Liberating Atlantis a-3

  Liberating Atlantis

  ( Atlantis - 3 )

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove

  Liberating Atlantis

  BOOK I

  I

  If not for the floorboard that came up at one end, it might all have happened differently. Or it might never have happened at all. How do you measure might-have-beens? Frederick Radcliff never found an answer to that, and the question was in his mind much of the time. He'd never known a slave in whose mind that question had not taken root and flourished.

  Frederick Radcliff was a slave himself: a house slave on Henry and Clotilde Barford's plantation, thirty miles outside of New Marseille. He was of middle height, but uncommonly broad through the shoulders. By his complexion, he was somewhere between griffe and mulatto-he had more than a quarter white blood in him, but less than half.

  He never used his surname where the master and mistress could hear him do it. Legally, the surname didn't belong to him. Legally, nothing belonged to any black or copperskinned slave in the United States of Atlantis. Legally, the whites (and the occasional free blacks and copperskins) who owned them also owned everything that was theirs.

  Regardless of what might be legally true, plenty of slaves claimed descent from Radcliffs or Radcliffes. The great white clan, descendants of the English fisherman who'd founded the first settlement in Atlantis, had flourished mightily in the four hundred years since. Henry Barford claimed a Radcliffe connection on his mother's side. (Clotilde, nee Delvoie, claimed a Kersauzon connection on her mother's side. The descendants of the Breton fisherman who'd led Edward Radcliffe to Atlantis, but who'd settled here after him, had also done well for themselves.) The Radcliffs and Radcliffes (and, indeed, the Kersauzons) had been fruitful and multiplied. And they hadn't been shy about lying down with slave women to do it.

  After four centuries in Atlantis, some of Edward Radcliffe's descendants had flourished more mightily than others, of course. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe drunkards in the gutters of towns all over the USA. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe butchers and bakers and candlestick makers-and farmers, always farmers. There were Radcliff and Radcliffe doctors and lawyers and preachers. And there were Radcliff and Radcliffe leaders, as there had always been in Atlantis. More than a quarter of the Consuls who'd headed the United States of Atlantis since the War for Freedom were Radcliffs or Radcliffes, and quite a few others had the blood without the name.

  Victor Radcliff had commanded the Atlantean Assembly's army in the war against England. After the war was won, he became one of the two First Consuls. (Isaac Fenner, the other, was descended from a crewman on Edward Radcliffe's fishing boat.) Every Atlantean schoolboy knew the First Consuls' names as well as he knew his own. So did Frederick Radcliff, although slaves, to put it mildly, were not encouraged to acquire an education.

  And Frederick Radcliff had a stronger reason to remember the First Consuls' names, or at least one of them, than a schoolboy's fear of the master's switch.

  Victor Radcliff was his grandfather.

  So his mother had told him, over and over again. The story was that Victor Radcliff had come down into southern Atlantis to join up with the Marquis de la Fayette's French army, and that Frederick's grandmother's owner lent her to the general so he wouldn't have to sleep in a cold bed. Nine months later, his father was born.

  Frederick didn't remember his father. Nicholas Radcliff had died when he was three years old. He'd stepped on a rusty nail outside, and lockjaw set in-so Frederick's mother said. She'd been a house slave, too, and taught Frederick what he needed to know so he wouldn't have to go out to the fields and work under the hot sun and the overseer's lash.

  He knew he lived pretty soft… for a slave. He was friends with the cooks-also slaves-so he got plenty to eat. Maybe he didn't dine quite so well as the master and mistress and their children (now married and out on their own), but he knew how the field hands envied his rations. He slept in a bed one of the master's sons had used before him. His bedclothes were ones the white folks had almost but not quite worn out. All that use only made the linen softer. No, not bad at all… for a slave.

  But if his grandmother had been white…

  No wheedling cooks then. No hand-me-downs-no stuff other people didn't want any more, or didn't need. No swallowing his pride to keep from angering people who could do anything they wanted with him, including putting him up for sale like a horse or an anvil. If he were the white grandson of one of the First Consuls of the United States of Atlantis, he would be a rich man. He would be an educated man. People would respect him, admire him, because of who his grandfather was. He might be getting ready to stand for Consul himself. He might already have served a two-year term. Instead…

  Instead, he had a meeting with that floorboard. He was never the same afterwards. Neither were the United States of Atlantis.

  Henry Barford didn't have many friends. He would hunt with his sons or other neighboring planters every now and then. He would drink with them every now and then, too. Frederick had learned just how much brandy to pour into his coffee the morning after one of those drinking parties. A shot and a half was about right to take the edge off the pain in the master's hair.

  Clotilde, now, was social butterfly, not social caterpillar. She was always clattering off in the carriage to visit the neighbor ladies. They gathered to sew or read books together, to stuff themselves with fried chicken or starberry pie, to pour down barrel-tree-rum punch (they didn't drink as hard as their husbands, but there weren't many teetotalers among them), and, always, to gossip.

  And, when Clotilde wasn't clattering off to visit the neighbor ladies, they were clattering in to visit her. Frederick supposed she made a good guest. He knew she made a good hostess. She was as plump as a pillow and as friendly as a puppy-to her equals, anyhow. She wasn't especially hard on the house slaves… not so long as everything went well.

  Sometimes only a few neighbor ladies visited the plantation. Three or four times a year, though, Clotilde would invite everybody from miles around. If you were doing well for yourself, you were expected to show off a bit, or more than a bit.

  Whenever one of those grand convocations came along, Henry Barford would take a jug and either secrete himself away in an upstairs bedroom or go pay a call on the overseer. The next morning, Frederick would make a point of correcting his coffee.

  It was a sultry, sticky summer's day. People who knew said the weather in the southeast, on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains, was even worse. But this was bad enough for all ordinary use.

  Frederick woke with the bedclothes sticking to him. In weather like this, he slept bare but for drawers. Helen, his woman, had on only a thin cotton shift. A slave preacher had made a marriage ceremony for the two of them-more than half a lifetime ago now-but it had no force of law. The Barfords could sell or give away either one of them any time they chose.

  With a sigh, Frederick said, "Hate to climb into the monkey suit today. Gonna roast my bones for the sake of swank."

  Helen looked at him. "You sooner go out and weed amongst the cotton plants? How'd you like to swing a hoe all day?"

  "Oh, I'll wear the monkey suit," Frederick said, resignation in his voice. "But I don't have to like it."

  "If the other choice is worse, you better like the one you got," Helen said. She was in no way an educated woman-she could barely read, and could not even sign her name-but she had her share of common sense and then some.

  Frederick, stubborn and more hot-tempered, had just enough sense to realize Helen had more. He sighed again. "Reckon you're right," he said, and leaned over to give her a kiss.

  She brought up a hand and rubbed first her cheek and then his. "Better shave, too-you're all scratchy. Miz Clotilde, she'll yell at you if she got to tell you that."

  Once more, it wasn't as if she were wrong. "I shaved yesterday," Frederick protested feebly. Helen just looked at him. He let out another resigned sigh and scraped his cheeks and chin smooth with a straight razor. He had a heavier beard than most Negro men did, and as for copperskins… That probably came down from his white grandfather. Like the rest of his inheritance from Victor Radcliff, it did him no good at all.

  He kissed Helen again after he finished. She smiled and nodded. That was worth a little something, anyway.

  Then he put on the white shirt with the tight collar, the cravat, the black wool trousers, the black wool jacket, the black socks, and the tight black shoes that pinched his feet. "Don't you look fine!" Helen said.

  Sweat was already running down his face. "Maybe I do," he said, "but I sure won't be sorry to take this stuff off again come the night." He left it there. His woman was right: wearing the monkey suit had to be an improvement on a field hand's shapeless, colorless homespun.

  An early-rising woodpecker's drumming punctuated the dawn stillness. The cooks already had coffee boiling in the kitchen. Frederick and Helen gulped big, snarling cups only partly tamed by sugar. A cook gave them bowls of cornmeal mush and chopped salt pork. A couple of young colored maids were in there eating, too. Soon they'd be off on one last orgy of sweeping and dusting. Everything today had to be right.

  Feathers flew in the kitchen-literally. Black hands plucked chickens, ducks, a Terranovan turkey, and a couple of oil thrushes the master had shot in the woods the day before. The worm-eating Atlantean birds made mighty fine eating. They couldn't fly, and they had no great fear of man. They were so tasty, and so stupid, they grew ever scarcer.

  In a way, Frederick pitied them. How could a man who dared not run away not pity a flightless bird? Pity them as he would, though, he ate of them whenever he got the chance.

  And if that doesn't suit me to be a slaveowner, may I be damned if I know what would, Frederick thought. He poured himself more coffee.

  Outside, another rhythmic thunking noise joined the wood-pecker's percussive syncopation. One of the field hands was chopping firewood. As Frederick poured down the strong, brown brew-darker than he was, if not a great deal-he nodded to himself. No matter how warm the day, the kitchens would go through a great plenty of pine and cypress today.

  He'd heard white men newly come from England complain about the lack of hardwoods. Oak and maple and hickory, they said, burned longer and hotter than Atlantean lumber. He hadn't noticed that the lack made them pack up and go back where they came from. All it did was give them something to complain about. He understood that. Everybody needed something of the sort.

  A slave, by the nature of things, had plenty to complain about. The only trouble was, complaining didn't do him any good.

  Clotilde Barford swept into the kitchen in a rustle of silk. The dress she wore was a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris eight or nine years earlier. She wasn't yet attired for receiving company. Before her guests arrived, she would put on a pretty good copy of what had been almost the height of fashion in Paris year before last. That would be plenty to let her keep up with the other women.

  Now she was dressed for cracking the whip. "Get moving, you lazy niggers!" she snapped. Almost all the house slaves were Negroes; whites trusted them further than copperskins. That shamed Frederick more than it pleased him. The mistress didn't care one way or the other. "Sitting around lollygagging! The nerve of you people!"

  Frederick glanced over at Helen. Helen's eyes had already swung his way. They carefully didn't smile. The mistress was in a state, all right. She got this way every time her friends and neighbors gathered here. The abuse mostly didn't mean anything. Mostly.

  She pointed a pale, pudgy forefinger at Frederick, aiming it as Henry Barford must have aimed his shotgun at the oil thrushes. "Everything better be perfect when they get here. Perfect, you hear me?"

  "Yes, ma'am." He scooped up his last few spoonfuls of mush double-quick so she could see he was hurrying. Like any sensible slave, he moved no faster than he had to. Why should he, when he was working for someone else's benefit rather than his own?

  Sometimes, though, you had no choice. If the mistress or the master stood over you, you had to step lively. And Clotilde was liable to have her beady little blue eyes on him every livelong minute till her gathering proved the triumph she'd known all along it would be-known all along it had better be, anyhow. Frederick took a heroic swallow that drained the coffee mug and almost drowned him. He hurried out of the kitchen. Helen wasn't more than half a step behind him.

  He wondered if the mistress would pursue them. Not yet. She stayed in there and laid down the law to the cooks as if she were Moses and they the children of Israel. Most of them had heard the speech before. Frederick certainly had. That didn't stop Clotilde Barford from coming out with it again. Stop her? It didn't even slow her down.

  "She does go on," Helen said.

  "And on, and on, and on," Frederick agreed, rolling his eyes. They both smiled. But they also both spoke in low voices, and neither one of them laughed. You never could tell who might be listening. You never could tell who might be tattling, either.

  The house slaves had been scouring the big house-so called in contrast to the overseer's cottage and the slaves' shacks-for more than a week now. Wood glowed with oily, strong-smelling polish. The good china had been scrubbed and scrubbed again. Even the silver had been polished, and shone dazzlingly in the sun and more than well enough in the shade.

  But, of course, everything had to be done one more time on the day itself. The housemaids bustled around, dusting and shining. They slowed down whenever they didn't think Frederick could see them. As he feared they might tell on him for saying unkind things about the mistress, so they worried he would tell on them if he caught them slacking. As coal and wood fed a steam engine, so fear and distrust fed the engine of slavery.

  "Careful, there!" one maid warned another, who was swiping crystal goblets with a rag. "You drop one of them, it'll come out of your hide."

  "Don't I know it?" the other one replied. "Now why don't you find somethin' for your own self to do, 'stead of standin' there playin' the white man over me?"

  Playin' the white man over me. Frederick's mouth twisted. Overseers who were slaves themselves commonly failed, and often ended up hurt or dead. Negroes and copperskins didn't care to follow orders from their own kind. They thought their fellows who tried to give those orders were getting above their station.

  They were right about that. What they didn't see was that whites who ordered them around were also above their station. Whites had more than looks on their side, of course. They had the weight of centuries of tradition behind them. And, if that weight turned out not to be enough, they also had whips and dogs and guns.

  With such cheerful reflections spinning inside his head, Frederick nodded respectfully, as he had to nod, to Henry Barford as his owner came down the stairs. "Mornin', Master Henry," he said.

  "Mornin', Fred," Barford replied. He was dressed in a shirt that had seen better days and trousers that had seen better years-they were out at both knees. He hadn't bothered putting on shoes or stockings. He often didn't. He seemed happy enough to let his hairy toes enjoy the fresh air. Maybe his wife would talk him into dressing up for her guests. More than likely, he'd stay comfortable and sit this one out with a jug, the way he did most of the time. He caught Frederick's eye again. "Clotilde's already in the kitchen checkin' up on things, is she?"

  Even if he hadn't known her habits, anyone not deaf as a stump would have had no trouble figuring out where she was and what she was doing. Frederick nodded economically. "Yes, sir."

  "Well, she'd better turn Davey loose long enough to sizzle me some bacon and fry up a couple of eggs in the grease, that's all I've got to tell you." Barford hurried past Frederick. The view from behind showed his pants were out at the seat, too. Frederick couldn't imagine how much trouble he'd get in for wearing such disreputable clothes. No, he could imagine it, much too well. But the master did as he pleased. That was what liberty was all about. Henry Barford took it for granted.

  Back in Victor Radcliff's day, the Proclamation of Liberty had announced to the world that Atlantis was free from England. Had the Atlantean Assembly, convening in the little town of Honker's Mill, noticed how many people the Proclamation of Liberty left out? Not many of the laws the United States of Atlantis had passed since gave much sign of it.

  There had been uprisings, here in the southern parts of Atlantis where slavery remained a legal and moneymaking operation (assuming there were differences between the two). Planters and farmers and white townsfolk put them down with as much brutality as they needed, and a little more besides to give the slaves second thoughts next time. Once or twice, the Atlantean army helped local militias smash revolts. What were the odds the army wouldn't do the same thing again?

  Frederick sighed one more time. You couldn't win, not if you were colored. You couldn't even break even-not a chance. And they would hunt you with hounds if you tried to run off to the north, where Negroes and copperskins were free. They weren't sure to catch you, but they had a pretty good chance.

  He'd never had the nerve to flee. Things weren't too bad where he was. He could tell himself they weren't, anyhow. The top circle of hell wasn't supposed to be too bad, either. Good pagans went there, didn't they? The only thing they were missing was the presence of God. Frederick nodded to himself. Yes, that about summed things up.

  The first carriage rattled up to the big house before ten in the morning. A black man in clothes as fancy as Frederick's drove it. A frozen-faced Negro in an even more splendid getup-he looked ready to hunt foxes-rode behind. When the carriage stopped, he jumped down and opened the door so Veronique Barker could descend.