The United States of Atlantis Read online

  First and foremost was keeping Freetown in Atlantean hands—if it still was. Maybe General Howe had sailed for the southern-most good-sized town in English Atlantis rather than heading farther south. And if he had, maybe Freetown had opened up for him. It had always been a royalist center—especially when viewed from the perspective of New Hastings or even Hanover.

  “Push it, boys! Push it!” Victor called. “We’ve got to keep Freetown living up to its name.”

  The men seemed eager to march. He cherished that, knowing there would be times when they weren’t. They also had enough to eat, which wasn’t always true. And the roads were good: hard enough to march on, but not summer-dry so that travelers choked in their own dust and advertised their coming from miles away.

  Victor breathed a sigh of relief when Freetown welcomed him as warmly as the place ever welcomed anybody who wasn’t born there. His own name was in good odor in these parts. He’d helped defend Freetown against an attack from French Atlantis fifteen years earlier. He would have put more credit in that if he hadn’t had redcoats as allies then. Freetown also remembered them fondly.

  Discovering the place wasn’t flying the Union Jack, Victor sent a messenger back to Honker’s Mill: “Tell them that if Custis Cawthorne wants to head for France, this may be the best place to leave from.”

  “I’ll do it, General,” the man promised, brushing the brim of his tricorn with a forefinger.

  Freetown fishermen said they’d seen the Royal Navy sailing south past their home. They said as much after Atlantean soldiers sought them out and grilled them, anyhow. They showed no great desire to come forward on their own and share what they knew.

  Talking to one of them, Victor Radcliff said, “We might have walked into trouble if you’d kept your mouth shut.”

  He got back a shrug. “I just want this war to end, one way or the other,” the fisherman said. “Don’t much care which.”

  How many people felt the same way? How many went A plague on both your houses when redcoats or greencoats came near them? More than a few, unless Victor missed his guess. Most of the time, that didn’t matter. It might have here.

  “I think you just helped us take a step toward winning,” he told the fisherman.

  “Huzzah,” the fellow said. “What difference does it make to me? D’you think the cod care one way or the other?”

  “You’ll have more places to sell them when Atlantis is free.” Victor refused to say, or even to think, if Atlantis is free.

  “And some nosy bastard seeing how much I caught and how much he can tax me for it.” No, the fisherman didn’t care for the war or freedom or anything else.

  Victor Radcliff raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. “If the day comes when Atlantean officials do such things, pick up a musket and march on them. By God, you’ll see me marching on them, too.”

  He still failed to impress the Freetown man. “You don’t catch on, General. I don’t want to march on anybody. I don’t want anybody marching on me, either. I just want to get left alone and not be bothered. Is that too damned much to ask?”

  Yes, Victor thought. “I was going to give you a couple of pounds for what you knew,” he said. “If you don’t want to be bothered, I’ll keep them in my wallet.”

  The fisherman turned out not to have anything against money going into his pocket, no matter how little he liked paying taxes. He left Victor’s presence happier than he’d entered it. That didn’t happen every day; Victor supposed he should have cherished it.

  He made a quick tour of Freetown’s ocean-facing forts. The Royal Navy hadn’t cared to test them by landing here. As far as Victor could see, the sailors had missed a chance. They could have put an army of redcoats ashore with little risk from these popguns. Maybe General Howe thought he could win the war farther south.

  “Here’s hoping he’s wrong,” Blaise said when Victor mentioned that.

  “Yes,” Victor said. “Here’s hoping.”

  Howe could land wherever he chose. He had plenty of time to maneuver after landing, too. Ships sailed faster than men marched. And they sailed all through the day and night, while marching men had to rest.

  Determined to do what he could, Victor sent riders ahead of his army, urging the former French settlements to call out their militias and resist the redcoats wherever the enemy happened to come ashore. Even if they all obeyed the summons, he wondered whether he was doing them a favor. The English soldiers would likely go through raw militiamen like a dose of salts. He shrugged. If he couldn’t stop the enemy, he had to try to slow them down.

  Moving south from Freetown took him back in time. When he was a younger man, he’d fought French settlers and French regulars again and again in these parts. The redcoats were his allies then. He’d been glad to lean on their skill and courage. Now he had to beat them . . . if he could.

  Coming up from the south, French Atlanteans had named the river that ended up dividing their land from that of the English the Erdre. Coming down from the north at about the same time, English Atlanteans called the same river the Stour. Since the English prevailed in their war, the latter name was heard more often these days.

  The bridge over the Stour closest to the sea was fine and new and wide. Roland Kersauzon’s French Atlanteans had burned the old one behind them when they crossed back into their own territory after their defeat south of Freetown. The new one, intended as a symbol of unity, was mostly stonework. Fire wouldn’t bring it down. Hogsheads of black powder probably would.

  Blaise’s eyes seemed to get wider after the Atlantean army crossed into what had been French Atlantis. When the men stopped for the night, he took special care to clean his musket. “You are among friends, you know,” Victor told him.

  “Am I?” The Negro’s voice was bleak. “On this side of the river, the law says I can be a slave. On this side of the river, maybe even now, is the master I was running from when we first met.” He squinted at the rod he was using to push an oily cloth down the flintlock’s barrel.

  “No one’s going to put chains on you, by God,” Victor said.

  “Not unless I wander away from the army and somebody knocks me over the head,” Blaise answered. “I got no freedom papers. How could I, when I ran off? It could happen—it has with others.”

  “Well, stay out of dark corners and don’t go off by yourself,” Victor said. “Past that . . . My guess is, anybody who wanted a slave would be afraid to buy one who’d worn three stripes on his sleeve.”

  Blaise thought that over. His smile would have made any slaveholder’s blood run cold. “You’ve got something there. Put together an army of blacks and copperskins and all this part of Atlantis runs for its mother.”

  Victor Radcliff laughed, even if his heart wasn’t in it. He hoped Blaise couldn’t see that. One of these days, Atlantis would have to face up to slavery and either let it go or decide it was a positive good and cling to it more tightly than ever. He had the bad feeling that that choice would prove rougher and nastier than the one between the Atlantean Assembly and King George—which was proving quite rough enough on its own.

  He also had the bad feeling that that struggle shouldn’t start till this one was over. One thing at a time, he thought. Sometimes accomplishing even one thing at a time seemed much harder than it should have.

  “General Radcliff! General Radcliff!” someone shouted.

  Blaise’s grin reverted to its usual mocking self. “Somebody needs you,” he said. “We can talk about this other thing some more later.”

  “All right,” Victor said. Sometimes not accomplishing something didn’t seem so bad. He waved and raised his voice. “Here I am! What’s the trouble?” Something had to be bunged up. People didn’t yell for him like that when everything was rosy.

  A cavalryman came over to him. “There’s Frenchies shooting at us when we try and forage,” he said. “They’re coming out with all kinds of daft nonsense, like here we are invading them again.”

  “Oh.” Victor swore in
English, French, and, for good measure, Spanish. He wished the Atlantean army included more French settlers. He’d tried to include some of the ones he did have in all of his foraging parties. “Why didn’t these Frenchies want to listen to the people who tried to tell them we aren’t after them—we’re fighting the English?”

  Without being in the least Gallic, the cavalryman’s shrug was a small masterpiece of its kind. “Why, General? On account of they’re French, I reckon.”

  “Can you tell me more than that?” Victor clung to patience.

  “They say we’re robbing them again, same as we did before,” the horseman answered.

  “But we’re not. We’re paying for what we take.” Victor eyed the man who’d brought him the bad news. “You are paying for what you take, are you not?”

  “Yes, General.” Butter wouldn’t have melted in the horseman’s mouth. “But they don’t fancy our money, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”

  Radcliff took the Lord’s name in vain again. His army couldn’t pay gold or silver—or even copper—for what it requisitioned from the countryside. It paid in paper printed by the Atlantean Assembly: possibly printed by Custis Cawthorne in person. If all went well in the war against England, that paper might be redeemable for specie . . . some day. As things were, it was worth what people decided it was worth—at the moment, not so much. With better choices, Victor wouldn’t have been delighted to get Atlantean paper himself.

  But the French Atlanteans had no better choices. They could take the paper money they were offered, which was worth something . Or they could take nothing. Or they could get killed and have their property run off anyway. Victor couldn’t see anything else they might do.

  “Do you want to go softly, or do you want to crush them?” Blaise asked.

  “I was wondering the same thing,” Victor answered. “I’ll try to go softly at first—I don’t want to make them hate us.”

  “More than they do already,” the cavalryman put in.

  “More than that,” Victor agreed. “The war is against King George. If we have to fight the French settlers, too, that only makes things harder. If they join General Howe, that also makes things harder. So I want to keep them sweet if I possibly can.”

  Blaise made a discontented noise deep in his throat. Victor might have known he would. French Atlanteans were enemies to the Negro, and always would be. He had his reasons for that. Victor even sympathized with them, but his own concerns overrode them.

  He shouted for a groom to fetch his horse. “Let’s see if they’ll listen to me,” he said.

  “What if they don’t?” the cavalryman asked.

  “They will wish they would have,” Victor replied.

  He found his cavalrymen just outside musket range of a stone farmhouse and barn. He could see men moving around inside the house. Maybe friends had gathered together to oppose the cavalry, or maybe it was one of the huge families common in Atlantis. He rode forward under flag of truce.

  “Is that smart, General?” one of his men asked.

  “Even if they fire, chances are they’ll miss,” Victor answered. He raised his voice and switched to French: “I am General Radcliff! I wish to parley!”

  A farmer stuck his head out a window. “You wish to steal, you and all the other English Atlanteans!”

  “We will pay you for what we take,” Victor answered.

  “In worthless paper,” the farmer jeered.

  “It is not worthless,” Victor said, which was technically true. He went on, “Your only other choice is to die fighting. We have no quarrel with you, but we must eat.”

  “So must we,” the farmer said. “And how do you propose to kill us? If you attack, we will shoot you down as you come. We know how to deal with mad dogs, by God. You cannot force us from this house. It is our patrimony.”

  “We do not want to fight you, but we will if we have to.” Victor couldn’t let the farmer get away with too much, or he would spend the next five years parleying at every little homestead in French Atlantis. “We will bring up our cannon and knock your patrimony down around your ears.”

  The farmer disappeared back into the house. Victor could hear argument inside, but couldn’t make out what was going on. Some of the defenders seemed to realize they couldn’t hold out against field guns. Victor didn’t want to slaughter them. But war made you do all kinds of things you didn’t want to do.

  When the farmer came back to the window, he shook a fist at Victor. “You are a bad chalice!” he shouted, which was anything but an endearment from a French Atlantean. “I will take your paper, and you will redeem it, or I will hunt you down and make you sorry.”

  “It is agreed,” Victor said. If the rebellion won, the Atlantean Assembly’s paper would be redeemed—he hoped. And if the uprising failed, more people than this rustic would be on his trail.

  He gave the man the paper money as the cavalrymen rounded up livestock. “This looks like a lot,” the French Atlantean said. “If it really were a lot, though, you’d give me less.” He wasn’t wrong. The farmers whose ancestors had sprung from Britanny and Normandy were commonly canny, and he seemed no exception.

  “Do please remember—you have one other gift of me,” Victor said.

  “Oh?” The farmer quirked a bushy eyebrow. “And what may that be?”

  “Your life, Monsieur. I was not joking about the artillery.”

  “I know,” the farmer said. “If I thought you were, I would have shot you out of the saddle.”

  “We don’t have to love each other. All we have to do is work well enough to keep from shooting,” Victor said.

  “You have more guns, which makes this easier for you to say,” the farmer replied—and, again, he had a point. Since he did, Victor tipped his hat and rode away. No one from the farmhouse or the barn shot him in the back, which was as good a bargain as he could hope for.

  General Howe’s army landed at Cosquer, the oldest French town on the coast. Victor had expected that. The only other choices the redcoats had were to land at St. Denis, a seaside hamlet south of Cosquer, or to sail around the Spanish-held southern coast of Atlantis and put in at New Marseille or even at Avalon. No one could stand against them in the west, but they would be too far away from the more settled regions to harm the uprising much.

  “Nouveau Redon again?” Blaise asked when the news came in.

  “I don’t think so,” Victor answered. Nouveau Redon, up the Blavet from Cosquer, had been French Atlantis’ greatest fortress till English soldiers and settlers besieged and took it. The siege involved cutting off the unfailing spring that watered the town. Without it, Nouveau Redon had to rely on the river, and was far more vulnerable than it had been.

  “Now we have to see how many people in these parts bend down and kiss King George’s boots,” Blaise said.

  Victor had trouble imagining the King of England in boots. Apart from that, Blaise knew his onions. If the locals flocked to the Union Jack, the war down here would be hard. If they didn’t . . . In that case, General Howe would have more work to do.

  Blaise also had other things in mind, even if he didn’t mention them now. Plenty of people in these parts cared not a farthing for either King George or the Atlantean Assembly. But those people had skins either black or coppery, and people with white skins—people who counted, in other words—cared not a farthing for what they thought.

  Most of the time, Victor wouldn’t have cared, either. He owned no slaves, and had no great love for men who did. Then again, he also wasn’t one of the stubborn hotheads who thought Negroes and copperskins should all be free. If they made their owners money, he was willing to let them go on doing that.

  If they rose up against General Howe and the redcoats, he was willing to let them do that, too. If they rose up against the Atlanteans . . . That was a different story. And they might, because Howe had little to lose in inciting them to rebellion. He’d shown farther north that he wasn’t afraid to play that card.

  “Blaise . . .” Vi
ctor said.

  “What is it, General?” By the way the colored sergeant said it, he was a natural-born innocent. Victor smiled; if he believed that, he was dumb as a honker.

  “I must make myself clear here, Blaise,” he said. “We didn’t cross the Stour to free the slaves. We came down here to free ourselves from the English. Once we manage that, we can look at the other, too. But I fear we can’t even look at it till we free ourselves. Do I make myself plain enough?”

  The Negro’s scowl said he made himself much too plain. “General Howe won’t care about any o’ that,” Blaise said, which paralleled Victor’s thoughts of a moment before much too closely.

  “Whatever he tries to do, we will set about stopping him,” the Atlantean general said. “And we will not do anything or say anything about the way of life in these parts unless we have no choice in the matter. Do I also make myself plain there?”

  “I’ll say what I please about it,” Blaise retorted. “It’s filthy. It’s wicked. By God, I should know. I wouldn’t have run off if it weren’t.”

  Victor wasn’t so sure about that. Some people—blacks, whites, copperskins—felt the urge to be free so strongly, they would run from even comfortable surroundings. But Blaise had been a field hand, not a house slave, so he was likely telling the truth.

  In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter much, and Victor Radcliff had to worry about the grand scheme of things. “One of these days, this whole business will sort itself out, Blaise,” he said. “You know that’s true as well as I do. If you think a little, you’ll know this isn’t the right day.”

  “Don’t want to think,” Blaise said sullenly. “Want to—” He mimed aiming a flintlock and pulling the trigger.

  “One thing at a time. I’ve said as much before.” Victor sounded as if he was begging. And he was. “Most of the time, we have enough trouble managing that. When we try to do two things at once, we go to the Devil.”