Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Back in the Atlantean camp, the captured insurrectionists would no doubt claim their captors hadn’t asked them the right questions. Technically, Stafford supposed they’d be telling the truth. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering what would have happened had the soldiers hurt them a little, or more than a little, to make sure they weren’t withholding.

  It couldn’t very well have turned out worse.

  “Snake!” a trooper wailed on a rising note of horror. “Lousy snake just bit me!” That gave Stafford one more thing to worry about: not what he needed at such a crowded moment.

  “Frederick Radcliff!” the captain shouted. “Come out and surrender, Frederick Radcliff!”

  A chorus of voices told him what he could do with his surrender. Their curses showed more ingenuity than Consul Stafford would have expected from such a pack of colored riffraff. “Go after them!” Stafford called. “The more noise, the more insurrectionists, and the more likely we are to catch our man.”

  He wondered whether they would know their man even if they caught him. What exactly did Frederick Radcliff look like? Who would bother painting a slave’s portrait? Nobody—no money in it. And the leader of the uprising wasn’t likely to have sat stock-still for a newfangled photograph, either. Stafford pictured Frederick Radcliff as looking like his famous grandfather, only with dark skin and kinky hair. That might be right, or it might not. He wasn’t sure within twenty years how old the jumped-up slave was. That might make things harder, too.

  But much harder? Stafford didn’t think so. Some Judas among the insurrectionists would give their leader away if he saw him. Maybe the copperskin or black wouldn’t do it on purpose. An involuntary gasp of surprise would serve well enough, though. And then Frederick Radcliff would dance on air or face a firing squad or suffer whatever other lethal fate his captors decided upon.

  And then . . . what? Would the insurrection quietly fold up and fail because the man who started it got what was coming to him? Stafford hoped so. That was why the raiding party had come here, after all.

  But what would happen if someone else—that damned arrogant Lorenzo, say—kept things going even after Frederick Radcliff was dead and gone? What would happen farther east, where slaves were rising up even though chances were they’d barely heard of Frederick Radcliff?

  Stafford muttered under his breath. It wasn’t a happy kind of muttering. The closer he looked at the insurrection, the worse it seemed. Back in New Hastings, he’d thought everything was simple. Sally forth, slaughter the insurrectionists, and march home in triumph.

  He hadn’t imagined the uprising was like the Hydra, sprouting two heads for each one you chopped off. But just because he hadn’t imagined it back in New Hastings, that didn’t mean it wasn’t so.

  To make matters worse, the enemy must have heard his well- intentioned advice to the cavalrymen. The Negroes and copperskins started making a racket first here, then there, then somewhere else. Anyone who tried following the trail of noise would be chasing a will-o’-the-wisp.

  Panting, his heart pounding, Stafford thought, Sinapis was right, damn him. I am too old for this. He pushed through the ferns anyhow. Maybe he would stumble over Frederick Radcliff. Maybe—a bigger unlikelihood, however little he cared to admit it to himself—he would recognize the rebel leader if he did stumble over him. Or maybe something else worthwhile would happen.

  Something else did happen, worthwhile or not. The green curtain in front of him parted. A Negro carrying a musket he must have stolen off a planter’s wall was also hurrying forward. They stared at each other in mutual shock and horror for a split second, the dapper, middle-aged white man and the young black in filthy, ragged clothes. Then, after simultaneous gasps, they both raised their guns and fired.

  And they both missed.

  They couldn’t have been ten feet apart, but they missed anyhow. The twin shots and the crack of the insurrectionist’s bullet darting much too close past Stafford’s ear all but stunned the Consul. The Negro looked as desperately unhappy as Stafford felt. But they were in different situations. It would take the insurrectionist at least half a minute to reload and fire another round. All Jeremiah Stafford had to do was pull the trigger.

  The black man figured that out in an instant. Had he been the natural-born coward Stafford assumed him to be because he was a Negro, he would have thrown himself down in the thick undergrowth or tried to run away. Instead, he clubbed his musket and rushed at the Consul.

  Stafford did fire again. He didn’t miss this time. The bullet caught the insurrectionist just to the left of the middle of his chest. Stafford couldn’t have placed it any better aiming at a target with all the time in the world to shoot.

  When you shot somebody—especially when you hit him right where you wanted to—you expected him to fall over. Stafford had done enough hunting to know that deer didn’t always fall over as soon as you shot them. He’d thought it would be different with people, though. For one thing, no deer ever born had tried to smash in his skull with a reversed musket.

  He ducked the stroke that would have scrambled his brains. Then he fired yet again—and hit the Negro yet again. The man still didn’t fall over, though he did grunt in surprise and pain when the bullet bit into him. He also dropped the musket, but only to try to snatch the eight-shooter out of Stafford’s hand.

  “Why don’t you die, damn you?” Stafford groaned.

  “Fuck your mother, you white devil,” the Negro said. He opened his mouth to add another unpleasantry, but blood poured out between his lips and from his nostrils. For a heartbeat or so, he looked astonished. Then—at last!—his eyes rolled up in his head and he slowly crumpled to the forest floor. A sudden nasty stench amid the forest’s green odors said his bowels had let go.

  He twitched a few times, but now he was plainly dying fast. Stafford stared down at him. He smelled the man’s sweat and his blood as well as his shit. He’d never dreamt killing could be so dreadfully intimate—the Negro was the first man he’d ever known he’d slain. All at once, he doubled over and was sick. Some of his vomit splashed the black man, but it seemed more tribute than defilement.

  “You all right, Consul?” a rough voice asked. A sergeant with grizzled side whiskers stood there. He jerked a thumb at the corpse. “Never done for anybody before, have you?”

  “No,” Stafford choked out. “Have you got anything I can rinse my mouth with?”

  “Here you go.” The sergeant handed him a tin canteen with a cloth cover.

  “Thanks.” Stafford undid the cover and gulped. He’d expected water. He got barrel-tree rum. He almost puked again, as much from surprise as for any other reason. Then he spat out some of it.

  The sergeant nodded. “That’s the way, friend. Gets rid of the taste better’n water would, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Stafford agreed, a different kind of surprise in his voice. He took another swig, and swallowed this time. Then he handed back the canteen.

  After putting it on his belt again, the sergeant said, “I don’t think we’re going to catch the son of a bitch.”

  “Neither do I, I’m afraid,” Stafford said. “But even if we don’t, we’re making him run away. We’re making the insurrectionists dance to our tune for a change.” Potent excitement and even more potent rum were hitting him the way the Negro’s musket ball would have had it connected. “That’s got to be worth something, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, we can hope so, anyways,” the veteran answered, and with such doubtful assurance Stafford had to be content.

  Leland Newton nodded to himself when the cavalry column came back without the rebel leader. Then he noticed that his fellow Consul was splashed with blood and distinctly green around the gills. “Are you all right, Jeremiah?” he asked, more real concern in his voice than he’d expected.

  He watched as Stafford looked down at himself and noticed the blood for what seemed likely to be the first time. “Oh,” Stafford said, and then, as if explaining everything in three words, “
It isn’t mine.”

  “Well, good,” Newton said. “Ah, whose is it, then?”

  “This nigger and I saw each other in the woods at the same time,” Stafford answered. “I ended up shooting him.”

  Newton would have thought the Consul from Cosquer would sound proud of himself after doing something like that. Instead, Stafford seemed unwontedly subdued. Colonel Sinapis understood that before Newton did. “Your first time, your Excellency?” the officer asked.

  “That’s right.” Stafford nodded jerkily. “You aren’t the first one to ask me, either. It must stick out on me like spines. Is that the mark Cain wore?” He sounded altogether in earnest. Newton hadn’t killed. He had no idea what it would be like, and wasn’t anxious to find out. Whatever Stafford had learned about himself, it seemed to have come closer to shattering him than bucking him up.

  Sinapis’ gaze swung to the captain who’d commanded the raiders. “You did not capture the rebel chief. Did you kill him?”

  “No, sir, not that I know of,” the captain said. “My guess is that he was there, or somewhere close by. There were plenty of insurrectionists in those parts, and I can see no reason why there would have been if they weren’t guarding something or someone important to them.” He paused for a moment. “I wish we would have had a better description of the scalawag, and I wish someone would have told me we’d be squelching through a bog after him.”

  “Were you?” Sinapis said, his eyebrows leaping. The captain nodded—unhappily, if Newton was any judge. “We did not learn that from the prisoners who told us where Frederick Radcliff would be hiding?”

  “We sure didn’t, sir,” the captain said. “Maybe they were holding out on us, or maybe we just didn’t find the right questions to ask. Any which way, we got into something we weren’t prepared for. The troops performed bravely. Not catching our man wasn’t their fault. They did everything they could. They might have done better if they’d known what they’d be getting into.”

  “It must be the fault of the questioning,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Had we asked the question we needed, we would have got the right answer. A bog? Malakas!” He didn’t bother to translate that. He sounded splendidly disgusted. With the bog? With the questioner? With the captives, for not volunteering more? With the whole campaign? That last seemed most likely to Newton.

  He put the best face he could on things: “On to New Marseille, then?”

  Sinapis dipped his head. “On to New Marseille, your Excellency. We shall make sure the rebels cannot steal the place. “That would be”—he paused to look for words—“unfortunate. Yes, unfortunate. To say nothing of embarrassing.” The ones he found seemed to fit altogether too well.

  They roused Stafford from his sorrowful lethargy, too. “New Marseille already has a garrison! It has cannon!” he said.

  “It has cannon,” Sinapis agreed. “Most of them point out to sea, to protect the harbor from enemy bombardment. It has a garrison: a small one. So far as I know, it has not been reinforced by sea. These people we are fighting have already done several things I had not imagined they could do while I was still in New Hastings. If they should surprise us again, it would not surprise me.”

  Newton tried to parse that last sentence. Logically, it made no sense. Logic or no, he understood what Sinapis was talking about. So did his colleague. “Well, we’d better get there ahead of them, then,” Stafford said. “Or, if we can’t manage that, we’d better drive them out once we do get there.”

  “Indeed,” Colonel Sinapis said. “I should not care to be remembered as the man who lost the city.” His mouth tightened. He must have been remembered for some failures back in Europe; he’d made glancing allusion to at least one of them. Plenty of people came to Atlantis to try to redeem failure elsewhere. Some succeeded. They were the ones who wrote their names in life’s book in large letters. Others went right on failing. Most of those, by the nature of things, were soon forgotten. But a soldier who failed might end up better remembered than one who triumphed.

  The same, Newton realized uneasily, held true for a Consul who failed. Newton had understood from the start that either he or Stafford wouldn’t get what he wanted from this campaign. Now he realized neither of them might get what he wanted. And what would come of that?

  BOOK III

  XIII

  They were gone. The last gunshots petered out at the edge of the wooded swamp adjoining the St. Clair plantation. Frederick Radcliff allowed himself the luxury of a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. He’d known the Atlantean soldiers were dangerous fighting men. He hadn’t dreamt how dangerous they were till they almost snatched him from his redoubt here.

  He wouldn’t even be able to stay here any more. The soldiers were liable to come back without warning. If they did, his own men might not be so lucky holding them off.

  How had the white Atlanteans learned where he made his headquarters? Only one answer occurred to him: they must have squeezed it out of a captive. What had they done to the men they took? All sorts of unpleasant possibilities occurred to Frederick. With the scars of the lash on his own back, he wouldn’t have put anything past the enemy.

  But he was still in the fight. That was the most important thing. The Free Republic of Atlantis remained a going concern. And it remained an inspiration for slaves all over the southern half of the USA. Not all the uprisings that had broken out from the Hesperian Gulf to the Atlantic were under his control. That had worried him at first. It didn’t any more. They all had the same goal: to give Negroes and copperskins the freedom they deserved simply by virtue of being men and women.

  Some of those distant uprisings had ended in massacre, either of whites by furious slaves or of slaves by victorious and vengeful whites. That kind of slaughter would make it harder for the two sides to come back together when peace finally returned, if it ever did. Frederick urged his followers and everyone who rose with him to limit killing whenever they could. And he hoped his urging did some good. He hoped, yes, but he wouldn’t have staked more than ten cents on it.

  His scouts still kept a close eye on the Consular army. The main body didn’t seem to be coming after him. As far as the watchers could tell, it was heading for New Marseille.

  Lorenzo clicked his tongue between his teeth when he got that news. “I told you we should have grabbed the town when we had the chance,” the copperskin said. “Ain’t gonna get it again.”

  “We might not even have taken it. We couldn’t have held it,” Frederick said, as he had a good many times before.

  As Lorenzo had before, he responded, “But think of the newspapers yelling ‘Rebel army takes New Marseille!’ Headlines like that, they’re worth money to us.”

  “Getting run out and shot up isn’t,” Frederick said. “Do you reckon we could keep those soldiers from running us out?”

  “Well . . . no,” Lorenzo admitted.

  “There you are, then.” Frederick would have boxed Lorenzo’s ears if the copperskin had tried to tell him anything different.

  “Here I am, all right,” Lorenzo said mournfully. “Here I am, trying to cipher out what we do next.”

  “We hang on, that’s what,” Frederick answered. “Long as we hang on, sooner or later we’re gonna win. They have to squash us flat to lick us. And even if they do, we’ll just pop up again somewhere else.”

  “All right. I hope it’s all right, anyway,” Lorenzo said. “We ain’t got killed yet, and when we started out I sure thought we would have by now. Reckon that puts us ahead of the game.”

  Frederick thought that put them ahead of the game, too. Had their cause failed, they wouldn’t just have been killed. They would have been put to death with as much pain and ingenuity as their white captors could come up with.

  A brightly colored little bird fluttered from branch to branch above Frederick’s head. Every so often, it would peck at a bug. He pointed to it. The motion was enough to send it flying away. A lot of Atlantean creatures had no fear of man. As far as Frederick could see, the lit
tle warblers were afraid of everything.

  He knew how they felt.

  Lorenzo saw the bird, too. His thoughts went down a different track: “Not much meat on those, but they’re tasty baked in a pie. Dunno why the rhyme talks about blackbirds. They ain’t half as good.”

  Off in the distance, more gunshots erupted. Frederick frowned, but that seemed to be the last flurry. “If you’re sure you don’t want to have anything to do with New Marseille, maybe we’d better head north, up towards Avalon,” Lorenzo said. “Plenty of plantations up that way. Plenty of mudfaces and niggers who’d be glad to see us, and plenty of white folks who wouldn’t.”

  He commonly put his own kind first. Frederick commonly thought of Negroes first. That wouldn’t matter unless the two groups paused in their fight against oppression and went after each other instead of the whites who held them both down. Some of the whites had tried to provoke them into doing just that. So far, it hadn’t worked. Frederick wanted to make sure it wouldn’t.

  “We’ve got to remember: the white folks are the ones we’ve all got to go after,” he said. “Blacks don’t fight copperskins. Copperskins don’t fight black folks, either.”

  “Well, sure,” Lorenzo agreed. “We’d have to be pretty damned stupid to pull a harebrained stunt like that.”

  “Plenty of people are stupid. Doesn’t matter what color they are. Fools all over the place,” Frederick said. “What we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to make sure the fools don’t drag everybody else into the chamber pot with ’em.”

  “That sounds good to me,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve got enough trouble taking on the white folks, looks like to me. We fight our own little war while we’re trying to do that, they’ll lick all of us.”

  Frederick Radcliff nodded. “Looks the same way to me.” He was glad he and Lorenzo both saw it like that. To Negroes, copperskins, even enslaved copperskins, had more touchy pride than they really needed. They were always ready for trouble, and would sometimes start it themselves if they couldn’t find it any other way.