Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Again, the other Consul needed no words to let Stafford know what he was thinking. "We are gaining ground against the insurrectionists, you know," Newton said, turning the subject.

"We're in deeper, anyhow," Stafford answered. "I'm not so sure about gaining ground. What they do to the wagon trains coming up from New Marseille…" He angrily shook his head. "They have no business doing such things, God damn them to the blackest pits of hell."

Leland Newton smiled thinly. "I never thought I'd learn how tasty frog-and-snail stew could be," he said.

"I never thought I would have to find out," Stafford said. "We were guarding the wagon trains well for a while, but things have slipped again."

"If you put everything you have into going forward, doing anything else with your soldiers is going to slip," Newton pointed out. "Even with the militiamen along, we're stretched too thin for that not to happen."

Stafford grunted and turned away, almost as rudely as Colonel Sinapis had turned away from him. Doing anything else would have meant admitting some of the army's failures were his own fault, and he was damned if he would. Newton didn't challenge him to a duel, although no regulations (except the laws of the United States of Atlantis, which a gentleman could ignore if he chose) prevented one Consul from meeting the other on the field of honor.

Newton's voice pursued him: "Don't you think we'd be better off talking with the insurrectionists and seeing if there isn't some way we might all live together peacefully? This is the only home any of us have, you know."

That made Stafford turn back. "We had been living together peacefully for many years, under a system that assigned everyone his proper place-"

"From a white man's perspective," Newton broke in. "From a Negro's or a copperskin's, maybe not. Easier to be impressed, I daresay, if you're doing the buying and selling than if you're bought and sold."

"You sound like you're selling nigger equality, Newton," Stafford said. "You may huckster as much as you please, but I'm here to tell you I'm not buying."

"Oh, I can see that," the other Consul answered. "Better to let Atlantis tear itself to pieces than to change one iota of the way we do things. Iota… That goes all the way back to the theological controversies of the fourth century, you know: the difference between homo-ousios, of the same nature, and homoi-ousios, of like nature. One little letter, and plenty of blood spilled over it. A few hundred years from now, will our quarrels seem as foolish?"

"No," Stafford said, and then, "It would, no doubt, be pointless to remind you that our Lord accepted the idea of slavery."

By Newton's face, it would indeed. He credited the parts of the Bible that pleased him and ignored the rest. Stafford didn't pause to wonder whether he did the same thing himself.

None of the fifteen or so prisoners Atlantean troops had taken in their latest skirmish with the insurrectionists seemed happy with his fate. The blacks and copperskins were alive, but hardly convinced they would stay that way for long. Maybe they'd heard the white soldiers weren't hanging captured enemy fighters, but they plainly had trouble believing it.

Surveying them, Leland Newton saw three who looked even more miserable than the rest. Two were copperskins, the other a Negro. Only one of them wore a skirt; the other two had on baggy homespun trousers like their menfolk. But, no matter what they wore, they were all of them women.

"Taken in arms with the men?" Newton asked the sergeant in charge of the soldiers guarding the prisoners.

"Sure as hell were, uh, your Excellency." The underofficer pointed to the black woman. "That there bitch damn near-damn near-blew me a new asshole before Paddy Molloy jumped on her while she was reloading. She fought him, too, till he clouted her a good one."

"May I talk to her?"

One of the sergeant's gingery eyebrows jumped. "You're the Consul, sir. Seems to me you can do any old God-damned thing you please."

Only proves you've never been Consul, Newton thought. But he didn't waste time explaining to the man with three stripes on the sleeve of his sweat-stained gray tunic. Instead, Newton stepped past him and walked up to the captured insurrectionist. "What's your name?" he asked her.

By the way she looked at him-looked through him, really-he might have been calling to her from a mile beyond the moon. When she answered, "Elizabeth," her voice seemed to come from at least that far away.

Newton pushed ahead anyhow: "Is it true, what the sergeant said? Did you fight against our soldiers, the same way a man would have?"

"Reckon I did." She regained a little spirit as she added, "Might still be doin' it, too, 'cept the fuckin' mick who grabbed me was too damn' big to whup." She couldn't have stood more than five feet two. A knot on the side of her jaw said Paddy Molloy had clouted her a good one.

"Have they treated you the same as the men they took?" Newton asked.

Elizabeth's first startled glance went to the two female copperskins who'd been captured with her. Then her eyes swung back to Consul Newton. He couldn't have said why, but her gaze made him feel like an idiot. That must have been what she thought, too, because she said, "You ain't the brightest candle in the box, is you?"

"What do you mean?" Newton didn't think he'd risen to the highest rank in Atlantis by being stupid.

Elizabeth did, though. As if to a half-wit, she explained, "They don't throw the men down on the ground and hold their legs apart and screw 'em eight or ten or twenty times. You may be white devils, but I don't reckon you's cornholin' devils."

"They did that to you? To all three of you? Molested you? Violated you?" The Consul heard his own horror.

Matter-of-factly, the captured female fighter nodded. "Chance I took. I knew that when I asked the menfolk to learn me to shoot. Didn't reckon I'd get caught, though." Her grimace declared she wished she hadn't. " ' Sides, they liable to give me the clap or the pox."

Newton hardly noticed that. He stormed back to the white sergeant. "Did you and your troops take unfair advantage of those women?" he thundered, as full of righteous wrath as Jehovah watching the Children of Israel bow down before the Golden Calf.

"Unfair? Don't look that way to me, sir." The sergeant seemed to think Newton was an idiot, too. Like Elizabeth, he wasn't shy about telling him why: "Jesus Christ, they were doing their damnedest to murder the lot of us! Were we supposed to kiss 'em on the cheek and invite 'em to a waltz, like?"

"No, but you weren't supposed to, to rape them, either!" Newton had to fight to get the dreadful word out.

"Chance they take if they fire at us." The underofficer and Elizabeth used the same brutal logic.

Seeing he would get no satisfaction-under the circumstances, perhaps not the perfect word-there, Newton stormed off to talk to a captain. The young officer only shrugged. "What do you expect from men who find women in arms against them, your Excellency?"

"Civilized behavior?" Newton suggested.

Sarcasm rolled off the captain's back. "War is not a civilized business," he said.

"It has its rules and customs. On the whole, the insurrectionists have lived up to them."

"Well, what do you want me to do about it? Put 'em up on charges?" the captain asked. That was exactly what Newton wanted, but the younger man's laughter told him he wouldn't get it-not here, anyhow.

Fuming, he stomped away to talk to Colonel Sinapis. The colonel had given Consul Stafford a hard time, so Newton assumed he would find him reasonable. He didn't. Sinapis said, "The soldiers took the women after the women fought against them?"

"That's right," Newton said. "It's disgraceful. It's barbaric. It's-"