Liberating Atlantis (20 page)

“Separating the opposing forces seems to me an excellent first step toward peace,” Newton answered.

“Wait a minute!” Senator Bainbridge shouted from the Senate floor. “You just wait one damned minute! An excellent first step toward peace is stringing up all the slaves who rose up against their rightful masters. That’s what a first step toward peace is!”

He got thunderous cheers from his southern friends. This time, though, Senator Radcliffe and the other northern fire-brands sat on their hands. That told Stafford as much as he needed to know about the kind of game Newton and his cohorts were playing.

But there were games, and then again there were games. “I am willing to support Consul Newton’s resolution,” Stafford said. Jaws dropped again. Eyes popped—among them, those of Leland Newton. No, Newton wouldn’t be able to call Stafford names for rejecting the resolution out of hand, even if it came with a poison pill. Stafford went on, “The usual command arrangements will of course apply.”

“Of course,” Newton said. “I am not trying to change the way the United States of Atlantis work.”

“No, indeed.” Sarcasm dripped from Stafford’s tongue. “Freeing the mudfaces and niggers would do nothing of the sort.”

“As a matter of fact, sir, it wouldn’t,” Newton said. “It would only extend citizenship to men and women who are now but residents.”

“And it would ruin an entire class of white men who have contributed greatly to making Atlantis strong,” Consul Stafford pointed out.

“Some form of compensation might be arranged,” Newton said.

“How generous!” Stafford fleered. “Tell me: what compensates for murder?”

“Killing in war is not murder,” Newton replied.

“Killing in an uprising is,” Stafford said. “And inflicting a fate worse than death upon helpless women is a foul crime in war or peace.”

“I would agree with you,” his colleague said. “So, no doubt, would countless black and copperskinned women compelled to be the vessels of their masters’ lusts.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Stafford insisted uncomfortably, recalling the mulatto woman who’d initiated him into the rites of loving.

“No, eh?” Newton said. “It all depends on who is doing what to whom, I suppose.”

“You make that into a joke, and a nasty one, at that,” Stafford said. “But you are quite right. A chattel has no say over his person—”

“Or over hers,” the other Consul broke in.

“Or over hers,” Stafford agreed. “But when a slave callously violates a free white woman—”

“He only imitates what white men have done to the women he is not permitted to call wives.”

“That is not what I was going to say.”

“Really? Why am I not surprised?”

Once the bickering ended, the resolution passed.
And we’ll see who ends up outsmarting whom
, Jeremiah Stafford thought. His guess was that, once an army full of white men bumped up against the insurrectionists, it would go after them full bore whether Consul Newton wanted it to or not. And even if by some mischance it didn’t, he could still use his alternate days in command to steer it in the direction he wanted it to go. He looked forward to it.

 

Politicians in Atlantis won votes by railing at bureaucrats. Leland Newton had done it himself. If you listened to politicians, bureaucrats were miserable old slowcoaches. The fist-sized snails in the southern states could move faster than they did. And cucumber slugs had more in the way of brains (to say nothing of less in the way of slime).

If you made a speech like that, you commonly believed it, at least while you were giving it. Newton knew he sometimes exaggerated for effect, but even so. . . . He expected the Ministry of War would need weeks to gather together the soldiers and munitions and other supplies an army required if it proposed campaigning against the rebels west of the Green Ridge Mountains.

The army was ready to move four days later. The Minister of War told Newton that Colonel Balthasar Sinapis, the senior officer who would accompany the Consuls into the field, had already apologized for taking so long. “I hope you will not be hard on him because of the delay,” the functionary added.

“Well, I may possibly forgive him this once,” Newton said.

“He does promise to do better in any future emergency,” the Minister of War said.

“Good,” was the only answer Newton could find.

Colonel Sinapis was a swarthy professional soldier who spoke with some sort of guttural accent. He’d come to Atlantis in the wake of the upheavals following the recent failed revolutions in Europe. Consul Newton thought of him as a human rifle musket: aim him at whatever you pleased, and he would knock it over for you.

What the colonel thought of the Consuls was something that hadn’t occurred to Newton till Sinapis sat down in the leading railroad car of the leading train that would take the army into action against the rebels. Sinapis had an axe-blade of a face, a shaggy gray mustache under a scimitar nose, and the fierce, unblinking stare of a peregrine falcon.

“You gentlemen will have a plan of campaign for the days ahead?” he asked. When he spoke, his accent and his ferocious manner gave him the aspect of a talking wolf. The only wolves Newton had ever seen paced an iron-barred cage back in Croydon. Had one of those wolves worn a gray uniform instead of coarse gray fur, it might have been Balthasar Sinapis’ brother-in-law.

However lupine Colonel Sinapis’ manner, his question was only too cogent. Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford. He was anything but surprised to find the other Consul looking back at him. “Well . . .” they both said slowly. Neither seemed to want to tell the colonel how much they disagreed about what ought to happen after the army encountered the insurrectionists.

A flash of scorn in Sinapis’ dark eyes warned that he already knew they couldn’t even agree to disagree. “Some thought now would spare us much trouble later,” he said, as if to squabbling children.

His accent might remain strong, but his English was grammatically perfect. Newton had already noticed as much. The colonel might have said,
Some thought now
will
save us much trouble later
. He might have, but he hadn’t. Which meant . . . what? That he expected no such planning; he just wistfully hoped for it.

Consul Stafford’s expression said he was making the same calculation, and liking it no better than Newton did. “We’ll do what we can to obtain a satisfactory result,” he said at last.

“Certainly, your Excellency,” Colonel Sinapis said. “And how do you propose to define success?”

“When we find it, we’ll know it,” Newton said.

“Yes, I suppose we will,” Stafford . . . agreed?

Colonel Sinapis sighed like a wolf that had failed to outrun a deer.
So many images in our language of animals not native here
, Newton thought. The colonel said, “What you mean is, you have not got the faintest idea of what you want the army to do. Or perhaps each of you has an idea, but you have not got the same idea. Is this true? Am I right or am I wrong?”

The two Consuls looked at each other. They both sighed, too, at the same time and on the same note. “You may be right—for now,” Newton said. “I think we both hope we will have the answer once the army goes into action.”

Sinapis’ brows came down over his eyes like battlements protecting a keep. The lines on his cheeks deepened like entrenchments in a siege. “Meaning no disrespect to you gentlemen,” he said, a phrase that always meant disrespect to its targets, “but an army without a plan is like a drunkard on a stroll. If you have no notion where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Or if you get there?”

“Let’s get there first,” Consul Newton said. “Once we do, I expect we’ll sort things out.”

“I hope we’ll sort things out,” Consul Stafford said. That wasn’t exactly agreement, but it wasn’t exactly disagreement, either. Newton decided he would take it.

By the way Balthasar Sinapis whuffled out air through his mustache, he was less satisfied. “Politics,” he said disdainfully. “
Gamemeno
politics.”

That sounded like a participle derived from
gameo
, the classical Greek verb meaning
to marry
. Leland Newton was mildly surprised and pleased that he recognized the form, and that he remembered what the verb meant . . . or had meant.
Marrying politics
made no sense. Perhaps the word had changed meaning in the centuries since Plato and Xenophon used it.

Before he could ask, the emigré officer went on, “All you think of are your
gamemeno
political points.” There it was again, just as incomprehensible as before. “What I think of, gentlemen—and you had better keep it in mind—is the blood of my soldiers. It is what you intend to spend to make your political points, and I do not believe you care a cent for it.”

Newton started to deny that indignantly. He stopped with the words unspoken. It wasn’t that he didn’t care what happened to the Atlantean soldiers rattling along behind him. Sinapis had that wrong, but Newton hadn’t thought at all about what might befall the gray-uniformed men. If he admitted as much, the colonel would be within his rights to call him on it.

“I have been thinking more of what our army will do to the insurrectionists,” Consul Stafford said.

“Of course you have—you are a politician, too.” No, Sinapis didn’t bother hiding his dislike for the men who outranked him. “You leave it to a soldier to worry about the other, don’t you?”

Stafford seemed to have no comeback for that. Newton knew too well he didn’t. Except for the dull, metallic rumble of iron wheels on iron rails, silence filled the compartment.

 

Wheee-oooo!
The locomotive whistle screamed as the train crossed the railroad bridge from the state of Freetown to the state of Cosquer. The land on the south side of the Stour looked no different from that on the northern side. All the same, Jeremiah Stafford let out a long sigh of relief. At last, he was back in God’s country—or at least in a country with civilized laws.

Before long, the train stopped in a sleepy little town called Pontivy. A gang of black and copperskinned slaves lugged fresh lumber to the tender. A swag-bellied white man in overalls had a pistol on his belt, but Stafford would have bet he hadn’t had to draw it for years.
Thump! Thump!
The sawed lengths of wood replaced what the locomotive had devoured since the last stop.

Another slave went down the train, oiling the wheels. The lazy black devil didn’t bother lifting the spout of his oil can between one set of wheels and the next. He just let the expensive oil spill out onto the dirt. Why should he worry? He wasn’t paying for it.

Seeing that kind of thing made Stafford grind his teeth. The overseer either didn’t notice or didn’t care—he wasn’t paying for the oil, either. Somebody was, though, dammit: the railroad company’s supply department, or the shareholders, or, on this journey, the Atlantean government.

Stafford hated waste. He knew slaves generated more of it than he would have liked. Because things weren’t their own, they didn’t care about them. That was why, for instance, planters had to give their field hands those heavy, clumsy tools. They would have broken the better ones white farmers used, and in short order, too.

“We have to do something about that,” he muttered. Atlantean slaveholders had been saying the same thing since the seventeenth century. The only answer anyone had come up with was making the slaves afraid to be careless with their tools—their owners’ tools. And that worked only up to a point. Press a nigger or a mudface too hard and he’d either try to murder you or he’d run off. Both were more expensive than broken tools.

Consul Newton had also got off the train to watch the refuel ing and to stretch his legs. He didn’t seem to notice the Negro wasting oil, which relieved Stafford. But he did notice Stafford mumbling to himself, and asked, “What was that?”

“I wish we would make our workers more efficient and considerate,” Stafford said.

“Why don’t you try paying them?” Newton asked, his tone not in the least ironic. “Nothing makes a man a careful worker like the fear of getting docked.”

“The whole point of our system is to keep from enslaving workers to money,” Stafford said.

His fellow Consul raised an eyebrow. “So you enslave them to their masters instead? A dubious improvement, I fear. And I have never yet heard of a slaveowner who broke out in hives when some cash came his way. No, the owners only worry when their slaves see a coin once in a blue moon.”

“Slaves don’t need money,” Stafford said. “Remember, their masters feed and clothe and shelter them.”

“None too well, more often than not,” Newton said.

“They live better than factory hands in Hanover—or in Croydon, come to that,” Stafford retorted. “Who said that the first freedom was the freedom to starve? Whoever he was, he knew what he was talking about.”

“I don’t see white factory hands swimming across the Stour to work on your plantations,” Newton said tartly.

“We would not enslave them if they did, and you know it perfectly well,” Stafford said.

“Fine. Have it however you please. I don’t see free Negroes and copperskins volunteering to go back under the lash, either.”

“It has happened,” Stafford said. “I recall one such case just a couple of years ago. The copperskin couldn’t make a go of it in Freetown, so he decided to come south. He knew he wouldn’t starve here, and his children wouldn’t, either.”

“It must not happen very often, by God, or you would not be able to call particular instances to mind,” his colleague said.

Since that was true, Stafford maintained a discreet silence. The train whistle blared again. It was even louder when heard out in the open than from inside a railroad car. The windows, commonly closed against soot and cinders, muffled some of the ferocious squeal.

“All aboard!” the locomotive driver bawled from the back of his iron chariot. He might have been piloting a ferry boat, not the most modern conveyance in the world. “All aboard!” The whistle shrilled once more.