Harry Turtledove - United States of Atlantis

"For which I thank you kindly," Victor replied. Amazing how defeat in the field inclined England toward sweet reason. He barely kept himself from clapping his hands in glee. No one now, not King George and not the Emperor of China, either, could claim the United States of Atlantis had no rightful place among the nations of the world!

Victor was lodged above a public house called the Pleasant Cod. The place had been open for business for upwards of a century; by now, very likely, every possible jest about its name had been made. That didn't keep new guests from making those same jokes over again. Only the glazed look in the taverner's eye kept Victor from exercising his wit at the Cod's expense.

He-or rather, the Atlantean Assembly-was paying for his lodging. One of the principal grievances Atlantis had against England was the uncouth English practice of quartering troops on the citizenry without so much as a by-your-leave-and without so much as a farthing's worth of payment. And if the taverner gouged him for the room… well, Atlantean paper still wasn't close to par with sterling.

Someone pounded on the door in the middle of the night, Victor needed a moment to come back to himself, then another to remember where he was and why he was there. He groped for the fine sword from the Atlantean Assembly. In these days of gunpowder, generals rarely bloodied their blades on the battlefield. But the sword would do fine for letting the air out of a robber or two.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out in the hall really wanted to come in. People in other rooms swore at the racket. Victor had no trouble hearing every angry oath through the thin walls.

"Who's there, dammit?" he called, blade in his right hand, the latch in his left. He wasn't about to open it till he got an answer he liked.

He made the knocking stop, anyway. "Is that you, Victor?" a voice inquired. A familiar voice?

"No," he said harshly. "I am the Grand Vizier of the Shah of Persia." He would have assumed a Persian accent had he had the faintest notion of what one sounded like.

Someone else spouted gibberish in the hall. For all Victor knew, it might have been Persian. It was beyond a doubt Custis Cawthorne. Victor threw the door open. "I thought you were still in France!" he exclaimed.

"His ship put in at Pomphret Landing," Isaac Fenner said. "We've ridden together from there to Croydon to see you."

"Perhaps not quite so much of you as this," Cawthorne added. Victor looked down at himself in the dim light of the hallway lantern. All he had on were a linen undershirt and cotton drawers.

"I was asleep," he said with as much dignity as he could muster. "You might have waited till morning to come to call."

"That's right! You bloody well might have, you noisy buggers!" someone else yelled from behind a closed door.

Victor ducked back into his room. After some fumbling, he found the candle stub that had lighted his way up the stairs. He lit it again at the lantern. Then he made a gesture of invitation. "Well, my friends, as long as you are here, by all means come in."

"Yes-go in and shut up!" that unhappy man shouted.

"We should have let it wait till morning," Cawthorne said as Victor shut the door behind them.

His little bit of candle wouldn't last long. Then they could either talk in the dark or go to bed. "Why didn't you?" he asked.

"Because what we came for is too important," Isaac Fenner answered stubbornly. The dim, flickering light only made his ears seem to stick out even more than they would have anyway.

"And that is…?" Victor prompted.

"Why, to finish negotiating the treaty with the English commissioners… Confound it, what's so funny?"

"Only that I reached an accord with them this afternoon," Victor answered. "If the Atlantean Assembly should decide the said accord is not to its liking, it is welcome to change matters to make them more satisfactory. And, should it choose to do so, I shall retire once for all into private life with the greatest delight and relief imaginable."

Custis Cawthorne burst out laughing, too. "All this rushing might have been avoided with a faster start," he observed. "But then, that proves true more often than any of us commonly cares to contemplate."

Fenner, implacable as one of the Three Fates, held out his hand to Victor. "Kindly let me see this so-called agreement."

"No," Victor said.

Shadows swooped across Fenner's face as it sagged in surprise. "What?" he sputtered. "You dare refuse?"

"Too right, I do," Victor answered. "God may know what miserable hour of the night it is, but, not being inclined to fumble out my pocket watch, I haven't the faintest notion. I am certain the treaty will keep till daylight. For now, Isaac, shut up and go to bed."

"But-!" Fenner seemed about to explode.

"Isaac…" Custis Cawthorne spoke his friend's name in a voice full of gentle, amused melancholy.

"What is it?" Fenner, by contrast, snapped like the jaws of a steel trap.

"Shut up and go to bed. I intend to." As if to prove as much, Cawthorne shrugged out of his coat and began undoing the toggles on his tunic.

His colleague's face was a study in commingled amazement and fury. Fenner's red hair warned of his temper, as a light on a lee shore warned of dangerous rocks. But then the Bredestown Assemblyman also started to laugh. "All right, all right-just as you please. I see there are two beds in the room. Who shall have which?"

"This one is mine." Victor pointed to the unmade one, in which he'd been sleeping. "The two of you may share the other, this being the price you pay for disturbing me in so untimely a fashion."

Isaac Fenner looked ready to argue about that, too. Cawthorne, by contrast, took off his shoes. Grunting, he bent to reach under the bed Victor had designated. He picked up the chamber pot that sat there. "I trust you gentlemen will excuse me…" he said, politely turning his back. When he'd finished, he presented the pot to Fenner. "Isaac?"

"Oh, very well." Fenner used the pot while Cawthorne lay down and made himself comfortable. Victor stretched out on his own bed. Blaise was in the servants' quarters downstairs. Chances were the Negro was asleep right this minute, too. Victor wished he could say the same.

"You'd better hurry up," he told Isaac Fenner. "This candle won't last much longer." Sure enough, it guttered and almost went out.

Fenner got into bed. The ropes supporting the mattress creaked under his weight. "Good night, sweetheart," Custis Cawthorne told him, as if men didn't sleep two or three or four to a bed all the time in taverns or inns.

"Good night-darling," Fenner retorted.

Victor blew out the candle. Blackness plunged down from the ceiling and swallowed the room whole. Victor didn't know about how his eminent Atlantean comrades fared after that: he went back to sleep himself too soon to have the chance to find out.

Down in the common room the next morning, Blaise looked grouchy. He usually drank tea, but a steaming mug of coffee sat in front of him now. He sipped from it as he attacked a ham steak and a plate of potatoes fried in lard. When Victor asked what the trouble was, his factotum sent him a wounded look.

"Some damnfool commotion in the nighttime," Blaise answered, swallowing more coffee. "Didn't you hear it? I thought it was plenty to wake the dead. I know it woke me, and I had a devil of a time getting back to sleep again afterwards."

"Oh," Victor said. "That."

"Yes, that. You know what it was?"

After a glance at the stairway, Victor nodded. "Here it comes now, as a matter of fact."

Blaise blinked as Isaac Fenner came down. He frankly gaped when Custis Cawthorne followed. "But he's in France," Blaise blurted.

"I thought so, too," Victor said. "In point of fact, though, he was in my room last night, wanting to see the treaty I hammered out with Oswald and Hartley yesterday. Well, actually, no: Isaac was the one who wanted to see it just then. Custis came with him, though."