Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Matter-of-factly, the captured female fighter nodded. “Chance I took. I knew that when I asked the menfolk to learn me to shoot. Didn’t reckon I’d get caught, though.” Her grimace declared she wished she hadn’t. “ ’ Sides, they liable to give me the clap or the pox.”

  Newton hardly noticed that. He stormed back to the white sergeant. “Did you and your troops take unfair advantage of those women?” he thundered, as full of righteous wrath as Jehovah watching the Children of Israel bow down before the Golden Calf.

  “Unfair? Don’t look that way to me, sir.” The sergeant seemed to think Newton was an idiot, too. Like Elizabeth, he wasn’t shy about telling him why: “Jesus Christ, they were doing their damnedest to murder the lot of us! Were we supposed to kiss ’em on the cheek and invite ’em to a waltz, like?”

  “No, but you weren’t supposed to, to rape them, either!” Newton had to fight to get the dreadful word out.

  “Chance they take if they fire at us.” The underofficer and Elizabeth used the same brutal logic.

  Seeing he would get no satisfaction—under the circumstances, perhaps not the perfect word—there, Newton stormed off to talk to a captain. The young officer only shrugged. “What do you expect from men who find women in arms against them, your Excellency?”

  “Civilized behavior?” Newton suggested.

  Sarcasm rolled off the captain’s back. “War is not a civilized business,” he said.

  “It has its rules and customs. On the whole, the insurrectionists have lived up to them.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it? Put ’em up on charges?” the captain asked. That was exactly what Newton wanted, but the younger man’s laughter told him he wouldn’t get it—not here, anyhow.

  Fuming, he stomped away to talk to Colonel Sinapis. The colonel had given Consul Stafford a hard time, so Newton assumed he would find him reasonable. He didn’t. Sinapis said, “The soldiers took the women after the women fought against them?”

  “That’s right,” Newton said. “It’s disgraceful. It’s barbaric. It’s—”

  “It is to be expected,” Sinapis interrupted. “Officers may be gentlemen. Your regulations say they are. So do the ones in most of the kingdoms of Europe. Perhaps that makes it so. But soldiers? My dear fellow! The Duke of Wellington, a very fine commander even if he is an Englishman, calls them the scum of the earth. Believe me, your Excellency, he knows what he is talking about, too.”

  “All the more reason to punish them harshly when they do something this outrageous!” Newton exclaimed.

  “Outrageous?” Sinapis tossed his head, as he often did where a native Atlantean would have shaken it. “I think not. This is revenge. What would you do if a woman tried to shoot you?”

  “Not that, I hope,” Newton answered.

  Sinapis studied him. The colonel’s eyes lingered—insultingly long?—on his crotch. At last, Sinapis said, “It could be that you would not. But a great many men would, and I see no point to punishing them for it. That would cause the army more problems than it would solve.”

  “What if the women they ravished were white?” the Consul from Croydon demanded.

  “Violating women for the sport of it . . . No good officer can allow that. If white women had tried to kill our troops in combat, though . . . That would be the women’s lookout, and their misfortune,” Sinapis said.

  He was consistent, anyhow—if he was telling the truth. If he wasn’t, his face didn’t know about it . . . which, if he was any kind of card player, meant nothing. “I had hoped for more cooperation from you, Colonel,” Newton said reproachfully.

  “I had hoped for more sense from you, your Excellency,” Sinapis replied. “We do not always get what we hope for, though, do we?”

  “Evidently not,” Newton said. “Please make sure, however, that your soldiers do not molest these women again.”

  “Now that the heat of battle has cooled, I believe I can do that. Very well, your Excellency.” Sinapis delivered a precise salute.

  “And please issue orders that other women taken prisoner in combat are not to be violated,” Newton continued.

  The colonel’s mouth twisted under the eaves of his drooping mustache. “I dislike giving orders sure to be ignored. It weakens discipline, which is the last thing any army needs.”

  “If you issue them strongly enough, the men will follow them,” Newton said.

  “You have never been a soldier. You have never tried to lead soldiers. This is as plain as the nose on your face—as plain as the nose on my face, even.” Sinapis stroked his formidable proboscis. “I am very sorry, but issuing those orders is a waste of time.”

  Newton’s voice went hard and flat: “Do it anyway.”

  “Yes, your Excellency.” By contrast, Sinapis’ voice held no expression at all. This time, his salute seemed more reproachful than anything else. Leland Newton didn’t care. Some things he would not put up with, and this was one of them. Whether the orders really would do any good . . . he preferred not to think about.

  A copperskin brought a hatchet down on a flapjack turtle’s neck. Pouring blood, the turtle went into its death spasm. The head flew some distance from the body. Its fearsome jaws opened and closed, opened and closed. No one got anywhere near it. Like a snake’s, it could bite for some time after being detached. And those jaws could easily take off a finger.

  To white folks, flapjack turtle was something you ate when you couldn’t get beef or pork or mutton or poultry. As a house slave, Frederick Radcliff had something of the same attitude. Field hands eked out the rations their masters gave them with anything they could get their hands on.

  “I’ll take this to the girls now,” the copperskin said with a grin, picking up the turtle’s carcass. The legs still flailed feebly; they didn’t want to believe the beast was dead.

  “Don’t let them hear you call them that, Joaquin,” Frederick said. “You won’t like what happens if they do.”

  “I ain’t afraid of them.” Joaquin swaggered off.

  “Any man who ain’t afraid of women—he ain’t as smart as he ought to be,” Frederick remarked to Lorenzo.

  “Yeah, there is that.” Lorenzo’s chuckle sounded distinctly wry. “Always knew they could fight—any fella ever had anything to do with ’em knows that. But I never reckoned they could fight like this, with guns and everything.”

  “Well, neither did I,” Frederick said. “Don’t suppose the white soldiers reckoned they could, either.”

  “Last surprise some of those bastards ever got,” Lorenzo said. “Good thing, too.”

  “Oh, sure,” Frederick agreed. “Kind of tough on the gals the whites catch, though.”

  Lorenzo nodded, but not with much sympathy. “They knew what they was gettin’ into. And they knew what was liable to get into them if somethin’ went wrong.”

  “White folks don’t cornhole the ordinary fighters they catch,” Frederick said. “We don’t cornhole their fighters when we catch ’em. They shouldn’t ought to fuck the gals.”

  “It’s different,” Lorenzo said, and Frederick found himself nodding. He couldn’t have said just how it was different, but he also felt it was. Maybe because most men didn’t enjoy cornholing other men, where any man who was a man would jump on a woman any chance he got.

  “Still and all,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t seem right. We been fightin’ straight up. So have the white soldiers, pretty much. Whole bunch of fellas jumpin’ on a woman on account of she was carryin’ a gun—that ain’t straight up.”

  Lorenzo’s eyes slid toward the cooking fires: the direction in which the younger copperskin with the flapjack turtle had gone. Slyly, he said, “You ought to go sing your song over there. You’d have all those pretty young gals crawlin’ under the sheets with you faster’n you could—” He snapped his fingers.

  “That’s what I need, all right!” Frederick rolled his eyes. As any middle-aged man would have, he thought about an embarrassment of riches. Even were the spirit will
ing, the flesh was definitely weak. And his spirit wasn’t so willing. “Reckon Helen’d have herself a thing or three to say about ’em.”

  “Give her one in the chops. That’ll make her shut her big yap, damned if it won’t.” Lorenzo found simple answers for all worries except military ones. He’d lived with a lot of different women while he was a field hand—with none for more than a couple of years. Now that he was a general, or as close to a general as any man in the Free Republic of Atlantis was, he cut as wide a swath through the women who’d joined the insurrection as a man his age could hope to do.

  But Frederick didn’t want to live like that. “Helen and me, we done got along good for a hell of a long time. Why should I want to change now?”

  “ ’ Cause fresh pussy’s more fun than the same old thing every God-damned time?” Yes, Lorenzo had an answer for everything.

  One trouble: Frederick thought it was the wrong answer. If lying down with someone whose likes you knew and who knew what pleased you wasn’t better than sleeping with a stranger . . . then it wasn’t, that was all. Some men—and some women—preferred the one, some the other. Frederick saw no point to arguing about it. Would you argue about liking duck better than pork?

  He did amble over toward the fires himself. Behind him, Lorenzo laughed a filthy laugh. In spite of himself, Frederick’s back stiffened. That only made Lorenzo laugh harder.

  “It’s the Tribune!” one of the cooking women said.

  “Stew won’t be ready for a while yet,” another one told him. Even as she spoke, chunks of turtle meat went into a big iron pot.

  “It’s all right. I’m just seein’ how things are going, I guess you’d say,” Frederick answered.

  “How about that?” Admiration filled the copperskinned woman’s voice. By the way she eyed him, Frederick didn’t think he’d have to work very hard to get her into his bed.

  But, no matter what Lorenzo thought, that wasn’t what he had in mind. All the people doing the cooking were women. Both they and the men seemed to take that for granted. Frederick wondered why. It wasn’t as if men couldn’t cook. Most boss cooks all through the slaveholding states were men. Frederick sadly remembered Davey. He’d been someone to reckon with, somebody who’d had a lot of influence on the master and mistress. The way to the heart did—or could—go through the stomach.

  That had been fancy cooking, though. Women handled the plain job. Men cooked for superiors, women for equals. Maybe that was what was going on here. You couldn’t get much plainer cooking, or cooking more intended for equals, than what went into feeding an army.

  Frederick was ready to fight to the death to make Negroes and copperskins equal to whites in Atlantis. That women might be equal to men had hardly crossed his mind up till now. As it did, he shook his head. White men, black men, and copperskinned men were all the same under the skin. Anybody (well, anybody who wasn’t a white slaveholder) could see that. But men and women? Men and women were different. Anybody could see that, too. Hadn’t people of all colors been telling stories and making jokes about the differences since the beginning of time?

  In the early days of the uprising, some of the men might have been hearing those old jokes inside their heads. They loudly doubted that women had any business picking up rifle muskets and taking potshots at white soldiers. And they plainly expected the women to break and run when soldiers fired at them.

  Well, they knew better now. Some women had run when the shooting picked up—but so had some men. Women mostly weren’t as big or as strong as men, so they had trouble fighting hand to hand. But the two sides didn’t fight hand to hand all that often, which meant that mattered less than Frederick had feared it would. Wounded women shrieked on higher notes than wounded men. Still and all, though, no one who’d seen women in action would claim they couldn’t fight.

  Since they could . . . Didn’t that argue that a lot of other differences were smaller than they seemed at first glance? Frederick rubbed his chin. Thanks to his famous grandfather, his beard was thicker than most Negroes’. He could have done without that part of Victor Radcliff’s legacy.

  What would his fellow fighters say if he told them that, after they won the war for freedom against the Atlantean army, they would have to give women the same freedom: freedom to vote, to hold property, to divorce for all the same reasons? They wouldn’t like it, not even a little. Which argued that he should keep his big mouth shut.

  And if you keep it shut, don’t you slam the door on freedom, same as the whites want to do? That was an interesting question—no two ways about it. The way it looked to him, if he tried to win everything at once, he only increased his chances of winning nothing at all. Once he established the principle that Negroes and copperskins had the right to be something more than property throughout the USA, before too long someone should get around to establishing the principle that women had the right to be more than property.

  Yes, that would be easy, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Frederick was sure of it. And, because he was, he decided not to try to push his followers any further than they were likely to want to go on their own. Equal rights for women could wait a while.

  “Nigger equality? Mudface equality?” As usual, Jeremiah Stafford freighted the phrases with as much obscenity as they would carry, and a little more besides. “No white man from south of the Stour will put up with that nonsense for a minute, and you know it perfectly well.”

  Leland Newton only raised an eyebrow and rustled the latest batch of newspapers that had come into camp. “But there is more to the United States of Atlantis than white men from south of the Stour, and the rest of the people are getting damned sick of a war going nowhere,” the other Consul said. “If they get sick of spending money on it, the states south of the Stour can fight it by themselves—and good luck to them.”

  After an outright triumph by the insurrectionists, that was what Stafford feared most. “If we don’t get help from the rest of the country, why should we bother staying attached to it?” he said.

  “Don’t let the door hit you in the backside when you leave,” Newton said cheerfully, which was also nothing Stafford wanted to hear. And that cheery tone rasped worse than the words.

  Could the southern half of Atlantis—the smaller half, the poorer half, the less populous half, the half racked by servile insurrection—make a go of things on its own? Consul Stafford had no idea. “If we leave, and if we win our fight, how many niggers and mudfaces do you suppose we’ll leave alive afterwards?” he said.

  “I couldn’t begin to guess,” Consul Newton asked. “But if you murder them all, what happens to your precious social system then? I’ve asked you that before. Who brings in your crops? Who cuts your hair? Who cooks your supper? How soon before you’re bankrupt because your wonderful whites from south of the Stour won’t do nigger work to save their lives?”

  Those were all . . . intriguing questions, much more intriguing than Stafford wished they were. Even so, he said, “We’d be taking care of things our own way. Nothing else matters.”

  “Then what am I doing here? What are all the soldiers from north of the Stour doing here?” Newton asked. “If you don’t want our help, we’ll leave, believe me—and we’ll be glad to do it, too.”

  “We want your help. We deserve it, by God,” Stafford said. “But if you don’t care to give it we’ll go on by ourselves.”

  They scowled at each other. Stafford had the feeling they were talking past each other, as they had so often and for so long in New Hastings. He also had the feeling this was the worst possible time for them to be doing that. The trouble was, he didn’t know how to fix it. Newton would not take him seriously; he didn’t think Newton took himself seriously. And, doubting that, Stafford couldn’t take Newton seriously, either.

  Since he could, he saw only one thing to do: win the fight against the insurrectionists while the Atlantean army remained opposed to them. But that meant getting Colonel Sinapis to do something with it. And Stafford was unhappily aware how
much he hadn’t endeared himself to the colonel.

  He tried to take a light tone when he asked Sinapis, “If you aren’t using the army, may I borrow it for a little while?”

  By the way the colonel’s eyebrows came down and together, by the way his mouth tightened to a bloodless line, Stafford knew the approach had failed. “I am using it, your Excellency, in case you had not noticed,” Sinapis answered in a voice like winter.

  “You aren’t using it enough,” Stafford told him.

  “There, sir, we differ,” Colonel Sinapis said.

  “Yes. We do,” Stafford agreed grimly. Levity hadn’t reached the somber officer. Maybe bluntness would. “See here, Colonel: do you want the United States of Atlantis to fall to pieces before your eyes?”

  He was appalled when Sinapis obviously gave the question serious consideration. And he was even more appalled when the army commander shrugged his rather narrow shoulders. “Meaning no disrespect, your Excellency,” Sinapis said, “but you will please believe me when I tell you I have seen far worse things.”

  Stafford almost asked him what could be worse than a republic—a republic often called the hope of both Europe and Terranova—dissolving into chaos. Only one thing made him hesitate. He feared Balthasar Sinapis would tell him. Instead, then, he tried a different road: “Let me put that another way, Colonel. Do you want to take the blame when the United States of Atlantis fall to pieces before your eyes?”

  “And why should I?” Sinapis rumbled. “When these things happen, there is usually plenty of blame to go around.”

  He was a cool customer, all right. Well, Stafford had already discovered that, to his own discomfiture. “Why? I’ll tell you why, Colonel. Because if this army does not put down the insurrection in a hurry, it’s liable to be recalled. If it is, the southern states will go on fighting the war on their own, even if that means leaving the USA. That is what it will mean, too. Plenty of blame to go around, yes. But a lot of it will stick to you.”