The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “For God’s sake, Radcliff, give me a drink,” he said. Without a word, Erasmus did. Mitchell, a squat, powerfully built man, gulped it. “Ahh!” He seemed to notice Victor for the first time. “What? You here, too? Just as well! It’s started up north.”

  “What do you mean?” Victor and Erasmus asked together.

  “They heard we had guns. They marched to get them. They did, too, or some of them—but we gave them a black eye and a bloody nose in the getting. It’s war up there, Radcliffs—war, I tell you! And it will be war here, too, war all through this land, unless you’re a pack of spineless poltroons.” He slammed down his mug. “Fill it up again! Atlantis and liberty!”

  II

  Victor Radcliff looked at the English soldier. The redcoat, standing on a Hanover street corner, glowered back. He carried a flintlock musket; with its long bayonet, it was about as tall as he was. He had pale blue eyes, yellow hair, and pimpled skin almost pink enough to belong to an albino.

  Had he known who Victor was, he might have tried to seize him. If the Atlantean settlements had risen against the unloved and unloving mother country, they would need someone to lead their soldiers. Without false modesty, Radcliff knew he had more practice at that than any other man born on this side of the ocean. No doubt some English officers knew it, too, but the knowledge hadn’t trickled down to this spotty young fellow.

  He just disliked being looked at. “Move along, you,” he growled in a clotted, barely comprehensible Northern accent.

  “Yes, indeed.” Victor touched the brim of his hat. “I never argue with a man with a gun.”

  “Damned well better not,” the redcoat said. Victor thought that was what he said, anyhow; he swallowed so many vowels, it was hard to be sure.

  What Blaise swallowed was a chuckle. “Oh, no, you never argue with men with guns,” the Negro said. “Not much, you don’t.”

  “Hush.” Victor looked back over his shoulder. To his relief, the redcoat was paying attention to a pretty girl crossing the street, not to him any more. “You don’t want to give him ideas. He’s liable to come up with them on his own even if you don’t.”

  “Him?” Blaise didn’t bother hiding his scorn. “He wouldn’t know an idea if it walked up and honked in his face.”

  By such idioms did the Atlantean distinguish himself from the Englishman. The irony was that honkers had grown rare on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The enormous, flightless gooselike birds were, like oil thrushes, unlucky enough to hatch from the egg without fear of man. As settlers advanced, honkers retreated: or rather, they died in place, and their haunts grew ever scarcer and more remote.

  Custis Cawthorne had written a pamphlet arguing that land should be set aside so honkers and other native productions of Atlantis could have somewhere to survive. It struck Victor as a good idea; most of Custis Cawthorne’s ideas were good. That didn’t mean it was likely to happen. People wanted to grab land, not set it aside for anything.

  Somebody shouted from a second- or third-story window: “The Devil fry all murdering English dogs!”

  “There! There he is!” Victor might not have known just where that cry came from, but the young English soldier pointed like a hunting dog. At his shout, four more redcoats charged out of an eatery. When they saw where he was pointing, they rushed in.

  A pistol shot rang out. Other gunshots answered it. A redcoat lurched from the building, right hand clutched to left shoulder. Blood welled out from between his fingers, brighter than the dyed wool of his coat.

  More gunshots boomed. Victor heard the crash of breaking furniture and several voices high and shrill with pain and fury. A couple of minutes later, the other three redcoats came out dragging a wounded local. The man was bloodied and battered, but he had no quit in him. His head came up. “Atlantis and freedom!” he called in a great voice.

  One of the redcoats hit him in the face. “Shut up, you bloody big-mouthed bastard!”

  “Shame!” a woman screeched.

  “Atlantis and freedom!” the prisoner cried again.

  This time, the English soldier clouted him with his musket butt. The local went limp in the other redcoats’ arms. “Shame!” the woman said again.

  “Maybe you’d better let him go,” a bareheaded, shock-haired ’prentice said, his hands balling into fists.

  “Maybe you’d better bugger off, sonny,” a redcoat answered. He had a corporal’s stripes on his sleeve and a scarred, weasely face that warned he’d give trouble no matter the mess in which he found himself.

  “Maybe I’d better not.” The ’prentice set his feet. Several other Atlanteans ranged themselves behind him.

  More English soldiers came out of the cookshop. The sun glittered off the sharp edges of their bayonets. “Last chance, boy,” the corporal said, not unkindly. “Otherwise, we’ll stick you and we’ll gut you and you’ll end up dead never knowing why.”

  “What do we do?” Blaise asked in a low voice.

  “Try to keep the town from blowing up,” Victor answered. “The time’s not ripe.”

  No matter what he thought, his opinion turned out not to be the one that counted. One of the men behind the bushy-haired ’prentice stooped to grub a cobblestone out of the ground. He flung it at the redcoats. It caught a soldier in the ribs. He said “Oof!” and then “Ow!” and then “Fuck your bleedin’ mother!”

  A split second after the curse passed the redcoat’s lips, muskets leveled at the crowd of Atlanteans. “Fire!” the corporal shouted. Triggers clicked. Descending hammers scraped flints on steel. Sparks fell into flash pans. The guns bellowed, sending up clouds of acrid gunpowder smoke.

  Most of them bellowed, anyhow: flintlocks were imperfectly reliable. The English soldiery’s muskets were also imperfectly accurate. Some of the shots went wide; one of them shattered a window well off to the side of the crowd. But men screamed. Men fell.

  And men who didn’t scream or fall hurled more stones at the redcoats. One of them had a pistol, which he discharged. The ball hit the weasely corporal in the arm. What he said made the other soldier’s obscenity sound like an endearment.

  The sound of gunfire brought more redcoats at the run. More Atlanteans boiled out of houses and shops. The two sides hurried towards each other like lodestone and iron. The Englishmen had discipline and firearms and bayonets. The Atlanteans had fury and whatever makeshift weapons they could snatch up and numbers. The fury kept them from fleeing when the redcoats shot and stuck some of them. What the Atlanteans did to a couple of redcoats they managed to grab . . .

  A paving stone sailed past Victor Radcliff’s head. He ducked, as automatically and uselessly as a man did when a musket ball came too close for comfort. If it was going to hit you, it would before you could do a damned thing about it.

  There were fights to join and fights to stay away from. This struck Victor as a fight to stay away from. He’d faced more dangerous enemies with qualms no worse than those of any reasonably brave man. When he had, though, he’d done it with some purpose in mind. If this mêlée had any point at all, he couldn’t see it.

  He pulled Blaise into a narrow, stinking alley. He didn’t know where it went, but it led away from the madness that had kindled here. “They are liable to tear this whole big place down,” Blaise said mournfully.

  “That they are,” Victor agreed. “They’re liable to tear Atlantis apart while they’re doing it, too.”

  “What can we do?” the Negro asked.

  “Get away. Live through this. See what happens next. Try to shape what happens next. Have you got any better ideas? If you have, spit ’em out, by God. I’d love to hear ’em.”

  But Blaise shook his head. “If we gonna get away, we better do it right now,” he said. That struck Victor as one of the best ideas he’d heard in a long time. The two of them wasted not a moment using it.

  Hanover writhed under martial law. The redcoats strode through the streets by squads. When they went by ones or twos, or even by fours or fives, they were
much too apt to be mobbed. Rocks and crockery and the contents of chamber pots came flying out of upper-story windows.

  Blaise had already escaped the city. He and Victor had gone their separate ways precisely because they were known to stick together. Blaise had got away clean. Victor’d expected nothing less. Englishmen—Atlanteans, too—had trouble taking black men seriously.

  And now it was time for Victor to get away himself, if he could. Coming into Hanover, he’d worn the clothes of a prosperous farmer, which he was. Leaving the city, he was by all appearances a down-at-the-heels shoemaker. He even rode a swaybacked nag, the kind of horse such a man would have if he had any horse at all.

  The English had checkpoints west of Hanover. They also had men scattered between the checkpoints. If you got caught trying to sneak out, you landed in real trouble. Things at the checkpoints were supposed to come closer to routine.

  They’d better, Victor thought. Up ahead of him, the redcoats were searching a fat man’s carriage. The fat man didn’t like it, and let them know he didn’t. “I’m a loyal subject of good King George! It’s not right for you to treat me like a common criminal,” he said.

  “Everybody’s a loyal subject . . . when he talks to us,” said the underofficer in charge. “Find anything, Charles?”

  “No, Sergeant. He’s not a smuggler, anyhow,” said a soldier, presumably Charles. “Do we strip him to his drawers?”

  “No. I expect he’s clean.” The sergeant nodded to the fat man. “Pass on, you.”

  “Strip me to my drawers?” the fat man spluttered. “You’ll win few friends playing such games.”

  “And do you think we care?” the sergeant said. “If you settlers weren’t in revolt, we wouldn’t have to worry about keeping you from sneaking guns out of Hanover. If you haven’t got guns, who cares if you’re friendly or not? Now get going, or we will find out if your linen’s clean.”

  Still spluttering, the fat man rolled on. The soldier called Charles gestured Victor Radcliff forward. “And who are you, friend?” he asked.

  No friend of yours, Victor thought. “My name is Richard Saunders,” he replied. Some Radcliffs and Radcliffes favored the English; the clan was too large to have uniform opinions. But if the redcoats knew they had hold of Victor Radcliff, they’d never let him go.

  “Well, Saunders, what are you doing coming out of Hanover?” the sergeant asked. “Where are you bound?”

  “I’m heading for Hooville,” Victor answered, which was true, although he wouldn’t stop there. Then he blossomed into invention: “I was seeing my solicitor. My uncle just died childless, and looks like I’ll have to go to law with my cousins over his property and estate.” He tried to seem suitably disgusted.

  The sergeant and Charles and the rest of the redcoats put their heads together. “Are you loyal to his Majesty, King George III?” the underofficer demanded fiercely.

  “Of course I am.” Victor lied without compunction. As the redcoat had said to the fat man, who would tell George’s soldiers no?

  And the English soldiers’ crooked grins said they understood the likely reason for his answer. “Then you won’t mind if we search you?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes, I’ll mind,” Victor said. “Not much I can do about it past minding, though, is there?”

  “Too right there’s not, friend.” Charles used the last word to suggest anything but its literal meaning. “Why don’t you get down from that sorry piece of crowbait you’re riding?”

  “Sam’s a good horse,” Victor protested. The redcoats laughed. In their boots, he would have laughed, too.

  They patted him down and looked inside his saddle bags. They found nothing to make them suspicious—Victor wanted to look as harmless as he could. The sergeant still seemed unhappy. “You’ve fought in war,” he said, and it wasn’t quite a question.

  Victor nodded. “I fought the French here, back about the time your beard sprouted.”

  The English underofficer scratched at a side whisker. “We were on the same side then, England and Atlantis.”

  “I am on England’s side still,” Victor Radcliff said once more.

  “Yes, of course you are.” The sergeant didn’t believe it, not for a second. But he had no real reason to disbelieve it, no proof Radcliff was anything but what he claimed. He looked unhappy, but he jerked a thumb toward the swaybacked horse. “Climb on your old screw and get out of here.”

  “Obliged.” Victor pretended not to notice his reservations. When he mounted Sam, the deep curve in the horse’s spine left the stirrups only a few inches above the ground. He pressed his knees against the animal’s sides and flicked the reins. Away Sam went. He’d get where he was going, but he wouldn’t do it in a hurry.

  Don’t look over your shoulder, Victor told himself. He didn’t want to give the redcoats any more chances to see his face. Sam ambled along. The soldiers could still call him back. They could, but they didn’t. The road swung around behind a stand of native pines. Only then did Victor breathe easier.

  He was riding a better horse by the time he came to Hooville. Someone took Sam back to the farm where he’d labored for a lot of years. Maybe his role in helping Victor escape Hanover would be celebrated in songs and paintings in years to come. He couldn’t have cared less. All he got out of it were a couple of carrots.

  Blaise waited in Hooville. “Good to see you,” he said when Victor rode in. “I wasn’t sure I was going to.”

  “Well, neither was I,” Victor said. “But here I am. They didn’t know they had me in their hands, and now they don’t, and so they won’t.”

  “Custis Cawthorne is loose, too. He’s on his way to New Hastings,” Blaise said.

  “Good for him—and that’s the right place for him to go, too,” Radcliff said. New Hastings held fewer loyalists than any other town in English Atlantis. Other places might be noisier in their disapproval of the mother country, but it ran deeper and wider there than anywhere else.

  “Not everybody’s going to get away, though. The redcoats do hold Hanover,” Blaise said. “What can we do?”

  “Right now? I don’t quite know. If this is truly war . . .” Victor Radcliff no doubt looked as unhappy as he sounded. If this was truly war, Atlantis stood alone against the mightiest empire in the world. “If this is war, I see only one advantage on our side.”

  Blaise raised an eyebrow. “Well, that’s one more than I see.”

  “Oh, we’ve got one.” Victor waved to the barmaid for another mug of flip. He’d drunk enough that he should have felt it, but he didn’t, or not very much. As she set the mug in front of him, he went on, “We’re a long way from England. She can’t move quickly against us, and she won’t find it easy or cheap to ship soldiers across the sea.”

  After a moment’s consideration, Blaise said, “Huzzah.”

  Victor wondered whether the Negro had been so sardonic in the African jungles where he grew up, or whether Blaise had learned it from him. If the latter was true, as he feared, then he had a lot to answer for. Sardonic or not, the Negro had a point with his sour acclamation. Atlantis had merchantmen and fishing boats to oppose the Royal Navy, farmers to face professional soldiers. She was short of gunpowder, and even shorter of firearms. And she was short of people—and how many of the ones she had would take England’s side?

  “What will the French down south do?” Blaise asked.

  “Good question,” Radcliff said. French Atlantis had passed under English rule only a dozen years before. Since then, the more numerous English-speakers had flooded into lands formerly barred to them. Would the older settlers rise against King George, or against the interlopers disrupting their way of life?

  “Have you got an answer?” Blaise seemed surprised to discover his mug of flip was also empty. He waved for a refill, too.

  “Only We’ll have to see,” Victor replied.

  The barmaid didn’t come back for Blaise as fast as she had for Victor. Was that because he was servant, not master? Because he was bla
ck, not white? Or only because she had other orders to fill first? Sometimes you could read too much into things that in fact carried no great meaning. Sometimes you could miss meanings in things that seemed ordinary at first.

  Blaise brushed two fingers of his right hand against the dark skin of his left forearm. Victor had seen Negroes use that gesture before. It meant, You did that because of my color. His factotum knew what he thought, then. And he knew what he thought of Victor’s comment as well: “Is that good enough?”

  “No,” Victor said honestly. “But it’s what we’ve got.”

  When he came to his farm, he found a delegation from the Atlantean Assembly waiting for him. The settlements had tried protesting to England one by one, only to learn that the mother country didn’t want to listen to them. Then they’d all joined together, thinking Atlantis might be heard if only it spoke with a single voice. Thus far, the evidence was against them.

  Isaac Fenner had red hair and ears that stuck out from the sides of his head like open doors. He was a solicitor from Bredestown, a few miles up the Brede from New Hastings, and spoke for the older city as well.

  Matthew Radcliffe, from Avalon on the west coast, was bound to be some sort of cousin of Victor’s, but neither had set eyes on the other before this meeting. The westerner was short and stocky; he looked travel worn. One of the farm cats had taken a liking to him and fallen asleep on his lap. He absently stroked its back while sipping rum punch.

  Everyone called Robert Smith, from Croydon in the north, Uncle Bobby. He’d carried the name since he was young. Victor didn’t know why; he wondered if Smith did himself. Uncle Bobby was also drinking rum punch, with the single-minded diligence of a man who needed it.