Liberating Atlantis (38 page)

“I hear the good colonel wanted to load you into a cannon and fire you at the insurrectionists,” Consul Newton remarked.

“No such thing!” Stafford said, which was true—not that truth had ever outrun a rumor. With such dignity as he could muster, the Consul went on, “I keep trying to spur him to more activity against them.”

“From what folks are saying, you keep trying to get yourself killed,” his colleague observed.

“If you wade through everything folks are saying, you’ll need to hold your nose and take a bath before you reach down to the truth,” Stafford said. “The smell will tell you what you’re wading in, too.”

“You didn’t challenge him to a duel, then?”

“What? Yes, of course I did. I might have won, too.”

Newton’s raised eyebrows said everything that needed saying about how likely he thought that was. And chances were he had a point, too; Colonel Sinapis was bound to get more pistol practice than Stafford did, and to have got more for many years. If Stafford was to win the duel, he would need luck on his side. Sinapis would need only routine competence. That, he had.

“The idea, you know, is to work
with
the colonel,” Newton said. “If you make him hate you, you won’t have much luck with that.”

“He’s a soldier. Soldiers do what you tell them to do,” Stafford growled. But he knew you caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. There was a difference between obeying orders from a sense of duty and obeying them because you really wanted to. The latter got good results. The former . . .

Again, the other Consul needed no words to let Stafford know what he was thinking. “We
are
gaining ground against the insurrectionists, you know,” Newton said, turning the subject.

“We’re in deeper, anyhow,” Stafford answered. “I’m not so sure about gaining ground. What they do to the wagon trains coming up from New Marseille . . .” He angrily shook his head. “They have no business doing such things, God damn them to the blackest pits of hell.”

Leland Newton smiled thinly. “I never thought I’d learn how tasty frog-and-snail stew could be,” he said.

“I never thought I would have to find out,” Stafford said. “We were guarding the wagon trains well for a while, but things have slipped again.”

“If you put everything you have into going forward, doing anything else with your soldiers is going to slip,” Newton pointed out. “Even with the militiamen along, we’re stretched too thin for that not to happen.”

Stafford grunted and turned away, almost as rudely as Colonel Sinapis had turned away from him. Doing anything else would have meant admitting some of the army’s failures were his own fault, and he was damned if he would. Newton didn’t challenge him to a duel, although no regulations (except the laws of the United States of Atlantis, which a gentleman could ignore if he chose) prevented one Consul from meeting the other on the field of honor.

Newton’s voice pursued him: “Don’t you think we’d be better off talking with the insurrectionists and seeing if there isn’t some way we might all live together peacefully? This is the only home any of us have, you know.”

That made Stafford turn back. “We had been living together peacefully for many years, under a system that assigned everyone his proper place—”

“From a white man’s perspective,” Newton broke in. “From a Negro’s or a copperskin’s, maybe not. Easier to be impressed, I daresay, if you’re doing the buying and selling than if you’re bought and sold.”

“You sound like
you’re
selling nigger equality, Newton,” Stafford said. “You may huckster as much as you please, but I’m here to tell you I’m not buying.”

“Oh, I can see that,” the other Consul answered. “Better to let Atlantis tear itself to pieces than to change one iota of the way we do things. Iota . . . That goes all the way back to the theological controversies of the fourth century, you know: the difference between
homo-ousios
, of the same nature, and
homoi-ousios
, of like nature. One little letter, and plenty of blood spilled over it. A few hundred years from now, will our quarrels seem as foolish?”

“No,” Stafford said, and then, “It would, no doubt, be pointless to remind you that our Lord accepted the idea of slavery.”

By Newton’s face, it would indeed. He credited the parts of the Bible that pleased him and ignored the rest. Stafford didn’t pause to wonder whether he did the same thing himself.

XVII

None of the fifteen or so prisoners Atlantean troops had taken in their latest skirmish with the insurrectionists seemed happy with his fate. The blacks and copperskins were alive, but hardly convinced they would stay that way for long. Maybe they’d heard the white soldiers weren’t hanging captured enemy fighters, but they plainly had trouble believing it.

Surveying them, Leland Newton saw three who looked even more miserable than the rest. Two were copperskins, the other a Negro. Only one of them wore a skirt; the other two had on baggy homespun trousers like their menfolk. But, no matter what they wore, they were all of them women.

“Taken in arms with the men?” Newton asked the sergeant in charge of the soldiers guarding the prisoners.

“Sure as hell were, uh, your Excellency.” The underofficer pointed to the black woman. “That there bitch damn near—
damn
near—blew me a new asshole before Paddy Molloy jumped on her while she was reloading. She fought him, too, till he clouted her a good one.”

“May I talk to her?”

One of the sergeant’s gingery eyebrows jumped. “You’re the Consul, sir. Seems to me you can do any old God-damned thing you please.”

Only proves you’ve never been Consul
, Newton thought. But he didn’t waste time explaining to the man with three stripes on the sleeve of his sweat-stained gray tunic. Instead, Newton stepped past him and walked up to the captured insurrectionist. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

By the way she looked at him—looked through him, really—he might have been calling to her from a mile beyond the moon. When she answered, “Elizabeth,” her voice seemed to come from at least that far away.

Newton pushed ahead anyhow: “Is it true, what the sergeant said? Did you fight against our soldiers, the same way a man would have?”

“Reckon I did.” She regained a little spirit as she added, “Might still be doin’ it, too, ’cept the fuckin’ mick who grabbed me was too damn’ big to whup.” She couldn’t have stood more than five feet two. A knot on the side of her jaw said Paddy Molloy
had
clouted her a good one.

“Have they treated you the same as the men they took?” Newton asked.

Elizabeth’s first startled glance went to the two female copperskins who’d been captured with her. Then her eyes swung back to Consul Newton. He couldn’t have said why, but her gaze made him feel like an idiot. That must have been what she thought, too, because she said, “You ain’t the brightest candle in the box, is you?”

“What do you mean?” Newton didn’t think he’d risen to the highest rank in Atlantis by being stupid.

Elizabeth did, though. As if to a half-wit, she explained, “They don’t throw the men down on the ground and hold their legs apart and screw ’em eight or ten or twenty times. You may be white devils, but I don’t reckon you’s cornholin’ devils.”

“They did
that
to you? To all three of you? Molested you? Violated you?” The Consul heard his own horror.

Matter-of-factly, the captured female fighter nodded. “Chance I took. I knew that when I asked the menfolk to learn me to shoot. Didn’t reckon I’d get caught, though.” Her grimace declared she wished she hadn’t. “ ’ Sides, they liable to give me the clap or the pox.”

Newton hardly noticed that. He stormed back to the white sergeant. “Did you and your troops take unfair advantage of those women?” he thundered, as full of righteous wrath as Jehovah watching the Children of Israel bow down before the Golden Calf.

“Unfair? Don’t look that way to me, sir.” The sergeant seemed to think Newton was an idiot, too. Like Elizabeth, he wasn’t shy about telling him why: “Jesus Christ, they were doing their damnedest to murder the lot of us! Were we supposed to kiss ’em on the cheek and invite ’em to a waltz, like?”

“No, but you weren’t supposed to, to rape them, either!” Newton had to fight to get the dreadful word out.

“Chance they take if they fire at us.” The underofficer and Elizabeth used the same brutal logic.

Seeing he would get no satisfaction—under the circumstances, perhaps not the perfect word—there, Newton stormed off to talk to a captain. The young officer only shrugged. “What do you expect from men who find women in arms against them, your Excellency?”

“Civilized behavior?” Newton suggested.

Sarcasm rolled off the captain’s back. “War is not a civilized business,” he said.

“It has its rules and customs. On the whole, the insurrectionists have lived up to them.”

“Well, what do you want me to do about it? Put ’em up on charges?” the captain asked. That was exactly what Newton wanted, but the younger man’s laughter told him he wouldn’t get it—not here, anyhow.

Fuming, he stomped away to talk to Colonel Sinapis. The colonel had given Consul Stafford a hard time, so Newton assumed
he
would find him reasonable. He didn’t. Sinapis said, “The soldiers took the women after the women fought against them?”

“That’s right,” Newton said. “It’s disgraceful. It’s barbaric. It’s—”

“It is to be expected,” Sinapis interrupted. “Officers may be gentlemen. Your regulations say they are. So do the ones in most of the kingdoms of Europe. Perhaps that makes it so. But soldiers? My dear fellow! The Duke of Wellington, a very fine commander even if he is an Englishman, calls them the scum of the earth. Believe me, your Excellency, he knows what he is talking about, too.”

“All the more reason to punish them harshly when they do something this outrageous!” Newton exclaimed.

“Outrageous?” Sinapis tossed his head, as he often did where a native Atlantean would have shaken it. “I think not. This is revenge. What would
you
do if a woman tried to shoot you?”

“Not that, I hope,” Newton answered.

Sinapis studied him. The colonel’s eyes lingered—insultingly long?—on his crotch. At last, Sinapis said, “It could be that you would not. But a great many men
would
, and I see no point to punishing them for it. That would cause the army more problems than it would solve.”

“What if the women they ravished were white?” the Consul from Croydon demanded.

“Violating women for the sport of it . . . No good officer can allow that. If white women had tried to kill our troops in combat, though . . . That would be the women’s lookout, and their misfortune,” Sinapis said.

He was consistent, anyhow—if he was telling the truth. If he wasn’t, his face didn’t know about it . . . which, if he was any kind of card player, meant nothing. “I had hoped for more cooperation from you, Colonel,” Newton said reproachfully.

“I had hoped for more sense from you, your Excellency,” Sinapis replied. “We do not always get what we hope for, though, do we?”

“Evidently not,” Newton said. “Please make sure, however, that your soldiers do not molest these women again.”

“Now that the heat of battle has cooled, I believe I can do that. Very well, your Excellency.” Sinapis delivered a precise salute.

“And please issue orders that other women taken prisoner in combat are not to be violated,” Newton continued.

The colonel’s mouth twisted under the eaves of his drooping mustache. “I dislike giving orders sure to be ignored. It weakens discipline, which is the last thing any army needs.”

“If you issue them strongly enough, the men will follow them,” Newton said.

“You have never been a soldier. You have never tried to lead soldiers. This is as plain as the nose on your face—as plain as the nose on my face, even.” Sinapis stroked his formidable proboscis. “I am very sorry, but issuing those orders is a waste of time.”

Newton’s voice went hard and flat: “Do it anyway.”

“Yes, your Excellency.” By contrast, Sinapis’ voice held no expression at all. This time, his salute seemed more reproachful than anything else. Leland Newton didn’t care. Some things he would not put up with, and this was one of them. Whether the orders really would do any good . . . he preferred not to think about.

 

A copperskin brought a hatchet down on a flapjack turtle’s neck. Pouring blood, the turtle went into its death spasm. The head flew some distance from the body. Its fearsome jaws opened and closed, opened and closed. No one got anywhere near it. Like a snake’s, it could bite for some time after being detached. And those jaws could easily take off a finger.

To white folks, flapjack turtle was something you ate when you couldn’t get beef or pork or mutton or poultry. As a house slave, Frederick Radcliff had something of the same attitude. Field hands eked out the rations their masters gave them with anything they could get their hands on.

“I’ll take this to the girls now,” the copperskin said with a grin, picking up the turtle’s carcass. The legs still flailed feebly; they didn’t want to believe the beast was dead.

“Don’t let them hear you call them that, Joaquin,” Frederick said. “You won’t like what happens if they do.”

“I ain’t afraid of them.” Joaquin swaggered off.

“Any man who ain’t afraid of women—he ain’t as smart as he ought to be,” Frederick remarked to Lorenzo.

“Yeah, there is that.” Lorenzo’s chuckle sounded distinctly wry. “Always knew they could fight—any fella ever had anything to do with ’em knows that. But I never reckoned they could fight like this, with guns and everything.”

“Well, neither did I,” Frederick said. “Don’t suppose the white soldiers reckoned they could, either.”

“Last surprise some of those bastards ever got,” Lorenzo said. “Good thing, too.”

“Oh, sure,” Frederick agreed. “Kind of tough on the gals the whites catch, though.”