Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Frederick examined his preparations one more time. He turned to Lorenzo. "Are we ready?" he asked. "Did we forget anything?"

The copperskin started to answer. Then he caught himself and took another long look at things himself. Frederick liked that. The more you checked, the less you took for granted, the better off you were likely to be. At last, Lorenzo said, "Only thing I wish we had are some cannon of our own."

"Me, too," Frederick said. "Don't know what we can do about that, though, except maybe grab some from the white folks."

"If we'd taken New Marseille-" Lorenzo began.

Frederick cut him off with a sharp chopping motion of his right hand. "Too late to worry about that now, 'specially since we might not've taken it."

"Still looks to me like we could've," Lorenzo said stubbornly.

They might have gone on arguing-it was nothing they hadn't done before-but several Atlantean cavalrymen rode out from under their army's dust cloud and trotted forward to look over the rebels' dispositions. "Hold fire!" Frederick yelled to his men. The clouds of powder smoke would tell the white horsemen just where their foes waited.

For a wonder, the men under his command did as he asked. The cavalrymen stared at the rise and the barricaded road and the woods off to the side. Then they rode back to report to their own superiors. Frederick's stomach knotted. It wouldn't be long now.

Jeremiah Stafford peered at the insurrectionists' position through a spyglass. He couldn't judge how many men they had behind that stone wall. Enough to let them think they could challenge the Atlantean army, anyhow. They couldn't possibly be right… could they?

By the way Colonel Sinapis lined up his men with fussy precision, and by the way the corners of his mouth turned down, he wasn't so sure. Instead of sending the foot soldiers forward to sweep aside the riffraff of Negroes and copperskins, Sinapis advanced his field guns till they weren't far out of musket range. "Hit the wall with everything you have," he told the artillerymen.

"What good will that do?" Stafford asked him.

Patiently, the Atlantean officer answered, "A stone wall will protect the men behind it from musketry. If they think they are safe from cannonballs… Inexperienced troops often make that mistake." He turned back to the men with the red chevrons and piping on their uniforms. "Now!" he commanded.

The field guns belched fire and smoke. They scooted backward from the recoil; a few artillerymen had to step smartly to keep the carriages from running over them. As soon as the recoil stopped, the gun crews wrestled their pieces back into position, swabbed the guns' iron and brass throats, and started reloading them.

Several roundshot smacked into the fence that protected the insurrectionists. From the way Colonel Sinapis had talked, Stafford thought the guns would smash down the wall all at once. They didn't. But through the spyglass he saw turmoil among the men on the far side. Something was going on, sure enough.

When he asked about it, Sinapis answered, "The balls break the stones they hit. You stand behind a stone wall that gets can nonaded, it is like standing up under shotgun fire. Those little bits of stone can kill you and will hurt you if they do not kill."

"Ah," Stafford said, enlightened. The cannon went on thundering. The commotion on the far side of the stone wall got worse. Here and there, roundshot bit chunks out of the wall. Even when they didn't, the copperskins and Negroes stirred like bees when their hive was kicked.

"So we shall see how they like that for a while, and then we shall see how steady they are after a cannonading," Colonel Sinapis said. "Artillery is what inexperienced troops commonly fear most. If it unsettles the-what do you call them?-the insurrectionists, yes, they will be easy enough for our infantry to handle."

"I expect they will be," Stafford said. "It's not as if they were white men, after all." He wondered how he would like to face artillery fire from behind a stone wall that offered less protection than he'd expected. Chances were he wouldn't like it much, but he didn't dwell on that.

Something gleamed in Colonel Sinapis' dark eyes. But the colonel didn't call him on it. The fieldpieces thundered again and again, hurling cannonballs up the slope. The whack!s the roundshot made when they hit the fence were shorter and sharper than the blasts that flung them forth.

Sinapis waved. The cannon fell silent. The officer turned to the bugler beside him. "Blow Forward," he said.

"Yes, sir," the man replied, and raised his battered brass bugle to his lips. Under the subtropical sun, it gleamed like gold. The imperious notes rang out.

"Hurrah!" the soldiers shouted as they started toward the enemy. They advanced with fixed bayonets. The sunshine also glittered from the sharp steel. Bayonets were another thing that made raw soldiers' knees knock. Somehow, it was easier to put up with the notion of taking a bullet than to imagine yourself screaming your life away, pierced by a foe who'd come all that way to stick you and who had within himself not a drop of the milk of human kindness.

While the main force advanced on the fence, a smaller group of soldiers moved against the barricade blocking the road. Copperskins and Negroes popped up from behind the fallen trees and fired at the oncoming men in gray. And plenty of insurrectionists in back of the fence blasted away at the Atlanteans moving toward them.

"They have nerve," Sinapis said.

"They have their nerve!" Jeremiah Stafford exclaimed, which meant something altogether different.

"I had hoped we could get in among them without needing to fire," Sinapis said. "That does not seem likely now."

Sure enough, the Atlantean infantrymen began shooting back at the foes behind the fence. Then they had to reload under fire from the enemy, which nobody in his right mind could have been enthusiastic about. Some of them got shot ramrod in hand-as ignominious a way to go out of the fight as any Stafford could think of.

Artillerymen wrestled some of the cannon around half a turn, so they bore on the logs across the road. Twelve pounds of highspeed iron smacking an obstacle like that did much more visible damage than the roundshot did to the stone fence. Logs tumbled like jackstraws. Consul Stafford hoped they squashed some of the fighters behind them when they fell over.

"This is good," Sinapis said in somber satisfaction-the only kind he seemed to show. "That is very good. If the flanking party gets through there, the frontal assault matters less."

Stafford hadn't thought the flanking party would matter. He'd assumed the frontal assault would overwhelm the insurrectionists in back of the fence. They proved steadier than he'd ever imagined they could. Despite the bombardment from the field guns, they kept pouring a galling fire into the Atlantean soldiers assailing their position. Dead and wounded men in gray uniforms dotted the slope, more of them every minute. There was a limit to what flesh and blood could bear. The Negroes and copperskins firing as if their lives depended on it-and they did, they did-forced the soldiers right to the edge of that limit.

And the attack on the barricade didn't go as well as either the colonel or the Consul wanted. Some of the men behind the logs might have got squashed. The rest kept on shooting. And insurrectionists hiding in the woods banged away at the flanking party from the flank-an irony Stafford failed to appreciate.

"Make them stop that!" he shouted to Sinapis.

The colonel looked at him without expression. "If you have any practical suggestion as to how I am to accomplish that end, I should be delighted to hear it." He didn't add If you don't, shut up and quit joggling my elbow-not out loud, he didn't. Stafford heard the suggestion whether it was there or not. He knew too well he didn't have any practical suggestions along those lines. He could see what was wrong, but not how to fix it.