, and broke crockery brawling.
“That will go on your scot!” the innkeeper cried. (He might put rat poison in the beer and wine and barrel-tree rum, too.)
“What makes you reckon we’ll pay you a ha’penny, you filthy, motherless scut?” one of them bawled.
A heartbeat later, he found himself staring down the barrel of Victor Radcliff’s pistol. A pistol aimed at your face, as Victor had reason to know, seemed to own a bore as wide as a fieldpiece’s. “You’ll pay your scot right now, and then you’ll get the devil out of here,” Victor said quietly. In the sudden, vast silence, he didn’t need to shout.
“And if I don’t?” The trader had nerve—more nerve than sense, as far as Victor was concerned.
He said, “In that unfortunate circumstance, your heirs will be responsible for what you owe this gentleman…and for the cost of your funeral. Add in the farthing you’re actually worth and it comes to a tidy little sum.”
The other settler’s bloodshot eyes crossed as he stared down the barrel of the pistol. “Who the hell are you, anyways, throwing orders around like you’re God’s anointed?”
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“I am Major Victor Radcliff,” Victor answered evenly. “If I have to ask your name, sir, you will not be glad of it: I promise you that. Now…Do as I told you or prepare to join the majority.”
“That’s fancy talk for ‘die,’ Ben,” another trader said, in case Ben was too dense or too sozzled to figure it out for himself.
He wasn’t—or he didn’t let on that he was. “I know what it’s fancy talk for, dammit,” he said. With an effort, he looked at Radcliff rather than his weapon. “Put that miserable thing away so we can talk this over like a couple of sensible people.”
“I am not a sensible person, and do not pretend to be,” Radcliff said. “I have spent this whole war killing people who got in my way. If you think one more will bother me to the extent of a fart on a dung heap, you are making what I assure you will be your last mistake.”
Ben considered. Victor knew the questions that had to be uppermost in his mind: could he knock the pistol aside before Victor blew his head off? If he could, could he win the brawl that would follow a split second later?
He must not have liked the answers he came up with. He said, “I’m going to reach down for some money. I’ll do it slow, and I won’t go for anything else. That all right by you?”
“Yes—as long as you mean it. If you don’t, I promise that my friend and I will make you…briefly…wish you did.”
“Your friend? You mean that…colored fellow?” Ben was almost, but not quite, too slow. He did have the brains to realize tagging a gun-toting Negro with an ugly name wasn’t the smartest thing he could do. He took out enough money to cover his tab and then some. After setting it on the table, he walked off into the night.
“Anyone else?” Victor inquired. “Or can you see screwing the Frenchies will be the same as screwing yourselves from now on?”
No one seemed inclined to argue with him. Short-tempered men who carried pistols often went without their fair share of disagreement, something he’d noticed before and was inclined to take advantage of. On the other hand, he didn’t fool himself into believing he’d magically convinced the English settlers of the error of their ways. Lack of disagreement wasn’t the same as agreement.
He suspected—no, he was sure—there would need to be laws to make sure the English didn’t screw the Frenchies…too badly. Quite a few people would get rich down here before those laws went into place. If Ben wasn’t one of them, Victor would have been surprised.
“Audace, audace, toujours l’audace,” Blaise remarked as he and Victor undressed for bed. The innkeeper gave the two of them a room to themselves. None of the traders from English Atlantis would have wanted to bed down with them anyhow. As far as Victor was concerned, it was mutual.
He only shrugged. “It wasn’t so audacious as all that, not when you were there to back my play.”
“But who backed mine?” Blaise asked. “Two bullets, then—” He made as if to strangle himself.
“Oh, nonsense,” Victor said. “What do you want to bet the innkeeper has a pepperbox pistol—or more likely a blunderbuss loaded to the muzzle with scrap iron—under the bar? He would have backed us both.”
“Maybe,” Blaise said unwillingly. “But maybe too slow to do us any good, too.”
“The devil take worrying about might-have-beens,” Victor said. “We did it, we got by with it, and there’s an end to it. And now why don’t you blow out that candle so we can get some sleep?” Blaise did. The room plunged into darkness scented with hot tallow. Victor never found out whether he or Blaise started snoring first, which probably meant he did.
Nouveau Redon would never be the same. English engineers systematically demolished the walls that had warded the great fortress of French Atlantis for so long. That made sense to Victor. Even without the spring, the site remained dangerously good.
He wasn’t surprised to discover French settlers could see that as well as he could. They’d also noticed that the English regulars charged with wrecking their works spoke no French. With smiling faces, the locals called the engineers appalling names.
With those same smiling faces, they called Victor Radcliff some appalling names, too. He smiled back, and replied in his best French: “Ah, but if you think I’m bad, you should see your own mothers.”
The setters who’d been making sport of him stopped, their mouths falling open. “Monsieur comprehends?” one of them said in alarm.
“Monsieur bloody well does,” Victor agreed. “Monsieur also comprehends that you would do well not to bait the engineers. If they find out the tenth part of what you’re saying to them, you are all dead men.”
“It would serve you right, too,” Blaise added.
“And who are you?” the settler inquired—cautiously. Most of the time, French settlers didn’t want to hear anything from Negroes or copperskins. Most of the time, they didn’t have to. Owning a man meant you didn’t have to listen to him. (Owning a woman meant you didn’t have to listen to her, either. That could be—and often was—even more convenient.) Having made one mistake, though, this fellow didn’t want to make two. (A surprising—to Victor, a dismaying—number of people didn’t care how many they made.)
“I am Sergeant Blaise Black, of the militia of the English settlements,” Blaise answered, pride ringing in his voice. He must have taken the surname on the spur of the moment; it certainly suited him. He went on, “I also have the honor to be the man who shot Roland Kersauzon.”
Nobody asked him any more questions after that. The French settlers couldn’t disappear fast enough. “Now look what you did,” Victor said.
Blaise shrugged in a way that showed he’d lived among Frenchmen. “I told them the truth. What’s wrong with that?” In English, he sounded ordinary. In French, he could be eloquent. Maybe he still knew more French than English. Maybe the difference lay in the genius of the two languages.
As for his question…“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Victor Radcliff answered. “That doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant thing to do.”
With another shrug, Blaise said, “They were throwing filth at us. You gave them something to think about. So did I.”
“All right,” Victor said mildly.
He did warn the captain in charge of the engineers that the locals were less friendly than they seemed. The grizzled officer said, “Well, I can’t tell you I’m amazed. The brothel we went to tried to give us a freshly poxed girl so we’d have something to remember her by.”
“And what did you do about that?” Victor inquired.
The captain made a fist. “Tore the place apart. Now we don’t pay for it any more. We have fun anyhow. These French women—” His opinion of them was at least as low as the jeering French settlers’ opinion of him and his men.
That wasn’t surprising, even if it was a little sad. As long as it didn’t start a riot, it also wasn’t Victor’s worry. He said, “I’m just glad you’re making sure they won’t use this place as a strongpoint against us again.”
“You never can tell,” the captain said. “They’re liable to start rebuilding as soon as we get done and leave. We’ll need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t.”
“I think we can do that,” Victor said. “And the problem will solve itself before too long, I suspect.”
“How’s that, sir?” the graying English officer asked.
“When there are as many English settlers as French here, no one will want to use this place as a fortress.”
“I hope not.” The captain didn’t sound convinced. Victor wondered why not. And then, all of a sudden, he stopped wondering—he knew. To this Englishman, settlers were settlers, and what blood they sprang from hardly mattered. They were all potential rebels, potential enemies.
Radcliff tried not to bristle in any obvious way. That would only have proved the captain’s point for him. I’m as good a subject of King George as you are! Victor wanted to scream it. Screaming it wouldn’t have done him any good, though. The captain would have thought he was protesting too much.
Blaise was thinking the same thing. “What can you do with such people?” he murmured…in French.
“I don’t know,” Victor replied in the same language.
“What is that jibber-jabber you’re going back and forth in?” The English engineer aimed the question at Victor. “Did you learn this nigger’s language so you could talk it without anybody knowing what you’re saying?”
“No, you fool!” Victor exclaimed. “It’s French! Don’t you know French when you hear it?”
“I should hope not.” The redcoat sounded proud of his own ignorance. “If it’s not English, it’s not worth learning.”
“Didn’t they ram Latin and Greek down your throat?” Victor asked, now taken by surprise.
“Not me.” Again, the captain sounded proud. “I came up through the ranks, I did. I’m not one of those rich buggers who got to go to Oxbridge or Camford or one of those fancy places. I’m an officer on account of I’m bloody good at what I do. Don’t need any damned foreign languages to know how to build a wall—or how to take one down, either.”
“Good God!” Victor said. Some merchants in New Hastings and Hanover were as proud of what they didn’t know as this fellow. Victor had always pitied them. The captain, on the other hand, frightened him. “How much do you know about Atlantis?”
“Not bloody much, and I don’t care to find out more,” the Englishman responded. “Damned place is full of Frenchies and niggers and copperskins. That’s all I need to know, isn’t it? King George has got to step on it with both feet, and I’m bloody proud to be the toe on one boot.”
“I think we better get out of here, Monsieur, before I kill him,” Blaise said through clenched teeth—still in French.
Also in French, Victor replied, “You would have to wait in line. I outrank you.”
They walked away in a hurry. “That man…That man, he is more dangerous to Atlantis than Roland Kersauzon,” Blaise spluttered. “To him, everyone here is a slave. Everyone! Not just me. I don’t like when people think I am still slave, but I know why. I am black. In a white man’s world, it happens. I understand, even if I don’t like. But that man…” He paused again. “To him, you are slave, too. Everybody from Atlantis is slave, as far as he is concerned. Why?” He stopped, breathing hard.