Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “I hope we can,” Lorenzo said. “I hope like anything we can.”

  Frederick’s head swung away from the Atlantean soldiers and toward his own amateur marshal. “You’re the one who set this up,” he reminded him.

  “I know. I know. Now I’m the one who’s worrying about it, too—all right?” Lorenzo said. “If it goes wrong, they’ll roll over us.”

  “Ever since the uprising started, we’ve known that could happen,” Frederick said. “As long as we can shoot ourselves or shoot each other before they get their hands on us, we’ll be fine.”

  “Fine?” Lorenzo bared his teeth in something halfway between a smile and a snarl. “Is that what you call it these days? We’ll be dead, is what we’ll be.”

  “We’ve been dead ever since I took the hoe to Matthew and the rest of you followed me back to the big house ’stead of whompin’ me to death with your spades,” Frederick answered. “You know it as well as I do, too.”

  “Well . . . yeah.” Lorenzo grudged a nod. “Don’t mean I got to like it.”

  “If you liked it, they would’ve shoveled dirt over you by now. They would’ve shoveled dirt over us all by now,” Frederick said.

  Lorenzo stared out at the white soldiers. The discipline with which they formed their ranks was daunting. “It ain’t like they’ve quit trying,” the copperskin said.

  “I know.” Frederick raised his voice so all the fighters in the trench, Negroes and copperskins, men and women, could hear him: “We’ve got to hold them here. No matter what, we’ve got to. If they break through this line, we’re screwed. So do whatever you can. You want to be free, you want to stay free, you want your children to be free if you’ve got any—or even if you don’t yet—this here may be the place where you can make it real. You ready?”

  “Yeah!” The answering shout wasn’t so loud as it might have been. The fighters could watch the white men deploying out beyond rifle-musket range, too. It was intimidating. Beyond any possible fragment of doubt, it was meant to be.

  A bugle rang out, ordering the Atlantean soldiers and militiamen forward. The note was pure and sweet, almost like birdsong. Frederick spied a flash of gold that had to be sunlight sparking off the horn’s polished bell.

  “Here they come,” somebody said. After a couple of heartbeats, Frederick realized that was his own voice.

  The white men’s cannon started roaring. Frederick hated artillery more than anything else—mostly because he’d never figured out how to match it. The white Atlanteans had it; the insurrectionists didn’t—they just had to endure it.

  In screamed the cannonballs. Some of them flew long. Others thudded into—and sometimes smashed through—the rampart in front of the trenches. A couple of them smashed into fighters after smashing through dirt. Screams rose up. The insurrectionists didn’t have much in the way of surgeons. Herb women made poultices to keep wounds from going bad. Men who’d been butchers could lop off shattered limbs. Ether? They hadn’t managed to steal any coming up from New Marseille. They relied on rum and thick leather straps to muffle pain.

  If the Atlantean artillerists had had guns that could loft shells over the rampart and down into the trench, they would have hurt the insurrectionists worse. They did all they could with what they did have. Frederick thought the cannonading would never end. And, of course, one minute under fire seemed as long as a week of ordinary life, or maybe a year.

  But the insurrectionists couldn’t cower. They would die if they did. “Up!” Lorenzo yelled, reminding them. “Up and shoot! The more of ’em you shoot before they get close, the fewer you’ll have to stick!”

  The fewer who can get close and shoot you, he meant. Frederick could see why he didn’t care to put it that way. Men who worried about what happened to their own precious flesh wouldn’t be inclined to let gunfire come anywhere close to it. Who in his—or her—right mind would be so inclined?

  Rifle muskets bellowed. Smoke rose in thick, fireworks-smelling clouds. Here and there, white men fell over—but only here and there. The rest kept coming. The bright morning sun shone off their bayonets, brighter than it had off the bugle but silver instead of gold.

  “Shoot the bastards!” Lorenzo howled. “Can’t let ’em come close, not with the numbers they’ve got. Kill ’em dead!”

  The insurrectionists did their best. By now, they could fire almost as fast as the white regulars. Practice hadn’t made regulars of the Negroes and copperskins, but it hadn’t missed by much. And they were firing from behind the rampart, so they exposed only their heads and sometimes their shoulders to the white Atlanteans.

  Not many of the whites were shooting. The regulars in the center trudged toward the ramparts as if they’d never heard of longarms. Here and there, a militiaman raised his piece to his shoulder and blasted away as he advanced. It wasn’t exactly aimed fire, but that didn’t exactly matter. With lots of bullets flying around, the law of averages said some wouldn’t be wasted.

  One cracked past Frederick, close enough so he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage. His knees bent in the involuntary genuflection almost everyone accorded near misses. Fifty feet down the trench, a Negro half his age screeched, jumped in the air, and clapped a hand to his bleeding shoulder.

  Whump! A cannon ball slammed into the rampart, throwing up a shower of dirt. The blacks and copperskins it had protected rubbed at their eyes and spat out grit—those who still had enough saliva to spit, anyhow. Those damned fieldpieces kept on pounding away.

  “Hurrah!” the regulars shouted as they came closer. “Hurrah! Hurrah!” Some of the militiamen joined the rhythmic chant. Others howled like dogs baying at the moon or yelled “Honk! Honk!” If real honkers had sounded like that, they’d probably all laughed themselves to death.

  For all the fierce and would-be fierce cheers, more and more white men fell as they neared the rebels’ strongpoint. The rest of the soldiers leaned forward and slowed down, as if they were walking into a heavy wind. They were brave—hating them, Frederick knew that much too well. But not all the bravery in the world could bring troops up to a rampart if the fire from behind it was hot enough. The insurrectionists could deliver that kind of fire.

  Their enemies’ officers had seen charges fail before. They must have realized this one was liable to do the same. Almost at the same moment, several of them raised their voices to call out orders. The men obediently halted. You could really do things with soldiers like that. Yes, a couple of them fell over, one kicking, another ominously still. The rest of the first rank went to one knee. The second rank crouched above them. The third rank stood straight.

  At another shouted command, they delivered a volley. Then they stood up as the next three ranks passed through them and delivered another one. After that, cheering, the regulars resumed their advance.

  They hurt Frederick’s men. Volleying at another army out in the open, odds were they would have ruined it and left it wide open for a charge. They couldn’t bring that off here, no matter how much they must have wanted to. The rampart did its job, saving the insurrectionists untold dead and wounded.

  Which might turn out to make no difference. If the regulars and militiamen got over the rampart and broke the defenders behind it, nothing would matter much. “When?” Frederick asked Lorenzo.

  “Should be any time now,” the copperskin said.

  “Better be,” Frederick said.

  The Negroes and copperskins kept firing at the Atlantean regulars and militiamen. Despite the volleys, the regulars couldn’t reach the rampart—not at the first try, anyhow. If they tried again . . . Frederick wanted to ask When? again. But he and Lorenzo had done what they could. Now they had to hope they’d done it right.

  Consul Newton was getting sick of listening to Consul Stafford gloat about what would happen to the insurrectionists. Stafford cheered as the white Atlanteans came close to storming the low earthen wall Frederick Radcliff’s followers had thrown up. “Next time they’ll get over!” Stafford exulted. “And t
hen—!” He made two-handed thrusting motions, as if wielding a bayoneted rifle musket.

  He’d done that before, too. Newton was also sick of it. When he turned away from the other Consul, he might have been the first white man to spot the Negroes and copperskins coming over the low rise that topped one side of the valley. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “Now what are you croaking about?” Stafford demanded. “You sound like a frog in springtime—know that?”

  Instead of answering, Newton pointed. Then he looked toward the other valley rim. Insurrectionists were swarming down over that one, too. Somehow, he’d thought they might be.

  “Uh-oh,” Stafford said. Then, as if impelled by a lodestone, his head swung in the other direction, as Newton’s had before it. “Uh-oh,” he croaked again.

  “Who sounds like a frog now?” Newton couldn’t resist the gibe. Truth to tell, he hardly tried. Even when things looked to be coming to pieces, he could enjoy needling his opposite number.

  Only trouble was, Stafford didn’t notice he was being needled. “They tricked us!” he cried, fury and astonishment warring in his voice.

  “I didn’t know that wasn’t in the rules,” Newton answered. Part of him realized he was much too likely to get killed in the next hour. If you were going to die, shouldn’t you die with a bon mot on your lips? Then again, why should you? You’d be just as dead one way as the other. And all the people who heard your last-minute wit seemed much too likely to end up dead with you. Who would send your cleverness on to your loved ones and to the history books?

  The soldiers needed a few seconds longer than the Consuls to see that they were suddenly facing a flank attack. Their attention had been even more strongly focused on the fight in front of them, the fight at the rampart. The insurrectionists must have planned it that way. Jeremiah Stafford was absolutely right—no, dead right. The slaves had tricked the professional soldiers.

  Now the professionals had to find some way to fix it—if they could. They didn’t have long to think things over, either. The insurrectionists were already starting to pour enfilading fire into the militiamen on either wing of the Atlantean army. Bullets aimed at the end of a row of men were much more likely to bite than those aimed from the front.

  Colonel Sinapis wasn’t usually a demonstrative sort. He started hopping around and waving his arms and shouting like a man possessed—or possibly like a man with his trousers on fire. The artillerists frantically swung their guns toward the brushy, patchily wooded sides of the valley. They started banging away at the Negroes and copperskins on the army’s flank.

  Artillery was the one arm the Atlantean force had that the rebels lacked. How much good it would do here, though, struck Leland Newton as being open to doubt. The fighters on the slopes were in loose order. Cannonballs couldn’t knock them over six or eight at a time, as they could against troops advancing close together over open ground. Maybe Sinapis hoped he could scare the insurrectionists away, or at least scare them into shooting badly. Or maybe—even more worrisome thought—he simply had no better schemes.

  That turned out not to be true. He pulled the militiamen away from the assault on the rampart and sent them upslope against the flankers. But that exposed them to enfilading fire from the rebels behind the earthwork. The militiamen showed reckless courage. Many—maybe even most—of them were panting for vengeance against what they saw as their uprisen property.

  None of that helped them much. Rifle muskets inflicted more punishment than flesh and blood could bear. Neither militiamen nor regulars had been able to get over the rampart. And the militiamen also weren’t able to get in among the rebels on the slopes. They came close. The bodies they left there, marks like those of high tide on a beach, showed how very close they came. Close counted in horseshoes. In war, it sometimes proved worse than not trying at all.

  Watching the militiamen reel down the slope, away from the concealed insurrectionists who murdered them one after another, Consul Stafford groaned like a man under the lash. “My God!” he said. “We are ruined—ruined, I tell you, Newton!”

  “This whole valley is a killing ground,” Newton said, which only put the same thing another way.

  “Damn his fumblefingered soul, Sinapis blundered right into it, too,” Stafford groaned.

  “If he did, you helped push him along,” Newton said. “You were bragging that you lit a fire under him. You told me how clever you were, how you got him to move when he might not have wanted to, when you threatened to blame him if Atlantis fell apart because he didn’t break the rebellion. Right this minute, the rebellion is breaking us.”

  Stafford didn’t call him a liar. He didn’t call him a feeble-minded twit, either. If that silence wasn’t a telling measure of the other Consul’s despair, Newton had no idea what would be.

  Up a few hundred yards ahead of them, the regulars rushed the rampart again. If the white Atlanteans could break any part of the trap, they might be able to wreck the whole thing.

  If. But muzzle flashes on the rampart spat toward the white men like tongues of fire shot from dragons’ mouths. And bullets flew farther than dragonfire ever could. Again, the regulars had to sag back short of their goal.

  An officer near Colonel Sinapis was trying to tell him something. The man’s knees suddenly gave way. His hat fell off as he sagged to the ground. He wriggled for a little while, but not for long.

  “They’re murdering us! Murdering!” Stafford said.

  “They are.” Newton couldn’t disagree. He did think the officer was liable to be lucky, as such things went. The poor fellow had died fast, and might not even have known he was hit. Not every man who stopped a bullet had such good fortune. Newton had seen too many ghastly wounds, and too many men suffering from them for too long, to hold any illusions on that score.

  “If we can’t stop them . . . Good Lord! What will become of the country after this?” Stafford choked out the words, but he did bring them forth. Newton had to respect him for that. Now the other Consul had found his bon mot in the face of death. How much good it would do him, and whether anyone hereabouts would survive to remember it tomorrow, were a couple of questions whose answers it seemed better not to contemplate.

  Jeremiah Stafford had a bullet, a charge of gunpowder, and a percussion cap ready in each cylinder of his eight-shooter. How much good they’d do him against enemies armed with rifle muskets that far outranged his revolver, he didn’t care to think about.

  He and Consul Newton both went up to huddle close to the rear of the regular contingent. Maybe misery loved company. Maybe that was the safest place to be in these parts, not that any place in these parts counted as particularly safe, not if you were a white man.

  Newton’s accusation burned like vitriol inside Stafford’s soul. Stafford had pushed Balthasar Sinapis as hard as he could. He had made the colonel go forward where Sinapis would have hesitated or even halted on his own. It had worked—up till now.

  Up till now. Three of the most mournful and miserable words in the English language.

  Then Stafford stopped thinking of mourning and misery in the abstract. A lieutenant about twenty feet away from him cried out, twisted an arm to try to clutch at the small of his back, and slowly crumpled to his knees and then to the ground.

  A moment later, a private soldier went down, also shot in the back. Again, Newton realized what was going on before Stafford did. Newton didn’t automatically assume the insurrectionists were stupid. “They’ve got men behind us, too,” he said glumly.

  And they did. The copperskins and blacks back there had done some quick, rough entrenching before they opened up on the white Atlanteans. No one had tried to stop them. No one had even noticed them till they started shooting. They could shoot at the whites with almost as much protection as the insurrectionists behind the ramparts had. And now they’d surrounded the whites.

  A classical education came in handy all kinds of ways. Even in this moment of despair, Stafford knew just what he and his comrades were facing. It w
asn’t as if such things hadn’t happened before, even if that disaster might have stayed unmatched for two thousand years and more.

  “Cannae!” Stafford groaned. “This is another Cannae!”

  Hannibal had surrounded and slaughtered several Roman legions at Cannae during the Second Punic War. The battle was the Carthaginian’s masterpiece. It was about as good a job as any general could do. And here, on a smaller scale, Frederick Radcliff had just re-created it.

  Of course, Carthage didn’t win the Second Punic War. But right at the moment, Jeremiah Stafford had no idea how the United States of Atlantis could hope to put down this great servile insurrection.

  By the way things looked, neither did Colonel Sinapis. He turned to stare at the rebels firing on his men from behind. He raised his hands in horror. They seemed to fall limply back to his sides all by themselves.

  He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind, Stafford thought. He hadn’t heard the vulgar phrase in years, but he’d never known a time when it fit so well.

  “Pull yourself together!” he shouted to Sinapis. “We’ve got to do something!”

  “Something, yes, your Excellency, but what?” the colonel answered. “They have us in a modern Cannae.”

  So his classical training still worked, too, did it? Nice that something did, even if his generalship had let him—and everyone else—down. “Pull yourself together!” Stafford repeated. “Don’t despair of the republic!”

  Sinapis didn’t answer. Maybe he wasn’t despairing of the republic, but of his career. Stafford didn’t know how he’d save that. Stafford didn’t know how to save his own career, either, assuming he could get his own life spared.

  Even then, the non sequitur made him laugh. If you don’t live through this, what happens in your career afterwards won’t matter one whole hell of a lot, he thought.