Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Yes, I think so, too," Frederick Radcliff agreed quietly.

"All right, then." Consul Stafford spread his hands. "If we killed most of our slaves, we couldn't go on living the way we could when we had them all. And going on the old way would be the only point to repudiating Slug Hollow."

"You can't put Humpty Dumpty together again," Frederick said.

"No, you sure can't." Stafford nodded. "All the king's horses and all the king's men… and since the old way won't work any more, we'd better try to make the new ones work as well as they can."

"That's how it looks to me, all right. I didn't reckon it'd look that way to you," Frederick said.

"No, eh?" This time, Stafford's chuckle was distinctly wry. "The other thing that happened was, as soon as the terms we agreed to in Slug Hollow got out, every idiot in New Hastings started telling me what kind of idiot I was. When a damned fool starts screaming at you, you know he's got to be wrong. And if he's wrong, what does that mean? It means you're right. You follow me?"

"Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes," Frederick answered. The canniest Senator could have sounded no more convincing. "One of the sweetest things in the world is rubbing some dumb son of a bitch's nose in just what a dumb son of a bitch he really is."

"Now that you mention it-yes," the Consul said. Drunk, he'd seen that Lorenzo was a man not so very different from him. Now, sober, he realized the same thing about Frederick Radcliff. Which meant he and his ancestors, back to the earliest days of slaveholding in Atlantis, had been wrongheaded through and through. Which meant the Slug Hollow accord was probably the least the USA should be doing, not the most. But that was a worry for another day. Today had plenty of worries of its own. Among them… "I do wish you the best of luck coming back safe from St. Augustine."

"I believe you," Frederick replied. "I wouldn't have a few months ago, but I do now."

"That's all right. I wouldn't have meant it a few months ago," Stafford said. "Things change. Either you change with them-or you don't, and they roll over you. I don't like that, Lord knows, but it's the only game in town." No, he didn't like it one bit, which, as he'd said, mattered not even a cent's worth.

Frederick Radcliff thought he knew everything there was to know about living in a warm, muggy climate. As soon as he got off his steamship-another first-and rode inland from St. Augustine, he realized he was an amateur. Sweat sprang out on his skin. But it didn't cool him, because it didn't-it couldn't-evaporate. It just clung, leaving him hot and wet.

One of the men in the cavalry escort the national government had given him wore spectacles. The trooper took them off and polished them with a rag, then set them back on his nose. Ten minutes later, he did it again. "God-damned things keep steaming up," he grumbled.

The ground was flat and swampy. Frederick saw shades of green he'd never imagined before. Ferns grew everywhere. They even sprouted from the sides of brick walls. Herons-blue and gray and white, some of them almost as tall as a man-stood in shallow pools. Every so often, one of those bayonet beaks would plunge into the water. A wriggling fish or frog or salamander would vanish at a gulp.

Vultures spiraling down out of the sky drew Frederick's notice to carrion before his nose caught the sickly-sweet reek. The men from his escort smelled it about the same time he did. "Something's dead," one of them said.

"Something big," added the trooper with the eyeglasses. He tried to wipe the condensation off them one more time. By the way he swore under his breath as he stuffed the rag back into his tunic pocket, he wasn't having much luck.

They rode around a corner, and then all reined in at once. A corpse hung from the branches of a cypress tree. Frederick thought it was a Negro's, but it might have been a copperskin's. Not easy to be sure: it was bloated and blackened, and the carrion birds had already been at it. A turkey vulture perched on the branch, not far from where the noose was tied. It sent the travelers a beady jet stare.

So battered was the body that it might even have been a white man's, hanged by the insurrectionists. It might have been, but it wasn't: a placard tied to it warned SLAVES STAY QUIET. They were still in country white men controlled, then.

"How much longer till we get to where the slaves have kicked off the traces?" Frederick asked.

"Should be pretty soon," a cavalryman answered. "When they start shooting at us from ambush, that's a pretty good sign."

Was it? Frederick wasn't so sure. Rebellious slaves might want to fire at government soldiers, yes. But disgruntled white men could also want to shoot at a Negro who'd already led a much-too-successful uprising.

You knew that before you came down here, Frederick reminded himself. And so he had, but the knowledge hadn't seemed so immediate in New Hastings. What would keep a white man from hiding in the ferns near that tree and potting the fellow who'd helped turn his world inside out?

The stink would, you fool. Frederick wouldn't have wanted to wait in ambush here. Maybe one of the vultures would have, but he couldn't think of anyone else who was likely to.

Then they rode past the hanged man. With the way the breeze was blowing, that took the stench away. Frederick started looking apprehensively at every clump of ferns or bushes, every stand of squat barrel trees, every fence and slave cabin. If somebody wanted to take a shot at him, it would be easy, guards or no guards.

Before long, the death reek returned. They'd passed from land the whites controlled into country the rebels held. Here and there, animals lay bloating in the fields. There were only a few of those, though. Frederick understood why: most of the beasts would have been butchered and eaten. But he wouldn't have seen any in a peaceful countryside. Human bodies lay in the fields, too. His nose told him many more people had died somewhere out of sight.

Slave cabins stood empty, some with doors yawning open. So did big houses, the ones that hadn't burned. Many of the planters' houses had had their windows smashed, so that they stared out at the muddy road like so many skulls with big, black, blind eye sockets.

In rebel country, several cavalrymen held up white flags of truce. Frederick wondered how much good they would do-and whether they would do any. Then he decided they had to do some. Without them, he was sure his party already would have been attacked.

"How do we get them to come out and to us talk?" asked the lieutenant who commanded his guards. Maximilian Braun's side whiskers had gray in them; he spoke with a heavy German accent-like a Dutchman, most Atlanteans would have said. Like Colonel Sinapis and a good many others, he'd washed up on these shores because of some European political upheaval. He would be grayer yet before he got a captain's third small star on either side of his collar.

One thing Frederick was sure of-like most Europeans, Braun had no use for slavery. "Maybe we should stop and stay in one place a while," the Negro said.

"Why not?" Braun said. "That will them a better chance give to surround us and wipe us out." No matter what he thought about slavery, he had an acute sense of self-preservation. Well, who didn't?

But the officer gave the necessary orders. His men set about making camp. They ran up a large Atlantean flag. The scarlet red-crested eagle's head on dark blue had never meant much to Frederick-he was in Atlantis, but not of it. Now that might change. He hoped it would.

Along with the national flag, the soldiers also went on flying a large flag of truce. Frederick hoped it would do some good. If it didn't… If it didn't, he was liable to discover in short order that Lieutenant Braun hadn't been joking. The immigrant didn't sound as if he had been.