Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  “He does,” Lorenzo agreed. And so it was decided.

  They took the rifle muskets out of their crates. Then they had to figure out how to use the percussion caps that came with the cartridges: all of the firearms on the plantation were flintlocks. But several slaves had heard about the percussion system, and had a notion of how to fit the thin copper caps over the nipple on each musket.

  Some of the field hands used beat-up old shotguns of their own to kill varmints and hunt small game. The fancy new muskets impressed them enormously. “See, the thing of it is, a flintlock’ll misfire maybe one time in five,” Lorenzo explained to Frederick. “And even when it doesn’t, there’s always that wait while the sparks set off the priming powder and the priming powder starts the main charge, so you miss what you were aiming at ’cause it’s not there no more.”

  “Not like that with these guns,” Frederick said. His shoulder was sore from a rifle musket’s fierce kick. “Soon as you pull the trigger and the hammer comes down—bang!” His ears were still ringing, too.

  “I hope to shit, it’s not like that!” Lorenzo said enthusiastically. “We’re gonna kill us a lot of white folks with ’em.”

  “That’s right.” Frederick saw the need, but he wasn’t so eager. The color of his skin reminded him of the white blood that flowed in his veins. So did the thick beard that rasped under his fingers every time he rubbed his chin.

  Lorenzo pressed ahead: “How are we gonna get there? We march down the road with guns on our shoulders, people’ll figure out pretty damned quick there’s a slave uprising.”

  “Think so, do you?” Frederick’s voice was dry. “Looks to me like they’ll figure it out pretty damned quick any which way.”

  Lorenzo grinned. He had strong white teeth, and his fierce expression made them seem uncommonly sharp. “Looks the same way to me. But do you want to let the whole world know right away, like we’re some traveling medicine show?”

  “Well . . .” Frederick didn’t need long to think that over. “No.”

  And so they went cross-country—all but the precious rifle muskets they weren’t using themselves and the even more precious ammunition. Those rolled down the road, guarded by slaves with eight-shooters taken from dead Atlantean cavalrymen. The Negroes and copperskins slapped paint on the wagons before setting out, so no one who saw them would think of the United States of Atlantis.

  One of the slaves who took the lead wagon down the road pulled a black felt hat of Henry Barford’s low on his forehead, so the brim was barely above his eyes. It was the perfect touch, especially since he was also smoking one of the dead master’s cheroots. If he didn’t look like a teamster, Frederick had never seen anybody who did.

  “They’ll get there ahead of us,” Davey said in worried tones as the rest of the Liberating Army started tramping from one big house to the other.

  Frederick shook his head. “Don’t think so. Hope not, anyways. I told ’em to hold up by the side of the road a couple of times. White folks going by won’t think anything of that. You know how they always go on about how lazy niggers and mudfaces are.”

  “Oh, hell, yes—usually while they’re pilin’ more work on our heads,” Davey said. “Then they get mad on account of we don’t finish as fast as they want.” He muttered something under his breath; the look in his eyes went as dark as his skin. After a few seconds, though, his face cleared. He set a hand on Frederick’s shoulder. “That’s good, the way you set it up. Seems like you got a notion of what’s likely to happen next. Fellow who’s runnin’ this show, he better do that.”

  “Yeah, I know. Right now, main thing I’m tryin’ for is not to do anything out-and-out stupid,” Frederick answered. Sooner or later, he would do something stupid, too. You couldn’t help it, any more than you could help needing to piss every so often. He just hoped his mistakes wouldn’t be too bad and wouldn’t hurt the Liberating Army too much.

  He was glad Davey seemed willing to let him lead. The head cook was one of a handful of men who might have wanted to run things himself. Lorenzo was another. He also seemed content with Frederick’s leadership.

  Well, of course they are, Frederick thought. Nothing’s gone wrong yet, so they can’t hang any blame on me.

  A rail fence separated Master Henry’s land from Benjamin Barker’s. Maybe it was Frederick’s imagination, but he thought the crops on the far side of the fence grew taller than they did on this side. Nothing, not even cotton plants, dared give Benjamin Barker a hard time.

  He remarked on that as he clambered over the fence and came down on the other side. Now it’s official. Now it’s an invasion, he thought. Helen answered him before anyone else could: “We’re gonna give Master Benjamin Barker a hard time, by Jesus! And his stuck-up bitch of a wife, too!”

  “That’s right!” Several Negroes and copperskins said the same thing at the same time. Women’s voices were loud in the chorus. Frederick knew nobody liked Veronique Barker very much. Considering what was likely to happen to her, that might be just as well.

  “Hey, now! What are you slaves doin’ on Barker land?” an officious-sounding Negro demanded. “And”—the fellow’s voice suddenly wobbled—“what are you doin’ with guns in your hands?”

  “This here is the Liberating Army,” Frederick answered proudly. “We’re here to clean things out, that’s what we’re here for. Are you with us or against us?”

  “Lord Jesus!” the Negro yelped. If he said he was against them, he wouldn’t live long. And maybe he didn’t need much persuading. “You’re gonna do for Master Benjamin?”

  “His snooty ol’ Veronique, too,” Helen said.

  “You really are!” Benjamin Barker’s slave might have discovered it was Christmas in summertime. “Count me in! You got a spare gun I can shoot?”

  “Not yet, but we will pretty quick,” Frederick said. If Barker’s Negro wanted to think that meant they aimed to plunder the big house, he was welcome to for the time being. Let him prove himself before he got a rifle musket of his own.

  “Well, come on, then!” he said now, and he sure seemed enthusiastic. “I’ll take you straight to him, I will!”

  V

  They hadn’t gone very far before they came upon a work gang weeding in the fields. Frederick’s back and shoulders twinged sympathetically. He’d been doing the same thing himself a couple of days earlier. And making sure the gang actually worked, of course, was Benjamin Barker’s overseer.

  He was older and tougher-looking than Matthew had been. Matthew had been a man who wanted to rise, the kind who dreamt of owning a plantation himself one day. This fellow was out of dreams. All he wanted was to go on doing what he was doing already. He’d never rise higher than overseer, and he knew it.

  Instead of a switch, he carried a lash in his right hand. And, where Matthew had had a knife on his belt, a pistol rode this overseer’s right hip.

  His hand dropped to that pistol as soon as he saw strange slaves. “All right, you bastards!” he growled. “You’ve got three shakes of a lamb’s tail to tell me what the hell you’re doing on Master Barker’s land. C’mon! Make it snappy!”

  He had to die. Frederick wasn’t the only one who realized it. Half a dozen rifle muskets rose as one and trained on the overseer’s chest and head. It wasn’t anything personal—but, then again, it was. Frederick had trouble imagining a field hand who didn’t want to shoot an overseer.

  “Son of a bitch!” this white man exclaimed. “You lousy, stupid idiots are trying to rise up!” With startling speed, his pistol cleared the holster.

  With startling speed—but not fast enough. Before the overseer could pull the trigger, those rifle muskets spoke together. A couple of the conical bullets the longarms spat might have missed him, but most struck home. A round that caught a man square in the face drastically rearranged his looks, and not for the better. Scarlet flowers blossomed on the overseer’s shirtfront, too. He pitched forward and lay facedown in the dirt.

  Benjamin Barker’s slaves gaped
at him, and at the men and women of the Liberating Army. Frederick paid no attention to them for a little while; he was reloading as fast as he could. Only after a new percussion cap sat on the nipple and a new powder charge and bullet were rammed down and firmly seated in the barrel did he start to notice their exclamations.

  “What’d you go and do that for?” a mulatto woman asked shrilly, her knuckles pressed against her mouth.

  Davey laughed. “You gonna tell me an overseer didn’t have it coming? Not likely!”

  “But . . .” The woman’s gaze traveled to the blood soaking into the ground under the dead white man, then quickly jerked away. “You went and shot him. Just like that, you went and shot him.”

  Lorenzo laughed at her. “Nothing gets by you, does it, sweetheart?” He’d also reloaded before worrying about anything else. Gunfire might bring Benjamin Barker at the run, intent on finding out what had happened.

  “What you gonna do with us?” a copperskinned man asked.

  “Set you free. Give you guns,” Frederick answered. “Nobody’s gonna sell us any more, not ever again. Nobody’s gonna horsewhip us any more, neither, not ever again. This here is the Liberating Army. From now on, we’re our own people, not anybody else’s, not ever again.”

  The copperskin looked at him as if he’d just declared himself God Almighty. “You’re gonna get us all killed, is what you’re gonna do.” Several of Benjamin Barker’s other slaves nodded somber agreement.

  Frederick also knew that was possible—and feared it was probable. Even so, he said, “Best thing we can do is whip all the planters around us and make our army bigger. The more people we’ve got fighting, the better our chances.”

  “Maybe we can lick some of the planters,” a Negro field hand here said. “We ain’t never gonna lick the Atlantean army.”

  Frederick brandished his rifle musket. The long sword bayonet glittered in the sun. “We got these from Atlantean soldiers,” he said proudly. He didn’t mention that most of them were down with the yellow jack. He also didn’t mention that the Liberating Army might have brought the sickness with it. Instead, he added, “Now—who wants to see Master Benjamin dead?”

  No matter what Barker’s field hands thought about the ultimate fate of the uprising, they did want to see their master dead. “And Mistress Veronique, too!” one of the women said—the one who’d been so horrified when they shot the overseer. Yes, Benjamin Barker’s wife had found a way to make herself remembered, all right.

  “Well, let’s go get ’em,” Frederick said, and then, “Scouts forward!” He wasn’t going to run into any nasty surprises, not if he could help it.

  He could see the big house in the distance. It was larger and fancier than Henry Barford’s place. Veronique Barker had always thought herself above Mistress Clotilde. Now Frederick saw why. The Barkers had more money, and with money came status. It was that simple.

  No—it had been that simple. Now there was a new game, complete with new rules. One of the new rules was, a white man couldn’t get rich off the labor of Negroes and copperskins. Benjamin Barker was about to be taken to school by the Liberating Army. He would remember his lessons for the rest of his life, however long that was.

  Here he came toward the fields: a big, sturdy man with streaks of gray in his black hair. He cradled a rifle or shotgun in his arms. Behind him strode his son, who was thinner and not yet graying but otherwise a good copy of the planter. The younger man was also armed.

  Seeing strange copperskins and blacks heading his way, Benjamin Barker shouted in a great voice: “What kind of riffraff is this?” He sounded more disbelieving that such people could invade his land than angry.

  His son reached out to pluck at his shirtsleeve. Frederick couldn’t hear what the younger Barker said. It wasn’t meant for him anyhow. But Benjamin’s response to it left Frederick in no doubt about what it was.

  “Drop those guns this minute, or it’ll go even harder for you than it would otherwise!” the planter bellowed.

  Frederick almost started to lay down his rifle musket. The habit of obedience to whites—especially to whites who gave orders in a loud voice—was deeply ingrained in him, as it was in all Atlantean slaves. One of Barker’s men send back an answer: “We don’t got to listen to you no more! You’re gonna git what you deserve!”

  “That’s what you think, Ivanhoe!” Barker yelled. He raised the longarm he carried to his shoulder. The gun roared. Ivanhoe screeched and fell over, clutching his side.

  “Give it to him!” Frederick said urgently. All the slaves turned their rifle muskets on Barker and his son. The guns stuttered out a ragged volley. The younger Barker clapped both hands to his breast, as if he were in a stage melodrama. But the blood on the front of his shirt was real. As the overseer had before him, he fell facedown in the dirt.

  Somehow, all the bullets in the volley missed Benjamin Barker, the man at whom they were aimed. He reloaded with almost superhuman speed and fired again. This time, he hit one of his own copperskins. Unlike Ivanhoe, the second slave didn’t make a sound. He simply crumpled, shot through the head.

  More bullets flew at Benjamin Barker. These didn’t bite, either. As slaves went, Frederick wasn’t superstitious. He had more education—and more sense—than most bondsmen. But even he wondered if the planter didn’t have a snakeskin or a rabbit’s foot in his pocket.

  Shaking his fist, Barker turned and ran back toward the big house. Another volley pursued him. Yet again, every shot missed. If that wasn’t uncanny, Frederick couldn’t imagine what would be.

  He also couldn’t imagine letting the planter get away. That would be . . . whatever was worse than a disaster. About as bad, say, as tripping over a floorboard that had come loose. Maybe even worse.

  “Come on!” he said. “We’ve got to do for him!”

  “How?” a copperskin asked. “If bullets won’t—”

  “If bullets won’t, we’ll burn down the God-damned big house,” Frederick said savagely. “I don’t want to do that, on account of the smoke’ll draw a crowd where we don’t need one, but I will if I got to. We ain’t gonna let that man get away!”

  His determination pulled the rest of the slaves after him. He realized it didn’t have to be a white man giving orders in a loud voice. Anyone would do, as long as he sounded sure of himself. Being right plainly wasn’t essential, or slaves would have stopped obeying masters hundreds of years ago. Being—or seeming—sure just as plainly was.

  Benjamin Barker got inside. He fired at the oncoming Liberating Army, and dropped a second copperskin. A moment later, another gun spoke from upstairs. Veronique Barker didn’t aim to sit around and let herself get slaughtered—or suffer the proverbial fate worse than death. Frederick didn’t think she hit anybody, but she was making the effort.

  “I need five or six men to come into the house with me,” Frederick said. “The rest can go on shootin’, make the white folks keep their heads down.”

  “I’m with you,” Lorenzo said at once.

  “Me, too,” Davey said. “Got to finish that fucker.”

  Frederick soon had his volunteers. As the rest of the Liberating Army banged away, they rushed toward the front door. Benjamin Barker appeared in a window like an angry ghost. He fired and vanished again. The bullet cracked past Frederick’s head, much too close for comfort. Involuntarily, he ducked. He hoped that wouldn’t make his comrades think him a coward. Whether it did or not, he couldn’t help it.

  His shoulder hit the door. “Oof!” he said, and bounced off. He might have known it would be locked.

  “Here—I’ll settle it.” Lorenzo fired two shots from a captured revolver into the lock. Then he rammed it with his shoulder. He fell down as it flew open.

  Davey sprang over him and dashed into the big house. He took a shotgun blast full in the chest, and sank without a sound. Benjamin Barker howled laughter. “Thought it would be easy, did you?” He fired again, this time with a pistol. A copperskin beside Frederick screeched and clutched
his leg.

  Frederick had never thought it would be easy. If slave uprisings were easy, one of them would have succeeded before this. But he thought it might be possible. And one of the things that would make it possible was killing planters who got in the way.

  He shot Benjamin Barker in the neck. Barker gobbled like a turkey. He clapped a hand to the bleeding wound. Why doesn’t he fall over? Frederick wondered. But the answer to that was only too obvious. Because you only grazed him, that’s why.

  He ran forward. Sure as the devil, Barker wasn’t badly hurt. He pulled a knife off his belt—no, a razor, the edge glittering even in the dimness inside the big house—and slashed at Frederick.

  But a razor in a desperate man’s right arm couldn’t match the reach of an eighteen-inch bayonet at the end of a five-foot rifle musket. What Frederick had was a spear, and he used it so. He stuck Barker in the chest. The bayonet grated off a rib before sinking deep.

  That finishes him, Frederick thought. But it didn’t. Benjamin Barker went right on fighting. Killing a man wasn’t so easy as it looked: it was a horrible, messy business. Frederick stuck the planter again and again, and still almost got his own throat slashed. Only when Lorenzo brought his pistol up against the back of Barker’s head and pulled the trigger did the white man quit struggling.

  “Whew!” Frederick said. “That man had no quit in him.” Barker was still thrashing on the floor, but he plainly wouldn’t get up again.

  “Who cares?” Lorenzo answered. “Long as you can make him quit, that’s all that counts.”

  Another shot rang out from upstairs. If Veronique had fired on the invaders from the landing, she could have done a lot of harm. Frederick looked around to make sure his surviving companions were all right. Then he said, “We better find out what that was all about.”

  Cautiously, they climbed the stairs. The door to the Barkers’ bedroom stood open. Veronique Barker lay on the bed, the muzzle of a pistol still in her mouth. The back of her head was a red ruin that soaked into the bedclothes.