The United States of Atlantis Read online

  “To encourage the others,” he said after the deed was done, so he knew his Voltaire, too. Then he asked Victor, “Are you now satisfied?”

  “That you are serious? Yes, and your men will be, too,” Victor said. And so it proved.

  XVIII

  Blaise looked around. So did Victor Radcliff. There wasn’t much to see: ferns and evergreen trees and occasional bits of grass, a landscape more nearly Atlantean than European. “Where the devil are we?” Blaise asked, and proceeded to answer his own question: “In the middle of nowhere, that’s where.”

  “More like the edge of nowhere, I’d say,” Victor answered judiciously.

  “Honh!” Blaise’s voice might have served as an illustration for skepticism, could voices only have been illustrated. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw one of those honker birds, like we caught over on the west side of the Green Ridge. If they don’t live in the middle of nowhere, I don’t know what does.”

  “I should be surprised if we saw one,” Victor said. “You’re always surprised to see them on this side of the mountains. I’m not sure how many are left here, or if any are.”

  “If any are, they’d live in a place like this,” Blaise insisted. He paused, struck by a new thought: “Lot of meat on a honker bird.”

  “That there is,” Victor said. “As much as on a deer, say. I wouldn’t mind seeing a deer in these parts, either.”

  As if to underscore that, his stomach rumbled. The Marquis de la Fayette’s Frenchmen had indeed left the redcoats behind by marching into the interior of Atlantis. They’d also come perilously close to leaving human habitation behind. As a result, they were living off the countryside, and the countryside had less to offer than Victor would have wished.

  Things would have been worse were they Englishmen, or even troops from English Atlantis. Being French, they cheerfully gathered the fist-sized snails in the woods, and made tasty stews of the frogs and turtles they took from the streams they crossed and the ponds they skirted. Blaise ate such fare without complaint if with no great enthusiasm. So did Victor, who’d fed himself on similar victuals in his journeys through the Atlantean wilderness. But plenty of his countrymen would have turned up their noses . . . till they got hungrier than this, anyhow.

  Victor might have thought the Marquis de la Fayette would turn up his nose at a large snail broiled on a stick over a fire. The French nobleman ate it with every sign of relish. He also failed to falter at flapjack-turtle stew. To see what he would say, Victor remarked, “You can also eat the big green katydids that scurry through the leaves and rubbish on the ground.”

  “Is that a fact?” Rather than disgusted, the marquis sounded fascinated. “You will have done this for yourself?”

  “I will have indeed,” Victor answered. “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything you can get your hands on.”

  Whereupon de la Fayette caught a katydid and toasted it over the flames. He chewed meditatively. “You have reason, Monsieur le Général,” he said when he’d finished. “They may be eaten. And, as you say, hunger likely makes the best sauce.”

  “No doubt,” Victor answered, eyeing the young Frenchman—was he even twenty?—with new respect.

  “Well, well,” Blaise said that night as he and Victor lay side by side rolled in blankets. “More to him than meets the eye.”

  “There is,” Victor agreed. That well, well secretly amused him: his factotum was borrowing the phrase from his own way of speaking. “Pretty soon, we’ll have to see how well the Frenchmen can fight. If they do it as well as they march, no reason to worry about them.”

  “I think they will do all right,” Blaise said. “French people used me for a slave, so I don’t love them. But in the last war, no one ever said the soldiers from France couldn’t fight. They fought as well as the redcoats did, but there were not enough of them to win.”

  “True, every word of it. Besides, they would be embarrassed to fight badly when this bug-eating marquis is watching them, eh?” Victor said.

  Blaise didn’t answer. A moment later, a soft snore passed his lips. A moment after that, Victor was snoring, too.

  Naturally, the Marquis de la Fayette called the river that divided what had been French and English Atlantis the Erdre. That name had gone into French atlases since the fifteenth century. Coming from the other side of the border, Victor just as naturally thought of it as the Stour. Thanks to the way the political winds blew, the English name waxed while the French one waned.

  Not all the bridges over the river had been destroyed. Not all of them were even guarded. The French army crossed into English Atlantis without getting its feet wet and hurried northeast.

  “You see?” Victor said to Blaise a few days later. “We’d gone farther west than this when we came north with those two copperskins all those years ago. I wonder what ever happened to them. I suppose they went west over sea to Terranova, the way they wanted to. That was the middle of nowhere.”

  Blaise would quibble with anyone. “No, that was the end of nowhere—and the wrong end, too.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve got something there,” Victor admitted, remembering the swamps they’d splashed through on the way up to the Stour. He changed the subject and lowered his voice at the same time: “What do you think of our French general now?”

  Also quietly, Blaise answered, “I wonder what he’ll be like when he grows up.”

  Victor laughed loud enough to make de la Fayette glance his way with a raised eyebrow. Victor looked back as imperturbably as he could. Eventually, seeing that he wouldn’t get an explanation, de la Fayette gave it up as a bad job. Victor wasn’t sure just how fluent in English he was, but suspected he understood more than he let on. “You are a rascal,” he said to Blaise.

  “Me?” The Negro shook his head. “You must be thinking of someone else, General.” Victor laughed again, not so raucously this time. The marquis eyed him once more, but soon shrugged and went back to talking with his own officers.

  “I wonder what Baron von Steuben will make of him.” By now, Victor took the German soldier’s pretensions to nobility for granted.

  So did Blaise, who asked, “Which is higher, a baron or a marquis?”

  “A baron. No—a marquis. I think. I’m not sure.” Victor scowled. “No one has much use for fancy titles of nobility in Atlantis. There are a few knights here—men you’re supposed to call Sir—and maybe a baron or two, but not many. If we win the war, if we cast off King George’s rule, I don’t believe we shall have any nobles left at all. Everyone will be the same, at least in law.”

  “Everyone white,” Blaise said pointedly.

  “Everyone free,” Victor corrected. “Or what would you be doing with those stripes on your sleeve?”

  Blaise grunted, acknowledging the point without wholly conceding it. “Can this work, with everyone the same? Even in my tribe back in Africa—other tribes, too—we have the chief, and other men you have to respect because of who they are. . . . How do you say that in English?”

  “Nobles?” Victor suggested.

  “Maybe.” Blaise didn’t seem happy with the way the word tasted. “Not the same, I don’t think. But we have those folk, and then we have the ordinary people, too. Law not the same for chief and respectable people”—no, he didn’t like nobles—“and ordinary folk. Chief makes law. How can it stick on him?”

  “Well, King Louis of France would say the same thing,” Victor answered. “So would King George, even if Parliament told him he didn’t know what he was talking about. How will it work without a king or nobles? I don’t know. It seemed to go all right in Athens in ancient days, and in Rome.”

  “Ancient days,” Blaise muttered to himself. “Idea seems silly to me. You win this war against England, you should be King of Atlantis.”

  That thought had crossed Victor’s mind once or twice. Who could stop him if he decided to put a crown on his head after he won this war? Who would want to stop him? Not many people. He could, in fact, think of only o
ne. “I don’t want to be King of Atlantis, Blaise.”

  “Why not?” The Negro eyed him in honest perplexity. “What could be better? Then I would be one of the king’s—what do you say?—the king’s ministers, that’s it. You would be very rich, and I would be rich enough. Margaret would be Queen of Atlantis, and Stella her, uh, lady-in-waiting.”

  “Why fight to take down one king if all you do is set up another one in his place?” Victor returned. “Why—?”

  Before he could go on, one of the few French horsemen galloped back toward the head of the Marquis de la Fayette’s column. “Soldiers! English soldiers!” he shouted. “English soldiers at the bridge over the Brede!”

  What the devil are they doing there? Victor wondered. But the question answered itself. If the redcoats knew the French army was on its way, of course they would do what they could to slow it down.

  “Shall we dislodge them?” de la Fayette asked gaily.

  “We’d better, if we aim to get up toward Hanover,” Victor answered.

  “Then let us be about it.” The marquis started shouting orders. Like the English, like the Atlanteans, the French used bugles and fifes and drums to maneuver their soldiers. Their calls were different, though, and more musical, at least to Victor’s ears. The troopers in their blue jackets moved into line of battle as smoothly as redcoats might have done.

  No more than a platoon of English soldiers guarded the bridge. They had one field gun: a little three-pounder. “Surrender!” Victor shouted to them. “You haven’t a prayer of holding us off!”

  “Be damned to you, sir!” the youngster in charge of them shouted back—he had to be around de la Fayette’s age. “Come and get us!”

  “Be careful what you ask for, son,” Victor said, not unkindly. “Someone may give it to you.”

  “I am no son of a rebel dog, nor son of a foul Frenchman, neither.” The redcoat shook his fist at Victor, at the Marquis de la Fayette, and at the soldiers deploying behind the marquis. “Come on, then, if you’ve got the stomach for it!”

  “What does he say?” de la Fayette asked as Victor rode back to the French army.

  “He defies us.” Victor whistled sourly; that didn’t seem strong enough. “He casts his defiance in our teeth.”

  “He is brave.” The marquis paused for a moment. “It could be that he is also a fool. He seems quite young.” Of his own age de la Fayette said not a word.

  Methodically, the French troops advanced to the attack. The Englishmen’s fieldpiece boomed. Its ball—a plaything to look at—knocked over four Frenchmen. One got up again. One never would. The cries from the other two filled the air.

  Just before the French opened up on them, the redcoats fired a volley. More men in blue fell. The French returned fire. Several Englishmen went down. The others retreated to the north bank of the Brede, hauling their popgun after them.

  “Rush the bridge,” Victor urged. “They’re going to burn it or blow it up.”

  De la Fayette shouted the order. The Frenchmen broke ranks and surged forward at a run. A couple of them were on the bridge when the powder charge under it went off. Timbers flew every which way. One of them speared the leading French soldier. He screamed like a damned soul as he toppled. The blast flung the other Frenchman on the bridge into the Brede. He half swam, half splashed back to the south bank of the river. The charge blew a fifteen-foot hole in the bridge: too far for any soldier to hope to jump.

  With a mocking salute, the junior English officer led his surviving men off to the east. “Damn him,” Blaise said quietly.

  Victor Radcliff nodded. “He did everything a man in his place could hope to do—and rather more besides, I should say.”

  “He shall not delay us long, despite his arrogance,” de la Fayette said. Sure enough, French military engineers—pioneers, they called them—were making for the nearest trees. They would have the bridge repaired soon enough: a few hours, a day at the most. All the same, the redcoats were costing them that time. A platoon facing an army couldn’t do much better.

  “Hello, General.” The Atlantean courier touched a finger to his hat in a not very military salute. “Good to see you again, damned if it ain’t.”

  “How did you find me? There’ve been times lately when I wasn’t sure Old Scratch knew where I was, let alone anybody else,” Victor said.

  “You ask me, it ain’t so bad if the Devil don’t know where you’re at,” the courier replied, and Victor could hardly disagree. The leathery horseman went on, “Devil or not, General, there’s ways.” He laid a finger by the side of his nose and didn’t elaborate.

  Not quite idle curiosity prompted Victor to ask, “Have any of those ways got to do with a foul-mouthed little head louse of an English lieutenant?”

  The courier’s mouth fell open, displaying discolored teeth and a cud of pipeweed. The man spat brown before asking, “How in blazes did you know that?”

  “Blazes or not, there’s ways,” Victor answered blandly.

  “Well, he’s been bragging to all and sundry in Bredestown how he slaughtered ten thousand Frenchies single-handed out in the wilderness—something like that, anyways,” the courier said. “Figures there’d be some Frenchies left over, don’t it? Figures you’d be with ’em if there was, don’t it? Tracked them down, tracked you down.” He let fly with another brown stream.

  Had he seemed even a little more impressed with himself, Victor Radcliff would have felt the urge to take him down a peg. As things were, Victor only said, “Tell me at once—do we yet hold Hanover?”

  “That we do. I’ve got letters telling you this and that, but there’s the nub: that we do.” The courier shifted his quid from one cheek to the other. As if reminded of something, he added, “Oh, and I’ve got letters for you from Honker’s Mill, too.”

  “Do you, now?” Victor could hear how toneless his voice went. “And what’s the latest from the Atlantean Assembly?” He wondered whether he really wanted to know.

  “Some old Jew gave ’em a nice stack of coin, so they aren’t quite so flat as they have been lately,” the man said.

  “Would that be Master Benveniste? He has always been generous in supporting the cause of freedom,” Victor said.

  “Some old Jew,” the courier repeated. His voice reflected absolute indifference to the Jew’s identity. “They’re all a stack of Christ-killers anyways. Ought to chase ’em out of Atlantis for good once we win.”

  “But take their money in the meantime?” Victor enquired dryly.

  “Well, sure. Got to squeeze some use out of ’em.”

  “Your charity does you credit.” Radcliff hadn’t thought he could get drier yet, but he managed.

  “Much obliged, General.” The courier recognized no irony. He handed Victor the letters, gave him a smarter salute than he had on first coming up, and then rode away.

  “What is one to do with such a fellow!” Victor cried, throwing his hands in the air. “The United States of Atlantis shall have freedom for those who confess any religion—even for those who confess none, by God!”

  “So long as their skins be not too dark,” Blaise remarked.

  “It is not the same thing,” Victor said.

  “I am not surprised a white man would say it was not,” the Negro answered. “If copperskins ruled the seas and held your folk in bondage to grow their sugar and dyestuffs, you would sing a different tune. And if black men did—! Well, you would not fancy that very much, either, I think.”

  “Settlements make those arrangements for themselves—states, I should say,” Victor replied. “If you tell me you are one whit less free than I, I shall call you a liar to your face.”

  “But you did not have to run away to make yourself free, whilst I did. You did not have to abscond with yourself, so to speak,” Blaise said. “Down in the French settlements, I am still a wanted man—for stealing me.”

  “We are both wanted men all over Atlantis, and for a crime worse than theft.” Victor knew he was deliberately trying to
turn the subject. He’d gone round the barn with Blaise a great many times on this, but he’d seldom felt the Negro chasing him quite so closely.

  Blaise, unfortunately, also knew he was turning the subject. “So the United States of Atlantis can decide that anyone gets to pray to God any which way, but each settlement gets to pick who is free and who gets sold. Well, well.”

  Slaveowners from the settlements in southern Atlantis might be persuaded to put up with Papists (for those who were Protestant) or Protestants (for those who followed Rome) or possibly even Jews (and some Jews owned slaves, too). They might even tolerate freethinkers, so long as the men who thought freely didn’t publish in the same way (and maybe sending Thomas Paine to Terranova would end up helping him stay safe). That slaveowners who made money from their two-legged chattels would ever tolerate equality with Negroes or copperskins struck Victor as most unlikely.

  Blaise tried a different gibe: “You don’t hate Negroes enough to keep from lying down with a slave wench. Suppose you got her with child. Would you sell your son for profit? Some men who own slaves do that, you know.”

  “It isn’t likely,” Victor said uneasily. “But the issue of my issue does not arise. Louise is not my slave. I have no slaves. You know that, too.”

  He thought Blaise would yield that point, but his factotum did not. “Is it not so that every white Atlantean has slaves if any white Atlantean has slaves? You go along with it. . . .” He shook his head. “There is a better word.”

  After a moment’s thought, Victor suggested, “Condone?”

  “Yes. Thank you. That is what I wanted. You condone it.”

  “Why do you say ’every white Atlantean’? I did not see you too proud to lie down with a slave, either. Maybe you made her belly bulge.”

  “I hope not. I shot my seed on it whenever I could.” But Blaise looked embarrassed. “Not ’every white Atlantean,’ then. ‘Every free Atlantean.’ Every free Atlantean condones having slaves if any free Atlantean has slaves. And this for the Proclamation of Liberty.” He snapped his fingers.