Liberating Atlantis (28 page)

Bullets cracked past people. They slammed into tree trunks. They whispered through the undergrowth, cutting leaves and fronds as they went. And a few of them smacked into soft flesh. Shrieks rose up along with the shots and the fireworks smell of gunpowder smoke.

Something up ahead moved. Jeremiah Stafford thought it did, anyway. He squeezed the trigger. The revolver bucked and roared in his hand. Maybe he drilled a vicious Negro right between the eyes and dropped him to the forest floor before he could even blink. Or maybe he’d wasted a bullet on ferns stirred by a vagrant breeze. Unless he tripped over a corpse on his way forward, he’d never know.

On the Terranovan mainland, they called something like this a copperskin fight. Both sides hid behind trees and shot at each other as they tried to move. The savages on the western mainland used bows and arrows, too: silent, unnerving weapons. The copperskins here banged away like their black brethren.

So did the Atlantean cavalrymen. They still had the advantage of surprise, and tried to make the most of it. Frederick Radcliff was in there somewhere. The faster they could grab him, the better.

When Stafford ran forward, his shoes sank into the ground. His feet felt wet—water was leaking in. Almost without his noticing, the hemlocks and pines were giving way to moss-draped cypresses. A flapjack turtle stared at him out of cold yellow eyes from a puddle—one of too many puddles that suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere.

“Sweet suffering Jesus!” he exclaimed. “We’re in a swamp!”

The cavalrymen had made the same unwelcome discovery at about the same time. Their complaints were even more heartfelt, and much more profane. Stafford started swearing, too, though he was an amateur alongside virtuosos. It might have been funny if it weren’t so revolting. This whole mission had been predicated on speed and surprise. Surprise was gone, shot dead by an alert sentry. As for speed . . . How could you do anything in a hurry with mud trying to suck the shoes off your feet, and maybe trying to suck you down into it?

Another maybe crossed Stafford’s mind. Maybe the insurrectionists’ leader wasn’t so foolish to base himself in a place like this. Maybe he wasn’t so foolish, period. That might have made the Consul wonder whether Negroes and copperskins generally were as foolish as he’d always thought. It might have, but it didn’t. Instead, it made him decide that Frederick Radcliff had his grandfather’s blood in him, all right.

“Those lying, poxed—!” The captain’s furious voice broke off, as if he couldn’t find anything bad enough to say about the people he had in mind, whoever they were. That came a moment later, when he tried again: “Nobody said anything about this being a God-damned mudhole!”

Back in the Atlantean camp, the captured insurrectionists would no doubt claim their captors hadn’t asked them the right questions. Technically, Stafford supposed they’d be telling the truth. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering what would have happened had the soldiers hurt them a little, or more than a little, to make sure they weren’t withholding.

It couldn’t very well have turned out
worse
.

“Snake!” a trooper wailed on a rising note of horror. “Lousy snake just bit me!” That gave Stafford one more thing to worry about: not what he needed at such a crowded moment.

“Frederick Radcliff!” the captain shouted. “Come out and surrender, Frederick Radcliff!”

A chorus of voices told him what he could do with his surrender. Their curses showed more ingenuity than Consul Stafford would have expected from such a pack of colored riffraff. “Go after them!” Stafford called. “The more noise, the more insurrectionists, and the more likely we are to catch our man.”

He wondered whether they would know their man even if they caught him. What exactly did Frederick Radcliff look like? Who would bother painting a slave’s portrait? Nobody—no money in it. And the leader of the uprising wasn’t likely to have sat stock-still for a newfangled photograph, either. Stafford pictured Frederick Radcliff as looking like his famous grandfather, only with dark skin and kinky hair. That might be right, or it might not. He wasn’t sure within twenty years how old the jumped-up slave was. That might make things harder, too.

But much harder? Stafford didn’t think so. Some Judas among the insurrectionists would give their leader away if he saw him. Maybe the copperskin or black wouldn’t do it on purpose. An involuntary gasp of surprise would serve well enough, though. And then Frederick Radcliff would dance on air or face a firing squad or suffer whatever other lethal fate his captors decided upon.

And then . . . what? Would the insurrection quietly fold up and fail because the man who started it got what was coming to him? Stafford hoped so. That was why the raiding party had come here, after all.

But what would happen if someone else—that damned arrogant Lorenzo, say—kept things going even after Frederick Radcliff was dead and gone? What would happen farther east, where slaves were rising up even though chances were they’d barely heard of Frederick Radcliff?

Stafford muttered under his breath. It wasn’t a happy kind of muttering. The closer he looked at the insurrection, the worse it seemed. Back in New Hastings, he’d thought everything was simple. Sally forth, slaughter the insurrectionists, and march home in triumph.

He hadn’t imagined the uprising was like the Hydra, sprouting two heads for each one you chopped off. But just because he hadn’t imagined it back in New Hastings, that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

To make matters worse, the enemy must have heard his well- intentioned advice to the cavalrymen. The Negroes and copperskins started making a racket first here, then there, then somewhere else. Anyone who tried following the trail of noise would be chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.

Panting, his heart pounding, Stafford thought,
Sinapis was right, damn him. I
am
too old for this
. He pushed through the ferns anyhow. Maybe he would stumble over Frederick Radcliff. Maybe—a bigger unlikelihood, however little he cared to admit it to himself—he would recognize the rebel leader if he did stumble over him. Or maybe something else worthwhile would happen.

Something else did happen, worthwhile or not. The green curtain in front of him parted. A Negro carrying a musket he must have stolen off a planter’s wall was also hurrying forward. They stared at each other in mutual shock and horror for a split second, the dapper, middle-aged white man and the young black in filthy, ragged clothes. Then, after simultaneous gasps, they both raised their guns and fired.

And they both missed.

They couldn’t have been ten feet apart, but they missed anyhow. The twin shots and the crack of the insurrectionist’s bullet darting much too close past Stafford’s ear all but stunned the Consul. The Negro looked as desperately unhappy as Stafford felt. But they were in different situations. It would take the insurrectionist at least half a minute to reload and fire another round. All Jeremiah Stafford had to do was pull the trigger.

The black man figured that out in an instant. Had he been the natural-born coward Stafford assumed him to be because he was a Negro, he would have thrown himself down in the thick undergrowth or tried to run away. Instead, he clubbed his musket and rushed at the Consul.

Stafford did fire again. He didn’t miss this time. The bullet caught the insurrectionist just to the left of the middle of his chest. Stafford couldn’t have placed it any better aiming at a target with all the time in the world to shoot.

When you shot somebody—especially when you hit him right where you wanted to—you expected him to fall over. Stafford had done enough hunting to know that deer didn’t always fall over as soon as you shot them. He’d thought it would be different with people, though. For one thing, no deer ever born had tried to smash in his skull with a reversed musket.

He ducked the stroke that would have scrambled his brains. Then he fired yet again—and hit the Negro yet again. The man still didn’t fall over, though he did grunt in surprise and pain when the bullet bit into him. He also dropped the musket, but only to try to snatch the eight-shooter out of Stafford’s hand.

“Why don’t you die, damn you?” Stafford groaned.

“Fuck your mother, you white devil,” the Negro said. He opened his mouth to add another unpleasantry, but blood poured out between his lips and from his nostrils. For a heartbeat or so, he looked astonished. Then—at last!—his eyes rolled up in his head and he slowly crumpled to the forest floor. A sudden nasty stench amid the forest’s green odors said his bowels had let go.

He twitched a few times, but now he was plainly dying fast. Stafford stared down at him. He smelled the man’s sweat and his blood as well as his shit. He’d never dreamt killing could be so dreadfully intimate—the Negro was the first man he’d ever known he’d slain. All at once, he doubled over and was sick. Some of his vomit splashed the black man, but it seemed more tribute than defilement.

“You all right, Consul?” a rough voice asked. A sergeant with grizzled side whiskers stood there. He jerked a thumb at the corpse. “Never done for anybody before, have you?”

“No,” Stafford choked out. “Have you got anything I can rinse my mouth with?”

“Here you go.” The sergeant handed him a tin canteen with a cloth cover.

“Thanks.” Stafford undid the cover and gulped. He’d expected water. He got barrel-tree rum. He almost puked again, as much from surprise as for any other reason. Then he spat out some of it.

The sergeant nodded. “That’s the way, friend. Gets rid of the taste better’n water would, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Stafford agreed, a different kind of surprise in his voice. He took another swig, and swallowed this time. Then he handed back the canteen.

After putting it on his belt again, the sergeant said, “I don’t think we’re going to catch the son of a bitch.”

“Neither do I, I’m afraid,” Stafford said. “But even if we don’t, we’re making him run away. We’re making the insurrectionists dance to our tune for a change.” Potent excitement and even more potent rum were hitting him the way the Negro’s musket ball would have had it connected. “That’s got to be worth something, doesn’t it?”

“Well, we can hope so, anyways,” the veteran answered, and with such doubtful assurance Stafford had to be content.

Leland Newton nodded to himself when the cavalry column came back without the rebel leader. Then he noticed that his fellow Consul was splashed with blood and distinctly green around the gills. “Are you all right, Jeremiah?” he asked, more real concern in his voice than he’d expected.

He watched as Stafford looked down at himself and noticed the blood for what seemed likely to be the first time. “Oh,” Stafford said, and then, as if explaining everything in three words, “It isn’t mine.”

“Well, good,” Newton said. “Ah, whose is it, then?”

“This nigger and I saw each other in the woods at the same time,” Stafford answered. “I ended up shooting him.”

Newton would have thought the Consul from Cosquer would sound proud of himself after doing something like that. Instead, Stafford seemed unwontedly subdued. Colonel Sinapis understood that before Newton did. “Your first time, your Excellency?” the officer asked.

“That’s right.” Stafford nodded jerkily. “You aren’t the first one to ask me, either. It must stick out on me like spines. Is that the mark Cain wore?” He sounded altogether in earnest. Newton hadn’t killed. He had no idea what it would be like, and wasn’t anxious to find out. Whatever Stafford had learned about himself, it seemed to have come closer to shattering him than bucking him up.

Sinapis’ gaze swung to the captain who’d commanded the raiders. “You did not capture the rebel chief. Did you kill him?”

“No, sir, not that I know of,” the captain said. “My guess is that he
was
there, or somewhere close by. There were plenty of insurrectionists in those parts, and I can see no reason why there would have been if they weren’t guarding something or someone important to them.” He paused for a moment. “I wish we would have had a better description of the scalawag, and I wish someone would have told me we’d be squelching through a bog after him.”

“Were you?” Sinapis said, his eyebrows leaping. The captain nodded—unhappily, if Newton was any judge. “We did not learn that from the prisoners who told us where Frederick Radcliff would be hiding?”

“We sure didn’t, sir,” the captain said. “Maybe they were holding out on us, or maybe we just didn’t find the right questions to ask. Any which way, we got into something we weren’t prepared for. The troops performed bravely. Not catching our man wasn’t their fault. They did everything they could. They might have done better if they’d known what they’d be getting into.”

“It must be the fault of the questioning,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Had we asked the question we needed, we would have got the right answer. A bog?
Malakas!
” He didn’t bother to translate that. He sounded splendidly disgusted. With the bog? With the questioner? With the captives, for not volunteering more? With the whole campaign? That last seemed most likely to Newton.

He put the best face he could on things: “On to New Marseille, then?”

Sinapis dipped his head. “On to New Marseille, your Excellency. We shall make sure the rebels cannot steal the place. “That would be”—he paused to look for words—“unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. To say nothing of embarrassing.” The ones he found seemed to fit altogether too well.

They roused Stafford from his sorrowful lethargy, too. “New Marseille already has a garrison! It has cannon!” he said.

“It has cannon,” Sinapis agreed. “Most of them point out to sea, to protect the harbor from enemy bombardment. It has a garrison: a small one. So far as I know, it has not been reinforced by sea. These people we are fighting have already done several things I had not imagined they could do while I was still in New Hastings. If they should surprise us again, it would not surprise me.”