Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s how come you can go on running things, far as I’m concerned,” Lorenzo added. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind being on top. But I won’t do anything that’d mess up the war against the whites. So help me God, Fred—I won’t.” He held up his right hand, as if taking an oath . . . not that slaves were allowed to take legally binding oaths in the United States of Atlantis.

  “That’s big of you, Lorenzo. Matter of fact, that’s downright white of you.” Frederick grinned crookedly. The copperskin groaned. Frederick went on, “Plenty of time to worry about all kinds of things once we win. Till we do, we better keep going like we’ve been going.”

  “We ought to go toward New Marseille instead of north, though. We really should.” Lorenzo kept gnawing like a termite. If he chewed long enough, he figured whatever he was chewing at would fall over. “Maybe we don’t attack—all right. But we should be in place to attack if we see the chance.”

  “Well, all right. We can do that,” Frederick said. Lorenzo’s jaw dropped. Smiling, Frederick went on, “Just because I don’t think we ought to attack it right now, that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good idea later on, maybe. We should be ready to grab the chance if we can.”

  The former field hand’s face lit up. “Well, hell, Frederick, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?” Lorenzo said. “For a little while there, I thought you were softer than you ought to be, but I see it ain’t so.”

  “Not me,” Frederick said. “We’ve come this far. We’ll go as much farther as we have to.”

  “Now you’re talking!” Lorenzo’s grin got wider yet.

  Jeremiah Stafford had thought New Marseille would be very much like Cosquer. Why not? They were both seaside, slaveholding cities in the United States of Atlantis, weren’t they? So they were, but they were no more identical than barrel trees and barrels.

  Over on the east side of Atlantis, Cosquer had real seasons. Oh, they were milder than New Hastings’—and much milder than Hanover’s or Croydon’s—but they were there. Once in a while, it even snowed in Cosquer. Washed by the warm current of the Bay Stream, New Marseille seemed to bask in an eternal June. It was always warm. It was always humid—not muggy, the way it got in Cosquer in the summertime, but moist.

  And Cosquer was an old place, the second oldest city in Atlantis: four hundred years old now, or as close as made no difference, only a year or two younger than New Hastings. The Bretons, after all, had found Atlantis even before the English fisherfolk. But the Radcliffes had seen right away that the new land needed settling, while the Kersauzons were slower on the uptake.

  Well, the Kersauzons paid for it, the way slowcoaches commonly did.

  New Marseille, by contrast, was new, as new as a freshly minted gold eagle. It hadn’t been much more than a fort and a trading post back in Victor Radcliff’s day. The best harbor south of Avalon on the West Coast, but so what? When it was hundreds of miles from the settled regions of Atlantis, that hardly mattered.

  Once the railroad and then the telegraph connected New Marseille to the rest of the world, it mattered a lot. Over the past twenty years, New Marseille had seen a growth spurt the likes of which the world had never seen the likes of, as one local boaster put it. He wasn’t so far wrong, either.

  There was one other big difference, too. Right this minute, all the white people in New Marseille were scared out of their wits. Many of them—most of the more prosperous ones—owned slaves. And it was impossible to look at a slave without wondering if he wanted to wring your neck as if you were a chicken, or to accept a cup of coffee from a house slave without fearing she’d slipped rat poison into it.

  (Even worse was the idea that New Marseille might not be so different from Cosquer. Had servile insurrection raised its ugly head back there, too? Did whites look askance at Negroes and copperskins there, too? The cut telegraph wires made it impossible to know for sure. But they let Stafford’s imagination run wild, and he could imagine things far worse than reality was likely to be. Or maybe, in the present disordered state of affairs, he couldn’t—and that was a genuinely terrifying thought.)

  Every so often, somebody in an upstairs window would fire at somebody down in the street. The somebody in the street—the target—was invariably white. The somebody in the window almost invariably got away. Jeremiah Stafford would have been willing to bet the shooter was bound to be colored.

  He would have been willing to bet, yes, but he couldn’t find anyone who would put up money against him. Not even Consul Newton was that big a sucker.

  Towns in eastern Atlantis had broad cleared belts around them. New Marseille didn’t. Insurrectionists lurked in the woods right outside the city limits. Sometimes they sneaked in to stir up the slaves in town. Colonel Sinapis’ soldiers tried to seal off the perimeter. There was too much of it, and there were not enough of them.

  The garrison that had held New Marseille was pathetically grateful for reinforcements. “Don’t know what we would’ve done if those devils got in here first,” was something Consul Stafford heard again and again.

  Stafford had a pretty good notion of what the garrison and the white populace would have done had New Marseille been forcibly incorporated into the Free Republic of Atlantis. They would have died: that was what.

  Big guns bore on the stretch of the Hesperian Gulf in front of New Marseille. They crouched in casemates of brick and iron and earth and cement. No naval cannon could smash them, except by luck. But they pointed only out to sea. Their giant iron cannonballs and bursting shells wouldn’t cover the landward side of the city. When engineers laid out New Marseille’s works, they never imagined anyone would attack from that direction.

  Well, life was full of surprises. Aside from small arms, the only pieces that would bear on the insurrectionists were three- and six-and twelve-pounders like the ones Colonel Sinapis had brought from New Hastings. Field guns were better than nothing—and they frightened the copperskins and Negroes in a way that rifle muskets didn’t—but Consul Stafford couldn’t help longing for all the massive firepower that pointed the wrong way.

  “Can we get those big guns out of their works and turn them around so they give the niggers and mudfaces a dose of what for?” he asked Sinapis.

  “It might be possible,” the colonel said slowly, and Stafford’s hopes leaped. But then Sinapis went on, “Even if it is, it would not be easy or quick or cheap. If you seek my professional opinion, your Excellency, the project would not be worth the trouble it causes them.”

  Stafford did want Sinapis’ professional opinion. He wanted that opinion to match his own. When it didn’t, his temper frayed. “What would some of the other soldiers here say if I asked them the same question?” he inquired, his voice holding a certain edge.

  Balthasar Sinapis looked him over. Stafford got the feeling he reminded the Atlantean officer of something nasty squashed on the bottom of his boot. After a moment, Sinapis answered, “Well, that is your prerogative, your Excellency. If you find someone who asserts that this is a practicable step, perhaps the army would be better served with a new commander.”

  If you don’t care for my judgment, I resign. That was what he meant, in plain English. Stafford might not have been sorry to see Sinapis go, had he had someone in mind to replace him. But accepting his resignation would no doubt cause a flaming row with Leland Newton. The Senate would wonder whether either one of them had the faintest idea of what he was doing. And the Senate might have good reason to wonder, too.

  Colonel Sinapis stood there calmly, waiting to hear what Stafford chose. Sinapis had the courage of his convictions. Stafford was uncomfortably aware that on this issue he lacked the courage of his own. “Well, I expect you know what you’re talking about,” he said gruffly.

  “One always wonders,” Sinapis said. “At the beginning, we thought this would be an easy campaign. . . .”

  He was generous to say we, not you. Stafford had thought it would be easy. The insurrectionists were more in earnest than he’d dreamt they could be. They als
o showed more in the way of courage and discipline than he’d dreamt they could. He associated those traits with white men, not with what he thought of as the dusky races. But Frederick Radcliff’s fighters had them.

  Stafford didn’t want to admit that, even to himself. He especially didn’t want to admit it any place where Leland Newton might hear. He knew what would happen then. Newton would start yapping about full freedom for natives of Africa and Terranova. Well, he could yap all he pleased. He wasn’t going to convince Stafford.

  That Stafford might convince himself was one more possibility he hadn’t imagined before he set out from New Hastings.

  While he was woolgathering, Sinapis said something he missed entirely. “I’m sorry, Colonel?” he said in faint embarrassment.

  “I said that we are lucky we made it here. We would have had to live off the already bare countryside or else commenced to starve if we had not,” Sinapis repeated. “If the insurrectionists were a little more energetic, they would have done everything they could to block our progress.”

  “Could they really have managed that?” Stafford asked.

  “I do not know, your Excellency,” the colonel replied. “But I tell you this: I am not altogether disappointed that we did not find out.”

  “Now that we have a sea connection to keep us supplied, how soon can we move against the enemy again?” Stafford asked.

  “Whenever you and your colleague agree that we should, we can,” Sinapis said. “Sooner or later, also, the roads and railroad line from the east will become passable again. They had better, anyhow, or this uprising is far more severe than we imagined, and certainly far more severe than any that came before it.”

  It was already the worst insurrection in Atlantean history. Stafford had no doubt of that. And it was worse than it might have been because the other Consul and the northern Senators had kept the national government from doing anything about it till almost too late.

  And now Stafford had to persuade his colleague that the army needed to go over to the offensive again. If the soldiers weren’t going to fight, why had they come at all?

  Leland Newton nodded. “Yes, I think we should move out, too,” he said. “We didn’t come west to defend New Marseille.”

  “I couldn’t have put that better myself.” Stafford sounded astonished.

  “We did not come to massacre Negroes and copperskins, either,” Newton warned. “We came to establish peace by whatever means prove necessary.”

  “If they are dead, they are likely to be peaceable,” Stafford said. “It’s the ones who haven’t gone to their eternal reward that you’ve got to watch out for. Sending them up before the celestial Judge strikes me as a good way to make sure they trouble Atlantis no more.”

  “Killing every Negro and copperskin in Atlantis might make Tacitus’ peace, but it would change the country forever,” Newton said. “It would also leave our good name a stench in the nostrils of every other nation in the world.”

  “Oh, nonsense. The Grand Turk massacres Armenians for the sport of it. The Czar murders Jews instead,” Stafford returned. Newton was about to ask him how he liked lumping the USA with the Ottoman Empire and Russia. But before he could, the other Consul continued, “Over in Terranova, they aren’t fussy about disposing of their copperskins whenever they need to. And England kills off as many people in India as it has to to keep the nabobs from causing trouble. Stafford paused, then murmured in Latin: “Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.”

  “‘Where they make a desert, they call it peace,’” Newton agreed. That was the Roman historian’s line, all right. He and Stafford might—did—disagree on a great many important things, but they came from the same educational tradition and argued from the same assumptions. Even disagreeing, they talked to each other, not past each other.

  “If we can’t get rid of the mudfaces and niggers, we might ship the lot of them back to Terranova and Africa,” Stafford said. “That would solve our problem, too.”

  “In your dreams, it would.” Newton ticked off points on his fingers: “Item—the Terranovans, as you pointed out yourself, have more copperskins than they want, and they don’t want ours. Item—shipping these people away would cost millions of eagles: money we haven’t got. Item—even if we had the money, we haven’t got the shipping. And item—these people are here in such numbers, they can breed faster than we can send them out of the country. This kind of talk you’re spouting has been going round for years. Nothing’s ever come of it, and nothing is likely to.”

  He waited for Stafford to get angry at him. Instead, the other Consul cocked an eyebrow and said, “Well, Leland, if you’re going to complain about every little thing . . .”

  Taken by surprise, Newton started to laugh. He wagged a finger at his colleague. “You got me that time, but I’ll pay you back.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt of that,” Stafford said. “In the meantime, though, what do you say we snuff out this insurrection if we can?”

  “If we can,” Newton agreed. “But if that should prove impracticable, we had better try something else.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Newton said. “Something—anything—designed to hold the United States of Atlantis together.”

  “I can imagine circumstances where it might be better if Atlantis came apart.” Before Newton could respond to that, his colleague held up a hand. “Let it be as you say: crush the insurrection first, and worry about everything else afterwards.”

  Newton didn’t think he’d said precisely that. On the other hand, he and Stafford rarely came so close to sharing the same view of anything. His glance slid toward the woods where the rebels lurked. Maybe the Atlantean army could smash them once for all. Maybe. Then why did he have so much trouble believing it?

  Yet another messenger found Frederick Radcliff. He was scratching a mosquito bite, which was one of the things you did when you made your headquarters deep in a swamp. He hadn’t been deep enough when the Atlanteans assailed him before, which meant they’d almost caught him. The obvious solution was to move where they would have a harder time getting at him. The trouble with the obvious solution was that it meant getting eaten alive.

  All of the messengers brought the same news: “They’re coming out!” It wasn’t what Frederick wanted to hear. He’d hoped the white Atlanteans would hole up in New Marseille and stop taking the war seriously.

  No matter what he’d hoped, that wouldn’t happen. He sighed. He might have known it wouldn’t. Come to that, he had known it wouldn’t. As soon as he touched off the uprising, his greatest fear was that the whites would put everything they had into crushing it. From their point of view, ruthlessness made perfect sense. Anything less than a crushed insurrection, and slavery was dead.

  What hadn’t occurred to him then was that slavery might be dead even if the whites crushed the insurrection. The men and women who fought under him—and the others, all over southern Atlantis, who’d flared into rebellion in his name even if not under his command—could be beaten, but so what? From this day forth, how could any master rely on his two-legged property to stay quiet? And if you couldn’t rely on your slaves to stay quiet, how were you going to get any work out of them?

  “What are we gonna do?” the messenger asked, bringing him back to the here and now.

  “Which road are they using?” Frederick asked.

  “Looks like they’re marching by the northeast one,” the other Negro said.

  Frederick swore under his breath. If the Atlantean soldiers had headed straight east again—if they’d started back along the same road they’d used to get to New Marseille—he still could have imagined they were giving up the fight and heading off to the Green Ridge Mountains again. But no. They intended to keep on with their campaign, all right. In fact . . .

  “Ain’t that where we got us most of our fighters?” the messenger said.

  “Yes,” Frederick said, and left it right there. He’d wanted to spread the insurrection towar
ds Avalon. The more of the southwest that fell under the influence of the Free Republic of Atlantis, the better, as far as he was concerned.

  None of the whites needed to be Julius Caesar—or, for that matter, Victor Radcliff—to see as much. And they would have taken prisoners, and squeezed them hard. Frederick had to assume they knew as much about his plans as any of his ordinary soldiers.

  He thought of something else: “Did they bring everybody out of New Marseille, or did they leave a garrison behind?”

  “More soldiers in there now than there was before the white folks marched in,” the messenger answered.

  That made Frederick swear again. He knew it would make Lorenzo swear even more ferociously. But now he could truthfully tell the copperskin that he’d thought about trying to take the town, and he’d had good reason to decide it wouldn’t work.

  He got to tell Lorenzo exactly that a couple of hours later. Lorenzo only nodded. “Too damned many snowballs stayed behind,” he said. If whites had rude names for their colored bondsmen, it was only natural that the folk who sprang from Terranova and Africa would return the disfavor.

  “That’s right,” Frederick said, wondering how Lorenzo had got the news. Messengers were supposed to bring it straight to Frederick himself, not to anyone else. Well, that was a worry for another day. The worry for today was all those white soldiers on the move.

  Lorenzo had to be thinking the same thing. “We can bush-whack ’em,” he said.

  “We can, and we’d better,” Frederick said. “If they go wherever they want and we don’t try to stop them, we’ve lost.”

  “I won’t try and tell you you’re wrong,” Lorenzo said.

  Frederick wasn’t sorry to leave his swampy fastness. The state of New Marseille was warm and sticky and bug-ridden from one end to the other. Having lived there for so many years, Frederick knew that all too well. But things weren’t quite so bad when he came out into drier country.