He carried a revolver taken from a dead Atlantean cavalry trooper. That gave him seven bullets to fire at the enemy—and one for himself if everything went wrong. After the raid, he’d decided the whites wouldn’t take him alive. One pull of the trigger got everything over with in a hurry. They wouldn’t be able to torment him, and they wouldn’t be able to use him to scare other slaves who’d rebelled.
Most of the whites had fled this part of the country. A couple of big houses bristled with warning signs and had sentries parading outside of them. They might as well have been forts. Frederick thought his men could overrun them at need, but he didn’t see the need. The whites holed up in them wouldn’t come out to attack his fighters, which was all that really mattered. If the army went away or lost, the holdouts wouldn’t count for beans. And if the army won . . .
If the army won, Frederick would be dead. He wouldn’t care what happened later on.
The Negroes and copperfaces were eating what they scavenged from the countryside, and from granaries taken when plantations fell. Most whites lacked the presence of mind to set fire to barns or to pour water into storage pits before fleeing. A good thing, too, or the rebels would have had a—literally—thinner time of it.
Soldiers, from what he’d heard, often turned up their noses at frogs and turtles and the big flightless katydids that were more common than mice in the woods. Slaves couldn’t afford to be so choosy. Nothing wrong with turtle stew, not if you’d been eating it since you were little and took it for granted.
Of course, the soldiers didn’t have to worry about such things now. They had a baggage train, a luxury the rebels did without. The soldiers could ship hardtack and salt pork and bully beef into New Marseille and bring it along with them when they marched. No, they wouldn’t go hungry.
Along with the other slaves, Frederick had sampled captured hardtack and bully beef. You could eat the stuff if you had to: no doubt of that. Given a choice, Frederick preferred turtle stew and frogs’ legs and whatever flatbread his cooks could bake on griddles or hot stones.
Scouts—both blacks and copperskins—shadowed the Atlantean column. The gray-clad soldiers were moving into the country where Frederick wanted to spread the insurrection. If he could keep them out, uprisings against the local planters would stand a better chance.
But he knew he would have to win a stand-up fight against them to keep them from penetrating the country between New Marseille and Avalon. Shooting at them from behind fences and out of the woods wouldn’t do it. The soldiers shrugged off those losses and kept marching. Their scouts also hurt the rebels. The whites were no stronger, not man for man. They were no better in the woods. But they were better shots, and they were better at supporting one another. They were professional soldiers, in other words, not the amateurs he led.
“Can we stop ’em in a regular battle?” he asked Lorenzo.
The copperskin shrugged broad shoulders. “Damned if I know,” he said. “Time to try, though, don’t you think?”
“Part of me does,” Frederick said. “Then I start wondering how many of us get shot if we try it and it doesn’t work.”
Lorenzo only shrugged again. “It’s a war. We hope we hurt the other bastards worse than they hurt us, that’s all.”
Frederick’s other fear was that the insurrection would fall to pieces after a lost battle. That worried him less than it had in the early days, though. The Negroes and copperskins who fought alongside him had shown their resilience. Chances were a loss wouldn’t scuttle everything.
And they might win. He would have had trouble believing that when the rebellion started, but they really might.
“Let’s try it,” he said. “You know a place where we can hold ’em up—and where we can fall back from if we’ve got to?” He didn’t want his optimism running away with him.
“Not me.” Lorenzo shook his head. “I ain’t from around these parts, either. We’ve got some folks who are, though. Best thing we can do is find out from them. Bound to be somebody who’ll know of one.”
And a bald, long-faced Negro named Custis said, “Reckon I know a place. Got to slow the white soldiers down some, or they’re liable to get to it ’fore we does.”
Skirmishing with the column of white Atlanteans was easy. Making sure the skirmishes didn’t get too costly proved less so. The soldiers seemed much more eager to mix it up with the bush-whackers than they had on their march to New Marseille. They usually had the better of it at close quarters, too. Like any other art, bayonet fighting took practice. The soldiers had more than the rebels did.
But the series of little fights did slow down the men in gray. And Custis’ promised spot proved as good as he claimed. A stone fence near the top of a low rise gave cover against musketry. A stream to one side and woods to the other made the fence hard to outflank. The road ran just in front of the woods. Putting a barricade across it was easy. The rebels behind the fence could rake the soldiers with gunfire if they tried to decline battle.
“If we can beat ’em anywhere, this here is the place,” Frederick said.
“I think so, too,” Lorenzo agreed. “It’s like the places where the white Atlanteans fought the redcoats way back when.”
“It is!” Frederick nodded eagerly. He hadn’t thought of that, but he could tell it was true as soon as Lorenzo said it. The Atlanteans under his grandfather had needed to fight in places like this. Less steady, less disciplined, than their English foes, they needed all the help the ground could give them. His own colored rebels needed that kind of help today.
He put men in the woods to keep the Atlanteans from outflanking his position by surprise. He posted men behind the barricade, too. Why let the enemy have an easy time tearing it down?
He knew when the soldiers drew near. They raised a column of reddish dust that hung in the dusty air. The Barfords had always complained about road dust when they visited friends and relations. Clotilde Barford said—over and over—the problem would go away if the government (sometimes it was the state government, sometimes the national) only macadamized or cobbled the highways. She wanted the government (whichever government it was on any given day) to start with the one that ran next to the Barford plantation.
Frederick might have been a slave, but he could see the trouble with that. He’d never set eyes on a macadamized road, or even a cobbled one, but he knew what they were and what making them entailed: lots of rocks (whether crushed or fist-sized), lots of labor, and lots of money. The government might not have to pay slaves in work gangs, but it would have to feed them and water them and doctor them, and it would have to pay their owners for their services and for their time away from the fields. Where would the government get money like that, especially since white folks squealed like hurt hogs about every cent they grudgingly coughed up in taxes?
People who liked paved roads talked about other advantages besides their being dust-free. The most important was that you could use them in any weather. Rain didn’t turn them to muck.
But horses’ hooves did better on dirt than on cobblestones or macadam. And dirt roads didn’t have to be expensively rebuilt. They didn’t have the added cost of maintenance, either. They were just . . . there. And odds were they would go right on being there for many years to come.
Frederick examined his preparations one more time. He turned to Lorenzo. “Are we ready?” he asked. “Did we forget anything?”
The copperskin started to answer. Then he caught himself and took another long look at things himself. Frederick liked that. The more you checked, the less you took for granted, the better off you were likely to be. At last, Lorenzo said, “Only thing I wish we had are some cannon of our own.”
“Me, too,” Frederick said. “Don’t know what we can do about that, though, except maybe grab some from the white folks.”
“If we’d taken New Marseille—” Lorenzo began.
Frederick cut him off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. “Too late to worry about that now, ’specially
since we might not’ve taken it.”
“Still looks to me like we could’ve,” Lorenzo said stubbornly.
They might have gone on arguing—it was nothing they hadn’t done before—but several Atlantean cavalrymen rode out from under their army’s dust cloud and trotted forward to look over the rebels’ dispositions. “Hold fire!” Frederick yelled to his men. The clouds of powder smoke would tell the white horsemen just where their foes waited.
For a wonder, the men under his command did as he asked. The cavalrymen stared at the rise and the barricaded road and the woods off to the side. Then they rode back to report to their own superiors. Frederick’s stomach knotted. It wouldn’t be long now.
XIV
Jeremiah Stafford peered at the insurrectionists’ position through a spyglass. He couldn’t judge how many men they had behind that stone wall. Enough to let them think they could challenge the Atlantean army, anyhow. They couldn’t possibly be right . . . could they?
By the way Colonel Sinapis lined up his men with fussy precision, and by the way the corners of his mouth turned down, he wasn’t so sure. Instead of sending the foot soldiers forward to sweep aside the riffraff of Negroes and copperskins, Sinapis advanced his field guns till they weren’t far out of musket range. “Hit the wall with everything you have,” he told the artillerymen.
“What good will that do?” Stafford asked him.
Patiently, the Atlantean officer answered, “A stone wall will protect the men behind it from musketry. If they think they are safe from cannonballs . . . Inexperienced troops often make that mistake.” He turned back to the men with the red chevrons and piping on their uniforms. “Now!” he commanded.
The field guns belched fire and smoke. They scooted backward from the recoil; a few artillerymen had to step smartly to keep the carriages from running over them. As soon as the recoil stopped, the gun crews wrestled their pieces back into position, swabbed the guns’ iron and brass throats, and started reloading them.
Several roundshot smacked into the fence that protected the insurrectionists. From the way Colonel Sinapis had talked, Stafford thought the guns would smash down the wall all at once. They didn’t. But through the spyglass he saw turmoil among the men on the far side. Something was going on, sure enough.
When he asked about it, Sinapis answered, “The balls break the stones they hit. You stand behind a stone wall that gets can nonaded, it is like standing up under shotgun fire. Those little bits of stone can kill you and will hurt you if they do not kill.”
“Ah,” Stafford said, enlightened. The cannon went on thundering. The commotion on the far side of the stone wall got worse. Here and there, roundshot bit chunks out of the wall. Even when they didn’t, the copperskins and Negroes stirred like bees when their hive was kicked.
“So we shall see how they like that for a while, and then we shall see how steady they are after a cannonading,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Artillery is what inexperienced troops commonly fear most. If it unsettles the—what do you call them?—the insurrectionists, yes, they will be easy enough for our infantry to handle.”
“I expect they will be,” Stafford said. “It’s not as if they were white men, after all.” He wondered how he would like to face artillery fire from behind a stone wall that offered less protection than he’d expected. Chances were he wouldn’t like it much, but he didn’t dwell on that.
Something gleamed in Colonel Sinapis’ dark eyes. But the colonel didn’t call him on it. The fieldpieces thundered again and again, hurling cannonballs up the slope. The whack!s the roundshot made when they hit the fence were shorter and sharper than the blasts that flung them forth.
Sinapis waved. The cannon fell silent. The officer turned to the bugler beside him. “Blow Forward,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the man replied, and raised his battered brass bugle to his lips. Under the subtropical sun, it gleamed like gold. The imperious notes rang out.
“Hurrah!” the soldiers shouted as they started toward the enemy. They advanced with fixed bayonets. The sunshine also glittered from the sharp steel. Bayonets were another thing that made raw soldiers’ knees knock. Somehow, it was easier to put up with the notion of taking a bullet than to imagine yourself screaming your life away, pierced by a foe who’d come all that way to stick you and who had within himself not a drop of the milk of human kindness.
While the main force advanced on the fence, a smaller group of soldiers moved against the barricade blocking the road. Copperskins and Negroes popped up from behind the fallen trees and fired at the oncoming men in gray. And plenty of insurrectionists in back of the fence blasted away at the Atlanteans moving toward them.
“They have nerve,” Sinapis said.
“They have their nerve!” Jeremiah Stafford exclaimed, which meant something altogether different.
“I had hoped we could get in among them without needing to fire,” Sinapis said. “That does not seem likely now.”
Sure enough, the Atlantean infantrymen began shooting back at the foes behind the fence. Then they had to reload under fire from the enemy, which nobody in his right mind could have been enthusiastic about. Some of them got shot ramrod in hand—as ignominious a way to go out of the fight as any Stafford could think of.
Artillerymen wrestled some of the cannon around half a turn, so they bore on the logs across the road. Twelve pounds of highspeed iron smacking an obstacle like that did much more visible damage than the roundshot did to the stone fence. Logs tumbled like jackstraws. Consul Stafford hoped they squashed some of the fighters behind them when they fell over.
“This is good,” Sinapis said in somber satisfaction—the only kind he seemed to show. “That is very good. If the flanking party gets through there, the frontal assault matters less.”
Stafford hadn’t thought the flanking party would matter. He’d assumed the frontal assault would overwhelm the insurrectionists in back of the fence. They proved steadier than he’d ever imagined they could. Despite the bombardment from the field guns, they kept pouring a galling fire into the Atlantean soldiers assailing their position. Dead and wounded men in gray uniforms dotted the slope, more of them every minute. There was a limit to what flesh and blood could bear. The Negroes and copperskins firing as if their lives depended on it—and they did, they did—forced the soldiers right to the edge of that limit.
And the attack on the barricade didn’t go as well as either the colonel or the Consul wanted. Some of the men behind the logs might have got squashed. The rest kept on shooting. And insurrectionists hiding in the woods banged away at the flanking party from the flank—an irony Stafford failed to appreciate.
“Make them stop that!” he shouted to Sinapis.
The colonel looked at him without expression. “If you have any practical suggestion as to how I am to accomplish that end, I should be delighted to hear it.” He didn’t add If you don’t, shut up and quit joggling my elbow—not out loud, he didn’t. Stafford heard the suggestion whether it was there or not. He knew too well he didn’t have any practical suggestions along those lines. He could see what was wrong, but not how to fix it.
Leland Newton pointed to the slope and the wall. “They’re getting up to it,” he said, and then, diminishing that, “Some of them are, anyhow.” Yes, a lot of bodies dotted the slope.
“Once they get over it and in amongst the damned insurrectionists, the fight is as good as won,” Stafford said.
“You hope,” the other Consul said.
“Yes. I do,” Stafford agreed. “And if you do not, I should like to know why.”
“Oh, no—I won’t fall into that trap. Now that we are in the field, you will not be able to accuse me of failing to support our soldiers in every way,” Newton said.
“I suppose you also wish to pretend you did not do everything in your power to keep them from taking the field,” Stafford growled.
“My dear fellow, had I done everything in my power to prevent it, the army never would have left New Hastings,”
Newton replied easily. My dear fellow, here, had to mean something like You silly son of a bitch. He wasn’t wrong, either. But he certainly had delayed the army’s departure.
Stafford might have pointed that out. Instead, he peered toward the fight at the stone fence. Some of the Atlantean soldiers were scrambling over it. Through the spyglass, he could see soldiers and insurrectionists stabbing at one another with bayonets. The copperskins and blacks weren’t giving much ground. Were they giving any ground at all? He had trouble being sure.
Over on the wing, the flanking party had reached the barricade. Not many white men had got past it, though. The gunfire from the woods alongside the road was too intense to let the flankers ignore it. They had to turn and respond, which meant they had trouble going forward.
“The insurrectionists planned this battle well,” Colonel Sinapis remarked. “I do not think I could have improved on their dispositions.”
Hearing that did nothing to improve Stafford’s disposition. “We can beat them?” he asked anxiously.
“Yes, we can beat them,” Sinapis said. “But they can also beat us, which I had not counted on before we set out.”
If enough Atlanteans got over the wall, they would win. But the enemy had more men, and more determined men, back there than Stafford had dreamt possible. Colored fighters, savages, couldn’t be that brave . . . could they?
Sinapis’ spyglass also surveyed the front. Under it, his mustache-framed mouth twisted. He lowered the telescope. “I am very sorry, your Excellency. I do not think we shall succeed this day.”
“Dear God in heaven!” Stafford cried. “Can that—that rabble beat our finest soldiers?”
“It would seem so, yes,” the colonel answered impassively.
“They must not!” Stafford said. “Do you hear me? They must not!”
“It is war,” Sinapis said. “There are no musts in war. There are only ares.”
Consul Stafford almost hit him. One thing alone made the Consul hesitate: the likelihood that he would lie dead on the ground a moment after he did such an unwise thing. He groaned instead, watching everything he held dear crumbling before his eyes.
Liberating Atlantis Page 24