“What kind of shit is he going on about now?” Lorenzo asked.
All Frederick said was, “Uh-oh.” He knew what the preacher was going on about. The House of Universal Devotion hadn’t attracted many slaves, but he’d heard of it. He thought the Preacher and his followers were a flock of loons.
He wasn’t the only one who did, either. A white prisoner threw a clod of dirt at the man preaching over the graves. “Shut your lying mouth!” the prisoner yelled.
“That’s right!” another white man shouted. “The House of Universal Devotion is the doorway to hell!”
“Liar!” yet another captive said. “God talks to the Preacher, and the Preacher tells his people the truth!”
The preacher—without a capital letter ornamenting his calling—standing by the mass grave tried to go on, but his audience didn’t want to listen to him any more. The white prisoners shook their fists at one another and bawled out curses and catcalls. They might have started brawling if not for the bemused insurrectionists standing guard over them.
“White folks are crazy. Crazy, I tell you.” Lorenzo spoke with great sincerity. “Only one who cares which church you go to ought to be God. He’s the only one with the answers, anyways.”
“Of course white folks are crazy,” Frederick answered. “They reckon they can keep slaves and keep ’em like beasts, and they reckon God loves ’em. You believe both those things at the same time, you got to be nuts.”
“Yeah. Hadn’t looked at it like that, but yeah.” Lorenzo pointed at the angry prisoners. “What are we gonna do about those sorry bastards?”
“Long as they’re just yelling, it doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s like a waddayacallit—a safety valve—on a steam engine,” Frederick said. “They blow off steam against each other, they won’t give us so much trouble.”
One of the white men chose that moment to decide he didn’t care whether the Negroes and copperskins were carrying guns. Full of crusading zeal, he decked another white who presumed to hold an opinion different from his about the House of Universal Devotion. A few seconds later, another enthusiast flattened the first fellow who’d used fists to make his point.
Frederick drew his eight-shooter and fired a round into the air. Nothing got people’s instant, undivided attention like a gunshot. Christians who’d been about to swing on their fellow Christians suddenly had second thoughts.
“That will be enough of that,” Frederick said into the pool of silence that spread as the echoes of the shot died away. “What you think about God is your business. When you punch somebody in the nose on account of what he thinks about God, that’s my business. You leave other folks alone, and hope like hell they leave you alone, too. You start acting like mad dogs, you get what mad dogs deserve.” Whites called slaves who dared rebel mad dogs. Frederick enjoyed throwing the phrase back in their faces. He pulled the trigger again. Another tongue of flame spat from the revolver’s muzzle.
To his amazement, some of the prisoners wanted to argue with him. “I’m trying to save that ignorant fool’s soul from hell,” one white protested earnestly.
“He reckons you’re headed that way yourself,” Frederick answered. “What makes you so sure you’re right and he’s wrong?”
“Why, the Bible says so,” the white man replied, as if to a fool.
“Suppose he reads it some different way? Or suppose he doesn’t care about it at all?”
“Then he’s surely bound for hell. And you’d better look to your own soul, too.” The captive edged away from Frederick, as if afraid God would strike the Negro dead for presuming to ask such questions—and might singe him, too, if he stayed too near.
“I will. I do. I look to mine. You look to yours. Let that other fella look to his,” Frederick said. “I promise you one thing: you start that kind of stupid trouble, we’ll be the ones who end it.”
Some of the prisoners thought the Preacher and the House of Universal Devotion were the fount of true doctrine. Many more were of the opinion that everything about them came straight from Satan. Frederick had heard that the Preacher opposed slaveholding. That inclined him toward giving the House of Universal Devotion the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, he had a hard time caring one way or the other.
His main goal was to keep the captives from quarreling among themselves. Sooner or later, he hoped to exchange them for fighters captured by the white Atlanteans. Under the laws of war, both sides got treated the same way. What color a combatant was didn’t matter. (The Europeans who put those laws together hadn’t imagined fighting people of a different color. But that was all right—the laws had more stretch to them than their framers figured.)
Just by treating with Frederick and his fighters under the laws of war, the white Atlanteans granted them more equality than they’d ever enjoyed here before. If the whites won, that equality would vanish. Both sides recognized as much.
And, up till lately, neither side had seriously wondered what would happen if the Negroes and copperskins won. The whites hadn’t dreamt it was possible. Neither had Frederick, not really. But dreaming time was over. Reality was here. Now both sides had to try to make the best of it.
BOOK IV
XX
Back in New Marseille, the telegraphers were proud of themselves and their colleagues farther east. In spite of the insurrection, they’d managed to open a connection with New Hastings on the other coast. Most of the time, Jeremiah Stafford would have been proud right along with them.
Most of the time. When the news he had to give the capital was of a disaster, his heart wouldn’t have broken had the line stayed down a little longer. As things were, he had no choice.
Neither did Consul Newton or Colonel Sinapis. Each man composed his own report and gave it to the telegraphers. Stafford collaborated with neither of the other leaders. As far as he knew, the other two didn’t collaborate with each other. He wondered how much the reports differed. He wondered if anyone, reading all three, would be sure they talked about the same event.
He couldn’t do anything about that. He thought he was telling the unvarnished truth. If Sinapis or Newton felt like lying, that wasn’t his affair. If they thought he would stoop to lying, they didn’t know him very well.
Besides, while you could write around the awful news as much as you pleased, you couldn’t make it go away. The insurrectionists beat the Atlantean army. They made it surrender. In lieu of slaughtering it to the last man, they made it march away without its weapons.
No one responsible could deny any of that. If anybody tried, it wouldn’t do him any good. No, the remaining interesting questions were two. First, who was to blame for the catastrophe? And, second, what the devil was the Atlantean government supposed to do about it now?
Newspapers in New Marseille had no doubt on that score. They printed highly colored interviews with soldiers they didn’t name (and a good thing for the soldiers that they remained anonymous, or all the dreadful things they’d escaped in the battle would have landed on them in the aftermath). They also printed headlines like STRING UP THE CONSULS! and EXILE THE COLONEL!
“Nice to know we’re loved,” Leland Newton said, holding up one of the more inflammatory papers.
“Don’t worry about it, your Excellency,” Stafford answered as he corrected his breakfast coffee with a healthy splash of barrel-tree rum. “They loved you before we lost the battle.”
“I’m sure they did.” If the prospect dismayed Newton, he hid it very well. “After all, I disagreed with them, and what crime is more heinous than that?”
Stafford knew the answer to that particular question: losing the battle that was liable to mean liberty for all the copperskins and Negroes in the USA. Instead of saying so, he sipped his rum-laced coffee. The other Consul could see the answer as well as he could himself. The only difference was, Newton wouldn’t think liberating slaves was a heinous offense. He was a northern man, after all, so what did he know?
A raised eyebrow said Newton guessed most of what was going on
in Stafford’s mind. The other Consul made a small production out of lighting a cigar. He said, “We both must be getting old. Seems too early in the day to quarrel, doesn’t it?”
“Now that you mention it, yes,” Stafford answered. “I will if you really want to, though. I don’t want to disappoint you.”
“I’ll pass, thanks,” Newton said. “The papers are quarrelsome enough, and whatever New Hastings has to say is bound to be worse. When do you suppose we’ll hear from the Conscript Fathers?”
After someone flings water in their faces, because they’re bound to faint when they get the news, Stafford thought morosely. “Are you really so eager?” he asked aloud.
“Eager? Well, as a matter of fact, no,” the other Consul replied. “Say rather curious, in a clinical way, as if I’m wondering whether the dentist will tell me whether he has to pull one tooth or two.”
Stafford winced. He’d had some agonizing encounters with tooth-pullers before they found out about ether. No one went to one of those quacks unless he was already in pain, and what they did to you only made you hurt worse—for a while, anyhow. Afterwards, you won relief. But that was afterwards. During was another story altogether.
And what sort of relief could the United States of Atlantis win from the abscess of insurrection? They’d tried to lance it, tried and failed. Now the poison was spreading through the country’s system. Stafford had no idea how to stop it. He would have been amazed if the Senators on the far coast did.
He hadn’t finished his ham and eggs and fried yams when a messenger who hadn’t started shaving yet handed him one telegram and Consul Newton another. “Oh, joy,” Stafford said as he unfolded his.
“Looking forward to it, are you?” Newton said.
“Well . . . no,” Stafford answered. The other Consul managed a chuckle of sorts, but one with a distinct graveyard quality to it.
Senate expresses its disappointment at failure to suppress slave insurrection , the wire read. It wasn’t quite You clumsy idiot!, but it might as well have been. The telegram continued, Use any—repeat, any—measures necessary to end uprising. Manumission not mandatory but not—repeat, not—ruled out.
That was all. That was quite enough. That was, as far as Jeremiah Stafford was concerned, much too much. “What does yours say?” he asked Newton.
“They want us to patch up a peace. That’s what it amounts to, anyhow,” his colleague answered. “How about yours?”
“The same, more or less,” Stafford said heavily. “By God, it frosts my pumpkin. If we fight a proper war, we can win it.”
“Maybe we can, but how much more money will it cost?” Newton said. “How many more lives will we lose? How much longer will the Senate put up with that? How long will the Atlantean people put up with it?”
“Even Colonel Sinapis thinks we can win it.” Stafford was clutching at straws, and he knew as much.
In case he hadn’t, Consul Newton rubbed his nose in it: “Right now, how far will anyone follow Colonel Sinapis?”
Stafford didn’t answer. No answer seemed necessary—or possible. Anyone who didn’t blame the two Consuls for surrendering to Frederick Radcliff and the insurrectionists blamed Colonel Sinapis instead. Quite a few Atlanteans were sure there was plenty of blame to go around. That seemed to be the sense of the Senate’s telegram.
Gently, Leland Newton said, “It won’t be so bad. Truly, it won’t. We’ve had free Negroes and copperskins in Croydon for more than a hundred years now. Our republic hasn’t fallen apart. Your states won’t, either.”
“Easy for you to say,” Stafford replied. “You may have freed them, but you never had very many for you to free. Things are different down here.”
“They certainly are,” Newton said. “The copperskins and blacks in Croydon are peaceful citizens, just like anyone else. They’re up in arms here. Don’t you see the connection? It’s time to admit that what you’ve been doing here isn’t working, even if it has made white people money.”
That made Stafford scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, making money and working meant the same thing. At last, he saw, or thought he saw, some of what Newton had in mind: “You mean a few of the slaves don’t fancy it.”
“More than a few, don’t you think? And ‘don’t fancy it’ is like saying ‘The ocean isn’t small,’ ” Newton answered. “They ‘don’t fancy it’ enough to pick up guns and risk their lives to try to do something about it. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”
“You want me to say slavery is wicked and horrid, and everyone who has anything to do with it ought to be ashamed of himself, don’t you?” Stafford said. “I’m very sorry, your Excellency, but I honestly don’t believe that.”
“I know. But whether you believe it isn’t the point any more,” Newton said.
That puzzled Stafford again. “How do you mean?”
“The point is, the slaves—the people who were slaves, I should say—do believe it. They would rather die than go on being slaves,” Newton said. “A lot of them have died. They’ve made a lot of us die, too. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”
“You’re playing the schoolmaster here. Suppose you give me the lesson.” Consul Stafford admired his own patience. Whether anyone else would admire it—or call it patience and not mulish intransigence—never crossed his mind.
And Newton seemed willing—maybe even eager—to do just what he’d asked. “The lesson is simple. If Negroes and copperskins go on being them and whites go on being us, Atlantis is ruined. We have to find a way for all of us to be Atlanteans together, or else we’ll spend the next hundred years fighting.”
“We had a way to live together,” Stafford insisted.
“Yes, but too many people couldn’t stand it. That’s why we’ve got the insurrection now.”
“Whites in the south won’t like the way you have in mind. If blacks and Negroes can grab guns and fight, what makes you think white men can’t?” Stafford said.
“That’s simple enough.” Newton aimed a forefinger at him as if it were a rifle musket. “You have to persuade them not to.”
“We ought to try and grab New Marseille now,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve got the white soldiers’ guns. Besides, their hearts have to be down in their shoes. We should hit hard and fast, before they get reinforcements and fresh supplies.”
Frederick Radcliff drummed his fingers on the outside of his thigh. A few weeks ago, he might have agreed with his marshal. Now . . . everything had changed. Or, if things hadn’t changed, the insurrection still had no hope. “Ask you a couple of questions?” he said.
One of Lorenzo’s eyebrows rose. “How am I supposed to tell you no? You’re the Tribune. What you say goes.”
That wasn’t how Frederick thought of his power—which didn’t mean it wasn’t useful here. “What happens if the white folks get riled enough to throw everything they’ve got into the fight against us?”
“Well . . .” The copperskin pursed his lips. As with the raised eyebrow, it wasn’t a showy gesture; it was, in fact, hardly noticeable. That he’d made it at all counted for a good deal. So did his hesitation before he said, “Wouldn’t be easy. They send everything, we’d have to be mighty careful fighting pitched battles. Raids, ambushes—we could keep on with that kind of stuff for a long time.”
“Would we win in the end if we did?” Frederick persisted.
“Damned if I know.” Lorenzo’s answering grin was crooked. “Tell you the truth, when this whole thing started I figured we’d both be dead by now—dead or wishing we were.”
“You ain’t the only one,” Frederick replied with feeling, and Lorenzo laughed out loud. “But the way it looks to me is, there’s a time to push and a time to go easy. We showed ’em we could beat ’em, and we showed ’em we didn’t aim to kill all the white men we could. Seems to me we got to let ’em chew on that for a while, see what they do next. If we push ’em now, we only tick ’em off—know what I mean?”
“Sure do. What I don’t know is wheth
er you’re right.” Lorenzo took a deep breath and let the air whuffle out between his lips. “What the hell, though? Like I say, you’re the Tribune. You’ve got us this far. Seems like you know what you’re doing.”
I’m glad somebody thinks so. But Frederick didn’t say that out loud. One of the tricks to leading he’d learned was never to let your followers know you had doubts. Sometimes you could get away with being wrong. With being unsure? No. That made you look weak, and how could a weak man lead? Not even Helen knew about some of the fears that knotted Frederick’s insides. What you didn’t show, you didn’t have to explain. You didn’t have to wonder about it so much yourself, either.
For once, he and his army didn’t need to do anything right this minute. The white Atlanteans weren’t pressing them—couldn’t press them for a while, as Lorenzo had pointed out. Food wasn’t a worry. Hardtack and salt pork and bully beef captured from the soldiers’ supply weren’t exciting, but kept body and soul together. And the hunting in this sparsely settled countryside was better than it would have been with more people around—though there wasn’t much livestock to take here.
Just waiting around felt good. It took him back to his days as a slave. You weren’t always busy, working for the masters. But you always had to be ready to get busy, and to get busy at someone else’s whim. That was how things worked here, too. If he’d made a mistake about how the white men would respond after being defeated and spared, they would be the ones who let him know it.
Slaves always kept their eyes on masters and mistresses. They needed to know what the white folks were up to, sometimes before the whites were sure themselves. And the Negroes and copperskins still slaving it in New Marseille were the insurrectionists’ eyes and ears there.
Frederick Radcliff didn’t think the Consuls’ army could move without his knowing about it beforehand. The slaves in New Marseille saw no signs that it was getting ready to move. Frederick took that for a good omen.
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