Liberating Atlantis (55 page)

That worthy looked at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. Frederick sympathized with the functionary. Quite a few Senators carried stout sticks, more often as weapons than as aids to keeping them on their pins. And how many more hid a dirk or a pistol under their waistcoats? Frederick didn’t know. He wouldn’t have wanted to find out the hard way, either.

Finally, something like order did return. “Why do you suppose Consul Stafford and I agreed to terms like those?” Newton asked. “Was it out of the goodness of our hearts, say?”

“Not likely . . . sir,” Frederick said, which startled laughter out of Senators from both sides of the Stour. He went on, “Probably because we had you in a place where we could’ve slaughtered you, but we didn’t do it.”

“Yes, you did have us in a place like that,” the Consul agreed. “Why did you let us go, then?”

“So we could get terms instead of fighting forever,” Frederick said.

“And now you have those terms,” Newton said.

Frederick nodded. “We sure do.”

“What do you think of them?”

“They’re fair. We can live with them.”

“They’re an outrage! They don’t punish you for what you did in the insurrection!” a southern Senator shouted.

Newton and Stafford used their gavels again. Frederick talked through the sharp thuds: “They don’t punish the slaveholders for everything they did before the insurrection, either.”

That set the Senator to spluttering without words. “Both sides agreed that recriminations were pointless,” Consul Newton said. Frederick nodded once more, though he’d learned the word
recriminations
after the talks with the white men started.

“We did,” Consul Stafford agreed. “I don’t believe that made anyone happy. I know it didn’t make me happy. But I also know doing anything else would have made everyone even more unhappy.”

“I want all the Conscript Fathers to think about that,” Newton said. “I understand that you may not wish to ratify the agreement we made in Slug Hollow. Believe me, though—the consequences of rejecting it are far worse than the consequences of accepting it.”

“Easy for you to say—you aren’t losing half your property!” that stubborn southerner cried.

“We intend to arrange compensation for slaveholders—after the agreement is accepted,” Newton said.

The southerner only jeered: “You say now you intend to. But when will we see cash for our niggers and mudfaces? When pigs fly, is my guess. You’ll get what you want, and you won’t give us what we need.”

He sounded like a girl trying not to give in to a man who wanted to go to bed with her. Noting how much the Senator sounded like that kind of girl, Frederick had all he could do not to laugh out loud. “We will meet all our obligations,” Consul Newton insisted.
Of course I’ll marry you afterwards
, he might have been saying. And maybe a man who told a girl something like that meant it, and maybe he didn’t.

“May I say somethin’, your Excellency?” Frederick asked.

“Go ahead,” Newton said. Stafford nodded.

“Thanks. What I want to say is, nobody’s giving us anything for all the stuff slaves have to go through. If slaves didn’t have to go through things like that, I wouldn’t have me Victor Radcliff for a granddad. I don’t reckon there’s enough money in Atlantis to pay us for all that. Just let us be free, and we’ll call it square. If white folks get somethin’ ’cause they can’t own people and buy people and sell people any more, they better reckon they’re the lucky ones, not the other way around.”

That got him another hand—from Senators from north of the Stour, he presumed. It also got him more fury from Senators from states where owning slaves remained legal. His guess was that most of those Senators would be wealthy men, which meant most were likely to own slaves themselves. No wonder they didn’t love him. Some of them brandished their sticks at him. But, if any of them were armed with more than sticks, they didn’t show it. That was something . . . Frederick supposed.

He turned to the Consuls. “Ask you something?”

“We’re supposed to be questioning
you
,” Stafford said with a thin smile. But then he nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Black man or a copperskin ever talk in front of the Senate before?” Frederick asked.

“It’s possible,” Consul Newton answered after a pause for thought. “Not certain, but possible. In the states north of the Stour, colored men have been free for a long time. They’ve been able to get an education. Some of them have done very well for themselves, and become experts on this and that. So they may have testified. I’m not sure going back through the records would say one way or the other.”

“All right.” Frederick hadn’t thought of that. “Reckon folks won’t have any doubts from here on out.”

“I . . . reckon you’re right.” By the way Newton paused before coming out with the word, he didn’t use it very often. “And your testimony has been intelligent and to the point. Let the record show that also. You have testified like a man.”

“I am a man,” Frederick said. The Senators from south of the Stour might not like that, but it was true. And he’d just proved it on the most important stage Atlantis had.

 

Senators from south of the Stour hadn’t cared for Leland Newton before he went off to face the insurrectionists. They liked him even less now that he’d come back with an agreement they saw as a surrender.

“Why’d you sell the country down the river, you son of a bitch?” one of them growled as he came up to Newton in a hall.

“Would you ask Consul Stafford the same question the same way?” Newton inquired.

“I’ve already done it,” the politico replied—he might be a fool, but he was a consistent fool.

Right at the moment, Newton didn’t see consistency as a virtue. He snapped, “Well, what did he tell you, you dumb shitheel?”

The Senator’s jaw dropped. He was more used to dishing out insults than to taking them. “I ought to cut your liver out for that, God damn you to hell.”

“When I have to deal with oafs like you, I think He has already sent me there,” Newton replied.

“Why, you—!” The Senator drew back a meaty fist.

As if by magic, an eight-shooter appeared in Newton’s hand. He’d practiced drawing it in front of a mirror. Practice might not make perfect, but it definitely improved things. “I will tolerate the rough side of your tongue, sir. But I suffer no man to lay a hand on me.”

“Pull the trigger! You wouldn’t dare!”

“You have already made a great many mistakes. I promise you, you will have made your last one if you swing on me.” Newton aimed the pistol at the middle of the Senator’s chest. The politico was a beefy man; if Newton did fire, he couldn’t very well miss. A lead ball almost half an inch across—or more than one—would make almost any man thoughtful.

Even the Senator? Even him. He took one careful backwards step, then another. As if he hadn’t, he snarled, “I still say you’re screwing the country.”

“Say whatever you please.” Newton didn’t lower the revolver. “For now, why don’t you go say it somewhere else?”

Swearing under his breath, the Senator edged past him. Newton held on to the pistol till he was sure the other man was going away. Then he tucked it back into his belt under his jacket. Only as he was putting it away did he let his hand shake—or rather, lose the ability to keep it from shaking. He came much too close to shooting himself in the leg.

“That must have been fun.” Frederick Radcliff came out of another Senator’s office.

“Now that you mention it,” Newton said, “no.”

“Is this what running Atlantis is like all the time? Is this what my grandfather had to do?” the Negro asked.

“If Victor Radcliff ever drew a pistol on a Senator in a hallway, history does not record it,” Leland Newton answered. “Plenty of people called him everything they could think of, though, and a little more besides. By everything I’ve read, and by everything old men told me when I was young, he gave as good as he got, or maybe a bit better.”

“Huh,” Victor Radcliff’s grandson said thoughtfully, and then, “Well, I worried some of my people might shoot me, too.”

“Did you?” Consul Newton said; Frederick hadn’t admitted that before. “So things weren’t all sweetness and light in the Free Republic of Atlantis?”

“Are you kiddin’ me? Only place it’s all like that is heaven—’ cept I bet they argue there, too,” Frederick said. “Somebody brags his halo’s shinier’n the other fellow’s, or this lady doesn’t like it on account of that other lady over there, she’s playin’ her harp too loud.”

“If some of the Conscript Fathers heard you, they would call you a blasphemous skink.” Newton had to suck hard on the insides of his cheeks to keep from cackling like a laying hen. He had no trouble at all picturing Frederick’s querulous angels, and hearing them inside his head. Chances were that made him a blasphemous skink, too. He didn’t intend to lose any sleep over it.

And Frederick Radcliff passed from the ridiculously sublime to the serious in a single sentence: “If all the southern Senators are like that big-mouthed bastard, how will you ever pass the agreement?”

“Not all of them are, thank God,” Newton said. “I doubt they will love you any time soon, but some of them can see reason if you hit them over the head with a rock. Consul Stafford did, after all.”

“Happy day. That makes one,” Frederick said.

“There will be more. There must be more.” Was Newton saying that because he really believed it, or to try to convince himself? He didn’t care to inquire into the question too closely. To his relief, Frederick Radcliff didn’t seem to care to, either.

 

No one banged on the door to the hotel room Frederick Radcliff and Helen shared. They had guards out in the hall to make sure no unwelcome and possibly armed visitors barged in on them. Given the emotional and political climate in the Senate, and in New Hastings generally, Frederick was glad those guards were there.

When someone tapped on his door, then, he didn’t hesitate to open it. One of the guards handed him a newspaper, saying, “A Senator gave me this. He asked if you’d seen this story here.” A callused forefinger showed which story.

Frederick would have found the headline even without the helpful digit. What else would a Senator want him to read but a story headlined SLAVE REVOLT IN GERNIKA SPREADS!?

He quickly read the piece. The revolt had broken out near St. Augustine, a sleepy subtropical town on the east coast south of the city of Gernika, the state capital. Local planters had had no luck crushing it; neither had the state militia. The state of Gernika had been Spanish Atlantis till the USA bought it from Spain thirty years earlier. Both before and after coming into the USA, Spaniards had an evil reputation among slaves. Better to be owned by an English Atlantean than a Frenchman, but better a Frenchman than a Spaniard any day—or so Negroes and copperskins said.

Maybe that was true, maybe not. If the slaves down in Gernika believed it, they would fight harder against the men who’d claimed the right to own them. Frederick gave the paper back to the guard. “All right. Now I’ve seen it. What does the Senator want me to do about it?”

“He didn’t tell me,” the guard answered. “But if I was him, I’d want you to stop it. That’s what you’re here for, right?”

That’s what you’re here for, right, nigger?
The guard didn’t say it out loud. He and his friends were doing their job well enough, so maybe he didn’t even think it. Maybe. But Frederick had trouble believing that. He could hear slights in a white man’s tone of voice. If he sometimes heard them even when they weren’t there, well, who could blame him?

Regardless of whether
nigger
was in the guard’s thought, what he did say made obvious sense. It had equally obvious problems. “How am I supposed to stop something down in Gernika if I’m here in New Hastings?”

“Beats me.” The guard tapped the two stripes on the left upper arm of his tunic. “I ain’t nothin’ but a dumb corporal. You should ought to talk to the Senator.”

“It would help if I knew which one,” Frederick pointed out.

“Oh, sure. That makes a difference, don’t it?” Laughing at himself, the underofficer thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Perhaps all men really were brothers under the skin. Frederick had used that same gesture when he was feeling more stupid than usual. The corporal went on, “This here was Senator Marquard, from Cosquer.”

From Consul Stafford’s home state, just north of Gernika. A Frenchman, by his name. A sly fellow, whatever his name and background—he didn’t want trouble spilling up over the border. Slaves everywhere south of the Stour seemed suspended in a state of limbo. If the Senate approved the Slug Hollow agreement, they would be free. If the Senate didn’t, they would explode, and Frederick didn’t think he or anyone else would be able to stop them or even slow them down.

The Negroes and copperskins down by St. Augustine must not have been able to wait. Or else some master had done something intolerable even by the loose standards of masters in a state where Spanish rules still held sway. The newspaper story hadn’t said what touched off the uprising. Maybe the reporter didn’t know. Maybe, when he was writing about slaves, he didn’t care.

Frederick didn’t remember any particularly hostile questions from Senator Marquard. The little the Negro knew of him suggested he could see sense. He supported slavery—what Senator from south of the Stour didn’t?—but he was less fanatical than most of his colleagues. Which meant . . .

“I’m going to have to see him,” Frederick told Helen after summarizing the newspaper story and his conversation with the guard.

“How come? All he wants to do is get you killed,” his wife said.

That hadn’t occurred to Frederick. He hadn’t thought of himself as naive, but maybe he should have. If he went down to Gernika to try to settle things and either the whites or the rebellious slaves didn’t want to listen to him, he could easily end up dead. But if he didn’t, what was he worth as a leader? What was the Slug Hollow accord worth?