Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

Blaise wasn't finished. "These Jews, they take slaves?"

"Some rich Jews own them, I'm sure," Victor said. "They buy and sell them now and again." Most of that trade, though, at least between Africa and Atlantis, lay in Christian hands. Uncomfortably, he finished, "They don't raid the coast to grab them, anyhow."

"Huh," Blaise said: a thoughtful grunt. "Maybe I turn Jew, then."

Victor didn't tell him that kind of conversion was against the law. He wasn't sure it was, or needed to be. Who not born to the Jewish faith would want to assume all the burdens it entailed? Speaking of those burdens…"Do you want to get circumcised?"

"Fancy word. What's it mean?" Blaise said. Victor told him what it meant. The Negro set a protective hand in front of his privates. "Muslims do that, too. Why would anybody want to?"

"I don't know why Mahometans do it. I didn't know they did. Jews think God requires it of them."

Blaise took the hand away. He was getting ever better at aping white people's notions of polite manners. "Ain't gonna be no Jew," he declared.

"Amen," Victor said, unaware he'd just come out with a Hebrew word.

When Victor-and Blaise-rode south into what had been French Atlantis, no customs barrier delayed them at the border. There were no customs barriers between English and French Atlantis any longer, no more than there were between New Hastings and Hanover. King George ruled them all.

The innkeeper at whose establishment they stayed was French. They both spoke his language. That pleased him. They also both stayed reasonably sober and reasonably quiet. That pleased him even more.

Men from English Atlantis filled the inn to bursting. They shouted demands in English. The innkeeper understood them well enough; so close to the old border, it wasn't as if he'd never had English-speaking guests before the war made him an involuntary English subject. But, by the way the newcomers acted, French might have been as dead as Aramaic.

They drank. They pinched and patted the barmaids. They ate as if they'd just discovered food. They bragged about the fortunes they were going to make by screwing the Frenchies. (That the innkeeper was listening, and might decide to season their capon with rat poison, never seemed to cross their minds.) They went on drinking. They brawled, and broke crockery brawling.

"That will go on your scot!" the innkeeper cried. (He might put rat poison in the beer and wine and barrel-tree rum, too.)

"What makes you reckon we'll pay you a ha'penny, you filthy, motherless scut?" one of them bawled.

A heartbeat later, he found himself staring down the barrel of Victor Radcliff's pistol. A pistol aimed at your face, as Victor had reason to know, seemed to own a bore as wide as a fieldpiece's. "You'll pay your scot right now, and then you'll get the devil out of here," Victor said quietly. In the sudden, vast silence, he didn't need to shout.

"And if I don't?" The trader had nerve-more nerve than sense, as far as Victor was concerned.

He said, "In that unfortunate circumstance, your heirs will be responsible for what you owe this gentleman…and for the cost of your funeral. Add in the farthing you're actually worth and it comes to a tidy little sum."

The other settler's bloodshot eyes crossed as he stared down the barrel of the pistol. "Who the hell are you, anyways, throwing orders around like you're God's anointed?"

"I am Major Victor Radcliff," Victor answered evenly. "If I have to ask your name, sir, you will not be glad of it: I promise you that. Now…Do as I told you or prepare to join the majority."

"That's fancy talk for 'die,' Ben," another trader said, in case Ben was too dense or too sozzled to figure it out for himself.

He wasn't-or he didn't let on that he was. "I know what it's fancy talk for, dammit," he said. With an effort, he looked at Radcliff rather than his weapon. "Put that miserable thing away so we can talk this over like a couple of sensible people."

"I am not a sensible person, and do not pretend to be," Radcliff said. "I have spent this whole war killing people who got in my way. If you think one more will bother me to the extent of a fart on a dung heap, you are making what I assure you will be your last mistake."

Ben considered. Victor knew the questions that had to be uppermost in his mind: could he knock the pistol aside before Victor blew his head off? If he could, could he win the brawl that would follow a split second later?

He must not have liked the answers he came up with. He said, "I'm going to reach down for some money. I'll do it slow, and I won't go for anything else. That all right by you?"

"Yes-as long as you mean it. If you don't, I promise that my friend and I will make you…briefly…wish you did."

"Your friend? You mean that…colored fellow?" Ben was almost, but not quite, too slow. He did have the brains to realize tagging a gun-toting Negro with an ugly name wasn't the smartest thing he could do. He took out enough money to cover his tab and then some. After setting it on the table, he walked off into the night.

"Anyone else?" Victor inquired. "Or can you see screwing the Frenchies will be the same as screwing yourselves from now on?"

No one seemed inclined to argue with him. Short-tempered men who carried pistols often went without their fair share of disagreement, something he'd noticed before and was inclined to take advantage of. On the other hand, he didn't fool himself into believing he'd magically convinced the English settlers of the error of their ways. Lack of disagreement wasn't the same as agreement.

He suspected-no, he was sure-there would need to be laws to make sure the English didn't screw the Frenchies…too badly. Quite a few people would get rich down here before those laws went into place. If Ben wasn't one of them, Victor would have been surprised.

"Audace, audace, toujours l'audace," Blaise remarked as he and Victor undressed for bed. The innkeeper gave the two of them a room to themselves. None of the traders from English Atlantis would have wanted to bed down with them anyhow. As far as Victor was concerned, it was mutual.

He only shrugged. "It wasn't so audacious as all that, not when you were there to back my play."

"But who backed mine?" Blaise asked. "Two bullets, then-" He made as if to strangle himself.

"Oh, nonsense," Victor said. "What do you want to bet the innkeeper has a pepperbox pistol-or more likely a blunderbuss loaded to the muzzle with scrap iron-under the bar? He would have backed us both."

"Maybe," Blaise said unwillingly. "But maybe too slow to do us any good, too."

"The devil take worrying about might-have-beens," Victor said. "We did it, we got by with it, and there's an end to it. And now why don't you blow out that candle so we can get some sleep?" Blaise did. The room plunged into darkness scented with hot tallow. Victor never found out whether he or Blaise started snoring first, which probably meant he did.

Nouveau Redon would never be the same. English engineers systematically demolished the walls that had warded the great fortress of French Atlantis for so long. That made sense to Victor. Even without the spring, the site remained dangerously good.

He wasn't surprised to discover French settlers could see that as well as he could. They'd also noticed that the English regulars charged with wrecking their works spoke no French. With smiling faces, the locals called the engineers appalling names.

With those same smiling faces, they called Victor Radcliff some appalling names, too. He smiled back, and replied in his best French: "Ah, but if you think I'm bad, you should see your own mothers."

The setters who'd been making sport of him stopped, their mouths falling open. "Monsieur comprehends?" one of them said in alarm.

"Monsieur bloody well does," Victor agreed. "Monsieur also comprehends that you would do well not to bait the engineers. If they find out the tenth part of what you're saying to them, you are all dead men."