Liberating Atlantis (24 page)

“If that is what it takes to put down the insurrection, yes!” Stafford said.

“Those who own these persons under current Atlantean law would not thank you for destroying their property,” Sinapis warned. “And what better reason to give the rebels still in the field to keep fighting instead of yielding?”

He might be nothing but a damned foreigner, but he was a shrewd damned foreigner. Slaveholders
didn’t
want their human property destroyed; they wanted it restored to them. As far as Stafford was concerned, they hadn’t thought things through. “How far will they be able to rely on slaves experienced in rebellion?” he asked. “Would you trust such a man to shave your face, Colonel?”

“Me? Not a bit of it,” Sinapis answered. “But if a man can get no use from this form of property, what point to having it?”

It wasn’t so simple. House slaves had to be trusted. They gave personal service and cooked; if you couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t turn on you, you couldn’t keep them around. Field hands were different. All you needed from them was work, and even before the uprising overseers had had to watch their backs. Plantations could stay profitable after the insurrection. But even if they did, white planters’ lives on them would have to change. Colonel Sinapis saw that clearly. So did Stafford.

“We shall burn that bridge when we come to it,” the Consul said after what he hoped wasn’t too awkward a pause. “First we have to win this war one way or another. If we lose it, nothing else matters any more. Or do you disagree?”

“No, your Excellency,” Sinapis answered. “As you say, winning comes first. Maybe not even winning, though, will solve all our troubles here. What do we do in that case?”

“Worry about it after we win,” Stafford said at once. “If we don’t win, we’ll have a pile of other things to worry about. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”

“About that? No,” Sinapis said.

He does think I’m wrong about other things
, Stafford realized angrily.
About what? About slavery? Well, the Devil take him if he does
.

 

By the map, the Gunston plantation lay only a couple of days’ march to the west. Leland Newton had studied maps till he was sick of them. What difference did they make if the enemy wouldn’t stand and fight? He didn’t like thinking of the insurrectionists as enemies, but he couldn’t think of people who’d shot at him as friends.

This stretch of countryside had belonged to the rebels till the Atlantean army marched in to reclaim it. Signs of that were everywhere. Big houses stood empty. Doors gaping open and smashed windows said they’d been plundered. Every so often, the army would march past one that had burnt to the ground.

Fields went untended. Ripening maize and wheat stood forgotten. So did acres and acres of cotton and pipeweed. No livestock was in sight. Even if surviving white plantation owners reclaimed this land, they would have lost a fortune. Consul Stafford couldn’t open his mouth without going on about that.

Consul Newton didn’t need long to get sick of listening to his colleague. “You didn’t care while whites were taking everything away from blacks and copperskins,” he pointed out. “Why do you bellow so loud when the shoe is on the other foot?”

“Because I
am
a white man, damn it,” Stafford snapped. “And so are you, if you take the time to remember it. The United States of Atlantis are a white man’s country, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I thought we were a free man’s country,” Newton said mildly.

“Same thing,” Stafford insisted.

“Come to Croydon and you’ll see how wrong you are,” Newton said.

“If I came to Croydon, I would see all kinds of things I don’t care to see: free niggers and mudfaces, screeching bluestockings, trade unionists, free lovers, and every other sort of crackpot under the sun,” Stafford said. “Since I already know as much, I have the sense to stay away.”

Before Newton could come up with the retort that would leave the other Consul gasping for air, a brisk racket of gunfire broke out ahead. “I wonder what that’s in aid of,” he said.

“It’s a demonstration of patriotism,” Stafford said. “What else would it be?”

“I’m sure the people shooting at our men would agree with you,” Newton said. “I own myself surprised, though, that you of all people would say such a thing.” Sometimes the worst thing you could do to sarcasm was take it literally.

This skirmish seemed sharper than the Atlantean army was used to fighting. Maybe the insurrectionists held no vital strong-points. Maybe they could melt off into the woods whenever they chose. But they could also fight whenever they chose, and they seemed to have chosen to fight here.

Newton rode forward to get a better look at what was going on. That made him a target: something he didn’t realize till he came close to the fighting. When he did belatedly figure it out, he wasn’t sorry to dismount and hand the horse’s reins to an ordinary soldier. He continued on foot.

As they usually did, the rebels fought from the edge of a stretch of forest. If things went wrong, they could melt away in a hurry. Not only that, but they’d dug themselves holes and trenches from which to shoot. They made much smaller targets than they would have had they stood up and volleyed the way the Atlantean regulars did.

A grizzled sergeant near Newton knew exactly what he thought of that. “Yellow dogs!” he growled, the stub of a stogie shifting in his mouth as he spoke. “Well, we can shift ’em even if they want to play silly games.”

Soldiers went forward in neat lines. Every so often, one would fall. Sometimes he would get up and stagger toward the rear on his own. Sometimes medical orderlies would carry him to the rear. Sometimes, ominously, he would lie where he fell, not to rise again till Judgment Day.

Those neat lines did not wash over the dug-in rebels. They couldn’t get close, not in the face of that galling musketry. Some men fell back. Others lay down themselves and returned fire. Then a flanking column went in off to one side of the insurrectionists’ line.

That shifted them where the frontal attack couldn’t. The Negroes and copperskins saw they were about to get enfiladed. They didn’t wait around to let it happen, but slid away into the woods. And they kept on sniping at the men who came up to look at their trenches and the handful of bodies in them.

“Well, we licked ’em,” an Atlantean soldier said. It was true, Newton thought—but only if you didn’t count the cost.

XI

Rain on a cobblestoned road was a nuisance. If you rode a horse, you wore a broad-brimmed hat and an oilskin slicker to stay as dry as you could. Many of the roads east of the Green Ridge Mountains were cobblestoned. Some were even macadamized. Traffic moved on them the year around.

Jeremiah Stafford was discovering that cobblestones and macadam were sadly scarce on the far side of the mountains. One day, no doubt, they would come, but that day was not yet.

And rain on a dirt road was not a nuisance. Rain on a dirt road—especially the hard, driving semitropical rain that pelted down now—was a catastrophe. What had been a perfectly ordinary, perfectly decent, perfectly respectable road turned into a long strip of something with a consistency between soup and glue. Foot soldiers swore as mud sucked boots off their feet. Cannon and limbers and supply wagons bogged down. The foot soldiers had to shove them through the muck by brute force. Not surprisingly, that made the men swear more.

On horseback, Consul Stafford had it easier than most of the men in the Atlantean army. His mount struggled to move forward, but it was doing the struggling. He wasn’t. Colonel Sinapis, also on horseback, said something to him.

Whatever it was, Stafford couldn’t make it out. The rain was coming down too hard. “Eh?” The Consul cupped a hand behind his ear.

“When I was a subaltern, we could not fight in weather like this,” Sinapis said, louder this time.

“Why not? What makes the difference?” Stafford asked.

“Percussion caps,” the Atlantean officer answered. “A wet flintlock is nothing but a fancy club—maybe a spear if you have a bayonet on the end of it. But a percussion cap will still go off in the rain.”

“Interesting how a mechanical device can change the way we wage war,” said Stafford, who hadn’t dwelt on the idea before.

“This always happens.” For Sinapis, such things fell within his area of professional competence. “If you doubt it, ask the Terranovan natives how much they have enjoyed opposing muskets with bows and arrows.”

“Mm—no doubt. The next question is, how well supplied with percussion caps are the damned insurrectionists?” Stafford said.

“Better than I would have thought,” Colonel Sinapis said, which was not what Stafford wanted to hear. Sinapis continued, “They showed every sign of having plenty at the skirmish yesterday. They fought quite well, in fact. Their steadiness impressed me.”

That was something else Stafford didn’t want to hear. “They’re nothing but lousy mudfaces and niggers,” he growled.

“No man with a rifle musket in his hand is ‘nothing but’ anything, your Excellency,” the officer warned. “No man who holds his ground till he sees himself outflanked and then draws back in good order is ‘nothing but,’ either . . . sir. You will get us in trouble if you think of the rebels as ‘nothing but.’ ”

“I want to get
them
in trouble,” Stafford said angrily. “We haven’t had much luck with that, have we?”

Balthasar Sinapis looked up into the heavens. A raindrop splashed on the end of his long nose. “If you can persuade God to ease this downpour, your Excellency, you will have shown me something I did not know before.”

“Even when the weather was good, we didn’t have much luck shifting the black bastards.” Yes, Consul Stafford was in a fine fury.

If that impressed Sinapis, the colonel’s face didn’t know it. “This campaign is just beginning, sir,” he said. “We will do some splendid things—I am sure of it. And we will have some terrible things done to us, and to the rebels those will seem splendid. Such is war.”

“It shouldn’t be war, not against these—these damned ragamuffins,” Stafford protested. “It should be like, oh, cleaning up broken crockery.”

“Never judge a soldier by the kind of uniform he wears, or by whether he wears a uniform at all,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Some of the most dangerous men I saw in Europe looked like farmers. They
were
farmers, till they picked up the guns they’d hidden in barns and sties and pigeon coops. After that, you would have thought they were devils straight out of hell.”

“What happened to them?” Stafford asked, intrigued in spite of himself.

“My men hunted them down and killed them,” the foreigner replied dispassionately. “We did, perhaps, too good a job. That was one of the reasons I . . . left that service and pledged my sword to Atlantis.”

Too good a job? What kind of howling wilderness had Sinapis’ men left behind? Stafford didn’t much care. As long as the insurrectionists got what was coming to them, nothing else mattered.

The rain came down harder. Stafford hadn’t been sure it could. With a little luck, it would wash Frederick Radcliff and the rest of the insurrectionists out to sea. But that was bound to be too much to hope for. The Consul began to hope the downpour wouldn’t wash him and the Atlantean army out to sea.

Every once in a while, a great storm would slam into southern Atlantis. Savage winds would tear off roofs and sometimes blow down buildings. The cyclones would roar inland till they finally weakened and petered out. This wasn’t one of those. It wasn’t blowing very hard at all. It was just raining and raining and raining.

Forty days and forty nights
went through Stafford’s mind. For hundreds of years, theologically inclined writers had wondered how Noah had put Atlantis’ peculiar natural productions aboard the Ark, and how those productions had ended up here and nowhere else. That sort of writing seemed to have tapered off in recent times. The consensus was that nobody knew, except possibly God.

A junior officer came back to Colonel Sinapis from the vanguard. Stafford admired him. Moving against the tide had to be even harder than going with it. The officer spoke to Sinapis. Whatever he said—again, the drumming rain muffled it for the Consul—made Sinapis gnaw at his mustache. Stafford thought that a disgusting habit.

After gnawing, the colonel dipped his head. He might have been Zeus in the
Iliad
, which Stafford remembered from his college days. He said something to the junior officer, who looked relieved and sloshed forward again.

At last, Sinapis condescended to explain: “We stop here. We can’t go forward any more. We will start killing animals if we do.”

“Soldiers will start drowning, too,” Stafford said.

“Well, so they will.” Colonel Sinapis cared about losing his men when they faced the rebels. When it came to a downpour, he seemed to worry more about his horses and mules. Stafford almost called him on it. But the rain also drowned his urge for a brand new row.

Even making camp wasn’t easy. Tent pegs didn’t want to stick in the soggy ground. Once up, the tents leaked like billy-be-damned. All soldiers were supposed to have oilskin groundsheets so they could sleep dry. Some had never been issued them. Some had thrown theirs away. And even the ones who had them weren’t happy, because muck slopped over the edges.

Cooking hot food—even boiling coffee—was impossible. Soggy hardtack made an uninspiring supper. Salt pork was next to indestructible, but in weather like this it was liable to start getting moldy, too.

Stafford’s tent was bigger than the ones the soldiers used, but no drier. He sat inside glumly, wondering what would happen if the insurrectionists chose this moment to attack. Colonel Sinapis had posted sentries all around, but so what? How much could they see, and who would hear them if they yelled a warning? Then Stafford thought,
If the rebels do attack now, they’ll go over their heads in goo, and good riddance to them
. He felt—a little—better.