Liberating Atlantis (58 page)

But a copperskin did come out of the greenery. The flag of truce he carried had been hacked from a bedsheet.
A planter’s bedsheet
, Frederick thought—the cloth was too white and too fine ever to have belonged to a slave.

“You really Frederick Radcliff?” the copperskin called to him, plainly not wanting to come any closer than he had to.

“I really am Frederick Radcliff,” Frederick shouted back. “Who are you?”

“My friends call me Quince,” the other man answered, pronouncing it in two syllables—
keen
-say—not like the name of the fruit. “It means ‘fifteen’ in Spanish.”

“Why do they call you that?” Frederick asked, as he was obviously meant to do.

“Oh, maybe it’s because that’s how many white men I’ve done for,” Quince said, eyeing the cavalrymen with Frederick. “Or maybe it’s because—” He glanced down at himself with unmistakable male complacency. He wore baggy slave trousers, so it was impossible to be sure what he had in mind, but. . . .

A trooper got the same idea Frederick did, and at the same time, too. Frederick was constrained by what he saw as diplomacy. The trooper wasn’t, and hooted in derision. “Now tell me another one!” he bawled in Quince’s direction. “My God-damned horse ain’t that big!”

“Poor creature,” Quince said. If he was joking, he joked with a straight face—or something. Frederick shook his own head like a man harassed by mosquitoes. At the moment, he wasn’t that kind of man, but in Gernika he was liable to turn into that kind of man any second now. He had some gauzy netting to sleep in—and he had some bites.

“I don’t care how you’re hung,” he told Quince. “Come on in and talk with us if you don’t want to get hanged.”

The trooper who’d doubted Quince’s attributes groaned. Several other cavalrymen sent Frederick reproachful stares. Maybe they hadn’t thought Negroes could make such bad puns. If they hadn’t, it only proved they hadn’t been around Negroes much.

As for Quince himself, he gaped at Frederick. Then he threw back his head and yipped. He sounded more like a fox barking at the moon than a man laughing, but the grin on his face declared that that was what he had to be. “Nobody told me you were a funny fellow,” he said, walking toward Frederick and the troopers.

“Don’t worry about it,” Frederick answered. “Nobody told me I was, either.” That drew more yips from Quince. Frederick went on, “Can you speak for all the slaves who’ve risen up in these parts?”

“If I can’t, nobody can,” Quince declared. The trouble was, maybe nobody could. As Frederick Radcliff had reason to know, insurrectionists lacked the Atlantean army’s neat chain of command. The army relied on hundreds of years—thousands of years, some officers said—of military tradition. Every band of rebels made things up as it went along.

Lieutenant Braun’s thoughts must have run along a similar track. “
Can
you for these slave rebels speak?” he demanded, as if he were contemplating seizing Quince for impersonating a spokesman rather than for any of the real crimes the copperskin must have committed. For all Frederick knew, the Dutchman was contemplating exactly that. He seemed a very . . . orderly officer.

But Quince nodded back at him. “I can. I do. I will,” the copperskin said, an enumeration thorough enough to satisfy even Maximilian Braun. Casually, as if the matter were of no great importance but did need mentioning, Quince added, “Anything bad happens to me, it’ll happen to you people, too—only slower.” He walked into the encampment.

“
Ja, ja
.” Lieutenant Braun sounded impatient, not afraid. Frederick admired his coolness, unsure he could imitate it himself. The Negro’s eyes surveyed the ferns from which Quince had emerged. He saw no other fighters, which proved nothing. They
would
be out there.

A sergeant muttered something to one of the troopers. The man looked surprised, but nodded. He brought Quince a square of hardtack, some chewy army sausage that was about half salt, and a tin mug of coffee. “For now, we’re friends,” the soldier said. He sounded none too friendly, but sometimes actions spoke louder than words.

Quince eyed the food as if wondering if it was laced with rat poison. In his place, Frederick would have wondered—had wondered—the same thing. Trusting the men who’d bought and sold you didn’t come easy for a slave in Atlantis. But the Gernikan rebel leader ate. He showed no great enthusiasm, but who could get enthusiastic about rations? After washing down the bite of hardtack with some coffee, he nodded back at the trooper who’d fed him. “For now,” he agreed.

“Maybe for longer. I hope so,” Frederick said. “You know about the Slug Hollow arrangements, the ones they’re talking over now in New Hastings?”

“Heard little bits—that’s about all,” Quince said. “Masters don’t like that kind of news getting to slaves, so they sit on it as hard as they can.”

Frederick Radcliff nodded. Back in his days on the Barford plantation—only last year, though they seemed as far away as China or Japan—he’d seen the same thing. Slaveholders weren’t fools. And, like the army, they had lots of experience on their side. If slaves didn’t hear news that had to do with them, they couldn’t get all hot and bothered about it. And so slaveholders did their level best to keep their two-legged property in the dark.

“What it comes down to is, the Senate’s working up toward saying these arrangements are the way things ought to be in Atlantis from here on out,” Frederick told him. “Slaves’ll be free—free as white men. They’ll have the same rights—all of ’em. They’ll get to own property. They’ll get to vote. If somebody elects ’em, they’ll get to go to statehouses or to the Senate. Their kids’ll go to school, same as white boys.”

“And you say the Senate’s gonna do this?” Quince didn’t call him a liar, not in so many words, but he might as well have. “How’d that happen?”

“On account of the slaves I led whipped the snot out of the Atlantean army the Senate sent out against us, that’s how,” Frederick said proudly.

Quince’s eyes lit up. “And you killed all the fuckers? Nigger, you’re my kind of man!”

Frederick Radcliff was far from sure he wanted to be Quince’s kind of man. But he did want Quince to be his kind of man here. “No, we didn’t,” he replied. “The government never would’ve let us alone if we had. We took their guns and let them go and made terms with them. There won’t be any slaves left in Atlantis after the Slug Hollow agreement goes through—if it does.”

“But those God-damned asswipes in New Hastings won’t let it happen, huh?” Quince said. “Sounds like them, by Jesus!”

“No, that’s not what was going on,” Frederick answered. “I think they would have passed it sooner or later. But then they got word of this uprising. They got to wondering if I could bring slaves along in the deal, or if folks’d just keep on fighting.”

“Can you blame us for rising up against these fucking dons?” Quince said. “And the shitheads who came down after Atlantis bought Gernika are just as bad.” He paused, then shook his head. “Nah, they’re even worse, on account of they don’t know when to quit and the Spaniards do. Well, sometimes.”

“How can I blame you for rising up when I rose up, too?” Frederick said. “But there’s a good time to do that stuff, and there’s a time that ain’t so good. You could’ve picked a better one.”

“Huh.” If Quince was impressed, he didn’t show it. “And what happens when we put down our guns? White devils jump on us with both feet, that’s what.” He answered his own question before Frederick could.

But Frederick said, “No, that’s not how it’ll work. You put down your guns now, it’ll be like it was a war, and nobody’ll come after you later on.”

“Give me a new story, why don’t you?—one I’ll believe.” Scorn filled Quince’s voice.

“If the government in New Hastings has to, it’ll send in soldiers to keep white folks off your back,” Frederick insisted.

“Go on! You’re tryin’ to fool me,” Quince said.

“No such thing. Honest to God, Quince, I mean it.” Frederick raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. “But you got to do it pretty quick. If you don’t, if the important white folks back in New Hastings decide I can’t deliver the goods—”

“I got you.” The copperskin stabbed a forefinger in his direction. “You want to be a big fella himself, and you want to get big on account of us.”

“I’m already a big fella,” Frederick said. “What I want is for slaves to get free. That’s the size of it. You keep doing what you’re doing, you could mess that up for niggers and mudfaces all over Atlantis.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah, says me,” Frederick answered. “And the reason I say so is, it’s true. You go on killing people and burning stuff, they’ll send lots of soldiers after you, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“So we’ll lick ’em. You say you did.” Quince seemed stubborn enough to make a proper leader for a rebel band. He might have got on well with Lorenzo.

“We did. And maybe you will. But even if you do, you’ll still be hurting all the other slaves in Atlantis,” Frederick said.

“Why should we care? When did them other fuckers ever care about us?”

Before Frederick could answer, Lieutenant Braun unexpectedly broke in: “One of your poets in English wrote, ‘No man an island is.’ He was wise, in spite of an Englishman being. Whatever you do, to other folk it makes a difference. Whatever they do, to you it matters. Believe me, I would not be in this strange land a stranger if this were not so.”

“Huh,” Quince said. “I can’t decide here on my own. I got to go back and talk with some other people, know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Frederick said. “Do that, then.”

“Strange. Even insurrectionists find it needful to invent again the committee,” Braun said. “This may God’s judgment upon us be.”

“Huh,” Quince repeated, not knowing what to make of that. Frederick Radcliff didn’t know, either. Still scratching his head, the copperskin eased away from the people who’d entered his territory and slipped off into the woods.

“It could be that you him convinced,” Lieutenant Braun said.

“Could be, yeah,” Frederick said. “Could be you helped, too. Hope so.” He shrugged. “Now we wait and see what happens next, that’s all.”

For Jeremiah Stafford, waiting and seeing what happened next was the hardest part of having Frederick Radcliff go off to Gernika. If the Negro persuaded his fellow slaves to abandon their revolt, he would be a hero. If the slaves kept fighting, whites in the Senate would decide Frederick couldn’t keep his own side in line—which would doom the Slug Hollow agreement. And if some angry white man down by St. Augustine shot Frederick, Negroes and copperskins in the rest of the country would explode—which would also doom the Slug Hollow agreement.

Dooming the Slug Hollow agreement would also doom Consul Stafford—politically, anyhow. Frederick Radcliff was liable to be doomed in the far more literal sense of the word. He’d understood that when he set out for Gernika, but he’d gone anyhow. That was admirable or stupid, depending on one’s point of view. Stafford wanted to think the black man was nothing but the usual dumb nigger. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. Whatever Frederick was, usual he wasn’t.

And the two of them were bound together now, like those occasional sets of twins that seldom lived long. If Frederick failed, he pulled Stafford down with him. That was part of what went with signing the accord at Slug Hollow. For the life of him, though, Stafford still didn’t see what else he could have done.

Some of his Senatorial colleagues from states south of the Stour understood why he’d done what he’d done. Not all of them were willing to admit it where a reporter—or even a waiter—might overhear them and quote them, but they would when they talked with him in private.

Others understood nothing and didn’t care to be enlightened. A Senator from Gernika with the euphonious name of Storm Whitson thundered against “that interfering nigger” with every breath he took. And Storm Whitson had taken a lot of breaths. He was up past ninety. As a youth, he’d carried a musket against King George’s redcoats. Later, he’d moved south to Gernika and made his fortune in indigo and rice—and in clever slave-dealing. Stafford wished he could blame Whitson’s intemperance on senile decay. But, while the old man wore thick glasses and cupped a hand behind his ear to get the drift of what other Senators were saying, his mind was clear. He’d been thundering about Negroes and copperskins for as long as anyone could remember.

He stood up on the Senate floor now—leaning on a stick, yes, but despite that straighter than many younger men—and shouted, “These inferior breeds must remain under our thumb! God has ordained it, and we would go against His will if we were to change the way we have done things for so long!”

Heads bobbed up and down. Not so long before, Stafford’s would have been one of those nodding heads. He too had believed the slaveholders’ course was ordained by God. But, if it was, why had God let the insurrectionists beat the stuffing out of the Atlantean army in the backwoods of New Marseille?

Before he could ask the question, his comrade on the dais found a different one. “I realize the honorable Conscript Father is a man of remarkable experience,” Consul Newton said—loudly, to make sure Senator Whitson heard him. “But will he tell this house he was present at the Creation and heard from Jehovah’s lips this onus laid upon the darker races?”

Senators from north of the Stour laughed. So did some from south of the river. Storm Whitson simply stood there, a living illustration of the third part of the riddle of the Sphinx. “Beware, your Excellency, lest God punish you for your iniquity,” he said.

“If you are so sure He will, then He must speak to you, eh?” Newton said.

“God will speak to any man who opens his heart and listens,” Senator Whitson replied.

“Any man who opens his mouth and talks can say God speaks to him,” Newton observed. “But saying something doesn’t make it so.”

“As you have proved time and again,” Whitson snapped. He might be getting frail, but his wits had indeed stayed sharp—sharp enough to make Newton wince.