Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

He waited. He'd told the truth as he saw it. How much that meant to Colonel Sinapis, or whether it meant anything at all to him… he'd just have to see. He'd got Sinapis' attention, anyhow. The officer stroked his mustache. He'd done something that made Europe too warm for him. Stafford still didn't know what it was, but it must have been something juicy. If Sinapis got another big blot on his escutcheon, who would hire him after he left Atlantis? The Chinese, maybe? Maybe. Stafford didn't think even the most raggedy principality in southern Terranova would take the chance.

After a long, long pause, Sinapis said, "You have an unpleasant way of making your points."

"I tried a pleasant way, Colonel. You took no notice of it," Stafford answered.

Sinapis muttered to himself. Stafford didn't think it was in English. That might have been-probably was-just as well. What Stafford didn't understand, he didn't have to respond to. Another pause followed. Then the colonel returned to a language the Consul could follow: "What do you want me to do?"

Now we're getting somewhere. Stafford didn't say it out loud. If he had, he would have lost his man. Sinapis' pride was even touchier than that of a grandee from the state of Gernika. All the Consul said was, "This is what I've got in mind…"

Rifle muskets cracked. Cannon thundered. Lorenzo's mouth twisted into a frown. "Damned white devils are getting pushy," he said.

"They are," Frederick Radcliff agreed. "How do we make them sorry for it?"

Now the copperskin smiled, and broadly. "You do know the questions to ask."

"I'm counting on you to know the answers I need," Frederick said. "If you don't, we've got trouble."

"I'll talk to people who know the ground, see what we can do," Lorenzo said. "Depends on what they tell me. And it depends on how pushy the soldiers are getting. If it's only some, chances are they'll give us more to worry about than they have been. But if they've decided they don't have to worry about us any more-"

"If that's what they've decided, it's up to us to show 'em how big a mistake they've made," Frederick said.

"There you go." Lorenzo smiled again. His lips were as thin as a white man's, which made this expression seem uncommonly cruel to Frederick. Lorenzo went on, "I reckon they're jumpy, all right. They think they've got to squash us today, this minute. The longer the war goes on, the more they figure they're losing."

He didn't say that the whites really were losing. That wasn't obvious. But if they thought they were losing, they might as well have been. Persuading them that they couldn't put down the insurrection was a big part, maybe the biggest part, of what Frederick wanted to do. It had worked for his grandfather against the English. How sweet if it worked for him now against the Atlanteans-against his grandfather's white relations.

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.