Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"It could be," Roland said. "But even if I would have, how many more just like him are there?" The sergeant had no answer for that. Neither did Roland, not in numbers. But he knew there were swarms of them.

Victor Radcliff found himself and his little band of English marauders in an odd predicament. They helped protect Spanish fugitives from the wrath of their uprisen slaves. And they gave aid and comfort to the Africans and Terranovans against the men who were convinced they had a right to own them.

Blaise didn't mind that. On the contrary-one day he hurried up to Victor almost jumping in excitement. "A woman here, she speak my language!" he exclaimed.

"Well, good," Victor said. "That must be nice. What's her name?"

"They call her Maria," Blaise answered. "She has a name in our language, too. It means in English 'little star.'"

"Pretty," Radcliff remarked.

"I can talk with she-with her." Blaise made a face. "Don't always have to think through different kinds funny words. Just…talk!" He really did jump into the air then, but the leap put Radcliff in mind of a dance step.

He got to see Maria a little later. He didn't think her especially pretty, but then Blaise didn't seem to find white women especially pretty, either. The black man and woman could talk together, all right. Their language seemed full of clucking and mooing noises to Victor. But he knew how delighted he would have been to find an English-speaking woman if he were stranded in West Africa.

Voice dry, he said, "You might want to tell her we still have some fighting to do. You can't marry her till that's taken care of."

Blaise's skin was already dark, but it got darker as he blushed. "Good thing she doesn't talk English. She think you making promises for me."

"I can tell her myself in Spanish, or in French if she knows it," Victor said helpfully.

"Never mind," Blaise said-in English. "Maybe I marry she-her. Maybe I don't. Don't got to decide now, though."

"What are you two talking about in that funny language?" Maria asked in fluent Spanish. "You better not be talking about me when I can't understand what you're saying."

"We're talking about the fighting, Senorita," Victor Radcliff replied in the same language. "We still have to beat the Spaniards."

"And you will fight to the last slave's last drop of blood to do it." Maria had a tart wit.

"We are here, in Spanish Atlantis," Victor said. "We fought our way through French Atlantis to get here. We would fight the Spaniards even if the slaves did not rise up against them."

She weighed that. Blaise plainly hung on her decision. Victor was surprised to discover he cared, too. You had to take Maria seriously. Some people had that gift. At last, she nodded. "Bueno. The Spaniards have plenty to answer for. And so do you ingleses, for selling them so many slaves from Africa."

She didn't know-Radcliff hoped she didn't, anyhow-how deeply involved in the slave trade his family was. You could make a lot of money off Negroes. Plenty of people had. If you didn't sail to Africa yourself, your hands stayed clean while you did it, too. Radcliffs and Radcliffes were welcome in all the best places in English Atlantis. We'd better be, he thought. We founded a lot of those places.

But that was an argument for another day. "Let's get moving," he said. "We don't do anyone any good sitting around like snails on a leaf."

They left more mansions in flames as they moved south. The Spaniards who took refuge with them cursed them because they didn't do more to put down the rebellious slaves. The slaves cursed them because they didn't do more to help the uprising. Getting sworn at by both sides at once suited Victor Radcliff fine. To him, it meant he was following about the right course.

He heard rumors the governor of Spanish Atlantis had let soldiers from French Atlantis come south to deal with the English settlers. He disbelieved those rumors as long as he could: if they proved true, they would make his life harder. But he sent scouts out to the north as well as to the south. The only thing worse than having the French settlers there would be having them there and getting taken by surprise.

A scout rode up from the south shouting, "The sea! The sea!"

"Why you smile?" Blaise asked Victor. "What so funny 'bout the sea?"

Blaise had never heard of Xenophon. Victor would have bet the scout never had, either. But more than 2,100 years earlier, the Greeks escaping the Persian Empire had raised that same cry-"Thalassa! Thalassa!"-when they finally came to the Black Sea.

For Xenophon's Greeks, coming to the sea meant finding the broad highway home. Things weren't so simple here. Who could say what kind of ships lay off the coast? Any at all? British? Spanish? French? All of them at once, banging away at one another as if these were the bad old days of the pirates of Avalon?

Victor again remembered Ethel Radcliffe, who'd shot his great-grandfather. Mule-headed stubbornness seemed to run through every branch of the Radcliff(e) line. He needed some of his own here, and some luck, if this venture wouldn't be remembered as another piece of Radcliff(e) damnfoolishness.

"Let's go down to the sea," he said. "We've come all this way-we shouldn't leave the last few miles undone."

The ocean here was nothing like the cold, green-gray one off Hanover's muddy beaches. The water here was turquoise. It looked warm enough to bathe in. The sand leading down to it was golden as a pretty girl's hair. An enormous black bird glided past overhead; it had a leathery red sac under its throat.

Several crocodiles unhurriedly ambled off the beach and into the ocean. Too bad, Victor Radcliff thought. With so much firepower at hand, they would have been easy to kill. And, even though crocodiles were ugly, they made better than tolerable eating.

Victor focused on the crocodiles and the frigate bird. Blaise was the one who pointed farther out to sea and said, "What ships are those?"

"Damnation!" Victor exclaimed. Several frigates cruised along on that lovely blue sea. His first horrified thought was that some French or Spanish admiral had got much too clever for comfort. It could cause him all kinds of trouble. If he didn't move his men off the beach, those ships could bombard them, and damn all he could do about it. Or they could land raiding parties, strike at him, and then get away before he could respond. Just by being there, they denied him the seacoast. He felt trapped between their anvil and the hammer of Roland Kersauzon's French settlers.

"What to do, Monsieur?" Blaise asked.

"Good question," Radcliff answered dully. He raised a spyglass to his right eye for a closer look at the ships. If they were French frigates, he might persuade their skippers he and his men were Spaniards. Conversely, if the ships were Spanish, maybe he could fool the captains into thinking he was Kersauzon. It might work for a little while, anyhow, though what good it would do he wasn't quite sure. He was looking for something-anything-to try, that was all.

He slid the shiny brass tube out a little farther to bring the frigates into sharper focus. Then he started to laugh. And, once he started, he had a hard time stopping. He wanted to keep on braying idiot mirth up to the sky that was only a couple of shades lighter than the sea.

Somebody not far away said, "He's gone clean round the bend, he has."

"What you see?" someone else asked. That was Blaise, his accent distinctive.

Reluctantly, Victor lowered the telescope. "Those ships out there…" He couldn't go on. He started laughing again instead.

"You better tell us." Now Blaise sounded almost threatening. Several of the white men around Victor looked the same way.

He took a deep breath and held it as long as he could. Then he let it all out and did the same thing again, trying to flush the laughter from his system. Only after that did he try to speak once more: "Those ships out there…They're English." That got him a load of profanity and obscenity covering as much relief as he felt himself.