Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “No!” the copperskins and Negroes shouted.

  “I can’t hear you.” Frederick cupped a hand behind his ear, the way he’d seen preachers do when they were riling up their flocks. “Tell me again, people—are they right?”

  “No!” the men and women of the Liberating Army howled.

  “That’s right. They’re gonna stub their toes. They’re gonna fall on their faces. We are free niggers. We are free mudfaces. And we don’t aim to let anybody take that away from us, not ever again,” Frederick said.

  They shouted loud enough to make sure the trees and the rocks heard. Frederick’s ears rang. They had the spirit, all right. Whether they would keep it once the white men started shooting at them . . .

  “Reckon we can win one fight the way you said—we’ll take ’em by surprise, like,” Lorenzo said quietly. “But what do we do after that?”

  “If we win one fight, we get us more guns and more bullets,” Frederick said. “That’ll make us stronger. It’ll give the white folks somethin’ to worry about. And if word of the uprising spreads amongst ’em, it’ll spread amongst the slaves, too. What you want to bet this won’t be the only hot spot the whites got to pour water on?”

  “Hmm.” Lorenzo contemplated that. “Well, maybe,” he said at last. “It better not be, or we’re all as dead as honkers.”

  “They say some of them big dumb things’re still alive, way off in the back country,” Frederick said.

  “They say all kinds of stupid things,” Lorenzo replied. “And even if it’s true, not enough of ’em are left to do anybody any good—not even themselves.”

  “Anybody who doesn’t want to stay here can run off on his own. I’ve told folks that before,” Frederick said.

  “I want to be here. I want to win,” Lorenzo said.

  “Good,” Frederick answered. “So do I.”

  VI

  The Liberating Army could draw on three plantations for livestock and supplies. That went a long way toward making sure the soldiers in that army didn’t go hungry right away. Frederick had enough other things to worry about. Adding hunger to the list would have been . . . part of what a general was supposed to take care of.

  He’d never thought he would be a general. He wondered whether his grandfather had expected the job. He supposed Victor Radcliff must have. The white man had been a prominent officer in the earlier war, the war where English Atlantis and the mother country fought against France. When it came time for Atlantis to rise up against England, who else would the Atlantean Assembly choose to lead its forces? No one else. And who but France would aid Atlantis in her fight against the mother country? Politics could be a crazy business.

  Frederick wondered what his grandfather would think of his own rising. Neither Victor Radcliff nor Isaac Fenner, the other First Consul, had done anything against slavery. Maybe they’d thought southern Atlantis would promptly part company with the United States of Atlantis if they tried. Or maybe they hadn’t cared—a much more disheartening prospect.

  Well, why should they have cared? Frederick thought. The lash never came down on their backs. It had come down on his. The strokes had healed well enough, but he could still feel them if he twisted the wrong way. He would bear the marks till the day he died. And he would remember the humiliation of being shackled to the whipping post—and the terror of each snap!-crack!—till they shoveled dirt over him, too.

  If they shoveled dirt over him. If they didn’t burn him or chuck him in a river or leave him aboveground as a feast for ravens and vultures and scuttling lizards. Once you raised your hand against the white man, you couldn’t expect mercy from him, not even in death.

  “You gonna wait for the white folks to come after us, or do you aim to go after them some more before they can?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I’ve been wondering about that.” Frederick also wondered if he should admit he wondered. Weren’t generals supposed to know everything? Didn’t they pull answers out of the air the way a stage magician pulled coins out of people’s noses? Maybe white generals did. They got a lot more practice soldiering before they became generals than Frederick ever had. He was reinventing the art from scratch, and had to hope he wouldn’t sink the uprising with some silly move a real general would have seen from a mile away. Sighing, he went on, “Looks to me like we ought to move again. If we get used to sitting around on our hunkers, the white folks’re liable to just walk right over us once they commence to fight.”

  “Looks that way to me, too,” Lorenzo said. “An’ it looks like they’ll commence to fight pretty damn quick, too. Longer they wait, more of their slaves’ll run off to us.”

  “Ain’t it the truth?” Frederick said. “Mudfaces and niggers’re already coming in. Folks want to be free, dammit. And why shouldn’t they? Look at what the whites’ve got. Then look at what they give us. Who wouldn’t want to be on the other end of that stick?”

  “I want to say nobody wouldn’t, but that ain’t so,” Lorenzo said unhappily. “That son of a bitch of a Jerome who came runnin’ in to warn the Menands. And we’ve had us a couple of fellows who went and disappeared. Don’t know where they went, if it wasn’t to tell tales on us to the white folks.”

  “Maybe they just snuck off to hide in the woods,” Frederick said. Lorenzo rolled his eyes. Since Frederick didn’t believe it, either, he couldn’t very well come down on his lieutenant for doubting. He knew how the white folks worked. To stop an uprising, they’d pay spies as much as they had to. They might even reward them with freedom. Frederick didn’t think he could stomach freedom bought at the price of betraying other slaves. Some men might not have such a tender conscience, though. Some might not have any conscience at all.

  “Which way do you want to go, then?” Lorenzo asked. “Gibsons are off to the east, an’ the St. Clairs’re north of here. We go after anybody else, we’d have to march back the way we’ve come.”

  “Uh-huh.” Frederick nodded. “I reckon we better hit the St. Clairs next. If I remember right, their land is on the edge of a good-sized swamp. Things go wrong, that’s a good place to hide. White folks won’t have an easy time digging us out of it.”

  “Makes sense,” Lorenzo agreed. “Things ain’t gone wrong yet, though. Maybe they won’t, knock wood.” In lieu of wood, he bounced a fist off the side of his own head.

  “No, not yet,” Frederick said. “But right when you’re sure they can’t, that’s when they do.”

  Frederick knew that Lucille St. Clair came to Mistress Clotilde’s socials, and that she invited Mistress Clotilde to hers. He’d heard that Ebenezer St. Clair was a slow man with an eagle, but not an especially harsh master. The plantation grew cotton and indigo. From everything he’d heard, it made money. Maybe that was Master Ebenezer squeezing every eagle till its eyes popped. Whatever it was, it was something not every plantation could boast.

  And it didn’t matter an atlantean’s worth, not when the Liberating Army was about to call on the place. How would Master Ebenezer record an invasion in his ledgers? He’d never get the chance, not unless he ran before the slaves who’d freed themselves arrived.

  The Negroes and copperskins under Frederick’s loose command grumbled when he got them moving. Sure enough, they were happy with what they’d already done. They wanted to sit around and enjoy it for a while.

  “You gonna keep sitting when the white folks come and cut your throats?” he asked them. “You gonna wait around for them to do it? You can do that—and I don’t reckon you’ll need to wait real long. You got to remember, they know we’ve risen up. Ain’t a question that they’ll try and smash us. Only question is, when are they gonna come after us?”

  His warriors shouldered their rifle muskets. They moved north after him. If they weren’t especially enthusiastic, that wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. He didn’t think any soldiers could stay enthusiastic about killing—and about laying their own lives on the line. But fighting came with their line of work, and so they did it.

  One of the
slaves who’d fled to the Liberating Army at the Menands’ plantation came from the St. Clairs’. “I think I can get you close to the big house without letting the field hands see you on the way, if that’s what you want,” he told Frederick as they tramped north.

  “That’d be good—let us get at the white folks without anybody warning ’em,” Frederick said. He paused, eyeing the Negro he didn’t know. “You lead us into an ambush, you may fuck us. All the same, I promise you won’t be around to spend whatever the white folks said they’d give you. You understand what I’m talking about?”

  “Sure do,” the other man answered steadily. “I don’t want to fuck you. I want to watch the big house burn, is what I want to do.”

  “How come? He do somethin’ to you in particular?” Frederick asked.

  “My woman’s gonna have his baby,” the Negro said bleakly.

  “Oh.” Frederick left it right there. That was one of the special miseries black and copperskinned men faced in Atlantis. If a white man set his eyes on their woman, he could take her. Dreadful things happened to slaves who tried to resist. But were you a man at all if you couldn’t protect your woman?

  Of course, this fellow might be lying, looking for sympathy as he fooled the Liberating Army. If he was, he wouldn’t get the chance to profit from it; Frederick had been in deadly earnest about that.

  The man led them to a stretch of forest that ran alongside the fields. For a little while, Frederick could imagine himself in the Atlantis that had existed when Edward Radcliffe (his how-many-times-great-grandfather) founded New Hastings. Ferns, barrel trees, a big green cucumber slug clinging to the trunk of a pine, spicy odors in the air, birds chirping . . . No sign that anything had changed, except for the weight of the rifle musket on his back and the pull of the sling against his shoulder.

  “Hold up,” said the Negro from the St. Clairs’ plantation—his name was Andrew. “We’re almost there. If you kind of scoot forward, you’ll be able to see the big house through the ferns.”

  Frederick scooted up till the leaves of the ferns started tickling his nose. Sure enough, there was the big house. The columned front porch would have looked incongruous to anyone who didn’t take that style of building for granted, but Frederick did, so he saw nothing strange in it.

  Chickens pecked in the yard between the big house and the barn. An enormous hog rolled in its wallow. And . . . as Frederick watched, a dozen white men with longarms rode up to the house. Another white, presumably Ebenezer St. Clair, came out to greet them.

  “Damnation,” Frederick muttered. “They’re getting reinforcements.” He called Lorenzo forward—he wanted the copperskin to see for himself. When he had, Frederick asked, “Can we take them?”

  “If we can’t, we’d better go home and let them do what they want with us, because we don’t deserve to win,” Lorenzo said. “I do wish we would’ve got here before they went into the house. Killing ’em in there’ll be a lot harder. How’d they know to come here, anyways?”

  “Maybe one of our runaways went and told them. Or maybe they’ve sent people to the Gibsons’ place, too. Only stands to reason we’d go after one or the other,” Frederick said. “Doesn’t much matter either way. They’re there, and we gotta get ’em. I wish we’d beaten them here, too, but I’m not gonna fret about that now. All I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna make sure we’ve got our guns loaded.”

  He passed the word back to his followers. They would vastly outnumber the whites inside the St. Clairs’ big house. The defenders would fight from splendid cover, though. And they would be very determined. Frederick was sure of that. How well would his own copperskins and blacks fight? Whites professed to believe slaves couldn’t fight—and did their damnedest to make sure slaves never got the chance.

  Well, they had their chance now. And they were at least as well armed as their enemies. Lieutenant Torrance would be kicking himself if he could know . . . or would he? He was a Croydon man. Maybe he was smiling down from heaven now.

  As soon as Frederick had the word that his followers would indeed be fighting with weapons loaded, he said, “Let’s go get ’em, then. Use the best cover you can find, and get up as close to the big house as you can. We may have to set it on fire to smoke those white bastards out of there. I’d sooner not, but I won’t worry if it comes to that. The secret’s out. The white folks know we’re in arms against ’em. So now we’ve got to win. Come on!”

  They emerged from the woods and trotted toward the big house. Lorenzo led a smaller party over toward the barn. That would give the Liberating Army cover almost as good as the big house offered the whites.

  Bang! A gun barked from the big house. A copperskin howled and clutched at his shoulder. “Get down!” Frederick called to his fighters. “Get flat! Crawl! Get behind things to shoot.” Reloading a rifle musket while flat wasn’t quite impossible, but it was a long way from easy. On the other hand, getting killed standing up wasn’t so good, either.

  A bullet cracking past his ear persuaded him to follow his own order. He wriggled forward through the grass. A small yellow-green lizard scooted away from him in horror, or perhaps derision.

  “Keep coming!” a white man yelled from the big house. “We’ll shoot you down like the mad dogs you are!”

  The white didn’t believe slaves could fight, not down in his heart he didn’t. He stood at an open window to shout defiance at them. Half a dozen rifle muskets spoke in the space of a heartbeat. He clutched at his chest and fell over. If he wasn’t dead, he was badly hurt. The Negroes and copperskins raised a cheer.

  “Who’s next?” Frederick called. Nobody answered him, not the way the first man had reviled the Liberating Army.

  Frederick slithered towards a boulder. Once he got behind it, he aimed his longarm at an upstairs window and waited. Sooner or later, somebody would shoot from that spot. Sooner, he judged: it let a marksman look down on targets he wouldn’t be able to spot from ground level.

  Was that movement there? Sure enough, a gun barrel poked out the window. He pulled the trigger. When the hammer came down on the percussion cap, the cap spat flame into the black powder in the firing chamber. The rifle musket punched his shoulder. Yes, the percussion system beat the devil out of any flintlock ever made. No hang fire, no delay, nothing but instant murder—if your aim was good.

  And Frederick’s was. The white man up there toppled forward when he was hit, and hung half inside, half outside the window. Several bullets spanged off the boulder after that. The cloud of gunpowder smoke hanging above it might have said Here I am! Shoot me!

  Off to one side, the pig he’d seen wallowing let out a squeal of agony. Roast pork after we win, he thought.

  A copperskin came out of the barn with a lantern in his hand. Fire and oil made a deadly combination—if he could chuck the lantern into the big house without getting shot down. He raced toward the white men’s shelter. Bullets whipped past him, but he threw the lantern through a window—glass crashed—and then turned to dash for safety. A round caught him then, in the small of the back. He fell forward and kept on trying to crawl away. More bullets bit him after that. Before long, he stopped moving.

  Why didn’t the big house explode into flame? Had the white men smothered the fire? Had it gone out? Frederick swore. He didn’t want his followers to give up their lives for nothing.

  Out of the barn trotted several men carrying a stout pole. Frederick realized at once what they had in mind. A battering ram would knock in the front door . . . if they could get close enough to use it. “Shoot at the front windows, fast as you can!” he shouted to his men. “Everybody with a pistol, now’s the time to use it!”

  He pulled out his own. The range was long for good shooting from a revolver, but he could keep the defenders ducking. Right now, that counted for more than accuracy.

  He and his men banged away at the big house. The copperskins and Negroes with the pole thundered forward. Whites popped up to shoot at them. One of the whites caught a bullet in the face.
He slumped back into the big house. A moment later, a copperskin on the pole grabbed his leg and fell. The rest kept coming. Another man was wounded as they climbed the stairs to the porch.

  “Come on!” Frederick yelled. “Charge!” If the battering ram broke in, the Liberating Army would win the fight all at once. If it didn’t . . . He didn’t care to think about that.

  He rushed toward the big house. When you were running, not thinking came easier. His fighters were charging the place with him. He would have been mighty lonely had they hung back—but not for long. After that, he would have just been dead.

  Thud! After so many gunshots, the noise of the pole slamming into the door didn’t seem like much. The door sagged in on its hinges, but didn’t open. The men with the battering ram hit it again. One more of them fell, shot from behind the door, but they knocked it in. Then they dropped the pole in the doorway, so the whites inside would have a harder time shoving the door closed again.

  Frederick seemed to fly up the stairs. A few men were ahead of him, but not many. A white stood in the doorway with a shotgun. The twin barrels looked wide as a railroad tunnel to Frederick. But one of the slaves shot the white before he could pull the trigger. He fell backward, and sent the charge into—through—the roof of the porch. It blasted a hole big enough to pitch a turkey through. It would have done the same to Frederick’s midsection. Yes, not thinking was easier.

  Then he was inside the house, blinking as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. That was a mad mêlée. The whites still on their feet swung muskets and shotguns club-fashion—they had no time to reload. One of them smashed a Negro’s head with a blow so hard, it broke the stock off his weapon. Another Negro bayoneted him. He squealed like a stuck pig. “Here’s another one, you fucker!” the black roared. “And another one! And another one!” A man often needed a lot of sticking before he died. That defender got every bit he needed, and more besides.