Liberating Atlantis (45 page)

“That’s right!” another white man shouted. “The House of Universal Devotion is the doorway to hell!”

“Liar!” yet another captive said. “God talks to the Preacher, and the Preacher tells his people the truth!”

The preacher—without a capital letter ornamenting his calling—standing by the mass grave tried to go on, but his audience didn’t want to listen to him any more. The white prisoners shook their fists at one another and bawled out curses and catcalls. They might have started brawling if not for the bemused insurrectionists standing guard over them.

“White folks are crazy. Crazy, I tell you.” Lorenzo spoke with great sincerity. “Only one who cares which church you go to ought to be God. He’s the only one with the answers, anyways.”

“Of course white folks are crazy,” Frederick answered. “They reckon they can keep slaves and keep ’em like beasts, and they reckon God loves ’em. You believe both those things at the same time, you got to be nuts.”

“Yeah. Hadn’t looked at it like that, but yeah.” Lorenzo pointed at the angry prisoners. “What are we gonna do about those sorry bastards?”

“Long as they’re just yelling, it doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s like a waddayacallit—a safety valve—on a steam engine,” Frederick said. “They blow off steam against each other, they won’t give us so much trouble.”

One of the white men chose that moment to decide he didn’t care whether the Negroes and copperskins were carrying guns. Full of crusading zeal, he decked another white who presumed to hold an opinion different from his about the House of Universal Devotion. A few seconds later, another enthusiast flattened the first fellow who’d used fists to make his point.

Frederick drew his eight-shooter and fired a round into the air. Nothing got people’s instant, undivided attention like a gunshot. Christians who’d been about to swing on their fellow Christians suddenly had second thoughts.

“That will be enough of that,” Frederick said into the pool of silence that spread as the echoes of the shot died away. “What you think about God is your business. When you punch somebody in the nose on account of what
he
thinks about God, that’s my business. You leave other folks alone, and hope like hell they leave you alone, too. You start acting like mad dogs, you get what mad dogs deserve.” Whites called slaves who dared rebel mad dogs. Frederick enjoyed throwing the phrase back in their faces. He pulled the trigger again. Another tongue of flame spat from the revolver’s muzzle.

To his amazement, some of the prisoners wanted to argue with him. “I’m trying to save that ignorant fool’s soul from hell,” one white protested earnestly.

“He reckons you’re headed that way yourself,” Frederick answered. “What makes you so sure you’re right and he’s wrong?”

“Why, the Bible says so,” the white man replied, as if to a fool.

“Suppose he reads it some different way? Or suppose he doesn’t care about it at all?”

“Then he’s surely bound for hell. And you’d better look to your own soul, too.” The captive edged away from Frederick, as if afraid God would strike the Negro dead for presuming to ask such questions—and might singe him, too, if he stayed too near.

“I will. I do. I look to mine. You look to yours. Let that other fella look to his,” Frederick said. “I promise you one thing: you start that kind of stupid trouble, we’ll be the ones who end it.”

Some of the prisoners thought the Preacher and the House of Universal Devotion were the fount of true doctrine. Many more were of the opinion that everything about them came straight from Satan. Frederick had heard that the Preacher opposed slaveholding. That inclined him toward giving the House of Universal Devotion the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, he had a hard time caring one way or the other.

His main goal was to keep the captives from quarreling among themselves. Sooner or later, he hoped to exchange them for fighters captured by the white Atlanteans. Under the laws of war, both sides got treated the same way. What color a combatant was didn’t matter. (The Europeans who put those laws together hadn’t imagined fighting people of a different color. But that was all right—the laws had more stretch to them than their framers figured.)

Just by treating with Frederick and his fighters under the laws of war, the white Atlanteans granted them more equality than they’d ever enjoyed here before. If the whites won, that equality would vanish. Both sides recognized as much.

And, up till lately, neither side had seriously wondered what would happen if the Negroes and copperskins won. The whites hadn’t dreamt it was possible. Neither had Frederick, not really. But dreaming time was over. Reality was here. Now both sides had to try to make the best of it.

BOOK IV

XX

Back in New Marseille, the telegraphers were proud of themselves and their colleagues farther east. In spite of the insurrection, they’d managed to open a connection with New Hastings on the other coast. Most of the time, Jeremiah Stafford would have been proud right along with them.

Most of the time. When the news he had to give the capital was of a disaster, his heart wouldn’t have broken had the line stayed down a little longer. As things were, he had no choice.

Neither did Consul Newton or Colonel Sinapis. Each man composed his own report and gave it to the telegraphers. Stafford collaborated with neither of the other leaders. As far as he knew, the other two didn’t collaborate with each other. He wondered how much the reports differed. He wondered if anyone, reading all three, would be sure they talked about the same event.

He couldn’t do anything about that. He thought he was telling the unvarnished truth. If Sinapis or Newton felt like lying, that wasn’t his affair. If they thought he would stoop to lying, they didn’t know him very well.

Besides, while you could write around the awful news as much as you pleased, you couldn’t make it go away. The insurrectionists beat the Atlantean army. They made it surrender. In lieu of slaughtering it to the last man, they made it march away without its weapons.

No one responsible could deny any of that. If anybody tried, it wouldn’t do him any good. No, the remaining interesting questions were two. First, who was to blame for the catastrophe? And, second, what the devil was the Atlantean government supposed to do about it now?

Newspapers in New Marseille had no doubt on that score. They printed highly colored interviews with soldiers they didn’t name (and a good thing for the soldiers that they remained anonymous, or all the dreadful things they’d escaped in the battle would have landed on them in the aftermath). They also printed headlines like STRING UP THE CONSULS! and EXILE THE COLONEL!

“Nice to know we’re loved,” Leland Newton said, holding up one of the more inflammatory papers.

“Don’t worry about it, your Excellency,” Stafford answered as he corrected his breakfast coffee with a healthy splash of barrel-tree rum. “They loved you before we lost the battle.”

“I’m sure they did.” If the prospect dismayed Newton, he hid it very well. “After all, I disagreed with them, and what crime is more heinous than that?”

Stafford knew the answer to that particular question: losing the battle that was liable to mean liberty for all the copperskins and Negroes in the USA. Instead of saying so, he sipped his rum-laced coffee. The other Consul could see the answer as well as he could himself. The only difference was, Newton wouldn’t think liberating slaves was a heinous offense. He was a northern man, after all, so what did he know?

A raised eyebrow said Newton guessed most of what was going on in Stafford’s mind. The other Consul made a small production out of lighting a cigar. He said, “We both must be getting old. Seems too early in the day to quarrel, doesn’t it?”

“Now that you mention it, yes,” Stafford answered. “I will if you really want to, though. I don’t want to disappoint you.”

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Newton said. “The papers are quarrelsome enough, and whatever New Hastings has to say is bound to be worse. When do you suppose we’ll hear from the Conscript Fathers?”

After someone flings water in their faces, because they’re bound to faint when they get the news
, Stafford thought morosely. “Are you really so eager?” he asked aloud.

“Eager? Well, as a matter of fact, no,” the other Consul replied. “Say rather curious, in a clinical way, as if I’m wondering whether the dentist will tell me whether he has to pull one tooth or two.”

Stafford winced. He’d had some agonizing encounters with tooth-pullers before they found out about ether. No one went to one of those quacks unless he was already in pain, and what they did to you only made you hurt worse—for a while, anyhow. Afterwards, you won relief. But that was afterwards. During was another story altogether.

And what sort of relief could the United States of Atlantis win from the abscess of insurrection? They’d tried to lance it, tried and failed. Now the poison was spreading through the country’s system. Stafford had no idea how to stop it. He would have been amazed if the Senators on the far coast did.

He hadn’t finished his ham and eggs and fried yams when a messenger who hadn’t started shaving yet handed him one telegram and Consul Newton another. “Oh, joy,” Stafford said as he unfolded his.

“Looking forward to it, are you?” Newton said.

“Well . . . no,” Stafford answered. The other Consul managed a chuckle of sorts, but one with a distinct graveyard quality to it.

Senate expresses its disappointment at failure to suppress slave insurrection
, the wire read. It wasn’t quite
You clumsy idiot!
, but it might as well have been. The telegram continued,
Use any—repeat, any—measures necessary to end uprising. Manumission not mandatory but not—repeat, not—ruled out.

That was all. That was quite enough. That was, as far as Jeremiah Stafford was concerned, much too much. “What does yours say?” he asked Newton.

“They want us to patch up a peace. That’s what it amounts to, anyhow,” his colleague answered. “How about yours?”

“The same, more or less,” Stafford said heavily. “By God, it frosts my pumpkin. If we fight a proper war, we can win it.”

“Maybe we can, but how much more money will it cost?” Newton said. “How many more lives will we lose? How much longer will the Senate put up with that? How long will the Atlantean people put up with it?”

“Even Colonel Sinapis thinks we can win it.” Stafford was clutching at straws, and he knew as much.

In case he hadn’t, Consul Newton rubbed his nose in it: “Right now, how far will anyone follow Colonel Sinapis?”

Stafford didn’t answer. No answer seemed necessary—or possible. Anyone who didn’t blame the two Consuls for surrendering to Frederick Radcliff and the insurrectionists blamed Colonel Sinapis instead. Quite a few Atlanteans were sure there was plenty of blame to go around. That seemed to be the sense of the Senate’s telegram.

Gently, Leland Newton said, “It won’t be so bad. Truly, it won’t. We’ve had free Negroes and copperskins in Croydon for more than a hundred years now. Our republic hasn’t fallen apart. Your states won’t, either.”

“Easy for you to say,” Stafford replied. “You may have freed them, but you never had very many for you to free. Things are different down here.”

“They certainly are,” Newton said. “The copperskins and blacks in Croydon are peaceful citizens, just like anyone else. They’re up in arms here. Don’t you see the connection? It’s time to admit that what you’ve been doing here isn’t working, even if it has made white people money.”

That made Stafford scratch his head. As far as he was concerned, making money and working meant the same thing. At last, he saw, or thought he saw, some of what Newton had in mind: “You mean a few of the slaves don’t fancy it.”

“More than a few, don’t you think? And ‘don’t fancy it’ is like saying ‘The ocean isn’t small,’ ” Newton answered. “They ‘don’t fancy it’ enough to pick up guns and risk their lives to try to do something about it. Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

“You want me to say slavery is wicked and horrid, and everyone who has anything to do with it ought to be ashamed of himself, don’t you?” Stafford said. “I’m very sorry, your Excellency, but I honestly don’t believe that.”

“I know. But whether you believe it isn’t the point any more,” Newton said.

That puzzled Stafford again. “How do you mean?”

“The point is, the slaves—the people who were slaves, I should say—do believe it. They would rather die than go on being slaves,” Newton said. “A lot of them
have
died. They’ve made a lot of us die, too. Shouldn’t
that
tell you something?”

“You’re playing the schoolmaster here. Suppose you give me the lesson.” Consul Stafford admired his own patience. Whether anyone else would admire it—or call it patience and not mulish intransigence—never crossed his mind.

And Newton seemed willing—maybe even eager—to do just what he’d asked. “The lesson is simple. If Negroes and copperskins go on being
them
and whites go on being
us
, Atlantis is ruined. We have to find a way for all of us to be Atlanteans together, or else we’ll spend the next hundred years fighting.”

“We
had
a way to live together,” Stafford insisted.

“Yes, but too many people couldn’t stand it. That’s why we’ve got the insurrection now.”

“Whites in the south won’t like the way you have in mind. If blacks and Negroes can grab guns and fight, what makes you think white men can’t?” Stafford said.

“That’s simple enough.” Newton aimed a forefinger at him as if it were a rifle musket. “You have to persuade them not to.”

 

“We ought to try and grab New Marseille
now
,” Lorenzo said. “We’ve got the white soldiers’ guns. Besides, their hearts have to be down in their shoes. We should hit hard and fast, before they get reinforcements and fresh supplies.”

Frederick Radcliff drummed his fingers on the outside of his thigh. A few weeks ago, he might have agreed with his marshal. Now . . . everything had changed. Or, if things hadn’t changed, the insurrection still had no hope. “Ask you a couple of questions?” he said.