Liberating Atlantis (37 page)

“If there are any places like that,” Frederick said.

“Bound to be some,” the copperskin insisted. “Let me ask around—I’ll see what I can come up with.”

Frederick didn’t tell him no. He didn’t want the Atlantean army hounding his rebels, either. And, before long, Lorenzo found a mulatto (or maybe he was a quadroon—he was nearer yellow than brown) who said he knew about a place where the main road ran through a valley wooded on both sides. “They go in there, a bunch of ’em don’t come out the other side,” the man said.

“That sounds good,” Frederick replied. “Next question is, can we get there without hanging out a sign telling the white folks why we’re heading that way?”

Lorenzo sent him an admiring glance. “That’s the kind of thing you wouldn’t’ve worried about when we started. Neither would I, chances are.”

“Long as you live, you better learn somethin’ from it,” Frederick said. “Only wasting your time if you don’t.”

“Got that right,” Lorenzo said. He put his head together with the light-skinned Negro. When the two men separated, Lorenzo was smiling. The white men leading the Atlantean army would not have rejoiced to see that smile. To top it off, Lorenzo nodded. “I think we can do it without making the buckra suspicious.”

That made Frederick smile in turn. Every slave used the word
buckra
from time to time to refer to white men. Every Negro slave Frederick had known insisted it came from an African language. No copperskin he’d ever heard of claimed it sprang from Terranova, but that didn’t stop copperskins from coming out with it.

And Lorenzo and the high-yellow local slave turned out to know what they were talking about. The valley—Happy Valley, the local man called it—was the perfect place for an ambush. Frederick’s fighters retreated toward the northeast and passed through the valley. They seemed to, at any rate. A lot of them melted away to either side instead. After the white Atlanteans charged forward, the insurrectionists would make them pay.

Only one thing went wrong: the Atlantean soldiers didn’t charge forward. They paused at the southern end of Happy Valley and sent patrols forward to see what was going on in there.

At Frederick’s orders, and Lorenzo’s, no one fired at the white scouts except what appeared to be the retreating rebel army’s rear guard. The idea was to make the white soldiers and militiamen believe the insurrectionists hadn’t posted men in the woods to ravage them when they stormed after the withdrawing Negroes and copperskins.

It was a good idea. Frederick remained convinced of that even afterwards. So did Lorenzo—but then, of course, he would have, because it was his. The one trouble was, it didn’t work.

The white scouts seemed to know something smelled like rotting crayfish right away. Instead of pressing on after the tail of the withdrawing rebel army (a tail now much stronger than the body of which it had been a part), the white men studied the trees and ferns to either side of the dirt road. They scratched their heads and rubbed their chins and generally acted like men who didn’t like what they were seeing.

Come on in! The water’s fine!
Frederick thought at them, as loudly as he could. By the intent expression on Lorenzo’s face, the copperskin was also doing his best to will the white men forward. Which only went to show that willing someone forward was a hell of a lot easier to talk about than to do.

Little by little, the Atlantean army advanced till it was close to the edge of the woods. The field artillery unlimbered and sprayed as much of the forest as the guns could reach with cannon balls and canister. Frederick hoped his fighters had had the sense to scoot back when they saw the cannon taking aim at them. If they hadn’t, it would be too late for some of them.

“How many of those white bastards can you see?” Lorenzo asked. “Are they screening us so they can go around to our right or our left before we cipher out what they’re up to?”

Frederick wanted to say no. He couldn’t, not when the Atlantean army had repeatedly done that before. He peered through a purloined spyglass, then passed it to Lorenzo. “Doesn’t seem like they are,” he said. “Or does it look different to you?”

After a long stare of his own, Lorenzo said, “I don’t
think
they are. Harder to be sure, though, now that they’ve got all those God-damned militiamen alongside the regulars. I hate those sons of bitches.”

“Well, Jesus Christ! Who in his right mind doesn’t?” Frederick said. “The soldiers are just . . . soldiers. They’ve got a job to do, and they do it. But most of the militiamen are the shitheels who bought and sold us. They want to keep on doing it, too.”

“And killing us. And fucking us,” Lorenzo added.

“Yes. And those,” Frederick said heavily. “Are we going to let that keep on happening?”

“Maybe they can still kill me. We’ve already killed a lot of them, but nowhere near enough. The rest . . .” Lorenzo shook his head. A lock of his straight black hair flopped down over his eyes. He brushed it back with the palm of his hand. “No one’s gonna
own
me any more, not ever again.”

He was bound to be right about that. If he and Frederick were unlucky enough to be captured, they wouldn’t be returned to slavery, as some of the men and women who followed them might. No, they would die whatever lingering, instructive death the ingenuity of the whites who’d taken them might devise.

Frederick had always known such things were possible, even likely. That was why he always kept a last bullet for himself in his eight-shooter. What slave didn’t have such knowledge? Fear of consequences, fear of failing, kept insurrections rare—but made them all the more desperate when they did break out. Right now, Frederick didn’t care to dwell on all the things that might happen to him and his followers if they failed. He aimed to keep from failing if he possibly could.

Because he did, he went back to dwelling on what the white Atlantean soldiers and militiamen were up to. “We’ve taught ’em respect,” he said slowly. “They’ve learned they’d better not just rush up like a herd of cows. We carve ’em into steaks when they try.”

“Too bad they’ve figured that out,” Lorenzo said. “They were easier to fight when they played the fool.”

The white Atlanteans had taught Frederick a lesson, too: not to keep his own scouts too close to the main body of his army. When the whites did try another flanking maneuver, he found out about it in time to shift part of his own force and delay the enemy. That let the rest of his men take new positions at their leisure. Seeing that the flanking move was doomed to fail, the white men broke it off early.

Both armies held their positions for a while. Frederick sent out raiders to try to wreck the enemy’s supply columns. His own men foraged from the countryside; he thought the whites would have more trouble doing that. To his disappointment, he turned out to be wrong. When the whites got hungry, they didn’t stop at chickens and ducks and geese. They ate turtles and frogs and snails, the same as his men did. Maybe they drew the line at katydids, but so what?

“Only proves what we already knew,” Lorenzo said. “They’re nothing but a bunch of thieves.”

“What does that make us, then?” Frederick asked in wry amusement.

“Folks with sense,” the copperskin answered. “Don’t know about you, but I’d sooner eat frog stew and fiddlehead ferns any day of the week, not their rancid salt pork”—he made a face—“and—what do they call them?—desecrated vegetables.”

“Desiccated,” Frederick said.

“What’s the difference?” Lorenzo asked.

Frederick only shrugged. He knew he had the word right, though. When you soaked the dried vegetables in water, they regained a faint resemblance to what they’d been once upon a time. You could eat them, even if Frederick, like Lorenzo, had trouble seeing why anyone would want to.

Lorenzo waved the question aside and came back to more important things: “What are we going to do to stop the white devils? Sure doesn’t look like we can starve them back to New Marseille.”

“No. It doesn’t,” Frederick admitted glumly.

“Well, then?” Lorenzo’s voice seemed sharper than a serpent’s tooth. The comparison came from the Bible, though Frederick couldn’t remember exactly where.

But he did have an answer for his copperskinned marshal, even if Lorenzo hadn’t expected him to: “As long as we don’t lose, we win. As long as we keep on fighting, keep on making trouble, we win. Sooner or later, the United States of Atlantis’ll decide we cost more than we’re worth—too much money, too much time, too much blood. That’s when they decide they better start talkin’ instead of fightin’.”

“You sound sure, anyway.” By the way Lorenzo said it, he was far from sure himself. He did unbend enough to ask, “How come you sound so sure?”

“On account of that’s the way my grandfather licked the redcoats,” Frederick answered. “He hung around and he hung around and he hung around, till finally they got sick of the whole business. That’s why there are the United States of Atlantis today.”

“And a fat lot of good they do us, too,” Lorenzo said.

“Oh, things could be worse,” Frederick said. “Some of the islands south of here—the ones the Spaniards still hold—the way they treat slaves makes Atlantis seem like a kiss on the cheek. And the Empire of Huy-Braseal, in southern Terranova, that’s supposed to be just as bad, or maybe even worse.”

“But I ain’t in any one of those places. I’m here,” Lorenzo said pointedly. “If they catch me, they’ll kill me. How does it get any worse than that?”

Frederick had had a similar thought not long before. “Don’t suppose it does,” he replied. “Thing is, then, not to let ’em catch us, right?”

“Right.” Lorenzo’s head bobbed up and down. “First sensible thing you’ve said in quite a while—you know that?”

“Well, I try,” Frederick said. They both laughed. Why not? They were—for the moment, for as long as their followers could hold off the white soldiers, or until the Atlantean government got sick of what looked like an endless, hopeless war—free men. Despite all the qualifications, this tenuous freedom was as much as Frederick had ever had. While he had it, he aimed to make the most of it.

 

Jeremiah Stafford fixed Colonel Sinapis with a glare that would have reduced any government functionary back in New Hastings to a quivering pile of gelatin. “We aren’t pressing them anywhere near so hard as we might,” Stafford said. He could have made the statement sound no more ominous had he demanded
Have you stopped beating your wife?
Whatever Sinapis answered would be wrong.

Or so Stafford thought. The officer, however, declined to turn gelatinous. “You wanted us to rush into that Happy Valley, too, your Excellency,” Sinapis said. “How many casualties do you suppose that would have cost us? It would have been the worst disaster since Austerlitz, or maybe since Arminius massacred the Romans in the Teutoberg Forest in the year 9.”

Quinctilius Varus! Give me back my legions!
Stafford remembered the Emperor Augustus’ anguished cry from his own slog through Suetonius in his university days.
Consul Stafford! Give me back my soldiers!
just didn’t have the same ring. But would it have come to that? He didn’t think so.

“We could have whipped those savages,” he said.

“I’m sure Varus thought the same thing,” Colonel Sinapis replied. “Sometimes, your Excellency, you have to know when
not
to fight.”

That was bound to be true, in war as in a barroom argument. All the same, Stafford said, “It sometimes seems to me that you abuse the privilege of not fighting, Colonel.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Colonel Sinapis said. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

Stafford gaped. He’d been a Senator before he was chosen Consul, and a prominent man before he was elected Senator. How could it be otherwise?
Only
prominent men reached the Senate; one measure of an Atlantean’s prominence was whether he reached the Senate. No one had had the nerve to be openly rude to him for many years.

“Come back here, you!” he snapped, as if Sinapis were an uppity house slave.

The colonel stopped, but did not return. “No,” he said calmly, and made as if to walk off again.

Before he could, Stafford’s voice went deadly cold: “Have you a friend with whom my friends may discuss this matter further?” Dueling might be illegal in every state of the USA, but that did not make it extinct. Men from the south, especially, were still apt to defend their honor with pistols.

As calmly as before, Colonel Sinapis said “No” again. That made Stafford gape once more. The colonel continued, “Your military regulations wisely forbid officers from dueling. Otherwise, your Excellency, please believe me when I say that I should take no small pleasure from killing you. Good day.” Sketching a salute, he ambled off as if he had not a care in the world.

What had been in his eyes as he responded? If it wasn’t a pure, wolfish pleasure at the idea of bloodshed, Stafford had never seen any such thing. He reflected that he didn’t know what kind of fighting man Sinapis was; army commanders seldom got to display their mettle in the front line. Maybe he was lucky not to find out the hard way.

Maybe, just maybe, he was very lucky indeed.

I was not afraid
, he told himself. He wondered how much that mattered, or if it mattered at all. A man might not fear an earthquake or a flood or a wildfire—which wouldn’t keep a natural disaster from killing him. Something told Stafford that Balthasar Sinapis held about as much compassion as fire or flood or temblor.

How exactly
had
Sinapis come to Atlantis? What were the circumstances under which he’d lost his position in Europe? Was it because some prominent man—a government minister, say, or a prince—got ventilated in a quarrel or a formal duel? Stafford hadn’t thought so, but. . . .

His encounter with Sinapis didn’t stay quiet. By the nature of things, encounters like that never did. Everybody was talking about it the next day. Not much of what people said was true, but when did that ever stop anyone?