Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Little by little, the Atlantean army advanced till it was close to the edge of the woods. The field artillery unlimbered and sprayed as much of the forest as the guns could reach with cannon balls and canister. Frederick hoped his fighters had had the sense to scoot back when they saw the cannon taking aim at them. If they hadn’t, it would be too late for some of them.

  “How many of those white bastards can you see?” Lorenzo asked. “Are they screening us so they can go around to our right or our left before we cipher out what they’re up to?”

  Frederick wanted to say no. He couldn’t, not when the Atlantean army had repeatedly done that before. He peered through a purloined spyglass, then passed it to Lorenzo. “Doesn’t seem like they are,” he said. “Or does it look different to you?”

  After a long stare of his own, Lorenzo said, “I don’t think they are. Harder to be sure, though, now that they’ve got all those God-damned militiamen alongside the regulars. I hate those sons of bitches.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ! Who in his right mind doesn’t?” Frederick said. “The soldiers are just . . . soldiers. They’ve got a job to do, and they do it. But most of the militiamen are the shitheels who bought and sold us. They want to keep on doing it, too.”

  “And killing us. And fucking us,” Lorenzo added.

  “Yes. And those,” Frederick said heavily. “Are we going to let that keep on happening?”

  “Maybe they can still kill me. We’ve already killed a lot of them, but nowhere near enough. The rest . . .” Lorenzo shook his head. A lock of his straight black hair flopped down over his eyes. He brushed it back with the palm of his hand. “No one’s gonna own me any more, not ever again.”

  He was bound to be right about that. If he and Frederick were unlucky enough to be captured, they wouldn’t be returned to slavery, as some of the men and women who followed them might. No, they would die whatever lingering, instructive death the ingenuity of the whites who’d taken them might devise.

  Frederick had always known such things were possible, even likely. That was why he always kept a last bullet for himself in his eight-shooter. What slave didn’t have such knowledge? Fear of consequences, fear of failing, kept insurrections rare—but made them all the more desperate when they did break out. Right now, Frederick didn’t care to dwell on all the things that might happen to him and his followers if they failed. He aimed to keep from failing if he possibly could.

  Because he did, he went back to dwelling on what the white Atlantean soldiers and militiamen were up to. “We’ve taught ’em respect,” he said slowly. “They’ve learned they’d better not just rush up like a herd of cows. We carve ’em into steaks when they try.”

  “Too bad they’ve figured that out,” Lorenzo said. “They were easier to fight when they played the fool.”

  The white Atlanteans had taught Frederick a lesson, too: not to keep his own scouts too close to the main body of his army. When the whites did try another flanking maneuver, he found out about it in time to shift part of his own force and delay the enemy. That let the rest of his men take new positions at their leisure. Seeing that the flanking move was doomed to fail, the white men broke it off early.

  Both armies held their positions for a while. Frederick sent out raiders to try to wreck the enemy’s supply columns. His own men foraged from the countryside; he thought the whites would have more trouble doing that. To his disappointment, he turned out to be wrong. When the whites got hungry, they didn’t stop at chickens and ducks and geese. They ate turtles and frogs and snails, the same as his men did. Maybe they drew the line at katydids, but so what?

  “Only proves what we already knew,” Lorenzo said. “They’re nothing but a bunch of thieves.”

  “What does that make us, then?” Frederick asked in wry amusement.

  “Folks with sense,” the copperskin answered. “Don’t know about you, but I’d sooner eat frog stew and fiddlehead ferns any day of the week, not their rancid salt pork”—he made a face—“and—what do they call them?—desecrated vegetables.”

  “Desiccated,” Frederick said.

  “What’s the difference?” Lorenzo asked.

  Frederick only shrugged. He knew he had the word right, though. When you soaked the dried vegetables in water, they regained a faint resemblance to what they’d been once upon a time. You could eat them, even if Frederick, like Lorenzo, had trouble seeing why anyone would want to.

  Lorenzo waved the question aside and came back to more important things: “What are we going to do to stop the white devils? Sure doesn’t look like we can starve them back to New Marseille.”

  “No. It doesn’t,” Frederick admitted glumly.

  “Well, then?” Lorenzo’s voice seemed sharper than a serpent’s tooth. The comparison came from the Bible, though Frederick couldn’t remember exactly where.

  But he did have an answer for his copperskinned marshal, even if Lorenzo hadn’t expected him to: “As long as we don’t lose, we win. As long as we keep on fighting, keep on making trouble, we win. Sooner or later, the United States of Atlantis’ll decide we cost more than we’re worth—too much money, too much time, too much blood. That’s when they decide they better start talkin’ instead of fightin’.”

  “You sound sure, anyway.” By the way Lorenzo said it, he was far from sure himself. He did unbend enough to ask, “How come you sound so sure?”

  “On account of that’s the way my grandfather licked the redcoats,” Frederick answered. “He hung around and he hung around and he hung around, till finally they got sick of the whole business. That’s why there are the United States of Atlantis today.”

  “And a fat lot of good they do us, too,” Lorenzo said.

  “Oh, things could be worse,” Frederick said. “Some of the islands south of here—the ones the Spaniards still hold—the way they treat slaves makes Atlantis seem like a kiss on the cheek. And the Empire of Huy-Braseal, in southern Terranova, that’s supposed to be just as bad, or maybe even worse.”

  “But I ain’t in any one of those places. I’m here,” Lorenzo said pointedly. “If they catch me, they’ll kill me. How does it get any worse than that?”

  Frederick had had a similar thought not long before. “Don’t suppose it does,” he replied. “Thing is, then, not to let ’em catch us, right?”

  “Right.” Lorenzo’s head bobbed up and down. “First sensible thing you’ve said in quite a while—you know that?”

  “Well, I try,” Frederick said. They both laughed. Why not? They were—for the moment, for as long as their followers could hold off the white soldiers, or until the Atlantean government got sick of what looked like an endless, hopeless war—free men. Despite all the qualifications, this tenuous freedom was as much as Frederick had ever had. While he had it, he aimed to make the most of it.

  Jeremiah Stafford fixed Colonel Sinapis with a glare that would have reduced any government functionary back in New Hastings to a quivering pile of gelatin. “We aren’t pressing them anywhere near so hard as we might,” Stafford said. He could have made the statement sound no more ominous had he demanded Have you stopped beating your wife? Whatever Sinapis answered would be wrong.

  Or so Stafford thought. The officer, however, declined to turn gelatinous. “You wanted us to rush into that Happy Valley, too, your Excellency,” Sinapis said. “How many casualties do you suppose that would have cost us? It would have been the worst disaster since Austerlitz, or maybe since Arminius massacred the Romans in the Teutoberg Forest in the year 9.”

  Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions! Stafford remembered the Emperor Augustus’ anguished cry from his own slog through Suetonius in his university days. Consul Stafford! Give me back my soldiers! just didn’t have the same ring. But would it have come to that? He didn’t think so.

  “We could have whipped those savages,” he said.

  “I’m sure Varus thought the same thing,” Colonel Sinapis replied. “Sometimes, your Excellency, you have to know when not to fight.” />
  That was bound to be true, in war as in a barroom argument. All the same, Stafford said, “It sometimes seems to me that you abuse the privilege of not fighting, Colonel.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Colonel Sinapis said. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Stafford gaped. He’d been a Senator before he was chosen Consul, and a prominent man before he was elected Senator. How could it be otherwise? Only prominent men reached the Senate; one measure of an Atlantean’s prominence was whether he reached the Senate. No one had had the nerve to be openly rude to him for many years.

  “Come back here, you!” he snapped, as if Sinapis were an uppity house slave.

  The colonel stopped, but did not return. “No,” he said calmly, and made as if to walk off again.

  Before he could, Stafford’s voice went deadly cold: “Have you a friend with whom my friends may discuss this matter further?” Dueling might be illegal in every state of the USA, but that did not make it extinct. Men from the south, especially, were still apt to defend their honor with pistols.

  As calmly as before, Colonel Sinapis said “No” again. That made Stafford gape once more. The colonel continued, “Your military regulations wisely forbid officers from dueling. Otherwise, your Excellency, please believe me when I say that I should take no small pleasure from killing you. Good day.” Sketching a salute, he ambled off as if he had not a care in the world.

  What had been in his eyes as he responded? If it wasn’t a pure, wolfish pleasure at the idea of bloodshed, Stafford had never seen any such thing. He reflected that he didn’t know what kind of fighting man Sinapis was; army commanders seldom got to display their mettle in the front line. Maybe he was lucky not to find out the hard way.

  Maybe, just maybe, he was very lucky indeed.

  I was not afraid, he told himself. He wondered how much that mattered, or if it mattered at all. A man might not fear an earthquake or a flood or a wildfire—which wouldn’t keep a natural disaster from killing him. Something told Stafford that Balthasar Sinapis held about as much compassion as fire or flood or temblor.

  How exactly had Sinapis come to Atlantis? What were the circumstances under which he’d lost his position in Europe? Was it because some prominent man—a government minister, say, or a prince—got ventilated in a quarrel or a formal duel? Stafford hadn’t thought so, but. . . .

  His encounter with Sinapis didn’t stay quiet. By the nature of things, encounters like that never did. Everybody was talking about it the next day. Not much of what people said was true, but when did that ever stop anyone?

  “I hear the good colonel wanted to load you into a cannon and fire you at the insurrectionists,” Consul Newton remarked.

  “No such thing!” Stafford said, which was true—not that truth had ever outrun a rumor. With such dignity as he could muster, the Consul went on, “I keep trying to spur him to more activity against them.”

  “From what folks are saying, you keep trying to get yourself killed,” his colleague observed.

  “If you wade through everything folks are saying, you’ll need to hold your nose and take a bath before you reach down to the truth,” Stafford said. “The smell will tell you what you’re wading in, too.”

  “You didn’t challenge him to a duel, then?”

  “What? Yes, of course I did. I might have won, too.”

  Newton’s raised eyebrows said everything that needed saying about how likely he thought that was. And chances were he had a point, too; Colonel Sinapis was bound to get more pistol practice than Stafford did, and to have got more for many years. If Stafford was to win the duel, he would need luck on his side. Sinapis would need only routine competence. That, he had.

  “The idea, you know, is to work with the colonel,” Newton said. “If you make him hate you, you won’t have much luck with that.”

  “He’s a soldier. Soldiers do what you tell them to do,” Stafford growled. But he knew you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. There was a difference between obeying orders from a sense of duty and obeying them because you really wanted to. The latter got good results. The former . . .

  Again, the other Consul needed no words to let Stafford know what he was thinking. “We are gaining ground against the insurrectionists, you know,” Newton said, turning the subject.

  “We’re in deeper, anyhow,” Stafford answered. “I’m not so sure about gaining ground. What they do to the wagon trains coming up from New Marseille . . .” He angrily shook his head. “They have no business doing such things, God damn them to the blackest pits of hell.”

  Leland Newton smiled thinly. “I never thought I’d learn how tasty frog-and-snail stew could be,” he said.

  “I never thought I would have to find out,” Stafford said. “We were guarding the wagon trains well for a while, but things have slipped again.”

  “If you put everything you have into going forward, doing anything else with your soldiers is going to slip,” Newton pointed out. “Even with the militiamen along, we’re stretched too thin for that not to happen.”

  Stafford grunted and turned away, almost as rudely as Colonel Sinapis had turned away from him. Doing anything else would have meant admitting some of the army’s failures were his own fault, and he was damned if he would. Newton didn’t challenge him to a duel, although no regulations (except the laws of the United States of Atlantis, which a gentleman could ignore if he chose) prevented one Consul from meeting the other on the field of honor.

  Newton’s voice pursued him: “Don’t you think we’d be better off talking with the insurrectionists and seeing if there isn’t some way we might all live together peacefully? This is the only home any of us have, you know.”

  That made Stafford turn back. “We had been living together peacefully for many years, under a system that assigned everyone his proper place—”

  “From a white man’s perspective,” Newton broke in. “From a Negro’s or a copperskin’s, maybe not. Easier to be impressed, I daresay, if you’re doing the buying and selling than if you’re bought and sold.”

  “You sound like you’re selling nigger equality, Newton,” Stafford said. “You may huckster as much as you please, but I’m here to tell you I’m not buying.”

  “Oh, I can see that,” the other Consul answered. “Better to let Atlantis tear itself to pieces than to change one iota of the way we do things. Iota . . . That goes all the way back to the theological controversies of the fourth century, you know: the difference between homo-ousios, of the same nature, and homoi-ousios, of like nature. One little letter, and plenty of blood spilled over it. A few hundred years from now, will our quarrels seem as foolish?”

  “No,” Stafford said, and then, “It would, no doubt, be pointless to remind you that our Lord accepted the idea of slavery.”

  By Newton’s face, it would indeed. He credited the parts of the Bible that pleased him and ignored the rest. Stafford didn’t pause to wonder whether he did the same thing himself.

  XVII

  None of the fifteen or so prisoners Atlantean troops had taken in their latest skirmish with the insurrectionists seemed happy with his fate. The blacks and copperskins were alive, but hardly convinced they would stay that way for long. Maybe they’d heard the white soldiers weren’t hanging captured enemy fighters, but they plainly had trouble believing it.

  Surveying them, Leland Newton saw three who looked even more miserable than the rest. Two were copperskins, the other a Negro. Only one of them wore a skirt; the other two had on baggy homespun trousers like their menfolk. But, no matter what they wore, they were all of them women.

  “Taken in arms with the men?” Newton asked the sergeant in charge of the soldiers guarding the prisoners.

  “Sure as hell were, uh, your Excellency.” The underofficer pointed to the black woman. “That there bitch damn near—damn near—blew me a new asshole before Paddy Molloy jumped on her while she was reloading. She fought him, too, till he clouted her a good one.”


  “May I talk to her?”

  One of the sergeant’s gingery eyebrows jumped. “You’re the Consul, sir. Seems to me you can do any old God-damned thing you please.”

  Only proves you’ve never been Consul, Newton thought. But he didn’t waste time explaining to the man with three stripes on the sleeve of his sweat-stained gray tunic. Instead, Newton stepped past him and walked up to the captured insurrectionist. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  By the way she looked at him—looked through him, really—he might have been calling to her from a mile beyond the moon. When she answered, “Elizabeth,” her voice seemed to come from at least that far away.

  Newton pushed ahead anyhow: “Is it true, what the sergeant said? Did you fight against our soldiers, the same way a man would have?”

  “Reckon I did.” She regained a little spirit as she added, “Might still be doin’ it, too, ’cept the fuckin’ mick who grabbed me was too damn’ big to whup.” She couldn’t have stood more than five feet two. A knot on the side of her jaw said Paddy Molloy had clouted her a good one.

  “Have they treated you the same as the men they took?” Newton asked.

  Elizabeth’s first startled glance went to the two female copperskins who’d been captured with her. Then her eyes swung back to Consul Newton. He couldn’t have said why, but her gaze made him feel like an idiot. That must have been what she thought, too, because she said, “You ain’t the brightest candle in the box, is you?”

  “What do you mean?” Newton didn’t think he’d risen to the highest rank in Atlantis by being stupid.

  Elizabeth did, though. As if to a half-wit, she explained, “They don’t throw the men down on the ground and hold their legs apart and screw ’em eight or ten or twenty times. You may be white devils, but I don’t reckon you’s cornholin’ devils.”

  “They did that to you? To all three of you? Molested you? Violated you?” The Consul heard his own horror.