Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

His grammar stumbled-on purpose?-but he wasn't wrong. Barns and plantation houses went up in flames. The raiders hadn't come to set black and copperskinned slaves free, but they didn't stop them from plundering and taking off for the north.

"Why do you do this?" an old woman asked Victor as a stately home where her family might have lived for generations burned to the ground. "Have I ever done anything to you, Monsieur?"

He bowed. "By no means. But an army of French settlers-and, by now, I daresay, French regulars as well-has invaded lands that belong to my king and my countrymen. Shall we let them get by with that without repaying it where and as we can?"

"Go fight these other soldiers, then. They have wronged you, it could be. I have done you no harm." The old woman started to cry. "Ruins! Everything ruins!"

Victor didn't know whether the redcoats and English settlers below Freetown were strong enough to fight the French straight up. He knew the force he commanded wasn't strong enough to do anything of the sort. But he knew some other things, too. "If we make your settlements howl," he said, "your generals will have to leave the land they invaded and come back to defend their own."

"What good does that do me?" the woman howled as the roof on the house collapsed in a shower of sparks.

It did her no good at all, as Victor knew. But that wasn't his worry. He aimed to make all the French settlements howl the way she did. With the small force at his disposal, that might have been more than he could reasonably expect to do. If you thought small, though, you wouldn't end up with much.

"March on!" he shouted to his men, and march they did.

Some of the plantations had young women on them, as well as or instead of old ones. Some unfortunate things happened-the young women would surely have agreed. Victor tried a couple of soldiers at drumhead courts-martial, and hanged them when they were convicted. Afterwards, those kinds of outrages stopped…or, if they didn't, the offenders got more careful. As Blaise said, mostly no trouble was about as much as you could hope for.

"Why you slay them?" the Negro asked. "They hurt enemy, too."

"Rape is a crime even when a soldier does it," Radcliff said.

"You think the French, they don't fuck English women?" With a limited vocabulary, Blaise could be very blunt.

"They probably do," Victor answered with a sigh. "But if they get caught, French officers will punish them. They use the same laws of war we do."

"Laws of war." As before when he heard that phrase, Blaise was bemused. "You white people plenty smart, but sometimes I think you crazy, too."

"Maybe we are. But if we're all crazy the same way, it evens out," Victor Radcliff said.

Some of the French were crazy in a different way: crazy enough to try to fight back against half a regiment's worth of men. They paid for their folly. Victor made a point of ensuring that they wound up dead. He also made a point-though a quieter one-of looking the other way when his men took their women in among the trees.

"Maybe you not so crazy after all," Blaise remarked.

"Maybe not," Victor said with a sigh. "Or maybe the extent to which I am a beast marks the extent to which I am a sane man."

The Negro frowned. "Don't understand that."

"Don't trouble your head about it." Radcliff set a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not sure I understand it, either. I'm not sure I want to understand it."

His raiders pushed east and south, in the direction of the ocean. He didn't expect to wash his hands in the Atlantic. Pretty soon, the French would scrape together enough militiamen to bar his way. The farther east the English went, the more towns and villages they ran into. And towns and villages had lots of men in them. Men with muskets hastily pressed into service didn't make the best soldiers. But Victor was uneasily aware his own men had been amateurs not long before. If you lived through a couple of skirmishes, you got an idea of what needed doing.

Again, Blaise had his own idea of what needed doing. "Should say all niggers here free, M'sieu Victor. Copperskins, too. You get more fighters. And the French settlers, they can't do a thing without those people."

He was bound to be right about that. Slowly, Victor said, "I have no orders to do any such thing."

"Why you need orders?" Blaise demanded.

"If we win this war, I think England will take away the French settlements in Atlantis," Victor said. "Maybe the Spanish settlements, too."

"And so?" Blaise cared nothing for that. "Most niggers and copperskins are free in English lands now."

"Slavery makes no money up in the north. The crops won't support it," Victor replied. "Things are different here. How can you raise cotton or indigo or rice or even pipeweed without plantations? How can you have plantations without slaves?"

Blaise looked at him-looked through him, really. "We don't use money in Africa. Maybe we lucky. You put money ahead of free?"

"If all the slaves down here are suddenly freed, everyone in these parts is liable to starve, Negroes and Terranovans and whites alike," Victor said.

"Pay people to work the farms," Blaise said. "They do it, I bet."

"It could be," Victor admitted. "Say it is."

"Then everybody free!" Blaise exclaimed.

"Maybe. Or maybe everyone is free to starve. Paying workers costs more than keeping slaves. If there is no profit, the plantations go to ruin," Victor said.

Blaise was a shrewd man, no two ways about it. "Make people who buy from them pay more," he said.

"And all the plantations in Terranova will undersell us, so we go to the dogs just the same. They grow cotton and rice and indigo in India, too, and I hear they will grow pipeweed there soon," Radcliff said.

"I hear about Terranova," Blaise said. "Where is this India place?"

"Beyond Terranova and an ocean-on the far side of the world."

"More world than ever I think," the Negro said. "Terranova, yes, I hear some about it-copperskins' talk, you know. They use slaves in this India place?"

"I have no idea." Victor Radcliff had never worried about it. All he knew about India was that it was supposed to be rich, and it had tigers and elephants. He'd seen a tiger once, in a zoological garden some high-minded cousin had set up in Hanover. It looked hungry. It looked angry, too, prowling its too-small cage and lashing its tail.

But Blaise persisted: "If they don't use slaves, how you say we need slaves?"

"All I said was, I don't have the authority to free slaves," Victor answered. "Politicians have to do that sort of thing; soldiers can't. I can tell slaves to run off-that's a measure of war. Freeing them is more than I can do."

"I have reason the first time," Blaise said, which showed he still knew more French than English. "White people are crazy."

Despite cold rain and mud, French regulars marched in perfectly dressed ranks and columns, just like English redcoats. And, as the French settlers had maneuvered the redcoats into a trap, so the English settlers tried to return the disfavor. Their fort had fallen, but they sniped at the French from whatever cover they could find. And they refused to fight fixed battles.

"What ridiculous excuse for warfare is this?" Montcalm-Gozon demanded indignantly.

"It is what I warned you to expect," Roland Kersauzon replied. "They fear your men would win in any stand-up fight-"

"As we would," the commander from the mother country broke in. "Oh, no doubt, Monsieur," Roland said politely. He didn't want to argue with the nobleman. That didn't necessarily mean he thought Montcalm-Gozon was right. His settlers had shocked the English redcoats. Maybe the English settlers could do the same to French regulars.

"As I said before, this is curious country," Montcalm-Gozon remarked. "Where it is settled, it seems European enough. Where people do not dwell, though, the plants and animals are quite different. Now and then you will see a familiar tree or bush or animal living amongst the native oddities, but only now and then."