Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"We can, and we'd better," Frederick said. "If they go wherever they want and we don't try to stop them, we've lost."

"I won't try and tell you you're wrong," Lorenzo said.

Frederick wasn't sorry to leave his swampy fastness. The state of New Marseille was warm and sticky and bug-ridden from one end to the other. Having lived there for so many years, Frederick knew that all too well. But things weren't quite so bad when he came out into drier country.

He carried a revolver taken from a dead Atlantean cavalry trooper. That gave him seven bullets to fire at the enemy-and one for himself if everything went wrong. After the raid, he'd decided the whites wouldn't take him alive. One pull of the trigger got everything over with in a hurry. They wouldn't be able to torment him, and they wouldn't be able to use him to scare other slaves who'd rebelled.

Most of the whites had fled this part of the country. A couple of big houses bristled with warning signs and had sentries parading outside of them. They might as well have been forts. Frederick thought his men could overrun them at need, but he didn't see the need. The whites holed up in them wouldn't come out to attack his fighters, which was all that really mattered. If the army went away or lost, the holdouts wouldn't count for beans. And if the army won…

If the army won, Frederick would be dead. He wouldn't care what happened later on.

The Negroes and copperfaces were eating what they scavenged from the countryside, and from granaries taken when plantations fell. Most whites lacked the presence of mind to set fire to barns or to pour water into storage pits before fleeing. A good thing, too, or the rebels would have had a-literally-thinner time of it.

Soldiers, from what he'd heard, often turned up their noses at frogs and turtles and the big flightless katydids that were more common than mice in the woods. Slaves couldn't afford to be so choosy. Nothing wrong with turtle stew, not if you'd been eating it since you were little and took it for granted.

Of course, the soldiers didn't have to worry about such things now. They had a baggage train, a luxury the rebels did without. The soldiers could ship hardtack and salt pork and bully beef into New Marseille and bring it along with them when they marched. No, they wouldn't go hungry.

Along with the other slaves, Frederick had sampled captured hardtack and bully beef. You could eat the stuff if you had to: no doubt of that. Given a choice, Frederick preferred turtle stew and frogs' legs and whatever flatbread his cooks could bake on griddles or hot stones.

Scouts-both blacks and copperskins-shadowed the Atlantean column. The gray-clad soldiers were moving into the country where Frederick wanted to spread the insurrection. If he could keep them out, uprisings against the local planters would stand a better chance.

But he knew he would have to win a stand-up fight against them to keep them from penetrating the country between New Marseille and Avalon. Shooting at them from behind fences and out of the woods wouldn't do it. The soldiers shrugged off those losses and kept marching. Their scouts also hurt the rebels. The whites were no stronger, not man for man. They were no better in the woods. But they were better shots, and they were better at supporting one another. They were professional soldiers, in other words, not the amateurs he led.

"Can we stop 'em in a regular battle?" he asked Lorenzo.

The copperskin shrugged broad shoulders. "Damned if I know," he said. "Time to try, though, don't you think?"

"Part of me does," Frederick said. "Then I start wondering how many of us get shot if we try it and it doesn't work."

Lorenzo only shrugged again. "It's a war. We hope we hurt the other bastards worse than they hurt us, that's all."

Frederick's other fear was that the insurrection would fall to pieces after a lost battle. That worried him less than it had in the early days, though. The Negroes and copperskins who fought alongside him had shown their resilience. Chances were a loss wouldn't scuttle everything.

And they might win. He would have had trouble believing that when the rebellion started, but they really might.

"Let's try it," he said. "You know a place where we can hold 'em up-and where we can fall back from if we've got to?" He didn't want his optimism running away with him.

"Not me." Lorenzo shook his head. "I ain't from around these parts, either. We've got some folks who are, though. Best thing we can do is find out from them. Bound to be somebody who'll know of one."

And a bald, long-faced Negro named Custis said, "Reckon I know a place. Got to slow the white soldiers down some, or they're liable to get to it 'fore we does."

Skirmishing with the column of white Atlanteans was easy. Making sure the skirmishes didn't get too costly proved less so. The soldiers seemed much more eager to mix it up with the bush-whackers than they had on their march to New Marseille. They usually had the better of it at close quarters, too. Like any other art, bayonet fighting took practice. The soldiers had more than the rebels did.

But the series of little fights did slow down the men in gray. And Custis' promised spot proved as good as he claimed. A stone fence near the top of a low rise gave cover against musketry. A stream to one side and woods to the other made the fence hard to outflank. The road ran just in front of the woods. Putting a barricade across it was easy. The rebels behind the fence could rake the soldiers with gunfire if they tried to decline battle.

"If we can beat 'em anywhere, this here is the place," Frederick said.

"I think so, too," Lorenzo agreed. "It's like the places where the white Atlanteans fought the redcoats way back when."

"It is!" Frederick nodded eagerly. He hadn't thought of that, but he could tell it was true as soon as Lorenzo said it. The Atlanteans under his grandfather had needed to fight in places like this. Less steady, less disciplined, than their English foes, they needed all the help the ground could give them. His own colored rebels needed that kind of help today.

He put men in the woods to keep the Atlanteans from outflanking his position by surprise. He posted men behind the barricade, too. Why let the enemy have an easy time tearing it down?

He knew when the soldiers drew near. They raised a column of reddish dust that hung in the dusty air. The Barfords had always complained about road dust when they visited friends and relations. Clotilde Barford said-over and over-the problem would go away if the government (sometimes it was the state government, sometimes the national) only macadamized or cobbled the highways. She wanted the government (whichever government it was on any given day) to start with the one that ran next to the Barford plantation.

Frederick might have been a slave, but he could see the trouble with that. He'd never set eyes on a macadamized road, or even a cobbled one, but he knew what they were and what making them entailed: lots of rocks (whether crushed or fist-sized), lots of labor, and lots of money. The government might not have to pay slaves in work gangs, but it would have to feed them and water them and doctor them, and it would have to pay their owners for their services and for their time away from the fields. Where would the government get money like that, especially since white folks squealed like hurt hogs about every cent they grudgingly coughed up in taxes?

People who liked paved roads talked about other advantages besides their being dust-free. The most important was that you could use them in any weather. Rain didn't turn them to muck.

But horses' hooves did better on dirt than on cobblestones or macadam. And dirt roads didn't have to be expensively rebuilt. They didn't have the added cost of maintenance, either. They were just… there. And odds were they would go right on being there for many years to come.