Liberating Atlantis (7 page)

“Wish we could go on to New Marseille,” a soldier grumbled after the service broke up.

“Well, we damned well can’t,” a sergeant answered; angry puffs of smoke rose from his pipe. “We’ve got to stay put till we’re good and sure we ain’t gonna make the whole damned town sick.”

“Don’t want to get sick myself, neither,” the soldier said.

“You run off, they’ll call it desertion and hang you,” the sergeant said. “You ain’t like the slaves here—your carcass isn’t worth an atlantean while you’re still alive.” The inflated paper money of the war against England lived on in memory.

“I’m not going anywhere,” the soldier assured him.

“God-damned right you’re not.” The sergeant sounded very sure of himself.

But it was the sergeant who fell sick the next day—and the copperskin who’d dug the dead trooper’s grave came down with the yellow jack the day after that. The copperskin rapidly got worse. His kind sickened more readily than whites, who seemed to sicken more readily than Negroes. A copperskin with smallpox was almost sure to die, where a man of some other breed might pull through.

Henry Barford was incensed, as Frederick had known he would be. “You
are
a son of a bitch!” he shouted at Lieutenant Torrance.

Torrance seemed more distracted than offended. “Sorry, Mr. Barford,” he managed at last.

That didn’t come close to placating the planter. “Sorry? I don’t think so!” Barford said. “I’m going to write to my Senator—that’s what I’m going to do.”

The Atlantean officer looked through him. “Mr. Barford, you may write to the Pope for all I care, and much good may it do you. My back hurts, and so does my head. If I have not got a fever, I should be very much surprised.”

Henry Barford stared at him in undisguised horror. “Lord love a duck! You’re coming down with it, too!” He edged away from the lieutenant.

If that offended Torrance, he hid it very well: or, more likely, he had other things to worry about. “I fear I am. I hope I am not, but I fear I am.” He muttered to himself, then spoke aloud again: “I wish we could have got these rifle muskets to New Marseille. Before long, the garrison there will commence to wondering what has become of them.”

Frederick heard that—the two white men were talking outside the big house after the work gang came in for the day. Frederick was healing, and was also beginning to get used to the work. He wasn’t collapsing the minute he’d had supper, the way he did the night after his first day in the cotton fields. What Torrance and Barford said didn’t fully register, not at the moment, but he took it in so it could spend the time it needed in ripening.

“You could send somebody to let ’em know,” Barford said. “Not that far to town—even closer to the nearest place where you could send a telegram.” Wires were beginning to crisscross Atlantis. The telegraph was new in the past ten years, so the process wasn’t complete yet. But it seemed to pick up speed year by year, because the device was so obviously useful.

Lieutenant Torrance shook his head. “I stopped here to keep from spreading the sickness any farther.”

“Oh, and a hell of a job you did, too, my boy!” Barford exclaimed.

As if on cue, his wife’s voice floated down from their bedroom. “Henry! Are you out there, Henry?”

“Sure am,” he answered. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t feel well, Henry.” By the way Clotilde Barford said it, it could only be her husband’s fault.

But that wasn’t quite true, was it? It could also be Lieutenant Peter Torrance’s fault. If he’d picked a different plantation . . . How much difference would it have made? Maybe not much—when yellow fever spread, it could spread like wildfire. But maybe it wouldn’t have come here at all. You never could tell. And if that wasn’t enough to drive you crazy, nothing ever would.

Henry Barford absently slapped at a mosquito, then wiped the palm of his hand on his trouser leg. “Don’t feel good how?” he asked.

“I’ve got a headache. My back hurts, too. And I’m warm—I swear I’m warm,” Clotilde said. She didn’t give her symptoms in the same order as Lieutenant Torrance had, which didn’t mean they didn’t match.

Frederick realized that right away. Barford took a few seconds longer, and then delivered a double take worthy of the stage. “Oh, you
son
of a bitch!” he snarled at the Atlantean lieutenant. He rushed back into the big house.

Torrance just stood there. He swayed slightly—he looked as if a strong breeze, or even a breeze that wasn’t so strong, would blow him away. He caught Frederick’s eye. “You. Come here.”

“What you need, sir?” Frederick asked as he walked over. He didn’t—he couldn’t—move very fast.

Chance were it didn’t matter. The lieutenant looked through him, too. “I
didn’t
mean to bring the sickness here,” he said after a long, long pause.

“Who would mean to do something like that, sir?” Frederick said, which seemed safe enough.

The answer seemed to focus the lieutenant’s attention on him. Frederick wasn’t nearly sure he wanted it. “What’s your name?” Torrance asked.

“Frederick,” the Negro answered automatically. But, a heartbeat later, something made him add, “Frederick Radcliff.”

Most white men would have laughed at him for his pretensions. At a different time or place, in different circumstances, Lieutenant Torrance might well have laughed, too. Now he gave Frederick his full attention. “I can see why you say so,” Torrance observed. “You have something of the look of one of the First Consuls to you.”

“He was my grandfather,” Frederick said.

“Easy enough to claim,” the officer answered. But he held up a hand before Frederick could get angry. “It could be so—I already told you you have the look.”

“Victor Radcliff’s grandson, a field nigger.” Frederick didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.

“I can’t do anything about it,” Lieutenant Torrance said. “I can’t do anything about anything. If I am alive a week from now, I shall get down on my knees and thank almighty God. If you are alive a week from now . . .” He ran down like a watch that wanted winding.

“What?” Frederick asked.

The lieutenant pressed his palm against his own forehead. Frederick had always found you had a hard time telling whether you had a fever that way, because when you did your palm was also warmer than it should have been. But Torrance’s grimace said he didn’t like what his own flesh told him. “I am from Croydon,” he said, out of the blue—or so it seemed to Frederick.

“Yes?” the Negro said, wondering if Peter Torrance’s wits were starting to wander.

“No slaves in Croydon,” the lieutenant said, so he had been going somewhere after all. “We don’t put up with that kind of thing up there. We haven’t, not for a man’s lifetime and longer. Doesn’t always stop our traders from making money off of what slaves do, but we don’t keep ’em ourselves. Some folks think that makes us better. But I’ll tell you something, Frederick Radcliff.”

“What’s that?”

“If folks don’t want you to be free, you can still take care of the job. Look what your grandfather did against England.”

He made it sound easy. Maybe he thought it would be. Or maybe his wits
were
wandering but he didn’t realize it yet. Running off was deadly dangerous and much too likely to fail. Rising up . . . Frederick’s mind shied like a frightened horse at the mere idea. Even if slaves did rise up from time to time, they had never yet failed to regret it. And the reprisals vengeful whites took were designed to make the survivors think three times before trying that kind of thing again.

Lieutenant Torrance shrugged. “If you are your grandfather’s grandson, you’ll find some way to be worthy of his name. And if you aren’t . . .” He let that hang, too. After touching one finger to the brim of his black plug hat, he walked back to the tent he’d run up. He wasn’t steady on his legs, and it wasn’t because he’d had too much to drink.

“What did the white man want?” Helen asked when Frederick came back to her.

“Don’t quite know,” he answered. “Tell you somethin’, though—don’t reckon I ever talked with anybody like him before.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Don’t quite know,” Frederick repeated. He wished he could spend more time ciphering it out. An enormous yawn soon put paid to that notion. He wasn’t so exhausted as he had been that first dreadful night, and his stripes didn’t pain him so much. But they did still hurt, and he was still weary.

He and Helen headed back to their cabin. He woke up in the night needing to use the chamber pot. As he lay back down, several itchy new mosquito bites reminded him again that he hadn’t screened the window. They kept him awake a little while. That was one more mark of progress; the first night, he hadn’t even noticed he was getting eaten alive.

 

No one blew the horn the next morning, not till the sun stood higher in the sky than it should have. And when the horn did sound . . . It always reminded Frederick more of an animal’s bellow than of a product of human ingenuity, but this morning it reminded him of an animal in pain.

He soon found out why: Matthew was blowing the horn, and he had no more idea how to do it than Frederick knew how to paint portraits. “What happened to Jonas?” Frederick asked. Several other slaves said the same thing as they came out of their cabins.

“Down sick,” Matthew answered economically. He looked toward the newly sprouted tents. “Those miserable, stupid soldiers . . .” Then he sighed, shifted the chaw in his cheek, and spat a brown stream of pipeweed juice. “They’re paying for it. But so are we. Mistress Clotilde . . .”

There was no sign of Master Henry, either. Frederick supposed he was tending to his wife. But he might have come down with the yellow jack himself. And Lieutenant Torrance didn’t come out of his tent. Only a couple of soldiers did emerge. They cared for the horses with the air of the stunned who’d lived through an annihilating battle.

Worse, there was no guarantee yet that they
had
lived through things, and they were bound to know it.

They went through the day without anyone falling over in the fields. To Frederick, that seemed something worth celebrating. And he might have celebrated if he weren’t so stiff and sore and tired, and if he thought the overseer would let him get away with it.

Later, he realized Matthew might have. The white man also seemed delighted to have got through a day’s work with no new catastrophes. “Wonder what things’ll be like when we get back to the big house,” he muttered as the gang shouldered tools and started back for supper.

Things were . . . not so good. Soldiers and house slaves had dug a grave for another of the troopers who’d been sick when the cavalry detachment arrived at the plantation. Had Lieutenant Torrance read the Bible over this dead man, too? Frederick had his doubts. The lieutenant was likely to be too sick to get off his cot or blanket or whatever he was lying on.

Henry Barford came out to watch the slaves return. He hadn’t combed his hair or shaved. Frederick thought he had done some drinking, or more than some. “Clotilde’s mighty poorly,” he announced from the front porch. “Mighty poorly.”

Frederick didn’t know whether to be sorry or not. He’d spent a lot of years with the Barfords. Most of the time, he’d got along well enough with the mistress of the plantation. But she was the one who’d had him whipped and degraded. She was the one who’d wanted to give him more lashes than he’d got. Why should he sympathize with her now?

Because anything that can happen can happen to you
, he answered himself.
Because you could be moaning in a sickbed just like her a day from now. Or, God forbid, so could Helen
.

He ate more supper than usual—not better, but more. Quantity had a quality of its own. No one had thought to tell the cooks to make any less than they would have without sickness tearing through the plantation. They hadn’t made any changes on their own. If you waited for slaves to show initiative, you’d spend a long time waiting. So the same amount of food was shared among fewer people. Frederick’s belly appreciated the difference.

Another cavalry trooper came down sick not long after supper. The men still on their feet had all kinds of worries. “We got enough men to post a guard on the wagons?” one of them asked.

“Hell with the wagons. Hell with everything in ’em,” another soldier replied. “Any of us still gonna be on our feet by the time this God-damned plague gets done with us?”

The first soldier didn’t say anything to that. Frederick wouldn’t have, either. It was much too good a question.

He glanced over toward the wagons. Sure enough, there they sat—they wouldn’t go on to New Marseille any time soon. But so what? The United States of Atlantis were at peace with the world. For the most part, they’d stayed at peace since the war that set them free. No invader was likely to descend on them now. What would the rifle muskets do but gather dust in some armory?

Frederick had been a boy when Atlantis got into a brief second scrape with England. Redcoats had suppressed the Terranovan risings that accompanied Atlantis’ revolt against the mother country. The Terranovan settlements rebelled again a generation later when England was distracted by the great war she fought against France. Atlantis covertly aided the Terranovans—but not covertly enough. And so England declared war on her former possession.

Atlantean frigates won their share of glory in what people these days called the War of 1809. But England had the greatest navy the world had ever known, a navy that spanned the seven seas. Despite her endless troubles with France, English ships bombarded Freetown and Pomphret Landing, and English marines burnt the latter town to the ground and slaughtered everyone who didn’t run away fast enough. Another force landed south of Avalon, but word of an armistice reached them just as they were about to engage the garrison there. Atlanteans these days sang songs about the Battle That Never Was.

No, New Marseille had no urgent need of those rifle muskets. Frederick had trouble seeing why the soldiers even bothered mounting guard over them.