Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “Be somethin’ if we got it,” Helen said. His disaster had turned her out into the fields, too. She’d never blamed him for it, not out loud, which surely made her a princess among women. She asked, “Any news about what the white folks in New Marseille’re up to?”

  Not altogether comfortably, Frederick shook his head. “Only thing I know for sure is, they haven’t come out against us. And some of the militiamen done gone home, on account of they can’t get their hands on any guns.”

  “Aw, toooo bad.” Helen didn’t sound brokenhearted.

  Frederick laughed. “Ain’t it just?”

  “They ain’t comin’ out to fight. But they ain’t comin’ out to talk with us, neither,” his wife said.

  “That’s about the size of it. You’d know if they were,” Frederick said.

  “Well, I hope so,” Helen said, which reminded Frederick of his own thoughts about how hard it was to be sure of what was going on. Then she asked, “What if they don’t do either one?”

  “If they don’t fight or talk?” Frederick said. Helen nodded. He scratched his head. The white folks had to do one or the other . . . didn’t they?

  “Maybe they try an’ wait us out, see if our army falls apart,” Helen said. “They know how to hold things together better’n we do.”

  Once more, that reminded Frederick of his unpleasant encounter with Humphrey. “You’re right,” he said in somber tones. “They do. They’ve had more practice doin’ it.”

  “Think we ought to, like, push ’em, then?” Helen asked. “Be harder for them to make like they don’t want to talk with us if we try an’ talk with them right in front of all the newspapers an’ everybody.”

  “It would,” Frederick murmured. Damned if it wouldn’t, he thought. Saying no or saying nothing was easy in private. Doing it where people who wanted you to say yes could listen in . . . That was another story.

  “Dunno if you ought to go yourself. Talkin’ with ’em face-to-face when we had guns all around, that was fine. Stickin’ your head in the lion’s mouth in New Marseille . . . Maybe they listen to you. But maybe they shoot you instead. Even if the Consuls don’t tell ’em to, maybe they do it irregardless,” Helen said.

  “Uh-huh. Same goes for Lorenzo.” Frederick could easily imagine a militiaman pulling out an eight-shooter and blazing away. The white men from south of the Stour loved rebellious slaves no more than the Negroes and copperskins loved them. The militiamen were having trouble getting firearms in New Marseille. That might count for very little. A length of rope might suit them better, in fact. Yes, watching a leader of the insurrection kick away his life might make them laugh like hyenas.

  Frederick had never heard a hyena, or seen one. Atlanteans often said things, or thought them, for no better reason than that they were embedded in the English language. He supposed his African ancestors and cousins knew all about hyenas.

  “Lorenzo.” Helen’s nostrils flared. “Don’t know if you oughta trust that copperskin. He’s liable to want to be the top fella, not the second one.”

  It wasn’t as if that thought hadn’t also occurred to Frederick. But he said, “If he aimed to kill me, he could’ve done it a hundred times by now. White folks are the ones we got to worry about, not our own kind.”

  “You hope,” Helen said.

  So Frederick did. If he remembered that Lorenzo was a copperskin, wasn’t exactly his own kind . . . If he remembered that, the insurrection would eat itself up. Quite deliberately, he made himself forget it.

  XXI

  Jeremiah Stafford might have been happier to see the arrival of the Antichrist at New Marseille than he was when Frederick Radcliff’s emissary rode into town. On the other hand, he might not have. On the other other hand—assuming people came with three—he wasn’t sure there was much difference between the Antichrist and a spokesman for the Free Republic of Atlantis.

  Had he had any choice, he would have ignored the Negro named Samuel. But Samuel made sure Stafford and Newton and Colonel Sinapis had no choice. Carrying a flag of truce, he rode into town with a guard of half a dozen insurrectionists. Two of them had captured Atlantean cavalry carbines, three had eight-shooters, while the last bore the Free Republic’s flag.

  Up till then, Consul Stafford hadn’t known the Free Republic had a flag. It hadn’t shown one in any of its fights with Sinapis’ soldiers. But it did now—one in stark contrast to the USA’s crimson red-crested eagle’s head on blue. The Free Republic’s flag showed three vertical stripes: red, black, and white.

  Samuel was only too happy to explain its meaning to New Marseille’s newspapermen (and parading through town with it made sure the newspapermen noticed him). “It shows the three folks of the Free Republic,” the Negro told anyone who would listen. “Copperskins, Negroes, and whites can all live together there in equality.”

  Not a single reporter asked him what had happened to the whites in the Free Republic, or why so many militiamen hailed from land it held. That the reporters didn’t ask such questions infuriated Stafford. “The black bastard might as well have cast a spell on them!” he complained.

  “He’s clever,” Leland Newton said, which only irked Stafford more. The other Consul went on, “And that flag is a master stroke. It makes the Free Republic look to be the same kind of thing the United States are.”

  “One more lie!” Stafford said. “He’s trying to force us to treat with him.”

  “He’s doing a good job, too, wouldn’t you say?” Newton answered. “If we don’t treat with him—or treat with his principals, which is what he’s come to arrange—we have to start fighting again.”

  Although Stafford was ready for that, he and the militiamen seemed to be the only people in New Marseille—maybe the only people in the USA—who were. “He’s arranged things so we have no choice,” he said sourly.

  That didn’t get the response he wanted, either. “Well, your Excellency, if you think so, too, let’s meet him and get it over with,” Newton said.

  Stafford didn’t want to, which was putting it mildly. But he’d done all kinds of things he didn’t want to do since leaving New Hastings. The more of them he did, the easier the next one seemed to become. Meet with a nigger fronting for a slave insurrection? Before leaving the capital, he would have laughed at the idea—if he didn’t punch whoever was mad enough to suggest it. Now . . . Now he let out a wintry sigh and said, “All right. Maybe it will make those jackasses with pens shut up, anyhow. That would be worth a little something.”

  It didn’t. Samuel made sure it wouldn’t. He wanted to meet while New Marseille’s reporters listened in. “Why not?” he said. “The Free Republic’s got nothing to hide.” That only made the scribes like him better.

  And so they sat down together in the eatery attached to New Marseille’s second-best hotel, the Silver Oil Thrush. Foreigners, no doubt, would have found the name peculiar. Consul Stafford cared little for what foreigners thought. Oil thrushes had grown scarce, even here in the southwest, but he’d eaten them often enough to know how tasty they were.

  Samuel, on the other hand, was a stringy old buzzard, his woolly hair frosted with gray. He must have been somebody’s butler, or something of the sort, before the insurrection: he spoke almost like an educated white man, with only a vanishing trace of a slave accent. Letting niggers and copperskins learn to read and write was a big mistake—Stafford had always thought so. It gave them ideas above their station.

  Too late to worry about that now. “Tribune Radcliff and Marshal Lorenzo want to meet with you folks to end the war,” Samuel said. Off to one side of the table where he talked with the Consuls and Colonel Sinapis, a sketch artist took down their likenesses. Soon, a woodcut of the scene would grace some New Marseille newspaper.

  “If they think we’ll recognize their crackbrained titles, they’d better think again,” Stafford snapped.

  Samuel only shrugged. “Talk to them about that, your Excellency. Talk to me about talking to them.” His use of Stafford’s title
of respect annoyed the Consul instead of mollifying him.

  “If I had my way—” Stafford began.

  “You’d whip me within an inch of my life. I know that, your Excellency,” Samuel broke in, with perfect accuracy. “But you don’t have your way here, not any more you don’t. Shall we talk instead?”

  “Yes. Let’s.” That was Newton, not Stafford.

  “I would still sooner fight it out,” Stafford said. Knowing he would get no support from the other Consul, he looked to Balthasar Sinapis instead. He got no support from the colonel, either. He feared he knew what that meant: Sinapis didn’t want the insurrectionists to humiliate him again. In a way, Stafford sympathized. In another way . . . “What good is having an army if you don’t dare use it?”

  To his surprise, Sinapis answered him: “To keep someone else from using his army against you.”

  “So that’s why the niggers aren’t in New Marseille, is it?” Stafford snarled.

  “Yes. That is exactly why,” Sinapis said.

  “And on account of we don’t want to come into New Marseille any old way,” Samuel said. “We don’t want to fight any more. We want peace. You gonna tell all the people in Atlantis you don’t want peace?”

  You sneaky son of a bitch, Stafford thought, watching the reporters scribble. Samuel knew how to play to the gallery—Frederick Radcliff must have understood what he was doing when he sent out the other Negro. Damn it, the people of Atlantis, or too many of them, didn’t want anybody telling them their leaders didn’t want peace.

  “If you think the people of Atlantis—of the United States of Atlantis—will let the so-called Free Republic of Atlantis stand, you’d better think again,” Newton said. Stafford blinked, the way he did whenever he and the other Consul agreed about something.

  Samuel only spread his pale-palmed hands. “I’m not the one to talk about that, either,” he said. “You’ve got to see what the Tribune and the Marshal have to say.”

  Consul Newton nodded. He was willing to do that. Colonel Sinapis was also willing to do it, or at least resigned to the prospect. If Stafford said no, all the blame would land on him. There was probably enough to crush him.

  If only . . . ! If only a lot of things, he thought. They started with wondering why Victor Radcliff had to get a slave with child and went on from there. Too late to do anything about any of them now. Stafford was stuck with the world as it was.

  He didn’t say yes. He couldn’t make himself do that. But he didn’t say no, no matter how much he wanted to.

  Approaching the hamlet of Slug Hollow, Leland Newton wondered how it had got its name. The answer proved altogether mundane: it sat in a depression, and the trees thereabouts were full of cucumber slugs, some of them half as long as a man’s arm. The settlers had had the imagination of so many cherrystone clams, but they’d told the truth as they saw it.

  No whites were left in the hamlet. Maybe they’d fled. Maybe they hadn’t had the chance. Newton didn’t ask—he didn’t want to know. Jeremiah Stafford did ask, pointedly. He made sure he did it where the reporters could hear him, too. Newton thought about teasing him for taking lessons from Samuel, but decided not to. He didn’t think his colleague would appreciate it.

  When Stafford asked, Samuel only shrugged and spread his hands again. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “They were long gone by the time I came through here—that’s all I can tell you.”

  “A likely story,” Stafford said. “How do you suppose so many buildings burned down? Lightning?”

  “I don’t know,” Samuel repeated. “If I don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

  “Would we find bones if we dug in the ruins?” Stafford asked.

  “Maybe you would, your Excellency,” the Negro said. “You got to remember, though—a war went through here.”

  Newton was ready to make allowances for that. Stafford didn’t seem to be, which surprised the other Consul very little: “It’s war when you do it, eh? But it’s nasty and villainous when we fight back.”

  “You said it, your Excellency. I didn’t,” Samuel answered. Stafford sent him a murderous glare.

  The Consuls and the soldiers they’d brought along camped west of the ruined Slug Hollow. Samuel and his smaller retinue camped east of the place. When Frederick and Lorenzo came down to join them, they would bring enough fighters to equalize the numbers.

  Colonel Sinapis had a good-sized force within easy reach of Slug Hollow. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. Leland Newton would have been amazed if the same weren’t true for the insurrectionists. If the talks failed—or maybe even if they succeeded—the war could start again any time.

  Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo walked into Slug Hollow two days after the men from New Marseille got there. The Negro and copperskin would have cut a fancier figure had they ridden. Maybe they didn’t care. Or maybe they didn’t ride. Why would they have learned while they were slaves?

  Stafford greeted them with, “If you keep up this nonsense about the Free Republic of Atlantis, we have nothing to say to one another.”

  “If you call everything that’s ours nonsense before we even start talking about it, maybe you ought to send in your soldiers again,” Lorenzo answered. “You want to settle things by fighting, I reckon we can do that.”

  If Newton hadn’t got it for free, he would have paid a hundred eagles for a glimpse of Stafford’s face. The other Consul plainly did want to settle things by fighting. Just as plainly, he knew he couldn’t. The United States of Atlantis had ended up with egg on their face when they tried. No matter how much he despised the idea, he had to sit down and talk with the insurrectionists now. And he did despise the idea, and made only the barest effort to hide it.

  Frederick Radcliff said, “If we can get what we need inside the United States of Atlantis, we don’t need to worry so much about the Free Republic. If we can’t . . . Well, that’s a different story.” He made hand-washing motions to show how different it was liable to be.

  “What do you need?” Newton asked. “Can you put it into words for us?” If Radcliff couldn’t, the Consul feared the talks would end up going nowhere.

  But the Negro leader didn’t hesitate. “You bet I can,” he said. “We want to be free. We don’t want anybody, no matter what color he is, to buy us and sell us any more. We want the law in Atlantis to forget about color, matter of fact. Whatever a white man can do, a Negro or a copperskin ought to be able to do. Whatever a white man gets in trouble for, one of us ought to get in trouble for, too—as much trouble, but no more.”

  Consul Stafford seemed bound and determined to make himself as difficult as he could. “You want the right to miscegenate with white women!” he exclaimed.

  “To do what?” Lorenzo asked.

  “To screw ’em,” Frederick Radcliff explained, which wasn’t the whole answer, but which came close enough.

  “Oh. That.” To Newton’s surprise, Lorenzo laughed out loud. “What makes you think we think white women are pretty enough to be worth screwing?” he asked Stafford. Again, Newton would have paid money to look at an expression he got to see for nothing.

  “White folks always get hot and bothered about that,” Frederick said gravely. “They spent all this time screwin’ our women, so naturally they figure we got to pay ’em back the same way.”

  Consul Stafford finally quit spluttering and gasping like a newly landed trout. “Will you have the infernal gall to claim you’ve all been chaste throughout this uprising? I hope not, by God, because I know better.”

  “No, I don’t say that. You don’t like it so much when it happens to your womenfolk, do you, your Excellency?” Frederick Radcliff answered. “But I say this—put us under fair laws and we’ll live up to them. My woman’s about the same shade I am. We been together lots of years. I don’t want a white woman—I want her to be my legal wife. What’s so bad about that?”

  “A lot of men from south of the Stour will tell you it’s the wickedest thing they ever heard,” Newton said
.

  “A lot of men from south of the Stour are damned fools,” Lorenzo said, and then, “Hell, it ain’t like we didn’t already know that.”

  “If you provoke us, we will keep fighting,” Consul Stafford warned. Colonel Sinapis stirred, but he didn’t come right out and call the Consul from Cosquer a liar.

  Can we go on fighting? Newton wondered. He supposed it was possible. He didn’t think it would be easy or cheap or quick. What would the United States of Atlantis be like after a generation of nasty campaigning and ambushes? Would they be any kind of place he wanted to live? He didn’t think so. Would they be any kind of place where a Negro or copperskin could live? He also had his doubts about that.

  “You don’t love us, and we don’t love you,” Frederick said. “Might be better if we went our own way in a chunk of this country.”

  “A minute ago, you claimed you would follow our laws,” Stafford said. “If you make your own country out of ours, do you aim to pay for what you take away from us?”

  Frederick rubbed his chin. “That might cause some trouble,” he admitted.

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Stafford said. “For that matter, how do you propose to compensate all the slaveowners in the USA for having their property forcibly stolen from them?”

  “You know what, your Excellency? That ain’t my worry,” Frederick Radcliff said.

  “Why not?” Stafford pressed.

  “On account of any man who’s been a slave will tell you slavery’s wrong to begin with,” the Negro answered. “Why should you get paid ’cause you can’t do now what you never should have started doing?”

  “Isn’t that an interesting question?” Newton murmured.

  “Shut up,” Stafford told him. He turned back to Frederick Radcliff. “Will you tell me slavery is illegal?”

  “Not yet,” Frederick answered. “But it sure ought to be.”