Liberating Atlantis (11 page)

Here he came toward the fields: a big, sturdy man with streaks of gray in his black hair. He cradled a rifle or shotgun in his arms. Behind him strode his son, who was thinner and not yet graying but otherwise a good copy of the planter. The younger man was also armed.

Seeing strange copperskins and blacks heading his way, Benjamin Barker shouted in a great voice: “What kind of riffraff is this?” He sounded more disbelieving that such people could invade his land than angry.

His son reached out to pluck at his shirtsleeve. Frederick couldn’t hear what the younger Barker said. It wasn’t meant for him anyhow. But Benjamin’s response to it left Frederick in no doubt about what it was.

“Drop those guns this minute, or it’ll go even harder for you than it would otherwise!” the planter bellowed.

Frederick almost started to lay down his rifle musket. The habit of obedience to whites—especially to whites who gave orders in a loud voice—was deeply ingrained in him, as it was in all Atlantean slaves. One of Barker’s men send back an answer: “We don’t got to listen to you no more! You’re gonna git what you deserve!”

“That’s what you think, Ivanhoe!” Barker yelled. He raised the longarm he carried to his shoulder. The gun roared. Ivanhoe screeched and fell over, clutching his side.

“Give it to him!” Frederick said urgently. All the slaves turned their rifle muskets on Barker and his son. The guns stuttered out a ragged volley. The younger Barker clapped both hands to his breast, as if he were in a stage melodrama. But the blood on the front of his shirt was real. As the overseer had before him, he fell facedown in the dirt.

Somehow, all the bullets in the volley missed Benjamin Barker, the man at whom they were aimed. He reloaded with almost superhuman speed and fired again. This time, he hit one of his own copperskins. Unlike Ivanhoe, the second slave didn’t make a sound. He simply crumpled, shot through the head.

More bullets flew at Benjamin Barker. These didn’t bite, either. As slaves went, Frederick wasn’t superstitious. He had more education—and more sense—than most bondsmen. But even he wondered if the planter didn’t have a snakeskin or a rabbit’s foot in his pocket.

Shaking his fist, Barker turned and ran back toward the big house. Another volley pursued him. Yet again, every shot missed. If that wasn’t uncanny, Frederick couldn’t imagine what would be.

He also couldn’t imagine letting the planter get away. That would be . . . whatever was worse than a disaster. About as bad, say, as tripping over a floorboard that had come loose. Maybe even worse.

“Come on!” he said. “We’ve got to do for him!”

“How?” a copperskin asked. “If bullets won’t—”

“If bullets won’t, we’ll burn down the God-damned big house,” Frederick said savagely. “I don’t want to do that, on account of the smoke’ll draw a crowd where we don’t need one, but I will if I got to. We ain’t gonna let that man get away!”

His determination pulled the rest of the slaves after him. He realized it didn’t have to be a white man giving orders in a loud voice. Anyone would do, as long as he sounded sure of himself. Being right plainly wasn’t essential, or slaves would have stopped obeying masters hundreds of years ago. Being—or seeming—sure just as plainly was.

Benjamin Barker got inside. He fired at the oncoming Liberating Army, and dropped a second copperskin. A moment later, another gun spoke from upstairs. Veronique Barker didn’t aim to sit around and let herself get slaughtered—or suffer the proverbial fate worse than death. Frederick didn’t think she hit anybody, but she was making the effort.

“I need five or six men to come into the house with me,” Frederick said. “The rest can go on shootin’, make the white folks keep their heads down.”

“I’m with you,” Lorenzo said at once.

“Me, too,” Davey said. “Got to finish that fucker.”

Frederick soon had his volunteers. As the rest of the Liberating Army banged away, they rushed toward the front door. Benjamin Barker appeared in a window like an angry ghost. He fired and vanished again. The bullet cracked past Frederick’s head, much too close for comfort. Involuntarily, he ducked. He hoped that wouldn’t make his comrades think him a coward. Whether it did or not, he couldn’t help it.

His shoulder hit the door. “Oof!” he said, and bounced off. He might have known it would be locked.

“Here—I’ll settle it.” Lorenzo fired two shots from a captured revolver into the lock. Then he rammed it with his shoulder. He fell down as it flew open.

Davey sprang over him and dashed into the big house. He took a shotgun blast full in the chest, and sank without a sound. Benjamin Barker howled laughter. “Thought it would be easy, did you?” He fired again, this time with a pistol. A copperskin beside Frederick screeched and clutched his leg.

Frederick had never thought it would be easy. If slave uprisings were easy, one of them would have succeeded before this. But he thought it might be possible. And one of the things that would make it possible was killing planters who got in the way.

He shot Benjamin Barker in the neck. Barker gobbled like a turkey. He clapped a hand to the bleeding wound.
Why doesn’t he fall over?
Frederick wondered. But the answer to that was only too obvious.
Because you only grazed him, that’s why
.

He ran forward. Sure as the devil, Barker wasn’t badly hurt. He pulled a knife off his belt—no, a razor, the edge glittering even in the dimness inside the big house—and slashed at Frederick.

But a razor in a desperate man’s right arm couldn’t match the reach of an eighteen-inch bayonet at the end of a five-foot rifle musket. What Frederick had was a spear, and he used it so. He stuck Barker in the chest. The bayonet grated off a rib before sinking deep.

That finishes him
, Frederick thought. But it didn’t. Benjamin Barker went right on fighting. Killing a man wasn’t so easy as it looked: it was a horrible, messy business. Frederick stuck the planter again and again, and still almost got his own throat slashed. Only when Lorenzo brought his pistol up against the back of Barker’s head and pulled the trigger did the white man quit struggling.

“Whew!” Frederick said. “That man had no quit in him.” Barker was still thrashing on the floor, but he plainly wouldn’t get up again.

“Who cares?” Lorenzo answered. “Long as you can make him quit, that’s all that counts.”

Another shot rang out from upstairs. If Veronique had fired on the invaders from the landing, she could have done a lot of harm. Frederick looked around to make sure his surviving companions were all right. Then he said, “We better find out what that was all about.”

Cautiously, they climbed the stairs. The door to the Barkers’ bedroom stood open. Veronique Barker lay on the bed, the muzzle of a pistol still in her mouth. The back of her head was a red ruin that soaked into the bedclothes.

Lorenzo grunted when he saw the corpse. “Huh,” he said. “She must’ve known what she had comin’. I never stuck it into a white woman before, but I sure would have. Serve her right, you know—pay her back for all the shit she done piled on her slaves.”

Frederick hadn’t wanted the Liberating Army to do things like that. What would Helen have said had he joined in the gang rape of the planter’s wife? Would she have screamed at him, or would she also have thought Veronique Barker got what was coming to her? Frederick didn’t know, and he wasn’t altogether sorry not to find out.

“One way or the other, she’s done for now,” he said. “This whole plantation’s done for. Let’s drag the bodies out of the house, let the Barkers’ slaves know they’re free for sure.”

Veronique Barker’s corpse left a trail of gore down the stairs. Her blood and Benjamin’s stained the rugs on the floor of their front room. Frederick pushed the bodies off the front porch with his foot. They rolled bonelessly down the stairs and came to rest in the dirt.

“See?” Frederick said. “They’re really and truly dead. We done killed ’em. They won’t ever trouble you any more.”

The Barkers’ slaves stared at the corpses with terrible avidity. Frederick hadn’t particularly hated the Barfords—he’d just hated being anyone’s piece of property. Things were different here: how very different, he didn’t realize till the newly freed Negroes and copperskins surged forward and took their own vengeance on the bodies.

It wasn’t pretty. They kicked them and beat them and hacked at them with gardening tools. A couple of men undid their flies and pissed on the bodies. The rest of the Barkers’ slaves—no, the new recruits to the Liberating Army—whooped and cheered. They hung the corpses up by their heels. Veronique Barker’s skirts fell down over her head. That drew more whoops, and some lewd jokes.

Moving faster than they would have under an overseer’s glare, the copperskins and Negroes piled firewood into a pyre for the Barkers. Someone poured lamp oil on the wood to help it catch. As soon as it was burning well, the newly freed slaves cut down their late masters and threw them on the fire. They cheered again, loud and long, as the stink of charred meat joined the cleaner odor of wood smoke.

“In a way, this is good,” Lorenzo said, watching the Barkers’ people caper and cavort. “After they do somethin’ like this, they can’t say they didn’t mean it and we made ’em join up with us.”

“Who would they say that to?” Frederick asked.

Lorenzo looked at him as if his wits could have worked better. “To the white folks, of course,” he answered. Sure enough, he might have been speaking to an idiot child.

He might have been, but he wasn’t. Patiently, Frederick said, “Only way the white folks’ll get a chance to ask ’em questions like that is if we lose. I don’t aim to lose. I been waiting my whole life to get free. White Atlanteans, they take it for granted. They don’t know how lucky they are. They’ve got no idea. But I do, on account of I’ve seen it from the other side. Nobody’s gonna stop me from being free, not any more. How about you?”

By the look on Lorenzo’s face, Frederick had startled him. That saddened Frederick, but it didn’t much surprise him. “I don’t want to go back to being a slave, no,” Lorenzo said after a pause, “but I don’t know what kind of chance we’ve got of really winning, either.”

“If we don’t, they’ll kill us all,” Frederick said, wishing the copperskin hadn’t come out with his own worst fear.

“If we do, we’ve got to kill them all,” Lorenzo said. “Otherwise, they ain’t gonna let slaves who rose up live. They never have, and I figure they never will.”

Frederick also feared that was much too likely to be true. Even so, he answered, “Main reason white folks didn’t is that, when slaves rose up before, they just wanted to murder all the masters they could.”

“And you don’t?” Lorenzo pointed to the fire consuming the mortal remains of Benjamin and Veronique Barker.

“Got to do some,” Frederick admitted. “But the white folks, even the ones without slaves, live pretty damned well in Atlantis. How come we can’t live the same way? Proclamation of Liberty set this country free from England. Don’t you reckon it’s about time Atlantis lived up to all the fancy promises it made itself a long time ago?”

“Don’t
I
reckon so? Of course I do,” Lorenzo said. “That ain’t the question, though. Question is, will the white folks reckon so? I’ve got to tell you, friend, it looks like long odds to me.”

“You’d better run off now, then, on account of that’s the only hope we got,” Frederick said.

“If it is, we’ve got no hope at all,” Lorenzo said. “But I ain’t runnin’, neither, ’cause
that’s
no hope. Skulking in the woods the rest of my days like a damned honker?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Shit—who knows? Maybe we can lick the white folks. Maybe.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it, though.

Frederick didn’t believe it, either. Sometimes you had to rise up whether you believed you could possibly win or not. If that wasn’t the measure of a slave’s damnation, Frederick had no idea what would be.

 

The Liberating Army had plenty of rifle muskets to arm Benjamin Barker’s slaves. Barker’s own arsenal would give several more slaves weapons. He’d kept far more guns in his big house than Henry Barford had in
his
. “Why does one man need so much firepower?” Lorenzo asked. “He couldn’t shoot ’em all off at the same time.”

“Not at the same time, no,” one of Barker’s men, a Negro, answered. “But if he needed to shoot himself a snake or a hawk or a fox or a deer or one o’ them big ol’ lizards in a river, he had the right piece for it.”

“Or if he needed to shoot himself a nigger or a mudface, he had the right piece for that, too,” Frederick said with a shudder.

“Or one of them,” the black man agreed. His former owner had put up much too good a fight.

A halloo made Frederick break off the conversation. A warning shout followed the halloo: “Somebody comin’ up the path!”

“Oh, good God!” Frederick exclaimed. That was the last thing he wanted to hear. No one had called at the Barford plantation, even before the rebellion broke out. Maybe neighbors knew the yellow jack was loose there. Or maybe it was just that Henry Barford wasn’t what you’d call sociable, even if Clotilde was.

Such musings blew out of Frederick’s head when Lorenzo asked, “What do we do now?”

That was a fine question. Show the visitor the pyre where Benjamin and Veronique Barker had burned? He’d surely want to see that, wouldn’t he? And what about the corpse of the Barkers’ son? And the dead overseer? Oh, yes—plenty to show off.

On the other hand, if the slaves chased the caller away, he would ride off and let the outside world know they’d taken over the plantation. If they killed him, more outsiders would come looking for him. That might buy a few hours—maybe even as much as a day—but it would also let the cat out of the bag in short order.

Before Frederick could decide what to do, his sentries went and did it. Two gunshots rang out, one after the other. The first provoked a startled shriek; the second abruptly ended it.