Liberating Atlantis (15 page)

“Serves ’em right,” Lorenzo said. “They weren’t gonna worry about how many of us they shot.”

“I know,” Frederick said. “But what’ll they do now? What
can
they do now?”

“They can leave us the hell alone, that’s what,” the copperskin said. “What else do we want, except to stay free and live in peace?”

“Ain’t gonna happen,” Frederick said sorrowfully. “They can’t afford to let us do that. They’d have uprisings all over the slave states, and slaves runnin’ off to come live with us instead of the white folks they belong to.”

“Good.” Lorenzo’s voice was savage.

“Good for us, sure. Not so good for the white folks,” Frederick said. “They aren’t stupid. They’ll see that for themselves. They’ll see they’ve got to finish us off no matter what.”

“You should have thought of that before you rearranged Matthew’s face,” Lorenzo said.

“Oh, I did,” Frederick answered. “Not a lot of hope here, but no hope at all livin’ the way I was livin’.”

“Speaking of finishing off, that’s what we’d better tend to with all the wounded whites on the ground,” Lorenzo said.

Frederick didn’t need to give orders for that. The men and women of the Liberating Army were tending to it on their own. They climbed over the barricade and started looting the corpses—and making sure the bodies they looted
were
corpses. Bayonets were more useful for that than clubbed muskets would have been, too.

They didn’t just take weapons and money, though those delighted them. But they also harvested shoes and clothes—many of which would have to be soaked in cold water before anyone could wear them again—as well as pocket knives and other such small prizes. By slavery’s modest standards, the fighters were newly rich.

They didn’t want to bury the bodies. Frederick had to cajole them into digging a long, shallow trench into which they tossed them. Otherwise, the stink and, probably, the disease would soon have become unbearable. Yellow fever hadn’t followed them from the Barfords’ plantation, for which he thanked heaven. He didn’t want other plagues coming down on their heads.

“Gonna be a while before the white folks try and mess with us again,” Lorenzo said proudly. “We learned ’em a real lesson, by God.”

“We did. We really did.” Frederick sounded almost as surprised as Lorenzo had before him. For now, he was master of all he surveyed.

For now.

BOOK II

VII

New Hastings in August could be hot and muggy, as if it belonged with the states much farther south. Or, at the same season, it could be the kind of place where you needed an extra blanket on your bed. It all depended on which way the wind blew.

And that was also a good enough description of how politics worked in the United States of Atlantis. Senators shouted and shook their fists at one another. Some of them brandished canes. No one had yet pulled an eight-shooter on the Senate floor, but it was probably only a matter of time.

Up on the dais, Consul Leland Newton and Consul Jeremiah Stafford eyed each other with perfect mutual loathing. The quarrel on the floor was about slavery. The Senators quarreled about other things, too, but slavery lay at the bottom of most of them.

Consul Newton reached for his gavel at last. He rapped loudly. “Order!” he said. “There will be order!”

“King Canute commanded the tides, and look how much good it did him,” Consul Stafford said scornfully.

Bang! Bang!
Newton rapped again, even louder this time. “There will be order! The Sergeant at Arms has the authority to impose order on the Conscript Fathers, and he will!”

The Sergeant at Arms sat at the foot of the dais. His person was inviolable; any man who presumed to strike at him would be banished from the Senate floor. That gave him a certain prestige no other government official enjoyed. All the same, he didn’t look eager to perform his duties.

And he didn’t have to. “I forbid it,” Stafford said, which was all it took. The Sergeant at Arms relaxed. Both Consuls had to agree before anything happened.

Back when the victors in the war against England framed the Atlantean Charter, they’d arranged this system to make sure no one exercised too much power. They’d assumed both Consuls would pull in harness most of the time, and that one would veto the other’s actions only in rare and extraordinary circumstances. So it proved, too—for about a generation. After that . . .

They didn’t see how the two halves of the country would pull apart
, Leland Newton thought bitterly. He was a small, sharp-nosed man in his mid-fifties, with very blue eyes. He had Radcliffe blood on his mother’s side, but so what? Most politicians did, on one side of the family tree or the other. Consul Stafford did, too. They might be cousins, but they weren’t kissing cousins.

“Consuls! Consuls! Let an honest man address the honorable Consuls!” cried Senator Bainbridge of New Marseille.

Oh? Do you know one?
went through Newton’s mind. Justinian Bainbridge was as slippery as a sleet-coated sidewalk, and everybody knew it. But he had followed the rituals of the Senate—no mean feat in these turbulent times. “You may speak,” Newton said. Jeremiah Stafford did not forbid it. Why should he, when Bainbridge belonged to his faction?

“I thank the honorable Consul,” the Senator said. “I rise to protest the government’s impotence in the face of the vicious and cruel slave insurrection convulsing my state at this very moment.”

That touched off the match under the powder barrel. Everybody in the chamber started yelling at everybody else. Somebody swung a cane. Someone else blocked it with his own. The noise, like a gunshot—much too much like a gunshot—cut through the rest of the furious racket. It seemed to sober the Senators, at least for a little while.

Consul Newton turned to Consul Stafford. “May I speak to that?”

His colleague’s gaze was full of contempt. “You may as well, yes. Since you are the main reason the government remains impotent, putting yourself on the record would make a pleasant novelty.”

“I thank you.” Newton, as was his habit, met contempt with irony. He looked out at Justinian Bainbridge. “Are you not the man who commonly trumpets loudest when the Atlantean government proposes to do anything that infringes upon what you style state sovereignty?”

“I am,” Bainbridge answered proudly; he wouldn’t have recognized irony had it tiptoed up to him and piddled in his boot. “But the circumstances differ this time.”

“If you say that in English, doesn’t it mean,
This time,
my
ox is being gored
?” Newton’s manner was pleasant, his words and expression anything but.

“My ox
is
being gored, God damn it to hell!” Yes, Senator Bainbridge was irony-proof. “These miserable niggers and mudfaces running around loose as if they’re as good as white men, killing, stealing—!” He broke off, spluttering in indignation.

“Yes, white men have proved remarkably good at killing and stealing,” Newton agreed in his politest tones. “It must be surprising to see our colored brethren imitate us so well.”

Jeremiah Stafford favored him with a glance that could have curdled milk. Stafford and Bainbridge believed the same things. Bainbridge believed them because he believed them—for the same reason he accepted the mysteries of his faith. Stafford had carefully examined slavery and what it did for his section of the United States of Atlantis. Having examined it, he’d found it good. And he knew all the reasons he found it good, and could—and did—argue most cogently from them.

To Newton, that he could find it good to begin with was incomprehensible. But the depth of the other Consul’s knowledge of the subject made him formidable in debate. So did his native cleverness. People didn’t call him the Greased Snake for nothing.

“May I ask my fellow Consul a question?” Stafford inquired in his politest, and most dangerous, tones.

“By all means, sir.” Leland Newton could also be formidably ironic. He gestured in invitation. “You see? I refuse you nothing.”

“Why refuse when you can veto?” Consul Stafford shook his head. “Never mind. That was not the question I intended. This is: imagine, sir, if you will, that an insurrection has broken out in the sovereign state of New Marseille, an insurrection marked by murder and arson and all manner of lesser crimes.”

“He doesn’t need to imagine it!” Justinian Bainbridge howled. “It’s happening right this minute!”

“Bear with me, Senator,” Stafford said easily. He turned back to Consul Newton. “Now imagine that this insurrection is the product of white ruffians and robbers, with not a single mudface or nigger attached to it. If New Marseille appealed to the Senate of the United States of Atlantis for aid under those circumstances, would you prevent that aid from coming?”

Howls and whoops rose from the slaveholding states’ Senators. Porfirio Cardenas of Gernika roared so loud, he suffered a coughing fit. One of his colleagues had to pound him on the back. Newton muttered under his breath. He supposed it had been necessary to incorporate what once was Spanish Atlantis into the USA. Now the red-crested eagle flew over the whole mid-Atlantic land mass. But adding the new state gave weight to the pro-slavery side, and the Spaniards had a name for being harsh masters. So did the Atlanteans from farther north who’d flocked into the new state to try to get rich quick.

Newton had waited too long. Stafford called him on it: “You see? Against white rebels, dragoons and artillery would already be on the way.”

“Not necessarily,” Newton said, buying himself time to think.

“Oh? How not?” Stafford returned with ominous calm.

“If white men rebelled because they were dreadfully mistreated, because they could suffer any sort of punishment at their masters’ hands without due process of law, because they were not allowed to take wives, and because the women with whom they cohabited could be forced into a master’s arms at his whim, would we not applaud them? Would we not send
them
dragoons and artillery to aid their fight against injustice?” Consul Newton took a deep breath.

He got the same tumultuous cheers for his answer as Stafford had for his question, but not from the same men. The Senators from north of the Stour (the Erdre, southern men still sometimes called the river, preserving the French name) clapped their hands and shouted. Those who favored slavery tried to drown them out with hoots and catcalls, but couldn’t quite.

When something close to order returned, Jeremiah Stafford said, “There is a difference, you know.”

“Oh? And that would be . . . ?” Newton asked.

“Simply that white men are of our own kind, our equals by nature. Niggers and mudfaces are not, and never can be.”

“Such an assertion would be all the better for proof,” Newton remarked.

“I have a great plenty of it, and should be delighted to give you as much as you require,” Consul Stafford said.

“Move we adjourn!” shouted Harris Mitchell of Freetown. His state bordered the Stour on the north. Slavery had lasted longer there than elsewhere in the north of Atlantis. Freetown wasn’t neutral ground, but came closer than any other state.

And a motion to adjourn was always in order. Half a dozen Senators roared seconds. The motion passed overwhelmingly. Everyone seemed relieved to stream out of the Senate chamber. One more day without blood on the floor . . . One more day, yes, but it had been a damned near-run thing.

 

When Jeremiah Stafford talked with officers in the Ministry of War, he was exceeding his authority under the Atlantean Charter. Consuls commanded an army in the field on alternate days—if an army
was
in the field. If not, they were supposed to fight shy of matters military.

You had to know where a man came from. More than anything else, that told you where he stood. Oh, there were exceptions. Some northern officers despised Negroes and copperskins enough to lean toward keeping them in bondage. Rather fewer southerners thought slavery morally wrong. On the whole, though, geography and politics walked hand in hand.

Major Sam Duncan was from Cosquer. Consul Stafford had known him for years. Duncan had Radcliffe blood, too, which made them kinsmen of sorts. Stafford passed his latest news on to the officer: “Do you know what the nigger leading the rising is claiming? He says he’s Victor Radcliff’s grandson.”

“Likely tell!” Duncan said. He was a solidly built man in his early forties, with bushy muttonchop whiskers that didn’t suit the shape of his face. “One of my brother’s copperskins said he was descended from the Holy Ghost. A good dose of the lash changed his mind in a hurry.”

“I expect it would,” Stafford agreed.

“When are we going to be able to send our soldiers over there and clean out those coons, sir?” Duncan asked. “The longer the government shilly-shallies, the more trouble they’ll kick up. Liable to be insurrections all the way from the Hesperian Gulf to the Atlantic coast.”

“You understand that, Major, and I understand it, and most men of sense do as well,” the Consul said. “Too many people, though, don’t appreciate the difficulties inherent in the situation.”

“Damn fools, if you care what I think,” Duncan said.

“Oh, I agree with you,” Stafford answered. “But our founders, in their wisdom—if that’s what it was—made it possible for determined folk, wise or not, to hamstring the government. Consul Newton remains opposed to the national government’s movement against the insurrectionists. This being so, nothing official may be done.”

He waited. He’d always thought Sam Duncan politically astute. That was one of the reasons he’d cultivated the man. But, if the major didn’t hear what he was saying, he might have to change his mind.

Duncan tugged at one of his muttonchops. He didn’t smoke; the side whiskers gave him something to do with his hands while he thought. His eyes, always heavy-lidded, narrowed further. “Nothing official, you say?”

Jeremiah Stafford smiled—inside himself, where it didn’t show. He hadn’t been wrong after all. Major Duncan
did
have ears to hear. “Unfortunately, that is correct,” Stafford said, sounding grave as a doctor delivering a gloomy prognosis.