Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  A courier rode up from the south and handed Roland a letter.

  Roland examined both the man and the seal with care. He would not have put it past the perfidious English to sneak in a false but French-speaking courier with a forged message to confuse him and his troops. But both the courier and the impression stamped into the wax seemed authentic. Kersauzon broke the seal with a clasp knife, unrolled the letter, and read.

  “What does it say, Monsieur?” a lieutenant asked. “Have we been reinforced, the way the English-speaking Atlanteans were?”

  “As a matter of fact, we have,” Roland said. “If this is true, two thousand of King Louis’ men have landed at Cosquer and are on their way north to us.” He turned to the courier again. “How far behind you are they, do you think?”

  “They’re foot soldiers, sir,” the fellow replied, with a horseman’s natural scorn. “I left them in my dust as soon as I set out.”

  “Well, yes. Of course,” Kersauzon said. “And you were riding relays of horses, so that made you all the faster. We can’t expect them for some time, then.”

  “I would think not, sir,” the courier agreed.

  “Nom d’un nom,” Roland muttered unhappily. “I don’t want to wait for them—we’ve already waited long enough. But I don’t want to go into battle without them, either. What to do? What to do?”

  “It’s your decision, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  Roland Kersauzon could have done without the reminder. He’d been the soul of decisiveness marching up into English territory. He’d got his backwoodsmen and half-trained militiamen a victory even he thought improbable against Braddock’s professionals. Now he wanted to rest on his laurels. He wanted to, yes, but he feared that if he tried he soon would have no laurels to rest on. Maybe he’d even made a mistake pausing after the battle. If he’d pressed on right away…

  Well, he hadn’t. But he would now. He turned back to the courier. “Go tell the soldiers from the mother country I am advancing,” he said. “I look for their support as soon as they are able to give it.”

  “Oui, Monsieur.” The courier repeated back the message. Roland nodded—he had it right. Neither the man nor his horse seemed thrilled at hurrying back in the direction from which they’d come. But the rider sketched a salute and rode off.

  “In the meanwhile…” the lieutenant said.

  “In the meanwhile, we go on,” Kersauzon said firmly. “We would go on even if the King of France left all his men across the sea.”

  “What will you do, sir, if the French from France”—the younger officer smiled at his circumlocution—“have an officer with them who wants to take command, the way General Braddock took command for England?”

  Spit in his eye, Roland thought. But he couldn’t say that. If there was such an officer, it would surely get back to him. And so Roland was circumspect for once in his life: “I will point out to him that I am more familiar with local conditions than he is likely to be. I will also point out that General Braddock’s misfortunes demonstrate how important familiarity with those conditions may prove.”

  “What if he chooses not to listen?” the nosy lieutenant persisted. “What will you do then?”

  Hope he has an unfortunate accident. Roland Kersauzon couldn’t say that, either. The theoretical officer slogging up the coast behind him would surely believe he aimed to arrange such an accident…and the usurping dog wouldn’t be entirely wrong. “I will do the best I can,” Roland said. “I will do the best he permits me to do.”

  “Surely he will value your experience,” the lieutenant said.

  “But of course,” Roland murmured. He didn’t believe it, even for a moment. A French officer sent to Atlantis would feel the same way prisoners said the English officer sent to Atlantis had felt: as if he were exiled from civilization. And it might be true; an officer who’d disgraced himself at the court might well suddenly find himself carried across the sundering sea to do what he could for a country that didn’t care to look him in the eye any more.

  Now Roland had to do things quickly and do them right, before the hypothetical officer could take charge and make a mess of whatever he touched. He swore at himself for all the delays he’d tolerated.

  Well, he’d tolerate them no more. “Can’t you move faster, you lazy lugs?” he shouted. “What are you waiting for? Are your feet stuck in the mud? They’d better not be, by God!”

  One of the soldiers grumbled that Roland had some part of himself stuck somewhere else. He was not talking about feet or mud. Roland listened without rancor. Soldiers were going to grumble; it was part of what made them soldiers. As long as they grumbled while they marched, Kersauzon didn’t mind a bit.

  “If you want us to hurry so much now, why didn’t you start us sooner?” A sergeant had the nerve to ask that to his face. Atlanteans who spoke English always bragged about how frank they were and how they spoke their mind to anyone, no matter who and no matter when. The French settlers here didn’t waste their time bragging about such things. They just did them.

  And the sergeant expected an answer. Sighing, Roland gave him the straightest one he could: “Because I didn’t know my own mind till now.”

  “Ah.” The underofficer weighed that, then nodded. “It happens, sir. I kind of wish it didn’t happen here, though.”

  Roland Kersauzon sighed again. “I wish it didn’t happen here, too, Sergeant. I hope to correct my error. I’m sorry if that means wearing out your boots.”

  “So am I,” the sergeant said. “I hope we can fix things, that’s all.”

  “Me, too,” Roland said, and sighed one more time.

  “The Frenchmen are coming! The Frenchmen are coming!” The frightened cry echoed through the encampment the English settlers and redcoats had made south of Freetown.

  It also echoed through the streets of Freetown itself. Some of the townsfolk showed the confidence in the men defending them by packing whatever they could into wagons and carriages, or onto the backs of horses and mules, or onto their own backs, and heading north at the best turn of speed they could manage.

  Blaise delivered a one-word judgment on that: “Yellow.” Then he asked, “Why is a coward yellow in English? Not in French. Not in my old tongue, either.”

  Victor Radcliff only shrugged. “I don’t know why. You might as well ask why we call a cow a cow and not a sheep. Because we do, that’s all.”

  “It doesn’t help,” the Negro said reproachfully.

  “I know it doesn’t,” Victor replied. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry that so many of the people in Freetown are sheep. They don’t think we can hold the enemy. When one runs, the rest follow. And they all go, ‘Baa. Baa. Baa.’” He mimicked a sheep’s bleat. “Well, what I have to say to them is ‘Bah!’”

  He waited to see whether Blaise would notice the difference between a bleat and a sound of contempt. The Negro’s broad smile—which seemed all the broader because his teeth showed up so well against his dark skin—said he did. No flies on Blaise, by God. That wasn’t a saying in French, either, and probably also wasn’t in the African’s native tongue.

  “‘Bah!’ is right, sir,” Blaise said. “They is silly fools.”

  “‘They are,’” Radcliff corrected. His body-servant-turned-sergeant nodded. He made fewer and fewer mistakes. Victor suddenly wondered if he threw one in every so often just to keep from making people suspicious. That wasn’t the most reassuring thought he’d ever had. Instead of pursuing it, he went on, “Despite our losses, we have more men than they do, even now, and still more coming in all the time.”

  “Yes, sir.” Blaise didn’t sound impressed.

  “It’s true, dammit,” Victor said in some annoyance. There had always been more Englishmen than French—and Bretons, before they finally amalgamated here—in Atlantis. The English came to carve out farms, or to fish, or to take advantage of the marvelous lumber here. Some of the Bretons fished, too; that seemed to be in their blood. But more looked for the same kind of work most French
settlers sought: as overseers on the broad, slave-filled estates that raised sugar and indigo and cotton and, lately, Terranovan pipeweed. That left them—and the Spaniards farther south still—thinner on the ground than the English were.

  All the same, Blaise had good enough reason not to sound impressed. Numbers mattered only so much. The surviving redcoats had had their confidence jolted by marching into a trap. Seeing their captured comrades freed on parole hadn’t helped their morale, either. And the militiamen from the local settlements weren’t so eager as they had been before their first taste of battle.

  Victor hoped they wouldn’t run if they had to fight again. He hoped so, yes, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Blaise found a new and unpleasant question: “Is true, sir, they have real Frenchmen from France now, like Braddock, he real Englishman from England?”

  “I hear it’s true,” Radcliff said. “I don’t know it is for a fact, but I hear it is. And if it is, someone in the Royal Navy needs a talking-to, by God.”

  “Talking-to?” Blaise rolled his eyes. “Need to kick somebody in a boat, kick him…” He mimed clutching at his crotch.

  “That would be good.” After a moment, Victor shook his head. “That would have been good. But it’s too late to fret about such things now. The Frenchmen are here, and we have to stop them. If we can.”

  “We do it.” Blaise sounded confident—but then, he generally did. Looking around to make sure no officers from England were in earshot, he added, “How you like command, sir?”

  “Don’t be silly,” Victor said. “I’m not in command here. That English lieutenant-colonel, the earl’s son…”

  Blaise laughed. “He don’t—doesn’t—know anything. But he not so dumb. He know he…doesn’t know anything. Some men, they don’t know anything, and they don’t know they don’t know anything, you know?”

  “Er—right.” That bemused Victor Radcliff for a couple of reasons. The Negro’s syntax, he was convinced, would have bemused anybody. And Blaise, all unknowingly—which fit his discourse well enough—was reproducing part of the argument from Plato’s recounting of the Apology of Socrates.

  Sure enough, the English officer approached Victor later that afternoon. “I hear the French settlers are on the march,” he remarked. He was a few years younger than Victor—in his early twenties, probably—and, with fresh features and baby-fine skin, looked younger still.

  “Yes, your Excellency. I hear the same,” Victor said.

  “If at all possible, we should stop their taking Freetown. Losing it would be a black eye,” the young Englishman said.

  “Yes, sir. I quite agree,” Radcliff said.

  “How do we go about doing that?” the lieutenant-colonel asked. “All too likely that they’ll outnumber us. The result of another stand-up fight would be worrisome, to say the least.”

  Victor nodded. “So it would, sir. I’m not sure about the numbers”—he wouldn’t call the English officer wrong, not to his face—“but they’re bound to have the advantage of morale.”

  “What, what are we going to do, then? What can we do, then?” Raised in the traditions of continental European warfare, the young lieutenant-colonel thought standup battles were the only possible way two armies could meet. Seeing as much, Victor understood better how General Braddock had come to grief.

  “Your Excellency, if I might make a suggestion…” No, Victor wasn’t in command. He couldn’t start throwing orders around. But if he could gently steer this overbred but willing youngster in the right direction…He talked for a while, hoping the Englishman would see reason.

  “Well, well,” the young man said at last. “You wouldn’t see such an approach taken in France or the Low Countries or the Germanies. Of that I am quite certain. Still and all, though, the so-called klephts in the Balkans might attempt an undertaking of this sort….”

  Victor Radcliff would have had a better notion of whether the lieutenant-colonel approved or not had he ever heard of klephts before. Since he hadn’t, he made do with the question directly: “Shall we go ahead and try it, then, your Excellency?”

  The Englishman looked quite humanly surprised. “I thought I said so, Major.”

  Maybe he had, but not in any language Victor understood. No matter, though. Saluting, Victor said, “Now it’s so very plain, sir, that even a settler can understand it.” The lieutenant-colonel nodded. Victor had bet himself a shilling that the man wouldn’t notice irony, and sure enough…Now he had to collect. I’ll take it out of the Frenchmen’s hides, he thought.

  Muskets banged from bushes by the side of the road. Roland Kersauzon’s horse snorted and sidestepped. He brought it back under control without even noticing what he was doing. Keeping the horse in line was no problem. Keeping his army in line was proving a much harder job.

  A couple of his soldiers were down from this latest bushwhacking. One clutched his leg and swore a blue streak. The other, shot through the head, lay still. The poor fellow wouldn’t rise again till Judgment Day.

  A troop of French settlers plunged into the bushes after the assassins. The whole army stopped, which was undoubtedly what the English skulkers had in mind. This wasn’t the first time they’d disrupted his march, or the fifth. They were doing it every chance they got. And why not? It worked. It worked much too well.

  Half an hour later, the pursuers—who’d gone after the bushwhackers without orders: indeed, against orders—returned, proudly carrying the corpse of one green-jacketed raider. The wretch or his friends had managed to wound two more of them before they caught him. Roland wondered whether he’d been dead when they did. If he hadn’t been, they’d taken care of it immediately afterwards. It did not behoove an officer to inquire too closely into some questions. The only thing Roland said was, “Let’s go on now.”

  On they went. An hour later, they came to another likely spot for an ambush. Roland Kersauzon ordered troops into the trees that came down too close to the road. Before the Frenchmen could get into the woods, they were fired upon. Two of them went down. Neither wound seemed serious, but even so…They lashed the trees with musketry. Then, satisfied they’d done what they could, they approached again—and were fired upon again.

  “These miserable English wretches are like mosquitoes!” a lieutenant exclaimed in exasperation. “Their bites are almost harmless, but they can drive a man mad.”

  “And sometimes you can sicken from the bite, too,” Roland said sadly. Learned doctors would have laughed at him. When they talked of malaria, they spoke of miasmas and fetid exhalations. To him, that only meant they didn’t know what caused the sickness.

  Well, neither did he, or not exactly. But he did know there had been no malaria in Atlantis when his multiply great-grandfather founded Cosquer three hundred years before. It came here about the same time as African slaves did, and soon spread from them to whites. How did it spread? Through the air? Or, perhaps, through mosquito bites?

  Some illnesses—syphilis, gonorrhea—needed contact to spread from one person to another. Some—unfortunately including measles and smallpox—didn’t. Maybe malaria fell into an in-between category.

  Or maybe you don’t know what the devil you’re nattering about, Roland thought. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  He had other, more urgent things to worry about. That lieutenant was worrying right along with him, too. “How are we going to stop the English from harassing us like this, Monsieur?” he asked.

  It was an uncomfortably good question. Since Kersauzon had no good answer for it, he picked nits instead: “Those aren’t redcoats, Lieutenant. English regulars don’t know how to fight like this. They’re Atlanteans: settlers doing the work in place of men from overseas.”

  “Very well, sir,” the junior officer said. “How do we stop the English Atlantean settlers from harassing us, then?” He spoke with admirable—truly French—precision.

  Roland Kersauzon wished he didn’t. Now the commander had no excuse not to answer the question—no excuse except
for his utter lack of a good response. “We cannot keep dancing to their measure,” he said at last.

  Well, how do we keep from doing that? He could see the question in the junior officer’s eyes. It would have been in his eyes, too, if someone had tried to palm that reply off on him. But the lieutenant was more polite than he likely would have been, and didn’t ask the question out loud.

  Eventually—after much too long—the French settlers did manage to drive away the bushwhackers. Roland hoped they did, anyhow. By then, it was about time to encamp for the night. Roland ordered an early halt, hoping to fortify the position well enough to make sure no one could assail it during the hours of darkness.

  Things got no better the next morning. A couple of batteries of horse artillery came out of the woods to the west, unlimbered, and fired one quick roundshot per gun at the French settlers’ line of march before tearing away again. Some of the iron balls flew high. Others tore holes in the settlers’ files. One luckless fellow tried to stop a rolling cannon ball with his foot. That sent him off to the surgeons, who had to cut off the shattered appendage. His shrieks, and those of the other wounded men, set Roland Kersauzon’s teeth on edge.

  Then the French settlers came to a veritable fortress made from logs and mud. Cannon inside the fieldwork fired on them. Musketeers defended the artillerymen. When Roland’s own field guns returned fire, the mud and dirt smothered the balls’ impacts.

  “Are we going to have to put on a regular siege, with saps and parallels, the way we would in Europe?” a sergeant asked.

  “By God, I hope not,” Roland answered. It wasn’t even a proper siege, because they hadn’t surrounded the enemy’s work. The English had no trouble supplying and reinforcing the fort.

  Somewhere south of here, the regulars from France were slogging forward. Roland had hoped to win glory without them. Now he wished they would get here to lend a hand. Cosquer had never seemed farther away.

  He refused to send a messenger south to ask where the regulars were. If they wanted to hurry, that was their business. His…His had stalled. He didn’t care to admit it, even to himself. But it seemed pretty plain that he couldn’t drive the English-speaking Atlanteans out of their fort. He couldn’t go on and leave it in his rear, either.