Liberating Atlantis by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page A

was getting wasn’t enough to do more than take the edge off his appetite.
    Watching the way things worked, he noted the plantation’s efficiency. The women with the bulging bellies couldn’t weed, but they could fetch and carry. The boy who brought the water jug around again was still too small to swing one of these heavy hoes. That didn’t make him too small to work, and work he did.
    Had the overseer set up this system? Frederick had known about it before, of course, but he hadn’t known about it. As a house slave, he hadn’t been caught up in it like a grain of wheat between millstones. Had Henry Barford worked it out, or his father before him? Or was it part of the lore all slaveholders knew, the lore they’d put together over hundreds of years? Frederick couldn’t have said for sure, but it looked that way to him.
    On a harsher plantation, the midday meal might have been smaller, or there might have been none. The break might have been shorter. Henry Barford wasn’t cruel for the sake of being cruel, and neither was his overseer. They were cruel simply because you couldn’t be anything else, not if you intended to own slaves and to get work out of them.
    A handful of free Negroes and copperskins had slaves of their own. From everything Frederick had ever heard, they made sterner masters than most whites. They had to—their animate property was less inclined to take orders from people of their color. They had to use colored overseers, too. That lowered the respect their slaves had for the overseers. But what other choice did such owners have? No white overseer would lower himself to working for someone he thought he should be bossing around. And so . . .
    “Come on, people!” Matthew shouted. “You done wasted enough time! Get to work, and put your backs into it for a change!”
    Whatever Frederick’s thought had been, it flickered and blew out like a candle flame in the wind. His joints creaked as he started hoeing again. He wasn’t used to this kind of work—no indeed. He didn’t know whether he dreaded getting used to it or not getting used to it more.
    Was this all he had to look forward to for the rest of his days? A hoe and a row? A shovel? A big sack at harvest time? If it was, wouldn’t he be better off dead?

III
    When the horn’s bray woke Frederick for his second day as a field hand, he didn’t feel a day over ninety-seven. Every part of him ached or stung. Quite a few parts ached and stung. As he had the afternoon before, he got about a third of the way toward wishing he were dead.
    He’d fallen asleep right after supper. He’d come that close to falling asleep in the middle of supper, with his mouth hanging open to show off the cornmeal mush or the chunk of fat sowbelly he’d been chewing when his mainspring ran down. Somehow, he’d kept his eyes open till he and Helen got back to the cabin. But he didn’t remember a thing after the two of them lay down.
    Beside him, Helen groaned as she sat up. She rubbed her eyes. She had to be as weary as he was. The first words out of her mouth, though, were, “How’s your back?”
    “Sore,” he answered. “Better than it was. Not as good as it’s gonna be—or I sure hope not, anyways.” He made himself remember he wasn’t the only one with troubles. “How you doin’, sweetheart?”
    “Well, I thought I worked hard back in the big house.” She shook her head at her own foolishness. “Only goes to show what I knew, don’t it?”
    She didn’t call him twelve different kinds of stupid, clumsy jackass for costing both of them the soft places they’d enjoyed. Why she didn’t, Frederick had no idea. If it wasn’t because of something very much like love, he couldn’t imagine what it would be.
    The horn blared out again. This time, Matthew’s warning shout followed: “Last one out’s gonna catch it!”
    Frederick had taken off only his hat and his shoes. Putting the straw hat back on was a matter of a moment. Shoes were a