Liberating Atlantis (48 page)

And so they sat down together in the eatery attached to New Marseille’s second-best hotel, the Silver Oil Thrush. Foreigners, no doubt, would have found the name peculiar. Consul Stafford cared little for what foreigners thought. Oil thrushes had grown scarce, even here in the southwest, but he’d eaten them often enough to know how tasty they were.

Samuel, on the other hand, was a stringy old buzzard, his woolly hair frosted with gray. He must have been somebody’s butler, or something of the sort, before the insurrection: he spoke almost like an educated white man, with only a vanishing trace of a slave accent. Letting niggers and copperskins learn to read and write was a big mistake—Stafford had always thought so. It gave them ideas above their station.

Too late to worry about that now. “Tribune Radcliff and Marshal Lorenzo want to meet with you folks to end the war,” Samuel said. Off to one side of the table where he talked with the Consuls and Colonel Sinapis, a sketch artist took down their likenesses. Soon, a woodcut of the scene would grace some New Marseille newspaper.

“If they think we’ll recognize their crackbrained titles, they’d better think again,” Stafford snapped.

Samuel only shrugged. “Talk to them about that, your Excellency. Talk to me about talking to them.” His use of Stafford’s title of respect annoyed the Consul instead of mollifying him.

“If I had my way—” Stafford began.

“You’d whip me within an inch of my life. I know that, your Excellency,” Samuel broke in, with perfect accuracy. “But you don’t have your way here, not any more you don’t. Shall we talk instead?”

“Yes. Let’s.” That was Newton, not Stafford.

“I would still sooner fight it out,” Stafford said. Knowing he would get no support from the other Consul, he looked to Balthasar Sinapis instead. He got no support from the colonel, either. He feared he knew what that meant: Sinapis didn’t want the insurrectionists to humiliate him again. In a way, Stafford sympathized. In another way . . . “What good is having an army if you don’t dare use it?”

To his surprise, Sinapis answered him: “To keep someone else from using his army against you.”

“So that’s why the niggers aren’t in New Marseille, is it?” Stafford snarled.

“Yes. That is exactly why,” Sinapis said.

“And on account of we don’t want to come into New Marseille any old way,” Samuel said. “We don’t want to fight any more. We want peace. You gonna tell all the people in Atlantis you don’t want peace?”

You sneaky son of a bitch
, Stafford thought, watching the reporters scribble. Samuel knew how to play to the gallery—Frederick Radcliff must have understood what he was doing when he sent out the other Negro. Damn it, the people of Atlantis, or too many of them,
didn’t
want anybody telling them their leaders didn’t want peace.

“If you think the people of Atlantis—of the United States of Atlantis—will let the so-called Free Republic of Atlantis stand, you’d better think again,” Newton said. Stafford blinked, the way he did whenever he and the other Consul agreed about something.

Samuel only spread his pale-palmed hands. “I’m not the one to talk about that, either,” he said. “You’ve got to see what the Tribune and the Marshal have to say.”

Consul Newton nodded. He was willing to do that. Colonel Sinapis was also willing to do it, or at least resigned to the prospect. If Stafford said no, all the blame would land on him. There was probably enough to crush him.

If only . . . !
If only a lot of things
, he thought. They started with wondering why Victor Radcliff had to get a slave with child and went on from there. Too late to do anything about any of them now. Stafford was stuck with the world as it was.

He didn’t say yes. He couldn’t make himself do that. But he didn’t say no, no matter how much he wanted to.

 

Approaching the hamlet of Slug Hollow, Leland Newton wondered how it had got its name. The answer proved altogether mundane: it sat in a depression, and the trees thereabouts were full of cucumber slugs, some of them half as long as a man’s arm. The settlers had had the imagination of so many cherrystone clams, but they’d told the truth as they saw it.

No whites were left in the hamlet. Maybe they’d fled. Maybe they hadn’t had the chance. Newton didn’t ask—he didn’t want to know. Jeremiah Stafford did ask, pointedly. He made sure he did it where the reporters could hear him, too. Newton thought about teasing him for taking lessons from Samuel, but decided not to. He didn’t think his colleague would appreciate it.

When Stafford asked, Samuel only shrugged and spread his hands again. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “They were long gone by the time I came through here—that’s all I can tell you.”

“A likely story,” Stafford said. “How do you suppose so many buildings burned down? Lightning?”

“I don’t know,” Samuel repeated. “If I don’t know, I can’t tell you.”

“Would we find bones if we dug in the ruins?” Stafford asked.

“Maybe you would, your Excellency,” the Negro said. “You got to remember, though—a war went through here.”

Newton was ready to make allowances for that. Stafford didn’t seem to be, which surprised the other Consul very little: “It’s war when you do it, eh? But it’s nasty and villainous when we fight back.”

“You said it, your Excellency. I didn’t,” Samuel answered. Stafford sent him a murderous glare.

The Consuls and the soldiers they’d brought along camped west of the ruined Slug Hollow. Samuel and his smaller retinue camped east of the place. When Frederick and Lorenzo came down to join them, they would bring enough fighters to equalize the numbers.

Colonel Sinapis had a good-sized force within easy reach of Slug Hollow. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did. Leland Newton would have been amazed if the same weren’t true for the insurrectionists. If the talks failed—or maybe even if they succeeded—the war could start again any time.

Frederick Radcliff and Lorenzo walked into Slug Hollow two days after the men from New Marseille got there. The Negro and copperskin would have cut a fancier figure had they ridden. Maybe they didn’t care. Or maybe they didn’t ride. Why would they have learned while they were slaves?

Stafford greeted them with, “If you keep up this nonsense about the Free Republic of Atlantis, we have nothing to say to one another.”

“If you call everything that’s ours nonsense before we even start talking about it, maybe you ought to send in your soldiers again,” Lorenzo answered. “You want to settle things by fighting, I reckon we can do that.”

If Newton hadn’t got it for free, he would have paid a hundred eagles for a glimpse of Stafford’s face. The other Consul plainly
did
want to settle things by fighting. Just as plainly, he knew he couldn’t. The United States of Atlantis had ended up with egg on their face when they tried. No matter how much he despised the idea, he had to sit down and talk with the insurrectionists now. And he did despise the idea, and made only the barest effort to hide it.

Frederick Radcliff said, “If we can get what we need inside the United States of Atlantis, we don’t need to worry so much about the Free Republic. If we can’t . . . Well, that’s a different story.” He made hand-washing motions to show how different it was liable to be.

“What
do
you need?” Newton asked. “Can you put it into words for us?” If Radcliff couldn’t, the Consul feared the talks would end up going nowhere.

But the Negro leader didn’t hesitate. “You bet I can,” he said. “We want to be free. We don’t want anybody, no matter what color he is, to buy us and sell us any more. We want the law in Atlantis to forget about color, matter of fact. Whatever a white man can do, a Negro or a copperskin ought to be able to do. Whatever a white man gets in trouble for, one of us ought to get in trouble for, too—as much trouble, but no more.”

Consul Stafford seemed bound and determined to make himself as difficult as he could. “You want the right to miscegenate with white women!” he exclaimed.

“To do what?” Lorenzo asked.

“To screw ’em,” Frederick Radcliff explained, which wasn’t the whole answer, but which came close enough.

“Oh. That.” To Newton’s surprise, Lorenzo laughed out loud. “What makes you think we think white women are pretty enough to be worth screwing?” he asked Stafford. Again, Newton would have paid money to look at an expression he got to see for nothing.

“White folks always get hot and bothered about that,” Frederick said gravely. “They spent all this time screwin’ our women, so naturally they figure we got to pay ’em back the same way.”

Consul Stafford finally quit spluttering and gasping like a newly landed trout. “Will you have the infernal gall to claim you’ve all been chaste throughout this uprising? I hope not, by God, because I know better.”

“No, I don’t say that. You don’t like it so much when it happens to your womenfolk, do you, your Excellency?” Frederick Radcliff answered. “But I say this—put us under fair laws and we’ll live up to them. My woman’s about the same shade I am. We been together lots of years. I don’t want a white woman—I want her to be my legal wife. What’s so bad about that?”

“A lot of men from south of the Stour will tell you it’s the wickedest thing they ever heard,” Newton said.

“A lot of men from south of the Stour are damned fools,” Lorenzo said, and then, “Hell, it ain’t like we didn’t already know that.”

“If you provoke us, we
will
keep fighting,” Consul Stafford warned. Colonel Sinapis stirred, but he didn’t come right out and call the Consul from Cosquer a liar.

Can we go on fighting?
Newton wondered. He supposed it was possible. He didn’t think it would be easy or cheap or quick. What would the United States of Atlantis be like after a generation of nasty campaigning and ambushes? Would they be any kind of place he wanted to live? He didn’t think so. Would they be any kind of place where a Negro or copperskin
could
live? He also had his doubts about that.

“You don’t love us, and we don’t love you,” Frederick said. “Might be better if we went our own way in a chunk of this country.”

“A minute ago, you claimed you would follow our laws,” Stafford said. “If you make your own country out of ours, do you aim to pay for what you take away from us?”

Frederick rubbed his chin. “That might cause some trouble,” he admitted.

“Oh, maybe a little,” Stafford said. “For that matter, how do you propose to compensate all the slaveowners in the USA for having their property forcibly stolen from them?”

“You know what, your Excellency? That ain’t my worry,” Frederick Radcliff said.

“Why not?” Stafford pressed.

“On account of any man who’s been a slave will tell you slavery’s wrong to begin with,” the Negro answered. “Why should you get paid ’cause you can’t do now what you never should have started doing?”

“Isn’t that an interesting question?” Newton murmured.

“Shut up,” Stafford told him. He turned back to Frederick Radcliff. “Will you tell me slavery is illegal?”

“Not yet,” Frederick answered. “But it sure ought to be.”

“You’ll find plenty of people who disagree with you,” Stafford said.

“Damned few who’ve ever been slaves,” Lorenzo told him.

“This is what we’re here to talk about,” Newton said. “What we have now plainly isn’t working.” He waited for the other Consul to quarrel with him, but Stafford didn’t. Thus encouraged, if that was the word, he went on, “We want to see what we can work out that will leave almost everyone not too unhappy.”

This time, Jeremiah Stafford looked like nothing so much as a stray dog vomiting in the middle of the street. But Frederick Radcliff slowly nodded. If that wasn’t a politician’s nod, Consul Newton had never seen one. And if that was a politician’s nod . . . In that case, the Negro leader was—or at least might be—a man with whom it would be possible to deal.

Newton dared hope so.

“Almost everybody not too unhappy!” Lorenzo not only mocked the sentiment, he did a rotten job of imitating Leland Newton’s accent. To Frederick’s ear, the copperskin sounded like a man trying to talk around a mouthful of rocks.

“Have you got a better idea?” Frederick asked. “What are we supposed to do if we can’t find a bargain the white folks will live with?”

“What we ought to do is kill the Consuls and that damned foreign colonel,” Lorenzo said. “After that, they’d all thrash like a pullet that just met the chopper.” With the flat of his hand, he mimed a hatchet coming down on a skinny neck. Then he did an alarmingly accurate impression of a chicken that had just lost its head.

But Frederick held up both hands in horror. “They would act like that—for a little while. Then they’d decide they could never trust us again, even a tiny bit, and they’d hunt us down no matter how long it took or what it cost.”

“Let ’em try, and good luck to ’em,” Lorenzo said.

“Do you
want
to live like a hunted animal the rest of your days?” Frederick asked. “If you do, you found the fastest way to get what you want.”

“Me? I want to live like the fancy masters wish they could,” Lorenzo said. “I want to have servants fan me with those big old feathers—”

“Ostrich plumes,” Frederick put in. Sure enough, such fans were in great demand among the richer plantation owners. Or they had been, till the people who would have done the fanning decided they didn’t care for the work.

“Yeah. Them,” Lorenzo agreed. “And I want pretty girls to drop grapes in my mouth whenever I get hungry, or maybe thirsty.”

Frederick didn’t know whether to laugh or to be appalled. “How do you propose to get that without turning into a master yourself?”

“Maybe we could make the Consuls slaves instead of killing ’em.” Lorenzo was full of ideas today. Not necessarily good ideas, but ideas all the same.

“And where would you get the pretty girls?” Frederick asked, with the air of a man humoring a lunatic.