In the great marble halls of Atlanta, safely ensconced behind the uniform granite of Leonidas' walls, one might come to think that the empire was just like her walls. Concrete, delineated. There was the bastion of Christian civilization in the south, the city on the hill, and then there were the various styles of misguided paganism that surrounded them. The sophisticated and urbane did not intermingle with the country backwater.
Anyone with a lick of sense and more than half a minute spent in the marches could tell you that was a load of poppycock. The Emperor and his court might feud and bicker about who deserved the taxes and fighting men squeezed from the land, but all that produce wasn't a given. It took a keen ruler – a clever one – to negotiate for those things. And if they didn't negotiate...
Caleb sniffed at the air and wondered if there was a note of human flesh in that constant stench of rot. The swamp always had a certain rotten smell to her, the sluggish flow of the water leaving things to fester under the fierce sun… but things tended to get more rotten when men stuck their noses where they didn't belong. Perhaps a certain deed or contract in some far flung city claimed that the whole of this land was Columbian, but real control ebbed and flowed.
His companions kept a constant watch, peering into the muck and the brush as they held tight to poles and gigs. The pronged fishing spear may not have had the gallantry of a Southron knight's lance, and a wooden pole made heavy with lead on one end couldn't dent imperial armor, but they were of use here. A gig could fill your stomach one way or the other. A stuck frog or fish was decent eating, and while a stuck man wasn't (unless you lived deep in the swamp, some rumors said) you could cash a bounty, usually.
This wasn't the season for some adventurous Founder-worshipper to come traipsing up from deep Florida – at least not usually – but the threat of Springsearchers was more constant. They were the buffer between the Empire and the princes of Florida, and those princes wanted to keep it that way. Caleb supposed he didn't have much room to talk when it came to serving external powers…
Squinting, he could spot a high roof and a trail of smoke rising from it. "Blackjack Village!" He shouted. One of the friendly communities, and their target for this particular expedition.
Carefully navigating through the brush, they nearly managed to avoid getting caught. Nearly. It took some shoving from their poles and an intervention from one of the other boats, but they made it to the village well before night time. There were new faces – there always were – but the smiles were familiar. You could move easily in the swamp, but a community could expel you. Would certain do so, if you disobeyed whatever idiosyncratic code of ethics dictated their lives.
Blackjack liked the foreign. Loved it, even, and if you weren't a total boor they might even have some positive feeling for you, in your capacity as a deliverer of foreign goods. The chieftainess – an aged woman named Zenobia – gave a gummy grin as he delivered her a clay pot filled with peach preserves. Cotton shawls and Atlanta jewelry (of plain copper and modest enamel, they didn't have the budget for the fine stuff) were shown off and given away far too cheap.
In addition to the goodwill that this expedition was really supposed to earn, they got food and a few blocks of peat to lay down in their boats. They wouldn't use a speck of the stuff for their cooking here; the folks in Blackjack prided themselves on their hospitality, and they wouldn't force their guests to use up the gifts they just received to fill their bellies. (Really, steady ground that you wouldn't sink into was more welcome than any amount of foodstuffs… not that he'd say it.)
The usual fare was frog legs, sometimes sauteed in hog fat if you were lucky… but this time, the villagers pulled out something a little more exotic: the preserved remains of a gator. The salt used for preservation had thoroughly annihilated whatever unique flavor it might have had beforehand, but the untouched head – well, untouched barring the cut that separated it from the body – gave them a manic grin as they ate.
"Did one of your boys kill it?" Caleb asked Zenobia between bites of gator.
"Naw," Zenobia said, working open a salted peanut with her fingers. It was one of the few foods soft enough for her anymore, but it had the benefit of actually tasting good. "It was one of those Shriner boys."
One of the other great players in the Florida area… for what it was worth, all the rumors seemed to say that the Emir of Suncoast really seemed to believe it, doing charity for love of his fellow man. Still, that didn't change the fact that his expeditions into the hinterlands and the aide he sent all tugged the people into his camp.
"Was it…" What was the word…? Caleb couldn't remember. "Taboo for them?"
"Seemed like it. They didn't have a speck of the stuff."
Well, he supposed there was something a little disquieting about eating gator even if you were allowed to, religiously. Caleb certainly hoped the gator hadn't eaten any man before men ate it… but what could he do about it if it did? Well, stop eating, he supposed, but a free meal was a free meal…
"Thank you for hosting us, Zenobia."
"And thank you for the gewgaw, Caleb."
"It's not gewgaw…"
"Bric-a-brac?"
After dinner, there was some Springsearcher ceremony that Caleb and his fellows tried to bow out off as best they could. They wouldn't have been allowed in their shrine or temple even if they wished to, but the singing and ceremony spilled outside. They sang of heroes of old, of a well that flowed with the water of life, but this wasn't like the hymns Caleb knew. A Springsearcher knew the water of life as something merited, something that could only be earned, not something freely given.
They spoke of ancient Ponce de Leon, a prince of far flung Puerto Rico – once American, now West Indian, Christian in a sense – who came to this country and found the Fountain. (Despite Puerto Ricans saying they had his grave.) Caleb knew that there was a street and a great bazaar in Atlanta named for the man, but they seemed to have a very different conception of him…
But honestly, Caleb couldn't be sure how much of this was true belief and how much was purposeful exaggeration on the part of the Sunshiners. Or perhaps it was some mix. As interested in foreign things as the people of Blackjack might have been, they were smart enough to be cautious, to sell themselves as something different – while also having a good laugh.
He knew that if push came to shove, they wouldn't just sit down and take the authoritarian rule practiced in some other part of the empire. (They didn't use them, but it seemed as if almost every member of the group carried some sort of weapon. Foreign detailing or clumsy local handiwork… but always something.) If they didn't just decide to melt into the swamp, they'd put up a fight that would be hard to forget, especially if some rich lord thought they could solve the problem of Florida with heavy armor.
Florida was once peopled by runaways and outcasts, if the stories were true. There was a broad understanding that the Indians were old – older than the Event, older than even America before her – but the Seminole were slightly more recent. Those who refused to be crushed underfoot found themselves in Florida, they accepted those fleeing bondage in the lands of the Columbian Commonwealth…
But when you got into pre-Event history, you got into heaps upon heaps of speculation. Caleb had heard the stories, old traditions passed down, but those weren't the concrete historical records written down in Atlanta and other great cities. (Although even those books could be wrong, no?) He supposed there was a practicality in speaking instead of leaving things to text that could be destroyed or forgotten or made intelligible with time...
His pa said that the Okefenokee wasn't peopled at all before the event. Old America, in some act of strange wisdom, had decided to close off the swamp entirely to preserve the animals contained within. Like a royal forest, without the additional step of Presidents or Governors actually bothering to hunt there.
Maybe the land had lost whatever merit it had back in those ancient days… but he almost had to wonder if those first settlers did so because they were running from something. Whatever happened in those dark days immediately after the Event.