United States of Atlantis

Chapter 13

Fog drifted in front of Victor Radcliff like a harem girl's veil in a spicy story about the life of the Ottoman sultan. Here and there, he could see fifty yards ahead, maybe even a hundred. But the men to either side of him were indistinct to the point of ghostliness.

One of those ghosts was Blaise. "Are we still going west?" he asked.

"I think so." Victor had a peer at a compass to be sure. He nodded in some relief. "Yes. We are."

"You could have fooled me," Blaise said. "Come to that, you could be fooling me now. I'd never know the difference."

"We may not keep on going west for long," Victor said. The pass through the Green Ridge Mountains twisted and doubled back on itself like a snake with a bellyache. A path of sorts ran through it, but only of sorts. Travelers had passed this way, bound for New Marseille. An army? Never.

Because the pass climbed, the weather here reminded Victor of that farther north. Not only was it moist, it was also surprisingly cool. Ferns and mushrooms grew lush. One horse had eaten something that killed it in a matter of hours. Seeds? A toadstool? Victor didn't know. Neither did anyone else. That discouraged the men from plucking up mushrooms, which they eagerly would have done otherwise.

Pines and towering redwoods grew on the slopes above the pass. They hadn't been logged off here, as they had so many places farther east. Strange birds called from the trees. Blaise pointed atone when the fog thinned. "Is that a green woodpecker?"

"I think it may be," Victor answered.

The bird drilled on a branch, proving what it was. "Never seen one like that before," Blaise said.

"Neither have I." Victor wondered whether some wandering naturalist had ever shot a specimen. Did a preserved skin sit in a cabinet in the museum in occupied Hanover, or perhaps across the sea in one in London? Or was the woodpecker nondescript- new to science?

He shrugged. He had more urgent things to worry about. Getting through the pass came first. Getting to New Marseille with his army more or less intact ran a close second. Then came beating General Cornwallis and driving him away. Next to those, Victor couldn't get excited-he couldn't let himself get excited-about a green woodpecker.

A man slipped on a wet fern or on some muddy moss or a rotten mushroom and landed hard on his backside. He took the name of the Lord in vain as he got to his feet. "You don't want to say such things, Eb," chided one of his comrades. "God, He punishes blasphemy."

"Well, I expect He must," Eb responded. "If He didn't, why would He afflict me with idiots for friends? You come down the way I did, you're just naturally going to let out with something with a bit of spice to it."

"But you shouldn't. You mustn't," his friend said earnestly. "For all you know, God made you fall just then so He could test you. If He did, things don't look so good for you."

Eb had one hand clapped to his bruised fundament. He clapped the other to his forehead. "God knows everything that was or is or will be, ain't that right?"

"I should hope it is," his friend answered.

"All right, then. In that case. He knew ahead of time I'd call on Him, like, when I slipped there. So how can He get angry at me for doing something He knew I was going to do anyhow?"

"That isn't how predestination works, Ebenezer Sanders, and you know it blamed well." Now Eb's friend sounded shocked.

"You sound like a parrot, giving back what the preachers say," Eb replied. "The only one who knows is God. Preachers are nothing but damn fools, same as you and me."

His friend spluttered. No more words seemed to want to come out, though. Blaise showed Victor he wasn't the only one who'd listened with interest to the argument, asking, "Do you think God knows everything ahead of time? Do you think we do things because He wills it?"

Victor shrugged. "I'm a Christian man-you know that. But I'm with Eb on one thing: the only One who knows God is God. He's the only One Who can know. People do the best they can, but they're only guessing."

"I suppose so." Blaise pursed his thick lips. "Gods in Africa don't pretend to be so strong. Well, except the Muslims' God. Is He the same One you worship?"

To Victor, what Blaise called Muslims were Mahometans. He'd also discovered Blaise knew more about them than he did. He shrugged again. "I can't tell you."

A little to his surprise, the answer made Blaise smile. "One thing I have to say-you're an honest man. When you don't know something, you say so. You don't try and talk around it, the way so many people do."

"Do they do that in Africa, too?" Victor asked.

Instead of smiling, Blaise laughed. "Oh, yes. Ohhh, yes. Doesn't matter what color you are, not for that. Black or white or copper-skinned, lots of folks won't even tell themselves they don't know something."

"I know it's true of white men," Radcliff said. "I shouldn't wonder if you're right for the others."

"You'd best believe I am… sir." Blaise sounded absolutely certain. "And if your fancy ships find an island full of green men, or maybe blue, some of them will talk bigger than they know, too."

That set Victor laughing. "Right again-no doubt about it. Green men!" He chuckled at the conceit.

"You never can tell," the Negro said. "I wouldn't have believed there were white men till I saw one-and till our enemies sold me

to them. I wouldn't have believed a lot of the things that happened to me after that, either."

"It hasn't been all bad, has it? You wouldn't have met Stella if you'd stayed behind in Africa," Victor said.

"No. But she was taken and sold, too." Blaise's face clouded. "And what white men do with-do to-their slave women… It isn't good. It's maybe the very worst thing about keeping slaves. The worst."

"Do you tell me black men don't treat slave women the same way?" Victor asked. "Or copperskins? Or the green and blue men on that mysterious island out in the Pacific?"

"Oh, no, sir. We keep slaves, too, some of us, and our men futter the women," Blaise answered. "But that doesn't make it right. Not for us, not for you, not for nobody. Do you say I'm wrong?" Before Victor could say anything, Blaise added, "So the settlements of Atlantis are the liberated United States of Atlantis? How can they be, really, when so many folk in them aren't liberated at all?"

Victor discovered he had no answer for that.

"On the downhill slope. General," one of the scouts told Victor, "No doubt about it-not a bit."

"Good," Victor said. If it's true, he appended-but only to himself. Aloud, he asked, "Have you come this way before?"

"Not me," the scout said, and Victor discounted the report almost as steeply as Atlantean paper money was discounted against specie. But the fellow went on, "The Frenchie I'm riding with has, and he says the same thing."

"Well, good." The report's value jumped again. Victor wished Atlantean paper would do the same. Maybe the Proclamation of Liberty-and his victory outside Nouveau Redon-would help it rise.

Here in the wilderness, money didn't need to be the first thing on his mind. He and his men couldn't get their hands on any they hadn't brought with them, and couldn't buy anything they hadn't likewise brought along. Life would have been simpler-but less interesting-were that more widely true.

He sucked in a lungful of hot, humid air. He wouldn't breathe any other kind this far south in the lowlands on the west side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The Bay Stream brought warmth up from the seas to the southwest, and western Atlantis got its share before the current went on towards Europe.

Victor had heard Custis Cawthorne and other savants speculate that, absent the Bay Stream, Europe would be as chilly as was the land at corresponding latitudes of northern Terranova. He didn't know enough to form an opinion pro or con there. From everything he could see, neither did the savants. That didn't stop them from speculating, or even slow them much.

Beards of moss hung from horizontal branches. He'd seen that farther south on the other side of the mountains: mostly down in Spanish Atlantis. Some people called the stuff Spaniards' moss, in fact. When you found it at all in the east at these latitudes, it was more like the down beginning to sprout on a youth's face than a proper beard.

Hunting parties brought back plenty of oil thrushes. Their flesh, though greasy, was quite good. The southwestern quadrant of Atlantis was most thinly settled, and oil thrushes were still common, for which he was grateful. They made good eating, and one bird was a meal for anywhere from two to four soldiers, depending on how hungry they were. He looked forward to gnawing meat off a leg bone himself. The wings weren't big enough to be worth bothering with.

He'd just finished supper when a commotion at the edge of the camp made him hurry over to see what was going on. A soldier clutched his leg. Another man pointed to the beaten corpse of a colorful little snake. "It bit him!" the pointer said. "He stepped on it, and it went and bit him."

The snake had been minding its own business. What was it supposed to do when somebody trod on it? Victor eyed the remains. Stripes of red and black and yellow… "Get him to the surgeons," Victor said. "Let's hope they can do him some good."

"It hurts," the bitten man said. "Am I going to die?"

"I don't think so." Victor lied without compunction. If that was a coral snake, as he feared, the Atlantean might very well. Coral snakes lurked in undergrowth. They hid beneath chunks of bark. They didn't go out of their way to strike people. But when they did… He tried to stay cheerful: "The surgeons will give you plenty of whiskey, to keep your heart strong."

"Well, hot damn!" the sufferer exclaimed. "Take me to 'em, by Jesus!"

He died the next morning, unable to breathe, his heartbeat fading to nothingness. "Sorry, General," one of the surgeons told

Victor. "We did everything we knew how to do, but____________________

" His shoulders wearily slid up and down. If a poisonous serpent bit you, you were in God's hands, not any surgeon's.

"I'm sure you did," Victor said. "We'll bury him and we'll go on. Nothing else we can do."

On they went. Some supplies did come over the Green Ridge Mountains after them-some, but not enough. Victor would have been more disappointed had he expected anything more. The path west to Avalon was far and away the best on this side of the mountains. He'd never thought he could keep an army of this size supplied from the far side of the mountains even on that track. This route to New Marseille didn't compare.

Well, the hunting was better down here. He'd told himself that before. He did once more, hoping he was right.

Red-crested eagles screeched from cypresses. Seeing and hearing them raised Victor's hopes. The eagles were dangerous-men reminded them of honkers, their proper prey. But in this part of Atlantis, red-crested eagles could more readily find that proper prey.

And if they could, people could, too. So Victor hoped, anyhow. And Habakkuk Biddiscombe's horsemen did. They brought back more than a dozen of the enormous birds on the backs of packhorses. Each honker carcass would feed a lot more than two to four soldiers.

Victor imagined his many-times-great-grandfather gaping at a salted honker leg in some low tavern in Brittany. That was how the story of Atlantis started, with Francois Kersauzon telling Edward Radcliffe about the new land far out in the sea. The English had always put more into this land and got more out of it. So Victor thought, anyhow. Any French Atlantean ever born would have called him a liar to his face.

His horse splashed across a stream. A frog as big as his fist hopped off a rock and churned away. He hoped there were no crocodiles or so-called lizards in the water. They'd come far enough south to make it anything but impossible, especially on this side of the mountains.

Blaise took the notion of crocodiles in stride. "They have bigger ones back in Africa," he said.

"Well, they're damned well welcome to them, too," Victor said.

"Maybe one of these is big enough to eat up General Cornwallis when he gets off the boat by New Marseille," Blaise said. "How much does he know about crocodiles?"

"Only what he learned the last time he was in Atlantis-if he learned anything at all," Victor answered. "They haven't got any in England. It's colder there than it is by Hanover."

"No wonder people from England want to come here!" Blaise said. He came from a land with weather worse than Spanish Atlantis'. Weather like that surely came from Satan, not from God. Good Christians denied the Devil any creative power. Such weather was the best argument he could think of for turning Manichee.

"It's not always sticky. Dry half the year. But always warm. All what you're used to," Blaise said. "The first time I found out what winter was like, I thought the world had gone mad. I was afraid it would stay cold like that forever. I wondered what I'd done to deserve such a thing."

"But now that you know better, aren't you glad you're not in a bake oven all the time?" Victor asked.

Blaise shrugged. "This right here, this is not so bad." By the way he said it, he was giving the local weather the benefit of the doubt.

To Victor, this right here was an alarmingly authentic approximation of a steam bath. "A wise man who lived a long time ago said custom was king of all-a fancier way to say 'All what you're used to,' I suppose. Me, I'd prefer something cooler."

"Even here, it will get cooler in the wintertime." Blaise made that sound like a damned shame. To Victor, it sounded wonderful. Sure enough, they bowed to different kings of custom.

But neither one of them bowed to the King of England. With a little luck-and with good fortune in war-they never would again.

Victor had heard that runaway Negroes and copperskins lived in villages of their own on the far side of the Green Ridge Mountains. Stories said they tried to duplicate the life they'd led before they were uprooted and brought to Atlantis. He'd never known whether to believe those stories. They sounded plausible, but anyone above the age of about fourteen needed to understand the difference between plausible and true.

The stories turned out to be true. Habakkuk Biddiscombe's men led him to what was plainly a copperskin village. The huts, which looked like upside-down pots made of bark over a framework of branches, were like none he'd ever seen before. Near them grew fields of maize.

Everything was deserted when he rode up to look the place over. "Some of the savages are bound to be watching us from the woods," Biddiscombe said, gesturing toward the tall trees surrounding the village. "But even if they are, we won't get a glimpse of them unless they want us to."

"Or unless they make a mistake," Victor said. "That does happen every now and again."

"Not often enough," the cavalry officer said, and Victor couldn't disagree with him. Biddiscombe continued, "Now that we've found this place, I suppose you'll want us to tear it down? If the weather were even a little wetter, I'd say burn it, but too easy for the fire to run wild the way things are."

The weather was wet enough to suit Victor and then some. "Why would we want to wreck the village?" he asked in genuine surprise. "These copperskins have done nothing to us."

His surprise surprised Habakkuk Biddiscombe. "They're runaways, General," Biddiscombe said, as if that should have been obvious to the veriest simpleton.

And so it was. But its consequences weren't, at least to Victor. "Well, yes," he replied. "They seem to be happy enough here, though. If we rob them of their homes, they may try to hunt us through the woods. They aren't our enemies now, and I'd sooner try not to make them hate us unless we have some reason for doing so."

"They're nothing but runaways," Biddiscombe repeated. "Copperskin runaways, at that."

"Leave them alone. Leave this place alone. That is an order," Victor said, so the cavalry officer could be in no possible doubt "If they harry us, we shall make them regret it. Until they do, I prefer to concentrate on the English, who truly are the enemy. Do I make myself clear?"

"Abundantly." Biddiscombe might have accused Victor of picking his nose and then sticking his finger in his mouth.

"Carry out your orders, then-and no 'accidental' destruction for the sport of it, either." Victor did his best to leave no loopholes in the orders. By Habakkuk Biddiscombe's expression, he'd just closed one the horseman had thought about using.

He wondered if he would have been so firm about protecting a village built by Negro runaways. Somehow, whites had an easier time looking down their noses at blacks than at copperskins. Blaise wouldn't have approved of that, which made it no less true.

Before long, Victor became pretty sure his men would be able to keep themselves fed on the road to New Marseille. He must have put the fear of God in the quartermasters at Nouveau Redon: supplies did keep coming over the Green Ridge Mountains. They weren't enough by themselves to victual the soldiers, but they were ever so much better than nothing. With oil thrushes and honkers, with fish and turtles taken from the streams (and with snails almost the size of roundshot and big, fat frogs taken by the French Atlanteans in the army), the men got enough to eat.

Marseille, Victor knew, lay in the south of France. Maybe that was why the French Atlanteans had named their western town after the older city. The weather here certainly was southern in nature. It was hot and humid. The army could have marched faster in a cooler climate. Too much haste here, and you were much too likely to tall over dead. A handful of soldiers did. They got hasty, lonely graves, like the one for the man bitten by the coral snake. The rest of the army pushed west.

Victor waited for someone to come over the mountains and tell him General Cornwallis had pulled a fast one, landing his army somewhere on the east coast of Atlantis. If the English commander had, Radcliff didn't know what he could do about it, not right away. Local militias would have to try to keep the redcoats in play till he shifted his men back to the east. And how obedient his army would stay after getting marched and countermarched like that was anyone's guess.

But Habakkuk Biddiscombe brought a couple of French Atlanteans before him. "I found them fleeing from the west," Biddiscombe said. "I don't talk much of their lingo, but I know you do." By his tone, speaking French lay somewhere between affectation and perversion.

Ignoring that, Victor asked the strangers, "Why were you running through the woods?"

"Because swarms of soldiers have landed in New Marseille," one of the men answered. "When soldiers come out of nowhere, it is not good for ordinary people." He eyed Victor and the troops he led as if they proved the point. Very likely, in his eyes, they did.

"Are their warships still in the harbor?" Victor asked.

"They were when we left," the French Atlantean said. His comrade nodded. After a moment, so did Victor. The Royal Navy wouldn't drop Cornwallis on this half-settled shore and then sail off to do something else far away. It would support him and, if need be, take him somewhere else.

Victor tried a different question: "Did anyone try to fight to hold the redcoats out of New Marseille?"

Both French Atlanteans looked at him as if they had trouble believing their ears. The one who'd spoken before said, "Suicide is a mortal sin, Monsieur." He didn't add, and you are an idiot, but he might as well have. His manner would have offended Victor more if he hadn't had a point.

"Have you heard of the Proclamation of Liberty?" Victor asked. "It announces that Atlantis is to be free of the King of England forevermore."

"Has anyone given this news to the English soldiers in New Marseille?" the refugee enquired in return.

"We are on the way now to deliver the message," Victor said.

"When the hammer hits the anvil, the little piece of metal in the middle gets flattened," the French Atlantean said. Was he a blacksmith? His scarred and callused hands made that a pretty good guess. Whether he was or not, his figure of speech seemed apt enough.

Victor had to pretend he didn't understand it. "Will you guide us to New Marseille and help us take your town back from the invaders?"

The local and his friend looked anything but delighted. "Do we have another choice?" he asked bleakly.

"In a word, no," Victor said. "This is a matter of military necessity for the United States of Atlantis." Les Etats-Unis d'Atlantk he thought it sounded quite fine in French.

If the refugees thought so, too, they hid it well. The one who did the talking for them said, "How generous you are, Monsieur. You offer us the opportunity of returning to the danger we just escaped."

"You escaped it alone. You return to New Marseille with the Army of the Atlantean Assembly at your back," Victor said.

"And where is your navy, to drive away the English ships?" the French Atlantean asked.

Victor would rather have heard almost any other question in the world. "One way or another, we'll manage," he said gruffly.

The French Atlantean had no trouble understanding what that meant. "There is no Navy of the Atlantean Assembly," he said.

Since he was right, Victor could only glare at him. "Nevertheless, we shall prove victorious in the end," he declared.

"But the end, Monsieur, is a long way away," the other man said. "In the meanwhile, much as I regret to say it, I fear I prefer the chances of the Englishmen. Good day." He wanted nothing to do with the Proclamation of Liberty or any other idealistic project. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone. But King George's forces and the Atlantean rebels seemed unlikely to pay the least attention to what he wanted.

An eagle screeched overhead. Victor looked up. As he'd thought, it wasn't the red-crested eagle that stood for the uprising, but the smaller, less ferocious white-headed bird. Instead of boldly attacking honkers-and livestock, and men-white-headed eagles ate fish and carrion. One of their favorite ploys was to wait till an osprey caught a fish and then assail the other bird till it gave up its prize. As far as Victor was concerned, the white-headed eagle made a fine symbol for England.

He laughed at himself. He might have become a fair general, but he knew himself to be the world's most indifferent poet. And he would never get better if he couldn't come up with imagery more interesting than that

Victor stood on a rise a couple of miles east of New Marseille, peering down into the town and its harbor through his brass telescope He muttered under his breath. The redcoats were there in force, all right. They had already ringed New Marseille with field fortifications. They'd gone to some effort to conceal their cannon, but he could still pick out the ugly iron and brass snouts.

And General Cornwallis couldn't hide the Royal Navy ships that had brought him here and still supported him. They filled the harbor of New Marseille. More anchored offshore. Avalon Bay farther north could have held them all with ease. Because New Marseille's harbor was so much less commodious, it had neither the checkered past nor the bright future of Avalon.

A little warbler with a green head hopped about in the tree that shaded Victor. The tree itself, a ginkgo, was curious not only for its bilobed leaves but also for its existence. Others like it grew only in China. Scholars had expended gallons of ink trying to explain why that should be so. Custis Cawthorne-Victor's touchstone in such matters-was of the opinion that none of them had the slightest idea, but that they were unwilling to admit as much.

Thinking about the ginkgo and about Custis made him wonder how the printer was doing in France. He also wondered how news of his victory over General Howe and the subsequent Proclamation of Liberty would go over there. All he could do was wonder and wait and see.

He didn't think he could do much more about New Marseille. If he hurled his army against those works, the redcoats and the Royal Navy would tear it to shreds. If he didn't… Sooner or later, Cornwallis would come after him. The English could bring in supplies by sea. He was proud of keeping his army fed in its overland march across Atlantis. If it had to stay where it was for very long, though, it would start running out of edibles.

He contemplated the prospect of retreating across Atlantis. After a moment, he shuddered and did his best to think about something else. He almost wished he hadn't crossed the Green Ridge Mountains-but if he hadn't, he would have tamely yielded western Atlantis to the enemy. Sometimes your choices weren't between bad and good but between bad and worse.

Blaise came up beside him. "What do we do now. General?" the Negro asked: one more question Victor didn't want to hear.

He parried it with one of his own: "What would you do in my place?"

Blaise eyed the redcoats' fieldworks. He didn't need the spyglass and the details it revealed to come up with a reasonable answer. "Wait for whatever happens next," he said. "That is a strong position. Mighty strong."

"It is, isn't it?" Victor said mournfully. "I wish our engineers were as good as theirs."

"Why aren't they?" Blaise asked.

"Because we never needed professional soldiers till this war started," Victor said. "I suppose the United States of Atlantis will from this time forward-and it will have them, too. But we don't have them yet, worse luck."

That made Blaise grunt thoughtfully. "Too peaceful for our own good, were we? You wouldn't think such a thing could be so."

"I fear it is," Victor said in mournful tones.

Blaise grunted again. "Well, if my tribe had more warriors, and better warriors, I never would have crossed the sea. I'd still be back there, still talking my own language." He spoke several incomprehensible syllables full of longing.

"Your life might have been-would have been, I suppose- easier had you stayed in Africa. But I would have missed a friend." Victor set a hand on the Negro's shoulder.

"Too late to worry about it now," Blaise said. "You are a friend, but this is not my land. It never will be."

"The United States of Atlantis should be any free man's land," Victor said, more stiffly than he'd intended to.

"Should be, yes." Blaise used that gesture Victor had seen before from him, brushing two fingers of his right hand against the dark back of his left. "Easier to talk about should be than is."

"Mmm, maybe so. We do what we can-nothing more to do," Victor said. "We aren't perfect, nor shall we ever be. But we keep heading down the road, and we'll see how far we fare."

He got one more grunt from Blaise. "Heading down the road on the backs of blacks and copperskins."

"Not on the backs of freemen, regardless of their color," Victor said uncomfortably.

This time, Blaise didn't answer at all. That might have been just as well. The United States of Atlantis might be heading down the road towards a place where a man of one color was reckoned as good as a man of another. Victor wasn't sure the land was heading toward that place, but it might be. He was sure it hadn't come close to getting there.

All of which brought him not a hairsbreadth nearer to deciding what to do about New Marseille. Attacking those works looked like something only a man who craved death would try. Going back the way he'd come yielded Atlantis west of the mountains to England, and God only knew what it would do to the army's morale. Unfortunately, things being as they were, he couldn't simply stay where he was for very long, either.

He ordered his men to start digging works of their own. If the redcoats came after them, they had to be able to hold their ground if they could. As far as he could see, General Cornwallis would have to be a fool to attack him, but maybe Cornwallis was a fool, or at least would turn out to be one this time. Victor could hope so, anyhow. He realized he wasn't in the best of positions when hoping for a foe's mistake was the best he could do.

A couple of days went by. Not much came from the far side of the Green Ridge Mountains. The hunters shot less than he'd wished they would, too. Before long, the army would get hungry. It might get very hungry.

He began planning an attack. It wasn't one he wanted to make, but when all his choices looked bad he had to pick the one that wasn't worst. He'd thought about that not long before, and now it stared him in the face again. Still, if he could take New Marseille from the English, he'd redeem this campaign.

If he could…

And then, to his amazement, the redcoats abandoned the town. They did it with their usual competence, leaving fires burning in their outworks to fool his men into thinking they remained there through the night. When the sun rose, the last few Englishmen were rowing out to the Royal Navy ships. The warships' sails filled with wind, and they glided off to the south.

Victor's first thought was that smallpox or the yellow jack had broken out in Cornwallis' army. But the English commodore could scarcely have let soldiers onto his ships in that case. Knowing only his own ignorance, Victor rode into New Marseille.

If the locals were glad to see him, their faces didn't know it. They seemed more French-and more superciliously French- than most southern folk on the other side of the mountains. Englishmen? English-speaking Atlanteans? If they recognized the difference, they didn't let on.

And they seemed proud of themselves for their Frenchness. "Don't you know why this Cornwallis individual absconded?" one of them demanded.

"No," Victor replied, "and I wish I did."

"Well, it's all because of King Louis, of course," the local told him.

"Perhaps you would be good enough to explain that to me?" Victor said. The King of France hadn't done much lately, not that he knew about.

But he knew less than the local did. "Word came here that France has declared war against the rascally English," the fellow said. "And… oh, yes…"

"What?" Victor asked, now eagerly.

"And recognized your United States of Atlantis," the man told him.