United States of Atlantis a-2

by Harry Turtledove

  "I understand that, yes. But these settlements are only a small thing," de la Fayette said. They-and their importance to Atlantis- didn't seem small to Victor. Before he could say so, the marquis went on, "I expect the ideals of the Proclamation of Liberty to kindle the kingdoms of Europe before many years go by, Monsieur le General. And not Europe alone, it could be. Like our Lord, the Proclamation of Liberty speaks to all mankind in a voice that cannot be ignored. One day, its words will be heard by the Ottoman Turks, by the Persians, by the Chinese, and even by the hermit kingdom of Japan."

  "Well!" Victor said in astonishment. Not even Paine had ever made such claims. Victor bowed in the saddle to de la Fayette. "You are the most… republican noble I ever imagined."

  "You do me great honor by saying so," the marquis answered. "That is, perhaps, one reason his Majesty chose me to command this army. He knew me to be more than sympathetic to your cause. And he may have judged it safer for the monarchy in France to send me across the ocean."

  "I see," Victor said slowly. So King Louis was trying to solve his own problems as well as Atlantis', was he? From things Victor had heard, he wouldn't have judged the King of France to be so clever. Maybe Louis wasn't. So long as one of his ministers was, what difference did it make?

  De la Fayette perfectly understood his hesitation. "Have no fear, my friend," the Frenchman said. "My country will not stint nor scant my soldiers because I am not in the best of odors at Versailles."

  Remembering how lavishly the French had already provided for their overseas army, Victor Radcliff decided he believed de la Fayette. "Good," he said. "Now that we've joined forces, let's work together until we root out the English from Atlantis once for all."

  "Until victory, you mean," de la Fayette said. Victor nodded; he meant that very thing. The marquis cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted it in English: "Until victory!"

  This time, the cheers from the Atlantean army seemed loud enough to scare Cornwallis and the redcoats all the way to Croydon. De la Fayette made a good friend. He might also make a bad enemy-Victor judged it very likely. Whoever had decided to let the marquis exercise his considerable talents far away from France must have known what he was doing.

  However loud the Atlanteans' cheers, they didn't scare the redcoats away. Victor judged that a great pity. Cornwallis hung on north and a little east of Hanover. If anyone was going to drive him out of Atlantis, or even back to Croydon, it would have to be done with bayonet and musket and cannon, and, no doubt, with a formidable butcher's bill. Mere noise would not suffice.

  Frenchmen and Atlanteans exercised together. They tried to, anyhow. The Atlanteans could have fit in fine with the redcoats. Atlantean drum and horn and fife calls were the same as the ones the English used. How could it be otherwise, when the Atlanteans had borrowed theirs from the mother country? But confusion ran rampant because the French used different calls and cues. Much polylingual profanity followed.

  Victor wanted to place the steady French professionals in the center of the combined army's line of battle. His own men, more mobile and more woodswise, seemed likely to do better on the wings. Or they would have fared well with that arrangement, if only wings and center could each have been sure what the other would do.

  "If we do not learn enough to fight together, we will fight our first engagement separately," the Marquis de la Fayette said. "We shall defeat the perfidious Englishmen even so."

  "We have a better chance together," Victor said fretfully. "Your men didn't cross the ocean to stand apart from ours."

  "We came here to win," the marquis said. "As for how-" He snapped his fingers.

  "All right." Victor smiled in spite of himself. "I've been in a few fights like that. Sometimes you can't figure out afterwards how you won."

  De la Fayette snapped his fingers again. "I tell you again, this for how! So long as you take the slave wench to bed and swive her good and hard, what difference does it make who climbs on top?… Are you well, Monsieur le General? Did I say something wrong? I have heard that English folk sometimes don't care to speak of matters that have to do with the boudoir. I never heard, though, that English folk don't care to do them!"

  "I'm all right," Victor mumbled. Had he turned red? Or white? Or green? He would have bet on green. He and Blaise had joked about green men. But whenever he thought about Louise and about the child she carried-about his own child!-green seemed the only color he could go.

  But, in law, the child he'd fathered on Louise wasn't his. In law, that child belonged to Marcel Freycinet. Throughout his arguments with Blaise, Victor hadn't felt slavery's injustice. How should he, when that injustice hadn't bitten him? Well, the trap had closed on his leg now, or perhaps on an even more sensitive appendage.

  By this time, his letter should have reached Monsieur Freycinet… shouldn't it? No sure accounting for wind and wave, but Victor thought so. And the French Atlantean planter's reply ought to be on its way north… oughtn't it? Again, no way to be certain, but…

  "You seem perhaps un petit peu distracted, Monsieur, if it does not offend you that I should speak so," de la Fayette observed. "If whatever troubles you can be washed away with brandy or rum, I should be honored to lend whatever assistance in the cleansing I may."

  Victor Radcliff had never heard-had never dreamt of-a fancier way to propose that the two of them get drunk together. Most of the time, he would have liked nothing better. But if he started pouring it down now, his sad story might pour out of him. He was readier to trust de la Fayette with his life than with his reputation. He was, in short, a man.

  "Once we've beaten the English, we'll have something worth

  celebrating," he said. "Till then, I'd rather not."

  "A renunciation! Crusading zeal! Almost a Lenten vow!" the marquis exclaimed. "Meaning no disrespect, but I did not look for such a spirit from an English Protestant."

  "We don't always find what we look for, or look for what we find," Victor said. And wasn't that the sad and sorry truth!

  His force and de la Fayette's kept working together. What choice had they? But Victor feared they would have to fight as separate contingents, not as parts of a single army. He wished he had the French nobleman's confidence. He wished… for all kinds of things.

  A few days later, a courier thrust a sheet of paper into his hand, saying, "This here just got to Hanover, General."

  "Thank you," Victor replied, breaking the seal on Marcel Freycinet's letter. One of his wishes, and not the smallest, had just come true. Now he had to discover how big a fool he'd been in wishing for it.

  My dear General, Freycinet wrote, I am in receipt of your letter of the nineteenth ultimo. I regret that I cannot see my way clear to agree to your undoubtedly generous proposal. While I was pleased-indeed, privileged-to have Louise serve you for a time, I do not wish to be permanently deprived of her, nor of the child she is to bear. She is being treated with all consideration, I assure you, and is in excellent health. She sends you her regards, as I send mine. I have the honor to remain your most obedient servant… He signed his name.

  Although Victor hadn't cared to get drunk with the Marquis de la Fayette, he hadn't said a word about crawling into a bottle alone. And he proceeded to do exactly that.

  Chapter 20

  Listening to gunfire while hungover wasn't something Victor would have recommended. However much he wished it would, his head didn't fall off. He disguised what the Spaniards called a pain in the hair with a stoic expression and a few surreptitious nips from a flask of barrel-tree rum.

  Maybe those nips weren't surreptitious enough. Both Blaise and the Marquis de la Fayette sent him thoughtful glances. Neither presumed to ask him anything about his sore head, though. That was the only thing that really mattered.

  No-that and the advance of the Atlantean and French armies. If not for their advance, musketry and cannon fire wouldn't have lacerated his tender ears. The things I endure for my country, he thought. But the rum, even if it did make his factotum
and the French commander wonder, also took the edge off his headache By evening, he was more or less himself again.

  "Anything I can do for whatever's troubling you, General?" Blaise asked, adding, "I know something is, but damned if I know what."

  "It's my own worry, Blaise," Victor said, and not another word. He couldn't very well claim it had nothing to do with the Negro. Knowing what it was, Blaise would have called him a liar-and he

  would have had a point, too. He didn't know, though. Victor hadn't been too drunk to burn Marcel Freycinet's latest letter the night before. He supposed things would come out sooner or later, things had an unfortunate way of doing that. As far as he was concerned, later was ever so much better than sooner.

  By Blaise's expression, he had a different opinion. "If I knew what it was, maybe I could give you a hand with it," he said.

  "I don't think so." Victor heard the slammed door in his own voice.

  Blaise must have, too. "Well, I bet you'll change your mind one of these days," he said. "Won't be this one, though." And he stopped probing at Victor. Even Meg might have kept at it

  So might the Marquis de la Fayette, but another brisk skirmish with the redcoats the next morning gave him something else to think about. He sent some of the French regulars on a looping march to the north to try to drive in the enemy's right wing. Cornwallis' soldiers, or the loyalists serving beside them, must have sniffed out the maneuver: the enemy fell back half a mile or so rather than waiting to withstand an attack in a disadvantageous position.

  Half a mile closer to Croydon, then. If the Atlanteans and the French kept moving forward at that rate, they'd get to the northeastern city… some time toward the end of next winter. Victor repented of making such calculations. Then he repented of repenting, for he knew he couldn't help making them.

  "I wish the English would stay to be netted," de la Fayette said. "It would make the whole undertaking so much easier."

  "Well, yes," Victor agreed, deadpan. "And if a beefsteak cut itself up and hopped into your mouth bite by bite after you cooked it, that would make eating easier, too."

  The French noble raised an eyebrow. "It could be that you take me less seriously than you might."

  From a man of a certain temper, such a statement could be the first step on the path that led to a duel. Did de la Fayette have that kind of temper? Victor Radcliff didn't care to find out. He'd never fought a duel, nor did he want to fight his first one now. "Iwas trying to make a joke," he said. "If I offended you, I did not mean to, and I am sorry for it."

  "Then I shall say no more about it," de la Fayette replied. And, to his credit, he didn't.

  North of Hanover, more fields were planted in rye and oats and barley than in wheat. That was partly because the folk of Croydon brewed a lot of beer. Oh, some Germans brewed beer from wheat, but most folk preferred barley. Victor knew he did. But the main reason the other grains gradually supplanted wheat was that the growing season got short up here. When the weather stayed good, or even reasonable, wheat ripened well enough. But, if you were going to lose your crop about one year in four, you had to own a certain boldness of character to put it in the ground in the first place. Farmers of the more stolid sort chose grains that grew faster.

  "Barley and rye, in France, are for peasants," the Marquis de la Fayette said. "And oats… Oats are for horses."

  "Englishmen say the same thing about Scots and their oatmeal," Victor answered. "But more than one Scot has seen that English farmers eat oats, too."

  "Do you?" the nobleman asked.

  "If I eat katydids, I'm not likely to stick at oats, Monsieur. And I don't-I like oatmeal myself. Nor should you. I've already seen that your French soldiers don't turn up their noses at horsemeat. If you eat the beasts that eat the oats, you may as well eat the oats, too."

  "It could be. But then again, it could also be otherwise," de la Fayette replied. "The delicate woodcock feasts on earthworms, while I should be less eager to do the same."

  "A point." As Victor Radcliff thought about it, a slow smile spread across his face. "As a matter of fact, the same thing occurred to me not so very long ago, although in aid of our native oil thrushes rather than woodcocks."

  "There you are, then." The marquis looked around. "And here we are. If we keep pressing forward, very soon we shall force General Cornwallis and his Englishmen back into Croydon."

  "Let's hope we do," Victor said. If de la Fayette had made the same calculation he had himself, the Frenchman would have realized they wouldn't make the redcoats hole up in Croydon all that soon. Plainly, de la Fayette hadn't. Which meant… what? Most likely that de la Fayette was of a more optimistic, less calculating temperament. Victor laughed at himself. As if I didn't already know that.

  Most of the people who lived north of Hanover sprang from one

  or another of the sterner Protestant sects that had sprung up in England and Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their descendants still looked as if they disapproved of everything under the sun. If soldiers in the Atlantean army argued about God's nature or will, chances were at least one of them came from the state of Croydon.

  Fortunately, the locals' grim disapproval extended to Cornwallis and his followers. "That man is assuredly hellhound," one farmer told Victor, sounding as certain as if he'd checked St. Peter's registry and discovered the English general's name wasn't there. (A joke Victor refrained from making: the Croydonite would have discovered Papist pretensions in him if he had, regardless of whether they were really there.)

  Instead of joking, Victor asked, "How do you know that… ah…?"

  "My name is Eubanks, General-Barnabas Eubanks," the local said. "As for how I know, did I not see him with my own eyes take a drink of spirituous liquor? 'Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging,' the Good Book says, which makes it true. And did I not hear him most profanely take the name of the Lord in vain, that also being prohibited by Holy Scripture?"

  He could as easily have seen Victor drink rum or heard him blaspheme. The profession of arms lent itself to such pastimes, perhaps more than any other. If this Barnabas Eubanks didn't understand that… But a glance at Eubanks' stern, pinched features told Victor he did understand. He simply wasn't prepared to make any allowances. Yes, he was a Croydon man, all right.

  "While I should be glad to see General Cornwallis in the infernal regions, I find myself more immediately concerned with his earthly whereabouts," Victor said. "What did you hear from him besides his blasphemy?"

  "He and one of his lackeys were speaking of how they purposed making a stand in Pomphret Landing." Eubanks' mouth tightened further; Victor hadn't believed it could. "The place suits them, being a den of iniquity," Eubanks added.

  All Victor knew about Pomphret Landing was that it lay between Hanover and Croydon. Until this moment, he'd never heard that it was as one with Sodom and Gomorrah. "How is it so wicked?" he inquired.

  "I am surprised you do not know. I am surprised its vileness is not a stench in the nostrils of all Atlantis," Barnabas Eubanks replied. "Learn, then, that Pomphret Landing supports no fewer than three horrid taverns, that it has a theater presenting so-called dramas, and"-he lowered his voice in pious horror-"there is within its bounds a house of assignation in which women sell their bodies for silver!"

  You silly twit! What do you expect sailors coming off the sea to do but drink and screw? No, Victor didn't shout it, which only proved he was learning restraint as he grew older. He also wondered where the wanton women's partners came by silver in these hard times. He didn't ask that, either. All he said was, "The theater doesn't sound so bad."

  "Oh, but it is," Eubanks said earnestly. "The plays presented encourage adultery, freethinking, and all manner of other such sinful pastimes."

  "I see," Victor murmured. If we can drive the redcoats out of Pomphret Landing without smashing the theater or burning it down, I may watch a play there myself One more thing he didn't tell his narrow-minded, if patriotic, informant.

 
Forcing Cornwallis to pull back from Pomphret Landing wouldn't be so simple. The town sat on the east bank of the Pomphret. Cornwallis' engineers had burnt or blown up the bridges over the river. Locals told Victor there was no ford for some mile inland. English artillerists fired their field guns across the Pomphret at his mounted scouts. Most of those shots missed, as such harassing fire commonly did. But de la Fayette's Frenchmen butchered two horses that met cannon balls. And the Atlanteans buried a man who also made one's sudden and intimate acquaintance.

  French engineers assured Victor they could bridge the Pomphret. "Fast enough to keep the redcoats from gathering while you do it?" he asked them.

  They didn't answer right away. The way they eyed him said he'd passed a test, one he hadn't even known he was taking. At last, cautiously, the most senior man replied, "That could be, Monsieur. It is one of the hazards of the trade, you might say."

  "No doubt," Victor said. "That doesn't mean we should invite it if we don't have to, n'est-ce pas?"

  The engineers put their heads together. When they broke apart, their grizzled spokesman said, "Perhaps if we began at night…"

  "You would be working by torchlight then, is it not so?"

  "We are not owls. We cannot see in pitch blackness, you know," the senior engineer said regretfully.

  "Do you not believe the Englishmen might notice what you are about?" Victor asked.

  "This too is a hazard of the trade, I fear," the engineer answered. "Having commanded for some little while, Monsieur le General, I daresay you will have observed it yourself by now."

  Shut up and quit bothering us, he meant. An Atlantean would have come right out and said so. The Frenchman knew how to get his meaning across without being ostentatiously rude. Either way, the result was frustrating. Victor looked up into the heavens. The moon rode low in the east. It would be full soon; against the daylight sky, it looked like a silver shilling with one edge chewed away. The pale-faced man in the moon didn't wink at him-that had to be his imagination.