Eight shots in one weapon were wonderful. Reloading the pistol after firing eight shots at the Atlantean infantry was a son of a bitch bastard, as Frederick Radcliff discovered to his sorrow. Put a bullet in each chamber. Measure a charge of black powder and stuff each charge into a chamber without spilling it. Fix a percussion cap for each chamber. Do all that while your hands trembled because you’d just come as near as dammit to getting killed.
Doing it seemed to take about a year. But Frederick methodically went on. He couldn’t afford to stay unarmed. Seven more bullets for the white men—some of them would probably hit, anyhow. One more bullet for himself, just in case.
They’d got over the wall. He hadn’t dreamt they could do that. He’d also assumed that, if the white soldiers did get over the wall, the battle was as good as lost. But it turned out not to be. The Negroes and copperskins he led didn’t flinch, even from the soldiers’ most savage bayonet work. They rushed toward the white men in gray, not away from them. They might be less skilled with the bayonet themselves, but they were every bit as plucky.
And they turned the wall to an advantage. They pinned the soldiers who’d got over against it and started killing them there. It was madness. It was mayhem. Neither side asked for quarter, and neither side offered it. For longer than Frederick thought possible, neither side gave ground, either.
A white man’s voice, furious and astonished, rose above the din of shrieks and gunfire: “You nigger assholes can’t do this!”
“Hell we can’t!” Frederick shouted back. He had no idea whether the soldier heard him. He’d finally got that damned eight-shooter reloaded. As he raised it, he breathed a small prayer that it wouldn’t explode in his hand. If you didn’t do a good enough job cleaning off excess powder, more than one chamber would fire when you pulled the trigger. Only one bullet could get out, of course. The rest . . . the rest would probably blow off the hand that held the revolver.
More whites scrambled up over the wall to try to help their comrades. Frederick fired at one of them. The man clutched his ribs and tumbled back on the far side of the stone fence. Only after that did Frederick realize the gun had hurt the enemy, not him.
Then—and the thought within him warred between all at once and at last!—more Atlantean soldiers were climbing over the fence to get away than to come to their friends’ rescue. “We licked ’em!” Lorenzo cried exultantly. He asked, “Shall we go after ’em?”
“If we do, their cannon will murder us.” Frederick unbent enough to follow that with a question of his own: “Or do you think I’m wrong?”
“Nooo.” The way Lorenzo stretched the word showed his reluctance. But he didn’t try to talk Frederick out of the decision. He might not like it, but he saw it was right. A moment later, he brightened: “When word of what we done here gets around, every copper man and black man in these parts is going to come running to join our army.”
“Expect you’re right.” Frederick hoped he sounded more enthusiastic than he felt. That would bring his army more men—men he mostly didn’t have weapons for, and men he would have trouble feeding.
Lorenzo went on, “Planters around here’ll have to light out for the tall timber, too, unless they want to get their big houses burned down while they’re layin’ in bed asleep.”
“That’s a fact.” Now Frederick could sound happy without reservation. “The Free Republic of Atlantis just got bigger.”
“Damned right it did,” Lorenzo agreed. “Those white sons of bitches’ll run back to New Marseille with their tails between their legs. Everything outside the city limits, I reckon that’s ours from now on.”
Half an hour later, a Negro who’d been a butler before the uprising and served as the rebels’ quartermaster these days came up to him. “You know where we can get more percussion caps, boss?” he asked. “We’re mighty low on ’em, mighty low. We’re short on powder and bullets, too, but we can come up with some of those, anyways. Percussion caps, though . . . You know how to make ’em?”
“Not me.” Frederick shook his head. “They got mercury in ’em—I know that. Mercury fulmisomethin’.”
“Know where we can get our hands on some this mercury whatever-the-devil-you-called-it?” the quartermaster persisted. “Can you dig it out of the ground?”
“Don’t think so. I think you’ve got to make it some way, like they make sugar out of sugar cane,” Frederick answered.
“But you don’t know how.” It wasn’t a question. But, by the way the other Negro said it, Frederick should have known how. The quartermaster set his hands on his hips. “How are we supposed to keep fighting if we can’t get no more percussion caps?”
“I never said we couldn’t do that,” Frederick replied. “I just said we couldn’t make ’em ourselves. But we can steal ’em from the Atlantean soldiers. We’re getting more from the men we killed at the wall, right?”
“Some more,” the quartermaster said grudgingly. “Not hardly enough to fight another battle with, though.”
“Well, we’ll get lots.” Frederick soothed him as best he could. “Some of the white folks in these parts’ll have percussion muskets, too. We’ll grab us more caps once we kill them or run them off.”
“A few more,” the quartermaster said. “But if the white soldiers just keep on picking fights with us, we’re licked, on account of before long we won’t have nothin’ to shoot back with. What do you propose to do about that, Mr. Frederick Radcliff?”
Frederick wondered whether his grandfather had ever had the family name flung in his face like that. Probably—the Radcliffs and Radcliffes had been prominent in Atlantis for so long, the surname made a handy curse.
And, even if the quartermaster was a snotty nigger (yes, Frederick knew that was how Master Barford would have thought of the fellow, but it fit too well to let him pretend it didn’t), the question needed answering. “They just got whipped, remember,” he said. “They won’t be hot to jump on us again right away. And I figure we’ll get our hands on more percussion caps by the time they do.”
“How you gonna do that?” the other man challenged.
“I’ll manage.” Frederick actually had an idea. He was damned if he’d tell it to anybody who talked like that.
Stafford wanted to try to hit the insurrectionists again. To Leland Newton’s surprise, Colonel Sinapis was thinking about it, too. “Are you both out of your minds?” Newton said. “We’ll just bang our heads on the stone wall again.” He pointed to the fence where the Negroes and copperskins had taken such a toll of Atlantean soldiers two days earlier.
“They can’t do that twice,” the other Consul declared.
“You didn’t think they could do it once,” Newton reminded him.
“This is the only reason I pause now,” Colonel Sinapis said. “I was surprised once. If I must take these people more seriously, then I must, that is all. If we were in touch with New Hastings by telegraph, I could ask for reinforcements. Without them, I fear we could not defend a perimeter after another misfortune.”
“Plenty of New Marseille militiamen to draw on,” Stafford said. “They’re a lot closer than any regulars except the garrison in New Marseille city. And they’d be up for fighting slaves who’ve risen up—Lord knows that’s so.”
“How well they would do it is, I fear, a different question,” Colonel Sinapis told him. “They have no experience in the field, they have little experience in drill, they are unaccustomed to following orders—as what Atlantean is not?—and they would be armed with flintlock muskets no better than the ones their great- grandfathers used against the English.”
“But they want to fight,” Stafford said. “That counts, too.”
“No doubt,” the colonel replied: one of the more devastating agreements Newton had ever heard. Sinapis went on, “In any case, we are lower on ammunition than I would like. After the next supply column comes in, we will be in a better position to try the enemy again.”
“That makes sense,” said Newton, who didn’t
want to fight again any time soon.
“That does make sense,” Stafford agreed. “When we fight again—and we’d better do it pretty quick—we ought to make damned sure we win.” Differing motives led the two Consuls to the same conclusion now.
But that conclusion turned out not to be worth a cent, or even an atlantean. The next supply column didn’t bring more bullets and powder and percussion caps and hardtack and salt pork and coffee to the Atlantean army. The next supply column never arrived. A handful of harried soldiers did. The tale they told wasn’t pretty.
“Bushwhacked!” one of them said, his eyes wide and staring. “We were going through the woods, and all of a sudden, like, there were these trees across the road, and wild men shooting at us from both sides. Wagons couldn’t turn around. Hell, we couldn’t do anything. I’m a good Christian man, and it’s God’s own miracle I’m here to give you the word. You’ll see me in church a-praying every Sunday from here on out.”
Another survivor nodded sorrowfully. “They came on us screamin’ and yellin’ and leapin’ and carryin’ on,” he said. “Some of ’em had bayonets, and some of ’em had hatchets, and. . . . Dear Lord, I don’t want to remember some of the things I seen when they jumped us.”
How soon did these fellows quit fighting and run away? Newton wondered. Were they the ones who’d fled first and fastest? Or had they played dead till the insurrectionists weren’t interested in them any more? Either way, they hadn’t covered themselves with glory.
Balthasar Sinapis had more immediate worries. “What became of the wagon train?” he demanded. “Where are our munitions and victuals?”
“Damned niggers grabbed all that shit,” answered the soldier who’d promised to go to church every Sunday from now on. “Reckon they’ll send us more from New Marseille sooner or later.”
“If we get it later but the insurrectionists have it now . . .” By the way Jeremiah Stafford looked around, he expected fighters in slave clothes to start popping out of the ground like skinks. (So Newton thought, anyway; a man from Europe or Terranova would have been more likely to compare them to moles.)
“This is not good,” Colonel Sinapis said, and Newton would have had a hard time quarreling with him. “This is not even slightly good. The loss of the munitions . . . The bullets and powder are bad enough, but the percussion caps are worse. The rebels had not a prayer of making their own percussion caps.”
“Can we recapture them?” Newton asked.
“The wagons, perhaps,” Sinapis said. “What they held? I would doubt that. Can you not see the Negroes and copperskins in your mind’s eye, each with a crate in his arms or on his back?”
Unhappily, Newton nodded. He could picture that only too well, the men singing the same songs they would have used at harvest time as they carried away their precious booty. Consul Stafford would know from experience what songs those were. Newton didn’t, but his imagination seemed to serve well enough.
“Maybe we should attack now,” Stafford said, “before they bring the loot up to their position.”
“Your colleague has the command today,” the colonel reminded him.
“Tomorrow is bound to be too late,” Stafford said.
You’ll get the blame if we sit here, he meant. “Well, we can try,” Newton said. He did not mind if papers south of the Stour screamed at him. If newspapers in his own section did the same, that wouldn’t be good. He could be only so dilatory before they started. If he wanted another term as Consul, which he did . . . “Yes, we can try.”
It was almost noon by then. The soldiers didn’t expect to attack the rebels’ position that day. Getting orders to the junior officers and forming the men up for the assault took longer than Leland Newton thought it should. The soldiers went forward willingly enough, but with no great enthusiasm.
And it soon became plain that Sinapis had waited too long to give the order (Newton didn’t think about his own role in the troops’ late start.) Either the insurrectionists had had enough percussion caps and ammunition all along or the copperskins and Negroes lugging those stolen crates had got to their position before the Atlantean attack went in. A rippling wave of fire from behind the stone wall greeted the white men in gray who advanced on it.
The soldiers didn’t press the assault the way they had before. None of them reached the wall, let alone got over it. They returned the insurrectionists’ fire for a while, then fell back toward their encampment once more, bringing their dead and wounded with them. Newton had a hard time getting angry at them for their performance. They could see they had no chance to break the position before them. What sensible professional would let himself get killed with so little chance to realize a return on the investment of his life?
But their failure left another question hanging in the muggy air. Newton asked it: “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?”
Setting out from New Hastings, Jeremiah Stafford had thought everything was obvious. They would close with the insurrectionists. They would smash their gimcrack army and hang or shoot or burn Frederick Radcliff and as many other leaders as they could catch. They would return the copperskins and Negroes to the servitude for which they were fit by nature. And then they would go back to the capital in triumph.
Right now, getting back to New Hastings in one piece would have looked like triumph to Stafford. More things had gone wrong than he would have imagined possible before the army set out. And the uprising had proved much worse than he’d dreamt it could in his worst nightmares.
“What are we going to do?” he demanded of Colonel Sinapis. “If we don’t put down the insurrectionists—” He held his head in both hands, as if the enormity of the idea made it want to explode. And that wasn’t so far from true, either.
“We need more munitions. We need more soldiers,” Sinapis said. “I do not believe any troops will be forthcoming from the national government for some time—if ever. The state militiamen you have mentioned are less desirable, but. . . .” He shrugged.
“A drowning man doesn’t care a cent what kind of spar he grabs,” Stafford said. “Send out the call, Colonel, by all means. If we have twice as many men under arms here, we can do . . . more than we can now, anyway. Will you tell me I’m mistaken?” You’d better not, his voice warned.
And Sinapis didn’t. “Yes, I think the time to do that is here, if we are serious about quelling the insurrection.”
“What else would we be?” Stafford yelped.
Colonel Sinapis shrugged again. “I am not a political man, your Excellency. I am a soldier. You and your colleague decide the policies here. Once you have done that, I shall carry out to the best of my ability any part of them involving soldiers.”
Stafford muttered darkly. Agreeing on anything with Consul Newton seemed to require a special miracle every time it happened. But Newton didn’t try to dissuade Sinapis from summoning the New Marseille militia, though he did say, “I worry that they may prove oversavage when they encounter armed Negroes and copperskins.”
“The enemy is not gentle himself,” Stafford pointed out.
“No doubt he has his reasons for harshness,” Newton said.
“No doubt the militiamen do, too,” Stafford snapped. “Some of them were forced to flee their homes. Some had their wives ravished, or their sisters, or their daughters.”
“Ravished, perhaps, by mulattos or halfbreed copperskins,” Newton said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Stafford asked coldly.
“What it says,” the other Consul answered. “You are not a naive man, your Excellency. You know slaveholders have been going in unto their bondswomen for as long as Negroes and copperskins have been in Atlantis.”
“That’s different,” Stafford said.
“I believe you believe it is,” Newton said. “Whether the slaves believe the same thing may be open to doubt.”
“Be damned to the slaves!”
“Are they not saying, ‘Be damned to the masters!’? In their place, would you not say the sam
e thing?”
“I am not in their place. They want to place me there, though,” Stafford said. “If they win, we shall have colored masters whipping white slaves and forcing white women to go on ministering to their filthy lusts. Is that what you have in mind?”
“Of course not. And, if you listen to the insurrectionists, it is not what they have in mind,” Newton replied. “They claim the Free Republic of Atlantis is to have equality for every man of every color.”
“Likely tell!” Jeremiah Stafford rolled his eyes. “They will claim anything to keep on fighting. You believe them, do you? And I suppose you will also believe that mothers find babies under cabbage leaves.”
He had the satisfaction of watching Newton turn red. “I know where babies come from,” the other Consul said tightly. “I am merely trying to point out to you that the rebels have more reasons for rising than Satanic wickedness. In fact, that is how they judge the system that brought their ancestors here and turned them into property.”
“As if I care how they judge it!” Stafford fleered. “Their cousins in squalid so-called freedom live worse, more benighted lives than they do. They have learned our language here. They have learned of our God here, the one true God. They are part of a . . . a great country.”
Newton was very quick. He heard the small hesitation and knew it for what it was. “You started to say ‘a free country,’ didn’t you? What does it profit a slave to be part of a free country? It profits only his master.”
“Maybe one day the mudfaces and niggers may be advanced enough to deserve freedom,” Stafford said. “But that day is not here.”
“And you are doing your best to make sure it never comes,” Newton said. “If you do not give a boiler a safety valve, it will explode when you keep the fire too hot for too long. We are watching one of those explosions now.” He walked away before Stafford could answer.
Liberating Atlantis Page 25