Liberating Atlantis (57 page)

“I believe you,” Frederick replied. “I wouldn’t have a few months ago, but I do now.”

“That’s all right. I wouldn’t have meant it a few months ago,” Stafford said. “Things change. Either you change with them—or you don’t, and they roll over you. I don’t like that, Lord knows, but it’s the only game in town.” No, he didn’t like it one bit, which, as he’d said, mattered not even a cent’s worth.

XXV

Frederick Radcliff thought he knew everything there was to know about living in a warm, muggy climate. As soon as he got off his steamship—another first—and rode inland from St. Augustine, he realized he was an amateur. Sweat sprang out on his skin. But it didn’t cool him, because it didn’t—it couldn’t—evaporate. It just clung, leaving him hot and wet.

One of the men in the cavalry escort the national government had given him wore spectacles. The trooper took them off and polished them with a rag, then set them back on his nose. Ten minutes later, he did it again. “God-damned things keep steaming up,” he grumbled.

The ground was flat and swampy. Frederick saw shades of green he’d never imagined before. Ferns grew everywhere. They even sprouted from the sides of brick walls. Herons—blue and gray and white, some of them almost as tall as a man—stood in shallow pools. Every so often, one of those bayonet beaks would plunge into the water. A wriggling fish or frog or salamander would vanish at a gulp.

Vultures spiraling down out of the sky drew Frederick’s notice to carrion before his nose caught the sickly-sweet reek. The men from his escort smelled it about the same time he did. “Something’s dead,” one of them said.

“Something big,” added the trooper with the eyeglasses. He tried to wipe the condensation off them one more time. By the way he swore under his breath as he stuffed the rag back into his tunic pocket, he wasn’t having much luck.

They rode around a corner, and then all reined in at once. A corpse hung from the branches of a cypress tree. Frederick thought it was a Negro’s, but it might have been a copperskin’s. Not easy to be sure: it was bloated and blackened, and the carrion birds had already been at it. A turkey vulture perched on the branch, not far from where the noose was tied. It sent the travelers a beady jet stare.

So battered was the body that it might even have been a white man’s, hanged by the insurrectionists. It might have been, but it wasn’t: a placard tied to it warned SLAVES STAY QUIET. They were still in country white men controlled, then.

“How much longer till we get to where the slaves have kicked off the traces?” Frederick asked.

“Should be pretty soon,” a cavalryman answered. “When they start shooting at us from ambush, that’s a pretty good sign.”

Was it? Frederick wasn’t so sure. Rebellious slaves might want to fire at government soldiers, yes. But disgruntled white men could also want to shoot at a Negro who’d already led a much-too-successful uprising.

You knew that before you came down here
, Frederick reminded himself. And so he had, but the knowledge hadn’t seemed so immediate in New Hastings. What would keep a white man from hiding in the ferns near that tree and potting the fellow who’d helped turn his world inside out?

The stink would, you fool
. Frederick wouldn’t have wanted to wait in ambush here. Maybe one of the vultures would have, but he couldn’t think of anyone else who was likely to.

Then they rode past the hanged man. With the way the breeze was blowing, that took the stench away. Frederick started looking apprehensively at every clump of ferns or bushes, every stand of squat barrel trees, every fence and slave cabin. If somebody wanted to take a shot at him, it would be easy, guards or no guards.

Before long, the death reek returned. They’d passed from land the whites controlled into country the rebels held. Here and there, animals lay bloating in the fields. There were only a few of those, though. Frederick understood why: most of the beasts would have been butchered and eaten. But he wouldn’t have seen any in a peaceful countryside. Human bodies lay in the fields, too. His nose told him many more people had died somewhere out of sight.

Slave cabins stood empty, some with doors yawning open. So did big houses, the ones that hadn’t burned. Many of the planters’ houses had had their windows smashed, so that they stared out at the muddy road like so many skulls with big, black, blind eye sockets.

In rebel country, several cavalrymen held up white flags of truce. Frederick wondered how much good they would do—and whether they would do any. Then he decided they had to do some. Without them, he was sure his party already would have been attacked.

“How do we get them to come out and to us talk?” asked the lieutenant who commanded his guards. Maximilian Braun’s side whiskers had gray in them; he spoke with a heavy German accent—
like a Dutchman
, most Atlanteans would have said. Like Colonel Sinapis and a good many others, he’d washed up on these shores because of some European political upheaval. He would be grayer yet before he got a captain’s third small star on either side of his collar.

One thing Frederick was sure of—like most Europeans, Braun had no use for slavery. “Maybe we should stop and stay in one place a while,” the Negro said.

“Why not?” Braun said. “That will them a better chance give to surround us and wipe us out.” No matter what he thought about slavery, he had an acute sense of self-preservation. Well, who didn’t?

But the officer gave the necessary orders. His men set about making camp. They ran up a large Atlantean flag. The scarlet red-crested eagle’s head on dark blue had never meant much to Frederick—he was
in
Atlantis, but not
of
it. Now that might change. He hoped it would.

Along with the national flag, the soldiers also went on flying a large flag of truce. Frederick hoped it would do some good. If it didn’t . . . If it didn’t, he was liable to discover in short order that Lieutenant Braun hadn’t been joking. The immigrant didn’t sound as if he had been.

Braun set out sentries at the cardinal points of the compass. The rest of the troopers tended to their horses. Having watched cavalrymen before, Frederick knew they worried about the mounts ahead of themselves. As soon as the animals were brushed and fed and watered, the troopers sat or squatted on the ground and started shooting dice. One of them glanced up at Frederick. “Want to get into the game?” he asked, sounding friendlier than white men commonly did.

Frederick needed only a heartbeat to figure out why: the trooper saw him as a victim to be fleeced—or, more likely, skinned. It wasn’t as if Frederick had never made the little ivory cubes spin himself. But . . . “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got me a rule against gambling with the other fella’s dice.”

“You ain’t so dumb,” the trooper said, not without regret. “Too bad. I was kinda hopin’ you were.” He eyed the Negro in a different way. “You really think you can get these rebels to behave?”

“I’m here to try,” Frederick answered.

“Sure, sure.” The cavalryman nodded as he rattled the dice in his right hand. “But what are the odds?” He threw the dice. “Seven!” he said happily, and scooped up the money on the ground.

What
were
the odds? Frederick shrugged. “We’ll just have to find out, that’s all.”

“Wonderful,” the trooper said. “We’re liable to find out they’d sooner kill us than talk to us. What do we do then?”

“Try and fight them. Try and stay alive,” Frederick replied. He could have given the answer in one word, but he preferred not to say that word out loud.
Die
. Yes, they could easily do that.

 

Leland Newton wished he were down in Gernika. He couldn’t remember the last time such a longing had overtaken him. He didn’t think such a longing had ever overtaken him before, come to that. Ever since Atlantis acquired it from Spain, the new state had drowsed under the subtropical son. If its Senators were more impassioned about slavery than men from other states south of the Stour, it didn’t send many of them to New Hastings: its free population was small. Newton understood that; he wouldn’t have cared to make his home in the midst of such humid heat, either.

Ten or twelve years earlier, a great cyclone had chewed across Gernika’s southern peninsula. Not all the damage from it was repaired, even yet. Nothing happened fast down in Gernika. Up till now, that might as well have been a law of nature.

But times changed. If that wasn’t a motto for the bustling, driving nineteenth century, Newton didn’t know what would be. When he was a boy, steam engines had been rare, expensive novelties. Now steamships plied the seven seas. Railroads with steam-driven locomotives tied the land down under an ever-tightening web of iron. And another web, this one of copper wires almost as thin and insubstantial as gossamer, brought news from one place to another as soon as it happened. Who at the turn of the century would have dreamt of any of that?

Who at any time in all the prior history of the world would have dreamt of change fast enough to be visible in one man’s lifetime? No one. Now the nineteenth century, and the men of the nineteenth century, had to try to cope with it.

Some tried to cope by denying that that change was real. Slavery’s diehard defenders seemed to Newton to be such men. But the change was there whether they liked it or not. Even a sensible conservative like Jeremiah Stafford could see as much. That he could finally see as much went a long way toward making him sensible in Newton’s eyes.

And some tried to push change along even faster than Newton thought it ought to go. He was pretty sure Stafford and he could eventually get the Slug Hollow agreement through the Senate. The slaves in Gernika didn’t want to wait. They’d had enough of waiting at white men’s orders for white men’s profit. Newton didn’t know what they aimed to do on their own. He suspected they didn’t, either. But it would be of their choosing, which was what they wanted.

If Frederick Radcliff could calm them down and persuade them to wait, the prestige he gained in so doing would surely help the Slug Hollow accord. According to Stafford, that was Frederick’s calculation. But if things didn’t go the way the Negro hoped, the cost was unlikely to remain only political. Chances were Frederick wouldn’t come back to New Hastings again.

He had to know it, too—know it better than anyone. But he’d gone all the same. Some whites still insisted on calling the insurrectionist slaves a pack of cowards. Newton hadn’t believed that before he saw his first battlefield. In all the fights against the Negroes and copperskins, he hadn’t seen them perform any less bravely than their white foes. And going forward into the face of what was much too likely to be death in Gernika took a courage of its own.

So Leland Newton thought, at any rate. Several Senators from south of the Stour saw things differently, and weren’t shy about saying so on the Senate floor. “The sooner that Radcliff nigger’s disposed of, the better off everyone will be,” declared a diehard slaveholder from Nouveau Redon.

“By ‘everyone,’ no doubt, the honorable gentleman means the entire population of Gernika except for whites, copperskins, and Negroes,” Newton observed dryly.

“Yes. I mean, no!” Too late, the Conscript Father realized he’d stuck his foot in it. Not only did Consul Newton mock him from the dais, but jeers rose on the floor both from northern Senators and also from men who would normally have supported him. With a baleful stare, the Senator from Nouveau Redon shook his fist at Newton. “You tricked me!”

“It wasn’t hard,” Newton answered. “That may perhaps—only perhaps, note—indicate that the honorable gentleman was talking through his hat.”

The honorable gentleman didn’t believe he was doing any such thing. Somehow, Newton hadn’t thought he would. The honorable gentleman tried to demonstrate he was doing no such thing by talking through his hat some more—at interminable length.

Interminable, at any rate, till Consul Stafford terminated the torrent of verbiage with several sharp raps of his gavel. “That will be quite enough of that. Quite a bit too much of that, in fact. The gentleman is out of order.”

“By God, sir, I am not!” the Senator shouted furiously.

“I’m afraid you are,” Stafford said, more in sorrow than in anger—for the time being, at any rate. “You are so far out of order that it would take a most superior watchmaker to pop off your back, tighten your mainspring, oil you up, and generally get you running again as you should.”

“Watchmaker?” the Senator spluttered. “What nonsense are you spouting now? God-damned watchmaker? And you said
I
was talking through my hat?”

“No, he didn’t. I did,” Newton said. “And you were. And you are. And it looks like you’ll keep right on doing it unless you sit down and shut up. So why don’t you do that instead . . . sir?”

“Hear! Hear!” As the laughter had before, the cry rose from northern and southern Senators together. Outraged but even more downcast, the Senator from Nouveau Redon sank into his chair and resentfully fell silent.

Newton turned to Stafford. “Thank you, your Excellency.”

The other Consul nodded back. “Thank
you
, your Excellency.” They smiled at each other. Newton couldn’t remember that happening up on the dais before the Slug Hollow agreement. However little Stafford might want them to, they found themselves on the same side now . . . and on the same side as Frederick Radcliff.

That would all fall apart if the Negro came to grief in Gernika.
I should be down there helping him
, Newton thought again. But, for the life of him, he didn’t see what he could do
to
help. Frederick Radcliff’s position and power might lie outside the Charter, but they were no less real for that.

 

They’d been camped west of St. Augustine for three days before a rebel slave showed himself. Lieutenant Braun had a bad case of the fidgets by then. Frederick Radcliff didn’t. Far better than the white officer, he understood how leery of authority the insurrectionists were. He’d wondered whether any of them would appear at all, or whether they would melt off into the swamps and the barrel-tree thickets till he and the Atlantean soldiers went away.