Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

Their enemies' officers had seen charges fail before. They must have realized this one was liable to do the same. Almost at the same moment, several of them raised their voices to call out orders. The men obediently halted. You could really do things with soldiers like that. Yes, a couple of them fell over, one kicking, another ominously still. The rest of the first rank went to one knee. The second rank crouched above them. The third rank stood straight.

At another shouted command, they delivered a volley. Then they stood up as the next three ranks passed through them and delivered another one. After that, cheering, the regulars resumed their advance.

They hurt Frederick's men. Volleying at another army out in the open, odds were they would have ruined it and left it wide open for a charge. They couldn't bring that off here, no matter how much they must have wanted to. The rampart did its job, saving the insurrectionists untold dead and wounded.

Which might turn out to make no difference. If the regulars and militiamen got over the rampart and broke the defenders behind it, nothing would matter much. "When?" Frederick asked Lorenzo.

"Should be any time now," the copperskin said.

"Better be," Frederick said.

The Negroes and copperskins kept firing at the Atlantean regulars and militiamen. Despite the volleys, the regulars couldn't reach the rampart-not at the first try, anyhow. If they tried again… Frederick wanted to ask When? again. But he and Lorenzo had done what they could. Now they had to hope they'd done it right.

Consul Newton was getting sick of listening to Consul Stafford gloat about what would happen to the insurrectionists. Stafford cheered as the white Atlanteans came close to storming the low earthen wall Frederick Radcliff's followers had thrown up. "Next time they'll get over!" Stafford exulted. "And then-!" He made two-handed thrusting motions, as if wielding a bayoneted rifle musket.

He'd done that before, too. Newton was also sick of it. When he turned away from the other Consul, he might have been the first white man to spot the Negroes and copperskins coming over the low rise that topped one side of the valley. "Uh-oh," he said.

"Now what are you croaking about?" Stafford demanded. "You sound like a frog in springtime-know that?"

Instead of answering, Newton pointed. Then he looked toward the other valley rim. Insurrectionists were swarming down over that one, too. Somehow, he'd thought they might be.

"Uh-oh," Stafford said. Then, as if impelled by a lodestone, his head swung in the other direction, as Newton's had before it. "Uh-oh," he croaked again.

"Who sounds like a frog now?" Newton couldn't resist the gibe. Truth to tell, he hardly tried. Even when things looked to be coming to pieces, he could enjoy needling his opposite number.

Only trouble was, Stafford didn't notice he was being needled. "They tricked us!" he cried, fury and astonishment warring in his voice.

"I didn't know that wasn't in the rules," Newton answered. Part of him realized he was much too likely to get killed in the next hour. If you were going to die, shouldn't you die with a bon mot on your lips? Then again, why should you? You'd be just as dead one way as the other. And all the people who heard your last-minute wit seemed much too likely to end up dead with you. Who would send your cleverness on to your loved ones and to the history books?

The soldiers needed a few seconds longer than the Consuls to see that they were suddenly facing a flank attack. Their attention had been even more strongly focused on the fight in front of them, the fight at the rampart. The insurrectionists must have planned it that way. Jeremiah Stafford was absolutely right-no, dead right. The slaves had tricked the professional soldiers.

Now the professionals had to find some way to fix it-if they could. They didn't have long to think things over, either. The insurrectionists were already starting to pour enfilading fire into the militiamen on either wing of the Atlantean army. Bullets aimed at the end of a row of men were much more likely to bite than those aimed from the front.

Colonel Sinapis wasn't usually a demonstrative sort. He started hopping around and waving his arms and shouting like a man possessed-or possibly like a man with his trousers on fire. The artillerists frantically swung their guns toward the brushy, patchily wooded sides of the valley. They started banging away at the Negroes and copperskins on the army's flank.

Artillery was the one arm the Atlantean force had that the rebels lacked. How much good it would do here, though, struck Leland Newton as being open to doubt. The fighters on the slopes were in loose order. Cannonballs couldn't knock them over six or eight at a time, as they could against troops advancing close together over open ground. Maybe Sinapis hoped he could scare the insurrectionists away, or at least scare them into shooting badly. Or maybe-even more worrisome thought-he simply had no better schemes.

That turned out not to be true. He pulled the militiamen away from the assault on the rampart and sent them upslope against the flankers. But that exposed them to enfilading fire from the rebels behind the earthwork. The militiamen showed reckless courage. Many-maybe even most-of them were panting for vengeance against what they saw as their uprisen property.

None of that helped them much. Rifle muskets inflicted more punishment than flesh and blood could bear. Neither militiamen nor regulars had been able to get over the rampart. And the militiamen also weren't able to get in among the rebels on the slopes. They came close. The bodies they left there, marks like those of high tide on a beach, showed how very close they came. Close counted in horseshoes. In war, it sometimes proved worse than not trying at all.

Watching the militiamen reel down the slope, away from the concealed insurrectionists who murdered them one after another, Consul Stafford groaned like a man under the lash. "My God!" he said. "We are ruined-ruined, I tell you, Newton!"

"This whole valley is a killing ground," Newton said, which only put the same thing another way.

"Damn his fumblefingered soul, Sinapis blundered right into it, too," Stafford groaned.

"If he did, you helped push him along," Newton said. "You were bragging that you lit a fire under him. You told me how clever you were, how you got him to move when he might not have wanted to, when you threatened to blame him if Atlantis fell apart because he didn't break the rebellion. Right this minute, the rebellion is breaking us."

Stafford didn't call him a liar. He didn't call him a feeble-minded twit, either. If that silence wasn't a telling measure of the other Consul's despair, Newton had no idea what would be.

Up a few hundred yards ahead of them, the regulars rushed the rampart again. If the white Atlanteans could break any part of the trap, they might be able to wreck the whole thing.

If. But muzzle flashes on the rampart spat toward the white men like tongues of fire shot from dragons' mouths. And bullets flew farther than dragonfire ever could. Again, the regulars had to sag back short of their goal.

An officer near Colonel Sinapis was trying to tell him something. The man's knees suddenly gave way. His hat fell off as he sagged to the ground. He wriggled for a little while, but not for long.

"They're murdering us! Murdering!" Stafford said.

"They are." Newton couldn't disagree. He did think the officer was liable to be lucky, as such things went. The poor fellow had died fast, and might not even have known he was hit. Not every man who stopped a bullet had such good fortune. Newton had seen too many ghastly wounds, and too many men suffering from them for too long, to hold any illusions on that score.

"If we can't stop them… Good Lord! What will become of the country after this?" Stafford choked out the words, but he did bring them forth. Newton had to respect him for that. Now the other Consul had found his bon mot in the face of death. How much good it would do him, and whether anyone hereabouts would survive to remember it tomorrow, were a couple of questions whose answers it seemed better not to contemplate.