Harry Turtledove - Liberating Atlantis

"Sure do. What I don't know is whether you're right." Lorenzo took a deep breath and let the air whuffle out between his lips. "What the hell, though? Like I say, you're the Tribune. You've got us this far. Seems like you know what you're doing."

I'm glad somebody thinks so. But Frederick didn't say that out loud. One of the tricks to leading he'd learned was never to let your followers know you had doubts. Sometimes you could get away with being wrong. With being unsure? No. That made you look weak, and how could a weak man lead? Not even Helen knew about some of the fears that knotted Frederick's insides. What you didn't show, you didn't have to explain. You didn't have to wonder about it so much yourself, either.

For once, he and his army didn't need to do anything right this minute. The white Atlanteans weren't pressing them-couldn't press them for a while, as Lorenzo had pointed out. Food wasn't a worry. Hardtack and salt pork and bully beef captured from the soldiers' supply weren't exciting, but kept body and soul together. And the hunting in this sparsely settled countryside was better than it would have been with more people around-though there wasn't much livestock to take here.

Just waiting around felt good. It took him back to his days as a slave. You weren't always busy, working for the masters. But you always had to be ready to get busy, and to get busy at someone else's whim. That was how things worked here, too. If he'd made a mistake about how the white men would respond after being defeated and spared, they would be the ones who let him know it.

Slaves always kept their eyes on masters and mistresses. They needed to know what the white folks were up to, sometimes before the whites were sure themselves. And the Negroes and copperskins still slaving it in New Marseille were the insurrectionists' eyes and ears there.

Frederick Radcliff didn't think the Consuls' army could move without his knowing about it beforehand. The slaves in New Marseille saw no signs that it was getting ready to move. Frederick took that for a good omen.

So did Lorenzo, who heard about it as soon as he did, or maybe even sooner. "Looks like you know what you were talking about," the copperskin said.

"I'm as happy about it as you are-you'd best believe I am," Frederick said.

"How long you aim to give 'em?" Lorenzo asked.

"Till it feels right. Don't know what else to tell you," Frederick answered.

To his surprise, that got a smile from the marshal. "We're all makin' this up as we go along," Lorenzo said.

"Ain't it the truth!" Frederick never would have admitted it if the other man hadn't come out with it first, but he wasn't about to deny it once Lorenzo pointed it out.

After a while, fighters started slipping out of camp. They thought they'd already got what they wanted. And they didn't think the Free Republic of Atlantis had any business telling them what to do any more. They were free, weren't they?

Lorenzo and Frederick took a different view of things. With Frederick's approval, Lorenzo posted guards around the encampment to catch deserters and bring them back. The United States of Atlantis didn't let their soldiers walk away whenever the men happened to feel like it. As far as Frederick was concerned, the Free Republic of Atlantis shouldn't, either.

That highly offended some of the men who wanted to go home. "Who you think you are, playing the white man over me?" a black fighter demanded when he was hauled before Frederick. "You ain't nothin' but a nigger, same as me. You got no business tellin' me what to do!"

"If I had me ten cents for every time I heard that, I'd be the richest nigger in Atlantis," Frederick said.

"It's the truth, damn it," the other Negro said. "If I'm a free man, ain't nobody can make me do nothin' I don't want to."

"It doesn't work that way," Frederick answered. "Nobody can buy you or sell you. That's what bein' free means. But you're in the army now. Nobody made you join up. You did it your own self."

"That's right. And that means I can leave whenever I please, too," the prisoner said.

"Means no such thing. If people left whenever they wanted to, pretty soon we wouldn't have an army any more. You go in, you got to stay in till the job is done unless you made a deal beforehand to get out sooner," Frederick said.

"Nobody told me I could make a deal like that!" the other Negro exclaimed.

Frederick smiled sweetly. "Then it looks like you're in till the job is done, doesn't it? That's how my granddad did things, and that's how I'm gonna do 'em, too."

"Your granddad was nothin' but a white man, and he didn't set no niggers free," the other man retorted. "Look where you was at 'fore we rose up. House nigger, that's all you was, an' I bet you felt all jumped-up about it, too."

How right he was! Frederick was embarrassed to remember the way he'd looked down on field hands before he got stripes on his back and became one himself. He was also damned if he'd admit any such thing. Instead, he answered, "You've got to start somewhere. Everybody's got to start somewhere. Before Victor Radcliff done what he done, nobody in Atlantis was free. White folks had to do what the King of England and his people said-"

"An' black folks an' copperskins had to do what the white folks said," the other Negro broke in.

"That's right." Frederick nodded. "My granddad made it so white folks were free, anyways. My grandma used to say he wished he could do more-"

"He done plenty with her, didn't he?"

"Shut up!" Frederick said fiercely. "If I was a white man an' you talked to me like that, I'd make you regret it-bet your sorry ass I would. But he figured out you can't have an army 'less you got people who have to stay in. He was right. All the white folks' countries do it that way. We're gonna win, we got to do it that way, too."

"I'll run off again. You wait an' see if I don't," the prisoner declared.

"I know who you are, Humphrey," Frederick said. He hadn't till one of the guards whispered the man's name in his ear, but he sure did now. "This time, you don't get anything but a talking-to, on account of you didn't know no better. We catch you again, you'll be sorry for sure."

The prisoner-Humphrey-stripped off his shirt and turned his back. His scars made Frederick's look like a beginner's. "What you gonna do to me that the white folks ain't already done?" he asked as he faced Frederick once more.

And what do I say to that? Frederick wondered. To his surprise, he found something: "White folks whipped you 'cause you did stuff they didn't like. You run off from us, they'd thank you for it. Chances are they'd pay you for it, same as the Romans paid Judas. You want their thirty pieces of silver, go ahead an' run, you bastard."

That shut Humphrey up, anyhow. Maybe he'd stick around. Maybe he'd try to desert again. If he succeeded… Frederick couldn't do anything about that. If Humphrey failed, he couldn't say he hadn't been warned. Freedom had limits. It had to have limits, or it turned into chaos.

Frederick hadn't understood that before tasting freedom himself. But there was nothing like running a revolution to drive the lesson home. His grandfather could have told him the same thing-if Victor Radcliff wasn't fighting on the other side.

Colonel Sinapis emptied New Marseille's arsenal to equip most of his regulars with rifle muskets-and with some ancient flintlock smoothbores that had gathered cobwebs there for God only knew how long. There weren't enough weapons for all the regulars. There weren't enough for any militiamen. They were loudly unhappy about that.

Sinapis stuck by his guns, and by the way he handed them out. Leland Newton backed him. "It's not a state arsenal-it's an arsenal of the United States of Atlantis," Newton told a self-appointed militia colonel. "It's only right that the guns go to troops from the national government first. If we had more, you'd get your share."