United States of Atlantis a-2 Read online

  United States of Atlantis

  ( Atlantis - 2 )

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove

  United States of Atlantis

  Chapter 1

  Victor Radcliff didn't like to go into Hanover or New Hastings or any of Atlantis' other seaboard towns. Too many people crowded too close together to suit him in places like that. He lived on a farm well to the west, more than halfway out to the Green Ridge Mountains. Whenever he found-or made-the chance, he ranged farther a'field yet.

  But towns were sometimes useful. He had a manuscript to deliver to a printer in Hanover. Unless he cared to buy a printing press himself (which he didn't) or to stop writing (which he also didn't), he needed to deal with the men who could turn his scribble into words someone besides himself and the compositor could understand.

  His wife kissed him when he left. "Come home as soon as you can," Margaret said. "I'll miss you."

  What might have been lay not far below the surface of her voice. They'd had two boys and a girl. None of the children saw its third birthday. Without Victor, Meg had a lonely time of it. Adam would have been fourteen now…

  "I'll miss you, too." Victor meant it, which didn't keep him from plunging into the trackless swamps and forests of western Atlantis as often as he could. A lot of Edward Radcliffe's descendants-those who still kept the e on the end of their surnames and those who didn't-still had the restless spirit that came down from the Discoverer.

  No doubt Edward had it, for without it he never would have started the English settlement in Atlantis. On sea and land, his descendants through his sons-and others through his daughters, who didn't wear the family name any more-had kept it through more than three centuries now.

  "Give my regards to all the cousins you see," Meg said. "There'll be a swarm of them," Victor replied. Radcliffs and Radcliffes had thrived here as they never would have in England. Without a doubt, old Edward had known what he was doing when he decided this was a better land than the one he'd left behind. Englishmen thought of Atlanteans as colonials, and looked down their noses at them. Atlanteans thought of Englishmen as strait-jacketed on their little island, and felt sorry for them.

  Someone knocked on the front door. "That will be Blaise," Margaret said.

  "Not likely to be anyone else," Victor agreed. He opened the door. It was Blaise. "You are ready?" the Negro asked, his English flavored both by the French he'd learned as a slave farther south and by the tongue he'd grown up speaking in Africa. He and Victor and two copperskins from Terranova had escaped French Atlantis together. Victor didn't know what had become of the men from the west. Blaise had stuck with him. The black man had been his sergeant during the war against France and Spain, and his factotum ever since. "I'm ready," Victor said.

  "Let's go, then. It will be good to get away." Blaise had two boys and two girls. He and his wife had buried only one baby. With the genial chaos in his household, he probably meant what he said. He made sure this trip wouldn't be for nothing: "You have the manuscript?"

  "Put it in my saddle bag half an hour ago," Victor replied. "I won't be the kind of author they make jokes about-not that kind of joke, anyhow."

  "Good." Blaise lifted his plain tricorn hat from his head for a moment. "I'll bring him back safe, Mrs. Radcliff."

  "I know you will." Meg smiled. "I don't think I'd let him go if you weren't along."

  "I'm not an infant, Meg. I have been known to take care of myself," Victor said, a touch of asperity in his voice.

  "I know, dear, but Blaise does it better." No one could deflate you the way a wife could.

  Victor left with such dignity as he could muster. He swung up onto his horse, a sturdy chestnut gelding. Blaise rode a bay mare. Stallions had more fire. They also had more temper. Victor preferred a steady, reliable mount. Blaise had come to horsemanship late in life. He rode to get from here to there, not from a love of riding. A temperamental horse was the last thing he wanted.

  They rode off Victor's farm and down a little, winding side road toward the highway east. It had rained a couple of days before-not a lot, but enough to lay the dust and make the journey more pleasant.

  Fields were broader than they would have been in England. Most of the crops were the same, though: wheat and barley, rye and oats. Here and there, farmers planted a field in Terranovan maize, but English farmers were doing that these days, too. Horses and cattle and sheep cropped grass in meadows, as they might have on the home island. Chickens and ducks and Terranovan turkeys strutted and waddled across farmyards.

  Apple orchards and groves of peaches and plums and walnuts grew among the fields and meadows. Lettuce and cabbage and radishes, turnips and parsnips and carrots flourished in garden plots. Dogs barked and played. Cats sauntered or snoozed or sat by woodpiles waiting for unwary mice. Again, everything was much the way it would have been in England.

  Only in the unsettled stretches did Atlantis remind Victor of what it must have been like before Englishmen and Bretons and Basques first began settling here. Pines, and even a few redwoods, made up the woods in those stretches. Barrel-trees, with their strange, short trunks and sheaves of palmlike leaves sticking off from the top of them, showed themselves here and there. All manner of ferns gave the native forest an exuberant, bright green understory.

  A bird called from the woods. "An oil thrush!" Victor said. "They're getting scarce in settled country."

  Oil thrushes were plainly related to the brick-breasted birds Atlanteans called robins. That name irked Englishmen, who applied it to another, smaller, bird with a red front. It seemed natural to Victor, though; he'd used it all his life. Oil thrushes were much larger: easily the size of chickens. They had wings too small to let them fly and long beaks they thrust into soft ground in search of earthworms. Their fatty flesh gave them their name. Settlers rendered them for grease to make soap or candles. And… "Good eating," Blaise said. "They're mighty good eating."

  "Do you want to stop and hunt?" Victor Radcliff asked. As if to tempt a yes, the oil thrush called again. Like a lot of Atlantean creatures, the flightless birds didn't know enough to be wary of men. But, reluctantly, Blaise shook his head. "I reckon not," he said. "We know where our next meal's coming from. I do like that. Don't need to take the time."

  "Sensible. I was thinking the same thing." Radcliff laughed at himself. "Funny, isn't it, how often we think He's a sensible fellow means the same thing as He agrees with me?"

  Blaise laughed, too. "Hadn't looked at it like that, but you're right, no doubt about it."

  Victor's good humor faded faster than he wished it would have. "No wonder Englishmen don't find Atlanteans sensible these days, then, and no wonder we don't think they are, either."

  "What can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?" Blaise was, above all else, a practical man. Victor supposed anyone who'd been a slave would have to be.

  "I don't know," Victor answered. "Along with seeing my manuscript off to the printer, finding out whether we can do anything makes me put up with going to Hanover. I won't have to wait for the news to come out to the farm."

  Blaise looked at him sidelong. "Thought you liked it there."

  "I do," Victor said. "God knows I do. But Edward Radcliffe came here three hundred years ago so he wouldn't have lords and kings telling him what to do. They seem to have forgotten that in London." Air hissed out between his lips. "Some people in Hanover seem to have forgotten, too."

  They came into the little town of Hooville as afternoon neared evening. Only an antiquarian-of which there were few in Atlantis-would have known it was named for the Baron of Hastings in the mid-fifteenth century. The sun going down toward the Green Ridge Mountains cast Victor's long
shadow, and Blaise's, out ahead of them.

  Hooville had three or four shops, three or four churches, and several streets'-or rather, rutted lanes'-worth of houses. Most of the streets in Hanover and New Hastings and other prosperous coastal towns were cobbled. No one in Hooville had seen the need, or, more likely, cared to spend the money.

  A boy took the travelers' horses. Victor tipped him a penny apiece for them. The boy grinned, knuckled his forelock, and made the broad copper coins disappear.

  Smoke and noise greeted Victor and Blaise when they walked into the tavern. The taproom was nearly full. A pockmarked man raised his tankard in salute. "Here's to the major!" he called.

  "To the major!" Mugs rose. Men drank. A dozen years earlier, Victor had been the highest-ranking officer from the English Atlantean settlements in the war against France and Spain. He saw several people here who he knew had fought under him. Some he knew by name. Others were just familiar faces.

  "And here's to the major's shadow!" shouted the fellow who'd hailed him before. Amidst laughter, the topers drank again. Blaise smiled, his teeth white against his dark skin. What he thought was anyone's guess. But, as a practical man, he must have known he couldn't keep people from noticing and remarking on his blackness.

  "Let's get us something to drink," he said. "Now you're talking," Victor replied. They made their way over to the tapman and ordered mugs of flip. The potent mix of rum and beer, sweetened with sugar and mulled with a hot poker, went a long way toward letting a man forget he'd been in the saddle all day-or, if he didn't forget, at least he didn't mind so much.

  "Something for your supper, gents?" By the way the tapman said it, he was stretching a point to include Blaise in that, but stretch the point he did. Nodding toward the big fireplace, he went on, "My brother-in-law shot a wild boar this morning, so if you hanker for pork…"

  "Bring it on, sir, bring it on," Victor said expansively: the flip was hitting him hard. Blaise nodded. Victor lifted his mug on high. "And God bless your brother-in-law, for turning an ugly beast into a fine supper."

  "Good to think God will bless him for something," the tap-man said. But then, men who spoke well of their brothers-in-law were few and far between.

  The cheap earthenware plates were locally made. So were the pewter forks. Victor and Blaise cut the pork with their belt knives. They drank more flip and listened to the Hooville gossip. Part of that was the inevitable local scandal: So-and-So had run off with Such-and-Such's daughter, while Mr. Somebody was supposed to be paying entirely too much attention to Mrs. Someone Else.

  Mr. Somebody had some sympathy among the Hoovilleans. "Can you blame him, when the body he's stuck with is cold as Greenland winter?" a well-lubricated fellow asked.

  "How do you know?" cried another drinker, and everybody laughed.

  Sooner or later, though, the talk veered toward politics, the way it did in any tavern sooner or later. "Major, how come England thinks it can tax us here?" somebody asked Victor. "Doesn't the king recollect our grandsires crossed the ocean to get away from all that nonsense?"

  As far as Victor knew, his many-times-great-grandsire came to Atlantis because of the cod banks offshore. Men still fished those banks today, even if the man-sized monster cod the old chronicles talked about had grown rare. But cod weren't what this fellow was talking about. Radcliff had to pick his words with care: "The king recollects that he spent a pile of money keeping the French from taking these settlements away from us. He wants to get some of it back."

  "He's got no right to do it the way he's doing it, though," the man insisted. "England can't tax us, not in law. Only we can tax ourselves."

  "That's how we see it. England sees it differently." Again, Victor spoke carefully. Ordinary people could talk as free as they pleased. No one cared about them. But chances were somebody in this crowded room would report his words to the English authorities… and someone else would report them to the local leaders squabbling with those authorities. He didn't want either side to conclude he was a traitor.

  He didn't want the two sides banging heads, either. Whether he could do anything to stop them might be a different question.

  Another man banged his mug down hard on the tabletop in front of him. "Me, I'm damned if I'll buy anything that comes from England, as long as she's going to play these dirty games," he declared. "We can make do with what we turn out for ourselves."

  "That's right!" someone else shouted. Heads bobbed up and down. Support for the latest boycott ran strong.

  A hundred years earlier, the settlers couldn't have done without England. The mother country made too many things they couldn't make for themselves. No more. Oh, some luxury goods, furs and silks and furniture and fripperies, still came from across the sea. But Atlantis could do without those, even if certain rich Atlanteans-some of them Radcliffs and Radcliffes-still pined for them.

  "D'you buy English, Major?" asked the man who'd said the king had no right to tax Atlanteans.

  A hush fell. Everyone waited on Victor's answer. He passed it off with a laugh, or tried to: "What? This far inland? I didn't think they let English goods get past the coast."

  When the laugh rose, it was an angry one. England might think of the Atlantean settlers as bumpkins one and all. The rich merchants in the seaside towns resented what the English thought of them-and thought the same thing of their inland cousins.

  "You can't win. No matter who you are, you can't win," Blaise said. The color of his skin gave him uncommon authority on such questions.

  "Someone will have to win, I think," Victor said later that evening, hoping the mattress he'd lie down on wouldn't be buggy.

  "Mm-maybe." Blaise still didn't sound convinced. "When he wins-if he wins-will he be happy in the end?"

  Victor said the only thing he could: "I don't know." He blew out the candle he'd carried from the taproom. It was guttering towards an end anyhow. The landlord wasn't about to waste a quarter of a farthing by giving a customer any more light than he absolutely had to. Darkness fell on the bedchamber like a cloak. Victor fell asleep before he found out whether the mattress held bedbugs-but not before Blaise, whose first snores he heard as darkness came down on them.

  By the time Victor and his colored companion got to Hanover, they were both scratching. One inn or another-or, more likely, one inn and another-had proved buggy. Victor was more resigned than surprised. Blaise was more apt to complain about big things than small ones.

  Hanover was a big thing, at least by Atlantean standards. With about 40,000 people, it claimed to be the largest city in Atlantis. Of course, so did New Hastings, farther south. And so did Freetown, south of New Hastings. Croydon, north of Hanover, also had its pretensions, though only locals took them seriously.

  Down in French Atlantis, Cosquer might have been half the size of the leading English settlement towns. Of course, most of the people who'd flocked there since the end of the war came from one English settlement or another. The same held true for the still smaller St. Denis, south of Cosquer, and for New Marseille, smaller yet, on the west coast of Atlantis. As for Avalon, north of New Marseille, it wasn't a pirates' nest any more, but it remained a law (or no law) unto itself. Nobody could say how many people lived there, which suited those who did just fine.

  None of Atlantis' leading cities would have been anything more than a provincial town in England or on the Continent. Even Terranova to the west, settled later by Europeans, boasted larger human anthills than any here. Of course, the Spaniards, who dominated the richer parts of the western continent, built on the wreckage of what the copper-skinned natives had done before they arrived. Atlantis was different. Atlantis was a fresh start.

  Cross-topped spires dominated Hanover's skyline. Churches here and farther north were Anglican or belonged to one of the sterner Protestant denominations. Officially, New Hastings and points south were also Anglican. Unofficially, Popery thrived there. The southerly English settlements in Atlantis were a lifetime older than the Reformation. Kings had alwa
ys had trouble enforcing their will here. Sensible sovereigns didn't try too hard. Victor's mouth tightened. George III and his ministers seemed unwilling to stay sensible.

  Along with the spires, masts in the harbor reached for the sky. Some of them were as tall as any church steeple. Not only merchantmen lined the quays, but also English frigates and ships of the line. Redcoats garrisoned Hanover. The locals had, and did not enjoy, the privilege of paying for quartering them.

  When the travelers rode into town, more English soldiers were on the streets than Victor Radcliff remembered seeing since the war. Then, the redcoats and English Atlanteans fought side by side against France and Spain. They were comrades-in-arms. They were friends.

  The redcoats in Hanover neither looked nor acted like friends. Their faces were hard and closed. They carried bayoneted muskets, and stayed in groups. When they went by, locals called insults and curses after them-but only from behind, so the soldiers had a hard time figuring out who'd done it.

  Instead of going straight to his printer, Victor called at the house of Erasmus Radcliff, his second cousin once removed. The Discoverer's family had flourished mightily in English Atlantis,

  and no doubt Radcliffs and Radcliffes and other kinsfolk with different surnames were busy helping to turn what had been French Atlantis upside down and inside out. Erasmus, these days, headed the trading firm William Radcliff had brought to prominence a hundred years before.

  He looked like a prosperous merchant: he wore a powdered wig, a velvet jacket the color of claret, and satin breeches. He had manicured hands, an exquisitely shaved face, and a gentleman's paunch. His eyes were a color somewhere between blue, gray, and green, and as warm as the Atlantic off the northern reaches of Iceland.

  "Yes, it's very bad," he said as a servant with the map of Ireland on his face brought in ale and smoked pork for him and Victor- Blaise was taking his refreshments with the house staff. 'T always think it can get no worse, and I always find myself mistaken."