Liberating Atlantis (21 page)

Colonel Sinapis nodded coolly to the Consuls when they joined him in the compartment they shared. He hadn’t got off the train. Reading glasses perched on that curved blade of a nose, he pored over maps of the southwest. Regardless of whether the Consuls were ready for whatever might happen when the army got where it was going, he intended to be.

What he wasn’t ready for, any more than they were, was their train derailing just outside of Pontivy. The only thing that saved them from worse misfortune was that they hadn’t got going very fast yet. There was a jolt and a crash. The next thing Stafford knew, the locomotive and tender had flipped over onto their sides—and so had the car he was riding in. He had time for one startled exclamation before he landed on what had been the side of the car and Colonel Sinapis landed on him.

“Oof!” Stafford said, which summed up exactly how he felt about the situation. The colonel had a more detailed opinion, which he expressed in English and what sounded like several other languages. Stafford didn’t understand them all, but admired the effects, especially the one that sounded like ripping canvas.

Leland Newton had also fetched up against the side of the car. He, however, was not festooned with a colonel, so his remarks were less impassioned. “Are you all right, Jeremiah?” he asked.

It was, as far as Stafford could remember, the first time his colleague had used his Christian name. “I seem to be, Leland,” he said, returning the courtesy, “or I will be, if the good Colonel Sinapis would remove his elbow from the vicinity of my navel.”

The good colonel did move the pointed part in question, and the Consul did gain considerable relief as a result. Sinapis scrambled to his feet. He stepped on Stafford once more in the process, but without malice. “We must help the injured—and there will be some,” he said.

Stafford only grunted, because Sinapis was bound to be right. Derailments were lamentably common, and produced more than their fair share of lost limbs and broken bones. The colonel wrestled the door open. It didn’t want to open sideways, but he made it obey. He scrambled out. Stafford and Newton followed.

Sinapis’ prophecy was confirmed at once. A couple of the stokers lay on the fern-splashed ground. One was clutching his leg and groaning. The leg had a bend in a place where it shouldn’t.

Consul Stafford’s stomach did a slow lurch. He looked away in a hurry. If an injury like this threatened to sicken him, how would he do on a battlefield with bullets and cannonballs ripping flesh? He hadn’t thought about that when he set out from New Hastings. Maybe he should have.

The engine driver limped out of the capsized locomotive. He was not only hurt but incandescently furious. “A rock!” he screamed. “Some God-damned fucking son of a bitch put a fucking boulder on the fucking tracks!” He started to hop up and down in his rage, but his ankle made him think better of it. “That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, he went and derailed us on purpose! I hope he rots in hell and Old Scratch uses his short ribs for toothpicks!”

Slow, cold certainty formed inside Jeremiah Stafford’s mind. “That shit-eating bastard, whoever the devil he was, was a mudface or a nigger.” He sounded as sure of himself as any Biblical prophet.

“Yes. Very likely.” Colonel Sinapis nodded. “Those people are the ones with the most reason to slow us down or stop us.”

Rounding on his colleague, Stafford said, “You don’t say anything, sir.”

Consul Newton spread his hands. “What would you have me say? I agree: most likely a slave did place a rock there to derail us. I have never claimed slaves loved us. The most I have ever said is that they may well have good reason not to love us.”

“Bah!” Stafford turned away from him in disgust. That let him look down the track. Half a dozen cars after the one in which he’d been riding had also overturned. Some of the soldiers inside them were bound to be hurt, too. The cars farther back had managed to stay on the rails. Had the train been moving faster, more of them would have gone off.

Those slaves were fools
, the Consul thought.
They would have done better to plant their boulder farther from town, so we would have built up more speed. Or maybe they didn’t know we would stop in Pontivy
.

A horrible shriek derailed his train of thought. The phrase had quickly become a commonplace after railroad lines began crisscrossing Atlantis. Now Stafford was reminded of the reality that had given rise to it.

Colonel Sinapis crouched beside the stoker with the broken leg. Among other things, the colonel knew how to set fractures, even if the process was painful. Stafford hoped the army surgeons had laid in a good supply of nitrous oxide and ether. The newfangled medicines seemed sovereign against even the worst agony.

“Hold still,” Sinapis told the stoker. His strong hands made sure the man obeyed. The officer nodded to the other stoker, who hovered nearby. “Draw my sword. Cut a couple of saplings. Cut strips of cloth, too, so I can splint this leg. Don’t just stand there, man!
Move!
”

Move the other stoker did, and smartly, too. When Balthasar Sinapis told you to do something, you did it first and worried about why later. He would have made a marvelous overseer. Consul Stafford chuckled softly. What was a colonel but an overseer who used a uniform and army regulations instead of a bullwhip to get his way?

Stafford stared this way and that. No slaves in sight now. He’d wondered if they would stick around to enjoy the chaos they’d caused, but no such luck. Even stupid slaves knew better. Too bad.

And the army was going to be later than it had expected getting to the insurrection. That was also too damned bad.

 

The train derailed once more before it got to Nouveau Redon. This time, people—no doubt colored people—had set logs on the rails. The train was going faster when it hit them. Leland Newton ended up with a knot on the side of his head and a left wrist sprained so badly, he had to wear it in a sling.

One of the army surgeons gave him a tiny bottle of laudanum for the pain. The potent mixture of brandy and opium pushed it off to one side, anyhow. The opium also settled his bowels, which had been flighty on a traveling diet of hardtack and salt pork: army rations.

“Slaves don’t love you, either,” Consul Stafford pointed out to him. “No matter how splendid you think they are, they’ll kill you if they get the chance.”

Worst of it was, Newton’s colleague wasn’t wrong. Newton hadn’t let that enter his calculations when he left with the army. He wondered what else he hadn’t thought about that he should have. He hoped he didn’t find out the hard way.

When he remarked on that, Colonel Sinapis said, “Plan ahead. Always plan ahead. It will not be perfect, but it will help.”

The latest dose of laudanum had worn off, leaving Newton sore and irritable. He wiggled his arm in the sling the surgeon had put on him. That only hurt more. “How do you propose to plan against what happens in a derailment?” he snapped.

To his amazement, the colonel had a sensible answer for him: “Belts across the seats would hold the passengers in place and not let them fly about promiscuously in an accident. That would save many casualties.”

“Damned if it wouldn’t,” Newton said in surprise, his pique evaporating. “I wonder why we don’t do it now.”

“Because the railroad companies say it would cost money to put all these belts into place. Because, they say, some people do not care to be closed in with a belt. Because, they say, feminine costume would be inconvenienced. And so people break limbs and sometimes break their heads, but a few cents are saved! Hallelujah!” Sinapis did not so much as raise his voice, which only made the irony more cutting.

Gingerly feeling the side of his own head, Newton could sympathize with that irony. He turned to Jeremiah Stafford, who’d come through the latest derailment unscathed. “Here is something about which the government should have its say, don’t you think?”

“Not quite so urgent as a servile insurrection,” Stafford remarked. But that wasn’t necessarily a veto, for he went on, “Bound to be easier to gain consensus on account of that.”

“One would hope so, yes.” Consul Newton was not about to let anyone display more sangfroid than he did.

“A plan,” Colonel Sinapis said again. “Have you gentlemen yet devised one?” He was relentless as a hurricane.

“How can we?” Newton did
his
best to sound reasonable. “We won’t fully know the situation till we arrive. Many telegraph lines are down—”

“Slaves’ doing,” Stafford broke in.

Newton shrugged. “As may be. But what comes over the surviving wires is the most amazing twaddle. If you tell me the slaves are responsible for that, I shall be most surprised.”

“No, no,” the other Consul said impatiently. “Do you expect calm and good judgment in the middle of an uprising, though?”

“Perhaps not. Occasional accuracy, however, would be welcome,” Newton said.

“Do we fight the colored rebels? Do we fight the people fighting the colored rebels?” Sinapis persisted. “Do we try to keep them from fighting? What do we do if they don’t feel like stopping?”

Those were all good questions. Newton had answers to none of them. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He had his own answers. Unfortunately, Consul Stafford also had
his
own answers, which weren’t the same . . . which were, in fact, as different as coal and kohlrabi.

At least Stafford also didn’t try to tell Colonel Sinapis exactly what would happen when the army got off the train in the state of New Marseille. He knew Newton had different answers, too.

Sinapis looked from one Consul to the other and back again. He might have been examining two insects with revolting habits. His voice suggested that he was: “Or will the army try to do one thing one day and something else the next, depending on who is in command? I tell you, gentlemen, this army is not a toy to be pulled back and forth between you as if you were a couple of spoiled children who needed spanking. You will cost me soldiers if you try to do things that way, and I remind you that soldiers are not toys.”

“The innocent white men and women being despoiled by the insurrectionists are not toys, either,” Stafford said.

“Neither are the slaves who have been despoiled for centuries by these so-called innocents,” Newton returned. He stared steadily back at Balthasar Sinapis. “What is your personal view of slavery, Colonel?”

“It is my personal view, sir, and I prefer to keep it that way,” Sinapis said. “Whatever it is, it is less important than my view that throwing away an army on account of lack of foresight and cooperation will do Atlantis more harm than good.”

“We are all three of us men of strong opinions.” Stafford sounded—amused? Yes, amused: Newton was sure of it. The other Consul went on, “Now, if only any two of us shared some of those opinions.”

“We are what the country has,” Newton said. “If from among us we can’t piece together a course that will do the country good, then Lord have mercy on the USA.”

“Yes.
Kyrie eleison
,” Sinapis said, which meant the same thing but sounded much more elegant.

 

In the eastern foothills of the Green Ridge Mountains, the insurrection really caught up with the army. Like his colleague, Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that a diet of salt pork and hardtack left a lot to be desired to start with, and went downhill in a hurry from there. When the train stopped in the evening, some soldiers pounded their hardtack crackers into crumbs and fried them in pork fat. Stafford tried that himself—once. He found that different and better meant two widely separate things.

He also found he hardly needed pipeweed. The inside of the car in which he and Newton and Colonel Sinapis traveled was smoky enough without pipes or cigars. The derailments had broken several windows. He supposed they were lucky all of them hadn’t broken. Even as things were, he feared he looked like the end man in a minstrel show. The soot on his white shirtfront told him how much he was likely to have on his face. The rasping coughs he let out every so often certainly warned him how much he had in his lungs.

Iron squealed on iron and sparks flew up from the wheels as the locomotive driver braked as hard as he could. “What the deuce?” Stafford said.

“I wonder if some of our not-quite-friends put something new on the tracks.” Leland Newton sounded pleased with his own cleverness.

Colonel Sinapis, by contrast, sniffed scornfully. “If they had any tactical sense, they would have put the boulder or log or whatever it was around a bend in the track,” he said. “Then the driver would not have been able to see it until he had no chance to stop.”

But the insurrectionists did have tactical sense, even if not of the sort Balthasar Sinapis had looked for. As the train slowed, they started shooting at it from the pines and redwoods to either side of the roadbed.

For a moment, those bangs meant nothing to Stafford. But when a bullet punched through the side wall of the car and cracked past his head before drilling out the far side, he figured things out in a hurry. “They’re firing at us!” he exclaimed, more angry than frightened.

“What do we do?” Newton added.

“For the sake of the country and for the sake of your own skins, I suggest you get low and flat—
now
,” Colonel Sinapis said.

He couldn’t give the two Consuls orders; they outranked him. But his “suggestion” had the snap of what would have been a command. It also seemed a very good idea. No sooner had Stafford got down than another bullet smashed through the space where he had been.

Sinapis did not get down. He drew his eight-shooter and started banging away through one of the broken windows. The reports only a few feet from Stafford’s head stunned his ears. Lying beside him on the none-too-clean planks, Leland Newton grimaced every time the colonel fired. “This is most undignified,” Newton said.

“Among other things,” Stafford agreed.