Opening Atlantis a-1

by Harry Turtledove

  "Should we shoot him, Monsieur?" asked a practical-but not quite practical enough-sergeant.

  "I daresay we should have shot him," Roland replied. He hadn't been practical enough, either. "Too late now." Too late it was, without a doubt. The Terranovan had vanished into the undergrowth. He knew where he was going. Pursuers wouldn't. Roland could hope he would tread on a viper in his headlong flight; there were enough, or rather too many, of them down here in the south. But, that unlikelihood aside, the copperskin had got away.

  Which meant-what? The fellow was bound to be a slave. He was also obviously a slave not tending to his master's affairs. Was he a slave who was part of a band of rebels? That was less obvious, but it matched the way he acted.

  Would his band of rebels want to tangle with Roland's French settlers? Unless that band was a lot bigger than Kersauzon thought likely, they would have to be crazy to try it. Then again, plenty of white men were crazy. Why not copperskins and Negroes as well?

  "Where do we go now, Monsieur?" the sergeant asked.

  Roland realized he should have inquired of the snooty Spanish teniente. He was damned if he would turn around again, even if it was only half a mile or so this time. He hadn't seen any white men-let alone white women-on the road since entering Spanish Atlantis. That had to mean the uprising was a serious business…or that the whites thought it was, anyhow, which might not be the same thing.

  The sergeant deserved-needed-an answer. Kersauzon scanned the southern horizon. He knew just what he was looking for: the thickest smoke. When he found it in the southwest, he pointed. "We go there."

  It turned out to be farther away than he'd expected, which meant the fires down there were bigger than he'd thought. No one seemed to be fleeing toward his army. Several Negroes and copperskins fled from it. The French settlers caught a Negro. The man tried to deny everything.

  "If you are as innocent as our Lord, why did you run from us?" Roland asked.

  In reasonable-almost French-tones, the black replied, "If you saw lots of men with guns, Senor, wouldn't you run, too?"

  "Not if I thought they were friends," Kersauzon said.

  "I thought you were ingleses," the Negro replied. "Los ingleses are the friends of no one but themselves."

  "You're right about that, by God," Roland said. "They will use you against the Spaniards, and the Spaniards against you. They will try to get the Spaniards to fight you instead of them. They don't care what happens to you, as long as it helps them."

  "No doubt you are right, Senor," the Negro said. "But how much does it matter? If you are a drowning man, you grab for whatever you can get your hands on. If it turns out to be a log-bueno. You are saved. If it turns out to be a crocodile-at least you don't drown."

  Crocodiles and the other toothy horrors usually called by the Spanish name for lizards-lagartos-were even more common in streams down here than they were in French Atlantis. There were hardly any near the English settlements; those lay too far north for the big reptiles to stay comfortable through the winter. All things considered, Roland would rather have drowned if a crocodile or lagarto was his other choice.

  He also needed to ask, "Why did you have to run from los ingleses? After all, they gain if you rise up against the Spaniards."

  "You said it yourself, Senor," the Negro replied with dignity. "I am a man. I am not a tool to be taken down from a shelf, used, and then put back. Slaves are nothing but tools to los ingleses. If these English"-he pronounced the name properly, and about as badly as Kersauzon would have-"said, 'Rise up, and we will help you become free men'…if they said that, I would be their man forever. But they do not. They care nothing for freeing us. All they say is, 'Rise up, and make los espanoles some trouble.' This does not inspire me, for some reason."

  Roland Kersauzon swept off his hat and bowed to the black man, who stared at him in astonishment. "It would not inspire me, either, Monsieur," Roland said. "I assure you of that." He gestured. "You may go. You are free-of me, anyhow."

  "But you and your men are still fighting for the damned Spaniards and against the slaves," the Negro said.

  "It is our duty," Roland said simply.

  "If you turn me loose, it is my duty to kill you if you get in my way and if I have the chance," the Negro said. "I need to go after the Spaniards first, but you are their ally."

  "Tell the other slaves to wait until los ingleses are gone from this land. If they do, we will not raise a finger against them," Roland said. "My quarrel is with the English, not with you."

  "This is a good bad bargain, but it is still a bad bargain," the black man said. "If los ingleses are not here, the Spaniards will have nothing to distract them from us. They will put us down, and they will make us pay for rising against them. But if we fight them now, while they also have to worry about the English, we have a chance to beat them. Maybe not a good chance, but a chance."

  He wasn't even wrong, not as long as he was talking about Spaniards. If the slaves did beat their Spanish masters, the French would invade and try to suppress them. Even the English would probably do the same thing. They might not have many slaves in their own settlements, but they didn't mind making money from other people's bondsmen.

  And Roland was sure the English aimed to seize French and Spanish Atlantis for themselves if they won this war. They wouldn't want Negroes and copperskins running around burning things and killing people. No, not when those same Negroes and copperskins could be harvesting crops and putting black ink, not red, in the ledgers.

  Kersauzon made as if to push the slave away. "You had better leave now, before I come to my senses and decide to hold you instead."

  The Negro bowed politely. "You may try, Senor. I don't think you will have much luck." Then he disappeared, so quickly and so effectively that he might have been part of a conjurer's trick. A leafy fern stirred for a moment. Deeper in the undergrowth, a bird let out a startled chirp.

  "He's a nuisance," a sergeant said. "You should have got rid of him while you had the chance."

  "It could be," Roland said. "But even if I would have, how many more just like him are there?" The sergeant had no answer for that. Neither did Roland, not in numbers. But he knew there were swarms of them.

  Victor Radcliff found himself and his little band of English marauders in an odd predicament. They helped protect Spanish fugitives from the wrath of their uprisen slaves. And they gave aid and comfort to the Africans and Terranovans against the men who were convinced they had a right to own them.

  Blaise didn't mind that. On the contrary-one day he hurried up to Victor almost jumping in excitement. "A woman here, she speak my language!" he exclaimed.

  "Well, good," Victor said. "That must be nice. What's her name?"

  "They call her Maria," Blaise answered. "She has a name in our language, too. It means in English 'little star.'"

  "Pretty," Radcliff remarked.

  "I can talk with she-with her." Blaise made a face. "Don't always have to think through different kinds funny words. Just…talk!" He really did jump into the air then, but the leap put Radcliff in mind of a dance step.

  He got to see Maria a little later. He didn't think her especially pretty, but then Blaise didn't seem to find white women especially pretty, either. The black man and woman could talk together, all right. Their language seemed full of clucking and mooing noises to Victor. But he knew how delighted he would have been to find an English-speaking woman if he were stranded in West Africa.

  Voice dry, he said, "You might want to tell her we still have some fighting to do. You can't marry her till that's taken care of."

  Blaise's skin was already dark, but it got darker as he blushed. "Good thing she doesn't talk English. She think you making promises for me."

  "I can tell her myself in Spanish, or in French if she knows it," Victor said helpfully.

  "Never mind," Blaise said-in English. "Maybe I marry she-her. Maybe I don't. Don't got to decide now, though."

  "What are you two talking about in that
funny language?" Maria asked in fluent Spanish. "You better not be talking about me when I can't understand what you're saying."

  "We're talking about the fighting, Senorita," Victor Radcliff replied in the same language. "We still have to beat the Spaniards."

  "And you will fight to the last slave's last drop of blood to do it." Maria had a tart wit.

  "We are here, in Spanish Atlantis," Victor said. "We fought our way through French Atlantis to get here. We would fight the Spaniards even if the slaves did not rise up against them."

  She weighed that. Blaise plainly hung on her decision. Victor was surprised to discover he cared, too. You had to take Maria seriously. Some people had that gift. At last, she nodded. "Bueno. The Spaniards have plenty to answer for. And so do you ingleses, for selling them so many slaves from Africa."

  She didn't know-Radcliff hoped she didn't, anyhow-how deeply involved in the slave trade his family was. You could make a lot of money off Negroes. Plenty of people had. If you didn't sail to Africa yourself, your hands stayed clean while you did it, too. Radcliffs and Radcliffes were welcome in all the best places in English Atlantis. We'd better be, he thought. We founded a lot of those places.

  But that was an argument for another day. "Let's get moving," he said. "We don't do anyone any good sitting around like snails on a leaf."

  They left more mansions in flames as they moved south. The Spaniards who took refuge with them cursed them because they didn't do more to put down the rebellious slaves. The slaves cursed them because they didn't do more to help the uprising. Getting sworn at by both sides at once suited Victor Radcliff fine. To him, it meant he was following about the right course.

  He heard rumors the governor of Spanish Atlantis had let soldiers from French Atlantis come south to deal with the English settlers. He disbelieved those rumors as long as he could: if they proved true, they would make his life harder. But he sent scouts out to the north as well as to the south. The only thing worse than having the French settlers there would be having them there and getting taken by surprise.

  A scout rode up from the south shouting, "The sea! The sea!"

  "Why you smile?" Blaise asked Victor. "What so funny 'bout the sea?"

  Blaise had never heard of Xenophon. Victor would have bet the scout never had, either. But more than 2,100 years earlier, the Greeks escaping the Persian Empire had raised that same cry-"Thalassa! Thalassa!"-when they finally came to the Black Sea.

  For Xenophon's Greeks, coming to the sea meant finding the broad highway home. Things weren't so simple here. Who could say what kind of ships lay off the coast? Any at all? British? Spanish? French? All of them at once, banging away at one another as if these were the bad old days of the pirates of Avalon?

  Victor again remembered Ethel Radcliffe, who'd shot his great-grandfather. Mule-headed stubbornness seemed to run through every branch of the Radcliff(e) line. He needed some of his own here, and some luck, if this venture wouldn't be remembered as another piece of Radcliff(e) damnfoolishness.

  "Let's go down to the sea," he said. "We've come all this way-we shouldn't leave the last few miles undone."

  The ocean here was nothing like the cold, green-gray one off Hanover's muddy beaches. The water here was turquoise. It looked warm enough to bathe in. The sand leading down to it was golden as a pretty girl's hair. An enormous black bird glided past overhead; it had a leathery red sac under its throat.

  Several crocodiles unhurriedly ambled off the beach and into the ocean. Too bad, Victor Radcliff thought. With so much firepower at hand, they would have been easy to kill. And, even though crocodiles were ugly, they made better than tolerable eating.

  Victor focused on the crocodiles and the frigate bird. Blaise was the one who pointed farther out to sea and said, "What ships are those?"

  "Damnation!" Victor exclaimed. Several frigates cruised along on that lovely blue sea. His first horrified thought was that some French or Spanish admiral had got much too clever for comfort. It could cause him all kinds of trouble. If he didn't move his men off the beach, those ships could bombard them, and damn all he could do about it. Or they could land raiding parties, strike at him, and then get away before he could respond. Just by being there, they denied him the seacoast. He felt trapped between their anvil and the hammer of Roland Kersauzon's French settlers.

  "What to do, Monsieur?" Blaise asked.

  "Good question," Radcliff answered dully. He raised a spyglass to his right eye for a closer look at the ships. If they were French frigates, he might persuade their skippers he and his men were Spaniards. Conversely, if the ships were Spanish, maybe he could fool the captains into thinking he was Kersauzon. It might work for a little while, anyhow, though what good it would do he wasn't quite sure. He was looking for something-anything-to try, that was all.

  He slid the shiny brass tube out a little farther to bring the frigates into sharper focus. Then he started to laugh. And, once he started, he had a hard time stopping. He wanted to keep on braying idiot mirth up to the sky that was only a couple of shades lighter than the sea.

  Somebody not far away said, "He's gone clean round the bend, he has."

  "What you see?" someone else asked. That was Blaise, his accent distinctive.

  Reluctantly, Victor lowered the telescope. "Those ships out there…" He couldn't go on. He started laughing again instead.

  "You better tell us." Now Blaise sounded almost threatening. Several of the white men around Victor looked the same way.

  He took a deep breath and held it as long as he could. Then he let it all out and did the same thing again, trying to flush the laughter from his system. Only after that did he try to speak once more: "Those ships out there…They're English." That got him a load of profanity and obscenity covering as much relief as he felt himself.

  As usual, Blaise was a man of direct action. He snatched the spyglass from Radcliff's hand and raised it to his own eye. He didn't understand how the lenses bent light-he thought it was magic. (Well, Victor didn't understand why the telescope worked, either. He did doubt whether witchcraft had anything to do with it.) Lack of understanding didn't mean he couldn't focus. Like Victor, he accepted the color-fringed, upside-down images as the price of magnification.

  And, like Victor, he started to laugh, even if not so loud or so long. "Fuck me," he said reverently. "They are English shipses."

  "What are they doing here?" someone asked, which had also crossed Victor Radcliff's mind. "Are they waiting for us?"

  "Maybe they are, by God," Victor said. "But whether they are or not, they can give us a ride home." The phrase deus ex machina ran through his mind. If those ships weren't the visible hand of Providence stretched out on the waters…If they weren't, then they were Somebody's idea of a cruel joke. Victor refused to believe that. He called out an order: "Show all the Union Jacks we have-the bigger, the better."

  The flags had grown tattered in their journey through French and Spanish Atlantis. Victor didn't care. They wouldn't be mistaken for the emblem of either enemy kingdom. They wouldn't be-and they weren't. The nearest frigate sailed closer yet. Victor imagined its captain peering shoreward through a spyglass just like his own. Before long, the ship lowered a boat.

  It stopped just out of musket range of the beach. "Ahoy!" shouted someone aboard, his voice coming thin over the water. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"

  Victor explained. Then he asked the same question of the bosun or lieutenant or whoever he was in the boat.

  "We were ordered down here to find you," the man replied. "Looks like we've gone and done it, too."

  "What will you do now that you have?"

  "Bring you back, of course."

  "Good God!" Victor said. "Not that we aren't glad to see you, but who sent you down here? How did you know where we were?"

  "I hear it was that army bastard, Lieutenant-Colonel What's-His-Name. Charlie," the sailor answered, showing his scorn for anything in a red coat. "He got your despatches, looked at a map, and said
, 'Go there. You'll just about find him.' And we just about did, didn't we?"

  "Bless my soul," Victor murmured. Thinking an Englishman stodgy just because he was an Englishman wouldn't do. The officer had used his imagination, and used it well. His scheme wouldn't have worked unless England ruled the seas, but England did, and he took advantage of it. And, with Roland Kersauzon's French settlers nipping at his heels, Radcliff was glad he did.

  "What do we do?" Blaise asked.

  "We go back to Freetown, that's what," Victor answered. "And we don't have to fight our way through Spanish and French Atlantis or plunge into the western wilderness to do it."

  Blaise considered, but not for long. "Good," he said.

  Leading the raiders onto the ships was a long, tedious job. Victor formed a rear-guard perimeter, and kept it in place as long as he could. After a while, it wouldn't have done much good. There weren't enough soldiers manning it. Had Kersauzon's troops descended on them then, it would have been embarrassing, to say the least. But luck had been with Radcliff all through the filibustering expedition, and it stayed with him now.

  He and Blaise were the last two men from the raiding party to step into a boat. Blaise grimaced. "Last time I went in ship, they took me from Africa," he said.

  Victor knew what hellholes slave ships-blackbirds, they called them-were. He knew, but Blaise knew. "This won't be that bad," Victor told the Negro.

  "Better not," Blaise said. Grunting sailors pushed the boat into the sea. Their mates pulled them aboard. They plied the oars like clockwork automata. The land receded. The frigate drew nearer. Victor was delighted. If Blaise was, too, his face didn't know about it.

  Roland Kersauzon stood on the golden beach, cursing Don Jose. He cursed the governor of Spanish Atlantis in his rising and setting, his waking and sleeping, his eating and shitting. He wished the governor's wife would take the pox from him, and he wished Don Jose would take the pox from his wife.