Liberating Atlantis (27 page)

A sentry rode back to the army and said, “Looks like there’s a bunch of spooks and coppers laying for us up ahead.”

“Can we give them a surprise for a change?” Consul Stafford asked.

“
I
command today,” Newton said pointedly.

“Do you
not
wish to surprise the enemy?” Colonel Sinapis asked him.

Part of him wanted to say yes. If he did, he could get away with it—for the day. Sooner or later, though, the news would get back to New Hastings. Odds were it would get back in whatever distorted form Stafford chose to use. And Newton had discovered he liked getting shot at no better than any other human being.

Not without reluctance, he replied, “Proceed as you think best, Colonel.”

“Maybe you are smarter than you look,” Stafford said.

After a salute that might have come from a clockwork mechanism, Sinapis conferred with the scout. Then he sent a cavalry screen forward to keep the insurrectionists from getting a good view of anything else he was doing. With luck, the flanking party that hurried off to the right would do unto the enemy what he wanted to do unto the Atlantean army.

With luck . . . The thought brought Newton up short. The soldiers hadn’t had much, not so far in this campaign.

He didn’t need to wait long for another lesson on the dubious joys of being the target of flying lead. The rebels lurking among the ferns at the edge of a stand of hemlocks opened up on the Atlanteans from cleverly concealed positions.

Those positions didn’t stay concealed for long, of course. When a rifle musket went off, it spat a long tongue of fire. And a cloud of black-powder smoke rose above the man who’d fired. If anyone ever invented gunpowder that didn’t smoke, he’d make a fortune. Nobody’d come close to doing it yet.

“Return fire!” Colonel Sinapis shouted.

Quite a few of his men had already started shooting back without orders. They marched with loaded weapons, something they wouldn’t do in anything but the most dangerous country. Two or three Atlantean soldiers fell. Screams rang out. One man, though, went down like a dropped rag doll. Shot through the head, he’d never get up again.

As they had more than once before, the Atlanteans in gray advanced on the ragged Negroes and copperskins harrying them. Before long, the rebels would slide back into the woods and disappear. Then the whole miserable process would start over a few miles farther down the road.

That was what the rebels thought, anyway. It was how things had worked out the last time they tried this stunt, and the time before that. It wasn’t how things worked out today. As the copperskins and blacks started their withdrawal, the flanking column hit them. A great thunder of musketry from their left—the Atlantean army’s right—announced the collision.

“That’ll shift them!” Colonel Stafford yelled. “The biter bit—and let’s see how the sons of bitches like being on the receiving end!”

By all the signs, the rebels liked it not a bit. That didn’t surprise Leland Newton. In war more than perhaps in anything else, it was better to give than to receive.

Now that the rebels had to fight the flanking party, they couldn’t simply fade away. The main body of the Atlantean army got into the scrap at close quarters. The soldiers had a lot of pent-up rage to vent.

Thinking about that, Newton turned to Balthasar Sinapis. “Colonel, don’t you think you ought to order your men to take prisoners?” he said.

“Why?” Stafford yelped, as if he’d proposed requiring the soldiers to start practicing some unnatural vice.

Newton looked at him. “If you have learned the art of interrogating corpses, your Excellency, I hope you will be good enough to acquaint the rest of us with it.”

“You mock me, sir.” By the way Stafford said it, his seconds would confer with Newton’s at any moment to arrange the terms and time of the duel. The
code duello
wasn’t dead south of the Stour, so maybe that was exactly what he had in mind.

Whether he did or not, Newton didn’t. “Don’t be a bigger blockhead than you can help,” he said, which made Stafford gape. He went on, “You’ve been mocking me since before we left New Hastings. Have you seen me take offense?”

“Some people are more sensitive to slights than others,” Stafford said, but his heart didn’t seem to be in the quarrel any more.

Newton looked back to Colonel Sinapis. “Prisoners,” he prompted.

“Yes, yes. The point is well taken.” Sinapis gave orders to a captain, and sent the junior officer forward to convey them to the troops. Then he sighed. “I hope they will heed him.”

That hadn’t occurred to Newton. When he thought of an order, he thought of its being obeyed without fail. But men and all their works were imperfect. What ever happened without fail?

Some captured rebels might have got shot or bayoneted, there in the woods with no one but angry Atlantean soldiers to see the job done. This was one of those places where asking too many questions didn’t look like the best idea in the world. All the same, the soldiers did lead out more than a dozen disgruntled rebels, most with their hands tied behind them, a few with nooses already around their necks.

“We ought to smoke them over a slow fire,” Stafford said. “That would give us what we need to know, and in a hurry, too.”

“In my experience, torturing prisoners is usually more trouble than it is worth,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Not always, and not in all circumstances, but usually. A better way is to question them separately, telling each man his answers will be compared to those of the others. Anyone whose answers do not match his friends’ will know he is to be singled out for punishment. This has proved a good way to get at the truth.”

It struck Consul Newton as a good way to get at the truth, too. “Let’s do that, then,” he said eagerly.
Too eagerly?
he wondered. Maybe so, but he had no stomach for tormenting captives.

And even Jeremiah Stafford gave a grudging nod. “We can try it,” he said. “First.”

Sinapis carefully instructed the men he told off to question the captives. Chances were he didn’t think they’d be gentle without careful instruction. Chances were he was right, too.

“Do we keep moving toward New Marseille?” Newton asked him. “Or do we wait to see what we find out? If we can strike at the heart of the uprising . . .” Had he just said that? Damned if he hadn’t.

Stafford neither sneered at him nor clapped him on the back. That other Consul left him to stew in his own juices. That was liable to mean Stafford was cleverer than Newton had given him credit for: one more worrisome thought among so many others.

“I don’t know, your Excellency. You are the commander . . . today.” Colonel Sinapis’ long face showed what he thought of Atlantean practice. It certainly had some flaws the framers of the Charter hadn’t thought of. The colonel continued, “I am here, as I understand my position, to put your orders and those of Consul Stafford into effect. As long as I am doing that, I may legitimately give orders of my own. Otherwise, those orders lie outside my region of responsibility.” His fleshy nostrils quivered. No, he didn’t like Atlantean arrangements even a cent’s worth.

“I am not asking you for orders, Colonel,” Newton said, as diplomatically as he could. “I am asking for your opinion, for your professional judgment.”

“Ah. My opinion. That, I am certain, is worth its weight in gold.” Sinapis could be formidably sardonic in a language not his own. “My opinion, your Excellency, is that it is better to put out a fire while it is still small, because dousing one after you let it get bigger will be much harder.”

Newton glanced over at Jeremiah Stafford. Again, his colleague failed to rise to the bait. Newton wondered whether something was wrong with him. He had the perfect chance to tax Newton for not letting the army move sooner—and didn’t use it. Such restraint seemed out of character.

Or maybe Stafford was letting events bludgeon Newton. Even if in the abstract you admired someone’s cause, it was much harder to feel loving-kindness toward him after he’d almost killed you. Newton had had that thought before. It came home to roost again.

He deliberately turned his back on the other Consul. Stafford’s soft chuckle said he had much too good an idea of what Newton was thinking. Ignoring it, Newton addressed Colonel Sinapis: “You want to go after Frederick Radcliff, then, if we find the chance?”

“I do.” Sinapis dipped his head, which he seemed to do more often than not in place of nodding. Newton thought again of Zeus in the
Iliad
. Sinapis made a mournful, bedraggled excuse for a Greek god. Well, what these days was so fine as it had been once upon a time? The officer’s figure of speech wasn’t Greek at all: “Maybe we can put the genie back into the bottle after all. Do they tell that story in Atlantis?”

Newton had heard it or read it, though he couldn’t remember where or when. Stafford did. “‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’” he said, and Colonel Sinapis dipped his head again. The other Consul added, “Ali Baba may be stuck in
The Arabian Nights
, but, believe me, the thieves made the crossing here ahead of you.”

“It would not surprise me,” Sinapis said. “I have never found a place where thieves did not make the crossing. Perhaps heaven is such a place. Perhaps not, too . . .” A long pause. “We shall pursue Frederick Radcliff, then, given that chance?”

“We shall,” Newton and Stafford said together. They eyed each other suspiciously. Newton couldn’t guess which of them that agreement bothered more.

 

Colonel Sinapis looked most dubious as he peered up from the ground at Jeremiah Stafford on horseback. “Are you sure you must ride with them, your Excellency?” he asked in tones that couldn’t have meant anything but
Are you out of your mind, your Excellency?

But Stafford nodded. “You’d best believe I am, Colonel. If they—if we—catch the rebel, I can make sure he gets what’s coming to him on the spot.”

“A written order carried by the commander of the raiding party would accomplish the same thing,” Sinapis said.

“No doubt. But I would not see it happen,” Stafford said.

The colonel sighed. “Have it your way, then. You will anyhow. I cannot give you orders—only suggestions. Still, if you slow down the men with whom you ride, you will make them less likely to do what you most want done.”

Flicked on his vanity, Stafford said, “I won’t slow them down.”

He hadn’t been riding long before he wondered if he’d told Sinapis the truth. The raiders were mostly young, bandy-legged, and small. They spoke in gleeful obscenities. And they seemed to think the presence of an Atlantean Consul was the funniest thing they’d ever run into.

“If I was back in the real world,” one of them said to him, “I’d think holding slaves was the wickedest thing a man could do.” The trooper’s accent proclaimed him a northern man, from Hanover or possibly Croydon.

“The real world?” Stafford waved. The ferns and grass and hemlocks and barrel trees all around seemed real enough to him and then some. “What do you call this?”

“This here?” The cavalryman thought the question was pretty funny, too. “Your Excellency, this here is fucking Nowhere with a capital N.” His friends on horseback nodded. They thought it was fucking Nowhere, too.

And they had a point. The only work of man in sight, besides the narrow road that might have started its career as a honker track, was a ruined, tumbledown shack. Stafford didn’t think the insurrection was the reason it was empty. By the look of it, nobody’d lived in it for the past twenty years.

“How do you feel about slaves rising up and killing their lawful masters?” Stafford asked. “How do you like it when they try to kill you and your friends?”

“On account of something’s lawful, that don’t make it right,” the young soldier answered. “But the other part of that there . . . You’ll have to wait a while before you find the next fella who tells you he’s only happy when some God-damned son of a bitch is shooting at him.”

Again, the other cavalrymen nodded. Consul Stafford would have been hard-pressed to tell the northern man he was mistaken. The captain leading the detachment glanced down at something in his hand—a sketch map, Stafford supposed. But for the gold braid on his hat and the three stars on each side of his collar, he looked little different from his men: not much older than they were, either.

“We swing in here,” he said, pointing down an even narrower track toward the dark woods ahead. “Lousy rebels are in there. We pitch into ’em from the flank, drive ’em off, and snatch the shitheel who tells ’em what to do.” Stafford couldn’t place him by the way he talked. Maybe he’d come from England or Ireland when he was young. He didn’t seem hesitant about what they were doing, anyhow. That was good. An officer who didn’t believe in the cause for which he was fighting could easily contrive to botch his mission while making the failure look like an accident.

As soon as they got to the edge of the woods, the captain told off horse-holders to tend to the other men’s mounts. He didn’t choose very many, which pleased Stafford: he wanted to get as many soldiers as he could into the fight.

They plunged into the woods. Some of the cavalrymen carried carbines. Others had eight-shooters at the ready. Stafford had a revolver himself. A carbine or a rifle musket could easily outrange it. In a forest where you couldn’t see past pistol range, though, so what? And, with eight bullets in the cylinder, he could put a lot of lead in the air in a hurry if he had to.

Would the insurrectionists even bother posting sentries on their flanks? Copperskins and Negroes were notoriously lazy and shiftless, so Stafford wouldn’t have been surprised if they didn’t. But that thought had hardly crossed his mind before somebody let out a startled, “Who’s there?”

“The Atlantean army and the Lord Jehovah!” the captain answered, stealing a line one of Victor Radcliff’s officers had used a lifetime earlier.

“Well, shit!” the enemy lookout exclaimed. If the redcoats had said anything like that in response to the Atlanteans long ago, it hadn’t got into the history books. It probably wouldn’t get into the history books now. The shooting started a couple of seconds later. Shooting would make the books. Shooting always did.