Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

If only he'd been? Frederick asked himself. If only I'd been. Who's the Tribune of the Free Republic of Atlantis, anyway? Who started this damned uprising? But it wasn't so simple. Frederick knew he was inventing his generalship as he went along. So was Lorenzo, of course. But Lorenzo showed a talent for that side of things Frederick knew he himself couldn't match.

Now he had to hope his rapidly retreating army wouldn't fall apart because it was retreating rapidly. He also had to hope the Atlanteans wouldn't knock his army to pieces. A bullet from some white man's rifle musket cracked past his head, close enough to make him hunch his shoulders and duck before he could catch himself. Another bullet snarled past, this one a little farther off. They reminded him that, like his army, he'd stayed here too long.

Fall back, then. It wasn't what he wanted to do, which had nothing to do with anything. If he and his fighters didn't fall back, the white Atlanteans would have them at their mercy… if the soldiers knew the meaning of the word, which struck Frederick as unlikely.

They got out barely in time. A volley from the flanking column raked them as they retreated, but only one, and from fairly long range. The soldiers in gray hadn't yet unlimbered their field artillery. That could have cost Frederick's men far more than musketry did, and it was something to which the Negroes and copperskins could not reply. Frederick hated and feared cannon and the men who served them.

His rear guard did what it was supposed to do. It held off the white men in gray whose frontal attack had done such a good job of blinding the insurrectionists to the flanking column's movement. The fighters in the rear guard fell back from tree to thicket to barrel tree. Quite a few of them didn't make it out of the woods they'd defended. That was the price you paid for joining the rear guard.

The Negroes and copperskins volleyed back at the whites in the flanking column. Frederick was delighted to watch several soldiers in the enemy's firing line fall over. "That'll show 'em we haven't quit," he said to Lorenzo.

"Damned right it will," the copperskin agreed. "They beat us, but they didn't lick us-know what I mean?"

"Yes!" Frederick had been thinking the same thing, though not so precisely. "We can stand up to them, no matter what."

"We really can," Lorenzo said. "It's taken us a while to figure that out, and it's taking them even longer, but that's a fact. They march smarter than we do, and they've got those blasted fieldpieces. Forget about those, and there ain't much difference between them and us."

"If we'd seen that a hundred years ago…" Frederick shook his head in frustration. "Almost like it's our own fault we didn't get free."

"Wouldn't be so easy without the rifles and muskets we got from the soldiers who came down sick," Lorenzo said. Frederick nodded; the copperskin had a point. Lorenzo went on, "And they always did their best to keep us from learning the secret."

"That's a fact," Frederick said. Whites genuinely believed they were better than copperskins and blacks. Because they did, they made the people they enslaved believe it, too. Frederick knew his own life would have been entirely different had his grandmother been white. I might've been one of the Consuls fighting the insurrection, he thought in surprise.

Of course, he also might not have. He might have been anything at all as a white man. The one thing he surely would not have been was the Frederick Radcliff he was now. Changing the color of his skin would have changed everything else that had happened to him since he was born. It wasn't the color itself so much that mattered. It was how everybody else treated you because of the color.

Right now, all these white men in gray uniforms wanted to kill him because he was trying to change how much color counted. And if that didn't go miles and miles toward proving his point, he was damned if he knew what would.

Lorenzo pointed north. "After we get over that rise, there's a stream with thick woods on the north side. If we can't stop those white bastards there, we can't stop them anywhere."

"We'd better try, then," Frederick said. Maybe they couldn't stop the white soldiers anywhere. He'd feared that after the insurrection started. He didn't fear it so much any more. But it was still possible. All kinds of things were still possible. One thing wasn't: a black man wouldn't become a Consul of the United States of Atlantis any time soon. And if that wasn't all of what the insurrection was about, it sure was a big part of things.

"Well," Colonel Sinapis said philosophically, "we almost had them there."

Jeremiah Stafford fumed. To say he was not inclined toward philosophy was putting it mildly. "God damn it to hell, we should have had them there!" the Consul exclaimed.

"One of the things you must understand, your Excellency, is that war is not like a steam engine or a threshing machine," Sinapis said. "The manufacturer cannot promise it will perform in such-and-such a way for such-and-such a time."

"War!" Stafford loaded as much scorn into the word as he could. "Putting down uprisen niggers and mudfaces shouldn't be dignified with the name! What are we doing but whipping curs back to their kennels?"

"When you whip dogs back to the kennels, the dogs do not pick up whips and try to whip you away," the colonel replied. "Making this a smaller business than it truly is will do us no good."

He was right. Stafford knew it, which only made him angrier. He said, "The point is, it should not be a grand business. These damned insurrectionists should not have the power to make it into a grand business."

"Well, I cannot say anything about what they should be able to do and what they should not. That is God's business, not mine." Sinapis made the sign of the cross, not quite as a Roman Catholic would have done it. Then he thrust a twig into a campfire and used the small flame he got to light a cigar. After a couple of meditative puffs, he went on, "All I can speak to, all I can deal with, is what is. And what is, here, is a serious rebellion, your Excellency. It seems only to be getting worse, too. The enemy soldiers have learned a great deal from facing our men several times. This happens more often than governments trying to put down rebellions wish it would. Before long, the enemy soldiers who live are troops as good as our own."

"These are not enemy soldiers, damn it!" Stafford thundered. "They are nothing but a pack of stinking insurrectionists!"

Balthasar Sinapis only shrugged. "You may call them whatever you please, of course. But it makes no difference in the end. The only thing that makes a difference is whether they perform as soldiers. Unquestionably, they do. That retreat they brought off… I quite admire them for it. No raw rebels could have come close to doing anything like that."

"Bah!" Stafford stomped away from the fire. He did not care to hear what Colonel Sinapis was telling him. Even if it was the truth-no, especially if it was the truth-he didn't care to hear it. If copperskins and blacks could fight well enough to make an experienced officer admire them, everything white Atlanteans had always believed about their social system was a pack of rubbish, no more.

Stafford couldn't believe that. He wouldn't believe it.

Frederick Radcliff was nothing but a nigger. He was a nigger in arms against the USA. That meant he had to be put down like any other sheep-killing dog.

He was, of course, also a Radcliff. He was a grandson to one of the First Consuls. No doubt at all that his grandfather had been a very able man. Little doubt he was a very able man himself-he wouldn't have caused so much trouble if he weren't. Again, that made things worse, not better. Frederick Radcliff was a slave by blood and a slave by nature. If you started bending that principle, where would you end up?