Liberating Atlantis Read online

  The Consul from Cosquer was much happier when militiamen started coming into camp. He could have been happier yet, for they seemed less like soldiers and more like braggarts and blowhards and ruffians. Little by little, he realized the Atlantean regulars had spoiled him. They were hard-bitten men, too, but they had discipline. Anyone among them who got out of line promptly suffered for it.

  By contrast, the militiamen did as they pleased . . . till regular sergeants and corporals started knocking sense into them. One underofficer died in the process. So did six or eight militiamen, most of them quite suddenly. That did not count the fellow who’d knifed the regular corporal. His company commander didn’t want to turn him over for punishment, and his friends seemed ready to defend him.

  They soon changed their minds. Staring into the muzzles of a dozen fieldpieces double-shotted with canister would have changed Jeremiah Stafford’s mind, too. Stafford judged it would have changed anybody’s mind. The militiaman got a drumhead court-martial. Then he was hanged from a stout bough sticking out from a pine. The drop wasn’t enough to break his neck and kill him quickly. He writhed his life away over the next several minutes.

  After he finally stilled forever, Colonel Sinapis looked out at the wide-eyed amateur soldiers who’d watched the execution. “Follow orders from your officers and from our officers and un derofficers, and nothing like this will happen to you,” he said. “We all face the same enemies, after all. If you work with us, we can beat them together. And if you work against us, I promise you will discover we are more frightful than any Negro or copperskin ever born.” He paused, then added one word more: “Dismissed.”

  The militiamen couldn’t have disappeared any faster if he’d called down thunder and lightning on their heads. A couple of dozen of them disappeared for good during the night. Sinapis took that in stride. “We shall be better off without them than we would have been with them,” he said.

  “Technically, they’re deserters. If you catch them, you can hang them, too,” Consul Newton said.

  “No, the colonel’s right,” Stafford said—words that didn’t come out of his mouth every day. “If they can’t stand the heat, they shouldn’t go near the fire. Let them run. Not everyone is a hero, even if he can fool himself into thinking he is for a little while.”

  “Well, maybe.” Newton was even less eager to agree with Stafford than Stafford was to agree with Sinapis.

  With the army reinforced, the colonel was able to send a good-sized force down to New Marseille to protect the next wagon train. The wagons reached the army without much trouble. The insurrectionists must have known they were well protected, because they did no more than snipe at them from the woods.

  Hardtack and salt pork weren’t inspiring—Stafford had already discovered how inspiring army rations weren’t. But having enough of them was better than not. And having enough munitions was literally a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, that also held true for the insurrectionists. What they’d hijacked would keep them fighting for some time to come.

  And what they’d hijacked would also let them—did also let them—expand the insurrection. More white refugees began streaming out of the north, most of them with nothing but the clothes on their backs and perhaps a musket or an eight-shooter clenched in one fist. The stories they told made Stafford’s blood boil.

  “How can you stand to listen to these people without your heart’s going out to them?” he demanded of Leland Newton.

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t,” his colleague answered. “But my heart also goes out to the Negroes and copperskins these same people have been mistreating for generations, while yours is hard as a stone toward them.”

  Stafford only stared. “How anyone could care about those savages . . . How anyone could say they are mistreated when they gain the benefits of Atlantean civilization . . .”

  “The lash, the shackles, the ball and chain, the auction block, the unwelcome summons to the master’s bedchamber,” Newton said dryly.

  “You have entirely the wrong attitude,” Stafford said.

  “If I do, then so does most of Atlantis north of the Stour,” the other Consul replied. “And so does almost all of Europe. The font of what you call Atlantean civilization thinks little of what has sprung from it.”

  “I care nothing for what Europe thinks. We needed to get free of Europe, by God. Or would you rather we still flew the Union Jack and bowed down to Queen Victoria?” Stafford said.

  “You must know I would not,” Newton said, which was true enough. “But I would also rather that we did not bow down to injustice here.”

  “Nor do we,” Stafford declared.

  His colleague sighed. “More and more people—of all colors—think we do.”

  XV

  A couple of dozen white men had holed up on a plantation. They held the big house and the nearby barn. Frederick Radcliff decided they showed enough determination to make a rush more expensive than he cared for. He approached the big house holding as large a flag of truce as he could carry.

  He’d barely got to hailing distance before a white man inside the house yelled, “Hold it right there, nigger! Flag or no flag, ought to shoot you down like the mad dog you are.”

  “Go ahead,” Frederick answered. “See what happens afterwards.” He feared that what would happen was that the uprising would fall apart. But that wasn’t what he wanted the white man to think about. And he hadn’t named himself, so the desperate whites couldn’t know they had the leading insurrectionist in their sights.

  “Well, say your say, then,” the white man told him grudgingly. “We’ll see how much manure you pack into it.”

  “Got no manure,” Frederick said. “What we got is, we got enough men to kill the lot of you. You think we won’t use ’em, you’re crazy.” He didn’t want to use them. How many eight-shooters did the white defenders carry? Those were the guns that made a difference when things came to close quarters.

  Their spokesman jeered at him: “Likely tell, black boy! You’re tryin’ to scare us out on account of you ain’t got the balls to drive us out. Probably another dozen skulkers back there behind you, and that’s it.”

  “Think so, do you? You’ll see.” Frederick had looked for some such response from the whites. Because he’d looked for it, he’d got his own men ready for it ahead of time. When he turned and waved, they knew what to do.

  Black men and copperskins with shouldered, bayoneted rifle muskets marched out of the woods to one side and into the trees on the other side. Frederick’s force did greatly outnumber the fortified whites. He made it seem even larger by having the men hurry through the trees where the whites couldn’t see them and then march out into the open again.

  He finally waved again, this time for the parade to stop. “Well?” he called. “Have we got the men we need, or what?”

  No one answered him for some little while. He could guess what that meant: the defenders were arguing among themselves. Some had to think they couldn’t hold off the rebels, while others would be more hopeful. At last, the leather-lunged spokesman bawled, “Well, if you don’t want to fight, what do you want?”

  “Come out. You can keep your guns, but come out,” Frederick answered. “You don’t want to stay in the Free Republic of Atlantis, you can march away. Long as you don’t shoot at us, we won’t shoot at you. You do start shootin’, you’re all dead. You stay in there, you’re all dead, too. That’d hurt us some, but it sure wouldn’t do you any good.”

  Another pause. Then the white man asked, “How do we know we can trust you? We come out, you got us where you want us.”

  “You’re in deep water any which way, and you know it,” Frederick said. “Have you ever heard of the Free Republic of Atlantis makin’ a deal like this and then going back on it?”

  “No, but if you murder everybody who comes out we wouldn’t’ve heard about it, would we?” The white man had his reasons for being suspicious. Frederick made himself remember that. The fellow was dicing for hi
s life with enemies he hated.

  “Killing everybody ain’t that easy. Somebody plays pigsnake or something,” Frederick said. Everyone in southern Atlantis knew about pigsnakes. They weren’t poisonous. When they got into danger, they puffed themselves up and hissed and snapped—and then they rolled onto their backs and played dead. Frederick went on, “ ’ Sides, some of us’d brag if we did that kind of thing. People run their mouths, no matter what color they are, and that’s a fact.”

  He waited again. He didn’t know what the white men would decide. He didn’t know what he would have done himself in a mess like that. He was glad he wasn’t the one who had to figure it out.

  “Time’s a-wasting,” he called, hoping to speed things up.

  He didn’t, though, or not very much. He stood there in the hot sun till the front door to the big house finally opened. “All right,” the spokesman shouted. “We’re coming out. You lied to us, we’ll kill as many of you bastards as we can.”

  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.”
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  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.