Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Nonsense!" the Senator from Gernika said.

"It isn't," Stafford answered. "Even now, part of me wishes it were, but it isn't."

Frederick Radcliff couldn't have been any more bored waiting for Quince to step out of the undergrowth again. He knew the copperskin might tell him the rebels didn't intend to lay down their arms. He knew Quince might not come back alone, but at the head of a swarm of slaves. If Quince did, Frederick wouldn't see New Hastings or Helen again.

But he couldn't do anything about any of that. He also couldn't worry about it all the time. And so… he was bored.

He was so bored, he did get into the cavalry troopers' seemingly unending dice game. He lost five and a half eagles in less time than it takes to tell. After that, he got out of the game again.

"Sure we can't talk you into sticking?" one of the horsemen asked, rattling the bones as temptingly as he could.

"Nah. I've already been as much of a sucker as I can afford to be, and some more besides," Frederick answered.

"You might win this time." The trooper rattled the dice again.

"Slim odds." Frederick left it right there. He didn't know the game was crooked. He didn't want to waste any more money on a voyage of discovery, either. A lifetime of slavery had convinced him each and every gold eagle-each and every silver ten-cent piece-was precious. Losing so many so fast… What Helen would say if she ever found out… No, he didn't want to play any more.

Then the troopers quit coaxing him. They all grabbed for their eight-shooters. One of them pointed. "Here's that mudfaced son of a bitch again!"

Sure enough, there stood Quince at the edge of the open ground. Lots of dirt in the southern states (though not that of Gernika) was reddish, which was how copperskins got their nasty nickname. Quince waved his big white flag. "Come on in!" Frederick called. "The truce holds no matter what you tell us."

Maybe so, maybe not. If the cavalrymen decided plugging Quince would help them, they'd do it. How could Frederick stop them? He couldn't. He knew it, and Quince had to know it, too.

But the rebel leader did come in. Along with the flag of truce, he had a pepperbox pistol on his right hip. Chances were it had been some planter's prized possession… and chances were that planter needed it no more and would never need it again. Ceremoniously, Quince laid the fancy pistol at Frederick Radcliff's feet. "We're gonna try peace," Quince said, as if it were a dangerous, possibly poisonous, medicine, like mercury for the pox. "If we can put down our guns and still get free… That's worth doing. But if it don't work out, nigger, you'll answer to me."

One black could call another nigger without a jolt. The word packed some in a copperskin's mouth, as mudface did in a Negro's. Quince had used it before, mostly in admiration. Frederick didn't think he intended malice this time. "Fair enough," he answered. "But if it don't work out, you got to stand in line. Plenty of other folks'll want to nail my hide to the wall."

"I believe that," Quince said. "Nobody's gonna come down on us 'cause we rose up, or 'cause of stuff we did while we were fighting?"

"That's the deal," Frederick said. "Nobody'll go to law with you on account of any of that." White survivors might try to take private revenge. If they came to trial, white juries might-likely would-acquit them. Frederick didn't know what he could do about that. So far, he hadn't come up with anything. But it was outside the law, and Negroes and copperskins could also play those games once they were free.

"They for true gonna pass that arrangement up in New Hastings?" Quince asked.

"If they don't, we all start fighting again," Frederick answered. "They got to know that, too. Chances that they will pass it just got better, too, if your people honest to God do quit fighting."

"Still a couple of snowball cocksuckers I wouldn't mind finishing, but I guess I can let 'em live," Quince said. Frederick nodded. Those whites were just as sure to want Quince dead. Well, they and he would have to forgo the pleasure… if the Slug Hollow accord passed. It has to now, Frederick thought. Doesn't it?

Jeremiah Stafford hated waiting. When you had to sit there twiddling your thumbs, what you were waiting for usually wasn't anything you wanted. It might be something you needed, but that was a different story. If you had a toothache, you waited for the dentist to get to work on you. Then you waited for whatever horrible things he was doing to be over. Ether was supposed to help with that torment, as it did with so many others. Stafford hadn't had to visit a tooth-drawer since the stuff came into use. He wasn't so eager to test its virtues that he wanted to visit one, either. Nobody with a full set of marbles wanted to visit the dentist.

What the Consul waited for now wasn't the cessation of pain. If the news here proved bad, though, it could end up causing more pain than all the toothaches he'd ever had put together. Bad news here could split Atlantis like a jeweler splitting a sapphire-or, less neatly, like a drunk falling out of a second-story window and breaking his leg. The second comparison seemed to Stafford to fit better. He wished it didn't.

Ever since the redcoats sailed away, New Hastings had been the place where important things happened in the USA. Now, all of a sudden, it wasn't. As history had been made in Slug Hollow (Stafford did his best to forget all the fighting preceding that bit of history), so now it would be made somewhere outside of St. Augustine, in the heat and humidity and insignificance of Gernika.

But what kind of history would be made there? That was what Stafford waited to discover, along with the rest of official New Hastings. He didn't have a flannel rag tied around his head to keep a swollen jaw from tormenting him quite so much, but he might as well have.

He was pretending to go through paperwork in his office when his secretary stuck his head in and said, "Your Excellency, a soldier wants to see you."

"A soldier?" Stafford echoed, and the secretary nodded. With a shrug, the Consul said, "All right, Ned. Send him in." Whatever the soldier wanted, talking to him was bound to be more interesting than a report on the previous fiscal year's revenues and expenses pertaining to canals.

The soldier strode in and delivered a salute as stiff as a marionette's. He was a young second lieutenant, so new in his uniform that he all but squeaked. "Your Excellency!" he said, and saluted again. "I am Lieutenant Morris Radcliffe, and I have the honor to bring you a report Colonel Sinapis has just received from Lieutenant Braun, who commands the security detail assigned to Frederick Radcliff in Gernika."

Stafford wondered which twig Morris Radcliffe represented on the family's huge, many-branched tree. He wondered how the lieutenant was related to him, and how the youngster was related to Frederick Radcliff. He also wondered what Morris Radcliffe thought of being related to a Negro.

But he wondered none of those things for more than a split second. "News from Colonel Sinapis? From this Lieutenant Braun?" he barked. "Well, out with it, man!"

"Sir? Uh, yes, sir!" Startled by Stafford's outburst, Lieutenant Radcliffe had to compose himself before he could remember what he was supposed to say. "Colonel Sinapis told me to tell you that Lieutenant Braun told him that Frederick Radcliff has arranged an end to the hostilities between whites and slaves in and around St. Augustine."

"He has arranged that?" Stafford wanted to make sure he'd got it straight. Sometimes you heard with your heart, not your ears.

"Yes, your Excellency, he has." Young Radcliffe confirmed it. "At the present moment-or at the moment Lieutenant Braun sent the telegram-there is, uh, was no fighting in Gernika. The Negroes and copperskins who had rebelled against established authority are coming in from the woods and swamps."