Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “He is right. Even if he is a Blackfoot, he is right,” another copperskin said. Not all of them came from the same tribe. They were as different as Portuguese and Germans and Poles…if you were a Terranovan yourself. Europeans tended to lump them all together, just as the Terranovans spoke of whites without separating Spaniards from Frenchmen from Englishmen. The fellow who wasn’t a Blackfoot went by the name of Ramón. He continued, “Give us weapons, and we will make the masters howl.”

  “We have not many weapons to spare.” Victor’s Spanish was imperfect. So was the Spanish the copperskins spoke—and they were imperfect in different ways. Everybody had to back and fill and try again every so often.

  Martín scowled at him. “You don’t want to give them to us, you mean,” he growled. His right hand folded into a fist. “How are you any better than these Spanish putos?”

  “¿Como?” Victor returned his blandest smile. “Simple—we’re on your side. What would happen if you asked the Spaniards for arms?”

  Reluctantly, Martín nodded. He didn’t like the point, but he saw it. But Ramón said, “We don’t ask no Spaniards for nothing. What he want from the Spaniards, we take, por Dios.”

  “Bueno,” Victor said. “But you make them all join together against you.”

  “Why do you care?” Martín’s grammar was better than Ramón’s. “Then they don’t fight you so hard.”

  “They still fight us.” Victor wondered what his superiors would want him to do here. His orders were to start no slave insurrections—not directly. And he hadn’t—not directly. But the enemy of England’s enemy…was a handy fellow to have around. “We can help you some—just not so much as you probably want.”

  “Anything is better than nothing,” Martín said.

  “But more are better—am better—than less,” Ramón said.

  “Well, the ones who do fight us don’t fight you,” Victor pointed out. “And, meaning you no disrespect, we are better fighters than you are.”

  “You think so, do you?” Martín was as affronted as Victor would have been if—no, as Victor had been when—General Braddock told him the redcoats made better soldiers than his settlers.

  “I do think so.” Victor Radcliff gave back the same kind of answer Braddock might have: “We have better discipline and more experience.” He didn’t talk about weapons, not when they were a sore spot.

  And he didn’t impress the copperskins. “We has something you will never has,” Ramón said, again without much grammar but with great sincerity.

  “What’s that?” Radcliff stayed polite, almost disinterested.

  “Hate.” Ramón needed no grammar to get his point across.

  “Hate sends you into battle,” Victor agreed. “Hate without experience and discipline sends you into battle…and gets you killed.”

  That also didn’t have the effect he wanted. “So what?” Martín said. “Do you know what we do, Señor? Do you know what they make us do? With what we do, dying in battle is a relief, an easier ending than most of us would find any other way.”

  It is if you lose, that’s certain sure, Victor thought. Spanish vengeance was proverbial up and down Atlantis. Before he could say anything along those lines, Ramón added, “We may die, but we kill, too.” He got things right there.

  “Help us kill,” Martín said urgently. “That’s all we want.”

  “Let’s see what we can do,” Victor said.

  He gave the slaves a few muskets. He gave them some bar lead and some bullet molds. He got his men to cough up some of the swords and bayonets and dirks they’d taken from Frenchmen and Spaniards. And he found that the copperskins were easily pleased. What didn’t look like much help to him seemed a great deal more to them. They were so used to getting nothing, anything at all might have been a miracle.

  “Now we make the Spaniards to pay,” Ramón exulted, brandishing a rapier he plainly had no idea how to use.

  Victor stepped away from him. “Have a care with that. You can hurt your friends with it, not just your foes.”

  Ramón’s gaze was measuring. “And which is you?”

  “I don’t want to be your enemy,” Victor answered evenly. “If you make me your enemy, you won’t want that, either. Do you understand me?”

  “Understand.” The copperskin’s voice was grudging, but he did nod. He might not like what he heard. Victor didn’t care about that. But Ramón and Martín needed to see that they would be fools to antagonize the Englishmen who were their only friends in this sweltering land.

  Blaise had a different question for them: “Do you lead blacks as well as Terranovans? Or do the blacks have their own leaders?”

  Ramón and Martín looked at each other. “We have blacks in our bands,” Martín said slowly. “Bands with black leaders have Terranovans in them, too. We both hate the Spaniards worse than we hate each other.”

  Blaise grunted. Victor might have done the same thing if the Negro hadn’t beaten him to it. That was an…interesting response. Blacks and copperskins could work together. Blaise had escaped with a couple of Terranovans, after all. But they knew they were different from each other as well as from the whites who exploited them.

  Guiding pack horses loaded down with weapons and lead, the Terranovans headed back to their own folk. Blaise muttered something in his native language. Victor looked a question at him. The Negro seemed faintly embarrassed. “Means something like, damned hardhead copperskins,” he said.

  This time, Victor did grunt. “What do they say about you?”

  “Damned lazy mallates,” Blaise answered without hesitation. “Mallate is like you say nigger.”

  “I’ve heard it before,” Radcliff replied. “I wasn’t sure you had.”

  “Oh, yes. I hear mallate. I hear nigger,” Blaise said. “Can’t help it if I black. Doesn’t wash off.” He made as if to scrub at one arm with the palm of the other hand. “Good when I run away—I am hard to see in woods. Other times?” He shrugged. “I all right where I from. You all right where you from. Terranovans all right where they from. Nobody from Atlantis, right? Everybody should be all right here.”

  That sounded good. Atlantis might have been a place where everyone could come together in equality. It might have been…but it wasn’t. Not yet, anyhow. Victor Radcliff wondered if it ever would be. Let’s smash up the Spaniards first, he thought. We can worry about everything else later.

  XXII

  Everyone in French Atlantis called the stuff that hung from the branches of cypresses and from the round trunks and outswept leaves of barrel trees Spanish moss. Roland Kersauzon had always taken the name for granted. Now, approaching the frontier with Spanish Atlantis for the second time in a fortnight, he really noticed how Spanish moss grew more common the farther south he went.

  He also noticed how deferential the Spanish frontier guards were when he returned to the border. They bowed. They scraped. As Don José had said, they abased themselves before him.

  “If you had let me cross when I came here last time, things would be better now,” Roland pointed out in his deliberate Spanish.

  “Oh, but, Señor, things were different then,” said the teniente in charge of the frontier post. “We had orders to prevent you from entering Spanish Atlantis, and we were honor-bound to obey them.”

  “No matter how idiotic they were,” Roland said acidly.

  “Yes. I mean, no.” The young teniente frowned. “You are doing your best to confuse things, Señor.” He sent Kersauzon a reproachful stare. He had a long, thin Spanish face, a drooping mouth, dark eyes, and heavy black eyebrows: a face God might have made expressly for reproachful stares, in other words.

  Roland gave back a bland, polite smile. “I always do my best,” he said, which left the Spaniard scratching his head.

  But neither the teniente nor his tiny garrison did anything to hinder the French settlers who followed Roland into Spanish Atlantis. That was the point. Given the inefficiency with which the Spaniards ran their settlements, Kersauzon ha
d feared that the frontier guards wouldn’t know their governor had begged him for help. Spaniards were indeed the kind of people who would open fire for the sake of honor, regardless of whether honor and sense lay within screaming distance of each other.

  The first copperskin the French settlers saw in Spanish Atlantis took one look at them, then spun around and ran like a rabbit. (In the early days of settling Atlantis, there had been no rabbits, any more than there’d been sheep or cattle or horses. There were plenty of them now: maybe more than in France, for they had fewer natural enemies here. Of course, like a lot of Frenchmen, Kersauzon was fond of lapin aux pruneaux—or lapin prepared any number of other ways, too.)

  “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, Señor, 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, Señor,” 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, Señor,” 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 españoles 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, Señor. 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, Señorita,” 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.