The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “God bless you,” Matthew Radcliffe said again. “Too many easterners can’t see any of that. We ought to pay King George back for trying to bugger us this way.” That wasn’t quite the figure of speech Victor had used, but it got the Atlantean Assemblyman’s meaning across. Matthew turned the subject: “Anything left in that flask?”

  Slosh. “A little.” Victor handed it to him. “Here.”

  “God bless you one more time.” His cousin tilted his head back. His throat worked. He set the flask down. “Not any more, by Christ!” He bared his teeth in something more snarl than smile. “But what the Devil can we do to England in Terranova? The settlements there are quiet. Quiet as the grave, if you ask me. Quiet as the tomb. Those bastards don’t give a farthing for freedom. If they’d risen with us, King George would have a harder time of it, to hell with me if he wouldn’t. Am I right or am I wrong, General?”

  “Oh, you’re right—no doubt about it. I wish you weren’t, but you are.” Victor stared sorrowfully at the empty silvered flask, which gave back what candlelight there was. He wished he had another nip of his own. Well, no help for it: not right now, anyway.

  “We ought to send missionaries to them, the way the Spaniards send missionaries to the copperskins they’ve conquered,” Matthew Radcliffe said. “If they can turn nasty savages into Papists, can’t we turn nasty Englishmen into freedom-lovers?”

  “Missionaries.” For a moment, Victor chuckled at the other man’s conceit. Then his gaze focused and grew more intense, like the sun’s rays brought together into a point by a burning glass. “Missionaries,” he said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice.

  “You’ve got some kind of scheme,” Matthew said. “Tell me what it is.”

  Instead of answering him directly, Victor clapped on a hat and stuck his head out into the pouring rain. He spoke with Jack for a minute or two. The sentry let out a resigned sigh. Then he squelched off into the darkness.

  “You have got some scheme.” Matthew Radcliffe sounded half curious, half accusing.

  “Who, me?” Victor, by contrast, did his best to seem innocence personified. By the look Matthew sent him, his best came nowhere close to good enough. The Assemblyman kept shooting questions at him. Victor ducked and dodged and finally said, “You’ll find out soon, I hope.” That also failed to leave Matthew Radcliffe serene.

  In due course, Jack returned. Thanks to the rain’s steady hiss, he almost got back to the tent by the time Victor made out his soggy footfalls. And he came closer yet before Victor—and Matthew—could hear that he wasn’t alone.

  “Who’s he got with him?” Matthew asked. “Our very own Jesuit, panting to bring the heathen English settlers of Terranova to the true faith of freedom?”

  Ignoring the sarcasm, Victor Radcliff nodded. “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  Right on cue, the tent flap opened. The man who stumbled inside didn’t look like a Jesuit, or any other kind of missionary. He looked like a drowned rat—an angry drowned rat. “Whatever this is, couldn’t it wait till the bloody morning?” he asked, his accent strongly English.

  Matthew Radcliffe glanced toward Victor. “You have your own pet spy?” he inquired.

  The newcomer glared at Matthew. “You have your own pet idiot?” he asked Victor.

  “Matthew, let me present to you Master Thomas Paine,” Victor said before things went beyond glances and glares. “Master Paine, this is Matthew Radcliffe, member of the Atlantean Assembly from Avalon. He—and all Atlantis—can use your persuasive abilities.”

  “What persuasive abilities?” Matthew Radcliffe looked unpersuaded.

  So did Paine. “What does he need from me that I can’t give as a soldier? I did not come to Atlantis for any reason but to seek my own freedom and some way to make a tolerable living—which I could not do in the mother country.”

  “Tell him what’s happened by Avalon, Matthew,” Victor said, and his distant cousin did. Victor went on, “If we can stir England’s Terranovan towns to rebellion, she won’t be able to do things like this to us again, and she will have to divide her attention, fighting two wars at once.”

  Matthew still seemed dubious. “Meaning no disrespect to Master Paine, but why should he be able to rouse England’s settlements on the far side of the Gulf when we’ve had no luck at it up till now?”

  “Because he is the best speaker—and especially the best writer—who backs our cause,” Victor answered.

  “You give me too much credit,” Paine murmured.

  “I’d better not,” Victor told him.

  “Better than Uncle Bobby? Better than Isaac Fenner? Than Custis Cawthorne, for God’s sake?” Matthew Radcliffe shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  Victor took a rumpled, damp, poorly printed flyer from New Hastings out of a jacket pocket. “ ‘Men are born, and always continue, free—in respect of their rights,’ ” he read. “ ‘The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural rights of man, and these are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression. The exercise of every man’s natural rights has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights. The law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to society. What is not prohibited by the law should not be hindered; nor should any one be compelled to that which the law does not require.’ ” He looked up; reading by candlelight was a trial. “You will have heard that, I am sure. Who do you suppose wrote it?”

  “Isn’t it from Custis’ pen? I always thought so,” Matthew said.

  Victor set a hand on Thomas Paine’s wet shoulder. “Meet the author. If he can’t set Terranova alight, no one will make it catch.”

  “Well . . . maybe,” Matthew Radcliffe said.

  “You want me to go to Terranova, General?” Paine sounded less than delighted at the prospect. “You want me to put aside everything I have in Atlantis, cross to Avalon and sail over the Hesperian Gulf?”

  Matthew Radcliffe started to make apologetic noises. Victor cut him off. “Master Paine, you are at the moment a common soldier in the Atlantean army. What precisely is it you have to give up, pray tell?”

  Thomas Paine opened his mouth to answer. Then he closed it again before a single word crossed his lips. He gave Victor a crooked grin instead. “Put it that way, General, and you’ve got a point.”

  “Can he really fire the Terranovans?” Matthew asked.

  Victor Radcliff nudged Paine. “What was it you said about William the Conqueror, and about how little hereditary monarchy means? Better Matthew should hear it from you than from me—I wouldn’t get it right.”

  “All I said was that a French bastard who landed with armed bandits and established himself as King of England against the consent of the natives was in plain terms a very paltry and rascally original.” Paine quoted himself with obvious relish.

  “You see?” Victor said to Matthew. “All they have to do is listen to him even a little, and he’s bound to infect them.”

  “You make me sound like the smallpox,” Paine observed.

  “No. You inoculate men with freedom—and there’s no inoculation against you,” Victor said. “As for Terranova, better to inoculate than never, by God.”

  Paine and Matthew Radcliffe both winced. The latter still seemed to need convincing. “Maybe . . .” he said again.

  “Give him something else,” Victor told Paine.

  “Am I then auditioning for the stage?” Paine asked.

  “For the most important stage of all: the stage of the world,” Victor Radcliff replied.

  That seemed to get home to the wet incendiary from England. His voice grew lower, deeper, and altogether more impressive as he said, “Call to mind the sentiments which nature has engraved in the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognized by all. For a nation to have liberty, it is enough that she knows liberty. And to be free, it is enough that she wills it.”

  “You see?�
� Victor said to Matthew once more. “He can do it!”

  “And do you propose to command me to make Terranova free?” Thomas Paine asked. “I trust you note the irony involved?”

  “I note it, yes,” Victor answered. “But, having joined the Atlantean army, you do leave yourself open to command, you know.”

  “If you command me in any soldierly way, I will obey you,” Paine said. “But if you command me to play the politico, do you not agree that that takes me out of the soldier’s province?”

  “Master Paine, you are a weapon of war, no less than a six-pounder,” Victor Radcliff said. “I hope you can harm the enemy more than any mere cannon might, even one double-shotted with canister. Will you tell me I may not aim you and fire you where you will have the greatest effect?”

  “We need you, Master Paine,” Matthew Radcliffe added. “The general—and yourself—have persuaded me. If Terranova rises against King George, too, that all but guarantees the safety of Avalon and the rest of western Atlantis. It ensures that the redcoats cannot carry copperskins across the Hesperian Gulf to harry our western settlements.”

  Thomas Paine sneezed. “Bless you,” Victor said.

  Paine waved that aside. He rounded on Matthew. “They’re carrying savages across the sea to assail us? I had not heard that.”

  “Nor had I, till he brought me word of it,” Victor put in.

  “It is the truth, damn them,” Matthew Radcliffe said.

  “Then I must do—must do—everything in my power to oppose them. I had not thought they would stoop so low as to loose the copperskins against their own kith and kin.” Thomas Paine turned back to Victor. He sneezed again. Then he said, “If I am your weapon, General, aim me and fire me as you think best. This king’s wicked minions must be checked.”

  “Thank you,” Victor said. Not until later did he wonder about the propriety of a commanding general thanking a common soldier. At the moment, he asked Matthew Radcliffe, “Will you undertake, either in your own person or through your fellow westerners, to convey Master Paine to Avalon as expeditiously as may be, and thence to one or another of the English towns of eastern Terranova, whichever may seem most advantageous at the time?”

  “I will, General,” Matthew replied. To Paine, he added, “Rest assured, you also have my thanks and that of the Atlantean Assembly.” Victor also didn’t marvel at that till after the fact.

  “Let me lay hold of my chattels, such as they are, and I am your man from that time forward,” Paine said. “Using barbarians to lay waste to civilization is to me unconscionable. If the king’s ministers and admirals fail to find it so, what are they but mad dogs who deserve no better than to be hunted out of this land?”

  Without waiting for an answer, he plunged out into the rain. “A fire-eater,” Matthew Radcliffe observed, making ready to follow him.

  Victor Radcliff shook his head. “Not quite. He is a fire-kindler. Others will eat the flames he sparks—and may they choke on them.”

  “Amen.” Matthew squelched off into the night after Thomas Paine.

  General Howe seemed content to enjoy his control of most of the northeastern coast of Atlantis. In his shoes, Victor might have felt the same way. The redcoats held most of the richest parts of the land, and most of the towns that deserved to be styled cities. From London, that might have seemed almost the same as crushing the Atlantean uprising underfoot.

  On bad days, it also seemed almost the same as crushing the uprising to Victor Radcliff. But only on bad days, when he looked at all the things he’d failed to do. Holding Hanover and New Hastings topped the melancholy list. Beating the English in a pitched battle anywhere came next. He’d come close several times—which did him less good than he wished it did.

  If he could have given the redcoats a black eye in any of their fights along the Brede, New Hastings would still lie in Atlantean hands. The Assembly would send its decisions and requests to the settlements from the oldest town in Atlantis, not from the grand metropolis of Honker’s Mill. An edict coming out of New Hastings seemed much more authoritative than one emanating from a backwoods hamlet with a silly name.

  Winter gave Victor the chance to drill his troops. New recruits kept coming in, both from the interior and from the coastal regions where King George nominally reigned supreme. That was encouraging. Less so were the Atlanteans who headed for home when their enlistment terms expired. There were at least as many of them as raw replacements.

  Victor sent a letter to the Assembly, urging it to enlist troops for longer terms: for the length of the war, if at all possible. The Assembly forwarded the letter to each settlement’s parliament. Maybe those august bodies—the ones not under the English boot, anyhow—would do as he asked. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Neither he nor the Atlantean Assembly could compel them.

  Sometimes he wondered whether the Atlanteans wanted to rule themselves, or whether they wanted no rulers at all. They didn’t give their Assembly much to work with. The English Parliament had the power to tax its own folk. It wanted the power to tax the Atlanteans, too. Victor’s people didn’t aim to put up with that. They didn’t aim to put up with taxes from the Atlantean Assembly, either. Anyone who tried to tax Atlanteans did so at his peril.

  Victor also wondered how his people expected to pay for the war if they weren’t taxed. The Assembly was doing the best it could, issuing paper money it promised to redeem with gold or silver once the war was won. When the uprising began, that paper was almost at par with specie. But it seemed to lose a little value every day.

  How long before the Assembly’s paper was worthless? Victor feared the time would come sooner than he wished. What would the Assembly do then? He didn’t have the slightest idea, and suspected they didn’t, either.

  In the meantime, the war went on. His drill sergeants did their best to turn the recruits into men who could march and deploy and follow orders without fussing about it too much. Despite his great chest, Tom Knox died of some lung ailment. Victor mourned the English deserter—he might have ended up a major had he lived.

  The Atlanteans did get a handful of a new kind of recruits: professional soldiers from Europe who saw a need across the sea and hastened to meet it. Some of them were frankly horrified at what they found.

  “A proper soldier,” one said in a thick German accent, “you tell him what to do, and by God he does it or he dies trying. You Atlanteans, you always must know why before you do anything. It is of time a waste. It is a—a foolishness!” By the way he said that, he couldn’t think of many worse names.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Baron von Steuben,” Victor said. Steuben was no more a baron than he himself was a king. The German captain also had no right to the aristocratic von. But he was far from the first man to improve his past on coming to Atlantis. And the idea of being drilled by a European nobleman appealed to the Atlantean soldiers. Victor went on, “And what I’ll tell you is this: officers can be wrong, too. Knowing why they want you to do something isn’t so bad. The men do fight hard. They’ve stood up to the redcoats plenty of times.” They hadn’t stood up quite well enough, but he didn’t dwell on that.

  “English regulars is—are—good troops,” Steuben admitted. “But maybe your men win if they move faster, if they don’t spend time with questions always. Foolishness!” Yes, that did seem to be the nastiest printable word he used.

  “Maybe.” Victor didn’t think so, but he didn’t feel like arguing the point. He did want to make sure the German captain knew what he was up against. “No matter how fine a drillmaster you may be, sir, I don’t think you’ll cure Atlanteans of needing to know why. That would take an act of God, not an order from a mere man.”

  “I shall petition the Lord with prayer,” Steuben said. “If He loves your cause, He will do what is needful.”

  “They do say the Lord helps those who help themselves,” Victor remarked. “We’re trying to do that against the English.”

  He kept sending out little bands to harry the redcoats. Moving small uni
ts and keeping them supplied was easier than moving and subsisting his whole army would have been. He gave men who performed well on the practice field the chance to test what they’d learned against some of the sternest instructors in the world. If his raiders won, they came back proud and delighted. And if they lost—which they did sometimes—they didn’t lose enough to endanger his main body or to hurt morale much.

  One band of horsemen reached the sea near Weymouth. “It’s not redcoats everywhere,” Habakkuk Biddiscombe reported to Victor. “They’re like any other men. They mostly stay where it’s warm and cozy. If we broke in amongst ’em with a big enough force, they wouldn’t know what the devil to do.”

  “It’s a thought,” Victor said. His own soldiers, as he knew full well, wanted to stay warm and cozy, too—and who could blame them? If they got through the winter and started the second year of the war as a force in being, wasn’t that a sizable achievement all by itself? It seemed so to him.

  The young captain, a born attacker, had different notions. “If it all goes well, we might threaten Hanover. We might even run them out of it. One of the prisoners we took says they haven’t got that many men there. They can’t garrison and campaign very well, not at the same time.”

  “Neither can we,” Victor said mournfully. A solid company of Croydon men had just marched off to the north. Their enlistments were up, and they didn’t intend to stay around one minute longer than they were obliged to. The English occupied the town that gave their settlement its name? If that bothered them, they hid it very well.

  “We ought to try,” Biddiscombe persisted. What would happen to a junior officer in a European army who kept on arguing with the general commanding? Victor wondered if he ought to ask “Baron” “von” Steuben. He enjoyed watching the German gutturally sputter and fume. Victor was sure a persistent captain like this one would be hanging his career out to dry.