Liberating Atlantis by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

different story. His fingers were stiff and crooked, his hands sore. He had a devil of a time tying the laces.
    Then he had to help Helen. Her palms looked even worse than his. “Should’ve put your ointment on ’em,” he scolded.
    “I was savin’ it for you.”
    “Well, don’t, confound it,” he told her. He also kissed her on the cheek, not least because he knew she wouldn’t listen to him. Yes, that was love, all right, even if the words the colored preacher’d said over them didn’t mean a thing in the rarefied air the Barfords breathed.
    They weren’t the last ones out. The overseer unbent enough to nod to them as they took their places with the field hands. With the other field hands —Frederick corrected himself. “Ready for another go?” Matthew asked.
    “I’m ready,” Frederick said shortly. He resolved to die before admitting to the white man that he was anything less.
    “Well, all right.” Matthew was taciturn, too. But he could have been much nastier. Maybe he was wondering if Frederick and Helen would go back to the big house before too long. If they did, they would be personages even an overseer had to reckon with. Was he hedging his bets now? Frederick could hope so. That might make life a little easier. And even a little seemed like a lot.
    When a Negro couple didn’t come out, Matthew went into their cabin after them. The shouting and screeching and carrying on made everybody in the labor gang smile. “I slep’ through the blame horn!” the male slave in the cabin wailed.
    “You’ll sleep in the swamp with a rock tied to your ankle if you don’t get moving, you stupid toad!” the overseer said. In less time than it took to tell, both the slave and his woman were out there. If some of her buttons were still undone, if he had to bend down to tie his shoes, Matthew wasn’t fussy about such things. They were there. Nothing else mattered.
    Frederick wolfed down his breakfast. He wished he could have got twice as much. He wouldn’t starve on a field hand’s rations. But he would wish—he would always wish—he could get more.
    Mosquitoes buzzed around him as he ate. They were worse in the close little cabin at night. So the raised, itchy places on his arms and ankles and the back of his neck insisted, though he didn’t remember getting bitten. They were worse, then, yes, but they never went away. He wondered if he could get some mesh or screening for the windows. Or would Matthew think something like that was too good for field hands? Slapping at a bug that landed on his wrist, Frederick thought, I can find out .
    The overseer glanced at the ascending sun. With a theatrical shake of the head, he shouted at the slaves: “Eat up! You ain’t porkers! Master Henry ain’t fattening you up. You got work to do.”
    A Negro pointed to the path that led from the big house to the road to New Marseille. “What’s goin’ on there?” he said.
    “Don’t waste my time with your silly games, Lou,” Matthew snapped. “You—” He broke off. Lou wasn’t playing games, not this morning.
    “Dog my cats if them ain’t soldiers,” another Negro said.
    “Cavalry,” a copperskin named Lorenzo—a power among the field hands, as Frederick had already seen—added with precision.
    It wasn’t just that the men were on horseback. Infantry could mount horses when they needed to get from here to there in a hurry. But the soldiers’ gray uniforms had yellow piping and chevrons, not the blue foot soldiers would have used. The troopers es corted two supply wagons: smaller versions of the prairie frigates settlers in Terranova used to cross the broad plains there. The copperskins who lived on those plains didn’t care for that, but when a folk that had to buy or steal firearms and ammunition bumped up against one that could make such things, the end of the struggle was obvious even if it hadn’t arrived yet.
    Matthew watched the wagons and their escort come up the path. Absently slapping at a