Liberating Atlantis (26 page)

That hadn’t occurred to Newton. He wanted to say the other Consul would be hearing voices next. He wanted to, but discovered he couldn’t. What Stafford had suggested might be unlikely, but it was far from impossible. What did come out of his mouth was, “We shall have to find out about that.”

“Yes. We shall.” Even the soft answer failed to satisfy Stafford. “We should have done it a long time ago.”

“Maybe we would have, had you suggested it then,” Newton said. “If you bring it to Colonel Sinapis’ attention, I am sure he will handle it.”

“He does not favor slavery,” Stafford said darkly. Newton wondered why that surprised the other Consul—few immigrants did. Stafford scowled. But then he unbent enough to add, “He will not care for the House of Universal Devotion, either: it is destructive of good discipline.”

“Something else on which we agree,” Leland Newton said. “We may have more in common than either of us would have believed.”

“So we may. But so what?” Stafford had no more give to him than the rocks of North Cape. “We also know where we disagree, and we know which carries the greater weight.”

“I am not your enemy,” Newton said. “You mistake me if you judge me so.”

“You are the enemy of things I hold dear, however,” Stafford replied. “You oppose me there, and I will oppose you to see those things strengthened and protected. I do not see how we can make a friendship of that.”

Neither did Consul Newton, however much he might have liked to.

Jeremiah Stafford scowled at Lorenzo. The copperskinned emissary from the Free Republic of Atlantis stared back impassively. Whatever Lorenzo was thinking, he didn’t tell his face about it: a useful quality in an envoy. Only the flag of truce he carried kept Stafford from ordering him seized and hanged from the closest tree. The Consul was tempted to do it despite the white flag.

“Here I am again. Now you start to see you can’t hope to beat us,” Lorenzo said. Even his voice grated on Stafford’s nerves. He talked like what he was: a slave, and likely a field hand at that. A pig in an archbishop’s robes would have made a more unlikely diplomat than Lorenzo, but only a little.

“We haven’t seen anything of the kind,” Stafford growled. “If your precious Frederick Radcliff is such a wonderful general, why doesn’t he come out and fight instead of skulking around like a coward?”

Lorenzo still didn’t change expression, though something might have flickered in his eyes. “If you are such a wonderful general, Consul Stafford, why don’t you make him come out and fight when he doesn’t want to?”

Beside Stafford, Leland Newton snickered, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Colonel Sinapis coughed, which might have been even more embarrassing. Stafford’s ears felt ready to burst into flame. He couldn’t even show his fury, lest he hand Lorenzo another point. “That,” he ground out, “can be arranged.”

“So you say, your Excellency.” By his tone, Lorenzo didn’t believe a word of it.

“I also say you deserve lashes for your insolence,” Stafford told him.

Lorenzo only shrugged. “If you want, I will take off my shirt and show you my stripes. I have tasted the lash before. Have you?”

“No, and I have not deserved it, either,” Stafford said.

“Oh? Deserved!” Lorenzo’s face might not show much, but he had an expressive voice. “Well, I did not deserve my whippings, either. But that did not stop the overseer. And many of the people in the Free Republic’s army will tell you the same story. That is why we keep fighting. That is why you will never make us give up, no matter what.”

“In a pinch, killing the lot of you will do,” Stafford said.

The copperskin started to laugh. Then he took another look at Stafford’s face and thought twice. He hadn’t realized Stafford might mean it. After a considerable pause, he said, “Well, you can try. Giving us the freedom we want, the freedom we deserve, would come cheaper, though.”

“You don’t think you have earned punishment for your insurrection? Punishment for your treason?” Stafford asked.

“Your Excellency, any man with stripes on his back who does not rise up against the folk who gave them to him deserves punishment for not having any balls,” Lorenzo said. “That is how it seems to me, and I have tasted the lash. Let us be free men and citizens, and we will trouble you no more. Say we have no right to that, and we will fight you forever.”

“Go fight, then, because we will do just that,” Stafford said.

“You say so now. Will you say so in five years’ time, or ten, or fifteen?” Without waiting for an answer, Lorenzo raised his flag of truce and strode away from the white men who led the army opposing him.

“You should know you were speaking for yourself there,” Consul Newton told Stafford. “Certainly not for me, and I would say not for the Atlantean government, either.”

“Well, so what?” Stafford said. “Today is my day in command. You let that Lorenzo get above himself when it was your turn. High time the insurrectionists understand that we will not put up with their insolence. And, whether I speak for the government of Atlantis or not, you may rest assured that I do speak for the government of every state with a servile population. This kind of thing cannot be allowed to spread, or it will consume us all.” He turned to Colonel Sinapis. “We ought to shadow that rogue of a Lorenzo, see where he goes. With any luck at all, he will lead us straight to Frederick Radcliff. If we take off the insurrection’s head, the body ought to die.”

“Interesting you should say so, your Excellency,” Sinapis answered. “I tried it the last time he called. I lost two men and gained nothing. The rebels may be many different things, but naive they are not.”

“Oh,” Stafford said on a deflated note. “Too bad.”

“It would not have worked in Europe,” Sinapis said. “Here, I thought, perhaps the enemy is not so clever, so I might learn something worthwhile. But no.” He spread his hands, as if to say,
What can you do?

What Stafford wanted to do was dispose of every slave who had risen. He still wasn’t convinced it was impossible. The will was there—or it would be, if it wouldn’t cost the slaveowners so dear. The means were the harder part.

He found out just how hard it might be a couple of days later. To his surprise, and even more to his dismay, he found out not from Consul Newton or Colonel Sinapis—men he’d come to see as obstacles in his own path—but from a messenger who galloped in out of the east.

The news the man brought was particularly unwelcome. The slave uprising had broken out in earnest behind the army. The railroad line over the Green Ridge Mountains was cut. No supplies would get through any time soon.

Balthasar Sinapis’ long face got even longer when he heard that. He said several choice things in English, then several more that sounded even juicier in what seemed like three or four other languages. Once the thunder and lightning stopped crashing down, he said, “This presents us with a serious problem. Two serious problems, in fact: food and munitions.”

“If the God-damned insurrectionists can live off the countryside, so can we,” Consul Stafford declared.

“But they have already been living off
this
countryside for some little while,” Sinapis said. “That makes it more difficult for us to do the same.”

“Hard to get more meat off bones the vultures have already picked clean,” Consul Newton agreed.

“
Vultures
is right,” Stafford snapped. “That’s just what they are, and high time you admitted it, too.” Having put the Consul from Croydon in his place—or so it seemed to him—he gave his attention back to the colonel. “We have enough ammunition to keep fighting, don’t we?”

“For a while,” Sinapis answered dubiously. “If we should run dry without getting any more . . . In that case, our troubles get worse.”

“Translated into English, that means we get massacred shortly thereafter, doesn’t it?” Newton asked. Put in his place he might be, but he refused to stay there.

Colonel Sinapis didn’t tell him he was wrong, either. Of course, that was because Consul Stafford beat him to the punch: “Oh, rubbish. The insurrectionists are bound to run dry before we do. And if we aren’t better men with bayonets in our hands, then something is dreadfully wrong with the way the drillmasters train our soldiers.” He turned back to Sinapis again—no, he rounded on him this time. “Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”
You’d better not
, his voice warned.

And Colonel Sinapis didn’t. “No, both those points hold considerable truth,” he said.

“Then why were you panicking a moment ago?” Stafford asked.

“I was not,” the officer replied with dignity. “I would be remiss in my duty if I did not point out difficulties.”

He was right, which didn’t make Stafford love him any better. Growling deep in his throat, the Consul said, “Well, sir, things being as they are, what do you recommend we do?”

“March for the town of New Marseille,” Colonel Sinapis answered at once. “We establish a secure base, and we secure a supply route by sea—all the more important now that the land route has failed. We also prevent the insurrectionists from seizing the place, which would be a disaster for us.”

He was right again. Leland Newton promptly nodded. Even Stafford could find nothing to quarrel at, not this time. He nodded, too. “Very well,” he said. “And we should do that as quickly as we can, before the niggers and mudfaces hereabouts find out what’s happened farther east and try to steal a march on us.”

“Assuming they don’t already know,” Newton said.

“Yes. Assuming.” Stafford contrived to make the innocent word sound more than a little obscene.

“All right, your Excellencies. For once, we find ourselves in complete accord. If only we did not require misfortune to cause it,” Sinapis said. He waved to his junior officers, who stood in a knot off to one side, waiting to learn what had happened.

After their commander explained, they seemed no happier—which was putting it mildly. “Sweet suffering Jesus!” one of them exclaimed. “We’re supposed to push the savages around. They aren’t supposed to push us!”

“War is not about what is supposed to happen, Captain,” Colonel Sinapis replied in tones so wintry, they should have frozen the subtropical landscape all around. “War is about what does happen, and about responding to it as best one can.”

“Er—yes, sir,” the captain said. That was one answer that was never out of place.

Not even Consul Stafford could complain about the way Sinapis and his officer corps got the men moving. The soldiers grumbled and swore, but soldiers always grumbled and swore. They marched along the muddy roads, which was what mattered. And the insurrectionists did not seem inclined to do more than harry them. Maybe that meant Frederick Radcliff didn’t aim to attack New Marseille himself. Stafford hoped so, anyhow.

XII

More hard rain further slowed the army’s march to New Marseille. Even after the soldiers got there, Leland Newton reminded himself, New Hastings would be a while learning of their misfortune. A ship or a land traveler would have to carry the news. The rebels had proved much too good at cutting telegraph lines. All the southern ones seemed to be out. Maybe a working line still ran from New Marseille up to Avalon. Even if one did, it wouldn’t help much. There’d been talk of stringing wires from New Hastings to Avalon, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Frederick Radcliff’s irregulars kept sniping at the Atlantean soldiers, rain or no rain. “The reports said the damned insurrectionists somehow got their hands on proper percussion pieces,” Jeremiah Stafford grumbled. “Why couldn’t they have been wrong for once?”

“It could be worse,” Newton said.

“Of course it could,” the other Consul said. “They could have got their hands on a couple of batteries of field guns, too? Wouldn’t that be delightful?”

Newton thought how he’d like to be on the receiving end of a cannonade. “Now that you mention it, no,” he answered. He might sympathize with the downtrodden Negroes and copperskins, but not enough to lay his life on the altar in expiation for generations of white men’s sins.

And then, just as he’d said it could, it proceeded to get worse. First one soldier and then several more came down with yellow fever. That did nothing to improve the morale of the men who managed to escape it. A good number of them were down with a bloody flux of the bowels. It was less dramatic than the yellow jack, which didn’t mean it was a sickness anyone would want.

A few men trickled away. Colonel Sinapis responded by setting out even more sentries than he was already posting. Desertions slowed, though they didn’t quite stop. Newton suspected more soldiers would have tried skedaddling had they not feared what might happen if the rebels caught them.

“God in heaven!” Stafford said. “The way things are going, I wonder whether we deserve to win.”

“I’ve wondered all along,” Newton said, drawing an irate glare from his colleague.

Colonel Sinapis looked at things from a different angle. “You must remember, your Excellency—these are green troops,” he told Stafford. “Many of them have been in the army for years and years, but they are green anyhow, because whom has Atlantis fought in all that time?”

Instead of reacting to the obvious justice of the comment, Stafford only muttered, “Whom,” as if he were a grammatical owl.

“Accusative case, is it not?” Sinapis said. “English is not my native tongue, but I do not care to make mistakes using it.”

“You were accurate,” Newton assured him. “You were more accurate than many people who grew up speaking English would have been.”

“Oh. One of those,” Colonel Sinapis said. “Every language has them, I suppose. They are like ambushes, set in place to trap the unwary.”

A breeze from off the Hesperian Gulf blew the rain clouds to the east. It brought with it the scent of the sea. Newton was familiar with that sharp salt tang, of course; he couldn’t very well not be, not when he’d spent most of his life in Croydon and New Hastings. But he thought the Hesperian Gulf smelled fresher than the ocean off the east coast of Atlantis. It probably was no coincidence that less sewage went into the Gulf than into the ocean off the East Coast.