Liberating Atlantis (42 page)

Stafford didn’t call him a liar. He didn’t call him a feeble-minded twit, either. If that silence wasn’t a telling measure of the other Consul’s despair, Newton had no idea what would be.

Up a few hundred yards ahead of them, the regulars rushed the rampart again. If the white Atlanteans could break any part of the trap, they might be able to wreck the whole thing.

If. But muzzle flashes on the rampart spat toward the white men like tongues of fire shot from dragons’ mouths. And bullets flew farther than dragonfire ever could. Again, the regulars had to sag back short of their goal.

An officer near Colonel Sinapis was trying to tell him something. The man’s knees suddenly gave way. His hat fell off as he sagged to the ground. He wriggled for a little while, but not for long.

“They’re murdering us! Murdering!” Stafford said.

“They are.” Newton couldn’t disagree. He did think the officer was liable to be lucky, as such things went. The poor fellow had died fast, and might not even have known he was hit. Not every man who stopped a bullet had such good fortune. Newton had seen too many ghastly wounds, and too many men suffering from them for too long, to hold any illusions on that score.

“If we can’t stop them . . . Good Lord! What will become of the country after this?” Stafford choked out the words, but he did bring them forth. Newton had to respect him for that. Now the other Consul had found his
bon mot
in the face of death. How much good it would do him, and whether anyone hereabouts would survive to remember it tomorrow, were a couple of questions whose answers it seemed better not to contemplate.

 

Jeremiah Stafford had a bullet, a charge of gunpowder, and a percussion cap ready in each cylinder of his eight-shooter. How much good they’d do him against enemies armed with rifle muskets that far outranged his revolver, he didn’t care to think about.

He and Consul Newton both went up to huddle close to the rear of the regular contingent. Maybe misery loved company. Maybe that was the safest place to be in these parts, not that any place in these parts counted as particularly safe, not if you were a white man.

Newton’s accusation burned like vitriol inside Stafford’s soul. Stafford
had
pushed Balthasar Sinapis as hard as he could. He
had
made the colonel go forward where Sinapis would have hesitated or even halted on his own. It
had
worked—up till now.

Up till now. Three of the most mournful and miserable words in the English language.

Then Stafford stopped thinking of mourning and misery in the abstract. A lieutenant about twenty feet away from him cried out, twisted an arm to try to clutch at the small of his back, and slowly crumpled to his knees and then to the ground.

A moment later, a private soldier went down, also shot in the back. Again, Newton realized what was going on before Stafford did. Newton didn’t automatically assume the insurrectionists were stupid. “They’ve got men behind us, too,” he said glumly.

And they did. The copperskins and blacks back there had done some quick, rough entrenching before they opened up on the white Atlanteans. No one had tried to stop them. No one had even noticed them till they started shooting. They could shoot at the whites with almost as much protection as the insurrectionists behind the ramparts had. And now they’d surrounded the whites.

A classical education came in handy all kinds of ways. Even in this moment of despair, Stafford knew just what he and his comrades were facing. It wasn’t as if such things hadn’t happened before, even if that disaster might have stayed unmatched for two thousand years and more.

“Cannae!” Stafford groaned. “This is another Cannae!”

Hannibal had surrounded and slaughtered several Roman legions at Cannae during the Second Punic War. The battle was the Carthaginian’s masterpiece. It was about as good a job as any general could do. And here, on a smaller scale, Frederick Radcliff had just re-created it.

Of course, Carthage didn’t win the Second Punic War. But right at the moment, Jeremiah Stafford had no idea how the United States of Atlantis could hope to put down this great servile insurrection.

By the way things looked, neither did Colonel Sinapis. He turned to stare at the rebels firing on his men from behind. He raised his hands in horror. They seemed to fall limply back to his sides all by themselves.

He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind
, Stafford thought. He hadn’t heard the vulgar phrase in years, but he’d never known a time when it fit so well.

“Pull yourself together!” he shouted to Sinapis. “We’ve got to do something!”

“Something, yes, your Excellency, but what?” the colonel answered. “They have us in a modern Cannae.”

So his classical training still worked, too, did it? Nice that something did, even if his generalship had let him—and everyone else—down. “Pull yourself together!” Stafford repeated. “Don’t despair of the republic!”

Sinapis didn’t answer. Maybe he wasn’t despairing of the republic, but of his career. Stafford didn’t know how he’d save that. Stafford didn’t know how to save his own career, either, assuming he could get his own life spared.

Even then, the
non sequitur
made him laugh.
If you don’t live through this, what happens in your career afterwards won’t matter one whole hell of a lot
, he thought.

Bullets from all directions were flying around him now. He didn’t know which way to duck. He did notice that Consul Newton and even Colonel Sinapis (whose courage was irreproachable, whatever one might say about other aspects of his military persona) also ducked at near misses. A few people, maybe the ones born without nerves, lacked that reflex, but only a few.

As Newton straightened, he touched the brim of his cap to Stafford. “Well, Jeremiah, I don’t suppose you expected things to end up this way. I’d be lying if I told you I expected them to.”

“I daresay you’re happier about it than I am,” Stafford answered. “Here’s nigger equality, all right, and it will be the death of both of us.”

“I don’t want to die. I have too many things I still want to do,” the other Consul said. “Trouble is, what I want doesn’t matter right this minute.”

“I blame it on Victor Radcliff,” Stafford said. “Even diluted, his blood is better than the vinegar and horse piss in Sinapis’ veins.”

“As far as I know, the insurrectionists’ number-one soldier, that Lorenzo, is pure copperskin,” Newton said. “Will you tell me his blood is better than Sinapis’, too?”

“Damned right, I will,” Stafford answered. “My parrot could have done a better job leading this campaign than that stupid foreigner did—and I haven’t got a parrot.”

“Heh,” Newton said—about as much laughter as the joke deserved.

In front of them, the Atlantean soldiers milled like ants stirred by a stick. Every time they turned any one way, they got shot at from the flank and behind as well as from the front. They weren’t dying like ants, though. They were dying like flies.

The Negroes and copperskins didn’t try to close with them. Why should they? They were doing fine carving up the white Atlanteans at a distance. Even as Stafford watched, the back of a militiaman’s head exploded, the way a melon might after a sledgehammer came down on it. The man’s rifle musket fell from fingers that could hold it no more. His knees buckled. He went down, and wouldn’t rise again till Judgment Day.

Most of the militiamen owned slaves. How many of them would be left alive by the time this fight finished? Ironically, Stafford began to hope the insurrectionists made the massacre complete. That might horrify Atlantis into fighting the war seriously. If it did, the whites would win in the end. As Newton had pointed out, winning might entail making sure not a nigger or mudface remained aboveground and on his feet. That would play hob with the long-cherished social system south of the Stour.

Jeremiah Stafford found he didn’t care. One way or another, the USA would sort things out. The Free Republic of Atlantis? That was an abomination, and had to be suppressed no matter what.

If I’m going to die, I may as well die usefully
, he thought. He couldn’t believe anything short of a massacre would galvanize the Senate and the people of Atlantis into giving the insurrectionists what they deserved. And, for the life of him—no, for the death of him—he couldn’t see how the Atlantean regulars and militiamen had any chance of stopping a massacre.

Usefully
, he thought again, and hoped it wouldn’t hurt . . . too much.

 

“In the sack!” Lorenzo howled exultantly. “We’ve got the sons of bitches in the sack, and we just tied off the top. They can’t even run away now. They’re ours! Ours!—you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Frederick Radcliff answered. “Looks to me like you’re right. This went better than I ever dreamt it could.” He’d wanted to surprise the white Atlanteans. He’d wanted to hurt them, too. To succeed beyond your wildest dreams . . . By the nature of things, you couldn’t possibly expect that.

“All we’ve got to do is keep going now.” Lorenzo mimed aiming, shooting, and reloading. “Before too long, won’t be none of those white bastards left alive. Extra sweet blowing holes in the militiamen. The soldiers . . . They’re just here working, you know? I don’t have anything special against ’em.”

“Except that they’re trying to kill us.” Frederick’s voice was dry.

“Yeah. Except for that,” Lorenzo agreed seriously. Then he came back to his favorite theme: “The militiamen, they’re mostly out there on account of they wanted to get their property back. Turn us into slaves again, that means. Well, I got some news for them—it ain’t gonna happen.”

“Sure won’t,” Frederick said. The militiamen seemed to be falling even faster than the Atlantean regulars.

“Serves ’em right, too,” Lorenzo said. “I want to kill ’em all, is what I want to do. And I reckon maybe we can do it, too.”

“So do I,” Frederick said. He never would have dreamt of
that
when the insurrection started, either. His dreams along those lines had been nightmares, almost without exception: nightmares of Atlantean regulars smashing through the rebels, shooting them, bayoneting them, hanging them, tormenting them in as many ways as his sleep-filled imagination could find. And it had proved ingenious in ways he never would have come up with awake. He hoped he wouldn’t have, anyway.

“You know what’ll happen when word of what we done gets to New Hastings?” Lorenzo said. “White folks’ll shit, that’s what!”

Frederick nodded gravely. “They sure will.” Then he found a question Lorenzo hadn’t yet: “And what happens once they get done shitting?”

“Huh?” The copperskin didn’t even see that it
was
a question. “Who the devil cares what happens then?”

“We’d better,” Frederick answered. What
would
the government of the United States of Atlantis do after a ragtag force of rebellious slaves slaughtered its professional soldiers and the white, mostly prosperous militiamen who fought beside those professionals?

Maybe the government would throw its hands in the air and decide the Free Republic of Atlantis was too strong to be put down. Maybe it would realize that blacks and copperskins were just as entitled to freedom as white men were. Maybe the government was looking for any reasonable excuse to liberate the men and women who’d labored in bondage for generations.

Maybe. But the more Frederick Radcliff thought about it, the less he believed it. The insurrectionists clearly could wipe this trapped force of white men off the face of the earth. Suppose they did. When word of the massacre got to New Hastings, wouldn’t it infuriate the Senate? Wouldn’t the Conscript Fathers decide the rebellion truly was dangerous? Wouldn’t all the whites in Atlantis decide the same thing, regardless of whether they lived in Gernika or Penzance?

And if all the whites decided the insurrection was dangerous, what would happen next? Atlantis held many more whites than Negroes and copperskins. As much to the point, or maybe even more, those whites held far more wealth than their colored counterparts. If they decided they had to kill everyone in Atlantis who wasn’t white so they could feel safe in their own beds, would they be able to do it?

No sooner asked than answered: of course they could. It might not be easy or quick or cheap, but they could do it. Frederick was sure of that. They might even feel bad about it afterwards, but afterwards would be too late to do anybody colored any good. Frederick was also sure of
that
.

Which meant . . . what? That slaughtering this trapped army might be the worst thing the insurrectionists could do? So it seemed to Frederick. One other thing also seemed all too plain:
not
slaughtering this trapped army had to be the second worst thing the insurrectionists could do.

“Lorenzo,” he said.

“What d’you want?” the copperskin answered. “We’ve
got
these assholes. We’ve got ’em right where they belong.”

Frederick explained what he wanted. He explained why he wanted it. Explaining made him more miserable, not happier. All the same, he finished, “We can’t kill ’em all. We don’t dare. Now that we’ve got ’em where we want ’em, we need to use that to get what we want. But we’ve got to call the cease-fire before they’re all down.”

Lorenzo spat in the dirt where the insurrectionists had dug their trench. “Then
you
go down and take a white flag and talk to the white folks. You done great stuff, Fred, but I will see you in hell before I do that here.”

“All right. I will.” Frederick didn’t sound thrilled, but he nodded. Fair was fair.

“And what happens when the white sons of bitches shoot you down like a hound even though you got that white flag?” No, Lorenzo didn’t bother hiding his scorn.

“Get our men to stop shooting. I’ll go down there. If the buckra kill me, go ahead and do what you want to them,” Frederick answered. “You will anyway—and I won’t be around to stop you.”