Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  Lorenzo grunted when he saw the corpse. “Huh,” he said. “She must’ve known what she had comin’. I never stuck it into a white woman before, but I sure would have. Serve her right, you know—pay her back for all the shit she done piled on her slaves.”

  Frederick hadn’t wanted the Liberating Army to do things like that. What would Helen have said had he joined in the gang rape of the planter’s wife? Would she have screamed at him, or would she also have thought Veronique Barker got what was coming to her? Frederick didn’t know, and he wasn’t altogether sorry not to find out.

  “One way or the other, she’s done for now,” he said. “This whole plantation’s done for. Let’s drag the bodies out of the house, let the Barkers’ slaves know they’re free for sure.”

  Veronique Barker’s corpse left a trail of gore down the stairs. Her blood and Benjamin’s stained the rugs on the floor of their front room. Frederick pushed the bodies off the front porch with his foot. They rolled bonelessly down the stairs and came to rest in the dirt.

  “See?” Frederick said. “They’re really and truly dead. We done killed ’em. They won’t ever trouble you any more.”

  The Barkers’ slaves stared at the corpses with terrible avidity. Frederick hadn’t particularly hated the Barfords—he’d just hated being anyone’s piece of property. Things were different here: how very different, he didn’t realize till the newly freed Negroes and copperskins surged forward and took their own vengeance on the bodies.

  It wasn’t pretty. They kicked them and beat them and hacked at them with gardening tools. A couple of men undid their flies and pissed on the bodies. The rest of the Barkers’ slaves—no, the new recruits to the Liberating Army—whooped and cheered. They hung the corpses up by their heels. Veronique Barker’s skirts fell down over her head. That drew more whoops, and some lewd jokes.

  Moving faster than they would have under an overseer’s glare, the copperskins and Negroes piled firewood into a pyre for the Barkers. Someone poured lamp oil on the wood to help it catch. As soon as it was burning well, the newly freed slaves cut down their late masters and threw them on the fire. They cheered again, loud and long, as the stink of charred meat joined the cleaner odor of wood smoke.

  “In a way, this is good,” Lorenzo said, watching the Barkers’ people caper and cavort. “After they do somethin’ like this, they can’t say they didn’t mean it and we made ’em join up with us.”

  “Who would they say that to?” Frederick asked.

  Lorenzo looked at him as if his wits could have worked better. “To the white folks, of course,” he answered. Sure enough, he might have been speaking to an idiot child.

  He might have been, but he wasn’t. Patiently, Frederick said, “Only way the white folks’ll get a chance to ask ’em questions like that is if we lose. I don’t aim to lose. I been waiting my whole life to get free. White Atlanteans, they take it for granted. They don’t know how lucky they are. They’ve got no idea. But I do, on account of I’ve seen it from the other side. Nobody’s gonna stop me from being free, not any more. How about you?”

  By the look on Lorenzo’s face, Frederick had startled him. That saddened Frederick, but it didn’t much surprise him. “I don’t want to go back to being a slave, no,” Lorenzo said after a pause, “but I don’t know what kind of chance we’ve got of really winning, either.”

  “If we don’t, they’ll kill us all,” Frederick said, wishing the copperskin hadn’t come out with his own worst fear.

  “If we do, we’ve got to kill them all,” Lorenzo said. “Otherwise, they ain’t gonna let slaves who rose up live. They never have, and I figure they never will.”

  Frederick also feared that was much too likely to be true. Even so, he answered, “Main reason white folks didn’t is that, when slaves rose up before, they just wanted to murder all the masters they could.”

  “And you don’t?” Lorenzo pointed to the fire consuming the mortal remains of Benjamin and Veronique Barker.

  “Got to do some,” Frederick admitted. “But the white folks, even the ones without slaves, live pretty damned well in Atlantis. How come we can’t live the same way? Proclamation of Liberty set this country free from England. Don’t you reckon it’s about time Atlantis lived up to all the fancy promises it made itself a long time ago?”

  “Don’t I reckon so? Of course I do,” Lorenzo said. “That ain’t the question, though. Question is, will the white folks reckon so? I’ve got to tell you, friend, it looks like long odds to me.”

  “You’d better run off now, then, on account of that’s the only hope we got,” Frederick said.

  “If it is, we’ve got no hope at all,” Lorenzo said. “But I ain’t runnin’, neither, ’cause that’s no hope. Skulking in the woods the rest of my days like a damned honker?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Shit—who knows? Maybe we can lick the white folks. Maybe.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it, though.

  Frederick didn’t believe it, either. Sometimes you had to rise up whether you believed you could possibly win or not. If that wasn’t the measure of a slave’s damnation, Frederick had no idea what would be.

  The Liberating Army had plenty of rifle muskets to arm Benjamin Barker’s slaves. Barker’s own arsenal would give several more slaves weapons. He’d kept far more guns in his big house than Henry Barford had in his. “Why does one man need so much firepower?” Lorenzo asked. “He couldn’t shoot ’em all off at the same time.”

  “Not at the same time, no,” one of Barker’s men, a Negro, answered. “But if he needed to shoot himself a snake or a hawk or a fox or a deer or one o’ them big ol’ lizards in a river, he had the right piece for it.”

  “Or if he needed to shoot himself a nigger or a mudface, he had the right piece for that, too,” Frederick said with a shudder.

  “Or one of them,” the black man agreed. His former owner had put up much too good a fight.

  A halloo made Frederick break off the conversation. A warning shout followed the halloo: “Somebody comin’ up the path!”

  “Oh, good God!” Frederick exclaimed. That was the last thing he wanted to hear. No one had called at the Barford plantation, even before the rebellion broke out. Maybe neighbors knew the yellow jack was loose there. Or maybe it was just that Henry Barford wasn’t what you’d call sociable, even if Clotilde was.

  Such musings blew out of Frederick’s head when Lorenzo asked, “What do we do now?”

  That was a fine question. Show the visitor the pyre where Benjamin and Veronique Barker had burned? He’d surely want to see that, wouldn’t he? And what about the corpse of the Barkers’ son? And the dead overseer? Oh, yes—plenty to show off.

  On the other hand, if the slaves chased the caller away, he would ride off and let the outside world know they’d taken over the plantation. If they killed him, more outsiders would come looking for him. That might buy a few hours—maybe even as much as a day—but it would also let the cat out of the bag in short order.

  Before Frederick could decide what to do, his sentries went and did it. Two gunshots rang out, one after the other. The first provoked a startled shriek; the second abruptly ended it.

  A Negro trotted back to Frederick with a big grin on his face. “We got us a new eight-shooter, jus’ like the ones the cavalry soldiers use,” he said proudly. “An’ that fella was ridin’ a mighty fine horse.”

  “Well, good,” Frederick said, hoping it was. By the nature of things, you couldn’t keep an uprising secret very long. He made up his mind: “We go after the Menand plantation next. We move out tomorrow morning—early tomorrow morning. And, between now and then, we post extra-strong watches all around this place.”

  Lorenzo nodded. He understood what was going on. Davey would have, too. Frederick worried about how much he’d miss the chief cook in the days ahead. But the field hand who’d brought word of the visitor’s demise scratched his head. “How come?”

  Frederick sighed quietly. You liked to think the people on your sid
e, the people you were leading into the sunlight of freedom, were all clever and filled with natural nobility. You liked to think so, yes, but they would disappoint you in a hurry if you did. They were people, no better and no worse than any others. For too long, masters had judged them worse than others. That would have to change. But they were no better, either.

  And so Frederick had to explain: “Somebody’s gonna miss the fellow you shot. Somebody’ll come and try to find out what happened to him.”

  “Oh.” The other Negro contemplated that. He didn’t need long to find an answer that satisfied him: “Then we plug that son of a bitch, too.”

  That could work . . . for a little while. “They won’t keep coming one at a time, you know,” Frederick said gently. “They may not even come one at a time when this poor, sorry bastard doesn’t ride home.”

  “Oh,” the field hand said again. He nodded, with luck in wisdom. “Reckon you’re right. I didn’t think of that.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Frederick murmured. Lorenzo’s shoulders shook with suppressed mirth. The field hand didn’t get it. Frederick wasn’t surprised at that, either. A swallowed sigh almost gave him the hiccups.

  He gave his orders. One of the new recruits to the Liberating Army, a copperskin from the Barker plantation, said, “I don’t want to do no more fighting. Long as I’m rid of the dirty snake who was crackin’ the whip on us, I’d just as soon take it easy for a while.”

  Several others, copperskins and Negroes, made it plain they felt the same way. No, not everybody in the uprising was as bright as he might have been. “Well, you can do that,” Frederick said.

  “I can? All right!” The new recruit sounded amazed and delighted. He hadn’t expected things to be so easy.

  And they weren’t. “Yeah, you can do that,” Frederick repeated. Then he went on, “You can do that if you don’t mind the white folks catching you tomorrow—if you’re real lucky, maybe the day after. Don’t you get it, you God-damned fool? We’ve killed masters. White folks grab us now, they’ll kill us as slow and filthy as they know how. Only way we can stay alive is to keep on fightin’ and keep on winnin’. Only way. You got that through your thick head?”

  Were the just-freed slave white himself, would he have turned pale from rage or red with anger? Since he was not much lighter than Frederick, he didn’t show what he was feeling that way. His scowl said he was angry. “I got it,” he answered. “But who d’you think you are, to play the white man talkin’ to me like that?”

  “I ain’t playin’ the white man. I’m playin’ the general,” Frederick said. “Liberating Army’s just like any other kind—it needs somebody in charge. Right now, that’s me.”

  “If I’m in this here army, I’m still a slave, then,” the copperskin said.

  “If you ain’t in this here army, you’re a dead man walkin’,” Frederick said.

  Behind him, Lorenzo cocked his revolver. The click of the hammer going back sounded much louder than it really was. “If you ain’t in this here army, you’re a dead man—period,” he declared.

  The man who’d been complaining gave back a sickly grin. “I was just funnin’, like,” he said. “Can’t you take a joke?”

  “It’s like Frederick said—this here is an army. When the general tells you to do somethin’, you don’t make no shitty jokes,” Lorenzo growled. “You do it right away, no matter what the hell it is. Some other stuff you don’t know nothin’ about may depend on it. And somebody may blow your fuckin’ head off if you fart around. Me, for instance. Understand what I’m talkin’ about?”

  “Uh-huh. Sure do,” the younger copperskin said. He took the prospect of getting shot by his own people seriously, anyhow, even if he didn’t have the brains to imagine that white folks might do it. Copperskins were supposed to be fierce and savage. Lorenzo used that to his own advantage, even against one of his own kind. And who could say for sure? He might have shot the new recruit as a lesson for the others. Frederick almost asked him, then decided not to. Some things he didn’t need to know.

  Again, the Liberating Army advanced on a new plantation cross-country. Surprise still mattered, even if it wouldn’t for much longer. The rifle muskets and their accouterments all fit in one wagon now. It also went cross-country. If the whites in the neighborhood were alerted to the rising, Frederick didn’t want them taking back a big chunk of his weaponry all at once.

  Whether the whites were alerted to the rising or not, the slaves on the Menand plantation knew something was up. “You gonna set us free?” they asked eagerly when they met the fighters from the Liberating Army in their cotton fields.

  “Not exactly,” Frederick answered. Their faces fell till he explained: “You’re gonna set yourselves free.”

  He and Jacques Menand’s slaves had been talking in low voices. When they heard that, they let out whoops of delight. Not nearly far enough away, a white man demanded, “What’s that stupid commotion all about?”

  “Your overseer?” Frederick whispered.

  “That’s right,” answered a man who looked to be of mixed copperskin and Negro blood. “Sooner that God-damned son of a whore gets what’s coming to him, happier we’ll all be.”

  “Amen!” added a man who looked like a pure-blooded copperskin.

  “I don’t reckon you’ve got long to wait,” Frederick said. “Can you lure him here?”

  They didn’t even need to do that. The overseer came forward of his own accord, to see what was going on. Rifle-musket butts, bayonets, and knives soon finished him off—though perhaps not soon enough to suit him. His screams rose up into the uncaring air. Frederick didn’t worry about that. They wouldn’t reach the big house, where gunfire might have.

  Menand’s slaves proved hot to join the Liberating Army. “First we kill this bastard here who’s been fucking us,” the copperskin said savagely. “Then we kill all the other white bastards, too.” The rest of the field hands nodded.

  The men who’d got the rifle muskets to the plantation passed them out. By now, they seemed as attached to the guns as any ordnance sergeants in the Atlantean army. “You take care of this piece, keep it clean, or we’ll take it away from you and shove it up your ass,” one of them warned the wide-eyed copperskin to whom he gave the weapon. “You got that?”

  “You bet,” the man answered. “I’ll do whatever I have to do, long as I get the chance to kill me some white folks.”

  “Oh, I reckon we can take care of that,” the Negro said grandly, as if he were personally responsible for it.

  Drill sergeants would have despaired at the way the Liberating Army advanced on the Menands’ house. The copperskins and Negroes kept no kind of order. One of these days, we’ll have to fight real soldiers, Frederick thought. We’d better learn how to do those things, or they’ll murder us. But that day wasn’t here yet. At least the men advanced with high spirits. As long as they kept doing that, anything was possible.

  No one fired at them from inside the big house. Everything was quiet—too quiet to suit Frederick. “What’s wrong with them?” he said. “They must’ve seen us coming. They reckon we’re here for a dance?”

  Then one of the house slaves came out. He was wearing a boiled shirt, black jacket, and cravat like the ones Frederick had put on every day for so many years. “Menands done run off,” he said. “You ain’t gonna catch ’em now.”

  “How’d they know in time to do that?” Frederick answered his own question: “Somebody came and told them!”

  “You’re a clever fellow, ain’t you?” the house slave said. “A field hand, he came runnin’ back here an’ palavered with Master Jacques. When they hightailed it, he went with ’em.”

  “I bet he did!” Frederick said. “Stinking Judas must know what we’d do to him if we got our hands on him. Who was the son of a bitch?”

  “His name is Jerome. He’s a copperskin.” The house slave didn’t try to hide his distaste. Frederick understood every bit of it. House slaves always sneered at field hands. And N
egroes and copperskins sneered at each other. Masters exploited all those differences. If this uprising was going to get anywhere, Frederick would have to find a way to plaster them over.

  “Menands tell you why they were going?” he asked the house slave.

  “Master Jacques said he didn’t aim to wait around and get killed,” the other Negro answered. “He asked if I wanted to go along, but I told him no. I reckoned I’d be safe enough.” He brushed two fingers over the back of his other wrist, showing off his own dark skin.

  “But they got away,” Lorenzo said. “That ain’t so good. That ain’t even a little bit good.”

  “Tell me about it,” Frederick said. “Word’s gonna be out. And that means the white folks’ll come after us. No more surprises, not now.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I’ve said it before—we could try splitting up and disappearing into the woods and the swamps, but you’d best believe they’ll come after us,” Frederick replied. “Slaves start killin’ masters, the white folks don’t forget about it. Only other choice—only one—we’ve got is fighting ’em and whipping ’em.”

  “We do that?” Three or four anxious slaves, Negroes and copperskins both, said the same thing at the same time.

  “Damned right we can.” Frederick didn’t say they would, only that they could. He hoped they wouldn’t notice the distinction. They didn’t seem to. “Damned right we can,” he repeated, sounding more confident than he felt. “First thing is, we know what happens if we lose.”

  He waited. Men’s and women’s heads bobbed up and down. They knew, all right. It wouldn’t be pretty. It would be as ugly as vengeful whites could make it. Masters had to be harsh with slaves who rebelled, or they’d face uprisings every day of the week. They understood that as well as the slaves did.

  Frederick held up a hand to show he hadn’t finished. “Other thing is, with a little luck they won’t know we got our hands on these fine guns. They’ll come along like we’re a bunch of no-accounts. They’ll figure they can lick us easy as you please. Are they right?”