Liberating Atlantis (25 page)

Someone tugged at the tent flap. “Leland Newton. May I come in?” the other Consul asked.

“Why not? Everything else has gone wrong,” Stafford said.

“Heh.” Newton ducked inside and let the tent flap fall behind him with a wet, dismal splat. “You should take your comic turn on the stage. You’d make more than Atlantis pays us.”

“Comic turn? Did you think I was joking? I am not glad to see you,” Stafford said.

“Nor am I enamored of you, believe me. But we are in harness together, like it or not,” Newton said. “And, one day soon, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, this army will start moving forward again.”

“Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, indeed,” Stafford muttered.

Newton pulled out a flask. “Here. Have a knock of this. It may improve your outlook. Something ought to.”

“Maybe I’m glad to see you after all.” Stafford swigged. Barrel-tree rum kicked him in the teeth and flamed down his throat. “By God, maybe I am!”

“Are you glad enough to answer a question for me?” Newton asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s see.” Stafford almost drank again, but handed the flask back instead.

“Suppose the rebels decline pitched battles. Suppose they keep sniping and raiding and skirmishing, as they have been doing. Are you ready to post thousands of soldiers in little garrisons all through these parts for the next twenty or thirty years to try to hold down the countryside?”

“If that is what it takes, why not?” Stafford said. “The Terranovans do it on their frontiers, to keep the copperskins from sneaking in and detaching people’s hair.”

“It will cost us dear,” Newton warned.

“What do you suppose
not
stopping the insurrectionists will cost us?” Stafford asked icily.

“Something,” Newton said, which surprised Stafford—he hadn’t expected the other Consul to admit even that much. Newton went on, “Change always costs something. But don’t you see? We have to change either way. I fear trying to hold down slaves in southern Atlantis for the next generation will cost us our souls.”

“I think we’d be fighting for them—and for our backbones,” Stafford said.

“Maybe you’re right, your Excellency. Maybe, but I wouldn’t care to bet on it.” Newton ducked back out into the rain, leaving Stafford alone, the taste of barrel-tree rum still on his lips.

 

Balthasar Sinapis pointed up into the sky. “Do you see that small, bright, yellow ball there?”

Squinting, Consul Newton nodded. “I do, Colonel. What of it?”

“If I remember rightly, in the old country we used to call that ‘the sun.’ ”

The craggy colonel
did
have a sense of humor. Leland Newton wouldn’t have bet a cent on it. Smiling to show he appreciated the joke, he said, “How long do you think the roads will take to dry out enough to let us travel on them?”

“They probably should be good enough for us to use just before it starts raining again,” Sinapis answered. Newton started to smile again. Then he realized the colonel wasn’t joking this time—merely expressing his faith in the innate perversity of nature. Since Newton had seen plenty of that perversity himself, he decided he couldn’t very well disagree.

All around them, the encampment steamed. That hot sun drew vapor up from the drenched canvas of the tents. The grass and weeds and ferns on which those tents were pitched steamed. So did horses’ backs. And so did soldiers’ clothes. Every time Newton inhaled, he felt as if he were breathing soup.

As if picking that thought from his mind, Colonel Sinapis remarked, “No one would say the state of New Marseille has a Mediterranean climate.”

“Avalon, farther north, is said to be quite pleasant the year around,” Newton replied.

Sinapis only sniffed. “It would not be the same. Are you familiar with the notion of dry heat, your Excellency?”

“Only by reading of it.” Leland Newton spread his hands. “Atlantis is surrounded by the sea, after all. And I believe it is a positive good that she is. Her position has gone far toward making her rich.”

“No doubt,” Sinapis said. “It has also gone far toward giving every citizen of this country rheumatism and lumbago. Or do your bones not creak when you get up of a morning? Till I came here, mine never did.”

He was talking about New Hastings, where he’d spent the bulk of his Atlantean military career. The capital had a good climate—or Consul Newton had always found it so. It was certainly a better climate than chilly Croydon’s. But Sinapis had different standards of comparison.

The colonel stuck a stogie in the corner of his mouth. Then he tried to strike a lucifer on the sole of his boot. The boot sole was wet, and the match wouldn’t catch. Muttering an unpleasantry that wasn’t in English, Sinapis pulled a small piece of shagreen from a tunic pocket. He scraped the lucifer against that. The rough sharkskin gave enough friction to touch off the match. Sinapis lit his cigar and puffed out pungent smoke to flavor the prevailing steam.

“You are ready for anything,” Newton said as the colonel put the shagreen back in his pocket.

“I try to be,” Sinapis answered. “If I may speak frankly, though, your Excellency, I was not ready for a war intended to be waged along political lines. I do not see how any army or any officer could be ready for such a thing.”

“All wars are political, wouldn’t you say?” Newton parried.

“In their goals, yes,” Colonel Sinapis said. “A clever modern German called war the extension of politics by other means. I agree with this. Anyone who thinks about it is bound to agree, I believe. But when political affairs interfere with the way the war is fought, it becomes less likely to have a happy result. I believe anyone who thinks about it is also bound to agree with this.”

Newton didn’t need to think much about it to decide it seemed quite likely. All the same, he said, “When the war touches slavery in the USA, political affairs are bound to interfere. Half the country takes the institution for granted, while the other half hates it. We should count ourselves lucky not to have flown at one another’s throats.”

“Do you expect this fight to solve your problems for you?” Sinapis didn’t sound as if he thought any fight could solve any problem.

“I hope so.
Expect
may be too strong a word.” Newton remained an optimist.

“Oh, well.” By the way Sinapis sounded, he didn’t. What had he seen, what had he done, in Europe to leave his attitude so curdled? Consul Newton realized he didn’t know the details of the colonel’s career before Sinapis got to Atlantis. He hadn’t cared enough to find out. That might have been a mistake. But asking now would seem awkward, so he didn’t.

In his own way, Consul Stafford was an optimist, too. Most Atlanteans—most white Atlanteans, anyhow—were. What were the United States of Atlantis if not a place where a man could build on his hopes? But Stafford’s hopes were different from Newton’s. The sun’s return prompted only one thought in him. “Now we can go after the insurrectionists and finish them off!” he declared.

Maybe the sun’s return prompted some thoughts among Frederick Radcliff’s Negroes and copperskins, too. They weren’t an army, or weren’t exactly an army. They could, and did, move around by ones and twos and small bands, where Colonel Sinapis’ men wouldn’t have felt happy or safe doing any such thing. And they popped up here and there and started sniping at the Atlantean soldiers.

One bullet snarled through the air between Newton and Stafford. Both Consuls automatically ducked. They exchanged sheepish looks. Almost everybody ducked. It didn’t mean a thing.

“We ought to hang every black bastard we catch sneaking around with a musket!” Stafford said after he straightened up.

“That will really make the rebels want to give up,” Newton observed.

“I don’t care whether they want to give up or not,” Stafford said. “I want them dead. I want the ones who are left alive to be afraid to lift their hands against their masters for the rest of their days. I want the United States of Atlantis to be safe for decent, God-fearing white people again.”

“You want things to go back to the way they were before the uprising started,” Newton said.

“Yes. That is what I want,” the other Consul agreed.

“How do you propose to get it, though?” Newton asked. “We’ve been over this ground before. Can you unscramble an egg? Can you make all the rain we’ve just had fall up into the sky?”

“The sun can dry out the rain,” Stafford said stubbornly. “That makes it as if it had never been. The sun of justice can dry out the insurrection, too, enough to let us get by.”

He meant it. He meant every word of it. Realizing as much alarmed Leland Newton, but he knew it was so. “When Pilate asked ‘What is truth?’ he didn’t wait for an answer,” Newton said. “Now I ask you, sir, what is justice? I will wait as long as need be for your reply.”

“Justice is giving people what they deserve for what they have done.” Jeremiah Stafford sounded as stern and certain as the Old Testament prophet whose name he bore.

Newton nodded. “We can take that for a beginning place. What do people who have held other people in bondage for centuries deserve? What do people—?”

“They deserve thanks and congratulations.” Stafford still sounded certain. He had the courage of his convictions. “Compare the lot of those bondsmen here with that of their savage cousins in Terranova and Africa and you will see that I speak the truth.”

“I had not finished,” Newton said. “What do people who buy and sell other human beings at a whim, who take the fruits of others’ labor, who violate their bondswomen whenever it strikes their fancy—what do those people deserve?”

“What do people who Christianize the heathen, who build a thriving country out of empty wilderness, who make the United States of Atlantis into the earthly paradise—what do those people deserve?” Stafford returned. “We are talking about the same people, you know. What justice is depends in some measure on the angle from which you view it.”

“Well, I would agree with you there,” Newton said. “You have a perspective different from mine about the planter class.”

“I know them. You don’t,” Stafford said.

“Let it be as you say,” Newton told him. Stafford raised an eyebrow; he hadn’t expected even so much of a concession. Consul Newton went on, “What you will not see is that we also have a differing perspective on the rebels. You think of them as murderous, bloodthirsty wild beasts—”

“Which they are,” Stafford broke in.

“To you, perhaps,” Newton replied. “To me, they look more like men and women who, having been treated intolerably for generations, seek liberty so these abuses cannot go on. They seem very much like proper Atlantean patriots, in other words, even if their skins be dusky.”

“That is a madman’s perspective,” the other Consul exclaimed.

“Oh, piffle! You know better. Do I caper? Do I gibber?” Newton said.

“You do not, as you must know. But you are more dangerous, not less, because you do not,” Stafford answered. “An obvious lunatic ends up in jail or an asylum, where he can do others no harm. A lunatic who is not so obvious will deceive many others and persuade them to follow him. What is the name of that maniac minister?”

“Which one?” Newton asked. Atlantis permitted all faiths, which meant strange ones sometimes sprang up in the backwoods like weeds. Most flourished for a while and faded, but some seemed likely to last longer.

“The fellow who founded the—what do they call it?—the House of Universal Devotion,” Stafford said. “I know there are others, but he’s the one I had in mind.”

“Oh. Him. Well, we have agreed twice in a few minutes—how strange. I think he’s a maniac, too,” Newton said. The House of Universal Devotion was indeed a backwoods sect, one with an unsavory reputation. People who didn’t belong to it claimed that far too much of the devotion went to the founder, far too little to the Lord. Members kept to themselves as much as they could. There were rumors some of the rites were licentious, even lewd. Newton didn’t know if those rumors were true, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Something else he didn’t know . . . “I can’t tell you what his name is. He goes by the Reverend or the Preacher.”

“If I came out with nonsense like that, I wouldn’t want my real name associated with it, either,” Stafford said.

“People listen to him,” Newton said. “He doesn’t seem to do much harm.” That was as far as he would go to praise the House of Universal Devotion.

It was too far to suit Jeremiah Stafford. “The devil!” the other Consul snapped. “The only reason you say that is, he rants against slavery along with his other ravings. That he does should make you ashamed to hold the same views.”

“Even a broken clock is right twice a day,” Newton said.

“That clock ought to be smashed, not broken,” Stafford said.

“If the sect provably violates the laws, or if we find good reason to set aside the Charter, no doubt it will be,” Newton said. “Until and unless that happens, tolerance seems the better policy.”

“You will tolerate a tumor on the Atlantean body politic, which wants only growth before it can extinguish the Charter. But an institution long sanctioned by our laws? That, you oppose.” Stafford sounded bitter as wormwood.

Consul Newton hadn’t thought of things in such a light. Uncomfortably, he said, “The Reverend and his followers do not harm others—”

“Not where they get caught,” Stafford retorted.

“Slavery does,” Newton went on as if his colleague had not spoken. “That is why I oppose it, and why so many in the north do.”

“Servile insurrection must be checked!”

Newton waved to the soldiers all around. “Well, here we are. What are we doing, if not trying to check it?” They were doing more along those lines than he’d had in mind when they set out from New Hastings.

“Whatever we’re doing, it’s not enough.” Stafford plucked at his whiskers. “I wonder if we have any weak-minded House of Universal Devotion men in this army. If we do, I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that they were discovering our plans to the niggers and mudfaces.”