The United States of Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  De la Fayette pressed hard from the west. Victor pressed . . . not quite so hard from the east. Victor still worried about protecting Hanover in case things went wrong. De la Fayette didn’t care about such things so much: even more than Cornwallis, he enjoyed the advantage of fighting on territory not his own. He could afford to be more aggressive than either his foe or his ally. And, of course, he was so very young—headlong attack came naturally to him.

  It worked, too. As the French and Atlanteans pushed towards each other, Cornwallis finally had to draw back toward the north to keep from getting pounded between them. Victor’s soldiers finally got to meet the men who’d crossed the Atlantic to aid them against King George. And de la Fayette’s soldiers got their first look at the army of the Atlantean Assembly.

  After hard marching and fighting, the French weren’t so elegant as they had been when they first landed in Atlantis. Their uniforms were patched and torn and faded. But they still marched like men who owned the world—and, even if they hadn’t, like men who’d invented close-order drill.

  “These—these iss soldiers!” Baron von Steuben cried as de la Fayette’s men approached. He might not be grammatical, but he meant every bit of it.

  Looking at the ranks of his own army, Victor knew them for soldiers, too. They weren’t so perfect on the parade ground as the French regulars, but they marched well. Their accouterments were far more uniform than they had been when the fight against England commenced. Bayonets tipped most Atlantean muskets. And the men had the look of veterans. They were veterans. They eyed their French allies with undoubted respect, but with nothing resembling awe. By now, they had the redcoats’ measure. And if they could stand against English regulars, why shouldn’t they be able to stand alongside the men from France?

  The Marquis de la Fayette rode forward to greet Victor. As he drew near, the Atlanteans smartly presented arms. He did the best thing he might have done: he saluted them. “Three cheers for the Frenchie!” a delighted sergeant cried, and the cheers rang out one after another.

  De la Fayette doffed his hat. He saluted Victor Radcliff, who gravely returned the courtesy. “These men are more, ah, presentable than I was led to expect,” the nobleman said.

  “This is not Terranova. We are not savages in breechclouts and feathers. We do not carry bows and arrows, or hatchets with stone heads,” Victor replied with as much dignity as he could muster. “Our troops can give a good account of themselves against a like number of European soldiers. We have given a good account of ourselves against like numbers of English redcoats.”

  “I beg you to accept my apology, Monsieur le Général. If I offended, I assure you it was unintentional,” de la Fayette said. “I knew your men could fight before I sailed from France.”

  He and Victor had been speaking French; Victor was far more fluent in it than de la Fayette was in English. Now Victor loudly translated the French nobleman’s comment for the benefit of the Atlantean soldiers. They cheered de la Fayette again.

  Grinning in pleasure unashamed, the marquis said, “I had not finished. I knew they could fight, yes, but I had not expected them to present so pleasing an aspect to the eye. More than one European monarch would be delighted to have troops of such an excellent appearance under his command.”

  Victor translated for his men once more. The Marquis de la Fayette won yet another cheer. Victor Radcliff wagged a finger at him. “I think you’re trying to seduce these good fellows away from the Proclamation of Liberty and make them love kings and nobles again.”

  He was joking. De la Fayette had to know it. All the same, the young Frenchman made as if to push away his words. “Never would I do such a thing! Never!” he exclaimed. “I told you my view of this soon after we met. The Proclamation of Liberty is a shining beacon in the history of the world. And I think its flame will—and should—spread far and wide from Atlantis.”

  “It’s already spread across the Hesperian Gulf to the English settlements in Terranova,” Victor said. Truly Thomas Paine was worth his weight in gold—no small praise in the specie-starved United States of Atlantis.

  “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 Général. 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.”

&nb
sp; 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 Général? 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.

  XX

  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. “I was 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 a
t 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 hellbound,” 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.)