Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

He rode past the marching men to take his place at the head of the army once more. The soldiers seemed profanely determined to punish the slaves, the English settlers, and the Spaniards for making them march and countermarch. Roland smiled to himself. If that wasn't the right attitude for an army to have, he couldn't imagine what would be.

Victor Radcliff knew less about copperskins than he wished he did. Far fewer had been brought to the English settlements in Atlantis than to those of the French and Spanish farther south. Meeting with the leaders of the slave revolt in Spanish Atlantis taught him how proud the copperskins were.

"Why shouldn't we kill all the whites?" one of them demanded. His Spanish name was Martin. He had another one, the one he'd used in the broader lands of Terranova, but Victor couldn't begin to pronounce it. Martin would have to do. Black eyes blazing, he went on, "They don't care if they kill us."

"He is right. Even if he is a Blackfoot, he is right," another copperskin said. Not all of them came from the same tribe. They were as different as Portuguese and Germans and Poles…if you were a Terranovan yourself. Europeans tended to lump them all together, just as the Terranovans spoke of whites without separating Spaniards from Frenchmen from Englishmen. The fellow who wasn't a Blackfoot went by the name of Ramon. He continued, "Give us weapons, and we will make the masters howl."

"We have not many weapons to spare." Victor's Spanish was imperfect. So was the Spanish the copperskins spoke-and they were imperfect in different ways. Everybody had to back and fill and try again every so often.

Martin scowled at him. "You don't want to give them to us, you mean," he growled. His right hand folded into a fist. "How are you any better than these Spanish putos?"

"?Como?" Victor returned his blandest smile. "Simple-we're on your side. What would happen if you asked the Spaniards for arms?"

Reluctantly, Martin nodded. He didn't like the point, but he saw it. But Ramon said, "We don't ask no Spaniards for nothing. What he want from the Spaniards, we take, por Dios."

"Bueno," Victor said. "But you make them all join together against you."

"Why do you care?" Martin's grammar was better than Ramon's. "Then they don't fight you so hard."

"They still fight us." Victor wondered what his superiors would want him to do here. His orders were to start no slave insurrections-not directly. And he hadn't-not directly. But the enemy of England's enemy…was a handy fellow to have around. "We can help you some-just not so much as you probably want."

"Anything is better than nothing," Martin said.

"But more are better-am better-than less," Ramon said.

"Well, the ones who do fight us don't fight you," Victor pointed out. "And, meaning you no disrespect, we are better fighters than you are."

"You think so, do you?" Martin was as affronted as Victor would have been if-no, as Victor had been when-General Braddock told him the redcoats made better soldiers than his settlers.

"I do think so." Victor Radcliff gave back the same kind of answer Braddock might have: "We have better discipline and more experience." He didn't talk about weapons, not when they were a sore spot.

And he didn't impress the copperskins. "We has something you will never has," Ramon said, again without much grammar but with great sincerity.

"What's that?" Radcliff stayed polite, almost disinterested.

"Hate." Ramon needed no grammar to get his point across.

"Hate sends you into battle," Victor agreed. "Hate without experience and discipline sends you into battle…and gets you killed."

That also didn't have the effect he wanted. "So what?" Martin said. "Do you know what we do, Senor? Do you know what they make us do? With what we do, dying in battle is a relief, an easier ending than most of us would find any other way."

It is if you lose, that's certain sure, Victor thought. Spanish vengeance was proverbial up and down Atlantis. Before he could say anything along those lines, Ramon added, "We may die, but we kill, too." He got things right there.

"Help us kill," Martin said urgently. "That's all we want."

"Let's see what we can do," Victor said.

He gave the slaves a few muskets. He gave them some bar lead and some bullet molds. He got his men to cough up some of the swords and bayonets and dirks they'd taken from Frenchmen and Spaniards. And he found that the copperskins were easily pleased. What didn't look like much help to him seemed a great deal more to them. They were so used to getting nothing, anything at all might have been a miracle.

"Now we make the Spaniards to pay," Ramon exulted, brandishing a rapier he plainly had no idea how to use.

Victor stepped away from him. "Have a care with that. You can hurt your friends with it, not just your foes."

Ramon's gaze was measuring. "And which is you?"

"I don't want to be your enemy," Victor answered evenly. "If you make me your enemy, you won't want that, either. Do you understand me?"

"Understand." The copperskin's voice was grudging, but he did nod. He might not like what he heard. Victor didn't care about that. But Ramon and Martin needed to see that they would be fools to antagonize the Englishmen who were their only friends in this sweltering land.

Blaise had a different question for them: "Do you lead blacks as well as Terranovans? Or do the blacks have their own leaders?"

Ramon and Martin looked at each other. "We have blacks in our bands," Martin said slowly. "Bands with black leaders have Terranovans in them, too. We both hate the Spaniards worse than we hate each other."

Blaise grunted. Victor might have done the same thing if the Negro hadn't beaten him to it. That was an…interesting response. Blacks and copperskins could work together. Blaise had escaped with a couple of Terranovans, after all. But they knew they were different from each other as well as from the whites who exploited them.

Guiding pack horses loaded down with weapons and lead, the Terranovans headed back to their own folk. Blaise muttered something in his native language. Victor looked a question at him. The Negro seemed faintly embarrassed. "Means something like, damned hardhead copperskins," he said.

This time, Victor did grunt. "What do they say about you?"

"Damned lazy mallates," Blaise answered without hesitation. "Mallate is like you say nigger."

"I've heard it before," Radcliff replied. "I wasn't sure you had."

"Oh, yes. I hear mallate. I hear nigger," Blaise said. "Can't help it if I black. Doesn't wash off." He made as if to scrub at one arm with the palm of the other hand. "Good when I run away-I am hard to see in woods. Other times?" He shrugged. "I all right where I from. You all right where you from. Terranovans all right where they from. Nobody from Atlantis, right? Everybody should be all right here."

That sounded good. Atlantis might have been a place where everyone could come together in equality. It might have been…but it wasn't. Not yet, anyhow. Victor Radcliff wondered if it ever would be. Let's smash up the Spaniards first, he thought. We can worry about everything else later.

E veryone in French Atlantis called the stuff that hung from the branches of cypresses and from the round trunks and outswept leaves of barrel trees Spanish moss. Roland Kersauzon had always taken the name for granted. Now, approaching the frontier with Spanish Atlantis for the second time in a fortnight, he really noticed how Spanish moss grew more common the farther south he went.

He also noticed how deferential the Spanish frontier guards were when he returned to the border. They bowed. They scraped. As Don Jose had said, they abased themselves before him.

"If you had let me cross when I came here last time, things would be better now," Roland pointed out in his deliberate Spanish.