Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  As they usually did, the rebels fought from the edge of a stretch of forest. If things went wrong, they could melt away in a hurry. Not only that, but they’d dug themselves holes and trenches from which to shoot. They made much smaller targets than they would have had they stood up and volleyed the way the Atlantean regulars did.

  A grizzled sergeant near Newton knew exactly what he thought of that. “Yellow dogs!” he growled, the stub of a stogie shifting in his mouth as he spoke. “Well, we can shift ’em even if they want to play silly games.”

  Soldiers went forward in neat lines. Every so often, one would fall. Sometimes he would get up and stagger toward the rear on his own. Sometimes medical orderlies would carry him to the rear. Sometimes, ominously, he would lie where he fell, not to rise again till Judgment Day.

  Those neat lines did not wash over the dug-in rebels. They couldn’t get close, not in the face of that galling musketry. Some men fell back. Others lay down themselves and returned fire. Then a flanking column went in off to one side of the insurrectionists’ line.

  That shifted them where the frontal attack couldn’t. The Negroes and copperskins saw they were about to get enfiladed. They didn’t wait around to let it happen, but slid away into the woods. And they kept on sniping at the men who came up to look at their trenches and the handful of bodies in them.

  “Well, we licked ’em,” an Atlantean soldier said. It was true, Newton thought—but only if you didn’t count the cost.

  XI

  Rain on a cobblestoned road was a nuisance. If you rode a horse, you wore a broad-brimmed hat and an oilskin slicker to stay as dry as you could. Many of the roads east of the Green Ridge Mountains were cobblestoned. Some were even macadamized. Traffic moved on them the year around.

  Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that cobblestones and macadam were sadly scarce on the far side of the mountains. One day, no doubt, they would come, but that day was not yet.

  And rain on a dirt road was not a nuisance. Rain on a dirt road—especially the hard, driving semitropical rain that pelted down now—was a catastrophe. What had been a perfectly ordinary, perfectly decent, perfectly respectable road turned into a long strip of something with a consistency between soup and glue. Foot soldiers swore as mud sucked boots off their feet. Cannon and limbers and supply wagons bogged down. The foot soldiers had to shove them through the muck by brute force. Not surprisingly, that made the men swear more.

  On horseback, Consul Stafford had it easier than most of the men in the Atlantean army. His mount struggled to move forward, but it was doing the struggling. He wasn’t. Colonel Sinapis, also on horseback, said something to him.

  Whatever it was, Stafford couldn’t make it out. The rain was coming down too hard. “Eh?” The Consul cupped a hand behind his ear.

  “When I was a subaltern, we could not fight in weather like this,” Sinapis said, louder this time.

  “Why not? What makes the difference?” Stafford asked.

  “Percussion caps,” the Atlantean officer answered. “A wet flintlock is nothing but a fancy club—maybe a spear if you have a bayonet on the end of it. But a percussion cap will still go off in the rain.”

  “Interesting how a mechanical device can change the way we wage war,” said Stafford, who hadn’t dwelt on the idea before.

  “This always happens.” For Sinapis, such things fell within his area of professional competence. “If you doubt it, ask the Terranovan natives how much they have enjoyed opposing muskets with bows and arrows.”

  “Mm—no doubt. The next question is, how well supplied with percussion caps are the damned insurrectionists?” Stafford said.

  “Better than I would have thought,” Colonel Sinapis said, which was not what Stafford wanted to hear. Sinapis continued, “They showed every sign of having plenty at the skirmish yesterday. They fought quite well, in fact. Their steadiness impressed me.”

  That was something else Stafford didn’t want to hear. “They’re nothing but lousy mudfaces and niggers,” he growled.

  “No man with a rifle musket in his hand is ‘nothing but’ anything, your Excellency,” the officer warned. “No man who holds his ground till he sees himself outflanked and then draws back in good order is ‘nothing but,’ either . . . sir. You will get us in trouble if you think of the rebels as ‘nothing but.’ ”

  “I want to get them in trouble,” Stafford said angrily. “We haven’t had much luck with that, have we?”

  Balthasar Sinapis looked up into the heavens. A raindrop splashed on the end of his long nose. “If you can persuade God to ease this downpour, your Excellency, you will have shown me something I did not know before.”

  “Even when the weather was good, we didn’t have much luck shifting the black bastards.” Yes, Consul Stafford was in a fine fury.

  If that impressed Sinapis, the colonel’s face didn’t know it. “This campaign is just beginning, sir,” he said. “We will do some splendid things—I am sure of it. And we will have some terrible things done to us, and to the rebels those will seem splendid. Such is war.”

  “It shouldn’t be war, not against these—these damned ragamuffins,” Stafford protested. “It should be like, oh, cleaning up broken crockery.”

  “Never judge a soldier by the kind of uniform he wears, or by whether he wears a uniform at all,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Some of the most dangerous men I saw in Europe looked like farmers. They were farmers, till they picked up the guns they’d hidden in barns and sties and pigeon coops. After that, you would have thought they were devils straight out of hell.”

  “What happened to them?” Stafford asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

  “My men hunted them down and killed them,” the foreigner replied dispassionately. “We did, perhaps, too good a job. That was one of the reasons I . . . left that service and pledged my sword to Atlantis.”

  Too good a job? What kind of howling wilderness had Sinapis’ men left behind? Stafford didn’t much care. As long as the insurrectionists got what was coming to them, nothing else mattered.

  The rain came down harder. Stafford hadn’t been sure it could. With a little luck, it would wash Frederick Radcliff and the rest of the insurrectionists out to sea. But that was bound to be too much to hope for. The Consul began to hope the downpour wouldn’t wash him and the Atlantean army out to sea.

  Every once in a while, a great storm would slam into southern Atlantis. Savage winds would tear off roofs and sometimes blow down buildings. The cyclones would roar inland till they finally weakened and petered out. This wasn’t one of those. It wasn’t blowing very hard at all. It was just raining and raining and raining.

  Forty days and forty nights went through Stafford’s mind. For hundreds of years, theologically inclined writers had wondered how Noah had put Atlantis’ peculiar natural productions aboard the Ark, and how those productions had ended up here and nowhere else. That sort of writing seemed to have tapered off in recent times. The consensus was that nobody knew, except possibly God.

  A junior officer came back to Colonel Sinapis from the vanguard. Stafford admired him. Moving against the tide had to be even harder than going with it. The officer spoke to Sinapis. Whatever he said—again, the drumming rain muffled it for the Consul—made Sinapis gnaw at his mustache. Stafford thought that a disgusting habit.

  After gnawing, the colonel dipped his head. He might have been Zeus in the Iliad, which Stafford remembered from his college days. He said something to the junior officer, who looked relieved and sloshed forward again.

  At last, Sinapis condescended to explain: “We stop here. We can’t go forward any more. We will start killing animals if we do.”

  “Soldiers will start drowning, too,” Stafford said.

  “Well, so they will.” Colonel Sinapis cared about losing his men when they faced the rebels. When it came to a downpour, he seemed to worry more about his horses and mules. Stafford almost called him on it. But the rain also drowned his urge for a brand new row.

&nb
sp; Even making camp wasn’t easy. Tent pegs didn’t want to stick in the soggy ground. Once up, the tents leaked like billy-be-damned. All soldiers were supposed to have oilskin groundsheets so they could sleep dry. Some had never been issued them. Some had thrown theirs away. And even the ones who had them weren’t happy, because muck slopped over the edges.

  Cooking hot food—even boiling coffee—was impossible. Soggy hardtack made an uninspiring supper. Salt pork was next to indestructible, but in weather like this it was liable to start getting moldy, too.

  Stafford’s tent was bigger than the ones the soldiers used, but no drier. He sat inside glumly, wondering what would happen if the insurrectionists chose this moment to attack. Colonel Sinapis had posted sentries all around, but so what? How much could they see, and who would hear them if they yelled a warning? Then Stafford thought, If the rebels do attack now, they’ll go over their heads in goo, and good riddance to them. He felt—a little—better.

  Someone tugged at the tent flap. “Leland Newton. May I come in?” the other Consul asked.

  “Why not? Everything else has gone wrong,” Stafford said.

  “Heh.” Newton ducked inside and let the tent flap fall behind him with a wet, dismal splat. “You should take your comic turn on the stage. You’d make more than Atlantis pays us.”

  “Comic turn? Did you think I was joking? I am not glad to see you,” Stafford said.

  “Nor am I enamored of you, believe me. But we are in harness together, like it or not,” Newton said. “And, one day soon, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, this army will start moving forward again.”

  “Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, indeed,” Stafford muttered.

  Newton pulled out a flask. “Here. Have a knock of this. It may improve your outlook. Something ought to.”

  “Maybe I’m glad to see you after all.” Stafford swigged. Barrel-tree rum kicked him in the teeth and flamed down his throat. “By God, maybe I am!”

  “Are you glad enough to answer a question for me?” Newton asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s see.” Stafford almost drank again, but handed the flask back instead.

  “Suppose the rebels decline pitched battles. Suppose they keep sniping and raiding and skirmishing, as they have been doing. Are you ready to post thousands of soldiers in little garrisons all through these parts for the next twenty or thirty years to try to hold down the countryside?”

  “If that is what it takes, why not?” Stafford said. “The Terranovans do it on their frontiers, to keep the copperskins from sneaking in and detaching people’s hair.”

  “It will cost us dear,” Newton warned.

  “What do you suppose not stopping the insurrectionists will cost us?” Stafford asked icily.

  “Something,” Newton said, which surprised Stafford—he hadn’t expected the other Consul to admit even that much. Newton went on, “Change always costs something. But don’t you see? We have to change either way. I fear trying to hold down slaves in southern Atlantis for the next generation will cost us our souls.”

  “I think we’d be fighting for them—and for our backbones,” Stafford said.

  “Maybe you’re right, your Excellency. Maybe, but I wouldn’t care to bet on it.” Newton ducked back out into the rain, leaving Stafford alone, the taste of barrel-tree rum still on his lips.

  Balthasar Sinapis pointed up into the sky. “Do you see that small, bright, yellow ball there?”

  Squinting, Consul Newton nodded. “I do, Colonel. What of it?”

  “If I remember rightly, in the old country we used to call that ‘the sun.’ ”

  The craggy colonel did have a sense of humor. Leland Newton wouldn’t have bet a cent on it. Smiling to show he appreciated the joke, he said, “How long do you think the roads will take to dry out enough to let us travel on them?”

  “They probably should be good enough for us to use just before it starts raining again,” Sinapis answered. Newton started to smile again. Then he realized the colonel wasn’t joking this time—merely expressing his faith in the innate perversity of nature. Since Newton had seen plenty of that perversity himself, he decided he couldn’t very well disagree.

  All around them, the encampment steamed. That hot sun drew vapor up from the drenched canvas of the tents. The grass and weeds and ferns on which those tents were pitched steamed. So did horses’ backs. And so did soldiers’ clothes. Every time Newton inhaled, he felt as if he were breathing soup.

  As if picking that thought from his mind, Colonel Sinapis remarked, “No one would say the state of New Marseille has a Mediterranean climate.”

  “Avalon, farther north, is said to be quite pleasant the year around,” Newton replied.

  Sinapis only sniffed. “It would not be the same. Are you familiar with the notion of dry heat, your Excellency?”

  “Only by reading of it.” Leland Newton spread his hands. “Atlantis is surrounded by the sea, after all. And I believe it is a positive good that she is. Her position has gone far toward making her rich.”

  “No doubt,” Sinapis said. “It has also gone far toward giving every citizen of this country rheumatism and lumbago. Or do your bones not creak when you get up of a morning? Till I came here, mine never did.”

  He was talking about New Hastings, where he’d spent the bulk of his Atlantean military career. The capital had a good climate—or Consul Newton had always found it so. It was certainly a better climate than chilly Croydon’s. But Sinapis had different standards of comparison.

  The colonel stuck a stogie in the corner of his mouth. Then he tried to strike a lucifer on the sole of his boot. The boot sole was wet, and the match wouldn’t catch. Muttering an unpleasantry that wasn’t in English, Sinapis pulled a small piece of shagreen from a tunic pocket. He scraped the lucifer against that. The rough sharkskin gave enough friction to touch off the match. Sinapis lit his cigar and puffed out pungent smoke to flavor the prevailing steam.

  “You are ready for anything,” Newton said as the colonel put the shagreen back in his pocket.

  “I try to be,” Sinapis answered. “If I may speak frankly, though, your Excellency, I was not ready for a war intended to be waged along political lines. I do not see how any army or any officer could be ready for such a thing.”

  “All wars are political, wouldn’t you say?” Newton parried.

  “In their goals, yes,” Colonel Sinapis said. “A clever modern German called war the extension of politics by other means. I agree with this. Anyone who thinks about it is bound to agree, I believe. But when political affairs interfere with the way the war is fought, it becomes less likely to have a happy result. I believe anyone who thinks about it is also bound to agree with this.”

  Newton didn’t need to think much about it to decide it seemed quite likely. All the same, he said, “When the war touches slavery in the USA, political affairs are bound to interfere. Half the country takes the institution for granted, while the other half hates it. We should count ourselves lucky not to have flown at one another’s throats.”

  “Do you expect this fight to solve your problems for you?” Sinapis didn’t sound as if he thought any fight could solve any problem.

  “I hope so. Expect may be too strong a word.” Newton remained an optimist.

  “Oh, well.” By the way Sinapis sounded, he didn’t. What had he seen, what had he done, in Europe to leave his attitude so curdled? Consul Newton realized he didn’t know the details of the colonel’s career before Sinapis got to Atlantis. He hadn’t cared enough to find out. That might have been a mistake. But asking now would seem awkward, so he didn’t.

  In his own way, Consul Stafford was an optimist, too. Most Atlanteans—most white Atlanteans, anyhow—were. What were the United States of Atlantis if not a place where a man could build on his hopes? But Stafford’s hopes were different from Newton’s. The sun’s return prompted only one thought in him. “Now we can go after the insurrectionists and finish them off!” he declared.

&
nbsp; Maybe the sun’s return prompted some thoughts among Frederick Radcliff’s Negroes and copperskins, too. They weren’t an army, or weren’t exactly an army. They could, and did, move around by ones and twos and small bands, where Colonel Sinapis’ men wouldn’t have felt happy or safe doing any such thing. And they popped up here and there and started sniping at the Atlantean soldiers.

  One bullet snarled through the air between Newton and Stafford. Both Consuls automatically ducked. They exchanged sheepish looks. Almost everybody ducked. It didn’t mean a thing.

  “We ought to hang every black bastard we catch sneaking around with a musket!” Stafford said after he straightened up.

  “That will really make the rebels want to give up,” Newton observed.

  “I don’t care whether they want to give up or not,” Stafford said. “I want them dead. I want the ones who are left alive to be afraid to lift their hands against their masters for the rest of their days. I want the United States of Atlantis to be safe for decent, God-fearing white people again.”

  “You want things to go back to the way they were before the uprising started,” Newton said.

  “Yes. That is what I want,” the other Consul agreed.

  “How do you propose to get it, though?” Newton asked. “We’ve been over this ground before. Can you unscramble an egg? Can you make all the rain we’ve just had fall up into the sky?”

  “The sun can dry out the rain,” Stafford said stubbornly. “That makes it as if it had never been. The sun of justice can dry out the insurrection, too, enough to let us get by.”

  He meant it. He meant every word of it. Realizing as much alarmed Leland Newton, but he knew it was so. “When Pilate asked ‘What is truth?’ he didn’t wait for an answer,” Newton said. “Now I ask you, sir, what is justice? I will wait as long as need be for your reply.”

  “Justice is giving people what they deserve for what they have done.” Jeremiah Stafford sounded as stern and certain as the Old Testament prophet whose name he bore.