Liberating Atlantis (33 page)

But their failure left another question hanging in the muggy air. Newton asked it: “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?”

 

Setting out from New Hastings, Jeremiah Stafford had thought everything was obvious. They would close with the insurrectionists. They would smash their gimcrack army and hang or shoot or burn Frederick Radcliff and as many other leaders as they could catch. They would return the copperskins and Negroes to the servitude for which they were fit by nature. And then they would go back to the capital in triumph.

Right now, getting back to New Hastings in one piece would have looked like triumph to Stafford. More things had gone wrong than he would have imagined possible before the army set out. And the uprising had proved much worse than he’d dreamt it could in his worst nightmares.

“What are we going to do?” he demanded of Colonel Sinapis. “If we don’t put down the insurrectionists—” He held his head in both hands, as if the enormity of the idea made it want to explode. And that wasn’t so far from true, either.

“We need more munitions. We need more soldiers,” Sinapis said. “I do not believe any troops will be forthcoming from the national government for some time—if ever. The state militiamen you have mentioned are less desirable, but. . . .” He shrugged.

“A drowning man doesn’t care a cent what kind of spar he grabs,” Stafford said. “Send out the call, Colonel, by all means. If we have twice as many men under arms here, we can do . . . more than we can now, anyway. Will you tell me I’m mistaken?”
You’d better not
, his voice warned.

And Sinapis didn’t. “Yes, I think the time to do that is here, if we are serious about quelling the insurrection.”

“What else would we be?” Stafford yelped.

Colonel Sinapis shrugged again. “I am not a political man, your Excellency. I am a soldier. You and your colleague decide the policies here. Once you have done that, I shall carry out to the best of my ability any part of them involving soldiers.”

Stafford muttered darkly. Agreeing on anything with Consul Newton seemed to require a special miracle every time it happened. But Newton didn’t try to dissuade Sinapis from summoning the New Marseille militia, though he did say, “I worry that they may prove oversavage when they encounter armed Negroes and copperskins.”

“The enemy is not gentle himself,” Stafford pointed out.

“No doubt he has his reasons for harshness,” Newton said.

“No doubt the militiamen do, too,” Stafford snapped. “Some of them were forced to flee their homes. Some had their wives ravished, or their sisters, or their daughters.”

“Ravished, perhaps, by mulattos or halfbreed copperskins,” Newton said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Stafford asked coldly.

“What it says,” the other Consul answered. “You are not a naive man, your Excellency. You know slaveholders have been going in unto their bondswomen for as long as Negroes and copperskins have been in Atlantis.”

“That’s different,” Stafford said.

“I believe you believe it is,” Newton said. “Whether the slaves believe the same thing may be open to doubt.”

“Be damned to the slaves!”

“Are they not saying, ‘Be damned to the masters!’? In their place, would you not say the same thing?”

“I am not in their place. They want to place me there, though,” Stafford said. “If they win, we shall have colored masters whipping white slaves and forcing white women to go on ministering to their filthy lusts. Is that what you have in mind?”

“Of course not. And, if you listen to the insurrectionists, it is not what they have in mind,” Newton replied. “They claim the Free Republic of Atlantis is to have equality for every man of every color.”

“Likely tell!” Jeremiah Stafford rolled his eyes. “They will claim anything to keep on fighting. You believe them, do you? And I suppose you will also believe that mothers find babies under cabbage leaves.”

He had the satisfaction of watching Newton turn red. “I know where babies come from,” the other Consul said tightly. “I am merely trying to point out to you that the rebels have more reasons for rising than Satanic wickedness. In fact, that is how they judge the system that brought their ancestors here and turned them into property.”

“As if I care how they judge it!” Stafford fleered. “Their cousins in squalid so-called freedom live worse, more benighted lives than they do. They have learned our language here. They have learned of our God here, the one true God. They are part of a . . . a great country.”

Newton was very quick. He heard the small hesitation and knew it for what it was. “You started to say ‘a free country,’ didn’t you? What does it profit a slave to be part of a free country? It profits only his master.”

“Maybe one day the mudfaces and niggers may be advanced enough to deserve freedom,” Stafford said. “But that day is not here.”

“And you are doing your best to make sure it never comes,” Newton said. “If you do not give a boiler a safety valve, it will explode when you keep the fire too hot for too long. We are watching one of those explosions now.” He walked away before Stafford could answer.

The Consul from Cosquer was much happier when militiamen started coming into camp. He could have been happier yet, for they seemed less like soldiers and more like braggarts and blowhards and ruffians. Little by little, he realized the Atlantean regulars had spoiled him. They were hard-bitten men, too, but they had discipline. Anyone among them who got out of line promptly suffered for it.

By contrast, the militiamen did as they pleased . . . till regular sergeants and corporals started knocking sense into them. One underofficer died in the process. So did six or eight militiamen, most of them quite suddenly. That did not count the fellow who’d knifed the regular corporal. His company commander didn’t want to turn him over for punishment, and his friends seemed ready to defend him.

They soon changed their minds. Staring into the muzzles of a dozen fieldpieces double-shotted with canister would have changed Jeremiah Stafford’s mind, too. Stafford judged it would have changed anybody’s mind. The militiaman got a drumhead court-martial. Then he was hanged from a stout bough sticking out from a pine. The drop wasn’t enough to break his neck and kill him quickly. He writhed his life away over the next several minutes.

After he finally stilled forever, Colonel Sinapis looked out at the wide-eyed amateur soldiers who’d watched the execution. “Follow orders from your officers and from our officers and un derofficers, and nothing like this will happen to you,” he said. “We all face the same enemies, after all. If you work with us, we can beat them together. And if you work against us, I promise you will discover we are more frightful than any Negro or copperskin ever born.” He paused, then added one word more: “Dismissed.”

The militiamen couldn’t have disappeared any faster if he’d called down thunder and lightning on their heads. A couple of dozen of them disappeared for good during the night. Sinapis took that in stride. “We shall be better off without them than we would have been with them,” he said.

“Technically, they’re deserters. If you catch them, you can hang them, too,” Consul Newton said.

“No, the colonel’s right,” Stafford said—words that didn’t come out of his mouth every day. “If they can’t stand the heat, they shouldn’t go near the fire. Let them run. Not everyone is a hero, even if he can fool himself into thinking he is for a little while.”

“Well, maybe.” Newton was even less eager to agree with Stafford than Stafford was to agree with Sinapis.

With the army reinforced, the colonel was able to send a good-sized force down to New Marseille to protect the next wagon train. The wagons reached the army without much trouble. The insurrectionists must have known they were well protected, because they did no more than snipe at them from the woods.

Hardtack and salt pork weren’t inspiring—Stafford had already discovered how inspiring army rations weren’t. But having enough of them was better than not. And having enough munitions was literally a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, that also held true for the insurrectionists. What they’d hijacked would keep them fighting for some time to come.

And what they’d hijacked would also let them—did also let them—expand the insurrection. More white refugees began streaming out of the north, most of them with nothing but the clothes on their backs and perhaps a musket or an eight-shooter clenched in one fist. The stories they told made Stafford’s blood boil.

“How can you stand to listen to these people without your heart’s going out to them?” he demanded of Leland Newton.

“I’m not saying it doesn’t,” his colleague answered. “But my heart also goes out to the Negroes and copperskins these same people have been mistreating for generations, while yours is hard as a stone toward them.”

Stafford only stared. “How anyone could care about those savages . . . How anyone could say they are mistreated when they gain the benefits of Atlantean civilization . . .”

“The lash, the shackles, the ball and chain, the auction block, the unwelcome summons to the master’s bedchamber,” Newton said dryly.

“You have entirely the wrong attitude,” Stafford said.

“If I do, then so does most of Atlantis north of the Stour,” the other Consul replied. “And so does almost all of Europe. The font of what you call Atlantean civilization thinks little of what has sprung from it.”

“I care nothing for what Europe thinks. We needed to get free of Europe, by God. Or would you rather we still flew the Union Jack and bowed down to Queen Victoria?” Stafford said.

“You must know I would not,” Newton said, which was true enough. “But I would also rather that we did not bow down to injustice here.”

“Nor do we,” Stafford declared.

His colleague sighed. “More and more people—of all colors—think we do.”

XV

A couple of dozen white men had holed up on a plantation. They held the big house and the nearby barn. Frederick Radcliff decided they showed enough determination to make a rush more expensive than he cared for. He approached the big house holding as large a flag of truce as he could carry.

He’d barely got to hailing distance before a white man inside the house yelled, “Hold it right there, nigger! Flag or no flag, ought to shoot you down like the mad dog you are.”

“Go ahead,” Frederick answered. “See what happens afterwards.” He feared that what would happen was that the uprising would fall apart. But that wasn’t what he wanted the white man to think about. And he hadn’t named himself, so the desperate whites couldn’t know they had the leading insurrectionist in their sights.

“Well, say your say, then,” the white man told him grudgingly. “We’ll see how much manure you pack into it.”

“Got no manure,” Frederick said. “What we got is, we got enough men to kill the lot of you. You think we won’t use ’em, you’re crazy.” He didn’t want to use them. How many eight-shooters did the white defenders carry? Those were the guns that made a difference when things came to close quarters.

Their spokesman jeered at him: “Likely tell, black boy! You’re tryin’ to scare us out on account of you ain’t got the balls to drive us out. Probably another dozen skulkers back there behind you, and that’s it.”

“Think so, do you? You’ll see.” Frederick had looked for some such response from the whites. Because he’d looked for it, he’d got his own men ready for it ahead of time. When he turned and waved, they knew what to do.

Black men and copperskins with shouldered, bayoneted rifle muskets marched out of the woods to one side and into the trees on the other side. Frederick’s force
did
greatly outnumber the fortified whites. He made it seem even larger by having the men hurry through the trees where the whites couldn’t see them and then march out into the open again.

He finally waved again, this time for the parade to stop. “Well?” he called. “Have we got the men we need, or what?”

No one answered him for some little while. He could guess what that meant: the defenders were arguing among themselves. Some had to think they couldn’t hold off the rebels, while others would be more hopeful. At last, the leather-lunged spokesman bawled, “Well, if you don’t want to fight, what do you want?”

“Come out. You can keep your guns, but come out,” Frederick answered. “You don’t want to stay in the Free Republic of Atlantis, you can march away. Long as you don’t shoot at us, we won’t shoot at you. You do start shootin’, you’re all dead. You stay in there, you’re all dead, too. That’d hurt us some, but it sure wouldn’t do you any good.”

Another pause. Then the white man asked, “How do we know we can trust you? We come out, you got us where you want us.”

“You’re in deep water any which way, and you know it,” Frederick said. “Have you ever heard of the Free Republic of Atlantis makin’ a deal like this and then going back on it?”

“No, but if you murder everybody who comes out we wouldn’t’ve heard about it, would we?” The white man had his reasons for being suspicious. Frederick made himself remember that. The fellow was dicing for his life with enemies he hated.

“Killing everybody ain’t that easy. Somebody plays pigsnake or something,” Frederick said. Everyone in southern Atlantis knew about pigsnakes. They weren’t poisonous. When they got into danger, they puffed themselves up and hissed and snapped—and then they rolled onto their backs and played dead. Frederick went on, “ ’ Sides, some of us’d brag if we did that kind of thing. People run their mouths, no matter what color they are, and that’s a fact.”

He waited again. He didn’t know what the white men would decide. He didn’t know what he would have done himself in a mess like that. He was glad he wasn’t the one who had to figure it out.

“Time’s a-wasting,” he called, hoping to speed things up.

He didn’t, though, or not very much. He stood there in the hot sun till the front door to the big house finally opened. “All right,” the spokesman shouted. “We’re coming out. You lied to us, we’ll kill as many of you bastards as we can.”