The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “The United States of Atlantis!” the soldiers shouted, and, “Down with King George!” and as many other things in those veins as they could come up with. This time, Isaac Fenner was right. The Assembly hadn’t done anything small.

  XIII

  Hog drifted in front of Victor Radcliff like a harem girl’s veil in a spicy story about the life of the Ottoman sultan. Here and there, he could see fifty yards ahead, maybe even a hundred. But the men to either side of him were indistinct to the point of ghostliness.

  One of those ghosts was Blaise. “Are we still going west?” he asked.

  “I think so.” Victor had a peer at a compass to be sure. He nodded in some relief. “Yes. We are.”

  “You could have fooled me,” Blaise said. “Come to that, you could be fooling me now. I’d never know the difference.”

  “We may not keep on going west for long,” Victor said. The pass through the Green Ridge Mountains twisted and doubled back on itself like a snake with a bellyache. A path of sorts ran through it, but only of sorts. Travelers had passed this way, bound for New Marseille. An army? Never.

  Because the pass climbed, the weather here reminded Victor of that farther north. Not only was it moist, it was also surprisingly cool. Ferns and mushrooms grew lush. One horse had eaten something that killed it in a matter of hours. Seeds? A toadstool? Victor didn’t know. Neither did anyone else. That discouraged the men from plucking up mushrooms, which they eagerly would have done otherwise.

  Pines and towering redwoods grew on the slopes above the pass. They hadn’t been logged off here, as they had so many places farther east. Strange birds called from the trees. Blaise pointed at one when the fog thinned. “Is that a green woodpecker?”

  “I think it may be,” Victor answered.

  The bird drilled on a branch, proving what it was. “Never seen one like that before,” Blaise said.

  “Neither have I.” Victor wondered whether some wandering naturalist had ever shot a specimen. Did a preserved skin sit in a cabinet in the museum in occupied Hanover, or perhaps across the sea in one in London? Or was the woodpecker nondescript—new to science?

  He shrugged. He had more urgent things to worry about. Getting through the pass came first. Getting to New Marseille with his army more or less intact ran a close second. Then came beating General Cornwallis and driving him away. Next to those, Victor couldn’t get excited—he couldn’t let himself get excited—about a green woodpecker.

  A man slipped on a wet fern or on some muddy moss or a rotten mushroom and landed hard on his backside. He took the name of the Lord in vain as he got to his feet. “You don’t want to say such things, Eb,” chided one of his comrades. “God, He punishes blasphemy.”

  “Well, I expect He must,” Eb responded. “If He didn’t, why would He afflict me with idiots for friends? You come down the way I did, you’re just naturally going to let out with something with a bit of spice to it.”

  “But you shouldn’t. You mustn’t,” his friend said earnestly. “For all you know, God made you fall just then so He could test you. If He did, things don’t look so good for you.”

  Eb had one hand clapped to his bruised fundament. He clapped the other to his forehead. “God knows everything that was or is or will be, ain’t that right?”

  “I should hope it is,” his friend answered.

  “All right, then. In that case, He knew ahead of time I’d call on Him, like, when I slipped there. So how can He get angry at me for doing something He knew I was going to do anyhow?”

  “That isn’t how predestination works, Ebenezer Sanders, and you know it blamed well.” Now Eb’s friend sounded shocked.

  “You sound like a parrot, giving back what the preachers say,” Eb replied. “The only one who knows is God. Preachers are nothing but damn fools, same as you and me.”

  His friend spluttered. No more words seemed to want to come out, though. Blaise showed Victor he wasn’t the only one who’d listened with interest to the argument, asking, “Do you think God knows everything ahead of time? Do you think we do things because He wills it?”

  Victor shrugged. “I’m a Christian man—you know that. But I’m with Eb on one thing: the only One who knows God is God. He’s the only One Who can know. People do the best they can, but they’re only guessing.”

  “I suppose so.” Blaise pursed his thick lips. “Gods in Africa don’t pretend to be so strong. Well, except the Muslims’ God. Is He the same One you worship?”

  To Victor, what Blaise called Muslims were Mahometans. He’d also discovered Blaise knew more about them than he did. He shrugged again. “I can’t tell you.”

  A little to his surprise, the answer made Blaise smile. “One thing I have to say—you’re an honest man. When you don’t know something, you say so. You don’t try and talk around it, the way so many people do.”

  “Do they do that in Africa, too?” Victor asked.

  Instead of smiling, Blaise laughed. “Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. Doesn’t matter what color you are, not for that. Black or white or copper-skinned, lots of folks won’t even tell themselves they don’t know something.”

  “I know it’s true of white men,” Radcliff said. “I shouldn’t wonder if you’re right for the others.”

  “You’d best believe I am . . . sir.” Blaise sounded absolutely certain. “And if your fancy ships find an island full of green men, or maybe blue, some of them will talk bigger than they know, too.”

  That set Victor laughing. “Right again—no doubt about it. Green men!” He chuckled at the conceit.

  “You never can tell,” the Negro said. “I wouldn’t have believed there were white men till I saw one—and till our enemies sold me to them. I wouldn’t have believed a lot of the things that happened to me after that, either.”

  “It hasn’t been all bad, has it? You wouldn’t have met Stella if you’d stayed behind in Africa,” Victor said.

  “No. But she was taken and sold, too.” Blaise’s face clouded. “And what white men do with—do to—their slave women . . . It isn’t good. It’s maybe the very worst thing about keeping slaves. The worst.”

  “Do you tell me black men don’t treat slave women the same way?” Victor asked. “Or copperskins? Or the green and blue men on that mysterious island out in the Pacific?”

  “Oh, no, sir. We keep slaves, too, some of us, and our men futter the women,” Blaise answered. “But that doesn’t make it right. Not for us, not for you, not for nobody. Do you say I’m wrong?” Before Victor could say anything, Blaise added, “So the settlements of Atlantis are the liberated United States of Atlantis? How can they be, really, when so many folk in them aren’t liberated at all?”

  Victor discovered he had no answer for that.

  “On the downhill slope, General,” one of the scouts told Victor. “No doubt about it—not a bit.”

  “Good,” Victor said. If it’s true, he appended—but only to himself. Aloud, he asked, “Have you come this way before?”

  “Not me,” the scout said, and Victor discounted the report almost as steeply as Atlantean paper money was discounted against specie. But the fellow went on, “The Frenchie I’m riding with has, and he says the same thing.”

  “Well, good.” The report’s value jumped again. Victor wished Atlantean paper would do the same. Maybe the Proclamation of Liberty—and his victory outside Nouveau Redon—would help it rise.

  Here in the wilderness, money didn’t need to be the first thing on his mind. He and his men couldn’t get their hands on any they hadn’t brought with them, and couldn’t buy anything they hadn’t likewise brought along. Life would have been simpler—but less interesting—were that more widely true.

  He sucked in a lungful of hot, humid air. He wouldn’t breathe any other kind this far south in the lowlands on the west side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The Bay Stream brought warmth up from the seas to the southwest, and western Atlantis got its share before the current went on towards Europe.

  Victor had he
ard Custis Cawthorne and other savants speculate that, absent the Bay Stream, Europe would be as chilly as was the land at corresponding latitudes of northern Terranova. He didn’t know enough to form an opinion pro or con there. From everything he could see, neither did the savants. That didn’t stop them from speculating, or even slow them much.

  Beards of moss hung from horizontal branches. He’d seen that farther south on the other side of the mountains: mostly down in Spanish Atlantis. Some people called the stuff Spaniards’ moss, in fact. When you found it at all in the east at these latitudes, it was more like the down beginning to sprout on a youth’s face than a proper beard.

  Hunting parties brought back plenty of oil thrushes. Their flesh, though greasy, was quite good. The southwestern quadrant of Atlantis was most thinly settled, and oil thrushes were still common, for which he was grateful. They made good eating, and one bird was a meal for anywhere from two to four soldiers, depending on how hungry they were. He looked forward to gnawing meat off a leg bone himself. The wings weren’t big enough to be worth bothering with.

  He’d just finished supper when a commotion at the edge of the camp made him hurry over to see what was going on. A soldier clutched his leg. Another man pointed to the beaten corpse of a colorful little snake. “It bit him!” the pointer said. “He stepped on it, and it went and bit him.”

  The snake had been minding its own business. What was it supposed to do when somebody trod on it? Victor eyed the remains. Stripes of red and black and yellow . . . “Get him to the surgeons,” Victor said. “Let’s hope they can do him some good.”

  “It hurts,” the bitten man said. “Am I going to die?”

  “I don’t think so.” Victor lied without compunction. If that was a coral snake, as he feared, the Atlantean might very well. Coral snakes lurked in undergrowth. They hid beneath chunks of bark. They didn’t go out of their way to strike people. But when they did . . . He tried to stay cheerful: “The surgeons will give you plenty of whiskey, to keep your heart strong.”

  “Well, hot damn!” the sufferer exclaimed. “Take me to ’em, by Jesus!”

  He died the next morning, unable to breathe, his heartbeat fading to nothingness. “Sorry, General,” one of the surgeons told Victor. “We did everything we knew how to do, but. . . .” His shoulders wearily slid up and down. If a poisonous serpent bit you, you were in God’s hands, not any surgeon’s.

  “I’m sure you did,” Victor said. “We’ll bury him and we’ll go on. Nothing else we can do.”

  On they went. Some supplies did come over the Green Ridge Mountains after them—some, but not enough. Victor would have been more disappointed had he expected anything more. The path west to Avalon was far and away the best on this side of the mountains. He’d never thought he could keep an army of this size supplied from the far side of the mountains even on that track. This route to New Marseille didn’t compare.

  Well, the hunting was better down here. He’d told himself that before. He did once more, hoping he was right.

  Red-crested eagles screeched from cypresses. Seeing and hearing them raised Victor’s hopes. The eagles were dangerous—men reminded them of honkers, their proper prey. But in this part of Atlantis, red-crested eagles could more readily find that proper prey.

  And if they could, people could, too. So Victor hoped, anyhow. And Habakkuk Biddiscombe’s horsemen did. They brought back more than a dozen of the enormous birds on the backs of packhorses. Each honker carcass would feed a lot more than two to four soldiers.

  Victor imagined his many-times-great-grandfather gaping at a salted honker leg in some low tavern in Brittany. That was how the story of Atlantis started, with François Kersauzon telling Edward Radcliffe about the new land far out in the sea. The English had always put more into this land and got more out of it. So Victor thought, anyhow. Any French Atlantean ever born would have called him a liar to his face.

  His horse splashed across a stream. A frog as big as his fist hopped off a rock and churned away. He hoped there were no crocodiles or so-called lizards in the water. They’d come far enough south to make it anything but impossible, especially on this side of the mountains.

  Blaise took the notion of crocodiles in stride. “They have bigger ones back in Africa,” he said.

  “Well, they’re damned well welcome to them, too,” Victor said.

  “Maybe one of these is big enough to eat up General Cornwallis when he gets off the boat by New Marseille,” Blaise said. “How much does he know about crocodiles?”

  “Only what he learned the last time he was in Atlantis—if he learned anything at all,” Victor answered. “They haven’t got any in England. It’s colder there than it is by Hanover.”

  “No wonder people from England want to come here!” Blaise said. He came from a land with weather worse than Spanish Atlantis’. Weather like that surely came from Satan, not from God. Good Christians denied the Devil any creative power. Such weather was the best argument he could think of for turning Manichee.

  “It’s not always sticky. Dry half the year. But always warm. All what you’re used to,” Blaise said. “The first time I found out what winter was like, I thought the world had gone mad. I was afraid it would stay cold like that forever. I wondered what I’d done to deserve such a thing.”

  “But now that you know better, aren’t you glad you’re not in a bake oven all the time?” Victor asked.

  Blaise shrugged. “This right here, this is not so bad.” By the way he said it, he was giving the local weather the benefit of the doubt.

  To Victor, this right here was an alarmingly authentic approximation of a steam bath. “A wise man who lived a long time ago said custom was king of all—a fancier way to say ‘All what you’re used to,’ I suppose. Me, I’d prefer something cooler.”

  “Even here, it will get cooler in the wintertime.” Blaise made that sound like a damned shame. To Victor, it sounded wonderful. Sure enough, they bowed to different kings of custom.

  But neither one of them bowed to the King of England. With a little luck—and with good fortune in war—they never would again.

  Victor had heard that runaway Negroes and copperskins lived in villages of their own on the far side of the Green Ridge Mountains. Stories said they tried to duplicate the life they’d led before they were uprooted and brought to Atlantis. He’d never known whether to believe those stories. They sounded plausible, but anyone above the age of about fourteen needed to understand the difference between plausible and true.

  The stories turned out to be true. Habakkuk Biddiscombe’s men led him to what was plainly a copperskin village. The huts, which looked like upside-down pots made of bark over a framework of branches, were like none he’d ever seen before. Near them grew fields of maize.

  Everything was deserted when he rode up to look the place over. “Some of the savages are bound to be watching us from the woods,” Biddiscombe said, gesturing toward the tall trees surrounding the village. “But even if they are, we won’t get a glimpse of them unless they want us to.”

  “Or unless they make a mistake,” Victor said. “That does happen every now and again.”

  “Not often enough,” the cavalry officer said, and Victor couldn’t disagree with him. Biddiscombe continued, “Now that we’ve found this place, I suppose you’ll want us to tear it down? If the weather were even a little wetter, I’d say burn it, but too easy for the fire to run wild the way things are.”

  The weather was wet enough to suit Victor and then some. “Why would we want to wreck the village?” he asked in genuine surprise. “These copperskins have done nothing to us.”

  His surprise surprised Habakkuk Biddiscombe. “They’re runaways, General,” Biddiscombe said, as if that should have been obvious to the veriest simpleton.

  And so it was. But its consequences weren’t, at least to Victor. “Well, yes,” he replied. “They seem to be happy enough here, though. If we rob them of their homes, they may try to hunt us through the woods. They aren’
t our enemies now, and I’d sooner try not to make them hate us unless we have some reason for doing so.”

  “They’re nothing but runaways,” Biddiscombe repeated. “Copperskin runaways, at that.”

  “Leave them alone. Leave this place alone. That is an order,” Victor said, so the cavalry officer could be in no possible doubt. “If they harry us, we shall make them regret it. Until they do, I prefer to concentrate on the English, who truly are the enemy. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Abundantly.” Biddiscombe might have accused Victor of picking his nose and then sticking his finger in his mouth.

  “Carry out your orders, then—and no ‘accidental’ destruction for the sport of it, either.” Victor did his best to leave no loopholes in the orders. By Habakkuk Biddiscombe’s expression, he’d just closed one the horseman had thought about using.

  He wondered if he would have been so firm about protecting a village built by Negro runaways. Somehow, whites had an easier time looking down their noses at blacks than at copperskins. Blaise wouldn’t have approved of that, which made it no less true.

  Before long, Victor became pretty sure his men would be able to keep themselves fed on the road to New Marseille. He must have put the fear of God in the quartermasters at Nouveau Redon: supplies did keep coming over the Green Ridge Mountains. They weren’t enough by themselves to victual the soldiers, but they were ever so much better than nothing. With oil thrushes and honkers, with fish and turtles taken from the streams (and with snails almost the size of roundshot and big, fat frogs taken by the French Atlanteans in the army), the men got enough to eat.