Liberating Atlantis (61 page)

Avalon voted first: the state north of New Marseille headed the alphabetical list. Within each state’s contingent, the Senators also voted in alphabetical order. One of Avalon’s six Senators voted no. Slavery wasn’t legal in Avalon, but it had been up until twenty-five years earlier. Some sympathy for slaveholding lingered yet.

Cosquer came next. It had more Senators than Avalon did, since it held more people; as far as Newton knew, every one of its Conscript Fathers owned slaves. Some of them defiantly voted against the Slug Hollow accord. Consul Newton waited tensely till Abel Marquard’s name came up.

“Senator Marquard!” the Clerk of the Senate intoned at last.

“Aye,” Marquard said. Newton and the Clerk might have failed to keep their voices emotionless, but the Senator from Cosquer succeeded. Could machines have been made to speak, his voice might have come from one of them.

He had opposed the agreement. Frederick Radcliff had claimed the two of them had an arrangement whereby, if the Negro brought peace to Gernika, Marquard would support Slug Hollow. The Senator denied everything. But, no matter what he’d denied, he’d changed his mind. He’d announced he would support the accord, and now he’d gone and done it.

Newton wondered how and why it came to pass that Abel Marquard had changed his mind. Nobody seemed to know. Or, if anyone—Frederick Radcliff, for instance—did know, he wasn’t talking. Something out of the ordinary must have happened, but who could say what?

And, in the end, what difference did it make? As long as Marquard voted the right way (which he did) and as long as he brought some Senatorial colleagues with him (which he also did), everything else was a matter of details.

“The state of Croydon’s delegation will now vote,” the Clerk of the Senate declared after the last man from Cosquer spoke a defiant nay. One by one, the Clerk polled Croydon’s Senators. All of them voted to accept the accord and make slavery a thing of the past. Leland Newton would have been horrified and astonished had they done anything else.

On the Consular dais, Stafford turned and whispered to him: “Next up is the compensation bill, the way we agreed.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” For a moment, Newton was tempted to imitate Senator Marquard and say something like,
We did?
The look on Stafford’s face would almost be worth it. But the operative word was
almost
. Compensation would make freeing the slaves, if not delightful to the whites who owned them, at least possible for those whites. Freeing slaves without compensation would touch off a revolt that would make the one just past (Newton hoped it was just past) seem a children’s spat by comparison.

That seemed as obvious to Newton as it did to Stafford. The other Consul’s warnings about the country breaking to pieces in the absence of such measures weren’t idle. Now Newton would have to persuade northern Senators that their states, their constituents, needed to see their taxes rise to placate a group of people who, they were convinced, were morally wrong.

Southern Senators went out on a limb for you and for Atlantis
. He could already see in his mind’s eye the shape his argument would take.
Now it’s your turn to do the same for them
.

Newton hoped the northern Senators would keep their country in mind, not just the next election at their local statehouse, the one that might send them back to New Hastings or hurl them into private life again, rejected by their own people. Yes, the kind of revenge the states south of the Stour could take would be far worse than even the Great Servile Insurrection.

Like Avalon, Freetown lay on the border with the slaveholding states. Two Freetown Senators voted against the Slug Hollow agreement. Newton winced. He’d expected to lose one vote there, but not two. Even though Abel Marquard had come through in the end, this would be closer than he wanted.

Storm Whitson looked ready to burst in anger and astonishment when the majority of the delegation from Gernika voted for Slug Hollow. “Brutus, Judas, Habakkuk Biddiscombe, and you sons of bitches!” he cried. “Traitors all!”

“That remark will be stricken from the record,” Consul Newton declared. “And you are out of order, Senator.”

“Well, sir, if I am, I don’t much care to be
in
order,” Whitson shot back.

“While you are on the Senate floor, you
will
abide by the Senate’s rules,” Newton said.

Whatever Whitson said after that, the gavel overrode. Then it was on to Hanover, the most heavily populated of the United States of Atlantis and also one of the states staunchest against slavery. As Croydon’s had, Hanover’s delegation voted unanimously for the Slug Hollow accord.

After that—before that, really, but the unanimous vote made it clear to even the dullest and the most partisan—the result was plain. When the last Senator had voted, the floor erupted in cheers and boos and applause and catcalls. A northern Senator punched a southerner in the nose. “I’ve wanted to do that for fifteen years!” he yelled. Then, before the Sergeant at Arms could get to them, the southerner picked himself up and decked his uncollegial colleague with a chair.

Eventually, the Sergeant at Arms and nearby Senators untangled them. On any other day, such behavior would have been a great scandal. It would have made headlines in papers on both sides of the Stour. When tomorrow came, though, it might not make the papers at all. The slaves were free! This side of the Second Coming, what news in Atlantis could be bigger than that?

 

The line that led to the justice of the peace’s chambers stretched around the block when Frederick Radcliff and Helen took their places in it. Most of the couples in the line were Negroes and copperskins: the reliable slaves of people who’d come up from south of the Stour to do business of one kind or another in the capital. It hadn’t been legal for citizens of New Hastings to own slaves for many years. Southerners could bring them up here, though, the risk being that, if the slaves escaped, nobody would do much to help the owners recover the property that had absconded with itself.

A few white couples—people who’d decided to get married today before so many newly free slaves rushed to make their unions official—stood in line with the copperskins and Negroes. Some seemed nervous about becoming the minority element in that long ribbon of colored people. Others made the best of it. That the Negroes and copperskins were all in high spirits lent everything a quality of easiness. A white man pulled a flask out of a jacket pocket and took a nip. He passed it to his sweetheart, a red-head with skin so pale it was almost phosphorescent. She also drank, then handed it to the copperskinned woman standing behind her. The copperskin smiled and sipped and gave the flask to her man. It went down the line till it ran dry, which didn’t take long.

But that wasn’t the only flask or bottle going around. Frederick and Helen had a swig of distilled lightning. “Somebody in line’s gonna get too pickled to be able to say his ‘I do’s,” Frederick predicted, smacking his lips.

“Well, if he is, his woman’ll set him straight.” Helen spoke as if that were a law of nature. To her, it probably was.

When the line didn’t move as fast as Frederick thought it should have, he said, “How come they didn’t hire more judges who could hitch people?”

“Don’t be silly. They’re white folks,” Helen answered. “They’re too dumb to see we’d all want to do this.”

“Yeah,” Frederick said with a sigh. A lot of whites honestly believed Negroes and copperskins were no more than animals that happened to be especially useful because they walked erect and had hands. And the whites had done their best to ensure that slaves stayed animallike by making it hard—sometimes impossible—for them to learn to read and write and cipher. Then, seeing how ignorant their colored workers were, they had no trouble deciding slaves truly were stupid.

When he and Helen finally got into the justice of the peace’s parlor, they had forms to fill out before they could go through the ceremony. A secretary did stand by to help illiterate couples. That wasn’t because of the influx of newly freed slaves; quite a few whites who intended to marry also lacked their letters (though far fewer, proportionally, than was true among copperskins and Negroes).

Frederick and Helen also had to pay the one-eagle fee required to make things official. Frederick proudly dropped a fat silver coin onto the tabletop. Its sweet ring told the world—and the secretary—it was genuine. The functionary filled in the blank lines on a form in a receipt book, tore it out, and handed it to Frederick. “Here you are, Mr. Radcliff,” he said, for all the world as if he were dealing with a white man, and an important white man at that.

“Thank you kindly,” Frederick answered, as if he
were
an important white man. Hearing and understanding that tone, Helen set a hand on his arm. They beamed at each other.

The newly married couple in line in front of them—he a mulatto, she a copperskin with strong cheekbones and long, lustrous blue-black hair—came out of the justice of the peace’s chamber hand in hand. Both of them were beaming, too. “Congratulations,” Frederick said.

“Thanks, friend. Same to you,” the man replied.

From within, the justice of the peace called, “Who’s next? Got to keep things moving today.”

“Here we come, your Honor,” Frederick said. He and Helen walked in together.

Books filled the shelves behind the justice’s desk. The half-empty glass of amber liquid on the desk said he’d already needed fortifying. But his motions were steady and his voice had no slur as he said, “Raise your right hands and set your left hands on the Bibles there.”

“Yes, sir,” Frederick said. He didn’t mind giving respect to a white man whose position deserved it. Helen nodded to the justice of the peace as she obeyed.

“I perform this marriage ceremony by virtue of the authority vested in me by the sovereign state of New Hastings,” the justice of the peace intoned, as he already had so many times before on this special day. He looked at Frederick. “Repeat after me: I—state your name—”

“Frederick Radcliff.”

The white man’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t miss a beat. He led Frederick through his part of the brief proceeding, then took Helen through hers. When they’d both said everything required of them, the justice of the peace went on, “By virtue of the said authority vested in me by the sovereign state of New Hastings, I now pronounce you man and wife.” To Frederick, he added, “You may kiss your bride.”

It wasn’t as if Frederick hadn’t been kissing Helen, and going to bed with her, for all of their adult lives. But kissing his bride? That was a different story. White men’s laws—slaveholders’ laws—hadn’t let them be man and wife till the Slug Hollow agreement passed the Atlantean Senate. He made the most of the kiss.

With a cough, the justice of the peace said, “Don’t like to hurry you along, folks, but I’ve got to do it. Big long line there behind you. I want to get through as many folks as I can. Nobody’s going to hold things up, not today.”

“Sorry,” Frederick said. “Not sorry I kissed her, but—”

“Oh, come on,” Helen told him. “His Honor knows what you mean.”

Without a doubt, his Honor did. Frederick Radcliff and his wife, Helen Radcliff, left the white man’s chamber together. This was the first time she’d had a surname to call her own. For that matter, Frederick’s surname had been highly unofficial. No more. Ex-slaves who didn’t have surnames would need to acquire them as fast as they could. State governments and the government of the United States of Atlantis would want to keep track of their new citizens: if for no other reason then to tax them more efficiently.

Taxes. Frederick’s lip curled. He’d never had to worry about those while Henry Barford owned him. Freedom had some rough spots, sure as the devil. Nobody took care of free men who were down on their luck or too old and feeble to work, either. But, compared to the alternative . . . “Come on, Mrs. Radcliff,” Frederick said. They walked past the secretary and out into the street together.