Liberating Atlantis (43 page)

“Damned straight you won’t,” Lorenzo muttered. He aimed a forefinger at Frederick’s chest like a rifle musket. “You nigger bastard, you better be right. You fuck this up, nobody’ll ever forgive you.”

“Now tell me something I didn’t know,” Frederick said.

Slowly, the gunfire died away. Frederick scrambled up over the rampart and advanced on the whites armed with only a flag of truce. He wondered if one of his own people would shoot him in the back. That might almost be a relief.

XIX

When the firing from all around the white army slackened, sudden crazy hope flowered in Jeremiah Stafford. Maybe the insurrectionists were running out of ammunition! Maybe the whites could snatch victory from what had looked like sure disaster. Maybe . . .

Maybe Stafford was building castles in the air. That seemed much more likely when a stocky, middle-aged Negro scrambled none too gracefully over the rampart with a big white flag. The man held it up as he came toward the surviving whites.

“Boy, if he wants to parley, I’d talk till the cows come home,” a soldier not far from Stafford said. “They can murder every fuckin’ one of us, and they don’t got to sweat real hard to do it, neither.”

That was an inelegant way of summing up the situation, which didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Now that the shooting had paused, the moans and howls and shrieks of the wounded took center stage. Stafford wished a man could close his ears to shut out dreadful noises, the way he could close his eyes so he didn’t have to see dreadful sights.

Colonel Sinapis limped back to the two Consuls. A blood-soaked bandage was wrapped around his left calf; he carried a stick in his right hand in place of his sword. Dipping his head to Stafford and Newton in turn, he said, “If they wish to treat with us, your Excellencies, I must recommend that we do so. However much I regret to say so, we are in no position to resist them.”

“That does seem to be the case, doesn’t it?” Leland Newton was doing his best to stay calm: an admirable sentiment, as far as it went.

He and Sinapis both eyed Consul Stafford. “If Satan wanted to talk to me right now, I do believe I listen respectfully,” Stafford said. “That nigger there isn’t the Devil—not quite—but I’ll hear him out.”

“Thank you, your Excellency.” Sinapis’ voice seldom showed much. But if he wasn’t relieved right this minute, Stafford had never heard anyone who was.

All the soldiers seemed glad the insurrectionists weren’t shooting any more. The regulars and militiamen also ceased fire. Stafford saw a couple of them doff their hats to the Negro as he approached. Even without orders, some regulars formed an escort for him and led him back to the Consuls and Colonel Sinapis.

Stafford fought down the impulse to salute the rebels’ spokesman. Yes, the Consul was glad to be alive—and even gladder he might stay that way a while longer. In lieu of the salute, he asked, “Who are you?”

“My name is Frederick Radcliff.” The Negro didn’t sound like a university man, but neither did he sound as ignorant as many of his fellow slaves. Under dark, heavy brows, his eyes flashed. “And who are
you
, friend?”

I am no friend of yours
, Stafford thought, even as he gave his own name. He studied the black man’s face, searching for traces of his illustrious grandfather. He didn’t need long to find them, either. The nose, the line of the jaw, the shape of this Radcliff’s ears . . . Yes, he did have a white ancestor, and Stafford was willing to believe it was the man from whose line he claimed to spring.

Consul Newton also introduced himself. Then he asked, “Well, Mr. Radcliff, what do you want from us?”

The Negro eyed him with scant liking. “You ever call a black man ‘Mister’ before?” he asked.

“Yes. There is legal equality in Croydon.” Newton hesitated, then added, “I haven’t done it very often, though.”

Stafford wondered whether that would do more harm than good. Had someone admitted something like that to him, he wouldn’t have liked it much. But Frederick Radcliff only grunted thoughtfully. “Well, maybe you’ll talk straight to me,” he muttered, before rounding on Stafford again. “How about you?”

“I doubt it,” Stafford answered. Had he thought Radcliff would believe a lie, he would have tried one. But if the black man had the faintest notion of who he was and where he came from, a lie would prove worse than useless. Better not to trot one out where that was so.

Frederick Radcliff grunted again. “You don’t reckon I’m dumb enough to believe any old story, anyways. That’s somethin’.” He waved back to the rampart from which he’d come, then to the sloping sides of the valley, and last of all to the insurrectionists who’d been pouring bullets into the white Atlanteans from behind. “You know we’ve got you. You can’t hardly
not
know we’ve got you.”

Both Stafford and Newton looked to Balthasar Sinapis. They weren’t about to admit they could recognize military defeat—no, military catastrophe. That was what a colonel was for. Sinapis made a steeple of his fingertips. “The present situation is difficult,” he allowed, which had to be the understatement of the year.

“Difficult, nothing.” This time, Victor Radcliff’s grandson didn’t grunt—he snorted in fine derision. “If I wave my hand, you’re all dead.”

“If you think you would live more than a heartbeat after you did that, you’re wrong,” Stafford said.

“Oh, I know,” the Negro answered easily. “As long as I have some other choice, I won’t do it. If I don’t . . .” He shrugged.

“If you think murdering all of us will help your cause, you may be making a mistake,” Stafford told him.

“Yeah. I figured that out, too,” said the Tribune of the Free Republic of Atlantis. Stafford had long been convinced Negroes had less in the way of wits than white men did. Dealing with Frederick Radcliff made him wonder, however little he wanted to. The leader of the insurrection nodded back toward the rampart. “Lorenzo, he hasn’t worked it through yet. He trusts me, but he doesn’t see it for his own self. He wants you folks dead.”

So you’d better deal with me
. The Negro didn’t say it, but it hung in the air nonetheless. Yes, he was a man of parts, all right.

Leland Newton said, “You wouldn’t have come out unless you had something in mind besides killing us all.”

“Think so, do you?” Frederick Radcliff had a very unpleasant grin. “Better not give me a hard time, or you’re liable to find out you’re wrong.”

Colonel Sinapis stirred. “You have the air of a man who is about to demand a surrender and ready to put forth the terms on which he will accept it.”

“That is just what I am, Colonel,” the Negro said. “If you say yes, you get away with your lives. If you say no, we will wipe you out and then see what troubles jump up because we did. Up to you.”

“Before we say yes or no, we had better find out what you are asking,” Consul Stafford said.

Frederick Radcliff fixed him with a glare. “I am not asking one single, God-damned thing. I am telling you how it will be. If you don’t like it, it’s your funeral. Yes, sir, that’s exactly what it is.”

“If your terms are completely unacceptable, we can go on with the fight,” Stafford said. Colonel Sinapis’ horrified expression warned him they could do no such thing. Stafford pretended not to see it as he continued, “You may kill us, but we’re liable to ruin your army while you’re doing it.”

“In your dreams, Stafford,” Frederick Radcliff said. The Consul didn’t think he’d ever had a colored man fail to give him his proper titles of respect before. He knew what he could do about it here: nothing. It rankled regardless.

“The terms,” Consul Newton said.

“Right.” The insurrectionists’ leader seemed to remind himself that was why he’d come forth to talk with his enemies. “Terms. You can have your lives, and that’s it. Give up all your rifle muskets and pistols. Give up all your artillery. Give up all your ammunition. Give up all your horses, too, except the ones you’ll need for the wagons that haul your wounded. Then march away to New Marseille, and don’t you ever come back again.”

“That’s outrageous!” Stafford exclaimed. “Once you have all our weapons, what’s to stop you from starting the massacre again when we can’t fight back?”

“Nothing,” Frederick Radcliff answered. “If you’d licked us, we would’ve had to take whatever mercy you felt like giving us—and there wouldn’t’ve been much, would there? Well, now the shoe’s on the other foot, so see how you like it.”

Consul Stafford liked it not at all. He took Newton and Colonel Sinapis aside to see how they felt about it. “What choice have we?” Sinapis asked bleakly, the wails from the wounded underscoring his words. “They can go back to killing us whenever they please.”

“I don’t believe they would violate the terms once made,” Newton added. “They don’t want to make themselves infamous in the eyes of Atlantis as a whole.”

“You hope they don’t,” Stafford said.

“Yes.” The other Consul nodded. “I hope.”

They stopped talking. They didn’t seem to have much else to say. When they turned back to Frederick Radcliff, he asked, “Well? What’s it going to be?”—which made things no easier.

Consuls and colonel all looked at one another. Nobody wanted to say the fateful words. But someone had to. After a long, painful moment, Colonel Sinapis took the duty on himself. “We agree,” he said, and then, sensing that that by itself wasn’t enough, “We surrender.”

 

When Cornwallis’ troops surrendered to Victor Radcliff, their band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” No bands played here, but the idea stayed with Leland Newton all the same.

Insurrectionists had come out to make sure the white militiamen and regulars held to the terms of the surrender Frederick Radcliff had imposed on Newton, Stafford, and Sinapis. Most of the Negroes and copperskins, though, stayed under cover. If the whites didn’t go along, the rebels could always open fire again.

Once officers convinced the regulars that the insurrectionists would also abide by those terms, the professional soldiers were willing enough—even happy enough—to stack their rifle muskets and pile up leather cartridge boxes below them. The artillerists drove spikes into the touch-holes on their fieldpieces, but nothing in the surrender terms said they couldn’t. Frederick and Lorenzo hadn’t thought of it, so the rebels would do without cannon a while longer.

That wasn’t the truce’s real danger point. Persuading the militiamen to hand over their guns was. The militiamen hated and feared their opponents much more than the regulars did. Many regulars, after all, came from north of the Stour; they might well be personally opposed to slavery. All the militiamen favored it. They all hated the idea that the insurrectionists might win freedom on the battlefield, and they all feared—no doubt with reason—that their former chattels might seek vengeance as soon as they caught their white foes unarmed.

Newton had to admit that Jeremiah Stafford did what he could to calm their fear, even if he was also bound to feel it himself. “They’ll let us go,” Stafford said, over and over again. “They’d be idiots if they did anything else.”

“Damned right they’re idiots!” a militiaman burst out. “Copperskins and mudfaces can’t hardly be anything but!”

“Since we’re stuck in their blamed trap, what does that make us?” Stafford inquired dryly. The militiaman blinked. That didn’t seem to have occurred to him. Maybe he really was an idiot.

Hiding a rifle musket was next to impossible. When tipped with a two-foot bayonet, the weapon was taller than a man. Even without a bayonet, you couldn’t very well stick one up your sleeve or down your trouser leg. Pistols—eight-shooters and old-style pepperboxes and even older flintlocks—were a different story.

“Not the end of the world, your Excellency,” Colonel Sinapis said when Newton remarked on it. “Some of our men will be able to protect themselves from robbers or shoot game for the pot. You cannot make war with pistols, not against rifle muskets.”

“I see the sense in that,” Newton replied. “But will the insurrectionists? Or will they use a few holdout pistols as an excuse to treat our men more harshly than they would have otherwise?”

Sinapis’ smile tugged up the corners of his mouth without reaching his eyes. “You think of such things, your Excellency. So do I, coming out of the cynical school of Europe. But that ploy never occurred to Frederick Radcliff or even to Lorenzo, who is less naive than the black man. When I mentioned it, they both promised they would not take it amiss, as long as the militiamen do not try anything foolish.”

“That’s good news.” Newton tempered the remark by adding, “I hope so, anyhow.”

“As do I,” Sinapis agreed. “A few hotheads could greatly embarrass us by doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. I would not be sorry if the rebels made an example of them. I fear I would be sorry if those people made an example of all of us.”

“Sorry. Yes.” Consul Newton left it right there. The more rifle muskets went up in neat stacks of six, the more vulnerable the white survivors became. One thing was clear: even if the fighting continued after this disastrous battle, the insurrectionists would not lack guns, cartridges, or percussion caps for a long time to come.

Here and there, blacks or copperskins robbed disarmed white soldiers. A handful of militiamen—no regulars—died suddenly. Maybe they refused to take orders from men they still thought of as natural inferiors. Maybe slaves recognized owners they hadn’t loved. Leland Newton found himself in a poor position to ask too many questions.

The whites started back toward New Marseille the next morning. They hadn’t been able to bury all their dead. They had to rely on promises that the insurrectionists would see to it. And what were those promises worth? Anything? Newton had no idea.

He also had other, more immediate, worries. He kept looking back over his shoulder. If the Negroes and copperskins came swarming after the defeated Atlantean soldiers, what could the white men do?
Die
, Newton thought.