Liberating Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

One more grunt from his colleague. Stafford threw his hands in the air. “All right, let them keep breathing for now. If their friends give us cause, we can always hang the wretches later.”

  “That seems fair,” Newton allowed—it was more than he’d expected to win from his fellow Consul.

  “So it does,” Colonel Sinapis said, and that seemed to settle that.

  Jeremiah Stafford felt like a man struggling in quicksand. It wasn’t just that he’d let Leland Newton talk him into treating captured blacks and copperskins as prisoners of war. That was bad enough, but there was worse. The servile insurrection sizzled everywhere but the places where Atlantean soldiers actually stood.

  A man who went off into the woods to ease himself might not come out again. If he didn’t, his friends were all too likely to find him with his throat cut or his skull smashed in. They weren’t likely to find the skulkers who’d murdered him.

  “Is this what you call fighting in accordance with the usages of war?” Stafford asked Newton after three ambushes in two days.

  “It may not be sporting, but I wouldn’t say it breaks international law,” the other Consul answered. “If Colonel Sinapis feels otherwise, I’m sure he’ll let us know.”

  “Bah,” Stafford said. The colonel didn’t agree with him often enough to suit him. As far as he was concerned, Sinapis had a soft spot in his heart for the insurrectionists. Stafford wondered why. Hadn’t the colonel been a loyal—maybe even an overloyal—servant of the status quo back in Europe? Did he have a guilty conscience he was trying to salve years too late?

  More and more whites fled the territory north and east of the city of New Marseille. Some of them took service with the militiamen fighting alongside the Atlantean regulars. Others seemed more inclined to moan about their sea of troubles than to take arms against them.

  “Why haven’t you people killed all those raggedy-ass bastards by now?” an unhappy planter demanded of Stafford.

  “I wish it were as easy as you make it sound,” the Consul answered.

  “Well, why ain’t it?” the planter said. “Nothin’ there but a pack of slaves. You should take the lash to ’em. They’d run miles, dog my cats if they wouldn’t.”

  Something inside Stafford jangled. Someone in ancient days was supposed to have put down a slave uprising like that. He tried and failed to remember who it was. He suspected the failure was a sign the ancient historian who told the story was talking through his hat.

  He also suspected the planter was doing the same thing. “Did you try scaring them off with a whip?” he asked.

  “Well, no,” the fellow admitted. “They woulda shot me if I had.”

  “Then why do you think things are any different for us?” Stafford inquired.

  “On account of you’re the government,” the planter said.

  By the way he said it, that gave the army everything but power from On High. If only it were true, Stafford thought. Aloud, he said, “Don’t you see that the insurrectionists have rejected government along with everything else?”

  “But they’ve got no business doing that!” the man exclaimed.

  How often had he rejected government when it tried to do something he didn’t fancy? Raise his taxes, for instance? No doubt he’d done it without thinking twice. Now he needed what government could give him, and so he was crying out for it. Listening to him made Stafford very tired.

  “We shall do what we can for you, sir,” the Consul said. “If you will pick up a musket and do something for yourself, that will also help your country’s cause.”

  “Maybe I will,” the planter said, which meant he wanted nothing to do with a notion that might endanger his precious carcass. Seeing as much, Stafford went off to talk with another refugee, hoping that fellow would show more sense. Just because a man hoped for such things didn’t mean he got them.

  “I wish we knew more about what’s going on in the rest of the country,” Stafford said to Consul Newton the next day.

  “That we don’t probably isn’t the best sign,” his opposite number replied. “The rebels are doing too well at cutting the telegraph wires. They control the countryside, and I don’t know what we can do about that.”

  “We ought to do more than we have been,” Stafford said fretfully. “We are not aggressive enough—not nearly. And that is not least your fault: you want the insurrectionists to prevail.”

  “I want justice to prevail and peace to return,” Newton said.

  “What you call justice is a southern man’s nightmare,” Stafford said.

  “A southern white man’s, maybe,” Newton answered. “To a southern colored man, the way he lived up until the rebellion was the nightmare. If we could find some way not to leave anyone of any blood too dissatisfied—”

  “Wish for the moon while you’re at it,” Stafford said. “And, if anyone is to be satisfied, I intend it shall be the white man. Believe me, your Excellency, that is my first concern.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Newton said. “That is a large part of the problem.” He walked away, leaving Stafford obscurely punctured.

  “Here they come!” a copperskin called, hurrying back toward the position the rebellious slaves held. Frederick Radcliff grimaced. He didn’t want to fight the white men. He wished they would leave the Free Republic of Atlantis alone. Too much to hope for, of course. Whites hated the idea that Negroes and copperskins might be able to take care of themselves. They hated the idea that Negroes and copperskins ought to be free even more. And so another battle was coming.

  Another chance for things to go wrong, Frederick thought. The Free Republic’s fighters had done better than he’d ever dreamt they could. But if things went wrong—no, when they did—he had to hope his makeshift army wouldn’t fall to pieces. They weren’t professional soldiers. Could they deal with defeat?

  Militiamen had finally let the Atlantean army flank its way past the strong position Frederick’s men held for so long. This new one the Free Republic occupied wasn’t nearly so good. It was the best the colored fighters could do, though. If they let the white men in gray march wherever they pleased, the Free Republic of Atlantis was only a sham. If land was really yours, you had to fight to keep it.

  Frederick wasn’t about to let his men stand there and trade volleys with the soldiers. That was asking to get the fighters chewed to pieces. The white professionals were trained to fight that way. His men weren’t. They would sweep the open area in front of the woods where they crouched with musketry. If the whites wanted to try advancing through it, they were welcome to.

  But counting on the enemy’s foolishness turned out to be a bad idea. Atlantean soldiers in their gray and militiamen in blue or brown or green or colorless homespun did attack across the field in front of the forest. There were enough of them to keep Frederick’s men busy: enough to make him think there were more.

  A man who knew how to do card tricks or seem to pull coins from someone else’s ear or nose had learned the art of misdirection. He made the audience look away from the important part of what he was up to so it wouldn’t catch on till the trick was done. The soldier commanding the Atlantean army had picked up the same knack.

  Frederick was pleased with how well his men were fighting . . . till somebody ran in from the left shouting, “We is fucked! We is fucked all to hell an’ gone!”

  “What do you mean?” Frederick asked, but the ice in his belly said it knew before his brain did.

  Sure as the devil, the scout pointed back the way he’d come, towards a swell of ground that hid the view to the southeast—hid it much too well, as things turned out. “They movin’ up behind that!” the Negro said. “They gonna cornhole us like nobody’s business!”

  “Son of a bitch!” Frederick said, and then, more sensibly, “We’ve got to get out of here before they can do it.”

  “Before who can do what?” Lorenzo, who’d come over from the shooters at the edge of the woods, plainly hadn’t heard about this scout’s news. As if to prove as much, he adde
d, “We’re giving the white men hell. They’re pretty damned stupid, to keep coming at us like that.”

  “I only wish to God they were,” Frederick said. As the scout had before him, he pointed to the southeast. “They got themselves a column movin’ up on us over there. We better pull back quick, or else they’ll . . .”

  He didn’t go on, or think he needed to. Lorenzo showed he was right—the copperskin swore in English, French, and Spanish. Lorenzo wasted no time arguing. He just ran back into the woods, shouting for the Negroes and copperskins who had been holding off the Atlantean regulars and militiamen to stop what they were doing and fall back to the north. Only a rear guard of sharpshooters would hold off the whites coming straight at them. The rest of the fighting slaves had more important things to worry about. Lorenzo was soldier enough to see as much right away. If only he’d been soldier enough to see the possibilities of that flanking move.

  If only he’d been? Frederick asked himself. If only I’d been. Who’s the Tribune of the Free Republic of Atlantis, anyway? Who started this damned uprising? But it wasn’t so simple. Frederick knew he was inventing his generalship as he went along. So was Lorenzo, of course. But Lorenzo showed a talent for that side of things Frederick knew he himself couldn’t match.

  Now he had to hope his rapidly retreating army wouldn’t fall apart because it was retreating rapidly. He also had to hope the Atlanteans wouldn’t knock his army to pieces. A bullet from some white man’s rifle musket cracked past his head, close enough to make him hunch his shoulders and duck before he could catch himself. Another bullet snarled past, this one a little farther off. They reminded him that, like his army, he’d stayed here too long.

  Fall back, then. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, which had nothing to do with anything. If he and his fighters didn’t fall back, the white Atlanteans would have them at their mercy . . . if the soldiers knew the meaning of the word, which struck Frederick as unlikely.

  They got out barely in time. A volley from the flanking column raked them as they retreated, but only one, and from fairly long range. The soldiers in gray hadn’t yet unlimbered their field artillery. That could have cost Frederick’s men far more than musketry did, and it was something to which the Negroes and copperskins could not reply. Frederick hated and feared cannon and the men who served them.

  His rear guard did what it was supposed to do. It held off the white men in gray whose frontal attack had done such a good job of blinding the insurrectionists to the flanking column’s movement. The fighters in the rear guard fell back from tree to thicket to barrel tree. Quite a few of them didn’t make it out of the woods they’d defended. That was the price you paid for joining the rear guard.

  The Negroes and copperskins volleyed back at the whites in the flanking column. Frederick was delighted to watch several soldiers in the enemy’s firing line fall over. “That’ll show ’em we haven’t quit,” he said to Lorenzo.

  “Damned right it will,” the copperskin agreed. “They beat us, but they didn’t lick us—know what I mean?”

  “Yes!” Frederick had been thinking the same thing, though not so precisely. “We can stand up to them, no matter what.”

  “We really can,” Lorenzo said. “It’s taken us a while to figure that out, and it’s taking them even longer, but that’s a fact. They march smarter than we do, and they’ve got those blasted fieldpieces. Forget about those, and there ain’t much difference between them and us.”

  “If we’d seen that a hundred years ago . . .” Frederick shook his head in frustration. “Almost like it’s our own fault we didn’t get free.”

  “Wouldn’t be so easy without the rifles and muskets we got from the soldiers who came down sick,” Lorenzo said. Frederick nodded; the copperskin had a point. Lorenzo went on, “And they always did their best to keep us from learning the secret.”

  “That’s a fact,” Frederick said. Whites genuinely believed they were better than copperskins and blacks. Because they did, they made the people they enslaved believe it, too. Frederick knew his own life would have been entirely different had his grandmother been white. I might’ve been one of the Consuls fighting the insurrection, he thought in surprise.

  Of course, he also might not have. He might have been anything at all as a white man. The one thing he surely would not have been was the Frederick Radcliff he was now. Changing the color of his skin would have changed everything else that had happened to him since he was born. It wasn’t the color itself so much that mattered. It was how everybody else treated you because of the color.

  Right now, all these white men in gray uniforms wanted to kill him because he was trying to change how much color counted. And if that didn’t go miles and miles toward proving his point, he was damned if he knew what would.

  Lorenzo pointed north. “After we get over that rise, there’s a stream with thick woods on the north side. If we can’t stop those white bastards there, we can’t stop them anywhere.”

  “We’d better try, then,” Frederick said. Maybe they couldn’t stop the white soldiers anywhere. He’d feared that after the insurrection started. He didn’t fear it so much any more. But it was still possible. All kinds of things were still possible. One thing wasn’t: a black man wouldn’t become a Consul of the United States of Atlantis any time soon. And if that wasn’t all of what the insurrection was about, it sure was a big part of things.

  “Well,” Colonel Sinapis said philosophically, “we almost had them there.”

  Jeremiah Stafford fumed. To say he was not inclined toward philosophy was putting it mildly. “God damn it to hell, we should have had them there!” the Consul exclaimed.

  “One of the things you must understand, your Excellency, is that war is not like a steam engine or a threshing machine,” Sinapis said. “The manufacturer cannot promise it will perform in such-and-such a way for such-and-such a time.”

  “War!” Stafford loaded as much scorn into the word as he could. “Putting down uprisen niggers and mudfaces shouldn’t be dignified with the name! What are we doing but whipping curs back to their kennels?”

  “When you whip dogs back to the kennels, the dogs do not pick up whips and try to whip you away,” the colonel replied. “Making this a smaller business than it truly is will do us no good.”

  He was right. Stafford knew it, which only made him angrier. He said, “The point is, it should not be a grand business. These damned insurrectionists should not have the power to make it into a grand business.”

  “Well, I cannot say anything about what they should be able to do and what they should not. That is God’s business, not mine.” Sinapis made the sign of the cross, not quite as a Roman Catholic would have done it. Then he thrust a twig into a campfire and used the small flame he got to light a cigar. After a couple of meditative puffs, he went on, “All I can speak to, all I can deal with, is what is. And what is, here, is a serious rebellion, your Excellency. It seems only to be getting worse, too. The enemy soldiers have learned a great deal from facing our men several times. This happens more often than governments trying to put down rebellions wish it would. Before long, the enemy soldiers who live are troops as good as our own.”

  “These are not enemy soldiers, damn it!” Stafford thundered. “They are nothing but a pack of stinking insurrectionists!”

  Balthasar Sinapis only shrugged. “You may call them whatever you please, of course. But it makes no difference in the end. The only thing that makes a difference is whether they perform as soldiers. Unquestionably, they do. That retreat they brought off . . . I quite admire them for it. No raw rebels could have come close to doing anything like that.”

  “Bah!” Stafford stomped away from the fire. He did not care to hear what Colonel Sinapis was telling him. Even if it was the truth—no, especially if it was the truth—he didn’t care to hear it. If copperskins and blacks could fight well enough to make an experienced officer admire them, everything white Atlanteans had always believed about their social system was a pack of
rubbish, no more.

  Stafford couldn’t believe that. He wouldn’t believe it.

  Frederick Radcliff was nothing but a nigger. He was a nigger in arms against the USA. That meant he had to be put down like any other sheep-killing dog.

  He was, of course, also a Radcliff. He was a grandson to one of the First Consuls. No doubt at all that his grandfather had been a very able man. Little doubt he was a very able man himself—he wouldn’t have caused so much trouble if he weren’t. Again, that made things worse, not better. Frederick Radcliff was a slave by blood and a slave by nature. If you started bending that principle, where would you end up?

  You’d end up as Leland Newton, that was where. You’d end up with nigger equality. They had it up in Croydon, or something close to it. They even let niggers and mudfaces vote up there! Stafford shook his head. He did not care to let such a tragedy befall his own state.

  Out in the woods, crickets and katydids chirped. Nighthawks and bats swooped low over the fires to seize the bugs the flames had lured. Soldiers’ shadows lurched here and there as the men walked in front of their tents. Other soldiers, out farther from the campfires, watched to make sure the insurrectionists didn’t sneak in and kick up trouble.

  Those sentries, these days, were every one of them experienced woodsmen. Ordinary Atlantean troopers on night sentry had shown a lamentable tendency to get their throats slit or otherwise to perish silently. That made night attacks all the easier. Dead men seldom gave timely alarms. There, at least, Colonel Sinapis did seem to have solved a problem.

  “A little one,” Stafford muttered discontentedly. “A tiny one.” The real problem wasn’t keeping insurrectionists from sneaking into camp and raising Cain. The real problem was that there still were insurrectionists.

  He spat in disgust. The wind sprang up. It was heavy with rain, as it often was in these parts. It was also heavy with the stink of the encampment’s latrine trenches. Stafford wrinkled his nose, though the stench was anything but unfamiliar. Anyone who lived in a city got to know it well—indeed, often got to the point where he took it for granted.