Opening Atlantis (51 page)

“I shouldn't wonder,” Victor said. “French Atlantis is ours now. There's no army left that can slow us down, much less stop us. Plenty of plantations, plenty of ordinary farms, plenty of shops in the towns that will need men to run them. There won't be enough Frenchmen to do it, not after we've killed off so many of them. And our settlements have always been more populous than theirs. Look at the way we're spilling across the Green Ridge Mountains. They have New Marseille over on the west coast, but that's just another little seacoast town.”

Now the Englishman glanced up to make sure Blaise was busy plundering. In a low voice, he said, “How do you suppose your bonny English settlers will like turning into slaveholders?”

Victor Radcliff shrugged. “It's a way of life down here. How else are you going to run a plantation?”

“I don't care for it,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “Slavery's against the law in England, you know.”

“I don't, either, but it's not here. Not in our Terranovan settlements, either,” Victor said. “Where slaves and money go together, who complains about slaves? Does that surprise you, sir?”

“Well, when you put it so, perhaps not,” the English officer replied. “I shouldn't care to buy and sell other men myself, though.”

“Neither would I…sir,” Victor said slowly. “But I wear cotton when I don't wear wool or linen. Much of what I wear is dyed with indigo. I enjoy pipeweed. Sometimes I eat rice when I don't eat maize or wheat. Isn't it the same for you?”

“Yes, of course it is,” the lieutenant-colonel said. “But—”

“No, sir. No buts, not in that case,” Radcliff broke in. “If you use what slaves make but don't care to own them yourself, aren't you like a man who eats pork but doesn't care to butcher hogs?”

The Englishman opened his mouth, then closed it again. After a moment, he tried again: “You are a bloody difficult man, Major.”

“Thanks. I do my best,” Victor said, not without pride.

“This may all prove moot, you understand,” the Englishman said.

With a sigh not quite of resignation, Victor Radcliff nodded. “I understand much too well. If the gentlemen who all speak French sit down together and decide to hand this country back to the people who just now lost it, nothing we can do to keep it this side of insurrection.”

“I should not recommend that, either,” the English officer said. “It would be foredoomed to failure.”

“You may well be right, sir,” Victor said politely, though less than convinced that the officer from across the Atlantic was. “I am operating on the assumption that it will not come to that. I am also operating on the assumption that those diplomatic gentlemen will not be so foolish as to squander what we won at such cost.”

“You are likely to be right yourself,” the Englishman said. “England had the power to take French Atlantis, and God has also blessed us with the power to prevail elsewhere in the world. We may throw France some small sop when this war is over, to prevent her utter humiliation, but I see no reason to throw her a large one. In my view, French Atlantis is too large and too important to return, it once having fallen into our hands.”

“We agree.” Victor smiled. “That is not something a settler and a man from the mother country can often say these days.”

“We have been tested in adversity, you and I,” the other officer replied. “And, unlike the King of Babylon, God did not weigh us in the measure and find us wanting.”

“Not yet, anyhow,” Victor said, smiling still. “Do you suppose that, with French Atlantis in our pocket, we could sweep down through it and pick up Spanish Atlantis as well? I tell you frankly, sir, the slaves who've risen against their masters would likely give us a harder fight than the Spaniards can put up.”

“I doubt that not at all,” the Englishman said. “Still and all, though, that's a long march, and one with uncertain supply lines, into a country notoriously unhealthy. I should hesitate to undertake it without orders from London.”

“My greencoats did it,” Victor said. “We lived off the land, and we had no trouble doing it.”

“What is easy for irregulars is often difficult for regulars,” the lieutenant-colonel answered. “Irregulars often have a certain amount of trouble remembering that the converse also applies. Or do you think your men could have stopped the flow from the spring here?”

Radcliff knew his men could have done no such thing. Even trying would never have occurred to him. That long underground burrow…He shuddered. No, he wouldn't have wanted to try that. “Your point is well taken, sir,” he admitted.

“Generous of you to say so,” the Englishman told him. “I also fear I can't promise the timely appearance of the Royal Navy, which you were able to enjoy. You might have known a certain amount of embarrassment had the French and Spanish Atlanteans succeeded in combining against you.”

The ships plucked you off the beach in the nick of time.
The lieutenant-colonel had a cat's politeness; he wouldn't come right out and say such a thing. But Victor understood what he meant. “You may be right, sir,” he answered insincerely. “Still and all, not much danger of a Franco-Spanish combination against us now, is there?”
We've whipped the French settlers once and for all
was what
he
meant, and the Englishman couldn't very well mistake him.

To his credit, the redcoat didn't try. “No, not much,” he said, “but I still believe we would do better to ensure our conquest of French Atlantis than to go haring off after something grander yet. Do you on this side of the ocean know the proverb about the bird in the hand and those in the bush?”

“I've…heard it,” Victor said. The English lieutenant-colonel chuckled at his reluctant—indeed, his reproachful (to say nothing of nearly mutinous)—subordination. After a victory like the one they'd gained here, chuckles came easy. Had Roland Kersauzon's men beaten the redcoats and greencoats and escaped en masse to continue the war, the English officer wouldn't have taken that hesitation so lightly. Victor went on, “A lot of the birds here, though, don't fit in the hand.”

Redcoats led glum French settlers into captivity. Some of those settlers were in their stocking feet. If they hadn't been whipped out of their boots, they'd lost them as spoils of war. Pretty soon, the English settlers and regulars would plunder Nouveau Redon, too. Victor would have been surprised if some of the more enterprising fellows weren't already starting.

“French Atlantis will fit quite nicely, I do believe,” the redcoat said.

“It is a good handful,” Victor allowed. Why argue now? Sure enough, triumph was a great sweetener. He took off his hat and saluted the English officer. “We won it together, Colonel Cornwallis.”

Cornwallis returned the salute. “We did indeed, Major Radcliff.”

V
ictor Radcliff didn't like Hanover. He never had. He didn't think he ever would. The place crowded too many people into too small a space. Army encampments did the same thing, but encampments were different. Everyone in them—well, almost everyone—accepted military discipline and knew his place.

Not in Hanover. People hopped after their own pursuits, as single-minded—or as mindless—as the big katydids that bounced across Atlantis' fields and forest floors. They all wanted more than they had, and they weren't shy about grabbing what they wanted with both hands.

So if Victor had had any kind of excuse, he would have stayed far away from the brawling metropolis of English Atlantis. But he had none. He was the hero of the war against the French. A hero had to be seen, had to be praised, to make a proper spectacle for the people. Victor dully and dutifully paraded at the head of a regiment of greencoats.

“Ah, well,” he said over his shoulder to Blaise, who strode along behind him. “One good thing about this nonsense—if the boys can't get laid tonight, they aren't half trying.”

“What about you, sir?” the Negro said, his voice sly.

“Not tonight, anyhow,” Victor answered. He was no saint when he was away from Margaret, though he had no bastards he knew about. “Not tonight,” he repeated. “I'm going to the feast for all the fancy Radcliffs and Radcliffes. Should be gruesome, but it can't be helped. Your friends you choose, but you're stuck with your relatives.”

Not all the Radcliffs and Radcliffes at the banquet proved excessively fancy. Some of the young, pretty women wore the name only because of a marriage connection. They were no blood kin to Victor at all—but they were interested in getting to know him more intimately. He got to know one of them much more intimately in a servant's tiny room under the stairs—and he was smiling benignly at her husband, some distant cousin of his, five minutes later. That was amusing, even if he didn't tell Blaise about it afterwards.

But neither the parade nor the fête nor the naughty sport under the stairs would have drawn him to Hanover by itself. All three of them together wouldn't have. What brought him to London in Small—the town's proud boast—and kept him there was the certainty that details of the peace treaty would come to Hanover before they came anywhere else in Atlantis.

He rode down to the harbor every morning, sometimes with Blaise, sometimes alone. Ships of all sizes and ages came in, from England and her settlements around the world and her allies. Some of the people knew that talks to end the war were going on. No one seemed to know how they were going.

And then, one afternoon, a swift, rakish Royal Navy frigate, the
Glasgow,
sailed into Hanover. When Victor asked the officer of the deck if he had news of the peace, that young lieutenant looked down his nose at him and demanded, “Why do you presume that you deserve to know?”

“I am Major Victor Radcliff. Without me, the ministers wouldn't be talking about French and Spanish Atlantis,” Victor answered. “Now, sir, who are you—and who is your next of kin?” His hand dropped to the butt of the pistol he wore on his belt.

The naval officer lost much of his toploftiness. “I…beg your pardon, Major. We do bring that word, as a matter of fact.”

“If you tell me what it is—at once—I won't ask any more personal questions of you,” Victor said.
I won't kill you,
he meant, and the lieutenant knew it.

“Well…” The younger man needed to gather himself. At last, he went on, “French Atlantis comes under English sovereignty. It is opened to English settlement without restriction. The dons keep Spanish Atlantis, but England gets trading concessions there. We take most of French Terranova, too, and almost all of French India.”

Radcliff cared nothing about India, and only a little about Terranova. The lands on this side of the Hesperian Gulf were wide enough for him. He nodded to the lieutenant. “Thank you. That's good news.”

It wasn't so good as it might have been. He would have loved to see the Union Jack flying over Spanish Atlantis, too. But the Spaniards weren't rivals, as the French had been. History had left Spain in a backwater. France, on the other hand, could have stayed ahead of England had she won this war.

She could have. But she hadn't.

“Who the devil are you talking to, Jenkins?” a senior naval officer demanded, scowling down at Victor.

“This is Major Victor Radcliff, sir,” the lieutenant answered. “The man who helped our regulars take French Atlantis.”

“Huzzah,” said the captain, or whatever he was. “More troublemakers for the Crown to worry about.”

“Would you rather they were here, sir?” Victor said. “Would you rather all Atlantis flew the fleurs-de-lys?”

“What a ridiculous notion,” the senior officer said.

“It is now, sir—because we won,” Victor replied.

The officer sputtered and fumed. Victor caught only a few words: “…damned settlers…lot of nerve…arrogant scut…” Then the fellow spoke more coherently: “As if this miserable, half-baked place mattered a farthing's worth in the grand scheme of things.”

“Sir, to an Englishman it may not,” Radcliff said. “Yet there are those of us who call Atlantis home, and who love it, and who would have grieved to see it lost to the French, not least after so much effort and so much blood expended to preserve it.”

“Yes, yes.” The naval officer still sounded impatient. “I see you can make pretty speeches when you care to. Well, you've got what you want. The French get a few islands off the Terranovan coast, where they can raise sugar cane to their hearts' content. And we…we get Atlantis, although I'm still damned if I know why we want it. An obstacle to navigation, that's all it is, and no one will ever persuade me otherwise.”

Victor Radcliff bowed. “Then I shan't make the effort. But perhaps one day time will tell you what you don't hear from me.”

When Victor had the chance to read the full terms of the peace, he found that they said nothing about the race of a prospective settler in French Atlantis. He told Blaise, “You ought to go down there. You're a clever man, and an able one—those two don't always march together. You'd get rich before you know it, and you could throw it in the Frenchmen's faces.”

“The only way I get rich there is, I buy niggers and copperskins,” Blaise said slowly. “Only way anyone gets rich down there, he runs him a plantation with slaves.”

“Well, yes,” Victor admitted. “You do need them in French Atlantis—what was French Atlantis, I mean.” He paused. “Some slaves who've got free do run slaves themselves now. That isn't against the law down there, either.”

“Don't happen real often,” Blaise said.

“No, it doesn't, but it's not illegal.”

Blaise set his chin. He didn't have the bony promontory that graced the lower jaws of a lot of white men. Somehow, though, the lack made him seem more stubborn, not less. “Done been a slave,” he said, and added several French and Spanish pungencies to the remark. “Don't want to do that to anybody else.”

“Someone else will if you don't,” Victor said. “I daresay you'd make a better master than someone who'd never seen it from the other side.”

This time, Blaise laughed in his face. That startled Victor Radcliff, and angered him, too. He wasn't used to such discourtesies from a Negro—certainly not here in Hanover, though he would have tolerated them better on campaign or out in the woods.

“If I'm a master, I'm as rough as anybody else,” Blaise said. “You have slaves, you got to be. Or they don't work. They don't do anything. I know. I was one.” He jabbed a thumb at his own broad chest. “Don't want to do that. So I won't. I stick with you, Major Radcliff, sir.” He saluted, mixing some mockery—but not a lot—into the gesture of respect.

Gravely, Victor returned the salute. “You'll never get rich that way,” he said.

Blaise shrugged. “Don't care about gettin' rich. Care about…” He paused, considering. “About not hatin' myself. Yeah. I care about that.”

“Have it your way. You will anyhow.” With the war over, Victor didn't need a sergeant-cum-body-servant any more. If he went back to exploring, he didn't need a body servant, either. An explorer with a servant was like a musket with a chamber pot: having one added something absolutely unnecessary.

Which wasn't to say Blaise couldn't take care of himself in the wilderness. He could, at least as well as Victor could himself. And, if Victor dismissed him, Blaise could take care of himself in English Atlantis, too. Blaise might be black, but he was as generally competent a man as Victor had ever met.

That went a long way towards explaining why the two of them got along as well as they did, even if Victor had never thought of it in those terms.

“Well, if you don't want a plantation, how
do
we reward you for shooting Roland Kersauzon?” he asked.

“Money is good,” Blaise said seriously. “What you reckon he's worth?” He was always ready to haggle.

He looked so ready now, Victor started to laugh. “Are you sure you're not a Jew under your skin?” he said.

Blaise took the question literally. “Don't even know what a Jew is.”

“They're white people who aren't Christians,” Victor replied. “Too foolish to know the truth, in other words.”

“They don't believe in God?” Blaise asked.

“They believe in God, but they don't believe Jesus is His Son.”

“Oh. Like Muslims,” Blaise said.

It was Victor's turn to be confused. A bit of back-and-forth made him understand Blaise was talking about Mahometans. A bit more made him understand that the black man knew much more about them than he did. “How do you find yourself so well informed?” he asked.

“Some of the tribes north of us, they Muslim,” Blaise answered. “They send their men, want us to be Muslims, too.”

“Missionaries. Muslim missionaries,” Victor Radcliff said wonderingly. “Now I've heard everything. We Christians send missions to Africa, too, you know.”

“Muslims send missionaries. They take slaves. Christians send missionaries.
They
take slaves,” Blaise said. “Us—we believe what we believe. We don't send no missionaries.”

“Do you take slaves?” Radcliff asked.

“Oh, yes. People we catch in war, things like that,” Blaise said. “We don't work them the way the French and Spaniards do, though. Don't have big plantations.” He paused. “These Jews, they send missionaries?”

“No. At least, I've never heard of it if they do.” Victor tried to imagine what would happen to a Jew proselytizing in Rome or Paris or London—or Hanover, come to that. Nothing pretty. The Jews knew better. That, in turn, made him wonder why Christians and Mahometans didn't. He found no good answer.

Blaise wasn't finished. “These Jews, they take slaves?”

“Some rich Jews own them, I'm sure,” Victor said. “They buy and sell them now and again.” Most of that trade, though, at least between Africa and Atlantis, lay in Christian hands. Uncomfortably, he finished, “They don't raid the coast to grab them, anyhow.”

“Huh,” Blaise said: a thoughtful grunt. “Maybe I turn Jew, then.”

Victor didn't tell him that kind of conversion was against the law. He wasn't sure it was, or needed to be. Who not born to the Jewish faith would want to assume all the burdens it entailed? Speaking of those burdens…“Do you want to get circumcised?”

“Fancy word. What's it mean?” Blaise said. Victor told him what it meant. The Negro set a protective hand in front of his privates. “Muslims do that, too. Why would anybody want to?”

“I don't know why Mahometans do it. I didn't know they did. Jews think God requires it of them.”

Blaise took the hand away. He was getting ever better at aping white people's notions of polite manners. “Ain't gonna be no Jew,” he declared.

“Amen,” Victor said, unaware he'd just come out with a Hebrew word.

When Victor—and Blaise—rode south into what had been French Atlantis, no customs barrier delayed them at the border. There were no customs barriers between English and French Atlantis any longer, no more than there were between New Hastings and Hanover. King George ruled them all.

The innkeeper at whose establishment they stayed was French. They both spoke his language. That pleased him. They also both stayed reasonably sober and reasonably quiet. That pleased him even more.

Men from English Atlantis filled the inn to bursting. They shouted demands in English. The innkeeper understood them well enough; so close to the old border, it wasn't as if he'd never had English-speaking guests before the war made him an involuntary English subject. But, by the way the newcomers acted, French might have been as dead as Aramaic.

They drank. They pinched and patted the barmaids. They ate as if they'd just discovered food. They bragged about the fortunes they were going to make by screwing the Frenchies. (That the innkeeper was listening, and might decide to season their capon with rat poison, never seemed to cross their minds.) They went on drinking. They brawled, and broke crockery brawling.