Liberating Atlantis (19 page)

“Meaning what exactly?” Stafford’s voice was dry.

“You really mean what you say,” the other Consul blurted.

“I should hope so. I am in the habit of it. Anyone looking at my career would be hard-pressed to doubt it. If you do, I hope I may take the liberty of asking why,” Stafford said.

He was surprised in turn when his colleague actually blushed. “I always assumed you were in the habit of saying what your constituents wanted to hear, as most politicians are,” Newton said. “That any man of sense could believe some of the things you have said . . .”

“I am going to say something now that you had best believe: I find your views every bit as repugnant as you find mine. Note, however, that I do not do you the discourtesy of thinking you hypocritical,” Stafford said. “I think you are every bit as misguided as you declare yourself to be.”

“Thank you . . . I suppose,” Newton said. “Since you then prefer to be judged a knave rather than a fool—”

“No,” Stafford broke in sharply. “Someone who thinks you are wrong is not a knave on account of that. He is only someone who thinks you are wrong. Recognizing the difference—not necessarily liking it, but recognizing it—is important.”

“Will you tell me you do not think me a knave?” Newton demanded.

Jeremiah Stafford hesitated before answering, which he seldom did. “Personally? No. You have the courage of your convictions,” he said at last. “In what you are doing to my section of Atlantis, the effect, intentional or not, is knavish.”

“This is my view of your effect on Atlantis as a whole,” Consul Newton said.

“Why not say, of slavery’s effect? That is what you mean, eh?”

“No. Slavery is altogether knavish, while you are not. Yet you support the infamy nonetheless. Can you not see that this makes you worse, not better?”

Stafford started to tell him he did not find slavery infamous. To Stafford, true infamy was the idea that Negroes and copperskins could presume to be equals. But Consul Newton didn’t wait for explanation. Like a banderillero in a bullfight down in Gernika (something Consul Stafford did find infamous, but also something he lacked the power to root out), Leland Newton planted a barb and walked away before his victim could gore him on account of it.

 

Senator Hiram Radcliffe came from the state of Penzance, north of Croydon. As the English Penzance, its namesake, lay close by Land’s End, so the Atlantean town that gave the state its name wasn’t far from North Cape, where ocean finally won the battle against land. Penzance held hardly any copperskins or Negroes. Penzance didn’t hold all that many whites, and the ones it did hold were of an uncommonly independent streak. To say they didn’t approve of chattel slavery would have been putting it mildly.

And so Consul Newton thought he would be glad to see Senator Radcliffe. He had no idea from which branch of the founding clan the Senator sprang; only a genealogist could keep them all straight. That didn’t matter, anyway.

Whichever branch Hiram Radcliffe sprang from, he looked nothing like the most famous modern member. Where Victor Radcliff had been tall and lean, his distant cousin had a short, well-upholstered frame and some of the most ornate whiskers the Consul had ever seen: his muttonchops grew into his mustache, but he shaved his chin—or rather, chins.

“Consul, what do you propose to do about the slave rising?” Senator Radcliffe asked, at the same time sending up clouds of pungent smoke from his pipe.

“Why, just what I have been doing,” Newton answered. “I propose to keep the Atlantean government from pulling the southern states’ chestnuts out of the fire for them.” The image had traveled across the sea from England. The only chestnuts growing in Atlantis were a few ornamentals, likewise imported. The land had none native to it, nor any other broad-leafed trees.

More smoke came up from Radcliffe’s pipe. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and then, amplifying, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Afraid of?” Leland Newton didn’t dig a finger into his ear to try to make it work better, but he caught himself barely in time to stop the motion. “Why do you say that?”

“On account of it’s true,” Radcliffe answered. “Yes, the slaves have their grievances. Lord knows I understand that. But it’s still a damned uprising, Consul. They’re burning and ravishing and killing. New Marseille doesn’t seem able to put ’em down, and brush-fires are breaking out in some of the other southern states.”

“That is the point of the business, is it not?” Newton said. “The rebels are being as moderate as their circumstances permit. Even accounts from their foes—the only accounts we have, remember—admit as much. They seem to aim to set up a colored republic of their own.”

“And what will they do with the white folks caught inside it?” Radcliffe asked. “Treat them the way they’ve been treated themselves, for all these years? That’s how it looks right now.”

“What if it is?” Consul Newton returned. “Can you deny the justice in such a turn of fate?”

“You can’t make your own cause just by murdering or tormenting folks on the other side.”

“Even when they’ve been doing the same to you since time out of mind?”

“Even then,” Hiram Radcliffe said stubbornly. “One reason I want a national army down there is to get between the rebels and the militias trying to do unto them. If the uprising stops, maybe we can get around to talking sensibly about what made it start in the first place.”

“Good luck! Meaning no disrespect, sir, but you will need it,” Newton said. “Expecting a southern white to talk sensibly about slavery is like expecting the sun to rise in the west. You may if you so desire, but you will be doomed to disappointment.”

“D’you suppose the copperskins and Negroes are any more likely to?” Radcliffe said. “Seems to me they’re just the other side of the same coin.”

“Would you not say they have two or three hundred years’ worth of pent-up spleen to vent?” Newton asked.

“I would. I would indeed. But if they keep venting it, they will make the white southerners decide the only way to stop them is to kill them all. And if they set about it, how do you propose to stop ’em?”

“They would do no such monstrous thing!” Newton exclaimed. But then he remembered his conversation with Consul Stafford. How monstrous would disposing of Negroes and copperskins seem to a man like that? Monstrous enough to keep him from trying it? Newton wished he could think so.

His face must have shown what was going through his mind, because Senator Radcliffe said, “Now you see what I’m driving at.”

“Well, maybe I do,” Newton said. “But keeping an army like that on anything close to an even keel won’t be easy. You know the law as well as I do: one Consul commands one day, the other the next. Against a foreign foe, this is no great disadvantage, since both men would naturally work toward the same end. But where one aims to push while the other wants to pull . . .”

“Consul, if a Croydon man can’t slicker some poor slob from Cosquer, he isn’t worth the paper he’s printed on,” Hiram Radcliffe declared.

“Your confidence flatters me,” Newton said dryly.

“It had better, your Excellency, on account of that’s what I had in mind,” the Senator from Penzance replied, not a bit abashed. “But you need to think about this whole business some more, and I’m not the only one who figures you do.”

“I . . . see. And how large is your cabal?” Leland Newton’s tone remained dry, which didn’t mean he didn’t mean the question. What kind of plotting had been going on behind his back?

“Large enough, by God,” Radcliffe said, which conveyed strength without informing: no doubt exactly the effect he had in mind. He coughed a couple of times. “Large enough so that, if we have to vote with the southerners to get an army sent down there, the size of the majority on the resolution will make your eyes pop.”

“It can be as big as a honker, for all I care,” Consul Newton answered, doing his best not to show how much the warning—the threat?—shook him. Hiram Radcliffe was, or had been, on his side. Still trying to seem unconcerned, he went on, “The resolution can be unanimous, for all I care. If I disagree with it, it will not pass.”

“You know what the history books say about Consuls who forbid measures just for the sake of forbidding,” Radcliffe warned.

Newton did know. There had been a couple of Consuls like that in the early days of the United States of Atlantis. The horrible bad example they offered dissuaded later Atlantean leaders from imitating them. All the same, Newton said, “Let history judge me. I will do what I think is right.”

“What’s wrong with being able to ride down a road without worrying about whether you’ll get robbed or murdered before you get where you’re going?” Radcliffe asked.

“If since time out of mind you have been robbing and murdering the people who have finally risen in arms against you, maybe you deserve to worry,” Newton said.

“Maybe.” By the way Hiram Radcliffe said the word, he didn’t believe it for a minute. He took the pipe out of his mouth to lick his lips. “I hate to say it, Consul, but you’d better worry that people don’t finally rise in arms against you.”

Newton had been in politics for many years. He didn’t miss much. And he didn’t miss the key phrase here. “In arms?” he echoed quietly.

Senator Radcliffe looked unhappy—he looked most unhappy—but he nodded. “In arms,” he repeated.

“Well.” Leland Newton made a steeple of his fingertips. “I never looked to be threatened with assassination—never so politely, anyhow.” In the hurly-burly of the Senate chamber, anything could happen. But this wasn’t like that. This spoke of dangers in a back alley in the middle of the night, or maybe of poisonous mushrooms garnishing a plate of boiled pork.

“I am not threatening you, Consul. I am trying to warn you,” the Senator from Penzance said. “If you keep on with it, more and more people will want to put you out of the way. Surely you can see that?” He sounded as if he was pleading.

“I might have expected something like this from Senator Bainbridge or some other froth-at-the-mouth southerner,” Newton said bitterly. “But . . .
Et tu, Hiram?
”

“
Et ego
,” Radcliffe answered, proving he remembered at least some of the Latin he’d had drilled into him as a schoolboy. “Sometimes you need to have your friends tell you, because you don’t take your foes seriously enough. We’ve got to do
something
down there, Leland. Doing nothing isn’t enough any more.”

“So you say.”

Hiram Radcliffe nodded. “So I say.” He heaved his bulk up from the chair in front of Newton’s desk. “And now I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“Does Consul Stafford know you came here?” Newton asked.

“Not yet,” Radcliffe said. “I hope I don’t have to tell him. And if you publish abroad what’s personal, private business I will damn you as a liar from here to Avalon.”

“I assumed that,” Newton said. Photographers had started capturing light. If only there were some way to capture sound as well!

“Figured you did, but even so . . . Good day to you, your Excellency.” Radcliffe lumbered out of the office. Newton fought down the impulse to speed him on his way with a good kick in the breeches.

IX

“Wait.” Sitting up there on the dais in front of the Conscript Fathers of Atlantis, Consul Jeremiah Stafford had trouble believing what his colleague had just said. “Repeat that, if you would be so kind.”

He wasn’t the only one to doubt his hearing, either. Half the Senators were staring at Leland Newton as if he’d just disappeared an elephant right before their eyes. One fellow dropped his glasses. Jaws dropped on both sides of the aisle in the Senate House, but especially among the men who came from south of the Stour.

Consul Newton turned to Stafford with an ironic smile. “You heard me correctly, sir,” he said. “I spoke, and I shall continue to speak, in favor of using an Atlantean army to interpose itself between the insurrectionists and the New Marseille militia—and, if necessary, between the insurrectionists and the militias belonging to the other southern states.”

A burst of applause echoed from the ceiling of the Senate House. Some of it, again, came from southern men. But others—firebrands like Radcliffe of Penzance—also joined in the cheering. That they did roused Stafford’s ever-vigilant suspicions.

“Wait,” he said again. “What precisely do you mean when you say you want to interpose an Atlantean army down there?”

“I mean what I say: neither more no less,” Newton answered blandly. “As you do, sir, I consider that an admirable habit. In my opinion, we would be better off if more persons in political positions followed our example.”

“We would also be better off if fewer persons in political positions were as exasperating as you make a point of being,” Stafford said.

His colleague gave him a seated bow. “I am your servant, sir.”

Stafford ignored that. It wasn’t easy, but he managed. “In a game of chess, for instance, you may interpose a bishop between your king and your opponent’s castle.”

Newton beamed at him. “Just so! You see? You understand perfectly! So why were you so troubled a moment ago?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Stafford answered. “Because an interposed piece does not necessarily capture the one that is causing the difficulty.”

Leland Newton stopped beaming. Consul Stafford got the idea that his colleague hadn’t expected him to realize that quite so fast. Croydon men commonly thought no one was clever except their own kind. Comprehension took longer to dawn out on the Senate floor than it did inside Stafford’s mind—which might have meant that Consul Newton had a point.

In case any of the Conscript Fathers missed anything, Stafford made it—he hoped—unmistakably clear: “You want to put the national army between the niggers and the honest white men now fighting them. You have not said one word about using the national army to fight them, however. Why is that, if I may enquire?”