Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  And then he could hear them. He froze, then moved forward even more slowly and carefully. Yes, the bad French and Spanish said they were runaway slaves. One Negro and two copperskins, he thought; they had distinctively different accents. His own French was nothing special, though he could make himself understood.

  Another sniff brought him the scent of roasting meat. His stomach growled. He winced—a noise like that could betray him, and it was nothing he could do anything about.

  There they were, dimly seen through the screen of multiply lobed little leaves. Victor stayed very still. He saw a Negro and one copperskin. They were cooking a turtle and a couple of big frogs over their fire. One of them said something and held up his supper. The other laughed.

  Runaways, all right, Victor Radcliff thought. They wouldn’t go out hunting him unless they thought he was hunting them. Since he wasn’t…Best just to slide away after all.

  He was about to do exactly that when someone jumped him from behind. While he’d scouted the camp, someone had sneaked up on him. A large, strong, muscular someone, too. And as silently deadly as a crawling snake—Victor had had no idea anybody was there till the instant before he found himself fighting for his life.

  The fight didn’t last long. When the sharp edge of a knife kissed Victor’s throat, he went limp. His assailant laughed, low and hoarse. “Figured that’d make you get smart,” the man said in copperskin-accented French. The knife dug a little deeper. “Now, you come along with me.”

  Numbly, Victor came.

  Roland Kersauzon peered out from the walls of Nouveau Redon. He was not quite the lord of all he surveyed, but he was the lord of a good deal of it. And he was named for one famously stubborn man, and descended from another. Roland the warrior might have saved everything but his pride if he’d blown his horn sooner and summoned Charlemagne back against the Spanish Mussulmen. And François Kersauzon remained a legend in these parts even if he was three centuries dead and gone.

  François had never set eyes on Nouveau Redon, not in all the years he’d dwelt in Atlantis. It lay only fifty miles inland from Cosquer on the Blavet. He’d never gone fifty miles inland or, probably, even twenty miles inland. That would have meant turning his back on the sea. François Kersauzon was too mulish a fisherman to want to do any such thing.

  Slowly, Roland made a fist and brought it down on the gray stone of the battlement. Nouveau Redon, everyone said, was the strongest fortress in all of Atlantis, French, English, or Spanish. And it needed to be. Roland muttered something a quarter Breton, three-quarters French, and all irate.

  If only François hadn’t sold the God-cursed Englishmen the secret of Atlantis for a load of salt cod! (Or, even more humiliating, for part of a load of salt cod. Some of the stories put it that way.) Then the Bretons would be happy over here, the English would be happy over there, and…

  “Merde,” Roland said. That kind of thinking was bound to be foolish. Sooner or later, the English would have found these shores on their own. But it would have been later than it was, which would have been better—certainly as far as a Breton was concerned.

  Nouveau Redon sat atop a knob overlooking the Blavet. The river approach was difficult. The landward approach, except for a narrow road hacked out of rock, was harder yet. Roland didn’t see how anyone could storm Nouveau Redon as long as it had a few soldiers inside the walls.

  He did see a horseman urging his mount up that narrow road. Even though the rider was alone and unable to move fast, muskets and cannon loaded with grapeshot covered his approach. Nouveau Redon was ready for anything.

  By the time the rider reached the narrow plain in front of the town, he was sweating and fanning himself with his hat. His horse was lathered and blowing. He seemed glad to rein in before the main gate. After yelling back and forth with the guards at the gate, he rode into Nouveau Redon.

  Before long, more shouts rang out: “Lord Roland!” “Come down, Lord Roland!” “Lord Roland, this man’s here to see you!”

  Roland Kersauzon said, “Merde!” again, louder this time. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. Not to put too fine a point on it, this was the moment he’d been dreading. He hurried down the stairs—hurried with what the lawyers called deliberate speed. The stairway attached to the wall was narrow and steep; if a man on it fell, he might break a leg—or his neck.

  Reaching the ground without mishap, Roland rushed to the gate. A man could break an ankle—or his neck—if he tripped on the cobbles, too. Old men grumbled and wished the streets were still unpaved. Roland didn’t miss the stinking mud one bit. Cobbles made his city as modern as any in Europe.

  “Lord Kersauzon,” said the horseman when Roland came up. “I bring news just here from France.” He held out a paper folded and sealed with ribbon and wax.

  “News.” Kersauzon’s mouth tightened as he took the letter. “Do you know what it says?”

  “Formally, no,” the rider replied. “Informally…Well, the word’s all over Cosquer. Gossip flies faster than the wind.”

  “All right.” It wasn’t, but Roland couldn’t do anything about it. He scraped off the seal and cut through the ribbon with a small, sharp knife he pulled from his belt. Then he unfolded the paper and read it. His sight was beginning to lengthen, but he didn’t need spectacles for reading yet. Sadly, he nodded to himself, as if learning that an aged and long-infirm uncle had finally died.

  “Is it—?” One of the gate guards couldn’t hold in the question.

  With a sigh, Roland nodded again. “War,” he said. “War against England.”

  “But why?” The gate guard checked himself. He sketched a salute. “Forgive me, sir. I know the English—they are dogs and sons of dogs. I know most of them are godless Protestant heretics, bound for hell.”

  “Everybody knows that,” another guard put in.

  “But of course. Everybody does,” the first soldier agreed. “Still, the English have always been dogs and sons of dogs. They’ve been godless Protestants for a very long time, anyhow. So why do we have to go to war with them now?”

  “It’s the fighting in Europe,” said the courier who’d brought the message to Nouveau Redon.

  Roland Kersauzon nodded. “It is indeed. We have joined with Austria and Russia to give Frederick of Prussia the thumping he deserves. The English—dogs and sons of dogs that they are—have sided with Frederick. And so we shall punish him and England as they deserve.”

  The courier and the guards clapped their hands. One of the soldiers tossed his hat in the air. Then he made a frantic grab to keep it from landing on a lump of horse manure. With an embarrassed grin, he set the tricorn back on his head. Another gate guard said, “We’ll whip them.” Everyone cheered again. Nobody threw a hat this time, though. The guard pointed to the paper Roland Kersauzon still held. “Does that just tell you the war is here, sir, or has it got orders for us, too?”

  “Orders,” Kersauzon answered. “First, we are to make sure Nouveau Redon is in the proper condition to defend itself, should it have to.”

  “Won’t be hard.” Two or three men spoke together, with almost identical words. One of them added, “You’d have to be a crazy fool to try and take this place.”

  “I think so, too, but who’s to say the English aren’t crazy fools?” Roland answered. The guards nodded—they also seemed to think the English were likely to be crazy fools. Kersauzon went on, “And you’re right: it won’t be hard to ready the town. It’s strong to begin with, and we’ve kept the works and the garrison in good order, thank God.” He glanced down at the sheet. “But there’s more than that.”

  “What is it?” Again, several men asked the question in chorus—he knew how to tell a story and spin it out.

  “We are to gather together an army from all the settlements under the rule of the King of France, and to march against the English and take away what has been theirs for too long,” he replied grandly. “So it is commanded of us, and so shall it be.”

  When the guards huzzahe
d this time, several hats went flying. A couple of them landed on the ground, but none, luckily, in the horse dung. Townsfolk came out of shops and taverns to see what the commotion was about. When the guards shouted out the news, fresh commotion spread.

  One of the men asked, “The Spaniards are on our side, is it not so?”

  He sounded anxious, and with some reason. Men who followed the King of France were almost as likely to reckon Spaniards dogs and sons of dogs as they were Englishmen. True, no one could accuse the Spaniards of being godless Protestant heretics. But if Spain allied itself with the godless Protestant heretics of England, that could prove unfortunate in Atlantis, where English and Spanish settlements lay to the north and south of France’s.

  Kersauzon slew the soldier’s worry with a smile. “They are on our side, yes. Their ships will join with ours. Their soldiers will slay Englishmen wherever they find them. We have but to stretch forth our hand, and the English settlements here will fall into it like a ripe apple.”

  How the men cheered then! They danced in a circle, spinning now widdershins, now sunwise. Had an English army been anywhere close by, it could have marched into Nouveau Redon without firing a shot. But the English were far away. Roland Kersauzon danced as enthusiastically as any gate guard. Why not? His orders were to ready an army and advance. Oh, he was also ordered to ready defenses at need, but he took that as a formality. After all, if he was advancing, he wouldn’t need to defend, would he?

  Of course not. That was so obvious, even an Englishman could see it.

  Victor Radcliff’s bad French saved his life. The three runaways who’d grabbed him feared he was a slavecatcher. Once they realized he was nothing of the sort, and especially once they discovered he was an Englishman, they treated him like a long-lost brother.

  One of them, as he’d thought, was black, the other two, copperskins. They fed him turtle and frog and fish and snails. Having convinced them he wasn’t French, he wondered if he ought to eat the snails. But the runaways did, with every sign of enjoyment, and so he did, too. Each snail gave him a couple of bites of tasty meat; the shells were the size of a man’s clenched fist. You wouldn’t have found snails like those chewing up the lettuces in a garden outside Paris.

  You might not have found them up by New Hastings, either, and you wouldn’t have up near Hanover. Big snakes and lizards stayed in the south, where the weather never got worse than mild. Snails spread farther, but not too much. The hot, sticky southern climate suited the Negro fine. In his vile French and worse bits of Spanish, he said it reminded him of Africa.

  As far as the two copperskins were concerned, he was welcome to it. They knew more Spanish than French, and even a few words of Basque—as much as any foreigner was ever likely to learn. They spoke to each other in Spanish, too. After a while, Victor realized they were from different clans or maybe different countries. The language of one made no more sense to the other than Hungarian did to an Irishman.

  The Negro called himself Blaise. The Terranovans went by Francisco and Juan. Those weren’t the names any of them had been born with. They gave Victor their real names, and laughed at him when he mangled them. “You white men, so many things you can’t say,” Blaise told him.

  Victor Radcliff smiled and shrugged. He could say one thing: I am a free man. Neither Negroes nor copperskins raided white men’s lands for slaves. They didn’t know how to build the ships or the guns that would have made such a thing possible. Their people did have a yen for the trinkets white slavers used to buy chattels and save themselves the trouble of fighting for them.

  Blaise and Francisco and Juan had a yen for freedom. At first, as they started traveling north, they seemed to think Victor had been wandering through the swamp for his own amusement. They didn’t expect him to know what he was doing there. “White men, they are without hope away from their towns,” Blaise said.

  Instead of arguing, Victor vanished. One second, he was walking along beside his new companions. The next, they went one way and he another. He didn’t warn them he would do it. He just ducked off behind a barrel tree and headed off on his own.

  He listened to them exclaim. Francisco swore. Juan started to laugh. “Maybe this blanco, maybe he knows something,” he said.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he just got lost.” Blaise was as reluctant to think a white knew what he was doing as many whites would have been to give him the same credit.

  Then Victor reappeared and tapped him on the shoulder. “Am I lost? Or are you?” he asked politely.

  Blaise almost jumped out of his skin. “How you do that?” he demanded.

  “Magic,” Victor said, deadpan.

  That won him more attention than he wanted. The Terranovans and the African took him literally. He wasn’t sure whether they wanted to use his sorcerous talents to help them escape bondage or to kill him so he couldn’t bewitch them.

  “His ghost will haunt us even if we do kill him,” Blaise muttered when he thought Victor was out of earshot.

  Victor smiled his most enigmatic smile. That set the black and the two copperskins muttering once more. They stopped bothering him. And he soon proved he could stay with them. He also showed he knew how to hunt—and he had a flintlock rifle and a pair of pistols. He could have had all that and eyes in the back of his head without their doing him any good. Even the fiercest, most deadly warrior had to sleep sometimes.

  He solved the problem by pretending it wasn’t one. If he took sleeping around them for granted, they wouldn’t think he was afraid to. That would give them one less reason to knock him over the head.

  He hoped.

  When he woke up the next morning…Well, he did wake up the next morning. Nothing else mattered.

  Off in the distance, a hound bayed, and then another and another. “They’re after me!” Juan blurted, his blunt-featured face going as pale as it could.

  “After all of us,” Francisco said sensibly.

  Although Victor suspected they were after him in particular, he didn’t say so. It might alarm his new companions, or they might decide he was lying. They were runaway slaves, after all. People trying to hold on to an expensive investment had good reason to hunt them with dogs. Why would anyone do such a thing to a white man, though?

  The French had their reasons. Victor knew that too well. Mentioning those reasons struck him as unwise. Francisco, Juan, and Blaise might decide they could sell him to the French for their liberty. They might prove right, too.

  Amazing how many people couldn’t keep their mouths shut, even when their lives depended on it. Victor had never had that trouble, anyhow. “Well, we have to get away, no matter whom they’re chasing,” he said.

  “Easy to say,” Blaise replied. “Not so easy to do.” As if to back him up, the hounds bayed again, on a different, more excited note. “They have our scent.”

  “Best thing to do, then, is to make sure they don’t keep it,” Victor said.

  “Here there is water,” Juan said. “This makes it harder for them. But harder is only harder, sí?” He sounded worried.

  “Let them come,” Victor said. The runaway slaves stared at him. He pulled a small leather pouch and an even smaller bottle from a larger pouch on his belt. Sprinkling fine black powder from the small pouch, he explained, “This is ground pepper.” He also dabbed a few drops from the bottle on the ground and the nearby leaves.

  “And that?” Francisco asked.

  “That is the gall from the snake called the lancehead,” Victor said. “Dogs do not like it.” He’d committed a serious understatement.

  Francisco and Juan might not have understood how large the understatement was. Blaise did. The Negro burst out laughing. Then he took Victor Radcliff’s face in his two large hands and kissed him first on the right cheek, then on the left. Sure enough, he’d had a French master.

  “And now,” he said, “we should get out of here. We will know when the hounds are…confused.”

  “We’d better,” Juan said.

  They hurried
off to the north. The dogs’ howls grew louder no matter how they hurried—four legs moved faster than two. Before too long, though, the hunting howls changed without warning to sudden, frantic yips. All the runaways laughed then. Blaise kissed Victor again. Victor could have done without the familiarity, but found he couldn’t blame the black man for it.

  Roland Kersauzon rode down to the coast to see how the muster was going. Cosquer might have belonged to a different world. Roland hadn’t seen the sea for years, or missed it. He was, and was proud to be, a man of Atlantis, not one who looked back to Europe. He’d never been to Europe, nor did he care to go there.

  When he got to the coastal settlement, he found a new reason to be unhappy. At the quays, along with ships from France and Spain and Portugal and their settlements in Atlantis and on the Terranovan mainland farther west, lay others from England and from her Atlantean colonies. War declared? No one in Cosquer worried about that, not when there was money to be made.

  In high dudgeon, Roland repaired to the harbormaster’s office. “War? Yes, indeed. A great pity,” that worthy declared. “Would you care for a cigar, Monsieur?”

  “No, thank you,” Roland said icily. He had his vices, but pipeweed wasn’t one of them. “I would care to know, however, why we tolerate ships of the enemy. For all you know, they are full of spies.”

  “Oh, I doubt it, mon vieux,” the harbormaster replied. He lit his own cigar at a candle, then puffed out a cloud of aromatic smoke. “What would they need to learn of our city that they do not already know?”

  “How many troops we have in it, how many ships of war, the state of our shore batteries…I could go on.” Roland Kersauzon scowled at the lackadaisical official. “I am charged with defending the settlements and with carrying the war to the enemy in the north. How can I do that, pray tell, if he learns everything we aim to do before we do it?”

  The harbormaster let fly with more cigar smoke. “Forgive me, but I think you are getting excited over nothing—it could be over less than nothing. If they want to fight in Europe, they are welcome to. But why should that foolishness trouble us, eh? Bad for trade, leaves hard feelings, and doesn’t really settle anything anyhow. They’ll just fight another stupid war in twenty years’ time to fix up what they didn’t get right this go-round.”