Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Do they have poisonous snakes in Africa, too?" Radcliff asked Blaise.

"Oh, yes. Here, you don't have-" The Negro used a word in his own language. He drew a picture of the kind of snake he had in mind in the dirt. He used a twig with a confidence a lot of sketch artists might have envied. That broad flare behind the head…

"That must be a cobra," Victor said. "They also have them in India, I believe. People there tame them and teach them to dance to music."

"You see this? You know it is so?" Blaise asked.

"Well…no," Victor admitted.

"Then it is a lie, I bet." Blaise sounded very sure of himself. He was willing-no, eager-to explain why, too: "Mess with these, uh, cobras, you have to be mad. Crazy. Cray-zee." He liked the sound of that word.

"I won't tell you you're wrong," Victor Radcliff said. "It seems crazy to me, too. But people do crazy things sometimes."

"You cray-zee with cobra snakes, you are not cray-zee long." Blaise spoke with great conviction. Radcliff suspected he knew what he was talking about. Anybody who spent too much time fooling around with venomous serpents of any kind was taking his life in his own hands-and its fangs.

His scouts reported that the French settlers were moving against his men from the northeast, as he'd suspected they might. They had more men than he did: he was sure of that. Since he didn't think he could meet them on even terms, he saw only two choices. He could try to ambush them, or he could avoid meeting them at all.

Had they been the regulars from France, he would have tried an ambush. One had worked against Braddock's redcoats; another might well work here. But not against other settlers. They knew the tricks of the trade as well as Victor's men. Since this was their country, they probably knew them better.

Avoid, then. Down the tracks that led south toward the Spanish settlements he went. Those tracks were truly wretched. Most of the real roads in the French settlements ran from east to west, from the seacoast to the interior. The same was also true in the English settlements, but to a smaller degree. With far more people starting to crowd a similar amount of land, the northern settlements needed and had a real road network.

Now the English settlers plundered more thoroughly and didn't burn till after they'd robbed. They'd eaten up the supplies they'd brought with them, and were living off the countryside. Radcliff had known that would happen. It worried him all the same.

"What do we do if they burn in front of us?" Blaise asked one hot, sweaty afternoon. It was early spring, but it felt like what would have been high summer in New Hastings or Hanover.

Blaise had unerringly put his finger on Victor's greatest fear. "We starve," the commander answered.

"Ah." Maybe Blaise hadn't expected anything that blunt. On the other hand, maybe he had. He showed only what he wanted to show.

The French settlers didn't burn their own homes and plantations to keep Victor's force from moving forward. Maybe they didn't think of it. Or maybe they were simply less ruthless than Radcliff and his colored sergeant. If they were, he wanted to make them pay for it.

He discovered he'd left French Atlantis and entered Spanish Atlantis when the lordlet whose house he'd just burned cursed him in most impure Castilian-actually, in the hissing Andalusian dialect more commonly used here and in Terranova. Victor surprised the hidalgo by returning the uncompliments in the same language.

"Why do you do these things to me?" the Spaniard cried, looking disconsolately from the English settlers running off his livestock to his house going up in flames.

"Our kings are at war," Victor answered with a shrug.

"You are one of the settlers from the north," the Spaniard said. "I thought you had no king."

"England has a king, just as Spain has a king," Victor replied. "If the King of England wars against the King of Spain, that makes the two of us enemies." The English settlements in Atlantis, Victor reflected, remembered their loyalty to King George only when England warred against France or Spain. The rest of the time, the settlers were more inclined to complain about how England didn't want them making things on their own or trading with other realms instead of buying from the mother country.

None of that mattered a farthing to the Spaniard. He saw his property burning and being stolen. "You offered no resistance," Radcliff told him. "We spare your life because you didn't. You can rebuild. You can start over."

The Spaniard bowed, which didn't hide the hatred smoldering in his eyes. "I hope you do not put yourself out too much, Senor, with this generous favor you grant me," he said. "If ever we meet again, maybe I will do the same for you-but it would not be wise to count on such a thing."

"Then I won't." Victor touched a finger to the brim of his hat. "Hasta la vista, Senor, and we shall see who does what to whom if we should run across each other again."

"Whoever sees the other man first will do it," the Spaniard said, which struck Victor Radcliff as all too likely.

Roland Kersauzon had heard that Englishmen complained Frenchmen moved too slowly to suit them. He thought the English settlers were jittery fools; Frenchmen moved at just the proper pace, as anyone but a fool could see. But, to him, the Spaniards seemed to have inbred with the fist-sized snails that gnawed on ferns and barrel trees down here in the south. The snails were excellent with garlic butter. Their speed, however-and that of his Excellency, Don Jose Valverde, of Spanish Atlantis-left something to be desired.

"Why does he not answer?" Kersauzon grumbled to anyone who would listen-and to people who got sick of listening.

God only knew what horrors the English settlers were wreaking on Spanish Atlantis. Well, actually, that wasn't quite true. Roland had a pretty good notion: the same kinds of horrors they'd inflicted on French Atlantis. And yet the Spaniards promised that, if he presumed to enter their territory without Don Jose's leave, they would fight him as hard as they fought the English, or even harder.

He believed them. Such idiocy perfectly suited Spanish notions of honor. Were they doing what was advantageous to them? Such a thought never entered their heads. They were doing what a hidalgo ought to do, as they saw it. Past that, as best he could tell, they didn't think at all.

He wished the Devil would bread Don Jose Valverde and fry him for a cutlet over the hottest fire in hell. Satan had to keep a special chamber or firepit in which to torment people who wouldn't answer their mail.

Roland knew too well that he couldn't linger too much longer hard by the border of Spanish Atlantis. Keeping his army fed wouldn't be easy. And, pretty soon, malaria and bloody fluxes and maybe even the dreaded yellow jack would break out. A force the size of his needed to keep moving if it was to stay healthy, especially in this miserable climate.

But if he went away, who won? Victor Radcliff did, damn his black heart. He had no compunction about roving through Spanish Atlantis. He wandered as he pleased, destroying whatever got in his way. And he didn't need to wait for permission from Don Jose blasted Valverde!

"We ought to boot these Spanish guards out of the way and do what we need to do," one of Roland's lieutenants said.

"And then we would be fighting the English and the Spaniards for the rest of the war," Kersauzon answered gloomily. "And the Spaniards would fight us, too. Never doubt it for a minute. They understand spite. They don't understand much else, God knows, but they understand spite."

After what seemed forever and was really a week later than he'd hoped, a horseman finally came up from Gernika. Roland almost dragged him out of the saddle. The rider presented him with a letter gorgeous with multicolored ribbons and seals. When the Spaniards made something official, they made it official.