Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Everybody knows that," another guard put in.

"But of course. Everybody does," the first soldier agreed. "Still, the English have always been dogs and sons of dogs. They've been godless Protestants for a very long time, anyhow. So why do we have to go to war with them now?"

"It's the fighting in Europe," said the courier who'd brought the message to Nouveau Redon.

Roland Kersauzon nodded. "It is indeed. We have joined with Austria and Russia to give Frederick of Prussia the thumping he deserves. The English-dogs and sons of dogs that they are-have sided with Frederick. And so we shall punish him and England as they deserve."

The courier and the guards clapped their hands. One of the soldiers tossed his hat in the air. Then he made a frantic grab to keep it from landing on a lump of horse manure. With an embarrassed grin, he set the tricorn back on his head. Another gate guard said, "We'll whip them." Everyone cheered again. Nobody threw a hat this time, though. The guard pointed to the paper Roland Kersauzon still held. "Does that just tell you the war is here, sir, or has it got orders for us, too?"

"Orders," Kersauzon answered. "First, we are to make sure Nouveau Redon is in the proper condition to defend itself, should it have to."

"Won't be hard." Two or three men spoke together, with almost identical words. One of them added, "You'd have to be a crazy fool to try and take this place."

"I think so, too, but who's to say the English aren't crazy fools?" Roland answered. The guards nodded-they also seemed to think the English were likely to be crazy fools. Kersauzon went on, "And you're right: it won't be hard to ready the town. It's strong to begin with, and we've kept the works and the garrison in good order, thank God." He glanced down at the sheet. "But there's more than that."

"What is it?" Again, several men asked the question in chorus-he knew how to tell a story and spin it out.

"We are to gather together an army from all the settlements under the rule of the King of France, and to march against the English and take away what has been theirs for too long," he replied grandly. "So it is commanded of us, and so shall it be."

When the guards huzzahed this time, several hats went flying. A couple of them landed on the ground, but none, luckily, in the horse dung. Townsfolk came out of shops and taverns to see what the commotion was about. When the guards shouted out the news, fresh commotion spread.

One of the men asked, "The Spaniards are on our side, is it not so?"

He sounded anxious, and with some reason. Men who followed the King of France were almost as likely to reckon Spaniards dogs and sons of dogs as they were Englishmen. True, no one could accuse the Spaniards of being godless Protestant heretics. But if Spain allied itself with the godless Protestant heretics of England, that could prove unfortunate in Atlantis, where English and Spanish settlements lay to the north and south of France's.

Kersauzon slew the soldier's worry with a smile. "They are on our side, yes. Their ships will join with ours. Their soldiers will slay Englishmen wherever they find them. We have but to stretch forth our hand, and the English settlements here will fall into it like a ripe apple."

How the men cheered then! They danced in a circle, spinning now widdershins, now sunwise. Had an English army been anywhere close by, it could have marched into Nouveau Redon without firing a shot. But the English were far away. Roland Kersauzon danced as enthusiastically as any gate guard. Why not? His orders were to ready an army and advance. Oh, he was also ordered to ready defenses at need, but he took that as a formality. After all, if he was advancing, he wouldn't need to defend, would he?

Of course not. That was so obvious, even an Englishman could see it.

Victor Radcliff's bad French saved his life. The three runaways who'd grabbed him feared he was a slavecatcher. Once they realized he was nothing of the sort, and especially once they discovered he was an Englishman, they treated him like a long-lost brother.

One of them, as he'd thought, was black, the other two, copperskins. They fed him turtle and frog and fish and snails. Having convinced them he wasn't French, he wondered if he ought to eat the snails. But the runaways did, with every sign of enjoyment, and so he did, too. Each snail gave him a couple of bites of tasty meat; the shells were the size of a man's clenched fist. You wouldn't have found snails like those chewing up the lettuces in a garden outside Paris.

You might not have found them up by New Hastings, either, and you wouldn't have up near Hanover. Big snakes and lizards stayed in the south, where the weather never got worse than mild. Snails spread farther, but not too much. The hot, sticky southern climate suited the Negro fine. In his vile French and worse bits of Spanish, he said it reminded him of Africa.

As far as the two copperskins were concerned, he was welcome to it. They knew more Spanish than French, and even a few words of Basque-as much as any foreigner was ever likely to learn. They spoke to each other in Spanish, too. After a while, Victor realized they were from different clans or maybe different countries. The language of one made no more sense to the other than Hungarian did to an Irishman.

The Negro called himself Blaise. The Terranovans went by Francisco and Juan. Those weren't the names any of them had been born with. They gave Victor their real names, and laughed at him when he mangled them. "You white men, so many things you can't say," Blaise told him.

Victor Radcliff smiled and shrugged. He could say one thing: I am a free man. Neither Negroes nor copperskins raided white men's lands for slaves. They didn't know how to build the ships or the guns that would have made such a thing possible. Their people did have a yen for the trinkets white slavers used to buy chattels and save themselves the trouble of fighting for them.

Blaise and Francisco and Juan had a yen for freedom. At first, as they started traveling north, they seemed to think Victor had been wandering through the swamp for his own amusement. They didn't expect him to know what he was doing there. "White men, they are without hope away from their towns," Blaise said.

Instead of arguing, Victor vanished. One second, he was walking along beside his new companions. The next, they went one way and he another. He didn't warn them he would do it. He just ducked off behind a barrel tree and headed off on his own.

He listened to them exclaim. Francisco swore. Juan started to laugh. "Maybe this blanco, maybe he knows something," he said.

"Maybe. Or maybe he just got lost." Blaise was as reluctant to think a white knew what he was doing as many whites would have been to give him the same credit.

Then Victor reappeared and tapped him on the shoulder. "Am I lost? Or are you?" he asked politely.

Blaise almost jumped out of his skin. "How you do that?" he demanded.

"Magic," Victor said, deadpan.

That won him more attention than he wanted. The Terranovans and the African took him literally. He wasn't sure whether they wanted to use his sorcerous talents to help them escape bondage or to kill him so he couldn't bewitch them.

"His ghost will haunt us even if we do kill him," Blaise muttered when he thought Victor was out of earshot.

Victor smiled his most enigmatic smile. That set the black and the two copperskins muttering once more. They stopped bothering him. And he soon proved he could stay with them. He also showed he knew how to hunt-and he had a flintlock rifle and a pair of pistols. He could have had all that and eyes in the back of his head without their doing him any good. Even the fiercest, most deadly warrior had to sleep sometimes.

He solved the problem by pretending it wasn't one. If he took sleeping around them for granted, they wouldn't think he was afraid to. That would give them one less reason to knock him over the head.