Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Had he had any choice, he would have ignored the Negro named Samuel. But Samuel made sure Stafford and Newton and Colonel Sinapis had no choice. Carrying a flag of truce, he rode into town with a guard of half a dozen insurrectionists. Two of them had captured Atlantean cavalry carbines, three had eight-shooters, while the last bore the Free Republic's flag.

Up till then, Consul Stafford hadn't known the Free Republic had a flag. It hadn't shown one in any of its fights with Sinapis' soldiers. But it did now-one in stark contrast to the USA's crimson red-crested eagle's head on blue. The Free Republic's flag showed three vertical stripes: red, black, and white.

Samuel was only too happy to explain its meaning to New Marseille's newspapermen (and parading through town with it made sure the newspapermen noticed him). "It shows the three folks of the Free Republic," the Negro told anyone who would listen. "Copperskins, Negroes, and whites can all live together there in equality."

Not a single reporter asked him what had happened to the whites in the Free Republic, or why so many militiamen hailed from land it held. That the reporters didn't ask such questions infuriated Stafford. "The black bastard might as well have cast a spell on them!" he complained.

"He's clever," Leland Newton said, which only irked Stafford more. The other Consul went on, "And that flag is a master stroke. It makes the Free Republic look to be the same kind of thing the United States are."

"One more lie!" Stafford said. "He's trying to force us to treat with him."

"He's doing a good job, too, wouldn't you say?" Newton answered. "If we don't treat with him-or treat with his principals, which is what he's come to arrange-we have to start fighting again."

Although Stafford was ready for that, he and the militiamen seemed to be the only people in New Marseille-maybe the only people in the USA-who were. "He's arranged things so we have no choice," he said sourly.

That didn't get the response he wanted, either. "Well, your Excellency, if you think so, too, let's meet him and get it over with," Newton said.

Stafford didn't want to, which was putting it mildly. But he'd done all kinds of things he didn't want to do since leaving New Hastings. The more of them he did, the easier the next one seemed to become. Meet with a nigger fronting for a slave insurrection? Before leaving the capital, he would have laughed at the idea-if he didn't punch whoever was mad enough to suggest it. Now… Now he let out a wintry sigh and said, "All right. Maybe it will make those jackasses with pens shut up, anyhow. That would be worth a little something."

It didn't. Samuel made sure it wouldn't. He wanted to meet while New Marseille's reporters listened in. "Why not?" he said. "The Free Republic's got nothing to hide." That only made the scribes like him better.

And so they sat down together in the eatery attached to New Marseille's second-best hotel, the Silver Oil Thrush. Foreigners, no doubt, would have found the name peculiar. Consul Stafford cared little for what foreigners thought. Oil thrushes had grown scarce, even here in the southwest, but he'd eaten them often enough to know how tasty they were.

Samuel, on the other hand, was a stringy old buzzard, his woolly hair frosted with gray. He must have been somebody's butler, or something of the sort, before the insurrection: he spoke almost like an educated white man, with only a vanishing trace of a slave accent. Letting niggers and copperskins learn to read and write was a big mistake-Stafford had always thought so. It gave them ideas above their station.

Too late to worry about that now. "Tribune Radcliff and Marshal Lorenzo want to meet with you folks to end the war," Samuel said. Off to one side of the table where he talked with the Consuls and Colonel Sinapis, a sketch artist took down their likenesses. Soon, a woodcut of the scene would grace some New Marseille newspaper.

"If they think we'll recognize their crackbrained titles, they'd better think again," Stafford snapped.

Samuel only shrugged. "Talk to them about that, your Excellency. Talk to me about talking to them." His use of Stafford's title of respect annoyed the Consul instead of mollifying him.

"If I had my way-" Stafford began.

"You'd whip me within an inch of my life. I know that, your Excellency," Samuel broke in, with perfect accuracy. "But you don't have your way here, not any more you don't. Shall we talk instead?"

"Yes. Let's." That was Newton, not Stafford.

"I would still sooner fight it out," Stafford said. Knowing he would get no support from the other Consul, he looked to Balthasar Sinapis instead. He got no support from the colonel, either. He feared he knew what that meant: Sinapis didn't want the insurrectionists to humiliate him again. In a way, Stafford sympathized. In another way… "What good is having an army if you don't dare use it?"

To his surprise, Sinapis answered him: "To keep someone else from using his army against you."

"So that's why the niggers aren't in New Marseille, is it?" Stafford snarled.

"Yes. That is exactly why," Sinapis said.

"And on account of we don't want to come into New Marseille any old way," Samuel said. "We don't want to fight any more. We want peace. You gonna tell all the people in Atlantis you don't want peace?"

You sneaky son of a bitch, Stafford thought, watching the reporters scribble. Samuel knew how to play to the gallery-Frederick Radcliff must have understood what he was doing when he sent out the other Negro. Damn it, the people of Atlantis, or too many of them, didn't want anybody telling them their leaders didn't want peace.

"If you think the people of Atlantis-of the United States of Atlantis-will let the so-called Free Republic of Atlantis stand, you'd better think again," Newton said. Stafford blinked, the way he did whenever he and the other Consul agreed about something.

Samuel only spread his pale-palmed hands. "I'm not the one to talk about that, either," he said. "You've got to see what the Tribune and the Marshal have to say."

Consul Newton nodded. He was willing to do that. Colonel Sinapis was also willing to do it, or at least resigned to the prospect. If Stafford said no, all the blame would land on him. There was probably enough to crush him.

If only…! If only a lot of things, he thought. They started with wondering why Victor Radcliff had to get a slave with child and went on from there. Too late to do anything about any of them now. Stafford was stuck with the world as it was.

He didn't say yes. He couldn't make himself do that. But he didn't say no, no matter how much he wanted to.

Approaching the hamlet of Slug Hollow, Leland Newton wondered how it had got its name. The answer proved altogether mundane: it sat in a depression, and the trees thereabouts were full of cucumber slugs, some of them half as long as a man's arm. The settlers had had the imagination of so many cherrystone clams, but they'd told the truth as they saw it.

No whites were left in the hamlet. Maybe they'd fled. Maybe they hadn't had the chance. Newton didn't ask-he didn't want to know. Jeremiah Stafford did ask, pointedly. He made sure he did it where the reporters could hear him, too. Newton thought about teasing him for taking lessons from Samuel, but decided not to. He didn't think his colleague would appreciate it.

When Stafford asked, Samuel only shrugged and spread his hands again. "I don't know what happened," he said. "They were long gone by the time I came through here-that's all I can tell you."

"A likely story," Stafford said. "How do you suppose so many buildings burned down? Lightning?"

"I don't know," Samuel repeated. "If I don't know, I can't tell you."

"Would we find bones if we dug in the ruins?" Stafford asked.