Liberating Atlantis (34 page)

Some of the whites carried muskets, others pistols. They all looked wide-eyed and jumpy, as if they were dealing with so many ferocious wild animals. Like as not, they thought they were. And they seemed to get even jumpier as they moved away from the cover of the house and barn.

Frederick waved encouragingly. “Go on. Nothing’s gonna happen, not unless you start it.”

They came up to him. “You got nerve, nigger,” the spokesman said.

“Maybe you got nerve, too, trustin’ me,” Frederick answered. He almost said
trustin’ a nigger
, but he couldn’t make himself call himself by that name to a white man, even if he sometimes used it among his own people.

The white studied him with disconcertingly keen gray eyes. “You’re a smart fellow, ain’t you?”

Frederick shrugged. “Anybody who brags on bein’ smart really ain’t.”

Ignoring that, the white went on, “I wouldn’t tell you this if you didn’t already know, but I reckon you do. We get out of here, we’ll join up with the soldiers first chance we find.”

“I suppose so,” Frederick said. “You reckon that, just as soon as your bunch comes in, they’ll have enough people to whip us up one side and down the other?”

“I—” The white man paused and sent him another sharp stare. “You
are
a smart fellow. No, I don’t figure we’ll make the difference all by our lonesome.”

“In that case, we may as well let you go, long as you don’t kick up trouble,” Frederick said.

As the white man walked on with his comrades, he got off one last verbal shot: “Some smart fellows, they come to grief on account of they ain’t as smart as they think they are.”

That was bound to be true. Frederick hoped it wouldn’t turn him upside down. But how could you know you were outsmarting yourself till you’d actually gone and done it?

Those white men would have found they’d outsmarted themselves if they opened fire on the insurrectionists. At least half of Frederick thought they would. Whites had trouble taking blacks and copperskins seriously as fighting men. Maybe the sight of all those bayonets had made these whites more thoughtful than usual. Bayonets didn’t have to kill to be useful weapons. They only had to intimidate, and they were splendid for that.

“You sure you should have let them go?” Lorenzo asked.

“No,” Frederick answered, which made the copperskin blink. He added, “But if we break a bargain once we make it, we give the whites an excuse to do the same thing.”

“Like they need one,” Lorenzo said scornfully.

“Army hasn’t fought dirty,” Frederick said. “They’d be worse if
we
did. Why give ourselves more trouble? Don’t you reckon we got enough?”

“Well, it’s pretty bad, way things are now,” Lorenzo allowed. “I don’t like getting shot at, and that’s the Lord’s truth. But I know what’s worse.”

“What’s that?” Frederick asked.

“Way things were before,” the copperskin answered. “I was gonna be a field hand the rest of my days—till I got too old and feeble to go out to the harvest, anyhow. Then I’d sit in my damn cabin till I got sick and died, or else Master Barford’d knock me over the head on account of I cost too much to feed. If I’m gonna go out, I’d sooner go out fightin’.”

Frederick pondered that, but not for long. “Me, too,” he said. White militiamen coming up from the south were one thing. White militiamen coming down from the north were something else again. Their leader, a bushy-bearded ruffian named Collins or Conlin or something like that, spread his battered hands and told Leland Newton, “I’m damned glad to be here, your Honor. I’m damned glad to be anywhere right now, and that’s a fact.”

“They let you get away, I heard,” Newton said.

“They did,” Collins or Conlin agreed. “They could have killed the lot of us, but they made terms and they kept them.” He might have been a man announcing a minor miracle.

“We would have done our best to avenge you,” Newton said.

“I expect so.” The militiaman nodded. “Wouldn’t’ve done us a hell of a lot of good, though, would it?”

Newton didn’t know what he could say to that, so he didn’t say anything. Instead, he asked, “Who made the arrangement with you? Were you sure he could get his friends to keep it?”

“We weren’t sure of
nothin’
.” Collins or Conlin spat a stream of pipeweed juice to emphasize that. “We damn near—
damn
near—started shootin’ at each other before we decided we didn’t have no choice. We was trapped where we was at. Fellow who dickered with us was a nigger. That’s all I know about him for sure. Later on, some people told us he was Fred Radcliff hisself, but I can’t say for sure he was and I can’t say for sure he wasn’t.”

“What would you have done if you’d known he was?”

“Good question.” The ruffian spat again, expertly. “If we’d plugged him then, they would’ve massacreed us for sure.”

He massacreed the pronunciation of the word, but Newton didn’t correct him. Instead, the Consul asked, “So the rebels observed the usages of war, then?”

“Observed the what?” Plainly, the militiaman knew no more of the usages of war than a honker knew about history. After a pause for thought, the fellow said, “They told us they wouldn’t kill us if we came out peaceable-like, and they didn’t. So if you mean, did they play square, well, I reckon they did.”

“That will do,” Newton said, nodding.

“But what difference does it make?” The militiaman sounded honestly puzzled. “They’re still a bunch of mudfaces and niggers. They’re still slaves in arms against their masters, too.” He might not know anything about the usages of war, but he was sure what such folk deserved.

At the time, Consul Newton had no idea whether that would matter. It turned out to, and the very next day. Atlantean soldiers brought in four rebels they’d captured spying on the camp: a Negro and three copperskins. It was the first success the gray-uniformed men had had for a while. Their friends whooped and hollered. “String ’em up!” somebody shouted, and in an instant everyone was baying out the same cry.

Jeremiah Stafford nodded like an Old Testament prophet. “Just what the renegades deserve,” he said.

He had the command that day. If he ordered the captives hanged, hanged they would be. All the same, Newton said, “I think we ought to treat them as prisoners of war.”

The other Consul stared at him as if he’d taken leave of his senses. “You’ve come out with a lot of crazy things, but that may take the cake,” Stafford said. “Why on earth should we act like a pack of fools? I mean, look at those villains!”

Newton did. Copperskins were said to be impassive. One red-brown prisoner was trying to put up a strong front. The other two, and the Negro, seemed frankly terrified. Even so, Newton answered, “They didn’t kill that pack of militiamen, and they could have. Besides, if we hang these fellows, what will the insurrectionists do when they get their hands on some of our men? After the last two fights, chances are they already hold white prisoners.”

He made Stafford grunt, which was more of a response than he’d thought he would get. “Why on earth do you imagine they would respect anything we do?” Stafford returned.

“
Because
they’ve kept terms after agreeing to them,” Newton said. “War is bad enough when both sides stick by the common rules. It only gets worse when they throw them over the side.”

Stafford grunted again. “The insurrectionists threw them over the side when they began their rising.”

“Will you talk to Colonel Sinapis before you go looking for the closest tree with a thick branch?” Newton asked. “Why not see what a professional soldier thinks of the whole business?”

“He’s soft on the insurrectionists, too,” Stafford muttered, but he didn’t say no. With Newton following in his wake, he hunted up the colonel.

Balthasar Sinapis gnawed thoughtfully at his mustache. “There are times when you
do
hang prisoners,” he said. “When the other side has committed some atrocity, you want them to know they have not put you in fear, and that you can repay them in their own coin. Here, though . . . In battle, the rebels have not acted like savages. Do we want to give them the excuse to start?”

“If they weren’t savages, they wouldn’t have risen against their masters,” Stafford insisted.

“No doubt the English papers said the same thing about the Atlantean Assembly’s army a lifetime ago,” Newton said.

“It’s not the same thing, damn it,” Stafford said.

“It never is when the shoe goes on the other foot,” Colonel Sinapis put in. Stafford scowled at him. Sinapis went on, “Is it different enough to make us fierce for the sake of fierceness? History argues that if you make a war against slaves a war to the knife, a war to the knife it shall be.”

“True,” Stafford said. “How many tens of thousands of them did the Romans crucify after they beat Spartacus?”

“How many Romans did those slaves kill before the legions beat them?” Newton said.

One more grunt from his colleague. Stafford threw his hands in the air. “All right, let them keep breathing for now. If their friends give us cause, we can always hang the wretches later.”

“That seems fair,” Newton allowed—it was more than he’d expected to win from his fellow Consul.

“So it does,” Colonel Sinapis said, and that seemed to settle that.

 

Jeremiah Stafford felt like a man struggling in quicksand. It wasn’t just that he’d let Leland Newton talk him into treating captured blacks and copperskins as prisoners of war. That was bad enough, but there was worse. The servile insurrection sizzled everywhere but the places where Atlantean soldiers actually stood.

A man who went off into the woods to ease himself might not come out again. If he didn’t, his friends were all too likely to find him with his throat cut or his skull smashed in. They weren’t likely to find the skulkers who’d murdered him.

“Is this what you call fighting in accordance with the usages of war?” Stafford asked Newton after three ambushes in two days.

“It may not be sporting, but I wouldn’t say it breaks international law,” the other Consul answered. “If Colonel Sinapis feels otherwise, I’m sure he’ll let us know.”

“Bah,” Stafford said. The colonel didn’t agree with him often enough to suit him. As far as he was concerned, Sinapis had a soft spot in his heart for the insurrectionists. Stafford wondered why. Hadn’t the colonel been a loyal—maybe even an overloyal—servant of the status quo back in Europe? Did he have a guilty conscience he was trying to salve years too late?

More and more whites fled the territory north and east of the city of New Marseille. Some of them took service with the militiamen fighting alongside the Atlantean regulars. Others seemed more inclined to moan about their sea of troubles than to take arms against them.

“Why haven’t you people killed all those raggedy-ass bastards by now?” an unhappy planter demanded of Stafford.

“I wish it were as easy as you make it sound,” the Consul answered.

“Well, why ain’t it?” the planter said. “Nothin’ there but a pack of slaves. You should take the lash to ’em. They’d run miles, dog my cats if they wouldn’t.”

Something inside Stafford jangled. Someone in ancient days was supposed to have put down a slave uprising like that. He tried and failed to remember who it was. He suspected the failure was a sign the ancient historian who told the story was talking through his hat.

He also suspected the planter was doing the same thing. “Did you try scaring them off with a whip?” he asked.

“Well, no,” the fellow admitted. “They woulda shot me if I had.”

“Then why do you think things are any different for us?” Stafford inquired.

“On account of you’re the government,” the planter said.

By the way he said it, that gave the army everything but power from On High.
If only it were true
, Stafford thought. Aloud, he said, “Don’t you see that the insurrectionists have rejected government along with everything else?”

“But they’ve got no business doing that!” the man exclaimed.

How often had he rejected government when it tried to do something he didn’t fancy? Raise his taxes, for instance? No doubt he’d done it without thinking twice. Now he needed what government could give him, and so he was crying out for it. Listening to him made Stafford very tired.

“We shall do what we can for you, sir,” the Consul said. “If you will pick up a musket and do something for yourself, that will also help your country’s cause.”

“Maybe I will,” the planter said, which meant he wanted nothing to do with a notion that might endanger his precious carcass. Seeing as much, Stafford went off to talk with another refugee, hoping that fellow would show more sense. Just because a man hoped for such things didn’t mean he got them.

“I wish we knew more about what’s going on in the rest of the country,” Stafford said to Consul Newton the next day.

“That we don’t probably isn’t the best sign,” his opposite number replied. “The rebels are doing too well at cutting the telegraph wires. They control the countryside, and I don’t know what we can do about that.”

“We ought to do more than we have been,” Stafford said fretfully. “We are not aggressive enough—not nearly. And that is not least your fault: you want the insurrectionists to prevail.”

“I want justice to prevail and peace to return,” Newton said.

“What you call justice is a southern man’s nightmare,” Stafford said.

“A southern white man’s, maybe,” Newton answered. “To a southern colored man, the way he lived up until the rebellion was the nightmare. If we could find some way not to leave anyone of any blood too dissatisfied—”

“Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Stafford said. “And, if anyone is to be satisfied, I intend it shall be the white man. Believe me, your Excellency, that is my first concern.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Newton said. “That is a large part of the problem.” He walked away, leaving Stafford obscurely punctured.