Liberating Atlantis (32 page)

“The insurrectionists planned this battle well,” Colonel Sinapis remarked. “I do not think I could have improved on their dispositions.”

Hearing that did nothing to improve Stafford’s disposition. “We can beat them?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, we can beat them,” Sinapis said. “But they can also beat us, which I had not counted on before we set out.”

If enough Atlanteans got over the wall, they would win. But the enemy had more men, and more determined men, back there than Stafford had dreamt possible. Colored fighters, savages, couldn’t be that brave . . . could they?

Sinapis’ spyglass also surveyed the front. Under it, his mustache-framed mouth twisted. He lowered the telescope. “I am very sorry, your Excellency. I do not think we shall succeed this day.”

“Dear God in heaven!” Stafford cried. “Can that—that rabble beat our finest soldiers?”

“It would seem so, yes,” the colonel answered impassively.

“They must not!” Stafford said. “Do you hear me? They
must
not!”

“It is war,” Sinapis said. “There are no
must
s in war. There are only
are
s.”

Consul Stafford almost hit him. One thing alone made the Consul hesitate: the likelihood that he would lie dead on the ground a moment after he did such an unwise thing. He groaned instead, watching everything he held dear crumbling before his eyes.

 

Eight shots in one weapon were wonderful. Reloading the pistol after firing eight shots at the Atlantean infantry was a son of a bitch bastard, as Frederick Radcliff discovered to his sorrow. Put a bullet in each chamber. Measure a charge of black powder and stuff each charge into a chamber without spilling it. Fix a percussion cap for each chamber. Do all that while your hands trembled because you’d just come as near as dammit to getting killed.

Doing it seemed to take about a year. But Frederick methodically went on. He couldn’t afford to stay unarmed. Seven more bullets for the white men—some of them would probably hit, anyhow. One more bullet for himself, just in case.

They’d got over the wall. He hadn’t dreamt they could do that. He’d also assumed that, if the white soldiers did get over the wall, the battle was as good as lost. But it turned out not to be. The Negroes and copperskins he led didn’t flinch, even from the soldiers’ most savage bayonet work. They rushed toward the white men in gray, not away from them. They might be less skilled with the bayonet themselves, but they were every bit as plucky.

And they turned the wall to an advantage. They pinned the soldiers who’d got over against it and started killing them there. It was madness. It was mayhem. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither side offered it. For longer than Frederick thought possible, neither side gave ground, either.

A white man’s voice, furious and astonished, rose above the din of shrieks and gunfire: “You nigger assholes can’t do this!”

“Hell we can’t!” Frederick shouted back. He had no idea whether the soldier heard him. He’d finally got that damned eight-shooter reloaded. As he raised it, he breathed a small prayer that it wouldn’t explode in his hand. If you didn’t do a good enough job cleaning off excess powder, more than one chamber would fire when you pulled the trigger. Only one bullet could get out, of course. The rest . . . the rest would probably blow off the hand that held the revolver.

More whites scrambled up over the wall to try to help their comrades. Frederick fired at one of them. The man clutched his ribs and tumbled back on the far side of the stone fence. Only after that did Frederick realize the gun had hurt the enemy, not him.

Then—and the thought within him warred between
all at once
and
at last!
—more Atlantean soldiers were climbing over the fence to get away than to come to their friends’ rescue. “We licked ’em!” Lorenzo cried exultantly. He asked, “Shall we go after ’em?”

“If we do, their cannon will murder us.” Frederick unbent enough to follow that with a question of his own: “Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“Nooo.” The way Lorenzo stretched the word showed his reluctance. But he didn’t try to talk Frederick out of the decision. He might not like it, but he saw it was right. A moment later, he brightened: “When word of what we done here gets around, every copper man and black man in these parts is going to come running to join our army.”

“Expect you’re right.” Frederick hoped he sounded more enthusiastic than he felt. That would bring his army more men—men he mostly didn’t have weapons for, and men he would have trouble feeding.

Lorenzo went on, “Planters around here’ll have to light out for the tall timber, too, unless they want to get their big houses burned down while they’re layin’ in bed asleep.”

“That’s a fact.” Now Frederick could sound happy without reservation. “The Free Republic of Atlantis just got bigger.”

“Damned right it did,” Lorenzo agreed. “Those white sons of bitches’ll run back to New Marseille with their tails between their legs. Everything outside the city limits, I reckon that’s ours from now on.”

Half an hour later, a Negro who’d been a butler before the uprising and served as the rebels’ quartermaster these days came up to him. “You know where we can get more percussion caps, boss?” he asked. “We’re mighty low on ’em, mighty low. We’re short on powder and bullets, too, but we can come up with some of those, anyways. Percussion caps, though . . . You know how to make ’em?”

“Not me.” Frederick shook his head. “They got mercury in ’em—I know that. Mercury fulmisomethin’.”

“Know where we can get our hands on some this mercury whatever-the-devil-you-called-it?” the quartermaster persisted. “Can you dig it out of the ground?”

“Don’t think so. I think you’ve got to make it some way, like they make sugar out of sugar cane,” Frederick answered.

“But you don’t know how.” It wasn’t a question. But, by the way the other Negro said it, Frederick should have known how. The quartermaster set his hands on his hips. “How are we supposed to keep fighting if we can’t get no more percussion caps?”

“I never said we couldn’t do that,” Frederick replied. “I just said we couldn’t make ’em ourselves. But we can steal ’em from the Atlantean soldiers. We’re getting more from the men we killed at the wall, right?”

“Some more,” the quartermaster said grudgingly. “Not hardly enough to fight another battle with, though.”

“Well, we’ll get lots.” Frederick soothed him as best he could. “Some of the white folks in these parts’ll have percussion muskets, too. We’ll grab us more caps once we kill them or run them off.”

“A few more,” the quartermaster said. “But if the white soldiers just keep on picking fights with us, we’re licked, on account of before long we won’t have nothin’ to shoot back with. What do you propose to do about that, Mr. Frederick Radcliff?”

Frederick wondered whether his grandfather had ever had the family name flung in his face like that. Probably—the Radcliffs and Radcliffes had been prominent in Atlantis for so long, the surname made a handy curse.

And, even if the quartermaster was a snotty nigger (yes, Frederick knew that was how Master Barford would have thought of the fellow, but it fit too well to let him pretend it didn’t), the question needed answering. “They just got whipped, remember,” he said. “They won’t be hot to jump on us again right away. And I figure we’ll get our hands on more percussion caps by the time they do.”

“How you gonna do that?” the other man challenged.

“I’ll manage.” Frederick actually had an idea. He was damned if he’d tell it to anybody who talked like that.

 

Stafford wanted to try to hit the insurrectionists again. To Leland Newton’s surprise, Colonel Sinapis was thinking about it, too. “Are you both out of your minds?” Newton said. “We’ll just bang our heads on the stone wall again.” He pointed to the fence where the Negroes and copperskins had taken such a toll of Atlantean soldiers two days earlier.

“They can’t do that twice,” the other Consul declared.

“You didn’t think they could do it once,” Newton reminded him.

“This is the only reason I pause now,” Colonel Sinapis said. “I was surprised once. If I must take these people more seriously, then I must, that is all. If we were in touch with New Hastings by telegraph, I could ask for reinforcements. Without them, I fear we could not defend a perimeter after another misfortune.”

“Plenty of New Marseille militiamen to draw on,” Stafford said. “They’re a lot closer than any regulars except the garrison in New Marseille city. And they’d be up for fighting slaves who’ve risen up—Lord knows that’s so.”

“How well they would do it is, I fear, a different question,” Colonel Sinapis told him. “They have no experience in the field, they have little experience in drill, they are unaccustomed to following orders—as what Atlantean is not?—and they would be armed with flintlock muskets no better than the ones their great- grandfathers used against the English.”

“But they want to fight,” Stafford said. “That counts, too.”

“No doubt,” the colonel replied: one of the more devastating agreements Newton had ever heard. Sinapis went on, “In any case, we are lower on ammunition than I would like. After the next supply column comes in, we will be in a better position to try the enemy again.”

“That makes sense,” said Newton, who didn’t want to fight again any time soon.

“That does make sense,” Stafford agreed. “When we fight again—and we’d better do it pretty quick—we ought to make damned sure we win.” Differing motives led the two Consuls to the same conclusion now.

But that conclusion turned out not to be worth a cent, or even an atlantean. The next supply column didn’t bring more bullets and powder and percussion caps and hardtack and salt pork and coffee to the Atlantean army. The next supply column never arrived. A handful of harried soldiers did. The tale they told wasn’t pretty.

“Bushwhacked!” one of them said, his eyes wide and staring. “We were going through the woods, and all of a sudden, like, there were these trees across the road, and wild men shooting at us from both sides. Wagons couldn’t turn around. Hell, we couldn’t do anything. I’m a good Christian man, and it’s God’s own miracle I’m here to give you the word. You’ll see me in church a-praying every Sunday from here on out.”

Another survivor nodded sorrowfully. “They came on us screamin’ and yellin’ and leapin’ and carryin’ on,” he said. “Some of ’em had bayonets, and some of ’em had hatchets, and. . . . Dear Lord, I don’t want to remember some of the things I seen when they jumped us.”

How soon did these fellows quit fighting and run away?
Newton wondered. Were they the ones who’d fled first and fastest? Or had they played dead till the insurrectionists weren’t interested in them any more? Either way, they hadn’t covered themselves with glory.

Balthasar Sinapis had more immediate worries. “What became of the wagon train?” he demanded. “Where are our munitions and victuals?”

“Damned niggers grabbed all that shit,” answered the soldier who’d promised to go to church every Sunday from now on. “Reckon they’ll send us more from New Marseille sooner or later.”

“If we get it later but the insurrectionists have it now . . .” By the way Jeremiah Stafford looked around, he expected fighters in slave clothes to start popping out of the ground like skinks. (So Newton thought, anyway; a man from Europe or Terranova would have been more likely to compare them to moles.)

“This is not good,” Colonel Sinapis said, and Newton would have had a hard time quarreling with him. “This is not even slightly good. The loss of the munitions . . . The bullets and powder are bad enough, but the percussion caps are worse. The rebels had not a prayer of making their own percussion caps.”

“Can we recapture them?” Newton asked.

“The wagons, perhaps,” Sinapis said. “What they held? I would doubt that. Can you not see the Negroes and copperskins in your mind’s eye, each with a crate in his arms or on his back?”

Unhappily, Newton nodded. He could picture that only too well, the men singing the same songs they would have used at harvest time as they carried away their precious booty. Consul Stafford would know from experience what songs those were. Newton didn’t, but his imagination seemed to serve well enough.

“Maybe we
should
attack now,” Stafford said, “before they bring the loot up to their position.”

“Your colleague has the command today,” the colonel reminded him.

“Tomorrow is bound to be too late,” Stafford said.

You’ll get the blame if we sit here
, he meant. “Well, we can try,” Newton said. He did not mind if papers south of the Stour screamed at him. If newspapers in his own section did the same, that wouldn’t be good. He could be only so dilatory before they started. If he wanted another term as Consul, which he did . . . “Yes, we can try.”

It was almost noon by then. The soldiers didn’t expect to attack the rebels’ position that day. Getting orders to the junior officers and forming the men up for the assault took longer than Leland Newton thought it should. The soldiers went forward willingly enough, but with no great enthusiasm.

And it soon became plain that Sinapis had waited too long to give the order (Newton didn’t think about his own role in the troops’ late start.) Either the insurrectionists had had enough percussion caps and ammunition all along or the copperskins and Negroes lugging those stolen crates had got to their position before the Atlantean attack went in. A rippling wave of fire from behind the stone wall greeted the white men in gray who advanced on it.

The soldiers didn’t press the assault the way they had before. None of them reached the wall, let alone got over it. They returned the insurrectionists’ fire for a while, then fell back toward their encampment once more, bringing their dead and wounded with them. Newton had a hard time getting angry at them for their performance. They could see they had no chance to break the position before them. What sensible professional would let himself get killed with so little chance to realize a return on the investment of his life?