Liberating Atlantis Read online

  Frederick wolfed down his breakfast. He wished he could have got twice as much. He wouldn’t starve on a field hand’s rations. But he would wish—he would always wish—he could get more.

  Mosquitoes buzzed around him as he ate. They were worse in the close little cabin at night. So the raised, itchy places on his arms and ankles and the back of his neck insisted, though he didn’t remember getting bitten. They were worse, then, yes, but they never went away. He wondered if he could get some mesh or screening for the windows. Or would Matthew think something like that was too good for field hands? Slapping at a bug that landed on his wrist, Frederick thought, I can find out.

  The overseer glanced at the ascending sun. With a theatrical shake of the head, he shouted at the slaves: “Eat up! You ain’t porkers! Master Henry ain’t fattening you up. You got work to do.”

  A Negro pointed to the path that led from the big house to the road to New Marseille. “What’s goin’ on there?” he said.

  “Don’t waste my time with your silly games, Lou,” Matthew snapped. “You—” He broke off. Lou wasn’t playing games, not this morning.

  “Dog my cats if them ain’t soldiers,” another Negro said.

  “Cavalry,” a copperskin named Lorenzo—a power among the field hands, as Frederick had already seen—added with precision.

  It wasn’t just that the men were on horseback. Infantry could mount horses when they needed to get from here to there in a hurry. But the soldiers’ gray uniforms had yellow piping and chevrons, not the blue foot soldiers would have used. The troopers es corted two supply wagons: smaller versions of the prairie frigates settlers in Terranova used to cross the broad plains there. The copperskins who lived on those plains didn’t care for that, but when a folk that had to buy or steal firearms and ammunition bumped up against one that could make such things, the end of the struggle was obvious even if it hadn’t arrived yet.

  Matthew watched the wagons and their escort come up the path. Absently slapping at a mosquito, he said, “Never seen the like in all my born days. I wonder what the devil they want.”

  Frederick had never seen the like, either, and he’d lived on the plantation much longer than the overseer. Were he still back at the big house, he would have come out onto the front porch and asked the soldiers what the devil they wanted—though he would have been more polite about it than that. As a field hand with stripes on his back, all he could do was stand there and watch.

  Henry Barford came out himself. He was barefoot and wore homespun wool trousers not much better than his slaves’, though his linen shirt was white. He hadn’t combed his hair; as usual when he hadn’t, it went every which way. He looked like a drunken stumblebum. But the unconscious arrogance with which he bore himself declared him the planter here.

  “What in tarnation are you doing on my land?” he shouted to the incoming cavalrymen.

  Their leader wore two small silver stars on either side of his stand collar: a first lieutenant’s rank badges. He gave Barford a crisp salute. “Sorry to trouble you, sir, but we’re bound for New Marseille with a cargo of rifle muskets and ammunition.” He waved at the wagons behind him. “Much as I hate to say it, three of my men are down with what looks like the yellow jack.”

  A low murmur ran through the slaves. The morning sun was already hot, but Frederick shivered all the same. He wouldn’t have wanted to take men with yellow fever into New Marseille. What would they do to an officer who let a plague like that get loose in a city? Frederick wouldn’t have wanted to find out, and evidently the lieutenant didn’t, either.

  None of which appeased Henry Barford, not even a little bit. He jumped straight up in the air, as if a scorpion had stung him on the ankle. He let out a wordless howl of fury as if he’d been stung, too. Then he did find words: “You mangy son of a bitch! Take your stinking sick soldiers and get the hell off my property! How dare you bring the yellow jack here?”

  “My apologies, sir, but I can’t do that,” the officer said stolidly. “The men need bed rest, and we happened to see your place here. Yellow fever doesn’t kill everyone who comes down with it—not even close. And I assure you that you will be generously compensated for your time and trouble.”

  “How can you compensate me when I’m dead and buried—if anybody’d have the nerve to plant me?” Barford said. “Go on, get lost, or I’ll grab my shotgun and blow some sense into you!”

  The lieutenant nodded to his healthy troopers. In the twinkling of an eye, they all aimed eight-shooters at Henry Barford’s head and midsection. “Meaning no disrespect, sir, but don’t talk silly talk,” the officer said. “We’re here, and we’re going to stay until my men recover.”

  “Or until you put them six feet under,” Barford said. But he made no sudden moves and kept his hands in plain sight. Frederick hadn’t thought anyone could make a mistake worse than his in the dining room. If Master Henry made one now, though, he’d never make another. He glumly eyed the revolvers. “Don’t look like I can stop you.”

  “No. It doesn’t,” the lieutenant agreed. His voice turned brisk. “Now . . . You won’t want me to quarter Jenkins and Merridale and Casey in the main residence, will you?”

  “In the big house? I hope to spit, I won’t!” Maybe Barford said spit. “What you ought to do is put ’em in tents way the devil away from anybody.”

  “No,” the lieutenant said in a hard, flat voice. “They’re good men. They deserve the best we can give them. I suppose your slave quarters will have to do.”

  “If my niggers and mudfaces come down sick, I’ll take compensation out of your hide,” Barford said.

  “I understand, sir,” the lieutenant said. Of course, if the slaves came down sick, he was liable to do the same thing himself. If he did, he’d be in no condition to compensate Henry Barford.

  Barford was also liable to come down sick. The officer didn’t say anything more about that. Neither did the planter.

  “Matthew!” Barford bawled.

  “Yes, Mr. Barford?” the overseer said.

  “Put up the sick soldiers in one of the cabins. Make sure they’ve got themselves a wench to take care of ’em. We’ll do the best job we can, but you know as well as I do they’re in God’s hands now.” Barford might be talking to his overseer, but he also aimed his words at the lieutenant. If your men die, it won’t be my fault, he meant.

  “I’ll see to it.” Matthew turned to the cavalry officer. “Can your men tote ’em into the cabin? They’ve already been around ’em.”

  “I’d thought it would be slave work, but. . . .” The lieutenant nodded grudgingly. “Yes, that does seem reasonable. Let it be as you say.” He barked orders at his men. They obeyed more readily—certainly more quickly—than slaves obeyed an overseer. And they were all white men, too! Oh, one of them was swarthy and had a Spanish-sounding name, but he remained on the good side of Atlantis’ great social divide.

  The sick cavalrymen weren’t quite so yellow as the trim on their uniforms, but they weren’t far from it. The soldiers who carried them from the wagons to the slave cabins didn’t look happy about their work. Frederick wouldn’t have been, either. Nobody knew how the yellow jack spread. Come to that, nobody knew how any disease except the pox and the clap spread. Handling someone who already had the sickness seemed as likely a way as any, and more likely than most. The copperskinned woman Matthew chose to care for them wasn’t thrilled about the honor, either.

  “Somebody’s got to do it,” the overseer said. “Why not you, Abigail?”

  Abigail had no answer for that. In her place, Frederick didn’t suppose he would have himself. He would have looked everywhere he could to find one, though. He was sure of that.

  Matthew faced the rest of the slaves. “Well, come on,” he said. “Get your tools and head on out to the fields. Or do you want to hang around here with the sick soldiers?”

  They headed out. The pace left stiff, sore Frederick struggling to keep up. It also left the overseer goggling. Had he ever seen
slaves move so fast? Had anybody, since the beginning of the world? If the other choice was sticking close to people down with the yellow jack, even weeding a cotton field under the blazing subtropical sun didn’t seem bad at all.

  Dragging back as the sun went down, Frederick wearily shook his head. Going out to weed under the subtropical sun might not have seemed so bad. Doing it all day, even at the slowest pace the overseer would let people get away with, was something else again. If it wasn’t hell on earth, he didn’t know what would be.

  The yellow jack, maybe?

  One of the troopers died two days later. A copperskin and a Negro dug a grave for him in the plot back of the cabins where they buried their own. Frederick and Helen had lain two small bodies to rest there. The lieutenant—his name was Peter Torrance—borrowed a Bible from Henry Barford and read the Twenty-third Psalm over the man’s body. The Barfords and their slaves and the cavalrymen all stood around the grave together, listening to the somberly inspiring words and now and then brushing and slapping at buzzing bugs.

  “Wish we could go on to New Marseille,” a soldier grumbled after the service broke up.

  “Well, we damned well can’t,” a sergeant answered; angry puffs of smoke rose from his pipe. “We’ve got to stay put till we’re good and sure we ain’t gonna make the whole damned town sick.”

  “Don’t want to get sick myself, neither,” the soldier said.

  “You run off, they’ll call it desertion and hang you,” the sergeant said. “You ain’t like the slaves here—your carcass isn’t worth an atlantean while you’re still alive.” The inflated paper money of the war against England lived on in memory.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” the soldier assured him.

  “God-damned right you’re not.” The sergeant sounded very sure of himself.

  But it was the sergeant who fell sick the next day—and the copperskin who’d dug the dead trooper’s grave came down with the yellow jack the day after that. The copperskin rapidly got worse. His kind sickened more readily than whites, who seemed to sicken more readily than Negroes. A copperskin with smallpox was almost sure to die, where a man of some other breed might pull through.

  Henry Barford was incensed, as Frederick had known he would be. “You are a son of a bitch!” he shouted at Lieutenant Torrance.

  Torrance seemed more distracted than offended. “Sorry, Mr. Barford,” he managed at last.

  That didn’t come close to placating the planter. “Sorry? I don’t think so!” Barford said. “I’m going to write to my Senator—that’s what I’m going to do.”

  The Atlantean officer looked through him. “Mr. Barford, you may write to the Pope for all I care, and much good may it do you. My back hurts, and so does my head. If I have not got a fever, I should be very much surprised.”

  Henry Barford stared at him in undisguised horror. “Lord love a duck! You’re coming down with it, too!” He edged away from the lieutenant.

  If that offended Torrance, he hid it very well: or, more likely, he had other things to worry about. “I fear I am. I hope I am not, but I fear I am.” He muttered to himself, then spoke aloud again: “I wish we could have got these rifle muskets to New Marseille. Before long, the garrison there will commence to wondering what has become of them.”

  Frederick heard that—the two white men were talking outside the big house after the work gang came in for the day. Frederick was healing, and was also beginning to get used to the work. He wasn’t collapsing the minute he’d had supper, the way he did the night after his first day in the cotton fields. What Torrance and Barford said didn’t fully register, not at the moment, but he took it in so it could spend the time it needed in ripening.

  “You could send somebody to let ’em know,” Barford said. “Not that far to town—even closer to the nearest place where you could send a telegram.” Wires were beginning to crisscross Atlantis. The telegraph was new in the past ten years, so the process wasn’t complete yet. But it seemed to pick up speed year by year, because the device was so obviously useful.

  Lieutenant Torrance shook his head. “I stopped here to keep from spreading the sickness any farther.”

  “Oh, and a hell of a job you did, too, my boy!” Barford exclaimed.

  As if on cue, his wife’s voice floated down from their bedroom. “Henry! Are you out there, Henry?”

  “Sure am,” he answered. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t feel well, Henry.” By the way Clotilde Barford said it, it could only be her husband’s fault.

  But that wasn’t quite true, was it? It could also be Lieutenant Peter Torrance’s fault. If he’d picked a different plantation . . . How much difference would it have made? Maybe not much—when yellow fever spread, it could spread like wildfire. But maybe it wouldn’t have come here at all. You never could tell. And if that wasn’t enough to drive you crazy, nothing ever would.

  Henry Barford absently slapped at a mosquito, then wiped the palm of his hand on his trouser leg. “Don’t feel good how?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a headache. My back hurts, too. And I’m warm—I swear I’m warm,” Clotilde said. She didn’t give her symptoms in the same order as Lieutenant Torrance had, which didn’t mean they didn’t match.

  Frederick realized that right away. Barford took a few seconds longer, and then delivered a double take worthy of the stage. “Oh, you son of a bitch!” he snarled at the Atlantean lieutenant. He rushed back into the big house.

  Torrance just stood there. He swayed slightly—he looked as if a strong breeze, or even a breeze that wasn’t so strong, would blow him away. He caught Frederick’s eye. “You. Come here.”

  “What you need, sir?” Frederick asked as he walked over. He didn’t—he couldn’t—move very fast.

  Chance were it didn’t matter. The lieutenant looked through him, too. “I didn’t mean to bring the sickness here,” he said after a long, long pause.

  “Who would mean to do something like that, sir?” Frederick said, which seemed safe enough.

  The answer seemed to focus the lieutenant’s attention on him. Frederick wasn’t nearly sure he wanted it. “What’s your name?” Torrance asked.

  “Frederick,” the Negro answered automatically. But, a heartbeat later, something made him add, “Frederick Radcliff.”

  Most white men would have laughed at him for his pretensions. At a different time or place, in different circumstances, Lieutenant Torrance might well have laughed, too. Now he gave Frederick his full attention. “I can see why you say so,” Torrance observed. “You have something of the look of one of the First Consuls to you.”

  “He was my grandfather,” Frederick said.

  “Easy enough to claim,” the officer answered. But he held up a hand before Frederick could get angry. “It could be so—I already told you you have the look.”

  “Victor Radcliff’s grandson, a field nigger.” Frederick didn’t bother hiding his bitterness.

  “I can’t do anything about it,” Lieutenant Torrance said. “I can’t do anything about anything. If I am alive a week from now, I shall get down on my knees and thank almighty God. If you are alive a week from now . . .” He ran down like a watch that wanted winding.

  “What?” Frederick asked.

  The lieutenant pressed his palm against his own forehead. Frederick had always found you had a hard time telling whether you had a fever that way, because when you did your palm was also warmer than it should have been. But Torrance’s grimace said he didn’t like what his own flesh told him. “I am from Croydon,” he said, out of the blue—or so it seemed to Frederick.

  “Yes?” the Negro said, wondering if Peter Torrance’s wits were starting to wander.

  “No slaves in Croydon,” the lieutenant said, so he had been going somewhere after all. “We don’t put up with that kind of thing up there. We haven’t, not for a man’s lifetime and longer. Doesn’t always stop our traders from making money off of what slaves do, but we don’t keep ’em ourselves. Some folks
think that makes us better. But I’ll tell you something, Frederick Radcliff.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If folks don’t want you to be free, you can still take care of the job. Look what your grandfather did against England.”

  He made it sound easy. Maybe he thought it would be. Or maybe his wits were wandering but he didn’t realize it yet. Running off was deadly dangerous and much too likely to fail. Rising up . . . Frederick’s mind shied like a frightened horse at the mere idea. Even if slaves did rise up from time to time, they had never yet failed to regret it. And the reprisals vengeful whites took were designed to make the survivors think three times before trying that kind of thing again.

  Lieutenant Torrance shrugged. “If you are your grandfather’s grandson, you’ll find some way to be worthy of his name. And if you aren’t . . .” He let that hang, too. After touching one finger to the brim of his black plug hat, he walked back to the tent he’d run up. He wasn’t steady on his legs, and it wasn’t because he’d had too much to drink.

  “What did the white man want?” Helen asked when Frederick came back to her.

  “Don’t quite know,” he answered. “Tell you somethin’, though—don’t reckon I ever talked with anybody like him before.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Don’t quite know,” Frederick repeated. He wished he could spend more time ciphering it out. An enormous yawn soon put paid to that notion. He wasn’t so exhausted as he had been that first dreadful night, and his stripes didn’t pain him so much. But they did still hurt, and he was still weary.

  He and Helen headed back to their cabin. He woke up in the night needing to use the chamber pot. As he lay back down, several itchy new mosquito bites reminded him again that he hadn’t screened the window. They kept him awake a little while. That was one more mark of progress; the first night, he hadn’t even noticed he was getting eaten alive.

  No one blew the horn the next morning, not till the sun stood higher in the sky than it should have. And when the horn did sound . . . It always reminded Frederick more of an animal’s bellow than of a product of human ingenuity, but this morning it reminded him of an animal in pain.