Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"We ought to smoke them over a slow fire," Stafford said. "That would give us what we need to know, and in a hurry, too."

"In my experience, torturing prisoners is usually more trouble than it is worth," Colonel Sinapis said. "Not always, and not in all circumstances, but usually. A better way is to question them separately, telling each man his answers will be compared to those of the others. Anyone whose answers do not match his friends' will know he is to be singled out for punishment. This has proved a good way to get at the truth."

It struck Consul Newton as a good way to get at the truth, too. "Let's do that, then," he said eagerly. Too eagerly? he wondered. Maybe so, but he had no stomach for tormenting captives.

And even Jeremiah Stafford gave a grudging nod. "We can try it," he said. "First."

Sinapis carefully instructed the men he told off to question the captives. Chances were he didn't think they'd be gentle without careful instruction. Chances were he was right, too.

"Do we keep moving toward New Marseille?" Newton asked him. "Or do we wait to see what we find out? If we can strike at the heart of the uprising…" Had he just said that? Damned if he hadn't.

Stafford neither sneered at him nor clapped him on the back. That other Consul left him to stew in his own juices. That was liable to mean Stafford was cleverer than Newton had given him credit for: one more worrisome thought among so many others.

"I don't know, your Excellency. You are the commander… today." Colonel Sinapis' long face showed what he thought of Atlantean practice. It certainly had some flaws the framers of the Charter hadn't thought of. The colonel continued, "I am here, as I understand my position, to put your orders and those of Consul Stafford into effect. As long as I am doing that, I may legitimately give orders of my own. Otherwise, those orders lie outside my region of responsibility." His fleshy nostrils quivered. No, he didn't like Atlantean arrangements even a cent's worth.

"I am not asking you for orders, Colonel," Newton said, as diplomatically as he could. "I am asking for your opinion, for your professional judgment."

"Ah. My opinion. That, I am certain, is worth its weight in gold." Sinapis could be formidably sardonic in a language not his own. "My opinion, your Excellency, is that it is better to put out a fire while it is still small, because dousing one after you let it get bigger will be much harder."

Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford. Again, his colleague failed to rise to the bait. Newton wondered whether something was wrong with him. He had the perfect chance to tax Newton for not letting the army move sooner-and didn't use it. Such restraint seemed out of character.

Or maybe Stafford was letting events bludgeon Newton. Even if in the abstract you admired someone's cause, it was much harder to feel loving-kindness toward him after he'd almost killed you. Newton had had that thought before. It came home to roost again.

He deliberately turned his back on the other Consul. Stafford's soft chuckle said he had much too good an idea of what Newton was thinking. Ignoring it, Newton addressed Colonel Sinapis: "You want to go after Frederick Radcliff, then, if we find the chance?"

"I do." Sinapis dipped his head, which he seemed to do more often than not in place of nodding. Newton thought again of Zeus in the Iliad. Sinapis made a mournful, bedraggled excuse for a Greek god. Well, what these days was so fine as it had been once upon a time? The officer's figure of speech wasn't Greek at all: "Maybe we can put the genie back into the bottle after all. Do they tell that story in Atlantis?"

Newton had heard it or read it, though he couldn't remember where or when. Stafford did. "'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,'" he said, and Colonel Sinapis dipped his head again. The other Consul added, "Ali Baba may be stuck in The Arabian Nights, but, believe me, the thieves made the crossing here ahead of you."

"It would not surprise me," Sinapis said. "I have never found a place where thieves did not make the crossing. Perhaps heaven is such a place. Perhaps not, too…" A long pause. "We shall pursue Frederick Radcliff, then, given that chance?"

"We shall," Newton and Stafford said together. They eyed each other suspiciously. Newton couldn't guess which of them that agreement bothered more.

Colonel Sinapis looked most dubious as he peered up from the ground at Jeremiah Stafford on horseback. "Are you sure you must ride with them, your Excellency?" he asked in tones that couldn't have meant anything but Are you out of your mind, your Excellency?

But Stafford nodded. "You'd best believe I am, Colonel. If they-if we-catch the rebel, I can make sure he gets what's coming to him on the spot."

"A written order carried by the commander of the raiding party would accomplish the same thing," Sinapis said.

"No doubt. But I would not see it happen," Stafford said.

The colonel sighed. "Have it your way, then. You will anyhow. I cannot give you orders-only suggestions. Still, if you slow down the men with whom you ride, you will make them less likely to do what you most want done."

Flicked on his vanity, Stafford said, "I won't slow them down."

He hadn't been riding long before he wondered if he'd told Sinapis the truth. The raiders were mostly young, bandy-legged, and small. They spoke in gleeful obscenities. And they seemed to think the presence of an Atlantean Consul was the funniest thing they'd ever run into.

"If I was back in the real world," one of them said to him, "I'd think holding slaves was the wickedest thing a man could do." The trooper's accent proclaimed him a northern man, from Hanover or possibly Croydon.

"The real world?" Stafford waved. The ferns and grass and hemlocks and barrel trees all around seemed real enough to him and then some. "What do you call this?"

"This here?" The cavalryman thought the question was pretty funny, too. "Your Excellency, this here is fucking Nowhere with a capital N." His friends on horseback nodded. They thought it was fucking Nowhere, too.

And they had a point. The only work of man in sight, besides the narrow road that might have started its career as a honker track, was a ruined, tumbledown shack. Stafford didn't think the insurrection was the reason it was empty. By the look of it, nobody'd lived in it for the past twenty years.

"How do you feel about slaves rising up and killing their lawful masters?" Stafford asked. "How do you like it when they try to kill you and your friends?"

"On account of something's lawful, that don't make it right," the young soldier answered. "But the other part of that there… You'll have to wait a while before you find the next fella who tells you he's only happy when some God-damned son of a bitch is shooting at him."

Again, the other cavalrymen nodded. Consul Stafford would have been hard-pressed to tell the northern man he was mistaken. The captain leading the detachment glanced down at something in his hand-a sketch map, Stafford supposed. But for the gold braid on his hat and the three stars on each side of his collar, he looked little different from his men: not much older than they were, either.

"We swing in here," he said, pointing down an even narrower track toward the dark woods ahead. "Lousy rebels are in there. We pitch into 'em from the flank, drive 'em off, and snatch the shitheel who tells 'em what to do." Stafford couldn't place him by the way he talked. Maybe he'd come from England or Ireland when he was young. He didn't seem hesitant about what they were doing, anyhow. That was good. An officer who didn't believe in the cause for which he was fighting could easily contrive to botch his mission while making the failure look like an accident.

As soon as they got to the edge of the woods, the captain told off horse-holders to tend to the other men's mounts. He didn't choose very many, which pleased Stafford: he wanted to get as many soldiers as he could into the fight.