Liberating Atlantis

XVIII

A head, to the northeast, Jeremiah Stafford could see the Green Ridge Mountains swelling up against the sky. They loomed taller than they had just a couple of days before. The insurrectionists kept giving ground. For a moment, Stafford almost forgot about the insurrectionists. He'd never dreamt he would see the mountains from this angle-from the back side, to any man who lived east of them, as most Atlanteans did-but here they were.

And here, almost in their rolling foothills, the Negroes and copperskins who'd caused the USA (to say nothing of Jeremiah Stafford in his own person) so much grief were making what had to be their last stand. Stafford had all kinds of reasons for thinking it had to be. If-no, when-the Atlantean army finished smashing them, they surely (please, God!) would be able to fight no more. And Atlantis needed it to be their last stand, too. Because if it wasn't, the army would likely be recalled. Not long after that happened, when it did, if it did, the country would probably start falling apart.

The insurrectionists seemed convinced this was their last chance, too. They'd run up earthworks at the far end of the low, wide valley that led toward the mountains. They might have been challenging the white Atlantean regulars and militiamen. If you want us, you'll have to dig us out, their actions said. And if you try digging us out, you'll have to pay the price.

Stafford turned to Balthasar Sinapis, who stood near him examining the trenches and ramparts through a spyglass. "How strong are they?" the Consul asked.

"Hard to tell," Colonel Sinapis answered. "The ground rises as you move that way-not much, but some. Enough so I have trouble seeing whatever they may be hiding there."

"It won't be much," Stafford said confidently. "Now that we've started driving them, they haven't been able to slow us down, let alone stop us. Have they?"

He waited. Sinapis couldn't very well do anything but dip his head in assent. The officer also couldn't help adding, "Because they haven't, your Excellency, doesn't mean they can't."

"Devil it doesn't," Stafford retorted. "They're whipped now. They have to know it, too, or they wouldn't hide behind earthworks. We go in, we slaughter them, and there's an end to it." Let there be an end to it, O Lord!

"Why are you so sure?" Leland Newton asked. By the way the words came out, he knew the answer as well as Stafford did. Because this has to be the end. Because the country can't stand any more.

Stafford didn't say that, not when the other Consul already knew it. He spoke to Sinapis as if Newton hadn't said a word: "They aren't waiting in the bushes to ambush us as we advance. You know they aren't-you ran enough scouts through the bushes."

"I needed to do it, too," the colonel replied with dignity. He waved toward the gently sloping sides of the valley: first to one, then to the other. "This is exactly the sort of terrain they are fond of using for an ambuscade."

"But they didn't, did they?" Stafford said. Colonel Sinapis couldn't very well claim the contrary. Stafford pressed his advantage: "And the reason they didn't is that they're too beaten down, too hard pressed. The foxes may have given us a good chase, but we've run them to earth. Now we'll bury them in it."

"You've always thought we would have an easier time against them than we turned out to," Newton said.

"Yes? And so?" Stafford answered coolly. "As soon as we root them out of their holes here, we've won. You never thought we could do it at all. It may have come later than I wanted, but not too late." Don't let it be too late!

If Newton wanted to argue, Stafford was ready. It was his own day to hold final authority, so the arguments didn't matter. But Newton didn't say anything more. As it had been when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the die was cast.

"Form up the men, Colonel, and send them forward," Stafford told Sinapis. "We've come this far. Let's get it over with."

Sinapis gave back a precise salute. "As you say, your Excellency." He might have been a valet answering a rich Englishman. Then he gave the regular officers and militia commanders their orders. The regulars would follow them. The militiamen might or might not. Sinapis kept them on the wings and in the rear, where any failures ought to matter least.

Bugles blared. The regular soldiers moved to their places like marionettes on strings. The militiamen had improved over the course of this campaign. Despite profane shepherding from their officers and sergeants, they were still slower and sloppier than the men who made their living from war.

But so what? Stafford told himself. They'll all roll over the insurrectionists, and then we'll glue things back together. We can still do it. I'm sure we can.

How much work had the insurrectionists put into their earthworks? While they shoveled, one copperskin complained to Frederick Radcliff: "I don't reckon the overseers ever drove us this hard." Then he flung another spadeful of earth up onto the growing rampart in front of their trench.

And Frederick just looked back at him and answered, "Good." When the other man stared, Frederick had condescended to explain: "God-damned overseers never needed you as much as I do now." That seemed to satisfy the copperskin, who went back to digging without another word.

Now Frederick and Lorenzo looked out over the rampart at the white men mustering against them. "We can still do it," Frederick said. "I'm sure we can."

"I hope we can," Lorenzo said. "I hope like anything we can."

Frederick's head swung away from the Atlantean soldiers and toward his own amateur marshal. "You're the one who set this up," he reminded him.

"I know. I know. Now I'm the one who's worrying about it, too-all right?" Lorenzo said. "If it goes wrong, they'll roll over us."

"Ever since the uprising started, we've known that could happen," Frederick said. "As long as we can shoot ourselves or shoot each other before they get their hands on us, we'll be fine."

"Fine?" Lorenzo bared his teeth in something halfway between a smile and a snarl. "Is that what you call it these days? We'll be dead, is what we'll be."

"We've been dead ever since I took the hoe to Matthew and the rest of you followed me back to the big house 'stead of whompin' me to death with your spades," Frederick answered. "You know it as well as I do, too."

"Well… yeah." Lorenzo grudged a nod. "Don't mean I got to like it."

"If you liked it, they would've shoveled dirt over you by now. They would've shoveled dirt over us all by now," Frederick said.

Lorenzo stared out at the white soldiers. The discipline with which they formed their ranks was daunting. "It ain't like they've quit trying," the copperskin said.

"I know." Frederick raised his voice so all the fighters in the trench, Negroes and copperskins, men and women, could hear him: "We've got to hold them here. No matter what, we've got to. If they break through this line, we're screwed. So do whatever you can. You want to be free, you want to stay free, you want your children to be free if you've got any-or even if you don't yet-this here may be the place where you can make it real. You ready?"

"Yeah!" The answering shout wasn't so loud as it might have been. The fighters could watch the white men deploying out beyond rifle-musket range, too. It was intimidating. Beyond any possible fragment of doubt, it was meant to be.

A bugle rang out, ordering the Atlantean soldiers and militiamen forward. The note was pure and sweet, almost like birdsong. Frederick spied a flash of gold that had to be sunlight sparking off the horn's polished bell.

"Here they come," somebody said. After a couple of heartbeats, Frederick realized that was his own voice.

The white men's cannon started roaring. Frederick hated artillery more than anything else-mostly because he'd never figured out how to match it. The white Atlanteans had it; the insurrectionists didn't-they just had to endure it.

In screamed the cannonballs. Some of them flew long. Others thudded into-and sometimes smashed through-the rampart in front of the trenches. A couple of them smashed into fighters after smashing through dirt. Screams rose up. The insurrectionists didn't have much in the way of surgeons. Herb women made poultices to keep wounds from going bad. Men who'd been butchers could lop off shattered limbs. Ether? They hadn't managed to steal any coming up from New Marseille. They relied on rum and thick leather straps to muffle pain.

If the Atlantean artillerists had had guns that could loft shells over the rampart and down into the trench, they would have hurt the insurrectionists worse. They did all they could with what they did have. Frederick thought the cannonading would never end. And, of course, one minute under fire seemed as long as a week of ordinary life, or maybe a year.

But the insurrectionists couldn't cower. They would die if they did. "Up!" Lorenzo yelled, reminding them. "Up and shoot! The more of 'em you shoot before they get close, the fewer you'll have to stick!"

The fewer who can get close and shoot you, he meant. Frederick could see why he didn't care to put it that way. Men who worried about what happened to their own precious flesh wouldn't be inclined to let gunfire come anywhere close to it. Who in his-or her-right mind would be so inclined?

Rifle muskets bellowed. Smoke rose in thick, fireworks-smelling clouds. Here and there, white men fell over-but only here and there. The rest kept coming. The bright morning sun shone off their bayonets, brighter than it had off the bugle but silver instead of gold.

"Shoot the bastards!" Lorenzo howled. "Can't let 'em come close, not with the numbers they've got. Kill 'em dead!"

The insurrectionists did their best. By now, they could fire almost as fast as the white regulars. Practice hadn't made regulars of the Negroes and copperskins, but it hadn't missed by much. And they were firing from behind the rampart, so they exposed only their heads and sometimes their shoulders to the white Atlanteans.

Not many of the whites were shooting. The regulars in the center trudged toward the ramparts as if they'd never heard of longarms. Here and there, a militiaman raised his piece to his shoulder and blasted away as he advanced. It wasn't exactly aimed fire, but that didn't exactly matter. With lots of bullets flying around, the law of averages said some wouldn't be wasted.

One cracked past Frederick, close enough so he felt, or thought he felt, the wind of its passage. His knees bent in the involuntary genuflection almost everyone accorded near misses. Fifty feet down the trench, a Negro half his age screeched, jumped in the air, and clapped a hand to his bleeding shoulder.

Whump! A cannon ball slammed into the rampart, throwing up a shower of dirt. The blacks and copperskins it had protected rubbed at their eyes and spat out grit-those who still had enough saliva to spit, anyhow. Those damned fieldpieces kept on pounding away.

"Hurrah!" the regulars shouted as they came closer. "Hurrah! Hurrah!" Some of the militiamen joined the rhythmic chant. Others howled like dogs baying at the moon or yelled "Honk! Honk!" If real honkers had sounded like that, they'd probably all laughed themselves to death.

For all the fierce and would-be fierce cheers, more and more white men fell as they neared the rebels' strongpoint. The rest of the soldiers leaned forward and slowed down, as if they were walking into a heavy wind. They were brave-hating them, Frederick knew that much too well. But not all the bravery in the world could bring troops up to a rampart if the fire from behind it was hot enough. The insurrectionists could deliver that kind of fire.

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.

Jeremiah Stafford had a bullet, a charge of gunpowder, and a percussion cap ready in each cylinder of his eight-shooter. How much good they'd do him against enemies armed with rifle muskets that far outranged his revolver, he didn't care to think about.

He and Consul Newton both went up to huddle close to the rear of the regular contingent. Maybe misery loved company. Maybe that was the safest place to be in these parts, not that any place in these parts counted as particularly safe, not if you were a white man.

Newton's accusation burned like vitriol inside Stafford's soul. Stafford had pushed Balthasar Sinapis as hard as he could. He had made the colonel go forward where Sinapis would have hesitated or even halted on his own. It had worked-up till now.

Up till now. Three of the most mournful and miserable words in the English language.

Then Stafford stopped thinking of mourning and misery in the abstract. A lieutenant about twenty feet away from him cried out, twisted an arm to try to clutch at the small of his back, and slowly crumpled to his knees and then to the ground.

A moment later, a private soldier went down, also shot in the back. Again, Newton realized what was going on before Stafford did. Newton didn't automatically assume the insurrectionists were stupid. "They've got men behind us, too," he said glumly.

And they did. The copperskins and blacks back there had done some quick, rough entrenching before they opened up on the white Atlanteans. No one had tried to stop them. No one had even noticed them till they started shooting. They could shoot at the whites with almost as much protection as the insurrectionists behind the ramparts had. And now they'd surrounded the whites.

A classical education came in handy all kinds of ways. Even in this moment of despair, Stafford knew just what he and his comrades were facing. It wasn't as if such things hadn't happened before, even if that disaster might have stayed unmatched for two thousand years and more.

"Cannae!" Stafford groaned. "This is another Cannae!"

Hannibal had surrounded and slaughtered several Roman legions at Cannae during the Second Punic War. The battle was the Carthaginian's masterpiece. It was about as good a job as any general could do. And here, on a smaller scale, Frederick Radcliff had just re-created it.

Of course, Carthage didn't win the Second Punic War. But right at the moment, Jeremiah Stafford had no idea how the United States of Atlantis could hope to put down this great servile insurrection.

By the way things looked, neither did Colonel Sinapis. He turned to stare at the rebels firing on his men from behind. He raised his hands in horror. They seemed to fall limply back to his sides all by themselves.

He doesn't know whether to shit or go blind, Stafford thought. He hadn't heard the vulgar phrase in years, but he'd never known a time when it fit so well.

"Pull yourself together!" he shouted to Sinapis. "We've got to do something!"

"Something, yes, your Excellency, but what?" the colonel answered. "They have us in a modern Cannae."

So his classical training still worked, too, did it? Nice that something did, even if his generalship had let him-and everyone else-down. "Pull yourself together!" Stafford repeated. "Don't despair of the republic!"

Sinapis didn't answer. Maybe he wasn't despairing of the republic, but of his career. Stafford didn't know how he'd save that. Stafford didn't know how to save his own career, either, assuming he could get his own life spared.

Even then, the non sequitur made him laugh. If you don't live through this, what happens in your career afterwards won't matter one whole hell of a lot, he thought.

Bullets from all directions were flying around him now. He didn't know which way to duck. He did notice that Consul Newton and even Colonel Sinapis (whose courage was irreproachable, whatever one might say about other aspects of his military persona) also ducked at near misses. A few people, maybe the ones born without nerves, lacked that reflex, but only a few.

As Newton straightened, he touched the brim of his cap to Stafford. "Well, Jeremiah, I don't suppose you expected things to end up this way. I'd be lying if I told you I expected them to."

"I daresay you're happier about it than I am," Stafford answered. "Here's nigger equality, all right, and it will be the death of both of us."

"I don't want to die. I have too many things I still want to do," the other Consul said. "Trouble is, what I want doesn't matter right this minute."

"I blame it on Victor Radcliff," Stafford said. "Even diluted, his blood is better than the vinegar and horse piss in Sinapis' veins."

"As far as I know, the insurrectionists' number-one soldier, that Lorenzo, is pure copperskin," Newton said. "Will you tell me his blood is better than Sinapis', too?"

"Damned right, I will," Stafford answered. "My parrot could have done a better job leading this campaign than that stupid foreigner did-and I haven't got a parrot."

"Heh," Newton said-about as much laughter as the joke deserved.

In front of them, the Atlantean soldiers milled like ants stirred by a stick. Every time they turned any one way, they got shot at from the flank and behind as well as from the front. They weren't dying like ants, though. They were dying like flies.

The Negroes and copperskins didn't try to close with them. Why should they? They were doing fine carving up the white Atlanteans at a distance. Even as Stafford watched, the back of a militiaman's head exploded, the way a melon might after a sledgehammer came down on it. The man's rifle musket fell from fingers that could hold it no more. His knees buckled. He went down, and wouldn't rise again till Judgment Day.

Most of the militiamen owned slaves. How many of them would be left alive by the time this fight finished? Ironically, Stafford began to hope the insurrectionists made the massacre complete. That might horrify Atlantis into fighting the war seriously. If it did, the whites would win in the end. As Newton had pointed out, winning might entail making sure not a nigger or mudface remained aboveground and on his feet. That would play hob with the long-cherished social system south of the Stour.

Jeremiah Stafford found he didn't care. One way or another, the USA would sort things out. The Free Republic of Atlantis? That was an abomination, and had to be suppressed no matter what.

If I'm going to die, I may as well die usefully, he thought. He couldn't believe anything short of a massacre would galvanize the Senate and the people of Atlantis into giving the insurrectionists what they deserved. And, for the life of him-no, for the death of him-he couldn't see how the Atlantean regulars and militiamen had any chance of stopping a massacre.

Usefully, he thought again, and hoped it wouldn't hurt… too much.

"In the sack!" Lorenzo howled exultantly. "We've got the sons of bitches in the sack, and we just tied off the top. They can't even run away now. They're ours! Ours!-you hear me?"

"I hear you," Frederick Radcliff answered. "Looks to me like you're right. This went better than I ever dreamt it could." He'd wanted to surprise the white Atlanteans. He'd wanted to hurt them, too. To succeed beyond your wildest dreams… By the nature of things, you couldn't possibly expect that.

"All we've got to do is keep going now." Lorenzo mimed aiming, shooting, and reloading. "Before too long, won't be none of those white bastards left alive. Extra sweet blowing holes in the militiamen. The soldiers… They're just here working, you know? I don't have anything special against 'em."

"Except that they're trying to kill us." Frederick's voice was dry.

"Yeah. Except for that," Lorenzo agreed seriously. Then he came back to his favorite theme: "The militiamen, they're mostly out there on account of they wanted to get their property back. Turn us into slaves again, that means. Well, I got some news for them-it ain't gonna happen."

"Sure won't," Frederick said. The militiamen seemed to be falling even faster than the Atlantean regulars.

"Serves 'em right, too," Lorenzo said. "I want to kill 'em all, is what I want to do. And I reckon maybe we can do it, too."

"So do I," Frederick said. He never would have dreamt of that when the insurrection started, either. His dreams along those lines had been nightmares, almost without exception: nightmares of Atlantean regulars smashing through the rebels, shooting them, bayoneting them, hanging them, tormenting them in as many ways as his sleep-filled imagination could find. And it had proved ingenious in ways he never would have come up with awake. He hoped he wouldn't have, anyway.

"You know what'll happen when word of what we done gets to New Hastings?" Lorenzo said. "White folks'll shit, that's what!"

Frederick nodded gravely. "They sure will." Then he found a question Lorenzo hadn't yet: "And what happens once they get done shitting?"

"Huh?" The copperskin didn't even see that it was a question. "Who the devil cares what happens then?"

"We'd better," Frederick answered. What would the government of the United States of Atlantis do after a ragtag force of rebellious slaves slaughtered its professional soldiers and the white, mostly prosperous militiamen who fought beside those professionals?

Maybe the government would throw its hands in the air and decide the Free Republic of Atlantis was too strong to be put down. Maybe it would realize that blacks and copperskins were just as entitled to freedom as white men were. Maybe the government was looking for any reasonable excuse to liberate the men and women who'd labored in bondage for generations.

Maybe. But the more Frederick Radcliff thought about it, the less he believed it. The insurrectionists clearly could wipe this trapped force of white men off the face of the earth. Suppose they did. When word of the massacre got to New Hastings, wouldn't it infuriate the Senate? Wouldn't the Conscript Fathers decide the rebellion truly was dangerous? Wouldn't all the whites in Atlantis decide the same thing, regardless of whether they lived in Gernika or Penzance?

And if all the whites decided the insurrection was dangerous, what would happen next? Atlantis held many more whites than Negroes and copperskins. As much to the point, or maybe even more, those whites held far more wealth than their colored counterparts. If they decided they had to kill everyone in Atlantis who wasn't white so they could feel safe in their own beds, would they be able to do it?

No sooner asked than answered: of course they could. It might not be easy or quick or cheap, but they could do it. Frederick was sure of that. They might even feel bad about it afterwards, but afterwards would be too late to do anybody colored any good. Frederick was also sure of that.

Which meant… what? That slaughtering this trapped army might be the worst thing the insurrectionists could do? So it seemed to Frederick. One other thing also seemed all too plain: not slaughtering this trapped army had to be the second worst thing the insurrectionists could do.

"Lorenzo," he said.

"What d'you want?" the copperskin answered. "We've got these assholes. We've got 'em right where they belong."

Frederick explained what he wanted. He explained why he wanted it. Explaining made him more miserable, not happier. All the same, he finished, "We can't kill 'em all. We don't dare. Now that we've got 'em where we want 'em, we need to use that to get what we want. But we've got to call the cease-fire before they're all down."

Lorenzo spat in the dirt where the insurrectionists had dug their trench. "Then you go down and take a white flag and talk to the white folks. You done great stuff, Fred, but I will see you in hell before I do that here."

"All right. I will." Frederick didn't sound thrilled, but he nodded. Fair was fair.

"And what happens when the white sons of bitches shoot you down like a hound even though you got that white flag?" No, Lorenzo didn't bother hiding his scorn.

"Get our men to stop shooting. I'll go down there. If the buckra kill me, go ahead and do what you want to them," Frederick answered. "You will anyway-and I won't be around to stop you."

"Damned straight you won't," Lorenzo muttered. He aimed a forefinger at Frederick's chest like a rifle musket. "You nigger bastard, you better be right. You fuck this up, nobody'll ever forgive you."

"Now tell me something I didn't know," Frederick said.

Slowly, the gunfire died away. Frederick scrambled up over the rampart and advanced on the whites armed with only a flag of truce. He wondered if one of his own people would shoot him in the back. That might almost be a relief.