Liberating Atlantis (29 page)

Newton tried to parse that last sentence. Logically, it made no sense. Logic or no, he understood what Sinapis was talking about. So did his colleague. “Well, we’d better get there ahead of them, then,” Stafford said. “Or, if we can’t manage that, we’d better drive them out once we do get there.”

“Indeed,” Colonel Sinapis said. “I should not care to be remembered as the man who lost the city.” His mouth tightened. He must have been remembered for some failures back in Europe; he’d made glancing allusion to at least one of them. Plenty of people came to Atlantis to try to redeem failure elsewhere. Some succeeded. They were the ones who wrote their names in life’s book in large letters. Others went right on failing. Most of those, by the nature of things, were soon forgotten. But a soldier who failed might end up better remembered than one who triumphed.

The same, Newton realized uneasily, held true for a Consul who failed. Newton had understood from the start that either he or Stafford wouldn’t get what he wanted from this campaign. Now he realized
neither
of them might get what he wanted. And what would come of
that
?

BOOK III

XIII

They were gone. The last gunshots petered out at the edge of the wooded swamp adjoining the St. Clair plantation. Frederick Radcliff allowed himself the luxury of a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. He’d known the Atlantean soldiers were dangerous fighting men. He hadn’t dreamt how dangerous they were till they almost snatched him from his redoubt here.

He wouldn’t even be able to stay here any more. The soldiers were liable to come back without warning. If they did, his own men might not be so lucky holding them off.

How had the white Atlanteans learned where he made his headquarters? Only one answer occurred to him: they must have squeezed it out of a captive. What had they done to the men they took? All sorts of unpleasant possibilities occurred to Frederick. With the scars of the lash on his own back, he wouldn’t have put anything past the enemy.

But he was still in the fight. That was the most important thing. The Free Republic of Atlantis remained a going concern. And it remained an inspiration for slaves all over the southern half of the USA. Not all the uprisings that had broken out from the Hesperian Gulf to the Atlantic were under his control. That had worried him at first. It didn’t any more. They all had the same goal: to give Negroes and copperskins the freedom they deserved simply by virtue of being men and women.

Some of those distant uprisings had ended in massacre, either of whites by furious slaves or of slaves by victorious and vengeful whites. That kind of slaughter would make it harder for the two sides to come back together when peace finally returned, if it ever did. Frederick urged his followers and everyone who rose with him to limit killing whenever they could. And he hoped his urging did some good. He hoped, yes, but he wouldn’t have staked more than ten cents on it.

His scouts still kept a close eye on the Consular army. The main body didn’t seem to be coming after him. As far as the watchers could tell, it was heading for New Marseille.

Lorenzo clicked his tongue between his teeth when he got that news. “I told you we should have grabbed the town when we had the chance,” the copperskin said. “Ain’t gonna get it again.”

“We might not even have taken it. We couldn’t have held it,” Frederick said, as he had a good many times before.

As Lorenzo had before, he responded, “But think of the newspapers yelling ‘Rebel army takes New Marseille!’ Headlines like that, they’re worth money to us.”

“Getting run out and shot up isn’t,” Frederick said. “Do you reckon we could keep those soldiers from running us out?”

“Well . . . no,” Lorenzo admitted.

“There you are, then.” Frederick would have boxed Lorenzo’s ears if the copperskin had tried to tell him anything different.

“Here I am, all right,” Lorenzo said mournfully. “Here I am, trying to cipher out what we do next.”

“We hang on, that’s what,” Frederick answered. “Long as we hang on, sooner or later we’re gonna win. They have to squash us flat to lick us. And even if they do, we’ll just pop up again somewhere else.”

“All right. I hope it’s all right, anyway,” Lorenzo said. “We ain’t got killed yet, and when we started out I sure thought we would have by now. Reckon that puts us ahead of the game.”

Frederick thought that put them ahead of the game, too. Had their cause failed, they wouldn’t just have been killed. They would have been put to death with as much pain and ingenuity as their white captors could come up with.

A brightly colored little bird fluttered from branch to branch above Frederick’s head. Every so often, it would peck at a bug. He pointed to it. The motion was enough to send it flying away. A lot of Atlantean creatures had no fear of man. As far as Frederick could see, the little warblers were afraid of everything.

He knew how they felt.

Lorenzo saw the bird, too. His thoughts went down a different track: “Not much meat on those, but they’re tasty baked in a pie. Dunno why the rhyme talks about blackbirds. They ain’t half as good.”

Off in the distance, more gunshots erupted. Frederick frowned, but that seemed to be the last flurry. “If you’re sure you don’t want to have anything to do with New Marseille, maybe we’d better head north, up towards Avalon,” Lorenzo said. “Plenty of plantations up that way. Plenty of mudfaces and niggers who’d be glad to see us, and plenty of white folks who wouldn’t.”

He commonly put his own kind first. Frederick commonly thought of Negroes first. That wouldn’t matter unless the two groups paused in their fight against oppression and went after each other instead of the whites who held them both down. Some of the whites had tried to provoke them into doing just that. So far, it hadn’t worked. Frederick wanted to make sure it wouldn’t.

“We’ve got to remember: the white folks are the ones we’ve all got to go after,” he said. “Blacks don’t fight copperskins. Copperskins don’t fight black folks, either.”

“Well, sure,” Lorenzo agreed. “We’d have to be pretty damned stupid to pull a harebrained stunt like that.”

“Plenty of people are stupid. Doesn’t matter what color they are. Fools all over the place,” Frederick said. “What we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to make sure the fools don’t drag everybody else into the chamber pot with ’em.”

“That sounds good to me,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve got enough trouble taking on the white folks, looks like to me. We fight our own little war while we’re trying to do that, they’ll lick all of us.”

Frederick Radcliff nodded. “Looks the same way to me.” He was glad he and Lorenzo both saw it like that. To Negroes, copperskins, even enslaved copperskins, had more touchy pride than they really needed. They were always ready for trouble, and would sometimes start it themselves if they couldn’t find it any other way.

“That’s how come you can go on running things, far as I’m concerned,” Lorenzo added. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind being on top. But I won’t do anything that’d mess up the war against the whites. So help me God, Fred—I won’t.” He held up his right hand, as if taking an oath . . . not that slaves were allowed to take legally binding oaths in the United States of Atlantis.

“That’s big of you, Lorenzo. Matter of fact, that’s downright white of you.” Frederick grinned crookedly. The copperskin groaned. Frederick went on, “Plenty of time to worry about all kinds of things once we win. Till we do, we better keep going like we’ve been going.”

“We ought to go toward New Marseille instead of north, though. We really should.” Lorenzo kept gnawing like a termite. If he chewed long enough, he figured whatever he was chewing at would fall over. “Maybe we don’t attack—all right. But we should be in place to attack if we see the chance.”

“Well, all right. We can do that,” Frederick said. Lorenzo’s jaw dropped. Smiling, Frederick went on, “Just because I don’t think we ought to attack it right now, that doesn’t mean it won’t be a good idea later on, maybe. We should be ready to grab the chance if we can.”

The former field hand’s face lit up. “Well, hell, Frederick, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?” Lorenzo said. “For a little while there, I thought you were softer than you ought to be, but I see it ain’t so.”

“Not me,” Frederick said. “We’ve come this far. We’ll go as much farther as we have to.”

“Now you’re talking!” Lorenzo’s grin got wider yet.

 

Jeremiah Stafford had thought New Marseille would be very much like Cosquer. Why not? They were both seaside, slaveholding cities in the United States of Atlantis, weren’t they? So they were, but they were no more identical than barrel trees and barrels.

Over on the east side of Atlantis, Cosquer had real seasons. Oh, they were milder than New Hastings’—and much milder than Hanover’s or Croydon’s—but they were there. Once in a while, it even snowed in Cosquer. Washed by the warm current of the Bay Stream, New Marseille seemed to bask in an eternal June. It was always warm. It was always humid—not muggy, the way it got in Cosquer in the summertime, but moist.

And Cosquer was an old place, the second oldest city in Atlantis: four hundred years old now, or as close as made no difference, only a year or two younger than New Hastings. The Bretons, after all, had found Atlantis even before the English fisherfolk. But the Radcliffes had seen right away that the new land needed settling, while the Kersauzons were slower on the uptake.

Well, the Kersauzons paid for it, the way slowcoaches commonly did.

New Marseille, by contrast,
was
new, as new as a freshly minted gold eagle. It hadn’t been much more than a fort and a trading post back in Victor Radcliff’s day. The best harbor south of Avalon on the West Coast, but so what? When it was hundreds of miles from the settled regions of Atlantis, that hardly mattered.

Once the railroad and then the telegraph connected New Marseille to the rest of the world, it mattered a lot. Over the past twenty years, New Marseille had seen a growth spurt the likes of which the world had never seen the likes of, as one local boaster put it. He wasn’t so far wrong, either.

There was one other big difference, too. Right this minute, all the white people in New Marseille were scared out of their wits. Many of them—most of the more prosperous ones—owned slaves. And it was impossible to look at a slave without wondering if he wanted to wring your neck as if you were a chicken, or to accept a cup of coffee from a house slave without fearing she’d slipped rat poison into it.

(Even worse was the idea that New Marseille might
not
be so different from Cosquer. Had servile insurrection raised its ugly head back there, too? Did whites look askance at Negroes and copperskins there, too? The cut telegraph wires made it impossible to know for sure. But they let Stafford’s imagination run wild, and he could imagine things far worse than reality was likely to be. Or maybe, in the present disordered state of affairs, he couldn’t—and that was a genuinely terrifying thought.)

Every so often, somebody in an upstairs window would fire at somebody down in the street. The somebody in the street—the target—was invariably white. The somebody in the window almost invariably got away. Jeremiah Stafford would have been willing to bet the shooter was bound to be colored.

He would have been willing to bet, yes, but he couldn’t find anyone who would put up money against him. Not even Consul Newton was that big a sucker.

Towns in eastern Atlantis had broad cleared belts around them. New Marseille didn’t. Insurrectionists lurked in the woods right outside the city limits. Sometimes they sneaked in to stir up the slaves in town. Colonel Sinapis’ soldiers tried to seal off the perimeter. There was too much of it, and there were not enough of them.

The garrison that had held New Marseille was pathetically grateful for reinforcements. “Don’t know what we would’ve done if those devils got in here first,” was something Consul Stafford heard again and again.

Stafford had a pretty good notion of what the garrison and the white populace would have done had New Marseille been forcibly incorporated into the Free Republic of Atlantis. They would have died: that was what.

Big guns bore on the stretch of the Hesperian Gulf in front of New Marseille. They crouched in casemates of brick and iron and earth and cement. No naval cannon could smash them, except by luck. But they pointed only out to sea. Their giant iron cannonballs and bursting shells wouldn’t cover the landward side of the city. When engineers laid out New Marseille’s works, they never imagined anyone would attack from that direction.

Well, life was full of surprises. Aside from small arms, the only pieces that would bear on the insurrectionists were three- and six-and twelve-pounders like the ones Colonel Sinapis had brought from New Hastings. Field guns were better than nothing—and they frightened the copperskins and Negroes in a way that rifle muskets didn’t—but Consul Stafford couldn’t help longing for all the massive firepower that pointed the wrong way.

“Can we get those big guns out of their works and turn them around so they give the niggers and mudfaces a dose of what for?” he asked Sinapis.

“It might be possible,” the colonel said slowly, and Stafford’s hopes leaped. But then Sinapis went on, “Even if it is, it would not be easy or quick or cheap. If you seek my professional opinion, your Excellency, the project would not be worth the trouble it causes them.”

Stafford did want Sinapis’ professional opinion. He wanted that opinion to match his own. When it didn’t, his temper frayed. “What would some of the other soldiers here say if I asked them the same question?” he inquired, his voice holding a certain edge.

Balthasar Sinapis looked him over. Stafford got the feeling he reminded the Atlantean officer of something nasty squashed on the bottom of his boot. After a moment, Sinapis answered, “Well, that is your prerogative, your Excellency. If you find someone who asserts that this is a practicable step, perhaps the army would be better served with a new commander.”