Liberating Atlantis (40 page)

Victor Radcliff hadn’t had any white children who lived. Frederick was his only direct descendant.
A piece of property
, he thought.
That’s all I am to the whites
. Had his grandmother been white, even if she weren’t Victor Radcliff’s wife . . . Frederick sighed. He’d already been over that ground too many times in his mind.

A runner came back from the insurrectionists’ picket line. A white soldier would have saluted before reporting. This Negro didn’t bother. “White folks is bangin’ away like nobody’s business,” he said. “Cannons blowin’ holes in our line, soldiers comin’ right on through ’em once they’s blown. Either we needs more muskets down where the fightin’s at or we needs to git outa there.”

Frederick and Lorenzo looked at each other. Slowly, Lorenzo said, “We keep pullin’ back, we lure ’em on, get ’em to a place where we can really hurt ’em.”

“Or maybe that’s what they’re after,” Frederick responded, worry in his voice. “They’re trying to get us to a place where they can really put the screws to us.”

“Well, sure they are.” Lorenzo sounded amused, which struck Frederick as taking optimism to an extreme. The copperskin went on, “We got to do it to them and not let them do it to us.”

“So what are we supposed to do down there?” the messenger asked. “You want we should fall back?”

“Yes. Fall back.” Frederick hoped that was the right answer. If it wasn’t, he’d just hurt his own side.

He’d been thinking about the differences between men and women. His male fighters followed the orders he and Lorenzo gave without much backtalk. The women who’d taken up arms against the white soldiers almost mutinied. “We want to kill them fuckers!” a copperskinned woman cried. “After what they done to us, we want to shoot their balls off!”

“Or cut ’em off!” a black woman added. The other women with rifle muskets and pistols shrilled furious agreement.

“We’re gonna do that. Honest to God, we are.” Frederick realized he sounded as if he was pleading. Then he realized he
was
pleading. He went right on doing it, too: “We’ve got to find a better spot, that’s all. We’ve got to find a spot where we can punch a hole in them, not the other way around like they’re doin’ here. We can whip ’em. We will. This here just isn’t the right place.”

“You better be right,” the copperskinned woman warned. “Yeah, you better be, else we gonna shoot
your
balls off.” Again, her comrades ululated to show they were with her.

“I ain’t worried about that,” Frederick said.

“How come?” some of the women demanded, while others asked, “Why not?”

“On account of if we don’t win, the white soldiers’ll string me up, and Lorenzo here with me,” Frederick answered. “Whatever happens to me after that, I ain’t gonna care about it one way or the other.”

“That’s just it,” said the Negro woman who’d complained before. “They catch you, they kill you, and then it’s over. They catch us, our bad time’s just startin’.” The other women nodded.

But, after they’d had their say, they fell back with the men. “Hey, that was fun, wasn’t it?” Lorenzo said. “Now I remember how come I never wanted to be Tribune.”

“Fun? Matter of fact, no,” Frederick said. Lorenzo laughed, not that he’d been joking. He went on, “One more thing I got to do, is all.”

He did it. So did Lorenzo: the copperskin extracted the Free Republic of Atlantis’ fighters as neatly and almost as painlessly as a dentist could extract a tooth using newfangled ether or chloroform. But the soldiers kept pushing after them, showing determination Frederick hadn’t seen from them before.

“They mean it this time,” he said unhappily.

Lorenzo nodded. “They do, damn them. Now we have to make them sorry for meaning it—if we can.”

Frederick wished he hadn’t added those last three words. He made himself nod, too. “Yes,” he said. “If.”

 

Leland Newton didn’t know what his Consular colleague had done to light a fire under Colonel Sinapis. But Jeremiah Stafford must have done something. The Atlantean soldiers—and especially the militiamen who’d joined forces with Sinapis’ regulars—advanced with more dash than they’d shown since crossing the Little Muddy. Part of that—no small part, Newton judged—came from their commander. Sinapis’ heart hadn’t been in the fight for some time. It was now.

And the whites were making progress. They were making more than Newton had thought they could, as a matter of fact. The insurrectionists skirmished and fell back, skirmished and fell back. How long could they keep falling back before they started falling apart? Consul Newton had wondered about that more than once, and each time the rebels’ resilience surprised him. Could they surprise him again? He would be surprised if they could.

Sinapis’ drive pushed the Negroes and copperskins back into some of the least known, least settled parts of Atlantis. Newton wouldn’t have been surprised to see honkers grazing on some of these meadows. Audubon had, not many years before.

No one saw—or shot—any of the big flightless birds. But a red-crested eagle did tear up a soldier’s back with its claws and fierce beak. If the man’s friend hadn’t driven it off with a fallen branch, it probably would have torn out his kidneys. Audubon and other, older, naturalists said honkers were the Atlantean national bird’s favorite prey, though people or sheep would do at a pinch. One thing was sure: as honkers had declined, so had red-crested eagles.

As best they could, surgeons patched up the soldier this one had attacked. “Do you think he’ll pull through?” Newton asked.

“If the wounds don’t fester, he should,” one of them answered. Seeing a splash of the soldier’s blood on the back of his hand that he hadn’t washed away, he spat on it and wiped it off with a rag.

“Not as deep as bullet wounds,” his colleague agreed, tossing a scalpel into a tin basin of river water. “Nasty all the same, though. I’m not sorry we’ve killed most of those damned eagles—I’ll tell you that. They’re vicious brutes.”

“Nothing but vicious brutes in this part of the country,” the first surgeon said. He was a tubby man with muttonchop whiskers that didn’t suit the shape of his face. “The eagle, the niggers . . .” By the way he talked, he came from somewhere south of the Stour.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the insurrectionists say the same thing about us,” Newton remarked.

“Well, your Excellency, people can say any tomfool thing they please,” the surgeon answered. “But saying it doesn’t make it so.” His chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon’s, so that it almost projected beyond his belly. He seemed to think he’d just said something wonderful.

Newton didn’t. “As you demonstrate,” he replied, and walked away. He felt the rotund surgeon’s eyes boring into his back as if they were a red-crested eagle’s claws. But the wounds they left behind tore only his imagination.

The army kept pushing ahead against resistance that seemed to fade more with each passing day. Jeremiah Stafford was inclined to gloat. “It may have taken longer than I thought it would at first, but we’ve finally got the insurrectionists where we want them,” he declared.

“Even if we do, have we got the insurrection where we want it?” Newton asked.

Stafford sent him a look he would have been as glad not to have. “What are you going on about now?” the other Consul demanded.

“You know as well as I do,” Newton said. “The slaves in Frederick Radcliff’s army aren’t the only ones in arms. There’s fighting wherever men and women are enslaved.”

He’d hoped that harsh way of putting things would make Stafford feel guilty, but no such luck. “Once we smash the head, the body will die. You wait and see,” Stafford said confidently. “And I think we will smash it, too.”

Newton was less sure they wouldn’t than he had been a couple of weeks earlier. “How did you manage to, um, inspire Colonel Sinapis?” he asked.

“Trade secret,” his colleague said smugly.

“Oh, come on! You sound like a drummer for a patent medicine,” Newton said. “When they say their ingredients are a trade secret, they just mean they have more opium than the other fellow’s potion does. If you’d put that much poppy juice into the good colonel, he’d be too sleepy to move, let alone fight.”

He got a chuckle out of Stafford, anyhow. “Opium isn’t the drug I used. I found something stronger.”

“I didn’t know there was anything,” Newton said. “Opium really works, and that’s more than you can say for most of the medicines the quacks have.”

“Well, yes,” Stafford allowed. “But threatening
dear
Colonel Sinapis’ reputation turned out to work even better.”

Had anyone ever used
dear
as less of an endearment? Consul Newton didn’t think so. “What did you do?”

“I told him that if the southern states left the USA because he didn’t go after the insurrectionists hard enough, he’d get the blame,” Stafford said. “He would, too, by God. Who’d hire him after that?”

“Good question,” Newton said slowly. And so it was. Well, a man who was a bad politician—which is to say, a man who didn’t understand what made other men tick—wasn’t likely to become Consul of the United States of Atlantis. Jeremiah Stafford might often be mistaken (as far as Newton was concerned, Stafford usually was), but that didn’t make him a fool.

“I only wish I hadn’t needed so long to see which lever to pull,” he said now. “The insurrection might be over and done with if I’d figured it out sooner.”

“Or we might have blundered into worse trouble than we really did find,” Newton said.

“I don’t think so.” Stafford shook his head. “It’s all over but the shouting. The insurrectionists will get what’s coming to them, and high time, too.”

XVIII

A head, to the northeast, Jeremiah Stafford could see the Green Ridge Mountains swelling up against the sky. They loomed taller than they had just a couple of days before. The insurrectionists kept giving ground. For a moment, Stafford almost forgot about the insurrectionists. He’d never dreamt he would see the mountains from this angle—from the back side, to any man who lived east of them, as most Atlanteans did—but here they were.

And here, almost in their rolling foothills, the Negroes and copperskins who’d caused the USA (to say nothing of Jeremiah Stafford in his own person) so much grief were making what had to be their last stand. Stafford had all kinds of reasons for thinking it had to be. If—no, when—the Atlantean army finished smashing them, they surely (please, God!) would be able to fight no more. And Atlantis needed it to be their last stand, too. Because if it wasn’t, the army would likely be recalled. Not long after that happened, when it did, if it did, the country would probably start falling apart.

The insurrectionists seemed convinced this was their last chance, too. They’d run up earthworks at the far end of the low, wide valley that led toward the mountains. They might have been challenging the white Atlantean regulars and militiamen.
If you want us, you’ll have to dig us out
, their actions said.
And if you try digging us out, you’ll have to pay the price
.

Stafford turned to Balthasar Sinapis, who stood near him examining the trenches and ramparts through a spyglass. “How strong are they?” the Consul asked.

“Hard to tell,” Colonel Sinapis answered. “The ground rises as you move that way—not much, but some. Enough so I have trouble seeing whatever they may be hiding there.”

“It won’t be much,” Stafford said confidently. “Now that we’ve started driving them, they haven’t been able to slow us down, let alone stop us. Have they?”

He waited. Sinapis couldn’t very well do anything but dip his head in assent. The officer also couldn’t help adding, “Because they haven’t, your Excellency, doesn’t mean they can’t.”

“Devil it doesn’t,” Stafford retorted. “They’re whipped now. They have to know it, too, or they wouldn’t hide behind earthworks. We go in, we slaughter them, and there’s an end to it.”
Let there be an end to it, O Lord!

“Why are you so sure?” Leland Newton asked. By the way the words came out, he knew the answer as well as Stafford did.
Because this has to be the end. Because the country can’t stand any more
.

Stafford didn’t say that, not when the other Consul already knew it. He spoke to Sinapis as if Newton hadn’t said a word: “They aren’t waiting in the bushes to ambush us as we advance. You know they aren’t—you ran enough scouts through the bushes.”

“I needed to do it, too,” the colonel replied with dignity. He waved toward the gently sloping sides of the valley: first to one, then to the other. “This is exactly the sort of terrain they are fond of using for an ambuscade.”

“But they didn’t, did they?” Stafford said. Colonel Sinapis couldn’t very well claim the contrary. Stafford pressed his advantage: “And the reason they didn’t is that they’re too beaten down, too hard pressed. The foxes may have given us a good chase, but we’ve run them to earth. Now we’ll bury them in it.”

“You’ve always thought we would have an easier time against them than we turned out to,” Newton said.

“Yes? And so?” Stafford answered coolly. “As soon as we root them out of their holes here, we’ve won. You never thought we could do it at all. It may have come later than I wanted, but not too late.”
Don’t let it be too late!

If Newton wanted to argue, Stafford was ready. It was his own day to hold final authority, so the arguments didn’t matter. But Newton didn’t say anything more. As it had been when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the die was cast.

“Form up the men, Colonel, and send them forward,” Stafford told Sinapis. “We’ve come this far. Let’s get it over with.”

Sinapis gave back a precise salute. “As you say, your Excellency.” He might have been a valet answering a rich Englishman. Then he gave the regular officers and militia commanders their orders. The regulars would follow them. The militiamen might or might not. Sinapis kept them on the wings and in the rear, where any failures ought to matter least.