Liberating Atlantis (46 page)

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 whether 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.

So did Lorenzo, who heard about it as soon as he did, or maybe even sooner. “Looks like you know what you were talking about,” the copperskin said.

“I’m as happy about it as you are—you’d best believe I am,” Frederick said.

“How long you aim to give ’em?” Lorenzo asked.

“Till it feels right. Don’t know what else to tell you,” Frederick answered.

To his surprise, that got a smile from the marshal. “We’re all makin’ this up as we go along,” Lorenzo said.

“Ain’t it the truth!” Frederick never would have admitted it if the other man hadn’t come out with it first, but he wasn’t about to deny it once Lorenzo pointed it out.

After a while, fighters started slipping out of camp. They thought they’d already got what they wanted. And they didn’t think the Free Republic of Atlantis had any business telling them what to do any more. They were free, weren’t they?

Lorenzo and Frederick took a different view of things. With Frederick’s approval, Lorenzo posted guards around the encampment to catch deserters and bring them back. The United States of Atlantis didn’t let their soldiers walk away whenever the men happened to feel like it. As far as Frederick was concerned, the Free Republic of Atlantis shouldn’t, either.

That highly offended some of the men who wanted to go home. “Who you think you are, playing the white man over me?” a black fighter demanded when he was hauled before Frederick. “You ain’t nothin’ but a nigger, same as me. You got no business tellin’ me what to do!”

“If I had me ten cents for every time I heard that, I’d be the richest nigger in Atlantis,” Frederick said.

“It’s the truth, damn it,” the other Negro said. “If I’m a free man, ain’t nobody can make me do nothin’ I don’t want to.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Frederick answered. “Nobody can buy you or sell you. That’s what bein’ free means. But you’re in the army now. Nobody made you join up. You did it your own self.”

“That’s right. And that means I can leave whenever I please, too,” the prisoner said.

“Means no such thing. If people left whenever they wanted to, pretty soon we wouldn’t have an army any more. You go in, you got to stay in till the job is done unless you made a deal beforehand to get out sooner,” Frederick said.

“Nobody told me I could make a deal like that!” the other Negro exclaimed.

Frederick smiled sweetly. “Then it looks like you’re in till the job is done, doesn’t it? That’s how my granddad did things, and that’s how I’m gonna do ’em, too.”

“Your granddad was nothin’ but a white man, and he didn’t set no niggers free,” the other man retorted. “Look where you was at ’fore we rose up. House nigger, that’s all you was, an’ I bet you felt all jumped-up about it, too.”

How right he was! Frederick was embarrassed to remember the way he’d looked down on field hands before he got stripes on his back and became one himself. He was also damned if he’d admit any such thing. Instead, he answered, “You’ve got to start somewhere. Everybody’s got to start somewhere. Before Victor Radcliff done what he done, nobody in Atlantis was free. White folks had to do what the King of England and his people said—”

“An’ black folks an’ copperskins had to do what the white folks said,” the other Negro broke in.

“That’s right.” Frederick nodded. “My granddad made it so white folks were free, anyways. My grandma used to say he wished he could do more—”

“He done plenty with her, didn’t he?”

“Shut up!” Frederick said fiercely. “If I was a white man an’ you talked to me like that, I’d make you regret it—bet your sorry ass I would. But he figured out you can’t have an army ’less you got people who have to stay in. He was right. All the white folks’ countries do it that way. We’re gonna win, we got to do it that way, too.”

“I’ll run off again. You wait an’ see if I don’t,” the prisoner declared.

“I know who you are, Humphrey,” Frederick said. He hadn’t till one of the guards whispered the man’s name in his ear, but he sure did now. “This time, you don’t get anything but a talking-to, on account of you didn’t know no better. We catch you again, you’ll be sorry for sure.”

The prisoner—Humphrey—stripped off his shirt and turned his back. His scars made Frederick’s look like a beginner’s. “What you gonna do to me that the white folks ain’t already done?” he asked as he faced Frederick once more.

And what do I say to that?
Frederick wondered. To his surprise, he found something: “White folks whipped you ’cause you did stuff they didn’t like. You run off from us, they’d thank you for it. Chances are they’d pay you for it, same as the Romans paid Judas. You want their thirty pieces of silver, go ahead an’ run, you bastard.”

That shut Humphrey up, anyhow. Maybe he’d stick around. Maybe he’d try to desert again. If he succeeded . . . Frederick couldn’t do anything about that. If Humphrey failed, he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Freedom had limits. It had to have limits, or it turned into chaos.

Frederick hadn’t understood that before tasting freedom himself. But there was nothing like running a revolution to drive the lesson home. His grandfather could have told him the same thing—if Victor Radcliff wasn’t fighting on the other side.

 

Colonel Sinapis emptied New Marseille’s arsenal to equip most of his regulars with rifle muskets—and with some ancient flintlock smoothbores that had gathered cobwebs there for God only knew how long. There weren’t enough weapons for all the regulars. There weren’t enough for any militiamen. They were loudly unhappy about that.

Sinapis stuck by his guns, and by the way he handed them out. Leland Newton backed him. “It’s not a state arsenal—it’s an arsenal of the United States of Atlantis,” Newton told a self-appointed militia colonel. “It’s only right that the guns go to troops from the national government first. If we had more, you’d get your share.”

“Or maybe we wouldn’t.” The colonel—who decked himself out in a uniform far fancier than Sinapis’—had a pointy nose, a whiny voice, and a suspicious mind. “Reckon you’re afraid we’d do us some real fightin’ against them damned niggers.”

Newton
was
afraid they’d try, and would shatter the fragile tacit truce that still held. Since he didn’t care to admit that, he answered, “I haven’t seen your men win any more laurels than the regulars.”

“We never got the chance!” the militiaman complained. “That damnfool foreigner you’ve got in charge of your soldiers wouldn’t turn us loose and let us fight the way we wanted to.”

What did that mean? Newton feared he knew. The colonel wanted to rape and loot and burn and slaughter. He would have made a fine freebooter from western Atlantis’ piratical past. A soldier? That looked to be a different story.

“Your private war against the men and women who were your slaves is not the only thing at stake here,” the Consul said coldly. “The fate of the United States of Atlantis rides on this, too.”

“You reckon they don’t go together?” The militia colonel made as if to spit, then—barely—thought better of it. “If you do, you’re even dumber’n I give you credit for, and that’s saying something.” He clumped away, disgust plain in every line of his body.

Staring after him, Newton sighed. Then he swore under his breath. The militiamen didn’t have to stay under Colonel Sinapis’ command. If they grew desperate enough, and if they got their hands on some muskets (which they could probably manage if they grew desperate enough), they could storm off against the insurrectionists on their own. Newton didn’t think they would cover themselves in glory. He knew he might be wrong, though. And even if he was right, that might not stop them.

He started to go warn Sinapis. But what would that accomplish? The most the regular officer could do would be to put the militiamen under guard. That would only complete the breach Newton wanted to prevent. The militiamen wouldn’t listen to reason from Sinapis, any more than that damned colonel had wanted to listen to Newton.

What then? Reluctantly, Newton hunted up Jeremiah Stafford instead of the regular colonel. He feared the other Consul wouldn’t listen to him, either. Still, if Stafford didn’t, how were they worse off?

Stafford did hear him out. Then he asked a reasonable enough question: “What do you want me to do about it, your Excellency?”

“We aren’t fighting Frederick Radcliff’s men right now,” Newton answered. “I’d like to keep it that way if we can.”

“Right this minute, the militiamen have damn-all to fight with,” Stafford said. “That’s the biggest part of what’s eating them.”

“Not the biggest part,” Newton said. The other Consul looked a question at him. He went on, “What’s bothering them is the same thing that’s bothering you. They don’t want the Negroes and copperskins to get their freedom.”

“Yes, that’s about the size of it,” Stafford said. “Why do you think I’d want to slow them down, then?”

“Because they’ll only spill sand in the gears, and you know it as well as I do. God knows the two of us don’t agree, but you’re not a stupid man. That militia colonel . . .” Newton shook his head. “He couldn’t cut his way out of a gunnysack if you gave him a pair of scissors. Your Excellency, we have a chance to end this peacefully. We—”

Stafford interrupted: “Peacefully, maybe, but not the way I’d want it.”

“To end this the way you want it, we’d have to soak Atlantis in blood. Even that might not do it, because killing all the Negroes and copperskins leaves the country without slaves, which isn’t what you have in mind, either. Or it might not end at all—there might be murders and burnings and bushwhackings a hundred years from now. You can have peace, or you can have slavery. I don’t think you can have both any more. It’s not just cooking and sewing and barbering these days. Will an overseer ever be able to turn his back on a slave with a shovel in his hands again?”

“You . . . God . . . damned . . . son . . . of . . . a . . . bitch.” The words dragged from Stafford one by one, as if dredged up from somewhere deep inside him.

“Your servant, sir.” Newton made as if to bow.

The other Consul started to say something else, then broke off with an expression of almost physical pain—or maybe of true hatred. Now Stafford was the one who shook his head, like a horse bedeviled with flies. He tried again: “You
are
a son of a bitch. You know how to rub my nose in it, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry.” Newton lied without hesitation. “The thing is there. You know it’s there, even if you don’t like it. That’s the difference between you and the colonel of militia. If I make you see it or smell it or whatever you please, you won’t go on telling me it’s not.”